Promo 101 with Nikki Leigh: virtual blog tour

In May and June - Barbara Weaver Smith will tour cyber space to promote her latest book. Learn a bit more about her "Whale Hunting Process" below.

Who We Are

The Whale Hunters is a training and consulting company helping our clients accelerate their business growth through large account sales. For small business owners, we offer workshops, books and materials, and coaching. For mid-size companies, we offer those services plus consulting modules to help you implement The Whale Hunters Process in cross-functional teams throughout your organization. For mid-size to large companies, we offer training for sales management and the sales team, focused on large account sales and key account management.

We are headquartered in Indianapolis, IN, with a southwest office in Phoenix, AZ. The company was founded in 2004.

The Whale Hunters Process™

Whale hunting focuses on creating a disciplined sales culture in your company that allows you to optimize your ability to catch and harvest whales. This dramatic shift in thinking and practice precipitates explosive growth of your company’s revenues and market position.

The nine-phase process model is consistent across companies and industries, but each company maps the model to its own steps.

Scouting

It all starts with knowing who you're hunting. With a focus on market and sales research and the creation of a target filter, scouting guides you to know, seek and harpoon whales whose business will be ideal for you.

Hunting

Hunting focuses on communicating with, pitching, and securely closing your ideal whale accounts. Our method of progressive discovery and disclosure relies on critical questions at each step of the hunt.

Harvesting

Harvesting brings sales and non-sales departments together in an integrated process to ensure you harvest your whale effectively, efficiently and harmoniously. It includes key account management and growing new business with your best accounts.

Virtual Blog Tour - Whale Hunting Women Vol 1

There are a number of ways to participate in a tour –

1. Write a review for the book (we supply a copy of the book)
2. Send interview questions for the author to answer (based on information from their blog, questions about their writing or the topic of their book).
3. Have the author guest post for the day - about their book, writing, the background or a topic in the book.
4. Post an excerpt from the book.
5. If you have a radio show or podcast, our authors love to do interviews.
6. If you have another idea, let me know. I love promoting – outside the box.


People Who Need to Read Whale Hunting Women

1. Women business owners—ranging from the home-based business to the very successful small to midsize business.
2. Women executives and managers.
3. Women “deal makers” both employees and volunteers who do deals in the education and nonprofit arenas—board members, fundraisers. Note: many women fall into at least two of these categories.


Topics That Are Discussed in Whale Hunting Women

* Women are great whale hunters (big deal-makers)
* Women’s talents and preferences are a perfect fit for deal-making in today’s economy
* Women sometimes think of themselves or their enterprise as “too small” to do big deals
* Community deals and education deals are as important and as challenging as business deals


About Whale Hunting Women [Vol. 1]


Whale Hunting Women—how women do big deals in business and community. For inspiration, motivation, and direction, this book celebrates women as deal-makers and includes how to “break the minnow mindset” and how to create a fast-growth culture. It documents three cultural transformations that favor women’s leadership styles: the trend to replace competition with collaboration; the need to transform bureaucracy to entrepreneurship; and the value of perceiving a world of abundance rather than a culture of scarcity. The book offers advice on how small companies or organizations can manage their public presence to generate the whales’ confidence that they have the capabilities and professionalism to complete big deals with big customers and partners. The book incorporates a deal-maker’s journal; each chapter includes worksheets to prompt reflections and action plans.

About Barbara Weaver Smith


Barbara Weaver Smith, president and CEO of The Whale Hunters, is an author, consultant, speaker, and coach. Barbara held positions as an English professor, a college dean, and a nonprofit organization president before founding her first company in 1996. Informed by her leadership experiences in all economic sectors, Barbara’s mission is to support women to achieve exceptional growth in their companies and organizations by doing bigger deals with bigger customers and partners.

Barbara Weaver Smith on Whale Hunting Women

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=203417952973835407&ei=tbvcSe_vE4OMqwK1jejdCg&q=barbara+weaver+smith


Testimonials about Whale Hunting Women event

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5760679615765042203&q=source%3A000744826227052310227&hl =en

For more information

www.thewhalehunters.com

http://virtualblogtour.blogspot.com/2009/04/whale-hunting-with-barbara-weaver-smi th.html

The simplest description for my idea of a virtual blog tour is: a cyber “tour” which includes various blogs, websites, radio shows, newsletters, etc. The more effective sites usually contain themes or content from the book that is being promoted. This “tour” gives authors the chance to reach many people as they travel the World Wide Web.

A tour includes a series of appearances with blogs, website interviews, reviews or guest posts, etc. that are posted on various sites during a specific amount of time. Various site owners host you and may ask interview questions about your book or request that you write a piece about a specific part or element of your book.

Benefits of a Virtual Blog Tour

Why would you do a virtual tour? Is it all about book sales? Selling books is only one of the reasons I encourage people to do virtual tours. The following reasons apply to fiction and non-fiction authors—however, some can be utilized more thoroughly by non-fiction and business authors.

* Build credibility
* Increase visibility
* Generate a buzz about your book
* Reach your target audience
* Get information to many people in a short period of time
* Generate additional links back to your site
* Let readers and potential readers learn more about you and your books
* Help blog readers get to know the person behind the book or other product
* Search engines love blogs and you get into search engines immediately
* Gives your target audience the opportunity to communicate with you
* Comments can give you the chance to see what people think about your topics

You can organize a tour for yourself or you can hire a professional. But, ask what the professional can do for you. There are many ways to describe a virtual tour, so be sure the other person explains what they plan to do—and more importantly, that they plan the best approach for you and your book. When a professional coordinates your tour it lets you benefit from their promotional network to generate a much larger reach for you.

Nikki Leigh is an award winning fiction and non-fiction author with over sixteen years of promotional experience. Promo 101 Promotional Services offers online promotional options. Her new book will be available in May: Book Promo 201: Harness the Power of the Internet with Web 2.0 and Social Media Marketing. The most up to date information is posted at http://www.twitter.com/litekepr. Visit http://www.nikkileigh.com to download The Insider's Guide to Virtual Book Tours. Additional promotional information can be found at http://promo101articles.blogspot.com.

Promo 101 Virtual Tours and Promotional Services is coordinating a virtual tour to promote Time Management in an Instant by Karen Leland.

On July 22nd - I'll be sharing an article from her about telecommuting. In these unusual financial times - working from home and telecommuting could be the answer for you.

More information and a special offer will be posted on July 22.

Nikki Leigh

While the rising cost of gas is making it more expensive for commuters to get to work, the shrinking cost of wireless technologies are making it easier to get work done from a desk in the bedroom, rather than a table in the boardroom.

One new national poll shows that telecommuting is becoming more commonplace. For example, nearly half (44 percent) of chief information officers (CIOs) surveyed said their companies’ IT workforce is telecommuting at a rate that is the same or higher than five years ago.

Improved retention, moral, increased productivity and better work-life balance are the biggest benefits sighted by workers and companies. If you think working from the comfort of your home might be for you, make a compelling case to convince your boss with the following:

• Evaluate Your Job. Do you spend a good portion of your day emailing colleagues and customers? Talking on the phone to vendors? Working on the computer? If so, you may be a great candidate for telecommuting.
• Present your boss with a plan – in writing. Let your boss know exactly what hours you plan on working from home, what the cost savings will be, what monetary investments (if any) would be required and the benefits to both the company and your boss of your telecommuting. If you need some juicy statistics to beef up your case, check out more about how to work from home at The Telework Coalition.
• Promise results. Your boss’s biggest concern is likely to be that instead of writing that sales proposal, you will sit around in your pajamas (or underwear) drinking beer all day long. You can help erase that image from his/her mind by agreeing to commit to measurable, weekly or daily work-from-home goals.
• Recommend a test run. If after doing all the above, you boss is still skeptical, suggest trying telecommuting out for a few weeks or a month.

For those of you who don’t work at the present time, but would like to start working at home to make some extra income consider the following:

• Make your creativity pay. Are you a crafter, knitter, beader or jewelry maker? If so, check out etsy.com the site that sells handmade items.
• Turn your people skills into cash. Want to earn $8-$15 per hour answering customer service calls for brand name companies? One of the biggest industries looking for work at home staff is virtual customer service. Check out Working Solutions and LiveOps.
• Score big with science and math. If you have college degree and excel at math and or science, why not tutor and teach online to make some cash. Sites such as Tutor.com operate online classrooms where students can seek one-on-one help.

Once your dream of working from home (part time at least) has become a reality, the next challenge is to manage yourself working from home. A few things to keep in mind are:

• Create a real home office. A desk stuck in a small corner of tv room, does not make for a great working space. If you are going to work at home, you need a private place that is set up as a home office, even if it's small in scale.
• Don't get caught in non-work tasks during the day. If your spouse works outside the office they may be tempted to ask you to pick up the cleaning, meet the plumber or power wash the patio, during the work day - don't. Drawing a boundary about when you work is essential to making working from home successful.
• Find a way to stay in the office loop. Out of sight, can mean out of mind. You don't want to lose touch with your boss or co-workers, because they see less of you. Scheduling regular check ins as well as making drop in appointments, will help keep you part of the working team.

Find more information about Time Management In An Instant the week of July 20th and view the Essential Email online course. Go to: /www.quality-service.com/timemanagement inaninstant

Karen Leland and Keith Bailey are the bestselling authors of six books including Time Management In An Instant: 60 Ways to Make the Most of Your Day. They are the co-founders of Sterling Consulting Group, which helps organizations and individuals learn how to fight distraction and find their focus in a wired world. For more information please contact: kleland@scgtraining.com