Tag: small business marketing strategy

Categories
Networking

Why You MUST Attend Events to Grow Your Biz

Look, I get it. Attending events can be a big deal. There’s travel costs, time away from work, time away from the family, etc. etc.

So why on earth should you bother? After all, between social networking and the telephone, you can meet all the people you want, right? And with all the classes and programs out there, you can get all the learning you need without leaving your house too. Right?

Well that’s not exactly true.

You see, going to events is a lot bigger than the networking and the learning. I would go as far to say something magical happens when you start going to events. Here are 3 reasons why you MUST make attending events a part of your marketing tool kit.

1. Gets you out of your “day to day” rut. It happens to the best of us. Between your huge to-do list and your commitments to your family, community, life etc., you have a lot going on. And sometimes it’s all you can do to focus on the next thing you have to get done.

The problem is when you’re in that mode (and trust me, I’ve been in that mode many times before) you can’t see the forest for the trees. You’re focused on the details, not the big picture. And when you get in that mindset, it’s really easy to miss something — maybe it’s a big opportunity, maybe it’s a problem waiting to explode in your face.

Going to an event means a break in your routine. It gives you a chance to breathe, to see things you might not have seen when all those to-dos are staring you in the face. It can give you a perspective you never had. You could end up with an idea that could transform your business, add an additional income stream or stop a problem in the bud that could cost you thousands in money, time, energy and aggravation.

2. Keeps you from feeling lonely. There’s no question about it — being an entrepreneur can be lonely. Chances are your friends, neighbors and family really don’t “get” what you do to make money, much less what it means to be an entrepreneur — the responsibilities you have and the decisions you need to make. Who do you use for a sounding board? Who do you talk to when something goes wrong — maybe your web site goes down during a crucial launch or your assistant sends the wrong email to the wrong list and causes all sorts of confusion and complications. Your friends and family probably don’t even understand the problem much less be able to give you any sort of help solving it.

But your entrepreneurial friends “get it.” They know EXACTLY what you’re going through because they’re living it too. And it can be such a relief to be surrounded by your “tribe” (not to mention having the opportunity to brainstorm and bounce ideas off of other successful entrepreneurs to see what “pops” for your business.)

3. Gets you in front of people you would never be able to reach any other way. Are there people you’d love to connect with but think they’re so “big” you’ll never get their attention? People like Alex Mandossian or Ali Brown? Well, I can tell you from experience it’s a heck of lot easier to connect with thought leaders at an event then it is to try to get them on the phone or through social networking. (And yes, one of the reasons why I got both of them as a client was I first met them at an event.) Over the years I’ve met nearly all my clients in person, and that has really helped me develop deeper relationships with them. And that doesn’t even count all the joint ventures or other opportunities that have come up because I met great people in person at events.

I really believe one of the reasons why my business started taking off is because I started attending events several years ago. Events can be a great way to boost your business, especially if you know how to approach them. I’ll cover some tips on getting the most out of your event attendance next week.

Categories
Business Ideas

3 Secrets to Succeeding Online with Your Business

Succeeding online is easy, right? Just throw up a sales page, drop in some “buy now” links and sit back and watch your bank account grow.

Well, if you’ve been in business any length of time, you already know it doesn’t work like that. (No matter what “promises” or “hype” you might have seen.) It’s never that easy. But there’s no question it IS possible. (My client list is proof of that.)

So how DO you succeed online? Well let me share 3 secrets to get you started.

1. Know what you’re highest payoff activities are. The successful entrepreneurs I’ve worked with know exactly what they should be focusing on each day. They know what they’re strengths are and what’s going to bring in the most money. That’s what I mean by highest pay-off activities. They know what’s going to bring them the biggest bang for the least amount of time.

So how do you figure out what your highest pay-off activities are? Start by making a list of your strengths and weaknesses.

Now look at your strengths. Out of those skills, what brings you the most money in the shortest amount of time possible? What you might want to do is make a list of activities and evaluate how much money you make versus time spent, then you’ll have a better idea what bring you the biggest bang for the least amount of time.

2. They DO their highest pay-off activities. Ah, yes. It’s not enough to actually know them, you need to actually DO them. And, better yet, you should organize your day around your highest-payoff activities. That way, you know you’re spending as much time as possible on your highest pay-off activities.

3. They delegate out or delete their weaknesses. Without a doubt, the successful entrepreneurs I know spend little to no time trying to “strengthen weaknesses.” What they typically spend their time doing is strengthening their strengths and outsourcing (or just plain dumping) their weaknesses.

Why do they do that? Because they make more money when they spend most of their time doing their highest pay-off activities. And they can’t spend their time doing their highest pay-off activities if they’re busy strengthening their weakness or doing low pay-off activities. We all only have 24 hours a day, so you need to know how best to use that time so you can become the biggest success possible.

Now, you may have noticed these aren’t specific for the Internet, these are general success strategies. I did that on purpose — if you master success habits that work online, you’ll master success habits that will work in pretty much any other situation. Next time I’ll share specific tips you can use online to be successful.

Categories
Sales & Marketing

What Information Products Can Do For Your Business

After spending the past few issues talking about mistakes entrepreneurs make creating and selling information products, I thought maybe it was time to talk about why you want to bother with this whole mess to begin with.

Well, let me give you 5 reasons why you want to add information products to your business:

1. An additional income stream. If you’re just making money selling your services, adding information products gives you a passive or leveraged income stream. It also can help stabilize your cash flow. If you’ve been in business for a few years, you notice there’s an ebb and flow to sales — offering a variety of packages, products, services, etc. helps minimize those cash flow “ebbs.”

2. Options for your prospects. If the only way your prospects can invest with you if through your services, you’re limiting yourself. Some people aren’t going to want to invest in your services — either it’s not right for them now or not right for them at all. But an information product may be exactly what they want. However, if you don’t have one to offer, you’ll lose the sale.

3. A way for your prospects to “try” your services. Sometimes your ideal clients need to “test you out” before they invest in your full services. An information product lets them do that — they can go through your product and if they decide they like what they see, they’ll take the next step with you.

4. Options for marketing. If you have information products, it opens up doors for you. You can sell your information products on teleclasses, you can sell them at the back of the room for live events, you may even find other opportunities falling into your lap. It’s amazing how much you can expand your marketing once you have an info product to sell.

5. A way to uplevel your entire marketing. If you have information products you can do things like have a product launch (or relaunch) or a sale. And every time you do a launch or a sale, not only do you have the opportunity to make money right then from that product, but you’ll also gain visibility, grow your list, and probably sell your other products and services as well. Best yet, the more launches you do, the more you’ll see your overall business grow.

Info products can be a great addition to the other programs and services your business offers. But, remember, none of the above 5 things just “happen” — you still need to take the time to properly market and create them. They’re not a magic bullet but over time, they CAN transform your business.

Categories
Sales & Marketing

3 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When They Start to Sell Information Products

Recently, I wrote about the big mistakes entrepreneurs make when they create information products.  Unfortunately, there are more mistakes to avoid when starting to sell them!  Here are the biggest 3:

1. Your expectations are out of whack with reality. I once had a self development consultant tell me he wanted to sell a million dollars of his $497 product in one year. So I ran the numbers for him on what he would have to do to get that. He got very, very quiet.

Look, I’m all about thinking big. I’ve thought big my entire life. But if you want to do more than simply think big and actually accomplish big things, you need to understand what it takes to get there.

Let me give you a quick example. Let’s say you want to sell one information product a day off your web site. If you have a 1% conversion rate on your sales letter (and that’s not a walk in the park to do, but we’ll start there because the math is easy) that means one out of every 100 people are going to buy your product. To sell one a day, means you need 100 people looking at your sales letter a day. (Note, I don’t mean 100 people looking at your web site a day, I mean 100 people looking at that sales letter a day.) That means you need to get 3,000 visitors to that page a month. And if you’re not getting 3,000 visitors a month, you probably won’t sell an information product a day.

So let’s say you’re this entrepreneur. You just finished your product, you wrote the sales letter and stuck it up on your site and are now sitting back and waiting for the sales to pour in. And instead of getting one sale a day, you’re lucky to get a sale a month. Or every 6 months.

And when this happens, you’re probably feeling very frustrated and discouraged. But you shouldn’t be. Because if you understood how the numbers worked, you would know what was realistic and you would ALSO know what you needed to do in order to sell one a day. (Note, for more information about this, check out my “Why Isn’t My Web Site Making Me Any Money?” product —

http://www.michelepw.com/10easysteps.html)

The problem I’ve found is entrepreneurs create their first info product sure this is their ticket to easy wealth. Then, when the days, weeks and months go by and it doesn’t sell, they get frustrated and give up. And giving up is the REAL problem. Not the lack of sales. (Lack of sales CAN be fixed.)

2. You don’t spent the time and energy selling it as you did creating the product. Sending a couple emails to your list is NOT putting a lot of time and energy into selling your product. Or, worse yet, throwing up a sales page and expecting people to flock to it and buy is also not putting enough time and energy into selling it.

Products are great, don’t get me wrong. And while they can be passive income, what they mostly are is leveraged income. Making sales every day from your site is NOT magic. Nor is it an accident. It’s a combination of doing the right marketing tasks to drive warm visitors to your site, collecting their contact information, and starting a relationship with them with an ezine or some other communications. It’s about doing visibility activities. It’s about doing product launches to up your visibility and take your marketing to another level.

When you do all these things, you find your overall sales go up. And when you promote a product specifically, sales spike further.

3. You give up. I can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs I run into who have unrealistic expectations about selling their product, and then do little to no promoting or marketing of their product, and then give up because they don’t sell any. They incorrectly assume there’s a problem with their business, their clients, the product, themselves, etc., when it’s a problem with their marketing.

Before you decide there’s something more drastically wrong, make sure you understand the numbers and the marketing. Only then can you make a determination if there’s a deeper problem then simply bad marketing.

Categories
Planning & Management

4 Simple Steps for Creating Your Strategic Marketing Action Plan (MAP)

Your strategic Marketing Action Plan (MAP) is a document that is used to plan your day-to-day marketing activities/strategies for running your online business; in other words it’s your MAP to online business management success. And just like a real map, your MAP tells you exactly how to get from point A to point B and the route you need to take in order to get there.

When you have your MAP in place it eliminates the guess work – you always know what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, and how you’re going to implement the strategies.

Creating a Marketing Action Plan can seem very daunting if you’ve not done this kind of detailed planning before; it can be difficult to know where to start.  My favorite tool for creating my strategic MAP is a spreadsheet because of the row/column formatting that spreadsheets use.

Today I’d like to make that process easy for you and share with you my insider secrets so that you can create your own MAP.

1. Heart of your business – your MAP is not a document that you create, look at once, and then set aside to review in a year’s time.  Like a real map you continually refer to (typically on a weekly basis) so that you know you’re going in the right direction. And if you do sway off course a little, maybe for a pit stop along the way, you can easily update it as necessary.

Your MAP will provide you with your ‘Big Picture’ route for the year.  You’ll want to keep it handy so that you can refer to it often, whether you print it out and keep it on your desk, or have easy access to it on your PC.

2. Chunk it down – the easiest and simplest way for you to manage your MAP is to break it down into doable action steps, so that you don’t feel overwhelmed by feeling you have to plan out your entire route in one go. You’re going on a journey and as such there might be detours along the way. I highly advise you to chunk down your MAP, first into quarters, then into months, and then into weeks.

3. See any overlaps/conflicts – as you’ve been planning out your marketing activities for the upcoming year, having it all together in one place will allow you to see any overlaps or conflicts in your plan.  Similarly it will also allow you to see any gaps too.

4. Automatically creates your weekly/monthly To Do list – this is one of my favorite aspects of creating my MAP because when I chunk everything down into quarters/months/weeks I find that I create my weekly action list.  And it’s so much easier to be able to just focus on that week’s action steps and so implement them.

Some points to remember as you’re putting together your marketing plan:

  • Seeding in ezine/networks – as soon as you’re clear on what programs/products/services you’re going to be offering and when, start mentioning them in your newsletter and to your social networks.  You don’t need to give a whole lot of detail – simply say that you’re working on something new, or an exciting project etc.  and this will start to create interest in your offerings.
  • Marketing – plan out when you’re going to be opening registrations and when you’re going to be running promotions.  This is important so that you don’t have any overlaps in your promotions/activities.
  • Delivering – also plan out when you’re going to be delivering your programs too, again to avoid any overlaps/conflicts in your promotions and activities.
  • Team Members – know which team members you’re going to need support from to help you implement your goals, i.e. virtual assistant, graphic designer, web designer etc.  You may need to contact them several weeks in advance so plan this in too.
  • Dates – and finally it’s important to include all dates in your Marketing Action Plan so that nothing gets missed out.

As my financial adviser reminded me just last week, you’re running a marathon not a sprint, and the same is true for your business also. Follow these simple steps for creating your strategic Marketing Action Plan and you’ll soon find yourself on track for achieving your business goals.