NLP Marketing

Stay away from "Professional SEO"

2008-05-28T19:19:00.000+01:00

'SEO' stands for 'Search Engine Optimisation'. It is the art of improving your ranking on search engines. You certainly should be behaving online in a way that wins you the attention of the search engines; how to do that might be the subject of a future post.

How not to do it is the subject of this one. Don't hire "SEO Consultants" who will promise to boost your rankings without you having to change your own behaviour, no matter how desparate you are getting about lack of traffic to your site. Why? Because what they do is "comment spam" on other peoples' blogs. And when they do it on mine, it gets right up my nose.

That's why I am putting on notice the desperate losers at "Stellar University" (can you believe that name?) that if they spam my blog again, I will google-bomb them. The only search term they will ever appear for is, you guessed it, "desperate losers".

Site Tours with Demofuse

2007-06-17T11:19:00.001+01:00

Well here's a surprise; another free service to help you market yourself. This one is for those of us who run fairly complex websites that need some explanation. I have created a sample Demofuse tour here; see what you think!

[Update: looks like Demofuse did not survive. Shame, it was a great idea.]

Three a day!

2007-04-02T10:10:00.000+01:00

The May NLP Events update is out with no fewer than 86 events on it - just shy of three per day. It's just an amazing explosion of creative energy.

But... as an email list it sucks, frankly. It's about a mile long! Either a lot of NLP event organisers need to rediscover apathy, or we need to come up with a better way of presenting the information than a single undifferentiated list.

Ideas, anyone?

Two a day

2007-03-29T03:12:00.000+01:00

I notice NLP Events has 62 events listed for April. Most of those are in the UK*, so, as a first approximation, if you live in the UK, you have a choice of two NLP courses to attend every single day. That's pretty mind-blowing, really.

* Officially, NLP Events' remit is "NLP events in the UK and the rest of Europe". In practice, that translates into "anywhere outside the USA". I have seen events in Canada, Singapore and India being advertised.

2007 Support the Conference badges

2007-02-27T17:37:00.002Z

If you want to show your affiliation with the NLP Conference, we now have a choice of four badges to put on your own website. To use any one of them, just copy the HTML below the badge and paste it into your own site's template.

The HTML serves up the image from our server and provides a link for search engines to follow, thus helping improve the search engine visibility of the Conference.

The image will automatically update each year; for this reason please do not take the image file itself; use the HTML provided.

To put this badge on your own site, copy the code in italics below.

<a href="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/" target="blank"><IMG SRC="http://chalkface.hosting4less.com/NLPconference-badges/NLPconf-meet-me.png" ALT="NLP Conference"></a>

To put this badge on your own site, copy the code in italics below.

<a href="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/" target="blank"><IMG SRC="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/nlp_badges/NLPconf-meet-us.png" ALT="NLP Conference"></a>

To put this badge on your own site, copy the code in italics below.

<a href="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/" target="blank"><IMG SRC="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/nlp_badges/NLPconf-presenting-at.png" ALT="NLP Conference"></a>

To put this badge on your own site, copy the code in italics below.

<a href="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/" target="blank"><IMG SRC="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/nlp_badges/NLPconf-supporting.png" ALT="NLP Conference"></a>

ITS blog

2007-02-26T09:56:00.000Z

Congratulations to Ian McDermott on his very smart and interesting blog. Looks expensive, doesn't it? OK for a successful guy like Ian, but not for the likes of you.

Hmm, let's calibrate. Look at any comment page. At the bottom of the page you will see "International Teaching Seminars Blog is proudly powered by WordPress."

And WordPress is, you guessed it, free. Ian has chosen to go for his own hosting, which is should be costing him no more than £5.00 per month, but that's it. Perhaps this is why Ian is so successful?

Snaps

2006-12-02T12:56:00.000Z

Mouse over any link on this page, and a little thumbnail of the linked-to page will pop up. Cool, no? And guess what, it's a free service that took me two minutes to sign up for and add to Blogger. Free.

Talking to folks at the conference, I find too many NLPers are still stuck in the "I've got to pay for one and have my own" paradigm. Thinking about it, there are some wider belief issues here. The successful business people I've seen have very little need for ownership or control. They happily trust others, and in doing so free (that word again) themselves to focus on what only they can do.

NLP Conference 2006 photos

2006-11-22T16:05:00.000Z

The 2006 Conference photos are now available

Slideshow

Static images

The photos including (nearly) all the presenters, and any delegates or stewards I could catch doing interesting things. If you were there, please do help me identify the people I photographed by adding notes or comments to the photos.

Feel free to use these photos in your own material, but if you do please credit them to the NLP Conference. If using them online, please include a link to http://www.nlpconference.co.uk

The phobia shop

2006-09-05T10:23:00.000+01:00

Do you remember, years ago Robert Dilts proposed "phobia booths" at every airport. He wanted to use the power of NLP to demystify personal change, and turn it into a series of simple, accessible commodities.

The technology never quite caught up with Robert's aspiration, but I'm impressed to see the same business model embraced by CTRN. Check this page, for example, for it's simple problem -> solution format.

CTRN's secret lies in its use of web marketing to reduce the cost of customer acquisition. They can cheaply reach a very large number of people with an easy-to-swallow proposition. Contrast this with a traditional therapist or coach (trad business model, that is) like I used to be, for whom winning each new client probably costs at least a free presentation somewhere.

CTRN is a US company; I would love to see someone copying their approach here in the UK.

Ether: get paid to talk on the phone

2006-07-30T12:40:00.000+01:00

Lots of us are experimenting with selling coaching & therapy on the phone. It has the advantage that you an offer a more convenient service at a lower cost. When you look at the customer's process as he or she goes from having his/her attention attracted, to interest, to decision, to action (AIDA), though, it stinks.

The marketing benefit of offering services by phone should be immediacy. The customer gets to that point of interest and is picking up the phone even as the decision is forming itself. Anything that introduces hesitation at this point will lose you 75% of the sales you were about to make, I guarantee it.

One solution is the premium rate phone line. UK providers will sell you a line on which you can charge up to £1.50/minute. That's £90/hr, which doesn't sound bad considering you don't even have to get out of bed to earn it. I've been investigating this route (for a technical support operation I'm building) and on closer inspection, it's not really very attractive. First, regulations limit each call to a maximum of 20 minutes. Second, and here's the killer, the phone company takes up to 50% of the revenue.

But don't despair just yet. Ether is a new service that looks custom designed for phone coaching. It has a simple web front end in which both buyer and seller create accounts. It then times the calls and provides a sensible set of call management functions. And Ether charge a more-reasonable 15% of the selling price.

Ether is a US company that claims international reach. I had trouble making out from their website just how real and practical this is for those of us in Europe. However, if they don't get their European service up to the same standard of convenience as their US service, you can be sure that there are dozens of European entrepreneurs already working on clones of the service.

I'd recommend that you take a look at Ether now. If it's not yet for you, add their blog to your news reader, and make a mental note to look out for developments in the paid-phone-call field.

Strange blip in visitor numbers

2006-06-17T14:19:00.000+01:00

I've let this blog lie fallow for a couple of weeks whilst I concentrated on the day job, so unsurprisingly readership has fallen off. On Monday, the blog had not one single visitor. Then on Thursday, a sudden leap.

Why? My first post in ages was on Friday; did people somehow know it was coming? Blogger does not provide me with a referrer log, but I've checked

all to no avail. Possibly something will appear later, but Technorati and Pubsub are both very fast, so it must be quite an unusual source. One possibility is that I've been mentioned in somebody's email newsletter; that would effectively anonymise the link so I couldn't find it.

Why is this relevant in a blog about marketing NLP businesses? Because somewhere out there, I have an influential fan. A 'sneezer' in Seth Godin's terminology. If I had something to sell, I would want to thank that person at the very least. I might also want to find out what would motivate them to regularly send people to my site. As an NLPer I would have a better chance than most of finding out what that motivation really is, and working out a win-win that meets both their need (whatever it is), and my need for more web traffic.

So if you are the phantom referrer, please identify yourself and be thanked!

Conference website updated

2006-06-16T09:53:00.000+01:00

Jo has just launched the newly-updated NLP Conference website. I thought you might find it interesting from a marketing point of view to know what benefits we hope to get from the change. The thing that prompted it was that since the April day, the site has had to explicitly support multiple events. It was only originally designed to support a single event, so we were pretty much forced into a redesign (and some reprogramming) for that reason.

Other features and benefits:

The navigation bar now contains three groups of links instead of a single undifferentiated list. For those of us with a 'magic number' below 12 (mine is 3!) the nav no longer throws us into a confusion state.
Top news items are now on the homepage. A conference site is only relevant to most users in the run-up to a conference; a really interesting news section keeps the site relevant, and therefore in your awareness, all year round.
Photos from previous conferences used in the banner. This is a much better appeal to affilliators, and to the majority of us who have a visual component to our convincer strategy.
The list of presenters now includes photos, for the same reasons.
There is now a list of past presenters accesible from the homepage. This is for search engines, not human visitors. The very day after I boasted about our search-engine friendliness, we started slipping in the Google rankings because some presenters had been hidden in a minor update. As I scraped the egg off my face, I became determined to ensure this could not happen again. Each presenter page is now just two clicks from the homepage; this helps Google and other search engines to see our presenter pages as significant.

I'd love to get some feedback on whether you see the update as an improvement, and what else you would like to see.

50 new NLP Events

2006-06-01T00:13:00.000+01:00

Wow! Over 50 new events have appeared in my Events RSS feed over the last three days. My favourite has to be Dr Harbinger's Crisis Clinic on 17th June in London. No idea what it is, I just like the name.

Get over there, and see what tickles your fancy!

The perfect residential course location

2006-05-30T00:22:00.000+01:00

If you are planning to run a smallish residential in the UK this year, think again! I have an alternative for you that could be better value, and more attractive to your clients. I have just got back from a company conference at the utterly charming Irbis Hotel in Krakow, Poland.

Why Krakow? As well as being one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, it is also served by low-cost airlines with direct flights from no fewer than 9 airports in the UK, and dozens over the rest of Europe. I flew from Stansted and it cost me about £50 return.

And why the Irbis? Well, I can't claim to have done a comparative study, but it served us well. It's a mile or so out of town, right on the banks of the Vistula. The excellent group room is claimed to hold 150. That's a bit moot but, since there are only 25 bedrooms, you are unlikely to get anywhere close to capacity. It opens onto a lovely lunch terrace that almost hangs over the river. I have seen more hotels that I would like in my life, and I would rate the staff at the Irbis as the friendliest and most obliging I've yet met.

So there you have it. Right price, right location, right facilities and right people. Unfortunately they don't offer financial inducements to bloggers, but they really are good enough to deserve an unremunerated plug.

Podcast problems

2006-05-20T10:05:00.000+01:00

Judy said

I've just tried to listen to my podcast for the first time, by the way - it
looks as if the link's wrong as the recording I get is of you rather than
me. It's probably a bit late for worrying about it but now I've got the
ability to listen to the podcast, I'd quite like to :-)

Investigation shows that the little Flash podcast players are getting confused and picking up each others' files. I suspect the culprit is the animated Flickr badge so, experimentally at least, that's gone. If you have had this problem, I'd appreciate it if you would go back through the April archive and let me know if it is now resolved.

Live listing of your events, on your own website, with no work!

2006-05-18T22:39:00.000+01:00

The previous post may look a little dull, but it is actually pretty cool. All I pasted into Blogger was this little snippet of text:

<script type=text/javascript src=http://www.nlpevents.co.uk/importEvents?organisation=2></script>

into the blog post, and it returned a live listing of all our forthcoming events. By live, I mean that it will update automatically.

As details of Michael Grinder's workshop are added at NLP Events, they will appear here automatically.
View this post after 18th Nov '06 and the two conference events will no longer be there, but future events will.

The data is updated automatically from NLP Events each time you view the page.

If you substitute your own NLP Events organisation number in "organisation=2", then you get a listing of your own upcoming events. (To get your number, log in to NLP Events and click " Edit user infomation".)

The function of this is that you can paste this one little snippet into your own website, and suddenly you have a dynamic listing of upcoming events that you need never touch again.

Oh, and it's a free service.

Live listing of upcoming Conference events

2006-05-18T22:32:00.000+01:00

Nice new badge

2006-05-17T23:38:00.000+01:00

If you look at the bottom of the navigation bar you will see an orange "meet me at the NLP Conference" badge. Jo asked me to produce a set of these for presenters, exhibitors, etc at the conference. It's a way for you to claim the kudos of association with the conference, and at the same time help boost its search engine visibility with some link love.

NLP Events up the spout no more

2006-05-12T21:32:00.000+01:00

I don't believe in karma, which is just as well because if I did I would be seriously freaked that the day after I brag about NLP Events' ability to pull in the punters for you, it gets all scrambled. When you enter the date of your event, it transposes the month and day. I've asked Sasha, the programmer, to get it fixed first thing in the morning. A good thing he works weekends!

Update: there is a temporary fix in place, and we're going to get it fully sorted on Monday. I will ask Barnali to email all event advertisers after it is completely fixed.

Update 2: permanent fix now in place.

The stats I forgot to mention

2006-05-11T21:57:00.000+01:00

An essential missing from my list; NLP Events clickthough stats (the link requires your NLP Events login and will show you your own stats, not the Conference ones in the pic).

The only plausible reason a visitor would be on the NLP Events site is if they are looking for events to attend, so these are pretty valuable clicks despite not costing you a penny. If you have several events on there, you will soon find out which are garnering interest, and which not. If, for example, you are seeing lots of advance interest in your Bristol workshop, but very little for the one in Birmingham, you might drop the Birmingham one long enough in advance to get your deposit back from the venue and put on a second Bristol workshop instead.

Principle 4: Measure and Track

2006-05-11T13:34:00.000+01:00

Following the Pareto principle, 20% of the effort you put into your online presence probably accounts for 80% of the results. The challenge is to know which 20%, so you can do more of what works and less of what does not.

To those of us raised in the NLP tradition of developing intuitions and extrapolating from minimal cues this does not come naturally. But...it is essential if you are going to get anywhere, so fire your best resource anchor and read on!

At the most basic level, tracking email results is easy. How many did you send, and how many orders or enquiries did you get back? Make sure that you do actually count, though. Your intuition will put spurious weightings on responses according to their emotional content, and this can easily mislead you.

Here are some ways to track what you are doing on the web:

Put a counter on your site. I use Site Meter - that's the little badge at the bottom of the nav bar. Ever so easy to install and it creates graphs like this one. These are the actual results for the current month, btw. The big blip corresponds to Jo mentioning the blog in an email. The dip is when I stopped posting over a long weekend.
If you use Google ads, stats are built in. But there is a problem. By default, all Google measures is clickthroughs. To you clickthroughs are irrelevant. So someone came to your site. Big deal. What you want to know about is conversions. How many people did something that moved them towards becoming a customer once they arrived at the site? Ideally, bought something, but signing up for an email newsletter would come a close second. Google gives you tools for tracking this but they are non-trivial to install.
Track individual links, especially those you send out in your email newsletter. What is popular, and what is not? Anything that is not grabbing the interest of your client base is actively putting them off, and you don't want to repeat it. I use NotLong, which both converts long urls to short ones and reports clickthrough statistics.
If you have your own managed site (and I've not persuaded you to get rid of it yet), get your web wallah to install AWstats. This reports a huge range of statistics. I am particularly addicted to the list of search terms that people have used to find the sites I manage.

Build your email list

2006-05-10T13:49:00.000+01:00

Someone who reads blogs about marketing does not need telling what a valuable asset a well-qualified list of freely-given emails is. So, courtesy of Nick and Yorke at Zookoda here is a solution that looks very promising. Full email management as a web service. Just clip it into your blog or website and away you go.

I would like to tell you that installation was completely painless, but it wasn't. I had to change a little bit of the form code to make it work. Having no idea how to do this, I asked the Zookoda guys and they got back to me within a day. They put a help/feedback form on every you need to set up the service. That is an idea I am so going to steal for Chalkface's online authoring system.

There's my signup box, over on the top right. Why not give it a go? I am planning to set up schedule of mailing each post so you get it fresh. You can unsubscribe at any time and I will only use the address for sending you posts from this blog.

The easiest way to build links

2006-05-09T12:50:00.000+01:00

We have established that a website lives or dies by the number of inbound links you get, and that the way to get those links is to 'give love'. Here is a quick and effective way to achieve both. Leave comments on blogs. When you comment on a blog, you are asked to leave your own web address. Instantly, this creates a link back to your own site. Voila! You have both given and received.

Some things to remember

The medium is the message. This is social discourse, and the point is to be seen to participate. What you say is less important.
Completely irrelevant posts are considered spam. Stay relevant, and be nice to people.
Make a habit of doing this regularly, at a pace you can easily sustain.
Find blogs to comment on by searching Blogger from right here on this page.
By all means comment on this blog!

Principle 3: Give Love

2006-05-07T23:22:00.000+01:00

Ever wondered about the name "Internet"? OK, it is a net, or maybe a network, and it is between something or things.

Actually, not things. People. The internet is a new technology to do a very old thing. It connects people to each other. All the technology, all the web pages, all the emails, RSS feeds and whatever else, serve only as intermediaries. The key thing is the people.

That's good, because, as NLPers, we understand people. Curiously, though, many NLPers seem to suspend that understanding when they switch on their computers. As a result, Principle Three is the one I have the most trouble explaining. The notion "give love" stems in this case not from any metaphysical principle, but from the social and technical dynamics of the internet.

The social dynamics of the internet
Imagine you are at a networking event, and you meet someone who could potentially become a client. What do you do? Do you back them into a corner, and try to deny their attention to your competitors? Unless your nickname is "That Weirdo", no you don't. You chat for a while, establish rapport, and then offer to introduce them to somebody you know. By doing so, you establish yourself as well-connected and earn social credit with the new introduction. To be loved, you must first give love.

The internet works in exactly the same way. Studies have shown that surfers value most highly those web pages that link to other web pages that they will also value. A web page with no outbound links is like the weirdo who backs you into a corner. Links are social currency, and outbound links are the way you earn social capital. This exchange is often referred to as giving and receiving 'link-love'.

Getting inbound links
Suppose you have a website, and you want to bring potential new customers to it. You need inbound links. Two ways to get these

Free links from other users or search engines
Paid links such as Google Adwords

If you are a regular reader, you will be aware of my antipathy towards paying for stuff; I shall ignore paid links in this post. If you want free links, you need some way to persuade people to give them. The best way, it turns out, is to have a reputation as a generous linker. This goes beyond simple reciprocation. People who understand the nature of the web will be keen to be associated with you. Once again, to be loved, you must first give love.

But....here's the clincher. Get it right, and most of your inbound links will come from search engines. This really only happens if you appear on the first page of the search; usually that means the top 10 returns for any search. Search engines all try to second-guess their users' needs, and to present the most relevant links first. They use complex formulae to determine relevance, but a key component is the number and type of inbound links to the page. Search engines will promote you if lots of other people link to you already; otherwise not.

If you are to have a powerful presence in any network, you must develop your reputation. Nothing is more important, nor more persistent once achieved, nor more difficult to achieve in the first place. This is equally true online and offline.

Exemplar
Now for some flagrant boasting. Try searching Google on the name of any presenter at a recent NLP Conference. What do you see in the first few links? Here are a few I've done already:

In the examples above, the presenter's Conference profile appears above even his own website. Nearly always, it is in the top three results. The Conference website gets a lot of traffic as a result. The Conference has sold out completely for two years running; the high profile of the website can legitimately claim to have made a minor contribution to that success.

Now look at the number of inbound links there are to the conference site. This evening, Who Links 2 Me counts 2339.

We achieved 90% of this by instituting a policy of giving link-love to anyone whose values are aligned with those that Jo holds for the conference as a whole. (The other 10% was by nagging).

Action point
So here is your simple action point. Give love. Specifically, go through your site now and make sure that wherever possible you have linked to people and organisations you admire.

If you want to really understand how you can succeed (and how most people fail) in building your online presence, read David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It is very accessible, and regarded amongst the digerati as the masterwork on internet philosophy. If you don't have time to read it, just count the number of outbound links on the homepage. You'll get the point.

Metaphors

2006-05-07T01:19:00.000+01:00

You may already know Jason Mahoney's metaphor website; I didn't until tonight, and I think it's lovely. Particularly to be celebrated is the fact that the site invites you to add your own metaphors, and publishes them.

When browsing the site, I'd like you to notice that it does not actually advertise anything. It appears entirely uncommercial. Now, ask yourself:

If I found a Metaphor workshop advertised, would I be more or less inclined to attend if I knew it was presented by Jason Mahoney?
If I needed to hire a metaphor expert, would I prefer someone who had contributed to this site over someone who had not, other things being equal?
Would I like to be associated with this site myself?

The site illustrates several principles that are dear to my heart, so expect it to pop up as an exemplar in future posts. I plan to include it in my Principle 3 post, but that's going rather slowly and I'm just itching to share my new discovery right away.