“Manipulation should be assessed by an outcome. Not on the perception of the word.” -Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert (click to Tweet)Click here to get the book!
“Why Using Manipulation Right Will Make You A Better Negotiator”
People don’t realize they’re always negotiating.
Suppose I told you that you have just been the victim of manipulation. How do you feel? Let us further suppose someone whispered those words in your ear while you were negotiating. Might you become more incensed?
Here is the point. At different times during our daily activities, we are more or less open to someone manipulating us. At first, you may find that repulsive. But in some situations, we want others to manage or enhance our emotional thought process, which stems from being manipulated. And it is during those times as a negotiator that you can use manipulation to advantage your position.
“The perception of strength resides in the perception of a strong mind.” -Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert (click to Tweet)Click here to get the book!
“How To Possess A Strong Mind When Negotiating”
People do not realize they are always negotiating.
I cannot recall the last time I was negotiating with someone that caved to our every request. Yep. That negotiator made one concession after another. I wanted to continue the negotiation to see how much we could get from him. Yeah, he projected a weak position from the moment the negotiation began. He lacked a strong mind, along with his soft negotiation skills.
Those were the comments of two members from the same negotiation team. They recalled the occurrences of a person with whom they had been negotiating
and mocking him for not being of strong mind. Are you aware of the last time someone ridiculed you for not possessing good negotiating skills? Did they think you were not strong-minded when it came to your will and negotiation skills? A negotiator’s weak mind is his foe and his opponent’s ally when negotiating.
The following is how you can project a more robust persona, along with a strong mind in your negotiations. Having this skill will increase your negotiation outcomes for the rest of your life.
There are so many ways to attract more website traffic, but when it comes to learning how to manage traffic to your blog, the sky is the limit. Here are some of the most promising methods we have been experimenting with for years to increase traffic to your # site.
In this article, we will look at the 10 best ways to increase organic traffic to your small business website and whether or not it actually works.
If you have your own tips for increasing traffic to your websites, I would love to hear about them!
1. Use AnswerThePublic.com
Go to answerthepublic.com and discover what people are already searching for on your keyword topic.
People are already searching questions around your content topic in search engines. Just enter your subject matter and Answer The Public will kick you back a report of the most commonly researched questions.
Just Enter Your Content Keywords
The Power of Google Analytics Delivered to You
Answer The Public scraps Googles algorithm to itemize the most frequently searched questions around your keyword. Find the top questions and simply create content that answers the questions.
Eventually if you do this long enough, Google will start to organically connect your content to people already searching for your answers.
Create Content People Are Actually Looking For!
Seriously, you can get a years worth of content ideas that people are already searching. All you have to go is go to the site, enter your keywords and get instant feedback at your little fingertips.
And it’s a completely free!
It’s Important to Know What People Are Already Searching For
For Google to Connect Your Content to the User
2. Gotta Build Those Links
Link building plays an important role in bringing more traffic to your website and improving the ranking of your website.
Links to pages that lead to other pages on the site increase traffic and increase your SEO, and potentially also increase valuable referral traffic.
Flat out, internal links are key to getting more Google traffic from your websites.
WARNING: Nerd Alert
Search engines use domain names – linked hrefs as ranking signals, and if you include a href that leads to a domain on a website in a separate domain, it has the potential to increase traffic to that website.
Basically, when Google sees that you are doing out of your way to provide helpful links to data sources, you perform better with their algorithm.
These internal links can also play an important role in directing traffic to your website and increasing valuable recommendations and traffic that you can potentially increase as a source.
In short, by building more links into your site and content, you increase your SEO effectiveness, increase your clicks, and possibly even increase referral traffic from other websites.
Using the tactics listed above to direct traffic to your website will help you get more leads, customers and revenue for your brand.
You will attract the right kind of traffic, both in quality and quantity, and you will bring traffic to the site and your visitors will keep coming back to see more.
3. Promote On Social!
Don’t skip over this one cuz you’ve heard it a thousand times and stop outsourcing it.
Social media is not just a great place to promote your content, it is the place to promote your content.
Add social sharing buttons to each blog post to direct traffic to your site via social media.
Advertise Your Content on Your Accounts
Use PPC and social media advertising to bring more traffic to your site and increase your visibility in search engines like Google.
Facebook is probably the easiest place to start.
For example, you can set an ad budget for as low as $10 per day and simply choose one interest your audience likes and Facebook’s algorithm will get your content in front of who will like it.
4. Host a Webinar
Combined with an effective social promotion campaign, webinars are a great way to increase traffic to your website.
Normally a live webinar provides very valuable content for free and is one of the best ways to increase traffic to a website because it is free.
In combination with your PPC and social marketing campaigns, your webinars can be a great way for you to increase traffic and increase it to the website, especially in the early stages of development.
We host webinars and digital event (16 per month!) and is one of the largest sources of traffic for our company site.
5. List Your Business on Online Directories
Another way to increase traffic to your website is to be listed on online directories and rating sites.
One of the free and easy ways to increase traffic to your websites is to be listed in a free online directory that features local business. But while that may sound complicated and time consuming, it’s not.
If you say the word “attitude” to people in the training community, most of us will think about presenters who burst into a room and knock trainees over with high bursts of energy. That’s not a bad image. Energy is absolutely part of attitude. Yet attitude is a lot more too. It is a force that amplifies training, improves performance, and leads to greater success.
Some very high-energy people have great attitudes. But attitude has been the motive force behind many kinds of people. Rosa Parks was a quiet woman, but she had the attitude to take on bigotry. Winston Churchill was not a showman who sought the spotlight but he rose to the challenge and his “never, never, never give up” attitude led his country to victory in World War II. Stephen Hawking, with his physical limitations, is not equipped to bowl people over with high energy, but his great attitude has enabled him to lead a very full life and expand the horizons of physics and science.
People of all shapes and sizes have put the power of attitude behind their success. And you and I can too, no matter your field of endeavor.
What Is Attitude?
Here’s an analogy that helps explain what attitude is.
Attitude is like STP, the popular oil additive. People who love STP say that when they add it to the oil in their cars, their engines run more smoothly, produce more horsepower, and deliver better gas mileage. Attitude is like that. You pour it into whatever you do, and performance improves.
Some other analogies come to mind too. One is that attitude is like a guitar amplifier. You can make very beautiful music on an unamplified acoustic guitar. But when you plug that guitar into an amplifier, your music fills large spaces and reaches more people without any more effort on your part.
Attitude is like an electric light bulb too. As soon as Edison began to sell electric light bulbs, people were able to read and learn during the evening hours, work longer days, and achieve logarithmically bigger things in their lives. Attitude is like that. It lights up the world and empowers people to achieve more than they ever thought possible.
How Can You Put the Power of Attitude to Work?
I am still working this out – it is a very big issue. But here are some observations from my own life in business that I know to be right:
A great attitudestarts with great listening, because attitude flows from other people to you – and not the other way around. When you become immersed in other people’s ideas, needs, concerns and inspirations, your attitude soars, and people sense that.
Being open to new ideas is the cornerstone of a great attitude. I have noticed confusion in this area, because some people seem to think that attitude means having emphatic opinions and trying to convince other people that they are right. A great attitude, in contrast, means trying to discover where other people are right and honoring them for that.
People who inspire you can help you build a powerfully positive attitude. If you apply life lessons from people who had great attitudes, you will take on some aspects of their greatness. When you study exceptional people, they will always be at your side in a sense. They might be your parents or other family members, business leaders you admire, historical figures, your minister or imam or rabbi – or anyone else whose life inspires you.
A great attitude is something that gets things done in the real world, not just in theory. If you go into a room and charm people and then nothing changes after you are done talking, you are not really tapping the power of attitude. Attitude does not stop as soon as the words are said. If you want to wield its great power, follow through and follow up and bring change to other people’s lives and to the world.
About Evan Hackel
Evan Hackel is a 35-year franchising veteran as both a franchisor and franchisee. He is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Principal and Founder of Ingage Consulting in Woburn, Massachusetts. Evan is the host of Training Unleashed and author of Ingaging Leadership. Evan speaks on Seeking Excellence, Better Together, Ingaging Leadership and Attitude is Everything. Evan is an active member of the C-Suite Advisors Network. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit www.evanspeaksfranchising.com. Follow @ehackel.
“The Ramsey Show” is a podcast with host… Dave Ramsey, who invites his audience on a mission to achieve financial freedom and to become debt free.
A mission they have been achieving together in a really significant way.
The show’s audience has paid off over $500 million dollars in debt since the podcast began just 15 years ago!
Their Podcast Was a Major Key to Their Success
“We’re teachers at the core,” said Brian Mayfield, executive vice president of Ramsey Network. “And podcasts are an extremely useful medium, giving us another megaphone to reach people. We’ve never seen anything grow the way the podcast world has grown, so we see tremendous opportunity there to continue to increase our audience.”
The caller-driven show, now in its 29th year, shares practical answers for life’s tough questions from money expert Dave Ramsey and best-selling authors Rachel Cruze, Dr. John Delony, Christy Wright, Ken Coleman, and Anthony ONeal.
“The Ramsey Show” is the third largest nationally syndicated talk radio show in the nation, airing on more than 640 stations across the country. The podcast is consistently one of the most downloaded shows across all major platforms.
Ramsey Network podcasts help people handle their money, navigate relationships, guide their careers, become better leaders, and grow their businesses.
How David Ramsey Built a Mass Movement With a Show
Ramsey and his team invite people to take a leap of faith and join them on a journey.
They believe in a world where everyone should live debt free and without fear of their financial situation.
Who wouldn’t want that?
To date, over 5 million people have taken or attended their financial peace university course to learn practical financial wisdom.
The journey is much more powerful than if Dave’s message just said, “Buy my course on budgeting.” The podcast invited people to join something bigger.
Ramsey teaches people to live like no one else, get out of debt, and make money. Because he did it. Reminding everyone that nobody wins without paying a price.
The Importance of Telling Your Story
From a very early age, Ramsey understood the value in a day’s work. As a teenager, he started several different business ventures to earn extra pocket money.
His work ethic helped him become a millionaire by the age of 26.
He started flipping houses, and that’s where things took a turn for the worse when his local bank was bought out and the new bank canceled his loan and gave him 60 days to pay back a $2 million dollar line of credit his previous banker had approved in good faith.
At 26 with little assets, he didn’t have $2 million in liquid cash and was forced into bankruptcy to avoid a potential jail time.
Dave was crushed. But developed a new mission in life. To get as many people out of debt as possible to avoid a similar fate.
Turning Lemon into Lemonade
Since then, he’s created a business empire that revolves around using his previous money mistakes to teach smart money management practices.
Today, millions of Americans have turned to the teachings of Dave Ramsey to guide them along the path to financial security and wealth.
He now has an estimate worth of $55 million, making him living proof than anyone can turn a bad financial situation around.
Conclusion
The Ramsey show has become one of the top 4 downloaded podcasts of all time by building up a community of people sharing a journey to overcome and achieve financial independence.
The podcast medium has proven again the potential for creating movements of positive change.
About Ramsey Solutions
Ramsey Solutions is committed to empowering people in the areas of money, business, leadership and personal development using Biblically based, commonsense principles and education.
Every day, Ramsey Solutions reaches millions with nationally syndicated radio shows and columns, #1 national best-selling books, products and courses and industry-renowned podcasts and video channels. Ramsey Solutions’ world-class speakers and authors give inspiration, practical advice and hope to audiences across the country.
Recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of best places to work in the country, Ramsey Solutions and its team of more than 950 are dedicated to doing work that matters. For more information, visit ramseysolutions.com.
What do you think is the most requested item is at homeless shelters?
Shoes? No.
Pants? No.
Underwear? Close. It’s the second most requested.
Give up?
It’s socks.
That surprised me.
It also surprised David Heath so much, he built a business around it.
You might not recognize David’s name, but I’m sure you’ve heard of the company he co-founded, Bombas. You can’t listen to a podcast or go anywhere on the internet without seeing their ads and products featured.
David is quite the entrepreneur, with two successful exits prior to launching his current company. In fact, he was working another job when he stumbled upon the idea for Bombas on social media.
“I was scrolling Facebook one day while I was at work and I came across this post on my feed that said socks are the most requested clothing items at homeless shelters,” David said. “I thought ‘huh, I didn’t know that.’ I would have thought it was coats or jeans or sneakers.”
“Here’s an item of clothing I never spend more than a few seconds a day thinking about and it’s perceived as a luxury item for over 600,000 people living right here in the U.S. I just couldn’t shake it.”
He is not far off with the numbers. According to the 2020 Annual Homeless Assessment reportto Congress, there are 580,466 people that have experienced homelessness in the U.S. on a single night in 2020.
This is when David decided Bombas would be a part of the one-for-one movement— a business model where pro-profit companies have built in philanthropy. For Bombas, it was to give away a pair of socks for every pair sold.
To date, Bombas has donated over 50 million pairs of socks through more than 3,500 giving partners scattered across all 50 states.
All this business and community success comes from a product most of us don’t normally think twice about. Even David admits, he didn’t think much about the undergarments industry until starting Bombas, but one thing he did know was the existing brands weren’t exciting.
“We see ourselves as being the Starbucks of the basics, inner wear category,” David says. “As Starbucks is to Maxwell House, we are to Hanes. Yes, it costs two to three times more per product, but the product and experience are so much better than what you’d expect from one of those other brands.”
This even led to a very successful and clever marketing campaign for the “greatest sock never sold” touting the Bombas donation sock.
“Why would you go out with a marketing campaign, spend money talking about a sock you don’t sell?” David asked.
While that question seems obvious to anyone in business, David says the groundwork leading up to the campaign started with a promise that, let’s just say was about to be written in permanent ink.
“Before we even launched the company, I remember sitting across the table from Randy (Goldberg), who’s one of our co-founders and I said ‘you know what? If we ever donate a million pairs of socks, I will tattoo the Bombas logo on me,” David said. “I kind of said it as a lark. A million pairs? We hadn’t sold one! I thought people would forget about it. We did it in two years.”
A good business never misses an opportunity for great promotion. In 2016 to capitalize on million pair goal, Bombas created a viral video campaign centered around David’s tattoo – which kicked off a personal trend for David.
“I didn’t have any tattoos and here I am seven years later, I got the bug and I’ve got 10 or 11. It is a slippery slope once you get one,” he said.
Trips to the tattoo parlor aside, that campaign lead the company decided to celebrate other million sock milestones.
“We did five million pairs. When we got to ten million, we decided that we can’t keep telling the same story,” David said. “We decided ‘Okay, what if we talk about our donation sock’?”
When Bombas started, it was donating the same socks you or I would buy. However, they kept hearing from the organizations they worked with that homeless people had different sock needs. The team at Bombas went to the drawing board and re-engineered their signature socks. They came up with a sock in darker colors to cover up wear, designed them with thicker seams so they last longer and added a special anti-microbial coating.
Bombas was following a tried-and-true rule of business: responding to customer needs — even if we’re not talking about customers in the traditional sense.
David says Bombas isn’t stopping at just socks. They expanded its product lines to offering underwear and t-shirts, keeping with the one-for-one philosophy. Soon, Bombas is planning to commission an independent study to see how many homeless shelters there are in the United States and find out which items are in demand.
“We don’t really have the sense (of what’s needed) at what volume. Is it 50 million? 100 million? 500 million?” David said. “We want something where we can measure our impact and say we’re delivering 50% or 10% (of what’s needed). We want to know where we stand in that paradigm. So, as we grow our business, we will know what’s the 4th most, the 5th most, 7th most, 12th most (in demand item) and start to build a strategy around our giving.”
Bombas is a company with the right strategy. A great mix of capitalism and compassion that corporate America could use more of in my opinion. They’ve made strides in that direction, but those who can, should.
David and I talked about a lot more than just Bombas’ mission during our discussion. We cover a lot about the business and what’s next.
Hello, everyone! I am Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. In this episode of the Keep Leading!® podcast (#107), I interview Dr. Jen Goldman-Wetzler. She is an organizational psychologist and the founder & CEO of Alignment Strategies Group. We discuss “Handling Conflict as a Leader.” Jen explains how to deal with conflict and achieving conflict resolution. Here’s some of the information you’ll learn in this podcast.
What is Conflict?
Conflict is part of our human experience. For some, it’s part of daily life. We may notice conflict emerging when we interact with someone, and it does not feel right. We may find ourselves intentionally avoiding someone, or we may not treat someone the way we should.
For a leader, an ineffective resolution of conflict can derail success at work and home. However, there are times when conflict can be a healthy element of life. In business, for example, it can lead to creativity and innovation— particularly when you have teams with diverse perspectives.
Situations When Conflict is Destructive for a Leader
As a leader, you must identify when a conflict is healthy and is helping you be more innovative and when it is not and therefore detrimental.
Destructive Conflict Situations
When you are going around and around in circles and not getting the required answers
When you are not coming up with the solutions that you thought you were going to.
When you feel like banging your head up against the wall while trying to get your team to do something different, but they are resisting and not doing it.
The ‘under the surface’ kind of conflict that bubbles up now and again and then dies down only to explode later, which you do not want to see or do anything about it.
People often get stuck on a conflict loop going around and around without any outcome due to certain conflict habits.
The Four Conflict Habits
We avoid conflicts because we don’t know what to do about them. So we either blame other people or blame and shame ourselves.
We shut down in the face of recurring conflict.
We relentlessly seek collaboration with other people and yet fail to get anywhere.
We waste time, energy, money, and resources- trying to achieve a ‘win-win’ solution with someone who does not cooperate with us.
Each of these four habits can be useful and can lead to healthy conflict outcomes unless a leader uses it habitually.
Handling Conflict
As a leader, dealing with destructive conflict situations or conflicting habits is about freeing yourself from them. If even one person makes a change, the entire relationship can get better in conflict situations.
Steps for Handling Conflicts as A Leader
Step 1 Stop, pause, and notice what is going on.
Step 2 Identify the conflict habit.
Step 3 Break the habitual response pattern.
If a person shuts down during conflict, you need to cool off over a weekend or let it go for a few days. It can jolt the other person out of their habitual way.
If a person has a conflict-avoiding habit, have a conversation with them. Share the truth with love, care, and respect.
Step 4 Be more direct in letting others know what you need.
Step 5 Empower yourself by learning negotiation skills to resolve conflicts with a win-win outcome.
“What Hidden Value Is There In Being A Better Negotiator”
People do not realize they are always negotiating.
My negotiation skills are not bad. I know I could become a better negotiator. But I do not see the hidden value in being a better negotiator. Is there one?
That was part of a conversation one friend had with another. The friend had asked about the importance of enhancing his negotiation skills and whether there were benefits to becoming a better negotiator.
Do you know the value of becoming a better negotiator? Do you know what you need to do to become one? Continue, and you will receive information that will help you negotiate better in every aspect of your life. And, you will also uncover information about why you need to become a better negotiator. You will also discover how to use your enhanced skills to enrich all aspects of your life.
How many times have you set a goal but never got around to doing anything to achieve it? Maybe you started making progress and then something got in the way.
We are not accountable to ourselves like we are to others. In fact, a study found that only 4% percent of people who were considered “nonresolvers” were successful in their goals.
As an executive mentor and trainer, I have seen firsthand that resistance can be the enemy to achieving our goals. Even though we really want to accomplish these things in life, resistance pulls us back to the status quo. Everyone wants to be healthy, eat right, go to the gym and achieve that killer body. We want others to see us as confident, credible, and trustworthy. However, we fall short of taking the necessary actions to get there.
We have a better chance of achieving our goals if we have accountability partners. We value the time, energy, and attention they commit to helping us, more so than we feel that obligation to ourselves. Because we feel a sense of responsibility and commitment to them, they are more likely to be able to help us reach those goals. When left on our own, excuses overpower our willpower. We fall victim to our resistance, avoiding the hard work needed to meet our goals. When another person is involved, we avoid making excuses because we don’t want to disappoint them or disrespect their commitment to us.
If you’ve hired a personal trainer or have a committed workout buddy, it’s hard to flake out. You don’t want to disappoint those who are trying to help you. In fact, in researching accountability, the American Society of Training and Development (ASTD) discovered that people have a 65% chance of reaching a goal if they have an accountability partner.
We all fight resistance, me included. Full disclosure: I despise writing. I’d rather do almost anything than be alone, writing. I schedule it on my calendar and share it with someone on my team to hold me accountable and follow through. That’s when I know follow-through is a must. I go to a coffee shop where others are working, which compels me to write.
Trust me, I know that you are stronger than your resistance. You deserve to be your best every day, to have influence, confidence, and credibility, but you need to own it and do the work.
This week, every time you start fighting with your resistance, take on these three action steps immediately:
1. Find The Right Accountability Partner
Identify someone you trust, whose feedback will be honest and thorough. Ideal accountability partners are those you respect and whom you don’t want to disappoint. This person can be trying to accomplish the same goal or just be a support resource, making sure you don’t skip out on the hard work, succumbing to the resistance. Entrepreneurs can find accountability partners at networking events where other like-minded business owners gather to learn from each other. This is a great way to get to know others with the same types of goals and needs.
2. Schedule A Standing Appointment
Schedule a reoccurring appointment, once a week, to meet with your accountability partner. Respect and honor your commitment to this time. This standing appointment should have as much significance to your calendar as a client appointment or meeting with your boss. If you are a business owner partnering with another entrepreneur, you can relate to how limited their valuable time is. This provides you both with more incentive to be fully prepared for and honor the standing appointment.
Schedule the activities you may be resisting — going to the gym, writing that article, or whatever it may be. If your child was in a play tonight, it would be on your calendar, and you would show up. If you had a client meeting scheduled for 10 a.m. tomorrow, you would be there without question.
Science has shown us that jotting commitments down on the calendar helps us push past the resistance. The ASTD’s study found that your chance of successfully reaching a goal rises to 95% when you establish an ongoing appointment with your accountability partner.
Throughout the week, prepare by making notes of your progress and efforts. Have a no-excuse attitude. You wouldn’t show up unprepared to a client site. You wouldn’t want to disrespect other business owners or leaders knowing the demands of their time. Don’t treat this appointment any differently.
3. Be Honest
Setbacks happen. No one is perfect. We all experience situations that challenge our focus to achieve our goals. When this happens, own it. This is not the time to give in to a one-time setback. Instead, be honest with your accountability partner, and accurately share the situation. Discuss ways to avoid future setbacks and how you’re going to recommit to your goal the next week.
Commit to what your accountability partner can expect from you in the next meeting, and then write it down. This ensures everyone is focused on the next step necessary in reaching your goal.
You can beat your resistance. By utilizing the power of an accountability partner, you become bigger than your excuses. You start achieving your goals by conquering the resistance. Your confidence increases and you show up at your best every day.
