Monthly Archives: May 2010

You know the “Oh, how…er…interesting” moment. It happens when someone at a networking mixer introduces himself saying something like this:  “I’m John Doe, and I’m lead widget wizard with United Widgets International.”

What is United Widgets? What do they do? What does he do? How can you connect with him?

You haven’t a clue. You look at his card: just the company name and his contact information. He stands there smiling expectantly.  The conversation sputters to a stop, and you awkwardly move on to the next person.

So the question is – how can you prevent others from having the same response to you?

The solution? Your elevator speech:  a simple sound-bite of an introduction that answers the unspoken questions of every person you meet: Who are you? What does your job or business have to do with me?

So John Doe the widget wizard might say something like: “I create viral online buttons that can send people streaming to your site.” In 12 words, he’s told you what he does, what a widget is, and how he can help you. In other words, he’s given you his unique selling proposition.

So how do you create a powerful elevator speech that markets your work in 30 seconds of face-time?

Share what you do, not your title or employer.

It may be a shock to realize this, but for most people, your title and company name will mean very little – it’s what you do in your company that makes you interesting. So start by describing the primary benefit that your work offers to your listener, in 25 or fewer short, punchy action words – nothing over two syllables if you can help it.

Focus on your service, not your status.

Imagine someone telling you “I’m a lead facilitator for Intermediaries International. I have a Ph.D. in interpersonal relations with a specialty in transactional analysis and have trained at the Berne Institute.” Without similar interests or experience, this is going to mean nothing to you.

Now imagine him or her saying: “I help to defuse tensions in families and in the workplace, and I spend my vacations helping to resolve conflicts in hot spots around the world.” Instant relevance, marketability, and adventure.

Offer Your Card to Lock In the Connection

Only after making that strong personal connection should you identify your company and hand over your card. If you make your meeting memorable, and follow up shortly afterward, that card will hold the energetic charge of your introduction. It will serve as your ticket to further conversations….and potential sales!

So you’re a loyal regular at all the networking mixers and business builder groups…you’ve handed out your cards at more events than you can count..but have you stood at a podium to offer an educational talk about your field of business to the general public, and fielded their questions?

If not – why not?

I’m not talking about presenting your products and services in pre-set sales appointments. One of the best-known ways of forging a personal connection with your local target audience is simply to show up in person and share your expertise as a friendly, approachable local expert.

But how would you know what to say? Well, if you’ve ever fielded volleys of questions from  confused prospects, you have material for a public presentation. You’re not there to prove a point, preach a sermon or to sell them on your services – you’re giving them information you know they need, while you imprint your face, voice and company name on their memories in the process.

But wouldn’t a strategically-placed ad or local Google campaign do just as well? Indeed not! When those local prospects need a service like yours, who are they going to remember – the faceless company name in the Yellow Pages, the plain-vanilla listing on a Google search page — or you, who made such an impression by showing up and  speaking directly to their questions?

But what if nobody comes to hear you? Well, that’s always a risk. However, you can take some simple steps to ensure that you have a ready and eager audience…

• Begin promoting your talk as early as possible. Even before you schedule it, you can put a teaser on your website or blog:  Be sure to come and hear me answer your toughest questions on (name your topic) – watch this space for details!
• Base the title and topic of your talk on your customers’ most urgent questions, using their language, values and priorities. If you are reaching for a skeptical, not-yet-green audience, for example,  don’t plan a lecture on “Cutting 20 Tons of CO2 From Your Carbon Footprint” – instead, title it “Three Simple Tips to Save Hundreds of Dollars on Your Annual Energy Costs.”
• Gear the time and place of your talk to attract the largest possible number of people interested in your topic. If you run a nonprofit offering services to veterans’ families, see if you can book space at an Armory or VA hospital around Memorial Day or Veterans’ Day.  If you’re a nutritionist advocating organic/seasonal/local foods, check to see if you can speak at your local weekly farmer’s market.
• Along the same lines, piggyback your talk on a larger event, such as a conference or expo. Yes, you’ll be one of many speakers – and you’ll have a captive audience, and a ready-made promotion for your exhibitor table. Plus, you can develop all sorts of collaborative and joint-venture possibilities with the other speaker/exhibitors.  Speaking opportunities at such events are gold – don’t pass them up!
• Use all possible media to announce your talk, well ahead of time – press releases to the newspapers, TV stations, and PRWeb.com;  Facebook events, calendar items for your local Chamber of Commerce, community associations, churches, and schools, and so forth. Not to mention a special announcement for your email list if you have one!
• Set up a page on EventBrite.com or a similar service to let people register for your talk, even if it’s free – this allows them to opt in to your list to learn about later events, while you get a general ballpark figure for attendance.

So you’ve decided on the title and topic of your talk, you’ve got it scheduled and it’s on the community’s radar – now how do you plan what you’re going to say?

Focus on the problems that you’re in the business of solving. Your audience doesn’t want to know the technical details of the latest whizbang gadget – or even how to use it. They want to know how to solve a problem. As Internet marketing guru Perry Marshall says, “Nobody buys a drill because they want a drill. They buy a drill because they want a hole.”

For example, if you’re an electrician in a community of vintage houses, you might want to speak about  avoiding the dangers of pre-1950s knob-and-tube wiring.  If you’re a plumber in the same neighborhood, you might want to talk about solving the problems caused by old cast-iron plumbing.

What’s the purpose? Simple – you’re establishing yourself as an authority on the topic, warning Do-It-Yourself renovators about the genuine risks they can face, and giving them an alternative: you! Such talks contribute significantly to public awareness and safety, while also building your business.

Remember, your audience isn’t just coming to hear you deliver abstract information – they could get this on the internet or in a Rodale manual. And they’re not coming to hear formal speechmaking with finely-crafted turns of phrase – they could get this by tuning in to a Congressional hearing.

They’re coming to hear you as the driving force behind your business – your personal expertise and teaching stories, your solutions for your clients’ unique problems, your concern for their well-being. Your passion for making their lives safer, healthier, happier or easier through the work you do.

Show that knowledge and passion to your public, and they’ll never forget you.

How many times have new clients asked to speak to me about setting up their new website, and then asked, “Can’t you just take the content from our brochure and put it up on the website? We like the way we have the wording and we just need it online, that’s all.”

Ah, the website that simply sits there – the “brochure site” that’s listed on company business cards but rarely shows up on Google or makes a sale. It can be the biggest money-waster on a business budget, not only for the money you spend getting it online and keeping it there, but for the money it doesn’t bring in!

Brochure sites are actually a relic of the days when business first noticed the Internet…the days when printed marketing collateral was still the Number One way for companies to inform the public about their products and services. In those days, marketers didn’t realize there was any difference between printed and online media.

In fact, there are two major differences: time and competition.

A brochure is designed to be absorbed in slow time – it may sit on your desk for a few days, then be picked up again, thrown in a drawer and emerge a month later. With plenty of time to work its spell, it can afford to be unusual, or perhaps self-consciously creative. It is interacting with you alone – unless you intentionally seek out similar companies, you are not distracted by competitors.

Visitors coming to your website, on the other hand, are usually searching for something specific, and know that a Google page full of competitors is just a few keystrokes away. If your content does not capture their interest within seconds, they will move on. And you will probably never know they were even there.

Clearly this online audience demands a whole new level of writing – focused, direct, with no frills or fluff. No flowery welcomes, no Home page rhapsodies about your company history – there simply isn’t time!

So how do you create a site that actually brings in revenue? It’s a complex process, but this is the core:

First of all, before you even begin to design the site content, you need to define its purpose, exactly, and know your audience, intimately:

• Who do you want to come to your site, and why?
• What are the benefits your visitors are seeking – what problems do they want you to solve? How do they want you to make their lives or work easier or better?
• What solutions can you offer them?

Once you have identified your audience and their needs, you need to structure your content toward providing solutions, moving from fewest words to most words, least detail to greatest detail, big-picture benefits to in-depth specifications, all directly focused on your prospects’ needs.

With only a few seconds to convey this information, your home page headline needs to be short, simple, strong, and laser-targeted.

Then, once you’ve captured your visitors with the practical benefits your business offers – the ways in which you can make their lives or work easier -  your body content has only one further purpose: to entice them to a detailed product or service page.

Once they click to the next level, you have plenty of time to give them all the details. They’ve already realized  your obvious knowledge of their needs and desires; they’ve seen that they need what you offer,  and they’ve taken the initial steps toward buying. From there, it’s a few clicks to the shopping cart and a sale!

Too many times, I have heard clients complaining, “I’ve set up my website – but I don’t think anyone’s visiting it!” And they begin sharing the tricks they’ve tried to jump-start their hit counter, ranging from pricey site add-ons to dubiously ethical wizards who try to outwit the search engine requirements.

Traffic generation can get complicated, there’s no doubt about it…but the underlying concepts are really quite simple. Having the right keywords, of course, is important…but even beyond that, there are additional factors.

First of all, Google is notoriously slow to notice new sites, even after they’re submitted for indexing…it can take three months or more for a newly launched site to show up in searches! So your first job is simply to get noticed.

There are two parts to this job – first of all, providing high-quality content that will catch the attention of the Web-crawling spiders, and second, giving that content credibility with incoming links.

But, you might say, “I’ve already set up the content on my site, and it gives all the necessary information about my company. Isn’t that enough?”

Not really. You’ve heard the saying, “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there?” Same principle here. Your site could be brilliant – and if all your content creation stopped on launch day, that site will be far down in the rankings.

Why? Google loves fresh content – the fresher the better. It’s the hallmark of a living site, sign of a living online business. Remember your high-school biology class and the signs of life? Same principle. If it reproduces (i.e., aquires new content), it’s alive. Otherwise – who’s to say?

So having a frequently updated blog, or a reader’s resource page of articles about your industry, products, or services, or other forms of  new content, is key to the success of your site.

Next – credibility. As a wise Internet marketing guru told me:  Google is rather like New York’s A-list Runway nightclub. If you try to get in on your own, you’re not likely to pass the bouncer. If you show up hobnobbing with Angelina Jolie, however, you’ll probably be ushered right in and treated like royalty. On the other hand, if you arrive with Lindsay Lohan, you may get in, but find yourself treated rather differently.

In other words, on the Internet as in life, you’re judged by the company you keep. You can affect your Google ranking by the quality of your incoming links (that is, the sites that link to your site).  High-ranking professional organizations’ sites and networking sites in your industry are good, and incoming links from these will earn you a higher Google ranking. Local Chamber of Commerce sites are also good…and these are just a few examples. You can also contribute marketing articles to a high-ranking content site like EzineArticles.com to build credible incoming links.

On the other hand, “free-for-all” link farms and free link exchange sites (also called banner exchanges) are bad, and Google will penalize your site with a low ranking – or worse – if you participate in these.

What do I mean by high-ranking sites? These meet Google’s standards for content and credibility. They show up at or near the top of the screen when you run a search for one of the logical keywords identifying your field of business.

So, for example, if you enter “green business” as a Google search, GreenBusiness.net shows up high in the rankings. Listing your site on this membership site for eco-entrepreneurs could boost your own Google ranking.

How can you get listed on these sites? Posting your company information and URL (Web address) in their member directories is one way. Purchasing an ad gives you an additional Google boost. And most of these sites offer ways for you to link to them in return, by placing their logo graphic or widget on your site.

Why would you want to post a reciprocal link on your site? Several reasons: first, of course, the credibility. If you’re a green business with a Green America seal on your site, for example, you’re demonstrating that you’ve passed their screening, thus earning a level of instant respect from green prospects. Second, posting other logos, such as a Buy Local seal, quietly tells visitors that you offer special values to qualifying customers.  Finally, by posting some logos, you can earn not only credibility as a member of a respected organization, but also enhanced membership values for your own business.

In other words, gaining a high Google ranking for your site isn’t that different from building a reputation offline. Prove that your business is alive and growing, that you have reputable associations and credibility in your field, and you’re halfway there.