solopreneur – Page 5 – Michele Christensen

“How big is your list?” is the wrong question

I’m a big believer in the power of email marketing and listbuilding. Whenever this topic comes up, the topic of list size also comes up. Some people have list size envy or even list size shame. Many times, when you first attempt to partner with someone list size is one of the first topics on the agenda.

The problem is that “How big is your list?” is the wrong question to ask, especially if it’s the only one you ask. Why is this the wrong question to ask?

It’s the wrong question because it doesn’t give you the information you really want, which is “How many people are likely to see an email you send?” What you really want to know is “How many people typically open your emails?” That’s what will tell you how many potential customers could be reached.

Here’s an example:

A person with a list of 10,000 and an average 20% open rate will give you an average of 2,000 people opening and potentially reading an email. A person with a list of 20,000 but an 8% open rate will only have an average of about 1,600 people opening their emails. If you stopped at “How big is your list?” you would probably choose the person with the bigger list to partner with. It’s not until you explore how many people actually open emails that you realize that the person with the smaller list has a better chance of getting more people to open an email.

So, stop obsessing over list size! It’s the number of people who read the email that matters. Start paying as much attention to how many people open your emails as you do to how big your list is. When it’s time to work with someone else, make sure to ask the right questions of them as well.

Want more great information on listbuilding and email marketing? Sign up for a free video training at Get Your List Growing.

Solopreneurs are everywhere!

Sometimes, it can feel like you are alone in your solopreneur business. Sometimes, people don’t think it’s a “real” business because you don’t have a location or employees. As this article shows, we are everywhere and our numbers are growing!

Solopreneurs Redefining Work

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How to kick-start your day

It can be hard to get your day started when you are a solopreneur! There’s so much to do in so many different categories, and then there’s all your personal stuff too. If you don’t have enough structure, that wide-open schedule might be as much a curse as a blessing. One way I get started right is to have a kick-start that I do every day. No matter how overwhelmed and lost I might feel, I always know to go through this short list and then I will have at least gotten started.

Here’s my kick-start list:

Clear my calendar and to-do list. I make sure I’ve done everything I planned to yesterday or I add it to today.
Review business priorities. I keep a one page document on hand that tells me what my current business priorities are. By reviewing it daily, it’s easier to make decisions that align with my priorities and not get sidetracked.
Write 100 words. This is a combination brain download, business journal, and writing warm-up. It’s a small chunk of writing that gets me going.
Do a money-making task. I always include something directly related to making money in my kick-start because it feels good to start the day that way. No matter what else happens, I’ve done something to make money that day.
Implement any coaching advice I’ve received. I regularly invest in training for myself just like I ask my clients to. Since I want to make it worth my while, I make sure to implement at least something from my training every day.

Once I tackled this list, I have a sense of accomplishment and my day is off to a good start. It’s often enough to get my momentum rolling and I can dig into everything else I want to get done. As with so many things, once you get your work day started it’s much easier to keep going than it was to get started.

If the idea of having a set way to start the day doesn’t appeal to you, an alternate approach is to set up the start to your day the night before. As your last task of the day, get yourself organized and set up for the morning so you can jump right in. Either way, make sure you give yourself an easy way to get your day going or you might waste a lot of time just trying to get started.

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Website Traffic Basics, Part 2

This post is the second in a series on website traffic basics. If you want to read part 1, click here. In the first post, I explained the concept of generating traffic to a website. Many new website owners assume that if they create a website that people will visit that site automatically and that’s not the case. In this post, I’ll expand on the concept of website traffic by talking about what you can learn by how long your visitors stay on your site. Not all visitors to your site are equally interested in what you have to sell, and not all visitors will behave the same way on your site.

One of the first things to look at when analyzing your web traffic is how long people stay on your site. In general, the longer people stay the more likely they are to take action (e.g. opt in to your email list, sign up for something free or buy something). When people stay on your site for a long time, it’s a good sign that they are interested in what they find there. After all, why would someone stay on a site that they weren’t interested in? Google Analytics can give you statistics on your website visitors in great detail including how long they stay.

A second figure to look at is bounce rates. In Google Analytics, a bounce is when someone clicks on you page and leaves quickly. It’s a good indication that they didn’t find what they were looking for. This is a good figure to compare for various traffic sources and keywords. If people land on your site after doing a search on a certain key word or phrase and then many of them bounce, that means that people searching on that key word or phrase are not finding what they wanted on your page. There could be a great opportunity for you here – fine tune the content of your page to better match what people want. You may also find that traffic from various sources tends to stay on your site for more or less time.

A third figure to look at is what actions people take when on your site. You might want them to opt-in for your email list, sign up for a free event or make a purchase. This is also a way to compare your traffic – you can look at what actions they tend to take while on your site.

In the first post I wrote, I talked about Pinterest and how it is great at driving site visitors. That post focused mainly on how Pinterest was good for driving a good volume of referral traffic. However, Pinterest is also good at driving high-quality traffic. My own experience is that the visitors I get to my site from Pinterest tend to stay longer than visitors from other sources. There is also some great data to support the idea that Pinterest users have a higher tendency to buy than visitors from other sites. In order to learn more about Pinterest and website traffic, you can watch this training I did with Becky Sangha, the creator of Business Marketing with Pinterest. She shares some great tips for using Pinterest and actually accomplishing something, and she also gives her strategy for using Pinterest in just 10 minutes per week! You can get a lot of traffic and followers in that time, which is a great return on investment. Check it out at the link below:

Pinterest Training for Solopreneurs

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What if you had a budget department?

When I worked for a big corporation, we had a budget department. It was not a big department, but there were 4-6 people whose sole function was to create and manage the company budget. Because it was a big company, the budget filled a 5-inch binder and there pages and pages documentation to go with it. The budget itself went from a big, broad picture to minute detail about each department within the company. The budget was drafted before the year started, and as the year progressed we measured how well we did in revenue and expenses against the budget.

In this setting, the budget served a lot of purposes and most of them aren’t relevant to solopreneurs. However, one of the vital functions of the budget was to justify every expense and make sure someone had the responsibility of deciding how to spend limited dollars. Nobody could just go off and autonomously decide to start some brand new promotion or create a brand new, untested product with no way of knowing if it would sell. While that does make for some slow implementation, it also makes sure that any new idea goes through some sort of review process.

As a solopreneur, you don’t have a budget department. In fact, you don’t have any departments or anyone to report to. This is a fun, phenomenal benefit of a one-person business, but it also means you can grab any half-baked idea you want and run with it. That can be a big problem!

Way too often, I see solopreneurs randomly adding project after project into their business with no planning and no way to measure what’s working. What they end up with is an overwhelming mash-up of disjointed tasks that aren’t working and no way to determine why.

So what’s the alternative? You don’t need a full department to help you stay on track, but you do need to perform the function of the budget department in your business. What if you did have to justify each new expenditure? What if you had to explain all the person-hours you needed? How would that change the way you work?

Here are a few tips to get your “budget department” started:

Do some research before you start anything new whether it’s a new promotion strategy, a new product or a change in the way you deliver a product. Don’t ever blindly just throw something out and see if it happens to work. Have some justification for what you are attempting. If it helps, you can pretend that you are justifying it to someone else.
Set some goals for your new project. What do you want to happen? How will you know if it’s a success? You don’t have to be elaborate with this – it might be enough to say “I hope to sell this new product.”
BEFORE you launch or start, have some way of capturing data about your success. Make sure there is some way to know if what you are doing is making any impact. Don’t wait until you’ve been doing this new project for 6 months with no feedback to try to force fit some measurement on the back end.

In short, one helpful way to look at any new project you are thinking of taking on is to pretend you have to justify it to a budget committee. How will it help your bottom line? How will it contribute to sales? If you are thinking of trying something new, and want to set it up properly from the start, I invite you to schedule a coaching session with me. I can help you make sure you are heading in the right direction and that you’ll be able to tell if your project is successful.

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Get Started Right – Standardize Your Intake Process

If you provide a service or work with clients, you have some sort of intake process. Even if currently you just grab bits of information as you realize you need them, you still have a process. Once practice I recommend is having a standardized intake process. Aside from saving you time, if you have a set process you’ll avoid re-inventing the wheel every time a new client enters your business. You can design your process to make sure you get all the information you need for each new client, such as their contact information, what name they like to be called, how they like to be contacted, etc. Because the process is standardized, you’ll get the same information in the same format for each new client which lets you hit the ground running. If you process is set up correctly, you can also be sure that each new client is added to your email newsletter list without any intervention from you. Of course always make it clear they are being added to a list during their transaction.

If you already use a shopping cart or Paypal, you can specify what contact data you want from the client when they checkout. Your shopping cart or Paypal should also add the client automatically to your email list. A great next step is to have your client visit an online form where they fill in whatever information you need to get started. You’ll want to make sure whatever form you use is as secure as you need it to be to protect your clients’ privacy. Finally, it’s important that you design your process to be as error-proof as possible. The client should be ushered through easily and flawlessly with no effort on their part. Whatever comes after the intake process should appear at the right moment.

Since you can’t, nor should you be, at your computer 24/7 all of this needs to be set up to happen automatically to create the best experience for your new clients. Making sure client intakes happen smoothly with or without you present is especially important for solopreneurs. The last thing you want is a bad first impression or a customer service situation you need to fix. You also should not set up a situation where you need to be there all the time to start new clients. Fortunately, you can use free or low-cost automation tools and even settings on the tools you already use to make this happen. Automating your intake process is one of the areas of automation I cover in my book The Solopreneur’s Success Strategy: Automate Your Grunt Work. In the book, I cover 10 key areas where you can use automation to deliver better service and more of yourself without adding more to your bulging to-do list. There’s also 3 bonus automation-related strategies and downloadable checklists to make your business run smoother. Get a copy today by clicking here.

Note: The book is a Kindle book, but you don’t need a Kindle device to read it. You can get a free reader for your desktop, or an app for your smartphone or tablet.

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3 Myths about Pinterest

This year, I’ve narrowed the number of social media sites I’m on so I can spend more time on each one and get better results. One of the two sites I’m focusing on is Pinterest. I was slow to get onto Pinterest, and one of the reasons is that I didn’t think it was appropriate for my business. I didn’t see how puppy pictures, wedding shoes and gorgeous food pictures could possibly fit into my business. However, it turns out I was wrong. I believed some common myths about Pinterest which have turned out not to be true. Here’s what I thought, and what’s right.

Pinterest Myth #1: It’s only for women

Yes, I am a woman and I do love to work with women, however my niche is solopreneurs, and I work with both men and women. I didn’t think being part of something that is primarily used by women would get me connected to people I might be able to work with.

The reality: Pinterest is still has more female users, but men are starting to use it a faster rate. There are some very specific interest areas in which men tend to post including sports, travel, home repair, SEO and social media.

Pinterest Myth #2: It’s for hobbyists

Before I knew better, the only people I knew who were using Pinterest were using it for their hobbies. They were sharing pictures of their favorite foods, clothes, animals, equipment, makeup and other hobby items. My business isn’t particularly picture-worthy, so I didn’t see how sharing pictures could possibly help me.

The reality: Pinterest is great for business, and there are a lot of businesses using it with great success. Pinterest is a great way to drive interested people to your site and Pinterest users tend to make purchases once they visit a site from Pinterest.

Pinterest Myth #3: It’s only for visual businesses

Take one look at Pinterest and you’ll see that it is indeed great for visual businesses such as photographers, designers, people in the fashion industry, artists, craftspeople, etc. However, you can have a non-visual and even a visually “boring” business and still use Pinterest. Yes, you will need to create some graphic to go with whatever you want to pin but you can use really simple graphics and even just a quote graphic can be pinned and shared.

Are you using Pinterest for your business? If not, why not? Jump in before Pinterest gets saturated with your competitors and start reaping the benefits.

Need a place to start? Watch this webinar for a great introduction to Pinterest for Solopreneurs. I hosted Pinterest expert and creator of “Business Marketing with Pinterest” Becky Sangha for a video training on getting started with Pinterest. Oh, and please use the Pin it and social sharing buttons below the video to share this with your friends and colleagues.

Want to see how to have a 6-figure teleseminar (or webinar)?

One of my sales mentors Lisa Sasevich is doing a brand new training on one of her specialties, 6-figure teleseminars and webinars! Even though I’ve worked with Lisa before, I still listen to all her trainings because they are so great! Tune in tomorrow (Thursday) to see her reveal her secrets!

Click here for information:

5 Secrets for 6-figure Teleseminar and Webinar Sales Success

If you are reading this after Thursday, click the link to see if she still has the replay up.

Being a solopreneur can be a long-term thing if you like it!

I want to straighten out some confusion I hear often. A one-person business is a viable, sustainable, long-term business model. Not everyone wants to have a bigger operation and not everyone wants to supervise a staff. Myself, and many other people love this business model, and while I do consider myself a solopreneur I do love to collaborate with others. I sometimes get the impression that people who are not solopreneurs think that being a one-person operation is just a temporary situation until the business grows. I intend to stay solo for the foreseeable future, and lots of people I work with do as well.

Many times, when I tell people I work with 1-person or solopreneur businesses, they often ask “You mean like startups?” I usually explain that typically, startups are looking to grow and make money for their founders or to be purchased by a bigger company. Some solopreneurs may be startups – there are probably some one-person businesses looking to grow and expand. However, there are a lot of people who are most content with the small, simple model of being a solopreneur. We can hire outsourced help when needed, but mostly the business thrives on us and our work alone.

I love being a solopreneur, and I love working with solopreneurs. I love the freedom, the flexibility and the autonomy. I also love to learn, so I like that a big part of my business is learning to tackle various parts of the operations. Being a solopreneur isn’t for everyone, but if you do find yourself drawn to this life you might just love it.

Make no mistake, it is challenging to run a solopreneur business. Aside from having a product or service that people want to buy, you have to be a business generalist and know a least a little bit about everything in your business aside from what you do for customers. There is a lot to do in order to keep a business running, and you have to do it all and do the work you get paid for. This is where automation can help. I believe that solopreneurs should automate everything they can before hiring help. Automation is cheaper, mistake free and can run 24/7 for you once you set it up. What are some areas of your business you can automate? How about appointment scheduling, social media, email sorting, computer backups and monitoring your industry to start with? I cover these 5 areas plus 4 more and 3 bonus automation-related strategies (12 areas in total) in my Kindle book “The Solopreneur’s Success Strategy: Automate Your Grunt Work.” This book has a 5-star rating and some of the comments include “Very helpful,” “No fluff,” and “Rich treasure chest of productivity.” So yes, you can be a solopreneur as a permanent way of doing business. However, I strongly recommend that you automate all the annoying little tasks that you can so you can focus more on what you love. Check out the book at the link below: The Solopreneur’s Success Strategy: Automate Your Grunt Work

Don’t have a Kindle device? You can still read this book with a free app for your smartphone or tablet or with the free Kindle desktop reader.

Independence Day coaching sessions still on sale!

In honor of the Independence Day holiday last week, I have a special way for you to work one-on-one with me that I’ve never offered before! There’s no contract, no long-term commitment and no complicated package. It’s simple and can help you make a big leap forward in your business quickly!

You have a huge degree of flexibility in how you use your sessions, and I’ve given you ideas to think about on the information page. I’ve coached solopreneurs since 2010, so there are a lot of areas I can help with. Click the link below to get inspired about how we can work together!

The offer is only good until Thursday, so click here to get details and book your sessions!

Independence Day Coaching Session sale

PS – This offer was opened for my email subscribers last week. If you want priority notification of upcoming special offers and useful content to help you grow your solopreneur business, fill out the box at the top of the right sidebar to join my email subscriber list.