Doug McIsaac

Marketing has changed - Have you changed your marketing?

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There are very few people I know who are as knowledgeable about strategic business planning as Doug McIsaac. He's a very talented, "under the radar" expert who has a natural knack for finding simple strategies to dramatically increase your profits. Doug is my go to guy for innovative Internet Marketing ideas and I think he's crazy for sharing all of his secrets.

Ron Douglas
TrafficSage.com
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My Ten Favorite Free Web Tools

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This list is slanted towards SEO tools so I will be doing follow-on post that digs into some of my favorite Social Media tools. I also tried to keep this as a toolset that someone with average web skills could use and skipped some of the geekier tools that I use less frequently.

1.       Mozilla Firefox

I was a Microsoft partner for a decade and it took months to get me to switch to Firefox, but now it’s by far my favorite browser.

2.       SEO for Firefox

If you are interested in understanding how your website ranks and why all from one interface the SEO for Firefox tool is one of the best free tools available.

5.       Roboform

Managing passwords is one of the hardest things for those of us who work online, especially if we are managing client websites and social media sites. Roboform helps me manage the hundreds of logins/passwords that I have to manage. You can get a free 10 site version here

6.       Quantcast

Quantcast.com has detailed traffic statistics and estimates for websites so you can get a feel for how big a site is when looking for sites to place ads on. Compete.com is a similar site with free and paid versions .

7.       Google Reader

a.      There are a lot of readers out there, but Google Reader has the best set of tools for segmenting and sharing blog and other RSS feeds.

8.       iGoogle

a.       With iGoogle  can get a quick glance at what is important to me. The modules I use are

i.      Google reader

ii.      Google docs

iii.      Digg

iv.      SEOBook competitive research tool

v.      What’s popular

vi.      Duct Tape Marketing

vii.      Seth Godin

9.       Google Analytics

a.       If your website designer doesn’t share some sort of analytics from your website with you they are an amateur or they don’t want you to know.

b.      I find GA is better than 90% of the paid tools that I’ve tried, yes there are tools that are better and if you control your own server and have a big budget you can purchase them, but none of the low end tools come close to the results you get form Google’s free tool.

10.   Google Keyword tool

There are two ways I use the Google external keyword tool:

a.    Find out if a market is getting any search traffic

Just because a market doesn’t get search traffic doesn’t mean that there isn’t a potential business there, but it does mean that you will need to find another way to get to your market – that will affect tour strategy and your marketing mix

b. To find out what Google thinks a website is about

When we type in a website address we can see what keywords come up. With our own website we find quite often that Google has a very different idea of our site than we have. It can also help when setting up a website you can

Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents

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There are a only a few people who’s blog posts I eagerly devour and learn from as soon as they appear:  Seth Godin, Simon Ford and Chris Brogan. I’ve read most if not all of Seth’s books, I’m CEO of one of Simon’s companies and I’m gleefully waiting for my copy of Chris’ new book Trust Agents to appear in my mailbox from Amazon.

Chris understands how social media works on a level that most will never truly understand and many of us are struggling to reach; at least I know I am, sorry to make assumptions about you. The core of social media and in truth all marketing is Trust. In any relationship someone must have faith and believe in the other person for the relationship to work. Business relationships are no different. Our clients must believe that our product or service will deliver at least as good as we tell them that it will.

I’m confident that Chris’ book will give us a deeper understanding of how to earn that trust and build influence using online tools.

In case anyone is thinking I’m  just pushing this for an affiliate commisison, I’m not, I trust that this book will be well worth the time invested in reading it.

Simply click ont he picture of the book and it will send you to Chris’ website for a list of locations to buy the book.

Trust Agents
Trust Agents

What’s Your USP?

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Seth Godin had a great post today, where he discussed why businesses that truly want to grow need to focus on going deeper with their product offering. In this post he describes the buffet that specializes in one thing, bacon, and how that buffet would always have  a line and people woud drive across town for it. That’s like the Rio’s amazing seafood buffet in Vegas. It’s off the strip and a bit of a pain to get to, but they made the buffet worth it by being the best seafood buffet in Vegas. There are several restaurants that I can think of like that here in Montana, the Cowboy in Fishtail is in a town of a couple of hundred and an is hour from Billings,  but you can’t go in there without seeing people who have driven the hour to get one of their steaks. They focus on serving  big steaks at a reasonable price and people flock there to get them. I’m sure if you look around in your community you will see examples, not just in restaurants, but in othe rbusinesses as well.

My mentor, Simon U Ford, refers to it as going “an inch wide and a mile deep.” Too many people get caught up in trying to be everything to all people. I’ve done it too, but once you focus on what you are the best at then  you can become truly successful.

Here’s a video a did last year that helps you understand and discover your Unique Selling Proposition:

Seth Godin, Blue Sweater and Our Shrinking World

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In Seth Godin’s post today, How Big is Your World, he discusses how much our world is shrinking and introduces us to Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund and her book the Blue Sweater.

He raises good questions for all of us to ask ourselves, How much are we involved in the world? Are we actively doing something to help or are simply standing by, getting excited about the “issue of the day” and going on with our lives? We all need to take time out of our busy days and really stop and ask ourselves what we can do today to make the world a better place.

Jacqueline (one of my favorite names BTW) has experienced poverty in Africa and wrote what sounds like an amazing book about her experiences as a naive banker entering Africa and started the Acumen fund to build businesses to help fight poverty.

I believe that the grassroots, entrepreneurial approach is the only approach that works long-term to both stabilize and enrich a nation. Providing these entrepreneurs with access to training and capital will help us get past the corruption of their governments and the politics of the NGOs. I applaud the Acumen fund for their efforts.

To do my part for our shrinking world I’ve joined up with a group of social marketers, Social Traffic in a Grass Roots effort to enhance social awareness and promote Earth Day Birthday events. Our goals are to raise awareness about our environment,  and use social marketing to enhance a good cause. We all need to give back with the skills that we have.

Doug
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Seth Godin, Social Clutter and Obama

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Seth Godin really struck a cord for me this morning with today’s post. I have clients who are asking me how how they can “do what Obama did” but don’t understand the differences between social marketing and traditional marketinBarack Obama: Changeg.

When I explain that using social media to market an idea or drive a movement can work very well, but to use the medium correctly they will need to change their way of thinking and make a commitment to social media.

This is what Seth was touching on in today’s post that too many businesses are creating a meatball sundae by trying to use social media like it’s another TV commercial or magazine ad. It’s not, with social media we want to be educated and entertained and if we like what you share with us THEN we will buy from you. This is a very tough thing for most organizations to get their hands around. I know I struggled with it for a while myself.

Most of my clients are offline businesses or inventors introducing new products and we are using social media in a limited way for their campaigns, but I have one client who I believe is extremely well suited for excelling at social media.  They are an 18,000 member nonprofit and if they leverage their current member base and freely share information about their members causes they will attract new members, grow the relationship with their current members and increase donations. I’ll keep everyone posted on their progress.