I believe in giving back to my local community. I'm on the board of Junior Achievement, I co-founded the Save Our Parade committee and saved the Billings St Patrick's Day Parade five years ago, I helped with our Billings Swords For Kids run at the  Pepsi Refresh grant #17 out of over 300, I help with the Yellowstone Highland Games and I give free presentations on online marketing and social media for a variety of organizations.

How do I give back?

I prefer to give back using my skills: public relations, marketing strategy and social media /online marketing and tend to do that for the different groups I get involved with. Most of the time that's simply because i have the most experience other times it's because I request to fill that roll.

I believe that anytime you can fill a roll that fits your work skills it's best. It's not that I'm allergic to setting up tents or manning a ticket booth, but I know that my skills are best suited lining up and doing TV and radio interviews. So try to fill in where your skills are best suited. If you're a carpenter, build things, if you're a graphic designer design things, if you are extremely organized, manage the projects there is no end to the number of roles that are available to you.

How do I benefit?

There are a lot of great benefits from giving back. I truly enjoy teaching kids in the Junior Achievement program. It's so much fun seeing the look in a kids eyes when a concept hits home. I also get a chance to hang out with some amazing people that I may not have met without getting involved.

My business has benefited because I've been able to get to know a number of the local reporters and have been interviewed on camera as the local social media and online marketing expert and provided commentary on Facebook changes and Cyber Monday. This has helped me get speaking opportunities and new clients without doing anything but giving free information.

So get out and get involved in your local community, you'll feel great, you'll meet some great people and you can build your business. Now I need to run the St Patrick's Parade lineup starts in 1/2 an hour.

This is a little different from what I normally write and is much more about me and mindset then strictly about business. We'll be back to our irregularly scheduled business and online marketing posts soon, but for today join me as I explore my goals from 20 years ago and how they relate to where I am today.

I have a game or ritual I've done for years. I walk up to one of my book shelves and I take down whichever book catches my eye first. I open it up to a page and sit down and start reading. Then most importantly I try to apply what I'm reading to a situation that I'm currently going through.

This morning I grabbed Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. I opened it up and the first sentence I noticed was one that I wrote in the book in 1991, when I was 23 years old. It said "Never lose sight of your dreams."  I asked myself had I lost sight of my dreams? The short answer is "maybe" the longer answer is much more complicated and I like to say my goals have evolved.

Ask yourself that question today and take the time to answer it honestly. Most of us have lost sight of our dreams or at the very least they've been subjugated or set aside. 

After thinking about that and journaling for a while I decided to track down my goals list from 1991 and I found it. I am blessed that I have journaled in my life. I wish I had done it more regularly throughout my life, but I've had several periods over the last 20 years that I've spent time journaling and am am able to go back and read about myself from those periods.

My goals / dream in 1991 were the following:

1. Build a multi-million dollar business and become a millionaire in my thirties.
    
2. Get paid to speak in front of 3,000 people
    
3. Compete in a national martial arts tournament – I didn't really care if I won, but I wanted to be a legitimate threat to anyone I fought.
    
4. Build muscle to reach 175 pounds
    
5. I wanted to help others achieve their dreams

Let's see how I did since then:

Goal # 1 Build a multi-million dollar business and be a millionaire in my 30s.

I did that with RMTG, Inc. We had 30 employees and did just short of $5 million a year for 5 years. Then I "retired" selling my shares back to the company with a 10 year, six figure a year payment package in 2005. RMTG ultimately went out of business and my payments stopped at 10 months instead of 10 years. This on top of a number of other things caused me to ultimately lose everything which could be another series of blog posts.

I joke that I should have been more specific with my goal because I was a millionaire in my 30s and lost everything before my 40s. I'm back on track to building a multi-million dollar business again and will easily do six figures in 2011.

Goal #2 Get paid to speak in front of a group of 3,000 people

When I was 23 I was speaking quite a bit, mostly presenting the Shaklee opportunity, but also talking about NLP and mindset. My regular speaking was MC'ing a monthly Phoenix- wide Shaklee seminar that had 100-150 people and the largest group I presented to a group of just shy of 300 where I was able to share the stage with Robert Cialidini, the author of Influence, one of the seminal works for people interested in persuasion. I ended up moving back to Billings from Phoenix in 2002 and pretty much set speaking aside until a couple of years ago.

In the last three years I've presented both paid and for free to groups across the US from as small as 10 people to almost 200. This year my goal is to get paid to speak at least once a month. I have three, possibly four speaking gigs lined up for March and am starting to plan April and May. The 3,000 is a very specific number and will take a while, but I will hit it. If you know a group that might be a fit feel free to contact me.

Goal #3 Compete in a National Martial arts tournament.

I was doing Kenpo karate point sparing tournaments back then and that's really what I meant. I didn't check a leg shot properly and tore my MCL and quit competing. Since then I've done Olympic fencing and fought in local club tournaments reaching the semi-finals a couple of times with foil. But my best chance at this is SCA heavy fighting. I've won 2 of the last 4 tournaments that I've been in and feel that even at the ripe old age of 43 I have a chance at increasing my skills enough to be a legitimate competitor in any tournament that I enter. Not quite there, but certainly on the path.

Goal #4 Build muscle and reach 175 pounds

I was pretty skinny back then and was working out an hour or two every day while trying to improve my fighting skills. I was about 165 pounds and one of the issues I had was not enough muscle and/or power. Because of that my goal was to build more muscle. Part of my reasoning was vain as well. What 23 year old doesn't want to have big shoulders and bulging biceps.

Today, I chuckle at this one. Let's just say I will never be only 175 pounds again unless I lose a limb. I soared past that in my early thirties. My goal today is to get back down to 205.

Goal #5 Help others achieve their dreams

What I meant when I wrote that was help people grow their Shaklee businesses. I quit doing Shaklee and personally feel that the old school MLM model is broken. I still use the products because I do believe in them. Which could just be a case of "drinking the Koolaid" but I find my body likes their protein better than any of the others I've tried over the years.

What it could mean today. I love working with business owners helping them grow their businesses. Almost everything I do is focused on helping people make more money. Local businesses don't understand online marketing and most of the people who are trying to sell them services are simply fleecing them or have no clue what they are doing.

I also dabble in information marketing and have built and sold several courses and coached other online business owners over the years. The courses range from my work with Social Traffic and my product Local Social Profits. Both of which were focused on showing people how to be a local social media consultant helping businesses leverage the power of social media marketing for their businesses. I'm toying with re-launching that again, but their are so many of the "get rich quick" types peddling "get rich" selling offline consulting that it has poisoned the well a bit for me personally. I've been doing online marketing consulting for almost 5 years now and get a little disgusted with what I see being sold.

The exercise:

1. Track down an old goals list. This is best if the list is at least a decade old.
2. Review your goals.
3. Write down what you meant on each goal that you set.
4. Write down how you've done on that goal
5. Write down where you are today.
6. Once you've done that ask yourself, "Am I following my dreams?"
7. Journal your answers
8. Come back here and share what you learned

I hope this post was as interesting for you as it was for me. I rarely share about myself and posted on Facebook that this post was coming yesterday because if I hadn't I probably never would have hit publish. 

It happened again this morning. I received an email from someone I consider to be a smart marketer and who has a depth of knowledge that I respect. She was offering new pricing for her services that are a deep discount on her past prices. Why is this pertinent to the post title? It's because I've seen her drop her prices several times in the last year and it appears that she has made a rookie marketing strategy mistake of discounting her services.

Why isn't discounting a good strategy?

History is littered with corpses of once great companies that tried to race to the lowest price.  When is the last time you shopped at a Kmart? Do you even remember Woolworth's or Kreskes. Walmart, as big as it is is even beginning to show some kinks in it's armor.

It also sounds like shes desperate. Do you want to do business with someone who's desperate? I know I don't for a number of reasons. First how did they become desperate? Do they suck? If you're going to offer a discount you need to tell me why you're desperate for the cash. Second desperate people tend to get themselves in over their heads and end up never delivering. I've seen it many times.

You don't want discount customers

The other problem with discounting is the type of customers it attracts. Spend an hour on a Saturday at WalMart, is that who you want as your customer? Discount customers are discount customers because they can't afford better or they don't value you and your services enough to pay what they are worth. Not only will you be stuck with these customers, but you will find that they tend to be the most difficult and demanding customers as well. 

What about the customers that paid full price?

Have you ever bought something and then saw it in another store for less or an ad where it was discounted? How did you feel? Do you want your customers feeling like that? Dropping your prices can cause a negative backlash from your current customers.

But sales are good aren't they?

Occasional sales are great, but they need to have a reason and a limit on them. If she had said I just had a big project reschedule and I have time to take on 5 more clients this week at a discounted rate. That would have been fine, it still maintains her value, gives a good reason why and gets her the cash infusion she needs.

The key in any business, but even more so as a consultant is that we need to value our time first before we can expect anyone else to value it. I'll do a follow up post explaining some of the things that I have done to maintain my value.

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Simple promotion strategies or ways to get fans to your page:

Invite Them

Inviting them through invite a friend. This works great if you have frinds that you know would like to join the page, but do not barrage all of your friends with this unless you are 100% sure that it’s something that they are interested in.

Ask Them

Ask them to invite their friends through invite a friend – same as above, can work well, but request that they invite people that they think would be interested.

Advertise

Run Facebook ads – honestly the most effective way to get your page past a “hump-. It happens on all pages your initial push gets you a bunch of fans and then everythigns slows down. Using ads is the quickest, easiest way to get things going again.

The “ninja” trick is to run ads against friends of people who are fans. The ads show with their friends names on it, most people do not realize that it’s a paod ad, they think it’s a suggestion from Facebook.

Contests

Have a contest – I’ve seen lots of great viral contests. This can explode you page, but contest people can be difficult to get engaged. They aren’t there because theya re interested in your page, they are there because they are interested in your contest. There are lots of ways to do contests that keep people engaged.

Tag em

You can tag people you know in a post about the page, do it sparingly because you don;t want to be blocked because of "tag spam"

Have a Party

Have a tagging party and tag other pages that you think your fans will like. This is something Mari Smith just started, it’s similar to a Follow Friday thing from Twitter. It will get you new fans, but they won’t be the most engaged.

Email them

Send an email to your current customer list. This assumes you have a list, but don’t just say “fan us on Facebook” give them a reason to go there. Restaurants could say check our Facebook page for our daily specials, a retail store could have Facebook only specials or even post a word or phrase of the day for discounts.

Ask Them 2

Ask your customers – assumes that you talk to them either on the phone or in your store. But give them a reason to fan your page.

Use Your Username

Add your Facebook.com/Username to your business card, your print ads and TV ads.

NEVER say Find us on Facebook without giving them your custom username. That’s like saying find us in the phonebook. I cringe every time I see someone with an ad campaign that does that. Do a Facebook search on the first 10 brand names that come to mind and look at the results. How many of those pages do you want your customers landing on? Probably not the “BrandX is cruel to animals” or I hate BrandX” pages.

Can’t find 25 fans to get your username, run ads on Facebook use one of the other examples above or if all else fails go to Fiverr.com and get 50 for $5. Don’t fool yourself the “fans” from Fiverr won’t be real people who will engage with your page, but they will get you your username.

Hand it out

Print your address on your business card – Tell people why they should check out your page

Fan Box

Add Facebook Fan Box to your website – I recommend showing the recent posts and at least two rows of faces. You will get more people who go to your website to join your fan page.

Go ahead and add your promotion ideas in the comments. In a couple of days I will dig into ways to get more engagement on your page.

Today’s topic is on finding your writing style or voice. I have a confession to make. I’m a horrible writer. Not that I can’t write, it just takes me a long time to do it. It takes me hours to put together a blog post. I can write 20 page proposals in less time than it takes me to write a 500 word blog post. I think it’s because I don’t like to share who I am. I prefer to share my knowledge. But I’m working on it, i fact I’m going to do my best not to delete anything in this post and just to write it.

I think the problem started when I was in school. Our English teachers taught us to write in the third person, but that doesn’t work in the new social media and blogging world. We expect to be able to get to know the people we follow. There are some that just lead with their knowledge but most of the successful bloggers / social media consultants let us into their lives to learn who they are.

My style will probably never be as open as someone like Chris Brogan or Mari Smith. That’s just not how I”m wired. I like my solitude and my privacy. I enjoy being out in the public and sharing information, but only once have I shared much about my past while on stage. I don’t hide where I’ve been and what’s happened in my life, but I feel we all need to walk out own paths and frankly like to leave my past in the past.

Now how can you find your voice? Here are a couple of things that I’ve done and I’m going to share one of the resources that helped me. Hopefully this will help you

Just hit Publish

One of the first things I was told was to just write and hit publish. That’s what I’m doing. It’s tough to do it, but I’ve been assured that it’s gets easier as you do more of it. Just like speaking. I remember when I was just out of high school and wanted to learn how to speak in public. I took the steps necessary to learn how to speak. You can read about it here.

The more I spoke in public the easier it became, where today I can get up in front of hundreds of people and deliver a talk without thinking about it.

Talk

Talk– this is advice I first received from, Paul Myers and more recently from David Preston. They both said if you have trouble writing don’t write talk. Dragon Naturally Speaking is a great tool to use. It takes some training to get it to work for you. I tend to do a lot of my work sitting in coffee shops so I haven’t used it as much as I should, but I agree that it’s a great tool to use and it is amazing how fast you can put an article together.

Read and Emulate

Read and emulate — this one is tough because what you want to do is find your own style, not try to become someone else. But if you are really struggling, just read other blogs and get some good ideas for content.

Tweet

I found Twitter helped me with my writing. You only have 140 characters, can’t do too much damage in 140 characters can you. I guess even using chat would have helped. It’s easier to keep it conversational.

There are the things I tried and here’s the resource that I mentioned from Paul Myers. It’s free, nothing to buy, Paul’s that kind of guy. He just creates amazing content and freely shares it. Heck even when he sells stuff it’s usuallyonly $17-27. I’ve received more value and learned more about marketing reading his free newsletter than I’ve learned in $2,000 training courses. Sorry for the sales pitch. Once again there’s nothing to buy, download the guide and let me know what you think about it.

Let me know what you’ve done to help improve your writing too.

Aren’t you tired of people using at the number of friends they have on Facebook or followers they have on Twitter to justify their experience or value as a social media “expert”?

Listen, do you really want to know how easy it is to get 5,000 friends on Facebook. Here’s the “secret” that’s been used and is still being touted by some of the so called Facebook gurus:

1. Send blind friend requests 30-40 people a day. Why is 30 -40 the secret number you ask? It’s because Facebook realized that real people don’t friend 100+ people in a day.  So they will ban your account if you send too many.
2. 30 – 40% of them will accept your requests.
3. In 4-6 month’s you’ll have 5,000 friends.
4. Or if you’re really “smart” you’ll go to Odesk or Elance and hire someone for $2 an hour to do it for you. You figure 1-2 hours a day for 180 days $320 – $640 to make yourself an expert.

Wow wasn’t that easy.

Here’s the deal, social media is not about the number of connections it’s about the quality of those connections. Now let me explain the dos and don’ts of friend requests.

Don’t send Blind Friend Requests

A blind friend request is any friend request sent without a reason why you are want to be their friend. I have 59 friend requests waiting right. 50 of them are blind friend requests. Several of those friend requests are from people who have social media consultant, strategist or expert in their profile…really. Is this what they teach their clients? The friend request is your first impression and we never get a chance to make another first impression.

Do send real Friend Requests

When you send a friend request you should take the time to explain why you want to be connected. If you aren’t willing to take 30 seconds to say why you want to be connected then you obviously don’t care about the connection.

When I send a friend request it’s because I met someone in person or read a good comment or post of there’s. There is usually a reason, you should have a reason as well. You should tell them the reason in the friend request:

“Dave it was nice meeting you, I look forward working together in the future…”

“Becky I couldn’t agree more on your comment on Jonathan’s post today. I think you’re someone I need to follow.”

Here’s a great friend request from Nancy Bain. Nancy “gets it” She listens, she learns and she passes her knowledge on to her clients. She’s someone worth paying attention to as well.

Nancy’s request was sent after a webinar I did with my friend and business partner Jonathan Rivera, the Real-TechGuy. She had a reason to listen to me and she told me what that was. That’s how a friend request should be sent.

Facebook profiles are for people and pages are for businesses, organizations etc. Does that mean someone can’t say what they do on their profile. Of course not, but what it does mean is that you shouldn’t have several profiles for different businesses or different aspects of your business you need to have business pages set up.  I’ll address dos and don’ts of using your profile to build your online presence without being spammy or breaking Facebook’s Terms of Service in another post.

I see people making the profile mistake all of the time. It’s an amateur mistake and I can understand a person who’s learning Facebook and just trying to get something started making that it. BUT when I see people who are touting themselves as marketing or social media experts building profiles for people it frankly just pisses me off.  This is 101 stuff that no one who’s been doing business on Facebook should be doing.

Why is it a bad idea? Because it’s against Facebook’s Terms of Service. Right, I know, they let you build the profile with a business name. Yes, you managed to slip it through. Yes, you’ve built up a couple of hundred or maybe even a couple of thousand friends.  But that still doesn’t make it a good idea. It’s kind of like speeding or driving without insurance or cheating on your taxes. Yes you haven’t been caught, but sooner or later…you will.

Here’s the info from FB:

How are Pages different from personal profiles?

Profiles represent individuals and must be held under an individual name, while Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook. You may only create Facebook Pages to represent real organizations of which you are an authorized representative.

In addition, Pages are managed by admins who have personal Facebook profiles. Pages are not separate Facebook accounts and do not have separate login information from your profile. They are merely different entities on our site, similar to how Groups and Events function. Once you have set up a Page within your profile, you may add other admins to help you manage this Page. People who choose to connect to your Page won’t be able to see that you are the Page admin or have any access to your personal account.

http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=904

If you don’t want to have a personal profile you can set up a business account. I don’t recommend them because you can’t add any applications to the page.

What is the difference between a business account and a user profile?

Business accounts are designed for individuals who only want to use the site to administer Pages and their ad campaigns. For this reason, business accounts do not have the same functionality as personal accounts. Business accounts have limited access to information on the site. An individual with a business account can view all the Pages and Social Ads that they have created, however they will not be able to view the profiles of users on the site or other content on the site that does not live on the Pages they administer. In addition, business accounts cannot be found in search and cannot send or receive friend requests.

Here are the terms and the pieces that you are violating if you have a bus

http://www.facebook.com/terms.php#!/terms.php?ref=pf

Section 3
1. You will not send or otherwise post unauthorized commercial communications (such as spam) on Facebook.

Section 4
2. You will not create more than one personal profile.

All in all, you can do what you want, but I think it’s foolish to violate the terms of service because sooner or later Facebook will notice and they will delete the accounts that are violating their terms.

Doug

When I was at Tony Robbin’s Unleash the Power Within™ seminar in 2002 he talked about Jim Rohn and the effect that he had on his life. For those that don’t know, Tony went to a Jim Rohn seminar when he was 17 and started working for him immediately after that. In Tony’s book’s he talks about being very successful at a young age and then losing it all.

He was successful when he was running an office for Jim, but lost it all when he allowed his ego to get in the way. He ended up destroying his business by allowing himself to go down a negative spiral and chasing away his customers and employees. He ultimately ended up in a little one bedroom apartment working as a janitor and feeling sorry for himself until a friend came and drug him out of the house.

After hearing about Jim I went online to see what I could find out about him.  I found his email list and signed up, I bought a couple of his books and cd series and amazingly I found a seminar only a couple of hours away in Big Sky, Montana that he was supposed to be speaking at and the tickets were only $300.  I think the seminar was called, “Secrets of the Mountain.” I immediately signed up and also bought a ticket for my girlfriend. She kept asking me what the seminar was all about and my only answer was Jim Rohn was going to speaking so we needed to go.

The day the weekend seminar was starting we loaded up and headed to Big Sky. When we got there we noticed that the event was at a pretty small guest ranch and it didn’t seem too crowded. As we were getting checked in we chatted with a nice gentleman named Jim, no not that Jim, but he had worked for that Jim. Over the course of several conversations I found out that this was Jim Britt, the guy that pulled Tony Robbins out of his apartment. I was beginning to get impressed with this event.

Then we got checked in and headed down to the first session. That’s when we found out there were only 25-30 people there. Which I thought was going to be pretty cool. Then I found out that there were going to be several speakers over the weekend in addition to Jim. That was fine and to be honest it was one of the best groups of speakers I’ve ever heard.

That night we ended up at dinner sitting across from Jim Rohn and listened to him and Bill Bailey swap stories. My girlfriend was in Mary Kay. Jim and Bill had worked with Mary Kay Ash, I believe when they were all with Earl Schoef so they talked about her for a while. Then they talked about all sorts of things and I just soaked it up. In fact after dinner we sat in the bar and listened to them swap stories for hours. It was really a great time.

Saturday morning we started our sessions and found that Jim was speaking Sunday morning. I wish I could remember all of the speakers names, but I can tell you it was an amazing line up and that it began to seem like my girlfriend and I were the only people who weren’t speaking, but I didn’t care it was great stuff. I took pages and pages of notes and I noticed that Jim Rohn was actively listening, taking notes and learning from every speaker. I see that as one of the hallmarks of his greatness. He didn’t let any opportunity to learn pass him by. He always had his journal and he was always taking notes.

He also spent a great deal of time answering questions that people were peppering him with. He calmly paid attention to everyone and gave everyone the attention that they craved. I learned many lessons from watching him that weekend.

Saturday night was a repeat of Friday with a kicker. My girlfriend had gone into town and grabbed a birthday card for me because it was my birthday. She had all of the people sign it including Jim Rohn and Bill Bailey. It was an amazing gift. We then sat around and swapped stories for hours again.

As a side note by Saturday night I had come to realize that we had lucked out in getting a ticket to this event. The wealth of knowledge at the small event was unbelievable. Most of the crowd were multi-millionaires and many of them were professional public speakers who charged thousands for an appearance. In fact my girlfriend kept asking me how I found the event. It was a blessing.

Sunday morning Jim spoke and I took dozens of pages of notes. His wisdom and delivery were unparalleled. I’ll never forget one of the things he said “This stuff is hard work; listen to what I say, but don’t watch me too close” But I can tell you from watching him over the previous day and a half that you could learn a lot from simply watching Jim “too close.” He was truly a man who walked his talk.

In Yesterday’s post I mentioned Warren Buffet and how he overcame his fear of public speaking. Here’s an interview he did on FoxNews. In it he talks about why he took the Dale Carnegie Public Speaking course and what he did to continue to overcome his fear of speaking.