Bay Area Mastermind®

LinkedIn for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, and Solopreneurs with Sandra Clark

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In this practical and informative presentation, LinkedIn Pro Sandra Clark will share why you can’t ignore the world’s largest business network and how to use LinkedIn to receive positive attention from business associates, clients and prospects.

Join us at our July Mastermind and learn:

  • How to effectively market yourself and your business with LinkedIn.
  • Why it all starts with you – your personal, brand, your authenticity, and your credibility.
  • What the critical difference is between the numbers game and a meaningful network.
Sandra Clark, LinkedIn, Mastermind

Sandra offers coaching services and workshops to help busy professionals build their online brand and showcase their expertise by creating great profiles on LinkedIn.

Sandra started her career as a teacher and theatre director before moving into educational administration, working for the University of California system (both UC Berkeley Extension and UCSC Extension) providing corporate training to Silicon Valley for 25 years before starting her own company, LinkedIn Mentoring.

We are honored to have Sandra joining us at the Bay Area Mastermind and are excited for this informative presentation and hand-on workshop!

Apply to Test-Drive our July 16th Mastermind Meeting today!

Register for this Mastermind and Presentation

Going International with Craig Handley

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What if you could take your already successful product, marketing, branding, and sales funnel, and expand it beyond just the English speaking US audience?

Imagine tapping into one of the fastest growing markets here in the US and around the world…

1 in 6 adults in the US are Hispanic – that’s over 50 million people, up over 46% from a decade ago. In addition, there are over 3 million Hispanic businesses here in the US, and that market is growing 3 times faster than the general market.

In the US, there are over 39 million Hispanics online, and globally, Spanish is the third most used language on the web.

Join us as we welcome special guest speaker Craig Handley, founder and CEO of Listen Up Español, named #1 in Business Products and Service (#27 overall) on Inc. Magazine’s 500/5000 list.

Craig will be sharing with us:

  • How to know when you’re ready to expand beyond the English language market
  • What offers are working – and which are flopping
  • Best practices for internationalizing your products and services
  • How to scale up to handle real growth
  • When and how to make the decision to internationalize

Craig HandleyCraig Handley is an entrepreneur, speaker, musician, and philanthropist and an expert in Hispanic Marketing, Direct Response Marketing, and Sales and Brand expansion. Craig started his professional career as a paperboy and won a contest at the age of 13 to go to Disneyworld for obtaining the most new subscribers. He followed that with 3 years of door-to-door insurance sales, where he won the company’s highest award 8 times. Craig then went on to work in a call center for telephone sales and was one of 3 employees, out of 950, to sell over a million dollars a year in product. A respected advisor for hundreds of brands, products, and services in almost every category, Craig has contributed articles to leading marketing and business publications and has been interviewed by business media outlets. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences, company retreats, seminars, and private masterminds.

Craig believes in “living life like an extreme sport.” As such, he has cage-dived with great white sharks, rappelled down Table Mountain in South Africa, driven the Baja 500 trail in Mexico, and snowmobiled across a live volcano in Iceland. Craig is the 85th civilian to have ever jumped out of a plane from over 32,000 feet; he also dove in the famed Silfra Fissure, which is the only dive site in the world where the dive is in a crack between two continental plates. He’s met Ringo Starr and bumped into Paul McCartney before security escorted him back to his table after trying to get a selfie.  In Calgary, he had a scarf blessed while meeting the Dalai Lama, which he has since misplaced.

Craig served five years in the U.S. Army Infantry during the first Iraq war, leaving with an honorable discharge. He studied voice and piano in college and has written and produced hundreds of songs, from rap to pop to ballads to humorous parodies. In 2010, Craig turned down a record deal because it would have been “a pay cut” from his profitable businesses – and the required tour schedule didn’t leave him enough time to spend with his kids. A devoted family man, Craig danced his way into his wife’s heart with the “running man” and his practiced rendition of “the worm.” He is also the father of five children, with several additional “adopted” children he considers his own. Craig believes that with faith and a little courage, anything is possible.

Ready to find out if the Spanish language market is right for your business? Want to have a chance to ask Craig your live questions during our Mastermind Q&A?

Apply to Test-Drive our November 10th Mastermind Meeting today!

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Dashboards, KPIs, and Metrics with Dave Lavinsky

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What if you could get ALL of your metrics in one place?

And what if your metrics were automatically updated, in real time, so you saved hours of grunt work?

If you want to double your profits, you need the right numbers at your fingertips.

As Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

But the problem is, your data is all over the place…

davelavinsky2015If you’re like most business owners, your data is spread out across at least half a dozen places:

  • Google Analytics
  • Google AdWords
  • CRM (like Infusionsoft)
  • Email software programs
  • Social media accounts
  • Shopping carts
  • And on and on…

Just running each of those reports will take you HOURS of grunt work. (Or you’ll waste hours emailing and calling staff to track down the numbers you need.)

Meet business metrics guru, Dave Lavinsky. He has developed a powerful technology that’ll help you find golden insights in your business — without all the grunt work. Dave a serial entrepreneur who has started and exited multiple business in multiple sectors, including internet, consulting and consumer products businesses.

Dave is the president and co-founder of both Guiding Metrics and Growthink.

Launched in 2013, Guiding Metrics builds executive dashboards that analyze and display companies’ key metrics in real-time. This allows them to better manage their businesses and dramatically increase sales and profits.

Start at the EndLaunched in 1999, Growthink has helped more than 500,000 entrepreneurs and business owners to start, grow, or exit their companies via Growthink’s business planning, capital raising, and growth strategy products and services. Under Dave’s leadership, Growthink has made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies three times.

Dave is also the author of the best-selling book, “Start at the End: How Companies Can Grow Bigger and Faster by Reversing Their Business Plan” published by Wiley and Sons in 2012. He is also a current contributor to Entrepreneur.

Dave holds an MBA from UCLA, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia.

Dave will show you the key metrics you must be tracking in your business. Then we’ll demo his technology, so you can see how it’ll run all your numbers for you, automatically.

Apply to Test-Drive our March 17th Mastermind Meeting today!

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How to Profit From Extreme Segmentation in Your Business

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One of the things all businesses need to do is be able to segment their customer base in order to maximize the profit potential of that customer base. By segmenting the customer base a business can better meet the buying needs of a specific group of customers and provide better offers to meet those needs. This in turn reduces promotional expenses and increases profitability.

In a perfect world every business would be able to be all things to all customers, meeting every wish of each customer. Yet, the economic reality clearly doesn’t permit this type of approach. A business who attempts to extend itself in this manner ends up alienating more customers than gaining loyal ones.

As we have discussed previously, the key to a successful business comes down to fully understanding two key points. The first is knowing what business you truly are in. The second is having a comprehensive understanding of who are the most profitable customers for your business. Knowing how to segment your business based on these two principles can open your business to hidden profits and expand its growth.

At times a business may be faced with a product or service that may polarize the target market. In other words, there can be one group of consumers who love the product/service and another group who just hate the product/service. As we will see, this is not always a bad thing and there in lies a hidden profitable opportunity. In this article we will look at how a business can take advantage of a polarizing situation as a profit and growth strategy.

How to know if a business has become a polarizing brand

During the course of running a business, management may not be aware of polarizing factions developing within their target market place. As we mentioned above there may exist people who praise the product/service while others abhor the product/service. Social media sites, blog sites, and forums can provide any business with insights on what the target market thinks about the brand, and a proactive businesses should be monitoring these sources.

Another way to determine if a business has a polarizing brand is to survey the customer base. Look at the the percentage of consumers who give the product or service a rating of 6 or 7 on a 10 point scale. Next, compare those scores to the percentage of people who rate it a 1 or a 2. The higher the percentages on both ends, the higher the polarization effect on the brand. Finally, another way is to calculate the standard deviation of the customer base overall ratings. A higher standard deviation indicates a greater polarization.

What to do once you discover there is polarization

There are two choices a business can make when brand polarization occurs. One is to spend the time and money to win back those that don’t like the brand. This usually involves developing a series of campaigns, both online through social media and offline through print media, to defuse the negative complaints and win back those unhappy consumers. A second approach would embrace one segment of customers to the exclusion of the others and by doing so maximize the opportunities with that one segment – increasing profits in the process.

Extreme segmentation

Let’s take a look at how some businesses have utilized this second strategy effectively.

The first example comes from the business methodology of Spirit Airlines. Unlike other airlines who place their focus on enhancing customer service, Spirit airlines is solely focused on providing travel for passengers who care about low fares. This is so intrinsic to their core beliefs that they reflect it in their ticker symbol, SAVE.

Therefore, Spirit airlines charges for everything to the dismay of many air travelers. In fact, fully one third of its ticket revenues come from fees. For example, Spirit charges $60 per year for their Fare Club with an automatic re-enrollment whether you fly or not. Also, they will charge a $100 for a carry-on bag unless you prepaid the lower fee online. No exceptions!

Although this example may appear extreme and contrary to what a successful airline should do, Spirit is highly successful in attracting the price conscious consumer who is alright with these conditions – as long as the fare is the lowest possible cost. So Spirit airlines is a polarizing business, while at the same time successful because it serves the price conscious consumer first and foremost.

In another example of extreme segmentation, the Harvard Business Review recently highlighted the success of an alcoholic cider company in the UK. This long established company determined that it would focus its marketing towards working class consumers to the exclusion of young professionals.

Thus, in 2009, the company launched ad campaigns that featured images of working class drinkers hoisting a glass of the cider as a reward for a hard day on the job. Almost immediately, young professionals began to view the product negatively and pulled away from it. However, the appeal among traditional cider drinkers intensified as polarization increased. The results were a market share increase by 23%, beating sales in the overall cider market by 6%.

Although these examples showed how whole businesses polarized their complete offerings, it’s possible to simply polarize specific products or services. At times, this is best done by establishing a separate, wholly owned subsidiary that focuses on those segments. This avoids brand confusion in the market place.

As these examples have shown, there are times when polarization can provide strong opportunities for increasing market share and profits. Understanding the potential begins with analyzing not only the existing customer base, but also looking at the overall target market. This is only the tip of the vast amount of strategies that members of the Bay Area Mastermind are exposed to on a monthly basis. Having a committed group of like-minded business owners in one room to discuss these types of strategies is invaluable. You are invited to “Test Drive” a meeting today and see what new strategies you could introduce to your business.

5 Critical Tacticts Every Business Needs to Know to Increase Search Rankings

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a way to provide the search engines with the information and the attributes of your website so that your site will get the the top, or close to the top result by individuals searching for services/products you offer.

Research shows that 89 percent of consumers usually choose one of the first three results from a search.

This fact alone has encouraged many business owners to look into search engine optimization as a valid and effective lead generation method. However, this area is very dynamic and subject to the whims of the search engines who are solely interested in increasing the user experience.

This means that at any time the search engines can and will make changes to their algorithms preferring one factor over another which then would move some businesses ahead of others and may even drop some from their top position. In this article we will look at five simple yet effective things an business can do to improve their search engine rankings based on the latest information.

Why Website Rankings Fluctuate A lot

As we stated above, the search engines are constantly taking in data and reviewing it in order to improve their user’s experience. As such, when their algorithms are adjusted, there is an immediate re-ranking of all sites.

For example, recently, the search engines decided to focus on gathering and compiling data from all the various search queries and then indexing and adding this information into determining search rankings. The intent for making this change is because it will more accurately provide search results that have a higher quality and relevance of a particular page/website to the query from the searching user.

This is why performing a detailed review of the keywords for each page of your website is vital. Pay close attention to the way your target market is searching for your products/services and make sure those keywords and long term keywords are properly located on the corresponding pages of your site.

The Amount of Content is Still Important

Many business owners have heard the comment “Content is King” and it is one thing that all search engines look for in giving preference to one site over another.

So, how much content does a site need to have?

The answer is there is no such thing as a specific amount. Rather, there should be enough current and relevant information to keep readers engaged. A few years ago there were many sites that simply copied information from other sites or used robots to amass articles for their blogs. The result was both a lot of duplicate content and unreadable material that frustrated the user. The search engines responded by penalizing the rankings of any site publishing duplicate content or having stale content.

The solution to this issue is to first know the audience you are providing content for and then plan in advance for a series of content that will show your business as a thought leader in that market space.

Don’t Ignore the Basics

One of the most important and basic things any business can do is to make sure there are unique page titles that are creative, compelling, and keyword rich. This must be done for each page of the site.

Many times websites only have a general page title or, worst yet, nothing for a page title. As we discussed above, generalities are punished in the way of rankings. The search engine will give preference and top ranking to those sites that best match the user’s search terms with the keyword description of the business website.

The Importance of Links

Quality of links is more important than quantity. The quality of the links to your site will be based on their relevancy and their authority. What this means is that a website with 10 authoritative links pointing back will outperform in rankings to another site with thousands of low quality links.

Understanding Your Search Results

A common question many business owners ask is why they see different search results from other people they know searching for the same terms. Search engines now tailor results based on various factors including location of the user, web history, and social websites being used. In order to get a “neutral” search result, it is important to clear your computer history and even use an anonymous program in order to get a true picture of your site’s rankings.

As we have seen above, the search engines continue to put an emphasis on specifics rather than generalities and on quality rather than quantity. Recently, many businesses have seen their website rankings drop – some into the very back page results – and not understood why.

The information we covered here is the start of any search engine optimization process. However, in order to properly maximize your efforts, it is necessary to stay on top of the ongoing changes the search engines implement. By being able to meet the requirements of the search engines coupled with a deep understanding of your target market, your business will rank at the top of search results for the product or service you offer.

When business owners want to keep up to date with business innovation, strategies, and tactics that will take their business to the next level, they look towards Bay Area Mastermind. Each month, Bay Area Mastermind gathers the most relevant and strategic business information for its members. Bay Area Mastermind covers everything from online marketing, off line marketing, management, sales, to the latest in strategy and implementation techniques. Find out what you have been missing by Test Driving a Bay Area Mastermind Meeting Today.

Keys to Naming Your Company, Product, or Service

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One of the most important things any entrepreneur can do is to come up with a name for their business that is both unique and grabs interest from their target market. A good name should help differentiate their business from the competition as well as build the brand and emotional connection with their customers.

However, recent research shows that 90 percent of businesses choose a name that sounds the same as their competitors eroding their uniqueness and increases the chances of their business being seen as a commodity. It is important that a business not leave the impression that their business is just like every other one out there.

The same concerns should also be applied to the naming of a product or service. The right name can propel a new product or service quickly into the consumers mind increasing your market share and profits.

In this article we will review some basic principles all business owners and their teams should consider in naming their company or products/services.

Make it clear

A good name is composed of several layers of meaning and association. It should evoke emotion and be easy to pronounce. Being able to come up with clever and fun names can have both positive and negative connotations.

Take for example a fun name to say like Oreo. We could all agree that this product name stays in people’s minds and is often repeated. Then there are the company names such as Virgin and Apple that create an emotion and imagery that positions the product in the public’s mind.

Avoid Names that are too enigmatic

At times start-ups have come up with names like Kwkly or Querly just because it looks cool or is very unique.

The problem is that although these names are unique your customer may not be able to know how to pronounce it or worse can’t find you. Any name that is hard to spell will make it also hard for consumers to find you online or on mobile services like Siri.

The last thing you want is your customer trying to find you and wondering how to spell your unique name.

A recent study conducted by Princeton University demonstrated how public companies with easy to pronounce ticker symbols outperformed those with hard to pronounce ones on the New York Exchange. Sure, there is always the advertising concept of educating the buying public on your name and what it means, but this not a cost effective method of marketing your company, product, or service.

What is in a name?

Names with repetitive syllables or sounds do stay in the mind of the consumer and when all possible you should consider the possibility of creating such a name as Jelly Belly, Coca-Cola, or Double your Dating. These names all position their brands and dominate their markets.

Lastly, make sure you check out what the name you come up with actually means and whether there are any negative connotations associated with that name.

For example, Nike came up with a new shoe they introduced in Ireland and named it ” The Brown and Tan Sneaker” after a tourist drink the marketing team saw in a pub. Had they simply Googled the term ” Brown and Tan” plus “Ireland”, they would have discovered that this term referred to a British paramilitary group that had caused a lot of damage in Ireland.

Then, there is the classic naming problem with the Chevy Nova that was introduced in Latin America. In Spanish, the name meant “doesn’t go.”

As you can imagine in both of these product launches the name of the product was the downfall. The take away is to simply do some research after you come up with your new name and, if possible, take it to a small market space and test it with potential consumers before presenting it to the world.

As we have seen, following just a few simple rules can make all the difference on the success of your next naming project.

Having the opportunity to brainstorm ideas with a group of successful and like minded individuals is priceless. That is one of the key benefits members of Bay Area Mastermind receive at each and every meeting. Imagine having the opportunity to explore your concepts with people who are impartial and want to see you succeed.

What could that do to your growth potential? The only way to see for yourself what a Bay Area Mastermind meeting can do for you is to Test Drive a meeting today.

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Think you’re a fit for the Bay Area Mastermind? Find out today and apply for a full-day test-drive!