It was great to meet everyone last night at the Irish Internet Association – Meetball demo and networking night.
We presented alongside Gary Mullan of Prosperity Recruitment and Emer Jameson of YourLocal.ie.
Big thanks to Roseanne Smith and gang at the IIA for organising the night.
I will be speaking this Tuesday at the Dublin Web Summit on using email for sales and marketing.
Looks like it will be a great event amazing people including Stefan Glaenzer founder of Last.fm, Ben Parr, Editor of Mashable, Dan Cobley, Google’s Director of European Marketing and more…
If you are there come up and say hi.
Alan
To jump start your marketing we have updated the wonderfully simple online marketing plan for you for the year. It is put together as a checklist and it has the basics filled in with space for you to add your own twist and cross them off each month. It also includes few tips on what holidays and events you can use each month. It is based on one I have been using last year and I can tell you it helped me focused and on track. Go ahead and download, print it off and hang it over your desk. This year you are going to be ahead with your marketing!
Keep us posted and let us know how the plan helped your business and let us know how we can improve it. We will showcase replies right here on the blog.
We will email you a link to download the .pdf file.
You will also be subscribed to the monthly Toddle marketing tips newsletter. See example.
There is a balance in email marketing that can be summed up in these three words.
Be pleasantly persistent!
Absolutely delighted to hear that this blog has been shortlisted for Best Business Blog in the Irish blog awards.
A huge thank you to you guys who read us, contribute and use Toddle. Some great competition in the category, including a couple of clients. Make sure you click through to read what they have to say.
Fingers crossed for the main event on March 19th in Belfast.
Have you seen Fiverr? Its a fun site where you can buy and sell the most amazingly strange and wonderful stuff for $5.
We spotted Pickle and just had to have her on the site. Welcome Pickle.
In this post I will not be covering how to present like Steve Jobs or how to make your content riveting. Other people have covered that very well. Instead, I will reveal a few simple and effective strategies that I have developed by speaking at various conferences and events over the years.
It is very easy to get a speaking slot talking to a willing, captive audience for an hour. What you don’t want, is thinking was it worth your time a week later. Since then, you have heard nothing more about it. No one came back to you with feedback. You received no sales leads. So what exactly did you get for your time and effort? Leads, press, feel good factor, made more contacts … Nope? Then read on and become a conference ninja.
Even if you do not get the keynote or the biggest standing ovation, you can come away with more value than those guys if you follow these steps.
Below you will find 3 simple steps to ensure you get the most from your speaking event
Dan Zarrella in Hubspot did some interesting research on this. Chris Penn does it well. On each presentation screen condense your key point into a 140 character long tweet.
Example “@alanorourke says 68% of men snore in bed compared to 20% of women. Who are the remaining 12%? #conferencetag”
And tell the audience TweetThis:
Not only will you have your audience sharing and talking about you but it helps condense your key points to take away with them.
When I started out I was so proud that I managed to get up and talk in front of an audience.
But I would get back to the office and my business partner would ask was it worth it and I would struggle to say yes. Realistically, it is very rare for an audience member to leave a talk and immediately call your company to buy your product or service. Most likely they will write down a few things and make a mental note to look at your website and follow up with you later. Then they get back to the office to catch up on the work they missed. Consequently that mental note to call you slips further and further down the priority list until it is forgotten completely.
This is where you need to take the initiative and maintain that contact. But how do you get their details in the first place?
Here are a few ideas I have tried in the past:
I have put resources online such as a downloadable ebook, report, planner, calculator, even a free graphic template. Anything you think would be useful to your audience. Mention these resources in your talk and tell your audience where to download them for free. In return they must provide an name and email address to complete the download.
One example that has really worked well for me is offering an ebook, that ‘normally’ costs $39, free for conference attendees.
Not everyone will go online so take a few printed copies of your eBook with you and tell the audience to come up afterwards to get one. Then ask for their business card to email them in future. If you have nothing to offer then offer a copy of your presentation itself. Ask them for an email address and you will send them a copy of the slides and audio after the event.
I love squeezing additional value out of work I have already done. It is very satisfying.
So what else can you do with your presentation? A quick list:
Related reading: Save $180,000 on your next tradeshow and beat Microsoft.
Photo: Alastair McDermott
Fantastic email from LinkedIn today.
Terrifically personalised, relevant, interesting and social.
It also plugs nicely into one of the top driving forces of social media reported by a Harvard study (Sorry I cannot find the link again). The top use of sites like Facebook is people like looking at photos of those in and out of their network. I must say what a good looking bunch of people you are.
Can you use more customer photos and profiles in your emails?
If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn you can find me here. Let me know you are connecting because of Toddle.
Great evening yesterday at the iGAP networking event in the Enterprise Ireland offices. It was great to catch up with fellow iGAP 1 alumni and current iGAP 2 participants who where fresh out of a day long session, getting their mind blown by the brilliant Oren Michaels of Mashery.
During the event Paul Hayes chaired a panel discussion with leading enterpreneurs Colm Lyons, Ray Nolan, Breon Corcoran and Mark Roden.
One of the key points to come out of the discussion is how hard it has become to get good techies and online marketing people in Ireland and how hard the government makes it to attract this tallent from abroad.
If you are thinking of changing career to online now is the time.
Below are a few photos from the event. More on flickr.
This is a genius idea from Damien Mulley. (warning, f-bomb after the link)
And then I decided to get money printed. #mulleybucks to be precise. Here they are.. I sent the money out to a lot more people than the Christmas cards. Over 100 people got them I believe. But the money was created for another reason too. Ideally I wanted to see these Mulleybucks used to be able to cash them in on products and services that I offered as well as from a few other people too. So with that in mind, here are some discounts from myself and other people. A few more too are on the way:
As we didn’t get a Christmas card (Ahem Mr Mulley!) we have a secret plan to get our hands on your MulleyBucks.
Send us $50 mulley bucks and get a $50 real money discount on a yearly Toddle Email templates subscription.
Go ahead and order and post us the Mulley Bucks after. We trust you.
