Rnordman

If shale energy production booms in the U.S. but no one's there to count the barrels, does it make a sound?

Thankfully, this conundrum has yet to materialize. Adam Sieminski has virtually guaranteed it never will.  

Two years into his term as the administrator of the Energy Information Agency in Washington, Sieminski has helped put a quantifiable face on what's been an unprecedented surge in unconventional oil and gas production. As demand for information has increased, Sieminski has successfully ushered the EIA into the big data era.

"There were things EIA  simply couldn’t do in the existing surveys and resources available to the agency," until now, he told BI in a phone interview Friday. 

In many ways the EIA has come full circle. It was created in 1977 as part of the federal government's frenzied attempt to grapple with 1970s energy shocks. In its write-up of Senate discussions to found the agency, the New York Times noted one senator had complained among other things about  "a seemingly endless argument over basic natural gas data" covering reserves and production. 

Today, Sieminski said, the agency manages "millions and millions" of data points.  They now run 41 different email lists with over 440,000 total subscriptions. 

Until he took over in 2012, Sieminksi's 40-year career as an energy analyst was spent largely in the private sector, most recently at Deutsche Bank. For Kevin Book, the managing director of Cleaview Energy Partners, that experience has been  critical to his success.

"He was, for many years, a consumer of EIA’s products, so he may be uniquely positioned to improve them," Book told us in an email. "Adam worked for decades – as I do – as an analyst, relying as all energy analysts must on EIA’s output. Adam also came directly to EIA from the National Security Staff where, in that capacity, he was trying to make decisions that relied on EIA’s data. In other words: he’s been both kinds of customer."

His achievements haven't gone unnoticed. This year, the agency got a 17.6% budget increase, to $117 million. As far as federal budgets go, it isn't much. But Sieminski says it speaks to a recognition of the agency's work.

"In the world of tighter and tighter public finances, that’s a huge success for EIA, and a reaffirmation that we’re doing critical work that is valued by both parties here in Washington."

Under his watch, Sieminski has expanded the agency's reach both locally and abroad. They've beefed up state-specific data through a new state energy portal, and relaunched the International Energy Outlook, which had been suspended in 2012. Last year the agency rolled out a huge new portal for state electricity data.  

Among energy analysts, the consensus is that Sieminski's greatest recent success was the launch of the monthly Drilling Productivity Report. The releases, which began last October, provide up-to-date and short-term forecasts of drilling output in the country's six major shale oil and gas production plays. Judith Dwarkin, the chief energy economist at ITG Investment Research in Calgary, says the report fits the pattern of robust response to data demand.  "The EIA continuously improves the breadth and depth of the data it provides regarding energy markets, along with thoughtful synopses on topical issues," Dwarkin told us by email. "The Drilling Productivity Report launched under Adam Sieminski’s watch is a case in point."

Book said it represents a "big departure" from previous reports like the Annual Energy Outlook that were largely retrospective. 

Sieminski agreed the Annual Energy Outlook, which is still published but relies on lagged data, wasn't cutting it. The 2013 edition was rendered obsolete within months of its release as production screamed higher, so Sieminski went about creating a more forward-looking product.

"We asked what it would take to get a good estimate of current oil production, and we said 'Well if we do it the standard way, it will take a year for OMB to approve a new survey," he said. "So we said 'Well, what can do with existing data from states and private vendors?' And we came up with a methodology that looks at hte six fastest-growing areas."

There's more coming down the pike: Sieminski says the agency plans to add 15 more states to its production survey, near-real-time electricity generation data, and  compile more data on fracked wells, including chemicals being used. And they have not neglected renewables growth, although he said their focus is largely proportional to an energy source's share in the economy.

As one might expect, Sieminski was quick to praise his colleagues, saying he was  struck by their dedication to public service and "trying to really actually provide good value to the public for the resources they [pay] ... to being accurate and objective, and doing a good job, to help maintain the trust of the public, has been extraordinary."

People are starting to notice.

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Here's the latest US stats we've seen around the web.

Intrigue is provided by native advertising, Alibaba hype, Twitter ads, newspapers and our obsession with our phones.

Get stuck in. And make sure you take a look at the Econsultancy Internet Statistics Compendium for more stats.

1. Alibaba IPO

There’s been so much press about Alibaba’s upcoming IPO, since it was mooted in March.

Well the company has filed its F-1 registration form this week.

According to cnet the IPO looks to be worth roughly $1bn with predictions as high as $20bn. 

Bloomberg reports Alibaba's market value as $168bn, which is pretty darn big. 

2. Native advertising works

Sharethrough has worked with IPG Media Lab to look at native ad effectiveness using eye-tracking (200 consumers) and surveys (4770 consumers).

The study attempted to measure visual attention and brand lift for native ads including National Geographic and Southern Comfort.

The following was revealed: 

• Consumers looked at native ads 53% more frequently than display ads.
• 25% more consumers were seen to look at in-feed native ad placements than display ad units.
• Native ads registered 18% higher lift in purchase intent and 9% higher lift for brand affinity responses than banner ads.
• 32% of respondents said the native ad “is an ad I would share with a friend of family member” versus just 19% for display ads. 

Here’s a tasty infographic on the subject:

(Click to enlarge)

3. Smartphone obsession

Firstly, according to figures collected by Locket, the Android app that pays users for to allow homescreen ads, the average user checks their phone around 110 times day. 

This comes from this digital stats blogger this week, where I picked up the next couple of figures, too. 

4. American Apparel social sales

We’ve made as much as $50,000 in one flash sale on Twitter.

That’s according to Ryan Holiday, Director of Marketing at American Apparel. 

5. Twitter ad business stutters

Quartz has given some interesting insight into Twitter’s first quarter revenue.

Although the $250m beat analyst expectations, stock fell.

This is possibly because ad revenue for each timeline view has decreased and Twitter’s user growth has been modest.

255m people use the service, up from 241m at the end of 2013.

 

6. Shopper privacy

IDC Retail Insights  published the results of its 2013 Annual Shopper Survey about relevancy and privacy.

Here are some of the findings:  

• 53%  of shoppers would choose privacy over relevancy, and 47% vice versa.
• But 62% believe that they do not have enough control over their privacy when it comes to retailers.
• Only circa 50% of retailers have a formal governance process for managing "give to get" data.
• Three in four consumers trust some non-retail brands, data aggregators such as Google included. 

7. Made-for-digital video

Americans are increasingly embracing original digital video, according to the IAB’s 2014 Original Digital Video Study

Viewers of original digital programming prefer it to news, sports and daytime programming on television, and like it almost as much as they do primetime TV. 

• 22% of American adults watch original digital video each month. That’s 52m per month.
• These viewing figures show a 15 percent increase from 2013.
• The main driver for watching digital content is flexibility of viewing (41% cite this as an advantage).
• Smartphones (by 46% of digital viewers) and tablets (by 41%) are now being used more than ever to view this sort of programming.
• Half of digital viewers (48%) use smart TVs.

Viewing habits also differ for those watching made-for-digital content. 

• More than half of monthly original digital video users say their viewing is unplanned.
• For TV (online and off) this unplanned figure is one quarter.
• Original digital video viewers conduct more social media activities related to the shows they watch online (52%) than they do for primetime TV (38%).

8. Brands mean enough, spare the celebs

WP Engine has announced the results of its WP Engine Content Creation Study.

The survey examines consumer behavior and sentiment towards brands producing their own content.

• 62% of Americans want to see content directly from their favorite brands.
• 44% want tips on using a brand’s products.
• 34% want customer stories.
• A whopping 96% don’t want celebrities parading a company’s products.

Original content

• 46% read brand blogs.
• Two out of five consumers prefer to read a brand blog rather than a magazine or website. 
• 40% of consumers said that there are negative effects if brands do not produce blog content.
• 52% prefer to go directly to the brand website, with only 25% going via social media.

9. Inflated newspaper circulation

This Poynter article is worth a read. It throws light on circulation figures that may not be as high as some outlets are reporting. 

Basically the point is that a year ago, circulation figures had to be 70% paid, so app use wasn’t included because the app is free.

However this year, it seems this rule is no longer, so the app figures are included and it appears that circulation has massively shot up. 

USA Today’s “digital nonreplica” circulation was 1,484,078 last September. However, in April 2014 the number had dropped 8%, to 1,365,388. This category reflects app use, actually contributed to an overall decline in reported circulation. (Without its new branded “butterfly” editions, USA Today’s total circulation fell since September’s report by almost 10 percent, from 2,862,229 to 2,587,103.)

But USA Today’s story celebrated the circulation figures.

…year-over-year comparisons make even less sense because app use wasn’t counted by USA Today in March 2013, when AAM’s bylaws still required 70 percent of circulation to be paid (USA Today’s apps are free). The result: USA Today’s huge, misleading year-over-year circulation jump…

10. Ecommerce to hit $371bn by 2017

Forrester’s  “US Online Retail Forecast, 2012 to 2017,” predicts online shopping will reach $371bn by 2017, hitting 10% of all retail sales.

There are many layers to the world of affiliate marketing and there are opportunities to make money at each of these layers. Perhaps you’ve had some experience as a publisher, promoting various affiliate offers from different networks. Maybe you’ve worked as an advertiser, using affiliate marketing to generate leads and increase sales. But have you ever considered running a network of your own?

Working at every tier along the way is a comprehensive solution from EvoLeads, an affiliate software system and offer marketplace that has something to offer for publishers, advertisers and white label users alike.

An Affiliate Revolution?

At its core, EvoLeads aims to power your white label affiliate program. Even if you don’t have any ambitions to run a full-fledged network, there is a lot of value in being able to have an affiliate program under your company name, using your own company logos and colors. This provides publishers with a certain level of confidence in what you are able to provide.

In this way, you could view EvoLeads as a white label tracking service provider. There are no set up fees for getting your own affiliate program going and everything is run through their reliable servers. For both you and your affiliates, you get real-time global analytics so you can best optimize your campaigns.

If you do choose to run a fuller affiliate network of your own with multiple offers from multiple publishers, EvoLeads is prepared to handle that for you too. Indeed, it is possible to set limits on the publisher activity so you don’t go over the budgets defined by your advertisers. This is the same kind of functionality that you see from much larger affiliate networks, but available to Internet entrepreneurs like you.

The EvoLeads Dashboard

After signing up with EvoLeads, you can log into your account and gain access to the main dashboard.

This provides you with a clean and intuitive way to get through all of your analytics and stats. The main dashboard will show your commissions, clicks and actions for the month to date by default, but you can easily access different time frames via the pull-down menu. Below the line graph, you’ll find the basic tables with your daily and weekly commission figures too, as well as the associated change in dollars and as a percentage.

The Offer Marketplace

While a big part of the appeal of EvoLeads is the ability to use the white label solution to run your own affiliate network under your own branding, EvoLeads itself is still an affiliate network in many ways. If you’re running your own network, you can still submit your offers to be displayed through the EvoLeads marketplace.

 

This means that you can effectively make money at all three tiers of the affiliate setup: as a network owner, as an advertiser, and as a publisher. The list of offers comes from other members of the network and you can sort through these based on category, tags, countries, traffic type, eCPC range, eCPA, click-thru and commission rate.

As of this writing, there are about 300 offers in the marketplace and they boast payouts as high as $340.00. There’s a lot of upside there as a publisher and it also means that there are higher tier white label users who are a part of the EvoLeads network as well.

Leading the Way

If you’re looking for a white label tracking solution for your network, then EvoLeads should be among your prime contenders. You get precise geo-targeting and you don’t have to pay any click charges. It’s priced at $499 per month and the four-page network registration form should only take you a couple minutes to complete.

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The post EvoLeads White Label Tracking for Affiliate Marketing appeared first on Blogging Tips.

The concepts of branding and inbound marketing may seem to be at odds most of the time. After all, branding is how the world sees you; inbound marketing is how the world finds you. You’ll spend thousands of dollars and valuable hours developing a brand—an identity—by which you’ll be identified. This brand may be available to and recognized by a large number of people…the whole world, if you’re lucky. Those people, amazing as they are, won’t all be potential customers, and that’s where your inbound marketing comes into play.

Image Source

Those who recognize your brand, see your content, and have pain points your products solve, these are the people at the top of your sales funnel. You’ll use inbound marketing to move those buyers from the top of the funnel to the middle, where you’ll use specific content to show potential buyers how your business solves their problems. Finally, those visitors will come through the bottom of the funnel and become bona fide customers.

The Internet makes sharing a brand easier than ever, but it also means you could destroy your image just as easily. Your inbound marketing channels, the outlets customers use to find you and your products, must maintain your branding at all times. One slip can start a scandal your brand might never overcome.

So, how can you ensure consistency in your inbound marketing efforts? Here are 3 ways:

Make Your Value Proposition Known

Your value proposition, how you will solve a customer’s pain point, is the heart of your brand. The rest—colors, logo, tone—aid in recognition, but your identity is your value proposition. All of your inbound marketing channels should keep that value proposition at the center. Blogs should address the pain point and solutions, ebooks and offers should provide valuable information relating to your products and services, and even your “fun” social media accounts should focus first on how you fix things.

Inbound marketing is all about directing customers to your brand and then building trust among those who need your services. If you’re not focusing on your unique selling proposition, your brand will be flimsy at best. At worst, your potential customers will walk away confused.

Pay Attention to Buyer Personas

Your buyers are as much a part of your brand as your products or services are. If you don’t understand the people who buy from your company your message will be muddled. Buyer personas are important when creating content for your blogs and ebook offers, communicating on social media, and even answering customer service requests.

Not only must you prepare content that your buyers want to read, but you must also know where to place that content so it can be found. Knowing the psychographic dimensions of your buyers means you’ll also understand where they spend their time on the Internet.

Invest in Your Story

You know the plot; you know the characters. Now it’s time to tell your story. When potential buyers find your brand, you get one shot to reel them in. Susan Gunelius says, “…the explosive growth of social media and content marketing, the opportunities to tell stories as part of direct and indirect brand marketing initiatives have become a strategic priority.” Each of your inbound marketing platforms should be used to convey your brand’s story at all times. Slip or deviate from the plot, and prospects will notice. To put things another way: Consider all of your inbound marketing channels as the components of a television commercial, only the story in a commercial ends after sixty seconds. Your brand story goes on forever.

Consistency is key if you want to build a strong brand, because your inbound marketing content will define you. Boring, useless content will equal a boring and useless company in the eyes of consumers. Have you encountered content that made you question a company’s branding standards? Did something shared on social media make you pause before placing an order? We’d love to know how inconsistencies have shaped your opinions about particular brands, so let us know in the comments.

The anti-virus software company AVG has created PrivacyFix, an app to help you get a handle on just how much you're worth to big-time data players Facebook and Google. According to the app, I'm worth $112.32 to Google, but a measly $16.60 to Facebook.

The app makes an estimate on what you're worth to Facebook by using its publicly available shareholder information to determine how much each user in a given country is worth to the social network. Then it either adds or detracts value based on your gender (females are worth more to Facebook than males) and how much you use the platform (number of friends, likes, and posts).

For Google, it measures the number of searches you've done in the past 60 days and compares that figure to the estimates securities analysts have made about how much each search is worth to the company. 

Here's how you can find out what you're worth:

1. Visit PrivacyFix.com and click "Get AVGPrivacyFix for Free."

Naturally, the app says it is "designed not to transmit or share your browser history or browser cookies."

2. Login with your Facebook account at the top of the page to see what you're worth to the social network.

PrivacyFix acknowledges that the number is only an estimate and can vary based on how often you click on ads, and which profile characteristics Facebook and its partners are using to target you.

3. The app also allows you to see which data you're sharing with Facebook, and provides easy tools to manage it.

Clicking one of the "FIX" buttons will bring you to the right Facebook page to make private certain kinds of information. I chose to go through and delete some of the old apps I haven't used in ages, this way they no longer have access to my Facebook information.

4. Scroll down to see what you're worth to Google.

The number is not exact because some keywords (for instance, one indicating a rare disease that requires costly medical equipment) have more value than others.

5. But wait, there's more!

You can also scroll down to see which ad tech companies are tracking you with browser cookies, which PrivacyFix shows you how to disable if you'd like. In my pool of logos, I noticed AOL Advertising, the audience measurement firm Quantcast, and the video tech company Ooyala. You can then scroll down further to see which of your favorite websites are keeping tabs on you.

Facebook declined to comment. We also reached out to Google earlier this morning, but have not yet heard back.

Now learn more about how Google's advertising works: Google will now track your in-store purchases to figure out whether its ads are effective

Join the conversation about this story »

Learn how to estimate your share of search for different keywords using Google Search Console, and how to perform a gap analysis to find your SEO gaps Making better use of organic search is a cost-effective technique for generating leads …..

The post How to perform gap analysis to boost your SEO and content marketing appeared first on Smart Insights.

One thing that always catches my attention online is a good infographic. Often, the subject matter isn’t one I’d proactively go looking for, but as long as the information is interesting and laid out in a well-designed fashion, I’ll end up boosting the publishing website’s ‘time spent on page’ stats quite significantly.

But are they for everyone? We ask our journalists what they think of infographics as a form of content marketing.

Pablo Smithson

They can be excellent, but only if you have the right idea. Some of the best concepts are not even that complicated or clever, you just need to put in the hours to find all the data. By going to this effort, your reader doesn’t have to – they get engaging content, you get your brand name noticed.

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Elizabeth Smythe

Infographics are a great tool to have in your content marketing armoury; they have the potential to reach and engage with audiences that simple text cannot – providing they are well thought out and serve a purpose, that is.

The best ones incorporate subject matter that everyone can relate to and that everyone is talking about, displayed in a way that resonates and thus encourages them to share. Even some of the driest topics can be transformed into innovative and interesting infographics with a bit of imagination, something that might not be so easy via news or feature content. Plus they’re fun to produce!

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Sarah Howard

Infographics are a great way of representing all the data we have at our fingertips. Be warned though, the novelty is starting to wear off, as readers have been flooded with mediocre visual content. To break through the noise, you’ll need to create a well-designed, bespoke infographic, that is inspired by a meaningful dataset.

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Larissa Hirst

In a technologically advanced world, where we have a million distractions and longer working hours, infographics are very important in effective content marketing. Because the internet has provided us with information overload, visually appealing content really stands out. Images and colours pull the eye quicker, as do interactive and moving infographics. Hence why social media has embraced infographics; they are exciting and easier to share.

However, no matter how pretty an infographic is, it still has to be relevant and add value. To be effective an infographic needs to be built on solid data or interesting copy, and the images must also align with the message a brand intends to deliver, otherwise it will look like a mess. Good content is about relevance, regardless of visual aesthetics.

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Laura Varley

Content marketing is all about variety and infographics provide a nice change from news stories and blogs. If you want to increase shares of your content, then they are definitely worth considering. They’re visual, don’t take long to read and are a great way of getting your brand’s name and image out there.

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Ashley Curtis

If you find your jargon-heavy whitepapers or eBooks aren’t getting the traction you wanted, infographics can be a great alternative. Take a look at the bounce rate of your content pages; a 20-page whitepaper should be getting at least four or five minutes or more of ‘time spent on page’. If you find readers are bouncing before then, ‘heavy’ content might not be appropriate for your audience, but easy-to-digest, visual infographics could be the ticket. They’re certainly a useful tool in the content marketing arsenal.

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Michael McFadyen

Some people just aren’t readers. The appearance of 1,000 words on a screen can appear daunting to some and not everyone is happy to sit down with a cup of tea to read a long article, despite how interesting or engaging the topic.

Infographics are a great way to target those who don’t fancy reading paragraph after paragraph on any given subject, or those who simply don’t have the time. They’re highly effectiveatcommunicatingvastamounts of information into one easy-to-digest diagram, making them much more accessible to a wider audience.

It’s worth it, as infographics have the power to simplify complex information and educate your audience in a fun way. They’re shareable and can be branded up, meaning your message is reaching a wider audience.

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Graeme Parton

Infographics are useful because they allow businesses to make information more fun and accessible for their audiences. Sometimes stats and figures are the best way to get a message across to potential customers, but they’re rarely appealing when presented in a straightforward piece of text. By adding a visual element, though, infographics have the power to highlight the most important parts and attract more attention.

Content marketing should not be thought of as merely advertising but a long-term commitment to solving the problems and pain points of your audience. Through continuous engagement and relevant content you have the opportunity to trigger a response, further creating credibility and trust for your brand. CM is here to stay and only keeps getting deeper entrenched within your digital community. It is important to gain a clear head and focus in order to produce desired outcomes. The B2B Content Marketing Statistics for 2014 clearly demonstrates not only the importance but some of the issues involved around content strategy, tactics, budgets, metrics, platforms, and time requirements.

“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” Content Marketing Institute

Cultivating and nurturing these relationships is part of the lead conversion in your marketing funnel. Consider where your audience lives and what they want and need. How can you make their lives easier, more simplified or answer their most pressing questions?

Think more in terms of solutions, benefits and features. Remember, it’s a two-way conversation, not a soapbox.

Content can be in a variety of forms: website, blog post, video, image, podcast, e-book, white paper, newsletter, social media post or an email. Whatever platform or venue you choose, direct it toward your readers and what they crave.

It isn’t a mass blast.

Quality over quantity because if you are simply pushing words to fill spaces, you probably aren’t being all that remarkable. You don’t want to be scratchy noise, but someone who is “follow-worthy,” shareable, intelligent, educational and helpful.

Brands and their agencies believe deeply that content is the future, and anyone who doesn’t get onboard will be left behind. Shane Snow

Creating a strategy AND tactics needs to be a part of your plan. What do you want to achieve with your content marketing? Who do you want to reach? Just because you read about the value and importance of CM, doesn’t translate to crazed writing and pushing of paragraphs. You need a method to your madness. Jason DeMers suggests 5 essential goals to consider as part of your content marketing plan:

1. Help & educate
2. Build a community
3. Demonstrate your expertise
4. Help the search engines help you
5. Keep in touch with your customers

When writing your content, these five components will help you to deliver rich and relevant content that interests your audience, creates deeper relationships, builds your online brand reputation and ensures greater results for your efforts and expertise.

Content Marketing Review

1. Goals
2. Strategy
3. Editorial calendar
4. Content
5. An understanding of your buyer personas
6. Where does your audience hang out
7. What are their greatest pain points?
8. What drives them to purchase?
9. What are they searching for?
10. Appeal to their logical mind as well as their emotions
11. Write for them. To them….. not the search engines.
12. Find the best distribution channels
13. Cross promote or vary content
14. Track and measure engagement, conversation and results

Citi is out with its list of disruptive technologies for 2014.

It's a brand new list from the one did they did last year.

And it's really good. Check it out:

4-D Printing

Description: The movement is spearheaded by a guy named Skylar Tibbits, a researcher in MIT's architecture department. The idea is this: You used 3-D printers to print out smart materials that can shape or assemble themselves. The concept is still in its infancy, but Citi says this could help individuals build stuff in extreme conditions, or allow medical devices to construct themselves once they're implanted.

"Utilizing a 3D printer to build the object layer by layer, intelligence can be imprinted directly into the actual structure [via more rigid or flexible materials] dictating the transformation and the eventual shape of the object."

Insane stat: The US Army recently contributed $855K, split between Harvard, University of Illinois and University of Pittsburgh to help advance projects focused on 4D printing.

Relevant graphic: Watch THIS! 

4D Printing: Truncated Octahedron from Skylar Tibbits on Vimeo.

Digital banking

Description: Citi says that, though it remains at an early stage, mobile banking is going to take off around the world. They forecast an 86% compound annual growth rate to $447 billion from $69 billion in 2016. Although the largest volumes will be in developed markets, the greatest opportunities for new entrants lie in emerging markets thanks to the relative lack of established financial institutions. 

Meanwhile, more and more banking services will become automated, resulting in savings costs.  

Insane stat: Norway, Finland and Sweden operate at branch per population densities 2x or more below developed market peers.

Relevant graphic: Cash intensity by country

  

Digital Currency

Has Bitcoin finally made it? Citi's Steven Englander, who's written about the cryptocurrency in the past, gives a basic introduction and talks up the potential of the block chain (both Bitcoin's and the concept in general). He poses the technology's potential thusly: "Bitcoin advocates who benefit from Bitcoin appreciation argue strongly for its role as an asset, but the transactions technology is generic and efficient and less complicated than introducing an intermediate currency (Bitcoin) to facilitate USD to USD or USD to EUR transactions."

Insane stat: As of April 2014, Bitcoinpulse counted 29,000 merchants accepting Bitcoin.

Relevant graphic: Price vs. transaction volume

Digital Marketing

Description: There's nothing new here per se but Citi says growth will start accelerating. The main outcome of this will be more user data. "...The digital market uses and generates massive amounts of data and it is this data that differentiates digital marketing from traditional offline marketing. The result is a highly personalized experience for a consumer across all channels in an experience that the prospective or current customer appreciates and they in turn encourage through greater access to their personal data."

Insane stat: Real-time-bidding-based digital ad spending will see a 66% compound annual growth rate into 2016. (Real-time bidding means the ad buying and placement process is automatic.)

Relevant graphic: the return to publishers from ads is not what it used to be

Electric Vehicles

Description: Citi's interesting suggestion, from analyst Itay Michaeli, for wider market goes like this: "The consumer purchases a new EV at a much lower price ($11-13k depending on size/ cost) and does so worry free of any residual value risk tied to future battery technology advancements. The operator would own the batteries, bill customers and operate battery switching stations that allow consumers to quickly (and robotically) switch batteries when desired or when taking very long drives."

Insane stat: Tesla plans to offer a Gen-3 model priced at $35,000. "A $35k price point is historically what’s required to begin the path towards achieving sizeable volume of over 100k units (typically 2-3 years after launch), in theory enough to crown Tesla as the 1st mover in the affordable pure EV market."

Relevant graphic: This cost comparison table

Energy Storage

Here is the clearest justification for energy storage we've yet seen, from Citi's Jason Channell: Solar generates its electricity when most households are empty, or have limited demand. Saving that electricity for later would dramatically offset consumption prices. He continues: "The potentially greater value is in terms of avoided capacity payments, and the grid stability which storage could provide. If storage could be combined with smart metering and demand response, we could conceivably move to a situation where load is managed (i.e., by dishwashers etc. being turned on automatically when demand was lowest and vice versa) and supply is being managed by storage. This could significantly reduce the amount of stranded capacity and hence wasted cost on an electricity system, as well as improve its reliability.

Insane stat: In the first quarter of 2014, solar and wind combined generated 28% of German electricity.

Relevant graphic: Here is the breakdown of the potential market size for different storage technologies

Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy involves training the immune system to both better recognize cancer cells, and attack them so that cancer becomes nothing more than a chronic condition. From Citi's Andrew Baum: "While existing chemotherapy or even newer oral drugs have a powerful initial effect on tumor shrinkage (the so called “response rate”), the durability of these responses are typically very short, after which the tumor begins to grow again and starts to spread (metastasize). In contrast, the durability of responses with immunotherapy can last a decade or longer, due to the induction of an ongoing immunological memory, targeting cancer cells for an indeterminate length of time and making it a potential tool to transform a significant percentage of cancers into something akin to a chronic disease."

Insane stat: Two-thirds of Western cancer incidence could be successfully treated with immunotherapy.

Relevant graphic: Here's how many more people immunotherapy will keep alive 

Insurance Securitization

Description: Insurance securitization represents a threat to reinsurance, which is how insurers currently pool their own risk. Instead of having to dump all that risk into one or two firms, insurance securitization would allow an insurer to spread their risk across capital markets in the form of securitized bundles.

Insane stat: Reinsurers had to cut their prices 15% in response to securitizers.

Relevant graphic: Most insurance-linked securities are focus on property policies, like hurricane insurance. But some tried to get smart and sell life insurance policies into the capital markets. After the financial crisis, they wised up:

Precision Agriculture

Description: Citi bundles a bunch of different technologies into this category. They include: yield mapping, soil sampling and mapping, hyper-local weather detectors, a farming machine Internet, and big data. "Unless there is a major divergence from historical trends, new land will not be nearly enough to meet [global food demand]. Farm productivity needs to take another step higher, and we think Precision Agriculture will be an important avenue to achieve these productivity gains."

Insane stat: The average age of a U.S. farmer is 57. 

Relevant graphic: Here's how much more food Citi says we're gonna need in coming decades

Robots

Description: The world leader? China — thanks to "the up-trend of wages (albeit from relatively low levels), the peaking out of the working population, the high level of job-hopping and the general trend of Chinese workers not wanting low-paid manual assembly, picking, inspecting or packaging jobs in factories."

Insane stat: U.S. manufacturing comprises just 12% of GDP, meaning that in that sector at least, there may not be that many more replaceable workers.

Relevant graphic: The CAGR for global volumes is ~8.5%

SEE ALSO: Everything you need to know about mobile money

Join the conversation about this story »

How situational applications enable CIOs to employ fewer, better information systems for less $$$

A NEW ECONOMIC IMPERATIVE

For decades, well established large organizations with robust business models have enjoyed IT budgets of relative plenty. But the slow-down in economic growth of recent years has installed a new economic reality.

The role of IT in organizations has not changed fundamentally – even while operating in a depressed economic period organizations need information systems to fuel process improvements, creative innovation, growth and front-line customer services. What HAS changed fundamentally is the size of IT budgets, probably forever. The world of corporate IT is facing a permanent change in its funding.

To achieve significant cost reductions whilst avoiding direct impact on frontline services and growth, organizations are re-visiting how they run IT and procure services. Decision makers are pressured to inject innovation into procurement approaches and to take marginally more risk where the promise of step-change rewards exists.

Nowhere is the potential for rewards greater or more achievable than in the supply of business software applications that satisfy stakeholder demands to source innovation in information systems, improve the efficiency of processes and inject new ways of engaging with customers and finding new markets.

 

THE BOTTOM LINE

The total cost of IT for organizations should not exceed 1% of income. For many organizations, a target outline cost for IT in the order of 0.5% of turnover is achievable.

Organizations that have already thoughtfully engineered their IT function, like easyJet in the United Kingdom, can today run their IT operations at a cost that represents less than 1% of total revenues. This compares to the majority of organizations whose IT costs will range from 1.5% to 6% of income. easyJet is profiting from moving its core platforms to cloud computing and adopting Software as a Service solutions for utility applications like email, calendaring and office software.

This paper argues that yet more rewards can be achieved through more thoughtful approaches to IT procurement without significantly increasing risk. For organizations that face more extreme changes to compliance and market conditions, more can be done to deliver adaptive, better-fit IT to proportionately more IT users.

A myopic focus on cost reduction can result in an inward looking culture that ignores the potential to power growth through technology innovation. The potential of IT to create competitive advantage, boost customer service performance and streamline business processes to create operational excellence has taken a knock over the last two decades – but the potential still exists for IT to do just that.

 

SERVING THE LONG-TAIL

The majority of large enterprise have adopted core platforms for business computing to service the ‘majority need’ for software applications. But a faster pace of change in business markets, the need for greater compliance and control, greater access to data made possible by ‘big data’ technologies and the joint impacts of social networking, consumerism and mobile working have led to greater demands by individuals and communities of users for ‘enterprise-grade’ software applications to meet their ever changing information needs.

In most large enterprises, the majority need for applications is met by a small number (i.e. the top 20%) of enterprise applications. Sourcing and deploying these ‘big wheels’ of enterprise computing architecture – that underpin the core mission-critical processes of the enterprise – has been the focus of enterprise computing for decades. Economies from these deployments come from the adoption of best practice and the consolidation of business operations to shared service centres able to fulfil business needs across the enterprise.

The last decade however has seen an ever growing demand for additional applications to respond to the ever changing needs of individuals and communities. While the net number of users for these applications may be lower, the importance of the information, and the role of these individuals as innovators and change agents in the enterprise, has placed greater pressure on IT and procurement departments to source an ever increasing range of business applications. This demand by smaller numbers of users for higher numbers of applications has become known as the ‘Long-Tail’. In a period when businesses are trying to cut purchase and support costs for IT by reducing numbers of applications, these demands are particularly unhelpful.

Situational applications platforms meet this need by providing a common technology platform able to repeatedly author applications and deliver them to individuals or communities of users in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of traditional tools. This is made possible by their adoption of codeless authoring and use of ready-to-use templates and design building blocks that negate use of traditional best-of-breed platform tools and coding skills.

The first ever situational application platform was the spreadsheet. Times are changing. Information workers need to deal with much bigger data sets and IT leaders must ensure that data is organized, always-secure and any software application must adhere to necessary standards of governance and compliance. The new generation of situational applications platforms like Encanvas (www.encanvas.com) are engineered to meet ‘IT hygiene standards’ of security, performance and scalability, yet they provide unrivalled self-service tooling to enable web workers to exploit existing systems data.

Encanvas was created 2002 by the founders of NDMC Consulting. The founders believed that business users would seek to work in social groups that would span across and beyond enterprise boundaries and, having experienced this new form of business workplace, key knowledge workers and creative contributors to business processes would seek to be able to author applications for their communities in a form purposely sculptured to the needs of the community of use.

This idea of socially-centric, built-for-purpose and potentially thrown-away software was unknowingly endorsed by technology thought-leader Clay Shirky in his essay ‘Situated Software’ published in March 2004 when he wrote, “Part of the future I believe I’m seeing is a change in the software ecosystem which, for the moment, I’m calling situated software. This is software designed in and for a particular social situation or context. This way of making software is in contrast with what I’ll call the Web School (the paradigm I learned to program in), where scalability, generality, and completeness were the key virtues.”

In August 2007, Luba Cherbakov and a team from IBM wrote the first of two articles on what they described as ‘Situational Applications’.

In their paper titled ‘SOA meets situational applications, Part 1: Changing computing in the enterprise’, Cherbakov and her colleagues defined the attributes of Situational Applications, stating, “The loosely accepted term situational applications describe applications built to address a particular situation, problem, or challenge. The development life cycle of these types of applications is quite different from the traditional IT-developed, SOA-based solution. SAs are usually built by casual programmers using short, iterative development life cycles that often are measured in days or weeks, not months or years. As the requirements of a small team using the application change, the SA often continues to evolve to accommodate these changes. Significant changes in requirements may lead to an abandonment of the used application altogether; in some cases it’s just easier to develop a new one than to update the one in use.

The need for team-based computing in the enterprise is not new. Development of applications by amateur programmers using IBM Lotus® Notes®, Microsoft® Excel spreadsheets in conjunction with Microsoft Access, or other tools is widespread. What’s new in this mix is the impressive growth of community-based computing coupled with an overall increase in computer skills, the introduction of new technologies, and an increased need for business agility. The emergence of Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax)—which leverages easy access to Web-based data and rich user interface (UI) controls—combined with the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style of Web services offers an accessible palette for the assembly of highly interactive browser-based applications.”

The emergence of BIG DATA technologies has led to the rediscovery of the important role of expert situational applications tooling as organizations acknowledge the need to equip analysts and middle-managers with self-service, community-centric applications to assimilate, analyse and act on the actionable insights they’re surfacing.

Nevertheless, situational applications remain a largely misunderstood concept in enterprise computing due to many misguided pre-conceived notions that are now proven to be fatally flawed. These include:

•Applications that can be designed cheaply enough to ‘throw-away’ can’t possibly be expected to meet enterprise data integration, security, performance and tuning expectations.

•It’s not possible to create the critical-mass of building blocks and tooling required to remove the majority of programming overheads.

•Organizations are better off buying best of breed solutions, to then mackle them together.

•There is no competitive advantage to be gained from IT as companies now use the same platforms.

•If players like Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM haven’t made it work then it isn’t possible!

 

CODELESS SITUATIONAL APPLICATIONS PLATFORM TOOLS

Situational Applications represent the MAJORITY of emerging demands for software ‘systems’ beyond the core platform components of Financial and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

Situational Applications Platformsare cloud-based tool-kits that support repeated production of situational applications. Their commercial licensing or rental models presume that organizations will produce a near-infinite number of business applications. They offer an alternative approach for the provision of new applications to serve the long-tail of demand.

Before engaging a procurement process or custom coding development, the majority of ‘systems’ requirements are considered for internal delivery by business analysts embedded into change management teams (and motivated through targeted remuneration packages to improve the process areas they serve).

Situational applications development is performed on software platforms that analysts can use themselves to create applications in consort with stakeholders to support improvements in business processes without having to code or acquire tools and skills that would necessitate an ‘IT project’.

This approach places focus and rewards on process improvement and business outcomes rather than the technology componentry.

Situational Applications offer a practical alternative to custom coding, software procurement or outsourcing.

Benefits of this method:

• Project complexity and risk is removed by creating applications during workshops and iteratively adapting applications to best fit the use case.
• No programming skills and competencies are needed.
• No dependencies exist for middle-ware software or third party tools in areas such as business intelligence, geo-spatial intelligence, forms and database design etc.
• New applications are created without additional software costs
• No costs associated with browser compatibility testing, applications re-working, de-bugging or performance tuning is incurred.
• No version upgrades or maintenance costs are incurred in relation to the applications developed.

KNOWN ROAD-BLOCKS

A series of road-blocks have prohibited innovation in IT procurement approaches to serve the long-tail of demand for software applications. Thanks to developments in the science and application of computing, these roadblocks have now been overcome.

1. Norms of IT buying behavior

Problem: There is a widely held view in business IT procurement circles that ready-built software represents a lower risk than custom-built software. This is mainly because buyers presume projects will require custom programming. Furthermore, IT buyers are pressured to consider outsourcing as a means of offsetting cost without being able to monetize the ‘downside’ of outsourcing strategies, or consider alternative insourcing strategies.

Solution: IT buyers must look beyond accepted sourcing approaches if they are to achieve step-change cost and efficiency benefits made possible by new innovations in computing.

2. Overcoming limitations of Web browsers

Problem: Until very recently it wasn’t possible to provide assurances to corporate IT buyers over the performance, security and usability of applications delivered via web browsers owing to the limitations of operating systems platforms and browsers. The presumption continues to pervade that applications installed on a client or server internally are somehow ‘better’.

Solution: Recent events in the development of web-based computing such as increased competition in the web browser market resulting from Google’s entry, market acceptance of AJAX technology, the release of HTML 5, the launch by Microsoft of Active Server Pages (ASP) 3.5 etc. have collectively made possible the design, deployment and operation of Rich Internet applications in a client server architecture that perform just as well as (if not better than) pre-installed desktop and server software.

3. Project cost and complexity resulting from custom programming

Problem: It is presumed that custom applications can only be developed by custom programming.

Solution: New innovative (so-called ‘codeless’) software like Encanvas Secure&Live facilitates the design, deployment and operation of sophisticated Rich Internet Business Applications without the need for custom programming. Applications are developed by business analysts working closely with stakeholders and users. Applications are designed in workshop environments without the need to programme.

4. Use of multiple development tools

Problem: It is presumed that new applications developments will require multiple separate technology components to discharge the varied functions of a business application – such as database, workflow software, intranet and content management software, reporting and dashboarding (business intelligence) software, mobile computing software, geo-spatial information and mapping software etc. For each of these software tools, unique IT competencies are needed, leading to large project teams and complex projects.

Solution: New codeless software development platforms like Encanvas adopt an approach similar to LEGO® whereby building blocks of technology are ready-made so that applications designers can create new applications with all of the necessary features supplied ‘out-of-the-box’ without custom programming.

5. Dependence on middleware

Problem: When data is held in different systems and in different formats, it has been traditionally very difficult to acquire and return data to and from new software applications. Another presumption therefore exists that it’s not possible to easily acquire and return data to different systems at the same time, or robustly govern the security and organization of data.

Solution: The advent of enterprise mashup technology and services oriented computing has overcome these obstacles. It means that new applications can be rapidly created that re-use data that exists in internal systems or is accessible via the web without compromising security or systems resilience. Products like Encanvas include sophisticated data acquisition, data transformation, data aggregation, data query design and database creation features thereby removing any dependency for middleware tools to exist.

6. Software development project complexity

Problem: Decades of failed IT projects have convinced IT buyers that custom software applications are high risk. IT projects often fail as the result of several associated factors that combine to create complexity:

1. Organizations have been traditionally required to use many tools to develop software applications.

2. Use of multiple tools demands multiple competencies; therefore the number of people required for projects swell.

3. Communications between project outcome specifiers and deliverers break down. Applications are programmed ‘offline’ in backrooms against a design specification that must be authored at a time when it’s difficult (if not impossible) to envision the end solution and whether it will deliver an ROI.

4. The need for programming (particularly in the area of logic scripts and user interface appearance) leads to large volumes of custom code that is non re-usable yet must be tested for cross-browser compatibility, security, server performance and resilience. This results in a major cost overhead for testing and debugging on any custom project.
5. Owing to poor communications between project sponsors and deliverers, it’s common for large amounts of re-working and editing of applications to be required amounting to as much as 15% of project total costs.

Solution: In simple terms, demands for custom programming and large number of tools results in project process complexity and poor collaboration between project sponsors and delivers resulting in high project cost, long delivery timeframes, unpredictable ROIs and high risks.  The solution to these challenges is to adopt agile design software that business analysts can use to deliver applications without needing to resort to programming and complex IT projects.

AN ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY TO POWER PROCESS IMPROVEMENT AND INNOVATION

The internal delivery of situational applications by business analysts (embedded into change teams) presumes the existence of development tools business analysts can master to build, deploy and support robust applications by themselves – without custom coding – in order to embed IT expertise into change teams.

To adopt SITUATIONAL APPLICATIONS DELIVERY three things need to happen:

1. A codeless platform for situational applications design and delivery should be selected and installed.

2. Analysts should be trained in situational applications project delivery.

3. IT procurement ‘norms of behavior’ should consider suitability of situational applications before turning to off-the-shelf software solutions.

These three key steps are described in more detail here:

1. Installing tools

Provision of an integrated applications platform that supports design, deployment and delivery of situational application means that analysts are able perform both design and delivery roles. This bleed of the IT function into change teams dramatically reduces the number of people engaged in IT projects and the level of expertise required of candidates. It dramatically reduces dependencies on internal programming teams and outside consultants.

Organizations like Volkswagen Group have for several years adopted Process Improvement Managers as part of change teams. These individuals are expert IT professionals (traditionally business analysts or IT project programme managers) and possess both an understanding of business processes and technology. Motivated by remuneration plans associated with process improvement targets and achievements, the focus of process improvement managers is to instigate and deliver perpetual improvement in core business processes, rather than simply build applications.

2. Equipping the analysts

For situational applications delivery to be successful, analysts require a common toolset (computing platform) that can design, deploy and operate potentially hundreds of secure and live portal spaces containing hundreds of applications without creating a burden on IT resources or creating performance, security and systems resilience issues.

The economics of the platform must enable applications to be designed and then discarded, modified or sustained without high costs to encourage innovation and the creative use of IT.

It’s important that business software applications can be iteratively designed in real time by analysts working in workshop environments without requiring programming teams or advanced IT programming skills; or the need to work with multiple technology tools that would demand too high a level of skills and competencies for any single person to master application design.

It’s important that the selected software application platform delivers Rich Internet experiences and levels of collaboration now expected of modern applications – a benchmark standard that is guided by the quality of applications offered to consumers by both Apple and Google.

3. IT procurement norms should adapt

Unless IT procurement practises adapt, possibilities for insourcing through situational applications delivery can never be achieved as successive applications requirements are packaged into boxes for procurement without consideration being given to alternative sourcing approaches.

Any time a website redesign is being considered or a company has decided to launch a brand new site, making sure it’s built right is absolutely important.

But, what constitutes a website that is built “right?” Is it design? Is it function? To lay the right foundation, here are 7 critical marketing questions businesses should ask their website designer before moving forward with any site development.

So, a quick warning! If a web design company is planning to make you a website mock-up before they understand your business, they are building your site backwards.

For your website to be successful as a marketing tool, you need a web designer whose design work is focused on the success of your business in your industry, rather than than on just creative design.

Before a company can create any sort of suggested design for your site, they should first be committed to understanding your brand message, target market, audience behavior, sales funnel, and revenue goals.

This is a critical part of the foundation for your business online. Be sure to ask the following questions before you move forward with a website contractor or web design company. Whether or not they have already answered these questions, or are seeking to understand these aspects of your business are sure signs of whether you should hire them for the job.

“Do You Understand Our Brand Message?”

Not all aesthetically pleasing website designs are created equal. While a certain layout, color scheme, and design elements may be generally appealing, if it doesn’t match and communicate your company’s brand message, you won’t see the performance potential your business could have online. A website that doesn’t resonate with the brand message of your company will strike a disconnect in the perception of your viewers.

If you’re a service-based business that focuses on building customer relationships, you’re looking for an inviting, simple layout that is easy to navigate and provides a helpful array of good information.

If you’re a product-based company that is seeking to boost sales by spiking consumer interest, you might be looking for a more eye-catching, vivid color scheme with flashy graphics that will make a bold impression on your viewer. Both are well-designed sites, but they must fit your brand message and accommodate the goals of your company.

So, Don’t Commit To Their Services If…

• They talk more about their design capabilities than about your business
• They’re not interested in learning about your brand message
• They don’t ask questions about how you want to impress your visitors

“Do You Understand Our Target Market?”

Your website is for your viewers, and specifically, for the viewers that will be most likely to make a purchase decision. These individuals are commonly known as your “target market,” or more specifically, your “buyer personas.” If your business’s most prominent customers are middle aged women, your website should be crafted specifically with them in mind.

• Why are they coming to the website?
• What layout do they find most helpful?
• What types of information are they looking for?
• What images or graphics would appeal to them most?
• What colors do they prefer?

If your web designer isn’t asking you these types of questions, you may find that you’re paying for a website that won’t actually work very well for your business.

More importantly, your viewers will likely have difficulty moving through your sales funnel because the site isn’t designed around reaching and converting your target market.

So, Don’t Commit To Their Services If…

• They don’t display interest in understanding your target market
• They only ask surface level questions regarding your potential buyers
• They have no plan for analyzing your current site to learn your buyers’ interactions

“Do You Know How Our Users Currently Engage With Our Business?”

Your web designer should be actively engaging you with questions about your current website, or customer activity and expectations. Before you put money down on a web design package, make sure that your web designer understands the current status of your customers and their interactions with your company. This includes the answers to:

• What do visitors currently click on the most?
• What are your most popular pages?
• What is already working?
• What is currently not working?
• What feedback do you get from customers?
• What are your expectations or needs based on your industry?

So, Don’t Commit To Their Services If…

…they don’t seek to understand what’s currently working and not working on the site you already have.

“Do You Know What We Want Our Users To Do?”

You’re not running a business website for no reason. You want to make money with it.

Before you buy a new site, make sure your designer knows what you want the website users to do. It might be one of the following things:

• Create an online account
• Buy a product
• Get more information
• Pay for services
• Click on ads

So, Don’t Commit To Their Services If…

…the person or team you’re talking to seems to have no interest in what you want the site to accomplish. If they aren’t about bring you the right web traffic and creating an experience built around users doing what you want them to, you’re probably not going to get a very good site, regardless of the price you pay.

“Do You Know How To Direct Our Users To Do What We Want Them To?”

There are lots of web designers out there, and a good handful of them can make your website a piece of art. But, here’s the deal: very few of them know how to make a site that actually directs people into the action you want them to take – like purchasing a product.

Creating a site is more than creating a piece of art that displays information. It also needs to include, among other things:

• Captivating headlines
• Strategically placed calls to action
• Strategically designed calls to action
• Motivating content
• Fluid navigation options
• Attractive page elements
• A well-planned conversion funnel for users

See, good looks means a lot, but without business brains behind the project, your new site won’t see its full earning potential.

Ouch!

So, am I really saying that you can spend upwards of $20,000 on a site and have it never make you more money?

Yes, I am.

So, Don’t Commit To Their Services If…

…before you buy a new website, you ask the designer or design company, “Do you know how to make our users do what we want them to?” and they don’t cover these kinds of real-world business topics.

“Do You Know How To Visually Present My Company To My Industry?”

Your Company Appearance

Most web designers will be cognisant of the need to build your site around the colors that you already use for your business, but not all of them will be. Some designers, especially the ones that promise a lot for a very small sum of money, are simply looking for work and won’t necessarily be too concerned about these sorts of details.

Even if you’re looking to hire an experienced company to do your site, have a conversation about your brand colors and see how they’re expecting to design your site around them.

Sometimes, however, a new site should come with a new company color theme, so be open to professional input on this. Especially if it’s been a long time since you’ve done anything with your company’s visual presentation, or if you never hired a professional designer in the first place. This can be a good time to consider updating the whole bit.

Regardless of how you approach this, make sure your design company has ideas for keeping everything matched visually and fluid.

Your Industry’s Appearance

People often have expectations of what your website will look like based on what is typical of your industry.

Consider the following examples, and read the caption for more information on each one:

So what styles and colors should your site use, and does your design company know what they are? Make sure they know this information before you hire them.

So, Don’t Commit To Their Services If…

…they don’t display interest in your current company colors, or if they never speak of your site in terms of your industry.

“What Is Your Past Experience?”

Hopefully, you aren’t buying a website from someone who’s never designed a website before, so look up their past work. If they have no experience on their website, it’s probably already time to find someone else.

If they do have their experience information readily available, ask the following things:

Do their past sites display a knowledge of business as well as good design?

A good web design business will display their past websites in their portfolio. Check out these sites and see if they have done a good job answering the questions posted in this article with their previous work:

• Does the content on their past sites display a knowledge of their customer’s brands and target markets?
• Are there well-placed, well-designed calls to action and other elements on the site that show a business brain behind the design as well as an artistic approach?
• Do the colors and styles accurately match the brand and the expected styles based on industry?

If these questions can be answered with a “Yes” and the site still looks and feels great, you’ve likely found a good designer to work with!

Have they worked on a project for a business similar to yours?

While not completely necessary in analyzing a web design business, you can receive extra reassurance that you’re paying for good work if the service you’re hiring has successfully delivered for a business similar to yours.

So, Don’t Commit To Their Services If…

…they have no experience. That’s for sure.

Also, don’t commit to their services if their past work doesn’t answer the questions listed above affirmatively.

Remember, a lot of companies will take your money and make you a new site. Very few will create a site that can reach its profit potential.

This is why it’s important to ask the right questions!

Whether you’re new to the block or a veteran marketer, you conceptually know that the first step in any successful inbound strategy is to attract strangers to visit your site. But actually putting it into practice can be hard. You're worried about lots of other things like getting bottom-line results or keeping up with the latest marketing trends, so it's easy to forget about that initial step. 

But it shouldn't be the forgotten part of your marketing. The key to making it a priority in your marketing strategy is to stop believing that generating traffic is impossible. Increasing website traffic and visitors isn't like playing roulette -- there are a few tried-and-true ways people do it. To make sure you're in-the-know on these tips, we’ve broken down some of the best ways you can generative traffic to your website in the post below. 

1) Optimize your website for "searchers."

When you hear the term “SEO” or “search engine optimization,” who do you think that implies you should be optimizing your site for? Well, I’ll give you a hint: it’s not search engines. In fact, great websites aren’t optimized for search engines -- they’re optimized for the people using search engines.

But here’s the good news: Search engines consider sites optimized for searchers to be fully optimized, as well. So by optimizing your website for the actual people coming to visit it, you’re killing two birds with one stone and simultaneously optimizing it for search engines, as well.

So when you think about creating a website experience that will attract more visitors to your site, be sure you’re first thinking about the searchers themselves. What do they want to see? What are they looking for help with? How can you best serve them? If you create a website optimized for searchers, search engines will follow.

2) Create content using the right keywords.

Your keywords are like bridges. They're the reason anonymous searchers can get to your website. But in order for searchers to make the trek across those bridges and actually visit your site, they have to be interested in the content behind the search listing.

The best way to know what those searchers want is to know your personas -- since it’s your personas who are the searchers you’re trying to attract. Keywords focused on the problems that your personas face or the goals they’re hoping to achieve are what you should be creating content about. Why? Because people are actively looking for solutions to those problems. If you have content that helps solves their problems, searchers will find and visit your site.

3) Ensure your site provides a cognitively fluent experience.

Imagine you’re looking to find a lawyer to help you file a patent for your newest invention. You head over to Google and type “patent lawyers Boston MA” into the search bar.

Before you click "search," stop. What do you imagine those patent lawyers’ websites will look like? The picture in your head probably isn’t one of a cluttered site outfitted in neon colors and fun fonts. Instead, when you imagine what a good, trustworthy patent lawyers’ website might look like, it probably uses more muted tones, a cleaner font, and presents opportunities for you to explore the different services the practice offers probably comes to mind.

Sure enough, after you've done your research, the patent lawyer you end up hiring probably has a website that looks a lot like your initial cognitive concept of what a good lawyer’s website should look like.

This concept is known as cognitive fluency: websites that attract more traffic tend to present an experience that’s similar to visitors’ ideas of what the website should look like.

A simple fix to improve the cognitive fluency of your site is to actually ask your personas (usually your current customers) what they’d expect to see on a site like yours. What style and formatting do they expect? What content should be front-and-center? Then, if your website doesn't match their wishes, it might be time to look into additional website optimization strategies.

4) Write blog posts on topics people need answers to.

It’s not just website pages that can help you attract traffic to your site -- your blog can be one of the most powerful tools you have to get new visitors. Just as you should be optimizing your website pages around the keywords that your buyer personas are searching for, you should be doing the same thing with your blog posts. What are your personas’ most frequently asked questions? What are the problems they’re facing and are searching for help with out on the Internet? These are your blog post topics.

Write blog posts that are relevant to your personas and answer their questions so that when your persona searches these terms, your site appears in front of them. This will not only help to keep your website and business top-of-mind next time that searcher is looking for help, but it also aids in building trust with your potential buyers.

5) Create a separate post for each of your most relevant keywords.

Your keyword footprint is a little bit like your carbon footprint, except on the internet. Your keyword footprint is the catalog of keywords your website ranks for on search engines -- basically how big of a mark you leave on the internet. Unlike a carbon footprint, having a large keyword footprint is actually a very good thing! Why? Because having a large keyword footprint means your website ranks for and is associated with many different keywords -- and each of those keywords is an opportunity for your website to get discovered.

Because each blog post you write is viewed by search engines as its own individual website page, the more quality blog posts you write about the keywords that are most relevant to your persona, the more chances you have to rank for those keywords and show up on search engine result pages. Blog posts help grow your keyword footprint and thus your opportunity to get found and attract visitors to your site.

6) Publish blog content on a regular basis.

It’s not enough to just blog about keywords that are relevant to your personas: If you want to attract visitors to drive sustained traffic to your side, you have to keep blogging consistently.

In the 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report, we found that businesses that blog daily are almost 70% more likely to report a positive return-on-investment than businesses that blog only once a month. What means for you is that blogging on a regular basis can produce big benefits -- benefits in the form of more visitors, leads, and even customers.

Blogging on a regular basis gives search engines a reason to crawl your website on a regular basis -- again, giving you more opportunities for those search engines to discover your pages, index them, and serve those pages up on search engine result pages.

7) Answer prospects’ questions on social media using blog content.

Have you ever seen someone asking for advice on Twitter or Facebook? Maybe they tweeted out a request for suggestions for a place to eat in your city, or posted a question about which toothpaste brand to purchase. What about someone asking a question in a LinkedIn group you belong to? Chances are, you have seen them ... but did you answer them?

What would you have done if someone asked you those same questions in person? Would you walk away and pretend you never heard them? No -- you’d answer them! You’d provide that person with the information they were looking for and act as a resource for them.

The same concept can work on social media: If a stranger or prospect is looking for help, don’t just skim over their comment or question -- help them! Seek out opportunities where your industry knowledge can be of assistance. Reply to social media posts and queries, but go one step further and include relevant blog articles or website pages in those responses. That way, those strangers and prospects not only get the help they were looking for, but you also get a new visitor to your website. As long as you're not just spamming people with links to your website -- you're actually helping them -- this can be a great tactic.

8) Monitor relevant keywords on social media and get involved if you can help.

You can’t share helpful content with strangers or prospects on social media if you don’t know they’re looking for it. So, use social media monitoring to keep an eye on those keywords most important to your business -- and see how you can help the people using them. (If you're a HubSpot customer using Social Inbox, you can even get alerts whenever people tweet these keywords.)

Listen on various social media networks for mentions of the biggest problems your persona face. When you see those conversations taking place, look for opportunities to get involved -- just like you would in the previous scenario when people were asking questions. By listening for the keywords that are most important for your business, you can contribute your two cents (and content) in the right place at the right time. 

By following these simple strategies, you can attract the right strangers -- your buyer personas -- to visit your website. And once you have those visitors, well, it’s only a matter of time before you convert them to leads, nurture and close them into customers, and delight them into promoters. But remember: it all starts with having the right traffic.

Want to learn more about any of the tactics discussed above or dive deeper into other strategies for attracting the right visitors to your site? Check out HubSpot Academy’s free Inbound Certification program!

 

As a social media marketer and Pinterest expert I know too well how marketers have to work harder than ever to get their content noticed. And that is especially true for service companies who are all competing to get noticed.  We craft blogs, articles, videos, webinars and ebooks all with the intent of engaging our potential prospects so we can build brand awareness, drive traffic to our websites and generate leads. It’s a lot of work!

From there we amplify our messages by leveraging social media and then we measure for results hoping for the biggest ROI possible. More work.

The great news is…

What if I told you that on Pinterest your content continues to work for you long after you’ve pinned? This does not happen on Facebook and Twitter.

Your content has a shelf life.

What I mean by shelf life is that at some point after you pin, tweet or post people stop engaging with it.

On Pinterest your pins continue to work long after you post them which increases your odds of engagement and that could mean more click throughs, repins, comments and likes.

Content on Facebook and Twitter doesn’t last very long. A link on twitter lasts approximately 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours.

Now it’s a different story with Pinterest and you’re going to love this!

According to Piqora they found:

1. 40% of the clicks happen within the first day.
2. 70% of the clicks happen within first 2 days.
3. Remaining 30% clicks come all the way through 30 days and beyond

Incredible isn’t it? This is heavenly for any marketer; the fact that your pin on Pinterest can still create engagement with your brand a full 30 days after you pin it.

When you pin an image on Pinterest it’s there forever unless of course you decide to delete it. 80% of the images are repins which tells you how your image has the potential to go viral. So from a marketer’s point of view it’s very rewarding to know that all your hard work continues to pay off for several weeks a month and even longer!

If you’re a marketer and you’re not sure about the best way to embrace Pinterest here eight steps showing you how to get your business started correctly on Pinterest:

1) Create a free Pinterest business account. If you have a personal account with a large following then consider converting it to a business account.

http://business.pinterest.com

Make sure you verify your website to receive free Pinterest Analytics which provides you with information about:

• What people are pinning from your website
• Who is seeing your pins
• Who is clicking your content

2) Pinterest can get overwhelming when you’re just getting started. Watch this video to learn how to use Pinterest for your business.

3) Promote your Pinterest profile by embedding a Pinterest button (Photo 2: see the green arrow) http://business.pinterest.com/widget-builder/#do_follow_me_button  on your website and blog.

4)  Make your website or blog is Pinterest friendly by adding a “Pin it” button

http://business.pinterest.com/pin-it-button/directly onto your product descriptions and blog images.  Adding a Pin It button will help you attract new visitors to your company’s website and product pages.

According to Curalate the “Pin It” button saw tremendous results: eight of Pinterest’s top 10 retail brands prominently displayed a Pin It button and brands like Ikea and Target generated nearly 1 million shares (aka pins and repins) from their website!

5) Add your Pinterest URL on your LinkedIn profile.

6) Add a free Pinterest tab on your Facebook page by going to http://tools.shareroot.co/facebook-tab/

7) Use a free tool like http://www.wisestamp.com to add Pinterest to your email signature box.

8) Add your Pinterest URL on your business cards, stationery, newsletters and all your marketing print materials.

When you employ these eight traffic generating tips you will be well on your way to growing your list of Pinterest followers and in turn growing your sales.

Good luck and pin with a caring heart.

If this is overwhelming for you and you feel like you are going around and around in circles with Pinterest and not getting anywhere contact me, Anna Pinterest Expert to learn more about my Pinterest Marketing Course for Business. (And how you can get one chapter for free)

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The big focus of most of the major marketing clouds that have launched in the past few years is B2C: working to enable one-to-one communication between brands and millions of connected consumers. That’s actually a departure from where marketing automation began, which is in the business-to-business space.

So it’s interesting to see that today Demandbase is launching what it calls the “first-ever” marketing cloud for B2B marketing.

And one that includes tools all its B2C frenemies already use, according to CEO Chris Golec.

“We’re launching the Demandbase B2B marketing cloud — all our suites are being rolled up into really the first marketing cloud for B2B,” he told me yesterday evening from the Marketing Innovation Summit for B2B conference. “The other major marketing cloud companies are all customers of DemandBase … most of their technologies were made for consumers.”

It might be a bit of a stretch to call Demandbase’s offering, which brings together its existing technologies into one integrated package, the “first ever” B2B marketing cloud — competitors such as Salesforce, Oracle, and Adobe certainly serve the B2B crowd as well. However, Demandbase does focus solely on the business-to-business marketing space, which separates it from the other marketing clouds. Adobe’s suite focuses on ad-buying, social, targeting, campaigns, and analytics, and Salesforce’s cloud includes email, mobile, social, advertising, and web components.

Demandbase has a different set of components, including five separate suites:

• identification technology that tells you who is on your site
• audience management that allows you to build lists of companies to target all over the web
• a real-time bidding ad exchange to buy targeted ads focused on those companies via Google, Facebook, and more
• connections into the same marketing clouds that also use Demandbase, including those from Oracle, Adobe, Salesforce, and 10 different marketing automation systems
• and a new CMO dashboard that gives you a complete view of spend and results

(In other words, B2C marketing automation systems use Demandbase to grow their businesses, and Demandbase connects to B2C marketing automation systems to enable richer functionality for its customers. Marketing technology is simple in 2014, said no one ever.)

Golec says that business-to-business marketing and selling is fundamentally different from business-to-consumer.

While that’s clearly the case, with typically long selling cycles, more difficult buyer identification challenges, and different demographic and “behavior” characteristics, it’s interesting to see that some innovative B2C marketing technology companies like IBM are starting to apply B2B marketing characteristics to consumer marketing — for instance identifying family units as families, then working to isolate the decision makers and the decision influencers, and targeting each in specific ways.

“It’s really about solving three problems,” Golec says. “One, you’ve got to get the right companies to your site. Two, when they arrive, you have to engage them with the right information. And three, then you need to connect that engagement with the right sales activity.”

The power of Demandbase is that with its identification and targeting capability, the company is able to tell companies exactly who is visiting its site and who doesn’t even have a clue the company exists. Being able to tie that information directly into a targeted ad campaign that focuses just on people in the companies you want to market to is a powerful capability.

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Do you do B2B mobile marketing? Answer a few questions in our
survey, and we’ll share the results from everyone with you.

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As Golec told me, when you know that a visitor to your website is from a large financial company that is already a customer, that changes things.

“You will get 2-3 times the number of clicks just by customizing the web experience,” he said. “And when you make the experience consistent from advertising to website, customers get very excited.”

The most interesting component of the newly-minted marketing cloud might be the CMO dashboard, which Demandbase says will give marketers a complete view of their funnel, showing them how much they’re spending, how much traffic those dollars are driving, and an estimate of revenue that they’ll achieve based on that traffic.

That one-dashboard-to-rule-them-all vision is something CMOs have longed for, especially as studies have come out indicating that even though marketers have more data than ever before, they’re actually using it less than ever.

Demandbase’s competitors include the frenemies and coopetors.

For example, Adobe has extensive targeting capabilities as well as analytics. There are other analytics competitors such as Mixpanel and personalization solutions such as KISSmetrics, while Marketo also offers strong identification and personalization features via its Insightera acquisition. Bizo might be the most complete competitor solely focused on B2B, with the key difference being that it is focused on small and medium-sized businesses while Demandbase is focused on the enterprise.

But no one competitor seems to have quite the mix of capabilities that Demandbase has, and that is having an impact on the company’s growth. Golec says the 100-employee company doubled revenue last year and is on track to double revenue again this year.

Part of that might be due to its interesting ability to intertwine customer/partner/client relationships with the other major marketing clouds. “Everyone has a different combination of marketing solutions,” Golec says. “We’re agnostic … we plug into everyone.”

Pricing starts at $100 per targeted company per month.

International Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM and nicknamed Big Blue (for its official corporate color), is a global technology and innovation company headquartered in the Northeast US. IBM is the largest technology and ... read more »

Whether it's a smartphone or tablet app, a game, a video, a digital magazine, a website, or an online experience, chances are that it was touched by Adobe technology. Our tools and services enable our customers to create groundbreaking... read more »

Oracle is the gold standard for database technology and applications in enterprises throughout the world?the company is the world's leading supplier of information management software and the world's second largest independent software... read more »

"Built by marketers, for marketers". Marketo provides online software to manage demand generation marketing campaigns: from generating sales leads and email marketing, to lead nurturing and lead scoring – with analytics to measure m... read more »

Demandbase, founded in 2005, is the first targeting and personalization platform for B2B. The platform is geared to enable B2B advertisers and marketers to deliver personalized messages to specified audiences by identifying and segment... read more »

How healthy is your sales pipeline right now? And what steps are you taking to progressively improve its fitness? Just as your own doctor might measure your body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure before putting you on a personal fitness regime, a pipeline doctor would want to understand your qualified pipeline value, average sales velocity and average sales win rate – and how these factors had changed over time – before coming up with their diagnosis. Here’s why these three measures are so important…

There are three fundamental things you can do to improve your sales figures: you can generate more qualified sales opportunities, you can shorten your average sales cycles, and you can increase your average sales win rates. Improving any one factor brings obvious benefits. But methodically improving all three factors has a powerful multiplier effect on your sales performance – and could dramatically improve your revenue predictability.

Bottlenecks and Best Practice

But if you’re not regularly measuring and reviewing all three sales pipeline metrics at every level in your sales organisation – from each individual sales person through to the whole sales team – you’ll struggle to identify either where your most pressing performance bottlenecks lie or (and this is equally important) to identify pockets of best practice which if adopted more widely would enable you to systematically increase your overall sales performance and improve revenue management.

Value, Velocity and Win Rate

Proactive pipeline management involves paying particularly close attention to all three factors – value, velocity and win rate. Together they represent what we have come to regard as the essential pipeline success formula.

And just in case you wonder whether the effort is worthwhile, a series of studies have shown that organisations that take a data-driven approach to proactive pipeline management show significantly accelerated revenue growth compared to their peers.

Qualified Pipeline Value

The key word here is qualified. Measuring pipeline value without imposing a company-wide universally agreed definition of what a qualified sales opportunity ought to look like will simply generate misleading, unhelpful and ultimately useless data. And “leads” or “enquiries” don’t count - tracking the number of leads generated in the absence of a consistent quality standard tells you nothing and may even lead you to do more of the wrong thing.

You’ll need to craft qualification criteria that address the specifics of your offering and your markets, but at minimum, a qualified sales opportunity must satisfy all of the following:

• Have they identified a clear need?
• Are they likely to buy something?
• Do we have a reasonable chance of winning?
• Would they make a good customer?

Sales Cycle Velocity

Most sales managers would acknowledge that the longer a deal hangs around in the pipeline, stuck at its current stage, the less likely they are to buy. Sales cycle velocity – the amount of time it takes for an opportunity to move from start to finish, and from stage to stage – is therefore an incredibly important predictor of sales success. And if you can shorten your average sales cycles, you have the capacity – without increasing your resources – to sell more.

Given all of this, it always surprises me to see many CRM implementations that are still not set up to report on how long each deal has spent at each stage, or to throw up an exception report when opportunities have been stuck for long than the typical time taken for winning deals to progress. If you’re not measuring or reporting on this, do something about it today. In fact, if your current CRM system can’t provide it, I would seriously think of changing it. It’s that important.

Sales Win Rate

This seems like an obvious metric, but even here not all organisations track it with enough granularity to learn the significant lessons this metric can provide. You need to be tracking all possible outcomes. In most complex B2B sales environments, there are at least four:

1. You win the deal
2. A competitor wins the deal
3. The prospect decides to implement an internally developed solution
4. The prospect decides to do nothing

You’ll miss the opportunity for incredibly valuable learning if you categorise the last three outcomes simply as “lost”. If you’re not evaluating the outcome of every opportunity into at least these four categories, I strongly suggest you start doing so today – and that you retrospectively analyse recent sales outcomes.

Measure at Every Level

My final recommendation is that you measure these three metrics at every level within your organisation, as well as analysing outcomes by source of opportunity – including comparing different marketing campaigns. You’ll inevitably find outliers in both directions: poor performance that clearly needs to be corrected, and exceptional success that needs to be replicated.

In fact, the latter may provide some of the most valuable learning opportunities: where are you currently being most successful today, what can you learn from this, and how can you enable the rest of the organisation to embrace the winning habits you have identified?

Note: this is an updated version of an article first published in 2011. It’s interesting to note how pipeline accuracy remains an issue for so many organisations even today. 

Discover which metrics to measure to increase the success of your next marketing campaign.

There’s a term in behavioural science: “Proximity Bias”. Basically, it means we tend to make decisions based on what’s close at hand, rather than what’s best for the task.

(Remember that loose screw you spent ages struggling to tighten with a two-pence coin, because your toolbox was in the garage? That’s Proximity Bias.)

Proximity Bias stops marketers choosing the right metrics

Marketers suffer from it all the time. When planning a campaign, most companies (and, unfortunately, many database consultancies) will measure its outcomes using the metrics that are easily available, rather than those that work.

Why? Because for many Marketing Managers, the information they need simply isn’t in the data. Perhaps the audience you’re approaching is too diverse, and your content is too broad-brush to appeal. Or your audience is very precise in its hopes and dreams .. but your collateral misses the mark.

That’s why, when you’re deciding which metrics to measure, Task One is make sure the data measures up. 

Develop a ‘Persona’ of one individual

No matter how many people are on your mailing list, each reads your content alone. That’s why your audience isn’t a mass of people; it’s just one person.

To drill down , it’s useful to start with a Persona. Not an “audience demographic”, but a description of one individual whose traits and challenges can be solved by your product or service.

WHY A PERSONA?

If you’re solving a business pain for one customer, you can probably solve the same pain for other people experiencing it. Note it’s the business pain that’s the common denominator. Not the industry sector, or company size. (That’s why SIC codes, used in many mailings, don’t give the whole picture.)

Look for customers in all the right places

You’ll find this change of approach leads to a change in mindset. Let’s say you help customers cut admin costs as they grow: in the last five years, your top three customers have doubled their staff levels with no increase in costs-per-head.

The business pain here was HR overhead as these companies grew from 100 to 200 in headcount. They all happened to be engineering firms… but that’s not the point. Your audience is now any company of under 100 employees whose overhead is growing faster than turnover. 

See how things change over time

Most metrics measure a single data point. But much of the time, data is more meaningful when you look longitudinally – how it changes over time.

(Such methods are often used by online marketers, but they can be applied to real-world campaigns too.)

Take the admin overhead example again. Before you acquired them, did your best customer suffer three years of rising costs in its HR department?

(Yes, it’s possible to find this data – perhaps by checking number of job roles matching a title!)

If so, companies in the same position may be hot prospects. For example, you could look for companies near the top of an income bracket but which haven’t grown out of it. Your business solution could be what they need to return to growth.

WHY BUSINESS PAIN?

Approaching prospects in terms of the challenges they face, rather than the products you sell, results in much faster engagement – with a much bigger audience. Which will keep both Marketing and Sales happy.

Marketing databases: a solid place to start

A good example of a marketing database is Marketscan’s Megabase which details 3.4m businesses in the UK. But what’s really special is the extra data it attaches to each record. These “descriptors” give you a far broader range of metrics to measure… including market sector and company type information that go a lot deeper than SIC codes.

Build an audience that’s ready to listen

When extracting information from a marketing database, make sure you consider the following:

• Catchment area – how local is your business? Can you service companies 10km away? Or  globally? It may be wider than you think.
• Job descriptions – how do your customers describe themselves? Is there a single standard role? Or 100 different ones? Collect the set.
• Market sector – your current roster may span one vertical, but your appeal may be broader. Check you’re reaching the biggest audience.

The broader, deeper data leads to more meaningful information. And that’s what helps you plan the metrics you need, rather than the metrics everyone else uses.

Measure what traits unite prospects

Buying database packages such as Sales Generator allow you to add value to your campaigns. Rather than a one-off list, it lets you choose a subset of companies – and, after seeing what worked in your last campaign, choose new prospects based on those results. Questions you might ask include:

• Are your customers all of a set size? Companies stuck at £5m in turnover could be your sweet spot.
• Have you been approaching Marketing Managers, but your budget holder is commonly a C-level executive? See how a different job role responds.
• Are you based in London, when there’s a larger cluster of prospects in Manchester? It may be worth a move. 

Because Sales Generator is based on access to a database for a full 12 months –not just buying a one-off list – it lets you plan not just one campaign, but your whole marketing strategy over the year. Without the costs.

Which metrics to measure: the ones that work for you

Together, these tools can establish which metrics to measure: the measures that accurately reflect the business pain you solve.

Because if you’re approaching customers who are already in the market for the solutions you offer, response rates will be higher. Conversions, faster. And the sales cycle? Shorter.

And when you apply those metrics to your next campaign – companies with less than 5% growth? With fewer than 100 employees? With profit margins struggling in single figures? – you can choose an audience for that campaign of companies just like those who responded last time.

And those are the metrics that matter. The metrics that are right for you.

Find out exactly who you customers are to effectively target your campaign: Get to know your customers, inside out.

Creating a buyer persona is easy -- heck, you probably already have a picture in your head of your company's ideal customer. But creating an accurate buyer persona is hard. And creating a few different buyer personas -- which almost every business will need to do -- and deciding which ones to prioritize is even harder.

As one college professor liked to tell me, the best way to succeed is to anticipate your mistakes. This applies to everything from love to marketing (which happen to share some eerie similarities). With that in mind, here are some common mistakes to anticipate before you start to craft your buyer personas:

1) Relying on Anecdotal Evidence From Your Team

For marketers, it's incredibly easy to rely on your team for research when creating buyer personas. Ask the accounts team what current customers are saying, ask the sales team what they're hearing from prospective customers, have the interns do some online research, and call it a day, right?

Not so fast.

For starters, your current customers aren't always the best example of the person who would buy your product today; the pain points of yesteryear aren't the pain points of 2014. And the pain points of current customers are different than those of someone who's never worked with you before. While your accounts team should definitely be finding out as much as they can about your current customers' challenges, that information shouldn't necessarily be dictating your buyer personas.

If you can convince them to work it into their conversations, have your sales reps ask potential buyers questions like, "How did you hear about us?" and "Out of curiosity, why did you choose us over X competitor?" The more information you have, the better, but remember that not all sales reps are likely to dig for the kind of in-depth insights that you need. Instead, you need to get out there and conduct intensive interviews.

2) Asking the Wrong Questions

Since creating a buyer persona is all about crafting an archetype of the types of people who would choose your product, it can be pretty easy to fall down a rabbit hole of irrelevant questions: Where did they go to school? How do they dress? Do they like yogurt?

When I was a poor, young journalist moonlighting as a consultant in the ad world, I found this blog post by Adele Revella, author of The Buyer Persona Manifesto, extremely helpful. These are the five insights she suggests pursuing, and I wholeheartedly agree.

• Priority initiatives: What are the three to five problems or objects that your buyer persona dedicates time, budget, and political capital to?
• Success factors: What are the tangible or intangible metrics or rewards that the buyer associates with success, such as “grow revenue by X” or a promotion?
• Perceived barriers: What factors could prompt the buyer to question whether your company and its solution can help with achieving his or her success factors? This is when you begin to uncover unseen factors, such as competing interests, politics, or prior experiences with your company or a similar company.
• Buying process: What process does this persona follow in exploring and selecting a solution that can overcome the perceived barriers and achieve their success factors?
• Decision criteria: What aspects of each product will the buyer assess in evaluating the alternative solutions available? To be useful, the decision criteria should include insights both from buyers who chose a competitor and those who decide not to buy a solution at all.

3) Only Talking to Recent Buyers

People who just bought your product are definitely pleasant to talk to; they're excited and happy and optimistic about your company. Plus, you probably have carte blanche to take them out for drinks. But the people who chose your competitor instead are arguably even more valuable. After all, they are recent buyers -- it's just that they just didn't buy from you. And as a bonus, you can steal some great competitive insights from those conversations.

You also don't want to just talk to people at the bottom of the funnel. Prospects in the beginning or middle of their purchase journey are incredibly valuable to talk to, as well. After all, as a marketer, reaching top and middle funnel folks is the name of the game.

4) Not Talking to Enough People

A good buyer persona interview requires a substantial, in-depth conversation, but convincing someone to sit down with you for 20-30 minutes isn't always easy. That leads a lot of marketers to say "Screw it" and rely on a small sample size.

Get a statistically significant amount of data by sweetening the pot. Gift cards work well.

5) Letting Your Persona Photo Drive Your Insights

Once you've started to craft your buyer personas, it's definitely helpful to mine stock photo sites to put a face to a persona -- it just helps keep your team on the same page. However, it's also deceptively easy to start making things up about your buyer persona based off that stock photo; after all, good marketers are good storytellers, and it's easy to start telling yourself stories about the face you're staring at all day long.

Before choosing a face for your buyer persona, be sure to really flesh out your persona in writing, and return to that text often throughout the process.

6) Creating Too Many Buyer Personas

Creating dozens of buyer personas is another tempting fruit in the buyer persona garden; it just feels like you're being more focused and specific! But usually, you simply don't need a buyer persona for every potential job title or industry vertical. The distinguishing characteristics are quite often trivial at best and fictional at worst.

Instead, group buyers based on the analysis you glean from your interviews; you'll end up with a clear picture of the handful of people you can target to take your business to the next level.

What common buyer persona mistakes do you think marketers should watch out for? Share them in the comments for the greater good!

When you're just starting your career, you need all the help you can get managing your time. Even when you're working hard, you could be wasting a tremendous amount of time either by trying to multitask or by focusing too much on minute details.

Montreal-based designer Étienne Garbugli has struggled with all of that. But as he's gotten older, he's learned how to manage his time and workload more effectively. Today, he's a consultant and entrepreneur, and recently published his first book, "Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want."

Last year, he collected some of his favorite lessons in the SlideShare presentation "26 Time Management Hacks I Wish I'd Known At 20." In December, SlideShare named it the "Most Liked" presentation of 2013.

Below, we've explained some of Garbugli's best time-management tips everyone should learn in their 20s.

1. There's always time. Time is priorities.

You never "run out of time." If you didn't finish something by the time it was due, it's because you didn't consider it urgent or enjoyable enough to prioritize ahead of whatever else you were doing.

2. Days always fill up faster than you'd expect.

Build in some buffer time. As the founder of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp, David Heinemeier Hansson said, "Only plan on four to five hours of real work per day."

3. Work more when you're in the zone. Relax when you're not.

Some days you'll be off your game, and other times you'll be able to maintain your focus for 12 hours straight. Take advantage of those days.

4. Stop multitasking. It kills your focus.

There have been academic studies that found the brain expends energy as it readjusts its focus from one item to the next. If you're spending your day multitasking, you're exhausting your brain.

5. We're always more focused and productive with limited time.

Work always seems to find a way of filling the space allotted for it, so set shorter time limits for each task.

6. Work is the best way to get working. Start with small tasks to get the ball rolling.

The business plan you need to finish may be intimidating at 8 in the morning. Get your mind on the right path with easy tasks, such as answering important work emails.

7. Work iteratively. Expectations to do things perfectly are stifling.

Gen. George S. Patton once said, "A good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."

8. More work hours doesn't mean more productivity. Use constraints as opportunities.

Don't kid yourself into thinking that sitting at your desk will somehow extract work from you. Do whatever you can to finish your current task by the end of regular work hours instead of working into the night.

9. Separate brainless and strategic tasks to become more productive.

Ideally, you can brainstorm your ideas and then execute them. If you're constantly stopping your flow of work to rethink something, you're slowing yourself down.

10. Organize important meetings early in the day. Time leading up to an event is often wasted.

If you have an important meeting scheduled for 4 p.m., it's easy for anxiety to set in and keep that meeting at the front of your mind. Try to get them over with early so you can work without worrying about them.

11. Schedule meetings and communication by email or phone back-to-back to create blocks of uninterrupted work.

You'll disrupt your flow if you're reaching out to people throughout the day.

12. Work around procrastination. Procrastinate between intense sprints of work.

Try Francesco Cirillo's "Pomodoro Technique." "Pomodoro" is Italian for "tomato," and it refers to the tomato-shaped cooking timer Cirillo used to break his work into 25-minute increments with 5-minute breaks in between. You can use the same idea with your own increments, as long as they inspire bursts of hard work.

13. Break down a massive task into manageable blocks.

Alabama football coach Nick Saban follows a similar philosophy he calls the Process. Instead of having his players focus on winning the championship, he trains them to focus only on what is directly in front of them — each block, pass, and field goal.

14. No two tasks ever hold the same importance. Always prioritize. Be really careful with to-do lists.

Daily to-do lists are effective ways of scheduling your day. Just do what you can to keep bullet points from making "clean desk" on par with "file taxes."

15. Always know the one thing you really need to get done during the day.

To help prioritize, determine what task in front of you is most important, and focus your energy into getting that done as soon as possible.

16. Delegate, and learn to make use of other people.

To be truly efficient, get over the fear of handing work off to someone else. "If something can be done 80% as well by someone else, delegate!" says John C. Maxwell, author of "How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life."

17. Turn the page on yesterday. Only ever think about today and tomorrow.

Don't distract yourself with either the successes or failures of the past. Focus instead on what's in front of you.

18. Set deadlines for everything. Don't let tasks go on indefinitely.

Spending too much time on a project or keeping it on the backburner for too long will lead to stagnation. Get things done and move on.

19. Always take notes.

Don't assume you'll remember every good idea that comes into your head during the day. It doesn't matter if it's a notebook, whiteboard, or an app like Evernote — just write stuff down.

20. Write down any unrelated thoughts that pop up when you're in the zone, so that they don't linger as distractions.

You'll get them out of the way without losing them.

SEE ALSO: 11 Ways To Set Yourself Up For Success In Your Early 20s

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NOW WATCH: You should never wash your jeans — here's how to clean them

It's not a great idea to argue in a negotiation , so investor and entrepreneur James Altucher has a better idea: get the other side to negotiate with themselves and reap the benefits of a good deal.

Read more...

Oklahoma City Thunder forward Kevin Durant won his first NBA MVP award on Tuesday, easily beating out LeBron James.

At the awards presentation, he gave a brilliant, heartfelt speech thanking everyone who helped him get to where he is today.

The best moment came when he talked about his mother, who was sitting in the front row. Talking through tears, Durant described what it was like growing up, moving from apartment to apartment, his mom always pushing him to practice.

"When you didn't eat, you made sure we ate. You went to sleep hungry. You scarified for us. You're the real MVP," he said.

It was a gorgeous moment, and one you rarely see from an athlete of his stature.

Here's the full text:

"I don't think you know what you did. You had my brother when you were 18 years old. Three years later I came out. The odds were stacked against him. Single parent with two boys by the time you were 21 years old.

"Everybody told us we weren't supposed to be here. We moved from apartment to apartment by ourselves. One of the best memories I have is when we moved into our first apartment. No bed, no furniture, and we just all sat in the living room and hugged each other because we thought we made it.

"When something good happens to you, I don't know about you guys, but I tend to took back to what brought me here. You woke me up in the middle of the night in the summer times. Making me run up a hill. Making me do push-ups. Screaming at me from the sidelines at my games at eight or nine years old.

"We weren't supposed to be here. You made us believe. You kept us off the street, put clothes on our backs, food on the table. When you didn't eat, you made sure we ate. You went to sleep hungry. You sacrificed for us. You're the real MVP."

Here's video of the part of the speech where he talks about his mom:

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Photo: Flickr @US Navy Imagery

You just got word from the development team about the launch of a brand new feature, and you have at least two weeks (hopefully) to prepare everything you need to spread the word. Before you start writing the press release, take a few minutes to brainstorm about the different outlets you can leverage. Press releases are still crucial, but your potential buyers visit dozens of online and offline resources daily to conduct their research, so don’t stop there.

A successful launch requires that you cover all bases – spanning traditional, online and social channels. Basically, your message needs to be wherever it is that your audience engages. So how do you do it? Here’s a checklist of the basics to help guide your marketing strategy.

Create a Unique Landing Page

If we’re talking about a business-changing feature, or one that has major significance, then it probably deserves its own landing page. Don’t overwhelm readers with too much text, simply write a few short paragraphs or use bullet points to describe: unique value propositions, what differentiates it from similar competitor features and how it will benefit your client base. The text should include a clear header and sub-header, and lots of keywords.

Don’t forget a call-to-action and engaging visuals that give a sneak peak of the feature (screenshots if possible) or a short video that shows the feature in action. Give your visitors easy access to the landing page by featuring the hyperlink on your home page, and make sure to include it in any social posts you use to promote it.

Send Out a Feature Spotlight E-mail

There’s no need to launch a full-blown e-mail campaign, but a few e-mails can’t hurt. Draft an e-mail announcement that will reach your entire database (you never know, potential prospects may convert to leads if they love the feature). Also, include a brief announcement about it in your weekly or monthly newsletter, or create a best practices e-mail on how to fully leverage the new features. Make sure you include a link to the landing page for those who want more info, and include a call-to-action. Also, A/B test the text and images, so you can optimize your feature e-mails going forward.

Write a Great (But Short) Press Release

Write a short press release with all of the details (no more than 500 words) on the feature. It should provide either a description or bullet point list of all the concrete benefits, and who will have access to them. Avoid using too much fluffy language, and let readers know what they’ll actually be getting. Remember to include contact details, such as your website and a personal e-mail. When it’s ready, do some outreach by researching the blogs that are most popular in your industry. Once you have a list, search each one for keywords that resemble your product, and find out which editors you should be contacting; you can then try to find their e-mails by using a tool such as Rapportive. Also, do a quick Google News search to find additional media outlets that recently covered similar topics.

Promote it on All of Your Social Networks

Definitely, definitely don’t launch a new feature without announcing it on social media! Use a platform such as Oktopost to create a long-term social media campaign, and post across multiple networks and profiles. Although your Facebook and Google+ audience should be made aware, focus most of your efforts on LinkedIn and Twitter. Be careful though, in LinkedIn, avoid posting anything promotional in Groups, and stick to your personal or Company Page status updates. Try to think of creative ways to convey the message about your new product on social media, such as posting a video, images, photos or even hosting a giveaway.

Record a Helpful Video Tutorial

There’s no better way to promote a new feature than actually showing people how it works. Record a short video that’s between 2-4 minutes long which provides a clear explanation. Upload the video to your website or knowledge base, as well as your YouTube channel to maximize its visibility.

Launch a Customer Webinar

If you can’t cram all of the info on your feature into a 2-4 minute video, why not host a webinar? Create an e-mail campaign and landing page to promote it two weeks in advance, and spread the word to all of your clients. The webinar shouldn’t be longer than 20-30 minutes, and make sure to leave enough time for a Q&A session. Your customers will appreciate that you’ve put together an entire event to make sure they get the most of the feature, and thank you for it.

Give Beta Access to Product Evangelists

Chances are you have a few “brand ambassadors” who would love early access to your new feature. Create a beta testing group, and give your biggest fans a sneak peak. This is an excellent way to show your appreciation, help nurture your relationships with them, and as a bonus – get their feedback. If there are any major bugs you need to be aware of, or overall improvements that need to be made to the feature, this is a helpful way to work out the kinks before the public launch. Also, ask your evangelists to help you announce the feature by Tweeting about it or mentioning it in a blog post.

Get On-Going Customer Feedback

Once you officially launch your feature, your two main concerns should be: customer support, followed by customer feedback. Use a service such as Intercom to engage directly with people using the feature, conduct a brief phone survey of a handful of customers, or reach out to top users by e-mail to get their thoughts and opinions.

Here's concrete advice from a CMO who helped his company get to 130,000 customers in two years.

Attracting a strong and loyal customer base is a matter of life or death for your e-commerce company. Ideally, adoption will snowball, and your startup's future will be bright and profitable. But how to make it happen?

Take some advice from Mitch Wainer, CMO of DigitalOcean, a cloud hosting site for developers. In two years, Wainer has expanded the company to 130,000 users through what he calls "growth hacks," which any online business can use. Here's how they work:

1. Acquire and understand 100 early adopters.

DigitalOcean attracted its first 50 customers by demoing in front of a New York tech meetup.

However you capture your first cadre of users, make sure to offer whatever you're creating or building for free in beta and then learn from your mistakes as quickly as possible.

"'Fail faster' is the motto, and that's going to allow you to adjust and find the success stories and work within those success stories," Wainer says. "You want to learn as much as possible about your first hundred users in the beginning."

When DigitalOcean was in its infancy, Wainer says, he would have phone conversations with early adopters and ask them a variety of questions, about their favorite foods and books, what kinds of blogs and websites they visited most often, as well as how they found DigitalOcean in the first place. The point? To come up with a blueprint of a typical customer to know how to target the rest of the 900 you want, or 199,900 you eventually want, using your products or services.

2. Allocate a small marketing budget, set goals, and diligently track your progress meeting them.

You may be bootstrapping, but getting the world to find and try your website or app isn't going to happen without at least a bit of investment. Set goals such as doubling your user numbers within 30 days or by a certain percentage.

"Whatever it is, you want to set targets and goals month over month, and you want to be tracking day to day," he says.

3. Offer promo codes to increase conversions.

They're highly effective in increasing user growth and engagement and can be distributed via banner and text ads as well as social media.

"Display advertising worked really well for us when we were building the first hundred customers," Wainer says. "We used BuySellAds.com and BuyAds.com to find relevant websites to place a banner ad on, and on those banner ads, we would offer a promo code."

4. Measure your conversions.

In the beginning, as you're accelerating, it's important to closely monitor every marketing campaign you set in motion as well as every tweak you make to your website to understand what's most effective in getting people to sign up or otherwise take an action you want them to take. To do that, Wainer suggests creating monthly key performance indicator (KPI) reports, an easy thing to do with a simple spreadsheet populated with data from Google Analytics as well your conversion data. For example, are people signing up with a credit card or only with an email and password?

"You want to build monthly reports to track your channels and your spend, and how many users came through that channel, and then the CPA (cost per action) for those specific channels," Wainer says. "For instance, if it's social media or if it's banner ads [that are] producing a high CPA, and then you find that retargeting generates a lower CPA, you might want to allocate your funds to retargeting instead of investing more money into social media."

Wainer says he uses Google Analytics URL Builder nearly every day to gauge campaign performance by creating a tracking link. To use it, you enter the URL for a page to which you want to redirect an ad, as well as the campaign medium, such as Google, Twitter, or Facebook, and whether it's cost per click, a banner, or an email. After assigning a name based on the campaign title, the tool creates a long URL you can shrink on a URL shortener such as bit.ly.

"You can create different campaigns with that link and add it to your Google Analytics account to understand how many conversions a campaign drove, and then make a decision on whether or not to scale that campaign or to cut back," he says.

5. Hire a writer and get serious about content marketing.

Providing quality content for free is a fantastic way not only to draw people to your website but to demonstrate your domain expertise. For example, DigitalOcean not only provides programming tutorials on its site, it also pays developers $50 per post to contribute content.

Wainer says startups should aim for about 20 posts per month that appeal to a typical customer. More of his advice:

• Create listicle BuzzFeed-type headlines involving numbers, such as "5 Ways to Do XYZ."
• Post longer content. Google likes 500-plus words.
• Use Google's keyword tool within AdWords to understand which key words generate high-volume traffic, high-search volumes, and low competition. Google Trends also shows which words people are searching for most at the moment.
• Include calls to action at the bottom of blog posts or articles, where they tend to get more engagement compared with other places on the page.
• Optimize headlines and meta descriptions with H1, H2, H3 tags (check out that link if you don't know what this means).
• Post content on other websites and include links back to your site.
• Consider including a user community on your site where people can ask and answer questions. "[At DigitalOcean] those questions become individual pages, so essentially we're having user-generated content on our website that gets indexed by Google and drives more traffic to our website, which again gets retargeted throughout the Web," Wainer says.

In short, you need to build a marketing engine that puts into motion a snowball effect.

6. Measure churn, cost of acquiring customers, lifetime value of customers, and more.

To get the next 900 users and beyond, it's important to measure as much as possible, including your monthly churn--which is the percentage of users who unsubscribe or stop using your service--a number that shouldn't rise above 10 percent, with 2 percent being an acceptable number, Wainer says.

Other things to measure: cost of customer acquisition (CAC), lifetime value of your customer (LTV), and the relationship between the two. Wainer says software as a service (SaaS) companies like DigitalOcean should aim for an LTV to be three times greater than a CAC.

"Also, you want to understand...how many months it will take to pay back the CAC," he says. "The best SaaS businesses are able to recover their CAC between five to seven months."

7. Play with your pricing and website design.

Wainer says DigitalOcean was able to expand the number of users fourfold by AB testing call-to-action buttons, pricing models, positioning, messaging, and design. The important thing is to track the funnel of how users interact with your website--when they sign up with an email address, enter payment information, convert, and activate.

"You want to create this funnel and attach numbers to each layer of the funnel going down," says Wainer, "and then basically you're going to build out [the] percentages [of] your conversion rates from when they sign up to when they activate with a payment profile."

8. Be aggressive with PR.

Wainer used his personal network to find a friend of a friend who could make an introduction to someone at TechCrunch, and then spent time selling the writer on an exclusive story that would announce a product launch.

"It catapulted our growth immediately," he says, "so we were signing up about 10 customers a day, and then after the release came out, we started signing up over 100 a day, so PR can really help spark a new level of growth for your business if you pair it with the right product release of the right announcement that's going to disrupt the market. So just work your network, and don't be afraid to cold email the writers that write about your industry."

9. Incentivize users with a referral program.

If you want your customers to become your salespeople, it's important to empower them with ready-made banner ads and materials that are easy to share on the Web and create referral links that generate more traffic for your website.

DigitalOcean also offers to pay customers who successfully promote the platform with credits for reduced-price subscriptions instead of cash, a strategy Wainer says helps keep costs down. His favorite referral automation tool: Ambassador, which has plans that start at $99 a month.

"Another great referral tactic is to create a contest to incentivize your users to generate more signups within a given time frame, like a 30-day period," he says. "At the end of the 30-day period, you can reward them with 2X or 3X commissions for the month. And maybe create a leaderboard for a little bit more of a competitive environment."

10. Target and engage with key influencers and ideal customers on social media.

DigitalOcean has used HootSuite and Sprout Social as well as Facebook and Twitter ads to get help doing this.

"[It's] understanding who your key influencers are in the industry, engaging with them, retweeting them, favoriting their tweets to get on their radar, reaching out to your user base with promo codes or incentives to sign up for your product online," Wainer says. "Actively participate in tweets and mentions in a timely manner. Engage with them, create conversations, create relationships, because those relationships build more awareness and spread via word of mouth your product or service."

He also suggests answering highly visible questions on Quora that are relevant to your industry or your business and position your company as a thought leader.

11. Use email marketing, but keep it simple.

DigitalOcean has used MailChimp and Campaign Monitor for help with email campaigns, but Wainer says the most important thing here is to keep emails and subject lines as simple and short as possible.

"An email with a subject line with just 'Thank you' works really well," he says. "A/B test every email. Focus on subject lines, add large calls to action at the bottom of every email to increase engagement. Include incentives such as a promo code."

The best time to send promotional emails? Midweek between the hours of 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. ET, when overall Web activity is at its peak.

Goodwill works well, too. Wainer says DigitalOcean has had success automatically sending customers who drop the service an email from the CEO asking for their feedback along with a note telling them their account has been auto-credited. In fact, during one 30-day period in which the company sent out 4,700 emails, 15 percent reactivated.

"It generated an additional $100,000 in annual run rate," says Wainer.

Clearly DigitalOcean is doing something right. The company--valued at $153 million--recently raised $37 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Social media has taken the world by storm. Everyone loves to connect with other people even when they don’t have time to do it face to face. With all of the different social media platforms available, the visual interests and usability of them all help find a place of preference for each social media user. For a CEO, that preference is a bit different. Yes, even if you’re a CEO, you’re still human. For example, some CEOs will prefer LinkedIn maybe because they like the professionalism or some CEOs might prefer Twitter because the vast majority of their audience is located on Twitter.

Forget which social media site you like better for whatever reason and remember this, you’re the CEO. You want to address and represent your company to all of your audience plus those who are connected to your audience. This means that even if you don’t like Facebook, part of your audience and potential audiences do. So Facebook is still important, and you should still represent yourself on Facebook along with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ if you haven’t already done so.

There are only positive repercussions from representing yourself as the CEO on social media. Everyone else in the world, most importantly your customers, are on social media and love it; so should you. Embrace your brand; don’t just say you do in a conference or a public speaking event, continually show them through your social media accounts. Open yourself up for feedback and respond to feedback. The most important thing about having a social media presence as a CEO is connection.

A new study released by BRANDfog suggests that social CEOs are better leaders who can strengthen brands, build trust in products and services, demonstrate brand values, and communicate accountability — all by simply being on a social network.

According to a study conducted by CEO.com and DOMO, as of June 2013, a whopping 68% of Fortune 500 CEOs did not have any social presence whatsoever — even on LinkedIn, the CEO social platform of choice.

Combat Your Issues

CEOs are very busy and CEOs have a huge reputation to uphold. Lots of CEOs may feel that they don’t have the time or simply won’t allot the time to mess with any social network. This is mainly because most CEOs feel like they don’t need to be there or it’s not part of their job to do so. CEOs could find social media quite frightening because there is such a big room for error. We have all seen big social media screw ups by companies and the struggles they experienced as consequences of those errors. Find time to get interested in social media and find a way to love it. Free up 30 minutes to an hour every day or every other day to devote to a social networks. One day could be LinkedIn, and the next day or so could focus on another network, and so on.

Embrace Your Brand

You are the face of your brand. People see the brand and love the brand; it’s your duty to represent yourself as the face of that brand and to uphold all of the values that your brand makes claim to. Representing yourself as the face of your brand only humanizes it even more. Customers like more personable brands and companies they can relate to. Embracing your brand on social media and labeling yourself as the face of the brand gives viewers someone, not just something, they can relate to.

Connect with Your Audience

The single most important thing, in my eyes, about being present on social media as a CEO is audience connection. This is a great way to build trust with consumers and consumers will value this trust greatly because it was built with an established relationship with the actual CEO not just a relationship with the company brand. Think of your social audience as a free, already established focus group. Here, you can display your products and services to the mass public. Simply by doing so, people will comment on them and tell you what they like and what they don’t like. You can then respond and comment on what they like, help address what they don’t like, and let them know what you can do to resolve their issues. Constant trust will be built/ strengthened by doing this and everyone knows the single most important thing in any relationship, especially a business relationship, is trust.

When you sit down for a difficult negotiation — asking for a raise, hiring an employee, or haggling for a loan — make sure there's some guacamole beside you.

That's because when people eat during competitive negotiations, they find better deals, according to a forthcoming study from Stanford's Graduate School of Business. 

"When you have a competitive negotiation, the added presence of food makes folks uncertain about how to behave," Stanford professor Margaret Neale says. "It's that juxtaposition of that social ritual, which is cooperative, and the negotiation, which is competitive. That disconnect gets people to pay more attention to each other." 

In a series of experiments, Neale and doctoral student Peter Belmi asked participants to negotiate while eating. In one, it was chips and salsa; in another, apple slices and caramel sauce. In some cases negotiators ate from the same bowl, while in others each person had his or her own plate. The result: Better deals came when people ate from the same bowl.

"It is the shared-ness of the food that's important," Neale explains.

Yet sharing just anything doesn't produce the same results. In another study, Neale and Belmi asked participants to share a calculator for their negotiations. It had none of the same cooperation-inducing effects as the food. She says this is because whenever we share food with someone, there's a social overlay of cooperation. 

After all, we share most of our food with family and friends, people that we're close with and care about. 

"It's the inconsistency between the competitive negotiation and the cooperative nature of sharing food that makes the difference," Neale says. "The lesson here is that you're really trying to generate a sense of uncertainty. That helps you pay closer attention to your counterpart, and that, in turn, allows you to find ways to create more value."

There's a clear takeaway for business here: If you don't want to leave money on the table, try negotiating over a meal.

SEE ALSO: 14 Tactics For Reading People's Body Language

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Yes! Here Are 12 Tools To Check Out Your Competition

If you are a business and making any type of inbound marketing effort you have a lot on your to-do list.

One of the best ways to get inspired with new ideas, stay up on industry trends and collect other valuable data is to keep tabs on your competition.

Having competitive intelligence is a great way to figure out where you are now, as well as where you are going.

Who are your major competitors?

What are their strengths and weaknesses?

How can you leverage both to your advantage?

With 2/3 of Americans now making purchases online, your presence in the online ecosystem and how you manage your time there is more important than ever.

Here are the best ways to make sure you know exactly what they are doing:

START YOUR ANALYSIS

Do you even know who your top competitors are?

You might know a few of them, but have some more popped up recently that aren’t on your radar yet?

Staying on top of your current and your newest competitors is important to knowing what they are doing and what they might do next.

Performing localized searches is the best way to find out who your competition is.

LOCAL RESEARCH

Yelp

Yelp’s incredibly localized search results can assure you of a list of your nearby competitors. Yelp can tell you if they are holding any specials or putting out new products you want to know about.

It is also good to keep an idea on your community’s opinion of you and your competition.

CitySearch

By categorizing businesses, CitySearch makes it easy to find out which companies are on your radar to look out for.

Google Search

You can also start with a simple Google search on your industry.

Which businesses are showing up in the ranking besides you?

With Google’s new emphasis on local ranking, there should be some local businesses showing up next to your name.

Once you have established who the competition is, it’s time to find out what they are doing.

• What keywords are they using to get ranking?
• What content are they using to drive traffic to their website?
• What is most important to them, leads, revenue or engagement?

You can find out all of this information and more with the following methods:

TAKE A LOOK AT THEIR WEBSITE

When you start looking at the websites of your competitors, keep some questions in mind:

• What keywords are they using on their pages in order to optimize for search engines?
• What kind of content are they putting out in order to attract visitors to their site?
• Can you identify a key message or their best products/services immediately?
• Who is their target market?
• What makes your company different from theirs?
• Do they have a blog? If so, what are they writing about?
• Can you sign up for an email list?
• What kinds of offers are they giving to their visitors? Is it something you might like to try?
• How is their website set up? It is easily navigable?
• Are there some changes you might like to make to your own website as a result?

Doing research on other websites will gain some key insight on what they are doing and how well they are doing it.

Now that you have a basic idea of who your competition is and what kind of website they have, it’s time to go behind the scenes.

Check out these tools for infiltrating the backend of your competitor’s websites and finding out exactly how you can beat them out in rankings, customer satisfaction and pure traffic.

When you begin doing research at this level, it’s time to switch over to your private browser so that the competition doesn’t catch on to what you’re up to.

12 AWESOME RESEARCH TOOLS

 

1. ANOTHER GOOGLE SEARCH

This time, instead of doing an industry search in your area, type in the name of your competition.

You want to know how much online real estate they own.

If the entire first page is full of their content – in the form of website URL’s, Facebook URL’s and pointers to other things your competitor has out there, you have an idea that they are doing a pretty good job with their ranking efforts.

While you are doing your Google searches, also type in a few of the keywords that you have identified for your product and target audience and see what comes up.

If your competitors are ranked at the very top under the paid ads, then you know they have paid pretty good money to be there.

It may be time to rethink and deepen your keyword endeavors.

Also take a look at the organic listings that show up below Google’s paid search ads.

Who shows up there?

Is your company on page one or two? This can determine how much deeper your new keyword strategies need to go.

2. SpyFu

Although there is a charge, SpyFu is a tool you can use to research the keywords that your competitors are using to get rankings.

3. Google Trends

Google Trends is a great free tool that allows you to explore what is trending with your industry products or services.

By clicking on “explore in-depth” you can play around with words and phrases that you think might be of interest in your industry, or for your competitors.

Pick your own topics, or follow the topics that pop up on the screen.

4. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a analysis tool that will let you know when one of your competitors is mentioned somewhere out there in the digital universe.

It would also be a good idea to add your own business on this platform and keep track of what people are saying.

Find out what others are saying about your competition.

5. Alexa

By typing in your competitor’s URL, you can see how your site ranks against them, as well as other key insights.

You can find out the keywords they use to rank and the websites that are linking to their content.

6. Compete

Find out where your competitors’ traffic is coming from, the unique visitors they get and also get an idea of how they are using their social media platforms.

7. SEO Book

This is a general website comparison tool.

How does your website compare with that of your competitors?

Just type in the URL’s of both and get stats on page titles, meta tags and keyword phrases you have in common.

8. Internet Archive

In terms of website design and basic changes a company makes, this tool is a great way to find out how a company has evolved their marketing strategy over the years they’ve had a web presence.

Find out how your competition has tweaked their webpage, their pricing and even their product lineup with this fabulous tool.

9. Domain Tools

Want to know who owns a particular URL, or how long one has been in existence?

Come to this website to find out.

You can get contact information, links to and from a website and even other domains owned by the same person.

10. Open Site Explorer

Run by Moz, Open Site Explorer has a free version and a member package.

Find out how your competitors rank with on page authority, their domain authority, who’s linking to them, their total links and more.

And this is just with the free version.

11. Keyword Spy

If you want to know a little about how much your competitor is spending on pay-per-click, or online ads, this is where you need to be.

Get their keywords, copies of their ads and find out their ranking for keywords.

11. Hoovers

Do searches on companies, individuals and industries.

You can get in-depth studies, white papers and other industry related papers that are great inspiration for content, as well as create and build sales lead lists to increase your revenue.

12. ReferenceUSA

Locate information on your competitors as well as make sure that your own business is being properly listed for better search engine results.

Carolyn Brown of Inc.com suggests doing your own qualitative research in order to get the best information you need to beat the competition.

Online chats, customer surveys and good old-fashioned focus groups are all proven ways to get data that can help you make your own approach to marketing more efficient.

Combine it with your competitive analysis for a home run.

After you choose a few of these tools to work with, you should be able to gain some valuable information on your competitors.

Now it’s time to turn to their social media efforts.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Another great way to find out what your competitors are doing is to find them on social media.

Check out their Facebook pages, their Twitter feeds, their Google+ circles and their LinkedIn company pages.

Do they even have a presence on the top outlets?

If so, are their pages optimized.

What kinds of visuals are they using and what kind of information are they giving out about their company to represent themselves?

Also, take a look at the number of fans they have.

Do they seem to be engaged and making comments on posts?

What types of content are they posting?

How often are they posting to which platforms and what time of day are they doing it?

Are you becoming inspired for content of your own just by what you are seeing? Hope so.

Are they using other sites like YouTube, Instagram or Pinterest to better market the same product you have?

Crawling around on your competition’s social media outlets is a great way to find out exactly how they present themselves to their target audience.

What other ways can you hone in on your competition?

WHO ARE THEY HIRING?

A great way to determine what your competition is up to is to find out who they are hiring and why.

LinkedIn is a great tool to find out who is working for whom.

Inc.com also suggests that hiring your competitor’s employees is another good way to get intel on what they’re up to; provided you don’t try to walk through any non-compete or non-disclosure agreements.

So when you look around at your competitors, their websites, research their intel, take a look at their social media and wander around their keyword strategy what else is there to do?

THERE’S ENOUGH TO GO AROUND

Realize that there is plenty of business out there and make friends with your competition.

Mention them in your Facebook posts.

Share something from their Twitter feed.

The best thing that can happen is that they’ll do the same thing for you.

Gaining the respect and regard of your competitors is one of those unwritten benefits of being the nice guy – even though behind the scenes you know exactly what’s going on.

It’s just smart business.

WHAT NEXT?

Now that you have all of this excellent recon on your competitors, it’s time to sit down and do some real thinking and analysis.

Be objective and look at your own online presence with a clean eye and see how you can improve.

The analysis that you have just done has taken time, you don’t want it to go to waste.

How are you going to change and improve your keyword strategy to gain an edge?

Are there some changes you might need to make to your website to make it more navigable and user friendly?

Why are you showing up on page three in local Google industry rankings?

Gauging your place on the local industry totem pole might be a little disheartening at first, but it can also be inspiring and a great way to improve your overall company vision.

Bring in someone else to take a look at the data you have compiled and get their unbiased opinion.

Take advantage of the weakness of your competitors.

If they are clearly superior in some areas, what did you learn about them that you can implement in your own strategy?

And don’t forget, there are some things that make you completely unique in your industry. Capitalize on those as you rethink your plan.

It is okay to research and spy on your competitors. Gaining an edge in the online market makes it a must to leverage everything you can, including intel on who you are up against and what you need to do to make yourself better than they are.

It’s no secret that ebooks have taken over the world thanks to Kindle and the iPad. In fact, I am turning my story about being fired from Facebook into my own little eBook.

Recently, Scott Britton sent me an email with 3 tactics for successfully promoting an eBook on Amazon. All of the tips were original and made me rethink how I will launch my own book.

Since then I’ve bribed Scott to share his tactics and knowledge about eBooks with OkDork readers. Scott himself has been creating amazing content and he’s here with some great marketing tactics to promote an eBook and get 40,000+ downloads on Amazon.

(Read all the way to the bottom to get his Amazon Best-Seller Marketing Pack)

Here’s Scott…

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Today I’ll share my exact results for a recent Kindle book that made me $1,000 in the first 8 days and give you 10 juicy marketing hacks to get you similar results for promoting Kindle ebooks all the way to the top of Amazon…

Whether you have your own eBook planned or want to help someone else promote their book, the tactics all apply. To be upfront, a few of the marketing strategies I share will be enhanced if you have some initial advantages like a social media presence or network of friends willing to help you. However, many of these don’t require any of those things to get excellent results.

Results From A Recent Book Release

A little over 2 weeks ago I launched my first Kindle book:  Lifehacks: 63 Ways to Save Money, Improve Time Management, Produce Great Work, and Increase Productivity.

Using the Kindle Direct Publishing Select program, I gave the book away for free for the first 5 days.

After 5 days of giving the book away for free, over 41,000 people had downloaded it. 

There’s been some research done by Digital Book Today that on the best day to do a free promotion on Amazon according to traffic on Free Book sites.

Monday had the highest percentage of traffic and also seemed like the best day I can blast my friends and family for help to leave a review so I decided to run the promotion from Monday to Friday.

After the 5-day free promotion, I started charging $2.99 for the book.

I chose 2.99 because this was the minimum price I could charge while still getting a 70% royalty. Royalties drop to 35%. when a digital book is priced below that in the Amazon Pricing Structure.

At the onset of selling the book, I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to buy it so that I could climb the store rankings while not totally sacrificing monetary interests.

After the first week it went on sale, I made $926 selling 555 books. That’s more than $130 a day.

Here’s the sales distribution by day during the first week.

A lot of people just think of Amazon as an opportunity to make money selling books on their site. That’s not true. There’s plenty of opportunities to expand your business beyond Amazon’s direct revenue.

For example, using a small call to action at the end of the book, I added 125 people to my mailing list after 2 weeks.

Here’s the call to action in the book:

To be candid, the number of email subscribers should and could be much higher given the amount of downloads and purchases I’ve had..

On average only 10% of people who buy a book finish it.  I made a huge rookie mistake by not including more call to actions and bonuses throughout the book, especially early on. I plan on adding these soon which is pretty easy to do using the KDP uploading system.

But dude isn’t changing a book hard to do? I mean it’s already published…

Kindle books can be uploaded in a few formats including Microsoft Word. So adjusting content in your book after it’s published is as simple as modifying the content on your computer and re-uploading it to Amazon following these guidelines.

Long Term Results?

It’s unclear how much of a drop-off there will be in sales and downloads over the long haul.

But if you project out 60% of these results since I took down the free promotion (which you can do every 90 days), I’d expect the following return over the next year:

Total Books:

555 * .6 = 333 books a week, 17,316 books a year

Profit:

17,316 books a year * 2.99 (current price) * .70 (my cut) = $36,242 in profit

Leads:

There were 125 leads directly from the book during the first two weeks it was released.

# of leads from the 5-day free promotion:  85

# of leads from the sale period: 40

Considering you can only run a free promotion for 5 days every 90 days, if we just extrapolate the 60% dropoff estimate assuming I’d never take the time to run a free promotion again, that equates to over 1200 additional leads during the next year.

40 * .6 * 52 weeks = 1,248 passive leads this year

Each one of these subscribers represents an opportunity to sell other products in the future.

I’m pumped with these results because this book was created from existing content I already had. Specifically, I spent $550 for a ghostwriter to take a series of emails from a google group and turn them into a working manuscript I could adjust.

I wish I had amazing advice for how to find and vet a ghostwriters. I just used the one my friend recommend. She was great and provides cover design service as well so everything is integrated.

Discounting the initial content creation that I had already done before even deciding to create a book, it took about 6 hours of my personal time to go from inception to publishing it on the Amazon store. The breakdown was 5 hours of editing and coordinating with my ghostwriter, and 1 hour of cautiously figuring out how to publish on Kindle.

Don’t let the hour it took me to publish this book scare you. In reality, it only takes about 15 minutes to publish a finished product on there. I was just very diligent because it was my first time and I didn’t want to make any mistakes.

Now that you’re hopefully convinced that there’s opportunity here, let’s talk about how you can replicate these results for yourself.

Winning on Amazon

The way to win on Amazon is to rank for keywords and within specific Kindle categories.

In order to do this, you’ll really have to hustle marketing and promoting your book like crazy in the beginning. Don’t worry, we’ll cover exactly how to do this below soon…

The good news is that once your book starts ranking well after your initial marketing push, the premier placement at the top of keyword searches and within the categories you select, sends a lot of new customers your way passively.

If the idea of categories is foreign, you can think of them as the genres that people use to discover new books in the Kindle Store.

Similar to ranking on the first page of google with website content, ranking well in the Kindle Store allows your content to get discovered long after you put in initial marketing effort.  That’s why optimizing for keyword and category ranking is the way to go.

For both keywords and categories, ranking is primarily determined by

1. Number of positive reviews
2. Total downloads
3. Total revenue

Your book title and meta-data is also important for keywords.

The easiest way to get reviews and free downloads is to join the Kindle Direct Publishing Select Program and launch your book with a five day free promotion. This gives your book a jump-start by eliminating all friction to people downloading and reviewing your book.

How to Keyword Research for opportunities with eBooks

To choose a keyword to optimize for, I recommend a tool called Merchant Words.

It’s lets you determine demand by projecting how many people are searching for specific keywords on Amazon across all categories (not just books).

And…the Merchant Words team was kind enough to hook up all OkDork readers with a 50% discount for life. You can grab it here.

I decided to try and rank for the term “Lifehack(s)” after I found that 52,000 people a month where searching for it.

A few other keywords I poked around with where “Productivity” and “Hacks.”

Productivity had great search volume so I dug deeper… 

The challenge with “Productivity” was that it was far more crowded with books optimizing for that keyword and phrases that were exact title searches (i.e. Extreme Productivity is a book).

I looked at the paid ranking # for the top ranked book for “Lifehack” vs. “Productivity” and the Lifehack book was purchased far less. This meant it was going to be easier for me to rank #1 for that term.

To show you exactly what I mean, here’s the search results for the keyword “Productivity”:

By reviewing the product details of the #1 ranked book, Productivity: Get 10X More in a Day, I could see it was ranked 105,018 in the paid store.

This was much higher that the top ranked book for “lifehack” which had a paid ranking of #555,573.

Again, assuming I could get an equal number of positive reviews, this meant it’d be much easier for me to rank #1 for Lifehacks.

Considering this was my rookie season, I decided to play the safer bet and go with “Lifehacks” even though it had lower search volume.

What happened next….?

Using the marketing strategies you’re about to learn, I was able to get the book ranked #1 for the term Lifehack in less than 1 week even though websites with much bigger audiences than mine like Lifehacker and Lifehack were going after the same term.

How was this possible?

A combination of putting the keyword as the first word in my title, getting positive reviews, driving a ton of downloads and eventually sales.

Category Ranking

Two weeks out I’m ranking in the top #2 spot in multiple categories and top 1000 in overall books for sale on Kindle.

This is important for sales, because the higher you rank in categories, the easier it will be for people to find your book.

When you’re selecting categories, you want to focus on two things:

1. Relevance
2. Competitiveness

In terms of relevance, don’t publish your book in a completely unrelated category. Make sure it matches the intent of people searching for your book.

To determine how competitive it is to rank in a category, contrast the overall paid ranking # of the 100th ranked book in each category you’re considering.

For example, I wanted to maximize the exposure of this book by choosing a business category and self-help category. This way I capture people searching in both genres.

Amazon only let’s you choose two categories with their current policy.

The two categories that I thought made sense in Self-Help for my book were Personal Transformation and Creativity.

By navigating from the category home page to the #100th ranked book in each section, I found that it’d be much easier for me to rank in the top 100 in Creativity.

The 100th ranked book in Personal Transformation was ranked #20,105 overall Amazon Kindle books.

While the 100th ranked Creativity book was ranked #109,458.

Creativity would be the easier category for me to crack the top 100 in so that people could discover me organically. So I chose to start with that one.

The cool thing about categories is that you can change them at any time as your book becomes more popular.

This means you can start off in a less-relevant category that’s easier to rank in and then make the jump into the most relevant once your overall paid ranking is indicative that you’ll crack the top 100.

You can use the same exact reverse logic we just outlined for selecting a category to determine this (paid ranking of 100th book).

Even though your category ranking might drop off over time, you’re still in a good spot if you can rank well for highly queried keywords like lifehacks.

If you write an amazing book and don’t market it well, you’re not going to see results.

That’s why I wanted to give you 10 marketing strategies that you can use to climb to the top of the Kindle store and reach thousands of new customers right now.

10 Meaty Tactics For Marketing Your Book

#1 Feed the Rabid Freebie Hoarders On Giveaway Sites

There’s a ton of sites out there where people basically hang out all day and collect free stuff to occupy space on their hard drive.

Though terrible for humanity, this is awesome for driving downloads…which again is a critical factor in ranking high.

Here are a few popular sites where you can give away your book for free:

1. Reddit (relevant forums and freebies forums)
2. BlackHatForum
3. OzBargain (Use an australian IP address!)
4. FatWallet
5. SlickDeals

Now just throwing a giveaway up on one of these sites doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful. You need to exercise some gamesmanship.

The best way to do this is by modeling past successes.

On each site you should be able to find a most popular section where you can gauge what people find interesting and then calibrate your copy and positioning to maximize engagement.

For example, on Reddit you’d want to click the “top” tab, select a date range, and look for patterns to see what resonates with that particular subreddit’s audience.

Once you see copy patterns that work, copy it for your giveaway to increase the odds that it’ll be successful.

Here’s an example post of mine on in the productivity subreddit. I noticed that previous posts that explicitly stated free Amazon books where well received so I made sure to follow suit.

*Pro tip: on the day you launch on any of these sites, check your thread every hour and respond to every comment.

Why you ask?

A key indicator of engagement that compels people to click is the “comments” section (often called “replies” on other sites.) People want to see what all the juicy gossip is about!

Every time you respond to someone elses’ comment on your post, that counts as a culmlative comment on the thread count. So replying to each one is an easy way to double the amount of comments on your post which increases engagement.

#2 Promote On Sites With Messaging Systems

There’s a lot of people out there that don’t have a blog or mailing list, but have access to an on-site messaging system that’s pretty much the same thing because site users receive push notifications.

Two great examples: Udemy.com and Meetup.com

Udemy is an education platform that makes it easy for people to host and take online video courses.

Within Udemy, there is a feature that allows teachers to “make an announcement” to all the students in their class. It more or less sends an email message to everyone in the class in the form of an email notification.

If you happen to be one of the 30,000 people who has a class on there and you’re reading this, make an announcement to your class about your book!

If you don’t, you can find everyone who has a class that is related to the free book you’re giving away and ask if they’d be interested in giving it to their students.

You can do the same exact thing for Meetup.com

Once you get a commitment from a teacher or meetup organizer, you want to make it as EASY as possible for the instructor to promote you by giving them an exact script they can send to their community.

Here is an example of a fellow Udemy Teacher that helped me promote my book to his 1200+ students using almost an exact script I supplied him beforehand.

Again, even though this message was sent through the Udemy platform, I received this in my inbox!

On-site messaging platforms can sometimes be email list 2.0’s.

#3 Build Your Insiders List and Ask Them Directly

I keep an ongoing spreadsheet of friends, family, and life-longlearner readers that I call “insiders.”

Here’s an exact template you can copy as well as a quick peak of mine:

Everyone on this list is either someone I’d do anything for or someone who has indicated that I’ve significantly helped them along the way and that they’d be willing to lend a hand whenever I needed it.

*This is not a favors owed list. It’s a list of people where there’s an unspoken mutual feeling of “I’ll support you no matter what because your success and happiness is important to me.”

Whenever I need the support of others for a project, I go through this list and see who might mutually benefit from getting access to something in exchange for a favor (like a Amazon review).

You can easily think you’ll remember people that you have this relationship but trust me writing it down will make your life way easier. Grab the “insiders” spreadsheet at the end of this article or right here.

I then messaged these people personally with the book promotion. Like this:

You can grab an exact template for this email here or at the end of the post.

A few notes on this email:

In anticipation for the launch, I created a page on my site that explained exactly how to leave a Kindle review. Then I made sure to link to it in all of these type of emails to make it as easy as possible for everyone to leave a review.

The easier you make it for others to take the action you want, the more likely they’ll do it.

I later found out that you can actually link directly to the book review page to make leaving a review even simpler (example link here) (Must be logged into Amazon to view).

This can be accomplished by linking to the page after clicking “Write a customer review” on your book page.

Again, the novelty here is creating a system or document that makes it easy to isolate the people that you can ask for direct help from in these type of situations.

BTW, you shouldn’t feel bad about creating a spreadsheet of people in your life if they end result is you providing value to them.

Just like a phone book, the purpose is organization, not an attempt to dehumanize your relationships.

#4 Find People With Mailing Lists And Ask For Real Estate In the P.S.

If you have a mailing list, you’re obviously going to want to email your subscribers about your book.

If you don’t or want to give a mighty effort, try to find people with other mailing lists to promote your book.

The challenge is that a lot of people are hesitant to mail their lists promoting someone else’s product. Especially when they’re not making a ton of dough as an affiliate.

One strategy for getting around this is asking if they can promote you in the “P.S.” section of an existing email they’re already going to send.

Here’s an example script you can use:

You can download this script here or at the end of the article.

The phrases highlighted in red are all places where you’re going to want to hyperlink to specific instances that display that you follow their work and strengthen the case that sharing this with their audience will drive a ton of value.

The goal of the second paragraph is to disarm their initial concerns and hint at scarcity.

Even if someone thinks your book rocks, they might still be concerned that any promotional email will prompt unsubscribes…

This is why exactly you suggest sharing your book in the P.S. section of an existing email!

Also, do you notice how I didn’t say “free promotion” anywhere in this email? That’s because asking someone to promote a free promotion crappy positioning.

Instead this idea is positioned as a link that gives “free access to the book”. They’re getting the same exact thing, but free access sounds much more exclusive and scarce than a free promotion that everyone and their mom has access to.

#5 Blitzkreig Relevant Facebook  Groups and Twitter Handles

When it comes to Free Kindle promotions, there’s a ton of different Facebook  groups and Twitter handles dedicated to featuring free books to their audience.

These are perfect places to promote your book.

I had my virtual assistant compile a list of every single Facebook  group and Twitter handle where free book promotion was encouraged. In order to determine this, I simply asked him to find search on facebook and see which groups were explicitly for free book giveaways or where people sharing books were positively received with comments and likes.

On launch day, I instructed him to blast the groups using a template I created you can find below around lunch time Eastern time…and blast he did.

Here’s an example Facebook  post:

Here’s a very small sample of carpet bombing all the free promotional channels we found on Twitter (over 30).

And some re-tweets that resulted from our efforts:

Due to time constraints, we only hit the Facebook groups and Twitter handles that we knew were interested in free book promotions…

But you can imagine how this strategy can be replicated across Facebook groups and Twitter syndication handles relevant to your book topic.

The only caveat with this strategy is that you’ll want to make sure groups are cool with you directly promoting your content especially if you’re not already an engaged member. Sometimes you’re better served pre-empting a launch by finding these communities, interacting in them for a few weeks in anticipation for your promotion, and then letting the guns blaze after you have some street cred.

*If you want the exact Facebook groups and Twitter handles where free Kindle promotions are encouraged, you can download it at the end of this post.

#6 Promote in Your Vacation Autoresponder

People have been promoting stuff in the emails they send ever since linking in your signature became all the rage…

But why limit it to the emails you send if getting the word out about something is really important to you?

One thing you can do is use a vacation autoresponder to tell everyone that emails you that you that “it might be a awhile getting back to them because you’re launching a book”…cough covert promo!

Every time someone emailed me for the first 3 days of the free promotion, this is what they saw:

The key element of this autoresponder is the title. You want to make sure to tell people you’re “Launching A Book” in the title. People are far less like to read the email if they just encounter a hackneyed “I’m away.”

Launching a book doesn’t happen everyday and people emailing you are bound to open the email to see what this book fuss you’re talking about is.

I got 10-15 responses to my autoresponder and a handful of people from this subset left me a review.

If I was a betting man, I’d guess that this autoresponder might have prompted someone who intended to leave a review (but maybe forgot) to follow through on leaving after being reminded again.

Persistency baby!

#7 Reward Kind Gestures…To Inspire More

Have you ever noticed that verbally rewarding the actions you want others to take begets people to take that action more often?

Understanding and leveraging this social-dynamic can help you to inspire additional people in your network to leave positive reviews for your book.

Specifically, publicly thank everyone who downloaded your book and individually highlight those left you a review.

On the 2nd day of my free promotion, I publicly thanked everyone who downloaded the book and left a review on Facebook :

Within a few hours, 4 additional people I was friends with on Facebook left a review.

Coincidence? I think not.

And when you find a marketing strategy that works, double down! (Tweet this)

The same “friend love spike” happened again after I repeated this process again on day 3:

The next couple of tactics might be lower hanging fruit or more obvious, but are still worth mentioning.

And I think you might find subtle nuances to improve your approach even if you’re already doing these things…

#8 Create Special Access Opportunities and Experiences

If people feel like they received special treatment or care, they’re going to be more supportive.

This means when creating something like a book, you want to seek out opportunities to create the “delight” of personal attention to garner support.

Ideally you want people to “opt-in” for these opportunities so it doesn’t seem random.

One way to accomplish this is by giving people in your social media network the chance to raise their hand.

I asked my network if they were interested in my book topic (lifehacks) as well as whether they wanted early access to a book I was coming out with.

My goal was to identify people to create a delightful experience that would hopefully provide reciprocal support in the form of a review.

On Twitter:

All of the people that respond indicating interest have “opted in” for an opportunity for you to create a mutual value exchange.

I used a spreadsheet to compile the list of everyone who’d gotten back to me on twitter and facebook. On twitter, I made sure to ask the people who replied to me for their email so I could follow up with them in a less public forum (email). For Facebook, I just planned on using the messenger.

I did not decide to ask these questions on LinkedIn or individually email people who I thought might be interested, but these would have absolutely been effective strategies.

Heck, you could go out to forums like Reddit and the other ones we mentioned earlier and ask random strangers if they’re interested in your subject matter and make of list of these people.

Once you have your list of interested parties,  you want to send each person a copy of your book with a personal message or email.

There’s two ways to do this. Gifting your book while it’s on sale or sending it someone during free the promotion period. I chose to try both.

When you first upload your book, you have to set a price. It only becomes free when you fire up your free promotion (full guidelines here).

I wanted to plan out my free promotion marketing and schedule it on a Monday, so I uploaded it a few days before the free launch and set the price at $0.99.

I didn’t tell anyone or try to attract attention to the book before I started the free promotion. Instead, I just teased about it alluding to the subject and that I was coming out with a book as outlined above. The reason I kept the book quiet even though it was listed on Amazon at a puny $0.99 was because I wanted the least amount of friction possible for people to download the book…and free is about as friction-less as it gets.

The day before the free promotion I bought a copy of the book for everyone from twitter who indicated they wanted early access.

Honestly the only reason I did this for people from Twitter and not Facebook was because I had their emails and it was a group of 8 people vs. more than 30 on Facebook.

Within the purchase email I made sure to give a gentle nudge to leave a positive review if they found it valuable.

Eight purchases for my twitter friends resulted in 4 reviews and some feel good vibes for hooking up some friends. It was an $8 well spent!

You can grab the exact script I used for the Amazon purchases featured above here or at the end of the post.

You can replicate this strategy for everyone that indicated they were interested in your topic (i.e. lifehacks).

On Facebook, I chose to simply send a personalized message to these people the day the free promotion started.

Here’s an example personal message:

You can steal this exact message template here or get it at the end of the post.

Of the 26 people I messaged on Facebook , 11 got back to me and left a review.  42% conversion rate ain’t too shabby.

In both cases, I primarily used a “soft ask” or “gentle nudge” instead of directly saying “hey can you give me a review.”

You should always calibrate with the relationship and context, but generally I’ve found it most effective when promoting stuff to simply suggest someone take the action you want instead of imposing it.

You never want someone that you care about to feel like you’re forcing them to do something they don’t want to do.

#9 Feature and Quote Other People, Then Encourage Them To Help Promote & Review

We mentioned this in #1, but the more you can involve people in the creation process, the more likely they are to help promote your book.

A very simple thing you can do is seek out opportunities to feature other people, products, and services in your book and then let them know that you included them in the book. The hope is that this will inspire them to help you promote it.

Here is an example of how I featured my buddy Matt in my book:

The day of the book launch, I shot him, along with everyone else who was featured, a personally tailored version of this email:

Key elements of this email:

• It has a kickass title that people will open. It’s not everyday that people get emails telling them they’re on the largest ecommerce site in the world.

• I made sure to note that in addition to being featured, they were linked to. This aligns incentives because promoting the book will result in more exposure for the both of you!

• I made it very easy for this person to not only realize that this was a personalized email,    but also to know exactly how they were featured without having to read the book with the “Your hack that’s in the book” paragraph.

No one is going to promote something if they don’t know what it is that they’re promoting so make it easy by giving them the cliffnotes in the email.

• Lastly, I removed the friction to them leaving a review by linking out to an exact    how to leave a review tutorial that only takes “4 quick steps”.

A good portion of the people featured either wrote a review or promoted the book on social media which was much appreciated!

#10 Create Ancillary Content Around the Book During the Week of the Promotion

The content you can create to drive downloads and reviews to your book shouldn’t stop with an “announcement” blog post or social media post.

There’s a ton of ancillary topics around your book that you can release after the initial launch to drive downloads and reviews. Videos on youtube, Slideshare presentations, and additional blog post are good places to start.

One “ancillary” content idea to that seems to get people excited anytime you’re trying to promote something is when you open the kimono to the process.

Companies like GrooveHQ have done an excellent job of this with their blog theme of “A SaaS Company’s Journey to 100K a Month.”

My buddy Charlie Hoehn wrote an awesome post for this blog on How to Hit #1 on Amazon’s Bestseller List when he was marketing his book Play It Away.

For my book, I wrote a post on the 3rd day of the free promotion about how I outsourced the creation of this book in less than 5 hours called How A Bunch of Emails Became A Best-Selling Kindle Book.

This got over another 1,000 views on my site, many of which probably went to my book page.

Though this amount of traffic pales in comparison to huge blogs, even 100 extra downloads can be the difference between breaking a critical ranking threshold like the top 100 in your Kindle category.

Another effective piece of content you can use is updated progress reports on the book’s success.

Throughout the free promotion I shared screenshots of its rise in the Kindle store on social media.

Every time you do this is another chance for new people to encounter your book and a reminder for others to leave a review if maybe they intended to, but forgot…kind of like a guest blog post on a sweet marketing site that features your book hehe ; )

Conclusion

Whether you want to make some money while you sleep or capture new customers, the Amazon Kindle Store represents a massive opportunity.

Again, their entire audience is on their ALREADY LOOKING TO BUY THINGS with their credit card on file. That’s my kind of search engine.

The key for you to be successful is to fight, scratch, and claw for reviews and downloads using the types of marketing techniques outlined in this post. A lot of this is just pure hustle, but if you’re willing to put in the work, the payoffs can be worthwhile!

Who is Scott Britton?

A dude who loves explore ways to lifehack. He write about his adventures here: Life-LongLearner.com.

Click here to download The Amazon Best-Seller Marketing Pack You’ll get Scott’s: List of the top free giveaway sites to drive downloads to your book The Insider’s Sheet Template The P.S. Real Estate Ask Email Script The Amazon Purchase Script The Ask For A Review Email Script

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That question often leads us to another: “What is the difference between Management and Leadership?”

Best selling author Brian Tracy says, “Management is transactional, while Leadership is Transformational.” Management responsibilities can include many areas, from budgeting to planning and reports, and general administration. Leadership, however, also includes the component of leading and supporting people, in a way that will ultimately allow them to achieve, be productive, and experience growth.

To answer the first question, “What’s the difference between a Manager (a boss) and a Coach (a leader)?”, let’s look at some context. One challenge that occurs in most organizations is that people move into the management role once they have mastered some technical competence in a department or role. And so, a great sales person will be promoted to sales management, or a top-notch software engineer developing code for the project is promoted to manage other programmers, or a productive accountant is promoted to Controller or Accounting Manager. The challenge is that the familiarity with the transactional side of management (often viewed as completing a list of tasks and achieving a result) is very different than the competence of leading others (through whom you are now tasked with achieving the result). In the absence of effective leadership development, managers can fall into the habit of dictating to-do lists, micromanaging, or unnecessarily rolling up their sleeves to become a ‘Do For’ boss or reverse delegator. We’ve seen new Sales Managers take over the sales process in a client meeting, much to the frustration of the Account Executive who is now responsible for the account. Over the years we’ve reviewed volumes of 360 Management Feedback reports, and have seen some clear habit/behavior distinctions between what we call the “Boss Manager” and the “Coach Leader”.

Here are 5 Key Differences between a Manager/Boss and a Coach/Leader:

• A Coach spends more time listening and asking questions, while a Boss spends more time speaking and giving directions.
• A Coach invests time in observing, while a Boss makes quick assumptions.
• A Coach uncovers issues to get the the root of a problem, while a Boss takes the quickest route to deal with the surface symptoms.
• A Coach helps Direct Reports accept responsibility, while a Boss assigns blame.
• A Coach supports employees in developing their plans, while a Boss gives them the plan and tells them to follow it.

We’ve all experienced variations of Boss vs. Leader types in our working lives. The truth is, it seems easier and more expedient to “boss” than to coach. But research and anecdotal evidence both show that coach/leaders have more engaged employees, and get better results. Do you have more “boss” types or coaches in your organization? Whether you’re the head of a global organization, or just trying to be effective in leading a small team, perhaps it’s time to ask yourself – am I more of a boss, or a leader? What would your employees say?

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AMAZON'S B2B WHOLESALE MARKET IS A SLEEPING GIANT: Amazon is quietly building one of the most disruptive businesses online — a business-to-business wholesale market called AmazonSupply. Amazon launched the business in 2012, and it's seldom ever mentioned on earnings calls — or anywhere for that matter. Wholesalers generated $7.2 trillion in revenues in 2012 (that's online and offline sales), according to the U.S. Census, while retailers took in $4 trillion in revenues selling to consumers. If Amazon executes as well as it did in the retail market, AmazonSupply could grow into an even larger business than the merchandise it sells to consumers on Amazon.com. 

SIGNS THAT E-COMMERCE IS BOOMING FOR RETAIL CHAINS: Online sales increased nearly 20% year-over-year in the first quarter for more than 100 retailers, according to e-commerce software company MarketLive. Although the retailers weren't named specifically, we know that MarketLive's clientele includes major brands such as Aveeno, Design Within Reach, Modell's, Fossil Inc., and Helzberg Diamonds. This is the sixth straight quarter that MarketLive clients have posted double-digit online sales growth. All of MarketLive's top clients appear to be retailers that originated as physical stores, but now operate across channels (commonly referred to as "omnichannel" retailers). Bricks-and-mortars are becoming increasingly effective at leveraging e-commerce to gain new customers and also retain loyal ones who might be doing more shopping online, rather than in stores. 

ALIBABA IPO OFFERS GLIMPSE INTO CHINA MOBILE COMMERCE: E-commerce giant Alibaba filed for an IPO earlier this week in the U.S., giving us a better look at how consumers shop online in China. More than three in four mobile commerce dollars spent in China last year flowed through Alibaba's online marketplaces. That suggests that any further smartphone penetration in China will directly benefit Alibaba — and we predict a lot of upside. As of last month, only 37% of 1.3 billion Chinese mobile subscribers were on 3G and 4G wireless networks. Tablets and smartphones channeled 20% of Alibaba's purchase volume in the final quarter of 2013 (see chart below), roughly double the proportion as in the same period a year ago. We expect the share Alibaba sales attributable to mobile to increase significantly over the next year. 

WELCOME, E-COMMERCE INSIDERS: This is our new newsletter covering all things e-commerce. Please email csmith@businessinsider.com with news and tips. 

ZULILY EARNINGS EXPOSE FULFILLMENT ISSUES: Zulily, a daily deals site for mothers, is growing its business faster than expected, but that's causing all sorts of growing pains for the company. Sales totaled $238 million for the first quarter, which is up 87% from the same time period last year, and the number of paying customers were up 93% to 3.7 million for the quarter. This surge in business caused fulfillment problems at the end of March — shipment times were averaging 13 days. Zulily CEO Darrell Cavens said on the earnings call yesterday that he's not concerned about long shipping times when there's a surge in orders, because people don't purchase from Zulily based on need. That's risky thinking at a time when e-commerce sites are becoming ultra-competitive on shipping times.

COUPONS.COM EARNINGS SHOWS THERE'S PLENTY OF ROOM FOR COMPETITION IN ONLINE COUPONING: Coupons.com posted strong first quarter earnings yesterday. Quarterly revenues totaled $51.5 million, which is up 41% from the same time period last year. Earlier this week, one of the company's chief competitors, RetailMeNot, posted quarterly revenues of $61.3 million, an increase of 51% year-over-year. The fact that both companies are performing so well indicates that there is plenty of room in the growing business of online couponing. This is a result of more consumers going online to shop, and carrying their smartphones  — ideal vehicles for coupons — when shopping offline. These shoppers are now being conditioned to check these coupon sites for discounts before making any kind of purchase. 

TRIPADVISOR'S BUSINESS PICKS UP AFTER WINTER WEATHER: TripAdvisor revenues totaled $281 million in the first quarter, which is a 32% increase over the previous quarter and 22% bump over the same time period last year. The quarterly growth was a result of relatively mild weather compared to this year's harsh Northern Hemisphere winter, which led to an uptick in travel. We expect online travel bookings to continue to increase in volume over the next few months. On the company's earnings call, CEO and President Steve Kaufer announced that TripAdvisor now has more than 150 million customer reviews covering four million hospitality businesses and attractions around the globe. For comparison, Yelp has just over 57 million reviews about local businesses.  

Tiger Global led a $15 million investment in LimeRoad, an online shopping site for women in India. Tiger Global seems to be investing heavily in Indian e-commerce, as it already has stakes in Flipkart and Myntra.

Apple's new Head of Retail Angela Ahrendts has received more than 113,000 units of restricted Apple stock which is valued at more than $68 million. The stock-options are a sign that Apple has high hopes for Ahrendts since a portion of her compensation will be directly tied to how the company performs. 

PERSONNEL MOVES:

Airbnb has hired Jonathan Mildenhall as its new chief marketing officer. Mildenhall previously worked at Coca-Cola where he was senior vice president of integrated marketing communication and design excellence. Mildenhall was recognized by Ad Age in 2012 as one of the most creative professionals working in advertising. 

Travelocity CEO and President Carl Sparks has reportedly left the company,according to Skift. The reason for his departure is still unknown, and a replacement has not yet been named.  

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