Biz Tips Blog: Internet Marketing Tips

Public Speaking Can Boost Your Business

As business owners, Patsi and I have learned over the past few years that one of the keys to our success has been taking the plunge and speaking at conferences and to niche groups. Speaking has boosted our credibility and extended our ability to reach more people. In a nutshell, speaking has helped us build a successful business.

Last week we were invited to speak at a 3-day seminar coming up in August, about how to using public speaking to build your business. It's not a seminar for public speakers though if you are one you would probably learn a lot; it's actually focused on business owners, entrepreneurs and service professionals who want to, and know they need to, add speaking to their marketing toolkit.

Our friends Arvee Robinson and Lee Pound have come up with an incredible kickoff offer for their Speak Your Way to Wealth seminar in August.

Drinking from the firehose

Saturday was an intense day of injecting information directly into my brain.  While Patsi was at the Mega Speaking Empire event, coincidentally in the same hotel, I spent the day with 25 others in a room with The System creator, Ken McCarthy at the System Intensive.

I started the day with a 7:30 breakfast with Patsi and our colleague Kathleen Gage of Street Smarts Marketing whom I had never met in person.  We jammed a lot of potential joint venture ideas in to an hour before we all moved on to our workshops.

The System Intensive was approximately 8 hours of Ken McCarthy giving the bird's eye view of marketing online and off.  McCarthy comes from a lineage of direct marketers and then transferred that knowledge to online marketing. The day started with an introduction to the direct marketing giants like Maxwell Sackheim, Eugene Schwartz, John Caples, David Ogilvy, and Gary Halbert.

Speaking Skills: Free resources for becoming confident

If you're interested in improving your presentation skills or overcoming the fear of public speaking, our colleague Dr. Larina Kase has some free resources on confident speaking for you.

1) Here are 3 articles on public speaking anxiety.

2) Here is a charisma quiz and some more articles on storytelling and speaking for business opportunities at.

3) The Blog Squad conducted a 30-minute interview with Larina and you can listen to it here (get more great tips on blogging while you're there too!)

To access more great resources to improve your presentation skills, visit Larina's blog at www.themindsetofsuccess.com.  And of course, we recommend the book, The Confident Speaker by Larina and her co-author Harrison Monarth.

Related Posts:
Tom Antion's Advice to The Blog Squad
Presentation Challenges: How do you handle unexpected challenges?

Web 2.0 Report: Few Participate

A newly published study by Hitwise reveals that despite the media frenzy surrounding Web 2.0 sites and services, only a minuscule number actually participate in social networking and information sharing revolution.

To read an analysis of the report, it's worth a visit to DaniWeb.com. Even if the percentage (.16%) of people uploading files to YouTube and Flickr are tiny, it still represents enormous volume.

To me, this means there is a great opportunity for people who want to get known and get found. The more you participate, the more your name will show up in web searches. Small business owners, writers, authors, speakers, entrepreneurs: are you paying attention? Start participating wherever you can.

Hitwise General Manager Bill Tancer, has analyzed some 860,000 web sites and the habits of 25 million Internet users and reckons this provides a crystal ball to predict who might be the next Flickr, Wikipedia or YouTube. Here’s what Tancer reckons you should be looking out for in the "making it big" stakes:

    * Imeem
    * Piczo
    * StumbleUpon
    * Veoh
    * WeeWorld
    * Yelp

Social Media: Welcome to the New Social Internet

Social Media, Web 2.0 and All That Jazz
©2007 Patsi Krakoff, Psy.D. and Denise Wakeman, The Blog Squad(TM)

If you’ve been around the Internet for more than a couple of years, you’ve learned that blogging isn’t just some geeky fad that’s going away soon. Just when you start to “get it” as far as the importance of blogs for marketing your business, along comes more new stuff, namely Web 2.0 and “social media.”

Here’s what we’re learning about social media and how it will impact your business and personal life. First, the Wikipedia definition:

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.

A few prominent examples of social media applications are Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), YouTube (video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Digg (news sharing), Flickr (photo sharing) and Miniclip (game sharing).

These sites typically use technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs to allow users to interact. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media)

Robert Scoble of Scobelizer.com had some fun writing about how this “new media” impacts our lives.

New York Breakfast with Clients

While in New York last week for the BlogHer Business conference, we had the pleasure of meeting with several of our clients.  We arranged a breakfast meeting at our hotel, the trendy Paramount near Times Square. Here are a couple of pictures:

Patsi with Ellen Bayer of Framing Change, and Stuart Nachbar of Educated Quest.

Google Calendar Helps You Share Your Events

A post by John Jantsch about Google Calendar reminded me of something I've been meaning to do for awhile.

How do you let your readers, web visitors, prospects and customers know what you're up to and where you'll be speaking?  For awhile I used Trumba calendar to have events dynamically posted on my blogs, but then they started charging for the service and it wasn't worth it to me.  Then I found out you can post public events from your Google calendar with an RSS feed.  It's been on my list to do for a few weeks. So, thank you John, for the reminder.  John posts the steps to set this up on his Duct Tape Marketing blog so I won't repeat them here.

I will say, however, that I finally took the time this morning to set up a public calendar for Blog Squad Gigs and it's now posted on all our public blogs.

Networking: How to you compare to your peers?

Courtesy of Jill Konrath, I just took an interesting quiz to find out my Networking Quotient.  Out of a possible high of 62, I got 35. 

This free quiz is designed to help you learn about your social networking skills for business and how your skills compare with those of your peers in several demographics.

Here's my graph:

30-39 points: Needs Some Improvement. Your score shows that you have not fully embraced the importance of social networking in your career. People do business with people they know and like, and your increased attention to building relationships will benefit you in many ways. Look for ways to be a resource for others and to let them know that you care as much about them and their success as you do about your own. The effort that you put into building your network will come back to you in ways you have not imagined.

You can see that I'm right in line with others in my demographics.  Networking has never been my strong suit though I am getting better, mostly as a result of blogging, online social networking tools and generally becoming more extroverted about my business.

What's your Networking Quotient?

Internet Marketing Retreat

Today I'm off to Virginia Beach to the Great Internet Marketing Retreat Center for a one day intensive retreat with Tom Antion.  This is not part of the mentoring program I'm in, but an exclusive, advanced one day session for Outer Circle members of the Internet Association of Information Marketers. As far as I know there will be only 5 people attending so this is going to be really high-level, intensive work, nearly one on one with Tom.  I'm excited to be going, though I'll miss my Blog Squad buddy, Patsi, who cannot make the trip with me.

If I get a chance, I'll report from the event; if not, I'll post when I get back.

People Powered Conference Tips

Fresh back from the BlogHer conference this past weekend, Patsi wrote a great top 10 list about how to get the most from attending a conference.  Originally published in this week's Savvy eBiz Tips, I asked her to publish the list on her blog as well, so everyone can benefit.  If you attend conferences and/or networking events, be sure to study this list of tips.