Packaging your knowledge, skills and methods and giving it away for free is a wonderful way to market your business. So how do you give it away effectively and profitably?
Use multiple channels and formats. For instance, give away information on your blog, in articles posted on other sites, in free giveaway ebooks, in audio teleclasses and excerpts.
Get something in return when possible. Encourage blog visitors to sign up for blog updates via email. Put a subscription box to your newsletter on every page of your website (particularly where you post your newsletters, etc.) For bigger “chunks” of information like ebooks and audios, require that they sign up for your newsletter to get these freebies. In ebooks, make a link to your website prominent at the bottom of each page.
One of the best ways to generate more income is to stop selling your expertise by the hour. Your expertise — knowledge, skills, methods — are your most valuable assets. By taking your expertise and packaging it in various forms, you can sell your expertise 24/7/365.
So if your knowledge, skills and methods are your most valuable assets, why in the world would I suggest that you give it away as a marketing strategy?? Read the rest of this post »
Are you working too hard in your business? If you’re an entrepreneur, you probably are, especially if you’re in the early stages of your business building. And you’re not alone.
Here’s an example from my own client files:
I was recently working with a client who was a real go-getter, very serious about being in business for herself, and marketing only to a more affluent clientele. She wanted to increase her reach into that market online. And she was considering adding article marketing to her mix.
At this stage in her business, she was already doing quite well. She was close to making 6 figures and charging 5 times as much as her counterparts - and getting it easily. But she wasn’t satisfied. She really wanted to break the $100k mark before the third anniversary of her business, which was coming up in just a few months.
Marnie Pehrson of IdeaMarketers.com published a great audio Q&A series addressing common article marketing questions: how to get started, where article marketing fits in your overall marketing strategy, using articles to increase traffic and find prospective customers, and more. Listen to the audio series here
Boring is one thing you can’t afford to be when it comes to marketing your business. With more than 3000+ marketing messages pummeling consumers on a daily basis, you need to be more, and do more, if you want to be heard above the racket.Your marketing message is how you communicate with the public; it needs to be appealing and memorable. In order to do that, consider the concept of the meme. A meme is a thought, idea or belief that replicates over time. What that means in terms of your marketing is creating a marketing message that is strong, bold,
and exciting so that it stays with the customer and becomes a part of their thinking. A good example of this is Nike’s “Just Do It”. This phrase is used in a lot of different contexts outside of talking about Nike’s products. People get what it means because it has permeated our culture. Below are some ways that you can avoid being boring by adding extra marketing appeal to your message. Read the rest of this post »
Several years ago, when I was working for an agency, I was fired from an account. What that means is the client didn’t want me writing for him anymore.
Another writer, a friend of mine, got the account and life went on.
Playing games can be a lot of fun, but in business they can take an ugly turn when they turn into head games. How we play games, or play at games, often reflects our true nature as to how we do business.
One of the most popular, inexpensive ways to market your business online in recent years is article marketing: writing quality articles and submitting them to dozens of article directories, where they (hopefully!) get picked up and published in relevant ezines and websites. This, of course results in potentially hundreds of copies of essentially the same content — your article — on various web pages across the Internet.
So — is this the dreaded “duplicate content” that Google and other search engines will penalize in their rankings? I’ve heard a lot of chatter this week that this is indeed the case, and so article marketing will start losing it’s effectiveness — or will it? The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth, by white hat search engine optimization expert Jill Whalen, offers a clear explanation of what is, and isn’t, considered duplicate content. If you have any doubts about the future of article marketing, this post may put them to rest.
I think that as conscientious Solo Entrepreneurs, we tend to think that creating a new product means starting from a blank sheet of paper. Kind of like baking from scratch, rather than from a box.
I don’t know about you but cake from a box is mighty fine to me!
