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.

Technorati Tags: Ferrazzi, never eat alone

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

Technorati Tags: napoleon hill, peace of mind, personal development, self help

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.

Technorati Tags: napoleon hill, personal development, peace of mind

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

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

Technorati Tags: Credibility, popularity, trustworthiness

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.

Technorati Tags: motivation, inspiration

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

Technorati Tags: ping services, xml-rpc, pingoat, pingomatic, blogflux, feedburner

#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:

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.

Technorati Tags: SEO, icerocket, opinmind, blogpulse, google, tailrank, sitemap, site promotion

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).

For a more in-depth discussion, read the original article

Technorati Tags: Niche marketing, affiliate marketing, keywords

]]> http://marketerseye.com/2006/01/17/niche-market-research-techniques/feed/ 0 http://marketerseye.com/2006/01/15/keyword-competition/ http://marketerseye.com/2006/01/15/keyword-competition/#comments Sun, 15 Jan 2006 22:21:08 +0000 Bruce Kroeze http://marketerseye.com/2006/keyword-competition.html . . . → Read More: Keyword competition]]> Everyone 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.?

Technorati Tags: keywords, adwords, seo, niches

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