Subtle Persuasions » Business Resources

Linkedin – It’s Like a Network in the Dessert…

Brad Slavin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:45:04 +0000

A while ago I posted about linkedin, and I just saw this video today.

It pretty much sums up how most people feel about the site. It has gotten to be a wasteland of connections with almost everyone looking for a free handout or recommendation.

Microsoft Store Video Front Page on Engadget

Brad Slavin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:02:47 +0000

I woke up this morning and my cell phone was vibrating, I thought that it was a server that had gone down and these were the inbound emails…but alas it was just the deluge of emails from Youtube about my Microsoft Store video.

Link back to the Engadget posting – http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/17/microsoft-store-employees-break-out-in-dance-video/

Well back to the grind, feel free to poke around.
I just hope that Microsoft has a sense of humor. Some of those comments are scathing.

Initial Meeting Confirmation Email

Brad Slavin — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:41:33 +0000

sales training San Diego

(Name:)

Thank you for your time on the phone today.

To confirm, we are meeting on (day of week), (day) at (time) for (minutes).

The purpose of the meeting it (state concisely the purpose of the meeting).

I would like to accomplish the following objectives:

At the end of the meeting we should have exchanged enough information to be able to determine if it makes sense for us to continue our dialogue, and, if so, to decide what are next step should be. If it is apparent that there is not a fit, we can close the file.

If these objectives are not consistent with your expectations, please let me know.

I look forward to seeing you on (date and time)

This simple format for writing a followup email for a meeting will go along way in establishing trust and credibility with your clients.

Why I use a local bank vs. a MEGA bank

Brad Slavin — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:01:47 +0000

The Background Story:

About a year ago I opened an additional business account at Regents Bank in La Jolla after checking with the bigger national banks in town. I spent about two weeks talking to a number of reps at the big box banks and they all had amazing features, online everything, account access anywhere, free this, free that and for a while I was tempted to just move my business to them. There was a guy at Wells Fargo that had me convinced that joining their institution would be the perfect fit for my business and that if I ever needed anything, a car loan, a business loan, a credit card, a merchant account, heck even a toaster…that Wells would take care of me.

I signed the paperwork and then called Jeffrey Wilber at Regents bank. I have known Jeff for about 5 years now, he sees me when I come into the bank every few weeks and we have had lunch a few times. I only had one question for him, really I was about to switch banks and I asked him, why I should stay with their small local bank.

His answer, the commitment that Regents Bank has not only to their customers but also to their employees. The people at the bank had been there a long time, they know the business and more importantly they know their customers. I thought about the glitz and glamour at Wells and I called the rep and asked him how long has been with the bank and what is goals were. He said about 11 months and he hoped to move to their private banking side, he told me that there would always be someone to take care of my account and not to worry there would be someone to take his place.

I called Jeff, and opened my additional account at Regents Bank and have been really happy ever since.

Fast Forward to 8:23am today. I get a phone call from the Regents Bank Fraud department to tell me that there was suspected fraudulent transactions on the account. A number of gasoline purchases were made in the past few hours in Iowa. I said, that the card was in my wallet and that these were not my charges. He said that he would close the account and I should go to the local Regents Bank office in La Jolla and get a new card.

Bank opened and I was in the door within just a few minutes. Behind the desk was a woman that I had never met before but I said “I am here because the fraud department called!” and her response was “Oh, you must be Brad from WebHEAT. Someone else is dealing with this but we all communicate and we were expecting you.” WOW. Did you hear that!? I am not the person responsible, but we all communicate and I will get you taken care of! I had NEVER met her. AMAZING.

They handled the issue is just a few minutes. And I was back to my day.

So to my FRIENDS at Regents Bank, Dan Yates, Jessica, Ryan, Cecilia, Ken, Jeff and the rest of the team that I have never even met. Thank you for operating a real community bank that really cares about each member!

Asking a Client for a Positive Online Review of your Business

Dan Kennedy Information Marketing

Brad Slavin — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:03:41 +0000

Just got off of conference call with Dan Kennedy where he discussed his A to Z marketing strategy and his info summit. Just like most info marketers he gave some real information, held back some of the finer points and then introduced his product.

For those of you who missed the call here is the Dan Kennedy formula for creating a successful info product.

ap + ql + mf + rr + ci + wn = Big $

Seems simple right?

Well this is what it meansQuality Product + Quality Lead + Marketing Funnel + Risk Reversal + Continuity Income + Whats Next = Big $

Quality Product – This one speaks for itself, don’t try to make money online with a substandard product. Make sure you have integrity and that your product is of the highest possible standard.

Quality Lead – There are people out there willing to buy a quality product, you just have to know what niche you are filling and advertise directly to them.

Marketing Funnel - Have some sort of automated system that directly markets to you people on your lists. This is something that you should setup the pipeline and let the software take over the dripping to your prospects.

Risk Reversal – Remove risk completely from the transaction. Give money back guarantees, the benefits will far outweigh the costs of returns. You will get more people who buy because of your guarantee than those who will return the product. Make this promise, IRON CLAD.

Continuity Income – Something, like a membership site, a paid newsletter – that keeps the customer paying month after month for the information that they are recieving from you. (THIS IS A BIGGIE)

Whats Next – Keep the prospects fully informed about what else they can buy from you, what else they can expect.

BIG $ – If you have to ask, you don’t need to know.

The Tough Enonomy is Invading the Schools

Brad Slavin — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:29:53 +0000

Lisa gave me the most amazing birthday present ever she enrolled me in Machine Shop Basics for some personal development. I have always wanted to learn how to run a lathe and a mill, I love the feel of metal, the clean lines and the glimmer of stainless steel.

SO I get there today and there are 90 people crowding around a small classroom listening to the instructor talk about the vocational training that City College offers. She spoke about Electronics Assembly, Electronic Testing and Machine Shop. She mentioned that this was the largest group that she had ever seen in her years of working for the district and that spaces were limited.

She asked for a show of hands on how many people were planning on the machine shop class and about 30 people put their hands up. Now this was really the most motley crew you have ever seen, people of ever age and every walk of like united by the one reality – that they needed a skill to get a job. Man, there were people there with some hard luck stories, people who needed bus tokens to get to school and subsidized textbooks.

The instructor said that there were only 12 open spots for the class and that there was just no way for everyone to get in. They decided to hold a lottery and 1/3 people would be accepted. This is when I walked to the front of the class, let her know that I was not going to take the course – I wanted someone to take it to build a better life rather than me who wants to build door nobs!

She was really appreciative – but man….I have really not seen just how hard people have been hit by this economy – until today.

Is Hummingbird the Twitter automation tool worth the money?

Brad Slavin — Sat, 09 May 2009 00:15:56 +0000

Hummingbird claims to be the software that the “Twitter Elite” don’t want you to know about. The developers claim that by using Hummingbird software you can automate to the building of a huge twitter following in a matter of weeks rather than months or years. I am a skeptic, I have always been the person that wants’ know “what’s the catch” or if something is to good to be true it probably is. Skeptical not cynical

So I plunked down some hard earned cash on April 20th of 2009 and decided to give it three weeks. Today is March 8 and I feel that I am in a pretty good position to be able to give this review. So that’s 19 days of owning the software, probably 15 days of using it, and I am SHOCKED at how well it works.

Here is the background information:

1. I created a brand new twitter account on the 20th of April. I added a picture to the account and I had ZERO followers at that point. Here is a copy of the email receipt to show when I got the software.

2. I searched the Internet for some relevant links in the niche that I was interested in and then copied the URLs into a text file on my desktop making some notes to what the web page was about.

It looked like this:

Short Sales:
My tweet, and then the url that I found:

How to do a short sale – http://www.ehow.com/how_8132_short-sale.html

Snag a great deal on a short sale http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/27/real_estate/short_sale.moneymag/index.htm

How to exit your property with a short sales http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/hotproperty/archives/2007/03/the_new_exit_st.html

I created about 40 links like this by searching google for “short sale 2009”

3. I posted about 10 of these links into my newly created twitter account while inside the Hummingbird interface just so that I had some content for people to read when they checked out my profile.

4. I used hummingbirds built in twitter following tool to find followers and I picked a keyword that I wanted to follow. I found a user talking about short sales and they had about 3500 followers. I clicked on their profile, and then on the list of their followers and when the list of their followers came up I pressed the button in Hummingbird to auto-follow the users in the list.

5. I then started posting every 5 or 10 minutes one or two of the remaining links that until I had posted about 30 total links including the original ten before I turned on Hummingbird.

6. At this point I was about three hours into the process and I had followed nearly 1000 people. I manually stopped Hummingbird because I did not want go get the account banned on the first night for following to may people. This was just too easy.

7. I had about 40 people following me within four hours. I then went back to step number 2, rebuild my tweets for the next day and went to sleep.

8. When I woke up I had 327 people following me! This was in less than 8 hours! I kept posting links throughout the day.

9. On day two all I did was post links and kept following the rest of the people in the account from that I was originally following. I got up to about 1100 people that I was following and about 36 updates. At the end of day two I had 331 unique twitter followers all found and auto followed with Hummingbird.

11. At about 8pm on day two, I started my first mass unfollow. And the next morning my numbers were even at about 331 followers and 381 following.

10. Day three I just posted about 20 new links found the same way as step 2.

12. I then started the process over again. Basically wash, rinse, repeat. I have done this three times in since I started using the software and as of today May 8, 2009 I have 1,627 followers and I am following 2,001 total twitter users and everything was automated with Hummingbird.

13. In Summary:

Start a twitter account
BUY HUMMINGBIRD – $197 is cheap!
Search Google for relevant content
Post 10-20 updates per day
Use hummingbird to find a person with lots of followers in your niche follow their followers
Wait 24-36 hours and unfollow the people that are not following you
Post 10-20 new tweets a day
Repeat.

*** I will tell you that the first 200 followers are the most difficult, actually maybe the first 40 are the toughest, people don’t want to be the first to follow a new user but one I got to about 40 twitter followers the Hummingbird really helped me to kick it into over-drive. ***

Results on Day 11

This software is amazing! I would most certainly recommend Hummingbird if you want to automatically build a twitter following. It is a great twitter manager software that automates the tiring tasks!

Results on Day 15.

Facebook Worm In Action..

Brad Slavin — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 01:29:17 +0000

Today I received a strange email from a friend on facebook. She is not the type to send random spammy emails so when I got this I was a little suspicious.

Knowing a little about how this virus was going around I felt pretty sure that I could track it down, without getting infected. So I decided to follow the link in the email – which by the way she sent to all of her facebook.com friends. (Lets hope they did not get the virus)

Once I followed clicked the link – I was redirected from a geocities link http://geocities.com/kellyconway02/index.htm…. to a site that calls itself YuoTube – Broadcast Yourself. Notice this is Yuo, not YouTube… Clever. It also has a reference to Teresa in the header and her picture in the profile to convince an unsuspecting viewer that this is a legit message.

And the profile picture that matches the facebook profile picture.

To make the page look even more believable that they have also included a user review section.

The culmination of the deception is possible because the video window looks like you are missing a plugin in order to watch. They report that you need a new version of Adobe Flash and then the download auto-starts.

This is the popup with the URL and port number for the setup.exe download that is a virus.

I then traced this IP down to the “Korean Education Network” and filed an abuse complaint. Who knows how many people will get hit before they respond.

Suggestions on how to get these guys shut down would be appreciated.

Insuring your E-Business Success

Brad Slavin — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:46:44 +0000

I have a number of clients who have equipment colocated all over the country, these sites range from individual and corporate blogs, e-commerce websites and even a customer that does 50 million in product revenue from house hold items. On the surface it may not seem like these sites have anything in common, except that all demand that they websites are always availible.

As a technology consultant I have to plan for the unlikely or the unreasonable while balancing this against the possible and probable. A consultant needs to balance what is likely to happen but plan for the unlikely. Here is a perfect example from this weekend.

There is a HUGE colocation provider located in Texas called The Planet that has near 100% historical uptime. They are located in a part of the country that is not prone to flooding, fire, tornadoes, hurricanes or even earthquakes – they seem like an excellent choice for a safe, reliable and cost effective service provider. They have all of the industry standard redundancies for Internet, environmental controls and security. They also stated that they had best of breed power systems, well this weekend – this failed.

Their data center literally had an explosion! According to The Planet website a piece of electrical gear shorted out and created an explosion that knocked down three walls of their electrical equipment room.

No injuries were reported and no servers were damaged or lost. But about 9000 servers were powered down and inaccessible from Internet. This means that tens of thousands of businesses were affected.

With a down server you could be offline for hours or even days. I still trust the planet Sometimes bad things just happen I bet that more than 99% of you have no idea when your website goes down.

Here is a quick tip: I monitor all of my clients critical servers with an online service called Pingdom, there a a few of these services out there but this seems to be the most reliable that I have found. On Saturday I received about 60 SMS messages to my Blackberry – I got in touch with technical support and then notified the affected clients. From my standpoint, it is better to be informed proactively than reactively.

The lesson here is, make sure that you or a member of your team gets proactively notified every time there is an issue with your website AND your mail server!

Make sure this goes to email and to SMS
Have the contact information about the service provider
Have your contract or account number
Your IT company and Staff should not be the only people getting these alerts
Do you have current online backups of your critical business data.

If you have suggestions for other monitoring systems, colocation providers or ways that smaller businesses can handle these situations let me know.

Lifelock – Who To Trust? The Lawyers or the Company

Brad Slavin — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:35:58 +0000

It really makes it difficult to find a product that performs as advertised, when you do you hang on and advocate it whenever possible. As a happy lifelock.com subscriber for a few years now, I have felt protected, not only when I get the confirmations from the credit companies but also when I try to apply for new accounts and I get a call from a Lifelock representative that they are doing what they promised they would do.

Basically I am 100% satisfied with the service that they are providing to me.

The press, the attorneys and Lifelock corporate have been caught in a bit of a scandal. Some are claiming that the service does not perform as advertised and then there is the response.

From the Lawyers

Todd Davis has dared criminals for two years to try stealing his identity: Ads for his fraud-prevention company, LifeLock, even offer his Social Security number next to his smiling mug.

Now, Lifelock customers in Maryland, New Jersey and West Virginia are suing Davis, claiming his service didn’t work as promised and he knew it wouldn’t, because the service had failed even him.

Attorney David Paris said he found records of other people applying for or receiving driver’s licenses at least 20 times using Davis’ Social Security number, though some of the applications may have been rejected because data in them didn’t match what the Social Security Administration had on file.

Davis acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that his stunt has led to at least 87 instances in which people have tried to steal his identity, and one succeeded: a guy in Texas who duped an online payday loan operation last year into giving him $500 using Davis’ Social Security number.

Paris said the fact Davis’ records were compromised at all supports the claim that Tempe, Ariz.-based LifeLock doesn’t provide the comprehensive protection its advertisements say it does.

”It’s further evidence of the ineffectiveness of the services that LifeLock advertises,” said Paris, who is lead attorney on the three new lawsuits, the latest of which was filed this month…..

From the lifelock.com perspective:

“My identity has been completely protected by LifeLock and I am as confident as ever about the LifeLock service”, says Todd Davis, CEO of LifeLock. “It is shocking that completely untrue statements about our company, the protection we provide and my personal identity are being repeated from a lawyer looking to create a case that clearly is not in the best interest of consumers.”

According to the FTC, nearly 3% of Americans are victims of identity theft each year. With over one million LifeLock members, you could expect LifeLock to have 30,000 victims. But as clear evidence LifeLock really works, only 105 individuals have been the victim of identity theft. In fact, among the 105 who have reported an identity theft, every single one has been covered under the LifeLock service guarantee….

Recent claims have suggested that Davis’ social security number has been used at least 20 times to obtain drivers licenses and other credit. Davis explained, “These claims are completely untrue and reflect total inexperience and lack of understanding of how credit files and identities work. While there have been more than 100 attempts to use my identity information, none of these recorded in the credit files resulted in any loss for me. However, a check cashing company failed to properly follow procedures and verify the identity of a thief in 2007, resulting in a person being able to cash a check for $500. Let’s be clear, there is currently no form of identity protection that would prevent this from happening, but this is why LifeLock serves such an important protection for consumers. The LifeLock guarantee served me as it serves all LifeLock members, what identity theft LifeLock can’t prevent, it will fix at LifeLock’s expense up to one million dollars.”

“As of today, there have been only four individuals out of over one million LifeLock members who have alleged they are dissatisfied with LifeLock as part of class action lawsuits. However, none of these individuals appear dissatisfied enough to cancel their service or even ask for a refund. We have done an excellent job of serving all our members and even those four people must agree. In the some of the recent challenges to LifeLock, you have to ask yourself, what is the motivation behind the lawsuits?”

Not sure of which side to listen to? Me either, but I love the service and if you are looking for to try it out here is a Lifelock Coupon that gets you $21 off and the first 60 days free and here is a Lifelock Discount for 90 days free and $110 per year.

I am a user, I love the service. My folks are getting a little older and I got them both accounts, for $10 per month, it really is an extra level of protection.