Stop Running Around the Room

The Digital Marketing Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Websites That Sell– Robert Bly (Entrepreneur)

So, how is your website doing? The so-called experts will all tell you that your business must have a web presence, but they don’t often tell you why. So, you go out and build out a website and depending on how much your budget is it may look slick, have some nifty doo-dads and maybe it even tells some of your business story, but how is it doing? Is your website driving sales, or customer experience; is it at least filling your sales funnel?

If you are scratching your head and not sure what the answers are, then you probably really have your answer. You may be guilty of what I call running around the room! Some guru tells you, you need a website or a Facebook page or a Twitter account, so you go out and do just that. The question then becomes, WHY? If you find yourself being pulled in twenty different directions, all the while chasing the new, shiny, thing; then you will want to take a break and invest some time with Robert Bly’s new book, The Digital Marketing Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Websites That Sell.

Bly has made a career out of cranking highly effective marketing copy that does exactly what it’s supposed to do; sell products and services. PERIOD. If you are a small business or looking to fire up a side hustle or even make the transition from side hustle to full blown business, this is a great starting place to gather knowledge of how to build out a website the actually makes you money! And isn’t that the bottom line?

If you are an experienced marketer, Bly approach may seem a little basic, but I can’t tell you how many people I work with that that invest in building out a website, only to have it not produce the results they thought it would and then who take the attitude that “this internet thing doesn’t work” or use the now famous line “I was too late, everybody already had a website like mine”.

Let’s face it, even folks who do this for a living are playing a game of catch up because the digital realm is changing seemingly every day. If you don’t have a solid foundation to build on then things like AdWords, landing pages, click through rates and the multitude of social media sites will all amount to deciphering hieroglyphics. Bly delivers the basics in easy to understand chunks and action steps that you can put into play right out of the box to start impacting your business today. Once you mastered the delivery, I would even suggest picking up one of Bly’s books on how to write effective copy that sells.

Avoid the Void

The Power of a Positive Team – Jon Gordon – (Wiley)

Have you ever been a part of a successful team?

How about a team that did not quite meet expectations or failed miserably?

Looking back at those experiences were you able to break things down and get to the bottom of what worked well, or where things went off the rails and failed miserably? It’s always a good idea to do that kind of postmortem break down to identify what works best.

In his latest book, The Power of a Positive Team bestselling, business and team guru Jon Gordon not only walks you through what the elements of a successful team are, and as the title suggests, how a positive team proves to be more successful. Now that may not sound like brain surgery, but as always, Gordon really offers some definitive insights, often based on scientific research about the mindsets that go into the chemistry of teams.

One of my go to stories when coaching teams or individuals, is about going to your favorite book store and asking for a book on how to be better at being negative, as I used in my review of Jon’s book, The Power of Positive Leadership. I spend a lot of time focusing on the impact of communication, good and bad, on businesses, and I love the chapter here that focuses on how communication impacts teams. Jon hits it out of the park when discussing how teams need to avoid the void; when there is a void in the process, more often than not, negativity will fill that void. He illustrates how effective communication within the team and its individual members can eliminate the void and cut down on negativity.

If you look at problem areas in most businesses, no matter what the business type or industry, communications are almost always at or near the top of the list. Gordon really drives home the point that while communication is “often the last thing you want to do” it is “the most important thing you must do.” He suggests a number of effective vehicles for communication among teams; it boils down to finding the method that works best for the team and the situation because it is not a once size fits all proposition.

Teams and team work comes in a multitude of varieties and Gordon offers great ideas and actionable steps the can help you keep those teams working in a positive fashion and with great results. This is a straight forward book, that you will want to keep handy so you can plug these steps into action.

The American Dream

I Love Capitalism: An American Story – Ken Langone (Portfolio Books)

Be perfectly clear up front, if you are a socialist pinhead who thinks you deserve a $15 minimum wage or worse a guaranteed income and government funded (meaning your hard working neighbor funded) health care; YOU WILL ABSOLUTELY HATE THIS BOOK. And that is why you are a pinhead.

I love, I Love Capitalism: An American Story, by Ken Langone, a longtime Wall Street investment guy, who helped raise the capital to found Home Depot, simply because the title says it all; this is an American story! The son of a plumber and a school cafeteria worker, Langone didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he did grow up with something you can’t teach; drive, determination and a work ethic that pushed him to rise above while other lagged behind.

This guy is all about the hustle and his stories about pulling himself up by the boot straps is the stuff of legends. I live in Central Pennsylvania and loved his stories about attending nearby Bucknell University and some of the things he did, hustling to make money. Some will whine about Langone being a braggart, but he has earned the right to toot his own horn because no one handed him anything, he mastered the grind and won.

While there are certainly no guarantees (income or otherwise), to me this is a great book to inspire your kids to be BOLD, to aggressively take chances and quite frankly to work hard to get what they want and achieve big things. At the end of the day isn’t that what makes the American story great? If you’re waiting around hoping that someone will hand you success, you will end up angry and empty handed.

Excellence 101

The Road to Excellence: 6 Leadership Strategies to Build A Bulletproof Business – David Mattson (Sandler Training)

It really shouldn’t be a secret, but it all too often is; excellence doesn’t just happen it is a process that is built brick by brick and step by step. It also doesn’t happen by accident, it happens by choice and by detailed planning.

It is that planning process that is the focus of Sandler Training CEO and President, David Mattson’s new book, The Road to Excellence: 6 Leadership Strategies to Build A Bulletproof Business. Clearly Mattson taps directly into the countless hours of training working with a wide range of businesses and organizations to draw on not only the best practices they have developed, but also the trends and common mistakes they encounter when advising and coaching these folks.

Mattson boils down leadership to a set of a half dozen strategy areas he labels the Six P’s-

• Planning – like everything else, excellence starts with planning; I say the word plan so often I start to worry that it starts to become wallpaper to the folks I coach. You have to spell it out that this is the most important, cornerstone piece of the success of any business venture.
• Positions – the organizational structure you design can make or break your business.
• People - they truly are the building blocks of success and the crumbling bricks can cause the failure.
• Processes- good things don’t occur by happenstance; leaders create the repeatable steps that build success by having the processes in place.
• Performetrics – what gets measured gets repeated if its working, if it doesn’t measure up, it gets fixed or tossed.
• Passion – my favorite question to ask leaders is “what are you passionate about?” Great leaders not only have passion, they know how to engage their team so they have the same passion and drive to succeed.

Recently I have spent a lot of time and energy focusing on employee engagement/satisfaction and the impact it has on business. Too many folks don’t understand that engagement starts on day one; whether it is a new employee or someone shifting to a new position in your organization. Mattson’s chapter on the onboarding process is worth the price of the book. He serves up easily actionable steps in an amazingly short section that will have immediate impact on your turnover, your employee engagement and your success. Ask yourself the simple question, “What does your first day look like?” This is not something you can leave to chance or the team to make work, it takes a plan, a process, perfometrics…are you seeing a trend?

Get Out…What You Put In

The Go-Giver Influencer – Bob Burg and John David Mann – (Portfolio)

A couple of definitions to start out:

Thoughtful – Showing careful consideration or attention. Or, maybe more importantly- giving consideration for the needs of other people.

Influence – The capacity to have an effect on the character, development or behavior of someone or something.

I have been blessed to be in a position to influence. I have always tried to guide my family members, co-workers and the folks around me with the simple phrase, “you get out what you put in.” I am often asked about why I spend so much time and energy, two commodities in short supply, working with community boards, organizations, students and more. The simple answer is that I get out more or get back more, than I put in. The payback I receive in both satisfaction and treasure, is substantially more than I put in.

To me that is the message the bestselling duo behind the Go-Giver series of books, Bob Burg and John David Mann spell out so well in their latest entry, The Go-Giver Influencer. The pair distill the insight down to the Five Secrets of Genuine Influence that they spell out in the story.

Five Secrets of Genuine Influence

    1. Master your emotions

    2. Step into the other persons shoes 

    3. Set the frame

    4. Communicate with tact and empathy

    5. Let go of always having t be right

Like so much of what goes into truly effective leadership these five secrets boil down to what amounts to, at varying levels, communications skills; not just leadership communication because they don’t draw the line to separate leadership and personal communication. The great secret here is that you can put to use these “secrets” in any relationship you may have, be it in the workplace, your family, as a volunteer or member of a community.

While I admit to never being a big fan of the parable form of leadership learning; I tend to lean towards actionable steps that I can put to work today, The Go-Giver Influencer is a truly learning experience that will guide to a more fulfilling work place, family life and community.

Hacking YouTube

Ultimate Guide to YouTube for Business – Jason R. Rich (Entrepreneur Press)

The numbers are gaudy; YouTube, the streaming platform delivers 1 billion minutes of streaming content to more than 1.3 billion active users on a daily basis. That bears repeating; 1 BILLION minutes to 1.3 BILLION users, per day. So how can you as a business owner or entrepreneur tap into that power and influence and grow your business?

The answers come in the form of Jason Rich’s second edition of the Ultimate Guide to YouTube for Business. Rich does a nice job of breaking down the nuts and bolts of using YouTube into easy to understand, digestible chunks that you can implement with just the right amount of planning. Yes PLANNING. Just because the numbers have a great allure and you will want to dive right in, I think Rich does the right thing by getting you to develop a strategy and set measurable goals for using YouTube.

I have labeled it running around the room, others have called it the shinny object syndrome; the reality is too many businesses skip the planning phase and try to jump straight to recording something on their IPhone that they can post today and they end up wondering why the stupid YouTube doesn’t work. Forget about becoming a “YouTube Star” and focus on getting the right plan to reach your customer with the right message.

Once you hit that, then it’s time to focus on what is the best vehicle to deliver your YouTube message. Rich delves into a variety of formats that have been successfully used and how to figure out the best fit for you. Then he tackles all those technical things like recording and editing and the hardware that is appropriate for your needs. Despite what you may have heard, it’s not all free! Rich lays out the differences in the hardware and how to best put it to use.

The resource list that Rich provides at the end of book is worth the price of admission; dynamic and covering all of the bases it will prove to be a HUGE time saving hack for cutting down the time from planning to concept to streaming.

All the Action…No Bullsh*t

Don’t Bullsh*t Yourself – Crush The Excuses That Are Holding You Back – Jon Taffer (Portfolio)

Let’s face it, you’re busy…I get it. So when you tell yourself that you don’t have time to read another business book; let me warn you in advance, time or a lack of it, is one of the excuse categories that JonTaffer, producer and host of Paramount Network’s (formerly Spike TV) Bar Rescue program, rails against in his new book, Don’tBullsh*t Yourself – Crush The Excuses That Are Holding You Back.

That is one of the great things about the book, you don’t have to slog through the entire book to get the gist of what Taffer is talking about. He breaks things down into a very actionable format serving up a summary of the problem/excuse categories in a bulleted and shaded list in each chapter, one category pre chapter. Then he provides a bulleted list at the end of each chapter he dubs the Don’t Bullsh*t Yourself Busters.

The categories are easily relatable and you will find yourself shaking your head in agreement, acknowledging that you (and I) have used these xcuses at one point or another in our careers. Fear, knowledge, time, circumstances, ego, and scarcity are things that everyone can relate to…and if you claim otherwise, stop bullsh*ting yourself, you know it’s true.

So what are you waiting for? No excuses…no bullsh*t! If you think you need more, Taffer provides a boatload of real world examples from real people who have overcome these problems/excuses and how they went about tackling them. Often the examples are worse than anything you and I have encountered. These examples tie in well with the to do lists and the steps you can start taking today.