No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.

Napoleon Hill

Google should post that as a disclaimer on searches on people’s names! Some of the nicest, brightest, most spiritual people I know have been the brunt of someone’s negative rants online, and unfortunately, if they shout loud enough and often enough, they can easily created a distorted perception of someone who has years or even decades of fans and satisfied customers.

Want to make the world a more positive place?

Tell about your positive experiences online. Write a review on Yelp or CitySearch. Give a recommendation on LinkedIn. Share about it on Twitter and Facebook. Rate it on Amazon or Google.

Don’t make stuff up. Don’t whitewash the truth. Just be every bit as willing — eager, even — to tell about good experiences as bad.

Besides the whole SOPA thing, I’ve been increasingly frustrated with GoDaddy performance issues. I’ve called them like five times, and while they’ve been nice enough, and given me some useful performance tips, they keep saying they can’t replicate the problem and they don’t see it in their logs. Ugh.

So I finally set up some monitoring with mon.itor.us, and look what happened:

And it’s even worse from Europe:

I know I’m not paying for an SLA, but 96% uptime? Unacceptable. 2 second response time? That’s RESPONSE time from the server, NOT page load time. Unacceptable.

I’ve tried to resolve the problem with GoDaddy, but they haven’t even acknowledged there’s a problem. That’s why I’m moving my hosting elsewhere. Meanwhile, my apologies to anyone experiencing flaky performance on any of my sites.

I’ve grown increasingly unhappy with GoDaddy, for a variety of reasons, including poor performance, constant upselling, SOPA, etc., I’ve been looking for a new hosting/registrar service. I’veheard good things about HostGator and others, but I came across one on Warrior Forum that is just pretty fantastic, so I thought I’d share it with my friends. When you’re first starting out with an online business, it’s super-important to keep your costs down, and this is the best deal I’ve found from a reliable company, hands down.

HostZilla is offering FREE cloud hosting, unlimited domains, unlimited bandwidth.

What’s the catch? Only 100MB web storage. Still, that’s enough for several starter sites.

And when you’re ready to upgrade, their premium cloud hosting plans start at $4.49/month, with unlimited storage. They don’t offer VPS hosting, but based on the reviews I’ve seen and what the hosting is spec’d at, their cloud hosting SHOULD out-perform comparably-priced VPS plans. They also have 24/7 support and a very sophisticated proprietary fraud detection system to prevent abuse of their servers.

Oh, and .com domains are $9.95!

If you’d like to check it out, I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d use my affiliate link. Or you can just go directly to hostzil.la. I recommend it either way.

You might also want to read the thread on Warrior Forum and see how they responded to various questions from savvy internet marketers.

Productivity = Getting things done

Focus = Doing one thing

Purpose = Knowing the right things to do

Any of them on their own is useful, but they’re even better in combination:

Productivity + Focus = Getting one thing done (but maybe not the right thing)

Productivity + Purpose = Getting useful things done (but maybe not the best thing)

Focus + Purpose = Knowing the one right thing to do next (but not necessarily getting it done)

For maximum effectiveness, you need all three:

Productivity + Focus + Purpose = Getting the next right thing done

What is the one next right thing you need to do to move your business forward?

If you don’t know what it is, go figure it out!  If you do know what it is, go do it!

Image: James Jordan

This morning I received possibly the best marketing email I’ve ever seen, from Ray Edwards. It started like this:

Yep, blood in the streets.

In the financial markets, and
literal blood, too.

…that’s what’s on the news.

I speak out against spreading more bad
feelings, and it offends a certain number of
people.

I know bad things have happened.

I don’t deny the reality – but I DEFY the
spirit these things create in people.

I DEFY HOPELESSNESS.

Read the rest…

All of my life, I’ve been an irrepressible optimist. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that I’m not being realistic, or that I’m in denial. But Ray’s email this morning really captured my sentiment beautifully – I’m not in denial, I’m in defiance. I DEFY HOPELESSNESS. And I don’t deny the reality, I just CHOOSE how to react to it.

Depending on your world view, you may or may not be in full control of the circumstances of your life. But no matter what your world view, you ALWAYS have the Power of Choice regarding your ATTITUDE and ACTIONS. You can’t change your past, but you can always change your future.

Image: Nob3L

I’ve read dozens of books on sales and marketing over the years, and while I learned a lot, some of the best, simplest advice I ever got came not from one of them, but from a sociology textbook. While you may never have heard of Diffusion of Innovations, it’s the foundational work on which more familiar titles like Crossing the Chasm and The Tipping Point are based.

The book is primarily focused on how innovations are spread within social groups. In that context, the author defines five characteristics of an innovation that influence the decision to adopt or reject it. If we think broadly about the term “innovation” as not just a new invention, but simply an idea that’s new to the individual, then it becomes clear that this is the same decision process someone goes through when evaluating buying your product or service. While every buyer has their own unique set of circumstances and decision criteria, these five characteristics offer an excellent checklist for both your overall marketing strategy and the individual sale:

Relative Advantage is the relative benefit of your offering compared to all other alternatives, including the status quo, i.e., doing nothing. Most marketers focus their efforts here — feature-benefits lists, ROI analysis, and competitive comparisons. Pricing also falls under this category. We’d like to think that if we’re the logical best choice, we’ll make the sale, but unfortunately, that’s all too often not the case. That’s because there are many other factors in the decision process that have nothing to do with pure logic.

Compatibility is a measure of how well the new idea fits into a person’s life. It may be a matter of logistics, e.g., actually having room for a large item, personal preferences such as color or finish, religious factors or cultural factors, or even more complex psychological factors, such as whether your product fits the customer’s self-image. Clearly defining your ideal customer will help you address this. Consider psychographic characteristics as well as demographics. What’s important to them? How do they see themselves?

Simplicity is, simply, how easy the product is to use and understand. Too many choices causes anxiety, and a confused mind says “no”. More complex products will have longer sales cycles and required the more skilled salespeople.

Trialability is a measure of the ability of the prospective customer to try out your product or service before purchasing it, i.e., test drives, free or super-cheap samples or trials, free initial consultations. Money-back guarantees are a slight variation on this. How can you apply this to your business?

Observability is the degree to which the benefits can be observed during the trial period or initial use. For example, it’s relatively easy to observe the benefits of taking aspirin to relieve a headache, but impossible to directly observe the results of taking aspirin to reduce the risk of heart disease.

You can apply this five-point checklist at every stage of your marketing and sales process: product strategy, sales process, campaign, and individual sale. You don’t have to be strong in all five areas, but if you have a gap, you need to be aware of it so you can either address their concerns or make a point of being sufficiently stronger in the other factors.

Want to know more? Read the full article at OPEN Forum.

That’s right. Your website has never generated one single lead, and it never will.

It may capture leads, qualify leads and convert leads, but it will never, ever, generate leads.

Think about it. How does someone end up at your website? No one just types it in randomly. Somehow or another, they heard about your site and thought that it might be of interest to them.

This is an important distinction. A great website is an essential piece of your lead generation strategy, but it does absolutely nothing on its own. You have to provide it with a steady flow of interested people for it to do its job. Without actual lead generation tactics, you’ll share your message with absolutely no one.

Fortunately, there are many, many effective ways to generate leads for your website:

1. Generic domain names – This could be considered an exception to what I said above, so I’ll address it first. Many people will try just typing in generic words as domain names to see what comes up. Some businesses have simply made that generic name their brand (Bags.com, Blinds.com), while others have purchased those generic names as a way to generate relevant traffic (Books.com – Barnes & Noble, Aspirin.com – Bayer). Those one-word domains may be hard to come by, but a 2 or 3 word descriptive domain appropriate to your business might not be, e.g., DallasDivorceAttorney.com or PhiladelphiaDJ.com. Even if people don’t type it in directly, descriptive domain names will generally rank well on searches for those keywords.
2. Organic search (SEO) – For many small business sites on a budget, this is the #1 source of online lead generation. It’s free, and it’s very effective…if you can get ranked well for keywords relevant to your business. There have been volumes written on search engine optimization, and the nuances of it are constantly changing, but for most small businesses, a simple two-pronged strategy is extremely effective: 1) publish keyword-rich content on your site on a regular basis that’s compelling enough to make people want to link to it, and 2) interact with people to share the link and encourage them to as well. Which brings us to…
3. Social media – The new social web offers several tactics for lead generation. First, your fans can easily tell others about you and share your content. That’s great if you have a bunch of raving fans who also happen to be active social media users. Most companies have to work for it a little more. As with your website, publishing alone won’t bring followers — you have to proactively seek out people and participate in the venues and public conversations that are relevant to your business. Interaction creates attraction. And when those people link to your content, that helps your search engine rankings.
4. Advertising comes in many forms online. While the old horizontal banner ads have all but disappeared from most mainstream websites, display advertising is still alive and well on the web. While some sites sell ads directly, most work with advertising networks, which they’ll be able to refer you to. The other approach is text ads, which are usually on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. These are offered by most of the major search engines, as well as some independent ad networks. Again, the site you want to advertise on should be able to refer you to the appropriate ad network.
5. Joint ventures and affiliates are a great way to reach new people. One form of joint venture is the “quid pro quo” approach — they promote your product to their list and you promote their product to your list. This is usually only done, though, if the lists are of the same order of magnitude. Otherwise, there will have to be some sort of revenue sharing, or affiliate program. This can be a highly effective strategy and usually involves little or no up-front cost to implement. Choose your associates carefully, though, as their behavior will reflect on you to some extent.
6. Content marketing is kind of a hybrid of some of the tactics listed above, but it still merits its own entry. The key here is to publish your content on sites (other than your own website) that already have traffic, that already have an audience of people looking for information about the topics you’re creating content about. Videos on YouTube, slide presentations on SlideShare, white papers on Scribd, articles on EzineArticles — the opportunities are endless. If you can get a regular column in a major outlet, that’s even better. Don’t be overtly promotional, but do be sure to always have a link back to your site, if possible, or at least have your domain name prominently displayed. You want to drive direct traffic, not just create brand awareness.
7. Publicity should be an essential part of any small business’ marketing strategy. At a bare minimum, you should be monitoring Help A Reporter Out (HARO) for media opportunities and pitching relevant local and industry media about your company. Seek out relevant internet radio shows and podcasters that might interview you. Make sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date and contains relevant keywords — it’s how many reporters, bloggers and other media producers find expert sources to interview.
8. Email lists – Depending on your business, you can buy or rent a list of people matching certain demographic criteria. How effective is it? It depends on the quality of the list, the relevance of it to your business, and then having a compelling offer that will drive people to take action. Stick with an established provider and focus the list as narrowly as possible to get to your ideal clients, not just a broad demographic segment.
9. Offline promotion - Put your web address (URL) on your business cards, invoices, brochures, menus — pretty much every piece of printed material that a customer will receive from you. Use it on billboards, TV and radio ads. Show it on the last slide of any presentations you do. Of course, if you’re not putting a piece of paper in their hands, it needs to be short and memorable — yet another reason to get a descriptive domain name!

Notice that webinars and teleseminars aren’t on the list. Why not? Because you have to promote them, too, to get people to attend and you can only promote them to people you’ve already reached via some other means. They’re a great conversion tactic, but not usually a good lead generation tactic, unless they’re being done as part of a joint venture and you’re accessing someone else’s list.

Note also how many of the items on the list above refer to another item on the list. Each tactic may be moderately effective on its own, but they work best when combined with the others. That’s why an integrated marketing plan is so important. Remember, people have to hear your message an average of seven or more times before taking action. The more channels you’re distributing your message through, the sooner you’ll reach that critical mass in the mind of your potential customers.

Cash flow problems giving you headaches? Check out these simple budgeting tips from my OPEN Forum article, 5 Budgeting Ideas for Every Small Business Owner:

Managing cash flow is one of the most challenging aspects of being a business owner. Learning to budget, however, can help you overcome this challenge. Many entrepreneurs leave a secure job to run a business. When you do this, you move from earning a regular income to earning a more haphazard income, which can make personal budgeting difficult. The haphazard nature of business income is one of the risks of running a small business. The following tips will help any entrepreneur or small business owner reduce the risks by creating a workable budget for the business:

1. Create a realistic cash flow projection.
2. List your essential expenses.
3. List discretionary business expenses.
4. Reduce debt quickly.
5. Never spend all of your profits.

For more details, continue reading at OPEN Forum.

A penny saved is a penny earned.

With our attention focused on acquiring new customers and growing revenues, it’s easy to forget this simple maxim. And while some cost-cutting measures may actually be trade-offs against long-term success, others just plain make good sense.

One place many businesses can save money without a lot of effort is in business insurance. And while you may expect to save money by shopping around, what you may not know is that you can realize even greater savings with good decision-making and habits on your part.

In my most recent article for American Express OPEN Forum, I list the 12 top factors that affect your business insurance premiums:

1. Loss history
2. Credit history
3. Driving history
4. Owner/management experience
5. Location
6. Building characteristics
7. Continuity of coverage
8. Safe working environment
9. Employee wellness programs
10. Use of insured/bonded subcontractors
11. Correct information reporting
12. Ask your agent

For further explanation of how these factors affect your insurance premiums and what you can do to reduce them, continue reading at OPEN Forum.

It’s January again — the time of New Year’s resolutions, annual planning, etc. — in a word: goals.

Life is a list of goals. Personal and professional aspirations motivate us to act every day in order to attain a result that will put us ahead in the game of life. Maybe you want to lose weight, stop smoking, become a manager, get a degree, or find a life partner; in every case, you are aiming at a goal.

In order to enjoy a balanced life, there are six areas in your life for which you must define goals:

- Finances
- Relationships
- Contribution
- Health
- Spirit
- Business

Once you define a goal, you start working to attain it and begin to see some progress, but at some point, something happens and you get stuck or find yourself back where you started…this might get you down, but it is quite normal.

Most people don’t attain their goals not because they’re not motivated, but because they don’t know how to define attainable goals and keep working to get there. As every successful business coach will tell you, that’s the difference between successful people and the ones who must struggle to survive. Successful people know how to define and attain goals. Surround yourself with successful people and you will see the patterns.

Here are the six requisites every successful person meets to attain his or her goals:

1. Dream big
   Think out of the box and establish ambitious goals. Do not set goals thinking that there is a limit to what you can achieve. The only limit is yourself and the past conditioning you allow to stop you from getting what you want.
2. Write down detailed goals
   Successful people know that writing down their goals initiates the process. This is why you have to be specific, because what you write down is what will begin to happen. Your achievements will be as accurate as what you wrote, because you are appealing to the universal laws and are setting your mind to work as focused as possible. So don’t write down that you want a new car; explain that you want a new full extras, silver BMW, with black leather seats, a full warranty and full service for life.
3. Your goals must be in harmony with your values
   You will attain your goals easily if you are working on something you value, because it means you are aligned with your purpose in life. First, define your values and second, base your goals on them.
4. Your goals must include two things:
   a. A specific plan to attain each
   b. The correct beliefs and mindset
   Without these, you will never attain your goals, thus, clarify your beliefs and think about what actions will lead you to attaining your dreams.
5. Check your goals daily
   Before you get out of bed, before you eat your breakfast, check your list of goals. Visualize your life once you attain them: how does it feel? Check them before going to bed at night too. What you are doing is programming your brain to work on your goals subconsciously, and to expect them to become a reality.
6. Never lose hope
   You never lose, even if you don’t get what you wanted. In case your dream doesn’t become a reality, remember that you still have what you learned in the process. Experience is crucial to advancing in life. As long as you focus on what you want, you will find the way to get there, in spite of the problems or setbacks you may encounter.