Posted on: October 29, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
I’ve been asked by friends in the last number of years why I started this sales and marketing blog. There are a number of reasons:
- When I started doing contract work a number of years ago, clients enjoyed it.
- It is a pleasure helping people, so whether people I know or don’t know learn from this Website, I’m glad to have helped.
- I enjoy doing online and offline research. When I have new thoughts on an item, it is fun for me to post once in a while on this Website.
Enjoy!
Posted on: October 2, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
I often find it interesting how useful vs. useless forum posting can be as a marketing strategy. For example, one of the message boards / forums I run has quite a large number of people that apply to become members each day. Of these applications, I find that 92% have no intention of posting relevant content. They just want to market their product in categories that are not relevant. I deny these people becoming members as clearly these days there are online tools to see who is going to be a real participant on a forum. These tools search existing forums to see if particular members, based on their email addresses, are relevant or not.
My thought on the best way to market on forums is to not waste time. If you have a product to market and want to talk about it on forums, have something to say. Sure, SEO strategy and keywords can help, but most importantly have a point. By posting on forums with relevant helpful information to others, a link to your product can be clicked more often when trust is built. People figure things out. If a person is just thinking they will be smarter than everyone and find clever ways to sneak in selling, it will rarely work. Conversion rate will decrease, other members may not interact as much with you, and the message board moderator may even remove any member that is detracting from the point of the message board.
I’ve posted on forums over the years, testing conversion with many techniques. Although quite a lot of strategies help, a base belief in adding to the forum is needed for success.
Posted on: April 10, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
About Managing
When I was young, I had the opportunity at the age of 14 to manage staff members for my parents. Ever since then, I have been in leadership positions, managing anywhere from a couple of vendors to teams of over 50 people. Now that I’m in my 30’s and many years ago graduated from college, management and building of teams and strategy is something I’m very familiar with. In the last couple of years I have become a VP, a temporary consultant for other companies, and a temporary director to help other companies.
If you would like to learn to manage, I would suggest getting started somewhere by reading, taking classes, locating a mentor, and most importantly putting yourself in a position to learn to manage people. It may just be that you start by managing one person, and even that may help get your foot in the door to learning.
About Sales and Marketing
Before and during college I had many opportunities to manage staff, sell to clients, and work with customers. After college I was extremely interested in selling and marketing. To bring this to a new level in my 20’s, I spent a lot of time reading books and magazines from experts, taking extra classes at local colleges, and most importantly selling and marketing my own products and services. Within months of graduating college, I was hired by the world’s largest Orchid company where I then managed, trained, advised, wrote for trade journals, and gave seminars to the public to sell Orchids and teach. A few years after that I grew to another opportunity and kept selling, marketing, and managing.
