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Archive for Web Marketing

Is Your Marketing Producing the Results You Expected

Tue Feb 07, 2012

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Quipol
Image:One-Fat-Man via Flickr CC

The poll question above is a bit loaded and, not that I want to skew the results, the answer for most lies in the fact that they don’t really know what results they expected or what result they are actually getting. Mostly they know the results aren’t what they had hoped for, but that’s another issue.

Setting expectations

One of the simplest, yet most effective, things you can do is set expectations or goals for your marketing. You can create overall revenue goals, campaign goals or more product or service specific goals, but either way, simply defining a target number will prove to be one of the best first steps.

Goals are like magnets in a way. If we define them and measure our results towards achieving them, they can produce some pretty dramatic pull.

I know this is an obvious bit of advice, but experience tells me that few businesses actually set real, tangible and meaningful targets. How many widgets do you need to sell this month? How many press mentions do you want to add this quarter? How many newsletter subscribers, webinar attendees or trial evaluations must you complete this week?

Measuring results

Once you define your marketing expectations you must define and track the most important indicators that will tell you if you are on track.

You can make this is a simple as a weekly sales total or as complex as the results of multivariate ad element testing, but the key is start measuring something and sharing the numbers.

If you’re not measuring anything, break a few key numbers down and figure out a way to produce a weekly spreadsheet that you use as a guide and also use to share with team members. Then start looking for ways to add key indicators to the list so in addition to simply measuring results you can start measuring individual effectiveness.

Add Google Analytics to your web site and pick up a copy of Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity
by Avinash Kaushik.

If you’ve been measuring key indicators and you’re comfortable with a tool like Google Analytics, consider looking at a more advanced form of measurement from the use of a tool like KissMetrics. This tool can measure so many things that it can also overwhelm, so don’t start here unless you’ve mastered the basics.

Posted by : John Jantsch on Feb 07, 2012 | 7:58 am

Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Web Marketing

Tag : Avinash Kaushik

3 Incredibly Useful Reasons to Hire a Coach

posted by: John Jantsch

Fri Dec 09, 2011

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I’ve been coaching business owners for years. I’ve trained hundreds to be marketing coaches. I believe in the process of strategic thinking, planning and doing, but I had never employed a coach myself.

euthman via Flickr CC

Highly paid athletes and performers are really only on stage or in the game for very short amounts of time. The rest of the time they spend practicing for the show and resting. Business owners on the other hand are always on, rarely practice to perform and, sadly in my case; don’t spend enough time rejuvenating or even thinking strategically.

Recently, I engaged my own coach to help me perform at a higher level and the payoff has been immediate in three very distinct ways.

Figure out the things I can’t do

You know, I have lots of answers. My problem, and the problem with most business owners, is nobody is asking me the right questions.

One of the things that engaging a coach has done is give me someone who will ask questions about what’s not getting done according to plan and why. So often the answer to these kinds of questions is that there are things I can’t do well.

The great thing about acknowledging these things is that most of the time they are also things that I don’t enjoy trying to do either. This simple acceptance has me fully engaged in finding team members who can and do excel at these things.

Figure out the things I won’t do

Lots of people know what they should do, what’s good for them and what’s prudent. The problem all too often is that left alone they do what feels good in the moment, what makes the most noise or strokes their ego.

That’s why we’re overweight, stressed and burned out.

In my case a coach is helping me understand what I won’t do on my own and providing me with a level of accountability that I can’t muster through pure will power.

Figure out the things I shouldn’t do

Spending time analyzing where I make my money is a pretty eye opening exercise. Like many people most of my income is derived in a couple of 30 minute blasts during the course of the day. Of course, part of the reason that is true is because of the fact that I’ve been doing this for a long time and part of it is true because I do a lot of little things all day that don’t pay – or at least not at the level I need to reach my plans.

Let me ask you this? If given the opportunity to identify three and only three of your highest payoff activities, what would be on that list?

Now, let me ask you another this? How much time do you spend doing those three and what would happen to your business if you spent twice as much time doing them?

Figuring out what you shouldn’t do and delegating or deleting it is just as important as figuring out what you should do.

If you want to take your business to greater heights in 2012, find a coach, consultant or someone that can force you to see what’s real and where to go to think and be bigger. (I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest a group of marketing consultants I’ve played a role in training.)

Posted by : John Jantsch on Dec 09, 2011 | 7:38 am

Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Web Marketing

Tags : coach, consultant

Coding Is the New Business Bilingual

posted by: John Jantsch

Tue Nov 22, 2011

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Many schools teach a second language as early as elementary school. Business travelers snap up copies of the latest course that promises to teach Japanese, Portuguese or Arabic in 30 days or less.

There are countless mobile apps, including the surprisingly useful Google translate, that can provide you with enough words and phrases to get fed and on the right train when abroad.

The fact is, however, there’s another kind of language that just might be far more important to learn. That language comes with names like Python, PHP, MySql, Java and C+. The new business bilingual is programming.

This TEDx Talk in the video above from 12-yr old app developer Thomas Suarez points to a new generation that’s taking an interest in coding what they interact with online, but make no mistake, this skill, or at least a working knowledge of some aspect of coding will become a foundational element of success from this point forward.

Programming apps and websites is no longer the turf of those geeks in IT, it’s a skill that better show up on your resume and in your problem solving toolkit in the next brainstorming session. It’s a skill that business owners need to understand in order to possess the necessary insight to move their business forward.

There are countless books, courses, and services popping up every day to rush in and fill the massive demand for even the most basic understand of the web’s most important languages.

While you will still likely hire experts to do things like build apps and create online databases, it’s time to make 2012 the year you become fluent in the new language of business.

Below are a few resources that I would recommend to help you get started.

Javascript

Code Academy – http://www.codecademy.com/subjects/javascript
Udemy Javascript – http://www.udemy.com/beginning-javascript/
W3Schools Javascript – http://www.w3schools.com/js/

HTML5

Udemy – http://www.udemy.com/deal/webhostingdealsorg-html-css-html5.html
W3Schools http://www.w3schools.com/html5/default.asp
HTML Rocks – http://www.html5rocks.com/en/

Ruby

Ruby Learning – http://rubylearning.com/
Learn Ruby the Hard Way – http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/book/
Ruby on Rails – http://railscasts.com/

Mobile

iOS – http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action
Android – http://developer.android.com/guide/index.html

More tutorial sources

Lynda.com – http://www.lynda.com/JavaScript-training-tutorials/244-0.html
Web Monkey – http://www.webmonkey.com/tutorials/

Posted by : John Jantsch on Nov 22, 2011 | 7:00 am

Categories : Marketing Strategy, Web Marketing

Tags : HTML5, Javascript, Lynda, Mobile Apps, Ruby, Udemy

10 Apps I Use Every Single Day

posted by: John Jantsch

Wed Oct 05, 2011

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Transmit app

More and more, we’re becoming an app happy world – Apps that run on our laptops, apps for the mobile and apps for the iPad or tablet. Even better are those apps that sync across all of our chosen devices, keeping us on task and on track in an increasingly online world.

Below are ten applications that I use on a daily basis to get more done, manage more information, communicate more ideas and generally keep the plates spinning.

TweetDeck – This is my primary social media dashboard. It’s a desktop application that runs on Adobe Air and while there are lots of alternative choices, I’ve just always stuck with TweetDeck. I do however use the Twitter app for the iPhone too.

I have groups, lists and searches set up at all times and use the scheduled Tweets feature to meter out content I want to share throughout the day.

Evernote – This is my brainstorming, idea clipping, bookmark storing powerhouse. Evernote syncs beautifully across all devices and allows me to outline my life in so many ways without having to commit anything to memory.

I’ve stored everything from ideas for my books to wines I want to remember. Here’s my Evernote routine in case your interested.

Dropbox – This is my online backup and file storage tool of choice. I probably overuse this tool, leaning on it as a file server for my team as well as a backup for important files, but it just works so well.

I also use it to share large files and grant conference attendees access to my PowerPoint presentations.

You can see my Dropbox routine here.

Reeder – This is an app that turns my chosen RSS reader, Google Reader, into something much more functional and much more attractive.

I do most of my blog reading on my iPhone or iPad and the Reeder app gives me a ton of functionality. I can easily share a post on Twitter, clip to Evernote and bookmark to delicious right from the post in Reeder. Great time saver.

Dragon Dictation – This iPhone app (at least that’s the only version I use) allows me to speak a memo and have it converted to text. I’ve not really tested this out, but I think I could compose a blog post using this tool.

The app then allows me to email the text or manage it in various other ways. I use this tool whenever I get a flash of brilliance while driving or think of something when trying go to sleep and want to capture the idea right away.

HelloFax – Actually this is billed as a fax machine replacement, but I don’t really use that function. What HelloFax allows me to do is receive a document, like a contract, agreement, vendor form or non disclosure (I get lots of these.) that need edits and my signature.

Instead of editing, printing, signing, scanning and emailing back I simply download the document, upload it to HelloFax, make my edits, drop in my stored signature and email it back.

And 4 just for the Mac

text expander

Text Expander – There are dozens of snippets of text that I need to use frequently. Text Expander allows me to write chunks of copy once and then paste those chunks whenever I need to with a couple keystrokes.

I have entire emails that I send in response to certain requests, email signatures, blog sponsorship messages, and even HTML code snippets that I use frequently committed to short, time saving keystrokes that are easy to recall.

Pixelmator – This is my replacement to Photoshop. Now, I’m not a graphic designer, so I don’t have major league design challenges, but I’ve used Photoshop for years and for $29 this tool does everything I need it to do and is much easier to use than Photoshop.

I’m sure Adobe would challenge this statement, but this tool is at least on par feature wise with the $99 Photoshop Elements.

Adium – I use Adium for all things related to IM – this Mac only client allows me to converse with folks via instant message regardless of the IM platform they use – Facebook, GTalk, or AIM. .

Transmit – This is my file transfer tool. It’s lightening fast and allows me to upload and manage files via FTP to my web sites. I also use it to access my Amazon S3 file storage as I use Amazon’s cheap hosting and streaming for my videos and other larger downloads that I make available on my sites.

I also use Transmit to move files around on my laptop. Instead of using two instances of the Finder on my Mac, I use a split window in Transmit that allows me to drag and drop files more easily.

Posted by : John Jantsch on Oct 05, 2011 | 8:05 am

Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Web Marketing

Tags : Adium, Dragon Dictation, dropbox, Evernote, Hellofax, Pixelmator, TextExpander, Transmit, tweetdeck

5 Ways to Use the Internet to Drive People Off the Internet

posted by: John Jantsch

Tue Sep 13, 2011

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One of the greatest uses of the Internet for small local business is as a tool to enhance their greatest offline strength – the ability to engage in person.

Mike_fleming via Flickr

While the Internet offers the ability to reach globally, it possesses real power for the local business in its ability to extend reach locally.

Local marketers that fuse what they are doing offline, in their store, in their leads groups and in their community, with the awesome depth and ease of reach available through an active online presence can amplify the impact of their efforts in ways that produce a much greater return on investment all around.

The in person experience is the ultimate competitive advantage for the small business and it’s how they beat the online and big box competition. Many people have begun to call this thinking O2O or online to offline marketing.

Here’s a taste of what I mean:

Meetings that start online and end offline

What if you started a local leads group and used MeetUp.com to help facilitate the promotion and invitation to your referral group that also met in person once a month in your place of business.

This could create a powerful network of strategic partners using a suite of online tools to build each others businesses passively while still connecting at a much deeper level by meeting in person.

Networking that is both on and offline

Local business owners understand the power of networking and belonging to local groups such as their Chambers of Commerce. What if you supplemented your local networking events with social media and networking tools?

Think about the impact of meeting someone at a local event and then connecting through Facebook or LinkedIn to continue to communicate and share. Now, imagine what the relationship might look like the next time you bump into each other simply because you were able to connect, learn and engage online in between meeting face to face.

By connecting some simple tools like Rapportive, SproutSocial or BatchBook you can easily add the social network participation of everyone in your contact database. Do you see how that might speed communication and networking in the best sense?

Snack sized online showcase

The next time you plan a seminar or workshop, add this feature. Invite all of your clients and prospects to the live event, but add several opportunities for them to sample the great content in a few easy to attend online events.

Interview speakers, tease content and give them a taste of the value of attending in person. It’s become much harder to attract customers and prospect to events and so you need to sell the value in many ways.

By creating preview type marketing and distributing it through online channels using tools like GoToWebinar or Vokle you can create a sense of excitement and offer potential participants proof that there is a compelling reason to attend the full deal.

GPS as a marketing game

Mobile is for the most part an online game that is played locally. People that use their mobile devices for locating, shopping, and sharing are often doing so with local buying in mind.

Smart local businesses are plugging into tools such as Foursquare to build brand pages and reward local offline purchases, but they are also creating their own games using platforms such as Twitter and Scvngr.

Create a local social group

Social networks such as LinkedIn allow members to create and moderate groups on any subject.

Some smart local marketers have picked up on this and created very locally based groups around a topic of interest. Of course the topic has the most traction if it has broad appeal rather than simply promoting one business.

If you can create a group that brings lots of your prospects and network together in support of a topic of interest you might find it to be a powerful way to drive offline behavior inside the group as well.

Bryan Elliot’s Linked Orange County is a good example of what’s possible.

There are so many ways to use online tools to make your business more attractive to offline prospects. The key is think about how to efficiently access increasingly larger online audiences to build the trust required to drive them into your profitable offline offerings.

Posted by : John Jantsch on Sep 13, 2011 | 7:10 am

Categories : Social Media, Web Marketing

Tags : batchbook, SCVNGR, SproutSocial, Vokle

Getting the Google Plus Conversation Right

posted by: John Jantsch

Fri Aug 19, 2011

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If you still haven’t joined Google Plus click here – 150 invites

Benson Kua via Flickr

One of the most interesting things about Google’s new social network, Google Plus, is the conversation that participation generates.

Some still attribute this to the newness factor, but it’s one of the things that really makes Google Plus exciting right now.

Posting is different

One of my first observations is about the kind of content that attracts the most interest. Simply republishing blog posts is not necessarily the best way to generate conversation. Publishing a somewhat divisive opinion contained in a blog post is. Posting images and videos is. Posting opinions is. Posting observations is.

There are essentially three ways for people to interact with your content on Google Plus. They can +1 it, share it and make a comment on it. In my experience so far, people +1 something as a way of saying – I like that. They share as a way of saying I want people that I’m connected with to see that (it’s one way people fill up their own stream.) They make comments when they want to agree or disagree or in response to a question.

Because of the way the entire content and conversation package is displayed on Google Plus the comments are a bigger part of how the conversation ends up then they might be on the more traditional blogging format.

Experiment with content

Noting some of the differences stated above has me playing around with getting the mix right, but I can say it’s a work in progress. Sometimes you make a simple observation and find the conversation wanders into considering your own mortality.

Here are a handful of posts that show the different kinds of engagement for different kinds of content with the engagement numbers for each.

Here’s where I asked people what they +1 or share – questions draw comments for obvious reasons – +4, 5 shares, 39 comments

Here’s where I suggested that we need prepare students better for the reality of a digital world – opinions can draw all three – +18, 17 shares, 26 comments

Here’s where I uploaded a photo that contained an interesting reflection my beer glass made on the bar – +38, 3 shares, 29 comments – including one telling me I was old and thought my life was over, but pretty amazing to think that an image, uploaded in real time would draw this much conversation – images draw lots of +1 and get comments if they are odd, but don’t draw many shares unless they are magnificent (photographers are finding a real home here)

Here’s a repost of a short YouTube video about giving referrals (another interesting thing about G+, videos, even ones you’ve previously posted elsewhere, do very well) – +31, 25 shares, 24 comments – short, inspiring videos can draw lots of attention.

Here’s another one that’s just an image from a photo shoot for a magazine – okay, it’s a pretty cool photo, but look at the conversation – +56, 1 share, 48 comments – again, another case of an image drawing +1 and comments, but not as many shares.

And lastly – Here’s where I created a graphic that stated something that the early users of Google Plus were all thinking, but I was one of the first to capture it I guess – The brutally honest guide to naming circles on Google+ +78, 2029 shares, 96 comments – one of the most shared images of all time mainly because it contained a powerful insight and the timing was right.

Here’s my advice

Shares are probably the most important if you want to build your audience and get more traffic. Thoughtful insights, useful videos and valuable how to content is what people share. +1s may help some day in search and comments are an important sign of healthy followings, but shares are where it’s at.

Traffic generation

Google Plus is often in the top three spots, and more than once the top spot, in daily traffic to my site. And yet, traffic from other social networks has not dropped. So, making the effort to get your posting on Google Plus right – meaning tailoring it to the Google Plus conversation – is not only worth the effort in terms of traffic, it will certainly be worth it one day in terms of search and is already worth it today in terms of stimulating conversation.

Posted by : John Jantsch on Aug 19, 2011 | 7:54 am

Categories : Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Web Marketing

Tags : Google, Google Plus

5 Collaboration Tools Demonstrate How the Future Web Will Act

posted by: John Jantsch

Thu Aug 04, 2011

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The ability to collaborate with individuals and groups around the world is one of the greatest gifts offered by the new breed of online tool. These tools, and perhaps the web in general, are evolving to become more interactive and feature rich.

With the eventual adoption of HTML5 and its heavy support for AJAX, web pages are quickly becoming web applications in a foreshadowing of the next standard for web sites. Take note of these new tools as they will usher in the expectation that all sites begin to function instead of merely house information.

Below are 5 new breed collaboration tools making heavy use of HMTL5.

Groupzap – This one wins the coolness award in my book, but offers a really powerful set of tools for instant collaboration and brainstorming meetings and white boards on the fly. Marry it with Skype and you have a no cost tool that is hard to beat. You can drag files into the space, document with notes and save the entire session as a PDF. Nobody has to register you just send out a link via IM or email.

Microsoft Office Web Apps – (okay, this one probably doesn’t use HTML5 as IE doesn’t add support for it until IE9, but it still fits the new breed label) – Using the Office Web Apps and SkyDrive you can open a document with a group of people and co-author and edit in real time with the entire group participating, making changes and viewing the changes live.

Google + Hangouts – One of the most talked about features of the much talked about Google + is Hangouts – a video chat function that allows you to invite or simply host an on the fly group video meeting. (There is now a Facebook plug in that mirrors this and you can add a Group Meeting plug in to your own WordPress blog)

TalkWheel – TalkWheel is an instant messaging platform that works more like a roundtable discussion than the linier stack of the typical IM. It actually create a visual representation of the conversations and filters and relates topics. Looks like a very cool way to keep track of conversations from around the web and I can see lots of focus group and brainstorming uses with its visual presentation.

Vokle – I’m probably stretching how some might view collaboration with this one, but I just love what you can do with Vokle. Vokle is actually a live streaming video platform, but it makes it very easy to have two people present or invite virtual guests to create a talk show kind of feel. You can also share a computer screen as the guest to flip back and forth from live presenter to slides or images. The entire stream can be recorded for future playback as well.

Posted by : John Jantsch on Aug 04, 2011 | 7:56 am

Categories : Social Media, Web Marketing

Tags : AJAX, Collaboration, Google Plus, GroupZap, Hangouts, HTML5, MS web apps, TalkWheel, Vokle, Web apps

The Only Reason to Participate in Social Media

posted by: John Jantsch

Wed Jul 06, 2011

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Plain and simple, the real reason to participate in any marketing activity, including Facebook and others, is to generate a customer.

That point of view gets overlooked in favor of the “see how many fans you can get” social media game. One of the things that has become painfully clear of late is that having lots of followers does not equate into having lots of business. I know plenty of well-known, heavy hitter social media types, the ones that show up on lots of tops of Twitter lists, that are broke.

I’m not suggesting that having no followers is the way to go either, but turning followers into leads and converting those leads into profitable business is the real reason to spend time and money in any tactic.

Again, I’m not suggesting that this means you find a way to buy a few fans and then spam them into submission, but you must have a workable plan in place to move people from followers to prospects.

For most businesses this means email. If you are not consistently putting out great content and offering that content for your followers to grab in exchange for their email address you are severely limiting your ability to make social media pay.

You can do this in the form of an email newsletter, downloadable free ebook or even free online seminar or other event. The point is that if you can gain trust in your social media engagement, the kind that makes people confidently give you permission to email them, you’ll make social media pay. If you don’t, you won’t, it’s that simple.

Once you’ve earned this kind of trust, you can begin to nurture this lead, educate and make offers in ways that simply don’t have impact in most social media settings.

Obviously, you can take this offline as well – drive folks to play a game of check-in, invite them to your in person event, or get them to enter to win a grand prize at your location – but the point still remains.

Look at what your doing right now with your social media efforts and ask yourself this question – What could I do that would entice some percentage of my followers to willingly and joyfully give me their email address? – answer that and you’ll turn your social media efforts into a powerful lead generation machine.

Posted by : John Jantsch on Jul 06, 2011 | 6:53 am

Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Social Media, Web Marketing

Tag : email marketing

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Archive for Web Marketing

3 Incredibly Useful Reasons to Hire a Coach

Coding Is the New Business Bilingual

10 Apps I Use Every Single Day

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Duct Tape Consulting Programs

Speaking/Workshops

Resources/Tools

Books by John Jantsch

Free Weekly Marketing eNewsletter

Years Worth of Posts Here

Recent Posts

Archive for Web Marketing

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Duct Tape Marketing Products

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