Tag Archives: Aaron’s Answers

Aaron’s Answers: How to start off on the right foot

By Aaron Hoos on January 4, 2010 in Portfolio

The Question:

aaronhoos_socialmedia_linkedin

I was asked this question by a connection on LinkedIn:

What do I have to offer? I am fresh out of Penn State and am fresh into the business world… I need more advice than I can supply!

How do I make myself more interesting and beneficial to others to generate business conversation???

Aaron’s Answer:

What an exciting time for you! And good for you for seeking out the advice of others to further your career. What I’m about to write is a small list of things I wish I’d done back in the day when I graduated from college and started my first business. Call it my “If I knew then what I know now” list.

1. If you want to be beneficial to others, but you don’t have advice to give, learn to connect people to other people. Don’t worry about giving advice based on your own experience. Instead, get to know LOTS of people and connect people together. (LinkedIn can really help you do this). If you’re going to take people out to lunch, take two people out to lunch and introduce them. Don’t bother having advice-oriented discussions just yet. Rather, prepare conversation starters to get things going.

If you need to make sales for your job (and assuming you have some leeway in how you do it), look into putting together seminars or workshops. Again, you don’t have to be the one at the front giving advice. Host them but have someone else (with experience) lead them.

2. Figure out your “angle” in business and focus on it. (For example, are you “THE Marketing Girl” or a social media expert or whatever). Create a position of expertise and target it on and off the web relentlessly. It’s tough to do it that early in your career but it’s well worth the effort if you can do it. If you have a bit of money and time to invest, read about personal branding.

3. Start a blog. Keep it professional but mix in some personal stuff too (but not too personal). You may not use it now for your career but it will slowly build a body of thought-leadership work that you can rely on in the future if you ever move.

4. Lastly, don’t ever apologize for having no experience. Turn it around and make it a benefit in your conversations: A lack of experience means you don’t have to color inside the lines the way experienced people tend to do.

Good luck in your career!

-Aaron Hoos
http://aaronhoos.com

 
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Aaron’s answers: Ineffective, unreadable content

By Aaron Hoos on December 18, 2009 in Portfolio

aaronhoos_socialmedia_linkedinThe Question:

Ratnakar Sadasyula asked:

What needs to be done to handle the vast amount of Junk Content on the Net?   While the Net for sure has made information more accessible to users, and has resulted in the spread of knowledge, the large amount of junk content can’t be ignored. There are a whole lot of sites, that have content, which is not of any use in any way. Portals are flooded with a whole lot of junk content, most of which is plain irrelevant crap. As we step into the next decade, the question begs is there a way to handle the junk content, that seems to increase day by day, and is clogging up the servers, bandwidth. Sooner or later, we would have to take a call on this.

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Aaron’s Answer:

My answer is just an observation from my own perspective, of course, and not intended to suggest that it’s the only reason.

In my line of work, I’m frequently contacted by small business owners to create content. Sometimes, the request is to create work that amounts to “junk content”. (Don’t worry, I turn those projects down). I’ve found that the two biggest reasons that junk content gets created and disseminated in the first place are:

1. Price. Businesses need to watch their budgets. That’s completely understandable. Unfortunately, they tighten their belts with low-priced content rather than saving money elsewhere. When a business hires a writer to create content for $1 for a 500 word article and another business hires a writer to create content for $50 for a 500 word article, you can be sure that the business receiving the $1 for 500 word article is getting exactly what they pay for. They’re exchange value for volume… to the detriment of their audience and their credibility.

2. Search engine optimization. This is an area that is improving but is far from “fixed”. For a long time, 4% keyword density was THE magic formula for search engine optimization. However, in a 500 word article, a 4% density means that the keyword has to appear 20 times. That’s pretty excessive and with long-tail keywords, it’s more than excessive; it’s ridiculous. These businesses have traded human-readability for search-engine-crawlability to the detriment of their audience and their credibility.

Sadly, I don’t see either of these issues changing any time soon.
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Aaron’s answers: Blog posting frequency

By Aaron Hoos on December 3, 2009 in Portfolio

aaronhoos_socialmedia_linkedinThe Question:

Samantha Parvin asked: I’m starting a blog – how often should I post? My posts are mostly concept-oriented (versus how-to, reviews, or news), and they’re mostly from 250 to 500 words or so. How often should I post a new article when trying to gain readership?

Aaron’s Answer:

I would advise that there are actually 4 things you should consider:

1. Frequency — which you mentioned. I would recommend at least 2-3 times a week. I try to post at least once a day. I know some who try to post 6-10 times a day. For your higher level work, I’d say that 6-10 times a day is excessive, but 3-5 times a week is probably what you want to aim for.

2. Consistency. A huge readership killer is not how many times a week you post but rather whether or not you keep it up. One of the most common phrases that you see in blogs is “I haven’t posted for a while, but…”. I’d advise creating a list of topics that will give you something to write about for the next 1-3 months.

3. Quality. It sounds like you know the quality you want to achieve at this point, and that’s a great start. Maintain that quality and your readers will respect you and look to you for more content. However, if you start your blog with great concept-oriented material but end up blogging about your favorite ice cream in a couple of weeks from now, you’ll erode readership who want to read about your concept-oriented work.

4. Lastly, connection. remember that your blog doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Make sure you’re promoting your blog in other places, tweeting your latest blog post, sharing it on Facebook, etc. As a PR professional, you’re probably already aware of the importance of this effort.

Best of luck!

Aaron Hoos

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Aaron’s answers: How to network at a conference

By Aaron Hoos on November 28, 2009 in Portfolio

The Question:

I am a real estate investor and I’m going to a local event shortly where I will be networking with other real estate investors and looking for money to fund my deals. I’ve got an introductory card that I give out but it isn’t pulling in as much response as I’d like. What do you recommend?

[For privacy, card is not included in post]

Aaron’s Answer:

The content on your card is good and just needs to be tightened up a bit. However, I think you should consider something to compel people to talk to you. After all, there are MANY real estate investors all networking hard to get a limited amount of funding dollars. An introduction of yourself is good, but you should consider enticing them to talk to you. I would write up a 2-3 page report about “The State of Real Estate In [your local city]” and indicate on your introductory card that you’ll give them a free copy if they talk to you.

Aaron’s answers: How do I market my business online?

By Aaron Hoos on November 6, 2009 in Portfolio

The Question:

AaronHoos_BusinessWriterandStrategist_Guru588207I was asked a great question through the private message boards on Guru.com. After briefly outlining his 3 new businesses, an entrepreneur asked: “I have never done much online but am interested in the effectiveness of blogging, press releases, etc.. If i am just beginning each of these businesses, what would you recommend for my ‘plan” to success?”

Aaron’s Answer:
At a very basic level, you’ll want a 3 step approach for each of your businesses; and you’ll find that it’s not that different than a really simple sales process:

1. Get the attention of cold contacts. You can do this through search engine optimization, articles, Twitter, and elsewhere (depending on the specifics of your target market). You might consider investing a little in Google AdWords or some other form of marketing, but that depends on your budget. The point of this step is to draw them into your “sphere” and turn them into warm contacts…

2. Build a relationship with warm contacts. Now that you have all these people listening to you, you need to give them something valuable. Again, it depends on the specifics of your target niche, but typically I’ll create some combination of the following for clients: blogs, whitepapers/reports, and ezines. The goal is to ultimately turn these warm contacts into customers…

3. Sell to your customers. There are a number things you can do — some of which I can help you with. This might include presentation material, “inner” website content (that doesn’t appear in search engines), and more. You might even consider broadening your offerings to include ebooks, webinars, and other products that you can either sell or you can use as positioning material to help you sell your services.

It’s hard for me to give you much more specifics than that with the little bit of information I have. I would say that the specifics depend on:
* Your target market
* Your business area (i.e., where do you do business?)
* Your budget
* … and a few other things.

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Aaron’s answers: Increasing website conversions

By Aaron Hoos on October 22, 2009 in Portfolio

The Question:

aaronhoos_socialmedia_linkedin

Steve asked: How to increase the number of conversions?

How one can increase the number of conversions with the limited number of visitors he is getting..

Thanks,
Steve

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Aaron’s Answer:

I quickly looked at your website (http://www.granite4less.co.uk/) and have a couple of suggestions:

1. Your “order now” button is buried in a list of other things. It should be more prominent. I’d suggest that you put it where the “call me back” button is in the top right.

2. When I click “order now” I get a phone number and email address. If someone clicks that, though, I’d guess that they are ready to buy online. But that option isn’t available to them. This adds an additional step in your sales process. “Order now” is actually “call us to order”. In your prospect’s mind, that’s an extra step. Websites should reduce the number of steps required to buy something, not increase them. If you can’t make the “order now” an immediate online purchasing option, I’d suggest that you remove it altogether and just make your phone number and email address more prominent.

3. You might also consider reducing the number of links on the left side of your page: Move “Why we are inexpensive” to the “price” page. Move “Site map” to the bottom of the page. (I’d even consider moving “Price” and “Contact us” elsewhere, too). In other words, make the left side of the page ONLY about finding a great product.

All the best,

Aaron Hoos

http://aaronhoos.com

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Aaron’s answers: 4 indicators that a business will be successful

By Aaron Hoos on October 19, 2009 in Portfolio

The Question:

aaronhoos_socialmedia_linkedinJohn Cameron asked: What are the leading indicators of business success?

When you see a business and think that it has a great future, what are you seeing?

I’d like the answers to focus on either entrepreneurs or businss owners.
I realize that they never really separate,but entrepreneurs bring business ideas to life and business owners build & maintain organizations that profitably deliver value to customers. Another way of looking at it is: what causes a business’ success?

Thanks in advance for your time.

John Cameron
ROCK SOLID Business Coach

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Aaron’s Answer:
In my experience, there are 4 elements that can make a business successful, but they appear at different times in different circumstances. (i.e., the entrepreneur might introduce a few of them and the business owner might introduce others).

1. Cash flow: Money needs to be coming in.
2. Profitability: Some of that money needs to stay in the business.
3. Investment: The business needs to invest in itself (i.e., innovation, better service, better processes)
4. Systems: The business needs to systematize or automate as much as possible.

Aaron Hoos

http://aaronhoos.com

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