Business Strategist for Solopreneurs
Just a quick note to let you know that the giveaway event I’m participating in is closing tomorrow. There are 13 great gifts for you to download, and they are all designed around the theme of freedom in your business. Make sure to get the gifts you want before the giveaway closes.
Grab your gifts here:
13 Gifts for Business Freedom Giveaway
It’s the week of Independence Day here in the US, and while it’s become known as “The 4th of July,” I prefer to call the holiday by the formal name in order to acknowledge the meaning of the day. I grew up in Philadelphia where much of the founding of the US took place, so I have a special place in my heart for this holiday.
In honor of Independence Day, I’m participating in a special independence-themed giveaway event. Myself and 12 other business owners have gotten together and created a page where you can download gifts from all of us to help you grow your business, achieve greater visibility, have a bigger impact and yes, make more money. Grab your gifts here: 13 Gifts for Business Freedom Giveaway I encourage you to visit the page as soon as you can – the giveaway only goes until the 9th.
This post is an introduction to some website traffic basics. If you are already working to generate and measure your traffic, this will be a refresher for you. If you aren’t doing any traffic generation, you’ll learn what you need to do and one place to get started.
First, one of the biggest things to learn about having a website is that you have to work to generate traffic. Before you have your own site, it’s easy to assume that visitors are automatically finding your site. In fact, it’s easy not to think about website traffic at all and just put a site up. However without an active plan to generate traffic, it’s likely that your site will get few if any visitors other than those who you refer. This means that unless people are typing in your site address from a business card or perhaps following a link you posted somewhere like on social media, on a personal blog or in a forum, they probably won’t find your site. You have to take specific steps to get people other than those you refer to find and visit your site. This is called traffic generation. Generating traffic is a big topic, and in fact there are people whose expertise is nothing but traffic generation. You don’t need that level of expertise, but I do recommend that you have a basic understanding of the concept of generating and measuring your website traffic. Some methods of generating traffic include:
There’s a lot more to be said on the topic of generating traffic, but the main point is that this is something you need to be doing if you want visitors to your site. If you want a simple way to start getting traffic, I recommend Pinterest right now. It’s my single biggest source of referral traffic (i.e. people who have gotten to my site by being referred or clicking a link) and it’s not complicated or time-consuming to use. You do, however, have to use Pinterest correctly to get a good volume of quality traffic. You can’t just randomly post things and expect results. If you want to get started with Pinterest, I recommend you watch this webinar I did with Becky Sangha, creator of Business Marketing with Pinterest, and my personal go-to person for Pinterest questions.
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Tomorrow is the beginning of List-a-Palooza, a free listbuilding training that lasts all summer long. This will be my third year participating in it, and if I’m coming back again you know I have to like it!
(Already know you want in? Click here to sign up)
For starters, what is lisbuilding and why should you care? Listbuilding is the collecting and growth of a list of email addresses from people who have said they want to hear from you. It’s arguable the single most valuable activity you can do in your business. Click here for my article “The Top Ten Reasons You Need To Be Email Marketing” for a quick explanation if you are not familiar with listbuilding or email marketing.
List-a-Palooza is for growing your list. It’s a 3-month long event focused solely on the most valuable activity you can do in your business. Best of all, it’s free! Yes, there are paid offers along the way, but the event is free and there is a ton of great information given every week that you can use to keep your list growing.
Here’s what happens each week during the List-a-Palooza:
Click here to sign up: List-a-Palooza
This is a great opportunity for you to focus on building your list. By the end of the summer, you could have a lot more subscribers and that opens up many possibilities. Join me and spend some time this summer building your list and your business.
Click here for access: List-a-Palooza
See you there!
Up until this year, I devoted my social media time to multiple sites. For the most part, it worked pretty well. When I first started using social media to promote my business in 2009 it was much easier to stay current on all the “in” sites because there were fewer of them. There was also less to know. The medium wasn’t very mature. Facebook only started in 2004, so a few early, early adopters had been using social media for more than 5 years but the rest of us were 5 years of less.
As social media matured and more sites came into existence, it got harder and harder to stay informed and use it well. Best practices were constantly being studied and revised. There were more things to measure and interpreting your data became more complex. I’m constantly testing and tweaking my business activities, so one of the things I did was cut way back on the sites where I got very little return on my time invested. That left me with a manageable two sites to focus my efforts on – Pinterest and Twitter. In a later post, I’ll talk about why Twitter made the cut but this post is about Pinterest.
Pinterest has several great qualities that make it ideal for solopreneurs. As a one-person business you have to be super efficient with your time and Pinterest fits that criteria. Here are some of the reasons I’m focusing on Pinterest this year.
If you want to find out more about Pinterest and how it can benefit your business, watch this video training I did with Becky Sangha, the creator of Business Marketing wih Pinterest. It’s the system I use to get all these great results on Pinterest. Even though the site is as great as I describe, you can’t just sign up and fool around and expect to get business-building results by magic. It’s not hard, but you do have to use Pinterest in a strategic, planned way to get good results for your business.
Watch the training at the link below, and please use the social sharing buttons on the video page to tell your friends and colleagues about it!
Pinterest Marketing for Solopreneurs
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I’ve got a new free resource to share with you! I interviewed Martina Zorc of Star Brand Studio, and she shared really useful in-depth information on branding. In the interview, she shares what branding is (and it’s more than colors or a logo), why it’s important to attract ideal clients and not just any clients, and her 12-step system for branding. Grab your free copy by clicking the link below: Martina Zorc Interview
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You’ve probably heard all the sayings about listbuilding. People say things like:
The money (or gold) is in the list
You gotta be building your list
You need to have a list
What is meant by this is specifically an email list, that is a collection of email addresses from people who have specifically said they want to hear from you. This is not to be confused with spam, which everyone hates. Legitimate listbuilding includes sending email only to people who want to hear from you. 5 years into my business, email marketing is one the most important activities I do in my business. It seems inconceivable to me that I didn’t do any listbuilding or email marketing at first.
It’s true however. I didn’t start building my list until I had been in business for over a year because I didn’t understand how email marketing could possibly help my bottom line. As a specialist in business strategy, I make it a point to never do anything unless I understand how it will contribute to my business so until I had a coaching session where it was laid out for me, I didn’t start.
That’s why I’m so excited to share this video training with you. My colleague, Becky Sangha (The Online Video Marketer) has recorded a brand new training laying out exactly how listbuilding works. If I had seen this video in that first year, I might have started my list sooner and I’d be that much further ahead!
Click the link below to watch this free, no opt-in training video. It takes about half an hour, but it is well worth it!
Get Your List Growing Free training
One of my big strategic shifts this year has been to devote even more time to email marketing. I’ve let go a lot of what I used to do that didn’t work as well. I didn’t start building my list or doing any email marketing until I had been in business for more than a year because I needed convincing that it was a worthwhile tactic for me to use. Let me state that I am now officially convinced that email marketing is one of the most powerful ways for almost any business to market. In this article, I’ll give you 10 reasons why you need to be email marketing.
Are you convinced you need to be using email marketing? If so, I invite you to join me on this special training They say “The money is in the list…” So where’s mine? I’ll be co-presenting with Becky Sangha, The Online Video Marketer, and we’ll be sharing how you can start your email marketing campaign in just a few weeks. If you aren’t convinced yet, I’d love for you to join me as well so you can get more information on how email marketing can help your business. Click here to sign up.
Are you using email marketing in an original way? Share it in the comments. Please share this article using the Pin It and social sharing buttons below. Thanks!
One of the fundamental practices of running a successful business is measuring the results of your efforts. There is an almost infinite list of things you could be doing to grow your business, but not all of them produce results in the same proportion to your efforts. Depending on your business, some activities will produce big results and some will produce few or no results. Every time you choose to engage in a promotional activity, you are choosing to leave countless others undone.
Another reason why it’s important to measure the results of your activities is that it’s almost impossible to get the best combination of promotional activities right from the start. Each business owner has to take their best shot at what will work and then adjust that approach as they get feedback. If something is working and bringing in business, do more of it. If something has not worked at all, do less or none of it. If something has worked but stopped working or isn’t producing results the way it used to, make a change.
It seems quite logical – try something, see if it works, adjust and repeat. However, this is probably the single biggest place I see business owners having trouble. Before being introduced to the concept of measurement, many business owners do what they think will work and when it doesn’t they either do more of the same or add yet more activities to their schedule. This is not the way to go! It will lead to exhaustion and wasting time. Getting on a marketing treadmill that keeps going faster as you add more activities will not give you the information you need to adapt and change, nor will it help you focus on the activities with the highest payout.
How might you go about measuring your results? It depends on what you are trying to evaluate, but here are a few examples to illustrate the idea.
These are just a few examples of the idea of measuring your results. If you are not measuring anything yet, I encourage you to get started today with just one thing.
What do you measure in your business? How have you improved because of your measurement?
I find myself saying more and more that our brains have become Google-ized. It’s not meant to pick on Google (which I love) but as a shorthand way of saying overloaded, drowning with input and managing more stuff than ever before. I’m increasingly finding that when I’m out just talking to people casually that I have to alter the way I speak because I can’t count on someone’s attention long enough to express a complex thought in 3 sentences. I’m rushing when I talk and trying to compress everything into the smallest number of words possible. While the change has been slow over the past decade, it seems to have really changed a lot in the last 3 to 5 years. One way I’ve changed is that I often shop for a short article on something I want to learn about rather than read a long one because I don’t know if I want to read a long one yet. In other words, I often won’t read a long article on something unless I know beforehand that the subject is worth it to me.
I haven’t seen this as much in business conversations but I think that makes sense. If we’re together to do business or talk about business, it doesn’t make much sense to rush and speak in simple terms. We’ve both committed time and energy to accomplish something, so we put more effort into being effective with our communication.
The important of this is that when people consume your information or content, they may be in a frame of mind where they are looking for a quick read, a fast conclusion, one simple concept or a two-minute breather. You can’t know what your reader’s current frame of mind is when they encounter your content.
As someone who wants other people to read your content, what do you do?
Where possible, consider making your content accessible by as many people as possible regardless of their frame of mind. This doesn’t mean you have to withhold your brilliance, but it does require some adapting. Keep your articles and blog posts on the short side and make them focused on just one point. People can do a quick read, get the point and move on. If you have a more complex concept to present, consider breaking it into individual pieces and linking them. That allows people to get the information a little bit at a time. Tailor your content to the situation – if it’s an article or blog post, you can’t count on much commitment. If it’s a tweet, there’s even less incentive to read it and be focused on it. If it’s a ebook your reader paid for, they probably have a higher level of commitment to the material.
In short, don’t ever dull your brilliance but when possible present it in a way that make it available to as many people as possible no matter what their frame of mind is at the time.