Jump the shark is now a term that is used for anything that is past its prime!  Which brings me to my question-has your website  ”jumped the shark?”  Your website or blog has to serve your clients/readers/visitors.  You need to keep content current, relevant, trustworthy and interesting and if you do need to make changes, they need to make sense!

Lorrie Thomas Ross, our fearless leader, started off with her own consulting business in 2005, under the name of Lorrie Thomas Web Marketing.  As our agency grew and we morphed into what is now Web Marketing Therapy, Lorrie realized that her old site was in need of change!  She did what we have advised many clients to do – updated her old site to be on brand and on purpose!  We optimized her site with a complete overhaul!  Check out the results.

Is it time for you to rethink how you are presenting yourself online?  Has your site or content turned stale or mediocre?  Perhaps it’s time to take a close look to ensure that you are avoiding following in The Fonz footsteps (or shall we say water ski’s) and remain current and interesting and ensure you are serving your target market!

BTW:  I disagree with my friend – I’m still enjoying Glee  and don’t think they have jumped the shark…YET!

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days

YIKES. So what’s the secret formula to keeping your blog active and working for you? KEEP IT SIMPLE!! I know because I struggle with this myself!

Here are some little pearls of wisdom I found in The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Online Marketing (Chapter 5) for some inspiration this week!

• Studies have shown that online content that is shared most often is readable to most elementary school kids. This is about providing instant clarity.
• Someone once said that blog posts should be like a mini-skirt- long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep reader interest.
• Think about how the blog can best educate, enlighten and engage them. Brand, build, and boost your business. Your expertise, ideas, perspective, tips, tricks and stories won’t help anyone if they are  all stashed away in your brain.
• Remember that, with blogging, done is better than perfect.
• Web users are in need of authoritative articles about millions of topics. When readers are educated, they feel empowered. When an organization empowers people, a relationship is build that can launch business.

Now stop over thinking and just get to blogging folks!  Have fun and let loose! Go get em!

I tried for days to come up with something nice and sweet to say to help inspire readers but the warm fuzzy approach never came.  So you get the tough love Marketing RX.  Bottom line, I am SICK AND TIRED of hearing “don’t” and “can’t” in a professional’s vocabulary – especially when it comes to marketing.  Trust me, I know what it’s like to be busy, manage people, oversee projects, pay bills and more but there is one thing I CAN do:

I CAN MAKE TIME FOR WEB MARKETING and SO CAN YOU!
**yes, all CAPS is screaming, don’t take it personally, a little tough love is good for you.**

Web marketing (and marketing overall) is not something that you turn on and off. Web marketing is the act of using certain web applications strategically as a way to brand, build and boost business.  Marketing is an act that you weave into your professional lifestyle because marketing is the life blood of your organization.

When people say “I don’t have time to work out” or “I can’t eat healthy because of ___(enter travel or kids or work or some other projection of responsibility)” all I hear this I hear “I don’t care enough about myself to take care of my health” or “I won’t eat healthy”

When I hear “I don’t have time for web marketing because of ___”, I hear “I don’t care enough about the health of myself/career/organization.”

Think about it.  This blog post is not to make you feel bad, it is to help re-train your brain to grab the reins of your marketing and get on top of this.  Being on top of your marketing sure beats being under it!

The next time you start to insert those wicked “can’t” and “don’t” words, think about professional self-respect.

Admitting that you need help is the first step to marketing recovery, so here are some self-help tips to make time for meaningful web marketing:

Step #1. Get some marketing self-esteem and get over the negatives.  Turn your “can’t” into a “can” and the “don’t” into “I choose to”
(The words “can’t” and “don’t” almost always really mean “I choose not to”.)  Try replacing the word “can’t” with “won’t” and listen to how the choice to do (or not do something) becomes very obvious.

Step #2. Remember that you do not spend time on marketing.  For healthy marketing, you INVEST time to grow your brand and business.  Example: This blog post you are reading may took my “time”, but I do it because it is an investment in my search visibility, credibility as The Marketing Therapist and usability (service to you, passionate professionals who I owe it to to support).

Step #3. Choose to CHOOSE. Choice is the biggest factor in business.  Who we choose to work with, how we choose to invest our time, money and resources all boils down to what is important.  Decide what is important to you professionally, then the “whats” of web marketing (blog, Facebook, Twitter, site optimizations, search optimization, etc) help fall into place.

Step #4. Ask for help.  Last year, I met my match, got engaged, wrote an online marketing book, grew Web Marketing Therapy, traveled to speak at conferences, worked on my business and in my business and taught several university classes.  I never stopped web marketing (or taking care of my heath by taking time off and hitting the gym!).  As my time got spread more and more thinly, I did choose to hire more website managers to help keep my sites up to date, to monitor my Twitter for me when I was traveling, write press releases and more.  Even though I can do this work myself, I realized that all the items above were a higher priority, so when I needed a hand, I hired help (and it was worth every cent).  Often, the accountability of having pros on your extended marketing team can motivate more meaningful work.  Do what you do best, but don’t forget to pay others to do the rest.

Making time for marketing that matters is something to think about.  You don’t have to break the bank to do this.  I give a lot of tips in my book on how to do this, there are a ton of free resources on Web Marketing Therapy (see the Shop page – hint, all the eBooks and Online tutorials are free!!)

You can weave web marketing into your lifestyle.  Think about it like starting a new gym membership – you aren’t going to become a bodybuilder, but you can start going a few times a week and build up as you choose to.  Choose your personal and professional help.

…and remember, we are here to help

Your co-founder is thinking in an old school way about his organization, the community around it and the tech. I like your Director of Sales as a person but she’s ALSO an old school marketing-type and doesn’t get social or even your core market to be honest. The organization could be run lean and mean and function like a hub-n-spoke or even a full-on holistic community that curates and distributes WHERE THE CUSTOMER locates. Instead, I can hear in your Director of Sales’ approach the traditional marketing methodology of driving the cattle to one location: the corporate/brand hub. That’s NOT social marketing and it’s not how current (and definitely not future) audiences grow.

If you put this book/site in front of your co-founder and Director of Sales, would they get it: http://www.artofimmersion.com/. I doubt they would. A vital part of Immersion is the following:

“In the months and years ahead, professional storytellers of every persuasion—people in movies, in television, in video games, and in marketing—will need to function in a world in which distinctions that were clear throughout the past century are becoming increasingly blurred: 

The Art of Immersion shows how this is happening and why, and what it means for us all. “ (http://www.artofimmersion.com/)

Organizations that see their hub as THE SPOT are doomed. That’s the patriarchy all over again. Your brand needs true social business sensibility, true customer-centric tech approaches typified by (a) discovery of where AND what the customer is/does (b) platforms that distribute content where and when it is being discussed (real-time content marketing) and (c) agreements with stakeholders that truly match their gifts with their community’s direction. 

At the moment, your Director of Sales is commissioned by your co-founder to set up the classic hierarchy. As they say in Greece, “Papapapapa!” which translates “Yikes, here we go again!” The best thing your co-founder can do now is fire himself and his Director of Sales asap from management and appoint a much tighter team of specialists to implement forward-thinking social tech and content-marketing approaches. THEN he can just be an owner and retire on the beach. Otherwise, I predict your brand will go the way of so many organizations that don’t have customer-centric sensibilities. It is a shame really because there’s so much potential in what could happen with an entity like your brand…in terms of really being part of the change this world needs. Collective storytelling IS the present reality of how audiences interact with content. Hierarchies of content distribution must learn to sit in a circle.

Sincerely,

HAL2012
Your friendly neighborhood Super-Intelligent machine

RESOURCES ON MONETIZATION:

The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing shows readers how to manage markets strategically—rather than simply calculate pricing based on product and profit—in order to improve their competitiveness and the profitability of their offers:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0136106811/

Free by Chris Anderson: The book has a solid grasp on how any business that has any Internet-related sales or support must adapt. The author’s argument about how costs are moving to zero for the “bits” world is dead-on.
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp/B00342VEP6/

Building a Sales-Marketing Machine:
http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSkok/building-a-sales-marketing-machine

Going Freemium via MailChimp:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/going-freemium-one-year-later/

Free To Paid Tips via TechCrunch: The big question is, “how do you transition your free customer base to a paid customer base, without upsetting/losing all of them?“
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/13/free-to-paid-tips/

Secrets of Freemium Pricing:
http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/37737/Secrets-Of-Freemium-Pricing-Make-The-Cheapskates-Pay.aspx

StartUp Pricing Study MIT:
http://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/blog/mitmadsmitedu/startup-pricing-study-mit-sloan

Three Ways to Build an Online Media Business to 50m in Revenue:
http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/three-ways-to-build-an-online-media-business-to-50m-in-revenue/

Evernote CEO Phil Libin on Freemium stats: What Works!
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/video-evernote-ceo-phil-libin-shares-revenue-stats-and-how-to-make-freemium-work/

From the CEOs of their most successful ‘freemium’ startups:
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2010/03/emergence_capit.php

Pricing page design:
http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/design/pricing-page-trends/

Pricing Page Designs 2: A variety of highly-creative, beautiful, unique, and most importantly inspirational designs which are following the same trend of creative pricing presentation.
http://www.instantshift.com/2009/10/06/77-inspirational-example-of-pricing-page-designs/

No related posts.

You may have seen these programs that promise to get you tons and tons of new followers in Twitter for a small fee. With a little research, you can easily find a program that promises to find you up to 20,000-30,000 followers. Some of you may have used these programs before. Perhaps some of you were pleased with the results if your goal was to simply have tons of new follows.

So forgive me for this “tough love” Web Marketing advice, but if your goals are to build influence and to generate new leads for your blog or your businesses, you are better off cultivating your own following.

When you do this, you engage with your followers (who are real people). You tend to listen more to them and learn from them, and they learn from you. This can result in increased traffic to your site, more leads for your business, etc.

Here are some practical tips that will take you just a few minutes a day (or week):

1) Decide on your goals to help you decide who you need to follow. This step will save you tons of time in the long run. What are your intentions on Twitter? Connect with journalists and other bloggers? Make friends? Find a job? Find new customers?  Don’t waste your time following everyone and anyone in Twitter- really.   They will think you are a spammer and trying to follow everyone drains your energy.

2) Research your competition or other individuals similar to you and see what they are doing. We frequently learn a great deal by watching what other people are doing. You will instantly recognize if someone is successfully building relationships on Twitter: are they engaging with other people? Do people seem to follow them back? Is their content something that you would want to read? Do this a few times a month (or every other month) to stay on top of current trends and best practices.

3) Find a”Guru”, someone you admire in Twitter- with a lot of influence. Preferably someone in your industry (or at least a similar industry).  How do you find them?  Easy- what blogs do you read?  Who is a big mover and shaker in your field?  There are usually links to their Twitter account from their site (if all else fails Google them!).

Figure out what makes them so influential and what they are doing right. What kinds of updates are they making?   Depending on who it is and how you ask them, they may be happy to share some of their tips and pointers with you. You never know!

4) Follow people who are similar to your “Guru”. The people at Twitter want you to succeed so have developed some awesome features that make it easier for you to find relevant people to follow:

• Upon following someone, you will often see an area on the right side of the page that says “Since you followed (insert name here), you might also want to follow”….with a list of people similar to the person you just followed! So check them out- click on “view all” for a goldmine of new Tweeps!

5) Let Twitter Guide you. This is another reason to be selective about who you follow. Every time you follow someone in Twitter, you give them information about who you tend to connect with. Do these steps for a few minutes a day and watch your following grow (with real people).

• Go to your homepage and look for the “Who to follow” section on the right side. Twitter makes customized suggestions of people to follow based on who you already follow.
• You can also click on the “Who To Follow” tab on the top of the page and you will see a list Twitter accounts suggested for you based on who you follow.
• Also in the “Who To Follow” tab: click on “Browse by interests” and select your interest.  You can also look at the people following them; you will probably find some great “tweeps” to connect with.

7) Follow Lists and check them regularly. Whew! All of these people Twitter is simply overwhelming! Wish there was a list or something we can use! Fortunately Twitter has Twitter Lists. Using the “Lists” feature is a great way to find relevant people to follow and engage with.  You can also find lots of great people to follow on Listorious.

You can create your own list (like “Favorite Bloggers”, or “Food Journalists”) or you can follow other people’s list (sometimes a preferable option since they have already done the work for you!). Click on these lists on a regular basis to see current updates from the people on the list; this is a great way to build conversations and find new leads!

Follow the lists of Top Influencers.  Go to your “Guru’s” profile and follow their lists that appeal most to you. Again, you will probably find a “goldmine” of potential leads and great people to connect with. If your “Guru” does not have any lists, find another person in your field of interest and follow their lists!

9) Repeat Often. This is not a one time deal. The more often you repeat this process the more influence you will build. Consistency is key. Daily, Weekly, Twice a week, monthly. It is up to you.

10) Play nice and follow the rules. Don’t spam or advertise to your followers.  Instead, ask questions to generate a conversation even if it is a general or trending topic. Read the updates of people you are following and answer their questions, RT them, or just comment on their Tweet.

11) Practice makes perfect. Try not to give up or get discouraged if you do not see immediate results. Just like Rome wasn’t built in one day, your Twitter influence takes time to build too; keep going, focus on contributing to a conversation and not dominating it.  Do a little bit at a time!  Don’t try to follow everyone all at once (again- they will think you are a spammer).

Use these guidelines to develop your personal approach on Twitter. If you follow these tips consistently and contribute quality content you will probably go far!