One of my favorite “classic” marketing tricks is the referral. Getting a referral is so important to a company because it has a very good chance of actually bringing in a profit. This is the case for because a referral means that your company is being talked about on a level of trust. The person getting the referral trusts the person giving the referral. This yields better results than if someone was just looking at a website.

If you think your company could benefit from more referrals, it’s time to start making this a priority. Consider a few of the ways your company can increase its number of referrals in the New Year:

Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Number of Referrals in 2012

1. Co-Marketing – Part of a co-marketing strategy is giving referrals. For those who are unfamiliar, many companies create partnerships with other, complementary companies for marketing purposes. For example, if you work at a day care center you may want to have a partnership with a pediatrician. If you refer customers to his/her practice and they refer their patients to your business, you will have an entirely new audience very quickly.

2. Social Media – You don’t need to resort back to traditional phone systems if you’re hoping for a referral. Contrary to what some may believe, old marketing tactics can coincide with new age methods. If you love social media, be sure that you have sharing buttons for all of your readers. This makes it easy for customers and clients to send an online referral to all of their friends and family.

3. Compensation – Even though giving a referral is very easy, people will be more likely to do so if there is an incentive. If you can give someone five dollars off their next visit or a free consultation just for bringing in a friend, your referrals will skyrocket. This is probably the easiest way to bring in new customers and clients (while making your existing clients happy).

4. Simply Ask – It’s never a bad idea to remind existing customers and clients that referrals are appreciated. This can be as easy as reminding them when they leave—just put it into your “goodbye” spiel. If you have a good relationship with a specific customer, ask them directly if they know anyone who may be interested. You might be surprised how something so little can go such a long way.

5. Testimonials – Gathering testimonials is great because it allows those who want to help to do their part. Many customers will tell you they simply do not know anyone in the area or anyone who would need your products or services. The solution to this is to ask for a testimonial for your website or brochure. Have them sign a document saying you can use their words on your website, and you’re good to go. This is an indirect way to give a referral, but a referral nonetheless.

In the end, people will not blame your company for trying to step up its referral statistics. It’s an inexpensive and successful way to grow a brand. In other words, looking to the past may benefit your company more than looking to the future in 2012.

Photo Credit: servicebusinessreinvention.com, mylot.com, blog.marketamerica.com

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to telemarketing. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including customer referrals to small businesses and entrepreneurs for Resource Nation.

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Word Choice

Mark Twain once wrote, “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” How true that is. There is a huge difference between telling someone that you demand they do something and saying that you would like them to do what you’re asking. Choose your words carefully so that you don’t aggravate people or unintentionally strike a nerve.

Vocabulary

It’s great to have a large vocabulary, but not everyone else does. Don’t use a complicated word when there is a simpler word you can use instead. You don’t want your listener(s) to lose your meaning just because you’re trying to impress them with your large vocabulary. Clear, direct words will help you get your point across much more precisely.

Pronunciation

It may seem superficial to you, but if you pronounce words incorrectly people won’t take you seriously. If you’re thinking of a word, but you don’t know how to pronounce it properly, then choose another word. Bad pronunciation of words makes you seem uneducated even though you may actually be quite intelligent. You can establish credibility with your listener simply by making sure you don’t mispronounce words.

Pace

Even if you’re really excited about something, good or bad, it does not do you any good to bombard people with a rush of words. The human ear and brain can only process so much information at once. On the other hand, you don’t want to speak so slowly that people think you’re belittling them or talking down to them. Speak with a natural, even pace and slightly raise your voice for emphasis only when you have an important point to make.

Avoid Slang

Slang words are like fads; they come and go. Additionally, slang differs in various areas of the country and across different age groups. What sounds perfectly acceptable among your friends may not go over too well with your boss or if you’re speaking to an audience. Just like you wouldn’t use slang in formal writing, you shouldn’t use it while you’re speaking professionally or talking to someone you don’t know like a company representative.

Verbal communication is an art form, and like all art forms, you have to use the right techniques. When something is really important to you, it can be difficult to get your point across. Keep your emotions in check and remember that the better you verbally communicate your point, the more chance you’ll have of achieving your goal. The trick isn’t just to make your point, but to make your point effectively.

About the Author: Tony Smith is a full-time writer with a passion for communications and technology. He also enjoys writing about jobs in healthcare, personal finance, and industry.

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Even if you have a great product, you have to find ways to cut through the noise to get their attention, and even then, most bloggers are very apprehensive due to the constant battle they need to participate in against spam.

Network

The first piece of advice that just about anyone gets when it comes to promoting anything is to network, but if you are new, or even a reasonably well known person online with a new product to talk about, it can be very difficult to network.

Some might think that I had an easy time promoting PicApp thanks to the contacts I made while blogging full time, but you would be wrong. Most of the people I know aren’t really able to help because their blogs don’t fall within the niches that can really use or discuss PicApp, and so while I did have some help from friends, much of what I had to do was from scratch.

Find Thought Leaders
One of the best things that I have done in my attempts to get people to talk about what I am doing is to focus in on the thought leaders. They might not run the most popular blogs, but they sway the opinion of a group of people, and that is very valuable in building any brand.

To find them, go to blog directories, blog search engines, and top blog lists and look for the top blogs in the niche you want to gain exposure in. For the longest time, I contacted some people that I know well listed higher up in the 45n5.com/top100 list, as they are other blogs in the same niche as this one, and I thought I would have a better chance of them recognizing me, and as such, being easier to approach.

Ask, Don’t Tell
When starting out networking with people, if you want them to look at something, make sure you write in a passive tone, and ask them, rather than telling them. If you write your e-mail, instant message, twitter, or other digital message in a way that doesn’t sound friendly, happy, and interested in their benefit first, then most likely your correspondence will hit their trash bin.

Don’t Spam
Keep track of who you contact, and don’t contact them again. If they didn’t respond, they probably weren’t interested. If you continually contact them, you will just be seen as another spammer, and bloggers will rightfully call you on that in their blog, making you and whatever you are trying to get attention for look bad.

Don’t Pressure
Remember, even if you have the best product in the world, you need their help more than they need whatever it is you want to talk to them about. Bloggers don’t like to feel pressured into anything, and their spam defenses go on overdrive when there is an inkling of urgency or pressure.

Your communications should respect their time, their focus, and their busy schedule. If they are unable to participate, you shouldn’t be making them feel like it would be a mistake, but instead be understanding.

Make Friends

The biggest help that I received early on was from my friends. Even people who ran blogs outside the normal target audience of the PicApp service took up a call to arms for me. Some of them did it out of kindness and friendship, while others I traded with. I used my skills in writing, WordPress, and other things I know to barter with some of my friends, making it more of a mutual deal, rather than me just “using” them.

Nothing Wrong Reciprocation
Some people that I have talked to think that it is kind of rude that people only do things for others when they know they will get something in return, but this helps takes care of those in society who continually leech off the backs of others for their own needs.

To do something helpful for a friend may free up the time they need to do something for you, and it becomes mutually beneficial, especially when they have skills or resources you are lacking and vice versa.

Work Together Towards Mutual Goals
Pretty much anyone publishing content online has a goal. It might be a small one or a very large one, but if you can find ways to work together with friends towards a mutual goal, sometimes that is the sweetest collaborations of all.

I have worked with a friend before on a link bait that would highlight his site, but was published on my site. This gained me traffic, links and exposure, of which was then filtered through to him. It was a great way to help each other out and worked out beautifully.

Attend Events

There are so many conferences and events for pretty much any niche or topic, and participating in one way or another can really drive eyeballs to the work you are trying to do. You don’t have to be a big sponsor to have events pay off dividends in building a brand, but you do need to have some sort of presence at an event to make an impact.

Research Events
It can be really intimidating going to events for the first time, as every event is different. Each conference and event that I have attended has a different dynamic, audience, and sets of groups. Navigating these can become much easier with a little preplanning.

Will you need to bring business material, marketing handouts, technical information, or just some business cards, pens and paper, as well as a smile and a firm handshake? Bring the wrong things and you will be unable to market yourself or your products effectively.

Ask Bloggers in Similar Niches What They are Attending
One issue I realized early on is that there are more events and conferences than you could ever possibly know about, and they aren’t always promoted well, and so asking friends, network connections or even competition which events they are attending will help you build a list of events you might want to attend.

I can’t even list the number of conferences I have found out about thanks to word of mouth through my network connections, and most of them were only told to me once I specifically asked what was available or what they were planning on attending.

Contact Interesting Attendees and Schedule Meetings
To make the most of each and every event you want to attend, make sure to find out the guest list, and try to schedule a few meetings. There will be lots of networking between sessions, in hallways, and afterwards, but it can be hard to get two words in sometimes unless you set some time aside. I make sure to try to do this in a casual way with friends and network connections, but it is something I am still working on myself.

Making sure to set some time aside where the focus is completely on what you wanted to discuss can mean the difference between a memorable meeting and a quick in-the-hall discussion.

Ask

If you don’t ask people, you’ll never open up the possibility that they will say “yes”. There are many bloggers who I barely had a relationship with that I asked to look over PicApp and provide me feedback. Some decided to do it privately via e-mail, and others published about it on their blog. Both responses were very helpful, and were a big part of the upcoming advances in the PicApp platform.

If I hadn’t asked them, then I would not have had the information that PicApp needed and wouldn’t have been as effective in my job.

It never really hurts to ask, as the worst thing they can say or do is nothing. Even negative press through contacting people you don’t know well can be handled, and might point out things that friends and network contacts were too polite to say.

Conclusion

Getting people to talk about PicApp and the great things they are doing is definitely much harder than coming up with blog posts ever was, and while I think it is only getting harder and harder to stand out from the noise and get messages out their to the people and audiences you hope to inspire and connect with, I still believe that with patience, persistence, and planning, anyone can get their message heard.

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Holding graphic design contests has its own benefits and advantages. One of the most important benefits of holding such contests is that you will have a good number of graphic designs at your disposal so that you can start your own business of providing web design and graphic design to other websites as well. All the competitors of the contests will be sufficiently compensated of course. If they are sufficiently compensated for their creations they cannot exercise any sort of right over them anymore. Hence you can conduct your own business of graphic design. It is also for sure that such contests will attract good number of designers from across the globe. The good the designs the better it would be for the blogs or websites. Web design has an active part to play in the positioning of the website in the search pages across the Internet.

As a matter of fact web design along with methods like article marketing, forum posting, link building and other forms of organic traffic building methods is very vital as far as the search engine optimization techniques are concerned. Graphic web design is no exception.

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Blogs at this time were creating a whole community of both Internet celebrities and Internet brands that were parlayed into huge amounts of cash through advertising systems, and sales. Corporations started, very slowly realizing how important blogs could be to their businesses, but we are still on the cusp of this realization going global.

The reason corporations look down on blogs is for a variety of reasons stemming from the massive numbers of personal blogs, to the low barrier of entry.

Personal Blogs

For every successful blog making money, or helping get out a strong branding message, there are probably one thousand blogs dedicated to people around the world talking about their lives. From the perspective of the average company doing research on blogs, they’ll likely come across many blogs talking about their pets, family, friends, and children. This doesn’t convey to them the level of professionalism available in blogging, and thus gives them a reason to think of blogs with a negative connotation.

Spam

We have all seen them, spam blogs are the bane of my existence. They steal content, and they push out crud through the Internet. Companies doing research on any topic will come across at least one spam blog in their searches, and this type of republishing outside of the normal control of the original publisher might scare companies who want to remain in control of their message. Imagine posting an article on your blog and a spam blog picks it up before you realize you’ve made a mistake. You correct your mistake, but the spam blog continues to have the “old” article which makes your company look bad. Small, and simple for sure, but this has to be a concern for businesses going forward.

Power of the Message Versus Money Invested

How powerful is the message going to be compared to the time and effort put into the blog? Companies are used to press releases and the results that can be achieved from them, but what can they expect from their blog? How will it grow, change and evolve over time? Will anyone even care? Companies are always looking at return on investment, and there hasn’t been many case studies released to companies regarding the return on investment of a good corporate blog.

Low Barrier to Entry

If it is too easy, it probably doesn’t have value. I have heard both people and companies claiming that due to the low barrier of entry in blogging, there is little to no value in blogging. It takes almost no time to set up a blog, make it look nice, and start feeding it content. But what companies aren’t seeing is how long it took to get to this point with regard to the barrier for entry. There were companies creating blog software in hopes of lowering the barrier for entry for over a decade. The barrier started high, but these companies weren’t interested in the idea behind it back in those days.

Knowledge and Fear

Most companies just don’t understand enough about the blogosphere, and what it means to be a company participating in it. Because of their lack of knowledge, they are afraid of jumping in and making mistakes, not completely understanding that transparency is one of the key benefits of blogging that will help companies connect to potential customers on a new level of relationship.

Conclusion

Companies can get into blogging, and do amazing things with their blog, but they have to be brave enough to take the first steps, find people that can help them reach their goals in an efficient and inexpensive manner, and be ready to be transparent. Blogging can be an amazing line of communication and community building for any company.

This is one topic where I wish I had taken a psychology degree so that I could articulate better the factors that really go into each point, as I believe someone could make a whole career around the psychology of companies involvement or lack of involvement in the blogosphere.

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Now you have the chance to not only read online books but you can access any PDF file you download. The PDF to EPUB converter saves you a lot of time and effort by converting PDF files available to be formatted into your own electronic books reader. The great thing about this program is that the PDF still retains its original features, so you don’t have to worry about using a different program to read the file. In addition, the interface of the program is very intuitive. The design is so simple you can start converting PDF to EPUB right away.

The program features are very unique and allows you to save up on your EPUB’s memory space. Let’s say you only need to read the first couple of pages of the PDF file, you can set the number of pages that need to be converted into the EPUB just by selecting the specified pages. Also, if you are a multilingual reader, no need to worry about translating errors because the PDF to EPUB converter suits different languages, such as English, French, German, even Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

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After our messages, people started using the same tag for their Twitters, and other things, until we got to the event, and the organizers let us know that the hash tag should be #wct08. Despite this set back, I continued to push out as many tweets as possible under the one my cousin had created, and when Joseph Thornley took the stage, it only got more complicated as he announced that the hash tag for the event should be #wpto08. We then had three event tags on Twitter, for a single event. It was safe to say that many people were confused, and slightly annoyed.

Questions started circulating if people should just add two or all three tags to their Twitters so that they are easy to find. No one wanted their tweets to be ignored for the event, especially as it was a great bulletin board of communication.

Over time, thanks to my constant messaging on Twitter, and my work at converting others, the #wcto08 hash tag showed up on the trending list, as an event tag that was being used fairly often. The other tags not getting a mention at all, and so over the course of Saturday, messages went out with the #wcto08 tag at a rate of ten to every one message that included the “official” #wct08 tag.

The second day began with the same confusion, as it was stated at the start of the day that we should be using the #wct08 hash tag on Twitter, and ideally on all sites we post WordCamp Toronto content on. It then became apparent that, while we still had many supporters, the #wct08 hash tag might win the day. It quickly appeared on Twitter’s Trending list, and over the course of the day the two fought out for their spot.

Interestingly enough though, my cousin, a few others, and myself continued to use the tag that Mark had come up with, and we were the heavier Twitter users, so by the end of the second, and final day, I think we had created enough messages that the #wcto08 tag was pushed out at around a rate of three or four messages to every one that was tagged as #wct08.

I know this all seems silly, but the issue could have been fixed quite easily. Since the #wcto08 tag was trending higher, and faster, the organizers, instead of sticking to their guns, could have adapted and promoted the more popular tag, so that people didn’t feel the need to tag their messages with both hash tags for the event.

Next time though, I think the tag for the event will be chosen much earlier to avoid such confusion, but for histories sake, I want to say again that my cousin, Mark Wood, selected the Twitter hash tag that became more popular than the official one, at WordCamp Toronto 2008.

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I guess the biggest thing for me versus the things I have done over the last three years that are public is that I couldn’t immediately see the reactions of those taking in what I had to say, and so if they didn’t like it, I didn’t find out until afterwards, thus allowing me to remain confident.

Thankfully, I am on a panel, and so I will have others that I can rely on for the hard questions, but I feel that I don’t have anything amazing to bring to the table. I don’t make ridiculous amounts of money while talking about the food I ate for dinner, I haven’t published a book, nor have I built up the attention of a million subscribers.

As I write this, I am sure most of you are thinking that I will do fine, and I am pretty sure I will too, as the worst thing that can happen is someone decides to point at me and go “boo”, but I wanted to remind all of you reading, thinking that you can’t do what I do because I have something “special” that I am not special, but instead passionate, and fortunate.

If you want to make working online, in whatever capacity, your full time career, there are so many ways to get there. If you want to build your personal brand up to the level where you are asked to speak at events, there are so many opportunities to do that, so don’t be shy, instead, be passionate as passion is infectious and no fear of anything should stop you form sharing what you most enjoy.

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The first blog up for the critiquing process is this one: Reader Blog Critique : Xfep.com.

Kevin asked me what main issues I wanted people to cover, and so I gave him my insecure list of questions.

Please, if you have any opinions on this blog, jump on over to BloggingTips, and leave a comment. You have a chance at one in three $10 prizes, or a domain registered at eNom.

Thanks again to Kevin and everyone that comments over on BloggingTips.

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The Happy Feeling

My initial reaction was a positive one. Being contacted by a big company to see how I am doing is nice. Asking me what I am up to and if there was anything I needed was also very nice.

Of course the conversation didn’t end there.

The Upsell

After asking how I was doing, the gentleman from Godaddy let me know about all sorts of value added services that I could take advantage of for one nominal fee or another.

Naturally, I wasn’t very interested at this point, and it sort of tainted the phone call, changing it from a friendly connection into a sales call.

The Conclusion

I would have loved to have been given some free product or an ultra discount.

I didn’t find the sales call to be very high pressure which was very nice for someone like me, as I really hate the strong sales tactics that some businesses do.

Overall, I was left with a positive feeling. Godaddy didn’t have to reach out and contact me. I do business with at least four other domain registrars and none of them have contacted me for any purpose.

Also, being able to give feedback on a service to a human is something that is becoming an increasing rarity in our world today, and so I valued the opportunity.

Customer support is more and more important as we see and truly interact with less and less people every day and that is why, despite the sales angle of the second half of the conversation, I am still awarding a +1 to Godaddy today.

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