The Official ActiveRain Guide

Handling Difficult Clients On The Phone

Have you ever had a phone call with someone like the gentlemant to the right?  No matter how wrong they may be, the only thing they want is for you to listen to them yell & scream and tell you how horrible you are.

While the days of text messaging & mobile phone apps seem to be at an all time high, some would argue that actual phone skills don't seem that big anymore. There are now mobile apps for just about anything you could possibly imagine. Everything from restaurant reviews, paying bills, and more can be done on the right types of phones. Even though these new apps & ideas are are streamlining the amount of time we may spend talking on a phone there are still times you will need to speak to an upset customer.

Proper phone skills are crucial to any type of business that exists. It is imperative that you handle angry clients properly when on the phone. If a person becomes displeased while on the phone with you, you just lost their business forever. Plus, they will probably then pick up the phone and call all their close friends to complain as well. You have now not only lost the business of that client, but also their entire sphere of connections.

That being said, here are 5 Tips to Handling Difficult Phone Calls with consumers.

Tip #1

When on the phone with an angry person, let them do the talking. Sometimes they just need to blow off steam and get what has been on their chest for the past week out in the open. If you begin cutting them off you will just increase their anger about the situation.

Tip #2

Don't Argue! No matter how wrong the person may be, if you begin challenging what they are saying and arguing with them on the phone, you will never make any progress at solving the problem. Instead you will just intensify the situation until they probably hang up on you never to be heard of again.

Tip #3

Show sincerity and concern. I think the age old saying "People don't care how much you know until the know how much you care" is key to problemsolving. They want you to realize that their problem is a major issue to them and that they don't just want you telling them what you are gonna do.

Tip #4

Don't Patronize! Don't behave towards someone in a way which is kind and friendly but nevertheless shows that you are being condescending. People hate that and can pick up on it almost instantly.

Tip #5

Lead them to the answer. My father tells me constantly that it is not always right to be right. When dealing with difficult people on the phone, if you can lead them to the answer and allow them to discover it on their own, it will make them feel better. You may have to eat a piece of humble pie when they tell you that they figured it out and you didn't, but at least they will end the call feeling good instead of upset and wanting to end the business relationship. Besides remember, it's not about you, it's about them.

I hope these 5 tips help increase your business. If there are other tips you use that work effectively, leave them here!

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tudor/255272612/

Since this Friday I am teaching a webinar for ActiveRain University titled Customizing Your ActiveRain Blog that it was time for me to share about the importance of building your brands across all social media platforms.  Instead of writing a 3,000 word novel to cover all of the different platforms that exist and tips to customizing each, I figured I would break this down into a series. 

The first network I want to talk about today is Customizing your Facebook Page.  But before I get into what to customize and how, I first want to share the difference between the three main categories Facebook offers. The first is a Facebook Profile.  A profile is your personal page on Facebook.  It is where you have "friends" and can connect with people on a personal level.  What many do not realize about these profiles is that Facebook frowns heavily on you doing any business on them.  In fact, section 4.2 of Facebook TOS says this: "You will not use your personal profile for commercial gain." Pretty self explanatory.

A Facebook Group is the second category of Facebook that I wanted to discuss.  These pages are limited to the number of members you can have.  Also, they normally require each person to be accepted into the group.  They also have several limitations to the customization end of things. So while these might be good idea, they have some major limitations when it comes to being effective for business.

The third Facebook category which I want to talk in detail about is Facebook Pages.  These are designed for businesses.  They allow many customizations and also unlimited number of fans.  Many times though, when I look at Facebook Pages, I see so many things that could use some improvement. 

Here are my 4 most important things to do when customizing a Facebook Page.

1.  Fill in the about me section on your main page.  Facebook pages have a small about me section on the main area of your page.  Make sure you fill this area in with a brief description of what the page is about.  The other thing that is good to do here is add a link to your website.  You can do so by just typing out the full URL to your site.

This is a quick and easy way to share a little bit of information about the purpose of your page and also your business.  Like I mentioned, keep this brief.  Don't try to get into a sales pitch here or you will lose the consumer before they even take the time to click to become a fan.

2.  Custom avatars-  Did you know that you can create your own custom avatars for your Facebook Page?  Instead of using a standard 200x200 photo, you can actually have something that is up to 540 pixels long!  One of the big advantages to the larger custom avatars is that they will stand out from your competition when someone is searching for pages to join.  If the logos for all the other pages are small and yours is over twice the size, you have a much better chance of them noticing you.  Here are a few ideas for other things to incorporate into your avatar.  You can add additional text, graphics, & colors to it.  While the links you add are not going to be able to be clicked, you can give people valuable information like a quick reference to your phone number, twitter account, etc.

Here are a few that I recently designed for clients.  You can see what I mean:

The key though to making these larger avatars is that you have to keep in mind the logo that will show up on your thumbnails on the wall.  So it is important that you use the correct spacing, sizing etc for your main logo/image. If not, you will end up with half of your head, or logo showing up on the thumbnails and that doesn't always look the greatest.  If you are graphically design challenged, I can help.

3. Integration of Blog- There are several ways to integrate your blog into your Facebook page.  While some work better than others, you have to go with the process you prefer.  I personally like mine coming in as an RSS feed through social RSS, but you can also use the notes function if you wish.  The key though is to feed in your blog information so that there is a steady stream of content other than just your regular wall posts.  One word of caution though, remember when you set up the RSS feed that it feeds everything posted to that domain.  So if you set it up & then place a blog post that is off topic or slightly offensive, it will be visible to your Facebook page as well.

4.  Custom Welcome Tab-  This is by far the most effective thing you can have on your Facebook page.  You can set this to be the tab that greets every single guest to your site.  That way they can get to know you immediately.  Our Facebook Page which was built by Mike Mueller, has a nice welcome video from myself & Jason Crouch that greets every single fan to our page.  We kept our video under a minute and just thank people for visiting & encourage them to become a fan.  In less than 10 days, it has been viewed 100 times! 

These custom tabs can also have all types of things added to them.  Including good keyword rich content, links to pages of your website, links to other services you offer.  If you know FBML, you can really do some awesome things on a page.  But, if you are like me and are not an expert on FBML (Facebook Markup Language) then I would HIGHLY recommend you contact Mike Mueller to build your page.  He has done over 200 of them & is really up to date on all the changes in specs to the pages.  That way you do not have someone build a great custom page for you to find out the next week that Facebook is making major changes to size allotments & other specs.  If you want a page, contact him here.  Also, because he likes me so much, he told me I can offer a 10% discount if you mention my name.  So tell him Jeremy sent you!

Take these 4 simple steps, place them into action, and you can really have one really awesome custom page that is branded to your business.  This means that if they find you on a website or on Facebook, it doesn't really matter because both sites look, feel & act in very similar manners. If you don't believe me, take a look at our website & Facebook page.  You will definitely see the correlation in our branding between the two.

If you want to learn more about how to customize your Facebook Page, feel free to contact me directly or register for our workshop on 3/17/10 at 2PM EST. Mike is going to teach you more on how to build awesome custom Facebook pages like ours!

Branding your image is one of the most important aspects of any business.  You need to have an image that depicts you and the business you are involved in.  Many sites require complex steps to customize a theme and make it the way you wish.  ActiveRain offers you a really great option on how to customize your blog to represent your image better.  Unfortunately, very few really master how to accomplish this.

Have you ever seen a blog on ActiveRain that looks like this?

I know I surely have.  While this type of theme might be acceptable on this network, it really doesn't convey a professional branding that you would wish to associate with your business.  On Friday March 19th at 11 AM EST (8 AM PST) I will be teaching at ActiveRain University on how to customize your your blog on ActiveRain.  This 1 hour webinar will cover the following:

• Creating a Custom Header that has Pizazz.
• Uploading a Header to your ActiveRain Blog & Outside Blog.
• Customizing your ActiveRain Background to compliment your header.

Now, in case you were wondering why ActiveRain chose me to teach this class, let me show you a few examples of headers I have created in the past for clients:

And here are a few more examples of member blogs that I have customized:

These are just a few customizations on ActiveRain that I have done for clients in the past.  In this webinar, I will show you step by step how to take your blog customizations to the next level.

To register for this class, visit: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/752157441.

Each time I teach a webinar class, one of the things we spend a good amount of time covering is how to claim the domain name for your outside blog.  When you become a Rainmaker, a custom domain URL is part of your benefit.  You do not need to go to godaddy.com and purchase a domain name. So, I decided that I would take a  moment tonight and do a brief tutorial on how to claim your domain for your Outside Blog through ActiveRain.

Also, if you were wondering if an outside blog would be a benefit for you, you may want to check out a few great features of the outside blog.

First, a few of the awesome themes available:

• Business Casual Theme
• Easy Going Theme
• Blue Days
• Real Estate Red
• A Day at the Beach
• Granite

And here are a few of the awesome widgets available:

• Local Posts Widget
• Google Search Widget
• Feedburner Email Subscribe Widget

So, if you have not yet become a Rainmaker and started your Outside Blog, try it today!  Also, if you would like to learn more on how to optimize ActiveRain & your Outside Blog, see if my Blogging Basics 101 class is right for you!

As I have shared over the past few weeks, I have been extremely busy with Webinars for our new members teaching them how to write posts effectively for search engines & also to be appealing to consumers.  In the classes I share how to write posts to rank well in the search engines as well as making your posts appealing to a consumer who comes to read what you have written. 

During the webinars, one of the questions that normally comes up is Why do I need to be a Rainmaker?  While there are thousands of reasons why everyone should be a rainmaker, I decided to just share 6 of the most important ones.

• Google Dominance-  This is a no-brainer.  If you write it properly, it will rank well in Google.  It doesn't take months and years to start ranking well in Google.  If you don't believe me, read about one of the members who became a Rainmaker in less than 10 hours of sending two posts public was #1 & #2 on Google!  If you take the training that ActiveRain offers our Rainmakers and put it to use for you, the same results can be yours. 

• Blog views get a steroid injection.  If you are trying to figure out how to get more traffic to your blog, then a Rainmaker is a great option.  Did you know that our Rainmakers Average 500 views per post?  Here are some really interesting stats from a member who recently became a rainmaker.

                   Before                                                                         After

These stats were taken immediately after becoming a Rainmaker and you can see the results.  In an instant their blog traffic increased 4 times what it was on posts before being a Rainmaker.  This happens instantly because when you become a Rainmaker you get to have your posts show up in the search engines and also be read by consumers. 

• Increase of Income- This is probably my favorite reason for becoming a Rainmaker.  Once you become a rainmaker, you can really increase your revenue.  I don't need to prove that a Rainmaker Membership can increase your income, many of our members already have:

Over the past week or two, I had two referrals from my friends here at ActiveRain, AND one of the biggest closings we've had in months.  The closing came from a consumer who found my blog months ago and became a "fan". -Jason Crouch

While almost 60% of the members who joined Active Rain at the same time I did, have not used  this amazing marketing tool, I have garnered close to sixty (YES, sixty!!!) new clients through my blogging on AR.  I literally credit ActiveRain with saving my business during these trying times. -Mirela Monte

• Posts show up on Localism.  "The World's Most Complete Neighborpedia"  When you are writing content about your local area this gives you a great secondary avenue to share your information & increase your Internet exposure by double instantly.
  

• ActiveBlogs- Think of the endless marketing opportunities by having your blog show up on it's own domain name.  For example, which would you prefer seeing on a business card? http://activerain.com/blogs/jeremy or http://activejeremy.com?  Just how Localism gives you another avenue to share your content exponentially, your ActiveBlog does the same thing by offering a third place to syndicate your content to.
  

• Top Notch Training- The training & knowledge you can obtain on ActiveRain is alone enough reason to become a Rainmaker.  Between the webinars offered by ActiveRain and also the great information shared by members you can learn enough to revolutionize your business and take it to the next level.

So if you are not yet a Rainmaker, what have you been waiting for?  Get started today for only $5.00 for the first month. Or, if you would some training on how a rainmaker can increase your business, feel free to sign up for my Blogging Basics 101 Webinar where I will teach you personally how to get the most out of your membership. 

What are you waiting for?  Let's take your blogging career to the next level today!

Last week I wrote about the exciting new one on one training program that ActiveRain is offering for those who want to become a Rainmaker.  Well the response has been so great that I have been very busy with those sessions.  But, many have asked if I can do this as a live webinar so they can see things live as I point them out.

With that being said, I am proud to announce that I will now be offering Live Webinars each week for those that are new to blogging and have not yet become a Rainmaker.  These webinars will be on Monday & Wednesday every week. In the beginning there will be 3 sessions per week. Monday will host 2 webinars, one at 1PM EST and another at 6PM EST.  Wednesday's session will be at 1PM EST.  Each webinar is limited to only 25 seats, so the make sure you register immediately.  The sessions will last aprroximately 60-90 minutes in length.  Unfortunately, if you are already a Rainmaker, this class isn't for you.  But, there is a great training session that Steven is offering for those that are currently a Rainmaker.  Check out his full schedule here.

What will be covered in the Webinar?

How to Optimize Your ActiveRain Profile.
How to Insert Photos into your Blog
How to Insert Hyperlinks.
Setting up Your Outside Blog.
How to write effective blog posts for consumers & search engines.
How to use your blog to connect with your community.
Topics to write about on your blog.
Question & Answer

How Much?!? How Much?!?

This is the greatest part, these webinars are only going to be $5.00 per person! But wait, theres more!  The $5.00 that you spend to join these webinars is not going to go to waste.  Not only will you receive a top notch training session on how to write blogs effectively to show up in the top of search engines which is worth much more than $5.00 in itself, you will also be given one full month to try out our Rainmaker Membership.  That includes your posts being indexed by search engines, the ability to send those posts to Localism and also posted to your personal Outside Blog.  As a final bonus, you will receive 1,000 bonus points for attending the webinar.

Why do I want to be a Rainmaker?

There are plenty of reasons why everyone should want to be a Rainmaker.  I am going to share just a few.  First, becoming a Rainmaker means that your posts will have the ability to harness the power of our 160,000+ members and the massive amount of search engine dominance that ActiveRain possesses.   Over 75% of ActiveRain's 2 million visitors per month come directly from the search engines.   Also, Rainmaker accounts consistently outrank members personal websites in searches.  Our Rainmakers posts average 500 views per post.  Others are receiving much more traffic (25,000 views!).

How do I sign up?

Well signing up is rather simple.  Simply fill out the form below with your contact information and I will send you an email confirming your session and also how to register.

If you were wondering why you would want to be a Rainmaker, here are 6 reasons why everyone should be a Rainmaker. Also, here are some awesome results from a member who took my webinar: Take Rainmaker Webinar today, the #1 spot on Google 10 hours Later!

One of the most common objections I receive when consulting someone on social media, is "Jeremy, I work in an area that is made up of an older generation.  They aren't into twitter and Facebook and all this Internet stuff.  So, I don't know if writing a blog would be a big benefit to me."  So, I asked a few more questions about the demographics and came to the conclusion that it appeared the average age range she was referring to was somewhere between late forties into late sixties. 

So this morning I started to do some research to see what type of age groups are making up social media and if older generations are participating or if they are non-existent.  The first place I started was here on ActiveRain.  I remembered the wonderful article by Art Kruschka titled: The View from the 84th Floor (which btw, Happy Birthday Art!) in which he wrote about celebrating his 84th birthday on Monday!  Art has been a very active member here on ActiveRain.  In fact, since starting here in March 2008 at the young age of 82, Art has published 566 blog posts!

Next, I decided I would visit both my Facebook business page & also ActiveRain's to see what the age breakdown looked like.  Here are the results:

This first graph is from my personal Facebook business page.  You will notice that only 35% of my group is under the age of 35.  While 35% of my fans are over the age of 45!  Also, I have twice as many fans over the age of 55 than I do between 18-24.  That stat really shocked me!

This graph is for fans of ActiveRain's fan page on Facebook.  The numbers here were even more astounding.  Fans under the age of 35 only make up 18% while there are just as many fans over the age of 55.  Fans over the age of 45 make up almost half of the members. 82% of the fans are over the age of 35!

After viewing these two graphs it leads me to believe that while many believe that Facebook is just for teenagers and college kids it appears that the majority of users are those over 45 years old by a long shot.  With that being said, I started to doubt the validity in the statement that the older generations are not on the Internet and definitely not involved with social media.

Are you still thinking this might be the case?  If so, let me share one more thing that should solidify my results that social media and Internet marketing isn't just for kids. 

Ivy Bean just celebrated her 104th birthday the beginning of this month and has become an instant celebrity.  Where you might ask?  Well on twitter of course!  I just followed her on twitter and became her 46,000 follower!  At first when I heard about her being on twitter, I thought it was some promotional stunt that someone was trying to just collect followers.  But when I investigated things I found out that it was legit.  Take a minute to watch this awesome video from Ivy.

So I ask if this statement is true?  Older generations are not reading blogs or using other social media platform.  I will let you be the judge of that.  My personal opinion is that it is the exact opposite, more and more are signing up for these different social media platforms every day.

It seems that everywhere you turn lately you are hearing buzz words like Social Media, Web 2.0, and the latest buzz word, "New Media."  You hear experts debate the best way to use twitter and facebook to increase your business.  Tweets from celebrities like Oprah & Shaq are posted all over the news and discussed by millions.  All of this buzz and hype have people seeking more information on how to use these two services to generate business.

But, one of the other types of social media and in my opinion the most effective avenue is being pushed to the wayside.  The amount of hype that you hear about writing blogs and using one for business seems to becoming a dying breed and lost art form.  That being said, I decided that it was time for me to do some research to see if blogs really were losing steam and becoming an ineffective means or if the "gurus" were just omitting an important component to any social media strategy.

The first thing I wanted to see is what is driving traffic to ActiveRain. Are search engines still what brings people to your site, or are they finding your sites through other social media means like Facebook & twitter. Over 75% of the traffic Came from search engines.  On the other hand, the two social media giants, Facebook and Twitter are only accountable for 1.65% of web traffic.  Seeing this, was a major shock to me.  I thought for sure that both would be in the top 10 and probably bring somewhere from 12-15% of our traffic. In retrospect, if you remember my post about the importance of labeling images, we learned at that time that 3.65% of our traffic comes from image searches.  That is more than double two social media giants!

Since it seems like social media is not great for directing traffic, I next decided I would see how a blog ranks in comparison to regular websites.  Whenever I ask someone if they use a blog on a regular basis, the top objection/reason they say is "they already have a web site that gives them an Internet presence.

I started doing some typical searches that a consumer would do to see which show up higher in the rankings.  My first keyword I did a search for was Austin Relocation Package.  The #1 result out of over 600,000 for that term was a blog by member Jason Crouch that he wrote in March 2008.  What was even more interesting was that Jason's website, only ranked #6.

Next, I decided to do a search for a community that Virginia Hepp, another member markets on both her blog and also on her website called Copper Bluffs in Mesquite Nevada. The Results were astounding!  Virginia's ActiveRain, Localism, and Outside Blog captured places 1-6 while her personal website showed up in the results at #8.  If you don't believe me, take a look at this search for Copper Bluffs Mesquite Nevada Real Estate. 

As I continued to do searches, this seemed to be the recurring theme.  Blogs consistently outranked personal websites on just about any and every search term I used.  This leads me to the conclusion that if someone is just using a website and has no active blog that they are updating on a regular basis that they are missing out a major chunk of potential business.

The third test that I used was to check activity from and whether it has decreased over the past few months as Twitter and Facebook have grown.  

A few months ago I wrote a post titled: 40,000 Visitors To Your Rainmaker Account in Just 25 Days!  This post shows how over a one month period of time I wrote 25 posts that garnered well over 40,000 visitors to my blog.  I also went on to share in that post how the best performance I ever had on my regular website was just over 3,000 hits.  My blog had more than 13 times the amount of traffic!  Since this was written several months ago, I decided that I would run the numbers again to see if my blog is decreasing in traffic since other social media sources are gaining such popularity.

For the last 25 posts, the total number of visits is 47,881 in comparison to the 40,699.  This averages out to a 6% increase or almost 300 more clicks per post.  This would lead me to believe that instead of my blog losing traction to other social media realms, it is actually gaining popularity over the past 5 months and becoming a stronger tool in social media arsenal.

So in closing I ask this question to you, Are blogs a technology of the past and something you should not focus on any more?  From the research I have done, I do not believe that statement to be true.  In fact, I believe the opposite.  Your blog is something that needs to be the main component to your social media strategy that you should focus on. What do you think?

In case you missed it earlier today, ActiveRain introduced the ability to now upload an HD profile picture in which you can crop & edit right on the network.  If you missed the announcement, take a minute to read all about it on Brad's post: It's time to update your photo- In HD.  To me, this is such a wonderful feature because for some reason, it seems the pictures of me where I am actually smiling and have my eyes open always have someone else in the photograph. (I should win an award for the worst person ever to be photographed.)  Now, I can use some of those pictures & crop out the surrounding people without needing to use photo editing software.

The video below will show you just how easy it is to use this feature.  I uploaded a new photo of myself, edited & saved it in less than 2 minutes.  Remember though, when choosing your new profile photo, make sure it is at least 600 x 600 pixels wide or you will receive an error message.  As always, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me for help!

I get asked often how I created my custom header for both my ActiveRain Blog and also my Outside Blog.  The process of creating one is actually pretty simple to do.  Instead of doing a tutorial with screen shots, I thought it might be easier to see how I created my header & uploaded it in a video format.  So, I made a generic header for my blogs today & taped it as I made them.

The entire process from beginning to end only took me about 5 minutes.  I actually spent more time locating the photograph I wanted to use & enhancing that.  So, if you are unsure about how to design your own header, watch these two videos below and you will be on your way to creating a great looking new header for your blog in no time!

This first video walks you through the process of actually designing the header.  It shows you how to re-size, crop, and also add text to your photograph.  I used a free online photo editing software called picnik.com to create mine.  If you have photo editing software that you are familiar with, you can use that & have the same results by following the steps.

Now that we have created an awesome looking header, it is now time to insert it onto both our ActiveRain profile & also our Outside Blog.  This video will walk you through uploading the picture to both places.

As always, if you run into any problems, do not hesitate to contact me.  Now go off & add Jazz Up Your ActiveRain & Outside Blog with a Custom Header!