Successful Blog

Pay Attention to the Questions

by

by
Rosemary O’Neill

Answer Questions, Build Relationships with your Prospects

In the classic movie Diner, Eddie subjects his fiancee to a 140-question quiz on Baltimore Colts football trivia in order to go through with the wedding. He loves Elyse, but is compelled to make sure she shares his passion for the Colts before getting hitched.

Have you noticed that your customers are constantly quizzing you, prodding, poking, trying to determine if you are a correct “fit” with their needs and mission? That you share their passion?

Pay attention to the questions


Flickr: Questions count

We’ve started using a gadget that allows visitors to ask questions via live chat on our corporate website. The results have been startling.

By offering a conduit for communication before the sale is made, we have learned what prospects are wondering, what content is missing from our website, how people are finding us, and where they might be confused about the product. In the live chat, they can quiz us with buying questions as well as relationship questions.

We save the transcripts from the chats and use them for sales training, content planning, website updates, and even technical support.

Find ways to bond in case you fail the quiz
Some buyers approach you with a detailed checklist of questions, often prepared by a committee. Many times these checklists include everything from “pie in the sky” dreams to absolute must-have items. It’s your job to help them sort out what’s important, and along the way, start building trust (Steven Covey on trust building: http://www.leadershipnow.com/CoveyOnTrust.html).

Along the path of sorting out the customer’s true needs, find nuggets of common ground to start building on. Train your mind to actively seek out points of connection. It could be with humor, common experiences, or commiserating over something. That’s the foundation of a real human relationship, which is essential for long-term customer retention.

Key takeaways for today:

  • Start building trust with prospects from the first impression
  • Provide a way to listen to and engage with questions
  • Be honest about what you can or can’t do
  • Share lessons-learned and common questions across your business
  • Build a strong enough human relationship that you can survive the “checklist”

Oh, and Elyse did fail the sports quiz by two points. He married her anyway.

Are you building relationships with your prospects so that they’ll marry you anyway?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Values Drive Value — Always Did

by

You Don’t Have to Wait for a Response to Know, Do You?

cooltext443809602_strategy

In a conversation on Twitter on Sunday, I asked what I thought was a simple question.

How do you know when you’re tweeting value?

I asked it because a new guy on Twitter wanted to know the answer. I thought I might see what ways other folks had for managing the value of their Tweet stream — keeping the signal higher than the noise, not drifting over into in to useless chatter.

Many people started with the idea that they know they have tweeted value by the response — the retweets, reactions, engagement, and new followers that come from what they tweeted. So many answers basically said, “Other people tell me whether I offer value.”

I was thrown by the sheer number of responses that came back like that.
Being a teacher and a business person, my first thought was “Is this how our schools and our businesses have undermined us? They teach us to defer to other people’s opinion of value?

Isn’t putting something out there and then deciding it’s value by how people respond what network television does?

Value Is Worth


BigStock: Value is worth.

Imagine a contractor saying he would decide what a house he built was worth by tracking how many people talked about it? Wouldn’t you hope that the contractor might have a sense of quality and value before he picked his materials and assembled them?

Our reasons for sharing and responding or not doing so are often unrelated to value. Sometimes we share to get attention, without discrimination, or just to fill up the silence. Sometimes we don’t share because we’re busy, bored, tired of the noise, or uncaring.

If you offer something of value and no one responds does it mean that it has no value? If no one visits Tiffany, or Cartier for a week, will that mean that the diamonds they sell will no longer we of value?

Value is not what provokes a response — we swat mosquitoes when they bite us, but we don’t value the experience of a mosquito bite. Value is worth — what people find worth thinking about, worth using, worth discussing, worth time and attention. Value is what people keep and remember — we remember it because of how it changes or adds to our lives.

Values Drive Value — Always Did

Values drive value. We stop and notice what we value. Value resonates. Value influences. Value moves us to act on it because we want to incorporate it or add it our lives and our businesses. Finding value is its own reward. Sharing value is a generosity.

If you want to find what resonates with, influences, and moves other people, start with what resonates with you. influences, and moves you. If you want to know what other people will value, start with what you value first. If you don’t know where to start, here are three universal values you might use to offer irresistible value in what you write, build and choose to share.

  1. Value simplifies. Simple is elegant. Fewer clicks, fewer buttons, fewer steps in a to complete a task means less less to learn and less chance of introducing error. Simpler can move us past building to using. We do less hunting and gathering, less collecting data, art, photos, words, music, books, videos, and more enjoying, participating, reading, reviewing, listening, analyzing and sharing what we’ve collected. Anything that simplifies the navigation or the process of collecting gets us more quickly to discussing, learning, interacting, and connecting with the people about what we’ve found.
  2. Value saves time, energy, and resources. Who wouldn’t value something that offered more time, more energy or more resources? We need all three to process information and to make connections to people. Information and people help us remove problems, disarm obstacles, or lighten burdens. Connecting us to people who and you free our attention and time for what we want even more of in our businesses and our lives.
  3. Value adds meaning. Meaning, passion, purpose is what keeps us moving forward and gives us something to look forward to. Meaning is how we define ourselves and what connects us to other human beings. Meaning helps us explain why we’re here, who we care about, and how we’ll invest our time, energy and resources. Friends, family, fortune, fame, fun, faith and so many others are meaningful to people. Share what’s meaningful to you.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that we stop listening for a response. Listening is a value in itself. It adds meaning to the relationships we’re building. Values attract people who value what you do. Serve them. Sharing values builds trust and trust simplifies, saves time, and adds meaning to a relationship.

Don’t build a life or a business around people who don’t share your values. They won’t value you. They won’t value your work. Why would you want to share what you value with people who don’t value it too?

Share what you know to be of value with people who value what you do. Then listen to their responses. Identify those who value you what you do and use what they say to serve them better, to think about what they might need next of value that will simplify, save time, and add meaning to their lives.

How do you know when you’re offering value?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Humanize your LinkedIn Profile

by

by
Rosemary O’Neill

Your LinkedIn profile can be a powerful calling card, even if you’re not looking for a new job. It will often show up on the first page of search results for your name in Google (try it), so why not take a moment to give it some personality?

Who’s searching for you?

In my case, I received two different invitations to speak at events after adding “speaker” to my LinkedIn profile. Coincidence? I also found out that my company had been highlighted on a “companies to watch” list based on the work we put into our corporate LinkedIn presence.

Both your personal and your corporate LinkedIn pages should reflect your style, personality, tone, and mission. Donâ’t make the mistake of using “corporate-speak” in your profile summary (unless you talk that way, in which case…stop it).

We’re all there to do business

Recent updates have made LinkedIn more visually appealing and more user-friendly, which may mean that more people are taking a second look. After all, Liz told you four years ago to start taking advantage of LinkedIn’s secret superpowers.


Humanize Your LinkedIn Profile

What are you waiting for?

Humanize your LinkedIn Profile

Grab those eyeballs with some LinkedIn profile bells and whistles:

  • Use your own tone of voice in your profile summary, and tell your story
  • Fill in the Volunteer Experience section; it makes you a whole person
  • Try adding the ReadingList app to show what books you’re reading
  • Add the SlideShare Presentation app and upload your marketing “deck”
  • Don’t forget to ask for recommendations when it’s appropriate, human voices on your profile are very compelling (be generous with your own recommendations too)
  • Try hard to include photo or video with your status updates

LinkedIn has said that they are working on enhancements to the company pages too, so start thinking about how you might spiff up your corporate presence as well!

Is your LinkedIn profile telling your story with pizzazz?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

The 5 Pillars Of Successful List Building

by

by
Gerald Gigerl

cooltext443809602_strategy

Marketing and List Building Online

Today I will introduce you to the 5 pillars of successful list building, the main factors that can make or break your wealth.

It has to be mentioned that most online marketers have a wrong idea about what marketing online really means. Marketing is war, marketing is testing and marketing is about being the best.

To be good in list building you have to put in at least hundreds of hours to become good at driving traffic, split testing, creating products and writing email campaigns.

There are no shortcuts in making this work and as long as you are not trying to find a way around the hard work, you are not getting into any trouble.

The 5 Pillars Of Successful List Building

Let’s have a look at the 5 pillars of successful list building.

Pillar #1: Niche Selection

Unbelievable but true, I think there are way too many people who get into a niche that they don’t like and are comfortable with. Your goal is to spend enough time researching a market that is big enough and has substantial equity to making your business worthwhile.

Never enter a market that you are not passionate about because in most cases you will “quit” before you ever realize success. When things are tough, the only thing that keeps you going is your drive, passion and goals.

Pay attention to what kind of market you enter as well as how much demand there is. It’s easier to succeed in an already booming market than it is to achieve substantial results in a developing market. It takes more money, energy and time to reach breakthrough success in a “fresh market”.

Pillar #2: Business Model

Your business model is the single most important success factor for your chosen market/niche. As for pretty much everything else there are two options: You choose to create your own business model or you decide to go with an already successful business model.

What is actually meant by creating or following a business model? Basically, you have a very clear plan on how you do everything such as what kind of products you promote, what kind of bonuses you offer, what kind of OTOs (One Time Offers) you offer, optimizing squeeze pages, running split tests using Google Analytics/Experiments, creating email campaigns and much more.

While this might be exactly what you are doing for “planning”, all these skills can only be learned in the process of DOING. Yes, you have to have a plan on how to drive traffic and market your products, but without a strict discipline of doing exactly that, you are just wasting your efforts for planning.

It takes insane amounts of sweat to make anything work. The best you can do to reach your list building goal is to work as hard and smart as you possibly can.

Pillar #3: Squeeze Page Optimization

This is the step where you start making real money really soon if you are putting in consistent effort to make it work.

A squeeze page is a page where a person leaves the email address to get a free gift. The main goal is to drive as much targeted traffic to your squeeze page as possible and convert the traffic as good as possible.

The opt-in rate is mainly determined on how persuasive your sales page is, meaning how people perceive the value you are offering. To get the highest opt-in rate possible, you have to test titles, value proposition, colors, free products and much more.

The only way you can really test all those factors is by driving ongoing, highly targeted traffic to your squeeze page(s).

IMPORTANT NOTE: The message you spread on your squeeze page for your free information product should be consistent. Don’t give people information that is not accurate just to make them subscribe to your email list. The information on your squeeze page must be in congruence with your product.

If your message is providing wrong information, you will get a higher unsubscribe rate than you ever thought possible before. Therefore, your message (value proposition) needs to be consistent to attract targeted customers to your products.

Pillar #4: Traffic Generation

Traffic generation is something that you should never get sick of. There is unimaginable amount of equity in driving traffic to your squeeze page(s). The more ongoing traffic you are able to drive to your capture pages, the more possibilities you have to split test.

Some typical traffic generation methods include forum marketing, free product offers, SEO, PPC, social media, video marketing, article marketing, ad swaps, solo ads, JV giveaways and webinars.

You should never get stuck with one traffic generation method but focus on more techniques to drive high quality traffic.

Pillar #5: Email Marketing

Under email marketing goes everything that you do within your autoresponder. You have got to learn how to set up email campaigns, write newsletters, promote products and much more.

If you decide to market the best-selling products from an affiliate network like ClickBank, many vendors will have email campaigns ready for the promotion of their product. All you need to do is to simple copy and paste their prewritten email campaigns into your autoresponder follow up emails.

If you are promoting your own products you will always have to write your own email campaigns.

No matter what product you decide to promote make sure to keep a stable relationship between your list and you. Don’t bombard your list by sending several emails a day promoting different products all the time.

You want to build and sustain trust.. The best way to do that is by giving your list immense value in the form of free products, free reports, free articles and so on.

Now that you know the 5 pillars of successful list building, you can start producing amazing results for your business!

Author’s Bio:
Gerald Gigerl is a product creator, lead generation and affiliate marketing expert. Gerald creates information products on how to drive massive traffic to your website and generate up to 75 “product hungry” leads a day! If you are really serious about making massive amounts of money online you can learn more about Gerald here: The Affiliate Traffic Pro .

How to use Pinterest for a Commercial Website with Few Images

by

by
Marcela De Vivo

As Pinterest, the picture and board-based social networking site, has exploded in popularity. Many businesses have been scrambling to use it to drive customers to their websites.

For ecommerce businesses this has not been much of a challenge due to the product and photo-based nature of their websites. They can create relevant boards and promote their products with elegant and sharable photos, driving a lot of traffic — and hopefully purchases — to their website. By interlacing their own product images with other interesting and relevant images, they can create appealing Pinterest boards that drive user engagement.

What about the rest of us?

How to use Pinterest for a Commercial Website with Few Images

Many businesses that operate online are not product-based or may not have a lot of photos to work with. Are they simply out of luck when it comes to Pinterest, or are there creative ways to use this network to drive customer engagement and traffic?

Fortunately, as creative social media SEOs and marketers, we proudly proclaim that all hope is not lost! There are a lot of ways you can use Pinterest to interact with your customer base, even if you’re not a photo-centric business.

Inspirational and Motivational Images

If your business has a motivational or inspirational purpose behind it, you can use Pinterest to share these values with your customers. If you haven’t noticed that motivational images have been exploding around the internet, it’s time to open your eyes.

These types of images — a beautiful picture with inspirational text overlaid on top — are some of the most shared images on the internet. They spread through Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter like wildfire and can be very effective drivers of traffic.

Pick out some values that your company stands for and turn them into motivational images. Throw them up on Pinterest boards and share them via all of your social networks. If you do your job properly you should see a positive response.

You can use a tool like PicMonkey to edit your images, add text, and make them fun and easy to share. You may also choose to add your watermark to improve your branding.

Curating Pins From Your Niche

If you can’t make the above strategy work, you can always act as the gatherer of information for your niche. There is ALWAYS value in aggregating all of the content related to your niche and organizing it into neatly consumable boards on Pinterest. A few websites have had major success using this technique. The best part: you don’t have to OWN or CREATE any of the content yourself!

Don’t get me wrong — this isn’t stealing. You’re going to pin and repin related content into boards that are organized. This way anyone interested in your niche can go to one place on Pinterest — yours — to get all of the information that they need.

Final Thoughts

Remember that Pinterest is just another social network. It’s not going to be the end-all of your social media strategies. It’s just another arrow in your quiver when it comes to delivering value to your customers and gaining their attention and hopefully their business!

Author’s Bio:
Marcela De Vivo is a freelance writer helping webmasters find the right tools to promote their websites online. She loves to connect on social media so be sure to follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

How to Get the Best People to Support Your Cause, Project, or Idea

by

Help Me!!


BigStock: What’s the Best Way
to Say “Help Me, Please”?

Ever wonder why some folks seem to have a slew of people ready to help them achieve their goals? Is their cause, idea, or project really better? Do they really know better people? Or is it the way they ask?

On September 22-23, I’m speaking at Pitch Refinery. Check out the agenda for the interactive event that proves

“Every business has a story…

how you tell it makes all the

difference.”

If you get a chance to be there, you’ll find the power of story to move people to action faster, easier, and more meaningfully.

How to Convince the Best People to Support Your Cause, Project, or Idea

In my role at the Pitch Refinery event, I’ll be outlining How to Leading Passionate Employees and Clients — How to get everyone who helps your business involved in sharing your best true story so that your business thrives. In that context, I’ll be talking about five steps to enlisting help on any cause project or idea.

In the spirit if a sneak preview, I’m sharing them here.

  1. Build your network before you need it. We might be on a team or leading one. We might be new to the industry. Maybe we’ve been working alone on a stealth project. Whatever our situation, success means we’ll need the help of others getting to know our story and sharing it. We’re better together than we are alone. As early as you can, share what you’re doing. Vvalue the people who take interest and invite the best them to get close so that they become part of the story too.
  2. Talk about them, not you. Every writer, teacher and storyteller knows that the opening of of a story is more than just information, it’s the moment that establishes a connection with the audience — the people we want to reach. Get to know what moves the people who love you. Get to know what wastes their tiem. Then when you reach out to ask for help you can start with them, not you. That will turn your offer from

    “We are a ___ that is trying to [stop world hunger] by ___. Akimi is a child parses out her rice each night so that it will last longer. You can help make those meals last longer.
    into
    “We’ve all had that horrible, deep pit in the stomach feeling of working on an empty stomach. It changes how we see the world. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to live with that empty feeling for months, but some do. Imagine how that sets their world view.

  3. Come out from behind the curtain. A true collaboration, an invitation to participate in building something great, cannot occur if we stay in our office, hold our territory, or hide behind our website expecting others to show up while we tell them what to do for us. Come out when you reach out. Show your “face.” Say hello before you ask and get to know who you’re asking. Build a relationship so that people understand that you want their participation not just their money or their time. And so that they see that participation goes both ways.
  4. Turn the pitch into an invitation. The reason most requests offers, and asks, are requested is because the size of the “ask” is far greater than the foundation of trust we’ve built. Trust is built through proof that I’m safe to have faith in you. To establish trust most quickly, show the people you want to help you that you see, hear, and understand them by building an invitation that is easy to accept because it fits seamlessly into their lives, saves them time, and offers and outcome that has meaning to them.
  5. Celebrate your heroes. Allow for mutation. Leave room for ideas that are bigger, better, easier, and more meaningful than your own. Listen to those who start to participate. Invite the best to be hands-on and minds-on with what you’re doing. It’s not if you build it they will come. It’s if they build it they will bring their friends.

People whose offers always get great participation have figured something out. They focus on how to make supporting their cause, project, or idea easier, faster, and more meaningful for the best people to participate. Do the same by concentrating on the people, not the brilliance of the idea or cause. It’s not a pitch or promotion. It’s leadership — building something we can’t build alone.

What are you doing to invite people to support your cause, project or idea?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!