Can I share a pet peeve of mine? (One of many, hehe…)

I get annoyed when I purchase something and then continue to receive emails saying “hey, buy this thing!”

This happened to me over the past couple of weeks. I purchased a program on October 13th which started on October 27th… and I’ve received an email every 2 or 3 days since then continuing to promote that same program.

I already bought it – so why do you keep asking me to buy it again? Seems like a little thing in some ways, but it is really frustrating to me. And I know this is frustrating to other people, too.

Now I get why people do this – they aren’t being strategic with segmenting their list. Segmenting a list means that you send emails only to a specific group of people. For example, you might “promote Product A to people who have bought Product C”. Or you might segment a list into “everyone on the ezine list LESS those who have already made a purchase” <– which is exactly what I’m talking about here.

Part of what comes into play here is the technology you are using to send your emails - in some systems it is easy to segment, and in others it may not even be doable.

Here are step-by-step instructions on how to do this with the two most popular systems that people use.

[Beware - this part is a bit techie. if you aren't the techie one in your biz, pass this along to your VA/OBM.]

• If you are using Infusionsoft this is super easy to do (gotta love Infusionsoft!).
1. Do a search of people who are tagged on your main list (ezine).
2. Then in the second drop-down box, pick the option “Doesn’t have any of these tags” and pick the tag/s for those you don’t want to send it to (the people who have already purchased).
• If you are using 1ShoppingCart (or some reseller version of that system), it gets a bit more tricky, but it is doable with a little bit of autoresponder “magic.”
  1. Set up a new autoresponder specific to your promotion, i.e.: it could be called October 2011 Promotion.
  2. Do a search for all contacts on your main list (i.e.: ezine), scroll to the drop-down box at the bottom of the search results, choose “Subscribe to Autoresponder,” and add them to the new one you just created.
  3. Wait a few minutes for that to process… then bring up all the people in that new autoresponder, go to the drop-down again, and this time choose to “Unsubscribe from Autoresponder.” Choose the autoresponders of people who have purchased – this will remove all the people who already bought the program.
  4. Every time you send out a promo, run step 3 again to remove new buyers.

Now I’m not sure how/if this works in other systems – if you know, go ahead and post here in the comments.

I’m sorting through your responses to my social media survey of last week and just want to make sure that your burning social media question is on the list so we can answer it in my free video series starting next week.

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Here’s a list of questions so far (you guys are asking some great stuff!)… if you don’t see your question here let me know k? Just pop it into the comments or send me an email if you prefer. We want to cover as much as we possibly can for you in this video series.

• Is Social Media really for everyone / every target group?
• Social Media Marketing Mix: What are the must-do Social Media activities for an VPA/OBM? (platforms, blogs, etc.) Is there certain tools, everyone should use?
• For us, content is the key! When starting a blog, what content to I share with followers / clients that are personal but yet professional and of interest.
• How to start Social Media activities to attract interest? Integrated within the company’s website or external?
• Is this really of interest for my business contacts or just a nice to have / must-do?
• I think for me it is probably being consistent! Finding the time and the inclination to post regularly is something that I tend to struggle with. It is very easy to do everything for our clients, but then end up somewhat neglecting those tasks that we should be doing for ourselves.
• How do you use social media to get a potential customer to become a paying customer?
• When I first started my business, I signed for anything that was free to get my name out there! I didn’t have alot of money, but did have alot of time. Now my business is doing quite well and therefore the I spend on social networking sites is valuable but limited. How do you decide which ones to drop and which ones to keep?
• In the social networking arena, what is necessary for a client to do/have and what can the client skip because it is really not worthwhile?
• How can you get an intern to do your social media and how do you train them?
• I don’t know the different between a wall and a page and which is best and why (and which one other people can post on and which one they can’t)
• How to monetize the people once I have them as friends.
• How to stop people from ‘advertising’ on your wall or page
• How do you measure the effectiveness using social media as a marketing strategy? What social media outlets get the best results (if results can be measured)?
• I mull over the balance between business and personal postings. I don’t care to post that I’m going to pizza tonight, but I don’t want to come across as too “salesy.”
• What are the best ways to use LinkedIn, aside from posting a profile and adding people to my network, how is LinkedIn best leveraged?
• How can a business owner be plugged into all the major social media outlets and not spend hours everyday posting, reading, answering, commenting?  Effective use of social media seems very time consuming.
• We have two challenges: 1:There is a fear that the social media will be inviting a barage of negative comments, which will 2: create a need for a dedicated person to monitor the social media site(s). My own organisation is holding back on starting a Facebook account, blog or tweet for these reasons.  They have just about allowed LinkedIn.
• Engagement is hard for my clients to grasp, we’ve put schedules together for clients that they can follow on a weekly basis, and we’ve coached them through engagement. I share with them the success that other clients have had when they engage – that seems to help, but two weeks later – crickets.
• I understand that the point is to connect with others, but I feel that if I don’t spend a lot of time online, that I’m not really connecting. With that said, then I don’t seem to spend much time anymore because I don’t want it to seem that I’m not genuine or just using social media to further my business. How can we find a balance between too much time and not enough time?
• Converting a following to a mailing list and converting them into sales
• Often after I follow someone on Twitter, I receive a message from them thanking me for the follow.  Is it necessary to do that to everyone who follows you or just a courtesy?
• I know squat, so what is the best way to get started?  I do have a LinkedIn account but it would be nice to have an online class along with knowing what is the best social media for business.
• Is there one program you recommend the most to do all the social media work.  Linking, profiling, changes, uploading etc.

Woo hoo! I’m looking forward to diving into these videos with you next week… first video will be posted on Monday, June 6th.

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It’s time to come clean. social media marketing confuses the heck out of me.

Now this might seem funny to you right? Given that i’m the Online Business Manager “expert” out there, you would think that I know this social media stuff inside out.

I get that social media is a key business building strategy these days and I understand the key components – but I feel like there are so many options, ideas and tools out there that it is hard to know what to do at times.

• What to do/not do?
• What is worth the time/effort/money?
• What could potentially harm me and my reputation?

And so I reached out to my friend and noted social media expert Lena West for help. Not only has she agreed to answer my social media questions, but she has also offered to tackle some of YOUR burning questions & challenges around social media too (woo hoo!)

Click Here to submit your biggest question, challenge or headache around social media.

Starting the week of June 6th we’ll be answering the top questions in a “myth-busting” free video series. Super hot stuff folks, I for one can’t wait for these videos to start.

Until then, let’s gather up all your questions via the link above.

And if you are curious… why Lena? She is an award-winning social media consultant, blogger, speaker, journalist, technologist and the Founder of Real Women Do Social Media and the Authentic Influencer Braintrust. She is smart, savvy and direct – the real deal when it comes to actually making social media work and not just be a waste of time and money.

We are doing a free call on November 8th re: video… and what better way to invite you to attend than by video!

>> Click here to register for this free call

I was surfing the web last night and was noticing how many sites have testimonials that never change. The same ones that they put up years ago, that they use over and again on various websites in different ways.

When I see that it makes me wonder – would the person giving the testimonial still say the same thing today?

Should testimonials have an expiry date on them that requires they are renewed on a regular basis?

This is something that I actually did a while back for one of my promotions – I had a testimonial that someone gave me for my book a couple of years ago that I wanted to use for a new promotion. It felt wierd to me to just pop this testimonial on my new page so I popped this person an email and said “hey, i know you gave me this testimonial a while back and I just wanted to check – are you fine if I use it again here [for my new promo] and would you still say the same things or would you prefer to tweak it?” Thankfully that person said yes, LOL.

But really, shouldn’t we be in touch with folks to see if the testimonial still applies? Would they add something to it or change it? Or would they prefer us to remove it altogether for some reason? I think we need to be willing to “stand in the truth” of our testimonials and also to respect if/when someone’s testimonial may no longer apply.

Curious for your thoughts… what do you think?

One of my favorite tips for any Online Business Manager re: finding new clients is this – go shopping!

Know who your ideal client is and then do some research. Find people out there who fit that profile and get to know them… read their blogs, join their newsletters, sign up for their tweets/etc. Pay attention to who they know, who they follow and talk about as well… and get to know those people too. You could make a list of hundreds (thousands?) of business owners this way and get to know some really great folks to boot.

Decide who you want to work with and look for ways to build a relationship with them over time. Even if they don’t need to hire an OBM right now, chances are down the road they will… and the fact that you know them and their business will be a huge benefit.

My OBM Tiffany likes to call herself my “stalker”, LOL! And you better believe that a huge part of why she was hired was the fact that she knew me, she had been paying attention to what I was doing and was really excited about my biz. (For me there is nothing more important really.)

Chapter 25 from the book Money, Meaning and Beyond

Question: “When you’re trying to sell something to someone, I know it’s important to communicate with people more than once. I’ve already emailed my newsletter readers with four different offers this month, but they still aren’t buying. What should I write in my next email that will work? I’m tired of pounding them so many times.”

With thanks to Aesop, let’s paraphrase a little story. It may give you a new perspective on this as well as other situations where you feel like you’re trying awfully hard.

The Sun and the Wind decided to have a little game. They agreed to prove which one of them was more powerful.

When a man came traveling down the road, they seized their opportunity – they decided to see who could make the man remove his coat, thus proving whether the Sun or the Wind was the more powerful.

The Wind took the challenge and began to blow. He blew as hard as he could at the man, trying to get him to remove his coat.

But the more the wind blew, the more the man clung to his coat and hat, and the wind had to give up.

Next the sun gave it a try and turned up his rays so it began to warm up. As the day grew brighter and the man grew warmer, he naturally found it too hot to keep his coat on and was happy to take it off.

Coming up on a small stream, he even took his shoes and socks off and took a wade before he continued on his journey.

With this story as a backdrop, let’s get back to the above questions:

“How do I stop chasing after customers and get them to try (or buy) my stuff?”

“How do I stop trying so hard to get results?”

These are very common questions for business owners and the answers are in the parable.

Ask yourself how you can be the sun, and not the wind.

How can you step into the river of your customer’s natural desires, rather than chase after them waving your company brochure as they go down a different path?

The saying goes, the only smart place to put a hot dog stand is in front of a crowd of hungry people.

Between the wind and the sun, which would you rather be, as you pursue the natural, effortless, stress-free growth of your business?

I had one of those ‘aha!’ moments the other day when I received this email from Andrea J. Lee’s Best of Multiple Streams f’ree ecourse. The subject line was:

Niche + Problem + Format = Income Stream

Out of a deluge of emails in my inbox this one instantly jumped out at me – as a (much needed) reminder of just how simple online business really is! And how much I had been overcomplicating some things in my business lately…

I’ve been knee deep in online business for years now – coming up on ten years actually – and despite all the great new things that arise in the online world it all comes back to this simple formula.

To break it down…

Niche

Definition: A niche is a group of people who have common issues and problems and who hang out together in some organized fashion.

Who do you serve?

It is essential that you have a clearly defined and specific niche market. This is the foundational piece in the ’8 Steps to Building a Multiple Streams Business’ that we’ve been teaching for years now… and is the one area where many businesses fall apart.

If you don’t have a good handle on your niche it becomes really hard to effectively tap into the specific needs of a market and provide products/services that serve that market (and that they are willing to pay for!). We go into finding your niche in great detail in Pink Spoon Marketing – be sure to check it out if this feels like an area that needs some work in your business.

Problem

People spend money on things that will help ease the ‘pain’ of their problems.

What keeps your niche up at night?

When you know what it is that the people in your niche market struggle with, then you can look for ways to help them – the solution becomes obvious. The key is, of course, to know what their problems are in the first place! And the thing is, this will change from time to time… so you need to make sure you are ‘plugged’ in to your niche.

How to find out their problems? Ask them what their biggest challenge is, and listen to their answers – look for themes. Read their blogs. Subscribe to their ezines. Follow their tweets. Pay attention.

Format

Once you know the problem, you want to consider how you are going to package and deliver the solution.

What is the best package for your solution?

The options for packaging offerings today are simply endless – everything from print-on-demand services (for books, CDs and such) through to webinar, multimedia and online video. It actually wasn’t too long ago that we were limited by our packaging choices, as many options where complex and expensive. We’ve come a long way baby!

When looking at packaging you want to consider two things:

1. What will be appealing to my market? If you are marketing to baby-boomers they may prefer a print book to an ebook. If you are marketing to twenty-somethings you may want to do an online video series.
2. What would I enjoy creating? If you love speaking but aren’t a big writer, drop the idea of writing a book and look to create classes, trainings, recordings and such. If you are camera shy you may not want to go the online video route. It is just as important for you to enoy the creation process, otherwise you will get frustrated, stuck and may never finish your product.

And there you go – at the heart of things it really is just that easy.This is one super powerful little formula – one that I recommend you print off and post on your wall.

If you want to dive deeper into any element of this simple formula check out the Pink Spoon Marketing Multimedia Home-Study Kit which will take you step-by-step through the process of building your business online.

Comments, thoughts? Post them here at the blog.

With all the bumps in the economy these days, i’m hearing some buzz among online support folks (virtual assistants, online business managers and the like) along the lines of:

“If my client’s business is struggling – doesn’t that mean they’ll have to let me go?”

Au contraire! Your services are needed more than ever because of these challenges.

Now I am no economist – heck, I barely pay attention to the news at all, never read newspapers – but my take on how these challenges affect us small/home-based business owners is this:

We need to step it up a bit, take a good look at things, let go of what isn’t working and get creative with how we serve our markets.

I’m certainly not the only person saying this of course, this is the basis of alot of the business advice out there right now - and for good reason. Those who are adapting are growing, those who are resisting are stagnant and struggling.

But I do want to make this clear – this applies to us as virtual assistants, online business managers and virtual support folks as well.

I believe quite strongly that regardless of what we are hired for – be it customer service, to build a website or to full out manage the business – our intention is the same. We need to always be focused on how we are helping to grow our client’s business.

This is always important, but it even more so important these days.

If you find yourself in fear of ‘losing your clients’ or are seeing some of your clients struggling I want to ask you:

What are you doing to help grow your client’s business?

Let’s put on our thinking caps shall we? It may not be as hard to do as you think. A few ideas:

• If you take care of customer service you actually have a pretty unique perspective on the business. You are in direct contact with potential and existing clients. What are they asking about? What are they upset/annoyed with? Share this with your client – these can be clues to potential new revenue streams. Also, what about people who have inquired but not purchased – can you put together a follow-up plan to reach out to these people with some kind of special offer? Being on the “front line” of the business is a very powerful place to be, you can truly make an impact here.
• Look to streamline, simplify and cut the fat. Where is the business leaking money? Most businesses are, and being in the role of ‘doing’ you are most likely the one to see where alot of this is happening. What tools are being used in the business – are they all necessary? Is your client paying for stuff they aren’t even using? Is there perhaps a new tool/software on the market that might be better? What about processes – what are you (and other team members) doing that could perhaps be done better? Saving time that can be put towards other business-building activities. Come up with a plan to ‘plug the leaks’ and share with your client.
• What can you take off your client’s plate? Freeing them up to focus on new business building opportunities… We talk about this alot in the Online Business Manager Training – one of the best things we can do for our clients is take stuff off of their already full plates. Give your client a tap on the shoulder and say “hey, I noticed you are really busy… why don’t you let me take x, y, z off your hands? I’d love to help”. This is music to your client’s ears, let me assure you! Chances are they didn’t realize you could help with x, y, z or in many cases they are so on autopilot it never occurred to them to let it go. I can hear the sigh of relief from your clients already….

 What else can you do to help grow your client’s businesses? Post your comments below…

And for the business owners reading this – don’t be shy in sending this to your team and/or having a discussion about it. Chances are they would love to step it up and see how they can help… they just might need a little nudge from you.

I got to thinking the other day re: social marketing as a business strategy. I know it’s a powerful tool for building a business, many folks are seeing great returns doing so… but as I shared a few weeks back I find that I get tired of social media.

And it occured to me – perhaps I find it tiring because I am an introvert?

See the thing is that I really get what social media is – I’ve invested in some pretty high end social media training, have been paying attention to how it all works and have even coached my clients on many of the strategies.

But for me personally, I haven’t been able to plug into a ‘flow’ if you will… I find that I go hot/cold – some weeks i’m really on, and others not so much – and I think it may have to do with being an introvert.

Now i’m no shrinking violet or anything, I’ve been told i’m quite outgoing and I daresay fun to be around (most of the time, hehe). But I do know that energetically I am an introvert – I ‘recharge’ more from solitary activities, getting away, reading, relaxing and such (as compared to extroverts who recharge in social situations, being out and about.)

When discussing social marketing with people i’ve always likened it to the world of ‘traditional networking’ – getting out and meeting people face-to-face at local networking groups, association meetings and the like. Some people really enjoy marketing this way, others not so much. I remember going to my very first professional coaches association meeting about 10 years ago in Calgary – I was so nervous the night before I barely slept! And it was just a breakfast meeting.

With the wide world of social media being online we aren’t meeting face-to-face of course, but the ‘energy’ of it is very much the same I would think? And so perhaps a bit more challenging for us introverted types?

I don’t have the answers here by any means… just struck me as interesting. I did a Google search on this and actually didn’t find much out there – would love to know if anyone has actually dug into this idea of social marketing for introverts a bit further.

I may put together a list of ‘social media tips for introverts’, hmmm…