OK, SEO ranking reports are not dead... but Google's personalized search is making them less and less relevant. Learn why many are using the wrong metrics to measure success--and three ways to reach online customers despite personalized search. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/18/2012 9:00:00 AM

Do you think a prospect responds better to your marketing message because you've based it on a customer persona? Unfortunately, that is not the case. To craft effective messaging, you need to address four essential questions. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/17/2012 9:00:00 AM

Want to create the next online viral sensation? Though no magic formula will get you there, the creators of the wildly popular Texts From Hillary website offer four essential tips that helped make their site a huge Internet smash. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/16/2012 9:00:00 AM

Many brands recognize the potential of Facebook's Timeline, but they don't really know how to use it to their full advantage. Learn six straightforward ways to optimize your brand's Timeline to drive better marketing performance. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/15/2012 9:00:00 AM

Creating a great call to action that gets results can be tricky, unless you have a few tricks up your sleeve. Here are 12 essential tips for optimizing your calls to action to ensure they compel potential customers to act. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/14/2012 9:00:00 AM

Despite their critical contribution to a business, sales reps can often get in their own way. Here are three of the biggest ways sales reps kill leads--and three solutions that'll help turn prospects into customers. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/11/2012 9:00:00 AM

If you've ever been to a zoo, you probably used a zoo map during your visit. Those maps provide wonderful visual cues to the customer-experience and performance-chain lessons we can all apply to our businesses. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/10/2012 9:00:00 AM

Like any marketing campaign, a mobile marketing campaign can be well thought out, meticulously planned, and perfectly functional... but still produce limited user engagement. Why? A subpar call to action. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/9/2012 9:00:00 AM

Companies are leaping onto the Pinterest bandwagon, and your brand, too, can benefit from what is now one of the world's largest social networks. Learn what type of content marketers should pin--and how. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/8/2012 9:00:00 AM

In an age of information overflow, having a user-friendly website is critical. How does your site measure up? Here is a three-step approach to analyzing the usability of your website, along with tips for improving its usability. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/7/2012 9:00:00 AM

Sure, you have customers. But are they loyal to you? Learn four things you need to know about your customers to inspire their loyalty. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/4/2012 9:00:00 AM

Choosing and installing a new content management system (CMS) is a great opportunity to improve your online presence. Here are six critical questions to consider when choosing a new CMS. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/3/2012 9:00:00 AM

Do you know exactly what your campaign goals are? Do you know how to measure your campaign outcomes? If not, here are three steps you must take when developing and executing any marketing campaign. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/2/2012 9:00:00 AM

Media appearances are essential if you want to build your personal brand and emerge as a recognized industry expert. Learn 10 tips for mastering media appearances, and five key guidelines to follow during an interview. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

5/1/2012 9:00:00 AM

The call to action in your marketing materials is one of the most important elements in a campaign. So how can you write one that works? Learn tried-and-true tips that can help catapult your call-to-action writing to expert level. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

4/30/2012 9:00:00 AM

Too many companies have yet to embrace marketing resource management (MRM) technology, which offers a host of capabilities that can empower them. Learn why you need an MRM solution, and tips for choosing the right one. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

4/27/2012 9:00:00 AM

For B2B, the ROI from social media isn't always so clear. Learn research findings about the social media use of one B2B segment--and four opportunities for B2B marketers to maximize social media ROI. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

4/26/2012 9:00:00 AM

Marketing mix analysis provides insights that improve ROI and optimize spend. The question is... will you get better results from outsourcing marketing mix analytics or building in-house capabilities? Read the full article at MarketingProfs

4/25/2012 9:00:00 AM

Customer experience is about meeting customer needs, aligning touch points, and creating relationships. Learn customer experience basics--and how to create an enriched customer experience that gets results. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

4/24/2012 9:00:00 AM

The post script (P.S.) can be a powerful tool for marketers--if it's used the right way. Learn five things you can do with your post script to generate more clicks in your emails and capture the reader's attention. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

4/23/2012 9:00:00 AM

Before taking your brand global, make sure you've done the proper market research, hired the right staff, and implemented the cultural checks needed to succeed. Here are six steps all brands must consider before going global. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

4/20/2012 9:00:00 AM

Marketing automation systems offer a veritable multitude of capabilities. But don't let all those features overwhelm you. Learn five ways to jump-start your marketing automation strategy without getting stressed out. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

4/19/2012 9:00:00 AM

Marketers can feel overwhelmed by the waves of marketing "solutions" that come at them daily: new digital advertising options, new mobile apps, every surefire lead-generation scheme in the book. It's enough to give a person a monumental headache. No worries, though. The data doctor is in. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

4/18/2012 9:00:00 AM

Imagine having a switch that activates your buyer's brain and gets her to pay attention to what you say—and to take action. Learn how "engagement energy" can help you craft stronger sales and marketing messages that get results. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

4/17/2012 9:00:00 AM

Almost inevitably, every website will encounter a problem of some kind. Many online marketers lack the technical skills to make website fixes themselves. So how can they effectively mitigate a website problem? Read the full article at MarketingProfs

4/16/2012 9:00:00 AM

Incredibly counter-intuitive research out of Harvard suggests a novel way to make your employees feel more free: Give them more to do. Huh?

Sometimes scientific findings of such head-slapping obviousness--talking on the phone makes you a worse driver and men generally favor large breasts, for example--that they make the average lay person wonder how anyone ever got funding to investigate the question in the first place. But then every once in a while, you run into a research result on the opposite end of the spectrum--something so counter-intuitive you can hardly believe it's true.

Harvard Business School just produced one of the latter, and it's of particular interest to entrepreneurs hoping to help their busy employees feel less of a time crunch. Michael Norton, an associate professor of business administration, wanted to find out how bosses can help their teams feel like they have more time. Given that we can't slow the sun's crossing of the sky, the obvious alternative is to simply give employees fewer tasks. But it turns out this common sense response is actually the exact opposite of what Norton discovered.

To figure out what can relieve our sense of time pressure, Norton conducted a series of experiments that gave some study subjects an unexpected block of free time, by sending them home 15 minutes early from an experiment they were told would take an hour for example. Another group was instead told to fill the time with worthwhile activities to help others such as editing essays for low-income students. Which group reported back that they felt they had enough time for all the tasks in their day?

Surprisingly, the answer is those who spend time helping others rather than those who were given additional free time. By doing activities that make them feel useful, employees increase their sense of "time affluence," the researchers conclude, implying that the source of our perceived time famine isn't really lack of hours but a lack of a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Norton offered three suggestions for how managers could put thus insight to use to Business Insider:

Make employees participate in a company volunteer effort, particularly if they can use part of their workday to do it.

Let employees know how their day-to-day tasks are helping others. If they can hear how the employee helped a customer, this will also make them more satisfied with their job.

Use fun strategies to encourage team members to help each other. Norton tells of one experiment where salespeople were given $20 bonus money and told they had to spend on another team member. Those teams sold more than other groups that were told to spend the $20 on themselves.

This latest research finding of Norton's follows earlier studies showing analogous, counter-intuitive results. One finding, for instance, revealed that letting employees give bonuses to others is actually more motivating than receiving bonuses themselves.

Do you think forcing your team to spend time on worthy tasks to help others would relieve their sense of being time poor--or just start a mutiny?

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5/18/2012 7:29:21 AM

The founders of Skype and Kazaa have moved onto their next digital venture: Rdio, a streaming music service. Will listeners subscribe?

In 2008, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the Scandinavian founders of Skype and Kazaa, started working on Rdio because they were convinced that music listening is shifting permanently from a download model (like iTunes) to one streamed on-demand from the cloud (like Pandora).

Initially with funding from Zennström's venture capital firm—when Skype was sold twice in recent years, Friis and Zennström reportedly earned close to $1 billion in the process—they set up shop in San Francisco. They also asked Drew Larner, a former movie executive with 20th Century Fox and Spyglass Entertainment, to be CEO. (Larner had met Friis and Zennström 10 years ago, when they were still working at Kazaa, the controversial online music-sharing service.)

Rdio users can now play any of 15 million songs from the likes of Justin Bieber, the Beastie Boys, and Coldplay—and never hear an ad—from the web or an app, and share (or discover) music in real-time with friends.

What distinguishes Rdio most is that—unlike many Internet publishers that rely heavily on advertising revenue—the company is going after a subscription model from the start instead. "It’s a very disruptive [music] experience to have to listen to an ad all of a sudden," says Larner. "We wanted to keep the experience clean and felt like we'd be able to offer something that was compelling enough to get people to subscribe."

Rdio users can listen on an Internet browser or Rdio desktop application. After hearing an undisclosed number of free songs (users see a meter "run out"), they are required to pay $5 a month. An additional $5 monthly fee applies to listen to music on the go with Rdio's iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows 7 smartphone mobile apps. "Ten bucks is roughly the cost of an album, and with us, you're getting access to everything," says Larner.

But the subscription model still pins Rdio up against established behaviors. Consumers are not accustomed to paying for online content. Less than 10% of revenue in the Internet publishing industry comes from paid subscriptions, according to IBISWorld.

And if they're going to pay, says Jack Plunkett, CEO of Plunkett Research, "consumer preference is to own the music."

Larner attributes consumers' slow shuffle toward paid subscriptions to an emotional disconnection from digital content. "In the past you showed people that rack of albums you had in a milk crate and said, 'Look, this is who I am,'" he says. "We believe Rdio expresses that really well in the way the service is built, but getting people over that hump is a challenge."

Rdio is focused on overcoming that challenge. With a reported $17.5 million in financing, Rdio is trying to make finding and sharing new music easier. The company recently upgraded to a faster browsing speed and continuously-scrolling interface. Each user can display most-played songs and artists on a profile, "follow" friends and other members, and share music with Facebook friends. Says Larner: "Once people see that everything is there—they can listen to [Rdio] on any device, they can listen to it on a plane, they don’t need an iPod or iTunes—they’re hooked."

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5/18/2012 7:00:47 AM

All eyes are on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Zynga. Clearly it's the right time to start a website. The Internet publishing industry is expected to hit $72 billion in five years.

More people than ever before go online for information and entertainment. Every day, almost half of all adult Internet users read web publications, and nearly a third watch Web videos, says Pew Research. Advertisers have taken notice. A recent study by eMarketer, which tracks the industry, projects that online ad spending will hit close to $40 billion this year, surpassing print ad dollars for the first time.

Industry-wide revenue (mostly from ads) for Internet publishers is projected to almost double in the next five years to almost $72 billion. The number of employees in the field is expected to grow to 150,422 by 2017, up from 127,880 this year.

As technology costs have dropped, it's pretty cheap to start and grow a website, and the typical company in the sector has only two or three employees. That said, ad revenue is highly dependent on Web traffic, and many players means tough competition.

Online video. Advertisers particularly like sites like Hulu that require users to check out commercials as they watch content, notes Brian Bueno, who follows Internet publishers for IBISWorld.

See more Business Opportunities by Industry in 2012

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5/18/2012 7:00:07 AM

Hiring a top PR firm is often out of the question for start-ups. Here are five tips for how to handle your own public relations.

For most journalists, taking a meeting with a vacuum salesman would be right up there with getting their teeth pulled. But when we worked as reporters and James Dyson came to town, we always took the meeting.

Dyson—the founder of the eponymous appliance company that's best known for it's see-through vacuums and quirky commercials—isn't just a brilliant inventor, he's the perfect pitchman for his company. But it wasn't his fabulous British accent or those memorable ads that got him the coverage in our magazine. In fact, at the time, his ad campaign hadn't crossed our radar yet and his company was relatively unknown in the United States.

What was it that set Dyson apart from the chorus of PR pitches we'd hear on a regular basis? He was passionate, animated, and honest. He built his company from scratch and was able to share all of the personal stories (like failing 5,000+ times in his quest to perfect his vacuum cleaner) that go along with being an entrepreneur. And it was that ability to tell real and interesting anecdotes that made us want to write about him.

While Dyson always made it look easy, getting media attention is far from simple. You've heard this before, but it's still true: the best way to get coverage inside a glossy magazine or on a national news show is to get to know someone on the inside. And that's really tough if you're running a company outside of New York City or any major metropolitan area. And that's where a large PR firm comes in handy—they make a living developing contacts in the media world.

Unfortunately, if you're an entrepreneur running a start-up (and are not yet as successful as Dyson!), you probably won't be able to afford a top PR firm. So until you reach that size, here are five tips for how to get your story told.

The silver lining to the sad fact that you can't afford to hire a fancy PR firm is that, like Dyson, you are the most authentic spokesperson for your business. You are the biggest champion of your brand and no one knows your company better than you do. Such authenticity is impossible to buy. Even the best (and most expensive) PR folks can't fake it. And journalists love to hear the real story-how did you dream up the company, how did you get funded, where did the name come from? The flip side is that journalists often hate to hear your story from PR folks. So feel confident that you are the right person to be leading your PR efforts.

You know your customer better than anyone else, so figure out where he or she spends their free time. Are they on fashion blogs, glued to CNBC, or watching the Today Show? Once you figure that out, develop a list of your media targets (magazines, TV shows, blogs, etc.). Make a long list because this process isn't easy! Once you have that list, you'll need to dive deeper and try to find the individuals at each outlet who cover your industry. Be sure to read their articles, follow their tweets, or watch their show regularly, so you know their beat or their interests well.

This will most likely be your toughest challenge. The benefit of a big PR firm is their hefty Rolodex and their relationships with journalists. But don't despair-thanks to social media, it's easier than ever to find someone's contact information. Check their company's web site first. If there's no clear contact information on their corporate site, move on to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. See if you can find a direct email on Facebook. You can even try to get their attention by tweeting at them about your company. Often calling the main office number and being friendly to the operator can yield the best results about who covers what you are pitching and how to reach them. Finally, we often check helpareporter.com. Journalists post detailed queries for sources and anyone who signs up can email a pitch if they think they're right for a certain story.

Once you have contact information for the journalists you want to reach or once you get a meeting, be sure to have a story to offer that will fit the content of the publication. Journalists need to constantly fill the pages of their magazine or the segments on their show. When we pitched O Magazine, we knew they did a regular story on women who switched careers. It was the perfect page for us since we'd left Fortune Magazine to create Altruette.com, our philanthropic line of charms. And eventually they profiled us in that section. Make their job easier by tailoring your pitch and you'll improve your odds of getting your story told.

No response? Keep trying. You're message probably isn't getting to the right person or he or she is simply too busy. As journalists we found the most effective PR people used the "pleasant pest" approach. They checked in often and stayed on our radar, but never got annoying.

Getting any press coverage can take a long time. But if you're willing to be persistent—and patient—DIY PR can truly pay off.

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5/18/2012 6:40:00 AM

Who knew what Facebook would become when Mark Zuckerberg launched it in 2004? Not these guys.

Hindsight is 20/20. And sometimes, it's just plain funny.

With Facebook's blockbuster IPO upon us, let's take a look back through the company's eight-year history at some of the people and companies who were doubters, haters, and nay-sayers.

Sure, in 2004, no one really expected the then-22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg's student-only social networking site to become a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of millions of users. Or that that fledgeling start-up would someday grow to make a public stock offering bigger than that of Google.

But in the age of the Internet, it's so easy to say: "Told you so."

Check out some of the worst offenses.

"For many in the dotcom world, 2007 was dominated by one story: the rise of Facebook. The success of the social networking service has increased optimism about the internet industry. After all, if Microsoft is prepared to buy a 1.6% share for $240m (£121m), there is evidence that good ideas can be worth a lot of money. It is no surprise then that investors are looking for the next big thing--and these are some of the favourites." —The Guardian, 2007

"The context of Facebook is 'social networking.' It's all the rage right now--the novelty of connecting or reconnecting, of building your network, of watching the torrent of trivia flow to and from your network of peeps. But ultimately we as people--at least most of us-aren't social networking hobbyists....While it is likely that Facebook will find a viable and scalable business model somewhere within the monthly engagement of 200 million people, its future is anything but certain." —Jim Banister, SpectrumDNA CEO and entrepreneurship professor at UCLA, 2009

"Facebook is a fad. Yes, a FAD!!! You couldn't give a single legitimate argument to prove otherwise (and don't try to feed me that crap line about social networking being around long enough to no longer be a fad… Facebook, a single company, doesn't equate to 'social networking'). People who waste their time chasing fads (especially in marketing) always get burned, wasting more time than they can justify in the long run." —SocialRealist.com, 2007

"Facebook can't afford to screw up. Facebook's U.S. user base grew 56 percent to 22.5 million in April from 14.4 million during the year-ago period, according to Nielsen Online. That was down from a blistering 98 percent growth a year earlier." —Forbes, 2008

"Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, told an investors conference in New York yesterday, 'It's a great site and I know the guys there well. We're certainly not paying $2 billion for Facebook.'" —MarketWatch, 2006

5/17/2012 2:25:34 PM

Joe Fernandez launched Klout the old-fashioned way: sleeping on couches, abandoning his friends, and risking his life's savings. Piece of cake.

How do you know you're ready to start a company?

The rational, prudent answer is obvious: You start the moment you've got adequate funding, an enthusiastic team behind you, and an idea everyone agrees is brilliant.

Only problem is, the rational, prudent answer is wrong. If you wait for all that, you will never launch anything.

I was reminded of that fact a few months back when I interviewed Joe Fernandez, CEO and co-founder of Klout. If you haven't yet heard of this three-year-old San Francisco company, you will. And if you have a Twitter account, you can be pretty sure Klout has heard of you. The company now rates the online influence of over 100 million people; the company’s 70 employees analyze 2.7 billion pieces of data each day.

Here's how a recent Wired story describes Klout:

Much as Google’s search engine attempts to rank the relevance of every web page, Klout is on a mission to rank the influence of every person online. Its algorithms comb through social media data: If you have a public account with Twitter, which makes updates available for anyone to read, you have a Klout score, whether you know it or not (unless you actively opt out on Klout’s website). You can supplement that score by letting Klout link to harder-to-access accounts, like those on Google+, Facebook, or LinkedIn. The scores are calculated using variables that can include number of followers, frequency of updates, the Klout scores of your friends and followers, and the number of likes, retweets, and shares that your updates receive.

...Klout is starting to infiltrate more and more of our everyday transactions. In February, the enterprise-software giant Salesforce.com introduced a service that lets companies monitor the Klout scores of customers who tweet compliments and complaints; those with the highest scores will presumably get swifter, friendlier attention from customer service reps. In March, luxury shopping site Gilt Groupe began offering discounts proportional to a customer’s Klout score.

The article goes on to quote a Klout executive predicting that people with formidable Klout scores "will soon board planes earlier, get free access to VIP airport lounges, stay in better hotel rooms, and receive deep discounts from retail stores and flash-sale outlets. 'We say to brands that these are the people they should pay attention to most,'[the exec] says. 'How they want to do it is up to them.'”

Five years ago, of course, Fernandez was not making any such grand speeches about the influence Klout would soon wield. In fact, he wasn't speaking at all. He was recovering from jaw surgery, and doctors had wired his jaw shut. Awkward as that was, it proved to be crucial to the origin of Klout, since it meant that his only means of communication was social media.

“I had to depend on Twitter and Facebook,” he says, “and it was amazing to me I could tell people who trusted me my opinions instantly from my phone, and their opinions in turn influenced me.” But it was obvious that some people's opinions mattered more than others, and it struck him that a system ranking the importance of those opinions could be a highly valuable service.

Fernandez had started two data companies before, one in health care and another in real estate. "They were interesting data problems to solve, but the impact that social media had on my life makes Klout so much different, and helped make me much more passionate about the idea.” It turns out that not only are people interested in influence, but companies are interested in people with influence -- companies like Nike, Disney, P&G, Virgin America, and Starbucks.

“An example is Audi,” Fernandez says. “When they were launching the new A8, [the marketers understood that] commercials just don’t resonate. But what we do care about is what our friends say.” So he helped Audi find the most influential people for high-end cars and “let them, in their own words, talk about it.” The results have been good for Klout’s clients, and explosive for Klout.

Even so, the idea didn't exactly resonate when he first described it. "When I got [my jaw] unwired, I couldn’t convince any of my friends that this was a good idea. In 2008 the idea that measuring who was influential on Twitter and Facebook could be a business [got nowhere]....Everyone was like, who cares?"

“It was just me for quite a while,” Fernandez says. “I quit my job and went to Singapore … and stayed there for four months while we built the beta version of Klout. I couldn’t convince any of my friends that this was a good idea. But at a certain point, in my gut, I knew that if I didn’t do this I would be thinking about it for the rest of my life.” Finally one friend joined him, then a second.

Even the funding came from Joe. “I put about $200,000 of my own money in, and was fortunate to have hosting partners and developers and people that were willing to work on belief in the vision and not on belief in cash on the table.”

Fernandez didn’t go to the VCs in Silicon Valley – not at first. Like his friends, they would not have seen what he saw. And they are not in business to take the wild passionate bets that founders make.

What made Klout a succeess? Well, it was a good idea, but ideas alone are never the key. Almost every good idea has been thought of before. (The iPod was not the first music player. The iPhone was not the first smartphone. The iPad was not the first tablet. And so on.) In Klout's space, celebrities have had their "Q" ratings and politicians their popularity ratings for years.

So, yes, Joe believed in his idea, but more than that, he believed in himself. He was willing do quit his job, put up his cash, move to Asia, sleep on couches, and “beg borrow and steal” to make it happen.

How do you know you're ready to start a company? VCs say they never invest in an idea alone. They invest in a team, and the team starts with one person with a burning desire to build something new. Joe Fernandez told me that he figured that “whatever it took, this was going to succeed.”

When you feel that way—that's how you know you're ready.

5/17/2012 8:18:33 AM

The projects that take off on crowdfunding platforms are the ones that offer great rewards. Here are a few ideas to try.

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from the recently published book The Crowdfunding Bible by Scott Steinberg, CEO of consulting firm TechSavvy Global, and Rusel DeMaria, author of High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games.

If you try to launch a crowdfunding project simply by asking for contributions and offering little of value in return, you’ll very quickly discover that managing projects isn’t like running a political campaign or charity fundraiser. Few will pledge money simply to provide support. The majority of backers expect something in return—hence the need to incentivize them by offering compelling goods or services in exchange for contributions.

In the case of physical products, the notion of pre-ordering, or making advance payments, is a well-established practice. Similar transactions work well under the crowdfunding model, especially when coupled with eye-catching or exclusive extras such as elaborate collector’s sets and limited edition coffeetable books. The type of reward you offer should be determined by the kind of project you’re running. In the case of special events, for instance, you might offer free admission, backstage passes, or even a chance to hop up onstage and jam with a favorite band.

However, for consumer products, the first and most obvious reward would be to provide backers with a digital or physical copy of the item in advance or at a price far less than the typical retail value. From there, you can tack on or bundle together other rewards. Bear in mind that creativity pays: Among the most consistently popular rewards are those that offer personal or unique touches, or provide singular opportunities, e.g. lunch with a famed industry figure or the inclusion of donors’ names in your new software product’s credits.

When weighing reward prospects, be sure to research similar projects to see what resonates with fans. The overall distribution makeup and the individual items’ respective contributions to the campaigns’ bottomline are important to keep in mind. The following are example rewards you might consider offering:

• The product itself. A copy of the item in question—and, potentially, one sold for a limited time at a steep discount. Be sure to calculate any associated costs and figure them into your pricing structure and funding goals.
• Advanced or early access to the product or service. This may include advance entry for backers to prototype testing programs.
• Enhanced versions of the product. For instance, autographed, deluxe, director’s cut and collector’s editions.
• Merchandise and souvenirs. Besides “making of” books and autographed materials, you might offer posters, stickers, t-shirts, caps and other items that commemorate the project.
• Behind-the-scenes photos, videos, and booklets. Items that show the people, concept work and other elements featured within the project—especially if there is a large visual component to it.
• Opportunities to affect the project’s eventual outcome. Some film, book, music, TV, theater and video game projects allow backers to suggest how stories develop, the contents included in the finished package, and featured subjects or locations.
• Making your backers part of the product. Several creative projects allow backers to be a character within the narrative, soundtrack or action itself.
• Giving contributors credit. It’s always a good idea to thank your backers, but sometimes there are ways to do so publicly: within the product itself (e.g. liner notes, book, or game credits) or at surrounding events. Be generous with donors.
• Combined rewards. These rewards combine several other rewards into one or bundle several pricing tiers worth of incentives together. Many successful campaigns use an “all of the above” strategy, offering simple rewards at lower tiers and then add extras on top of them.
• Exclusive access. Chances to meet people who are part of the creative team behind various projects or related notables (e.g. actors, directors, musicians, artists, online celebrities, etc.).
• Private parties, events, and occasions. Some projects offer special events as a reward to donors—usually at the highest pricing tiers. These may include invitations to exclusive launch parties, private events held in backers’ honor or private concerts.

There are lots of options when it comes to creating unique, eye-catching and memorable rewards. Pick the ones that fit your project best.

The electronic version of The Crowdfunding Bible is available now for free download.

5/17/2012 8:00:54 AM

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5/17/2012 8:00:54 AM

Have big dreams of tech entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley but no clue how to realize them? A Dev Bootcamp alum explains how he did it.

Suppose you're sitting around your hometown, whether it's Poughkeepsie or Pensacola, with big dreams of start-up life in Silicon Valley but only a modest amount of tech know-how and absolutely no idea of how to get where you want to go. Do you head to university or sign up for a graduate course to gain the skills you need? Do you pack your bags for the Bay Area and pray you land on your feet? Both paths are risky. Lachy Groom suggests there may be a better way.

Already a veteran of several start-ups at the tender age of 17, Groom desperately wanted a life of entrepreneurship in America's tech hub but being from Perth, Australia, he was, well, as far away from the action as you can get geographically. Then he spotted an ad by Shereef Bishay in Hacker News, offering to teach highly motivated but relatively unskilled novices the programming language Ruby on Rails in an intense eight-week course in San Francisco, which Bishay dubbed Dev Bootcamp.

Groom signed up and never looked back. He completed the intensive experience in the spring of this year and is now navigating the choppy waters of U.S. immigration for the necessary visa to start work as a Dev Bootcamp employee in the Valley. And he's not the only one of his cohort of 20, including recent grads, mid-career professionals from industries spanning insurance to finance, and a handful of start-up veterans, who found the experience life-changing: 88% of Groom's fellow students currently have job offers on the table, with approximately 60% of those headed to start-ups and the remaining 40% mostly employed at consultancies.

"I went with the idea that I would use [programming] as a skill to complement me being in start-ups," Groom told Inc.com, explaining that Dev Bootcamp was a great choice for others with similar ambitions but cautioning, "the thing about Dev Bootcamp is you're trained to become a software engineer, not just given enough knowledge so that you can be competent in a conversation with a CTO, so I think it's great for start-up people to do it as long as they're willing to put in the hard effort because it's a very intense course."

How intense?

"It's officially nine-to-six every day but you'll struggle to find a day when people aren't there until midnight," Groom says, noting participants basically put their lives completely on hold for the duration of the course, which was eight weeks for Groom but is increasing to 10 weeks for future courses.

The payoffs for the hard work can be substantial, though.

"We were ready for entry-level programming positions," by the end of the bootcamp Groom reports. And he believes program grads even have an edge over other junior-level candidates. "A lot of programmers get stuck and then they get frustrated and stop, but there was a focus on how to get to that next level and where to go for solutions. We have that ability to learn very quickly after going through this course," he says.

Talks by folks from Twitter and the CEO of IGN among other weekly speakers also can't hurt when it comes to preparing the fledgling programmers and plugging them in to the start-up community.

So who is right for Dev Bootcamp? With the experience being so full-on, motivation is key as, obviously, is a modicum of intelligence and a basic grounding in technology, if not programming.

"You need tech context. You need to know that programming languages power the Web. You need to maybe have a Twitter and a Facebook account," says Groom. Also, counter to popular images of awkward basement-bound programmers, social skills are incredibly important as well, according to Groom. "Definitely one of the big skills is how good are you at working in a team. Are you a person with a lot of empathy? Empathy is something we focus on because that's something you need to be a great software engineer, because you need to be empathetic with your users and your team."

And while he's shattering stereotypes of who's cut out for software engineering, Groom notes that the program, though still tilted heavily towards men, is making special efforts to attract women.

"It's definitely a mission to take it to 50-50 gender balance, but in this one it was three out of 20," he says.

Efforts to attract more female participants include a scholarship for women and further company funding to cover complete tuition of some women, which is in the works but yet to be nailed down.

Groom attended Dev Bootcamp straight out of high school, skipping college to move to Silicon Valley.

"I don't think there's anything wrong with university, but if you know you want to be a software engineer, this is the fastest path. We had computer science people do it and they said this blows their CS degree out of the water," he says.
"If you want to become a software engineer at any stage of your life, this is perfect."

"I think we're at the very beginning of a wave of these programs," he adds. "There's such a huge demand and when there's such a huge demand for something, it's nature that solutions will pop up to fill the demand."

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5/17/2012 7:42:51 AM

Criticism...who needs it! Well, you do, if you truly want to understand your customers, take the bad with the good, and spin it into gold. Here's how.

Hear reason, or she'll make you feel her.
- Benjamin Franklin

The quote above says it all: it's best to learn your lessons the first time around, or those suckers will keep circling back in different (typically, more painful!) ways until you bow down. Criticism from those we love and trust is an easier pill to swallow...at least we know they have our best interests at heart. But what about when criticism comes raw, with no filters, and possibly no good intent? Is that any less valuable than constructive criticism? I used to think so, but then I learned better.

Before, I was one of those cats who would throw the baby out with the bathwater, and dismiss criticism when it came from someone acting like a jerk, or someone who's own questionable behavior didn't seem to position them particularly well to dole out advice. But you know when I got smart and upped my tolerance for—well, actually, thirst for—criticism?

When I realized deep down that incorporating the lessons from people's criticism made me money!

Now, you can call it shallow if you want to. I sort of wish I could tell you that my ability to stomach criticism was rooted in a spiritual epiphany prompted by Oprah or Phil Donahue (if you're too young to remember, the guy that preceded Dr. Phil). But it simply wasn't that fancy. If you're like me, you agree with philosophical advice about criticism, yet have a hard time converting it into action. So here are three concrete tips I use to learn from criticism, honed through the school of hard knocks:

1. Consumer feedback is free. Consultants are expensive.

Consumer feedback is free, and often much more insightful than the findings a fancy consultancy is going to share about the same matter. So when I get a raw email from a consumer, I set it aside, and then later re-read it as if I'd gotten my hands on a confidential strategy document that our strongest competitor created in order to leverage my company's deepest vulnerabilities. This "role play" allows me to get past the rawness, absorb and act on the growth areas, and keep money in my pocket while still benefitting from authentic consumer insights.

2. Take a hint, or risk losing a client.

If you've chosen wisely, your clients seek smooth sailing on the path to profits, just like you do. So when I receive hard-hitting client criticism, I've learned to pay attention to the message, not the messenger (or the package, for that matter...it is tempting, but dangerous, to dismiss criticism just because it's loud, offensive, or lengthy). Case in point: straight out the gate, my company had a client contact infamous for being a hothead. I once dismissed some essential feedback he shared, thinking it was just his ridiculous attitude talking. Well, turns out that despite the horrible delivery, his sentiments were shared by several other decision makers...we almost lost the account. Thankfully, both parties were able to strengthen our businesses from the experience, but the lesson it reiterated was: Throwing the baby out with the bathwater can be costly.

3. Inventory your strengths in order to catalog your weaknesses.

There are two sides to every coin. When you receive positive feedback, take the time to write it down, and then write down a possible opposite. For instance, if a client compliments you on being "super responsive," receive the compliment, but also ask yourself if there are times when you take exceeding expectations too far with one client, to the detriment of not fully servicing another. Heading off foreseeable negative feedback at the pass can help you avoid making costly mistakes later.

I only truly learned to stomach criticism when I realized it made me an exponentially better entrepreneur. So, I'll amend the adage when it comes to business: If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all...unless it makes me money!

5/17/2012 7:26:14 AM

We asked 16 social media experts and LinkedIn gurus to size up the Romney campaign's organizational and candidate LinkedIn profiles. Here's their analysis.

Like millions of other Americans, Mitt Romney is looking for a job.

Career consultants say if you're job-hunting, you need to be on LinkedIn. So, I figured I'd do Romney a favor, and I pulled together a panel of 16 public relations, marketing and social media professionals across the United States. Then we all got together to critique Romney's LinkedIn profile.

(Of course, I also asked them about President Obama's LinkedIn strategy. I'll have their thoughts on that subject in my next column.)

We found two Romney profiles that seem legitimate (although just to be sure, check out the caveat at the end of this post). The first is the organizational profile of the Mitt Romney for President campaign. The other is what purports to be Romney's personal or professional profile.

So, what is the presumptive GOP nominee doing right? What is he doing wrong? And what does his profile really tell us about him? Here's what our experts had to say:

Right under the photograph and career highlights on just about any LinkedIn profile, you'll find a summary. Romney's didn't exactly blow our experts away.

Here's what it says in its entirety:

Successfully turned around a number of companies, the Olympics, a state, and now Mitt wants to turnaround the United States of America and restore to it the principles that made it the greatest nation in the history of the earth.

Married to Ann for 42 years. Ann and Mitt have 5 boys, 5 daughters in law, and 18 grandchildren.

Specialties

Turnaround artist.

Huh.

"A bit weak," said Maciej Fita, founder of Brandignity.com in Boston. "It's the first paragraph people see and read, so make it count."

"[H]e is not utilizing the space well," said Lori Ruff, a Minneapolis-based trainer, consultant and author who has written extensively about LinkedIn. "Someone else obviously wrote this ... I don't think anyone would assume he wrote his own profile, [but] LinkedIn is a professional networking space. No one introduces themselves third-person in real life; why would you do it here?"

Romney has the requisite "500+" connections, along with 97 recommendations. Not bad, and the fact that they seem to come from a cross-section of supporters bodes well.

"Worth their weight in gold," said Dan Wehmeier, social media manager for The Screamer Company, a creative and marketing agency in Austin, Texas.

But 97 recommendations: Is that good or bad? Our experts were divided.

"As a presidential candidate, there should be far more," said Susan Jacobsen, president of public relations firm LUV2XLPR in Washington, D.C.

Mark W. Halpert, managing partner of Connect2Collaborate in Fairfield, Connecticut, disagreed. In fact, he said he believes Romney has "way too many recommendations."

The magic number, he suggested, is 2% of your total number of connections. So if you have 500 connections, you want 10 legitimate recommendations.

Go to the Romney campaign organization's profile, and here's the text you'll read (at least as of when I wrote this column):

America faces exceptional challenges. Mitt Romney is an exceptional man with unique qualifications to lead our country through perilous times, restoring our strength at home and abroad.

Mitt was born in Detroit on March 12, 1947. His mother, Lenore, gave up an acting career when she met and married his father, George. Mitt's father came from humble origins and never graduated from college. He apprenticed as a lath and plaster carpenter and sold aluminum paint before beginning a career that brought him to the head of American Motors and then the governorship of Michigan.

Our LinkedIn experts thought that as bland to say the least. Overall, the campaign organization's website struck Linda Pophal of Strageic Communications, LLC, as "a recruitment tool," for paid staff, as opposed to something to encourage people to vote for the candidate.

"There are 1,500 characters available and the largest paragraph talks more about his father's accomplishments than his own," said Ruff. "Also, there is no call to action. ... Side note: the page appears to be only about a month old... I'd have started it sooner!"

Chuck Hester, a consultant in Dana Point, California, agreed.

"The 'company' profile—for the organization—is not very well managed," he said. "A good company profile should have their employees [use] consistent key words in their own profiles."

Overall, our experts said, both profiles looked as if they'd just been thrown together to check a social media box, so to speak. There is no link to Twitter. Just a small, black-and-white photo on the personal profile and lots of staffers with no photo at all on the campaign site. No call to action for either site, and no real argument why anyone should support Romney.

"I was very surprised to see so many basic mistakes in both profiles given the number of digitally-savvy people who work for the campaign," said Patrick Galvin of Galvin Communications in Portland, Ore.

Our experts all-but-uniformly hated the photos, including both the Romney "R" logo on the campaign website and the black-and-white headshot on the willardmittromney site.

The photo "could lead voters to conclude, 'he's living in the past,'" said Scott Swanay, president of Sherpa Social Media in New York. "

"The Romney logo looks a bit lost. Needs to be bigger. Some of his staff don't have pictures, but they show up first. VERY simple to fix and I'd suggest it's done ASAP," said Diane Darling, a Boston-based author and speaker who teaches executives how to use LinkedIn. "Switch to a color picture of Mitt! And one where he is smiling. B&W looks like it's from Mad Men."

(In fairness, one of our experts, Diane Darling of Effective Networking in Boston, had some constructive criticism for the photo on my LinkedIn page. I've been using a photo from my time reporting in Iraq for a few years, but if you don't know that, she said, it "looks like it was taken while you were in someone's backyard.")

When I started working on this column I reached out to both LinkedIn and the Romney campaign to make sure these profiles were legitimate. I never got a definitive answer. So I asked our panel of experts what they thought.

The bottom line is that they're mostly sure that these are legitimate. The one thing that gives them pause is that neither profile is anywhere near as professionally done as you might expect a major party presidential candidate's to be in 2012.

That said, 14 of 16 experts were convinced of their legitimacy. (The two others weren't sure one way or the other.) The profiles look real—with vanity URLs and lots of connections including campaign employees.

Moreover, if you follow the money, it makes sense that they're real. The organizational profile includes job listings that "cost a significant amount of money that someone trying to spoof Mr. Romney would likely not [pay]," said Marty Martin, managing partner of Adapt Partners in Raleigh, North Carolina.

And, that page in turn links to the individual Romney profile we've been talking about.

Just as important, it's not as if there's another LinkedIn profile reading Mitt Romney LinkedIn that seemed even remotely legit.

Of course, if either profile wasn't on the up-and-up, it would say a heck of a lot about the campaign's social media savvy that somebody else managed to impersonate the presumptive Republican nominee for president!

Next up: President Barack Obama's LinkedIn strategy.

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5/17/2012 7:14:00 AM

Some guidelines to help you decide if this is the time to jumpstart your new venture.

Facebook's IPO will likely spawn a new generation of entrepreneurs. A number of Facebook alums have already invested in their own start-ups, but there are millions more young people who will now look to create the next big thing.

It's an exciting time to be a young entrepreneur, given how easy technology can make running a business. But first you have to ask yourself: Do I have what it takes? Do I really want to start a business? Is now the right time? Is it too risky?

No one can tell you the answer. There's no calculation that can make it a sure bet either way. But here's how I look at it. In my view, there are two types of entrepreneurs: those who come to this vocation by nature; the other by nurture.

A natural entrepreneur is someone who takes risks no matter what, and sees some of them hit really big. Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs come to mind. That said, the majority of entrepreneurs are "nurture" types; they are people who take a calculated risk to start a business because they have a particular skill set that enables them to.

If you're a nurture type, you will probably think through your decision to start a company very carefully. The odds may be against you, but you see some reasons a venture may not be too risky, especially if you are young and starting your career.

Here are some reasons to start your entrepreneurial adventure sooner rather than later:

• Freedom. People are waiting longer than ever to have kids and get married. Before that life transition, and the accompanying responsibilities and expenses, throw yourself into your business. Make it count by selfishly devoting yourself to your dream.

• Passion. The vast majority of entrepreneurs don't go into business to become rich. There are thousands more 10-year successes than overnight successes, so you better enjoy what you're doing. This is a chance to make a career out of something you love.

• Jobs. You may start out on your own, but eventually you could be building a place for other people to work and prosper. The more growing new businesses that sprout up, the more job growth we'll see.

• Education. You learn the most from failure. If your first entrepreneurial go doesn't work out, you can still work in the area where skills lie. Or, maybe you'll be more prepared a second time around. Building a business takes lots of patience.

Hats off to those who can sell a new app for a billion dollars, but it's more likely going to be a slow climb. I know it was for SurePayroll. No matter what happens, you'll discover great things about business, and yourself, along the way.

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5/16/2012 9:30:42 AM

Consumers can already rent dresses, cars, and DVDs by the day. Why not fine art?

Everyone wants nice things. The problem is, most people can't afford everything they want.

That's a basic, simple example of customer pain—and as an entrepreneur that should get you really excited. Especially so, because there's an obvious cure: the rental business model. (Sometimes it's referred to as collaborative consumption.) Instead of selling new goods, some smart entrepreneurs have built businesses around the idea of renting them in bite-size morsels.

Think about it: Rent the Runway, as the name implies, rents high-fashion by the day. Airbnb rents short-term real estate. Zipcar rents cars by the hour. Netflix sends DVDs to people who still actually rent DVDs (yes, we know they stream online too).

Now we're about to find out if the same model will work in the world of fine art.

Lorenzo Thione, a native of Milan and a serial entrepreneur with a successful and eclectic background, found his first success with the technology company Powerset (which he sold to Microsoft) before producing Broadway shows including Catch Me if You Can, Addams Family, West Side Story, and Allegiance, among others.

His new company, Artify.it, just began a soft-launch in San Francisco. It offers customers, "free delivery, white glove installation, [and an] amazing database of original fine art."

The company rents great art to customers, with an ever updated selection of new works—at a fraction of the cost to purchase. Customers can also freshen the art hanging on their walls and experiment with different artists, styles, and media.

"Talk to anyone who has ever bought or thought about buying original art," Thione told us. "They will tell you that their first foray in the art-collecting market was a painful, long, and intimidating experience."

But building a rental business "lowers the stakes for both artists and would-be afficionados," he continued. "Artify.it increases the total size of the art-collecting market, providing an instrument to begin the journey to become a collector of contemporary art."

It's an intriguing model. But it remains to be seen whether it will work for at least two reasons.

First, can Thione's company maintain its highbrow image without becoming the Rent-A-Center of the art world?

And second, many sharing services operate on the theory that people would rather not pay for assets when they're not using them. Why pay for a car when it's just sitting in the driveway, or for a designer dress when it's hanging in the closet?

But is the art world different? When you return a car or a dress, presumably you no longer need it. But if you return a painting, you're left with a blank space over the couch.

So far, industry experts we talked with say they think Thione can overcome these issues, in part because the idea seems a natural extension of existing art museum rental galleries that have been sharing and renting art for years.

Laurie Ghielmetti, who advises clients on major art purchases told us, "It offers a different and additional level for customers who can't take the time to view the resources of rental galleries."

Artify.it says the company has already raised about $800,000 in seed money from investors, including ex-PayPal CEO Peter Thiel and former Google and Facebook exec Benjamin Ling, and recently opened offices in San Francisco. Will renting work in the world of fine art? We're about to find out.

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5/16/2012 9:06:00 AM

What's better than data to a marketer? Getting a true emotional response from your audience. Here are the questions you need to ask first.

Marketers are positively drowning in data. You don't need to take my word for it: A recent survey of some 1,700 chief marketing officers worldwide by IBM Consulting said marketers are being in some ways paralyzed by the reams of research they're being provided.

Aside from eye strain, migraine headaches, and other occasional physical side effects, the mounds of data are impairing, if not disabling, the one quality great marketers (and entrepreneurs for that matter) depend on: their gut instinct.

Indeed, Christa Carone, Xerox's chief marketing officer, recently opined, "I fear that marketers' access to and obsession with measuring everything takes away from the business of real marketing. It's impossible to measure squishier, meaningful intangibles, such as human emotions, personal connection, and the occasional 'ahhh' moment. Those things often come with a marketer's intuition and they deliver big time.”

I agree with Ms. Carone. It's important not just to collect data, but to feel what your audience is feeling on a personal level: as humans, rather than data points in a report. That's why my team has begun asking the "why" question whenever we have the opportunity to go beyond a client's market research data. The latter is superb for answering the who, what, when and where questions necessary to sell a product, service or organization. But, data fails miserably when it comes to providing answers to the why and how questions. Stated simply, market research disconnects marketers from the human contact that is so crucial to triggering an executive's gut instincts and eliciting an ahhh.

Here are three recent examples of how we've used the why question to glean insights left unearthed by the clients' market research:

• A major technology corporation conducted quarterly surveys of its employees that told them everything except why their workers weren't engaging with the organization's internal communications. By sitting alongside a handful of employees at different levels and from different business units, we found out why. We learned that they were already overwhelmed with information from internal and external sources. And we could see first-hand, as they worked in real time, that there was no space on their computer screens for any more input. How, we asked, can internal information become a must-read? Easy, they responded, explain how the company can help us do a better job, get a raise and promotion, and we'll find the space. We've since retrofitted the employee communications and workers are now engaging.

• A professional services firm was trying to connect better with chief financial officers. Thanks to decks upon decks of research, they knew all there was to know about the world of a CFO, except how to engage with him (Note: more than 90 percent of the CFOs in the client's target base are male). Empowered to speak to a number of CFOs for an hour each, we asked a series of why questions. Why you do ignore our client's thought leadership? Why do you instead go to certain conferences to learn what's next and make connections? And, why are you having so much difficulty making connections at those conferences? The answer to the final question produced one of many ahhh moments for us and our clients. CFOs were too busy to connect with other CFOs in advance of the conferences they attended. If our client could become, in effect, an eHarmony for CFOs, they'd provide a clear value-added benefit that would set them apart from competitors. Guess who is now setting meetings for CFOs?

• A financial services firm in a highly competitive, highly commoditized industry was desperately trying to appear hip and relevant to the college and university students it needed to recruit for future growth. Yet, despite endless surveys and on-campus seminars, no apparent differentiator bubbled to the surface. So we took the time to follow a mix of undergrads and graduate students from our client's target schools on their online job search journeys, as they made various decisions about a future employer. At each step, we asked why they visited a particular chat room, web site or blogger. When they finally arrived at our client's site and then exited just as quickly, we again asked why. "Simple," one female student told us. "I'm a triathlete and am worried the 24x7 nature of your client's business will prevent me from pursuing my passion." Market research had told our client that work-life balance was a big concern for incoming employees. They thought they had adequately addressed it online. But as the recruitee told us, "I saw a lot about work, but not much about life." We confirmed that oversight when we analyzed their online presence. As are result, our client not only switched the mix, but, critically, told one work-life balance story through the eyes of actual triathletes working at the firm.

Nothing is more challenging in today's frenetic workplace than pausing to put yourself in the shoes of your audiences so you can find out why they do, or don't, engage with your product, service or organization. But, I'd argue it's never been more important to find the time to ask the why and how questions. If you do, I guarantee you’ll be the one emitting the next ahhh.

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5/16/2012 8:20:30 AM

This restaurant went from being a quiet nook New York City's West Village to an always-packed hotspot, overnight. Here's how its owner dealt with the good and the ugly of being an instant hit.

When an accolade comes—whether it's a glowing New York Times review, a shout-out from Anthony Bourdain, or a twinkly new Michelin star—a restaurant needs to be prepared. Takashi went from being a quiet Japanese eatery in New York City's West Village to an always-packed hotspot after Anthony Bourdain tweeted it was the "most exciting cooking" he's seen in a long time, and featured it on his show The Layover. But for every Takashi, there are a few more like New York City's Heartbreak, which closed one week after receiving a Michelin star last year. Takashi chef Takashi Inoue tells us how he dealt with the positive and negative aspects of being an instant hit.

I visited Takashi a few months after it opened in 2010 and it was relatively quiet. I tried to come again in February 2012 and there was a two-and-a-half hour wait. When did you notice the shift?
Sam Sifton's review in the New York Times came two months after we opened, and it put us on the map of new and interesting places to eat in the city. It all kind of exploded from there on.

Anthony Bourdain loves Takashi and is very vocal about it. Did you recognize him when he first came in? Did you treat him any differently from other customers?
Yes his assistant called to ask if she could make a reservation for him, and I'm a huge fan so I said, "yes of course." I went up to him to say "hello," but apart from that, he ordered like any regular customer who'd walked through our doors.

How has his endorsement affected your business? Have other endorsements been as influential?
His endorsement was astronomical. I didn't quite realize what a rabid following he has worldwide. We've had people as far as Australia say they came to Takashi because they saw us on his show. His stamp of coolness—selecting us for his one layover dinner in the entire city—was quite an honor.

How have you handled the increase in business?
We expanded our hours slightly to accommodate the added demand for tables. We're a cozy establishment with no real room to expand seating, so that was the best we could do.

Are there any plans for expansion?
Not at the moment, but having introduced Japanese-style yakiniku horumon (grilled innards) to New York, I might want to try a whole new concept next time.

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5/16/2012 7:49:30 AM

A naming professional reminds entrepreneurs to keep their competitors in mind when choosing a name for their company.

You have a business idea and a rock-solid business plan. Maybe you've got a great partner or have even been eyeing up the perfect premises. Now all you need is a name.

Your first consideration is probably your customers. What will potential names convey to your clients about what your business does and what it stands for? You're probably also thinking about yourself—communicating something of your taste, your preferences, your style. But a recent post on OPEN Forum reminds budding business owners that a name is as much about your competitors as it is about your character and the character of your business.

The post by Elizabeth Sile rounds up recommendations from a handful of naming professionals to help out entrepreneurs searching for that elusive perfect name. But one point in particular from Laurel Sutton, principal at Catchword Brand Name Development, quoted in the post, bears repeating. Her point?

Rather than simply thinking of a moniker that conveys the essence of what your business is about, Sutton recommends thinking of your name as encapsulating everything that sets your company apart from competitors in the space. Sile writes:

Sutton says that businesses should not only check out their competitors’ names, but the styles, tonality and messaging of their brand. Find what makes your brand totally different, and base everything on that…. small businesses should avoid falling into the trap whereby their names’ sole purpose is to describe what the businesses do.

"A descriptive naming strategy overlooks the fact that the whole point of marketing is to separate yourself from the pack," she says. "It actually works against you, causing you to fade into the background, indistinguishable from the bulk of your competitors."

On a more practical note, Sutton also notes that, once your have a contender name in mind, you should make sure no one has beaten you to the punch. "If your business is looking to form an LLC or incorporate down the road, checking to make sure a name is not already taken now will prevent headaches when it's time to start the registration process. You can search the availability of a name through your state’s secretary of state office," Siles writes.

Interested in more tips on naming? Check out the post for many more tips from experts.

What other considerations often get overlooked when entrepreneurs set out to name their new business?

5/16/2012 7:19:02 AM

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5/16/2012 7:19:02 AM

Starting up is risky. Get in where it's hot--in industries such as water, restaurants, mobile games, and e-commerce. These will provide the best business opportunities for budding entrepreneurs in 2012.

Featured Articles

• How Popdust Has Charmed Gen Y
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What industries offer the best business opportunities right now? Our annual list features mobile games, pet care, big data, environmental consulting and more.

Featured Slideshows

• How is Your Personal Data Being Used?
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5/16/2012 7:00:20 AM

Industries such as residential construction, mobile games, and big data will provide the best business opportunities in 2012.

Starting a business is always risky, especially if your business is trying to swim against the larger economic tides. That’s why many savvy entrepreneurs take a broader view of the forces shaping supply and demand before taking the plunge and founding a company. What those broader forces reveal: Now is a great time to get in the game.

The economy is growing again, with gross domestic product up 2.3% compared to 1.7% last year. Interest rates also remain at historic lows, with no sign of significant inflation. There is also plenty of capital to be had, as venture capitalists continue to make deals at a brisk rate. Even the IPO market seems hot these days, especially with Facebook set to debut this week. Add all that up, and you've got some pretty favorable business conditions.

But what type of business, exactly, should you start? After scouring the data, the team at Inc. has identified the industries with the best business opportunities for start-ups. Here are 11 industries that the smartest entrepreneurs will be targeting this year:

• Big Data
• e-Commerce
• Environmental Consulting
• Full-service Restaurants
• Internet Publishing & Broadcasting
• IT Consulting
• Mobile & Social Gaming
• Pet Care
• Residential Construction
• Supply Chain Management
• Water Conservation

This year’s list is the product of old-fashioned reporting, boosted by data and insight supplied by a trio of independent research firms: Sageworks, which performs financial analyses of privately held companies; Plunkett Research, a business intelligence firm that studies trends affecting the world’s most vital industries; and IBISWorld, which provides industry growth figures, five-year revenue projections, employment growth, profit margin averages, and industry competition ratings.

To make the list, industry have to be not only fast-growing but accessible to entrepreneurs. In other words, we excluded growing industries like energy production, nanotechnology, and auto dealers because they are typically too capital-intensive for most start-ups to break into. We also omitted several professions that are growing nicely but require years of additional education or training: law, medicine, and accoutancy, for example.

The list also reflects macro- and micro-level economic drivers that continue to shape the U.S. economy. For example, not only are millions of Baby Boomers now reaching retirement age, some 90 million so-called Millennials or “Gen-Yers” are now entering the workforce—and creating new patterns of consumption and demand, says Jack Plunkett, CEO at Plunkett Research. Those Millennials are one key reason Plunkett is high on the growth prospects for the residential housing market—an industry that was severely hit by the Great Recession. “We are already seeing steady improvements in the existing housing market where unsold inventory is drying up,” says Plunkett, noting that new building permits were up 34.3% in February 2012 over a year ago. “That means we are going to see a significant new demand for housing from this maturing demographic over the next several years.”

Another trend with wide impact is the increasing demand for eco-friendly products and services, says Nikoleta Panteva, a senior analyst with IBISworld. Not only does that boost the residential housing market, where 'green' homes and renovations are increasingly in demand, but it also drives business-to-business demand for services such as environmental consulting and water conservation. “There is a definitive shift toward finding ways to make things more efficient and longer-lasting,” says Panteva, who notes that government programs such as Energy Star are also helping drive consumer demand for eco-friendly products.

As the U.S. economy continues its slow recovery, consumer confidence also recovers. That promises to unleash some of the pent-up demand that has built up during the past few years. “Both businesses and consumers are sitting on tons of cash,” says Plunkett. “As their confidence increases, we’ll start seeing some spending sprees, like we’ve been seeing with people replacing their automobiles.” Full service restaurants will be one beneficiary of that swing in spending. “When the stock market goes up like it has, it makes people feel better, which feeds demand for little luxuries like dining out,” says Plunkett. “People are little less likely stay home and eat leftovers while watching TV.” While margins are typically razor-thin in running a restaurant, the barriers of entry are fairly low, especially if you want to start with a trendy new food truck.

Increased discretionary spending is also good news for the pet care industry—particularly pet grooming businesses. “There is a clear trend where more and more people are living alone and delaying having kids,” says Panteva. “People are now spending their money on their pets instead.”

But it's the mobile and social gaming industry that is projected to show the highest growth over the next five years. Plunkett cautions that low barriers to entry make this market highly competitive, which could make starting a venture here risky business. “It might not be the best industry to start a business in for the entrepreneur who is faint of heart,” he says.

It's not just consumers who are expected to increase their spending -- there's plenty of opportunity to be had selling to businesses, too. And here, no trend is more powerful than the continued burgeoning of information technology throughout the global economy. “There was an expectation that e-commerce would peak several years ago, and that simply hasn’t been the case,” says Plunkett. “A growing number of people and companies have turned to e-commerce as a way to save money and gain efficiencies.”

The growth of the digital economy has also spurred demand not just for IT consulting services, but also for Big Data services. Big Data companies provide sophisticated software tools that mine and analyze the terabytes of information created by each purchase, doctor’s visit, and new 'friend' on Facebook. These Big Data firms help other businesses better understand their markets and customers using the data they collect.

Transportation and logistics companies are also expected to be winners over the next five years. “Supply chain management can involve anything from just-in-time sourcing in China to buying a truck and offering a delivery service,” says Plunkett. “It’s all about creating efficiency and saving clients money.”

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5/16/2012 7:00:17 AM

How to live the entrepreneurial dream while minimizing your risks and maximizing your success. (Warning: This ain't easy.)

Starting a business is easy. You can do it in a day.

Starting a business that lasts is a lot harder, even if you put all your time and money into it. And the all-in approach is a lot riskier, since the more time and money you invest the more you put at risk.

So if you haven't yet taken the entrepreneurial plunge, how can you live your entrepreneurial dream while minimizing your risks and maximizing your chances of success?

Simple: Start your business—and keep your full-time job.

Except in rare cases, keeping a full-time job is the best approach for first-time business owners.

It's also the hardest approach, since sacrifice, discipline, and a massive amount of hard work will be necessary. But that's okay; if you aren't willing to work hard and sacrifice, your new business will fail whether you keep your full-time job or not.

Here are six steps to minimizing risk while building a solid foundation for small business success:

Almost every business venture requires spending money before making money. (And if money isn't required, time certainly is... and time is money.) Some small businesses take years to turn a profit.

A huge percentage of start-ups fail because they run out of money, and even if you do not, chronic money problems can lead to making poor long-term decisions.

Never assume personal savings will see you through. Eliminate every bit of personal spending that isn't necessary.

Before you start your business, cut all your personal expenses to the bone.

When small business capital and cash flow are tight, losing your income is the last thing you can afford. Be a superstar. Work as hard and efficiently as possible. Get more done than anyone else you so you can leave on time without regret—and without raising concerns about your performance and dedication.

Work incredibly hard at your job so your evening and weekend time is yours, not your employer's.

You'll need it.

When your "normal" work day ends, your start-up workday is just beginning.

Decide how many hours you think you can spend on your start-up every evening and add 25 to 50%.

Then commit to that schedule. Write it down, and if your schedule says you will work from 5.30 p.m. to 9 p.m. every evening, and from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekends, work those hours.

See the schedule you create for your start-up the same way you see your schedule for your current job—as non-negotiable.

Then work that schedule.

Say you start a consulting business. Once you land a few clients you'll be working every evening and most weekends.

That's not a bad thing; it's a good thing. Landing clients means you're generating revenue.

You may have to get up early every day to take care of emails and voicemails before you head off to work. In large part your clients will choose your work hours for you.

Don't whine. Don't complain. Keep reminding yourself that having demanding clients is great because it means you actually have clients.

Resist the temptation to complain or feel sorry for yourself. Happily pay the price—it's a price most other people won't pay.

At first you'll be tempted to spend your profits. That's natural.

Don't. Reinvest every dollar you earn. Use profits to set up the business infrastructure you need (not the one you want, but the one you need.) Buy supplies. Buy equipment you've been renting. Advertise. Or save cash to tide you through inevitable revenue downswings.

Don't think of profits as income; think of profits as a tool to further establish your business.

Deciding when to quit your job and go into business full-time is the hardest decision you will make.

It's impossible to make an objective decision when you're tired, stressed, sick of your full-time job, sick of your boss... or when you just want your life back.

But don't quit too soon. When in doubt, hold out. Always focus on numbers, not emotions.

Your financials—personal and business—will tell you when it's finally time to quit your job.

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5/15/2012 9:00:00 AM

Too anxious to take a vacation? An expert insists stepping away can actually improve your business--if you do it right.

Vacations: We all know we should take them for our mental health and the health of our relationships, but many entrepreneurs stress that stepping away from work responsibilities will harm their businesses and land them with a painful backlog of tasks upon their return. But j2 Global, a company that provides cloud-based communication solutions to small firms, insists that actually, getting away can significantly improve not just your marriage or your stress levels but also how you run your company long term.

Mike Pugh, vice president of marketing at j2, explained to Inc.com in an interview that while j2's recent poll of small business owners revealed that more than half are planning on either skipping their vacation entirely or working through their time away, his experience working with small businesses shows that "vacations are good for the soul and for the business."

A recent Intuit study confirmed this, finding 82% of small business owners who took a vacation experienced an increase in job performance when they came back. So how can you manage both to get away and to get a post-vacation productivity boost? Pugh has four tips.

Yes, it sound simple, but Pugh insists many business owners neglect to inform those around them that they're leaving, robbing themselves of lots of freely available assistance. "Between instant messaging, email, text messaging, and phone, if someone wants to find you, they will work very hard to find you. That makes for nagging presences while you're out on the beach," he explains, suggesting that the simple step of telling colleagues about your trip in advance, setting an away message on your email or changing the voice greeting on your phone can make a big difference.

"Most people want to help someone on vacation, and if they know that you're gone, they'll leave you alone until you come back. But people don't take enough advantage of that help they can get from their network," Pugh says.

Of course, not all businesses can afford to tell their customers they're jetting off for awhile, but more can than are willing to admit it to themselves, according to Pugh.

"If you're running a retail store and anonymous customers are wondering where you are, that's different," he concedes, "but if you're a real estate agent you can very easily tell one of your clients that you're going to be away for a long weekend. It's contextual but it definitely works with vendors, with other suppliers and contractors and, in some cases, can work really well with customers also."

"Sometimes you don't do something until you have to, so use a vacation to delegate and empower others," Pugh suggests. "Small businesses tend to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. There are vendors, employees, your next door neighbor in a retail establishment, an outsource person that you use for some of the work, people within your network who can take on more."

Using your vacation to force yourself to get these folks to shoulder a larger share of the load "can be a great way not only to get away, but to realize that you don't have to do it all yourself when you come back."

This limits not only your stress, but the stress of those you're vacationing with. "In the ideal world you leave on vacation and never think about work again until you come back, but then reality strikes and you realize either you worry too much to let go, or an issue comes up that actually needs your attention," Pugh says. "If you need to work while you're on vacation, pick a time of day and a finite amount of time—maybe an hour in the morning and an hour at night—to check email, check messages, return phone calls. You'll be available if there is work to be done, others know that they have touch points when they can check in, and then you can disappear with a clear conscious."

Your traveling companions will thank you too. "As a person who's taken this advice to heart myself, my office hour in the morning has turned out to be a great time for my wife to get a massage," Pugh says. "Office hours are a way to not impose on the rest of your party so that work can't break the flow of a trip."

"If businesses can divorce themselves from all the premise-based components of their business, especially the communications, IT, and back-office parts, they make it much easier to keep the important stuff flowing," Pugh says, suggesting that vacations offer a great opportunity to try out simple cloud-based solutions that allow small businesses to stay lean and agile. Trying out things like Google Apps, Dropbox, or phone-routing solutions like j2's own eVoice, helps entrepreneurs to work from their hotel rooms, andt can also benefits their businesses after they return home.

"Going on your vacation brings you back as a more productive person. It's the change of scenery but also thinking: 'How would I do the important stuff if I wasn't in the office? How would I do it faster and more efficiently?'" Pugh says.

All in all, Pugh's advice boils down to using your vacation not only as an opportunity to work on your tan or practice your fishing or golf skills, but also a way to reflect on what's really important in your business, what you're needlessly obsessing about and what you could accomplish more efficiently. Vacations, he says, function as a reality check. "We look at how busy our day is and we think we can't possibly get away and then we find a way to get away. We find out that some of the stuff we were doing beforehand really wasn't as important as we thought it was," he says.

"When we come back and see 100 or 1,000 emails, we realize that 90 percent of them didn't really need to be dealt with. Opt out of newsletters or wean some of our network off of daily contact and on to weekly contact. Then, on the flipside, realize what were the things that I was doing on vacation that were important to the business. Focus on those because that's what really makes my business go. Breaking away lets us see what's important."

What tips do you have to reduce vacation anxiety?

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5/15/2012 7:52:24 AM

The nation's 36th president, Lyndon Johnson, offers five tips you can use every single day to make your business stronger.

For the past 30 years, author Robert Caro has been working on a five-volume biography of one man: President Lyndon Johnson. The fourth volume, The Passage of Power, came out this month.

So far, the tomes run more than 3,000 pages. President Bill Clinton reviewed the latest installment in The New York Times.

You probably don't think of LBJ as an entrepreneur, but any list of the most impactful political leaders of the past 100 years would have to include him. Moreover, as a politician, I think Johnson put into practice the Harvard Business School definition of entrepreneurship: "the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled." That definition is near and dear to me, as well, as Jon Burgstone and I wrote at length about why this definition is so well thought-out in our recent book, Breakthrough Entrepreneurship.

So with that in mind, here are five leadership lessons from LBJ for today's entrepreneurs:

LBJ was a classic networker. When he first came to Washington in 1937, he lived in a large boarding house with other members of Congress. And they shared a communal bathroom. Wanting to know as many fellow legislators as he could, he pantomimed getting to ready for work multiple times each day, figuring that he had an opportunity to build relationships by standing next to fellow legislators as he brushed his teeth and shaved, over and over again. He lived up to the true entrepreneur's mantra: It's not who you know; it's who you get to know.

From the passage of the Civil Rights Act, to the Great Society, to even the Vietnam War, it's hard to dispute that Johnson was a hugely impactful leader. This was not a president who played small ball, or who devoted his time to less school uniforms. You don't have to agree with his ideology to acknowledge that while he only lived to be 64, he spent his time on this earth working toward really big goals.

Okay, when historians think of LBJ they likely don't think of "balance." But clearly his family was important to him. Interestingly, Johnson and First Lady Lady Bird Johnson named both of their daughters so that everyone in their family would have the initials "LBJ."

Here, LBJ's story is a cautionary tale for modern leaders. Regardless of what anyone thinks today of the Vietnam War and the Great Society, the United States simply couldn't pursue both of these goals at once. It's probably the same thing for your business: Pick the few things you really need to accomplish, and do them. Don't divide your attention.

Johnson became president upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and was elected in his own right in 1964. But by 1968, the Vietnam War was immensely unpopular, and Johnson nearly lost the New Hampshire primary to Senator Eugene McCarthy. Days later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy joined the campaign, and Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. Things didn't work out too well for Johnson's party—Richard Nixon won—but at least he knew to get off the stage when there was no chance he could win.

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5/15/2012 7:20:00 AM

The upcoming Facebook IPO will make this group worth billions. How many Silicon Valley start-ups will they create?

You probably already know about the PayPal Mafia—the influential and wealthy group of former PayPal executives that spawned many of Web 2.0's biggest hits. But soon, there may be a new generation of Silicon Valley start-up bosses in town. When Facebook goes public, these current and former Facebookers-turned-entrepreneurs and venture capitalists will be worth billions. What's more, this group is rich in ideas and connections. So when they're not backing promising start-ups, you can bet they'll be tinkering on something of their own. Here are the Mafiosos to watch. —John McDermott

Parker first disrupted the business world—and caught the ire of the music industry—in 1999 when he launched Napster. After founding online address book company Plaxo in 2001, he joined Facebook as its inaugural president in 2004. Since leaving the company under questionable circumstances, he formed Founders Fund with investor and former PayPal executive Peter Thiel. Parker also has been enlisted to help woo the music labels he once irritated: He is a Spotify investor and board member. This June, he will reveal his stealth start-up Airtime, which he created with Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Thiel's résumé includes many of the darlings of the social Web: He was CEO of PayPal, a LinkedIn investor, and one of the earliest backers of Facebook. He remains on the Facebook board and maintains a 2.5% stake, which could be valued at up to $2.5 billion after the IPO. His newest ventures are far more eccentric. Recently, Thiel invested in biotech start-ups looking to reverse the aging process and Blueseed, a moored boat that will float in international waters and serve as a business incubator. Thiel's Founders Fund also flew 50 engineers and entrepreneurs to Hawaii for a secretive three-day conference.

The former Treasury Department chief of staff and Google vice president made news recently about her insistence on leaving work at 5:30 every day to spend time with her children. Although the Facebook COO has yet to found her own company or invest heavily in other start-ups, the upcoming IPO will give her more than enough to do either—with almost 2 million shares, her stake will be worth roughly $1 billion.

Moskovitz was Zuckerberg's Harvard roommate and is the youngest person on Forbes's list of billionaires (he is eight days younger than his former boss). In November 2009, the Facebook co-founder left the company to co-found Asana, a workplace productivity start-up, with former Facebook engineer manager Justin Rosenstein. (Rosenstein is the man responsible for Facebook’s ubiquitous "Like" button.) Moskovitz owns 7.5% of Facebook, a stake that could be valued as high as $7.6 billion. To get Asana off the ground, he landed angel funding from Thiel and Parker, among other Silicon Valley notables.

D'Angelo began working at Facebook the summer after his sophomore year at California Institute of Technology and eventually became the company's chief technology officer. Cheever was Facebook's software engineering manager for three years, until he and D'Angelo left to found Q&A website Quora in April 2009. Quora's $11 million in initial funding came from fellow former Facebooker Matt Cohler, a partner at Benchmark Capital. Back before Facebook acquired Instagram, D'Angelo played a Godfather-like role at the fledgling start-up—he helped the company find engineers, gave feedback on initial features, and was an initial investor.

Hired in 2005 as the vice president of product management, Cohler was the seventh Facebook employee. He remains a "special advisor" to the company, but his primary responsibility today is as general partner of venture capital firm Benchmark Capital, whose investments include Quora and Asana. Cohler's role as venture capital Mafioso comes with experience: Before he started at Facebook, Cohler was protégé to Reid Hoffman, another member of the PayPal Mafia.

Facebook Connect is a set of APIs that streamline the login process across countless other sites across the Web, and Morin is one of the men responsible for the feature's development. Since leaving Facebook in February 2010, he co-founded Path, the buzzy social network that declined a $100 million buyout offer from Google less than a year after it was launched. Whether or not that was a wise decision remains to be seen. He's also invested in a slew of tech start-ups, including inDinero, TaskRabbit, and Tumblr.

Saverin was the Facebook co-founder Zuckerberg pushed out of the company by diluting his shares. (Hello, fans of The Social Network.) Don’t feel too bad for Saverin, though; he was given about $1 billion worth of shares in a legal settlement (now worth $2 billion). Is he really a legitimate Facebook Mafioso? He still lists himself as an active co-founder on his LinkedIn profile, but Saverin's level of involvement is suspect. Reports say he was last seen living a playboy lifestyle in Singapore. He'll have to do something with his new wealth, but after renouncing his U.S. citizenship, it seems increasingly unlikely he'll funnel some of it back into Silicon Valley. Read more: Mark Zuckerberg's Smartest Moves

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5/14/2012 12:51:00 PM

Trying to make your team come around to your way of thinking is often a waste of time. Here's what you can do instead.

Most people hate to be told what to do. We're not generally keen on being told we're wrong, either.

Both tendencies, taken together, can add up to usually reasonable folks digging in their heels to hold on to positions that are pretty clearly wrong-headed, just to avoid giving in to the hectoring of others—you've undoubtedly experienced the phenomenon in your own life.

Still, as a business owner, you regularly need to convince skeptical colleagues of your ideas or approach and bring around clients or vendors to your way of seeing things. How can you get people to alter their thinking without putting them on the defensive? Get them to persuade themselves, suggests a fascinating recent post on PsyBlog.

The post cites research that asked people both to sit and passively listen to a persuasive speech arguing for a particular point of view and to give a speech themselves defending a position. The scientists compared how persuaded those that sat and listened were to those who were asked to actively argue for a position they initially didn't believe in.

PsyBlog summarizes the results: "What emerged was that, on average, people were more convinced by the talk when they gave it themselves than when they merely heard it passively. This suggests that we really are persuaded more strongly when we make the argument ourselves, even if it isn't in line with our own viewpoint." Research into smokers confirms these findings, showing that smokers are more persuaded to quit when asked to deliver an anti-smoking message than when they are subjected to a similar message delivered by others.

So how can entrepreneurs put this insight to use? PsyBlog offers an explanation of the phenomenon, as well as a suggestion:

The explanation seems to be that we are very good at convincing ourselves because we know just what sorts of arguments will sway us. So if you want someone to persuade themselves, you can try asking them to put aside their own attitude for a moment and try getting them to generate their own arguments for the point you want to make.

Whatever the cover story, as long as the person is encouraged to generate their own arguments, it has a chance of changing their mind.

Could exercises that ask your team to generate arguments for the course of action you want to take be a better use of your time than simply lecturing them on your point of view?

5/14/2012 9:28:48 AM

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5/14/2012 9:28:48 AM

You don't have to be Einstein to apply this success theory to your business. But, trust us, the results can be nothing short of brilliant.

In 1992, after significant time laboring over a title for his new book, Jack Canfield thought of the name, Chicken Soup for the Soul. He recalls getting goose bumps and a feeling of certainty that this book title would carry his labor of love into the hearts of people around the world. Even his co-author, Mark Victor Hanson, Canfield's associates, friends, and family were enamored. Yet 144 publishers and 14 months later, that certainty faded to doubt and concern.

Committed to his life principles, Canfield persevered and convinced a publisher in Florida that his book would certainly sell a few thousand copies. Today, Chicken Soup for the Soul has become an international brand with over five hundred million books sold.

"I have lived by one crucial principle since I was 24 years old," says Canfield. Taken under the wing of self-made millionaire, philanthropist, and author, W. Clement Stone in the '60s, Canfield learned that assuming 100% of the responsibility for his life is key to happiness and success.

"I don't blame or complain about things like the economy, the government, taxes, employees, gas prices, or any of the external things that I don't have control over," says Canfield. "The only thing I have control over is my response to these things." Canfield calls this principle E+R=O. Today, he and his staff live by it.

First, take the E (for "event"): What is going on around you? We are living in a "bad economy" and, individually we have no control over that. "It's how we respond to this recession that produces the outcome, not complaining that our results are poor because of it," Canfield says. "We have to constantly change our response to these events to create better outcomes."

Then, add the R (your "response"): According to Canfield's principle, there are only three "R's" that you have any control over: your thoughts, the images that you hold in your head (visualizations, worries, fears and fantasies), and your behavior (what you say and do). Change these images, fears and your behavior and the events will no longer control you or your outcomes.

Then imagine the O (for "outcome"): Visualize what you want to happen, rather than the negative outcome that you believe your environment will produce, and take action accordingly. You cannot control your outcome but you can influence it strongly.

But to successfully apply the E+R=O theory, you must have a pretty good idea of what you want out of life. Canfield believes that everyone is born with a unique life purpose. "It's not an accident that musicians become musicians and engineers become engineers, it's what they're born to do," he says. "If you can tune into your purpose and really align with it, setting goals so that your vision is an expression of that purpose, then life flows much more easily." Straying from your purpose into areas that you don't know much about, and don't feel passionate about, will not produce the results you're looking for--and you must be willing to work hard and burn the midnight oil to capture your dream.

"I worked from 10 p.m. until 1 a.m. every night for a year to write the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book," Canfield recalls. The willingness to pay the price and understand and commit to your priorities is a necessary trait for those who desire success.

As a reminder of his priorities, Canfield keeps a sticky note in his office identifying one of his top operating strategies: The Rule of Five. "Know your priorities and identify the five powerful action steps that you intend to take to move your initiatives forward each day," suggests Canfield. "If you go to a tree with an ax and take five whacks at the tree every day," he explains, "it doesn't matter if it's an oak or a redwood; eventually the tree has to fall down."

But success strategies will only take you so far if you are emotionally "stuck." Many people simply don't take action on their dreams—despite knowing what the steps should be. It's not uncommon for entrepreneurs to feel stuck, even paralyzed, by fear, the negative impact of past events, and even life trauma. Canfield has increased results for his audience and clients by an astonishing amount since he incorporated the powerful method known as the Emotional Freedom Techniques into his teaching regime some six years ago.

"We literally help people transform their lives and businesses with EFT," says Canfield. In his recent book, Tapping Into Ultimate Success: How to Overcome Any Obstacle and Skyrocket Your Results, Canfield and his co-author, Pamela Bruner, teach their readers to eliminate what they call "stoppers" so they can achieve their vision, purpose and goals.

"Overcome your barriers, intend the best, and be patient," Canfield says. "You will enjoy more balance, more growth, more income, and more fun!"

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5/14/2012 7:24:00 AM

It wasn't long after Hurricane Katrina that John Besh's catering company was ready for more business.

5/13/2012 4:03:03 PM

5/13/2012 4:03:03 PM

By 2005, John Besh was living his childhood dream as a 'fancy pants chef' in New Orleans. But then Hurricane Katrina hit.

5/13/2012 4:01:55 PM

Stop giving it away! We asked successful young entrepreneurs to brainstorm creative ways that small businesses can spread word and boost sales without resorting to the likes of daily deals sites.

The Young Entrepreneur Council asked 11 successful young entrepreneurs to share a creative way to market a business without resorting to daily deal sites. Here are their best answers.

Doing joint-venture marketing with companies targeted the same customer base can be an excellent way to lift sales without relying on coupon sites. For example, you can upsell each others products in your shopping carts, or do email blasts promoting each others non-competetive products. It's a win-win scenario—if you can find the right partners.
—Matt Mickiewicz, 99designs

Search Yahoo! Answers for questions related to your niche that you are knowledgeable on. Provide a helpful answer and put your website in the source field. When you actually help people as opposed to spamming, people will be more likely to click on your link and check out your site. Yahoo! Answers also ranks very well in search engines, which is a nice bonus.
—Josh Weiss, Bluegala

What most people don't realize is that you have to "buy" customers and if you go out of pocket and give away your product or service for free the first time, you will be able to reach many more people than any other traditional marketing campaign will allow you to reach. You need to look at the lifetime value of that customer's repeat business.
—Louis Lautman, Young Entrepreneur Society

Spotlight your customers with testimonials. How are your customers using your products or services to improve their business? Just ask and then feature them on your blog. People are tired of hearing about your business, but they do care about themselves. Give them a place to tell their story and they will share it with their networks.
—Benjamin Leis, Sweat EquiTees

No matter the small business, there is a clever way to invite customers to participate in a fun and exciting contest of some kind. For a restaurant, it might be some sort of eating contest to promote a local favorite. For a clothing store, it could be photo submissions of your favorite jeans. Establishing this shareable content will create positive buzz for the business.
—Logan Lenz, Endagon

Give away an eBook that provides useful information that is relevant to your industry. Potential customers will begin to think of your company as a thought leader in the space and may even share the eBook with others.
—Bhavin Parikh, Magoosh

Facebook Ads allows you to get very specific about who you want to target. This makes it an amazing platform for businesses of any size. Try using it to offer a discount or free product that allows you to capture prospective clients to your mailing list. For example, you can target people on their birthday by sending them a message or a gift?
—Natalie MacNeil, She Takes on the World

Your content is your marketing. Give away your expertise, share something of value and publish it where people are looking. Answer questions in forums and on LinkedIn. Share your knowledge with people on your blog or a webinar. Prove to your audience that you are a trustworthy and valuable source and the new leads will come in. Coupons are short-term.
—Lucas Sommer, Audimated

High conversion happens when someone hears about your product or service through a friend. Instead of sharing the revenue with daily deal sites, reward your best customers through a referral program! When they share your brand, thank them by offering free or heavily-discounted products.
—Aaron Schwartz, Modify Watches

Even if you don't have a huge email database as daily deal sites do, why not run a first-time special on your site for 24 hours? The key is to send the special to unsuccessful or not-so-warm leads from the past—not to clients who are already loyal.
—Devesh Dwivedi, Breaking The 9 To 5 Jail

Coupon sites definitely don't work for some small businesses. If you're having trouble seeing how they would work for yours, consider offering coupons to your business events. Hosting a workshop? Put out a coupon for it. Even if you don't get many biters, these can raise your brand awareness.
—John Hall, Digital Talent Agents

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5/11/2012 7:59:50 AM

Freelancers (at least the good ones) have their pick of projects, and you have to work hard to keep them engaged. Here are a few tricks of the trade.

In our last column, we talked about how important it is for a small-but-growing business like Altruette to find talented, capable freelancers and consultants to work with. Working with freelancers, though, isn't quite the same as dealing with people on staff. Freelancers (at least the good ones) have their pick of projects, and you have to work hard to keep them engaged. Here are a few ways we've tried to do that at Altruette.

Like the best romantic relationships, we've found that great consultant relationships are best built slowly and over time. Yes, we admit, there have been times when we've fallen head over heels with a new talent and thrown a huge project their way without vetting them properly, but that usually doesn't end well. Each time we work with a new freelancer we try to start with a small, manageable project that doesn't have a crazy deadline. If that goes well, we build from there, getting a good sense of how the individual's pace and capabilities as we go.

The first thing to understand if you want to work successfully with freelancers and consultants is that you're not the only game in town. They're juggling multiple projects and you have to understand that. We'll ask upfront about a person's other commitments so we can understand what we can realistically expect from them. Several designers we've worked with have had fulltime day jobs at prominent brands. Sure, it means that projects they work on move at a slower pace, but it also means we're privy to all the trends and industry know-how they're picking up during the week. We always plan ahead and are usually able to cut our freelancers a lot of slack if they have big deadlines or need to travel. And once you've shown you're willing to be flexible, it's amazing what they will often do for you. We vividly remember scrambling to get signage done for an event and our graphic designer (who was on a family vacation in Texas without Internet access at the time) had his mom drive him 20 miles to the nearest spot with Wi-Fi so he could send us the file!

Julie is especially good at ferreting out what someone is really good at. And sometimes, it's not what we originally hired them to do! Recently a woman we hired to do some social media work for us had great ideas about selling our charms at retail so we asked her to work up a whole presentation about that, even though her background was in advertising.

The biggest challenge with freelancers is that you're not in face to face contact with them everyday, so it can be a challenge to make them feel like they're really part of your company. But we do two things regularly: Ask for (and value) their opinions. Now we do this because the freelancers we work with are really, really smart and we need their advice and expertise. Recently we were going to ask the factory we work with to change the type of clasp they were using on a new line of charms we're producing from a lobster style clasp to a spring ring clasp. But we asked a freelance designer her opinion first, and lucky we did. She told us that in her previous job with a major brand, whenever they used spring ring clasps they had horrible problems with breakage, and as a result, had tons of returns. She steered us away from making the change and we listened.

Secondly, we are generous with praise when someone does good work. Being a freelancer can feel somewhat lonely--there's no boss patting you on the back every morning and no coworkers applauding your ideas. So we go out of our way to thank freelancers who go above and beyond and let them know that we really value their work.

The best thing we've found about working with freelancers is that they bring so many varied experiences, talents, and inspirations to our company. One day we hope Altruette will have a full-time staff of hundreds, but right now we're thrilled with our hardy band of "some" timers!

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5/11/2012 7:42:00 AM

Think you're an incorrigible workaholic? A Harvard professor suggests you might actually be addicted to success. And that's a good thing.

The latest science on how habits are formed, and broken, according to New York Times staff writer and author of The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg, involves routines and rewards. Take Duhigg's waistline-expanding afternoon cookie compulsion for example. In order to stop his daily habit of dropping in to the cafeteria for an unhealthy snack, Duhigg's research into the science of habits led him to try replacing his destructive munching with another routine that offered the same reward—in his case not calories, but a friendly chat with other colleagues in the cafeteria. By swapping his cookie for a bit of office gossip, he satisfied his need for an afternoon break without packing on extra pounds.

That's great info for dieters, but what does it have to offer workaholic entrepreneurs who find themselves chained to their smartphones all day and night (and, let's be honest, even all vacation long)? Quite a lot, explains Leslie A. Perlow, a professor of leadership at Harvard Business School, in a recent HBR blog post. Perlow's research is on the underlying motivation of those who work 24/7 and how to modify this hard-to-break behavior pattern.

Her conclusions offer hope for even hopeless-seeming workaholics (and their long-suffering families), suggesting that an always-on mentality isn't an unchangeable personality trait but stems from a need for success. Like Duhigg's cookie habit that was really about a bit of social engagement at the office, the drive to work at all hours isn't really about an obsessive need to peck away at a keyboard, Perlow found, but instead about a need to feel successful. And she found that need can be satisfied in healthier, schedule-liberating ways. Perlow explains using the example of one of her study participants, a consultant named Tad:

When I proposed the idea of turning off for discrete periods of time — with the full support of his manager — Tad explained to me: "It's going to be really hard to let go... even on weekends, I cannot let go... I'm always thinking about work." Tad was used to taking his Blackberry everywhere and whether during work meetings, his best friend's wedding, or quiet moments with his nine month old daughter…

But Tad was part of a team on which I was conducting an experiment. The experiment was to have each team member turn off for one night a week. Starting at 6 pm, for that one night, they were to do absolutely no work — not even to check their wireless devices. They were to completely disengage from work. Each person's night off was set well in advance and was not supposed to change, even if suddenly there was a client deliverable the next day. And, each week the team met to discuss their progress, with each team member being required to share whether they had taken their night off, and if not, why not. Suddenly, always being on was not the badge of honor that it once had been. Rather, team members were publicly applauded for taking their time off — even the night before a major deliverable — and they were shunned for failing to take their nights off.

Tad like so many others was initially resistant to this plan. He saw this as causing more stress not less. As he said, it interfered with his ability to keep on top of what was happening, always. Yet, several weeks into the experiment, Tad reported with delight: "It was the first Saturday in three years I did not check my Blackberry!" And soon it was other times as well.

By going deeper and understanding the reward Tad was seeking from his behavior – feeling successful – Perlow was able to engineer an office environment that provided this feeling while sparing Tad the physical and psychological toll that constant connectivity can bring. Tad was able to switch from getting his success fix from his Blackberry to getting his success fix from the praise of his colleagues (and no doubt his vacation companions and fellow wedding guests).

Could your business band together to try something similar?

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5/11/2012 7:25:05 AM

Who'd put a price tag on the White House? Truth is, you can figure out a fair market value of just about anything. Try it with these tips.

Earlier this week the real estate website Movoto.com had some fun trying to set a smart listing price for the White House. To do so it recruited a luxury homes expert who proposed $110 million, and then said he'd expect a sale price somewhere between $75 million and $80 million.

The thing is, that's ridiculously low. Earlier this year a Russian billionaire dropped more on a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. Granted, real estate prices are higher in New York than Washington, D.C.—but c'mon!

There's a key lesson here for entrepreneurs. Figuring out valuation is tough. We ask ourselves over and over: "What are our products and services worth to customers?" And maybe someday, if we do well, "What is my business worth to a prospective buyer?"

I've been working on a writing project with Ken Marlin, managing partner of Marlin & Associates, a boutique financial and strategic advisory firm. With this White House story in mind, I asked him to talk about how to put a smart price tag on just about anything—especially when there is no active market shaking things out for you.

Here's the five-point, back-of-the-envelope plan he came up with.

Movoto's expert estimated the listing price based on the White House's size and location, but of course that has almost nothing to do with why someone might theoretically want to buy it. They'd do so for the history and the symbolism. (Wouldn't you love to be a fly on the wall as a listing real estate agent walked through the White House, suggesting that it be staged a bit differently, or that that facade would be more striking if it were painted a nice robin's egg blue.)

"You've got to know what's really cool about the property, or about the business," Marlin said. "And, that's what you have to make sure you highlight and communicate to potential buyers."

The flipside of this is that you have to figure out how the asset—whether it's real estate or a business—would fit into a potential buyer's portfolio.

If you're selling a business, for example, you might find that potential buyers might want to acquire you for purely financial reasons. Others might want to acquire you strategically as part of a plan to continue building their businesses.

As for the White House, Marlin said, think about who might line up to bid on it.

"You'd have hugely wealthy Russian oligarchs. Donald Trump would want it as condos with a golf course on the South Lawn," he said.

Valuations are always tough when there is no functioning market, and thus no comparable sales to point to. So a smart entrepreneur, whether he's trying to sell a company or a piece of iconic real estate, tries to create one.

Often, that means staging an auction. You don't need hundreds of potential buyers: just two, although having more is better.

"When we advise sellers, we tell them you want an auction. When we advise buyers, we say you want to avoid an auction," Marlin said.

Whoever buys the asset—whether it's the White House, a product you're selling, or your business—wants to pay as little as possible, of course. But there's a second factor that a potential buyer considers in coming up with a bid: He or she doesn't ever want to look like an idiot.

So your job as a seller is to give them a good-faith basis for your asking price or listing strategy. And, you need to negotiate in such a way that the potential buyer understands you could legitimately walk away.

"Nobody wants to look stupid," Marlin said. "So, if you're asking them to pay twice as much as the guy down the street, you need to give them a reasonable basis for that."

Here's where the strategy diverges a bit between selling something like the White House and selling a business. With the White House, a buyer would mostly be buying the past.

But while business buyers need to understand your asset's history, they're only interested because they need to understand the future.

"That's what they're buying—the future. And a buyer always has a fear that you know something they don't–that you're selling at the top of the market," Marlin said. "They don't care about the past. From a business perspective, from a corporate perspective, you have to help a prospective buyer see the future the way you see it."

The bottom line, Marlin told me, is that putting a price tag on just about any asset is, well, about much more than just the bottom line. So you'll do yourself a service by thinking long and hard about the people involved in the transaction.

"Valuation and negotiation are as much about the human element as they are about math," Marlin said. "Probably more about the human dimensions. You can't just apply the math and say, 'My competitor sold for 12 times EBITDA, so multiply my EBITDA by 12.' It just doesn't work that way."

5/10/2012 10:43:27 AM

It sounds like straightforward enough advice to build a better business, but the approach has serious flaws.

Talk about launching a new venture these days, and chances are someone will likely mention the principles of the lean start-up. A significant portion of Silicon Valley and the start-up community in general have wholeheartedly embraced them. The idea in a nutshell: The path to start-up success involves launching a minimum viable product, testing it, learning from it, and reworking it accordingly.

It sounds straight forward enough. But there are some deep flaws in this approach. As trendy and popular as "lean" is these days, launching lean can be a really, really bad idea.

The lean idea stems from the Toyota Production System (TPS), which was first developed after WWII, and which continues to be refined. The goal of the system is to reduce waste in the production process. Techniques such as kanban and eventually ISO-9000 emerged to improve efficiency and repeatability.

Lean start-up fans emphasize the analogy to ISO-9000. They claim that the lean start-up model can provide a roadmap to make the development of new products and companies standardized, efficient, and predictable.

As a former ISO-9000 auditor, and as a successful entrepreneur, I can tell you these two activities–launching new ventures and producing uniform products–have virtually nothing in common. I'm an engineer by training. I'm all for developing processes with predictable outcomes, but emulating the Toyota Production System is not the way to do it in the world of entrepreneurship.

TPS is designed to produce a system that can churn out millions of copies of a product with consistently high quality. How is that like entrepreneurship? Is the goal to churn out a million identical Instagrams? Obviously not. Each start-up needs to be different, to fulfill an unmet customer need, to create value.

Two tenets of the lean start-up concept have generated especially high levels of buzz. Both are deeply flawed:

Lean start-up principles encourage entrepreneurs to introduce products quickly to the market and learn from customer feedback. It sounds smart on its face, because learning from customers is hugely important. But going to market with a lackluster product can be insane. Think about the iPod, the Google search engine, and Facebook. None of these products were the first competitor in the marketplace. Instead their developers learned from other, lackluster products. They improved upon the initial work of others, produced a better solution, and grew to dominate their markets.

Perhaps smart entrepreneurs should watch the efforts of lean entrepreneurs and then pull an Apple, Google, or Facebook on them.

Another key lean start-up principle is the idea that standard accounting practices are not helpful measures of progress in the dynamic days of an early-stage company. Instead, the thinking goes, start-ups should rely upon "innovation accounting," or more creative metrics. So instead of, say, measuring the number of customers a start-up has, you measure instead the "engagement" of those customers.

Innovation accounting sounds good–but accounting is accounting. Standard accounting simply needs to be interpreted differently for early-stage ventures, not ignored or deemed irrelevant.

Think about Groupon, for example–a prominent lean start-up case study if there ever was one. Groupon has managed to trip over profound accounting issues in its short history. First, the SEC required the company to change its accounting to conform to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles before going public. Making that change required Groupon to report even greater losses.

Then came Groupon's first quarterly earnings announcement. Again, the company had to restate earnings (actually losses) twice, due to more accounting issues. And most recently Groupon took the highly unusual action of disbanding their director's audit committee. If Groupon is the role model for "innovation accounting," it's time to seriously reconsider this concept. Entrepreneurs certainly can use standard accounting tools successfully; they just need to understand how start-ups (and thus their GAAP accounting) differ from established enterprises.

I applaud the effort to bring a degree of predictability to launching new ventures. It's a worthy goal. However, entrepreneurship and innovation are not paint-by-numbers activities. Company founders need to think—and be smarter—about their new ventures. And that does mean entrepreneurs must be resourceful, adaptable, and learn from what doesn't work. But trying to follow a system designed to produce a million identical, high-quality Corollas, Camrys, and Siennas makes very little sense.

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5/10/2012 8:10:00 AM

Although technology wildly increases the speed of business growth, if entrepreneurs aren't careful, it can also adversely affect their companies. Here's how to keep it in control.

Technology is so crucially important to my business; it's difficult to imagine how I would successfully run things without it. It allows me to stay connected to my customers and partners in other parts of the world, work seamlessly when in remote locations, and simplify tasks that if done manually would suck up an unimaginable amount of my time. The benefits of technology are also essential to us competing neck and neck with companies that are much bigger than my own.

Be that as it may, the dangers of technology are not to be underestimated. As with most things in life, if not properly managed, the pleasures that technology provides can quickly turn into pain. This is why I encourage entrepreneurs to be mindful and avoid the sting that comes with relying too heavily on technology.

Here are some of my tips for practicing technological moderation:

When establishing a relationship with potential clients and partners, I suggest foregoing email and Web conferencing programs in favor of in-person meetings so that you can get a solid sense of each other's personality, style, and needs. That way, as things progress and you celebrate the successes, or troubleshoot the snags that make entrepreneurship so exciting, you hopefully are working from a sturdier foundation and deeper commitment to each other. It is of course also important to regularly meet with people in-person as you cultivate relationships. But setting the stage in person is particularly essential.

I doubt I'm alone in the experience of occasionally encountering people who seem to falsely believe that email offers some kind of cloak of invincibility that frees them to electronically dismiss manners that would normally be observed through in-person interactions. Email behavior that we at my company dissuade includes passive-aggressive communication, and using the "cc:" and "bcc:" features as weapons. Plus, when emails start 'ping-ponging' and it's clear that people are missing each other's points, it's time to take things offline, pick up the phone, or walk down the hall. While email is great for many things, it's usually not the best medium for complex issues, stressful situations, or sensitive matters.

Another lure of technology is the tendency to multitask—this one is particularly tempting for me. There are plenty of studies that show that rather than multitasking, it is better to successively focus on one project at a time. The rub is, life often just doesn't work that way. As soon as I receive an urgent call on my cell about a customs issue preventing my wine from arriving on time from South Africa, I get an email from a retailer in need of an instant reply, and then my home phone rings because one of my boys needs to be picked up from school due to an ear infection. Now while these types of emergencies certainly are not rare, there is plenty of non-urgent time when I can deliberately choose to work more effectively and resist the urge to multitask—even though it's counter-intuitive! So instead of simultaneously toggling back and forth between screens, speaking on the phone, and reading mail, I work to focus on one task at a time.

Sometimes, old-fashioned communication is simply better. When someone goes out of their way to show you deep kindness, interrupt your busy day and take the time to handwrite a note of thanks. Sure, it's easier to instantly email your thanks. But easier isn't always better...pause for the cause, break out your pen, and thank someone appropriately. They will appreciate it more than you know.

Although it takes discipline, adapting a more deliberate, moderate, approach to technology can improve your business, and ultimately, reduce your stress. Give it a try, and let me know your results!

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5/10/2012 7:40:00 AM

Leading a meeting or brainstorming session and want to get your group to loosen up and forget their fear of embarrassment? Musician Bobby McFerrin has the answers.

A few weeks ago we offered scientifically validated presentation tips from author Susan Weinschenk. Now, on her blog, she's offering another tidbit of public speaking advice from her forthcoming book 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People, and this time the recommendation stems from the self-evident truth that people don't like to look silly in front of others.

Most of us aren't keen to feel embarrassed by stepping away from the group and doing something that might make us look stupid—not unless we have a compelling reason to anyway. Speakers, whether they're leading a small team meeting, a brainstorming session or are addressing a packed conference space, on the other hand, often want audiences to speak up and participate. The audience's desire to keep their heads down to spare their blushes is directly at odds with the speakers' desire to have them actively engage with the presentation. How can we bridge this divide?

For inspiration, Weichschenk looks far afield to musician Bobby McFerrin, best known for his memorable hit Don't Worry, Be Happy. McFerrin's infectious music might seem a world away from your sales data PowerPoint presentation, but Weinshenk insists the same techniques McFerrin uses to get his audiences singing along with and contributing to his concerts can help you lure your audience into a more participatory frame of mind by lulling their fear of embarrassment. How does McFerrin accomplish this? Check out this super entertaining three-minute TED video to get some idea:

If you watched, you're probably smiling now, but besides boosting your mood, what else should you have gotten out of the video?

Weinshenk explains that the key to getting a buttoned up TED audience to start singing is social validation and safety. McFerrin moves people towards increased participation as a group, never asking any one person to boldly step out in front, nudging them slowly from the simplest actions to more complicated and possibly embarrassment-inducing ways of participation. Through body language and facial expressions he also reassures people that they're doing great and should feel safe to come out of their shells. It may all seem like a bit of a mysterious gift of McFerrin's but Weinshenck boils this ability down to five simple tips you can use to lure your audiences into participating. She writes:

• Start slow. Have people do one small activity before an activity that is longer or more complicated.
• Make sure it's always safe. Don't ask people to do anything they are not comfortable doing, especially at the beginning.
• Humor is good for making people relax, but don't make fun of people as a form of humor, or the entire audience will start to feel unsafe.
• Research shows that synchronicity bonds people together—when people do something together, such as clap, laugh, raise their hand to a question, it bonds the group. A bonded group feels safe, so ask your audience to do something all together and the group will bond.
• Be confident. If you are the leader people will follow you.

Want more public speaking tips? Weinshenk's book is out on May 14.

What makes you more likely to participate in a meeting or group discussion?

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5/10/2012 7:25:58 AM

Surprise: New figures out of the Census Bureau show that the rate at which Americans are starting new businesses is at a record low.

With Facebook's billion-dollar acquisition of Instagram and impending IPO things sure seem fizzy in Silicon Valley, leading to a whole lot of speculation about whether we're in a tech bubble. There are compelling arguments on both sides of the debate, but there's one thing no one can argue with—cold, hard data. And the Census Bureau just released a bunch on start-ups in America.

What's the headline takeaway? The formation of new businesses has actually fallen to record lows. Start-up mania and the stated ambitions of many to escape their cubicles and found their own ventures aside, Americans overall are starting far few new businesses. New firms made up 13% of all businesses in the 1980s, then fell to just less than 11% in 2006. Now the percentage has dipped sharply with young firms representing just 8% of businesses in 2010, the most recent available data.

That's bad news for job seekers as well as entrepreneurs, with entrepreneurs creating 40% of all new jobs in the 80s but only 30% recently. "New firm formation has waned since the 1980s. If we are to achieve and sustain a hearty recovery, policymakers, educators and organizations that help entrepreneurs commercialize their technologies must be willing to address every obstacle that stands in the way of new business formation," said Robert E. Litan, vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation.

The decline in the formation of new businesses may be bad for the economy, but the economy is also clearly bad for the formation of new businesses. States in the West, Southwest and West that were hardest hit by the collapse in the housing market and subsequent recession has seen the steepest declines in the number of new business being formed.

These figures highlight the fact that despite the high-profile rises of the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and the increasingly loud buzz surrounding flashy, fast-growing tech start-ups, meat-and-potatoes small businesses spread throughout the country aren't being created nearly as often as they once were. Policy wonks and business leaders need to argue out what should be done about that, but for entrepreneurs the takeaway is more immediate—get out there and start more businesses!

Is this decrease in firm formation just due to the terrible economy? What's your diagnosis?

5/9/2012 2:14:00 PM

Its a low-cost commodity, but make no mistake--theres money to be made in water.

Water entrepreneurs are problem solvers who look at global issues like water scarcity and failing infrastructure and see opportunity. Here’s a look at some markets that are ripe for change and the companies that are making that change happen.—Issie Lapowsky

Wastewater, traditionally a cost center for businesses and governments, is now becoming an asset, thanks to smart entrepreneurs who are turning waste into biofuel or renewable energy. Pasteurization Technology Group, a San Leandro-based start-up, uses biogas produced in water treatment to power a turbine that produces renewable energy. That energy can be used on-site or sold to utilities. The exhaust produced from the turbines then pasteurizes the wastewater, purifying it so it can be reused.

The price of water is rising, but it’s still low compared to the other costs farms have to contend with. Still, some businesses are finding opportunities on specialty farms, selling water monitoring tools to help farmers produce higher quality crops. Fruition Sciences of Oakland, California, for instance, makes and installs sensors that measure water levels on grape vines for vineyards. It reduces water costs, and prevents the grapes from being overwatered or dehydrated. Because Fruition’s technology makes for higher quality wine, vintners throughout Napa Valley are willing to pay for it.

The need for water innovation is greatest in the developing world, and while the end user rarely has the ability to pay for the technology, aid organizations and NGOs often do. That’s the market that Puralytics, a Beaverton, Oregon-based start-up, is targeting with the SolarBag. The company, which also makes water purification technology for high-tech laboratories, has developed a three-liter bag, lined with nanotechnology-coated mesh. When exposed to the sun, the bag can purify dirty water in a matter of hours and be reused hundreds of times.

Water efficiency is becoming increasingly important to both utilities companies and eco-conscious consumers. Start-ups like WaterSmart Software, in Tiburon, California, help the two parties communicate. WaterSmart sells a white label software product to utilities companies, which then offer the service to their customers. The WaterSmart dashboard allows homeowners to track their water use online and compare it to the rest of the neighborhood. It also makes suggestions for reducing water use. In May 2011, WaterSmart landed a $900,000 round of funding.

Desalination, the process of removing salt from seawater, has traditionally taken place at massive plants, but companies like Seven Seas Water, which is backed by the Virgin Green Fund, are proving there’s a market for innovative small scale solutions out there, too. The Tampa, Florida-based company builds desalination units on large cargo containers and transports them to private and public customers primarily in the Caribbean, where access to drinkable water is sometimes limited. Modular desalination has also been important in the aftermath of natural disasters, like the earthquake in Haiti.

Consumers are becoming more aware of the contaminants, like nitrates, in drinking water. That leaves a huge opportunity for companies to purify water without the use of chemicals. One such company is HydroNovation, based in San Francisco. It makes residential and commercial water treatment systems that use a chemical-free process called electrodeionization to soften and purify water. In January, HydroNovation landed an investment from 3M New Ventures.

The country’s water infrastructure is old and crumbling. Before cities can replace aging infrastructure, they’ll need the help of technology to detect leaks and weak spots in the system. TaKaDu makes software that connects to sensors in existing water infrastructure. Using information from the sensors, as well as data like maintenance records, TaKaDu can predict where problems are likely to occur. TaKaDu may be a frontrunner in this space, having landed $6 million in funding in April, but it is based in Israel, which leaves room for newcomers in the domestic market. Read more about the water conservation industry.

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5/9/2012 12:44:59 PM

Industry-wide revenue for web publishers is projected to almost double in the next five years to almost $72 billion. Want to get in on the action? From Instagram to Path, take notes from the newest darlings in tech.

Industry-wide revenue for web publishers is projected to almost double in the next five years to almost $72 billion. Want to get in on the action? From Instagram to Path, take notes from the newest darlings in tech.

The photo-sharing app is the perfect example of scalability within this industry. Launched in 2010, Instagram, often praised for its elegant user-interface and superior mobile function, gained millions upon millions of users in 2011. The company does not generate revenue, but that didn't stop Facebook from acquiring it in April for a staggering $1 billion (shortly after the company received $50 million in Series B funding.) This year, the company captured its 40 millionth user.

Path proves that bigger isn't always better when it comes to social networks. Serial entrepreneurs Dustin Mierau, Dave Morin, and Shawn Fanning have positioned the app as a more intimate alternative to Facebook. Unlike other platforms, Path limits networks to 150 people to increase the quality of connections. Since its inception in late 2010, Path has accumulated more than 2 million users—half of whom joined after the app’s relaunch last December. The company, which raised more than $41 million in funding last year, is available on iPhone and Android devices.

In the last year, Tumblr has been the platform of choice for a number of key events, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and the launch of President Obama’s official 2012 reelection campaign. And those are just two of Tumblr's nearly 54 million blogs. The average Tumblr user creates 14 posts each month bringing the total post count to more than 22 billion. To date, the company has raised $125 million in funding.

Video is another sector of the industry with much growth potential. Look at Ustream, a service that broadcasts live programs like boxing matches, presidential debates, and red carpet events to viewers in the United States, Japan, and Korea. The company has raised $60.5 million to date, from Jeff Clavier, Infinity Venture Partners, SoftBank Capital, and others. Ustream integrated with Facebook Timeline in April and lets users stream events on television sets, computers, and mobile devices.

Practically overnight, Pinterest saw the kind of hockey-stick growth most start-ups can only dream about. The "virtual pinboard" racked up 10 million monthly users—mostly teens and women—in February, according to comScore. While some sources suggest that Pinterest's user figures may be leveling off, it hasn't stopped rumors that the start-up is the next big acquisition target. Meanwhile, the company has just raised $100 million in funding, putting it at a $1.5 billion valuation. Its reportedly venturing into the e-commerce space in the near future. Read more about the Internet publishing industry. --Judith Ohikuare

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5/9/2012 11:57:15 AM

As Garrett Camp announces he'll be leaving daily duties at the company he built, sold, bought back, and ran for a decade, Inc. looks back at how he did it.

After a decade building and running the online discovery engine StumbleUpon, CEO Garrett Camp announced this week he's stepping down from his position, and assuming the role of company chairman.

In a blog post, Camp said he's undergoing the transition to be: "focused on the vision and strategy of the company while also starting a new venture." Camp is also founder and chairman of private car-for-hire start-up Uber. The other new venture he refers to in the post is still a mystery.

Camp and co-founder Geoff Smith began creating StumbleUpon as a side project while Camp was a graduate student in Calgary, Canada. He didn't come to Silicon Valley until 2005, for a meeting with Brad O'Neill, and early StumbleUpon user-turned-investor.

In 2007, Camp and Smith sold StumbleUpon to eBay, where it stagnated.

"About a year in, after the acquisition, we started realizing it wasn't as exciting," Camp told Inc.'s Christine Lagorio at South by Southwest Interactive in March. "When you're a start-up, everyone has stock options, everyone is energized. If you don't take a risk, the status quo will continue. "

He and investors bought back StumbleUpon in 2009, and the company has shown remarkable growth since then. The site has grown from 5 million to 25 million users today.

"This is the most exciting phase the company has seen—and it's three years almost now," he said. "The majority of our growth has come recently, and when something goes viral on StumbleUpon, it's crazier than Facebook."

Inc. reported in 2011 on how Camp sold, and, remarkably, re-acquired his own company. Here's the full story, in his own words, as told to April Joyner.

• Also, check out a 2010 Inc. LiveChat with Camp.
  

For years, Garrett Camp ran StumbleUpon, a service for discovering and sharing webpages, part time while finishing his master's thesis at the University of Calgary. In 2007, within a year of moving the company to San Francisco, he sold it to eBay. In 2009, he organized an investor group to buy the company back.

At eBay, I had a boss, but I still managed all the product engineering. The day-to-day flow really wasn't that different. But we weren't getting the same people to apply to join. We were seeing people who were looking for a conservative, stable job rather than something with a little more risk and a lot of upside.

The lack of flexibility was the biggest issue. At one point, we had to hire a database administrator, and they said, "Oh, there's a hiring freeze." And I was like, "Sure, eBay has a hiring freeze, but how can you stop us from hiring the one critical position we need to keep the site running?"

I started thinking about a spinout in the summer of 2008. I talked to my boss, and he talked to other executives at eBay. I also contacted one of my old investors, Ram Shriram, who talked to people he knew on eBay's board. Because we were part of a public company, we had to be discreet.

The spinout was a complicated negotiation. It took six months of discussions, and then several months to find investors. I'd never really made the rounds of Sand Hill Road before. I'd had a lot of casual meetings with investors, but with the spinout, I actually had to give presentations and say why StumbleUpon was a good investment.

Once we became independent again, in April 2009, there was just a sense of energy and excitement. The spinout basically reset us to a start-up. We had years of experience and a lot of scale, yet we were a brand-new company. All of a sudden, we were able to attract great candidates. Within nine months, we were on full throttle. When we left eBay, we had 300 million stumbles [page recommendations] per month. Now we have over 1 billion. We've released new mobile applications and relaunched our ad system. Our agility and nimbleness are a lot higher, because we have a lot more people who really want to make something cool and have a big impact.

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5/9/2012 9:15:36 AM

Hey, small-business owners: Facebook really, really wants you. It's making a special pitch, and teaching how to best buy ads, use offers, optimise the timeline, and create sponsored stories.

Facebook announced Wednesday a series of webinars designed to help small and mid-sized businesses understand and use the new Facebook product offerings, such as Timeline, Offers, Sponsored Stories, and real-time Page Insights. Given the company's impending IPO, and filings that show more than 85 percent of revenue comes from advertising, this looks like a move intended to help drive more usage by small and mid-sized businesses.

According to a survey last month of 100,000 sellers on Facebook by commerce platform vendor Payvment, 39 percent of respondents report having used Facebook Ads, "making this the most prevalent marketing tactic used by sellers to drive traffic to their stores beyond general Facebook marketing--such as promotions and deals posted to their wall--and nearly 70 percent of respondents say they plan to use Facebook Ads again."

Chris Luo, head of small-business marketing for Facebook, described to Inc. two different types of webinars: "One is for existing, more advanced advertisers, and one is for businesses that are new to Facebook's offerings. They will appeal to a wide range of people, from a marketing manager at a small or medium business to a business owner that wants to better understand how to use Facebook to drive sales."

Luo and his SMB market-solutions team, which works with customers daily and has collected the best practices from these small and mid-sized business, will conduct the workshops.

"We've done webinars on an ad hoc basis in the past, and people love to hear from us, and especially from other businesses who have offered tips and tricks," he said. "Now that we're starting to see ways that SMBs are succeeding and driving sales, we wanted to create a framework for business success on Facebook."

As we learned from Facebook's fMC marketing conference earlier this year there are a number of new marketing offerings, and they may seem disparate, but Facebook sees them as being connected together by a company's Facebook page. That is the base which companies build from, but not everyone knows how to connect their page together with ads, the "offers" feature, sponsored stories, and timeline.

The webinars will have a four-step framework:

Build: "Everything starts with your page," said Luo. " It's where you build connections, use your timeline, represent your brand, put in a cover photo, and invite current customers to "Like" your page." Consider it Fan-Building 101.

Connect: This webinar will help companies understand how to accelerate growth of connections, including connecting with fans through ads.

Engage: Once a company has built up connections and started interacting with them, they want to turn connections into loyal and repeat customers. This webinar will show how to engage connections with quality content. Companies can also learn to make sales using "offers" (which is in limited beta) to drive people to sign up and buy.

Influence: The last webinar helps busineses amplify their messages by getting the attention of more friends of fans, using tools like "sponsored stories."

The first webinar, occurring Wednesday May 9 at 12:30 ET, will be an overview of the entire framework. Viewers can sign up via http://facebook.com/classroom/.

Wednesday's seminar is suggested for those with some experience with Facebook's platform and products. For those who are new to Facebook advertising, there will be "newbie" webinars Tuesdays at 12:30 ET, starting May 15.

5/9/2012 9:13:46 AM

5/9/2012 9:13:46 AM

Traditional tactics alone don't always lead to success. Some of these unconventional methods, including the Care Bear Stare, may level the playing field.

When trying to sustain a start-up business, chances are you will heavily rely on traditional business philosophies to ensure its success. That's all good, but I've found that several screwball techniques have been key to Slingshot SEO's climb to Inc. 500's ranks of the fastest-growing, private companies.

Sometimes I find myself laughing at the strategies that helped me and my partners get to this point. Here are four of those screwball strategies:

What is your immediate reaction when a competitor calls you out publicly? How do you respond to someone who criticizes what you have worked so hard to create? What goes through your mind when you hear rumors of a hip start-up competitor encroaching on your hard-earned clients? Most people would not look to the loveable Care Bears for inspiration. I do.

Those Care Bears of 1980s fame carried a lethal weapon in their arsenal. I call it the Care Bear Stare. By coming together and radiating light from each of their tummy symbols, the Care Bears created a ray of love energy that spread good cheer into the target's heart. Take a leap with me here, but imagine applying that technique to the challenges I just mentioned. At Slingshot SEO, our take on the Care Bear is about killing your critics with kindness. If someone throws a rock at you, send them a gift. If someone punches you in the face, give them a hug. Find common ground and less than obvious synergies that create positive relationships as opposed to an adversarial one. Build concrete bridges that can't be burnt and always keep the door open; you never know who you may work with in the future.

Besides that, I attempt to develop close relationships with our competitors. I consider many of them friends. We learn from them and they learn from us, especially the newbies. One of our clients, the cloud computing company Rackspace, says it best: "We like start-ups and want to support them. Start-ups are good for our company. They push us and keep us on the edge of technology. Our country needs more start-ups. We need growth in the U.S., and start-ups are all about creating new areas of growth."

As a start-up, you may not have much to offer your employees as far as incentives go. So how do you attract top talent? What can you offer that most companies don't? When Slingshot SEO was faced with this problem, we tried thinking outside the box by implementing what we call The Rules of 4:

• Implement a 4-day work week. This not only gives your employees more flexibility, but offers them the chance to recharge, focus on research or finish projects from home. You'd be surprised at how much more work can be done by extending the work day and shortening the work week.
• Offer 4 weeks of paid time off. Many companies make a distinction between personal time and sick days. Some even require a doctor's note from employees taking a sick day. Consider the message you're sending employees. Basically, you're saying, "I don't trust your word." So we simply combined personal time and sick days. It's not groundbreaking, and we certainly are not the first company to do it, but it IS effective.

By thinking creatively and outside of the corporate box, Slingshot SEO was able to create an attractive work environment for talented people.

The language used in each office is like a fingerprint. No one else has one quite like yours. It can go a long way in creating the work environment you are seeking to create. At Slingshot SEO, employees are encouraged to pass around what we call the "SEO Glossary," adding to it when necessary. This list of words commonly used in our niche ensures that all employees have a deep understanding of industry and company terms.

Not only does this pertain to the corporate "jargon" but it includes the slang thrown around the office as well. Early on, we had what we called the "Delta Force" with a picture of Delta Burke looking down on us all--"pushing us" toward excellence. Around here, I'm referred to as "Papa Slingshot." The list goes on. In short, this special Slingshot SEO vocab has helped create a tightly knit group in a quickly growing company.

Never lose touch with what's going on in the trenches of your company. Hewlett-Packard Corp. came up with a style of management known as "Manage by Walking Around." HP encouraged its executives to spend time getting to know the people on the ground floor--making sure everyone was on the same page. You have to commit to this walk-around-style of management. Make it a point to talk to as many employees as you can in one day, discussing whatever comes to mind. Ask if they're aware of trends in the industry, if they're happy with what they're doing, or even what they're up to outside of work. Eventually, they will open up and freely discuss issues they may never have been comfortable mentioning before.

These are just four simple things that have worked for Slingshot SEO. I'm sure there were plenty of other screwball techniques that didn't work, but that's part of the fun of operating a start-up. Give yourself and your company a chance to figure out which screwball strategies work. You'll be surprised by how effective many of them can be.

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5/9/2012 9:12:06 AM

What industries offer the best business opportunities right now? Mobile games, pet care, big data and environmental consulting are all hot on this year's list.

Why work around the clock to build an a company in a declining industry when you could have a much easier ride in one that's booming? Or, to paraphrase the great investor Warren Buffett, if you put a brilliant manager with a business with lousy economics, it's the business that tends to keep its reputation. That's why many savvy entrepreneurs make sure the wind is at their backs before taking the plunge.To help you build -- or keep -- a reputation for brilliance, Inc scoured the data produced by research companies, consulting firms, and even the U.S. Census Bureau to find the best business opportunities for startups. The result: our exclusive list of 11 industries that are ripe for starting or growing a business in 2012.

Thanks to the ability to order one-off customized products and the ease of comparison shopping, Americans are spending more and more money online. That's expected to continue, with the e-commerce industry poised to grow 8.8% annually through 2017. Employment will creep upward as well, from 177,642 e-commerce related jobs last year to 183,396 by the end of 2012 and nearly 206,000 in 2017. Americans are expected to spend $334.3 billion online by the end of 2017. See more

Full-service is what's for dinner, as growing disposable incomes allow even the budget-conscious to eat out—and eat healthier. Restaurant sales are poised to increase by 4.5% this year and 5.5% in 2013. The industry already employs 12.9 million people this year, or 10% of the total U.S. workforce. See more

Internet publishing continues to thrive as more people go online for information and entertainment. The industry grew 11.4% annually between 2007 and 2012, and to pick up from there. Between 2012 and 2017, it should grow at a 16.2% clip, reaching $72 billion. Within the industry, online video will be the fastest-growing segment. Exhibit A: Sites like Hulu, that attract advertisers by requiring viewers to sit through commercials before they can view the content they crave. See more

No industry on our list has been growing as fast as mobile gaming, which currently employs 28,000 people at 1,500 game developers and boasts about $4.5 billion in sales. Compare that to 2007, when there were just two mobile game-makers collecting $2 million in revenue and employing 32 workers. That adds up to a 397% annual growth rate, and tons of opportunity for entrepreneurs. The best news is that big growth is by no means behind us: Industry growth is actually expected to accelerate thanks to high smartphone adoption rates. As of the end of February, more than 104 million people in the U.S. were smartphone users, a 14% increase from just three months earlier. See more

Forget about old-fashioned kennels. Today's pet owners take their animal companions for massages and psychotherapy. And with 62% of U.S. households owning a pet, there's a lot of money being spent—an estimated $52.87 billion in 2012. That number's been growing at about 4.1% annually for the past five years, and is expected to grow at 5.4% for the next five years. See more

After years in the doldrums, the residential construction industry is finally gaining traction, thanks to pent-up demand and slowly-improving incomes. For the next five years, revenues in the residential constrution industry are projected to increase an average of 10.4 percent per year, reaching $573.1 billion in 2017. The number of enterprises--and maybe one of them will be yours--is expected to increase to 556,090 in 2017, up from 340,544 this year. The housing industry isn't expected to reach the fever pitch of 2005, but given what happened after, that's probably a good thing. See more

In an increasingly digitized world, everything we do creates an electronic record—and entrepreneurs are jumping in to organize, analyze and strategize, using all of it. Big data was a $3.2 billion industry in 2010, but is expected to jump to $17 billion by 2015. See more

Between the BP oil spill and new laws aimed at reducing carbon emissions, the environmental consulting industry continues to boom. It's been growing at about 39% a year since 2007, with sales expected to top $20 billion this year. Over the next five years, revenues are projected to grow by 45% a year, and the industry is expected to add some 52,000 jobs. See more

As businesses transition to mobile and cloud-based computing, the field of IT consulting grown by an average of 8.3% a year over the last five years. The industry's best customers are energy, health care, and other businesses that require a significant amount of customer interaction. They're looking to move some of those interactions to mobile devices, keeping the industry moving right along. The IT consulting field added nearly 200,000 jobs from 2007 to 2012. See more

Among the biggest beneficiaries of the economic recovery will be businesses that help move products from point A to point B. Freight transporters alone have already seen sales rise at about 20.5 percent a year, and that may be just the beginning. As domestic manufacturing gets stronger, and as companies look to cut their environmental impact and their costs, the opportunity for transportation and logistics companies will get even bigger. See more

Over the next few years, expect to hear just as much about the 'blue' economy as we all hear about the green one. The planet is increasingly strapped for clean water: If everyone in the world used as much water as the average American, we'd run out of clean water within eight years. Within the U.S., severe droughts are increasing the demand and price of water; within five years, the water industry will be growing at about 14.8 percent annually. As water irrigation and supply centers are becoming privatized, there's a huge opportunity for start-ups to join this $62 billion industry and help solve what may be the planet's most important problem. See more

5/8/2012 3:40:38 PM

Daymond John identified a cultural need for hip-hop fashion, and then grew FUBU into a $350 million (sales) clothing business.

5/8/2012 2:40:36 PM

The world of competitive paper plane throwing got a jolt when a San Francisco plane designer decided to pair up with a former college football player to throw his plane for him. WSJ's John Letzing reports.

5/17/2012 9:30:00 PM

Amateur drone makers are sending their do-it-yourself creations up into the skies of Silicon Valley. WSJ's Andy Jordan reports from San Francisco on the stunning footage they're capturing.

4/11/2012 8:58:42 PM

You can never be too rich to trim your expenses. Plus, a look at how some advisers are preparing for the possibility of higher dividend taxes. And, a look at infrastructure stock. Dow Jones Wealth Advisers' Veronica Dagher reports.

3/27/2012 4:06:21 PM

Want to deliver group presentations with confidence or improve your social skills at an office party? Communications expert Arthur Samuel Joseph tells you the tricks of his trade, including how to ask your boss for a raise.

3/20/2012 10:28:02 AM

Here are some things to think about before you pick your investment.

3/16/2012 2:37:34 PM

If you sell your business today you want to make sure you have enough to live comfortably in retirement. MassMutual Advisor Michael Moran shares 5 keys to a successful sale.

3/12/2012 4:14:32 PM

New Websites and apps help parents teach their children about saving and spending, Emily Glazer reports on digits.

3/12/2012 11:49:45 AM

How to differentiate between the two types before you invest.

3/9/2012 6:45:04 AM

WSJ wealth reporter Robert Frank shares investment strategies he's learned about since covering the super-rich. Hold cash, buy gold, invest globally!

3/5/2012 5:22:41 PM

Don't dismantle those bookshelves yet. Kelli Grant discusses why e-reading is still far from perfect. Photo: Getty Images.

3/5/2012 12:03:47 PM

Goal setting is embedded in my DNA. Because something deep inside me gets so much satisfaction from completing them, I have to be careful that the goals I set are not colossal wastes of time and energy.

Not long ago I gave myself the goal of quintupling the number of connections I have. Ultimately of course, my goal was to gain more clients, do more speaking engagements, produce my own events and also just get the information I have to share, out to more of the people who need it.

I started with about 2,000 connections and (geek that I am) set up an Excel spreadsheet to keep track on a monthly basis of the number of new connections I would gain across the various social networks.

As of September 2011 I am officially the proud owner of more than 10,000 social connections (actually as of this writing nearly 12,000). So as not to be disingenuous, I'll be more specific. That means that across the five social tools I actively use - LinkedIn, Facebook, my email list and Twitter, 10,000 of my closest friends’ multiple personalities are following my daily habits. As I started sharing this news with a few of those friends the questions you might expect came up. How did I do it? Is this number impressive or lame? What does this actually mean for my business and my career? And how the heck does one keep up with 10,000 connections across multiple networks in a way that isn't a full time job?

Since you all know I'm a wee bit of a data geek I though it would be helpful to provide some context around what my communication process looks like with that many connections going on.

I get:

> 1,000 emails per week
20 LinkedIn requests per week
30 Twitter followers per week
3 Facebook friends per week
20 messages per week on LinkedIn

These numbers all shift up significantly when I've published a new post or I've been featured somewhere like when I was named one of the top 11 people to follow on Twitter.

I also want to mention that over the years I've noticed lots of people using tools like TwitterAdder in order to rapidly gain followers. While this can be useful (large numbers by themselves can seem impressive) I made a conscious decision to grow my network "organically". Basically everyone in my network is someone I either personally know, or who I personally connected with out of a specific interest, or who requested a connection with me. I generally also disconnect with people who send me spam.

My thinking has been quality over quantity. I think this strategy has helped my click through rates on twitter and Facebook which are traditionally dismal to be higher than many people's even though my content is not generally for entertainment or shocking.

I Can Email You With the Next Update
Click here to get notified of new posts to "The Internet Strategist" by Email
so you and your company won't miss a beat!
(and I promise no bottomless pit of despair)

How did I do it?

When I started my quest, I had about 2,000 connections. I was able to build an additional 8,000 connections in just 2 years. I strongly believe this is due to a couple of really big things that may unfortunately be hard to replicate, and then a lot of really small things that are actually quite easy for you to replicate - so easy in fact that sometimes people don't believe me.

Hard things to replicate:

4 Easy things to replicate:

These things may seem small but over the 24 months of this goal, I averaged just 300 new connections per month. That doesn’t seem like a huge number but it adds up. If you market consistently those small monthly numbers over time add up to big gains in the depth and breadth of your professional network.

I did begin the article with making sure the goals I set are not “colossal wastes of time,” yes?

Has it been completely worth it to have all these social connections? In order to save you some time, in the next post I’ll outline exactly how I LEVERAGE these 10,00012,000 connections and both what has and has not been worthwhile.


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• 6 Tools to Nurture and Engage Your Twitter Followers
• Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies
• Top 13 Ways to Drive Blog Readership
• Drive Blog Loyalty – How to Get Repeat Traffic
• How to Use Your LinkedIn Profile – a Checklist
• Maisha's Complete Internet Marketing Archive

3/5/2012 8:30:38 AM

My first Inc. 5000 conference experience began with a 2am arrival at Washington’s Union Station to a taxi line that snaked around the corner with not a taxi in sight. But everything was uphill from there. I shared a ride with one of the Inc. 5000 winners who showed a completely endearing excitement as he pointed to the brightly labeled Inc. 5000 van stationed outside the hotel. His excitement was contagious.

Ted Leonsis - does happiness matter?

I was blown away by some of the day’s presenters.

Ted Leonsis spoke from the heart about being happy to be successful. He shared the harrowing story of being in a near plane crash and striking a deal with God. “If you get me through this, I will give back more than I take.” He told us he’s been trying to live that ever since. I’ll be checking out his new book when I get home. His key takeaways:

Ted’s presentation really inspired me. His ending point – be in pursuit of the “double bottom line” not just profit but social responsibility and social impact – including an impact on you.

Barbara Corcoran challenges the attendees to be courageous

Barbara Corcoran was a dynamo on stage – sharing her rags to riches story starting out as a waitress in pigtails. I’m proud to say that when I met her we hugged and took an awesome photo which I’ll share with you when I get my copy from the Inc. photographer!

I am now a Barbara Corcoran fan. She embodied how scrappiness, chutzpa and sheer charisma were the cornerstones of her success and encouraged small business owners, who have so much less to lose, to be more courageous and take more chances in creating a brand for themselves. My favorite quote of hers “Perception creates reality”. Time and time again, she provided examples of how her merely suggesting the reality she wanted helped other people to make it real for her. I also appreciated her reminder about the “pressure of the crowd” in sales. Creating scarcity if used wisely can be an amazing sales tactic.

Tristan & Daniel talk daily deals and local marketing

Lastly – at a panel in the afternoon Tristan Walker, Director of Business Development for FourSquare, Marci Weisler of Tipping Point Partners, Daniel Kim founder of Red Mango and Inc. blogger Howard Greenstein tackled the hotly controversial topic of leveraging daily deal sites and tapping into local marketing. They shared excellent advice and ideas including:

• Know your average sale - don’t make the mistake of not knowing how much your average sale is in advance of crafting a discount deal.
  
  
• Count all of your costs when thinking about the profit of a daily deal i.e. franchisees have to pay 6% of revenues even for revenues from a daily deal.
  
  
• Eroding value - they all were concerned that the daily deal industry may in the long run hurt service based businesses like spas by creating a culture that in a sense commoditizes these services so that customers never expect to pay full price. They did suggests trying multi-package discounts. For example - a discount on three sessions instead of one so that customers build loyalty. Another suggestion was to create a mailing list of your daily deal customers and then run your own deals with discount codes so that your business keeps all of the profit.
  
  
• I also loved Tristan’s story about how vendor Jimmy Chu used FourSquare to get 4,000 people chasing the Jimmy Chu brand all over London for 3 weeks and drive a 30% lift in sales. I look forward to sharing a video where I talk more about this with Tristan.
  
  
• The panelists were hard pressed to come up with examples of location based deals for BtoB companies. If you’re a BtoB and trying to figure this out, you’re not alone.

I also had the chance to interview Tristan and Daniel to get some insights to share with you including the backstory on Jimmy Chu. When the videos are posted I will share a few links.

Throughout the conference I got to speak to several attendees. I was amazed at how consistently powerful their experiences have been and how much the companies who attend love the Inc. 5000 conference. Over and over again, they talk about the ability to really connect with other business owners which can be so easy to miss in today’s Internet driven world. My thought – too many people think of social media as an alternate to face-to-face connections. In fact, social media is about creating and enabling more intimate and face-to-face connections with people you might not otherwise have met. The goal is to get beyond the simple social connection and engage.

Today was my chance to be in the hot seat. I engaged with Inc. 5000 attendees by conducting live critiques and giving answers to how they could use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social tools to build powerful marketing strategies and brands and drive business online.

More soon!

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9/24/2011 3:44:34 PM

Over the last few months we've been working with a number of our clients on establishing and growing their email marketing strategies. We helped one client send out an email for the first time and saw conversion rates that were 2-3 times higher than their Web site conversion rates. I mean conversions from subscribers to buyers which meant real dollars in their pocket.

As we start 2011 and face the hype over new tools and new ways to use "old" tools like Facebook, this is an excellent time for you to consider the importance of

Read Related Articles by Maisha

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• Shortlist of Twitter Apps for Your Desktop
• Pick the Right Twitter Tool: Mobile Apps
• 8 Types of People on Twitter

1/17/2011 11:00:00 AM

A while back I wrote a piece on Blogging tools you'll actually use to run and grow your blog. I received a lot of great feedback on that series of posts and I wanted to provide a similar short list for running and growing your Twitter community.

Instead of a frighteningly comprehensive list of every Twitter tool under the sun, below are just the 6 that I think are particularly useful and effective for starting to really engage people on Twitter.

The first 3 are kind of standard/basics so skip 'em if you're a Twitter veteran. The second three are tools you may not have heard of and should check out because they'll enable you to do things that you can leverage for additional exposure, traffic, and customers.


The Basics

Link Shorteners - the vast majority of posts I see on Twitter are not the "what I ate for breakfast" posts, but people sending links to content - articles, videos, pictures etc. This is a great way to help people understand your area(s) of interest and expertise as well as help them find great content online. The basic purpose of a link shortener is to help you get around Twitter's limit for the length of each of your posts (or tweets).

You have only 140 characters to work with so sites like Bit.ly, tr.im and TinyURL will take your long, long URLs:
http://www.inc.com/maisha-walker/use-twitter-to-inspire-action.html

and turn them into nice 15-20 character ones à la:
http://bit.ly/dudwkJ (go ahead, click it!).

Many of the tools you'll use to post messages on Twitter (see Shortlist of Twitter Apps for Your Desktop and Pick the Right Twitter Tool: Mobile Apps), come with built in URL shorteners.

In addition to the practical necessity of shorter links, most of these shortening tools also provide great tracking! You can see how many people clicked on your links, which links were most popular, when people clicked etc. to inform you about which topics are most popular with your Twitter audience.


TweetMeme - the ubiquitous grey and green "retweet" box (which you see in the top right area of this post), allows readers to click on the image and easily send or "retweet" your post to their own followers on Twitter. It's a great way to encourage your community to spread the word about what you're doing or share your words of advice/wisdom.

In addition TweetMeme actually tracks your links as they hop around through the Twitterverse and displays the total number of times your link was retweeted. Not only does this help you to understand the popularity of given topics, it brilliantly enables the raging competitor in each of us to benchmark the success of our post against others and even ourselves. Very handy!


TwitPic - one of the many tools that enbale you to take photos with your phone and post them onto Twitter. Other products that do roughly the same thing: TwitGoo, yfrog and img.ly. Often tools like these are also integreated into the Twitter mobile app you're using. You usually also get some statistics so you can track response to your photos. Images can be very engaging. You'll have to decide if you want to use a special tool like this or simply link people to a Flickr account, Facebook page or a page on your Web site that displays your photos.

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So you and your company won't miss a beat!

Stretch a Little...

There are lots of neat little apps out there that will enable you to get creative using Twitter to build a strong and engaged community. Once you're ready to amp up your Twitter strategy here are three apps to help you get started (note this amp-ing up could be now, or it could be never. Don't feel obliged. Fancy-schmancy Twitter strategies are not for everyone but this will help you get your head around the kinds of things you can do.):

TweetSwell – suggested to me by my friend, their PR guy @TheDaveClarke who helped me compile the apps for this article, TweetSwell enables you to create Twitter-based polls – with each response also doubling as a tweet to help the poll go viral. TweetSwell also works to maintain your brand identity by making sure your poll pages keep your customized Twitter layout. Similar tools are http://twtpoll.com and http://twtsurvey.com.

TwtVite - allows you to use Twitter to congregate in person - sort of similar to Eventbrite. Watch the little animation video to get a sense of how it works.

For an example with live-action characters, I've found this fantastic "case study" for you of a bar owner in Milwaukee who used TwtVite to help him host the biggest Tweetup in the history of the Midwest! To get the juicy details of how he did it, visit the page and scroll down to see his answer to the question "How did you get the word out before the event?"


TwtQpon - creates online coupons which can be posted to various social networks, including Twitter. While there are tools like Groupon, Living Social that also handle online couponing, TwtQpon is designed to work specifically within social networks.

Anyone out there used TwtQpon who can talk about it? I'm eager to hear business owners' experiences with it as I think online couponing is an amazing opportunity for small businesses to very clearly and directly drive a lot of new and repeat business.


Leave me a comment and tell everyone about what you've done. Be sure to include a "signature" in your comment that includes your name, company name and a link to your company Web site so we can learn more about you!

If you have had particular success with "local" marketing using tools like Twitter, Groupon, Yelp, Facebook, online coupons, or last minute deals and can back it up with real data, let me know. I will be featuring a variety of companies as examples right here in "The Internet Strategist" on Inc.
You can submit your social/local experiences here.


Re-Tweet, LinkIn and Follow!

• Click here to re-tweet "6 Tools to Nurture and Engage Your Followers" to your fans on Twitter
  
• Click here to follow Maisha on Twitter at @maishawalker
• Join Maisha for her free Internet Marketing Webinar on October 28th
  
• Connect with Maisha on LinkedIn

Read Related Articles by Maisha

• Use Twitter to Inspire Action
• Shortlist of Twitter Apps for Your Desktop
• Pick the Right Twitter Tool: Mobile Apps
• 8 Types of People on Twitter

10/26/2010 9:35:00 AM

Over the last 3 weeks I've been part of a 5-week, 5-city speaking and book signing tour sponsored by Deluxe Corp called the Small Business Heroes tour. I'm excited about our next stop tomorrow which is Orlando and I've been thrilled to connect with and provide advice to many businesses in Denver, Portland and Austin. I was also thrilled to make my broadcast television debut with an interview on NBC news. I can never get over what a goofball I seem to be on camera but I was thankful for the opportunity and humbled by my interviewer, journalist and fellow entrepreneur Gregg Moss telling me he's a big fan of this blog! Thank you!

While the Deluxe staff on the tour are giving free presentations on many topics I've spoken and written about including Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, building Web Sites and lots of others, my presentation for this tour is on "local marketing" - how you as a small business owner can easily use the Internet to *successfully* gain visibility and sales within a local area at very little cost.

I am currently working on a whole series of articles around this topic and if you have a local marketing success story, I would love to feature your business here! So if you have a local marketing success story to share you can tell me about it here.

One of the most successful tools to market locally is - surprise, surprise - Twitter! Small businesses all over the country are successfully using Twitter to win customers.

How are they doing it?

Examples abound.

There's the Chicago based Domino's franchisee who sends personalized videos (think Old Spice Guy, but less naked) to people who tweet both praise and complaints about his pizzas, getting him praise on 87,000 Web sites and fierce loyalty from his customers.

There's the Santa Monica Hotel lounge that got 250 people into its lounge one night (to spend $$ on lots of other things) by offering free bubbly to it's Twitter and Facebook followers for "friending" them and then accessing a secret passcode.

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There's the San Francisco massage and wellness spa that regularly fills it's open, unused appointments by offering last-minute, deep discounts to twitter followers.

The bottom line is - it works. But you have to know how it works and when it works -- Twitter isn't great for everything.

How can you make Twitter work for you?

All of these examples fall into the category of "remarkable" content either as:

1. An offer they can't refuse - deep discounts & free champagne sound like pretty sweet deals. So sweet that they grab your attention and make you want to patronize the business if for no other reason than to check it out. Of course it's up to the business to turn those newcomers into loyal customers but getting people in the door is far, far more than half the battle. The trick is to find an offer that is exciting, relevant to your business and affordable.

2. Content that is highly Personal and/or Strikingly Unusual - Ramon the Domino's pizza franchisee didn't have to spend a lot of money or offer deep discounts, he won loyalty with a secret weapon that is hard to copy or steal - his charm and personality. This is one of the areas that scares business owners the most - the kind of committment that Ramon shows to having a highly personal, highly communicative relationship with his customers. While this can be a home run for people who are lucky enough to have that personality, many business owners wouldn't want to go down this path.

However here's another example of a business owner who uses her personality and passion in a far less overwhelming way. The Pink Cake Box makes "extreme cakes" and the business owner simply posts photos of her cakes to Flickr. But the cakes are so remarkable and she's been doing it consistently for so long (years) that she has built a Flickr following that now drives 10% of her Web site's traffic.

The path you take depends on you.

Yes - you! And what resources are available to you including your own passions and skills. When you think of what to offer is it your personality (very time consuming) or a great deal (more of a financial investment)?

What can you do or offer?

Who is it exactly that you're trying to reach and for what purpose? Getting new customers? Keeping old ones?

Make sure you figure out the answers to these questions first. If you're not able to answer these questions, move on to something else. Perhaps local marketing and/or Twitter are not right for your business!

Discuss These Topics Live

If you're in Orlando on October 5th or Charlotte, North Carolina on October 12th, you can see me walk through these topics in more depth in person at noon. I've also been known to sign a few copies of my book as well as sit down one-on-one with businesses for a bit of highly personalized advice.

I hope to see you there!

Follow me on Twitter@maishawalker and join me at the Small Business Heroes Tour in Orlando on October 5th & Charlotte, North Carolina on October 12th.

Read Related Articles by Maisha

• Shortlist of Twitter Apps for Your Desktop
• Pick the Right Twitter Tool: Mobile Apps
• 8 Types of People on Twitter
• Your Social Media Marketing "Killer App"

10/4/2010 3:31:01 PM

Last time I was discussing the challenges in deciding which Twitter tools to use once you've decided you're going to use Twitter at all. And when I say "use" I'm focusing on your role as a distributer of content.

I want to reiterate that this isn't as big a decision as, say, choosing blogging software. If you decide to change blogging software it can be a real pain (and expense) to do so. But Twitter management tools tend to have three things in common that make them wonderfully interchangeable:

So it's not that hard to switch between them or even to use more than one tool at the same time! While I offered some hints last time on mobile tools, this becomes more relevant as we look at the tools you'll consider for desktop usage.

In fact I actually use four or five different tools to manage my Twitter accounts. Between active posting, list management, direct message conversations and statistics, there isn't one tool so far that has met all my twitter-ing needs. While this obviously isn't ideal from an ease of use perspective, it is great that I at least have the option to use as many tools as work for me i.e. using Co-Tweet to answer all of my direct messages or using HootSuite to publish all of my posts. This is only possible because the tools happily pull all of the relevant content *from Twitter* instead of storing it in their own database. So I never actually *have* to choose.

Here is a breakdown of some of the available tools that I think are worth checking out:

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TweetDeck - known for it's desktop version but also has a mobile version. You can monitor multiple accounts, tweet from multiple names, and setup pop-up alerts. There's also an iPad version.

CoTweet - great when you'd like to give multiple users access to the same Twitter account or even assign specific posts to an individual user to respond to. Because of it's multi-user and assignment features it's a great tool if you plan to use Twitter for customer service and has attracted large brands like Starbucks, JetBlue, and Coca-Cola. They do offer a feature-rich free version. As of the writing of this article it is desktop only.

Twhirl - like CoTweet and TweetDeck, Twhirl can handle multiple accounts and has all the features you'd expect. Note Twhirl was acquired by Seesmic in 2008.

HootSuite - a great tool (and my personal favorite) with a user-friendly interface. All the standard Twitter functions plus the ability to track keywords and trends, post directly to Facebook, schedule posts, put followers into groups and the ability to manage multiple accounts. You can also track clickthroughs on your embedded links. HootSuite has both desktop and mobile versions.

Twitbin - Twitbin is actually a Firefox extension that allows you to view your Twitter accounts as a sidebar in your browser. This setup allows you to easily keep a constant eye on what's happening on Twitter. Wonderfully convenient. For those who want to make Twitter a central communication tool holding real time conversations and posting multiple times per day this "always on" setup may be the tool for you!

SocialOomph - people really debate the automated direct reply issue. I like it beacuse although it can be annoying having to delete DMs that aren't very useful, it can also be a quick way to learn more about the person you just followed -- what someone puts in their direct message, and sends to every single person who follows them is telling. Or if you ask a good question in your own automated DM, it can be a way to learn something about the person who just followed you. SocialOomph has a good tool to enable you to create an automated DM as well as lots of other features.

Which Twitter desktop app do you use? Did I leave yours off of the list? Have you had any great or challenging experiences with any of the tools above?

One of the most important things you can do on Twitter is actually engage other users. While the list above tackles some of the basics of posting, next time I look forward to getting into tools for engagement and for measuring your success.

Follow me on Twitter. Special thanks to Dave Clarke, Communications Strategist at Churnless, for his excellent help in compiling the data for this article! You can ask Dave about his favorite Twitter tools at @thedaveclarke or ask me more about mine at @maishawalker.

Read Related Articles by Maisha

• Pick the Right Twitter Tool: Mobile Apps
• 8 Types of People on Twitter
• Your Social Media Marketing "Killer App"
• A Guide to Social Media Tools and their Uses

8/9/2010 9:30:00 AM

You've decided to take the plunge into Twitter. You even have some idea of how you're going to use it (gasp – a real Twitter strategy!). But since this is *online* marketing we're discussing, you now have a array of options facing you for exactly how to do that and which tools to use. Which one has the features you'll need? How do you answer that question without spending endless hours testing and wondering? Which one has the lowest learning curve?

If I can ease the anxiety a bit on this one, I actually don't think this is a place to worry too much about making the "right" decision from the start. If you know (and abide by) these three reasons you'll be able to switch tools at a whim without much, if any, remorse:

Think of your goal as finding one or two tools and then being mindful not to do anything that *removes* content from the Twitter database while using them.

So without further ado, here are some Twitter tools that can help you put in play your tweeting master plan.

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Mobile Apps - Twitter Tools to Manage Accounts, Posts, Replies and Multiple Users

Let's face it, some of our best ideas happen when we're in the car, brushing our teeth, just about to fall asleep or otherwise un-tethered to a traditional computer. Here are some great Twitter tools for the mobile in you:

Seesmic - this application is especially nice for devices operating on Android. It has a clean, thorough interface and connects with URL shorteners and photo/video sharing. It's a great tool if you want a single software for both mobile and desktop.

TwitterBerry - If you've got a BlackBerry, this is a must-have app. It provides most of the basic Twitter functionality you experience at your desktop including the ability to tweet pictures, view timelines, search, and send and receive direct messages. Note however this is only for BlackBerry and as of the time of this article does not have a desktop version.

Tweetie - in addition to the Twitter functionality you'd expect, Tweetie can also do a restoration of your user interface if you're interrupted by a phone call and your offline Twitter actions can also be synced up when you come back online. Note that as of this article this tool does not have a desktop version.

What do you like/dislike about these mobile twitter tools? Which ones did I leave out?

Next time we'll talk about desktop apps, tools to boost engagement and tools for measuring your success.

Follow me on Twitter at @maishawalker. Special thanks to Dave Clarke, Communications Strategist at Churnless, for his excellent help in compiling the data for this article! You can ask Dave about his favorite Twitter tools at @thedaveclarke.

Read Related Articles by Maisha

• 8 Types of People on Twitter
• Your Social Media Marketing "Killer App"
• A Guide to Social Media Tools and their Uses

7/6/2010 9:33:00 AM

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at Inc.'s Growco conference in Orlando.

Not only did I meet some amazing business owners, I also had the opportunity to collaborate with Deluxe (yes, the check printing company!) who is making a bold move to extend their business beyond branding printed items to supporting small businesses in their need for digital branding as well.

Deluxe hosted a dinner on Monday night with approximately 50 business owners in attendance. They invited me to be their guest speaker and lead a discussion on how growing businesses can get the most out of online marketing.

From innovative product retailers like Rich Johnston of KeyPlex Direct who had some excellent questions like "When is blog content considered too old and no longer trustworthy?" to fine art photographers like Anne Day of Anne Day Photography who was at the conference helping to produce social video content for an inspring book project targeting youth entrepreneurs, to builders like Peter Feinmann, who was "hoping that I would be stimulated by new and creative ways to grow my residential design/build business. I was not disappointed." The dinner hosted a dynamic group of successful businesses that all had unique and fascinating challenges, questions and experiences to share about how to maximize their online brand.

One of the biggest topics of discussion for almost all of the business owners was deciding whether to and how to market using a blog. It is a question many business owners are still facing. How do I get started? How do I come up with content that is interesting? How often should I post? How important is blogging for Search Engine Optimization? What else can blogging do for me?

Luckily I had answers! We had a passionate discussion about these and other topics during the cocktail hour and over a fantastic dinner at The Ritz Carlton. I thought in honor of our event I would post some quick references for you to get answers to those questions and share with everyone what was discussed at our intimate dinner.

Growco Attendee Question: How do I get started?
The Internet Strategist: Dive in! One thing you'll definitely want to do is make sure you've thought about the purpose of your blog and how often you plan to post. Make sure you're choosing a frequency you can keep up with for the next 2-3 years minimum. To test the waters you can even start posting without making your blog public. Take a look at my 10 Step Guide to Blogging and use it as your step-by-step planning guide to get you started with your blog.

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Growco Attendee Question: How do I know if my content will be interesting?
The Internet Strategist: I strongly recommend not worrying too much about this one. The best bet is to write about things you are a) passionate about, b) extremely knowledgable about, and c) will be able to stand writing about for the next several years! The wonderful thing about the Internet is that there are just so many darn people on it. There's likely to be a sizable group of people who are just as passionate as you are about just about anything. Keep in mind however that your goals will impact your topic choice - are you looking to drive advertising revenue or are you looking to build credibility in your industry? Make sure you choose a topic that is appropriate for your goal and don't worry about the traffic yet. That comes with marketing. But do be honest with yourself - if you're really not a great writer, blogging may not be the venue for you. There are so many other Internet Marketing Techniques available to you. You can download my free Internet Marketing Checklist to get your head around what they all are. When it comes to marketing it's all about the cost/benefit. If you have limited resources (as we all do) make sure you are making the most of them.

Growco Attendee Question: How often should I post?
The Internet Strategist: So I get this question a *lot*. This is completely based on your goals. If you are looking to create a high traffic blog that will generate advertising revenue, minimum once per week but even better is once per day. Time and time again bloggers have seen that the more you post, the more traffic you receive. If you are not looking for advertising revenue, my advice is don't sweat it. Do what you can handle now (monthly, even quarterly is ok) and then build up to more frequent posts if you can.

Growco Attendee Question: How important is blogging for Search Engine Optimization?
The Internet Strategist: blogging can be a great way to boost your search engine rankings and is often a large factor in choosing to blog. But note - to reap the benefits of SEO, you have to have your blog content built within the same site you want optimized. So you can't build a free blog at WordPress.com and then just have a link to your corporate Web site if you want your corporate Web site to improve in the search rankings. If you want more detail on this take a look at these two articles: "Build Your Blog" and "Blogging for Coin"

Growco Attendee Question: What else can blogging do for me?
The Internet Strategist: That's a big question. There are so many things from building credibility, creating content that can go "viral", being the basis of other kinds of social media marketing, Twitter links, LinkedIn profile content (see this post for details), being fodder for other materials (ebooks, printed books etc.), helping people truly understand what it is that you do and what your expertise and strengths are. To help you understand the myriad benefits of blogging and decide which benefits you want to pursue, I would strongly recommend referencing these three articles:

• To Blog or Not to Blog
• Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs (part 1)
• Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs (part 2)

I'm looking forward to the next big Inc. event and hope I'll see you there! I've been promised some video from the dinner - if it's not too horribly embarrassing I'll try to post it here!

3/23/2010 12:48:18 PM

Outside of missing the 22 ways to successfully market your blog by getting new traffic and repeat traffic, here are some major caveats offered from experience. Don't get caught doing these 11 things that will drive your blog readership down instead of up.

Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• Drive Blog Loyalty – How to Get Repeat Traffic
• Top 13 Ways to Drive New Blog Readership
• 13 Must Have Blog Techniques & Tools
• 8 Basic Blogging Features You'll Actually Use

2/16/2010 1:30:12 PM

Anyone who pours sweat and tears into their blog, and actually succeeds in getting new readers as we discussed last week, should make sure it's not all wasted by finding ways to get those readers to come back! You can only do so much to build a solid, consistent and growing readership by constantly chasing new readers — you have to make sure you're keeping the old ones.

Of course that starts with having good content, and many of the techniques we discussed for getting new readers will also help you keep the old ones because some of your existing readers will be found in the places you're looking for new readers.

But you need to find ways to turn new readers into loyal readers, and then turn loyal readers into a real community.

So today we focus on loyalty — how do you get people who liked your content once to remember you and come back? Well actually, you don't. Just like it's hard to break through the noise with new readers, it's also really hard for people you've already convinced! So you have to help them out...

Building Your Blogging Tribe

Be Predictable

For those of us who sometimes like being predictable, here our chance to shine! Making regularly timed posts, at a frequency your readers can come to expect is a great way to get readers loyal by helping them make you a part of their daily/weekly/monthly routine. It also builds a certain trust with your reader knowing that s/he can always rely on getting new content from you.

Cross Promote in your "Owned" Venues

• Email Signature - list your blog address amongst other details but avoid putting the list of "100+ ways to reach me on every communication tool known to man" (you know who you are!). In case you were wondering, yes, it's definitly overkill.



• Your Non-blog Web Site - whether you include a link in the main navigation or a prominent callout on the Home page make sure it's there if it's appropriate. Also consider linking to your blog posts within the content areas of other pages of your site or through callouts to *specific posts* in the left or right sidebars



• Offline - remember the real world? Make sure it and your blog are not strangers. While it's much, much easier to get people to visit your blog when they're already online, don't miss in-person opportunities to build your brand. Tell people at your events or bring some printouts of your most popular post to distribute. Add links to specific posts to your existing marketing collateral as appropriate.



• Your Email newsletter



• Your Business Card (Duh right? But it's so obvious it gets forgotten!)

Cross Promote in Your "Outposts"

Another great place to cross promote is — you guessed it - Social Media.

Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse (of ProBlogger) have a name for this which they call "creating outposts". It starts with having a presence in a few social sites (I would suggest picking 1-2 social sites until you get your bearings on how to do this well) and it can grow to creating entire online communities around your brand and your work within these venues.

Jacob Morgan of The Social Media Globetrotter confirms that "to this day twitter is one of the largest traffic drivers to my site".

Fatemah Khatibloo of TimesTwoMarketing was surprised to find that "Facebook Fans drive a substantial amount of our blog traffic."

For Chris Clark of The Senior List his Facebook fan page has made it to his "top 5 tactics" list.

A key tactic with social media is being able to automatically feed your blog posts to sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Delicious. Two popular tools that enable this automation include FriendFeed and Ping.fm. Even previously Twitter focused tools like Hootsuite are starting to add this functionality.

At the end of the day, every business is as different as is the community of people who follow it. You must identify which methods will actually work well for your business as well as for your resources. Also keep in mind that until you have significant numbers of followers you will be using these tools slowly but surely to build your numbers over time.

Keep Your Inner Circle Updated

There will definitely be moments when a post you've written deserves it's own mini-audience among people you're connected to. Don't deny them! Send individual posts in response to questions, to relevant clients, or to friends and family. Email certain relevant posts and be careful you don't spam them with content that doesn't interest them.

Diane Menke of Myers Constructs, Inc. takes a good approach "We send relevant posts to people we speak to on the phone or in emails if we think they may find it interesting. For example last week I sent an architect we want to work with a link to a post about bids and why we do not do bids." When considering who to send to, specific groups can include:

• Potential and Current Clients
  
  
• Your groups, networks, professional and alumni associations
  
  
• Your friends and loved ones (hey what are friends for!)
  
  
• New contacts you meet at networking events - sending a link to your blog can be a great way to follow up with someone you just met in a professional context so they can learn more about you and you can begin a conversation. Try to think of something they'd be interested in when you meet them and if possible link them to a specific, relevant post.

Email is Still Critical

These days, anyone who volunteers to give you his/her email address, requesting that you add yet another piece of email to their ever-unmanageable inbox has really got to love what you're saying.

These people are gold. Do not leave them hanging by not providing an email subscription option. Feedburner and Feedblitz are the two most popular tools that enable your visitors to get an email each time you add a new post. It's a great way for them to stay up to date with your new content and it's wonderful for you because it's fully automated! Feedburner is very easy to use and is free.

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Feed Me Baby!

In last week's 13 ways to drive new readers to your blog, we mentioned RSS as a "find new readers" tactic by getting other Web sites to publish your feed. But RSS is traditionally known for it's ability to send content directly to an individual. For those of your readers who know what RSS is, it's a great tool for getting them to stay abreast of what you're writing about and click whenever a headline appeals to them.

Cross Post Linking

One of the best things you can do is encourage visitors to get more of what they already like. Linking *within* your blog is an important way to increase "stickiness" (the amount of time visitors spend on your site) and encourage visitors to read more content or save content they find and want to come back too. Andrea Toochin of Trendcetera Magazine uses a tool called LinkWithin to automate this process for her blog and confirms that it has increased the time people spend on her site.

Monitor your traffic

• Referral Source - find out which sites & sources your readers are already coming from. Leverage your success by finding ways to repeat it.
  
  
• Click Streams - use CrazyEgg to see where visitors click
  
  
• Time of day/Day of week - try posting at different times of the day & different days of the week to see if it affects traffic
  
  
• Post Page Views - know which posts are the most popular to learn more about the audience you're attracting and how to keep them coming back.

Take Care of Your Voice

Your blog is an excellent way to build your brand (see my discussion of blogging goals and strategies) and as such you want to be careful about the brand you're inviting people to engage with.

I really like the way blogger & filmmaker Hugh Rhodes put it:

"A blog conveys a voice, a visual aesthetic, and a record of opinion, all in one. I don't write about my film exclusively - I write about movies I have seen, filmmaking strategies, and personal issues related to my career."

Be conscious of the overall presentation of your blog. In addition to making sure your content is useful & relevant you also need to:

• include compelling headlines
  
  
• include people or products that will attract attention.
  
  
• define what your "voice" or "brand" is
  
  
• make sure your site is visually pleasing and easy to read/use and looks clean and professional, it helps with trust and credibility.
  
  
• and as Brock Green of JustinAamir.com reminds us "Stay true to what interests you! This will help to develop your core/niche following."

Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• Top 13 Ways to Drive New Blog Readership
• 13 Must Have Blog Techniques & Tools
• 8 Basic Blogging Features You'll Actually Use
• Blogging for Coin

1/25/2010 3:00:35 AM

If you have a blog then you know that the biggest challenge next to content is readers. How do you get your audience, who are bombarded by hundreds (thousands?) of messages per day, to focus on your messages?

Of course your first responsibility is providing content your audience will actually find relevant and useful. Your second responsibility is to tell them, often, that your content exists. If it sounds simple, that's because it is. There's no magic trick to building blog traffic if your content is good (and sometimes even if it isn't!)

But it *is* time consuming — and that you should be prepared for.

You should also be aware that in driving traffic to your blog you have 2 distinctly different jobs:

1.Get new readers to find out about your blog and visit
2.Get past visitors to come back

This second one is critical. Meeting your goals will be nearly impossible if you can't get readers to come back to your blog on a regular basis. Sometimes the same tactic can be used for both goals but there are some that are specific to each.

Today I outline the top 13 techniques for getting new readers to your blog, and share experiences from business owners just like you. Next time we'll discuss how to keep people coming back.

How to get New Traffic and New Readers to Your Blog

Link Building

These days the idea of "link building" is almost loosing it's meaning because so many online marketing techniques could fit into this category. Link building for your blog has essentially two major benefits — 1) introducing the audience of another Web site to your blog and 2) boosting your search engine rankings. Link building techniques for your blog include:

1/14/2010 1:05:25 PM

Last week we talked about basic blogging tools and techniques you should pretty much always have.

But when you think of maximizing what your blog can do for you there are some other tools you'll want to make sure you have. Blogging can be awfully time consuming and I want to help you blog smarter not harder. While there are a many many ways you can get the most out of your blog, some ways are simpler and more universal than others.

Here are 13 of the simplest yet important tools and techniques you should be using to maximize the value of your blog:

11/30/2009 3:00:00 PM

Blogging tools are designed to be easy to use. They generally don't provide all the advanced features of a complex content management system, but rather do one task — publishing a blog — very well. To this end, they can help you:

• Create posts. Since the purpose of a blog is to be able to post new text or information to the site frequently, creating posts is usually quick and easy.
• Upload or embed pictures and multimedia. Pretty much all blogs allow you to upload pictures to your posts. Some will also enable you to upload video and audio/mp3/podcasts. One significant note here is that most people do not have video that is in a "Web ready" format and often the video you have is just huge which means you risk spending a lot of money for the space to host the video and the bandwidth that enables people to view it. My general recommendation is to post your video on one of the video sites like YouTube or Vimeo and then use their embed feature to embed the video into your site. Quick, easy and no-cost.
• Configure the appearance and layout. Tools vary widely in the degree to which they allow you to configure your blog, and the methods they offer to do this. Most blogs are built on themes — essentially a design template that can be installed and modified.
• Display posts & comments to visitors. A blogging platform makes it easy for readers to view your posts and to add their comments.
• Moderate. you will want to remove some of comments left by readers and you will eventually have to fight comment spam. Different platforms provide varying degrees of spam protection and moderation features to weed out unwanted contributions.
• Publish RSS feeds. RSS feeds allow more tech-savvy users to subscribe to your blog and get headlines via myAOL, myYahoo, iGoogle or another RSS reader.
• Find support. Not every blogging tool offers the same degree of support: while some offer personalized assistance, others have forums where you can find answers to your questions.
• Host your blog. While some blogging software lives on your own server, others are hosted by the software provider or vendor. A great example of this is WordPress.com which is hosted by WordPress vs. WordPress.org which you download and install on your own server/hosting account.

These are some of the basic blogging features that pretty much all blogs provide.

Next time I will describe another set of features that you may not know about but will definitely be useful to maintain your blog.

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Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• Blogging for Coin
• Build Your Blog
• Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs pt 2
• Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs

11/24/2009 10:33:11 AM

In my last few posts we covered what a blog is, and the benefits of blogging as a technique to boost your business. For any blogging initiative you'll need at least three things:

Last time we began the discussion of blogging software, focusing on ways you can build and maintain your blog for free using services like WordPress.com, Blogger.com, or Blogher.com. The key with free blogging software is knowing what you're getting.

Here are some explanations these companies have provided outlining the features they offer:

WordPress
free features: http://en.wordpress.com/features/
premium (paid) features: http://en.wordpress.com/products/

Blogger
(all free) http://www.blogger.com/features

Blogher
features http://www.blogher.com/using-this-site

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But as anyone who has experienced "buyer's remorse" would know, equally important is knowing what you're NOT getting with these services. Since we all tend to be rather shy about broadcasting our deficiencies, I'll respectfully let you in on some of the downsides. These services do come with some caveats, namely, that you have to abide by their Terms of Service, the details of ownership can be somewhat nebulous, you have limited control over the look and functionality of your blog, a free service (because it's hosted separately) will limit the SEO value of your blog and you cannot, as of this writing, place ads on your blog.

For those who want design control, functionality control, clear ownership of content and want to be able to generate advertising revenue -- installing your own blog is probably the ticket. If that's you, let's talk about the two other options for how to build your blog — paid upgrades and downloadable version.

What ponying up will get you

Most blogging software have more or less the same features. Google owned Blogger really surpasses in terms of what it offers for free, but if you throw a little coin into the game you can get everything you need. The two options when you're considering upgrading from free are:

These two paid options give you more control over your blog, your brand, and your content. Here is a chart showing who offers each option from least control to greatest:

Free Software Free Hosting
With a completely free tool like WordPress.com, WordPress owns the server, provides you the software to build your blog and hosts it for you, all for free. They can generate advertising revenue off of the blog you build but as of this writing you cannot. Note also that this version most likely means your Web site and your blog (if you have both) are completely separate hurting your SEO and possibly weakening your brand with very different designs.

Paid Software Free Hosting
Here again, the software and hosting are both provided by a company like WordPress but you can get more by paying a one time or periodic fee. For example on WordPress you can pay to use your own non-WordPress domain, to get extra hosting space, to customize the blog's design, to upload & store video, or to turn off advertising on your blog. Note that as of this writing WordPress still does not let you post your own ads or upload a completely custom theme even if you pay for an upgrade. Also note that Google-owned Blogger, although far less popular, lets you do all of these things for free.

One other note on either free or paid software hosted by the blogging company, if you ever decide to move your blog beware. The process of moving the content itself could be a little challenging but more of a concern is your links. Each post you create will have it's own "permalink" or a permanent link that people can share, bookmark etc. If you move your blog it may be difficult or impossible to re-create the same structure on your new blog as you had on your old blog, meaning all of your links will no longer work.

Free Software Download Paid Hosting (by your hosting company)
This is the most flexible option. You get a hosting company (like HostGator), get your own domain name and have a developer download your own copy of WordPress or other software and install it into your hosting account for you. The options for customization are unlimited, you can use whatever design theme/template you like or hire someone to create one from scratch. You can install whatever widgets or tools you like to add to your blog's functionality, you of course own all of your content, you can post whatever you like (within the terms of service of your hosting company), and you can sell ads on your blog as a revenue stream. Just like the "paid software" version above, you pay a monthly fee but it goes to your hosting company. This version can be set up just as quickly but usually with the help of a development company. Basic hosting will be anywhere from $5-$15 depending on what you need.

How to choose?

Generally I suggest the free version if you don't plan to generate advertising revenue, and don't need sophisticated customizations or a custom design. Also if you're not planning to generate a lot of traffic to your blog in the beginning, you won't be as concerned about moving it (and breaking the links) later.

The paid upgrade gives you a bit more but it doesn't eschew the limitations and restrictions that are inherent in working with the blogging companies.

If you are ready to invest I generally recommend the downloaded version which will give you total control over your content, your design, your features and maximum SEO benefits if you have an existing site you want to integrate the blog with.

I hope this has helped you understand a bit better how the world of blogging software works and how to decide which path is right for you.

If you're still wondering which version is right for you, post your question below. I'd like to hear from you.

Two important notes:

I will be highlighting a variety of companies as examples in upcoming posts.
If you've had success with your Blog and can describe results/back it up with real data, you can submit your Blogging strategy here.

Even in a bad economy there's a silver lining. I'm giving away a free Web site!
If you'd like to be the lucky business owner tell me about your business and why you should win here. I acknowledge I'll be choosing the winner purely based on my own discretion. Heck I may even choose more than one. I look forward to seeing your entry!

Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• Build Your Blog
• Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs pt 2
• Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs
• To Blog or Not to Blog

11/16/2009 7:00:00 PM

We are knee deep in the basics of blogging!

In my last few posts we covered what a blog is, and the benefits of blogging as a technique to boost your business.

If you've decided you'd like to blog, or if you just want more information before taking the plunge, there are a few more steps, namely:

Deciding what you'll write about is clearly a highly subjective decision that goes beyond our scope for today (although maybe a good idea for a future feature? Hmm...). But I read a nice piece on this very topic the other day by Sonia Simone on copyblogger. The article was "Steal This Trick: The #1 Secret of Confident Bloggers". When choosing a topic, Sonia advises:

Strong headlines, smart copywriting technique, celebrity gossip, telling stories, making readers laugh, stategic [sic] use of controversy, reviews of the latest technology, reveling in your love of Steve Jobs and all he creates. They each have their advocates, and they can all work. But there's one insider's trick that makes the rest of it easy'Start by picking a crowded topic [and then] Instead of being a big fish in a small pond,' Be a small, ridiculously evolved, very rare and weird fish in a great big pond.

Her overarching point: write about a topic lots and lots of people are interested in, but write about it in a way that is uniquely you.

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Once you know what you're going to write about (or if you plan to work through it publicly) the "how" then takes center stage.

To construct a blog you will need two things.

To get the blog-style Web site, pretty much everyone uses some form of blogging software.

Blogging Software

Just like any other site you can build your blog from scratch (I don't know a single person who does this) or you can use a Content Management Tool aka Content Management System aka "CMS". The CMS is a piece of software. In the same way that Microsoft Word allows you to create and maintain Word documents, a CMS allows you to create and maintain a Web site.

Pretty much every blogger uses a CMS. Popular CMSs include:

WordPress
Blogger
TypePad
Live Journal
Movable Type
Expression Engine

the list goes on. With blogging software you can design and create your blog. If you keep it simple you can even do it without needing a developer. The CMS also enables you to add text and images to your blog in the form of posts.

While these tools are very similar, they're not actually the same and they each have variations. This takes us to the second thing you'll need...

Blog Hosting

As with any Web site that you build, you need a physical home for your site — literally. You need a computer where all the files that make up that site are stored and from where your Web site can be viewed by others. That computer is called a "server". The good news is that to keep things simple, all of the companies we mentioned above (except Expression Engine and Movable Type) in addition to offering the blogging software also will host your blog.

Software as a Service

This model of providing software and hosting that software for you (instead of you having the software installed on your computer) is what's called Software as a Service -- if you always wondered what SaaS stands for, now you know.

The Software as a Service model is very popular in the blogosphere. As I mentioned all of the blogging companies listed above offer you their CMS and most of them will host it for you too. Another bonus, some of them are free.

You can go to WordPress.com, sign up and instantly have your CMS and hosting and be ready to create your first post in about 5 minutes. No joke.

Making a choice

The catch with all of these services is that they have both limitations in terms of how much you can customize their software (design, features etc.) and they have somewhat daunting and controversial Terms of Service that restrict the kind of content you can publish, allow them to shut down your blog, prohibit you from selling ads on your blog (so no revenue generation) and generate questions about whether they in some way have ownership of your content. A bit scary.

I think these tools are a great way to get started with blogging — especially the free ones. They let you dip your toe into the world of blogging to make sure that it's somewhere you really want to be before diving in completely.

If you are going to be a serious blogger however (meaning using it to really build a brand and/or drive traffic and search rankings to your site) I would suggest another option.

Next time we'll cover some of the blogging options that cost money. They are typically not that expensive and will give you total control over your blog setup, design, revenue generation and your content.

Two important notes:

Get Your Blog Featured
I will be highlighting a variety of companies as examples in upcoming posts. If you've had success with your Blog and can describe results/back it up with real data, you can submit your Blogging strategy here.

Get a Free Blog or Web Site!
Even in a bad economy there's a silver lining. I'm giving away a free Web site! If you'd like to be the lucky business owner tell me about your business and why you should win here. I acknowledge I'll be choosing the winner purely based on my own discretion. Heck I may even choose more than one. I look forward to seeing your entry!

10/27/2009 2:45:00 PM

From the comments and emails I've received, the benefits I described in the first half of Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs have hit home but also helped you think of new ways that your blog can help you build your business.

I liked the issue raised in a comment by SaveMoneyCostCutting from last week. Sometimes it is a fine line between too much marketing and just enough. It is important to establish a position on this that will work based on what you're selling and to whom you're selling it. There's no one-size-fits-all on that one. Blogging is a tool you can use creatively to get out what you need to say to the world, and/or as a serious business tool for driving leads, creating advertising inventory (aka traffic), generating sales and building a brand. Just be true to the brand and the tone you establish.

I also like jimfracis' comment that blogging helps him "shape his convictions". As I mention towards the end of the "Credibility" paragraph helping you to actually articulate what you know or believe is definitely a big benefit.

If you think that blogging might be a great leads or revenue generator for your business, the problem is how to justify the fact that blogging is *really* time consuming, especially when you consdier that typically you'll spend at least the same amount of time marketing your blog as you do writing it, often more, sometimes, 2-3 times more.

So to help you to decide whether to blog or not to blog, I'll outline the final 5 of Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs.

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Networking

I think many people don't understand what it really means to "network" (not that I'm a guru). But instead of focusing on "networking" I'd like to talk specifically about "how to build" a network that will educate you, inform you, support you emotionally, and tell you about opportunities, and one that will also enable you to inform, support, provide opportunities for and educate it. This is a network that serves your needs 360 degrees. When you're building a network it's critical that people in your network know what it is that you need, and what you have to offer. Regularly publishing content that makes clear your areas of focus is a great way to help people very tangibly understand why they should connect with you. It's one thing to say you're an expert, it's another thing to write 50 articles about it that are read, appreciated, forwarded, reposted etc. Making it very clear what how you can help people is ironically also a great way for other people to figure out how they can help you.

Customer Loyalty, Customer Service & Customer Education

Product details, how-to instructions, usage hints can all be smart content to provide to build both sales and loyalty especially if your product is technically complex or has a lot of hidden features. A blog can be used like individual FAQ posts to answer both old and new customer questions. And just like FAQs, your posts/answers can highlight features that customers don't know about, or help customers understand the best way of using your product or service.

Case Studies

One of the greatest benefits of Case Studies is self-identification. Case studies offer detail and context about a specific situation your product resolved and provide more information about the customer you worked with. This is wonderful for potential customers, enabling them to see themselves and see their specific needs, situation, challenges not only laid out in front of them and tangibly understand that you can fix it.

Social Media Content

Social media strategies and campaigns are built around content. Whether the content is video, images, or text, those businesses who invested in the idea that "content is king" now have a leg up in creating social media strategies because they have a store of content that can be used to support, encourage and extend dialog. If you have a blog you also have the beginnings of a wonderful social media strategy.

Consistent Presence

Presuming you blog with some regularity, blogging, like all social media tools, has the excellent benefit of helping you strengthen more of your weak ties by communicating with large numbers of people frequently and with relevance.

Advertising Revenue

Not that I created this list in any order of priority, but I do advise making a mental note of how far down on the list this one is (at the bottom). While generating significant revenue from your blog by selling advertising can still work for some bloggers, these days it is a difficult way to justify the investment if advertising revenue is the only payoff. You have to either have a significant amount of traffic (I'd think about 50,000 page views minimum) or have a captive audience of readers who are extremely difficult to reach else where, or both. While Google AdWords are great it generates tiny amounts of monthly revenue for most bloggers so don't assume that's all you'll need!

So Now What?

You may have looked at this list of payoffs and recognized several that fit squarely into your business strategy. So now what?

Armed even with knowledge of what reasonable goals are, I find that businesses trying to dive into the world of blogging are still somewhat at a loss for how to start. How on earth do I build an effective blog? How much time will it take? What tools are available and which ones make the most sense for our needs? How do I actually get all the payoffs?

Stay tuned — next time we dive into the technical side of blogging and how to get started.

Till then I look forward to hearing more about blogging benefits and what you get out of blogging for your business.

10/12/2009 3:00:00 PM

In last week's article I discussed what a blog actually is and its relationship to both your business and to your regular Web site if you have one.

The purpose of blogging in general, is usually to establish and/or support an existing brand with an understanding of how that brand generates revenue.

This week, as promised, I'm getting into the real payoffs. Why does it make sense to spend hours of time each month, writing content, then giving it away for free and if that's not enough, even more hours marketing that free content to make sure people will know it's there?

Here's what makes that multi-hour investment worth it.

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Intimacy

I loved this advice from Oliver Vass on LinkedIn who according to his title, is not a marketing industry professional, but a customer and business owner.

In my village there are two shops that sell newspapers and sweeties for the children.

I use Gordon's shop. Why? Because when I go there he chats with us, he tells us what's happening in his shop, his life and the village. He doesn't push products or sell to us. He just makes us feel welcome and keeps us in touch. The other shop waits until I've made my choice of purchase, then takes my money and thanks me politely.

That's how business blogging helps a business. Engagement. Making your customers feeling a part of your enterprise. It isn't to get people to buy more, that'll be seen through as marketing. It is to ensure that when people buy, they do it from you, not your competitor.

I found this so wonderfully put and direct (erudite even) I had to give kudos. Thank you Oliver.

By posting content on a regular and even reliable basis, your blog can not only have a huge impact on your efforts to establish your brand, it can make your relationship with your audience and customers far more intimate. In mature industries where products and services become almost commoditized, the difference between Company A and Company B may be entirely built upon this intimacy.

Search Engine Optimization

Because you are writing so much content on a (presumably) regular basis, your blog can be an excellent way to improve search engine rankings. Note if you want to leverage your blog to optimize a whole Web site you really need to have your blog integrated into your domain name — so that your blog and your non blog content are part of the same Web site. So that means if you're a consultant and you want your consulting company's Web site to show up higher in search results, having a blog at myconsultingcompany.wordpress.com just won't do it for you. Keep everything at myconsultingcompany.com -- install a copy of WordPress wherever you are hosting your existing site and build your blog, and your SEO rich content there.

Building Community

As I stated in an earlier post, every business needs a team or as Seth Godin would put it "a tribe". Being open with your content through a blog can help you establish one. When you share content you not only define your areas of expertise, you also create good will in addition to attracting relevant people to your brand. An added benefit is that simply showing that you have a community of people interested in your content can help that community itself grow in addition to growing your business.

Customer Research

The interaction you receive from your readers in the form of comments, feedback and emails is a great way to learn who your blog is attracting, but also what are your consumers interested in? What needs do they have and how can you meet them? What questions do they really need answered? Almost every company can do a better job of understanding the needs of its customers and a blog is an invitation for your readers (and customers) to help you do just that.

Credibility

There's nothing like a blog to truly help people understand what it is that you do, what your area of expertise is, and that you are, in fact, an expert or highly knowledgeable. The simple fact of posting useful content, on a specific topic, that is of course also relevant to your target audience, and on a regular basis, will help people understand very specifically what you do, how you can help them and the depth of your abilities. One added benefit of this is that blogs force you as a writer to come face-to-face with what you do and do not know, and fill in any gaps in your knowledge. It can also help you to be able to articulate what you know (because you've spent so much time thinking about how to write it!). When I told my father that I would be writing this blog for Inc. and that my postings needed to be weekly, his response was "wow — do you really know that much to write about?" If I've managed to convince my dad I'm an expert, there really must be something to this blogging thing.

Differentiation

This morning I was on a live radio show sharing Internet Strategy tips for solo entrepreneurs with Ed Able the founder of Skillpreneur.com (I'll post the link to the podcast tomorrow -- subscribe here if you'd like me to email you when it's up). The focus of the show was "differentiation". How can you differentiate yourself from all those competitors out there? I think you know what I'm going to say. BLOG! While blogging isn't necessarily the solution to differentiation woes anymore (because, well, so many people are blogging) it is a way to broadcast your differentiators once you know what they are. Because the point of blogging is to blog regularly, one of the best things a blog can do for you is brand you. Branding has many benefits and getting the point across about what makes you different is one of them. Choose carefully what you decide to cover in your blog and/or how you decide to cover it — it can be a great way to help you separate yourself from the crowd which again will help both your business and your blog grow.

More to come! Next time I'll cover the last 5 -- but I'd love to see you beat me to it!

Two important notes:

Get Your Blog Featured
I will be highlighting a variety of companies as examples in upcoming posts. If you've had success with your Blog and can describe results/back it up with real data, you can submit your Blogging strategy here.

Get a Free Blog or Web Site!
Even in a bad economy there's a silver lining. I'm giving away a free Web site! If you'd like to be the lucky business owner tell me about your business and why you should win here. I acknowledge I'll be choosing the winner purely based on my own discretion. Heck I may even choose more than one. I look forward to seeing your entry!

10/5/2009 10:34:17 PM

Outside of the fact that you happen to be reading one right now, I find that there are lots of smart, business savvy folks out there who when placed in the position of having to explain, strategize or build a blog (or decide if one should be built at all) are at a bit of a loss. Blogs are usually easy for most people to recognize but harder for folks to define.

When I hosted a free class on the subject (as I do from time to time) it "sold out" (in the way only free classes can!) the room filled to capacity.

Even those who can sort of describe a blog, often find it hard to understand when, why and how to create one so that it will actually create benefit for a business, organization, cause etc..

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Of course everyone who manages a successful blog has found themselves in a similar position at least once and gotten past it, so I thought I could impart a few words of advice.

First of all, what is a blog really?

A blog is just a Web site.

Let me repeat that for the non-believers — A BLOG IS JUST A WEB SITE.

But it's a special kind of Web site.

Let's start by looking at the different kinds of Web sites that exist. Many of the students of my in-person classes will recognize this.

According to my calculations and ruminations, there are essentially 4 kinds of Web sites you can build based on how your business attracts revenue:

Web Site Types

A branding site like Dove is working hard to immerse the viewer in the company's ethos. You can't actually buy any product from their site, they don't seem to sell ads, nor are they pushing hard for you to give up your contact information. Dove's site is all about convincing you of their commitment to improving women's natural beauty and self-esteem in the hope that this will generate an emotional affinity to their brand.

An advertising revenue site like Inc.com has articles and information as its content. It is designed and organized into categories like "Business Advice" "Tech Startup" "The Internet Strategist" to display that content in a way that's easy for you — the reader — to find, read and pass along.

An Online Store like Zappos.com has products — shoes - as its content. So it is organized and designed to make it easy for you to find the kind of shoes you're looking for. One of reasons Zappos is so popular is it provides a variety of ways to find what you're looking for.

A service Web site like message medium has services as its content. So our site is organized to make it easy for you to find our services and also to find the things that make us a credible company to work with — testimonials, articles, client samples, news clippings etc.

As a business owner, more than likely you are not looking to spend millions of dollars on a branding Web site so let's focus on the other three.

So How do Blogs fit in?

Blogs are an interesting breed of Web site. In structure, they are most like Advertising Revenue sites. Like a newspaper, they usually publish content with some predictable regularity, and the content is typically arranged by date and/or by category so that it can be easily found by readers.

But what's interesting about blogs and has made them so ubiquitous, is that they, with all of their content and social elements, can be used very effectively to support an Advertising, eCommerce or Lead Generation Web site.

• My blog "The Internet Strategist" is designed to fit within Inc.com's business model of generating revenue through advertising and things like events.
  
  
• The blog of Tony Hsu, the CEO of Zappos, is designed to generate brand loyalty and increase sales of the products Zappos sells.
  
  
• This blog also does double-duty, helping you the reader understand my areas of expertise as an Internet Strategist, which my company message medium hopes will help us generate more consulting, Web site design and construction, and Internet marketing clients as well as attendees in our classes.

So the first thing you have to identify when considering blogging is — what kind of business do I have and how do we stay afloat? How do we generate revenue? This will help you determine your ultimate blogging purpose.

Next time — I'll discuss "The Big Payoff" what can you expect a blog to actually accomplish for you?

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Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (final/part 3)
• Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (part 2)
• Small Business "Success Studies" Using LinkedIn
• LinkedIn the 11 Most Useful Features for Small Business

9/29/2009 2:24:29 AM

The last 2 posts I've written have focused on featuring real businesses that have created highly successful social marketing strategies using LinkedIn as a key element.

I started the series with an overview of LinkedIn concepts, then moved into a guide for creating your LinkedIn profile, followed by a list of the 11 most powerful LinkedIn tools for small businesses. Finally, I outlined 6 core strategies that small businesses use to leverage LinkedIn for building a tribe and covered the first three:

• Building a live community (LinkedIn tribe part 1)
• Business development (LinkedIn tribe part 2)
• Promoting a blog/branding/building traffic (LinkedIn tribe part 2)

I also hosted an in-person Social Media Marketing workshop in New York City in which I provided the hands-on help many small business owners need to translate these strategies into action. If you missed it, click here to be notified of my upcoming Social Media Marketing events.

Today we cover the final 3 strategies.

• Getting work as a freelancer or consultant
• Promoting a product
• Strategies for everyone

The Freelancer or Consultant

As a consultant, outside of being good at what you do and generally being able to successfully run a business and manage clients, success is heavily dependant upon two things:

Finding ways to stay on the radar of people who will either hire you or refer you to new business is a critical challenge for freelancers and consultants.

You will find many examples of business owners who are using LinkedIn's "Q&A" feature as a significant element of their visibility and lead generation marketing.

Heidi Cool, owner of Heidi Cool Consulting is one great example. Heidi shared with me how by providing excellent answers to the questions of other LinkedIn members, she has built visibility and credibility for her business, more and higher quality traffic to her Web site and more leads.

Here's what Heidi did...

Using LinkedIn Q&A

The key for Heidi is not generic visibility, but high quality visibility - where her answers set her apart. She focuses on answering questions that are directly relevant to her areas of expertise and will possibly get selected by the questioner as "best" answers. When this happens, both the question and the answer show up in her profile further building her credibility as an expert in her field.

To give you a sense of scale, Heidi has spent 1-2 hours per week over the last 6 months answering questions related to Web site design. Questions her take about 5-30 minutes each to answer properly.

As a great example of the inherently holistic nature of social marketing, Heidi relies heavily on her existing blog content to make sure that questions get a thorough response in a way that would not be possible by just answering the question on LinkedIn alone (as of this writing there's a limit of 4,000 characters for responses). Heidi's Results

• Heidi received more than 3 times the number of visitors to her site in July when she focused heavily on this technique. She adds:

  "I can generate traffic from other sites for much less effort, but the quality of visitors isn't as high"

• Heidi defines quality as both how many pages visitors view on her site ("stickiness") and how many real inquiries/leads she receives from site visitors. For example, the visitors from an article aggregator site she posts content to are not "high quality". 86% of those visitors leave after viewing only one page, "and so far none have made an inquiry through my contact form".




• But during July when she ramped up her Q&A strategy, LinkedIn visitors sent her 29 email requests for more information or project proposals.

Other Freelancer/Consultant techniques:

• Create an Email Signature and consider including your LinkedIn Custom URL on your business cards and on more of your marketing materials to enable potential customers to learn more about you and your company


• Create a group


• Send connection invitations immediately after conferences and events


• Recommendations as strategy. Michael Zittel Owner, Serr.biz LLC offers this advice (in response to a LinkedIn Q&A of course):

  We use, and recommend to our clients, to at least utilize Linked In as a validation service of testimonials and "recommendations." It's easy for anyone to write a bogus testimonial about their services and post it on their site. It is not possible to do so on Linked in. So, having recommendations here, and posting on your site, then linking to LINKED IN so people can validate the reference is, in our approach, one of the simplest methods of utilizing LinkedIn.

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The Product Promoter

LinkedIn is a very interesting tool for those who have a product to sell or promote. The same way communities must be built for the purpose of congregation, businesses also need to build communities around services and products.

Author Gary Unger shared a great example of how he uses LinkedIn to regularly sell out of his book which is available for sale at Amazon.com. In July 2008 he published the book "How to Be a Creative Genius (in Five Minutes or Less)". Gary spends about 4 hours per day on LinkedIn, reading messages, looking for questions to answer, writing answers and interacting with people he meets. His results? He explains that for every good answer he posts, about 15 people will email him asking to connect. For his Web site he gets up to 500 unique visitors per week if he is as he says "in the zone" - active in answering questions. He also regularly checks his book sales during these periods and says that he will easily sell 20 books per week and see his Amazon ranking jump when he is actively posting.

Supporting this experience, freelance copywriter and marketing consultant Leon Altman cautions "You shouldn't try to sell directly from LinkedIn. But you can start building the bridge to marketing your products and services". Leon's also underscores the importance of landing pages "on your website you must get people to opt-in."

To Connect or Not to Connect?

One of the questions that often plagues early LinkedIn users is deciding who to connect to.

LinkedIn offers these suggestions:

Thoughtfully select those people you know and trust because these are the people you will seek advice from and request a recommendation about your/other's quality of work. Because of this, the quality of your contacts is always more important than the quantity of contacts. It is important you know your connections because you may be asked to recommend one of your connections to another. If you know little about the connection you weaken the integrity of the recommendation and your network...Choose your connections wisely as there are certain questions you might only ask a connection because you know and trust that member with this information. Be sure you trust your connections with the information you make available to them."

However on the opposite end of the spectrum, many members of LinkedIn support what's called "open networking" meaning they will connect with pretty much anyone who sends them an invitation.

Also keep in mind these LinkedIn facts:

• all connections are visible to your direct connections by default (although you can change this)



• maximum number of connections is 30,000



• maximum number of invitations you can send is 3,000

My take on this is that I think once you know your goals, resources and the tools you have to work with, the question of who to connect with no longer takes on the same importance. If you need to build out a community of 500 people with very specific goals like Daniel Tunkelang from LinkedIn strategies part 1, perhaps open networking is not necessary for you. If however you're trying to build a community of 5,000 people with broad interests it's probably more important. Keep in mind that the more people you have in your network, the more people you can contact directly. This is probably the biggest advantage to accepting most of the invitations you receive.

Strategies for Everyone

Here are tips for other things you should do regardless of what category you fit into:

• Update your job description — your profile and the details in it are the center of ALL activity on LinkedIn and are at the core of your credibility for whatever you do on LinkedIn. Keep it current with new accomplishments by updating it a few times per year.



• Check in — often a tactic used by successful business owners as a core of their business success. Use your profile as a Rolodex and check in with a few contacts each week or month just to say hello



• Check References & Interests — it is always good to do a little research in preparation for a new relationship. In fact these days it's not at all creepy, it's respectful. The same way you'd research a company before an interview or a big sales presentation, these days each person is his or her own walking brand. Research their interests and know a little before you interact with them to help make the interaction more successful



• Find people you should meet — if you know who your target audience is, you should also know some search criteria for finding them on LinkedIn. Perhaps it's not cost-effective for you to try to reach out to every one of your potential customers individually, but perhaps it's super smart to reach out to that guy or gal who runs the local chapter of the retailers association who could make a great strategic partner for your business.



• Consider a LinkedIn ad — and tailor the reach to your target audience



• What are you working on now? — this feature is often not noticed by your connections in my experience, but it can be used to share good news, newly completed projects, new hires with your connections



• Maximize Travel - check the locations of your connections before you travel so you can schedule time to see people in the city your going to. (Thanks to @merylkevans for the reminder on this one!)



• Maximize New Connections — Barbara Rozgonyi offers these words of advice "After you accept an invitation, consider replying with a quick personal message that includes a few bullet points about what you do, an opportunity to ask questions about your industry and additional ways to connect with you online such as your blog, ezine or forum." A great tip and something I try to do as well. Thank you, Barbara!



• Connect Your Connections - helping others find the people they need from within your own network can go a long way. (Thanks to
  
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9/21/2009 3:00:00 PM

I hope that you have thought of or already found some ways to put last week's list of LinkedIn Strategies for Small Business to good use.

We covered the first of the 6 LinkedIn Strategies that I'll share with you:

• Building a live community
• Business development
• Promoting a blog/branding/building traffic
• Getting work as a freelancer or consultant
• Promoting a product
• Strategies for everyone

Business Development

A piece of advice that I will never forget receiving from an older, wiser mentor of mine who started and ran 2 successful businesses including a luxury goods marketing firm — he has a rolodex of more than 1,000 people who he keeps in touch with on a regular basis. How does he do this? For him it's a simple phone call that usually lasts no more than 5-10 minutes and if appropriate leads to a follow up email and possible work. This very simple technique kept him busy.

One of the simplest ways of using LinkedIn is just as a "modern Rolodex" a list of the people you want to communicate with on a regular basis so that they remember you're out there, what you have to offer, and why they like you. The only tools you need for this is your LinkedIn profile, sending LinkedIn invitations to people you know and an hour per day to make phone calls. One of the biggest challenges for a freelancer or consultant is just making sure people remember you when they need something you offer. These quick check-in calls (with an appropriate time lapse in between) are a great way to just stay on your prospect's radar.

Of course LinkedIn search is also a great tool for this — whether you are searching within your networking or outside of it, using keyword searches on LinkedIn to find people who match your target audience is a great way to "mine the network".

NileGuide, a trip planning website, used LinkedIn to help with a variety of successful "business development" campaigns.

The primary tools? LinkedIn Search & LinkedIn InMail. Here are the 3 ways they used it:

• Fundraising - to identify relevant venture capital firms during their fundraising process
  
  
• PR - to identify a target list of publications to build awareness of their product, they searched on the publication names, and proactively contacted journalists with whom they had at least a "friend of a friend" connection.
  
  
• Strategic Partnerships - to contact people in the right departments at target companies with whom they wanted to explore business partnerships in selected industries. Their goal was to find partners who were interested in providing personalized travel guide functionality to their users.

Let's look more closely at how they leveraged LinkedIn for strategic partnerships'

How NileGuide used LinkedIn to build Strategic Partnerships

The results - roughly 33% of their inquiries yielded immediate results, which is an incredibly high success rate. These partnerships have yielded customers, brand benefit, content, and a variety of other valuable assets for NileGuide.

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Promoting a Blog — Traffic and Brand Building

A blog is basically about building a community. Instead of a community of people who meet, it's a community of readers and comment-ers. So generating traffic for a blog can certainly use all of the "tribe" techniques, although when you are using it to drive traffic to your own blog, you have to be a little more careful about how you reach out. Connecting with other practitioners, industry experts, leaders of communities where your target audiences congregate, and directly with the communities themselves needs to be done respectfully or else face the "spammer" label which could get your ability to email and invite people on LinkedIn dramatically limited.

A great example of how to drive traffic to a blog or content site and build your brand via LinkedIn is the new content portal Ventureneer started recently by Geri Stengel. Ventureneer offers free Webinars and other content relevant to socially driven enterprises.

When launching her business and Web site Geri had three goals — 1) to build her brand, 2) to build relationships with content providers and 3) to build her "contact" list including email subscribers and Twitter followers.

Here's what she did:

Her results — having launched her site just a few months ago, she has more than 1,600 followers on Twitter (@ventureneer), more than 300 LinkedIn connections, and gets about 150 attendees per week to her free Webinars. Way to go Geri!

8/31/2009 9:58:34 PM

All around us we see evidence that the world is becoming more transparent. People are sharing information about themselves, their knowledge, their businesses at a wondrous rate. As transparency proliferates, success becomes a little less about just access to information and resources, and a little more about how you use those resource and what you're using them to do.

Part of my goal in writing this column is to help along this information equalization - who knows how far it will go, but for now the shift is great for small business.

In this article in my series on LinkedIn for small business, I'm sharing the case studies of individual small businesses who took nothing but their time, their creativity and (mostly) free tools and turned them into successful marketing strategies on LinkedIn.

Each of these business owners has gracefully shared their knowledge, experience and prowess not just for a few moments in the spotlight, but because they know the transparency is coming, and they have much more to offer the world than just the ideas I'm sharing with you. I owe them thanks for their contributions to this article. I hope you too will reach out and send a quick note of thanks for sharing some of their secrets with all of us. And I hope to see your business here — sharing your story and your success so that the world can see that what else you have to offer us.

The most persistent theme in the LinkedIn strategies that I've used and encountered, is that people are seeing success when using LinkedIn as a very targeted, high-touch marketing tool. Not as a spam blaster. When people spend the time to craft targeted messages to targeted groups of people, they see fantastic results. But this isn't a big shocker -- this is marketing 101. The more specific your audience and the more targeted your message, the better your results. So if this is marketing 101 why doesn't this kind of targeting happen all the time?

Often the reason business don't target (outside of not knowing who to target!) is that typically targeting is hard or expensive or both. How do you find all those small businesses owners in Arkansas in the welding industry? In the past you had to buy a list, spend $$ for an ad that was mostly wasted or do a lot of cold calling. Now? Do a search on LinkedIn. LinkedIn makes it much FASTER, CHEAPER and EASIER to find and communicate with exactly the right people.

And we can all understand the value of fast, cheap and easy when it comes to marketing.

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While a lot of marketing can be just a numbers game, that's not really the point on LinkedIn. I mean, it still gets down to numbers, but not in the anonymous, send-a-million-spam-messages-because-at-least-one-of-them-will-get-suckered-in kind of way. In fact that same search that allows you to find exactly the people you know you want, can even help you figure out who you want by simply looking for the commonalities and/or the points of difference in your search results.

The "killer app" for LinkedIn, is its particularly effectiveness for maintaining your weak ties with a purpose. That purpose is what I called "building your team" and what Seth Godin calls building your "tribe".

Building Your Tribe on LinkedIn

Building a tribe is good advice for any business. Who is that group of 1,000 people who will be ecstatic about what you're doing? For a lot of industries, I'll bet you can find a good number of them on LinkedIn.

Once you have an understanding of:

• the reason you want to use LinkedIn (I'm trying to build a community, I'm trying to support product sales, I'm trying to find consulting work) the tools available to you — search, groups, email blasts, Q&A your resources — i.e. I have 2 hours per week so either I can't do this on my own or it's going to take me much longer

And the most important question:

• who are you looking for

You can build a tribe that even your networking-iest friend would be envious of.

The List of LinkedIn Strategies for Small Business

While we cannot possibly cover every LinkedIn strategy in a single article, and I unfortunately could not include every example I received, I've chosen some of the most widely used strategic goals and provided great examples of what small businesses have done to make LinkedIn work for them. They include:

• building a live community
• doing business development
• promoting a blog/branding/building traffic
• getting work as a freelancer or consultant
• promoting a product
• strategies for everyone

Building a Face-to-Face Community
LinkedIn can be an excellent tool for pulling people offline to congregate in the real world. Anyone looking to build a very targeted community of people who share a common and specific interest can use LinkedIn extremely successfully to find and build that community. Whether building a community that congregates online or in person, there are 3 tools that can put your group on the map quickly:

Using LinkedIn Search
Daniel Tunkelang who is the Chief Scientist at Endeca is a great example of how a very well thought out search for exactly the right people can turn into a huge win. He was helping to organize an event called the Workshop on Human Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval and wanted to let people who had a strong interest in these topics. After conducting a search on LinkedIn for everyone who matched "human computer interaction" and "information retrieval" and chose just 100 people to send a personalized connection request.

His results? More than 50% of the 100 people he contacted accepted the connection. Only 1 person responded with LinkedIn's "I don't know this person" field which is the equivalent of invite spam. This is an excellent return. He adds

"Some will submit papers to the workshop, one ended up volunteering to review my new book. And I got very positive feedback from the people I targeted--they clearly didn't feel spammed, but rather were happy to receive information so carefully targeted to their interests. Some even commented that they'd never been as happy to receive unsolicited email via LinkedIn."

Create a LinkedIn Group
Groups offer an easy way to enable your community members to congregate, an easy way for you to invite people to participate and an easy way for you to communicate with those who are already participating through group emails. This is a great option if you have a specific topic or idea around which people can freely congregate. Not such a great idea if you just want them to be "fans" of your business.

Use LinkedIn Events within a Group to build Offline Community
It's debatable whether the free LinkedIn Events are effective for promoting an event outside of an existing LinkedIn group. There is a paid option that allows you to promote your event to the top of the events list. But using them to promote an event within an existing group can be very successful. A great example of this is what Larry Moffet, who is an e-strategy business consultant in Brussels, did. Over several years, Larry's business partner had built a group of "expats" in Brussels. His goal was to use LinkedIn to launch a series of events that would enable expats to congregate and network professionally once a month, but at a time of the evening that was unusual for that community. And so, Larry and his partner created the "Expats Networking in Brussels" group on LinkedIn, began inviting their Brussels based connections to join it, and then began inviting group members to events.

Within 2 months they had about 117 members in their LinkedIn group, and as of May that number had doubled to 232. They estimate it took them about 3 hours per month to manage this process on LinkedIn.

Also of note, the LinkedIn group not only served as an administrative and marketing tool to build his offline community, it also made the community and the events themselves better!

"Group members can sign up for the event on LinkedIn, view the profiles of other members, decide whom among the other attendees they would like to meet and connect via LinkedIn before or after the event. This ensures that the face-to-face meetings aren't just random encounters but can be prepared in advance in order to make the most productive use of the event' Inevitably, people who meet face-to-face and hit it off will subsequently connect on LinkedIn, which ensures continuity between the monthly events."

Tune in next week...

I've received so many wonderful submissions that I'm going to split this coverage so as not to overwhelm everyone with too much of a good thing.

Coming up:

• business development strategies on LinkedIn
• promoting a blog and generating traffic and branding on LinkedIn
• being a freelancer or consultant on LinkedIn
• promoting a product on LinkedIn
• Strategies for everyone

I look forward to hearing more about your LinkedIn strategies in the comments below and to hearing from you the next time I'm looking for businesses to feature!

Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• LinkedIn the 11 Most Useful Features for Small Business
• How to Use your LinkedIn Profile — a Checklist
• An Introduction to LinkedIn: In Restrictions a Gold Mine
• Top Twitter Techniques (or 9 Good Excuses if you want to Ignore Twitter)

8/19/2009 7:50:00 AM

In doing the research for this post, I heard from many LinkedIn users and business owners.

One of the things I have found fascinating about LinkedIn (which was corroborated by the conversations I had and emails I received), is that the individual tools on LinkedIn seem to form their own intense user groups. One person may focus their whole strategy on maximizing LinkedIn Q&A, another might focus on LinkedIn Events, while a third builds an entire strategy around participating in LinkedIn Groups discussions.

Once you have completed your profile an individual tool on LinkedIn can be a cornerstone of your business' marketing.

Next Monday I will publish the much anticipated and well contributed article on LinkedIn strategies. I have received many submissions by small business owners and look forward to sharing them with you!

This week — a primer on LinkedIn Tools and when we discuss strategies we'll all be on the same page about how the underlying tools used in the strategies work.

Note this is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all the tools on LinkedIn, just of the ones I think are most useful for small business owners. Next week we'll put these into some perspective by exposing how small businesses are successfully using these tools.

All About LinkedIn Applications
In the bottom of the left column on your LinkedIn profile is a section called "Applications". You might notice that in comparison to Facebook, there are relatively few applications available on LinkedIn. But the dearth of applications is more of a strength for LinkedIn — there's far less clutter and the apps are focused on a single purpose — helping you present your professional wares. Many of the tools listed below are actually LinkedIn "Apps" that were developed by 3rd parties (i.e. not LinkedIn). There are only 4 third party apps that I've included in this list (and they only represent 2 "Tools"). The rest of my recommendations are tools that are core to your LinkedIn profile.

So here's my Top 11 list...

LinkedIn Events
This feature is very simple. You can submit your event allowing you to promote it to other LinkedIn users both within and outside your network. You can also go here to find events you might be interested in attending. Both live and virtual events can be included.

• "Events Home" displays a list of the events related to your connections (created by, attending or interested in).
• "Find Events" allows you to search for events you may be interested in attending.
• "My Events" are events you have created that are upcoming or past.
• "Add an Event" is where you, well, add an event. Once you publish the event, your connections will automatically receive an update. You can also share it with up to 50 specific contacts at a time via LinkedIn mail, and you can pay to advertise the event to people outside your network.

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Blog Link or WordPress
If you write a blog (a professional one of course), have the blog content automatically "sucked in" by one of these 3rd party applications so that your most recent posts are actually displayed and promoted in your profile.

SlideShare or Google Presentation
Have a smashing presentation you did in PowerPoint? You can use this 3rd party application to post your presentations publicly on LinkedIn to help you build credibility and clarify your areas of expertise.

LinkedIn Groups & Discussions
This is one of LinkedIn's most useful features (and I would hazard a guess that it's the most used too). Individual LinkedIn members start groups where other members have discussions, share news and post jobs. The wonderful thing about these groups is they are basically segmented mini-markets ready and waiting for you to tap into. As of this posting, there are more than 357,000 groups on LinkedIn ranging in size from 0 to more than 100,000 members. Approximately 5,000 new groups are created each week. Some groups have a spam problem but often there are worthwhile discussions to be had and news to read. Groups are also a great place build visibility among people who are interested in your area of business (we'll dive into this more next week!). Be careful though — the line between "sharing information" in the form of links to your site or blog and spam can be very faint.

LinkedIn Searches (within your network and outside it)
Many people use LinkedIn as a simple contact management database. Having a lot of people in that database can provide you access to any company, person or network with whom you want to connect.

In fact especially if you don't know who to reach out to for a particular question, need or opportunity, a quick keyword search on LinkedIn can tell you who you already know that meets your criteria, and can also find people you don't know but should - and that's where the magic begins!

Network Updates
These updates are useful obviously to keep up with what people are doing, but also as an excuse to reach out to someone and reconnect, and as a means of finding people you might want to know. You receive a list of updates both via email and at the bottom of your profile letting you know of the changes people have made to their profiles. Did they change their headline? Change their current job? Are they connected with 5 new people some of whom you might know?

LinkedIn Browser Toolbar
This application installs a thumbnail into your browser bar. The application simply opens different pages on LinkedIn to save you the time of typing them in. http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=browser_toolbar_download

LinkedIn Q&A
This is a tool that many LinkedIn users swear by. This tool can provide a great deal of exposure. When you answer a question, and your answer is rated "best answer" it will also appear in your profile which not only adds to the good will surrounding you but help you build credibility as an expert in your field. Beware however — this can be very time consuming.

Send Mass Emails
LinkedIn does limit your ability to do this outside of groups, typically you can email up to 50 people on your list at a time. But it can be a great way to get the word out. Note that when you post a "question" in Q & A, you can send the question to up to 200 of your connections in addition to making the question public.

Job Postings
For $195 for a 30-day posting, you can use LinkedIn to post jobs to a wider network of people or you can post jobs for free through groups that you're a member of if the group owner has turned on the "Jobs" feature. Note that job descriptions are limited to about 3,900 characters.

Tagging
I included tagging in the last article on How to Set up your LinkedIn Profile but it really belongs here in the list of tools. It is a great tool for organizing your contacts into groups that are personally meaningful. Right now the tool is in Beta so it may not be visible yet to everyone. But when it becomes available I would definitely suggest checking it out.

That's my power list of what I think are the most important "tools" for small business owners on LinkedIn.

Stay tuned next week for LinkedIn Strategies. Much like the article I wrote covering Twitter strategies I will highlight how real people actually use these tools to create successful LinkedIn marketing campaigns. I will share with you examples of how small business owners did it, how much time it took them and what their results were.

Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• How to Use your LinkedIn Profile — a Checklist
• An Introduction to LinkedIn: In Restrictions a Gold Mine
• Top Twitter Techniques (or 9 Good Excuses if you want to Ignore Twitter)
• Facebook Demystified: Profiles and Pages and Groups (oh my)

8/10/2009 3:29:33 PM

So how did you do with your LinkedIn homework assignment?

Just getting the lay of the land on LinkedIn is a great start but wouldn't it be nice if more of the social marketing tools come with a "recommended usage" manual?

Twitter has just launched Twitter 101 which I think is pretty great.

If you are on LinkedIn profile but wondering how to maximize your use of it, I've created this profile "Cheat Sheet" so you focus your attention on the features that deliver the greatest impact AND understand how much time you should reasonably expect to spend on it.

Overview on Completing Your Profile
As I described in "A Guide to Social Media Tools and their Uses" all social networking sites begin with a single user creating a profile. Unlike other sites where your profile questions ask you to reveal your secret lust for sci-fi action flicks, your LinkedIn profile is showcase of your professional preferences and accomplishments.

You want to consider how you'll be using your profile when you complete it. I'll be covering LinkedIn strategies in one of my next articles (and I welcome your submission of your LinkedIn strategies here).

Linked in also offers its own suggestions on the LinkedIn Tips and Tricks blog, plus user submitted LinkedIn case studies which may be helpful to you.

Let's get started!

The Photo
I do recommend including a picture. LinkedIn profiles seem incomplete without them. Also try to be consistent with your photo — if you have a photo on other social networking sites it's a good idea to use the same photo everywhere. Note: it's also wise to be consistent with your name — use the same spelling, middle initial, honorific etc. everywhere. This is important for SEO and for building your online brand.
5 minutes

The Headline
The headline is a bite-sized explanation of what you do and what your value is. Note that your headline shows up ALL OVER LinkedIn, especially in lists. Your headline very often accompanies your name. Make sure your headline is at least clear and concise. If you are building "brand you" consider making it more engaging.
You could spend countless hours tweaking and refining this single 120 character field. Just try not to.

"Current"
Hopefully I'll save a few minutes of confusion by noting that yes, your "current" section is created directly from the Experience items for which you check "I currently work here". It is not editable separately from the Experience listing but do consider what you use for your "title" for your most current jobs since this will show up at the top of your profile.
15 minutes

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Web Site fields
You get to include three active links to external sites. Links you include in other parts of your profile won't be clickable so these are valuable. Make sure you use one of these for your company's Web site, then perhaps use the other two for your professional blog, and perhaps another profile like your company's Facebook page. TIP: don't use the generic "My Website" labels. Instead select "Other" and you will be able to choose your own label which will become the text of your link.
10 minutes

Public Profile
Social networking sites are now giving you the opportunity to create a "custom URL" for your page on their site. Here I explain how to set up a custom URL for your Facebook Profile or Facebook Page. On LinkedIn you edit this through your "Public Profile" field.

For example, my standard LinkedIn page is: http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=257307&trk=tab_pro
But my lovely custom URL is: http://www.linkedin.com/in/maishawalker
5 minutes

Your Summary
Use this area in a similar way to a cover letter. Explain in (relatively) normal-speak what makes you unique or different, why someone might want to connect with you, and possibly few details about your products or services. Note that you cannot create clickable links in this area.
30-90 minutes

The Resume or "Experience"
While it might seem tedious to enter every job you've had for the last 20 years this really is an opportunity. Think of it this way, while it would be strange for you to randomly send your resume to everyone you meet, sending your LinkedIn profile is perfectly reasonable and can give you that extra edge.

As LinkedIn user Divya Gugani aptly describes "Adding my profile link in outgoing emails adds credibility and the extra qualification nudge with certain requests... I like being able to subtly sell my expertise."

There is some debate how long each job description should be. I think this depends on your experience. If listing more than 5 jobs, perhaps use brief descriptions that include important keywords. If listing 5 jobs or fewer, longer descriptions won't be as problematic.
1-4 hours (depending on how badly your original resume needs an update!)

Contact Methods
If you would like to receive emails from strangers who might have opportunities for you, choose to accept "Introductions and InMail" so that anyone can email you. Also use the checkboxes to indicate what kinds of inquiries you're interested in.
5 minutes

Build Connections
LinkedIn doesn't have a lot of value without connections. This also tends to be a big strategy question for most people — do I connect broadly or intimately? I will address this question in my future post on LinkedIn strategies, but for now, if you're just starting out you don't have to worry about this. Just go into "Imported Contacts" and check your email address books for people who are on LinkedIn. The best and easiest way to gain useful connections is with the people you already know.
30 minutes

Create your Company Profile
Lots of people miss this one. When you mouse over or click on a company name in LinkedIn it takes you to a profile describing that company and displaying it's current and former employees plus details like where the company is located. To do this for your company, you first have to add your company to LinkedIn beyond adding it in your "Experience". Here are instructions for how to add your company profile to LinkedIn (you'll need a valid and accessible company email address). Once your company is added, click on your company name from your profile and then you can alter the company description to your liking by clicking on the Edit Profile link in the top right corner.
45 minutes

Set updates to be sent weekly not as they happen
If you don't want to receive an email every time someone in your network makes an update, you can change your settings to send you messages weekly or not at all. Just click on the "Account & Settings" button in the top right corner. I pretty much set everything to weekly except discussion replies, connection invitations, and emails from my connections
5 minutes

Recommendations
I've seen a lot of recommendations lately on LinkedIn. Unfortunately the more I see them, the less of an impression they make on me. Often people send generic emails out asking for recommendations from almost everyone in their network, and often people get generic recommendations back. The recommendations that most impress me are the ones that are not generic but really specific and sincere. Did the recommender use a specific product? Attend a specific event? See high return from a specific service you provided? Were they one of your partners in a venture? Sometimes a profile's long list of recommendations shows only that the person knows how to get lots of people to write something generic about them. Is this meaningful?

If you want a meaningful recommendation, sometimes the best way to get one is to write one if that's feasible. And while there are always exceptions, if you can't write a meaningful recommendation for someone there's a reasonable chance they won't be able to write a meaningful one for you. Writing recommendations is time consuming so I suggest that you write them only when you really have something worthwhile and not generic to say.
15-30 minutes per recommendation

Sneak Peak: Tagging
For a natural categorizer like me (INFPers unite!) LinkedIn's tags are a dream come true. It's a quick way to categorize the people in your network in a way that is personally meaningful. So if you are trying to build out a client base in Cincinnati, you can do a search for all of your contacts who have the word "Cincinnati" in their profile, and then "tag" the relevant profiles for future reference. After getting very excited and telling a colleague about this feature, I discovered "tagging" is still in beta so not all LinkedIn users have access to it yet.

One problem I've found with tags so far is they aren't integrated with other LinkedIn features. So as of this posting you cannot for example select all of the people you tagged as Cincinnati and send them all an email. Nor can you use tags in the "compose message" area. But you can export your tagged lists for use in other software.
30 minutes - several hours depending on # of contacts and # of categories

Keywords & Search Engine Optimization — this is a profile bonus
Keep in mind that when someone does a Google search for your name, it's likely that your LinkedIn profile will be one of the first links that shows up (unless you have a very common name or share a name with a celebrity). Take advantage of LinkedIn's high search-ability. Think about the keywords you'd want to be found under on search engines and on LinkedIn itself. Make sure that you include keywords relevant to your industry and position. You might decide to go back and rewrite things at the end to address this.
30-90 minutes

A Warning
Some have complained about the difficulty of deleting a LinkedIn profile. While LinkedIn does provide instructions for how to terminate a LinkedIn profile or close a LinkedIn account there have been some posts that describe user frustration in not being able to delete one's profile.

So, what's the damage?
According to my estimates, doing all of the things I outline above should take you between 4.5 hours and 9.5 hours (not including recommendations or the countless hours you'll spend transforming your 120 character headline into iambic pentameter). That's 1-3 days working a few hours per day, or 1-3 weeks working just a few hours per week - stretching it over a longer period is often a better plan for additional objectivity and less burnout.

I look forward to your comments outlining things I may have missed and your submissions of LinkedIn strategies for my upcoming article! We'll also cover things like Groups, Applications and other ways you can use LinkedIn beyond basic profile setup.

Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• An Introduction to LinkedIn: In Restrictions a Gold Mine
• Top Twitter Techniques (or 9 Good Excuses if you want to Ignore Twitter)
• Facebook Demystified: Profiles and Pages and Groups (oh my)
• A Guide to Social Media Tools and their Uses

8/4/2009 12:00:15 AM

"I've been trying to find a way to use Facebook in a more professional manner and I've found it — it's called LinkedIn."

Inevitably many users have an "aha" moment when, after spending a quiet afternoon digging a little deeper they stumble upon some feature of LinkedIn that they find immensely valuable. At that moment they become converts, thirsty for knowledge about how to do more. This is what happened to my friend of the quote above. But many businesses never get there.

LinkedIn is a far less frenetic tool than most of the other social networking sites. As noted by blogger Sam DeReign "On LinkedIn, I am able to share the things I am most proud of — accomplishments that show what a capable person I am in the workplace. My contacts on LinkedIn aren't going to tag a photo of me attempting to do the Cha-Cha Slide after a bottle of wine." Thanks to LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman for hipping everyone to this simple but spot on blog post. It is LinkedIn's subtlety which makes it powerful.

So how do you use LinkedIn effectively to help your business in ways you cannot really do on Facebook? As with all of the social media tools, there are three keys to unlocking the value in LinkedIn. Since LinkedIn is designed specifically to be used in a professional context, I think it is worth investigating them here in more depth.

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I remember when I first discovered LinkedIn back in 2004. I had spent a considerable amount of time with social networking sites from many perspectives:

• as a usability advocate


• as a programmer (anyone remember PERL?)


• as a traffic and engagement analytics advocate


• as a customer service advocate


• as a strategist & business advisor

and perhaps most importantly

• as a professional participant. I've spent (and spend) many hours in online communities digging into the dynamics of online interactions and understanding how things like a particular stated mission, a prominently placed button, a set of carefully designed restrictions, usage recommendations or "rules of play", the absence of certain features and the presence of others can completely shape how a particular social network is both perceived and used.

With all of that experience when I stumbled upon LinkedIn back in '04, it was easy to see that it was different from all of the other online communities that were popular at the time. LinkedIn was attempting to mold restrictions in usage, interface design choices, and a carefully selected but limited feature set into a social network that actually stuck with it's stated purpose - to be both perceived and used for professional networking and nothing else.

Their success in sticking with this stated purpose, and limiting the site's functionality around that purpose is what enables you as a business owner to use LinkedIn as perhaps the most significant tool in your social media marketing tool box. It is this context of (usually) subtle limitations that gives the three keys I describe above their great usefulness on LinkedIn.

There's a lot to cover, far too much for a single post, so next week I begin breaking down those keys one-by-one.

In the meantime I'm giving you a homework assignment!

Below is a screenshot of my LinkedIn profile with the areas of most interest highlighted. Take the next week to start investigating LinkedIn. There are probably gems there that you didn't even know existed. Come back with your questions, strategies, tactics and stories.

If you've had particular success with LinkedIn and can describe results/back it up with real data, let me know. I will be highlighting a variety of companies as examples. You can submit your LinkedIn strategy here.

Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• Top Twitter Techniques (or 9 Good Excuses if you want to Ignore Twitter)
• Facebook Demystified: Profiles and Pages and Groups (oh my)
• A Guide to Social Media Tools and their Uses
• The Weakest Link - Your Social Media Marketing "Killer App"

Homework Assignment - investigate the LinkedIn profile hotspots:

(click to view the full the image with hotspots highlighted, it will open in a new window)

7/27/2009 3:00:00 PM

In my view Twitter, like many marketing and social media tools, is basically a stage. How you present yourself upon it depends on what talents you have and what you're trying to accomplish.

Below, I've outlined 9 methods of interacting on Twitter. This list should either allow you to comfortably ignore Twitter because none of these methods of interaction are feasible or meaningful for you, or recognize an opportunity for yourself or your business.

The Personality
This applies both to actual celebrities, and people who are building a brand that can be clearly defined as having a "voice". People like Perez Hilton, Oprah Winfrey and Tony Hsieh of Zappos immediately come to mind. All of them have Twitter feeds and each of them has a very distinct voice. "In waiting room at doctor's office. In addition to magazines, they should offer a selection of paint so people can watch it dry." A recent post from the CEO of a company with projected 2008 revenues of $1 billion. People follow these feeds for a variety of reasons but mainly because they receive something emotionally satisfying from the postings.

The Guide
The Guide is typically a person or people assigned to seek out messages posted by people who have a question related to your business, products or services. Here is a great case study of a company who did just that and has shared their results. Note that to maximize their efforts they have someone spending 30 minutes per day on Twitter in this role.

The Brand Watchdog
Someone proactively seeks out mentions of their company name or product name and responds personally to each post. Two companies that immediately come to mind are GeekSquad Founder Robert Stephens (thanks @DanielRiveong and @britopian) and ComCast's Director of Digital Care Frank Eliason @ComCastCares. Companies can win big brownie points by having very senior staff members respond to customer service questions. The idea here is that by providing direct access to someone who really knows what they're talking about, companies can prevent damage to their brand from disappointed customers.

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The Customer Support Rep
Very similar to the Brand Watchdog, this too is focused on watching for and responding to customer service questions. But while I would put Frank Eliason in the Brand Watchdog category, this category is usually filled by the unsung Twitter heros (Twiroes?). They are likely handling questions in other (non-Twitter) venues and have added Twitter to the ways they communicate. The catch here is that the expectation is that Twitter customer service reps will actually help you resolve your issue. We'll see how long that lasts!

The Publisher
People and companies will often use Twitter as a way to simply feed followers information about their area of influence. A lot of news is now breaking on Twitter before it hits major publications. But you don't have to be first, just relevant and somewhat consistent. A really interesting take on the publisher model is The Brooklyn Museum who is monetizing their social content and their community by offering memberships to a "socially networked museum membership" for $20 per year.

The Promotion Channel
Unfortunately I think both spammers and ecommerce sites fit into this category. But the ecommerce sites I've seen use Twitter in interesting ways to do promotion and inform customers about products they are interested in. Take a look at Amazon on Twitter. Their feed is a little bit all over the place in terms of content and they don't have an individual person that followers can connect with (which limits conversation and can limit your follower numbers) but they've still managed to collect almost 4,000 followers as of this article. Contests, Twitter only discount codes, free giveaways are all part of the promotion channel arsenal.

The Conversationalist
Many of the most popular "tweet"ers are those who actively engage with their followers. In essence this is what really makes Twitter unique as a communication tool, although it's also what scares the bejeezus out of small business owners. Being the Conversationalist can be very time consuming, but the rewards are high in terms of building a loyal following and truly connecting with people who are interested in what you have to offer, from whom you are interested in learning and with whom you can build strategic relationships. We're talking several posts per day many of which are directed at specific people.

The Curious
There are many people who don't post to twitter at all. They use it as an information resource, watching the "twitter trending topics" to "crowd source" their news or following people they find interesting or informative. This can be a great way to use Twitter and learn a thing or two. The key here is to be careful about who you follow — you want people with a high signal to noise ratio usually with far fewer posts but each post is a gem.

The Entertained
Again here it's not about posting information but consuming it. There are many feeds on Twitter (The Onion is one of my favorites) that are purely about entertainment, putting a smile on your face or making you think.

As you'll no doubt notice, some Twitter strategies combine these methods.

The Conclusion

If you are not interested in any of the 9 methods above then Twitter is probably not for you. But really the best way to find out is to use it. Sign yourself up - it takes only a couple of minutes to sign up and if you're looking for somewhere to start, start following me and then look at other people who follow me. You don't have to know someone to follow them. You can even sign up under what I like to call an "incognito name" — a name that won't be associated with you or company so that you can experiment without worrying about making an embarrassing mistake. After a few weeks drop the incognito account and sign up with accounts branded for you and/or your company.

The Future?

On a more serious note, I can't help noting how many meaningful events have occurred in the last few weeks, and the very different way we experienced them. I am struck with the realization that every real moment can be played out near real time on a global scale.

These little 12-17 inch screens and keyboards we've become so intimate with, that bring close the lives of far away friends, over the last two weeks opened up a world of individuals sharing their grief, and made a political maelstrom that might before have seemed "far away," personal in a way many of us have never experienced.

As people, we know instinctively that how the world makes it's way into our lives is changing, dramatically. And not just how it reaches us, but where it comes from, who filters it (if anyone), how we seek it out and find it, that we can share it, comment on it, alter it and then pass it along. As people we struggle with concepts like authenticity while trying to grasp the ever-slipping confines of the personal within the ever-growing realm of the public.

And while those lines are being blurred and redefined, as businesses we must be careful not to loose sight of the very human, once personal context in which we're operating more and more. I think it's keeping sight of this context which in part keeps us authentic and relevant - regardless of the tools we use. While some debate whether or not Twitter is useful, others are simply putting it to work, filling a need, and reaching an audience they would never have reached before.

I thought something I read recently put it well:

"Asking when Twitter will end is like saying, 'When will the cell phone fad end'?...The value of cell phones can't end, it only can be replaced by something that provides the same value and more. Once we have a capability, we never want it taken away from us." -- David Spark, founder of Spark Media Solutions

While you definitely can learn from how others are using tools like Twitter both successfully and unsuccessfully, keep in mind that a) the communication is still yours b) the content is still yours c) everyone is still figuring this stuff out so don't be afraid to dip your toe in the water and don't be afraid to make a few mistakes d) do try to remember that there are humans on the other side of that message. There is something they probably want and want from you. What is it that they're looking for?

Related Articles:

• Facebook Demystified: Profiles and Pages and Groups (oh my)
• A Guide to Social Media Tools and their Uses
• The Weakest Link - Your Social Media Marketing "Killer App"
• The Marketing Skills You Can Learn from Obama

7/6/2009 3:00:00 PM

Depending on what kind of "entity" you are, you have 3 choices for how to create a presence on Facebook. As I mentioned in A Guide to Social Media Tools and their Uses, many of the social tools handle "entities" differently. The kind of presence you would set up for a business vs. a person in LinkedIn is not the same as what you would set up on Facebook, which makes for a very confusing experience for someone just trying to understand how to get started.

So in keeping with my "start at the beginning" methodology — I'm going to break down what the 3 different choices are for Facebook, how they're different and how each can be used.

Before we go any further, it is vital for your own sanity to understand that only the Facebook Profile can exist on it's own. In order to create a Group or a Page you have to attach it to someone's profile. For a Page that attachment is hidden, for a Group that attachment is public.

Places where Facebook Profiles, Pages and Groups are the same

I think the reason why it's so confusing to figure out which one to use is because most of the things people want to do on Facebook can be done with all three.

They all enable you to:

• create a page describing yourself, business or group
• put a main picture or logo on the page
• add photo albums
• get people to "join" the page
• create and promote events associated with the page
• send both individual and mass messages to all those who have "joined"
• have updates appear on the pages of those who have "joined"

At first glance this may seem like all you'd want to do with Facebook which is why it's hard at first glance to tell the 3 presence types apart. But the features that differentiate a Profile from a Page from Group, while usually not top of mind for most users, can become important as your usage of Facebook becomes more sophisticated.

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Differences in Facebook Profiles vs. Pages vs. Groups

Audience Terminology — this one's quite simple. For each type of presence the people who are connected to you are called something different to help underscore the purpose of that presence. People connected to your Profile are your "friends". People connected to your Page are "fans" and people connected to your Group are "members".

Custom URLs — Facebook has just recently announced that you can now create "pretty" URLs for your Facebook presence.

For example, my old Facebook page was:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1002729552281

My shiny, new, custom URL Facebook page is now:
http://www.facebook.com/maishawalker

But these custom URLs are only available for Pages and Profiles. It is currently not in the plans to give Groups this feature.

Facebook Apps (Applications) — if you want to use any of the applications that are available on Facebook but not already part of the Groups functionality, you're out of luck. For now at least, Facebook Apps are limited to Profiles and Pages. Also note that some Apps only work in Profiles.

Individual Membership Control — of course in your Profile you have the ability to decline any friendship invitation you're sent. In Groups you also can use settings to allow you to accept or decline anyone who tries to join the group, i.e. creating a group focused on alumni of a specific company or school. Facebook Pages do not give you that ability. You can only control fans in large groups by age and country, not on an individual level.

Discussion Boards — if you want lively discussions that aren't swept away by the speed of your friend's updates, you'll want a Group or a Page so that you can use the "Discussion" feature.

Delegation & Shared Credit — although each of us has at least two people who technically share in the credit of our existence, Facebook isn't in the business of forcing those connections on your profile. You cannot delegate your Facebook Profile within Facebook, nor can you make someone else a "point person". Pages on the other hand have to have an "Administrator" — someone who has a Profile and is fully responsible for maintaining the page. Groups have to have an "Administrator" as well, but they go a step further. Groups also allow you to create "Officers" who have no ability to maintain the Group but are listed for recognition and perhaps as a point person for the group.

Visitor Data — only Pages give you access to information about who is visiting you.

Messaging Ability Limitations — currently, Groups that have more than 5,000 members do not have messaging ability as a way of preventing spam abuse.

Connection Limitations — you can't have more than 5,000 friends on your Profile but you can have an unlimited number of fans on your Page or members in your Group.

So'

Profiles — are for an individual. You are limited in the number of friends you can collect.

Pages — are for promoting a public brand. You must attach it (not publicly) to a profile that will administer the page.

Groups — are for organizing people based on criteria you define. You can interact with group members in a very limited number of ways since you can't install additional Facebook Apps, but Groups do give you the ability to accept members based on your own criteria (or whims).

You can also read up on how Facebook defines Pages and how Facebook defines Groups in their FAQs.

To tie it all together, I'm putting together a Facebook comparison chart. Contact me if you'd like my Facebook comparison chart for free when it's finished.

Related Articles:

• A Guide to Social Media Tools and their Uses
• The Weakest Link - Your Social Media Marketing "Killer App"
• The Marketing Skills You Can Learn from Obama
• Getting Good Rank: Search Engine Primer for small biz

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6/16/2009 7:29:46 AM

As I mentioned in The Weakest Link - Your Social Media Marketing "Killer App" social media tools empower you, using tools that are largely free, to maximize your business' exposure and interaction, connecting and staying in touch more often and with more people than you ever could before.

Now I'd like to talk about how. How does one do this? It all starts with knowing which tools are most useful for your business. In fact I'm often asked "what are the best online marketing tools for small businesses?". I'll save that question for another post. For now let's focus on a subset of that - what are the best social media marketing tools for small businesses?

First let's take stock. Here is a list of some of the most popular social media tools (at least in the US market, in other countries it's a different story mind you). I want to give a nod to Seattle based Creativetechs for doing the thinking and the legwork to gather these sites into tidy categories!

Social Tools

All of these tools enable you to interact with people but in each group a different kind of content is the focus.

Social Directories — in some ways the simplest because it is the content focus is YOU. Each individual creates a profile and the directory enables you to find and connect with people based on the information they supply about themselves in that profile. This has extended beyond individuals to "entities". So that a company or group can also create a profile. Which brings me to one of the most confusing things about these directories - that not all of them approach "entities" the same way and most of them don't make it very easy to figure out how to create a profile for your entity. Facebook invites you to create a Facebook "page" for your business but does not want you to create a "profile" for your business even though pages and profiles can use many of the same features and tools (but not all). On the other hand, LinkedIn has a very limited "page" for businesses providing very limited functionality. Small businesses often struggle to figure out which kind of existence they should have in these directories (should it be me? Should it be my company? Should it be someone else within my company?) both to stay within the terms of service and still maximize the tools marketing potential.

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Social Bookmarking (also called Link Sharing) — these tools allow you to highlight and share individual Web pages you like by sharing a link to them. People can "vote" on each link that has been shared and the links with the most votes move to the top of the page making the site a portal to the "best" content as filtered by the community. Note that an individual profile is connected to the posting of each link so over time you can get to know your fellow bookmarkers by their sharing habits, genre, frequency etc. These sites are useful if you post a lot of content and would like that content to be found and read by more people.

Video Sharing — sites like YouTube are usually very straightforward in functionality. They make it very easy to upload your own video and once the video is uploaded, it is also easily viewed and commented on by others. YouTube also provides ways for the video to be shared and embedded in other sites increasing their ability to turn "viral". Because video can be far more useful for branding than for sales, and because small businesses often do not have access to the budgets or marketing expertise to leverage the benefits of viral video, this tends to be a useful tool only when the business has ready and very easy access to a good quality video writing, production and editing resource that is willing to work for free or at low cost (i.e. close friend, owner, family member).

Photo Sharing — these sites are usually quite simple in functionality. Members can post photos which then can be viewed and commented on by the general public or only by those who are invited to see them. Small businesses sometimes use these sites to share photo galleries instead of building photo gallery capability into their own Web site. I think this usually poses a branding and user experience conflict. Especially since photo galleries are usually pretty inexpensive ($300 or less) to integrate into one's own site.

Blogging — the content is your creativity, your voice. You post content on a regular basis whether it's text, video, photos, podcasts or all of the above. Blogs enable you to be an individual publisher, and usually enable readers to participate in the conversation by posting comments.

Out of all of these tools, the top 3 in my list perhaps will not be a surprise:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Next time I'll go into more detail about each and why I prefer these tools for small businesses.

I also am fond of blogging (go figure!) but that deserves to be covered separately.

Also next week on Tuesday, June 16th I will be hosting a Social Media Marketing hands-on workshop for around 20 small businesses. If you'd like to be one of them learn more about it and register here.

Related Articles:

• The Weakest Link - Your Social Media Marketing "Killer App"
• Getting Good Rank: Search Engine Primer
• The Marketing Skills You Can Learn from Obama
• The Outsourcing Paradox

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6/8/2009 9:13:10 PM

I have this unrelenting suspicion that people deeply, innately, in every fiber of ourselves need to be connected. Radical, I know.

This weekend I went back to Princeton for my college reunion and spent 48 hours either with people I hadn't seen or spoken to in many years and yet because of Facebook and LinkedIn still felt oddly knowledgeable about, or with people I had actually never met but again felt oddly knowledgeable about through the sheer quantity and intensity of the virtual communications we shared. As inevitably strange situations and new sensations came and went at my reunion (because reunions are kind of wonderfully odd), I couldn't escape constant little reminders of how the new technologies we've so quickly become immersed in, are playing a role not only in our need but also our ability to be connected.

While I was on campus, I gave a lecture on social media marketing (and giving a "lecture" at my alma mater was certainly odd for me in so many ways). We looked at the Susan Boyle phenomenon. Note that according to The Telegraph the episode of "Britain's Got Talent" in which Susan Boyle debuted (it was the show's season premiere) had was viewed on television by 11.8 million people. But in just a few days, the video of that same show on YouTube had generated more than 80 million views. That's TV 11.8 million, YouTube 80 million. Anyone who grew up with television as the quintessential mass medium may need to take a moment just to absorb that fundamental shift.

And more and more people have a nagging suspicion that things like Susan's YouTube video are stark examples that social media tools really are changing the way that we communicate, and wondering what to do about it.

I agree with this suspicion because I think such change is inevitable.

What we now call "social media" are just the latest in a long and continuing evolution of communication tools. From smoke signals to Morse code to radio to television, each new tool we invent changes the way we communicate.

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If you imagine with me for a moment, communication tools shifting over time in four respects:

we seemed to have had a long progression toward an ever increasing number of recipients from tools like Morse code (only a few people can send complex messages to a few other people, so presumably senders and recipients are chosen carefully as are the messages they send) to tools like television (once the infrastructure is built, a few people can send messages to massive quantities of people relatively easily and so senders are chosen carefully while the recipients not so much & the messages can be drivel or not).

But Social Media seems to have taken this progress on a new path where we are growing not just in the numbers of recipients but also of senders. Large numbers of people can now relatively easily reach large numbers of people, as if we are each our own publishing house.

But the tools go beyond that too. In the past large numbers of recipients meant one-directional messages -- you could reach lots of people but they were passive recipients of your information. Now, these large numbers are also interactive. You can reach out to lots of people and every single one of them can immediately reach back. Instead of controlled, one-directional messaging, these tools enable a constantly evolving, living dialogue on a huge scale.

In it's novelty, just the fact that the power to create large scale dialogue is in the hands of individual people is kind of amazing. As a business owner though, the fact that you can now communicate interactively and regularly with 10 or 1,000 times more people can seem overwhelming.

There is a middle ground.

In the 1970's a sociologist named Mark Granovetter introduced a concept called "the strength of weak ties." It is the idea that as we reach beyond our closest friends and families, we have "weak" but vitally important ties that connect us to other people and their networks and the important information and opportunities that those networks hold. It is far more often through the networks of our "weak ties" for example, that we get referrals for business and find opportunities for new jobs.

What's amazing for small business owners about these new social media tools is that they are incredibly good at empowering individual people to efficiently and inexpensively maintain a far larger number of "weak ties".

Half the battle of being a successful business is just making sure people remember your business and what you offer when it's time to make a purchase or a referral. Through social media tools, a business can stay connected to a larger number of "weak ties" and the networks they belong to, have access to the information and opportunities in those networks, and do it better and faster.

By helping you maximize those weak ties Social Media Marketing provides small businesses with a powerful tool that doesn't need an overwhelming amount of complexity to be useful. Its power is based on the simple human desire to be connected and the tools that now exist to enable you, as an individual to fill that desire.

Here are a few steps for how to maintain your sanity while using social media tools effectively.

Related Articles:

• The Marketing Skills You Can Learn from Obama
• Getting Good Rank: Search Engine Primer
• The Outsourcing Paradox

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6/2/2009 5:21:37 AM

So now that we know that Link Farming is bad and reciprocal links may have limited value, how do we convince other Web sites to link to us without linking back to them?

One Directional Link Sources

First - where can you get these one directional links? Great places include:

• Industry directories — sites that are directories of other sites in a particular industry
  
  
• About.com — often has directories and provides information about a wide variety of industries and specific, niche topics
  
  
• Event Sites - for events you are hosting or where you are a sponsor or speaker
  
  
• Online PR — PR sites, or sites that have an article written by you or about you
  
  
• Library sites — if you have content that is relevant to a particular topic and for a wide range of people libraries often offer great directories and resource lists
  
  
• Blogs — if you have a product or service that is exciting and you can get a blogger to write about it.
  
  
• Review Sites — if you have a product that can be reviewed.

If your site has a lot of free and useful content you will have a much easier time getting incoming, one directional links.

How to Ask for a Link

Also if you plan to reach out to other sites to link to you, make sure you use the right approach.

• Consider "deep linking" - invite linkers to link to a specific page of relevant content rather than linking to your home page. This is usually far more appealing for bloggers and other content sites.
  
  
• Make the contacts personal — avoid sending blanket emails to sites. Write personal emails or consider calling. Consider establishing a relationship over time. The extra time it takes you to do this will force you to be more selective in the sites you choose to reach out to.
  
  
• Choose carefully — getting a link can be a lot like pitching a story to a magazine or even like cold calling. Make sure you have done your research and confirmed that your content is right for the site you're contacting. The last thing you want to do is create bad will by blanketing sites that have no interest in what you do.
  
  
• Have something noteworthy and specific to offer — remember that in general, noone cares about your latest product or your newest client. I know that sounds harsh but it's unfortunately true. You have to find a reason for them to care. Find something interesting, unique, exciting, personal or noteworthy that would make people want to link to you.
  
  

Related Articles:

• Getting Good Rank: Search Engine Primer
• Search Engine Optimization in 3 Easy? Steps
• 10 Tips to Avoid the Biggest SEO Mistake
• The 9 Places to Put Your Keywords for SEO Power
• Link Building -- What Not to Do

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5/25/2009 4:42:56 PM

We've come pretty far in our Search Engine Primer!

Now let's cover the third and final step: link building.

Just like the other steps, link building is very simple on the surface, but getting it done can be more challenging that it appears.

What is link building?

In essence, you want to get other Web sites to link to you. That's it.

When another Web site links to you, it's as if that site is "voting" for your site. Their link is an indication that they believe your site's content is valuable.

If your site gets a lot more "votes" or incoming links than your competitors', this will help boost your search engine rankings higher.

In the past, getting incoming links was quickly and easily accomplished through "reciprocal links".

For example, you own that wonderful diner in Durham, and a motorcycle shop owner in Santa Fe emails you and says "Let's exchange links. You link to my site and we'll link to your site and we'll both improve our search engine rankings." What a great idea! Right?

Link Farming vs. One Directional Links

In the high-rolling '90's, entire businesses were formed based on this concept. You could pay a company a fee and they would instantly add your link to 100's of sites overnight. It was dubbed "Link Farming" and it was all the rage. Link Farming focused simply on buying the most links, not on sites meaningfully "voting" for your site. And Google found that it "unnaturally" inflated the rankings of sites who participated, diluting the value of the search results.

To combat this, Search Engines now focus on "one directional" links — where sites link to you but you do not link back to them. These are harder to get of course. Search Engines also penalize sites they suspect of artificial link building. If you have any reciprocal links, you can avoid this penalty by making sure you don't have too many and that for any reciprocal links, the two sites have content that is related. So avoid motorcycle shops linking to diners, no matter how good the pancakes are, unless that motorcycle shop happens to have a "road trip" feature listing great places to eat across the country.

Now that you know what *not* to do, next week I'll provide some tips on what *to* do - how to find sites that will give you one directional links and then how to ask for them.

To see the other installments in this Small Business SEO Guide visit:

Getting Good Rank: Search Engine Primer — what are SEO, SEA and SEM and should I really care?
Search Engine Optimization in 3 Easy? Steps — the three elements of SEO
10 Tips to Avoid the Biggest SEO Mistake — all about how to choose your keywords
The 9 Places to Put Your Keywords for SEO Power — what to do with your keywords


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5/12/2009 9:26:29 AM

We've covered a lot of ground so far in this SEO Guide. From a definition of Search Engine Marketing, to deciding whether SEO is worth it for you, and if it is identifying the 3 elements involved in SEO:

Last time we covered how to create your keyword list - the foundation of all of your other SEO and SEM efforts.

Now let's talk about what to do once those keywords are selected — step #2 is building keyword density.

According to Wikipedia, the definition of keyword density is: "the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase."

Basically - on a given page, what percentage of all the text is used by a specific keyword phrase? So for example, if a page has 100 words, and your keyword phrase is used 5 times, that keyword's density is 5% for that page.

The part that small business owners sometimes don't know is when we say "text" that doesn't only mean the readable text on the page. It also includes text that is found in your HTML code.

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In a shout out to readers Sherri and James R. who appreciates the practical and tactical, (thanks for your comments! How am I doing?), here is a very specific rundown of what elements of your HTML code are recognized by search engines. You'll want to put your keyword phrases in these places to ensure the SEO power of each of your pages. Note that depending on how your site is built, some of these places you will have access to and some you may need your developer's help with:

A big note - this list does NOT include the Meta Keywords tag. While that used to hold weight with search engines, it's pretty much ignored now. It's too easy to put whatever you want in them, so companies used to stuff them with totally unrelated but super popular terms like Janet Jackson or Britney Spears. Search Engines got wise to that scheme and stopped paying attention to them.

Keyword density is where large, content focused sites have an absolute advantage. The more text or pages you have the more you can repeat your keywords in all of the places outlined above. If you have a 5 page site there's only so much you can do against a 500 page, optimized competitor.

Incidentally, this is one reason why businesses blog. Frequent blogging is an opportunity to create many pages of content that can use your keywords. But you have to believe that SEO (and blogging) is going to be a valuable way to generate new business for you in order to use this tactic. Read my post on that here.

For some additional research get it direct - try Google's Webmaster guidelines and their answer to the question: How can I create a Google-friendly site?

Now here's an offer - do you have questions about keywords and keyword density? Post them over the next 7 days by Thursday, May 7th and I will try to answer as many as possible and encourage everyone to join in the discussion!

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4/30/2009 10:48:09 AM

I started this Search Engine Marketing Series with a definition of the two SEM areas — Search Engine Advertising and Search Engine Optimization. Last week we focused on SEO with SEO My Web Site in 3 Easy? Steps. We discussed the three elements of SEO and what I call their "blind spots".

As we learned last week, the first of those 3 elements is your keyword list. Your keyword list is critical because it is these keywords that will be used for optimizing your your HTML code & programming and build your incoming links. When you start doing SEA you'll find that your keywords are critical there too.

So what are keywords?

Keywords are the word or phrase that someone types into a search engine to find something they are looking for — like "buttermilk pancakes" or "cannon digital camera".

When a searcher types in one of these phrases, a "search engine results page" (aka SERP) is returned with a list of Web sites that the search engine has decided best fits that phrase.

Here are the SERP pages for "buttermilk pancakes" on Google (top) and Yahoo (bottom):

So let's say you own a diner in Durham, NC and you'd like anyone who searches for "buttermilk pancakes" to see your diner at the top of the results page.

That sounds pretty good, right?

I mean the #1 ranking, I know the pancakes sound good and yes — that was a trick question.

In fact, choosing "buttermilk pancakes" as your keyword phrase could not only waste a lot of your resources, it could also cause problems for your business.

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Here's why.

First — there is such a thing as too much traffic. How many phone calls do you need from someone in another state trying to place a delivery order or asking you'll mail them your pancake recipe? If your staff time get's maxed out by inquiries from people who won't ever do business with you, your staff won't have time or energy for the people who will.

Second — you will have devoted valuable time and money on a top position for a keyword that may hurt your business rather than help it. Those resources could have been spent far more productively elsewhere.

Unfortunately, many small businesses fall into the trap of choosing the keywords based on volume — thinking the ones that provide the most traffic will be the best investment. But what you really want is to focus on the keywords that will bring you the most business, even if they bring a small amount of traffic.

So how do you do that?:

Have you been burned by keywords or have they been the path to success?

Share some of your keyword tips below!

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4/14/2009 7:00:36 AM

So let's jump into our primer with a deeper dive into SEO.

You may be surprised to discover that Search Engine Optimization is essentially comprised of only 3 things:

That doesn't sound so hard right?

Well theoretically it isn't. But what makes SEO difficult for most small businesses is what my friend calls "the blind spots" — those major roadblocks you suddenly hit but never even saw coming.

Let's redo that list now with the blind spots added in...

Now we're getting somewhere! So now that we've out-ed the blind spots, what's a business owner to do?

For starters, we can identify how to avoid each of these roadblocks. I'll start with keyword list creation next week.

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But before all of that, there's really a much BIGGER question we haven't even talked about.

As you follow the tactics in my coming posts, and start to see the resources you'll need to invest in SEO, you want to ask yourself — is this really worth it? Does it actually make sense for me to spend time optimizing my site for search engines?

I know, given all the SEO hype this may seem like a shocking question (do I hear gasping?). But you really do need to find the right answer for your inidividual business.

Think of one of those old balances you used to have in chemistry class. On one side of the balance you'll have the cost - the time, money, and strategic focus you'll be spending on SEO that you could be spending on something else. After all, marketing decisions at some point boil down to "is this where I can invest my resources to generate the greatest profit?" SEO should not be immune to this filter.

So, on the other side of the balance is "what will I get out of it?" meaning how likely is it that you'll a) beat out your search competitors given the resources you can put towards SEO and b) get real, live, paying customers from all of this? If 80% of business in your industry is driven by high-touch sales and personal referrals, does it really make sense to spend your resources ranking on a few search engine results pages that frankly leave a lot to be desired in the personality department?

For many businesses the answer is somewhere between an emphatic yes and a mitigated yes. For some it turns out to be a resounding no.

As a business owner, I encourage you to be skeptical of any marketing technique until you understand the "cost" involved and the realistic payoff for your business - no matter how much hype surrounds the technique. By walking you through the "cost" involved with SEO and where the possible payoffs are, through this and the next posts I hope to help you decide if and what amount of SEO is right for you.

Stay tuned next week for some fun with keywords!

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3/31/2009 3:51:26 AM

Do you remember those IBM commercials from the early 2000's? The ones where the execs are sitting around a board room table and there's a lone techie at one end spelling out "the new tech thing"? Awe and mysticism seems to fill the room. Appropriately quizzical theme music twinkles in the background. This is one of my favorites:

Clearly this is an exaggeration but those commercials crack me up. Perhaps it's because durng my careeer I've been on both sides. Perhaps it's also because I've spent more than 13 years sitting right in the middle - translating.

A little while ago I found myself in such a situation. I was moderating a panel for a great group of entrepreneurs-in-the-making and the topic was Search Engine Marketing. Much like the "Universal Business Adapter" lots of people eye Search Engine Marketing with a bit of awe and a lot of mystique.

One usually finds mystique in situations of information scarcity, not so with SEM (just do a search for search engine marketing and you'll see what I mean) and yet, the topic is still little understood.

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I think part of the challenge is with the way SEM is covered:

So I've decided to tackle the problem and share it not only with the people who attended that event, but with Inc.com readers here.

First let's address the biggest question — what does Search Engine Marketing actually mean?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of optimizing your Web site and what I like to call your "digital footprint" so that search engines like Google will rank your site above other sites when people search for things. When looking at Google, this refers to the left side of screen or the "organic" listings which can draw more than 70% of the search engine clicks. If you want to get really in depth check out Google's Webmaster Tools http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 (beware, there's a LOT of information there).

Search Engine Advertising (SEA) is making a payment directly to a Search Engine (or through a broker or service provider) so you can place a text advertisement on the search engine results page (or SERP) when people search for things. This is also called "sponsored links" or "Pay Per Click (PPC)" advertising. You bid for a certain keyword phrase and you pay the search engine each time someone clicks on your ad.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) — has come to mean different things. Some people use the terms Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Advertising synonymously. I think this isn't really accurate or especially useful. Marketing is not just advertising. I think the better use of "SEM" is to refer to all of the ways that you can use search engines to market what you have to offer.

Next week I'll cover the most critical factor in any search marketing campaign — your keywords. How do you choose them? How should they be different for SEO vs. SEA? How do you keep from loosing your shirt by buying the wrong ones in a PPC campaign? Stay tuned'

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3/24/2009 8:00:00 AM

Last time we were discussing some of the challenges of getting up to speed to make technology outsourcing successful for your business.

We looked at the data from a recent programmer project posting which resulted in a variance of more than 250 hours and $5,000 in cost.

While we anticipated the candidate responses would turn out the way they did, the question remains, where do you go from there?

Often business owners set out on outsourcing adventures and only realize how unprepared they are when they're at the point like this one where a decision needs to be made, but they don't know how to make it.

Here are the primary things you'll need to navigate your next technical outsourcing project:

1.Know the outsourcing market — outsourcing sites have their own modus operandi and the programmers who use them have devised theirs too. It's good to know what those are so you know what to expect out of the process.

2.Product detail & clarity — all too many times we've consoled business owners who felt locked into a project costing far more than anticipated because the programmer had to go through so many iterations of (sometimes still unsuccessfully) translating their idea into a working site. The problem is if you're working directly with a programmer (and not a Project Manager, Technical Lead or other go between) that's not their job. Your programmer shouldn't be figuring out the best way for your Web site to sell your product or what pages it should have. You should work that out in advance and provide all of that information to your programmer in the form of technical specifications'

3.Site specifications — a 3 page description of what you want does not a specification make. When you're building a site that has a certain complexity, a strategically thought out set of features that is then turned into a well written specifications document is essential to creating a site that you (and your customers) will be happy with, and your programmer will be able to do correctly the first time.

4.Technical Expertise — I know, the expertise is what you're trying to hire. That's the paradox. You need a certain amount of expertise in order to accomplish steps 1-3 for technical outsourcing to be effective. However you find it, you need someone who can effectively interpret and document your needs, evaluate & choose from candidates, manage the ensuing relationship, and evaluate the work being done to ensure it's good quality. Just looking at links to a potential programmer's work and speaking to their references is usually not enough to confidently hire for a technical project.

At the end of the day it is often a wise decision to hire an independent third party to act as your sounding board and guide to help you outline your project clearly, hire the right people, and if budget allows also assist you in managing the relationship either by being the point person or by acting as your behind the scenes adviser.

If you're not a technical person (and don't want to become one) make sure you come to the outsourcing party neither alone nor empty handed. Don't let your outsourcing dream transform into a money wasting, hair pulling nightmare — just be prepared.

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12/20/2008 9:00:48 AM

So you're ready to get your Web site built and you want to hire someone who can do the job right within the budget you have. You decide to try outsourcing to find a programmer.

Often the idea of outsourcing is equated with the idea of an efficient system – the fastest, most efficient way to find and hire the best help within the budget available.

Sites like getafreelancer.com, odesk.com and guru.com are easy to get started on. You can do a bit of due diligence and comparisons, post your projects, and start receiving bids almost instantly. But once you start reviewing those bids, you might soon find that mastering the outsourcing game is a little trickier than you thought.

Case in point: a posting was done recently for a freelance programmer. Included in the posting was a job description, a set of instructions (as in, send links to your work, indicate what time zone you're in, provide your contact information). For those who made it past the first cut, each candidate was provided a set of identical tasks and asked to provide a time and cost estimate.

Here were the results:

• Initial Replies - more than 50 initial candidates replied. Unfortunately 48 (or 96%) of the replies were generic "throw it against the wall" replies that had no bearing on the post and did not follow the instructions.
• Follow up – each candidate was sent another email asking that they follow the instructions in the first email
• *Real Replies* - this time 15 of the 50 candidates (or 30%) responded with their details and all of them were invited to provide estimates on the list of tasks.
• Estimates - 6 of the remaining 15 candidates (40%) responded with estimates. I'll detail the estimates below.

The process up to this point required:

• 4 initial postings
• approximately 70 follow up postings emails and replies (since communication had to be done one at a time with each candidate, "mass" responses were ignored)
• approximately 15 hours between reading and writing responses, devising the list of tasks to estimate, and working with slow and somewhat clunky freelancer Web sites.

Here's where it gets particularly interesting. In the end the exact same list of tasks received wildly divergent estimates.

The lowest estimate: $450 for 15 hours of work.The highest estimate: $5,210 for 289 hours of work.

I kid you not. The exact same tasks procured estimates with a gradual variance of more than 250 hours and almost $5,000.

At this point after so much time spent and such wildly differing results, many a business owner would throw up his hands. How can this be so complicated, time consuming, unpredictable and hard to evaluate?

Herein lies the paradox. Many small business owners try to use the method of casting a wide net to hire a technical person, but don't realize that if you're going to do that, you really need some technical expertise just to get through the process, know who to hire and then get the most out of the relationship.

So now that we've had a chance to see what an outsourcing project response might look like (without you having to spend 15 hours to find out), next time I will break down the four things you'll need as a non-technical business owner, to get you through your next technical outsourcing project.

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12/11/2008 3:09:32 PM

I've been fascinated by the analysis of the Obama campaign. In many ways, Obama's campaign and its success is a big, bright, "LCD sign" of the times. New media has come of age in a very public way.

Most people seem to agree that the campaign used a number of techniques to capture an audience and even inspire the traditionally unenthused. Some of my favorite attributions are:

Audacity - the fact that Obama wasn't afraid to "redefine his target audience" and go after states like Indiana who this November voted for a Democrat for the first time in 44 years.

Mobilizing Large Numbers and doing it "Grass Roots" - unprecedented fundraising success by generating large numbers of small donations rather than small numbers of large donations to raise more than an estimated $600 million (McCain raised an estimated $250 million).

The Message Consistency - the message never waivered from the idea of being an "antidote" to the status quo.

But perhaps the most obvious and (to a techie like me) inspiring elements of witnessing this campaign was its focus on social technology to support and propel all of the other techniques.

The use of "new media" from friend building on Friendster to the seemingly simple text message proved to be a powerhouse for the campaign, as it extended the concept of "Team Obama" far beyond campaign headquarters literally into the hands of millions of Americans who voted and vocalized with their typing fingers.

For all the small business owners who couldn't help wondering, wow - can I do that? My answer is Yes you can! (Sorry couldn't help myself).

In taking a closer look, the technologies used form a rather familiar list:

• Official Web site: http://www.barakobama.com and http://my.barakobama.com


• Text messaging strategy - enabled via collecting phone numbers on a mass scale


• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/barackobama


• Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/


• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/barackobama


• Twitter: http://twitter.com/BarackObama


• YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/BarackObamadotcom


• Meetup.com: http://barackobama.meetup.com/

The list reads like a "who's who" of social media marketing.

But the real power in these technologies is understanding that the goal is not just to "set up" one tool or another, but to understand each tool's potential. That potential in the Obama campaign was brought to fruition by:

• having a consistent message


• providing free and open access to "making a connection"


• *always* keeping the tool up to date


• providing pertinent digestible bytes of information that could be read, downloaded, passed on


• leveraging the sheer quantity of enthusiasts and supporters on each tool to disperse messages almost instantly across an unbelievably wide, new network of venues and communities that hasn't been seen since the invention of television.

Think about the leverage that a database of 948,000 people on MySpace and 3.1 million people on Facebook provides when you have a message to communicate (and consider that vs. McCain's 221,000 on MySpace and 600,000 on Facebook).

As you think about your business and consider the challenge to build brand, generate buzz and stay on the radar as a small business owner with limited time and a limited budget, there are some very simple lessons to learn here:

1. everybody needs a team. Whether you're trying to build a team of millions of voters or a few thousand supporters of your business, build a team by building a venue for them to get involved. Even the simplest involvement can be powerful.

2. email, the Web, and cellular technology have created an unprecedented venue for that involvement. Know who should be on your team and know the different ways they like to be involved.

3. Use wisely. Learn how these technologies work and learn by example how they can be leveraged to build a community of supporters for you.

This is an advantage that won't last forever. As businesses gain competency in these techniques and learn to invest wisely, these techniques will slowly become standards rather than competitive advantages.

But it is possible for a growing small business to build a strategic, cost-effective and impactful social media campaign. As "Team Obama" has shown - yes you can.

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11/25/2008 10:11:36 AM

Just because you pay the domain name bill doesn't mean you own it.

That's right. You may not be the legal owner. Whoever is the legal owner of your domain name, that person has total control over it including – what Web site it points to, what domain name registrar maintains it, changing information about your domain name account, controlling who administers it, and being able to sell it.

In the many classes I've taught there's always someone who unfortunately has to deal with this issue. Here are some tips on how to find out who owns your domain and what to do if it isn't you.

First find out who owns it – Go to the WhoIs database and search for your domain. Whatever contact information is listed for both the "Registrant" fields and the "Administrator" fields, all of it, including any email addresses for these two fields, should be yours.

If you find this information is not yours, there are three possible reasons:

1.Private Listing – If you see something like "Domains by Proxy" listed as the registrant, more than likely the domain has a private listing which protects your privacy by not displaying your contact information. Contact your registrar to find out what contact information is behind the private registration. This is often stored in a separate account with a separate username and password.

2.Host Hijacking – Sometimes when you get a domain name included with your hosting account, the host will put their information as the registrant and administrative contact. Usually you have the ability to change this information by logging into your account. Don't let the host convince you that it should stay as it is.

3.Designer/Developer Hijacking – Sometimes unscrupulous practitioners will set this information to theirs without telling you. Sometimes this is done out of ignorance, but other times it is purposely intended to enable them to hold your domain name hostage should your relationship go sour.

Remedies – If a hijacking of your domain name has occurred here's what you can do:

Option 1 – Ask: for a host hijacking, developer hijacking or anyone else who's name appears where yours should, contact them to see if they'll change it. If not or you don't think this will work, you may need Option 2.

Option 2 – Legal Recourse: if you have a trademark it will make this easier. First, to find out your registrar's policy on domain name disputes, try searching your registrar's help section for the word "trademark." Most registrars adhere to the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy which is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization. The UDRP starts at $1,500 to arbitrate a dispute.

Here are some helpful links describing their policies:

WIPO General Domain Dispute Information

WIPO's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy

The key is to keep your calm, know your options and find out as soon as possible if your domain name is in peril.

And always, always keep the details about your domain name registration account. You should know who your domain is registered with and the username and password for your domain name registration account. You should be very careful about giving this information to anyone since you are potentially handing over the legal rights to your domain name. Try using the various tools registrars now provide to give someone limited access to manage things in your account. If you have to give someone a username and password, change it before you give it away and then change it back once they're done.

Stay tuned for more insights next week and if you've had a domain name story that might help another entrepreneur please share your experiences. Help you take a bite out of domain name crime.

11/12/2008 9:00:16 AM

Yes – you can build a decent Web site for free but once your business reaches a certain level of maturity and visibility free probably won't cut it. Why? You'll want more control over updating the site, more tools and automation features, visual consistency with your other branding materials and customization for the way your business operates.

When you reach this point, it's time to create a bigger budget for your Web site. I've created this breakdown of cost factors that should help you in creating an RFP and gauging the estimates that you receive in response.

What will affect the cost of your Web site?

Number of Pages – Expect to spend $50-$200 per page for your site's construction.

Number of Pages Designed – How many pages actually need their own design? Most (non-shopping) sites use a "Home page" design and maybe an "Internal page" design. The "Internal page" design is used throughout the rest of the pages. But some pages like a photo gallery may need a special design. Expect each additional design to cost 10% of your initial design fee.

Number of Design Mockups – Would you like to have the designer show you three different potential layouts? Or will you start with one and then add others if needed? Additional mockups can cost 25-75 percent of the original design fee.

Template or "From Scratch" Design – Templates have come a long way baby. In the last few years there has been a revolution in the template market and you can actually get a really good full Web site design for less than $100. With the help of a designer you can also do minor (or major) customizations to a template. In fact, many designers will present customized templates as "original" designs so you might be getting this anyway. A "from scratch" design will cost between $1,500 and $5,000.

Flash – Flash is what's used to create sophisticated animations on Web sites. Take a look at tetris.com for a little break and a good example of a full Flash Web site. Flash instantly increases the cost of your site between several hundred to several thousand dollars. Flash templates are also available at 1/10 of that cost – but they'll still need to be customized with your content.

Automation Features – Things like Photo Galleries, Intake Forms, Contact Us forms require programmers. Programmers work hard and they are expensive. Expect these added features to cost a few hundred dollars each if there's a tool that can be bought and customized. Possibly a couple thousand dollars if it has to be created from scratch.

Email Newsletter Tool – The vast majority of Web sites should have a formal mechanism for collecting visitor email addresses that does not involve copying and pasting into Excel (those of you still doing this, you know who you are). Email newsletter tools usually start at $15-$50 per month. You can integrate the code into your site yourself or to have your developer do it expect a few hundred dollars to create a signup page and add signup links throughout your site.

Online Shopping – Adds a whole other level. Typically built using an off-the-shelf shopping cart software, expect the installation and configuration of your store to add $1,500 to $15,000 to the cost of your site. PayPal and the new Google checkout are great alternatives if you have fewer than 20 products to sell. You can set up an account for free, you're only charged when someone makes a purchase and you don't need shopping cart software.

Maintenance Fees – The most popular are hosting (around $5-$20/month) and your domain name ($5-$25/year). If you have an online store you'll also need an SSL certificate ($20-$50/year), and a merchant account and payment gateway ($30-$40/month plus transaction fees). You should also consider budgeting 10-20% of your original Web site budget annually for software upgrades, new features and consulting.

Marketing Costs – These can vary widely depending on your site, industry and budget. For a good budgeting rule of thumb, gauge the percent of your marketing budget to spend online according to the percent of your customers you expect to get online.

Now that you have some figures in mind you should have a sense of what your site should cost and be closer to getting bids from a Web development company. For tips on how to hire a Web site development company check out How to Hire a Web Designer.

11/5/2008 9:00:25 AM

Do you look like the possessed girl in the movie The Exorcist when you think about your new Web site project?

If that's you, never fear, after 13 years of Web site projects large and small, I'm going to break it down for you.

1.Planning – This is the part where you figure out what you want. If you don't know how to do this, read on! Check out this post on 10 Vital things to give your Web Designer and this one on Web Site Costs to get you started. Your goal should be to create a Site Map and a set of Wireframes (an outline of what will be on each page).

2.Design – Will you build it yourself, buy a template or hire a designer? Take a look at my 3-hour Web Site Plan and see the section on "build it or buy it." Then get yourself a design or a designer.

3.Copywriting – This is often an afterthought but if you can afford it it shouldn't be. Good copy can really make or break a Web site - being the difference between being convincing and being boring.

4.Construction – Your Web site will typically be built in one of three ways: plain HTML, Flash, or a Content Management Tool (see below). Which one depends on your needs. Also part of the construction process is testing and optimizing your site for search engines " SEO."

5.Marketing – How will you generate traffic to your site? What techniques will you use, who will implement them and how often?

6.Maintenance – Make sure you know how your Web site is going to be updated. Who will do it and what tools will they need? Many a small business has fallen into the trap of launching a beautiful site that they can't update, by a designer who has disappeared. Don't let that be you! Strongly consider using a Content Management Tool like Joomla! or Drupal so that you can have control over updating the text and images without relying on your designer/developer.

That covers the 6 essential elements of building and maintaining a Web site. Stay tuned for our next topic – Web Site Cost Breakdown! where I'll help you figure out what your project should cost.

In the meantime, tell me how you've fared with any of these steps. Have you used a Content Management Tool? Which one?

10/29/2008 9:00:17 AM