Our “Who Said That?” section includes recent posts from other blogs that we think you may enjoy…Trust me, the blogs below along with many more not mentioned, have some great additional content. If you are new to this whole blog scene, you should learn about RSS.

I, as many of you, get asked often about Natural rankings in Google. Other than a **** of hard work…Lee Odden of Top Rank Blog Offers: New Study on Google Ranking Factors

Want to take your own blogging more serious? Check out Pick The Brain - 27 Lessons Learned on the Way to 3,000 visits a day and 2,200 RSS Subscribers

One reason that CBG has multiple writer’s is because of what Nate Whitehill mentions in this post - The Pressures of Blogging Consistently

Other than what Joe Whyte mentions Amazing Way to get FREE .edu links that is 100% Ethical .edu’s can be fairly easily achieved if you provide well written content to their target audience. We recently got some great .edu’s (including Library .edu) by simply targeting the audience with good content. However, Joe’s idea has merit as well.

eMoms at Home has a nice post An Introduction to Social Media Strategy and Social Media Content. By the way, our very own Tara is a mother of triplets and a stay at home eMommy professional who writes some great posts for us. We are open to hear from other eMommies who like to write about work from home type tips. Feel free to contact Christine [at] Create Business Growth [dot] com.

Tags: Who Said That? by David - 1 Comment »

There are a lot fancy email management tools out there that you can use to connect with potential new clients and business peers. Many of these tools are just downright awesome, with all of the gadgets and conveniences you could ever dream about.

But I was having a reflective moment the other day and thinking about all of my current clients and how I met them. Even I was surprised by the answer. It turns out that every single client I work with now came from a simple text email or a referral from one of the people that I met through a simple text email. Pretty incredible!

One client who has probably netted me at least $40,000 over the last year or so was a result of an email that literally took me about 5 minutes to write. I thought it was kind of cheesy to send a text email, but I did it anyway because I had made “contact 10 new potential clients” one of my checklist items for the day. I didn’t even have a website up at that time. I shot of the emails in about 10 minutes and about 5 minutes after that got a call from one of them. That was a year and a half ago and that relationship is still profitable.

I met David the same way. I just happened to send him an email at the very moment that he was online looking for copywriters. We’ve had an awesome business relationship ever since and, together with this team, have taken a lot of sites to page 1 in Google.

So if you’re just starting online out and wondering where to begin, my advice is to just put yourself out there! Fancy html email programs are great and they can help a lot, but if you’ve got a good product or service to offer, it’s more about getting the word out rather than the format in which the word get’s out in.

Tags: Business Building, Business Networking, Marketing by Adam - 1 Comment »

One of the best ways to grow a small business is to appreciate the loyal customers that you already have. If you find ways to treat and pay respect to your most valuable clients, you will most likely attract more. (Most people hang out with friends who are similar to them, right?)

Hosting an effective client appreciation event can be a difficult task. You walk a fine line between simply thanking them for their past business, attempting to cement the relationship further and hopefully gaining referrals for future business. All the while hoping that your best customers are having a great time.

Here are some tried-and-true events that can work depending on your customer base and personal marketing style:

One-on-One Dinner Event: Invite your best client and their spouse to dinner (preferably to a high-end restaurant) and ask them to bring one or two other couples. The key to this event is its intimacy. The purpose is simply to thank them for their business – no hard selling required. By getting to know you better as a person, they will feel more comfortable recommending you to their friends (who just happen to be enjoying the dinner and getting to know you too!)

Larger Dinner Event: If your customer base is larger, you may want to rent out a restaurant or other local attraction for an evening of entertaining. This gives you the opportunity to thank multiple clients at the same time. You can still have them bring friends if space permits. I would recommend addressing the crowd as a whole and then mingling around the room for mini-conversations throughout the night.

Hosting a Seminar: If your business centers around a service, such as marketing, finance, real estate, etc…, give your prized customers the opportunity to learn more about their own businesses through seminars. Bring in top-notch speakers to cover some valuable topics in-depth. If you are in finance, for example, you can host a business seminar that covers retirement planning options, the economy and running a business on a budget. Not only will you be helping your customers build their own businesses, getting information from an unbiased third party can be just the push they need to take the next step with you!

Obviously there are many, many more ideas for hosting a client appreciation event. If you have held a successful one recently, I would love to hear about it!

Tags: Marketing by Adam - 1 Comment »

Are you approachable to customers, potential new clients and partners? Scott Ginsberg literally wrote the book on how to be more approachable in business. His now very successful and highly publicized business began like most great ideas – on accident. One day Scott attended an event at his college where he wore a “Hello, My Name is Scott” nametag. After the event, he decided to leave the nametag on and noticed that strangers all over campus began approaching him.

That was 6 years ago and Scott hasn’t removed the nametag since.

His success begs the question; how can you make yourself more approachable? For those that have an online presence, this can be tricky. You know that you are more than just a 2 dimensional website, but do your customers?

Here are some ideas for conveying a sense of approachability on your website:

Publish your photo

The way business is conducted has changed dramatically since the days of old, but people haven’t. In general, people still want to know who they are dealing with and that there is in fact a face behind the website.

Open the lines of communication

The web is the ideal medium for communication! Offer several ways for clients to communicate with you such as through live chat, email, phone, comments, etc. Then get back to people ASAP with customized, non-canned responses.

Open up

Blogs are a great way to give your readers insight about yourself, your interests, and your life. Go Daddy’s CEO Bob Parson’s reveals a lot about himself on his blog and through his podcasts. I gained even more loyalty for SEO Guru Rand Fishkin after watching his marriage proposal. People are much more likely to approach you if they know that you really are a human, not just some web bot.

Tags: Business Building, Social Networking, Business Networking by Adam - 1 Comment »

This fantastic video from Daily Motion does a great job of portraying the changing relationship between advertisers and customers: (click to view - opens in new window)

Advertising is typically pretty one-sided. But with the internet and today’s technology, all of that is changing. Consumers are demanding more meaningful relationships.

Building strong customer relationships is not unlike building solid personal relationships. Here are a few ways that we’re all aware of that are essential for building strong personal relationships that can be used when interacting with customers.

Listen

Most of the world just wants to talk; it’s the people that genuinely care that actually take the time to listen. In business, it’s essential to have a platform where your customers can talk freely, without restraint. Whether that’s a blog post that asks for feedback and allows for open dialog, an email address designated for feedback, or customer service surveys that offer an area for free-form writing, your customers will appreciate the fact that you want to hear from them.

Anticipate their needs

Someone who genuinely cares about you is always thinking about your best interests as they go through their day. They know what your interests are and the problem’s your facing in your life. While shopping or reading a magazine, they may see something they think you would like or need and pass along the details. When you see products, tools, solutions, or articles that you think would be of value to your customers, don’t hesitate to post info about it on a blog, and e-newsletter, or a simple email.

Be open to trying new things

Who knows more about what your customers need and want than your customers do? By providing a forum for open communication, you stand to learn a lot about what your customers need. Listen to their suggestions with an open ear and be willing to try some of their suggestions. Sometimes we get set in our ways with the way we run our businesses. But if you don’t listen, someone else will and your customers are likely to stray.

On that note… what can we provide more of at Create Business Growth to help you grow your business?

Tags: Blogging, Business Building by Adam - No Comments »

Whether you are new to internet market or a seasoned pro, you should always be looking for more effective ways to market your website. If you stand still, you’ll be quickly left behind in the world of internet business.

Below is a checklist of 13 ways to market your website. Some of these methods get you great traffic, some get you links, and others get you publicity, and together they will help make your site more successful (along with good sales copy, etc, etc.).

1. Optimize your website
2. Write and submit articles
3. Write and submit press releases when appropriate
4. Submit your site to free (the good ones) web directories
5. Participate in related forums (with your site in your signature)
6. Create an email newsletter
7. Build reciprocal links with relevant sites
8. Advertise your site on PPC search engines
9. Advertise your site on related blogs
10. Rent targeted email lists (use with caution)
11. Create a viral marketing campaign
12. Start an affiliate program
13. Advertise via shopping sites / malls

In case you’re wondering what makes these lucky marketing methods, I’ll tell you. They are “lucky” because they work! Of course, this list is not exhaustive, but it’s a great basic checklist. It’ll get you started.
Learn how to make these methods work for you, and you will never lack traffic for your website.

Tags: Internet Marketing by Adam - 1 Comment »

I’m starting a new category called “Hangout Cafe” where our various contributors can talk about off topic matters like music, family, life, etc. It’s just a place to unwind and get to know each other better like having and espresso without talking business.

I just spent $15.39 on 4 CD’s at Half.com…

Somewhere More Familiar… : Sister Hazel (CD, 1997)

Bent [Single] : Matchbox Twenty (CD, 2000)

Yourself Or Someone Like You : Matchbox Twenty (CD, 1996)

Crash : Dave Matthews (CD, 1996)

Although the above is a sample of the type music I like, you cannot tell much about me by it because I also like The Allman Brothers and The Black Crows which in and of themselves are two totally different bands.

Tags: Hangout Cafe by David - 1 Comment »

Styles come and go, trends ebb and change, and it seems that we are on the forefront of a new style of blog advertising. All the cool kids are doing it, and it seems to be working. Take a look:

Marketing Pilgrim

CopyBlogger

Alexa

Read Write Web

Blog-vertising can mean big bucks if you’ve got a popular blog. Many of these little cubes are going for $1,000+ a month – you do the math! That’s the power of gaining a strong following and doing the legwork to establish yourself as an expert in the industry.

How do you get to charge those kinds of rates for advertising? The same way that magazines do – by gaining subscribers. In our future posts about RSS feeds, well talk more about how to develop a strong, measurable, readership through RSS subscriptions.

Until then, try subscribing to some RSS feeds yourself if you don’t already to see how it works from a user’s point of view.

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to sign up for our RSS Feed!
Got an RSS Reader? Grab this: http://createbusinessgrowth.com/feed/
You can also share this post using the “share this” button below.

Tags: Blogging by Adam - 1 Comment »

This is the first post in our new category “Time Management.” Unfortunately, I don’t have time to finish the post because I’m headed to see Shrek 3 with the family

Did you get it?

More to come in this valuable Category.

Tags: Time Management by David - 1 Comment »

I recently became aware of a relatively new “phishing” scam that’s making the rounds. This one is particularly insidious to my mind because it’s most likely to catch customer-service oriented business people — the kind of folks who try their best to “do right” by their customers. (The kind of people who read this blog!)

The way it came to my attention was that I got what appeared to be an e-mail from the BBB, alleging a complaint from someone. It looked pretty official and for a couple of minutes I was a little bit taken aback. What could I have done that made someone so upset they filed a complaint with the BBB? None of my clients or business associates had said anything directly to me about being unhappy…

My first clue that something might be amiss was that I had never heard of the person who supposedly had filed the complaint. Now, y’all may not have noticed, but I’m not exactly a large multi-national corporation. I pretty much know everyone I work with, and I was at a total loss as to who this guy might be. Hmmm.

Well, the e-mail advised me that the attached Word document would give me all the details of the complaint and also the procedure I should use to resolve it. My anti-virus and anti-spyware protection is pretty robust and always up to date (has to be, given the amount of time I spend out on the Wild Wild Web), so I took a chance and downloaded the document. Scanned it for viruses, and it came back clean, so I clicked on it.

And that’s when I got my second clue that this might not be on the up-and-up. Instead of having the promised information, the Word document instead contained what purported to be an embedded Adobe Acrobat PDF document. Now, why would the BBB go through the trouble of creating a PDF (a perfectly acceptable document type to e-mail) and then embed that PDF into a Word document for e-mailing? Didn’t make sense. Double-hmmm.

The third clue was when I tried to open the PDF. (Yeah, risky… I know. But I was curious, and I have confidence in my anti-virus protection — as it happens, apparently well-placed confidence.) My anti-virus software came back and alerted me that this supposed “PDF” was trying to run some sort of executable file, and that this didn’t seem safe. I opted to not run the file. (Hey, I may be a bit of a risk-taker, but I’m not crazy!)

Usually, I’m a “three strikes and you’re out” kinda person, but just in case this was from the BBB, I didn’t want to leave a customer complaint un-answered (even if it was from somebody I’d never heard of before). So I looked closer at the e-mail itself.

This time around, I noticed the return address actually said it was from the Better Business Bureaus. The name of the organization is Better Business Bureau (no “s” on the end). And checking the details of the header showed the message actually originated on a server that belonged to a company that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the BBB.

So I went to the BBB website, to see if there was a way I could enquire about the legitimacy of this message. And that’s where I found this warning. As I had come to suspect, the message is a scam!

So, thanks to good virus/spyware protection and a suspicious turn of mind, I wasn’t affected by this scam. But I wanted to help get the word out, in case there are other conscientious, customer-service oriented business people out there among our readers, who might get taken in by this phony “complaint” scam.

Tags: General Business Issues by Adam - 1 Comment »