Reflections on Giving Thanks

It’s been a great Thanksgiving with family. Great Turkey, great side dishes and my pies came out rich and creamy. This is a great time to reflect on personal and professional thanks and I’m very thankful for my family, my readers, my publisher and my friends and colleagues who are reading Market This! and getting value out of the book. I’m also thankful for all the business owners who are talking about my book, referring my book to others and are asking for more resources and tools to make them better marketers. Thanks to everyone who has been supporting this book and its ventures! It’s been a great year for Market This! so far and I’m looking forward to more adventures in the coming year.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, I hit the stores at day-after-Thanksgiving sales a.k.a. Black Friday and was amazed at the volume of shoppers up so early in the morning. I read that this retail season should not be so great, but tell that to the shoppers out there! They were in full force looking for bargains galore, and honestly there are some out there. Thankful, busy shoppers is what I saw yesterday. I think the official “Black Friday” retail sales results will publish this Sunday, but I have to say I saw a lot of people out and they were doing some serious shopping! Will be interesting to hear…

Here’s wishing that you had a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends and may you continue to have many thankful and joyous moments throughout this holiday season.

Market This! Finalist in National Best Books 2009 Awards

I’m thrilled and honored to report that Market This!: An Effective 90-Day Marketing Tool has been selected as an award-winning finalist in the Business: Marketing & Advertising category of the National Best Books 2009 Awards, sponsored by USA Book News. I received an email over a week ago with the good news and had to share. Great news for the book!

USABookNews.com is the premiere online magazine and review website for mainstream and independent publishing houses. Winners and finalists were announced in over 140 categories covering print and audio books and awards were presented for titles published in 2009 and late 2008. USABookNews.com will have a national media promotion about finalists and winners prior to the holidays so this may help to get the word out about the book.

As an award finalist, my book will appear on their website for six months here:

If you’re interested in seeing the full list of winners and finalists in every category, I’ve included the link! Scroll down to Business: Marketing &
Advertising category!

I’m thrilled that the book is being recognized!

Ideas for Building multiple streams of income

I taught the marketing session this past week of the Startup 101 course at Outside the Cube and had some very talented business owners and entrepreneurs join the session. In general, attendees in this course were really looking for some innovative ways to upgrade marketing efforts along with some exciting ways to re-craft and position their marketing message to customers. I was impressed to see that most of the attendees had more than one business going at the same time!

What was really exciting is that these existing businesses had the opportunity for multiple streams of income. We had some very creative discussions about how to create and drive additional streams of income. After some collaborative discussions from this past week, I’ve collected some thoughts on new ways to increase and build multiple streams of additional income with your business:

Live Events:
- Extending current services to include live in-person workshops, or programs giving you opportunity to share expertise, training and/or event information about your product or service. Package these live events so that you can provide them for more than one type of customer or audience.
- Hosting Rountable discussions and gathering key feedback from attendees which can then be prepared into a packaged report available for purchase on your website.
- Partnering with one or two other professionals to offer a seminar or workshop that can help to drive new leads, business-profit from event can be shared.

Building Value through Audio/Video Content:
- Build content CDs, recorded Webinars or Audio Teleseminars and package into an offer for customers. You may already have existing content in print or in presentations that you can use and re-position. Customers love using CDs, Teleseminars or Webinars to learn more about a new product or service and if they find value in what you are offering, they will pay to learn more.

Self-published e-books and guides:
- e-Books, booklets and mini booklets can be prepared as a download and packaged with other content CDs or standalone and available for purchase. Instead of handling the print costs associated with book publishing, create an online e-booklet and attach a price.

All of these examples above are fairly inexpensive to product and can be offered as downloadable products for sale available from your website!

Startup 101: Crash Course for New and Aspiring Entrepreneurs

M.F. Chapman, CEO of Cubes & Crayons and Outside the Cube has done it again! She is really listening to the entrepreneur community in Silicon Valley and has created a much-needed and asked for Business 101 course starting this Fall. I’ve been asked to help teach the marketing part of this newly launched program and am really excited.

If you’re an entrepreneur or an aspiring entrepreneur, this is the course for you! We’ll cover legal, accounting, social media and of course marketing in this program and each focus area will be taught by a different business expert. You’ll get the hands-on, practical tools and coaching that you need to run your business successfully. What is great about this course is that you can take the subjects separately or bundle them together as one complete course. The registration is now live and if you’re interested please sign up!

Please note that I have a special discount code set up for friends and family, so encourage you to take advantage when signing up: OSTPC.

We’ll be using some of the exercises from my new book, Market This!: An Effective 90-Day Marketing Tool and I guarantee that you’ll have a lot of fun putting some new marketing ideas into action with my help!

See you in October!

http://biz101sv.eventbrite.com/

Collaborating with entrepreneurs at Outside the Cube

I had the good fortune to do a mini-workshop at Outside the Cube in Mountain View this Friday thanks to Felicity Chapman, Founder and CEO of Cubes & Crayons and Outside the Cube. Outside the Cube  is a place to work with other professionals in an open work space with the convenience of childcare (if needed).  This is a great alternative to folks who work in their home and occasionally need to get out and work in a new office space environment. It’s simple solution: the convenience of leasing space to work in a very cool environment with other like-minded businesspeople.

What a relaxed and inspiring work space! I arrived early for my workshop and there were two other professionals in the work space while I got my handouts organized. Our workshop was in one of the available conference rooms, but I needed to make some copies before we started, so I walked into the general work space area first and looked for a copy machine which was readily available. The walls were beautifully designed with soothing and creative colors that really made you want to sit down for a full 8 hours and get some stuff done! I immediately observed that one professional had her computer set up at a workstation and was humming tunes while listening to her iPod. The other professional there was busy also working on a computer but helped me find the water and copy/fax machine. Soon, a few moms came in with children and were entering the childcare section of Outside the Cube, getting ready for a few hours of on-site work with the convenience of childcare. I felt energized by the open space and the feeling that the professionals using the workspace had come for a productive morning of work all the while co-sharing space with other like-minded professionals and entrepreneurs. The vibe was positive, the mood was productive and there was a lot of natural light in the co-work space. What more could you ask for if you needed to sit and work?

My workshop started at 10AM and it was a mix of consultants and entrepreneurs who were looking for new ways to increase the value of their marketing messages to existing and potential customers. We used several exercises from my book and because the workshop  was fairly small, we had the opportunity to openly discuss how to improve the marketing messages of each business owner there. This was a great experience for me, since I had the unique opportunity to really coach some great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs on how to up-level their current messaging and find new ways to market themselves using online tools. The business owners in the workshop ranged from IT consulting organizations to virtual assistants to international business and marketing coaches and several marketing and communication consultants. All in all, it was a great workshop and I found that a lot of the attendees were feeling that they needed a new way to “re-position” their marketing message with the given economy yet hadn’t had the time to really sit down and do it!

Workshop attendees were impressed (as was I) with the one space and community feel for the Outside the Cube environment and CEO Felicity Chapman gave us some information about upcoming business workshops for entrepreneurs from coaching, business consulting help and even events for working moms and dads. She’s got it all!  I highly recommend Outside the Cube for any professional who’d like a change of pace for working environment and is open to getting some creative juices flowing with other like-minded entrepreneurs or professionals. Hats off to Felicity for developing an outstanding solution for the 21st century professional!

For more information on Outside the Cube as well as to find out about their workshops and community events, visit: www.otcsf.com

Book Review from Thursday Bram

Several months ago, journalist and writer Thursday Bram requested a copy of my book to do a review. I’m of course thrilled that she’s interested in marketing and was happy to see that she took the time to write a review of the book on her blog.  Market This! really is designed to be easy-to-read and easy to implement for any business and really helps the reader see what’s going on in their business. I like how she has commented that the book can help you to increase your marketing efforts even before you get to the plan.

Thursday’s got some great tips on her blog about how to market your freelance writing in 31 days and has an ebook coming out soon based on her strategies.  She’s got a great summary of how to get your writing out on the market quickly and I’m looking forward to seeing her ebook published. Thanks Thursday, for reading Market This!

http://www.thursdaybram.com/category/marketing

Are we becoming completely virtual?

I’ve seen billboards, ads and evites for virtual conferences lately and I think the trend is really becoming more than a trend. With travel being limited, I think more and more businesses are seeing the value in staying on the ground to save plane fares and have invested in new ways to keep customers coming back to their products and services. This year, it’s virtual events! Virtual conferences, virtual kickoffs and virtual meetings.

I’ve been invited to one virtual kick-off meeting and three virtual conferences in the past two months. These are well-planned and executed events, some of which have virtual rooms where you click on various environments that simulate a conference room with banner ads and a place to actually scroll through a live presentation. I can’t say that they completely replace the face-to-face experience, but I will say that it has saved me plane fares, hectic airport security lines and the stress of getting to and from an event on time. From the comfort of a computer, yes, I can say that I have been able to communicate with others in chat rooms in a virtual conference environment and learn about best practices for a new product launch or a service. I’ve also been able to post comments on my opinions about a presentation and it’s really quite satisfying. However, I still believe that it’s hard to replace the excitement and enthusiasm of seeing a new product announcement or idea come to life in the presence of the actual presenter.

I think virtual events are a great idea, but I will be interested to see some research as to how many customers feel that they are closer to making a decision on a product or service when they attend a virtual event as to opposed to attending an in-person event. Sometimes that in-person handshake just seals the deal on how you feel about working with a company or how you feel about a new product or service. With so many people working remotely these days and the cost of travel being halted this year, virtual events do make sense. The question is, will they keep customers coming back more quickly or will it slow down the decision process?

Why we love our Customers

I have to admit that I have become recently impressed with my local dry cleaner business. I have been using the same dry cleaner for over four years now and I use them primarily for the convenience of the location. It’s a family-owned business and a husband and wife team. The wife takes an interest in my kids, my life and of course, my clothes. She’s friendly, honest and chatty. She always takes the time to walk me out to the car (if I need help carrying my clothes out) if I’m with the kids and she always takes time to ask me about my week and how things are going.

A few months ago I started noticing that all my hangers had a “We love our customers” (with the word love typed out not as a word but as a heart visual image) message proudly displayed on the paper of each hanger. But even before I noticed the “We love our customers” hangers I noticed something else. A prominent white sign in the window AND on the front registration area that explained that this was now a “green-friendly” dry cleaner. Once I noticed the green sign I asked the owner about this. She said, “Yes, well you know people want this and expect this from a good dry cleaner so it’s something we felt customers would appreciate.” I asked her if she thought most of her customers expected their dry cleaner to be green. “No,” she said, “But some of my most loyal customers had mentioned it in passing so I wanted to be sure we got this.” 

Good for my local dry cleaner! Simple concept, simple way to keep your customers. Find out what your best customers want and need and make it happen. Something tells me this local dry cleaners is going to be around a long time. After all, they know how to keep customers happy and understand how to keep their business thriving at the same time during a tough economy. And…they “love their customers” and in my opinion, it certainly shows.

Learning from the Young Entrepreneur

I found a great new blog today called Young Entrepreneur. How refreshing it was to find a blog out there that addresses some fundamental questions that entrepreneurs ask themselves on a daily basis! As I read through the articles, I was even more pleasantly surprised to find the writers get to the root of an entrepreneur’s real emotional challenges. This is a blog worth visiting on a regular basis. Many of the topics have answers to real questions that need to be addressed before diving head first into a new venture. Topics of articles such as “what are the sure fire ways to know if your business will work or not?” and “how to stay motivated” as well as “when is it time to go full time with your business?”  These are all topics that any entrepreneur will find both practical and helpful.

The site is easy to read and use and has a simple layout. I like the way they have included an “Entrepreneur Interviews” section where they highlight guest entrepreneurs.  This is a great way to learn more about like-minded entrepreneurs and hear their best practices, however I would like to see more female entrepreneurs highlighted in this section, since there are a ton of them out there! 

I think my favorite part about the site is the “Entrepreneur polls” section. They have really done a nice job of getting some great poll surveys completed, and the topics range from understanding “how to market your business on Twitter” to “how to stay motivated.”  I look forward to seeing more polls and scanning these weekly.

Overall, a great find (through Twitter!) and as I stumble through new found social media sites, I have to say that these guys deserve a bravo for taking the initiative to start such a great blog that addresses real entrepreneur issues. I hope my book readers will take the time to visit this site as well.

Check out their blog at http://www.youngentrepreneur.com/blog

 

 

What customers want to hear right now

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about the economy and how it is impacting their customers directly. Some say their customers are buying less and want more from the products and services they’ve got. Most people are saying that big purchases are being put on hold for the next few quarters and that spending budgets are smaller in general. But I keep hearing the same thing over and over again from vendors, customers, investors and partners…and that is that they want to hear more from their vendors and suppliers and partners. What do they want to hear?

• Advice, tips, and tools to help to get them through this economic downturn
• Best practices around social media strategies
• Innovative ways to do more with less

Customers want to hear more from people who can help them ride this economy successfully. They  want to hear from their top vendors and they want to hear what they have to say about helping them with their businesses. They want help from their trusted advisors. This means more frequent communication via emails, news alerts and certainly social media. 

Many businesses are trying to “figure out” social media and really make a dent in how it can work for their businesses. If you have customers that need help getting a social media strategy implemented or need to just get started, maybe it’s time for you to be that trusted advisor and help them get started.

Everyone is trying to “do more with less.” “Don’t push more products and services at me” I heard one company say. “Show me how I can dig in deeper with the products I have to be more successful today.” I think that sums up how people are feeling right now with their current investments. Customers need to evaluate what they have and see how those tools can continue to help them in this economy.

Customers really need our help right now in many ways. And, this is really great for marketers. If we can identify what tools and tips will help our customers do better out there, we can help them weather this storm and chances are if we weather it together, we’ll be in good shape when this economy turns around.