One of the things we all love about the Internet is all the free stuff available for download. For the profit-minded, there are good reasons to make quality, helpful content available on your web site for free. Useful content gives you credibility in your field and helps to build long-term relationships with prospects. If your content is popular, you can generate revenue through advertising. If your content contains text, there are lots of good keywords for search engines to latch onto. Another benefit of good content is that it attracts incoming links, sometimes called "link bait". In checking the external links for one of my sites on which I sell craft supplies, I can see that by far the most popular individual pages are those that contain project tutorials or free templates. Given that incoming links help your site in the organic search results, and that search marketing has a very high ROI in a time when advertising budgets might be shrinking, having quality content that people want to link to is a huge advantage.

I put my web site address on the free templates available for download on one of my web sites so that users will be reminded of my business every time they see the template. Don't overlook the possibility of placing your content on specialized portals so that people who have never been to your site have the opportunity to be exposed to your content. Be sure to embed information about your company within that content. Just to name a few examples, there are portals for articles, blogs, Illustrator files, movies and RSS feeds. If you publish a Brainshark presentation, there are two types of portals provided in which you can make your content available for free or for a fee. Click here to view Webinar Resources' Brainshark content portal. Brainshark is a powerful tool that you can use to turn PowerPoint slides into multimedia presentations with many powerful features including viral marketing capability.

By giving a little, you could gain a lot!

If the content you provide on your web site or blog is of high enough quality, people will be eager to share it with others and do some of your marketing work for you. Those with their own web sites might go to the trouble of editing one of their pages to add your link. To make the task easier and to encourage more linking, many webmasters have provided code and sometimes an image for interested persons to use. I think that is still a good idea, I don't know if anything beats a good old-fashioned hard-coded link in the search engines. Fortunately with the rise of social media there has come an even easier way to encourage site visitors to spread the word about your content.

This morning I signed up for an AddThis account. AddThis is a free bookmarking/sharing service than enables you to create a button or chicklet that empowers your site visitors to print your content, email it, or best of all send a link to the social networking service of his or her choice. It's similar to the Share This link you see right below this blog post you're reading. Would you like to have that capability to leverage your own content that you've worked so hard on? Just go to the AddThis site and follow the super-easy instructions. You don't have to register to get a button, but I did so that I could receive the additional service of analytics. What a great way to see which content is the most popular!

"Doing Well by Doing Good" is a phrase used in a slightly derisive manner to describe the actions of someone who benefits his or herself while doing something for a charitable cause. In a more positive light, you could refer to this practice by another well known phrase, a "Win-Win Situation".

I found a really good example on the soapmaking supply retailer From Nature With Love's Soap Donations page. Customers of From Nature With Love are invited to donate some of their handmade soaps to two domestic violence shelters and one homeless shelter. In return, they get a listing with a link on a donor's thank you page and the right to display a banner on their site that links back to the thank you page on From Nature With Love's site.

This is a very smart marketing program for several reasons. Web-savvy soap makers get a link from a high profile site to their own sites, which helps them greatly in the search engines. They also help build a good image with their own web site visitors by advertising their charitable act. From Nature With Love gets a boost in the search engines by having participants in the program link back to them, and the keywords contained in the donor listings are good for their search engine presence as well. And people who are down and out, perhaps at the lowest points of their lives, get to enjoy a handmade luxury personal care product, a small thing but speaking as someone who enjoys handmade personal care products myself, a potentially significant morale-booster that is good for physical and mental health. Not just a "Win-Win-Situation", but a "Win-Win-Win Situation"!

A few days ago, Mark and I were discussing ways to try to interact with a company that we would like to do business with. The company's web site sported chicklets for Twitter, Facebook and You Tube, letting us know that they were accessible via these social media services. More and more companies are adding social media applications to their communications toolkit, because it makes sense to have a presence in multiple channels so that a prospect can communicate with you via the channel of his or her choice. Many of us here at Webinar Resources have had individual Facebook accounts for awhile. We decided it was time to have a company profile on Facebook, so I started one. I'm sure we will think of ways to use it as we go, but one of our very first acts was to use it to invite visitors to register for an upcoming webinar presented by one of our clients. Come visit us on Facebook by clicking here:

Some time ago, I was given a stack of books by two former teachers of mine who were getting ready to move to another state and trying to lighten the load. One of the titles was "Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation" by Don Tapscott. Written in 1998, at the height of the Internet boom and also the year I started working in the industry professionally, it reflects the heady optimism of those times and the feeling I remember having every day as I went to work that we were participating in a revolution that would have as great an effect on people's lives as the Industrial Revolution did. The book's primary focus is on the generation just younger than my own Generation X, Generation Y, which the author proposes renaming the Net Generation or N-Gen because growing up with the digital media and the Internet is their defining characteristic. How will the N-Gen change the way we learn, play, work, shop, and live as a result of having developed with
this technology?

The author argues that one of the things that is changing is that knowledge is becoming capital. The competitive  advantages that once went to the companies with the most money or equipment will in the future go to companies with the most knowledge. "There is no sustainable competitive advantage today other than organizational learning. That is, companies can compete only if they can learn faster than their competitors."

If this is true, how can businesses make sure that they are fostering a healthy environment in which learning can take place?

Technology is certainly a big help. At Webinar Resources, we use software such as Xerox Docushare, Google Spreadsheets, and Content Circles to organize documents and make them available to all the employees who need them. We use technology such as Brainshark Presentations and ExactTarget emails to help our clients distribute and archive their important knowledge.

At least as important as technology in my opinion is the organizational attitude toward learning and collaboration. At Webinar Resources we have a culture that allows knowledge to flourish. Knowledge flows from the top of the hierarchy down, from bottom to top, and from peer to peer. Employees are encouraged to write up instructions for whatever new techniques we've learned and upload them to our online knowledge base. All employees are allowed to contribute to the shared knowledge of the organization and enjoy doing it (I do anyway). Employees are expected to teach each other, and are given tools and resources for self-directed learning as well.

Contrast this kind of culture with a workplace that you may have been unfortunate to experience, where employees are given incomplete or deliberately misleading information, and employees who refuse to share with each other are tolerated, even to the detriment of customer service. Sometimes this kind of toxic environment results when there are fears that employees will leave the company with important information. Yet the kinds of employees with a lot of knowledge to share are probably the ones who enjoy learning the most. What kind of environment do you think will keep them happier and healthier? Where are they more likely to stay?

In "Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation", the author believes that the influence of digital technology leads to the development of workers who thrive in a collaborative learning environment. That may be true, but whatever generation they are from, I believe that it's in your best interest to help all of your employees to reach their full potential by providing a fertile and healthy environment for learning in your organization.

Mark Rice and I from Webinar Resources and our partner  Louise Donovan of Discovery LightTM traveled to Philadelphia to promote the Discovery LightTM at the AIIM/On Demand trade show for digital printing and document management. In this picture you can see a copy of the sample Discovery GangTM book in the uv lightbox which was a the table where attendees could learn about Xerox Specialty Imaging. The effect on display in the lightbox is Flourescent Mark, hidden text or images that are viewed with a UV light. The sample book includes examples of three other specialty imaging effects, plus variable data which has been used to personalize the story by incorporating a child's name throughout the book. The books can be printed to order and on demand for a specific child.

To see more photos from AIIM/On Demand, please click here.

For more information about Discovery LightTM, please visit www.discoverylight.com.

Arr! Talking like a pirate is fun, but if Corsairs of the Internet take away your domain name, you will be having anything but fun.

People I know have faced the following scenario - one day you go to your browser to look at your organizations' web site, and it's not there! In its place is the web page of someone else's site, or even more aggravating, that of a domain name squatter.

Domain name squatters are people who look for domains that have expired, hoping to resell them to someone else or back to you for an inflated price, or use them for some other purpose. If this happens to you, you will either have to pay the pirate a ransom to get your domain name back, or get a new domain name for your site. Neither of these options are very attractive. In the first case, you're rewarding unethical behavior which is infuriating not to mention expensive, and in the second case you face having to reprint any collateral that has your web site address on it, go back to square one on any link building you've done for your web site, or possibly even change the name of your company. What a nightmare!

How does this happen? Often it's because the person who has control of the domain name has changed their email address and they didn't get the reminder message from the registrar with the notice that their domain name is due to expire. I think it's a good idea for someone in every organization to stop for a moment and think about whether you know the answers to the following questions:

• Do you know who in your company is in charge of the domain name?
• Does that person have the current username and password to get into the domain name account?
• Do you know what registrar your domain name is currently registered with?
• Is the email address and other contact information on your account current?
• Do you know when your domain name expires?

I recommend you find out and document the answers to those five questions, then take the following actions. If the contact information with the registrar is not current, fix that immediately. If someone in your organization is not the Administrative Contact, correct that as soon as possible. Make note of the expiration date of your domain and put it on your calendars. Then decide how many trustworthy people in your organization should have access to this information, share it with them, and ask them to store it in a safe place. That way, if there is a domain-related emergency with your web site and the person who usually manages your domain is not available, someone else can step in and help.

Some people don't want to deal with all the above details, they prefer to let their web hosting company or an outside web developer handle all domain related issues and put the domain registration fee on the bill with their other services - understandable, but I don't recommend it. If the person you work with at the outside company leaves, there might not be anyone else in the organization who knows the information, and it's often a bit of a hassle to try to get the registrar to give you access to your account. Not that they don't have good reasons to make it difficult - they don't want your domain to get poached by an unauthorized party. Nevertheless, it's one more hassle you don't need. If you are certain of the name of your domain name registrar (I've run into many clients over the years who did not know that information), you will be protected in case domain name pirates send you a fake renewal notice. The expiration date might be real, that is public information, but the company sending the notice might not really be your registrar - they are just trying to trick you into moving your business to their company. Even worse, if you're dealing with an unethical hosting or web development company, they might hold your domain information hostage until you give them something they want that they're not really entitled to. I personally know someone who found herself in just that situation. So please, make sure you're in control of your own domain name. Share the login information with your web developer or hosting company if they need it, and change the password after they're done with their work if that makes you feel better, but always maintain control.

If you have already lost your domain name, what should you do then? I recommend getting a new domain name as similar to the old one as you can, and putting your web site there. Then, see what the expiration date is on your former domain name. When that date arrives, check to see if anyone has renewed it, and if not, grab it. It's possible that if someone was holding your domain name in order to resell it, they were unable to unload it and chose not to renew it. Domain name pirates usually only renew their booty one year at a time - one reason why search engines are said to favor web sites with domain names reserved for longer periods of time. The preceding scenario has happened to someone I know, so it's possible that you could get lucky and get your former domain name back without having to pay bounty to a pirate. That will leave you with two domain names, which is not necessarily a bad thing. You can redirect one to the other, so that no matter which of the two addresses someone uses to get to your site, they can still reach you. Having two domain names to play with is also an advantage when it comes to Search Engine Optimization - so if you're in this position don't get rid of that extra domain name until you've talked to a search engine expert about the SEO possibilities available to you.

Everyday we are encountering more social media tools that allow you to quickly share information with others.   Today we launched an email campaign for one of our customers that contained a personalized video for the recipients.   Each customer received a PURL, a personalized URL, that embedded the customer's name in the video.   It was a pretty slick application.

Using ExactTarget, we launched the email movie clips through personalization strings that contained the PURLs.   This was an effective lead generation process for driving customer acquisition.   Through personalized marketing campaigns, you can capture your reader's interest and move them to take an action.

We are using Brainshark presentations to personalize on demand presentation content and further honing our abilities to deliver a Webinar for ONE.
 

Blog Posts: It's not easy to find the time to complete a blog post, and once I've done that, I still have to see if my boss will accept it and post it to our Webinar Resources Blog, powered by Compendium Blogware software. Once I get that far, I feel like I've really accomplished something. Therefore it's very satisfying to potentially increase the audience for that blog post by making it also show up in several other places. By clicking the "Share This" chicklet below each blog post, I can instantly add it to my wall on Facebook. Via an application called Blog Link, the new post automatically appears on my LinkedIn Profile. And by taking our RSS feed link, putting it through FeedBurner, and then using some RSS integration code on my web site, it automatically appears there as well.

I also maintain a WordPress blog that I started for an organization that I belong to, the Route 66 Association of Missouri. I use FeedBurner and RSS integration code with this blog as well to make my posts appear on another one of my web sites. It also appears on my LinkedIn profile with the use of the WordPress LinkedIn Application.

What ways have you found to leverage your valuable content? Please feel free to share your discoveries by leaving a comment.

Power Point Presentations and Webinars: If you've created a PowerPoint presentation, even if the occasion it was created for is over, it can keep on working for you. Some social media sites include an application that allows you to upload a Power Point presentation to your profile page. If you would like to embed your presentation on your web site, Brainshark can accomplish that for you, plus do a lot more: add narration, music or sounds, questions, polls, guestbooks and more. It will even notify you by email when someone has viewed the presentation.

We have clients for whom we provide webinar services that involve inviting people to the webinar, sending reminder notices out to those who registered, recording the webinar and archiving it as a Brainshark Presentation, and sending out follow up emails that invite attendees to view a replay of the presentation. We are currently working on a proposal which involves making the replays available on a web page. The menu for the replays will have some text describing what the webinar is about, adding valuable keywords to the web page to draw visitors through organic search. In addition, the code that embeds the presentation into the web site will contain a "Share This" link which allows viewers to email the presentation to colleagues. Of course we will include a sign-up form in each presentation for viewers who want to receive invitations to future webinars. Now that is what I call getting the most out of your content!

I have always had success in driving customer acquisition with press releases.   When you post content on "the wire",you get immediate hits.   Your content is picked up by other services - usually search engines. 

However, search engines are always looking for good blog content as well which is what Chris Baggott discovered when he was posting blogs regarding email marketing at ExactTarget.

We submitted a press release for a customer webinar that we are producing to a site called "What They Think".   What They Think is a portal dedicated to supporting the digital printing business.   On the same day of our submission, I received a Google Alert that  content regarding "webinar resources" was posted on the web.   When I selected the Google Alert link in my email, I was delighted to see the press release for our customer webinar posted on the What They Think site.   This has also happened with Brainshark presentation links that we have posted in press releases.

It is truly amazing how fast the web can work.   I know when I post this blog, Google will again send an alert to me and more hits will come to our press release on What They Think.   What do you think about that?

Photos: Are you having an open house or exhibiting at a trade show? Those are opportunities to post some photos and allow your contacts to get to know you better. Social media applications such as Facebook can help you get those photos online quickly and in front of an expanded audience.

I upload some of my photos to Facebook. If I want to link to a specific photo album or image from one of my web sites using ordinary HTML links, this is easy to do because Facebook provides a link you can use that is visible to everyone, not just Facebook members. In addition there are several styles of Facebook badge that you can choose from to embed on your web site. I use one that contains a thumbnail image of the last three photos I uploaded. If one of those images grabs the attention of a visitor to my site, they only have to click on the thumbnail to view the whole album it belongs to. Not all businesses have content that lends itself to taking a lot of photos, but many do, such as entertainment, event marketing, or event management.

Like everyone, we have some customers who come and go across our desks a couple times a year, and then we have some who are there a couple times a day to drive lead generation.

Recently we drove customer acquisition for one of our frequent customers for an event through a personalized marketing campaign.  Through a lot of work, the event sold out in two weeks and our customer was thrilled.

Because we work with this customer on an almost daily basis, we decided to go the extra mile and support the event locally, though there's nothing in our contract that defines our work in that way.  I found myself pulling what props I could from my children's closets so that I could dress like a pirate and take pictures at the event.

My thoughts were, "OK, just give me a salad at the customer dinner in exchange for these services, and we'll call it a draw."  What our team got in return was much more than a salad.

Yes, I dressed like a pirate and managed to draw enough smiles from our client's customers to create a spiffy memory book for the occasion.  We also managed to meet with no less than 9 cricital contacts in the span of 2 business days.  As a result of these meetings- some scheduled, some by chance, we are better positioned across our client's corporation, and we were able to schedule new business.

So - while the salad and the meal were really good, what was even better was the unexpected developments with existing and new contacts.  It's definitely worth it to partner with your clients in ways you might not consider "your area"- - it was well worth our while!


 

Text messages: I set up a Twitter account for myself, and linked it both to my cell phone and my Facebook account. This gave me the ability to send a "Tweet" and update my status on Facebook simultaneously. I can send my text message from the Twitter application online, or, if I'm not near a computer, I can even send it from my cell phone. As an added bonus, with some code supplied by Twitter, my "Tweets" now also show up on one of my web sites. That's a lot of benefit from a very small effort. Would you like to follow me on Twitter?

Some of you may know me as the infamous songwriter who penned a song for ExactTarget's software release a year ago - blog.exacttarget.com/blog/scott-dorsey/0/0/ready-to-rock-and-roll.   It was a fun attempt to mix marketing and music to drive customer acquisition to our website and it worked well.

Years ago I penned a unique tune about a Missouri farmer who raided a grain elevator to retrieve his soybeans after the elevator company went bankrupt.   It was my attempt to make it in the music business in 1981.    I still have a couple of records laying around.   The song never got much air play except for the milking parlors in Southeast Missouri.    I guess the cows liked it.

Enter the web and the power of Google 28 years later.   This evening my son, Zach, informed me that he saw my record on Google.   I thought he was pulling my leg.   However, after searching Google images, the past became the present as I came upon "The Great Soybean Raid of 1981".   What a surprise.   It shows you the power of the web and organic search.

So now I am blogging about a composition I wrote 28 years ago and it is still on someone's hit list.  Feel free to give a listen - blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/08/365-days-242---.html. 

I just had the great opportunity this past week to attend one of my customer's events onsite in NY.   My events team spent a great deal of time setting up online tools to support customer acquisition including the use of a Brainshark presentation for customers.

Through specially designed personalized marketing campaigns, we were able to draw a record crowd of customers in less than three weeks.   The event also had a "pirate-theme" and we produced personalized pirate maps with the customer's names on them.

I attended the event and was able to participate in the festivities which included wine, grog, spirited networking and the opportunity to meet my customers and their customers.   I also repurposed one of my old pirate tunes from college and added new lyrics to fit the event.   I will share the song in a future post.

What I didn't expect was that I would run into other contacts from my customer's account that I have been trying to meet for over two years.   The success of the customer event established my company's credibility for building lead generation conferences like this one and our dialogue was both positive and productive.

So next time you put a lot of effort into setting up an event or campaign for your customer. make sure you participate in the event as well.   You will learn more about your customer's business, their customer's business and you may just meet that key contact/decision maker that will influence additional business in your customer's account.   You also will be considered more of a partner than a vendor and your business relationship will continue to grow.

We all know that almost any marketing strategy we attempt to use in the online world will not be very effective without content. We also know that unfortunately good content is not that easy to come by - it takes time to produce. Time is very valuable, so when I succeed in creating some content, I am anxious to get the most benefit from it that I can. The diagram above shows all the ways I am currently using technology to get the widest audience possible for my output of text messages, photos, PowerPoint presentations, and blog posts. Whether or not you are using any of the same services or applications, I hope you can get some ideas for how to use your content from the following examples.

In today's world, we cruise through video web conferencing, webinars, and email embedded movies with the confidence of a navy captain.  But that confidence is sometimes quickly shattered when we just can't get what we want on screen.

It doesn't matter if you're on a laptop, desktop, mac, or pc, we've all been so frustrated with the technology that we ironically love so much that we yell at the screen asking, "Why won't you just DO IT?"

As in any heated situation, the key to getting back to your happy place of sailing along with your presentation, project, or planning your next trip is to keep a cool level head and know it will be OK.

First - eliminate the "unknown but temporory possibilites."  This could be a momentary blip in the network, a glitch in the program, or your own "fat finger."  How do you know if this is the simple cause of your frustrations?

Try it again.   But don't just keep hitting "send" "submit" or "download."  Log out.  Close your browser and all browser windows that may be open.  You may even need to reboot.  Then walk away and get a cup of coffee.  Fresh java in hand, now try it again.  More times than not, you're back in business and not on the road to the helpdesk. 

The key is to keep a clear head and know that many perceived program failures are actually just momentary glitches.

And for the record - ironically - as I was writing this blog, my screen went gray and I had to re-boot, losing everything.  There is no explanation - I just moved on and tried  not to mourn the eloquence lost from the first version.  :-)

Being "Green" is trendy. Being "Green" makes you feel like you're doing the right thing. Giving the impression of being "Green" makes you look good to your customers. Appearing to be "Green" is an effective marketing tool for products that, according to one study, are only 1% likely to really be beneficial for the environment. As a business person, you know that in a competitive environment you can't afford to fall for Greenwashing and hype when the time comes to find ways to make your operation more green - it makes sense to be skeptical. On the other hand, when you can find genuinely environmentally friendly practices that have additional benefits for your business, that's a win-win situation.

We've found that one such win-win situation in our work is the use of online forms for collecting information from customers. Using an online form instead of a paper form saves the paper and the resources that went into making it, transporting it, and printing on it. But there are many other benefits to an online form that have nothing to do with saving paper. For example, the data you receive is in a format that you can cut and paste, reducing retyping time and human errors that take time to correct and can cause delays in a project. If your customers are in the habit of leaving out important information on paper forms, you can make those fields required on an online form, and the customer will not be able to send the form without completing it. This not only eliminates the time it would have taken to contact the customer for the necessary information, but also you will be able to turn around projects more quickly, which improves customer service and your profits. Another productivity increase that comes with online forms is the ability to send the data to multiple recipients with one click, saving time that might otherwise be spent gathering the information and making it available to colleagues who need it. With online forms there is an opportunity to upsell or give your customers better service by providing links to information that you want your customers to have, either on the form itself or on a web page where they are directed after completion.

None of the benefits I've mentioned so far are new - online forms have been around for awhile. What is new are some of the added functions that you can add to forms and landing pages with products like email marketing by Exact Target and automated, on demand voice messaging by Vontoo. It is now possible to send a voice message or a text message to a customer's mobile device at their request with forms and other triggered sends. It's possible to show them a personalized image on a landing page that is generated by completing a form or by a click in an email - for an example see this Personalized Landing Pages demonstration - or wow them even more with a rich media Brainshark presentation with customized content that reflects the customer's input from the form.

Please contact us if you would like to deploy any of these exciting new techniques in your customer acquisition program.

It's hard to believe that webinars and internet marketing tools are still relatively new concepts in some companies.  Just before my 7-year maternity leave back in 2000, I was helping my sales team at MCI Conferencing introduce the concept of "web-based data conferencing" to our customers which included Xerox.  Ironically, though we never met, within a few months of my leave, my boss, Mark, was working at Xerox on the team that was developing the Xerox Webinar program.

It's 8 years later, and we have been working together for almost a year in a much different technology and a much different world than we had in 2000 and early 2001.

What better time than now are we all positioned to make the most of this technology!  Want to really partner with your customers?  Let them know that their success is important to you!

In your customer acquisition, build a reliable and approved list of customers, and give them information, presentations, and tools to help them grow their own business while you grow yours.

Look for synergies between your customer's industry and your own, and build a presentation series around it.   Back in 2000, my VP of sales partnered with one of my customer's VP of Sales to conduct a short webinar series at both companies.

Today, we have customers who do the same, and then also bring in industry experts to a "round table."  The presentation is then broadcast on a webinar, and provide the Brainshark replay later as an on-demand "webinar for one" for those who missed the live version.

Every company should have a regularly scheduled presentation series designed to help their customers grow their own base. Your monthly or quarterly newsletter should have a dedicated space for your webinar news. 

Our customers always provide live links to register for upcoming webinars, and to go directly to the Brainshark replays of webinars that have passed.  We are also developing personalized landing pages for key customer contacts. These are like a little mini-reference books compressed down to a singular web page that provides the customer with all the tools and reference points he needs for past, current and upcoming web events.

Mark and I marvel at how closely we missed each other back in 2000, when our entire business was a budding technology.  With the tools of today, we'd be much less likely to miss each other, now.