Self Employed Success

I’d love your input and feedback!

I’ve had an idea brewing in my mind for quite some time for a live weekend event. I’d love your feedback on this idea!

What if you could get away for an entire weekend to create the most fabulous business you can imagine?

I’m interested in your feedback on a retreat weekend for small business owners, where you could plan and create your entire next year for business in one weekend.

It would be a place to work ON your business, not IN it, brainstorming and masterminding with other small business owners about creative possibilities and solutions for your business.

Could you help me by answering a few questions about this retreat weekend idea and what you’d like to see in it? Thanks! Here’s the survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WDCL76H

When you offer services, whether to large corporations or individual consumers, you find that you’re just one of many and you need to stand out from the crowd to be seen and remembered.

Many small business owners struggle with the question of “How do I make my service unique and stand out from the crowd?”

Announcing March’s free teleclass – Personal Branding: Stand Out By Standing For Something

In Personal Branding, we talk about creating a brand to captures people’s attention, and more importantly, their loyalty. Here’s what we cover:

• How to define your brand and your uniqueness
• How to become a know expert in your community
• How to use specific marketing techniques to build your brand and reputation
• How to stand out from the crowd

March 24, 2010
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM eastern

Class will be recorded, so if you miss a session, you will be able to download the audio recording of the live class and listen to it at your leisure.

To register for this free teleclass:

http://www.passionforbusiness.com/calendar.htm

There are three email newsletters I read faithfully, every single time they enter my Inbox. I subscribe to over 20 newsletters, but only three are never-miss-reading newsletters.

Would you say email newsletters are dead because I don’t read 17 immediately, or would you say it’s very much alive because of the three I read right away? (Look at the bottom of this post for the three I love.)

There’s been lots of talk among my clients and students these days, speculating on the possible demise of the email newsletter as a powerful internet marketing tool. Funny thing: I remember having this discussion back in 2005 with my internet marketing colleagues, yet email marketing is still alive and well five years later.

Sending out weekly or monthly updates to your list has grown in popularity and importance as a marketing tool ever since the public Internet began. But now people are overwhelmed with the amount of email they’re getting, so what are you to do?

There are lots of pros and cons to using email newsletters and email marketing:

Pros

1. People can get to know you through your newsletters. Not just what services or products you offer, but how you think and feel about the topics you write on.
2. If you’re sending out HTML emails, you control the look and feel of your email newsletter, and can establish a solid brand and image in people’s minds
3. You can track to see who opened the email and how many people clicked on the links in the email. Statistics are a crucial measure of the success of email marketing.
4. You can customize your message to segments of your list. For example, if a group of students took an introductory-level class with me, I can offer them the advanced-level class. Or if people have expressed an interest in a specific topic, I can send just those people a new article I’ve written on that topic.
5. Never overlook the fact that most people are time-constrained and appreciate convenience. With the overwhelming number of places on the internet to search for information, having ONE source they can rely on is a blessing.

Cons

1. There are many ways to get in front of your target audience with your content and news now: social media sites, your own blog, article bank sites like www.ezinearticles.com, YouTube, etc. Your newsletter is just one of a mix.
2. Too much email, too much junk. People are inundated and often will ignore things in their Inbox that they can’t take care of right away or that have a lower priority. And don’t forget those nasty filters that whisk away your email before your reader even sees it!
3. If you don’t write regularly, people are apt to forget about you. Or worse, think you’re inconsistent and therefore unreliable. Ewwww.

Strategy

I still believe your mailing list is the hub of your internet marketing strategy. It’s the only place where people have raised their hands and said, “I want to hear from you.” (Tools like Feedburner allow people to subscribe to your blog and get updates via email, so your blog becomes your email newsletter…how simple!) But you need a strategy for your email marketing.

Here are some tips:

• Above all else, offer value. When you write an article for your email newsletter (or your blog, or your Facebook Notes area), make sure you’re giving good information. (Read your past five newsletters…did you serve your audience well?)
• Sixty-day rule. Remember that your subscribers are most responsive in the first 60 days of signing up for your list. Stay in contact with those folks more often than your once-a-month newsletter.
• Loyalty counts. Reward long-time subscribers with special freebies or discounts.
• One of many tools. Ask yourself, “What are ALL the different ways I can communicate with my audience and share my articles, advice, offers, and news?”
• One of many lists. Think of your email list as just one list of many. Your Facebook friends are a list, your Twitter followers are a list, and your blog subscribers are a list.
• Combine with human contact. Don’t just have an email list and think that’s enough for people to get to know you and trust you. Offer free teleclasses. Be available via Facebook or Twitter for ongoing conversations. Give live speeches both locally and nationally. Get out there and be seen – everywhere.

Email newsletters aren’t dead. They are a strategic component of your internet marketing plan. But having an integrated internet marketing strategy, mixed with some real-life connection to your audience, is what will bring success.

Oh, the three email newsletters I read faithfully?

Alan Weiss – http://www.summitconsulting.com/
Pamela Wilson – http://www.bigbrandsystem.com/
Nancy Marmolejo – http://vivavisibilityblog.com/

Not only do they use their email broadcasts to strengthen their brand image, but I love the way they think and write, too.

I’ll be speaking at the following live events:

• March 19 – “Creating Small Business Websites That Grab Attention” – Association For Women in Communications – NJ Chapter/West Orange, NJ
• March 23 – “The Power of Mastermind Groups” – Women’s Entrepreneur Success Symposium/Warrington, PA
• April 30 – “90 Minute Marketing Plans That Get Results” – International Coach Federation – Connecticut Chapter/Shelton, CT

I hope to see you there!

Ha! My friend and colleague Erin Hyland sent me a link to a color personality test.

Holy cow, it was incredibly accurate! It said that I’m “creative” and “a doer.”

How did they know that?

Go ahead, take the personality test, and let me know what it says about you, okay?

I heard this comment at a National Speaker’s Association meeting last month: “Being your own boss is the hardest way to make easy money.” Boy, isn’t that the truth!

So many people I speak with dream of becoming self employed and starting their own small business. Don’t get me wrong: being self employed is the best lifestyle I know. It has a huge range of rewards, from flexibility to independence to self-responsibility. I’m completely in love with being self employed and wouldn’t exchange it for a corporate job for a million dollars! (Okay, truthfully, if you want to offer me a million dollars a year in salary, I’m willing to entertain a discussion.)

But it is hard work, plain and simple. After carefully studying and working with people who start their own businesses, my best estimate is that it takes at least a year to make a serious profit, and often it’s more like two years. I have yet to see a “quick fix” for small business marketing that will land a lot of cash in your pocket in 30 days. If your business structure and administrative process are not firmly in place, you’ll crash and burn eventually. If your business strategy and plan are not fine-tuned, you’ll spend an extraordinary amount of time running in circles trying to find the right customer and the right product or service to sell them.

So why do people look for (and purchase) products and services that promise a quick fix to their ailing small business? In the question lays the answer: they want a quick fix to the pain. Don’t we all?

Running your own small business is a marathon, not a sprint. Stop trying to sprint your way to your first million without a firm foundation under you. Remember, marathoners train all year long for just one marathon; they don’t wait until the month before to begin preparing.

Things to consider:

1. Make sure you have the personality to be self employed (more on that here in my post “Are You Cut Out To Be Your Own Boss?”).
2. Make sure you have enough money to finance your dreams, and a good financial plan that tells you when you’ll actually start making a profit.
3. Invest money and time in sound, effective marketing strategies and do them every month, rain or shine.
4. Have a written business plan and a business strategy, even if it’s only three pages long.
5. Test your marketing ideas, your product ideas and your service ideas to make sure you’ve got everything on target.

And finally, have a marathoner’s attitude: the finish line does exist, just over the next hill. Believe that you will make it to the finish line, as long as you keep putting one foot in front of the other and maintain a positive attitude.

Starting a Mastermind group will help create SUCCESS in your personal and professional life.

Create a mastermind group for yourself, or increase your income by offering mastermind groups to your clients. Your clients will love you for it!

There is synergy of energy, commitment, and excitement that participants bring to a Mastermind Group. The beauty of Mastermind Groups is that participants raise the bar by challenging each other to create and implement goals, brainstorm ideas, and support each other with total honesty, respect and compassion. Mastermind participants act as catalysts for growth, devil’s advocates and supportive colleagues.

In this 3-week teleclass you will learn how to:

• Help people distinguish between a mastermind group, group coaching, and training classes
• Pick what type of people should attend your mastermind group
• Choose to facilitate, participate, or both
• Select your mastermind group’s niche and type
• Decide where to hold meetings
• Determine if your group should be free or paid
• Create meeting agendas
• Write group guidelines
• Prepare for your first meeting
• Choose among basic masterminding techniques
• Determine why mastermind groups fail

FOR MORE CLASS DETAILS AND TO REGISTER ONLINE:

http://www.MastermindGroupToday.com

This teleclass series begins February 23, 2010

• Feb 23
• Mar 2
• Mar 9

All teleclasses are 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM eastern

Classes will be recorded, so if you miss a session, you will be able to download the audio recording of the live class and listen to it at your leisure.

Fee: $129

Instructor: Karyn Greenstreet. I’ve been starting and running mastermind groups since 1994. They are your greatest resource for creating success in your personal and professional life!

Consumer trust of the messages they see on TV, read in the newspapers, and even the product and service suggestions their friends make is down 50% in the past two years, according to a study described in an Advertising Age article, In Age of Friending, Consumers Trust Their Friends Less.

Yet we use testimonials, social media and word-of-mouth as viable marketing techniques, right? But Edelman’s 2010 “Trust Barometer” says that consumers just see the jumble of marketing messages scrolling across their Facebook News Feed and Twitter Stream as a bunch of noise, not to be trusted except if it comes from someone they really, truly know in real life. In our minds, we separate our social media “friends” from people we really know, like and trust so much, we now use the acronym IRL to mean “in real life” when talking about certain friends.  (Perhaps we should use IFL to mean In Facebook Life? )

Now more than ever, it’s important for you to get out in the real world and let your face be seen and your message heard from your own lips. You can’t rely on social media word-of-mouth to do passive marketing for you if your prospective clients don’t trust marketing messages coming to them in that manner.

And it’s equally important, if you are using social media marketing, to make sure that most of your messages are not marketing messages. Never forget the importance of “social” in social media marketing. We can’t get to know you, like you or trust you if all you do is throw marketing messages at us without ever sharing tips, techniques, ideas, rants, and news about who you are IRL.

In the grocery store last week, I had an epiphany of the effectiveness of marketing message and marketing differentiation.

My husband loves cheese — specifically cheddar cheese. He swoons over the decision about which cheese to purchase. He’ll stand in front of the display of cheeses in the market for ages and ages, reading each and every label, like he was choosing the next Nobel Prize winner.

I laughed so hard, my stomach hurt, when he rationalized his latest cheese-buying decision:

“Look. Right here on the label is says ‘Hand milked by Amish farmers.’ It must be great cheese.”

‘Nuff said.

My client Mary called me and cried, “I need to find my niche!”

She had been told over and over again that she needed to find a narrow niche for her Life Coaching business so that she could be more noticeable among the pack of Life Coaches who market themselves to business professionals and managers.

But she had also been told that using words like “meaning” and “purpose” to describe what clients were looking for was over-used; all life coaches were using those terms and they had lost their power when it came to writing marketing text.

To find your niche, you need a tailor-made approach. Here is my reply to Mary in regards to identifying her niche and writing her marketing text towards that niche:

Finding The Right Words

Remember, WITHIN the coaching industry, words like “soul,” “meaning,” and “fulfillment” are used constantly and we’re used to them and don’t think they’re special.

But, OUTSIDE the coaching industry, people are just awakening to these words. They love these words. And people ARE looking for meaning and fulfillment in their lives. (Just because you are used to seeing those words everyday doesn’t automatically make them powerless or boring.)

So you may be tired of hearing catch-words in YOUR industry, but that doesn’t mean that customers aren’t still searching for those very same ideas.

If you want to know if people are interested in these words, go to the Google Keyword Tool  and type them in. You’ll see for yourself how popular they really are.

As a life coach, saying you don’t want to market yourself using the words “fulfillment” and “meaning,” is like saying you’re a dentist, but you don’t want to have the niche of “filling cavities” because every dentist does that.

Sometimes your niche isn’t just what topics you talk about with clients; sometimes your niche is the combination of what topics you talk about AND the people/groups you talk to.

Finding The Right Niche

The whole purpose of choosing a niche is so you can find a central place that potential clients congregate — so that you can get in front of them to introduce your business via your marketing techniques. You can find “professionals” or “mid-level managers” or “upper level executives” in specific industry associations, magazines, websites, newspapers, peer groups, etc.

But say you want your niche to be “Hyper Ambitious Stress Coaching.” There is no industry association for Hyper Ambitious people…how will you locate them?

Do you really want to be known as the “Hyper Ambitious Stress Coach?” (Do people really type in “hyper ambitious stress coach” into Google when they’re looking for help?) It implies that you work with only people who are hyper-ambitious, and only stressed ones at that. There are plenty of “non-hyper-ambitious” professionals who are want to achieve great things and be successful (and are stressed), they just don’t go overboard into “hyper” behaviors that create unbalance.

One caveat: labeling yourself the “Hyper Ambitious Stress Coach” is great for PR. The news media loves a specialist. But clients may not be looking for a Hyper Ambitious Stress Coach; they’re just looking for help with stress, over-scheduling, high demands, etc. So unless you’re going to get all your prospective clients via news media interviews, you might want to re-think that narrow niche.

Choosing a niche is not an exercise in finding a place where you have no competition. It’s okay if you have competition in your niche: it shows there’s a thriving market there.

Differentiation vs. Niche

If you’re simply looking to differentiate yourself from your competition, then that’s not done by choosing a niche market. Differentiation and Niche are two separate marketing steps. You can differentiate yourself based on:

• your personality
• your processes
• your techniques
• your classes and products
• your background
• your experience
• your skill set & knowledge
• your availability
• your fees
• your style

Differentiation asks, “Why would they buy from ME versus my competition?”

Niche asks, “Where will I find THEM so I can introduce myself?”

This entry in Wikipedia may help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_market

I’m not saying, “Don’t go in that niche direction.” What I am saying is this: if you define your niche too narrowly, you’ll have a hard time getting in front of them with your marketing techniques. And along the way, you might not be following your own soul purpose.

So, how do you define your own niche? I’d love to hear about your target audience and how you help them!