So many people I know are hesitant to sell. They’re hesitant to sell themselves. They’re hesitant to sell their products or services. And they’re hesitant to sell their business.

It’s easy to understand, right? As soon as I mention the word ‘sell’ what goes through your mind. For me I think of the pushy people in the appliance store. You know, the vultures hovering around waiting for the next carrion to fall through the door. Or the guy at the car dealership who goes through some pavlovian response the minute you have a question.

We just don’t think well of selling, do we? Which means we probably have some idea that stand in the way of us selling, as well.

But we don’t have to be obnoxious to sell. The obnoxious ones are not the best salesman. The best salesmen sell you without you ever knowing they were selling to you. They engage you, understand your need and help you fill it. That’s it.

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Over the weekend we spent some time Christmas (oops) Holiday shopping. Of course, the mall was packed and the stores were full of people making decision on what to buy the people they care about.

Being so cramped with other people, I couldn’t help but here the conversations they were having about gift their gift selections.

“I think we should get this sweater for mom.” “Don’t you think Jas would love this truck?” “How much should we spend on Aunt Jennie?”

Everywhere I turned I heard questions like this. And while they may seem perfectly normal and benign, I got to thinking…

Aren’t these people marketing themselves?

Sure, none of them were actively promoting their business or selling their products to each other. On the contrary, they were trying to sell other companies products to each other.

But what they were doing is promoting their opinions; selling their ideas. Isn’t that marketing? And isn’t that what each small business owner is trying to do – market their ideas of how to solve your problems?

What do you think? Are you convinced?

image Are You Convinced by yueproduction on flickr

The other day, I ran into Starbucks to get my wife a latte. It was mid-afternoon on a Saturday and, as usual, Starbucks was hoppin’.

As I waited for my wife’s coffee, I looked around. Every table and seat was filled with people talking with each other. I gently tuned into the conversations that were close by (yes, I was easy-dropping). At one table, two girls were talking about their college Chemistry class. At another three guys were discussing investment ideas. I heard two women talking about gardening, a couple discuss their wedding plans, and a dad sharing stories with his two twenty-something daughters.
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Well, now that I’ve bared a bit of my soul for you all to see, I’m not sure where to go next.

When I wrote the post on Friday about my ‘Gotta Get Goals,’ I didn’t realize it would have such an effect. Not only on you, by your comments – which I thank you for, but on me as well. Over the weekend and into today I’m a little foggy on how I want to proceed.

I’ll certainly continue blogging about small business development, marketing, using the web, blogging, etc. And, it feels right to begin doing so with even more of my own, unique perspective.

When I work with clients, it’s never just about business building. It’s much more. Often I share with my clients how to bring themselves more forward in their business. Not just ‘own,’ but how to bring more of their own, authentic selves forward in caring for their clients and customers.

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Do you find it hard to write sometimes? You sit there at the keyboard and just can’t get the words to come out. Or maybe you’re like me, you begin a post, then delete it. Begin again, delete it. Begin again, rewrite it, then delete it. And so on.

Sure, sometimes the posts just coming flying out – like this one. But sometimes it’s a struggle to get anything down at all.

It’s probably true that anyone who writes deals with writer’s block from time to time. But what do you do when it comes knocking on your door? Or worse, when it makes itself at home, follows you to your office and sits on your lap all day?
Well, Bestseller Interviews has put together The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Writer’s Block. And they should know. Bestseller Interviews covers “Best Selling Authors and How to Write Best Selling Books.” So if anyone would know how to deal with writer’s block, they should.
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Part 4 of my comments on a really good post from ProBlogger written by Tony Hung of DeepJiveInterests about what he calls “the five prerequisites for having a successful blog.” Realize It’s Not About You (its About Them).

…Certainly the kind of blogging you want to do is not about you at all. Its about Them. I’ve alluded to it plenty of times in this very article, but blogs that are successful, popular, and growing are not ones centered around their authors. They are centered around news and information that is interesting to their readership.

But what does this also mean? It means ask yourself and Them, how you can make yourself better to serve their interests. It means, changing your content to make it wildly interesting to Them. It means ask yourself if the next Big Change your going to do on your blog will cheese them off or encourage more feed signups.
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I had some time over the holidays to think about the past year; the projects I’ve worked on, the people I’ve worked with and many of the conversations I’ve had. It’s been a great year and I thank you for that.

As I looked back over past conversations and one-on-one consultations, I’m struck with the overwhelming amount of misinformation about search engines. And unless you’re following current trends closely, you’d have no idea if what you’re being told is accurate or not.

Probably the biggest piece of misinformation “out there” right now is about keywords – how they’re used and what they can do for your website.

You’ve probably been told that all you need to do is get a big list of keywords (some times called search terms, or search phrases). This big list of keywords then goes in your copy. It also goes in what is called a META tag in your web code. And when you’ve got this done, you just sit back and watch the search engines build your business for you.

Well, it used to sort of be that way. But it’s nothing like that today.

You see, when popularity in the internet was growing early on, search engines did track big lists of keywords and use them in search results.

Ten years ago one of the most effective ways to get high rankings in the search engines was to add that big list of keywords to the META tag.

Remember, the internet did not begin with commerce, blogging or personal interest in mind. It began with scientist wanting to quickly share data from experiments. The first search engines were designed merely to make it easy for researchers to find data for papers and projects.

So, the people who wrote the parameters for internet coding (HTML, HTTP, etc) created META tags. These META tags housed metadata that was used to catalog and quickly search for research data.

META tags have attributes. One of those attributes is called “keywords.” The keywords attribute was established so that researchers could better cross-reference similar data. That way when a research chemist searched the then internet for “peptide reactions,” they would not only get specific experiments about peptide reactions, but also data that related in some way to it.

So back then the internet was nor more than a valuable research tool. Therefore, the accuracy of data and the ease of searching and sharing that data was of the only importance. And the keyword attribute was one of the most important ways to catalog that data.

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