Category: Letters From Dan

Guest Post By Susanne Myers

Daily Affiliate Tasks

Most of us learned how to take notes in high school and college. You write down the most important facts, dates etc. and then commit them to memory before the next test. The main focus is to listen and capture the most important points your professor or teacher made.

Taking notes at an Internet Marketing Conference like NAMS is very different. There’s no need to transcribe each lesson and note all the facts because:

1) There isn’t a test at the end (no matter what some instructors will tell you).

2) If you’re staying at the hotel, you’ll get recordings of all sessions.

3) It’s not the facts and figures that matter.

Continue reading “Don’t Take Notes At NAMS Like You’re Still In College”

Podcamp Nashville is one of the largest Podcamp events nationwide, did you know that? As a local resource for social marketing and all things internet, it’s almost like the Internet Knowledge Superbowl here in town. There really isn’t anything bigger or better (unless you count its sister event, Barcamp Nashville).

But have you heard of it?

In the same breath, we meet with local businesses all the time who need help growing their business. 99% of the ones we meet with weekly just don’t know anything about the power of the internet. I might as well be speaking Greek when I start talking about the utility of autoresponders, squeeze pages, e-mail parsing and WordPress. And amazingly, that goes for the students we spend time with at our local Universities, too.

This stuff just isn’t common knowledge yet.

And while the media’s advertising and marketing folks are learning how to use these tools to benefit their companies, the innovators or innovations of these tools rarely make ripples in our popular culture. You can almost credit Steve Jobs alone for getting iPad launch events into the news. Can you imagine if they had done that 20 years ago for every new PDA launch from Palm?

Unfortunately the only people who get hurt by the relative anonymity of Podcamp is the small business owners. From our seminars and presentations, we know small business owners are eating up every piece of content they can in hopes of learning how to increase their revenue. But their time is very limited. And its the stuff you learn at Podcamp that can really change the revenue model of small businesses.

With that I charge you this task. If you know a savvy small business owner (plumber, CPA, hair stylist, etc. . . ), drag them to Podcamp Nashville.  These are not easy economic times, yet in the span of one day you can open up to them a world they never knew existed.

Imagine if the local bird seed guy walks away from Podcamp Nashville having found a new way to drive customers into his store? What if that guy starts a podcast that garners 5,000 “bird feeding” enthusiasts over the next year and from that he hires two more people? Now we’re talking about changing lives with one afternoon.

If you serve local businesses, call all your prospects – the people whose business you’d like to earn. Give them the opportunity to enrich themselves with Podcamp’s information wealth. Perhaps it is only vision that they lack in moving forward with your company. Podcamp is about vision – it’s about hearing and seeing what is possible. Some people say “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats forever”.

I say “Give a man a blog and he’s thankful, take him to Podcamp Nashville and he’ll see what is possible.” That’s when business relationships change, too.

Podcamp Nashville is an untapped resource for local business owners in Nashville. If you know someone who’s hungry to help his business grow, bringing them to Podcamp may change that business’s future forever. Please, check out the Podcamp Nashville website, register, and read about the sessions. But don’t worry about finding the Check Out Page or the Session Pricing Page. Those pages aren’t there – Podcamp is free!

Tell me again why you couldn’t convince a small business owner to attend?

(Register for my meeting notes, and you’ll get all my Podcamp notes, new ninja tricks and insights the following week. Sign-up below)

 

Follow the Podcamp Nashville Blog Tour

 

The 11.6 Hour Twitter virus is definitely something you want to avoid. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s in a tweet that says  “I have spent 11.6 hours on Twitter. How much have you? Find out here.”

There’s a link in the message that leads to an application called “Time on Tweeter”. This app asks for authorization to your Twitter information then starts sending out that message without your consent.

This is the kind of “prank” that seems to be popping up a lot lately on different social media sites and is a reason to be very careful about what you click on, and what you give access to your accounts.

From a business perspective, it’s much more than a prank. These “twitter viruses” send out tweets from your account annoying your customers, and harming your brand. That’s not the kind of company you want to be.

Solve this 11.6 Hour Twitter Virus problem:

If you’ve fallen victim to this scam, you should immediately revoke Twitter access to all suspicious applications. To do that, log into Twitter, click on “Settings” in the upper-right drop-down menu, choose “Connections” and click “Revoke Access” on suspicious apps — which, in this case, is the app named “Time on Tweeter.”

To prevent the problems that could arise with a Twitter account like:

• Not being able to log-in
• Not knowing who at Twitter to contact for support
• How to stop spammers

Check out my free Twitter Glitch Action Guide at http://twittrglitch.com

As a marketer of small businesses, I started using Foursquare with the sole purpose of learning how others were going to use it and make it successful. I checked-in to every place I was, places I wasn’t, got every badge I could find and every Mayorship.  I really wanted to see how business was going to use Foursquare’s tools.

Guess what? Marketers are now seeing the true power Foursquare has.

Pepsi and Von’s Grocery Stores are really moving the needle. When you register for a Von’s card and sync it with your Foursquare account, they’ll give you a free 2 litre of Pepsi.  So what? That’s nothing new, eh?

How about this then. . . when you swipe your Von’s card at check-out, you’ll automatically be checking in to Foursquare – which means all your online friends will see “Von’s”.  That’s some great advertising for Von’s. And to keep you “checking in” Von’s adds free stuff to your Von’s card based on your Mayorships, Badges and check-ins.

Imagine becoming the Mayor of your local Veterinary Clinic (which means you visit there often) and getting a dog food coupon from Von’s – automatically!  That kind of target marketing based on your social media preferences is surely changing the game.

The consumer gets rewarded over and over and over, Von’s gets publicity, Foursquare gets new users who check-in unconsciously, Pepsi gets word-of-mouth marketing like this and many times everyone gets a  plug on Twitter or Facebook. Win! Win!

Scoot on over to the Bellagio in Vegas.  The Bellagio has a team dedicated to monitoring social media sites like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter for mentions of their name.  Guests who check-in on Foursquare, tweet their location or rave on Facebook get upgrades and rewards from The Bellagio. Mayorships and badges to them aren’t nearly the value of rewarding the “word-of-mouth” marketing guests do on their own.

Different from those two is Radio Shack and their holiday promotion. Instead of taking advantage of existing customers, Radio Shack and Foursquare created a “badge” that Foursquare users can earn when they go to Radio Shack and check-in.  The incentive of the “badge” wasn’t enough to drive sales, so the badge itself gives users 20% merchandise during the holidays.

For Radio Shack, they not only get new customers into the door using the coupon, but have their name on a badge on all Foursquare user’s phones, the internet, every Foursquare related website, press releases and more. From a driving traffic perspective, Radio Shack’s promotion is much more traffic-centric.

The Pepsi / Von’s promotion is certainly the most cutting edge. Connecting your grocery card to social media as a means of getting the Von’s name out there hundreds of times per day is genius. But then rewarding users based on their Foursquare habits – that’s over the top cool.

Please. . . please tell me if you know of any cool Foursquare promotions. Leave a comment below. I love hearing how business is using these new social media tools.

Companies spend thousands of dollars on consultants in their quest to come up with product, service and company names.  Here in Nashville there are names like Laser Quest, Cheddar’s, Nissan and Maggiano’s that probably were the result of months of talks, tests and money.

But does the name itself create revenue for the company? Does that even make sense?

In a consumer world largely based on what you can find on Google, your name can significantly impact your bottom line. A marketing guy may tell you differently, but he’s likely to give you examples like Pepsi, Blockbuster and Disney. Dare them to give you an example of a start-up or small, local company.

Recently a company in town opened called Nashville Furniture and Interiors. The name isn’t sexy at all, but when you drive by you surely understand what’s inside. On the other hand there’s another new place called Kay’s.  The reflection on the window has prevented me from seeing it is a clothing store for women.

That same thinking applies to the web, but in a much more revenue generating manner. When a consumer chooses to go furniture shopping, the first thing they may search for is “furniture store nashville”.  If your business name happens to have Nashville and Furniture in the title, you’re much more likely to be found on the search engines.

Not only that, but whenever your business name is mentioned elsewhere on the net and people click it to go to your website, Google gives you extra “points” for having your main keywords directly in the link.Technically, a link that contains your keywords is called a “keyword rich anchor text” link.  Those are the sought after kind. That’s much easier to attain when your name is your keywords.

From a branding perspective, fancy names do have a place.  Pepsi, JC Penney, Best Buy and even eBay have excelled with little attention paid to their keyword-empty names. On the local level however, a good plumber is a good plumber. Whether you call Fast Pipe Guy or Nashville Plumber doesn’t matter when the toilet is overflowing.

The difference however, is whether you can find Fast Pipe Guy during those critical moments when you search for “Plumber in Nashville”.

My wife brought home giant marshmallows this past weekend. Seriously, they’re giant – the size of 4 marshmallows  perhaps. When my kids saw those  – all I heard from them for the next 2 days was  “can we make s’mores?”  I don’t know when marshmallows were invented, but for at least the last 25 years there’s been 2 sizes: regular and hot chocolate size. That’s it.

Of course, during that time the marshmallow people have experimented with colors, shapes and flavors and even miniatures, but to my knowledge – “jumbo” was like 2% bigger. The folks at the marshmallow company could have spent hours and days and weeks coming up with a brand new product – and perhaps they did, but someone there had the job of adding value to marshmallows. And from my kids’ point of view Giant Marshmallows are way better.

Continue reading “Adding Value with Giant Marshmallows”

Business schools just don’t understand the value of content in your marketing efforts. Rarely do I run across a business owner who truly appreciates the term “content”. And we’ve found even those who do, don’t have time to create it because “they’re too busy marketing and finding new customers”.

The bottom line is this, if you don’t understand that the internet has changed the game – then content will never make sense. For most people marketing classes were about the three P’s and “location, location, location”, and branding. And in all of those cases, the examples in the book were billboards, product packaging and sales letters.

That’s it!

To expect Master’s degree wielding marketers to grasp the Shift from post cards to websites is maybe too much to ask. But in the same breath, aren’t those same people the ones who shop, research and buy online?

Somehow, it still baffles me when I can’t make the connection between the content on the sites they’re currently buying products from – and their inability to translate that to marketing analysis.

Building the bridge between yesterday’s marketing classes and today’s marketing environment is the key, for sure. I find once business owners fully understand how the web works, what Google’s role is and how consumers find goods – the light bulb will have gone off. I’m not yet sure if it’s the mechanics of Google or the mechanics of the internet – but one of them solves the other.

Words. It comes down to words. When you search for “Honda 355 Motorcycle 600 cc Nashville”, Google’s job is to find something to return to the person searching that matches their query. And the ONLY thing they have to go on, is words.

I heard you screaming in the back. Yep, you’re trying to tell me that links are just as important. Well, you have the right idea – but you’re not using the right “words” to convey it. A link is code someone types onto their website that references yours. No matter what, that link is made of words – even if it’s a picture.

Together, the words used to link one page to the next, the paragraphs of text on web pages, the names of the photos you’ve loaded up to the web pages, the title of web page and the words people use when they comment on your posts – that is content.

Content + Search Engines = Marketing

If you’ve got great, structurally correct content – then you’ve got a marketing plan any professor would be proud of. (Even if that means you have to show them how many units you sold first).

This week, at my MeetUp group, to which the topic was “Laser Target Your Customers”, I met a guy who sells solar panels as a commissioned salesman. He’s really pretty inspiring being that he got the job so he could learn more about solar panels so he could create a better website.

I found out right away that he’s been aggressively marketing his solar panels – doing all the right things you would assume a solar panel salesman is doing. He’s got business cards, he goes door to door, he did a mailing, he’s got

websites set up to send prospects where they can learn more about solar panels, he’s trying to capture e-mail addresses, he’s met with Realtors to learn if they improve home value and he’s met with home builders about installing them in new homes. . . I’d say he’s better than your average salesman when it comes to productivity.

BUT he’s making no sales.

The problem is he hadn’t figured out what the true benefit of solar panels are, and thus he had no message and without a message there’s no one to target. So, that’s what we did and now he’ll have no trouble “laser targeting his customers” going forward.

Messaging

After all the talk about the benefits of solar panels, I asked him one question: “When do you make your money back”? Solar panels reduce utility bills but you’ve got to pay for equipment and installation up front. His answer was “10 years and at that point you’ll have no utility bills”

PRESTO! That’s the answer in a nutshell.

The benefit of solar panels is that you’ll have no utility bills in 10 years. That’s an easy-to-understand, straight forward benefit. And from that we can contrive a very smartly put together target market. Of all the people on the planet, who would most appreciate no utility bills? 

Yep, you guessed it: Fixed Income Seniors!

Now we’re getting somewhere. So . . . if you retire to a fixed income, utility bills are one of the few fluctuating bills remaining. If it takes 10 years to get to that benefit, wouldn’t it behoove Mr. Solar Panel salesman to target 55 year old homeowners? How about 55 yr. old homeowners, within his sales territory, who can afford the upfront cash outlay? Now there’s a market we can laser target.

Laser Targeting Methods

Here’s where you come in.  How can a solar panel salesman market solar panels to 55 year olds? I’ll get the ball rolling, and then I want to hear your ideas:

1. Joint Venture with a Financial Services guy to put together a seminar about “Getting rid of utility bills when you retire”.
2. Use Facebook Ads demographics to reach only people in his territory who are 55 right now with an ad that says “Retiring in 10 Years? How about reducing your utility bills to nothing?”
3. Guest blog on “planning to retire” websites with articles about the value of getting rid of your utility bills.”
4. Start his own local radio show (or become a guest on one) that’s about Saving Money for Retirement.
5. Partner with the power company and get featured in their events about selling power back to the utility company.

So that’s enough to get your thinking cap on. How can Mr. Solar Panels further laser target this very clear niche?

Aileen Bennett’s newest masterpiece, Using People,  is in print. Now if you know Aileen you’ll understand the significance of “newest masterpiece” – because she pumps out spectacular speaking engagements, masterful PR campaigns and engaging social media exploits all the time. This go ’round, her genius is on paper.

I should disclose that Aileen and I sit in a Mastermind together and thus this “recomendation” could be construed as somewhat expected of me, as a friend. But until I got through the first 16 pages, I had no idea how well presented, informative and necessary this information is for us, as marketers and business makers.  To quell any thoughts that this recommendation is biased, I’m prepared to give you some concrete reasons why Using People should be your next purchase.

So let’s cut to the chase and talk about “Lie to Yourself”, one of the great chapters in the first half of the book. We already do lie to ourselves – every day – that’s one of the points Aileen makes in “Using People”. We make assumptions all the time all the time about the way people are going to react to our proposals, about the way people feel about us and about what people are already expecting of us. Then we do everything we can to notice evidence to support these lies.

 The point is we’ve got to learn to recognize that these assumptions and untruths exist. Since they aren’t real, and aren’t the real truth – planning and taking action with these assumptions leads to failed purposes. Aileen says emphatically, “. . . our assumptions say more about us then they do other people.”  This is a lesson you can’t learn too soon.

In “Flip a coin”, Aileen uses a familiar coin toss trick to teach you that indecision is really just procrastination.  I personally use the “regret approach” (which will I regret least?) to help make these indecisive moments clearer – but I fear my technique could be much improved with the simple coin toss. Aileen suggests when you lack clarity on a decision, “flip a coin”. When you flip a coin and vow to go with the result, you inevitably reap the mental sigh of relief when the coin lands on the side you really want and instant regret when it asks you to follow a plan you really didn’t want to do. This instant regret may have been hidden – but becomes clear with the toss. Use the tool – then do what’s right.

The short section titled “Never Forget a Name” had me writing this review before I was even finished. I was not only caught off guard in her insight, but it forever changed the way I’ll introduce myself and be introduced at functions and events. Her bottom line is this. . . many of us have problems remembering people’s names. So we’ve all heard of the many pneumonic devices and tricks to assist in remembering names . . . but when have you ever gotten this advice?

You need to go into every meeting knowing that the other person may have a hard time remembering your name. Not only that, but you can use that to your advantage. Unlike others around you, help new acquaintances remember your name using a few great “Using People” techniques.  Wouldn’t it be great if your name is the only one people remembered from the event? Personally, I think paying that much attention to someone in an attempt to help them remember my name will inversely make it easier to remember theirs.

[stextbox id=”grey”](If that’s not enough reasons, then I should mention that the most beautiful woman I think I’ve ever seen is pictured on page 98. )  :)[/stextbox]

Now, that’s just 3 great reasons to read this book. If you found any of these ideas worthwhile – then know that there are atleast 12 more that are going to improve your business and bottom line. So if you like to wait before you get things, then got to Amazon and get this book right now. No one from Amazon is going to rush out and bring this book to you today, so ordering it today will insure that it will be in your mail box before you finally get around to “getting it”.

Oh yeah, I’m not sure if I mentioned it earlier, but my name is Dan Morris.  I author Lettersfromdan.com 🙂

Strangely, this week has been the week of piggyback marketing discussions. I have no idea why because I’ve spent little time on the subject in the past. But it has been tremendously appropriate this week.

On Monday,  I met with a gentlemen who is selling an incredibly useful and revenue producing service. But no one knows it exists, and the few that do aren’t properly incentified to delve further and learn more about it.

And then on Saturday, I spoke to a friend who’s selling a product that isn’t highly sought after by her target market. That sounds odd doesn’t it?  Why would you have a product that your target market isn’t looking for? Despite them not looking for it, most who could use it would end up with happier and more fulfilling marriages.  Not every product has a built-in audience, unfortunately.

So how do you market products and services like this?

We market an antioxidant supplement that’s different than any other supplement on the market. The problem is no one knows to ask for the benefit we offer. Even though lots of folks know what antioxidants are – and millions are searching for them, we know it’s not worth the effort to get to the top of Google for our keywords. (That’s like battling giants). Thus, have decided on a piggybacking strategy instead.

We use infomercials. How are they piggybacking, you ask? Well, we didn’t create our own television station, nor did we invent a new kind of TV.  Instead, we’re advertising on TV stations and Radio stations that already have a built-in audience. Unlike SEO, we’re not reaching them at the exact moment they’re looking for us – but we’re reaching them and creating awareness and identity.

Piggyback marketing is the art of identifying businesses with an audience similar to your target market -and then offering your services to their market. Often times companies will do this as a service to their customers, while other times an affiliate arrangement has to be negotiated.

So how do you start a piggyback marketing strategy?

The one and only important thing to know is who your target audience is. That’s it. If you know who they are, you can begin step 2 which is figuring out where they are. Once you figure out who and where they are, all you need to do is meet the people who are already serving them.

Erica Douglass of Erica.biz has long held the belief that guest post blogging is a fantastic way to build a relationship with your target audience. In fact, she wrote a book and teaches about guest post blogging. If you can make a name for yourself, with solid guest posts, you’ll begin to receive attention and will be able to market products and services. This is especially helpful if your product or benefit would be sought after IF your audience knew it existed.

[stextbox id=”warning”]If you really want to know the details of exactly how to do that, get Guest Post Secrets and learn from the master. [/stextbox]

Another way to hop onto traffic that someone else has created is by uploading an e-book to Clickbank.  That’s a passive way of getting your product onto websites who are serving a similar audience.  In a similar story, I recently learned of a self-published author who got her books on the counters of book and gift stores – and ended up selling hundreds of thousands of them. She understood that the bookstores she chose were catering to her audience already.

And if you’re really good, like the people at MARS, Inc., get your product mentioned in next summer’s cinema Blockbuster. Product placement, though a separate strategy, is piggybacking on the efforts of others. Remember when E.T. enjoyed munching on Reese’s Pieces? That’s marketing genius there.

Just like SEO, piggyback marketing is the art of standing in front of the traffic (wherever that may be).  However, SEO requires your audience to be looking for you. Piggybacking gives you the opportunity to send out your message to an audience that will be receptive to it.