How to shine as a radio host

A few weeks ago I did the Insider Tips on How to shine as a radio guest program by Lorraine Cohen. My motive was partly that I was developing a series of teleseminars on various aspects of starting and growing a business and had decided to present the teleclasses in an interview format and I had been invited by Lisa Hartwell as a guest on her radio show.

The program, Insider Tips on How to shine as a radio guest by broadcaster and life coach,Lorraine Cohen is really excellent and I can whole heartedly recommend it. The next program kicks off on May 26th. To read more click here.

There is a F.R.E.E. 60 minute preview call on Wednesday May 6th 2009, 6-7 pm EST/3-4 pm PST that you may wish to sign up for.

As both a host and guest, Lorraine has participated in over 150 programs that have been heard and downloaded by so many people around the world. Contributing as both host and guest has taught her so mcuh about how best to deliver a message that is informative, distinctive, and most of all, memorable.

If you're serious about expanding your market by positioning yourself as a radio guest expert, this program is for you.

If you follow the 5-week program you'll learn tips to:

• Distinguish yourself as a great guest so that hosts will want to invite you back again and again

• Develop confidence in talking about your passions

• Avoid some common mistakes to create raving listeners

• Generate income and build your opt- in lists

• Create instant connections with any audience

A kick in the butt from IttyBIz

Some kick in the butt advice from Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz (yep, another Facebook friend of mine but since she's moving to the UK soon may become a real friend). I have taken a chunk verbatim from her latest blog post:

If you run a service business — and in service I include coaching and consulting — and to a degree if you run any other kind of business, here’s the best piece of advice I’ve got.

Spend 4 times more time on MARKETING than you do on DOING.

I could give you the list and litany of people who are the worst at this, but basically everybody is the worst at this. Except maybe life coaches. They’re the REAL worst.

You bust your ass creating this wonderful business that is going to change lives. You get the certification and you spend the money on the website and you give the free sessions to get the testimonials. You create something that will quite honestly make it so people will not even remember what their life was like before they worked with you. And then what do you do?

You sit around and wait for people to find you.

Unless any of the other aspects of your business are absolutely tragic, you should not be spending your work time:

- tweaking your website
- responding to comments
- reorganizing your accounting methods
- taking skills upgrade courses, including mine
- reading ebooks
- chatting on IM
- telling people what you ate for breakfast on Twitter

There is nothing wrong with any of the above activities, but those are the things to do in your SPARE time. And if you’re not getting clients right now, you don’t have spare time during the workday. The time that you THINK is spare should be spent getting your name out there, all over the place.

If you are not getting enough clients, your only priority is getting clients.
That is all. Now stop reading blogs and get back to work.

Original post at IttyBiz

Marketing Tips from an Olympic champion

Colleen Coyne, a former member of the U.S. women's ice hockey team, earned a gold medal at the 1998 Winter Games. And in a post at the HubSpot blog, she outlines how the keys to Olympic success apply to your work in marketing.

1. Don't train harder, train smarter

2. Success is a decision

3. Plan the work

4. Work the plan

5. Be in position to be in position ie anticipate the possibilities and make sure you are prepared to take advantage of them.

6. Nobody cares what you want, they care what you do

7. Hang out with & watch the pros

8. If you are not getting better, you're getting worse - There is no such thing as "maintenance" in business. Everything you do (or don't do) contributes to your level of success.

Click here to read the full post.

Market Research - Tracking buzzes

TRACKING BUZZ ACROSS SOCIAL NETWORKS, FORUMS AND TRENDY WEBSITES

Meta Search Engines are under-the-radar rivals of Google Blog Search and Technorati. Sometimes they have gems the bigger guys don't. A few:

Clusty enables searches for news, images, wikipedia articles and blogs.
Serph tracks buzz in real-time. Search for a product, company name or person. It will include results from blogs, news aggregators, social bookmarking sites (such as Magnolia and del.icio.us), image sharing sites like Flickr, and video sharing sites.
Zuula searches multiple sites at the same time. Run a web query; results from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, Mahalo and other search sites will be separately tabbed for easy perusal.
Nielsen BrandPulse. This enables you to tap into forums, boards, Usenet newsgroups and blogs that may be discussing your company, brand or product.

Google Trends. What's more popular: The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal? Google Trends lets you pit them against each other and graph the results. A broader product, Google Zeitgeist, tracks what users are querying most on the Google search engine.

Facebook Lexicon counts mentions of words and phrases on Facebook users' profiles. Like Google trends, keywords can be pitted against each other (just separate them with a comma). For an example, see Clinton vs. Obama.

TweetScan enables users to search for product or company mentions in real-time across Twitter.com, a website that is popular with early adopters and tech lovers. Also see Twitterverse, which gives you a sense of commonly-tweeted topics of the day; Intwition, which tracks links shared on Twitter; and TweetClouds, which builds tag clouds based on your query. More tools for sifting through Twitter data, or tracking brand buzz on Twitter, are in this article.

BoardTracker lets marketers search for mentions in discussion boards. The homepage also features a dynamic tag cloud, so you can find out what products, brands and topics people are discussing most today.

Google Groups and Yahoo Groups let marketers sift through discussions occurring on, namely, Google or Yahoo Groups.

Much of the information in this MarketingVOX How-To was gleaned from The Art of Strategic Listening by Robert Berkman, who specializes in culling market intelligence from social media resources.

Marketing Blogs

Advertising Age produces a list of the 500 top media and marketing blogs. No, I have not checked them all but quite a few of them are blogs that I frequently come across in my peregrinations on the internet and I thought I would share them with you. Some will keep you up to date with what is going on in the world of marketing and others can provide you with helpful information on how to market your business.

Streetsmart Marketer (aka Michael Hepworth)

Seth Godin

Jeremiah

Drew McLellan

Rohit Bhargava

Marketing Professionals

Driving visiters to your site

Get 1 Million Hits, FREE!

This claims to explode visiters to your website. I am testing it to see. Its FREE so I figured I did not have too much to lose.

Marketing - a new twist to your message

Michael Port published this excellent story in his eZine recently.

One day, there was a blind man sitting on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet and a sign that read: 'I am blind, please help.'

A marketer was walking by and stopped to observe. He saw that the blind man had only a few coins in his hat. He dropped in more coins and, without asking for permission, took the sign and rewrote it. He returned the sign to the blind man and left.

That afternoon the marketer returned to the blind man and noticed that his hat was full of bills and coins. The blind man recognized his footsteps and asked if it was he who had rewritten his sign and wanted to know what he had written on it. The marketer responded: "Nothing that was not true. I just wrote the message a little differently." He smiled and went on his way.

The new sign read: Today is Spring and I cannot see it.

Moral of the story ? Sometimes we need to change our strategy. If we always do what we've always done, we'll always get the same thing (which is fine if this is what you want !). Be innovative - change your world and the world of those around you !

Facebook - learn all about it

Brian Campbell is proving to be THE person to be linked with on Facebook as he generously shares his learnings about making Facebook work for your business whilst still respecting the rules of being on Facebook.

Sign up now for his 10 hour Social Media Monetization Course - totally FREE !!! Click here for "Backdoor Signup "

Its awesome - an absolute must !!

Follow Trends - Start Trends

Have you discovered Edopter ??

Here's what it says about itself: Edopter is social trendcasting.Edopter combines your insight and worldwide buzz to tap into the next big thing. Create and follow trends, share and discuss them - then watch as they spread across the world. Who tells the world what‘s next? You do.

Seriously useful for your market research and marketing strategies.

It's FREE !! of course !!!

Facebook - you have been warned !

Yesterday I was merrily growing my little list of Facebook friends and then BANG - I start to get the nasty warnings that my account will be de-activated because I am allegedly a spammer. I could not even open my messages. I had heard of this happening to people but I assumed (naively) that it was the people who were adding friends at the rate of hundreds a day. NO.

Here's what I have been able to piece together. It seems that you start to get warnings about being a spammer and threats of being bounced off of Facebook if you cut and paste and/or if you include a URL. The cut and paste is a definite and it can be as innocuous as writing a personalised message and then pasting your name and some information underneath it (which is what I was doing).

It is essential to always type each message and cut and paste nothing. Some people are telling me not to include my URL which I was doing when I wrote on new friend's walls to thank them for joining my circle of friends.

For me, the pain with Facebook is that there are no clearly set out rules. I would pay to be on it as I find it heads and shoulders above LinkedIn and Ecademy however the owners seem to prefer free membership but operate with unwritten rules.

I would direct anyone and everyone to the teachings of Brian Campbell and Travis Greenlee who are both 'friends' of mine on Facebook.

Facebook - maximising its potential

If you are on Facebook and want to harness the power of social media marketing then link up with Travis Greenlee and Brian campbell and join all related groups. Both post some awesome videos and provide lots of free advice.

More Twittering !

Use Twitter to gather intelligence about your target clients and to announce your products and services:

Start a Twitter profile. Visit Twitter.com and sign up. If you want to communicate with just a few clients or colleagues, keep your stream private by checking the "protect my updates" box under Settings.

Spread the word to your target audience, with simple instructions on how to sign up for a free account and follow your stream. Now you're rolling.

Explore the universe. Share news from seminars and other events; broadcast meetings and meeting places; announce your teleclasses; open a video or audio channel for those who can't join you.

Using Ecademy to drive business to your website

Here are some ideas for driving visiters from your Ecademy profile to your website.

Update your status whenever you have the opportunity and include your web address. Click this link to see what I mean. Why is this a good idea ? Because Google spiders the status page and follows the link to your site.

In your profile, use your keyphrases to link to your website. Click this link to see the links I have set up at the beginning of my profile.Google spiders profiles so if your keyphrases point to relevant pages on your site this helps in your Google rankings.

If you post an ad in Marketplace use a keyword in your ad title and then repeat it in the test with a link to your website. Not only will this be picked up by Google but non-Ecademy members can find you.

These suggestions came from Nikki Pilkingtons Blog - 299 Steps to Website Heaven.

FaceBook

Check this link for great tips from Travis Greenlee on making Facebook work for your business.

Twittering for bloggers

I just have to share this with you. Out there in the ether is a guy named Darren Rowse who generously shares on his blog (ProBlogger) how to make good use of Twitter to drive traffic to your blog.Click on link to go read this for yourself.

Happy twittering !