Self Employed Success

Remember the childhood game, Pin The Tail on the Donkey? You would be blindfolded, spun around three times, and a paper donkey tail would be put in your hand. Your job was to “find the donkey” and attach the tail to it, without raising the blindfold. Lots of fun!

(When you were 6 years old. Not so much today.)

In business and marketing, working blindfolded is a curse. And you’ve no one to blame but yourself. If you don’t have a business plan or a marketing plan, you haven’t answered the foundational questions, especially the ones that go like this:

• Who is my ideal client?
• Who is my target market?
• Where can I find them?

If you feel like you’re running around in circles with your marketing, it’s because you ARE! Your prospects aren’t moving…but you can’t find them because you can’t see them. Pin the tail on the prospect.

And please don’t tell me that you have these plans “all in your head.” Have you ever actually seen a business plan or marketing plan? These are sophisticated documents that takes several hours (sometimes several days) to really think through. It’s not something you keep in your head. Write it down.

And update it at least once a year. Times change, your customers’ needs and challenges change, technology changes…you’d better keep up or you’ll be left out.

If you do not have an up-to-date business plan and marketing plan, STOP marketing and get thee to thine writing desk! Learn how to write a business plan, and what belongs in a marketing plan. These are strategic documents that you can’t afford to be without.

You are capable of taking off your own blindfold. Make a commitment today to doing the homework necessary to building your business by buildling your foundation. It’s not as hard as you fear, but it takes a bit of thinking and pondering, and a little research. You’ll have a happier (and more prosperous) business once you get these documents under your belt.

Good news! Once again I’ve create mastermind groups for the self-employed for the new year. Groups will begin in late January and early February. Each group is limited to 6 people.

The Success Alliance: Mastermind Groups for the Self-employed

I have been running mastermind groups, and been a member of mastermind Groups, since 1994. They have profoundly shaped my life and my business, and I’m successful because of my participation in them.

There is synergy of energy, commitment and excitement that participants bring to a mastermind group. The Success Alliance Groups (TSA Groups) offer a combination of masterminding, peer brainstorming and support in a group setting.

The Benefits of TSA Mastermind Membership:

• Increase your own experience and confidence
• Sharpen your business and personal skills
• Create real progress in your business
• Add an instant and valuable support network
• Get honest feedback, advice and brainstorming
• Borrow on the experience and skills of the other members
• Create plans and have the group hold you accountable for fulfilling your plans and goals
• Receive critical insights into yourself
• Work ON your business, not just IN it; make the transition from being self-employed to acting like a business owner
• A sense of shared endeavor – there are others out there!
• Save 40% off the cost of private coaching and consulting, plus all the benefits of a mastermind group

Read more about joining The Success Alliance

 Application deadline is January 5.

There are some people in the world who love the challenge of “cold calling” – that is to say, they enjoy calling people who they have never met, have never had any contact via email or phone, and asking them whether they need your product or service.

But what about those people who DO contact you and ask about your products and services? Do you follow-up with those “warm” phone calls and emails?

Most people will make at least one follow-up phone call or email to a prospective customer. But if they don’t get a response back, they often drop the whole thing. No one wants to feel like they’re being a pest.

But you have to remember two important things:

1. The prospect called YOU.

2. There are many reasons why a prospect might not call you back.

Let’s look at both reasons. In the first place, the prospect contacted you. They ARE interested or they wouldn’t have gone to the effort of leaving a voicemail or sending an email. People who take action, even these seemly simple actions, are motivated and interested.

In the second place, just because they don’t return your phone call or email doesn’t mean they’re not interested anymore. Think about your own life for a minute: I bet you’re a very busy person and there’s always something going on that needs your attention. Items on your to-do list slip off, including returning phone calls and emails. Well, your prospects are just like you! They’re busy, they’re time-constrained, and they’ve got to put out fires, first, before they can take on another task.

I’ve done an unscientific test over the past six month. I’ve continued to call and email people who have expressed an interest either in my business coaching work or my website design work, just to see what happens. Amazing! In nearly every single case, the prospect was grateful that I took the time to continue to follow-up, even though they hadn’t replied to me.

So why hadn’t they replied to me? In short, life happened:

• A family member died and they had to go out of town to take care of funeral and house-selling tasks for a month.
• A child was preparing for a big college-entrance exam and needed a lot of extra time and attention.
• They, themselves, were working on a big proposal for a prospect and put everything else on hold until the proposal got out the door.
• They had never gotten my reply email (a spam filter had captured it).

…And any number of other reasons. All legitimate.

How often should you follow-up? Here are the rules of thumb I work with when I get a prospect call or email:

• First contact: we try to follow-up within one business day.
• Second contact: we re-try 7 days later, always via phone (darn those email filters!)
• Third contact: 10-14 days later, both by phone and by email

In marketing and sales, being shy or lacking confidence is a killer for your business. If people express interest in you, now is the time to connect with them, repeatedly if necessary, and not avoid it.

Do NOT follow the herd when it comes to choosing marketing techniques. Doing what everyone else does or doing what’s the latest-and-greatest is a sure path to marketing failure.

People tell me they want “a marketing plan,” but what they really mean is, “Tell me exactly which techniques to choose and when to do them.” Guess what? There is no magic marketing plan that will guarantee results. Why? Because everyone’s audience is different, everyone’s marketing message is different, and everyone’s marketing goals are different.

The last time I counted, there were over 30 internet marketing techniques available, and at least 50 traditional marketing techniques to choose from. How can one-size-fits-all come from 80 choices?

Instead, it’s time to do your homework. And the place to do your homework is in crafting a Marketing Plan. A marketing plan takes you step-by-step through all the topics you need to consider when doing the marketing for your business, including:

• defining your target audience
• defining your niche (which is different from a target audience)
• setting your marketing goals
• analyzing your competition
• setting your prices
• determining your unique selling proposition

Whatever you do, don’t just jump on the bandwagon of every new marketing technique that comes along. That kind of knee-jerk reaction will put you in the poor house faster than you can say Shotgun Approach To Marketing.

Let me give you a good example: social media marketing. Everyone says, “Oh, get a Facebook account!” But the vast majority of Facebook users are 18-34 years old, with the largest single population being 18-24 years old. So why would you market on Facebook if your target audience is 40-55 years old? And the click-through rates for ads on Facebook are extremely low as compared to other online advertising click-through rates.

I know it take time and effort to research and write a marketing plan. But only through marketing planning can you have the confidence of knowing you’ve chosen the best techniques from the 80+ available, will be executing the techniques in the correct order, at the right time of year. I’d trade confident marketing for quick marketing any day.

A strange phenomena has been spreading like a virus over the past few months. In the past four weeks alone, three of my clients have told me that their website designer or virtual assistant has “disappeared.” No return phone calls, unanswered emails. Gone, gone, gone.

Kidnapping? Hardly. When the economy gets tough, many website designers and virtual assistants (small business owners themselves) simply go out of business. Some get full-time jobs in corporations, some just shut their doors. If they use a lot of sub-contractors to fulfill project demands, they find that the sub-contractor pool is drying up, so they become less responsive to your voicemails and emails.

This is a huge problem for small business owners, who rely upon their website designer or virtual assistant to maintain and upgrade their websites for them. There’s not much you can do if your website designer or VA goes out of business. But you can protect yourself and prepare yourself to move to a new website designer. You just need to have access to all your files before your website designer disappears.

When we design websites for our clients, we always give them the following information immediately after the site is complete. Use this checklist to get control of your website for the future:

1. Login information for the hosting company control panel (CP).
2. FTP login information.
3. Blog login information (this may be different than 1 and 2 above).
4. Email address login information for each email account (you may have more than one email address for your domain, such as office@domain.com or mary@domain.com or info@domain.com).
5. Other login information to auxiliary software, like membership software, forum software, content management systems, etc.
6. Logins for Google Analytics and Google Adwords, if you use either of these services.
7. A copy of all your website coding, graphic, audio, video and animation files, including the original source files for all your graphics and Flash files (typically Photoshop for graphics and Flash for animation), on CD or DVD.
8. Written confirmation that YOU own the content of the website and have the right to transfer it, edit it, submit it to Federal Copyright Office, sell it, etc.

For security purposes, if your website designer disappears, change ALL login IDs and passwords on your accounts. In addition, if you have given your website designer your credit card information, you may wish to cancel the card and have a new number re-issued.

I think we may see more of this happening in 2009. I recommend you get the above items from the person who maintains your website today so that you have full control of your website — and your internet marketing — for the future.

I’m going to be harsh here, so hold on to your hat. Have you CHECKED to see if people want your product or service?

The first – and ultimately the biggest – mistake that small business owners make is that they fail to do adequate market research. We get overly-excited about a new idea and assume that our customers will love it, too. We ask a few colleagues or a few customers, and base our strategic business decision on the opinion of six people. Then we are bitterly disappointment when no one buys.

Save yourself the wasted time and money (not to mention the anxiety and frustration), and learn to conduct a simple marketing research project to test the waters. For more help on Marketing Research:

• Read our article, Ground Truth and the Importance of Market Research
• Listen to our free, how-to audio, Yes, You Can Do Your Own Market Research

We always want to know which marketing techiques are the best, the easiest, and yield the greatest results for our time and money. Any shortcuts to marketing are viewed with awe and respect.

And yet what can you do when you try the “best” marketing techniques and they just aren’t working for you? Do you ditch them? Or is there a simple tweak you can do that will transform them?

I began to research why marketing fails about a year ago. So far I’ve come up with 35 different reasons why marketing fails, separated into nine categories. In this blog post series, I will review each of those 35 reasons and offer you a quick tip on how to tweak your marketing as related to the “failure point.” Hopefully these insights and tips will help you get your marketing back on track.

See the Why Marketing Fails Blog Series here. I’ll be adding to it each week or so.