BlogPosts from July, 2012

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The Importance of Having a Mentor

While I was with my mentor on Tuesday, watching the sunset over London Town in Hyde Park and seeing the transformation for the Olympics, it dawned on me. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for my Mentor and his help with my successful journey as a Business Owner. I think the importance of having a Mentor is certainly overlooked.

If you didn’t know, I’m going through Seed investment for my Ecommerce Platform Gloople where I am looking to receive £500,000 worth of investment. Voted as one of the Top 100 Start-ups, I’m taking my business to the next level from three staff, up to nine.

When my mentor mentioned that he saw my two minute investment pitch, he commented on how my presentation skills had grown over the past three years. Looking back, I would have only recorded this pitch once. Now, as I have grown as a person, I was able to stand in front of a camera and use my experience in practice to take at least fifty voice memo’s on my iPhone and 10 videos on my flipcam. This helped me deliver a near perfect pitch in one take when it mattered most.

My mentor then reminded me of the first time he heard me talk and asked me how many times I rehearsed that presentation. My response to him was just once.

Having him as a mentor has now enabled me to do things naturally and break old habits and build new ones, which I have a few of since I’ve had him in my life.

Along with my business mentor, I also have two speaking mentors, who have both shared with me very different skills and styles which I have learnt to use when delivering my seminars. Both without a doubt deserve enormous credit for their help in my growth as a Keynote Speaker.

When choosing your mentor, you must think about these 3 very simple things.

1.  Would you invite him/her round for dinner to meet the family?

2.  Does he/she really know their stuff and have other business owners received great value, financially and emotionally from this person?

3.  It’s OK to say NO and walk away if the said person isn’t right for you. Take your time in finding the right person, if it fits, your intuition will guide you.

Looking at the cost of a mentor, it may seem expensive at first, but with the knowledge and skills you will receive, it will be a priceless investment and stay with you forever. Remember, we’re not just talking professionally, what you can learn from you mentor will help your personal life too.

For me, having a Mentor has been well worth the outlay, so much so as buying a house for a return on an investment.

This is my experience with my mentors; I would love to hear about yours.

PS This is dedicated to my 3 amazing mentors, you know who you are.

Working Remotely With a Team

I am writing this blog as I am sat in beautiful Portugal, after being hit by a Tornado (yes, Tornado!!) that was moving at 100mph. luckily, nothing too serious besides a friend with a broken rib.

As I have been away in Portugal for over a week, I have had to find ways to contact my staff that isn’t going to cost an arm and a leg. Here are some great tools I have been using to work with my team remotely.

Working remotely can be a challenge but as long as you are dedicated and flexible with you time then you should be able to achieve all that you would in a normal working environment. As I am only in Portugal, the time different isn’t an issue for me but for those that are in different time zones, you need to use the time as a way of getting work done without any distractions and when you and your co-workers are able to communicate, use this time to discuss any queries within your team.

An application that I use on a daily basis (and have done for over 3 years) is Dropbox. This is a great cloud storage service that allows you to hold all of your important documents. You can also share your Dropbox folders with your work colleagues where you can both amend the documents. As a team, we find this very helpful as we can go into the said document, make changes and save for everyone else to see, as opposed to a constant email conversation going back and forwards (only on Gmail, obviously). You get 2GB memory space free when you sign up with the opportunity to increase this as you invite people to share your folders. Like Dropbox, Do.com is another cloud application I use. The difference between the two is that Do.com allows you to assign tasks to certain people and create events, unlike Dropbox which is purely a storage system.

How do you store all of your contacts? We use Highrise as our CRM to manage our database. This application allows you to enter all of their details including; name, company, phone number, email address and even twitter usernames. The great thing about Highrise is that it allows you to add tasks and leave notes for every contact which is a great way for me and my team to keep up to date while I am out of the country. There is three price plans for Highrise which can be viewed here. Also worth noting that you get a 30 day trial to see if this is the right platform for you.

As I can’t hold a physical meeting with my team, I have to use an online face to face application. The only two applications I use for this is Skype and Google Hangout. Skype is great for instant communication as it is not only an application to call someone, you can also IM them too. You can also share your screen with one of your contacts, allowing you to work with one of your colleagues. Google Hangout is slightly different as you can only chat to someone who is within your circles in Google+. This, however also works for me too, as a Social Media Expert, my team has utilised the tools available, including Google+.

When travelling for business, pleasure, it is important to keep up to date with your colleagues. If you have a Smartphone, make sure you have all of the available apps installed so that your team can reach you from anywhere.

Are you ready to work remotely with your team?

Why its Important to find your Audience Online

With so many social networks and tools available, you need to be able to see where your audience is most responsive to you. It’s all well and good saying that your target market is “everywhere” but you can’t be everywhere so you need to decide which platforms are the most successful for your business. Using Social Crawlytics will help you do just that.

Social Crawlytics was created by Yousaf Sekander from the UK SEO Agency ElevateLocal. Among his previous creations, you can find a WP Plugin SEO Crawlytics which adds a robot tracking capability to your WP control panel. Now they’ve come out with the Social Media Analytics tool ‘Crawlytics’.

This tool is free (up to 500 weekly scans) to use and will ask to login via Twitter to access the data needed to create the Crawlytics. I used my Ecommerce Platform Gloople (www.gloople.co.uk) to share with you the results I found.  As you can see, my audience hangs out on mostly Twitter and LinkedIn. Gloople is a B2B venture which has been shown through the findings. You can also view your analytics as percentages (bottom right).

   

I have also used Crawlytics to generate a report for my website (www.warrenknight.co.uk). I found similar findings which did not surprise me as I centre my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts on my company which is a B2B platform. As well as looking at your analytics as percentages, you can also see which links have had the most click throughs on each network. Ass you can see below, my top five viewed pages on my website, are five of my blogs.

 

It is so important to use this kind of tool to find where you customers hang out online because you need to be where they like to spend there time. If your audience is in Facebook and Twitter, you primary focus should be those two networks. It’s still important to be on the networks listed in the analytics but there is a reason that people are engaging with you more on some networks than others. If you notice that some blogs are performing better than others on your website, then think about the topic in that said article and how you could capatalise on the popularity of it.

Where is your audience hanging out?

How to get on the front page of Slideshare

It’s great that we, as a Social Media driven society are endorsing great, visually impressive sites like Pinterest but there are some networks that go almost unnoticed as a way of increasing traffic and driving sales, one of them being Slideshare.

You might think I’m crazy to focus on Slide sharing as a way of increasing traffic but this is something we overlook on a day to day basis. Have you seen Forbes ‘Richest People in America’ list? This is a slideshow. Apple has incorporated slideshow’s into their iPhoto application as a key feature. The list is endless for the businesses using Slideshow’s as a way of presenting their products.

Slideshare offers users the ability to upload and share publicly or privately PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF Portfolios. I uploaded my first presentation on May 9th 2009 and have been actively using the network ever since. Now at 23,452 views, I will share with you some great tips on getting on to the front page of Slideshare.

CRM Software & Cloud Computing business Salesforce have openly said; “I see SlideShare as a virtual bookshelf, or a library in the cloud, where we can make our best content more discoverable to a diverse audience.”

For you to really utilise Slideshare and all it has to offer, you need to look at it as more than just powerpoint presentations that leave you reminiscing about school. Visually, Slideshare is now a platform that allows you to engage, entertain and inform users with effective pictures and “to the point” information. With over 60 million visitors per month alone, you are seriously missing out on the generated traffic (over 500% more from business owners than any other professional website) that Slideshare has to offer.

Think it’s going to cost you to create a visually interesting presentation? Think again. It really isn’t as hard as you think it is. I have personally created all of my presentations on my Slideshare account and have had success. Although design is important, you must focus on how you present your work and the quality of that information you are sharing.

Front page of Slideshare? It’s not as hard as you think. First you must research the kind of presentations that are successful on Slideshare. The title of a presentation should be looked at as a heading for a blog post. It must be engaging and stand out from the crowd. The use of text and images is a must. The best way to do this is to caption photos within the presentations. Keep the slides within 10-25 pages as you don’t want to lose interest.

When thinking about creating a presentation or document, you need to take into consideration the audience who is going to view it. Most likely, this will be business people. I’m not saying ‘don’t target beginners’, but keep the topic noticeable, without being predictable. The idea of Slideshare is to allow your viewers to pay forward your information to their community. Social Commerce today wrote an article which included one of my presentations. This automatically increased views and to this day, is my most viewed presentation.

To get the word out about your presentations, use your community on Social Media to do this. You have all of the free networks out there where you can promote, so make sure you utilise them. Without sharing your work, you will not make the front page of Slideshare. You need the initial views from your community to get the ball rolling inside of Slideshare. The whole idea is that you are giving your audience something of value which means they will pay it forward to their community. You can pin your presentation for Pinterest, Tweet about it, use as a Facebook post or even create a blog post around it.

It is important to Keep brand continuity when making your presentations. You may notice on my Slideshare account that I have recently altered my branding. My older presentations have my older branding and my more recent work, has my new branding.

Slideshare is first and foremost a network so treat it like one. Use a photo of yourself in your profile and include your keywords around your business in the description so people can see the message you are trying to portray.

Are you ready to make the front page of Slideshare?

My Top 5 Smartphone Apps for Business

As a professional speaker, CEO of Gloople, author and mentor, I have a lot to do and little time to do it. I have to find a way to utilise my time and I’m sure there are many of you in my position who need the same help. Here are my 5 top apps that help me organise my day to day work in the best possible way.

1. Do

Do.com allows me to manage my notes, tasks and documents in an orderly manner. The great thing about this app is that it allows you to include Dropbox and/or Google Drive Documents, and then share and make notes with my work colleagues. Do.com Also allows you to integrate with Salesforce, if you use this CRM.

2. Dropbox

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring together your photos, documents and videos into one place and share them easily. The great thing about Dropbox is that you can invite people into your folders and share your information with them. You can say goodbye to USB sticks and Hard Drives as Dropbox gives you an allowance of 2GB for FREE with opportunities to increase this.

3. Skyscanner

Being an international keynote speaker, Skyscanner allows me to find the best deals for travel, car hire and accommodation. This is a great website that has been under the radar for far too long.

4. Hailo

Recently new app that allows you to order a licenced taxi from your smartphone. You sign up for an account and enter in your card details and you won’t have to face the annoying end of journey exchange of cash. Hailo very handy as it will tell you you’re estimated waiting time while going through the ordering process. I have used this app on various occasions as my schedule is so busy, I may have two talking engagements on the same day in different parts of London and don’t have the time to wait around on the corner of a road for a taxi.

5. Roboform

Being a mentor and running social media management campaigns for various clients, it’s important to connect into the right account quickly and easily and that’s what Roboform allows me to do. I have over 300 unique passwords for my different accounts and Roboform helps me find the desired password within seconds! Well deserving title as the Worlds No1 Password Manager.

These are my top 5 apps for business, but what are yours?