Guest Appearances

4 Ways to Get Back Up After Miserable Business Failure Knocks You Out Cold

Posted on February 6, 2012 | In Guest Appearances

Have you ever felt like you would never, ever, ever succeed?

Sure, you get the occasional pat on the back from your boss, or a colleague congratulates you for a job well done, but have you ever tried failing so bad that you thought no one could do worse?

Your retail store isn’t selling as much as you would want. You only get 20 people in the entire world to buy your new book. In fact, you’ve been working so hard day and night, churning out great content every time,  but you’ve recently noticed that no one is actually reading your blog. And that’s when you feel it.

You feel that you’ve become a failure.

You didn’t do well way back in school, and now things are coming full circle. Everything that you’ve done for your business is going wrong.

You’re afraid to look at your family and friends in the eye, and admit that you’re a loser.

When people think of entrepreneurs, business owners and the like, they instinctively think of people driving a BMW, living in a cozy mansion with a perfect family and a couple of German Shepherd Dogs.

Then they look at you, and all they see is a failure. How do you get back up after that?

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More Customers with Foursquare Marketing: The 3-Part Strategy that Really Works

Posted on February 3, 2012 | In Guest Appearances

Ever wondered how your small or local business can take advantage of the latest trends in social media and mobile marketing, and attract new customers in the process?

Let’s face it. Every local business wants an easier and more effective way to get customers during this economy. But how can these businesses attract and retain more customers with social media, without spending a lot of time and money to do it?

That’s where Foursquare comes in. I’ll tell you why it’s important, and show you a proven Foursquare Marketing strategy to get more customers in the door and keep them coming back.

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The Simplest Marketing Strategy: Make New Friends

Posted on February 2, 2012 | In Guest Appearances

Marketing strategies on the internet are as prolific and omnipresent as a trust-fund hippie bragging about his wanderings in a hostel in Hat Yai.

I will never apologize for my lack of reverence, tact, or muzzle. I will also never brag about how awesome I am at making you a lot of money.

Let’s agree to deal with those two facts.

Today I’m going to give you 4 simple steps that will ensure lots of (1) money, (2) fun, and (3) super-duper sexy sex.

Have I got your attention? ;-D

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Open Source Your Marketing!

Posted on February 1, 2012 | In Guest Appearances

Writing articles is hard work.

I’m sure you felt that, yet it has always been a good way to market business. I found 37signals because of their awesome blog, yet we could only do so much.

What if we did what developers did to market themselves?

Open source.

While open source is what they used to build credibility, we can use open source to build backlinks, to reach new customers and innovate our marketing.

It’s better to learn by example, so here are some examples that might apply to your business…

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The Art of Pulling the Trigger: Upselling Done Right

Posted on January 31, 2012 | In Guest Appearances

Upselling is like bringing a gun to a knife fight, or a knife to a fist fight. If you’re doing it right, and your competitor isn’t, they lose.

Upselling is essentially the art of generating free money. Money that can be made without any additional marketing costs. And of course, everybody likes them free monies.

I’m not going to go into much detail on upselling itself here, but let me just bring up a short definition in case you’re not that familiar with the concept:

Upselling is a technique of selling another products right after a client has bought your main product. And by “right after” I mean a second after (i.e. immediately). – from my post What Exactly is an Upsell (and Upselling) – feel free to check it out to find out more.

So in plain English: if you’re offering an additional product to your customer at the precise moment when they’re standing at the cash register, that’s upselling.

And in this post, I’m going to show you exactly how to do it…

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How I Doubled My Organic Traffic the Last Two Months (Using This Single Method!)

Posted on January 30, 2012 | In Guest Appearances

Most of us know how effective guest posting can be if it gets in front of the right audience.

A quality guest post in front of your niche often generates a quick traffic spike or increase in sales, not to mention long-term relevance to your brand.

And, on an SEO stand point, Google’s algorithm makes that Super Mario extra life sound every time it sees a quality link pointing to your site from a reputable domain.  They are simply some of the best links you can get, and your keyword rankings will increase with an influx of these types of links.

However, if anyone has tried guest posting, they know that it is an exhaustive and time-consuming process.

That is, unless you do it my way… ;-)

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The Twitter Hashtag Game

Posted on January 27, 2012 | In Guest Appearances

For my marketing idea, I created something called the “Hashtag Game.”

Like Naomi Dunford said: “It’s the shit that we do to get people to buy our shit.” There are many things we can do to attract potential readers and customers such as: producing powerful content; word of mouth; Facebook marketing; free eBooks to lure people in; and guest posting.

There are also the little, effortless things that we forget to do that can add up overtime: adding hashtags at the end of our tweets.

For example: If I were tweeting “Engagement From Scratch” . . . and let’s just say I don’t have 50,000 followers but I want to spread the word about it. By adding hashtags that are relevant to the subject of the book or who the book is targeted to, it can:

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How to Set Up Retargeting in Google AdWords

Posted on January 26, 2012 | In Guest Appearances

Seventy percent of online shoppers abandon their shopping cart without completing a purchase.

For a small business owner, this can mean losing a lot of potential revenue. One of the most powerful ways to get website visitors that didn’t buy back to your site to increase the chances of gaining that lost revenue is through a strategy called “retargeting.”

For business owners that aren’t familiar with the term, retargeting means targeting online ads directly to people that have been to your website in the past. Retargeting is done through building a targeted list of visitors and displaying your ads to those specific users on different sites across the web. Google AdWords Remarketing is a great way to set up retargeting and increase the overall ROI of your organic and paid search strategy across the Google Display Network.

Retargeting strategies can become very complex. You can set up campaigns and ad groups that target just about any landing page you choose with appropriate messaging to get the results you want. Here’s just a few examples of ways retargeting can help:

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Pulp-Fiction Style Get Found Online Adrenaline-Shot to the Heart of your Small Business

Posted on January 25, 2012 | In Guest Appearances

When Danny Iny asked me if I’d be interested in participating in this contest I was both nervous and excited because in full disclosure I’ve never entered a contest of this nature before.  Not being known as a person with much in the way of patience I immediately accepted the challenge and turned my marketing brain on.

I printed out the flyer Danny sent me outlining what the contest entailed, shut the door to my office and got to thinkin’… If I worked for a small business, what could I do that would be quick and easy to implement (small business types don’t have much time to budget for marketing) and wouldn’t require me to be a marketing-guru-ninja-rockstar but could completely change the game for my small business?

Then it hit me… I’ll write about the importance of a quality ad in the Yellow-Pages…

Psyche!

Look, I try to be funny and break the ice, but the deal is simple, I work for a small business, an independent family-owned insurance agency in Upstate NY.  All my clients are small businesses, so this is actually a very important exercise because small business is struggling right now and contests like these help drive innovative thought creation that could potentially help small business get back on their feet…

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Content Marketing for the Biz Blogging Telesummit

Posted on January 24, 2012 | In Guest Appearances

I had a crazy idea over the summer.

Why not run a telesummit featuring experts in blogging, social media and SEO providing information designed specifically to help small businesses market online? Oh, and why not add in actual small business case studies as well?

Great idea, right?!

Well, I pulled together the pitch, signed up some amazing interview subjects including Marcus Sheridan, Pamela Slim, Denise Wakeman, Jack Humphrey and Danny Iny (of Firepole Marketing) and started conducting the interviews.

This may sound easy, but how I did this is another story! Anyway… halfway through the 18 interviews I started to realize the enormity of the task required to not only pull this off, but to get people to attend!!

So I quickly pulled together my marketing plan consisting of…

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Why Should Any Marketer Write A Book?

Posted on January 23, 2012 | In Guest Appearances

Having a book on your topic of expertise, with you as the author, is a solid gold credential.

Even before anyone reads the book, they know that you are a leader in your field. Even if all they see is a picture of it on your website, you already have distinction, by virtue of being an author. Wouldn’t you prefer to buy products or services from the person who wrote the book on your topic? So would your prospects.

So why haven’t you written one?

Well, you may have heard that it’s hard. Or expensive. Or both.

But actually…

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The Pivotal Role of Social Context in Your 2012 Marketing

Posted on January 21, 2012 | In Guest Appearances

First, there was inbound marketing.

Then came social proof.

This year, the focus will be on social context.

Online, social context is the “push” behind the goal to get you to take action.  It’s a combination of social proof (such as “14,380 people like Zangy Spaghetti Sauce”) and people within your social sphere that could influence your decision (such as “Joe Bloggs and Suzie Homemaker like Zangy Spaghetti Sauce”).

As both sociable and influenceable creatures, we recognize the pull that numbers can have – but what really seems to spur action is the fact that our friends approve of it and can even motivate us to try it – even something as insignificant as the brand of spaghetti sauce we use…

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