• Business Idea of the Day - What a great resource. Not only do they feature different business ideas, you can rate them.
• Ten Tiny Things Every Small Business Owner Should Do in 2009 - Guy Kawasaki's post to the OPEN Amex Forum.
• What's wrong with these pictures? - Here's an object lesson for all of you panicky business people out there….note how many EMPTY stores had signs out front that said 40%, 50%, 70% off….now look at the last store, selling premium items without any discounts…look at the crowds. Enough said.
• Did This Man Just Rewrite Science? - New York Times - Is Dr. Wolfram the Isaac Newton of our age? Have a look at his paper computer and see for yourself.
• LogoInstant.com | Download Free Web 2.0 Logo Designs - If you need a logo, stop by logoinstant.com, they're giving away one free logo a day! Even if you can't use it 100% it's a good place to start the ideas flowing.

Everything looks good until we hit the one thing that is, on the client’s part at least, non-negotiable, but which adds tons of complexity to the entire deal and creates extra costs and heartache for everyone.

Let me give you an example. A prospective client in the Northwest came to us and wanted a lead generation program put together. They wanted to be able to publish materials and have people sign up for them and then have the system keep track of what each person received. In this way, the lead nurturing part of the application could alert them which prospects were ripe for the picking.

So far, so good. This is standard bread and butter. Then came the stickler. The CEO wasn’t a big fan of words, so the programs had to be driven with pictures. The problem is, the company was selling some pretty complex software. 

I admit that I was pretty stumped. Yes, you can use diagrams and pictures to tell a story, but at some point we’d have to bring on the words to differentiate, educate, and inform. The CEO was even resistant to having wordy white papers and other sales materials.

The whole point of a lead generation campaign, at least where I’m coming from, is to get something out there quickly and start tracking data right now, so you can make decisions that are smarter than the ones just based on instinct.

I’ll be the first to tell customers to create podcasts of an interview and offer it up instead of a 5,000 word white paper (very easy to create and publish) but the CEO balked at this approach as well–who really had time to sit and listen for 20 or 30 minutes.

And yes, I pointed out to the CEO the inherent difficulty of communicating the complexity of their offering with pictures (after all, we weren’t selling watches or luxury cars) but the response was always the same: they wanted a slick, branded approach.

Needless to say, we moved on. We’re not a “slick, branded approach” type of company. There’s lots of other places you can get that. We’re the “nuts and bolts, make it sturdy and functional and reap ROI like a sonofagun” type company.

I’m not sure if the CEO’s company made something happen within these constraints. My point isn’t that this particular CEO is wrong, but that there’s an easy way to do things and a hard way to do things.

It’s been my experience that turning a hard thing into an easy thing is pretty, well, easy. All you have to do is knock off that one stickler thing in your list of requirements/objectives/whatever, and suddenly, you have something that is achievable.

How can you tell if something is really hard? When you explain what you’re up to, look at the body language and facial expressions of your developer. Anything that involves raised eyebrows, twitching, frowning, or detachment while they think through what you’re saying usually means “oh my, I didn’t think you’d say that.”

• Getting Into Google - New Unavailable_after Tag and More! - Dan Crow, crawl engineer @ Google, spills the beans. Worth reading. So read it already.
• Ten Tips to the Top of the Search Engines - Jill Whalen - Some more worthy advice, and what’s become a pattern by now: stop writing SEO copy for the search engines! Instead, target your market, research the keywords, and write for the niche! This will help you become link-worthy!

We really didn’t know what to do with it all, so the project kinda sat on the shelves for a little while. Then today, I put together this web site and offered the recordings up for sale. If you’re a business owner, consultant, techie professional and you want to write a book, then it’s a good idea to have a listen to these recordings….and I’m not just saying this because I’m one of the guys on there.

It’s really good advice. Have a look.

1. Use your house email list and snail mail list to announce the launch of the site. If anyone on the list is a current customer, give them a coupon for 10% the first purchase (if your site has an ecommerce component). 

2. Current customers should get an announcement card along with their next invoice or bill. If you have a retail store, print the announcement directly on the receipt. 

3. Create articles with titles like “10 things you should know about X.” Make sure the title and keywords in the article relate to your new site. Also, include several links to your new site. Submit these articles to ezines, partner sites, and other places that will get attention. 

4. The same articles can be turned into landing pages that are targets for search engine marketing campaigns.

5. Reuse the same material as press/news releases and submit them to PRWeb.com and other online press release sites. 

6. Create a series of simple 125×125 ads and run them on small business blogs. CPM for these run anywhere from $1 to $5, and give you access to a great deal of traffic, and your competition is NOT using these places. There are several really good ad networks (like Federated Media) that can place your ads on numerous blogs with one-stop shopping convenience.

7. Once you get the ball rolling with customers, send any customer who has spent X amount in Y time an email with an affiliate ID in it. Tell them that if they refer their friends and colleagues to you, and if their friends/colleagues enter the affiliate ID when they register, that any purchases made will result in credits for them. It doesn’t have to be much, just pennies on the dollar. With just a little bit of programming, you could set up a multi-generational thing, where person X brings in persons A, B, and C, getting credit for their purchases, and when person A invites persons F, G, H, that person X also gets a piece of this action (reduced, obviously).

8. Put up huge posters at your physical locale announcing your new site.

9. Mention your new web site on your office voice mail and in email signature files.

10. Send flyers and other print materials to your target market announcing the site.

11. Run a promotion on the radio ahead of a big holiday event appropriate to your business. Use your 30-second spot to promote the power of your service or product.

12. Make it painfully obvious on your web site how to sign up and get started. Also make it obvious that signing up is FREE (if that’s true), they don’t have to buy anything now. Then make it really painfully obvious they can invite their friends to join too.

13. Send out a monthly e-newsletter to current customers with web site promotions and informational tips for making their dollars stretch.

14.Lead nurturing: identify, over time, all the folks who have signed up at your site and spent under a certain amount (say $0 to $100 over 90 day period) and contact them via email or phone. Find out how they like the site, what would make things better overall, or if they have specific issues with the pricing, etc. 

15. As soon as a new customer orders something, send them a special promotional code with their email invoice. The promotional code is good for $10 off the next purchase in the next 45 days. This can get new buyers in the door for the second time, which could be critical to your success.

16. Send company representatives to networking events (such as BNI, AMA, PRSA, Ad Fed, Chamber of Commerce, etc) to talk about your new site. 

17. Create a workshop or seminar that teaches folks how to use and order from your site. Make the workshops free and send out the first invitations to your existing customers—-make it a training class + unveiling/launch.

18. Create a screencast to show how easy it is to order stuff from your site and put a link to this how-to material on your home page.

19. Use in-store kiosks to generate awareness about the site.

20. Set up a booth at trade shows in your area to promote your new site.

21. Sponsor a charity event in your local area and make sure that your banners and signs are prominent throughout. This might get you lots of local media coverage if you pick the right event.

22. Don’t forget to imprint your URL on pens, coffee mugs, t-shirts, and other promotional giveaways and then…give them away!

One last assertion before we get to the good stuff.

With any luck, there are five million of you reading this book. In which case, please forward all mail to Aruba, where I’ve retired in style. Even if there aren’t five million of you reading this book, there are probably at least that many reading some kind of book on starting a freelance business, and countless others already out there doing their thing without the benefit of a high-value, wisdom-packed book such as this.

Do a Google search for freelancers in your specialty, and you’ll run across hundreds (if not thousands) toiling away in your city or region. Competition is out there, and all you are is fresh meat.

You know what? That’s okay! You want competition. If nobody’s doing X, then that should be a huge signal to you that there are problems with bringing X to the market. Either the buyers aren’t interested, or the sellers can’t figure out how to deliver X profitably.

The key, though, is to be able to carve out a little niche for yourself. You want to stand out, become memorable, be that guy or gal who is known for something. Why? Because having a unique brand position saves you a ton of time and money, and because you’ll end up getting a ton of referrals from all those other guys who are supposedly the competition.

Listen, if you’re reading this as someone with a technical background, you’ve probably not been exposed to the world of branding. If you have, you’ve probably cocked a skeptical eyebrow at the entire industry that has sprung up around the concept of branding.

Everywhere you look, there seem to be guys running around doing brand research, brand evangelism, brand stewardship, and yada-yada-yada. They give presentations, lead workshops, and run surveys. It’s okay to feel a bit weird about it, and to feel like you’ll never ever fully conquer what you need to know about branding. Relax—you only need to read two books on branding to get it. The rest aren’t worth a damn.

Those two books are The Brand Gap and Zag, both by Marty Neumeier. They’re both presented as white board discussions in print, with lots of visuals and hard-hitting bullets. To make a long story short, and to cut things down to what you need to know, branding is not just your logo or trademark, its a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or other offering.

That’s it in a nutshell. A brand is an instinct, a warm fuzzy, a bad fuzzy, whatever. Companies can try to buy their way toward a brand position, but they usually find a way to screw it up. Nationwide Insurance spent millions and millions to tell folks that “Nationwide is on your side.”

Katrina hit, and Nationwide started rejecting claims left and right. Cue lots of media coverage of folks who have lost everything (including loved ones) trying to get a check out of Nationwide. Not gonna happen.

So, is Nationwide really on your side? Their slick, expensive ads and logos say so, but no, not really. Their brand reputation on the street says something else entirely.

Let me just say right here and now that you won’t have the time, energy, or money to develop a brand the way the Madison Avenue gurus think it should be developed. Instead, you’re going to build a brand the old-fashioned way, with hard work. You’re going to make certain promises, then you’re going to deliver on those promises, over and over and over again. You’re going to build up your expertise and become known as the go-to guy for X.

Now your job is to define X, and make X doable. You may not be able to become the worldwide expert on JavaScript, but you could become the best JavaScript coder in Boise, Idaho. You may not be the best technical writer in Austin, TX, but you might be the go-to guy for writing technical case studies. Or the best technical writer on network security.

Get the idea? Focus makes things easier.

Here’s something else that makes things easier: zagging when others zig. Marty Neumeier talks about this in his book Zag. You will find soon enough that most companies participate gleefully in Me-Too Marketing. They look at what all their competitors are doing and then do the exact same thing. Those guys have a trade show booth/white paper/podcast, well we better do those things too!

Time to zag. Stand out. Do something unexpected. Our brains are hardwired to notice something that’s different, something that’s moving. In a sea of Nordic blondes, the brunette or redhead stands out. A single red dot on a page full of grey dots jumps out, draws the eye.

You’ll learn how to stand out in this book. For right now, remember the golden rule of differentiation: the more competition you have, the more focus you’ll need in order to stay competitive.

Now it’s time to get practical and work on that focus.

  

 

• Six Lessons from a Wooden Boy: Part One: Search Engines Want to be Real Boys - Search Engine Guide Blog - First in a series by the inimitable Jennifer Laylock. I love how she provides a chronology of search engine evolution and her Pinnochio metaphor (ie, that search engines seek to mimic human behavior).
• Common Sense Algorithm Chasing - Search Engine Guide Blog - This is an oldie but goodie. I wish I had a dime for every person who has asked me about search engine algorithms and how to beat them. People: stop the algo-chasing. Please. Create good content. Get folks to link to you. Link back. Rinse, repeat. Oh, and have a strategy, mkay?
• bookoutlines / The Ultimate Question - The Ultimate Question, ah yes, very very important. Ask your customers: How likely are you to recommend us to your friends and colleagues? Go ahead, then calculate your NPS (Net Promoter Score). Cry at the results (it will likely be a very soberingly low score) then work your ass off to make it better. Here's a book outline.

• bookoutlines / Predictably Irrational - Some real interesting lessons here for entrepreneurs, most notably the fallacy of supply and demand (the black pearl story is instructive) and price relativity.
• Search Engine Optimization Tips - A nice summary of Bill Hartzer's "24 Things You Should be Doing to Optimize Your Sites" series from earlier in 2008.
• The Secret of How to Sell Anything — Copyblogger - OK, this is it. This post is all you need to become an overnight success in sales. Are you ready for it? You better be ready! Okay, go read it.

1. Create something of value. If you have an ezine or e-letter (or whatever you want to label it) with valuable content that will help your customers make more money, grow their businesses, avoid problems, or be more productive, then that right there is your first step. GREAT CONTENT will attract subscribers.
2. Stop boring us! Don’t just create an ezine or teleseminar series like everyone else. Stand out! Give us your opinion, your thoughts, a little bit of you! Be yourself. Be human. Just standing up and shouting, “I can’t believe you’re doing it that way” and then telling us a better way of doing it will get you noticed!
3. Make it easy to invite more people to join in the fun. Take a look at the new fields we added to our event registration form. It’s an easy way to allow you to invite three other friends to our events when you register. It’s not that people don’t want to tell their friends about your content or your stuff, it’s that they’re too busy to really stop! Help them help you!
4. Publish a press release to tout your new event or ezine. Jen Blackert does this to enormous effect. She can double or triple her list in a few weeks or months with this tactic.
5. Repackage your information. If you’ve done a teleseminar series, offer it as a subscriber-only podcast series on iTunes. Or package them as a set of Audio CDs and sell them on your site. Or create blog entries about each 15 minute segment and publish them that way. Just remember: drive them to a signup page!
6. Create an email course. Just be sure to send them a new installment every few days, and keep the content quality high. Don’t just give them fluff and crap. Give them value.
7. Create and publish articles about your ezine or event on other sites. You can easily enter the game of “article marketing” with zero or no costs and just a little bit of elbow grease. In fact, I guarantee that you probably have a lot of content just lying around that you can repurpose into articles for this very purpose. As long as you drive traffic to a signup page, you’re good!
8. Don’t overthink the signup page. Think simple. Nice big headline with a benefit. A paragraph or two to explain why they should sign up. Then a simple form, with the least amount of info required, like their name and email address.
9. One more thing: send them a welcome message right away! Start the relationship on the right foot. Send them a little note thanking them for signing up. Tell them how to unsubscribe if it wasn’t them that actually subscribed. Then give them links to some of your introductory content so they get a feel for what you’re about.

  

I knew a guy once, a freelance database wunderkind. Guy was smart. Way smarter than I’ll ever be, by miles and miles. Get him inside a database problem, and he was a total samurai. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do in MySQL, PostGreSQL, Oracle, Informix, DB2, you name it. He’d forgotten more about databases than you or I will ever know. He was poised to make a bazillion dollars as a lone-gun consultant.

The problem was, he could never make a decision. He’d agonize over every single step in his business. He’d literally get analysis paralysis. Should he start a blog centered around his true love, tweaking databases? Well, let’s take his buddy Tom out to lunch thirteen times in as many months to discuss it, noodle it, push the idea around. And in between, research the topic until his brain burned at night with visions of what could be. Watch as other lesser talents created their own blogs and downloadable white papers and gave talks at conferences and write articles and books.

Listen up folks, I’m going to say this about a million times in this book (and even if I don’t, I say it about a million times a day to others, it seems). It’s okay to make a decision in business, especially if you agree beforehand that it’s okay to change your mind once you get better information.

If you decide to do a teleseminar series, find out what you need to know and then DO IT. Just do that first one. You’ll learn a lot once you do, and given that new set of data, you’ll either continue doing it, or not. The best part? You’ll get real data from your audience and the market instead of subsisting on the paltry dregs of your own half-baked thoughts, delusions, and daydreams.

Sometimes, the world of freelancing is like driving an old-fashioned car without power steering. Have you ever tried to turn the wheels on a big, heavy, vintage 1950s vehicle (made with heavy steel) that didn’t have power steering? When you’re sitting on the side of the curb, trying to pull out into traffic, it takes a heck of a lot of effort to turn the wheel, but once you get going, it’s pretty easy.

Same thing goes with your freelance business. All you need is a bit of momentum and then driving the business becomes a bit easier.

For those of you who are bound to misunderstand me, let me take a second to be clear. I’m not telling you to drive your business off a cliff. I’m just telling you to stop sitting on the curb, trying to decide which way to go. Just pull into traffic and make some decisions. All you have to know is that you’re going back home, or going to the grocery store. Metaphorically speaking, if you have some goals for your business (we’re getting to that part here in a jiffy) and have some values to guide you, you’re not going to make catastrophic decisions.

Here’s another point. So what if you make a bad decision? You’re not ExxonMobil, or Apple, or Nike. You’re not going to spill a million barrels of oil into some unsuspecting Alaskan harbor. You’re not going to piss off a bunch of customers by cutting the cost of your phone two months after release. No enterprising reporter is going to uncover your sweat shops in Indonesia.

You’re just you. A freelancer. A lone-gun technical consultant. Believe me, hardly anyone will notice if you do make a mistake, and even if you do make a mistake that someone picks up on, it won’t be anything major. Trust me.

(This game is a bit of a balance, you see. You’ve got to have enough ego that you would try consulting, but enough realism to realize that you’re really not that important….yet.)