I came across this photo set a few weeks ago.
Lorena Turner took brand new products that are made in China, and dusted them for fingerprints. It was chilling to think about the people in factories on the other side of the world that were part of that process. While this realization has a profound impact on my feelings about consumerism and global poverty, it has a practical application as well.
Everything you do should have your mark on it. Your fingerprints. Read More→
The Internet is a tremendous tool that can be used for great things. Unfortunately it can also be used for harm.
When you are mentioned on the web, you are there forever. When you write a blog post or upload information and photos, you leave a mark impossible to erase. This is a huge concern for people and for how open they – or you – should be on the Internet.
Safety is an issue for all of us in the post 9/11 world but in all honesty there is no more impenetrable security. We are all open to attack whether in real life or the cyber-world. While it is wise that we should be cautious, we should not and cannot live in fear.
It is important as a business or entrepreneur that we open up and be transparent about our lives and our companies, including the successes and failures. Our clients, customers, friends, and followers want to know they are dealing with a real person. It’s vital that we build true relationships in a technology driven world.
So how open or transparent should you be? As open as you want the world to know about you and your company.
Whatever your write and post about will be a track record. It will follow you. And as long as you understand this, then it’s up to you to decide how transparent you should be with your social media tools or website. Besides, if someone really wants to gain information about your life, past or present, it can be achieved…but if you want to protect anything from being used against you, just don’t make it easier to find.
My takes is that common sense will guide you well in determining what’s in your best interest when it comes to transparency. What do you believe?
If you want your website to be effective, you need to put yourself into it. Your blood, sweat and tears should be worked into the navigation, content and code of your site.
I’m not saying you need to be a web expert and do everything yourself. But if you don’t take a personal interest in your site, your customers won’t either. More than ever websites are a conversational piece of your marketing plan. They’re no longer about broadcasting your message, they’re about interacting with your audience. And that interaction is something you can’t fake or outsource. By all means bring in help to do it right, but if you’re not engaged and putting some of your personality into your site, it’s not going to work. If the people actually running your site aren’t empowered to give it personality, it’s going to flop.
You can’t just throw something online and hope it works. But if you put yourself online, if you’re engaged in the process and care about what it says and how it says it, then customers will notice. It’s no longer just a bit of marketing, but it’s a connection.
If you’re not in your website now, change it:
Blogging has been one of the best tools for building my career and was the catalyst for my entrepreneurial endeavors. Through my first blog, I got the experience, attention and momentum that helped me build a successful online business here at iThemes, among other life-changing events.
We offer a free introductory webinar called Blogging Your Way to Professional Success that gives you some basic steps for increasing your professional and career value through using a blog.
Here is the webinar recording:
You don’t necessarily have to be on Facebook to take advantage of the widely popular social networking site. But you should make sure your website is Facebook friendly.
Facebook has a feature where users can share links and post content into their stream of updates. That shared content will then be seen by their friends and fans. Users can post links directly in Facebook or you can add ‘Share on Facebook’ icons to your site. The application works by visiting the site you’re linking to and grabbing a preview of relevant information, including the title, description and any images embedded into the page.
But sometimes the information shared isn’t always helpful. You can change that by checking out what information Facebook grabs. You can make sure your site has a useful meta description in the header (which is also good practice for search engine optimization). If you have a blog you might consider putting an excerpt of the blog entry in the description. That way the excerpt will show up when someone shares the link on Facebook, as opposed to the general description of your blog. More specific details will be more likely to hook people.
Facebook’s share feature will also grab an image from the shared link and give the user an option of picking the thumbnail that fits best. You can override this by pointing to a specific image. This might be helpful if your logo isn’t an isolated file on your site—you can point to the perfect image. This is also incentive to include relevant images with your blog entries and make sure when people share the links they’re sharing relevant and helpful information.
Visit Facebook and try sharing a few links from your site. Check them out and see how the title, description and thumbnail images come up. If they’re not as good as they could be, considering changing them. After all, there are more than 300 million users on Facebook.
In the past couples of years I’ve seen Apple’s popularity increase drastically, just judging from the number of tech conferences I’ve been to where I’ve seen a flood of Apple logo lights everywhere in the audience.
And here’s an even better example …
The other day, I was talking with an older gentlemen who was at our house to fix our air conditioning and he noticed my Mac laptop sitting on the couch and told me how much he loved the one he got.
For the next 10 minutes, he went on and on about how much he loved his Apple and how many awesome things he could do with it.
He said he was old-school and didn’t know how to “work a computer.” But his wife bought him a Mac for Christmas last year … and he began to tell me about Apple’s One on One personal training, which I knew existed, because I see customers getting help at their little workstations every time I walk in an Apple store.
He told me that for around $100 he could go in once a week for an hour at a time for a whole year and ask all his questions.
Here’s the Apple website’s description of the program:
“There’s no better way to get set up, get trained, and get going on your new Mac than with a One to One membership at the Apple Retail Store. We’ll transfer your files from your old computer, teach you the basics in face-to-face training sessions, and guide you through more advanced projects as your skills grow.”
If you do the math, Apple could lose money on that endeavor IF someone took advantage of all 52 hour-long sessions. But you know a minuscule percentage actually do. The others probably use 4-5 hours I’d guess, but they all have the peace of mind that they aren’t on an island not knowing how to use their new computers.
The $100 cost is an insurance program for those customers.
But for Apple, it’s so much more. Apple knows the value educating of their customers.
For training like this, they could theoretically lose money – but ultimately my A/C guy will never buy another brand of computer. He’s hooked, he’s trained. And people love familiarity, especially with computer software.
Apple bought a lifetime customer.
They have made the second sale, and the third, and on and on. He’ll also be telling everybody he knows about great Apple is and how easy their computers are to use. He’ll insist they buy the One on One training.
(And, by the way, I’m sure it also saves Apple a ton in support costs because they are doing it in the store and not through a call center!)
Here are some ideas I had thinking through how we are going to educate our clients here at WebDesign.com that you could put to use in your own business:
How are you educating your customers and clients?
I remember the circumstances around starting my first blog. A whole mess of fears flooded my mind about how I wasn’t the best at what I did, or even a big name in my field. I wondered if I had enough experience or good enough ideas to share with the world.
Because of those fears, I almost didn’t get started at all. I almost let them consume me and stop me from taking a chance and putting myself and my ideas out there for the world to see and judge and mock.
But I took a risk.
I bought my domain name and hosting. I made my first blog post. Then I made another. Over 600 posts and several years later, I look back fondly at that first blog and what it did for me and my career.
Here’s some of the benefits I reaped because I took a chance on blogging:
So many people stop short because of fear. And their awesome potential and ideas are locked within themselves and their current sphere of influence.
That’s extremely disappointing to me!
I’ve said many, many times that there were better people out there, with bigger names and better experience and skill and ideas than me … but they choose not to take a risk.
Take a chance. Put your ideas out there. No regrets!
Blog. What a crazy word. Five years ago no one knew what it meant. Today it’s even possible to have a six-figure income as a blogger (OK, it’s possible, but not likely).
While blogging has become much more widespread, it still prompts befuddlement. Even if you can avoid the puzzled look, you may be just as perplexed at the idea of your business having a blog. Why would your business need a blog?
The popular concept of a blog is a place where unedited blowhards rant and play loose with the facts. Certainly some blogs are like that, but yours doesn’t have to be.
The original concept of a blog was simply a website with updates in reverse-chronological order (newest at the top). The word blog comes from “web log,” because it was a log of the latest updates. But blogs really took off when software automated this process and made it ridiculously easy to post new content. Comments made it possible to have a two-way conversation. Suddenly blogging enabled a new form of web publishing where anyone could easily post continual updates and interact with people.
The fact that blogging is dominated by partisan rhetoric and confusing techno-babble shouldn’t scare you away. What’s important is blogging as a tool. Just because it’s called a blog doesn’t mean it has to be a blog. Instead of putting on the blogger label, just use the tool.
A blog for your business doesn’t have to be a personal diary chronicling your favorite brand of breakfast cereal. Instead it can be a tool enabling you to easily post updated content to your website. The genius of a blog is the software behind it makes all the headaches of posting, archiving, linking and disseminating that content super easy.
Imagine the possibilities:
Your business can have a blog without having a blog. Don’t call it a blog if the word seems intimidating or doesn’t fit. But do take advantage of the basic tool of blogging.
Having a blog is a great way to go public with your expertise. In a way, having a blog is like having a PR agent that gets you published in print, web, and even on radio and TV shows.
You may not become a national celebrity (you could) but really, you only need to be what Steven Van Yoder calls “Slightly Famous” to the people you want to reach. You can become locally famous to your potential customers.
How can that happen?
As you blog, you can create content that is suitable to be used for articles, news releases, and talking points for you to use in other media.Don’t shoot for the New York Times, or Time Magazine, work your way up by becoming slightly famous in industry targeted media.
After you have written your articles, news releases and talking points, it’s only a matter of submitting them in the right place to the right people. Networking!
I have seen bloggers take content from their blogs right into the mainstream media even appearing on national television. A good blog post in the form of a 350-700 word article could make great content on a news or magazine website. But it is almost as exciting (and probably as lucrative) to be spotlighted in the highly-targeted, customer-rich industry media.
One morning while having my coffee and looking at the mail, I found a blog post of mine was transformed into the cover story on a print trade magazine I had given permission to use content from my blog. That put my message and URL right in front of the people I wanted to reach and I didn’t have to pay for an ad in the magazine!
An e-book I produced from a blog series I completed had more than 100k downloads and put my message and “business card” in the hands of my targeted audience. Another e-book I wrote landed me scores of print and targeted radio and news interviews.
Here are a few ideas for getting your blog content working for you in other media:
Blogging works with search engines as a free advertising tool for you. I have alluded several times in previous posts how blogging helps you come up in the search engine results when people look for topics of interest to them.
One of the big surprises to me when I started blogging was the fact that as I blogged more, the more important search engines became to getting traffic to my site. Soon I discovered that nearly half of my web traffic came from search engines. Blogging tripled the traffic I received on my web page before I started. And each month my traffic kept building as long as I continuously blogged on a regular basis.
You may think that when you post an article on your blog that the traffic from that post lasts only the few days it appears on the main page of your blog. But, quite the contrary, like fine wine, your blog post will age and turn into key-word-rich search engine food that will stay around for a long time after you initially post it.
Many people start on the web from search engines. Some people seem to think Google is the Internet and even type URLs into the search engine as if it were a browser. You can’t go wrong making friendly with the search engines and search engines love blogs!
Your blog post will be attracting people for as long as you have it on your site. And since all the work of writing the post is done, it’s like having a free internet advertisement that showcases your skills and knowledge out on the web for as long as you want it there.
The best part of search engine traffic is it is very targeted. People who type in a URL and come to your site take pot-luck that you have something there they want to see. But not with search engines, when people come to your site from a search, they are looking for exactly what you are talking about. The best kind of traffic is the kind that comes from people who are interested in your expertise on a topic of immediate importance to them.
Getting search engine traffic is free. Of course, you can pay companies to list your site and even sponsor advertisements in search engine results. But, if you regularly blog on the topics that are most relevant to your customers needs, you will be placed highly in the organic search engine results of their searched. That’s like getting free advertising every time you write a blog post.
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