Category: Sales & Marketing

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Sales & Marketing

Article Marketing: Where to Get Published

Article marketing is one of the oldest and most reliable ways to drive traffic to your site and increase your profile on the web. These days, there are countless places to submit your articles, but not all of them are equal. Here’s a list of six different places where you can get published and effectively drive new visitors to your website.

1. Blogs:
– Try to find industry-specific blogs that are very relevant to your product or service. You can use Google for this, or ask your clients and associates what they like to read online. Once you find blogs, contact their owners to find out if they’re interested in free content in exchange for a backlink. This is a great way to build online marketing relationships.
– Try BloggerLinkUp.com, a newsletter that connects bloggers with one another.

2. Industry sites: Find sites that pertain to your industry or niche and find out if they accept articles or newsletters.

3. Trade associations

4. Professional associations

5. Ezines: Do some poking around the web for newsletters and ezines that accept submissions from people in the industry.

6. Article directories-sites that accept submissions of articles and guides-for example:
– iVillage.com
– About.com
– Examiner.com
– SelfImprovement.com
– Buzzle
– IdeaMarketers.com
– GoArticles.com
– EzineArticles.com
– Suite101.com

Of course, no matter how you submit your articles, the most important thing is to make sure they deliver good, relevant information, are well written, and inspire people to share your content with others. Most importantly, your articles should inspire people to visit your site.

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Sales & Marketing

How Employers Should Use LinkedIn

Article Contributed by Dominick Frasso

Many businesses are just now getting the hang of how to use social media to improve their businesses. Sure, marketers have been trying to utilize Twitter and Facebook (and MySpace before it) for years; but today, other business units are finding ways to put the power of social media to work for them. For example, creating social media customer service channels has proven to be tremendously effective for some companies.

The human resources function is no different. There are plenty of ways to use social media in the recruitment process. In particular, LinkedIn offers businesses a direct hotline to professionals that might be a good fit.

Here are some ways that employers should be using LinkedIn today in the recruitment process:

  • Start by developing a highly-relevant network of professionals. As an employer, you’re going to have professionals with a number of different skillsets but all within your industry. For example, a materials manufacturer might include engineers, CAD specialists, lathe operators, plant managers, and more in her network of professionals. These contacts aren’t necessarily the people that you’re going to try to recruit into your business, of course. Most of them are happy where they’re at. Instead, they provide you with the most extensive referral chain in the world. Your network will reach out to others in their network, bringing in prospects in droves.
  • Develop active searches for candidates on LinkedIn using keyword searches. If a LinkedIn user lists their experience or qualifications, you should be able to find them via the search process. Share your contact information with these individuals, so they can come back to you when they’re job hunting (either actively or passively).
  • Develop a strong company profile. Don’t just give details about where you’re located, what you sell, and how many people work for you. Talk about your company’s goals, about your approach to corporate responsibility, about how your company treats its employees. Make your company look like an attractive place to work on LinkedIn.
  • Make sure your company profile can be found on LinkedIn. Likewise, you want to have keyword-rich company profile that indicates the types of work you’re likely to have. Don’t just stick with industry keywords; reach out into specific job functions, particularly those that seem to have the highest rate of turnover.
  • Look to colleagues, as well. People that you’ve worked with in the past can be wonderful assets going forward. If they parted amicably, they might be one of your best employees yet again. If not, it’s still likely that they could send you some of your best employees for the future.
  • Search for candidates by recommendations. Go to those key LinkedIn users whose judgment you trust. It might be an industry colleague, or it might be a former employee. Read the recommendations they’re making about others, and then reach out to the one being recommended.
  • Join relevant LinkedIn Groups. There are groups by industry, by employment skills, by background, by professional membership, and more. Groups can be a wonderful resource for referrals, as well.
  • Consider fee based posting of jobs on LinkedIn. The jury is still out on just how effective this will be. Chances are pretty good it’s going to bring in the traditional stack of resumes, from which you need to sift through and find the one needle. You’re almost always better off going the referral route and choosing half a dozen recommended individuals and bringing them into the interview and candidacy process.
  • Offer internships. If your company does internships, LinkedIn is a great place to find candidates. Almost everyone knows a young up-and-comer who could use some real-world experience, and it may as well be at your company.
  • Use LinkedIn cautiously. Be careful when it comes to zeroing in on your own employees and contacts on LinkedIn. Not all of the information on their profiles is going to be current. It might look like your VP of Finance is gunning for a position at a cushy job down in Southern Florida, when really he was simply messing around with his settings one day and forgot to change them back. Take everything on LinkedIn in stride, recognizing that not all of it is necessarily current, accurate, or relevant.

Below are 3 action items to start doing today to put this to work for your company:

  1. Identify and join 3 LinkedIn Groups related to your industry– use the LinkedIn Group Directory to find relevant groups. An example if you’re an advertising agency could be the Creative Designers and Writers group. This is a great place to built a network of creative talent that you can draw upon in the future.
  2. Contribute at least 1 meaningful reply per week for each of the 3 groups. Meaningful means that you add value to the conversation rather than just getting through your 1 reply per week quota. This will help group members realize that you’re a real person at an interesting company.
  3. Start a discussion topic once per week in one of the 3 groups you joined. The topic can be anything that would make for a good talk at a coffee shop. For example, ask for the group’s thoughts on whether an article’s prediction about your industry is accurate and why. This will help establish you as a more authoritative member of the group, which is helpful for recognition as you put out the word to your network regarding openings at your company.

Of all the social media tools out there today, the one most HR-friendly has to be LinkedIn. It’s a database of potential employees, a screening mechanism, a referral network, and more, all wrapped into one.

Use LinkedIn to enhance your recruiting and hiring process, get better candidates, and keep your business humming right along with the best people.

About the Author

Dominick Frasso is SEO/SEM Specialist at Vistage International, a membership organization that helps CEOs build successful companies through business coaching groups, executive coaching and executive development opportunities.

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Sales & Marketing

Is Your Inner Critic on Your Biz’s Board of Directors? 3 Ways to Tell

You know that voice. The one that berates you and criticizes you.

 

“So-and-so has a successful business, what’s wrong with you?”

 

“Your mother (or spouse or friend) was right — you’re not cut out to have a business.”

 

“You only have 6 months left of 2012 and you STILL haven’t accomplished anything on your to-do list.”

 

And on and on. You get the picture.

 

This voice is your Inner Mean Girl or Inner Mean Bully, which I prefer to call Inner Critic (mostly because Inner Critic sounds way too nice for that nasty voice).

 

Now, while your Inner Mean Girl/Bully can show up in all sorts of instances (i.e. in your love life, as a parent) this is about when she/he decides to put herself on your business’s board of directors.

 

We all have one — a board of directors residing in your head. This is the place where you make business decisions such as:

 

* Should I invest in the program or not?

* Should I hire this person or not? (Or should I hire someone period?)

* Is this an opportunity I should take advantage of or not?

* Is this someone I should partner with or not?

* Should I create this product or not?

* Should I complete this marketing task today or not? (Or should I write my ezine or not?)

 

You see where I’m going. Pretty much any decision you make with your business traces back to your business’s board of directors.

 

Now the problem comes in when your Inner Mean Girl/Bully is sitting on the board (or worse, president of the board). Because if this is the case, you’re making decisions from a place of weakness instead of strength. Consider:

 

* You don’t hire someone because you’re afraid you won’t be able to pay for it, even though you’ve reached a point you can’t grow without putting a team in place.

 

* OR you spend WAY too much (on a program or multiple programs, on a big team, etc.) and your business can’t support that yet.

 

* You find yourself choosing partners or opportunities that turn into disasters.

 

* You procrastinate when it comes to completing marketing tasks even though you know it would help stabilize your cash flow.

 

* You always have “one more edit” or “one more thing” to do with your product or book (which means you never actually start selling it.)

 

* You can never relax — you’re constantly “doing” yet you’re still not moving forward in your business the way you think you ought to be.

 

* And so on.

 

To top it off, (as if making poor decisions wasn’t punishment enough) your Inner Mean Girl/Bully will beat you up when things go wrong.

 

There’s just no way to win.

 

So how can you tell if your Inner Mean Girl/Bully is in charge or not? Here are 3 signs:

 

1. How are you feeling? Do you find yourself suffering from burnout, exhaustion, overwhelm? You probably have an Inner Mean Girl/Bully problem.

 

2. Do you find yourself procrastinating or maybe you’re unfocused? Or maybe you have writer’s block or are creativity stuck? This is another Inner Mean Girl/Bully sign.

 

3. Do you have a history of making bad business decisions? Again, tell-tale sign of an Inner Mean Girl/Bully on your board of directors.

 

These are just the tip of the iceberg but I think the key is this: if you are unhappy with any part of your business, then it’s worth it to see if there is an Inner Mean Girl/Bully lurking about and sabotaging you.

 

 

 

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Sales & Marketing

Resultse21 3 Keys to Enjoying Summer AND Growing Your Biz

Who says you can’t do it at all?

Now that summer is here, the lure of playing hokey is warring with the responsibility of getting something done in your business.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if you could do it ALL — make money, grow your business AND have time to play?

Here are 3 keys to having your cake and eating it t/o:

1. Plan your time off.

Now I’m sure you already have your vacations blocked off, but what about afternoons off? Long weekends? Go ahead and plan those as well and get them on the calendar (because you know if you don’t plan your time off it’s not going to happen). Plus if you have time blocked off in your calendar then you can relax and focus during work time because you know you have your “play” dates already accounted for.

Not sure how much time off to block off? Well, there are a couple of things you can do. Do you have a big launch coming up this summer? You may not be able to take as much time off as you’d like, but schedule what you can and see what happens. Have you decided you’re going to “coast” this summer? Then definitely block off more time.

Or just ask your gut. How much time is your gut telling you to take off? That might be the easiest and more reliable way to figure it out.

2. Plan to WORK on your work days.

No screwing around here. You have your time off planned, so on the days where you’re scheduled to get things done, get things done. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be tempted to not take your time off, which means you’ve in effect “lied” to yourself, the Universe, etc. And how much time off are you really going to end up with if the message you’re sending is you’re not honoring your time off?

3. Change up your energy if you’re really feeling stuck or sluggish.

I get it. Just because the calendar says you must work doesn’t mean you’ll actually feel like working. So what do you do on those days where you find that pure willpower isn’t enough?

On those days take a break. Go for a walk. Visit a Starbucks. Blast a song on your iPod and dance around the house. Go outside and lay in the sun for 10 minutes.

The best thing you can do is move your energy around, either by exercising or a change of location or both. It doesn’t have to last long — even 10 minutes is enough. Just do SOMETHING. Chances are when you sit back down you’ll be able to focus on your work.

Above all, keep in mind why you have a business in the first place. Yes there will be times you have to put in long hours but you also need to balance that with time off. Chances are you didn’t start a business so you could work all the time but so you could work when you CHOSE to. Summer is a great time to remind yourself you have the power to arrange your work schedule to suit yourself, your family and your life.

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Sales & Marketing

3 Powerful Ways To Increase Your Sales

Article Contributed by David Lynch

Everyone in sales goes through difficult moments, even those who are very experienced and highly skilled. The great news is that it’s much easier to get out of the negative zone and back into the positive one if you use the right methods:

1. Elevate Yourself

One of the main problems of going through a bad period in sales is the change of mental state that occurs. It doesn’t matter how strong you are mentally, you will find it difficult to escape this drop in confidence. Well, the only way out is to elevate your state of belief and get yourself back into the perfect frame of mind for selling. You need to trick your subconscious mind into believing that things are going fantastically well, and the good news is that our brain is sufficiently stupid to accept it as the truth. Take a sheet of paper and start writing a series of positive affirmations about your capabilities in selling. Make sure they are always in the present! Do this for about 10 minutes, anything less will not be enough. The positive affirmations will be translated into “truth” and “reality” by your subconscious and this should get you back on track in no time.

2. Get Yourself a Mentor

I discovered this one in recent years because previously I had always thought that I could solve my own problems. This is a common mistake among sales people who love to take responsibility on their own shoulders and just ride the storm alone. Well I now realise that this is not really the smartest way of giving yourself a boost. Find someone such as a motivational coach and listen to their audio or video training. If you like this person and admire their approach, it cannot fail to influence your state. Try this one because it really works. I like Tony Robbins because he has energy levels that I could only dream of. If I can take 20 per cent of his drive, it can carry me for the rest of the day.

3. Be Grateful For What you Already Have

This is a problem that we all face in western civilisation today. People have got so much they have forgotten what it was like for our ancestors. If you sit in silence for a few minutes and think of how people in third world countries need to walk for miles to carry fresh water in heavy containers to keep their children alive. Millions of people work for less than a dollar a day and they still manage to survive. Then we look at our problems in selling. Okay a few people told you to go away and stop annoying them. This is nothing compared to the difficulties that others face in the world. Get up off your chair, take some fresh air and go back to selling and enjoy it like it’s a privilege.

About the Author

David Lynch is a Sales Training Designer & Accomplished Author. He has more than 20 years’ experience in a variety of industries including software, insurance & hospitality. If you would like to learn more sales skills from David you can download a Free Copy of his E-book “25 Mistakes To Avoid When Selling” at http://www.saleswillgrow.com/freesalestraining2.html