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12 Questions for Mentoring Success

Posted: 17 May 2019 09:00 AM PDT

The articles frequently say that mentors give advice and sponsors give opportunity. This isn't always the case. Based on my experience and research working with hundreds of mentors and thousands of mentees, I have found that the most successful mentoring relationships are rooted in a two-way dialog where mentors and mentees ask each other (and themselves) questions that result in career-advancing insights and opportunities for the mentee. Here are some examples.

Questions Mentors Should Ask Their Mentees

  • What do you want to achieve for yourself, your team and your company? This question allows both mentors and mentees to zoom in on specific strategies and behavioral changes that are in tune with the mentee's goals. It moves the conversation from general to specific.
  • Why is this goal important to you, your team and the company? In asking this question, the mentor is doing a non-threatening reality check. He or she is helping the mentee assess if the goal is worth the effort needed to make it happen.
  • What difference will achieving your goals make? This question opens up a big-picture discussion about what is likely to happen when the mentee's goals are achieved. It allows the mentee to assess the potential impact personally, professionally and corporately. It's not uncommon for possible negative outcomes to surface (e.g., more time away from the family). These are not necessarily deal-breakers, but they are needed eye-openers.

Questions Mentors Should Ask Themselves

Too often mentor/mentee relationships are defined by the mentor telling the mentee what to do. In my experience, these are the least successful relationships as they tend to be short-lived and disappointing. For best results, mentors need to think of themselves as listeners and sounding boards, helping their mentees broaden their horizons. Asking themselves questions like these will help mentors successfully fill those roles:

  • How can I help my mentee think differently and see things differently?
  • Am I listening for what ISN'T being said?
  • How can I help my mentee clarify her or his thinking?

Questions Mentees Should Ask Their Mentors

  • How can I use my skills and expertise differently? By asking this question, the mentee is tapping into the mentor's knowledge and experience and applying them specifically to his or her own skill set. It's a major step towards dovetailing the mentee's individual talents with corporate needs.
  • How do I develop key relationships with decision makers? Early-career mentees, especially women, often believe doing a good job is enough. This all-important question gets them past that misconception and helps them learn how to get noticed in the right ways by those who matter for their career advancement.
  • How do I know if I am working on things that matter and that will move my career forward? By asking this question early on, the mentee, like the mentor, is doing a reality check about the importance and relevance of the mentee's goals to the organization. The mentee is making sure to receive honest feedback that will keep him or her from exerting effort in the wrong direction.

Questions Mentees Should Ask Themselves

Research shows that the most successful mentoring relationships are ones in which the mentee takes an active and intentional role. Asking themselves these questions will help mentees ensure that success:

  • Am I considering how my near-term opportunities can set the stage for longer-term career goals?
  • What worked when I applied the insights gained from my mentor conversations? What's different from what I anticipated?
  • How truly invested am I in my growth and development?

There are numerous benefits from mentors and mentees asking each other and themselves questions like the ones I've outlined. Mentees stay focused on goals, gain insights into achieving and fine-tuning those goals, learn what skills and behavior patterns need adjusting and discover pathways for interacting with key decision makers. Additionally, mentors gain new insights into successful interactions not just with their mentees, but also with their team members, colleagues and senior leadership.

As with so many other professional and personal interactions, successful mentoring relationships aren't just about having the right answers. They're about asking the right questions.

How to Measure and Improve Your Marketing ROI

Posted: 17 May 2019 08:54 AM PDT

Measuring and optimizing your marketing processes is important to finding winning campaigns that have significant results on your bottom line. It is critical to establish specific key performance indicators (KPIs) for all your campaigns to determine your marketing return on investment. Measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns will help you uncover what works and what doesn't so you can scale or optimize performance.

What is marketing ROI?

Marketing ROI refers to the sales generated from a digital marketing campaign. By measuring marketing ROI, you can see how each campaign is performing in terms of specific metrics that are important for your business. For example, you can measure the results of a campaign in terms of leads, page views, sales and social media followers.

 

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The most important metric that determines the true marketing ROI is revenue or sales. This metric helps you to know whether you are making or losing money with your campaigns. However, not all of your campaigns aim to generate revenue or sales. Some are used for brand awareness, others for getting more customers into your marketing funnel. Measurement of marketing ROI depends on what you want to achieve through your campaigns.

How to measure your marketing ROI

Here are a few common digital marketing metrics that are used for ROI analysis.

Conversion rate

If the goal of your campaign is to convert visitors into leads or customers, this metric will help you see whether your campaign is accomplishing the goal. It's important to check conversion rates by channels and devices so that you can invest more in channels and devices that are performing better than others.

Cost per lead

If you are bringing in leads through your marketing campaign, you need to measure how much you are spending on each new lead. To determine cost per lead, you need to divide the total campaign spend by the total leads generated through that campaign. If the cost per lead is more than what you will get after closing the lead, it means ROI is not positive.  

Cost per acquisition/sale

This is the average cost of acquiring a new customer. To determine the cost per acquisition, divide the total campaign spend by the total number of sales generated through the campaign. If the cost per acquisition is more than what the customer will actually bring in to your business, it indicates negative ROI. You will need to optimize your marketing campaigns to lower the cost per acquisition.

Customer lifetime value

This metric measures what your customers will spend over their lifetime. To calculate customer lifetime value, you need to multiply the average sale per customer by the average number of times a customer buys per year, multiplied by the average retention time in years for a typical customer. Looking beyond the first purchase and seeing the long-term profit yields a more accurate ROI.   

How to improve marketing ROI

Marketing ROI mainly depends on the cost of implementing campaigns. Here are some ways you can improve your marketing ROI.

1. Measure the effectiveness of core metrics.

Not all metrics carry the same weight. For any marketing campaign, the core metrics are sales, leads and traffic. Even so, you need to drill further down into these metrics to determine their impact on your revenues. For example, for traffic, you should measure things such as bounce rate, conversion rate and unique visitors.

2. Experiment with different marketing channels.

You can also experiment with different campaign channels to determine the ones that lead to the highest ROI. Some key channels that you can experiment with are email marketing, direct response marketing, social media, video marketing and paid ads. The performance of the campaigns will help you see the channels that your target customers respond best to.

3. Implement A/B testing across all campaigns.

You should split-test your landing page elements such as copy, graphics, navigation links, calls to action and website colors to find out what changes make more visitors take action. Successful A/B testing involves changing one element on a campaign and comparing its performance to another.

You should define the period over which a split test should run. After identifying a winning campaign, continue optimizing it so that you end up with the highest sales or leads at the lowest cost.

4. Focus on your ad spend and income.

To improve marketing ROI, it is also important to know how much you are spending at each stage of your campaigns. Keeping tabs on your marketing spend can help you uncover areas where you are spending too much but getting poor returns.

You can find out how your channels are performing by comparing the conversion rate, leads and profits generated by each. From there, decide whether the results are what you are aiming for.

How to Start Accepting Guest Posts on Your Blog

Posted: 17 May 2019 07:00 AM PDT

But, have you considered allowing others to guest post on your website? When someone guest posts on your site, they'll share their work once it's published, giving you free marketing for your blog. This gives you a chance to increase your traffic and can lead to more links to your site. Plus, you don't have to do any of the work.

Ready to reap the benefits of guest posts? Here's how to start accepting guest posts on your blog.

1. Build a community.

Before you start accepting guest posts, you need to build a community. Just because you have a blog with a lot of useful content, doesn't mean that you're ready to accept guest posts. After all, nobody will want to guest post for your blog if you don't have an active community of readers.

If you've got some website traffic but lack an active community, there are a few things you can do to build one. First, you should be starting a conversation with your readers. At the end of your blog posts, ask them a question or ask them to leave their opinion in the comment section. Next, you should be engaging with readers in the comment section. Readers will be more likely to comment if they know they'll get a response from you. You should also spend time commenting on other popular blogs. This will help you build a relationship with other bloggers and their readers, who in turn, will start interacting with your blog too.

2. Create guest posting guidelines.

Once you've built a community, you can start thinking about accepting guest posts on your blog. But before taking submissions, you need to create guest posting guidelines. You should only be accepting quality guest posts because your reputation is on the line too. Determine what you want to see on your blog and what you'll accept and create guest posting guidelines for writers to follow.

Your guest posting guidelines should include:

  • How long you want the posts to be

  • What blog topic ideas you want to see

  • Your preferred writing style

  • Specify whether you accept pitches, drafts, or both

  • What you won't accept in guest posts such as self-promotion

  • Blog image requirements

In your guest posting guidelines you can also link to example posts from your blog to give writers a better idea of the quality you're looking for.

3. Determine how writers will submit.

If you want to start accepting guest posts on your blog, you'll also need to determine how writers will submit their work. The method in which writers will submit their blog posts has to be easy and convenient for them but also be streamlined and organized for you. One method to keep things organized is to create a separate guest posting email such as guestposting@myblog.com and instructing writers to send their work to that address. But posting an email address on your website opens you up to receive a lot of spam.

A more secure and convenient way would be to create a guest post submission form on your website. Using a contact form builder you can create an online form for writers to fill out that also allows them to directly upload files.

4. Promote your guest posting opportunity.

Next, you need to put the word out that your blog is accepting guest posts. There are a number of ways you can promote your guest posting opportunities to writers including:

  • Reaching out to writers you know directly

  • Posting it on social media

  • Joining online groups for writers

  • Creating a dedicated landing page on your website

Remember, most writers don't want to write for free. So, if you're not paying for guest posts, they need to get something else in return. Be sure to show writers the benefits of guest posting on your blog. Share stats on how many monthly visits your website attracts, how many email subscribers you have, how many social media followers you have, and so on.  

5. Show your guest writers some love.

Once you start accepting guest posts on your blog, to get those writers to submit over and over again, as well as attract new writers, you need to show your guest writers some love.

For instance, give your guest writers an author bio that includes a photo and link to their website. You should also be promoting their guest post on your social media accounts so that they get the exposure they're looking for. Guest blogging should be a win-win relationship for both parties.

Accepting guest posts doesn't have to be a hassle. With these tips for how to start accepting guest posts on your blog, you'll start receiving a ton of quality content to boost your traffic. Your blog will become a go-to for finding helpful information from a variety of experts.  

3 Strategies to Make Money From Your Free App

Posted: 17 May 2019 05:00 AM PDT

All these efforts are unlikely to yield results if you don't have a monetization strategy for your app in place. It's time to game plan on how do you plan to make money from your mobile app.

While free apps might have a higher chances of being successful on the app stores, making money off your free app requires a carefully thought out app monetization strategy. Unlike paid apps that have a clear price tag attached to them, making money from free apps is somewhat more complex.

There are a number of ways to make money from your free app and each monetization method comes with its own set of pros and cons. Read on to get critical insights about how free apps make money, what are the options available to you and the pros and cons of each to choose the one you can use to maximize profits from your mobile app.

1. Advertising

Digital advertising via mobile applications has become a go-to strategy for marketers and its surge in popularity has resulted in high returns for mobile app developers. Users are spending an increasingly large amount of their time on smartphones making app advertising a highly effective platform for advertising.

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Pros of Advertising Model

  1. Increased benefit to the marketers: Studies have shown that consumers are more likely to remember and retain the ads displayed on the mobile apps over those they see on television and laptops because of higher engagement levels of the former.

  2. Ease of adoption: There are a number of mobile ad networks you can sign up with to get started with app advertising like Admob by Google or iAd by Apple. You can easily partner with relevant brands over these and get paid by them to post ads on your app.

  3. Greater number of options: App developers have the choice of what type of ads do you want to display in your free mobile app. You can choose between interstitial ads, banner ads, native ads and video ads according to your requirements.

Cons of Advertising Model

  1. Obstruction of the user experience: Ads within mobile apps can act as major detractors for the users and unless done focussing on showing relevant content to the target audience, can be a source of annoyance to the users.

  2. Need for widespread users to be effective: Your app needs to enjoy heavy traffic with a large user base generate a sustainable revenue stream solely from advertisements.

To be successful at in-app marketing, you need to focus on incorporating the ads in such a way that they don't detract the users from actually navigating through the app. Having relevant content that actually provides them value instead of meaningless and irritating adverts is the way to go if you wish to follow this revenue model with your free app.

2. In-app purchases

In-app purchases bridge the gap between free mobile apps and ones with premium features. While the app itself is free to download, the users can access the premium features offered within the app by purchasing and unlocking them.

Pros of in-app purchases

  1. User willingness: The customers don't feel like something is being shoved down their throats. They make purchases based on the value they feel is offered. Since the power resides with the end users, in-app purchases have become a highly effective app monetization strategy these days and will continue to remain an important part of app development in the near future.

  2. No need to develop two different applications: You don't need a free app with basic features and another fully packed paid version for customers to upgrade to. In-app purchases ensure that a single app meets all user requirements.

  3. Value addition for the users: Whether you are offering consumables (virtual coins or gems), non-consumables (access to an ad-free version of app) or subscriptions (access to additional content on a periodic basis), the perceived value of in-app purchases make it a lucrative offer for the app users.

Cons of in-app purchases

  1. Cost-value equation: The additional features that you provide as in-app purchases should provide value and be compelling enough to drive the users towards making the purchase.

  2. Added technicalities for payments: You need to install additional payment gateways in order to process the purchases made. Since you would be processing sensitive credit card information, data security is another factor that must be taken into consideration, which amps up the functionality requirement of the app.

To successfully implement in-app purchases within your mobile app, an understanding of human psychology for designing features that compel the users to hit the buy button and complete their purchase is a must. App revenue follows the model for a freemium app, which is a hybrid between free apps and premium apps.

3. Subscription-based model

In the case of content-based mobile apps, a subscription model for making money from your free app works wonders. The revenue generated is more or less consistent. Subscriptions can be offered on a monthly or a yearly basis to incorporate choice for app users.

Pros of subscription model

  1. Higher engagement and consistent revenues: The advantage of content-based apps is that fresh content in the form of audio, video, images and even news is highly engaging. All you need to do is provide freshly brewed content that meets what your target audience is looking to consume and you have ensured a consistent revenue stream.

  2. Higher demand: The demand for content is ever increasing. With smartphone penetration becoming ubiquitous, accessibility to internet and changing content consumption trends, the demand for these apps is only going to increase.

  3. Platform support: Both Google Play Store, as well as Apple App Store, are incentivizing subscription model by slashing down their cuts in the revenue generated making it an attractive option for app developers.

Cons of subscription model

  1. Content creation: Creating engaging pieces of content that compels users to subscribe is a resource-intensive process.

  2. Limited scope: There are limited category of apps for which the subscription model has shown potential of revenue generation. If your app idea doesn't have consistent value provided over a period of time, users won't be likely to subscribe.

Simply having the know-how of "how do free apps make money" isn't sufficient. The application of this knowledge is what matters.

There isn't a single correct answer to choosing the monetization strategy for your free app. You could pick one that best fits your needs from the options available or create a monetization mix for your business that combines two or more of these strategies.
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