You Too Can Stand Out Above The Crowd

Let’s Reveal The Secrets That Will Allow You To Stand Out

Face it, in business the person who stands out from the crowd, in a good way, will be the one with the most success.

So how do you transform yourself from average to that person looked up to?

I’ll let Michael Hyatt give you his secret:

In the chatter of a market filled with messengers, you and I mustn’t give way to the tug of impersonation. Your message is too important for that. Instead, we must commit to authentic representation. You—you!—have too much to offer.

Want to stand out? Here’s the three-part secret:

1. Know who you are. This is no small task. It requires time, energy, and courage to connect with who you are at your core—your dreams, personality traits, talents and passions. It requires hanging out in the quiet spaces, outside the noise of the market, to connect with the less-than-public, less-than-packaged you.
   

   Try this: Shut down the laptop. Power off the phone. Ignore your email and analytics and social media accounts for a day. In its place, take inventory of who you are and write it down. Honor yourself and your message enough to become well acquainted with both. Only then can you expertly deliver it to the world.

   
   


2. Know who you are not. Earlier this week I listened to an interview with Dr. Henry Cloud. He was discussing his book, Boundaries For Leaders, and in the course of conversation he said words I will not soon forget: “The first thing you need to know is who you are not. Be not conformed.”
   

   Although I may co-host Michael’s podcast, I am not him. I am not a technology wizard (this fact cannot be overstated). I am not a once-a-day blogger or web theme designer. And my writing style will always be far more narrative than how-to. But my differences don’t make me less-than. They make me me. Which leads me to the third aspect of the secret.…

   
   


3. Believe you are enough. When working in a world with such talent and opportunity, it’s easy to focus on what we lack. Like you, there are moments I wish I had different gifts and talents. But to standout, you and I need to spend less time wishing we were different and more time believing we have just what it takes. It is the quirky, unique, and uncommon that makes both a product and person stand out.

Don’t dishonor the uniqueness of you. You’re far too valuable than that. Instead, deliver the one product absolutely no one else can replicate.

You.

Question: What would be possible for you and your message if you focused on authentic representation instead of impersonation?

Read the full article here

How do you stand out above the crowd?

Inspire us with your comment.

You Too Can Stand Out Above The Crowd

Thoughts On Making Connections

Do You Talk To Others To Make Them Like You?

It’s a lot easier to make the sale if they do. Yet so many people in business talk about their products instead.

The trick is to connect first and do business later.

Here is an article by T Harv Ecker Detailing the art of making connections

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The time and date is set. You made sure you arrived early because you wanted to do everything you could to make a good first impression. It’s your favorite “after-work” haunt so you’ll feel right at home.

You’ve rehearsed your intro, keeping things light and hopefully funny, but you’re anticipating the words that’ll give you an opportunity to really get the conversation going. At the end of the day, though, you just hope you like them and they like you.

Sounds like going out on a first date, yes? My partner and I “date” as much as we can, but a first date has been so long for me I’m not sure I’m the guy you want dating advice from!

I do know something about creating great first impressions with potential clients or business partners. Just like any other human connection, there are things we can do to give ourselves a chance of making a great impression and set ourselves up to get what we’re looking for.

In fact, most of the top marketers in the world hardly ever talk about product! They talk to get people to like them, so when the moment comes the selling is easier.

The one thing that’s critical for everything in life—not just in negotiations but in making a connection with anyone—is to create affinity. Affinity is closeness, warmth, and likeability. People generally act based on emotion (Something to remember when marketing!), andthen they justify their decisions with logic.

In other words, people will usually give a much better opportunity to someone they like.

I’m not talking about flattering butt-kissing. That’s fake affinity. More than likely most people will sniff that out and get turned off quickly. Genuine affinity means genuinely intending to make an honest and real connection with the other person.

We do it all the time and probably don’t think about it much: finding something in common. I’m like you is another way of saying I like you. Take this to another level by stating your intention for a win-win situation early and often. It’s as simple as saying something like, “I want to make sure this works for you.”

Also, think about how disempowering the word “but” can be in a conversation. Think about what it feels like when you are trying to get your point of view across to someone, and they respond by saying, “Yeah, but …” It’s as if everything you just said was negated. It stings. Avoid “buts”.

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What Can You Do To Make Better Connections?

Leave us a comment and let us know how you do it.

Thoughts On Making Connections

7 Body Language Tricks

Do You Pay Attention To Your Body Language?

A lot of us don’t give body language  much mind. But for those who are serious about getting ahead in life these techniques ar critical for increased success.

There’s no question that body language is important.

And according to Leil Lowndes in her book “How To Talk To Anyone,” you can capture — and hold — anyone’s attention without saying a word.

We’ve selected the best body-language techniques from the book and shared them below.

The Flooding Smile

“Don’t flash an immediate smile when you greet someone,” says Lowndes. If you do, it appears as if anyone in your line of sight would receive that same smile.

Instead, pause and look at the other person’s face for a second, and then let a “big, warm, responsive smile flood over your face and overflow into your eyes.”

Even though the delay is less than a second, it will convince people your smile is sincere and personalized for them. According to Lowndes, a slower smile can add more richness and depth to how people perceive you.

Sticky Eyes

“Pretend your eyes are glued to your conversation partner’s with sticky warm taffy,” Lowndes advises. Even after they’ve finished speaking, don’t break eye contact. “When you must look away, do it ever so slowly, reluctantly, stretching the gooey taffy until the tiny string finally breaks.”

You can also try counting your conversation partner’s blinks. In a case study, subjects reported significantly higher feelings of respect and fondness for their colleagues who used this technique.

Epoxy Eyes

In a group of people, you should occasionally look at the person you are interested in, no matter who else is talking. If your attention is drawn to that person even when they are simply listening, you show that you are extremely interested in his or her reactions.

Be warned — using full Epoxy Eyes can be a bit overwhelming to the subject and could leave them feeling uncomfortable. You should primarily watch the speaker, but allow your glance to bounce to your target when the speaker finishes interesting points.

The Big-Baby Pivot

People are very conscious of how you react to them. When you meet someone new, turn your body fully toward them and give them the same, undivided attention you would give a baby. Lowndes says, “Pivoting 100% toward the new person shouts, ‘I think you are very, very special.’”

Limit The Fidget   —    Click Here To Read The Rest Of The Tricks

Body Language Is Important

7 Body Language Tricks

Does Your Business Engage With Awesome Content?

Here Are 7 Outstanding Content Tips For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs and small businesses have not been the best content marketers in the past. They’ve been slow to adapt to this blockbuster internet marketing method. Things are changing as more and more how-to’s, e-books, guides and a slew of other content marketing techniques are being taken advantage of.

Here’s an article outlining some great ways to have outstanding content for your prospects and customers.

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Whether the content is created in-house or outsourced to an agency, there will be a time when creative ideas for interesting new content become scarce. Here are seven tips for creating outstanding content.

1. Create a Content Marketing Calendar

Having a calendar that documents a content strategy is a great way to ensure timely content creation, but this strategy is too often overlooked. Sixty-one percent of marketers say that their biggest difficulty with content creation is that it takes too much time, but only 44 percent are reported to have a documented content marketing strategy.

Putting together a calendar of content scheduled for the month is a great first step that provides a set amount of time to strategize, brainstorm, create, and publish.

2. Find Out What Works

Before researching other sites for inspiration, understand the characteristics of past content that has worked. Dive into Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to check the top-trafficked pages and search queries to see what content has performed the best and the keywords people have used to find it.

Social statistics can also provide insight into content that has performed well. Check social media performance by utilizing services like AddThis that embed sharing buttons on blogs with tracking information. There are easy-to-use dashboards that provide information on the number of shares, and click backs from those shares.

Understanding these trends will help better inform what topics and strategies have worked in the past and where to head with future content.

3. Understand Social Trends for Newsjacking

Social media is also helpful in providing ideas for topics in real-time. Writing content around trending topics, or newsjacking, help provide valuable content to people actively looking for it. Twitter has had trending topics available for a while, and Facebook introduced trending topics earlier this year. For a more local view of trending topics, Trendsmap provides an intimate view of trending news overlaid on a map with data from Twitter.

Enhance content by addressing different sides to a story, taking a controversial stance, or supplementing it with different media like videos or infographics.

4. Create a Survey

Create news with a simple survey. Understanding the consumer stance on a topic in an industry provides material for articles and infographics. This will likely result in backlinks to the content and builds reputation as a primary source of data in a field.

Creating and conducting surveys have become much easier with products like Survey Monkey Audience and Google Consumer Surveys that allow the creation of surveys and purchase of responses at an affordable price-point.

5. Utilize Visual Content

While much of SEO focuses on text that search engines can digest, visual content is much more appealing for human readers. Audiences are naturally wired to be more engaged with visual content, as 90 percent of the information that comes to the brain is visual, and content that utilizes imagery gets 94 percent more views than those without.

A survey of marketers from MarketingSherpa found that images were the easiest form of content to produce. Create infographics with the research that’s already being done for content, or outsource creation to include on a blog. Keep visitors engaged and scrolling by adding still images or animated GIFs to written content.

6. Start a Video Blog

Another easy way to create consistently high-quality content is to create videos. Seventy-eight percent of people say they watch online video every week, and 55 percent say they watch every day.

Starting a video blog isn’t expensive or time-consuming. Short videos are the easiest to digest, and simple to shoot with a personal webcam.

Video blogs require minimal editing, if at all, and can be posted immediately to YouTube. A study by Animoto found that video content helps persuade 73 percent of consumers to buy a product or service.

7. Repurpose Content

If finding a topic and doing the research for it is too time-consuming, create a bundle of content you have already created around a certain topic. Gather content with an underlying theme, like “Website Design Tips,” and package it with a supplemental blog post. This creates a valuable package of materials for readers to digest.

Another way of repurposing content is to revisit an older piece of content and providing updates. New information is constantly being studied and evaluated, which can be easily reported as an update to an earlier post.

Read the conclusions here

What tips can you offer for getting awesome content published?

Your comments are more than welcome.

Does Your Business Engage With Awesome Content?

Tips To Boost Your Blog Posts

There Are So Many Different Ways To Do It

l love this post! Rebekah presents many great ideas… one key area to check on your blog posts before hitting publish is the headline. Take a look at this awesome free Headline Analysis tool that will give you an EMV score: that is, your Emotional Marketing Value. Most professional copywriters’ headlines will have 30%-40% EMV words in their headlines, while the most gifted copywriters will have 50%-75% EMV words in headlines. Isn’t that neat!

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How To Boost & Promote Your Blog Posts from Atomic Reach

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source

Tips To Boost Your Blog Posts

Make Conversation the Key To Facebook Conversions

The Conversation, The Interaction With People Really Is The Key

I’d like to share the conclusions of a recent Facebook study. It seems some of the things you control in the process really mater. Like providing great content and engaging with your fans so they will want to buy from you. It’s the interactions between people that are the primary driver of conversions on social networks.

Here are some of the insights from this study:

“Your content should act as a vehicle for user interaction

First off, there’s this whole thing about user-generated content having more influence on sales than marketer-generated content. Does that mean we as marketers shouldn’t even bother producing content, that we should just open the page up as a free-for-all? Especially when we see that only direct interactions boost sales?

Not exactly.

Instead, we need to think of marketer-generated content as a vehicle to create interactions between users. A piece of content that gets shared a lot but that doesn’t lend itself to conversation probably isn’t going to do much for conversions either.

A piece of marketer-generated content aimed at your general audience (as opposed to a single person) should have two primary goals:

• To get shared in order to expand reach (more on that later).


• To get commented on in order to increase your conversion rate.

As the study shows, user-generated content has the strongest impact on conversions. And the more comments you get, the higher your average lifetime customer value will become.

The more comments you get, the higher your lifetime customer value will become.

If you’re still working at increasing the conversation around your blog posts, there are other ways you can interact directly with your audience. Shopify recommends posting surveys or asking questions to get your audience involved.

The more opinions the better

The study sheds light on another interesting aspect of conversion psychology.

Information-rich user-generated content increased sales regardless of whether the tone was positive or negative. This mirrors what we said about customer reviews a few months ago. A diverse range of opinions helps sales as opposed to hurting it.

While the study found several instances where positive interactions were more helpful than negative ones, they didn’t find any cases where negative interactions actually hurt sales.

Focus on creating those interactions (whether good or constructive) by getting people talking.

Leverage user interactions for greater reach

By now, I hope the insights above have convinced you that it’s time to step up meaningful interactions with your audience on Facebook. And while I’m sure you see the benefit of keeping your existing audience engaged, you likely also want to leverage those interactions to help your audience grow in size.

This is a dilemma faced daily by smart marketers everywhere: the struggle between expanding your reach and keeping your existing audience. Keeping an audience is the hardest part. In order to make it work, typically, you need more than surface-level content. You need depth.

And, of course, that’s a huge problem when you also need to get shared on social networks. Because what gets shared on social networks is almost never in-depth.

True, Facebook’s increased prominence and visual weight for link posts has helped a lot, but at the end of the day, most of what you see in your Facebook feed still has unattractive or no images.

So we’re faced with a dilemma. If we want to retain an audience, we need in-depth, actionable, useful blog posts. But if we want to expand our reach on social networks, we need bite-size visual content that produces an instant emotional reaction.

The solution to this problem is to  embed links to our blogs where we have engaging images or videos on every post. 

Embed your way to more reach and engagement

By embedding bite-sized Facebook posts directly into your blog posts, you can complement the traditional Facebook process in a number of ways:

• Who cares if average Facebook reach is down to 6%? If you have an email list with a high conversion rate, you can send a much larger portion of your audience directly to a blog post containing an embedded Facebook post. Your initial reach will almost always be larger on your blog than if you simply post it to your wall.


• While including a Facebook share button on your blog is a good idea,many people will more readily share a bite-size piece of content on their wall rather than a whole blog post.


• Embeds add flavor to your blog posts by making them more interactive and visual.


• You can use the text field of your Facebook post to link back to the blog post in order to ratchet up your referral traffic.

The goal here is to take Facebook itself out of the equation as much as possible.You’re not trying to game Facebook’s algorithm and you’re not relying on Facebook as your primary platform. Instead, you’re using your own site and your own email list to build up an audience and merely using Facebook to expand it.

Continue reading more at the source for a tutorial on how to embed links in Facebook posts.

I have to agree with this article. It make a lot of sense to drive the traffic back to your website where you can make money with ads. Ads for your products or ads from the ad agencies were you get paid. Even more important is to encourage the coversation to continue with sharing buttons for numerous other social media sites and to encourage visitors to leave comments.

What other tips do you have to increase engagement on your website?

Make Conversation the Key To Facebook Conversions

Targeting Your Audience On Facebook

Are You Familiar With All The Targeting Options For Facebook Ads

With one fifth of the world’s population on Facebook there is a potential massive reach. Now combine that with the detail in the user data base and you have an awesome targeting tool.

Here is an infographic provided by Quaya that gives you a handle on just what kind of detailed targeting you can get:

“I like to think of Facebook not as a “social advertising platform”, but rather as the world’s largest media channel married to the world’s largest survey. Because that’s really what we’re talking about here.”

 

Some of the highlights include:

►How to choose Facebook users: custom audience vs. lookalike audience
►A comprehensive listing of personal interests and behaviors
►The multitude of demographic characteristics available for refining your selection

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If you would like to use this infographic, you can get the embed code back on Quaya’s web site

 

Targeting Your Audience On Facebook