Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing
Archive for 2008
How To Get Industry Experts To Contribute To Your Blog
Chris McCombs, KickBackLife.com
One of the best ways to not only get content for your blog, but to also build your Rolodex and get you established as an expert in your niche is to get industry experts and celebrities to contribute to your blog.
Whenever someone starts a new blog, one of the first things I tell them to do is go interview a whole bunch of people and post those interviews on your blog.
It’s actually amazingly easy to get a ton of people who have a lot of authority and are already established experts within your niche or industry to help you out. All you need to do is send them an e-mail that says something like this.
“Hey, I think you’re awesome and I think that your product (or website) is awesome. I have a blog over at www.mysite.com. I would love to interview you on ‘xyz subject’. The interview should get you plenty of exposure in the industry, more traffic to your site and help to get you more customers or clients. I have already interviewed X, X and X. The interview will take less than an hour. It will be quick, painless and fun. Will you do it?”
When I send out e-mails like that to just about anybody who has written a book or has a popular website, or has info products out in my niche, I usually get well over an 80% positive response. Now sometimes the e-mail might not get through to the person. In that case, you can try to call them or get a hold of their assistant or something else. But if you can get that e-mail through, most people who have a product or popular website or book out want to get their name out there more and will happily do an interview. You do want to let them know though to please not make this a pitch… but they can plug their product and/or services. You just don’t want them to do any heavy pitches for it.
This process will help establish you as an equal authority in the eyes of your audience, because hey, there you are talking to this person, interviewing them, so you must be on the same level with them. But what it will also do is build your Rolodex and create great relationships that you can use in the future. This process will also help you come up with a lot of contacts.
On top of publishing the audio to your blog, you can also have it transcribed and make pieces of it into individual posts. For example, if you cover five topics, you could take the transcriptions and break that down into five individual posts. Just make sure you always give the person giving the interview credit and a link back to their site.
I followed this process before one of my product launches, and in just a few months, I became one of the biggest experts in my industry and got tons of traffic and built tons of great relationships with well respected people in my industry. Many of them ended up promoting my product based on the relationship that all started with an interview for my blog.
Interview industry experts, celebrity and some out-of-the-box experts who might not be an expert in your industry, but who might know something applicable to your industry. Like, I am in the health fitness marketing industry, but I go out of my way to find other marketers and possible bloggers and things like that who have nothing to do with the health and fitness industry that can offer a fresh, out-of-the-box perspective for my readers.
Just make sure that when you contact the person you want to interview that you show them what is in it for them. Don’t try to convince them about how amazing your own website is going to be and that is why they should get on board. Convince them based on the facts of what it is going to do for them and how it can help them. And always throw in a few compliments because we all love to hear compliments. It is really pretty easy to get these people on board.
If you do one of these interviews a week, that will be 52 of them in a year. You will have expanded your Rolodex with 52 new possible future partners and people to promote your products or services and other experts who will possibly link back to you and interview you for their blogs, etc. And you will be getting an extra blog post a week just from the audio for the interviews. Not to mention if you chunk down the transcriptions and use them to make multiple posts.
Sunday Evening Blues – Possible Sign Workplace Needs Makeover
By Kevin Kennemer, SPHR
When B.B. King, the King of the Blues, wrote these lyrics, “When my heart starts beating like a hammer, and my eyes get full of tears,” he wasn’t writing about his job but many hard working Americans feel this way on Sunday evening each week. According to research, getting ready for Monday can be a real bummer.
Have you ever had that feeling of dread come over you on Sunday evening as your mind begins to prepare for the work week ahead? Does your heart start beating like a hammer? Do your eyes fill with tears? Is the thought of Monday – the start of a new work week – so daunting that you begin worrying about work on Sunday?
This type of worry and dread cuts into your weekend. It feels like Monday starts on Sunday. This phenomenon has been termed the “Sunday Evening Blues.”
It is a real phenomenon. For some people there is much to worry about. In fact, more heart attacks occur on Monday mornings in the workplace than any other day of the week. When the sun rises on Monday mornings so does the blood pressure of many hard working Americans. What is the cause of the Sunday Evening Blues? The cause could be related to your morning commute, sleep deprivation from the weekend, abuse of alcohol, poor family relationships, or the act of returning to a toxic work environment.
When surveying employees regarding their satisfaction with work, I think it is a good idea to ask this question: “Do you experience the Sunday Evening Blues when thinking about returning to work on Monday?” The results will be a good indicator of the health of your workplace.
As business leaders we should do what we can to make the workplace a welcoming and inviting place. The environment should help employees perform at their highest levels. Below are a few ideas on how to create a warm and inviting workplace and beat down the Sunday Evening Blues:
- Drive Out Fear in the Workplace – Fear stifles creativity, productivity and quality. Fear seizes up the organization’s ability to freely produce results because employees are afraid of being reprimanded. Drive out fear by ridding your organization of supervisors who are overbearing, micromanaging, nitpicking, fire-breathing Neanderthals.
- Model Servant Leadership – The most productive teams are motivated by servant leaders. When leaders realize their job is to help others succeed, work/life begins to make more sense. When everything and everyone has to accommodate the leader, he/she is not a servant leader but a dictator.
- Throw Out Rigidity and Embrace Flexibility – Our personal and professional lives have never been more complicated. Many times the competing demands of our family and work intersect and create enormous pressure. When the company forces employees to choose between work and family, the company will always lose in the end. Even if the employee chooses company over family, the company will eventually lose when the employee’s family falls apart. It is best to work things out through flexible leadership. In other words, focus on results not face time.
- Provide Lessons on Etiquette and Civility – Our country severely lacks some basic lessons on etiquette and civility. If a driver does not speed off at a green light within one second, hoards of cars will start honking their horns, shouting obscenities and shoving crude finger gestures at you. These ruthless, impatient, vulgar people are driving to work too and you likely work with many of them. It is a good idea to provide mandatory etiquette and civility training to help smooth out the major and minor irritants that cause friction in the workplace. If there is friction in the workplace it is manifesting itself at the customer level as well.
- Leaders Should Be Nice - It is amazing what will happen in an organization if the top leader and his/her executive team are simply nice people. You do not have to be mean and nasty to get work done. That is myth not reality. Leaders who are nice, cordial, pleasant, focused, determined, objective and fair will lead their company to greatness. When nice starts at the top it will cascade down the organization.
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