O MANNY's

Unless you have earned my attention, you are not worth my precious time. 

Lately, everyone seems to have a strong stench of desperateness ... trying eagerly to share their expertise, their opinions on LinkedIn groups, guest post on Forbes, literally anywhere that can help them get noticed by the “pretty girl”. In this context, the pretty girl is the potential customer. Unfortunately no matter how good or terrible your content is ,it doesn’t entitle you to be engaged. I’ve taking the liberty to share some tips to help improve your chances of engagement.

You could share content on every social media network in the world as much as you want and as frequent as you want, even buy the endorsement of LeBron James and it will not mean anything if no one really wants to listen to what you have to say.



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Take Personal Responsibility

Practice & Excel

You can’t be average in your field, or in your knowledge, to truly break free from a competitive world.  You either got it or you don’t got it. Think of how many real estate agents are in your city which ones would you take advice from in an emergency? Obviously, the top performing, most successful, most fair and trustworthy ones.

Therefore to be heard you need to make the tremendous effort to practice, practice, practice, apply, and improve . Talent doesn’t mean shit if you don’t improve.

Experience Is Useless

Millions of people have more than five years experience cooking for a family of four but could they suddenly cook in a restaurant? A tiny few would be fine however restaurant pace, and processes are different. You could have 10 years experience having sex with your wife does that mean you are more than qualified for adult entertainment.

Lots of people have an acceptable level of “Expertise Comfort” and simply stop trying. They just stay good enough to avoid current challenges. Continued improvement, exposure to new experiences, takes a lot of self motivation, time and know-how. And the reality is experience is stagnated if you don’t update.

Reflect And Ask For Feedback

I never claim to know everything about building or managing a growing founders community or about marketing however I never stop learning,analyzing and monitoring my performance.

Common questions to ask: Is this activity getting me closer to my goals? Why am I performing this activity? Are our processes working? Is content unique enough or do we sound like everyone else? Are customers, fans, prospect openly engaging us?

Pick Your Mediums

Speak at Small Events or Start One

No one earns great success without paying the price. So go and earn your connections, wisdom, skills, respect, etc by starting small. Even way before Sidney Crosby ever got into the NHL, he started small. Make sure you take on a tough path and not the path laid in gold.

Work With Organizations & Network

Work with organizations’ leaders, editors, workers , founders, influences to help them achieve their goals. Strong chance you will eventually get what you want. When it comes to networking, it’s best to go have a good time & make new friends.

Go Teach

• Find a way to educate others about something that maybe your prospects never could learn. Like for a example, teach them how to make their own beer brand if your company sells small production customized beer. You could use your blog, Youtube videos, Skype, Google Hangout,  seminars, webinars, offline events.  A video or book can demonstrate to potential journalist, TV Networks, Conference organizers that you could be great asset.

• Taking the time to speak your mind when ever you get the right opportunity whether that's at a cocktail parties or just among friends or networking event..

• Do some consulting work within the industry or variety of organization so that you begin to establish tangible proof of your expertise and accomplishment.

Build Your Credibility

Start Building Your Brand & Credibility

A great way to start is by using the many free tools like Facebook, Linkedin, twitter, word processors, video editors software, graphic design software, spell checkers, other writers material, etc to begin to create your branding and just jump in. 

One thing of advice, the best thing is to be yourself. Find a way to constantly enjoy building your brand and credibility because success never happens overnight. Do you think the music artist, “Drake” woke up one day and said I’m going to be a rapper / actor. Start by clearly defining what you want in life and business.

• Assess the current and future market, industry issues and start a discussion with peers.

• Find out what it takes to be a creditable asset and not just a want a be amateur.

• Building credibility takes consistency accept for Donald J. Trump. Oh...I think he’s always been a person you either like or hate, or hate and like. In my opinion, it’s best to be progressive and not be trapped in a box.

• A good first impression is always a good start whether that’s your appearance, your body language, your word choices, your tone, your actions, your association, your attitude, etc.

• Take the time to figure out what image do you want to present to the world. Be thoughtful who you associate with. My advice, associate not by status but by character. Because a billionaire in the 21st century , post 2008, might be running a ponzi scheme, ..Madolf.

• Be thoughtful what political or religious stands you take. It’s your show you might as well be in a Hollywood hit.

• Learn the art of selling yourself.

• Take the time to serve others.

Great Content Best Practice

We Reach

If you are part of an organization, it is crucial that you truly understand the market, industry, demographic, personas, lifestyle, income, occupation, roles, priorities, challenges, etc of your potential audience. You will waste a lot of time and resources if you haven’t done your homework or continue to update your data.

We Learn Differently

Most people sometimes prefer a certain type of content over others because they are either strong visual learners, are audio, are text, or hands on learners. So it’s very important to try to mix it up if you can. As you spend more time with your potential customers or potential users you might gain more insight into what would work best

• More and more tech companies have adopted the use of videos to demonstrate their products and what problem they solve as a first introduction tool.

• When it comes to text, you want to play with small number of pages for some situations and lots for other situations. For a quick insight to LinkedIn’s Sales Navigation tool they have a two page explanation of their sales navigation features and benefits. When it came to their Social Selling eBooks they went in-dept to explain and demonstrate ways to achieve great performance. It was more than ten pages.

• There are many variations of ways to present content, or information so don't be afraid to experiment.

Delivery A.K.A Distribution of Content

Hollywood has a distribution mechanism to get their movies to the audiences. I’m not 100% sure how it all works. It’s probably no different from retailers who buy goods from suppliers. My point is that if people don’t hear, see, smell your existence they aren’t really going to consider buying what you sell.

Distribution of content might be through your own social media pages, your employees network, your friends and family, paid media, etc

Provide Extraordinary

In a world were almost every single human being on this planet has a presence on Facebook, has a email account, has a smart phone, you might want to find ways to break free from the noise with extraordinary content.

And the only way to do that is to be  what I call, “relevant creativity”.  Creativity for the sake of creativity is great for experimenting but for final production it requires discipline to do what is necessary and keep out the unessential.

Try maybe presenting a different perspective.

Titles Need Strength

When you look at the front of a newspaper, or a website, most likely you are looking at text that’s meant to grab your attention. You never start reading the body of a document.

First, you scan it for something to grab your attention.

Your headline is a crucial key to getting the response you desire so take the time to strategies your title.

Attention Span

Human attention span, it seems, is heading towards matching that of a goldfish which is nine seconds. So what this tell us is we need to simplify our messages, our visuals, our design to get users to take a certain action.

Content is A Means To...

Hollywood movie studio don’t spend millions on a movie so they can entertain you and your friends. They spend to create an invaluable product that you are willing to pay for and get entertained.

Give people actionable information along with your content on how to: obtain, download, call, respond, comment, act, engage, buy, sell, apply, share, etc in exchange for money, email address or simply to promote your brand.

Be Search Engine Friendly

The way most people discover information is still primarily through search engines. Whether that's Google, Bing, Yahoo, or your website search engine it is very important you optimize or find ways to increase the probability that people will find it. Popular keywords could help. Even unpopular keywords could help you find a niche audience.

People want answers to their questions and concerns, make sure you are doing everything you can to be the source or one of the key source for information. And one of key provider of solutions.

Provide Source Reference

The more significant you become the more effort is needed to ensure what you say is valid, or from a creditable source and you are not just making up facts.It’s important that any statistic you state can be verified.

Quality facts and sources builds trust with readers. The worst sources can permanently damaged careers or your organization..

Shake The Tree

When was the last time you took notice of a tree being a tree. I bet if it had a bird nest in it, or if your cat is always in it. Sometimes a little tolerable tree shaking keeps life fun.

Basically, step out from the typical statuesque material but remember to stay relevant and focused on your objectives. Get readers thinking and asking questions or maybe start a movement.

Content With Images

Every newspaper and magazine rarely present an article without a image. An image relevant to the headlines which will lead you into investing time to read the heading, the first few paragraphs and then the whole article. They’ve got you. It also makes your content more sexy.

Keep Updating

Developing and managing content, distributing, analyzing content is a commitment. It’s a commitment to stay relevant and significant in society. When keep satisfying people, then the whole machine turns into a spiraling wheel...one user likes your content, they tell four people, then those four people tell sixteen people and eventually you are a frigging blogging superstar. Or increasing the leads in your business pipeline.

One key message, depending on your audience’s standards,..take the time to do it right the first time.

Content For Mobile

Most people are not trying to read a full ten page plus eBook on their phones. It’s all done with quick scans. So having more visual is more practical and effective. If you post text on your blog or anyway that likely will be consumed on mobile, then you need to turn all that text into bite size without overwhelming the user who just might abandon the content, ignore your call to action, etc.
Don’t be afraid to ask your current readers for their feed backs.

Thank God For Bullet Points, Layout & CSS

IF it weren't for these features, a lot of content would be very messy. Imaging reading a newspaper, or an online article and every main heading had a different font type, different size, different
character spacing,...it would be a lot like a child’s coloring book. So format it. Bullets are useful to emphasize points so someone with little time can get to what matters faster.

Use bold for lines or words that you want people to notice.

CSS or Cascading Style Sheet., as a way for Web developers to define the look and feel of their Web pages.

Winning Engagement

The Why Read Statement

Sometimes headlines, images, or the presence of videos might not be enough to tell them to click or read so you might want to tell people briefly what it is about and why it is important. It’s like telling a friend why she should go to a particular event. You can a why read statement in any part of your post or your content.

Vary It Up

Like sex with your wife, husband, or partner, it does help vary it up. With content and engagement it does help to change up your positions. You could do long content, bold content, controversy, stupid, fun, amateur video, professional video, invite others, try a different color, go informal, go quick and dirty, etc

Content With No Expiry Dates

Actually this will depend on your available resources. If your organization or yourself can produce content that stay relevant to trends, no matter how frequent change occurs, then go for it. If your “how to...”material is still relevant twenty years from now then awesome. I personally think that's a lot more efficient.

Sprinkle A Little Emotion

Everyone loves engaging content that triggers or compliments an emotion in us. So instead of the usual essay like blog post try adding catch phrases, emoticons, descriptive materials, entertaining images, video, etc

Share Relevant Content

However always be thoughtful what you share. When you know what your audience likes it’s much easier. Share insights gained from a business trip, networking event, dinner with co-workers. Remember no one is putting a gun to your head to share your sex video. Think both short term and long term about what you share.

Chat & Read Comments

Having a loyal audience is a great asset. It’s like having a great wife or husband. They have chosen to be with you. They have chosen to follow you. So if you want to keep them, make sure you are listening and communicating with them. They can reach you through your social media or website or through tools like “Skype”.

When it comes to comments, read through them. You might gain more insight into whether you might be on to something. So acknowledge “Likes” “Re tweets” “InMails” “Comments” “Thumbs Up” and the occasional negative reviews.

Practice Good Backups

Sometimes just simply hosting your entire brand or existence on a reputable web host or cloud service provider is not enough. So diversify, like establish a presence in multiple social media networks, make regular secure online and offline backups of your notes, take snapshots of your social media pages, websites, so you have reference if you need to rebuild.

When it comes to passwords, a few common tip: never use common phrases, people’s names, address, phone numbers, less than eight characters, do use symbols like “#” or “%”

Measure, Analytic, Data

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter all have data on your audiences. It can tell you where they are from, when most people are online interacting with your page, demographic. You might gain insights on personas if you are willing to scan their profile.

Create An App

Everyone seems to be in love with mobile and mobile app experience. So you might want to consider creating an app that’s relevant to what you do and will be invaluable to your customers. The complexity and cost will depend on your idea and features.

However remember that you are competing with thousands of others to be on someones phone and to be the number one in usage.

Art of Sophisticated Images

What I mean by sophisticated images, is that, there’s a huge amount of science and psychology research that can tell you what different colors mean to people, how hints of sexually might be considered offensive, how different ethnicity observe a picture. I believe I read it somewhere, where if you give an American a picture of an apple tree with dogs in the background, the American would first notice the apple tree but for a Chinese they are more likely to focus on the whole picture, the “Chi” of the picture.

(Please look this up because I might have explained it okay or just messed it up. I will look it up myself and update this in the future). 

• The color of your call to action can also influence whether someone will click or not click.

• Also look into sizes, tone, HD image, etc

• Don't be afraid to experiment to see what will work for you.

See What Others Are Doing

How else will you get better if you don’t take the time to see how others are doing something. The world is full of ideas. With the internet you can even obtain information on anything for the price of nothing. And that's awesome however not everyone leverages the internet well.

Use Labels & Tags

It’s always important to categories, label and / or tag your content strategically. Why? Because for people to find what they are looking for, you must make it easier for them to find it. No one searches for years to find anything on the internet unless it’s so rare.

And it helps improve the experience. And if you, the author, are looking for something you will know where to look.

Different Action Calls

This one will require some experimentation because not every call-to-action will work in every circumstance. Take the time to look up possible CTA.

Fill Out Your About Page

Everyone whats to know it’s safe to do business with this organization. It’s safe to talk to this person. The best way is to give a unique presentation of who you are, why are you doing this, what do you hope to gain, what are your values, where are you going with this venture or blog, etc. Who are you partnered with?

• It will give them something to use to connect with you. And the more genuine and sincere you are the better.

• Make changes if needed on a as needed basis.

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