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The Start-Up Drive Ep 3 : Agile and Lean does not mean we won’t document plans.

In today’s daily drive I’ve been thinking about the best way to document your plans. I’m not talking about writing a 1000 page document, Gantt charts, deliverables and projections. I’m talking about a monthly or quarterly overview of key objectives. Doing this will achieve a few goals for an up and coming company that has limited resources:

1. Keep focus on your goals over that time period.
2. Allow for non-tech types to understand what you’re doing.
3. Build up a library of documentation for potential investors.
4. Create a roadmap for business goal and KPI (Key Performance Indicator) definition and refinement.
5. Help to focus your efforts and build up definable metrics that can be used to one day forecast revenues and plans.
6. Build a “machine” and process for actually delivering on high level things like content strategy, offers, communication schedules (email, social media), and pricing offers.

I start with either a Visio or Omnigraffle document and every 30 days or so iterate a new set of two pages. It’s close to a mind map but leans more towards a process flow and goal illustration.

The nice thing about this is it keeps things understandable, it’s a quick read, it doesn’t take days to put together and lastly (and probably most importantly) it helps to document your journey in the chaos and speed of growing business.

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The Start-up Drive Ep.2 : Email marketing still matters.

Start-ups, small businesses, medium sized, and companies of any size will benefit from a strategic plan for email marketing (if you heard yesterday’s podcast then you’ll get that one). Here are a few ideas for making sure that you’re not discounting the powerful and low cost addition to get your communications consistent and relevant.

Any additional thoughts, tips or experiences for those just getting an email program put in place?

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Introduction and Summary – Episode 1: Planning for marketing versus a marketing plan.

I’ve decided to resurrect my podcast in order to be more relevant to a wider audience, in addition to it being easier and more convenient for me to record a short ten to fifteen minutes podcast on my drive into the office every morning.

I’m anticipating that it will be a podcast full of tips, anecdotes, gripes, strategies, tactics and techniques that I’ve used over the years and in my day to day adventures in the world of startups and marketing.

If you know me then you’ll know that I have a number of concurrent projects happening all of the time. The concept of the “lean startup” is not new to me. It’s actually called bootstrapping, or, “starting up without any money” – this concept is as old as commerce itself.

For some reason it’s the new rage in the world of technology startups, so I’ll refer a bit to that audience but in reality this should be useful for any entrepreneur, small business owner or marketing/business professional making their way in this new digital economy that has developed.

Episode 1: Planning for marketing versus a marketing plan.

I cover why a marketing plan written in stone will do you no good at all, especially when you’re moving quickly and defining your product or service. I give up a process I’ve used successfully dozens of times in both the online and offline business worlds.

Click the play button to get started, and please forgive the noise, I really am driving while I recorded this!

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The Internet Marketing Minute

In today’s marketing minute I’m going to talk about Twitter. Here are a few highlights:

1. Download my Twitter Strategies for Converting Customers Whitepaper from Honeypot Marketing. Tons of great tips in there (and I wrote that myself, no copy paste).
2. Go to Sponsored Tweets and Sign Up – monetizing your Twitter is s-m-a-r-t.
3. Go to http://ad.ly and sign up – same concept but slightly different. You get sponsored by the week, not the tweet.
4. Check out these videos by Scott Monty in charge of Social Media for Ford (interview in 3 parts: http://bit.ly/3v0NrR – http://bit.ly/3Wumqf and http://bit.ly/2VXCUo
5. Listen to the podcast. I talk about Twitter and how not become a spammer (or have other people on Twitter hating everything about you).

*Whew* Busy Tuesday. Is it Friday yet?

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The Internet Marketing Minute

In today’s episode of the Marketing (almost) Minute I’m looking at the importance of a correctly formatted and updated XML sitemap. Often times this is poorly implemented on a site.

There are a number of “optional” tags meaning you can get away without implementing them but I strongly recommend you make sure you are implementing a full URLSet.

Keep in mind that if you are running a dynamically generated site, this becomes even more important. In order to keep up with the changes on your site you’re going to want to get the Google Sitemap Generator and install it on your server. More details in the podcast. Click the image below to Play the podcast.

Note: This is a pretty “grass roots” podcast In time it will become more refined but for the time being keep in mind my main motivation for doing this is to give out some good tips that you might not find everywhere else in the universe. I’m refining the links I place in the podcast itself as clicking them will take you away from the site. For now these are the links in the podcast:

Sitemaps XML Format

Third Party Sitemap Generators

Google Server Side Sitemap Generator

Here’s the example for the suggested format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>

      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

      <priority>0.8</priority>

   </url>

</urlset>

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Well I’ve finally decided to get things in gear with my Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m thinking of the following format:

1. Limited to (around) 1 minute each and every day. This makes it manageable for me personally as I’m swamped with both Honeypot Marketing and Natural Traction.
2. Low production value. I’m not going to spend hours tweaking intros and outros – I’m not really a radio guy in fact. I’m thinking you want the information in the minute not a minute of music.
3. Highlight one strategy each and every day. This is will be a focused podcast not one about last great conference I went to and how I met up with Matt Cutts and we got drunk. There are enough podcasts like that.
4. Stay out of SEO rambling debates and debates among arrogant designers who think there is no value in SEO or Internet Marketing.

Now I am thinking one thing here. Since I have years of online gambling marketing and sportsbook internet marketing experience I could focus on that here and then do a more general podcast on Honeypot Marketing. I’m actually thinking of leaving it up to you all out there.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Basically it comes down to a niche podcast versus a generic podcast. I’m thinking out loud and need some input.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?