Welcome to my Blogging Underground review. In this article I'm going to cover
what this service does, who it's for and whether it will work for you. What Is
Blogging Underground? It's a traffic system which consists of 3 main
components. It has been put
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (final/part 3)
The last 2 posts I've written have focused on featuring real businesses that have created highly successful social marketing strategies using LinkedIn as a key element.
I started the series with an overview of LinkedIn concepts, then moved into a guide for creating your LinkedIn profile, followed by a list of the 11 most powerful LinkedIn tools for small businesses. Finally, I outlined 6 core strategies that small businesses use to leverage LinkedIn for building a tribe and covered the first three:
Building a live community (LinkedIn tribe part 1) Business development (LinkedIn tribe part 2) Promoting a blog/branding/building traffic (LinkedIn tribe part 2)I also hosted an in-person Social Media Marketing workshop in New York City in which I provided the hands-on help many small business owners need to translate these strategies into action. If you missed it, click here to be notified of my upcoming Social Media Marketing events.
Today we cover the final 3 strategies.
Getting work as a freelancer or consultant Promoting a product Strategies for everyoneThe Freelancer or Consultant
As a consultant, outside of being good at what you do and generally being able to successfully run a business and manage clients, success is heavily dependant upon two things:
making sure people remember who you are and what you domaking sure enough people are in group number 1 to keep your pipeline full.
Finding ways to stay on the radar of people who will either hire you or refer you to new business is a critical challenge for freelancers and consultants.
You will find many examples of business owners who are using LinkedIn's "Q&A" feature as a significant element of their visibility and lead generation marketing.
Heidi Cool, owner of Heidi Cool Consulting is one great example. Heidi shared with me how by providing excellent answers to the questions of other LinkedIn members, she has built visibility and credibility for her business, more and higher quality traffic to her Web site and more leads.
Here's what Heidi did...
Using LinkedIn Q&A
The key for Heidi is not generic visibility, but high quality visibility - where her answers set her apart. She focuses on answering questions that are directly relevant to her areas of expertise and will possibly get selected by the questioner as "best" answers. When this happens, both the question and the answer show up in her profile further building her credibility as an expert in her field.
To give you a sense of scale, Heidi has spent 1-2 hours per week over the last 6 months answering questions related to Web site design. Questions her take about 5-30 minutes each to answer properly.
As a great example of the inherently holistic nature of social marketing, Heidi relies heavily on her existing blog content to make sure that questions get a thorough response in a way that would not be possible by just answering the question on LinkedIn alone (as of this writing there's a limit of 4,000 characters for responses). Heidi's Results
Related Articles by Maisha:Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (part 2)
Small Business "Success Studies" Using LinkedIn
LinkedIn the 11 Most Useful Features for Small Business
How to Use your LinkedIn Profile — a ChecklistHeidi received more than 3 times the number of visitors to her site in July when she focused heavily on this technique. She adds:"I can generate traffic from other sites for much less effort, but the quality of visitors isn't as high"Heidi defines quality as both how many pages visitors view on her site ("stickiness") and how many real inquiries/leads she receives from site visitors. For example, the visitors from an article aggregator site she posts content to are not "high quality". 86% of those visitors leave after viewing only one page, "and so far none have made an inquiry through my contact form".
But during July when she ramped up her Q&A strategy, LinkedIn visitors sent her 29 email requests for more information or project proposals.
Other Freelancer/Consultant techniques:
Create an Email Signature and consider including your LinkedIn Custom URL on your business cards and on more of your marketing materials to enable potential customers to learn more about you and your companyCreate a group
Send connection invitations immediately after conferences and events
Recommendations as strategy. Michael Zittel Owner, Serr.biz LLC offers this advice (in response to a LinkedIn Q&A of course):We use, and recommend to our clients, to at least utilize Linked In as a validation service of testimonials and "recommendations." It's easy for anyone to write a bogus testimonial about their services and post it on their site. It is not possible to do so on Linked in. So, having recommendations here, and posting on your site, then linking to LINKED IN so people can validate the reference is, in our approach, one of the simplest methods of utilizing LinkedIn.
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The Product Promoter
LinkedIn is a very interesting tool for those who have a product to sell or promote. The same way communities must be built for the purpose of congregation, businesses also need to build communities around services and products.
Author Gary Unger shared a great example of how he uses LinkedIn to regularly sell out of his book which is available for sale at Amazon.com. In July 2008 he published the book "How to Be a Creative Genius (in Five Minutes or Less)". Gary spends about 4 hours per day on LinkedIn, reading messages, looking for questions to answer, writing answers and interacting with people he meets. His results? He explains that for every good answer he posts, about 15 people will email him asking to connect. For his Web site he gets up to 500 unique visitors per week if he is as he says "in the zone" - active in answering questions. He also regularly checks his book sales during these periods and says that he will easily sell 20 books per week and see his Amazon ranking jump when he is actively posting.
Supporting this experience, freelance copywriter and marketing consultant Leon Altman cautions "You shouldn't try to sell directly from LinkedIn. But you can start building the bridge to marketing your products and services". Leon's also underscores the importance of landing pages "on your website you must get people to opt-in."
To Connect or Not to Connect?
One of the questions that often plagues early LinkedIn users is deciding who to connect to.
LinkedIn offers these suggestions:
Thoughtfully select those people you know and trust because these are the people you will seek advice from and request a recommendation about your/other's quality of work. Because of this, the quality of your contacts is always more important than the quantity of contacts. It is important you know your connections because you may be asked to recommend one of your connections to another. If you know little about the connection you weaken the integrity of the recommendation and your network...Choose your connections wisely as there are certain questions you might only ask a connection because you know and trust that member with this information. Be sure you trust your connections with the information you make available to them."However on the opposite end of the spectrum, many members of LinkedIn support what's called "open networking" meaning they will connect with pretty much anyone who sends them an invitation.
Also keep in mind these LinkedIn facts:
all connections are visible to your direct connections by default (although you can change this)maximum number of connections is 30,000
maximum number of invitations you can send is 3,000
My take on this is that I think once you know your goals, resources and the tools you have to work with, the question of who to connect with no longer takes on the same importance. If you need to build out a community of 500 people with very specific goals like Daniel Tunkelang from LinkedIn strategies part 1, perhaps open networking is not necessary for you. If however you're trying to build a community of 5,000 people with broad interests it's probably more important. Keep in mind that the more people you have in your network, the more people you can contact directly. This is probably the biggest advantage to accepting most of the invitations you receive.
Strategies for Everyone
Here are tips for other things you should do regardless of what category you fit into:
Update your job description — your profile and the details in it are the center of ALL activity on LinkedIn and are at the core of your credibility for whatever you do on LinkedIn. Keep it current with new accomplishments by updating it a few times per year.Check in — often a tactic used by successful business owners as a core of their business success. Use your profile as a Rolodex and check in with a few contacts each week or month just to say hello
Check References & Interests — it is always good to do a little research in preparation for a new relationship. In fact these days it's not at all creepy, it's respectful. The same way you'd research a company before an interview or a big sales presentation, these days each person is his or her own walking brand. Research their interests and know a little before you interact with them to help make the interaction more successful
Find people you should meet — if you know who your target audience is, you should also know some search criteria for finding them on LinkedIn. Perhaps it's not cost-effective for you to try to reach out to every one of your potential customers individually, but perhaps it's super smart to reach out to that guy or gal who runs the local chapter of the retailers association who could make a great strategic partner for your business.
Consider a LinkedIn ad — and tailor the reach to your target audience
What are you working on now? — this feature is often not noticed by your connections in my experience, but it can be used to share good news, newly completed projects, new hires with your connections
Maximize Travel - check the locations of your connections before you travel so you can schedule time to see people in the city your going to. (Thanks to @merylkevans for the reminder on this one!)
Maximize New Connections — Barbara Rozgonyi offers these words of advice "After you accept an invitation, consider replying with a quick personal message that includes a few bullet points about what you do, an opportunity to ask questions about your industry and additional ways to connect with you online such as your blog, ezine or forum." A great tip and something I try to do as well. Thank you, Barbara!
Connect Your Connections - helping others find the people they need from within your own network can go a long way. (Thanks to
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Read Related Articles by Maisha:
Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (part 2) Small Business "Success Studies" Using LinkedInLinkedIn the 11 Most Useful Features for Small BusinessHow to Use your LinkedIn Profile — a ChecklistSo What Do Polaroids & A MLM Business Have To Do With One Another?
For the last 30 years I've been an advertising photographer and stumbled across this video the other day by AmyJo Neal that got me t
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs pt 2
From the comments and emails I've received, the benefits I described in the first half of Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs have hit home but also helped you think of new ways that your blog can help you build your business.
I liked the issue raised in a comment by SaveMoneyCostCutting from last week. Sometimes it is a fine line between too much marketing and just enough. It is important to establish a position on this that will work based on what you're selling and to whom you're selling it. There's no one-size-fits-all on that one. Blogging is a tool you can use creatively to get out what you need to say to the world, and/or as a serious business tool for driving leads, creating advertising inventory (aka traffic), generating sales and building a brand. Just be true to the brand and the tone you establish.
I also like jimfracis' comment that blogging helps him "shape his convictions". As I mention towards the end of the "Credibility" paragraph helping you to actually articulate what you know or believe is definitely a big benefit.
If you think that blogging might be a great leads or revenue generator for your business, the problem is how to justify the fact that blogging is *really* time consuming, especially when you consdier that typically you'll spend at least the same amount of time marketing your blog as you do writing it, often more, sometimes, 2-3 times more.
So to help you to decide whether to blog or not to blog, I'll outline the final 5 of Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs.
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Click here to get notified of new posts to "The Internet Strategist" by Email
Networking
I think many people don't understand what it really means to "network" (not that I'm a guru). But instead of focusing on "networking" I'd like to talk specifically about "how to build" a network that will educate you, inform you, support you emotionally, and tell you about opportunities, and one that will also enable you to inform, support, provide opportunities for and educate it. This is a network that serves your needs 360 degrees. When you're building a network it's critical that people in your network know what it is that you need, and what you have to offer. Regularly publishing content that makes clear your areas of focus is a great way to help people very tangibly understand why they should connect with you. It's one thing to say you're an expert, it's another thing to write 50 articles about it that are read, appreciated, forwarded, reposted etc. Making it very clear what how you can help people is ironically also a great way for other people to figure out how they can help you.
Customer Loyalty, Customer Service & Customer Education
Product details, how-to instructions, usage hints can all be smart content to provide to build both sales and loyalty especially if your product is technically complex or has a lot of hidden features. A blog can be used like individual FAQ posts to answer both old and new customer questions. And just like FAQs, your posts/answers can highlight features that customers don't know about, or help customers understand the best way of using your product or service.
Related Articles by Maisha:Blogging's 11 Big Payoffs
To Blog or Not to Blog
Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (final/part 3)
Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (part 2)
Case Studies
One of the greatest benefits of Case Studies is self-identification. Case studies offer detail and context about a specific situation your product resolved and provide more information about the customer you worked with. This is wonderful for potential customers, enabling them to see themselves and see their specific needs, situation, challenges not only laid out in front of them and tangibly understand that you can fix it.
Social Media Content
Social media strategies and campaigns are built around content. Whether the content is video, images, or text, those businesses who invested in the idea that "content is king" now have a leg up in creating social media strategies because they have a store of content that can be used to support, encourage and extend dialog. If you have a blog you also have the beginnings of a wonderful social media strategy.
Consistent Presence
Presuming you blog with some regularity, blogging, like all social media tools, has the excellent benefit of helping you strengthen more of your weak ties by communicating with large numbers of people frequently and with relevance.
Advertising Revenue
Not that I created this list in any order of priority, but I do advise making a mental note of how far down on the list this one is (at the bottom). While generating significant revenue from your blog by selling advertising can still work for some bloggers, these days it is a difficult way to justify the investment if advertising revenue is the only payoff. You have to either have a significant amount of traffic (I'd think about 50,000 page views minimum) or have a captive audience of readers who are extremely difficult to reach else where, or both. While Google AdWords are great it generates tiny amounts of monthly revenue for most bloggers so don't assume that's all you'll need!
So Now What?
You may have looked at this list of payoffs and recognized several that fit squarely into your business strategy. So now what?
Armed even with knowledge of what reasonable goals are, I find that businesses trying to dive into the world of blogging are still somewhat at a loss for how to start. How on earth do I build an effective blog? How much time will it take? What tools are available and which ones make the most sense for our needs? How do I actually get all the payoffs?
Stay tuned — next time we dive into the technical side of blogging and how to get started.
Till then I look forward to hearing more about blogging benefits and what you get out of blogging for your business.
Two important notes:
Get Your Blog Featured
I will be highlighting a variety of companies as examples in upcoming posts. If you've had success with your Blog and can describe results/back it up with real data, you can submit your Blogging strategy here.
Get a Free Blog or Web Site!
Even in a bad economy there's a silver lining. I'm giving away a free Web site! If you'd like to be the lucky business owner tell me about your business and why you should win here. I acknowledge I'll be choosing the winner purely based on my own discretion. Heck I may even choose more than one. I look forward to seeing your entry!
Have a question? Got something to share? Something I missed?
Your feedback, comments, real world experience and tactical questions are an important part of the discussion. If you have a comment, question or feedback post it below.
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Blogging's 11 Big PayoffsTo Blog or Not to BlogBuilding Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (final/part 3) Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (part 2)Pinpointing the Next Bubble
Each day,Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here's what we found today.
Start-up bubble? Nope, says Thiel. College bubble? Perhaps. "Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you," Sarah Lacy writes in TechCrunch today. Lacy sits down with the PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel at his home in San Francisco to discuss what Thiel believe is the next big bubble. And, no, it has nothing to do with tech or start-ups. In fact, it's perhaps the most sacrosanct of all American institutions: a college education. "A true bubble is when something is over-valued and intensely believed," he says. "Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus." This is perhaps a justication-or a reason-for Thiel's "20 under 20" where he pays 20 kids under the age of 20 $100,000 to pursue a business idea. But the program has drawn criticism from academic-types that argue that a 19-year-old can't successfully run a well-rounded business. So, what do you think? Is education valued too highly, or is this just hot air from Thiel?
The art of being a part-time entrepreneur. As the hiring market heats up, The Wall Street Journal poses an interesting question for people who started their own companies after being laid off: "Should you continue growing your start-up or go back to earning a steady paycheck?" For some, like Kevin Dinino, founder of KCD Public Relations, going back to work for "the man" would be impossible. "I'm the decision maker," he tells The Journal. "I don't have to take orders anymore." For others, though, it's a necessity. When Stephanie Burns' start-up, Chic CEO, ran out of funding, she took on a marketing job at a healthcare company. Now, Burns wears two hats as an entrepreneur and marketing exec. But before you consider that option, consider the cautionary tale of Kendra Kroll, who got fired for talking about her company Undercover Solutions while on the clock at her day job. "Going forward," Kroll says, "I would be more cautious about the way I accept a position given my propensity for talking about my business."
Gathering signatures gets simpler. Is your business wasting a lot of time and money sending documents around town—or around the world—when they need a signature for a transaction? Now there's an app for that, the New York Post reports. It's called Sign Docs, and it's exclusively for the iPad now, for $6.99.
Nurturing creativity. In today's ultra-competitive marketplace, one may argue that the only truly sustainable competitive advantage is creativity. But creativity doesn't just happen to an organization; it requires building a culture that fosters curiosity, exploration, and innovation. Forbes compiled a list of the seven most important rules to establishing and maintaining a creative startup culture. It emphasizes concepts such as diversity, independence, celebrating and sharing ideas freely, and how to act in the face of failure.
Is a social media consultant right for you? It's an existential crisis. You want to promote your small business on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, but you have no time to post or tweet because you're too busy actually running your small business. Never fear, there's a consultant for that. Today, Mashable posted a guide to to help small business owners decide if outsourcing your social media efforts to a consultant is the right step for your business. The guide follows a recent MerchantCircle survey revealing that that of 8,500 small businesses, two-thirds use social media as a marketing tool, but one-third of these admit they lack the time and resources to be sufficiently social. Mashable's guide offers four questions to consider, including whether social media will drive your business growth, how well your social media is working now, if outsourcing could free up more of your time, and how to determine ROI of using a consultant.
How they did it. Women who made it big talk to the Wall Street Journal about how they fought challenges in the workplace to get where they are today. Here's Mellody Hobson, Julie Louise Gerberding, and Marissa Mayer, and it's all part of the Journal's well done and extensive report on women in the economy that came out this month.
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The Week on AdFreak (Adfreak)
Out-of-home advertising was hot this week, just as springtime got in full
swing. We also got a new Aflac duck, a possibly gay military spot from
Budweiser and a remarkably sexist poster from Dos Equis. Check out all the
AdFreak highlights from the week below.
1. Classic anti-drug ads
Rebecca Cullers put together a great collection of anti-drug ads that might
have had the opposite effect on the target market than they intended. Lots of
great '80s stuff in here. Just say whoa! 10 Anti-Drug Ads That Make You Want
to Take Drugs
2. Aflac's new quack
It doesn't look like a duck, but it quacks like a duck. After a monthlong
search, Aflac found its new feathered mascot--36-year-old Dan McKeague of
Hugo, Minn. Yes, his quack is nearly as annoying as Gilbert Gottfried's. Meet
the New Voice of the Aflac Duck
3. Budweiser: Don't ask, don't tell
A TV spot featuring a gay U.S. soldier from Bud, that prototypical Americana
marketer? Maybe, maybe not. You be the judge. Is This Budweiser Ad Gay?
4. Clever new outdoor ads
A street ad from Holland for a local aquarium appears on ...
swing. We also got a new Aflac duck, a possibly gay military spot from
Budweiser and a remarkably sexist poster from Dos Equis. Check out all the
AdFreak highlights from the week below.
1. Classic anti-drug ads
Rebecca Cullers put together a great collection of anti-drug ads that might
have had the opposite effect on the target market than they intended. Lots of
great '80s stuff in here. Just say whoa! 10 Anti-Drug Ads That Make You Want
to Take Drugs
2. Aflac's new quack
It doesn't look like a duck, but it quacks like a duck. After a monthlong
search, Aflac found its new feathered mascot--36-year-old Dan McKeague of
Hugo, Minn. Yes, his quack is nearly as annoying as Gilbert Gottfried's. Meet
the New Voice of the Aflac Duck
3. Budweiser: Don't ask, don't tell
A TV spot featuring a gay U.S. soldier from Bud, that prototypical Americana
marketer? Maybe, maybe not. You be the judge. Is This Budweiser Ad Gay?
4. Clever new outdoor ads
A street ad from Holland for a local aquarium appears on ...
Real-Time Data And A More Personalized Web (Smashing Magazine)
As Web designers, we face a daily struggle to keep pace with advances in
technology, new standards and new user expectations. We spend a large part of
our working life dipping in and out of recent developments in an attempt to
stay both relevant and competitive, and while this is what makes our industry
so exciting to be a part of, it often becomes all too easy to get caught up in
the finer details.
Responsive Web design, improved semantics and Web typography have all seen
their fair share of the limelight over the last year, but two trends in
particular mark true milestones in the maturation of the Web: ?real-time data?
and a more ?personalized Web.?
technology, new standards and new user expectations. We spend a large part of
our working life dipping in and out of recent developments in an attempt to
stay both relevant and competitive, and while this is what makes our industry
so exciting to be a part of, it often becomes all too easy to get caught up in
the finer details.
Responsive Web design, improved semantics and Web typography have all seen
their fair share of the limelight over the last year, but two trends in
particular mark true milestones in the maturation of the Web: ?real-time data?
and a more ?personalized Web.?
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