2009

Are You About The Climb?

by Russ Henneberry

TweetWhat will motivate you to keep going?

Can you recognize and find inspiration and hope in small wins? Incremental gains?

I hope so.

Perhaps you are at the beginning of your climb and you are staring at the sheer cliff wall. And you are frightened. Or excited and anxious.

Take the first step. Begin your climb. Look for a quick win and extract all the motivation you can from this win.

Perhaps you are smack dab in the middle of your climb. You have made some gains. You have made some mistakes. This is what it is all about. If (and when) you make it, you will remember this climb with a smile. You will know that you accomplished something extraordinary.

No question — reaching the top is the goal. But, when it is all said and done, it is about the climb.

How do you feel about this? For you — is it about the climb or reaching the top?

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Trust Not Traffic: What Are Your Internet Marketing Goals?

by Russ Henneberry

TweetGet your priorities straight!

What are your true Internet Marketing goals?

Is it better rankings in Google? No. Is it more traffic on your website? Nope. Is it more sales? Absolutely.

No doubt you have heard of Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO.) Both of these tactics will increase your rankings in Google and/or send more traffic to your website.

What Will They Find When They Visit Your Website?

Sending 10,000 visitors to a garbage website via PPC or SEO wouldn’t do a bit of good for the business owner. No one will buy from a garbage website.

All things being equal, we buy from people we KNOW, LIKE and TRUST.

Ask yourself this:

What is on my website that will help me get to know people?
What is on my website that will cause people to like me?
What is on my website that will build trust with people?

Are you creating a community around your business on your website, allowing people to get to know you? Are you providing helpful content that will cause me to like you? Are you publishing video, audio or text content that will cause me to believe that I can trust you?

How do you feel about it? What are your true Internet Marketing goals?

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Are You Selling Steak or Sizzle?

by Russ Henneberry

TweetYesterday:

Decent Product or Service + Huge Ad Budget = Success

Today:

Superior Product or Service + Outstanding Customer Service + Intelligent Web Marketing = Success

The Web Is Too Transparent To Sell Only Sizzle

In the old scenario you could hammer the “sizzle” into my head using thousands of brand images. Repeatedly drumming me with hyperbole or rhetoric:

~ Visa – It’s everywhere you want to be.
~ Nike – Just Do It.

None of us believe that Visa is EVERYWHERE we want to be. In fact, when this slogan was running, credit and debit cards weren’t accepted in most of the places I wanted to be.

As for Nike, what exactly are they implying with Just Do It? If I buy these shoes, will I have a complete attitude shift, will I suddenly be able to achieve something I couldn’t before I bought them?

Nevertheless, selling the sizzle worked for decades because of the repetition of the message and the masters that created those messages. The marketing tugged at your heartstrings. They used images and language that deliberately connected with us on an emotional level.

People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.
~Zig Ziglar

The “Cold Shoulder” and “Marketing-Avoidance” Technology

We all know it has long since moved past ridiculous.

There are ads crammed into even the most unsuspecting places. At the urinal, on your grocery cart, right smack dab in the middle of a baseball game broadcast:

~ “This call to the bullpen is brought to you by AT&T. ”
~ “This pitching change is brought to you by Robinson Roofing.”
~ This bloop fly ball is brought to you by some other business that is interrupting the game.”

All selling the sizzle.

But we have evolved. We have become remarkably adept at ignoring these messages. One of the most important metrics that are measured with branding campaigns is called RECALL. Essentially, it amounts to whether you remember the content of the ads that you are seeing.

Traditional marketers are terrified by the numbers they are seeing. Recall is lower than ever before and it is mostly by their own making. The more messages that are thrust in front of us, the less we recall. It is a simple function of our memory. As a result, these ads have become more shocking and borderline offensive in an effort to make an impression on us.

Do you remember the name of the real estate agent that was advertising on your grocery cart this morning? Didn’t think so. Didn’t make an impression, did it?

The plastering of marketing messages into every nook and cranny of our lives has caused us to invent technologies that allow us to avoid marketing messages. Tivo, iPod, Netflix, and pop-up blockers are all examples of technologies that allow us to circumvent the sizzle.

Why The Steak Better Be Good

Sites like Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed make it very easy to query your network for referrals on products and services. Those that have experienced your products/services and customer service will be more than willing to pipe up with the good or bad news about your organization.

The Internet is nothing, if it isn’t transparent. Good stuff bubbles to the top and the garbage fades to the bottom. The winners in the future will have to start their marketing efforts with their products and services. The steak better be good.

Let Your Customers Sell The Sizzle

Today, smart companies are putting more of their money/energy into developing truly remarkable products and services. Their customer service is outstanding. Their products/services are so UNIQUE that they cause customers to scream the praise to their entire network.

And those networks are huge. Networks that span the globe. With communication tools that do it in milliseconds.

Your own satisfied customers will create the sizzle for you and it will be more authenic. It will be in the form of a REFERRAL. And there is nothing more powerful than referrals.

What about you? What are you doing to improve your products and services going forward? Are you selling the steak or the sizzle?

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The Disconnect Between Sales And Execution

by Russ Henneberry

This happens to customers all the time when sales and execution aren't on the same page.

Advantage: Tiny Business Owner

I have experience working with a large service based organization that had 100′s of sales representatives beating the street. These sales reps would secure deals, get a contract signed and then pass it on to us for implementation.

We were the ones executing on the terms placed in these contracts. Big problem.

We often found that the customer was “misled” or outright lied to by the sales representative. After all, the rep is rewarded for getting the sale and thus the commission.

This often led to a extremely agitated customers and, of course, it was up to us (not the sales rep) to make it right.

Tiny Businesses Don’t Have This Problem

More than likely, you are doing the selling and the execution.

Your tiny business can take advantage of this strength by ensuring that you know exactly what you do and don’t do. Make promises to your customer and then deliver on those promises. Your customers will appreciate the seamless transition from sale to execution.

Make sure that your potential customers know that you will be handling every aspect of their experience with your company and that you will be “taking care of them” personally. Understanding that this differentiates your company from your larger competitors can be a powerful selling tool.

What do you think? Have you ever experienced a disconnect between sales and execution either as a consumer or as an employee at a large organization? What kinds of frustrations did you experience?

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[Video] Merry Christmas and Some Awesome Xmas Video

by Russ Henneberry

TweetTom Croghan is the owner of Creative Candleholders, a place to buy candles and candle holders online. He also makes brilliant use of Content Marketing by creating video that corresponds with holidays where we use lots of candles. This is yet another example of Tom’s fantastic use of video.

Merry Christmas To All and I hope you enjoy Tom’s latest creation.

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Is Barack Obama Your President Without The Internet?

by Russ Henneberry

Barack Obama

I ran across some very interesting statistics while reading a book called Socialnomics by Erik Qualman. This book is a fascinating look at the drastic changes that have occurred due to the advent of social media. The book is current, fresh and very relevant to tiny business owners.

One of the chapters in the book discusses the way that Barack Obama was able to leverage social media to drive small $5 and $10 donations to his campaign amounting to millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

The statistics below are a snapshot of the numbers at the time of the election.

Network	Obama	McCain
Facebook Fans	3,000,000	600,000
MySpace Friends	800,000	217,000
Twitter Followers	113,000	4,000
YouTube Views	20,000,000	2,000,000
Blog Mentions	500,000,000	150,000,000

Obama also encouraged the youth of America to get out and vote by using online video and the powerful video sharing site YouTube. The video below, which is a spoof of the classic “WASSUP” Bud Light commercials was released one week before election day and at the time of writing this blog post had over 7 million views on YouTube and over 20,000 comments.

The “WASSUP” videos had been successful at selling millions of Anheuser Busch beers and were apparently equally successful at marketing the Obama campaign.

Could a relatively unknown Senator from Chicago have rocketed to the presidency in just four years without the power of the Internet? Are there similarities between Obama’s use of the Internet and JFK’s use of the new medium of television?

Leave Your Thoughts In The Comments Section! Remember — This is not a political discussion but a marketing discussion.

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A Review of AWeber Email Marketing Service

by Russ Henneberry

TweetAWeber is the industry standard when it comes to email auto responders. I recommend it highly but this review won’t be a complete love fest. I do have some issues with AWeber that I will be discussing but overall, I am a big fan.

You can check out AWebers service by clicking here.

What is an email auto responder? It is a service that handles “soup to nuts” with your email marketing.

The service provides all of the following:

The set-up of email opt-in forms like the one you see in the upper right of this site.
The ability to segment your list of subscribers.
The sending of a series of automated emails after someone subscribes.
The sending of one-off “broadcast” emails
And it keeps you from damaging your companies reputation by following strict anti-spam rules.

AWeber is just one of many companies that offers an email auto responder service. Whether you decide on AWeber or some other service, I recommend that you use a trustworthy service to handle your email marketing.

Flexible Opt-In Forms - As you can see in the upper right hand corner of my site, you can do just about anything with your email opt-in box. You can add images, video, text and just about anything else to your opt-in box.

This is important because there are so many newsletters that are available and you need to do something a extra to get people’s attention.

Deliverability – For me, AWeber’s biggest strength is their deliverability. AWeber is squeaky clean when it comes to SPAM and this leads to the ultimate in deliverability. In fact, AWeber is so obsessed with ensuring that they are not sending SPAM through their service, it can be annoying sometimes.

However, the company is up front and honest about its policies — you should only be sending email to people that ASK for it. Everything else is SPAM.

Check out AWeber’s Anti-Spam policy here.

Ease of Use - AWeber is super easy to use with a handy set-up wizard that shows you your progress and prods you along to take care of each step in succession. There have been a couple of times when I have struggled to find the location of some random setting or something but overall they score high in ease of use.

Opt-In Audio – I really dig this feature. One of the biggest problems with a double opt-in (e.g. The first opt-in occurs by giving entering your email and then you must opt-in a second time by clicking on a link in an email – cutting down on SPAM… dang this is a long sentence to be in parentheses) is that you lose a fair percentage of people when they have to click on the link in the email to opt-in the second time.

Some people forget. They delete the email. They don’t understand what they are supposed to do. And so on. You lose them.

The addition of the audio that follows the first opt-in is a great feature and has reduced my percentage of second opt-in losses quite significantly. Basically the audio simply tells the email subscriber what they need to do to complete the second opt-in.

AWeber is an outstanding service and I would recommend that you START your email subscriber list from the get-go using this service or something like it. It is difficult to move from a self-managed Excel spreadsheet and Outlook email list to a service like AWeber because these companies are leery of the methods you used to harvest these emails.

You can check out AWebers service by clicking here.

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What is the Tiny Business, Mighty Profits Meet Up About? – Presented Dec 10th, 2009

by Russ Henneberry

TweetThe Tiny Business, Mighty Profits Meet Up is off and running.

We had our first meeting on December 10th and there were some fantastic tiny business owners in attendance. If you are wondering about the content of this meet up — watch this short video.

The next meeting is January 14, 2010 at La Quinta Inn in Westport at 7 pm. You can RSVP here!

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My Big Twitter Blunder

by Russ Henneberry

TweetBuild my ego.

That was (apparently) the first goal I set out to achieve when I began using Twitter. I suppose I wanted to feel important, powerful —- popular.

I went for numbers. And I got them.

When I began using Twitter, I used some tactics that allowed me to build a lot of followers very quickly. I can remember one day my Outlook didn’t stop dinging for more than a minute with a new “So and So You Have Never Met And Whom Doesn’t Care About You And Whom You Don’t Care About is now following you on Twitter” email.

A Big Mess

To make things worse, I enabled a setting in one of my tools that automatically followed back anyone that followed me.

The “You have a New Follower” emails were followed by the inevitable spammy DM message telling me how I could become rich overnight or, better yet, how I could gain even more followers whom didn’t care about me and whom I didn’t care about.

My Twitter stream quickly became an endless parade of less than worthless messages.

I promptly stopped tweeting.

Well, I should say that I promptly stopped tweeting as a human and let sites like Twitterfeed automatically publish other people’s blog posts along with my own via RSS.

Although my following continued to grow during this time, I saw absolutely no benefit to my business.

Saved By Twitter Lists

I knew I had made a mistake but the prospect of “unfollowing” hundreds of people using the clunky Twitter interface (hint, hint to Twitter) made me ill.

Enter Twitter Lists.

Twitter lists allowed me to segment those that I was following and I immediately set to work creating my first and only Twitter list. It is called “Trusted.”

My “trusted” list is a group of people that I know are real human beings with real businesses. They are not scam artists or hucksters.

I was saved. I could now filter out all of the “untrusted” and only see the “trusted” tweets. By the way, don’t feel bad if you are not in my trusted list on Twitter yet, I am still working on it.

Suddenly I could see again. The tweets that I was reading in my “trusted” list had merit. They were actually valuable. I turned off all of my automated tweeting and started ACTUALLY engaging with a few of these people.

I made friends. I networked. I retweeted. I made jokes. I shared. I borrowed.

I used Twitter for what it is truly good for. Communicating.

I now find Twitter to be an irreplaceable tool for my business. It keeps me connected with a group of people that I would otherwise never known existed. I have begun to receive referrals from some of these connections. And I have referred business myself.

It has been absolutely remarkable.

What about you? Have you made some of these same mistakes using Twitter? Are you finding Twitter to be a useful tool for your business?

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Raising Your Internet Marketing IQ

by Russ Henneberry

TweetThere is no shortage of information available online which will allow you to gain knowledge about marketing your tiny business on the Internet.

But don’t mistake this knowledge for skill.

Skill is acquired through practice and execution. Testing and tweaking. Measurement and evaluation. Success and even more important — failure.

It’s the difference between being “book smart” and “street smart.” It’s the difference between a college education and an education from the the “school of hard knocks.”

What Does This Mean For Your Tiny Business?

It means that eventually you have to stop reading and planning and EXECUTE. Don’t get me wrong — planning and educating yourself is extremely important — but it is all for nothing if you don’t take action.

After all, it is not the knowledge of these new methods of marketing that will increase sales for your business — it is the execution.

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