NLP Marketing

'SEO' stands for 'Search Engine Optimisation'. It is the art of improving your ranking on search engines. You certainly should be behaving online in a way that wins you the attention of the search engines; how to do that might be the subject of a future post.

How not to do it is the subject of this one. Don't hire "SEO Consultants" who will promise to boost your rankings without you having to change your own behaviour, no matter how desparate you are getting about lack of traffic to your site. Why? Because what they do is "comment spam" on other peoples' blogs. And when they do it on mine, it gets right up my nose.

That's why I am putting on notice the desperate losers at "Stellar University" (can you believe that name?) that if they spam my blog again, I will google-bomb them. The only search term they will ever appear for is, you guessed it, "desperate losers".

Labels: filthy spammers

Well here's a surprise; another free service to help you market yourself. This one is for those of us who run fairly complex websites that need some explanation. I have created a sample Demofuse tour here; see what you think!


[Update: looks like Demofuse did not survive. Shame, it was a great idea.]

The May NLP Events update is out with no fewer than 86 events on it - just shy of three per day. It's just an amazing explosion of creative energy.

But... as an email list it sucks, frankly. It's about a mile long! Either a lot of NLP event organisers need to rediscover apathy, or we need to come up with a better way of presenting the information than a single undifferentiated list.

Ideas, anyone?

Labels: nlp nlpevents email

I notice NLP Events has 62 events listed for April. Most of those are in the UK*, so, as a first approximation, if you live in the UK, you have a choice of two NLP courses to attend every single day. That's pretty mind-blowing, really.

* Officially, NLP Events' remit is "NLP events in the UK and the rest of Europe". In practice, that translates into "anywhere outside the USA". I have seen events in Canada, Singapore and India being advertised.

If you want to show your affiliation with the NLP Conference, we now have a choice of four badges to put on your own website. To use any one of them, just copy the HTML below the badge and paste it into your own site's template.

The HTML serves up the image from our server and provides a link for search engines to follow, thus helping improve the search engine visibility of the Conference.

The image will automatically update each year; for this reason please do not take the image file itself; use the HTML provided.

To put this badge on your own site, copy the code in italics below.

<a href="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/" target="blank"><IMG SRC="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/nlp_badges/NLPconf-meet-me.png" ALT="NLP Conference"></a>

To put this badge on your own site, copy the code in italics below.

<a href="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/" target="blank"><IMG SRC="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/nlp_badges/NLPconf-meet-us.png" ALT="NLP Conference"></a>

To put this badge on your own site, copy the code in italics below.

<a href="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/" target="blank"><IMG SRC="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/nlp_badges/NLPconf-presenting-at.png" ALT="NLP Conference"></a>

To put this badge on your own site, copy the code in italics below.

<a href="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/" target="blank"><IMG SRC="http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/nlp_badges/NLPconf-supporting.png" ALT="NLP Conference"></a>

Congratulations to Ian McDermott on his very smart and interesting blog. Looks expensive, doesn't it? OK for a successful guy like Ian, but not for the likes of you.

Hmm, let's calibrate. Look at any comment page. At the bottom of the page you will see "International Teaching Seminars Blog is proudly powered by WordPress."

And WordPress is, you guessed it, free. Ian has chosen to go for his own hosting, which is should be costing him no more than £5.00 per month, but that's it. Perhaps this is why Ian is so successful?

Mouse over any link on this page, and a little thumbnail of the linked-to page will pop up. Cool, no? And guess what, it's a free service that took me two minutes to sign up for and add to Blogger. Free.

Talking to folks at the conference, I find too many NLPers are still stuck in the "I've got to pay for one and have my own" paradigm. Thinking about it, there are some wider belief issues here. The successful business people I've seen have very little need for ownership or control. They happily trust others, and in doing so free (that word again) themselves to focus on what only they can do.

The 2006 Conference photos are now available

• Slideshow


• Static images

The photos including (nearly) all the presenters, and any delegates or stewards I could catch doing interesting things. If you were there, please do help me identify the people I photographed by adding notes or comments to the photos.

Feel free to use these photos in your own material, but if you do please credit them to the NLP Conference. If using them online, please include a link to http://www.nlpconference.co.uk

Do you remember, years ago Robert Dilts proposed "phobia booths" at every airport. He wanted to use the power of NLP to demystify personal change, and turn it into a series of simple, accessible commodities.

The technology never quite caught up with Robert's aspiration, but I'm impressed to see the same business model embraced by CTRN. Check this page, for example, for it's simple problem -> solution format.

CTRN's secret lies in its use of web marketing to reduce the cost of customer acquisition. They can cheaply reach a very large number of people with an easy-to-swallow proposition. Contrast this with a traditional therapist or coach (trad business model, that is) like I used to be, for whom winning each new client probably costs at least a free presentation somewhere.

CTRN is a US company; I would love to see someone copying their approach here in the UK.

Lots of us are experimenting with selling coaching & therapy on the phone. It has the advantage that you an offer a more convenient service at a lower cost. When you look at the customer's process as he or she goes from having his/her attention attracted, to interest, to decision, to action (AIDA), though, it stinks.

The marketing benefit of offering services by phone should be immediacy. The customer gets to that point of interest and is picking up the phone even as the decision is forming itself. Anything that introduces hesitation at this point will lose you 75% of the sales you were about to make, I guarantee it.

One solution is the premium rate phone line. UK providers will sell you a line on which you can charge up to £1.50/minute. That's £90/hr, which doesn't sound bad considering you don't even have to get out of bed to earn it. I've been investigating this route (for a technical support operation I'm building) and on closer inspection, it's not really very attractive. First, regulations limit each call to a maximum of 20 minutes. Second, and here's the killer, the phone company takes up to 50% of the revenue.

But don't despair just yet. Ether is a new service that looks custom designed for phone coaching. It has a simple web front end in which both buyer and seller create accounts. It then times the calls and provides a sensible set of call management functions. And Ether charge a more-reasonable 15% of the selling price.

Ether is a US company that claims international reach. I had trouble making out from their website just how real and practical this is for those of us in Europe. However, if they don't get their European service up to the same standard of convenience as their US service, you can be sure that there are dozens of European entrepreneurs already working on clones of the service.

I'd recommend that you take a look at Ether now. If it's not yet for you, add their blog to your news reader, and make a mental note to look out for developments in the paid-phone-call field.