Li’l Specs – My Wife’s Site
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 14, 2010
Man, I must be the worst husband in the world. Here I am, talking about all this stuff I do and have, and I just realized that I haven’t mentioned my wife’s website in almost 18 months. Well, let me take care of that right now.
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Her site is called Li’l Specs, and she makes customized clay pins. The reason you see them with eyeglasses is because they’re actually pins you can wear and, if you have reading glasses, you can hang your glasses on them so you won’t misplace them.
She’s got a great inventory of pins, and her most popular seems to be dogs. Actually, if you just wanted either dog pins or fish pins you could just request one and she could get you something fairly quickly. Or if you wanted something special, say a whale, she can do that as well. If you wanted your specific pet and wanted to send a picture she can do that, but it’s much easier if you just said “I want to doberman” or “I want a dog” or “I want a fish”.
Something else she makes are what’s known as pillow blankets. If you follow that link, you’ll see four pictures of the one she made for me. It’s hard to show them properly, but mine is about 6′ in length and 3′ wide. She makes them in 3 sizes, which includes the baby sets she makes. I haven’t talked about the blankets in the other posts, as she wasn’t sure way back when that she wanted to add that to what she does, but now she has.
Li’l Specs; think of it, check it out, and trust me, it’s something no one else you know will be wearing until they see yours. And yes, the pins are mainly for women, but she made American flags one year and there were some men who bought them, so she’s pretty flexible. The blankets; I’ll just say that I use mine every single night, and I’ve even taken it on the road with me. It might be too late to get it there by Christmas, but they’d make great New Years gifts as well.
There; I’ve done my duty for the month. 
I’m Supposed To Ask You To…
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 19, 2010
It’s Friday, and I figured it was time for something a little intriguing, more of a question and comment and a wish that I could remember what got me thinking about this.
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Actually, that’s not quite accurate; I remember what got me thinking about it lately. I was reading a post by Larry Brauner of Online Social Networking, whom I mentioned as one of my early commenters, called Top 10 Ways To Get Facebook Page Fans. As I was reading each of the points, I smiled when I realized that half of them involved asking people to join in some fashion that was more direct than just writing about it on one’s blog, which I’ve also done, as well as adding a widget, which you see there to the right.
The thing that made me smile wasn’t so much that Larry had half of his points saying that as much as the reality that I’ve read often how we’re supposed to ask people to sign up for this or that, or help us out in some fashion. As a matter of fact, I did that very thing just over 2 years ago when I first stated that I wanted more RSS subscribers, and here and there I’ve asked that question again, adding a failed contest along the way.
It’s strange because days ago I wrote about how bad I’ve been in promoting my own products, and now I realize that I’m pretty bad at asking people to sign up for anything on this blog, or other blogs, or my website, or even to follow me on Twitter. What is this thing all about? What the heck is wrong with me?
Actually, I think it ties in with a conversation Sire and I were having in a comment area about talking ourselves up. He felt it was kind of unseemly, while I said if you can back it up and were actually telling the truth that it’s not such a bad thing. And I truly believe that; yet, here I sit, not really talking about myself all that much in the things I do for work, and the things I believe I could do for others.
True, this blog isn’t necessarily a blog to market myself, but it has been a component over the years. Early on, I used to talk about all these different methods I’ve tried in making money online, and I used to disclose my monthly income all the time; not so much now. The truth is that I believe I’m kind of a talented guy. Sure, you wouldn’t know it by that image above; yeah, I drew that for one of those online survey things.
I’m definitely not an artist by any means. But I have been a songwriter, have written two books now, helped a hospital make more than $700 million in revenue in one year, helped a guy get an $80,000 contract two weeks after just one business coaching session, had articles in many magazines over the course of the last 8 years and gave a keynote presentation at a health care conference in 2007. And I make a mean meatloaf, even if I might mess up tuna every once in awhile (only once; read the story).
Other than writing the books, who knew any of that other stuff? For that matter, what else don’t you know about me? And trust me, there’s plenty more. That’s my fault because, though I feel I disclose a lot, I really don’t promote myself all that much. It’s one reason why next week I’ll be having those evening posts about my products; gotta promote something, right?
Anyway, Larry’s right, and it does me little good to go out kicking and screaming against it because, well, overall it’s just not my style. But I did talk about wanting to be known as a big time blogger, so it behooves me to just come out and ask. In my way, of course.
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So, as humbly as I can, I’d like to ask that, if you participate, you assist me in this fashion, and of course I do it as well when I can, and we can all win:
1. Hook up with my Facebook business page (I hate that it’s still called “fan” page, but oh well), and of course hook up with me on Facebook as well.
2. If a post grabs you enough, whether you comment on it or not, and you’re on Twitter, click that “retweet” thing at the top right of the post and share it with others. I went with Topsy because it doesn’t make you add an application to your Twitter account to use.
3. If you like a post, whether you comment or not, think about clicking on that little “like” thing at the end of each post. If you want to know the truth, I really have no idea where that goes or if it shows anywhere else except on the post, but it’s there looking pretty lonely most of the time.
4. If you’re predisposed to do so, ask me to write a guest post for you. For this one, you’ll have to send me an email, which is under the “contact” tab at the top of the blog. I refuse to ask people if I can write a guest post for their blog, but I’ve asked people to write guest posts for this blog, and I have written a few here and there this year, but nowhere close to as many as I had thought I would. And I know the guest posting rules since I wrote some, and our friend Pat wrote a wonderful one last week on someone else’s blog and has responded to every person that’s commented; great job Pat!
That’s all I have. Now, other than next week, watch me go another year before remembering to ask for something; oh well… And be on the lookout closer to the end of the year, because next year I’m going webinar crazy; well, for me at least.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
First Social Media Marketing Goal
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 28, 2010
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Two weeks ago I wrote two posts on social media marketing. The first was titled Do You Have A Social Media Strategy?. The second was called Goals For A Social Media Strategy. I was attempting to start a general conversation on the topics because I kind of had an ulterior motive planned. Some of you (Scott, Dennis) wanted more specifics on those goals; I didn’t want to give them up. Now I can talk about it a bit more.
On July 22nd, in Cortland NY, I’m going to be a big part of a workshop on social media marketing. Okay, truthfully I’m doing most of it, but my friend Renée Scherer of Presentations Plus is going to be doing a part of it as well. The topic is titled Make A Splash With Social Media Marketing For Business. This is a 6-hour presentation that will talk about social media strategies, mention special social media outlets and actually help people set things up as need be. We’re also doing the same presentation on August 19th, but I really want July to be successful.
We’re charging $149 for members of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce and $169 for everyone else. That’s because the venue sponsoring us is Greek Peak Mountain Resort, a new member of the Chamber (for those who are local I know they’re not in Liverpool, but I don’t ask questions lol) who’s promoting their new attraction, Cascades Indoor Water Park. And if you think that’s a high price, Renée got a flyer in the mail last week for a similar presentation being given in Hawaii for $475 for the same time frame; this is a steal! And there’s a special price which makes it inviting to turn it into an all day thing with the family; coupons if you will. Here’s the flyer to download if you’d like to check it out.
The thing is I wasn’t initially a part of this event. I was asked if I would take over for someone else, and there were some circumstances that I wanted taken care of before I consented. Those have been taken care of, so now I’m a part of this thing. And I have a lot of work to do; I’ve already started on the initial outline, but this is at least 5 hours of talking, presenting, and hands on teaching, so it’s more than the traditional presentation for me.
Now, something I mentioned to my friend Scott is that I don’t believe all goals have to have a time frame on them, and I stick by that. He is correct that most trainers will say you must have a date on it, otherwise it won’t have a chance to be fulfilled. How many of you have lost the amount of weight you said you were going to lose by the date you set? I thought so. How many of you have lost at least some weight by the date you set? I’m betting that’s a different number, and that’s kind of my point. Sometimes the effort towards the goal is more important than the date on the goal; at least that’s how I’m dealing with this thing with my health club, as I’ve yet to lose any weight but have lost some inches.
Anyway, now I can reveal the goal that I really had, which is to have at least 50 people at this event in July. Actually, some of the things we’ve tried have already been put into motion, but I’ll talk about mine, since I’m going to be trying it the social media way. Once a week for the next 2 weeks I’ll be having a post on the event on this blog; that might mean two blog posts in a day, or it might be the only post on that day. In the last 10 days I’ll be throwing a blurb on here as well, and one of the posts will be a sticky post, which means visitors to the blog that come in through the mail page will see it at the top for those 10 days. I’ll also be writing about it on my business blog; I’m not sure I’ll be writing about it more than once on my finance blog, since the topics aren’t quite compatible.
I’ve already started talking about it on LinkedIn, albeit kind of discreetly. I’ve had 3 people contact me asking me to keep them in the loop when I knew more; that’s not a bad start, and now that I can be more free, I’m going for it. How am I going to do it? I’m going to use the 120 character box on the main page to mention it and link to it, and I’ll be throwing out something in some of the local LinkedIn groups I’m a part of. In the last few weeks my connections have grown, and now I’m sitting at around 235 people; that’s not so bad.
It will become a part of my Twitter marketing. Of course the messages will go out when the blogs post, since those messages go out automatically, but I’ll be wording the campaign differently when I mention it separately. The thing about Twitter is that you can miss a lot of people if you only post something once a day, since the stream moves fast. Lucky for me, I talk about so many other things, as well as talk to people in general, that hopefully it won’t be seen as spamming the masses too much. Oh yeah, there’s also a Tweetup on the 30th that I’m going to, and I’ll be talking about it there as well. It’s an offshoot of social media marketing, so it counts; my rules. And y’all can look to the right there to see how many folks I have following me there.
As for Facebook, first I hope more of you join my Facebook business page, for which the widget is there to the right, or you can click on this FB business link. I’m going to mention it in that group, and of course I’ll create an event link to market it as well. I have almost 450 friends there, but of course I’m only going to send a specific link to those people who are local. I’m also a part of a couple of local groups there as well, so you can bet they’ll hear about it.
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Both Renée and I will be doing an email marketing campaign as well, as it’s part of social media marketing, old school as it were. We’ll be getting some help with that one via the Liverpool Chamber; ah, finally something that my paying a membership for is providing me. 
Renée will be using Constant Contact, and she’ll be presenting that since I know nothing about it except I market it as an affiliate.
One final thing we might be doing concerns the webinar we gave last year. I want to talk about YouTube in a bit more detail, so our plan is to take a piece out of that webinar we market and have a short video from it made so we can then create a YouTube page to put it on. I’m not sure how well that will be received, but it’s the next step in my overall social media marketing strategy, so I might as well get a jump on learning how to use it, right?
Anyway, time to end this one. As you can see, it’s an audacious goal, but we’re going to push this one hard. We have verbal commitments; now all we have to do is turn those verbals into actual paying customers. And now you know the rest of the story; thanks Paul Harvey. Stay tuned; at some point after the event I might let you know how successful we were. Oh yeah; future emails will be much shorter. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010-2011 Mitch Mitchell
Creating Your Own Products; Let Me Talk About Mine
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 23, 2009
Something you hear many of the internet marketing gurus talking about is creating your own products, especially information products. Supposedly there’s this big market for almost anything that’s intellectual property, and big money can be made from these things.
Well, I’m about to somewhat challenge that view by talking about my own products that I’ve created. Some I’ve talked about here, while I haven’t talked about the others. So, I’m going to do that here, with links to where I might have talked about a product before, and then talk about the other things I have. Of course, within those other links is a link to my product.
First, for this crowd, is my book Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool, which is up there at the top left of this blog. Do you know how many people have actually visited the book from this blog? Four ever; period. That’s it. Now, to be slightly fair, the last time I actually promoted the book in full was in August, but come on, only four people ever, with all the visitors I have coming to this blog? All the people who say they’re interested in making money, all the people who have businesses with lousy websites, and I could only drive four people to that site? That’s pretty pathetic. What’s also pathetic is that for each of the times I’ve written about this book, I didn’t get a single comment on that post; I’m obviously a terrible marketer.
The second thing you see over there is for my webinar Social Media, SEO & Your Business in 90 Minutes. That post also didn’t get a single visit, and I’ve driven 3 people to check out the ad for the book from this blog. At least it’s newer than the other ebook, but still,… And, once again, no comment on this post, though I did get a couple of comments when I was talking about it before I actually did the webinar. Once again, created product, but lousy marketing I assume.
Next, look to the left there under the ad for 123Inkjets. This is my book Embrace The Lead, the one product I’m the most proud of. It was a labor of love, and I worked hard on completing it before my dad passed away. I was able to get 9 people from this blog to go look at it, but that’s not really great either. It has been my biggest selling product over the years, as I sell it in both electronic and soft cover form (I’ll even autograph a copy if asked). But I have to admit I’d have thought I’d make at least one sale from it off this blog, which has never happened. I have made a sale because of my Mitch’s Blog, which is my business blog, but not this one. And I’ve had two different squeeze pages for this book, but neither has generated all that much action ever, which is why it’s a muted looking page integrated into my business website format.
Below that is my CD series Keys To Leadership, and I’ve driven 7 people from this blog to check it out, even though it got some nice comments here. Seems people were more interested in what I had to say on the blog, which was a pretty funny story, than actually deciding it was worth taking the time to go see what the CDs were all about. You know, it makes me wonder just how many people actually even use the Listen button at the top of each blog post instead of having to read some of my longer posts. Okay, that was a sidebar thing; don’t answer it. Once again, it had one of those fancy squeeze pages that I later decided didn’t work, and integrated it back into my business website.
The last two products I haven’t really talked about here, but I will now. One is called the Mitchell Manager Training Program, and is a training program for new managers who want to gain some skills in things managers or supervisors need to know, but don’t have time for a lot of deep theory. It also has a portion that talks about stress and time management, as well as a brief lesson on budgeting. Sure, it’s still around 150 pages long, but I wrote it to be fairly easy to understand. Two weeks ago I made my first online sale, as it was only maybe 4 months ago I turned it into a digital product and began marketing it in that fashion. This one has never had a squeeze page; I’ve always marketed it basically through my business website. I haven’t put it on this blog because, frankly, I figured I’d be wasting my time. After all, it hasn’t lit a spark for any of my other products.
And finally, there’s my Mitchell Employee Evaluation Module, which has always been on its own squeeze page, though I’ve thought about pulling it back within the business site. It’s about 27 pages worth of information and sheets that will help managers evaluate their employees, as well as set up criteria to use in evaluating new employees. Once again, I’ve only made one digital sale of this product, and the buyer seemed to be happy with it. I knew this one would have no interest whatsoever on this site, which is why I haven’t marketed it here before now.
So, there’s six information products that I’ve created, and how are the sales? Lousy. How is my marketing? Obviously lousy. See, a big part of the piece says to try to find out what someone is interested in, then create something towards that interest. The other part of it is that, if you’re not interested in that, how the heck can you write about it? Some of these gurus aren’t interested and don’t care about stuff. They pay someone else to write it, someone else to help market it, and collect the profits. It works best when they’re already big names in selling something else; I doubt most of us could get away with that.
And why would we want to? What could be more dishonest than that? Matt Cutts was talking about that once with a website that advertised medical services that someone needed for their mother, but when asked for more information they couldn’t give it because the person knew nothing about the procedure; they had paid someone else to write it for them so they could put their name on it. How irritated would you be about something like that?
In any case, this post has a twofold purpose. One, to highlight all of the products I’ve created thus far; more are coming as I move along. And two, to show you that even creating your own products doesn’t guarantee success or interest. This doesn’t mean don’t create new things; it just means to temper your thoughts on how successful it might be once you put it out there.
Once again, there are no get rich quick schemes.
Ultra Diamonds
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Social Media, SEO And Your Business in 90 Minutes
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 20, 2009
Talk about grabbing for opportunities when you can. Y’all remember the post on the two interviews I gave and talked about, right? Well, one of my friends listened to the one on social media and now we’re going to do a webinar on the topic, which you see the title of above, and you can get to the social media registration link here.
Okay, I’m actually doing the webinar, but I’m using the software of my friend Renee Scherer of Presentations Plus, who still has open her MS Word webinar for July, which you can still register for. It’s three weeks of seminars for one price, so you’ll be getting plenty of good information, for sure.
Anyway, back to me for a minute. I couldn’t be happier to see some of what’s been going on for me lately, what with the interviews I gave above, and now this new interview that I gave to Murray Newlands for his blog of the same name. He even put my picture big and prominent on his site; wow!
Of course, the big thing about it all is that I know it’s just my time to be talked about or to by so many people, and can only hope that it turns into bigger and better things down the road. No, I’m not believing the hype, so y’all don’t have to worry about my getting my head out the door.
Then again, I was in the local newspaper also, and someone else wrote a very nice blog post about me; maybe there is something to all of this. Somebody stop me!
Okay, here’s the stop, and now the pitch and the request. Yes, there is a fee for the webinar, $37, but it’s 90 minutes, will have parts where questions can be asked, and answered of course, and, well, I expect it won’t be boring, and I’m betting that everyone knows someone who has asked “What’s Twitter” or “What’s all this noise about blogging” and the like. Well, I’m going to address all of that and more during the webinar. This is my first webinar ever, so it should be interesting to see if I’ll fail like a Twitter whale or succeed like David over Goliath; heck, those two references were the best I could do?
So, for SEO and marketing purposes, I have to put this one here one more time: Social Media, SEO and your Business in 90 Minutes; be there!
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