Author Archive for Heike

The top 2 mistakes small business makes with their email marketing

By Heike

Friday, July 30th, 2010

We’ve all been told to send out email newsletter – colorful, stylish HTML email newsletters with lots of pictures – in the hope to gain more new customers and bond better with existing ones.

There is a big battle as to which mail system to use and what colors and fonts to choose, but many small businesses fail to recognize their deadly mistakes when they send out their newsletter week by week:

Email Marketing Mistake # 1:

A newsletter full of promotional offers. With “full” I mean 100%. Almost every day I receive a newsletter from differing sources with 100% promotions. Sometimes it leaves me quite annoyed that the sender of the newsletters and emails don’t even want to make an effort to talk to me rather than sell to me.

As a rule of thumb: effective email marketing includes 80% valuable content and 20% promotion, or you can sometimes stretch it to 70% content and 30% promotion, but that’s it. Many well known Email marketers, like Alexandria Brown, teach their clients this rule and their success has proven them right. It simply annoys me when I receive email newsletters that only contain promotions. When I subscribe to a newsletter I want to learn something, get value out of it. I give these companies my contact details so that they actually interrupt my day and send me a newsletter about THEMselves, so the least they can do is to offer you something of value for the courtesy.

In the past people may have subscribed to all sorts of newsletter, but nowadays it’s getting harder to compete with other companies who also want to build their list of prospects.

Always make sure that you include a personal note of yourself and what you are up to during this week. Some quirky personal messages have worked very well for many entrepreneurs. Ali Brown, self-made millionaire and former “ezine queen”, had a major breakthrough when she posted her cat’s “birthday sale”. People love personal stories and want to know more about the person who sends out the newsletter.

Always add one article to your newsletter (or ezine) that contains some valuable information. To find out what your target market wants, survey them or watch their questions on Social Media channels. If your readership finds the information you give them interesting, they will be keen to open your newsletters, otherwise they just press “delete” and off the email goes into the trash. Or even worse, they unsubscribe.

All this doesn’t only apply to Internet marketing companies, but also small businesses. If you don’t know what valuable content to provide, check out these ideas”

If you are an accountant, write about any GST changes,
if you are a coach give your readers good tips on how to set goals,
if you are a psychologist help your readers with body language tricks,
if you are a real estate salesperson write about homestaging,
if you are a webdesigner help people with the search engine optimization,
if you are a dentist tell your patients what happens when they don’t floss,
and so on.

20 to 30% of your email marketing should be used for marketing or promotional opportunity. Try to tie the promotion together with your content.

2. The second big Email Marketing mistake is:

to solely write content and articles in your newsletter, but no promotion at all. Sometimes you get email newsletters that are long, very long and full of information. After a few minutes you notice you have fallen asleep or you just click “delete”. There is a lot of content, but it’s just too much and the concentration levels of your readers will go down. Additionally, there is no “call to action”, so no reader will actually “do something” after they read your newsletter. They will just continue their day the way they did before reading your email.

You need to make sure you have a good offer for them that they can take up, otherwise you don’t make money with your newsletter. As mentioned before, don’t make it bigger than 20-30% of the newsletter content, but don’t forget about it either. It’s an integral part of your business to make money, so use the chance to convert her loyal readership to buy valuable programs or products from you. Nobody will mind if you add some promotions to your emails if there is also free, quality content available. This can also include affiliate marketing or recommendations.

Occasionally, you may send an email to your list that only offers them something specific and this is fine, but don’t make it a habit. Stick to the 80/20 rule most of the time and you will have a loyal fan base for the next years.

Categories : Email Marketing

Tags : affiliate marketing, Alexandria Brown, Ali Brown, customers, Email Marketing, email newsletter, ezine, ezine queen, Heike Miller, newsletter, promotion

If you are a small business, why bother having a blog and blogging?

By Heike

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

I hear it regularly at local networking meetings: why should a local business worry about blogging?

Most small business owners still believe that blogging is a) only for crazy online geeks with big glasses and b) won’t be of any use to small businesses that provide services or sell to mainly local markets.

Point a) I know many bloggers that are quite normal people who have families, go on holiday, drive normal cars, go to restaurants, have friends (yes, it is possible as an Internet geek to have real life friends!) and live a normal life, just like you. So don’t judge them on the stereotype (although I agree it’s funny).

Point b) In this post I would like to point out the advantages of blogging to YOUR business. You could be a real estate salesperson blogging about the market and newest listings, a coach blogging about midlife crisis, a consultant about tips on finding a new job or a cosmetic institute blogging about the latest eye shadow fashion.

The main thing about having a blog is to attract the right kind of people to your website or blog, the people who likely love what you have on offer – either your knowledge or your goods. You could have tons of people visiting your website, but if they are not targeted – people who are not in your target audience – you gain nothing from it, just a fleeting visitor who vanishes into thin air within two seconds.

If you are a dating coach and you regularly blog about dating tips, how to dress for a date, dating body language, dating psychology and so on, chances are that you will get the attention of single folks who are eager to read your newest advice – and eventually book an appointment for a consultation with you.

Chances also are that other businesses who have something to do with dating, for example men advice forums (like Askmen.com or similar) may find some gems in your post and link to you – bingo, and you have started to become more important in the online world and your blog or website will be ranked better due to this link. The more you have the better it is, but don’t fall for these weird emails from foreign people who ask you for a reciprocal link to their dodgy website that sells even more dodgy products. If the other website’s content has nothing to do with your content it won’t give you any advantage, the opposite can be the case. So beware.

When you have your own blog for your business make sure you research what your target market wants to know. Ask them when they come through the door of your shop or send them a survey (great free survey tool is http://www.surveymonkey.com) This tool has a weird name, but is used by many large companies as well as small ones.

If you are a fitness coach, the amount of topics about weight loss is sheer endless and you actually offer a kind of community service to blog about your fitness and diet advice. It would be crazy if you didn’t make use of a blog to show off your expert knowledge, build relationships with your readers and even offer your products or consultations occasionally. But be aware and don’t stuff your blog posts with constant “buy this” or “order that”.

A blog is there for information and relationship building in the first place. Remember you talk to people who look to you to find help with their problems. Once you have build relationships and you use an integrated marketing approach (including email marketing marketing and opt in reports and freebies) you will earn money with your knowledge and attract more clients who are keen to sign up with you.

If you get a blog from your webdesigner, make sure that it’s connect to social networks. There are many plugins (loosely translated as a connector) that help blog visitors to share your post with other people. If you mention “plugins”, your web developer will know what you are talking about…

If someone, for example, loves your post on how to loose weight without starving yourself, they can “retweet” it to their followers on Twitter. Twitter is a ultra popular Social Media tool that millions of people use daily. Many people keep the window of Twitter open throughout the day, always ready to read about something new or interesting. If your post gets re-submitted to a large group of people, chances are that other people will tell others about it, too, and you have quite a viral effect with your one post. Other people, who have never heard about you, will come to your blog or website and read what you have to say. And maybe even become your customers…

Another thing to ask your webdesigner for is the RSS feed to your blog. With this feed your loyal website visitors can sign up to receive all your future blog posts straight away after posting. There are different options on how they can receive them (in a reader or per email) and you can discuss this with your webdesigner). It is important to have this function so that you can start building relationships.

“Heike, I’m located in xxx and all my customers are locals. Why should I blog? I don’t need to get website visitors from the other side of the globe”, you may say now.

Becoming an authority in your field is a great thing, if you are recognized in Iceland, in the Seychelles or in your hometown, your website will get a better ranking when you have optimized your keywords that describe what you do, offer or write about. Your local people may well put in a search term, such as “Hamilton real estate”, into the search engine and if you have optimized your blog posts’ keywords, chances are your post will come up for the person to read.

Additionally, never really discard selling globally! I know it sounds scary, but it’s sometimes even easier than locally because there are so many people out there maybe looking for exactly your tools and knowledge while your locals might not even care. So don’t close your eyes to the opportunity, especially when you offer a service, such as coaching, consulting, training, etc. You’d be amazed how many people train with overseas institutes nowadays or buy wares from foreign countries. It might be time to open up your mind about the opportunities worldwide.

The Internet has made it possible for us to cross borders, communicate with people from around the globe and to sell and buy easily from other countries, so keep your mind open about this. If you would like to have more information on this, please send me an email.

Summing up, blogging is a great tool if you are a local business targeting local people just as much as global audiences. Be brave, try it and you will reap the rewards of getting a better website ranking, more targeted visitors to your blog, more inquiries and connections.

Categories : Blog, Web2.0, Wordpress

Tags : become an authority in your field, Blog, blog post, blog site, blogging, expert status, global marketing, keywords, links, local marketing, plugins, retweet, search engine, search ranking, small business, Target Market, Twitter, webdesigner, website site

To Turn More Prospects Into Paying Clients, You Must Motivate Them!

By Heike

Sunday, July 4th, 2010

Are you a coach? Then this article by Client Attraction specialist, Fabienne Fredrickson, is a MUST-READ:

When talking about their business, most solo-preneurs make the mistake of describing exactly what they do, in boring detail. “My company has been in business for X number of years and we use the newest technology systems. We use a complicated series of… blah blah blah.” Many coaches and consultants talk about coaching ad nauseam, “What is coaching, are you coachable, what is your coachability index, who is the coach, blah blah blah”.

I know, because I did it too in the beginning and it didn’t work.

Hate to say this, but… SO WHAT! Nobody cares!When I hear someone talk to their prospects this way, it sends up a big red flag for me: these people don’t really KNOW what they DO for clients and they’re losing potential clients every time they open their mouths and every time someone reads their materials! The problem is that they’re clearly not connected enough to their client base to see what real benefits they bring their clients.

There’s a saying that goes “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” And until you can tell someone what’s in it for THEM to work with you, they won’t pay attention to you or what you’re saying.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with you if you’ve been doing this, but it’s something that you’ll want to work on quickly so you don’t let any more ideal prospects slip through your fingers. It just takes asking yourself what you really DO for clients, what results and benefits you get for them and then to articulate that so that a prospective client looking for that solution will want to work with YOU.

Let’s look at exactly what your ideal prospects are motivated by: The Motivators. Below is a list of the top 10 reasons, results or benefits that make people buy, according to Jim Edwards and David Garfinkel in the ebook entitled “Ebook Secrets Exposed” www.EbookSecretsExposed.com that I read a bazillion years ago:

Here, according to them, are the most powerful motivators:

1. Make money

2. Save money

3. Save time

4. Avoid effort

5. Get more comfort

6. Achieve greater cleanliness

7. Attain fuller health

8. Escape physical pain

9. Gain praise

10. Be popular

Now, not every one of these fits your business, and most likely, yours fall into the top 4 motivators, unless you’re in healthcare or image, then it usually falls within the last 6. Either way, it’s time for you to narrow yours down into motivators from the Top Ten list above.

What’s so powerful about using “motivators” in your marketing is that you position yourself as their ultimate SOLUTION, the one they would do anything and pay relatively anything to get. When you can show prospects how you can help them achieve one of them, they’ll immediately pay more attention to you.

They’ll want more. You’ll PULL them in. They’ll call YOU, as opposed to you chasing THEM. It’s such a beautiful thing to watch when that begins happening in your business.

Your Assignment:

Circle the motivators that fit your business from the list above and then list an example of how this has already happened using real client examples. Then, sprinkle this throughout all your marketing materials, your elevator speech, your website, your signature talk, etc. You’ll have people coming out of the woodwork wanting to work with you and your 1ncome will increase dramatically, in a very short time.

You may not be sure where to start with your elevator speech, signature talk, website, and everything else you need to do, and that’s OK. I was there once too. The step-by-step Client Attraction Home Study SystemTM will show you everything you need to know. Not only do you get clear on what clients you should be targeting, how to create the marketing message that will have them WANT to work with you and seek you out, but exactly WHAT to do with your marketing time and HOW. It’s everything you need to know to fill your practice quickly; no matter how long you’ve been in business. All the tools, scripts, templates, and examples are handed to you on a silver platter. So, you do step one of the system, and when you’re done with that, you move on to step two, and so on. So easy. That’s why my customers have gotten such great results from it. You can get yours at TheClientAttractionSystem.com.

Fabienne Fredrickson, The Client Attraction Mentor, is founder of the Client Attraction System , the proven step-by-step program that shows you exactly how to attract more clients, in record time…guaranteed. To get your F.R.E.E. Audio CD by mail and receive her weekly marketing & success mindset articles on attracting more high-paying clients and dramatically increasing your in.come, visit www.ClientAttraction.com.

Categories : Internet Marketing, Mindset

Social Media: LinkedIn – why are you doing it?

By Heike

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

I went to a local workshop for coaches on Social Media and Marketing and noticed that many newer, and even established, life coaches are having trouble with Social Media and its relevance for their coaching practice, and ultimately their bottom line.

Some coaches particularly asked about Twitter and LinkedIn and why one should even consider using it. Today I’m going to briefly look at why a life coach could benefit from participating on LinkedIn.

The first thing to consider is the overall Social Media and Business Strategy. Unfortunately, we can’t just dive into a Social Network and expect great results, we need to deliberately plan it. Why are we using LinkedIn and does it actually fit into our business model? Very important questions.

Research is always a good start. Stroll around in LinkedIn.com and look who’s around. What kind of people do you see on the forums, what kind of people do you see in the profiles? Do they fit into your target market? How about your colleagues, are they on LinkedIn?

If none of them is on LinkedIn, this could either indicate that coaches like you don’t need to be on this social network or maybe coaches are still a bit hesitant about using Social Media in general. This doesn’t help you, of course. So scroll through LinkedIn’s groups and see what kind of groups are available and what kind of questions are posted on the forums. Is there something that catches your eye? Are there interest groups dealing with coaching? Are there groups that may have the answer to some of your business questions, such as Internet marketing or Social Media questions? It may be a good idea to join those and watch the questions and answers and learn more about online marketing.

Another aspect to consider is the exposure from simply having a LinkedIn account and profile for you and your business: it definitely helps you to get found online if someone types in your name into the search engines. Social Media networks rank extremely high in search engines and it is beneficial for you to have a presence online.

LinkedIn is a bit different to Facebook and Twitter. The audience is more “professional”, that means you will find lots of professionals and even corporate companies on it. This can be a good thing as many life, business, leadership, life balance, and career coaches target this segment of the market. Many coaches deal with people who are employed or who are executives in a company. So you are in the right place to attract ideal clients for your coaching services.

If you join groups where these people hang out you have one foot in the door. Look at the groups these professionals would be interested in, such as business, leadership, marketing, etc. Try to post meaningful messages, helpful tips and ask good questions in these groups to stand out from the crowd. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get noticed with helpful, informative posts on the right messageboards! But beware of spamming and advertising your services. A great way around this is to have your profile well written, fully filled out and a signature created so that each post shows who you are and what you do, for example: “Linda Doyle, Career Coach, website address.”

Be aware that a good(!) photo is highly important. Don’t make the mistake and download a casual holiday photo, one with friends around you or in too casual wear. Many photographers take a nice headshot of you for little money, make use of this.

Summing up, yes, LinkedIn can be a great Social network for a coach, especially for those coaches who deal with professionals. You are doing it to find out more about your target audience, read their questions, see their troubles and get them to know, like and trust you through helpful and informative participation.

Categories : Social Media

Tags : career coach, leadership coach, life coach, LinkedIn, LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn profile, Social Media, Social networks, target audience, Target Market, Twitter

Why blogging is good for life coaches

By Heike

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

When blogging started years ago it was more of a diary for people. Nowadays business blogging has other reasons: it’s a place where you can prove you are an expert or that you know what you are doing because you can “talk” about it on your blog and inform your target audience.

You can also bond with your readers because you write about the topics they are looking for. The other very important aspect is the enormous benefit “fresh” content on your website/blog because the search engines, like Google, will like this and rank your website higher and it will be found by more people. The best is to have your blog page on your website in a combined blog website, which is usually on WordPress.

If you have a WordPress.com blog that is hosted by WordPress, not one on your own domain as WordPress.org, it won’t help your website’s search rankings because it’s separate from it. There is a difference between getting a blog that is hosted by WordPress and one that is hosted by your own webhost. If you have a website without a blog it is a good solution to switch to a WordPress blog website rather than having a separate website and a separate blog. It’s not difficult to switch and it’s not an overly expensive exercise either.

Blog websites are just optimized much better to be found on Google than ordinary websites. If you combine your website with a blog your website’s traffic ranking will go up quicker, especially if you focus on keywords that your niche will search for. If you write blog posts try to think about topics that your niche wants to know about and then focus on these keywords. Put this keyword in the heading, mention it in the first sentence and sprinkle it throughout the blog post text. This way it’s easier to be picked up by the search engines, which means more people can find you when they search for the keywords you focus on.

So nowadays a blog is an important tool for a coach to be found online by prospects and to show their knowledge and bond with prospects so they become clients. If you want you can even re-purpose your blog posts and send them to article submission websites, which will give you more traffic again. As there are so many coaches around it is important that you stand out with your content marketing efforts.

Categories : Blog

Tags : Blog, Blog website, blogging, google, life coaches, search ranking, traffic ranking, Wordperss

Thoughts about ’14 Things I Think I Think About Social Media’ by Jay Bear

By Heike

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Jay Bear, Social Media consultant, was interviewed by Social Examiner’s CEO, Michael Stelzner, about Social Media Marketing, and brought up very interesting thoughts.

Jay Baer Interview from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

This interview gave me a different view on Twitter’s development during the last year. Jay felt that Twitter used to be the Social Network that described “where you are and what you are doing”, but has moved into a more resource sharing tool where people tells others about good resources and important news they feel others need to know about. Foursquare and Yelp are increasingly taking up Twitter’s former role of “where am I right now” with local/ized Social Networking. Jay also stressed to not undervalue Yelp for its role of local social networking.

Facebook’s Fan/Business pages can be viewed in a way of replacing company’s newsletters and convert previous customers into repeat customers through relationship building communication.

Jay also described that “tools”, such as Twitter and Facebook, are only “tools” and usually interchangeable. He stated he believes current dominant Social Media networks will change in the future, just in the same way as dominant Social Networks of the past, eg. MySpace, lost its dominance and got replaced by Facebook. It is important to have a content strategy using the Social Media tools, but not solely seeing the Social Media networks as the end all without having a proper strategy. Without a strategy that connects all utilized tools and social networks the social media campaign is worthless.

Jay also pointed out that many companies have different people handing Social Media and email marketing, which leads to a lack of coherence in their campaigns. It is important to link them together and also make sure that email newsletters have “share” buttons included so that your messages and blog posts can be shared easily by readers.

Video and Youtube is still underutilized by companies in its importance of improving search rankings. Companies need to catch on to use video more often.

Categories : Email Marketing, Social Media

Tags : Jay Bear, Michael Stelzner, Social Media, Twitter, Yelp, youtube

Traffic Geyser – all the hype for nothing?

By Heike

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Many people come to my website because they search for more information on Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser has been strongly promoted in the past half year as the new way to earn money online. So what’s the story about this? Is it just another “get rich quick” scam?

No, it is not. If you want to set up a business and are prepared to put in the work to run this business and help other small business owners, you will have a good resource and system in Traffic Geyser to make this happen.

The system leverages the whole Internet Marketing “pie”, which means it sends out your message (about your business and services), to the whole spectrum of Internet Marketing media. Traffic Geyser makes it easy to make use of Mobile Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Blogging, Search Engine Marketing, Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing in “one click”. Ok, it’s not really one click, but the Traffic Geyser system enables the user to spread information and relationship building messages in an easier way and ion a less time consuming fashion. It utilizes a variety of tools to get the message out to your audience and in different media channels so you can be sure that your message, and the message of your clients, will be heard and found.

Many small businesses have a website and engage a bit in Social Media, but don’t really get much traffic to said website nor get known in their target niche as the expert. They are one “player” in a big pool of” players” and have little chance of being found by clients. Webdesigners promise their clients to optimize their website to get an optimum number of traffic, but in reality it’s not that easy and even if potential prospects find your website, it’s not guaranteed that they stay on your website nor buy from you.

That’s where relationship marketing and Social Media comes in because you can foster relationships and become visible and trustworthy in the eyes of your target market. Video marketing is one of the best tools to help with this and Traffic Geyser relies heavily on Video Marketing. Additionally, it helps re-purposing content to get your marketing messages out in different forms, such as articles and blog posts.

Seeing someone in a video instantly makes them feel familiar. A website itself will never bond with an audience as well as a person in a video will do. We are people and we love looking at other people. Around 30 billion videos are watched in the USA alone per month and they make up almost 60% of all web traffics, so you can confidently say that video marketing is a good option for you to get “known”, “liked” and “trusted”, the foundational pillars of Internet sales.

Traffic Geyser is a complete system tool that helps non-techy people use online tools successfully without knowing as much as an online expert or virtual assistant would know about the technical things. When you log into your Traffic Geyser account you will get instantly to the tools you need to market your services or you can use your Traffic Geyser account to help your clients, such as local business owners, get visibility online for a fee. This is the trick of earning money with this system. You are the person offering the video marketing service to your small business clients and they will pay you a fee for it. If you employ all the tools that Traffic Geyser uses by yourself, without the system in the background, it will take more time and you will require more technical skills and training to do so.

That’s why Traffic Geyser is so popular. You can do it without the system, but it takes more time (and time is money, we all agree!) and you need a lot of training in the technical side of Internet Marketing and Online business tools. And not everybody is happy to put in that time or wants to become a technical person. Many people rather utilize Traffic Geyser’s help and “done for you”-services and sell the benefits of the system to their small business clients for an instant reward.

Categories : Social Media

Tags : article marketing, blogging, content, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, Traffic Geyser, video marketing

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Author Archive for Heike

The most important question for anybody is consciously or subconsciously: What is in it for ME?

Email Marketing Mistake # 1:

2. The second big Email Marketing mistake is:

Here, according to them, are the most powerful motivators:

Your Assignment:

Get your free Ebook on Listbuilding!