Category: Letters From Dan

I just thought of this this morning.  How can you find out who is in your niche, what they’re doing and stay on top of that – without a lot of work?

I went to the book signing/book tour Scott Stratten was doing for Unmarketing this week. And then I read a blog post about the best business books ever.

And then on top of that I go to a Geek Breakfast every few weeks where everyone seems to be reading new, awesome books. Where does everyone get the time?

Well, it actually doesn’t bother me like it used to because I can pretty much talk about any new book out there.

So I’m a huge fan of Rick Raddatz. I love most of the stuff he comes out with. I even enjoyed watching him make a fool of himself on that show “Wipe Out”. Continue reading “Best Business Books Ever”

So if you don’t have a way to have multi-line conference calls, get yourself a free account at freeconferencing.com. (Well there are dozens, so pick one).

Now that you have that done, you’ve got a way to record your phone calls – which is very, very handy.

If the local paper wants to interview you over the phone, ask if you can record it? If so, you’ve got yourself an asset you can put just
about anywhere. Continue reading “ROI on Conference Calls”

Testimonials and reviews are worth their weight in gold if you can get them. The hard part is getting them. Customers always say they’d be willing to, but how often do they actually do it?

And almost more importantly, are they leaving them in the spots that matter? It used to be nice to hang the written kind on the wall of your business, but that doesn’t really help the people who’ve never been there.  What you really need are reviews on Yelp, Google Places, Merchant Circle and your website or Facebook Fan Page. But directing people to do that is hard, unless all they have to do is click a link in an e-mail.

So here are some tips on collecting reviews and testimonials.   Continue reading “Getting Testimonials”

I got a great e-mail from a client in the financial industry today. It had nothing to do with finances but is a tremendous example of what you should be doing in your marketing efforts.

What made me so excited is that he put this “awesomeness” in his “signature” so that it automatically appears in every e-mail he sends out.

So, we’ve been doing a weekly podcast, regular upon demand YouTube videos, blog posts, articles and he does a guest spot on the radio. All great activities to enforce that he is the expert in his local niche. Continue reading “Cross Reference Everything”

Every single job we do for clients starts with the this question:

“how does the client make money?”

Without FULLY understanding how you make money or how you want to make money, you’ll never know where to start with keywords or any type of optimization.

In the case of our tutoring client, they help everyone from elementary school students with reading issues to college kidsstudying for the LSAT. So where do we position them?

When you’re figuring that out for yourself, it’s very important to determine what kind of work you want to be doing long term. In the case of our tutor, we we really want to attract the college kid who’s studying for his last exam, as a test prep client? Or do we want the elementary school kid who has 10 years of exams and tutoring ahead of him? Continue reading “Keywords for my client”

So I’m talking about doing events today. . .

There is no bigger waste of time than putting something big together, having it succeed and then helping to clean up with nary a plan in place to follow-up with the attendees.

If you’re going to put together a Tupperware Party, Weekend Retreat, Grand Opening, or Music Concert – don’t forget the follow-up. That’s the most important part.

You’ve got to be able to capture names and e-mail addresses at the minimum. Since the people attending have already overcome all the major hurdles to even get to your event, you might as well not waste what time and energy you’ve spent. Continue reading “Most Important Thing about Events”

Most of the takeaways I took from the NAMS Conference were at Jeff and Martiza’s seminars, mostly because I was busy with my own seminars and didn’t get a chance to get to too many others. So here’s what I got:

Continue reading “NAMS Lessons”

This past week we had a MeetUp Group Meeting and I met with two website owners looking to improve their business:

First we spoke about the power of Gmail. Gmail is Google’s e-mail client, like Hotmail or AOL or earthlink. But Gmail offers a few things the others do not. I consider Gmail to be an e-mail manager. You can send and receive e-mail from all your accounts in Gmail.

So if you work at Autozone and your e-mail is JoeJoe@autozone.com, you can receive all that e-mail in your Gmail account and you can reply to it (Re: JoeJoe@autozone.com) without the person ever knowing you use Gmail to manage your e-mail. I recommend that for its sheer simplicity and efficiency.

Another great part of Gmail is the “labs”. In the upper right corner of the Gmail screen, you’ll see a little circle that looks like a gear. Click it and drop down to Settings. Inside the Settings is a tab called Labs.

This week I was able to meet with 3 different groups for lunch. It was a pretty good week for me because I think I took more notes than I gave. I love learning new, cool stuff.In no particular order, we talked about these things:

PixelPipe, Onlywire, and  TubeMogul are syndication websites. That means they’ll send your content out to lots of other websites. TubeMogul will send your videos to YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion and a bunch of others all at once. PixelPipe does photos, Onlywire bookmarks things.

Setting these sites up is a bit of pain. In order for TubeMogul to upload your video to YouTube, you have to a YouTube account. That goes for all the other sites as well. This is the kind of task a VA could set up for you. Getting these set up would allow you to send your videos and blog posts out to 150 sites or so with the click of a button. Continue reading “Virtual Assistants and Article Marketing”