Virtual Impax

Effective Strategic Digital Marketing

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Reach your customers before they start searching

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One of the most important elements in web site management and marketing is to think strategically about what your customers are doing BEFORE they start searching for solutions to their problems.

So often, business owners tend to  view the whole “web site management and marketing” game as just that – a game.  We engage in SWOT analysis because we want to analysis our strengths and weaknesses as well as the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors.  Our web site management and marketing plans are all focused on what happens in the the “end zone” – what words are our customers using to find our products and services.  We want to fool ourselves into thinking that our customers are rational.  We want to tell ourselves that our customers are approaching the buying decision with a checklist – and the first company to successfully meet the criteria will “win” the sale.   This mindset is a sure fire way to make sure you settle for less than success in your business.

Instead, the smart business owner’s web site management and marketing strategy will focus on the journey your prospective customers are taking as they meander along life’s path.

For example, let’s say you’re a a registered dietitian who wants to start a offering your services as a nutritional coach.  It’s a great “marriage” of services so to speak – because motivation is a HUGE part of encouraging good nutritional habits.   Your role as a dietitian is to provide information meanwhile your role as coach is to provide motivation.  I mean, no one is going to eat hemp bagels because they are so tasty!  No, you eat hemp bagels because they are NUTRITIOUS!  A coach is going to help you find the motivation to eat hemp bagels after you discover they won’t get you “high”.

So, you’re a nutrition coach who wants to find clients for your practice. A blog is a GREAT marketing tool for you to use to build your practice.    It’s a great tool in the authentic pursuit of making money.  However, you have to blog with your prospective customers or clients in mind.

For example,  in the case of the nutritional coach – trust me, if you focus on targeting people who are searching for hemp bagels – well, you’ve missed the boat.  If you’re blogging to reach those people for your practice, blogging may not be the best use of your time.  Anyone searching for hemp bagels already POSSESSES the necessary “motivation” – no, you need to find customers or clients who are struggling.  You need people who want to believe that Fiber Pop-Tarts are the answer to better nutrition.

See, there’s a wake up call in the future of the “dietary deluded”.  In some cases, it’s going to be handed to them at a doctor’s office with the results of their blood work.  In others, it’s going to be delivered in the cardiac care unit.

Your goal, as the nutritional coach should be to reach those prospective clients before the wake up call is issued.  If you – as the nutritional coach- had a web site management and marketing plan in place (a.k.a. a blog) where you were capturing the attention of the “dietary deluded” you could do just that.

That’s why I spend most of my time “pounding” the never ending beat on the “target your audience” drum.  When you know who your target audience is, it’s easier to reach them BEFORE they begin searching.  As a matter of fact, there’s no possible way to reach them before they start searching if you don’t know what they’re doing BEFORE they start searching!

Reaching your customers before they begin searching for solutions is the high road.  Learn more about how to do that by picking up a copy of my book, Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results.

Why would you think it’s easier to win [insert name of sporting championship here] than to build a successful blog?

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The subtitle of this post should read: “Everyone wants to be a winner -but not everyone is willing do to what it takes to BE a winner.”

The Indianapolis Colts have over the past three weeks restored hope for a chance at the playoffs thanks to three back to back wins including yesterday’s defeat of Houston.  (GO COLTS!) I’d love nothing better than to taunt my neighbors (most of whom hail from the land of the Giants, the Jets and the Patriots) this February with a garish display of Hoosier Pride.  I’ve still got everything perfectly preserved from the Colt’s 2006 Super Bowl win, hoping for the chance to bring it all out again.  ( I also had to endure the drunken near rioting of some of my other neighbors when UF won national titles in both football AND basketball!)

Not too long ago, the Phillies won the World Series.  In order to achieve that accomplishment, they had to play 162 games in the regular season just to make it to the post season.  They had to WIN more often than they lost just to make it to the playoffs.  In order to achieve that feat, every member of the team had to work hard – physically AND mentally – to even have the opportunity to play in the World Series.

This is the way the goal setting works.  First you define or set a goal and then you work towards ACHIEVING that goal.  However, if you don’t DEFINE the goal first, it’s almost impossible to put into action a plan to achieve the goal!

I’m not a baseball fan, but my son is.  Twelve years ago, my six year old baby boy would be so excited about playing coaches pitch baseball that he would bounce up and down in left field through the entire game.  Fortunately, no one could hit the ball that far because it’s my observation that bouncing up and down is NOT the preferred stance for outstanding performance in the outfield.

Years passed and my son’s love of baseball continued and fortunately, his skill as well as his concentration improved.   When he was 11, his All-Star team finished 1 game shy of competing in the Little League World Series regional play.   Watching that game was one of the most painful experiences of my life.  You could LITERALLY watch the wheels fall off that wagon as the final game progressed – and the saddest part of all was it seemed to be the COACHES who were determined to make sure their team didn’t advance to regional play!

Tom Volkar writes in Clarity Empowers Progress

The clarity of exactness and preciseness increases the probability of intentional manifestation. Maybe that’s what keeps many from choosing. A couple of participants on a recent group coaching call, supporting our community leveraging experiment, admitted as much.

When we definitely state what we want, in stark specificity, we have chosen, haven’t we? Perhaps that’s why folks choose to remain confused and general because you can’t really commit to a generality, can you?

Try dedicating yourself to excellence in vagueness. Yes you can develop the inspired confidence to move mountains but you’ve got to identify the damn mountains! If you don’t commit then you can’t fail but you can’t succeed either. Without clarity and inspired commitment your only choice is to remain safely frozen in whatever waiting hell you’ve created.

As I read Tom’s entire post (check it out, this is just one golden nugget of many in the post!), I can now see – almost a decade later – what was going on back then.  (Hindsight really is 20/20!)   It hit me like a ton of bricks: those coaches had achieved their goal when they reached the state finals.  Once they achieved that goal, they ran out of gas.  There was no new goal – new vision.  They had already achieved all they thought was possible – and we wereall  forced to remain frozen in the hell of what MIGHT have been that year!

However, this recognition extends beyond ancient history and fading memories of a Little League team that couldn’t – it’s also shined a bright light onto a dark area in the realm of building a business.

One of my biggest frustrations with clients is when they refuse to declare their intentions.  The three words that will keep ANY service professional poor are , “I HELP EVERYONE.”

When you strive to target everyone with your marketing message – in essence, you’re targeting no one!

I love Tom’s choice of words in the paragraph above – “Yes you can develop the inspired confidence to move mountains but you’ve got to identify the damn mountains!”

The Indianapolis Colts have identified the mountain they’d like to move – just as every other team in the NFL is targeting the mountain named “Super Bowl.”  Every game they win or lose is translated into their “chance” for a playoff berth.

Every professional sport has its own mountain.  Every game that is played is played with the goal in mind of getting the opportunity to ultimately move that mountain and claim it as the team’s own.  There is no greater hell than to be a fan of a team that obviously has not defined their season goal as winning the ultimate championship.  (I live in Miami Dolphins territory – believe me, I’ve seen the pain of that dilemma over the past few seasons!)

What mountain are you attempting to climb with your blog?  If you haven’t identified one you’d like to own -you’ve still got a few weeks to make it your 2009 New Year’s Resolution!

Steps to Starting a Small Business: #4 Naming Your Business

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When you’re starting a business, one of the steps to starting a small business is naming your business.  While a rose by any other name may indeed smell just as sweet, the name you choose for your business is one of the most critical decisions you will make.

Your business name is the foundation of EVERYTHING in your business.  It will affect every aspect of your business from customer perception to the domain name you use for your web presence.   Make a mistake in naming your business and, trust me – it will haunt you for years to come.

This post is obviously a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of post.   I am the QUEEN of choosing horrible names for my adventures.  Case in point – Virtual Impax.  I can admit it – it’s a TERRIBLE NAME for a business!  The “fun-n-funky” hooked on phonics spelling just makes it worse.

How do I know it’s a terrible business name? The first clue I had that the name Virtual Impax was a horrible business name was when first question most people ask is, “What is that?” or “What do you do?”

Another horrible choice – Acumen Web Services.  Do you know what the word “acumen”  means?  If you don’t, you’re in good company.  Naming my alter ego business Acumen Web Services is clearly a case of “Who talks like that?”

The answer – me and only me.

With this said, there is a school of thought out there on naming your business that would tell you that I’ve been BRILLIANT in naming my business ventures.  See, these unique and unusual names means that my web presence is a GUARANTEED NUMBER 1 listing with the search engines.

People who SUBSCRIBE to this school of thought are idiots.

I say this with all the love and affection possible, but these people truly do NOT understand search.

WHO CARES IF YOU HAVE A NUMBER 1 SEARCH PLACEMENT ON A TERM NO ONE IS USING TO SEARCH?

You put yourself at a huge advantage if your business name is also your domain name.

“But wait,” you may be thinking, “Xerox is a made up name and they’re a house hold word now!”

Ah, yes my Padawan learner (veiled Star Wars reference) Xerox, Kodak, Kleenex – even Google are all “not real word” names that have come mean something in our daily lives but the path those “brands” have taken have literally been paved in gold.   In each case (except for Google), the path to creating a brand name that becomes a household term is achieved through extensive and relentless advertising.

One of my early web development clients was a local Tru Value store.  This was way back in the 1990’s and my client had recently purchased the store.  While the storefront was barely breaking even, the previous owners had started selling lighted Christmas lawn displays out of the back room.  Now THAT was a business worth buying.  My client had decided to take the business “to the web”, which was VERY cutting edge thinking way back in 1998.  Unfortunately, the name he chose was Holiday Silhouettes.  The only reason I can spell silhouettes is because of the time I worked with him.   He took a pass on the easy to spell, easy to remember domain name “Christmas Lights.com” Is it a coincidence that the company who chose the easy to spell domain name is still in business and he’s not?

So if choosing an obscure hard to spell word, a nonsense jumble of letters or purposefully misspelling common words are all LOSER business naming strategies, what are some WINNING business naming strategies?

The following advice is for those who don’t have a lot of money to spend on either a branding consultant or a naming service.

  1. A great small business name tells what you do.
  2. A great small business name communicates your business’ unique place in the universe.
  3. A great small business name uses words that people can easily spell.
  4. A great small business name uses words that people are using to search for solutions to the GDP (not Gross Domestic Product but rather Goals, Desires and Problems).

A rose by any other name may indeed smell as sweet – but you can make the climb to the top easier by choosing the right name for your business.

Buyer Beware: Be an Informed Consumer

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The customer SHOULD be king -but sometimes, some businesses tend to treat you like a dog!

I created the 8 Week Power Blog Launch  because after 6 months of blogging, my clients would come back to me with various questions about what else they needed to be doing to make their blogs successful.

Because my clients are not “web savvy”, a significant part the course is education about web basics.   While I don’t guarantee that you’ll become instantly “web savvy”, when you finish the course you will have the basics you need to become an informed consumer on the web!

One of the things it teaches you to do is to “spy” on what’s going on behind the scenes  which in the context of building your blog, is ESSENTIAL information.  However, it’s can also serve as a sort of “truth detector” when used to evaluate the claims of various “success” gurus.

It made my day when I got an email from an 8 Week Power Blog Launch user:

“I was in talks with an SEO expert who wanted to work on my blog.  However, when I used the “secret spy tools” you shared in the course, I didn’t like what I saw.  This information alone was worth the price of the course.”

YEAH!!!

Quite honestly, those stories are ALMOST as good as the stories of phenomenal traffic growth from using the program.  One of those stories is Sara Healy.  Sarah is one of my blog clients who was the first in line to grab a copy of the program.

When Sara started the 8 Week Power Blog Launch program, I didn’t grab a screen shot of her Alexa ranking.  However, as I was composing this post,  I went in to check and see what progress  she had made over the past 3 weeks.  Here’s what I saw:

Her blog has seen a 939% increase in reach and has moved up over 4.1 Million positions in the past three months.  (Most of this has happened in the past month as she’s been working the steps of the course.)

I want to be QUICK to point out that this jump is the result of Sara’s hard work!  She’s a wonderful writer and has a gift for communicating effectively.  The course  didn’t provide any “magic”, it just provided the education she needed to make her blog a rising star!

I use these tools ALL the time in my journey about the web.  The other day, I followed a link to a product that claims to be very similar to the 8 Week Power Blog Launch product.   It was one of the dozens of “Make Easy Money Blogging” products available online and like a good Internet Marketer it is being sold via a long one page sales page site which features:

  • a picture of the “author” working on his a laptop under a palm tree by the beach
  • a photo of his collection of rare antique sports cars parked in front of a mansion
  • a “screenshot” of his earnings
  • a long LIST of testimonials.

Now, since his product PROMISES  A Ton Of Free Traffic (copied and pasted from his sales page -explaining the font and color), I decided to check on the blogs which he lists as “testimonials” for his “secret system”.  (Remember, his system is effortless so there’s no reason WHY the testimonials wouldn’t have blogs with amazing Alexa rankings!)

The first thing I notice is that several of the “testimonial” sites are not blogs but simply single page websites selling their own info products.  The few that are actual blogs are not doing well by ANY stretch of the imagination when it comes to traffic.

What was this guy THINKING?   Doesn’t he know how EASY it is to copy the URL and visit the site?

So much for A Ton Of Free Traffic without any effort on your part.

With that said, while the  8 Week Power Blog Launch program is not HARD, it does require an investment of time and effort on your part.

If Sara had purchased the program and then done nothing – well, then her blog would still be sitting in the dark corners of the unexplored areas of the web.  Instead she’s working through the program and as a result has increased traffic to her blog – and she’s not even to the “blog promotion” part of the course!

One of the “tools” I recommend you use in the course is the Firefox plug-SEO Quake.  You have to be using Firefox as your web browser to use it – but you should be using Firefox anyhow!  Install it and it will change the way you view the web!

Sneak Peak at WordPress 2.7 Dashboard

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If you’re using an updated version of WordPress, you’ve been seeing what is known in the trade as a “beg” screen asking you to update to WordPress 2.6.3 for the past few weeks.  (If you’ve been ignoring the previous beg screens, you should have noticed the message changed recently.)

It’s really important to keep your WordPress installation current.  These beg screens help to remind self hosted WordPress blog users that part of using the world’s best CMS software is keeping your installation current.

A self hosted WordPress blog installation is the closest thing to web site marketing magic you get – and when you’ve got something that is that powerful AND easy – well, the “bad guys” on the internet will want a piece of that action.

Imagine if there was a possibility that you could gain back door access to some of the most highly trafficked sites on the internet.  Imagine that if you could find this golden ticket, you could gain access and inject high PR sites with code to link that site to websites of your choosing.   Wouldn’t you be constantly searching to find that hidden way in too?

The WordPress development team is faced with the challenge of matching wits with those “bad guys” every day.  They’re working tirelessly to make WordPress even better AND easier to use.

THANK YOU WordPress Development Team for all your hard work!

(I’m going to bitch and whine a bit later, so I wanted to preface that whine and bitch session with an expression of gratitude!)

If you’re one of my clients, don’t panic when the beg screen appears asking you to update WordPress to the 2.7 version.  I’ll be “testing” it thoroughly on my test blog before I update yours.

IMPORTANT NOTE:  WordPress 2.7 is not ready for production blogs yet!!! Wait until your “beg screen” tells you it’s time before you update.

I just installed the beta version on one of those test blogs.  Here’s the screenshot of the new and improved dashboard:

If you aren’t my client and aren’t familiar with my business model, I work with people who need tutorials to be able to use WordPress.  Because I’m a SUCKER for customer service, I prepare these tutorials in the format my CLIENTS desire (PDF) , not the format which is easiest for me to create (video).

I won’t leave my clients on 2.6 for any longer than necessary – and that means I need to get started creating a whole new suite of tutorials – created with “regular” people in mind

WARNING:  BITCHING AND WHINING LIKE A PRE-PUBESCENT GIRL STARTS NOW:

This change in the dashboard is effectively rendering the last Blog Post Tutorial I created EXTINCT!  WORTHLESS!!!

Just like the ones I created for all the versions that have come before!

I HATE IT!!!  I’ve got other things I need to do!

I know why they made the changes. The new dashboard IS more intuitive and is easier to use.  However, I enjoy the comfort of the familiar.

In the movie, V for Vendetta, V begins his address of the nation with:

Good evening, London. Allow me first to apologize for this interruption.

I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of every day routine- the security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any bloke.

Fortunately, the new WordPress isn’t promising you order and peace, nor is it demanding your silent, obedient consent.   However, ignoring this update will no doubt create chaos and confusion in your future.

With the update will come the usual minor and temporary chaos.  I’m sure that popular plugins will cease to function and some themes will stop working as a result of the update.   However, it’s SO WORTH IT when you consider how much you gain by using WordPress.

My sister owns a Mercedes.  NOTHING is cheap when it comes to the care of that car.  A simple lube oil and filter runs almost $200.  However, she has deemed the car essential to her business AND her professional image so she accepts the costs associated with owning  a Mercedes.   IMHO, the same applies to WordPress.