Review Influencer, the Power to Change Anything

I am a big fan of Vital Smarts books, training, and CD’s. Their first book, Crucial Conversations, contains essential skills needed for success working with other people. It was only later in my studies that I realized that Vital Smarts borrowed liberally from the world of non-violent communications studies.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/mH3Z4ME6TBUY2/ref=ent_fb_link

I wasn’t as enthused about the second book, (Crucial Confrontations), but felt it was worthwhile nontheless. I view it as a supplement to Crucial Conversations, which focuses mostly on the having conversations when there is a confrontation at stake.

Well, I’m extremely happy to say that Vital Smarts new book, Influencer – The Power to Change Anything, is not an example of the law of diminishing returns. This book is arguably the best thing coming out of Vital Smarts.

This book is a study of what works in the field of Influence, and borrows from social and positive psychology, management, sociology, and non-violent communications. The folks from Vital Smarts borrow from everybody, but come up with something that is cohesive, unique, and effective.

Mixed in with the data, are numerous examples and case studies that serve not only clarify the content, but make the book an easy read as well.

This book is a must read, (or a must listen to), if you want to understand the tools to make change in your life, your company, and your world. Whether you’re trying to lose weight or reduce disease progression in an impoverished country, Influencer has something for you.

www.vitalsmarts.com

You’d Think They Would Know Better ZD-NET and SPAM

Once a year or so, I unsubscribe to everything email. Newsletters, marketing, things I want, things I don’t want. It doesn’t matter, it’s a purge, a way to get things in my inbox back in order.

This year, I’ve only had a bad experience with one company, and to my surprise, it was ZD-NET.   Their emails keep coming, and coming, and coming, like the Terminator.

So, I sent a nice email out to  Jason Young, CEO at Ziff-Davis pubishing.

Jason,

I know this is not intentional on the part of your teams, but ZD has grown so much that when it comes to email, you are a victim of your own success.

Half of my inbox was being filled up with your publications, and despite multiple what appeared to be successful attempts to unsubscribe, I’m still getting them.

I’m a reader, I know that ZD frequently rallies against this type of issue. Could you have someone on your team investigate the issue, and see what’s going on?

Thanks

Paul Misner

I didn’t get a response from anyone on Jason’s staff, but I did have the Web Buyer’s Guides Stop coming, but other email from Ziff Davis keeps coming and coming and coming.  At least 5 more since I wrote this letter.

The Can SPAM act requires

that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a “menu” of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.

Ziff-Davis has been made aware that this is a problem, yet they are not addressing it.   What’s up??

Note: Class Action Attorneys, count me out. I don’t want a free subscription to PC World for 2 months, while you collect a big settlement.

Search Engine Optimization: Tuning Your Site for More Visitors

The Internet is a very large and somewhat intimidating environment. With well over 60 million pages on the Internet, and with the Fortune 500 pouring millions of dollars in Internet advertising and paid placement, the adage. “If you build it, they will come”, simply is not true.

The true currency of the Internet is information. That’s what users are looking for, and if you provide end users with valuable information for your targeted group, and organize your website so that search engines will give you a high placement, then you will get the audience that you desire. Money may help in getting placed on the Internet, but intelligent information is still is of greater value to the search engines, and by definition will always need to be so. If a search engine takes a user primarily to sponsored sites of little value, the user will most likely find an alternative search method.

Search Engine Optimization

A search engine optimization (SEO) plan should be a part of any web marketing strategy. A business can pay tens of thousands of dollars for a search engine consultant, but it is not necessary. There are a number of free and low-cost tools out there to do analysis for you. Combined with hard work and a bit of ingenuity, you can find yourself in the prime time search engine space, the top 20 of Google, MSN, Yahoo or Ask.

Throughout this article, I will use the example of a typical hardcover book to draw analogies to what search engines are looking for.

What are you about?

And who do you want to reach? You wouldn’t try to write a book without a theme, and you shouldn’t have a website without a theme. Your theme is the mission for your site, and should be consistent with your overall marketing and sales plan. You should frame your mission in the following way.

I wish to provide my readers with information on _______________________ and I will receive __________________.

The first portion of this statement is what you are giving. If you provide nothing of value, then a searcher or a search engine probably won’t arrive at your site. The phrase “unique value proposition” gets thrown around these days, but in this case the phrase is entirely appropriate. The more unique and valuable the information you provide is, the greater the chance you’ll be placed higher on a search engine.

The second portion lists what outcomes you want. Your goal for a business site should ultimately provide some financial value. An objective like “raised brand awareness” is only a partial objective. “Raised brand awareness which will ease my access into major accounts and result in more, faster, and better sales,” is a much more complete mission.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are equivalent to the keywords a library database would have about a book. Once you have your mission down, you should be able to further break down the information topics you provide into keywords. These keywords should be added as Meta tags to your website. Meta tags should reflect precisely what information your site provides. You should keep your metatags at a limit of 300 characters.

Title Analysis

The name of your website is probably more equivalent to a title of a book, but a website also has a title. This website title is the subtitle of your site, and will be used by the search engines to categorize your site. A title should be relevant to your site and also your geography, if you do business in a certain area. For example, you should be “Washington, D.C.’s number one ad agency” if that is your market.

Robots

A robot, or crawler, is used by a search engine to read your site. You should check and see if robots can read your entire site, except for those areas that you don’t want the search engines to crawl. There are tools to do this mentioned below.

Keyword density

When a search engine’s robot reads a site, it is looking for a percentage of keywords that are the same or similar to each other. While in normal writing it’s good to mix things up, on the Internet consistency is the rule of the day. Try to have 4%-7% of your content using the keyword topics. Don’t overdue it, the search engine bots will flag your site for keyword spamming. A good rule of thumb is just to mentally focus on your keywords while you write your content. Much of the time, this conscious focus will be all it takes to get you in the correct range.

Backlinks

When you pick up a book at a book store, you probably look for the reviews on a dust jacket. There are probably a number of quick one-liners on the back from other famous authors. If a book merits a thumbs up from another author whose work you enjoy, it is more likely you’ll pick up the book.

Backlinks work in much the same fashion. Search engine robots are looking for sites that are connected to you. Each site that is connected to you has a relative rating or value placed upon it by the search engines. Your placement is largely based upon the relative value of the other sites and the number of sites backlinked to you.

Authority Sites

When a site is deemed authoritative by a search engine, it receives higher rankings in terms of site value. A link from an authoritative site is a great way to raise your value on a search engine. It’s even better to become an authoritative site. Groups such as trade organizations, museums, or industry publications seem to be deemed authoritative more often than ordinary sites.

Tools and other sites

There are a number of tools that you can use to analyze your site for search engine optimization. Some of the best are free.

You can get some great tools for free from: www.fromshawn.com . Shawn Pringle is an excellent Internet marketer in his own right, and he’s giving away some of the best tools on the market for search engine optimization. Shawn is just a fantastic guy, and he’s a pleasure to do business with. I also love his shareware PR Prowler tool.

The Google toolbar provides a great resource for quickly looking at page rankings.

I have a good, very low cost hosting provider, www.siteground.com. The free SEO tools that they offer are to me worth the cost of signing up for a website, even if you don’t use it. A year of service at Siteground is $6.95 a month, which includes their free SEO tools.

Last but not least, check out www.seochat.com . In my opinion, it is the most definitive site devoted to search engine optimization.

You shouldn’t expect results overnight, and in fact you should be planning your SEO strategy to start bearing fruit in six to nine months. It’s been rumored that Google “sandboxes” new sites for up to nine months to keep them out of top rankings, so be patient.

Snake Oil SEO

I was asked recently by a friend if doing SEO could get her in trouble with the search engines. The answer is “NO” if you use ethical techniques like the ones described above. You are actually helping the search engines improve their ability to find information by using these techniques.

Beware of the “SEO Snake Oil Salesmen” who promise top placements in days for a fee. These are equivalent to “get rich” schemes. They frequently involve using tactics that could get you in trouble with the search engine providers. The only way to get a better placement is to follow the rules, and provide legitimate value.

Search Engine Optimization is a science, but it’s not rocket science. If you use the tools available to you as well as some ingenuity and hard work, you will move your website into the forefront, and you will make your business more successful.

One Page is All it Takes- The One Page Proposal Reviewed

There’s a book I want you to pick up, especially if you sell to C-Level People. It’s called The One Page Proposal, and it’s by Patrick Riley (BTW, I linked this to the Amazon page because Patrick Riley isn’t Shawn Pringle when it comes to Web Marketing.

I started making money with this book before I finished reading it. (I ended up skipping to the back, and looking at the examples.)

The book teaches how to write a conscise summary to present to a C-Level Executive.  The basic concept is that a CEO has 30 seconds to review your proposal. If it is too technical, or too long, or too complicated, it probably will never get read by the C.

Comments I get on the one page proposal are, “This is what I needed to bring to the team”, or “This is what I need to start this project”.

I’ve used this type of proposal to get things running internally with my VP as well.

Get this book!  A small investment in reading, a small financial investment, and a lot of research will get be worth it.

Combine this approach with my 15 Minute C-Level Meetings, and you’ll have a solid foot in the door.

Here’s a redacted copy of the memo I wrote for tomorrow’s blog topic.

VIRTUALIZATION OF XXX TEST LAB ENVIRONMENT
An initiative to improve the quality of external testing and benchmarking for XXX

TARGET:  Create an easier, better, faster way for customers to benchmark and test XXX. Exchange this testing tool in exchange for knowledge of who is testing.

” Customize an existing virtual machine server environment as a server to test XXX and competitive products.
” Develop documentation to facilitate an easy install.
” Develop a set of tests that can be used to evaluate XXX against other products, using the test server.
” Create a marketing campaign that says that we have this available, and in exchange for customer information, we will allow a download.
” Create a set of tutorial videos that shows how to set this server up.
” Create a set of promotional disks that can be sent out to CIOs and the analyst/reviewer community.

XXX has been seeing an amazing increase in the number of customers wishing to evaluate and test XXX in the lab.  I’ve witnessed a great deal of variance in lab testing, which for the most part has been abysmal.  Lab testing is generally shorter in time, limited in focus, and misses important features.  It is proving to be very costly for us to participate in lab testing, setup time takes up much of the day, and results are not optimal, because of the disparities in testing, and the limited amount of knowledge the evaluators have.

If XXX would develop a virtual server testing environment that contains all the tools necessary to do a complete demo of us against the competition, we gain the following advantages.

” Reduced Configuration Time
” More Complete and Faster Evaluation Process
” Goodwill from the Customer Community
” Knowledge of prospects evaluating this project.

I would recommend that we do not use internal XXX resources to develop the actual Virtual Machine.  It would reduce our costs, keep focus, and maintain impartiality if we have a third party do the actual development of this server environment. We could use open source tools to set up a Linux distribution that has a mail server, DNS, DHCP, Microsoft networking, a database, and file shares, with sample sets of data.
RESOURCES:

Since we are using standard open source tools, we could outsource this project for a very low cost. We would require a minimum amount of internal engineering help to outline the initial configuration.

We can also use external resources to document the install, and even record the training videos.  This of course can also be done with internal resources.

XXX marketing would need to develop the appropriate collateral and web resources to facilitate distribution. We’d also need to provide distribution resources for physical media, if we choose to distribute this.

ACTION: XXX will assign a team containing a member of marketing and XXX engineering.  A project and financial plan will be drawn up, and upon approval, the project will be executed.

This example differs slightly from the examples in the book, primarily because it was aimed at an internal executive. It is in the spirit of the OPP.

The Intra-Office Microloan

One of the by-products of being relatively self-sufficient ( but not necessarily proficient or artistic) from a marketing and technical side is that I have grown impatient.  With even a small company, things have to go through certain people, and that takes a lot of time, especially for small stuff.  It’s so much easier sometimes to get the job done outside of the company.

I met this really nice woman on my block walking two beautiful dogs (labs?) a few weeks ago. We got to talking and she said that she was with the Grameen Foundation.  I spoke with her about what they do, and realized that I had just read an article in the Harvard Business Review about the need to develop success metrics for microfinance,  so I was able to sound like I knew what I was talking about.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking just how cool if companies had an internal microfinance program.  In terms of administration, this could be handled like an expense report, only that instead of an expense, this becomes an investment.

The purpose of the intra-office microloan would be to enable employees to invest in low cost activities or purchases that either lower operating costs, or increase revenue.

Think about it. If I know there is something out there that I can do myself, that makes my company better, and costs less than $2000, it probably costs my company more in manpower to approve it, then the actual project will.

Siteground- An Out of Sight Hosting Service at a Fantastic Price

Siteground should be a case study for how to manage a service for small businesses. Customers who pay $6 to $8 a month for hosting get a wide range of pre-installed applications and virtually unlimited disk space and bandwidth. And every few months, an email comes saying that customers are generally getting more bandwidth and more disk space.

But the most amazing thing about Siteground is their support. Even with over 100,000 sites hosted, Siteground’s tech support team responds to most tickets within 15 minutes.

I’ve used Siteground for over 3 years now, after leaving one hosting provider who abandoned me and another who had abysmal customer support. I’m not going to tell you everything is perfect. It’s been a great marriage though, and they have raised me from a customer to a fanatic.

I asked Lilyana Yakimova, who is Marketing Director for Siteground, to answer a few questions about how Siteground works.

Paul : When you started in Siteground in 2004, did you ever think that you were going to have 100K customers in less than 5 years?

Lilyana: The truth is that at the beginning we did not set a goal like: “we need to have a certain number of customers in certain number of years”. We were not obsessed with the numbers but we rather concentrated on creating a service that will be good and useful for many people. So it seems that this approach was appropriate.

P: What are some of the factors in your being able to maintain a high level of support, even with so many customers?

L: It is extremely challenging to provide quality support, when you target a low cost market and the number of your customers grows so fast. There are two main factors that allowed us to keep up with the good support level: good admin work that helps us keep the number of server issues to minimum levels and good support system and team that helps us decrease problem resolution times.

The non-stop automatic server monitoring help our server administrators diagnose and solve many problems before they ever affect our customers. This is one way to decrease the number of reported problems. Our server administrators also believe that when a problem occurs its immediate resolution is just a small part of the work. What is more important is that we make efforts that it never occurs again. This way almost every server problem occurring now help us have less problems in the future.

The other thing that helps us provide efficient support to so many customers is our constantly improving HelpDesk. It was started as a simple form for posting a ticket. Now it includes quick answers for the most frequent questions, several extremely innovative report generating tools that reduced the time for problem solving dramatically. We are also constantly adding new features.

P: I’ve noticed on your site that you have both offices in the US and Bulgaria. How do these two offices work together?

L: The company’s main activities are performed from Bulgaria. However, we do have experience in coordinating two offices in different geographical locations and I may say that it requires a very clear structure, efficient communication and strong management.

P: How do your keep your staff motivated? They seem almost to jump on support tickets.

L: We have high standards regarding the speed of the support team reaction, especially when it comes to serious problems like website or email being inaccessible. These high standards are definitely not easily met by everyone. However, people who make the effort always receive the recognition. There is also a lot of fun, besides the hard work, that bonds our team together.

P: With the growth of Web 2.0, streaming media, and other high bandwidth needs, how do you see Siteground keeping up with that challenge?

L: I believe that to a great extent there is a natural balance in our industry. The price of server resources falls constantly and these technologies become more and more massively available.

P: With such a barebones price, how do you support marketing initiatives?

L: It is true that money is one of the important things needed for a successful marketing initiative. Good ideas, however, can often be even more important. IOur low cost put some constraints on our marketing budgets, but on the other hand it inspires us for more creativity. Another thing that helps us grow without a big marketing budget is the fact that our customers are happy with our service. Once they start using our services they often transfer all their websites to us and they also tell their friends about us.

P: And finally what’s the weirdest site that you host?

L: We have had such a diversity of websites that it is really hard to single out one as the weirdest. I have made some quick research among the people in the office and the most weird we come up with was a website that was asking each subscriber for a list of all the people, who have ever called him/her “an idiot” and explanation for the reason this happened. Not surprisingly it did not have many subscribers:)

I hope that this interview didn’t sound too much like an infomercial. The downside to working with Siteground is that there is no phone support. If you don’t like working through a helpdesk, even one that’s blazingly fast, then you’ll probably want to go elsewhere. (Me, I prefer helpdesks myself).

I really, really, really like Siteground, and if you are considering a place to host, you should check them out. www.siteground.com

Is this a Gift?

I don’t know how to think about this, so I’d figure I’d just blog it, and ask my readers.

On our anniversary, my wife and I went to a wonderful, but expensive restaurant around us. The bill was about $250, and we didn’t get a bottle of wine, but it was definitely worth it. The waiter was excellent, the service extraordinary, a great night.

A good friend of mine is running a fundraising event this February. She  requests donations from various businesses in the area. My friend called the restaurant, and asked for a donation.

She did get a donation, a gift card for $25. Twenty-five bucks won’t buy someone two mixed drinks in that place, much less than a meal.  So, here are my thoughts, mixed as they are.

1) $25 gift card is a gift, and should be accepted with gratitude.
2) $25 is an insult, it’s worse than giving nothing at all.
3) My friend did not relay the benefit of giving generously to her organization. It’s for a good cause, but also just about everyone in that room will fit the demographics that this restaurant needs. Other good restaurants in the area, like the Elkridge Furnace Inn, understand this, and make it part of their marketing plan.

I guess I’ll look at the gift as a $25 donation, and give it mentally the value of a $25 donation. Thank you, restaurant. Your gift was nice and appreciated. The size of it does not particularly encourage me to go to your restaurant again, but I won’t boycott you either. Nor do I feel encouraged to mention your name, but if someone asks me about the restaurant, I will say it’s great. You haven’t been raised any higher on the list of places where I entertain clients (which would have more than made up for a good donation, I’m more than certain), but you haven’t been placed any lower either.