online marketing Archives

Butterflies On The Way To The Top!

The plan was to write a really deep blog post today, but you know, I can hardly work with all these butterflies flying around in my tummy! Why? Because today I am launching my new book!

It’s amazing how terrified one can get about showing the world what you have to offer. But you know, I’ve decided to say: “to hell with it!” Those that like the book will like it, those that don’t won’t. And that’s just fine. Because you can’t be all things to all people. Some people are going to love it and get a lot out of it, others will have other opinions.

It’s good to remember what Don Miguel Ruiz wrote in his book “The Four Agreements”. By the way, I highly recommend you reading it (and thanks to my friend Thorunn for recommending it to me :) : “Don’t take anything personally”. What people think, say or do is never really about other people, it is about themselves. People will view and judge things based on their own reality, their experiences and no one else’s, and that’s simply something you can’t waste time and effort thinking about. If people don’t like what I do, that’s their problem and not mine.

Another good phrase I remind myself of every now and then is “When everyone around you is an asshole, take a good hard look at yourself”. Sometimes I catch myself thinking less than good thoughts about someone – we probably all do it at some time – but I am getting pretty good at stopping myself and thinking “why am I thinking this?” And without exception, the reason has nothing to do with that other person, and everything to do with me. Me and my insecurities. And I have a feeling this applies to most of us.

A good friend of mine once told me that the biggest fear of successful people was to stand alone at the top. To dare to excel. To leave behind others that don’t aim as high. I would like to believe that we celebrate those who aim high and get to the top. I for one am incredibly proud of many of my friends, family and clients, who have and continue to achieve great results in their endeavours. Here are just a few examples: [Read more…]

Owning or Renting Your Marketing

Those that have been following me for a while might accuse me of being anti-advertising. So I want to address that today.

I am not against advertising, per se. However, I want to make sure that businesses are always using the marketing activities most suited to themselves, their market and their brand, and activities that give them the best return on investment (hmmmm very much a business phrase! :) – and activities that can be measured to show that they are really delivering results and that all important ROI.

Unfortunately, many of us just throw adverts out there and don’t think enough about what we want them to do, or make sure that they are doing what we want them to do. The fact is that people need to see you (your business, product, service) quite a lot of times before they are ready to buy, and for most small businesses, getting that exposure entirely through advertising is simply too expensive. I have spoken extensively about how often people need to see you in videos. If you plan to drive your marketing mainly through advertising, you have to advertise a lot and that can get very expensive.

Another thing that non-specialists in marketing have a tendency to do with their advertising is to try to say a million things at once. The fact is that it is hard enough to get people to take note of one message in your advert and as soon as you try to get more across everything becomes muddled and the ad loses its effectiveness.

Advertising can however be a great marketing tool if used correctly. What do you need to do for that? Here are five things you need to remember when you use advertising in your marketing: [Read more…]

Getting found on Google – 5 things to keep in mind

If I had a dollar, pound or euro for each time someone asks me how one goes about getting found on Google, well, I would at least have one nice free lunch each week :)

Search Engine Optimization – making your website, and other online information about you – visible on Google and other search engines (apparently there are others, like Bing and Yahoo ;) This used to be the realm of the techies. It was all about keyword analysis, meta data, robot txt, link building and all those fun things. Many of those things are still valid, but many are not and its impact is constantly diminishing. You can no longer get ahead in the search engines by using trickery because Google and all the others are alert and are constantly changing their algorithms to make sure that they can’t be manipulated. But you know, this is actually not a bad thing at all. It is actually really really good. Because you know what that means? It means we just all have to get better at marketing.

Hmmmm … how? [Read more…]