What I Learned Turning Off and Tuning In

Picture of me in a hedgehog onesie on a giant teddy bear from New Years 2016, photo by Jane West.

2016 brought a lot of learning and a lot of joy.

My biggest lesson of 2016 was figuring out how to serve myself first in order to serve everyone else sustainably. People had always warned me about "burning out" but I had never hit my limit. Creating the 2nd Annual Women Grow Leadership Summit in Denver for over 1,200 women was my greatest accomplishment. It was also what broke me.

Although I could have blamed external challenges for breaking me. I realized that all my external challenges were reflections of my own inner struggles. So I went about investing everything I had into working on myself. Yoga, meditation, books, dance, music, purpose-driven leadership, cannabis, psychedelics and the School of Womanly Arts were my practices. We found a new CEO to take over my role at Women Grow on July 1st and I focused on myself full-time.

Leaving the CEO role at Women Grow was the hardest transition I've ever made. The unexpectedly tough part of aligning your personal and professional purpose is allowing them to separate when needed. It took me almost three months just to stop thinking of myself and my role as one.

I ran away to play in Spain, speak in Berlin, camp at Burning Man, and work Symbiosis. I traveled 26 weeks of 2016. I learned a lot.

I learned how to love myself unconditionally. I learned how to stop using food to solve problems that food doesn't solve (and lost 30 pounds). I learned how to stop caring about what people who don't care about me think. I learned how to put myself first every day. I learned how to process dark emotions and self-hatred. I learned to stop over-thinking the past at the expense of being present. I learned I didn't have to be afraid of my full emotional range.

I took six months off for myself. The changes I've made to my mental, physical, and emotional health have just begun to benefit me. I'll be back at the 3rd Annual Women Grow Leadership Summit in a few weeks. I invite you to join me at the summit, Feb 1-3. It’ll be an experience like you’ve never had. Click here for more info.

Scroll down to see how I learned how to be in a museum, how to Burn in Spain, new psychedelic treatments, the final Summit at Sea, winning licenses, and at the very bottom, everything else I'm up to this year.

I Learn By Teaching

I perfected the blend of education, inspiration, and community that encourages women to take huge risks. Over 1,200 women gathered in the Ellie Caulkin's Opera House in Denver to hear 32 speakers, including Melissa Etheridge.

I Learn What Burn-Out Really Is

I was wiped after this event. I couldn't think. We tried to do long-term planning but we had exhausted ourselves and the entire team. It was impossible to follow up on this momentum. I'm so grateful to the so many of you who gave me space during this sensitive period to grow and recover. I was no longer taking care of myself and I had failed to care for my team.

I Learn How to Release

I Learn How to Be in a Museum

Being featured in the Oakland Museum's exhibit on Cannabis in California was a first. You sometimes feel like you're both predicting and making history on days like this. I'm grateful we got over a dozen women featured in this exhibit.

I wrote

You have everything you need to start. Every time you are waiting for another teacher, you are wasting time. Learn in practice, not study.

I Learn to Relax in Europe

Grateful to Bar-Keep for showing me the most diverse Burning Man event in the west. 2,000 Europeans gathered on a small plane in the Spanish desert for a week in scorching July to build a humble city and party down.

Grateful for the invitation to speak at Tech Open Air in Berlin. I got to debut my talk on "Clarifying Your Calling with Cannabis" to a packed house.

Grateful to edge pushers like Cindy Gallop on "Why the Next Big Thing in Tech is Disrupting Sex" if you want to know what's up after cannabis.

I Learn About Relationship...

Excerpt from More Than Two

Grateful for the many books I read on relationship this year...including American Savage, Goddesses Never Age, The Law of Attraction, The Art of Everyday Ecstasy, and More Than Two.

Learning at the Burn

Getting the bus tuned up before we leave for the Burn.

Playa-bound!

For my fourth Burning Man, I attended for 10 days and lead a camp of 35. Friends from across the world came. I learned to run my first electrical grid (with lots of trial and error). I found a pair of exceptional Tantra Energy Teachers and became enraptured with their workshops.

I Learn About Fear & Love

John Lennon and I share a birthday in October and this thought

"There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life."~ John Lennon

I Learn About Psychedelic Treatments at Horizons

The Horizons conference presented research on MDMA & psychedelics from celebrated universities...NYU, Columbia, John Hopkins.

Multiple studies showed patients experiencing up to 8 months of relief from symptoms with just one "magic mushroom" therapy experience. These "peak spiritual experiences" were leading to increased positive attitudes, altruism, and deeper development of social relationships.I was seeing that we had extended our physical bodies past our ability to fill our lives with meaning. Alzheimer's disease was preventable if we stayed mentally active and engaged. These patients showed how spirituality was actually a component of health, particularly at end of life.

I Learn Prototyping in November

I took Prototyping for Creative Innovation with Megan Goering, formerly of Google. We ran through prototyping techniques and tests until we could do them by habit.I wrote out dozens and dozens of business ideas and then weighted them on factors like start-up costs and market size. I began testing messaging of all the different things. The cannabis helps with ideation but didn't make narrowing down any easier.

I Learn About Sex & Sugar at Sea

On the eve of the election, I boarded a cruise ship for 3,000 "innovators" and we sailed out to the Caribbean. Marijuana was legalized in six states but we were all shocked by the Presidential election. We gathered to build new ways to a future we all want to live in. We workshop. We dance. We drink. We eat. We snuggle.

I attend panels like "Sugar is the New Tobacco" and learn from Dr. Dean Ornish that 86% of 3 trillion dollars spent in healthcare are spent on chronic care for mostly reversible conditions. We've created a food system, which externalizes all the costs of eating cheap food that causes illness.

Dr. Ornish reveals that "bad habits" are developed to deal with the isolation of modern life. He uses lifestyle as treatment by asking people to eat well, stress less, move more, and love more. He's found that fear is not a sustainable motivators for people to change bad habits. You have to fill the voids those habits leave with even more joyful and pleasurable motivators.

I Learn Good Work Pays Off in December

Grateful to the Women Grow community in the Bay Area celebrating two years.

Grateful for the dispensary license process in Maryland where two teams I had advised won licenses.

Get Free Press For Your Startup With Original Data

Getting traditional PR coverage is hard! As new startups flood journalists with lame press releases, how do you stand out from the pack? Will Flaherty of SeatGeek taught "Data Driven PR" at General Assembly today.

Startups have a treasure trove of valuable, propriety data regarding some aspect of their given vertical. When packaged in a digestible and usable format to the right journalists, it will get you mentioned. Although it may not be a love story about your company, it will get you more free press.

What kind of data do you have?

• Demographics about your audience

• Trends in your marketplace

What Your Data Can Lead To

• Print: Stories were created from data sent to individual writers.

• Radio

• TV: Since television is a visual medium, they place the highest value on giving them someone who is immediately available to be on camera. This means you need someone who can talk knowledgeably and is willing to meet a camera crew wherever local news crews are.

• Infographics: These are produced by SeatGeek and take about 15-20 hours to produce. You'll notice in their Final Four infographic that they partnered with Seamless to get even more interesting data.

How to Pitch Data

1. Create a couple of hypotheses around a topic that your audience might find newsworthy. SeatGeek picks a type of event and location to focus their analysis on based on which news outlets they want to attract. It's faster to chase existing stories in news (like the Super Bowl) and provide data to earn mentions. SeatGeek has also done well digging up deep data on an original story to get higher quality mentions.

2. Pull the raw numbers into something like Excel and analyze it while keeping an open mind for new findings.

3. Synthesize the trends you're seeing in the data. What are the changes over time, locations, etc. Write compelling punch bullet points.

4. Create a visual element (graph/infographic) to convey your data in a different and powerful way. (Don't forget to include your logo & URL on the graphic)

5. Push the pitch out to interested journalists, bloggers, and media members.

Building Your List of Media Members To Pitch

• Find the media members who are writing stories in your locale/vertical/etc. If you know one site that perfectly epitomizes the readership you're looking for, copy their URL. Then do a Google search for "related:URL.com" to see the sites that are similar to them.

• Most of the time, their email address will be listed on their stories or website. If not you can use a few tricks to find it.

• If they work for an organization with a common email structure like first.last@company.com you can use that. You can use Gmail tools like Rapportive to confirm your guess.

• You can search the journalist's tweets for their email address using sites like Snap Bird. Just enter the target's Twitter name and the search term "email".

How to Contextualize Your Data Points

• Comparison: How do prices/demand/profits compare to others or past? How do customers in your area compare to other areas?

• Superlatives: Most expensive/popular thing in X years.

• Trends: How is prices/profits/demand changing over time.

• If Statements: If you bought all components individually would it be cheaper than buying them individually? If you had bought this widget it the past, what would it be worth now?

• Use Google Alerts to track what are popular story topics in your industry.

Writing Your Pitch

1. Punchy, description subject line. Use an actual data point that will stand out to a journalist drowning in story pitches.

2. Personalized opening paragraph. Make it clear this isn't a stock email to hundreds of people. Mention your specific relationship with them whenever possible.

3. Crisp, clear data points. Write in complete sentences (that the journalist can copy) and bold the numbers you're pitching.

4. Always provide a link. Encourage the journalist to link to your site by providing a landing page that supports the story (hopefully a page that puts readers a click away from a transaction with you).

5. Give them a method to follow up. Make yourself available to provide more data or provide a quote. Will uses a Google voice number that forwards to his cell phone (which I thought would be great for scaling later on, if you want to have different folks answer at different times).

Check It Out

• OkCupid (a dating site) pulled aggregated data on their users to create buzz-worthy blog posts and earn press mentions in the New York Times.

• Yipit (a daily deal aggregator) has become the go-to source on daily deal industry metrics. They produce detailed data reports that they sell to the other daily deal sites and the financial community.

How To Create A Responsible & Effective Cannabis Brand

The first annual Cannabis Business Summit wrapped up today with an overview of how Cannabis companies should shape their brand and marketing strategies. Taylor West, Deputy Director of the National Cannabis Industry Association, led a session with Kali & Bridget from Agent 64.

Culture Movements Are Not Marketing Gimmicks

Bridget believes that Cannabis legalization is a cultural movement, which means you are now a part of the cultural movement.

"Culture movements define an idea on the rise."

We have a huge responsibility to shape how the public perceives Cannabis going forward. Unlike traditional product marketing, which starts with the product, Bridget encouraged the audience to define their cannabis brand based on the culture movement and not on the product.

Integrated Marketing

I believe in integrated marketing, where every touch point from the front door to the website is shaped by marketing. Bridget spoke about the importance of looking at every single customer touch point and making it consistent no matter where you're interacting with your customers.

Why Market Responsibly

1. It's The Right Thing To Do: We are building a brand new cannabis industry from scratch and we have the opportunity to be the example. Let's skip the bad marketing to children from industries that came before us (Marlboro's Joe the Camel).
2. Don't Screw This Up For Everyone: This is an industry that is in a very volatile position. Your work in the cannabis industry reflects on the entire industry.
3. The Medical Credibility of Cannabis Is At Stake: Unless you are in Washington and Colorado, you are marketing a medical product. When you don't market cannabis responsibility you are hurting the chances of people discovering or having access to the medical benefits of the plant.
4. You Need New Customers: If you'd like to grow your business, you have to start thinking beyond your current customer base.

"Think about customers not in your traditional demographic."

Think about marketing to women. Think about senior citizens. Think about health care professionals. At the very least–you need to not actively repeal these groups. At the most–you need to attract these segments to your brand.

Define Your Brand Promise

This is the most important thing you can do. Living and breathing your brand promise from CEO to budtender shapes your entire company.Build Your Golden Circle: Define why you do it. Then how you do it. Then what you do. Simon Sinek's TED talk explains exactly why you need to do this.

Marketing Strategies

This is no different than the marketing strategy process for most industries. If you haven't been through this process before, find someone who has to guide you.

1. Define your customer segments: Who are you going to talk to and what do they want?
2. Find the white space: Where is there opportunity in the market that isn't currently saturated?
3. Figure out what unique about your brand: What do you stand for that other's don't? What is truly important to you?
4. Define your brand promise: Notice all that research and thought you need to do before you could define this?
5. Pick your target profile: What is the age, income, gender, location, etc. of your target customer?

Customer Retention

• Customer surveys: Ask you customers how they heard about you. Why they choose you. Make sure you know what makes you different from your customer's perspective.
• Brand design: What does the design of your brand tell customers about you?
• Customer database management: Do you know who your customers are and what they're buying? Personalize your marketing to your customers exact needs whenever possible. Many companies wait until they are quite large to setup robust customer analytics, missing years of data that could reveal where and how they should have grown.
• Online/social media: This is an industry that was used to darker corners. Today you need to take control of social media and your public perception actively. Options for paid social media are limited but that may not last forever. You need to build community now.

Responsible Marketing 101

• Don't Market to Children: Perhaps the most important thing to remember.
• Don't Market Like Children: Put forth a face that is professional and polished. If you take beer as an analog to cannabis, remember that no one is ever drunk in a beer commercial. Sell your experience. Your experience goes far beyond "getting high".
• Don't Alienate 50% of the Population: You can segment your marketing without actively offending women. Women are actually more likely to have a chronic illness, more likely to try alternative medicines, and more likely to control a family's medical decisions. Women aren't decoration for your ads.

What They See is What You Are

No matter what you think your mission–what your customers see is what they will define you as. This extends to your logo, signage, employees, and more. You need everything that makes up your company to be true to your brand.

What They See is What WE Are

As an industry. All Cannabis companies are affected by the images being put out by the Cannabis industry. From legislation nationally to your home district, the marketing being done in this industry will affect how the Cannabis industry proceeds (or doesn't). You have the power to shape our collective future so we hope you take it very seriously.Photo from Barbary Coast MMJ Dispensary, San Francisco

Personalizing B2B Sales Relationships at Scale

Marketers think in terms of campaigns and touch points, whereas traditional sales people think about one-to-one sales calls. This conflict is being riled up by a few factors:

• Less selling involves in-person contact (more demos are online or remote)
• There's an increased volume of leads coming from marketing
• It's hard to hire more bodies to interact with them with all leads

Tawheed Kadar has solved for these conflicts by making each sales person a mini marketing organization with his 5x5 Method, which he spoke about the Sales Hacker Conference today. Oh and if you haven't guessed yet, his company ToutApp will help you do this.

The 5X5 Method

5 Pre-Planned Templates

These are the five touches a sales person will need to make with an inbound lead. These can be emails, phone calls, tweets, or LinkedIn messages.

5 Days/Weeks/Months Apart

Each touch is going to be 5 days apart. You may elongate the schedule but unless the prospect is super engaged, you don't want to overwhelm them with touches too close together.

5 Strategic Touches

You'll give a little bit and take a little bit over five contacts with the prospect.

1. Introduce yourself: First touch is simple, don't ask for anything!
2. Provide value: Again–don’t ask for anything! Just provide information that the customer will value. Not about your product but about their needs.
3. Offer help: Next you offer them help with a need they have.
4. Engage for feedback: Build rapport.
5. “The Ask”: Only after all these touches, do you actually ask to meet.

Is This Sales Automation?

Yes and no. You’re using your staff to run a drip campaign but with their active involvement so you’re building a better funnel that engages sales people. You don’t want these emails to look like designed marketing emails. The email should look personal.

Best Practices for Touches

• Automate when possible: You may want to automate certain inbound lead collection funnels.
• {{Personalize}} as much as possible: Make sure your email system pulls in multiple data points to personalize the email touch points.
• Use Engagement Data to drive next steps: Front-load leads that visit your blog or pricing page. If your prospect is engaging you online, your rep needs to skip waiting 5 days and call now.
• Constantly iterate and test new messaging: Someone on the team needs to be testing new subject lines and messaging to create the ultimate text.

How You Can Provide Value to the Client in Your Touch

• Use LinkedIn: Research who you’re actually talking to and what the people above your lead are asking them to do.
• Check Glassdoor for Employee Reviews: Are employees leaving? Can you offer help in retention? What do employees complain about? Do you solve for that?
• Check Indeed for Jobs: Hey it looks you’re hiring VP of Sales, do you want my lead list of VPs of Sales that I just interviewed?
• Read their Blog: “Gateway to the soul of the company.” Incorporate what they care about into your touches.

Will This Work In Your Organization?

Check out the ToutApp blog for more sales education materials.

Why Marketers Need To Inform Instead of Advertise in 2013

Creating ads is the minority of what I do as a Marketing Director in 2013. My most successful campaigns revolve around great content pieces that generate and educate leads at the same time. No longer is its marketing’s job to just deliver lots of eyeballs. We create materials that attract the right eyeballs and educate them en masse until they are primed for sales. Instead of our sales staff booking lots of information meetings with leads that may or may not be qualified, we qualify our leads with informative content that is cheap to deliver (and therefore easily scalable to additional markets).Here’s how to create informative content that delivers qualified leads that are ready to buy everything you sell, illustrated by examples from retailers and service providers around the country.Note: For simplicity, I will refer to what you are selling as a “product” but the same principles work for services and so on.

Teach Us WHAT To Care About

Every purchase has multiple elements that your buyer needs to consider. By teaching your audience those elements you empower them to become a buyer AND get to imply that your product addresses all potential concerns. Apple Specialist, Springboard Media, offers customers browsing their computer selection the Top 9 Mistakes to Avoid When Purchasing a Mac. Not only does the document offer good free advice to customers but it lays the groundwork for Springboard's staff to add-on accessories by mentioning concerns like data backup and warranties.

Tell Us Why You're The One Doing It RIGHT

Talk about how your product unique in the marketplace because all your competitors have changed but you’ve upheld a process that creates a better product. This is especially potent in industries that have changed without your customer’s lifetime. It’s easier to convince people who already reminisce about the past that the “old way” of doing things results in a more original, accurate, and superior product before automation and profit-sharing ruined craftsmanship. See how Heritage Meats, an artisan butcher shop that specializes in organic, locally grown and sustainable meat products, convinces us that what they offer is no longer available because he is the last trained artisanal butcher left in an industry dominated by supermarket butchers. The whole video is worth watching, but the butcher makes this point brilliantly at about 2:20 into the video.

TEACH Us Job/Life Skills

You will you create a wider audience for your product by educating a new group of potential customers. Remember to frame the title of your workshop/ebook/whatever from your customer's perspective.Also you'll get a better response if you make your audience feel smart instead of dumb, so lay off the abbreviations and assumptions.

Get Someone Else To Tell Us To TRUST You

Your audience is going to be skeptical of everything you say because you're trying to sell them something. At one client, I plan executive lunches where a customer tells his or her peers how they solved a common business challenge. Although their help implementing the solution is mentioned, the results are more credible coming from an independent customer instead of a sales person or case study. This is the same reason that earned press is more influential than any print ad in the same publication.

Partner Up for Double The Exposure

Is there a business that provides a related service that your customers also need (but you don't provide?) Get your message out to more potential customers by partnering up to create a piece that serves both businesses. See how Hubspot marketing software and SurveyMonkey created The Ultimate Guide to Using Surveys in Your Marketing to attract mutual customers. Your best bet is to team up with a business of a similar size with mutual interests. If one business is significantly smaller, the larger business might resent the smaller partner for having less reach. Also be careful not to tap businesses that you might soon compete with, I wouldn't be surprised if Hubspot adding survey tools to their package in the future and soured this relationship.

SCARE Us Into Talking To You

If everything else fails, humans are animals that respond to greed, vanity and fear. That's why CyberSource, a payment fraud detection service, gives a webinar on the most common fraud attacks on your business. CyberSource doesn't start out by telling you to buy their product, they teach their audience the complexity of the problem that their product happens to solve.

6 Ways You Haven't Used Social Media To Improve Your Blog

No matter how long you've been doing social media for, there are new tricks and tips coming out every day. Tip #1 and #5 were well worth the price of admission for my organization. Here are my notes from Austin Gunter's (Brand Ambassador, WPEngine) presentation on "Developing Digital Marketing (Social Media) In Your WordPress" at WordPress Camp NYC.1. No One Cares About What You Just Said On TwitterThink about your site from the perspective of a first-time visitor, they're looking for a reason to trust you. Stop using the standard Twitter widget to show the last few tweets you've sent (which could be awesome or random rants). Instead reconfigure your Twitter widget to display your account's favorites. Favorite great tweets about your organization and re-label your widget something like "140 Character Testimonials".2. It's Time To Make Sharing Your Content AwesomeUsing the standard Facebook & Twitter share links are LAME. It's time to do some custom development for elegant sharing solutions. Instead of a tiny Pinterest button above every post, Wedding Chicks does an elegant job of encouraging pins. Every image you mouse over has a "Pin It" badge appear in the lower right.3. You Can't Fight On TwitterThere are going to be customer support issues and people are going to complain. You need to take it off Twitter. Generate a support ticket for the customer and email them or reach out another way. 140 characters is not enough to be logical and really help.5. Facebook is for Developing Your Existing Fans, Not First-Time CustomersYour customers aren't going to follow you on Facebook until they've already experienced your brand. Liking a brand on Facebook is akin to putting that brand's bumper sticker on your car. Use Facebook to develop deeper conversations with your biggest fans, not sell to first time customers. Austin likes integrating Facebook with his blog post comments so the comments on his site spread to Facebook too (and vice-a-versa).5. The One Thing To Use Google+ ForGoogle is now using Google+ profiles to determine who is writing what online for SEO with rel="author". People who have been writing quality content for years will benefit from this move (which fights SEO cheating). To do this, follow these instructions to update your Google+ profile with what sites you write for (or guest post on). This will allow your headshot to appear next to your content on search results (which may increase your click throughs) as well as possibly raise your general rankings.6. Turning Twitter Conversations Into Real StoriesYou can use Storify to collect tweets around a topic or conversation. It allows you to comment and expand on what was said. We've seen great summary posts on conference, news events, and locations.Bonus: Check out Buffer for a super easy way to share what you've read online into scheduled posts that are even faster to use than HootSuite.

Increasing Page Views & User Retention on Your Wordpress Blog in 3 Minutes

Do your readers leave your site right after they finish the first post they came in on? Neil Mody from nRelate gave a great overview of all the elements you need to use to drive more readers to your site and get them to stick around for longer at WordPress Camp NYC today. If you know the basics already, skip to the end for all the plugins your should install in 3 minutes to increase page views.You've Got Nothing Without Great ContentFocus on your message first. Create an original consistent presence on the Internet with quality content first. Then you can build a long-term audience. Everything else optimizes on high quality content. Without good content you won't get far. Your Site Must Load in 3 Seconds or LessYou must use a caching plug-in to speed up the load time of your pages.

• W3 Total Cache (free)
• WP Super Cache (free)

Then you need to use speed loading testing tools to check it.

• YSlow (based on Yahoo Tools)
• Google Page Speed Tools

Hosting Options (from least to most expensive / least to most scalable)

• Blue Host
• Liquid Web
• Media Temple
• WP Engine (specialized hosting that starts at $29/month)
• Rackspace (high-end if you have dedicated staff)

Everything you add to your site will make the site slower. Your site should load in 3 seconds or less. For every extra second your site takes to load you lose a portion of visitors according to Google's analytics.Bring Style to Your Substance With a Quality ThemeHow your site looks can be just as important as your content. Having a stylish theme with clear navigation affects how many users stick around to read more. Just as how a book's cover design affects how many people buy the book in the book store, your theme will affect how many users will read your site.Social Sharing in NOT OptionalYou need to:

• Link to your site on Twitter
• Have an active Facebook page
• Start using Pinterest

You MUST reach out to people in your community and engage! Start commenting on other people's posts. Sending out your content is just half the job, engaging others is your other.Be Where Your Audience Is

• Depending on where your audience is, you need to rank well there. In the US, search traffic is dominated by Google so you must rank well in Google.
• Study your referral traffic and see what terms readers are coming in from. Build content around your most profitable terms.
• Setup Google news alerts for related terms to your content. Build content around trending topics.
• Link parties are collectives of bloggers who are linking to each other to building incoming links. You have to be careful though because your links could end up on less desirable sites.

FINALLY! Engage Your Audience Beyond the One Post They Came in OnnRelate makes plugins for most of these functions but there are tons of great options out there. Tell us which plugins you like in the comments.

• Auto-linking plugins automatically ads a link back to your other content whenever you add certain words to your post.
• Photo galleries and slideshows increase page views (but can be really annoying).
• Related Post plugin should be in your sidebar or at the bottom of your post.
• Most popular post plugin should always be in your sidebar.
• Flyout plugins suggests a related article to your reader when they reach the bottom of the post
• Social sharing and commenting plugins allow your users to easily share your content to their network. One developer said you have to un-gate (not require login) to encourage commenting.

New Trend: Video Holiday Cards - Bergdorf Goodman Goes to the Dogs

I received more video holiday cards than physical cards from businesses this year for the first time. Whether your business is trying to save trees or just preparing for the Postal Service to go out of business, a video holiday card might be right for you.

Tips For Spreading Your Business Message with a Video Card

• Set a budget: Although a video card is cheap to send out through email, you can spend much more producing a video than printing paper cards. Make sure to set a budget and find a video director that can work within it.
• What's the payoff?: The best holiday videos have a plot payoff for watching them. You know how the best commercials can make you want to cry in 30 seconds? Can you make your story pay off at the end? Watch Bergdorf Goodman's longer holiday video for their heartfelt ending. Or check out LivePerson's charity donation at the bottom of this entry.
• Keep it short: 30 seconds to 2 minutes is optimal
• Keep it agnostic: Unless you're sure all your customers celebrate Christmas, it's better to go for general Happy Holidays.
• Make it fun(ny) or unusual: If you want the video to be shared, make it fun or funny. On the unusual side, Tekserve's most successful viral video featured $60,00 worth of recycled iPods.
• The delivery method is the most important part (and often overlooked): Once you have the perfect holiday video card, the most important part is getting it watched. Make sure you consider the timing of sending your video to recipients, the holidays get busy and any non-essential message gets trashed. Can you create a great email message that will make them want to click-through? Will your recipients be able to view it from their mobile phones?
• Seed the sharing: If your holiday message is meant to reach potential customers as well as existing customers, reach out to target blogs and ask them to embed the video. Don't forget to upload it to your Facebook page and YouTube.

Bergdorf Goodman's Holiday Card

Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury department store in Manhattan, created a great holiday promotional video card by letting famous New York dogs lose in the store. Not only are cute pet videos more likely to be shared, but also I would argue that BG's target customers are dog owners. Because having a dog in Manhattan is a luxury, their shoppers are more likely to be pet owners. The fun footage of dogs running through the store gave them a great excuse to show off a lot more products than a typical commercial. Although I would have made the video shorter, the ending is the perfect heartfelt payoff that their target customers will love. If you check the audience analytics on YouTube, you'll see this video is most popular with women age 35-54 (their target customers).

Offering to Donate To Charity

With more businesses limiting gifts to employees, donating to charity on their behalf has become popular. LivePerson sent their customers an email asking them to visit the page screen-shot below and choose from one of twelve charities for a donation. This method aligns your organization with doing good while making your customers feel good. You'll notice LivePerson doesn't mention how much they will be donating so the bottom-line impact was totally up to them.

12 Things You Haven't Tried To Improve Your Website's SEO

"Best practices are things you should have done if you had thought of them first." If all your competitors are doing it already, you won't get the returns you're looking for by jumping in late. Try taking best practices from other industries and reusing them. This quote is from Byrne Hobart, who taught the Advanced SEO course at General Assembly that I attended last week.How to Advance Your Way Up the Blog HierarchyHere's how to work your way from nothing to a top-level blog or news source.

• Do a Google search for "your industry blog" and you'll find the most popular ones. Pick a highly-ranked blog that speaks to your prospects. Then use Google to show sites related to the highly-ranked blog by searching for "related:rankedblog.com." Less popular related blogs will be returned. Continue to do this until you find the least popular blogs with readership communities. Collect these into a list.
• Stalk your new blogger friends. Comment on every post they write on your industry and re-tweet their stuff. After a few weeks they'll start to recognize you as a loyal reader.
• Write a post they'll like on your blog and send it to them. For example, write a deeper-dive into a topic they cover or a clarification of something they wrote. If they repost your piece you're in! Plus you'll be the girl they turn to when they need a quote or clarification on your industry.
• Now use their repost of your content to trade up to more popular blogs. Most bloggers read all the blogs larger than theirs and a few sites less popular than theirs. Write an email to a more popular blog, "You may have seen my post on LesserBlog.com, I liked your related post, and so I write this post."
• Continue trading up until you reach the top blog in your industry.

Get More Shares By Giving Up CommentsYou can get more shares if you make sharing the only action available at the end of your post. When someone gets to the bottom of your post, they typically have a couple of choices: commenting, reading a related article, etc. If you make the only option sharing the article with their network, you'll get more shares. This works especially well with controversial content where your audience wants to add their input but can't because you've removed commenting. Google doesn't discern between people linking to your page because they disagree or agree with you.Fast Content Gets Shared FasterContent that is fast to read will get shared more often and more quickly. Shorter posts rise to the top of Reddit because Reddit takes the velocity of votes into account. So a photo that takes five seconds to read and react to will rise further than a well thought-out post that takes ten minutes to read. So if you have a long article, create an infographic of your top data from the post that you can share everywhere and then link back to your longer article.Get More Shares By Figuring Out Why Your Audience Really ReTweetsWhy do most people actually share your posts? They want to show off that they read your type of content (regardless of whether or not they do). This is why posts by Malcolm Gladwell are tweeted seconds after they're posted. Your audience wants to show off how smart they are for finding your content and sharing it with their friends (Facebook) or potential bosses (LinkedIn).Test Keywords Using AdWords Instead of SEO Because It's Cheaper (Really)Ranking on your keywords through organic search can take weeks and even months to climb to the top. You can buy the top slot through AdWords and check if the keywords you've chosen really convert before investing in a longer-term SEO strategy. Once your keyword terms move into organic search the conversion rate won't necessarily be the same but this is a great tactic to compare potential keywords against each other.Swap SEO Friendly Headlines In After Everything-Else Friendly HeadlinesSEO friendly headlines are stuffed with keywords that target searchers. Everything-else friendly headlines use a teaser proposition, controversial view point, or question to encourage click-throughs and shares. You can post the article with your teaser headline, get a lot of shares, and then switch it to your keyword stuffed headline later. Your article will retain it's popularity for being shared even after you change the headline.How A Print Ad Can Increase Your Search RankRun an ad campaign that tells your audience to search for "your company + what you do" on Google. If you get enough people searching for your brand name in conjunction with high-priority keywords, it will rise your search rankings. You'll be more likely to appear in the search suggestions for what you do. Coupon Cabin ran subway ads asking people to Google their name for coupons instead of listing their URL.Optimize Your Guest Blog BioWe all know that guest blogging (in both directions) will help bring credibility to your site. What you may not have thought of is optimizing the keywords used in your guest blog bio. Try to keyword stuff the link back to your company's site. So instead of "Jane Smith is Founder of Company.com" try "Jane Smith is Founder of the most popular widget company in New Jersey."Links Are ForeverWhen someone posts about your business but doesn't link to you, simply contact them and ask. Articles last just as long as the news cycle but links are forever.Use WordPress if You CanSimply put, search engines love WordPress. To solve the SEO drawbacks of WordPress, download the All in One SEO Pack.Use The Most SEO-Friendly URL For Your BlogYour blog's URL should be YourSite.com/Blog for maximum SEO benefit to your site. If you're in a "serious" business and the term "blog" isn't appropriate for your target audience, use YouSite.com/Articles or YouSite.com/Research.This post also appeared on Women 2.0's Blog For Female Entrepreneurs.

6 Trends in Web Design Coming To A Website Near You

Web design shifts and changes every season just like the fashion world. Instead of watching a runway on Fashion Week, here's a few sites I use to preview what's likely to take off next:

• Behance Network - Creative Professional Platform to share what designers are working on now. Filter results by Blogging, Web Design, or Web Development for a peak. Behance is a NYC-based startup.
• Dribble - A nicely designed portfolio site, check out what's been posted in web design lately. Allows you to search by color if you have one in mind.
• DeviantArt - Less curated than Behance but still relevant, click my link for an overview of popular web interfaces submitted in the last week.

Huge F'ing Background ImagesPopularized into the mainstream by Bing, this has spread to tons of tech startups and newer page designs. Go Right Not DownWhen web designers found out that folks didn't want to scroll down for more than a few page views, they started asking viewers to navigate to the right.Arranging Images In Tag Cloud StyleJust like a word tag cloud makes more frequent words appear larger, some sites are now organizing their images using this principle to make more important images larger. Notification AlertsUsing smart icons with red badges has become prevalent from iPhone Apps to Facebook.

 

Grey GradientsBlack is too hard to read and white is so 1996, so we've settled on grey gradients as the cool kids color.Better TypographyWe finally got bored with half a dozen font choices and the following companies are driving better typography coming to the world wide web.

• Google Web Fonts
• Fonts.com
• WebINK
• Fontdeck
• Typekit

People Don't Buy What You Do, They Buy Why You Do It

If you lead, create, sell, or hire -- watch this.Also available on TED.com: Simon Sinek