Business Strategist for Solopreneurs
Earlier this year, I gave my email subscribers the chance to ask me anything about their business. In this video, I answer a question about how many experts to be following. I’ll be answering more questions over the coming weeks and months.
One of the easiest, and most profitable way to provide value to your prospects, leads and customers is through YouTube videos.
The more value you provide, the more valuable you are, priming your audience to become eager buyers of your products and services.
Have you started creating YouTube videos? I confess, I’m under-using YouTube. That’s why I’ve signed up for this training.
Maybe you have a few videos, but you are frustrated because they aren’t generating the interest you had anticipated and you aren’t sure how you can create YouTube videos that will drive high quality traffic to your sign-ups, website, and sales pages.
If you would like to make yourself more valuable to your prospects and clients while getting unlimited, highly targeted traffic to your website, hen I know you’ll want to join in this new training offered by my friend and colleague, Becky Sangha (a.k.a. The Online Video Marketer).
How To Create YouTube Content Fast For More Traffic, Sign-ups And Sales
This is a workshop training course where you will learn everything you need to know to use YouTube videos to generate value, and increase traffic, and your profits. There is no selling in this workshop, it’s pure training. She’s even going to have me on the workshop live as one of her examples! I honestly have no idea what she is going to tell me, but I can’t wait to find out!
Because it is a workshop, Becky wants to ensure that each participant gets maximum value, and she’s limited the number of people who can register. So click on the link now before it fills up and she pulls the page down.
How To Create YouTube Content Fast For More Traffic, Sign-ups And Sales
Becky’s just opened this up to the public, and it’s already generating quite a buzz, so don’t wait to sign-up, or you might be too late.
PS – I’ve worked closely with Becky for almost 3 years, and I am proud to be an affiliate for this training. If you decide to register, I’ll make a small commission.
VIP Half-Day Planning sessions are closed right now. Please make sure you sign up for my mailing list using the box at the top of the right sidebar to get priority notification when new VIP opportunities are available. Thanks!
My first few years in business, I pretty much flew by the seat of my pants. There was so much to master, so much to do, and so many balls to keep in the air that I couldn’t find the time to think ahead. I was too busy reacting. As you probably know, this is not the best way to run a business. It’s like trying get somewhere by running really fast without knowing if you are going in the right direction. Fortunately, I learned that I had to plan ahead to be successful.
First I took baby steps, and just planned a few weeks ahead. Now that I’ve gotten much better at it, I plan my full year out ahead of time. In case you are wondering, things never go exactly as planned so my plan changes a lot as the year progresses. Nor does having a plan lock me into anything. As a solopreneur, I can change my plan any time I want. The key thing is having a plan to start with.
What will having a plan do for you? You’ll be able to make much better decisions about what opportunities to say yes or no to. You’ll know if you have space or can make space for something new. You’ll be working proactively and moving forward, instead of fire-stomping and treading water. What you do during the year will be laid out in a logical sequence.
Do you see how having a plan can help you have your best year ever? The benefits may be obvious, but how are you supposed to find the time to do a plan for a whole year? It’s one of those things that’s important but not urgent so it tends to get pushed to the back burner and before you know it months have passed.
To make sure you get your plan done for 2015, I’m pleased to offer you my support in a VIP Half-Day Planning Session. Your VIP experience starts right away with a questionnaire that I’ll review before our session so we can jump right in. Your VP Half-Day will be a total of four and a half hours – 4 hours of work with 2 breaks of 15 minutes. I’ll give you my custom planning tool, and we can even work collaboratively on your plan during your session (i.e. both of us working on the same document from our separate computers) if you want. This is not a group experience – you and I will be the only ones present and we’ll get your 2015 mapped out so this isn’t hanging over your head any longer. We will meet virtually and you have several technology options to choose from for our meeting.
To make absolutely sure you that nothing gets in your way, I’m adding in a 15-minute follow up call in February. We can revise your plan or talk about anything that you need help on to keep moving forward.
To recap, your VIP Half-Day Planning Session includes:
I offered this first to my email subscribers and as of this posting, there are 8 spots left.
To get started on your VIP Half-Day Planning Session, click the button below (terms and conditions here).
VIP Half-Day Planning sessions are closed right now. Please make sure you sign up for my mailing list using the box at the top of the right sidebar to get priority notification when new VIP opportunities are available. Thanks!
One of the main skills you need to be an entrepreneur who works at home is how to schedule and block your time out. When you work for yourself on your own schedule, there is no natural start and stop time for anything. Creating your own start and stop times is the structure that you need to create in order to be successful at running your own business from your home.
It’s definitely great to work from home, but without the skill of being able to properly schedule and block out your time you may find yourself spending too much time in a grey area where you are trying to straddle your work and personal life and do both at the same time. You can end up with a lot of poorly used time where you aren’t really working and getting things done and you aren’t really enjoying yourself.
What are some examples of in-between behavior?
Any of these can be enough to cause you problems. You can end up with no time where you are really “off” work, and you end up with a lot of hours of poor-quality work because you weren’t fully into your work. Because you don’t take enough time off, this can lead to burnout, stress and lack of enthusiasm.
It’s super important to create time when you are 100% working and time when you are 100% not working. The grey area in between is not a good way to spend your time and needs to be minimized. There’s a Zen saying that comes to mind:
“When walking, just walk. When sitting, just sit. Above all, don’t wobble.”
In our entrepreneurial world, we could say “When working, just work. When off, just don’t work. Above all, don’t try to do both.”
Make sure every minute of your day is spent intentionally. Whether you are relaxing or working, what you are doing should be a conscious choice that represents the best thing you could be doing right now.
Be More Popular is about creating and utilizing culture to make your startup a success. I’ve written and spoken a lot about how I think that startups are not the same as solopreneurs, but there is a lot of value for solopreneurs in this book. I decided to read this book because I have tremendous respect for the the author, Lee Schneider, and have collaborated with him on several occasions. I’m also a subscriber to his newsletter and fan of his Twitter feed!
One of the key themes of this book is on gaining users for your product, but there is a big focus on building community. There are some valuable lessons in the community-building part of the book, and most of what is written about gaining users can be applied to other kinds of businesses as well.
Can a one-person business have culture?
At first I questioned this idea because culture, almost by definition, is shared by more than one person. However, the theme of culture is expanded upon greatly and culture isn’t only about shared rituals or traditions by employees. Culture permeates everything about your business and is a backdrop to every decision you make. Culture impacts what kind of people want to do business with you. The biggest takeaway I got in this area is that your business has a culture whether you are aware of it or not. Rather than let your culture just be some scattered list of ideas that you don’t even know about, it’s better to be intentional in creating your culture and communicating it.
Much of the book is dedicated to building community, and this is valuable for a solopreneur as well. Even though you may be mostly a one-person operation, the people who are interested in what you have to say are your community. They are your future customers, your advisory board and the home of your business. The book features case studies, and covers both fast and slow ways to build your community.
Most of what I’ve mentioned so far has been more about how this book teaches you new concepts and new ways to think about your business. However, there are some really practical “how to” sections as well.
One of the noteworthy sections of the book covers how much you can or should spend to acquire a user/community member/potential customer. Spending money is a perfectly valid way to let people know about you, but it can be a challenge to balance how much you spend vs. the potential revenue per client. Lee walks you through the calculation in enough detail that you could do this for your own business. It’s a really valuable concept and one that all business owners should be aware of.
A second section with valuable “how to” information is on using email marketing. It’s refreshing to hear someone in the startup community talk about the value of email marketing even though there are much more exciting and newer ways to reach people. The fact is that email marketing is still one of the most, if not the most, valuable activity a business can engage in even if it’s not particularly sparkly or new.
An unexpected surprise was a chapter on hacking your nervous system. This was toward the end of the book, and it was almost like getting a present! The book would have been complete without this chapter, but it was useful information on how you can make small changes to help yourself perform better.
I recommend you read this book for your business! Click here to see this book on Amazon.
Image from Amazon.com
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.
One of my big themes for 2014 is narrowing my focus, and one of the areas I’m focusing on is writing Kindle books. I’ve got two published and a third is in the works. One of my books even got to #1 Bestseller status in the Kindle store! In this post, I’m reviewing a Kindle book that has information I used to get my book to #1 Bestseller status:
Author’s Quick Guide to Making Your Book a Bestseller
The book’s author is Kristen Eckstein, who is one of my Kindle mentors. I was in her first “Kindle in 30 Challenge” back in January, and from that I was able to get my series “The Solopreneur’s Success Strategy” started.
Here’s the review, in short form: Buy it. It’s well worth the $3.49 price point. If you are writing Kindle books that sell for $2.99, you only need to sell 2 to cover the cost of this book and I’m pretty certain this book will cause you to sell at least two additional books.
If you want more information, here’s the longer review.
Kristen’s credentials for writing this book are extensive and can be found in the beginning of the book. Suffice it to say, she knows her stuff. She covers many areas that will help you become a bestseller including writing a good book, choosing catagories, pricing, using keywords and writing for your specific audience.
One of the great things about this book is that much of what you will learn is applicable to other areas of your business as well. For example, she spends a lot of time on finding your audience and learning to speak their language. That skill is useful in so many areas of your business – when marketing on the web, when speaking from the stage, when creating products or when talking one-on-one with potential customers.
This book was hugely helpful to me and helped me get one of my books that coveted #1 status! My tip: Don’t forget to take a screenshot when your book gets to #1!
Check out the book here:
Author’s Quick Guide to Making Your Book a Bestseller
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Image source: Amazon.com
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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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:
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
