#1: Goals And How To Stick With Them All Year

With the new year, our podcast is revived and have every intention of keeping it going through the year (and beyond). That’s the important thing isn’t it? Setting goals and wanting something for the new year is one thing. Taking action on it and keeping on doing it for the whole year is a whole other thing. What better way than to kick off our podcast talking just about that?

Join me (Lynette Chandler), Melissa Ingold of SpecialReportsClub.com and Kelly McCausey from SoloSmarts.com as we casually chat about:

  • Our direction for 2013 and how they come to be
  • Why you need a WHY and how it should change over time
  • How growth doesn’t always equal doing more
  • Branding consistently across your sites
  • Content Curation – this is awesome. We spent a bit of time on this but packed great tips into just a few minutes
  • Ways to keep your why, words and overall goals in front of you all year

Mentioned Resources

Mastermind group for women – SoloMasterminds

Kelly McCausey’s Smart Podcasting Skills

Why Your Site Stats Matter – Especially To Your Bottom Line

Talks about knowing your website statisticsIf you’ve listened to our past podcasts, you would have learned about Kelly McCausey. Kelly is the owner of SoloSmarts, a resource and podcast for small businesses. She’s always gives me something to think about and some fabulous action steps each time I talk to her, no matter how ‘old’ the topic seems to be.

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to get Kelly on the phone with me to talk about website statistics. It was such a good chat, we went over time. We covered things like:

  • Why you’re missing out big chunks of free market research when you’re only watching your page views and number of visitors.
  • How stats can help you laser target content topics your customers are interested in so you can go create more of them.
  • How your stats can tell you if you are wasting time and money creating content nobody cares for.
  • How your website statistics can give your bottom line a healthy boost almost immediately.
  • How your stats can help you boost your rankings in the search engines and make search engine optimization a breeze to boot.
  • The difference between Google Analytics and your webhost’s website stats and why one is better of the other especially when working with ad networks.

Listen in on the interview, click the player above or download the audio to take it with you.

Kelly will be holding a “Know Your Blog Stats Worshop” to show us step-by-step how to really mine our statistics for better profits. The workshop will be held October 13th. Learn more about this workshop and how to get access and recordings.

8 Clever Outdoor Ads That Gets The Message Across

Having studied advertising in the past and worked closely with an ad agency to create everything from TV ads to billboards and print, I have always noticed ads. This is even more true outdoors. When traveling, I’d watch out for those billboards. It truly is marvelous how creative some agencies are. What’s more interesting to me, it seems the simplest ads does it best whether it is to get the message across or to strengthen a brand. Check out some of them.

Penline

Hardly needs much text, in fact none on the board itself. Instantly understood – this is some strong tape.

Photo courtesy of Explore Marketing

Sprite

A refreshing way to reinforce the brand.

Original photographer unknown, shared by @CostofSale

Martor Solingen, Germany

Watch out! They have really sharp razor blades.

Razor sharp

Photo from Mastercom

Lego

What is Lego if it doesn’t stand for building? Brilliant branding. There are actually many examples of Lego in outdoor advertising. One was containers stacked on top of each other dressed up as Legos. Smart!

Photo from Indeziner

IKEA

I love, Ikea to death. They’ve also always been rather innovative in their advertising. I know they had put up rooms at airports for weary travelers to rest and couches at train stations. This one is just as cool.

Photo source unknown

Duracell

Power beyond the ordinary – clearly.

Photo source unknown

Eskom

Believe it or not, this is something Ken and I talk about a lot. Companies wasting power needlessly. Great advertising, better branding.

Photo source unknown

Rest area restaurant

No way they’ll miss this ad

Shared by @WRGCreative

 

How Your Online Brand Can Be Hijacked Overnight And What To Do About It

Let me ask you a question. What do you think, is the cornerstone your brand online? Website design, Your voice, Your product quality and all the other things we talk about here? Well yes, they are of course important and play a part in the make up of your brand but the foundation of all online brands is…

The Domain Name

Photo credit: Sameer Vasta, via Flickr. Some rights reserved.

How credible can Amazon be when every aspect of your marketing from web site to emails and communications said “Amazon” but their web site domain name is “Amazonian.com”? The answer is none. Zero. Instead, they’d look like spammers or people out to steal identities.

It’s the same for small businesses with an online presence. Chances are, you took time choosing the right domain. You spent money and time developing the website, then there are business cards printed, ads run, articles or guest blog posts written that all lead back to your domain. Many of these things send you traffic over time and cannot be stopped even if you wanted it to. We all invest a lot in our web sites so imagine how you’d feel if your domain is hijacked from right under your nose.

It happens. In fact, domain theft is on the rise. There are a variety of ways this is done. The common story is, someone gains control of your domain administrator’s email address. This allows the thief to transfer the domain to their own account. When the transfer is complete, it is pretty much a done deal and a big hassle to get back – that’s if you’re lucky.

At that point, the thief can point the domain to their own web sites and steal everything. Your traffic, your good name, your online presence. It’s devastating.

What can you do about it

Be vigilant. Monitor your own domain names. You can get a free account over at domaintools.com and setup alerts to notify you whenever a change is detected with your domain. Remember, you may not get change notification emails from your own registrar if your email is hijacked so using a third party monitoring tool and having those alerts sent to an alternative address is a good idea.

Watch out for emails that disguise themselves as your registrar. It’s better to log in to your registrar directly instead of clicking links in those emails.

Consider private registration for your bread and butter domains.

Lock your domains. While this alone won’t do the trick when the admin account is compromised but it can help in other types of attempts.

Protect your email accounts. If you use Gmail, turn on two-factor authentication. Make sure you connect to your email accounts securely when using email clients like Outlook, Mail or Thunderbird. Change passwords regularly and it goes without saying, be sure the passwords are different from others and difficult to guess.

When you have a domain online that represents your brand, you have to get serious about this stuff. There’s too much riding on it not to.

Professionally Prepare Your Book For eReaders With Folium

Does it seem like everyone and their cat is publishing a Kindle book these days? Little wonder now that eReaders have gone main stream. People like it (I do, it’s the only way I read anymore) and the demand for content is huge. It’s not just because more people own it, I bet people who own and read using a Kindle, Nook, iPad or other readers are reading more than ever before. That’s what I’ve noticed about myself.

The technologies to create eBooks have also improved dramatically. Being a sucker for tools that help entrepreneurs in any which way, I jumped on the chance to review Folium Book Studio when they asked. Mind you, I don’t always review software just because someone asks. 99.9% of requests often go unanswered. Somehow, Folium sounded intriguing so I agreed.

What Is It?

Folium Book Studio labels itself as an eBook conversion and design tool. It will take your book and make it into an eBook format that Kindles, Nooks, iPads, Tablets etc can open.

How?

You start by creating a free account. Once in your account, you can familiarize yourself with the options using a sample book project that is automatically loaded into your account. You can’t export this book though but you can edit, remove, add, tweak, change the cover, design the cover, change styles and do just about anything to the sample book project so you can gain confidence using the tool.

Once you are ready to create your own eBook, you can start by creating a new project. Projects cost you 1 credit ($79) and you will have to pay up front for a credit before you can create a project.

When you have paid for a project, you begin by giving the project a title and some basic information. Next, you can upload your book. Folium accepts books in these formats:

  • Microsoft Word (.DOC or .DOCX)
  • HTML
  • Rich text format (.RTF)
  • Plain text (.TXT)

After the book is uploaded, Folium will attempt to clean up the formatting and detect where all your chapters, page headings and content are. It will present you with a quick snapshot of the headings and content. From there on you can edit the content in a nice, easy to use editor interface. You can also re-arrange your chapters easily by dragging and dropping them. At any time, you can also preview how the book will look like in an eReader.

When you are happy with the book and ready to publish, you simply click the Download button and Folium will generate a copy of your book in the necessary formats for Kindle and B&N. It’ll also automatically generate and assign an ISBN to your book.

You can return to download this book multiple times. Folium will save your book project for 1 year.

Likes

What I like most is the built in styles. One of my biggest challenges creating digital books is my lack of creativity when it comes to matching fonts and sizes. It sounds easy but it’s not. I’m not in the printing or publishing business but have worked in an ad agency. I know there are reasons behind certain fonts and sizes. So having pre-built styles that look like a regular book is fantastic. You can even add little glyphs or fleurons to your page for that nice finish.

Free ISBN. This I like. An ISBN is included in your project credit. It’s automatically created and attached to your book when you export. While getting an ISBN is not difficult – you can buy one online and have it immediately – but single ISBN’s cost $125 and a bundle of 10 cost $250. The price to create a project and have it properly formatted with ISBN with Folium is $79. I’d say that’s a deal.

Dis-Likes

Because I am only reviewing this product for a short time and haven’t actually created the book and put it up over at Amazon, iBooks or B&N, my experience is limited. At this time I can say the tool itself is a pleasure to work with and the price is right. The ability to push the book to these digital marketplaces would be nice.

Another thing, the ability to download the book without ISBN generation would also be welcome. This way, we can test how the book looks like by directly loading it into our own devices. As it is, I couldn’t verify the design and formatting on the Kindle or iPad. I’m sure it will look great but it would be nice to experience the book in a real device.

Disclaimer

We received a free credit worth $79 in exchange for an honest, unbiased review of Folium. Views favorable or not are a result of my experience with the product, not from the credit – although it was appreciated because it allowed me to dive deeper into the product.

Getting Web Traffic For Free – Top Questions Answered

Getting web traffic to your site isn’t what it used to be anymore. Especially free tactics. We can lament all we want but the smart thing to do really is to adapt and keep forging ahead.

Sadly though, there are tons and tons of really bad tools out there that could give you a temporary traffic boost at best. There’s also a lot of people still dishing out old advice.

Rush Hour

Which is why I was really curious when I received an email from Jimmy D Brown about an hour long video presentation about free traffic. I was curious because I wanted to know what he had to say about getting web traffic for free in today’s framework. And also because I always pay attention to Jimmy because he always manages to give a new twist to things and leave me wondering, now why didn’t I think of that… even on the stuff that you may think you already know.

I sat through this video and here’s quick summary for you.

The video is formatted as a classic Q&A where Jimmy answers the top 10 questions his readers asked and these questions are:

  1. Is Article Marketing still a good and reliable strategy?
  2. Isn’t paid traffic better than free traffic?
  3. What should be included in a great free offer that can be used to drive traffic?
  4. How to ensure traffic you get from free sources are qualified buyers and not useless traffic?
  5. Do viral e-books still work?
  6. How much effort should you put into SEO?
  7. What percentage of people on Jimmy’s list have been obtained from free traffic methods?
  8. How do you drive traffic to a squeeze page?
  9. What is the BEST way to get free traffic?
  10. How do you get A-listers to email for you when you are starting out?

In answering those, Jimmy emphasized several things that he is not a fan nor a proponent of temporary tactics and tools. What he is after is long-lasting traffic. Traffic where:

  • You only have to do work once or at least minimal work in the beginning and keeps drawing people again and and again
  • Once it is set on the loose, cannot be turned off

Now that I like – don’t you?

There are also other things that stuck out for me and they were:

  • Getting others to distribute your content
  • Source of traffic is key whether paid or free

These just happened to stand out for me because of where I am right now. I’m confident you will likely find something extremely valuable that’s applicable for your business. Watch it today – Jimmy did not mention when this will be pulled. Better watch it before it is gone.

Photo by Tim Arai

How To Untether Your Business And Work Anywhere

It is almost strange in these days of wide spread smart phone adoption that we are talking about this because some days, it seems to me everyone is ‘mobile’. Yet, judging from the questions and comments we receive, I am proved wrong and so I’d like to share some thoughts on how I made gradual changes to my business so now, I no longer have to be in my office and at my desk all day long if I choose.

Before going too far I must say that not all businesses or entrepreneurs require, want or can be mobile. If you own a wedding cake business, obviously you can’t work from anywhere. However there are parts of any business that could be.

In our business, I do a variety of things. Some examples are blogging, writing guest posts, appearing on web casts, creating written and video content, fixing or tweaking web sites and of course application programming.

At this point in time, I still have not found a good way to program or fix web sites on the go. The reasons are varied but it is largely because there are certain programming environments I need to have access to that just aren’t available on a mobile device or if they do it’s plain uncomfortable. Give me a power house desktop and multiple monitors any time for that kind of work.

However there are plenty of other areas where I can implement mobility. Like, content creation, communicating with customers and followers on social networks or email, brain storming, project planning, team management. You get the idea. These are things you just don’t have to do in the office or for that matter need a computer to accomplish.

With that in mind, I started looking for tools that can help me write, brain storm, communicate and manage from anywhere.

One of the first things I purchased was not a smart phone surprisingly, but a Livescribe pen. If you didn’t have to be in touch with anyone at all this pen alone would suffice. It has really been great. Here is a short list of some ways I’ve used it:

  • Record conversations with clients as we went over their web site and hashed out wants, likes, changes
  • Write articles for distribution, affiliates and blog posts at the beach
  • Brainstorm new projects, company direction and focus at the park
  • Wrote standard operating procedures including sketches etc to share with helpers so they know exactly what I want and how I want it done
  • Record and note important points listening to an MP3 while traveling

The next thing I did, was to consciously seek out and utilize tools that are not desktop bound and when I say desktop I also mean laptop. I’ve never really been a fan of laptops and would much rather not carry one if I can carry something many times lighter and smaller.

Back to the tools, when choosing them I also made it a point to ensure the tool has either a mobile app or mobile interface. While I placed a high value on this, it was not entirely necessary depending on what the system is because if the program is accessible online, most modern smart phone browsers can handle it. Here’s a rough list of what I ended up implementing:

  • Our payment system was not a problem because we already utilize a web based shopping cart and set everything up for automatic delivery. For the service portion of our business, we used Zoho Invoice which is also web based and we will soon be switching to another script also web based but installed on our servers.
  • For emails, I put our domain on Google Apps that allowed me the use of Gmail, Google Docs and other applications under our domain name. This actually took care of more than just emails but document sharing and calendars.
  • When it comes to task and project management, I specifically seek out web apps that can be tied into Google Apps. I’m still moving back and forth between a few solutions with no concrete decision which yet but as of now, it’s a close race between ManyMoon and GQueues.
  • In other areas, I chose Evernote and Dropbox.

Lastly, I upgraded my phone. While I’ve always had a smart phone, I felt it was important to switch to a different platform that offers more current and popular apps and also one that the tools chosen above supported. Because I made sure the tools I used had mobile options in the step above, this part was like riding downhill. It just ‘fell in place’. All I needed to do was to get and install the mobile apps.

Somewhere along the way I also added a tablet. It does not get as much use as the phone though. And now, I have everything I need to stay productive no matter where I am and even at very short notice. A wonderful example was when my husband asked me to accompany him on several trips to a nearby city these past 2 months. Without having to think too much about it, all I needed to do was pick up the phone, my Livescribe pen and notebook. I’m good to go.

Have you gone mobile too? What do you use most? Do you like it? Do share use the comments space to share.