Informationweek Influencer

John Jantsch (@ducttape)

Twitter Bio:: Small business marketing consultant, speaker and author of Duct Tape Marketing, The Referral Engine and The Commitment Engine.
Location:: Kansas City, MO
Website:: http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog

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Here’s an email, which every small business owner should read!

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The email is from a former small business owner, who had to cease trading recently after 5 years in business. The following excerpt is quoted with the author’s consent, though they have asked me not to use their name. It contains 2 lessons, which I hope you will find useful.

“Me and my wife quit our regular jobs in 2007 to start a business. We were excited and worked like crazy to make it a success. By mid 2011 we knew we were in trouble as our life savings were almost gone and the business was still making too little money to cover our overheads.

How to Make an Impression in 8 seconds

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Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from Barry Moltz – Enjoy!This is a world of talkers. Business people are constantly chatting on their cell phones, email, blogs, texting or using whatever social media tools they can find. They are telling people who they are, what they do and what they think about a situation. But, can anyone really understand them? In fact, is anyone really listening? Most importantly, are they doing it in a clear way that helps others understand how their company can help? This becomes a huge issue since the average adult attention span is 8 seconds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

How Do You Tailor Content to Different User Levels?

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Today on ProBlogger, we’re publishing the first in a little two-part series of posts on WordPress themes. The first is on choosing a theme, and the second is on installing themes.

Now, some ProBlogger readers might wonder if professional bloggers need this kind of information. Of course there will always be pro bloggers who haven’t ever installed a theme, and the articles may be helpful to them. But is that our key target audience here?

The census we conducted earlier this year revealed a lot about ProBlogger readers—enough that we could break you up into different categories or audience sub-segments.

This is a useful

How to Keep Track of How Other People Are Using Your Media Online

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Whether you have a blog, you post photos on photo sharing sites, or you're a YouTube star you probably wonder when and how your media is getting used by other people. Regardless of whether it's free-to-use media or copyrighted material the process of tracking it down is the same.

Depending on the type of media you're producing you can track it in different ways. For our purposes we'll break the search into three types: art and photos, writing, and videos.

Tracking where photos and art appear online is pretty easy if you don't mind doing

30 Ways to Build the “Know, Like, and Trust” Factor that Grows an Audience

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Your content is good. You know your material. You know how to put words together in a way people want to read.No matter how strong a writer you are, you won’t grow the vibrant audience that supports your business until you fit one more piece into place.The reality is, your audience won’t pick up real momentum until you’ve mastered the “know, like, trust” factor. Face to face salespeople have known this for decades, but some content marketers are still struggling to get it right. Unlock this reader response for more comments, social shares, and followers. For invitations to guest post. And for a transformation in your blog, your business, and

This Week in Small Business: It's Small Business Week!

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National Small Business Week kicks off. President Obama holds a small-business round table and proposes new tax incentives. But the chairman of the House’s Small Business Committee says the majority of the president’s policies have “burdened” small business. A new report

The Importance of an Ongoing Optimization Strategy

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Those four words likely conjure up the thought of a seemingly endless road trip of days past. Luckily for you, I’m not going to be talking about road travels in today’s post. No. I have a very different thought in mind, and that is the notion of ongoing optimization.When I speak with friends and family about our work here at TopRank, I’m often asked the question ‘when is a site optimized?’ It’s a fair question, especially considering what typically precedes it is my soap box speech on the importance of optimizing content with the customer’s wants and needs in mind. So what do I say? My answer is always the same: it’s ongoing process. Now, that’

The Commitment Engine Inspires Small Business Growth Small Business Trends

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After having several of these kinds of interactions, it’s become clear to me that no one is really sure what commitment is or what it looks like. But we are all really sure that it’s important to have commitment both in our businesses and as part of our lives. So where does commitment come from, how do we harness it and in what ways can we generate an environment of commitment inside of our business?These are all the questions that John Jantsch (@ducttape) answers in his latest book, The Commitment Engine: Making Work Worth It. This book comes as a follow-up to John’s last book, The Referral Engine. It’s interesting to see how Jantsch has

New Research Shows That Small Business and Social Media Are Coming to Terms

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Over the course of the last few weeks I had the chance to team with Vocus (NASDAQ: VOCS), a leading provider of cloud marketing software, to analyze the results of a new survey of 400 decision makers at small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) and their use of social media, which shows among other things, that small business and social are coming to terms.The study reinforced something that I’ve been noticing more and more, that there’s finally this acceptance that social media not only isn’t going away it’s an essential element of the marketing mix and the real challenge now is to figure out how to integrate it into the total online and offline

7 Most Important Online Marketing Tactics for Any Small Business

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Building an effective online presence these days has moved beyond the realm of the occasional event and into the daily routine of the marketing department. It doesn’t matter if it’s just you, as opposed to the traditional definition of department, online marketing must become a habit that’s practiced daily.Below are what I believe are the most important online marketing tactics for any small business. Focus on these actions before trying the chase this week’s new, new thing.Your entire content strategy should be informed by a catalog of themes and topics you visit and revisit in a predictable manner. You must commit to researching a core set