Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Sunday, June 13, 2010
How Blogging Brings Fame: Becoming Famous and Successful Through Your Blogs
How Blogging Brings Fame: Becoming Famous and Successful Through Your Blogs
If you have a knack for writing and if people loves
what you write about but you can't find a publisher
that wants to publish what you write, you have to try
out the internet. You have to consider the fact that
writing can make you famous. If you think that you are
good enough, then you should try writing blogs. Ever
since blogging craze began, there were a lot of people
who began opening up their own blog sites and a few of
them have become famous. So, how does blogging bring
fame?
First of all, because you will be posting what you
write on blogging websites, it can be easily accessed
by a lot of people. This is the internet. With
millions of people logging in each day, there is a
great chance that someone will come across your blogs.
If you are seeking fame and be known as a great
writer, then positing what you write on blogging
websites is the cheapest way to do so. It is also one
of the easiest ways to become famous in the internet.
To start writing blogs, you first need to create a
blogging website. Today, there are quite a lot of
websites that hosts blogging for free. Sign up with
one of these websites and begin posting your blogs.
Basically, blogs are known to be journals. Think of it
as writing your day to day activities and experiences
and letting people know about it. However, you can
absolutely write about anything in blogs. It can be
facts or you can also write fictional short stories.
Or, you can do a mix of both.
The great thing about blogging is that you absolutely
have complete freedom on whatever you want to write
about. However, you have to take care in avoiding
offending someone. Racial discrimination and other
hate messages is prohibited as well as pornographic
content.
Now that you posted your very first blog, the next
thing to do is sit back and wait for readers to come
across your blog and begin reading it. You don't
actually need to advertise as the people who read it
will be the ones that will advertise for you. If you
are good enough, then they will leave a comment on
what they think about your blogs and they will also
recommend it to their family and friends as a good
read.
The secret in becoming successful and famous in blogs
is the content of what you write. It should be
interesting and easy to read. Try catching people's
attention on the very first sentence. Once you catch
their attention, they will become interested enough to
read the entire blog.
This is the secret to becoming famous in blogging and
gain a lot of loyal readers.
Try to update your blogging website on a daily basis.
If you really don't have something to write about and
you have a normal, routine life, try adding a little
spice to it. You don't actually need to lie but you
can always bend the truth behind your so called
escapades. Exaggerate a little and also add a little
humor.
You have to remember that readers don't really want to
know about your day to day activities. They want
excitement. You don't actually need to tell the
readers details about your daily life, but what you
need to do is get them to use their imagination.
These are some of the tips that you might want to
remember when writing blogs. With these tips, you can
be sure that your blogging website will bring you
fame
Saturday, June 12, 2010
A-Z Thoughts and Facts
A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|L|M|N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|V|W |
A | |
Article Writing: Writing a minimum of six articles per year that get published in magazines that have an opportunity to be read by your ‘public’ is a vitally important personal branding process. Personal branding must be continuous to be effective. Getting articles published online is another internet marketing concept to build your reputation. Articles can be more current in nature, and more topic focused because you only need to write between 300-800 words. Crafting and drafting an article to suit a particular magazine or publication forces you to work with your own writing. If a topic hasn’t got enough subject matter to become a book at a later stage, it can become a booklet, or an e-book of between 5,000 and 20,000 words. | |
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B | |
Body Language: Researchers estimate that human beings have a body language ‘vocabulary’ of over 20,000 different gestures, each with its own distinct meaning. As with spoken and written language, the more fluent your body language, the better the job it will do to reinforce your verbal message. Clients may have observed your body language long before you open your mouth. For example, clients will observe the way you greet people as you enter the room. By the time you speak, this group will have made some preliminary conclusions about you. Do you seem open? Are you friendly? How responsive are you?
The three Ps of building a personal brand: Branding Strategy: ‘To know is to have gained knowledge, to do is to have gained wisdom’ is an important metaphor in your brand building campaign. All consultants know the importance of marketing and branding. But it’s taking the action and doing the necessary activities that separates the amateur from the professional. Consider four areas: Branding By Writing a Book: Writing one or more books is one of the signature steps to becoming a fully-fledged Odyssey consultant. Writing a book, of course, is only the first step in a two part process. Getting your book published is the second part of this process. Despite the avalanche of electronic information and the accelerating pace of change, the written word in the form of a book holds an influential place in the minds and hearts of men and women everywhere. Business of Consulting: Seeing consulting as a business rather than as some kind of different or protected profession is the behind the concept of ‘the business’ of consulting. Seeing it as a process not an event. It takes time and dedication. You can make the break through by following the complete systems thinking approach, whatever your profession – lawyer, accountant, dentist, doctor, architect, engineer, management consultant. | |
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C | |
Client Profitability: client profitability has a direct relationship between the fees you charge and the time you spend on the assignment. Some clients may be very profitable; others may be costing you money. While 20 percent of your clients may contribute 80 percent of your profits, the question then arises, ‘what do you do with your least profitable clients who absorb your most valuable resource – your time? Competent Warrior: The Competent Warrior stage – the second step – emerges, where you develop a formula that works more often than not, and you start to get seriously focused on expansion plans and visions for the future of your career or business. Competencies of a Consultant: The Odyssey Competency Model is based on the integration of three different but important competency concepts: 1. Personal, Interpersonal and Team Competencies Consultative Selling: In a nutshell, the client buys you and your expertise first, your solutions second, and your company third. The flip-side of the same coin is that as an Odyssey consultant, you must put the client first, your company second, and yourself third. Creditability Builder: In the 1970s Professor Albert Mehrabian’s study Silent Messages looked at the three ways in which you make an impact when you communicate with others — through your words, tone of voice and non-verbal behaviour. He proved, convincingly, the over-riding importance of non-verbal communication or body language in being a credible communicator. The three areas are: | |
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D | |
Definition of Consulting: The first definition is a broad, functional approach to consulting. Fritz Steele in Consulting for Organisational Change (1975), defines it this way: “Consulting is any form of providing help on the content, process, or structure of a task or series of tasks where the consultant is not actually responsible for doing the task itself, but is helping those who are”. In Peter Block’s book, Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used (2000), he suggests that “You are consulting any time you are trying to change, or improve a situation, but have no direct control over the implementation. By this definition, many executives in organisations are really consultants, even if they don’t officially call themselves consultants. So, if you are a helper or an enabler, or a provider, or even a manager, you can assume the consulting role”. Consulting, therefore, is a generalist approach, open to everyone rather than the preserve of the elite. This positioning helps explain the hi-jacking of the title ‘consultant’ by everyone from the ‘hairdressing consultant’ to the ‘sales consultant’ to the ‘IT consultant’. It’s an approach or a way of doing something. | |
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E | |
Executive Briefings: Executive briefings are the best kept secrets in marketing a consulting practice. You invite a targeted group of executives to a lunch or evening occasion where you get the opportunity to present on a subject that will add immediate value to their operational or strategic challenges. This provides you with a platform to ‘display’ your expertise. Executive briefings provide an ideal location for working jointly with media, academics or a business sponsor, such as a chamber of commerce, newspaper or other commercial player. Executive briefings, above all, provide an opportunity to publicly show your professionalism and puts you within eyeball distance of prospective clients. | |
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F | |
Financial Intelligence: Financial intelligence is the ability to generate sufficient profitable revenues to meet your goals, to invest that profit wisely, and to ensure that every cost adds direct value to your business. | |
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G | |
Generalists & Specialists: “To be a generalist or to be a specialist, that is the question”. To be a real management consultant, you need to be a generalist, some would argue. A specialist is an industrial engineer, a financial analyst, an expert in compensation techniques, but not a management consultant. This argument says that generalists lack the in-depth knowledge required to fully understand and resolve problems and provide added-value in today’s business environment. Clients today want consultants to have the generalist skills of a general manager and the in-depth knowledge of an expert. It’s a balancing act that could kill your business. By firmly deciding who you are, and how your talent is different, you can find the right balance. Although you may be a generalist in your field, your clients need to perceive and believe that you are a specialist in their area of need. Good Soldier: The Good Soldier stage which is exemplified by the enthusiastic professional who has just joined the profession from college or management. Provided you survive the soldier year(s), you are ready to progress to the next level. | |
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H | |
Human Performance Management: Human performance management has attempted to link business strategy and business transformation with limited success. Linking human performance improvement with the very purpose and future strategy of a business is a consulting task that is not often appreciated by executives and leaders. The impact of a total integrated organisation wide strategic process can be significant and long lasting on a company. | |
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I | |
Ideal Client: Client profitability has a direct relationship between the fees you charge and the time you spend on the assignment. Your biggest clients may not be your most profitable clients. Be careful not to fall into the trap of confusing size or amount of revenue fees from a client with bottom line profit. Niche marketing for the Odyssey Consultant allows you to identify and work with your ideal client more easily and more often. Some markets just do not fit, or will not pay the kind of fees you need to reach the top echelons of consulting. One of the major reasons average consultants stay average is because they are working in the wrong markets where it is difficult for a small consultant firm to maximise their positioning, and to charge the value based fees they deserve. Your best clients will be moving forward as action orientated leaders. Change will be endemic. They will be seeking a piece of their better self in you, therefore, you will need to be at least 10-20 percent ahead of your client in terms of your psychological and social intelligence. In any market, there is always a profile of potential clients who are high probability clients, these are clients who very much value what you do, and are prepared to pay the consulting fees that you deserve for the ‘worth’ that you create. To justify higher fees to your client, you must increase the perceived value of your portfolio of solutions. Value is truly in the eye of the beholder. Your sales and marketing strategies AND your personal and professional branding are critical to positively differentiating your offering in the minds of your clients. You talk more about profits, return on investments, the vision of the client organisation rather than the features and benefits of your products or solutions. You stop selling, in the old fashioned sense. You realise that your personal capital knowledge bank, expertise and talent can add value at an organisational level and be of real benefit to your client. Intelligent Consultant: As an Odyssey consultant, you must change all limitation thinking with regard to your intelligence. You must put into perspective all forms of the ‘IQ’ way of thinking. You probably have too many comparisons from your management career and examination results that tell you how smart you are, or how intelligent you must be. Exam aptitude can determine your future, if you let it. Your previous management level can put a ceiling on your consulting business, if you let it. Unfortunately, these measures and this kind of ‘limitation thinking’ permeate the consulting industry. IQ tests originated during World War II when more than two million Americans were sorted out for military enrolment through the first mass paper-and-pencil test. This way of measuring intelligence has permeated the education, economic and social world for decades. Be careful that it does not limit your consulting career. In the last few decades, however, there are major developments in the area of multiple intelligences. Interpersonal Communication: Interpersonal communication is a learned art, science and practice of the professional advisor. Interpersonal communication is the process that you use to exchange information with your client on a one-to-one basis. It’s the super-highway to building solid and lifetime relationships.You use the communication process to listen to the needs and wants of your client. You use it to explain models and ideas, but also to share your intentions, feelings and attitudes. The Latin word communicare literally means to share. Interpersonal communication, at its simplest level, is a two way process. Intervention: What is the scope and parameters of the consulting profession? How do you, in fact, help, assist or advise? What’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate? What does an intervention mean? There is a myriad of answers to these questions, but here are 10 general ways a consultant can intervene in a client organisation as follows:
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L | |
Learning by your Talent: Let your talents shine. What do you really enjoy doing as a consultant? What do you find easy to do? What do you find easy to learn? These tasks are probably clues to your natural talents. These areas need nurturing and development just as much as your weak areas. Pick a subject (maths)or task (driving a car) for example, and map yourself on the north/south easy/difficult to learn axis and on the east/west easy/difficult to do axis with regard to the subject/task. What comes easier to learn and do are talent indicators for you. If you cannot name your talents, you probably don’t really know those talents well enough to exploit them for your own good or the good of your clients.
Listening to Write: Writing a superb professional letter by the Odyssey consultant has a cause-and-effect relationship. Endeavouring to get it right first time, however, means having a systems thinking approach and a total grasp of the picture in the client’s head. | |
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M | |
Marketing Excellence: Marketing in a consulting business is about getting the right portfolio of solutions, to the right clients, in the right places, at the right time, at the right fees, with the right level of communication, and at a right profit Master Practitioner: The mastery stage is the ultimate goal for the Odyssey Consultant. Mastery of your subject can take 5-7 years of dedicated hard work. That’s up to 10,000 hours, focused on doing the right things. It’s not 10,000 hours ‘cruising along’. That’s a lot of extra time to invest in moving to the top of your profession. But the time is going to pass anyway so why not start immediately with a systematic action plan.
Market Strategies Positions: One of the biggest single mistakes that average consultants make is to give equal attention to everybody. The cost of acquisition is often the same for creating a low value, low appreciative, client as it is for your high value ideal client. This piece of insight needs operational wheels, however, or it can turn to cynicism and stress.
Clients will tell you everything you need to know, at that time, if you create this zone between both of you. However, it’s got to be a peer level regard. If they don’t feel safe with you, if you don’t seem totally credible (that’s 100 percent credible) they will, unconsciously, hold back vital information or give it to you in an operational, technical, superficial form. This will cause you confusion in the letter writing stage. The cycle of average has been started. The benchmark will be set, probably for the entirety of your relationship. (MR1) Meeting One Response: The goal is to present all M1R letters right first time. You may outsource this to your PA by dictating the letter in your car immediately after you meet the client. Or you may do it yourself, or outsource it to an agency. Follow your house-style whichever way you do it, some basics of design as are follows:
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N | |
Narrowcast Marketing: 1. Proprietary Research is used regularly by the big firms to develop positions on a specific market sector or problem. 2. Seminars and Executive Briefings are a core competency for the Odyssey consultant. 3. Writing Books and Articles gets your profile in magazines and newspapers. 4. Making Speeches at public conferences gets publicity and spin-off benefit. 5. Attendance at Industry Meetings gets you involved in real operational issues. 6. Networking is always important but never urgent. It needs to be ongoing and is best when you are having ‘a feast’ period. 7. Referral Sources are gold mines. Do good work and they will be volunteered to you rather than you asking at the time of your greatest need. 8. Community Activities. Giving something back needs to be an ongoing activity and during the ‘feast’ period. Definitely never during a ‘famine’ period. 9. Getting Quoted in the newspaper is the ultimate reference. It requires networking and keeping in touch with journalists. 10. Newsletters can be regular or periodicals, paper or electronic, but should serve to update and refresh. 11. Brochures are too associated with product selling. Keep them different. 12. Media Tracking for opportunities is good but used a lot in product selling. 13. Cold Calls is the old fashioned hard-selling method that went out with the 20th century. 14. Direct Mail is too predictable, product-oriented and immediately positions you in the wrong way. 15. Advertising rarely works. Free PR, ‘subliminal advertising’ is better. Networking: networking is the active process of developing and managing mutually beneficial relationships within your personal, professional and business contacts. | |
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O | |
Observation Awareness: Observing means much more than seeing. You see everything that passes by your eyes but you do not record it. Observing is like listening with your eyes. The eyes are the windows of the soul. How good are you at reading signals? Remember there are 20,000 non-verbal signals!
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P | |
Personal Productivity: Personal productivity is the ultimate personal talent differentiator in the achievement of your personal and professional strategies. Excellence in personal productivity means achieving your primary objectives, on time, every time. It’s having a clear understanding that there are choke points and winning edge factors that either hinder you or help you to be very productive as a consultant. Sometimes, ironically, you may like the limiting factors because they protect you from the truth. Sometimes you may develop a state of ‘learned helplessness’ with regard to the winning edge factors that give you the push-up to the next level of productivity and performance. Personal productivity is about getting important tasks completed in less time, with less stress, so you can focus even more attention on the high-value activities that give you a maximum return on your investment. Process Consulting: The consulting process has a clear beginning, middle and end, and includes all the activities undertaken between the consultant and client to help achieve both their clearly defined outcomes and objectives.
Purpose of Consulting: Establishing a conceptual framework regarding the purpose or purposes of consulting helps shape your approach to client assignments. The underlying motives of helping, assisting, or advising seem to permeate all definitions of consulting. Here is the Odyssey definition of consulting:
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Q | |
Questions: Observing means much more than seeing. You see everything that passes by your eyes but you do not record it. Observing is like listening with your eyes. The eyes are the windows of the soul. How good are you at reading signals? Remember there are 20,000 non-verbal signals.
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R | |
Referral Marketing: Word of mouth marketing will still account for 60 percent or more of the best work you will receive from your ideal clients. One of the great blessings of working with your ideal client is that they have a tendency to talk about you with similar others. This has a ripple effect of creating a golden chain of recommendations for your consulting business. The primary purpose of your consulting business is to create and keep clients who appreciate what you do and who put you in ‘a category of one’. When the need for a solution enters their thought process they immediately think of you, and only you. It is just too awkward, time consuming and risky to consider the alternatives. This most basic question is, ‘Why should I do business with you?’ Results-Based Consulting: A systems thinking approach to managing the critical first part of the Odyssey process which is creating the right kind of relationship with the right kind of client and at fee levels where both you and the client are very happy. It is about win/win versus win/lose, lose/win or lose/lose in the client/consultant relationship. Revenue Generation Strategies: | |
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S | |
Sensing Consultant: Tapping into your preference areas are vital in talent identification and finding the best ways to be an advanced learner. An important consideration in your learning is how you prefer to use your five senses — seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling — which are controlled from the neo-cortex of your brain. How do you prefer to use these senses in your learning? You may be dominant in one learning style and may struggle with the others if you are not aware of your preferred style. Consider experimenting with some of these different ways of learning during the Odyssey process. Seven Ingredients of the Marketing Mix: Six Profit Drivers: Social Networking: A good ‘rule of thumb’ is to balance your speech with 60 percent content or information on your topic and the other 40 percent on the process that makes the content work. There is no better way to engage an audience than by giving examples, telling stories, showing a demonstration or diagram, and moving about appropriately on stage. Having humour, fun, encouraging questions and interactions are all supreme skills that need to be practiced a thousand times over before you become expert with them. Speaker: Establishing yourself as a professional speaker is a powerful trademark as an Odyssey consultant. Always maintain your primary branding position as a strategist, businessman, or as a consultant. Explain that you are privileged and honoured to be invited to speak at their conference as a key note speaker or as part of a panel of speakers. Strategy: Strategy is an essential thinking tool and a powerful planning process to gain the individual, team or organisational competitive edge. | |
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T | |
Trusted Advisor: the Trusted Advisor stage is where the majority of competent consultants find their level of excellence. They do good work for a niche market who are loyal to them and vice versa. They have gone beyond the ‘feast or famine’ roller-coaster and earn above average personal income. They enjoy their work and work with their ideal clients only.
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V | |
Value Priorities: Perception is reality. The client will have many moments of impression from their interactions with YOU … from the very simplest to the critically important. How your staff answer the telephone … how your presentables (letters, documents, brochures, manuals etc.) are quality focused … how consistent your offering is maintained … and how you live out your brand promise are all critical moments of impression.
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W | |
Writing- House Style: Developing professional writing habits and learning to write with purpose needs to be part of your values, mission and communication ethos. Writing excellence is simply a formalised expression of your thoughts, captured in a piece of script. Having the right content, however, does not mean the job is done. Your goal is to present all your documentation to the highest possible standard, to maintain consistency across your consulting practice, in the most efficient way, and to set standards below which you will never fall. Call it your own unique HOUSE-STYLE. | |
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