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  • Your Content Is An Extension of You

    I was talking with one of my coaching clients yesterday, who was complaining to me about time management problems. It seems that she can’t find enough hours in the day to make videos, write articles and participate in the global conversation online.

    Normally when I hear this problem I know that most people who complain about time management are actually time wasters. Case in point: my client was spending an hour each day making cold calls which she felt was a good utilization of her time. Entrepreneurs love to make justifications for the things they do and cold callers are no exception, in many cases we can always look to the one or two really good customers who we have found through a cold call to make it all worthwhile.

    What my client didn’t understand was that if she spent that hour each day publishing content to the Internet she would be much more effective over the long term. Filming a five-minute video and putting it up on YouTube is very easy. It’s also very easy to get 1000 people to view that video. YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the world next to Google. If 1000 people watch your video, it’s the equivalent of making 1000 five-minute phone calls.

    Start thinking about the messages you want to get across to your audience and start thinking about the mediums you want to use to deliver those messages. I prefer to use articles and video to deliver my messages. Increasingly my audience has been growing exponentially because I spend more time putting content out and less time talking to people one-on-one.

    I am not saying that you should completely replace face-to-face or telephone communication, I am suggesting however that you find ways to maximize that communication and leverage it to a larger audience. As a for instance yesterday I spent 30 minutes on the phone with one of my trainers. We did a question-and-answer session that was intended for a larger audience. This call was recorded and will be heard by thousands of people.

    Lately when people have been asking me for mentoring or business coaching and they don’t have any money to pay for my time, I have been asking them to do recorded calls with me that I can later release on my blog. These calls will be a valuable tool for me to recruit new clients, so even when I give up some of my free time, I am able to monetize it down the road.

  • Exercises to Research and Prepare Promotional Marketing Materials

    Here is a helpful exercise on how to research and prepare promotional marketing materials to bring the right people to your business. When I do this exercise with my marketing students, we always have a lively conversation that not only sparks solutions but also leaves participants feeling enthused, inspired, even excited about showing up in the marketplace.

    The themes we explore and the fun we have doing this exercise are so central to an authentic approach to small business marketing that I have decided to highlight them in this article.

    First, let us stipulate that somewhere in the world there are prospective clients or customers who will fit you and your work “just right.”

    (If this does not feel true for you yet, then you have work to do. Perhaps you need training, practice, or mentoring before you can attract “just right” customers. Or perhaps, like I did with my art business, you are trying to make an avocation into a vocation. For now, let us assume that you are in the right business with the right skills.)

    Second, let us assume that “just right” clients are those who get great value from working with you just the way you are. These are clients who share enough of your standards and values that it is easy to develop mutual respect, appreciation, and benefit. With these two assumptions in mind, here are some unconventional yet highly productive questions to help focus the image, tone, and message that will attract clients who fit “just right.” Answer them quickly to tap into your creative subconscious. There will be plenty of time later for thinking about the answers and deciding when and how to use them in sharing your gifts with the world.

    1. If your work were a color, what color would it be?

    2. What shape would it be?

    3. How big would it be?

    4. What texture would it have?

    5. If you pressed it with your finger, what would happen?

    6. If your work were a popular song, what song would it be?

    7. Who would be singing?

    8. How loud?

    9. If your work were an historic personage, who would it be?

    10. If your work were going to a party, what would it wear?

    11. If your work had a typical mood, what would it be?

    12. If your work were a plant, what kind of plant would it be?

    13. In what environment would it thrive?

    14. If your work were an animal, would it be domestic or wild? How big?

    15. If your work were a meal, what kind of meal would it be? (Fast food? Haute cuisine? Mac and cheese?)

    What is the point of questions like these? Simply this: Answering them can reveal aspects of your personality that inform and augment the work you do. By surfacing these unique associations, you will be unearthing imagery and attitudes you can use to set the tone for your marketing so that it is easy for your “just right” clients to differentiate you from other people doing similar work.

    Try this exercise – it could be the start of something beautiful.

  • Getting Free Marketing Through Forums For Your Offline Business

    A social media outlet that people often overlook is the forum. While sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn get a lot of attention when people are focusing on social media, many people forget about the saliency of forums when it comes to making a reputation for your business online.

    The great thing about a forum is that it’s an easy place to establish a reputation of expertise. What you should absolutely not do is join a forum and start spamming it with ads for your business. This will only annoy the other users of the forum, and could possibly end up getting your account deleted by the moderators of the forum itself.

    The best way to use a forum is to join one that is specifically related to your area of interest and product sales and start offering advice. For example, if you own a car dealership, you should look for dealership-related forums that pertain to the kinds of autos you sell. Then, you put in the address of your website or social media profile in the “signature” area of your profile and start answering questions. Giving out advice for free sounds like it might not be the best way to end up producing revenue, but once you can establish yourself as an expert on the forums, you can start drawing people into being curious about your products and services. After all, if you’re so helpful on the forum, you might have something useful to offer in the realm of sales, as well.

    Another way to drum up trust in your business area using forums is to create your own forum. Of course, you’ll need to go through proper advertising channels in order to make people aware of your forum, but this is a great thing to announce on your Twitter feeds and Facebook profiles! If you can get a lively forum going that is directly attached to the website you have for your offline business, it’s a great way to get traffic to your site and a lot more customers, since you’ll have daily traffic to the forum. A successful forum might even have thousands of hits per day!

    Establishing a reputation of excellence and expertise is the lifeblood of any small business. As it’s likely that you’re competing with a big box store of some sort, your bread and butter is the personal touch that you can add to your customer’s experience. When the business is online, or when you’re advertising your offline business online, a great place to show that you actually do possess both excellence and expertise is by engaging people on forums. In this way, you start building relationships of trust with the online contingent, and draw them further into your store and products.

  • Essentials of Generating Traffic with RSS Feeds

    Video: Brad explains what RSS feeds are and how to generate traffic using RSS.

  • Setting Up A Blog In Just 4 Simple Steps

    You have a small business, home business or hobby that you want to monetize. You want to build your online presence but have no start up cash. Do you give up? Hell, no. The web is so full of free options that you can build a new business website for free in less than half an hour. Taking it one step further you can build a trendy company blog in the same amount of time. That is right, you can have a company blog like all of the “big guys” in about the same time it takes you to shower in the morning. Don’t believe me? Well, try it.

    You can easily start your business blog right now by following these few steps…

    1. Sign up At WordPress.com – WordPress.com will offer you a free website built on the easily customizable WordPress platform. Visit the site and follow the instructions to get your initial site set up. All you will need is an email address. WordPress.com will even handle the hosting for you.

    2. Choose A Theme – Using the back office of WordPress.com you can search for themes for your website. The theme will cover all of your major design details. You can search by a number of different parameters that will allow you to find the perfect theme for your business. If you have a logo there is sure to be a color scheme that matches.

    3. Create Your Pages – In the back office of WordPress you should set up a couple static (not changing regularly) pages first off. You should add an about page that explains about your company. You should also add a products or services page that goes into what you offer. Lastly create a contact page so people can find out how to get a hold of you.

    4. Add Content – Posts are different than pages, posts are content that you add on a regular basis. These posts can be how-to articles about your niche, industry news, insider information or just helpful tips. You will want to add information as often as possible. The more information and posts you have the more likely you will receive web traffic.

    Four steps. That is it. You now have a fully functional business blog that can help you find prospects, leads and like minded individuals. Obviously each of those above steps are a little more detailed in practice than explained here. Also you can take this company blog much further with some education, but if all you want is a basic company blog then there you have it. All you have to give up, is about 20 minutes.

  • Quality PLR Actually Exists

    Quick — what is the first thing you think of when you hear the term “PLR products”?

    What did you think of?

    Sadly, there is a high chance that you instantly thought of something negative. Since I have been creating PLR products, I have noticed that there seems to be a stigma around the term PLR.  People seem to doubt quality, how current it is and quite frankly the value.

    All fair worries, because there has been a lot of subpar PLR content released over the years. The problem is for people who put in the time to create good quality PLR products.  There are a number of creators online that offer great products, and they face an uphill battle because of this stigma.

    The stigma of PLR is so bad that the term alone might drop sales.  I haven’t done any really scientific testing, but we have sold personal rights versions of our products, and the PLR versions for similar prices and seen the personal rights version sell more.

    That has happened more than once as well.  Even if it isn’t a pattern or a trend, realistically speaking the PLR version should be far more popular right?  You get the eBook that you would get in the personal rights version, plus all of the other goodies, editables and the right to rebrand it as your own.   It should be a slam dunk that it is more valuable, but when it comes time to sell and market – it is regularly proving it isn’t.

    As a PLR Creator What Can I Do?

    I don’t think there is a simple answer for this, there is nothing one (or even a handful) of PLR creators can do to wipe away years of history.

    The first step is to produce the best quality PLR that you can.  We like to believe that is what we are doing, and from our interaction with other people it seems to be what they are doing as well.   As we build our businesses and customers, we will naturally be building more respect (and hopefully less of a stigma) for PLR in general.

    Another thing you can do is think of different ways to spin your creations.  Maybe PLR is so tainted we have to move away from it.   Maybe we are simply content creators or opt-in specialists.  Maybe we are selling rebrandable guides, and instant content solutions.

    I think that is kind of the cowards way out, I’d like to challenge people’s beliefs about PLR head-on.  That said,  in some cases being creative about your services is a smart business move.

    I am not sure how we can remove the PLR stigma, or if it is even possible.  All I know is the more people who create and sell HIGH quality PLR means the more customers who will be open to it altogether.  If you want to build your PLR business while building the actual market then commit to high quality PLR. 

  • How PLR Can Make Selling On Webinars Easy

    have mentioned it before, but a personal goal of mine is to help reduce the stigma of PLR.  So many people instantly think “low quality crap”.  Well, I think stories like this will prove that there is some great PLR content out there, and more importantly, it can be used to make money right “out-of-the-box”.

    So recently Justin (if you don’t follow us, he is my biz partner and one of the “founding fathers” of Best Quality PLR) was approached to give a webinar.   When you are working in the online world there will be a lot of these kind of opportunities.

    People will approach you to do a webinar based on reputation

    Someone in your social network will need a webinar guest

    You can offer joint venture opportunities to people with big mailing lists who can schedule a webinar

    You can speak on someone’s web show – people are always looking for guests

    There are even websites directed solely to generating webinar traffic.

    Hold your own webinar – set up landing page and direct paid traffic to it.

    Anyways, creating webinar opportunities is a post in itself.  What we want to discuss is how PLR helped us make some money. When doing a webinar there are two things you really need:

    Webinar Content

    An Offer

    We were able to use our PLR products for both.

    After being approached by someone who needed a basic SEO webinar, Justin created a slideshow from our SEO related products.  He didn’t skimp on the info, the goal is to deliver some quality content.  Delivering a webinar can be a lot of work, but having this content did speed up the process.

    So while Justin perfected the webinar content, I worked on putting together a package.  I took some of our SEO related products, slapped our branding all over them (could have increased profit by adding our affiliate links through out but we didn’t in this case) and zipped them up.  I believe we used 3 eBooks.  We packaged them for $27 and that was our upsell.

    Justin delivered the webinar to 80 people.  This is a good number of people for a webinar.  Now, one thing to keep in mind is Justin is a total natural on the camera, and has a knack for creating webinars and video content. We have that inherent advantage over a lot of marketers, but you can get good and comfortable as well – it just takes practice.

  • Harness Your Gift Of Writing To Earn Lots Of Money

    Creating (or buying) high quality content for your site is without a doubt one of the most important activities you can do. Content truly is king. You want to consistently add good content to your site. This is what will attract people to your site, and more importantly bring them back. Most people won’t buy something until their 3rd time on a website. You want to give them as much of a reason to comeback as possible, and nothing does that better than good quality content.

    Content will also catch the eye of Google. If you are creating a new blog post in WordPress every time you add content, that is a separate page that can be indexed in Google. The more pages you have in Google, the more chance people have to find you AND the more powerful your site is to Google itself (better Google rankings).

    Fresh content is another big favorite of Google. A site with fresh content will out rank one with stale content all things considered.

    Great content is also a traffic driver. You can try all of the traffic techniques you want but NOTHING will top your content going viral. If your content is good enough, people will share it. Social media makes sharing things so easy now, that nothing can compare with the traffic driving power of “word-of-mouth”.

    If you want to build backlinks, drive traffic, increase your Google rank and create repeat web visitors – then you need to create good content on a consistent basis.

  • Essentials of Installing WordPress Automatically Using Cpanel

    Video: How to install WordPress automatically using cpanel

  • Blogging For Success Is Easier Than You Think

    Another social media outlet that is often looked over in terms of the biggies of Facebook and LinkedIn fame is the humble blog. While the word “blog” might make you think of a teenager with an axe to grind and Comic Sans font or a geek writing about the latest coding language, blogs can also be used by responsible adults in order to connect with others and promote their offline – or online – businesses.

    Undoubtedly there are blogs in your area that follow local events. Simply do a Google search on blogs in your area to see what pops up. As a local business with an actual physical storefront, you’ll be able to network with these blogs and maybe even get a link to your site. If, for example, you own a car dealership and you can find a local blog that’s dedicated toward cars, see if you can arrange to get an entry on that blog featuring your place of business. That way, every person who frequents that blog will look at – or even read – an article dedicated to who you are and what you do. Even better, many of these local blogs operate free, so you won’t even have to pay for this kind of exposure!

    In return for the cooperation of local bloggers, don’t forget to keep your networking constant. Comment on their blog posts and reference them on your own blog – because you do have your own blog for your business, right? – in order to keep the networking relationship fresh.

    Another great place to look for blog connections are the more traditional sources of media – namely, television, radio, and newspapers. Many journalists are asked to keep a blog as part of their job, particularly when it comes to local publications. Making contact with these journalists and establishing blog relationships with them is not only a great way to increase the social media standing of your business as a whole, but also a great way to make connections with people in your area. Journalists are valuable people to keep in contact with, as they’ll often know about big events where you can advertise, and if you start making friends they can even put in a good word for your in a potential customer’s ear.

    Remember to keep in mind that you have a powerful advantage over an online business by having a physical storefront. Use this advantage to win over local social media contacts through mediums like blogs and then you’ll be able to fight the social media war on both fronts. Even better, if you can make face to face contact with the people who write the blogs and the people who publish the news, you can even get some of that personal interaction that’s so crucial while publicizing yourself. Not only can journalists write a blog about your business, they can refer a friend, as well!