Big doors swing on little hinges

Posted on 10 May 2012 by

Big doors swing on little hinges. I often think of opportunity when I hear this, but really, it applies to many things. The words you speak and what you allow into your eyes and ears are hinges to your heart… your life. They will open big doors… good and bad. Don’t let the enemy open big doors in your life through your thoughts, words and what you may believe to be small actions.

People never succeed… or crumble in a day… so don’t let black and white turn to gray in your thoughts, decisions and actions.

Blogging: bypassing the media

Posted on 23 April 2012 by

National and international business is doing something mainstream media professionals never saw coming – they have wrested control of information away from entrenched media sources. Standard media sources provide content in a confined and compartmentalized fashion. This form of communication is normal, expected, dare I say status quo?

A Passing Fad or Defining the Medium

In the beginning, blogs seemed more attuned to ‘stream of conscious’ thought. The beginning of blogging was personal and sometimes social. This thought morphed into social networks that are prevalent today.

Somewhere along the way business caught a vision that blended information and marketing into a highly personalized package known as business blogging.

Taking Information to the Consumer

Blogging has taken business information from small portions of data from sources you need to pay for and brought it to the masses – at no cost.

Suddenly those who were the most knowledgeable were bypassing the media and actually finding greater success in reaching those most interested. Not only was the information available in a timely way it had a significant impact on the marketing aspect of the company.

The media can often drain the personality from an interview with an expert, but a b-blog can restore the personality and allow visitors to see your business as more approachable, accessible and likable.

Where Media Fails

Where once a staff writer had numerous stories to work on and numerous contacts to make to finish other stories, now a motivated industry expert could bring multiple opinions and insight to their readers in a very short period of time. While the staff writer worked on trying to understand the issues surrounding the article they were been assigned to write the business owner/industry expert is already gathering comments and analysis from other industry experts.

Essentially business blogging removes one of the most cumbersome steps to information distribution – time. The biggest positive in all of this is blogging has the ability to place you in the driver’s seat of information.

Many businesses have not explored blogging because they haven’t caught the vision for success and they haven’t understood the benefit of developing a niche specific information stream that has the ability to convert motivated information consumers into customers who understand how the information affects their purchasing decisions.

Blogging has given business a tremendous gift. Interestingly mainstream media has taken an ‘if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em’ mentality by providing their own blogs that have taken this town hall approach to get information to their readers. In the final analysis, mainstream media still stand several paces behind business blogging pioneers who are now viewed as trusted authorities.

Learn more about business blogging from Jack Weinzierl and get the latest updates on search engine optimization at twitter at http://twitter.com/jackweinzierl.

Social Media Marketing – goals and effectiveness

Posted on 16 April 2012 by

Social Media Marketing is a form of internet marketing, which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks like YouTube, Facebook, social web application like digg, delicious, reddit, Wiki. The goal of each social media marketing program varies from business to business, but mainly involves building of brand awareness, increasing visibility and through this, sells a product or service.

Social Media Marketing is becoming an essential marketing tool for connecting with customers and optimizing online presence. Social Media describes the tools and platforms, people use to publish, converse and share content online. Video, pod cast, blogs, discussion boards and social networking sites are all tools, online businesses can use to build relationship with their customers and keep them on websites longer. Social media provides more opportunities for organizations to present optimized content that can be indexed by search engines and ultimately improves site rating.

To implement some of the social media elements, it is first important to evaluate your customers to create an effective strategy. If your consumers are professionals who commute, then pod cast can be downloaded and can be very effective.

Posting video content on YouTube is a unique opportunity to improve your position in Google’s universal search results. With YouTube, customers can visit the site, view your video and easily post to their own blogs, social networking profiles or websites. YouTube is a great way to reach a broader viewer and generate buzz around new products, especially if your product has a visual appeal.

Building a healthy relationship with the customer that last is an on-going process for a businesses. Social media takes this a step further by making that relationship personal through blogs. It tells about you, not only about your product or service.

A blog, which includes video, pictures and text, can build interest and loyalty among customers with the added benefit of search engine optimization.

Social media encourages social visits to your site. Keep adding content to encourage customers to return regularly. With the advent of social media, consumers have become contributors, contributing to brand messaging. SMM is related to other online tactics such as SEO, SMO. It has a more active planned role in directing, influencing and engaging the community members.

Connect with Jack Weinzierl and receive updates on twitter at http://twitter.com/jackweinzierl.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The Myth?

Posted on 09 April 2012 by

Search Engine Optimization. Big words. Sounds Important. What is it? If you do a search in Google for the web definition of search engine optimization, you get a lot of different results.

Some simply say that search engine optimization is the generic term for making sure your site is optimized to appear as one of the top ranking web sites on a search.

Others get more detailed with their definition and say search engine optimization is the term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a web site to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken.

A number of factors are important when optimizing a web site, including the content and structure of the web site’s copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process.

Is it important? That also depends on which definition you believe and who you ask that question to. If you ask someone who runs a business and charges for search engine optimization, they will tell you it is the most important thing you will ever do for your website.

At each SEO website, they will tell you they are the number 1 SEO company on the web, even though each of them has a completely different method of optimizing your website.

If you ask many self-appointed webmaster gurus in some of the webmaster forums, they will tell you the same thing, then each one will tell you a different way to do it and they will all disagree on the most important aspects of search engine optimization.

So the confusion continues for the average user and the SEO companies love it that way. If the consumer doesn’t understand what you are doing, you don’t really have to do very much and just say you are doing a lot. Most of them would never work on your website on a contingency payment plan, one based on actual results and performance. Some say money back guaranteed, but read the fine print.

A lot of these businesses are based on the fact that people who are new to the web and even some of those who have been online for awhile do not know what search engine optimization is. They know that with more and more people coming onto the web for the first time, their business is secure. They can continue to tell people that without their service the website will fail.

I’m not saying all search engine optimization companies are rip-offs. Some of them really do their best to get good rankings for their clients and know what they are doing. A lot of them still really believe that search engine optimization is the key to success on the web.

It isn’t. How’s that for a statement? I know a lot of web designers will disagree. I know a lot of SEO companies will disagree. But simply put, search engine optimization of your site’s pages is not the most important thing you need to do to succeed on the web.

Let’s break down some of the things that are included in the phrase search engine optimization.

Metatags are one of the things these gurus tell you is important. Metatags are all but dead. Search engines, especially Google, ignore metatags for the most part.

Having them in does not hurt you, but go do a search on any topic besides web design or search engine optimization, etc. and you’ll find that IF the websites at the top of the search results have metatags at all, they usually only have the description and keywords metatags.

Well they also have the title tag, which is sometimes referred to as a metatag, but it is actually the only metatag you need to have.

Keyword Optimization is something the gurus will tell you is very important. Some will tell you they know the exact percentage of text that should be your keywords. Yes, keywords are very important. Do they know what percentage the search engines will want to read for the best results? No.

When writing copy for your website, you must be conscious of the keywords you wish to promote. Don’t pick too many keywords and try to optimize each page of your website for twenty different things. If you do, it will not be relevant for any of them. That isn’t guru talk, that’s just plain old fashioned common sense.

Remember that search engines crawl web pages, not web sites. If you choose just one or two keywords per webpage that you wish that page to be optimized for, then you can optimize the page easily and write text the user will want to actually read.

Write your sales text the way you would with only the user in mind and with making sales in mind. Then go back and reread the page.

Find places where you can add in your keyword without destroying the flow you created when you wrote the text in the first place.

Now, do you need to hire an SEO company to do that? Do you know your product? Do you know how to sell your product? Then you need to write the text. If you do not wish to write the text, then hire a writer. You still don’t need a search engine optimization guru.

Some search engine optimization experts will tell you they can increase your link popularity. They use a variety of methods. They create websites where they put all of their clients website links so you will have links to your website. The search engines call these link farms and discount any value they may have had in the past.

Those methods, along with many others, are simply tricks that temporarily work.  A lot of search engine optimization companies all keep up with the latest tricks and shortcuts. They may even get you some good results in the short-term. But what happens when the search engines catch onto the trick?

I’m glad you asked. They stop letting that trick or shortcut work. They may even penalize the websites that used it. They penalize you, the customer, not the search engine optimization guru who used the trick and charged you for it.

Whenever one of these companies tells you it has “inside information”, “ex-search engine company employees”, “guaranteed search engine placement”, guaranteed top 10 placement”, or “secret methods”, a red flag should go up in your mind right away.

If you start a business offline, like a restaurant or a store, you know that besides the money you will have to put up, you will also have to work to make it a success. It is no different when you start a business online. You have to work at it, if you want to be successful.

If search engine optimization is not the most important thing you can do to become successful, what is? Again, I’m glad you asked.

Promotion. Do not depend solely on being found by the search engines. Search engines are fickle creatures and what is today’s #1 can be tomorrow’s #100 just because they decided to change the way they give relevance to websites.

There are other sources of traffic out there. Would you rather have 1000 hits from a search engine for one of your minor keywords or have 100 hits from someone who read an article you wrote and came to your website because they liked what you had to say?

If you chose the thousand hits, you don’t get it yet. Out of that 1000 hits you might convert 2 of them into sales. Out of the 100, you may get as many as 20-25 people who want to buy from you. Conversion rate is more important than how many hits you get to your website.

Write articles about your website, about your products, about relevant topics to your products or services you wish to sell. Distribute or submit those articles to article submission websites that provide free content to webmasters.

You may write one article like the one I am writing now and have 100 webmasters want to use it as content for their website. That would mean there is suddenly 100 other websites on topics related to your product that now contain a link to your website.

That increases your link popularity without the need for a company to optimize you. Just by submitting your article to several article submission websites, you increase your link popularity, but when those webmasters start to republish your articles, you will see a huge increase in your page rank and the quality of your traffic.

Some people write one article per month and others write one or more per day. It depends on you. How fast do you want your website to grow?

So that we are clear. Search engine optimization is necessary, but by no means the most important thing you can do for your website to make it successful. Promoting your website IS the most important thing you can do. Articles are just one of the methods you can use to promote your website.

Advertising, buying links on relevant websites, posting in forums and blogs with related topics, putting your link in your signature line, are some of the other ways you can promote your website.

My Checklist:

  1. Be conscious of the keywords you wish to target with each webpage you build. Write your text for the reader, then go back and add your keywords without destroying the flow of your text.
  2. Make sure the website is easy to navigate and user-friendly. Don’t assume the customer knows the web site as well as you do. Make it simple. Make it easy to find the buy button!
  3. Once the website is built, quit worrying about the newest search engine trick or optimization technique as some like to call it.
  4. Search for blogs and forums with related topics and sign up for them and participate in discussions with your link in your signature line.
  5. Write articles about related topics and submit them on trusted blogs and authority sites.

This article in no way claims to have listed all the ways you can use to promote your website. What I have done here is try to explain to what is or is not important to creating and maintaining a successful website. I hope this helps you.

Connect with Jack Weinzierl on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/jackweinzierl.

Social media etiquette

Posted on 06 April 2012 by

Social media sites understand they are going to be used as a marketing tool. They are designed to accommodate marketing. Some users may bemoan the notion that a social media site has to be subjected to blatant marketing tactics and I do admit they can be annoying, yet it is this format that the world’s twenty-somethings are gravitating to.

This is a marketplace of ideas, random thoughts and fun links in an environment that is in so many ways ‘connected’ in a style that is often defined as web 2.0 – the next generation of media sites.

If you spend any amount of time on a site like FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg or other similar social media sites you begin to see how creative businesses have found a way to carve out a piece of the marketing pie. There are millions of ideas, products and services to promote and you can find them all on social media networks.

In some ways, what has just been described may be thought of as more like a community garage sale or flea market, but site members can be choosey about why and who they allow to communicate with them.

What this means is that in most cases site members can block individuals from commenting on their website. Some sites even allow you to ban certain individuals from visiting your site while others allow you to develop your presence as a private ‘by-invitation-only’ page.

If someone visits your site and is very blatant about marketing their site without any real indication they are interested in your business or product, it may make sense to remove them from a list of friends. If they return with more blatant advertising they can be banned from visiting the page in the future.

There are some individuals who have no problem allowing others to post blatant marketing material on their pages, while others view the practice as a relative of spamming.

In essence you can configure most social media sites to react to others the way you want them to. In many cases you can remove friends at will and you can invite friends at will.

You should not be surprised when members who are blatantly marketing their products ask you to add them to your list of contacts. Remember, you do not have to accept their request.

If you are a business owner looking to use social media to connect with an organic audience, just remember you are being watched so make sure you contribute to the pages you visit and allow others to see you as a friend – not the cyber equivalent of a telemarketer.

Why is search engine marketing so effective?

Posted on 04 April 2012 by

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a pooling of various online marketing strategies to increase traffic flow to a website, a blanket term which includes SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SMO (Social Media Optimization), pay-per-click advertising, and paid inclusion into search engines.

But why is SEM so effective? A good SEM campaign can vastly increase your website’s traffic and boost sales, more so than any other marketing campaign. So why does it work so well?

The answer is variety. SEM draws on many different strategies, rather than relying on just one. SMO “gets the word out” to entire communities of people who stand to be interested in your products and services. Pay-per-click advertising works much like standard marketing, placing your advertisements on the monitors of hundreds if not thousands of people across the internet. Paid inclusion makes sure that search engines get around to evaluating and listing your website in a timely fashion. And SEO ensures that your website’s META tags, keyword content, and backlink promotions all work together to ensure that your website places as high as possible on said search engines.

In essence, where your traditional marketing campaign might target only one or two areas, good SEM covers the full spectrum of marketing possibilities.

Be sure before paying for SEM that you know what the company is offering, however. A good SEM service will be upfront about which of these services it offers, and how much it charges for them. Some SEM services focus on only one or two aspects of online marketing, such as search engine inclusion and SEO, for example. Others offer certain services for low prices, but charge significantly more to include the full spectrum of SEM. And there is nothing wrong with paying an SEM service to do strictly SEO or strictly search engine inclusion.

SEM is effective because it works with the natural patterns of traffic on the internet. It capitalizes on advertisements, on search engines, even on word of mouth through social media. A good SEM company knows how to use each outlet of marketing to its best advantage, and your business booms as a result of it. That’s the true secret of SEM; knowing how to work with the internet, instead of working against it.

Learn more about search engine marketing and connect with Jack Weinzierl at http://www.lookuppage.com/users/jackweinzierl.

A guide to organic SEO and its benefits

Posted on 03 April 2012 by

What Is Organic SEO?

Put in the simplest manner possible, organic SEO is search engine optimization done manually using no black hat methods, no underhanded methods and no automated scripting. It is the purest form of optimizing your website for the benefit of search engines, while still retaining interest for your site visitors, and done well it is exactly the thing that search engines are looking for in a website. Once they find it they will reward your site with better rankings and improved positions within the search engine results pages.

Understanding The Search Engines

Understanding Search Engines and their general concept is vital to the use of effective SEO methods. Search engines enable their visitors to enter a specific word or term, known as keywords. Once submitted, all pages containing those keywords that can be found in the search engine’s directory are listed on the search engine result pages. Each page is “ranked” according to relevancy, popularity and a few other factors. Therefore, in theory, the more relevant a page is to a given keyword the more likely it will appear at the top of the listings.

Introducing The Search Engine Spiders

Another important factor to remember about search engines is that they don’t use real people to crawl the billions of websites and judge how relevant they are. Instead they use automated software called a “spider” or a “bot” that does this work much quicker. The calculations that the search engine uses to determine the ranking of a website are called algorithms and in the case of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN these algorithms are changed on a regular basis. The changes and the specifics of the algorithms are not released to the public in order to prevent black hat SEOs from manipulating their sites to reach the top of the pile despite containing to information relevant to the search query or keyword.

Optimizing For Search Engines – Optimizing For Visitors

Of course to some extent, all of us reading this article are probably guilty of altering our web pages to meet the whims of search engines but it must be done in a positive and organic way. We understand that optimizing a page purely for the benefit of search engines spiders may massively detract from the actual value of the site to your visitors. Search engines understand this too, hence the evolution of the algorithms. With each new algorithm created and usually patented by search engines like Google, we are getting closer to a structure whereby sites are genuinely judged on their value to visitors. The algorithms and the spiders are basically becoming more human like.

Basic Components Of SEO

The actual methods of optimizing your website are saved for another article, but the basic components of an SEO campaign are broken down into on page and off page optimization techniques. On page SEO includes factors like keyword inclusion, content optimization, page structure etc… whereas the main contributing factor of off page optimization is inbound links. There are many different factors to each of these areas and different SEOs will give you varying information on which factors are the most relevant to gain higher rankings. These extensive differences in opinion occur because nobody is certain of the algorithm criteria.

The Benefits Of SEO

SEO is probably the most beneficial way to conduct Internet promotion. It is highly cost effective, can yield long term results and the leads it generates are opt in and targeted. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider trying out alternative methods of advertising your site. For many, banner advertisements, press releases (can actually be used as part of an SEO campaign as well), PPC campaigns and sponsored listings prove to highly beneficial and including these will help your site’s popularity.

The cost effectiveness is easily determined when you look at the potential of an SEO campaign compared to the method that many consider to be the next best thing – PPC. A PPC campaign will usually cost you anywhere upward of $1-10.00 per visitor generated…depending on your niche and the competition you are up against.

Targeted Leads

Targeted leads are the best type of leads you can generate. It means that the visitors to your site are already predisposed to the basic topic of your site and are interested in what you have to say. It means that they will be more likely to purchase goods or services from your site, click on affiliate links or click Google ads to earn you revenue. Because SEO leads are physically searching for the topic that your site relates to you are guaranteed that they are interested in whatever you’re offering. First of all they search using keywords relevant to your site. They then read the description and name of your site and this further compounds their interest in the page in question and click on the link. Already they have become highly susceptible to the message of your web page.

So Remember…

SEO is a webmaster’s greatest tool but treated badly, it can quickly blow up in your face. By ensuring you stick to the very letter of the law and do not use any underhanded methods you should soon benefit from your comprehensive SEO implementation.

Connect with Jack Weinzierl on Linkedin at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jackweinzierl.

How to make a search engine optimization company work for you

Posted on 30 March 2012 by

Search engine optimization is a marketing strategy that many websites are employing to make their sites’ ranking go up during searches. Actually, search engine optimization employs many methods to ensure that the website has constant traffic.

Search Engine Optimization for Search Engines:

Before anything else, it is better to understand how search engine optimization works. Initially, webmasters would present a URL or a web page to the search engines operating in the Internet. From then, the search engine would try to gather relevant links and information regarding the website or URL. The information and other relevant data that these crawlers would get from the website are what the search engines would use to catalog or index the site. The relevance of the site and the rate of which it is visited has an effect on its ranking during search engine results.

Initially, search engine optimization first turned out to be a highly maneuverable business where webmasters would put irrelevant meta tags and keywords on their site to rank higher and to attract traffic. These black hat methods were soon found out by search engines and nowadays meta tags have lost their relevance in search engine optimization. Many revisions were done with search engines in order to avoid webmasters’ tactics and tricks used by search engine optimization firms which have no relevant information at all for those searching for serious ideas and materials.

Some search engines have also refused to be used by SEO companies and their blatant inappropriate ways of marketing their clients. Search engines are repeatedly banning search engine optimization companies and their clients who are noted to use black hat techniques to raise their rankings. Consistent banning of sites and SEO companies who optimize these sites can ruin a site’s integrity and bring about lesser traffic since search engines are usually what most people use to scour the Internet. Not appearing in search engine results will create a vacuum for your company and you will have to create another site if you are continuously banned from search engines.

SEO companies who repeatedly go against the search engine rules will ultimately lose clients because search engines might automatically block off their clients without any reason other than that this certain SEO company has a reputation of using black hat techniques to manipulate higher rankings for their clients. Search engine optimization can be easily manipulated just by submitting content which are rich in keywords and key phrases but have less relevance. Spamdexing is also one way of immersing the Internet with irrelevant information designed to raise rankings.

These methods are frowned upon by search engines and your site may be banned for a period of time if you or your SEO company indulge in overly aggressive techniques. Other black hat ways that some search engine optimization firms use to raise a site’s ranking is to insert a hidden text in the site itself which human browsers can not see or detect but spiders or crawlers can easily find and include in their indexing. Search engine optimization does not actually have a lot of fixed rules and regulations regarding what to do and what not do when optimizing a site.

Search Engine Optimization Methods To Raise Rankings:

There are actually many methods of search engine optimization which is why there is actually no need for black hat techniques and other underhanded techniques to raise rankings. The varied ways of optimizing a site is to have relevant keyword rich content, having articles title rich in keywords, have images and pictures scaled down to a size that does not require long waiting time to load. Other methods for search engine optimization are website redeveloping, putting links and submission to search engines.

Choosing a Search Engine Optimization Company:

Many SEO companies deal with marketing a site using white hat methods, which is to say that they do things aboveboard and without offending any of the search engines. You would just have to make your choice well when you are in the market for a company to do your search engine optimization work.

One of the ways to check and see if the SEO company you wish to contract with has no underhand dealings is to get recommendations from older sites that have used the search engine optimization methods of the said company. More recent sites might not have had results yet regarding ranking and traffic so it is better to evaluate the SEO company through sites which are already more than two months old. You will also benefit by learning a little about ways of search engine optimization so you will be aware of any underhand techniques employed by the SEO company.

Learn more about search engine optimization and receive updates from Jack Weinzierl on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/jackweinzierl.

Self promotion, small business marketing… and your core values

Posted on 28 March 2012 by

The core premise of authentic self promotion is that showing up, serving, and thriving are interrelated. Promotion, or putting yourself forward, is part of showing up and is essential to having a successful business. Having a successful business is essential to being and sustaining an offer of service. In other words, you cannot serve if you do not take care of business.

Authenticity is the cornerstone of effective, sustainable self promotion because being authentic draws on a renewable resource, i.e., your core values and strengths. Put it all together, and you have authentic promotion.

Authentic self promotion is grounded in the conviction that you have something of unique value to offer the world and that you are willing to discover how to embody that offer, to show up and serve, and to thrive in the process.

Authentic self promotion reconciles values of service and integrity with the tools and practices of effective small business marketing. Authentic promotion of your small business rejects the easy dismissal of marketing and sales as shallow, manipulative, and inauthentic. Instead, authentic self promotion claims that marketing and sales are vehicles for creating enduring relationships and delivering substantial value. If you choose the path of authentic self promotion, you will learn that marketing your small business effectively will challenge you to evolve continually as a person and as a professional.

Authenticity is intimately involved with creativity, evolution, and change. It is closely allied with the notion of authorship, thus of owning and being accountable for one’s actions. Authenticity acknowledges that we are always creating or writing our life stories. Expressed in business, such authenticity will step up to the challenge of making strong, clear, valid offers to prospects who are likely to benefit from those offers.

When we do business in an authentic fashion, we understand that we will be affected and even changed by the processes of doing business. Authenticity is dynamic. When you extend yourself authentically in the world, you expect an authentic response — one that may touch you deeply and influence your future decisions. There are risks, then, in authenticity.

Egocentric business practices, on the other hand, declare, “I don’t need to answer to anyone. I have no intention of being changed or affected by you as we do business together. Either you like me or you don’t. You’ll either find me or you won’t.”

Often this egocentricity is masked by a pseudo-authenticity, one that pretends to stand for immutable values and unassailable principles but that is really a declaration of self-absorption, “My way or the highway.” A better test for authenticity is whether or not we are willing to be affected by our transactions. The authentic expression of our deepest values and most closely held principles will always open us to the risk and blessings of new possibilities.

Authentic marketing and self promotion says, “I’m here to connect with you. I expect that we will both be changed in the course of our relationship. I am willing to discover you and myself in new ways as we do business. Come on down, let’s see what we can create together.”

I propose that the very real excesses and evils of some business practices can be countered in a powerful way by independent professionals who use their businesses as a vehicle for showing up, serving, and thriving. It’s about more than making a living. Though, unless you do make a living, you will not be able to express your gifts to the fullest.

Authentic self promotion is about trying on business and marketing practices and adapting them to fit your values, your resources, and your unique gifts. It’s about having enough integrity and courage to welcome the inevitable breakdowns as occasions for learning and platforms for future success. In order to be truly authentic — in other words, to authenticate our values and our standards — we must act in the world. We must show up to serve, and we must stop pretending that commerce is something the bad guys do. In this way, we will shine a light on unfamiliar or inadequate practices for the sake of devising better practices.

Connect with Jack Weinzierl on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/jackweinzierl.

How to unleash your leadership potential

Posted on 26 March 2012 by

There is a steady flow of information in the form of books, articles, white papers and training all in the context of “what is leadership” or “how to develop a leader”.  In this post, I will avoid those two questions and write about two others that I believe might be on the minds of a lot of readers:

Why does better leadership make a difference?

How does better leadership achieve those differences?

Leadership is a highly unique form of human behavior that requires the integration of character, knowledge and experience. So what can you do if you step up and unleash your leadership potential? Change the world.

Your journey to unleashing your leadership potential begins with a great understanding of self. Discover your personality traits and how they relate to leadership. When we know ourselves, we can maximize our positive traits, and become aware of our weaker areas, which help us to achieve our leadership potential.

Once you understand and know yourself, next you must hone your communication skills. These are not limited to your public speaking skills either. This includes your writing style and your body language. Your ability to communicate effectively enhances your ability to improve interpersonal relationships. Another important skill is to learn how to learn. Examine different teaching methods and learning styles to identify how you learn. This skill will greatly enhance your ability to make decisions and give clear instructions.

An exceptional leader is one that recognizes the value of harnessing the skills and abilities of team members and leads them toward greater efficiency and effectiveness.

…and so “leader” is not a title and leadership is not something you are born into. Leadership is something you develop.

This is what Dr. Ken Blanchard, in his book “The Heart of A Leader” had to say about good leaders; “If you want to know why your people are not performing well, step up to the mirror and take a peek.”

To receive leadership resources and updates, connect with Jack Weinzierl at http://twitter.com/jackweinzierl.