Internet marketing provides a way for companies to reach markets. It lets entrepreneurs build small businesses even from home. It’s a valuable opportunity that generates billions of dollars for people who use it. And it’s a marketplace filled with hype, potholes and inflated claims. There’s a lot wrong with the way that commerce is done online. Here are 31 of its biggest problems.

1. It’s a Battle of SEO Against Content

Content is supposed to be king but any glance at Google’s search results shows that the kings of the SERPs aren’t the best articles on the best sites but the sites with the best SEO practitioners. Often that means pages filled with carefully selected keywords but short of solid content. Instead of focusing on digging up great stories, doing the research and adding real value, Internet publishers tend to find that much of their time is taken up by link-building, keyword-targeting and article syndication.

2. Content Has to Be Constantly Updated

It’s not just Google’s algorithm’s that determine the nature of Internet publishing. It’s also the priority decisions the company takes. When sites that update frequently (however poor the content) are weighted above sites that update occasionally (even if they produce better content), Internet marketers are under pressure to keep performing. Instead of being free to work at their own pace, they have Google as a whipcracking boss.

3. The Web Changes All the Time

And just when you think you’ve finally cracked it, when you have a routine that works and a business that brings in cash, Google goes and changes the algorithm, sending you to the bottom of the SERPs and crashing your business plan. It happened to WiseGeek.

4. It’s Not Free

Although anyone can set themselves up as an Internet entrepreneur, it’s not something that anyone can do without any money. Domain registration is only a few bucks but a good domain costs a lot more. Hosting costs a few dollars but reliable hosting that keeps your site up, fast and gives it space to grow, costs more too. And then there are the expenses involved in designing and building the site, marketing it and creating content. Getting started with Internet marketing can be free but building an Internet marketing business will cost money — like any business.

5. The Numbers Are Complex

When you’re counting the money out, you need to be able to predict the money coming in. That’s not easy to do. You have to figure out clickthrough rates, CPMs, eCPMs, views, unique views, impressions and users. You need to understand the effect that half a percentage decrease in a clickthrough rate can have on eCPM, and which impression sources are more important than others. The number-crunching is complex stuff, less interesting than producing content — and it has to be done.

6. Adwords Has a Monopoly

There are lots of places where a website can advertise online but the only service that really matters is AdWords. With about a million sites on Google’s content network and a total dominance in paid search results, online advertisers have to figure out how tweak their ads, track their stats and play with their keywords. It’s painful, difficult and surprisingly expensive. And sadly, it’s also necessary.

7. AdSense’s Limited Control

Just as AdWords dominates advertising inventory so AdSense is the best way to earn from advertising on a site. And Google wields the kind of tight control over it that would embarrass even Apple. Publishers have limited control over the ads they show, how they appear and how much they earn from them. Once you’ve chosen AdSense, you’re stuck with whatever amounts Google decides to pay you — minus the company’s own 32 percent commission.

8. Amazon Has a Miserable “Associates Program”

Choose to skip Google’s pay-per-click program and opt for affiliate commissions instead (or in addition) and you’ll find that Amazon sets the standard. And those standards are low. Amazon’s rates start at just 4 percent and rarely reach the 15 percent the company advertises. To make more money with Amazon’s Associates Program than an “associate” at Walmart, you’ll need plenty of traffic and a site focused on products.

9. There Are Too Many Big Affiliate Networks and They’re Too Hard to Work With

Amazon may be the most obvious place to look when you’re selling affiliate products but it’s not the only place. The Web has dozens of affiliate networks offering a range of different items and available to different kinds of publishers. Just choosing the right affiliate site will be a chore (although directories can be helpful, once you’ve decided which directory to use) and you’ll still have to choose the right products. That means assessing promotions, payment thresholds, stats and a whole host of other factors that can have a strong influence on your revenues. If you’re not using Amazon and you want something more physical than Clickbank, affiliate selling can get hard.

10. The FTC Makes You Tell Everyone You’re an Affiliate

The guidelines provided by the Federal Trade Commission now require marketers to tell readers when they have a commercial relationship with a company they’re promoting. In principle, it’s not a bad idea. In practice, it means that every time you tell your blog readers about a book you enjoyed or a store you like, and include an affiliate link, you have to spill the beans, even when you’re not doing it for the money. It’s not a huge deal but it can affect the relationship you have with your readers.

11. Can-Spam Laws Can Emails, Not Spam

The Can-Spam Act of 2003 should have made the junk folder in your email program obsolete. It hasn’t though, has it? Instead, it’s made you include an unsubscribe link in your email marketing, tell readers where they signed up, jump through hoops to use some email programs, pay attention to your headers and from address, and cost you readers. Spammers, despite the odd arrest, have barely noticed the difference.

12. Privacy Policies Are Meaningless

Just about every site has a privacy policy, if only because Google is believed to penalize sites that don’t have them. The FTC does actually have a clear list of guidelines for privacy policies but because the pages tend to be written by lawyers rather than publishers, readers tend to avoid them. That makes them a chore to create rather than a clear expression of a site’s relationship with its readers — and a pain to produce.

13. Content Is Too Easily Stolen

Copyright rules prohibit content from being republished without the creator’s permission. And yet there’s still a general belief that what’s on the Web is fair game (sometimes with serious consequences.) Even publishers who understand copyright rules though get around them. Freelance sites are filled with requests for article spinners and rewriters who can do just enough to avoid accusations of plagiarism while not costing enough to produce new content.

14. Long Form Sales Letters Are Obnoxious

Sales letters have been around for almost as long as the mail service has been pushing envelopes through mailboxes. In print form, they were narrative, readable and even appealing. Move them on to the Web and they’ve become loud, highlighted and painful to look at. They’ve also become unavoidable for selling just about any digital product.

15. You Have to Build Landing Pages

That’s even true when you’re reselling digital products. Whether you actually need a landing page to collect email addresses is debatable. But when you’re buying traffic for the chance of selling products, the argument for sending that traffic to a page that allows you to hit them again in the future is hard to beat. You might not like sales letters, but if you’re making affiliate sales, you’re probably going to have to build some version of them.

16. False Scarcity is Truly Insulting

One of the characteristics that makes sales letters so obnoxious is the use of false scarcity. Readers are told that a product will only be available for a limited time or in a limited run, even though there’s no reason that they couldn’t keep selling it forever. It’s a strategy that’s intended to prompt leads to buy now instead of putting off a purchase that they might never come back to. And often, we know it’s false — especially when we hit F5 and see the countdown on the sales page starting again.

17. The Claims Are Outrageous

No one ever reads an information product sold online for the pleasure of the read. They do it for the results. So marketers inflate the results by talking about how their strategies have earned them millions of dollars.  Nobody believes that someone who has made that much money (usually by following a strategy wheedled reluctantly out of someone in a bar) is going to be selling information products online. Nor do they expect to make that amount of money. They’d just like to know how much they can reasonably expect to make in their first year and when they can quit the day job. That’s a lot less hype-y but a lot more honest.

18. Confusing Cancel Pop-Ups

Worse even than being hurried into making a buying decision is being unable to get away from making that decision. Too many sales letter don’t just use obnoxious highlights, false scarcity and outrageous claims they also require you to click a button when you try to surf away. It might be the cancel button or the other one — it’s never really clear — but it’s always hugely irritating and about as welcome as a sales assistant grabbing your arm as you leave the store. And about as effective.

19. Testimonials are Incredible and Hard to Gather

Personal recommendations are an essential element in a sales pitch. But collecting them presents a Catch-22: you can’t gather testimonials until you’ve made sales but you can’t makes sales until you have testimonials. It’s no surprise then that so many marketers are believed to cut corners by making them up. It’s impossible to know how many actually do but the belief is widespread enough for readers to treat testimonials with caution — however important they are.

20. There Are Too Many Bad Products

One result of the difficulty of trusting testimonials is that it’s impossible for a buyer to know whether a product is good until after they’ve bought it. Sellers have to rely on cast-iron return guarantees, and affiliates have to look at return rates as a way of assessing quality. Neither of those though prevents new products from reaching the market that are just plain poor. Print publishing has several layers of filters to increase the chances that a book will recoup the investment made in it. The relatively lower costs involved in creating digital products mean that anyone can get their information product out, however poor it might be.

21. Good Products Are Given Away

And when a good product does come out, marketers sometimes give it away for nothing. The idea is to build a up a list of email addresses that’s more valuable than the product itself. That may be good for the publisher in the long run but it also makes it harder for everyone else to sell useful information. Once users have grown used to getting books for free, it’s hard to persuade them to buy.

22. Clickbank’s Gravity Score is Deceptive

Digital product store Clickbank uses its own “gravity” score to indicate the success rates of the products it offers. But those scores reveal less than they appear. They only count the number of affiliates who have made sales, not the number of sales they’ve made. The result is that new affiliates rush to follow other sellers who might have made only one sale, leaving items with better conversion rates on the shelf.

23. YouTube Dominates Online Video

As video marketing starts to take over from the long form sales letter as the dominant form of online pitching, Internet business builders are finding that they’re running up against the power and popularity of YouTube. Seven hundred billion playbacks in 2010 represents a great opportunity — until you realize that your video will be competing with the 35 hours of video uploaded every minute.

24. Viral Memes Promise Much, Deliver Little Without Lots of Work

One apparently easy way to get views to a video pitch is to make an ad that goes viral. Get that right and the viewers do the marketing for you. But it’s much harder to get right than it looks. Not only does the content have to be viral but the marketing has to be persistent until the ad picks up enough critical mass to generate its own steam. The concept of viral marketing is as much powered by hype as the ads it tries to promote.

25. It’s Not As Passive As It Looks

The big dream of most Internet marketers is to create a site, set up the traffic streams then relax as users come in, convert and leave money behind. Usually, it doesn’t quite work like that. Produce a product and most of the revenue will come in during the launch. Income will then start to fall until you update at the end of a year. Online marketing is more cyclical than steady and more continually active than passive.

26. Twitter Doesn’t Deliver Instant Revenue

For all the hype about Twitter’s marketing power, it’s not really a sales channel. There are a few services that allow important influencers to earn from advertising, and plenty of accounts that broadcast coupon codes but the real value of Twitter is in customer service and relationship building. Those things take time and deliver benefits that are hard to measure.

27. Gurus Are Full of It

GuruDaq lists 60 “gurus” in its Internet marketing index, and that’s just a partial list of the people who claim that they’ve cracked the secret to online marketing. There’s plenty more, offering expertise on everything from Facebook promotions to Ebay selling. Some, no doubt, have plenty of valuable experience to provide. Others, equally doubtless, have nothing more valuable to say beyond “offer a good product, promote it well and take the highest price.” All are primarily interested in selling their information.

28. You Still Have to Pay Taxes

Buy a product from Amazon and because the company has no retail stores, it doesn’t have to charge sales tax. That tax-free atmosphere can lead small business owners, the type who make a few bucks from affiliate sales and site ads, to feel that they don’t have to declare their taxes either. They do. Just because you’re selling everywhere, all the time, in virtual space, doesn’t mean your earnings are tax-free.

29. It Takes Time

Despite all of the get-rich-quick information products sold on the Web, Internet marketing takes time. It takes time to create products. It takes time to create content. It takes time to build an audience and an email list. And it takes time build a relationship with that list that converts into sales. And there are no shortcuts. Start an online business and you can’t really expect to give up your day job for at least a year.

30. It Takes Work

That inability to give up your day job is a shame because creating an Internet business also takes time. Content sites will need to upload at least three times a week in addition to marketing the site, tweaking ads and negotiating with advertisers. Products have to be planned and created. Starting an Internet business can feel like having two jobs at the same time.

31. It’s Still Too Tempting

Despite all these problems though, despite the cost, the time, the difficulty and the endless hype, Internet marketing still feels too much like an open opportunity — a chance to be your own boss without the risks involved in creating a bricks and mortar business — to ignore it. That may be the biggest downside.

Learn more about the hype and myths of Internet marketing — and how to beat them — in our new book Internet Marketing Hype: 40 Online Money Making Myths That Kill Success (and How to Beat Them).

Photography: cortto

At the beginning of the year, three months before the iPad’s official announcement, the Wall Street Journal published details about Apple’s new product. The newspaper was right about the launch date, right about the size, right about the models, and wrong about the reported $1,000 price point. For a company as secretive as Apple — a company that is reported to instruct employees to cover prototypes with a black cloak when someone walks into the room and turn on a red light to alert others when they’re working on something top secret — the amount of information that the newspaper had managed to acquire was impressive, even if it didn’t all turn out to be completely accurate. According to John Martellaro, Apple’s former Senior Marketing Manager, it was also a planned corporate leak, a careful and deliberate use of rumor to prime the market.

Writing on MacObserver, Martellaro described how Apple uses rumors for one of four reasons: to apply pressure to a foot-dragging partner; to confuse the competition; to generate interest for one of its media events; or  to float an idea (in this case, the $1,000 price point.) A rumor allows the company to do all of these things from a distance while denying responsibility for the results or implying any official verification of the news being leaked.

That was all interesting stuff, but perhaps the most interesting aspect of Martellaro’s disclosure was that this leaking fell to him. For Apple, seeding rumors is an essential part of marketing.

So what can smaller businesses learn from Apple’s ability to control both the information it possesses and the details it chooses to release to the rumor mill?

Be as Interesting as Apple

The most important lesson is probably to be as big and interesting as Apple. Reporters are happy to be fed information by anonymous Apple insiders because they know that readers are fascinated by the company and by its products. It’s an interest so strong that it’s even allowed one fanboy to turn  his back on a medical career and spend the last ten years doing nothing but publishing Mac rumors. It’s hard to see a physician giving up his medical bills to live on the income generated by a site peddling Microsoft rumors.

Smaller firms with lower profiles and less interest from the public will have to work a little harder than Apple then, but the right rumors themselves can do that too. Corporate rumors are interesting when the information they contain sounds as though it might impact the lives of the people doing the listening, and make them much more fun. People want to know about Apple because the company’s products are disruptive and desirable. Rumors about products from a small firm then have to be equally interesting — at least to some people.

You might not be calling reporters from the Wall Street Journal, but the same principles apply to trade reporters, local journalists and even bloggers desperate for new content. Where there’s already some interest in your company and what it does, rumors can heighten that interest — and the more exciting those rumors, the greater that interest will rise.

Fortunately, those rumors don’t have to be entirely true — that’s why they’re rumors not releases. But they do have to be mostly true. Apple paid for the ability to test a $1,000 price point in the Wall Street Journal by telling the newspaper’s reporters some true facts about the product’s specifications. A company that wanted to spread rumors about its new product then would need an air of secrecy to show that the information was valuable; some true information to ensure that the reporters didn’t get burned by publishing nonsense; and the real information it wanted released surreptitiously.

No Email

So much for the message. The release process is no less tricky. Martellaro has described how he would be approached by a “senior company executive” who would ask him to call a “trusted person” at a major media outlet. During the conversation, he would “idly mention” the information that Apple wanted to put out. Email was forbidden so that there would be no paper trail and both sides could claim that any inaccurate information was the result of a misunderstanding.

Smaller entrepreneurs are unlikely to know trusted people at major media outlets but they might know the main writers in their field, and meet them at conferences and launches. Or they could make contact with them on Twitter. Create an anonymous timeline with a bio describing yourself as an employee, start chatting with someone with the right connections and let slip a little detail that you hope will spread virally. While that would leave something of a paper trail, at least until you deleted the post, it would also be a lot easier than trying to call someone you didn’t know. As long as some of those rumors turn out to be true you’ll build up enough respect and trust for others to pay attention to you.

You could seed the same information more anonymously through posts on industry forums, or even in comments at the bottom of important blog posts. That would allow you to skip past the reporters who act as the media’s gatekeepers, and reach audiences directly. While open places are more likely to be filled with misinformation, predictions that turn out to be true will stand out, and commenters who consistently deliver useful information will be watched for when they post again — even when some of that information turns out to be more useful to the company than to the audience.

For most businesses, it’s hard enough to drum up media interest using traditional press releases. Rumors are even harder to use because they depend on at least some interest in the company already being present. They also deal with an element of untruth, promising reporters and audiences unreliable information in return for being among the first to know about it. Used carefully though, they can have the effect of wrongfooting competitors, preparing the market — and discovering that $1,000 is too much to charge for a tablet computer.

The Old Spice ads, starring former NFL wide receiver Isaiah Mustafa as The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, might just have been the most popular viral ad campaign ever created. The original ad has picked up over 15 million views on YouTube, the follow-up just over 11 million, and according to Visible Measures, a firm that tracks the popularity of online video, the real-time responses generated almost 6 million views in 24 hours, beating even President Obama’s victory speech, President Bush’s shoe-dodging, and Susan Boyle’s singing. The staff at ad agency Wieden + Kennedy have set a standard and a model that other social media marketers — large and small — will try to follow. Most will come  up short, but the ads contain a number of key ingredients that can be incorporated into even the most budget-conscious of viral ads.

That might not be apparent in the original ad which began with Isaiah standing in a bathroom, showed him on a boat and ended with him sitting on a horse, all apparently in one take. In an interview, Craig Allen and Eric Kallman of Wieden + Kennedy, explain how that ad took three days to shoot. The bathroom was placed on a set and hoisted away by a crane, and a specially-constructed dolly moved Isaiah invisibly from the ship onto the horse as he talked to the camera. CGI was only used to turn a shell into diamonds and the diamonds into a bottle of Old Spice.

Seven Minutes for Every Video

The real-time responses too looked simple but a photograph of the studio on ReadWriteWeb shows just how complex the production was. There’s a team of staff, banks of monitors (apparently showing Twitter), a teleprompter and a host of professional gear beyond the budgets of most one-man businesses. Two social media experts were tracking responses, and a technical expert had built a workflow that identified the best questions, passed them onto the copywriters and allowed the film to be edited and uploaded quickly. The 180-odd videos that the team produced took an average of about seven minutes each to create, something that could only have been done with a super-efficient and well-prepared team.

Wieden + Kennedy haven’t spoken about the workflow they created, but that’s something that could have been done without too much expertise. Dashboards like Hootsuite allow multiple users to manage one Twitter account, broadcast messages across social media platforms and monitor mentions. Old Spice’s Twitter timeline consists mostly of short sentences and links to YouTube, rather than interactions with other twitterers, and tracking the comments on YouTube and Facebook could even have been done with manual refreshes rather than an API.

What was most impressive about the response videos though was the speed and number of films that the team created, and the variety of social media sites — from Reddit to 4Chan — that they interacted with. Again, that wouldn’t have been something that required great technical skills but it did require a breadth of social media knowledge that few people possess.

And that knowledge was deep as well as wide. Talking to ReadWriteWeb, Iain Tait, Global Interactive Creative Director at Wieden, explained how his team chose the messages they responded to and what they did with them:

We’re looking at who’s written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web…in real time.

So a number of factors were going being considered as the replies came in, including not just how the scriptwriters might answer the questions but the “influence” of the commenter, something that would have been measured by the number of followers they have, the number of messages they receive or the size of their YouTube audience. It explains why so many of the videos were addressed to celebrities with large followings like Demi Moore and Alyssa Milano, whose interactions alerted other people on the Web to the ads and helped to spread the message.

Getting the Content Right

The technical side then is simple enough to replicate. A smaller budget — or no budget at all — might mean fewer videos shot in a day, a longer turnaround, less engagement with smaller social media sites, and clips that are less slick than Old Spice’s but the mechanics of tracking responses and choosing replies to questioners with the greatest influence is straightforward enough. To make your own ads, you wouldn’t need more than the following equipment:

• 1 Charming actor
• 1 Witty scriptwriter
• 1 Efficient director
• 1 Social media expert
• 1 Video camera and lighting equipment
• 1 Editing suite
• 3 Computers (one each for video editing/uploading, social media monitoring, and scriptwriting)
• 1 Hootsuite (or Brizzly) account
• 1 Tabbed browser open to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and any other social media site you intend to engage.

Much harder to get right is the replies themselves. Although they’re selling a man’s product, the ads are aimed at both men and women. Proctor and Gamble, the makers of Old Spice, knew their market and they knew that while men use Old Spice, it’s women who buy it for them. Throughout the ads Isaiah Mustafa refers to products that smell like lavender and daffodils as the competition, communicating to men that Old Spice is a product for them, while telling women that if they buy Old Spice, their boyfriends would at least smell like the star of the ads even if they can’t look like him.

To engage with that audience though, they needed to get the character right, and even Wieden + Kennedy had got that one wrong in the past. Other Old Spice ads, starring Terry Crews, went heavy on an attempt to include power in the brand but lighter on the irony. They were creative enough to win some popularity but didn’t do as well as Isaiah Mustafa’s self-awareness and self-parody.

But it wasn’t just that these Old Spice ads were absurdly funny, they also fitted the product’s notion of manliness, sophistication and confidence. They took an essential part of the brand and satirized it, allowing the audience to feel clever enough to see beyond the marketing message while still absorbing that message.

To make your own Old Spice ads then, you’ll need first to create an ad with a character that users show they like — and you might need to create more than one ad before you hit on the right one. You’ll need to set up monitoring systems across social media sites so that you can gather responses and choose the responders with the most influence. You’ll need to have a studio — however makeshift — ready to film the replies, edit them and  upload them. And most importantly, you’ll need to have a really witty scriptwriter who can mock your product without damaging the brand.

If you can get all those together, then you too can make your own Old Spice ads.

Photography: Markus Merz

Personal branding isn’t new. It’s been around the since the days of P.T. Barnum, since Buffalo Bill turned himself into a one-man sideshow, since Walt Disney decided to name the studio after himself, and it’s been a staple part of marketing Hollywood stars for as long as there have been movies. The idea that personal branding can be applied to anyone, that it’s possible — and essential — for even a corporate drone to create a self-image and market it, is new. That idea has only been around for as long as social media has made it possible for individuals to create personal profiles on websites and social media platforms, and put them in front of anyone they can bring to see them. Dozens of writers now have written books explaining how a personal brand can help to win jobs and build careers, as well as sell products and help entrepreneurs. But while the techniques and strategies of turning a life into a brand are clear, it’s much harder to know where to place the boundaries. What are the limits of personal branding, and how do you know when you’ve crossed them?

To some extent, the answer is personal. Different individuals will have different sensitivities to sharing aspects of their personal lives. Evan Williams and Biz Stone, both founders of Twitter, are happy to post occasional tweets that mention their wives (and in Williams’ case, his child too) but are miserly when it comes to details about the work that they’re doing for Twitter. Actor and technology geek Stephen Fry, on the other hand, has averaged just over eight tweets a day in the two years he’s been on Twitter and talks about his TV appearances, his charity work, his scriptwriting, speeches and product reviews. He regularly replies to tweets sent to him and comes across as open and direct, all of which have become important aspects of how the public sees him. And yet in none of his tweets does he ever mention his life with his partner, an agreement the couple made when he began using the site.

No Family and No Friends

Your own personal comfort level then will be one important guide to where you place the boundaries. There’s nothing wrong with leaving your family out of your personal branding — and certainly many people do — but there is a price to pay for that gap. Everyone has some form of family life so if it’s missing from a Twitter stream or not included in a professional Facebook page, the proximity to the reader is affected. The reader will know you’re not being fully open, and when someone has information he’s not prepared to share, he’s not just protecting the privacy of the people he loves. He’s also declaring the nature of his relationship to the reader.

He’s not as close to the reader as the reader might like to think.

The same is true of friends. Facebook pages, tweets and LinkedIn profiles will contain plenty of references to colleagues, partners and associates. But it’s less usual to find public information that reveals the relationship between two pals, and tries to use it for branding.

That’s a much more solid limit and one that’s particularly revealing about the factors that go into personal branding.

Colleagues bring something to the power of your personal brand. When you mention that a well-known figure in your field is a friend of yours, you win some credit by association. It’s why people name-drop, and it can be an important part of personal branding. Marketers, in particular, like to build their own reputations by attaching them to the reputations of others. It’s also a strategy though that fulfills the need to show that you’re a well-rounded, normal and popular individual with an active social life.

Just as people know you have family, so they’ll assume that you have friends — and they’ll become suspicious, or at least distant, if they’re not mentioned.

Talk about a friend who works in a completely different field however, and while you will come across as human and personable, you do nothing for your reputation as a professional.

It’s not possible then to place a limit on the mention of family without paying some sort of price in personal branding power. But it is possible to swap friends for colleagues, and keep your social life private.

Limiting Your Professional Life

There should be limits too within your own professional life. Personal branding, whether you do it through a website, a social media platform, or both, is essentially an advertising tool. It’s not meant to show everything you’ve ever done — including those projects that didn’t work out, the clients who fired you and the companies that made up for the loss of your intern work by hiring a coffee machine. It’s meant only to show what you can do. That means that while you talk up your successes and most significant projects, the work that failed or was insignificant can be swept under the carpet. It’s not something you want to hide or deny. But if it’s not worth mentioning, don’t mention it.

Personal branding then comes with its own paradox. It’s easy to construct and simple to maintain. It’s meant to show not just what you’ve done — which has always been the role of a resume — but what you can do and, more importantly, who you are. It’s supposed to be honest and open and comprehensive too. And yet, it’s also clearly a marketing piece, a kind of multi-platform brochure that can manage both advertising and distribution. Readers expect it to show every aspect of your life, both professional and personal, while still understanding that you’re only being this open with them because they believe you might have a position or a job that you’d like.

It is possible to place limits on your personal brand. It’s also acceptable and understandable. But the final impression should still be that you’re capable, reliable and likeable. Get that right and there are no limits on what your personal brand can do for you.

Image: blip .

It would be great if a product’s success was all about the idea. Come up with the right concept and it doesn’t matter what the product looks like as long as it does the job. But the opposite is usually true. A product that looks appealing can often sell more than one that does the job better. An apple will squish a hunger flatter than a candy bar will, for example, but it’s the Hersheys that are next to the supermarket cash desks, not the fruit stands. A candy designer knows how to put temptation on the packet; an apple grower, not so much. If look-and-feel are so important for the success of a product then, every entrepreneur with a smart idea needs to know at least a little about creating products that don’t just work well but which look attractive too.

That starts with understanding constraints. Video game developer Dino Dini has identified two kinds of constraints that dictate a product’s design: non-negotiable constraints are the product’s essential functions – a dating site, for example, has to be able to hold data, display profiles and allow members to communicate;  negotiable constraints are the optional extras around which the designer can get creative. The site’s colors, for example, the way that profiles are displayed and even the decision to include video chat or instant messaging are all negotiable constraints. The site has to allow members to get in touch but how they do it and what they’re looking at while they do it are negotiable.

Get the non-negotiable constraints wrong and the product won’t work. Get the negotiable constraints wrong and the product won’t sell.

The first stage of thinking about a product’s design then is to separate the functions from the extras, then let the designer figure out how to make those extras stand out.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

Simplicity is usually important too. One of the most popular design approaches is summed up by the acronym KISS: “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” The phrase is said to originate from Kelly Johnson, lead engineer on the plane design team Lockheed Skunk Works, for whom it meant “Keep It Simple And Stupid.” He intended the jets he built to be simple enough for an engineer with just a handful of tools to repair. Today though, the approach has a much simpler requirement: designs have to be basic enough for people to use without getting confused and turning away.

That’s easier agreed than done. Products tend to start out with one simple idea. As competition heats up, more features are added so that a page that used to contain just a search box, ends up with links to images, maps, news, iGoogle and more. And an email option that allows users to receive and send messages becomes a place where everyone can suddenly see who each other is emailing.

That isn’t to say that growth is a bad design concept. But growth that gets in the way of the non-negotiables, making them harder to use, is always a bad thing. It’s important to identify what your product needs to do at the start of the design process but it’s vital not to forget those features as the design and the product develop.

The first steps are particularly important. The home page of a website, for example, can lead to a range of different actions. Visitors can be asked to sign up, invited to search, tempted to download and offered a video to play to name just four. When a user reaches a site then, he’s got no idea what he’s going to have to do next. Smart design makes that understanding simple so that the user can find his way to the site’s most important goal quickly. Often, that means hiding all of the alternative options or making the most vital one stand out more prominently with a large button or central positioning. Google, for example, might now have a much more cluttered home page than it once had, but the main option is still offered first and it’s placed front and center. The home page of hosting company GoDaddy is much harder to navigate. Should users search for a domain name, buy a cheap one, or click on any of the dozens of other links on the page? A product might have more than one non-negotiable function but if users can’t reach the most important one immediately, they’ll go elsewhere.

Build Personas

Understanding what it will take to move a user to reach that goal though means understanding the user. That’s a vital part of design that’s often overlooked. Marketers like to focus their efforts on demographics, but too often developers will forget about the sort of person who’s actually going to be clicking the buttons as they focus on the shape of the buttons themselves. Addressing Bar Camp in London in 2008, Amanda Jahn, Yahoo! Answer’s Lead UX Designer, talked about using data from user testing, customer service emails, search logs, blogs and suggestion boards to create personas that include their likes, dislike, background and behavior. Some of those “personas,” she said, are going to be more important to the success of the product than others so designers need to make sure that their needs are met first. It’s not enough, it seems, to make things simple; you also have to make things simple for a particular group of users.

Design is usually something best left to professional creative types – the people who spent years at art school doing strange things with their hair and getting invited to parties while the geeks were busy coding. But it’s not something that only they should understand. Good design is such a vital part of the success of any product that every developer and entrepreneur needs to understand the constraints of their product, how simplicity can deliver users to those functions and what sort of users they need to appeal to.

That’s just good design.

Photography: Steve Wampler

When it comes to listing a product’s unique sales points, there’s always one point that’s sharper than all the others. It doesn’t matter how many features the product has, how many problems it solves or how much it will change the user’s life, if the market believes the product is “cool” it will fly off the shelves. So what makes a product cool, can coolness be created and what can a developer do to add that all-important ingredient to its offerings?

Design certainly helps. Apple wasn’t the first company to place digital music on portable players but Jonathan Ive’s clean design, with its plain white face and silver back, made the company’s music player as much a fashion accessory as an electronic gadget. Being seen with an iPod in the device’s early days marked a user as someone who was up with the latest fashions. Even if you couldn’t hear the tunes they were listening to — beyond the irritating thump of a bass delivered second-hand — you knew that an iPod user’s white earphones marked them out as someone who was serious about their music.

It wasn’t just color that made the iPod cool though. Its user interface was different too. The clickwheel, a mixture of mechanical buttons and a touch sensitive ring, made users wonder why no one had thought of that before. It made the device simple to use; a flick of the thumb was enough to change volume or move to the next song without looking at the screen or searching for the right button. The iPod was cool to use as well as look at.

It’s that simplicity that helped to mark the iPod’s coolness. Early MP3 players, such as Saehan’s MPMan and Diamond Multimedia’s Rio, seemed to owe their main design influence to Sony’s Walkman. Or perhaps a brick. The Rio, in particular, was packed with more buttons and switches than you can find on a typical flight deck. By doing away with all of that complexity, Apple showed that it was forward-looking, current and different. It marked a break with the past – and revolutionaries are always young, cool and trendy. Just ask the estate of Che Guevara.

Google Was Cool… Once

Disruptive technologies then can be cool too. For a long time, Google was the coolest company in Silicon Valley, the place where every geek wanted to work (and a place that could make most workers wish they were geeks.) It acquired that image by producing a product that looked as simple and frill-free as Apple’s iPod but which did an equally good job at flattening the competition. At a time when AOL and Netscape were ruling the Web, watching those then-giants take a sock to the jaw from a company that was then the little guy on the block was cool. And it did it the right way too: it produced a product that was unique, effective and which did a much better job than anything available at the time. Better still, Google became almost as well known for the degree to which it pampered its staff as for the reliability of its service. Google epitomized the coolness of the underdog. When a small company suddenly starts wiping the floor with big, heavy opposition, individuals cheer — especially when the company is seen to support the individuals who made it happen.

The downside though is that that sort of coolness does come with a time limit. Google isn’t as cool as it used to be. It’s now a big company too, and while the Googleplex might still be a nice place to work, the firm’s “Do no evil” slogan has taken a battering from its involvement in China, its forays into markets as far-flung as mobile phones and office software, and its attempts to build a digital library, regardless of what authors (another kind of underdog) think. Coolness is powerful but it’s also fragile. Pick it up for being small but extraordinarily good, and you might find that it starts to disappear when you’re big and merely as good as everyone expects you to be.

Unless you’re also a master of hype. This is a very different kind of coolness – a manufactured kind, created in advertising offices and nurtured through public relations, image-building and careful branding. Again, it’s no surprise that Apple, today’s ultra-cool manufacturer, is the master of this technique too. Very few of Apple’s products are actually as innovative as they look. Capacitive sensing, the technology behind the clickwheel, has been known since 1919, and the clickwheel itself was first designed by touchpad manufacturer Synaptics. Quantum Research, a UK technology company, also sued Apple for copyright infringement. The iPad, despite months of anticipation, has delivered nothing that didn’t exist already. While it might not have been possible to buy an outsized iPod Touch before, it has been possible to buy tablet computers, even with touch screens.

Apple’s genius isn’t just to create attractive products  but to make cool  new versions of the kinds of products already on the market.

Measuring Coolness

Coolness isn’t something tangible. It’s not something you can measure in the same way that you can count screen size or memory capacity. It’s more powerful than that. It can come from a design that speaks to the market and turns buyers into members of an elite club (in the iPod’s case, a club of devoted music fans). That can happen even if the club is enormous, non-selective and open to anyone willing to open their wallets wide enough.

It can come from being sharp enough to change your industry even when you’re so small the industry has barely noticed you. That’s a coolness connected to your competence – the fairest kind – but it’s also a coolness that can disappear once you become established.

And it can also come from careful marketing. That’s the hardest kind of coolness to create and maintain. In fact, one of the things that makes Apple so cool is its ability to still be cool despite being a big company that produces proprietary software, distributes copy-protected content and runs a capricious monopoly over the applications created by independent developers.

It is possible then to create coolness, but you have to be cool enough to know how to do it.

The launch is the most important moment in the life of any product. It’s the moment when the entrepreneur gets his or her first notion of whether the idea is going to fly. After all the months and years of development, after all the dreams of striking it rich and drowning in cash, the product is available and customers are starting to buy. The money is coming in at last. But while a launch marks day one in the life of the product, it’s actually just one more day in the life of the product’s development – and in its marketing too. The success of the launch might depend on the quality of the item itself, but it depends no less on the anticipation built up before the big day.

That anticipation is a key element in any sales strategy. The route to a purchase usually passes through awareness and recognition before it reaches a desire strong enough to lead someone to part with their cash. The market has to know the product is going to exist before it can decide that it wants it.

Apple Leaks

The real master of this kind of anticipation-building is Apple. In an article in MacObserver recently, John Martellaro, Apple’s former senior marketing manager, described how he was sometimes asked to make controlled leaks, despite the company’s official policy of not discussing unreleased products:

The way it works is that a senior exec will come in and say, “We need to release this specific information. John, do you have a trusted friend at a major outlet? If so, call him/her and have a conversation. Idly mention this information and suggest that if it were published, that would be nice. No e-mails!”

Those leaks though are used to do more than whet the audience’s appetite. According to Martellaro, Apple  also uses leaks to solve problems. They could be used to give a slow-moving partner a push; to test market reaction to a price point; to confuse a competitor; and also to create expectations about a forthcoming event so the right sort of people are in the audience.

For large companies – especially those that generate as much interest as Apple – leaks can always be effective at building pre-launch interest. But small firms bringing out their first product will struggle to get press attention even with widely distributed press releases. The Web’s self-publishing tools though make it possible to skip past the mainstream news outlets and bring snippets of information about what they’re doing directly to their market.

Twitter’s Anticipation Platform

The easiest way to do that is through Twitter. The microblogging site allows a company to shoot out quick bulletins about the project it’s working on, creating curiosity with each post. In the days before blogger Darren Rowse released a new photography ebook, for example, he posted the following tweets:

Releasing a new E-book on DPS in 36 hours, entering into the ‘frenzy zone’

And

getting ready to launch a new DPS photography e-book – am in a prelaunch frenzy – amazing how many windows I’ve got open right now

Those tweets are clearly about Darren and his life, rather than the product, which is the way that Twitter works best, but there’s no question that the followers that Darren has already gathered would have had their interest piqued by the posts. They’d want to know what the book is about and whether they should be buying it. The tweets themselves might have been small but the effect they can have on the anticipation before the launch can be massive.

But that depends on having an audience ready to receive those messages in the first place. Again, this is something that Twitter makes simple. Creating a large follower list can take a little time but it mostly involves lots of active tweeting and chatting. It also helps though to have a popular website whose readers will also migrate to Twitter in order to pick up more information from a source they trust. If Twitter is one way of providing small pieces of information about your product to your market then, a blog is another.

The problem with a blog though is that there’s no reason not to spill the beans completely. When space is unlimited, it’s possible to use a blog post to describe exactly what your product will contain and what it’s likely to do. Claiming the need to protect confidentiality is unlikely to help; audiences will care little about your need to protect yourself, and far more about its own desire to know what you’re doing. Tweets though have to be small and because space is strictly limited, you always have the perfect excuse for providing only the smallest of glances into what you’re doing. You get the anticipation but because you don’t provide the audience with satisfaction, you also get the curiosity that means they care when the launch happens.

So how you deliver the information matters. What sort of information you deliver matters too.

Darren Rowse’s tweets revealed nothing about the product but did describe the work that went into making it. That’s always one useful approach: bring people behind the scenes of your business and you connect them to your business. On Twitter, that happens personally: Darren Rowse’s followers saw not how a company was creating a product but how he was working on it. That’s a much closer connection.

Apple though has been building anticipation about its tablet not by taking people behind the scenes – officially, nothing was said at all – but by leaking sneak peeks of the product. Letting them try a little, then taking it away, can be an even more effective way of getting an audience excited about a product before it launches.

The launch day might mark the first opportunity for a market to meet a product but it shouldn’t be the first time buyers hear about it. There’s plenty of groundwork that can be done in the days and weeks before the product is released, and it all helps to determine whether the launch and the product will be a success.

Viral marketing has become the Holy Grail for just about any business with a small budget and big dreams. Let Coca Cola cough up the millions for a 30-second slot during the Superbowl. Let L’Oreal pay through the nose to get the name of its moisturizers seen on the walls of reality TV shows. Savvy small companies can pick up a reach that’s just as broad and even more powerful by sidestepping the expensive conventional channels. Give the public a reason to talk about them and they’ll get to spread the name of their business for next to nothing, helped by an army of happy gossipers. All you need is a place to start.

And an understanding that it’s not that easy. A deliberately planned viral marketing campaign, one that has the aim of improving a company’s sales, needs three elements: content, distribution and response.

Content is the DNA of the virus, the element that encourages the people who receive it to react and pass it on to their friends. For many marketers, that means something cool and creative. Burger King’s Subservient Chicken was one of the most famous examples. Created in 2005 for the fast food chain by ad company The Barbarian Group, the site took a literal interpretation of the slogan “Get chicken just the way you like it.” It placed an actor (actually, a costume designer; the actor refused to do it) in a chicken outfit and filmed him performing about 300 different moves. Users who reached the website could enter commands into a text field and see the chicken apparently obey those commands.

The interactivity made the campaign a hit. A day after the site was launched, it had a million hits. A week later it had 20 million. While Burger King didn’t release actual sales figures, it did report that in the month after releasing its chicken sandwich, the company saw “double-digit” growth in awareness and a “significant” increase in sales.

Big Ideas or Free Ideas

But coming up with smart ideas like subservient chickens isn’t easy. Creative concepts only work when they’re original so they can’t be copied, but it is possible to copy the approach. The Subservient Chicken worked because it took Burger King’s chicken sandwich slogan to ridiculous lengths. Blendtec’s series of YouTube videos, in which company founder Tom Dickson shows off the strength of his blenders by blending bizarre items including cell phones, silly putty and a running video camera, worked in a similar way.

One place to begin then is by looking at what your product does and asking just what it could do if you pushed it to the limits. Put the results online and if it looks bizarre enough, you might have people lining up to see it.

Alternatively, you can give your product away.

Creativity might be fun but freebies are just as powerful, and they’re a lot easier. Let the world know that you’ll be handing out something for nothing and it won’t be long before people are rushing to tell their friends.

The simplest type of freebie is usually an ebook or downloadable report. Because these can be copied and distributed easily, they will be — provided that the information is high enough quality. It has to be usable, practical and valuable. An information product like that might not reach a massive audience but it should saturate your main market, putting your name in front of anyone who needs to know it.

It’s also possible though to give away something that you know everyone will want. Earlier this year, Moonfruit, a company that sells and hosts websites, decided to mark its tenth anniversary by giving away ten Macbook pros. That wasn’t a cheap campaign — and despite its image, viral marketing is rarely free — but traffic to Moonfruit’s site increased by a factor of eight.

Twitter Changes Viral Distribution

The Subservient Chicken was hosted on a website but it was promoted conventionally, mostly through TV spots that included the chicken. It was those ads that kick-started the campaign and generated the word-of-mouth advertising. By the time Moonfruit launched its campaign four years later, the environment had changed completely. The company did it all on Twitter. To be eligible for a free computer, Twitter users simply had to tweet the company name. They could do it as many times as they wanted — and everytime they did it, they spread the name further along Twitter’s network. It’s no wonder that “moonfruit” was the number one trending topic on the site for days.

For viral marketing, distribution has always been difficult. You could create the coolest concept ever but if no one sees it — or if only the wrong people see it — the virus won’t spread. Twitter has made everything a great deal easier by creating a network along which links and information can spread rapidly and effortlessly, but the old principle still applies: for your content to go viral, you still have to put it in front of the right people right at the beginning.

So if you’re planning to use Twitter to launch a viral campaign, you’ll need to make sure, before you launch, that your timeline is active, large and contains plenty of people who also have active timelines and lots of followers. Identify at least a dozen people who retweet regularly and post the tweet announcing your content at a time you know they’ll be active. That should increase the chance that your message will be passed on. Whether it will continue to be passed on along Twitter’s networks depends on the quality of what you’re offering and, on Twitter, the degree to which you can keep the campaign feeling personal.

It’s the last stage that’s the most important though. A viral marketing campaign will make your company known. It will bring people in and lead them to think that you’re cool and trendy. But it will be up to you to ensure that that interest converts into sales. That’s the bit that people often forget. Viral marketing can take off very quickly but it needs to be seen as part of a long term strategy rather than a short-term launch goal. The Subservient Chicken ads got that right by being ready to break the chicken off the Internet and place it in different formats. Moonfruit’s campaign might be forgotten fairly quickly but it did bring people to its website where they were able to play with the company’s site-building software and perhaps purchase a subscription.

When you’re putting together your viral marketing idea, make sure you know what you’re going to do with the interest you receive — and how you’re going to profit from your virus.

Photography: burienundressedblog

Create a product that becomes a fad, and you’re in for a sackload of money — for a while at least. For a few months, maybe a year if you’re lucky, you’ll wallow in media attention, see your name in every newspaper, field calls from Jon Stewart and perhaps even Oprah, and look goggle-eyed at your sales figures. And then it will all disappear. As quickly as the fad rocketed into the stratosphere, that’s the same speed at which it will crash into the ground. Suddenly, the phone will stop ringing, no one will want to talk to you, and if you’re making sales, it’s to asset-strippers hoping to make a few bucks off your desk. If you didn’t squirrel away your money during those boom times, you’ll be back where you started – minus one good idea. Create a product that turns into a trend though, and you’ll be set for life.

You won’t just have created an item that lots of people buy now. You’ll have started a fashion that lots of people will continue buying in the future. That means you’ll have to deal with competitors, copycats, pirates and me-too bandwagon-jumpers but because you’ll have been first, you’ll have the advantage. It’s much more demanding than selling a fad but it’s also much more stable and ultimately more rewarding. So what are the differences between fads and trends, and what can you do to turn your product from one to the other?

Fads Are a Load of Crocs

It used to be said that a fad starts in California, a trend in Connecticut. Crocs though, started in Canada then moved to Colorado. In 2007, the company made a profit of $168 million selling its range of plastic clogs. In 2008, that giant pile had become a $185 million loss. A third of the company’s workforce – some 2000 employees – have recently been given their marching orders.

Perhaps they should have seen it coming. Crocs had all the hallmarks of a fad: they were everywhere, suddenly; they divided opinion – either you loved them and wore them daily or you hated them and wondered why anyone would want to put rubber tubs on their feet; they were particularly popular with kids, a notoriously fickle market; and they tried to stay the same in the fashion world, an industry which has to bring out new product ranges every season.

Worse, the products themselves last almost forever so once you’ve bought one, there’s little reason to buy another one.

Crocs though did make money for a while, and they did try to move into a more stable revenue stream. (The company’s range of Croslite clothing didn’t do so well.) MySpace though is starting to show all the signs of faddiness without any of the big profits. The site, which already had 100 million accounts back in 2006 – a lifetime ago in Internet terms – has just laid off 30 percent of its workforce.

Like Crocs, MySpace is particularly popular with young audiences, but unlike Crocs, it’s tried to stay there. Instead of looking for ways to bring in older, more stable users – in the way that the slower-burning LinkedIn has done – it’s focused on bringing out emoticons, profile modules and most importantly, music. The result is that as the users have grown up, they’ve grown away, taking their advertising value with them. And they never bought anything either.

Compare MySpace though with YouTube, another social media site snapped up by a larger conglomerate but which appears to be on much more solid ground. While MySpace is shrinking, YouTube is the third most popular site on the Web, after Google and Yahoo!.

Faddy MySpace, Trendy YouTube

Part of that is down to need. No one needed rubber shoes, but those who bought them thought they looked cool… until they didn’t. MySpace grew at a time when there were few other options available for online social networking. But by staying the same and allowing Facebook to do social media so much better, no one who doesn’t own a guitar needs MySpace any longer.

YouTube was also born out of a need but it remains needed. The apocryphal story has founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen attending a dinner party then wondering how to share a video of the evening online. That might not be true but the methods of sharing online video were very limited at the time. There was a demand for YouTube before it existed, even if those demanding it didn’t quite realize what they wanted. And since its creation, YouTube has not only managed to adjust – creating channels, introducing advertising, and allowing publishers to place videos on their websites – it’s also allowed users to change the site too.

That’s crucial, and it’s one very valuable way in which fads become trends. Customers do get bored after a while. Deliver the same thing in exactly the same way time after time, and eventually those customers will stop buying. They’ll buy the next new thing instead – especially if it does the same thing better. Allow your customers to get creative with your product though, and you might just find that it has more uses and a longer life than you could have possibly imagined.

YouTube might have been invented to allow people to share their home videos but it took off – and revolutionized the media world – when people start using it to upload copyrighted professional content. It got a second lease of life when users started creating their own versions of those clips, and added an extra base when companies saw its viral marketing value.

While fads tend to have one use – which means the product disappears when that use is no longer wanted – trends are flexible enough to adjust to the market’s changing desires. So the iPhone, which was unique when it came out but now competes against a host of other smartphones, remains a trend because of the directions its app developers have taken it. Twitter too might have risen with the speed of a fad, but its flexibility, its range of uses that have extended so far beyond its original vision as a kind of public messaging system, and its giant list of apps and APIs, have made it into a trend that’s going to stay (as long as Biz Stone and Even Williams can figure out how to monetize it.)

If you’re wondering whether your product is going to be a fad or a trend then, ask yourself what it does. What needs does it fulfill? And what needs could it fulfill if you gave your customers the freedom to put it to new uses?

It’s the goal that any business would hope to reach. You’ve picked an area of specialization, demonstrated that you’re knowledgeable about your subject, built trust in your market, and you have a loyal following that buys from you, returns to you and recommends you to their friends.

You’ve mastered your niche and moved your business from the start-up phase to a much more stable phase.

And that’s when the trouble begins.

It’s hard enough to identify a niche that looks promising, and it takes time and effort to conquer it so that you become the leading expert in the field. But once that happens, all sort of problems can crop up that can threaten your hard-earned position.

Competition is Flattery

You get competition for one. The main benefit of targeting a niche is that the competition is smaller than you might run across in larger markets. But once other people can see that you’re making money, they’ll want some of the action too.

This is what happened in the online dating market. Once it became clear that the concept worked – that people were willing to pay a monthly fee to send emails to other singles – everyone piled in until there were hundreds of sites offering exactly the same service. Some of them were smart and focused on their own niches, such as JDate, for Jewish singles or MillionaireMatch, for well-to-do couples. But many others such as DatingClub.com, stayed general and failed to survive.

And that’s the good thing about dealing with the competition that follows in your wake – stay alert and you should stay ahead. Match.com wasn’t just one of the first Internet dating sites, it’s also now the market leader. The same is true of Amazon.com, a pioneer in online retailing, and now the first stop for many people looking to shop online despite the huge numbers of alternatives.

While competition will follow a niche master then (removing one of the biggest advantages that a niche offers) the mimicry isn’t just flattery, it’s often also recognition that the company’s the leader – and likely to stay that way.

Expectations rise too when you’ve mastered your niche. People will believe that you understand everything there is to know about your topic, especially when that topic is small and narrow, like Yosemite rock-climbing or the power of communities. This is always going to a problem when the company is a one-man band rather than a group of bright individuals. Professional speakers like Paul Hartunian, a publicity expert, can expect constantly to be asked questions about their subject, and some of those questions are going to be headscratchers.

It’s always going to be impossible for one person to know everything there is to know about a field, especially when that field is constantly changing.

While that can bring a threat of disappointment – and worse, a sense that the expert isn’t such an expert after all – it’s also an opportunity. One approach taken by a number of bloggers is to portray themselves not as people who have more knowledge than their peers but merely as people who share their knowledge with their peers. That can still create a leadership position within a niche but it also makes the expert a kind of über-user. It’s an approach which enhances trust and for businesses, which try to do the same thing through careful branding, keeps a group of customers centered on a single supplier.

What Do I Do Now?

The worst danger that can come from mastering your niche though is not knowing what to do next. That can happen when you feel you’ve reached the goal you’ve set yourself when you started, and find that you’re drifting. It could have happened to Amazon.com when it became the world’s biggest book retailer but it didn’t because the company had different goals at different levels. While it focused on books initially, it also had the aim of selling a variety of other goods. And once it had mastered that position, it began to describe itself not as a retail firm but as a logistics firm, handling storage and delivery for other companies.

And perhaps that’s the most unexpected consequence of mastering your niche: it gives you strength to expand until eventually, you’re no longer a niche player but a general player in a much bigger market. Virgin, for example, might have started as a music retailer but it now has fingers in pies as big as planes and trains.

Clearly, that’s not going to be the result of conquering every niche – and describing that sort of success as trouble could be a bit of a stretch – but all of these big achievements started as attempts to rule one small area. That’s not a bad place for anyone to start.

Photography: *Tom*

We’re all in favor of niches. They’re very useful ways to start out in business, find your feet and build a foundation before expanding into different areas. They make the first steps easier but they don’t make the very first step easier: you still have to choose the right niche.

Perhaps the most tempting mistake to make is to leave the niche too big. Create a role-playing video game, for example, and you’ll find yourself competing against World of Warcraft, a thankless challenge. Create a role-playing game for people who like to cast their spells in teams instead of alone though, as the makers of Warhammer have done, and you’ll stand a better chance of staying in the fight and surviving long enough to take on the leader once you’ve grown stronger.

But there is a second mistake you can make when choosing a niche, and that’s leaving it too small. Make that error and you might not be squeezed entirely out of business by a threatened competitor but you will be limiting your income and making future growth harder.

So how can you tell whether you’ve chosen a niche that’s too small or just right?

What are your Customers’ Names?

One of the most obvious signs that your niche is uncomfortably tight is that you can name your customers. This happens a lot on blogs and websites. Although sites often have a small group of readers who leave more comments than others, when you see the same names turning up time after time in response to your articles – and almost no other names – that’s a pretty good sign that your site has become a clique rather than an open club.

Ideally, a website will have a broad base of users and a few leading followers who shape the post-article debate. When your readers are few but dedicated, you’ll struggle to expand and to make sales.

The same is true of businesses. Plenty of slightly nerdy entrepreneurs have paid their bills by opening comic stores; few have managed to do it though by opening comic stores dedicated solely to Spiderman.

The Bottom of the Barrel

Talking to a devoted choir can get dull but another sign that your niche is too small is far more painful: you run out of ideas. Again, on a website, that’s particularly acute — and easy to spot. If after just a few months, you’re scratching your head and wondering what topics to discuss that you haven’t written about already, then you’ve probably narrowed down the potential list of subjects too finely. And that’s dangerous.

When you find yourself having to dredge the bottom of the barrel of your ideas to keep your blog or your website ticking over, it won’t be long before even your most dedicated of minority followers start to feel that you’ve got nothing left to offer them. A website that started with so much enthusiasm and picked up a great reaction can soon fizzle out in disappearing users and irregular posts.

Again, the same can happen in business. One of the necessities for commercial success is constant innovation. If you don’t offer something new, your competitors certainly will. Choose a niche that leaves little room for reinvention though and it won’t be long before your market is saturated. You’ll make a lot of customers very happy in the beginning but once they’ve left, you’ll have no one left to replace them. It’s why specialist used record stores do well for a while (or used to until digital music killed the disc) but then struggle once the fans have loaded up on their favorite songs – and dismissed the owner as a sell-out for trying to expand his range.

A third sign that a niche is too narrow is perhaps the most overlooked but it’s also one of the most important: the advertising is difficult. It’s a problem that works in both directions. Websites with narrow niches struggle to win relevant ads even from services with a tail as long as Google’s AdSense. Without those relevant ads — or with just a small group of advertisers to call on – advertising income is always going to be small.

Similarly, with just a few relevant places to advertise, businesses with tight niches will either have to cope with low conversion rates or spread their advertising narrowly. Either way, the result will be slow, expensive growth.

The correct response to all of these signs, of course, is to expand the niche. That has to be done carefully so that you don’t lose your core audience — some of whom are likely to be disappointed at the influx of new community members anyway – and it has to be done in the right direction so that you don’t find yourself in another tight corner. A better solution is to choose the right-sized niche in the first place.

Viral marketing isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s been used since before the Internet existed, but the online world makes it far easier to spread ideas. It’s a method that can benefit freelancers.

What is viral marketing? In a nutshell, it’s any method of promoting a concept (message, product or “content”) in a manner that allows it to be self-propagating, or not far from it.

Maki of DoshDosh has written extensively about viral marketing in general, and had a simple, to-the-point explanation of viral marketing in the online world:

Your message is the virus. The carriers are your audience.

Catch popular attention with your concept, and it’ll get passed on by others who want to share it.

So how do you get people’s attention and how does this apply to freelancers? What are good formats for viral content, and how do you even produce viral content?

How Do You Get Viral Attention?
There are several ways that you can get readers/ viewers/ listeners to propagate viral content.

1. Be exclusive, at least initially. Allowing others to be part of an exclusive group will often give people an incentive to talk about you or your message.
2. Employ an element of surprise. Uniqueness of idea isn’t always enough. Novelty does work, but interest will taper off faster if the idea is too novel and otherwise lacking value. For example, LisaNova, an online comedian, had the novel idea of free video collabcharacters. Unfortunately, many people think she was serious, and from that viewpoint, her approach is far too annoying.
3. Trip emotional triggers: Surprise, joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust.
4. Be targeted. If your viral content is aimed at or about current online influencers, it’s potentially more viral. They’ll start the conversation for you – whether to praise or criticize – and their influencees will carry on the conversation.
5. Promote your campaigns. For a viral marketing campaign to work, you have to get enough word of mouth from other people. Start with willing colleagues, and maybe they’ll have their own colleagues that’ll tip the viral effect. Use microblogging services (e.g., Twitter) and guest articles. All this employs the idea of Six Degrees of Separation and the concept that “word of mouth” is the fastest way in the world of communicating an idea – whether it’s in person, on the phone, or via some digital form such as IM/chat, email, microblogging or whatever.

What is a Good Format for Viral Content?
Viral messages get passed on through numerous mediums: verbally; through IM/ chat; Twitter or other microblogging services; an email; or websites that link to your digital content or embed it. So a viral effect can be achieve in a number of ways, and to facilitate that, viral content has to be easy to propagate. Here are a few forms of potentially viral content.

1. Video. Web video particularly seems to catch the attention of the online world. Some of the popular video series so far include:

1. Ask a Ninja.
2. You Suck at Photoshop.
3. Will It Blend?
4. Pepsi/ Coke + Mentos soda spray fountains.

All of these are catchy enough that they’ve been embedded on thousands of web pages, virally propagating interest in them. They’re all unique, but Will It Blend actually promotes a product – Blendtec’s commercial blender. In the video below, host Tom Dickson tests the Blendtec on golf balls.

The diet soda and mentos idea (below) is so easy to implement (and for the most part fun) that it spawned hundreds of similar videos.

According to a MarketingSherpa survey, web video in an ad can increase viewer response. Likewise, web video in general can be a very effective means of virally spreading a message, since the content is generally easily embedded into website and blog pages. Music videos can be especially effective. As Chris Brogan points out, musician Chris Blake created a [video for “Someone Else,” a song from his WAVE album, simply by using images and text. The text came from search results when he looked up “Biggest regrets” on Google.

2. Ebooks. Free ebooks go in and out of favor, but the ones whose authors openly tell you to redistribute are often the books you’ll see over and over again. Hence, a viral effect.

3. Websites and blogs. Groundbreaking or otherwise attention-getting articles can go viral. There are numerous websites out there that enjoy constant popularity as a result. Articles get promoted and linked to by readers and other writers, thereby getting propagated semi-virally. Skelliewag has list of nearly forty viral article ideas to consider.

4. Themes and plugins for the free WordPress blogging platform are also immensely popular, and have even created a mini online economy for “premium” versions.

5. An image or diagram. A clever diagram or a captivating image can be just as viral as other content.

6. A message on a t-shirt. (While this an offline medium, if the shirt is available exclusively on a t-shirt website, then the idea has the potential to go viral.)

7. A slogan or saying. Twitter can be an effective medium to “pass it on.” So can your Facebook wall.

8. A podcast. Podcasts don’t enjoy nearly the kind of popularity that web videos do, though a well-executed series that’s catchy and properly promoted has the potential to be viral as well.

How Do You Produce Viral Content?
Viral marketing can never be an exact science, but you can prep yourself to produce the kind of creative thinking that’s necessary. In fact, it’s intersects quite closely with the same sort of effort needed to simply think creatively:

1. Consume information, esp. related to pop culture.
2. Track and tap into trends. Study trends relevant to your freelancing niche, both directly and peripherally.
3. Employ the Medici Efect by broadening the sources of your daily diet of information. Absorb news from several niches/ markets, and in several forms (audio, video, TV, newsprint, online articles). Cross-discipline thinking is often where the greatest ideas come from.
4. Be unique. Using the same idea someone else has just won’t work. But just as with patents, you might be able to take something that worked before and give it a new twist. So study other viral marketing campaigns.
5. Be fast and be first when you have a new, unique idea.

How Does Viral Marketing Apply to Freelancers?
If you have a main website (and you should) to promote your brand of services, then you can apply viral marketing for several purposes:

1. Draw attention to yourself.
2. Display your skills in a creative manner.
3. Increase traffic to your website, and thus your potential client base.

The more attention you draw to yourself, the greater the chances that someone will be interested in your services. You’ve proven that you can get attention online, which is a commodity. Provided that the attention is not negative (or sometimes even if it is), then that should eventually translate into an increased demand for your services – especially if your work is targeted to the online market.

Photography: billjon

Mastering a niche is one shortcut to success. Instead of competing against a large  number of established businesses, you can spot a gap in the market, pitch your services to a small number of people and put down some firm roots. From there, you can grow gradually into any field you want without risking your entire business.

It’s a strategy that’s worked for Microsoft, which started with operating systems but now produces products from media players to game consoles, and it worked too for any number of now-large corporations which started with soap, records, insurance and who knows what else then expanded to become today’s multinationals.

But what happens when the expansion begins? How do you avoid diluting trust in your brand… and how do you do it when you’re just a one-man band trying to widen your income base?

Pick up a Book

One example to look at is the way publishing companies work. The publishing industry is dominated by a small number of major firms but that’s not the impression you get when you browse a bookstore. Pick ten books off the shelf on ten different subjects, and you might feel that they’re coming from ten different publishers. In fact, they’re likely to be imprints owned by just two or three major publishing houses. Random House, for example, owns DoubleDay, Fodor’s, Ballantine and a whole host of others. And the company itself is just one division of Bertelsmann, a giant, German media company.

Random House doesn’t hide any of this stuff. Its website lists all of the publishers it owns and the imprints that they own. But it doesn’t go out of the way to make those details clear to shoppers either, and nor do other publishers. Someone who picks up a Dummies guide, for example, understands exactly what he’s getting: a brand that he trusts in a niche offering basic information about a topic. He doesn’t know – or care — that he’s actually holding a book produced by Wiley, publishers of Frommers, The Unofficial Guide To…, and owners of WeightWatchers.

Look beyond large companies though, and you can see the same thing happening in small businesses too. Web design firms like Peppercorn generally offer a wide range of services from basic design to search engine optimization to on-site games and print services. When they pitch for a job though, they only focus on the tasks the client wants to achieve. Portraying yourself as a specialist is always going to be more persuasive than appearing as a generalist.

But those other skills could be useful too so it doesn’t pay to hide them. The fact that Peppercorn can also create small online video games, for example, could be of interest to a firm that asked it to design a gaming review site.

And Here’s My Other Blog…

The same principle works for bloggers. Blogs are usually the ultimate in long-tail nicheing. They focus on one specialized topic – in our case, helping experts turn their knowledge into money – and they appeal to a very select audience. But it’s possible to offer information of similar quality to other, carefully chosen audiences on other topics. ButtermilkPress.com, for example, is a blog about Southern food but its author also runs a host of other blogs about cats, self-help, Hollywood and even office stationery. Each blog is independent but there’s no reason why lessons learned researching one topic shouldn’t enhance blogs on others. (We also produce Photopreneur, a blog that helps photographers earn income from their images. The actions and strategies that we see photographers take while researching that blog are often applicable to experts in any field and enhance this blog too.)

That means that branching out from one niche into another – even when your business is as small as a one-person blog – isn’t difficult but it is a balancing act. The different niches need to be kept separate – as separate as publishing imprints – but they shouldn’t be hidden. Knowledge from one niche can certainly help another and the cross-promotion can be beneficial too. Do well in one niche and you already have a market, at least some of which is likely to be interested in your other field of knowledge.

And that’s the real benefit of branching out into new topics. You get to grow and expand your business. You also get to refresh your enthusiasm and appeal to new markets. But most importantly, you also find that it gets easier every time you do it because you already have at least one market to draw on.

Choosing a niche may be difficult. But choosing two niches can make your life a lot easier – and wealthier too.

Entrepreneurs always have two things to sell: they have the product they create; and they have the knowledge that went into creating that product.

Both of those things are valuable.

If you had built a successful website that matched local tour guides to tourists-in-the-making, for example, then you might have a valuable product. (Don’t get excited. It’s been done.)

But the lessons that building that site would have taught you about website optimization, marketing, fund-raising, copywriting, outsourcing and a whole host of other techniques could all help someone else do the same thing… and can all make you money.

It’s likely too that creating that product would be a lot easier than building your business in the first place. Information products don’t even have to be physical. In fact, digital products often sell for far higher amounts than hard copy books.

Why that might be is an interesting quirk for economists to puzzle over. Physical books go through rigorous selection processes. They’re edited, printed, professionally designed and expensively marketed. And yet they still rarely sell for more than $25, giving an author who might have sweated over the manuscript for months little more than a dollar a copy — assuming, that is, he sees past the advance. Most don’t.

Digital products, on the other hand, can sell for hundreds and even thousands of dollars, most of which ends up in the creator’s pocket. They can be written and placed on the market by anyone, few are edited and many are poor. A buyer has to depend on nothing more than a giant sales letter he hasn’t read and testimonials from people he’s never heard of to trust that the money he’s paying will buy him the foundation of his new business, rather than slightly less space on his hard drive.

And yet they sell, generating large amounts of income for entrepreneurs and analysts who understand that what they know is sometimes more valuable than what they do.

There are a number of ways to do it.

Clickbank — Your Friendly Downloadable Shopping Mall

The easiest is to post your product on Clickbank, an online mall for downloadable products. For publishers, the site offers a couple of advantages.

First, it’s open to everyone. You won’t have to write a persuasive query letter or talk your way past a commissioning editor to get your book on the shelves. That makes it a good place to start.

And the second is that it’s marketed to marketers as much as to buyers. Clickbank makes its money by encouraging website publishers to promote the products it “stocks” as affiliates.

That makes the sales relatively easy too.

The downside is the pricing. Clickbank caps the amount publishers can charge at $50, although it might be willing to stretch this to $200.

That sounds like a lot in comparison to traditional publishing but if buyers are willing to pay more, Clickbank’s easy uploading and marketing could turn out to be fairly expensive.

Become a Guru

An alternative to Clickbank is to market the product yourself — and market yourself at the same time. The Web is filled with business experts who speak at conferences and use those appearances to promote products that can also be downloaded online. Freed from the restrictions of Clickbank, they can charge whatever they think the market will bear.

AdSense expert Joel Comm, for example, first made his name selling an e-book containing his strategies for $97 — almost four times the price of his hard copy version.

The real money for gurus though lies in the orders for the sort of physical products audience members can pick up at conferences. David Garfinkel’s copywriting course, for example, is described as a steal when you can pay for it in three “easy installments of just $347 each.”

But in addition to a physical book, you also get a stack of CDs, DVDs and transcripts for that price. That’s a lot harder to produce than a digital product, even if a low-cost digital product is often used to promote it.

Become a Sherpa

If you want to get in on the really high-paying downloadable materials though, you need to leave the world of self-promotion and head for analysis. This is where the big bucks really are… not least because this is where the valuable information is.

Some of the e-books available on Marketing Sherpa, for example, make exactly the same promises as those sold by the likes of uber-marketers Armand Morin and Jeff Walker. “Landing Page Optimization for Ecommerce” could easily have been titled “Boost Conversions By 816% With Unbeatable Landing Pages!” but it sells for just under $1,000, the sort of price that would have a guru outsourcing hours of box-stuffing.

The difference is Marketing Sherpa’s apparent reliability. The company tells publishers to drop the hype, raise the proof and use the sort of language more often found in business schools.

It makes their products look researched rather than cobbled together by a guru and a ghostwriter, which means that people are more confident that they’ll get the results — and more willing to spend more money on them.

All of that though pales into insignificance when you look at the amount polling firms charge for their digital products. While these aren’t the sort of books that you can produce on the strength of the experience you picked up marketing your website, they are worth a lot of money. Gallup’s World Poll, for example, is available online to anyone prepared to spend $28,500.

At that price we’ll have two… and a $200 subscription to esurveyspro.com.

Photography: Urban Mixer

It might not feel it. You probably aren’t noticing it in your wallet. And it certainly doesn’t apply to the price of loans, food aid or gas, but the world is getting cheaper. It’s not just that you can now buy a pair of Chinese-made jeans for less than $15 and it’s not only that you can pick up a basic laptop for $500 and one that would have cost four times that a couple of years ago for $1000.

It’s that many of the products and services that we use every day — items that bring real value to our lives — are completely free.

Email is free. Media programs like RealPlayer and iTunes are free. Even the music that we play on them and the videos that we watch on them are often downloaded for free too.

While we complain about the exorbitant cost of a frappucinno in Starbucks or the amount we pay to eat popcorn in a cinema, much of the world is moving towards a business model based on giving customers exactly what they want — and not charging them for it.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. If you give your customers everything they want for nothing, you’ll soon find that you have nothing left to give. The principle has always been to give away just enough to tempt people to buy more.

Minitel wasn’t Free

Nor is the approach new. Businesses have been handing out samples for as long as they’ve been selling. What has changed is the number of items being handed out and their value to the user. If once you could receive 33 percent more washing powder if you were prepared to switch brands or get a free dessert if you ordered soup and a main course, now you’re able to search for recipes online, Twitter to the world what you’re cooking and IM your friends to invite them, all without spending a dime.

Mostly, it comes down to the rise of digital technology, and in particular, the Internet. Had the Web charged users from the beginning — in the same way that France’s Minitel did — it’s possible that users would now be paying by the page, the minute or the website. Instead, you have to look hard to find any media site that charges for its content. Even the Wall Street Journal is now moving away from subscriptions, reserving fees only for premium services.

And that’s the new model of free, a system that Wired quotes venture capitalist Fred Wilson describing as ‘Freemium.’ Most of the basic services that come with a product are given away for nothing and enjoyed by most of the users. A tiny fraction of users — as low as 1 percent — then pay for additional services, and those fees support everyone else.

It’s the system that dating sites use to allow people to post profiles and search the database while reserving the ability to send emails to paying members. Skype too lets its users chat to each other over the Internet for nothing but makes a profit when a small number of those people buy credits to call telephones.

Rules for Giving Things Away

That means that for a business to copy this model, it has to follow a couple of vital rules.

The first is that what you give away should bring value to the business too.

When dating sites let people post profiles for free they don’t just make it easy for people who prefer not to buy a subscription to become available to other singles. They also make their database bigger, their selection broader and the site more attractive and valuable.

When iJoomla lets Joomla programmers download some extensions for nothing, it increases the power of the content management system, creating a firmer foundation for people who might buy its premium add-ons.

And when the New York Times lets people read its content online for free, it increases the number of its viewers, making the company more valuable to advertisers.

Sometimes a benefit can be as simple as the extra business that will come from a free sample. Online though, the extra value often comes as a result of large numbers of people using the system — something that’s only likely to happen when the service costs nothing. The key then is always to find a premium service that you can charge for and that people will be willing to buy.

The second rule is that while the value of the freebie is high, its cost must be close to nothing.

That’s one of the reasons that so much is given away on the Internet. A bank of servers might cost a business a large sum of money but spread over millions of users the marginal cost is practically incidental. It’s why email providers like Google and Yahoo! are able to hand out gigabytes of storage to anyone who wants to fill them and it’s why handing out music can make sense for bands. Storing tunes online and allowing people to download them costs very little — it’s the touring that’s expensive, and these days, it’s where the profits are made.

The easiest way to square this circle then is usually to look to technology. Even a blog can provide both valuable information and, if it’s something you would like to write anyway, would cost next to nothing to produce. Alternatively, stripping away the most costly features of a product and charging only for those could work well too.

Every business has to find a way of translating what it produces into cash. In an environment in which users expect valuable services to be free, that’s harder than it sounds. But plenty of businesses are doing it and many are making a great deal of money by giving away their items for nothing.

Photography: Vicki’s Pics

Create a professional website and inevitably, you’ll have to do it. You’ll have to write an About Us page that tells a lead who you are, what you do and how you got there. It’s the story of your company and while that account might not be as important as your product or your services, your business’s narrative is an important part of your image and your branding – especially when you find that it plays the role of the bad guy. Google, after all, would still have a world-beating search engine and advertising system even if it didn’t come with a story of two noble geeks who promise to do no evil. Microsoft, on the other hand, has produced a standard-setting games console but its competition-squashing has made it the computer world’s Lee van Cleef, a characterization that only inspires young virus-writers to call the company out.

It’s up to PR firms to create – and change — the stories that the public believes about large companies. Small firms just setting out start with a clean sheet have a much easier time. They can produce a tale that explains where their idea came from, how they’re trying to make life better for customers and why they’re the best qualified firm to do it.

Wear a White Hat

Whether they hold on to that story though will depend on the quality of the products and the services they provide, and their behavior too. Poor customer service is always one good way to send a white-hatted business character over to the dark side.

But stories about companies aren’t just held by potential buyers. The attitudes of employees towards their place of work can also be dictated by what they believe about the behavior of its management and the company’s attitude in general. Tales told around the watercooler might be a way of shooting the breeze, but when those stories are about managers who don’t care and products shipped with known bugs, the effect on motivation could be lethal. In fact, an entire academic discipline called “organizational storytelling” has grown up to capture those tales and help managers use them to train staff, share ideas, transmit values and battle negative rumors.

Controlling the stories told within businesses is always going to be difficult, especially once the company has grown to a size that separates top management from entry-level staff. Moving close enough to hear the stories – and demonstrate that the characterization owes more to someone’s imagination than the CEO’s actions – might help. Much easier to control are the sorts of tales that are told directly by company officials as they promote their businesses.

What Makes a Good Tale?

Shawn Callahan of Anecdote, an Australian firm that specializes in “business narrative services” has described some of the features a good anecdote should contain: a clear date, he suggests, makes the story sound credible; a conversational tone is important too; and if it’s possible to include a main character on a transformative journey so much the better. “It’s how we learn without having to experience something first-hand,” he writes.

For sales staff making pitches, that’s all useful information. Experienced marketing executives understand the importance of selling benefits, not features, but those benefits become even clearer when they’re placed in contexts that show their effects. A sales script that included a narrative describing how an executive was able to help a business overcome a number of challenges would be much more interesting — and far more persuasive – than reading a checklist of program features.

The listener should be able to identify with the company in the anecdote in the same way that a salesman tries to create identification between the lead’s problems and the solution the product offers. By the time the story has reached its happy ending, the listener should understand that his company too could be enjoying that success.

With conference speeches now an important part of many companies’ promotional programs, being able to weave anecdotes into presentations is also much more likely to leave audience members with a positive impression – or at least a narrative they can remember in a weekend of similar speakers.

And perhaps that’s the most important feature of business stories: their ability to stick in the mind and in the process, to leave important messages in the listener’s memory. “Who Moved My Cheese,” for example, contained a very simple narrative but it’s one whose details most readers would struggle to remember. What they don’t forget though is the book’s underlying message of the importance of adjustment to change.

When you’re struggling to produce an About Us page that portrays your company in a good light, you don’t have to create a tale about a hesitant mouse and his go-getting friend. But if you can create a story with a beginning, a middle and an end — one that talks directly to readers – your company should stay in their thoughts and lay the foundation for a profitable future.

Photography: Martin Kingsley

So you’ve got an incredible idea for a new business, and can’t wait to roll up your sleeves and get to work. However, before you pour dollars and hours into creating your product, it’s a good idea to see if people are actually willing to buy what you have to offer.

Why not just conduct a survey, I hear you ask. Well, I’ve learned that survey data can’t be relied upon at all. During a business implementation class in university, one of our assignments was to conduct a survey and see if our product had sufficient demand. We surveyed our fellow students and asked if they would be interested in buying our Japanese fried cakes, which we planned to offer in campus for a week.

8 out of 10 of our respondents said yes. We based our sales projections on this figure, and projected a 250% return on investment. When we actually sold our product however, we hardly broke even. If it wasn’t for some very persuasive sales tactics and risking annoying our friends, we would’ve reported back a huge loss to our professor and received a relatively low grade for the implementation part of the assignment.

You see, most people are polite and hate saying no. How do you circumvent this? Instead of asking people if they would buy, the most reliable indicator is to actually ask them to buy right there on the spot even if you don’t have the product available yet.

This method is called dry testing, and we’ll be using this method with Google AdWords to check if there’s potential in our business idea. Before we begin, decide how much money you’re willing to put in to test your product. A reasonable budget is $500; but ideally, $1000 would do the trick.

It might seem like a lot, but think about how much money and time you’ll save in the long run. No need to pay programmers to code your website, or a designer to design you a logo, or a copywriter to create your salesletter — you can do it all on your own and test the raw potential of your business all by yourself.

Step 1: Analyze your competition. Duration: 1 day

Detailed market research really is a whole other post by itself and is beyond the scope of this article, but for basic purposes use SEOBook.com’s keyword suggestion tool to look for top searches. Find several key phrases that people are searching for, then head over to Ask.com and use their “expand your search” and “narrow your search” tools to find what else people are typing in. You can also use Google’s Keyword Tool for more suggestions.

Take the top 3-5 phrases and take a look at the ads that show up on Google’s Sponsored Links. Read their salesletters and note down the good parts, and figure out how you could improve on their offers.

•    Can you offer more credibility with your product?
•    Can you provide a better offer than they do?
•    What about your pricing? (Don’t slash your prices to undercut the competition; instead, figure out how you can provide more value for the same price by giving bonuses and such)

Now is a great time to start building your swipe file as well.

Step 2: Set up the website for your product or service. Duration: 1-2 days

Start writing your salesletter by using the bits and pieces you like from your competitors. Rewrite it so you’re not outright plagiarizing their work. Your salesletter should be about 300-700 words long and must be able to:

•    Attract your customer’s attention
•    Gain their Interest
•    Build their Desire for the product
•    Inspire them into Action

At this stage, you don’t need to hire a copywriter just yet. This four step process, AIDA for short, is a fundamental copywriter’s formula for a good salesletter and should do for now.

Set up your website so it flows like this:

If you have Dreamweaver, go ahead and use it to create your sales page; if not, a tool such as Weebly should do the trick. Get a “Buy Now” button by doing a Google image search and link it to a page with a form that asks for the buyer’s name and email address.

No need to pay for Aweber or GetResponse just yet. Instead, sign up for an account at CampaignMonitor and use their code for a form. You only pay when you use their service to send emails, so you can use them to capture leads and export the email addresses once you need them. Formspring and WuFoo are also a great alternatives for those who need more fields in addition to the name and email address.

But instead of taking their payment details, take them to a page that says your product has been sold out and that they’ll be notified by email once it’s available. If you’re selling an info-product, you can say that the 1st edition is off the market and you are now working on the 2nd edition. Install Google Analytics and set up goal conversions on your “sold out” page. This will allow you to see how much people “bought” your product.

Doing the above requires some technical skills, but readers of Geekpreneur don’t really have much of a problem with that, do they?

Step 3: Set up your AdWords account and test your product. Duration: Less than 1 day

Once you’ve signed up for Google AdWords and put in your credit card information, set up a new campaign and create two ads to test. Write your ads so that it highlights your differentiators. Write a compelling headline, use the first 35 characters to highlight the main benefit for your customer and the second 35 characters to state your offer.

Use keywords that have high commercial intent (to determine this, use Microsoft’s AdLabs tool). It’s ideal to aim for the first or second position with your ads; however, if your keyword is the slightest bit competitive expect to pay at least a dollar per click for positions 1-3. This could get very expensive, and since we don’t know what type of ads work just yet, we’ll save this for when we’ve actually gathered enough data.

For our test purposes, set your maximum CPC at $1.00. You’ll only pay approximately half of that — that way, your $500 budget will get you around 1,000 visitors which should be sufficient data during this test period.

Step 4: Test, tweak, and then test some more. Duration: 5-7 days

Take your overall budget and spread that out over 5 days to determine your campaign’s daily budget. At the end of each day, look at your click-through rate for each of the ads. If one ad seems to be pulling much better than the other, delete the less-effective ad and use the one that gets more clicks. If you created a different campaign for search network and campaign network, switch all your ads to the one that pulls better.

If your product doesn’t seem like it’s bringing in “sales” (you’ll know through Google Analytics), don’t give up yet. Here’s the process of the things you should test before determining your test a failure:

It might be that your ad is irrelevant to your product. If it’s not the ad, then maybe the salesletter is the problem and you might have to test a different offer. Maybe have a better guarantee (“we’ll refund your money and pay you an extra $50 if you don’t like it” is a great guarantee) or include more bonuses. And if it’s not the offer, maybe you need to sell a different product altogether.

It’s only once you’ve gone through your ads, your offers, and your products will you be able to determine whether that particular market will bite. If the market is the problem, then maybe your business idea isn’t all that great and you need to move on to the next one.

Conclusion

The entire process takes about a week, but can be done in as little as 5 days if you know what you’re doing. Carefully monitoring the results will give you all sorts of useful data — the type of headline that works, what type of offer brings in the most customers, and you can even test the title of your product through this method.

You will also get an idea of your cost-per-conversion, or how much it’ll cost you before someone decides to purchase. This should help you identify a reasonable price for your product.

And there we go. Much more can be written about this method but this should do for now. Have you tried a similar method before? What sort of results did you get? Can you share your tips with the Geekpreneur audience? Discuss and comment below!

Uh..Bob

You’re two weeks away from launch date.

You’ve slaved and toiled and labored for months, and now here you are. Finally, with your latest product ready to roll. It could be a book you self-published, it could be a new website for your business, it could be software which took you months to develop. It could be anything, really.

You decided to outsource your web design, and the Indian guy you hired on E-Lance did a surprisingly good job for the $150 you’ve paid him. You snagged a snappy domain name, and now you’re sitting down in front of your laptop to write your salesletter.

Then… Blank.

*****

Outsourcing is the latest craze in the business world this 2008. The 4-Hour Workweek, the national bestseller by Tim Ferriss, dedicates an entire chapter to the art of outsourcing. It’s a crucial element in his step-by-step process into becoming part of the “New Rich” defined as “those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using…time and mobility.”

Let’s face it: sometimes, we just can’t be bothered to put in the hours to learn a new skill. Studying HTML and CSS will eat up a crapload of your time — time that could be better spent working on your business, instead of in it (which is the central theme of business bestseller The E-Myth). Many of us also do not have any artistic talent whatsoever — outsourcing your logo design often pays off in the long-run than to have lousy branding that could cost you thousands of dollars in lost sales.

But what about copywriting? What your website says about your product generates customer interest and persuades the purchase. This is the make-or-break point of your website. Should you put your best salesman in the hands of a complete stranger?

As a freelance copywriter, “Is it really necessary to outsource my copywriting?” is a question I’ve encountered several times. I put together a list of six pros and cons to ponder about when it comes to writing copy to hopefully help you towards a decision.

Pro: Land a professional copywriter and you will get professional results.

Copy isn’t just about words.

While the words you choose are crucial, it’s more than just that. The purpose of effective copy is to build instant credibility, make a compelling statement, tell a persuasive story and last but not the least, get your reader to take action. It answers any objections your reader may come up with, increasing sales in the process and reducing the amount of returns and refunds.

A lot of my clients became clients simply because they have no idea what to write on their website. Many people make the mistake of thinking that their copy should be about them. They talk about the company and its history, or launch a tirade on the X-amount of features their product has. Professional copywriters know and understand that to get a person to buy, they must know the benefits of what you can offer them. People don’t buy quarter-inch drills — they buy quarter-inch holes.

A professional copywriter will take your product, understand the benefits it has to offer, and most importantly communicate those benefits to your readers in such a way that it inspires action from them. Many times, the sales you’ll achieve from hiring a professional copywriter far outweighs the cost of hiring him in the first place.

Con: Professional copywriters who know their worth are very expensive.

Michel Fortin charges at least $3,000 per job. Dan Kennedy costs about $9,600 per day.  The rates for other, lesser-known copywriters are lower, but you can expect to be billed at least a thousand dollars for one quality salesletter.

This can be out of the budget for the startup, who often is bootstrapping his operations and can’t afford to eat up a huge chunk of their budget on any one endeavor. Hiring a professional copywriter is sometimes more of a gamble than an investment, as you don’t have a guarantee that sales will come in as a result of hiring him.

Pro: You’re focused on the things that matter.

Marketing/advertising and copywriting are two very different things. Marketing and advertising brings people to look at your website, where your copy can do its job of convincing the customer why he or she needs your product.

Both activities eat up a lot of time, money and effort. You might have the best salesletter on your website, but if you don’t market the damned site itself then nobody’s going to see it. Outsource your copywriting, and your priorities can be spent on growing your business and selling more of your products.

Con: Quality copywriters are hard to find.

On the other hand, there’s no sense in spending all that time marketing your website if it can’t do a good job of selling your product. Almost anybody can come up with hype-laden copywriting and outdated methods of persuasion, and many groups of people are particularly turned off by this type of copy. They do not want to feel like they’re being marketed to, even though they are.

In addition, copywriters who REALLY know their stuff are quite a rare breed. I love the folks at Elance, but a majority of them come from third world countries without English as the first language. I’m not bagging on these people (after all, I come from such a country myself) but the chances of you hiring an overnight copywriter are much, much higher. If they’re making basic grammatical mistakes, how can you expect them to write effective sales copy for you?

Pro: You know your product well.

Who better to write about your product than you?

Since you know the ins-and-outs of your product, then maybe you’re the best person to communicate those benefits to your customers especially if you yourself are part of your target market. You will know their pain points and the specific problems they encounter, and you’ll be able to express how it is exactly your product can help them get rid of these annoyances.

Knowing the product inside and out, you’ll also be able to highlight specific features and tell your readers the exact benefit for them. A copywriter who has two weeks to write something about your product might not be able to dig in as deep as he should be into your business, and might miss a couple of important points that he should otherwise emphasize.

Con: You know your product too well.

If the hypothetical situation in the beginning of this post resonates with you, then chances are it’s because you know your product too well. Can such a thing really happen?

Unfortunately, yes. It’s tough to realize it, but your mind could be so entrenched in the details of your product that looking at it from an outsider’s perspective is damned near impossible. Much more writing about it so an outsider will understand. It’s now your baby, and nothing less than perfect is good enough for it. So you delay releasing it and work on your copy for a little bit. Then you realize you’re not satisfied, so you delay it again. All because of that oh-so-evasive salesletter.

You could also be so overworked from making your product that the last thing you want to think about is writing the copy for it. You could be so sick of thinking and writing about the topic your ebook is about that you just want to flush everything down the toilet. Good luck writing persuasive copy then (it is exactly because of this why I’m an advocate of writing your copy first, or at least before you’re in too deep of the product creation process).

*****

All in all, the decision whether to write your own copy or hire a copywriter to do it is up to you. Thoughts? Post them in the comment section, folks.

Freelance long enough and at some point someone will tell you that it costs ten times more to find a new client than to keep an old one. Or twenty times more. Or a hundred. Or just more than you can afford.

Whatever the real figure, retaining clients who have already trusted you with their work is always going to be cheaper than advertising for a replacement. More importantly, it’s a lot easier. That’s because if it’s a strain for us to find clients, it’s no easier for buyers to find reliable freelancers. Sometimes, all it takes is a small amount of regular nudging to ensure that a buyer who came to you once keeps coming back for more.

Here are some of the ways you can painlessly poke your clients in the ribs:

Provide Regular Valuable Information
In the good old days, websites would ask users to tick a box showing that they agreed to receive a regular newsletter packed with fantastic tips, advice and special offers.

The good old days are still here.

Companies are still using services like Aweber and ConstantContact to send out electronic newsletters and promotional emails.

To be effective, those emails have to be genuinely interesting. They have to provide information that the reader can use — tips to get more out of a product are always a good idea — or special offers that feel exclusive and will save the reader money. They also have to be regular. Once a month is usually the right frequency to keep you fresh in a client’s mind without bothering them.

You can write a corporate blog as well, of course. That can be useful too. But clients have to choose to visit your blog or to hit the subscribe button. Signing them up to receive your newsletter comes when they’re at their hottest and brings your message — and your reminder — directly to them.

Send Cards
Sometimes, the smallest thing can be enough to remind a client that you’re still around, that the two of you have a relationship… and that he should be giving you more work.

A Christmas card or a birthday card can do it.

One site that makes that a little easier is JackCards.com. This lets you enter your clients’ birthday details, choose the cards a year in advance and receive them stamped, addressed and ready to mail just before the event. All you’ll have to do is write your greeting — and add that you’re still available for big projects that pay well.

Send Gifts
If you’re really feeling generous, you could go a little further and send out presents. That costs a lot more but it also makes a much deeper impression. Restrict it to your most valuable clients — that 20 percent responsible for 80 percent of your income — and you should find that it pays you in spades.

Google is one company that’s very good at doing this. Each year, it sends out freebies to its top AdSense publishers and advertisers. Past gifts for advertisers have included a mini-fridge, while publishers have enjoyed digital picture frames, wireless mouse kits and 2GB memory cards.

Note that each of these gifts combines two elements. The items themselves are useful and imaginative (no ballpoint pens or printed coffee mugs from the Googleplex); and they have Google’s logo on them. That might seem a little crass but it’s tastefully done, and it’s where Google gets back part of the value of the gift (the part that goes beyond gratitude.) Every time the recipient uses the present, he remembers the company who sent it.

That’s advertising worth paying for.

PersonalizationMall.com is one option if you want to follow Google’s footsteps but their selection is a bit dull. A better choice might be to ask Etchstar to scratch your logo onto an electronic product, or if you’ve got more than 50 clients you want to please, ask Gelaskins to create a unique design for an iPod Nano.

Meet Them
We only said that these were “almost” effortless ways to keep your clients. When you’re used to working with people through email, telephone and Instant Messaging, a face-to-face meeting can seem a little strange — and a lot of work.

But it’s also very powerful.

Nothing cements a business relationship harder than actually meeting, talking and tossing around ideas.

Obviously, if you’re working in Idaho and your clients are in New York, San Diego and Burkina Faso, that’s not going to be easy. But when one of them happens to passing through, or if you’re visiting West Africa, it pays to make the effort, meet and sip some beans.

Make Sure They’re Getting Results
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how great the gift you send, how useful the information you supply or how well you get on over a cup of coffee and a croissant. If your client isn’t making money — or doesn’t expect to — you won’t either.

The best way to make sure that your clients will come back to you then is the simplest: ask how they’re getting on. Try to find out what the results are from your work and see if you can come up with ways to improve them.

That’s not always easy. It requires a little tact. You want to sound helpful, not nosey. But get it right — and make your clients rich — and beyond doing the job, you won’t have to make any effort at all to keep them.

Sales people can take a lot of flak in a tech business. They’re not geeky enough to build the products. They’re not creative enough to design the brand. They wear shirts and ties while everyone else is swanning around in trendy shorts and tees.

And they spend all day on the phone annoying people with their sales pitches… before ending the month with the sorts of bonuses that make the rest of us green with envy.

But we have to admit they deserve it. Winning sales isn’t easy, and tracking down leads can take a lot of time and effort.

Salesconx.com is trying to make things easier. It lets US-based sales professionals introduce the people they know to other sales professionals — and pocket a fee for the service.

Psst… Wanna Buy a Used Client?
The examples the site gives are fairly innocuous. One case study describes how a furniture salesman noticed that a telecoms seller was looking for leads for his communication equipment. Knowing that his client needed that sort of product to put on his new desk too, the furniture seller made the introduction and earned a $100 commission on a sale of $5,000.

No one was hurt and everyone gained… provided the communications equipment does the job and works better than a couple of cans and a piece of string.

But it’s easy to see the problem here. A referrer can tell the seller that “This company needs services like yours.” That’s valuable. To the buyer though all he can say is: “This person is selling the stuff you’re looking for.” He can’t say whether the product is good, the service helpful and the technician knowledgeable. If he’s being paid for the introduction though, he’s certainly not going to say anything negative.

Which makes you wonder what the buyer is getting that he couldn’t have found by opening the Yellow Pages. He’ll have to sit through a sales pitch that will explain why the seller’s product is better than everyone else’s but if the pitch is true and the buyer is smart, he’ll know that anyway.

At best, Salesconx makes sure that some sellers get the chance to offer their product to a buyer in the market. At worst though, it commoditizes relationships, leads to clients being pestered by salesmen and generates bad buying decisions prompted by unfounded recommendations.

And for sellers, it isn’t really necessary to offer cash for leads. Social networking has made it very easy for marketers — and small business owners — to find people who know people with money to burn.

There are really three options: MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s Bonds are Strong… and Free
While all of those sites can be used for professional networking, the most effective when it comes to driving sales is usually LinkedIn. MySpace tends to be young, and while Facebook has been heavily hyped as a multi-billion dollar commercial marketing hub, the results have been fairly disappointing. It’s hard to find a company that boasts about all the sales they’ve won by networking on Facebook — let alone advertising on it.

LinkedIn though was designed for professionals. Everyone on the site understands that everyone else is there to meet people, win jobs and make professional connections. They’re willing to help not for a cash fee but because they hope that someone else will do the same thing for them.

That sounds like recommendations are being offered for rewards that are even more valuable than the sort of commissions tossed around on Salesconx, but on LinkedIn buyers can trace back the connection to the referrer. That means that they can be reasonably certain that the referrer’s recommendations are grounded and they are more likely to trust the seller. As a way of selling, it’s a lot more powerful than bribing someone to give you a phone number.

It’s also a lot slower though, and that’s the downside. Networking on LinkedIn takes time and effort. You have to create a complete and enticing profile, one that mentions everything you’ve ever done and every place you’ve ever worked in the same way that a resume does. You also have to link up with just about everyone you’ve ever met. The more connections you have, the greater the chances of finding clients.

And you need to be active too.

That’s the stage that many people on LinkedIn neglect. They assume that it’s enough to show off their experience and wait for the offers to roll in. That’s a poor strategy even for job-seekers. To be successful on LinkedIn, you also have to join groups, work the networks and keep in touch with the people you connect to.

You have to schmooze as well as solicit help and most importantly, you have to identify the people in the network who enjoy acting as brokers and are keen to lend a hand.

It’s not as simple as paying for introductions, but it is a lot more valuable… and it’s a lot more likely to get results too.

Brand. For some this 5 letter word might be of least importance but when it comes to business, without an effective brand name success is hard to come by. Brand name and brand images are created in many ways. Some make use of images, some slogans and some simply the name of the businesses. Brand name is what sets businesses apart from their competitors. For example Wal Mart has successfully created a brand “Always Low Prices“ which is what customers mostly recognize Wal Mart with – Low Prices.

Although branding is one of the most important aspect when it comes to business, most businesses seem to let go off this important element with time. As the business grows, individuals and companies rely and start focusing on so many different things that they eventually let the brand name of the company erode. In this post we will talk about some signs of brand erosion. Some of these might not seem to directly relate to brand erosion but still is an important element when it comes to brand building and brand sustainability.

1. Losing Existing Customers

This is a sure sign of brand erosion which directly hampers your business. One of the reasons most businesses lose existing clients is simply because the brand image or the name isn’t conveying the central idea of your business. Let’s take Wal Mart for example again. Wal Mart’s slogan “ Always Low Prices “ relays the message to the customers that they will find low prices on everything at their store and this is what customers relate Wal Mart with. If your customers start taking their business to your competitors, that’s a sure sign of brand erosion.

2. Decline in Customer Loyalty

One of the main reason customers switch brands is because of the promises that is being broken. As a business you make promise to your prospective customers and that is how your brand is recognized. Once your brand message fails to keep up with what has been promised, customers will be forced to look for other alternatives that support their needs better.

3. Wide Product Line

This is something that most businesses don’t realize. Most businesses grow so fast that they often fail to give time to the initial product or service of the company. As a business grows, it is natural to have an urge to start a new product or widen your existing product and or service line. But with extended product line comes increased pressure and increased demands and expectations. A wide product line isn’t always good. Sometimes it is best best to narrow your focus on one thing than on hundreds.

4. Failure To Convert Employees as Brand Ambassadors

Most people argue that the most valuable asset of a business is it’s customers, but I contradict that notion. I think the most valuable and integral part of any business is it’s employees. If your business isn’t catering to your employees needs it becomes impossible to meet your customers needs. Your employees are the best resources that can help you your brand. If the employees are unhappy and their needs aren’t met then they fail to promote the business they work for. If your employees aren’t putting in good words for who they work, it’s a sure sign of brand erosion.

5. Stale Product

Although this might appear contradicting to what I had pointed out in #3, it’s not. There is a difference between a wide line of products and stale products. A wide line of product is when a company introduces new products whereas a stale product is something that the company has failed to jazz it up since the product was launched. Customers like what appeals to their eyes. Anything and everything can generate attention only for so long. Once a product has been around for a while, it needs to go through some changes. The change can be in the way it functions, or the way it looks. If a product is stale and doesn’t look any different than what it did a year ago, your brand name is bound to sink.

6. Unmet Demands

This is a no brainer. If you have a business that provides it’s customers with a certain kind of product or service, your customer are going to expect you to do just that. Branding isn’t just about marketing and slogan and images. Branding is about reputation, ability to take responsibility and potential to fulfill the demand for a particular product or service within a market. If you fail to meet demand in your market your customers will fail to recognize you as a brand.

7. Insufficient Resources

The other most important thing for the existence of a business is resources. Different business have different needs and different markets. It’s been seen time after time that a business will start out successfully but over the years fails to climb the success ladder. One of the reasons as you can imagine is insufficient resources. Your customers are your’s because they believe in you and your brand. If you can’t keep up with their needs and demands due to insufficient resources, your business is sure to take the plunge, thus hurting the brand name.

Branding is extremely important in business world. Without a brand name it is hard to be recognized. If you were to walk on a street at night and you had two convenience store – Seven Eleven and something else, which one would you choose? My point exactly. It takes time to build a brand and one of the biggest loss a business can suffer from is brand erosion.

Back in the good old days, it was enough to produce an idea, stick “.com” after the company name, and wait for venture capitalists to throw suitcases full of money at you.

You didn’t need a revenue model, profit predictions or anything more than a basic business plan. All you had to do was declare that you were going to give away whatever you produced for free while advertisers pick up the bill, and investors would assume that companies would line up to give you their marketing dollars.

It didn’t quite work that way.

Once those early tech companies had finished giving away their investors’ money, all that was left was a pile of P45s… and the idea among consumers that they can have everything they want without paying for it.

For entrepreneurs who now want to charge for their products — especially if they’re Web-based — that creates a giant headache.

It Looked Good on Paper…
One company that provides a lesson in what businesses need to do to make ad-supported freebies a success is ABS Notebooks. Their product didn’t take years of coding to create and it’s unlikely to have absorbed millions of dollars during the development phase. It’s a notebook for students… with ads on the subject dividers.

The product itself is very simple. So is the reason it works, but it’s a principle that often gets forgotten when businesses start handing out objects to promote themselves.

The item that carries the ads is genuinely useful.

The company was started in 2006 by Avi Steinberg and Alejandro Bremer, two Kellogg Business School alumni who had grown fed up watching advertisers give students objects that no one wanted as a form of promotion.

“They were tired of seeing advertising dollars going to make key chains and cup holders, and decided to channel these dollars into a creative yet functional product: a notebook,” explains Ken Harris, a friend who was brought in to help launch the business. “[I]t was an opportunity to do good by students and help marketers optimize their brand messages while creating powerful brand experiences.”

After starting with 8,000 notebooks, to which the company gave the sexy name “Shadow,” ABS Notebooks will reach over 700,000 students nationwide in Fall 2008 and more than a million for the January 2009 edition. Advertisers have included Ford, Geico, Discover, Wrigley, P&G and Unilever. Ken Harris wouldn’t reveal how much the company charges for advertising but noted that because it’s a premium product, their fees a little higher than most other youth-oriented marketing vehicles and the campaigns are customized depending on the target area. The results for advertisers though have been impressive. Brand awareness has increased by between 56 percent and 146 percent; Wrigley’s Altoids saw a return on investment sixteen times the amount they paid for the campaign.

The Ads are Valuable Too
Part of that is down to the unique nature of the market. Students might not have high incomes but they spend everything they earn, and their wallets will grow once they graduate. They’re new consumers who tend to stay loyal to the brands they meet at school and they have close relationships characterized by strong peer pressure which makes viral marketing easy and natural.

But the success of ABS Notebooks also has much to do with the nature of the product. Unlike lanyards, cup-holders and key-chains, students are accustomed to paying for a notebook, so the item that carries the ads is likely to be picked up and used. In fact, according to the company’s website, each ad will be seen an average of 96 times over a four-month period.

“[I]t has to be something of value.” says Ken Harris. “ If your ‘something’ is just free, that’s when you’re just responding to price-sensitivity.”

Interestingly, the nature of the ads is important too. Had the ads been scattered at random throughout the notebook, there’s a good chance that they might have been removed by students who found them intrusive. Instead, the ads only appear on dividers and covers, and many provide discount coupons, giving students an added incentive to keep them and act on them. (STA Travel’s ad even includes a crossword, ensuring that students both look at the ad and keep their note pages doodle-free during lectures.)

It’s a model that Ken believes could work anywhere provided the product is valuable and the ads supportive of the item’s use rather than obstructive.

“Once you are able to identify the right ‘something’ and find a healthy balance between two complimentary party’s goals, you’ve got yourself an opportunity,” he says.

Photography: Leo Reynolds

No two businesses are ever completely alike but all entrepreneurs have at least one thing in common: they all have to decide on the amount to charge their customers. That’s never easy. Pitch too high and you’ll struggle to pick up customers. Pitch too low and while you’ll pick up lots of business, you’ll struggle to make it pay.

Even before you decide on the amount you want to charge though, you first have to decide how you want to charge. Do you want the client to pay according to the project or do you want to set a fee that depends on the amount of time it takes you to complete the work?

Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. Charge by the project and the client can see exactly how much the work will cost. There’s no chance of any nasty surprises when you present the bill and you don’t have to worry about an argument with someone who’s convinced that it’s possible to build a website from scratch in half an hour and can’t understand why you’ve charged for three days’ labor.

The time pressure too will be lessened. Dawdle while you work and you’re only wasting your time. That’s bad enough but it’s your choice and you’ll end up paying for it. Take lots of breaks while you’re charging by the hour and either you have to keep turning off a stopwatch or you’ll end up bumping the price until it’s no longer competitive. That could cost you your reputation, something much more valuable than the price of a coffee break.

How Long is Too Long?
The biggest danger of charging by the project though is that you can underestimate the amount of time it will take to complete the work. Sometimes you can get it very wrong indeed. Programmers asked to write scripts, for example, can provide quotes on the basis that the work would take two days only to find it takes four. That would be two whole days without income and no way of recovering. Once the price has been agreed, you can’t return to your client and say that the work is taking longer than you expected and that you’d like to charge more.

So charging by the project makes everything clear for the client but not for you; charging by the hour returns the risk to the client but weakens the attractiveness of your offer.

In practice though, for successful businesses there’s often little difference between charging by the hour and charging by the project. That’s because in both instances, the company has a good idea of how long the work is going to take. If a business owner knows that a job will take half a day, for example, and he wants to earn $150 dollars in that time then he can either charge $37.50 an hour or he can ask for $150 for the project. When the time estimate is clear, the result should be the same.

The best time to display your prices as an hourly rate then is when you don’t know how long a project will take. SetYourRate.com, for example, is a UK-based freelancers’ service that mostly offers coaching and teaching. All the prices here are quoted by the hour. In part that’s because a lesson lasts a set amount of time but even graphic designers and handymen are quoting their prices by the hour here because they have no idea what sort of projects they’re going to be receiving.

Give the Client a Clue
Making the hourly rates clear when the work is unclear means that the buyer has to rely on his or her own estimate of the size of the project. The negotiations then are not about your fee but about the time it will take for you to complete the work — a much easier field for you to negotiate on.

So choosing whether to charge by the hour or by the project should be fairly straightforward: when you know how long the project will take, charge by the project so that the client will know how much he can expect to pay. When you don’t know what sort of projects you’ll be receiving or how long they’ll take, provide an indication of the price by giving an hourly quote.

Setting that rate though is a whole other question.

Looking at what competitors charge is a good place to begin. Again, freelancers’ sites with different types of jobs like SetYourRate.com or Elance.com can be good places to do research but make sure that you remember that prices can differ greatly from location to location — as can costs.

And while you’re looking at these sites — especially those that offer coaching services — pay attention too to the range of different jobs on offer. You might well find that people there are offering a service that you hadn’t considered. You might not want to look after small pets but if you know how to complete tax returns, that could be something you sell by the hour too.

Image by: lumaxart

That videoconferencing, email and chat have made it possible to work with anyone anywhere has opened up all sorts of fantastic opportunities. An entrepreneur in California, for example, can team up with a programmer in India, as well as a designer in England and a specialist in Spain to create a unique product in which they all have a share.

And they could work together for years without ever buying a plane ticket to fly halfway around the world, stay in a hotel and meet in person.

But working as a virtual team has its challenges. Bringing people from different places together is relatively easy; keeping them together is not. These are some of the most important things that can turn a virtual team into a real disaster.

1. Irregular Contact
Teamwork is always about communication but when the team is working in the same building, that communication comes naturally. Without that contact, team members quickly drift apart and soon start thinking as individuals instead of as vital elements of a group effort.

When that happens, it’s not long before everyone is working towards different goals — which means that no goals are reached at all.

The best solution is to fix a time to “meet” regularly. That could be a weekly phone chat or a morning videoconference, but it should be rigid. Even if there’s nothing new to discuss, just coming together at a set time to provide updates and swap ideas can stop the team falling apart.

2. Lack of Leadership
Equality might work in communes but when you’re building a project, you need a project leader, someone who’s prepared to take charge and make sure that everything works smoothly.

That will require effort. It means checking up on what each team member has been doing, solving problems before they slow the entire group down and ensuring that everyone knows what everyone else is up to. The leader will also need to set the times for the team to meet and chase up team members who say they can’t make it.

The team might be scattered in different places, but everyone should know where the center is.

3. Lack of Responsibility
While one team member will have overall responsibility, each team member should also feel that they have responsibility over their own area. That’s always important when delegating but it’s particularly important with a scattered team when the leader isn’t directly on hand to answer every question and constantly check progress.

Part of that comes from smart leadership — by delegating just enough responsibility to give each team member freedom but not enough that they wander off and get lost. But it also comes from clever hiring. Usually when you’re looking to build a team, it pays to find people who are good at working together.

When you’re looking to build a virtual team, you have to find people who are good at working alone too.

4. Sudden Disappearances
But not too alone. The biggest responsibility that every team member has is to the rest of the team. If a team member has a tendency to forget that, it’s always going to come out during virtual teamwork.

It’s just too easy to ignore the rest of the team if you never actually have to see them.

When emails go unanswered, phone calls are never returned and deadlines are missed without even so much as an excuse, it’s probably best to start looking for a replacement rather than waste time trying to get that team member to stay in the club.

5. Lack of Member Information
One of the reasons that virtual teams are more vulnerable than real teams is that the team members don’t really know each other. That makes the social penalties for letting down other team members less severe and it also reduces the social rewards that come from impressing people you respect.

A solution is to not only make sure that everyone is aware of what each other is doing for the project but also enable them to see what each team member has done in the past. Understanding that the project’s programmer, for example, was responsible for building a tool that the designer uses is more likely to motivate that designer to keep working well. The more pride the team members feel in the team, the more they’ll work to keep the team successful.

And you don’t need to strain yourself to make this happen. The very first “meeting” between the team members could start with an introduction and everyone could then exchange Facebook addresses. Or you could put up a website on which everyone places a profile — as well as the work they’re collaborating on.

It would be great to be able to say that virtual teamwork is the perfect answer to long distances, that all of the communication tools now available mean that location doesn’t matter — only skills do. But that isn’t quite the case. While virtual teams do work, they also need special attention to keep them working — and to prevent them from dying.

[tags] virtual teams [/tags]

Photography: Brian Vallelunga

It’s been called the iPod for book-lovers. But if Apple really had produced a hand-held digital reader capable of downloading and displaying books it’s unlikely that it would have looked like an Etch-A-Sketch for grown ups. It would have been sleek, cool and might even have turned trendy teens into avid readers. Well, maybe.

And yet despite its looks, Kindles sold out within hours of the launch… which does make you wonder about Amazon’s production figures. The shortages meant that on eBay, the readers were being offered for up to $1,500, more than three times their $399 retail price.

Booklovers, it seems, are prepared to forgive the Kindle’s uninspiring appearance when they can fill it with hundreds of inspiring volumes — and at $9.99 each.

Kindle Lights the Publishing Revolution
But if Kindle’s aim was to revolutionize the way people read books, it hasn’t done it. Most readers still prefer paper and ink, and bibliophiles like to admire books on shelves more than they want to see lists on a screen. But look a little closer and you might find that Kindle does have the power to create a real revolution — in publishing, and especially in publishing for entrepreneurs.

Kindle’s Digital Text Platform lets anyone make a book available for sale through the Kindle store. Authors can set their own price, and royalties — at 35 percent — are much higher than those paid by mainstream publishers.

Like any self-publishing venture, seeing your book on Kindle isn’t quite the same as seeing it in a bookstore, but seeing the figures on the checks from Amazon is certainly nice — and seeing that people are reading it can help to build the sort of fan base that’s vital to a personal brand.

And it seems to be remarkably easy to generate sales.

Stephen Windwalker, an author and blogger at indiekindle, reports that in December 2007, he placed three short-form articles on Kindle. He sold more than fifteen copies within the first couple of weeks — and a hundred more by the middle of January 2008.

“I did nothing to market them other than fill in keywords and categories for the Amazon search engine,” he writes.

It’s possible that Windwalker is being modest. His website reports that it’s had more than 1,400 readers in the first couple of weeks of March which might suggest that having a focused, if small, reader base — such as by developing a reasonably successful blog — is a good start when self-publishing on Kindle.

How Do Authors Sign Kindles?
It is clear then that selling reading material on Kindle might have as much to do with online marketing skills as traditional book-selling strategies. Kindle authors can’t do signings but they can keyword their works carefully, place articles in different categories to see which generate the most sales and track the results.

That’s the sort of thing that online publishers have been doing for years to make sure that their pages are generating advertising revenue.

The best strategy for someone looking to sell through Kindle then looks like being to build an online presence first; offer higher valuable content through Kindle to see which categories and keywords are the most lucrative for your field; and then expand to full-length e-books and guides.

And that’s when things can start to get interesting.

The ease of publishing ebooks means that they’ve had a bad press. The Web is filled with 30-page, pulp-filled volumes that promise great wealth and cost the earth. It’s one of the reasons that major publishers have for the most part steered clear of letting readers download books even as the music and movie industries have reluctantly made their peace with the digital age.

But self-published books on Kindle stand alongside works by Dan Patterson and J.K. Rowling. They don’t look like they’re self-published so they don’t carry the stigma of either self-publishing or the sort of ebooks that are marketed by long, one-page sales letters.

That means that smart Geekpreneurs could put their ideas and strategies into book form, write about their approach on their blogs and websites, sell individual chapters to hone their marketing… then start selling their books through Kindle.

And if their book takes off, they might well find that they’re getting offered a print contract too.

[tags] selling on kindle, kindle [/tags]

Every great product starts with a great idea. And every great idea starts with a tiny spark. When you’re looking to make money as a geek, the first step is to get those sparks flying. Here are 30 sources of inspiration that can help your idea catch fire.

1. Google
You could just toss your thoughts into the search engine but that might be pretty frustrating. A better place to look for inspiration on Google is Google Labs. This is where the company tries out its own ideas, most of which never get big. Some of those ideas are bit odd but a few just need a push in the right direction. Maybe you could pick one up and supply a shove.

2. My Programs
One thing you’ll notice on Google is that many of the tools you use on your computer are migrating to the Web. So take a look through your program list and see what other pieces of software could be offered online.

3. Internet Forums
Internet forums are often filled with people asking for help to solve their problems. Whether that’s advice on unblocking a sink or a how-to for unlocking an iPhone, it’s always possible to make money by offering solutions.

4. Airport Lounge
Forums are where people hope to find solutions; airport lounges are where they find problems. They’re places where people are looking for ways to fill empty hours so next time you’re waiting for a flight, fill yours by watching how they do it… then try to think of ways to help them do it better.

5. Blog Comments
Solving problems is one way to come up with business ideas. Another is just to give the public what it wants. Whenever a piece of technology gets discussed in a blog, people often respond by writing what they wish the gadget did. Read the comments… and get to work.

6. Libraries
Sometimes it’s not the people that provide inspiration but the place. A library can be a good spot to clear out the distractions and let the ideas pour out. Unless you’re one of those types who prefers a bit of noise…

7. Cafes
The alternative to calm and quiet is often Starbucks. If you’re the sort of person who tends to daydream when there are no distractions then try working somewhere that forces you to focus… like a lively café with plenty of new nomadics.

8. Hiking Trails
Or you can be a nomad yourself and hit the trails. Even if the birds and bees don’t inspire you, the fact that once you’ve started walking there’s no going back until you’ve reached the end means that you’ll have no choice but to think about ways to make your business big.

9. Press Releases
They’re rarely riveting reading, but press releases announce the arrival of new ideas into the marketplace. They can also give you new plans for ways to build on those ideas.

10. Children
Children can make a game out of an old shoe and a piece of string. They think out of the box naturally because no one’s told them yet what the box looks like. Spend time with a bunch of kids, watch how they squeeze new uses out of old items and think about the different ways that you can make the familiar new.

11. Supermarkets
Coming up with the product idea is only the beginning; you also have to market it. One of the best places to find ways of making your item stand out is to browse the supermarket shelves. As you’re filling your cart, look at the strategies that different companies use to attract shoppers’ attention.

12. Cereal Packets
And when you get home, stare at your cereal packet. You’d be hard pressed to find a better example of careful design, created specifically to appeal to a particular group of buyers. Note too, how companies like Kelloggs form joint ventures with other companies, like Disney, that appeal to the same market.

13. Cinemas
You might think that a cinema is the last place to go when you’re looking for inspiration for a money-making geek idea, but actually movie theaters have a lesson for anyone interested in earning extra income. They might market themselves as places to see films but almost half their profits come from the giant mark-ups they add to the popcorn and the soda. Sometimes, the most valuable idea isn’t the product but what you offer when people come to get it.

14. A Notebook
Yes, it’s old fashioned but it can still work. Grab a pencil and a blank page and start sketching what you’d like your business or product to look like. You might just be surprised at how much you already know.

15. Design Stores
A design store is obviously a good place to look for inspiration if you’re wondering how to plan a room or thinking about how a product should look. But even just paying attention to the way designers have thought about the way an item should be used might tell you something about what people want to do… and can’t do yet.

16. Japan
Not everything that starts in Japan makes it around the world. (There’s still something very Japanese about Hello Kitty.) But when it comes to comics, mobile phones, capsule hotels and a whole bunch of other strange things, Japan is way ahead of the pack. It’s one direction to look when you want to catch a wave.

17. Wall Street
This might not be the best time to be dabbling in finance, but Wall Street isn’t going anywhere and if you can meet a need here, you can do anything anywhere. Just ask Michael Bloomberg who made his billions not by trading, but by creating the financial software that let other people trade.

18. Siberia
We don’t literally mean that you should pack a hat and exile yourself to the icy wastes. But sometimes, a restriction can be the grandparent of invention. It was the desire to access email without using a computer, after all, that led to the Blackberry…

19. A Stopwatch
One restriction that’s easy to apply is to take away time. Tell yourself that you have two minutes to write down all the business ideas you can think of, then admire all the things that have been on your mind.

20. The Bathroom
Why the bathroom happens to be the world’s most successful source of ideas is anyone’s guess. But it certainly seems to work, and not just for Archimedes. Keep a pencil handy and you might even try mounting a whiteboard on the shower wall.

21. Second Life
One of the biggest challenges of coming up with new ideas is that so many have already been thought of that it’s tough to be a pioneer. So try heading to a new world — a place where there’s still plenty to be discovered and fortunes to be made: online.

22. Your Car
We’ve already seen how airport lounges can be good places to create products that fill empty time. But you don’t have to go that far. The morning commute leaves many people stuck with nothing to do but stare at rear fenders. What can you create to make the time pass faster?

23. Support Groups
Attend a book club, a group for hopeful screenwriters or even an organization for people who love growing orchids and you should spot a ton of opportunities to supply products that help people reach their goals. You’ll be selling to a very targeted market — but that just means there will be little competition.

24. Further Education Colleges
And the same is true of the sort of night and weekend classes that older folk use to pick up fun new skills. Sign up, look for ways to help students get more out of their studies… then market it nationwide.

25. Conferences
Obvious really, isn’t it? Business conferences are filled with people selling ideas — and sharing them too. They might be pricey but if you bring your own thoughts, you could find yourself creating a very inspiring partnership.

26. Art Galleries
Just as design centers can tell you something about function, so art can talk to you about form. Look at all the pretty shapes and colors in your local art gallery and you might find that you’re thinking about uses too.

27. Science Fiction
Was the clam-like design of the Flipper mobile phone really inspired by Star Trek? Probably. What other ideas can you steal by watching old sci-fi reruns?

28. Amazon
Bookstores contain shelves packed with volumes that are themselves packed with neat ideas. There’s no bigger bookstore than Amazon, so browse the books and read the reviews. At the very least, you might be inspired to write your own.

29. Blogs
Well, we had to say that, didn’t we? This blog aims to get your creative juices flowing — and there are a number of others doing similar things.

30. Your Life
The best ideas are usually the ones that come the easiest. What would make your life better? If you can’t find it, then build it… then share it.

[tags] geek money ideas [/tags]

There are lots of attractions to stepping out into the business world by yourself. There’s no more kowtowing to the boss. You get to set your own rates. You can take time off whenever you want.

And then there’s the knowledge that your career is in your hands and not dependent on anyone else.

That’s priceless.

But there are plenty of disadvantages too. Your business could fail. You might not be able to repay your loans. And you might hate it.

Freelancing can be a useful position between working for the Man and building your own business. It gives you the freedom to control your own career without the risks that come with employing people and renting office space.

If it works, you can grow. And if it doesn’t, it’s only a short step back to the corporate world.

But if freelancing is to work, it does require mastering skills beyond those you’re selling. Here are some of the things you need to know:

Know How to Charge
When it comes to charging for your work, there are two schools of thought: you can charge by the hour; or you can charge by the project.

Often, that can mean the same thing. One easy way to calculate a rate is to estimate how long a project is likely to take and decide how much you want to earn in that time. That’s your minimum rate. If the client isn’t prepared to pay that, you shouldn’t feel concerned about walking away.

But you can then take into account other factors, such as additional costs, what the market is charging for that sort of work, and even whether the client is demanding or easy to work with. Projects that require little time — like designing logos or writing short scripts — can still produce handsome hourly rates if you know that buyers are prepared to pay a lot of money for them.

The best strategy then is to decide first on your minimum rate, then see whether you have any reason to charge more.

Know When to Increase your Charge
The negotiations don’t end once the agreement has been made. Part of building a successful freelance business is keeping your clients. Ideally, you want to have a solid base of regular buyers who give you a stable income and a small number of changing clients who keep the work varied and interesting.

But once you’ve been with a client for a few years, there is a temptation to charge more. Inflation, after all, will have increased your costs and the client won’t expect your rate to stay the same forever.

The same principle that you applied to setting your rate applies to re-setting it though. You still have to figure out the minimum you want to earn for the time you’re investing, but bear in mind too that after working in the same field for a while, you might be able to complete the client’s projects faster anyway. The client might not be paying more, but you’ll still be earning more.

And consider too that if the client refuses to pay, replacing him could be a lot more expensive than keeping him at the original rate.

Know How to Market
After the skills you’re selling, marketing will be the most important knowledge you’ll have as a freelancer — at least until your book is full and you start turning down work.

That means knowing where to find clients, understanding what they’re looking for, creating a portfolio that raises eyebrows as well as interest, and knowing how to communicate professionally with leads so that you build trust and create the right impression.

Initially, the marketing can look difficult but every market will have plenty of examples that you can follow. One good strategy then is to identify the sellers who are already doing well and do what they do. When you’re doing well too, you can start adding your own unique touches.

Know How to Do the Tax Thing
Unfortunately, the “free” part of freelancing usually refers to the price clients expect to pay rather than your tax status. Like everyone else, freelancers have to report and cough up to the Inland Revenue.

That means spending time keeping books, collecting receipts and sending out invoices. Those expenses of time, paperwork and accounting fees have to be factored into your hourly rate.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that if you’re working from home, many of your household expenses will be deductible. These can include some of your mortgage, car expenses, electricity bill, your computer and Internet connection, and a whole host of other things. You might even get the sales tax back.

When those were things you were going to buy anyway, that means an instant discount on some of your purchases and some useful ways to cut your taxes. It might also mean that when it comes to taxes, profits can be a very bad thing — an approach to business that requires a whole new attitude.

There are a number of things you need to know to make freelancing work but there’s always a difference between knowledge and practice. The only way to know for sure how well you’ll get on as a freelancer is to try it and see.

[tags] freelancing [/tags]

It should be the ideal way to earn a living: identify what you like to do the most, then find a way of getting paid to do it.

Ideal… but hardly easy.

In fact, considering the small number of people who can honestly say that their job is their hobby, it looks more like a dream than a realistic way of building a career.

But it doesn’t have to be. With a little thought and quite a bit of preparation, it is possible to get paid to do the sort of thing that you’d otherwise pay to do. Here are some of them:

1. Turn your Passion into a Job
The most obvious method is probably the worst: to turn what you enjoy doing into a salary-paying, 9-5 job. That’s actually what everyone hopes to do when they choose a career — they try to pick something they like and won’t mind doing until it’s time to stop doing it and start collecting a pension instead.

So people who like playing around with film become video editors. Computer geeks become programmers, and arty types get jobs designing graphics.

The problem with this method is that in practice only a small fraction of what you’re doing every day will actually be made up of the tasks you like to do. You might enjoy playing around with Photoshop, but deleting red-eye from dating site pictures is no one’s idea of a hobby.

And besides, there’s a world of difference between doing something because you want to do it and doing something because your boss tells you to do it.

In general, although it’s a good idea to work in a field you like, it’s always much easier to find a way to enjoy your job than to find a job made up entirely of what you enjoy.

And even if you succeed, there’s always the risk that doing your hobby every day will soon beat the pleasure out of it.

2. Go Freelance
A better option then might be to keep your passion for your spare time and use it to bring in extra income. So people who like writing can work on their novel — or more likely, their blog. Programmers can work on the killer app that will give them independence, and photography enthusiasts can attend art fairs or sell on stock sites rather than market to wedding couples and aspiring actors.

The advantage of this method is that there are no risks and only benefits. If you don’t make money, you’ll have had a good time trying. And if you do, you’ll have a better understanding of what it takes to earn from your passion so that you can decide whether it really is something you want to do full-time.

Best of all though, because you’re not dependent on the income to pay the mortgage, you can turn down the sort of jobs that can make you regret ever picking up a camera, a paintbrush or a laptop.

3. Go Teach
Both working a regular job and freelancing mean getting paid to produce the goods. But people who are passionate about an activity usually want to share their enthusiasm.

You can get paid for that too… by spreading your knowledge to other people who want to learn about your hobby.

While sticking up notices might bring you in a few students, a better method is to talk to a local adult education center. These places tend to be subsidized by the local authority and often lack teachers. If you can come up with a good idea for a course — whether it’s on vegetarian cooking for beginners or how to program a video game — you should find that you can pick up a class.

And once you have a class, you should also find that you have a room full of potential buyers for any guides or products you create.

4. Enjoy the Marketing… or Outsource It
However you decide to monetize your hobby, there are always going to be aspects of the activity you like less. Taking pictures is fun; archiving them not so much. The key to keeping the passion alive then is to find ways to turn even the tedious stuff into something to treasure.

So the sort of work that dulls the brain can be an opportunity to put on some music or listen to one of the podcasts filling up your hard drive.

Bringing in buyers for an eBay auction might not be your idea of fun, but if you can think of it as a chance to chat with other people who like your sort of work, you might find yourself enjoying it.

And if you don’t, try finding someone whose passion is marketing and team up.

You’d have the beginnings of a business… and you’d both be doing what you love.

Globalization might be a horrible thing if you’re an auto worker in Detroit. If you’re a geek and an entrepreneur however, it means you can find Indian programmers without having to pay Silicon Valley prices. It means you can sell your services to buyers from London to Lanzhou.

And it means lots of meetings conducted over the phone and through teleconferences with people you might work with for years and never actually meet in person.

Making those sorts of meetings work so that everyone gets all the information they need — and leaves with a clear understanding of what needs to be done — can require some skill. Here are a few ways to get more in less time out your next virtual meeting:

Prepare Properly
Most face-to-face business meetings come with some preparation. The person who called the meeting usually creates an agenda. Even if that’s just a list of items he wants to cover, everyone can see he has one, what’s on it and no less importantly, how many items are on it.

Not all virtual meetings need to be that structured though. If, for example, a client just wants to know how you’re getting on with a project and discuss what the next stage will look like, you should still make sure you both know exactly the topics that you’ll need to cover. A quick email exchange in the days before the call can work wonders.

Use Visual References
One of the problems with virtual meetings is that each participant is seeing something different. That can be distracting and makes it hard to keep everyone focused on the same subject. One solution is to distribute visual aids that everyone keeps in front of them during the meeting.

An agenda in a Word document could be sufficient, but you could also try using one of the many online To Do list tools when discussing tasks that still need to be completed. When everyone is looking at the same page, it’s easy to forget you’re not in the same room.

Don’t Multitask
But looking at a screen is all you should be doing during a virtual meeting. While it’s true that the other people on the conference call can’t see you, it’s still rude to doodle while someone’s talking, check an email or catch up on the sports scores.

It’s harder to stay focused when you can’t see who’s talking. It’s even harder when you’re not giving all of your attention to what’s being said.

Make the Introductions… and Make Notes
Virtual meetings between two people are fairly straightforward. Things tend to get a bit harder when there are five or six people on the line. You might know one or two names but the others could be new, unfamiliar… and quickly forgotten, especially if they don’t say much during the meeting.

That’s a danger. Just because you haven’t spoken to someone before the call doesn’t mean you can think their input is going to be unimportant — which is often the temptation when coming in to a meeting like this. One solution is to make sure that introductions are made at the beginning of the meeting so that everyone understands who’s on the line and why they’re there.

But to make sure you don’t forget who’s there, take a note as you hear their name. Write down who they are and also jot down something that will help you to remember their voice so that you can match the name to the person. A number corresponding to the depth of their voice might help.

Use the Right Tools
There are all sorts of ways of holding virtual meetings these days. The phone is the simplest (although steer clear of mobiles — you want the people you’re meeting with sitting still); Skype is cheap but low-quality; and text messaging can be useful if all you need is a quick check-up and exchange of simple notes.

Timebridge is a neat tool that makes arranging the meeting very simple, but if you really want to splash out, the latest videoconferencing rooms actually put life-size digital images of the people you’re talking to around the same table. They cost up to $350,000… but as that will soon be the price of a barrel of oil, just think how much you’ll save in travel expenses.

Leave Time for Small Talk
This is particularly important for very small groups working together over a long period. Teams are strong because everyone knows each other and trusts each other. For teams that work virtually those sorts of bonds are much looser — and the team can be much less effective as a result.

You can either call into the conference line a few minutes early and chat while waiting for other people to come in, or you can leave a few minutes at the end of call to discuss any other business… and just shoot the breeze.

At the very least it will help to take the pain out of the meeting.

[tags] virtual meetings, long distance meetings [/tags]

Geeks have two things of value. They have the products they create or the services they provide; and they have the knowledge they possess.

Both of those can be used to make money.

For most people, the logical step is to focus on the products. Many geeks see themselves as entrepreneurs (at least in the making). They dream of turning their ideas into companies that grow, employ other geeks, frighten Bill Gates then beat Microsoft back into the garage it grew out of.

The alternative route though can be a lot easier. It can also be very lucrative and bring a unique satisfaction that can only come from helping others.

Speaking Lets you Share Success
Professional speaking is about sharing your special knowledge with other people so that they can go out and achieve success themselves. It’s a path that seems to be mostly trodden by marketers like John Chow and Mark Widawer but look a little closer and it’s not hard to find that many of the people at the podiums have their background in technology.

Joel Comm, for example, who’s now best known as an AdSense expert and creator of “The Next Internet Millionaire,” started out by co-developing ClassicGames.com. He later sold it to Yahoo! where it became Yahoo! Games. Jason Calacanis, who also speaks at marketing conferences, created Weblogs… and sold it to AOL.

The idea that an audience would turn up to hear a former programmer explain how to use Ruby on Rails or create a blogging platform might be a little strange though — and it would be, if that was all professional geek speakers did. In practice, if they want to be a professional speaker rather than just a speaker, they have do more than that.

Professional speakers identify techniques that other people can use, deliver a talk that gives an overview of what those techniques can do and leave the audience so persuaded of the real benefits of those techniques that many of them pick up a copy of the speaker’s kit on the way out of the hall.

First, Create a Plan…
The first stage of becoming a professional speaker then isn’t to sit and write a talk. That will come. The first stage is to identify methods that other people can use, and create a kit that explains in detail how to use them.

A programmer, for example, could explain how to spot flaws in software products that entrepreneurs can exploit.

A designer could create a manual showing how to use website layout to improve sales.

A gardening expert could reveal how to create a home-based plant business.

The kit could include a technical guide, CDs with interviews of people in the same business or who have used your techniques in the past, and related booklets, but as long as it brings real, valuable benefits, a speaker can charge hundreds of dollars for it.
And if the talk is good enough, find that people are willing to pay.

Once you have the kit, the next step is to get on the speaker circuit, and that’s usually what gives potential speakers pause for thought. Call a major conference, for example, and ask if they’re short of a speaker and you’re likely to be given short shrift.

Paul Hartunian, a publicity expert who trains professional speakers, offers one solution. He recommends that new speakers skip the big venues at first and start small by organizing their own events. They could even try teaching their system as a course at community colleges and adult education centers. While speakers won’t be able to sell directly in a classroom, a hard-sell approach is never the most effective anyway, Paul teaches. Audiences want to be alerted to an opportunity, not sold.

“Your job [as a professional speaker] is to inform and to create curiosity and interest,” he writes in his own professional speaking kit.

That doesn’t mean you can skip the conferences though. They’re still good for seeing how the top professionals do it, as well as for networking. And they should be the ultimate destination.

Selling a stack of $200 kits to a room filled with 20 people is a nice evening’s work. Selling a stack of $200 kits to a room filled with 200 people is a much nicer evening’s work.

The best part of being a professional speaker though isn’t the pile of checks at the end of your talk. It’s the emails and letters that come in from people who have used your system and found that it worked for them.

That’s something that even the most appreciated product or service just can’t compete with.

Professional speaking is ultimately about selling success so clearly it helps if you’ve already achieved it. But as you’re making your way towards your goals, be aware that helping others achieve their goals can be another way of reaching your own.

Geeks might be masters of code or wizards of design but few also happen to be wonderful salespeople. Usually, they leave the selling stuff to the marketing types, the ones who seem naturally to know what pushes buyers’ buttons… and who don’t mind the rejection.

But to turn any idea into a business, a product or even just a new freelance gig will require some skills at persuasion. Here are a number of neat little tricks that no geek should do without:

The Sullivan Nod
Invented by restaurant consultant, Jim Sullivan, the Sullivan nod involves reciting a list of options but just inclining your head slightly when you reach the choice you’d like the buyer to make. The nod has to be subtle but perceptible and works best in lists of no more than five items. According to Jim Sullivan, it’s successful up to 60 percent of the time.

For geeks who aren’t trying to push the most expensive wine in the restaurant though, the same technique could be used at a face-to-face meeting when offering design options or server choices, but it could also be used in emails by marking out one item (with a double-space, say) or on the phone with a short pause.

It might just get the client’s site looking the way you want it to look, rather than the way they think it should look.

The Benjamin Franklin Close
When your prospect is humming and hawing, help them reach a decision by taking a leaf from Benjamin Franklin’s book: have them make a list of the pros and cons of the option you’re trying to persuade them to take.

Of course, if their “cons” turns out to be longer than their “pros,” you might be in a spot of trouble. But while you can praise the pluses, you can also knock down the objections now that you can see what they are.

Remember that it’s not just the quantity of items on a list that matters; it’s their priority too.

The Boomerang Method
Popular among savvy salespeople — and not just in Australia — the Boomerang Method tosses an objection back at the prospect, pitching it as an advantage.

So if an investor argues that he can’t afford to hand you a suitcase full of cash to help you develop your toolbar, you’d reply with: “But can you afford not to?”

Clearly, you’re also going to need a good follow-up so that you don’t get a simple “yes,” and that’s where things can get a little tricky. But if you can show a prospect that what they think is the biggest reason not to listen to you is in fact an unbeatable reason to agree, you should get your way.

Kotler’s Black Box Model
Marketing academic, Philip Kotler, described the human mind as a black box containing all of the aspects that go into making a decision to buy: why, how, when, and from whom.

He didn’t, however, explain how you can get the box open, unravel the wires and listen to the tape so that you can make use of the answers. What you’ll have to do then is focus not on the box but on what Kotler says is in it.

If you know how the person you’re pitching to would answer those questions, you’ll know what it will take to make them agree.

Needs-Creation Selling
The most important question you can answer someone you’re trying to persuade is “Why do I need this?”

The problem is that often the answer is that the person you’re talking to doesn’t need it. When that happens, the solution is to create the need. That will involve asking questions and above all, listening to the answers.

Try to listen out for problems that they or their company may be having… then explain why your method will solve those problems,

And if they don’t have any problems you can solve, tell them about the problems they’re going to have.

T-O Technique
Finally, if all else fails, one option is to give up… and let someone else have a go.

This is a technique common in retail in which one salesperson turns the prospect over to another before the close.

You might not have another salesperson to finish the persuading for you, but you might have a partner who can ram home your point or even a customer service person.

Sometimes, the best way to persuade someone is not to try at all.