June 1, 2011 by 3 Comments

8 Simple Steps to Email Marketing Loveliness

8 Simple Steps to Email Marketing Loveliness

Some of you might be wondering why I’m writing about email marketing today – it’s old hat isn’t it? With all this new social media buzz, there is surely no place in the world for email marketing is there? Well I believe there is and I intend to tell you why and how you can use it to grow your client base today.

Let’s settle one thing quickly – if you’re reading this, thinking about buying a database from someone on a street corner (or even  a more reputable source) then this article probably isn’t for you. I’m focusing today on using your own valuable data, built up over years possibly.

I want to start with a story. About a year ago a guy approached Optix having met me 6 years ago at a networking event. I’d agreed with him to receive the Optix newsletter and we both went our separate ways. Optix kept in touch with him by way of our monthly newsletter and recently he became one of our largest clients. He’d watched the business grow and liked what he’d seen.

Here are a few sure fire ways to use email marketing to help your business grow:

1). All about the data – A good email marketing campaign revolves around good data. Make sure yours is clean or you’ll just be throwing money away.

2). Build your data – what can you give away to build a database of leads/contacts/prospects? This year we launched our free social media policy generator: http://www.optixsolutions.co.uk/free-social-media-policy-generator/ – A tool of real value which also helps us build leads – true ‘Inbound Marketing’.

3). Split Test your email subject lines – A good email marketing system will split test campaigns for you. It will take 50% of your database and send two different subject lines, content variants or from names and then track the most successful delivery rate, then send the winner to the other 50% – using this will give you better open and click through rates.

4). Spam & Client Testing – Emails show up differently in different email clients. Now email is consumed more and more on mobile devices you need to make sure your email is designed and developed for all these variants. This again is something a good system should be able to do for you. If not, make sure you ask your designers to consider this.

5). Deal with bounces – If an email bounces (doesn’t reach its destination) it can be for a couple of reasons. A soft bounce may infer a problem with the routing of an email to someones email box/server and is likely to be ok next time round. A hard bounce means that email doesn’t exist any longer and should be cleaned from the database – no point spending money on people that won’t ever answer!

6). Use Autoresponders – When you signup to something on a site have you ever received an email a few days later which follows it up…and then again a week or so after that? You’re part of an autoresponder system. Clever marketers know that it takes a few ‘touches’ to get to a sale but tracking and sending emails to everyone that signs up with your site manually would be far too inefficient to deal with so autoresponders help to do this for you. Used cleverly, these are extremely powerful tools

7). Segment your data – If you’re blasting everyone in your database in one go you’re probably not getting the most from it. Segment your data into interests/purchases made if you’re running an ecommerce shop or even simple things like male/female if this makes a difference to your customer. For example, I’m not hugely interested in the latest dresses from Reiss (a favourite shop of mine) but they don’t send me that because I’m segmented in their database.

8). Tie into your Social Profiles – If you have a fantastic Facebook page and a tremendous Twitter presence then make the most of them. Ask people to sign up for your updates – if you don’t ask you don’t get after all. Don’t bombard them but a few calls to action every now and again is fine.

It’s time to get clever with your email marketing – it’s still one of the most powerful tools in the online marketing toolbox.

Oh and if you’re looking for a provider, we have our own that you can find out more about over at http://www.envirosend.co.uk

Image courtesy Ramberg Media Images

Now Your Thoughts

  • What’s worked or not worked for you when you’ve marketed by email?
  • Got any tips for the other readers?

Filed Under: Building & Managing Relationships, Business Startup, Networking, S & M, The Entrepreneur, Web Design and Online Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
May 16, 2011 by 11 Comments

Here’s a Great Way to Lose Some Customers :)

Here’s a Great Way to Lose Some Customers :)

Never, ever, step outside your own rules/boundaries….

I don’t often blog negatively but we’re away in Cornwall this week, staying in an idyllic house in a place called Polzeath. The family come away every year to the same house which is near a well known hotel called The St Moritz. Today I witnessed a great way to lose customers and wanted to share it with you.

So here’s what happened. There is a party of 10 of us deciding whether to go for a swim over at the hotel. 4 of the girls are getting beauty treatments at the hotel tomorrow so a few of us pop over first and ask if the group can have a discount on the swimming today.

Officially the hotel offer people having treatments 50% discount on the swimming so we’re going to see if they’d be kind enough to extend that to the rest of us. The guy on the reception tells us that everyone can have the discount and so, very happy, we pop back to the house and round up the group. Everyone bounces over to the hotel happy as larry and the girl on reception tells us she’ll get the manager who we had originally spoken to.

The managing director appeared 5 minutes later and in no uncertain words tells us that everyone pays full price and only the people paying for treatments get it half price. He says this without any consideration or thought for what sits in front of him (10 new customers for a start). In fact he goes on to say, ‘you can’t expect me to give the benefit to everyone – I’m afraid the person you spoke to didn’t have authority to say that, I’m the managing director and I say everyone not having treatments pays full price’

So lets dissect this in case you want to use this tactic to lose some of your customers.

  • We wanted to use a facility that sits there and costs money whether people are in it or not.
  • The whole time we were there we only saw about 10 other people (we were there for at least 2 hours).
  • He took about £100 off us instead of £50. I very much doubt we’ll be recommending the hotel or it’s facilities now.
  • We could have gone back there everyday this week for all he knew – at a fiver per person, per day that would have been some good business for him.
  • He was unwilling to budge from the rules he’d laid down.
  • In this social, sharing world, it was pretty easy for me to write this and share it to thousands of people

Now some of you might be saying – but what if others found out, would that cause him a problem? Maybe, and if that was really going to be an issue I think the way the situation was dealt with could have been better even if the outcome wasn’t the one we’d all wanted. Communication is everything in business – your customers are your new marketing.

If you’re wondering how I would have approached the situation – here’s how: I would have told us that the first guy had made a small mistake but that on this occasion I was willing to stick by it. I might have made a little joke about not telling anyone and I’d have had 10 happy customers without a bad taste in their mouths and returning every year.

Now Your Thoughts

  • What fantastic strategies have you found for losing customers?
  • Do you have a different view on this? Was the guy right for sticking to his own rules?

Filed Under: Building & Managing Relationships, S & M Tagged With: , , ,
February 4, 2011 by 9 Comments

7 Super Useful Resources for Busy Business Owners

7 Super Useful Resources for Busy Business Owners

We’re all busy right? In the fast-paced life we lead, it’s great when a tool comes along that helps us run our business more efficiently – the trouble is there are a lot of them out there which have little or no benefit to users and in fact end up wasting us a lot of time.

Every now and again I come across websites that are really helpful and increase my efficiency dramatically. I want to share a few of these with you today. It would be great if you could share any gems you’ve found in the comments so this post becomes a really useful resource for others.

So here are some tools that you can start using immediately.

Nudge Mail – I love this tool and as I get to know more about it I use it more often. This clever system allows you to email it (without any kind of signup procedure) with a date or time that you want the email sent back (i.e. a nudge). The possibilities are endless. I think I might write a more detailed post about it in the future. If you practice GTD this is a great tool for you.

Evernote – There’s not much you can’t do with Evernote. Setup folders for documents, scans, emails, clips from webpages, images and pretty much everything else you might want to organise. If you need a central place for putting things in ‘the cloud’ this is as good as any.

Remember The Milk – Online to-do lists. I’ve set mine up in GTD style. You can email directly to this online system which means when it gets there you can categorise it. I use a tagging system that helps me pick tasks I want to do according to my mood (i.e. If I am in the mood for lots of sales calls – I have a tag for calls)

Adwords Keyword Tool - If you blog then you need to consider what people might be searching for in the likes of Google. This useful tool is great for finding out what people are ‘actually’ searching for, not just what you think they might be doing. Simply take your findings and make sure you craft your titles and articles around them.

Dropbox – Emailing large files can be a real pain. Email servers normally have a limit of about 10mb on them and quite often you might need to get larger files to other places. I recommend dropbox which is free for upto 2gb of storage.

Survey Monkey - Are you looking to run an online survey? Perhaps you want to get feedback from clients. Survey monkey is a great website which makes building a survey very simple and gives you fantastic feedback data and graphs the other side.

Eventbrite – Running a seminar or event and want to invite people? Want to charge but don’t have your own credit card facility? This website allows you to create an event and set a price (can also be free) and invite people to book online. It takes all the hard work out of it for you.

Have you found this post useful? This is the sort of thing I’ll be sharing more regularly with my friends who signup to my email list. It would be great to see you there – just pop your name and email addy in to the box on the homepage on the right hand side.

Now Your Thoughts

  • What tools do you use to increase efficiency? Let’s share and make this a useful resource in itself

Filed Under: Building & Managing Relationships, Business Startup, S & M, The Entrepreneur Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
January 28, 2011 by 5 Comments

How to make your website a lead generating machine – 3 easy steps

How to make your website a lead generating machine – 3 easy steps

How are you generating leads for your business? Is it hard work? Lots of networking and meetings right? Would you rather be ‘found‘ by potential customers? Well that’s where the practice of inbound marketing can be very useful. Hubspot in the US were the company to coin this term and their website is a perfect example of how to practice lead generation. In fact, they now get over 27k leads a month because they are so successful at this. Guess what, it’s not that hard to do in your business – In this article I’m going to teach you how.

At Optix, we practice Inbound Marketing but on a much smaller scale. I’m going to take you through a recent example which I hope will get you thinking about your own business and how you could do something similar.

We’ve been writing social media policies for clients for some time now. We decided to release a free ‘cut-down’ version of a policy which anyone can download and use. All we ask is that the user gives us their name, company name and email address. We also ask a couple of basic questions about the companies use of Social Media. The website then builds the policy on the fly and emails it to the user. Within the first month of this going live two amazing things had happened:

Over 50 companies downloaded the policy and gave us their details – all leads for my sales team.

We started to appear within the first 5 results of Google (They are very good at finding useful sites) for some really key terms like:

So how can you do this in your business? Here are three easy steps:

1). Consider what you can give away of value online. Can you create an ebook or a whitepaper or could you even do what we did and create a tool of value? Try and think ‘out of the box’ – don’t talk about yourself or your product directly, think about something of real use to your potential customers.

2). Put this on your website on a ‘landing page’ dedicated to that content and ask the user for some basic details in return for access to this valuable content – ideally if you can, blog about it and spread it using social media platforms like twitter, facebook and linkedIn.

3). Work out a ‘multi-touch’ (different ways of talking to the prospect – i.e email, phone, meeting – I’ll credit Scott Gould and Kristen Sousa for that one :) ) plan for keeping in contact with the users who download it. Consider auto-responders if you don’t have much resource in terms of sales teams.

So there you have it, consider what you can create today and start to create compelling landing pages for capturing the details.

Now Your Thoughts

  • Can you share examples of where you’ve seen other companies do this. We can all do with inspiration :)
  • Have you dabbled with this type of marketing before? Let’s hear your thoughts.

Filed Under: S & M, Web Design and Online Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
January 14, 2011 by 10 Comments

The No 1. Trait I want from my staff

Someone asked me today, “Alastair, what’s the number one trait you expect or want from your staff”. Hmm interesting – this made me think very hard. Some of the obvious ones sprang to mind immediately:

  • Honesty
  • Integrity
  • Skilled
  • Motivated
  • Hard Working

They all came close.

Do you know what I ended up answering and on reflection still consider up there at the top? (enough to write a post about it! at least!)

Someone who ‘Accepts Responsibility’

What do I mean by this?

This person never blames anyone else, they accept responsibility themselves in a positive way and offer a solution which they learn from and better themselves with. In sales especially this is very important and easy to explain using the following example:

Sales person A returns from a pitch, and say’s the following: “Boss we didn’t get it because the customer doesn’t have the money just now – times have been tight because of the recession and the chips are down – it’s hard out there right now.”

Sales person B returns from the same pitch and say’s, “Boss I didn’t get the pitch for these two reasons – I didn’t qualify the person hard enough, so hadn’t realised they didn’t have the right budget for our product and I didn’t build a good enough relationship with the decision maker. I tell you what though, I’m not going to make the same mistakes again and I’ll nail the next one Boss.”

Who accepted responsibility in that scenario? Who would you rather have working for you? Yes of course, the second guy right?

This doesn’t just apply in sales, it happens in all areas of business and I personally want to surround myself with people who have the ability to accept responsibility. If someone comes to me and says they made a mistake but they’ve learnt or they know how to fix it then that’s a HUGE tick in the box. If they come to me blaming someone else or some external factor then it has the opposite effect.

There is a great article on the Livestrong Blog which goes into far more detail about the topic and is well worth a read if you agree with my points above: http://www.livestrong.com/article/14698-accepting-personal-responsibility/

Now Your Thoughts

  • Don’t forget that when you employ people, you are looking for things like this from an early stage – what sort of questioning could you use to coax this kind of personality trait out of someone?
  • What would you say the No1 trait you look for in your staff is?

Filed Under: Business Startup, Employing People, S & M Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
November 17, 2010 by 4 Comments

Calling All Exeter Based Recruitment Agents

Calling All Exeter Based Recruitment Agents

I’ve got an exciting new project to tell you about today. We’ve just launched a new project that’s been under wraps for the last 6-12 months – YourJobsBoard.co.uk

Over the last ten years we’ve worked closely with many recruitment companies in the South West and especially in Exeter where we are based. We’ve built lots of recruitment based websites and been involved in online marketing strategy for many more in that time. Many of them have become good friends of mine.

We recognise what makes a successful recruitment company work and what it’s challenges are. One of the biggest marketing challenges all recruitment companies have is accessing the best candidates and they quite often pay through the nose for this service. Traditionally job ads were placed in newspapers (which cost a fortune), now much of the searching is done online. On average an independent recruitment company in a town like Exeter will have to pay and access CV’s from at least two or three of the large job websites. These sites are (in our opinion) fairly faceless and also quite expensive but they are a necessity for our clients because they attract the candidates to the roles they need to fill.

Roll on YourJobsBoard.co.uk – We’re all about local at Optix and this has certainly been my focus for the last couple of years. We do a lot of work across the UK but as former graduates of the University in Exeter and having built our business here, we are very fond of the area and want to promote local growth in the economy where possible.

About a year ago I had the idea of building a local jobs board to take on the nationals (well sort of). I thought to myself, why don’t we build a jobs board for Exeter, purely aimed at Exeter recruitment agents (of which there are over 120!), Exeter companies and Exeter Candidates. I’m pleased to say that my fellow director James and the guys at Optix got behind me and created the fantastic new site at http://www.yourjobsboard.co.uk

Here are a couple of reasons behind my thinking:

1) It’s Niche – In the current economy it’s important to focus – working in a niche is more important that spreading yourself thinly – you are far more likely to get better results this way

2) Relevancy – If we can build a site that is so relevant to Exeter then it should be able to gain traction in the search engines and show the most relevant results to both candidates and companies alike, helping the local economy

The idea of YourJobsBoard.co.uk was born. Initially I went to our recruitment agent clients and sounded them out about the idea. They loved it and helped us hugely with new ideas and challenges to overcome. It felt like true collaboration and showed the power of building a product alongside your clients rather than for them without any input. Consider whether you could build any of your products and services with your clients?

What makes the concept unique?

There are a number of factors that make this unique – here are just a few:

  • A truly local jobs board for a local market
  • Integrated with Social Media – A candidate can link up their Twitter Feed/LinkedIn and Blog if they have them
  • Candidates can also use video to promote themselves
  • It’s completely free for recruiters to post jobs (over 10)
  • Recruiters can add tips and career advice for free
  • It’s linked up with the local University to promote their job schemes

How you can help?

Without the people of Exeter behind this it will be a far harder job to take on the nationals so please tell people wherever possible about this new and exciting jobs board. If you know people looking for work, make sure they register and if you have a placement then get it online – it’s free after all. If you know recruitment agencies please pass the message on that there’s a new Jobs Board in town.

The address is http://www.yourjobsboard.co.uk

If you have any feedback then as always I’d love to hear it.

Filed Under: Business Startup, S & M, The Entrepreneur Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
November 5, 2010 by 1 Comment

Like Minds & The Social Media Survey 2010

Like Minds & The Social Media Survey 2010

So last week was the Like Minds conference in Exeter, Devon, a bringing together of Like Minded individuals from all over the globe – The topic – Creativity and Curation.

My Online Marketing Agency, Optix Solutions was proud to sponsor the event for the 3rd time running, making us one of the companies to be there in support from the beginning. We also used the platform to launch the results of the Social Media survey we ran earlier in the year. A glossy 26 page booklet with the findings as well as contributions from some of the world’s leading social media minds was presented. More information on the survey and details of how to request a copy can be found here: http://www.optixsolutions.co.uk/social-media-survey-2010/

It contains insights from the likes of Scott Gould, Trey Pennington, Olivier Blanchard, Julian Summerhayes and a foreword was kindly written by Chris Brogan.

Anyway, here are my take-aways and observations from the fantastic two day conference

1). Exeter is a special place and everyone that came to visit it loved it.

2). Despite Like Minds’ move away from social media to other things, it remains in my mind, a social media conference and when the speakers take on social topics, the audience lights up. I hope the team take this on board for future events.

3). Steve Moore of the Big Society can write a well crafted speech in front of a couple of hundred people in less than an hour, just before he goes on stage – he is also extremely funny and tells amazing stories.

4). The new immersive format in the mornings rocked – I got most of the value from these sessions this year.

5). Did I mention that Optix Solutions released the results of the Social Media Survey 2010 :)

6). Benjamin Ellis is one clever guy and if you want to talk Psychology then he’s your man. Thanks Benjamin

7). Joanne Jacobs predicted in her immersive that by 2012 the web will be viewed by mobiles more than desktop computers, so companies better get their websites mobile friendly. She also said that we’ll see a shift of users to people that currently don’t really use the internet at work (like handymen) – the Internet on their mobiles will become very important for their work

8). Was great to see Jon Akwue back again and even more fantastic that he read the Jeffrey Gitomer book I gave him last time recently and enjoyed it :)

9). Wikis are a great way of sharing social strategy with staff internally, allowing everyone to collaborate and understand what the company is trying to achieve

10). Cofacio is a new Help Engine which is very cool – You can offer help and ask for help and earn points which are used to help good causes. You should signup now

11). Shaa Wasmund has done a lot with her life and not let anything get in her way. She rightly points out that if you don’t try you’ll never know what could be. She’s also incredibly positive – a massive plus in my book

12). James Whatley talked about gaining success in Social Media (and other places) by ‘Displacing the market’ – I.e. trying to do something different to the norm. I love this and will use it often – thanks James :)

12). Robin Wight is a fashion icon (and very clever guy) and I want his shoes!

If you’ve not had the chance to be a part of a Like Minds Conference until now then I wholeheartedly recommend you do your best to get to the next one – you won’t regret it.

Now Your Thoughts

  • What were your highlights – I know the organisers read this blog so it’s a great place to share
  • Have you read the survey – what are your thoughts on the results?

Filed Under: Building & Managing Relationships, S & M, Web Design and Online Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
October 22, 2010 by 7 Comments

How to Rock a Tradeshow

How to Rock a Tradeshow

For those of you who follow me on Twitter you’ll know that this week I attended The East London Expo in Dagenham. It was a great event but it highlighted a few things for me which I felt were worth blogging about this week. Hopefully if you find yourself getting ready for an exhibition, you can take some of this advice and use it to your advantage.

First things, first – Expo’s are not cheap. You have the price of the stand, the cost of travel, the cost of the equipment and printed material and (don’t forget this one), the cost of your time. If you’re going to invest in this, you need to be sure you’re going to make proper use of it.

So rather than tips today I’ve made a list of thoughts for you

1). Prepare, prepare, prepare – Think out your stand well in advance, work out the dimensions, what you’re going to have on there in the way of furniture and plan it properly (we marked ours out with tape first to see what space we had).

2). Watch out for the ‘snatch and grab’ brigade - Yes, those people who walk round and take every bit of literature going as if it were to be part of a collection or something – placing expensive material near the front of the stand allows this group to do this and guess what, you’re not going to get any work from them – don’t waste it.

3). Seminars – Many shows I’ve been to over the years have had seminars running at them. These are usually unpaid speaking gigs but they give you the ability to raise awareness of yourself and your company. I highly recommend putting yourself up for these talks, at which you can of course invite people back to your stand afterwards to chat further.

4). Dress Appropriately – Suit and smart clothing may be best for your business but if you have branded clothing this goes down especially well because you’ll be walking about a lot. At the expo this week I even saw someone dressed as a spark plug!

5). You’re there to learn, not to sell – POW – you weren’t ready for that one were you? I lost count of the times that I walked around shows and people on stands practically accosted me and pulled me into their stand and waffled at me regarding their service or product. Sound familiar? What had these guys done? They’d spent their valuable time telling me about their business (which by the way I wasn’t really interested in) while their perfect client walked past, saw they were busy and walked on.

6). Them not you - A quick cursory glance at your stand name and then the inevitable, ‘So what do you do then?’ Heard that one before? Crikey, I must have heard that 300 times this week. I almost always respond in the same way (this works at networking events aswell by the way) – ‘We run a web design and online marketing agency, but hey that’s not important, what do YOU do?’ Turning the question around on someone allows them to talk about themselves and for you to learn…that way you’re far better placed to work out which of your services might be able to help them.

7). The next step – Work out what your next step is for the show. What is the perfect outcome for you? Do you want hundreds of cold lead business cards that will probably take you ages to follow up and get back to or would you like fewer, but more serious appointments or at least phonecalls booked? I know which one we go for.

8). Follow up material – If sending out follow up material is important to your business then make sure it’s prepared before the show so all you need to do when you get back is hand over the addresses and away you go.

There are probably hundreds of hints and tips for tradeshows so I could go on but I’ll let you guys take the stage and add some more

Now Your Thoughts

  • What howlers have you seen occur at these events?
  • What’s made you smile and think that’s innovative?

Filed Under: Building & Managing Relationships, Networking, S & M Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
September 24, 2010 by 1 Comment

Guide to Setting Up a Meeting & The Upfront Contract

Guide to Setting Up a Meeting & The Upfront Contract

Do you find yourself spending too much time in meetings? Do they often over-run? Do you leave them feeling like you don’t really know what the outcome was or what you actually achieved? I did…for years I had meeting after meeting without clearly defining my outcomes and objectives and I dread to think how much time I wasted. As time is such a valuable resource I recognised I needed to do something about it and have recently enlisted on the Sandler Sales Management Training in my area (which I can recommend highly). One of the first things I learnt was a process they teach called the ‘Up Front Contract’ It’s taught for sales meetings really but I’m adapting it and using elements now for all my meetings. I’ll expand.

Here are the stages (and quite often this will be done on the phone pre-meeting)

Step 1 – Define the point of the meeting – a clear statement (what’s this meeting for)

Step 2 - Define the length of time required for the meeting and check that is ok with the person you’re going to see – do both parties feel it’s adequate.

Step 3 - Define the other parties objectives and expectations – what do they want to get from the meeting?

Step 4 - Define your objectives & expectations for the meeting – what sort of things are you going to cover, what type of meeting is it likely to be? Is it an informal chat or a presentation for example.

Step 5 – Outcomes – What will the outcome be? In a sales situation you either want a yes or a no ideally but if it’s not a sales meeting I’m adapting that to actionable items on both sides and if another meeting is required, getting that in the diary there and then. You shouldn’t end the meeting without this clear cut off point.

No one will hate you for having a structure and it will save you hours and hours of wasted time. If you’re interested, by the way, in Sandler training, drop me a mail and I’ll personally introduce you to their team.

Now Your Thoughts

Do you have any systems like this? Are there spins on the above that work for your business?

Filed Under: Building & Managing Relationships, Business Startup, S & M Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
September 10, 2010 by 7 Comments

Who are your influencers?

Who are your influencers?

In my last blog post I talked about the influence project. This week I want to focus on finding your influencers.

How do you spread the message about your business? Do you try and do it yourself? Do you employ sales people to go out and do it on your behalf? These are valid tactics but I want to let you into a secret today – it’s far easier and more effective to spread the message about your company if you let others do it for you. Sounds obvious right but how do you do it? Here’s how:

1). Work out who your ‘sneezers’ are. Seth Godin came up with the concept of the sneezer in a book entitled ‘Unleashing The Idea Virus’ (aff link) a few years ago. The idea being that your sneezers will help you push out a message to far more people and far quicker than you could hope to do on your own. A sneezer is the type of person that loves to talk, they love to tell other people about other peoples business. I’m sure if you think hard enough about it you will work out a few of your sneezers right now. More often than not they are the people that attend every networking event and seem to know everyone. Their personalities just lend themselves to ‘sneezing’ :)

2). Give them the tools to pass your message on. If you’re hoping they will pass your message on in real life, the message better be good. You better have a fantastic new product or a purple cow (another great book by Seth, also an aff link). These days we have social media which allows us to push a message on quickly by sharing, retweeting or forwarding on a message – it can literally be at the click of a button.

3). Find these people online. I keep a list of my sneezers on my computer at all times. I started with a list of everyone that’s ever passed my name or my company name onto a contact as a recommendation. That’s the holy grail by the way (someone putting their neck on the line for you). Treat these people very carefully and concentrate on them when you need to get a message out there. Influencers online are usually quite easy to find. They are normally well liked, well followed people. If they run blogs then look for signs like numbers of rss subscribers, number of comments, number of times they get retweeted. If these people push your message on you’re going to get traction. Spend time building relationships with them, engage with them and help them wherever you can.

4). Hang out in places where influencers are. I’m a member of two or three online communities. These cost money but boy are they worth it. The quality of member I’ll meet here will be worth their weight in gold. There are two that I’d recommend joining today, one here in the UK and one in the states.

Entrepreneurs Circle – If you’re a business owner or entrepreneur then join up today. I believe at the time of writing you get two months free so what have you got to lose? This group has both online content, which is worth the joining fee alone and offline meetups where you can network with successful individuals.

Join Entrepreneurs Circle (aff link)

Third Tribe – Chris Brogan et al started Third Tribe with the vision of scaling their knowledge and bringing like minded online marketers together. There is an excellent forum and the podcasts (which you can download to your mp3 player) are second to none. If you want to mix with the best online marketing people in the world then this is the place to be.

Join Third Tribe Marketing (aff link)

I make no bones about the fact that I am an affiliate for both these groups. I never promote things I’m not a fan of or have not benefitted from myself. These two groups have had a profound effect on my business life so I heartly recommend you joining today if you can.

Now Your Thoughts

Do you know who your influencers are? Have you got processes in place to look after them and help them to help you?

Filed Under: Building & Managing Relationships, Business Startup, Networking, S & M, The Entrepreneur, Web Design and Online Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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