I just received an interesting question from a client and thought it was important enough to use as a blog post, so here goes:

Question: Should I write and distribute a press release when I join my local Chamber of Commerce this week?

Answer: Congratulations on identifying and joining an organization that will help you in your business! It’s so important to surround yourself with people and organizations that provide you with opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise.

If you were appointed to the board, the media would be interested in running that in their version of “People on the Move.”  But they can’t run something on every new member of every organization in town so I wouldn’t waste your time in sending out a press release.

However, I do have ideas on how to maximize your new membership:

1. If you have a “press” tab on your web site, add a short blurb about joining the chamber there.
2. Add their logo to your home page. This is a credibility piece that you now have in your portfolio. Proud member of:  LOGO GOES HERE.  Add all of your membership organizations.
3. In a similar fashion, you can add the logo to the bottom of your next enewsletter. People like to associate w/ others who also invest in themselves and their businesses.  In lieu of adding it as a permanent part of your enewsletter, just mention it in your opening paragraph about what you’re up to.
4. Does the chamber offer any special new member announcements to other members of the chamber?  Be sure to use the free promotional opportunities they provide.  Some are substantial.  My membership in a local chamber afforded me to be published in their newsletter nearly every month, just by sending them updates, information on upcoming teleclasses and workshops.  Most members don’t take full advantage of benefits.

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When a Winter Storm Warning was issued in Durham recently I could only envision the ensuing panic as residents rushed to the store to buy water, milk, bread and other essentials.  And this was just at the threat of snow!  When people think someone is going to run out of something, it doesn’t really matter what it is, they are more motivated to buy that product.  You see scarcity marketing all the time.  QVC and other home shopping networks are masters at this by showing consumers a countdown clock and the rapidly decreasing number of remaining products.

You can use that same scarcity model when promoting your products and services.  Words and phrases like “limited time offer”, “while supplies last”, “only a few spots remaining” are very effective calls to actions that get clients to make a purchase.  Always be honest when using this approach.

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In my experience as a coach, consultant and trainer I have learned a lot about the differences between coaches who find success easily, and those who tend to struggle.

One of the distinctions is the more successful coaches exude confidence, and they have structure to their coaching; structure that makes it easy for them to talk about the value they provide.

Beyond coaching hundreds of clients and training literally thousands of coaches, the one thing that has helped me exceed a 6-figure income as a coach has been the use of assessments.  Not just any ol’ assessments, though. I use scientifically validated, heavily researched assessments.

By using these with all my clients, I short-cut the learning curve and I have a clear coaching structure for the first several coaching sessions. With the right assessments, you can do this regardless of what brought the client to you in the first place.

Until recently it has been quite expensive to use assessments of this caliber. In fact, standard registration for the company I work with is $2495 with additional fees and requirements placed on you to get started and continue with them.  A number of other companies are even more expensive and restrictive.

Now you can actually get started with the exact same assessments I have used to create my 6-figure coaching business for as little as a one time fee of $140, then purchasing the reports as you need them.  And it’s all done online, so it’s super easy.

It’s hard to explain just how valuable this is and how easy they are to use, so I’m offering a demonstration of how the system works so that you can see for yourself what might be possible and how you could use assessments to grow your confidence and increase your income.

To “Test Drive” the EPIC (Electronic Profile Information Center) visit http://discninja.com/client-resources/demo/.  If you want additional information on how this system can help you visit  http://discninja.com/client-resources/epic-account/.  Then call or email me with additional questions.

Having a solid system in place when coaching clients can be incredibly empowering, for both you and your client or staff.

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When you’re starting a business, how do you get clients if you have no track record and no testimonials? Here are 2 ideas for doing just that.

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Read Part One of How to Do Transformational Selling

Remember our couple who wanted the new $15,000 patio and outdoor entertainment area?  (See How To Do Transformational Selling, Part One).  I promised I would walk you through the steps of successful transformational selling and how it ties in to good customer relationships and collaborative marketing.  Here’s what can happen when you are set up to sell this way.

• Have an active customer and community relationship management system in place.  If you’re good, you will work this in two ways.  If the young couple is already in a business relationship with you, you will have achieved top of mind awareness that is so entrenched that they won’t even think of looking elsewhere, and you will also know that the couple has wanted this new patio area for a while.  If the couple isn’t an existing customer, your community outreach program will be strong enough to encourage their looking at you even though you are not their current financial institution.  And again, if you really know the people in your community, you will have heard that the couple wants a new patio for their home.  Either way, your relationship building strategies have worked in that they’ve given you a shot at doing this deal.
• Craft your offer based on transformational selling.  This means that your advertising copy and sales conversation focuses heavily on what a new patio area will do for the couple.  You use emotional triggers rather than logic, and you focus first and foremost on what the patio means to the couple.  The delivery mechanism is secondary.  Focus on how the patio area transforms the couple’s home, what the outcome of adding to their home will give them, the feelings that will come into play.  Perhaps the couple wants the area to entertain.  Perhaps they want it because they envision children playing out there in the near future.  Your job is to know the emotional triggers and address them in copy and conversation.  Help the couple to voice the vision that is in their mind, the unspoken emotions.  What will it cost them if they decide not to build the patio area?  Show the couple that you get and care about what this will do for them, how it will transform them.
• Make sure that your transformational sales conversations are genuine – meaning that you are genuinely interested in this couple and want an ongoing relationship with them, whether they do business with you this time or not.  Transformational selling requires true and ongoing customer relationship.  Otherwise, it will sound insincere and manipulative and will most certainly drive the couple away.
• Only after having the transformational conversation do you turn your attention to the delivery mechanism.  Your delivery mechanism (amount of loan, interest rate, length of term) has to be competitive, but it does not have to be the very cheapest deal around.  Remember that transformational selling is based on relationship.  Customers who feel understood will decide based on relationship as well as the bottom line.  If you have done your job well, your customer will do the deal and tell their friends, “We paid just a little more but we felt understood and know we will be taken care of if any problems come up.”  That word of mouth will help you in subtle but powerful ways with other potential customers, too.

You can use transformational selling to build collaboration and great word-of-mouth as well as media.  A great customer relationship system will continue to strengthen the bond with this couple long after the deal is done.  What if, for instance, you followed the patio’s progress and when it neared completion you showed up with a new plant, a cooler on wheels, or a bottle of wine?  Want even more play?  Get a relationship going with the hardscape installer, and the two of you go in together to sponsor the first patio party for the couple.  Got a photographer as a bank customer?  Call him into the mix, too.  Not only will the couple never forget their first party (giving you great word-of-mouth for years to come) but you have given the photographer a little business, built stronger relationship with the installer who might recommend you to others needing money for similar projects, and you can easily get local press – a picture in the paper with a mention of the three businesses who made this couple so happy.

Tranformational selling is a win all the way around.  It is heartfelt as well as good business strategy, and it helps build and keep customer relationships strong.  Add it into your sales strategies and watch what it does for your bottom line.

© Sue Painter

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One of the questions I’ve often asked is “What should I post on Twitter and Facebook”?

While there are several things you can post (check out my post on How to Become an Expert Using Content here) on Twitter and Facebook, the simplest of all is to let your friends and followers know when they’ve helped you in some way.

Rather than send a private “direct message” on Twitter, openly thank or congratulate someone for something they’ve done.

In addition to showing gratitude/recognition to someone, openly posting “thanks” or “kudos” does a few things:

1. It shows that you’re happy and willing to give credit or thanks when appropriate.

2. It links you publicly with the person you’re thanking/giving credit to (and puts you in their stream).

3. This type of post counts towards “valuable and informative” content and isn’t self-promotional.

So what are you waiting for?  Go share some gratitude and recognition today!

And if you’re not yet on Twitter or are ready to take it to the next level (while freeing up your time), you’ll want to check out Social Networking: Done 4 You today!

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Once you’ve figured out your niche (or you’ve at least narrowed it down significantly), it’s time to figure out what problems they are struggling with, and what they want by way of solutions. Remember, if you will only ask your market, it wants to help you create the products it wants to buy!

How do you find out what your target market wants? There are several ways to get this information and use it to help you create an offering that will solve your niche’s problems and make a profit for you at the same time.

The best way is to do your research. The most critical research to do is to join the conversations that your market is having:

Here are two ways to do this:

1. Simple: Ask them!
Ask your prospects a simple, open-ended question, like “What’s your biggest challenge with building your business online?” or “What’s the one thing you’d like to learn more about that relates to balancing your work and family life?” Tailor the question to your niche and use the information you receive to help spark ideas for new products and services.

2. Almost as Simple:
Do a simple survey that asks 1-10 questions using a survey tool like Zoomerang or Survey Monkey. This allows you to ask more specific questions to elicit more specific responses. Doing a survey like this really helps you to NOT waste your time creating offerings your target market simply doesn’t want.

Once you’ve figure out what your niche’s problems are, you can create or find the solutions to solve those problems. Your solution can be packaged in a variety of ways: an ecourse, a PDF manual, an ebook, an audio download and/or CD, group programs, teleseminars, e-manuals, etc.

3-Step Process to Creating Products:

Here’s a very simple process to follow to create a product to add to you funnel quickly:

1. Do a free or paid live class on your product

Once you’ve done your research and you’ve chosen a topic your target market is interested in knowing more about, offer a 1-hour teleclass on that topic. Cover three points and offer your solutions. Most important is to make sure you record the teleseminar, as this is what leads to a product for you.

As you’re designing your outline for the class, do so in a way that creates notes for your participant. (If you’re a member of my Coaching Cafe, you know that I give very detailed class notes, so you know what I mean by this).

As the end of your live teleclass, you’ll have the recording and notes to then…

2. Package it virtually.

Now you have the audio recording and notes to offer as a bundled product and…

3. Package it into a tangible product.

You can then take it up a notch and turn it into a physical product and offer it that way as another income stream for you.

And here are some of my other favorite tips for simple product creation:

- If you don’t have a list or access to a list, you can offer a free class on a topic and then charge people for the product down the road, or afterwards.

- Another option is to have someone interview you on your topic to create your product. You can offer the questions along with the interviewee’s questions. This is a good strategy if you don’t think you can get enough people on a call.

- You can record any live classes or workshops you’re holding as well, and re-package those presentations virtually or tangibly.

- Try to record everything so you always have the option to offer it at some level down the road.

- Promote your teleclass to your list, via colleagues who are willing to spread the word (especially if it’s free) and at teleclass listing services.

- Promote on the discussion lists and groups that you’re a part of, promote it there with permission and on the appropriate day.

- Pricing: If this is a new process for you, if you’re offering your topic for the first time and sort of feeling out your market, go with the lower end. If you’re putting together a 90-minute class with lots of comprehensive step-by-step information, charge more.

- When it comes to creating your big-ticket item, they can be created from all these little products along the way. So, if you were creating a product a month or every other month, that gives you 6-12 products at the end of the year that can be packaged together into your big ticket item.

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Back when I was young and spry, I spent a semester hiking through the Yosemite back country for college credit (one of the perks of attending UCSC).

Whenever things weren’t going well -like when the bears ate all our food 3 days into a 5-day hike – my friend Terry Chan would say, “We’re not having
fun now, but it’ll make a great story!”   (Terry had ample opportunity to use that line during those 3 months.)

And she was right.  I’ve traded off stories from that experience for the last couple of decades.

People love stories.  They love to tell ‘em, they love to hear ‘em, they love to be the center of ‘em.

Truth is, using stories is one of the smartest things you can do to increase the effectiveness of your promotional campaigns.

The human brain is wired to want our questions answered.

By weaving a plot or theme throughout your launch communications, it encourages your audience to keep reading your materials so they can find out, “What happens next?”  It’s almost like inviting them into your own personal soap opera.  (And whether it’s All My Children, Dallas or Grey’s Anatomy, we’ve all got our favorite one of those, don’t we?)

Bottom line: Your launch will be strongest, and most compelling, when it’s a sequence of actions and communications centered around a particular storyline.

And * compelling* is where the profit lies.

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As a solo service professional you are probably already clear on who your niche is, i.e. you know who those people are who want and need your services, but are you providing the solution to their problems in the way that they want?

If your products, programs, and/or services are not selling as well as you thought they would it could be there’s a mismatch between what your market wants and what you’re providing them with.  In other words, are you providing the solutions based on what YOU think the problems are rather than what your target market wants?  And how do you find out?

The answer is simple… market research!

When you think ‘market research’ it conjures up all sorts of images of telephone surveys, sending out questionnaires, and standing in the street accosting people to ask them questions (yes – I used to do this type of market research many years ago when I worked for a management consultancy practice J ), and as a solo business owner it is crucial that you do your own ‘market research’ to find out what makes your target market tick, what keeps them awake at night, and what they’re really struggling with.

This process needs to be done on a continual basis – never stop asking your target market what they want – so that you can constantly provide the solutions to their problems.

Today, I’d like to share with you three simple strategies for conducting your own market research (that doesn’t involve standing around in the street!), and how you can put these strategies onto autopilot so that you’re constantly gathering information from your market.  All of these have worked very well for me over the past few years!

1.       Ask via your sign-up page.  When someone signs up to your list, don’t just get their name and email address, ask them what their biggest challenge is too.  This is something I’ve done for many years, and in fact you would have seen this yourself when you signed up for this newsletter.  I have a specific question that asks:  What is YOUR biggest office headache?  Feel free to adapt this question for your own needs, i.e. what is your biggest [fill in the blank] when it comes to [fill in the blank].

2.       Follow-up with an autoresponder.  Once someone has signed up to your list, create an autoresponder that goes out a few days later and asks the same question again.  Very often people may not have answered the question when they signed up to your list, and sending them an email a few days later will elicit a reply from them.

3.       Create an annual or semi annual survey.  At least once a year it’s a good idea to survey your readers and ask them several more in-depth questions.  You’ll want to find out what their biggest problems are, what it is they want to learn more about, plus how they want to learn, or how they want their problem solved.  For example, you might find your readers prefer home study courses to teleclasses, or would like more interactive programs from you.  Putting together a survey is really simple, especially if you use a service such as Survey Monkey.  They do the analysis for you, so you get really valuable data.

However, for the data you get through steps 1 and 2 above, analysis isn’t as automatic.  Simply gather together all of your data and go through it periodically (at least twice a year) to see what your reader’s problems are.  You don’t even need to be a statistician to figure it all out.  Just print off all the responses and read through them, noting any common themes as you go along.

By combining all of this data, and implementing your market research strategy so that it runs on autopilot, you can then use this information to put your products and services together so that you’re providing solutions to your target market’s problems in the way that they want and need.

Remember, you are providing your market with what they want and need, not what you think they want and need.

(c) 2008 Tracey Lawton

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About the author:  Office organization expert, Tracey Lawton, teaches professional speakers, coaches, and authors how to create the essential online marketing and office organization systems needed to operate an efficient, organized, and profitable business.  Learn how YOU can create an efficient and organized office in 7 EASY steps, and receive free how-to articles at http://www.OfficeOrganizationSuccess.com

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As a solopreneur, one ingredient you need for a successful online business is traffic… and lots of it! But there are so many websites out there, all competing for the same traffic, that it can be difficult to attract visitors to YOUR website!

Today, I’d like to share with you my top five strategies for attracting highly targeted visitors:

1. Offer a Free Taste

Your free taste is something that you give to someone in exchange for them giving you their name and email address, and signing up to your list. Your free taste is also your chance to show off your expertise, and give your new subscriber a sampling of what it is you offer.

It must be something of value to your subscriber, without giving away the whole shop!

Then you simply promote your free taste on your website, in your email signature, in your Resource Bio, and any other place you can think of! Place a call to action and people will read it, and click through to your website to get what it is you’re offering.

2. Get Others To Promote Your website For You

If you have products and programs for sale then you can easily get other people to promote them for you by offering an affiliate program. People will sign up to your affiliate program and promote your products and programs through their website, newsletter, and/or blog. In exchange you offer them a percentage commission for each sale that your affiliate makes – and make it a generous commission so that they have a real incentive to promote you.

If you’re currently using a shopping cart service, check out everything they have to offer – they may have an affiliate program included as part of their service. Mine does!

3. Participate in a Joint Venture (JV)

This is an excellent way to drive highly targeted traffic back to your website, and very easy for you to organize. Gather together some of you colleagues who offer complementary products and services to you and agree to promote each other’s products and services to your list.

I participated in a joint venture earlier this year where the organizer created a dedicated web page for this promotion. Everyone’s promotional ‘blurb’ was listed on the website, and each ‘joint venturee’ sent an announcement out to their list during a specified period directing their subscribers to this webpage. I got a TON of new subscribers as a result!

4. Article Marketing

This is one of my all-time favorites… one of the most successful and cost effective online marketing strategies you can do is to submit your articles to various online article submission websites. This is a great way to:

• promote your services;
• elevate you to ‘expert’ status within your chosen niche; and
• grow your subscriber list.

It has been well documented that one-way links to your website increase search engine rankings more than reciprocal linking, and article submission is an excellent way to achieve one-way linking. It works by creating backlinks to your website, which the search engines love! With each article you submit, you include a resource box that contains information about you, your business, and an active hyperlink back to your website, newsletter sign up page, product, or special offer – you choose where you want to direct your readers. For example, my resource box directs readers to my newsletter sign up page.

5. Host a Free Teleclass

Hosting a free teleclass is a great way for you to get out in front of your target audience. They actually get to listen to you presenting your information, and have the opportunity to ask you questions on the call – all of which can’t be achieved just by writing articles!

And it also gives you to chance to interact with your target market, and find out valuable information about their struggles and pains. It all goes towards building the like, know, and trust factor that is so important when building a solo service business.

All of these strategies work well on their own, and I’ve had a huge amount of success with each one of them! You can choose to implement just one strategy, or use a combination. Whichever you choose, they all achieve the same goal… to drive highly targeted traffic to your website!

(c) 2008 Tracey Lawton

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About the author: Office organization expert, Tracey Lawton, teaches professional speakers, coaches, and authors how to create the essential online marketing and office organization systems needed to operate an efficient, organized, and profitable business. Learn how YOU can create an efficient and organized office in 7 EASY steps, and receive free how-to articles at http://www.OfficeOrganizationSuccess.com

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