strategy – Page 4 – Michele Christensen

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.

13 Gifts for Business Freedom Giveaway closes tomorrow!

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

Beware of the “Trojan Horse” Sales pitch

As I’ve increased the reach of my business, I’ve had an increasing number of people attempt to pitch me something in the guise of a Trojan Horse. It’s usually something like “Can I share your {whatever} with my audience?” or one particularly blatant one “I have a speaking gig for you, let’s talk (turned out to be a long sales pitch for something that was completely inappropriate for me.)

Just to be clear, it’s totally appropriate to pitch and sell when you are in business. Without selling, there would be no business. My objection to the Trojan Horse approach is that it is sneaky and often untargeted. In each case, I didn’t know I was going to be pitched to and the product or service being offered was not something I needed or wanted. The person pitching me occupied my time under false pretenses and I felt burned at the end.

What I want to share with you is to be on the lookout for these sales pitches. They will waste your time and if your experience is like mine, the people that do this don’t even try to target the right potential customers. Here are a few warning signs to look out for:

Somebody comes to you with an offer that is too good to be true
The person is overly flattering when it’s clear they haven’t gotten to know you or your work
They request a phone, in-person or Skype meeting without explaining what the value to you will be or why it can’t be handled in a more efficient manner
Vague references to “working together” without even one example of what that might look like
You have a feeling of “What is this person talking about?” or “What the heck?” that isn’t shared by the other person
They express urgency at needing to meet with you right away

One of the really vexing parts of the Trojan Horse sales pitch is that it is usually flattering! I admit, the first few times it happened I was thrilled that a stranger recognized my genius. I’ve now gotten pretty good at sniffing out legitimate admiration vs. insincere and generic compliments designed to woo me into a meeting. I’ve also come to recognize just how valuable my time is, so I place a higher bar on any meeting and very low value on ego-boosting.

Another problem with ducking these sales pitches is that if you get too broad with your criteria for declining, you may miss legitimate and valuable opportunities to collaborate and have a sales conversation about something that may actually be useful to you.

It goes without saying that you should not be using this to sell your own products or services. It makes a very bad impression and wastes both your time and your unqualified prospect’s time. The big question is how do you avoid the time-wasting Trojan Horses and accept the right appointments?

Here are a few ideas:

First, don’t jump to schedule an appointment just because someone asks. Check them out by visiting their website, social media sites and doing a Google search.

Second, make sure you understand why you are having a meeting rather than some other form of communication such as exchanging emails. Ask them some questions about why a meeting makes sense. Often, this drives away people who you probably don’t want to meet with and people who are a good fit appreciate your thoughtfulness.

Third, don’t schedule right away. I generally schedule everything a week ahead of time anyway, but a side benefit of this is that it wards off people who don’t have a legitimate purpose for talking to you. They don’t want to work that hard or plan ahead!

Fourth, pay attention to your feelings. If you feel pressured, unsure, weird, etc. it may be because the meeting isn’t right for you.

As a solopreneur, you have to guard your time or you won’t be able to do everything you need to do. Don’t plan a meeting simply because someone asks. Make sure you know the value of the meeting for both you and the person who wants to meet with you.

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Website traffic basics

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:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which is making your site more likely to be displayed by search engines
Social media – you can post links and small bits of information that encourage people to visit your site and work to get those links shared
Paid advertising – you can pay to advertise your site to encourage people to visit

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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List-a-palooza 2014 starts tomorrow!

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:

Weekly accountability check ins for tracking your results so that you accelerate your path to more subscribers
Two training calls each week with some of the world’s top listbuilding experts who share their hottest strategies and tactics with you for growing your list
A weekly “Power Hour” in which we all get online together at the same time to implement ONE specific list-building tactic.

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!

Why this solopreneur is focusing on Pinterest this year

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.

It sounds cliche, but it really is a traffic driving machine! I made just a few changes to my Pinterest activities and within a week Pinterest was in my top ten referral traffic sources. The following week, it was #4 in referral traffic and #7 overall. Given how little I did and how little I knew at the time, that’s pretty amazing. My Pinterest traffic has continued to grow as I’ve gotten better at using the site.
When you add a pin to Pinterest, it creates a permanent link which can be found forever. Technically, the same is true on other social media sites, but the big difference with Pinterest is that people use the search function more than the feed of most recent pins. This means that it doesn’t matter when you made a pin, it only matters that you use the language that someone searching is using. How often do you read or get retweeted on year-old tweets, Facebook posts or LinkedIn updates?
Pinterest boards are based, ideally, on interests. This means that when someone finds and follows a board of yours they are specifically looking for pins on that topic. You can create multiple, highly-targeted boards which will attract people interested in that topic instead of attracting people to your entire stream the way you would on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. That means you can tightly target your content to the audience of each board, and someone doesn’t have to be interested in everything you do in order to follow some of your boards.
Images are becoming increasingly important on social media, and on Pinterest the link goes with the image. When someone repins your pin, the link to your site usually goes with the new pin.
People share a lot on Pinterest! Repinning, or sharing someone else’s content, represents 80% of pinning activity. Your quality pins have a good chance of being repinned and exposed to entire new audiences.
The traffic that comes from Pinterest is high-quality! In a future post, I’ll talk more about driving traffic to your site with Pinterest but for now suffice it to say that the visitors that come from Pinterest are interested in what you have.

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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Interview with Martina Zorc of Star Brand Studio

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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