I’ve written hundreds of cold emails over the past year and come to a few conclusions about how to elicit a positive response. I’ve also received a few myself and consistently see people use strategies that just haven’t worked for me. Here’s my two cents on how to cold email prospects effectively.
Do:
Keep it 4 sentences or less (ideally 3).
When you send someone you don’t know a novel to read, you’re making them work. Busy people have too much on their plate to dedicate time to a speculative narrative – so they don’t read them diligently (this may not apply if your email domain rhymes with moogle or hicrosoft).
Most long, cold emails I receive are from JV sales people that rarely …
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I’ve gotten hours of my life back over the past year by borrowing a practice employed by customer service departments.
For whatever reason, people approach me with the same questions over and over again. How do I get a job in business development? How do I get access to the SinglePlatform API? Is it free? How do you break into startups as a non-technical person?
Instead of continually answering these on a one-off basis, one approach to enhance productivity is to create assets that address your life’s F.A.Q. At SinglePlatform, these take the form of PDF’s that address many preliminary questions potential partners may have. Outside of SP, I try to write blog posts or canned email responses about anything I’m continually …
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In the first part of this post, I discussed ways to encourage sharing once someone has read a post.
But before anyone shares your content from the highest hill in the twitterverse, you must convince people to read your content. This is a whole different challenge. This post will discuss best practices to put your content in play.
Reading
Again, in order for a post to be shared it must be read. There are certain things producers can do to increase the chances of visitor staying to read it:
1. Write a compelling first sentence.
Bloggers compete in the attention economy. Readers have no shortage of content to consume, but a fixed amount of time. Within this environment, you need to capture someone’s attention quickly …
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This post originally ran on Maxton Men.
Most people have limiting beliefs that prevent them from creating additional income streams. These include:
1. It’s going to take a lot of time that I don’t have
2. I don’t have any particular valuable skills or connections people would pay for
3. It’s hard to create a product to sell
There’s good news – for most people, these beliefs are false and it’s never been easier to make some extra coin on the side.
The best way to create additional income streams without incurring a large time cost is to package an existing asset into a commodity or service that can be distributed with minimal effort. This is scalable income creation.
Still sound hard? Most people stop here because …
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I recently gave a presentation on networking to New York’s CTO School. The focus of the talk was on ways to provide value to others and how to bring an intentional, targeted approach to networking:
Video:
Slides:
To accompany this talk, I created a page for CTO School with other resources on networking. Feel free to check it out.
If you’ve ever spent 2+ hours slaving over a blog post only to have 1/2 a spam bot be the sole person to share it you may want to read this post.
Improving the odds of getting people to share your post starts with creating compelling content (or having a lot of money to give entrepreneurs). Assuming you can achieve this, there are certain considerations and practices that maximize the exposure available through social media.
The Sharing Funnel
You can visualize the content sharing funnel by working backwords.
For content to be shared, it needs to be read (unless you have a posse retweet jockeys).
For it to be read, a visitor must perceive that it’s worthy of their attention upon arriving at the post.
For …
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Have you ever met a great contact, then found yourself cautious to email them months later because you’re not sure if they even remember who you are? I sure have.
I’ve wrote about this before, but the biggest networking fail is consistency.
A great networker strategically massages his network in order to turn acquaintances into trusted professional contacts and friends. The methodology for doing this is simple – consistently provide value to these acquaintances without expecting anything in return. Just like content marketing, time + value is the magic formula.
Anyone who’s attempted this realizes that building relationships this way can be challenging and time-consuming. After all there’s only so many relevant articles to ping, feedback to provide, or potential hires to source …
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