Email Marketing

Archive for Tina Forsyth

Aug
5

What you recommend really matters (and how I learned this the hard way)

by Heike

 

Tina Forsyth, CEO of Onlinebusinessmanager.com

by Tina Forsyth, CEO of Online Business Manager, on August 5, 2011

Tina says,

“I had a really ick situation happen earlier this year. I was asked to be part of a telesummit, and of course with my inclusion as a speaker I agreed to do some promotion for the event – including some solo email blasts to my list.

After sending one of these promotions to my list I got a response from a lady who essentially said:

“I don’t believe in what you are promoting here, and so I’m unsubscribing from your ezine [which I totally get and respect] and I’m also unsubscribing from the ezine of the person who connected me to you in the first place [eeek! this person lost a subscriber due to me!].”

Now I get that I can’t please everyone, but the thing is, you guys, is that I KNEW that this was not something I should have promoted. It just wasn’t my “thing” – and no offense to the telesummit folks themselves, it just wasn’t my style, my target or my message.

All of these things I knew the minute I was asked to participate and commit to promoting. BUT I still did it anyway.

Why? I was on automatic “yes” for being asked to speak. I’d fallen prey to the say-yes-to-everything-no-matter-what-it-is syndrome… not sure if that is an actual syndrome, but you get my point.

And because of this I sent something to my list that:

  1. Was not something I actually believed in or agreed with. (If i’m honest I actually cringed when I saw someone promote this series the year before.)
  2. Cost someone else – a biz colleague and friend whom I know and respect – a subscriber. That’s the part that hurt the most… I’m OK with me paying for my mistake but someone else also had to pay for it. Ouch :(

This one person spoke up, and who’s to say how many others didn’t speak up and simply hit the unsub button?

So from now on I’m committed to recommending ONLY stuff from people or companies that:

  1. I know and like/respect what they have to offer.
  2. I have had a positive experience with (either knowing them personally, as part of a program or having used their software, etc.).
  3. I know would be useful to the folks on my list.
  4. feel *right in my gut* – this has to be the final check cause it’s never wrong.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning here, too, that affiliate commissions aren’t that important to me. If someone is offering an affiliate commission on something I want to recommend, then great… I’ll take it. And if not, that doesn’t stop me from making a recommendation on something I know you will find valuable.

How about you? What is your criteria for promoting/recommending stuff?”

What would you do?

When it comes to affiliate marketing, many people may support anybody who asks them to promote or who pays high commissions, but is it actually a good thing to promote something that doesn’t fit your own beliefs, your brand and your target market?

Check out the replies on Tina’s Blog here.

Categories : Affiliate Marketing
Sep
4

New E Commerce course for Virtual Assistants starting soon

by Heike

Any of you who is a bit unsure about the shoppingcart and its uses can learn the ropes with this upcoming class from the Hotskills team, Cindy Greenway and Tina Forsyth.

The goal of this course is to help you set up the shopping cart and using it to be able to sell products, keep in touch with clients with autoresponders and send out broadcasts and reports.

This course is designed for Virtual Assistants, but if you are an entrepreneur and really want to master the shoppingcart all by yourself, this might be a good option for you, too.

Check it out, I’ve done it and recommend it. Great teachers and lovely community: click here to find out more.

Categories : Virtual Assistant
Sep
1

Online Business Manager Certification

by Heike

CertOBM_HeikeMillerWith great pride I would like to announce that I have received my certification to become an “official” online business manager. The training took place from March to August under the watchful eyes of Tina Forsyth and Andrea J. Lee, two very well know entitites in the world of multiple streams of income for online businesses.

If you are interested what the certification entails, check out the website: http://www.certifiedobm.com. The training was very thorough and brought all my virtual assistant skills and my management knowledge together in one sophisticated model that will support my clients’ businesses successfully in their growth and active maintenance periods.

Tina, herself a very successful online business manager and mentor of new and existing online business managers (OBMs)  is the first to officially talk about the “OBM” role. People have worked unofficially in the role of an OBM before, but Tina has defined, finalized and announced the term of the OBM for everybody to see in her book: “How to become an online business manager”. 

Most people I’ve talked to read this book with a strong interest as it offers ambitious virtual assistants a fresh career opportunity with more responsibility and added value. It is also a good read for business owners who want to know what this hype about online business management is all about. Business owners nowadays more and more realise that they need to let go of some tasks in their business to grow. There is simply no other way to achieve growth.

If you look in the offline world, the brick and mortar businesses never really function with one owner by him/herself for long! They either get their spouse, their children, family members and eventually outside help into the business to grow. It’s still a bit the “do it yourself” mentality online, though. The more you grow the more you realise how burned out you get if you don’t delegate. Your business is not simply a business. Most entrepreneurs and coaches start their online business based on their passion and life purpose (and that’s probably why it’s so hard to let go and delegate!), but to succeed and share your message with the world, you need to look outside and gracously receive help from other talented human beings who love your business (almost ;) ) as much as you do. Yes, this is possible.

When I look at some of my clients’ businesses and the amazing things they help their clients with I know that I’m in the right job. I like helping people and when I help you, I actually help a whole lot of other people because they are able to access you with my assistance. Without your OBM and VAs you don’t grow your online business and these people miss out because you only have so much time to serve clients one-on-one.

Thanks to Tina and Andrea for all your support and help with the online manager certification. You both are an inspiration! Check out my resource page for some excellent programs Andrea and Tina created to help you with your strategies.

Categories : Online Business Manager
Aug
22

5 Signs That You May Need to Hire an Online Business Manager, by Tina Forsyth

by Heike

Businesswoman painWondering if you should hire an Online Business Manager?

Here are 5 tell-tale signs that it may be time for you to add an OBM to your team.

  1. 1. Your business is growing while your own free-time is shrinking.
  2. I’m betting you started your business to create more freedom in your life yes? Freedom of time, money and choice. Let me ask you – as your business grows are you actually working more or less time?                                                                                                         

If you are on the ‘working more time’ side of things you certainly aren’t alone… I can’t count how many times i’ve talked to business owners who have shared how they are actually working more hours in their own business than they ever did in their ‘old job’.

However it doesn’t have to be this way… as a business owner you have the ‘freedom of choice’ to be able to make changes in your business, including hiring the right help to get stuff off your plate.      

This is exactly what an Online Business Manager does – their main focus is to free up the business owner so that they can focus their time and energy on the things that only THEY can do in their business.

2. You are having to turn away opportunities because you are so busy!

This is a sad by-product of the first point. Are you so busy that you can’t take advantage of the opportunities that are coming your way? Do you ever find yourself saying “I would love to do X and know it would be a great new revenue stream… but I simply don’t have the time for it right now… ”

Not only can an Online Business Manager help free up your own time to be able to explore these opportunities, they can also work on bringing some of these opportunities to life for you! An Online Business Manager is very focused on implementation, and can help manage the process of creating new revenue streams in your business from concept to launch.

3. You are still doing things the same things you were doing when you started your business.

delegatingRemember when you first started your business and had to wear many hats? You were the cook, hostess, waitress and busboy (so to speak, hehe.) Now that your business is growing, are you still doing the same things as you were in the beginning? Are you still updating your own website? Are you still managing your shopping cart? Are you still answering all your customer service emails?

As your business grows your role will (and should!) change. An Online Business Manager can lovingly ‘slap your wrist’ when it comes to you doing some of these things… helping you let go of some of the ‘old’ stuff taking up your time that gets in the way of you growing your business.

4. You have a great team, but find yourself frustrated by them always ‘bugging’ you.

This is actually a very common complaint from business owners – they have a great team of VAs, webmasters and such. And yet they are constantly frustrated by how much their team needs from them. They feel like someone is always tapping them on the shoulder with a question or request. The thing is, your team does need someone to manage them. They need someone who they can turn to with questions, to get what they need to complete their projects quickly and on time.

And if there is not an Online Business Manager on the team who do they turn to? You – the business owner. As a colleague of mine so eloquently shared: “My VAs were doing a fine job – it was ME who was unhappy managing them.” Most business owners really don’t enjoying being managers, and i’m guessing this may be the same for you. An Online Business Manager becomes the key point of contact for your team – all questions, requests and such go to the OBM instead of you.

5. You are stuck at $X revenue and can’t seem to get past that point!

When you find yourself stuck at a certain point in revenue there is usually one thing getting in the way – you! My business partner Andrea Lee calls this the quarter million dollar speedbump (can be more or less than that of course) and a big part of the solution usually requires you removing yourself from the day-to-day of your business.

Start to ask yourself as you go about your day – do I need to be the person to do X? (with X being the many things you spend your time on each day.)

Chances are many things on your to-do list could be passed along to someone else on your team. And an Online Business Manager can help with that process by delegating and managing those tasks on your behalf.

Ready to hire an Online Business Manager?  

Tina Forsyth is the author of Becoming an Online Business Manager: Playing a Bigger Game with Your Clients and Yourself. She writes and consults in advanced online marketing and business systems for business owners and their support teams. www.OnlineBusinessManager.com

Categories : Online Business Manager
Aug
17

Call with the Shift-it coach

by Heike

christinamerkleyToday, I was listening to a call with the shift-it coach, Christina Merkley. The call was organised by Tina Forsyth and part of the training for the International Association of Online Business Managers (www.obmconnect.com).

Tina, trainer of the Certified Online Business Management program and co-founder of the International Association of Online Business Managers, asked Christina to help the newest graduates of the OBM training with their strategic planning process. Where to from here?

Christina is a strategic planning and graphic coach and helps business owners identify their strategic direction by taking stock of their lives and drawing up their future goals and vision. She uses interactive maps which help the business owner get creative. These maps can easily remove blocks that often come into play when you are just thinking about your goals and vision in your head without committing to writing it down. We as entrepreneurs often get overwhelmed and stuck while planning for our future direction and drawing/writing it down helps us to create a new vision.

 At first it can be a bit difficult to identify positive goals rather than taking about “what I don’t want in life”.

Christina guided us into turning the negative thoughts into positive goals. Changing the wording of our goals into a positive statement. Eg. “I don’t want difficult clients” gets reframed into “I work with friendly, enthusiastic clients” instead.

The positive statement is so much more powerful and will help attracting the positive things into your life and business.

Christina has a fantastic freebie report on her website: http:www.shift-it-coach.com. It’s called “Focus on me” and it includes several maps to fill out yourself with excellent instructions to guide you through the process. A great tool, which is an ideal follow on to my 25 Questions about your Dream Business. 

In May I actually downloaded Christina’s report and worked through the maps. I kept the maps for reference and today I looked at them again. What a difference! One of the maps showed “my reality” in May and one showed my desired outcome back then. Amazingly, many of the things and goals I mentioned have come true!

I will definitely work on a new map and see how much more it will transform my business and my personal life.

Go and check out Christina’s website: http:www.shift-it-coach.com

Categories : Strategic planning

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