Tag Archive for: ed dale

Creating content is key to online success

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I’ve spent a number of years creating all different types of content for all different types of people, including a stint at BBC Radio many moons ago. As a result, content creation has come fairly naturally to me, mainly because I’ve had a lot of practice.

What I hadn’t realised until recently was that the majority of people run scared of writing, painting, videoing, speaking and blogging for many different reasons.

I’ve got nothing to say

It’s all been said before

No one will read/watch/listen to my stuff

In today’s online age, if you want to be noticed, then you’ve got no option… you have to become a content creator – you cannot get by without participating.

I had a great meeting with someone I’ve admired from afar for a while yesterday. I’ve admired Graham Jones because of the huge volume of excellent, insightful content he produces on daily basis at his Internet Psychology blog. He blogs every day and the content isn’t short either – it’s in depth and well researched and guess what, it gets him noticed… You don’t get a PageRank 6 blog for nothing. There are over 5,000 links back into his site and he earns a very nice living speaking and consulting. Much of that comes as a direct result of his online profile and because he gets noticed by producing great stuff.

What fascinated me about meeting Graham is that he is a journalist by trade and so his method of producing content is simple…

HE FOLLOWS A PROCESS.

What fascinated me even more, is that the course we’ve just released with my content partner Ed Dale teaches the exact process Graham follows. He’s a living breathing case studyof what this course is doing for people.

Creating content is a habit. It CAN be learnt – you don’t have to be a trained journalist / Hollywood producer to put out great content online. It’s something you can start doing straight away and who knows, you might find yourself getting noticed, even more.

To conclude then – you should do two things.

1) Check out Graham’s superb blog for advice and insight on all things Internet.

2) If you want to become a ‘Graham’, visit our new Creating Content Online course and watch the first module completely free… you can then grab yourself an exclusive 20% discount using the coupon code beingsmarter

10 ways not to do business in 2010

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Happy New Year to all of our Being Smarter readers.

I wanted to start the year by resurrecting a post from December last year – which seems very appropriate for the start of the working year for most people…

At a recent conference, a now colleague of mine, Ed Dale did four separate sessions on a topic which I am calling “How to do business in 2010“… he had a different title, but my take on it was simple – it was a message to all corporate management… to all the folks who’ve sadly been made redundant recently from that world… and to all smaller businesses who are paralysed by indecision. The message was something along the lines of

“Wake up and smell the coffee… the world has totally changed (not just by the Internet.) If you carry on doing business as it was done ten years ago, or do you know what, perhaps even a year ago… then you are dead in the water.”

There were 86 separate provacative statements, here’s my top 10:

1.) Whatever you do, make sure you’re in a business or market place that you are completely unpassionate about. Make sure that it leaves you feeling cold, empty and completely drained at the end of the day. The great news is that if you’ve found a marketplace you particularly have no interest in, it will help you to be average at best when it comes to selling to and supporting your customers – and they will love you for it.

2.)If you are in a small business, ensure you try to run it like a corporate entitiy. Make sure you absolutely do not in any way try to differentiate yourself from these bigger companies. Treat your customers like numbers and be completely devoid of any business personality.

3.) When developing products or services, it’s imperative that you don’t start to build anything without examining every ounce of detail at the early stage. Take as long as you like to write specs and make sure you start with the small picture and buld it up. You’ll never get anything launched if you don’t spend many weeks and months getting the finer detail argued about, before talking to customers about the concept – they won’t thank you.

4.) When your service is launched – for goodness sake try to sell it to everyone that moves… ignore segmentation and playing in niche markets – it’s a complete waste of time. If the product is good enough, everyone will want it.

5.) If you’re in the online game, think very carefully about building giant server or data centre infrastructures the minute your product is out the door. There’s literally no one else out there that does this kind of thing… and they certainly wouldn’t be able to scale it up to your demands.Your data is important to you, and so you should keep it under your control at all times.

6.) When designing your next product, ensure you get every feature that your customers will need into the very first release. Don’t design it so that it could be released in stages, or people just won’t buy it. They need everything on day one.

7.) Decision making – this is key. Involve everyone at all times. Ensure you plan as many meetings as possible – all day ones if necessary to reach a consensus. If you aren’t able to make a decision with the whole team after a huge amount of analysis and delay, then play safe and don’t make one.

8.) When it comes to recruitment, make sure you hire experts in their field, irrespective of whether they are difficult to work with. It’s much better to have a team of experts who don’t communicate than a team of generalists who gel as a team and work for the common good. Oh – and don’t work with them as affiliates or freelancers first to test them out – that just isn’t the done thing.

9.) Customers don’t mind being slightly misled about what they are about to receive as a service… as long as you hook them in, they’ll generally soon get over it. It also helps to provide a very detailed contract, which is difficult to break out of, for your protection.

10.) And finally, the Internet is just a fad. Stick with the old rules of marketing – direct mail and cold calling has worked for years. Your customer base has no idea what a twoot or a blag is, and they’re still on 56k modems, so video will never work on their pcs – you will just need to invest in a support department.

If you like my take on Ed’s wisdom, check out this post 5 Days with Ed Dale.

How to get noticed

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OK – so it’s a day later than planned – the final part of my “5 days with Ed Dale”, founder of the Thirty Day Challenge. If you’ve missed the first three, you can see the intro here, How to do business in 2010 here and 3 golden rules to creating content here.

It was an inspiring few days with Ed and his team which I’ve enjoyed writing about. Today, however, seeing as a few people came to ask me during the event we were recording how I managed to persuade him to work with us, I thought I’d do my final article on how to get noticed… or more specifically, how we got noticed.

I’ve not had a great deal of experience of getting noticed in the B2C space, however I have spent the last 10 years or so working in the business to business environment, and believe me, it’s not an easy thing to do. Attempting to create new relationships with Directors of Marketing or HR in large corporates is difficult to say the least. Inboxes are crowded places, cold calls aren’t exactly the way forward, and snail mail will almost certainly end up lost in some strange basement post room.

So – how did I get Ed’s attention? What are my tips for getting noticed by your Targets?

Know your Targets

You are looking for new customers – you have to know who they are first. Remember, one size doesn’t fit all. You have to niche it down. If you are selling a service with mass appeal, focus on one niche at a time. Figure out 100 targets and then get to know them before approaching them…

Legal stalking

Do some basic searches on your Targets… find out all about them. Use Gist as a great tool to data mine and cross reference. If you can’t find anything on them, get to understand their company instead. People so often ask my why I bother with Twitter. Legal stalking is my answer – follow those of your targets who have a Twitter stream. Get to understand what makes them tick, so that when you finally come to approach them you can be personal and relevant. The key words in this whole article.

Email marketing is dead in the water

Broad brush, blanket, call it what you will, email marketing does not work when you are looking to target new customers. Sure, it’s fine to maintain a relationship (although I’d still question that) however you are never going to get noticed with an html newsletter. How many do you delete on a daily basis?

Get noticed

So – my personal favourite tack is to write a short, punchy email – question every single word within it to see if it is relevant and adds value to the approach. Make sure your target knows that this is not a cut and paste email. Write something personal in it… “I noticed you were interested in chocolate tea pots…” etc. Make it easy to read – and don’t send it straight away. Send it the next day. As the Lynx advert rightly says, you’ve only one chance to make a first impression.

Now comes the clever bit

I’ve been developing and refining a system for the last 8 years and have shown beyond reasonable doubt that the more personal you get, the higher the chance of a response. At the end of your email, refer your target to a URL, and do not make it your company URL – again, that’s not personal enough – if they liked you, they’d look it up anyway. Instead, make the URL personal. ie www.chocolateteapotsdemo.com/richard-fox.

That’s right – a URL with their name in it… put your mind in your Target’s shoes… they open the email, see the link and think  “Huh – they’ve done something for me? wow – I’m intrigued – I’ll take a look.”

Think about it – you’d click the link wouldn’t you?

Get them engaged

So they click the link – and you’re thinking it’s just a redirect to the main website? Wrong. Big mistake, I’ve tried that too. Instead, that link needs to go to a page which is personal to them. A page which carries on the conversation and then tells your story. Typically in a short video format. Here’s an example of one we use… (imagine this at the bottom of your email).

http://845tv.com/vip/richard-fox/

The feedback loop

You then need to know if / when they clicked the link so that you can follow up, or if you do it well – so that you can predict when they might respond to you.

How to automate this process

Having used this technique for a while now, I started to get my targets asking whether they could  buy the system.  My first answer was no, but now it’s yes…. Targets to Prospects is now born and in 30 seconds, you can create a personal page and personal link for your target. This is the exact technique I used to get Ed’s attention. This is what he said to me once we’d started to work together…

“I get dozens of approaches on a weekly basis and 99% of them tend to get ignored. I noticed Mark’s email to me, because it was personal. The link with my name in stood out from the rest of the crowd, and the page it landed on hooked me in, due to the excellent video story… As a result, I’m now looking forward to working with him over the coming months.”

He is a busy man to say the least. No one was more shocked than me when I got a response from him in 12 hours. I created cut through, because the communication was personal and relevant.

Tell me more

To see a full demo and details of how to buy a system for your choice of domain, you can check out Targets to Prospects here.

A big thank you

To Ed for a cracking few days and for the quote above. I learnt a load and am looking forward to bringing together his expertise in 8.45 Club style courses over the coming months.

3 golden rules to creating content online

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I’d firstly like to thank everyone for their interest in the posts from the last two days. 5 days with Ed Dale and 10 ways to not do business in 2010 have been amongst the most popular posts I’ve ever written – so I’m hoping you’ve found them interesting. Let’s get back to it then in day #3 of our series of articles on my experiences and learnings of spending 5 days with Ed Dale, the creator of www.thirtydaychallenge.com.

The three day seminar he gave last week has been inspiring to many (Hashtag here). Today, as someone that creates content online in various guises every day of the week, I wanted to add my take on Ed’s thoughts on creating content online.

#1 Overcoming writer’s block

“It’s all been done before”… Oh no it hasn’t… not with your spin on it… not for your audience – think about a different take. Add your opinion. Leave your own web footprints around the Internet by creating opinion. Create an audience for yourself. Granted, it won’t happen over night – but it will do eventually if you are discipined in your approach. Go find the prominent bloggers out there – Chris Brogan didn’t say that everything’s been done before… he just started writing and created an audience.

“I’ve got nothing to say”. Of course you haven’t, because you aren’t following rule #2.

#2 Be a selective  information sponge

Google Reader without question is the most awesome free business tool you can possibly use. It is your very own personal information database, which pushes the information you need to you… If you don’t know what it is and how powerful it is, then take a look here.

Get into the habit of:

  • Using the ‘note in reader’ button on your browser toolbar, collect information as you go. Don’t get distracted by it – store it away for when you need it.
  • Use the TAGS function. If you see an article you want to share – note it and tag it as tweet. When you’re short of something to say – head into reader and dig it out again. When you are going to write a blog post, look at the blog post tag for articles you’ve filed away.
  • Clean up your RSS feeds on a regular basis. Your information needs change over time – so manage your feeds accordingly.

HEALTH WARNING: be obsessed by relevance. Don’t collect information unnecessarily and don’t get distracted by it. There’s a time and a place for reading – schedule it.

Get into the groove

Ed talked about having a process for creation – whether it be writing or video recording or whatever. This is great advice. I write blog posts at the start of each day – never in the middle or at the end. It’s when it’s quiet. Some people literally put their writing hat on to get into the zone. What could you do to help you focus? Turn the phone off, turn your email off and turn the children off if you have to … that’s the only way it will happen.

Once it’s happened – whatever it is on the page – then take a break, and go back and edit… add the images, add the links, tidy it up and make it fit for purpose. Key to success is – don’t edit as you go.

Day #4 of my experience of working with Ed comes tomorrow…

My 5 days with Ed Dale

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So, first things first, this is not a sycophantic rant about someone I have admired for afar for a while… this is going to be a 4 part series of articles explaining what I’ve learnt over the last few days from a man who’s been there and got the t-shirt in many ways. I hope you pick up something from the wisdom.

You may not know who Ed Dale is. He’s the architect behind www.thethirtydaychallenge.com which simply put, is a free 30 day online video training guide on ‘how to make your first dollar online.’ It runs every August as live, but is available all year round for the price of your email address. 80,000 people went through the process last August.

It’s the course I stumbled upon about 18 months ago when looking for the next ‘thing’, and being frank, I’ve not looked back since. It may be over the top to call it a life changer, but it’s not far off, as it changes your view on the Internet Marketing world (for the better) and explains in detail the principles behind it and how to do it. Ed’s not the only one in front of the camera. He’s assembled a great team who’ve helped research the principles and then go on to present it.

I’m delighted that Ed has now partnered with us here at The 8.45 Club and so we spent some time together filming, had a very nice lunch and followed that with a three day seminar we recorded and so I got quite an insight into the guy…

Business can be fun

Ed brings humour to most things he does… he records a lot of video (as we did together) and humour is a key element. Not humour for humour’s sake – it’s appropriate and injects personality into everything he does. He passionately believes in making business fun. The  three day seminar was based around the FUNdamentals of business. Think about it.

  • If you are doing something repeatedly in your day job which is potentially a chore, for goodness sake, make it so it’s easy and fun. (Have you read FISH! ?)
  • If you are not doing, creating or writing around a subject you enjoy, then it is not going to be fun. You’re never going to excel in that space until you change your subject matter or role.
  • Have fun and celebrate success with your teams. He’s made that mistake of not doing that before and won’t make it again.

Newton’s 3rd law is an essential rule of business

Newton’s 3rd law for those of you who hated physics at school is simple.

For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction.

It was a superb piece of advice someone gave me 10 years ago which I value and Ed is a prime example of someone who embodies this law.

  • He’s a self-made man who’s taken action throughout his life. He’s created and sold businesses and created quite a following. You don’t do this by prevaricating and sitting on the fence. You don’t create a following (eh Seth?) without taking action, without expressing opinion, without helping people.
  • So – taking action is all about making decisions… and making them quickly. Don’t take 3 months to write a technical spec. Sketch it on a side of A4 and review as you go.
  • Don’t spend months trying to create a brand and spending thousands on an agency to do it for you… keep working on the content behind the idea and the brand will come. (Sometimes in the shower or on a tube train – true story).
  • You will make mistakes, regret actions (or inactions) and there will be disappointments along the way. Dust your selfdown – take a day out and then get on with it again. Even if that decision cost you millions, you can’t get it back – so go find another way to make it back.

You can be a good human being and still ‘make it’

This is an interesting one. So often in business, you come across successful people who have sold their own grandmother at least twice to climb to the top of a greasy pole. You don’t have to – and I’ve seen this a few times now – which is really rather good news for us all don’t you think?

  • Don’t try to be someone you’re not. Be YOURSELF.
  • Live your values – and stick to your principles. If you don’t believe something is the right way to do things, despite many others doing it to further themselves – then find another way. A way you believe in.
  • Go out of your way to help others… give something back. Good karma will come around. Eventually.

Tomorrow – what I’ve learnt from Ed and his team on how to get your web business started.

By the way, you could do a lot worse than following @ed_dale (oh and @ME of course…)

Update (March 2010)

You can see the results of the photo above at www.ed-ucationonline.com