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Marketing Gem 9 - 10 Tips to help you become an expert.

Wednesday, June 7th, 2006

Todays gem is from
“Never Eat Alone : And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time” by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz.

This is the best self-marketing and networking book I’ve ever read. Actually I bought it twice. The first time was an Audible book, which I listened to with full attention for the whole unabridged 12 hours (in the car, of course). The audiobook was so good that I had to by the hardback, so that I could take notes and properly quote it for this blog.

In this gem, Ferrazzi shares his 10 tips to become a sought-after expert. I’m going to give his titles verbatim, and paraphrase the details.

  1. Get out in front and analyze the trends and opportunities on the cutting edge - Identify the movers and shakers, meet them of possible and take them to lunch, read their newsletters, learn from them.
  2. Ask seemingly stupid questions - Question the unspoken bases that people are using for their understandings. This is how breakthroughs are made.
  3. Know yourself and your talents - Work on your talents and let others fill in your weaknesses.
  4. Always learn - Read books and magazines, take classes, talk to experts. I’d add to this list, “write a blog on the topic”.
  5. Stay healthy - don’t burn out, take vacations, do things to nourish your spirit.
  6. Expose yourself to unusual experiences - Learn things out of the mainstream, to spark creativity.
  7. Don’t get discouraged - Passion keeps you going through inevitable hard times.
  8. Know the new technology - If you can’t then adopt a geek who’ll help you.
  9. Develop a niche - start small and expand, don’t take on the world at once.
  10. Follow the money - you can’t make money if there is none to be had in your chosen area.

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Gems from the Classics - 2

Thursday, April 27th, 2006


On Another gem from “Grow Rich! : With Peace of Mind” by Napoleon Hill.

This one is particularly appropriate today, since it is my second-to-last day at my current job.

A job that is past opens a new door to the future. Suppose you have lost your job through no fault of your own. Suppose, then, you nurse a great resentment and a festering hatred of your former employer who was so unjust to you.

[…]

What if you are questioned about your former employer? Say noting bad about him! What was bad must always stay in the past and never be allowed to hinder the future.

Jobs also seem to be favorite spots in which to grow grudges. Of course you have rights and it is no part of success or peace of mind to allow yourself to be stepped upon. Many little scratches in human relations, however, are nothing but that, just little scratches, and need not be reacted to as though they were deep wounds.

[…]

But a nursed grudge is a viper in the bosom. It is a treasured negative, and you not only let it take away your peace of mind, you also encourage the formation of ulcers and many other ailments which the mind can inflict upon the body. Close the door!

It is wonderful and gratifying to see how the habit of closing the door upon the past becomes one of the greatest of sustaining habits. It helps you take possession of your own mind and condition it for the attainment of any purpose you desire.

-p.30

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Gems from the Classics - 1

Tuesday, April 25th, 2006


On The Warrior Forum, one suggestion was to read and learn from the classic sales and personal development books. Taking the advice, I dove right into “Grow Rich! : With Peace of Mind” by Napoleon Hill. It really is a great book, and I can see that so much modern “self-help” got its start with this one.

One paragraph from the book really spoke to me as a marketer and a budding entrepreneur. It speaks directly to motivation & money-guilt in a refreshingly direct manner.

Is there a definite connection between being wealthy and having peace of mind? There is a connection, but it is not absolute. There certainly are poor people who have peace of mind; but they are far more rare than folklore would have us believe. You need not be a millionaire, but without sufficient money you are cut off from much in life that sustains the spirit. If you are continually worrying about where your next meal is to come from - when you’ll be able to get your shoes repaired - how you are going to pay your dentist bull - how many more years your how can go without paint - you have no peace of mind. If your lack of funds forces you to live in a shabby neighborhood so that you constantly worry about the influence upon your children, you have no peace of mind. If you cannot occasionally buy and cherish something that is beautiful - if you cannot afford a vacation you really enjoy - if you cannot partake of a motion picture or a stage show which you know is very much worthwhile - your mind does not have the chance to satisfy itself. Money brings much good into your life and much that nobody should have to do without.

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Why I study marketing

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

Reading I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about Marketing and site design. It is not natural for me yet, and I have an immense amount to learn.

a lot of programmers might not spend as much time, since the topic seems so simple. That’s exactly the point, it is simple, so it is hard to understand all the ramifications. The guys in Call To Action put it much better than me:

As Allen Weiss explains in his article, it’s hard to really understand simple ideas. In fact, it’s often harder than remembering complicated ideas. With complicate ideas, like those in mathematics, software coding, and finance, we tend to really “get it” because we spend so much time trying to understand the ideas.

With simpler ideas we tend to spend little energy (often because we think that it warrants little energy to understand) and often mistakenly think that we understand something because it appears to be simple.

In a lot of ways marketing is simple. For example, the basic ideas behind branding are actually very few. Still, people like to see these same ideas presented in thousands of different ways. People want thousands of different examples that expose the same basic idea — isn’t this a waste of time and money?

The reason for this seemingly strange inefficiency is that marketing is based on tacit know-how. Tacit know-how is difficult to write down and can only be learned by doing. Learning to play an instrument is based on tacit know-how, as is learning to cook and virtually every other practice that requires reading/learning and then doing (many, many times) before you really understand it.

- P.41

“Street Cred” and how to earn it

Thursday, February 16th, 2006

Key to success Todd gives 21 Tips for Improved Website Credibility on his StuntDubl blog. Since I am in the process of launching a new store, these tips were very helpful for me and well timed.

In particular, I liked:

  • About Page
  • Pictures of REAL people
  • References
  • Link to good people
  • No 404’s
  • Write like a real person
  • Have a freakin’ sense of humor

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Five tips to keep yourself motivated

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

Pushing a boulder up a hillI find that projects, especially major ones like launching a new income vehicle, tend to go through three phases. Launch happiness where it is all exciting, new and coming together so fast. An agonizing push through the dry spell. Finally, a usually satisfied resolution. Of course, not all project make it to that last phase. Sometimes the agonizing push is really too much, I get discouraged and give up. As I’ve gotten older, however, I find that I am much more able to make it through the dry spells, using a few motivational techniques I’ve picked up over the years.

My top 5 tips to get through the dry spell

  1. Have written goals. Nothing makes the water murkier than constantly changing the goals. Pick a time frame, write down some goals, and try to achieve those goals.
  2. Focus on the successes. My goal for this quarter is to make $10 per day from one of my new sites. In the last week, I made a grand total of $18, while spending $1.50. That’s not very far along the way to $70, but it is much more than nothing. The first few dollars are the hardest dollars, they are the ones which prove you are on the right track with your product.
  3. Overcome your fear of marketing and success. If you think marketing is beneath you, or that it is some shameful thing, you will never be very good at it. Sadly, I have friends and coworkers who think exactly that. No wealthy ones though. You don’t have to lose your ethics to make money, the pie is big enough for us all to have a big sloppy piece.
  4. Find supportive people, which is almost certainly not your coworkers. I guarantee you that your coworkers are going to think you are an idiot. Most people do not want to believe that going outside the 9-to-5 cube could possibly work. Ignore them. I think that ksblog put it best when she was writing about her first rejection letter.

    There are two camps. One that thinks this single rejection is the end of the world or at least the end of my writing career. They say things like “well, you tried” or “better you find out now that it isn’t going to work.”
    [ … ]
    The other camp is the keep on trying crowd. They say things like “Now you’re a real writer” and “So how many more queries you have out there?” And then they tell the war stories about how many rejections they’ve received in life.
    You’re a smart person so you can probably guess the disparity in net worths between the two groups.

    She then goes on to point out that the “keep going” crowd are the ones she’ll want to talk to when she is seriously thinking about dropping a project.

  5. Finally, if despite the above, you are still getting bogged down and bored, why not apply what Steve Pavlina calls “Overwhelming force”?

    Ask yourself, “What would it take for me not only to achieve this goal but to absolutely dominate it?” What would you consider overkill? Imagine your goal as if you’re planning a battle that you MUST win, regardless of the cost. Write down what you think it would take to be certain of success.

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Another tip to make your blog search friendly

Friday, January 20th, 2006

ready to send a pingLet the world know that you are actively adding content to your blog. This just takes a moment to set up, and pays off with more timely and accurate search crawls of your site. To do this, you need to choose an “update notification pinger”. Once you’ve chosen one or two, you configure your blogging engine to use them. In Wordpress, this is managed in the admin pages under “Options, Writing, Update services.”

What this does is send a notification to a service that you’ve updated your blog. While you could have your blog send notifications to every service around, I think manually setting up every one is just not worth the aggravation, so I suggest using a “meta-pinging” service. These services will pick up your update notification and relay it to many other blog search and aggregation sites. I like using Pingoat to do this, with Feedburner as a backup.

Refer to Technorati’s nice configuration howto for details on setting up b2, Blogger, Ecto, MarsEdit, Movable Type, Nucleus, Radio UserLand, TypePad, and WordPress to use ping services.

Ping services to choose from

  • pingoat - PRO: has a rep for reliability, and a LOT of services, Google sitemap generator is a great tool, free. CON: May tag you as a “splog” if you are overly focused on marketroid speak. Services: 1engine.com, Weblogs.com AudioRPC, a2b.cc, amagle.com, bakeinu.jp, bitacoles.net, bitacoras.com, bitacoras.net, blo.gs, blog-search.net, blogdb.jp, blogdigger.com, bloggers.jp, blogmatcher.com, blogmura.jp, blogoon.net, blogpeople.net, blogrolling.com, blogshares.com, blogstreet.com, blogstyle.jp, bulkfeeds.net, catapings.com, cocolog-nifty.com, coreblog.org, dontpushme.com, effbot.org, feedburner.com, feedster.com, focuslook.com, freshpodcasts.com, geourl.org, gpost.info, icerocket.com, ipodder.org, longrank.com, memigo.com, moreover.com, my.yahoo.com, newsgator.com, newsisfree.com, pubsub.com, rubhub.com, syndic8.com, technorati.com, technorati.jp, topicexchange.com, veneblogs.com, weblogalot.com, weblogs.com, weblogs.se, weblogues.com
    Ping server address: http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
  • FeedBurner - PRO: nice interface, great services in general, fast, free. CON: not that many services. Services: Blog Buzz Machine, Feedster, Icerocket, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Ping-o-matic, PubSub, RssFwd, Syndic8, TailRank, Technorati, Weblogs.com, blogdigger
  • Ping-o-matic - PRO: many many services available as options, free. CON: Seems to be down a lot. Services: A2b GeoLocation, Audio.Weblogs, Blo.gs, BlogRolling, BlogShares, BlogStreet, Blogdigger, Feed Burner, Feedster, GeoURL, Icerocket, Moreover, My Yahoo, News is Free, NewsGator, PubSub, RubHub, Syndic8, Technorati, Topic Exchange, Weblogalot, Weblogs.com
    Ping server: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
  • Blog Flux - PRO: interesting other services besides just the pinging. CON: ??? (comments welcome) Services: 1740, A2b.cc, Audio.weblogs.com, Bakeinu, Bitacoles.net, Bitacoras.com, Bitacoras.net, Blo.gs, Blogbot.dk, Blogdb, Blogdigger, Blogg.de, Bloggers.jp, Blogmura, Blogoon, Blogrolling, Blogshares, Bulkfeeds, Catapings.com, Feedburner, Feedster, Geourl.org, Goo, Moreover, My Yahoo, Odeo, Rubhub, Sourceforge, Syndic8, Technorati, Weblogs, Weblogues.com
    Ping Server address: http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
  • technorati - Not a meta-pinger, but they are very important and they suggest direct pinging.
    Ping Server address: http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

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5 one-time site promotion tips that pay off big

Thursday, January 19th, 2006

Global visibilityMost writers want more readership for their sites, yet throw their hands up in despair over the “Google Sandbox”, and assume that no one will find them for a few months. That’s just not true if you put a little effort into your site promotion efforts. Here I present 5 tips which will only cost you a few moments of time, once, but which will pay off over the long term.

#1 Add your site to Opinmind

Opinmind is a unique service that searches sites for opinions, rendering an “opinmind” scale for any topic. For example:
google opinion sample

It does this by searching the content of sites, looking for opinions about the topic. You can get your site included in its searches, and linked on detail pane of their opinion search results by manually adding your site to their search engine.

Submit your site from the form at the bottom of any search results page.

#2 Add your site to IceRocket

IceRocket is a dedicated blog search engine. It has a number of interesting features, such as keyword term comparison graphs, where you can see how up to three terms have changed in popularity over time. Adding your blog to their searches will net you readers who are looking for blogs, which is a more valuable class of reader to many of us than the general reader referred from Google.

Submit your site on their Add Your Blog page.

#3 Add your site to TailRank

TailRank is an interesting site I first learned about on TechCrunch. They attempt to be a “newspaper of the blogosphere”, by aggregating hot conversations into groups, and highlighting blogs talking about or initiating hot topics. Most interestingly, they get their blogs to include from members’ subscription lists. You can get yours listed by importing an OPML feed list.

First, make an OPML feed list. The easiest way to do this is to make sure your sites are in your preferred RSS reader. I like Bloglines. Then, export the list as OPML. Most readers will do this for you.

Once you have the list, create an account at TailRank, and then import your feeds to TailRank.

#4 Submit your site to BlogPulse

BlogPulse is another dedicated blog search engine. It has a different focus than the others listed in this article, seemingly more interested in the “top sites” and “top searches”. Getting your site added to its search engine is a snap, though finding where to do it is less easy.

I found their blog submit page here.

#5 Add your sitemap to Google

Google will be able to crawl your site more efficiently if you give them a sitemap. This is especially easy to do if you are using WordPress, which has the excellent Google Sitemap plugin. If you aren’t using Wordpress, you can use Google’s own sitemap generator.

Once you’ve created your sitemap, submit it to Google and confirm that you own the site you are attempting to add. This will pay off in better-targeted searching at Google, as well as visibility into your crawl stats, errors and your pagerank. Nice payoff for a small amount of hoop-jumping!

Manage your sites and their sitemaps using the Google sitemap page.

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Niche market research techniques

Tuesday, January 17th, 2006

Researching at the libraryEveryone tells you the key to profits lies in finding a good niche. But with all the competition on the net, how do you analyze a potential niche to see whether it is worth your time? One good guide I’ve found is at Jamdo Blog Marketing.

He suggests the following steps:

  1. Use the keyword search tool at overture (go to: resource center, keyword selector tool) to see how popular your main search term is. A good bet is 20,000 searches.
  2. Go to Google, type in the search term, and go to the first ten sites. On each one, get the Page Rank using the Google Toolbar. Ideally, you don’t want any competition over PR5.
  3. For each of these sites, also go to Yahoo, and type in “link:the.site.url”. This will show the backlink count. You don’t want more than 100 or so.
  4. Lastly, go research your keywords on WordTracker (that link will pay Jamdo’s blog for his helpful article).
  5. For a more in-depth discussion, read the original article

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Keyword competition

Sunday, January 15th, 2006

Searching for keywordsEveryone says to focus on a niche, at least at first. But how do you find a niche that isn’t suffocated by well-established companies with legions of affiliates?

You look for niches which are just going by default to the top sites. At least that’s the strategy recommended in this article. The author points out that many sites don’t even really try for good search ranking for some niche products. But no one else is either, so the big guys win by default.

How to use this information

You can take advantage of that, and drive those non-targeted searchers to the site of your choosing. First, identify likely niche.

In my own keyword research I have found many keyword phrases that tens of thousands of Internet users are searching for every month by considering the following question…

Did the top ten websites purposely optimize their pages for this keyword phrase or did they get there simply because no one else is actively COMPETING for search engine placement?

Then, apply these tests from the article:

  1. Is the keyword phrase in the title of the listing?
  2. Is the keyword phrase used in the Domain Name of the listing?
  3. Is the keyword phrase used anywhere in the URL at all?
  4. How many backward links are pointing at the URL?
  5. Are the backward links pointing at the page mostly internal links or do the come from other quality websites?
  6. Is the URL a top level domain or some obscure page buried deep within a larger website.?

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