• Status Update
• Link in Your Blog and Slideshare
• Join Some Groups
• Answer Questions
• Connect Frequently
• But Recommend Only People You Can Vouch For
• Schedule Some Time
• Invite People

John Jantsch guest blogged for Chris and wrote about referrals.

When it comes to getting a significant amount of business by way of referral some companies are better at it. It’s not that they have implemented a better process for asking clients and partners to refer them, it’s that they are simply more referable.

In the business of referrals, trust is the most important reason a recommendation is made and, conversely, lack of trust the single greatest reason referrals don’t happen. There are countless ways that companies build and break trust with their customers, but most can be summed up with the term ‚”honesty.”

Here’s something your customers won’t ever tell you but that you had better understand: Your employees probably treat your customers about the same way you treat your employees. Let that soak that in for a minute.

Read the full article, “What’s Your Referability Factor?“

The other day, I saw a post from another website designer in the WordPress LinkedIn group asking for website hosting recommendations. Everybody and their cousin has a hosting recommendation, but I thought my answer was a little more helpful than many of the others, so I posted a comment. I didn’t just say, “I like hosting company XYZ.” but I took an extra 10 minutes and wrote up what I thought was a more insightful suggestion, complete with links and examples of companies I liked and had worked with. Because this isn’t the first time I’ve had this question (or this answer), I had already written up a How To post (complete with tutorial video) on my own website (Using Google Apps email for you@yourdomain.com) on how to do what I was recommending.

So later in the comments, Rob writes some thank you’s to people who commented. Here they are. I’ve bolded his response to me.

@Lucian, thank you for your vote for JustHost

@David, thank you for your input

@Stephane, thanks for your thoughts on shared hosting

@Bradley, yes, I’ve never bumped into anyone else on Surpass either. I’ve found them to be getting a little worse in the last few months – packing their shared servers with accounts in order to maximise profits.

Thank you for clarifying this whole Google Apps for mail issue. I didn’t realise you could use Google’s vast resources for your own personal you@your-domain.com mail address. That’s awesome! This actually slightly negates my need to move as mail was the #1 gripe with Surpass and literally took me hours to sort out. I watched your entertaining movie a couple of times.

@Paul thanks for your UK based recommendation

@Justin, thank you, you may well have saved me a few dollars there. You’re a star!

@Kevin, thanks, another one for Hostgator

People, I may well write a blog post on the back of this discussion as I think I’ve got some really good opinions and recommendations from some seasoned WordPress pros. Would that be OK?

You’ll see he carefully read through the comments and even went to my site and watched the video. Great, sounds like I helped him out. Of course, he is also helping me out by mentioning my helpful post and video on my site so others might come and see it.

So you ask, “That’s all delightful, but how does it help your business?”

For one, I see the website design business as cooperative rather than competitive. So this helps someone in my industry, my industry is stronger for it. But how it directly helps me are the hits/clicks to my site and the traffic that might follow. Maybe someone else reads this same post and thinks that my post is worth linking to from their site, maybe they Digg it or Tweet it or just mention it elsewhere on the web. These are all links to my site, they’re called backlinks. Backlinks are good. Backlinks are very important. But I’m getting a little technical. The bottom line is that I helped someone using my expertise and didn’t go unnoticed.

More on the topic:

• Can’t cc yourself with Gmail/POP
• Try “Recent Mode” to maybe get those CC’d emails
• Gmail Help Discussion: Send email to Self

Quick testimonial: Gil offered his services valued at $500 as a donation. That client eventually turned into a $3,000 paying client. ‘Nuff said.

Thank you so much to all of those who took my auction forms this morning! I only had 16 seconds this morning to explain this auction, so here’s just a bit more about it – including a letter below that explains it all in more detail and a donor form (download PDF) that you can fill out and fax in (Rooftop Fax: (415) 695-5429).

I think this would be a great way to advertise your business/services to a group of 600+ families who are looking to spend money because they know it’s going to a good cause (our school). Remember, you don’t send money, just offer a product or service. It’s also fully tax deductible.

What To Do

So here’s how you can help-and help your business, I’m going to use Mischa as an example:

1. Fill out the attached form with the service you’re offering. [E.g. "Family photo session. $500"] Fill out my son’s name (Liam Charbonneau) as the student and mine as the solicitor (Bradley Charbonneau).
2. Fax it in: Rooftop Fax: (415) 695-5429
3. Mischa’s service, because it’s value is $500+, will receive a quarter page ad in the Rooftop Auction Catalog. Rooftop families and friends will all receive this catalog. It’ll also be listed on their auction website: http://www.rooftopauction.org.
4. At the auction, families will bid on Mischa’s family photo session. Maybe it goes for $300, maybe it goes for $900, who knows. They’ll then have a voucher that they can use for the session with Mischa. There’s a chance no one buys the service or that someone buys it and never redeems it. That’s OK, Rooftop will still get the money spent.
5. Mischa provides the service, hopefully has a new client, and when everyone at Rooftop hears of what a great photo session he did, he might have more clients.
6. Big thank you from Liam, my 6-year old !

If You’d Like to Come to the Event

Finally, it’s a really fun event if you’d like to come. Great products and services available (as well as art) and again, all for a good cause! Last year (for a friend’s school), I bought massage gift certificates for my wife, car wash gift certificates (guess that was for me … ), and got outbid on a two-night stay in some hotel in Napa.

Rooftop Auction
The Hall of Flowers
March 20, 2010
5:00-10:00pm
Lincoln Way & 9th Ave
San Francisco, CA 94122
Map: http://tinyurl.com/7schzm

——————–

Here’s the letter from Rooftop:

Dear Community Friend,

I would like to introduce myself as the parent of a child who attends Rooftop School in San Francisco. Rooftop is a K-8 public, alternative elementary/middle school located in Twin Peaks, in the heart of San Francisco. Each year Rooftop’s Parent and Teacher Association (PTA) hosts an Auction to raise money to fund programs that make our school special, such as the library, garden, science, sensory motor and art.

I am writing to you on behalf of all the Rooftop children to help us with our biggest annual fundraiser by donating a gift certificate and/or merchandise that will be sold to the highest bidder during the Auction on March 20, 2010.

These are difficult times for all schools, and with huge state budget cuts our children’s educational system needs even more help.  Your support at this time is greatly appreciated.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and consider making a donation from your establishment. Attached you will find the Donor Form; please complete the form (keep a copy for you records) and return with your donation. If you prefer, we can make a gift certificate for you (just indicate this on the form).

If you would like more information about Rooftop School and the wonderfully positive and creative learning environment we provide, please visit our website at www.rooftopk8.org.

The Staff and Children of Rooftop thank you in advance for your support!

Mailman (usually provided for free with a cPanel backend control panel on Unix hosting) does a good job with mailing lists. This is one-to-all email, not necessarily a newsletter that everyone in the group can use. Pretty simple software, but it works well.

Here’s a quick video showing how to add a new member to a list or remover an existing member from a list. Click image to left to view video.

FAQ about our mailing lists

Q: If I send an email to a list from my personal email (ilovekittycats@yahoo.com), will it go to the list?
A: No. That would then let anyone (joespammer@yahoo.com) to email us all also.

Q: So what if I want to send from my personal email address?
A: Send Bradley an email with the personal address you’d like to use and I’ll put it on the “white list.”

Overview of the dashboard stats and then deeper statistics provided by the wordpress.com stats plugin. Quickly go over the different areas of the stats (Referrers, Top Posts & Pages, Search Engine Terms, Clicks, and Incoming Links) and then a bit of analysis of the keywords. Finally, a very brief example of how to put those keywords to use in a particular post using the All-in-One SEO plugin.

Then I stumbled on Carbonite, compared it to the competition, test-drove a few of them, and I’m done, it’s settled, I’m backed up online, all the time, no worries, no hassles, no baby pictures lost to the cyber vacuum.

Click the link on the left to get Carbonite for your files.