Stuff with Moxie

I have the privilege of hosting a group of colleagues from the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant network in Austin this weekend. We shared some of our favorite online marketing and business tools. Some cool stuff here to help you take action, get organized and more!



Universal Business Listing

Great service to get your business listed online. There’s a fee, but look for the fine print on the bottom for the $39 basic package to get started. Might be the best $39 you’ll spend this year to help your business get found online.

Meeting Burner
Host an online webinar to educate clients or generate leads or just hold meetings- free.

KnowEm
KnowEm allows you to check for the use of your brand, product, personal name or username instantly on over 550 popular and emerging social media websites. Grab your name and secure your brand before someone else does.

I have been getting a lot of info about Google+.  For this edition of Stuff with Moxie, I’m posting some info worth checking out if you want to drill down a bit on Google+ for your business — and life.

Good “insider” interview with Google’s Joseph Smarr

What’s New in Google+

An easier way to invite:  Hey Everyone, We’ve heard that you want to invite your friends, but sometimes you don’t know their email addresses… or sometimes its not easy to find it. To address this, we’ll be rolling out a new feature over the next few days that lets you invite others simply by using a link.  Read more.

More quick links of interesting marketing tips, tools and info that came to my attention over the last week.

Google Circles

Google’s taking on Facebook

Watching this one closely as Google rolls out Google +.   It’s invitation only right now (I didn’t get one, bummer), but here’s how Google describes it in their tour: http://www.google.com/+/demo/.

There’s a good review in Inc. about what people are saying about Google+. There seems to be potential for work and business use.  Read the full article.

Do the Work

I’ve been laughing and crying over the book Do the Work by Steven Pressfield.

It’s a quick read filled with pithy, thought-provoking ideas that every entrepreneur and small business owner should read.  Get it.  Read it.  Fight the Resistance.

Go to Amazon and click on the “Read the First Chapter Free” button.

The folks at Ring Central (my virtual phone service of choice by the way), asked its customers what Independence day meant for them. Pretty inspirational comments here that I could relate to.  Read the full post here.

Happy Independence Day everyone.  May you have a safe and blessed time with family and friends.

I came across this interesting article on the Marketing Profs Blog about how to make your business cards do more work to promote your business. Tara Horner offers five great ideas, and I’ll add two more:

1. Be sure to include your social media links – your blog site name and your Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter profile names.
2. Got an offer, a free report or a newsletter sign-up form on your web site? Put a QR code for it on the back of your card. What’s a QR code?  With the rising popularity of smart phones, you’ll be seeing more of these box-shaped squiggly codes in ads and flyers. Similar to a bar code at your grocery store, you point your smart phone camera, enabled with a QR code app, at the QR code box.  Bada bing bada boom! Your mobile web browser goes to the web page you encoded with the QR code. Check out this article in Tech Crunch about how to make a QR code on Bit.ly.

My semi-regular weekend roundup of marketing stuff with Moxie that I came across recently.

Facebook Business Page Upgrades

Mashable’s Vadim Lavrusik posted a good review on the new features Facebook launched last week for “Fan” or business pages.  One of my favorite improvements is the ability to post comments and likes under your business entity, rather than just your personal name.  Read more.

50 Places to Find Images for Every Small Business Need

From Small Business Trends:  ”Your blog posts, your marketing materials and your website all need images. As a small business owner, you probably think that photos come with an expensive price tag, but they don’t have to. In this post, we highlight 50 image sites and services where you can get photographs and types of images for free or a low cost.”  Read more.

Add Skills to Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn has added a beta tool to help you search for people (and list your own) by their skills. More and more, Linked In is getting it right with powerful new features to help you connect and grow you B2B business.  Read more.

Here’s my weekend posting of stuff that’s “got moxie.”   Short blurbs of interesting stuff that came across my feed reader or to my in box recently.

For this post, I’m borrowing a couple of cool bits of info John Jantsch featured in his Weekend Favs post:

Fiverr – a marketplace where people all manner of services for $5. There are some really interesting offers for business and pretty entertaining read.

OnePage – interactive one page business cards for the web. You can create a page that lists all of the ways to contact you and then embed the card in multiple pages.

And this thought-provoking blurb popped up in my RSS feed reader this week:

The Certainty Premium – Good thinking from Seth Godin.  What’s the “ultimate promise” that could set your business apart?

Happy New Year!  I haven’t followed my own advice to blog at least once a week once your blog is up and running, so let this be a lesson to you – give your blog good care and regular feedings and it will love you back. I’m afraid this blog looks neglected right now, so I’ll give it a little love today.

With that sheepish disclosure, here are three items of interest that popped into my feed reader recently (bonus tip:  My Yahoo! is my preferred reader of choice for the way it aggregates the page with columns, is customizable in both design and content categorization, and lets me preview postings by hovering over the link.)

Act Your Shoe Size, Not Your Age: 3 Ways to Market Smaller in 2011

A flattering post for small business marketing from Marketing Profs.  Here’s an excerpt:

The bigger a business is, the more likely it is to struggle with the things that will spell success in 2011: The ability to market “real-time;” be quick and nimble; emphasize human-scale, one-on-one interactions; embrace simple social media approaches and the amplification effect you get when the right people start spreading their interpretations of your messages and content throughout their social graphs; and maintain a maniacal focus on super-serving niche audiences (or “microcultures”), as Greg calls them. Need help? Take a page from small businesses, which are typically more natural micro-marketers and are generally more open to serving niche audiences.

Click here to read the full post.

New Year’s Cleaning Tip:  Degrease your Laptop with Mr. Clean.

Huh?  Yeah, really.  I do find my laptop getting a little messy from time to time from finger prints, dust, etc.  Check out this post and video from Lifehacker.

What Should You Do the First Week of the Year?

Good advice from one of my marketing heroes, Steve Yastrow, on the first week of 2011 — or any week for that matter:  focus on your customers.   Read his newsletter article here.

A semi-regular Saturday round-up of moxie marketing links, tips and stuff on the web and my feeds.

Have you tried Google Hotpot?

Google keeps adding new ways to get customers to interact with your small business.  All the more reason to make sure your Google Place page is active and has offers to attract and convert customers.  Invite your customers to review you!   It’s not a Yelp-killer…yet.  Here’s a nice post.

Ten Things I Believe About Email

Don’t believe the naysayers that say email marketing is dead.  It is still one of the best ways to build lasting relationships. Here’s a nice post by Dylan Boyd with some classic email tips to help your program thrive.

Cheap Versus Expensive Copywriters – Which Should You Choose?

I’m asked a lot about the importance of good copywriting.  Skimping on copywriting is like filling your high-performance car with regular gas instead of premium.  It’ll get you there, but the ride isn’t as sweet or satisfying, and you might even have a few breakdowns.  Check out the CopySnips blog.

Here are  three more marketing faves, links of interest or posts I came across in my semi-regular weekend edition of Marketing Stuff with Moxie

One stop shop for posting and marketing your events

If you use events to market or grow your business, or you’re with a community organization that hosts events or fundraisers, keep your eye on Hubvine.com.  They’re an Austin-based company and still in beta, but they offer a one-stop shop to not only post your events on your web site, but also push it out to online event calendars in your community.

Video Marketing is the new Black

The folks from Pixability came to demonstrate their online video marketing service to the Annual Gathering of Duct Tape Marketing Consultants last week.  Pretty cool stuff.  You can make affordable, professionally-produced videos for your website and your YouTube Channel and market them with Pixability’s help.  They’ll even send you a Flip Phone to capture your own shots and interviews and send them back to Pixability.  Not sure if video marketing is worth your the investment?   You are 53x more likely to appear on page 1 of Google’s search results if you have video on your website. (Forrester Research, January 2009).  Watch Pixability’s video.

More and more research shows that video improves your marketing efforts significantly. Video in email marketing increases click-through rates by 96%. (Implix 2010 Email Marketing Trends Survey) – Shoppers who view video at Onlineshoes.com are 45% more likely to buy (Internet Retailer, February 2010) – Press releases that include video components receive a 500% increase in views (Eloqua, April 2010)

Frankenstein Meetings and Halloween Greetings.

Halloween’s around the corner. Check out Mark Anderson’s Post at Small Business Trends. Fire, Bad! Happy Halloween.

It’s official. I’m a mobile blogger.

This post is being written on my Blackberry Bold using the Blackberry WordPress app as I sit under an umbrella outside Starbucks in The Domain. Pretty cool app. Easy to use. Intuitive. It has enough tools to handle a basic post, from formatting font to inserting video or images.

Why should you care?

I am often asked in my workshops how often to post on a blog. Two to three times a week is a good goal, especially when you’re starting out. After that, post whenever you have something to say. Aim for at least one a week but whatever you do, don’t ignore your blog for weeks (or even worse, months) at a time.

So a simple app like this is a nice little tool to help you post a quickie on the go in your quest to achieve “Blog Nirvana,” whatever that is for you.

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.