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Archive for April, 2007
April 11th, 2007 by Allen Voivod
Ah, the flexible business life. While Lani and Joe cuddled in bed together watching a movie, I went downstairs into the basement home office to get some good content-related learnin’ in.
 We’re trying out an introductory offer for Ali Brown’s Mastermind Group (that’s her in the red at left), and yesterday’s call featured Catherine Seda (in the maroon below), author of the recently released How to Win Sales and Influence Spiders: Boosting Your Business and Buzz on the Web. The call itself focused on getting free search engine traffic and publicity for your business, and here are the gems I got out of it:
 Seda’s top recommendations for bringing in traffic to your site: Commenting on other people’s blogs, and writing articles to post on your blog, submit to article directories, and send out in place of the garden-variety press release.- The new age of linking strategies: Emailing people to trade links is old-fashioned, time-consuming, and ultimately not worth the effort in terms of search engine optimization. Instead, comment on other people’s blogs, and create profiles on social networking sites like MySpace.
- Use online press release services like PRWeb that submit your press release to search engine news services like Google News.
Seda’s also a pay-per-click expert, and she threw in a few tidbits on this subject as well. Namely:
- Don’t bother competing for the most basic search terms anymore. Now, start looking for “tail terms” - longer keyword phrases that have lower volume, cost less to bid on than the more generic terms, and yet are very profitable for your business. (For example, don’t bid on “business coach,” but do bid on “business coach women los angeles.”)
- Don’t take clickers on your pay-per-click ad to your home page. Take them to a specially constructed landing page that references the offer in your ad “above the fold” (without making people scroll down the page to see the specific offer in the ad).
- Construct your landing page to do only one of two things - get the reader onto your email list, or get them to buy something from you.
And there you have it! As for my own piece of advice - if you sign up for one of these calls, definitely be sure to get in on the live call. Based on our own experience, we almost never get around to listening to the recording afterwards. I’m definitely glad I was on the line for this one.
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business (and get creative AND effective with your own marketing efforts), sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in All About Content, Dances With Gurus | 1 Comment »
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April 10th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
A New Hampshire small biz success story, launched by an epiphany following a near-death experience…two gutzy chicks…6000% growth in the first year…bold messaging on comfy, cozy, sun-washed tees and sweatshirts…PLUS a smiling Alec Baldwin…
I LIVE FOR STORIES LIKE THIS!
Meet Alyson Bruu and Kristine Fichera, founders of Liv’n Out Loud! Clothing Company Inc.
I found out about their story and biz success in this article on NH.com, from where this explanatory excerpt hails:
“We’re not just a clothing company,” said Bruu, a marketing and public relations professional and owner of December Marketing. “We’re promoting a lifestyle. We’re getting people to look at their own humanity and ask themselves, ‘Am I living the life I’m meant to live?’ It’s like we’re igniting these epiphanies.”
Their own “aha moment” came after Alyson nearly bled to death after simple surgery to remove an ovary. The Big Life questions started pouring in: “Did I live a meaningful life? Did I make a difference? Was I true to myself in life?”
The conclusion to each of these questions was “No.” So the six-fig salary was ditched, and a T-shirt company was born. Bold insight PLUS joy-filled action. Ain’t it purty, tho’?
Now, the co-owners boast huge growth, international attention, and an ever-broadening fan base - all in less than two short years! - because of regular press coverage and successful viral marketing efforts. (Getting some good Hollywood exposure hasn’t hurt, either.) Cancer survivors find comfort and strength in their clothing AND powerful mini-anthems:
- “Hey Cancer…You Picked the Wrong Broad!”
- “Defy mediocrity”
- “Because I Can”
- “Mine Are Brass”
- Bring It On!”
Congratulations, ladies. Excellent messaging. Stellar mission. Bold moves. You are fab examples of how to “A-Ha Yourself!”
Keep on truckin’!
Posted in A-Has in the Ether, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?, Insight + Action | 1 Comment »
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on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 5:01 pm and is filed under A-Has in the Ether, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?, Insight + Action.
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April 9th, 2007 by Lani and Allen
Time: 9 minutes, 51 seconds. (And it goes fast - give it a listen right now!)
Featured Experts: Lani & Allen Voivod, aka “The Content Lovers,” Epiphanies, Inc.
Summary: The three objections we hear most often about blogging - and the responses we give to get people jazzed about blogging for their businesses.
Teaser Quip: “The world is not going to care about you, but your target audience might.”
Posted in ADD Info Summits, All About Content, Blog Bits | No Comments »
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on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 11:45 am and is filed under ADD Info Summits, All About Content, Blog Bits.
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April 8th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
Great news we forgot to blog about - seasoned freelancer Dale Buss found a bit of our advice for spousal-preneurs worthy enough to include in the following feature article (way back in February) for Forbes.com:
AND in the complementary “in pictures” segment:
Here’s the winning excerpt:
Next tip: Involve trusted third parties in the business, especially the finances. The quickest way to marital perdition is to get mired in money matters. If you must, designate one partner as chief financial officer. Better yet, delegate all accounting and tax matters to a professional. “Since we hired a third party to keep us on track and honest about budgets, cash flow, performance targets and so on, we’ve crossed divorce off our list of things to do,” quips Lani Voivod, co-owner of Epiphanies, a marketing consultant in New Hampshire.
It’s true, too. For us, 2007 is SOOOOO much better than 2006, and we know a lot of it has to do with the changes we’ve made in our approach to finances. It’s still all a big ol’ learning process, but it’s a lot easier to learn together when we see steady money coming in, and yelling isn’t a part of our “Financial Fridays.”
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business (and get creative AND effective with your own marketing efforts), sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in Married - With Business, Press 'n Such | No Comments »
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on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 10:20 am and is filed under Married - With Business, Press 'n Such.
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April 7th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
Several years ago, I read a fantastic Get Fuzzy comic that has never left my brain. I think I cut the comic out, but I can’t find it, and I’ve now spent about an hour searching for a picture of it online, but alas, have come up empty handed. (D’oh! I KNEW I should’ve spent the $$ to put it on a T-shirt or coffee mug!)
 It was one of the comics where Bucky the Katt was sharing his great and vast worldly wisdom, and he declared this memorable, inalienable truth:
“You can wordify anything if you just verb it.”
 Bucky’s meow-usings ended up being Nostradamus-like, as evidenced by a rad article I read on VisualThesaurus.com last month by “Sparrow,” a “pundit poet” with a keen eye on the languaging culture:
An excerpt for ya:
CEO-talk is big on verbifying: “I’m almost ready to greenlight the Douglas project”; “The Board will be conferencing Tuesday”; “We may have to outsource some of the tech work.” One feels that the immense power of the CEO can bend nouns into verbs, the way Superman bends iron bars.
What can YOU verbify today, this month, or this year to become part of the collective culture? An idea? A signature product? A service? Think about it - it’s yours to invent.
Allen and I unwittingly did it by saying “A-Ha Yourself!” to anyone who will listen. Now it’s up to us to keep explaining what that means, until it’s as clear to you as it is to us.
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business (and get creative AND effective with your own marketing efforts), sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in All About Content, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | No Comments »
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on Saturday, April 7th, 2007 at 11:46 am and is filed under All About Content, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!".
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April 6th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
You have an idea. A business. A passion. Something to say.
The question is: How important is this to you?
“Well, I have a website/blog/brochure/business card,” you say. And that’s a good thing. You should. They’re all part of your self-marketing efforts. They’re all virtually essential these days. You want to have your information retold, repackaged, and reinvented in various forms, to suit your audience’s content consumption preferences.
So why not take it a step further and turn your singular information, concept, strategy, philosophy, process, or knowledge into an eBook?
Make it interesting. Make it readable. Give it titles and subtitles, sidebars and sass.
Make it easy to download and email.
Share it with people, groups, websites, and associations that would find value in it, or be entertained by it. (Or preferably, both!)
More than anything, make it available…for FREE.
“But, I don’t have time to spend on creating and developing a FREE eBook?!!” you yelp. “Why the heck would I waste my time/energy/billable brain power on that?”
Well, don’t you already?
Don’t you already think about your own passions, ideas, business, systems, or solutions in a fairly obsessive way?
Wouldn’t you like a clean overview of your might and mission to hand off to prospects, fans, clients, consumers, strategic partners, website visitors, email recipients, and accidental tourists so they could sample your wares? Experience your voice and style? Scan over your offerings? Dig into your ideas? Benefit from your expert status?
Essentially, consume a premeditated, decently configured version of YOU?
What’s more, wouldn’t it be valuable to YOU to put your fleeting thoughts and down-the-rabbit-hole analyses into some semblance of order and refined context?
Hey - we’re talking a free eBook here. It doesn’t have to be a $20,000 project. Make it neat. Format it nicely. If you can get a designer to help it look good, that’s a plus, but if that’s not possible right now, let it go.
Most importantly - HAVE SOMEONE PROOFREAD IT so you don’t embarrass yourself, or worse, lose business because of grammar, spelling, or blatant nonsensical communication skills.
If you still don’t think it’s worth your while, check out what a free eBook did for marketing messiah Seth Godin. (Seth even has a simple “How-to” on the subject on a Squidoo lens, here, in addition to downloadable examples of his own free eBooks.)
Don’t make it harder than it is. If you’ve just got 10 pages, turn it into a Special Report or White Paper. You can always expand or add to it over time.
Bottom line: People can’t learn to know and love you - your products, services, passion, advice, know-how, brilliance, ideas, insights, offerings, deliverables, voice, style, personality, vision, business, unique promise of value, philosophies, etc. - if you don’t give them anything to know and love.
 For a stellar example of a useful, informative FREE Special Report that generated more than $100,000 in new client revenue in less than two months and took about two weeks to create, check out the “The Secret to Making Your Business GO NUTS in 2007!” 18-pager we created with Acorn Creative. It’s really good stuff!!!
Posted in All About Content, Fun With Marketing, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | No Comments »
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on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 12:46 pm and is filed under All About Content, Fun With Marketing, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!".
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April 4th, 2007 by Lani and Allen
Time: 11:45.
Featured Expert: Kevin Skarritt, Branding Expert and Chief Nut, Acorn Creative
Summary: High velocity taglines are vital to your business success. (Tagline Velocity = Increased information and emotion + Fewest letters and syllables as possible)
Teaser Quip: “Would it work as its own message on a T-shirt?…A business wants to have a message, mission, or philosophy to become something bigger than it is.”
Posted in ADD Info Summits, All About Content, Brand Funk | No Comments »
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on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 3:39 pm and is filed under ADD Info Summits, All About Content, Brand Funk.
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April 4th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
You can learn a lot about yourself from your bathroom. Especially from the reading materials hanging around near your commode.
On my way through our downstairs powder room - which connects our laundry room with our son’s tornado-struck play area - I caught a glipse of this spatter of magazines, just waiting for one of us to entertain ourselves during our next home office pit stop.
Seeing this strange mix of potty fodder designed to entertain and inform pseudo WIRED, ENTREPRENEUR PARENTS with GIANT aspirations and a soft spot for guy pulp (GQ’s Lindsay Lohan spectacle) made me realize just how divided our attentions are these days.
Mingling life, love, parenting, and business is no easy task. But boy, it makes for a diverse reading library!
(By the way, if you haven’t checked out Wired mag lately, you gotta give it a try. This month’s “Get Naked and…” issue is all about “Radical Transparency” as a business success strategy for CEOs and minions alike. March’s issue was all about our entertainment “snack culture,” where everything we consume - from videos to music to games to information - is in tiny, mini, micro, and “bite-sized” content pieces. The articles are always good ‘n hip and right on target. Oh, and they’re interesting and fun, too. :-D)
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business (and get creative AND effective with your own marketing efforts), sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in Entrepreneur Diaries, Married - With Business | No Comments »
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on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Entrepreneur Diaries, Married - With Business.
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April 2nd, 2007 by Allen Voivod
This realization struck me as I was kind of helping teach my son to ride a bike without training wheels (I say “kind of” because in truth I was just shouting advice - he had the tough part figured out in mere minutes).
So after a couple of times of him yelling “Watch out!” and a couple of ankle contusions for the grown ups who didn’t get out of the way, I said to him, “Stop looking at us. Look past us, where you’re going, and you won’t hit us.”
And it worked! The next day, when he decided he was going to slalom between the parking cones at nearby Gunstock Mountain, I told him not to look at the cones, but look betwen them. And that worked, too.
That night, talking over the day with Lani, I remembered something similar I’d read in Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins. He told a story about learning to drive a race car, and every time he looked at the wall, he drove right into it. His instructor told him to look where he wanted to go, and the car would follow, and it did. So much for my original bike-riding instructions. 
Lani brought up a great point - that this instruction has a lot to do with goal setting and achievement. Namely, if you want to reach a goal, you have to keep your eye on it and head straight for it. If you want to fail, keep looking at all the negative consequences of failing at whatever you set out to do.
No, reaching your goals is never as simple as that. But #1, it’s more fun to think about what success looks like, and #2, in my experience, it’s more likely you’ll succeed keeping an eye on the positive.
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business (and get creative AND effective with your own marketing efforts), sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in Lessons Learned | 1 Comment »
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on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 7:16 am and is filed under Lessons Learned.
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