Speaking and Marketing Tips

Overcome the Fear of Public Speaking

2011-04-19T15:26:00.013Z

One downside of being a professional speaker is that I get to attend hundreds of meetings every year and listen to literally thousands of speeches. The downside is that most of them are boring.

I have never quite understood this. Surely people know when they are not good at speaking. The clue is in the number of audience members who are falling asleep or leaving during the presentation.

The reason people are boring I believe is that they are scared to do anything exciting in case they make a fool of themselves, and that is the primary reason for fear of public speaking. Most of us can speak in public places - as long as we are not the centre of attention - and when we are it is the fear of ridicule or embarrassment that challenges us.

For the past 30 years I have coached all sorts of people to improve their speaking skills and brought it down to just four simple principles and unlike many authors of books on this subject I will briefly explain you those steps now.

You might wonder why you would then want to buy the book if I have explained the content.

The workbook contains 13 practical assignments designed to take you on a journey to discover how to turn your own content into compelling speeches using the four basic principles outlined below. By the end of seven days you will be standing up in front of an audience feeling empowered and ready to entertain and inform.

Just $27 to Banish Fear of Speaking in Public

Four Principles of Outstanding Speaking

1. Speak from Experience
2. Become a Storyteller
3. Provide Clear Purpose and Structure
4. Be Passionate about Your Topic

1. Speak from Experience

Speak on a topic about which you have earned the right to speak. If you speak about something you know well, if you speak on a topic about which you are an expert, then you are going to feel far more confident, and more importantly you don't have the problem of trying to remember the speech, because you already know the content inside out. And of course you are already an expert on the subject of your life which is the source of your primary content.

2. Become a Storyteller

Develop stories about your experiences in life and in work. Start getting into the habit of telling stories to friends and colleagues socially or at work. Stories are easy for us to remember as speakers and easy for the audience to remember.

3. Provide Clear Purpose and Structure

When you start writing your speech, begin with a clear and definite purpose. Why are you delivering this speech? What exactly do you want to achieve with it? What are the audience expecting from it? Write out your One main message - your purpose – and then support that with three key points to illustrate the purpose with interesting facts and stories and you have a winning speech. That makes it easy for you to remember and easy for the audience to recall. They will thank you for your clarity and you will overcome your fear because won't make a fool of yourself.

4. Be Passionate about Your Topic

Get excited and passionate about what you speak about. People spend so much time trying to memorise a speech and then perform it, when really all that is needed is to get passionate. The more excited you are the better your animation, the better your gestures and body language and the more engaged your audience will become – put all these four elements together and you are sure to have a compelling speech.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Why Most Small Business Owners Fail To Attract Clients Using LinkedIn

2011-03-10T11:19:00.002Z

I found this article really helpful in providing simple tips to improve my use of LinkedIn.

Why Most Small Business Owners Fail To Attract Clients Using LinkedIn | SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

There are now 90 Million users on LiknkedIn and people are jopining at the rate of 1 every second - more importantly the average income of LinkedIn users is over £100,000. That says a lot about the power of the network.

When I first started using linked in I linked up with lots of power networkers but found that was not really useful except in expanding my reach. It was not until the Groups feature was significantly improved that the real value of the network has become aparent.

I joined 49 groups, and set up my own GenderShift group which now has about 110 members. With my own group I can broadcast messages - though its important not to overuse the feature of people will leave. I participate as much as possible in discussions on groups and I have invited a number of people in the UK I would like to connect with - and most have accepted.

Again you have to use these features respectfully - When you invite members of a group you can do so without their email address by indicating you are in the same group. If you have already invited them - then you will be asked for their email address to invite again - I have found a few times that I have been asked to decifer a graphic image after I have sent a lot of invites - so now I limit it to a few every day.

The real benefit of this has been that I am able connect with key contacts on major corporations. If you have ever tried to reach someone in a large company when you don't have a name you will know how difficult it is. Many organisations only publish a call centre number.

As a result of this strategy over the past couple of months I have already had one booking for speaking and a number of enquiries for help - I have also managed to recruit some really excellent contacts to my own group. More importantly I am establishing my name and reputation in a community of professionals who potentially could be buyers or influencers of my services.

So check out the article and get working on making LinkedIn a significant tool in your marketing strategy.

Why Most Small Business Owners Fail To Attract Clients Using LinkedIn | SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Scientific Evidence that PowerPoint can send you to Sleep

2007-05-02T11:11:00.003Z

Back to the dreaded PowerPoint again which I discussed in January - I am presently taking a short course in Political theory - My Tutor Peter Ryley, who has an excellent blog (Fat Man on a Keyboard), pointed me to a recent article in the Telegraph which reports that there is now scientific evidence that our brains are unable to effectivley process information if it is spoken to us while we are reading.

So now when you fall asleep in a seminar you have scientific evidence to validate your behaviour - I shall feel much more comfortable in future when I nod off to the droning sound of a speaker reading their PowerPoint slides. However I have noted that even professional speakers are prone to using too many words on a slide.

PowerPoint is an excellent AV tool - if you need to show images that support a presentation but if you are using it to display words you really should question that. Presenting words both auditorily and visually it seems does not reinforce the message, it actually confuses the brain which starts to switch off.

I suspect that in addition to the problem with trying to assimilate the same information being received simultaneously via two senses, there is another issue. A speakers voice, I notice, tends to become more monotone when they are reading from slides and there is also far less storytelling to engage our interest.

All in all the evidence is clear that if you want to get a message across the best advice is to leave PowerPoint behind and rely on your oratory skills to get attention and be remembered.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Seth Godin explains This is Broken

2007-04-14T22:43:00.002Z

The This is Broken Blog has been around for a few years, but I have only just come across it as a result of seeing the short speech by Seth Godin at the 2006 Good Experience Live Conference (GEL 2006). In this speech Seth explores some real life examples of customer experience and how businesses do things to break the customer relationship.

As well as being a really entertaining speech, it certainly made me think about what I might be doing to damage customer relationships - The video is about 20 minutes - but it might save you thousands of dollars.

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 (Good Experience Live Conference)

Incidentally if you want to see other speeches from GEL 2006 (or 2005 or EuroGEL 2006) you can find them all on the GEL Web site

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

What is Web 2.0?

2007-03-12T08:40:00.001Z

I have written a lot on this blog about Web 2.0 - but this short video animation entitled Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology is the best explanation I have seen - it is less than 5 minutes - so watch and enjoy.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

LinkedIn - Now becoming a really useful network

2007-02-06T12:39:00.001Z

I have been using the LinkedIn network for a couple of years now but to be honest it has never really been my favourite on-line network because it really didn't contain much in the way of networking tools - but that is all changing.

If you want to look for a job in IT, or promote yourself to prospective head hunters, or look for joint venture partners in a software project there is no doubt that LinkedIn really works. There are some very high profile success stories like Scott Rafer who contacted Eric Marcoullier one of the founders of MyBlogLog with an idea for the development of the product, got appointed as CEO and has just picked up a very nice fortune when the business was acquired by Yahoo last month.

But things are happening at LinkedIn to make the network more interactive in particular the new Answers feature which enables you to ask any question and get responses from the LinkedIn network - very useful if you want some opinions on a product or service or if you want to undertake some research - but most importantly it is getting members of the linked in network interacting where it had been fairly static.

The real value of LinkedIn is in helping members find out who their network knows and getting introduced. I have just 330 members in my network - but they know nearly 150,000 people. However even getting people I know who are on LinkedIn to connect never been very user friendly. If you click on my profile in the right side panel it is not easy to see how to link to me and you need to then go find my email address to send the invite all of which means you may not bother. However yesterday Marketing Hipster Cord Silverstein pointed me to a very neat widget created by Andy Beard - the LinkeIn Fast button

Just Click to Connect

Get your own LinkedIn Fast

Update: As you can see this neat widget is no more. LinkedIn objected and Andy removed it (actually I think it probably does still work - but LinkedIn want it stopped. So if you want to link to me on LinkedIn my email address is rikki at gendershift dot com (just to stop the spammers though I think most of them have my email address already)

I have also noticed that more an more of my network contacts are joining LinkedIn - I recently connected up with a number of trans community leaders from Press for Change and that has promoted some better communications and the possibility of some joint venture work. So I am suddenly taking a much bigger interest in LinkedIn and my network is growing very quickly.

If you are not a member I do recommend joining and linking up with me - you may be surprised who you meet, and if you need some tips on putting together your LinkedIn Profile here are some great ideas from top blogger Guy Kawasaki.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Develop an Eye and an Ear for Humour and Stories

2007-02-03T22:20:00.001Z

Apart from feeling ghastly with the tail end of a persistent flu bug, I have had a brilliant day today attending a workshop for professional speakers on humour and storytelling. Excellent material and some great ideas for making my own keynote presentations more effective. Also on the same subject I recently discovered John Kindes excellent Humor Power blog which is packed with ideas to add more humour into your presentations.

There is always a danger dissecting humour - it's like trying to explain a joke - the more you try to explain it the less funny it is. However it seems to me that when you are delivering funny material you need to have worked it so much that it's no longer funny to you in order to deliver it. I came across a very funny post the other day (funny to me anyway) from Bug on the Joys of Boys, which were a number of humorous observations on life from the perspective of a mother. I say mother - although interestingly there were no clear markers in the text - I just know this was written by a woman. However the point is that I would not be able to deliver that material right now - I laughed so much it hurt and even now if I try to tell some of them to people I start to laugh uncontrollably and can't deliver the punch lines.

The seminar today was a great mix of tips for finding and developing humour and stories and some excellent examples but the important message for speakers was that humour is not about jokes - it's about observing the humour in life around us. I remember walking down Piccadilly in London one day and saw an A-board for an opticians that read "Eyes Tested - While you Wait."

One of the great lessons I learned about speaking is that it doesn't matter where you speak or who you speak to - this is show business. The audience wants us to entertain them - and if you, as a small business owner, want people to remember your speech and come and do business with you, adding in some humour to your presentations is definitely going to help to achieve that goal.

My big lesson today was about remembering to LOOK and LISTEN - Observe the humour around me - and then WRITE IT DOWN immediately. It's a good tip for any business - keep your eyes and ears open for anything funny related to your products or the needs you satisfy and write it down. Start collecting stories about the way your clients use your products, and don't be scared of the things that go wrong. Self deprecating humour is the best and sometimes the greatest product innovations are the result of a disaster - Post-it notes were the result of a failed experiment to develop a super bonding agent.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Google Reader is changing the way I Blog.

2007-01-31T08:47:00.001Z

It is now 12 days since I switched to using Google Reader in which time you can see I have 58 blog subscriptions, have read over 1000 posts, starred 54 and shared 27. That took surprising little time and I thought I would share how using Google reader is changing the way I read and write blog posts.

First a few comments on how I am using the tools in Google reader.

I have set up a number of folders and tags that enable me to organise the subscriptions. Folders and tags are pretty much the same - except that I keep Folders specifically to organise the blog subscriptions by topic area and Tags to record individual posts I want to be able to refer back to. I was initially relying on the Star feature for this - but this quickly becomes unmanageable. When I come back to interesting posts I usually want to look at a specific subject area and so it is much easier to organise interesting posts with Tags than Stars.

When viewing the posts I either click on All Posts or select a specific Folder if I just want to review one topic. I have found the best way to read is to start at the bottom of the list of recent posts and press K to move up to the next. Once read it stays in the list until I refresh the page - then it is unlikely that I will ever see it again. You can start at the top and press J to move down but I found that unless I clear all posts I end up with unread posts getting older and older.

My sense of timeliness has also changed radically - when you get 100 posts a day - a week is a long time so I have noticed that I tend to scan more quickly though older posts when I subscribe to a new blog. I have also noticed how much more aware I have become of the interaction going on between bloggers. These are the main things I have noticed about the way I read posts that are changing the way I blog.

I seldom follow through on a partial feed. If all that is available on the post is a heading and a few lines, it has to be pretty compelling for me not to press K. Denise from the Blog Squad posted a poll a few days ago on this and I see that currently nearly 65% are in favour of full feeds.
The same is true of posts that rely on me following a link to get the information. I find I need a reason to to take the time to follow the link - I want to read a Blogger's commentary then follow through because it sounds interesting.
FeedBurner's FeedFlare has suddenly become much more important because it allows me to place tools for social bookmarking at the foot of the feed - so they appear in the reader - most stuff from my blog never reaches the feed.
I take about 2 seconds to decide whether to read or move on - so if the post is confusing and I can't see the message quickly - it's gone. The Title, the first paragraph and subheads are critical to draw a reader in and this is basic journalistic practice but I still forget.
I am starting to add more links in my blog posts because I don't see any of the links around the post - at the same time I find lots of links in a post discourages me from reading it - needs a fine balance.
Making comments is not so easy because the comments link is not included in the feed - so I have to make a point of going to a post on the blog to comment as a result I am not tending not to make as many comments.

The big problem for bloggers with Google reader is that you have no idea if I am reading your posts because Google only registers as a single reader in feed stats. Not sure if Google are going to deal with that but overall I love the product and it is definitely changing the way I do things.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

People should need a licence to use PowerPoint

2007-01-21T11:55:00.001Z

I do a lot of voluntary work in my local community and as a result I attend a lot of "presentations" and "workshops" presented by senior executives in public, private and voluntary sector organisations and there seems to be common feature with the presenters. They all use PowerPoint but have never learned how to use PowerPoint.

Most of these senior executives spend a great deal of their time communicating with a variety of stakeholders and community representatives, yet seem never to have spent a much time learning how to communicate. Having looked a number of job specifications for these senior posts however I can confirm that in every case "Excellent communication skills" is there as an essential requirement. I think the problem is that the interviewers for these posts are not good communicators so they set the bar of "excellence" very low.

Let me give you an example of how bad it gets. This is the wording on the first slide of a workshop I attended last week. (I have changed the names and departments to avoid adding further embarrassment)

Some Introductions

My name is John Smith, a senior officer with the City Council's Important Developments Department. I will give a short presentation.
This is my colleague James Brown who will help with any questions you may have and with the workshop that will follow the presentation.
You have probably met Jenny Jones and Peter Green of the Voluntary Council who are here to assist us all.

If he had actually understood PowerPoint I am sure he would have used Motion Path Animation to create a little black ball to bounce along the words as he spoke so that we could all join in :)

Inevitably the presentation was difficult to follow - because we were all trying to follow 33 slides packed with words and half way through I started asking questions and the meeting finally came to life. Unfortunately after a long and very interesting question and answer session they insisted on finishing the slides.

When I ask people why they use slides the most common answer is "I want to make sure I cover everything - and with out the slides I may forget". My response is "If you are having a problem remembering what to say, it's likely that the audience is going to have more trouble trying to remember it."

I think most presenters would be better off simply setting the scene and letting people ask questions - at least that way the audience get to hear what they came for. There is no justification whatsoever for slides full of bullet points - they destroy the presentation, make the presenter sound stilted, undermine any chance of building rapport and finally they make lousy handouts. So often the PowerPoint slides are the speakers notes or even worse their script and the speaker becomes the narrator to a boring slide presentation

Here is my advice.

Write down your speech objective and how you will measure that it has been successfully achieved.
Write your speech (and I don't mean write it out - I mean write your notes and structure - see my PEPP Talk recommendations for that)
Add in a couple of questions to ask the audience to get them into the habit if interacting.
Ask yourself - How would slides help this presentation? Be honest and then IF they are necessary, make sure you produce a professional looking presentation (hint - it takes time)
Create a useful standalone handout that helps you to achieve your speech objective

When I use PowerPoint the slide presentation takes me days to produce - sometimes weeks - There are few words and few slides and I switch off the slides (press B on the keyboard) when I don't need them. I invested a lot of time in learning how to use PowerPoint and make my slides part of a performance - not my notes. Most importantly the slides are there to support me and help me to communicate my message (one message) more effectively.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Switching to Google Reader

2007-01-20T21:32:00.001Z

One of the important lessons I am learning about blogging is that get readers to your blog you have to read and comment on other blogs. I have mentioned in previous posts a few tools I started using over Christmas to start interacting with other bloggers and the net result of using these tools is that I now subscribe to about 50 Blogs. That is a lot of information to sort in order to find the nuggets I need.

If you are subscribing to a few blogs then simply using the live links feature in FireFox or IE7 should serve you well - but if you plan to be come a serious blogger you are going to find you need a much better solution. Until now I have relied on Sage, an in browser add on to FireFox which has done the job well, but since the increase in blogs over Christmas it has become a bit of a pain.

I have been looking at on-line readers as an alternative and have played with Bloglines on an off for a couple of years but never really gelled with it and I had stumbled upon Google Reader sometime last year but having played with it for a while decided it was not for me. Oh I set up an account and subscribed to all my blogs on both to help my search engine presence, but as a usable tools neither were anywhere near as useful as Sage.

Then today I came across Robert Scoble's blog where there was a discussion about Google Reader recommending it to manage 29,000 posts in 30 days. Well that got my attention. Clearly I was not alone in my early view of Goole Reader because it has been significantly upgraded and I am very impressed - infact I am now in the process of switching over immediately. As seems to be typical with Google however they have not made a song and dance about the changes - in fact I keep discovering new products or upgraded products that were launched without any comment.

There are actually a few reasons for the switch and the most important was the need to change from a reader that is PC based to one that is web based. I use one PC most of the time - but increasingly I am finding my self using my laptop or working on a PC in another office. As some new plans for 2007 move into place it is inevitable that I will increasingly be needing to access by blog subscriptions from a variety of PCs.

The second reason is the shear volume of information I now need to manage with increasingly number of subscriptions which Sage is not good at because it essentially deals with each blog separately as does Bloglines. Google Reader allows me to manage blogs much more intuitively by tags and by folders (I can put a blog into more than one folder) and by setting the reader to display only unread blogs I am not cluttered with the ones I have read.

The third reason is a really neat tool in Google reader - Sharing. I can highlight specific posts in two ways - First I can star them so that they are easy to find again, but I can also share them. Sharing the post places it into a personal RSS feed on Google reader that I can then syndicate to my blogs, web sites or anywhere else that I want to promote my shared posts (which can include some of my own posts of course).

Rikki's Shared Blog Posts

One further advantage to Google reader is that everything in the Google stable seems to be being linked up where it can be and I am using more and more Google tools. I have just started using Google Calender which is really great - can't get access to Google Mail yet - but I gather then are some links happening there to Google Reader.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Upgrading to New Blogger - Huge Task but Worth it

2007-01-01T11:08:00.001Z

Happy New Year

I hope the new years revelries have not left you worse for the wear and if you are now considering your New Years' Resolutions I have a free gift that may help - no string - just pop along to Expect More From 2007 and download the eBook full of tips for being more successful from nearly 60 top professional speakers from around the world. My article is on Page 33. Feel free to send a copy to friends if you wish.

Now if you have visited my blog before you will I hope notice the complete new look and feel which I managed to complete late last night - actually it was early this morning - I know spending New Years Eve upgrading a blog is sad - but at least I am not sporting a mother of all hangovers this morning.

A week ago I mentioned Charlemagne Stavanger's Custom Templates blog which has provided me with two great three column blogger templates that I though would take me a couple of days to install as part of my Blogger upgrade - I was wrong - It has kept be very busy for most of the past week - actually installing the templates only takes a couple of minutes - populating the templates is a different matter.

I am sure there must me thousands of Bloggers dreading the fact that they will eventually need to upgrade to New Blogger which is why I thought it might be helpful if I blog some of my experiences from this past week. In fact upgrading to New Blogger is very easy - just a few seconds but that retains your old template. The challenge is moving to a New Blogger Template and Layouts because all your hacks and modifications, those that you can remember installing, have to be reinstalled and in many cases the previous code no longer works. Because this was going to be a huge learning curve I decided to leave this blog to last as it involved the most work.

First I converted my Personal Blog which was fairly basic with few modifications, using the standard new blogger template. Then I started adding page elements that I had not been using but were on this blog which helped me to learn more about how the page elements worked. Along the way I kept discovering new add-ons like MyBogLog and TheGoodBlogs so it was a fascinating learning curve.

Probably the most important discovery or realisation for me was that using Feedblitz or FeedBurner I could provide a means for visitors to subscribe to my blogs by email. This has been a godsend - I really have a problem with newsletters. I launched one in September 2005 and have still not managed to get issue 2 out yet - they are so time consuming. Yet I love Blogging. The only downside to blogs was that so few people understand about feeds or what to do with them. IE7 is going to help but now I can replace my attempts at developing an ezine with blogs.

By now I had also discovered the three column templates but was very uncomfortable about tackling this blog with such a huge change, especially as I was finding more neat add-ons. So I decided to get to work on my GenderShift blog which I have been meaning to start for a while. Having completed that I was even more nervous about this blog, when I read a comment somewhere on Beautiful Beta, a blog dedicated to hacks and mods for new Blogger, suggesting working on a test blog first. Such an obvious thing to do. Duhhh!

So that was yesterdays task - reconstruct this blog on a test site and then copy the completed template over here job done - NO! I don't know why but the widgets simply would not transfer - I am sure there was something I needed to have done but I really do not - (I did expand the widgets before copying) So I finally copied all the page elements one by one and it seems to have worked - I am sure there is probably some extraneous code somewhere - but it ain't broke so I am leaving it.

Just one final point. If you use a test template - or want to transfer lists of links between blogs I strongly recommend that you use the HTML widget and not the Links Widget. The Links widget is very basic and you cannot add attributes like "target" or "title" If you have even a basic understanding of HTML you will be frustrated by the links widget especially when you have to copy links between blogs they have to be set up again one at a time. With the HTML widget you can simply copy and paste the lot.

Well I'm proud of my new look blogs, excited by all the new tools and tips I am learning by being part of the blogosphere, pleased that I can drop my newsletter plans and stick to blogging and inspired to keep up regular posting to make the huge effort of the last two weeks worth while.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Blogging is Slowing Down? I am Just Getting Started.

2006-12-28T05:26:00.001Z

It is interesting to notice that whilst I have been, in a fashion, blogging for 2 years now, I have not really understood the whole idea of the Blogosphere and the sense of community that exists between bloggers. I have MyBlogLog largely to thank for the change because despite having registered my blog on a variety of blog directories, until I joined MyBlogLog I didn't really get into any communications with other bloggers.

One reason I have started spending a lot of time working on learning how to promote my own blogs better is because I am in the process of setting up a new social enterprise with the goal of helping people in the voluntary and community sector and small business owners to use blogging and other Web 2.0 tools. I recently discovered when introducing blogging as a promoting tool on a course that most people in my home city of Hull over 30 don't even know what a blog is. Oh they have heard the term on the TV or from their kids - but just don't get what blogging is all about at all.

Then a couple of days ago I read a post on Build a Better Blog about the Gartner research suggesting that blogging may plateau in 2007 because there are now 200,000 ex bloggers, and that things will slow down. Strange I thought - everyone I speak to has not even figured it out yet - but the early adopters are already looking for the next big/new thing.

The reality is I think that, certainly in the UK, Blogging has only just started. A few months ago David Cameron the young leader of the Conservative Party launched a video blog because he understands that to reach the 18-30 voters he has to use this technology, but he is well ahead of the game. IE7 has only just started to make people aware of the idea of subscribing to blogs and although I have been using it for a year I have only just recognised the significance of FeedBlitz in allowing people to subscribe to blogs by email. The hardest thing I find to explain to technophobes is RSS and feed aggregators and I saw some statistics suggesting that less than 20% of people understand it.

Finally I have just come across the great idea from Mack Collier at Viral Garden for helping to give some air time to good "Z-List" blogs that deserve a mention and at the same time lift our rankings in Technorati. It's an easy idea - Copy the list of blogs below - and add a few that you love to the list. Lots of grateful bloggers will come along to read your blog and you should see your traffic increase. If you want to know more about the idea - pop over to Viral Garden for the latest update.

I have added a few blogs I have come to like a lot over the past week - especially Charlemagne Stavanger's Custom Templates which has provided me with two great three column blogger templates that will keep me very busy upgrading from old blogger to new over the next couple of days.

Custom Templates
Blogging to Fame
Small Business Branding
Build a Better Blog
Creative Think
Soloride
Movie Marketing Madness
Blog Till You Drop!
Get Shouty!
One Reader at a Time
Critical Fluff
The New PR
Own Your Brand!
OTOInsights
bizandbuzz
Work, in Plain English
Buzz Canuck
New Millenium PR
Pardon My French
Troy Worman's Blog
The Instigator Blog
AENDirect
Diva Marketing
Marketing Hipster
The Marketing Minute
Funny Business
The Frager Factor
Mindblob
Open The Dialogue
Word Sell
Note to CMO:
That's Great Marketing!
Shotgun Marketing Blog
BrandSizzle
bizsolutionsplus
Customers Rock!
Being Peter Kim
Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Andy Nulman’s Blog About Surprise
Billions With Zero Knowledge
Working at Home on the Internet
MapleLeaf 2.0
darrenbarefoot.com
Two Hat Marketing
The Engaging Brand
The Branding Blog
CrapHammer
Drew's Marketing Minute
Golden Practices
Viaspire
Tell Ten Friends
Flooring the Consumer
Kinetic Ideas
Unconventional Thinking
Buzzoodle
Conversation Agent
The Copywriting Maven
Hee-Haw Marketing
Scott Burkett's Pothole on the Infobahn
Multi-Cult Classics
Logic + Emotion
Branding & Marketing
Popcorn n Roses
On Influence & Automation
Bullshitobserver
Servant of Chaos
converstations
eSoup
Presentation Zen
Dmitry Linkov
aialone
John Wagner
Nick Rice
CKs Blog
Design Sojourn
Frozen Puck
The Sartorialist
Small Surfaces
Africa Unchained
Perspective
gDiapers
Marketing Nirvana
Bob Sutton
¡Hola! Oi! Hi!
Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid!
Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together
Community Guy
Social Media on the fly
Jeremy Latham’s Blog
SMogger Social Media Blog
Masey.com

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Some Brilliant Tools to Promote a Blog

2006-12-23T16:19:00.001Z

I set this blog up nearly 2 years ago and to be honest I have not really done much to promote it - in fact I have often struggled to keep posting regularly - but as I am about to start trying to help people in Hull learn how to blog - I have been spending a little more time researching this and have discovered a huge amount help available resulting in me spending much of this week exploring and installing some new tools on my blog.

First if you are looking for ideas to promote your blog there is one site I was referred to someone in the Everywoman network. I have only just started working through Yaro Starak's Blog Traffic School Pre-Launch Blog which is packed with ideas to get traffic to your blog. After following just couple of tips and already I can already see the results.

First you may have noticed the widget in the sidebar listing the last five people who read my blog. I was so impressed when I saw that one someone's blog I just had to investigate and discovered MyBlogLog.com which I can totally recommend. If you have a blog get over there right away and sign up. MyBlogLog is a Blog community - a chance to search and find other blogs of interest and by reading other blogs make yourself known to other bloggers, many of whom will in turn come and read yours - Traffic to my blog as more than doubled this week and I get that brilliant widget on the side bar shown me who has visited. All of a sudden instead of being alone blogger - I feel part of a community - real people are reading my blog wow!!

Next you will also see another addition to the side bar called GoodBlogs. That widget displays details of other blogs and in return my blog gets displayed on other blogs - This week already that has resulted in 10 visits and in addition 15 people who visited my blog have visited blogs I have promoted - nice synergy.

Then I was visiting John Jantsch's Duct Tape Marketing Blog - which if you are reading this blog is one you should also visit - and running my cursor over a link, a preview of the page leapt out at me. Wow - "How did he do that?" I thought and off I went to Snap to pick up that tool. If you want to see it in action simply point your cursor at any link on this page.

Finally I visited the blog of a professional speaker friend David McQueen and noticed two things on his side panel - First field allowing visitors to subscribe to an email notification if the blog is updated - and second lots of tags (called labels) which were all linked to his various posts - Wow - "How did he do that?"

Well the first I discovered is a site called FeedBlitz - which I have already signed up and added to my Personal Blog - I will be adding it here but the addition of Tags I discovered is a new feature in the latest version of Blogger and that is going to take a bit of work to install - I have already started and again that is already included in my Personal Blog and will be here over Christmas.

What it means is that customising your blog is now much much easier and as it is out of Beta is not going to give you any technical problems. So if you are looking for something to do to get away from the Christmas chaos - there is enough here to keep you busy for the rest for the week.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Internet Explorer 7 looks set to change the world

2006-12-01T23:47:00.001Z

I stopped using internet explorer nearly 2 years ago when I discovered tabbed browsing and live bookmarks in Firefox. On the occasions when I have had to revert to IE it has been like travelling back in time. Of course IE still dominates the browser market even if that is because most people don't make a choice so much as use the browser that is available.

However I have to say that IE7 is a massive improvement and in some ways seems to have even jumped ahead of Firefox particularly in look and feel although I still prefer the scope in Firefox to add extensions. What is important in IE7 is the fact that subscription to live feeds is built into the browser and whilst this will be lost on most people - in a few years this development will I predict have been responsible for accelerating a major transformation in the use of the web.

I have recently discovered that a significant majority of the community certainly in Hull, do not even know what a blog is let alone how to add an RSS or live feed into a feed reader, so the new IE7 feature that enables users to subscribe to feeds will take a while to become common practice. But the fact that it is there and so easy to use is going to mean that people will start subscribing to blogs without even knowing what they are doing.

In IE7 the new menu is entirely visual including the international feed icon - a small orange symbol like this:

The default for this image is greyed out - however if you visit a page that contains a live feed, such as a blog - the image turns orange and clicking on it will enable you to "subscribe." What that means is that the page is added to a new favourites list, called Feeds, where every time the page is updated, you will be notified. This is important with web sites that provide regularly updated information such as news sites and blogs.

The problems with SPAM means that most of us are increasingly reluctant to sign up for newsletters and even if we do spam filters tend to junk them. Blogs are a far better way to manage newsletters because the recipient has full control. We decide when to read and a good feed reader enables us to quickly scan the articles in a feed to determine which are worth reading. I have about 30 subscriptions which I check every week or so. I have a file in my email folder containing over 10,000 unread newsletters that I doubt will ever be read and when I have time I will unsubscribe from them. If I want to unsubscribe from a blog of course it is as simple matter of deleting it from my list.

Over the next year or so, two things will happen - More and more people will understand the value of blogs and start writing them - More and more people will learn about subscribing to feeds and start using them. The net effect will be that newsletters will become less and less used. The growth of blogs as a primary communication tool has been waiting for this development from Microsoft. If you have not yet downloaded IE7 you can do so from www.microsoft.com although I understand that if you have automatic upgrades enabled you should soon be notified that IE7 is available, and it is certainly one upgrade I strongly recommend you download soon.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Skype - The whole world can talk for free.

2006-11-01T09:45:00.001Z

I have been using Skype for over a year now and though it took a while to change the habit I am now using SkypeOut regularly to call to land line and mobile phones and what a saving. I have even set up a London number 0208 1235672 for people to call me - which is proving very useful - switches to a free Skype Voicemail account of I am out.

If you are not using Skype it really is something to check out - I spent half an our chatting to a friend in South Africa the other week - no cost - because that was Skype to Skype but I think a lot of people think Skype is all about PC to PC communications - most of my Skype calls now are PC to land line and if you sign up and buy £10 of Skype credit at the moment they are giving away six months free calls to UK landlines - for me an offer too good to miss

If you are not using Skype Check it out - my Skype ID is rikkiarundel but if you look in the sidebar you will also see a button that lets you know if I am on-line - click on that and you can connect me.

Skype - The whole world can talk for free.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Rikki Arundel - PEPPTalk Speaker Showreel

2006-10-05T12:40:00.001Z

I have started looking at how to use video more effectively both on my web sites and on my blogs. There are so many resources around now to help it is amazing and the great thing is that these resources are free.

There are four main sites where you can upload video and share it with the world.

YouTube
Google
MySpace
Yahoo

Most sites limit the size of the video to 100 Mb - which is about 10 minutes - though if you sign up for a director account on YouTube - you can upload longer video. At this stage I am still exploring, however the good thing I have discovered is that as a speaker I can now embed my showreel video in my blog here as you can see below, on my Professional Speaking Page and on my Speaking and Marketing Tips site. Other sites like The Ecademy and Squidoo have a YouTube embed link. Embeding a video means that it appears directly in the page and plays there - the visitor does not need to click on a link to the hosting site to view it.

In addition I can add the link to all the social bookmark sites like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia which also help to improve search engine rankings. Video is really taking off on the web and I am about to explore a number of other options available for video email and video and audio auto play on web pages. But one thing is clear - pretty soon most sites are going to be showing video and as a speaker not using it is going to be a real challenge.

My PeppTalk Showreel


7 minute edited version of Rikki Arundel's PEPPTalk Motivational Speech on how to write and deliver and outstanding speech. Great resource for anyone needing to become a better public speaker, especially relevant to women in business.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Struggling to Use Social Bookmarking as a Marketing Stratregy

2006-09-17T11:53:00.001Z

I have been using Del.icio.us for quite a while now, initially as an online repository for links I wanted to access when working on other computers and also to share links with friends who have similar interests. Of course I could also see the potential in social bookmarking in increasing popularity by creating back links to my site and recently when I began using Squidoo, a group of us on the Ecademy agreed to bookmark each others lenses to see whether this would have much impact on our ranking. Unfortunately the idea didn't really take off beyond the initial flurry of interest.

One reason was that it is a little time consuming. We each tried to help by posting our lens URLs with the titles, notes and tags on the forum, but posting three or four lenses for each member was going to take too much time and we had no idea what impact it would have. I could also see that, for this to really work it would be necessary to submit to more than one social bookmarking site. I have bookmarklets in my browser toolbars for both Del.icio.us and Yahoo My Web - these bookmarklets automatically add the URL and title of the page - but leave you to manually add notes and tags so it still takes a lot of time and when I started looking at Furl and Blink and .... I had no idea how many there were and there simply is not enough room on my browser for all those bookmarklets.

My Speaking and Marketing Tips site is a Site Build It site - and one advantage of that is the remarkable forum of members who are very knowledgable and post practical solutions to a lot of challenges. One solution that emerged was some code deveeloped for Site Build It owners that would enable us to display "Add to" bookmarklets for nine social bookmarking sites. If you have not used these links they work the same way as bookmarklets in the browser and encourage visitors to save the page. The problem is that even this was not keeping up with the huge growth in sites. And some of them like Technorati and Google are not really social bookmarking sites anyway.

Then I launched my own Article Directory, and got some help from Jodi, a web developer in the USA who I noticed was using a couple of submission sites - Socializer and OnlyWire. There are links to both of these in the side panel - Social Bookmark This Page takes you to Socializer and OnlyWire is just below it.

01/01/2007 update
Since writing this article I have discovered AdThis which I prefer to Socializer - You will see the AsThis buttons at the foot of this post and in the sidebar for both social bookmarking and feed subscriptions - works the same way but enables me to put a link at the foot of each post.

Socializer works like my "add to links" bookmarklets except that it takes you to a page full of them (nearly 50 and I know there are more). However from there you still have to link to each separately - Great for your visitors who are using one or two sites although to be honest most visitors like me should have browser based bookmarkets for their favourite sites.

OnlyWire on the other hand is a bulk submission site (at present the only one) which will summit the page to 15 social bookmark sites - including all the the leading ones. However it is not without its bugs - two of the links don't work properly and two of the links do weird things with the tags. You can see my reviews of them all here. I am hopefull that OnlyWire will fix the problems and add some missing links like Yahoo My Web soon because this really is a time saving tool. Even with only 11 really working it is as quick to submit to them all as it is to submit to a single site. And don't worry about submitting a link twoce - the site picks that up and updates your information.

One big advantage of posting to social bookmark sites is that the top sites do have huge amounts of traffic and high page ranks - I have noticed that my links on sites are already turning up in good positions in seach results.

As I wrote this post I became increasingly aware that this might be all goggledygook to many of my friends who still struggle with technology, so I have produced a few pages on the topic on my web site - very much an in evelopment section because the whole topic is developing and I will be producing a Squidoo lens on the subject in few weeks.

Social Bookmarking for Collaboration and Marketing

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Performancing - Makes Blogging Easier to Manage

2006-09-14T12:09:00.001Z

Performancing.com | Helping Bloggers Succeed

I am still exploring what this site can do - but there are two features that have already become indispensible to me

The first is the firefox extention. (If you are still using internet explorer - you should have got the message by not - all the really cool developments on the web are now happening with Firefox) This makes it really easy to publish blogs and comes with a neet and much better WYSIWYG editor than blogger. (not seen the new service yet)

The second tool is the tracking service - do you know how many people, or as I have discovered how few people are actually reading your blog - well just add a line to your template and you can have up to date metrics on all the activities - including how may people are clicking on your adsense links and which of your blog posts are getting the most attention.

Finally the bit I have yet to get to, you get to join blogging community - and either lurk (read all the posts without actually getting involved - thats what I am doing first) or you can post your own blog posts and comments and find out how to make your blog more successful. This site has a Google Page Rank of 7 so posting blogs here is going to do your own site popularity a few favours anyway.

If you are using Firefox - I strongly recommend this site. If you are not using Firefox - trust me - It is free to download and will transform your browsing experience. You may already understand what Web 2.0 is - if not it's all about the evolution of the web from it's information providing phase to a new interactive and collaberative phase. Internet Explorer is a web 1.0 tool - Firefox is web 2.0.

Performancing.com | Helping Bloggers Succeed

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

The Importance of Long Tail Marketing

2006-09-12T09:42:00.001Z

I have increasingly been hearing about Long Tail Marketing recently and made a point today to check it out. If this is a term that is unfamiliar to you stay with me. If you know what Long Tail Marketing, is but would like to know more I have added some links and resources to my Small Business Marketing Lens, including an interview with and presentaton by Chis Anderson the editor in Chief whose Article in October 2004 started it all, and a link to his lens.

So what is Long Tail Marketing and why is it so important for Small Businesses.

First there is nothing new about the Long tail. It is a statistical term derived from a distribution scattergram. If we plot numbers of people up the left axis of the graph and number of products along the bottom, the Long Tail is the section with lots of products being purchased by small number of people and is represented by the yellow section of the graph.

Imagine you go into a book store to buy a Harry Potter book - the chances are you will find a copy in most stores. It is in the red section of the graph - "The Head." It is produced in huge quantities and stocked by all leading stores. But what if you wanted a copy of a Spell Book for Wizards and Witches. The chances are you are going to have to find a small specialist shop or search online. Now you are in the Long Tail where products appeal to a small number of specialist buyers.

Large companies have generally not been interested in the long tail because they cannot afford to stock everything and the cost or reaching small numbers of people is uneconomic in tradition business models. But they are waking up because Amazon now achieves more sales in the long tail than it does with the blockbusters. Why? Because it does not have to hold the stock. Either a specialist supplier advertises in the markeplace or Amazon orders the book for you when you buy it.

But more than this - the internet now has over 1 billion users worldwide and search engines make it easier to find a niche product supplier in the long tail than in the head. Type "Marketing" into Google and you are going to get 1.5 billion responses. Search for "marketing for voluntary organisations" and there are about 700 responses. If you are targeting that market the chances of being found are quite high because there is little competition - whereas getting seen at all in the mass market is increasingly difficult for new small businesses.

Large companies simply do not have the resources to deliver to many niche markets so they don't bother, but increasinlgy we as consumers are deciding that we are not prepared to put up with the general mass market products - we want unique, customised, focused products that exactly meet our needs.

Understanding the long tail is critical for all small businesses, yet when I am networking I constantly find that people with small businesses are trying to reach everyone. When I ask who are your customers I hear, "everyone." If you try to appeal to everyone - you will lose the niche markets. Small businesses cannot serve everyone - there is a limit to how much business you can manage, so why not become THE supplier to your niche and work the long tail, instead of trying to compete with major corporations in the head.

Do visit my Small Business Marketing Lens on Squidoo for links and information on this important strategy.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Speaking about Transgender History

2006-09-02T23:23:00.001Z

Well I had some fun yesterday. I have spoken at just about every sort of venue, but yesterday was a new experience - I was speaking at a Shopping Centre, right in the centre of the Princess Quays shopping centre in Hull on a busy Friday morning.

It was not without its challenges I have to say.

First the technology did not work - I don't often use PowerPoint these days mostly because I am trying to teach people how to create great speaches and it takes a considerable skill do that and use PowerPoint. The topic of transgender history lends itself to powerpoint because it is a very visual history, but with the technical problems I had to go on without slides and still managed to hold a very transient audience for 30 minutes.

The event was a Hate Crime awareness event - with lots of dignatories around, so it did not do my reputaiton and personal brand any harm. The other challenge was the awful acoustics in a cavernous indoor shopping centre - I have faced the challenges of Speakers Corner in London and a number of outside events, but this was very different.

I believe that most hate crime and discrimination is caused by ignorance and so I try to tackle this as far as trans people are concerned by raising awareness with an entertaining look at the history of trans people. Reclaiming and publicising our long history is a great way to help people see us in a different light.

I can't give you the speech here but I can give you something the Hull Citizens missed - the visual tour - Please visit this Squidoo lens for a fascinating journey through a very colourful Transgender History

TransHistory - A Colourful Past and Present on Squidoo

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Jobs for the Girls: Surviving in a Man's World - Monster.co.uk

2006-08-18T15:24:00.000Z

I spend a great deal of my time working with women in business and it is surprising how many still have problems day to day in dealing with men in the office. All too often I see women observing successful men in busines and then making the mistake of trying to replicate their behaviour.

Men and women do business differently - and right now the qualities most needed in business those natural strengths most associated with women. I recieved this article this morning from Monster.com which offers some particulary useful advice for women on how to survive in a male environment and stay true to who you are.

Jobs for the Girls: Surviving in a Man's World - Monster.co.uk

Rikki
Free business articles for your Blog or Web site

Squidoo : My Lensmaster Page

2006-08-12T16:12:00.000Z

What, you might be thinking, is Squidoo?

Squidoo is a free service (in fact you can even earn money with Squidoo) that enables you to create "Lenses" - Views on subjects you are expert in or simply topics you wish to promote. You can use a lens to promote your area of expertise and help establish you as the person to come to. You can be really commercial and use one to promote your business. Or perhaps you have a passion - well you can create a lens to bring together resources and people who share your passion.

Squidoo is not a blog - though you can write items - and you can link your blog and your web site to any or all of your lenses. And yes - you can create as many lenses as you wish. One thing I have discovered is that the more focused the topic on each lens the better. Take a look at the first two lenses I have created - and remember they are still works in progress so do pop back from time to time:

Selling and Marketing to Women
Write and Deliver and Outstanding Speech

But hey - I have only just started exploring this medium so if you want to see what you can do check out this lens from author and founder of Squidoo, Seth Godin (he has lots - see the link to his other lenses) It gave me some great ideas on how to use this new medium and there are lots of other helpful tips once you find your way around.

What you need (okay, want) to know about Seth Godin

Rikki

Articles That Sell

2006-07-12T01:03:00.000Z

If you write articles to help promote your web site or blog - here is a great blog I have just found that provides lots of useful tips, advice and links - well worth putting in your RSS links.

Articles That Sell

Publish your Blog on your Web Site

2006-01-13T11:47:00.000Z

Well I am back after a long break to complete a Masters dissertation and am now emersing myself deeply into continuing to develop my web site. Like many people interested in internet marketing I spent a lot of time over December downloading thousands of dollars worth of free ebooks and software and of course trying to understand a lot of new information.

When it come to internet marketing I tend to look for easy to understand solutions. One thing is clear from my December downloads, RSS is becoming more and more important and easier to understand and use - though I think the real explosion will happen when Internet Explorer arrives with a built in RSS reader. Of course for those of us sensible enough to switch to Firefox that has been a reality for a while now.

RSS if you are new to the term apparently means Really Simple Syndication - which means an easy way to publish news feeds and blogs on other sites. You will have seen that many portals like Yahoo, MSN and Google publish news feeds from a variety of sources - RSS is the protocol that enables them to take that news feed or blog and publish it on their web site - and now you can do exactly the same without having to lean any complex programming languages.

If this is beginning to lose you - can I suggest that you go to my web site where I am building pages now to explain and demonstrate the importance of RSS and Blogging and how all businesses should be taking advantage of this new technology. If you already are ahead - you will know that the real shortcoming of a Blog like this is getting people to read it. Well I discovered that there are some free services around that make it a five minute task to publish your Blog on your web site.

Some of the services are simpler that others but these are the three I recommend you have a look at.

RapidFeeds - This is a real all round site which provides a wide range of RSS solutions all free. You can set up your own feeds - So for example you could create a feed notifying readers when ever you change a page on your your web site.

You can creade the code to publish any RSS or Atom feed on your web site. This site offers a choice of different codes - PHP, ASP, Javascript of iFrames. Personally I found the Javascript from here a bit unweildly compared to other sites, but I really like the iFrames. Click here to see this blog published in iFrames on my site which you can see allws me to diaplay items in a small scrollable box.

RSS-to-Javascript.com provides a simple script building service. Just complete a couple of fields and copy the script to your web page in the body of the html - no need to put anything into the header. I had a a few problems getting the beta services that provide scrolling and boxes - but I am sure the bugs will be gone pretty soon. Again Click here to see this blog displayed using this java script - you will need to scroll down the page a bit.

Feed2JS.com is an academic site which provides a similar service - though I found it a little less user friendly - then thats the nature of academic sites - and it seemd to have a problem with my feed however a number of site owners I know are using it with no problems.

Incidentally if you look over on the side panel of this blog - assuming you are reading it in Blogger - you will see that I have also published my web site RSS feed there - so every time I update this blog, it creates new content on my site and every time I update any page on my web site - new content is posted to this blog. Great news.

Rikki
Professional Speaker
Looking for Small Business Marketing Strategies?
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To publish any articles I have written please click on the Star for details.

Speak about real Experiences - become a Storyteller

2005-10-07T14:55:00.000Z

A couple or weeks ago I wrote about the importance, when speaking to network meetings, of answering the question "What do you do?" in a way that tells people how you can help them. I said then that I spend quite a lot of time on my Presentation and Communication Skills for Networkers Workshop on this topic. Still my frustration has always been that despite the fact that I get people early in the day speaking with passion, the moment I tell them to talk about their job they revert to boring corporate speak.

Last week running another workshop by accident I seem to have stumbled on the answer. One delegate, Liz was struggling with how to use stories in a speech about her work as a recruitment coach. "How specifically do you help people?" I asked. As she started to answer generally I asked her to be very specific. She started to tell a story about one client she had helped to be more effective in job seeking but still wanted to keep it anonymous and rather general. "What is her name? What was her problem? How did you help her overcome that problem? I asked.

As Liz became specific about the case, as she started to tell the story her passion and animation returned and I realised what was happening. People take a story and then generalise it instead of retaining the individual story. I immediately started to ask other delegates to tell me their stories - and all were doing the same thing.

Having identified the problem, with a bit more guidance and group diasussion I managed to get most of them to switch to telling specific stories about how they had helped a named client(they could change the name if the felt more comfortable). For the first time I saw these business networking presentations start to come alive.

So if you are explaining what you do at a networking meeting - either one to one or to the group let me suggest a simple approach.

First answer the question, "Who do you specialise in helping and how do you help them? Be very specific - No one person is able to sell to everyone. We all have a niche or preferred market and the more you focus the more successful you will become.

When you have the answer to that clear in your mind, pick a client who typifies the kind of work you do and then answer these questions. "What is their name? What was their problem? How did you help them overcome that problem? You are not trying to sell yourself to an entire audience at a networking meeting - what you are trying to do is make sure that everyone understands clearly what you do - and a real story is the best way to do that.

OK it's possible that only one or two people in the audience will identify personally with the story and approach you, but when you are presenting at a networking meeting the audience is not your target, especially if they are women. You want is for them to recommend you to their network. You want them to be thinking, "That's exactly the problem my friend Jane has - I must tell her about this."

Telling a real life story is the most powerful way to convey what you do and how you help people in a way that is memorable and likely to result in people referring you on to their friends.

Rikki
Professional Speaker
Looking for Small Business Marketing Strategies?
Claim your free eBook - How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy
To publish any articles I have written please click on the Star for details.

Focus on Positive Outcomes not Problems

2005-10-06T09:05:00.000Z

I ran a public speaking workshop last week for about 30 life coaches, two of whom were there only because they had been persuaded to be there by the organiser. I can only describe their feelings about speaking in public as near phobic - extreme discomfort.

Because the group was so mixed in abilities I was unable to do any specific phobia cure work and decided to press on with the course as planned, which it transpired was exactly the right action. Had I focused on them specifically I would have brought about the one thing they feared most - being made centre of attention. It's not speaking in public that is the problem for most people it's being the focus of everyone's attention.

As the day progressed they were able to follow the short and simple speaking exercies in groups of six getting loads of really positve feedback from the group and by the end of the day both admitted to me that they were actually excited about having their turn to speak next - what a total transformation.

The whole experience has made me sit back and think hard about how we as speaking coaches work with people who fear speaking in public. That day they were totally focussed on having fun, being positive, speaking from personal experiences, telling life stories and exploring their passions. In fact what we did was to counter balance all the bad experiences of their past and create a set of really good experiences.

It all makes sense now that I look at it - but all too often we focus on the problem. I remember when my children were young watching one of them come into the room with a very full glass of milk. "Don't spill it," I said and or course they immediately did. Why? Because I focused their attention on the idea of spilling it.

Focus on the outcome you want and on having fun achieving that outcome.

Rikki
Professional Speaker
Looking for Small Business Marketing Strategies?
Claim your free eBook - How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy

To publish any articles I have written please click on the Star for details.

GenderShift - The Greatest Social Change in History

2005-09-20T00:05:00.000Z

I have just read an article about why the world needs more women leaders - a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with but I couldn't help noticing that the article was written by a man and that there were huge assumptions about the commercial world that were entirely male in concept.

Let me explain. I changed gender four years ago - that is I present a female gender my id documents all say I am female and for the most part I am treated by people as a woman. What a shock that was. Interestingly last week I met someone on a course who told me a story about a friend who had changed gender and then decided to revert to male - the reason. He could not handle the loss of status and recognition that came with being a woman.

Its actually more than that. Now I am going to generalise a lot here and I know what I say is not all men - but in my experience it does apply to the majority. The public world has been created by men for men. Men from child hood are essentially competitive, and position against each other in determining where they rank. Power is determined according to the circumstances - sometimes its money, sometimes its physical strength, sometimes its daring, sometimes it's who can pull the best women. Men don't need a reason to compete just a set of criteria for measuring who won.

So they organise business along the same lines as they used to organise armies. Command and control structures that institutionalise competition and positioning. In business today they call the leaders Captains of Industry, the staff the troups and they all go out to do battle with their competitors. It really does not take a genius to see why women are going to struggle to succeed in this enviromment.

Women are collaborators, they work together not in competition. I am not saying no women compete, but many compete because the system makes it so that they must and they get reputations as "bitches" - Margaret Thatcher revelled in the title the "Iron Lady" - she is I believe in a minority.

When I first experienced networking as a woman I was quite taken aback at how different the experience was. Women made a point of finding out what support I needed and went out of their way to connect me with the right women who could provide it . One women(and I have lost the reference) said "I don't want to be at the top of my organisation, I want to be at the centre of it." This is a totally different structure of organisation based on networks not heirarchies.

Women can and will be great leaders but first they will have to dismantle the male dominated heiracharcial structures which is why so many are bailing out of the corporations to start their own businesses. Why competition - surely if we all collaberate we can overcome the huge disparities of wealth and create a more equitable planet. Why when a corporation is worth $100 billion is it still so focused on economic growth - why not human growth. Because wealth is power and for men the ultimate goal of business is power - it's not the amount that is important, it's having more than the competitors.

We are experiencing GenderShift, the most signifcant social change in recorded history where the influence of women will ultimately transform the world - it's going to be a very different world and one men are going to have some challenges in coming to terms with, but change it will - because one thing the human species is good at is survival and if we continue with the male dominated culture of greed and competition we will not survive.

The GenderShift will take place because the survival of the human race requires it to happen.

Focus on Positive Memories to Grow

2005-09-19T22:25:00.000Z

I have been very busy the past weekend trying to complete my ecourse on how to Overcome your Fear of Public Speaking. I got to day five of the 7 day course and then found myself questioning it and ended up rewriting the first four sections. Throughout the time I have been researching and writing this course one issue keeps coming up - focus on the positive. It's all too easy to focus on the negative.

Last week the USA remembered September 11th and all though the summer in the UK we have been remembering the war, yesterday it was remembering the Battle or Britain and it horrifies me that the media keep reminding us of July whatever date it was (I refuse to remember the date of a bomb attack). It's not that I feel any disrespect for those who lost their lives, far from it, but millions of people lose their lives every day, some in horrible ways. I just don't want my life filled with memories of death and distruction. It happened, I pay my respects to those who died, and move on to fill my life with a celebration of life and renewal and transformation.

It's the same with overcoming fear of speaking - the reason people have that fear is that we anchor powerful negative emotions connected to traumatic events of embarrassment and ridule and then connect them to the act of getting up to speak. To remove those powerful negative anchors we have to erase the memory of the negative experience turning it into something comical. Thats the essence of the NLP Phobia cure.

But here was my dilema - I enjoy speaking because I have attached to the act of speaking in public powerful positive emotional anchors. I do an exercise when I speak about speaking getting people to look at what they like about themselves - very difficult for a lot of people. Another exercise is cataloging all our Moments of Triumph - all those successes in life - We forget so many which is why I like to get out my certificate folder from time to time and look through to remind me of my achievements.

So that was why I had to do a big rewrite. I needed to make sure that the focus on overcoming fear of speaking is to focus on the positive, rebuild or even build self confidence and encourage people instead of focusing on the reasons for the fear, to recall and relive the rich resources and successes of their past.

I am nearly complete - and if you have a problem with fear of Speaking in Public - I really need your help - I am pretty sure that what I am creating will be one fo the most powerful courses ever in helping people to put that fear behind them and actually enjoy speaking in public. The course is available free if you register now - provided you agree to provide some feedback.

Take the Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking in 7 days course for free in September - this really is a once only offer.

Finding a sense of purpose and an inspired vison

2005-09-15T22:00:00.000Z

Its been a busy couple of days. Having risen at 4:30 am yesterday to travel over 3 hours to London and deliver an intensive presentations skills workshop before returning home, I was back up again this morning at the same time to travel across country to Blackburn where I was the closing speaker for a fabulous Women in Business conference organised by East Lancs Chamber of Commerce.

One thing that is so wonderful about being a professional speaker is that I get to hear and meet some of the worlds greatest inpirational speakers and today was such a day. Opening the conference was Richard Olivier, son of the the late great Laurence Olivier. Richard's own story is an inspiration in itself. Coming from a family of actors his early life was predictably in acting, and he spent 5 years directing productions at the Globe Theatre in London, but then realised that this was not where his passion lie.

The speech today looked at Shakespeare's Henry V, but not in a literary way, Richard delved into the leadership lessons the play teaches us. I have always been a great Shakespear fan, but today has renewed and further inspired me and 200 other women. Coming from a literary background the presentation was packed with wonderful quotes, not just those of the bard, but others inspirational thinkers on leadership.

My lesson from all this was the inportance of creating an inspired vision and I can best convey some of the message with a few of the quotes that inspired me.

"If you do not know what truly inspires you, it will be impossible to inspire others" Richard Olivier

"This is the true joy in life - being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one" George Bernard Shaw

“I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve". Albert Schweitzer

"To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - that is to have succeeded" Ralph Waldo Emerson

There were so many more but from it all emerged a strategy to reflect back on those moments in my life when I have felt myself to be truly connected with what I was doing, when I couldn't wait to get up in the morning to start work, and from that to analyse what truly inspires me to find my purpose. Then having found a sense of purpose connect to that a vision, a felt reality that others can join and share.

I will keep coming back to this as my project progresses.

Answering the question "What do you do?"

2005-09-14T22:29:00.000Z

I have just delivered a one day workshop on public speaking for a group of Women in Business on behalf of Everywomen.co.uk and I am exhausted, but exhilerated. The group were very positive and eager to learn and we had a very productive day. The focus of this course is not just on public speaking but on how to use speaking to promote your business, especially at networking meetings.

One of the tasks on the course that always seems to be the most challenging for everyone is where I get them to really focus on what they do and who they do it for, in simple terms how to answer the question "What do you do?" Most people in the UK tend to answer that question with a job description and when I asked it at a conference in Singapore in April I was surprised to get similar answers there. Sometimes I get an elevator pitch - a sixty second tightly structured promotional speech.

Both answers don't work. The job description vitually ends the conversation unless it's an interesting sounding job description, the elevator pitch stops people asking any more questions and start looking for an exit. 60 seconds is too much. The 30 second elevator pitch has its place but later in a conversation.

I believe that you have only 5 seconds to answer this question but you need to answer it in such a way that the person asking is prompted to ask, "Really, how do you do that" or "tell me more." I have a few prepared answers. "I help women in business to make outstanding business presentations" or "I help women in busines to make more sales and have fun while they are doing it" or "I help women to be more successful in Business and teach men how to understand us."

The key to this is that I have a clear focus on who I work with and how I help them. Helping people to create similar statements is very challenging.

When the first statement emerge there is a tendancy for them to be very broad. I help all businesses to be more successful. Or the way they help is too woolly and full of marketing speak.

The key to it is that you have to realise that an individual cannot help the world. The best we can do is work with a few hundred people. I might speak to thousands, but the people who book me to speak are a few hundred in a year. I can provide information and support to thousands, even millions, but not everyone is going to be interested in this blog or my web site.

I focus on working with Small businesses and in particular women in business - Its a very clear focus. It will probably get more focused with time. But it means I am able to develop a clear set of strategies. I understand the marketing problems of small businesses, I know where to find small busines owners, I can work hard to connect myself to small business marketing keywords.

It meant I had to let go of people I didn't want to work with, I had to find a financial model that would work in a market that is not flush with corporate cash. I made a decision that I only work with people I like - so I get up in the morning and I am passionate about getting to work, I love what I do - and so when I answer the question "What to you do?" the answer comes from my heart and people know that.

Take care - Links can damage your PageRank

2005-09-12T11:03:00.000Z

I have been delving into the depths of Link Exchange and discovered it's a lot more complex and dangerous than I first expected and it's all down to understanding Google's PageRank, a complex mathematical calculation of the value of a web page. The higher the PageRank the better the page does in Google.

The first thing I learned is that Google is not ranking web sites, it is ranking web pages. As far as google is concerned the entire internet is one big network of interlinked pages. This is important to know because you need to decide which pages it is important to get ranked well and which do not need to be ranked so well. In other words which pages do you most want people to find before they reach your site? And are there some you want Google to ignore entirely.

First important point about Links is that Incoming links are absolutely essential - the more you have the better BUT it is equally essential to link your primary keywords to the page link. Most domain names do not contain keywords, and google therefore cannot index them.

Second important thing - every page gives away some of its page value to the page it links to. To increase the ranking of your page - you need to link to pages that have a high rank. An Inbound link from a page with no value is if limited value. Now the bad news - every outbound link from your site gives away value to that site. Fine of you have a reciprocal link but beware. If your inbound link is to your homepage that improves your home page value - but if the outbound link is to a links page you are taking value away from that and if your links page has low value people will not way to link exchange.

Can you see how complex this gets. There are a lot of Link Farms and Google does not like them so it penalises them - therefore the inbound link has limited value but worse any outbound link may result in your site being penalised. There is an excellent article on this at the Web Workshop

Now I set that link on Blogger's composer - the link below which is one of the links I try to get accepted has built into it a number of features to significantly improve inbound links for me. This one points to my Newsletter page, the link is in bold and there is an incentive of a free ebook if you sign up - that's the human design. But more importantly it is highly optimised for search engines from my current understanding (it keeps changing I may be wrong). The link text contains my primary site and newsletter Keyword Phrase "Small Business Marketing" - the page address is SpeakingandMarketingTips.com/Small-Business-Marketing.html - Lots of keywords. Hover over the link and "Subscribe to Speaking and Marketing Tips today" appears for a moment - more keywords. All of these are indexed by Google. Follow the link and there is a page equally optimised for those same keywords.

Low Cost Small Business Marketing Strategies From Rikki Arundel
Content rich site to help your small business to Get Attention and Be Remembered - Free ebook - How to Get Customer Queuing up to Buy

I am learning to use a lot of attributes with the html for the link. target="_new" to make it open in a new window, title="keywords text" for that little pop up when you hover over the link and a new one rel="nofollow" This tells google not to follow a link and therefore not to rank it. I will use this whenever I have a link and no reciprocal link exists.

Which reminds me that finally you need to watch out for that being used in your reciprocal links because then you are not getting the value of the Link exchange. Other tricks are using links in java script, or having a "nofollow" meta tag on the page. It is also important to check that a page you are linking to is indexed. Type "www.domain.com/page.htm(l)" into Google (with the quotation marks) and you will soon find out.

That's it for today - bit tekkie if you don't do your own web site - but it has really opened my eyes today.

Struggling to get people to read my Blog

2005-09-11T00:47:00.000Z

I don't know whether you have noticed this but the world is made up of two kinds of people. There are those who know what Blogging is and there are those who sort of glaze over as if in a strange trance whenever they hear or read about Blogging. Technology is funny that way - people love it or hate it.

I have a very good friend who at my encouragement now has a web site and a blog. I say she has them, when she writes an article it's a good days work for a couple of paragraphs. The reason is that she just gets bored and goes off to chat to someone. I keep trying to persuade her to get a microphone and start using the MS voice system which would help. I shall not give up.

But it struck me that there is a divide now between those of us who write online and those who don't and I notice that those who do not write also tend not to read much. Now I am a prolific reader and writer. I can sit down and write 1000 words for a post on a forum. My challenge is write succinctly. Winston Churchill is credited with saying, though I think he was paraphrasing Somerset Maugham, "I'm sorry this is such a long letter, I didn't have time to write a short one."

That said it concerns me that there is such an emphasis on sound byte communicating. It's as if everyone wants to know everything, but "Can we have it in a single paragraph please." One technique journalists use is to tell the story in the first paragraph and then to progressively reveal more of the detail like peeling the layers from an onion. There is an maxim in speaking from an old Baptist minster whose name I forget, that you "Tell 'em what your gonna tell 'em, then you tell 'em, then you tell 'em what you told 'em."

Back to Blogging - having got into it now, I find myself having an even harder challenge getting people to read what I write, but interestingly I notice more and more web sites now with Read My Blog clearly positioned on the site. I suspect however that another step is required, to educate and encourage people to even look - that will be my project tomorrow - to find a way to make the idea of visiting my blog more appealing to my friend. If I can reach her, I can change the world.

I finally launched my Speaking and Marketing Tips Newsletter

2005-09-10T22:40:00.000Z

It's taken nearly 6 months, but yesterday, actually I lie, this morning I finally pressed the send button and off my newsletter went to 250 people.

Now there is the first great success - 250 people - Achieving that has been a huge task. I allowed the names to build up very slowly at first. I quickly learned that people needed an incentive to subscribe, so back in March just before travelling to Singapore where I was delivering 5 presentations and seminars, I wrote an ebook, How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy.

I had thought of using someone elses, but realised then that my newsletter eventually would be the means my which I kept in touch with people who have heard me speak or have networked with me, so it was important that the ebook set a standard for what could be expected in the newsletter. However it had only attracted 100 subscribers by August so I emailed everyone who hade exchange business cards or networked with me online - about 700 of them and 150 signed up.

Then there was the problem of "what did I have to do differently to get people to read a newsletter." I look at my inbox and the huge number of newsletters receive - actually they are not in my inbox - they are all filtered to folders to read later - some of those folders have 1000 unread newsletters in them.

The whole concept of my Speaking and Marketing Tips web site is to present information, lots of practical advice on Small Business Marketing Strategies particulary employing public speaking and technology and public relations with a strong emphasis towards gender issues. Essentially encapsulating my personal strengths.

I decided to theme each newsletter around a specific marketing strategy and look at it in some detail, simultaneously developing a number of web pages to provide additional support. I think it works. I have had a few very nice comments back - most of the subscribers are people who know me so I hope they will take the time to complete a survey I have set up.

If you would like to see the first edition of the Speaking and Marketing Tips Newsletter they are all being archived on the site so please take a look and if you have a moment let me have some feedback - I will be publishing the results which may help you in you Ezine development for the future.

Writing articles to promote my business is paying off.

2005-09-10T07:20:00.000Z

For the past month I have been actively developing my skills in the the area of using article to promote my business. Now this is not a new area to me. In the past 10 or so years I have had over 600 articles published by trade magazines, mostly for a writing fee or ghosted for a client, but a many were purely to help position me as an expert and I have secured quite a lot of business as a result.

However I simply had not kept up to date and I had missed the explosion that has taken place in this strategy in the past couple of years with the emergence of ezine article directories. Of course it make perfect sence. There are at least 300,000 ezines and gzillions of web sites all desperate for one thing - a regular supply of topical and interesting content.

So far I have actually used 6 articles I found in directories this blog, on my web site and in my Speaking and Marketing Tips ezine. Last week I started to see some returns.

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No catch - Author Daniel Hall read one of my articles and emailed me to offer a joint venture deal to sell his new book Speak on Cruise Ships. He takes three or four Luxury Cruises every year absolutely Free. Oh alright there is a catch. He has to deliver three of four short seminars while they are at sea and there is nothing else to do. The idea of taking a cruise somewhere every year definitely appeals to me and as I can add value from my site by helping people to ovecome fear of public speaking and improve thier presentation sklls, it is a perfect product match and a great result from my articles.

Then I got an email from a Professional Speaker friend Graham Jones with some nice compliments about my site but even better he informed me that he had just used one of my articles in his September newsletter and it was now on his site. I checked and it is already coming up on Google. Now the interesting thnig is that Graham and I are competitors both speaking about presentation skills and internet marketing, but of course Google likes that. I had already been looking at Grahams articles and will be using one in my next newletter so we are both helping each other to imprive our Google rankings and both driving traffic to each others site. Co-operation is far more effective than competition.

Finally I was struggling with a decision about the first article I submitted to the directories - it is about 1700 words long and everyone was telling me that long articles don't get selected by publishers. I could see the point having already rejected a couple of good articles myself because they were too long for what I wanted. So I was about to remove the article and replace it with three shorter ones when I received an email from the Malaysian Junior Chamber of Commerce asking if they could use the article in this months newsletter to their 1200 members. There are no rules, only guidlines.

The hard work is paying off – I typed "Rikki Arundel" into Google and was stunned to see nearly 400 web addresses where my name now appears.

If you are interested in finding out more about how to use articles to promote your business you are welcome to have a look at my September Speaking and Marketing Tips newsletter.

If you would like to consider publishing any of my articles please click on the star for details.

Overcome Fear of Public Speaking by eCourse

2005-09-08T19:40:00.000Z

The Book of Lists of often quoted by presentations skills trainers for listing Speaking to a Group of people as the number one human fear, just ahead of fear of heights and fear of spiders. Fear of Death is number seven - which is why I suppose so many people say "Speak in front of a groups of people? I'd rather die."

Now everyone gets a bit of nervous tension before a major speech and I remember a few years ago when I was still a very active member of Toastmasters, helping a lot of people with real challenges, angry rashes, stammering, incoherance, fainting - the fear comes out in all manner of forms. But the thing we often bemoaned was that we only got to see and help the people who already had enough courage to walk though the door. What about the thousands who were so terrified of speaking in public that the possibility that they might be asked to say something on the first visit was enough to ensure they never made it past the front door.

It's these people I am trying to address with my latest eCourse project - Overcome Fear of Public Speaking in 7 days. But here is my challenge. Many of the techniques I would normally uses are designed for face to face training and consultancy sessions. Can I deliver that over the internet, by a daily email.

I have decided to test it and see if it works. If your fear of speaking in public is more of a phobia, or so dibilitating that is makes you ill just thinking about it. If you spend your life avoiding situations that will result in you having to "say a few words" thereby limiting your career - I have an offer for you.

Go to Overcome Fear of Public Speaking in 7 Days and the first 50 people to enrol in September get the eCourse for free, provided you are prepared to help me by meeting a few conditions about commitment and feedback. It's as simple as that. I promise to do my best to erase your fear or phobia of Public Speaking if you will give me some feedback on how it went.

Have your got your free copy of How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy

Marketing with articles through your network

2005-09-07T20:03:00.000Z

Things are getting better and better. Today I received an email from a speaker friend Graham Jones as a result of my mailings yesterday, telling me that he has used one of the articles I posted on EzineArticles.com in his September newsletter - it's also posted on his web site at http://www.presentationbiz.co.uk/newsletter/latest.htm - now thats a high traffic web site - so very good news for me.

Now you need to understand something - Graham Jones is a competitor to me. We both speak about speaking, we both speak about the internet and internet marketing - so why would he use my article on how to set up a room for a meeting effectively? Well it enables him to add other expert opinion to his newsletter, but there is an even greater advantage. I know I am very soon going to repay the compliment by using one of Graham's articles in my ezine for exactly the same reason.

That way Graham has promoted me to his network, and I have promoted Graham to mine and simply by sharing our expertise we have both doubled our reach, we have both helped each other to raise our profiles as experts, we have both increased our presence on the internet and improved the rankings of our web sites thereby gaining more visitors each and we will add to this with a link Exchange.

Can you see the power of this strategy. If we multiply that effect by the size of our networks, and add in the effect or our networks now referring us both to their networks, we have what is called a "combinatorial explosion." By working together we double our combined efforts, ie 1+1=2x2=4 It's strange maths - in practical terms it means that two people supporting each other can be hugely more successful than two people competing against each other.

Get your free copy of How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy at http://www.SpeakingandMarketingTips.com

If your would like to Publish articles by Rikki Arundel - follow the link below for details.

Keeping in touch with your network by ezine

2005-09-06T22:36:00.000Z

I have been pondering today just how infrequently I connect with the people I consider to be my "network". Now I am not by the standards of the big hitters a prolific networker, but I have a real problem staying connected to the 700 or so people I do connect with.

This all came to a head this morning. I have spent the past week preparing for the launch of my first monthly Speaking and Marketing Tips ezine. That has involved making sure that the follow up links from the ezine are in place on the web site, including the Link Exchange I wrote about yesterday, and emailing the 300 people who have exchanged business cards with me in the past year of so.

Then it struck me - What about my network? They at least know me and what better way to keep in touch with them than to share my knowledge and expertise in sales and marketing communications. An ezine lets my network know what I do so they are much better able to let other people know about me and thats the secret of networking. They may not be prospective customers - but they know people who are.

So where is this network of mine. I am a member of three primary online networks - The Ecademy, LinkedIn and Open BC. In addition to that my email address book contains about 300 people I consider part of my network. All four sources overlap but in all I have been able to email today about 700 people - some of whom I have only had contact with once or twice. I don't know what the response will be, but so far it looks encouraging.

My blinding flash of the obvious today was realising that my network, and that includes my existing clients who still evangalise about my speeches, really are the primary target audience for my ezine. By thinking about them when I write it encourages me to be less formal and more personal. I am writing to friends after all and that personal style means that new people signing up are going to also feel that they have become part of my network.

If you would like to become a part of that network you can sign up simply by downloading your free copy of How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy today.

Link Exchange - An important small business strategy

2005-09-05T08:39:00.000Z

I have been struggling to understand how to fit this blog into my marketing strategy and today, trying to explain what blogging was all about to someone, it all became clear. It was inspirational author Richard Bach in his wonderful book Illusions who said "You teach best what you most need to learn.

I still find that I learn something new every day, infact it sometimes alarms me that every day I discover new things about which I know absolutely nothing. However the focus of this blog is Small Business Marketing Strategies so what I am going to do is recount my daily learning experiences as I try desperately to keep up with a world in which the only contstant remaining is that, "It will change tomorrow."

So my lesson today is about Link Exchange. This is a simple idea - You put a link to my web site on yours and I'll put a link to your web site on mine. Why would we do that? Well research shows that most people visit web sites as a result of a link from another web site. This is why Google adsense is so popular and successful. But surely you think, "If I have managed to get a visitor, the last thing I want to do is direct them somewhere else." The reality is that if someone is looking around on my links page it's a pretty good bet that they have not found what they were looking for on my site. f I am about to lose them why not refer them to someone who refers back - its all about co-operation rather than competition.

However there is an even more important reason for a Link Exchange program. Search engines look at how many incoming and outgoing links there are on your site in assessing how popular it is. The more links the better your ranking. They are also looking for relevance. Are the sites you are linked to relevant to the primary keywords on your site. So this a real area where synergy works - The best links I can have are with the people who I am most likely to compete with.

My lesson however was all about how to create those links on other peoples sites so that I benefit at least as much from the incoming traffic as I lose from the outgoing. It's too much to explain in detail here - but have a look at my Link Exchange page for full details about how to link with my site but also how to set up a Link Exchange program yourself.

My criteria for a successful Link Exchange program are

The url link is connected to associated primary Keywords for my site
The link has a short discriptive paragraph next to is laced with keywords
The link copy contains an incentive to visit me
I provide the exact HTML code for the way I want my link displayed
I help you to make your programme work well
The best recipricol links are to similar businesses
The links on my site open up in a new window so my site stays on the desktop
I organise the links pages well to make it attractive for people to link to me
The exchage is strictly like for like - its got to be a win win agreement

Get your free copy of How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy NOW.

Public Speaking: Getting the Room Set-up Right

2005-08-30T21:55:00.000Z

I don’t know why it is, but no matter how carefully I brief a hotel on the room set-up I want for my seminars, workshops and training meetings, more often than not when I arrive, they have provided a standard hotel room set up. What I find even more alarming is the number of times that I attend a meeting either as a guest speaker or audience member to find that the meeting planner or speaker has not bothered to think beyond this standard room set-up which is often quite hostile to the audience.

Seating Arrangements

The standard hotel set up for seating is theatre style with a centre aisle, set square with about 20% more seating that you need, based on your audience expectations.

A centre aisle means that the speaker stands in front of empty space, or more often a projector, with the audience split to right and left. Theatre style means that the audience cannot interact or even see each other and they also tend to fill up from the back. More seats means that people spread out and the room feels empty, i.e. unsuccessful.

The larger the audience the more likely you will have to use theatre style – but try a herring-bone or semi circle shape with no centre aisle. Instead have two aisles, one either side.

If you expect 100 people set out 90 seats and have the extras on the side – let the room fill up, then bring in the spare seats for the late comers. This creates a great sense of the meeting exceeding expectations.

If you get less bookings than expected for a meeting which will result in an empty space problem – switch to classroom (rows of tables) or cabaret style (round or square tables) layout. Bringing tables into the room fills it up and helps to convey the feeling of success.

If your workshop seminar style is interactive seriously consider a cabaret style or horse shoe style set up. Each has its benefits, but they share the fact that the audience can see each other and interact. People will simply interact more is the room layout is designed to encourage it. Numbers in attendance often dictate which style to use – Horseshoe is not really practical for more than about thirty and cabaret is not really practical for less than about fifteen, but don’t take either as unbreakable rules – be creative.

Above all – think about the room set up as an essential part of the programme, and be creative. Design a room set up that provides you with the best chance of making the meeting a success. Put yourself in the audience and see things from their perspective. How you set the room can literally make or break your meeting.

Stage Set-up

The standard set up is a top table with two or three chairs behind set to one or other side of the room, a flipchart on the other side, a screen in the centre of the room and a data projector blocking the centre aisle.

If you have to use PowerPoint don’t make it the centre of attention relegating the speaker to the role of narrator. If possible move the screen to stage left (if you are right handed) at an angle and move the projector off there as well (same for OHP). That way the slides are a side show and remember the “B” key. Pressing “B” when you are showing a PowerPoint slide “Blacks Out” the presentation until you press “anykey.”

Place the Flip Chart on your left, if you are right handed so that you can write on the chart without standing in font of it.

Get rid of the top table – I even do this at other people meetings, I hate having someone sitting at the table behind me when I am speaking.

Look at the stage set up as a member of the audience from every angle. Make sure that nothing interferes with your ability to communicate.

The entire room set up should be something that the audience don’t really notice. It should work naturally with your seminar or meeting and contribute to making it flow. Anything that gets in the way of that – change it.

If you are speaking at someone else’s meeting you will be more restricted in what you can do, and they are often reluctant to stray from the hotel standard, so I try to work with them, rather than being demanding, to make the room set up work. That means asking for changes as a big favour and it also means getting there very early with plenty of time to make changes if they are needed. Make yourself a resource for the meeting planner, and demonstrate the focus of your recommendations to be in support of their meeting objectives.

About the Author:

Founder and First President of the Professional Speakers Association, RikkiArundel is an International Keynote Speaker, Trainer and Writer and an expert in sales and marketing communications with an impressive track record.

Get your free copy of How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy at http://www.SpeakingandMarketingTips.com

If your would like to Publish this or other articles by Rikki Arundel - follow the link below for details.

Personal Branding: Characteristics of a Strong Personal Brand

2005-08-23T06:54:00.000Z

By Thomas Murrell

How many times have you been at a networking function and been lost for words when asked "what do you do"?

We all have. But do you see this as a threat or an opportunity?

Developing a Personal Branding Statement or PBS can be a powerful way to help market yourself to prospects, clients or potential employers.

Here are 8 characteristics of a strong personal brand:

1. WOW factor. It must be memorable with high recall. Hearing it makes people say 'WOW that's interesting ...... tell me more'. Be truthful, accentuate interesting or key parts of your role without fabricating the facts.

2. 10 words or less. The fewer words the more powerful it will be. Often a strong summary will work for all networking functions. However tailor your spiel for the conversation, people will be more interested in something they recognise.

3. Focus on benefits. The statement should address the age old marketing question 'What's in it for me', known as the WIIFM.

4. It should reflect your values, beliefs and personal mission in life rather then just a profession. Be passionate about what you do and relay this in your message.

5. Saying it should give the impression of confidence and energy.

6. Use it as a 'Teaser'. Don't tell the whole story - think of the analogy of a newspaper, radio or TV headline encouraging the target audience to want to find out more. The questions generated by your opening spiel should act to direct the explanation to the person’s needs. Let them identify areas they are interested in rather then covering it all.

7. Positioning. Marketing is all about positioning - use it to position and differentiate yourself in the marketplace.

8. Be flexible. Slogans, brand names and themes change over time and in different situations. Change it to fit your market, interests and career aspirations. Know enough about what you do to be confident and flexible, uncertainty can portray distrust or other negative implications.

Thomas Murrell MBA CSP is an international business speaker, consultant and award-winning broadcaster. Media Motivators is his regular electronic magazine read by 7,000 professionals in 15 different countries.
You can subscribe by visiting http://www.8mmedia.com. Thomas can be contacted directly at +6189388 6888 and is available to speak to your conference, seminar or event. Visit Tom's blog at http://www.8mmedia.blogspot.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com

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Marketing to Women -- Can I Buy You A Clue?

2005-08-22T21:35:00.000Z

By Denise O'Berry

A while back a small business owner paid me a visit. He wanted help marketing his fitness business to women. Before we even started talking, he handed me his business card. The card was very professional and said all the right things. But it also included a huge blunder.

He was pretty smart to target women as prospects for his business. After all, experts say that in the average household women control over two thirds, 75 percent, of the finances and are responsible for 80 percent of purchasing decisions. That means women wake up in the morning ready to spend money. Will they spend it with your business?

And what about women-owned businesses? Well, that's a huge market too. According the the Center for Women’s Business Research, 10.6 million firms are at least 50% owned by a woman or women and the average growth rate of women-owned firms is nearly twice that of all firms. On top of that, women-owned firms employ 19.1 million people and generate $2.5 trillion in sales.

So if you're targeting women as prospective buyers, you better make sure you know how to sell to them. And don't make marketing blunders like my client did. Make sure your visual materials scream "women are my market" too. His didn't. On the front of his business card was a photo of "rock hard men's abs." Ack.

Denise O'Berry helps small business owners take action to grow their business. Find out more at http://www.smallbusinessmatters.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com

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Are your newsletters reaching anyone?

2005-02-27T14:00:00.000Z

Do you send out newsletters or eZines to your customers and contacts? If not you should. But at the same time to you need to be aware that there are significant growing problems with using newsletters. It’s all down to SPAM, the scourge of modern day business. There are now laws in most countries making the sending or unsolicited electronic mail illegal and it is absolutely essential that you make sure that everyone on your email list has "opted in" to it and that you honour any requests for removal immediately. If you don’t you will most likely find yourself at the very least on an email black list which means that email from your address will be filtered without every reaching its destination. Of course you also may find yourself facing a hefty fine.

Unfortunately despite the legislation and most businesses now mailing only to op in lists, Spam is still a major problem. Because of the global nature of the internet, if any country fails to implement and enforce Anti Spam legislation, the world’s serial spammers simply start trading from there. As a result most internet service providers (ISPs) have installed software to filter out the spam and in addition you may be using a software product or service yourself to clean your mail. And here lies the problem.

Anti Spam software looks for features, words formatting, etc., common to most unsolicited mail, but in the process is lets some spam through but filters out some important mail that you wanted to keep. I have lost count of the number of requests for quotations I have rescued, and almost all of the newsletters I subscribe to have now had to be added to my "White List". All anti spam software and services offer a feature to "Black List" or "White List" email addresses. Each has its own procedure but essentially you list the portion of the email address after the @ symbol, and specify that email from that address either "is Spam", your Black List, of "is not Spam", your White List. It is very important that you do this or you will be losing important email.

It is also increasingly important if you are sending out email newsletters, or even standard sales letters and responses, that you check the content to make sure that the email is not likely to be filtered out. There are a number of free and commercial services available to help you check your content – there is a free service you can use at www.lyris.com/contentchecker and I will be listing others on my Speaking and Marketing Tips Web site as I test them out. If you use a list manager for managing you email newsletter you may find that they have a service for customers.

More and more web sites are providing information about white listing and there are also a few products around to help deliver the newsletter to the desktop without using the email system. Blogs like this are one particular popular option, but there is still a long way to go before everyone is able to understand this new technology and easily set up a means of reading and accessing them. You will find a few ideas in my new eBook How to Get Customers queuing up to Buy, and you can download a free copy from my Speaking and Marketing Tips Web site.

If your have registered for my newsletter please also add @speakingandmarketingtips.com to your White List.

How to Get Customers Quening up to Buy

2005-02-27T12:00:00.000Z

I attended a networking lunch recently and the speaker, a well respected and very influential figure in the Yorkshire business community, talked a lot about overseas competition and the threat it posed. Most of the women business owners I spoke to were not worried. Many of them are already buying stock from China and India anyway. What they wanted to know was how to get more customers. And that’s what this Blog is all about.

I have recently published an eBook entitled How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy, worth $27, but I am giving a copy free to all new subscribers to my Speaking and Marketing Tips Newsletter. Just click on the title to go to the web site. In this Blog and the newsletter I will be expanding on the book and providing a wealth of further low cost/no cost ideas for getting more customers. However before I talk about getting more customers I am aware of the possibility, especially if you have come here following an invitation from me, that you have absolutely no idea what a blog is.

A few months ago I was in the same happy state of blissful ignorance, however since spending a day in the company if one of the world’s most successful internet millionaires I have realised that, in this instance, ignorance is how to lose customers. BLOG is short for WebLog, and it is essentially an online diary. There are literally millions of people now using them, mostly as a means of keeping in touch with friends and family, and the entry of Google into the market with this blogger.com service I am using, has started to make blogs the "latest big thing" on the internet.

But why are Blogs important to you as a Small Business Marketing Strategy. Well because this site is owned by Google, they index it in their search engine very quickly. So if you create a blog and post interesting content related to the needs of your customers, you are going to get listed in Google very quickly. In addition if you post links to your web site here the search engines prefer to find links than have them submitted.

However here is a very important tip on linking to your web site. The domain name is not very useful in search engine placement unless it contains important keywords, and most don't. My Speaking and Marketing Tips web site contains lots of further tips, but I am listing it here to demonstrate how to list links, and this applies wherever you list your web site. My site domain name is www.SpeakingandMarketingTips.com so you can see that it does contain keywords, but not easy to read. The site is all about Small Business Marketing Strategies.

Now in both instances in that previous paragraph I have listed a descriptive phrase, and turned it into a hypertext link. You can do this easily when you make a post by selecting the text you want to link, clicking on the Hypertext symbol (a chain link + globe symbol) and adding the web address. Why is this important? Well now when the search engine checks out this entry in my blog it will find a link to a web site and a "keyword phrase" to index it under. I happen to know that "Small Business Marketing Strategies" is a quite popular phrase people use to search the internet, but that not many web sites use it, so my chances of getting a good listing on Google and therefore of having customers visiting my web site are greatly enhanced.

I know it's possible that this Blog may have prompted more questions than it provides answers to. Don't worry - that’s why you should visit regularly. I will be providing a regular flow of ideas to demystify speaking and marketing and help you to get more customers without spending a fortune on advertising. I strongly recommend that you register with this blog now - please feel free to post any comments - I will respond and if your comment is appropriate make the answer a feature in a future blog. And take a little time to check out the help pages for more information on blogging.

And finally a reminder that if you register for my free Speaking and Marketing Tips Newsletter, I'll give you a copy of my new eBook, How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy worth $27 absolutely free. Simply click on the link above and sign up to access the download page.