A great Article from Jim Connolly on how to attract better clients.



Jim said "I recommend that you spend some time determining exactly what type of clients or customers you most want to work with, and then shift your marketing focus so that you are as relevant as possible to them."



Is this what you are doing?



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How to attract better clients

December 14, 2010 by Jim Connolly 17 Comments - Have your say: Leave a comment!

How selective are you, regarding the people you work with?  Many small business owners make the costly mistake, of working with anyone, who has the ability to pay them.

In this post, I explain why this is a bad idea and how you can avoid wasting YOUR time and money working with low value clients.

Many small business owners attract too few good quality inquiries and end up building a client base that’s of little real value.  Even though they know from their conversations with a prospective new client, that this person will be a total nightmare to work with, they still decide to work with them because they need the money.

With a low quality client base, working for people who are a pain in the rear, their work ceases to be enjoyable and their business suffers in every respect, as a direct result.

The answer?

You can increase your income, lower your stress levels and develop a more robust business, by focusing your marketing messages so that they exclusively target inquiries, from people with your ideal client profile.

This means moving away from the mindset that any business is good business and using a more strategic approach to your business development.  It means not wasting another minute of your time developing large, untargeted networks and email lists.  It means no longer writing your marketing messages, so that they are of some relevance to almost everyone, and focusing them like a laser-beam, so they are 100% directly relevant to your ideal profile of client.  Of course, by making the content of your website/blog as relevant to this group as possible, your SEO should also improve, as Google and Co are always looking for the most relevant sites.

What next?

I recommend that you spend some time determining exactly what type of clients or customers you most want to work with, and then shift your marketing focus so that you are as relevant as possible to them.

What are their challenges?  Find out and demonstrate that YOU have the answers.

Where are they, online and offline?  When you know where they are, you know where to connect.  Look for groups, forums etc online and also the exhibitions or conferences they attend offline.

The bottom line: If you want the right people to get in touch with you, you need to motivate them to send you an email or compel them to give you a call or visit your premises.  This means that what they see/hear when they connect with you, either on your site, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc, needs to be as relevant as possible to them and their needs.

A message that’s designed to appeal to too wide a group, is just not powerful enough to motivate people to take action. Read more at jimsmarketingblog.com

 

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Would this work?

If you have been curious how others add the like button to their Facebook Tabs, this will show you how. Thank you Tim Ware for a fantastic article.

The easy part they speak of to do this...hmmm, I think it depends on your comfort with doing the steps outlined. If you can't do it show it to whomever does your online webdesign.


If this is helpful to you click "Like" and comment.

Amplify’d from www.socialmediaexaminer.com

How to Add a Like Button to Your Facebook Tabs

By Tim Ware Published December 13, 2010

Have you ever wondered how certain Facebook pages add Like buttons to their custom tabs? Look no further.

Many have asked me how sites like Threadless are able to add multiple Like buttons and comments to their Fan page, allowing visitors to buy, Like and comment on any t-shirt on their Shop tab.

Well, it turns out it’s actually quite easy, using the fb:comments FBML tag.

Using fb:comments, you can add a Like button and comment boxes in multiple places on your Facebook tabs and, optionally, each can be accompanied by a user comments section. This provides more avenues for fans to interact with, and share, your content.

The Threadless Fan Page — How Do They DO That?

The Threadless Fan Page “Shop” tab displays a selection of six t-shirts from their catalog, and visitors can order, Like and/or comment on each one.

Each Threadless product has "Add to cart," a Like button, and Comments.

The left column in the above illustration is a product image and a pull-down select option. Once a user makes a selection and clicks “Add to cart,” he or she is redirected to the Threadless.com website to complete the purchase.

The right column content is created using the fb:comments FBML tag:

<fb:comments xid=”UNIQUE-IDENTIFIER” canpost=”true” candelete=”false” reverse=”true” returnurl=”http://www.threadless.com/product/1295/And_How_Are_You_Feeling_Today”> <fb:title></fb:title> </fb:comments>

The parameters and values used for fb:comments

xid: This is the unique identifier for this instance of the fb:comments tag. You must include a value, and I suggest using something short and descriptive. You’re limited to alphanumeric characters, hyphens, the percent sign, periods and underscores. The user won’t see this content; it’s just for creating a value that can be accessed by developers for programming purposes. Some examples are: xid=”Product-205″ xid=”Product-Blue-Shoes xid=”Tan_50%”

canpost: You’ll most likely want “true” for this value, indicating the user can post a comment.

candelete: You’ll want “false” for this, meaning a user can’t delete any of the comments.

reverse: Setting this to “true” places the “Add a Comment” box below the posted comments, as is done on the Threadless page.

returnurl: This is the most important value! This is the URL that the user is Liking when he or she clicks the Like button. If the user ticks the “Post comment to my Facebook Profile” box, the comment will appear on their wall as “[User] likes [Website's Title Tag] on [URL].” You can have any valid URL for the “returnurl” parameter. Threadless has the product’s page on their website as the “returnurl” value.

Using CSS to hide unwanted elements in the fb:comments tag

You can remove that "Facebook social plugin" text and logo with CSS.

You can easily hide this element from being displayed. Using the Firefox plugin “Firebug” (a must-have for coders!), I determined that the little Facebook logo and “Facebook social plugin” text are contained in a DIV assigned the class “subtitle_left“, and this DIV can be hidden, in all browsers, with CSS.

To hide this content, you simply add:

.subtitle_left {display:none;}

to your stylesheet, which hides the DIV:

Presto! The containing DIV for the logo and text are hidden with display:none.

Just want the Like button? Use CSS to hide the comment box

If you want only the Like button and not the comments box, you can use the “display:none” CSS property to hide the unwanted comments box.

Because all the comment features are contained in a DIV assigned the class “comment_body” (thanks again, Firebug!), just add the following CSS rule to your stylesheet:

.comment_body {display:none;}

The result:

Adding Multiple Instances of the Like Button

You can have as many instances of the fb:comments FBML tag on your custom tab as you wish. Just make sure that each has a unique “xid” value.

Giving users more options than just Liking your page and/or sharing it means more user engagement and more mentions of your brand showing up on users’ walls.

Give it a try and let us know how it works. Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

About the Author, Tim Ware Tim Ware is the owner of HyperArts Web Design, helping businesses build and promote their Web presence. His focus these days is Facebook app development and Static FBML. Other posts by Tim Ware »

Read more at www.socialmediaexaminer.com

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LinkedIn: How to add the LinkedIn Recommendations Button to you Website

LinkedIn has been adding to the companies page and I like what I am seeing. The LinkedIn recommendation button is something I think most of us would benefit from. All the details are below.

Two other additions to add to your LinkedIn companies page, are discussed.

1. Gather Insights on how well your Company Page is Doing.

Use the LinkedIn Analytics tab on your companies Page to learn who and where your visitors are from. Nice!

How will this data be of value to you?

2. Have more control over your brand’s Company Page

Control who can have access. I strongly recommend including your team and use all resources to strategically promote.

Will you use the LinkedIn Recommendation button on your Site?

If you found this article helpful, then click "LIKE"  above and also share it. Thanks!

Amplify’d from blog.linkedin.com

Add LinkedIn Recommendations widget to your site and gather Insights

We have over 50,000 products and services represented on LinkedIn Company Pages today and that number is growing at a pretty rapid clip.

With millions of LinkedIn members following over a million companies on LinkedIn, we are glad to introduce a range of new capabilities for companies to glean insights, ways to both manage their Company Page more effectively and to make it easier for customers to recommend them.

Here are three new features we’re launching this week for companies:

1. Gather insights on how well your Company Page is doing today

On your Company Page’s Analytics tab, you can now see how many LinkedIn members are visiting your Company Page and how many LinkedIn members are following your company. You can also see what industries, functions and companies these professionals come from. Finally, you can also track how they are interacting with your Careers Tab or Products and Services Tab, how many are clicking on your promotional banners, and how many choose to contact employees at your company etc.

In short, everything that you need to know to manage your company’s presence on LinkedIn is now available via the Analytics tab. And for every one of these data slices, you can compare yourself against similar companies to benchmark your performance.

2. Have more control over your brand’s Company Page

We’ve now included more flexibility for Company Page managers to manage the editing and privacy settings with our new administrative controls. You could give every single employee at your company editing rights to your Company Page. Or if you’d prefer to give editing rights to just a select few employees, that’s an option as well.

3. Make it easy for your customers to recommend you by adding LinkedIn’s Recommend button on your site

When happy customers recommend your products and services, you get the most authentic, credible endorsements. Why not make it easier for your happy customers to bring you more customers? Embed this “recommend” button on your website, for each of your services or products so your customers can recommend away with ease – again, with just the click of a mouse.

The code: <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js“></script><script type=”in/recommendproduct” data-company=”CompanyID” data-product=”ProductID″ data-counter=”right”></script>

To get your Company ID Go to linkedin.com and click on “Companies” and search for your company by name. Go to your company profile. Your Company ID is the number in the URL i.e. the URL follows the format http://www.linkedin.com/company/CompanyID. Replace “CompanyID” in the above code snippet with your actual Company Id.

To get your Product ID To get code snippets for additional services (or products), just replace the Product ID # (data-product=) in the code snippet above. You can find the Product ID # for any of your products from the URL of your respective product pages – it’s the number that follows “prdid=” in the URL.

For example, LinkedIn’s Company ID is 1337, and the Product ID for Recruiter is 1441.

Code example to recommend LinkedIn’s Recruiter product <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js“></script><script type=”in/recommendproduct” data-company=”1337” data-product=”1441″ data-counter=”right”></script>

Ryan Roslansky December 10th, 2010

See more at blog.linkedin.com

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