Yesterday I sent out a simple “tweet” saying I was off to give a presentation that would warn people that Twitter should not be used for business. Within moments the broadcaster and communications consultant James Lush had replied saying he’d be fascinated to know why on earth I was saying such a thing. Well, this morning I delivered my suggestions to the Business Leaders Group where several CEOs and Managing Directors had gathered to find out whether or not social networking could help their business.

So, I rose to my feet, took a deep breath and suggested the un-suggestible. In fact, James Lush was not the only person who wanted to know why I was daring to say Twitter is not for business. Several people I met this morning at the Business Leaders Group said the same thing. They want to know how could I say such a thing when there are plenty of examples of companies making money using Twitter.

But therein lies the twist in my tale. The companies making money from Twitter are not using it as a business tool. Far from it; they are using it as a social tool.

Consider life before Twitter – if you can remember back far enough, before the internet. How did you go about getting new business in those days? And how did you go about getting more business out of existing clients? Unless you are in the fast moving consumer goods industry, business has always been about relationships. You got more business from existing clients by socialising with them – having lunch, playing golf, going down the pub, even, perhaps, going to their daughter’s wedding. But whatever you did, you didn’t discuss business – politics, yes, other people, certainly and “putting the world to rights”, of course. But business – pah! Who wants to talk about that? Yet, despite no talking about business you got more of it from these people.

And, in the past, when it came to getting new customers, what did  you do? You took every opportunity to get to know them. Instead of filling their minds with “buy this” messages you sat down with them, chatted to them, asked them questions about themselves. You were trying to extract as much information out of them as possible to see where you could “fit”. But the encounter with potential clients was always social, not “salesy”. Indeed, if it were focused on sales, what happened? You were accused of being a “hard seller” using …tactics”. In other words, as soon as the conversation turned to business, that’s exactly what you lost. When the conversation was social, you gained business.

Now, fast forward to Twitter. What happens when you see a tweet that is a business conversation, when it is sales focused? Almost certainly you ignore it; you might even get angry and stop following the individual. You will, of course, find an endless array of “social networking gurus” forcing social networking guff at you on Twitter, which makes it seem that these “experts” know a thing or two and therefore if your business does the same thing you’ll be OK. Wrong. Come back in a year and see how many of the “gurus” are still in business….mmmm….I wonder?

The successful businesses on Twitter are not using their tweets to focus on business. Instead, they are simply being social; chatting, holding conversations, being friendly, even showing altruistic kindness. When you see Twitter merely as a system to hold conversations, as a social tool, your business will do well out of it. All the time you see it as a business tool it will fail you. So, don’t “do business” on Twitter, simply socialise – just like you used to do before the web came along.

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.

If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:

Think about it. Every single day, your customers, prospects, and employees are inundated with information from e-mail, voicemails, spam, and memos. So how do you get your important messages across to them in a way that doesn’t get lost in all of that noise? The answer is podcasts.

So what is a podcast?

Podcasts are the new way of distributing audio content. A podcast is an audio or video recording that someone can subscribe to, receive, download, listen to, or watch using a their computer, iPod, M3 player, iPhone, iPad or smartphone. Your customers and prospects can therefore listen to or watch this information whenever and wherever they wish—in their cars, during lunch, in the evening, at the office, at the gym, while jogging, at the beach, up a mountain, by a lake or even on their day off.

A podcast resembles a TV programme or radio show, but is much easier to create and distribute. And it costs nothing to do so. Podcasting requires you to create an audio file, then make it known and available, as described below.

Why podcasting might be a good idea

If you’ve never considered podcasting, let me give you some more reasons why you should. For one thing, tens of millions of people around the world already subscribe to podcasts on virtually any topic you can imagine, and that number is growing exponentially. Even 9 year old schoolkids in the UK are now taught podcasting … which means that it will soon be ubiquitous.

Today’s college students get recordings (podcasts) of their professors’ lectures to play back later. Some company CEOs send out monthly messages to their workers via a podcast. Thanks to groups of dedicated podcasters, you can also take self-guided tours of several museums and landmark buildings by downloading an audio tour before you leave home. The potential uses for podcasts are only limited by your imagination.

Most people think of podcasts as audio files, if indeed they even know what podcasts are. But that is no longer necessarily the case. Podcasts today are a vehicle for many types of media that individuals can use as a means of delivering standalone content, or easily integrated into social media.

It’s easy to add music, digital photographs, company logos, animations, videos or anything else it takes to get your message across.

Thousands of hours of audio in your pocket

The ability to download, organise and carry thousands of hours of songs, audio recordings, podcasts and other programs on a device you can slip into your pocket is amazing. And with the convergence of technology, Apple’s iPhone and iPad also have iPods built-in. Most smartphones also offer broadly comparable capabilities.

Audio is particularly appealing to people on the go, and it has certain advantages over text-based tools and even video. It’s unlikely that you’re going to read something or view video while you’re exercising, but audio is the perfect companion.

Why do you suppose so many car manufacturers are rushing to make their cars iPod-compatible? Because so many people who drive—especially those who spend a lot of time in their cars—like to listen to music, news, sport, politics, weather, and other forms of audio information.

Historically, this was the exclusive domain of radio, an industry that was built upon finding ways to entertain, inform, and then sell stuff to a captive audience of drivers during the highly lucrative drive-time hours. But that was then.

Car manufacturers today know that iPods and iPhones have become such ubiquitous and indispensable devices that people want to integrate them with their in-car hi-fi systems. And now you and your business can be there too, and in all of the other places people take their iPods and smartphones, provided you know why, when, and how to make podcasting part of your business strategy.

Creating and sharing audio

If you’re in any way daunted by the prospect of recording and editing audio, don’t be. Creating and sharing audio is a doddle. There’s even a good chance that all the tools you need are already built in to your computer or iPhone. In any event it doesn’t take long to get up to speed with audio recording, editing and sharing. And once you’ve created your audio content it’s easy to host it on your blog, or use any of a number of sites that are dedicated to hosting podcasts.

It’s also quick and easy to upload your podcasts to iTunes. Since 85% of all podcasts globally originate on iTunes, being featured there potentially exposes you to millions of prospective customers or advocates. And a percentage of them will be searching for exactly what you offer, however exotic your line of business.

OK, that’s the theory. What about the practice?

In the top 10 on iTunes at my first attempt

Encouraged by Ian Scott, who interviewed me for one of his podcasts a few months ago, click here, I recently had my first attempt at putting together two podcasts and submitting them to iTunes, the world’s largest distribution channel for such recordings.

I merely recorded the content of a couple of blogs I’d already written because I needed to work out a step by step process to pass on to participants in my Eureka program so that they could gain hands-on familiarity with the process, as part of a much wider social media strategy. This was one of fifteen familiarisation exercises, each one using a different social media tool.

I had no particular expectations of success. It was just an experiment that took an evening from start to finish. But to my utter amazement the two podcasts reached the top 10 best selling marketing and management titles on iTunes exactly three weeks after submission, and were also featured in the top 3 new and noteworthy podcasts. This was completely unexpected, and I probably wouldn’t even have even known had Ian Scott not alerted me. Click here to hear the podcasts.

Based on what I learned from the exercise, I wrote up around 3-pages of notes on podcasting and incorporated them into the Social Media Roadmap manual I was creating for participants in my invitation-only Eureka program. That manual is one first of four such publications I’ve been developing on social media and online marketing, and much of this article has been extracted from it. Click here to view the curriculum for the first three years of the Eureka program and where social media fits into the picture.

Creating a podcast step by step

Step 1: Download iTunes. If you don’t already have iTunes on your computer, go to www.Apple.com, and download it for your Mac or Windows PC.

Step 2: Try iTunes. Try it, even if you don’t plan on buying and downloading music. See how the interface works.

Step 3: Prepare a podcast. Creating your own podcasts is easy, so don’t be daunted if you’ve never created one. Think about WIIFM (What’s In It for Me?), from your customers’ and prospects’ point of view. What can you tell them in 10 minutes or less that is important to them?

Gather information. Write an opening explaining who you are, what your subject matter is, and what you will be talking about.

Write a script for your content based on your area of professional expertise or other subject matter of interest to you. Or prepare a few bullet points so that you can just talk spontaneously on the subject, without sounding too rehearsed or rigid. And if you don’t want to plan out your podcast—then it’s fine to just wing it!

Write your close or sign-off, reminding your audience who you are; what your subject matter is, and where they can find out more.

Step 4: Download your sound editing software. Plenty of inexpensive or free sound editing software is available to record your podcast. A lot of podcasters use Audacity. It provides easy-to-use, high-quality tools. You can download it from the internet and it’s free! If you have a Mac, GarageBand is probably the best choice as it has an entire podcast studio built in and can handle every aspect of Podcasting for you with ease.

Get your head around the software. Read the instructions and/or go through the tutorials so that you know how to use it.

Step 5: Record your podcast. Once you know what you want to say, it’s time to record it. Use your computer’s built-in microphone or connect an external microphone for better quality. I used an decent external microphone for mine because I found the built-in one was picking up sounds from the computer. Open Audacity or Garageband, hit the record button and let your thoughts flow!

N.B. Most people only have about a 7-minute attention span for audio. Taking any more time than that will likely lose your listeners’ interest.

Step 6: Edit your podcast. Sound editing sounds scary, but it is really easier than you think. It’s as easy as copying, cutting, pasting, and deleting. In most cases, you will at least want to eliminate gaps in your recording and paste together your intro, your recording and your sign-off. I used Garageband which also made it easy to blend a bit of music into the start and close of the piece.

Step 7: Save your podcast to disk. Be sure to save your podcasts in a usable file format. Most people want your content in an MP3 format that is compatible with their digital music players. Be conscious of file size too. Most music tracks runs at about 3-5 MB each, so try to keep your finished files in the single-digit MB range.

Step 8: Upoad your podcast to your blog. Add your podcast to your media library on your WordPress blog. Create a “Podcasts” (or equivalent) post category. Create a new post for each podcast. Add a title and describe your podcast in the post. Somewhere in the post add a link to your podcast file. Select the “podcasts” category and add tags as appropriate. Click Publish, and your podcast will be published as a post in the “podcasts” category.

Step 9: Download and configure Podcast Channels plugin. If you’ll be hosting your podcasts on your WordPress blog, add a Podcast specific plugin. I tried Podcast Channels and Blubrry, and settled on the latter. Configure the settings to work with your “Podcasts” category.

N.B. You don’t HAVE to host your podcasts on your blog. You can also use services like Podbean to host, syndicate, and distribute your podcasts for free.

Step 10: Create an RSS feed for your podcasts. By RSS feeding your podcasts, you are making them available to literally millions of potential listeners. Go to your blog’s home page. Go to the “Podcasts” category and go to the RSS feed for that category and copy the podcast feed URL.

Step 11: Upload your podcast to iTunes. Tens of millions of people search iTunes every day looking for content that might be similar to yours. Be sure to follow their guidelines to ensure your podcast’s success. And keep in mind that if your podcast falls under the “educational” category, you should upload it to iTunes’ “iUniversity.”

To submit your podcast to iTunes, click here. Paste your podcast feed URL into the relevant box. Click continue. Check that the details on the next page are correct and hey presto, once your content has been accepted, your podcasts will be available to millions of people worldwide.

What next?

I enjoyed my first attempt at podcasting, am still amazed at the results, and will now regularly be publishing podcasts. It is so easy, and so many people like it, that it would be a shame not to. How about joining me in that adventure? It’s easier than you think.

What’s your experience with podcasting? Has this article been useful? Please leave your comments and thoughts below?

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.

If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:

The simplistic view of social media is that you join sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You create a profile. You find people you know and invite them to connect with you or follow you. Over time your participation grows. You follow and connect with more people that interest you. And you develop your own following. Eventually you build relationships and trust, some of which results in new business.

That’s absolutely fine, as far as it goes. It can also be enjoyable, even addictive. But it isn’t exactly a strategy to take you to market leadership in your niche using social media.

So with this article I want to share with you an overview of what I’ve learned about preparing for social media success in your business. This has come about as a result of several months invested in developing an in-depth social media roadmap, supported by detailed written materials, a series of exercises and a number of interactive planning tools for the aspiring market leaders in my Eureka program.

Can you define the term “Social Media”?

The explosive growth over the past few years of online marketing in general and social media in particular has attracted the attention of millions of businesses. It’s dawning on more and more businesses leaders that social media is likely to be one of the most important changes that has ever come about in business.

Millions of businesses know they need to embrace it. But many still can’t explain the meaning of the term, and few know how to develop a meaningful social media strategy, or have any real idea of what’s involved.

It turns out that nearly 70% of the 600-plus respondents in a 2009 survey were unsure of the meaning of social media. But nearly every respondent felt that social media would somehow revolutionise the world. They felt that they should know the meaning of the term, but didn’t, and in some ways they also feared social media because they didn’t understand it’s implications or whether it would even threaten their existence.

This parallels the reactions that occurred when railways, telephones, cars and aircraft first started to proliferate. People instinctively understood that these new technologies would change the world, but they also feared them because they knew they would change the status quo. They also had no idea how it would impact on them; what part, if any, they would play in the process; or what sacrifices they’d have to make to accommodate these new advances. And that’s exactly where social media stands today.

My own journey

As an early participant in several of the better social networks, I learned what they were about. Along the way I read a lot, put ideas I learned into practice and accumulated considerable knowledge, data and experience.

Among other things, early in 2009 I managed to achieve the largest following on Twitter in the UK for a non-media celebrity. And in March 2010 I was ranked the UK’s No.1 marketer out of 42,559 UK advertising and marketing professionals on LinkedIn, based on recommendations. So I think I can say I have a reasonably solid grounding in social media.

Bit by bit I observed and analysed how the top social networking sites worked; watched them grow exponentially as people increasingly got involved; and have witnessed a fair amount of feature convergence as the sites themselves began to understand what people can, and want, to do using social media, and as they borrowed good ideas from each other.

Above all I was looking for a way to build a solid step-by-step social media strategy that would serve any business well. Participants in my program need to exactly know what to do, when to do it and why. So bit by bit I’ve been assembling an in-depth social media roadmap based on a logical series of steps that can be used to create create a worthwhile social media presence and community.

Step 1: Understanding

The first step in the process is to understand what Social Media is. I like David Meerman Scott’s 61-word explanation of social media marketing:

You can buy attention (advertising)
You can beg for attention from the media (PR)
You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales)

Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free: a YouTube video, a blog, a research report, photos, a Twitter stream, an ebook, a Facebook page.

This explanation makes it clear that social media is much more than mere participation in social networking sites. It requires you to become a publisher of written, audio and/or video content. You then need to build a community around that content.

Step 2: Familiarisation

The second step is to become familiar with the essentials of each social media element. That requires you to get to know, understand and experience all of the following: Social networking; publishing; photo sharing; audio; video; microblogging; livecasting; virtual worlds; gaming; rss; aggregators; search; mobile marketing; interpersonal communication technologies and an ever-growing array of productivity applications.

As you become familiar with each element in the social media ecosystem, it’s worth taking time to consider the possible applications for each element in your business.

Step 3: Hands-on exploration and assessment

Once you understand the purpose of each social media element, I’d advise you to embark on some hands-on exploration of some of the better known tools in each category. This first hand familiarity will allow you to broadly assess the available social media tools, and determine which of them potentially fit in with what you do.

Participants in my program are asked to undertake a series of specific exploration exercises, followed by the completion of a scorecard for each of the tools they experience.

Step 4: Discover your social media niche

Enlightened by these first-hand experiences, your fourth step is to assess your strengths and weaknesses relative to each social media category, and also identify the opportunities and threats.

Once this SWOT analysis has been completed and the results summarised, it should be possible to identify the right social media niche for your business to focus on. This will be where you can play to your strengths and start building a community around the people who share the same interests as you.

Your community may be local, regional or national. Or it may be global.

Step 5: Plan for your social media success

With your niche decided, the fifth step is to build a solid set of foundations for your future social media success. To operate successfully in the social media ecosystem you have to view yourself as a publisher of content relating to your areas of interest or expertise.

Audience: You therefore have to identify which audience or market niche you will be serving and with whom you will be developing an interactive relationship. Achieving a clear definition of your audience is crucial to your success.

Doing so requires you to understand their behaviours; attitudes; values; beliefs; needs and preferences. You need to assemble demographic data and discover any common interests or goals.

You also need to identify the small number of individuals within each group who have a knack for influencing what the other members of the group say, believe and do. Knowing who these influencers and promoters are will add tremendous viral value to your eventual offering.

By carrying out this research you can establish the common characteristics that will allow you to interact with four or five clearly defined audience personas.

Competition: Once you have a clear idea of your proposed content and the likely characteristics of your audience, you need to assess your competition. This requires you to ask some important questions. For example:

Who else is already catering to the same audience? In what ways are they doing so? What tools do they use? What is the quality of their content? How many people are part of their community? How much interaction occurs on their site(s)? What is the quality of that interaction? What are the compelling advantages of your concept over theirs? What additional compelling advantages could you offer?

Concept: By now you should have gathered enough information to start building a value proposition that describes how your intended audience will benefit from your content. Your content in turn will relate to the products or services you offer; the additional expertise you bring; and the things that will encourage your audience to contribute.

As you go through this exercise, you may well find that you have several workable concepts, each with its own distinct audience personas. In each case you have to define your concept, thinking in terms of the needs of your potential community rather than the needs of your business.

Based on your research you will now need to convert your concept into a 100-150 word concept statement that you can share with almost anyone in less than two minutes.

Sample content: You can then start expanding the details of your offering, perhaps even producing some sample content to demonstrate to your potential audience the flavour and feel of your finished offering, and highlighting the advantages you’ll be offering over your competition.

Audience input: I recommend that you then invite a reasonable sized sampling of your potential audience to assist you in the process of refining, developing and positioning your offering. In tapping into their collective wisdom, I have to point out that you will only gain and maintain their attention if you can demonstrate your sincerity in communicating with them, and of course by incorporating their feedback in what you do.

Sales viability: As a business engaging in social media you should always be mindful of the sales viability of your concept. This is where you need to carefully consider which revenue model or models to adopt.

You can sell products, services or information; advertising and sponsorship; earn commissions on your site’s role in selling transactions carried out by others; offer subscriptions; operate a “Freemium” model where you offer certain content free but you also offer premium versions at additional cost; or you can offer software as a cloud-based service, of which there are many well known examples.

It’s often possible to offer several of these revenue models simultaneously.

At the end of this planning process you’ll know what audience to target; have an appealing concept that’s been tested and refined with their help; an understanding of who you’ll be competing with; a number of compelling advantages to offer … and one or more revenue generation models.

Step 6: Evaluate and organise your existing resources

The sixth step is to evaluate and organise your resources. This requires you to evaluate the social media awareness of your entire team; tap into their collective wisdom and experience; and engage them in your social media plans.

From there you should be able to pinpoint your social media starting point, i.e. The strategies you should deploy at the outset of your social media journey.

The right strategies at the outset are likely to vary enormously from one situation to another depending on how far you’ve already travelled down the social media road; your level of competence in doing so; the social media skills of different people within your team; and the final destination you hope to reach.

Step 7: Creating your social media implementation plan

Having completed the first six steps in the process you can now take the seventh step, which is to create your social media implementation plan.

Your implementation plan should be realistic because it’s not practical to simultaneously introduce hundreds of tools from the social media ecosystem into the daily operations of your business. The introduction of even a dozen tools could be disruptive, so it’s important to pace yourself.

While human nature often compels us to try lots of different alternatives as fast as we can, it is better to think in terms of adding one new tool every month.

That will give you the time and space you need to promote each new tool to your employees, prospects and customers, and evaluate how effective you have been in implementing each tool. As the year progresses you can also evaluate how well the tools complement each other … and you can measure the effect on your revenues and profits.

If it becomes evident that adjustments are required, you’ll be able to do make them as you go along. The key is to remain flexible and experimental.

The implementation process

With your planning completed, you need to start the all-important implementation process and roll-out.

That implementation process will involve such things as:

• Building your online destinations using websites, blogs, forums and wikis.
• Building trust, visibility and engagement using elements like RSS; SEO; email; social networks; search engine marketing; mobile marketing and measurement
• Deepening your engagement using elements like photo sharing; audio sharing; video sharing; and interpersonal communication.

These topics go well beyond the scope of this post and will be covered in future articles.

So, as you can see, there’s a whole lot more to preparing for global social media success than merely joining Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And preparing for success itself is only the first part of the process.

The process described here is covered in explicit detail as part of the Eureka program for aspiring market leaders. You can view the curriculum here.

Finally, please rate the article and comment on what you’ve learned from it. What actions will you now take as a result? Please also share any ideas and tips that you think will assist anyone in their planning for social media success.

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.

If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:

Late this afternoon I put out the following message on Twitter, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom: “Have created 3 stunning websites in 2 days. Used to use vastly expensive web design co who took 6 months to achieve fraction of the same result.”

The tweet immediately excited massive interest. Several people wanted to know what software I had used. A professional web designer from South Africa responded “Impossible … send URL’s please,” which of course I did.

One person said “Wow, three websites in 2 days = impressive!” He then asked me how I achieved such fast website building and how much I’d charge to create a CMS website for him. My response to him, and to anyone else with the same question, is that whilst I can build websites rapidly and very competently, it is not what I do, nor is it a service I am ever likely to offer.

The best I can do is explain what I did and how it came about. So here goes …

In the past I used vastly expensive web designers …

In the past I believed that web design, to be any good, should be left in the hands of the professionals. When a valued client needed a new website a couple of years ago, I immediately suggested a web design company with an excellent reputation, who had developed and refined their own content management system over many years. I had known the owner of the company for nearly a decade, and also knew several of their satisfied clients. So I recommended that they do the design.

The company was briefed in October 2007. They came up with a proposal at the end of November. The proposal was finally approved and the company started work on a “functional specification.” This went backwards and forwards a few times until it was approved in February 2008. It took four months to get this far.

I commissioned a first class copywriter to come up with the copy, based on a 20-page master document we had already created. The copywriter turned the job around in a few days, and the copy was ready to go by the end of February. No problems there. He did an excellent job.

Based on a briefing from the graphic designer who had designed my client’s visual branding, the web designers came up with a mockup of the proposed home page early in March. It went backwards and forwards numerous times before we were happy with it. In mid-May the design was finally approved. It had taken 7 months to reach this stage.

From there the web designers set about building the website. This involved building the main menu structure, which then couldn’t easily be changed, and a series of page templates based on the approved design. They also had to integrate a blog, the means to show random testimonials, random team profiles and a few other small refinements. This took another 6 weeks.

Finally, early in July 2008 we took delivery of the unpopulated website. It had taken 9 months to get this far.

We then added images and copy to all the pages, which took about a day. A few days were spent testing and tweaking the site, and getting the bugs worked out. The finished result was presented to the client and approved. And in mid July it went live.

But all was not well. Fifteen months and many £ thousands after starting the project, the blogs still didn’t work, the content management system was clunky with a dreadful user interface and turned out to be a real pain in the backside … and the client was not happy.

Then I discovered WordPress … and everything suddenly changed

While all this was going on, someone recommended that I look at WordPress. I had looked at it casually some 2-3 years earlier, but wasn’t overly impressed at the time. It was suggested that I should look at WordPress + Bluehost + Woo Themes.

I looked into all three, and was very impressed this time. Set up an account with Bluehost. It was hassle free and only took a few seconds. Transferred my domain across, again a painless process. Within a minute or two I had installed WordPress using tools provided in the Bluehost control panel, and was ready to go.

The back end of the WordPress Content Management System turned out to be VASTLY superior to that used in the very expensive website described above. Yet anyone can install WordPress, and it costs nothing.

I added some pages. It was both easy and intuitive. Arranged them in the order I wanted. Set up my preferences. Downloaded some useful plugins. Found some attractive design themes, many of them available free of charge. Uploaded the ones I liked to the site. Experimented with them. Settled on one I liked and started to build the site.

Even as a novice it took me less than a day in total, excluding ongoing tweaks to the copy. My only outlay was for a few stock images from iStockPhoto, but they weren’t expensive at about $3 apiece (now $5). Within a day I had an excellent website up and running using a very robust platform that was also used by millions of others. And it cost me next to nothing.

Over time I discovered other attractive themes and useful plug-ins that could add extra functionality to the site. I eventually decided to switch to a premium theme. But at $20 a year, it was hardly expensive … and if you’re reading this now at marketingwzdom.com, you’re viewing the final result right now.

I started my blog. Within its first month it ranked in the top 2% in the world. The site is professionally designed, looks good and gets frequent compliments. In its first 7 months it attracted some 150,000 visitors from 90 countries, and ranks within the top 5% of sites in the world. And that’s without even trying.

The WordPress content management system is also extremely robust. And intuitive. I couldn’t say either of those things about the so-called professionally designed website described earlier, even though the developer is considered to be one of the best out there. My WordPress installation made that system obsolete overnight.

Which brings me to the subject of my tweet …

Three new sites in just two days

Having seen how easy WordPress was to use, my partner was often frustrated by the complete ineptitude of some of the web designers she’d had to deal with on behalf of her clients. Trivial matters were often blown up into big issues, and simplest tasks were made to seem impossible to perform.

So when her sister needed a new website for her business, my partner offered to create one for her. As recently as a year ago she would never have dreamed that she would ever be able to put a website together, let alone a decent one. A client for whom she produces newsletters also needed a new website, so she offered to put that one together too.

She initially spent a few days putting the sites together using some free WordPress themes, and getting up to speed on WordPress in general. I felt they needed to look more professional and wasn’t keen on the typography, but found that it was’t too easy to customise them.

Around that time I heard about the Canvas theme from Woo Themes. I checked it out and was very impressed by its capabilities as described on their site http://www.woothemes.com. I suggested to my partner that she should use the Canvas theme, which can easily be customised in dozens of ways.

A few days later we needed a new site to promote an upcoming joint venture with one of my clients. By now I knew exactly what was entailed in putting together a WordPress site, and knew what Canvas was designed to do. I knew I could get the unpopulated site up and running in a matter of hours using WordPress and Canvas.

I then discovered that Woo Themes offers something called the Woo Themes Playground, where you can set up a free account and experiment with any of their themes as if it were installed on your own site. I signed up and in an hour or two had pulled together a really nice customised site using Canvas. And yes it turned out to be every bit as good as claimed.

First website — Sunday

I bought the Canvas theme. It was $70. Within a few minutes my partner’s sister’s site had been switched to Canvas. I spent an hour or two setting up the navigation, pages, posts and styling for the theme, deciding which pages should have three columns; two columns or be full width. In Canvas this is a doddle to set up. It is also extremely easy to set up custom navigation. The theme is a joy to use.

Using Photoshop I came up with a nice full width header image. I’ve been using Photoshop since 1990, soon after it was originally launched, so it only took a few minutes to do this, even though I only use the program occasionally and am now somewhat rusty with it. Loaded the resulting image onto the site. It looked great. Tweaked the colour scheme so that it complimented the header image. Then arranged to meet my partner’s sister to get her feedback and tweak it while we met. That was two days ago.

She liked the design immediately. We spent a couple of hours tweaking it here and there over a coffee. She was delighted. Within hours we had accomplished a whole lot more than the professional web designers had achieved in 9 months, at a cost of £ many thousands. It’s now just a matter of adding the copy and images, which doesn’t take long, and the site will be ready to go live.

Second website — Monday

The following morning, i.e. yesterday, I had arranged to meet a colleague and my joint venture partner to decide what we needed to include on the joint venture website. I decided to create the site there and then in the meeting. This would have been inconceivable a couple of years ago.

We met at a hotel and used their Wifi to connect to the web. I set up a new account with Bluehost. Within a minute WordPress was installed and ready to go. Uploaded the Canvas theme, and we were in business. By now I knew my way around the theme’s customisation options, so it took no time to get up to speed on the finer details.

We decided on the fly which pages would be needed. We created them there and then. We also set up some special blog post categories to use within the navigation, and created several dummy blog posts for each of the special categories to check that the navigation worked as intended. It did. A few minutes later we had created the navigation menu structure using a combination of pages and categories — very easy to do with Canvas.

In fact I learned that Woo Themes’ custom navigation menu set up has impressed WordPress to such an extent that they have delayed the release of WordPress 3.0 to incorporate this functionality into the final release. I can confirm that it revolutionises the construction of navigation menus. You decide what pages or categories you want to use, then just drag and drop them into the sequence you want, edit display names as appropriate and click save. Job done.

We then tweaked the menu descriptions and words a few times. Within a few minutes we were all delighted with the result. Then it was a matter of finalising the look and feel of the site before we went our separate ways again.

I looked through various images I already owned to see if one could be repurposed as a full width header. Found one that was perfect. Cropped it to size. Uploaded it. It looked great. We decided to blend it with a cityscape image to communicate the right message at a glance.

Looked for a suitable cityscape image from a stock image library. Found the right one almost immediately. Bought it there and then. Fired up Photoshop. In a minute or two the two images were blended together (one of my colleagues said he’d had to pay £ thousands in the past to achieve a similar effect) and I added some text to the banner.

Uploaded the banner image to the site. It looked great. Tweaked the colour scheme on the site to complement the header image. Again it really only took a few minutes, and we had a result we were all delighted with.

I gave my colleagues access to the back-end content management system. One of them spent a couple of hours today copying and pasting the appropriate text. It took five minutes to link the site to a third party payment processor. The copy now just needs tweaking, refining and editing. And we need to select and add a few images to lift the pages before the site goes live.

Once again, we accomplished in well under half a day what the web designers took 9 months to deliver … and every part of what we created in that short time works exactly as it should, unlike the vastly expensive web site I described at the beginning of this piece.

Third site — Monday Evening

The third site? When I got back from yesterday’s meeting my partner asked me to help her with her second site. I started after dinner yesterday evening, and the job was completed before I had to go to bed. I spent an hour or two this morning working out how to incorporate an image slide show on the home page. Figured it out with a bit of delving. And hey presto the job was done. And she was delighted.

The end result? 3 great looking websites in less than 2 days. They still need to be populated with copy and images before going live. But that’s not a big job. The point is that using WordPress and Canvas we have accomplished three times as much in two days as the professional web designers managed to accomplish with just one site in 9 months, and at vast cost.

Can anyone create a decent site in half a day?

Can anyone turn out really decent sites this easily? Yes, but with a couple of caveats. Whether the end result looks professional enough to impress is down to your eye for design; flair for colour selection and ability to arrange the elements in a visually appealing manner. An attractive and intuitive user interface also makes or breaks the design for me. Not everyone has those skills and abilities, including plenty of professional web designers. And not everyone has the tools to hand that I had, like Photoshop and Easycrop, or the knowledge of how to use them to produce a particular result. And not everyone will start the task with the workable plan in their head, that I had, from the moment they start using the tools.

I should also point out that when I say “create a site” I’m referring to building a fully functional but unpopulated site. Copy and images would still have to be added. But this is no harder than using a word processor. And if the content has already been planned and written, it doesn’t entail much more than copying, pasting, and uploading the relevant images from your computer to the site. The most time-consuming task, in my experience, is finding the right images to use.

If you’re completely unfamiliar with WordPress, Photoshop and image libraries it might take you a week to achieve the result I was able to produce in half a day. But that’s still way better than the months, vast cost and endless frustration entailed in using some of the traditional web designers out there who still (unwittingly?) use obsolete methods to achieve inferior results at vastly inflated costs. And once the first site is up and running, it won’t take you long to set up a second one based on what you learn from the first one.

People who already know WordPress, Woo Themes’ Canvas, and many of the other good premium WordPress themes won’t be particularly surprised by any of this. But lots of other people will, I’m sure, be shaken to the core. Based on the responses to my tweet earlier, and the considerable interest it generated, this really does change everything!

If you’ve had experience with WordPress and can recommend certain themes or plugins, please share your experiences by leaving your comments below.

Update: Since this piece was written I have moved the Marketing Wizdom site across to Canvas as well.

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Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.

If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:

Are you thinking about starting a blog? If so, there are several things you should keep in mind. Here are the top 10 tips you should keep in mind before you launch a blog.

1. Be Specific About Your Goals: Oh, sure, everyone knows that you should have an objective for your blog before you launch it. But most people aren’t specific in their goal-setting. Do you want it to attract customers? Do you want it to add personality to your brand? Or do you simply want a channel to communicate your take on the latest headlines? Be specific.
2. Think Backwards: Jerry Brown was a great advertising man who decided the best way to sell a product was to get inside the mind of the customer. He called it Thinking Backwards. When you’re Thinking Backwards about your blog, ask yourself “What’s in it for my reader?” Nobody comes back to a blog unless they get tools, tips or techniques that improve their lives in one way or another.
3. Write Headlines that People Will Google: If you want traffic to your site, then write headlines that are Google-able. People don’t Google “Engines,” they Google “How to fix a 1954 V-8 Chrysler engine” or “V-8 Chrysler engine.” Write your headlines the way people Google. That’ll ensure better traffic and readership.
4. Vary the Length of Your Blogs: A lot of people wonder how long a blog post should be. The correct answer is as long as you want it to be. That said, your readers will appreciate it (and come back for more) if your posts vary in length. Remember, variety is the spice of life.
5. Use Guest Bloggers: Eventually, all bloggers need a break now and then. You can keep your ideas and your writing fresh by taking time off and stepping away from your blog. Make a policy of having regular guest bloggers. That way, you can maintain the quality of your work without sacrificing quantity.
6. Blog 3 to 5 Times a Week: Some people won’t agree with this, but we’ve found that unless you blog 3 to 5 times a week, Google, Yahoo and MSN won’t rank your blog as high.
7. Know Your Blogging Platforms: The most common blogging platforms are WordPress, Drupal, Typepad and Google’s Blogger. They’re all good. We use WordPress and love it. Drupal has a more graphical interface. Typepad has been around a long time. And Blogger is good if you’re a beginner.
8. Enhance Your Blog with Plugins: Plugins are mini-software programs that make your blog more user-friendly. No matter what platform you use, be sure to check out the Plugins. Your visitors will have a better experience that way.
9. Stay on Topic: It’s easy to get distracted on your blog or to write about off-topic subjects. But your readers aren’t interested in off-topic subjects. They’re interested in whatever it is you specialize in. So stay on-topic as much as possible.
10. Ask Questions: To encourage reader-engagement, you should ask questions at the end of your posts. Don’t ask just for the sake of asking. Ask because your readers probably have a lot of good ideas and comments you haven’t thought of.

Does that make sense? Is there anything we’ve left off? If you were giving advice to a new blogger, what would you tell them?

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Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.

If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:

The post is called “9 Ways People Respond to Your Online Content” and is now republished here, with Jamie’s kind permission …

Blogs and Twitter have almost eliminated any barrier to publishing. You have an idea and in a few minutes your thoughts can be online. Think about it – with every person thinking about more than 50,000 thoughts a day, producing online content can be simple.

Maybe. But simply churning out meaningless content does not guarantee that others will read what you write. Make this mistake and people will read what you write and write you off.

What’s the alternative?

Use your creativity to generate content that will inspire and transform the lives of the audience in a positive way. Remember that it costs time (and indirectly – money) for your audience to read what you write. And, they expect a good return for that investment.

You will know whether you are succeeding in influencing your audience in a positive way because the audience will tell you. No, maybe not directly but by the way they respond to your content.

So, here are the nine ways your audience will respond to your online content:

1. Spam: If your content does not provide a reasonable ROII (return-on-investment for an interaction) for the reader or is self-serving or simply useless, the reader will mark it as spam. Posting something that may be assessed, as “spam” is the fastest way to losing credibility.
2. Skip: The reader makes an assessment that he or she won’t lose much by reading it. In this case, the reader has not written you off yet but if you consistently create content that is worth “skipping,” the reader might write you off.
3. Scan: The reader thinks there are only a few parts that are of relevance and wants to get right to the core of the content and skip the rest.
4. Stop: The reader is touched by the article and stops to think about the article, it’s relevance and what it means to him or her personally and professionally.
5. Save: The content is so good that the reader might want to re-visit this multiple times.
6. Shift: The article is transformational. The reader is so deeply affected (in a positive way) by the article that it shifts some of their values and beliefs. In other words, this piece of writing will transform the reader and make him or her grow.
7. Send: The content is not only useful to the reader but also to one or more people in the reader’s network. The reader simply emails the article or a link to it to people that he or she cares.
8. Spread: The reader finds the article fascinating enough to spread it to anyone and everyone via a blog, twitter or the social networks that he or she belongs.
9. Subscribe: This is the ultimate expression of engagement and a vote of confidence that you will continue to provide great content. When the reader wants to continue listening to your thoughts, he or she will subscribe.

Finally, here are a few things to consider before you post your next online content:

1. Understand Your Audience

Unless you are writing something for your private consumption, your audience should be the center of the focus and not you. The more you know about your audience, the better you can connect with them. Think about:

• Who is your audience?
• Why are they reading what you are writing?
• What are their concerns in general and what are their concerns NOW?

2. Check Your Objective

Some questions to think about:

• What is the purpose of your article?
• What assessment do you want the reader to create by reading your article?

3. Unleash Your Creativity

You know the audience and you know the purpose of the article. Now the next step is to unleash your creativity and create something that will generate the kind of response that you are looking for.

Some questions to think about:

• What would be unique (content, point-of-view etc.) in this article that will make the audience do what I want them to do?
• How can you make this article “extremely relevant” to the current times?
• What can you include that will increase the “longevity” of the article?

4. Learn from Feedback

You already know the nine ways that people respond to your online content. When people act the way they do, they are providing you valuable feedback. Keeping your emotions aside, learn from the feedback and incorporate this learning into your next article.

Background: An earlier version of this article was titled Skip, Scan, Stop, Save and/or Spread. Thanks to several people especially Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki and Kathy Hendershot-Hurd who helped me enhance the initial concept through their comments.

About the Author: Rajesh Setty is an entrepreneur, author and speaker based in Silicon Valley. Rajesh maintains a blog at Life Beyond Code. You can also find him on Twitter at @UpbeatNow.

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.

If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:

Updated Feb 2010: If you’re in business and reading this post there’s a good chance that you’re either a member of LinkedIn, or have at least been invited at some point to join, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom.

It seems that a lot of people join LinkedIn but really don’t really know why. I’ve come across many people who poke around the site every so often and accept occasional requests to link with other members and that’s about it. It’s clear that most people don’t really understand what LinkedIn is for; how to use it; what it’s good for; what the benefits are; or how to leverage it.

In my own case it took some time and perseverance to figure out and understand it. Even now, I find that I’m still learning a lot and discovering further possibilities every week. In addition, LinkedIn are constantly adding new dimensions and capabilities to the site, which increase its usefulness.

The aim of this post, therefore, is to give you a simple understanding of what LinkedIn can do for you get you up to speed quickly on the absolute basics to save you time when you use this powerful online networking tool.

What is LinkedIn?

If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, it is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, mainly used for professional networking. It connects you with other business people you trust to establish professional business contacts, recruit clients or find trustworthy suppliers.

Early in 2007 there were 8.5 million users worldwide. Membership grew to 19 million a year later; by May 2009, it had more than 40 million registered users, spanning 170 industries; and now, in February 2010 it has over 60 million. Many top companies, including all 500 of the Fortune 500 companies are represented, 499 of them by director-level and above business leaders.

Tell people what you can do for them

You can join LinkedIn free of charge, and can build an online profile that lists your experience, your interests, your educational background and expertise. Your profile will tell the world something about you, depending on the amount of information you provide. This can range from a glorified business card to a full-blown CV or resumé with bells and whistles.

Each person you connect to connects you in turn to their connections, who in turn connect you to their connections etc. You can invite business people you trust to connect with you, or accept other members’ invitations to join their networks.

If you like, LinkedIn is a more intimate way of networking than briefly exchanging business cards with a stranger when networking or attending a convention. If you meet someone at a business meeting you may get a few minutes to talk to them, but it’s an isolated communication and quickly forgotten. With LinkedIn you can get rich background information from their profile, plus you can see your mutual connections.

Equally, you can review other people’s connections and select some key people you would like to meet, or invite, or email something to, and again you can use your intermediate contact to relay the message and act as your introducer.

Build your reputation

One of the more valuable aspects of LinkedIn is the ability to build your reputation online. Other members can recommend you as a trustworthy reliable person or an expert in your field. When they do, their recommendations show up on your profile. This is similar to the very useful book reviews you see on Amazon that tell you whether or not a book is any good, just how good it is and how many people have recommended it. The more recommendations a person receives, the more highly regarded they are likely to be. This can give you very useful insights when deciding to do business with someone, or employ them.

Imagine opening a Yellow Pages to find a plumber. How do you know which ones are any good? Think of LinkedIn as a bit like a Yellow Pages, but for professional services, where you can choose service providers based on recommendations instead of the random listings you see in a directory.

Connect with people

Most people use LinkedIn to “connect with someone” in order to make a sale, or find investors, or form a partnership, or get a job or find specific expertise. Many members are directly connected to dozens or hundreds of people, while there are also some super connectors who have built up thousands of direct connections. You can be linked to millions of people in just a couple steps. It’s a great way to build a global network of business contacts that can help you in numerous ways.

You can use LinkedIn to find people e.g. former employers; former employees; old friends; old business associates; someone you met at a social event but can’t find their card; likely prospects for your product, service or expertise and people who have the expertise you need. There’s a very good chance that you can find the exact people you need, in virtually any industry, in just a couple of steps, through your LinkedIn network.

One example is a recruitment consultant who specialises in the broadcasting and media industries. He was trying to track down a digital-business executive who had recently changed jobs and relocated from the other end of the country. Someone suggested he try reaching him on LinkedIn, and sure enough he was listed there as a member. He sent a message to him, which was promptly returned the next morning, and he was able to resume a potentially beneficial business relationship.

Searching for specific expertise

Here’s another example. I was searching early in 2008 for people who had expertise in Word of Mouth marketing. Although this is a highly specialised form of marketing, I was able to find 339 such specialists within my own LinkedIn network, i.e. within three levels of contacts, in a matter of seconds. The top ranking person, who was directly linked to two of my first level contacts, turned out to be the author of a top selling book on the subject. He is also a university lecturer and consultant as well as being the former CEO and President of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and the founder and former CEO and President of the Interactive Marketing Association.

Someone with credentials like that should easily be able to meet my requirements, but if for some reason they didn’t or couldn’t, I could still fall back on the other 338 contacts who had varying degrees of expertise in this specialist field. Also, to establish who was worth contacting, I could see at a glance which of these experts had been recommended; how many recommendations each had received; how many other people each is directly connected to; and could view their profiles, read their recommendations and make a shortlist of the most appropriate people to contact before taking any further action. It’s incredibly useful to be able to glean so much valuable information in mere seconds or minutes.

Two years later, my own LinkedIn network had grown to 9.78 million contacts within 3-degrees, and LinkedIn itself has more than tripled in size. Performing the same search in February 2010 turned up 2,437 results globally within my own network (all people who I can directly contact), 129 of them in the UK where I am based, and tens of thousands within LinkedIn as a whole.

Build a global network of contacts

I came across someone who, for personal reasons, decided to move to Brazil. He thought that having a job there might be helpful since he likes to eat, but he was unsure how he could do that and also leverage the experience he had built over a long career. But since he didn’t know anyone in Brazil nor could he speak Portugese, this was quite a challenge.

He made it a priority to build a LinkedIn network in Brazil and South America which could provide the contacts he needed to build a career there. But he knew no one there professionally and had only visited occasionally as a tourist. Although it wasn’t achieved overnight, he did soon build some excellent business relationships. After this experience he realised the power of LinkedIn. If he could build “real world” relationships in a place thousands of miles away with absolutely no initial face-to-face contacts, then what could he do where he already had a large number of real contacts as a foundation to build upon?

He reports that LinkedIn has now become an important part of his business life. He maintains a large number of business contacts on it and has built most of his recent business relationships either directly or indirectly from its use.

Carry out online research

LinkedIn is also an invaluable research tool. If you want to reach a particular company, you can do a LinkedIn search for all members in that company. LinkedIn will show you not only who is there, but will even tell you the shortest route by which you are connected to them. You can then send a targeted message to the one individual you want to meet.

You can find meaningful connections prior to every meeting that can help you deepen a relationship; check out prospective employers or employees; find out how good vendors are; Get the answers you are looking for; find out much more about a company than Googling them or going to their website. You can also track your competitors; find common ground with people you want to reach … and so much more. And what I’ve covered here is really only the start.

Rather than go into more uses for LinkedIn, let’s now look at the basics of setting up your account and creating your profile.

Getting started on LinkedIn

At its most basic level, LinkedIn is free but still worthwhile. Although there are several paid upgrade options, I’m told that 98% of the 60 million members stick with the free account. It only takes a few minutes to set up your account. Once you’ve done that, you should complete all relevant details in your profile in as much detail as possible … then keep it updated.

Used correctly, LinkedIn can be a very powerful tool for keeping abreast of your contacts, finding people who can help you and for developing new business. It gives you access to millions of people and their skills and contacts. It also allows millions of people to reach you and benefit from your skills and contacts.

When you’re searching for people who can help you, you’ll be far more inclined to contact someone or use their services if their profile has been completed in full, because then you can assess whether or not they can bring anything to you. And of course their potential value to you increases dramatically if they also highly recommended by other members.

The same factors apply to your profile. If you list your current company and position and leave it at that, like most new users do, you really can’t expect people to get too excited about you and what you do. This will severely limit your ability to connect with people, and LinkedIn really won’t do you any good.

Complete your profile as if it were an executive bio, including full details of past companies, education, affiliations and activities. This will allow people to see all of your credentials.

The more information you provide, and the more recommendations you receive from other members, the more credible you will be, and the more you will benefit from your membership. After all, the breaks that come your way depend on how the world perceives you, and if the world is looking at you, you might as well put your best face forward. Properly completed, your profile becomes another asset in your Reputation Management repertoire.

To influence what people see when they search for you, fill your profile with what you want people to see. Include keywords relating to your area of expertise so that your profile shows up in any searches for your particular skills or the outcomes you can provide.

Increase your Google and search engine visibility

An effective profile can give you a lot of online visibility as LinkedIn profiles are very highly ranked by web search engines. To improve your Google page ranking, you can change your “public profile” setting to “Full View.” Your profile information will then be available for search engines to index, and your profile will be accessible to anyone who performs a web search containing the keywords you’ve included in your profile.

Each profile has its own public profile URL that you can—and should—use in your email signature, blogs, online postings etc. Instead of using the default public profile URL you can customise it to be your actual name, or something else that’s easily remembered. Mine, for example, is: http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertclay

Your LinkedIn profile also allows you to publicise your websites and blogs to search engines like Google and Yahoo. There are a few pre-selected categories like “My Website,” “My Company,” etc. If you’re linking to your personal blog, include your name or descriptive terms in the link. voila! instant search-engine optimisation for your profile.

As mentioned above, make sure you include a link to your profile as part of your email signature. That link will enable all email recipients to view all of your credentials with a single click, which would be awkward if not downright strange, as an attachment.

To further strengthen your visibility in search engines, use your public profile URL in various places on the web. When you comment in a blog, include a link to your profile in your signature.

Link to your email contacts

Once you’ve populated your profile with information and uploaded a photo, the easiest way to get started is to connect with LinkedIn members you already know. Your existing email contacts can be imported in just a few simple steps, described on the site, from virtually any address book, database or email client, including Hotmail, Gmail or Outlook.

In a matter of moments LinkedIn will tell you which of your existing contacts are already members. You can then send a personalised invite to some or all of these to join your network.

Don’t expand your network indiscriminately. Only do it if there’s value in your doing so. It’s very important that you only invite people you know well and trust or who would definitely know who you are. Don’t ask someone to connect if you don’t know them or if they have never heard of you, and you definitely shouldn’t invite everyone from your Yahoo! Groups or other online discussion groups and forums.

If you send out invitations to all and sundry, it only takes five people to hit the “I don’t know [your name]” button to get your account penalised, which means that part of your account will be “locked” until you change your practices. This helps to ensure that your contacts’ contacts, and their contacts in turn are genuinely known to one another, which is useful when you’re trying to contact other people through your own contacts.

Quality is much better than quantity. People who have a tight connection to you and know your work can give you strong introductions and will be more influential than the person with whom you’ve only ever exchanged a single email.

When you invite people to link in with you, LinkedIn provides standard boilerplate text that you can use. But that canned invitation is very basic and impersonal, and quite frankly is pretty ineffective, so you will get a much higher response if you tweak the standard text and create a much more personal communication.

A few minutes after you hit the submit button, responses will normally start flowing in. As people start accepting your invitation, your network will grow.

You can also invite any number of non-members on your list to join. I would recommend that you contact them first, reminding them of how you are connected to them and explaining what LinkedIn is and does. By all means send them a link to this post if you feel that will help. The value of having just one virtual “touch” with that person is worth far more than a dozen people in your network who you don’t even know or communicate with.

Before anyone can accept your invitation, they will be invited to set up their own free LinkedIn account. And as they grow their network, yours will grow too.

It’s worth periodically reloading your existing email contacts. With around 40 people joining LinkedIn every minute, it’s likely that a good number will have joined LinkedIn since you last checked.

Similarly it’s worth periodically performing searches for your previous companies, and your schools and colleges to get a new wave of connections.

There is much more to LinkedIn than it’s been possible to cover in this post, so in future posts I’ll expand on what’s written here.

If you have any comments about this post, or would like to share the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please do so. We’d love to hear from you.

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Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.

If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:

Since Google AdWords was launched in 2002 the face of advertising has been changed almost beyond recognition, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom. Using AdWords it’s possible to achieve things today that could hardly be imagined just ten years ago.

When Google was founded in 1997, the “big boys” in internet search like Yahoo, AltaVista and Inktomi were already well established. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had little idea at that time how their company would make money.

Unlike so many other players on the internet they weren’t concerned with “spreading hype” about their product, or “locking users in” or “making their site sticky.” Instead their mission was to build a better mousetrap — in their case a search engine that would give people exactly what they were searching for, and as rapidly as possible.

If you were searching for car rental in Birmingham, or Geneva, or Seattle, they wanted to give you the very best and most popular car rental websites on the very first page of results.

They developed an amazing mathematical formula for figuring out who visited websites and why, and used that information in their search engine. Their entire focus was on improving their web search technology … and word soon started spreading about the quality of Google’s search results, the lack of clutter on the page, and the speed with which relevant results were obtained. It wasn’t long before long the world beat a path to Google’s door.

By June 2000 Google had indexed more sites than any other search engine, and from that point they never looked back. Today Google Search is the leading online destination in virtually every country in the world. According to Comscore, a leading internet marketing research company, some 61 Billion searches are conducted worldwide each month, with each user conducting around 80 searches a month.

We increasingly see the effect of this when carrying out customer surveys for our clients. In industry after industry Google Search is increasingly the first port of call when people search for a new product, service, supplier, job, home, car … or almost anything else. In some industries we have discovered that up to 85% of initial research is carried out through Google searches.

If you’re not geared up to benefit from this effect then you are probably losing out in a big way.

Since the introduction of Google AdWords in February 2002, Google themselves (as well as millions of businesses who use this form of advertising) have benefited massively from the vast volumes of online traffic generated by their quality approach to internet search.

Quality has always been the driving force at Google. So when they started selling their Google AdWords “Pay per Click” advertising programme, they were extremely concerned that the advertisers who would benefit the most would be those who also put out the most relevant messages.

With that in mind Google rewards you for being relevant, and they establish relevance by letting the people vote who are searching for your type of product or service. If people click on your ad it’s relevant. If they don’t, it isn’t.

If too few people click on your ad, Google eventually disables it. The higher the percentage of people who click on your ad, the less you will pay for the position you want and the more traffic you will receive. This creates a “Darwinian” effect, a deliberate natural selection process that weeds out bad advertisers and rewards good ones.

The bottom line is that both your ads and the content of your website must be relevant to what searchers are looking for. To harness the power and the business volumes that Google is capable of delivering to you, you need to understand the issues that your prospects and clients want to solve, or what they most desire … then show them how and why you can solve those problems and/or give them the outcomes they are seeking.

So, when someone types in “car rental in Birmingham,” you need to understand what they are really thinking. Figure that out and present it to them both in your Google AdWords ad and on the pages they will land on on your website, and you’ll beat your competitors by a country mile.

To develop the best possible AdWords ads, you need to test several alternative ways of putting your message across. I’ve come across instances where reversing two lines in a Google Ad, i.e. using exactly the same words but with the contents of the third line transposed to the second line and vice-versa, produced more than twenty times as much traffic for the same investment.

Unless you test the alternatives in this way, you’ll never discover what really motivates people to do business with you and how much potential you’re leaving on the table. Testing alternative approaches not only pushes your cost per click down, it simultaneously pushes your traffic up … AND you’ll be able to use the winning approaches you uncover to develop compelling offers, copy and high-performing headlines for any other media you may be using, from direct mail to print advertising and brochures etc.

As a case in point, we recently launched an email marketing campaign for a client who had used the same medium with reasonable success a number of times before our involvement. The campaign we develped produced very good results … Although the percentage of people who opened the email was virtually the same as before, the number of hot leads produced by the campaign per 1,000 emails jumped by 560% and at around 20% of the previous cost.

The new message, which was based on research into what really mattered to our client’s prospects and clients, was obviously much stronger than anything they had used before, and therefore was not worth tampering with.

To push response rates up further, it was therefore necessary to get more people to open the email in the first place. This entirely depends on whether or not the subject line compels more people to open the email. To discover the most effective subject line then simply becomes a matter of using Google AdWords to test 10-20 different possibilities. Within a matter of days it’s clear which headlines (or subject lines when applied to an email) are most appealing to users.

That established, you simply discard the lower performing alternatives, and focus on variations of the highest performing ads. Using the highest performing version in the subject line of the email should then drive up opening rates, which in turn should generate many more hot leads. The winning AdWords ads can also be used in dedicated AdWords campaigns to drive additional traffic to your website.

Best of all, once you test your messages via Google AdWords, then apply your findings to everything else you do, you should achieve a lot more response for the same investment in every other medium you use.

Getting responses is one thing. Converting that response into business is another. The better the copy on your website, meaning the better it demonstrates an understanding of the prospect or client’s problems and issues and the better you manage to address those concerns and provide the proof that you can do so, the more highly Google will rank you, the more traffic will be converted into business and the more revenues you will generate without spending a penny more on leads.

Best of all, you can use Google AdWords as a way of testing all sorts of assumptions so that instead of spending fortunes developing products, services and ideas that nobody wants, you’ll only ever have to invest a few £ hundred — or in the worst case a few £ thousand — to discover what people really want.

Harnessing Google’s power by approaching your marketing in the quality manner that Google rewards, allows you to obtain solid marketing results more quickly and easily and at much lower cost than virtually any other alternative. No wonder Google is such a phenomenal success!

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.

If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you: