Hani Mourra – Simple Podcast Press

Hani Mourra really enjoyes developing tools to help people marketing their business online. His passion is to help people generate more traffic to their site through various strategies he has used that work in today’s market. Hani acknowledges that it isn’t easy, but there are several things people can do in order to get the ball rolling.

Two of the main WordPress plugins Hani developed are called Simple Video Press and Simple Podcast Press. The idea is that when you publish a video or podcast on various plugins, it automatically adds those episodes or videos to your website. Each of the videos or podcasts has a specially designed email optin box below the episodes or videos.

Hani recommends picking the tools that work for you. You don’t need a lot of plugins because that will slow your website down. However, the tools you do choose, make sure that they actually help shave time off your operating procedures.

Hani loves technology, video, podcasting and has a lot of fun spending time in this industry. What Hani found when he talks with people is that they just want the solution and they want things that help them to minimize the time they have to allocate to creating content. Keep it simple and that’s a big reason why he included “Simple” in the name.

I like taking complex problems and making them simple. -Hani Mourra

Hani Mourra Likes to Keep Things Simple

Hani is a big beleiver in picking tools that you need and are helpful to your business. The more time you have to be creative, the more likely you are to develop better content. Hani kept simple in his mind throughout the entire development process. Hani has an engineering background and so he enjoys solving problems by taking complex problems, breaking them down and finding a simple solution with a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for any user to perform tasks in a shorter amount of time.

Hani started a blog called easyonlinevideotips.com so that people that visited the site understood the solution was going to be easy. Hani made it so the user would add a minimal amount of information and then the software would do the rest. Hani is a big Apple fan as a simple user interface. His a minimalist. He doesn’t even put a case on his iPhone because he doesn’t like the look and feel of having the case on the phone.

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If you want to learn more about or connect with Hani Mourra, check out his links below and remember he welcomes all questions, comments and inquiries!

Easy Online Video Tips Website

Simple Podcast Press Website

Simple Video Press Website

Hani Mourra on YouTube

Hani Mourra on Google Plus

Connect with Hani Mourra on LinkedIn

Seth Greene – The Ultimate Marketing Magician

Seth Greene is the founder of the fastest growing privately held marketing firm in the country. He is a bestselling author with his sixth book just about to launch. He didn’t start out as a direct response marketing expert.

Seth started out as a retail finance advisor when he was 22 years old fresh out of college. He was happy to hear from his new manager that he was going to give him a book with all his clients ready to buy from him.

When he got to the meeting with his new manager, the manager gave him a copy of the phone book. This was a devastating blow as this is not what he was expecting and needless to say, he wasn’t as excited to start this career.

In Seth’s spare time, he is a magician. Seth was reading a marketing trade journal for magicians when he came across a full page ad about marketing for magicians. He couldn’t afford the course so he asked his parents to buy it for him for his birthday.

While it wasn’t a surprise because he knew what he was getting, he was definitely excited about it. Seth decided to change his marketing for his magic show.

Now Seth was the most expensive magician in the area and the busiest magician. He asked the course developer if this would work in his real job as a financial planner and the answer was yes. He asked Dave Dee, the owner of the course, where he learned these techniques and the Dave told him the two words that would change his life… he said “Dan Kennedy”. He spoke with Dan and he told Seth he was doing everything wrong.

Seth immediately reached out to Dan to ask him how he could use these techniques in his real job and Dan basically said “write me a big check and I’ll help you” (although his pitch was a lot better than what he said, but for the sake of time Seth was very impressed.

He proceeded to ask permission from his wife to write this massive check and she kept saying no. Seth persisted and on the 31st day, she finally said “this better work”.

Three Questions from Seth Greene Every Business Owner Should Answer

While there are just under 20 questions in Seth’s quiz, these are the first three questions that he asked that I thought were the most important because without the answers to these questions, you simply cannot have a successful marketing plan.

* Have you created a written description of who your ideal customer is?

* Have you created a written description of your business’ unique selling proposition (Your marketing message – what makes you different from anyone else)?

* Do you know how much any given customer will spend with you?

Go to quizmymarketing.com to take the free quiz Seth Greene designed. This will help you learn where you are in your marketing. This is the quiz that he wished he would have had when he first started.

As an opiner, you can get Seth’s book for free by visiting PodcastMarketingMagic.com (all you have to pay for is shipping and handling). This book will help you find great guests and how to find customers with your show.

If you want to learn more about or connect with Seth Greene, check out his links below and remember he welcomes all questions, comments and inquiries!

* Market Domination LLC

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Frank Bria – Author and Business Mentor

Frank Bria is a self-titled “recovering consultant”. He started off his career in the banking and high-tech finance world. He did a lot of tech start-up work and one of the companies he helped to get the banking business off the ground ended up selling for $175 million. He traveled all over the world and spent a lot of time with venture capitalist where he grew his consulting business. While it became very lucrative, it was also very exhausting. Frank came to a moment where he realized a change was needed. He started to see all the things he had been teaching to the larger companies about positing their products to sell were the same things that small business owners needed to know. Some of the initial feedback he received was that it was going to be too expensive for small business owners to do the same scaling techniques as the larger corporations. By educating small business owners that the broad concepts of scaling a business properly are not expensive at all. Now, Frank helps coaches, consultants and experts turn their six figure businesses into seven figure businesses. To be a successful consultant or coach, it can be a difficult life to live, income aside, because you are trading time for money quite a bit. Not a lot of people can tell you how to transition from one to the other. If you are starting from scratch, it is a little easier because you really don’t have anything to lose. Whereas when you are already operating a six figure business, you don’t really have that much time because you are so busy. The question Frank always gets asked is how do you take, what is basically that commodity that he charges so much for and now dedicate to build something else without losing income and taking years to grow their business.

The Secret to Growing Your Business From Six to Seven Figures

The secret is using information to build a better business. Many times using split testing or other tactics are good ways to learn what is working and what isn’t. The problem is that many people don’t have a strategy to leverage the framework to learn from what is happening and react to it. Most prospects, as they are growing go through certain phases. Where you can really learn about the various stages of growth is by seeing what happens in retail. If you go into a store and you are wandering around, you go through stages as you come closer to making a buying decision. If a customer is standing outside of a store loitering, he needs to have some information that would motivate him to get into the store. Once he makes it into the store, he is still kind of just wandering around and as soon as the sales person asks to help him, there’s a pretty good chance that he would say “I’m just looking”. There is an instant message. The reason that he doesn’t want to talk to a salesperson is because he really doesn’t know what he wants. Basically, he is just experiencing things. Frank Bria calls this type of person a looker. There are a lot of “lookers” in people’s email list. Many people are on email list that are just trying to figure out whether or not they are interested in buying anything yet. However, there is a transition that happens somewhere along this journey that turns “lookers” into “shoppers”. Really good retail people can sense this. When someone is aimlessly looking in the aisles, but when they start reading labels and making comparisons, this is the transitional behaviour a sales person looks for. Now the sales person can engage the “shopper” with a beneficial conversation. At some point,

Kevin Jordan – Author and Owner, Red Point Marketing Consultants

Kevin Jordan is involved with an excellent organization called “Duct Tape Marketing”. Just like the name implies, Duct Tap Marketing is about simple, affordable and practicle marketing strategies for small business. What they are doing and why Kevin became involved with them is because they treat marketing as a system. They’ve put together a lot of tools and resources for small business to help them market better. Kevin is now a certified consultants and has licensed their brand.  Kevin got involved with four other consultants within the Duct Tape Marketing brand to write a book. Kevin jokingly talked about how easy writing a book was, but he, along with his co-authors, took the time to pull from each of their expertise to write a book. Here’s a link to each of the 5 Authors of “The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Local Lead Generation”:

* Mark Z. Fortune

* Kevin Jordan

* Ray L. Perry

* Phil Singleton

* Justin Sturges

Kevin faced a couple challenges with his book called The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Local Lead Generation. While he acknowledges that it is a bit of a mouth full, he recognized the importance of describing the book in detail and it helps with search engine optimization as well. The main challenges Kevin and his team faced was combining five voices into one voice. Check out Kevin’s new book: Share on Twitter He wanted the book to have a cohesive flow so that it was reflected in the content as one voice. The way he solved the problem was by hiring a copywriter. At first, he thought it would be easier to record content and send it to the copywriter and it would be done. He found out that it wasn’t as easy at it seemed. In most cases, the content was transcribed well; however, in other cases, the team found out that it was hard for the copywriter to interpret the information so that the information was communicated in a way that was easy to understand. The target audience for this book is someone who may have heard what SEO is, but they really don’t understand more than that. In order to make this happen, they had to be careful with the jargon. Kevin said it was challenging to break down marketing in a simple step-by-step process. The content was created with the team on the call and the copywriter would take the information from the call. This provided a great starting point for the team to decide whether or not that was the “tone” they were looking for. If Kevin had to do this all over again, he would definitely hire a copywriter again. Within the team dynamic, they chose two people to do the editing so they would avoid having too many people trying to do the same thing.

A book is never really completed – Kevin Jordan

How to Write With a Team

Kevin actually really enjoyed working with the team to...

Jeff Steinmann – Entrepreneur, Consultant and Author

Jeff Steinmann started off like most young adults. He was supposed to go to college and figure out what you are going to do for the rest of your life. Jeff went down this road and spent 13 years getting his bachelors degree. He knew this wasn’t a sustainable trajectory and in the late 90’s he sort of fell into a career in technology. He started doing some programming and project management.

He started to figure out how corporate life worked, but he was never fully sold on corporate life. One day, he thought he was ready to quit his job. He began a little business on the side and he got so far that he even scheduled an appointment with his boss to resign from his job. He remember’s this point in his life like it was yesterday. He came into work early and went down to the conference room where the meeting was going to take place. With his resignation letter in hand, Jeff was waiting to meet with his boss. His boss walked in, and Jeff could tell he was in a big hurry. His boss asked him point blank, “Okay Jeff, what do you want?”

Instead of going through with his initial goal of leaving the corporate world and launching his entrepreneurial career, Jeff chickened out. He quickly made up another reason for having the meeting and he went back to his desk. He remembers sitting down and saying to himself that everything was ok and that he wasn’t going to do this. He remembers trying to comfort himself by thinking that he still had a job and that he was going to retire in about 45 years. He decided to make the best of it and charge forward.

Jeff realized a lot of success in the corporate world. He received several promotions and raises. Even though he was doing well, he couldn’t help but realize that with every promotion, raise or new responsibility, he felt almost as if he was a hamster on a wheel. He would do good, celebrate by going out for some wine and a steak dinner, and then he would go back to work the next day and do the same thing the very next day. This didn’t make any sense to him. He wasn’t growing inside. He wanted so much more out of life.

He remembers one moment for him, which Jeff says was a defining moment in his life. He had a meeting with a member of upper management who was about two weeks away from retirement. Now, Jeff was 36 or 37 during this meaning and so he has been in corporate america for 13 years now. During their meeting, his colleague received a phone call and it apparantely it wasn’t good news as he let out a string of profanities and looked frustrated with what was happening.

Don’t let fear stop you. – Jeff Steinmann

Jeff remembers thinking, “this is what I am aspiring to”? This is what it looks like when you climb the corporate ladder. He realized this is where he needed to finally make the jump.

How to Quit Working

Before Jeff could actually quit his job, he had to start working on his marketing and consulting firm to build up some clientele. When Jeff went into the same meeting in 2012 that he experienced 13 years earlier, albeit with a different manager, he successfully quit his job.

There are two things initially that you have to understand about this transition. Time and credibility.

How do you find the time to begin the entrepreneurial journey? The fact of the matter is that this sucks. There really is no secret to finding the time. You have to stay focused on why you are working as hard as you are and why you aren’t doing things like going to the ball game or watching television.

Kevin Periera – Entrepreneur

Kevin Periera has always been an entrepreneur. He is a college drop out who has always wanted to have his own business. He is the co-founder of the Wet Shave Club and startup incubator called Groove Living in Tampa, Florida. Kevin remembered that he went fishing with a friend one day and his freind was the CEO of a $10 million company. What resonated with Kevin was that his friend made a comment that forever changed Kevin’s outlook on life. His friend said that he could leave his work in the middle of the day and no one would notice. Kevin hasn’t looked back since.

Kevin and I started discussing the Wet Shave Club, which is a subscription box company that sends out shaving products each month. Since it’s subscription based, he likes the fact that he gets to know what he will be making each month once he knows what his retention rates are, but the hard part is managing the inventory. We tries not to carry too much inventory and because it’s subscription based it is a constant challenge to understand how much inventory to keep.

Here’s a video interview of Kevin Periera from my friend Kevin Jordan:

Kevin and his partner purchased the company a little over a year ago. They met a gentleman that has a company that had about 50 subscribers. While the site and branding wasn’t right, Kevin knew there was potential there. In the first six months of the previous owner brought in approximately $3000 in sales and Kevin did this in the first week after he purchased it.

The more you share, the more things come back to you. – Kevin Periera

The previous owner was charging $12.50 per month and using a combination of branding and perception of value, Kevin was able to increase the monthly subscription cost to $29 per month. They included more things in the box, but the overall brand image helped to justify the price increase.

How to Use 99Designs to Get the Best Design

They knew what they wanted the brand to be, but they couldn’t do the graphic design themselves, so they decided to create a contest on 99designs. If you are unfamiliar with 99designs, people will submit real designs and you get to choose which designer you want to award. There’s a couple ways to make sure you have a successful contest. Never choose the cheapest design because you won’t have good designers going after that price level. Kevin chose a designer that was priced in the middle. He focused on one page, the home page. Then they will use the designer that was awarded the contest to complete the website so the design remains consistent.

One of the best ways to get more designers to participate in the contest is to not award the designs 5 out of 5 stars. Other designers will start seeing these stars and therefore they won’t participate because they think the contest is almost over. By awarding 3 or 4 stars, more designers will come in as they still think there is going to be a better opportunity of getting the job.

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When Kevin starts a project, he will use the developer he awarded the design to so that the designer completes the project to maintain continuity in the website.

What is Groove Living

Groove living is a is a closed Facebook group that anyone can join. Kevin is sharing all his strategies that he’s learned i...

Kate Taylor – Staff Writer, Entrepreneur.com

Kate Taylor is a staff writer for Entrepreneur.com. Kate covers franchises and anything relating to the franchising and entrepreneurs. She has been with Entrepreneur for nearly two years. She was hired and didn’t know she was going to be writing about franchising until the day she started work. Little did she know, she found franchising intriguing and really enjoys learning and sharing her knowledge about franchising. Kate was a history major in college, but she always wanted to be a writer. Before working for Entrepreneur.com, she interned for Forbes and found an appreciation for business writing.

Kate separates herself from the competition by consistently writing new content. For example, some people start blogs or writing with the best intentions, but people often quit before they develop an audience because they aren’t receiving any feedback or getting any response it’s easy for people to stop writing. For Kate, it’s really important to just generate the content and get it published.

Writing is a lot of work, but working for Entrepreneur.com, Kate has a great editor that helps her out. Most of the time she wants to get an article out before noon. For longer stories, it’s less of a direct deadline, but if you are working on articles everyday, you get used to a rhythm that works best for you.

Writing once a month or once a week is fine, but you have to be honest with yourself. If you say you are going to write once a month because that’s all the time you have, and you miss a month, you really have to get into a routine and make sure you commit.

If you are writing once a month, don’t skip. – Kate Taylor

Kate says a big debate as to how long an article should be. She thinks that shorter articles may be more likely to go viral, but also there are longer articles that Kate put a lot of time and energy in that have a longer shelf life. She recommends that you need to balance the two and figure out what you’re voice is when creating content.

Kate says that developing a voice is as much as developing confidence and like many other things, it comes with practice. Kate found her voice through trial and error and writing a lot of articles. Getting your own voice is an extension of expressing your personality. This is easier to do when you are writing about topics that you are more interested in.

3 Things That Will Make You a Better Writer

The first thing to becoming a better writer is that when you are choosing a topic, write about personal experiences and make sure it’s interesting to you. The second thing is just making sure that there aren’t any grammatical errors and finally, learn how to make your articles something that your audience wants to read. It has to do a lot with creating a great headline. Make sure you title your article or story with a “clickable” headline. In other words, find out different ways to express yourself and get your point across quickly.

To make headlines better, you can start off with trial and error in figuring out what works with different audiences. Reread your article and try to find out what the article is about. If you are writing about someone, it’s a good idea to go back through the article and find something interesting they said and use that as a headline.

If you want to learn more about or connect with Kate Taylor, check out her links below and remember she welcomes all questions, comments and inquiries!

Kate Taylor Entrepreneur Staff Writer

Brad Ahrens – GetSocial.io

Brad Ahrens is the marketing director for Getsocial.io. Brad made the transition from fast moving consumer goods which focused on outbound marketing to SaaS which works best with inbound marketing. Brad lived in the Caribbean where he was fortunate enough to work there for a while. This is where he worked with fast moving consumer goods. Basically, he was responsible for placing products like chewing gum in the stores and make sure that he was moving as much product as fast as he could.

Brad started working with focus groups to find out various buying habits so that he could develop a survey. This survey was used to identify whether or not the feedback he received from the focus groups did indeed compliment the true feeling of the local environment. Once he verified the community was in line with the focus groups, he went back to the focus groups, created additional designs for certain products, and then propose the products to the focus groups.

Based on this research, Brad was instrumental in developing the product via feedback from focus groups. This is a great way to discovering your target market to the next level.

Brad speaks seven languages. – Fun Fact

What is GetSocial?

GetSocial is a software as a service that helps websites owners understand how social sharing drives their traffic and conversions. This services provides a social media app store for all your needs, from awareness to conversion.

GetSocial is a SaaS solution for social sharing and analytics. GetSocial is a service for WordPress, Shopify and many more CMS (Content Management System) solutions as well. This software will track who has clicked on their buttons, what the visitors have done as a result of clicking on the buttons, how many people have clicked on them and how many of their friends have come back to the page based on the original share.

One of the coolest analytic features this software is providing the capability of tracking the address bar. This is called “Dark Social Sharing”. The software can tell users if someone were to copy the url (the link in the address bar) and shares it with their friend in an email, the user can track this as well. This is an incredible way of tracking your social signature.

How Can a User Track Social Media with GetSocial?

There are several ways of tracking and displaying your social media with GetSocial. Here is a list of features GetSocial offers:

Click to enlarge the GetSocial Apps

* Horizontal Share Bar: Use one of our templates or design your own social sharing bar. Customize size, shape and colour and pick from 15 social networks.

* Copy and Paste Share Tracking: In some customers, 80% of shares are made by copy and paste a URL into email, chats or social networks. Start measuring it now.

* Custom Facebook Shares: Customized Facebook shares that give a new meaning to sharing. Love, dislike or approve your content and products.

* Floating Social Share Bar: Use one of our templates or design your own floating sharing bar. Customize size, shape and placement and pick from 15 social networks.

* Floating Total Shares: Increase engagement by showing the total number of shares in a big counter on top of your floating share bar.

* Google Analytics Integration: Integrate your GetSocial sharing activity with Google Analytics and have all of your analytics in one place. No code required.

* Horizontal Total Shares: Increase engagement by showing the total number of shares in a big counter on the left of your horizontal share bar.

* Mobile Share Bar: 30% of shares in GetSocial are made through mobile devices. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to increase traffic.

Zac Johnson – Blogger and Entrepreneur

Zac Johnson is the founder of blogging.org. Zac has always had a business mentality. Zac fell in love with the internet early on in his life. He was still in high school when he started his online business. Zac started making money online in 1995. He learned how to make websites and started earning an income through affiliate marketing. He found that be simply redirecting traffic from one location to another, he was able to generate over six figures as a teenager from his affiliate sales.

While other kids were playing sports and doing the things that kids do, Zac spent his time working in a corner office of his parents home developing affiliate campaigns. He would sometimes work all night and his dad would wake up, ready to leave for work, and Zac would still be on the computer generating campaigns. Hard to imagine, but a teenager was making more money out of his dad’s study that his dad was going to work.

When he got into blogging, he built a celebrity website where he was ranking really well for celebrity names. He incorporated Cost per action (CPA), sometimes known as pay per action (PPA) and cost per conversion, is an online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays for each specified action – for example, an impression, click, form submit (e.g., contact request, newsletter sign up, registration etc.), double opt-in or sale.

In 2007, Zac launched his own brand at ZacJohnson.com. He now had his very own platform to teach others how to make money online. He no longer had to worry about what happened with Google or search marketing, he would still have a brand to fall back. This allowed him to take control of his own financial future without having to worry what other companies were doing.

Today, Zac is focusing on Blogging.org.

Zac Talks about CPM and Paid Placement Ads

CPM stands for cost per thousand. Depending on the site, you can pay .50 – $10.00 for every 1,000 times your ads are shown. If you look at someone like Perez Hilton, he has a site called PerezHilton.com he gets tons of traffic. Just for a banner ad, he gets over $45,000 per month. This is how he generates over $1 million dollars per year. Zac will help teach you how this is done.

If you have a site and you want to make money, you can work with advertisers and create deals with them where they are paying a high amount for CPM advertising or they can pay you a high amount for affiliate sales. Zac will help create your niche and provide you with relevant ads that will convert based on your audience that are coming to your site.

Zac on Retargeting

Zac is focused on Facebook advertising right now using retargeting. If someone comes to your website and you are trying to sell them something, but they leave, by offering a retargeting ad campaign, you can track these visitors by placing a “cookie” or tracking mechanism on your site, visitors will continue to see ads that are related to what they were searching for when they visited your site originally.

If someone doesn’t place an order the first time they visit your site, you can create a “retargeting” ad campaign that will offer alternative follow up advertisements to hopefully convert potential customers at a later time. If you are selling an online course, you can say “I noticed you came to our site, but you didn’t purchase, click here to get a guide about how to make money online with blogging”.

Brendan Hufford the Value of Teaching

Brendan Hufford grew up on Syracuse NY with the support and opportunities provided by his mom. he ws never hungry. He didn’t want to learn for himself. All through high school and college he rode the pine. He was the worst who made the team or the best who didn’t and he fell into the as a mindset.

After discovering a passion for teaching he decided there had to be a better way to teach and discovered he wanted to teach something he was passionate about. In 2011-12 Brendan started his own business, a local community blog devoted to the Jui Jitsu scene in the Chicago area. Through research to learn how to make a better blog he discovered Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn.

Brendan then he discovered Gary Vaynerchuk and stayed up until 2 or 3 am watching Gary’s key-note speeches on YouTube. With that inspiration he went headfirst into the online world with GiReviews.net. Here Brendan did reviews of all the Jui Jitsu uniforms manufactured, something he is passionate about.  He was up off the bench, ready to hop the boards onto the ice and get into the game.

Here’s Brenan’s interview with Gary Vaynerchuck: Gary Vaynerchuk on Entrepreneurs and Coffee

Brendan Hufford Keeps it Simple

Brendan loves Jui Jitsu. When he gets a chance to train he usually ends up teaching as well. he finds that most teach by demonstrating and there is no curriculum. The “here watch me do it” method is not effective. There is a way to teach and a way to just demonstrate. He won’t inundate students with too many details. Overwhelming leads to “paralysis by analysis” and most end up doing nothing with too many details to concentrate on.  If you give you one detail or one nugget of information to hone in on and you decide to make it a part of what you do, that’s huge. One tip not a hundred to remember makes learning so much easier.

Brendan Hufford on Value

There are two ends of the spectrum. First the marketing guru that offers a course for $1,000.00 because he knows he will get better customers with a high price, the high price adds perceived value and he will get more action because it is more expensive. The problem is, his stuff is crap, useless. Brendan isn’t going to buy a product from someone teaching how to run a business if that person has never actually had one of their own.

Second are the imposters. Those who feel like what they have to offer everyone already knows and it’s not needed. Very often this is not true. Most really do know something unique that can be taught and shared with others and can provide value.

Ask yourself what other people ask you for help on. When Brendan started podcasting a lot of people started asking him questions regarding podcasting. he then put himself in a position to provide a service and help others. Much like Tony Robbins. tony feeds millions of people a year and that money is raised in-service.Brendan also wants to be helpful and provide a great value and he does not want anything in return. If he can help that person be successful in another way like make an additional $10,000.00 per year, it has value. When he sees something has value, he starts to develop a product.

Brendan Hufford – Building Your Product with Value