If you love gaming as much as I do, then you’re probably looking for ways to justify your time dedicated to pillaging villages and completing epic quests. Well fear not, my game loving friends, there actually happen to be extremely beneficial lessons to be learned from the online realms of adventure.

The spirit behind most multiplayer online games is in community. The more you interact with each other, the richer your experience with the game is. Through my time spent in these alternate worlds, I’ve discovered a few key correlations that can be applied to the business world. So if you’re ready to level up your Intelligence, read on…

Lesson #1: Be Where The People Are
Often times in games you need the help of others for a variety of reasons. You might need an item they have, help finishing a quest, or guidance in finding a particular location. In all these instances, you have a greater chance of connecting with someone who can help if you are in one of the major cities, simply because that’s where the greatest number of people are. In real life, when you want to make connections with like-minded individuals, you need to be where they are. In the social media realm, those “cities” are places like Twitter or Facebook. Where are your people? Do some research and find out where your peers and customers are. That’s where you need to be making connections.

Lesson #2: Have a Quest or Mission Others Can Get Behind
Once you’ve found where you should be most visible, you need to give people a reason to befriend you. In gaming, it’s usually an invitation to join in a battle to the death over the destiny of the online world. In real life, your mission may not be quite as epic, but it should still be something that inspires and motivates. What is your quest? What is it that you are trying to achieve? Use that as your base and find creative ways to spread your message so you’ll pick up helpers and followers.

Lesson #3: Reward People for Networking with You
Loot is a powerful motivator in online games. Everyone wants their just rewards for helping out. In real life, it’s not much different. People want to know that you appreciate their efforts and gifts of time. Make sure to leave no doubt of your gratitude. The more you can give back and reward contributors, the closer your connection will be with them. They’ll also consider you a valuable ally for future business adventures.

Lesson #4: Keep In Frequent Contact
When you’re faced with the possibility of connecting with over eleven million players, it’s easy to forget about someone. If you’ve made a valuable connection, keep the momentum going with frequent communication. Drop a line to see how they are doing, take them out to lunch, or connect with a quick chat or message via Twitter or Facebook. If you stay on a person’s radar, you’ll never be far from their mind.

Lesson #5: Join or Create a Guild (Tribe)
When you find people you want to connect with on a daily basis, or when you’re looking for a group to help you level up and complete quests, you usually join a guild. The guild then becomes your online family, the place you go for help and friendly banter. In the real world, finding a like-minded group or tribe is essential to growing and getting support in your field of choice. Now that online communities are so prevalent, it’s even easier to find a group willing to accept you into their fold. With the right group, you’ll find an amazing support system ready and able to help you achieve your goals of a true epic destiny.

While the online world is a great break from the stresses of your daily life, nothing quite compares to the feeling of real life achievement. If you use these tips, you may find the adventure of your real life even more rewarding then your latest online achievement.

Do you have a passion for gaming? In what ways has gaming helped or hindered your business goals?

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In an ideal world, competition with others wouldn’t exist. People would realize that everyone benefits when more people are interested in a subject. It would be common knowledge that focusing on creating a new way of approaching a subject is much more rewarding than spending your days trying to sabotage another’s efforts. Unfortunately, this is not an ideal world.

Competition is something we all face. In business, it can be something we have to confront on a frequent basis. Not much can dampen your spirits like finding out your competitor is engaging in actions that could potentially cause you a loss in business. When you’re giving your everything to pursue your dreams, it can be incredibly easy to lose focus and fall into the trap of trying squelch the competition at all costs.

This is probably one of the most detrimental actions you can take. In any endeavor you pursue, any time you put your attention on negative behaviors you end up hurting yourself. There is a common belief that I have found to be true in all aspects of life from business to personal.

“Whatever we put our attention on will grow stronger in our life.”
–Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

If you allow yourself to get caught up in other people’s affairs, you are taking time, energy and momentum away from your actual business. Instead of doing actions that will move your business forward, when you fall into the “competition zone,” you end up leaving your business at a stand still. How? If you’re focused on someone else’s affairs, you certainly aren’t giving 100% to your own.

As a business owner, I realize this outlook can be tremendously difficult to have at times. It’s not hard to fall into the trap when someone is price cutting you or knowingly trying to sabotage your efforts. You may not have experienced it yet, but as you succeed you’re going to run into it at some point. Someone is going to do something that will make you want to fall victim to the competition trap. When it does, keep these tips in mind for staying focused on your own affairs:

Confirm the facts
Often, rumors are started from someone who didn’t get all the facts straight or someone who enjoys the attention spreading gossip gets. Before reacting, always take a step back and verify what’s going on. Most times, I’ve found things to be a giant misunderstanding and saved myself a lot of aggravation by just confronting the source directly.

Acknowledge your feelings
While you certainly don’t want to obsess on an issue, you do need to acknowledge what you’re feeling. When faced with an upset like this, give yourself some cool down space so you can come back to the problem later and look at it objectively.

Keep it private
In most cases, you’re going to want to talk about whats going on. When you do, make sure you are venting to people who know you’re just venting. Do it privately, and never in front of potential customers or media. Gossip has a nasty habit of getting back to the person it’s about, and you never want to intentionally give your competitors a reason to feel justified for doing something unethical.

Everyone has a right to pursue their dream
Let’s face it, you’re not the only person in the world that can do what you do. In fact you’re probably not even the best. You do what you do because you believe in it and feel passionate about it. Everyone deserves this right, even if it happens to be in your industry. If they’ve done something more clever or interesting, treat the situation as a challenge instead of a threat. No matter where you are or what you’re doing, someone will always be up and coming. Don’t let yourself get complacent or feel entitled.

Focus on the positive
You excel at something your competition does not. Remember that and keep perfecting that differentiator. Sometimes competition can be a good thing. It gets you up and moving and doing things you probably should have been doing from the beginning. Use this as a sign that it’s time to refocus and apply what you know works or even branch out into some new areas you’ve been reluctant to venture into.

Keep your own house in order
The competition can’t knowingly affect you if you’re not actively looking for it. It’s good to know what’s going on around you, but after that it makes sense to forget about them and focus on your own affairs. Remember – whatever you give attention to will grow. Value what you spend your time thinking about. Picture your thoughts as your mental real estate. What thoughts will yield you the best return on investment?

Do you have a specific way of dealing with competition? Share your story or solutions!

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I pride myself on being somewhat well versed on sales techniques. My very first job was in sales, and it’s been a constant part of everything I’ve done since, whether it has been selling an actual product, selling advice or even selling an experience. During this journey, the first thing I learned in sales was a technique referred to as call to action. Most anyone who has learned about sales or marketing should be familiar with this term. If not, here’s a simple a explanation… it’s what you to do ask for the sale. In some cases it may not be an actual sale, but rather whatever the next action you want the person to take. That action is your “sale” or target goal. Some examples:

• Buy Now…
• Checkout Here…
• Add to Cart…
• Call 1-800-BUY-HERE…
• Click Here…

Like I said, I’m well versed in sales and most sales techniques. I’ve known about call to action since I was eighteen. However, even with all this experience and know-how, after looking over some of my marketing materials, I realized even I’m not using it as well as I should. In fact, in some places, I’m not even using it all! Once I recovered from my horror, I began focusing on ways I could improve this. I came to the conclusion that if someone who has been trained in this area isn’t using the technique as well as they could be, chances are there are others that could also use a few pointers or reminders about making use of this tool. So, here are a few tips concerning the call to action:

Call to Action is Relevant No Matter What You’re Doing
When it comes to product sales and eCommerce, it’s a little more obvious where and how calls to action occur. However, in the world of blogging, it may not be as obvious. Call to actions range from asking for comments to getting people to fan or follow your social media pages. You may not even realize you’re using it for your personal life as well. Whether you’re setting up a lunch date or deciding what to do for dinner, the call to action is a crucial element to getting things done.

Forgetting To Ask Is Losing You Time & Money
If you don’t ask for what you want, chances are you’re not going to get it. This is true for every aspect of your life from business to personal. The more clear and direct you are about what the “next step” is, the higher the chance you’ll actually get there. In business, forgetting to ask for the sale or next action leaves you open to wasted time and loss of money, because you’re not leading your customer to where you want them to be. You have to double up your efforts to go back, get them interested again and then lead them to an eventual sale. If in doubt, always ask. The worst they can say is no.

Know What You Want Your Customer To Do Next
Obviously, asking for a sale or action only works if you know what action you want them to take. It’s important to consider that a person can really only focus on one thing at any given time. If you have multiple products, you’ll need to evaluate how to present them to your customers so they can hone in the one they need. This is where having a series of goals is beneficial. Come up with all the things you want a prospective customer to do when they visit your website, store, seminar, etc. Now pick the number one goal. That should be your main focus, and it should be where the main calls to action direct your customers. You can then set up secondary goals, each with their own separate calls to action in less obvious areas. It’s much easier to direct actions when you know exactly what those actions are and how important they are to your business.

Be Creative & Unique
Some calls to action will always remain essential, such as “buy now” and “click here.” However, there are quite a few ways you can make even these seem more unique and stand out. You could make large buttons, have arrows pointing to them, and use various text styles, sizes and colors. What’s really important here is not necessarily to be unique for the sake of being unique, but rather to infuse your style of branding and personality into the buying experience. If you want readers to give you more comments, ask thought-provoking or humorous questions at the end of your posts, or hold fun contests for people who comment. Want more email signups? Offer something you know your readers or customers would really benefit from for free in exchange for their email address. Need article submissions? This is another area where contests are a great motivator. People also really respond to humor and imagery, so if it makes sense with your branding and marketing, inject a little fun (or even sarcasm!) into the equation.

Make It Easy To Follow Through
Once you’ve put together your calls to action and placed them in the most responsive areas, you need to make sure it’s easy for your customer to finish the sale. Go through your sales experience and make sure you’re leading your customer all the way through the entire process. If any stage seems unclear or bulky, trim it down and offer clearer explanations. Never assume your customers know what to do.

Now that you’ve read this, examine at your business. Are you utilizing calls to action as well as you could be? Are there calls to action you have in place that you didn’t even realize were there? Feel free to share your thoughts, ideas, and discoveries in the comments below! (See there? That was a call to action!)

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I’m going to share with you one of the biggest mistakes I made when creating my previous online magazine, Lovingyou.com. Hopefully, it will help keep you on track and save you some time and money in your own venture.

First, let’s start off with a little history…

Lovingyou.com started as a personal homepage in 1996. It was my “playground” of sorts. I’m fairly competitive with myself, so while it was “personal,” it was still built to succeed. Where I wanted it to succeed was in gaining traffic and having large amounts of interactivity within the site. I applied all of my previous marketing and sales knowledge to these goals. The entire site was built around social networking and user-generated content long before those were buzz words. It’s good marketing – it just makes sense to let people be able to contribute, but that’s a story for another day. These strategies obviously made great sense, because this is where my failure took root.

You need to build for growth.

While I certainly dreamed of overnight success, I didn’t foresee that my methods and strategies would actually work. I wasn’t prepared for success and certainly wasn’t looking at any long-term growth plans. In my mind, it was still a personal homepage with a million pageviews per month. Since it was never meant to be a profit generator, I sort of haphazardly approached growth and expansion. By the time I realized this was going to become our main business, we already had over 50,000 pages of content. Imagine redesigning a site with that much content by hand. It was a HUGE project.

Stay up to date technically.

At the time, there was no such thing as a content management system. Everything was done manually. We eventually automated certain sections of the site as we could afford it. If I could go back, I would have put every extra penny into the technical aspects of the site. The main hinderance here was I wasn’t as knowledgeable in those fields at the time. I didn’t really grasp what a content management system was, and honestly our site was so large (500,000 pages) by the time CMSs became mainstream that it was fairly unapproachable.

Don’t be afraid of hiring an “expert.”

We became quite clever in creating faster fixes for updates, but in all honesty, I should have looked for an expert in the area and let them find a better answer. This lack of foresight is still a problem for the site. I haven’t been involved with the project in the last two years, and quite a significant part of it is still created manually, including the front page.

So what’s the lesson? Anticipate for growth and plan for it!

You’re never going to know everything that’s in the future for your business, but you can put in steps to make growth and transitions easier. It really comes down to how scaleable your business is at any given moment. If the systems you have in place don’t allow you to grow easily and effortlessly, guess what? You’re going to plateau at some point. That doesn’t look too sexy on paper or your bank account.

A lot of people have an “I’ll deal with the problem when it comes up” attitude in an effort to conserve resources. What this attitude fails to take into consideration is that you may be saving immediate time and possibly money, but you’re certainly going to pay for it later, and at an inflated price. While this may be necessary in some situations, it’s best in my experience to try and avoid it as often as possible.

How flexible and ready for growth is your business?

• Take stock of what actions you do every day. Is there a way you can automate or streamline any of these tasks? Could you save time (which in turn saves money) by hiring someone else to do more menial tasks for you?
• What is your method of handling incoming sales, emails and contacts? Can you step away for a day or two and not have your system go completely into meltdown? Is it efficient and easy to find whatever you’re looking for?
• If you have staff, do you need to be there to answer every question? Is there a clear system for doing things in place? Have they been properly trained for it?
• Have you networked to find knowledgeable people in areas you are weak in? For you it may seem like a huge issue, for an expert in the industry it might take them five minutes to give you a solution.
• Planning ahead can shave off tons of frivolous time. It may take a few hours each week ahead of time, but knowing what you’re doing and when you’re doing it keeps you focused and on track during the week. When’s the best time for you to plan ahead?
• If you all of a sudden received a massive influx of traffic to your site, orders or contacts, would the systems you have in place handle them?

Take it from me, I could have done twice the work in half the time if I’d used these tips fourteen years ago. If you’re in a similar situation and need some advice, feel free to contact me and I’d be happy to share my ideas with you.

Now it’s your turn, what are you doing to get your business ready for growth?

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