I’ve always understood the expression “Can’t see the forest for the trees.” It wasn’t till I moved to northern Wisconsin that I realized not everyone does understand it. It’s easy, in this land of wonderful woods, to miss the beautiful expanse as you focus on one scruffy pine—wondering why someone hasn’t pruned it. The same thing happens at work.

People get caught in the daily cycle of “Write the to-do list, work on the to-do list,” and get frustrated by how many things remain on the to-do list at the end of the day. It would be silly to expect that cycle to be anything but a permanent part of our work life. There will always be more tasks than there is time. There will always be interruptions that usually end up dumping more tasks on our desks. Fast isn’t fast enough. Remember when you could blame things on the post office? Overnight delivery services, fax machines, and e-mail technologies have changed forever what we mean when we say, “I’ll do it right away.” More than ever, we need someone to help us break the cycle of tasks and encourage us to see beyond the day-to-day. Leaders are those people.

Most employees don’t have the opportunity to attend trade association meetings or have access to and the time to read industry forecasts, but they need the information obtained by doing both. That’s where you come in. As a leader it is your job to understand the bigger picture. How does your organization fit into your industry? How do you rank against your competition? What changes are affecting the way you and your competition will do business in the future? You need to know these things in order to make wise decisions and chart a course into the future. The people at all levels of your organization need to know these things, too. They need to know so they have a better context for understanding management decisions. So they can help customers understand changes in policies and practices. So they can think about their own future. So they have hope.

People get so focused on the task in front of them (the next deadline, the next round of budget cuts) that they seldom lift their heads to look at the big picture. It is in the bigger picture that we can find the hope that will lift us out of daily despair. If you want to call yourself a leader, you should know about the bigger picture, so talk about it.

It’s the vision thing. In my favorite leadership book, The Leadership Challenge by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, the authors remind leaders that it is their job to imagine things for their organizations that are beyond the ordinary. That’s why people ask this kind of question. It is their attempt to understand, clarify, and get excited about their future. If they can’t get an answer from their leaders, they feel lost, adrift, and frightened.

I’ve sat in more leadership team meetings than I care to remember during which the leaders asserted how impossible it was for them to answer this question. Their excuses were many. “The things that are happening are confidential.” “Once we get things turned around, we’ll have time for this philosophy stuff.” “The competition is killing us; we may not have a future.” “We don’t have a clue.” These are the responses of leaders who are using their titles under false pretenses. Even with the constraints of confidentiality, can’t you say something? How will you turn things around if you don’t know what direction you’re facing? Why shouldn’t we engage our entire team in dialogue to help us understand and beat the competition? How can you not have a clue? Leaders have to talk about the future. All the time. At every opportunity.

What happens during your leadership team meetings? Maybe it’s time for you to discuss this question together. Whether you’re the team leader or a member, bring it up for conversation. If you lead from the middle of the organization, gather your peers and talk. Too often, everyone assumes that these issues are the responsibility of the organization’s real leader. Nothing is further from the truth. Real leaders exist at all levels of the organization, and the visions they have need to be part of the ongoing dialogue about the future.

After you have become known as a leader who thinks, talks, and cares about the future, start turning this question back to the people who ask it of you. Help them understand that they help the organization and themselves when they share what they know from their unique perspective.

It will not undermine your credibility as a leader if you talk about your vision for the future based on what you know today and revise your view when circumstances change—as long as you include the changing circumstances along with your revised vision for the future. It will enhance your credibility as a leader if you identify the unshakable values that will guide your own and the organization’s behavior, no matter what the future brings. It will focus and uplift your organization if you talk about things beyond the ordinary each time this question is asked.

Here’s a thought. School’s never out for the professional. How does that make you feel? Excited or depressed? Continuous formal learning, whether in the university classroom or the corporate training room, is a necessity not a luxury for all of us. But there is another, informal style of learning that leaders need to encourage. It is learning because of curiosity and need.

I was at a speaker showcase several years ago when I heard a presenter by the name of Bob Prichard say, “When you’re not learning—someone somewhere else is. When you meet—guess who has the advantage.” I’ve carried that concept with me every day since. As a leader, you need to ask yourself if you could honestly say that your team is smarter today than they were a year ago. If they are, do you know how they got that way? Good business means, in part, replicating effective behavior, but you can’t replicate behavior that you don’t know about. Start asking questions about learning.

Finding out how your people learn can be a fascinating exercise. You’ll find those who learn by doing, some who learn by listening, and others who need to see a picture (either real or imagined) before something sinks in. The advantage of a supported do-it-yourself learning environment is that everyone can have their learning the way they need it. You can be part of the support process. Does your organization have a library? Does it have both books and books on tape? Are there whiteboards and flipcharts available for everyone’s use? Do you understand that doodling, muttering under your breath, and standing up during a meeting can all be signs of a person learning? It appears as though there could be a lot for you to learn.

Why bother? Because of the competition. You can bet they’re learning, and if they are and you aren’t, the future starts looking dim. So, start asking a few questions. Who knows, you might learn something!

The company knew they had to do something. Customer satisfaction ratings were dropping, employee turnover was rising, and nobody wanted to talk about morale. Serious competition was looming. A group of leaders were appointed to do something about the situation and to do it fast. Meeting after meeting produced idea after idea. Consultants were hired, and a final decision was reached.

“We’ll create a video that tells everyone why they should be happy that they work here,” they decided. “We’ll prove that the future’s bright by showing our grandly produced video to everyone. Spare no expense,” they said. “Just get it done.”

So, the script was written, the actors were hired, and the locations scouted. Production began and money was spent. The final version was shown to the executive team and they beamed at each other. This would do it; things would change now. After all, they had spared no expense.

Employees were ushered into the meeting room and given plastic cups filled with sparkling grape juice. The lights dimmed and the video began. The music was powerful and the videography impressive. The leaders sitting in the front of the room led the applause and raised their glasses in a toast to the renewed commitment they were certain everyone in attendance felt. People filed out of the room talking about their weekend plans. That’s when I heard one of the participants say, “I can’t believe they’re trying to get us to put our hats back on with that crap!” No one else seemed to hear his comment. Curious, I followed him out of the building and asked, “What hat?”

“Oh,” he replied offhandedly, “When I first started, fifteen years ago, we all had hats with the company’s name and logo. I was like most guys; we wore them all the time. We wanted everyone to know where we worked. We were proud to work here. I haven’t worn my hat for a long time.”

Many organizations, in an attempt to improve morale, spend dollars, time, and energy externally and forget that morale is an inside job. Please don’t ask consultants to help you improve morale in your organization. Start by asking this question yourself of the people on your team, really listen to the answers, and go to work.

The nature of my work requires that I spend a great deal of time away from home. Time alone in hotel rooms provides fertile ground for unusual questions to surface. One evening I got to wondering how a hotel concierge learns about the places they recommend. So I asked. I was amazed to discover that, for the most part, they are expected to learn about shops, restaurants, and local attractions on their own time with their own dollars. That got me thinking about how organizations learn about their competition.

(If this apparent leap in subject is uncomfortable for you, get used to it. Not because it is a fault of mine, but because it is a common occurrence when you get serious about asking questions all the time. One interesting question seems to fire brain activity that may appear to be random but with close scrutiny is connected. My experience has been that the effort to find the connection brings little insight, so I’ve learned to ignore the leap and focus on the seemingly new topic. I suggest you do the same.)

I can remember only one time in my corporate career when my employer asked what I knew about our competition. As it happened, I knew quite a lot about a new product that was being introduced by one of our hottest competitors because one of my customers had just gotten a bid from them and had given me a copy. I had read and filed the information. I’m ashamed to admit that it had never occurred to me that this might be important information for the whole organization, and if I hadn’t been asked, it would have remained buried in my file.

Employees are consumers before they are employees, and many of them choose to do business with the organizations that vie for the attention and the dollars of your customers. Or they know people who regularly interact with your competition. How are you mining the information they have?

Even more interesting, there is the possibility that your employees may have some insight that you don’t into who the competition really is. I remember attending an American Booksellers Association BookExpo in 1995 without hearing one bookstore owner mention Amazon.com. I have to believe that many of them had heard about the new company, but most seemed to dismiss it as a fad for the few. They were focusing on the growth of the large bookstore chains, a serious threat to be sure, but nothing compared to the impact of Internet book buying.

I’m pretty confident that out there somewhere is an Amazon.com like competitor for at least part of your business. Asking this question might just give you the heads-up you need.

This is the flip side of the last question. By asking this question, you’re seeking information that will allow you to compare and contrast your customer’s opinion of you and your competition.

I don’t know any business or organization that doesn’t have competition. I don’t know any business or organization that doesn’t need to know more about their competition. It seems to me that asking your customers about your competition is an obvious place to start learning. Your view of your competition is inherently biased. You have preconceived notions of your superiority of product, your extraordinary customer service response, and your exceptionally speedy customer responsiveness. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be working there, leading a team, right? Having a positive mental image of your organization is good as long as it is tested against your customers’ opinions on a regular basis.

It occurs to me that fear might stop you from asking this question. What if you found out that your competition was really doing a good job? What if your customer confided that they were switching to your competition? Think of it this way: What if your customer was thinking those things and you didn’t know about them? Without the information gained by asking this question, you have no chance to change things for the better. Shouldn’t you be more afraid of that?

You may lead in an organization that is fortunate enough and big enough to have entire departments that measure customer opinions. That doesn’t replace the value of hearing those opinions for yourself. Asking your customers questions about your competition will help you understand the reports that land on your desk in a deeper way. You may lead in a small organization where decisions are more often made by hunch than by research. Your quest to listen to your customers’ opinions of your competition is even more important. This information can provide valuable insights into your customers’ behavior in the future.

Finally, asking a customer this question might spark the awareness that you really care about their opinion. Certainly it will help them understand how much you value them as a customer.

How do I know which keywords to target?

The most important task you will have is determining which keywords you should target on any given page of your website.

I say “any given page of your website” because you should optimize each page individually. Each page on your site needs to be able to stand on its own as far as ranking for keywords on that particular page.

This enables you to bring in visitors on many different keywords and keyword phrases instead of just the few that your home page will be optimized for.

I don’t recommend simply copying and pasting each page and then modifying the content. You should take the time and start each page from scratch.

This enables you to better optimize each page for the keywords you are hoping to target. You want to try and take full advantage of the potential traffic you can get by having many ‘doorways’ into your site.

The more doors you have, the more traffic you can get. View each page as a new ‘doorway’ into your site through which Web surfers can enter.

Although your first instinct will be to go with more popular terms such as music, marketing, or cars, you should narrow the scope quite a bit.

Some reasons for not optimizing your pages for these types of keywords are:

1) They are too broad - If your website is about Rap music, would you want to attract thousands of Country music or Gospel music fans? Even if you are tempted to answer ‘yes’ to that question, you should say ‘no’. These visitors won’t be interested in your music, and will quickly leave in search of a site that fits their interests.

2) Too much competition - You will have a much more difficult time getting a high ranking on the search engines when you use these more general and more popular terms because you will have literally millions of websites all trying to get the same spot you are.

3) Too much time and effort involved - If you decide to try and compete with the other millions of webmasters out there trying to get into the top 25 or so listings, you’ll spend an awful lot of time trying to get there, and spend even more trying to keep your position!

I’m sure your next thought will be: “Okay, I’ll go for Internet Marketing, or Rap Music, or Used Cars!”

Well, that does narrow things down a bit, but these phrases will still have a ton of competition.

The better (and more profitable) approach is to search for keywords and keyword phrases that meet both of the following:

1) Popular - They are searched for by a lot of people

2) Have little competition - It is so much easier to get a high ranking (and stay there!) when you target keywords that have little competition.

The key to success with the search engines is to find keywords that many of your potential customers are searching for, but that few of your competitors are optimizing for.

How in the World do I do that?

The absolute best resource you’re going to find online for finding keywords that fit the above criteria is: WordTracker

They offer a free trial, and if you need to have access to the more advanced reporting features, or would like to research other search engines not offered in the trial, you can subscribe to their service for a small fee.

The trial will work just fine, but if you decide to get serious, this will be the best money you spend. Each time you add a new page to your website you should research the best keyword phrases and optimize that page for them.

Since this is such a valuable resource, and because this part of your search engine strategy is so important , I’m going to give you a quick tutorial (complete with screen shots!) of how to use WordTracker to find the best keywords.

Obviously you’ll need to have a general idea of what the subject of your website is, or is going to be, and then click here to go to the WordTracker website.

Once there, find and click on the Trial link. You will then be asked to enter your name and email address to start your trial. (They will send the results to this email address, so make sure you enter a valid address.)

Make sure you check the box to get the weekly Top 500 Keywords report! This is a very useful email that you’ll get once a week that will show you the most popular keywords for that week.

Then you’ll see the following:

For this example I’ll enter in “marketing” and click Proceed, which will then bring up a list of related keywords and phrases:

You will have a left window and a right window, and when you click a keyword it will display the results in the right window.

By clicking on marketing, I get this result in the right window:

This list gives various keyword phrases with the word “marketing” in them, and sorts them by number of searches.

What you will then do is click on a few of these keywords to add them to your basket (don’t worry, this will make more sense after you’ve gone through it once.)

After you’ve added a few of these keywords to your basket, click the link to move to Step 3.

This step gives you some choices that are only available in the full version, so just click the link to go to Step 4.

Step 4 is where you’ll find the good stuff!

The important information on this page is the KEI Analysis. This gives each keyword a rank based on how popular the keyword is, and how much competition it has.

A low score means that either not many people search for the keyword, or that there is too much competition for it.

The amount of competition is determined by searching for each keyword on the selected search engine, and finding out how many sites come up in the results.

What you want is a good mixture of popularity and competition … or lots of popularity and little competition!

If you look at the scale just above the table in this graphic you will see what KEI numbers will mean you have found a good keyword or keyword phrase.

In this example it appears that I didn’t find any good keyword choices.

But, another search I ran found these:

As you can see in that list, there are a few terms that have a very high KEI ranking. This means that these would be good keywords to target because they have a good ratio of popularity to competition.

This is exactly what you are looking for when trying to find the best keywords to target for your website or for individual pages on your website.

When you choose keywords that are popular and that have little competition, you’ll be able to quickly get your site into the top results for that keyword.

The following articles will show you what you must do to make sure you take the right steps to take advantage of the great keywords you discovered during the above process.

Edit : These is a new upgrade from Wordtracker that gives more accurate results. If you find that you liked Wordtracker, you should try KeywordSpy.

KeywordSpy - keyword research technology

High end resale rights products are products that you won’t find in any type of cheap package.

You will pay a lot more for the rights to sell these kind of products.

TIP: Creating a high end product is simple. Members of the Digital Reseller Vault can use Ebooks or software programs inside the members area to create a brand new package, and then sell it for a high price. I will show you how to do that in detail later on.

I prefer selling high end resell products for several reasons…

• I can charge a higher price

• Some products allow me to charge a separate price for the resell rights (Master Resell Rights)

• There is less competition.

• The product’s value will be protected by the resale license.

• The sales page is often of higher quality.

• I can set up an affiliate program and recruit more affiliates to help me sell the product.

• I can set up more joint venture partners if I have a high priced quality product to market. People are more willing to promote a product that pays them well.

A good example of a high end product is the “Proven Pricing Report” It currently sells at $124.98.

Of course, I don’t sell as much copies as for the $15.00 products that I promote.

But one sale of the report makes up for 10 “lower” sales.

On the Internet it’s just easier to make REAL money selling a killer package, costing $124.98 (or even $199 or more) than it is fighting to make peanuts per sale from a lousy $14 - $17 package.

What also entices people to buy the report is that they get full resell rights, and the ready made web site.

Offering resale rights motivates people to ACT.

They know that one sale will make up their initial investment, and the rest if pure profit, without them doing any work, besides promoting the package.

But that’s not all…

The entire package (including the exclusive bonus rights), allows a reseller to make hundreds of dollars weekly in so many bonus ways and even from within some of the products - it’s a no-brainer.

If people were to pay me for exclusive ownership rights to this package, I could charge them up to $1,000.

Don’t shake your head… I’ve seen it happen on the Internet. However, I wanted to make this product affordable for other marketers who don’t have a high end, hot-selling product of their own to sell.

Audience: sales reps
Message: We appreciate your hard work to make us successful; we’re drowning the competition.
Tone: informal, sincere
Timing: 5-6 minutes, depending on the insertion of details of sales records set by various groups

“Never murder a man when he’s busy committing suicide,” Woodrow Wilson advised. Our competition is doing just that—self-destructing. In a period of recession, instead of putting forth more effort, it seems that they have decided the game has been rained out.

You, on the other hand, have continued to meet and exceed your quotas. You have outsold both of our major competitors—combined. I’m delighted to report that (year) was a dynamic year for us at (company). We have set several records. Let me mention who, where, when:

[Insert details of the sales records set by various groups and divisions.]

Why the continuing success when our competition is lagging so far behind? You know as well as I do that it takes more than superior products to make a successful sale. It takes superior people. Like you.

As impressive as our records are for this year, they’re history the day after they’re recorded on the balance sheets. Our history and our future as a company rest with you, our sales team.

As impressive as our team record is, we can be more. More productive. We can budget our time better and knock on more doors. Our training programs to be offered this coming year are opportunities for you to polish your time-management skills and get more hours in your week. You can learn to set priorities, favoring large-volume customers,… and to plan a strategy for add-on sales.

As impressive as our record is, we can be more. More alert to new prospects that our marketing research turns up. From the most recent advertising campaigns, we already have fat databases of prospects awaiting our attention.

As impressive as our record is, we can be more. More diligent to ask our satisfied customers for referrals to their associates who can make use of our products and services. Most will be more than happy to help us help their colleagues reach their own goals. They want their associates to get the same kind of performance they’ve been getting from our products.

As impressive as our record is, we can be more. More knowledgeable about our customers’ needs. We can continually probe to find new needs to pass on to our engineering and research staff. Today’s unfilled needs are tomorrow’s innovative products.

As impressive as our record is, we can be more. More appreciative. And this one’s addressed clearly to us in management positions. We can be more appreciative of your efforts—of what it takes to sell in today’s market.
Let me say it more clearly: We are impressed with you…. Your hard work…. Your knowledge…. Your skill…. Your drive.

History tells us that we have the competitive edge—a superior sales team that goes out every day to “make it happen.” That’s history. And we have every confidence that it’ll be the future, thanks to each of you.