At one time in my life, I worked for a temporary agency. One of the assignments they sent me to was at a large manufacturing plant where my job consisted of answering the phone for a department.

(Just a quick aside. Why would an organization put a temporary employee in a front-line, customer contact position? I cringe when I remember how many times I said I was sorry because I had no idea how to answer a customer’s question. I was sorry until I realized that I seemed to be the only one who cared.)

During the week I worked there, I overheard the leaders of the department talking about the lack of creativity their people exhibited. Later the same day, I observed the team working out a creative solution to a major problem facing their company bowling team. I’ve thought about that contradiction a lot since then. I’ve learned that the leaders were right in one way. In an environment that doesn’t expect people to be creative, they won’t be creative. However, those same people will be creative in an environment that challenges them to be creative. I’ve also learned that those leaders could have had a creative workforce if they had asked, What volunteer work do you do?

People volunteer for causes they believe in and for jobs in which they can put their skills to good use. Think about what you’d learn about the hidden talents in your organization by asking this question. You may be surprised by the people you discover. An accountant that coaches a winning soccer team. An administrative assistant who teaches watercolor painting at the local community college. A customer service representative who leads a fund raising campaign. “So what?” you may ask. So what indeed. Look at the hidden talents you didn’t know about or, more importantly, didn’t expect. This is a question that requires listening to the answer without reaction. You may hear some responses that challenge strongly held beliefs, and it is human nature to let that incredulity show on your face. Keep in mind that a look that expresses surprise or curiosity is okay. Incredulity is an insult.

Many of the specifics you learn when asking this question won’t have practical application—unless, of course, you’d like your administrative assistant to illustrate your monthly reports. But these answers will force you to look at the people you work with through new eyes, seeing different possibilities, and changing some limiting expectations. This kind of challenge is good for a leader.

Many organizations develop a list of values—conduct they uphold as their guide for the behavior of all employees. These values are often published and distributed. Too often, these values are thought to be real just because they’ve been put on paper, but they become fiction in practice. Values are too important to exist only on paper— they need to live in an organization’s daily activities.

The challenge successful leaders should give themselves is to use their values as a measurement and evaluation tool. Leaders need to praise and encourage the good behaviors, monitor the difference between actual and desired behaviors, and correct bad behaviors before they become institutionalized. The challenge for most leaders is to maintain an accurate picture of the real state of their workplace. This question can help you do just that. When leaders understand that organizations, like people, have both good and bad habits, there is potential for positive change. Finding the gaps between what gets said and what gets done gives you a place to start. Think about what you would (and have) done when confronted with situations where your stated values have been contradicted. If you say you have respect for people in your values statement, would you fire your top salesperson because they repeatedly berated the clerical staff? If you value creativity, would you decline a job because you couldn’t see any way of adding innovation to the client’s existing processes? If, according to your mission statement, customers come first, would you withhold a bonus for the vice president of customer service when your customer service targets were missed? What about your own bonus? Do you practice what you preach? Believe me, if you don’t live your stated values, there will be gaps between the behavior you want your organization to practice and the behavior I’d observe if I spent time with your people. Finding those gaps should be your priority, unless, of course, you want to revise that value list you so proudly print in your annual report. This question begs for a follow-up. Try this one—How can we get our behavior back on track?—and listen well.

The best time to ask this question is when you’re talking to a customer. The next best time to ask this question is when you’re talking to someone on your team who regularly interacts with your customers. This is a question designed to generate ideas—lots of ideas from many sources. So your job with this question is to ask it of as many people as you can, as often as you can.

The worst possible position to be in when it comes to ideas is to have too few of them. That’s why the primary rule of brainstorming is to amass quantity, not force quality. Unfortunately, many people forget this rule, ask for ideas, stifle the conversation by judging each idea as soon as it’s mentioned, and then wonder why their people just don’t brainstorm well. If you want to hear about ideas that might make your customers happy, you need to generate lots of ideas and consider them all—even the ones that are too costly, too time-consuming, or too outrageous.

Creativity is messy. The best ideas never appear fully formed and practical. They are often hidden inside an idea that is impractical and silly. These best ideas need to be coaxed, nurtured, and defended. Creating an environment that encourages creative thinking isn’t always easy, but it’s usually fun.

Slowly but surely, links are where the traffic is!

Link popularity and link relevancy, have become the most important factors in determining whether you show up on page 1 or page 1,000 of the search results.

Requesting links is tedious, boring, and too closely resembles work! But you have to do it… if you want to get any traffic from the search engines, that is.

Stay away from the shortcuts on this one because they’ll cause you more harm than good. Spend the time finding sites that have a lot of links pointing to them and that get a great deal of traffic.

Each time you convince a decent site to link to your website, you stand to gain more visitors to your site, as well as a nice boost in the ranking of your site on the search engines.

As more and more sites link to you, you’ll see your search engine traffic start to increase because they will view your site as being more important.

Think about it: What if every site that links to you sends you 10 visitors per day. Find just 10 of those and you’ve picked up another 100 visitors per day…FREE!

Burn a little midnight oil and get that number up to 100 sites, and you now have 1,000 visitors a day sifting through your site!

Keep in mind that some links won’t bring you any traffic at all, and others will send one here, and one there. But these add up over time, so don’t dismiss a site because you don’t think you’ll get thousands of visitors from it.

Another reason I stress finding your own link partners rather than using some of the “5,000 links a day” programs is that the latest search engine trends are to rank the sites that link to you.

It’s not the quantity, but the quality that counts!

This means that 10 sites that have 100 sites linking to each of them is better than 100 sites with only 10 sites linking to them.

Basically, the search engines give a higher weighting to sites that link to you that are also popular themselves. There are many more factors in determining the popularity of a site, but you can typically use this as a good rule of thumb when searching out partners.

This makes sense because if an important site likes your site enough to link to it, then the search engines will like it too.

This is called Link Relevance, or Link Importance. Where Link Popularity merely counts the number of incoming links to your website, Link Relevance attempts to actually rank each of those sites that are linking to you.

By the way, the best tool I’ve seen out there for finding important sites to request links from (those that have many incoming links to them), is called Internet Success Spider by Neil Shearing.

You can either choose to enter in the URL of a popular site, or enter in search keywords that your target audience would search for. When the Spider is finished crunching, it will give you a list of sites, sorted by number of incoming links, that you can then contact and request a link from.

This can save you many, many hours of wasted time requesting links from lesser important sites, and allows you to focus on only the ones that will increase your website’s link relevance. You’ll also stand a good chance of getting a quite a bit of traffic through from these sites.

Internet Success Spider can save you a ton of time and allow you to build partnerships that can be worth many, many thousands of dollars.

I’ve used it to find a number of great affiliates for my affiliate program. In fact, one wonderful lady I discovered using the Spider software jumped onto my top 10 affiliates list in less than a week after I contacted her!

Use it to find out what sites are linking to your competitors, or that link to high ranking sites, and then contact them to see if they will link to yours as well.

Create some mini sites

An inexpensive and not-too-time-consuming option is to create several mini sites, and link them to your main site.

Mini sites are great at getting top rankings on the search engines because they are typically very focused on a particular topic, which the search engines like.

If you spend some time learning the steps to creating successful mini sites, you can get a quite a bit of traffic from them, while also increasing the link popularity of your main site.

The best resource by far on this subject is Phil Wiley’s “Mini Site Profits” ebook. If you understand the profit potential of mini sites, you’ll make sure you have Phil’s ebook in your library!

Setup a few of these sites and you can quickly start to see a large increase in traffic to your website, as well as more sales from the targeted visitors. (The extra sales should easily cover the small expense of Phil’s ebook)

A little creativity goes a long way

There are many different strategies that you can use to get more links to your website. In fact, i can recommend one of the ebooks named Website Traffic System with the topic “131 Link Building Strategies”.

I highly recommend that you put some effort into this because nothing else you do will give you as much long term rewards for your time.

One thing that I learned (another one of those “Why didn’t I do this earlier!”) is that for some sites it works better if you create a graphic of some sort for others to link to you with. I had always offered up a text link to people that added their affiliate program to my directory.

I rarely received links this way! I know that you would think people wouldn’t want a graphic on their site, but I found that when I created a few graphics and then told them they could use the graphic to link to me, the number of sites linking to me increased very quickly!

This may not work for your type of site, but I give this as an example to show you that you need to keep an open mind and be willing to try different methods.

I can’t stress enough the importance of getting lots of links!

A friend of mine, Larry Rogers, makes few waves in our social circle. Quiet and unassuming, he has been a member of our group for almost five years. But I’d bet fewer than a third of our acquaintances would recognize his name on a membership list. Smart? Sure. Successful? Sure, you should take a look at his paycheck. But nobody in our social circle has an inkling. Why? He never says anything.

But at work it’s another story. I was conducting an effective writing seminar for a large financial services firm, when the participants’ lunchtime conversation turned to communication skills in general.

“You should hear one of our VPs. Talk about the golden-tongue orator! He has everyone eating out of his hand. He gives speeches for just about every occasion, and audiences just hang on his every word.”

“So, who is this guy?” I interrupted the amens of the others.

“Larry Rogers, our corporate lawyer. You know him?”

My mouth gaped. My friend, Larry, who said fewer than 50 words on any given social encounter?
Since that time, I’ve learned that on behalf of his company, he frequently addresses Wall Street, gives interviews to the national media, and speaks at corporate board meetings—not to mention the rah-rah speeches of day-to-day internal business.

Evidently, the two “split” personalities and reputations could be attributable to his taking communication skills seriously only on the job.

But what a major difference that becomes. Good ideas alone aren’t enough; good ideas are floating around everywhere. If you don’t believe it, listen to the cabbie who knows a solution to the city’s transportation problems or to the techies who develop new software programs.

But if you never get great ideas to the right people, what good do they do? Ideas are only good if they can be communicated. Speechmaking catapults a professional to the forefront of his or her career, and speechmaking confirms success.

For the business person who aspires to motivate people, lead organizations, sell ideas, inspire creativity, and deliver quality, communication becomes everything. Nothing can light a fire in your career path or your corporation’s profit-and-loss statement like the visibility gained through speechmaking.
Think message. Think audience. Think results.