Take Credit for Your Past – Add Value to Your Future

January 31st, 2010

You have a lot more skills and experience than you give yourself credit for. I’ll lay odds that you don’t even realize the full extent of your assets and resources. There’s a good chance that you are discounting or undervaluing them. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that all your other talents and other events from your past are irrelevant to what you are doing now.

I recently did an exercise where I had to reflect on all of my past work experience. I realized that one of the jobs I had completely forgotten about was actually very relevant to what I am doing now.

During the gap year before I went to university, I worked on a car sales lot on an American military base in Germany.  I was 18 and was uncomfortable about selling, so I teamed up with one of the sales guys there. We worked together, but I was more like his assistant.

He collected the names of everyone who came in and expressed an interest in a car. These were our leads. I loaded their information into the computer, which was unusual back in the late 80’s -  a lot of companies weren’t even using computers much in business.

We used that information to do direct mailings to those people, letting them know about special offers and things that were happening on the car lot. I basically assisted him in getting more people to come to the dealership.

The net result was that we won a competition that year for the highest number of cars sold at the American bases in Germany.  We won an all expenses paid holiday to the Caribbean.

I had completely blanked that experience as being relevant. But when you think about it, I’ve really been using direct mail to promote business and promote sales for a long, long time.  And those skills and experiences I gained back then, are very much relevant today.

My point is, it doesn’t matter whether you’re 25, 45, or 65. You have had many different life experiences and you possess a multitude of assets that could be useful and relevant in helping you to build your online business.

You’ve likely put together some type of resume in your past to submit to an employer with a job application. On it, you surely included your education background and previous work experience, any recognitions or awards and maybe a couple of references.

There is a lot more to you than that, though.

Have you ever done a resume of your life experiences? Have you ever taken inventory of your existing assets and resources?

I am certain that if you sit down and list out all the things you’ve ever done, there are jobs that you’ve performed in the past that somehow contribute to what you’re doing now.

And, I’m pretty sure that there are skills you’ve learned along the way that you apply in some way to the growth of your business. It could be something that you were just doing as a past hobby.

But I’m positive that you have a lot more relevant experience than you are giving yourself credit for right now.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Take Credit for Your Past – Add Value to Your Future

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Posted in Advertising, Business Plans, Business Success, Marketing, Personal Productivity, Sales Leads, Sales Motivation, Success Secrets | No Comments »

Outsourcing – Know When to Say Goodbye

January 30th, 2010

What if you’re not completely happy with someone you’ve hired to help with your business?

Should you keep them on to see if things improve? And, how long do you wait for that to happen? Is the problem really this person? Is it your system? Is it you?

Here’s what to consider:

• A good rule of thumb is to trust your gut.

Really trust your gut. Chances are that if you’ve been thinking for awhile about letting someone go, you probably had an inkling within the first week that something wasn’t going to work out.

If an employee, assistant, vendor or supplier takes up more time and energy than they are worth, you need to let them go. Dan Kennedy, a marketer who has influenced me quite a bit, has very strong beliefs about running your business autonomously and doing business on your own terms. He says, “If I wake up three mornings in a row thinking about you and I’m not sleeping with you, you’ve got to go.”

As much as you’d like to see the good in everybody and give people a chance, don’t drag things on longer than necessary. Be decisive about pulling the plug when things clearly aren’t working. There’s really no point in continuing down the wrong path.

• Check their attitude.

There will always be an element of human error. If you’ve hired a person who has the right attitude – where they’re proactive, they’re willing, they’re trying – and they’ve just made a mistake, be willing and able to overlook that. The fact is that whenever you’re dealing with people, there’s going to be an element of human error. That’s just a fact of life.

• Evaluate your communication and training systems.

85% of problems can be solved by communication. Evaluate the training you’ve provided. Be clear about your needs, and have a good system for communication in place.

• Examine your own attitudes and beliefs.

Determine your own role before you make your decision to keep someone on or let them go. Ask yourself, “At what level am I creating this?” And be honest with your answer. Have you created an insurmountable barrier in your own mind that they can never break through? If you’ve already written off someone who’s working for you – thinking “they’re no good” – you’re going to get that mirrored back to you. You need to take responsibility for that as well.

• Are they an investment or expense?

The right people will ultimately make and save you more money than they cost you. The wrong people will just cost you. If your time or energy is being drained by an individual, then you may very well need to just cut your losses and move on.  Remember, if it’s not working, it’s not working. The best thing you can do is to set  free. Let them go so they can find where they’re meant to be.

Use these tips to evaluate your team and make the right decision as to when it’s time to say goodbye.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Outsourcing – Know When to Say Goodbye

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Get Focused By Increasing Your Psychic RAM

January 29th, 2010

Have you been in the situation where you notice that your computer is a lot slower than it used to be? It takes longer to boot up, takes longer to carry out simple tasks, and takes longer to switch between programs. Something in the background seems to be chewing up all the computer’s capacity to process the information you’re feeding it.

It’s frustrating, because suddenly you can’t rely on your computer as much as you used to. It just doesn’t seem to be working as well.

There’s a simple solution: increase your PC’s random access memory, or RAM.

It’s a quick job, and you’ll be amazed at how much more efficiently your computer will be able to work.

The same step can be applied to you. You can increase what I call your ‘psychic RAM’.

Sometimes when we’re doing too much at work, one of the challenges we’re faced with is psychic RAM. I don’t mean psychic as in a medium or clairvoyant, but your mental space. When you’re doing too many tasks, too many parts of your brain are tied up.

See if this scenario sounds familiar: You need to edit the weekly newsletter. The chances are that throughout the day, before you actually get around to editing the newsletter, it pops into your mind five or six times. When you’re in a sales meeting, on the phone to clients, or working on a new project, your mind jumps to the newsletter. While you should be focusing on other parts of the business, your brain decides to focus on something else.

It’s a type of psychic disturbance that has the power to disrupt your train of thought, putting you off more important work. When you’re overloading yourself with too many tasks, you put amazing amounts of pressure on your mind to keep functioning at its usual top speed. It’s so easy to lose focus when you have too much to focus on.

Doing too many tasks yourself affects your energy. It’s having a direct effect and impact on your business because it’s draining your energy. It’s pulling you away from your unique ability – the things you love to do, the things you do best, the places where you add most value.

But if you start to delegate aspects of your business, and when you know that someone else is taking care of them, you start to free up mental space. This makes more of your brain available for creative thinking, for coming up with new ideas, for solving other problems.

Even if you decide to delegate just some of these tasks, it will free up your psychic RAM and increase your productivity. It’s quite amazing how it just happens. Every time I delegate or outsource an aspect of my work, I’m amazed at the leap in my productivity and new ideas. I suddenly have so much more mental capacity to focus on the core areas of my business.

Increasing your psychic RAM will give you so much more energy, and will allow you to focus more on what you do best.

Isn’t it time that your mind had an upgrade?

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Get Focused By Increasing Your Psychic RAM

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Posted in Business Plans, Business Success, Marketing, Personal Productivity, Small Business Ideas, Success Secrets, Systems | 1 Comment »

Doing Business On YOUR Terms

January 28th, 2010

When you’re building your business, remember that you are the person in the driving seat. You are in control of what shape your business will take, what work you will do, and what work you won’t do.

So many people are trying to build a business based on compromise. They base doing it on the way that they think they have to.

The message I want to get across to you is this: it’s possible for you to do it exactly how you want to!

Many business owners find themselves working all their waking hours, because they feel that they have to. That if they don’t their business won’t grow, they won’t attract new clients.

If you’re in this position, you’re not alone. You might wish to work more conventional office hours, but you find yourself working lots of unpaid ‘overtime’. This is very tempting to do, because your business is your brainchild – you came up with it, you’ve developed it, and of course you want it to succeed.

I’m telling you that you don’t have to keep falling into this trap. You can decide for yourself how and when you work.

When I first started my business, I didn’t set regular hours for myself. It took having a baby for me to decide that I wanted to work in a different way. One of the biggest things I did was to fix hourly times, to say this is when I start work and this is when I finish work.

That was just one of the changes I made after I had a baby, but I was amazed at what happened. The year after I decided to fix my work hours, my income actually doubled versus the previous year. Working the way that I wanted to made a huge difference.

The ability to have it your way also includes how you outsource.

Many people have a vision of how they want to outsource, but think that it won’t be possible. They think that they won’t be able to find the right people to help, or that they will be expected to interact in a specific way with their assistants.

But you can do it your way. You can choose who you will hire. You can choose when you are in contact with your assistants, and whether that’s in person, over the phone, or by chat.

So, if you work from home and you don’t want people to come into your home you can do that. I’m in this position: I prefer to have remote contact with my assistants rather than work with them face-to-face. In fact, I work with virtual assistants who are dotted all around the world.

If you only want to speak to your team once a week, you can. If you don’t want to be constantly responding to emails from your assistants throughout the day, you can choose to send one reply at the end of the day instead.

If you don’t want to be in a situation where you’re constantly having to send emails to or phone people who are working for you, you don’t have to be. You can set it up so it suits you.

Wasn’t one of the main reasons you decided to start your own business because you wanted to do things your way? Don’t be afraid to be the boss of your own business!

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Doing Business On YOUR Terms

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Posted in Business Plans, Business Success, Marketing, Motivation, Small Business Ideas, Success Secrets | 2 Comments »

3 Tips to Successfully Balance Work and Play

January 27th, 2010

Are the edges getting blurred between your work life and home life? If you work from home, it’s really easy for those edges to get blurred. You might, for example, find yourself checking for responses to your tweets when you should be spending time with your family. Or maybe you feel the pull of work because your office is right there at the top of the stairs. Whatever your situation, you must set some “hard edges” between work and personal time if you’re going to work from home successfully. Here are three rules for defining hard edges between work and play.

I. Set Firm Work Days: Working seven days a week is a common mistake of work-at-home entrepreneurs. That’s a real mistake, because no one can maintain that level of intensity long-term.

Decide how many days per week you’re going to work, and stick to it. Here’s why this is important: the work you have to do will fill the time you spend doing it. In other words, if you allow yourself to be sucked into working late nights and weekends, you’ll adjust your workload because you know you’ve got lots of time to do it.

On the other hand, if you say you’re going to work just three days each week, you have to adjust your focus to get things done in less time. If you want to have time for something besides work in your life, create a hard edge between business and personal time by setting firm work days.

II. Reserve Time for Yourself: It may not seem logical that setting aside time for yourself each week actually improves your productivity, but it does help. An important aspect of setting hard edges between work and play is allowing time when no one requires anything from you.

You should especially pay attention if you’re a work-at-home parent. By setting a time when someone else is minding the children and you’re not working in your business, you allow yourself to refocus. It also gives you time to do those things you never seem to get scheduled in your personal life.

Whether you take a whole “You Day” each week, or just a few hours, decide now to set firm time that’s all yours. It will make you a happier and more productive person.

III. Stick to the Schedule! It’s all well and good to say you’re only going to work four days each week and take Wednesdays for yourself, but sticking with that schedule takes resolve. It’s so easy when working from home to read “just one more email” or let a project stretch into family time.

There’s no amount of money that can replace time with your family. Allowing your business to encroach on that time probably won’t even improve the strength of your business.

For your own health, and the health of your business, delineate a hard edge between work and play, and then stick with the schedule you set. You’ll be amazed how much you’re able to get done when you have less time to complete it. And your family will benefit from the time you set aside just for them.

When you work from home, you have the freedom to call the shots, to decide when and how you’re going to work. That is, after all, one of the reasons you own your own business, isn’t it?

Rather than allowing your business to control your life, decide what work schedule suits your situation. Let hard edges, not blurred edges, define how your business and personal lives blend. Doing so is a big step toward being truly successful.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

3 Tips to Successfully Balance Work and Play

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Posted in Business Plans, Business Success, Home Based Business, Home Business, Personal Productivity, Small Business Ideas, Success Secrets, Systems, Words Of Inspiration | 4 Comments »

How To Reach Your Target Audience

January 26th, 2010

Where do the people in your target market hang out? That’s a question you’ll want to answer in order to grow your business quickly. Online or offline, people with similar buying habits tend to read, join and discuss in the same places. By doing some research, and creating a list of established points of connection, you can affordably reach more people in your target audience.

Where Do Your Target Prospects Flock Together?
The old saying about “birds of a feather” really applies when it comes to people likely to buy your product. They probably read the same publications, hang out on the same websites and belong to the same associations. What’s more, they’re likely hanging out together in significant numbers.

This is where good research pays off. Once you learn where your target prospects congregate, you can find ways to leverage relationships other people have with them.

For example, if they’ve paid to subscribe to a magazine, there’s a relationship established with that publication. Someone else might already be selling their products regularly to the same group of people.  Many members of your target audience may also belong to the same trade associations.

The point is, any way you might be able to connect with your audience through an existing connection should be added to your list. Media contacts, possible joint venture partners, associations, and online discussion groups are all valuable assets to be leveraged while growing your list.

If this sounds like a lot of legwork, there’s some good news. Once you begin to find these places where your target audience congregates, a snowball effect will kick in. You’ll talk to one or two people, and then learn of more and more connections. Rather than painstakingly tracking down each place, your new prospects will begin to show them to you.

Find common connections between the people in a specific market. Look for books and publications which give lists of trade magazines or associations.

Ways to Reach Your Market
Remember, the key is to gather information on your list that allows you to reach your market. That means not starting from scratch trying to sell to your audience if there’s another way in.

You might choose to advertise in that magazine your target audience likes to read, or submit some editorials. As you research your list make notes about who accepts advertising, articles or editorials.

A joint venture with a company already selling products to your intended market is another good way to break in. Look online at companies you might once have considered your competitors. If your products complement theirs, a joint venture could benefit you both.

Another possibility is to offer to give talks to the groups you find your market tends to join. Keep notes on who needs guest speakers, how often they meet and whether you can sell from the back of the room.

Again, all this will take some research on your part. Even if someone else could tell you exactly where members of your target audience hang out, they don’t know your product like you do, so do your own homework.

A final tip about reaching your audience: don’t waste your money trying to reach your market through large publications. The expense to advertise in national, regional or even large local publications is enormous, and you’ll be paying for circulation beyond your audience. Target niche magazines and newsletters, instead; your return will be much more profitable.

Devote some time to researching where your target market hangs out and keep your eyes open for opportunities to leverage existing relationships. Expanding your list of marketing prospects will become much easier once you multiply your impact through these avenues.

How To Reach Your Target Audience

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Posted in Advertising, Business Networking, Business Plans, Business Success, Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Joint Venture, List building, Marketing, Niche Marketing, Online Marketing, Success Secrets | No Comments »

The Top Five Reasons To Outsource

January 25th, 2010

I’m a huge fan of outsourcing. I think every business owner should outsource as much as possible.

I’ve been outsourcing for a number of years. I now have a team of virtual assistants located around the world, and I can’t imagine doing business without them. It doesn’t matter if you outsource to one person or to one hundred. Making the decision to outsource will have such a profound impact on your business that you won’t ever look back.

Today, I’ll give you my top five reasons to outsource.

1. It will grow your business.
Outsourcing will help you free up more time, which you can devote to the business. This seems pretty obvious, but sometimes it can happen in surprising ways. I’ve mentioned before a client of mine who came to me, asking for help in attracting new clients. However, she was so bogged down in administrative work that the last thing she actually wanted was new clients because that meant more paperwork. But as soon as she started to outsource her administrative work, her business started to take off. Wouldn’t you like to hand over the mundane parts of your business to someone else to deal with?

2. It helps you decrease costs.
Sometimes you need to play mind games with yourself, and start to quantify every cost that’s going on in your business all the time. You are the greatest asset that your business has. You are the hardest worker, and you come up with new ideas and new products and new plans. Your time is worth so much to your business. But if you find yourself doing routine tasks instead of earning money for your business, you are costing yourself money. You’re completing the accounts or updating the website when you could be meeting with a client. These tasks could be carried out by someone external to your company, and would cost a fraction of the amount that you could otherwise be earning. Outsourcing should not be an expense, but rather a cost saving exercise.

3. It increases your productivity.
By outsourcing routine tasks that aren’t part of your unique ability, it will free up your time and allow you to focus more on what you do best. The whole purpose of your business is to build a business around your unique strengths and your unique talents. You don’t want to be stuck doing jobs that you dislike and which could be done by someone else. Whenever I let go of a part of my business that’s been draining my time and energy, I get an instant boost in productivity.

4. It will help you move faster.
This will have a huge impact on your business. It’s quite interesting the number of people who have told me that it can sometimes be frustrating to attend a seminar or buy a new product to do with building the business. This is because it gives you more ideas, but if you’ve already got a backlog of ideas that haven’t yet been actioned, the last thing you want is more ideas. You need help getting things done, and outsourcing your work can give this to you. When you get someone else to do your routine tasks, you will free up time and energy to move on ideas that you haven’t had the capacity to action. You’ll be able to respond more quickly to clients, both new and old.

5. It builds scalability.
If your business is built purely around one person doing all the work, sooner or later you’re going to run out of time. And normally that’s sooner rather than later. But when you start to outsource, you will start to build scalability because it makes it easier for you to multiply and duplicate your business. You can put systems in place that make it easy for tasks to be duplicated, which make it easier for your business to grow. Building an online business is about helping you reach more people. You’ll be able to deliver more value to more people more often, so you make more money. You’re in a position to do more because you have more time and energy.

Many people think that they can’t afford to outsource. But I guarantee that you’ll be amazed at how much of an impact outsourcing just one task will have on your business. It will free up so much time and mental energy that you can devote to core aspects of your business.

The Top Five Reasons To Outsource

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Posted in Business & Money, Business Plans, Business Success, Freelance Work, Marketing, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets, Systems, outsourcing | 9 Comments »

Make A Change from the Inside Out

January 24th, 2010

The beginning of a New Year is a traditional time for change and improvement. Most of us attempt to make some sort of change for the better. Quitting smoking, losing weight, making and saving more money are all common examples.

Unfortunately, many people fail in their attempt at change. They don’t realize that before any tangible and visible change can happen, less visible and harder to articulate changes must first take place. Their mindset needs to shift.

If you are seeking to increase your business and your financial success, recognize that the change that you need to make must occur first on the inside.

There is a definite connection between mindset and money. I learned this as I was growing my own business. So, if you feel like you know what you’re supposed to be doing, but you’re not getting results, you may need to discover the connection too.

If you are doing all the right things and still bumping up against a brick wall, there is a good chance that it’s not what you’re doing that is the problem. It could be that there is some pattern of sabotage that’s blocking you from getting the results that you deserve to get.

If you’ve been frustrated, working hard, dreaming about having more, and maybe even feeling guilty about wanting more, sometimes a kind of desperation can take over.

And that can lead you to looking for that one thing, the quick fix. Feeling that sense of urgency, that need to know that one thing, can actually become an obstacle for you. Your own impatience can be a pattern that blocks you from getting to the answer as quickly as you would like to.

So, even if you’ve read The Secret, taken courses, and done the affirmations, the results that you desire may still elude you. Why? Because sometimes the workshops, trainings and books aren’t always helpful at bringing about the change on the outside.

Sometimes all you really get from them, if you’re not careful, is just a better way of articulating your dysfunction.

They just give you more labels for describing your limitation.

“Let’s explore your abundance or your scarcity mindset” or whatever,

Having an intellectual conversation about your beliefs isn’t going to effect the change that you want. You already recognize that if you’re doing all the right things and still not getting the results that you want, something going on inside of you needs to change.

And to be honest, if you’re not getting the results you want, how do you really know you’re doing all the right things? Maybe that’s part of the problem. If you feel “I know that. I know that,” but you’re not producing results, you really only know something on an intellectual level.

It is only when you have that knowledge on the deep down, gut level that you can translate it into results in your life.

If you’re not there yet, try to have a bit more open-mindedness. Maybe there’s something left to learn.

Looking back from where I am today, it’s easy, with hindsight, to see different points of the journey.

I recognize that what stopped me from getting here sooner was arrogance – a feeling that I’m intelligent and I’ve read the books and I’ve got this figured out. I didn’t have it figured out. And it wasn’t until I admitted that to myself and the people around me that things started to change for me.

You need to focus on what that change needs to be for you. Focus on what’s going to make the difference for you.

—

Bernadette has launched her new programme Stepping UP, and 2010 promises to be an exciting and profitable year! You can hear all about it on her teleseminar http://is.gd/6iiNS

Make A Change from the Inside Out

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Posted in Business Plans, Business Success, Marketing, Motivation, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets, Systems, Words Of Inspiration | No Comments »

How Do I Start Outsourcing?

January 23rd, 2010

So you’ve made the decision to start outsourcing. Congratulations!

You’ll soon notice the positive impact this will have on your business, and you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it. Outsourcing is so important, because if you want to grow a profitable online business, you’ll need more than one person!

It’s time to build up a network of people around you that you can outsource routine tasks to.

But where do you start outsourcing? For some people, deciding which aspects of their business they could or should outsource is really simple. To them, it just makes sense which routine activities to outsource.

But for other people, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious answer to the question of where to start outsourcing. No part of the business stands out as being more easily outsourced than any other.

Something that will help you to identify what to outsource is to keep a log of your day. Try to keep a track of all your work activities on a daily basis, ideally for a week. It may seem very labour-intensive to start with, but this will help you to save time in the long run.

Once you’ve done this, sit back and look at this time log. Start to identify any activities that you would like to hand over, things that could be done by someone else. Highlight any tasks that, in an ideal world, you would handover.

Say, for example, you really dislike doing the accounts, or you wish you could get someone else to do your monthly newsletter mail out. Highlight every time during that week you spent on accounts or on organising the month’s newsletter. You’ll probably be amazed at how much time you’ve spent on tasks that aren’t part of your core business.  Tasks that you could hand over to someone else to deal with.

This is where you should be starting to outsource. The routine jobs that immediately jump off the page at you are where you should concentrate, as these are the tasks that you have readily identified as not being part of your core business.

When you start doing this, maybe you’ll only highlight a few tasks on your log. While you might want to hand over other things on your list, at the moment it might seem like too much of an impossible dream.

But I promise, once you start this process you’ll be hooked. And the longer you do it and the more things you’ll start to observe, you’ll begin noticing all that you’re doing that you could be delegating.

The great thing about doing this is that once you’ve got your list of tasks and activities that you would like to handover, you can start to group them together. Ask yourself if there are skill sets that go together, and if you can outsource a group of tasks to one person or team.

For example, your list might contain several activities relating to editing and publishing, or website maintenance, or data entry. These groupings might not occur to you if you just thought about a regular business day. But actually going through each minute of your day clarifies exactly what you do to keep your business going.

I still find myself monitoring my daily routine, because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of doing things that I could be delegating. Whenever I sit down to look at exactly where I’m spending my time, I immediately experience a boost to my efficiency and productivity.

So, your challenge is to keep a log of your activities next week. For those who aren’t outsourcing, you’ll be amazed at how much of your day you will be able to delegate to someone else. And while you may already be outsourcing, think of it as a ‘tune up’ for your business.

Get ready to feel that boost of productivity!

How Do I Start Outsourcing?

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Posted in Business Plans, Business Success, Home Based Business, Marketing, Online Marketing, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets, outsourcing | 5 Comments »

10 Steps To A Winning Marketing Plan

January 22nd, 2010

Planning your marketing strategy can sometimes feel overwhelming. But the truth is, it is one of the most important steps you need to take in order to achieve success! There are so many options, so many opinions and so many decisions to make. How do you know which will work for you?

As a member of several mastermind groups, I’m often privy to insider information regarding the conversion levels people are achieving, and the amount of revenue that is being made in the marketplace.

Through my own personal experience, and the experiences of others, I’ve been able to witness how some business soar whilst others are not achieving the growth they could be.

This week, I wanted to share with you 10 tried-and-true tips that I see in every successful marketing plan. Incorporating these steps in your marketing plan will help you to transform your marketing and reach more customers.

  1. Analyze the marketing methods of people that are really soaring in their businesses. Where can you apply some of their techniques in your own business?
  2. Make sure you’re aware of what your market really wants. Understanding what people are looking for on a logical level and emotional level is the foundation of successful marketing.
  3. Understand that know-how itself isn’t enough. Simply knowing the right business model or the right techniques will not give you the edge. It takes more than just knowing what to do in your business to achieve extraordinary results.
  4. Dig deeper. Don’t market “by the numbers” and just check off all the boxes as if you’re working a marketing “to do” list. Look beyond the surface to make a real connection with your audience. Find what it is that makes you and your business unique, and make that a focus of your marketing strategy.
  5. Emotionally engage your audience. Figure out what it is that will keep their interest and keep them coming back for more. A newsletter with an ongoing story, a must-read tip-of-the-day, an answer to the previous day’s question. Find something that will make your audience unable to resist tuning in to see what you are up to.
  6. Personal revelation. Allow your customers to get to know who you are, why you are doing what you’re doing. This is one of the most effective ways to emotionally engage an audience.
  7. Create likeability in your marketing. Tell the truth, be an expert, and reveal things about yourself, even including weaknesses or things that you had problems with in the past. That can really add to your marketing
  8. Do something simple, like add a photo to your profile.
  9. Uncover your story. What’s the element of your story? What’s your background and your reason for being in business? What’s going to draw people in and engage them?
  10. Don’t be afraid to polarize your audience. As you really make it your job to emotionally engage people, there will be some who aren’t going to like you and others that will love you. That’s just a fact in both business and personal life.

Take the time to focus on these ten steps, because they will help you to develop a winning marketing plan. When you really focus on these things, and commit to using them, your business will flourish.

10 Steps To A Winning Marketing Plan

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