Being Smarter

A great technique for getting your business noticed is to set yourself apart from the pack by BEING HONEST! We all write marketing blurb which stretches the truth from time to time…

How about doing things differently, acknowledge when something isn’t quite right and tell the world about it? If you have a strong brand and a loyal set of followers, they will respect your honesty. I heard a great story about this concept yesterday from the very unique Jeffrey Hollender, founder of Seventh Generation and I’m going to tell that story another time. He took things to extremes and it paid off.

I came across two other examples of this honesty this morning.

1) Andy Palmer, SEO dude extraodinaire is a long time colleague of mine and has always tried to do things differently. He posted the feedback given to him by his audience at a seminar he gave yesterday. Whilst the results are good, he acknowledges room for improvement. Look – it’s the first time he’s given this seminar – so it was never going to be perfect. But, what a bold step to publish those results.

2) Alliance software, the company behind the amazing Market Samurai tool has also been honest. We all read About Us sections on websites every day of the week. How many have you seen which write about their strengths AND weaknesses. Refreshing or what.

How could you be more honest?

With Being Smarter’s emphasis now on helping businesses to get noticed, this morning sees a big development in the evolution of Google. If you want your business to get noticed, clearly you need to figure out the online game if you’re not already.

My first search this morning showed that Google is slowly rolling out a new SERPS layout, in that it didn’t show on another PC this morning, despite it using the same IP address. You may not yet have seen this – and so there’s a screenshot below.

Some big changes have been made. Notice first of all on the right the emphasis on video search. Secondly, with the search options opened up which admittedly few people will play with, look what happens when the preview button is ticked.

A whole new set of challenges for businesses and SEO-meisters  have just started as the race to get noticed continues.

Click the image below to go full screen. Be fascinated in your thoughts.

I’ve come across a few interesting posts and videos lately which I thought would be interesting to bring together.

I guarantee you that you can always find a new or different way to win new customers if you think / look hard enough.

There’s some great advice in the links below:

Why you aren’t getting new business referrals – from the Marketing Profs folks – people I admire from afar

B2B lead generation video – I interview Lindsay Willott, an ex-boss and the founder of The Marketing Practice

The art of getting a business referral from Flying Solo – colleagues in Australia

Understanding business development from one of my favourite authors, Seth Godin

The lead generation handbook – a pdf I read a couple of years ago which still holds true today

Here’s a suggestion, pick something new and try it today. What’s the worst that can happen?

I don’t know about you, but I seem to be more attuned than ever to watching how advertisers and marketers are getting their messages across to audiences which are more and more discerning. These audiences are bombarded from the moment they wake to the moment their heads hit the pillow. I wouldn’t be surprised if in years to come someone figures out rate cards for dream-advertising and we all go to bed wearing some kind of skull cap attached to the mains.

Anyway, I digress.

My iPhone doesn’t leave my side and I find myself being pointed at a lot, whilst I take photos of random interesting things in order to share them with others.

I love it when advertisers put a smile on my face. Does it really cost anything to think laterally and get people to talk about your advertising? This is such a cool example by a favourite brand of mine. Poking fun at themselves and at the same time delivering a great message about a new product just launching…

When was the last time you thought outside the box and got creative? Go on – you know you want to…

We’re delighted to welcome another guest blogger to the Being Smarter stable. Maria Sadler runs The Small Marketing Company and has set herself up (quite uniquely) as a Social Media manager for people who know they should… but don’t have the time.

Maria’s first thoughts for Being Smarter are below…

You don’t need to throw large sums of money at advertising and PR to get started you just need to be a bit savvy. So here are some tips to get you started.

1) Think about your targets first

This may sound obvious but if you start to really hone in on who your ideal customer is, you can start to identify where they ‘hang out’. For example if your business benefits mothers with school age children you could target PTAs and school newsletters. If your business or service would be of interest to local businesses, check out the local Chamber of Commerce and local networking groups.

Now you know who your targets are and where you might find them, you need to consider how to attract their attention. If you are targeting a busy professional who will no doubt receive countless emails per day you need to grab their attention fast by being brief, different and a little intriguing.

These are probably the ideal people to send an eye catching but short email – Targets to Prospects software is perfect for this – or consider approaching them via Twitter, where you get 140 characters to grab attention.

2) Now think about your message

Once you understand your customer, you can then start to craft your message to make sure you get their attention. Work out what problems and issues they face and then think how your product or service could help resolve them. You may be desperate to tell them about a great new feature of your product but guess what, your potential customer won’t care.

Try the ‘so what’ test. So what benefit does that feature give the customer, focus on the feature that gives the greatest benefits, and think about the problems your customer has that you can alleviate.

3) Differentiate yourself from the competition

Whilst price is always a factor, at the moment is isn’t always the decider. So you need to determine what is different/better about your service above the competition. Here is one of the places that being ‘visible’ and something of an authority on a subject can be of great advantage, and this is where an online presence comes in.

Think about when you are looking for a product or service – what is the first thing you do? If you are like most people, you will go to Google and do a search for the type of product or service you need. If your name or company name keeps appearing on websites, blogs, articles, Twitter and other social media, discussing that very thing – the potential customer will begin to believe in your credibility.

4) Get your customers to blow your trumpet

Once you start to sell your product or service, ask your customers if they could give you feedback – you can then start to use this on your marketing materials as proof that you deliver. This will also become a very useful source of information on how you can improve your product in the future and what new products you could add to expand your offering. Finally it shows your customers that you care about what they think, and want to provide the best customer service.

Maria Sadler runs The Small Marketing Company which specialises in online marketing using Social Media. Follow her at www.twitter.com/mfsadler

Copywriting is a skill. A skill which can take years to master. A skill which you perhaps will never master, yet if you run any kind of business, the chances are you have a need to be able to write persuasively, clearly and concisely on a daily basis.

Whether it’s an important internal email, an email to a target or a client, a blog post, an advertisement or a script, there’s a big difference between average copy and great copy.

Assuming you don’t have years to master the art, if you need to get a document together quickly, then this application may be for you.

Wordy is a WordPress plugin and web service which takes your draft copy and provides it to a network of copywriters for proofing and editing as required.

Academic text, corporate literature, blog posts and web content are all among the categories of copy that Wordy’s professional editors can handle, with specialized staff available to work on material focused on specific subjects. The interface to them is simple – you upload your file to Wordy.com, or use a WordPress plugin for integrated editing.

Wordy then instantly returns a quote along with an approximate delivery time. As an example – EUR 7.68 for 26 minutes of editing on a 440-word document. If you accept, a Wordy copy editor checks the text for grammar, spelling, punctuation and structure—the company can currently accommodate both UK and US English—and returns it in ready-to-publish form. After that, you have two business days to accept the work or request a re-edit.

A great concept and one for the copy-phobic amongst you. We’ve not tried it yet – but if you have – why not leave a comment below.

Related articles

• A Word About Wordy (binarybonsai.com)
• Write Eye Catching Headlines In 32.4 Seconds (cenaynailor.com)
• Increasing Revenue By Becoming A Great Copywriter (pro2sell.com)

As regular readers to the Being Smarter website will know, we like to feature new ways of doing things. Innovation is so key in business and today, we’re delighted to be participating in an innovation called a blog book tour which fuses social media, brilliant segmenting of a marketplace and win-win for the book authors and promoters.

We’ve been lucky enough to have Dr Karl Kapp, Professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University PA, USA as an advocate of The 8.45 Club‘s method of training. We were delighted when he asked us if we would like to participate as a guest blog on Day #12 of his blog book tour, to promote the sale of his excellent new book “Learning in 3D” (affiliate link).

We thought that because 30 other people will be talking about the book itself, instead, let’s talk to Karl about this blog book tour concept, find out what such a thing actually is, how it’s being used in this context, and most importantly, how YOU could use it yourselves to promote your next publication. Guess what, it could be applied to any product or service with a bit of thought – so even if you’re not an author – keep watching…

So make a coffee – sit back and watch Dr Karl, live by satellite…

OK, so there are hundreds of sites, all claiming to be expert in getting website visitors and we we’re not pretending to be specialists, however we do have over 30 sites, all receiving traffic, some more than others and have been in the game for a couple of years now, which isn’t that long, but more than many…

Being Smarter, as regular readers will know is all about helping businesses do things better, faster, quicker… and thinking outside the box. Today is no exception.

I meet many people in my job all looking to set up web businesses, or who have bricks and mortar businesses, who don’t get online at all or who have some kind of webpresence, but it may as well be a blank homepage for all the good it does them.

Simply put, nothing will happen online unless you have visitors to your site, or ‘traffic’ as it’s known. Unless you have traffic, no one can buy anything, read anything, connect with you, collaborate with you or spread your message.

If you want one of the best explanations of this concept, then I thoroughly recommend you take 6 minutes out of you day and watch the video below…

Anyway, that’s not the main reason for today’s article.

Hopefully now, you appreciate the value of “traffic” to your website. The next question is how do you get it? There is of course no simple answer, and the devil is in the detail, however, I stumbled across a great set of immediately implementable ideas for someone starting out, or an established web business and wanted to share it with you.

Download 366 Traffic Methods here.

I know I called the title 365 – because there’s at least one method I’m not sure about, however in 10 minutes, you’ll be able to scan through the pdf and choose at least 100 you could use for your business.

I should add, there’s a pitch from the orginial author in the first couple of pages, which if you purchase will earn us a few bucks/pounds, however it’s easily skippable, to get on to the meaty part!

Take action today and go get some more traffic!