Thinks I find along the way
…according to John Jantsch…
One of the most common questions I receive is “how do I get started blogging?” Some might find it a bit odd that I suggest a three step approach and the first two steps don’t have much to do with directly working on your own blog. No, I think you get started blogging by working on your blogging mindset and blogging presence. So, here’s my 3-step blogging start-up plan.”
Click here to read more…
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Aliza Sherman has a great post over at Web Worker Daily…
“How many times are you hearing the question, “Why should I engage in social media?” during your work week? I’m hearing it often, and it’s reminding me of 1995 and 1996, when clients — and colleagues — were asking “Why should I have a web site?” And who remembers when the question was “Why should I have email/a cellphone/a computer/a typewriter/a telephone?” OK, maybe none of you remember the old telephone question, but I heard that when the telephone was first introduced as a consumer product, most families were appalled with the concept of putting a phone into their homes and saw it as an invasion of their privacy. Yes, the telephone.
Here is how I try to explain to people who may not be convinced that they — or their company — should be using social media for business. Hopefully, this proves helpful to those of you in the position of reaching the decision makers who are ignoring social media outright and consider it a fad.” Source: Why Should I Engage in Social Media?
The diagram she refers to is a useful, thought provoking tool…
Personally, I’ve benefited a great deal from applying social media to my internet marketing strategy and I’m happy to share my ‘home bases and outposts’ strategy with my clients. When a customer’s needs are greater than what I can handle myself, I include my virtual team members Dana VanDen Heuvel, the thought leadership guru at MarketingSavant.com and the brilliant folks at Envano led by David Sauter. Whether your needs are great our small, one of us can help you figure it out…
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I’m talking social media with a barrista named John in the Starbucks in York, NE. Yes, there is one thank God — it’s one of the few redeeming features of this intersection called York where I have been sleeping while attending Husker Harvest Days. John noticed my Wisconsin license plate and asked where I was from. Turns out we’re from opposite ends of Kewaunee County and we’re chatting at a Starbucks in York. Small world…
Starbucks has the only reliable wireless internet connection for me to upload my content for AGCO so I have been a better customer than usual as yesterday I had over 2.5GB of content from the show to upload for the Envano team back in Green Bay. The social media campaign we have been doing for AGCO has been wildly successful. There are over 2,000 fans in Facebook now and we just added a beautiful YouTube channel for Husker Harvest Days.
I’m looking forward to heading back to Algoma with stops in Des Moines, IA and Galena, IL along the way. Soon I’ll be sharing some thoughts on the technology behind the AGCO social media success — including my huge disappointment with the iPhone and the way it performed on the trip! Be sure to fan AGCO in Facebook and follow the new YouTube channel in the meantime. If you’re curious about how all this works, give me a call @ (920) 486-4798. I’ll be happy to talk with you — I have 12 hours of driving time to kill on the way home… ;-)
It’s always easier to just buy an ad. There are people that will take your money and use it to produce a commercial, tv spot or print ad. People will see your ad and a few of them may even come into your store if your ad has a good call to action or a coupon. There is a problem with that strategy. There’s an easier way that takes more work. How can something be easier and take more work?It’s more work to…
…gather contact information for all of your current clients or members.
…communicate with them about things other than your organization, store or “sale of the century”.
…talk to individuals instead of buying an ad for the masses.
But it’s easier to…
…get information of your current clients than to get information from strangers.
…talk about what’s important to their lives if you’re listening on their terms (Facebook or Twitter come to mind).
…talk to individuals and get a response than to buy an ad and get the attention of the masses.
As with all things worth while it’s easier in the long run if you do more work in the beginning.
Stop throwing money at the masses and start talking to individuals.
Nice post by Andy Traub. For me, it’s like Guy Kawasaki says ““If you have more Money than brains, you should focus on Outbound Marketing. If you have more Brains than money, you should focus on Inbound Marketing.” [Just in case you’re not sure, ads are outbound, social media is inbound.] One of the things I love about social media marketing is that it takes more time than money! All of us are working hard in the current economy but imho, the smart ones are channeling that effort into inbound marketing in the form of social media. Questions? Feedback?
…or doing it for the first time? In either case Seth Godin has an interesting perspective to share:
“The most common question people ask me when they want a new website is, “If you were in charge of this, who are the 2 or 3 people you’d want to be sure to talk to – to help think through the issues, help us figure out who should do the work, etc.?”
The second most common question people ask me, “In addition to Apple’s site, are there 2 or 3 that you think are really appealing and work well for their business?”
I think these are perhaps the tenth and eleventh questions you should ask, not the first two. Here’s my list of difficult and important questions you have to answer before you spend a nickel” Seth’s Blog: Things to ask before you redo your website
Go to the source for the questions that Seth thinks you need to answer before you begin — it’s always good to ‘measure twice and cut once’!
I love it when I find a quote to support my preconceived notions because if I say it, it’s just opinion, but if an ‘expert’ says it, well, it must be true. In this case a designer talks about web design…
“This one will probably get me into trouble.
I’ve worked as a graphic designer for over two decades and I’m not supposed to say this stuff. After all, it’s my job to make miracles. To wave my magic design wand and make a business look stronger, smarter, and more powerful than it really is.
Before I start dodging rotten tomatoes, though, I’m going to go ahead and say it out loud.
It’s a smart business move to have a well-designed website.
But good design — even great design — won’t solve all your business problems. Not even close.” Source: The Myth of Beautiful Website Design | Copyblogger
Although I do design websites, I think of myself less as a web designer than I do a social media technologist. In my methodology, a blog enabled website is a homebase or hub for a social media publishing network. My goal in design is simply to have the site load fast, connect to social media outposts and not be so ugly that a user won’t roll around on the floor clawing her eyes out. That’s it. As Pamela says in the quoted article “Don’t expect miracles from your graphic design. It’s definitely a valuable part of creating your business’s image, but it’s not a substitute for a sound marketing strategy.”
“As a lead generation tool, your website provides a virtual wonderland of sales and marketing opportunities. It’s easily accessible, available 24/7, highly visible, and gives you the ability to present your company and services in your most positive light.
Plus, your site gives prospects the ability to find you whenever they need to. All this makes it one of the most powerful lead generators at your disposal.
So… is your website, this powerful lead generating machine, doing all it can to bring new clients to your doorstep?” Click here to read more…
PDC is Personal Digital Coaching and it’s totally different than the kind of experience that’s being discussed here…
“I’ve been reading with great interest this past week as some of the leading web application companies discuss their philosophies regarding the providing of phone support for their services.” WebWorkerDaily » Archive Phone or Email Support – Which Do You Prefer? «
Give me a call at (920) 710-0790 or contact me through the contact page…
I have a lot of preconceived notions about blogging and one of them is that blogs drive traffic to your site, especially if you update them on a regular basis. Along comes HubSpot — one of the best social media sites on the internet — with a great blog post about websites and blogs and what a blog adds to your business. The HubSpot content was difficult to bring into this post in a way that made sense so I encourage you to go to the site and read the whole article — it only takes a minute or two — but it demonstrates in a graphic way why blogging is good for business…
I’ve seen this happen in a very graphic way in my own political blog. By using tools that update search engines and drive content into social media, my blog continues to rise in the rankings. Last week for example I was ranked 7th most influential in the State of Wisconsin and my one week Alexa ranking average was 1,077,607 in the world — not bad for a little political blog!
What’s my secret? I use WordPress to custom design websites that have blogs and use blogging combined with a well thought out strategy using search engine optimization and social media. You can check out some of my projects here. If you’ve got a point that you’d like to get across, I’d love to show you how you can do the same things I do easily and economically!
John Jantsch recently wrote on the topic of “Profiting from other people’s content”. He says…
“Don’t be alarmed by that title — I’m not talking about stealing content for gain, I’m talking about adding the filtering and aggregating of content to your content consumption, creation and sharing routine.
Pretty much everyone has bought into the idea that they need to produce lots of valuable content in order to build the trust and search engine eyes of today’s online prospect. One way to supplement your content strategy while still providing lots of value, is to get good at finding and filtering other people’s content that your prospects and customers will find useful as well. (Done right, the other people will thank you for giving a wider audience to their content).
It should go without saying that giving credit to the original source and full attribution to the author when appropriate is a must.” Source: Profiting From Other People’s Content | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
John talks about his “consumption, creation and sharing routine” — my mantra is ‘listen, publish, promote’ which is a little more elegant in my book but we’re both trying to say the same thing and use an alliteration in the process. If I were John, I might go for ‘consume, create, communicate‘ — in fact, I might start using that instead. Either way, the point is that gathering good content effectively and commenting on it is a great way to build your personal brand. I’ve been using this strategy for years — most recently, I amped it up by using Posterous [another tool that John advocates] and saving more content directly to my blog instead of shared bookmarks as I used to do. Here are the results:
I think the results are really quite good for an ‘army of one’, don’t you? I do all my ‘creation and communication’ as a result of my daily ‘consumption’ — because my system is easy to implement and use, I work it frequently. I call quoting other sites ‘curation’ and my rare original thoughts ‘creation’. The curation works to draw people to my creation. Does it work? You betcha [you’re reading this, aren’t you?]. The average person drawn into my blog through effective communication reads 3.3 pages and spends 2:52 minutes on the site, while only 4.75% ‘bounce’ to another site. Over 71% are new visitors…
Jantsch goes on to give three tactical implementations of his ‘profiting from content’ suggestion. They are…
“Make yourself a better resource
Creating a habit of filtering content related to your industry, products, competitors and customers will make you better at what you do, allow you to keep up with trends and give you data to help you build deeper relationships with customers.
Share content to draw attention
Pointing out useful resources and good finds is a great way to build your social media and blog followings. Consistently sharing relevant links and sharing them on Twitter is a strategy that many find helps them be seen as follow worthy. Creating a once a week blog post roundup of good stuff is a great way to add content and keep readers engaged.
Filter personalized content
A more advanced strategy is to use your filter skills to create your own industry research briefs. If you specialize in several market niches you can create laser specific new pages and email newsletter roundups that feature the best of what you find each week. You can even use RSS technology to deliver dynamically changing web content password protected for your best clients.” Source: Profiting From Other People’s Content | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Clearly, John and I share a lot of the same ‘common sense’. He goes on to list 10 different resources [you can follow the link] you can use as tools to find other people’s content. One of them — Kurrently — is one I’ll have to add to my toolkit. For me, however, this is where we part ways. My paradigm is “Google Reader is the answer. Now what is the question?“.
I use Google Reader like a tactical nuke. It’s the one tool I use to manage the ‘rest of the internet’ and I use it like a virtual newspaper or better yet, news bureau, where I manage hundreds of little newsbots that do my news aggregation for me. I have 5 great ways to get relevant content into Google Reader and they include most of John’s 10 tools — it’s just that in my book, Google Reader is the one tool that rules them all. It really is the driver in my ‘e1evation workflow’ outlined below. Either you get it and you can use it or I can help you implement it but the point is that if you have a brand and you want to build it online, we can help…
…through our partnership with AGCO around ‘socializing’ — using social media to cover — trade shows. Here are some interesting thoughts from Kipp Bodnar on the topic…
“Almost every B2B company invests part of its marketing budget in trade shows. It is one tried and true method of lead generation. The problem with trade shows is that they aren’t cheap, and they are a big line item on the marketing budget. So if your company is making the investment, then it should do everything it can to squeeze out every last drop of value. This need for value, combined with cut travel budgets across all industries, means that the solution to this problem is social media.” Source: 5 Ways To Make Your B2B Trade Show Social | Social Media B2B
Go to the source for the rest of the article. Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment or use the contact page to reach me…
I recently came across this post from my Internet buddy Brandon Henak and I’ve been thinking about it all week. It was about using Plaxo for unified contact management and it went like this…
“The people in your network and the relationships you develop with them are some of your most valuable assets as a young professional. You look to them first for advice, job opportunities or just to discuss the latest events in your life. How you keep track of all the contact information you have collected in your personal and professional life is crucial to your success.
Contacts Everywhere!
In the poll we took earlier today we saw an interesting breakdown of contact management solutions, from relying on a cell phone to store contact information to using Microsoft Outlook, Facebook and other online sites. Each one of the solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. I have tried every one of the solutions listed with various degrees of success but, what if you could use each of them where they work the best, Outlook at the office, Mac Address Book at home and Plaxo online, without having to manually update each? I recently found a way to centralize and standardize all my contact and calendar information across all the services I use, automatically!
Sync them up!
Enter Plaxo 3.0 beta with Sync Points. After setting up an account, all I had to do was click on the “Add Sync Point” link for each of the programs I wanted to use (in my case Google, Mac Address Book, Outlook, and AIM) and it walks you through the process of putting in your login information for Google and downloading small add-ins for Outlook and Mac Address Book. Now, all of my sources sync together and I can sync all my contacts to my phone through Address Book. Any addition anywhere flows across the systems and is easily accessible.”
This was particularly interesting to me because I’m a Plaxo subscriber, but I’ve experienced a lot of problems with contact management. So what’s the problem?
A little background info…
I’ve been in marketing, sales, and technology for 25 years now and I have collect over 5,000 vcards and thousands more business cards that aren’t documented. I use 7 computers spanning three platforms and I want to access my contacts on all of them.
The answer?
The answer for me, like Brandon, starts with Plaxo for the following reasons:
So if Plaxo is the answer, what’s MY problem? In a nutshell, using Plaxo was causing, not eliminating duplicates. Or, better said, using Plaxo with ActiveSync was causing duplicates. When I made the decision to stop using two synchronization tools simultaneously, my problems went away and I got closer to the promised land that Brandon was describing…
More background. I’m currently in the process of moving to Linux; I don’t want to pay ransom to Microsoft anymore and although I’m a former Apple account executive, I don’t want to pay for Apple’s industrial design when I can have the benefits of a Linux based operating system on inexpensive Intel hardware. The answer for me is Linux.
For now, however, my solution set consists of Plaxo, Microsoft Outlook 2003 [I only said I didn’t want to pay anymore – I’ll still use what I have], Gmail, Google Calendar and a Treo 700wx. I see myself moving off Outlook to Thunderbird/Lightning [Mozilla’s answer to contact and calendar management – Mozilla is only going to get better at this!] and off the Treo onto either a Blackberry or the Google Android platform. Thankfully [?], Sprint is forcing me to keep my current phone until September when the outlook on Google’s approach to cellphones should be known…
A big part of solving my problem was also to realize [thanks to David Allen] that some contacts are context sensitive, namely, that I don’t need to be able to call all 5,000 people from my cellphone – some I only need to be able to access when I’m sitting at a computer. I was actually synchronizing contacts for which I didn’t have a telephone number to my phone! Why? Because I was going to send them an email from the phone? Unlikely. In reality, I have found that after careful analysis, I actually need to synchronize less than 200 contacts between my phone and my computer and if I really were honest with myself, there are probably less than a hundred people that I call on a regular basis. So, I copied all my contacts to a folder called ‘Master’ in Outlook and deleted all contacts that I either hadn’t called or didn’t anticipate calling this quarter [there’s a copy of the deleted contacts in Master, remember?] As a result, I’m only synchronizing what I have to now. This is a HUGE savings of time and energy and silly as it may seem, actually represents a massive epiphany for me. Call me Captain Obvious?
The underlying idea here is getting closer to a world where it doesn’t matter what computer or platform you’re using – your information is accessible from anywhere! Plaxo can get you a good part of the way there…
By the way, if you’re not using Google Desktop, start! It can unify all the computers you’re using and allow you to search your Gmail and your computers in the same way you search the internet now…
As a father of 6, parental analogies are always close at hand for me. It’s why I sometimes say that clients are like children in that when you see them take the things you teach them and they make it their own and excel, you can’t help but burst with pride. Recently, the AGCO blog was included in the agriculture feed at Alltop, the internet’s best source for news aggregation, becoming the only Farm Equipment manufacturer to do so…
AGCO’s success should rightly be credited to Jamy Johnson, a budding online community manager and social media practitioner who took the time to embrace the ‘e1evation workflow’ and make it her own. Last month, their blog had over 10,000 visits and it’s rapidly becoming a key factor in lifting the corporate website to new heights in search and traffic rankings as well…
Kudos to Jamy’s manager Sue Otten who had the courage to embrace social media in the ag space before ag social media was cool! If Jamy and Sue can rise to the top using “good, fast, and cheap” social media tools for agriculture, imagine what you can do in your industry!
Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has been reading my mail. Or attending my seminars. Or both. Seriously, he does a great job in this video of explaining some of the tactics that I use to drive traffic to my blog…
“Every businessperson leads a busy life. There are marketing meetings to attend, RFPs to reply to, and client projects to finish. With so much work demanding so much attention, many of us never make the time to keep our business relationships alive, and wish we did: ‘What does he do again?’ ‘Does she still work there?’ ‘Didn’t I know someone at that company?’
Rather than regretting not staying connected, pick some of the twelve ideas below and use them to start conversations with people you’ve met before and want to speak with again.”
You might want to also check out the RainToday series on LinkedIn 101.
Every year, I spend hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours reading articles on Internet Marketing for my annual Best Internet Marketing Posts blog post. The effort to find these posts, read them thoroughly, identify whether they meet certain criteria, and categorize them takes an incredibly huge toll on me, but at the end of the day, I’ve been proud to provide regular content to my readers. Over the last five years, hundreds of URLs have been carefully collected and selected for inclusion in this post.
The posts for the last five years are:
- Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2010
- Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009
- Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2008
- Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2007
- Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2006
Each year, this post has gotten bigger and better, and for my 30th birthday, I offered 300 great links that can most certainly act as the only internet marketing schooling you’ll ever need.
If Tamar says this is the best, I’m all in!
John Jantsch says…
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, social media tools are killer for the small local business trying to drive people offline and into their businesses and to build deeper relationships with existing local customers.
For this episode of Local Color I met Scotty Wise an Indiana restaurateur and owner of Scotty’s Brewhouse that is has his business booming through the use of social media. The key in his case, and I think for any local business, is to move beyond simply building a Facebook page or Twitter feed and to look for ways to deeply integrate social media into everything you are doing.”
I say John rocks and if you’re a small business owner, sit up and pay attention while you watch the video. John goes on to say…
“In the case of Scotty’s Brewhouse, not only do they Tweet and use Facebook, they sponsor events that involve social media, use Foursquare to reward frequent customers and even built iPads into the booths at their newest store to allow existing customers to interact in deeper ways, connect on Twitter, sign up for their eclub and what videos of their meals being prepared. There’s even a Scotty’s iPhone app so you can order ahead, get coupons and learn about special events.”
Hello! Any small business owners listening?
“So, there’s plenty of bad economic news floating around. From the price of oil to Wall Street to bailouts to the death of traditional advertising.
Which is great news for anyone hoping to grow or to make an impact.
Change (and the fortunes that go with it) is almost always made during the down part of the cycle. It might not be fun, but it’s exciting. (Where do you think Google came from?) The opportunity is to find substantial opportunities (in any field) that deliver real value and have a future. Those jobs/investments/companies/ideas are undervalued right now, but not for long.” Click here to go to the source…
In its first report on the use of “geosocial” or location-based services, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project finds that 4% of online adults use a service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby. On any given day, 1% of internet users are using these services.
Location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla use internet-connected mobile devices’ geolocation capabilities to let users notify others of their locations by “checking in” to that location. Location-based services often run on stand-alone software applications, or “apps,” on most major GPS-enabled smartphones or other devices.
But which 4% — are they key influencers or just geeks & weirdos or both? Follow the ‘via’ link to find out…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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