Successful Blog

Show your Authenticity; Monkey with your Business

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Rosemary O’Neill

“True authenticity is a lack of perfection,” said architect Gil Schafer in the June 2012 issue of Architectural Digest. He was referring to a beautifully designed home, but the same principle applies to the beautifully run business.

The architect mentions, in the same interview, that he loves to include accents that are off-kilter, or “monkeyed with.”
Yes! I say. Exactly.

Show Your Authenticity. Humans Aren’t Perfect

Should a small business owner try to emulate the stilted language of a Fortune 500 on their website? Should an entrepreneur build a carefully crafted facade of social media perfection? No. Humans aren’t wired that way, and we have a hard time relating to businesses that are wired that way.

That doesn’t mean you can ignore the importance of copywriting, or that you can abandon business niceties altogether, and it certainly doesn’t mean you can show up at a presentation in your PJs.

But as a small business owner, you have a golden opportunity to show your human side, to be authentically you, as you conduct business. There’s no 50 page guidance document holding you back. If you screw something up royally, just apologize.

Embrace your lack of perfection. Celebrate it!

How to Be Off-Kilter On Purpose

Some inspirational ideas:

  1. I recently ordered some iPhone lenses that came with a tiny plastic dinosaur in the box, for no apparent reason. Photojojo.com made me smile.
  2. The AppSumo site has a funny, sometimes bizarre sense of humor, and a readily distinguishable “voice.”
  3. A local Seattle promo design shop (the fun folks at B-Bam!) caught my undivided attention last month by sending me a Christopher Walken t-shirt out of the blue.

Are you striving for B-school perfection? Stop it, and release the monkeys! Your customers will thank you for it.

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

How to Write Powerful Content that Powerfully Connects

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How to blog series

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Chris Nosal

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How To Write Powerful Content

Being able to connect with your customers is one of the most important skills you could possibly learn in both blogging and in business, because your ability to connect with your customers is what translates into dollars, keeps your business running, and adds value to your customers’ lives.

In this blog post I want to detail some simple and easy but very powerful tricks that you can use to really connect with your readers and customers.

How to Really Connect with Readers

Basically, I’m going to show you some psychological “hacks” that you can use to capture people’s attention, and literally captivate them with every word you write (or say).

If you’ve ever watched Steve Jobs give a presentation (such as his presentation on the iPhone in 2007), you’ll notice he does one thing that 99% of speakers don’t:

He does’t start by focusing on how powerful the phone is, how fast the processor is, or how it’s different from all the other phones.

He starts by talking about how it is something revolutionary that is going to completely transform and revolutionize the way we (as humans) live our lives forever, and the incredible changes that are going to take place, for the first time in history, in our lives as a result of this groundbreaking discovery.

Now, which is more exciting:

A new electronic phone … or something that is going to change the way every person on the planet lives their lives forever for the first time in history?

Can you guess why people were lining up by the millions to get the iPhone yet, while no other company has ever had such a response to their products?

This same formula worked time and time again for the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad; with people obsessively lining up by the millions sitting out in the cold for 14+ hours just to get their hands on one.

Which leads me to my next question:

What did Steve Jobs do here that was so powerful?

Going back to the iPhone example, Steve knew that people didn’t want just a phone; they wanted a story to emotionally connect with their phone.

The idea was that by buying an iPhone, you’d be among the first to experience something revolutionary and new that is going to transform your life like never before.

You weren’t just buying a piece of plastic that could make calls and manage your daily activities — you were buying something that was going to change your life, and change the world, and you were part of a revolution that was changing the world.

This is so powerful because, on a mental level, humans don’t connect with logic.

We want to FEEL like we’re a part of something; like what we’re doing has a purpose.

How to Write Powerful Content that Powerfully Connects

So, now that we’ve covered the basics, how do you personally apply this information (and this formula) to write blog posts that really pull your readers in, and literally compel them to read everything you write?

While there’s a lot of information on this topic, I’m going to break down the main points here in to a very simple formula that you can instantly use to skyrocket your results in just two simple steps — and here they are:

Use Visuals

If I use vague, bland, abstract words like communication, potential, integrity, or commitment, how do you feel? Now, how do you feel when I use words like ice cream sundae, swimming pool, or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup?

Did you notice what I did there?

The second list of words creates a FEELING, and activates your imagination through mental pictures already associated with those words. Use imagery like that and you’ll move just talking to communication where your reader is actively involved and participating in what you say.

Create A Story

If I mention a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, you’ll notice you get a picture of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in your head, as well as the emotional experience that goes along with the image; I’ve just completely gotten your focus on what I’m talking about, and I’ve captured your attention using your emotions.

Now, let’s make this ten times more powerful by adding a story to this image

If I say, “I was sitting at home after a long day of driving, and as I sat at my kitchen table I wrapped my hands around the wrapper of a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup. As I slid the wrapper open, and slowly slid the chocolate out, I began to put it in my mouth, and then proceeded to softly chew on it as the peanut butter flavor soaked up in my mouth.”

Now how does that compare to just say or writing, “I ate food yesterday”?

With the second option, you’re just reading text on a page.

But the first example takes a vague piece of text and brings it to life by getting your emotions and your imagination involved, and holds your attention and focus on exactly what I’m talking about.

Even more powerfully, what I did in the first example actually built an emotional connection with the reader.

The Keys To A Powerful Blog Post

The most important thing about your writing is that it captures people’s attention on an emotional level, and that your writing really connects with them at a one-on-one level. Do this by connecting a clear and specific mental image with a story that emotional involves your audience.

The best part is that it takes practically no effort to make these simple but very powerful changes as you’re writing. And the more you apply these techniques to your writing, the better you’ll to become at communicating and connecting with people.

What sort of content powerfully connects with you?

Author’s Bio:
Chris Nosal writes about social skills and communication mastery at popularitysecrets.com. He is the author of Popularity Secrets, and also does personal coaching and consulting.

Don’t Build Your Business Castle on Another Guy’s Land

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How to blog series

Content Is King

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When building an online presence for a business, people quickly think of a website, social networks like Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and Google+ — all of which, when put together, can seem overwhelming. Add in a blog to the mix and often people will flinch. It’s reasonable that growth-focused businesses might worry about the commitment and time that a blog could represent.

Still, whenever I’m invited to help a business connect to their customers and grow their community, a blog is always central to the content strategy. Content attracts, informs, demonstrates, and establishes value. There’s a reason online professionals say, “Content is king.”

Don’t Build Your Business Castle on Another Guy’s Land

All of the social sites might seem to replace the role of a blog. Twitter allows us to connect, converse, reconnect, faster and easier. Facebook and Google+ allow us to be social with our customers. LinkedIn is the Chamber of Commerce online. Instagram and Pinterest give us a chance to share what we see and like.

But if you want to the search engines working for you, a blog is a cornerstone to reaching those goals.

Have you read the terms of service on those social sites where you’re putting your advice, your expertise, your unique content? Would you keep your address book, your contact lists, your communication records inside another guy’s business?

It’s hard to have a true presence, if everything you say is on social sites. How to people know which place you call home? Where do you put your serious thoughts? What home holds your business body of work?

Your business blog content is the cornerstone of your business online. Well thought and well presented content is easiest, fastest, and most meaningful way to share your expertise. Helpful (not hypeful) insights, how-tos, and information that’s relevant to your customer’s lives is an invitation to get to know your business beliefs, values, and business sense. Content like that attracts people you want to work with, and give search engines valuable pages to index. Those indexed pages advertise you whenever people search for the solutions you write.

Don’t put something as valuable and attractive as content on another guy’s url.

If you’re going to build and share online content, own the url where you house it. Instead of writing a post on a social site write it on your business blog. Share the link and an excerpt on that social site instead. Keep the original content on your own URL – where Google and your visitors can connect it to your business.

Let the traffic and the authorship come to you.

Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+ and the rest make it easy to build groups and share content quickly. But what are we risking by building a following in places where we don’t own the “land”? The social site “landowner” is gaining benefit of every customer you attract. If you decide to leave, you might lose your whole list.

Who can trust that the social site sill never change the “rules”? Are you willing to risk your business on that?

Free isn’t free when you think about it.
Go visit instead and invite folks back to where you’ve build a location that looks, feels, and interact with them in a way that only your own property can. Content is king. Don’t build your castle on another guy’s land. You might find that you can’t get to the castle one day.

How would your business be affected if Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, or Google+ lost the content and connections you’ve built?

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

What Makes a Link-Worthy Blog?

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Tara Hornor

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What Does Link-Worthy Mean?

When creating a blog, it is essential for the content on the blog to be link-worthy. What does link-worthy even mean? It’s a standard you should consider for every single post — link-worthy means that your content is good enough that site visitors would want to bookmark your page, share with friends, or use as a reference piece on their own blog. It means that your blog will build a great amount of backlinks, and thereby increase its visibility online. When people link to you, your site receives many benefits from added social credibility to search engine boosts and more.

To ensure that your blog and its content are linkable, focus on writing about topics that truly interest you as well as your visitors. Some people dive right in to creating a blog without focus and then end up short of the success they hoped for because they were not fully dedicated to a specific topic or niche.

Key to Link-Worthiness: Passion

Starting with a topic you’re passionate about will help you to keep your blog up-to-date with quality content — content to which others will create backlinks. If you love a topic or know a whole lot more information than other people know, use that to your benefit and write about the topics you love and know best. In doing so, you are teaching what you know and sharing your passion about it. Offer content that is informative and useful that connects your passion to others, and people will be linking to you.

So make sure you love what you write about first and foremost. This will drive the rest of the content generation and energy behind your blog. When you’re excited about a topic, you’ll go the extra mile to make the post amazing.

Always before you hit “Publish,” ask yourself, “Is this the kind of resource that I would want to revisit?” If not, what’s missing? What extra bit of information would take it over the top? Now go add it to your post!

Setting Your Blog Up for Success

When your blog is set up in a professional manner, you are more likely to have success. The following is a list of a few aspects you need to consider:

  • Choose a domain name for your blog that is professional, catchy, and easy to remember.
  • Choose a blog layout or template that matches up with the content and is visually appealing.
  • Offer only original content on your blog. nIf you quote someone be sure to link to their work.
  • Write with a friendly and conversational vioce because that is what people tend to look for.

Promoting Your Link-Worthy Blog

Other people are the most important part of helping you build a blog that is linkable. Many well-established blogs already have strong readership. Owners of these popular blogs know to look around to see what other bloggers have been saying about them. If you are write about them and link to their work, you can easily get noticed by these bloggers and sometimes in return, they may link to you. This means more success for you because links from established bloggers often carry more google juice which can raise your visibility and help you to become more established too.

Guest blogging is also an ideal way of building a link-worthy blog. As a blogger, you can offer to guest blog on other well-established blogs and instead of being paid, you can ask that the blogger link to you. That link back will ultimately help you establish credibility with search engines and increase traffic to your blog. With more traffic, you will find people who are following your blog on a daily basis because they are so interested in what you have to say.

So how do you make sure that your blogs are link-worthy?
Do you have a specific set of ideal pieces of content you always try to provide?

Author’s Bio:
Tara Hornor writes about marketing, advertising, branding, web and graphic design, and desktop publishing for PrintPlace.com a company that offers online printing for print marketing media. Find her on Twitter as @TaraHornor .

 

A 5 Point Plan to Differentiate Your New Business

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Jacob E. Dawson

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Building a new business is challenging, frustrating, exhilarating and rewarding. If you’re embarking on the journey of entrepreneurship, it will be the hardest yet most satisfying adventure you can imagine. You will have a million things to take care of on a daily basis, and a seemingly endless check-list of tasks you need to undertake in order to reach the success you’re striving for. In addition to discovering your customer’s pain-points and creating a great product to satisfy their needs, you’ll also need to take care of the books, understand the legal requirements and make sure you can keep your head above water as you approach profitability.

A 5 Point Plan to Differentiate Your New Business

If that seems overwhelming, you can take a deep breath and relax. There are plenty of valuable guides for new business owners. in order to give you a helping hand, which is why we’ve put together a 5-point plan to help you differentiate yourself from competitors once you’ve entered the market with a new product.

  1. Embrace Your SmallnessEveryone has dreams of building a giant business that experiences hockey-stick growth and explodes onto the market. That’s fine, but one of the best ways to turn a weakness into a strength is to embrace it. Acknowledge the small size of your business in the early days and use it to your advantage. People love to root for the underdog, and will often support you and your business more eagerly than they would a larger, more established company.
  2. Pour Your Personality into the BrandIn addition to embracing your small size, you can also help to build a strong customer relationship by pouring a lot of your own personality into the business. Large corporations are renowned for feeling faceless in their customer communications, and this is a huge point of differentiation that you can use to your advantage. You can cleverly insert quirks and idiosyncrasies into your brand character, helping your business to feel unique, friendly and approachable.
  3. Encourage One-On-One ConversationsWhen you are establishing your new business in the marketplace, marketing and promotion are some of the most difficult parts to get right, especially when you have a very limited budget to work with. There are, however, a few ways to maximise what you have by utilizing the power of word-of-mouth, by finding your most passionate customers and lavishing them with attention. When you invite them into your world, share your business’s journey and give them access to unique insights & offers, you can turn a customer into an evangelist – someone who will passionately share your business with the world – maximizing your valuable marketing dollars in the process.
  4. Show Yourself as a ‘Hands-On’ ExpertIf you can’t compete with larger businesses pound-for-pound, you have to find other ways to outdo them. One of the best ways to do this is to establish yourself as an expert in your field. Write informative blog posts and ‘how-tos’, start finding forums and seminars that you can speak at, seek out public-relations opportunities where you can show your expertise through the media. Before long your customers will see you as an expert in your field, strengthening your business reputation, and enabling you to compete with larger, less hands-on competitors.
  5. Tell Your Personal StoryYou know that starting a business is one of the hardest journey’s that you can embark on, so why don’t you share the challenges you encounter with your customers? When they know much effort you put into offering them the best products and services possible they will become more attached to your brand and feel much more invested in your future success. Let them see the ups-and-downs and your willingness to share will be repaid with stronger customer relationships and, eventually, a successful business.

I hope that this 5 Point Plan to Differentiate Your Business has given you some ideas and inspiration to help you to sharpen your new business and begin your journey towards success! What are your thoughts about these techniques, and which ones do you think that I’ve missed? Do you have any personal experience that you can share with us? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Author’s Bio:
Jacob E. Dawson writes for Delivery Hero, the best way to find local home delivery . Jacob E. Dawson is an entrepreneur, marketing and SEO / SEM expert with a passion for making the most of every day! You can follow him on Twitter as @jacobeddawson

 

Thank you for adding to the conversation!

How to Build Something You Can’t Build Alone

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The Power of Community Focused in the Same Direction

Whether you count yourself in huge corporation, a small team, or feel you’re the only member of an entirely unique group. If we hope to move forward, we all could use a more strategic view. We can chase our dreams. We can hire an evangelist. We can put our noses to the grindstone. Still the truth of the matter is we’re social beings and we build better things together than we’ll ever build alone.

The best dreams are built with insight from a variety of viewpoints. The best ideas and innovations are fleshed out with minds and voices that approach a problem from differing points of view. The best communities come together around participation and personal investment. And we’ve all seen the power of a community focused in the same direction.

Leaders want to build something we can’t build alone.

How to Build Something You Can’t Build Alone

When we think of social business, the tools may have changed, but the people haven’t. We’d still like our lives to be easier, simpler, and more meaningful than just getting up each day to go to work. Invitations attract us. Aspirations move us forward. Focus brings us to a clear path. Relationships well-chosen lighten our load. Quality raises our investment. True collaboration brings out our better selves.

Great leaders who build great things understand that human nature and engage it to fuel their goals. If you want to be that kind of leader — one who attracts, inspires, guides, focuses, connects, and unites — here’s how to build something you can’t build alone.

  1. Be a Magnet, not a Missionary. Quit converting and start attracting. Understand and respect our different, yet symbiotic purposes. The community needs the goods, services, and economic contributions of growing businesses. Growing business need the support and patronage of loyal communities.
  2. Have and Share a Vision. To make a thriving business, start with a long-term loyal, internal community of employees. They will build and protect a healthy innovative culture, promote the values of the business, stay with the company, develop expertise with coworkers, and live to serve customers.In any community, it’s not the how or what of work that builds connection and loyalty. It’s vision and mission. The underlying vision that unites us toward building something that we can’t build alone. A community needs leadership to set and invest that vision and so that they can feel smart, safe, and powerful in investing too.
  3. Know How to Choose the Easiest, Fastest, Most Meaningful Next Move Strategy is a realistic plan to advance a position over time by leveraging your unique opportunity. Recognizing opportunity and getting where you want to go is impossible if you don’t know where you are now. Position is informational — It’s part part property and packaging, part size, scope, and systems. Position is relational — it’s part values and relationships, part mission, vision, and perception. The most advantageous next positions look only slightly different than the place we already are. Deeply study your position and you understand the true value proposition of your brand.
  4. Lead with Relationships Choose the people around you — employees, vendors, partners, customers — wisely with deliberation and intention. They are the people who will build your business with you. Likewise, choose your sponsors and the businesses you support with equal thought to how they build your community and your life.
  5. Even Cheap Is Expensive When the Model Is Doesn’t Work Start a new business and you’ll soon see, that numbers reflect history. Without history, questions are what we use to generate the numbers we use. Numbers are important and useful, but they are as deep as the questions we ask. When we aggregate the numbers into a graphic they become shallow and flat. What I just saw will forgotten in an hour. What I just bought won’t win you my next dollar. Haven’t we figured out yet that impressions, circulation, and hits in general are short-terms goals and NEVER have been attributable?
  6. Understand the Power of Collaboration If communities and corporations, align our goals and head in the same direction the results could be amazing. But first we each have to know where we’re going and negotiate from the SAME SIDE of the table, recognizing that we’re stronger together.

Leaders make work and life easier, simpler, and more meaningful. Sometimes we do that simply by letting folks see what they see, know what they know, and do what they do … because other people see, know, and do valuable things that we can’t see, know, or do.

Leaders who need no one, lead no one. Don’t hire a staff, engage people who contribute. Don’t build a coliseum, raise a barn.
It’s irresistibly attractive to build something you can’t build alone.

How will you be a leader this week?

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