Home Wealth Project
Extensive Research On How To Build Wealth From The Comfort Of Your Own Home.
Buyers Generation 2.0
Jun 25th
Most Effective List Building Methods Revealed!! Promote This Product And Make Up To 50% Commission!!!High Conversion Rates!!
Buyers Generation 2.0
The Master Plan – The New Generation of SEO
Jun 15th
This has been the hottest selling interactive, step-by-step guide for top level Search Engine Optimization. Updated for 2008, This guide gives the search engines what they want and in return gain top 10 rankings for 100s of keywords in just weeks.
The Master Plan – The New Generation of SEO
Book Review: The Steve Jobs Way, iLeadership for a New Generation
May 7th
Steve Jobs has been a popular figure in business books lately. First we had The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs which aimed to get us to think differently and gave us some insight into innovation. And now, Jay Elliot, author and former Senior VP of Apple, has delivered an insider’s view of Steve Jobs and his leadership style in his book The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation
Jay Elliot Writes an Intimate, Insider’s Story
Elliot (with the help of William Simon) has written The Steve Jobs Way in what I’d call an intimate and reflective style. He delivers the leadership lessons he experienced working alongside Steve Jobs.
Don’t expect a how-to manual here. After reading through the stories and examples that Elliot provides, you’ll have to reflect on your own experiences and then think about ways that you might want to implement Jobs’ way as part of your own.
WWSJD (What Would Steve Jobs Do?)
There is no doubt that Steve Jobs reigns supreme in the worlds of product innovation, brand building, marketing, presenting and leadership. Here is a passage from chapter 2, “Success in the Details.” I’ve picked an excerpt where you can see the lesson in play. After reading this paragraph, I started thinking about the ways in which I could make my customers “successful” or help them become “master users.”
“Steve Jobs understood something that a lot of companies try to do, but are rarely successful at. The more he advanced, the simpler his products became. In some instances, it’s less about the product and more about the user. Every user wants to be successful. When you know how to operate something masterfully, how does it make you feel? More people will buy if customers feel good using the product.”
Here’s another example of a leadership lesson that pulls from the popular story of Steve’s calligraphy class experience:
“What’s your most unusual talent, ability or area of knowledge that you never expect to have much use for?
One example: In his short stay at Reed College, [Steve Jobs] had stumbled on the subject of calligraphy. This was a young man who had, at an early age, been bitten by the technology bug. Why on earth would such a rarefied field as calligraphy have appealed to him?
His fascination with shapes and forms stretches from the configuration of letters in fonts like Garamond and Myriad to the incredibly appealing design of the iPhone.”
Why Should I Read Another Book About Steve Jobs?
Steve Jobs’ management style, his entrepreneurial spirit and his unique way of being appear to be resonating with today’s marketplace. Whether it’s his relentless focus on the customer experience or his ability to create a culture of innovation and creativity, Jobs has captured the interest of consumers and businesspeople alike.
If you’re looking for a break from checklists and worksheets that poke and prod at your brain to come up with new ideas, this book offers a gentler way of thinking about things while you read about Elliot’s experiences and Jobs’ actions and reactions to common business challenges.
If you’re a fan of educational biographies, this is a good book for you. You get to experience Steve Jobs’ style as if you were literally walking beside Elliot from the time he meets Jobs in a restaurant through Jobs’ ouster in 1985.
Book Review: The Steve Jobs Way, iLeadership for a New Generation
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Traffic Generation Course
Apr 25th
SEO Training Package is a training program that will teach you how to great high targeted traffic to your website and begin to make good income online. This package is a 10 part intensive video course.
Traffic Generation Course
Keeping Customers Is the New Lead Generation
Apr 12th
Keeping Customers Is the New Lead Generation
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Used to be that we could go out there and hunt down new leads and customers with a measured precision. We found a message that worked, found a medium that reached the right folks, tested, measured, refined and bingo – turn on the tap to growth.
Image Neil T via Flickr
And then a couple of things happened. Our prospects developed tools wise enough to block and ignore messages, social media platforms turned the equation into a dialogue vs. a monologue, and the worst recession in years crippled our prospect’s confidence.
Customer churn, something that might have been acceptable at some point in your trajectory, is devastating in today’s market reality.
Today a lost customer costs in two very significant ways.
First, replacing a customer has become harder to do and, perhaps more importantly, a happy customer is the greatest lead generation tool available. A thrilled customer is the most potent marketing asset your organization can leverage. Smart marketers realize this and explore ways to collaborate, enable and grow with their existing customers as a powerful lead generation channel.
Keeping a customer happy doesn’t stop at delivering on your promise. While not every company even passes that test, there is an expectation that you will deliver. To turn your customers into a collaboration partner you’ve got to up your total customer experience game.
I know everyone talks about that, but what does it really mean in the practical every day world.
It’s more than just creating a fun and exciting experience. I think those are important aspects, but turning your customers into committed partners requires an experience that possess mutually beneficial elements. They must get something in return for their commitment.
Below are some of the elements I think you need to consider in an effort to draw your customers close enough to turn them into committed partners.
Personalize the follow-up
You need to stay top of mind, you need to keep in touch, but that’s a minimum level effort. If you want to stand out you need to personalize your follow-up by connecting with your customers via social networks and exploring ways to tailor your message to their world. You need to ask them frequently about what they need to know, hear, read and consume and find ways to deliver that.
Review results
Your marketing and customer service processes must contain a way for you to help your customers realize the impact of working with you. You must gauge this for your own sake and so that you can find and fix occasions when something didn’t work as planned. Imagine how much business leaks from organizations because clients don’t have the time, energy or desire to find out how to get what they thought they were going to get. If you don’t do this step you’re throwing money away.
Publish together
Every one of our customers has a suite of publishing tools available to them. They can blog about us, create video product demos, review us, and tweet sweet little nothings with very little effort or cost. Oh, and the search engines really kind of love to find all that stuff too.
So, if you want to draw your customers in deeper, get in the publishing game with them. Teach them how to use these tools and then find ways to shoot success stories together, let them guest blog post and respond to comments, show them how to write reviews and find other great resources on review sites. Most importantly, find a way to show them why doing this is good for them.
Pair with peers
One of the greatest gifts you can give your customers is to facilitate their networking efforts. In most cases, some segment of your market consists of customers that are peers in some way – all small business CEOs, all purchasing agents, etc.
What if you found ways to create roundtable discussion communities and brought these peers together to discuss meaningful developments in their industry? What if some of these were customers and some were not? Do you see how you, your customers, and your lead generation efforts could benefit from this?
Be sharable
One the easiest ways to power your thrilled customers is to make your content assets as sharable as possible.
Add sharing plugins, Like and Retweet buttons, and make it very easy to pass your ebooks, slides and email newsletters.
Gather
A couple times a year take groups of four or five of your customers to lunch. You don’t have to do much more than bring them together and let them meet. You will be surprised how often they find ways they can help each other.
Once in a while bring as many of your customers together as you can. Acknowledge your referral champions and create a video booth where they can share their testimonials and success stories.
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Have We Lost a Generation of Small Business Owners?
Apr 4th
We’re down more than 1.1 million. That’s how many fewer self-employed Americans there are today than when the Great Recession began.
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, there were 589,000 fewer incorporated self-employed people and 569,000 fewer unincorporated self employed people in December 2007 than in February 2011. Perhaps most remarkably, on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, we have 753,000 fewer self-employed people now than when the recovery began in June 2009.
The most severe losses have been among the one third of the self-employed who head corporations. As the figure below shows, back in December 2007 there were 598,000 more incorporated self-employed Americans than there are today, and back in June 2009, there were an additional 95,000.
Click for larger chartThe recession and tepid recovery that has followed has eliminated 10.1 percent of the incorporated self-employed. To give you a sense of the magnitude of this loss, between December 2007 and February 2011, the total number of Americans with jobs declined by 5.6 percent on a non-seasonally adjusted basis.
As a result of the recent decline, the current level of incorporated self-employed is back to the level we had in April 2004, despite a significant increase in the population.
The disappearance of so many incorporated self-employed is troubling given the characteristics of this type of self-employment person. An article by Steve Hipple, a BLS economist, explains that self-employed heads of incorporated businesses are less likely to work part time and are more likely to have employees. Moreover, nearly half of self-employed heads of corporations have at least a college education, making them more educated than the unincorporated self-employed, on average.
Hipple finds that many incorporated self employed are found in construction and professional services. Doctors’ offices, law firms, accounting firms, dental practices, real estate agencies and insurance agencies, for example, all involve a lot of incorporated self-employment.
The staggering reduction in the particularly valuable incorporated form self-employment has me wondering, “How long it will take America to rebuild our stock of small business owners?”
Have We Lost a Generation of Small Business Owners?
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Referral Generation Requires Both Strategy and Tactics
Jan 19th
Referral Generation Requires Both Strategy and Tactics
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
In my book The Referral Engine I point out that referral generation must be a foundational mindset that runs throughout your marketing plan and your marketing implementation. To become a widely referred organization everyone in your business must think about referrals at the strategic level and and at the everyday tactical level.
It’s this point of view that drives organizations to get better, so they deserve more referrals, while also getting clearer about how they receive more referrals. The combined strategy and tactics approach is the catalyst that truly revs the referral engine.
Recently, one of my readers sent me a note that I think illustrates this strategy and tactics frame of mind in a simple, yet powerful manner. I run his note here to help bring this point to light in the real world.
Hello John,
A lot of business advice we hear makes a lot of sense in theory and is then left to us to adapt and implement. It doesn’t mean it’s not valuable, just that it takes more work and creativity on our part to get it to work in a practical sense. In reading “The Referral Engine,” I became really excited by the concept of using referrals as both a strategy and a tactic at the same time – which is pretty unusual. It’s a strategy because it sets up a goal with each customer to exceed expectations in a way that will cause them to tell others. As a solopreneur, if you adopt that strategy it forces a level of intellectual honesty that helps you make lots of decisions along the way by asking yourself, “Is this good enough that my client would want to tell a friend?” But it’s using this concept as a tactic that made the biggest difference for me.
I outlined this passage in your book: “…your lead-conversion process must contain referral generation as part of the deal: ‘We know you are going to be so satisfied with what we’ve agreed upon today that after the project is completed, we are going to schedule a meeting to make certain you received the results promised, and at that time we’ll ask you if you would introduce us to three others that you know need these same results.” That seemed like a really powerful sales tactic to me. It’s better than a money back guarantee, which puts the focus on failure. This approach demonstrates to the customer that you have a goal that is beyond siphoning money from them.
And so I immediately put that to use last September. I’ve just launched a new inbound marketing consulting business, which means that I didn’t really have any reference-able accounts at the time (just some non-profit volunteer work). As I sat in a meeting with the company’s leadership I was open with the fact that I was just getting this business started and while they appreciated the candor, they were also obviously concerned. That’s when I told them that my primary goal in this project wasn’t to collect a paycheck; it was to exceed expectations to a point where they would be happy to introduce me to three others who would like to achieve the same results. I wish the meeting was being recorded because I immediately detected an emotional shift in the room from concern to genuine excitement. The COO quickly replied, “Oh yeah, I can think of five clients right off the top of my head that we could refer to you. Nothing would make me happier!” I’m convinced that was one of two key tactics that landed me the account.
Your book contained lots of other great tactics that I’m also trying to implement but this one, in my opinion, had the biggest “bang for the buck.” So thanks!
Best Regards,
Jon DiPietro
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
How to Create a Content Lead Generation System
Dec 2nd
How to Create a Content Lead Generation System
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Everyone’s talking about content these days and like it not you’ve got to get in the publishing game. (Content Rules – great book on the subject just out.)
Of course this doesn’t mean get the game just to play. The idea behind all of this content creation you’re being asked to do is to use it to build your business in the long term – to get more leads and sales.
The following systematic approach to content creation will help guide you in the most effective use of your limited time on the way to creating a momentum building content lead generation system.
Content Creation Strategy
Like all good systems and processes, your content lead system must start with strategy. With that in mind there are three very important concepts to consider
- The total body of work – think big picture when you think content. Pretend (or for real) that you are outlining a book about your entire subject of expertise. Now, as you think about content work through the outline and remember that are creating a body of work that may take months and years to finish.
- Purpose and repurpose – As you create content always think about the purpose you have in mind – drive traffic, get links, draw reaction – and the repurpose opportunities – blend several posts into an article, use it as seminar, create an ebook from a category of blog posts.
- Medium diverse – One great way to get more bang for your buck is to republish your content in various forms. Record and archive seminars, transcribe audio and video and offer multiple forms of the same content.
Tools – Moleskine notebooks to capture ideas, Dragon Dictation or Casting Words to transcribe audio and video to text, Audio and Video capture tools such as iPhone or Flip Camera
Content Inspiration
Even with a big picture body of work approach you can get blocked when it comes to creating fresh and frequent content. It’s a good idea to have ready made sources of inspiration to turn to and help keep you up to speed on all the real time happenings in your world.
- Questions – make a note of all the questions that prospects and customers ask and get in the habit of posting answers to these inquiries.
- Delicious – use bookmarking tool like delicious so you can mark things you’ve found for later reading and so you can see what other people are bookmarking for categories you need to keep up on.
- Google Reader – Subscribe to and browse 50 or so related blogs – you can do this on your phone while you stand in line at the coffee shop.
- Alltop – Convenient way to see lots of blog posts sorted by countless topics
- StumbleUpon – Unique way to find of the beaten path stuff about topics you choose
- Google Keywords – Sometimes you just need to write about what people are searching for and using a keyword tools helps you know the best way to say it.
- SmartBriefs – Daily digests of some of the best of the web on a variety of topics.
Content Automation
Few people are still as geeky about RSS as me anymore, but I still love what you can do with it. (Back archives and tutorials on RSS use)
My favorite use is to create content automatically or on the fly by installing a bit of RSS magic. Using this approach you can create fresh content for your own site or even custom filtered feeds just for your best customers.
Here’s a quick tip: Bookmark mentions of your company in delicious using company name tag, grab the RSS feed from the tag on delicious and take it Feedburner and use the Buzz Boost feature to create HTML code to publish this info to your “In the news page.” The page updates automatically every time you bookmark an news mention.
Tools: Google News, Feedburner, Delicious, Yahoo Pipes
Advertising Content
If you want your advertising to be more effective and your content to generate leads don’t sell your stuff, advertise your content.
Use your Facebook and other PPC advertising to point to your valuable free ebook or upcoming online seminar and past seminar archive. Turn your advertising into a trust building platform rather than an expensive turnoff.
On Demand Content
One of the most dramatic advances in the communication of sales messages has come in the form of presentation platforms.
With today’s low cost and easy to use video tools you can create full featured, highly engaging sales presentations and host them online to effectively generate and nurture leads night and day.
Using a tool like SlideRocket allows you to also easily embed forms in your interactive presentations and receive alerts when people view the show and complete the form.
Content Partnerships
And now for the big payoff for all your content creation.
Once you create a blog, ebook, white paper, podcast, videocast, online and offline educational seminar you can take these proven and practiced bits of content and start offering them to your strategic partners.
Let them cobrand your ebook and offer it to their clients. Invite them write guest blog content and interview them for your podcast. Offer to provide your awesome seminar free of charge to their customers.
While content creation may seem like a lot of work, using even a fraction of the ideas contained here you can make the ROI of content creation crush just about any other form of lead generation today.
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
SlideRocket Set to Blast Into the Online Lead Generation Space
Oct 6th
SlideRocket Set to Blast Into the Online Lead Generation Space
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
SlideRocket is an online presentation editor positioned initially to take on the likes of PowerPoint and Keynote on the web. Today I think it took a giant leap forward.
I’ve always liked SlideRocket’s ease of use for design and find it easier to use than most desktop software. Over the last year or so the tool has continued, in my opinion, to improve by making it easier to add video, use presentations offline, and host online presentations that don’t require any download or plugin on the part of the attendee.
SlideRocket is also a great presentation asset manager because it allows you to share and collaborate on presentations with team members and even updates all your presentations and slides when you make a change to an asset such as a logo. Organizations that share or use common presentations for sales and demos should really appreciate that functionality.
This week SlideRocket announced additional features that also make it a powerful sales and lead generation tool.
SlideRocket users can now embed live collaborative comments as well as polls and surveys into presentations and have these presentations available 24/7 as marketing assets.
Viewers can add comments, like sticky notes, anywhere in a presentation and have the comments delivered to the presentation author in real time organized in one place.
While other online meeting tools such as GoToWebinar and WebEx use polling and surveys, what makes SlideRocket’s implementation different is the ability to create and host interactive presentations that can be viewed at any time and then get real time alerts as people add comments and complete survey data.
For the small business this is almost like having your best sales person standing by making presentations, qualifying, nurturing, and perhaps even closing leads day and night.
As you can see I’m pretty bullish on this update because I think this could be a game changer in the world of small business lead generation.
Imagine running a PPC or offline ad campaign that sends people to a landing page to view your educational presentation featuring, slides, data, audio, video, surveying and polling and knowing in real time who is viewing the presentation, how they are responding, where they spending the most time or where they stop viewing.
There are other providers of real time lead analytics, but few compare to Slide Rocket’s ease of use and ability to engage.
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View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
ActSeed is the Next Generation in Social Media for Business
Sep 21st
| (BUSINESS WIRE)–With the resurgence in entrepreneurship, new business creation and the explosion of social media activity comes… |
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