How Not To Follow Up After a Conference

I’ve been attending blogging conferences since 2007. Through conferences I’ve been able to meet some amazing people. However, through my own ineptitude I’ve not done a great job of following up with everyone that I’ve met. The photo above is an actual box that I have filled with missed opportunity, missed connections and missed business opportunities. Some business cards are over 3 years old. Might be a little late to follow up with those folks. So here is my surefire guide on How to Screw up Follow Up.

Step One – Collect cards like Pokemon
Some conference attendees are whipping out business cards and collecting them all like crazy. I’ve been in a group of people having a great conversation and then someone comes up and hands you their card out of nowhere. Will you remember that person at all? Will you follow up with that person? Most likely not. So, the key to follow up is to actually meet people and talk to them, make a connection and then exchange cards. You do not have to collect them all. More meaningful connections make for much better follow up.

Step Two – Glance at the card and shove it in your pocket.
Taking a business card and shoving it in your pocket after a cursory glance will be a way in which to immediately forget the person who gave it to you. When someone hands you their business card take a good look at it. is there something interesting that you can talk to the person about? There should be something on that card that you can ask a question about. People love to talk about themselves so give them a chance to do it. So don’t just take the card and put it away, try and make that mental connection, if you don’t then it is unlikely that you will actually follow up.

Step Three – Try and remember everything in your head.
When you are at a conference you are going to meet so many people and trying to keep everyone straight in your head is an incredibly futile task. After you meet someone and take their business card you should make some notes for yourself. Make a few notes directly on their card. This will give you reminders as to who the person is when it comes time to follow up.

Step Four – Go home, put the cards in a box and hide it away. You’ll get to them in a few weeks. Really, you will.
If you stick everything into a box and leave it there waiting for a the right moment to hit you to follow up then you will never do it. The box above has three years of cards that I was going to follow up on in a couple weeks. As you can see that never happened.

So How Do You effectively Follow Up?
When you get home take a stack of 5 -10 cards, open up your e-mail program and enter all the card info into a new contact. Also write in the notes that you made about the conversation that you had with the person. Then write them a follow up email reminding them about the conversation that you had and how much you enjoyed it. Repeat until your giant stack of business cards are gone. Do this within 2 weeks of the conference just not the first day you are back unless you can schedule the e-mail to go out a day or two after the conference. Many people are dealing with their own thing and playing catch up the moment that they return from a conference so don’t get lost in the shuffle.

Additional Tips.
When you add the new person as a contact put them in a group for that conference so you can pull up everyone that you met at a specific conference. Make sure that you add in notes that you want to remember about that person, likes, dislikes and the like.

Hopefully your conference experience will be a fruitful place to make meaningful connections with great new people.

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Keyword Winner – Targeted Keyword at Your Fingertips

We already know that blogs are a winning formula for any business, but you can’t simply expect to throw a blog up there and hope for success. Instead, you need to focus on producing quality content, then leveraging social media, seo and wordpress plugins to make that magic happen. A new wordpress plugin called Keyword Winner will soon be released from my friend and fellow blogger Daniel Lew.

What Can Keyword Winner Do For You?

The end goal of this wordpress plugin, is to get you more traffic and better rankings in the search engines. How is does this, is by helping you with writing your blog post titles and other key points to getting that extra edge in the search engines.

With so many of us focusing on paid advertising, it’s always important to never forget about the BILLIONS of free targeted traffic that is out there every day in organic search results. Keyword Winner can help you get there.

While the product hasn’t officially launched for sale yet, many beta testers and bloggers are seeing the first results of what Keyword Winner can do. To give a better idea on what Keyword Winner can do for you, check out this promo video.

Make Money with Keyword Winner

Right now Daniel Lew is doing an amazing job of getting pre-launch promotion for his Keyword Winner wordpress plugin, and he’s still looking for more! The launch is going to be big and many people will be ready to buy when it becomes available. This leave a big window of opportunity open for you to cash in. Join the Keyword Winner JV program and you will earn 50% commissions on top of a bunch of bonus prizes.

Be sure to check it out and sign up to the mailing list where Daniel will show you how others are already creating review sites and getting ready to cash in at launch time.

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Announcing the Prose Theme for WordPress

You may have seen recently that we merged StudioPress, creator of the powerful Genesis theme framework, into Copyblogger Media. Why did we do it?

I can sum it up for you in a single phrase: because we’re control freaks.

With Genesis, we saw an opportunity to create WordPress themes that were tailored exactly to our customers’ needs and desires.

We could incorporate the features that are most important for content-rich sites, the expert SEO you insist on, and the security to keep your sites as safe as possible.

Brian and I worked closely with Genesis founder (and our new partner) Brian Gardner on a new collaboration. A WordPress theme designed for those of you — bloggers, copywriters, consultants, and content marketers — who in one way or another produce great content to make a living or part-time income.

I’d like to introduce you to Prose.

An elegant minimalist design

The first thing we knew was that we wanted the design to support your content, not fight with it.

Some themes make great use of animated widgets, or are designed to highlight striking imagery. Or they’re great for e-commerce, or building a corporate brand.

And Genesis has terrific themes that do all of those.

Prose is something different. It’s all about words.

Your words.

It’s simple and elegant, so it doesn’t distract. But it has enough design sophistication that it never looks amateurish or “fly by night.”

Like the perfect little black dress, it doesn’t call attention to itself … it just makes you look amazing.

Point and click design controls

But just because you may not be first and foremost a designer, that doesn’t mean you want to commit yourself to a single rigid design mold.

Writers are creative people, after all. And we knew you’d insist on being able to change some key elements yourself, without “breaking” the overall clean, designed look of the theme.

That’s why we built in point-and-click design controls into Prose. They let you control site colors, typefaces, font sizes, and other critical elements of your site design. Instantly.

Do your readers want a larger font size? That’s just a few clicks away, starting right from your WordPress dashboard.

Want to try a different column layout for your site, or to change the look of your subheads? Takes less than a minute. And if you don’t like it, it’s a few clicks to change it back again.

You can change how your links are styled, how tall you want your header to be, and dozens of other key design elements.

And you don’t have to know any CSS, HTML, PHP, or any other letters. If you can point and click, you can customize your site design.

Search optimized and powered by Genesis

You might have seen that Genesis isn’t just a WordPress theme, it’s actually what’s called a theme framework.

So my first question when I saw that was, What’s a theme framework?

The first thing you need to know is that when it comes to web design, form and function need to be separated.

In other words, how your web page works (like the code that Google looks at to find your content and how to rank it, or the security that keeps evildoers from hacking your blog) should be separated from how your web page looks.

Why?

Well, in the first place, Google is a big fan of clean code. The Google “bots” are sophisticated, but they’re only so smart. Clunky, junked-up code can confuse them — and if Google gets confused, they won’t give your site the ranking you deserve.

In the second place, the web evolves. Those “back end” elements always need to be up-to-date. Security evolves, SEO evolves, WordPress evolves, and your page function needs to grow with those things so that everything works the way it should.

But the last thing you want is for your carefully designed web page to suddenly look completely different because you updated your WordPress theme.

That’s the beauty of a framework. When you click the button to update Genesis, it automatically takes care of all of those security and SEO issues for you. But it doesn’t touch the design of the page, because that’s handled by “child themes.”

OK, so what’s a child theme?

The theme framework is all about how the site works.

A child theme (like Prose and 27 others from StudioPress) is in charge of how the site looks. The colors. The layout. The typefaces.

The child theme controls the “look and feel” of your site. And the exact same content will have a very different feel depending on how that content gets presented.

The nice thing about child themes is that with the Genesis framework, you can change them in just minutes.

That means you can take a funky site with a handmade flavor, like the Genesis Bee Crafty theme, and in about two minutes you can give that exact same content a sleek professional gloss by switching to the Enterprise theme.

And you’ll never touch the important “behind the scenes” code that makes your site work exactly the way you want it to.

The biggest security hazard for most blogs

Unfortunately, bad guys are everywhere, and blogs get hacked every day.

The most common culprit? Bloggers who haven’t updated their theme or their WordPress installation because they’re worried it will mess up the look and usability of their sites.

Outdated software is a major security hazard. In fact, Brian Gardner told me that one of the reasons he developed the Genesis framework in the first place was to make updating his own sites one-click-easy.

When it’s easy for you to update WordPress and your theme framework, and you don’t worry about anything breaking, you won’t put it off.

And that keeps your blog (and your readers) safer.

Get Prose + Genesis today

Pick up Prose with Genesis today and you’ll get:

• Prose’s point-and-click design controls to create the exact look you want
• A great-looking theme that puts the focus on your content
• All the SEO and security benefits of the Genesis Framework
• Unlimited updates and support
• The ability to use Prose on as many sites as you like (no developer surcharge)

Find out more about the best WordPress theme for writers and content marketers here.

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Keyword Winner – Awesome WordPress SEO Plugin

Keyword winner is a cool new SEO plugin by my friend Dan Lew that is about to open to the public in a few days. This thing is really interesting! I seriously cannot wait to get my hands on it!

What is Keyword Winner?

Keyword Winner helps you get better search engine rankings by assisting you to write your post title (and other things) in a way that will get you as much search engine traffic and have the least amount of competition. Basically, it helps you get more traffic with little extra effort on your part.

From the website:

Keyword Winner makes writing posts and ranking high in the search engines so much easier, no need to write different headlines in Google to find the best one based on its competing pages and search trends, it’s all there at your fingertips in your blog post admin!

Awesome stuff! That thing does exactly what I do... except I do it manually... so I seriously cannot wait to get my hands on this thing!

Check out this video promo from the pre-launch page:

Affiliates For Keyword Winner

Dan has not yet launched his SEO wordpress plugin but will be launching it very soon. If you want to get in on the action, I suggest you go join his JV page and get ready to promote it as soon as it launches! I think it's going to sell like hotcakes.

A lot of the top bloggers are going to be promoting this so the sooner you promote, the better your chances are at getting some sales!

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What’s the Best Way to Contact You?

Last week I was speaking at the Performance Marketing Expo and one of the questions for the panel was “What’s the best way to get in contact with you?” and another was “How do I get the attention of big affiliate marketers to promote my products?“. I thought both of these were good questions and wanted to expand on this subject through the blog post.

Here’s my response and how I would answer the questions.

“What’s the best way to get in contact with you?“

Honestly… if you aren’t using email or AIM instant messenger, you probably won’t get in touch with me. I rarely ever answer my cell if it’s an unknown number. If you send me a text, I’ll get right back to you. For me it’s just so much easier to reply by email, instant messenger or text than having to get into a full conversation over the phone. Many people are phone people and love to talk… but I’m not one of them. This seems to be a growing trend among many affiliate marketers.

“How do I get the attention of big affiliate marketers to promote my products?”

This is an interesting question and can be broken down into two parts; how to entice big affiliates, and how to get their attention. Many affiliate manager just don’t get how the affiliate world works. New affiliate manager will expect all affiliates to want to join and promote their program, but it’s anything further from truth. If you are going to want super affiliates and high volume web sites promoting your web site, you need to cater to them. This means building custom landing pages, branded web sites, higher commissions or anything else the affiliate / site needs to deliver leads. After all, that big affiliate or web site that you are desperately trying to get to promote your web site… they probably have a good idea what works and what does. For big time affiliates and web sites, it almost always comes down to what makes money and what doesn’t.

Now let’s talk about how to get big marketers and web sites attention. How many emails do you get every with a new network or affiliate program saying “we have the best offers and highest payout!”… I get a ton, and I know you do too. These are the types of emails that just go unread and unnoticed. You will get no where with template based emails sent out at random and hope for success. Instead, take some time to send a formal email and make it exclusive and worth the time to read. Another great way to grab the attention of a big marketer, is to find something they are interested in, and just send them a gift. Yea… it may sound like a bribe, but it works! If someone sends me a new iPad, a gift card or even just something simple cheap and simple, but is focused on something I’m interested in… you got my attention. It’s the time and details others put in, that gets my attention.

So…What’s the Best Way to Contact You?

That was my take on how I’ve conducted business and contact with thousands of people over the years. Other people love the phone and never want to respond to email or text messages, then there are others who are the complete opposite. No way is right or wrong, and it’s all based on preference. The end results is what is driving results for you and your business.

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How to Use Storyselling to Boost Sales

This guest post is by Johnny B. Truant, of JohnnyBTruant.com.

When I was in high school, I witnessed the most impressive sales job I have ever seen.

One afternoon, the entire student body was called to the auditorium for an assembly. Nobody knew what the assembly was about. We were just told to attend.

The presenters were two guys, dressed casually. As they began, instead of telling us why they were there, they started telling us jokes. They told us a few stories, too—funny stories involving their own families (who were as clueless as our own, since we were teenagers and knew everything), and stories that empathized with us about how ridiculous school was and made gentle fun of our principal and teachers. We liked these guys. They thought like we did. Their stories were interesting and fun. We settled in and relaxed.

We stopped caring why we’d been called to the assembly. Someone had made a mistake and had booked pure entertainment, but we weren’t about to complain.

Halfway through the presentation, the mood of the two guys up front changed. It was like a sneak attack: it was on us before we knew it was coming. Suddenly, the presenters were talking about AIDS. And abstinence. And how it was bad to drink a lot and do drugs. It was all the stuff that adults usually try to talk to teenagers about—the stuff teenagers usually roll their eyes at.

But we weren’t rolling our eyes. We were listening. We’d been transfixed.

Instead of saying AIDS was bad, they’d tell us about the girl who we’d met in one of those funny stories toward the beginning of the presentation, and how she got sick after contracting HIV and died.

Instead of telling us not to drink and drive, they told us about the kid we’d heard about earlier, but now the tale turned to him being in a wheelchair for the rest of his life after being hit by a drunk driver.

When 1200 high school kids filed out of that auditorium at the end of the assembly, nobody was jaded, skeptical, or mocking the message we’d been told. Most of the kids who streamed past me were silent or crying.

Those presenters came to our school to sell us on the idea of being careful, and making smart choices, and staying safe—all ideas that teenagers usually aren’t even a little bit interested in buying from well-meaning adults and parents.

But because they did their selling through stories, we’d bought it all.

Persuasion starts with a story

When you blog, you’re often trying to convince people to do something. You want them to start reading the post. You want them to read until the end of the post. You may want them to buy a product or a service, or sign up for a newsletter or RSS feed. You might want them to leave a comment, take a survey, or be convinced of your point of view.

To convince readers do anything at all, you have to sell them. And one of the most powerful ways to sell is through a story—I call it “storyselling.”

Stories are disarming. Stories interest people on an entertainment level first, which causes them to lower the guard they usually have in place to keep people from pushing things onto them.

Back in high school, at that assembly, we didn’t want to be told anything contrary to what we already believed to be true. We were having fun, and nobody knew better than us what we should be doing. Teenagers are the hardest people to convince of anything—the hardest sale any presenter will ever try to make.

But these guys succeeded because they entertained us first. They got us to drop our guards. They got us to like them, and relate to them. And after they’d done that, when it came time for them to “sell,” we were defenseless. We never had a chance.

Four ways to sell your ideas (and products) with stories

Want to give storyselling a try? Here are some things to keep in mind as you do so.

1. Tell a story that demonstrates a need for what you’re selling or advocating.

The goal of storyselling is to cause the reader to recognize a need for a certain course of action (or a certain product or service) through allegory. Rather than explaining rainforest destruction, tell the story of your trip to stripped plots of land. Instead of outlining features and benefits of your new workout plan, tell the story of how you used to be overweight and how you developed the workout that got you thin.

2. Show, don’t tell.

Always try to lead your reader to conclusions by demonstration rather than by beating them with brute force persuasion. You know who was great at this? The ghosts in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. They didn’t tell Scrooge about how his life would stink if he kept doing what he was doing. Instead, they took him there and let him see it for himself.

3. Keep it relevant.

A common mistake with this approach is to string out a long tale that may be a great story, but which never gets around to selling the product or idea at hand, or loses the audience before it does so. You always have to keep your main “selling point” in mind, and keep bringing the story back to it. It isn’t just a story—it’s a story that shows the reader why they should do X or buy Y.

4. Be honest.

Everyone has a real, true story, and every product or movement has a reason for existing. Somehow, you became convinced to get involved, so it’s your job to pull that desire and motivation out, and to use your own story to convince others. There’s no need to make anything up—the truth always sells better.

Give storyselling a shot the next time you’re looking to persuade. No matter what you’re selling, you may just find that telling a tale will get you past the skepticism of many more readers than a bulleted list of benefits will.

Johnny B. Truant is the creator of Storyselling 101. (He also builds websites.)

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