If you want to became an Inbound Marketing Certified Professional join me  for free. Just go to Inbound Marketing University and register for the classes. This season you have 2 new ones. The first one is held by Mitch Joel from Twist Image and author of Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. and the second one is held by Paula Berg from Sothwest Airlines.

If you just want to learn more about inbound marketing you can get the recordings of the previous classes here and if you like them drop me a comment bellow.

Some time ago I joined a conference held by Magnus Lindkvist. He did a little experiment and put the audience to grade their customers’ satisfaction from 1 to 10. He then took the grades and picked up 2 companies. One had the highest grade for customer satisfaction and the other ha the lowest. All the other were just mediocre and boring. On the long run nobody will remember them.

Recently I stumbled upon an outstanding company. They sent an invitation to a conference abroad with one month in advance. They asked for a confirmation in 3 days and told us that we will get the details later. And I’ve gon no other message for the following 3 weeks. I have arranged to arrive to the conference according with their first announcement on Monday at 2 pm. Last Wednesday I have received an updated agenda. As you can imagine, the event was schedule to start on Monday but at 8 am. I have changed my flight and asked who can help with the change of the accommodation. This way other people became aware of the change in the agenda. Finally I found out thet the Wednesday agenda was not correct (at least was not intended for me) but there is a new agenda of the event and the starting hour is 10.45 am. Guess when I found this?4 pm on Friday.

For me this company won one of the two outstanding places regarding customer satisfaction. You guessed which one. I think that being outstanding is important but it matters also what you choose to be different at.

Have you had similar experiences? Did this make you change that company or you use that company’s services still?

I don’t know about you, but for me 2009 was a great year. It was the year when I decided and succeeded to make a great change in my life and move from corporate life to freelancing, when I spent more with my kids and my family and, of course when I started this blog and some other new projects.

2009 was a great year for me and for this I have first to thank you. You made my year so great and helped me go over some difficult periods. And because it is Christmas time, I hope you are all well with your families, and Santa already visited you, leaving some gifts behind and a lot of joy.

Tell me how 2009 treated you, what were your great achievements in the last year by just leaving a comment below.

While in the US is the Thanks Giving and Black Friday shopping frenzy, I thought that this is a good moment to say “Thank you” to some people I know (online or offline):

1.First  to you, the reader of this blog, because you inspire me, help me experiment and keep this blog alive

2. To Hubspot people (Rick, Rebecca, Mike and all others) because they gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about Inbound Marketing at IMU.

2. To my colleagues from IMU which helped me with their expertise (Dan Ronken, Kim Kolb, Ton Aničić and others).

3. To my former colleagues from Bancpost who helped me through these past 6 months.

4. To my family (my wife, my gorgeous 2 daughters, my parents and my sister) who stood by me all this time and inspired me to go further.

5. To all my friends, old and new, existing and future, online and offline

6. To people that created these books which I enjoyed a lot and gave me their invaluable advice

7. To my teachers

To all of you I want to say a big:

THANK YOU!

In their book “Trust Agents”, Julien Smith and Chris Brogan tell a story about how you can become richer (not necessary in terms of money) without loosing anything. In short the story is the following:

If I have a dollar and trade that dollar for something you have, I will be 1 dollar poorer and you will be 1 dollar richer. But if I have an idea, I know a story, a joke, a piece of advice and tell you, I will not loose anything while you will be richer.

In the last 6 months I managed to read more or less a dozen of books that I wanted to read for some time. Their effect on myself was profound so today, I want to share what I have learned form those books with you and I will start a new category on this blog: Books you should read. In this way you will find out what is out there you should read to became a buzzmaker in your niche. If you have some suggestions on other books drop me a comment and I’ll try them.

I found this video on YouTube. I have seen a similar presentation live and it taught me that it doesn’t matter if you are the future president or you are a small business owner you have access to the same tools and head for the same results. Enjoy the video and leave your opinion below.

Several days ago I realized that during my corporate life I have never asked for a raise. When I left my last job I was earning four times more than the moment I was first hired with 6 years before. And I asked myself why I did so good without even asking for it and why you have chances to earn more when you are not asking for a raise:
1. If you focus on what you have to do then you will do it better and with better results. Results are the ones that trigger the raise not you asking for it.
2. If you think you should get a raise you start to become demotivated and this will lead to poor results in your work.
3. If your boss does not realize you should get the raise either you are in the wrong place or you are not doing what you are supposed to do. In both cases you should change something, either the organization or your attitude. Since the last one is very hard to change most of the people I’ve seen in this situation changed the organization.
4. Lets suppose that you are going to ask for a raise and you get what you asked for. What would you think afterward? Shouldn’t I ask more? Have I asked for too little? All these will determine you to overvalue your efforts and in the end you will ask for more and chances are that second time you will not get the raise, become unhappy and leave the company.
5. If you are doing the job just for the money you are in the wrong place. Work should be fun and if this is what you are missing not even all the money in the world will not be able to compensate your efforts so start looking now for your new job or start your own business. It will change your perspective and make your life happier.

Have you tried to get a raise by asking for it? Did it worked in the long run? Tell me your experience bellow.

Now you have started a blog but for different reasons people are not getting to your site. What are the 10 things that will drive traffic to your site?
1.Great Title. Whatever the post is about you should look for catchy titles. Most of the viewers will read your post only if the first thing they read makes them click your post. In most cases we decide what is interesting and what’s not in a matter of seconds (less than 10 seconds) and the only thing we can read in this short time is the title of the post so have a great title and you will increase your chances of having me reading the rest of your post. If you are reading this post means that the title I’ve chosen made you click on it.
2, Great Content. In real estate there is a saying that there are 3 things that are important to make profit and these are: location, location and location. That means that if your property is in a good location then you sure can make money from it.
For your blog if you have good content you will get noticed and your blog will get big numbers of visitors. If you have a good title but the content is not so good you will have traffic but of low quality and with increased bounce rate (the percentage of your visitors that leave your site in less than 10 seconds). What else can you do to drive traffic to your site?
3. Optimize your post for Search Engines. When you write a post be sure to complete all the meta fields such as description, keywords and so on (keywords are not used by Google but the other search engines may use them). Verify if your keywords appear in the body of your post frequently enough and get as many inbound links as possible. These will help the search engines to index your post and to rank better in the search results. You can have plugins that help you optimize your blog. I use All-In-One-SEO plugin for WordPress on this blog.
4. Social bookmarking sites. Submit your post to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon. One very important thing for getting found is the number and quality of links to your blog and your post from other sites. By submitting your post to social bookmarking sites you can get quickly some links to your post. You can use plugins on you site so that people that liked your post can bookmark your post.
5. Social Media. Promote your post through social media. Write a tweet, update your status in LinkedIn or Facebook. Your followers, friends or connections will be the first to visit your article and comment on it. From my experience, depending on the moment I tweet about more than half of my twitter followers are clicking on the link to my post. If you have huge number of followers this is a great way of driving traffic.
6. Newsletters. This is a classic one, if you have a newsletter you can advertise your post there.
7. Blog comments and Forums. By posting relevant comments on other blogs you benefit of the traffic of the other site and drive traffic to yours. In most of the cases you will not get SEO credit for the links posted in the comments (while the comments may be set not to be followed by search engines) but you may get real visitors. Forums are another grate way of posting links to you article. You can answer to a user question and just ad “by the way, I’ve wrote a post on this topic and here’s the link”.
8. Pitch other bloggers to link to your post. I do this mostly offline when somebody is asking for my support, I give him my advice and then tell: “by the way, I’ve written a post on this subject, If you are interested in more details here is the link”.
9. E-mail signature. You interact daily via e-mail with people. Buy writing a link to your post in your signature will make these people aware of your post. Remember that people that know you, that trust your opinion are more likely to read and comment your post than perfect strangers.
10. Directories. Depending on your post you can submit your article to different sites that let you post news with links to your article. I use the Inbound Marketing site for submitting my stories related with inbound marketing. You can search for similar hubs in your niche.
These are the ways I promote my posts. Do you use the same? Do you have some other? What are your best practices? Share them bellow.

PayPal Puzzle

I was writing last week about the challenge launched by PayPal. If you cannot sleep until you solve the mystery here is the solution: you have to go to https://www.x.com/confinity/, enter the word you see on the screen and then enter the Konami code in order to enter the site. Then you will find out what is all about but I will not talk about this now. Instead I will ask what do you think? Is this type of promotion effective? What PayPal is trying to achieve in this way? Are you thinking to use a similar scenario to promote your product?

I just have received Chris Brogan’s “Trust Agents” from Amazon. I just cant wait to start reading it. Have you read it? What is your comment on the book?

You can buy this book here:

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk