On April 22nd and 23rd Search Engine Guide will be hosting the first Small Business Unleashed Conference here in Houston at the Northwest Forest Conference Center. Pop Labs will be sponsoring Charity Speed Networking Unleashed! which will be held on Sunday, April 20th – 6pm to 9pm the night before the conference starts. The event is open to the public with proceeds going to the Youth Development Center. There will also be a silent auction with some awesome items to bid on. If you would like an opportunity to meet the speakers before the conference starts come out and join us.

I am really looking forward to this event because it’s one of the few times a conference that wasn’t planned by someone in Houston, was held in Houston. I first met Jennifer, the Editor-in-chief for Search Engine guide at Got Social Media in January and I know first hand that she has been working really hard at making this an event that you will want to attend. The sessions all look really interesting.

If you would like to attend the conference there is still seating available so register today. Friends of Pop Labs can get a discount by using the code POPLABS.

Check out the Youtube video for more information on the conference.

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Thank God for Spike T.V. finally having the guts to play the number one anticipated event in all of television history- the entire saga of Star Wars! I wouldn’t consider myself a nerd, but I just love this story. This saga is a visionary epic and George Lucas is da man! It’s amazing how a movie based on so much fantasy has multiple applicable real-life meanings. So of course in preparing myself for a hectic work week, I spent my entire weekend watching this series for the 800th time.

Lucky for me, I also took about ten minutes out of my busy weekend to flip through an old dusty book or two (of course, applicable to my client services role at Pop Labs). Don’t we wish our kids were invested so heavily in their future too? Too bad George Lucas didn’t make a movie about those books.

I recall reading about educating your clients on new products and services as well as new uses for existing products. In fact, the book went so far to suggest that anyone in the client services industry that didn’t educate their current happy clients about new products and new benefits for existing products actually does that client a disservice. After all, if the client is happy paying you for Service A and you roll out the brand-new Service B, why wouldn’t you want to offer him service B and contribute just that much more to this client’s happiness and satisfaction?

Lightning strikes and magic happens. It was as if Obi-Wan just handed me my father’s light saber! This whole concept is completely applicable for online marketing as well. The past is the best predictor of the future. If you manage online marketing campaigns or PPC advertising, then you know when your PPC campaign can absorb more clicks. If you have a benchmark for performance and your PPC campaign is a well oiled machine that is consistently turning out ROI, why wouldn’t you offer your client the opportunity to expand their business by asking for a bigger budget?

That’s a rhetorical question young Skywalker…the answer is fear! Is your fear of failure greater than the excitement of success? Fear of sales, fear of the almighty NO, fear of everything this side from death. So below are a few Jedi mind tricks to help get past that fear and moving towards the direction of more profitability, productivity, and success for your clients, Google, and you:

• Love your Clients! – Clients could care less about what you know until they know you care.
• Serve your Clients! – If you’re selling something that the client doesn’t need, then you probably shouldn’t be selling it at all. If they do need it, then you’re not really selling, only consulting through educating and persuading. Remember- people hate being sold, but they love to buy!
• You are Yoda! – Just as every Jedi goes to Yoda, your clients come to you because you have the omniscient, all-knowing Yoda type of knowledge that is responsible for them paying you in the first place.
• Encourage New Ideas! – Keep a questioning nature and always remember that business owners know more about their businesses than you do. So shut up and pay attention…
• Get Hungry! – A closed mouth doesn’t get fed if you want things to happen. You have to initiate the action!

Remember, if you manage online marketing/PPC campaigns for your clients, wouldn’t it be to their benefit if they were willing to give you whatever budget you needed to help grow their online presence? Especially after you have a benchmark for success based on past behavior (e.g. daily budget runs out)? After all, once you establish that you truly care about their business, wouldn’t it be a shame if they decided to spend their advertising budget elsewhere in another form with someone who didn’t care as much as you do? I’d wager to guess that the answers to these questions are “yes,” in which case you have one solution. Get to explaining, educating, and asking for additional budget to support your clients’ business growth.

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What is social media? Is it a conversation? Is it web PR? Is it YouTube or Facebook? If you work in this industry you have your own ideas on how to describe social media, but if you’re one of our potential customers it may be a bit more of a mystery. This is where I usually go into my description of what it means to leverage human assets.

Everyone has people, customers are people and employees are people. These “human assets” have talents that should be tapped into for social media. You’ve probably done this to some extent by asking your customers for referrals and then posting them on your website or touting your employees’ education/background. While this may have been a good start, we need to go a step further and leverage specific talents for the sake of social media. For instance, Pop Labs employs a search marketing specialist by the name of Charles Lewis (aka The SEO Rapper, M0 Serious, Poetic Prophet, Chuck). Chuck has the ability to rhyme, to flow—if you will, and has turned this ability into a way to get virally marketed content viewed online, resulting in branding himself and Pop Labs as experts in our industry. Chuck has developed very good content on topics such as link building, design coding, and conversion closing, to name a few. The important part to remember is that he’s transferred this content into something that people actually want to pay attention to: rap videos delivered through YouTube. Probably not the best for every target audience, but you have to work with what you’ve got.

While Pop Labs could have deposited this very same content onto our company website as its very own page or maybe even into this blog, we looked to take it a step further by getting creative and leveraging Chuck’s talent as a rap artist to produce something entertaining and fun that was appropriate for our goal: brand Pop Labs and get exposure from other well-known entities. Sometimes you just have to throw it out there, but you have to be prepared for the feedback you’re going to get… the good and the bad. Transparency is crucial for social media… which is why Chuck not only delivers these rhymes, but he writes them as well—not a hired gun.

Not every company has an aspiring rap artist to utilize and that’s okay. What you DO have is experiences and relationships and other talents that set YOU apart from everyone else, from your competitors. Once you have those figured out, the creative way in which to deliver your message should start to become clear. Good luck!

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