My Best Advice for Female Entrepreneurs

After crossing paths with thousands of female leaders, there were 3 things I learned. There were 3 things that made being a female leader fundamentally different and frankly I was going about leading the wrong way. I've kept this video private for a while because I had barely learned these lessons in time for this speech but this is the best advice I've ever given to female entrepreneurs.

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.

5 New Years Resolutions for Entrepreneurs

Photo: Jazmin Hupp, Women Grow Co-Founder | Tamara Beckwith/NY Post | Read Article

Tis the season for NewYears Resolutions but NONE of these include going to the gym. Take a look at five things I've learned benefit every entrepreneur no matter what stage your business is in.

1. Focus on the Important Over the Urgent

If there's one skill that separates the entrepreneurs who are driving their businesses versus the businesses that are driving their entrepreneurs crazy, it's this. There will always be urgent tasks but they often fill up your day so that none of the important things get done. Here's a few different tactics to keep your focus on what really matters:

• Don't start your day by checking your email or social media. EVER. This is the fastest way to get sucked into urgent instead of important.

• Start your day meditation, reciting affirmations, or journaling about your goals. It will be easier to make choices that align with your goals if you review those goals every morning.

• Rewrite your to-do lists into time blocks. Write out what you'll be doing that day in 15-minute increments. It'll be easier to tell when you've over-promised how much you can get done that day and you'll quickly learn how poor you are at estimating how long tasks take.

• Find at least one thing to say no to every day. The hardest part of leadership is deciding what NOT to do. There are a million opportunities out there and it's easy to get excited about something new every day. Start every morning by removing at least one thing from your to-do list that doesn't support your goals.

• Delegate at least one new thing every day. Even if you're a one women show, I bet you have friends and family wiling to lend a hand. I use FancyHands virtual assistants to take small tasks off my list like calling my cable company.

• Hide from the world occasionally. The office, our phones, and our laptops are an unending opportunity for distractions. For big projects, setup an auto-responder on your email and turn OFF your phone for the day. Turn off notifications, social media alerts, and anything else that pops up on your screen. Take that day to make big progress on your goals.

2. Start Tracking Your Time

Time is the only finite resource. No amount of money in the world will buy you more hours in the day. You must fiercely protect your time. Start tracking how you spend your time and you'll recognize the real costs of projects. This is the first report I look at when I'm considering hiring or getting an assistant. Time tracking shows me the things that could be delegated to a less expensive resource. On Mac I like Harvest and RescueTime. Many task managers and company accounting software have time tracking plug-ins for freelancers. 

I just started using AND.CO and its brilliant for tracking your time and billing for it.

3. Read One New Business Book a Month

The majority of business people read a business book about once every 5 years. If you can increase your reading to one book a month, you'll be in the top 1% of 1% of business learners (without shelling out thousands for an MBA). Even reading fiction can help improve your empathy and reading of social cues. If reading isn't in your schedule, try audio books. Here's a few books I love for entrepreneurs:

• Contagious: Why Things Catch On. If you've ever wanted something to "go viral" read this first.

• Bossypants by Tina Fey. I listen to this audiobook twice a year. Tina Fey is hilarious while navigating male-dominated fields of comedy and Hollywood producing.

• Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. Learn what separates great leaders from the rest.

• Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. Learn how the founder of Zappos went broke before enjoying the success of creating an organization designed around the people he wanted to surround himself with.

• Awesomely Simple: Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas into Action. If you don't have time to read 100 business books a year, John Spence already did it for you and summarized the basics.

4. Practice Some Form of Mind Control

The research continues to mount on the benefits of meditation and other forms of mindfulness. I don't care which practice you choose to follow but it's worth finding one that works for you. If you use alcohol, cannabis, or pharmaceuticals to increase your focus, fight depression, or decrease stress, look at meditation to supplement that dependence.

5. Get Serious About Building Your Email Lists

We're limited in how we market in this industry so the most-effective and lowest-cost method is email newsletters. That's right! Email converts at higher rates than Twitter or Facebook so stop spending all that time retweeting and get serious about collecting email addresses of your supporters and customers. Try this:

• Setup an easy way to add the people who email you to your email lists. No matter how early stage you are, it's never too early to start building your email list. You can use a combination of Gmail, Zapier, and MailChimp to start building your email list for free. Here's the full instructions on how to setup building your email list with free services.

• Make acquiring email addresses the first priority of your website. The vast majority of your website visitors never come back. Do everything you can to convert every visitor into an email newsletter subscriber so you can bring them back. Talk to your web designer about improving email signups on your site.

• Import every business card you get. We're all bad at actually following up on all the business cards we receive. Make some time to import the contacts you receive into your lists regularly.

Why Focus on Women in Cannabis Now?

Some folks are surprised that there are already groups serving minorities within the cannabis industry since it's fairly new. In truth, this industry is already quite large and I agree with predictions that it will grow $35 Billion industry in sales over the next 20 years. (For comparison alcohol retail sales in 2012 were $197.8 billion.)

The Industry's Survival Depends on Greed Not Screwing This Up

The Cannabis industry is in a volatile stage where a few bad actors could retard the progress towards creating a national regulated market. 80 years of anti-marijuana propaganda, started by William Randolph Hearst, is a daily struggle to overcome. We cannot afford to have an industry that puts greed ahead of health and safety. I'm generalizing of course, but women tend to make community- and family-oriented choices. Having women involved in the cannabis industry is just one more check on us not making the mistakes alcohol and tobacco industries did in the past.

The National Cannabis Industry Association, a founding member of Women Grow, features this education for newcomers to the industry at their events and their Code of Conduct emphasizes professionalism.

The opposition says we're the next big tobacco industry in the making.

Diverse teams show that we look and think nothing like big tobacco did and never will.

Diverse Teams Create an Industry That Serves Diverse Customers

Some early companies were focused on their most loyal customers: people who like to smoke frequently. Some of their customers had serious medical conditions, some didn't, but many ended up focusing on potency to serve those loyal clients.

Today, with over half of Americans living in a state with some form of legal cannabis, the market is much broader than we thought. Newcomers, women, seniors, and athletes are just some of the new groups we're serving now. These new customers need new products. The fastest way to create those products is to include people from those groups in your business.

Julie's Baked Goods, a founding member of Women Grow, creates healthy cannabis-infused edibles. Founded by a mom with celiac disease, she was one of the first to create edibles that would not appeal to children. Her products are a favorite among patients with digestive challenges and healthy adults.

The opposition says we're only out to get everyone high.

Let's show them we're in the industry for so many more reasons (and getting high is safer than getting drunk).  

Companies with Female Leadership Outperform Others

I was taking clients on a tour of top dispensaries in Denver and suddenly realized that the majority of stops we were about to make had female owners (3D Cannabis Center, The Farm, Good Chemistry, Mindful and LiveGreen Cannabis). Even though few dispensaries are owned by women, those dispensaries are often the ones that differentiate themselves in training, selection, or environment in my experience. Don't believe my anecdotal experience in Denver, let's get the big numbers in here.

Catalyst studies the financial performance of Fortune 500 companies based on the gender diversity of their board of directors. Here's what their study found:

• Return on Equity: On average, companies with the highest percentages of women board directors outperformed those with the least by 53 percent.

• Return on Sales: On average, companies with the highest percentages of women board directors outperformed those with the least by 42 percent.

• Return on Invested Capital: On average, companies with the highest percentages of women board directors outperformed those with the least by 66 percent.

Diversity Goes Far Beyond Just Gender Diversity

Empowering women in cannabis is just the first challenge for Women Grow. We have this chance to create a new American industry that we can all be a part of (instead of spending decades trying to change it after it's already been built). I hope you'll join us for an event near you because we have a lot to do together. 

7 Reasons You Should Focus on Women in Your Advertising & Your Business

Cindy Gallop opened the second 3% Conference in San Francisco, named because only 3% of Creative Directors in advertising are women. Gallop's keynote is required watching for men and women, as she teaches us how businesses are missing out on innovative ideas and ultimately profits by staying male-centric.

Key Takeaways

• Women ARE your target audience. Women are no longer a "niche" marketing target. They make the majority of purchases in almost every sector and are key purchasing influencers in every sector (even traditionally male-dominated ones). Women influence 60% of car purchases and 90% of technology purchases. Women are even the majority of gamers today, if you include social gaming.
• "Women share the sh*t out of everything." At any social gathering listen to the men talk about sports scores while the women share their experiences. Women have shared their experiences to build intimacy since the world began so it's no mystery why today they are the majority of social media users.
• Women get stuff done. Even if your product is aimed at men, Ms. Gallop recommends targeting your advertising at women. Women are the norm. Men are now the niche audience. There is a ton of money to be made by taking women seriously.
• Marketing done with women through the male perspective is no longer acceptable. When the 97% of Creative Directors are men, you gets ads that don't feature women in dynamic, engaging, and aspirational roles – instead you only see women as mothers, girlfriends, and sidekicks. We need a new approach to creativity – created by women, presented to female Creative Directors, for female clients.
• "Women challenge the status quo because we are never it." Women innovate and women disrupt. If you want your company to be innovative, find every department run by an all-white-male team and add women to it.
• "Women notice things that men don't." They notice relationships. They notice how people communicate. They notice how to get people to work together more cooperatively naturally and intuitively. Women notice the things that will make your company run better than it does today.
• "Women get sh*t done." How many women do you know that support men by doing the things they don't want to do? From the laundry to Sheryl Sandberg operating Facebook so Mark Zuckerberg can do what he really wants to do. The men who recognize this can still be the stars of the show but have a much smoother operation behind the scenes.

Your To Do List

Cindy Gallop implores men and women to do the following things to help change this culture, and ultimately make a ton of money.

1. Call It Out. If nobody says anything, nothing will change. Every time you see a conference with an all-male line-up – say something. Every time the junior male account rep tries to take over a meeting you should be running – say something. It doesn't require being angry, it just requires pointing it out, because gender bias is often unconscious. You have to "break the closed loop of white guys talking to other white guys about white guys."
2. Put Yourself Forward. Women who don't promote themselves help this male-dominated cycle continue. Gallop cites how there's been a ton of outrage over Twitter's lack of female board members but women she knows (and are highly qualified) hesitate even nominating themselves to advise a new startup.
3. Redesign the Business. Business has been built for centuries around a male model of command and control, which is perfectly logical because, for centuries, women weren't allowed to work. The Future of Business is about complementing that with female values – collaboration, consensus building, and community. The system of business today is based around men going to work and women staying at home to support them. The reason we don't have enough women in leadership is because the very system is built to work for men and not the women who shoulder an unfair amount of the home support work. When women look up at the men running their organizations and see the grueling hours, they opt-out. But why have we designed every position at the top to be so unbearable? It doesn't have to be. Gallop challenges us to redesign a bite-size chunk of how something is done at your company. Redesign it the way you want to work and point to it as an example of how a redesigned business process makes work better for everyone.

Gallop believes the business model of the future is "shared values + shared action = shared profit (financial & social)". This is the business model she urges brands to adopt. Go beyond "co-creation" and pursue "co-action" between brands and people to benefit everyone. This business model also applies to men and women working together to create a world that we will all love working and living in.

Watch It!

Your Company's Facebook Posts Will Soon Be A Waste Of Time

Without boosting your Facebook boosts with advertising spend, you're shouting into the dark. No matter how hard you worked to build your fan base, as many as 98% of your fans never return to your Facebook page after liking it.

Facebook Organic Post Reach Is Diving Off A Cliff

The percentage of your fans that you reach organically (without paying for ads) is rapidly declining: from an average of 12% in October 2013 to 6.2% in February of 2014 (according to social@Ogilvy). The day when your organic posts will reach virtually no one is coming fast.

Shift Strategies or Abandon Facebook Organic Posts in 2014?

Even though Facebook has become an advertising network (with a social media network as a lost leader), you can still target extremely specific audiences. What other medium can you find 15-17 year old girls who live within 50 miles of Cleveland, Ohio, and own an iPhone 4 or iPhone 5? If you have the ability to craft campaigns that speak to your customers in their own homes and phones you can reap enormous rewards. I can't name another newspaper that is sent directly to all of my customers, for as little as $25 a campaign. Can you?

Custom Audiences Are Your New Best Friends

You're going to upload lists of email addresses and lists of phone numbers from your customer contact lists. This will allow you to target your current customers for ads (even if the haven't liked your page) and find more people like your customers on Facebook. Custom Audiences will allow you target people who have shopped with you before.Uploading your customer's email addresses and phone numbers to Facebook puts a lot of trust in their court. Facebook says that they encrypt the data that is uploaded, use it for matching purposes at that time only, and then delete the data. This means you should update the data periodically to add new customers. Privacy is never perfect but this is likely worth the risk for your brand. (Technically, they hash the data, not encrypt it, if you want the full technical explanation.)If uploading your customer lists are too creepy, try tracking everyone who visits your homepage. You'll install a tracking code in your header tags so that you can retarget ads to anyone who visits your company's website. Slightly less creepy and it continues to grow as your website traffic grows. 

Lookalike Audiences Are Your New Holy Grail

How often do we sit around as marketers and complain: "I wish I could find more people who are just like my best customers." Facebook is offering to deliver them to you. Once you've uploaded a list of your best customers, you can tell Facebook to match their entire database of people within any single country to your type of people. To get started, see Facebook's "How to Create Lookalike Audiences".

So Now Facebook Is Just Like Any Other Advertising Network? Nope!

It seems clear that Facebook is turning into an Ad network and should be treated like the New York Times or Google Adwords. But one thing still separates Facebook, according to the Ogilvy report. There's one thing that STILL means your social media marketing messages should be fundamental different from other paid ads.

Making a Big Difference in a Small Town: Teaching Tech with Bella Minds

Jennifer Shaw spoke at the Women Techmakers Summit about two organizations she founded, New York Tech Women and Bella Minds. Jennifer was taught tech skills by her mother as a teenager and then went to school for business. When she was looking to enter the tech field a few years ago, the environment was not very welcoming and even the women weren't treating each other very well. New York Tech Women was established to help women feel welcome in technology and work together.With the initial success of New York Tech Women she was receiving emails every day from companies trying to hire their first female technologist. She was frustrated by the tokenism.

The problem isn't that we don't have enough women in technology, the problem is that we don't have enough people in technology. We're missing about 250,000 people to fill technology jobs in the US.  ~Jennifer Shaw

Jennifer focuses on mid-career women instead of students. Bella Minds takes city-centric education resources and pairs them with small cities. By placing technologists in small cities to teach hands-on courses, they bring mid-career women technology skills. The curriculum includes 36 hours of workshops with experts and then eight weeks of online video sessions "where participants help each other confront the challenges inherent in learning and taking risks." By jumpstarting women already in the workforce she is quickly triaging our need for more technology skills.

Want to Teach?

Bella Minds is accepting applications for their first 15 teaching fellows. 

How To Become A Female Fortune 500 CEO

As Mary Barra prepares to be the first female leader of a global automaker GM, I wanted to repost a presentation I attended last year from another Fortune 500 CEO.Laura Sen, President and CEO of BJ's Wholesale Club spoke at the MIT Sloan's Women in Management Conference in 2012, about her tips for reaching the top of the corporate ladder as one of only twelve female Fortune 500 CEOs.

Performance is Proof

The result of your work must have a tangible measurable benefit that you can point to and take credit for. In her experience, when you succeed and put up the numbers your gender will be overshadowed by your results. This will also make you a more obvious candidate for promotion.

Follow Your Passion

Laura started as a French major who liked to shop and ended with a career as one of the most successful women in retail. She says that her work never feels like a job because she loves it. Following your passion is the only way to work hard without burning out, even if where you start isn't where you end up.

Branch Out

Try a new class, read a different type of book, or volunteer for something new. Your perspective will be expanded. In Laura's experience, diversification was the key to advancing her career. When moving from a fashion buyer to logistics at BJ's she gained a diverse foundation that helps her in her job as CEO today. She added that the more diverse the background of a candidate is, the more likely they will be promoted to general management positions.

Promote Yourself

In 2002, when the CEO of BJ's stepped down it was between herself and the other VP for the CEO position. She was advised to run a campaign to ask the board to pick her but declined, thinking that the board knew her well enough already. The other VP was chosen and fired Laura 10 months later. In 2006 that CEO was fired and she met with the chairman of the board who re-hired her.

Start With Your Values

The underpinnings of Laura's leadership are values. The BJ values are used in all business decisions from hiring to operations. Although the values are common sense, it is her job to remind everyone to uphold those values even through economic downturns and departmental fights. Respect, honesty, and integrity are values she models to her staff constantly. When the board was in discussions about the company being bought, she worked with her leadership team to create a communication plan to tell all team members in person. This turned a possibly debilitating rumor into a positive experience.

Ask for Feedback

Laura asked store managers what they needed to be more profitable and surprisingly they answered "more community involvement". She hired community managers, which helped turn around some stores. Shealso runs a buddy systems for successful store managers to mentor under-performing stores.

Thank Everyone

When Laura walks around a store she thanks every single person and has conversations with all of them about the company. She tells every employee that she cares about them because without that she can't expect employees to care about customers.

"You Never Regret Taking The High Road"

Some people advised her to sue BJ's after being fired. "It's not worth it," she told the crowd. The decision paid off by not burning bridges with the company, even though she never thought she would work for them again. She was rehired six years later and became CEO soon after.

My Inc. Interview: 7 Networking Tips for Women

Geri Stengel interviewed me about networking tips for women entrepreneurs in conjunction with my monthly Founder Friday events in New York City. I start many meetings reminding the 200 attendees to approach networking events in a thoughtful way designed to make the most of your time. Read the complete article about Networking Tips for Women on Inc.

...Connections open doors, doors to money, markets and qualified managers and employees.

1. Pick your venue. There are plenty to choose from. If you don’t like the vibe of one organization’s events, try another. You can choose gender-specific hosted events such as Women 2.0 Founder Friday or the National Association of Women Business Owners, industry specific organizations, such as Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or general business groups such as Chambers of Commerce.
2. Know your elevator pitch. You are not here to make a sale, so you don’t need to close the deal. You do need to let people know who you are and what you do in a way that makes them want to hear more.
3. Ask questions. Women are great at building closeness and connections through conversation. By asking questions you’ll engage the person and really get to know what they do. Still not comfortable? Pretend you are interviewing people for an article about the event; get the who, what, and why. Make the task less personal.

Read the complete article about Networking Tips for Women on Inc. [author]Geri Stengel is the founder of Ventureneer.com, which connects socially responsible businesses, social enterprises, and nonprofits with the knowledge needed to make the world a better place while thriving as businesses. As a woman business owner herself and past board member of the New York City Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners, she understands the unique challenges women entrepreneurs face when growing their businesses beyond $1 million.[/author]

16 First Date Skills That Will Make You A Better Business Networker

You've heard that WHO you know is more important than WHAT you know, but your education focused on facts instead of making connections. Whether you use these skills to connect to your next investor or to meet the love of your life, many of the same principles that make you a great first date will make you a better business networker too.

BEFORE YOU MEET

1. Prepare your soundbites. Almost every meeting will include questions like "what do you do?" and "where are you from?" Instead of the standard answers, prepare short stories that make you sound interesting, fun, and unique. Don't tell your latest acquaintance that you're building the next social network and looking for a technical co-founder. That's predictable and so common it's forgettable. Tell him how you combined your love of website design with yoga to create a video blog that teaches parents how to introduce yoga to their kids and it's gotten far more popular than you could have imagined. If this isn't natural to you, check out books on how to talk about yourself with just the right amount of self promotion such as BRAG! The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It by Peggy Klaus.
2. Investigate to find common ground. It's easier to bond with someone when you have something in common. If you've lived in the same states, vacationed to the same places, or went to the same school, you'll want to bring that up early to build rapport. With all the free information available on the internet, there's no excuse to not know that they love shiba inu puppies too. I use tools like 123People to find where my potential connections lurk online. You'll make an amazing first impression if you can start the conversation with "Hey I really loved your blog post on Facebook's inflated evaluation last week, how did you..."
3. Dress up, instead of down. People form judgements about you in the first 15 seconds of meeting you and clothes are part of that equation. I would lean towards looking a little too good instead of the opposite. If you can wear something distinctive, without looking silly, it might help you be more memorable. Gary Sharma, of GarysGuide, wears a red tie to all events, which he even mentions on his business cards and email signature so he's easier to find and remember.

STARTING THE CONVERSATION

1. Practice walking up to people you don't know. You should be able to walk up to anyone at a networking event and introduce yourself. Look for people alone or in pairs at the endges of an event for an easy start and work your way up. People come to networking events to talk to new people but get stuck just saying hello to people they already know. Break out of the rut and you might just meet your next co-founder. If this is a tough skill for you, practice by introducing yourself in low-pressure situations like the person sitting next to you on the train tonight.
2. Add value to join any conversation. The person you want to meet is at the center of a conversation and it seems impossible to break into the group. You can use the same method savvy guys employ to break into a group of girlfriends at the bar. Don't just shove your way into the group and interrupt, stay close and listen for an opportunity to add value to the conversation. When your target brings up how much they loved the gelato at dinner, offer that there's a new gelateria in town that they should try.

DURING THE CONVERSATION

1. Smile a lot. Look like you're having a good time anytime someone can see your face. This is especially useful at events where you'd like to make an impression on the speaker. Sit in the front row and look really attentive by smiling, nodding, and taking notes on key points. Most people sit in an audience with a blank stare or spend the whole time checking their laptop. If you're the friendly and receptive face in the crowd, you'll be a welcome contact to meet after the event too.
2. Focus on how you can help them. Many people approach networking opportunities selfishly trying to find people to help them. Flip your priorities around and focus on how you can help people you meet. Helping someone make a connection or find a resource will give you an excellent reason to trade contact information. Every time I've focused on helping the other person, they've returned the favor when I've needed something.
3. Don't cross your arms in front of your body. I recommend everyone take a basic body language course to learn the visual cues that show you're receptive to the conversation. The very first lesson is to stop crossing your arms across your chest. Although it's a comfortable way to hold your hands, it makes you seem closed off. I take courses at the Nonverbal Group in New York City.
4. Buy the next round. It may seem simple but offering to buy the next round is a skill men mastered ages ago to keep the conversation going. I learned how few women employ this technique when booking event spaces with bar minimums for Women 2.0's Founder Friday events. Events with primarily women sell the least drinks because women aren't culturally tuned to buy rounds. Events with men trying to impress women sell the most drinks for...obvious reasons.
5. Banish distractions. You never know where your next important connection will come from so even if you don't think the person you're talking to is "important", don't check your phone. Don't look around the room. Don't sit there and think about your day or what you need to do next. Be fully present for your conversation partner. It's the best present you can give them.
6. Be positive. Nothing says "steer clear" like somebody who spends half the conversation complaining about their company/ex/apartment/family or whatnot. Keep the first meeting topics upbeat.
7. Don't let the conversation stall. Everyone needs a bank of general questions you can ask a new acquaintance to get them talking and find common ground. You already know the standards like "do you have any siblings" but now is the time to invent questions that make you more insightful. I like, if you had enough money that you didn't have to work, what would you do?
8. Listen more than you talk. We are a culture starving to be listened to. We broadcast our most minor thoughts throughout the Internet, desperate to be read. Listening is much more powerful than talking. Also making people feel like their minor thoughts on the Internet are being listened to can help too so like, retweet, and up vote away.
9. Compliment them. Try to offer at least one honest compliment to your conversation partner. This technique is over used so if you can't say something genuine, skip it.

AFTER THE CONVERSATION

1. Follow up! Follow up! No really, follow up! We all think important people are too busy to respond, so most people never reach out in the first place. I've given out business cards to 50+ people at an event in which every single one promised they'd follow up with me and gotten 2 emails afterwards. If you get someone's contact information, send them a follow-up within 24 hours every SINGLE time. I use CardMunch to import business cards into my address book automatically and send LinkedIn invites. If you see a speaker that you'd like to connect with, the least you can do is tweet a useful tip from their speech with their username, tweet them a compliment, and follow them on Twitter.
2. Personalize every follow up. I use the Gmail plug-in Rapportive to display everyone's social media updates along side every email I write to them. This allows me to personalize each email with something like "hey I saw you were in Chicago last weekend, did you find any good restaurants while you were there?" instead of the general "hope all is well with you" opening.

 

 Jelly Belly photo by Mike Crain. 

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.

Why Don't More Women Go Big With Their Own Business?

With few female entrepreneurs to look to, MIT Sloan hosted a panel on how women can go big with their own businesses. The panel included Joanna Rees (Founder of VSP Capital), Katrina Markoff (Founder of Vosges Haut-Chocolat), Alexandra Wilkis Wilson (Founder of Gilt Groupe), and was moderated by Fredricka Whitfield (Anchor, CNN).

What Is Getting In the Way?

Joanna thinks that fear and giving up after set-backs gets in women's way. Some women quit after their first major failure instead of taking it as a learning lesson and pushing forward. Joanna got rejected by hundreds of investors in the process of starting VSP Capital. Her tips for negotiation meetings was to "ask for the order" and make sure you know where you stand before you leave. Alexandra emphasized listening to all the negative feedback you get while pitching. You may learn that there is a hole in your business plan or way you could explain something better. The road to success is not smooth.

How Important Are Support Networks?

Imperative! Gilt was built on personal connections. Alexandra didn't have the money to the buy a marketing list so they had to sign up quality customers through word of mouth and personal networks. Joanna suggests that you need to surround yourself with people you trust that can collaborate with you on solutions. Katrina is working on building her advisory board to supplement the help she already has. We must remember to help each other as well. Joanna revealed that when she ran for mayor of San Francisco she reached out to mayors and legislators across the country. Interestingly, all the men she asked met with her. but all the women sent their staff to meet with her in their stead.

What Role Do Role Models Play?

Alexandra thinks that less women pursue founding companies because there are few female role models. She says female entrepreneurs should share their stories and she has gone as far as writing a book with Alexis (co-founder) on their journey.[box type="shadow"]Women 2.0 offers videos and local meetings where you can hear from successful female founders.[/box]

What Role Does Confidence Play?

Alexandra talked about her father- and mother-in-law. Her father-in-law will spend a few minutes cooking and declare the results the best in the world. Her mother-in-law will spend hours in the kitchen cooking multiple courses and fret it isn't good enough. Why do women always undersell themselves? Katrina opened a retail store in NYC without telling her accountant or banker (who would have told her not to) because following her inner voice has lead to the best results. Going big requires taking big risks, working hard, and be resilient.

Who Is Keeping Women From the Boardroom?

MIT Sloan's Women in Management Conference held a panel around the fact that only 16% of Fortune 500 board seats are filled by women. Panelists included Lisa Carnoy (Global Co-head of Capital Markets for Bank of America and mother of four kids), Jean Hammond (Golden Seeds Co-Founder & Venture Capitalist), and Jennifer Siebel Newsom (Director of Miss Representation and mother of two kids).[learn_more caption="Miss Representation Trailer"]Newest Miss Representation Trailer (2011 Sundance Film Festival Official Selection) from Miss Representation on Vimeo.[/learn_more]

How do we get more women to serve on boards?

If you own stock, Jean suggests voting your proxy and refusing to re-elect all male boards. (The California State Teachers’ Retirement System recently expressed their concern with Facebook for choosing an all male board.) The panel was asked if we should set quotas like the Netherlands has? Lisa says that we should encourage company leaders to publicly set their own goals for board diversity. She also recommends that we change how we look for board members. Many board members are chosen through personal networks or search committees.

3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are Women

These few high profile women are asked to serve on hundreds of boards. Lisa cites historical hiring practices of existing board members hiring more men like them. She suggests that women need to pursue board memberships by talking to existing board members and making their interest clear. Jean suggests starting on the boards of smaller companies like start-ups and non-profits.

How Can You Get On A Fortune 1000 Board?

You are probably going to go through a head hunter for those positions but you might get on the short list through serving on a non-profit board says Jean. Being at the top of your current company or starting your own company is also vital.

How Do We Get More Women in the C-Suite?

It was generally agreed on by the panelists that women are judged more harshly and have to be even better than their male peers to rise to the top. Lisa cites working for months without days off and being on conference calls after delivering twins. Her epiphany was realizing that her boss couldn't read her mind and that if there was something she wanted she had to ask for it. Jean encourages women to start their own companies to create the best working environment for themselves. The next topic was how women can help each other and the conclusion was mentorship.

How Can I Find A Mentor or Sponsor?

Mentorship and sponsorships of women by leaders of all genders is very important says Jennifer. Jean says you can start looking for a mentor by just asking leaders to have a conversation with you about something they have experience in. Everyone is really busy but if you show them that you value their advice, they'll make the time. Jennifer reminds the audience to have three well-organized questions for your potential mentor and then send a hand-written thank you note afterwards.

More Resources

• Five Steps For Women To Reach The Boardroom on Women 2.0
• Five Important Tips To Get on a Corporate Board on The Glass Hammer

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