In love, in the end, what you give is what you get. – John Lennon

This famous wisdom applies to many facets of life, including business. Based on 20-plus years of entrepreneurial experience, Webcopy+ Founder Rick Sloboda suggests that giving to receive is especially powerful and rewarding when it comes to networking, creating value, and building professional relationships. In this article, we’ll show you how Sloboda’s approach to networking brings him success.

Creating Opportunities by Making Connections

Business is about relationships, says Sloboda, who creates multiple ‘circles of influence’, where he relentlessly connects fellow entrepreneurs and creatives with complementary interests or causes. “Mindfully connecting people provides real value and creates all sorts of opportunities,” he explained.

As a ‘giver’, networking and connecting people comes naturally to Sloboda.

“Whenever I meet someone, I listen intently, and if there are any opportunities to make connections, I immediately describe the opportunity.”

He often tells people over coffee: “You need to meet [so-and-so], and here’s why…” By the next day, he follows up with email intros.

Sometimes it’s connecting influential, highly-established people in different continents, which can translate into major initiatives and big business dealings. And sometimes it’s a form of giving back and making time to help a student get on the right track.

He mentioned a recent example where a young designer early in her career was exploring potential paths. Being connected to a vast range of people, the veteran web copywriter and content strategist was able to introduce her to an established photographer, a usability expert from Microsoft, and a neuroscience specialist in Europe.

“Two of the three responded to her the same day, offering to answer any questions,” said Sloboda. “Hopefully she’ll pay it forward to another up-and-comer when she has an opportunity.”

Sometimes making connections sparks immediate results.

Last year, Sloboda connected an inbound marketer with a design agency and an international business coach. “They now work closely together, and devotedly pull me in as their content strategist and copywriter on collaborative projects,” said Sloboda.

“I created that circle of influence, and it’s created fantastic opportunities for everyone involved.”

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“I created that circle of influence, and it’s created fantastic opportunities.”
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Sloboda’s circle of influence can be achieved simply by sharing opportunities with people you meet. And by being generous with your knowledge and network.

How to Get Quoted in Publications

Sloboda values the power of PR—public relations.

“Free press is incredibly valuable exposure, especially where you’re quoted as an industry authority,” explained Sloboda. “It’s more credible and can be much more valuable than any high-priced ad you can purchase.”

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“Free press is incredibly valuable exposure.”
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But how do you find opportunities like this?

Sloboda keeps his ear to the ground to intercept editors and reporters looking to quote people with certain experiences or expertise. For instance, he recently connected a New York marketing agency with a television opportunity, artists and graphic designers with design publications, and social media specialists with a major newspaper.

He is able to do this, in part, by creating that circle of influence.

The other reason is that he is giving reporters what they need. By sharing his network with these reporters, helping them finish their stories with relevant people and information, he creates a win-win relationship that will benefit him as well as the reporters.

When reporters and bloggers need interviews with a web content expert to discuss marketing or branding-related topics, they look to Sloboda, who always makes himself available.

“With the major papers, deadlines are often tight, so if you don’t jump at the opportunity, someone else will.”

Savvy entrepreneurs place great value on these opportunities, and so they should, stated Sloboda.

“A mention in a publication can be equivalent to a $10,000 ad, or more,” he explained, “and being cited as source or expert carries a heck of a lot more credibility, not to mention any valuable inbound links you acquire.”

Sharing Gigs and Careers Creates Deeper Connections

Lately, Sloboda has also been leveraging his personal LinkedIn and Twitter networks—comprising 20,000 and 10,000 followers, respectively—to uncover and share job opportunities with other creatives.

“These gigs range from three-day contracts to some super sexy, full-time, senior roles,” he said. “It’s another way to provide value and help others, and people are appreciative.”

These networking efforts now have agencies reaching out to him, asking if he knows of any suitable creatives for select roles.

“Funny enough, I’ve been asked on a few occasions if I’m a recruiter,” he said. “’No, I’m a content strategist’, I explain, ‘who likes to network and share opportunities with others’.”

The Rewards of Giving

Sloboda enjoys connecting people and opportunities, so he says he doesn’t consider it work.

His social media interactions often connect him to new people in different circles around the globe, which naturally lead to emails and phone calls, and sometimes ‘creative coffee sessions’.

“I make time to go for coffees with other creatives 3-4 times per week, just to talk shop, exchange ideas and explore opportunities,” said Sloboda.

“I find meeting with other creative types is inspiring and educational, often challenging my mindset. Also, it’s led to many wonderful friendships and professional relationships.”

In recent months, new connections have engaged him in noteworthy initiatives, including consulting projects with world-leading communication authorities, launching creative publications and a National PR Chair appointment with the Graphic Designers of Canada.

“These are remarkable opportunities with amazing people, some of whom I didn’t even know just a few weeks before,” he said.

Curious Minds Connect

Sloboda is an example of the value of connecting and sharing knowledge with others. No longer do we think of the successful entrepreneur or creative as a lone wolf. To be successful, you must make connections. And to make those connections worthwhile, it’s time to get generous.

If you’re an entrepreneur or creative type who has questions about web content strategies, or just want to talk shop, you can connect with the seasoned writer via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or visit his blog.

 

 

 

You hear the phrase content is king thrown around a lot. What people mean is content is an opportunity to add value to what you’re selling. We just finished up the website design portion of #theprep, now lets dive into how you can drive traffic to your site and create more value with content marketing.

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Content is about adding value to your products. Here’s how to do it via @mojomarketplace
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Tell Your Story Through Content

What’s your story, anyway? As we discussed in the identity episode of #theprep, your brand is how you talk to your customers. It’s the way you want to be perceived.

This is a big part of content marketing. Nailing down your voice and the pillars of content you focus on with your business. Optimizing content on your site for keywords related to your products. And finding what matters, what adds value to your audience. That’s all part of telling your story, building authority, and earning trust from your customers.

There are three big ideas about content to learn: strategy, adding value, and context.

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy is a very complicated system of production and distribution across different channels with a specific goal in mind. The high-level goal should always be to add value, but that can be broken down into smaller, more specific goals. After you publish, you measure and tweak your strategy based on the results.

We can break this down even further. Think of it this way: who are you, what do you sell, and who is your audience?

Next, you look at ways to add value to your product by providing content for free.

That’s what we’re doing right now. Our customers create businesses and they need websites. So we must be WordPress and website experts, selling website products and services that will help our customers succeed at building their business or website. That’s why we write WordPress tutorials and create videos for entrepreneurs

That’s how you add value. You don’t just create a product and assume that people will find it useful. You make sure that you are talking about how it is useful, and actually help your customers get the most out of it.

If you want to learn more about content marketing and the mechanics of building a content strategy, check out the Content Marketing Institute and CoSchedule.

Adding Real Value with Content

Let’s talk more about value. It’s a two way street. On one hand, you’re providing information, resources, and guidance around your industry. On the other hand, you’re getting more eyes on your site, your products, and your content.

When we talk about content pillars, that really comes from the world of SEO, or search engine optimization. In a nutshell, a content SEO strategy involves finding keywords that are most relevant to your business. Then, you can identify pillar topics related to those words to structure your content strategy around.

You would then write some evergreen content, something that never gets old, like a guide on how to build a website, for each pillar. And then you continually produce supporting content, every week. Eventually, you build a reputation and a footprint on the internet in your space, and you’ll start ranking better in search results for those keywords.

The goal can be visualized like this. You’re an HVAC company. You want people to call you when their systems go down, of course. But what about air conditioning maintenance?

Who thinks about that in the winter? So you can start targeting questions about A/C maintenance and answering them with your content. This will drive search traffic to your site, provide useful answers for people who land there, and enable you to convert those people into customers.

But how do you make that conversion happen? Sales copy.

How to Turn Free Content Into Sales

One word: action. Just as sales people must always be closing, or ABC, your content must always be active, ABA.

Be cautious. You don’t want every article or video you produce to be selling people on how great your products are. That doesn’t sound authentic, and it doesn’t add value. It merely repeats what’s already there–the features of your product.

Your content is about turning people who need your help into real customers. And that can be a long journey in some cases, but it always pays off.

Instead of listing features or coming up with fancy jargon that makes your product sound intelligent, think of concrete actions your customers can take. And funnel them through your content to those actions.

Here’s an amazing example from CoSchedule. This article is about how to write headlines. It’s useful and relevant to their product and audience, and it’s one of their content pillars–content marketing.

The article goes in-depth about writing headlines, the strategy, the execution, etc. And it provides you with a free tool, the CoSchedule headline analyzer.

This analyzer is just a small part of CoSchedule’s overall product, and they give it for free. This is the perfect pairing of content and product, and the customer doesn’t even have to buy anything.

This is an example of what a customer lifecycle can be with content marketing. Drive your customers to act with quality content and solid sales copy and ideas.

Distributing Content and Finding Appropriate Context

A common mistake a lot of content marketers make is distributing content to as many places as possible with no context. Imagine that you have a blog about dog walking and you create some 10 minute tutorials about training your dog.

If you post that to snapchat, no one’s going to pay attention–it’s a ten minute video! The attention span isn’t there. But, what if you did a 10 second video of a dog doing a funny trick? Now you’ve created the right context for snapchat, and you can funnel that audience into other channels they might be interested in. Or, they can just stay engaged watching your weekly dog trick video. Maybe in 5 years when they get a dog they’ll remember you and come back for your products.

Another part of achieving the right context is your audience. Using the same dog example, you want to focus on audiences within your channel that are genuinely interested in dogs.

An additional content marketing mistake is pumping out your content to as many people as possible, no matter what. This creates bad vibes and makes people feel like you’re spamming them. Don’t try to convert cat lovers into dog walkers.

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Don’t try to convert cat lovers into dog walkers says @mojomarketplace
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Before you achieve world domination, start with the small stuff by targeting people within Facebook, Instagram, etc. who are already looking at dog videos. Finding a niche to establish yourself is probably the fastest path toward bringing in your best customers.

What’s After Content?

The answer? More content.

There will never be a shortage of ideas that can build your content engine and keep it running smooth. You can do a YouTube series, like #theprep, Podcasts, Guest Posts, Instagram stories, Pinterest boards, Holidays… the list goes on and on. A single Google search can yield a handful of content ideas.

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A single Google search can yield a handful of content ideas via @mojomarketplace
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In many ways, once you’ve created a product or business, your job stops being about the product and starts being about the people who need it.

Good luck! Reach out if you need a hand with your content strategy. We’re here to help because that’s our job.

 

You make a lot of choices on the path to creating a business. We just talked about why WordPress is the best website platform for entrepreneurs.

Now, you face another set of difficult choices–the design of your website and the WordPress theme you choose to build it with. Your theme is where your site design starts, and where it stops too. If you don’t invest in a solid theme, you will have trouble executing on your vision.

Let’s look at ways to choose the right WordPress theme for your business.

Paid vs. Free WordPress Themes

A WordPress theme is essentially a template. It’s a base of code that uses the WordPress software to publish a website.

Different types of customization are built in, and no two themes are created equal. There are two types of WordPress themes from a cost perspective. There are free WordPress themes and paid or premium WordPress themes.

I’ll tell you right now, the biggest difference you’ll notice is support. Premium themes, such as the ones on MOJO Marketplace, offer way more support and features than free themes, bottom line.

Also, free themes tend to limit your options for customization–because it takes a lot more time and effort to build more features into a WordPress theme. Also, many free themes are not ready-made for integrating plugins–an extremely useful tool–such as WooCommerce, which expand the functionality of your site.

Basically, you can’t build a great business with a free WordPress theme without rebuilding that theme yourself. So save yourself the trouble, and put yourself ahead of the competition by choosing a quality theme. Here’s what we look for in a solid premium WordPress theme.

Mobile First – Responsive No Matter What

First things first–and this shouldn’t even be an issue with a premium theme–you need a mobile-ready website. Responsive simply means that your website design will adjust to different screen sizes on different devices.

Most, if not all, premium WordPress themes have this by now. However, some themes do it better than others. Make sure that you check the responsiveness of your theme demo before you buy. Typically, you can check the quality as shown below by clicking the different device icons. If not, you can also scale your browser window down and see how the site responds.

Plugin Compatibility

Plugins are a huge help. They can solve all sorts of problems, such as spam, allow integrations with tools like OptinMonster, or help you create a storefront and checkout system as with WooCommerce.

However, not all themes come ready for all plugins. Some of the more advanced plugins, such as the Visual Composer, a drag and drop page building tool, won’t work on themes that aren’t designed with the plugin in mind.

Plugins allow you to add amazing features without creating code from the ground up. Many plugins are free, and a lot of the premium themes on MOJO Marketplace come with paid plugins installed. Here’s an example of what you can do with visual composer–build awesome pages without any code simply by adding and arranging elements.

 

When you’re shopping themes, think about what plugins you’ll need. For example an eCommerce site will require a storefront plugin or theme. A magazine style blog might require a featured content slider. A hotel or travel agency may require booking software. Google a bit to find plugins, and make sure that the theme you choose can support them.

 

What is an Identity?

I’ll admit for anyone unfamiliar with design and branding, some of the lingo can all start to sound the same. It’s a little intimidating, as well. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important to understand what an identity is. And for that matter, how to get it just right.

An identity can span across your logo, brand, social media handles (@yourusername), packaging, domain name, and more. In other words, it’s everything that represents you and your idea.

Even something that seems small–the type of photos you post on Instagram–makes a big statement about who you are. All of the touch points for your brand add up to create a perception of who’s behind the brand. It’s like telling your story a little bit at a time in different ways.

The Difference Between a Brand and a Logo

When thinking about your identity, it’s easy to confuse your logo with your brand. The reality is, these are two very separate ideas.

Your identity is made up of your brand and logo.

In short, the best way to think about identity is to imagine a large box and inside that box actually sits your brand and logo.

Your logo is is a mark, icon, or some sort of visual representation of your identity. And your brand is what drives the way your logo looks, your voice, your messaging, your color palette, the style of the bar stools in your restaurant, and even down to how your packaging looks.

For example, think about Apple. The Apple logo, store, website, products, and packages share a common style. It’s all very polished and techy. The logo is iconic because of the brand.

So, as you further develop your brand and choose a logo, the two will work together to establish your identity. This is the north star of your company, and should represent the feeling your customers get when they interact with your products.

Defining Your Brand

Start with your brand. You want your brand to communicate who you are and what you want to accomplish. Like Southwest Airlines. Their longest running CEO, Herb Kelleher defined Southwest as “THE low fare airline.”

Everything else follows from that. Think about how simple and direct that is. It’s something any employee can understand, throughout the company.

Let’s say you have a strategy, which you can communicate in 100 words or less (as discussed in the last episode of #theprep).

Now, take that strategy and start molding it into an identity that your customers can understand. Remember, your customers don’t need to know about your competitive analysis. They need to know who you are, and identify with the story you’re telling.

Brand Checklist

Imagine what you want your customers to experience and start throwing ideas on the whiteboard. Here are some initial questions to answer:

• What makes you unique?
• Who are your customers?
• What kind of experience do you want to create?
• What adjectives would you use to describe your company?
• Imagine your company as a place. How would it look, feel, and sound?
• At the end of the day, what’s your goal?

Answering these questions should get you to a point where you can make what’s known as a creative brief. This is a document that communicates what you want to accomplish as a brand. It distills that idea into a game plan for designers and creatives to execute your vision.

You can download our creative brief template here, and get started on your branding.

Designing a Logo

A logo is a lot like a name. It’s the visual representation of your brand. Think about the most iconic logos: McDonald’s, Apple, Starbucks, Nike, etc. Those logos are fairly simple, but because of the brand, they’ve become iconic.

Here are some simple targets that you must hit with your logo design.

• Recognition – The logo should be something people can understand. A complex diagram is the wrong way to go. A symbol people can recognize that is related to your name is the right way to go.
• Simple – Remember that your logo will have multiple uses–site icons, app icons, hats, clothing, stickers, websites, billboards, videos etc. It should be fairly simple–a bold icon with little or no text, or simply a stylized version of your company name.
• On Brand – If your branding is all about being colorful and loud, your logo shouldn’t be black. In other words, make sure the style of your logo will fit into the vision you’ve created for your brand overall.
• Powerful – Your logo should make a statement and grab your customers’ eyes right away. Don’t copy other iconic logos if you want to be unique.

These principles should help you bring something to the table. Also check out this article about more of the visual aspects of designing a logo.

Securing a Domain Name

Domain names are fairly straightforward, but can be tricky. But still, I’ve seen domain names gone wrong and wondered how it happened. Like your logo, the domain should be easy to understand and communicate the essential idea behind your brand.

First things first, get a basic idea of your brand down so you know what the key takeaway is for your customers. Think about it. Your customers are searching for something online. What do they type into the search bar that takes them to your site? It doesn’t have to be related to that, but it’s something to consider.

Above all, make sure that your customers can remember and spell your domain. And that it communicates the feeling you want your brand to represent.

Sometimes you will have to compromise if your domain is already in use. Check to see if your domain is available on domain.com and use the availability as a brainstorming tool.

Follow the Process

Before you jump into logo design and buy a domain name, remember that this is a process. Between taking the idea you came up with walking down the street and turning it into a brand there are a lot of challenging steps you have to take.

If you haven’t yet, review the idea, the vision, and the strategy episodes of #theprep to catch up. And before you spend time and money designing a website–lock down your identity.

I’m excited to announce a new series on the blog today: #theprep! The purpose of the series is simple. We want to help anyone and everyone who has an idea get it launched to the world. We’re going to take you through each step of launching your idea and guide you along the way. In the end you’ll have a new site launched as you get ready for #theclimb (the next step, a follow-up to #theprep.)