Successful Blog

Put a Face to that Name! Use Images to Build your Personal Brand Online

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By Diana Gomez

For many small business owners, their integrity is the backbone of their enterprise. Loyal customers depend on them to reliably deliver exceptional goods and services. This personal trust is a key reason that many of these “Davids” can successfully compete with the “Goliaths.”

As more products and services are transacted online, it has become more difficult for small businesses to maintain the personal relationships that can provide a competitive edge. This is why it is so important to cultivate personal identities and relationships on the web as well.

One easy way to get started is to incorporate personal photos into your online activities. A good approach is to treat your personal profile as if it is your brand. After all, in many ways it is!

images for personal branding

Take a cue from savvy brand marketers:

• Packaging is everything: Consumer products companies spend millions of dollars to design packaging that is appealing to the customer. Make the effort to take some good photos of yourself as well. In most cases, this would be a professional, recognizable head shot. Remember, unless you happen to be a big-time wrestler, you want your image to be friendly and portray trust!

• Be Consistent: Brand marketers generally try to display their brand consistently across all products and media. The same goes for your photo. Consider using the same one in all of your on-line activities. In a way, your photo becomes an instantly recognizable brand logo in the online community.

• Protect the Brand: Many companies go to extraordinary lengths to protect their brands. You should do the same with your online identity. Be careful how your profile and photos are distributed and portrayed on the web. Monitor your online persona. Take corrective action to remove posts that aren’t “on message.”

Once you’ve defined your personal brand, it’s time to publish it. Here are a few places to start:

• If you have a Facebook or LinkedIn account, it’s likely that you have already posted a personal photo. Start by reviewing these and any other photos already on-line and consider replacing them with some that are more suitable.

• If your business has a website, you will want to personalize it with photos. This is one of the few venues where photos other than headshots may be appropriate. Just make sure that they are professional and consistent with your strategy.

• Consider adding your personal photo to your email signature. If you decide to do this, resize the photo and be selective in its use. Some recipients discourage this practice as it can add to the size of the email, but most email providers now make it easier than ever to add images.

• Some integrated phone systems such as Microsoft Lync enable you to add photos to your profile. The system will display these personal images in contacts, email, phone and IM communications.

• By adding a photo to your Google+ profile, it will be accessible from other Google offerings such as Authorship or Hangouts. These applications will link to your profile and further expand its reach. Your photo can even be displayed in Google search results.

• Blogging tools such as WordPress can incorporate your photo. This same image will then be displayed in your posts on all WordPress Blogs. While many people use avatars for blog posts, consider adding your headshot instead.

• Of course, you can also add a photo to your profile on a multitude of individual sites such as Twitter, Skype and Yelp. Be sure to take advantage of these whenever you can.

The old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is just as true today as it was a hundred years ago. Incorporating personal photos into your online activities will help you build and maintain valuable relationships with your customers. Goliath won’t have a chance!

Author’s Bio: Diana Gomez is the Marketing Coordinator at Lyoness America, where she is instrumental in the implementation of marketing and social media strategies for USA and Canada. Lyoness is an international shopping community and loyalty rewards program, where businesses and consumers benefit with free membership and money back with every purchase.

Photo Credit: Brian Auer via Compfight cc

How Amazon Became the “Default”

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When I need to buy something, whether it’s a set of s’mores skewers or the latest bestseller, I click on over to Amazon.com first.

It’s taken me a while to recognize this behavior, because I was doing it very unconsciously.

Amazon.com logo

How did this happen?

Amazon.com is my “default” place to buy things. They have simply removed every trace of friction from the shopping experience. To the point that other factors like price and diversity of selection take a back seat.

You may not have the resources of Amazon, but you should aspire to be the “default” provider of whatever service or product you offer.

Remove Purchase Friction:

Answer Questions

Amazon has to sell you things that you can’t feel or touch, so it has to provide you with every single bit of information you might want before buying. Consider the lessons of Marcus Sheridan, “The Sales Lion,” who saved his pool company (and built an empire) by answering every single question right on his website.

Establish Trust

As an entrepreneur, you may not have a recognized name. But Amazon started somewhere too. They incorporated a ratings system for their shopkeeper program so that you can clearly see reputation as a buyer. Look for ways to build trust with your prospects and customers– whether it’s social proof, testimonials, or being maniacal about follow-through.

Remember Your Customers

One reason why Amazon is the default is that they store my credit card information, and they remember everything I’ve bought since the site went live. I hate having to go find my purse, pull out my credit card, and type in those numbers. Have you thought about ways you can streamline invoicing for your customers? Do you offer different options for billing, discounts for annual payments? When your customer contacts you, can you pull up a record of their purchase history?

Offer White Glove Delivery

Recent news items about drones, food lockers, and other innovations coming from Amazon make it obvious that they are very focused on delivering as fast as possible. How magical is it that you can, with one click, have a book delivered to your device in seconds? What parts of your product or service can you deliver for instant gratification? Perhaps you can make sure that the customer receives some component of the service immediately, even if the whole transaction can’t be instantaneous.

Be Proactive

Amazon will sometimes offer me recommendations, remind me of family birthdays, and provide other proactive information as I need it. When you see an opportunity to add value to your customers, do it! If you see an article that is directly relevant to your prospect’s challenges, go ahead and send it. Be proactive and be useful.

Reaching default status is the Holy Grail of sales. Think about it…when was the last time you switched toothpaste brands? Do you get all confused when your favorite product changes its packaging?

All of the key points above relate to one thing–considering the customer’s thought process and experience first.

Focus on removing any trace of friction from the customer’s buying process, and you might earn a spot as the “go-to” provider.

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

Head Smacking Realities: Why Blogging Isn’t Doing a Thing for Your Business

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By Tracy Vides

“Have a blog and you’ll start getting inbound leads.

“Blogging helps you gain traction and develop a community.

Companies that have blogs make more sales than those that don’’t have one.

If you did hear one (or all) of those statements but are often wondering why nothing seems to be happening, you aren’t alone. There are millions of blogs that do nothing but exist.

Corporate or business blogging is even more difficult as it’’s like asking businesses to set aside resources to make it happen (compared to individual bloggers who are intrinsically motivated). Nothing happens without a reason and there are plenty of reasons why your blogging efforts aren’’t doing anything to meet your goals yet. Here are some of them:

No plans, no gains

Remember those days when everyone used to carry around business cards? You’d get yourself a set of cards too. Then, everyone and their neighbor got themselves a website and a bunch of social accounts and followed suit. Blogging, more or less, seems to have been bitten by the same bug. You blog because blogging apparently is the ““baby steps” of inbound marketing.

Starting to do something is good, and I won’’t bite you for that. Not having a plan in the sense of not knowing why you blog for your business in the first place is a sore wound.

Do you blog purely to drive sales? Or do you blog to become a thought leader? Do you blog to proliferate your brand name or do you engage in all-out blogging efforts? (Hope you end up getting inspired by How Jon Morrow Writes, as narrated by Demian Farnworth of Copyblogger.)

Figure out why you think you have to blog in the first place. What’’s all this trouble for? Write it down and think about it over a cup of coffee.

You pay attention to worthless stuff

Driven by the incredible amount of information available on digital marketing (most of it is farce, unjustifiable, or maybe just hype), your mind starts to nibble at things that don’’t matter at all: all the drive for ““SEO domination”” lets you believe that keywords should guide your content creation.

The truth is that keywords won’’t matter because the bots don’t buy; people do. All that time spent on social media takes your time away from creating awesome posts. Your blogs are way too short or perhaps way too long. Instead of thinking about your readers, you worry about Meta information, alt text, and backlinks.

There are many of those little gears that have to click in place to make your inbound marketing strategy work, starting with your blog.

Are you doing it right?

It’s not about words, links, or technobabble; it’’s about people.

Bloggers often forget that they are writing for people. Companies are even quicker when it comes to forgetting that blogging is an effort to promote brands, establish credibility, engage with potential and current customers.

David Silverman, author of Typo, and professor of business writing at Harvard, gives this test to his students:

Can you rewrite this bunch of babble into a word or two?

“It is the opinion of the group assembled for the purpose of determining a probability of the likelihood of the meteorological-related results and outcome for the period encompassing the next working day that the odds of precipitation in the near-term are positive and reasonably expected.

Businesses just worry about tools used, platforms that blogs should be based on, and the kind of voice, words, or personality that they expect blog posts to express. Of course, all this counts; individuality does matter, and these are what make blogs different from academic articles. Yet, you shouldn’’t forget that you are writing for people. Relationships still matter. You’ll need to get off the screen and meet actual people. You should be able to sell at a flea market before you can sell online.

Self-centered content strategy

First, your content strategy is self-centered. All that you blog about is how great that vacation has been, how life changing your moving to paradise was, how Venture Capitalists are now trying to break down the doors just so that they can invest, and how you grew your blog from 0 to 67,987 subscribers in 3 months.

What are some of the best examples of narcissistic and self-centered blogs, you ask? Go pick any of those nomadic vagabonds who try to sell you location independence and travel while working. It’s not to say that there’’s no value from such blogs. But more often than not, there’’s the ““me syndrome” creeping in with ““Where I Was Last Week”” and ““Exotic Destinations I’’ve Been To.”

Stand back for a moment. No one cares about you. Your customers — you know, the ones reading your blog — wouldn’t care if you just signed up a million dollar deal, bought another company, merged with a bigger one, or if you now float on $4 billion of excess cash balance in the bank.

All that your customers care about is what you can do for them. How many of your blog posts talk about your customers really? Can you actually count the number of blog posts that share something that doesn’t have anything to do with you, your business, the brand, the products or services?

Crappy content

Your content qualifies as crappy if there’’s no value given to your readers by the end of the post. There’s nothing it for them to ruminate, chew dry bread on, or ponder about. Your blog posts have nothing new to say.

I will repeat that. Your content is dry, sounds like a term paper, and makes readers scroll faster than ever. They won’’t read most of it they’’ll just scroll through and escape. And you’’ll never see them again!

Stop wasting time with blogs that don’’t make an impact. Stop hiding behind words. Show up with some guts and talk to your customers like they were your best friends. Be afraid to own up, accept your mistakes, speak your heart, and get bolder.

Great companies go to the extent of admitting their faux pas. Online marketing firm SEER Interactive admitted screwing up in their link building methods. AirBnB’’s Brian Chesky wrote up a self-deprecating post to own up the apparent horror that a customer had to face.

Doing this takes guts. Can you do it too?

Blogging needs you to post awesomeness regularly. It requires you to show up and be real. It demands that you use the fact that you are human to get other humans to buy from you, believe you, or accept your point of view. It requires you to multi-task. Blogging requires your belief to be brought to fruition by your determination and will.

As long as you produce blog posts because you should, your customers or readers will make it a point to leave because they can.

Author’s Bio: Tracy Vides is a content creator and marketer, who loves to blog about subjects as diverse as fashion, technology, and finance. She’s always raring to have a discussion on startups and entrepreneurship. Say “Hi” to her on Twitter @TracyVides. You can also find her on G+ at gplus.to/TracyVides.

Do You Have Designs on a Mobile App?

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asuccess 52114As a business owner, what were your top goals coming into 2014?

Some may say lowering their budgets, while others may point to making better hires. Still others might have focused on becoming more adept at social media.

No matter what your primary objective was when the calendar turned to 2014, thinking about how you can improve your business model should be a never-ending focus of what you do.

With that said, how mobile is your business? Specifically, does your business offer a mobile app?

If you don’t think about the following information from j2 Global and eMarketer:

  • Barely 13.5 percent of small businesses noted mobile marketing was a top priority for them;
  • It is projected that more than 45 percent of Americans will use the mobile Internet at least once a month this year;
  • Nearly 70 percent of those individuals running small businesses state they have used or will use Facebook mobile apps in their marketing efforts this year. Meantime, nearly 43 percent have used or will use mobile Twitter apps, while just over 34 percent have used or will be using mobile YouTube apps.

Don’t Wait for a Mobile App, Get it now

With those numbers in mind, what are some reasons you need to get with the right mobile app design company and push forward with a mobile app this year?

Among the reasons a mobile app can be beneficial to your small business:

  1. Consumers are on the go – Face it, many consumers are shopping while at work, running around doing errands, or from the comforts of home. Yes, many people still shop in person, but there is a growing block of people that can increase your revenue stream when they can be mobile shoppers. The bottom line is mobile apps, tablets and smart phones have revolutionized how Americans shop. Even if someone doesn’t buy a product or service from you, having a mobile app is crucial in order to provide customers with product and service information (see more below on marketing), directions to your business, your hours of operations, contact details and more;
  2. Your competitors likely have one – While you can’t be fixated 24/7 on what the competition is doing, it is a rather safe assumption that your competitors have mobile apps. In that case, they’re already one step ahead of you if you don’t offer one;
  3. Data gathering – Although some businesses still rely on a paper trail of information to see what customers shop for, purchase etc. more and more are finding mobile apps can serve as a treasure trove of data. In a day and age when money is tight and time is of the essence, having key data with which to rely on is important. When you target current and potential customers with ads, knowing what their likes and dislikes are via mobile app data gathering saves you time and money;
  4. Affordable marketing – With a mobile app, you can spread the word about the products/services you have to offer. By utilizing the incoming data that you can receive by having an app, you can target your marketing efforts towards those most likely to buy from you. When you find relevant people, you focus in on them, allowing you to drive more sales.

Now that you can see all a mobile has to offer, take the time to find the right product.

Yes, there are countless app designers to choose from, but which one is best for your brand?

First and foremost, find one that comes with high recommendations.

Along with word-of-mouth, be sure to visit the designer’s website and check their social media action on Twitter, Facebook etc. Look to see what kind of social interaction it is they have with consumers, along with how often.

Also do a Google search of the company’s name, looking for any flash points.

If they’ve received a number of customer complaints, have had issues with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) or have stability issues with their finances, those are all red flags.

In a day and age when mobility is key, is a mobile app on your priority list for 2014?

Photo credit: KROMKRATHOG / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: Dave Thomas writes about a variety of subjects on the web, including small business, social media and finances.

Scaling Content Delivery to Fit Your Bandwidth

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By Lisa D. Jenkins

I wasn’t here last week. I know I promised more about visual content but something else has been wandering through my brain, and it’s taken me a bit by surprise. Because the connection is so weird.

Two months ago, I agreed to give CrossFit a 3 month try because The Husband, who loves CrossFit, has graciously embraced so many things I love – live Shakespeare, my quirky clothing choices, BBC television, wine, the crazy things I do to support the causes I believe in … he’s quite the sport.

Crossfit training

So on April 1, off to Arbor CrossFit I went with the goal of participating twice a week. In 2 months, I’ve been a total 4 times and here’s why: I refused to scale the workouts and I paid for it in over-exertion and injuries that equated to lost time. It’s entirely my fault.

I’m still not certain the workouts are for me, but I’ll tell you this: the culture at Arbor CrossFit has me committed to doing a full 3 months. Every person in that box is supportive, inclusive and helpful. They help everyone scale, because they want everyone to succeed. If your ego just won’t listen they’ll let you fail on your own terms but step up right beside you the second you need a helping hand to get back on track.

It occurred to me that I recognized something in this – and there was Liz Strauss whispering to my brain, “Surround yourself with people who won’t let you fail.”

If you’re in business, you can’t afford not to have a group of people like this. They can’t, won’t and shouldn’t do the work for you, but they can help you form an achievable plan and make the right choices. They’ll tell you when the load might be too big. They’ll help you figure out how to scale until you can carry that load. They’ll nudge you when you need to step into something bigger. I have that and it’s invaluable.

If you’re like me, the thought of blogging is rough. And when you read that ‘everyone’ says you should be writing on your blog every day, you get worried. Worried to the point that you never write a word, even if you have something valuable to say, because the thought of failing to publish regularly is paralyzing.

‘Everyone’ is wrong. In case you don’t have someone in your corner yet, I’m taking today to invite you to join me in scaling the weight of content delivery to something that’s manageable for you, so you can get started or re-start.

Try this: write a single post. How long did that take you, from start to finish? I mean to the point where it’s fully polished, proofed and publishable – because grammar and punctuation matter just as much as the image you include. Think about how often you can take that much time to write. Is it once a day? Bully for you! Is it once a week? Also amazing. If it’s twice a month, I’m right here cheering you loud and proud because that’s what you can commit to. Don’t take on a commitment you can’t fill. Publish a few articles consistently and over time you’ll know when you’re ready to bump up the blog delivery.

And if actual writing isn’t your thing? Find another way to tell others about what you do. Share how-to’s on SlideShare, replace long text reports with infographics that share key data findings, and if talking is easier for you, record podcasts instead of publishing articles. Communication isn’t a cookie-cutter proposition – modify the tools you’re comfortable with to deliver your message. (This by the way is a helpful bit of advice I received from my own core group – #Table2!)

I can’t tell you how I got from CrossFit to content – my brain is a weird and mostly wonderful place like that. But I can tell you this: I didn’t name my own sadly neglected blog the Occasional and Erratic Blog for nothing. I’m afraid to commit to writing. Publishing here twice a month is a serious stretch for me.

Now it’s your turn. Will scaling help you publish something online more often? Ready to commit? Tell me what you’re aiming for and every time you hit publish, come back here and share the link. I’ll check it out and give you a virtual high-five, a clap of the hands or anything reasonable you request. Let’s do this!

Author’s Bio: Lisa D. Jenkins is a Public Relations professional specializing in Social and Digital Communications for businesses. She has over a decade of experience and work most often with destination organizations or businesses in the travel and tourism industry in the Pacific Northwest. Connect with her on Google+

Photo Credit: Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson via Compfight cc

Good People, Good Ideas

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“Good people, good ideas.”

That’s how Liz summed up the community here at Successful Blog the last time we chatted.

sky with clouds and bubbles

It rings true for me.

Every time I encounter someone who has attended a SOBCon event, is part of this blog community, or resonates with Liz’s message, I am impressed by their intelligence, their generosity, and their spirit of curiosity.

Those traits make you excellent sharers.

With that in mind, we are actively seeking community members who would like to apply to be a weekly columnist on the site.

Successful Blog is a community for people who are serious about building a business and want practical, usable advice to get things done.

We’re for the “doers,” not the readers.

Columnist Requirements

  • Ability to produce one original, exclusive, well written article per week.
  • Long-term commitment (at least 6 months, preferably one year).
  • A passion for, and expertise in, your subject area.

Applicants will go through an interview process.

Benefits To You

  • Grow your online visibility with a huge audience.
  • Hone your writing voice and exercise your writing muscles.
  • Share your expertise.
  • Make lifelong connections with the Successful Blog community.

If you would like to be considered, please email Rosemary O’Neill (rosemary.oneill@gmail.com) and include the following:

  • Links to published writing examples (or your blog if you have one)
  • Social media profile links
  • Desired topic/category (major categories we cover include Content, Design, Leadership, Marketing, and Personal Development – check out our subcategories here in the sidebar)
  • 5 article ideas within that category

We look forward to adding your voice to Successful Blog!

Photo Credit: Nina Matthews Photography via Compfight cc