Napoleon Hill coined the term “Mastermind Group” as we know it today. It is sometimes referred to as the an “Inner Circle” where a group of entrepreneurs work together by challenging each other by raising the bar, implementing goals, brainstorming ideas, and supporting each other with total honesty, respect, and compassion. On a smaller scale, personal one-on-one coaching helps you to achieve the same goals. A one on one coach or mentor will give you their experience, skill, and will instill confidence in you as well as teach you the skills you need to be successful. You will gain real tangible progress and experience that will help your business and family life grow. Personal one on one training can shave off a years worth of your time, not to mention thousands of dollars chasing opportunities one after another without know what your doing.
- Automate most of it
- Get others to help you do it
- Start implementing strategies you don't see elsewhere
- Spend more time creating content
- Spend more time networking
Archive for Blogging
Jan-10
26
Recipe For Successful Branding
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We all know that blogging and other marketing campaigns can really help us build up the buzz behind our brand. We know our goals are also similar in that we want to get people talking and spreading the story about our products and services. But it is going to take more than just blogging and marketing to make this kind of effort pay off. There are three main ingredients that help build and establish our number one goal for personal branding, Trust! We want to establish the kind of trust that will create a positive reaction in our clients and customers. The products and services that we offer need to have:
Quality
While branding builds the recognition for your product, that product or service must have superior quality needed to evoke strong positive emotions in your customers. Your brand cannot gain positive brand recognition if your products and services are don’t offer the kind of quality needed to elicit strong trust in your customers and clients.
Excellent Service
We recognize that customer service is everything in business and know it has been for a long time. When building a strong personal brand, customer service can increase word-of-mouth advertising. So this, in turn, boosts referrals and helps your brand to grow even that much more. Even in businesses that have no product or service that is sold directly, like blogging for a living, remember that customer service still is extremely important. The bottom line is that people will trust the authority of your blog if the posts are written with authority and integrity. A way that you can also build authority and integrity is with timely and well thought out responses to comments from the readers of your blog.
Value
And finally comes value. Value is a growing buzz word with customers and clients these days. If your product or service comes at a price, you have to make sure your buyers get the value they are after. Value should not mean cheap. It should mean quality for the price point. Even the information that you provide for free should have tremendous value. The information you share and provide needs to be accurate, informative, or entertaining. You want your readers to feel like they have gained some insight and have not wasted their time by visiting and reading. If they like the value, whether it is for free or purchasing a product and service from you, they will visit and buy from you once again.
Personal branding builds on all these important and key ingredients in a successful business and puts them in a package that your customers and clients can readily identify with. When you offer rock solid service, impressive quality and value, your products and services will begin to speak loudly. So later down the line when you have new products or services, they will be much more likely to have strong footing in the marketplace solely because of the brand you have built. This personal branding thus enables you to build on your previous successes and allows you to grow your customer and client base. Once this strong personal brand it set up, launching new offerings will become much more effective.
If you’ve found this post helpfull, can you please share it with your Facebook and Twitter followers.
Dec-09
23
New Media Business Opps
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Chris Brogan has a simple but powerful message to small business people, in this case a Realtor.
It is simple in that all he is saying is if I were a Realtor I would:
I’d write a blog about the location where I was selling. I’d take tons of pictures and post them on the blog. I’d shoot walking tour videos all the time with a Flip camera and post them. I’d shoot interview videos with people from my community. I’d host meetups and tweetups for local residents, inviting people who are house hunting. I’d find various niche communities (developers, stonemasons, parents) and start community platforms for them on Ning. I’d empower as many local businesses onto the Net as I could, and help them get successful. I’d encourage as many people in my community to join Twitter as possible, and I’d bundle them into a list.
Great Advise Chris!
So if your reading this right now, if I were a gambling man, I would bet that you are also an entrepreneur or are contemplating being one. I’ll guess you also know about Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, and other Internet sites useful to business.
There is one thing I can almost guarantee, is there are local businesses that for one reason or another recognize that social media is viable for expansion of their businesses. In fact, it can be much much more effective than printed advertising. In some cases they may already have some type of local networking going on right now and all that would be required is to plug in the social media portion. But they may not know exactly how to implement it.
What I’m driving at is it could be YOU that shows your local businesses how to go about doing this. Show and teach them about attraction marketing. Show them that VALUE means a lot to people. Teach them that Personal Branding will separate them from their competition. Teach them how to blog, how to set up newsletters, how to tweet, how to set up a Business Fan page. You see if they already have an advertising budget, all you have to do is say, “How would you like to learn how to cut your advertising budget almost in half and eventually double your business.” Make sure you have a business plan to be able to present to them, make it a fair price, and you will get customers. You can make money on the training and coaching, on potential products related to internet business, and the business model will not be much different from business to business. So once you get it under your belt, it will be easy! So for 2010, what say you? How many businesses will you help?
Oct-09
21
48 WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without
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Down below I have the forty eight or so plugins that I use on this blog. I have a little blurb about what they do. Because wordpress is so customizable and most of the themes are different, there may be reasons to include one that are missing here and reasons I have some others don’t. But for the most part these are essential. I am almost positive there are new one’s out there that I should have but these have been serving me well. Feel free to suggest others.
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”
All in One SEO Pack
Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. As a fan of SEO, I think it’s like putting together a three dimensional puzzle, I like this plugin and it is one of the mainstays of SEO for wordpress. Of special interest is the “Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page:” option. The plugin even has it’s own forum if you’d like to learn more.
(http://semperfiwebdesign.com/forum/)
CommentLuv
Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.
Comment Relish
Increases your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short ‘Thank You’ message to users when they first comment on your site.
Contact Form with Captcha
Simple Contact Form with Captcha Enabled
Custom Field Redirect
This plugin will do a 301 redirect on any page where you set the “redirect” key in a custom field. The value you set will be the URL to where the plugin will redirect you. In the dashboard when you create a post you have the ability to enter a custom field. If you create a “redirect” key is will go to the location designated.
Dewplayer
Insert Dewplayer (Flash Mp3 Player) in posts & comments. There are a lot mp3 players. This happens to be the one I’m currently using.
Disable Revisions
Disable revision functions in WordPress and delete all entries of revisions in database. It is extremely important to back up your database before install this plugin. I always hate when there ends up being 8 revisions of the same post. This should be a custom option built into wordpress to begin with.
Exclude Pages from Navigation
Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.
Facebook Sharecount
The Facebook Sharecount plugin shows the number of shares on Facebook your posts get and allows users to share it themselves.
FeedBurner FeedSmith
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
FeedBurner Widget
Adds a sidebar widget to easy customize and display your FeedBurner subscribers stats RSS button.
Get Recent Comments
Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.
Make sure you configure this plugin after activation.
Google Friend Connect Integration
Easily integrate Google Friend Connect with WordPress. To get started, please enter your Google Friend Connect Site Id number in the GFC Integration admin page and choose whether to turn on the social bar or not. You can add Google Friend Connect gadgets to your sidebars by visiting the widgets page. For help and support see the official Google Friend Connect integration for WordPress page.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
Homepage Excerpts
Homepage Excerpts are great when your theme doesn’t provide this functionality.
LinkWithin
Displays recommended stories and associated thumbnails from your blog. This is at the bottom of all my single posts. It provides nice pictures you see below.
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin. The reasoning behind this is your blog will ping technorati and many other ping services. If you edit your blog, let’s say a typo or misspelling or indentation etc, every time you hit publish you are pinging the services. You may be banned and didn’t even know it. When this goes, so does your SEO. Visit plugin site
One Click Plugin Updater
Upgrade plugins with a single click, install new plugins or themes from an URL or by uploading a file, see which plugins have update notifications enabled, control how often WordPress checks for updates, and more.
ONW Simple Contact Form
This Plugin creates a simple contact form.
Popularity Contest
This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the Popularity Values and View Reports. You can also use the included Widgets and Template Tags to display post popularity and lists of popular posts on your blog.
Random Pages widget
This is a widget that displays a list of random pages/posts on your widgetized sidebar.
Recent Posts
Returns a list of the most recent posts.
Robots Meta
This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.
RSS Shortcode
Makes it easy to display an RSS feed on a page
SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
SEO Super Comments
Use your blog comments to get more traffic.
SexyBookmarks
SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts.
SimplePie Core
Does little else but load the core SimplePie API library for any extension that wants to utilize it. It is needed for the Single RSS Colleague plugin found below.
Simple Tags
Simple Tags : Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3, 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags !
Single RSS Colleague
A plugin to feature a colleague or tribe member for syndication. You will find it under by social badges on the right hand side bar labeled “Visit My Colleagues”. I will be making this available to everyone sometime next week.
Subscribe To Comments
Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
Translate
Adds a sidebar widget to display languages into which you can translate your blog.
TweetMeme Retweet Button
Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.
Ultimate Google Analytics
Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.
What Would Seth Godin Do
Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.
wp-cache
Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. Once enabled, go to “Options” and select “WP-Cache”. One note of caution. TURN this off anytime you are changing anything. Then when you are done, turn it back on.
WP-Cumulus
Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress
WP-DBManager
Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.
WP-PageNavi
Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.
WP-Print
Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
WP-Sticky
Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog. Modified from Adhesive by Owen Winkler.
WP-UserOnline
Enable you to display how many users are online on your WordPress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots).
WP Security Scan
Perform security scan of WordPress installation.
Oct-09
05
101 Traffic Tips | #12 | Making Your Blog Exceptional!
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Today, I’d like to write about what you consider the most important pages on your blog. What are they? Take the time to figure out what they are. I came up with around 8-9 of them. Some of them should be obvious but some you maybe only set up as a token gesture actually may be much more valuable than you may think. This exercise also may be a lot tougher than you think because after all, aren’t all pages and posts important on your blog? What you end up having to do is to look at your blog from your visitor’s point of view.
Visitors
Firstly, how are they arriving to your blog? Are they following tweets? Coming from Facebook? Returning directly? Coming from your email campaigns? This will help. There are pages and posts that are much more frequented than others. For example, you may have a great post that gets 500 visits over a week or two that end ups getting buried under newer content. Of course you will reconstitute it in your email campaigns, recent post and similar posts but if you compare it to lets say your “About Me” page, over a 4 month period, it would have been read just as much if not more. Additionally, as a matter of strict importance, if you eventually are trying to get your visitors to consider going into business with you, they are going to dissect that page. In fact they are going to dissect any page or post dealing with you as a business leader, a business trainer, your communication style, and an overall snapshot of what you’re about. How you brand yourself in these often unforgotten pages you wrote long ago is what will make a difference on whether people choose to buy from you or do business with you.
Mindset
Secondly, an important thing to consider is what was your mindset when you wrote those posts or pages? I don’t know about you, but I’m trying to grow every day. Each day as I learn more and gain experience, my confidence, my outlook on things, my courage, my poise grow and my fear, apprehension, uncertainty, and doubt continue to fade away. I am not the same person I was even a few weeks back. Do you think your writing and communication reflect your new grown confidence? How long ago did you write your “About Me” page or your “Work with Me” page? Most likely, you’ve grown in confidence and have learned more. Take a look at those important pages and do a make over.
Things To Consider
Since everyone is different and they should be, you don’t want your blog looking like every one else’s. You want it to reflect the image you are trying to portray and your uniqueness. I won’t try to tell you what you exactly how things should be because it’s a little out of scope for this piece and you need to make it for yourself, but I will give you an overall summary of the things you need to consider.
Front Page
This seems to be an obvious one. A blogs gets more traffic to the front page than any of the others. But it may surprise you that most people enter your blog through a post from a link somewhere and then after reading it, to your front page to see what your site is all about. The front page needs convey what your blog is all about in a matter of a few seconds. You need to ask yourself whether your blog’s titles, categories, tags, header, tag lines all strongly communicate what your blog is all about. Do your visitor’s eyes get drawn to the important elements? Are your sidebars overly cluttered? Your side bar gets looked at probably the most of any aspect of your blog. It is there whether you’re looking at one post or front page. Make sure that everything you have is useful and important. It should not be cluttered.
About Me, Work with Me, Products and Tools, Subscribe
These are the pages that people will look for when they are making a decision to take some further action on your blog. Go over to them and make sure they reflect your thoughts and ideas. As mentioned above, they change as you grow. If you are selling your services as a coach or mentor, your prices should grow as you do. This will have a psychological effect when people start seeing that you are charging more than bottom of the barrel pricing. It will give you instant creditability. Your “About Me” should change as you grow as well. Your persona and writing change as you grow in your self development. In fact, It may need a makeover every month.
Pillar Content
Pillar content are pages or posts that are parts of your best work. They are usually timeless in that the material in them will be valid one year from now as they are today. There may be new insights or information that you want to add to them. Now there are some purists who like to keep their blog posts original and not change them. For the most part I agree with this. However, pillar content consists of pieces of work that are very comprehensive and thought out. It would be a disservice if there was something you later learned that wasn’t reflected in the original or something new shed a light. I say to feel free to update these pillar pieces and simply note at the bottom that it was updated. If there is a lot of information added or changed, you can come out with it again and feature it all over. You could do this 1-2 times a year if the changes are significant. This would simply be adding more detail about certain aspects of the pillar content. At the end of the year and if you had 2-3 pillar pieces, you could wrap them up into a PDF and offer them as a “Gift” in your opt-ins or send out to your list as added value.
Conclusion
As you continue to blog and do these make-overs periodically your blog will evolve into something that shows that you care about your readers and visitors. It will be the little intricate fine details that your readers will notice. It will be the small gold lapel pin on your suit, or the initials on your scarves. It will be what makes your blog exceptional.
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Aug-09
15
Contributing to the Conversation On Your Own Blog…
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Over on a different forum related to marketing and blogging that I am a member of, there was a question that was posed that asked, “Is it poor form to comment on your own blog?” This is very important so I’d thought I’d share it here as well. This is how I responded.
As marketers one of our main goals is to attract people to our sites to have them potentially sign up for more information about potential products or services we may have. I use the word potential because the best way to have someone click the big X on your tab is first appear as if you are trying to sell something. If you are pitching, touting, overtly recommending to buy or sign up, people will do one thing, Run away! This is not to say that you can not recommend things and ask them to buy, but that should only come after they have earned your TRUST.
So how do they earn your trust? Firstly, by not pitching. Secondly, by offering value in the form of insights, education, thoughts, perspectives, interests, and humor. To do this, it will involve interaction. Certainly the number one ice breaker in the whole world is the weather followed by concerns of how things are going. There are psychological underpinnings in this small talk and it is usually a way two people determine whether (pun intended) each other want to continue in a dialog. What’s the best way to do this? It is to engage people in dialog by responding to people in your blog just as Julia suggested. People love it when you engage them and consider their questions, ideas, or concerns important. They even love it more when you ask THEM what they think about something. This isn’t something that we have to be phony about. It’s just having genuine and concerned thoughts and ideas that will resonate with people.
So NO there is nothing wrong with commenting on your own blog posts. In fact I encourage it. I encourage it on all the social media you use. Engaging people and building relationships is something that will differentiate you from all the other spammers using social media as nothing more than an advertising bill board. In all your interactions with new people you meet should end with a question. This is the whole concept behind ATTRACTION marketing.
I’d like to hear your opinions…
Photo Credit McAzadi
Aug-09
05
One-on-One Training
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Personalized One-on-One Training and CoachingIf You Are Ready For Extraordinary Abundance and Are Ready To Manifest Your Goals To Reach That Level, Then Read On. I’m Going To Show You Some Training Right Now That Will Allow You To Scientifically Start Generating As Many Leads On Demand As You Want and How To Earn Money From Multiple Income Streams Just As Easily As One. You Can Be Signing Up New Partners In Your Business On Complete Autopilot Using Nothing But TECHNOLOGY To Do It…
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Robin Lynn Brooks
