The Rogue Salesman
As of late, I’ve been playing a rogue in World of Warcraft (subtlety PvP for those who play), which is an interesting damage-dealing class. Rogues use stealth, hard-hitting attacks, and all sorts of counterattacks to make themselves highly effective against other players.
One of the interesting things about the rogue class is that they spend a lot of time positioning, watching, observing, and looking for opportune moments to strike. This is largely because unlike other classes, rogues have a very limited pool of resources on which their attacks depend. In combat, they remain stealthed, waiting for the right opportunity and then unleash a strong opening attack that consumes their immediate resources (energy). Assuming the attack is successful, they gain additional resources (combo points) with which to either counter the opponent’s defenses or finish them off.
Sound familiar? This is effectively what a skilled salesperson does. Let’s compare:
1. Extensive observation. If you’re good at sales, you spend a lot of time looking for the right opportunity, instead of just rushing headlong onto the battlefield and hoping things go your way. You let others make all the noise and attract all the attention, while you look and listen for opportunities to make the biggest difference possible.
2. Strong opener. Rogues and salespeople both share the common worldview that in many cases, you only get one shot. You don’t open weak or with your least effective materials. Having watched carefully and understood what the opportunity is, you open strong. Sometimes, if the opportunity is aligned well enough and the need is great enough by your prospect, you win on the opening move.
3. Rewarded success. Every minor yes, every objection successfully handled, every step forward is an additional minor win that helps you stack up resources for the finisher. Sometimes the pace of the sale means you use recuperative abilities to catch your breath and reinforce your own position. Sometimes the pace of the sale means you get a few moments to reposition. Whatever the case is, successes give you more leverage for closing.
4. The finisher. Like rogues, the good salesperson closes strong, using their finishing moves appropriately to end the sale.
It’s telling that for a good rogue, 99% of the fight is spent in stealth, watching the battlefield, waiting for the right opportunity, prospecting for resources to take or objectives to capture and for opponents to let down their guard. A well-played rogue is rarely visible, rarely heard from, rarely noticed until it’s far too late to do anything about them.
The same is true for a really good salesperson. They spend most of their time doing research, understanding the situation, maybe having quiet conversations, slowly positioning and getting ready to bring out exactly what’s needed at the right moment. 99% of the time, they’re not selling in the traditional, used-car salesman sense – and when they are selling, if they’re doing it right, you won’t really notice until after it’s over and you own the goods.
Obviously, there are some subtle differences between rogues and salespeople – generally speaking, a good rogue leaves their opponents dead, stabbed multiple times with poisoned knives while a good salesperson creates an enduring relationship that follows their client from company to company and job to job. But the similarities on good technique, positioning, tons of observation, and pursuing the right opportunities at the right times are universally applicable.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Set up your own link shortening service
One of the obvious yet overlooked little things I do is have a simple link shortening service of my own, cspenn.com. I find having my own link shortener to be invaluable for four major reasons:
1. Easy to remember permanent shortlinks. Every day I start off with a welcome message. Instead of having to remember other services’ links, I just have to remember my domain and the URL for the welcome page: cspenn.com/w. Nothing easier to remember. I’ve got Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ wired up the same way, with easy to remember URLs like cspenn.com/f, cspenn.com/t, and cspenn.com/g.
This is even more important in a word of mouth culture: if anyone asks me for one of these URLs, it’s easy for them to remember, too. Make your links easy to remember and people will share them more easily.
One cautionary note: services like Google and Bit.ly tend to frown on redirects of redirects, so if you’re being social with clients like Tweetdeck, etc., you’ll want to make sure your shortened links don’t get re-shortened if possible.
2. Easy redirects of affiliate links. Most affiliate links are horrendously long affairs that are highly subject to error, even when copy-pasting. What’s worse is that depending on where you make the error, an affiliate link that’s mistyped may still function, getting a visitor to the correct destination, but will fail to give you credit (and therefore commission). Solve this with your custom link shortener so that you only have to set up an affiliate link once, then use your link shortener the rest of the time on your site ads.
For example, if I had to remember this every time I wanted to plug TweetAdder:
http://www.tweetadder.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=10695_0_1_3
I’d probably go nuts. But cspenn.com/ta is much easier to remember and far less prone to errors and copy pasting problems.
Here’s another angle a lot of affiliate marketers forget: sometimes, affiliates go bad. They stop paying, or they flat out shut down. If you’re posting content out there (which is in turn getting scraped, linked, excerpted, reposted, etc.) with clear affiliate links, then if you have an affiliate that goes bad, you can’t do anything to change those links that are out of your control. If you use your own link shortener, you can simply change where the redirected link goes to and move that traffic to a different affiliate.
3. Easy implementation of Google Analytics tracking codes. If you’ve been at any of my talks, read my blog posts, etc., you know how much I harp on using Google Analytics tracking codes in your links and campaigns. Be honest: you probably don’t most of the time because it’s not a whole lot of fun to set those up over and over again. If you have a certain number of URLs you’re sharing over and over again (like links to downloads, content, landing pages, etc.) then take the time to set up the Google Analytics link tracking codes for those regular URLs once and stick them in your link shortener. Then you won’t have to remember to tag them with tracking codes and your traffic will get correctly attributed time and time again.
4. Shortened links under your control. As much as I love services like Argyle Social, bit.ly, etc., they are not under my control. At any point, they could be shut down, especially anything with a .ly domain (which is owned by the country of Libya and has caused problems in the past). For your average socially shared links, this may not be a big deal, but for your top links, your most important links? Don’t leave those in the hands of a service that isn’t yours.
Here’s another example. Imagine if I had set up cspenn.com/my years ago for MySpace. Any links I published promoting my MySpace profile years ago I could simply redirect now to Facebook or Google+ and have people going to the correct places now.
So how do you get started with your own link shortener? It’s fairly straightforward but not terribly user friendly. There certainly are plenty of other services and software that can do this sort of thing for you, but I tend to prefer simplicity where and when I can get it. Start by purchasing a domain name that’s relatively short and somehow relevant to you. I bought cspenn.com because it’s what I use in many places for my username. Get that domain set up with a cheapie Apache-based hosting account – no need to go pro for simple traffic redirection – and then start working on your redirection file.
For most Apache-based hosting services, there will be a file you can create called an .htaccess file. This is the file which specifies where you want to send traffic. For example, here’s a few lines from mine:
The format of the redirects is fairly clear. I specify that I want to redirect (redirect 302 or redirect 301) the visitor from the shortened link (/l, /f, /t, etc.) to another destination. Choosing 301 or 302 depends on whether I’m linking to my own site or someone else’s site – 302 for everyone else, 301 for me. Why? Especially with affiliate programs, things can change, and the 302 redirect is better for that. But even for non-affiliate programs, it’s not a bad idea.
You can see that for shortened links to my site, I’ve got all of my Google Analytics tracking codes implemented so I don’t have to remember them.
Is running your own link shortener a good idea? I think so, and it’s dirt cheap to do. It gives you far more control over your most important links, makes things easier to remember, and protects your most important links from unexpected changes down the road. If the technical implementation is a bit harder than you’re comfortable with, hire a local nerd to help you out and get set up. It’ll be worth it, especially in a few years when you find you need to redirect all those worthless social network profile links to the network of the future.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Leading economic indicators
Predicting the future is no easy task, especially in uncertain economic times. One of the ways economists, market watchers, and armchair pundits try to ascertain what’s happening and going to happen is by focusing on economic indicators. Economic indicators are metrics that are derived from a variety of data sources such as manufacturing firms, census statistics, government agencies, and more. There are tons of economic indicators out there – virtually anything that can be measured is being measured.
Broadly, there are three categories of economic indicators: leading, or indicators that might foretell what will happen, coincident, or what’s happening now, and lagging, or what happened. Most folks with a vested interest in finance, marketing, business development, or the economy focus on leading indicators.
Here are a few of my favorite leading indicators and what they mean. Feel free to add your own in the comments.
ISM PMI/NMI report: Of companies making stuff, how many have new orders? The ISM numbers are really important because they tell you about what’s happening to companies that make stuff. Physical production of goods isn’t something you can game too far in advance (no one rationally builds up a 3 year inventory these days for most industries), so ISM numbers can tell you what will be hitting shelves and marketplaces in the next 6 months. Click here for an example of the most recent ISM report.
Weekly Jobless Claims: how many new people filed for unemployment insurance each week? While this number doesn’t reflect the broader picture of underemployment or discouraged workers, it’s a good number for indicating churn of jobs and how fast the economy is creating or losing jobs. Bloomberg puts together a nice chart here.
Google Trend Searches: Google Trends shows you what people are searching for. Here are a couple of useful searches that tell you how many people are searching for job-related terms such as laid off or get a job.
Baltic Dry Index: One of my perennial favorites, the BDI shows you what it costs to ship something on a cargo ship. Generally speaking, you don’t invest in cargo space unless you have something to ship, so BDI is a reasonably good gauge of shipping demand. Bloomberg again comes out with a great chart. Flip it to 5 year view to see before and after recession.
For marketers, these sorts of numbers are somewhat useful because they give you an idea of how the economy will strain or boost your prospects’ willingness to buy. If you want to get really innovative, look for economic indicators that are specific to your vertical or niche. For example, let’s say you wanted to create a social media economic indicator of some sort. You’d want to blend in PCE, a basket of company stocks specific to the space (LinkedIn, Renren, Google, etc.), and perhaps even something like the average cost of broadband from the OECD.
Once you have your own set of economic indicators that are reliable, you’ll know what is going to affect your business, your clients, and your revenues in the days and weeks to come, hopefully before any of your competitors. You’ll be more agile because you’ll know what is coming and how to adapt more quickly.
What would you use to predict the fortunes of your vertical’s business cycle? What are your personal leading economic indicators?
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
4 Google Analytics Power Tips For Tracking Behavior
Are you wondering how your prospective customers are behaving? Stop guessing, stop wondering, and start tracking! Google Analytics can provide some very interesting behavioral clues to prospect behaviors on your site if you’re willing to do a bit of coding to make it do more than just out of the box analytics. Here are four power tips you can use to develop new insights about your future customers.
Caveat: be sure you’ve set a goal and goal value in your analytics first, otherwise tracking behaviors is largely meaningless. People have to accomplish some sort of business objective in order for the following tips to be of true use. Also, be sure you understand the basics of event tracking with this guide from Google.
Is your site too fat? In the Javascript event handlers, there’s a Window.resize event. You can tie Google Analytics events into this with a simple script that tells Google Analytics someone had to change the size of their browser window manually to see all of your site. If this is any significant percentage of your traffic, you may need to rethink your site’s design. Here’s an example of the code.
window.onresize = function() {
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'behavior', 'resize']);
}
What ads are working best? Set up a simple onClick event that carefully denotes what ads you have on page and where, so that you can dig in and figure out which variations are working best. For example, if you have a sliding main panel in your WordPress theme with images, make sure each image that’s clickable is tracked, then look in your analytics data for which image is getting the most clicks, and which image is driving the most conversions to your goals.
onClick=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'slider', 'click', 'panel5']);”
Example of a report:
Learn where your forms die. Tie your form fields to your analytics with the onFocus event, and you’ll track how many people click on each field. If you notice that there’s a significant difference in the number of clicks into each field, you’ll know which form fields (such as date of birth or social security number) are causing people to abandon your form. You can then decide whether or not you really need that data – if the business cost of losing the data outweighs the business cost of losing the form completion.
onFocus=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'form', 'fieldfocus', 'ssn']);”
The Cold Feet Indicator. How many people bail out before hitting submit? Tie an onMouseover event for your submit button to Google Analytics event tracking and you’ll know how many people hovered over the button and then how many people finished the form. If you have a multipage form, you’ll know exactly when people are abandoning; for a single-page form, you’ll know how many people are getting cold feet and putting their mouse on the submit button but not actually hitting it.
onMouseover=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'form', 'submitbutton', 'submitmouseover']);”
For the more technical, any Javascript event handler can be tied to a Google Analytics event call, so you can develop ridiculously advanced forms of tracking that can give you insights into the behaviors you care about on site, from measuring how far into a video someone watches to seeing how long they hover the mouse near the top 10 pixels of the page. You’re limited to 500 event tracking calls per session, so don’t go too overboard, but definitely look at stepping up what you keep track of.
What power tips do you have to share?
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Unsolicited Review: Cloudflare
About a month ago, Bryce Moore mentioned that he had gotten some good site speed improvements from Cloudflare, and recommended it. Being one of the smartest people I know, I trusted his recommendation and blindly installed it on my web site. The results have been spectacular.
First, Cloudflare is a caching service. I call it the poor man’s Akamai, because it caches and distributes your site content so that you are less likely to get Slashdotted. In this respect, it’s actually quite similar to Google’s Page Speed Service which was just announced. Cloudflare’s caching service does a nice job of turning around pages really fast, about 60% faster than the site itself, based on their metrics and a few pokes and prods from my testing tools.
The key difference with Cloudflare that I very much appreciate is its transparent interception of security threats. It intercepts them at the DNS level so that hostile bots, hacks, etc. never physically reach your web site, which, given the recent spate of WordPress-related security issues, is a wonderful thing.
Cloudflare also integrates with some anti-spam and anti-hack services like Google’s malware index and Project Honeypot, so it’s fairly adept at catching obvious site-wreckers.
Setting it up is not easy. You have to know your way around DNS some, either through your DNS provider (whoever you bought your domain name from) or if you run your own DNS server, how to administer it competently. After you’ve done DNS configuration, you do need to install the WordPress plugin so that the service and the plugin communicate with each other, but that’s relatively straightforward. If you have any bizarre DNS settings, be sure to verify that they’ll work with Cloudflare before you switch over or you risk blowing up your site. For example, if you’re a company that uses the non-www version of your URL to go someplace different than the www version, blindly clicking OK on the Cloudflare install wizard is likely to force one of your two sites to simply vanish.
Could Cloudflare make the process easier? Not really, no. It’s one of those things that there is no version of brainlessly easy for, and that’s okay. It’s not for everyone, but for those willing to learn and experiment (and screw up), Cloudflare delivers the goods as promised.
I haven’t tried any of the pro version paid services. The free version does everything I expected it to.
Should you try it? If you’re technically adept enough to, yes. If you don’t feel confident monkeying around with DNS, then I would strenuously urge you to find the nearest geek, bribe them with beer, and have them do it for you.
Full disclosure: Cloudflare hasn’t given me any compensation or perks for this writeup as of the time of writing. That said, I wouldn’t say no if they offered.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Book Me to Speak
Got an event coming up? Learn why you should book me to speak!
• Download my 2012 speaking kit
•Book me to speak now!
Get Marketing White Belt
Grab my new book, Marketing White Belt: Basics for the Digital Marketer, and get better at marketing right now!
Blog Delivery
Things I recommend:
I recommend:
for Wordpress themes like this one.
I recommend:
for Twitter audience building.