Seth Godin is an amazing thinker. In a recent post he outlines some of the foundation elements for modern businesses.

When you sit down to dream up a new business, you can imagine a world without constraints. Or you can choose to build in fundamental pieces that will make it more likely your idea will pay off.

Here are some fundamental pieces of most new successful businesses. The goal is to build these elements into the very nature of the business itself, not just to tack them on. For example, the Scotch tape people at 3M can’t do #5, because of the structure of retail distribution and the way they mass produce and can’t track who is buying what.

You can live without some of these, but go in with your eyes open if you do:

1. Build in virality. Consider: Groupon.
2. Don’t sell a product that can be purchased cheaper at Amazon.
3. Subscriptions beat one-off sales.
4. Try to create an environment where your customers are happier when there are other customers doing business with you (see #1).
5. Treat different customers differently.
6. Generate joy, don’t just satisfy a need for a commodity.
7. Rely on unique individuals, not an easily copyable system.
8. Plan on remarkable experiences, not remarkable ads.

Read the whole thing here (Foundation elements for modern businesses.)

How can you treat your customers differently from what your competition does? I think that building “remarkable” into the experience is a very important part. What do you think? Leave a Comment.

In my post last week (Would you pay for Twitter?) I got a comment from a reader who asked:

“Here’s my question, if you are a business and offer a lot of things for free, how do you parley that into appropriate revenue without disengaging your audience?”

That is a very good question, and one that every business (or would-be business) should be asking. I started thinking about this a couple of years ago, posting this article (How Can You Measure the Value of a Conversation?) in October ’08. Here is the heart of the message:

Make money “because of”, not with

The “because of” effect is much more powerful than the “with” effect. One of the commenters on Jason’s post, Mack Collier (The Viral Garden), hits the nail on the head with:

…companies that are NEW to social media, wanting to use metrics and measurements that they are used to when using TRADITIONAL marketing methods to ‘get their message out there’. Their thinking is ‘how do we make money from this?’, whereas companies that have been active in this space for a while, such as Dell, understand that by PARTICIPATING that they will make more money as a BYPRODUCT of their efforts. Dell has been in the game long enough to see the impact that their efforts are making, and as a result have shifted away from the ‘how do we make money with this?’ mentality.

Attempting to DIRECTLY monetize social media efforts is the quickest way to ensure they fail. But companies that aren’t familiar with this space don’t know any better. In a few years, after more companies are more familiar with these tools, I think we’ll see them looking to INdirectly monetize their efforts, while putting the focus on SM as a way to DIRECTLY connect with their customers.

One of the best lessons that I learned from the SOBCon event that I attended in May was that blogging (and Social Media in general) should be treated like a business. That business is the marketing of your products and services & establishing yourself/your business as an authority. The goal of that business is to make money because of your blog (or Social Media efforts), instead of with your blog.

Let me repeat that for you – “by PARTICIPATING [you] will make more money as a BYPRODUCT of [your] efforts”.

Money as a by-product of participation

How exactly does this work? Well, it is both easier and more difficult than it sounds. The very first thing that your business can provide for free to its customers is Value. Something above and beyond the products and services that gives your customers a reason to visit your place of business or website, or follow you on Twitter, or friend you on Facebook (this list goes on and on).

For a real-world example, using a “place of business”, look at Starbucks. The mental images of the starving artist or writer slaving away over a venti latte, or the entrepreneur using Starbucks as an office are so common as to be a cliche. But they are a cliche because Starbucks offers something that places like McDonald’s do not – a welcoming atmosphere with music and ambiance, access to coffee and snacks, and typically like-minded folks to chat with. That is the value. That is what makes people come back.

Now, this example is not representative of what you can do with Social Media, or is it? Imagine that your blog or website is the Starbucks, how do you go about inviting people to come and hang out there? Give away some cool, free stuff. I’m talking about your blog posts, or FAQs on your industry, or whatever it is that draws people to your site in the first place. Give them the answer or information about the solution to the problem that they have, then give them even more. Add value.

Then add an opportunity for your visitors to have a conversation.

If you let them speak they will come

Online communities are exploding in popularity and will continue to grow. As Clay Shirky discusses in his book Cognitive Surplus (review here Thoughts on Cognitive Surplus) people crave community and the online space has the lowest barrier to entry, ever. Letting your customers talk to you and to each other gives you a Starbucks-like place for your potential marketspace to congregate. Then, and only then, can you get involved in the conversation – providing that added value, building your credibility and authority, and finally creating a rapport that invites your community to ask to buy something from you.

Jeffrey Gitomer says “People hate to be sold, but they love to buy”

In his Little Red Book of Selling (which every blogger and business person should read by the way) Gitomer says, “If they like you, and they believe you, and they trust you, and they have confidence in you…then they may buy from you.” That is what you are doing when you build the community and marketspace. Do ask compelling and engaging questions. Don’t sell your product or service.

Ask the community what they think. Talk about profit and productivity. Remember, they are taking the time to be involved in their community, not your community, it all needs to be about them.

I trust that this has given you some ideas for your own business and how to apply this concept to create more sales as  by-product of your Social Media activities. If you still have questions and are interested in being the feature of a case study on this topic (to be published for free on this site), please send me an email and we can talk about your situation.

Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is one of the best business books that I have read this year. To echo Seth Godin’s blurb on the jacket, “Ignore this book at your peril”.

Rework is a collection of short essays on business, but it is more than that. The essays turn into something greater than the sum of their parts – because they point out that the world has changed. The business environment has changed, and the old way of doing business is essentially gone. The companies that cleave to the “old way” are going to get crushed by faster, smarter, more agile companies that do business the “new way”.

Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson are the founders of 37signals, the software company behind Highrise HQ and Basecamp (and more), and the book is enhanced by the work of illustrator Mike Rohde. Here Rohde talks about how Basecamp‘s “View all of these images at once” made reviewing the illustrations a snap.

Once a batch of inked illustrations were completed in Photoshop, I would export lower-res versions of the pieces as JPG files, and post them to the Basecamp project for Jason’s review. Basecamp’s handy “View all of these images at once” feature allowed Jason to scan an entire batch and approve or suggest tweaks…Illustrating REWORK was a fun, interesting and challenging project from start to finish. It’s amazing what we were able to produce in just 16 weeks, all while I worked nights and weekends and had a baby in the middle of the project. Our constant communications and use of Basecamp really made the difference.

Yes, they talk about their products. Yes, they talk about their actual practices. That is a big part of what makes this book so valuable, they walk the walk (and the 37signals products are really good). The real value of the book is in its structure as a collection of essays that are tied together but aren’t necessarily sequential. You can pick up this book, open it anywhere, and find something useful. Or peruse the table of contents for the section that you need to read right now.
For instance, are you feeling bogged-down in your work? In the Productivity section there are 11 essays:

Productivity

* Illusions of agreement
* Reasons to quit
* Interruption is the enemy of productivity
* Meetings are toxic
* Good enough is fine
* Quick wins
* Don’t be a hero
* Go to sleep
* Your estimates suck
* Long lists don’t get done
* Make tiny decisions

Here is a short piece from “Don’t be a Hero“:

“A lot of times it’s better to be a quitter than a hero.
For example, let’s say you think a task can be done in two hours. But four hours into it, you’re only a quarter of the way done. The natural instinct is to think, “But I can’t give up now, I’ve already spent 4 hours on this!”
So you go into Hero mode … sometimes that kind of sheer effort overload works. But is it worth it? Probably not. The task was worth it when you thought it would cost 2 hours, not 16…”

There is a lot more of this common-sense-yet-counter-intuitive information in Rework. Get this book. Read it. It will make your business better.

Here is my Amazon link, thanks for supporting this blog.

[Editor's note to the FTC: I bought this book myself, the only potential compensation is 4% of any Amazon sales through the above link.]

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from by Tara Rodden Robinson

When it comes right down to it, marketing is really simple: it’s the process of getting people to know, like, and trust you on the way to buying or hiring. If you’re a small business owner and wearing every single hat in your business (not to mention a bunch from home, too) then marketing isn’t simple at all. It’s a complex set of strategies and tactics that you have to design and implement, make time for and keep up with, and monitor in a way that allows you to know whether or not it’s working.

There’s good news, though: you can harness the power of GTD to move your marketing forward and grow your business. Here’s how.

Marketing is a project that is never completed

The first thing to remember is that marketing is never done. It’s a role or an area of focus (which puts in at the 20K horizon of focus). There will be next-actions, projects, and goals that you complete, yes. But as long as you’re in business, you’ll need some marketing to keep the leads–and the cash–flowing.

Get clear on your vision of success. In this case, ask yourself what successful marketing looks like to you. Harken back to the idea of know, like, and trust on the way to a decision about buying or hiring. When leads are moving along the path from first introduction to you or your products, what are the signs of success at each step along the way?

Don’t censor your vision on your thoughts about what’s likely, possible, or feasible. Don’t worry about how. Just create a rich, compelling vision of success.

Once you’ve got your vision of success pinned down (you did that step, right?), look at your current process and find one aspect of what’s happening now that you want more of. For example, let’s say you’re getting some leads from Twitter. You’d like more of those. So focus your attention on those leads–how can you serve those leads even better? Poll them–ask what enticed them to want to learn more. And then do that.

Finally, choose a handful of tactics that you can implement consistently. If it’s blogging, then set your writing schedule and post–come what may. If it’s Twitter, then tweet regularly. Put those tasks into your trusted system, just like you do any other next-action, and plow through them. Or create a checklist. Either way, use your GTD skills to get your marketing done. Every day.

—

About the Author
Known as The Productivity Maven, Tara Rodden Robinson is an author, coach, and educator. You can learn more about her here: Tara Robinson.com.

I have a new post up at the SOBEvent blog: Concrete Steps Toward Integrated Virtual Marketing

The old cliche about marketing used to be that a business knew that part of the money and effort spent on marketing was wasted, they just didn’t know which part. A recent survey mentioned in the WSJ shows that this perception is still true in the days of Social Media:

…a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What’s more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives.

You might have heard of my friend and blogging consultant, Chris Garrett. He wrote the Problogger book with Darren Rowse.

Well he has a new ebook out that tells you everything you need to know to get quality authority links and a boost in traffic, all through a quick and easy approach to guest blogging.

Right now he is offering it for the crazy low introductory price of only $7! This price is sure to go up within days as the reviews and testimonials start to pour in, so make sure you grab your copy and check out all the bonuses fast.

Check it out here: Guest Posting Workbook

Mack Collier, writing at The Viral Garden, has a very informative post about how to get the most out of the blogging “lull” in December:

Use December’s blogging lull to your advantage – The Viral Garden

Here’s five ways to make the most of December’s blogging lull:

1 – Re-evaluate everything. Go back and look at what your blogging results have been for 2009. How did traffic do? Subscribers? Comments? And how did these metrics tie back to your blogging goals? Put your blogging strategy for 2009 on trial, and then tweak it for 2010. Set goals for your blog. But make sure that those goals tie back into your larger focus for your blog.

This is always good advice. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, right? Have you done your measurement? How do you track your traffic and how your readers navigate your site? I use a combination of Sitemeter (the free service)and Google analytics. Sitemeter is great for me because it is much closer to real-time than Google, and I like to keep an eye on my referral logs.

2 – Ramp up content. David Armano advises doing this, using the Holiday vacation to push out as much if not more content than usual, with the thinking being that since many other bloggers are slacking off, your content can more easily be seen. We are going to keep looking for content to share with our networks, and if you keep creating great content while everyone else slacks off, guess whose posts will be shared with my network? Use December to increase your blogging visibility.

This is a no-brainer, but time can be an issue. Like the old saying goes, the best time to plant an orchard is 10 years ago, the best time to prepare for the December lull is earlier in the year. How do you do that? Well, for one thing you can compile your posts on book reviews as you do them, creating an uber-list for gift-giving ideas. And use those Amazon links to generate a little extra money for your own holidays…

3 – Use December to get a blogging jumpstart on 2010. Hey we all want to spend time with friends and family during the Holidays. Work in all forms seems to take a backseat…But if nothing else, use that last week of December to get your content in order to hit the ground running in January. Most people won’t begin to get back into reading blogs regularly until Jan. 4th (a Monday), and this is when many bloggers will begin to get back to writing. Use December to have at least one week’s worth of posts already written for January, so that way first thing on Monday the 4th, you’ve already got fresh content waiting on readers, while many other bloggers are thinking about getting back to writing.

Again, get out your calendars right now and jot yourself some notes for August, September, and October 2010 to write some draft posts that you can complete for that first week of 2011. Getting a head start like this is a real motivator and can help you get a jump on your competition next year. And remember, in the US November 2010 is an election for the Congress, who knows what might happen. Uncertainty will likely be highin January 2011 – think about how your business can capitalize on that.

4 – Experiment. Every year I spend the final week of the year spending time with social sites/tools that I’ve been meaning to try out, but just haven’t had the chance. … December is a great time to examine different tools and see if they work for you to complement your blogging efforts.

If you have done your homework and prepared for your December/January content, then this is a great time to play around with all of those applications that you have been meaning to try. In addition, this is great new content! Blog about your experiments, and create conversations with your readers and social media network about what works and what doesn’t.

5 – Become a commenting superhero. Remember, traffic is going to come to a crawl on many blogs. … If many people aren’t commenting, this is your chance to get noticed. And not just with other readers, but by the bloggers themselves.

Commenting is definitely one of the best network- and traffic-building strategies. It is time-consuming and feels like real work sometimes, but it can also be fun and can pay off in increased traffic for your site, increased credibility and authority for yourself/your company and may even lead to guest-posting offers.

What is your December strategy? It’s not too late to do at least a couple of these activities this year.

One of the first questions that people ask when they are setting up a blog for their website is, “Where do I get content?” The answer is often right in front of their faces, in the form of their existing press releases, brochures, and other printed materials. Mequoda.com has published an excellent style article for turning this printed content into a blog post or page. I am going to elaborate on some of their points:

Titling, categorization and tagging rules for online publishing with WordPress blogs

When publishers pull apart their archived content and start putting it up on their blog, they have a variety of style options to choose from when posting.

We recommend taking a little extra time to optimize your old articles (whether they are evergreen or not) in order to make that content as valuable to your blog (and audience) as possible.

The following style guide for unleashing your print archives into a blog is specific to WordPress in terms of folksonomy, but can be applied to any type of blogging platform.

Rule #1: Include at least one primary or secondary keyword phrase in your blog titles and subhead.

Why? Because blog titles are so specific, you might choose to use a secondary keyword in your title (like “repurposed content” in the case of this article) and a primary in your subhead (like “online publishing”). If you want to get ranked on a keyword in search engines (and you do), this is your prime real estate to display them.

Keywords are very important, and the search engines parse your posts looking for the most important words in the text. It is important to highlight them. Which leads to:

Rule #2: Make sure your blog is set up to define your title and subhead in H tags.

Why? H1, H2 and H3 are highly regarded by Google as defining what a page is “about”.

In your “writing page” in WordPress there is a button in the menu bar titled “Paragraph”. In the drop-down menu you will see Heading 2 and Heading 3. I recommend that you use Heading 2 no more than once per page, and Heading 3 for your sub-headings. Edit your CSS to make these headings “pop”.

NOTE: Never use H1 in your content! That tag is reserved for the title of the page and you will be penalized by the search engines.

Examples:

This is H2/Heading 2

This is H3/Heading 3

Rule #4: Assign posts to a single category.

Why? From testing, it’s become abundantly clear that assigning single categories to articles boosts ranking on the category title. Hopefully your categories (or topics) are named as keywords that you want to be ranked on. This can also avoid duplicate content.

You should also keep in mind that your blog should have a few, very focused categories. If you write about cars, for example,you might use categories like Sedan, Coupe, Convertible, then use Tags for more specific topics like Corvette, BMW, and so on.

This is really great information for people that are looking to optimize their online content, and for more information like this, including audio and video with step-by-step instructions and real-life examples, see Writing for the Web, Inside and Out, by myself and Brad Shorr.

I started reading Hugh McLeod’s blog Gaping Void about three years ago, and was amazed (and a little bit shocked) at his ideas, candor, and language. Now he has turned a long essay on creativity into a book that you should read.
Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity is an awesome resource. Here are the first ten keys:

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you sud­denly being “dis­co­ve­red” by some big shot, your plan will pro­bably fail.

5. You are res­pon­si­ble for your own expe­rience.

6. Ever­yone is born crea­tive; ever­yone is given a box of cra­yons in kin­der­gar­ten.

7. Keep your day job.

8. Com­pa­nies that squelch crea­ti­vity can no lon­ger com­pete with com­pa­nies that cham­pion crea­ti­vity.

9. Every­body has their own pri­vate Mount Eve­rest they were put on this earth to climb.

10. The more talen­ted some­body is, the less they need the props.

Number 6 is one of my favorites: Ever­yone is born crea­tive; ever­yone is given a box of cra­yons in kin­der­gar­ten.
“So you’ve got the itch to do something” is how this chapter starts, and I think that we all feel this sometimes. McLeod describes all sorts of situations and ideas that may occur to you to create something, but you are afraid that is isn’t “good enough”, or no one will want to publish it, or any number of reasons not to do it.

So what is his amazing and powerful advice? Do it. Make it. Put your heart and soul into making something amazing that will blow the minds of people that see it. “If you make something special and powerful and honest and true, you will succeed.” If you have even the tiniest bit of creative spark in yourself, you will know that his is true. It might be buried way down deep, but you know it.

Read this book.

Then get started on that amazing thing. I am working on mine and I feel awesome. In fact, after reading this, and an opportunity came for me to take another day job (see #7 above), I took it. Because now the time that I spend on my “creative stuff” feels so much more valuable, more meaningful. And the small idea that I had for a Productivity E-book is turning into something special and powerful and honest and true. And it is going to be much cooler than the original plan called for. Stay tuned.

(I get something like $0.50 if you buy it through this link)

Let me start with this: I met these gentlemen in May of 2008 at SOBCon and they are two of the most knowledgeable and sincere people that I have encountered. I really didn’t know who they were or what they did, but I have sure learned a lot from them since then.

In fact, I have spent about 3 years learning about what is in this book:

You need to go to Amazon and order this book right now. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

This book is a complete course in how to do business online in today’s world. There is quite a bit of buzz about this book, it is a NY Times best-seller after all. But that is not why I want you to go out and buy it, or why I gush a little about how cool Chris and Julien are. No, the reason is that you can save yourself a lot of time and effort learning the things that I learned the hard way – reading lots and lots of blog posts and e-books and whatever else I could get my hands on.

Trust Agents – Find out what Social Media is really all about

Chris and Julien have put together a reference book and instruction manual for gaining the background and skills that you need to bring your business into the world of Web 2.0 and beyond. To quote from the introduction:

“Trust Agents is the answer to the question,”What do I do now?” It is full of actionable information, supported by research and strategies, studies, and an explanation of the thought process behind what we do on the web. We love all the great “idea” books out there, and we do have lots of ideas packed in here as starting points. In addition to these, we give you actionable tasks that you can execute.”

Ideas and actionable tasks for business

The book starts off with a couple of stories about building trust, social capital, and the state of media today (and this will probably be the only business book you read this year that has stories about mobsters and student loans). Basic Social Media Literacy, followed by an in-depth explanation of what they call the six principles of trust agents.

Now, since this is a review and not a summary, I am just going to tell you about one of these principles:

The Archimedes Effect

This is my favorite, primarily because it is about leverage, a word that lots of marketing people hate to use. Which is too bad, because – even though it may be badly overused, it is the best word to describe the effect.

“Everyone uses leverage every day: Business owners hire employees so that their business can do more; people use technology such as cars to help them get to work faster; companies have systems that allow them to be more efficient. Yet millions use the Web every day and ignore how best to use the tools at their disposal to bring the greatest benefit.”

This chapter has page after page of examples on using leverage to increase the power of your online (and offline) efforts:

• Build on one success to fuel another
• Arbitrage and Pay Per Click advertising
• Applying these principles for online gaming and business
• Building your network and strengthening relationships
• Create your own niche
• Using your time effectively – delegate
• Get creative with your business marketing, be bold
• Protect your community

If you can’t find something in this chapter to apply to your business, well, it’s likely that one of your competitors will. Guess what happens then?

Buy Trust Agents at Amazon, now.