How to Persuade and Influence People to Achieve Personal Power

May 142012
 

Personal Success | May 14th, 2012 | No Comments »



how-to-persuade_influence-people_personal-powerYour ability to persuade and influence people to help you get the things you want in life is one of the most important skills you can develop. By learning how to persuade and influence people, you can achieve greater personal power and get more of the things you want faster than anything else you do. It can mean the difference between success and failure. It can guarantee your progress and enable you to use all of your other skills and abilities at the very highest level. Learning how to persuade people will earn you the support and respect of your customers, bosses, co-workers, colleagues and friends. The ability to influence others to do what you want them to do can make you one of the most important people in your community.

Your job is to become absolutely excellent at influencing and motivating others to support and assist you in the achievement of your goals and the solving of your problems. All truly effective people have mastered the art of getting lots of other people to work with and for them in the accomplishment of their objectives. You can learn this skill set to achieve personal power and master the art of influencing others.

How Human Interaction Affects Your Ability to Influence People

The opposite of being influential is having little or no influence at all on the behaviors of other people. It is the difference between being powerful and being powerless. You can either persuade others to help you or be persuaded to help them. It is one or the other. Most people are not aware that every human interaction involves a complex process of persuasion and influence. And being unaware, they are usually the ones being persuaded to help others rather than the ones who are influencing people to help them.

All successful people with personal power are persuasion experts. They give a lot of thought to how they can get other people to help them. They plan and strategize before they act. They define their goals clearly and then they choose the people whose cooperation they will need to achieve those goals. They then think about what they will have to do in return to get the other people to help them.  They achieve their goals of persuasion and influence indirectly.

The key to persuasion is motivation. Every human action is motivated by something. In order to learn how to persuade others, you must find out what motivates other people and then to provide that motivation. People have two major motivations: the desire for gain, and the fear of loss. The desire for gain motivates people to want more of the things they value in life. They want more money, more success, more health, more influence, more respect, more love and more happiness.

Human wants are limited only by individual imagination. No matter how much a person has, he or she still wants more and more. When you can show a person how he or she can get more of the things he or she wants by helping you achieve your goals, you can motivate them to act in your behalf and achieve greater personal power.

How to Persuade Others Through Leverage

You can learn how to persuade others by using leverage. Leverage means that you learn how to multiply yourself and get far more out of the hours you put in rather than doing everything yourself.

You leverage yourself through other people’s efforts by getting other people to work with you and for you in the accomplishment of your objectives. Sometimes you can ask them to help you voluntarily, although people won’t work for very long without some personal reward. At other times you can hire them to help you, thereby freeing you up to do higher value work.

The definition of management is “Getting things done through others.” To be a manager you must improve your personal power and know how to persuade and influence people to work in a common direction. This is why all excellent managers are also excellent low-pressure salespeople. They do not order people to do things, instead, they influence people to accept certain responsibilities, with specific deadlines, and agreed upon standards of performance. When a person has been persuaded that he has a vested interest in doing a job well, he accepts ownership of the job and the result. Once a person accepts ownership and responsibility, the manager can step aside confidently, knowing the job will be done on schedule.

Achieve Personal Power by Becoming an Expert

You can learn how to persuade others and can develop your personal power by always remembering that there are only two ways to get the things you want in life, you can do it all yourself, or you can get most of it done by others. Your ability to communicate, persuade, negotiate, influence, delegate and interact effectively with other people will enable you to develop leverage using other people’s efforts, other people’s knowledge and other people’s money. The development of your personal power will enable you to become one of the most powerful and influential people in your organization. By learning how to persuade and influence people, it will open up doors for you in every area of your life.

I hope you enjoyed this post on how to achieve personal power by learning how to persuade and influence people. Do you think that the ability to influence people is useful in your line of work? Please comment with your answer below!

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5 Tips for Running Effective Meetings: Improve Meeting Management Skills

May 142012
 

Leadership Success | May 3rd, 2012 | 2 Comments »



management skills-effective meetings-meeting managementMeetings are an essential part of the life of every organization and your ability to run effective meetings with your management skills is a critical part of your success in meeting management. As a leader, there are a series of things I recommend that you keep in the back of your mind.

Meeting Management Tip #1: Begin With a Purpose

One of the most important tasks you need to do to improve your management skills and hold more effective meetings, is to begin with an outline of the purpose.  When everyone sits down you say, “We are holding this meeting today to accomplish these goals and objectives.”

The opening five to seven minutes in any meeting is the most important component to conducting more effective meetings.  It sets the foundation, establishes the parameters, organizes the terms of reference and tells everybody in the room why they are there, for how long, and what they need to accomplish.  I also recommend that you write out your introduction word for word and read it out.  This clarity will allow a person who doesn’t know you or the situation coming in to get right up to speed at the start.

Improve your management skills during a meeting by being both specific and punctual with the timing.  Be sure to announce the duration.  This should also be printed at the top of your agenda, but you want to restate it in your introduction.  Begin right on time. Do not penalize the people who were there on time by waiting for others who are late. Assume that the latecomer is not coming at all and get right on with the meeting.  This helped me so much when I first learned this.

If someone comes in late and finds out they’ve missed important information, refuse to start over for them.  They will eventually get the message, be more punctual, and help you improve your management skills in a respectable manner.  Many companies have a policy where if a meeting is called for 10:00 am, they lock the doors from the inside at 10:01. You only have to do that once to get people to be on time.

If you’re there to solve a problem you say, “We are here to talk about and to come to a decision, conclusion, and resolution on this problem.  Here are the facts of the problem.  Here is the information that we have, the alternatives we’ve considered, and our market intelligence.  Now, what do we do from here?”

Meeting Management Tip #2: Encourage Open Discussion for More Effective Meetings

It’s very important that you get input from everybody; not only the people who have a lot to contribute and are eager, but also from those who are more shy and less likely to speak up.  You want input from especially women and others who may be a little bit reluctant to try to compete with more aggressive or assertive people.

Remember that leaders don’t dominate. We have found that the natural tendency of meeting leaders is to speak 50 percent of the time on average. This is not for you and it is important for you to steer away from this to improve your management skills. As a leader, you should take the role as a facilitator and avoid hogging the discussion. There is a tendency if you don’t use the round-robin technique for you to speak more and more because you’re the one who prepared the agenda.

The way to avoid inadvertently dominating the meeting is to delegate meeting leadership. Whenever possible, assign the meeting management responsibility to someone else, to build subordinates skills. This is wonderful training tool that gives employees the opportunity to build their meeting management skills,  organize their thought, and perform in front of a group. They will learn a lot from planning the meeting and preparing the agenda, and this will ultimately help you run more effective meetings.  Very often what I’ll do in my management positions is rotate the leader position to other staff in subsequent meetings, which will help them improve their management skills.

Keep the discussion on track.  A key job of the meeting leader is to keep bringing people back to the issue. Stick to the items on the agenda and don’t allow discussion to stray or wander. By keeping the discussion back to the main issue, this will help you conduct more effective meetings and save a lot of time.

Meeting Management Tip #3: Press for Closure

Once you start talking on a subject, discuss it thoroughly but press for closure on what has been decided and who’s going to do what and by when, before you go on to the next item on the agenda.

The inability to keep on track and to press for closure are the two major time wasters and major complaints from people who attend non-effective meetings.

Meeting Management Tip #4: Summarize the Main Point

An important meeting management tip to learn is to summarize at the end of each discussion point and at the end of the meeting.  Set out and summarize your time and action schedules, and your implementation plan and assignments.  Then have everybody in the meeting agree on what has been decided.

Something very interesting happens.  There is what is called “peer pressure.”  People who agree to do something in front of their peers are much more likely to follow through.  If everyone heard them say that they would do something by Thursday at noon, it is much more likely that they will have an internal incentive that will save you the need to monitor, inspect and control.

They can’t come back later and say they didn’t know what they were supposed to do, because there is a group of witnesses.  So getting people to commit publicly is a very powerful tool of meeting management psychologically and one of the best management skills I’ve learned to use.

Meeting Management Tip #5: Keep a Record

Finally, distribute minutes from the meeting within 24 hours. The more important the decisions that have been taken, the more important that you have them distributed in writing so that if they have questions they can get back to you. If there are no questions then they are accepting the record of the meeting as distributed. This is a final step that is very important part of conducting more effective meetings and improving your management skills.

Please comment below if you enjoyed these tips on running more effective meetings by improving your meeting management skills! Feel free to share this post with your friends and family!

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Effective Communication: 3 Ways to Improve Your Public Speaking and Presentation Skills

May 142012
 

Personal Success | May 1st, 2012 | 5 Comments »



Public speaking-effective communication-presentation skillsThere are three components you must know in order to improve your presentation skills for better public speaking. When someone asks me how he can build effective communication skills and improve his public speaking, I quote to him the words of Elbert Hubbard, who said, “The only way to learn to speak is to speak and speak, and speak and speak, and speak and speak and speak.”

But while it’s true that the only way to become good at anything is by repetition, over and over, until it becomes second nature, there are many things that you can do to be more effective speaking in front of audiences.

The starting point in the art of public speaking is to pick a subject that you really care about. It is to think through the subjects that have had an extraordinary impact on you, the subjects that you would like to share with others because you intensely feel that others could benefit from your knowledge. With this, you have a springboard off which you can leap into your first public talk.

The second part of public speaking is preparation for effective communication. Preparing is more important than anything except caring about your subject. It’s not unusual for a person to spend many hours, days and even weeks preparing for a talk.

Planning for Effective Communication

To prepare for a talk, the first thing to do is to write out an objective statement of what you wish to accomplish as a result of your presentation. Whether it’s a 10-minute presentation or a 10-hour presentation, the statement of your objective is the same. It’s the answer to the question, “Who is my audience, and what effect do I want my talk to have upon them?”

So you need to ask, “What action do I want this audience to take as a result of the things I say to them?” Write out this action statement of your objective very clearly. Then write down everything that you think you could possibly say, one point after the other, to this audience to cause them to take this action. Remember, the reason for public speaking is not simply to teach or to share information. It’s to move people’s minds and hearts and to provoke them into changing their behavior in some way.

Once you have an outline of what you want to accomplish and some of the ways that you can accomplish it, begin to do your research, if necessary. If you don’t have enough information, begin to read and to ask questions.

If you’re giving a short talk, the very best strategy to improve your presentation skills is to write it out, word for word, in detail. Then read through it and edit it. Revise it wherever necessary. Add to it, and subtract unnecessary data. Work on it until it is polished, and then read through it several times so that you have such a good sense of the material that you can go through the entire talk prior to falling asleep or while you’re driving your car.

Improve Your Presentation Skill

If the first two parts of successful public speaking are caring and preparing, the third part is practicing and improving your presentation skills. If you have a tape recorder or, even better, a video camera, record yourself giving the talk from beginning to end. Then listen to it or watch it, and make notes on how you could make it better. If you’re using a video camera, look into the camera and use the same facial expressions and the same body gestures that you would use if you were speaking directly to someone. When you critique yourself, be very hard on yourself. Remember, the more honest and objective you can be about how you come across to others, the faster you will build effective communication skills for success.

Practice makes perfect, and perfect practice makes it even more perfect.  If you practice consistently, you will find that your presentation skills have dramatically improved over time. Remember, your ability to speak effectively in front of people can do more to advance your career and your life than perhaps any other skill you can develop.

Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking

It’s normal and natural for you to be nervous about public speaking, but you must overcome that fear to improve your presentation skills. Fifty-four percent of American adults rank public speaking ahead of fear of death among life’s major fears. Most people become nervous and uneasy at the very thought of standing up to speak in front of an audience, and their hearts pound.

Speaking professionally really is not something that you can decide in favor of or against. You don’t really have a choice. If you want to realize your full potential in the world of business, you must learn how to improve your effective communication skills to better communicate with people. I have seen executives make extraordinary career jumps, saving themselves as much as five to 10 years of time working up the executive ladder, simply by using effective communication skills at a corporate meeting. I’ve observed men and women who’ve put their careers onto the fast track by overcoming their fears and developing their presentation skills.

Pay any price, spend any amount of time, overcome any obstacle, but make a decision, right now, that you’re going to learn to speak well before groups and practice your presentation skills consistently. It could be one of the most important decisions you ever make in assuring long-term success in your career.

Please comment below and share your thoughts about effective communication techniques for better public speaking. Also, please share with your friends if you enjoyed this post about improving your presentation skills for greater success!

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Colossal Day of Craziness!

May 142012
 

Hello, I am Anthony Skinner, the CTO of MozLand!

Many of you were affected by several SEOmoz tool issues that happened last week, unfortunately all colliding into one colossal day of craziness on May 3rd. We want to first apologize for any inconveniences or problems that these issues caused you.

The good news is that our awesome engineers fixed these problems quickly, but we want to share an update of what happened, how we fixed it, and what we’re doing to prevent “colossal days of craziness” from ever happening again. So, here’s the inside scoop (y’all know we like that whole transparency thing ‘n stuff ;-) ).

So, down to the nitty gritty of what happened last week and where we are now….


Status

 Issue

Fixed

 Rankings – Rankings were delayed by a couple of days for all customers due to some intermittent outages in our database. This delay caused custom reports without rankings data.

 
Fix: After trying it the hard way, we had a eureka moment (in the shower, no less) and promoted our back-up disks to primary, resolving the problem almost immediately.

Why it won’t happen again: We had planned for SSD failures, but did not expect to see a full cluster failure at one time. Going forward, we’ll be looking at making sure we’re using SSDs appropriately, and, when we do use SSDs, having more robust failover plans in place. We’re also changing the way custom reports are built to speed up the process, and enhancing custom reports to wait on dependencies.

Fixed

 Slow Open Site Explorer CSV Reports, and Mozscape API calls were failing – The Mozscape API was running noticeably slower and reports weren’t finishing. We found two export jobs that were continually requeuing themselves, severely backing up the CSV reports queue.

Fix: We fixed the condition causing the queueing and made some adjustments to the load balancing on the servers.

Why it won’t happen again: To prevent the queues backing up in the future, we’ve added a hook to prevent failed jobs from re-queuing. Monitoring and alarms have also been added to notify our ops team if these queues start backing up.

Fixed

 Campaign Setup and Custom Crawl – Users were running into an error message when trying to create new campaigns, and some users were seeing a dramatic reduction in the number of pages crawled.

Fix: With some creative ops magic, our engineers were able to configure the proper permissions and get campaign creation working again. Truncated crawls were caused by a race condition. We also made the transition between finalizing the crawling of a campaign and scheduling the next crawl smoother, which resolved this race condition. Affected campaigns were re-crawled so users could receive a full weekly crawl.

Why it won’t happen again: We’re working to do better testing at scale and to create more defined unit tests to catch these types of race conditions that don’t appear in small scale testing. We’re also working on better monitoring around the campaign crawl service and decoupling campaign creation from the custom crawl service so back end crawler problems will not have such a dramatic affect on the usability of the rest of the SEOmoz PRO app.

Fixed

 Delay in SEOmoz PRO Web App picking up the new index – Our latest index update wasn’t reflected in the SEOmoz PRO web app right away.

Fix: We redeployed an old endpoint in our API that we had been using for campaigns to pick up the new index metrics. We also updated the PRO software to use the new endpoints that Mozscape API now supports.

Why it won’t happen again: We updated our release procedures, and also updated the PRO app to use a new Mozscape API endpoint that publicizes the index launch date. This improvement will mean much smoother updates to Mozscape API campaign metrics in the future.

Fixed

 Social – PRO users trying to connect their Facebook accounts were receiving an error message. We were getting odd data back from the Facebook API indicating users’ authentication data expired – like 25 years ago :) .

Fix: We’ve updated the Facebook connection to return the correct time format.

Why it won’t happen again: To be honest, we’re not sure it won’t… We’ll try to stay on top of changes in Facebook and update our app before the changes affect our users.

We’re also going to be putting some of the new funding (read the memenouncement here) towards making sure things like this do not happen again. We’re investing in infrastructure improvements (blog post to come) to both help keep things running smoothly, and bring you new features and improve stability all around. We’re also hiring… if you’re a brilliant, motivated SEO-lover, apply here.

Again, many apologies for the inconvenience this caused all of you. We’ve learned a lot in this process and will keep doing our darnedest to keep things running smoothly.

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The Penguin Update – Whiteboard Friday

May 142012
 
Hello, and welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Rob Kerry. I’m co-founder of an SEO agency called Ayima. Today we’re going to be talking about the Penguin Update. There’s been a lot of talk in a lot of communities out there, a lot of SEO communities, about the Penguin Update. A lot of false information being chucked around out there as well. Hopefully, this video clears up quite a few things.

The first issue is that a lot of people still use the term white hat, grey hat, black hat. Now, this terminology was taken from the hacking world and adopted for SEO reasons. It’s actually in Google’s best interest for us to use this terminology because it makes SEO sound like a risky, dangerous, almost illegal thing to be doing. Whereas if you actually use the hacking terminology and adapt it to SEO, the only thing that is black hat SEO is hacking someone’s website and embedding links into there for SEO reasons. Everything else is basically white hat, because you’re either getting permission from another webmaster to have a link on their site, or you’re making adaptations to your own website, all of which would be classed as white hat.

Rather than looking at whether you use a white hat SEO provider or a black hat SEO provider, actually have a look to see what techniques are being used. Even if you’re not buying links, you can still get affected by the Penguin Update. This isn’t an update about whether you are buying links or not buying links. This an update about how you’re trying to manipulate Google.

If your white hat SEO provider is currently just putting links into your site for commercial terms or even only putting 50% of the links in using commercial terms, let’s say we’re trying to rank for the term “penguin,” if half your links or more are saying penguin in them, then you’re going to get tripped up in this kind of filter because you’re seen as manipulating Google, even if those links were acquired through directories or through asking for links or through viral campaigns.

So, rather than looking at that, we need to look at the footprints that are going into your site. Quite a good case study for that is we have a client who works with a lot of seasonal campaigns. We were about to run one at the beginning of this year for an event, which they sell products for. A competitor SEO agency in the UK works with one of their big competitors, one of the big competitors of our client. We were basically monitoring to see what that other SEO agency was doing. Three months before the seasonal campaign needed to launch, they started building links into their client’s website using the commercial anchor text, so people putting links in saying penguin, penguin, penguin, going into those client pages. Whereas, we went with a different tactic.

We actually changed the way that we do SEO in terms of off-page SEO about a year ago, predicting that this kind of update would get rolled out. With our clients now, as long as the on-page is optimized properly and there are a few links going in using commercial terms, then we basically just build up the authority and the trust of our client website.

It sounds like kind of a lame idea, and it goes against traditional ideas of SEO, but it does actually work ever since this update rolled out. So, whilst we were starting to go up and up and up in the rankings, eventually hitting number one place for the biggest term for this seasonal campaign, we noticed our competitor going down and down and down.

There are even complaining on Twitter that Google might be broken, there’s an algorithm issue, just because they didn’t understand why putting loads of anchor text with commercial terms going into the client’s site wasn’t working. It’s basically because Google has been working towards this kind of thing for quite a long time.

So, have a look at your anchor text ratios. Go to Open Site Explorer, type in your website, click on the anchor text link, and that will order it by, I think, group linking domains. You can actually see what links are most used on each URL of your website. If your commercial terms are quite near the top, let’s say in the top 10, then you need to really work at getting better links going into your site and maybe even taking down some of the links, which are overly optimized. This is basically their step towards an over-optimization penalty.

There’s another thing, which is content providers, who as soon as the Penguin Update rolled out, we got a barrage of emails from all of these people saying, “We can fix Penguin by building lots and lots of more pages of content for your site.” These would actually negatively affect you, because one of the things that Penguin’s trying to do is further penalize the production of crap content.

Rather than paying thousands and thousands a month to have 200-words news articles put onto your website, get rid of those if they’re not actually bringing any traffic in. Look at actually creating a good quality resource of information on your website to become the authority in your industry. A few pages of great content is a lot better than just hammering Google with loads of news articles.

The big thing is there’s no quick fix. If you get an email from a company saying that, “We can fix all your Penguin issues,” it’s likely not to be the case, especially if it’s like a $35 fix. You just basically need to build a better campaign for your website. Look at taking down content which might not be unique or useful information. Get rid of some of that from your website if it’s not driving any traffic directly to it.

Also, look at just making your website look as natural as possible. Build authority into the pages that you want to rank, but don’t start over- optimizing on the anchor text. If you start doing that, not only will it fix Penguin issues, but it will also help you to rise up in the rankings. Thank you very much, and that’s about it.

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