Spending time in Vegas is not my favorite thing to do. However, Ali Brown’s SHINE conference made it definitely worthwhile. And although I had many light bulb moments during those three days, I wanted to share with you 10 of my top take-aways.
1. Your personal income cannot exceed the work you’ve done on yourself.
This is something I know to be true, based on my own experience as well as that of my clients. I know that the more I grow inside, the more my business grows on the outside. Your business (and your life) IS a mirror for what’s going on inside your mind, your heart and your soul. The more you work on yourself, the more your business will grow.
2. There’s always turbulence before the next level.
Another truism! Take a moment and think back to how you were feeling and what was going on in your business just BEFORE you broke through to the level you’re at now. Did it feel rocky, off-center, uncertain? Even just a little bit? The higher level you aspire to, the more off-kilter things will feel. Remember that it’s an indicator that you’re on the right course.
3. People buy from people.
You may know this, but it bears repeating: people buy from people they know, like and trust. The more YOU you put into your marketing, the more people will get to know, like and trust you, and the more sales you’ll make.
4. When you are yourself, you have no competition.
Enough said.
5. Frequency will always outpull a single blast.
You have to get comfortable not with just asking for the sale, but with asking for it a lot. It’s taking a lot more marketing these days to fill programs, enroll clients, and sell products, so one of the best and most immediate things you can do for your business growth is to get really comfortable with increasing how much you market your offer.
6. Luck favors the prepared.
Are you ready for the next level of business success that you desire? Do you have the systems in place? Do you have the team in place? Do you have your mindset ready to receive the abundance that’s coming?
7. Your best ideas don’t come from sitting at your desk.
My best ideas come to me in the car. Or sitting on the dock in the early morning of summer. I created this business under a palapa in the Turks & Caicos. Where do your best ideas come to you? When you’re stuck or need to hit the refresh button, go where your best ideas are able to pop into your mind.
8. Does __________ represent where I’m going?
This one really struck me. Fill in the blank with all the pieces of your business.
For example:
“Does my website represent where I’m going?”
“Does my team represent where I’m going?”
“Does my photo represent where I’m going?”
“Does my brand represent where I’m going”
“Does my business model represent where I’m going?”
Etc.
Well, do they? If not, what do you need to do to make sure that they DO represent where you’re going?
9. Be serious about your numbers.
You have to pay attention to your numbers if you’re serious about running a successful and sustainable business for the long haul.
Track what’s coming in, what’s going out, how many people you have in each program, what that adds up to, how many subscribers/fans/friends/followers you have, etc.
It ALL counts – you need to know your numbers!
10. You’ve got to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Being an entrepreneur will bring up all your stuff. 🙂 Most of the time, that’s going to make you uncomfortable. You have to be ok with that and recognize that it’s just an indicator that you’re moving through whatever you need to in order to grow and reach the next level. If you can remember that, it’s actually pretty exciting, isn’t it?
It seems that, at least in the US, the holiday season starts earlier and earlier, with Christmas cards taking over most of the card section of any store right after Halloween (if not before!).
And while it bugs me to hear holiday music over the store speakers while I’m shopping for my kids’ Halloween costume (because by the time Santa does visit, I’m quite tired of dreaming of a “White Christmas”), as far as planning on how to market for and during the holiday season for my business, it’s almost never too early.
One of my business principles is “Giver’s Get,” in the sense that you are giving from a place of having no expectation of getting anything in return.
What follows are 5 ways that you can give in your business, feel really good about it, and reap the rewards from the Universe.
1. Thank your clients and customers.
An obvious one to do around Thanksgiving is to show your gratitude to your current clients and customers for their business. But you might be surprised at how few business owners actually take the time to do this.
It could be something as simple as expressing your thanks in a short email. Or you could send a thank you card in the mail. Or you could take it a step further and do something I’ve done before – sending a postcard expressing my gratitude with a link to a special – and fr*e – gift to my VIP clients and customers.
Taking the time to say thank you goes a long way towards deepening that all-important relationship with your current clients and customers. If you do nothing else this holiday season, at least do this.
2. Give your ezine list a gift.
Your ‘pot of gold’ in your business in your email list of potential clients and customers. You should always be treating them well, but at least once a year, offer them a gift – no strings attached – just because…
Something I’ve given to my subscribers a few times that has been hugely successful was my 12 Days of Christmas series, where they received something of value that benefited them in building their business once a day for the 12 days leading up to Christmas. You don’t have to offer 12 gifts, however. Just one will do very nicely as well.
3. Give a holiday coupon.
As a gift to your list as well as to give you a boost in your income, why not offer a coupon towards one or more of your offerings. You could offer a 2-for-1 coaching session, or a 20% off discount for one of your ebooks or ecourses, or you could offer a special price for the month of December only on one of your programs.
4. Give your affiliates a gift.
our affiliates are also one of your greatest assets in your business. Show your gratitude to the folks who have chosen to join your ‘sales force’ by increasing their commissions for the holiday season.
Ideally, your commission rate should be at least 25%. Why not reward them further for promoting your offerings by doubling their commissions to 50%?
5. Give yourself a gift.
And don’t forget yourself! If you haven’t already, hire a virtual assistant to help you now so you can enjoy more of your holidays. You’ll be so glad you did and you’ll never go back to being a lone ranger!
I’d like to invite you to choose at least two of these ways of giving in your business to implement this holiday season.
About 3 years ago, I was driving around running errands, and I tuned into a local radio station that was hosting a radio-thon to raise money for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. When the DJ said, “Think about what your healthy child is doing right now, playing, having a snack, whatever… and then think of the kids at St. Jude” – well, I couldn’t pull over fast enough to whip out my wallet and cell phone.
Now, like you, I get a lot of solicitations either in the mail or even via email. Most of those get dumped in the trash or deleted. But what was different about this time? I mean, I literally stopped what I was doing (driving!) to pull over, take out my credit card, call the number, and make my contribution.
So, what made me not even hesitate? It was that deep FEELING of empathy for those kids and their parents, as well as an overwhelming FEELING of gratefulness for my own healthy child.
You see, as humans, we tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain. And you may be surprised to learn that we actually will do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure.
What that DJ said really got to me – it was incredibly painful for me to think of my own little girl ever being that sick. In order to avoid feeling that pain, I became a Partner in Hope and now make monthly and annual contributions to St. Jude’s directly from the proceeds of my business.
The same holds true in your marketing. If you can touch upon your target market’s pain, address what it is that they are most struggling with, and offer the solution to them – well, it’s a winning formula every time.
When you’re writing your sales pages, you want to state what problem your reader is struggling with and how your offering can solve it, right at the beginning.
One effective way of introducing your solution is by asking a question of your reader around what it’s like to struggle with the problem your offering solves. If you can relate to your reader’s frustration, pain, struggle, or challenge, you’ll immediately establish a connection and they will want to know more about how you can solve their issue for them.
Touching on your prospect’s pain and offering them relief by way of your solution is not manipulative. It’s direct, honest and open. Your reader is at your website because they are looking for a solution. If you want to help them, then the only way to do that is to tell them that you understand their pain and that you offer the solution.
So, think about your market. Are they more likely to seek out your services or your products because they want to gain pleasure? Or is it because they want to solve their most pressing problems? Then weave your answer into your marketing messages.
If you’re reading this ezine, it’s likely that you’ve participated in a teleseminar, whether it be mine or one of my colleagues. You’ve probably been on some that have been very good, where you got tons of really valuable information. And you may have found yourself on a few that were nothing but pitch-fests for the host’s latest product.
But I want to share something with you. Hosting content-rich teleseminars for my target market is some of the quickest and easiest mo^ney I’ve generated in my business.
Holding F.R.E.E. introductory teleseminars are a great way to promote your business, increase your email subscriber list, make more sales on your products, and enable your potential clients another way to connect with you. By being on the phone with you, they get to know you through your voice, adding the human touch that can be so hard to cultivate online.
I offer a f.r.e.e. monthly teleseminar that gives people an introduction to what I teach. From each of these calls, I get more ezine subscribers, more members for my group coaching membership, and more sales of my products.
Holding PAID teleseminars helps to promote your business and generate revenues as well. I do one paid teleseminar at least every two months on a different marketing topic, and I gross a minimum of $2000 for each of these calls.
Another way to offer teleseminars is to do “intensive” or “bootcamp” series of multi-week teleseminars. I’ve offered 10- and 4-week ‘”workgroups” on the topics of listbuilding, creating a successful business online from scratch, and search engine marketing that have been very profitable.
1. The Right Target Market and the Right Topic
Here’s the secret for producing and profiting from a teleseminar: It must be designed for a target market AND it must solve a problem that that target market is struggling with. If you have those two keys in place, you’ll be sure to attract enough sign-ups and make money from your topic.
2. A Bridge Line
There are several good no-cost bridge lines available for you to use, but the one I’m currently recommending is FreeConferenceCall.com because you can record the teleseminar for free as well. This is a nice benefit to offer your participants and to anyone who had to miss your teleseminar for any reason. I use it as a back-up recording for all my calls. You can have up to 100 people on the line with you.
3. Recording Service
You’ll need a way to record your teleseminars so you can provide the audio for people to listen to later and for you to make CDs from if you decide to package your teleseminar into a physical product later. I use AudioAcrobat to record all my teleseminars, with FreeConferenceCall.com as a back-up.
4. Automatic Registration
You’ll want to be able to have people sign up for your teleseminar without you having to do a lot of work. I use Aweber for all my teleseminar registrations, but you can also use your shopping cart’s autoresponder service if you have one.
I’d like to invite you to start offering f.r.e.e. teleseminars to promote your business, and once you get more comfortable with both the format and the technology, start offering paid teleseminars. Even if you only have a handful of people on your first call, it’s great practice. And I guarantee your numbers will increase as you continue to build your email list, and you’ll be profiting from teleseminars in no time.
Now that the fall is upon us, I’m already gearing up for 2011 – planning, organizing, strategizing, visioning, and more. There are many transitions and transformations on the horizon for me and my business, and much to do to prepare for them, so I’m making space and opening the flow.
Here are some of the ways I’m doing this in my business that you can do too:
1. Clean Up Your Business Time
Time is your only non-renewable resource. If you’ve ever experienced days when you don’t know where the time has gone, but you do know you haven’t accomplished much, then you need to take a serious look at just what is eating up those precious minutes.
My coach’s request of you is to track your time for the next two weeks. Like a food diary makes you intensely aware of what you’re eating, a time log will allow you to quickly and easily identify where you’re frittering time away.
Most likely culprits?…
Email and TV (yes, I know some of you are ‘watching’ TV while you’re online, and no, that’s not multi-tasking, that’s just pure distraction).
Once you are aware of where your time is going, make a conscious effort to redirect it to more productive – or even more restful – activities. Turn the TV off (or TIVO/DVR whatever it is you must watch and give it your full attention later). And don’t leave your email open all day long! Allot specific time to read and respond to it instead.
You’ll be amazed at how just doing this simple exercise will free up the time you want for more important (and fun!) things. (Be sure to read Part 2 of this article next week where I’ll share more specific and effective tips for handling email overload.)
2. Clean Up Your Business Space
Now is a great time to go through your files – computer and physical – and delete or organize them for moving forward into 2011.
I spent several hours going through my physical files recently, shredding lots of documents (I love to purge!), and setting up new files for my new Platinum clients as well as empty files for the ones yet to come.
During this process both online and off, I also found a lot of gems I’d forgotten about – pieces of content, systems and processes, tools, resources, audios, and more.
And now that I have a recent visual in my mind of what’s in my files, it’s literally at my fingertips as I move forward in building my business.
As for my computer, I actually went so far as to purchase a brand new laptop, and I’m being very discerning about what gets transferred over from my old PC to the new. Energetically and electronically, I can feel how much more open the flow is by doing this.
3. Clean up Your Business Circle
This one can be a bit difficult, but it’s necessary to prune the people you surround yourself with from time to time. It doesn’t mean you have to completely disconnect from them (unless they’re just weighing you down energetically), but do make a conscious choice to spend more time in the company of those who lift you up.
Let me give you a simple example. If you’re on someone’s ezine list just because everyone else is or you feel like you should be, but you either a) don’t read it or b) don’t feel good when you do read it, just unsubscribe and allow the space for something that resonates with you to take its place.
Or maybe you’re part of a mastermind group that you feel you’ve outgrown. Now is the time to graciously bow out. Once you do, you open the space for a new group to form around you that better supports where you are now.
How are you making space and opening the flow for the rest of 2010 and into 2011?
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