Self Employed Success

Whew! After 11 months of hard planning, multiple website graphics choices, and lots of coding (700 pages!), we launched the new-and-improved version of the Passion For Business website yesterday. Poor Aly, I think his fingers are whittled to the bone with all the website coding work he did. He gets a much-deserved vacation after this launch!

I know many of you are thinking it’s time to redesign your website, but you don’t know where to start or how to manage the project. Let me share my experience with you in hopes that it will make your website redesign process smooth and efficient.

1. First, know that this is going to be a long process, so find that extra bit of patience. It will pay off big time, trust me. There will be any number of times that you want to cut corners or give up an important feature that’s a pain to code. Stop. Breathe. Start again.
2. Make sure you DO need and want to redesign your website. Not sure? Take this self-quiz: Is It Time To Redesign My Site? (PDF).
3. Write everything down – don’t trust your memory on something this important. Keep your ideas and your To Do list in a Project Plan file so everything is at your fingertips in one central location.
4. Start the redesign process by asking the big questions: What are the goals of my business? What role(s) will my website have in reaching those goals? Who will visit my website and what do they need/want to find there? What is my business brand and image?
5. Decide what content you need on the site, then organize that content into logical “buckets” so that it’s easy to design the menu/navigation structure, and easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for. Make a list of each individual page and file that needs to be on the site.
6. Decide what extra features you need on your site: will you have a newsletter sign-up box, a free offer, sidebar advertisements, a blog, video files, audio files, social media, etc.?
7. Design the graphical page layout to include your logo and business colors, making sure there is enough room on the page for sidebar advertisements, sign-up boxes, etc. This is the time when a good website designer can make this process easy.
8. Remember, the reputation of your business relies on professionalism and a professional look — this isn’t the time to cut corners with do-it-yourself graphic work, logos, navigation, or website page layout. A good website designer can target your website graphics and layout to your audience, and can make it user-friendly. A poor website design will have people walking away from your site instead of sticking around. Read this blog post on How to Choose a Website Designer if you need more tips.
9. While your website designer is working on some preliminary designs, it’s time for you to edit and/or write your website text. Take a look at all your existing pages: are they talking to the audience and helping them solve a problem or reach a goal? If you’re not good at copy writing, consider hiring a copywriter to help you with the text updates.
10. While you’re busy writing, don’t forget SEO work to increase your rankings on search engines. Choose your keywords and make sure those keywords are in your text.
11. Once you choose the website design that works best for your audience, your brand and your business goals, now it’s time to start coding. You have several options when coding your website: your website designer can code it for you (typically in CSS), or you can use a platform like WordPress. Even if you use WordPress, there’s still a HUGE amount of coding to do, so if you are not deeply familiar with CSS or PHP, hire someone to do the coding for you. Typically you can find a website designer who does both the graphic design and the coding, or who works as a team with other professionals to get your site done.
12. DO NOT code directly to your existing domain, overwriting your existing files. Create a “testing” folder to put new files in.
13. Make sure you code the SEO meta tags, ALT tags, etc. in the behind-the-scenes coding to help with your search engine rankings. (Choose a website designer who has a lot of experience with SEO so that you can be assured this work is done correctly.)
14. Once the site is done with the initial coding, TEST the website in all the standard browsers to make sure it’s compatible: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Test it in several versions of these browsers as well; not everyone is using the current version of browser software.
15. Test to see how your site looks on both PCs and Macs. (This is a good time to get your friends involved so you can see your new site on their browsers and machines.)
16. Test to see how your site looks on mobile browsers and phones, like BlackBerry, Smart Phones, etc.
17. After you do the testing, you’ll probably find that your site looks great in some browsers and awful in other browsers. This requires additional coding to test the browser version the visitor is using and write code to make the site look the same in all browsers. (Now you know why you pay a website designer to do this work! )
18. Okay, so now you’ve got your final website design. It looks great in all browsers and the text and graphics are extraordinary. Now is the time to test all links (both the links in the menu/navigation and the links in the text). Make sure all links open to the appropriate page, file and/or external websites. Patience, my friend, do this slowly and properly. If you have bad links on your site, you’ll lose visitors and Google doesn’t like a site with a lot of bad links.
19. Now test all forms. Sign up for your own newsletter, your own free offer, or any other form you have on your site (perhaps a Contact Us form?), and make sure each form does exactly what it’s supposed to do.
20. Sick of testing yet???
21. Now you’re ready to go live. But wait! I’m only going to say this once (loudly): BACK UP YOUR EXISTING WEBSITE and BLOG. Trust me. If you overwrite files and something blows up, you’ll be happy that you can easily put yourself back to the old site while you fix the problem.
22. Take a deep breath, and upload your new website design to your hosting.
23. Once it’s live, test again. All of it. Seriously.
24. Tell your audience your site is live, invite feedback, and tell them if they find a problem with the site to please let you know about it. It’s great to have a lot of people checking out your new site to make sure there are no mistakes.

Congratulations, you’ve done it! Have a huge party to celebrate! 

(If I’ve missed any steps, please leave a comment and tell me about YOUR website project experience!)

Learn to teach teleclasses like a pro!

Teleseminars are a great way to teach! But how can you teach well, when people can’t see you?

Course Overview

In this teleseminar, you will learn techniques that boost your teaching skills in a teleclass environment, overcoming the visual barriers and creating interactive and supportive environments for your students. Create telephone-based learning environments that keep students coming back for more!

What You Will Learn

In this four-week teleseminar, you will learn about:

• Handling the first few minutes of your teleseminar, the springboard to any successful teleseminar
• Teleseminar leading skills for interactivity and learning
• Creating rapport with students over the phone
• The common mistakes the teleclass leaders make
• Techniques for keeping momentum while also allowing for student discussion
• Dealing with student situations that can undermine your teleclass success
• Handling the technology of using a teleconference line

What Students Say…

Teleseminar Leader Training with Karyn enabled me to bring a new cohesiveness to my teleclasses. Following the first class, I immediately wrote up an information sheet on how to participate in teleclasses for my future class participants. Her ideas on how to use my voice, better operate the technology involved and handle difficult participants were especially valuable.

The wealth of resource information Karyn provided both before and after classes completed every area she discussed during the three weeks. Finally, her model of professionalism in her presentations and on her website come from a place of integrity and obviously years of excellent business practices.

Elsie Kerns
Founding Member, Wellness Workers

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Opening and growing my coaching practice has meant stepping out of my comfort zone and trying something new almost daily. Karyn’s Teleseminar Leader Training class presented this key aspect of growing my business in a step-by-step, friendly and supportive way.

Through this class I know what to do, how to do it, where to go for the technical aspects and how to confidently handle potentially tough situations. I have found the articles and references Karyn so generously provided to be of value above and beyond my complete satisfaction with the class content itself.

Lisa Jordan
The Right Fit Coaching

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This class was the frosting on the cake for me. I have been learning as I go in teaching teleseminars. This filled in the holes of my knowledge. I am sure my students will appreciate my improved teleseminar leading skills.

Jennifer Grainger
Spiritual Growth Community

Length of Workshop

This teleclass meets one hour each week, for four weeks.

• November 16
• November 30
• December 7
• December 14

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

NOTE: There is no class the week of November 21 for the USA Thanksgiving Holiday.

Format

This workshop is offered via live teleseminar format with an instructor.

Teleseminars are live workshops that are given over the telephone where you can interact with the instructor and the other students. Teleseminars are a great way to learn, because you can learn from the convenience of your home or office.

The live teleseminar sessions will be recorded, so if you miss a session, you will be able to download the audio recording of the class and listen to it at your leisure. Class recordings are generally made available within 24 hours of the class date. For instance, if a class is held on a Tuesday, the recording will be available for downloading on Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning.

About the Instructor

Karyn Greenstreet is a small business coach and self-employment expert. She has been creating and teaching classes for adults since 1981, and has taught over 250,000 students in business and personal development topics.

Karyn is the owner of Passion For Business and runs a small business school for self-employed people.

Registration Fee (in U.S. Dollars)

$169 for the four-week class

www.TeleseminarLeaderTraining.com

I know.

I know you’re excited about your new business ideas.

I know you have a great idea and when you tell others about it, they think you have a great idea, too. A great idea is the birth of a new small business.

But as a self-employed small business owner, you can’t afford to take chances on ideas without getting more information about what your entire market audience wants and what they’re willing to pay for it. Talking to 10 or 20 other people isn’t enough. You’ve got to talk to thousands.

In the military and in NASA, they use a term called “ground truth.” While they can observe things via satellite and other distant monitoring devices, nothing beats getting down on the ground and seeing what’s really happening in real life. Here’s NASA’s explanation of how they use Ground Truth:

http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/SCOOL/groundtruth.html

So, how can you get ground truth about the viability of your business idea? The answer is market research. Market research is a study of your consumer’s preferences and your competition. Sometimes you’ll hear it called a “feasibility study.”

Through surveys, literature research, internet research, and other information gathering techniques, you can learn the trends in your industry, as well as individual preferences of your potential customers. If you’re in a well-defined industry, like toy manufacturing, you might find that your national professional organization has already conducted research studies on behalf of the members of the organization.

Why is market research necessary? Because we all have different tastes, different ideas about what’s important in our lives, and different ability (or willingness) to pay a particular price for what we want. Often the small business owner thinks they have a great idea for a new product or service, only to discover that people either don’t want that service or product, or they’re not willing to pay the price that the small business needs to set in order to be profitable.

Sometimes they discover, joyfully, that not only do people want this new product or service, but that these same people can suggest other new products and services that would work well with the new idea, allowing the small business owner to see future growth into new areas. Or maybe they discover through their market research that if they made a small change in their product or service, for instance, making a product with a red cover instead of a blue one, that people would buy it more often.

Another purpose of market research is to discover what your competition is doing. Say that you want to create a new type of office product and you think your idea is unique. Take a look at what’s on offer at the Staples, OfficeMax and Office Depot websites, and you might discover that your competitors have already created a product to solve the same problem as your product solves. Does that mean you should then give up the idea entirely? No, not necessarily. What it means is that you now have some ground truth about what you’re up against if you want to go head-to-head with these competitors.

You need to know the ground truth about your ideas before you spend countless hours and money taking a new product or service to market. I know that it feels like it’s putting a damper on new business idea creation, but in fact, it’s just the opposite: I’m encouraging you to find out what your customers want, and what they will pay for it, so that you can ensure future success.

This month, I will continue the copywriting topic with some more copywriting basics. Here are the steps to any marketing copywriting, whether you are selling services or products.

Last month I gave you some ideas about formulas you can use to write good headlines for your sales pages and newsletters. (If you didn’t see the post, you can still read it on my blog: 3 Headline Formulas for Non-Copywriters.)

Here are the basic six steps you’ll need:

First, know thy audience. This sounds so familiar, right? But do you really know what it means and how to DO it? Before you begin writing, close your eyes and put yourself in your audience’s shoes. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Who are they? Specifically, who is your ideal customer? It’s important for you to spend some time thinking about them as real people, not a mass of humanity known as “my prospects.” They’re not a mass of faceless humans. They’re real people with real dreams and challenges.
2. What do they want? This is no time to lack bravery. Do not take the simple way out and say something banal here. Instead, ask yourself what they specifically want. What are they trying to achieve in life? What problems get in their way?

Now, write a headline that promises to help them create the life they want, or helps them solve a problem. You can read more about writing headlines here in this blog post. Remember, the whole purpose of writing a headline is to grab their attention.

Next, help them to get to know you and trust you by honestly talking about their dream or their challenges. Give them some tips. Give them examples. Tell them a story about how you have been where they are and how you created the life of your dreams. Above all, educate them so that they receive real value from you. This isn’t the place to fluff it up.

This next one is the hard part, the part where nearly everyone falls down: You have to make the offer. You have to tell them what you are offering, and ask them to buy. Be clear and straight-forward here. Tell them the benefits of your product or service, exactly what they’ll get, the price, and how to buy. Answer any questions you think they might have about your product or service. This is no place to be shy. If you don’t believe completely in what you are selling, why should your customer? You don’t need to be aggressive or manipulative; just tell them how you can help them and make an offer. Trust their own intelligence that they’ll know if it’s a good fit or not.

To help build your credibility, next you will share testimonials from your satisfied customers. Testimonials that tell how the customer benefitted from your product and service are best. It’s far better to have a testimonial that said, “I was able to create my lesson plan and teach my first class within one month of taking Karyn’s program,” than to have a testimonial that says, “Golly, Karyn is a great teacher.” What were your customers able to DO after using your service or product?

The final step is the Call To Action. What action do you want them to take? Should they visit your website for more information? Should they click a button to buy the product or service? Should they call your office to schedule a time to talk? You have to tell them exactly what to do next so there is no confusion.

Copywriting is no mystery. There are some straight-forward formulas that work every time. But you have to be willing to ask for the sale.

Are you ready to try these copywriting steps in your own business?

Over the next month or two, I’ll begin to go into the details of each of these steps, give examples, and answer your questions!

I’d love to hear your comments and questions — won’t you join in the conversation on my blog?