Archive for March, 2008
Free 12 Week Marketing Intensive
Posted by: | CommentsYou are invited to attend an extraordinary free online/teleconference event that has the potential to make this year the best ever for your business…
Just by enrolling in the Marketing Qi (say *chee*) Business Teleseminar 12-week Intensive, featuring…LIVE in-depth interviews with twelve top marketing and business experts on the web today…
Register Now At:
http://www.biztipsforcoaches.com/marketing-qi
These expert speakers will be teaching you cutting edge business information such as:
*Six simple steps to creating passive income streams
*How to get great marketing results, even on a small budget
*How to get yourself to actually take action toward your business goals
*Find out if you have the personality to be a successful solopreneur
*How to use the entrepreneur’s Secret Weapon
*How to use a blog to gain expert status
*How to easily conquer Telephone Terror when cold-calling
*How to become the preferred solution to your clients’ most pressing problems
*Learn to use SEO to boost your website’s visibility and get more traffic
*How article marketing can get you more sales
*How to charge what you are worth…and get it…
…and much, much more!
Sign up now at:
http://www.biztipsforcoaches.com/marketing-qi
You will be learning from some of the most successful marketing and small business experts on the planet, plus… you’ll get an armload of bonus gifts from some great people, just for signing up…
Here is the speaker lineup:
Alicia Forest
Rory Cohen
Janis Pettit
Terri Z
Melanie Benson Strick
The BlogSquad
Wendy Weiss
Kathleen Gage
Karyn Greenstreet
Marnie Pehrson
Kendall Summerhawk
Larina Kase
The Marketing Qi Intensive begins Tuesday, April 1st at 8PM Eastern/NY so get this written into your calendar now!
Seats are limited so reserve your place early…
And did I mention that for a limited time…the Marketing Qi Intensive is…
Totally free! Sign up now at:
http://www.biztipsforcoaches.com/marketing-qi
Warmly,
Janet
Voices in the Financial Reports
Posted by: | CommentsI have had my meeting with my CPA friend, Sally, and what an interesting experience. You may remember my reporting that she was going to help me learn to hear what my financial reports had to say. Well, this gal should be a coach! We sat down with the balance sheet and the profit and loss statement for my business for February and she proceeded to have me get quiet and “listen to whatever the reports might say to me”. She was very cool with no agenda attached to it as though she had coached for years.
The first things the reports said to me were all emotional – they said “this is very complicated stuff” and “you’ll never really get all this” and “you don’t even know what some of this stuff means”. Slowly, by not letting me off the hook with that, Sally helped me hear other things as well. They also said – “this part of the business made more of the income than the other two parts last month.” They said – “the equity in the business (the stuff that I own) is much bigger than the liabilities (money that I owe)”. They said – “at this rate, the amount of gross income I am making this year is more than I realized”.
Then we talked about how to use the reports to track goals over time. You can make a decision based on the financial information and check at the end of the month for results. For example, the sales of my e-book were a “low hanging fruit” this month – meaning I could spend a little time to make a significant income return in that area. Next month, you can compare how much time you spent on the project to how much income was generated by the activity. Through this process, you will learn over time the key indicators of your business that help you decide how to most productively use your time to generate income. I know that doesn’t sound very coach-like, but it does sound like an entrepreneur. It is vital to tap into your inner entrepreneur in order to continue to do the coaching work that you love. Even if it means learning to hear the voices in the financial reports.
Marketing Techniques
Posted by: | CommentsWhenever I am in discussion with a new coach about marketing, we need to talk both about finding your own marketing voice and about marketing techniques. The distinction is important and can be confusing to some. As I have written about previously, your marketing voice is what you say in a way that is uniquely you. My marketing voice is the way I talk about Biz instead of business, it is the frank approach that I take to telling it like it is for beginning coaches, it is the clever and I think, funny, little phrases I use from time to time. Marketing technique is something else. It is the tried and true ways that marketers have found that work to get people to respond. It is certain ways of using your words and how they are structured to get the most bang you can out of your voice.
Let’s take an example. When you write sales copy of any kind, one of the most important pieces of it is the headline. If you don’t spark someone’s interest with the headline, then they are not going to read the rest of the great stuff you have to say. There are certain techniques and sequences of words that are known to attract people’s attention. As a business person, you need to read up on headlines and what makes effective attention-grabbers. At the same time, you want to be sure that your headline speaks in your voice. Generally when you are trying to create a headline for sales copy, you need to write 5-10 possibilities until you begin to get a sense of which one really does work for you. Make sure you are using the techniques for good headlines in all of them and you can’t go wrong.
Another example is what is called a sales page – the one page website with the sole purpose of getting you to buy something. It is vital that your sales page sounds like you and says things in the way that you might express them personally. At the same time, it is equally as important that your sales page contains the important elements needed to effectively get someone to buy your product. While you are putting in the great headline, the testimonials, the results your product helps achieve and all the rest, you are doing it in a way that is unique to you. When you can combine both your unique marketing voice and the power of research by others on effective marketing techniques, then your marketing will be powerful and draw those clients to you that truly understand what you have to offer.
Free Small Business Summit
Posted by: | CommentsThere is a great opportunity to get lots of free advice for starting and running a small business next week at the Microsoft Small Business Summit. The summit runs from noon to 4pm (eastern time) on March 24th through the 27th. The schedule looks like it has lots to offer so make sure you register for the event soon. Topics listed on the schedule are everything from marketing, branding, and publicity to technology, finances and how to handle start-ups.
Two speakers that I know I do not want to miss are John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing fame and Andy Wibbels who wrote the famous book Blog Wild. I will also try to get to the sessions on entrepreneurship, life balance and using Vista successfully. In case you can’t make your favorite session live, Microsoft is repeating the entire schedule later each afternoon and making recordings available after the summit. If you can be there live, it should be great. The seminars will be transmitted to your computer using streaming audio and video. You will be able to interact online and submit questions to the speakers during their talks. It sounds like there will also be an online discussion forum during the seminars.
It seems curious to me that the giant Microsoft is focusing on small business information. I think – what on earth do they know about SMALL business….. but their summit promotional material claims that most of the company worked for small business before signing on with the giant. Of course, it is a very well developed marketing technique to hold an event like this. That is the way of marketing now in the information age, you must be willing to share information in order to gain credibility and customers. It is heartening to me to see that even the giants of the world follow the same strategies that solitary coaches do to promote their business.
Join me at the summit. Let Microsoft market and we will get smarter and more informed because of it!!
Find Your Marketing Voice
Posted by: | CommentsNew coaches always seem to struggle with the idea of how to portray who they are as a coach. The most frequent comment on marketing from new coaches is that they don’t want to “sound like a sales person”. The process of gaining your voice as a marketer and a business person is crucial to succeeding as a coach. Coaches who started out as therapists seem to carry extra baggage in this area and are concerned about appearing unethical.
I have had recent exchanges with a coach building his business, Shaun Kieran , who is saying exactly that. Shaun says, “I have the broadest possible helping experience you can imagine….. what doesn’t come easily is …the use of language to make an initial connection to my potential client… and the need to be clear, ethical and professional about what I do, how it works, and what the results will look like.” What Shaun is struggling with is finding his marketing voice.
There is a wonderful marketing giant named Jay Abraham who reframes the idea of marketing beautifully. Jay says that if you have a product or service (in any field) that solves a problem, then you have a moral obligation to promote it. Say what? What a profound idea that is and it takes the sleaze out of marketing entirely for me. I truly believe that the people who are most successful promoting their coaching are the people that genuinely believe in what they are doing and simply use their words in order to convey their beliefs to the world. And now add they are morally obligated to tell the world about the possibilities…
Your marketing voice is about who you are as a coach. Please abandon the idea that you are the perfect coach for everyone, even that you are the perfect coach for everyone in your niche. You are the perfect coach for exactly those people who can hear YOUR authentic voice and respond to your message. These people know that you could help them. These are the only people you need to target your marketing towards – anything else is wasting both your time and that of your prospect.
Financial Reports Can Talk to You
Posted by: | CommentsI have a wonderful friend, Sally, who is a CPA (http://www.massageecpa.com) and we have recently begun meeting periodically to discuss our businesses and to support each other with business growth. Our first meeting was wonderful and we both came away with some great ideas for moving forward. I am definitely not an accounting person and so our very different view points made for an interesting discussion.
I have a bookkeeper that handles most of the tasks related to financial record keeping for me. She inputs my receipts, expenses and income into QuickBooks. Every coach needs to have a system for logging income and expenses and I believe QuickBooks to be the best. Aside from a bit of complicated setup, the software is so simple I can use it myself if I have to! But Sally was not content with what I already had in place. She wants – no – she is insisting, that I start reviewing my financial statements with her each month. As the coach who works with other coaches to be better business owners, I am a little embarrassed to admit to her and to you, I have no idea what those reports mean.
Sally was not put off by this confession at all. She says, “Your financial statements are trying to talk to you. They have many pleasant things to tell you in their own little voices”. She has pledged to teach me to understand their language and I will report back as that process continues. The most important financial statements to review each month are the balance sheet and the profit and loss statement. The balance sheet tells you about your assets, liabilities and equity for the designated period of time. The profit and loss statement tells you how you did overall in making money during that period. I guess those both could be nice voices to be attuned to in order to know your status and grow your business.
If you don’t have an accounting system set up yet, you need to get one as soon as you can. You aren’t really a business without one. If you have your system in place, I challenge you to get those financial reports for 2008 to date and see what the little voices are trying to tell you.
