Category: Uncategorized

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Let’s spend the day together

I’d like to spend a day with you.
Let me explain.

Business is a funny thing. Takes a lot of effort and money to launch a business and new services, then there is the phase where you do a lot of marketing to get in front of people, to be known for what you do and then you sell.

Not a bad process and one that you can rinse and repeat forever as long as things stay the same. But things do change, like the economy and people change too, they even change the way they buy and what they like. Have you noticed how connected and mobile the consumer is today and the amount of information we all have access to? How loyalty to a brand seems like something from the past?

These things do affect our business, but there are other things that affect even more. The way people see your business and how familiar with the business. Believe me, familiarity can kill your business. I bet you never thought of that, did you?

It reminds me of that TV commercial from Wendy’s where the girl go to the salad fridge and talk to the salads and then tells a woman beside her that she visited the same pre-packaged salads last week.

The fact is that today we can’t, as businesses and service providers, afford to be the same salad for very long. We need to innovate what we do and many times we need to re-position our business in the market. Be very visible and yet not that familiar.

Isn’t that tricky when marketers tell you to be connecting and engaging all the time?

It is and when you try to do it alone and you are emotionally involved in the business that can take a long time and take you nowhere.

This is why we’d like to spend a day with you. We are the pair of fresh eyes (in this case, 2 pairs), emotionally free and with a lot of experience in business to show you how your business can be top of mind, how it can be connecting with prospects and clients 24/7 without creating that sense of “old salad” and show you how to create a business choreography that attracts clients and keep them with you.

We can accomplish a lot in one day. We brainstorm, we create strategies, a positioning map, a marketing map and the business choreography gets laid out. Besides, we have real experience in different industries, unlike many marketers that have a one fits all strategy.

If you are local, you can come to our offices, if you are not, we’ll use Google hangouts, which is a 2 way video conference.

A full day working on your business with experts in client attraction and retention and super duper online marketers. Now, that is exciting!

Again, I’ll make an irresistible offer if you act in the next 48 hours. Your investment will be only $1,500 for the full day. That is half of the usual investment. In fact, very seldom we even offer the full day option. Yes, we can split that in 2 as long as we meet after November.

All you need to do is call 801-330-90-10 or write to buzz@buzzbooster.com

Just think on how things can be different in 2013 if you align everything in your business and have maps to guide you during your journey. No fluffy, no magic, directions that work only.

Of course, you can keep doing what you are doing and not invest in becoming irresistible to your market, or you can buy some cool product online that is cheap, promises a lot and delivers nothing. (this is the drug of choice of many business owners nowadays), but can you feel that funny smell coming our of your fridge?

48 hours: Your investment will be only $1,500 for the full day. That is half of the usual investment. Yes, we can split that in 2 payments as long as we meet in November or later.

All you need to do is call 801-330-90-10 or write to buzz@buzzbooster.com

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I got an e-mail

I got an e-mail this morning.
Subject line: Resume,
body of e-mail: attached resume.
Nothing else.
The resume is from a guy looking to be hired as a social media project manager. Now, about the social word in social media, doesn’t it mean some communication skills?

What an e-mail like this tells about a person? That he is willing to do the minimum necessary to accomplish things. There is a sense of entitlement, he deserves the job, doesn’t need to do much other than attach his resume to get it. Shows he thinks he is the only one sending a resume to our company and that we should hire him just because he exists.

It also tells that despite his probable knowledge in a technical side of social media, he is not worried in communicating with others, not very social, I would say. It also says that when in communication with clients he would follow the same style and not give them more than a line. Hey a line is a lot, we got less than that and he wants the job.

For a customer-centric company as all companies should be, this spells disaster. He is a big no for us even though the resume itself was quite good.

Now, what does this have to do with your business? Everything stars with good positioning, because positioning tells a story about you and your company. You may not be aware of what it is really telling to your market. Like this guy, he probably thinks he is doing the right thing in an efficient way. The reality is quite contrary.

Every single touch point with customers and prospects should be well thought of before taking action. Even a simple thing like sending an e-mail. Even if you have a super duper company with super duper services or products. Nothing will matter if when you get in touch with people you fail.

Simple but not common, which is sad.

You are telling a story very time, make sure you are telling the right story, the one that brings customers to you.

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ChamberWest Women In Business are excited to present the Buzz Boosters

Women In Business Present Buzz Boosters

Date: Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Time: 11:30-1:00pm
Location: Arbor Manor-2888 West 4700 South Salt Lake City, UT 84129, click here for directions
Cost $20 with RSVP and $30 day of.
Registration www.chamberwest.org/rsvp or call 801-977-8755

Shahar and Nashlah Boyayan are the founders of Buzz Booster,a mother-daughter operated small business marketing training company and social media agency that specializes in innovative marketing strategies for small business owners.

Their mission is to help business owners and entrepreneurs achieve long lasting prosperity. They know what it takes to build a business from scratch and have helped hundreds of businesses grow.
Welcome our friends Shahar and Nashla as they educate and entertain you on small business marketing! Don’t forget to bring business cards for building new business relationships and networking opportunities.

MIX & MINGLE NETWORKING ~ 11:30 AM – NOON

Introducing our Mix & Mingle Networking Opportunity! Promote your business before our monthly luncheon. Mix & mingle to capture new leads and network with an amazing group of women. Showcase your business or products before lunch with a FREE reserved table location and meet-and-greet attendees at the onset of our monthly Women in Business Luncheon. Tables are limited. For more information & to reserve your table location contact Jeanie Bowen, Membership Director at jeanie@chamberwest.org

We are collecting school supplies for Kearns Junior High, our adopted school. Please bring donation items to the WIB Luncheon on Tuesday, September 11.

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Social media marketing is the new SEO

Yes, we know we should be using social media marketing to engage and create a relationship with prospects and buyers but we cannot miss the fact that we need to be in search engines when people are looking for products and services we offer.
When buyers know what they want they go to search engines and you need to be there or your business will suffer.
Instead of investing hundreds of pounds a month for SEO wizardry, companies now will be forced to focus on the real, honest and authentic content that Social Networking and Blogs allow.

There were several changes related on how to optimize a site and many of the things you were already doing to bring people to your site are probably hurting you right now. For example, links.

I’m not going to go through the changes but want to show you how now, social media marketing is not optional anymore for businesses:

From now on, search engines will contain more and more social media mentions. Facebook, Twitter, Google plus profiles will have a bigger impact in search engines rankings. Share only relevant information on your networks to get attention.

The search engines now show results recommended by people in social networks. You can see how it works by searching for something while you are logged in and logged out. You will see 2 different results.

Quality content with one way will be of more importance in the future.

Work on rich snippets. This are the two lines after a title. This is very important and it provides people with a snippet of what they will see when they click.

Online videos are indexed by search engines and should be used.

Becoming a guest blogger will improve your ranks.

Mix content: Text, videos, pictures, presentations etc.

If you have filled out any social media profiles, this will improve your rankings: Google is now implementing an improved comprehensiveness of social media via 200 various public profile pages.

Things not to do:

Avoid money keywords when you create links
Stuff keywords on internal or external links
No longer rip content from one page and republish it on your own. Instead, this duplicate page content will be removed by Google.

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Smart entrepreneurs should take smart actions

Sounds obvious, I know, but why people don’t do it?
You see things changing in the market place, you see consumer behavior shifting, so why you as a business owner don’t adapt to it?
We find all kinds of excuses to avoid change and try new things but this impacts the results we have in business.

There are exceptions.
We talk a lot here that consumers don’t want to be over flooded with information, they just want small bites of information that they can apply and see results right away. In fact we say this all the time. Most people understand the concept and just keep doing whatever they do.

Chris Makell form Chris Makell coaching not only understood the concept, but took action. She decided to give entrepreneurs just the right amount of information so they can take action and see results fast.

She calls it Summer refresher series. 30 minutes where she interviews an expert and where they tell specific actions people need to take.
Simple, fun and effective. No sales at all, just content.

It is brilliant because she is giving people what they want and what they need.

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30 way to market your small business site online

Excellent article from Search Engine Watch that I decided to post here.

Are you looking for ways to market your small business website with a limited budget?

Whether it’s with established sites such as Google and Facebook, or newer outlets like Pinterest, there are plenty of options available to promote your site.

There are at least 30 ways to market your website with a time investment and no credit card required. Some of these are oldies but goodies, while others are newer and exciting avenues you may not have tried out yet.

Here are 30 things you can do today to get started marketing your website for free.

1. Press releases still work. Granted a submission to PRWeb or a Vocus account make the pickup and link benefit much easier, but those cost dollars – so for this article lets reiterate the best free press release sources:
24-7PressRelease.com
PRLog.org
IdeaMarketers.com
Send the press release to your local media outlets, or any niche media outlets that may be interested in what you do.

2 Claim, verify, and update your Google Local Business listing. This is extremely important. Google Local Listings have been absorbed into Google+, so be sure to check out this great resource over at Blumenthals.com to keep up to date on how to manage your Google Local Listing.

3 Find a niche social media site that pertains to your exact business and participate. Be helpful, provide relevant and useful information, and your word of mouth advertising will grow from that engagement.
Examples:
Travel or hospitality business – Tripadvisor.com forums
Photography store – Photo.net or RockTheShotForum.com
Wedding Planning or Favor site – Brides.com or Onewed.com forums

4 Search your niche or service plus forums to find ideas. If there isn’t a forum out there, consider starting one.

5 Build a Google+ page for your business and follow businesses that are related to your product or service niche. Share informative and relative content and link to your profile from your website. You should also consider allowing users to +1 your content on a page by page basis.

6 Setting up joint benefit with local businesses or others in your niche can help you reach eyes you never did before. Be sure to answer the question “Will my user find this information beneficial as they shop and purchase?” every time you link to a resource, or request a link or listing on another site.

7 Comment and offer original, well thought out, sensible information, opinion and help on blogs that are relevant to your website’s topic and be sure to leave your URL. Even if a nofollow tag is attached, you could gain a bit of traffic and some credibility as an authority on the subject matter. This is not blog comment spamming, this is engaging in a conversation relevant to your website’s topic.

8 Set up and verify a Webmaster Central Account at Google.

9 Set up a Bing Webmaster Tools account and verify it.

10 Update or create your XML sitemap and upload it to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.

11 Write a “how-to” article that addresses your niche for Wikihow.com or Answers.com. This is kind of fun and a good resource for getting mentions and links. Looking at your product or service in a step-by-step manner is often enlightening in several ways. It can help you better explain your products and services on your own website. I will say I don’t know why some of these sites still rank well, many of them are junk. I do like most of the answers on the two sites mentioned above. Be picky with where you participate.

12 Write unique HTML page titles for all of your pages. This is still extremely important, don’t skimp on this one.

13 Share your photos at Flickr – get a profile, write descriptions, and link to your website. Don’t share photos you don’t own or have permission to use.

14 Start a blog. There’s nothing wrong with getting the basics of blogging down by using a free service from Blogger or WordPress.

15 Make sure your Bing and Yahoo Local listings are up to date.

16 Update and optimize your description and URL at YP.com. They’ll try to get you to spend money on an upgraded listing or some other search marketing options. Don’t bother with that, but make sure the information is accurate and fresh.

17 Use your Bing Webmaster Tools account to look at your incoming links. How do they look? Are all of the sites relevant and on-topic? If not, reevaluate your link building practices and start contacting any of the irrelevant sites you can and ask them to take down your link. A clean and relevant incoming link profile is important; cleaning up bad links is a necessity until we can tell Google and Bing which links we want them to ignore.

18 Make a slideshow of your products or record an original how-to video and upload to YouTube. Be sure to optimize your title and descriptions. Once it’s uploaded, write a new page and embed the video on your own Web site. Add a transcription of the video if possible.

19 Try a new free keyword tool for researching website optimization, then see #20.

20 Add a page to your site focused on a top keyword phrase you found in #19.

21 Build a Facebook Page and work to engage those that are interested in your product or service. Facebook is so much more robust than it ever was! Create groups, events, and photo albums. Link to your Facebook profile from your site and allow visitors to your site to like and share your content.

22 Install Google Analytics if you don’t have any tracking software. The program is pretty amazing and it’s free. You need to do this if you haven’t already. It’s that important.

23 Start Twittering or start doing it much better than you are now – it’s a great way to network with like-minded individuals.

24 Pinterest is hot right now. If you have visually stimulating content that is relevant to the site’s demographic, you can find great success right now. Be sure you’re using solid practices for marketing on Pinterest as you get started.

25 Create a new list in Twitter and follow profiles of industry experts you know and trust. Use this as your modern feed reader. I don’t use RSS feed readers anymore. I like content that has been vetted by my peers and is worthy of a tweet or two.

26 Try a new way to write an ad for a struggling PPC ad group or campaign.

27 Review your Google Analytics In-Page insights and take note of how users are interacting with your page. Where to they click, what is getting ignored. Make changes based on this knowledge.

28 Set up a Google Content Experiment through your Analytics account and test with the information you obtained and changes you made in number 27.

29 Build a map at Google Maps and add descriptions for your storefront, locations, and nearby useful points of interest. Make your map public and embed it on your own website. Add links back to relevant content on your site if possible to each point of interest.

30 Rinse and repeat.

There you have it – 30 ways to market your website. Get to work and make something happen! There’s no reason to say you can’t be successful because you don’t have a huge advertising budget. Time is all you need.

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Strategy Sessions that Convert Well

The number one thing we hear from prospects, specially coaches and consultants is that they give those free strategy sessions and have a very hard time converting that prospect into a client. They then go on to blame people for not having money to buy or whatever it is they are doing to market those strategy sessions.

While the quality of the prospect you attract is a key factor, 99% of the time is your sales process that is not structured enough and simple mistakes done during the negotiation.

There are several ways to fix this and over the years we have a process that works really well.

Specially for 1 on 1 negotiations.

We have explained this in dept here. How to close more sales.