Jim Estill

Jim Estill is an author, speaker, freelance marketer and business consultant. He helps companies creatively maximize sales and margin by unleashing hidden values.

Estill has experience running companies from zero to $2 Billion in sales. Estill was CEO of SYNNEX Canada for 5 years. SYNNEX is a $2 Billion distributor of computer hardware, software and peripherals as well as consumer electronics.

Prior to that, Estill started a computer distribution company from the trunk of his car while attending his final year of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He grew that company to $350,000,000 in sales prior to selling it to SYNNEX in 2004.

Jim Estill is a board member of Research in Motion, makers of the famous Blackberry. He has been on the board since before the company went public in 1997.

Estill is an avid reader, writer (he published a book on Time Management), Blogger and Social Media Expert. His interests include running, health, computers and marketing.

The 3 Links of Selling

Sales is all about links.

In order to sell, it helps to get to know people. It helps to stay in touch with them. It helps to connect with them. People like to buy from friends. More friends - more sales.

In the old days, one of the ways to do this was by playing golf or hitting the links. So at one time (some people would still say that time has not passed and insist this is the only way even now) golf links were very important.

Then came the era of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an awesome tool for staying in touch with people. Mostly because many people are increasingly changing jobs and it's tough to keep in touch with everybody. LinkedIn has your friends maintain their contact information rather than you having to keep current.

Essentially it allows you to stay in touch whenever you want to. LinkedIn also allows you to send updates, similar to Twitter of Facebook, which are a good, soft way of staying in touch with people.

LinkedIn is also a great tool for connecting to people whom you don't yet know because you can see who is connected to and ask for a warm introduction.

The third link is about links to your website and blog. Increasingly people are finding business partners and suppliers on the Internet and the most common way to do this is through Internet searching. In order to rank high on the Internet searches (you really want to be on the first page), you need to have what's called a high PageRank. PageRank is determined by the number of quality inbound links coming to your page.

As you can see, it's all about the links.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization Basics

Do you want to get first page on Google? If you have a web page or blog, you likely already are first page for some searches. With a bit of SEO, you can gain first page on more searches. And its simple.

The first and most obvious step is think about what words or phrases you want to be first page on.

Once you have that list, determine how many people are searching for those terms. To check how popular a search is you will need a tool. I use Wordtracker (there is a free online version). The higher the number, the more popular the search.

No point in trying to optimize for a word or phrase that is rarely searched. There is also no point in trying to optimize for a word that is too popular because getting a high ranking there will be almost impossible. So this is a "just right thing". You want to optimize for words that you have a good chance of ranking for. I suggest choosing 10-20 words and phrases.

Think about "long tail"

Think about how people will search. People often search with a question. EG where do I find X? Or where do I find Y in Canada. The longer the string, the less competition you will have for it so the easier you will get ranked.

So make the list of phrases you want to "own" and ones that are realistic to "own".

Now it is simple. Just put these words and phrases in your titles, picture descriptions, videos and in your text. The titles are the most important. That is why a blog called "Vegetable Lentil Soup Recipes" will get good Google juice on all 4 words. So searching "vegetable soup" will get first page. Or "lentil soup recipes" or "vegetable lentil recipes" etc.

Yes you want to repeat your words and phrases often in the text. This said - write naturally. Never let SEO be a substitute for good content.

So you do this and you still are not first page. That is because you do not have enough credibility with Google. You need another free tool to check this. I use a free Firefox plugin called searchstatus. It gives me both the PageRank and the Alexa rating of any web page. Higher PageRank numbers are better. High credibility is your ultimate goal as that is what gets you ranked first and Alexa tells you traffic (a lower number is better)

My blog (www.jimestill.com) has a pagerank of 5 and Alexa of 493,052 (meaning it is the 493,052th most popular site in the Internet). CMA blog has a pagerank of 4 and an Alexa of 587,900. This means if I SEO on the same phrase as CMA blog, google will list me before CMA Blog.

How do you increase your PageRank?

It is all about quality inbound links. You want people with a high credibility (PageRank 4+) to link to you - eg Globe and Mail would be great. More is better and link rank is almost logarithmic so a PageRank of 6 is worth 10 times one of 5 etc.

The best inbound links are contextual. So someone blogging and saying I heard time management guru Jim Estill speak and hot linking from "Time management guru" is great for me. Second best, hot link to "Jim Estill". Third is just having a link on a blogroll without any context or a link to click here.

You get a higher rank if you update your content regularly. That is why having a blog on your site is a good way to increase your ranking.

Moderate cross linking within your own material will also increase your rank and clarify for google what it is that you do.

3 ways to get links to your site:

1 - Ask politely. You might not always get a link but it never hurts to ask.

2 - Comment on other relevant blogs (and have your PageRank on so you ignore low PageRank and high alexa). Note that most comments in themselves do not constitute a link. But being out there gets people to look at you. You need people to look at your stuff for them to be inspired to link to it.

3 - Have good material. People link to quality. But of course they have to see it so promote your content

4 - Have your URL on all your print material, cards, letterhead, email sig file etc.

5 - Write guest articles and blogs in the right (high traffic) places (check the pagerank and Alexa).

6 - Contribute to other sites. EG write reviews on Amazon, join the conversations.

And a word of warning. Never play games (like buying links).

In the end it is about having good quality material. And being out there so people look at your material. People link to quality without you asking as long as they know about it.

Jim Estill

New Years Resolutions and the Weekly Roll Up

This is the time of year people think about New Years Resolutions. It is also a great time for the company to do the same.

On a personal basis I do an exercise called 60 Minutes to Clear Goals. A similar process works for a company also.

I have always published a list of goals for the company. I usually do 3-5 of them. I let everyone know what they are. I even call them New Years Resolutions at this time of year.

One management technique I have used is the weekly roll up report. Everyone in the company writes a weekly report that they send to their manager who can then take parts of to send to their supervisor who can then send to their manager etc.

One of the rules of the weekly report is there is a 24 line maximum to keep the information readable (too much information is the same as no information at all). This distillation roll up is a great way for managers to understand what is going on in the company.

It is a good idea to occasionally read the unfiltered versions from the lower levels in the organization to make sure the filtering is done appropriately.

Another line in the weekly report is "things I need from you (the manager)" This ensures people are getting the support they need to do their job well.

So how does this tie into New Years Resolutions or goals? I ask everyone in their weekly report to address what they have done to move the organization towards the stated goals (which is why I like to keep it to only 3-5 goals.)

It is powerful to have everyone know the goals and even more powerful to ask them what they have done to move them forward. It keeps people focused on the goals.

Good luck with your resolutions in 2010.

Maintaining a Network

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations."

Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

One axiom I have in networking with people is to try to add value (to the people I network with - not me) 98% of the time. This builds a "goodwill" account and gets the stuff I send read. It also helps to build a following.

One principle in networking is to "gently" stay in touch with people. What I mean by this, is being respectful of their time and mind space.

This meshed with the concept of having many people in my network. Of course I would prefer to meet with everyone in my network daily for an hour but that would limit how large my network could be. And it would no doubt violate the time and space of people I was networking with.

Marketing is what we do when we have limited time to interact.

So I decided to start sending out daily quotations from famous people. I know that email is an "interrupting medium" so I chose to only send them by twitter, linkedin, facebook and post them to a Tumblr page and to a section on my blog. That way if people "chose" to look, they would see them.

Of course being a time management guy, I largely automated the process by using Ping.fm to post to all sources at the same time and using Hootsuite to send them at preset times. So right now I have my quotes set to go out for the next 90 days and even without me logging in, they go out. I often read books that are rich in quotes so can add 10 or more at a time in a short sitting (or even more efficient, have my trusty assistant, Elliot, do that for me)

Once I started to send out the quotes, people said "Jim likes quotes" so would send me quotes that all I needed to do was to cut and paste. Only once did this get me in trouble when I posted a quote that was not said by the person who I attributed it. And I had just moved to the US at the time so did not understand the political nature of the quote (Making rich people poor does not make poor people rich - I attributed to Abe Lincoln but he never said it).

And by attributing quotations to other people, they often seem to have greater weight than my own words. In a way I get their brain/power attributed to me.

And for that matter, if I could not find a quote, I could always make one up and attribute it to the great Anon.

Of course not all people like quotes:

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

I guess that is why Emerson is not connected to me on Linkedin.

Four Things Marketing Cannot Do.

Marketing can solve any problem - right? Wrong.

1 - Marketing cannot create repeat customers. Once a customer has experience with your company, they will judge you based on how that interaction went. Marketing can help to get the first sale but after that, the company, product or service speaks for themselves louder than any marketing.

2 - Marketing cannot fix bad service. No amount of marketing can convince a customer your company is good if your service is poor. I almost laugh when I see hugely expensive advertising campaigns for companies I have dealt with that leave me on hold for an hour without solving a problem they created.

3 - Marketing cannot change who you are. For example, would Wal-mart win by saying it sells fine wine? Would Saks Fifth Avenue be able to convince customers they are the "lowest price"? Customers will simply not think it is plausible. Over time you can change the customers' perception of your company but that takes a lot of time. Marketing alone though cannot change who you are in the market. You need to be who you say you are.

4 - Marketing cannot hide the truth. In this day of the internet, it is very short sighted for any company to think they can market away the truth long term. And trying to do so would not only be virtually impossible but outrageously expensive.

In the end, marketing can enhance a good product or service but can do little to make a poor product or service sell or be accepted in the market. I am a big believer in marketing (or why would I write for CMA?) but believe spending time and money on delivering excellence should be the first step for any entrepreneur or business.

Excellence first - marketing later.