Happy Birthday to me...

It's Friday is one year old this week

Here are some figures:

Total Newsletters sent

48

  List members August 2011

17

  List members August 2012

41

  Industry opening rate

15.5%

  It's Friday opening rate

41.7%

  Hours spent each week to produce

2

  Most popular newsletter:

It's Friday - WTF is Curation? (It's not about bacon) 63% open

Aside from curating a page on Content Marketing for Business and keeping a fairly low Twitter profile – the newsletter is the only push marketing I do.

In the last year I have more than doubled my client base and quadrupled turnover.

If you’d like to see how a newsletter could work for your business, reply to this email and book a session.

 

Clarity – how to grow your business - fast

Knowledge is growing exponentially

The world is exploding with information – every week there’s a new tool, a new school of thought, a new data-set to be absorbed and lessons to be applied.

You either know or you don’t

Doctors and Lawyers are able to charge huge hourly rates because the difference between knowing and getting it wrong could be your business, your reputation, hell even your life.

Mobile Digital Footprints

It’s all about access and trust; with the near ubiquitous penetration of the smart phone and savvy business people developing digital footprints on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter; it’s easy to identify and contact the people who can help your business.

Time is money

Sometimes you just need 10 minutes with an expert to see a problem differently – even if it was at $10 a minute – that $100 could end up saving you a fortune

Clarity.fm

Is an exchange where you can search for and book phone calls with people who are experts in their field. It’s still early days and the expert pool reflects the start up culture of Silicon Valley, but it should grow to cover all areas of life.

This is not another social network that you need to invest time in but a real tool that could help grow your business – check it out – http://Clarity.fm

You’re an expert

I would suggest you register yourself – chances are if you’re running a successful business – someone’s going to find your time and expertise valuable; plus, it’s a great way to meet new clients.

In the meantime, if you want to tackle that marketing project you’ve been putting off for months, reply to this email and book a session.

 

Testimonials and how to use them

If you’re hating writing for your website (yes – I’m looking at you) or if you haven’t even started (I’m looking at you too!) then how about getting someone else to do it?

Free content

Yes you could pay someone to write for you * but much better if you can get it for free – and what’s better than having someone who’s paid for your service telling others how amazing you are?

Consumer reviews rule

I was chatting to the owner of an established LA based sprinkler and water supply company (having just paid him $600!); they employ around 20 staff and service the San Fernando Valley. He stopped his yellow pages advertizing last year as he found it to be a waste of money – all his new business is coming from Angie’s List and Yelp.

Free awesome content

If your business is generating positive reviews on these sites, there’s nothing that says you can’t take a good review, “top and tail” it with an introduction and finish with a link to the product or service they were writing about and publish it as a blog post on your site.

Clearly not every post can be a testimonial, but if you’re looking to knock out 3 or 4 articles a month, having one of those be an examination of one of your products or services based around a positive independent review – how cool is that!?

If you want to know how to incorporate reviews into your website, reply to this email and book a session.

* Killer writer for hire

If you want to get started on your content strategy but writing isn’t your strong suit – I have a killer writer who won’t break the bank and writes like a dream – she’s currently doing a great job for a few of my clients and I highly recommend her; get in touch if you’d like an introduction.

 

Why your business failed with social media

If you want the 7 point plan that the guys over at Socialmediaexaminer.com propose – you can check it out here. I’m just going to comment on the three biggies:

1. Social Media – it’s not just for Christmas

Just as you wouldn’t give a kid a pet as a gift – all nice, new and cute until it needs training and cleaning up after – social media marketing is for life.

I was looking at the stats of a client who stopped writing a while back; they had 1,000 less visitors to their site in quarter 2 than they did in quarter 1. For a small business – that’s pretty significant.

2. It’s about engagement

I’m watching another client who is doing a great job of stimulating discussion and interaction. They’re writing provocative and media current articles, distributing them across their footprint and then driving the ensuing discussion back on to their website.

The trick here is that every comment or interaction is responded to and it’s the responses that drive further interaction. The more interaction you have on your site, the more visible you are and it all becomes a wonderful virtuous circle.

3. It’s about expert content

Good content is hard, but it shouldn’t be if you’re good at your job and knowledgeable about your industry. If you don’t have an opinion or feel strongly about certain things in your business, then you’re no different from the competition, so why should anyone choose you?

It doesn’t matter what your business is – if you’re selling a service or a physical product – people will ultimately need to make a decision whether to give you their time and money. It is your expert content that facilitates this decision.

It’s not rocket science

Understanding all this isn’t hard, hell, actually doing it isn’t hard – maintaining a presence over time and committing to it – that’s what’s difficult.

The social media examiner article is a good one – you should read it.

If you want to get your social media marketing back up and running – reply to this email and book a session.

Habla Español? Parlez-vous Français?

I’m in the middle of translation gig for a forward thinking law firm in Los Angeles; they’re offering their entire site in Spanish, which got me thinking…

Are you in the Spanish speaking market?

There are over 50 million Spanish speakers in the US and it’s a growing population; if you’re in the Los Angeles area almost 40% of the population consider Spanish as their first language – that’s getting on for 5 million people!

Mandarin & French

If you do business in Louisiana, Maine even New Hampshire, you might want to consider a few pages in French. If you do a lot of business on the west coast you might want to present a page or two in Mandarin.

Amazing customer service

There is nothing more powerful than speaking to someone in their own language – particularly in a foreign country. The button on your home page that says “se habla español” is going to be immediately visible to a native speaker

10% of US searches are in Spanish

Sure you’re optimized for your keywords – in English – but what about Spanish? If I built your site, every page has a beautiful Meta title and description – but that’s invisible to over 10% of your potential customer base.

Don’t half-ass it

If you’re thinking of translating your site – don’t do it on the cheap – there’s nothing more amusing than reading someone’s poorly translated website; if you’re going to do it, get a professional – I can refer you to one. Likewise – if you don’t have anybody on the team who can speak Spanish then maybe this isn’t for you – there’s nothing worse than raising expectations and then disappointing a potential client.

If you think your business could benefit by offering a different language on your website, reply to this email and book a session.

 

You don't know what you don't know

We’ve got a couple of filmmakers staying with us at present – they’ve been on the road for a year shooting a documentary about the corporate takeover of democracy in America. Their business model is pretty similar to yours:

  • Make people aware they exist
  • Publish unique and interesting content to drive engagement
  • Make it easy for people to receive product in exchange for money
They have a basic website, a well established Facebook page770 Twitter followers and an underused YouTube channel.

We’re all autodidacts

It’s just the two of them and they’re pretty much self-taught when it comes to digital marketing, and just like everyone else, they’re overwhelmed with how much has to be done to maintain and develop an online presence.

So we’re talking about social media and I ask Terry if he’s heard of Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. Two minutes later he’s standing slack jawed in front of my monitor as he realizes how he can now incorporate different feeds into one interface, monitor and interact quickly with targets and generally become more effective in less time just by using the right tool.

New tools all the time

New technologies are being developed all the time and there are a lot of tools out there that can make your life a lot easier if you know they exist.

If you’re struggling with a particular aspect of your marketing, it may be that there’s a new tool that exists that will help you.

If you’d like to find out, reply to this email and book a session.

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