Expert Business Growth, Virtual Staffing & Personal Branding
In the wee hours of yesterday I was having an ‘entrepreneurial problem’, of not being able to sleep because of too many ideas rolling around inside my head – ever experienced that?!
One of them was to try out the popular presentation sharing website SlideShare as a way to test out an additional avenue to get traffic to my blog.
14-hours later it was featured on the homepage of the highly popular website, listed in not one, but THREE separate categories.
Today… I’m gonna tell you how I did it.
…
I’m in the process of putting together some pretty major changes to my blogging focuses, schedules and over all online strategies. All will be revealed here shortly, I promise.
One of the main things that I’ve been looking into recently has been that of my efforts to build an online community, away from blogging, for everyone to come together, converse, network and help each other.
When you’re doing something like this, as far as I’m concerned it comes down to a very simple question…
I believe that *most* people have a clear picture of their answer and certainly favor one of the social networking giants, over the other.
Facebook certainly has a bigger number attached to it, in terms of users. However, Google+ is being seen as potentially more authoritative, for the obvious reasons, as well as slightly more ‘entrepreneurial’, too.
So, I’d like you to take 10secs and comment below with your answer.
If you’d like to elaborate, then feel free – but a simple one-word reply is also very much appreciated.
GO!
As entrepreneurs we have a thousand ideas a minute and not enough hours in the day to think about ’em!
If you’re just starting out, bootstrapping, growing – you’re no doubt doing long hours and tiring yourself out. That’s okay. It’s expected. A lot of the time you ARE the only one that can take care of a certain task, or project. However, a lot of the time there are certain tasks that you shouldn’t even be thinking about getting involved with (unless you’re an expert in that particular subject).
Today, I thought it might be good to look into this a little more.
Here are my ‘Top 3 Things’ that Remarkable Entrepreneurs should certainly leave to the people that do them every day for a living. By having this type of ‘Delegation Mindset’ we can a) work a few less hours, and b) genuinely get better quality work output.
When you’re done reading, I’d love to hear what else you think startup business owners shouldn’t be attempting themselves, instead delegating to the pro’s.
Here’s a true story, involving… me… 3-odd years ago when I started to play around online for the first time, I decided that I could buy a customizable WordPress blog theme, spend a few hours tweaking it to the way I wanted it to look and then go live with my first blog post.
FACT – Business owners are, 9/10 times, perfectionists.
That afternoon turned into the evening, which turned into the wee hours of the night. It was 4am by the time I had finished ‘tweaking’ everything and the blog I was trying to set-up still didn’t look the way I wanted it to. I was tired, frustrated and overall, I felt deflated about the whole thing.
The next day I sent it onto a Web Development guy that I knew in Manila, telling him what I wanted and even attached a couple of sketches I had put together in regards to the way I wanted the homepage to look. Just 6-hours later I had my blog online and looking exactly the way I wanted it to!
This story will no doubt ring home with a lot of other entrepreneurs that might read this post. The moral of the story – get the professionals to rock out great looking logos, business cards, flyers and websites – whilst you focus on the income generating tasks, such as writing sales copy for your website landing page, or spending time with your number one client on the golf course!
This is probably one of the toughest topics I had getting to grips with when I started getting active online, in regards to promoting and marketing my business on the internet. That has changed a lot over time, obviously, as I have become a lot more knowledgeable on the subject by reading a ton of books, trail and error and asking as many questions (to those that ‘know’) as possible!
As someone who came from a very traditional, brick ‘n mortar business background (and who’s largest company, presently, is still very much in that category), I struggled with understanding SEO concepts. I soon learned that marketing a business online is a lot, LOT different to marketing one in the ‘real’, offline world.
From day one, I paid someone else to do it for me. Someone that had experience and understood Google and how ‘ranking’ worked, etc. And it paid off – for sure. Nowadays even though I’m a little more involved with the general strategies that we implement online, I still pay other people to do it for me, and I know one thing for sure…
If I had’ve even attempted to do this type of work myself when I was starting out, it would have been a complete disaster.
SUGGESTED LISTENING: Check out Episode 42 of the VBL Podcast with marketing professional David Meerman Scott for some of the most up-to-date marketing ideas and concepts for small business available anywhere online. David is a genius at this stuff!
Being who I am, and doing what I do – this one is kind of a no-brainer.
Call it ‘working with a virtual assistant‘, or ‘outsourcing‘, or whatever you like – offloading the types of tasks that bog you down everyday as a hard working, ball-busting startup entrepreneur is just plain, good business strategy.
Whether you have to do a ton of online research; frequently have to update your social media channels; handle boring, repetitive book-keeping tasks; update your website content regularly; handle your calendar (note – I am terrible at this, and would be lost without my personal assistant doing it for me!); reply to boat-load of daily email inquiries or simply have to transcribe audio or video files, delegating work to other people, nowadays, as simple as 1, 2, 3.
Off-loading these types of everyday ‘busy tasks’, as I call them, is a great way to leverage your time, allowing yourself to get more done, with less effort and really focus on growing your business. At first that might mean spending more time on marketing concepts, or packaging ideas for your launch product. Down the road it could mean that you have more time to spend on putting processes in place for your growing empire.
Either way, working with VA’s and other types of professionals, people that do this stuff for a living everyday, is great business sense and you’ll enjoy the benefits of it, I’m sure.
That about wraps up my ‘quickie list’. Although, like I said, I’d love to hear from you on any other types of tasks, projects or processes that you feel startup entrepreneurs should simply hand over to the people ‘that know’, instead of attempting to do it all themselves.
Comment below, and lets see if we can get a bit of a conversation going!
Snapshot taken via Instagram, whilst in Hospital
I enjoy my social media action.
I have just as much fun enjoying interacting with friends online as I do in real life… And its a great way to get to know my community here better, as well as hopefully help as much as possible, too.
Not to mention building brands and marketing businesses, too. Creativity to one side – being active on social media channels has become the ‘norm’ in our very online world nowadays.
Tweeting is my favorite form of social chit chat. It’s quick, very mobile and above all, simple. Effective.
Twitter is also a fantastic tool for finding new, real time, business opportunities, too (which I regularly do!). But, thats a topic for a future post, perhaps.
I also enjoy taking photos. Instagram makes even the most inexperienced photographer ‘cool’ with its different filters, and sweet blurring effects (I’m sure there’s a technical term for that, but I’m buggered if I know what it is!). As of today, I have 711 people following me on Instagram, and I’ve posted 192 photos in the year or so that I’ve been using it. If you’d like to follow me – just search for ‘chrisducker’ in the app.
A couple of days ago Facebook announced that it was acquiring Instagram in a deal that would total one billion dollars (a mix of cash and stock).
Immediately a couple of quick thoughts popped into my head, namely:
Will I still be able to share my photos from Instagram to Twitter?
Will Instagram itself, as an app, be slowly, but surely incorporated into the Facebook app?
Fair questions to ask, and although Mark Zuckerberg says that the app will remain the way it is, I have to be honest, I doubt it will. I just don’t think that they (Facebook) will be able to help themselves, and eventually it will become ‘part’ of Facebook.
I also have to be honest when I say that I’m actually getting quite sick of all these different social media platforms.
The social media landscape is just too damn noisy for me now…
Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Four Square, Pinterest, Tumblr, and so on and so on. The old adage of “You’ve got to be in it, to win it!” is complete and utter rubbish, as far as I’m concerned. I only use a few of those and do quite well when it comes to building a personal brand and marketing my businesses.
I am contemplating making quite drastic changes in my social media interaction. I might even completely drop certain platforms all together.
I’ve started to dislike Facebook as it’s become more and more ‘complicated’ to work with and enjoy. Lets face it – did we REALLY need Timeline? I don’t think so. But, its hear nonetheless. Related Note: If you want a great tutorial on Timeline for Pages, then check out my buddy, Pat Flynn’s excellent post (complete with videos and templates).
However, I do enjoy the interaction on the VBL Facebook page, which currently has over 11,000 people who have ‘Liked’ it. Do so here if you want to be loved forever!
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Are you feeling the same way as me….?
Or, do you love social media, in every way, shape and form?
Will Instagram be affected by this whole thing?
Are you finding yourself strapped for time when it comes to your Social Media playtime?
I’d love to hear your comments below…
Today I have a very sincere message for every business owner out there that is using social media to promote and market their business…
Stop having one night stands on your social media channels.
If you really want to utilize this medium to grow your business, then start getting married, instead.
Let me explain my thoughts further.
A short time back, I had marketing expert and world-renowned speaker, David Meerman Scott on the VBL Podcast. I’m a massive fan of David’s and literally read everything he puts out. The guy is my marketing Yoda, plain and simple.
The one thing that he mentioned that stood out, more than anything else, was that people have got to stop pitching and start engaging more, to be able to make social media work for them in business.
So, in reverse order, here are three quick and easy tips to start utilizing social media to help grow your business faster than you thought possible… The RIGHT way.
At the beginning of February I had the opportunity to fly over to Phuket, Thailand and speak in front of 160 passionate entrepreneurs on the subject of boosting traditional / brick ‘n mortar success, by engaging the online world of business.
Throughout the course of the 3-day conference many successful business owners, myself included (duh!) presented their pearls of wisdom to the highly energetic crowd. One session was on the subject of getting your social media strategy in place – for the entire year!
The strategy is to post something, across all your channels every day of the week.
Its better to try and automate as much of this as possible, so you just have to focus on the interaction side of things, once people start replying, commenting and RT’ing your posts.
It included things like:
Perhaps I’ll go into this strategy a little more in the near future, but the big eye-opener for almost all in attendance was that, with a little planning and execution, you can be everywhere, be engaging, helpful, resourceful and reap massive rewards through social media, in a non-spammy / sales-pitchy way.
So, get creative, plan your posting schedule (in the same way you would as a blogger), and then put it all on autopilot. Following this, all you have to do is pay attention and engage.
The one thing that I love about social media is that it’s instant.
Sometime last year I had issues with my hosting provider – our sites went down. I quickly went onto Twitter and discovered that there were a lot of people in the same boat, all using the same provider, just by doing a quick search.
This got me thinking. Surely if people were using the micro-blogging site to bitch and moan about problems they were experiencing, then they MUST be using it to find solutions, too.
I was bang on, right!
So, I immediately started stalking search.twitter.com, searching for people that needed help and support in my niche, and started reaching out – without pitching my company or services. I figured that if I helped them out willingly, that they would go ahead and visit my profile, click on my links and check out what I had to offer – when they were good and ready.
I was bang on, right – again!
Nowadays, I don’t do this searching myself. I leave it up to my VA, who manages all the searches via TweetDeck, and sends out pre-written responses that I produced in the course of my experimenting myself, as well as other types of interaction that she handles herself, too.
She does this with her own Twitter account, some company ones, and even sometimes using MY account, too! So, people think that they are chatting with me, as a thought leader in our niche, before they actually DO start talking to me. Smart so-and-so, aren’t I…?!!
For me, it works… Check out the tweets below, showing social proof.
This is simple, yet so many people overlook it.
It’s time to minimize and simplify.
Having a presence on the major social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn is important (click at random to interact with me on these channels). However, being actively involved on them all is just unrealistic – especially if you want to make a major difference in your business and more importantly, genuinely help your customers and prospective customers.
So, stop chasing the social media dragon and start getting smart.
Pick ONE channel that you enjoy using more than any other, and then GO FOR IT in a major way. That doesn’t mean that you won’t utilize the other channels frequently (or even have a virtual assistant manage them for you), it simply means that this one channel will become your social media focus.
For me, it’s Twitter. I like to tweet because it’s quick, easy and very mobile (thanks to my iPhone4 and iPad). It also enables me to add images, videos and links to other cool and helpful resources for my list of over 40,000+ followers.
For my aforementioned buddy, Pat Flynn – it’s Facebook. Pat’s fan page is ridiculous – in a good way! The engagement he has with his fans is unlike any other Facebook page that I have seen. Why? Because he decided a long time ago, that this was the way he wanted to answer fan questions, help, support and interact with them, away from his blog. He does a great job of it, too.
I’ll leave you with this…
There are LOTS of people doing things right already. However, here’s a list of ten of them that I see using social media in the right way (consistently), as discussed above, to engage, motivate, inspire and educate (as well as promote their businesses!).
Check ’em out on Twitter, and emulate, people.
What experiences have you had with social media in regards to utilizing it for building your brand and promoting / marketing your business?
I’d love to hear about the good, the bad AND the ugly in the comment section below.
Quick Request: If you liked this post and found it even remotely helpful, I’d really appreciate a quick share of it on your favorite social media channel. Here’s the URL, so you can copy and paste it quickly. Thanks in advance! – https://bit.ly/ygb0dO
Chris is a serial entrepreneur and highly regarded as THE authority on the subject of building a profitable personal brand business.