Got an Ugly Site? Maybe You Could Win …

Reader Larisa Church of Idea Catchers sent me an update on a cool contest they’re doing. I love this!

“Our company recently launched an "Ugly E-Commerce Contest" and we're seeking entries for independent retailers, online store owners, mail order catalogs and the like to submit their Web sites for a chance to win a new custom e-commerce site (valued up to $25,000) and 90 days of free online marketing support.

Any existing Web site that currently accepts online payments qualifies to enter. The entry deadline is December 31, 2006, and the winner will be announced on February 1, 2007. The entry details can be found at http://ideacatchers.com/ugly/.”

What I’m Doing Over the Holidays

You may have noticed by now that we have no snow in the barren muddy hills of Vermont and the North Country at the moment. So ski season’s kind of on hold (OK, I will admit to jumping the mud and rocks at Whiteface … amazing how long a little fake snow will stick around.) BUT … regardless, we all still know how to have fun.

Tonight I’m off with my kids, hubby, brother, his family, and assorted teen age counterparts to catch Grace Potter’s show at Higher Ground in Burlington. Grace is a Vermont phenomenon who’s recently gone national with her first big album – she’s kind of a latter day Bonnie Raitt. Grace is not even 25 and she sings like a woman’s who’s had entire lifetimes of experience … and her original tunes are just great. We love Grace! Check her out….

The Diabolical Art of ‘Splogging’

Our reader, Frances Flynn Thorsen, contributed a useful comment to my post about the mysterious, spammy Google Alerts I was getting on searches for my name.

She wrote:

“Yep. This happens a lot. There are a lot of blog aggregators using honest feeds with good content to drive traffic to their web sites to capitalize on page views. They're called "Splogs".

Then the Blog Squad gals weighed in with their two cents on this (thanks Denise!)… and added quite a bit of clarity

“ It's not Google Alerts that are spammy. It's spam blogs that are spammy and harvesting your content. When your name appears on that splog, Google finds it and sends it to you. I find The Blog Squad's stuff all over splogs and I get an alert every time there's mention on a site or a blog, no matter if it's spam or not.”

A Mega Blog Directory List

Here’s a monster list for you of pretty much all the blog directories out there you can put yourself on. That should keep you busy for the holidays!

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

(If you’ve got a better one to share, we’d love to know about it!)

My Pretty Silly Christmas Greeting to You!

Admittedly I’m a sucker for funny holiday pass alongs – and boy, this is a GREAT example of viral marketing at it’s best. Check out Office Max’s Elf Yourself mini video. Starring yours truly (it’s not that big a deal … you can star in it, too.) Have fun! http://www.elfyourself.com/?userid=3c1b732f006fb35ce18b1ccG06122004

It’s my way of saying happy holidays and thanks for reading the Get Known Now Blog!

Using a Non-Profit Tie In to Get National Publicity

Last week I posted on Joeann Fossland’s virtual tour to support CARE. I was curious to learn how that netted out for her in terms of traffic and money raised for her cause.

What’s the increase of traffic to your blog you’re seeing since you began your CARE initiative? The best spikes in traffic happen after Listserv posts and e-mail newsletters. But we are seeing some increase from the blog.

Explain how your sales are impacted by the CARE project – do you sell product and they get a percentage?
Right now, our "product" is to raise the $100,000 for CARE, knowing that this will be increasing our brand awareness. Increased sales have been happening with my yearly planner and we have also advertised 2 books on selling HUD homes, one for the consumer and one for the agent with all proceeds going to CARE. We have not offered an affiliate arrangement since we wanted to direct 100% to CARE

How did you come to choose CARE … was this your idea or theirs? And how did you use this to get into MORE Magazine?
In May, More announced their pledge to raise $1 Million to CARE by creating a contest. They invited people to give to CARE through a Giving Circle. The Giving Circle that raised the most would go with the editors to Peru on a working vacation for a week.

I am competitive by nature and love to travel and have great appreciation for the poverty and what a difference just a little can make, so I was in... I figured if I could get 20 other people to each commit to $5K each, we'd raise $100,000 and be a slam dunk to win!

MORE featured me as the founder of the Giving Circle in their October issue and has been doing an update of the progress each issue.

Choosing CARE as the charity grew out of the work that was being done with women and micro-development. The goal is to empower the women-who can then pass along to the children and their villages ways to make a living. Some examples have been gifts of seeds, guinea pigs and ovens for baking bread. It is amazing how a very small gift can make a HUGE difference.

Have you had any other national publicity? Since it is really a MORE promo, I don't expect it to be featured in what might be seen as competing magazines. The great thing that works for me is that MORE readers are definitely the demographic that I like working with as a coach...so it is a very good fit

How much have you raised so far… or what kind of contribution is it making to CARE so far?
We have raised $19,685 so far. CARE donations go a long way...A $40 contribution can send an Afghan girl to school for a year. We are excited at what we've done but there is lots left to do. We'd love a few more people to join our circle...there is still room!

To make a contribution to Joeann’s CARE program go to our post on her program. Thanks!

A Great Way to Capitalize on the Holidays

One of the great things that happens at the holidays is that it’s a real chance to give back to your people … the very folks who read your blog, your ezine, hit your site, pass your work along, and generally keep you in business. (Not to mention allow you to live your life purpose.)

I found a recent collective of gift givers who used the opportunity to not only give back but to team up so they all got more exposure to the public in general. The group includes authors Denise Linn, Sonia Choquette, and many other Hay House writers. This kind of collaboration has worked well in contests, Amazon Days, and other promotions. But I’d never seen it done as a holiday gift tie in … good idea!

Check it out and scoop up some freebies. You will have to surrender your contact into, but it seems like its well worth it to me.

Make 2007 Your Biggest Year Yet

I’m pleased to announce that no less than the excellent Andrea Lee and I will be hosting a special monthly club that’s going to mean the end of your to-do list meltdown! Why? Cause we know that you coaches and small biz consultants out there could probably get along fine without one more bit of information.

What you really need is a place to make commitments and keep yourself accountable. We’ll be providing a pretty amazing array of benefits – everything from fun (tangible) rewards for goals accomplished to brainstorming calls and tech Q&A calls. You’re not going to want to miss this in ’07 … Check it out.

How to Make Your Own Comics

Last week I blogged about the value of creating a cool comic strip on your blog or site. (I’m actually about to launch a web page with a comic strip on it just for fun.) Guy Kawasaki submitted a comment identifying the source of that cool comic-building software … Comic Life. Only for your Mac users, sadly.

Anyone out there found a Mac equivalent?

Google Alerts Gets Spammy?

OK, I’m confused. For the last month, my Google Alerts account has been returning at least two Google Alert notices to me every day. (Google Alert is a service you can sign up for that lets you know when any keywork you plug in, including your name, gets a new listing in their organic search returns.) To keep track of how often I’m mentioned online, I plugged in my name.

But something’s gotten fishy. A lot of my alerts look like this:

Asolo Hiking Boots - Borrow Traffic If…
By Administrator
2005 Suzanne Falter Barns LLC. info getknownnow This was posted on March 09, 2004 some content courtesy The Psychology Of Closing common.ppmg NEWS ltc 02 1108.htm The Psychology of Limited Resources The first one is going to show people ...
Specific Wholesaleclothing Information - http://wholesaleclothing.altitudeclothing.com

Click on the blue link and you go to an unrelated article that mentions my name in a separate line at the end. Click on the green link and you’re into an ad.

EEEEuuuwwwww. I feel the ooze of spam.

Anyone else have this experience?

Capitalize on today's TODAY show segment on coaches

OK, life coaches. Your big moment has arrived. This morning, a segment about life coaching gift certificates aired on NBC's Today Show, thanks to efforts by the International Coach Federation. Cool!

Want to capitalize on that and get your own media? Create a press release (or use the one available to ICF members at their excellent wesbite) and run with it. Get yourself some local media with papers, TV news affiliates, talk radio shows, etc. in your area. You can find those contacts through Bacon's media info site. But act now ... your window of opportunity is brief.

This is a great example of how to captialize on breaking news with a speedy press release. (Note: The ICF's own press release for memebrs undoubtedly contains some awesome concrete facts/study stuff the press can't resist so that may be your best bet -- join the ICF to access.)

Every major national media story is worth at least three or four other press mentions -- some of them even national. How does the media get their ideas? From other media, that's where! So this is really a hot opportunity ... don't forget to captialize on it!

Using Your Blog to Change the World

I am pleased to welcome my former student and friend, Master Coach Joeann Fossland to my blog. Joeann has a blog for her real estate practice and is the leader of a group of professionals that publishes three blogs for philanthropic fundraising. She has embarked upon a Virtual Tour to promote their cause, and today's stop on that tour is the Get Known Now Blog.  (So check out what we're doing here if you want to learn how to support good works with your blog.)

Suzanne: What is the Web Women Giving Circle and what's your mission?

Joeann: The Web Women Giving Circle is a group of professionals who have gathered to leverage their talents and resources to raise money for CARE, the humanitarian relief organization. We have three blogs, one is a general blog that features information about the giving circle and contains inspirational posts about the people we are trying to help; another blog, WWGC Book Club and Shopping Alliance,  is set up to generate affiliate income dollars for CARE; and the Inspiring Woman blog is a place where people can nominate an inspiring woman in exchange for a $10 fee that will be donated to CARE.

Suzanne: Tell us more about your marketing efforts. Are blogs your primary medium?

Joeann: Blogs play a major role in our marketing efforts. I think that the operative word here is "viral." We are combining blog posts with corresponding e-mail campaigns and Listserv posts. We presently are targeting three major audiences: real estate, coaches, and general public. Since many of our giving circle members are professionals in the real estate community, the real estate community is a major demographic we are trying to reach. Coaches and other members of the "Love and Abundance" community reflect another segment of an audience we are trying to attract. Molly Gordon, a leading coaching luminary, is a cherished member of our giving circle, and San Francisco artist Paulette Long joined last week.

Suzanne: Where do you go from here?

Joeann:

We have set up a Book Club and Shopping Alliance that earns affiliate income at Amazon. If you make your Amazon purchases here (books, gifts, DVDs, CDs, or electronics), the Web Women Giving Circle will earn referral dollars. ALL referral dollars that we make at Amazon will be donated to CARE.

Also, a prominent San Francisco artist, Paulette Long, has joined the Giving Circle and she is creating a series of 20 paintings that will be sold to generate money for CARE.

And, last but not least, we have three wonderful Premium Packages for real estate agents who can receive hundreds of dollars of value for as little as $20 that will be donated to CARE. This is possible through the generosity of our sponsors.

And, I will continue to visit blogs. Visitors here are welcome to contact me for information about booking a stop their blogs. We will try to extend our reach. The more money we can raise for CARE the more we will be able to share with people around the world who have so much room for abundance in their lives. 

Thank you for your hospitality today, Suzanne. You have a lovely set of the digs in the blogosphere!!

An Absolutely Amazing Post

I've been working recently with an end of life coach, Bettina Desrochers, who has a knack for writing the vulnerable stuff most of us long to remember but don't have the guts to share or even think about. Her post about losing her baby at birth is one of the most powerful things I've read on the Web ... check it out.

She's got an incredible gift of love to share this holiday season here -- share it and pass it along.

Another Free Telebridge Service to Recommend

Reader Lisa Soloman wrote to tell usa bout a free conference call service that helps you record AND can hold up to 1000 callers!

She writes: “It's called Simple Event, and you can find details about the service at https://www.simpleevent.com/. If you want to record, it's simple: plug your phone line into a recording adapter and plug the other end into your computer. Record directly onto your computer using Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), which is free (Audacity is full-featured and you cal also use it to edit your recordings). 1ShoppingCart (which is the cart I will be using) has support for electronic product delivery, and will host files of up to 7MB on their servers.

The recording adapter works with all phones (I even use it with a cordless phone), since you just run your regular phone line (i.e., the cord with the clear, square-ish click-y thing on the end) out of the phone and into the adapter. It then has another cord coming out the other side with the same type of connector, and that plugs into the back of your computer. The third cord coming out goes into one of the round jacks on the back of the computer (I think it's the line-in jack).

It might take some tweaking to figure out which cord under your desk goes where, and in what order (I also have a fax hooked into the same line!), but adding the adapter into the mix does not appear to have any effect on the sound quality on the phone line. The great thing is that, using Audacity, you can do a test run with your speaker on the phone to see where the speaker's levels (and yours) are, so that you can optimize sound quality.”

The Search for a Better Free Teleclass Service

Recently friends and GKN staffers have recommended the following cool free telebridge services for use with teleclasses. www.freeaudioconferencing is a decent service which can help you host a call for free for up to 100 visitors. However, we’ve also found an even better one! Free Conferencing Live Office can house up to 250 callers for free and comes with recording capability.

As ever, don’t quit your paid bridge, however. I’ve found these ‘free’ services have flaws. One, www.freeconferencecall.com was a terrific service until a recording kept busting into each of my calls with the menu of control options loudly explained in a twenty second recording, which was not only unstoppable but incomprehensible. Since I was recording my calls for possible info products and for the use of participants, that service had to go.

Any others to recommend?

Ahem … A Small Announcement to Make

I have some exciting news … and a new strategy to share. While in St. Louis last month at the ICF conference I did something I always do at every ICF conference: I had tea and dessert with Andrea Lee.

Andrea Lee and I are creative soul mates who both run businesses appealing to life coaches, therapists and other folks of this ilk. (Andrea’s Multiple Streams of Coaching Income has been a landmark business in her field and highly successful.) We met maybe eight years ago when she was running Thomas Leonard’s early iterations of Coachville … and since then our paths have crossed happily many times.

And we’ve always wanted to do ‘something’ together.

Each year, over tea, we repeat our vows to collaborate … but in the past we were never sure on what, exactly. But this year is different. Both of us are looking at ways to morph our businesses, develop exit strategies for some of them, and create the space for new creative endeavors … like my Serenity Hawkfire work.

So now the wheels are turning as we see the huge possibilities in helping each other do this. So nothing really ends – it just gets reinvented and shared. You get served. We share the labor and expenses. And best of all, we get to play together creatively.

We plan on blogging about this process so you can learn what to do with these products, services, sites or blogs you may have started that no longer keep you

Look for a product launch from us later this month that will help you make 2007 the Year of You in your business.

Innovate or Die – Even Guy Agrees

Got a comment the other day on the blog from no less a luminary than Guy Kawasaki, who I recently heard keynote on innovation at the ICF conference in St. Louis. Guy had some wonderful points to make that day – the most important (to my ears) being that you either have to innovate or die.

No, Virginia, it’s not OK to run a vanilla business that does absolutely nothing to push your particular field forward. And this is the very same concept that drives ‘blue ocean strategy’ which is a central piece of my coaching … helping people create not just a business … but one that truly changes the field.

And it’s not so hard to do that – just look in great detail at what’s out there, then methodically research and come up with a better idea. Which, if you’re passionate about what you do, is no problem.

Examples: Guy had a good one – flip flops designed specifically for the surfer set which include a neatly tucked in bottle opener in the sole. Love that! Others he described included a kimchi chiller, Fandango - the online movie ticket seller, the Smart Car which can park perpendicularly, and the Brieitling Emergency Watch which emits an emergency signal detectable by airplanes.

So what’s the result of all this wild innovation? People hear about you and they can’t help but talk. So you could be one of those mavericks who never even HAS to market yourself. Cool!

Thanks, Guy!

Word Press Mania … The Next Big Thing!

In a few short years, WordPress has become the world's most popular blogging software. But how does it work? How do you get started using this totally free blogging platform?

Join blogging expert Andy Wibbels and me for a meaty, fun 1-hour demo and Q & A (‘WordPress 101‘)  on how to take advantage of the powerful free blogging package WordPress. We’re not only going to learn a lot … if Andy’s there, it’s actually going to be fun!

www.getknownnow.com/andy.html

What’s the Life Cycle of an Info Product?

Have you ever noticed what happens when you create an info product? It follows a fairly reliable life span.

First … lightening strikes and you think of a new product. Cool! Suddenly you’re inspired and you find yourself cranking this baby out in the wee hours. It’s going to be FANTASTIC. You can almost feel how many sales you’re going to get – images of dollars rolling in mingle with the sheer satisfaction of creating something really effective and useful right from your home office.

You launch the product to your loyal fan base as soon as you can. People buy it. Buzz gets spread. Affiliates jump on board. Things are great! Sales aren’t quite what you projected (after all, you weren’t being exactly cautious) … but that’s OK! There’s always tomorrow!

Next comes the post-launch letdown. Sales slow to disheartening pace. Suddenly you scratch your head and realize you need a marketing plan. So you sit down and you write one.

A few months later, sales have trickled to nearly non-existent and you remember your marketing plan. Somehow life got busy and you just didn’t get to all those good intentions to set up Google Adwords, article distribution, JV calls, and find more gung ho affiliates. You renew your vigor and attack again.

A few months later the slow trickle of sales has grown to a light semi-stream as you work your plan. OK, so crowds aren’t knocking down the door to buy your product but there are maybe four or five sales a month. Which is not great, but OK. You start to wonder if that’s all you can expect.

Lightening strikes a few weeks later and you think of a new product – cool! Suddenly you’re inspired again. The product you’d launched earlier in the year is forgotten now as you move back into full creative mode and do what you love best … making things. Marketing be damned! This is the fun stuff!

Sound familiar?

Some business analysts suggest that this is a healthy business cycle – that your primary job as info-preneur is to keep creating groups, products, services, etc.. And that you can expect them to whither away and die after a while.

I’ve personally found the strong products just keep on selling. It’s only the weaker products that just don’t catch hold with people’s imaginations that must whither and die.

Other biz gurus suggest re-purposing the work into relaunches, or even spreading content out over mini sites that get loaded strategically with Google Adsense to bring in advertising income. To me, that seems like the inevitable shredding of hardcover books that don’t sell so the paper can be recycled. In other words, eeeeeuwwww!

What do you find the cycle to be … and what do you do with the ‘leftovers’?

The Cleverest Blog Post

Never underestimate the power of humor to draw humans to your website or blog. No matter what business you are in, marketing with charm and true cleverness can truly rock your world.

Witness what no lesser a personage than biz guru Guy Kawasaki calls ‘one of the cleverest blog posts’. It’s two zany young guy’s account of what happened when they were offered a comp ‘tasting dinner’ worth mega bucks at a top French restaurant in New York City. (One of them is behind a fairly serious food blog.)

A few notable things about this post:

- The author created this event to blog about. An influential blogger, he was invited to attend a high end truffle tasting dinner that was WAY out of his price range. So he called up and requested a media pass for free for himself and a friend. And because of the power of blogging … he got it! So don’t be afraid to ask – creating events to blog about totally works.

- The post is formatted as if it were a comic strip. So how DID these guys do this? (Anyone know what kind of software does this?) It’s brilliant, really, because it has all the chatty charm of a blog but it totally stands apart because of the visual, moment by moment sequencing of it. A wonderful combination of a viral video’s visual impact and a blog’s conversational appeal.

- It combines multimedia video clips courtesy of youtube. Don’t miss one of these dudes signing drunkenly into his fork after the third wine was poured. Here’s a great way to add a little interactivity to really drive your point home

- The writing is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Just like the best of David Sedaris, you simply can’t keep from cracking up.

More Tips for Successful Conference Booths

Recently I described coaching software creator (and executive coach) Sylva Leduc as booth ‘den mother’ at ICF conferences of yore. She kindly responded with a few more ideas on how to boost your booth’s chances of being a hit.

Syl recommends you:

- Get roses as Safeway if possible. Usually less than $10 for a dozen and they last for the whole conference. (I’ve found most major grocery stores offer the same.)
- NEVER have a drawing for your service or product. People will decide to wait until after the drawing takes place and then they often forget to return to complete their purchase
- If possible, have some balloons imprinted with your logo and fly 'em high! Your exhibit area will be much easier to find.