State is the most important part of any marketing exercise.

Catching people when they’re low,  leaving them high – or keeping them on that emotional pedestal when they’re ready to fly.

As a smart marketer I know that you have finite opportunities to help turn miserable lookers into bookers. I know equally that when people are smiling they are receptive, perceptive to your message and ready to give you almost limitless ways to make them bring out their wallets and sing your song.

I found myself realising this only too sharply one wet winter’s morning when I was frankly at odds with the world. I’d been trying to book a holiday for weeks and at my lowest ebb, I found what would days earlier have been the perfect escape. I started seeing all the frayed edges, questioning why this was a better deal than x. When the fog cleared the next day and I was ready again to tackle life with positive mental attitude, I reflected on that opportunity which no longer existed.

Hit us when we’re happy

We’re all so different, yet emotions unite us. We know when things push our buttons, in the right or wrong ways, and rarely do we take a moment of pause to consider how we would see the opportunity in front of us in a different light. It’s especially important to meditate on aspects of life that look impossible when we’re in a negative frame of mind: Rarely are they, and often a short walk in the sunshine is enough to restore us and our perspectives to the good times.

Marketers can help provide those good time vibes by themselves thinking about the message they want to convey. Noone wants to be sold to, but we all want to feel like we belong, like someone’s out there scratching our itches and solving our problems.

Be of value with your values

So be clear, always, on the values you espouse; the culture of your organisation; the benefits, and not the features, of everything you provide as a business. It’s the difference between a sale and a fail, and more importantly, of building a cast-iron relationship with a prospective customer that will last the test of time and potentially grow your business by generating powerful word of mouth marketing among those now-delighted consumers.

It’s your time; it’s your business. Don’t worry, be happy – and make sure your customers are, too.

When it comes to blogging, I’ve heard it all this week. In one article I discovered blogging is losing ground with the big guns, and later – in the same story – that it isn’t.

Are we blog-fatigued? Or is it simply that some of the Fortune 500 types are falling for the quick-win hype of social networks? Is the real problem that people simply don’t understand that blogging first came about as an electronic journal of one’s life achievements?

Blogging has the same problem as podcasting – either people understand it, or they think they do, and they don’t. Either way, few people think of blogging as a valuable asset to the businesses of today building for tomorrow.

Note, term. Because the proof of concept is in the incredible content of many blogs that is literally powering business success, with few other marketing strategies involved than common sense. Businesses that weren’t even designed around a blog, are adding blogs to their daily duties and growing customer communities who realise that there are real people behind the brand, and they like what they read and see.

Marketo did a pretty good job explaining what blogging really is, when it launched a social media month for its staff. That blogging needs to be planned for, not just adopted as a knee-jerk reaction to what the competition is doing and saying.

It’s all about marketing

I bet the one thing that stuck out for you from that presentation, as it did me, was the importance of having a reason for every single article. We can’t afford to waste time on wishy-washy content that doesn’t add value to the customer relationship, and that applies both to us and our customers themselves.

• Businesses that blog generate 67% more leads than those who don’t
• Define the objectives for your blog well in advance: Is it to generate sales, brand recognition, SEO, raise your customer service standards, start meaningful and lasting conversations with your customers, build a community around a new product range – what? Have a commercial motive, not just a desire to follow the pack
• Create a content calendar in advance – regularity and consistency is key to building authority through blogging
• Work with other companies and be generous with your links – and you can expect the same in return (most of the time). It’s networking!
• On each blog post consider this: What is the action you want to trigger? Convince, persuade, lead, inform?
• Blogging is all about value, and it’s all about providing solutions to your customers’ needs.

Blogging doesn’t only work in isolation: It can provide the stimulus for you to create your own presentations (and have people like me share them with lots more people, thus amplifying your brand), to start a podcast or web video series, create eBooks and white papers, and so on.

If you haven’t already got a blog, start one now. And if you don’t know where to start – get in touch and let’s get to work.

It took me a long time to grasp the benefits of the landing page.

The first time I was exposed to such a thing, I was aghast: It was a mess of yellow highlighted text, reams and reams of paragraphs, a badly-formatted stock photo of someone for whom a gushing quote about the seller and their wares had been manufactured.

It was like reading The Onion – the parodied features where they use the same pictures all the time, with different names attached. And like an onion, those landing pages used to make me cry.

Sadly some haven’t moved on from that time in 2001. I’m looking at one right now. I’ll spare the creator a reddening but here are some more questionable characteristics doubtless featuring in the snake-oil merchant’s guide to landing pages:

1. Create urgency by abjectly lying about the number of items you have to sell/seats available at your webinar. I’m all about urgency – it’s one of the tried and tested methods of converting lookers to bookers. But using strikethrough to suggest you’ve sold a bunch of products, there are only a few more left, and then hard coding the same ‘remaining’ figure into the flow of your landing page where it’s been since you launched it is just dumb, dumb, dummy!
2. Why bother creating a favicon for your landing page? Use the one your CMS shipped with for added amateurism. People will admire you for not having bothered to dot the i’s. They know you’re so busy you don’t have time to do things properly – and it gives them a taste for the quality of the stuff they’re about to buy, probably for less than $98.
3. Use at least 5 different font styles. People love it when their eyes lock up due to your infatuation with colour and shape. Why stop at red Arial when you could use pink Comic Sans? Way to go, Helen Keller!
4. Always use Comic Sans: I didn’t just pick that one out for effect. Comic Sans oozes professionalism, respect, trust and authority. And if you don’t sell much stuff, you’ll probably get snapped up by a small boy to write his class newsletter in exchange for moist lollipops.
5. Write at least 10,000 words, because no trees need be chopped down through your rampant screen real estate megalomania. The rules of content don’t apply here – brevity sucks. Same applies to value. Just churn, baby, churn. And the Chinese thought they had it down pat with their burns. That’s nothing compared to the retinal torture of your wordy ways.
6. Make the same point at least eight times. Ideally 15, unless you contract RSI en route. You’ve heard the mantra about people having to read something five times before being convinced to buy? Well why not avoid the need to have to touch them on five different occasions, showing you care and are right for them, by reiterating it at least eight times in the same piece of copy? To hell with the science of marketing!
7. Over-promise and under-deliver. The more crap you write, the more people fall under your spell. Because you’re spouting such nonsense, you can write and write and it only takes you a short time to churn it out. By the time they come to buy your sub-standard gear, they’ll have forgotten what you promised, anyway.
8. Always offer a lifetime guarantee because loads of people will forget about it – and you’re sure as heck not going to remind ‘em once the spondoolicks have hit the PayPal!
9. The magic figure is $97. Doesn’t matter what you’re selling – dog collars for frisky men, or dog food for cats, or a two-page eBook on the benefits of wearing a dress on weekends (hell, I bought it) – you have to ship at $97. $97 is the clearest indication your product probably isn’t worth that – but the people who buy it, don’t know that! Guess what the price tag ends in for discontinued lines at PC World and Currys here in the UK? Yup – 97p! Just a coincidence? Of course!
10. Seal the deal with a raft of ‘fantastic’ bonuses available for the first 5 people to snap your stuff up. Psst – no-one can even buy your stuff without the bonuses, but people are hardwired into wanting more for their money so they’re bound to fall for this caper. Barely got enough genuine value in your stuff to merit writing a single chapter of a book? No problem! There are loads of free ebooks floating around the web you can tag on to yours (that should be free) to make it look like an irresistible offer. You’re really rocking the party now, sister! Oh, and incidentally – if these bonuses are only available to the first five people, yet you’ve already sold 35 (you said it yourself earlier – remember?)…
11. To your unfeasibly large ‘Register Now’ icons, smartphones are a curse, and their owners, the work of the devil. The second best people are those with 27″ monitors – and your favourites, those using projectors or with Digital Outside Of Home screens or the owner of the electronic billboards in Times Square and Piccadilly Circus. These are the only people who can see your natty Register Now buttons without scrolling. The bigger the icon, the bigger the fool who buys, the bigger the ego of the seller. And so the wheel turns.
12. One of the lady ‘endorsers’ has to look like Joan Collins. Or Phil Collins. Just like in those 70s porn flicks (I have been told) where the music sounded a bit like Englebert Humperdinck, but wasn’t (I’m pretty sure about that…), you should use pictures that have a celebrity hint to them so people will feel more comfortable about being ripped, er, sold to. Social proof. Peer pressure. And your buyers will be so mesmerised by your sort-of-might-be star testimonials they’ll completely overlook those folks’ names, written in 8px Comic Sans, which is just as well: When was the last time you met a guy called Mike Rowe-Fowan and his wife, Chris Paquet?
13. Make sure the landing page doesn’t live up to expectations. Like this article.

Don’t worry – I have a great article coming up soon showcasing great landing pages. I have one in mind at the moment, and if you have some to share, drop me a line and let’s get them in the hall of fame!

You have a few ways to get in touch with me. As well as the usual getWAM Twitter account, and our Page on Facebook, there’s a WordPress plugin called What Shall We Write About Next by Vladimir Prevolac that squirts a text box in at the bottom of every post.

Today someone decided to use that feature (thanks, anonymous!) and ask this question:

What if you have the five Ps (or at least you think you do), but the public couldn’t care less?

First of all, wow. You’ve got down pat Planning, Perseverance, Passion, Personality and Prowess – and you don’t know what to do with it?

Heck, you’re our dream client!

There isn’t a single industry in the world today that isn’t crying out for a disruptive innovator, one who champions the needs of both customer and business and marries them up using a groundswell of client feedback and an army of creative ideas.

I mean that. Whether you’re a greengrocer or a printer of greenbacks, you have an abundance of opportunities to position yourself as the natural go-to guy or gal.

With your Planning, you can create an amazing strategy founded on consistent delivery of information that you create, curate, or aggregate (the latter being a hybrid of the two former methods).

With your Perseverance, you can see it through to the point where your expertise is shining brighter than the sun on a particularly hot and cloudless day. I’ve also found the sun is incredibly bright on the crispest winter’s morning, too, which is a bit weird.

The Passion that keeps you up at night thinking and jotting is the same burning desire that people gravitate towards and empathise with. It’s the passion of leaders that provokes action and stimulates change.

Thanks to your Personality you provide folks with a unique perspective on any issue or idea that comes your way. There’s no such thing as noise and interference when you combine your Planning with Personality to provide a hyper-focused take on a problem at hand that turns an objection into a sale. The same Personality can break through clouds of commerce like the aforementioned sun to provide your customers with clear minds and a desire to do business with you. It’s personalities that make us all different, setting us apart through our one-of-a-kind insights and experiences.

And finally it’s the Prowess, those 10,000 hours of mastery that make us experts in our space, that garners the triple totems of respect, loyalty and trust to guarantee us an audience, community and tribe to last the test of time.

So what do I do?

Reader, I want to to take a bold oath: That from this day on, you stop keeping your passion a secret. That Kryptonite? Get rid of it – it’s weighing you down.

Take stock of everything you know, and have ever written, on the subject that makes your heart beat faster, and I want you to create a plan. Grab a Google Spreadsheet, and simply add days into column A to take you from now to the end of this year, a day in each row.

In column B, I want you to write down four words describing a subject you want to share.

Column C, think of all the methods available to you. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blog, white paper, ebook, presentation, focus group, Google+ Hangout – heck, if you collect stuff, even Pinterest (just don’t get me loving that).

Column D – forget it. Today is when you start methodically championing your cause. You’re the expert – you’re that disruptive innovator that we’re all rooting for.

And be the best. Respond to questions, always. Listen and engage, constantly.

And deliver. Always deliver. Because if there’s anything we want, it’s concise content, riddled with value.

5Ps. Be the best.

Why is it that so few of us are willing to take advice, yet all of us need it constantly throughout our lives?

We seek that beacon to guide us towards successful outcomes. So is it shyness, bravado or ignorance that stops us in our tracks when it comes to publicly seeking counsel for our own good and gain?

Thankfully the internet has made it easier than ever for us to covertly research answers to all of our questions.

Sadly most of the information online is shrouded in irrelevance and noise, making it difficult for us to find exactly the solutions we seek.

With the semantic web no more than a pipe dream, us businesses with sustainable success in our DNA need to change that.

It’s time for us to step up and to become lighthouses for our industries and future success through your content marketing strategy. For your clients, prospects, suppliers and staff.

There are four reasons why we need to look to the seafarer’s best friend to become the best content concierge in the land:

• Community. The lighthouse heralds land, and helps the inbound traveller navigate around the craggy outcrops and into a safe haven. As a business you have a duty of care to help your prospective clients decide on where to spend their money. There are problems to be solved, and thanks to your powers of listening and analysis, you are providing this crucial demographic with answers to questions – some of which they never knew they had.

  Equally your responsibility is to advise on the products of, and activity in, your niche. You are the arbiter and the intermediator. A business that understands its role as a content concierge also acknowledges that it is a barometer of its industry, the information it provides a litmus test for the customer to decide whether now is the right time for them to transact, or later.

  NerdFitness is a fantastic example of a business devoted to helping its customers navigate the waters during unsettling times. Getting fit is one of the hardest challenges we have to face, and you’ll find answers and solutions to all of your fitness-related problems in that one place.

• Influence. Who doubts the lighthouse in the data it delivers? Equally when you reveal the completetruth about your products, your industry, you demonstrate an indubitable and inherent expertise – and confidence.

  The web is full of truths and untruths and your role from a marketing standpoint is to offer transparent, legitimate and relevant content. The more accurate and trustworthy your information, whether curated, created or aggregated, the more respect your brand garners, and the more solid the relationship between you and your customers of today or tomorrow.

  Blogging expert Chris Garrett has proven time and again what it takes to influence a customer into taking an action. His newsletter provides case studies of clients’ challenges – and how he’s helped solve them.

• Inspiration. The power to influence customer behaviour is something that every business craves. As we all question our role in helping customers make decisions, those brands and businesses that can actually play a role in influencing the transaction are revered. Those organisations who consistently deliver customer-centric, trust-generating content are those first in line for sustained success.
• Sales. A business is an organisation that exists to generate profit. Let us not deceive ourselves: Every action we commit to has to have transactions as its outcome. The lighthouse leverages perseverance in pursuit of profit, and its content marketing strategy reflects that.

Like I said, this is all about building a better business. If you’ve started reading Sharing Superheroes, you’ll already know how crucial it is to gain an authority standing in your industry. Replicate the lighthouse and you’re set.

If ever there were two great examples of juggling your time to the best of one’s abilities, they are:

1. Being a mother
2. Writing a book and running a business

With very little experience of the former, other than seeing how much of a handful I was to mine in the lines on her face, I can only speak to the latter. It is indeed a circus act of a challenge, this writing and running lark.

As is running a business, alone. I reflect on all the good advice that Gerber gave in metaphorical terms – that of a pie, my most treasured object on earth.

Hungry? Stop reading…

Think, for one moment, of your business as a pie.

A really good pie needs the twin talents of both baker and chef. First you need to blind bake the pie bottom, and that requires the discipline of one who understands the texture of pastry. Then the ingredients need to be lovingly mixed and assembled, which is very much the domain of the cook. Finally the baker comes back on the scene with his buttery duvet and in a short time, the heavenly treat is ready to serve.

Gerber would say you should fuss less about the filling, and obsess instead about touching the pastry top. Have confidence in the ingredients and the way they all work together, and providing the pastry is crisp and delicate, the pie will be a success.

Bollocks.

If you’re a modern entrepreneur you need to be sure that every component is just so, if only to demonstrate to your cohorts that you care. Everyone agrees that you can’t give someone a task to do if you wouldn’t do it yourself, if you don’t show them.

And so we encounter the delirium-inducing time sap syndrome.

There’s a way in, and a way out

Managing your time is a dark art, one rarely shared (except by Sharing Superheroes in the world of project management).

I’m sure resources such as Basecamp and the forthcoming Wunderkit will go someway to helping us be where we’re needed most, at the appropriate moment, but this isn’t a technical issue.

What’s truly needed are two of the 6Ps of smart marketing upon which Sharing Superheroes’ success is built:

• Planning
• Patience

If people only spent a little more time planning, and a little less time doing, the world would be a safer place for us all. And in the world of business, being prepared – just like a Scout – means you’ll have more time to dance from post to pillar, and back again.

How to build that business

The ways of planning available to us are many, and we simply need to focus on those that we gel with best. I use the full Google Docs suite to keep abreast of every situation, most often the Calendar and word processing tool, with Wunderlist as my day-to-day task list synced across all my computers and smartphone. Some folks use Evernote but I find it a waste of time.

I use a Google Spreadsheet to both plan my content and social strategies to ensure that I’m delivering the right message in the right place. For Twitter, I harness the Buffer application (now built into the Twitter web interface) to give me the best chance of being where I’m wanted at the right time. As a fallback I also work with Hootsuite which allows me to schedule Tweets well in advance – and if you buy the Pro version, at a measly $6 a month, you can also upload a spreadsheet filled with a week’s worth of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn updates in one fell swoop.

Patience is the ability to not get stressed and fussed by having to do a kazillion things at once. The finest Sharing Superheroes have mastered the mind like water approach, that means you don’t get sidetracked or hassled by ancillary projects when you’re focused on the one in front of you.

To help with this, executing the right things in a tidy, methodical order, I use the free Pomodairo application that takes over your time management by showing you a pulsating clock complete with loud ringing feature to tell you to move on to the next thing. You can also set priorities for certain jobs, to make sure everything is in order.

Here’s one more thing we all overlook: Self-congratulation. A stretch, a walk, a run, a game, a chat, a bun, a smoothie. A pie, even. Because it’s your engine you’re running on overtime, and it needs care and attention to keep it firing all its cylinders.

And finally, something that supercedes everything that’s just been said. A recital you should introspect upon each and every day, because it’s all that really matters. It’s what makes Sharing Superheroes, true superheroes. And it’s this, from Inc.com (10 Questions That Create Success):

1. Have I made certain that those I love feel loved?
2. Have I done something today that improved the world?
3. Have I conditioned my body to be more strong flexible and resilient?
4. Have I reviewed and honed my plans for the future?
5. Have I acted in private with the same integrity I exhibit in public?
6. Have I avoided unkind words and deeds?
7. Have I accomplished something worthwhile?
8. Have I helped someone less fortunate?
9. Have I collected some wonderful memories?
10. Have I felt grateful for the incredible gift of being alive?

I’m thinking I might offer some Sharing Superheroes secrets of social next – would that be useful to you?

The world of tech was uproarious when Google declared it was getting personal with your search and unleashing Search, plus Your World.

It was a clever move, timing the launch as every tech blogger was hanging out at the Lenovo stand at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in ‘Vegas.

It’s a hugely controversial decision by Google, which is doing rather a lot of things right now that make me wonder whether its ultimate intent is to be a content, rather than search, company.

Search Plus My World

So what’s changed? Well, for starters, unless you switch it off Google now delivers ‘personalised search’ based on what other people in your Google+ ecosystem are reading and voting on.

All very good news if you have a disparate and diverse set of buddies: Not so great if they’re all of a certain inclination or bias, in which case you have to question the legitimacy and relevancy of search results.

Not only that, but because Google is swallowing hard on its all-out goal of getting as many people hooked in to Google+ – its newish social network – as possible, you’ll notice some pretty interesting and leaning things happening on the right hand side of your results page.

Search for ‘music’, for example, and only those artists with G+ will appear there. Search ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ and rather unexpectedly his G+ profile occupies prime-time real estate, even though there are precisely zero updates there. Perhaps if there was less bias and more focus on relevancy, we’d have Zuck’s Facebook profile further up the page?

You can argue that Facebook and Twitter are not sharing their ‘firehoses’ of information – literally, the data generated by its users – with Google, which makes things rather challenging from an archival and repository-generating standpoint. But that doesn’t help us, the consumers.

What does this mean to me?

As I’ve said before and I’ll be preaching in my book (soon!), there is no more valuable place to offer your most valuable content than on your own website. It’s the only rug you own on the world of the web, and noone can pull it from under you.

If you’re not paying for  something, it is you, and not it, that is the product. The Googles, Facebooks and Twitters can switch off tomorrow and you have precisely no recourse on the content you’ve squirted in.

So yes, your website is bigger than Google. It means more to you, your customers and your peers than Google ever could – and nothing will move away from your favour to change that, anytime soon.

• Further reading from Wired on Search, plus Your World.

It was while I was writing the third chapter of our forthcoming book (giggly excited about this; I may have bored you to tears already about this so please have the mascara replacement session on us) that I realised two very important things:

1. Elevator pitches are tough. Unless you get your customers to do it for you: Next time, that’s my preferred option
2. I hadn’t really nailed down ours. That ‘less than 10 word introduction to what Word And Mouth is, does and stands for’.

Conscious of being ruled out of the next series of The Apprentice on that basis, I decided to help unmuddy the waters and explain why I created Word And Mouth.

As a journalist I’ve always worked on finding the story in every situation. Because in every situation, there is a story.

And the same rules apply to businesses. Every business has a story. Every business has thousands of great things to share, from the moment it was conceived on a beermat, to the moment that is now – and beyond.

But let’s face it, running a business is in itself taxing enough. We rarely take pause to reflect on how far we’ve come – and even if we do, it’s but for a moment or two, at town hall meetings or preludes to Christmas parties.

So you leave all that value on the table, and try every single marketing method known to man, oblivious to the relationship-building potential of every thread of information you’ve learned, every product you’ve launched, and each and every experience your business and personal life has presented at your door.

Word And Mouth finds the value in your business and sets your story free to be shared and delivered in such a way that customers can’t resist passing it on.

It’s much more than communications.

The traditional marketing and communications companies will tell people, or give you sales ideas for, what you tell them.

That’s great if you want a one-off transaction with no longevity in the client relationship.

But imagine if you could build a relationship founded on trust, loyalty and engagement – on being fascinated and intrigued and involved with the brand, rather than merely sold to.

That’s the power of sharing everything. And Word And Mouth unleashes the content in you to make that possible.

For us it’s about discovery, recognising your innate talents and putting them on the world stage. We’re pretty good when it comes to communicating those strengths for you, but we’re also keen on the whole ‘teach a man to fish’ philosophy, too. Because the people who know best about your business, are invariably you and your team.

Word And Mouth builds better businesses. It’s all about the value in you, and creating a strategy founded on sharing the magic that is the DNA of your business, to create those meaningful customer relationships.

That’s the value in you – and a guide to what we do…