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I often hear about link baiting - what is it? It’s about the hooks you give another person to want to link back to their site. It’s an on-line way to form relationships with your fellow bloggers.
Here’s 6 ideas where you can get hooks from. These are articles or postings you would put in your blog to get other bloggers to link to or from.

1. News - it always sells good news or bad news it’s your choice.

2. Contrary - you write about something or hope to get someone to post something opposite to what your opinion or point is.

3. Attack - Something that is totally opposite of what you believe to be true. (I don’t think you want to go there)

4. Resources - write about a resource that would help your readers, subscribers or information that you can direct people to.

5. Humour - Everyone likes a good clean joke or story. Life itself is humorous in itself.

6. Incentives - Give an incentive to subscribe to your site or someone else’s site, share with other bloggers.

Spend a few hours researching what will work for you the best or do all of them and test what seems to show up for you the most.

It’s easy to get side-tracked with all the information and resources that are available to you online. Sometimes, it’s just best to book mark it and come back later. If you don’t get back to what you have book-marked - well, I guess it really wasn’t important for you.

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Here are five simple starting points for creating the greatest customer experience ever..

Do you run a small service center that’s struggling to differentiate itself? Is your service acceptable, but still well short of even your own expectations? Maybe you’re the uneasy captain of a giant corporate function where growth has stalled and your “loyal” customers keep looking for other options.

Many elements can make a business fail, but one piece of every wildly successful business you should grab is the “customer experience.” It’s just too easy to be great at this to let it be a reason for failure. And, as you may already know, so many of your competitors are miserable at creating a fantastic customer experience that this creates a huge competitive opportunity for you.

Creating a great customer experience is both incredibly simple and the hardest thing you’ll ever do. There is nothing magic or mysterious about an incredible customer experience, but you have to turn your mind inside out. You already spend 100 hours a week focused internally on staffing, sales, inventory, production, billing, shipping, and fixing. Carve out a few hours every week to focus on delivering the greatest customer experience ever.

Here are Five Simple Starting Points–these initial ideas should be free or pay back within 1 month. If your ideas don’t pass this test then keep thinking. If you’re new to this then there should be 2 to 3 years of free ideas before you have to make any significant investments.

1) Focus inside out and look at your business the way a customer does.
You can’t do this yourself because you know too much about how it’s supposed to work. Ask friends, family, relatives, acquaintances and strangers to buy or use your company’s products and services. Get brutally honest feedback about how it really works from a customer’s perspective. Don’t focus on the routine, everyone does the ordinary well enough. It’s the exceptions and the crises that make businesses rise or fall. Have a friend return a broken item or call with an emergency request. 99 times out of 100 your staff will not be treating the exceptions the same way you-as the owner-would have treated that customer. Why? Because you’ve issued a policy that they are naive enough to follow to the letter. Anyone can train their staff, you have to train your staff to think.

2) Listen actively to everything and anything that can help you see what the customer sees.
Very few people give you direct feedback. “How was the salmon tonight?” “Very good, thank you for asking, I’m just a little full.” (Translation: I’m never eating here again.) Active listening means taking in all the verbal and non-verbal clues. Wipe a white glove around your bathrooms-yes, the customers are just as grossed out. When you walk in the door does it smell like fresh flowers or new leather or hot cinnamon buns-or whatever your product is-or does it smell like failure?

3) Measure everything from the customer’s perspective.
How fast does your website load in Tacoma? On a dial-up line? Ship a few boxes of your product to yourself the next time you’re on vacation. Does that crate of “farm fresh vegetables” arrive at your vacation cottage a sodden mess of decayed matter? You may change the oil in 15 minutes, but how long does the customer wait in line to get to that 15 minutes?

4) “Maximum joy” is your new goal, not order fulfillment.
Those teenage mutant automatons you hired to jerk your sodas-do they ever say “Welcome!” or “Thank you!” to your precious customers? If you paid an extra $1.50 an hour could you get some counter help that came without a cell phone attached to their ear or a snarl planted on their lips? Is your packaging fun? When a customer opens a box of your product are they surprised and pleased, rushing to the phone to call their friends about their prized possession or is it just another return they can’t wait to throw in the mail.

5) Improve constantly.
If you haven’t fixed something in the last 48 hours you’ve just fallen 2 days behind your best competitor. Focus on the smallest improvements that you can find. Your packing tape is ugly-fix it. Your staff treat customers like an interruption to their busy conversations-fix it. Your logo is boring-fix it. The last time anyone other than you had an idea was never-fix it, you’re not that smart and they’re not that dumb-you are making them feel unimportant.

There are a thousand ways to turn your mindset inside out and start running your service center the way your customers would like-instead of the way that’s most convenient for you. Remember, you’re trying to create maximum joy and maximum customer loyalty that leads to maximum returns. If you start from maximum returns and expect that to turn into the greatest customer experience ever you’ll be sadly mistaken, as will your saddened ex-customers.

Steven Grant is a former customer service executive from American Express with over 25 years devoted in Fortune 500 companies analyzing, improving and delivering on enhanced customer experiences. Share your experiences and suggestions on improving the customer experience at http://www.customerresearchcenter.com or email Mr. Grant at scgrant@customerresearchcenter.com.

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We all want to do better in life whether it’s in our business or in our personal lives.

Did you know that 55% of employees surveyed said that “Professional Development and Training is the most popular employee benefit incentive that is asked for” This is over cash incentives, it was at 52%.

*According to the CSPA Association August 2006

For me personally I’ve read books, took experiential programs, learned from my mentors, listened to CD’s, I go to conferences; there are all kinds of opportunities to learn and grow.

Has it been worth it? Yes.

I have grown into this pretty good person, I understand myself and what makes me tick; I’ve learned how to communicate better; I have had some insights in how to do things better and differently. These are just a few things I personally have benefited from having taken some training.

Here’s a list of 20 ways that training will benefit you and your business.

1. You’ll find a different way to think and act
2. You’ll change your mind in how things can work better for you
3. Be a better person
4. Be challenged
5. Finding ways that work better
6. Discover what direction your need to go
7. You’ll demonstrate more results and successes
8. You’ll be inspired and empowered
9. You’ll learn more about other people and what makes them tick
10. You’ll develop self-confidence
11. You’ll develop self-esteem
12. You’ll open new horizons for yourself
13. You’ll become a Leader
14. You’ll want to be continuous learner
15. Change your attitude along with your employees and customers
16. You may get an attitude adjustment
17. You’ll experience a more fuller life
18. You can learn how to grow a better business
19. Keep up with the trends that you need to know about
20. You’ll find people who are willing to support you
21. Improve just about anything and anyone in your business

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When I first created Heart@Work, it was about creating “Kinder” workplaces. To promote myself I did talks about adding Kindness in Business, the support for this concept was divided 1/2 supported the efforts and 1/2 strongly did not. I talked about how Kindness or being more Heartful in your business would make a difference for everyone involved. People were so resistant about the concept it was unbelievable. Their minds and hearts weren’t open enough to see how Kindness could make a difference in their businesses.

What does Kindness have to do with business anyway?

I put out that I wanted an opportunity to demonstrate that putting “Heart” and “Kindness” in a business it would truly make a difference. while I was waiting for the opportunity to appear - just let go the idea of pushing this concept in workplaces. I even had one of my supporters ask if a local magazine if they would give me an opportunity to write about Kindness - they gave me the opportunity to write a few words, although it wasn’t about Kindness is was about being NICE! Being nice, is a part of Kindness there was more to the meaning of being Kind than being nice.

Oliva McIvor implemented a Kindness to Colleague program when CT and TD were merging - the morale of your staff is usually at it’s all time lowest. Since, then she has written a book about it, The Business of Kindness.

I wrote a White Paper about how you could Profit from Being Kind. Lots of people have read it. I wonder what actions they have taken?

From 2001 to 2005 workers or employees kept telling me we need more of this in our workplace. All you hear is management complaining about something. So, for the 4 years I kept on talking about kindness in the workplace -I discovered that employees wanted more kindness and the employers did not. So, what does this tell you?

In 2001, also presented “Heart on the Line” awards. (By the way over 33 Awards have been presented since then.)People could nominate someone who was kind to them, it was that simple. The awards began when I first produced the first “Kindness to Colleague Conference.” There were over 8 speakers talking about how Kindness has effected their lives. The engagement of everyone that attended was amazing and really heart-felt. It was just a WOW!

My major sp0nsor Brian Sherrington of Signature Printing asked me if I would like to do it again the next year - I responded with ‘Why not?’ We did another conference in 2002.

Back to my opportunity to create an engaged and kinder workplace. It happened when a non for profit needed an administrator. As one member put it to me one day - “they didn’t tell you the whole story or situation that I would have to deal with. You must like a challenge.”

Yes, it was a BIG challenge -I took it on, as after all I wanted to prove to people that a Kinder and Engaged Workplace really works.

Within three months there was some evidence that things were turning around. I was acknowledged publicly that by putting kindness in the workplace amazing things were starting to happen. People were jumping in to help each other, more help was arriving everyday, there was less negative gossiping; partnerships were being created. You could feel and sense that something was cooking, there was more activities being created, volunteers started to show up.

It wasn’t easy to get people to believe that Kindness makes a difference in our world, in our workplaces and in our own lives. We all have something important to say. How many of us are truly willing to listen and take action?

What are you willing to do to create more Kindness in your business?

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