Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

By Michael Werner from Dream Jobs Dialog

Everybody thinks that being successful in developing and running their own business is all about having enough start-up and working capital, or the proper image that fits your market, or the right employees.

Yup, being successful in running your own show does require a significant dose of all of those things.

But, what I see missing most of all – and it just jumps out at me when I see people, either in their own businesses or as employees – is a willingness by that person to be themselves, and to trust their own instincts.

I fight with this constantly in my own businesses, and indirectly with my own employees.

They want themselves – and our company, by extension – to be something else.

And, this just absolutely drives me nuts-o.

We have whatever success we do by being who we are, not by trying to be something or someone else.

I have one employee, Brad (real guy, name changed), who’s always trying to portray us as bigger – much bigger – than we are. “Well, Michael,” he’ll tell me, “I just want to make sure that the customer takes us seriously.”

Hey, Brads of the world. The customer already does take us seriously – they buy products and services from us. They do that because they like who we are, how we act, and how we look.

We are who we are and, if we’re any good – and in the case of the real-world Brad I’m talking about, we’re damned good; been in business over 23 years, lots of growth spurts, plenty of industry innovations along the way – we don’t need to make up anything about ourselves. They like us, they really do like us.

The corollary to this is a feeling by lots of people that “well, we better do it that way because that’s how Microsoft [substitute your own name here] does it.”

Well, poop. We’re not Microsoft, we don’t wanna be Microsoft (really), and if we were really trying to be more like Microsoft, they’d eat our lunch before we even got past breakfast.

Be yourself, trust your gut. After all, what in the hell are you doing here if you can’t be yourself?

Michael Werner runs the blog at http://DreamJobsDialog.com and is also the CEO of InfoSource, Inc., a company trying hard not to be like Microsoft.

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A quick heads up and thank you to Steven Rucinski from Small Business Trends Radio for his short and kind review of my podcast - Podcast Review: Entrepreneur’s Journey.

If you are keen to delve into more small business related podcasts you may want browse through the Small Business Trends Radio archive reviews and see if anything jumps out at you. Podcasting is way cool after all!

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Cameron Riley and the crew at The Podcast Network are testing a different way to make money from their G’Day World podcast - by selling ad inventory on eBay.

It should be interesting to see how well this goes. Given eBay has such tremendous reach it’s surprising more bloggers and podcasters don’t make use of the auction site to help monetize their online enterprises.

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I’ve been mulling over what to do with Small Business Branding. After reading Rich Schefren’s Internet Business Manifesto and Missing Chapter it hit home (again!) the fact that I need focus, even more focus than I currently have. Because of this I have decided I need your help, my fellow bloggers!

I am looking for two partner bloggers to start blogging on SmallBusinessBranding.com on topics related to Small Business - preferably “marketing” and “branding”, and not “Internet business” or “entrepreneurship” as they are the topics for Entrepreneur’s Journey. I’m looking for two bloggers who currently run a small business or even better - currently coach small business owners or have extensive history managing small businesses - and that doesn’t have to be online business, in fact offline business would be a welcome change of focus. General branding and marketing topics would be most welcome and encouraged - as long as you have experience and education to draw from I’m sure your will be capable of producing valuable content.

Here is some additional selection criteria -

• You must be able to write quality articles with consistency - I’m asking for two full sized articles per week minimum.
• You must have examples of your past work, preferably in a blog format, but any writing examples will do.
• If you currently run a business related blog that is certainly a plus.

Job Details

If you are selected to blog with me you will be required to keep SmallBusinessBranding.com updated with regular content. Two articles per week required (500 - 2000 words each), preferably with a “smattering” of smaller news articles and links thrown in whenever inspiration strikes you.

The blog will be a group blog, with the two new bloggers hired plus me (Yaro) keeping the place going. Initially I will moderate your work.

What’s In It For You

I want this to be about fostering a relationship. I’d like to partner with you on this blogging project so you get the benefits of being considered my friend and blog partner. What that means for the future is difficult to predict, but I’d like to think it would be mutually beneficial in terms of education, exposure, joint ventures potential, networking and of course financially rewarding as well.

If our relationship goes well you will be given an equal share of any profits generated by SmallBusinessBranding.com and will help to decide the future direction of the blog. I will remain the owner of the blog however I am open to rewarding long term hard work with partial ownership.

Your public profile will be enhanced as will your personal brand, being exposed to the nearly 1000 daily readers who come to SmallBusinessBranding.com through the web and RSS readers. If our relationship proves successful SmallBusinessBranding.com will be re-branded to include your photographs, biographical and contact details.

You will be permitted to link to your own site(s) in signatures and within articles when relevant, sending traffic and valuable PageRank to your sites (SmallBusinessBranding.com has a PR6 and good authority in the small business niche).

In terms of content direction you will be free to write on topics of your choosing but of course within the realms of small business relevancy. I will act as content editor initially and will be available to help with guidance and ideas for topics. As mentioned previously, at least initially, I will moderate all contributions.

Applications

If you are interested and prepared to commit yourself to consistent writing of new and original content to help reinvent and reinvigorate SmallBusinessBranding.com into a fantastic small business, multi-authored blog, then please email your interest to me -

yaroATblogtrafficking.com

Please include links to your past writing and details about your experience and education in the small business industry.

I welcome any questions in comment replies.

Note: This does not mean I am no longer going to blog at Entrepreneur’s Journey. This blog is my home.

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By Jon Symons from Art of Money.

It’s ironic but in the whole deluge of textual information presented on the web, the skill most sorely lacking it the ability to write. We’ve seen Yaro and others write about how AdSense (I’ve nicknamed it Crack-Sense) is ruining the Internet and it certainly is true. Not only has the fact that Google will pay you very well to put crap sites online contaminated the global well of information by spawning infinite spam sites, but it has also changed the nature of that information as well.

Thanks to the magic pill of search engine optimization (SEO) we have a new bizarre skill set that is dominating the online world: SEO writing. SEO writing is the art of writing like a search engine thinks - only backwards. Keywords are important, keyword density (the number of times, represented as a percentage, that a keyword appears on a page), tagging keywords in bold or italics, placing keywords in the first and last paragraphs; and on and on it goes.

With these shackles iron locked to their wrists the SEO writer is now given the task to write quality articles on a given topic keyword phrase. It just isn’t possible. Why? An essential ingredient in effective writing is to understand the audience that you’re writing to. SEO writing is the art of writing to the GoogleBot. Real writing is the art of writing to someone in your target audience. You get to pick only one or the other.

The choice should be fairly obvious (this coming from a reformed SEO writer) but you still see a surprising amount of effort and money put into finding the magic on page SEO factors.

The Arms Race

Google is constantly trying to make its search engine algorithm more and more organic. What this means to an SEO writer is that you are in a constant “arms race” with the Google algorithm. The algorithm shifts and you must shift your mental keyword stuffing pattern. The problem with being in an arms race is that there is no improvement factor, the best you can do is to just keep up with the formula: not a very satisfying position to be in. There is no business synergy in an arm’s race with a search engine.

What’s a poor webmaster to do? Write well and wait for Google to evolve. As the algorithm refines, it is becoming less and less productive (meaning the return on time invested is deteriorating) to attempt to consciously manipulate the search engine results. In my online business I’ve found this to be a very refreshing fact. I’ve taken “SEO” off of my business card and begun to focus on the craft of writing for humans.

Writing is to Evoke

Whether a child’s bedtime story or an online sales letter the point of the most writing is to persuade. It may be to empathize with the perils facing a curious teddy bear as he attempts to quench his appetite for fresh honey, to sell an set of e-books, or to express your perils when trying to balance your checkbook on your personal personal finance blog.

Whatever the topic or purpose, the result is accomplished by skillfully tickling the reader’s thoughts and feelings like a conductor coaxes sounds from his orchestra. As your writing skills progress the melodies can become more complex and incorporate more suspense, misdirections and delayed expectations which will increase the the level of resonance with your visitors.

The Three Most Important Writing Factors

1. Organization
2. Clear Intention
3. Empathy

God knows that rambling is a perfectly acceptable writing style on a blog and I indulge in the practice regularly, but when it comes to business you would be best to dig out your lessons from grade school, because your 10th Grade teacher had it right. A good essay, sales letter, magazine article, or an effective online article has a clear structure. The first paragraph introduces what is to come, the paragraphs flow into one another and at the end is a summary. There is a reason for this; our brains like this structure. It corresponds to the cycle of life; being lead along it by a skillfully written article or story is satisfying on many levels.

Getting Organized

How to achieve an organized writing style varies from writer to writer. The first method I use is to start with paper and pencil to scribble notes or even draw pictures of the story outline (pictures can be great for stimulating the writer’s imagination…they are like gasoline on the creative process).

The other method I use it to just start writing and pour every thought out onto the page without much concern for quality or organization. Then I’ll print out a couple copies double spaced and get away from the computer (don’t worry you’ll survive!). Heading to a café or some other place of refuge and with a pair of scissors and some tape and lots of markers, I’ll read and reread the article until I start to recognize the best structure for the material.

The best part of this method is that you can relax and really let it all hang out when you write the first draft. You can take risks and express things in creative ways and experiment with styles and even syntax; knowing that you’re going to thoroughly go over it before any other humans ever get to see it. By letting it all hang out you’ll often find a more powerful writing style that will be more compelling to your readers. And you can always tone it down a bit if necessary . On the flip side, there is a danger with this method and that is that when you do the first draft, you’ll get lazy and think you’re done, or half way through the first draft you’ll shift into final draft mode and call it done. Neither of these shortcuts will likely produce an effective article.

Your Intention Matters

Hand in hand with being organized is to have a clear intention when you are creating an article. If you are writing an article to submit to eZine sites then the intention might be to have it re-published on as many websites as possible, in which case you are writing to eZine publishers to get them interested in your article. If you also want get the eZine article readers to read the article all the way through and then get to the resource box and click through to your site, now you have a more complex intention: part one to attract the publisher and part two to seduce their readers away from the eZine and to your site.

Another possible intention would be to have someone click on an affiliate link from your site and go to the merchant site and make a sale. This style of writing is called pre-selling. It is like having a hungry person in your house, as an affiliate you don’t feed them, you just have a bunch of food on the stove so the delicious aromas whet their taste buds, then you send them to your friend’s restaurant and hope they will spend money because of the excellent job you did in stimulating their appetite.

The sales letter page or product sales pitch’s intention is to cultivate a need or want and to simultaneously remove the prospect’s resistance to commit. These pages have become a pretty standard formulas with the only real difference being how small the vertical scroll bar can become (shorter pages work better by the way).

One of the best research tools for this type of writing is the Clickbank product directory. Since it is organized according to performance you can see examples of effective sales pitches just by looking at the top products on any category. Read through a few and notice the intention as you go. They usually include: stress the benefits that the purchaser can expect (stats work great here: “Lose 10 pounds in 7 days!”), the testimonials to prove that others liked the product and so you will too. Then there’s the money back guarantee to remove the possibility that you’re getting ripped off. The last element is the email grab which allows those who aren’t ready to purchase yet to let you know that they’re willing to possibly convinced in the future.

Whatever the intention you are working on, having it clearly defined before you begin writing is fairly necessary. It doesn’t mean that you have to be obvious in directing your reader towards the intention, but taking the time to craft a strategy and understanding the elements the will affect your intention will increase your likelihood of achieving your goal dramatically.

Get in to Their Skin

By far the most important skill of a writer is the ability to get inside the head of her reader. It is to be able to march in lockstep with the experience of your reader as they make their way through your copy. You are writing for them after all. You can write solely to express yourself, but if you want to make money in your business you will need to write for an audience.

To know how to create a response in a reader by really understanding them is the most powerful form of writing. The further you’ll move into understanding and satisfying your readers wants and needs and imagination not only will your writing improve, but your business will improve in general. The key elements of this skill are to respect you reader, put their needs above your own agendas and to anticipate their experiences within your words.

The Business of Writing

Writing is a craft, you get better at it by paying attention, trying new things and practice and following the three guidelines above. There are not really any shortcuts, with the possible exception of paying a professional to write your business copy for you.

I’d be bold enough to say that if you’re doing business online, you’re in the writing business, no matter what your product, service or business model. Writing is about connecting with your customer or site visitor and building their trust in you by demonstrating to them that you care about them. It is this expression of concern that will really draw people in to your writing and your business in general. I’m hoping that you’ll join me in taking SEO off of your list of writing concerns and focusing your efforts on respectful communication with your visitors.

Jon Symons is a full-time Internet Entrepreneur blogging his brains out on Art of Money.

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