The first two ideas are to hire a business coach and focus on the near-term. I believe that both of these are fantastic ideas. I use a local free service via the University of New Hampshire Business School for business coaching and I have found their assistance to be invaluable.

Focusing your efforts and thinking on the near-term is also very good advice. The important thing is going to be to get to the end of the year “in the black”. The results of the 2010 mid-term elections in the US are going to be anybody’s guess right up until November, so small business owners need to focus on being prepared for just about anything.

The third idea, I believe, warrants even more discussion.

3. Reinvent your business.

2010 will be the year when you will have to reinvent yourself and your business. The world is not the same world you inhabited just a few years ago. Don’t get caught up in thinking that, once the economy settles, we’ll all be returning to the way things were. There is no going backward. And, honestly, even if you could, would you?

To respond to events, do something new and innovative. Something other people would not expect you to do. The old way of doing things doesn’t apply any more. So be brave and try something new in your life and business.

While the next 12 months will bring new challenges, look forward to more signs of recovery in the upcoming months while, at the same time, putting into place a plan for your business that will weather a double-dip if and when one should occur.

How can you re-invent your business? I can think of at least two examples:

Turn a service into a product

If your small business is a service of some sort, turn part of it into a resource that your customers can purchase. For example, perhaps an bookkeeper manages the accounts of some specialty firms and has created spreadsheets with all sorts of custom templates and macros. One of these may be applicable to other businesses. These potential customers may not be able to afford your ongoing bookkeeping services, but they may be interested in purchasing the accounting tool and doing it themselves.

In addition, you now have the opportunity to market to these customers with other products that you develop, or possibly add services in the future. Make the product once, sell it multiple times. Sell upgrades. Sell customization.

Turn a product or service into a training course

Once again we are looking at something that you can do once, convert it into a digital format, and sell it multiple times. Whatever your business I am sure that you have a set of frequently asked questions or frequently recurring situations that you must handle for your clients or customers.

Turn this FAQ resource into a training tool, using PDF or audio or video format. That is what Brad Shorr and I did with the Writing for the Web course, to teach our own clients the basic tools of do-it-yourself SEO (Search Engine Optimization). By adding this training course to our website packages we were able to cut down the amount of time spent coaching our clients on the same information over and over.

What type of small business do you have, and how can you re-invent part of it for 2010? Share in the comments.

In the old days, gifts like these would cost money to create and be hard to share. Today, the opposite is true. The goal of something that’s free is to spread the idea.

On the other hand, some bonus things we built for Linchpin:

Oh, wait, I can’t show them to you because you have to buy something first.

Anyway, what we did was collect:

* Zen Unicorn, an ebook of the last few years of this blog (it sells on the Kindle for $9)
* Membership to the invite-only online Triiibe community that I started a while ago (limited supply of these)
* Ten minutes of excerpts from the audio version of my book
* Some other bonuses, below

To get them, you need to answer a simple question to demonstrate that you’ve ordered the new book. That’s because they are bonuses, not free. And yes, you qualify even if you got the book as a gift or received it a month ago. The bonus material will only be available for a few weeks.

[...]

Whatever you sell, whatever idea you want to spread, it’s now possible to create both freebies and bonuses. One spreads, the other induces.

I am working on my own little productivity book, and I have been thinking about this sort of “goodie-bag” approach to marketing and selling it. Almost everything in the book is available here, on the blog, in a less-polished and un-collated manner. The book will also include answers to questions that people have asked me, in person or by email, about how to get over the stumbling blocks in their own workflow.

What would you like to see as a bonus or freebie in conjunction with this book? Share with us in the comments.

GTD, Marketing, e-book

Creating a remarkable product

Godin uses this time with some software engineers to exhort them to create something remarkable, that is, something that people want to talk about, because “ideas that spread, win.” In fact, if your product is remarkable, people will talk about it, especially if talking about the product (or service) makes it better.

This is something that Godin has been talking about since he released Unleashing the Ideavirus (aff link) as a free, 200+ page PDF.

All of the concepts from Godin’s previous books that applied to businesses and products and services have been leading up to the single most important thing that Linchpin represents…you can and should apply these very same principles to yourself and to the people that you lead.

Personal Development = Business Development

Watch this video (it’s about an hour long) with a pencil and paper handy, and jot down notes for yourself as you watch – keeping in mind that you are looking for ways that you can apply these creativity and marketing principles to your own personal development and the professional development of your team.

This is a great video for anyone who makes anything, software or otherwise.

Please to enjoy Seth Godin at the Business of Software 2008.

BTW, tomorrow we start talking about our Groundhog Day Resolutions.

We programmers have a saying: “Garbage In – Garbage Out.” This essentially means you get out what you put in. If you put in chit-chat, don’t be surprised if that’s all you see in return!

Here are nine benefits I’ve personally seen through my couple of years of Twitter usage.

1. Networking connections

Because of my Twitter network, I’ve had real conversations with people I never would have been able to reach otherwise. Also I’ve been able to form deeper connections with people in real life because of our first meeting on Twitter.

I agree with this 100%. Twitter is a quick and easy way to touch base with people in your network, and add more people to your network as well. I have the Twidroid app on my Samsung phone, and I log in from time to time during the day, when I am away from my computer, to catch up on what is happening and to ask or answer questions.

2. Traffic

How much traffic you can generate with Twitter depends on a number of factors, not least how many engaged followers you have. “Engaged” being a key point; they have to want to hear from you, otherwise they might as well not be following.

Indeed. This site gets quite a bit of traffic from Twitter, partially because I tweet about new posts, but also because people that I tweet with or follow visit as part of their research, whether or not to follow back.

3. Leads

Twitter is fast becoming an instant referral system for business leads. Someone will ask if anyone knows a consultant/freelancer/vendor/etc. with a certain skill set or experience, and others will reply with suggestions.

If you build a strong network, you will get a good share of those referrals. I have seen it happen repeatedly, from design and programming through where to stay on vacation!

This has been one of the most profitable ways that I have found to use Twitter. The “Search” function is invaluable for finding people that are looking for help in your field.

I like to find people that are tweeting for help and assist any way that I can. Sometimes it is a referral to one of my other colleagues on Twitter, sometimes it is something easy that I can do quickly and for free, other times it leads to a paying client relationship.

If you do this consistently and transparently, you can turn this network of “People that I have helped” into a Twitter List and have an instant Word-of-Mouth referral & reference resource.

4. Direct sales

Obviously the end result of all those referrals is you get sales, but also sales of products and other services too. Dell is making millions of additional dollars this way.

Keep in mind that if all you do is promote your products, people will stop listening, so keep up the good content too. Make an offer and see what happens.

There are 5 more at SME, read the whole thing – 9 Ways to Get More From Twitter

NutshellMail Lets Users Create Simple Email Newsletters For Facebook Fan Pages

FbFund-backed NutshellMail provides an innovative web-based service that lets users send and receive your messages from social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, in your email inbox. Today, the application has added a nifty feature that lets any Facebook page administrator create an automated email newsletter campaign.

The NutshellMail Facebook application allows users to easily add an “Email Newsletter” tab to your page, letting fans opt-in to receiving emails that highlight recent content from your page.

The application is fairly simple; NutshellMail collects recent activity from your page, organizes it into an email and delivers it to each subscriber on Facebook as per their own delivery preferences. Subscribers can also comment, like, share or post comments back to your page directly through email. And administrators can determine how often an email update is sent out to fans.

This is a great feature for connecting with the fans and customers of your business. Visit NutshellMail to access the newsletter app.

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

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.

• Community participation
• Serve your existing customers
• Opportunities come to the prepared mind
• Connect your business with your lifestyle
• Create a database of your Network contacts
• Be consistent in your branding
• Direct mail still works

And for one of the very best marketing books out there, take a peek at:

Why Hashtags Are Useless

Many marketers think of hashtags first when they think about “going viral” on Twitter.

A hashtag is a word or string of characters that starts with a number sign [like #tcot or #gtd, Ed.]. When a hashtag appears in a tweet, it links that word to its Twitter Search results page.

That’s initially pretty appealing from a marketing perspective, but there’s a problem: Twitter Search doesn’t explain what the hashtag means.

Unless you’re already involved in the conversation, the Twitter search results page is usually useless — so useless that you often see Twitterers asking “What the heck is #suchandsuch? And why is it a trending topic?”

There are a couple of ways to read this, and a comment by Christopher Drinkut gets right to it:

” hashtags are pointless,” Oh really?

Look, I’m not in love with hastags – I really could care less – but to say they are pointless, that’s insane.

1. One reason they are not pointless is that people use them. If you want to talk about the culture of a community hashtags matter.

2. If your logic is – “hashtags are pointless because I can’t leverage them for my own marketing” – you need to reevaluate. Marketing in the future (and today) requires a lot more consideration of the marketed to.

3. Why am I even writing all of this? …So it’s not something you are going to use – I wouldn’t necessarily call it pointless.

hashtags are pointless because I can’t leverage them for my own marketing

I believe that this statement is the sum of the argument that Dan Zarrella is making. Unfortunately Zarella is missing the point of the hashtags – creating a link to a set of related tweets by people who may or may not be following each other. This makes the hashtag a fantastic resource for marketers doing research on a topic or product. Take a look at “#Quiznos” for example, quite a bit of conversation where people are taking the time to tag their tweets with that particular hashtag.

If I worked for Quiznos I would be keeping an eye on that search stream and using that list of customers to make something happen. Like following those folks, for one thing. And doing a little more digging into this tweet for another:

What kind of marketer could resist knowing about what came before and after this tweet? And you can just go ask him. Useless?

Did You Etsy Today?

And then we have this from the WSJ on Friday, 24 April:

How #etsyday Grew on Twitter

Image: schugirl08 via Flickr

Internet companies shell out millions to build buzz by buying keywords on Google or (back in the day) placing weird 30-second ads during the Superbowl. On Friday, e-commerce site Etsy.com – the eBay of handmade crafts – got a huge dose of buzz for free.

For much of the day, #etsyday has been the top-trending topic on Twitter, the social short-messaging juggernaut. The mysterious term refers to a day to celebrate the online store Etsy.

Etsy spokesman Adam Brown says his company had little to do with it. The idea for Etsyday came from Susan Schumann, a 37-year-old teacher and photographer in Newport, Rhode Island. She started selling prints of photos from her Peru vacation on the site in February, but was surprised that many of her friends hadn’t heard of the site. So she posted a message on Etsy’s user message boards suggesting that the community of users do some grassroots marketing of their own.

As of this writing it is too soon to tell what impact this may have had on sales at Etsy.com, but judging from tweets and comments on the blog, it has people pretty excited:

and:

“Endless Possibilities in Vinyl Lettering Design”?? How about endless possibilities in cross-linking and free promotion?
Keep in mind that you simply cannot buy that kind of excitement. And it’s all because of a “useless” little hashtag.

What say you? Leave a comment.

We’re pleased and delighted that Geoff Livingston, top blogger in the communications space and author of the popular 2007 social media book, “Now Is Gone” has agreed to lead the Saturday afternoon Models and Masterminds session on “An Integrated Offline / Online Marketing Customer Outreach Program.” He’ll be answering the question: What are the parts and proportions of an integrated overall online and offline marketing and pr plan?

Read more –>