I'm excited for you to know more about how my book can help you grow your business. Newt Barrett, of the very successful Content Marketing Today blog, has done a thorough review of Web Marketing for Small Businesses that I hope you'll take a look at.
Newt is a consummate content marketer (say that 3 times fast) and really works hard to extract the essence of his material. He talks about what resonated for him and I hope for you as well!
The next stop on my virtual book tour for Web Marketing for Small Businesses will be May 15th at 3pm
I'm excited that two great experts will be joining me:
Learn more here and sign up for this Free call with me and Andy Wibbels and Roger Parker
My new book launch started with a kick-off call with the great Michael Port. He's the author of Booked Solid and Beyond Booked Solid. I'm really excited to speak to Michael about my book Web Marketing for Small Businesses. He's helped so many people with his "Think Big" revolution.
Here's the link to listen to the teleseminar
We talked about how to:
-design your website so that it's easy for customers to buy
-tell a compelling story, so that visitors become subscribers
-choose the right tactics and tools for marketing on the web
->use the four key questions to build a successful and effective website
I'm really excited to let you know that my new book launch starts tomorrow with a kick-off call with the great Michael Port. He's the author of Booked Solid and Beyond Booked Solid. I'm really excited to speak to Michael about my book Web Marketing for Small Businesses. He's helped so many people with his "Think Big" revolution.
We'll be talking about how to:
-design your website so that it's easy for customers to buy
-tell a compelling story, so that visitors become subscribers
-choose the right tactics and tools for marketing on the web
->use the four key questions to build a successful and effective website
A "golden nugget" of information is reported in Business Week's Small Biz Feb/March 2008 issue. In "What's for Launch" Doug Hall, small biz guru and CEO of Eureka Ranch looked into the issue of determining whether to go ahead with a new product launch. I'm often asked questions about new product launches, e.g., how to decide whether to launch one product over another or to launch at all.
To answer this question, Doug Hall looked into his data archives of 100 product launches by his clients and academic articles to see if he could offer an answer. He found that the single best predictor of success was meaningful difference or uniqueness. Meaningful difference in this case refers to a blend of customer interest in buying and perception of how different the product is from competitors.
The big takeaway here is that the marketing task for any product or service is to tell customers why it's not the same old thing. There needs to be a real answer to that question, not just spin. That means that if you are struggling to find the difference, or there really isn't one, reconsider launching it until it has one. If you spin the product to appear to have a difference when one doesn't exist you'll get returns and unhappy former buyers.
I'm starting a new feature for my readers called "You Asked." The impetus for this came from the great responses I got from a survey of the readers of my free ebook "Small Business 2.0."
The people who responded to this survey will be getting a special bonus from me when I launch my upcoming book in May, Web Marketing for Small Businesses: 7 Steps to Explosive Business Growth.
If you'd like to participate in the survey and receive the bonus then submit a comment to this blog that tells me your top two questions about growing your online business. I really want to hear from you!
Do you feel that your product or service is so unique that you just aren't sure how to find your customers? In my Mindjet newsletter column this month I present a case study about How to find the perfect customer for your product.
In the article you'll find a link to a mindmap template you can use to help find your perfect customers.
If you spend time thinking about what kind of content you should create for your customers, check out Why We're Powerless To Resist Grazing On Endless Web Data by Lee Gomes in the March 12th issue of the Wall Street Journal.
He discusses research done by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in what motivates the human need for information. Gomes says that "When you find new information, you get an opioid (brain chemical) hit, and we are junkies for those." Biederman calls us 'infovores.' (Note: This also explains the heavy use of the back button when you land on an exceedingly boring page.)
So what's the take-away from this? I think it's as simple as— Don't be Boring! Which you already know. But somehow when you start to sell your product or service you start writing copy like, "Our product is known for it's maintenance-enhancing, all powerful widget-bending factors like none other." Boring counts no matter what you sell.
I'm excited to report that my new book "Web Marketing for Small Businesses: 7 Steps to Explosive Business Growth" published by Sourcebooks, Inc. is almost ready to launch.
More upcoming in future weeks on what's in the book and how it can help you. I've taken everything I know about growing businesses online and turned it into 7 easy steps to get your business moving. It's got lots of worksheets and tools to make it happen.
You can:
pre-order on Amazon
preorder on Borders
preorder on Barnes and Noble
Check out my February column called "Create a Mailing List Building System with MindManager Pro 7" in the Mindjet.com Monthly Newsletter.
It shows you how to use a mailing list to take your successful business to the next level and includes a map template you can use to build your own system.
Much as I wish I could agree with the idea that everyone is a potential customer, I can't. If you target everyone, you are targeting no one. What the web 2.0 era has ushered in, is the ability to target customers more effectively.
The niche is everything. You need to speak to a constituency and meet their needs. Why care? You need to know what bloggers they read, what information sources they like and how and where they receive information. If you think you know that intuitively, forget the Web and open a fortune-telling booth.
To this end, check out Newt Barrett's blog Succeeding Today for this post on market research: Doing Market Research Is Both Easier and More Important Than You May Think In it, he writes about how you can make an inexpensive effort with a big payoff. He outlines options and costs. It's a must read for those of you who think you can't do market research.
I saw a very interesting customer service interaction in a major chain store the other day that I have to share. The woman ahead of me bought many items. The clerk handed her back a small shopping bag with all the items unappealingly squeezed in—almost bursting the bag. When the woman asked for a larger bag, the clerk refused saying, Sorry I can only give you a bag that fits your items with no space or I could lose my job. The woman became annoyed (as I would have) and said, 'If I give you $5 dollars can I have a bigger bag?' At that point everyone in line joined the conversation and a larger bag was finally supplied.
When it was my turn, I asked the clerk why she could lose her job. She said the store was having theft problems and the way she was instructed to deal with it was to make sure that bags had no room to stuff extra mechandise.
Hmm, well that's one way to handle it—punish the customers who buy a lot. Make sure to think through your solutions to service problems, lest they have the opposite effect.
This month in my Mindjet.com column I focus on how to Make your service business easy to understand. Each month my column focuses on a marketing issue and how I'd approach solving it with a map. I always include the actual map so you can download it and modify for your own use. This month we feature Yovia.com. Check it out.
Also, if you have a marketing issue you'd like to submit, please do so at the link above.
In my previous post for the new year, I talked about asking the right questions. The second part of that is setting the right priorities. I'm sure you've read about a million different ways to prioritize your work lists. But there is a key part of that which is usually overlooked. That's what I want to write about today— defining priorities your way. That makes all the difference to a small business owner or anyone who has responsibility for the bottom line. Let's look at the components of this.
First you have to have a way to rank priorities. I use this method but if you have a preferred method use that.
I determine whether it is: 1-Important and urgent; 2-Important not urgent; 3-Unimportant and urgent ; 4-Unimportant not urgent and I write the number next to the item on the list. Then I put them in order by number and that should do it, right? WRONG!
What I haven't done is redefine what those categories mean to me at this moment in 2008. What is truly important? Is it what your staff thinks? Is it what your accountant thinks? Or have you thought it through to the point where it really is what you think. The key to moving your business forward is acting on what you know to be important to you and your business and not what's standing outside your door at any given moment. This is deceptively simple. You think you know what's important to you, but given the explosion of social media and new ways to think about business, have your really developed your priorities?
Now is a great time to formulate the questions you need answered to grow your business. As the old saying goes, "everyone is an expert when you ask the right question." It's important to note that you ask yourself questions as you go through your businessday. For example: "Why are these products moving faster than those products?" "Why do I seem to get sales concentrated in the morning hours?" Yet, if I asked you what questions you want answered about your business, you'd probably not be aware of any. That's why you need to capture them! They'll never get answered if you don't write them down.
As you go through the work day, resolve to make a list of all the questions you ask yourself. Carry this list around and don't be lazy about adding to it. At the end of the week, look at the list and see what patterns emerge. Are you asking lots of questions about packaging? How about returns? Prepare a new list with all the questions grouped in categories and set up a time to answer them. But, can you answer them? If not, you need to figure out what tools to put in place to capture the information. Once you get proficient at capturing and answering these questions you'll be on the road to really growing your business.
Timothy Ferris: The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
Douglas Rushkoff: Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out
Tara Calishain: Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web
Chip Heath and Dan Heath: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Gina Trapani: Lifehacker: 88 tech tricks to turbocharge your day
Patricia Seybold: Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company's Future
Steven Pressfield: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
John Naisbitt: Mind Set! Reset Your Thinking and See the Future
Michael A. Stelzner: Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged
David W. Galenson: Old Masters and Young Geniuses : The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity
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