Whatever audience you must persuade, you need to engage them with compelling content in the form of stories. That’s easy to say, but hard to do.

As Jerry Weissman, author of Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, puts it, "The problem is that no one knows how to tell a story and no one knows that they don’t know how to tell a story."  Fortunately, you’ll come away from reading this book armed with the necessary tools to tell those all-important stories brilliantly.

Presenting to Win, in its new expanded edition, teaches you to communicate with a purpose–whether you are convincing employees of the need to change, persuading prospects that you have the best solution to a problem or leading skeptical community groups to support your cause.

Presenting to Win overflows with practical advice on how to engage an audience by telling your story with a focus on what’s important to them. You become an "audience advocate," showing concern for your listeners’ needs that puts them at the heart of your presentation. By following Jerry’s detailed roadmap, we can learn how to tell stories that move and motivate listeners by keeping them engaged, from a compelling start to a big finish.

Jerry’s first career was as a Hollywood producer and screenwriter. His friendship with venture capitalist Ben Rosen led him to his second career as a presentation guru. In 1988, he launched a business that taught high-tech executives to move from feature-laden, techno-speak dissertations to engaging, listener-centric presentations. Yahoo!, Intuit, Cisco, Microsoft and Intel are among his clients.

Jerry offers plenty of real-world anecdotes, how-tos and helpful graphics that convey ways to grab and keep your audience’s attention. His "opening gambit" concept typifies his own story-telling approach in the book: He offers a rationale, supports it with multiple success stories and describes a broad range of gambits.

An opening gambit must pull the audience out from a possible state of disinterest or suspicion about you and your presentation. Posing questions to an audience is one of seven strategies discussed, and Jerry cites an experience by Scott Cook as an example. In 1993, Cook, founder of Intuit (maker of Quicken and QuickBooks), faced a jaded audience of investment bankers. Rather than launch into a feature-packed discussion of a new product, he asked two questions: How many of you balance your own checkbooks? How many enjoy doing it?

After a round of chuckles, he continued, "You’re not alone. Millions of people around the world hate balancing their checkbooks. We at Intuit have developed an easy-to-use, inexpensive home-finance tool, Quicken." With this "aha" moment, Cook was off and running.

Equally insightful chapters on presentation essentials provide a level of detail and clarity that leaves nothing to chance. Jerry demonstrates that even those of us who aren’t presentation naturals can present to win.

Learning what he recommends requires significant effort because his approach contains a broad range of interrelated elements that can vary, depending on purpose, topic and audience. You’ll need to devote time and effort to perfecting his method, but as leaders of Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Intuit and Yahoo! have learned, your effort will be well worth it.

Click here to buy it on Amazon.com. You can also get the Kindle edition.

There’s a reason that school rooms and conference rooms have whiteboards.  We all tend to learn better when we combine what we hear with what we see.  That’s why presentations can be more powerful when they integrate appropriate visual imagery. 

That was probably what the creators of PowerPoint had in mind rather than the bevy of bullet point, text-heavy monster presentations it has unleashed upon the world.

There is a better way and it’s all about visual thinking. Dan Rowe makes a powerful case for building on basic visual imagery as the best way to share information, solve problems, and sell ideas.

Although the pictures that he suggests we draw are as basic as can be, his concepts are pretty sophisticated.  Why?  It is almost always hard to make things easy.  For example, this is true of software, which may be incredibly complex behind the scenes.  But, for the developers, the real challenge is making that software easy to use for unsophisticated customers.

So it is with Dan’s approach in "The Back of the Napkin".  Basic drawings are just the beginning.   Visual images are part of a very sophisticated approach to presenting information persuasively.  You will learn to share information or sell ideas with visual representations that will be easy to explain and easy to grasp. The hard part comes in deciding exactly how best to represent what visual images you will show and how you’ll show them.

Thus, learning to use his methodology will require some effort.  but, it will be time well spent because communicating both verbally and visually using Dan’s approach really works.

To give you an idea of what Dan has in store for you, here are the primary concepts to grasp:

• He says that there are six ways of seeing things.  This applies literally to a scene we might observe outdoors or virtually to a problem or challenge we might want to describe. As we think about the ideas we need to convey, these are the vital questions to ask and answer about the visual elements to be shown:
• Who or what?
• How many?
• Where?
• When? 
• How?
• Why?
• It’s essential to decide on the kind of visual message we want to present before we worry about the actual image.  He creates an acronym called,SQVID as a mnemonic to organize these concepts. For example if our topic involved an apple pie we would want to decide between the vision of a completed pie vs. the execution of actually creating the pie. That’s  the ‘V’ in SQVID. Here are all of the visual variations:
• Simple versus elaborate
• Quality versus quantity
• Vision versus execution
• Individual attributes versus comparison
• Delta (or change) versus status quo

In the spirit of visual presentation, here is his core conceptual construct the way Dan envisions it as a Swiss Army knife metaphor:

Here’s a more elaborate diagram that lays out Dan’s complete set of elements you will need to evaluate and employ when you create your visual thinking-based presentation:

Read Dan’s book so that you can become a better visual thinker–and so that you can do a dramatically better job of presenting and persuading every audience from large to small. 

If I haven’t convinced you, be sure to visit his extraordinarily visual and persuasive website: The Back of the Napkin.

Terrific new book from Paul Gillin takes the mystery out of using online conversations and communities to connect with your customers.

Nothing is more rewarding than to read a book that is at once valuable, timely, and engaging. Secrets of Social Media Marketing is all that and more.  Paul has a genius for making the complex simple enough to understand without oversimplifying.

Is there a need for this book?  You bet!

“There has been more change in the media world in the last five years than in the previous 500.”–Peter Koran, President, Media & Advertising, IAC

Understanding social media marketing is so difficult because it seems to be so different.  For decades, most of the rules of communicating with customers stayed the same.  You figured out who you were going to sell to.  You did your best to create a product or service that would have value for that target audience.  And then you blasted out your marketing message in print, on billboards, on radio, and since the 1950s on TV.

Now, and in the future, much of those old methods go right out the virtual window. Happily, Paul’s book teaches you exactly how to put social media marketing to work by telling you what to do and precisely how to do it.

It’s all about relationships extended online.

There is an important connection with the past which cuts through a lot of the confusion that surrounds social media marketing.

In his introduction, Paul notes that social media is really about relationships extended online.  That’s not so new. The desire to form communities of shared interests goes back to the guilds of the Middle Ages.  But, here’s the hard part: Figuring out how to make effective use of the staggering variety of ever-changing social media trends, venues, and technologies.

As Paul indicates:

Marketers aren’t stupid or reactionary.  They recognize that the world is quickly changing around them.  They are trying to change as well, but a variety of internal and external factors make it difficult to do that very quickly.  They’re scared and nervous, but that’s okay.  No one is an expert on all these new trends and no one knows where it’s all going.  Marketers need to start learning and experimenting because the only sin in social media right now is inaction.

Plenty of practical and easy to apply information

To give you an idea of Paul’s approach to bringing social media mysteries down to earth, here is a quick look at his blogging appropriateness quiz. Most content marketing types, myself included, will urge virtually every business to get a blog going.  But, with a helpful little six question–and 5 minute–scorecard, he helps business executives figure out whether they should bother blogging at all.

Here are the highlights(minus Paul’s explanations of each question):

Is  blogging right for your business?

• Do you want to do it?
• Do you have a topic in mind?
• Are you passionate about the topic?
• Are you knowledgeable about the topic?
• Do you communicate well?
• Do you have a thick skin?

You apply varying point levels to your yes or no answers.  A high score means, “go for it.”  A low score means “don’t bother.”  He has just saved you hours of meetings and deadly powerpoint presentations.

The ‘cut-to-the-chase’ blogging appropriateness quiz is a tiny sample of the wealth of useful, compelling, and understandable coverage of every conceivable element of social media marketing–and how to deploy those that are appropriate for your organization.

You need to begin deploying social media marketing.  This is the book that will put you on the right track.

There may be a better book on social media marketing.  But if there is, I haven’t found it. 

Go to Amazon.com right now and buy it: Secrets of Social Media Marketing

A vital recommendation from a useful new book, The Contrarian Effect!

This new book from Michael Port and Elizabeth Marshall delivers plenty of great advice about why and how to abandon old-fashioned sales approaches that just don’t work in the age of the empowered customer.

Too many salespeople and organizations are still stuck trying to push products down the throats of their customers.  In The Contrarian Effect, Michael and Elizabeth argue for a completely different approach.  As they stress:

Sales professionals must find a way to build relationships and to be there when customers are ready to buy–a totally different world view and way of interacting with potential customers.  Something that won’t be possible if you insist on selling to them and use the usual approach to reach and communicate with them.

Their approach is completely in sync with the fundamentals of content marketing which stress the importance of an in-depth understanding of your customers and their needs. Only after you have developed that understanding should you attempt to encourage them to buy from you. Otherwise, you risk becoming everyone’s vision of the worst possible used-car salesman.

Collaborative sales and marketing: combine forces with colleagues to maximize your impact.

I found one of their sales and marketing recommendations particularly powerful: Collaborate with noncompetitive business colleagues who share a common target audience in order to dramatically increase your collective impact on an audience larger than you ever could have reached on your own.

In fact, Elizabeth has built a business which exemplifies how well collaboration can work when applied to the Web. Her company, AuthorTeleseminars.com, reinvents the old-fashioned idea of author book tours by moving them to the Internet.  She capitalizes on the trend that sees fewer authors running around from bookstore to bookstore, speaking to small audiences, spending lots of money, and rarely selling many books.  Instead, she creates a virtual book tours which partner an author with other author experts who share a common target market.  All participants benefit from promotion to a larger set of prospects by combining contact lists and outreach efforts.

This kind of collaboration can be applied to any target market and is particularly powerful on the web where outbound direct marketing is incredibly cheap and the potential audience size enormous.

Run out and buy a copy of The Contrarian Effect. You’ll find plenty of great ideas that you can put to work right away to reinvent the way you sell and market yourself, your company, your products, and your services.

New Book Co-authored by David Meerman Scott Reinforces Content Marketing Principles

Too many companies develop products based on their own inward looking approach.  According to the new book “Tuned In,” that’s exactly backwards.

They offer as a delightfully disastrous example: The introduction of the Susan B. Anthony dollar in1979. Between the misguided efforts of the US Mint and vending machine lobbyists, the government managed to introduce a product nobody wanted.  In fact, as the authors point out, extensive research had showed that such a coin would be a colossal failure.  Why the failure?  Simple.  Nobody wanted a dollar coin, particularly one that would look almost exactly like a quarter.

To succeed with product development, it is essential to take the opposite approach.  Determine what your customers want and provide a product or service so compelling that your customers will sell it for you. Of course, this approach is at the very heart of successful content marketing best practices.

As the authors say:

“You shouldn’t have to wave your arms around and shout at people to convince them to pay attention to your product and service.  The tuned in, market-driven company understands market problems and builds products that resonate; these practices drive both sales and customer satisfaction.”

Here’s their diagram of the simple, six step process you need to follow to create just such products and services:

Coincidentally, NextBus, which we write about separately today because of their Google success, has done exactly what Meerman Scott & co. recommend. They created a solution to a nagging customer problem. 

Frustrated bus riders desperate for a solution to wasted time

Transit riders have been frustrated for decades because there was no way to know exactly when the “next bus” was coming. NextBus solved the problem by providing real-time information that told riders where ever they were and whenever they needed the information, exactly when the NextBus would arrive.  Not only was this a solution for transit riders, it was a solution for transit management because it made both for happy passengers and for much more efficient operations.  Best of all the company chose exactly the right name, “NextBus” because it described perfectly the core of the benefit that their service provided.  The result was what the book describes as a “resonator”.  That is: a product or service that sells itself.

Tuned In can teach your organization how to replicate the kind of success enjoyed by NextBus or FedEx or Nike.  The book is loaded with examples that illustrate how the process they recommend works in practice.  And, it doesn’t apply just to large organizations but to entrepreneurial startups as well.

Unless all of your products and services are resonating with your customers, you need to buy this book.  Click here to do just that.

Sales Streak Past 1000 Copies. Online Marketing Guru Recommends Our Book.

One thousand copies pales in comparison to any of the Harry Potter books.

But, put into context, it suggests solid acceptance of Get Content. Get Customers. among business book buyers.  Here’s what our book and every new book is up against in attempting to penetrate a very tough, competitive market(numbers from bookstatistics.com):

• In 1947, there were 357 publishers; in 2004 85,000 publishers
• 2.8 million books in print in 2006
• 291,920 books published in the U.S. in 2006
• average book sells 500 copies in U.S.
• 30% of books had print runs of less than 100
• only 20% of books sold more than 100 copies
• only 10% of books sold more than 1000

Thanks to so many of you and to the support of marketing experts like Shama Hyder, we have been able to beat the odds by exceeding the sales of 90% of all books published in the U.S.

Online Marketing Guru–and Content Marketing Aficionado–Shama Hyder Give Us a Major Plug

Frankly, I’m not sure this endorsement of GCGC could have been any better if we had written it ourselves.  It is especially meaningful because Shama is so good at what she does with After The Launch as we have written in our article: When You Are the Brand, Content Marketing is Crucial.

Here’s what Shama had to say:

Get Content, Get Customers! by Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett. You know how I am a big fan of VALUABLE content rather than loud marketing? Yea, these guys get it. Not only do they get it, but they show you how to do it. They show how any business (large or small) can use the concept of content marketing to attract qualified clients. This isn’t a book of theory. It’s jam packed with case studies and statistics. Content sells! They show you how. The best marketing education 20 bucks ever bought anyone!

Be sure to read her entire article, 10k Worth of Knowledge for Roughly 40 Bucks in which she recommends another superb book, Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day by Dave Evans.  I know I just bought it on her recommendation.

Join the Content Marketing Crusade!

Content marketing works.  We teach you how to put it to work for your organization in ways that will pay off on the bottom-line in these tough times.

You can follow Shama’s very sound advice simply by

clicking here to buy Get Content Get Customers or if you’d like to download a FREE excerpt, go to www.GetContentGetCustomers.com.

Thanks to everyone for helping us get this far.

Stephanie Diamond lays bare mysteries of online marketing for small business executives.

Hyperbole?  Maybe.  But, this is a terrific book.

Marketing is probably the biggest challenge for small business owners and executives.  We typically spend so much time running the business day to day that establishing and maintaining a marketing focus just doesn’t happen.  The accelerating pace of Internet marketing change makes it all that much more challenging. 

Happily, Stephanie Diamond has written that rare book which both forces us to think in new and different ways about marketing issues–and simultaneously provides a detailed roadmap so that we can put those thoughts into action. Once you have finished the book, you will be ready to develop and deploy a successful Web marketing strategy. 

Her new book, Web Marketing for Small Businesses, is a much-needed addition to the literature of online marketing.  This book enables us first to grasp complex concepts and then to put them into practice with easy to follow steps.  Even solopreneurs will find significant value in Stephanie’s book.  I know that I have already begun to implement several of the strategies about which she writes so knowledgeably.

Stephanie conveys so much valuable content in her book that it is difficult to do it justice in a short review.  So, I will simply share some of my favorite stuff.

My 7 favorite lessons learned:

1. Making it easy for your Web visitors to buy from you is essential, but it’s even more important to make it easy for them to tell your story to others.  This is the key to word-of-mouth marketing.  You must tell stories that are so compelling and memorable that dozens of others will be retelling your stories to dozens of others.
2. Power has shifted from sellers to buyers on the web.  This means that your web presence must provide plenty of compelling content that makes it easy for buyers to take action.  Don’t give them an excuse to look elsewhere for essential information.
3. Develop a precise and in-depth understanding of your buyers. Create a ‘persona’ for your buyer that makes her a flesh and blood human being for whom you can craft just the right messaging.
4. Simplify.  Simplify.  Simplify. Make it incredibly easy for your web visitors to understand why your products and services will provide perfectly tailored solutions for their most important needs.
5. Always think of what actions you want your visitors to take.  Provide content within an information architecture that will lead your visitors to take those actions naturally and effortlessly.  This action-focused approach applies to every part of your website.
6. Your website is effectively a direct response mechanism.  Therefore think like a direct response copywriter and ask “so” questions.  For example, “our widget is the lightest in the industry.”  So?  Then finish the equation… “so you can carry it with you wherever you go.”
7. You must do usability testing no matter how small your marketing budget.  It’s really just a question of recruiting several users who know nothing about your company, your products or your website. Put them in a room in front of a computer and let them figure out what your company and your products are all about–and what action you would like them to take.  Keep repeating the process until even the most clueless user instantly and intuitively understands what your website and your company are all about.

7 step plan for “explosive business growth”

Plenty of variables may affect the business growth you can achieve by following Stephanie’s seven step plan.  But, because so many of us will never create a thoughtful and realistic plan on our own, her seven steps are just what the marketing doctor ordered to spark significant growth. 

Stephanie devotes an entire chapter to each step with description, references, and examples. I think you will find just about the right amount of information in each chapter to begin developing and deploying your strategy.  Here are bare-bones descriptions of the 7 steps:

1. Niche–precisely define your perfect customer and developer niche to match.
2. Brand–make it “obvious, repeatable, and ready for storytelling by the customers who will carry your message.”
3. Story–tell stories about your company, its people and its products that are true, compelling, and unique.  Make sure these stories are easy to retell.
4. Search–be easy to find on the web.  Craft your content so that it is search engine friendly and so that it can be found quickly by your ideal customers.
5. Tactics–social media–carefully consider core social media methods such as business blogging, videos, podcasting and the social networks.  You can experiment with each of these inexpensively and should probably choose one or two as a starting point to avoid straining always limited resources.
6. Tactics–tried-and-true–although for some small businesses these tactics may be somewhat unfamiliar, they have been effective online for a decade or more.  Among these tactics are: eNewsletters, article marketing online press releases surveys and loyalty programs.
7. Results– you must continually reassess each of your online marketing initiatives to determine what’s working, what’s not, and what to change accordingly.  Measurement online is easy and essential.

Plenty of practical elements in the book

Stephanie gives just enough description and explanation so that those of us who are not steeped in Internet technology and leading-edge marketing practices can understand fundamental principles.  And, most importantly, she teaches us just how to put those principles into practice.

Throughout the book she provides worksheets that enable readers to begin laying out a practical plan for a successful Web marketing strategy. These worksheets lead you from where you are today to the new kind of thinking you’ll require, to a definition of your customers and your niche, and ultimately to the action plans to execute your Web marketing strategy.

Thanks to Stephanie’s book, developing a successful Web marketing strategy has now become eminently doable for even the smallest organization. 

My favorite quote from the book:

“A year from now you may wish you had started today.” (Karen Lamb) 

So, get started today.  Go to Amazon.com and buy Web Marketing for Small Businesses right now.  If you don’t, a year from now you may wish you had.

A salesperson is a salesperson is a salesperson. Not so.

Because selling and sales professionals are fundamental to your in person content marketing strategy, you must develop just the right team for your company and your market.  However obvious this might seem, here’s why so many companies get it all wrong.

Identifying great sales people isn’t as simple as you might think. They don’t all look alike, think alike or act alike. One category of salesperson would die rather than get friends together to sell them Tupperware. Another breed thinks that the purpose of having a lot of friends is so that you can have lots of Tupperware parties.

Difficult or not, selecting the right sales candidate for the right sales situation is fundamental to building a successful company.

That’s why you should run out and buy, “Discover Your Sales Strengths,” by Benson Smith & Tony Rutigliano. They evaluate what determines sales success both from a salesperson’s perspective—and from that of his manager. The authors demolish common myths about sales people and replace them with a common sense approach to creating the right fit for sales success.

“Discover Your Sales Strengths” is based on decades of empirical research by the Gallup organization which set out to understand that ‘right fit.’ A typical client scenario would be to determine which reps are responsible for the vast majority of a company’s sales. Invariably, this follows the 80/20 rule; 20% of the reps make 80% of the sales. Gallup then determines what ‘strengths’ are common to those peak-performers.

Although the blend of strengths varies widely from company to company, the authors suggest that great reps are consistently able to:

· Build relationships

· Impact others—get a ‘yes’

· Uncover and fulfill client needs

· Focus on meaningful goals and rewards to drive their performance

· Find the best company, product, and client structure to optimize their sales results

Many companies may well understand many of these elements but are still adhering to well-worn myths about selecting and building top performers. For example, education is frequently a requirement for a sales position. The authors disagree, “In all the companies we have studied we have never—even in very technical fields—found a relationship between education and sales success.” They also shoot down other myths:

• You’ve got to have experience in a market or product to succeed
• A good salesperson can sell anything
• There is only one sales approach that will succeed
• Training will transform poor performers into effective reps
• Build relationships and sales will follow
• Money as the sole motivator
• Enough desire will carry you through

The authors suggest that it’s mostly about who you are rather than what you know or what you’ve done. In other words, our instinctive behavior drives us. For example, in a study of truck driver safety, they found that the safest drivers intuitively thought about what was going to happen next on the road. training can’t create that instinctive behavior pattern. Either you’ve got it or you don’t. So it is with sales people.

Great sales people evolve from the combination of their core strengths and the right job fit. As managers we must make that happen. Buy this book.

According to a new book by Gerry McGovern, content in and of itself is not king. It’s got to be customer-centric first and foremost.

In a most useful review on the Relevant and Valued blog, Pete Shemilt draws the following conclusion , “time spent on developing quality, impactful content is a worthwhile investment. The analogy he uses is that we should treat content on the Web as ‘a hidden asset, it’s gold’, not as ‘coal – a low-grade, low-cost commodity best published in bulk.’  Put simply: Killer not Filler!”

Or, in other words, creating great content may not be easy, but it is absolutely essential.  Why? Because it’s worth its weight in gold. 

Here are my 3 favorite takeaways:

1. Readers scan for carewords, not keywords.  ‘When we see these words, we click, we act. And that is what the Web is all about: tasks and actions’. Lesson: understand what your readers care about, create your content by focusing on these carewords and reap the benefits.
   
2. Testing is essential. Customer behaviour on the web is easily measurable and so, therefore, is the value of your content. Lesson: creating and supporting a test and learn environment will help you achieve a culture of continuous development and help you to enhance value.
   
3. Focus on a single idea.  Lesson: niche and targeted is worth much more than trying to meet everyone’s needs but delivering on no-ones.

Click here to read the rest of the review. It’s well worth your time.

Click here to buy the book on Amazon.com.

Co-authors, Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett, explain why a new form of marketing is needed,

“The buyer can find everything they need to make informed purchasing decisions on the Internet. They don’t need to rely on old-fashioned marketing collateral nor salespeople to educate them about products. Today, businesses that market only through traditional means ignore the importance of the fundamental changes in buyer behavior that make compelling content so critical to the decision-making process.”

Pulizzi and Barrett recommend the use of content marketing strategies to woo this new breed of buyer. They suggest that providing frequently updated content that is both relevant and compelling is essential to attract and to retain loyal customers.

Get Content. Get Customers. is a practical guide for executives to the brand new world of content marketing. Readers can expect to learn the following:

•The three reasons traditional marketing isn’t working.

•Content marketing is the biggest industry you’ve never heard of.

•What content marketing really is and why it is important.

•Why you must now think like a publisher today!

•The 11 biggest benefits of content marketing.

•The seven deadly sins of content marketing.

•What Best Buy, MindJet, and ThomasNet are doing to drive business through the use of great content.

•What specific methods you should use to implement your content strategy now.

Get Content. Get Customers. is available for free download on the book’s website: www.GetContentGetCustomers.com. The greatly expanded print version will be available in January 2008 from Voyager Media, Inc.

Joe Pulizzi is chief content officer for Junta42 (http://www.junta42.com), a content marketing/custom publishing search portal. Newt Barrett is the founder of Succeeding Today. He is the chief content officer for ContentMarketingToday ( http://www.contentmarketingtoday.com), the online content marketing resource.