Monday, September 5, 2016

How 16 Characteristics of Greatness Apply to Storytelling

Don Yaeger_InstagramQuestions are Key


Ask the right question and the world will open up for you.


Well, at least a person might, and from that you can get a fantastic story.


Don Yaeger walks us through his interview process and his sources for inspiration as a prolific author and editor. He's written twenty-five books, is a nine-time New York Times bestseller, and was an associate editor for Sports Illustrated.


He's adamant that there is no such thing as a 'go-to' question in an interview. You must really know your subject so that you can give yourself the opportunity to ask unique and driving questions.


Don also believes that empathy is a core storytelling component and that including humor in your work and being deliberate about your inner circle is paramount.


Through his careful efforts and years of interaction with extraordinary individuals, he has extracted 16 characteristics of greatness that he openly shares and applies to storytelling.


In This Episode



  • What the 16 characteristics of greatness are and how you can apply them to your story

  • How to ask the most interesting questions of your interviewees

  • Why humor is an important tool for accessibility

  • How empathy is at the core of all storytelling

  • Why keeping good company that challenges you is a key to success

  • How to break down barriers and open up your audience


 


Quotes From This Episode


“I'm focused on my circle. By surrounding myself consistently by people who push me, who encourage me, who challenge me, I think I'm a better me every day.” -@DonYaeger


“The key to good storytelling is empathy. It starts there.” -@DonYaeger (highlight to tweet)


“Those who tell the best stories, those who are able to inspire others to action based on the story you tell them are those who change the world.” -@DonYaeger


“If you take excuses off the table, if you stop making excuses every time you fail, and if you stop blaming someone else every time something doesn't go your way, you will learn how to hate losing more than you love winning. Because as long as you can blame somebody else for your failure, you'll never own it and you'll never hate it.” -@DonYaeger



“I try not to focus on the superhuman, even though the superhuman is what might draw people to want to read about them originally. I want to focus on the human.” -@DonYaeger


You cannot lead people you do not know. That became a real driver for me to realize that it doesn't matter how big or small my company is, I need to know as many of them, as many of the things that they're challenged by. I need to know in order to truly be their leader.” -@DonYaeger


“Their emotional dynamic and their willingness to engage increases dramatically when they're getting into a conversation that'll make them laugh.” -@DonYaeger


“The way we break down walls is that we understand each other better, we know each other's story.” -@DonYaeger


Resources







       


How 16 Characteristics of Greatness Apply to Storytelling

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6 Ways to Create Killer Webinars That Will Ignite Your Business

6 Ways to Create Killer Webinars That Will Ignite Your Business


Clément Delangue has many reasons to be proud of himself.


He worked for eBay at the age of 17, being one of the first professional sellers from France. And after being the co-founder of various startups, including VideoNot.es and UniShared, he is now the chief marketing officer of Mention, one of the top social media marketing tools for businesses.


Somewhere among his list of achievements is the fact that he made around $10,000 within just two hours of his first webinar.


How about that?


The value of webinars


“There is nothing more powerful, leverageable or exponentially more profitable for you and your business than a well executed webinar strategy,” says Amy Porterfield.


She would be the right person to know. When it comes to webinars for businesses, Amy is something of a legend.


Webinars can be an extremely powerful tool for businesses looking to market a product or service or even startups wanting to attract audiences and gain visibility. A well-planned webinar is a win-win both for your business and your customers or prospects. It gives you a chance to interact with, and sell to, your customers, while building value for them that no other sales strategy can offer.


So be prepared to take notes. Here are the 6 best ways you can make tons of money and a name for your business, even before you hit the market:


1. Choose the perfect topic to attract your audience


What's the first thing about a webinar that draws people in? It's the topic, of course.


Selecting that topic is one of the most crucial steps when it comes to creating webinars. Not only should the title be perfectly worded to appeal to most people, the actual nature of the topic should be such that your prospects and customers cannot resist joining in.


If you have no idea where to start with the topic, don't worry. You can find a topic with the Keyword Planner. The amazing Google tool offers you an array of features that help you gauge the popularity of your keyword and stay on top of what people look for in your niche.


The topic you settle on after extensive research through the Keyword Planner must be unique. See what other people are offering and find ways to set yourself apart. If you're new to the market, the only weapon you have in your arsenal is attracting people by offering what no one does.


Here's an example of a perfect webinar topic:


topic to attract your audience for webinars


2. Create a well-crafted plan for your webinar


In marketing, there is no such thing as a stroke of luck. Every successful marketing endeavor is a product of a great deal of thought and planning. Same goes for webinars. If you're aiming for success with your webinars, you need to have a well-designed strategy.


Before you start, ask yourself this question… Why exactly do you want this webinar anyway? Webinars can be used for various purposes and each one demands a different strategy. So determining why you want to do it is the first step towards a successful strategy.


You may want to attract new leads or strengthen your relationship with your new customers. You may want to launch a new product or service or simply establish yourself as an expert in your niche. Whatever your purpose may be, you need to discover that first.


Below is an example of how to create a webinar plan:


well-crafted plan for webinars


3. Sell your idea in advance


“You don't need a finished product to start making money with webinars,” says Mariah Coz. “You don't need a blog, a social following – you can literally build up your business with webinars.”


This is an amazing idea if you are just starting off your business venture and want to attract new leads. So what if you don't have a product yet. You have the skills and knowledge to educate people, right? Why not use those skills to create hype around your upcoming product and get people excited? You can also use the webinar to build your Facebook business page.


And, of course, a couple of thousand bucks that you can make with the webinar itself can't hurt either.


That's what Mariah Coz did. She offered webinars 30 days before the product was released. Not only was she successful in advertising her product, she also managed to earn around $30,000 dollars through the webinars in those 30 days. Not a bad deal.


Here's the right way to go about Webinars according to Mariah:



  1. Do a webinar: See how many people register, gauge interest, pitch your product concept. Listen to their questions about your topic.

  2. Pre-sell your product: Make money while you build it. More webinars.

  3. Listen to your audience: Get feedback, build what they ask for.

  4. Launch to your engaged, raving audience: Make sales.


sell your idea in advance for webinars


4. Pay attention to the content


Even if your webinar marketing strategy is a success and you're able to get a good number of people to show up, you can't hold them in place or keep them coming back for more without great content.


The content of your webinar must be fresh and exciting. No one likes boring snooze-fests. It must offer useful information instead of being too salesy. No one paid good money to hear you advertise your products. And, finally, it must be engaging. The goal of your webinar is to interact with prospects and customers. If you can't get them to do that, it's a wasted opportunity.


Other considerations are equally important. One of those is the time. The webinar should not be so brief that people feel cheated. Nor should it be so long that it's boring. The perfect duration for a webinar is somewhere around 45 minutes. Make sure to leave plenty of room for a Q&A session.


Here's how Rapt Media thinks ideal content should be:


sell your idea in advance for webinars


5. Host free webinars through Google+ Hangouts


The Google+ Hangouts On Air is a dream-come-true for those of you who want a free and flexible platform to host webinars. It offers a remarkable number of features that allow you to conduct meetings, organize workshops, and present them online. The only thing you can't do through a Hangout session is charge people.


You can also customize your webinar by creating trailers and apps. Google+ not just allows you to broadcast the webinar through the Hangouts platform, but also live stream it on YouTube simultaneously or publish it there later.


Here's how to create a webinar using Hangouts:


host free webinars for webinars


6. Find smart ways to market your webinar


Promoting your webinar is as important as, if not more than, creating it. After all it is this step which will get you your customers and enable you to pocket the revenue. The success and failure of your webinar depends upon how well you're able to promote it.


This is why you need to find some of the best and smartest ways to reach prospects. You need to rely on a combination of the tried and tested strategies, an amalgamation of social media, email marketing, and the good old advertising.


When it comes to marketing your webinar through social media, you need to get organized. Create a social media content calendar and schedule regular posts so that your audiences are periodically reminded about the upcoming event. If you want to reach the widest possible audience, you should use a combination of various social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and others.


Here's how to schedule a Facebook post:


smart ways to market your webinars for webinars


Become a webinar guru


With the right amount of planning and effort, anyone can be as successful, in igniting their business through webinars, as Clément Delangue, Mariah Coz, or even Amy Porterfield.


Following these few simple steps can elevate your webinar marketing strategy to a whole new level. So go out there and conquer the world!


Guest Author: Bill Achola is a content marketing consultant specializing in content. You can hire him to help you write the right content that can help you generates traffic and revenue back to your business. He has been featured in top publications like Huffpost, Problogger and etc.


The post 6 Ways to Create Killer Webinars That Will Ignite Your Business appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.






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Friday, September 2, 2016

Why Do So Few Marketers Care About Quality Leads?

Stat of the Month


Every day the battle rages on in the marketing trenches between quality and quantity. There are many marketing practitioners who will swear up one side and down the other that better quality leads are what they are looking for. There is no question about this. Better quality leads mean people at companies who are more likely to buy what you are selling.


In fact, 77 percent of marketers surveyed by Ascend2 listed improving the quality of leads as the top goal of their lead generation program. This is up 7 percent from the same survey last year.


This is more than three-quarters of marketers, so you might assume that the battle is over, and the quality warriors won. But there is a second data point in the survey that is worth looking at: Forty-one percent report that they want to increase the quantity of leads generated. They want more leads-not better leads.


lead-generation-goals-2016


Respondents could select more than one answer, so this is not a clear either-or decision. But an awful lot of marketers are saying they just need more leads. And of that group, there are likely many who are only looking for more leads. That means that more leads is their leading goal.


The Leads-for-Leads'-Sake Mentality


Developing a lead generation process should be a joint effort between marketing and sales. This is the easiest way to develop alignment between the two departments. And based on their typical response to the leads generated by marketing-that is, rejection-it is not likely that sales is clamoring for more leads. They want better leads.


The situation is this: Marketing practitioners, or more likely marketing leaders, are demanding more leads. Every business looks to grow from year to year, and yours is likely no exception. Depending on the size of your company, you might be projecting 20 percent, 50 percent, or 100 percent growth in revenue. You can do the math backwards, based on your average conversion rates at each stage, to determine how many leads you need.


There are two ways to look at this, but just like the survey results, they are not mutually exclusive. You can try to get more leads overall, regardless of quality, which could ultimately yield more sales. That assumes that your past conversion rate holds true-and you know what they say about past performance. This is especially true if you change your tactics to get more leads, just so you can say you got more leads.



Increasing Leads by Focusing on Quality


The other way is to improve the quality of your leads. This will actually improve your conversion rate and get you to those higher sales numbers. If you bring in more people who are more likely to become customers, guess what? More of them become customers, thus increasing your conversion rate.


The math is relatively easy, but you can always let your Excel spreadsheet handle the heavy lifting. The only thing that changes is the percentage of responses that become marketing qualified leads. If you can't reasonably increase this conversion rate enough to account for the suggested overall increase, you may also need to increase the number of leads, too.


And remember, you cannot just change the numbers in your spreadsheet without actually changing your marketing activities. To improve your overall lead pool to make sure you are getting better qualified leads, you probably need to add some sort of data analysis or technology to your marketing process. For example, examining your existing customers to develop lookalike models will help you more easily target the right prospects.


So the next time your management team give you a new, ridiculously high number of leads as your goal, before you accept that number, ask a question: What if we bring in better quality leads instead of just more leads? (highlight to tweet) Follow that up with a plan for how you are going to do it.


We might just be able to keep increasing the number of marketers who want better quality leads.






       


Why Do So Few Marketers Care About Quality Leads?

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Forget the Celebs, Reach Out to Hyperlocal Influencers Instead

Want a Kardashian to endorse your brand? You're better off asking local influencers to partner with you. (And your customers will prefer them, too.) Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Forget the Celebs, Reach Out to Hyperlocal Influencers Instead

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5 Step Success Strategy to Prioritize Social Networks for Your Business






prioritize social networks for business


Every marketer and business leader is faced with the challenge of where to prioritize their time and investment. Time is our greatest asset in both business and life. How we spend our time can make or break business and marketing success.


When it comes to digital marketing, social media and branding, it is no different. In my 20 years of business and marketing experience I have never heard a marketer exclaim, “I have so much time, resource & budget I don't know what to do with it.”


Unfortunately, there are far too many “experts” online touting that you must be on every new shiny object and social network. They'll even go so far as to warn you that if you don't start snapping on Snapchat, storytelling on Instagram and delivering live video on Periscope that your business is destined to fail. Let me tell you right now this is 100% false.


Marketing and business leaders must give themselves permission to prioritize. You do not need to be everywhere all the time. You do not need to treat every social network equal nor spend the same amount of time and investment on every social network. You do not need to work 24/7, 365 days of the year to be successful. Release your fear of missing out and start prioritizing your time and investment of money and resource.


The truth is that the more you focus and prioritize, the better your results will be. Stop only playing around with the social networks. Instead, get serious, get focused and you will start seeing real results.



It's not just about what the technology will do for you, but instead, what you can do with the technology. You are in control of your business, your time and your investment in social media, period.Click To Tweet


What matters is where your audience and target customer is online. You must be where they are. You must deliver them value where they are, using methods, language and mediums that will inspire them, connect with them and bring them closer to your brand.


How do you prioritize what social networks you invest in for business success? How do you know where you should engage? How do you determine where your audience is hanging out online so you can build the most meaningful relationship with them as possible? How do you achieve a positive ROI using social media and digital technologies and strategies?


Take a listen to episode 214 of the Social Zoom Factor podcast to learn our 5 Step Success Strategy and Tactics to prioritize what social networks you invest in for your business.


Be sure to subscribe to our entire digital and social media marketing series on iTunesStitcher or SoundCloud!


In this 30 minute podcast you will learn: 



  • 5 Step Strategies and tactics to prioritize what social networks you invest in for business.

  • Why you must get real on your time and budget available to invest in social media

  • What skills you must have to be successful at social media for business

  • How to leverage the data available natively via the different social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and more

  • The difference between a business goal, KPI and objective

  • Tips to set goals, measure results and continuously optimize

  • What to look for when you do a monthly audit and refresh of your online social presence and efforts

  • How to prioritize and select tools for analysis, measurement and audience research

  • Suggested tools for audience research

  • Why it's not about what the technology can do for you, but instead what you can do with the technology


Supporting Resources:










Free webinars: We are also launching a series of webinars and training opportunities to dig even deeper. Sign up here-> You are the Media – Building Your Media Foundation


social_zoom_factorHow to Subscribe to Social Zoom Factor Podcast 











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#SocialSkim: Apple's Social Video App, Facebook's Offers Upgrade, Plus 10 More Stories This Week

Apple grabbed headlines with chatter about its impending social video app. Also: Twitter attracts YouTuber-like influencers, Facebook makes a big update to Offers, and Snapchat works on behavioral targeting. Skim to stay in the know! Read the full article at MarketingProfs

#SocialSkim: Apple's Social Video App, Facebook's Offers Upgrade, Plus 10 More Stories This Week

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