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Get a FREE Copy of this book 9/10/2013 & 9/11/2013

Get your copy here http://j.mp/stupidfreebook

As a 20 year car guy I've been given a LOT of bad advice over the years and I've made a TON of mistakes and I figure the best thing I can do is help others avoid some of those pitfalls. Plus, I love reading but the book has to be an easy read, a fast read, because I have work to do and so do you. 

I'm giving away my book FREE today and tomorrow and all I ask is that you give it an HONEST review. If you enjoy it, head back to the link and tell everyone what you liked. If you think it sucks, tell everyone it sucks! Honesty is the best policy :)

If you’re looking for a grammatically well-written book by someone with an MBA that will put you to sleep; this is the wrong book for you. However, if you’re looking for a book written by someone who has spent 20 years in the trenches of sales, succeeding AND failing over and over so that you can learn from their efforts and improve your career….READ THIS BOOK!

The late, great, Zig Ziglar once said: “You can get anything you want in life if you are just willing to help enough other people get what they want.”

Those words have been a constant inspiration in my sales career so I want to help you get what you want. That said, I believe that everyone who gets into sales really wants to be successful but most of them, like me, start out with little or no direction, knowledge or training on how to reach that goal of success.

This means that we start out “stupid” in our sales career. When we don’t know what we’re doing, we look for advice from our peers but unfortunately they have little more training than we do, they’ve just got the experience of ‘time served’ so technically, they’re “stupid” too.

I’m not saying it to be mean because it’s not totally their fault, their manager was probably “stupid” too and his manager probably was too. 

In sales, too many of us have learned from those who did their best but really didn’t have the knowledge, talent, or ability¬ to give us what we needed to be successful so the stupid cycle just keeps going.

This book will show you how to completely F*$K up your sales career. Hopefully this book will put a few smiles on your face while sharing real life examples of epic sales failures as well as solid practices for how to ‘Stop the Stupid’.

GET YOUR FREE COPY OF THE BOOK HERE Http://j.mp/stupidfreebook

Thanks in advance for reading and sharing - feel free to give this link to EVERYONE you know that wants a fun read!

Helping the best get better,

Mat Koenig
CEO & Founder

KonigCo & iCarMedia
www.konig.co | www.icarmedia.com

Some infographics are long for the sake of being long. They take up way too much space to make very few points or to present data in ways that simply don’t make sense from an graphic perspective. Then, there are those infographics that are long for a valid reason. This is one of those.

Social media is ever changing. In many ways, this is a good thing. Innovations come through change and the major social networks are all much better than they were just a couple of years ago. Other changes are annoying, especially for businesses that rely on their social media presence as a venue to drive engagement, communication, and branding. Having the appropriate matching of the brand look and feel is important. Unfortunately, just when you have the right graphics in the right places, they go and make changes to the size and location of these graphics.

It’s a drag. Thankfully, this infographic from Tent Social is up to date… as of right now. There’s no telling when Facebook will decide to make their cover images larger or when LinkedIn will change the dimensions of its logo space, but for now, here’s a good reference for everything from image sizes to post lengths.

“Measurements” image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The vast majority of business websites out there tend to stay laser-focused on their goals. Whether they’re intended to sell a product or generate leads, it seems that all of the content placed on their websites works towards this end. While there’s something that can be said about the strategy, changes at Google, Bing, and social media sites makes it beneficial to post content that does nothing more than educate, entertain, or act as a resource for people without attempting to sell or generate a lead.

If you want to truly get ahead of your competitors this year, you should be willing to devote a little bit of time (or money if you choose to buy it) every month on content. This isn’t the type of content designed to get ranked in the search engines, but it can help your important pages get ranked. It’s not the kind of content that will generate leads through social media, though you have opportunities every time someone lands on your site. It’s the type of content that is truly giving – you’re motives should be business-oriented but the content should be able to stand alone.

First, let’s take a quick look at why this helps. We’ve covered it before but here’s a refresher:

Valuable Content Helps the Rest of Your Site

Google, Bing, and the social media sites love quality content. They can tell the difference between quality content that is beneficial to visitors and content that is designed specifically to generate leads and/or sales. They can tell by the content itself in many cases (particularly in the case of Google) but they can also tell through inbound links that are earned and social signals that are given.

When you have content that people are willing to share, whether by linking to it from their websites and blogs or by sharing it on social media, the search engines and social media sites (Facebook and Google+ in particular) give additional trust to the domain. This is the primary reason that we strongly encourage having a blog on the primary domain itself. That’s not to say that there are no benefits from having an offsite domain, but for this exercise the benefits yielded come from the domain’s interactions.

A post that is valuable to visitors can link to other pages within the domain, helping both the domain in general and specific pages rank better in Google. For Facebook and Google+, sharable content ads the trust factor. Most domains do not appear as well on social sites regardless of the content because they do not have an established history of trust. By posting content that people share, the social sites start to get “acquainted” with the domain. You can tell if your domain needs a trust boost by having someone post content from the site and then clicking it on Facebook. If a warning comes up that “you are about to leave Facebook and go to blah blah blah”, then your domain is not trusted yet. You can fix this. You just need more people sharing the content on your domain. This can be achieved by posting quality content that people are naturally willing to share.

This type of useful content helps both in search and social. Now, let’s look at the content types.

Content Worth Sharing

There are several different kinds of content that can play well for the search engines when it comes to building two of the primary SEO signals: inbound links and social shares. The general way of looking at it is to take your industry, your area, or both and apply your knowledge into the creation of content worth sharing. Here are three examples:

• Entertain – Let’s say you have a Ford dealership. You can post a gallery of images of classic Mustangs, title it something like, “7 Epic Mustangs from the 60s and 70s”, and write up a 3-5 paragraph blurb about the storied history of the car. Many people love classic cars (and Mustangs in particular) and will be willing to share the page and the images on their social profiles as well as their blog or websites.
• Educate – With what you know about your industry and location, you should be able to teach people things they didn’t know. Even if you don’t know for sure, the internet is there to help. For example, you could post something like, “The Storied History of the Seattle Space Needle in Pictures”. Gather up some images of the Space Needle from when it was built and during times of note, write up a quick paragraph or even a sentence describing each scene (make sure it’s unique – don’t copy and paste!), and post something that will be educational on your site today and into the future. This has excellent sharing potential from locals.
• Resource – You’re the expert. Show it. There may not be a direct business reason to post a story titled, “How to SYNC Any Device in a Ford Fusion“, but the information can be helpful to those who run into challenges. They may share it. They may link to it. If they visit the page, they will likely stay on it for a while as they apply the advice. This component of the search algorithm isn’t discussed often but when a page is sticky, the domain gains trust in search.

These are very basic overviews of the ideas, but the key is to stay consistent. Some have asked me in the past why I keep it limited to two pieces of content. I don’t. If you can post every day, go for it! Twice a month is something that’s sustainable. In the business world, we often find ourselves starting a new project and abandoning it if it becomes too hard. Twice a month is enough to build up a nice library of content that can benefit your marketing immediately as well as over time.

The key is to stick to it. Schedule it. Make it happen. You’ll soon find you’re looking at your competitors in your rear-view mirror.

It may be the biggest change in the Google algorithm that very few people noticed. The reason they didn't notice is that the change has been slowly happening since February, 2011. Between Panda, Penguin, and the rise of social signals, word count of content is not something that you should ever focus upon when writing content for search engine optimization or social media marketing purposes.

Here's a quick breakdown of the loose timeline. One of the first changes that happened when Panda, Google's low-value content algorithm change of 2011, rolled out was that the total number of unique words in stories had a predictable affect on SEO value. Stories with fewer words were deemed less valuable. This lasted for about a month. I cannot say for sure how the conversation went at Google, but at some point in the early days of Panda Google noticed that there was some great but very short content that was being hurt, while low-quality content with a lot of words was getting favorable treatment. This is where links and social signals started making a quick comeback into the realm of understanding the importance of a piece of content.

The example in the image above is what Google likes today. That's not to say that they don't like long, comprehensive content, but in the case above an infographic with a coupe of paragraphs of content but strong social signals to the page was able to easily trump much longer pieces of content on the same subject. It ranks exceptionally well for the target keywords despite the lack of words.

The content that you post should have a purpose. It should then fulfill this purpose in as few words as possible. This is a dramatic change from the days of old in SEO where more was better. Now, quality trumps quantity (as it does in so many other ways and in other arenas) to the point that giving your readers what they need without loading it with fluff is ideal. They will be more likely to share it, to link to it, and to interact with it if it's something that fits into their schedule. That's not to say that you should only write a couple of paragraphs on any subject and call it a day. It simply means that you should write your content to fit the need, to fulfill the goal, and to become a resource for your readers.

It's quality that makes the difference. You're better off focusing on a topic that is important and of interest to your readers, then bring the value to them quickly.

I do not want to be misunderstood on this: if a topic needs 1500 words to cover it properly, then write 1500 words. The point is that if a topic takes 300 words to cover it, don't think you have to fluff it up to any of the "magic numbers" like 500 words for it to be valid to Google. It doesn't. They know. It's better to have a short, concise, and valuable 200 word article with a graphic that gets shared on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social sites and that people are willing to link to from their websites than to have a piece that's fluffed up to hit a particular word count.

Write what you need to write, no more, no less. Focus on quality and get the concept of word counts out of your mind for good.

Internet Sales 20 Group - Chicago - Department Staff & Human Resource Management - Ralph Paglia from Dealer Synergy on Vimeo.

http://www.internetsales20group.com