ReThink Your Web Presence - Chris Brogan

When I go to your website (or blog, or twitter page, or facebook page), what do you want me to do? What do you REALLY want me to do? Don’t answer that right away or glibly. What do you want me to do on your site? How do you want me to feed into your systems?

This is what I want to give you: a few questions to consider, from the same side of the fence as your prospective customer/visitor/reader/member whatever. Remember, these questions are not from your side of the fence. They’re from the other side, the important side.

Answer These Questions for Your Audience

Who do you want me to be? – In designing my up and coming new website, I had this great breakthrough. And I started working on it, and then I realized that this design I had in mind would be much more “male” in flavor and I wanted women to feel welcome. I want older people 35-60(ish) to come, so I know I want my font to be large enough and distinct enough. So, that’s what I thought about for my would-be buyer. Who do you want me to be on your site?

How will I know that I belong? – Will I be able to see “me” in your site? Will it make sense? When I go to Runner’s World, I don’t see me. There aren’t any fat trail runners there. I don’t feel like I belong there. (I probably do, but you know what I mean?) How will I know that I’m supposed to be on your site?

What do you want to show/tell me?

You’ve dragged me here. Make it easy to find what you’re hoping I consume. This is your main thing. This is where you want me to get really excited.

What do you want me to do?

I’m here. Now what? You want me to buy your something? You want me to hire you? You want me to sign up for your something? Make that really obvious. This is where things go the most wrong, I think.

How will we keep this relationship going?
– You want me here more than once, right? I’m hoping you do. How can we do that? Shall I subscribe to your blog? Do you want me to do a newsletter? What’s next for us? (This one’s pretty important too, eh?)

How shall I talk of you to my friends? – You don’t want the relationship to end with me, do you? How can we find some of my friends that will also like you? What message do you want me to carry? Is there a way we can do that together?

How Do You Answer This?

I don’t know, but I’m thinking these end up being important questions. What do you think? How does your site stack up?

via chrisbrogan.com

I think this is a really great exercise for us all to do - to really think about WHY we are online, what is the purpose and are we achieving the outcomes that we expect?

I am constantly amazed by businesses that do not have any idea what they want to 'get' out of using social media or the web generally. The answer I normally get it is more money. That always makes my heart sink - and look for the exit!! The businesses that I really get excited about working with are those who are focused on their customers needs and happiness - constantly striving to better the offering they have and generally just being passionate about what they do.

I met with a very successful business man recently (65+ years old) to talk to him and extract some information that we could use for the copy on his new website. I spent 45 mins talking to him about 'why', why he started the business, why he has grown it so big etc...At the end of the conversation I pointed out to him that not once during the whole conversation did he mention money, profit or turnover. He pointed out to me that obviously he had to make money, and he admitted that he consciously avoids thinking about the large number of people he employs because it scares him that if he messes up it affects all of their lives. But fundamentally his focus was on his passion for the business.

He'd be a fantastic business to get online - simply because he actually cares.

So if you are reading this and are thinking 'That's me, I really care' then get online, get yourself a Facebook and start to share your passion with the world :-)

Posted via web from Grow Sales Online's Posterous

7 Insanely Useful Ways to Search Twitter via ducttapemarketing.com

As a marketing tool Twitter gets much more interesting and useful when you can filter out 99% of the junk that doesn’t apply to your objectives and focus on the stuff that matters.

The basic search.twitter.com functionality is fine for searching things that are being said about your search terms. The advanced search function offers more ways to slice and dice the stream, but still leaves some room for improvement as it only searches what’s being said and where. From a marketing standpoint who is saying it might be more useful.

Now that the search engines are all pretty geeked up over real time search you can create some very powerful searches and alerts combining Google and Twitter.

1) Target by occupation

Let’s say you have a business that sells an awesome service to attorneys. A simple search on Twitter will turn up thousands of mentions of the word attorney, but many of them will be from people talking about this or that attorney or the need to hire or not hire one. That’s probably not very helpful for your purposes.

However, if you cruise over to Google and use a handful of operators from the Google shortcut library (more on that here) you can create a search that plows through Twitter and gives you a list of all the users that have the word “attorney” in their title (username and/or real name) – Click on this search phrase and see what happens – intitle:”attorney * on twitter” site:twitter.com – what you’ll find is a handy list of attorneys of one sort or another on Twitter.

Without getting too technical, this search basically asks Google to look in the title attribute of profile pages on Twitter – obviously you can use any word to replicate this. The * tells Google to find the words “attorney on Twitter” without regard to order or other words – “on Twitter” appears in the title of every profile page so we need that term to make sure we search profile pages only.

2) Target by bio

In some cases searching through the optional biographical information can be more helpful than the username or real name fields. Maybe you’re looking for a very specific term or some of the folks you are targeting only reference their profession in their bio.

Google search to the rescue here again. This time add the intext attribute, the word bio and our key phrase to search bios – So a search for web designers would look like this – intext:”bio * web designer” site:twitter.com. When you look at this list you might notice that none of the people on the list would have been found by searching in their title, as in the first tip, for web designer. Try it both ways to test for best results.

3) Target by location

Location search by itself is simple using the Twitter advanced search tool – if you want a list of people in Austin you would use this in Twitter – near:”Austin, TX” within:25mi and Twitter would use the location field to show you Austin Tweeters.

But . . . let’s say you wanted to target salons in Austin or maybe the whole of Texas – it’s back to Google to mix and match – (intitle:”salon * on twitter” OR intext:”bio * salon”) intext:”location * TX” site:twitter.com – we search the title, bio and location to get a very targeted list of Salons in Texas on Twitter. Note the OR function for multiple queries.

4) New sign ups

Another handy thing about using any of the searches above is that you can also use the exact operators to create Google Alerts. By going to Google and putting in your search string as described above you’ll get everything they have now, but by setting up an alert you’ll get an email or RSS alert when a new attorney (or whatever you’re targeting) joins Twitter – I can think of some powerful ways to reach out to that new person just trying to find some new friends!

5) Keep up on your industry

Some of the best information shared on Twitter comes in the form of shared links. In other words people tweet out good stuff they find and point people to it using a link. I love to use a filtered Twitter search to further wade through research on entire industries, but reduce the noise by only following tweets that have links in them and eliminating retweets that are essentially duplicates – “small business” OR entrepreneur OR “start up” filter:links – this gets that job done and produces an RSS feed if I want to send it to Google Reader. Don’t forget the “quotation marks” around two or more word phrases or you will get every mention of small and business.

6) Competitive eavesdropping

Lots of people set up basic searches to listen to what their competitors are saying and what others are saying about the competition. I would suggest you take it one step further and create and follow a search that also includes what the conversation they are having with the folks they communicate with – not just what people are saying about them, but to them and vice versa – from:comcastcares OR to:comcastcares.

7) Trending photos

Photos have become very big on Twitter and the real time nature of the tool means photos show up there before they show up most anywhere. If you want to find an image related to a hot trend, or anything for that matter, simply put the search phase you have in mind follow by one of the more well known Twitter image uploading services such as TwitPic and you’ll get nothing but images. So, your search on Twitter might be – olympics twitpic OR ow.ly (You can add more photosharing sites to expand the search).

There, Twitter just go way more interesting didn’t it?

via ducttapemarketing.com

Being able to search Twitter in this way is super valuable - once the 'I just don't get Twitter' business owners are shown the results relevant to them from these handy tricks they will be converted immediately. The marketing information that is held within Twitter is a vital source when beginning to develop your online marketing strategy, here you can see what people are saying, what they want / hate and also what their 'problems' are. Where else would you get primary market research like this for free?

Small businesses are now in a unique situation, with the emergence of Social Media and the fact that it is mostly free to use, we have the opportunity to compete with the big brands. But here's the catch....
WE MUST PLAY CLEVER!!!

We need to spend the TIME NOT MONEY using the information that is out there to plan an effective strategy, engage with our audience and most of all LISTEN to what they want.

So go forth and get engaging and turn your small business into a big brand!

Posted via web from Grow Sales Online's Posterous

7 Insanely Useful Ways to Search Twitter via ducttapemarketing.com

As a marketing tool Twitter gets much more interesting and useful when you can filter out 99% of the junk that doesn’t apply to your objectives and focus on the stuff that matters.

The basic search.twitter.com functionality is fine for searching things that are being said about your search terms. The advanced search function offers more ways to slice and dice the stream, but still leaves some room for improvement as it only searches what’s being said and where. From a marketing standpoint who is saying it might be more useful.

Now that the search engines are all pretty geeked up over real time search you can create some very powerful searches and alerts combining Google and Twitter.

1) Target by occupation

Let’s say you have a business that sells an awesome service to attorneys. A simple search on Twitter will turn up thousands of mentions of the word attorney, but many of them will be from people talking about this or that attorney or the need to hire or not hire one. That’s probably not very helpful for your purposes.

However, if you cruise over to Google and use a handful of operators from the Google shortcut library (more on that here) you can create a search that plows through Twitter and gives you a list of all the users that have the word “attorney” in their title (username and/or real name) – Click on this search phrase and see what happens – intitle:”attorney * on twitter” site:twitter.com – what you’ll find is a handy list of attorneys of one sort or another on Twitter.

Without getting too technical, this search basically asks Google to look in the title attribute of profile pages on Twitter – obviously you can use any word to replicate this. The * tells Google to find the words “attorney on Twitter” without regard to order or other words – “on Twitter” appears in the title of every profile page so we need that term to make sure we search profile pages only.

2) Target by bio

In some cases searching through the optional biographical information can be more helpful than the username or real name fields. Maybe you’re looking for a very specific term or some of the folks you are targeting only reference their profession in their bio.

Google search to the rescue here again. This time add the intext attribute, the word bio and our key phrase to search bios – So a search for web designers would look like this – intext:”bio * web designer” site:twitter.com. When you look at this list you might notice that none of the people on the list would have been found by searching in their title, as in the first tip, for web designer. Try it both ways to test for best results.

3) Target by location

Location search by itself is simple using the Twitter advanced search tool – if you want a list of people in Austin you would use this in Twitter – near:”Austin, TX” within:25mi and Twitter would use the location field to show you Austin Tweeters.

But . . . let’s say you wanted to target salons in Austin or maybe the whole of Texas – it’s back to Google to mix and match – (intitle:”salon * on twitter” OR intext:”bio * salon”) intext:”location * TX” site:twitter.com – we search the title, bio and location to get a very targeted list of Salons in Texas on Twitter. Note the OR function for multiple queries.

4) New sign ups

Another handy thing about using any of the searches above is that you can also use the exact operators to create Google Alerts. By going to Google and putting in your search string as described above you’ll get everything they have now, but by setting up an alert you’ll get an email or RSS alert when a new attorney (or whatever you’re targeting) joins Twitter – I can think of some powerful ways to reach out to that new person just trying to find some new friends!

5) Keep up on your industry

Some of the best information shared on Twitter comes in the form of shared links. In other words people tweet out good stuff they find and point people to it using a link. I love to use a filtered Twitter search to further wade through research on entire industries, but reduce the noise by only following tweets that have links in them and eliminating retweets that are essentially duplicates – “small business” OR entrepreneur OR “start up” filter:links – this gets that job done and produces an RSS feed if I want to send it to Google Reader. Don’t forget the “quotation marks” around two or more word phrases or you will get every mention of small and business.

6) Competitive eavesdropping

Lots of people set up basic searches to listen to what their competitors are saying and what others are saying about the competition. I would suggest you take it one step further and create and follow a search that also includes what the conversation they are having with the folks they communicate with – not just what people are saying about them, but to them and vice versa – from:comcastcares OR to:comcastcares.

7) Trending photos

Photos have become very big on Twitter and the real time nature of the tool means photos show up there before they show up most anywhere. If you want to find an image related to a hot trend, or anything for that matter, simply put the search phase you have in mind follow by one of the more well known Twitter image uploading services such as TwitPic and you’ll get nothing but images. So, your search on Twitter might be – olympics twitpic OR ow.ly (You can add more photosharing sites to expand the search).

There, Twitter just go way more interesting didn’t it?

via ducttapemarketing.com

Being able to search Twitter in this way is super valuable - once the 'I just don't get Twitter' business owners are shown the results relevant to them from these handy tricks they will be converted immediately. The marketing information that is held within Twitter is a vital source when beginning to develop your online marketing strategy, here you can see what people are saying, what they want / hate and also what their 'problems' are. Where else would you get primary market research like this for free?

Small businesses are now in a unique situation, with the emergence of Social Media and the fact that it is mostly free to use, we have the opportunity to compete with the big brands. But here's the catch....
WE MUST PLAY CLEVER!!!

We need to spend the TIME NOT MONEY using the information that is out there to plan an effective strategy, engage with our audience and most of all LISTEN to what they want.

So go forth and get engaging and turn your small business into a big brand!

Posted via web from Grow Sales Online's Posterous

Remote-controlled farming for city dwellers: tailor-made, no-fuss vegetable gardens

"Have you forgotten where the vegetables on your table come from?" It's a question agricultural firm Azienda Agricola Giacomo Ferraris asks potential customers. Offering Italians the opportunity to reconnect with the origins of their food, the company's innovative online offering—Le Verdure Del Mio Orto ('The Vegetables from my Garden')—lets anyone build an organic garden right from their web browser.

How it works? Users first select a garden size based on the number of people they'd like to feed; 30m2 is sufficient for 1–2 people and costs EUR 850 per year. The virtual gardener can then choose from 40 different types of vegetables, using a highly intuitive interface that includes information on expected yields and harvest times. Optional extras include a photo album of the garden's progress (EUR 49), herb and fruit beds (EUR 50/75), and even a scarecrow with a picture of the customer's own face (EUR 39). Once the garden has been designed and fees paid, planting begins on the farm, which is located between Milan and Turin in northern Italy. As the organic produce grows, it's picked and delivered to the customer's door within 24 hours. Weekly deliveries are part of the package.

A souped up version of community supported agriculture, Le Verdure del Mio Orto capitalizes on consumers' hunger for locally grown food and—in a wider sense—for anything that's faithful to its roots. As our sister site trendwatching.com would say, it's (still) made here. The time seems ripe for farmers of all varieties to consider setting aside a few lots, adding branding and logistics, and serving it all up for city-dwellers with an enticing online presence. Of course, there's also an opportunity here for smart companies willing to take care of the non-agricultural elements on a farmer's behalf. Better yet, contact Azienda Agricola Giacomo Ferraris and ask if they're willing to license their system. (Related: Innovative olive farmers — Adopt a Maine lobster trap — More homegrown vegetables, without the sweat.)

Website: www.leverduredelmioorto.it
Contact: info@leverduredelmioorto.it

Spotted by: Giulia Cuccolini

via springwise.com

This is something I would love to be involved with, I have no clue about growing vegetables, in fact plants generally don't like to live with me! We do have some land though, so if anyone is interested in setting up a little allotment, and either has green-fingers or wouldn't mind learning about all that good stuff, I'd love to give it a go.

Posted via web from Grow Sales Online's Posterous

Do I need a website?

Cartoon of the Week

March 12, 2008

via funnytimes.com

Posted via web from Grow Sales Online's Posterous

EVERYONE should have a Customer Database

Cartoon of the Week

October 14, 2009

via funnytimes.com

Posted via web from Grow Sales Online's Posterous

MyMillionDollarMovie.com – So Cool We Had To Invest | IDDICTIVE.COM | Innovative Business Ideas

Every now and then we see an idea that ticks all the boxes – it’s new, it’s innovative and it’s very very cool.

MyMillionDollarMovie.com is just that kind of idea. In short, up and coming film and TV director Casey Walker wanted to get his feature film made. Unfortunately he didn’t know any Hollywood power brokers, rich uncles or Angel investors.

So, inspired by Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Home Page, he decided to sell individual frames of his movie, inviting the public to become his producers – and in a neat twist – help raise money for good causes at the same time.

We caught up with Casey and asked him to tell us a little more about the project – and just in case you’re wondering, Iddictive are now officially assistant movie producers too.

We bought frame number 22,507.

Can you explain your project in one sentence?

“MyMillionDollarMovie.com is a fundraising initiative designed to finance my first feature film by offering everyone the chance to not only participate in the making of a movie, but the ability to fundraise for the environmental charity of their choice.”

Once you had the idea, how did you get this going?

“At first we launched a simple beta site that was all manual. I sent out a press release and we had so much traffic the site crashed every day for a week. We then took what we learned, along with the initial sales, and put our time into designing an automated site. The purpose for this was so that I would be able to spend more time on making the film, and not on managing a website.

After some traditional press, we started to get noticed by bloggers, and people on sites like Facebook. Now we’re concentrating more of our efforts to promote the project online and not simply the traditional media.

We’re getting ready to launch an aggressive online campaign to build awareness for the project. I’m pretty excited.”

Apart from the investment what other positives have come out of this for you?

“I’ve made many new contacts online and friends around the world (there are producers in 22 countries now). I get a lot of support from people in the UK and I’ve never even met them …

Several distributors are paying close attention to our progress. I always get job offers, but I’m very selective as I don’t want to take on something that removes me for too great a time from this project.”

I read somewhere that you’ve bagged mytwomilliondollarmovie.com – what’s the deal there? Any plans?

“After I’ve proved this business model works, I want to be able to give the same opportunity to other first time film makers. So I went out and bought a bunch more domains, so that we can keep moving forward. The big plan is to have an online studio where people can choose to support the genre of their choice.”

Why should our readers invest in your movie?

“Purchasing frames in mymilliondollarmovie.com not only provides you with an advertising platform for your own business or project, but as the site gains more attention, so will you. There are contests and incentives for producers, you get to participate in the casting process by voting on your choice of actors, and if you surf around the site, there are some pretty cool people to network with.

And once we’ve sold the film, you will receive your initial purchase back, and get to choose the environmental charity that your profits go to. We are certified Climate Neutral so you can rest assured that your purchase is not harming the planet. And seeing your name up there on the big screen is pretty cool too.”

What’s been the feedback from those who have invested?

“Feedback has been fantastic and honestly, it is sometimes what keeps me going during the hard times. A lot of producers just believe it’s a good idea and want to be apart of it. We’re making history here and it’s not often you can say you were apart of something like this.

I didn’t design this project to get lots of money from a few people. I set the price at $10 so a larger body of people from all walks of life could be a part of something unique.

And it’s because of people like this that my dream is coming true.”

Site: www.mymilliondollarmovie.com

Subscribe for Free: RSS | EMAIL

Tagged as: alex tew, casey walker, crowd funded, fundraising, milliondollarhomepage, mymilliondollarmovie

via iddictive.com

Another cool idea! Think I'm gonna invest in this too...

Posted via web from Grow Sales Online's Posterous