On the never-ending journey to locate, implement and document the most efficient, practical, effective, reliable and affordable means for entrepreneurs and small business owners to get the word out in this always-on, socially-connected world I jumped into Typepad blogging this week with some joys and some frustrations.

Frustrations First:
I had to forget what I “knew” about domain forwarding. For years I’ve had dozens of domains I secured because the name was cool but I had them forwarded to sites I was actively developing rather than have them “parked.” Since it was so simple I thought I knew what to do, and I did insofar as a simple forward was concerned.

Joys:
I use GoDaddy as my domain name registrar (and they’re having a sale, by the way). Since I wanted to have my simple domain name point to my Typepad blog I had to forward it from GoDaddy.

Forwarding a URL typically limits the SEO effectiveness of your site because a lot of search engines and directories will ignore forwarded URLs. However, Typepad is pretty snazzy and provides instructions on how to make your Typepad blog get indexed like any other blog.

They do this by not only forwarding your domain name to your Typepad blog URL but also providing instructions on modifying your CNAME records at your registrar (GoDaddy – they’re having a sale, you know!) and then activating your Domain Mapping in your Typepad Account Settings.

GoDaddy talks about it here: http://help.godaddy.com/article/5106#configuring

Typepad talks about it here: http://help.typepad.com/godaddy.html

All in all it was pretty simple but you need to follow these steps:

1. Get your domain name (at GoDaddy).
2. Get your blog at Typepad.
3. Modify your CNAME (at GoDaddy).
4. Forward your URL at GoDaddy to the same URL including the “www.”
5. Wait 24-48 hours then activate your domain mapping at Typepad.

Easy cheesy.

Happy blogging.

The tag line here at The Sales Whisperer® is “Life is too short for follow up calls.”

What I mean by that tag line is that your entire sales and marketing process must be scripted and planned in advance and the people you meet should know when they will hear from you, how they will hear from you and purpose of the correspondence and/or meeting.

Good ol’ Woody Allen once said “80% of success is just showing up.”

In today’s Age of Disruption, your sales and business success is ALL ABOUT your marketing efforts showing up in the inbox, mail box, voice mail and text on a regular and consistent basis or you and your company and your features and your benefits and your patents and your new and improved gizmo will be forgotten

While most sales professionals and business owners and marketing folks understand this at a rudimentary level, i.e., send a folder with a full-color brochure to someone that fills out a contact form then call them 12 times until they answer then push for a meeting and try to sell them something, what I have in mind is a little more elegant, sophisticated and productive.

In order to get this right you must view proper follow-up as a way of life vs. a gimmick or tactic or quick hit for a short term revenue boost. It requires forethought and planning because to do it well you must take what you do naturally or “off the cuff” (Sin # 1 of The 7 Deadly Sins of Selling) and systematize it and apply it to every constituent group in your business.

Here are some ideas on how to take your follow-up “To infinity and beyond!” (I just love Tim Allen in Buzz Lightyear.)

Employees & Staff

• In my sales management training I instruct my clients to “manage activity and pay on results.” With the right marketing automation platform you can assign automated tasks and notifications to your employees to keep them focused and on point. Case in point is cold calling. In my prospecting training I teach sales people to develop not only a great opening line for speaking to prospects but to also deliver a storyline of sequential voicemail messages when they reach the inevitable voicemail in the majority of their calls. Your autoresponder can be set to deliver a message to your salespeople that it is time to call prospect #1,687 and leave voicemail message #3. If you can keep your people that focused over any length of time good things will happen!

Clients & Customers

• Build an autoresonder email series to deliver supplemental training to new customers. This is especially beneficial when you have a complex product or service with many subtleties or intricate features.
• Upsell or cross-promote to your customers and offer extended warranties, upgraded service packages or complimentary offerings.
• Send a survey to your customers asking them how they would rate your product, service and support. (Send an apology letter and/or gift if you’ve let them down.)
• Send an email asking for testimonials.
• Send an email or letter asking for referrals.
• Send handwritten notes and/or little gifts or articles about their business or industry.

Prospects

• Auto-responders: You need an autoresponder to “automatically respond” to your prospects in a timely manner. Simple autoresponders such as Aweber can be setup to deliver a series of emails, free reports, links to audio or video files on your site, announcements of upcoming webinars or tradeshows and even snail mail to your prospects over a predetermined time frame. Delivering relevant, credible, timely information on a consistent basis to people that asked for your information is a great and affordable way to stay top of mind and build trust. My personal favorite is more than just an autoresponder, it’s actually a complete marketing and selling automation secret weapon and they allow my readers to get a free 30-day trial vs. the standard 15-day trial. Check out the only software platform guaranteed to double your sales here.
• Social Media: As soon as I meet someone I’m checking out their profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and sending them invitations to connect. Then I stay in touch. I shoot a quick note to them and I make sure to comment on a couple of posts they make sooner rather than later to help them remember me and what I do.

Referrals & Referral Sources

• Referrals are like ATMs with hopes, fears, desires and goals. Cater to and address their needs and the profits will flow forth. Craft a follow-up process that not only helps you get and stay in touch with your referrals but also with the referral source! Keep them informed of the progress you’re making with the referral they sent your way. Let them both know they are appreciated and special.

Vendors & Suppliers

• These are free eyes and ears for you and your business. Treat them like trusted, valued, appreciated extensions of your company by keeping them informed and watch your vendor issues decline, their satisfaction rise and their sales – and yours – soar.

To see what kind of follow up sequences we can create together click on over to my contact page and setup a free consultation.

What are the chances you can make your biggest dream come true in 30 days or less?

How big is your dream?

How committed are you to making it happen?

Are you focused on winning…or on not losing? (There is a difference.)

Conner Cordova is a high school senior and self-admitted Geek. Arianny Celeste is a Maxim bikini (or less) model and certainly NOT a geek.

Arianny is now Conner’s date for his Senior dance because Connor was:

• Bold.
• Creative.
• Fearless.
• Took massive action.

When was the last time you took massive action to grow your business? That can change today if you contact me right now.

This is a shorter rendition of Southern Social Media due to “time constraints” and scheduling conflicts, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t packed with some good info and a few jokes.

Amongst the topics:

• How 1 company leveraged Twitter to grow their customer base by 840% in a year
• Why strategy is so important to your social media campaigns (we sound like a broken record on this, but it’s that important!)
• Social Media Mondays
• List Samurai update (it’s likely going to have more like 20 videos instead of just 13)
• Facebook 20.1 tips

Social Media Sites Are The Way To Go To Get New Customers

This is more of a “selective myth” than an outright lie.

I say “selective-myth” because not all social media sites are created equally, nor with the same purpose and goal in mind. A great majority of the sites are “social” first (hence the name), which means people are there to visit and be sociable rather than shop or be sold something.

Because of that oft-overlooked fact, many of the major social media sites are either not the best places for a business owner to spend their resources – time and money – and/or their “typical” approach to marketing is not ideal and must be reevaluated and redesigned to fit the social media landscape.

*Sidebar: Truth be told, most – as in 92.75% – of small businesses don’t know SQUAT about sales or marketing. They waste money on glossy brochures that end up in the trash. They turn over their sales force at an alarming rate but hold on to the doddering do-gooders that know how to brown nose and befriend the staff despite missing numbers year after year. Their media buys are based on the deal-of-the-month with no consideration given to creating and delivering a powerful message or considering how it will fit into a bigger strategic marketing picture. And they have no centralized, process-driven system for automating, tracking and measuring it all. Now back to your regularly-scheduled blog post already in progress…

When approaching social media for business purposes – and ALL businesses should – you must first determine your primary objective and there are only two choices: networking or link building.

Volumes have been written on the various means and methods to achieve both objectives (and a Saturday morning blog post before the Army @ Air Force and LSU @ Alabama games (Air Force and LSU will win, IMHO) is not the place to get into the weeds on those topics) but suffice it to say every major and minor social media site lends itself more adequately to one or the other for your business.

Once you understand the primary focus and benefit of each social media site for your industry you can then leverage them to first make the marketplace aware of you, then lead them back to your site or blog and then to become a customer.

Start small. Create a standard profile on several major sites and start listening. Demonstrate your expertise and skill level and industry insight by first asking great questions. This will show how good you are without bragging and provide insight as to the interest level and market potential in the chosen social network based on the degree to which others contribute to your question.

Answer questions posted by others. This again shows your expertise and will begin to attract prospects to you. (It also gives you a chance to create valuable content that can be used on your site for SEO.)

Integrate your social media sites together with free tools such as RSS feeds, Ping.fm and HootSuite to expand your reach and presence with minimal duplication and see which platform produces the best results.

Always keep in mind the primary function of social media sites is help you get noticed, which causes the reader to want to visit your site or take you up on a unique, timely, relevant call to action, which, at a minimum, enables you to capture their contact information and ultimately results in a sale.

There’s a lot of moving pieces and parts.

If you need a little help give me jingle and watch your cash register ring.

Kudos to the Germans for leveraging social media to build awareness by getting free press via social media. They’re also using their creativity to solve “mundane” issues.

What’s the last creative idea you actually thought of, let alone had the guts to implement and test at the risk of being called “silly” or “stupid” or “whatever?”

It’s working for Volkswagen. Might it work for you?

Getting creative help is more affordable and accessible than you think.

Why in the heck is social media so confusing? So full of wasted energy and broken promises? So full of snake oil salesmen promising you “secrets revealed” and the “one thing you gotta do to make money with social media?”

If these guys and gals are so good why do they hide behind fancy websites and 240 page PDF’s and 95 CD’s they know you’ll never get through?

What happened to good old-fashioned, real life, live interaction?

Well, I guess it takes a Southern boy to bring Southern hospitality to the world of Social Media Marketing.

Please join me live every Monday morning to kick start your week with new ideas on how to leverage social media to grow your business. And because I’m a longtime salesman we’ll also get into persuasion, follow up, writing compelling copy, making powerful lead magnets, getting the attention of decision makers and a whole lotta other cool stuff that will help you garner and focus the energy and the power of Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Ning and YouTube and all the other 57 million (it seems like) social media platforms popping up out there.

And the good part is the calls will be recorded and you can download them anytime to listen to forever!

And the even better part is…it’s AFFORDABLE! These classes will only be $47 per month!

Yep, you read that right: $47 per month. Not per week or per day or per hour or per half hour or per quarter hour or per minute or…you get the point.

Just $47 per month gets you live weekly calls with me and a host of experts and other sales people, business owners, entrepreneurs, marketing professionals to exchange ideas, share best practices, learn from each other and from the best social media marketing minds in the country.

And you’ll get access to a new membership site we’re building as I type this blog update so the same $47 per month will get you access to the membership site, also.

And, check this out, you’ll also be able to attend any future training or participate in any future workshop I’m conducting at 50% off the published price as long as you’re an active member of the Social Media Marketing Mastery Monday Mastermind.

So what do you have to lose except headaches and backaches from staring at the computer screen all day long?

Sign up now before we get the first 100 and have to either cut it off or add another class at a higher amount. (It would be worth it at $97/mo but let’s hook each other up and do some business together and grow ourselves to our true potential.)

A later than usual version of Southern Social Media today, but it’s better late than never, right?

Among the topics:

• Men make more than women in social media related jobs
• People in social media jobs aren’t as satisfied in their roles as they were a year ago
• Why you need to simplify before tackling social media
• Social media is WORK!!! It ain’t all fun and games in spite of the misinformed opinion to the contrary.
• What do you REALLY want social media marketing to do for you at the end of the day? We believe that most people want leads out of their campaigns so that is the crux behind the List Samurai product due to be released any day now.
• The southern definition of “aspect”
• 5 Eras of Social Media (the time-frames are very short for “eras”)
• Seek guidance with your social media marketing campaigns!!! Don’t try to tackle all of this stuff solo . . . there’s simply too much of it to master in too short of time. Find someone to help you shorten your learning and implementation curve.

What’s good for big business is not always good for small business.

There have been a log of myths and misnomers about the benefits of social media marketing and social networking sites for small businesses.

Many small business owners are finding that these platforms do not live up to the buzz.

While I am a big fan and promoter and provider of “outrageous” marketing consulting, ideas and tools that get your business found and gets your message out, there are a lot of challenges when setting up your social media marketing strategy and tactics

(To be fair, I’ve not found more than a handful of small business owners that know how to market worth a cr*p, so they face challenges with any marketing medium. But we’ll focus on Social Media Marketing here today.)

So if you’re drawn to the Facebook-Twitter-LinkedIn-etc. bright, shiny pots of gold on the hill, please pause and consider the following few posts before you go any further.

1. Social marketing is free.

We all know that direct mail is not free. You have to get the list, write the letter, address the envelopes, stuff the envelopes, pay for a stamp and get them to the post office…all for a 0.5% to 1% response rate (I can help you bump that up DRAMATICALLY. It all boils down to list segmentation and copy writing, but I digress.)

Leveraging social media sites for marketing is not “free,” either. In fact, because of the proliferation of social media sites and tools, it may be the most expensive form of marketing available today because it takes so much time to wrap your arms and brain around this ever-evolving platform.

Sure, most social media sites can be created for free: Facebook, WordPress, Twitter, Google, Google Wave, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, TweetDeck, HootSuite, etc. all cost zero dollars to create.

But like a new puppy, they all need constant care and feeding and attention because, just like an un-supervised puppy can get into trouble, an out-of-date blog or Facebook Fan Page can actually harm your Web 2.0 marketing efforts.

And if you’ve ever attempted to write a direct mail piece, update the content on your website or even create a radio or TV ad, you know how hard it is to keep your sites and marketing material up to date and current. Social media ads the additional “burden” of requiring you to respond to questions from visitors either in the comment section or via text/chat, post brilliant ideas and concepts (such as here! , add attractive, eye-pleasing graphics, monitor (good and bad) activity (you should see one of the “crazies” that attempted to hijack one of my LinkedIn Groups) — all in an effort to create buzz and chatter about you and your business.

Companies using social media marketing to successfully close new business are on their sites all the time. What is considered “old information” today may be just an hour old! If you allow comments – as you should – and you do not respond, you might as well transfer money straight to the PayPal account of your competition.

Most mid-sized companies (and certainly, large enterprises) have fulltime “social media marketers / writers” building their online presence. It is a fulltime job keeping a presence on these sites, and fulltime people consume fulltime resources. If you don’t have that type of cash or time on your hands you can always check out my Done-For-You-Social-Media offering at a fraction of the cost of a fulltime person.

(Next we’ll look at whether or not the “big” sites are the “best” sites for you.)

Well, Hot Diggity Dog!

I just got my Google Wave Invitation from my homeboy, Steve Gibson over at Upper Deck!

I’ll let you know how the evaluation goes. If you’re one of the fortunate ones to get an invitation and have some feedback, tips, input please throw down some notes below!