Cindy Ratzlaff

Bestselling author, award winning brand marketing and social media pro, Cindy Ratzlaff, creates sales driving campaigns for authors, books and publishers.

Binders Full of Women | Top 18 Women For Business Advice

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Every entrepreneur should have binders full of women (and men) who are resources, teachers, strategists, leaders, contacts and potential partners. Social media provides the digital version of a binder through Facebook Interest Lists and Twitter Lists. G+ has circles and Pinterest Boards. We’ve got Evernote to capture and save links, sites and notes and digital contact lists on our mobile devices that act as simple Customer Relations Management, or CRM, tools.

The resources, education and support I’ve gleaned from my Binders Full of Women = priceless.

Here’s a peek inside just one of my personal “binder,” my Top 18 Top Women to Follow for Business Advice. Each of these women share their expertise, advice, resources and opinions so freely that you’ll feel like you’re getting a mini-MBA just by adding them to your stream. These are in no particular order and every one is provides such valuable information, guidance and inspiration, I recommend you take time to visit their websites and see if what they talk about will help you grow your business.

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5 Strategies to Boost Your Brand Visibility and Rank Through Search

By Cindy Ratzlaff

by Cindy Ratzlaff

Ranking through search engines like Google, Bing, YouTube and others should be one of your goals. After all, if people don’t find what you’ve written, you’re a diarist, not a teacher, coach or business blogger. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re creating products, services and content as a business and want to increase your search ranking and help new clients discover you, there are a few visibility and ranking strategies to keep in mind.

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Use Facebook Interest Lists to Grow Your Page and Social Influence

By Cindy Ratzlaff

A consulting client recently confessed to me that his Facebook news stream is overwhelming him and he’s ready to give up on the brand visibility strategy we’ve outlined for building his personal brand through social media. I asked him to make a list of the top 25 people he’d most like to do business with, be on stage with or have as a strategic partner.  He was able to make that list in just minutes, of course, because when he focused on his business goal, it was easy to identify those people most likely to be a part of that goal. This social media strategy technique saves him time daily.

Strategic Influence Building

I showed him how to put each of those top 25 influencers into a Facebook Interest List, which we called A-List Influencers.  Now he can filter his news stream each morning and quickly scan the posts of the people he most wants to connect with and add to their conversations, comment, compliment, create value and in general develop a relationship with these highly desirable contacts. Facebook will always revert back to the standard news feed view but any time he wants to check in on his A-List Influencers, he can do so with just a click.

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YouTube Adds Easy InVideo Branding | Entrepreneurial Toolkit

By Cindy Ratzlaff

*Editor’s Note: The video you feature must be hosted on YouTube.

YouTube quietly added a new feature to the platform that will help small businesses, cash strapped start-ups, entrepreneurs, authors, speakers and coaches promote their brands, in just a few simple steps, across all of their YouTube videos.

InVideo Programming allows users to insert a branded logo or even another video into the corner of all currently uploaded videos on an individual’s YouTube Channel, all at once.

Branding With a Logo or Video

Imagine that as a small business owner you are creating short informational videos and posting them to YouTube. Next you share them through e-mail or through Facebook and even your business website* (your video must be hosted on YouTube, even if it’s featured on your website).  Now with InVideo Programming, you’ll be able to embed another video into the corner of your informational video–say an announcement about a big launch, sale or special event–and ever consumer facing touch point for the original informational video now becomes an invitation to view the special announcement video in just one click.

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Twitter Redesign Surprise

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Take a deep breath.  On NBC-TV’s The Today Show, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced sweeping redesign to the Twitter platform with a focus on the look of Profile pages and a significant update to the mobile and iPad apps.

What Changes?

The Profile Look:  Profile’s will feature a large Header Photo on the right hand side that might remind some users of the look and feel of Facebook.

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5 Entrepreneurial Voices for Personal Brand Marketing

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Finding your brand voice or your entrepreneurial message is a fundamental building block for growing a successful, profitable and sustainable revenue stream for your business.

Understanding and implementing strong, clear messages is easier when you have identified your entrepreneurial voice. There are several different voices with which a business can communicate and choosing one can help you get from the idea stage to the starting line. You’ll add additional voices and messages as your company, product or service matures, but since the start is the most challenging hurdle in any entrepreneur’s business life cycle, let’s examine some options that will get you to go.

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4 Great Marketing Ideas Your Business Can Use Now

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Every day thousands of fantastic articles and marketing ideas for entrepreneurs and small business owners come streaming onto the web, and throughout social media. What’s a busy entrepreneur to do.  You can’t read everything.  You can email yourself great links to articles you want to read later or save the links to a private circle on G+ or even bookmark them for handy reference. I use the G+ strategy most of the time and add sites that regularly deliver to my Google Reader account.

For those who haven’t yet figured out how to scan the headlines and save the best for later, here are a few ideas are so creative and useful that I want to make sure you don’t miss them.  I’ve added short introductory paragraph to tell you why they’re worth your time to click through and read and possibly save. But all of these have ideas that you can use, right now, to amp up the action on your marketing.

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Personal Branding Tips | How to Start Even Before You Have A Business Idea

By Cindy Ratzlaff

I received an email from someone recently asking me for ideas on how they can begin developing their personal branding even though they don’t yet have a business plan or a fully imagined business idea. I was impress they were thinking about branding at this stage of their business development and the question got me thinking about how we can all set up foundational brand elements now that will serve us as we grow an idea into a business.

But how can we brand something that doesn’t exists, you ask? We can’t.  But I believe that you are always the brand.   So you can and should begin to articulate what the brand of “you” includes.

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Facebook Debuts *Promoted Posts* | Facebook Advertising Tips

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Facebook’s Promoted Posts launched this morning and the starting price for promoting an individual post is $15.00 and the choices go up to $300.00.  According to Facebook, “when you promote a post, it will be shown in the news feeds of more of the people who like your Page than you would reach normally. Friends of the people who have interacted with your post will also be more likely to see the story in their news feeds for up to 3 days from when the post was first created.”

Facebook estimates your $15.00 promoted post will be served up to 2,100 people more than would have seen it through the regular Edgerank system.  You can change the lifetime budget even after publication.

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Facebook Fan Page Changes | How to Highlight Your Custom Tabs

By Cindy Ratzlaff

UPDATE: New Facebook page designs cause a great deal of anxiety for business page owners as we get used to the new look and functionality of our pages. I wrote this update for people during the 2012 redesign. Stay tuned because a new design is rolling out in September 2015.

By now everyone is going through the 5 stages of grief over the loss of default landing tabs as the fact that all Facebook fan pages will convert to the new Facebook Timeline for Pages Design on March 30, 2012 sinks in.

Questions about the content housed on the millions of custom tabs created by businesses and entrepreneurs such as contests, opt-in offers, streaming video channels and e-commerce pages have people scrambling and questioning whether or not Facebook fans pages will be a worthwhile investment for small to mid-sized businesses and entrepreneurs, in both time and money.

All of your custom tabs still exist. You just need to think creatively about how to market them.

As of this writing, all of the content on custom tabs is still live and accessible. The only change has been that you cannot set up a default landing tab for non-fans. So how does a page entice fans to search for and click on a tab now that they are no longer displayed on the left hand side of a page?

Page admins can upload a custom image to represent the tab or app as Facebook is now referring to all tabs. Imagine seeing a series of evocative, engaging images in this 180 x 180 pixel format under the cover photo.  Color, words, and images will call out to the reader like carnival barkers. “Come see the amazing offer.”

Page admins can also rearrange the order in which the apps appear. Four apps are “above the fold” and the rest live under the drop down arrow on the right hand side. Three of those app spots are available to admins to highlight the apps of their choice.  Photos will always display.  So admins can change the view to highlight specials, sales, contests or whichever three apps are most important to a page in any given time period.

I created two simple word images just to illustrate what’s possible. It was easy to upload the new app cover images and I expect to see brands and entrepreneurs doing some very creative work with these images.  If you have examples of fun, enticing or downright awesome images fan pages are using to highlight their custom tab offerings, please post their URL below.  Let’s amass some examples to inspire one another.

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