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POPS2010 Internet Marketing Trends With the New Year basically here, it's important that we stay on top of what the trends are in the New Year. The trends listed at Level Ten Designs include: * Social fatigue * Social shakedown * Emphasis on ROI and metrics * Mobile Boom * Hyperlocal * … and more.
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POPSWant to Make Your Blogs More Interesting? Some blogs (like this one) are primarily text and that's okay. But other bloggers may want to combine other media into their blogs and pictures are one way to do that. Unfortunately, copyright doesn't always allow bloggers to include pictures legally. (They do anyway, but that's a rant for another time). So, how can bloggers create an engaging blog with pictures without breaking the law or busting out their digital camera every time they want to take a picture?
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POPSSquidoo Lens Ideas A friend of mine confessed to me lately that he has a love/hate relationship with Squidoo. He likes the idea of Squidoo – it's easy to build lots of lenses – but hates that the line is blurry between what he should post on his blog and what his lenses should be about. The challenge he highlighted was that he didn't want to create lenses about anything, but rather about something relevant to his business. At the time, I was already thinking about a lens I wanted to create but hadn't refined it yet. So I went in search of some lens ideas that would solve his problem and mind at the same time.
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POPSLeave Your Mark When I was in college, my dorm was somewhat notorious for the people who had lived there before. And each year, the group of freshmen (and freshwomen) who lived there were ushered into a hallowed closet and invited to write their names on the wall, joining the hundreds who had gone before. It was an interesting tradition and somewhat meaningful to add your name to the list of people – luminaries and not-so-luminaries – who had lived there, too. This same idea translates into the business world, too, specifically when it comes to commenting on blogs. When you leave your mark, you are joining with others to indicate your participation in that community – however modest – and you are aligning yourself with other likeminded people. This is the ultimate in positioning!
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POPSA Study in Getting More Customers A business' customer base isn't static. Over time, that customer base will slowly decline. It doesn't matter if your business gives the world's greatest customer service, you will need to find new customers. Maybe some of your current customer base stops needing your product or they move to an area you don't serve or they pass away or whatever. This "customer attrition" will naturally occur. Often, it's unnoticeable, perhaps declining 5% to 10% per year. Over time, though, the results are catastrophic.
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POPS4 Myths of Internet Marketing The other day a friend of mine called me up in a panic. His website had been advancing dramatically in PageRank and he was working hard to build it up. Then he checked at the beginning of December and noticed that his PageRank had dropped to zero. The phone call to me was an "I'm ruined" phone call and it took me a long time to calm him down and assure him that he was not ruined. It inspired me to write this list of 4 myths of internet marketing.
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POPSDon’t Wonder – Wonder Wheel Google has a very innovative tool called the Wonder Wheel that you should take a look at if you haven't already. Google Wonder Wheel is basically a simple mindmap that connects one keyword to related keywords that people are searching for. Here's how to find it:
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POPSAttack of the Long Tailed Monster I was recently doing some search engine optimization for a client which included some articles with keywords included in them. I think keyword rich (NOT keyword stuffed) articles are a good marketing tool. Most of the articles went okay. Then I got to one article in which the keyphrase was a four word phrase that was grammatically incorrect. I don't want to say what it was exactly, but to give you a fictionalized example, it was something like "Cadillac Dealership Car Oklahoma". In other words, it wasn't anything you would ever use in a sentence; it was just the result from a Google keyword search. I suggested to my client that they rethink this keyphrase as an article but they insisted because 500 people a month search for that phrase.
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POPSIt’s That Time of Year Again With the New Year upon us, it's time to rethink about what you do and how you tell people about what you do. I don't know if this happens to you, but it does happen to a lot of coaches I know: They may start their year with a nice, crisp elevator pitch to describe what they do but as the year progresses, the pitch evolves. It's okay for an elevator pitch to evolve IF it evolves in a good way. But it doesn't always work that way: Your pitch might take on new elements as your business changes or as the market place changes. Frequently, I've noticed that lots of coaches who have heard the objection "your price is too high" will unconsciously add a price clarification into their elevator pitch even though it's not necessary. So a pitch that says "I help people become organized" becomes "I help people become organized and I don't cost as much as other coaches".
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POPSCreate a Lasting Record of Telephone Calls If any of your coaching takes place over the telephone, one of the services you can offer your clients is to record the telephone call and provide it for their review later. (Disclaimer: If you are recording any telephone call for professional reasons, you should let the other person know and you should ask for permission first).
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POPSMy Evolution in Learning When I first became a coach, I used to read everything I could about coaching. Everything. If it even had the word "coaching" in it, it was in my reading list. (Which means I can now coach kids hockey whenever I'm needed!) After a while, it all started to sound the same and I began an evolution to where I am today: Now, I read as widely as possible. Of course, I still have a few key coaching resources that I turn to again and again (insert shameless plug for this blog here). They are in my Google Reader and I'm a faithful and loyal follower. But as soon as I started reading more widely, I found that I became a better coach because
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POPSClustering Change If you've ever been camping, you've probably heard the occasional annoying buzz of a mosquito. Once when I was camping, though, I was swarmed by more mosquitoes than I had ever seen in my life and that cluster of tiny, biting bugs made me run in the other direction! That idea of clustering is something I want to talk about today.
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POPS When Good Help is Bad As a professional coach, you have some expertise in your particular subject matter or industry: Time management, productivity, family life, business, whatever. But a lot of coaching involves psychology and helping to guide a client through the psychological complexities of the particular area you are coaching in. There is one part of coaching that we coaches face all the time which we are not really prepared to address, but which psychologists deal with frequently: Enablers.
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POPSThe Year of the … In the Chinese calendar, each year is marked as a year of a particular animal. Frequently, social leaders and governments will mark a year according to something important. "The Year of the Senior" was a recent one I recall, which highlighted the importance and issues of the aged. I never thought of it for myself until just a couple of years ago.
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POPSAttracting New Clients in 2010 This is the season in which we tend to throw our diets aside and gorge ourselves on whatever happens to be served up at the table or stuffed into our Christmas stocking. So, this article by Seth Godin may be seven months old but it is timely in its topic and in its relation to food. You should read the full article here but I'll summarize it for you below:
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POPSWide Net or Laser Focus? Generating revenue is a big priority for your business, and there are really two basic way that you can go about it: You can cast a wide net and generate revenue from multiple streams of income or you can focus on one area with laser precision and generate revenue from that. I've heard success stories on both sides of this argument.
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POPSTransforming Your 2010 Success Want to make 2010 way better than 2009? There is one to-do that I recommend: Think back to all of your failed presentations (the ones that DIDN'T turn into sales) and write down the objections the customer gave that killed the sale. In fact, strive to make a list of your top 5 objections that kill sales.
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POPSAnalogies as a Teaching and Learning Tool Several years ago I was in a business coaching group. There were a number of us – maybe 12 or so? – who would gather for weekly meetings and talk about our businesses while networking. One day, the session opened with the group leader asking us to describe our business experience while using the analogy of a roller coaster. So some people talked about Ferris Wheels and some people talked about Merry-Go-Rounds, and I sat there with a bad attitude, rolling my eyes and asking myself "why did I pay to do this?"
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POPSHaving “The Talk” With Your Client Recently, a friend of mine had to have "the talk" with his son. You know what talk I'm talking about. The Talk. Like many kids, the realization of "the birds and the bees" was alarming and apparently he walked around in a state of shock for a while afterwards. If you're a business coach, you have a similar awkward job with your clients as you help them understand their business and how it is changing.
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POPSNo More Mr. Nice Guy (or Ms. Nice Girl) In the last job I worked at before starting my own business, I had a manager who was – ahem – not a great person to work for. When he wasn't yelling or making rude or obscene comments, he was harshly critical of everyone in the office. It's no wonder that during my 9 months of tenure in that office, our staff went from 7 full-time and 5 part-time staff to 3 full-time staff only. After I left, leaving the office with the same amount of work for 7 full-time and 5 part-time but only 2 people, my manager was finally let go. It's a shame that it went that far.
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POPSTiger Woods – A Study in Brand Because of the economic situation, 2009 was not a good year for a lot of people but now that we're nearing the end, 2010 is looking potentially brighter and more hopeful. That is not necessarily the case for Tiger Woods.
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POPSInvesting In Your Business With 2010 approaching, business owners are turning their thoughts to what the next year will bring and what they need to do to be more successful. In the midst of these thoughts there is the inevitable consideration: What do I need to be investing in for my business? Investing in business is essential for a business to grow and become successful. There are all kinds of investments you might consider making in order to have a more successful business:
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POPSB2B Versus B2C Operating a company that sells to businesses (B2B) is different than operating a company that sells to consumers (B2C). If you're just starting out as an entrepreneur, that is something you'll need to decide right away and determine what you need to do differently. In this article, we'll look at different aspects of your business and how they are impacted by the difference between B2B and B2C.
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POPSWhen Feedback Turns Ugly Just Google the name of a favorite business and the words "hate" or "sucks" and your search will reveal the dark underbelly of online feedback. Businesses want to make customers happy and we all know that you can't please everyone. But what happens when you not only fail to satisfy a customer but you end up creating a monster – someone who adopts it as their mission in life to destroy your reputation?
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POPSOn Stickiness – Part 2 You want a sticky website. The longer people are on your site, the better, and you can do things to help make it sticky. In the last blog I talked about minimizing (or at least being aware of) links that pointed people away from your website, and I also recommended that you build up links that point to other parts of your site. In this blog, I will continue to give some pointers and ideas to help you create a sticky site. The ideas here are generally useful for most business and audiences, regardless of whether you use a blog or a more conventionally formatted website.
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POPSOn Stickiness – Part 1 If you run Google Analytics, one of the metrics you should pay attention to is "Average time on site". This metric indicates just how sticky your site is. The longer people are on your site, the stickier it is. The term "sticky" is a great term. Think of a sticky fly strip in which flies land and can't leave. That's the kind of site you want to create: One where your audience, prospects, and clients show up and are "stuck" to your site; they can't leave.
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POPSComments and Their Challenges Businesses that run blogs as part of their online marketing strategy face the always-present reality of comments. This reality is a mixed blessing: Sometimes good and often annoying. On the good side: On the good side, it's great to see valuable contributions from commenters, even if they don't agree with you 100%. I love seeing a dialogue start as a result of a blog and watching it progress. I enjoy healthy debate, link backs, and even kudos (who DOESN'T love kudos?!?). On the bad side: Unfortunately, offering the ability to leave comments means you are opening yourself up to…
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POPS6 Ways to Use Google’s Keyword Tool Google's Keyword Tool is useful for people who are creating AdWords and for doing search engine optimization. But that's not all it's useful for. Here are 6 ways to use Google's Keyword Tool for your business:
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POPSWhy You SHOULDN’T Haggle I had a potential client who called me up and asked about my services and rates. After giving them a quick overview, they suggested to me that they should pay me slightly less and they gave me a rate that "was within their budget". I didn't take them as a client and I'd recommend that you don't haggle with people either. Here are the reasons why:
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POPS “I want to make more money” We're nearing the beginning of the New Year and it's around this time that we start to really vocalize the thought that is always at the backs of our minds: "I want to make more money". We may continually WANT to make more money as coaches but we rarely go about it as strategically as we do at this time of year. There's something about the new opportunity of a brand new year that compels us to act on our wishes. How you go about earning more money is the challenge. Do you raise your rates? Do you increase the number of hours you work in a day? Do you create passive income?
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POPSOperations Manuals When I got my first fresh-out-of-college job at a big faceless corporation, they handed me an operations manual for my position. The name "operations manual" sounds boring but it wasn't bad. I read it, applied it, and did well at my job.
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POPSBusiness success story: Digg Although my blogging style is frequently conceptual and (hopefully) practical, from time to time I like to report on business success stories from which business owners an draw out lessons to incorporate into their businesses. So when I read about Digg as a success story, I was eager to post it here.
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POPSSignal to Noise Ratio In the early days of the web, portals like Yahoo were cluttered with "stuff". Yahoo still seems cluttered. And maybe that's okay for some users but when Google stepped in with a compelling search algorithm AND a nice clean interface, people noticed. On Yahoo, there was a lot of noise. On Google, there was a lot of signal.
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POPSShort or Long Sales Page? If you're selling something online, you've probably wondered which one was right for you: a short sales page or a long one. The short ones end up being just a screen or two of content that you need to scroll down. They are persuasive and quick to read. The longer ones seem like Herman Melville (the author of Moby Dick) decided to write them: They're the equivalent of 15, 20, 30, or more pages of text.
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POPS8 Ways to Make Your Blog Better In my opinion, blogs are one of the best ways to generate a lot of attention about yourself online. In fact, if you had to pick between a blog and a website, I’d pick a blog because they provide search engine optimization and search engine marketing benefits while keeping the content fresh and compelling for readers. If you have a blog, your goal is to keep people on it for as long as possible (so that they become convinced of your expertise and your ability to solve their problems). In fact, on metric I have pay attention to on some of my blogs is the "time on site" metric available through Google Analytics. The longer people spend, the better.
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POPSThe Granddaddy of Social Networks This post seems to have two separate thoughts and I will bring them together at the end. First, let’s talk about LinkedIn. Social networking seems to be an entirely new "web 2.0" thing, but it started much earlier. LinkedIn is a great example of early social networking that broke ground for what we have today as Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.
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POPSTwitter as your Client-Generating Tool Recently I changed an important part of my productivity system and tweeted proudly about my hopes that it would help me to be even more productive. Right away I received a response back from someone who congratulated me but advised that I be careful of "the Hawthorne Effect". (The Hawthorne Effect is a situation in which ANY change in the environment can temporarily improve productivity for a short time. You can read more about it here:
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POPSIt’s Not Me, It’s You I recently ended a coaching relationship with a client. It's not something I want to do but it needs to happen from time to time. Let me tell you the details: Just over a year ago, I had a client approach me and ask me to coach them in their businesses. They owned three small businesses but weren't seeing success in any of them. We met every other week and spent the first couple of months figuring out what his goals were and what was going on in his business.
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POPS6 Tips for Telephone Coaching If you are a coach, you're likely connecting with your clients through one of three ways: Face-to-face, via telephone (including Skype and other VOIP options), or email. Each of these ways presents their own unique challenges and opportunities. For those of you who are connecting through the phone, here are six tips you can use for more effective connection.
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