Book & Product Reviews

Yesterday I shared with you the purpose of my website at Get International Clients:

• a live portfolio for the services I offer: culturally customized content strategy to create a a variety of communication tools at minimum cost.

And I also listed the projects I have underway for creating information products from the content on Get International Clients.

Companies can use the internet to effectively open international markets if they use the right strategy. An important part of this is an efficient foreign content creation strategy to be used within an effective international communication strategy.

So how can you create a good foreign content strategy?

Plan Your Content Creation

You need to plan the content you first put in. You need content you can easily re-purpose or re-package into different formats to be used in different channels. This gives your company maximum exposure with minimum investment in foreign content. It also gives you the means to find the best communication channel in your foreign market.

Here’s an example. If you have a 2-page newsletter written every month in a foreign language, you can re-purpose that same information into 4 emails, 4 blog posts, 4 podcasts, 1 Power Point presentation and 1 video.

There are well over 100 articles on Get International Clients. The Get International Clients Newsletter has also been published for 3 months so there are over a dozen feature articles there. Lots of content to begin a regular program to re-package and re-purpose the content.

I planned for future information products right from the start. It was not easy. I spent just as much time planning the content strategy as writing the articles. It’s a big project.

How Ed Rivis’ Blog Planner Gives Me Better Content Management

One of the tools I rely on is Ed Rivis’ Blog Planner.When I started my two blogs 5 months ago I bought Ed Rivis’ Ultimate Guide To Highly Profitable Small Business Blogging DVD and Blog Planner.

About The DVD – The Ultimate Guide To Highly Profitable Small Business Blogging

If you have not started your blog yet, or only just started, or like me struggle to “get” the technical side of things, I highly recommend you get the DVD too.

I’m lucky, I did have help to start the blogs from a friend much more technically inclined than I am. So I did not use Ed’s video to actually start my blogs, but it really helped me to actually “get” it. I now do everything myself and thanks to Ed’s DVD know I could easily set up everything myself next time around.

About The Blog Planner – Poster And Booklet

It is the other part of Ed’s product that I use daily and really like: the Blog Planner.

The little booklet is full of details, tips, and ideas on how to manage your blog. I’ve added to it with other ideas I’ve collected elsewhere. My revised version has become the source inspiration for my content creation.

The poster is to the right of my two computer screens. It is basically a calendar with space to write down the blog post topic for each day as well as a square to check off if you have completed it. There is also a mind map on the bottom with the essential ingredients outlined in the booklet.

I use this poster to manage the content for both this blog, the Get International Clients blog and also my French content.

Why The Blog Planner Is A Great Tool

Well, it’s true. It’s only a poster. And it is easy to manage blog content on your computer.

But I struggled to get things right. I tried keeping all of the management of the content creation on the computer. The thing that finally made it tilt for me was the Blog Planner. The Blog Planner gives you an overall vision of all of the blogs activity. It was the missing ingredient. It saves me time, because I see everything all at once, in a way I can’t with anything digital.

My Tools To Manage Content Creation

This is what I now use:

• monthly mind maps – this helps creativity
• an excel file with a list of all of the articles -this helps planning the information product creation
• the Blog Planner – this helps to keep on schedule and provides a global vision of everything at all times

How I Use The Blog Planner

I write in the main topic for the Get International Clients blog on the poster. I put up a little round green dot sticker as soon as I have a Get International Clients article published. I use red dots for posts to this blog, purple for the Sunday Blog Carnival, orange for the posts here in French and yellow for the articles I publish on the French business directory.

They fit – maximum of three per day. I also put up the number of the weeks – a European habit – I use the numbers of weeks on my mind maps.Those dots are always in my line of vision. So I always know where I am, or rather how far behind I am.

I can see at a quick glance if my topics have been varied for the week or not. I would like to have variety of topics each week and am striving towards that. But recently I often get a series of articles up on the same subject because that is what I’m working on at the moment.

It was looking at the Blog Planner that I saw I wanted to do a Sunday Blog Carnival on Get International Clients, and a Sunday Book Review on this blog.

The space on my wall is limited, with one poster I can do all of that. It’s great!

Use Good Management Tools For Efficient Content Creation

Creating content with the purpose of re-packaging it into various information products on a regular basis, to be used in a monthly online strategy for international business development, requires both planning and inspiration.

These are the tools that have helped me get started on the right foot. If you have something else that works for you, I’d love to hear about it.

Here are some more Product Reviews:

• Ed Rivis’ Stats Faceslap
• Success Chef’s Marketing E.S.P.
• The Management Tools I Use For Content Created To Be Re-Packaged
• The Ultimate Desktop Copy Coach By Tony Flores
  
• Web Video University And International Marketing
  

Read the Book Reviews:

Communication For International Sales

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with communication for international sales:

• A Writer’s Guide To Powerful Paragraphs By Victor C. Pellegrino
• Content Rich By Jon Wuebben
• Get Content Get Customers by Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barrett
• Letting Go Of The Words – Writing Web Content That Works By Janice Redish
• Stories That Sell By Casey Hibbard
• The Culturally Customized Web Site By Nitish Singh And Arun Pereira
• The Magic Of Pre-Writing By Steven Osborne
• The Secret To Writing A Successful And Outstanding Blog By Liz Strauss

International Sales

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with international sales:

• All of the Little Sales Books by Jeffrey Gitomer
• Asinine Advertising By Herschell Gordon Lewis
• Influencer: The Power To Change Anything by Kerry Patterson – Joseph Grenny – David Maxfield – Ron McMillian & Al Switzler

International Web Marketing

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with international web marketing:

• Bit Literacy Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload By Mark Hurst
• Dotcomology The Science Of Making Money Online By Stone Evans
• How The Internet Works By Preston Gralla
• How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders By Catherine Seda
• Landing Page Optimization By Tim Ash
• Mastering Online Marketing By Mitch Meyerson
• Multichannel Marketing By Akin Arikan
• Online Competitive Intelligence By Helen P. Burwell
• ProBlogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett
• Stats Faceslap By Ed Rivis
• The Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy By Ed Rivis
• Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

All of the book and product reviews here are totally unsolicited… spontaneous …and without affiliate links. These are books I have read recently and only the ones that I share with friends. So all of the reviews you find here are on books and products that I highly recommend.

Also, as these are books and products that I have recently read since, this is not a list of my all-time favorite books. Hopefully I will get around to reviewing my favorite culture and international business books sometime soon.

Use these skills in your international tactics on the…
Get International Clients International Sales Road Map:

Guide To Multichannel Marketing • Do you know how to communicate with different countries? This guide shows you how

Guide To International Web Marketing • Do you know how to pull all of your different international marketing pieces together? This guide shows you how

Step 5 – Connect With Your International Markets Connect… • With culture customized content • With trust and empathy • With strong cross-cultural communication

International Business Success Basics • Do you feel at a loss with regards to dealing with international business? This guide gives you the background information you need right from the start.

Copyright Cindy King 2006-2010 - International Business Blog

The Management Tools I Use For Content Created To Be Re-Packaged