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Self Promotion in Sales: 13 Ways To Build Your Image Without Having to Brag
Strategic Plan Implementation - The What, How, Who And When...
Advantages Of Using Pinerly To Monitor Your Marketing On Pinterest

Self Promotion in Sales: 13 Ways To Build Your Image Without Having to Brag

Posted: 03 Jul 2012 03:10 AM PDT

The one thing we business people love to talk about most is ourselves. We love to brag about our projects, skills, achievements or anything else that makes us special, even if it's in our eyes only. There are no exceptions here. In spite of how successful you are, talking about what you have done makes you feel better about yourself. The trouble is though, bragging is not something you can do too often. At least not when you are selling.

You can't go to your clients office and talk about yourself. Or brag about how great your product is and what technology you have used to build it. Or how you have reinvented the wheel in your industry. You just can't, sorry.

But, at the same time, you want to be known. You want your clients to hear about you way before you even ring them. And, you want them to know how great you, your product, service and company are. It's a catch 22. You can't promote yourself but hey, if you don't do it, who else will?

Turn Self Promotion Into Your Best Marketing

Self promotion sounds like a dirty word to many people. Bragging or singing one's own praises are not something we tolerate. Yet, if you look closely at people who have found success, in business and life, you will notice that self promotion played an important part of it. If achieving success, your business survival or livelihood rely on promotion then ultimately you have no choice but to self promote.

Remember, if you don't do it, who will?

13 Techniques to Promote Yourself While Staying Professional

# 1. Blog

Writing your own blog is by far the best way to promote yourself, build an image of being an expert in your field and promoting your name to your prospects. If you can't do it on your company's blog, set up your own one. Register a domain with your name, or any other domain and get a simple WordPress site set up.

# 2. Write a Column

Write a regular column in the newspaper. Just like with blogging, offer tips and advice that will make your clients lives better.

You most likely won't get paid for doing this but the benefits of promotion here outweigh any potential income you could get from this writing.

# 3. Speak in Public

Public speaking is a great way to promote yourself. Not only do you get a chance to stand in front of your potential customers but also offer them advice and introduce yourself as a person with authority. Good places to start when seeking public speaking opportunities would be your Chamber of Commerce, County Council or local area business groups.

# 4. Give Interviews

This is by far one of the most powerful ways to self promote, however, the most difficult to obtain. Being mentioned in the press gives you the credibility that you really need when self promoting.

# 5. Write a Book

Having a book out adds an enormous amount of credibility to your person and can be used to market yourself out there.

You can self publish the book quite cheaply, just like I did and send a copy to every prospect you meet. Also, having it reviewed means even more promotion to your name.

# 6. Post Online Videos

Videos are the second best thing in marketing. And, creating them is quite easy. Use your laptop's built in camera and some free software and record yourself talking about things that matter to your prospects.

TIP: One of the best ways to create videos is to reuse your old content. Simply record yourself reading or talking about something you wrote previously in a blog post and you are done.

# 7. Go Crazy on Social Media

Without a doubt, social media is the self promotion haven. It is the place to go to promote yourself. If your company already has social media accounts and you can't use them for yourself, set up your own one and start connecting to people there too.

# 8. Publish an Elite Newsletter

These days, self promotion is all about information and quality. And, just as sharing it openly with anyone works great, building an elite platform, where you share the best of the best advice is even more powerful. Of course, as part of doing so, you want your subscribers to tell their connections about it and spread the info about you further.

# 9. Teach a Class

Depending on what you do, this could be a really great way to promote yourself. Create a course where you would be preparing young adepts in your profession.

# 10. Get Involved with Community Groups

Community groups can be a great way to introducing and promoting yourself, especially if you are working on a local market.

# 11. Join Business Networking Groups

Business networking groups like BNI are a great way to build business relationships and gain referrals. Seemingly, they are ideal if you want to promote yourself as a person too. Just make sure that you don't overdo on the self promotion and stay professional.

# 12. Perform a Media Stunt

This technique might not be for everyone but if you decide to do it, the results can be pretty amazing. A media stunt involves doing something crazy (but while staying professional) that will attract the attention of the press and other people. It's not the easiest thing to achieve but it can be done on the cheap.

# 13. Guest Post on Other Blogs

Writing guest posts on blogs read by your audience allows you to introduce yourself and your knowledge to a new audience, often at the expense of the blog owner, who created the community. Just make sure that you offer an amazing value to the readers, otherwise they won't pay any attention to you.

Your Turn

How do you self promote yourself in the market place? What techniques do you use to get your name known to your prospects? Let me know in the comments.

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Image: "Worms Eye View of A Businessman/Shutterstock"

Strategic Plan Implementation - The What, How, Who And When...

Posted: 03 Jul 2012 02:57 AM PDT

Following my last article, I promised I'd talk 'nitty gritty' and the fun and games of implementation. It can be the one thing we gloss over or simply avoid but, make no mistake, having a clear implementation plan is an absolute must in delivering strategic objectives.

So, what am I on about?

Why is it important to look at implementation as a separate topic to strategy in and of itself? Because it's often the one thing we tend to steer away from [it's true!] and can derail strategic planning objectives if it's not allocated and organised properly.

In the context of implementation, consideration has to be given to the resources, individuals and timing allocated to objectives - as well as balancing the operational demands of the business.

A line in the sand: Day-to-day versus strategic

Too often, the day-to-day can erode or frustrate strategic objectives while we attempt to juggle client, personnel and financial demands. Don't leave yourself vulnerable to stressors - create your implementation plan and ensure you also allocate time to appraise and evaluate it.

So... When we've finally wound our heads around the big vision and fully understood where it is we really want to be, we've got to look to the what, how, who and when of our implementation plan.

An implementation can be likened to a recipe; you've got to have the right ingredients, timing, direction and application to deliver the finished product [e.g. the plans' objectives]. As pointed to already, balance of the operational versus strategic, is hugely important and should not be underestimated.

Think backwards

What does this translate into for you, as Owners, CEOs, or whatever you refer to yourself as? Simply, a clear layout of the route your specific strategic objectives will need to travel in order to come to fruition. Sometimes it helps to think about your strategic objective in a reverse-engineered way - e.g. if this is what we're going to achieve, working backwards, how might be do it? Bear in mind that there may be a little trial-and-error involved...

Step-by-step

Take, for example, the area of new market exploration - this is often an objective of a growing SME. How do you feel you might approach this? A wise stance would be to:

Identify the specific market[s] we feel are most suitable - or the "what";
Understand the possible route to defining the markets [e.g. research, visits, meetings, stakeholder contact and so on] - the "how";
Decide on who the key people are - internally and externally - and their role in the objective, how they will be informed / instructed;
... most importantly, the element of time is critical in strategic plan implementation, we're all fully versed in the notion of SMART objectives, right? Well, without timing in implementation, we're not likely to realise any real outcomes.

To recap...

Does this make sense? What - are we looking to achieve here? How - do we make it happen [taking a wide-angled approach, and ensuring several options are explored!]? Who - are the right people [taking into consideration skill, ability, personality, knowledge] to take on this piece of work? When should this objective be achieved by? Time is of the essence and should reflect a realistic, achievable deadline - whilst also ensuring that the time allocated to the objective will facilitate the appropriate outcome.

The vital ingredient: Review!

Another key consideration in implementation? REVIEW. Yup, I'm a staunch advocate of "Plan, Do, Review", so make sure you do just that. Remember, implementation of any plan is not worth a jot if you can't review its success.

Related: How Clear is Your Vision?

... and finally...

By their very nature, businesses are evolving organisms, hence growth and development is to the fore of success. Evolution also means we've got to evaluate our successes and failures on an ongoing basis so keep your strategic objectives fresh!

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Image: "Word Cloud Concept Illustration of Strategic Planning/Shutterstock"

Advantages Of Using Pinerly To Monitor Your Marketing On Pinterest

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 09:03 AM PDT

Are you using Pinterest yet to market your business? Many infographics and articles about Pinterest quote statistics demonstrating the exponential growth of this relatively new social media platform, highlighting extreme success stories and telling you that women aged 25-44 are the most popular users. Having fun with Pinterest is one thing but if you are using it to market your business, you need to know if it is delivering results.

How to Monitor Your Success on Pinterest

80% of pins are repins, simply because it is easier to repin on pinterest than search for new content. (Interestingly as a comparison, only 1.4% of tweets are retweets which demonstrates the much higher chance of your picture going viral on pinterest). Therefore it makes sense to find out, not only how many times your original pin has been repinned, but also if it is resulting in click throughs to your website and ultimately in sales.

By signing up to Pinterest, you will receive an email notification when your pins are repinned, liked or commented on. However, you won't necessarily find out if these repins are repinned further.
Google Analytics contains information on your traffic sources. For the first time this month, visitors to my site from pinterest surpassed those from Facebook and not only were they coming in larger numbers but they were visiting more pages and spending more time on the site. However, the numbers of visitors is not necessarily an indication of conversions. Setting up a funnel to determine if a conversion/sale occurs is the most accurate mechanism. (See CGOnline Marketing's post on how to set up a funnel).
Pinerly is a new online measuring tool for Pinterest that will record the number of repins, likes, comments and click throughs for each campaign.

How Does Pinerly Work?

Pinerly is the new online measuring tool for pinterest that is also free to use. However, it is limiting its numbers of users for the time being. Having just received access to it this week (a month after registering), it's very much early days for reporting on its effectiveness. Nevertheless, it does seem to be very easy to use and monitor so I can see it becoming hugely popular.

To pin using pinerly, add the Pinerly It bookmarklet tool to your bookmarks and use it to pin from your website/blog instead of clicking on the 'pin it' button. As you can see in the image above, you can doublecheck the link, add effects to your photograph and you can write in your descriptor just as you would for pinning on pinterest.

You can also select the 'website' option (see below) and simply paste in the url from the post or product that you wish to pin. The picture will be displayed and all you have to add is add a description which should, of course, contain your keywords. You can then select the board where you would like to pin that image.

Each pin/post seems to create a single campaign so there seems to be no limit to the number of campaigns that you can have. It is not yet clear whether a campaign can be created from a board which contains numerous pins.

Remember, true pinners are those who pin interesting content they like so don't be tempted to use pinterest solely to self-promote. To pin successfully, it very much has to be a mixture of pinning your own content and other people's.

Main Advantages of Pinerly:

Tells you how many likes, comments and repins your pins/campaigns are receiving
Can reveal the number of click throughs to your website
Displays the information numerically and in a graph
Tells you the number of followers for that pin (some people will follow all your boards, others will elect to follow a single board so the numbers of followers will depend on the board the image is pinned to)
Tell you the reach for that pin
Shows you other pinerly pins so you can connect with others
Suggests people that are worth following
Provides tips for improving your pinning abilities

I always recommend to clients that they pin and repin little and often, especially if they are also sending their updates out on their twitter and/or facebook feed. It is not recommended that you clog up the page for your followers with all of your pins/repins or you will be unfollowed. However, not everyone has the time to check into pinterest a couple of times a day and the scheduling feature of Pinerly will be a very useful tool when it is released.

I can see it becoming a valuable tool for monitoring your progress on pinterest.

Access to Pinerly is being wheeled out gradually and I see that I can invite 20 friends to use it this month so do let me know if you would like an invitation (will require your email address). You can follow me on pinterest right here.

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marți, 3 iulie 2012