Joel Comm's Blog, page 18

A Better Way To Help Companies Help Themselves

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of RESULTS.com for IZEA. All opinions are 100% mine. Of all the businesses I’ve built, the one that gives me the most satisfaction is the one that lets me help other people build their businesses. I can’t tell you how satisfying that is. Someone’s made the jump. They’ve launched their own company. Now they want to make it fly. That’s what my books try to help them do. It’s what the talks I give try to help them do. And it’s what the consultancy work I offer helps them to do. If you’ve ever wondered what work you could do that makes you feel like you’re making a difference, I can’t recommend it enough. But it can also be frustrating. I can tell companies how they can improve their marketing, develop better strategies, build stronger brands, but I can’t do it for them. I have to trust them to get on with it without me. They don’t always. It’s a problem that consultants have always had. It’s a problem that’s starting to change. RESULTS is a Partnership Program for consultants that lets them set up an efficient management system for companies. The companies get a smart way to track their marketing efforts and build their strategies. They can do away with those old performance reviews that scare the living daylights out of staff but don’t reward improvements or creativity. Instead, staff can look at their own metrics and see for themselves where they need to make a bigger effort. Managers and team leaders can spot potential, provide encouragement at exactly the right moments and make better decisions. Team members never have to worry about missing a promotion because their boss didn’t like them; their boss can point to figures pulled from Salesforce, QuickBooks and other sources, and show them where they’ve been going wrong. They can also tell the employee exactly what they need to do improve to move up the ladder. It’s a much better way to work, one that cuts out any arguments and builds a clear path to career success. Best of all, the company can also create strategy pages that tell everyone exactly what they’re trying to do, why they’re trying to do it, and how they’re trying to make it happen. When everyone can see the big picture, the results are always so much better. But the consultants get access to that information too. After talking to the staff and filling them up with smart, new ideas, we can look at the platform and see just how well the company is implementing those ideas. We can nudge them to implement them better, give them a round of applause for implementing them so well… or give them a kick in the pants for not implementing them at all. Setting the system up is pretty simple, and just requires some time with the company’s top brass to understand what they’re trying to achieve and what metrics they can track. The usual consultancy work, in other words. Most of the work that I do to help companies is based on ideas. It’s about branding and engagement strategies, and so on. But if you’re looking to get into the nitty-gritty and help a company to track exactly how staff can better hit their targets, RESULTS’ business management platform looks like it’s setting the standard. Check it out.

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Alibaba’s Super September Presents the Best Deals of the Season

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Alibaba.com Super September for IZEA. All opinions are 100% mine. When it comes to building a business, it’s essential for entrepreneurs to make wise purchases. Sometimes it can be difficult to find merchants that don’t require large purchases in order to determine if they offer the quality the buyer requires. That’s why finding reliable suppliers offering great prices with trade assurance is key to their success.  To Get the best deals of the season now, Alibaba.com is offering an event focused on doing just this. It’s called Super September and it features attractive deals on trending products in major categories. With low minimum quantity orders and free order inspections, small businesses can Source from reliable suppliers now to help them acquire and keep happy customers.  The following video shows how Super September means the best deals of the season.

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Want to be a business rock star? Keep your eye on real rock stars

What if it really IS all about that bass? If Russian hackers were to break into Mitch Joel‘s telephone and browse through his emails, they’d be surprised at what they found. Sure, there would be messages from the clients and executives at Mirum, the digital agency Joel founded and grew into 45 countries and 2,200 employees. There would also be invitations from companies like Google, Starbucks and Wal-Mart to talk to them about digital marketing. And there would probably be some emails from his publishers about his bestselling books. But in between that work stuff, there would also be emails from Chuck Rainey, Liam Wilson and Tim Lefebvre, saying that they were in town and inviting him for a coffee and a chat. That’s because when Joel isn’t talking to audiences and building marketing campaigns, he runs a podcast that aims to build the largest oral history of bass players. Through No Treble, Joel has spoken to just about all of the world’s greatest bass guitarists, pulling out their stories and chatting with them about life on the road. “This podcast has given me the chance to speak with everybody,” he says. “It’s given me tremendous access to these people whose stories haven’t been told.” The result has been not just a growing account of the music industry told from a unique angle and about one particular instrument, but also a powerful business lesson in the value of micro-niching. There’s no shortage of blogs and podcasts about music in general and guitars in particular, and even a few about bass guitars. But by focusing on just one aspect of just one kind of instrument and the people who play it, Joel has managed to create a product with a dedicated audience. Finding that micro-niche isn’t simple but the best guide is your own interests. Joel isn’t a bass player himself, though he did learn to play before realizing that he preferred writing about music than strumming on stage and spending his days traveling from gig to gig. The inspiration for No Treble came from his realization that other interviews would focus on the musicians’ albums and their gear while he wanted to know who the bass players were and what they did. “I want to read about them the same way that you would hear a story told about them,” he says. “I wanted to know what makes them as artists creative, inspiring and interesting. I wasn’t getting that anywhere.” There are few areas of interest more crowded than the music industry. But Joel made his podcast a success by not thinking about success at all. Instead, he thought about what he wanted to hear and assumed that other people would want to hear about it too. It also helped that he was doing it for fun. The No Treble podcast is a labor of love, and regardless of the size of the audience, Joel loves putting it together and talking to people whose music he so admires. Focus on your own personal interest, do what you enjoy and not only will you have a great time, you’ll also have a better chance of creating a great product. And your inbox will be a lot more interesting too. Listen to the entire interview with Mitch Joel via iTunes or Stitcher Fun Podcast

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What Leaping Twenty Feet In The Air Taught This Kitesurfer About Customer Engagement

Live video’s authenticity builds engagement.   At the end of 2016, social media platforms added one of the most powerful customer engagement tools to your phone. You might not have used it yet. You might have dismissed it. You might have no idea what you can do with it. You might be missing out. One person who hasn’t been missing out is Ryan Steinolfson. The owner of a digital marketing agency in San Diego, Steinolfson is also an action sport enthusiast. He’d played around with GoPro when the small cameras came out but it was the ability to broadcast live on Periscope that really sparked his imagination. “I thought, ‘Wow, you mean I can actually bring people along for the ride? In the moment?'” he recalled. He built a small contraption that allowed him to fix his mobile phone just above his eyes and he did what he loves to do most when he’s not building digital marketing campaigns for his clients: he headed out onto the water. He strapped a surfboard to his feet and a parachute to his back, pressed the Broadcast button on Periscope and started leaping off the waves, reaching as high as twenty feet in the air before crashing back into the Pacific Ocean. That’s not the usual content that you’d expect to find in a marketing video–unless it’s for a kitesurfing company. When companies broadcast live, they’re most likely to talk directly to the camera, as Mark Zuckerberg likes to do, or take their customers behind the scenes of their business. There’s no connection at all between leaping off the top of waves with a parachute and building the Facebook audiences and traffic streams that Steinolfson does in his day job. But Steinolfson saw a 20-40 fold increase in engagement during that broadcast. “People still talk about the kitesurfing videos,” he said. “They’re like when are we going to go kitesurfing again?” Recorded video is a powerful way of delivering information to an audience. It can hold attention and spread easily. But live video adds a new level of excitement. It brings a touch of magic to video. Because it can be spontaneous and unplanned it brings audiences into your life and it shows them a brand that they know is authentic. Whether the video is being released by an individual or a brand, it shows audiences exactly who they are. “It allows people to look into your life,” said Steinolfson. “That’s what creates the connections and that’s what helps with my business. People know me not just as the guy who does live videos or digital marketing but they know more about me than that because they were able to share a kite-surfing experience, jumping fifteen or twenty feet in the air.” The challenge for brands is to dream up content that will work in a live video broadcast, but that content doesn’t have to be anything special. It’s enough to bring people into your life and show them who you are–even if you’re not using a parachute. Listen to the complete interview with Ryan Steinolfson on the Fun Podcast on iTunes and Sticher  

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How Toupee Tape Created A Business Opportunity That Came Unstuck

Why your next business idea might be right under your hat. Some people just some to have a knack for spotting opportunities. They can look into a half-empty room and see a dozen different business ideas just based on the formation of the chairs and the napkins on the tables. Sue B. Zimmerman is one of those people. She’s had a long list of business ideas that have included the little plastic gizmos that people put in their Crocs. While other people were wondering why anyone would want to wear ugly, rubber clogs, she saw footwear worn by the young and the old, by men and by women. “They had the crossover appeal of jeans and baseball caps,” she recalled. But one of her strangest ideas came from the other end of the body. While she was teaching an art class to children, a friend turned up with a roll of sticky tape. It wasn’t just any sticky tape though. It was toupee tape, the stuff used to glue wigs to people’s heads. The children took the tape. They decorated it. They cut into funny shapes. They used it in their artworks. And they had fun. “I said this tape is magic,” Sue recalls. “No one was crying. No one was getting covered in glue and they were making some cool projects.” At the time, America was going through a scrapbooking craze. People were buying all sorts of accessories that they could use to decorate their photos. So with a little creativity, that toupee tape sold in wig shops became Treasure Tape, and after a bit of pushing, it was sold in Michaels and AC Moore outlets. That should have been satisfying enough but then QVC came calling. Sue’s toupee-fixing Treasure Tape had the Wow Factor that the television show was looking for. She spent a day at QVC’s school learning how to sell on television and which of the seven cameras to look at during the broadcast, and was then told that she would be on air at… 1am. Despite the early hour, she made her numbers, selling 5,000 units a minute during her five-minute slot. The show asked her back. The television appearances were Treasure Tape’s peak moments. Sue hadn’t taken out a patent on decorated toupee tape, and it was easy enough for companies in China to copy her idea and flood the market. It wasn’t long before Sue was moving on to her next business idea. But in the meantime, she had learned three valuable lessons. First, she had learned that there really are opportunities everywhere and that they can turn up at any moment. You just have to seize them, make them happen and run with them as far as you can go. Second, she learned that you can’t always protect your business. Products come and products go, and you always have to enjoy it while it lasts and be ready to move on to the next big thing. And thirdly, she learned that sometimes that next big thing can be bigger, better, and closely related to what you did before. Sue B. Zimmerman is now a leading expert on Instagram marketing, delivering talks and teaching businesses how to create viral hashtags and market themselves on Facebook’s image-sharing platform. She’s gone from helping people to decorate printed photographs to helping them to decorate digital photographs. And she’s still spotting opportunities in half-empty rooms. Listen to the entire interview with Sue B. Zimmerman on the FUN podcast

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Innovation Models Are All Around Us

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Zzysh. The opinions and text are all mine. I’m never been much of a cook. In fact, I’ll go further. In the past I was able to microwave chicken nuggets and make some eggs. I might even burn the salad. But where there’s a problem, there’s some smart entrepreneur working on a solution. Recently, I’ve been using a service that does everything but the cooking for me. They send me a box of ingredients for a dish and include a detailed explanation of what to do with them. I just have to follow the instructions and use what they send to cook up a perfect meal. It’s easy. Even I can do it. And it’s a smart bit of thinking from someone who recognized that there was a market for people who want to eat good, homecooked food but don’t have the time to learn how to sauté or spend an hour in the grocery store squeezing vegetables to see if they’re fresh. But it’s given me another problem. Sometimes, I’ll have a glass of wine with that homecooked meal. I’m not a wine connoisseur and I’m not big drinker. I’ll have the odd glass every now and then but it can take me weeks to finish a bottle. It’s not unusual for me to end up pouring wine down the drain because it’s gone bad. So someone has come up with another solution. A company called zzysh® has designed a tool that keeps an open bottle of wine fresh for weeks. Instead of putting the cork back and putting the bottle on the counter, you can use zzysh’s® special stopper and pump. The pump sucks the remaining air out of the bottle and replaces it with argon, an inert gas. The wine has nothing to react with so instead of the air in the bottle turning the wine into vinegar, it stays fresh for weeks. For an occasional wine drinker like me, it’s perfect.Now, neither of these ideas are anything that I would have come up with myself. I’ve had websites that writers have used to share recipes, and I’ve looked at plenty of recipes online. And I’ve also had the experience of seeing a recipe that looks good, only to check the kitchen and realize that I don’t have smoked paprika or fresh cilantro. But I do have the phone number of the local pizza place. This is a sponsored post written on behalf of zzysh®. All opinions are my own. I’ve also had the experience of pulling a cork out of a bottle I opened two weeks ago, and finding that I could use the wine now as a salad dressing. It didn’t occur to me that if I pumped out the air and replaced it with something else, I could save money and keep the wine. Someone thought of both those solutions. And those people are now running growing businesses that I’m sure are making tons of cash. There are business opportunities all around us. They’re in every problem we encounter, whether it’s cooking the evening meal, carrying in the groceries or polishing off a bottle of wine. If you can improve on a current solution, you can cook up an entirely new business. Special Offer: Get 20% off the purchase of a zzysh® product with promo code getyourzzysh

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How to Focus Your Business

Some people think you should focus on one thing in your business. Others are proponents of multiple angles. A question posted by Brian Fanzo on Facebook triggered a long discussion about which approach is best. I decided to shoot a short video that breaks down my theory on this. Please be sure to comment and let me know what you think!

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The One Simple Secret to Success

As I look back at my 22 years of doing business online, there is one consistent characteristic that has led to my success. Here’s a hint. It’s not about the product. It’s not about the price. It’s not about the people involved. It’s not about location. And it’s not about your competition. I’m going to tell you exactly what the common thread is in this video because I’ve recently experienced this phenomenon once again. And in doing so my new podcast hit the top 200 on iTunes. Watch this to discover the secret: Once you’ve watched the video and know the secret, check out the podcast that is blowing up on iTunes at: The Bad Crypto Podcast You’ll learn a lot about a subject which WILL impact your future. You can choose to listen on iTunes, Soundcloud, YouTube, Stitcher or Google Play. And if you like what you hear, please take a moment to leave a review.

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What the Heck is Bitcoin?

What the heck is Bitcoin? It’s a question I began asking myself several months ago. And the more I learned, the more fascinated I became. Enter Travis Wright. TeeDubya and I have been friends, but we shared a newfound passion for cryptocurrency and began having regular discussions about the implications for its future. And then, inspiration hit. Just last week Travis asked how long before we do the Travis & Joel talk bitcoin podcast. He was joking, I think. I took him seriously. We barely understand this stuff. But in a short time, we have become dangerous. Most people we talk to know next to nothing. So we have started The Bad Crypto Podcast, a show for cryptocurrency newbies (and seasoned pros alike) that covers the topic, explores things we’ve learned, discusses the investment opportunities and has us putting our money where our mouths are! If you’ve been crypto-curious, give us a listen. And please SUBSCRIBE and REVIEW the show. It’s the only way to get love from iTunes. Select any of the locations below to listen now!   —– affiliate link ——

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The 3 Things You Need to Live The Bucket List Lifestyle

What this Denver Bronco skydiver can teach you about landing on your feet. Nobody can accuse Kenyon ​Salo of being asleep at the wheel of life. A motivational speaker, Kenyon has made over 5,000 skydives and 400 base jumps. As one of the six members of the Denver Broncos Thunderstorm Skydive Team, he flies into Sports Authority Field at over 60 mph at each home game, landing on his toes on the ten-yard line. He’s been to a lot of Broncos games but he’s never once had to come in through the gate. Kenyon’s life is filled with the kind of adrenaline-packed activities that many people would love to do. And he’s helping those people to enjoy those experiences. Kenyon is also the creator of TheBucketListLife.com, a community that introduces people to extreme experiences, from leaping out of planes to wrestling alligators. It’s not the kind of job that most people would think of, but it is the kind of job that many extreme sports enthusiasts would dream of. So what can Kenyon’s journey to his ideal lifestyle teach other people looking to build their own perfect lives? The first lesson is that the path to your destination might well go through a period of hard effort. “There are times when you have to buckle down and do what needs to be done,” says Kenyon. So if you don’t have the capital that lets you get through the period that always comes before revenue, then you might have to do two or three things at the same time, working a nine-to-five job then focusing on what you really want to do until midnight or later. “Eventually you’re able to make the leap from one to the other,” he says. For Kenyon, the process was reversed. He worked nights for a property maintenance company in Colorado while spending his days on the ski slopes until he was good enough to become a professional snowboarder. But moving towards work that’s so enjoyable it doesn’t feel like work requires more than the hours needed to make the leap. According to Kenyon, the activity you choose to do needs to contain three things. First it needs be about you. It has to be something that makes you excited and happy. Not everyone is going to find that in leaping out of a perfectly good plane, but that’s what does it for Kenyon Salo, so that was the path he chose, however strange that might be those of us who prefer to get our thrills reading Stephen King. Secondly, it should build a connection with others. The excitement that comes from sharing stories with friends and colleagues builds bridges between people. It opens new paths in life that people might not have considered and exposes them to new opportunities. And even if those people choose not to take those paths, the stories deepen friendships and forges relationships. And third, the activity should help others because that’s when it’s most fulfilling. Doing something that you love is always an incredible experience but the only thing that beats it is helping other people to do what they love. Even if what they really love to do is jump out of a plane. For the complete interview with Kenyton Salo, check out episode #7 of The Fun Podcast HERE on iTunes

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