Free Infographic Tools

Attributed to Mark Twain via Benjamin Disraeli The phrase takes a life of its own with Visual Infographics that almost any marketer can use due to the number of tools that are out there in the marketplace today.

I am a fan of a picture tells the story much better than words but this is no more important than when one looks at infographics. My fave Web 2.0 communicator @AmberMac just did a great post on Fast Company on a feature that i would encourage you to bookmark or subscribe to just because of the quality of the content. It discusses Infographics and follows on an interview with Nicholas Felton

AmberMac – Thoughtfullness and Prolific Valuable Content

I don’t miss an item that this prolific author and speaker produces because of the tremendous value she delivers. And delivers, and delivers. She has a bestselling book that came out last summer Power Friending: Demystifying Social Media to Grow Your Business as well as produces a technology column for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, has a video podcast Command-N she hosts which is now into over 230 episodes with her brother Jeff MacArthur produced and shot by fiancee Christopher Dick.

If that were not enough you can also find her on Twit.Tv weekly with Sarah Lane on The Social Hour as well as Canadian television show Webnation and a commentator on Canada’s CTV Television network. Add on that she is a mother of a toddler and a sought after consultant with her firm mgimedia.ca and keynote speaker around the world and she is a busy,busy person.

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I am an unabashed fanboy but herein I sense is the real magic that I appreciate so much about Amber. She so willingly shares this information to assist others to grow and succeed in all of her forums.

Having just listened to Mitch Joel, on his Six Pixels of Separation podcast with Tim Sanders, author of Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence while just having read the latest effort from Seth Godin’s Domino project the book,Do the Work” by Steven Pressfield which helps people get it going and moves them, I think of this sharing culture I see out there and encourage readers to embrace it as one of the new pathways to contemporary lifelong learning.

Who knows what you might be able to convey using some of the new infographic tools.

Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story

Any smart marketer knows that the best way to succeed in their objective is to tell a story that explains the idea better than any set of points could on the merits of the idea. The Hidden Power of Story is the way that we all learned at our Daddy’s knee and it is the way that most of us learned our life lessons all along.

Tell To Win Author Peter Guber

Tell to Win Author Peter Guber

The celebrity name-dropping lends some glitter to Guber’s very reasonable precepts: as he urges the reader to harness the power of metaphor in crafting the core narrative of a pitch or advertising campaign, he refers to how Michael Jackson taught him about drama by making him watch a python slowly stalk a helpless mouse, and how KISS frontman Gene Simmons, son of Holocaust survivors, used his backstory to fuel his ambition and his business strategy. This valuable and inspiring book will help readers deliver an authentic and meaningful story to customers, colleagues, or prospective clients.

Tell to Win Teaches Us How To Spin a Good Tale

Good storytelling begets good understanding as the reader feels the story on an emotional level. I think it is often interesting to look who makes pre-sale comments on new books. I heard about this title from an email from Tony Robbins who told me the story of how Guber had been such an influence on his life, not only as a friend and a mentor .but also from the spinning of great stories which moved Robbins, who is no slouch in the storytelling and personal development world. Guber’s book Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story is available March 1 at online sources and bookstores. If you want to preorder this book, Tell to Win you can do it now at Amazon,Barnes&Noble or many other fine booksellers.

Rightsleeve Delivers Promotional Design Excellence

Promotional Design and Branding are a key part of any marketing strategy. Who you are and what you do can be expressed by your visual identity and how you brand yourself. It can also be supported by all of your communications channels around your brand as well as by good promotional design with Rightsleeve.

No more are we left to put our brand on promotional pieces and other advertising and marketing giveaways designed in mass by factories in overseas locales. We now have promotional design, the social media channels and YouTube as well as online publications in addition to the older print media campaigns of the past.

Today you can design a complete strategy to support your branding using a wide variety of products. One Canadian company has taken this to an art form. Rightsleeve has taken the best in marketing, just in time manufacturing, and an integrated use of technology to save time,money,overhead and deliver value to customers around the world from a Toronto based centre of operations.

Rightsleeve is Double Award Winner

Winner of a Dell Small Business Excellence award in Canada for innovative technology deployment , Rightsleeve manages their whole global operation online from sourcing,design,online catalogues,customer service ,billing as well as and probably of the greatest value employee engagement. They are not just a source for pens and key-chains like some promotional companies.

Rightsleeve Honoured by Michael Dell in Texas

They are a promotional design agency which uses design,promotional products,rich media and technology to improve a company’s marketing results. Different from a number of their competitors but highly effective at delivering results. They were awarded the 2011 Gold Web award at the largest global promotional Products Conference PPAI in Las Vegas.

Award Winners at PPAI Conference 20111 in Las Vegas

If you want a source of promotional material or “swag” to promote your brand Rightsleeve can get it made for you,delivered on time. I discovered Rightsleeve and its CEO Mark Graham myself with swag I got at the social media and marketing conference “MESH”in Toronto several year ago and have been impressed with their depth of branding tools in their toolbox to deploy for you and your brand . You may want to view Mark’s social media presentations at a recent Promotional Products Industry conference. Mark sets the standard in his industry for his sharing of great content.

Not just content to help you promote your brand ,almost all of their own promotion is done online and through social media channels like Facebook.Twitter,You Tube and Linked-In serving Fortune 500 companies,advertising agencies, small business and organizations who want sharp branding and excellence in their promotions.

Rightsleeve Delivers Marketing Results

Technology is certainly a differentiator today in a number of industries. The judicious and careful use of it can produce extraordinary results for your promotions. Smart marketers have to get it working for them to get results they deserve. I am not an affiliate or promoter for these guys, they are just damn good at what they do. I like Rightsleeve and their results for clients. You should too.

Get Your Universal Business Listing

List Your Business Once. Be Found Everywhere!!!

It is time to move from traditional white pages listing of your business by someone else to a full online profile that you can control. The Universal Business Listing (UBL) – is a tool used by Local Search Marketing and Yellow Pages Representatives which is now available to be used by any business.

The Universal Business Listing gives your business the ability to list your business profile one time, and UBL will then submit your business listing information to various local search engines such as Yahoo! Local, YellowPages, Super Pages, Google Places, in fact all the major online directories, search portals, data aggregators, and to the national 411 database. Unlike traditional business listings that require a business phone line, UBL let’s you list your part-time or Internet business, your cell phone, your website and email. UBL is all you need to get your business visible on the internet.

Google Places

This is truly a time saver and a way for you to make sure your enhanced business information is published the way you want it.

UBL is the fast, easy and inexpensive way to get businesses and their ever-changing profiles listed everywhere. For less then dinner for two , you get the knowledge that your business is profiled and ready to be found in different types of online and mobile local search. Universal Business Listing will also allow you to track your submission to the different sites to report back to you that it has been submitted.

Universal Business Listing Increases Exposure

With this distribution you will be able to get the best possible exposure for your company’s public business information and contact points. This includes full product & service description, locations, web site URL, email contacts, certifications & awards. UBL is perfect for those:

That want the easy way to manage all of their listings

Need to have mobile phones listed in local and national 411 Directory Assistance

Don’t want to spend all of their time registering their info with Search Engines, Portals and Online Yellow
Pages but want the best possible exposure for all of their public information and contact points at an affordable
price.

Unlike the traditional print Yellow Pages where businesses are restricted in the type of information they can submit and in turn how they can be found (Business name, address, telephone number, fax number, URL and category). Success in online local search requires that more robust information be provided.

* Secondary Categories
* Brands Carried
* Products &Services
* Hours of Operation
* Logo
* Video & social Network Links
* Amenities
* Photos
* Specialties

This is especially important when you consider how online and mobile users are searching for local information and how the local search algorithms work on the search engines as well as the information that tools like Yelp and GigPark,Zagats and other location based systems are using.

UBL distributes your batch client listings to all the major Search and Directory outlets – hundreds in total.

* These include: Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing
* Online Yellow Pages such as Superpages, Yellowpages.com
* Social Networks such as Yelp
* Portals and Guides such as AOL, CitySearch
* Cell Phones and Mobile devices such as BlackBerry and iPhone
* 411 Directory Assistance
* In-Car GPS Navigation
* Telematics such as OnStar

Universal Business Listing

Universal Business Listing Maximizes Your SEO Returns

The faster you get started, the quicker your company’s search results are everywhere!

For businesses in the USA click on Universal Business Listings USA

For Canadian Businesses click on Universal Business Listing Canada

For United Kingdom Businesses click on Universal Business Listing U.K.

It is a wise move to have the listing contents EXACTLY the same everywhere as you have in your Google Places (Maps) Listing and UBL Listing for consistency in spelling, punctuation in Universal Business Listing as your linking and ability to be found improve dramatically, especially for citations in local search which tend to let you rank higher, the more citations and customer testimonials and comments you have.

Social Media is a great tool to use

for community involvement and access to a wide variety of people locally and around the world. I came across this example: the 10to20 project from Queens, a large rural municipality on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia Canada .

View Larger Map

They are using a social media campaign on Facebook to reinforce the buying of goods in their communities during the holiday season.

Social media spreads the word not ony to the residents of Queens and Nova Scotia but globally. Their mission is kind of simple:

“If everyone in Queens spent 10% of their income here at home, we would pout $20 million into the local economy! We know you aren’t going to spend it all here, but just spend that little bit more. 10cents per dollar makes a huge difference!”

The project is locally based by the South Queens Chamber of Commerce and the North Queens Board of Trade and the Municipality of Queens.

Social Media Tools

They are using Social Media tools such as Facebook and Twitter in this effort to reinforce their message on their website.

Social Media for Communities

Here is a link to a TV interview about buying local with CTV Atlantic’s Live at 5 program.

I want to thank my Facebook friend Monica Howard for bringing this social media tidbit to my attention. You may also want to like them on Facebook or friend on Twitter.

Local Search Marketing

Online Visibility in local search marketing helps professionals to widen their market reach and attract more clients and customers.
In this article I am going to give you 3 actionable ways you can get yours for no money and just a little time on your part.. First before let me show you some statistics that will give you why these local search marketing ideas are things you should implement after reading this article.

73% of all online activity is related to local content (Google)

66% of Americans use the Internet to find local businesses (Comscore)

54% of Americans have replaced their phone books (yellow pages) with Internet searches (Comscore)

82% of local searchers follow up with their search by phone call and/or walk-in (TMP / Comscore)

43% of search engine users are seeking a local merchant with the intent of buying in their local area

Facebook is growing at a rate faster than Google and its users are stickier with more time on the site

Interesting statistics indeed and the big tip for you is to be where your clients,prospects and customers are playing and have some visibility in their playground.

Local Search Marketing- Google Places

Google Places is a revolutionary and totally free service that can literally catapult a small, local business from obscurity to insane profitability almost overnight. By taking advantage of a Google Places listing, you can highlight your business’ products and services and place your information in front of thousands of local customers who are searching for your particular type of business in your particular local area via Google.com.

Not only will a listing on Google Places make your business stand out among dozens (sometimes hundreds) of local competitors, you will also get to tell potential customers a little bit about your business, where your competition cannot.

Because Google Places is relatively new, many businesses do not know about it and because of that, your competition probably doesn’t know about it either! Right now, you have in your hands the ultimate “secret weapon” to gaining a stronghold in your local market-a weapon to not only getting a free, Google Places listing for your business, but inside tips, tricks and secrets to securing a front page listing for your business so that your potential customers are finding you-not your competition-when they conduct a Google search for your particular products and services in your area.

Service Areas: If you travel to serve businesses, you can now include your service areas on your Google Places page. Additionally, if you operate without a storefront, you can now privatize your business address, which was not allowed in the past

Customized QR Codes: Google will now create a custom that is unique to your business. This code can be placed on business cards and other marketing material. These can be scanned by a smartphone which can take the customer directly to your Google Places page.

Real Time Updates: You can now update your Google Places page and have those updates appear instantly on Google.

Personalized Dashboard: Google provides your Google Places page with customized information collected through search. This includes providing data to you that tells you how many visitors visited your listing and what search terms they used to get there.

Local Search Marketing:Review Sites

Google.Bing,Yahoo,Yelp,Yahoo,GigPark, Insider Pages

An easy way to get reviews for your business or practice quickly is to send an email. Google Places makes this easy.

To do this, go to your Google Places page and click on the link that reads, “see your listing on Google Maps.” This will take you to your Google Maps listing.

Now, up in the right hand corner of your screen, you will see a picture of the map that depicts your business’ physical location. Above that is links to print, email or get a link. If you click “email” a link containing your Google Maps listing will automatically show up in an email.

From here, you can send an email to your current clients, friends, family members or anyone that can give your business a review. They will need a Google Account (Gmail, etc) to do this, but it only takes a few minutes to make a Gmail account and to give you a review. If they already have a Gmail account, it will let them write a review right away.

This should get you some reviews. And with these reviews, your relevance and trust with Google will begin to grow. Remember, the more reviews you can get-the better so be sure not to skip this. As John Jantsch the best- selling author of the Referral Engine puts it the best referrals come from your customer network; people who have got to know, like and trust you. And who better to write you a positive review on Google, Yelp or Insider Pages.

Local Search Marketing- Photo Sharing Sites

Panoramio, Flickr,Yfrog, Photobucket,

Facebook started out as a photo sharing site of sorts but now there are many social sites where you can share your photos. A picture can tell a story and create an emotional connection with your prospect. Let people get to know you as an individual and deepen their connection. You can also post photos to your social media profiles on Facebook and Twitter and a host of other platforms.

These three tips will get you underway quickly and painlessly. There are many more but get these three ideas implemented in a short time. I spent the most space on this post on Google Places as a local search marketing must. Do this first and follow it with reviews and photos. Remember once you have claimed your Google Places listing you will also have the opportunity to put photos and videos on that listing.

To learn more about these tips, step by step instructions and much more you can get my new book on Amazon.
It is titled Finding Your Business Today: Help Customers Find You and Get Ranked at the Top of Google It will assist you with Local Search Marketing

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Unmarketing is Truly Engaging

UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging is not your typical business marketing book. Then again Scott Stratten who brands himself as the Un-Marketer is an atypical marketer. The premise is that you should stop doing push and pray techniques but engage in what he describes as pull and stay techniques.

Scott is a great communicator and when he says engage he really means it and walks the talk. I have not read a book for a long time that I think is talking to me directly. In Unmarketing Scott makes you feel it is just the two of you in one place having one of those conversations about what you do and how you do it. He weaves great storytelling along with vivid case study examples that you are never at a loss to understand. I honestly felt I was in a comfy chair in a pub with him as he talked. For a copywriter they call this getting into the mind of your prospect. He does it so effortlessly that you cannot leave the room or shall I say the chapter.

Unmarketing Works

Anyone who is not aware of the depersonalized waste and ineffective nature of some current tactics like push and pray would be well advised to read the book and gain a new perspective on the benefits you will derive from the use of pull and stay techniques Unmarketing outlines. Not only enlightening Scott  is also very funny and keeps you in stitches, his self-deprecating style and the footnotes on each page are like one liners being thrown out by a talk show host that all are spot on.

Yeah Unmarketing, it is damn good.

It does make me say Yeah! over and over and gave me some great ideas to implement. If you do not engage with Unmarketing in your mind after the first 30 pages don’t read the book; enjoy your life in the eternal ashes of mediocrity. Leave Unmarketing for those of us who get it. We will join the UnArmy and vanquish you with good actions. March on.

Trust Agents Review

I have just finished reading Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith for the second time. This the hardcover version although a paperback edition of Trust Agents has just been released.

Trust Agents are also Smart Marketers

Knowing both of the authors of Trust Agents , Julien Smith and Chris Brogan from listening to them on Media Hacks-part of the Six Pixels of Separation Podcast I enjoyed their storytelling. The message is universal throughout Trust Agents. Give more than you receive and you will benefit in untold ways.

Chris Brogan is a consummate blogger at Chris Brogan.com and is always providing valuable content that one thinks of him at top of mind when you think of a modern marketer. The written dialogue between the two authors and their observations of each other are unique and give you a good view into their personalities. They both are “what you see is what you get kinda guys” who entertain as well as educate.

Trust Agents Is Timeless

Even though I have a couple of decades on them I enjoyed their repetition of what works in the business world, from the perspective of timelessness. I am always interested in Trust and Social Media and its application by those that are trusted. Trust Agents is a good read for any one who enjoys relationship marketing and marketing in general.

I also have written a review on Amazon on this book.

Testing to Improve Conversion- Yes

Testing is one of the most important concepts that an internet marketer can learn.

There is a very helpful site that I have found that is operated by Anne Holland, the founder of Marketing Sherpa. Anne and Natalie Myers provide a weekly test to test your skills on testing and judgement of various presentations of information.Which test Won is very engaging and draws you in for more. It is not a site for testing and analytic geeks but a site primarily for marketers who want to improve their craft and conversions.

The current week testing post compares headlines,subject lines in emails and copy in order to determine a winner, in terms of revenue.

You can also find very useful Testing-Free PDF’s, and Testing Videos to assist you in your testing practices. They will help you learn how, why and when to do your testing as well as yield valuable tips on what to test. You can learn a great deal from this site and from 66 past tests that will help you better optimize your site(s) for revenue creation.

You can always learn by testing.

Related Posts:

Marketing Sherpa Founder Anne Holland

Direct mail is an established and effective marketing tool.

Marketers use a number of tools for marketing communications and the one most widely used over the last few decades is direct mail. By direct mail I mean writing a letter to your customer or prospect to let them know about your product or service and presenting them with an offer.

In order to do this you can use your own mailing list that you have compiled or buy or rent a list via a list broker or information supplier. You then have your lettershop or data service provider personalize the letter you are sending and print and stuff and mail to your prospects. You can use First Class postage or Standard mail in the US or First Class and Addressed Lettermail in Canada.

The preparation of your mail can bring you savings and it may be wise to use a service that is familiar with all the ins and outs of the postal service regulations. If you prepare your mail and have it delivered to the post office in bins that are sorted down to the route code you can achieve a lower cost. It is wise to contact your local postmaster or visit the website of the USPS or Canada Post for more definitive details.

One thing you may want to be sure of is to have your list sanitized first. What do I mean sanitized. Sanitizing makes sure all the data is accurate and in the right format for the postal system. It can also verify your postal coding against the post office files. There are a list of approved vendors in both countries that do sanitization or the industry term list hygiene, and the list is posted on the post office websites.

By running your list through an approved postal service licencee you can be assured that the person whose address you will put on the envelope is checked against the National Change of Address Database. This service will provide you with the new address and postal code via an automatic link with the post office that the file is checked against. You are not guaranteed of any address veracity only if there has been a move where the postal system has been notified.

By making sure your list has been pre-checked before your rent it you can avoid this process but if you are working from an internal list it is a very useful process to employ. By doing it you ensure your offer gets to the right person at the right address. With the move rate hovering about 12% this check can help you save on postage as well as actual letter production.