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Extreme Makeover: Web Marketing Edition

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Just about everybody understands that having a completely integrated web and social media strategy is important. But for some reason there’s a perception among small business that it costs an arm and a leg to get everything up and running.

It’s true that just a few years back, a website could cost upwards of $10,000. But today you should be able to get something far superior for a lot less.

Great free web tools from WordPress, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter make it easier and more economical than ever to update your web presence.

Just recently I rebranded and relaunched Kurt Shaver’s site The Sales Foundry. Kurt is a professional speaker, I met at the National Speakers Association’s annual convention this past summer in Anaheim.

At the time he had a site that folks generally describe as brochure-ware. Very little interactivity, and no social media integration.

If I were a smarter man, I’d have a screen grab of the “before” to really bring home the improvements in the “after.”

But alas, all I can do is provide a list of some of the new features to demonstrate how you can improve your own online marketing.

First of all, the new site is built using WordPress. It’s a great little content management system that is very easy to customize and is practically designed to feed content to search engines.

The first thing you’ll see on the home page is a set of rotating banners that promote all of Kurt’s services. You’ll also note how prominent the signup is for his monthly newsletter along with the icons for each one of Kurt’s social media pages.

Above each piece of content on every page we have icons to help people share individual pages across various social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Google.

As I’ve stated before – LinkedIn is the most important social media site for business.

And on Kurt’s blog, we’ve replaced the default WordPress comments with Facebook comments to reduce spam and provide another opportunity for people to bring the conversation into the social sphere.

Staying with the blog for a second, we’ve connected the pipes so that whenever Kurt creates a new blog entry, that content is fed out Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn automatically. We used Feedburner for this.

But if someone is interested they can sign up to receive blog postings via email or install a native Android or Blackberry app.

Social media a a great way to let folks share content. But it’s important to have something worth sharing. Here you will see a quiz that allows folks to do a self assessment for the LinkedIn effectiveness.

Again this is a simple WordPress plugin. But it works great.

Other items a lot of folks seem to miss when building a site, that we’ve included:

  • Proper XML sitemap
  • Privacy statement
  • Feedburner RSS feed
  • Copyright
  • Physical address
  • Videos

If you’re in the market for a new site, make sure your coder/marketing person reads this article. You can also fill in this form and l’ll take a look at your site for free and give you some tips over the phone or via Skype. And of course, you can contact me and we can talk about building a site that includes all these features – in just over a month and for much less than you think.

Do-it-yourself marketing for speakers

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It’s entirely possible to take care of your marketing without any help. You just have to invest the time and effort to do it right.

The calculation you need to make is how much is your time and effort worth?

If you get paid between $5000 and $20000 a day for an engagement, then you have to consider the cost of each day you personally spend doing your own marketing in those terms.

If you are new to speaking or make considerably less on your average engagement, then there are things you can do to market yourself more effectively without having to spend a lot of money.

Let’s start with the basics. If you don’t have a site, you’ll need one. You can save yourself a lot of time and money, if you arrange for your own hosting and domain name. The good news is that you don’t have to be a tech-head to do this yourself. A quick search for cheap hosting will bring up thousands of choices. To save you a bit of time, I’m going recommend Siteground.com because that’s the one I use. And I think they do a fine job.

But feel free to do some research for yourself. Like I said there are literally thousands of hosting companies out there to choose from. And just before you make your decision do one more piece of research. Type “domaincompany.com sucks” into Google and see what complaints show up.

One of the biggest mistakes folks make is building a static site that is virtually impossible to scale upwards. If your goal to be successful, then a little planning now could save you thousands of dollars in the future.

For this reason alone, I recommend using a Wordpress.

It comes with thousands of free and paid extensions to make it very easy to integrate the latest and greatest tools from around the internet.
www.wordpress.org

Many hosts use something called a cPanel that let’s you install WordPress with just a few clicks.

It comes with an few out of the box templates to choose from, but you can also find free templates online or hire a programmer to custom build something for you. My experience tells me that you should look through the free templates first and then hire a programmer to customize it for you.

I’m actually using an out-of-the-box solution on this site.

If you don’t like any of the free ones, you can find hundreds of Wordpress designers on Upwork.com

The next step is to define your marketing position from the viewpoint of a visitor. Too many speakers believe people care who they are. Assume that each visitor to your site is someone who doesn’t know you, but has found you through some research or a referral.

What is it you’re offering them? That’s the reason they are there and that’s the only reason they are going to hire you.

If you have a site that is all about how awesome you are, nobody will care.

Offer real solutions to real problems and you won’t have to look very hard for clients.

The good news for speakers when it comes to web marketing is most of your competitors’ sites are terrible. They might look shinny, sharp and cutting edge, but if you peak under the hood, they aren’t search engine friendly.

If your name is Johnny Speaksalot and your site comes up number one, when someone searches for you specifically, great. But it’s far more important to reach those who are looking for a keyword or phrase that relates to what you do. Johnny would be much better served if the content on his site attracted folks typing “conference speaker for widget convention.”

There are a number of ways to do this, but for this article I’ll give you two quick ways to bring in more qualified leads through search use the words you want to be found for into the actual content of your pages and have a proper site map so that Google and other search engines can easily find and index your content.

One of the first things I do when I visit a potential client’s site is look for a sitemap ie www.example.com /sitemap.xml . If it isn’t there I know there is work I can do to help them.

Site maps are so valuable and yet I’m constantly surprised by how many folks don’t have one. If you are one of those folks, here is a great free tool to generate one within a few minutes:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Once you’ve done this upload the site maps to your site and submit them to the Google, Bing, Yahoo.

Here are the links:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.website.com/sitmap.xml

Web marketing isn’t rocket science, but it does take a bit of time and effort. Do it yourself or hire someone else. But don’t underestimate the power of the web to help you find clients from around the world.

Other things to promote your self online

Invest in a bit of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). How much is your time worth? Should you really be the one looking for keywords and trying to figure out how to get a better placement on Google? Use Scriptlance for this.??Install Analytics on your site. Find out how many folks are actually coming and set a realistic goal for improvement. www.google.com/analytics??If you have videos, create a custom YouTube Channel. How many folks come to your site compared to YouTube? Build the channel bring your content to a whole new audience. Then use a module to bring those YouTube videos to your site.??Link all your social media together. Whenever you send out a newsletter, publish a blog post or update your status – let it show up everywhere automatically. Create a podcast and update it once a month. You’re a speaker. Speak.

http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/creatorfaq.html. Try a webcast. This is a great way to engage your existing clients and even get some referals. The secret is simple. 1 hour consisting of 50 great content peppered with 10 minutes of subtle pitching.

Gotowebinar.com let’s you do this for $99 for up to 1000 attendees. Imagine the impact of reaching that many potential clients without even leaving your room. Look into POD (print on demand) services that will get your books onto Amazon sites across the world. Lightningsource.com is a great resource to get your book distributed around the world! Turn your books into ebooks through Smashwords.com. They now provide content for Apple’s Ipad, the Amazon Kindle, Sony e-reader and Barnes and Noble Nook.

You can do it yourself. So the decision is yours. Do you have the time and the inclination to do this or would you rather hire a web marketing expert to take care of it for you?

If you are looking for the latter, then please contact us and we can make this the most profitable year in your speaking career.

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Social media and internet marketing services

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With over 12 years experience in social media and internet marketing, Short Circuit Media will help you grow your business with integrated marketing strategies to bring more qualified leads to your site, and help you move those visitors into the sales funnel.

We have options to fit into virtually any budget. Here are the big six. And if there is something else you’re looking for…just ask.

Small business marketing strategy and execution

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When you finally decide to offload your marketing duties to an outside agency the first thing you need to consider is compatibility.

There are a million different companies swimming in the same pool offering virtually identical services.  So the key is not look for the best – most are pretty good – but rather the agency that works best for you.

A bit of history

2005 was a particularly hot summer, so there were many opportunities to brainstorm ideas while enjoying Toronto’s patio season.

At the time Aidan Crawford was working as the Manager of Internet/Intranet for BMO Mutual Funds. After spending the previous three years as the Web Marketing Specialist for Group Investments at Canada Life, his career path looked to be forever linked to financial services if he didn’t make a change. And soon.

Among the many ideas that bubbled up during those long sunny afternoons, was a concept to build national bank websites for people to research specific products without having to go to individual banking sites.

For the next two years, Short Circuit Media developed banking and investment sites using the latest internet marketing technologies.

Since 2010 Short Circuit Media has built a solid reputation as the go-to marketing firm for consultants, professional speakers and trainers, delivering one-off projects like websites, copywriting, business consulting and coaching all the way up to full service retainer marketing programs.

If you are a consultant, professional speaker or sales trainer find out what we can do to make your business grow.

Marketing and Coaching Services for Consultants, Speakers and Trainers

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BOOK A 30 MINUTE EXPLORATORY CALL

Why wouldn’t you work with a marketing firm with over 10 years experience helping Consultants, Speakers and Trainers succeed?

Prospecting clients is hard enough without having to take care of your own marketing.

If you are a professional speaker, trainer or consultant struggling to master marketing, you are probably wasting time that could be better used prospecting and qualifying clients.

Short Circuit Media works with speakers, trainers and consultants who are too busy to do their own marketing, need more strategy than a VA brings to the table, and don’t want to add a full time marketing person to the team.


There are a million different companies swimming in the same pool offering virtually identical services.  So the key is not look for the best – most are pretty good – but rather the agency that works best for you. If you are a speaker, trainer or consultant we may just be the agency you’re looking for!

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Here‘s how we’ll work to grow your business

UNDERSTAND


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STRATEGIZE


marketing-strategy

EXECUTE


launching-a-marketing-plan

SUPPORT


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We take the time to fully understand  your business model. What is it you do? Who are your clients? Why are they going to give you a big fat check for speaking at their event or training their people?

These are important questions that you need to know. And if you don’t know them, that’s where we’re going to start. By helping you define your message and align it to an audience, we will make you successful.

From there we’ll present you with a number of strategies that will help get you in front of the decision-makers. This may include a:

  • Website makeover
  • Social Media Integration
  • blog writing, newsletters, podcasting
  • Targeted advertising on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook
  • Content development

You get the point…

Here’s where the fun begins. After we tell you what needs to be done, we’ll do the hard work for you!

We implement the strategies we’ve come up for you; taking care of the technology and arranging the resources to make what we’ve discussed happen.

Simple as that.

For many clients, this is when the relationship takes off.

Once we have a marketing plan implemented, you can choose to take on the challenge of keeping it going yourself, use your existing staff or you can retain us as your very own marketing department; composing and deploying eblasts, writing blogs, sending out newsletters, producing podcasts and assisting in product development, while helping you create and implement new strategies to make your speaking, consulting or training business grow.

Speak to us today

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