Michael Rasmussen - good in affiliate marketing

I am very much pleased to introduce Michael Rasmussen to my blog readers though he needs no introduction in Internet marketing community.

I used the term INTRODUCTION just because of the fact that this is first time I am writing about him. So, it is a real opportunity for those readers, who are interested in making money online but are not aware of his contribution in affiliate marketing.

Michael Rasmussen is one among those few top affiliate marketing geniuses, who set affiliate marketing up in a new height.

While he was spending his vacation with his family in Hawaii, he earned more than $100,000 as real profit using his own affiliate marketing system.

Here are a few examples of his earning that proves his credibility as a super affiliate marketer:

He made real profit of $15,024 in just 3 days� $18,957.58 in 7days � $35,122.32 in just 3 days �just wait � this is not the end. You will find hundreds of examples like these that essentially prove that he actually reinvented the Art of Affiliate Marketing.

• Now he has become the most sought after JV partners in his niche market.
• Product creators are running after him to sell their products.
• He won tons of affiliate contests using his own system.

But, success didn’t come easily to him,

• He struggled just like YOU for almost a decade.
• He tried everything that he could think of - still he could not succeed.
• He did not know - what to do and how to do?
• He felt helpless.

One day he stumbled on affiliate marketing almost by accident. After a few try he figured out a simple system for promoting products that he could reuse as often he wanted. He could make massive of cash online at his will.

The key of his online success was having a step-by-step plan to follow and he is reusing the same plan for his every promotion to bring tons of online profit for him.

Here is the most important news for you.

He has recently launched an online course Affiliate Launch Blueprint in which he reveals the same blueprint or system of affiliate marketing that brings rare success for him.

This course Affiliate Launch Blueprint is basically divided into 6 modules.

In these modules he reveals his entire affiliate marketing secrets and how to use them to set up the same affiliate marketing system to bring tons of online profit like him. It’s a complete plan building your own online business.

Here the few important things that you learn and implement in your own online business if you join his course:

• How to select winning products to promote
• How to sell, where to sell products
• How to set up a simple website, write simple copy that generates actual sales
• How to implement the most hyper-effective product promotion strategy
• How to become a valued JV partner or affiliate partner in your niche market
• How to launch products in a small or no list of subscribers
• How to create nearly irresistible urge for people to buy products from you
• How to build a list of buyers (not just a list of subscribers) from scratch
• How to get tons of laser targeted traffic to your website in just 1 to 3 days at zero cost without using Google Adword, PPC marketing, eBay promotion and not even writing 1000 of articles
• And most importantly you will learn how to start from scratch with no list and make a realistic online profit of $500 to $2500 in each promotion using a simple step-by-step system

To become successful

• You don’t need a list of 100,000 + subscribers. You can easily start with a list of ZERO people
• You don’t have to be a technical genius
• You don’t need to spend hours reading books

You just need to join Affiliate Launch Blueprint and spend just a few hours to follow exactly what to do. It’s an underground affiliate marketing secret formula.

Conclusion:

It’s neither a promotional post and nor I am insisting all of you to blindly follow what I told you.

If you want affiliate marketing as your main option for making profit online then grab this opportunity right now! Merely 3 to 4 hours of investment in learning underground affiliate marketing secret formula and setting up the same affiliate marketing system may change your life forever!

Just check this FREE video on Michael Rasmussen’s own site and decide whether it really matters or not.

Remember that this exclusive affiliate marketing secrets are open for a limited time. Too much wasting of time in decision making may cause you lose this wonderful opportunity!

Wishing you best affiliate marketing success,

Ways towards success product

Small business success is easy, but certainly not simple. Turn your passion into small business profits. Many business owners experience Small Business Success. Even though the world is experiencing economic difficulty, business growth is rampant. If you need help to achieve business success you have come to the right place.

What can an individual do to achieve lasting success in their small business? Here are a few ideas based on time tested secrets that I personally use in my own business.

1. Research. You can either market the product you have now, in the hope of it being acceptable to the market place, or you can research the market for the best product to sell. At any rate, market research has to happen first, and once done, marketing is a continual process throughout the life of your business.

2. Cash Flow. Lack of cash flow is a major reason for business failure. It’s OK to gain sales and make money, but if you don’t or can’t collect it, you are destined to go broke. The rule to keep in mind, is to make sure you invoice as soon as possible and you pay as late as possible. This is a simple plan that works. So sit down, and take the time to create a cash flow plan now.

3. Technology. Technology will save you thousands of dollars and halve your work time. Buy as much as you can afford. Remember, the hours spent in your business are worth money; and plenty of it, so be smart and embrace technology. Technology can automate every part of your business, including communicating with customers.

4. Passion. There is nothing worse than going to work and becoming a clock watcher because you are unhappy. Find something you are passionate about and do that. The day won’t seem long enough to accomplish all that you desire. Why? Your passion creates enthusiasm, and that will carry you through any tough spells. It’ll motivate you when your business hits bad times.

5. Marketing. The prime function for you as a business person is not to sell products, but to become a marketing Guru. Marketing is one of the areas where many business owners fall short, and that has a bearing on whether or not a business will be successful. You love your business and you want it to be successful. Do research and find out how are you will convince prospects to buy what you have.

6. Advice. You may think you are pretty smart. You may have specific knowledge about your specialty; which is great, but you will come unstuck if you haven’t run a successful business before. You must still seek advice from experts when building your business. The reason for this is that business is not about what you know in your field. It’s controlled by legislation, consumer rights, and marketing. Get advice from solicitors and learn about customer service from experts. Being prudent in this area will help eliminate any start-up mistakes and propel you ahead of your competition.

7. Delegation. When you own a small business, you have to wear many hats. You are the CEO, GM, admin manager, customer service manager, research and development person, sales and marketing manager, and everything else. It’s not practical to manage your business this way and hope to grow at the same time. Delegating responsibilities and tasks is an important component of running an efficient and successful business. As the business owner, your time should be spent growing and working on the business; not in it.

8. Internet. I am not talking about using the Internet to sell your product or service [even though it is often used for this], but rather use it for research, communication, and making payments to save time. Use the internet to gain more for your business to save time and money for business building tools and the latest resources.

Dream to success in your product

Many people dream about running a business from their own home and gaining the substantial amount of freedom a home based business will provide. One of the best ways to achieve this dream is through affiliate marketing. It is very easy to get into the affiliate marketing business. In fact you can start with just one hour of work per day in your spare time. Unfortunately it is so easy to get into the affiliate marketing business that there are a lot of marketers out there which makes competition fierce. It is crucial that you find ways to make yourself stand out from the crowd.

What will you do to make a consumer click on your link and purchase from you instead of the next guy?

One of the things you must master is the art of making a great squeeze page. Your squeeze page is where the customers go when they click on your links. This is your one opportunity to really pre-sell your prospects and make them want to buy your affiliate products. Unfortunately consumers have seen so many squeeze pages they are becoming immune to them. It is important that you make a unique squeeze page that will add value to the consumer�s internet browsing experience.

There are two things you can do that will really make your squeeze page, also known as a landing page, stand out from the crowd. The first thing you should do is turn your landing page into a review of the product you are promoting. Consumer�s love reviews. A good review page will reduce consumer skepticism and increase the likelihood of them making a purchase. Try to make your review as objective as possible and include one or two potential downsides of the product you are promoting. If your review just talks about how wonderful the product is the consumer will not believe it. An honest review will always perform better than a glowing review that is an obvious sales pitch.

Keep in mind the purpose of your landing page is not to sell the product. Leave that up to the product maker�s site. What your squeeze page should do is go for the soft sell. You want to soften the consumer up to the hard sell that they will see when they click through to the product�s actual sales page. As I mentioned before a review site is an excellent way to do this because it will gain the consumer�s trust and make them feel that you are adding value to their experience. Another good way to soft sell the consumer is by giving them a free product for opting into your mailing list. Once they have opted in you can continue to soft sell to them on a regular basis. This is a method that savvy marketers constantly use in their affiliate marketing efforts to capture consumers who are not willing to purchase a product the first time that that they see it.

The real trick to becoming an affiliate marketing success story is to keep working and learning more about the internet marketing process and developing and testing new techniques. As long as you are willing to put in the necessary work you are almost guaranteed to develop a nice affiliate marketing income stream.

Talking about success

happiness is the secret of success

Rising national wealth does not necessarily make people more satisfied with their lot, so economists and politicians are looking beyond growth to questions of well-being

Happiness is just as important a measure of the success or failure of a society as GDP, according to economists such as Joseph Stiglitz. Photograph: Rex Features

In the wistful imagination of wage-slaves chained to their desks in grey, rainy Britain, France is a land where everything is better: long holidays, crusty baguettes, fine wine and a Gallic disregard for money-grubbing individualism. So perhaps it's not surprising that Nicolas Sarkozy wants to export the French penchant for the good life to the rest of the world. Last week he launched a major new report by the Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and a panel of experts about how to ensure that governments take full account of their citizens' happiness and well-being, instead of measuring their success by gross domestic product (GDP) alone.

Sarkozy made no secret of his target: the rapacious Anglo-Saxon neo-liberals who hoovered up multimillion-dollar bonuses while bringing the world economy to its knees. "For years, we proclaimed the financial world a creator of wealth, until we learned one day that it had accumulated so much risk that it plunged us into chaos," he said.

But there is much more to Stiglitz's work than a critique of the naked pursuit of profit. Even before the crisis, a growing number of serious economists were beginning to question whether a single-minded devotion to maximising GDP growth led to governments neglecting other important goals.

GDP simply totals up everything made within an economy in a year, from widgets to whizzy financial products, at their market value. It was John Maynard Keynes, the great 20th-century economist, who pushed for more detailed "national accounts" to guide governments seeking to manage their economies, at a time when reliable data was scarce.

But just as corporations have been accused of fetishising "shareholder value" in recent years, pursuing quarterly gains in their stock price, sometimes through sheer recklessness instead of steady, step-by-step growth, economists have been charged with losing touch with the reasons we were interested in GDP in the first place – as a measure of social, as well as economic, progress.

There have been two pressures for wider measures of national success from outside mainstream economics. Environmentalists point out that conventional national accounting doesn't allow for the heavy costs of economic progress, in terms of pollution, depletion of natural resources and so on.

As Stiglitz explains, looking at GDP without accounting for environmental damage in the figures gives an artificial picture. "A firm would look at its assets and liabilities if it wanted to see if it was better or worse off," he said, "yet we don't look at any of these things when we talk about the balance sheet of society."

Meanwhile, psychologists – and economists with a psychological bent – have for decades been gathering a large body of evidence showing that beyond a certain point, rising national wealth stops making the population any happier, a puzzle known as the Easterlin paradox, after the economist Richard Easterlin, who worked on the question in the 1970s.

In the ensuing 30 years, a whole branch of "happiness economics" has developed, mapping the correlations between people's reports of how satisfied they are with their lives and a host of different criteria.

Some of its insights have been quirky, rather than having obvious policy implications: a 2003 study by David Blanchflower, the former member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, and Andrew Oswald, a professor of economics at Warwick University, showed that having regular sex makes people happier, especially if they're well educated, for example. But other findings – such as that people in more equal societies tend to be happier – have sparked deep thinking about what constitutes a successful economy.

In his 2006 book The Challenge of Affluence, Avner Offer – an Oxford historian rather than an economist – wrote about the prevalence of obesity, eating disorders and family breakdown in wealthy modern societies. "Well-being is more than having more," Offer said in his conclusion. "It is a balance between our own needs, and those of others, on whose goodwill and approbation our own well-being depends."

Oswald, a pioneer of happiness economics in the UK and a member of the Stiglitz panel, said: "Nobody starves any more in advanced societies, and we're more likely to have a BMW than an old Ford, so in the modern economy, thinking about people's mental health and their enjoyment of their lives is key."

He adds that economists have increasingly been shifting towards the use of so-called "biomarkers" – objective measures such as blood pressure and heart rate – instead of relying solely on surveys asking people how they feel about their lives. But he insists it would be foolish of economists to ignore reports of how happy people are, citing the economist Alan Blinder's comment that, "if molecules could talk, would physicists refuse to listen?"

Politicians, too, had begun to notice the broader idea of "well-being" long before the credit crunch. In David Cameron's early days as Conservative leader, when the GDP numbers still pointed to an impressive track record for Labour, he told a conference: "It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP, but on 'GWB' – general well-being."

In government, meanwhile, the idea is gaining creeping acceptance: local authorities have been given an obligation to maximise their citizens' well-being, and John Prescott began publishing a range of quality-of-life indicators when he was deputy prime minister, admitting that GDP alone gave little insight into what's really happening in society.

These moves were an acknowledgement that people's day-to-day experiences do not always tally with what the bare economic data tells us – a problem likely to become more pressing in the coming months. In the UK, GDP may already be rising again, and if this is confirmed by official figures next month, it will mark the official end of recession. But thousands of people will continue to lose their jobs, and the elusive "feel-good factor" eagerly sought by politicians may take much longer to return.

Angel Gurría, secretary general of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which has done substantial work on how to move beyond GDP, responded to Sarkozy's launch of the report by highlighting the gulf between what statistics show and how ordinary citizens feel.

"This gap can be clearly damaging both to the credibility of political debate and action and to the very functioning of democracy," said Gurría. "Economic resources are not all that matter in people's lives. We need better measures of people's expectations and levels of satisfaction, of how they spend their time, of their relations with other people … We need to focus on stocks as much as on flows, and we need to broaden the range of assets that we consider important to sustain our well-being."

However, the strongest argument for ditching GDP as the sole yardstick of economic progress has come from the spectacular collapse of the debt-fuelled US and UK economies since 2007.

"The crisis gives salience to the work, in two ways," Stiglitz told the Observer. "By looking at GDP, you didn't know whether what was going on was sustainable – and it obviously wasn't. The second point is that when you add apples and oranges to form GDP, you use prices, and they reflect the relative values that people put on apples and oranges."

The problem with this, he explains, is that when there is an almighty bubble in an economy, as there was in the US and UK over the past decade, the prices of some assets – properties and shares, in this case – can move far out of line with reality, which in turn creates an illusion of economic success.

While the US financial sector created extraordinary profits from 2003‑07 – accounting for about a third of total profits in the economy – the vast losses in 2008 wiped them out. Even on its own terms, then, as an objective, mathematical measure of an economy's strength, GDP fails: it sends dangerously misleading signals to policymakers and the public about what's really going on.

For example, Gordon Brown turned on the public spending taps in 2001 safe in the knowledge that the economy was barrelling along at a healthy pace and Britain's financial sector was generating impressive profits – yet much of that has since proved illusory, exactly as Stiglitz describes. "This crisis really highlights the importance of getting our statistical metrics right," he said.

In the US, there were signs the economy was not delivering for its population well before the crash, for those who knew where to look. While average GDP-per-capita looked relatively good, distorted by the lavish share taken by of those at the very top, median income – the pay of the person in the middle – had actually been declining.

"Median income has been going down by half a percent a year for the last eight years. That means that all the increase went to a few at the top: most Americans are worse off. If you're grading an economic system, you have to say, if most people in society are worse off, you can't give it an A," Stiglitz said.

There is a thriving debate about what other criteria would better measure economic success: equality? health? happiness? However, experts have been working hard on this for years, and there have been several impressive recent attempts, including the "happy planet index" from a British thinktank, the New Economics Foundation, to bring together measures of environmental damage, health and happiness with raw economic data.

The crisis of the past two years has already overturned great swathes of economic doctrine; many, including Stiglitz and Oswald, believe the time may finally be ripe for the dismal science to let in a bit of happiness.

Interesting talking about success product in food from good article

Nobody wants a recall. Nobody wants to make people sick. Generally, food manufacturers do have safeguards in place--some more than others--to avoid outbreaks of foodborne disease and the recalls that typically follow. But outbreaks and recalls happen. Bacteria and viruses are microscopically small and can be hard to detect, and there will always be an inordinate number of companies who simply are not doing everything they can to control pathogenic hazards on food. It would be inspiring to report to the food consuming public that it has a safety net in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but this is not the case. Ultimately, the web cast by these agencies is not, and cannot be, a reliable alternative to good food safety practices. As a result, the onus for food safety, and avoiding recall or outbreak situations, lies squarely on the shoulders of food manufacturers.

In the food context, "recall" is a less than apt description for a process that, a lot of the time, is really geared toward just stopping the bleeding. The USDA and FDA define a Class I recall[1] as "a situation in which there is a reasonable probability that the use of or exposure to a violative product will cause serious adverse health consequences or death." The definition implicitly contemplates the ability to physically secure the violative product, or at least ensure that it is not distributed as originally intended.

But food is different from many products in that it often has an extremely finite shelf life and is thus not reachable by even well-intentioned recalling companies. Frequently, particularly in the context of lettuce and other fresh vegetables, shelf lives are measured in days, and getting product back from distributors and retailers, much less the ultimate consumer, can be an exercise in futility.

In its 2004 report to Congress on the success of food recalls generally,[2] the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) discussed four recalls that it had tracked, finding that only a recall of canned soup occurred "well before" the end of the soup's shelf-life. Packaged turkey sandwiches were recalled "near the end" of the products' shelf-lives, and recalls of ground beef and fresh-cut, bagged lettuce occurred "well after" the recommended shelf-life had expired. A more recent example is the spinach STEC[3] outbreak in September 2006. The FDA announced this large outbreak on September 14, 2006, by which point most of the affected product had been consumed, and most outbreak cases were already sick.

Food manufacturers need not waste time looking to the FDA or USDA for help in most recall situations. For one thing, the agencies lack virtually any legal teeth in the food context. In stark contrast to the authority of certain regulatory bodies over other products, Congress has not vested the USDA or FDA with the authority to seize and detain food products, even when the agencies well know that the products at issue are contaminated. And to complicate matters, it is less than certain whether the USDA and FDA are equipped to effectively assist at all. They certainly cannot lengthen the shelf lives of perishable products to make effective recalls more realistic. And, as the GAO notes in its 2004 report:

USDA and FDA do not know how promptly and completely companies are carrying out recalls. Neither agency's guidance provides time frames for companies on how quickly to initiate and carry out recalls. Consequently, companies may have less impetus to notify downstream customers and remove potentially unsafe food from the marketplace.
***
USDA and FDA do not promptly verify that recalls have reached all segments of the distribution chain, yet monitoring the effectiveness of a company's recall actions is the agencies' primary role in a food recall.[4]

Aside from a sometimes less than efficient effort from the government, and the problems posed by extremely perishable product, yet another obstacle exists for a food manufacturer trying to recall contaminated food: the dissemination of information to consumers. Currently, recall listings in the form of basic news releases are distributed to the media and posted on the FDA or USDA Website, as well as on the recalling company's Website. Realistically, however, if a person does not learn about a recall in the print or broadcast media, the only audience for online releases is interested people in the food industry or government--not a good cross-section of the food-consuming public. My experience is that the food-consuming public generally will not become aware of a recall unless it's been issued as a result of an outbreak and has therefore garnered media attention--in other words, we don't become aware of a recall unless people get sick. And if there are outbreak victims, it's probably too late to do much more than stop the bleeding.

I'm the first to point out that food manufacturers face a daunting uphill battle in trying to successfully recall a contaminated food product. The simple fact that these products are typically highly perishable renders recall efforts, a lot of the time, public relations exercises where there is little expectation that much, if any, affected product will be secured. As a result, food manufacturers cannot afford to think retrospectively about food safety. Avoiding the brand injury and liability costs associated with sick people means avoiding contamination in the first place.

Promote your product to success

On August 27, the San Francisco chapter of the American Marketing Association held an interesting panel discussion entitled “Advertising, PR and Marketing Sucks! Now What?” which featured notable speakers such as venture capitalist and founder of AllTop, Guy Kawasaki, technology evangelist Louis Gray, Renee Blodgett, Steve Patrizi of LinkedIn and Loic Le Meur, founder of Seesmic.

I had heard a similar presentation of this nature during the Inbound Marketing Summit here in San Francisco by Chris Brogan but thought it would be intriguing to bring it up here in light of the panel discussion. Here’s the concept behind why PR, Marketing & Advertising “sucks”, as given by Le Meur:

Do not trust any advertising message or press release, they are generally fake.
Le Meur states that this is the press releases and messages that you would typically receive are all bias towards the product. They’re always going to be “one-sided” and aren’t neutral in any way.

Bad practice by so-called “PR experts” can burn your experience & leads to lack of trust.
With Le Meur’s case, he had been treated in a harsh manner by some PR firms who simply doesn’t understand how to manage relationships properly and effectively. Examples of bad practices by PR firms include having interns write fake iPhone app reviews or perhaps addressing emails to the wrong individuals with a templated (and non-personalized) header (”Dear ”). In light of this, Le Meur has decided that it’s not appropriate for PR agencies to handle the communication & conversation with bloggers and the media so he does it himself.

If your product is good enough online, you don’t need the publicity.
This resonates with me because if you have an online component and are doing a great job reaching out to people through outreach, engagement and conversation, then you don’t need to spend the extra money going out putting up banner ads, issuing press releases and undertaking all the other promotional steps. The word of mouth effort will be strong if people are happy with the existing product. They will be your advocates. So focus on helping to create a better product and have people use it online, elicit feedback, improve, and repeat the cycle all over again – the more people that are happy with it, the less effort you will need to exert to promote it.

So now what?

Before you think that these are simply just reasons why you should do everything by yourself, there are steps you need to take to ensure that you’re on the right path. Without taking care of these first, you’re not really prepared to do this self-publicity by yourself.

Find an empty space.
This is similar to finding a niche. Take a look at the market and if you see an opening for a service that isn’t being provided, take advantage of it and be the first provider!

Ship as soon as you can.
Sometimes, unfinished and “beta” products can help you get noticed and offer some great assistance. Just look at what Le Meur did with Seesmic – they released an unfinished product and it has since spread and grown to become a good one. According to Le Meur, people online are used to looking at unfinished product – they understand that there are things that will be rolled out in later phases so it’s alright to get your product out the door as quickly as possible. Although, this doesn’t apply to all products in the known world. Some things should be finished to its fullest extent if possible, but speaking generically, ship as soon as you can.

Listen to every single piece of feedback you get.
Whether it’s positive or even negative feedback, make sure you listen to every single piece of feedback. Le Meur suggests looking on Twitter search under your brand to see what people are saying about your product. It’s suggested that if you interact with an angry user who is unhappy with your product and show them that you care about their input, then you’ll be able to convert them to being a happier person and perhaps even then a supporter of your product. This is where a community manager would come in handy.

Answer especially if it’s negative.
Don’t shy away from any negative press or feedback. These are the things that will get you to improve your product. Let’s face it…no one has a 100% perfect product that everyone absolutely adores. All products have some noticeable flaw that you might not have accounted for. So get rid of the delusions of grandeur and instead focus on how you can get your product up to snuff.

Use all the tools available to filter the feedback.
Don’t rely on Google or search engines to get you the feedback. There are other tools that you can add to your arsenal. Obviously one would be Twitter, but what about using feedback support with GetSatisfaction or perhaps ZenDesk? UserVoice is also another option. Don’t think that by using one option, you’re able to account for most feedback. Give your users multiple points of entry to leave you feedback.

Most important, create a long term community.
If you’re thinking that a community happens overnight, you’re sorely mistaken. Plan for the long-term and let your community grow by itself. Fans come and go with the tide and over the long-term, you’re going to accumulate more people in your community as long as you take care of your product and do right by the customer.

These are basic steps that you should take to get your message out, but find what works and what doesn’t for you and build upon that. If you find that you need more marketing dollars or a PR agency, then that would be the way for you to go, but the Internet has offered a wider avenue to explore when it comes to promotions and the only person suited to reach out to a community about your product is, quite frankly, you.

Good luck!

Promote your product to success

On August 27, the San Francisco chapter of the American Marketing Association held an interesting panel discussion entitled “Advertising, PR and Marketing Sucks! Now What?” which featured notable speakers such as venture capitalist and founder of AllTop, Guy Kawasaki, technology evangelist Louis Gray, Renee Blodgett, Steve Patrizi of LinkedIn and Loic Le Meur, founder of Seesmic.

I had heard a similar presentation of this nature during the Inbound Marketing Summit here in San Francisco by Chris Brogan but thought it would be intriguing to bring it up here in light of the panel discussion. Here’s the concept behind why PR, Marketing & Advertising “sucks”, as given by Le Meur:

Do not trust any advertising message or press release, they are generally fake.
Le Meur states that this is the press releases and messages that you would typically receive are all bias towards the product. They’re always going to be “one-sided” and aren’t neutral in any way.

Bad practice by so-called “PR experts” can burn your experience & leads to lack of trust.
With Le Meur’s case, he had been treated in a harsh manner by some PR firms who simply doesn’t understand how to manage relationships properly and effectively. Examples of bad practices by PR firms include having interns write fake iPhone app reviews or perhaps addressing emails to the wrong individuals with a templated (and non-personalized) header (”Dear ”). In light of this, Le Meur has decided that it’s not appropriate for PR agencies to handle the communication & conversation with bloggers and the media so he does it himself.

If your product is good enough online, you don’t need the publicity.
This resonates with me because if you have an online component and are doing a great job reaching out to people through outreach, engagement and conversation, then you don’t need to spend the extra money going out putting up banner ads, issuing press releases and undertaking all the other promotional steps. The word of mouth effort will be strong if people are happy with the existing product. They will be your advocates. So focus on helping to create a better product and have people use it online, elicit feedback, improve, and repeat the cycle all over again – the more people that are happy with it, the less effort you will need to exert to promote it.

So now what?

Before you think that these are simply just reasons why you should do everything by yourself, there are steps you need to take to ensure that you’re on the right path. Without taking care of these first, you’re not really prepared to do this self-publicity by yourself.

Find an empty space.
This is similar to finding a niche. Take a look at the market and if you see an opening for a service that isn’t being provided, take advantage of it and be the first provider!

Ship as soon as you can.
Sometimes, unfinished and “beta” products can help you get noticed and offer some great assistance. Just look at what Le Meur did with Seesmic – they released an unfinished product and it has since spread and grown to become a good one. According to Le Meur, people online are used to looking at unfinished product – they understand that there are things that will be rolled out in later phases so it’s alright to get your product out the door as quickly as possible. Although, this doesn’t apply to all products in the known world. Some things should be finished to its fullest extent if possible, but speaking generically, ship as soon as you can.

Listen to every single piece of feedback you get.
Whether it’s positive or even negative feedback, make sure you listen to every single piece of feedback. Le Meur suggests looking on Twitter search under your brand to see what people are saying about your product. It’s suggested that if you interact with an angry user who is unhappy with your product and show them that you care about their input, then you’ll be able to convert them to being a happier person and perhaps even then a supporter of your product. This is where a community manager would come in handy.

Answer especially if it’s negative.
Don’t shy away from any negative press or feedback. These are the things that will get you to improve your product. Let’s face it…no one has a 100% perfect product that everyone absolutely adores. All products have some noticeable flaw that you might not have accounted for. So get rid of the delusions of grandeur and instead focus on how you can get your product up to snuff.

Use all the tools available to filter the feedback.
Don’t rely on Google or search engines to get you the feedback. There are other tools that you can add to your arsenal. Obviously one would be Twitter, but what about using feedback support with GetSatisfaction or perhaps ZenDesk? UserVoice is also another option. Don’t think that by using one option, you’re able to account for most feedback. Give your users multiple points of entry to leave you feedback.

Most important, create a long term community.
If you’re thinking that a community happens overnight, you’re sorely mistaken. Plan for the long-term and let your community grow by itself. Fans come and go with the tide and over the long-term, you’re going to accumulate more people in your community as long as you take care of your product and do right by the customer.

These are basic steps that you should take to get your message out, but find what works and what doesn’t for you and build upon that. If you find that you need more marketing dollars or a PR agency, then that would be the way for you to go, but the Internet has offered a wider avenue to explore when it comes to promotions and the only person suited to reach out to a community about your product is, quite frankly, you.

Good luck!

Success story about nestle

Nestlé is the world's foremost Nutrition, Health and Wellness Company, committed to serving consumers all over the world. Our focus on responsible nutrition and promoting health and wellness is a core value, emphasizing responsibility and sustainability. We believe that long-term success should create value for all stakeholders, an approach which we call Creating Shared Value. I invite you to join us and to be part of our future.

We have operations in almost every country in the world, and strive to help our employees to achieve their full potential wherever they are. At Nestlé our commitment to your development can lead to an exciting career that takes you all over the world, as it did for me.

We have opportunities across all business disciplines including Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain and Procurement, Manufacturing, R&D, Finance and Human Resources. We expect you to be dynamic, pragmatic, a team player, a person of integrity, and an achiever. These are the qualities which are the basis of strong management, financial discipline and social responsibility for our company.

We have great plans for our future growth. If you're excited by the prospect of outstanding career opportunities in a global company with ambitious goals, in a truly international culture, Nestlé provides just that. Contact our Recruitment teams to discuss your next steps; we look forward to hearing from you!

Paul Bulck

Chief Executive Officer,

Nestlé S.A.

Success story about Pipkins, Inc

Pipkins, Inc., a workforce management software and services supplier, is celebrating 26 years of consistently creating and delivering superior workforce management products for call centers of all sizes.

Founded in 1983, the company’s premier product, Vantage Point, is an accurate forecasting and scheduling tool that assists over 300,000 agents in over 500 locations in all industries worldwide.

The company maintains a balances portfolio with 13 industry-first applications.

In addition to celebrating the company’s 26 years of success, in March 2009, Pipkins (News - Alert) was the recipient of two awards. Industry analyst DMG Consulting named Pipkins a market leader in customer satisfaction in its 2009 Contact Center Workforce Management Market Report.

According to Donna Fluss, president of DMG, Pipkins received a perfect score in all six categories of DMG’s customer satisfaction survey.

“Customers gave Pipkins highest ratings across the board for product/solution, implementation, service and support, training, professional services and overall customer satisfaction,” said Fluss.

Additionally, Pipkins' solution “RTA Global View” was listed in the “2008 Product of the Year” awards from TMC's (News - Alert) Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.

The company’s Vantage Point is a graphical adherence monitoring system that reduces time and expense required to track schedule compliance for multi-site contact centers. Companies using the system can monitor process by displaying adherence levels for each center on a single color-coded map and allowing point-and-click drilldown to individual sites, enabling system wide oversight by a single analyst.

In other popular products, Pipkins offers Smartphone support, enabling users to check agent status at a glance, modify schedules with a click, send messages and notifications and view reports while in meetings or off-site.

With this system, managers and supervisors can view schedules, log schedule changes and send popup and email messages with a click from the same grid without navigating to different screens.

In June 2009, Pipkins joined forces with Contactual, an on-demand software provider for contact centers, to cross sell technology.

The partnership brought together workforce management and hosted contact center software to provide direct connections for call center managers looking to combine a trusted workforce management system with hosted contact center software.

Strategies to implement for your product

There are many instances in today's business world where companies have failed to leverage their differentiation for increased profitability. Recently, Business Week's Chief Economist, Michael Mandel, wrote about this in his article, "Innovation, Interrupted—The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S." Mandel asserted that innovation efforts in the United States have failed to deliver their intended benefits over the last decade, with companies now suffering at the hands of lower cost producers. Incremental improvements, rather than true innovation, have been the norm. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Benefits are not clearly defined for the selling organization:
  
  • “Our business call goes through contracting and all they care about is the lowest price.”
  • “The competition can do anything we can do.”
• Product managers cannot effectively articulate the value proposition or provide effective selling tools.
• There is not much focus beyond commodity cost recovery.
• There is no price premium at higher performance levels for a product due to a focus on the bundle or “job” price.
• Pricing organizations cannot effectively mediate the disagreements, etc.

Key product success

The launch of a product that has not considered the "usability factor" poses a significant risk to your business and provides an opportunity for competitors to gain an upper hand. By Kipp Lynch and Simon Gillmore.

The usability challenge

Everybody wants a usable product— it’s absurd to suggest that a product manager should address the team at the beginning of a project and say, “Make sure to include all the user’s needs in the specifications; it doesn’t matter how you do it, just make sure you do it.”, but often that is how the process goes. Even though one of the team’s goals may be to produce a usable product, the design and development process often treats usability as a “feature” or as something that can be tacked on at the end; build a prototype, bring in some users, give them a few tasks and see how they perform. Then correct the errors and behold “a usable product.”

Unfortunately, the outcome is rarely a usable product; more likely it’s an application that has some threshold level of frustration that users are willing to tolerate—until another company delivers a product that addresses the same functional challenge (or in some cases not), with a user interface that is more intuitive or just “simpler.”

This “usability challenge” is faced by many companies that are heavily reliant on their software products to attract new customers, build loyal communities of users, improve their client’s effectiveness, and generally help a business be better at what it does. In each case, the launch of a product that has not considered the “usability factor” poses a significant risk to the business, and provides an opportunity for competitors to gain an upper hand.

Customers are rarely quiet and, if given the chance, have a lot to tell a company that is willing to listen. Amidst all that chatter—the help desk logs, focus groups, and site visits—a product manager might find some gems that point to features for the next generation product. What will be missing is how to make the product more usable. Undoubtedly the customer will often say, “it would be nice if this were a dropdown instead of a textbox” or “you really need to add more keyboard shortcuts” but those incremental changes only turn an unusable application into a tolerable one. In other words, all customer data is not equal—work practice and improved usability is not gathered in the same manner that one captures the details within a functional specification.

Usability is not an end product; rather it should be thought of as an emergent property. Good usability does not come from knowing where to place buttons, or even how to display complex information. It arises by innovating on current work practices and integrating that with potential product requirements. In other words, usability starts from the beginning, and in the beginning there is the customer.

Current approaches to user interface design are a combination of guidelines and seat-of-the-pants decision-making. Design decisions are usually made on an ad hoc basis with problem analysis performed on the fly and from wildly varying empirical bases. What we generally have is TLAR, or That Looks All Right to me. We ask our co-workers, the marketing department, defer to the boss, the client, and fiddle around on a trial-and-error basis until the results meet some, usually unspecified, criteria. Various goals often compete. Technology and time constraints determine much of the decision making, and there is usually very little real information to guide decision-making. Many of the changes take place in the design and iterate phase, with scant empirical support for changes.

This is very apparent during design reviews. In a typical review, especially during expert evaluations, team members argue their points based on what is more logical. But often logic is not the proper measure for determining how an application should behave. Real people rely on rapid categorization and pattern recognition not “if A then B.” Though the intent, again, is to create a usable product, the end result is often one that makes sense to the development team, but not to the actual end-users.

In the design of complex applications, an in-depth understanding of the user population is critical. Unfortunately, the majority of projects find ways to circumvent the process. Knowing others is hard work—even in our everyday life, we have ways of cutting corners. We jump to rapid conclusions about the behaviors and motivations of others, which is an efficient tool for decreasing our cognitive load, but not a good method for creating a usable product.

During the product development lifecycle there are two major obstacles to creating a usable product; information degradation and responsibility transfer. As information is translated into various forms; from customer workflows and needs, to product requirements, use cases, technical and User Interface (UI) prototypes, to the final product, it undergoes both information loss and translation. Some of the changes are positive and are the result of refining the product, but many changes result from the need to simplify the design process and get the product to market.

Similarly, responsibility transfer comes as each department within a company has their own specific goals/milestones that need to occur during product development. Though lip service may be given to the idea that the product must solve the user’s problems, immediate department needs often supersede this. Marketing wants a usable product, and the UI team starts off with that goal, but as time-pressure mounts, the UI design suffers and responsibility still sits with Marketing, who, as the development process continues, takes on less and less of a role. By the time coding begins, the developers are concerned with creating innovative error-free code, not necessarily a usable product.

Addressing the usability challenge

Contemporary usability practices include augmenting the standard marketing approach with a specialized contextual method of understanding the user and their needs.

This approach begins with observation and contextual analysis of the user wherein the user is interviewed in their natural environment and asked to share day-to-day activities as they relate to the product being designed. This observation/interview method provides a clear understanding of the user and their needs as well as key areas where a user is struggling to effectively do their job. The output from this process is provided to a User Experience (UX) analyst who uses their expertise to synthesize this information, develop user model(s) and produce design recommendations.

The output from the observation and analysis phase is then applied as an input to the software design and development phase. This input is provided in the form of user requirements, an approved interaction model and high-level conceptual design(s). The ability to carry responsibility for the user between the analysis and design phases is a significant step in determining a successful product outcome.

During the design phase, it is critical that proposed concepts are validated with users. This validation is used to ensure that the direction for the product UI is meeting the needs of the user and triggers the commencement of detailed design and development.

Toward the end of the development phase, evaluation of the (almost) completed product begins. This process involves the usability testing of the beta product, during which any task-focused issues can be addressed and overall usability improvement can be determined prior to release.

Justifying usability

Contemporary approaches to good usability can help produce a better product; however, it also makes good business sense. Implementing a product development process that includes usability tasks and deliverables will develop an enhanced appreciation of the user, address the challenges posed in this article and deliver the following business benefits.

Reduced time to market

Methods of product development that do not adopt a pre-emptive approach to usability rely on a laborious process of gathering market feedback to refine the prototyping of a product. Even when some form of usability testing (e.g. expert evaluation or scenario-based usability assessment, with real users) is included in the development process, the tendency is still to use a prototype approach and iterate until user feedback is deemed positive enough to launch.

Establishing usability as an impartial advocate that supports every phase of the product development cycle ensures that users’ needs and expectations are understood.

Translation of user needs, so that appropriate solutions are implemented and validated prior to a product being released to market reduces the number of delivery cycles to bring a product to market.

The reduced number of iterations provides significant cost savings to the organization. Once an application is developed, it costs 10 times as much as it does to correct a UI problem during design.

Reduced support

One of the largest cost savings can be realized by a significant reduction in the support the product requires when it reaches the market. In 2004, McAfee®reported a 90% reduction in the expectedsupport of their product by implementing an innovative method of user interaction (i.e. a dashboard-type management console).* The company attributed this improvement to the enhanced product design and the significant role that usability played in the need for user help requests.

Brand value

Increasingly, the impression of a company’s brand is linked to the usability of its products. Some companies differentiate themselves by improving usability of existing products, and others base their entire brand on product usability. Whichever the path, when an organization finds an innovative way to solve a problem, the result positions them as an innovator and brings value to the brand.

Apple® demonstrated their UI innovationskills back in the early Apple vs. PC days with a graphical user interface—a whole new approach that set the “tone” for Mac® advocates today, “Mac’s are simply more easy to use.”

It is not only innovative design that can help a company enhance its brand value; a usable product should also strive to provide more relevant or useful output based on a user’s need. Google™ demonstrated how this can be done by entering an otherwise commoditized market with a product that was more user-centric. Its success comes from taking the same input as its competitors and producing a more desirable output. The resultant brand is an unquestionable success.

In each of the cases above, concern for the user is key, whether it produces a smarter or easier to use interface, the result is a great user-centric design.

Competitive advantage

In a competitive and commoditized market, companies need to be able to differentiate their products. Usability provides a tangible way of addressing this differentiation in a variety of ways, some of which include; bringing a more usable product to market first, patenting a user-centric design, or simply producing an easier-to-use product to which customers will gravitate.

Smaller, more agile firms in rapid growth industries (e.g. Biotech) are placing a greater emphasis on usability, allowing them to reduce time-to-market with products that address existing problems in established markets.

For example, FlowJo™ is a software product that is having a disruptive effect on the flowcytometry market. It was developed by a company that doesn’t make Biotech instrumentation, but it has gained significant market share due to its usability. Incumbent organizations that struggle to incorporate usability into their software products lose a key differentiator for their combined instrumentation/software products. The result; competitors instrumentation (in a commoditized industry) when partnered with the FlowJo product are not only competing, but are taking market share.

Usability support

There isn’t a simple magic potion that can be applied to a product to ensure good usability, but there are some key pointers that will go a long way in helping to build a usable product.

• Engage usability expertise if you are serious about improving your product and need support to deliver enhancements in design or greater value to your evolving user community.
• Employ actual/real users. Complex applications require domain-specific knowledge. Though it might be easier to enlist someone from another department to run through a quick user test, the results are likely to be questionable.
• Include representatives from all critical departments. Too often, testing and user-research limits the participants to UI designers and Marketing. Developers, business analysts, and technical leads should play an active role in the usability process.
• Test early and test often. Usability testing should continue throughout the design and development cycle. The most common mistake is to test an application when it is near completion—at a time when changes are most costly.

Consideration for good usability is not required to deliver a product to market, but it is required to bring a good product to market. It also helps you manage the process of delivering users’ needs and is cost effective. A good usability consultancy will help you balance the prioritization of usability vs. the cost of delivery. They will also manage the entire process for you. The only thing missing is the desire to provide your user with what they will inevitably want.