What You Should Build Before Building Your Own (yourname.com) Site

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The website is a great tool for many things, one of which is personal branding. Having your own site means you’re able to display (and promote) the best that you have to offer. In  other words, visitors to your site are able to feel your personality, get a sense of who you are by the feel your site gives to the web surfer.

This brings me to the important topic for today. The thing is, I’ve seen many sites where the site itself is really fantastic; nice theme, cool animation, nice feel basically to the entire thing. You get a sense that the person behind this site (since it’s a yourname.com kind of site) must be something. So when the chance comes, and I finally meet the person, guess what…

Disappointing. He is nothing like his site. He doesn’t speak as well, motivate as well… hey, you start wondering if the site is really his.

If you’re building a site about yourself, it’s best to build your offline personality first. This should come even if you never decide to build a site in the first place. Having a personality helps because persons with personality are memorable. You want to be remembered not to be praised at, but to be helpful and easily accessible in the hearts and minds of others when they do need help on something.

So if you have a site, remember to build your offline personality too. Speak confidently and clearly, improve on your language pronunciation, dress well, display motivation.

With that, people will be more inclined to visit your site too. Your site should be based on a personality already there, and not on hollow ground.

Guide to HR: 5 Ways of Detecting Leadership

Leadership is one of the tacit traits human resource personnels try their very best to detect, and for good reason. Quite simply, good leadership increases the probability of assurance, followship and good systems dynamics.

Here are my guidelines for detecting leadership, marketing style:

1. The applicant must be a poet. He must have the ability to tell stories. Stories inspire. Inspired people are motivated to follow through a cause.
2. The applicant must have done something extra-ordinary. It must be something his fellow peers have not done, and he had the audacity to do it.
3. The applicant must speak with conviction. Detect the fire and passion in his eyes.
4. The applicant must have taken leadership roles in the past. Look beyond his affiliations and ask if he had led them, and if not, why.
5. The applicant must be able to do beyond his current specialization. Detect in his resume or sharing various disciplines he has tried to dip his hands in. Leadership is such that you possess the ability to drive others who then might have the required skills.

Oh here’s a bonus: you know he’s a leader in the making if he’s able to command influence and persuasion in the meeting room, if after those minutes you suddenly find yourself as the interviewer (with the leverage that you have as an interviewer or HR personnel) being moved by his words…

And presence.

Queues Encourage Corruption

In the dispensing of public services, officials should do all that they can to reduce and, if possible, avoid the queueing system altogether. At face value, queues are a sign of inefficiency and excess demand over supply. However one of its major spillovers is corruption. You don’t have to look far for a familiar example…

• You line up for a drink at the vending machine
• You see a familiar face already in line
• You request he purchases the drink for you

Is this corruption? Absolutely, because you are gaining an unfair advantage, often for your own self, at the negative expense of others. The above is just a small simple example, but when you look into it deeper in other contexts, you open up a pandora’s box…

• Work overloads, you put em all in the intray
• You clear some, miss some
• When it gets too much, you choose to conveniently remain silent. ‘Pending’ becomes ‘Silence’

Keeping it simple: Reanalyze the systems you’re in, and reduce queues where possible.

I Suck At Names

… and it’s a serious problem. Coz having the ability to call people by name gives you an extreme competitive advantage over people like me.

1. You’re able to ger closer to people
2. You offer better personalized service each and everytime
3. You call people by the sweetest word they know…

Their names.

So in the next month, I will attempt the extraordinary: to call each person at my workplace by their name, and if I don’t know, I’ll make sure I find out there and then. I’ll probably bring along a paper and draw them or something…

Remember them, and they’ll remember you.

(PS: Do you have any tips for remembering names? Would appreciate the expert advice!)

Relationships Take Time

Before you decide to expand, switch markets. venture into new frontiers, remember the above.

Recently I took a trip to the nearby donut shop during lunchtime, all excited to get my cheese chocolate special. What greeted me was this:

We have expanded! Check us out at our new branch at Expo!

I was at Toa Payoh. Check them out at Expo eh… nice expansion, clumsy strategy.

Remember that relationships take time. So once you’ve build that rapport, don’t severe them unneccessarily just because you’re all excited. It’s like getting to know someone, and just as you’re getting alittle cozy with their style, they suddenly disappear.

Treasure customer-built relationships. Give them more of what they like, in addition to your new offerings.

 

Cutting Edge Site Subscription Tip 5

Cutting Edge Site Subscription Tip 5: Diverse Promotions

Unless you’re someone famous, getting high subscriber counts cannot be achieved passively. You’ve got to be creative, go out of your comfort zone and actively promote subscription.

And we’re not just talking about online promotions via facebook, msn nicks, yahoo answers, email signatures, bookmarking engines, etc. Also include in your arsenal the ability to transfer offline benefits for your customers through online subscription.

Think out of the box, pass the wall in front of you, and get creative.

Cutting Edge Site Subscription Tip 4

Cutting Edge Site Subscription Tip 4: Permission Marketing

Permission marketing is about waiting for the green light from potential customers before shoving to them all that you’re excited about but in that which they have little interest in. Quite simply, it’s about waiting for their permission to allow you to market to them.

Site subscription mechanisms in your site (or even offline deals) should have a hinge based on Permission Marketing. Not only are we talking about the call to subscribe, but also the option to unsubscribe.

What’s a good example of non-permission marketing? …

Spam.

Getting 2500 Subscribers Overnight

Weekend’s here, so I’ve decided to take a break from my Cutting Edge Site Subscription Series and show you the dark side of this whole business.

Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.

Little satisfaction. Practice ethical marketing folks.

Cutting Edge Site Subscription Tip 3

Cutting Edge Site Subscription Tip 3: Start Regular

To build the intitial base of subscribers, chances are you’d have to post more and more frequently in the early stages of your blogging. Here’s are my thoughts:

• Frequent and bite sized infos are extremely readable. Don’t worry too much about people who fuss that your blog is giving them too much updates (due to frequent postings). That’s the basic function of a blog: to be that regular, updated and independent voice.
• When you have an idea, write it down somewhere. The minute you have your hands on a computer, blog about it.
• Don’t conform to expectations. In the intitial stages, explore your writing. You may set the blog objective / branding later.

Advantage of going regular first? You may switch to diet later.

Cutting Edge Site Subscription Tip 2

Cutting Edge Site Subscription Tip 2: Flying Purple Cows

Cows are boring. Purple cows are Seth Godin’s briliance. Flying purple cows, and that should get you noticed.

Subscription calls are like cows. So make them purple, and get them flying. Have your subscription calls visible in key areas of your site. Clear your cache, and visit my site once again, this time looking out for the places I place the call to subscription:

• For new visitors, a welcome pop up message. Note: only for new visitors.
• First line of sight on the site, the call for subscription on the right side.
• Another call for subscription in the middle of the right sidebar, this time addressing the statement from the users’ perspective.
• A final juicy button on the right sidebar at the bottom most area. For the curious ones.
• For posts, a welcome RSS call for new subscribers. Also an endnote to encourage subscription if they liked the post.
• A standalone page, explaining the subscription business as transparent as possible.

These should be executed with abit of creativity. Remember that at the end of the day, the reader is in transit, and wants to read what he came to your site to find for in the first place. That is still the dominant component.

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