1) I don’t have time to write an eBook

You have all the time you need.  If you can find 10 minutes a day, you can write an eBook. Ten minutes a day is all you need to write 100 words, and with the average eBook only being 10-20,000 words that means you can have your book finished in a little more than 3 months if you write every day.  Find 20 minutes, and you can cut that time in half.

2) I’m not any good at writing.

You actually don’t have to be.  You can buy a cheap audio recording device and then record yourself giving information on the topic as if you were speaking to someone in front of you.  Then, transcribe what you’ve written, do a little editing or hire someone to do it, and you’ll have your book in no time.  This is actually one of the fastest ways to get your content written.

3) I don’t have anything to say

If you have a business, you have plenty of things to say. You know how to start a business, you can talk about what mistakes you’ve made and how you overcame those, you can talk about where to find new clients and new leads, you can dive into the how-to’s of what you do in your business and give people a behind-the-scenes look.

There are so many things that you have to share with others, and that eBook can be the very thing that opens the door to allow you to do just that.  Once you’ve written your eBook, there are also plenty of other ways you can use that content.   You can break your eBook into a webinar and generate sales leads, you can take them and transform them into single day seminars, you can record them and sell the audio books, there are at least a dozen uses for a single eBook.  Trust me, your business needs an eBook.  If you aren’t sure how to get started, you can always purchase my eBook How to Write an eBook in 40 Days (or less!) from the Amazon kindle store for less than the price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks, or you can wait to download it for free at any time during April 23-27th.  If you still need help, connect with me @WriterBrandy on Twitter or through my facebook fan page, or fill out the contact form.  I’ll be glad to help you write your first eBook.

1. Get Involved

Become a part of something.  I don’t just mean signing up and then never showing up.  I mean not only signing up, but showing up to do the work and put in the time it takes to make it happen.  You will gain more opportunities to make connections this way.  People are always more comfortable doing business with someone they know and trust than they are with a stranger, and this is the absolute best way to allow people to get to know you, get to know what you’re capable of doing, and get to know your work ethic.  When you volunteer, they get to see all of this and how likely you are to follow through with what you say you are going to do – for good or for bad.

2. Give of Yourself

Marketing gets a bad reputation because a lot of times it’s all focused on getting something from the consumer. So, when somebody comes along whose marketing technique is to genuinely help those around them, it can be a bit of a surprise. In fact, it can be met with outright skepticism.  ”This isn’t how business is done” is the thought for many, or “That person’s going to end up going out of business.”  Here’s the truth, though: When you give some of yourself to others, people are very likely to reciprocate.  I have found more success in being generous with my time, efforts, and even my money than I have in all the  years before I discovered this secret.

3. Elevate Others

Everyone enjoys being around someone who makes them feel better about themselves, who helps them achieve and do the things they never thought they could do.  When you become that person, and people identify your brand with that feeling, you won’t have to work so hard to sell what you have because people will be coming to you in search of it.  Most people struggle with their self-esteem, struggle with their self-doubts and their feelings of being worthless.  If you, and your brand by association, become that person that lifts them up and shows them a better way not only will you stand out from the competition but you will have made the world a better place which is worth something all by itself.

4. Believe in People

This is one of the rarest traits to come across in all of the business world, in part because so few people believe in themselves.  You can’t give what you don’t have to offer, and if you don’t believe in yourself you will never be able to believe in anyone else, either.  Believe that people have exceptional potential and use your marketing to show them how your company is going to do something to help them fulfill the potential that you see in them.  We all crave someone who will believe in us no matter where we are at in life and who will give us the permission we need to be the exceptional people we were meant to be.  If you are that person, if your marketing lets them know that this is what your business is about doing, your reputation will begin to spread because this is a need that everyone has deep down inside them.

5. Be Authentic

Don’t put on airs or pretend to be someone you aren’t.  Don’t fake it for the camera.  In every piece of marketing you put together, make sure it is a real reflection of the values you hold and the things you believe.  There’s nothing that turns people off more than to be shown one thing and be given another, and there is nothing that delights and surprises people more than to find someone – or some company – that is who they say they are.  This may be the hardest piece of advice for someone with perfectionist tendencies to follow, sadly, because most perfectionists have a hidden fear that their real self just isn’t going to be good enough which is why they strive so hard for perfection.  However, it’s the most important secret of the whole thing and nothing else you do will work until you can get this piece into place.

Now that you know these secrets, I want you to not only put them into practice starting today but I want you to share them with others. The more people that get this message, the better.  I also want you to let me know where you are in your efforts to market your business and I want you to tell me where you’re struggling, or what you’ve done that has helped you to succeed.

We first went looking for research done by other companies.  We quickly discovered that there was a great deal of research that had been done from the perspective of those who actually host webinars, but we were unable to find any that came from the perspective of those who are attendees of webinars.  This seemed a shocking omission to us, since part of the rules of creating great content is to first know who your audience is.  This showed us that there was a need in that area, and we decided to step into that gap and go ahead and put together the research that might help hosts better understand why people do or do not participate in webinars, how long a webinar should be based on empirical data rather than just guesses, and what the most common reasons are for people to decline to participate.

As part of our efforts to better understand webinars from the perspective of those who participate, we are conducting research through SurveyMonkey.   The survey is very basic, just 10 questions long, and anyone who participates is eligible to sign up to receive a copy of the compiled results.  We’ll also be posting those results here on our website once we have gotten a big enough survey sample for the results to really be significant.  Right now, we’ve had 10 respondents and it’s starting to give us a good idea of what people want in terms of webinar lengths, but it’s not a big enough picture yet to be sure of the accuracy of what we’ve found. We are asking as many people as possible to participate, even if you’ve never participated in a webinar before, to give us a better idea of why people may decide not to participate in webinars and what their feelings are about webinars in general.  So, please, make the world a better place for webinar attendees everywhere.  Take the survey.

Let me ask you a couple of very simple questions:  Are you getting enough qualified leads that have been completely and throughly educated in what your business does and can do for them?  Have they been nurtured through the process of deciding upon your product before you are ready to try closing the sale?  After they are in, are they constantly being moved forward through your fulfillment process while being kept informed about the process?  What about the ones who you didn’t convert…are they being revisited from time to time?  If your answer is “YES!” then you are probably using InfusionSoft.  If your answer isn’t, then keep reading…

If you have talked to me or have read any thing I’ve posted (other than cat videos) you know that I am an automation specialist.  You will probably not find a more vocal champion for automating any and everything you do in your life.  Automation makes your life easier, allows you to get more done, and eliminates mistakes in your workflow.

So, basically, I’m an automation junkie.

It should come as no surprise that I would fall in love with software that makes it so easy to automation processes that I personally find challenging…and that software platform is InfusionSoft.

InfusionSoft in a Nutshell (or: ld;dr)

Ok, so if you are reading this you are probably asking yourself: “Self, what is InfusionSoft?”  This is silly, since you don’t know what InfusionSoft is and have no answer to give yourself.  If you are this kind of person, see me after this blog post and I’ll refer you to a local psychologist to get that checked.

InfusionSoft is a platform designed to automate work flow for your business, primarily in the marketing and contact management side (although the platform supports eCommerce and has an open API so that people like myself can extend the platform to allow it to automate just about everything you do repetitively).

You can, for example, create a campaign that is started by a particular “magnet”…say a whitepaper about a particular topic in your industry…that sets off an automated process that nurtures that potential lead into a contact and moves them through your sales funnel towards conversion…and after conversion you can continue to automate the fulfillment process so that every step of the way the customer is informed of what’s going on and your behind the scenes processes move smoothly.

The way that would work is the lead is presented with a simple yet good looking form asking for their name and email address. A link to the whitepaper is sent to that email address.  Once this form is submitted, InfusionSoft creates a client record for this lead. It generates an email customized with the contact’s name to their email address containing the link to the whitepaper.  The email itself is built in side of InfusionSoft’s email builder and is branded with your company logo and formatted to fit the look of your brand.  Future emails are built using this template to maintain consistency and to build your brand’s trust.  It sends the email, places a record of the sent email into that client’s record, and tags the email as having been sent.

The email heads out into cyberspace and into your lead’s inbox where they (hopefully) open it.  InfusionSoft is able to track this and shows you the rates at which your emails are opened.  This lets you know if you subject line is effective or not and allows you to make changes if you just aren’t getting enough people to even look at the email!  Inside, the link is waiting for them to click on it.

If the lead clicks the link, the file is downloaded and their client record is flagged as having downloaded it in InfusionSoft.  From here, you can setup a follow up email chain to send out over the next couple of days thanking them for their download and asking them if they need more info or offering additional links.

However, if they don’t download the file you can have InfusionSoft send a follow up email asking if there was a problem and if there’s anything you can do to assist them.

You’re getting the idea of how InfusionSoft can help keep on top of your leads…but did I mention this is completely automated?  As in this is happening while you’re in your pajamas dreaming of your next vacation?  Yes, THAT is the power of automation.

And it doesn’t end there!  Once you’ve nurtured this lead to the point where they are ready to be converted into a sale InfusionSoft can automate the fulfillment process.  It can quickly fire off emails to suppliers or other venders requesting items to be created or shipped.  InfusionSoft could send alerts to others teams in your organization about things that needs to be done or contacts that need to happen…and using the same automation as before it can follow up if things are or aren’t done in a timely manner, notify you that things are or aren’t getting done, and even keep the customer apprised of the status of their order.

It’s all about the add-ons

There’s also an army of developers out there who are writing plugins for the platform to do even MORE!  There are plugins to help with Social Media Marketing, to assist you in handling customer service and help desk functions, to allow for automation of scheduling ..if there’s a need for it in business then there’s a plugin that is out there or someone who can make one.

Wow!  This is powerful…but I’m in over my head!

Maybe you’re like me and you can jump in with both feet and learn InfusionSoft to where you have everything automated…right down to a robotic coffee maker that knows when you need a top off*.  Then I invite you to head over to InfusionSoft and get started right now!

However, a lot of you look at this and say “I know this can help me grow my business, but I don’t know how to use it.”  That’s a fair statement, and InfusionSoft is ready to help you.  InfusionSoft offers an amazing array of help options from self guided courses to an actual coach who can help you not only figure out how to use InfusionSoft to maximize your ROI, but also to even identify areas that you can use the software!  And if that’s not enough, there’s an ever growing group of certified partners that are waiting to be hired to launch your business through the next level and into the level beyond that.

Yeah, it’s that big of a deal.

So, tell us your InfusionSoft success stories or ask us how InfusionSoft can help you in the comments below!

1) Know your value

Know the value of the product or service you are marketing.  Know its worth, not only to yourself, but to the world at large.  Martin Luther King, Jr. never lost sight of the fact that every single person he was fighting for had a real value to offer the world if the world would just allow it to shine.  He knew his own worth, and he knew the worth of his people.  He never let the negativity that people threw at him, never let the setbacks he faced, or the obstacles in his path cause him to forget that value.

2) Don’t allow your competition to define you

For a very long time in American history, the black culture received its definition from the dominant “white” culture. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood the damage this was doing and so he took pains to redefine for blacks who they were, what their place was supposed to be in society, and how they should expect to be valued.  He told them they were to be valued by their actions, not their skin color; that their place was as equals with the “white” people, and that they were children of God every bit as much as the whites who were oppressing them.   When you allow your competition to define who you are, don’t be surprised if the definition comes up lacking.

3) Hold the High Ground

When you take steps to redefine and revalue a product or a brand, you can expect to meet resistance.  Some of it might be fierce, and there might be harsh words spoken.  There certainly were threats, harsh words, and worse when Martin Luther King, Jr. began to redefine and revalue the black culture.  However, he never allowed his own actions to stoop to the level of those who stood opposed to them. He held on to his dignity and held the high ground.  Following his example ensures that your company never has to apologize to anyone for their behavior.

4) Think Long Term

Realize that redefining and revaluing a brand or a product is not a short battle, but a long term war for the hearts and minds of a people. As such, be prepared to make continual sacrifices as you go down the road.  Always keep the end in mind, just as Martin Luther King, Jr. did.  He knew that every sacrifice he made was a necessary step toward achieving the goal of equality.

5) Be prepared for the mud

There were plenty of people who doubted Martin Luther King, Jr’s motives, integrity, and methods.  Even those who agreed with him about the end goal  of equality did not always agree with him about the methods he used to achieve it.  Some people went so far as to cast aspersions on his character.  If we can learn anything from his example, it is that the closer you come to achieving your goal, the better a job you can do, the more mud you can expect to have thrown your way.

Ok, so you’ve decided you want to leverage the power of the internet to take your product out of your 8am-7pm brick and mortar store and have it offered, marketed and sold 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! Or, maybe you’ve got a new product but don’t have a way to sell it yet.

Welcome to the world of eCommerce!

If you’ve searched the web for information on this topic, you’ve probably found some good sources…however, there are a few things you might not have considered yet:

1. Inventory Level Controls

One of the things that most people don’t really think about when they are planning or running an eCommerce site is inventory levels. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like it when an item I want is out of stock. However, what I like even less is when I’ve paid for an item only to be told after I’ve spent the money that it’s out of stock!

Most eCommerce platforms have the ability to input your inventory quantity into the system, thus preventing unfortunate situations like the one I mentioned, but those only work if the inventory on your website matches the inventory you have on hand.

If you are selling a product strictly online, it’s not that hard to manage your inventory level. However,  if you’re using an eCommerce solution along with your brick and mortar business, you’re going to either have to train your employees to update your inventory or you’re going to have to automate your inventory tracking. If neither of those are an option, you can always set aside some of your inventory to be online only. This is a good middle ground between automation and manually updating your inventory. The draw back is that you have inventory that’s tied up and may not turn over as quickly as you’d like.

2. How Frequently Inventory Changes

For some eCommerce sites, their inventory rarely changes. If you’ve using your site to market a specific product, or if  you’re an author using the site to sell your books, your inventory is going to be pretty easy to manage.

Most stores, however, will need to have a rotating inventory feature. For example, you might have seasonal inventory that you want to promote during the winter or summer, or during specific holidays and festivals.

Knowing what you want to promote and feature ahead of time, and knowing the limitations of your eCommerce Platform, can save you hours of headaches as you approach this. Some eCommerce solutions have built-in abilities to create featured categories while others require custom templates or categories in order to push the hottest items to the front.

Attention to this detail could make the difference between a couple of sales and a sales explosion.

3. Specials and Coupons

Most eCommerce solutions allow you to apply discounts directly to items in your store front or to have special coupon codes which can be entered by your customers during checkout to give them discounts or special shipping options. Use them!

However, discounts and coupons are only as good as the marketing used to promote them.  Get the discount information to potential customers before they get to your site and use them as a . method to drawing people to your website. Once they are there, you can use suggestive selling techniques to sell them even more.

Coupon codes are a great thing to include in your emails and newsletters.  You can include a newsletter signup form on your checkout page or in the sidebar of your website.

4. Customer Support

One of the advantages to many customers in using an online store is the lack of a sales person to make them feel pressured or awkward. This advantage can quickly turn into a lost sale, however, if the customer has trouble finding what they want or if something goes wrong on your site.

The best way to overcome this is to make the shopping experience as simple and intuitive as possible. However, sometimes people will need help…this is where customer service comes in to play. Your phone number should be right there in front of the customer at all times, in plain sight and easy to find. That’s half the battle…the other half is the person on the other end of that number! Your customer service agent needs to be not only knowledgeable about your products, but also about the eCommerce site itself. Nothing will lose a sale faster than hearing someone say they don’t know how their own site works!

You can even hire your own 24 hour 7 day a week support for your business through companies like Provide Support, often at relatively minimal cost.

5. DIY vs. Professional

Finally, it comes down to money. How much money is it going to cost you to design, develop, implement, and then maintain your eCommerce website? If you have a very simple store with only a few items and no need for special programming, and you have a head for html, css, php and other groups of letters that people say when they want you to think they know about web development, then you can save yourself some out of pocket expense by building the site yourself.

However, if you have a complex store with over a thousand items, or if you have little to no experience with web development, you probably want to turn to a professional to help you out.

Look at it this way: Anyone can build an amazing looking and functioning eCommerce website:  All you need is time.  How much is your time worth? On average it takes anywhere from 40-120 hours of work for a professional to build a moderate sized eCommerce website from scratch. That’s a professional that knows what they are doing.  If this is your first eCommerce website you can easily spend weeks just learning about the technology before you are even ready to touch the code.  That doesn’t take into account graphic design, web layout, mockups, template design, etc.

You can easily find yourself investing 1000s of man hours into the project, and if you consider your time valuable…say you’re worth $20/hr, you’re looking at a perceived cost of $20,000…when you could have just paid a couple of grand and avoided the headache of trying to do it yourself.

It all comes down to how much your time (and sanity) is worth.

1. Bad URL

The URL is a universal resource locator.  You can think of it as the internet equivalent of a street address.  Much like the post office has trouble delivering your mail if your home address isn’t readable or if the standard conventions aren’t followed, the same thing is true about your url.  Many site designers like to use flash or php or ajax to make the site pretty or add dynamic functionality to it.  The problem is that search engines like Google can’t read pages that have # or ? as part of the title.  In fact, it won’t even read past the point where it reaches a ? or a # sign. Therefore, the page never gets included in its list of addresses to deliver mail to and your site’s page never gets any visitors.

2. No Meta Title

Meta Titles are buried in the html code for your web pages, and they tell search engines, and the people using them, what to expect when they click on your link.  Each and every page needs a title that is unique.  The maximum number of characters to use for each page is 60.  The meta title does not have to match the main title of your page. It should read like the headline of an advertisement, because that’s exactly how it will appear when a user searches using those keywords.

3. No Meta Description

If the meta title forms the headline of your online advertisement, the description is what you use to sell the user on the content. Google will create it for you if you don’t create it for yourself, but this is likely to make for some unappealing and very dry reading with no clear call to action.  It’s best for you to create this yourself so that you can include just the right wording to get users onto your page and into your website.

4. Too hard to navigate

Imagine if you walked into a store and couldn’t find the product you wanted.  Now, because you took the time to drive to that store and because you don’t want to waste gas driving to another store, you might spend a little time hunting. You might browse the aisles, especially if it’s a product you really want or you have a bit of time on your hands.  However, eventually you’ll leave if you don’t find what you are looking for.  You’ll leave even more quickly if you can’t find a sales associate to help you.  Your web site has even less time than a retail store to convince a potential buyer that you have what they need or want.   Put the stuff customers want to know right up in front. Make it easy for them to find the prices, the products and services you offer, and the research they need to choose your company over your competition in easy reach.

5. No Contact Information

When it comes to doing business online, you don’t have the luxury of a sales person who can put people at ease and earn their trust through conversation.  Potential customers who are coming to you are gambling on you to have the knowledge, the skills, and the talent needed to deliver what you promise you will.  They are being asked to take a leap of faith that the money they spend will produce the results they hope, and all they have to base their decision on is your web site.  This is why it is absolutely crucial that you provide them contact information on every page.  No, a form that emails someone isn’t enough.  They need a NAP – they need a name, address, and phone number.  Those three things are also crucial to search engines trying to index your site and determine whether or not you are a credible source.

As a small business owner, however, there’s very little room for gambling on such things.  When your budget is often whatever’s left over after you’ve paid the utilities and rent for the month, it’s hard to justify spending $100 on something that may or may not attract attention.  I began searching for better ways to market our business, to get the attention and attract the clients that I knew were out there.  Over the last three months, I have spent a lot of my time and a lot of my efforts learning better techniques for every aspect of our business, and now I’m going to share what I’ve learned.

1. Solve a problem

Your giveaway should solve your customer’s problem in a way that creates a lasting impression on them and encourages them to come back to you for more solutions.

2. Research your giveaway

In this information age, it’s easy to find out what problems your customers have that you can easily (and inexpensively) solve for them.  It may surprise you. For example, the idea for How to Write an eBook in 40 days or less came while I was researching other topics.  I noticed that people were doing a lot of searching for how to write a book and how to write an eBook.  There were almost a million searches a month for variations of that topic, which told me there were a lot of people out there who needed help I could provide.  Capitalizing on this, I wrote that eBook and published it, then used it as a tool to drive people to our Facebook page.  It’s been our most successful advertising campaign yet.

3. Remember: People love their kids

I probably shouldn’t need to tell you this, but people love their kids. This is especially true for most women. If you want to win the heart of a female customer, you appeal to her through her children.  When you seek to create a giveaway that will have lasting value and keep your brand front and center, give them something that will become a keepsake.  Offering free pictures with Santa for the Holidays works very well when you’re trying to get customers in the door.

4. Give them something fun to do

There are over 1 million searches a month for things to do for fun.  Create a fun activity or a game and use it to bring people to your website.

However, all that they’ve really proven is that bad marketing doesn’t work. Shooting from the hip, failing to do the research, or having someone who knows nothing about marketing in general driving your marketing campaign is a recipe for failure.  Here is some advice for getting the most out of your marketing dollars:

1. Before beginning a campaign, decide on a goal

Answer the question, “If this campaign works, my _____ will increase.”  Sales is just one way to measure success.  Success can be measured by increases in visitors, in contacts, in readership, or in leads. Once a goal has been set for the marketing campaign, the entire campaign should be planned around achieving that goal.

2. Assign a campaign code

When advertising on multiple mediums, such as running an online ad, a print ad, a direct mail campaign, and a radio spot at the same time it can be difficult to figure out which piece of the puzzle is the most successful.  Eliminate the problem of trying to figure out which is working best by requiring people to give the code prior to taking advantage of the offer.  For example, if it’s a direct mail campaign, require them to bring the postcard in to take advantage of a discount.  If it’s a radio spot, have them give the name of the station they were listening to when they heard the ad to get the discount.

3. Check ROI

The ROI is the return on investment.  It’s a comparison that allows a business owner to see exactly how much money was spent to achieve the intended goal.  If the goal is increased sales, and the company increased sales by 500% but the ROI was so high that money was lost for each sale made, that’s not a sustainable marketing model unless those small sales can be upgraded into larger sales.  For instance, some cell phone companies are willing to take a sales loss of $250 for each phone because the ongoing profit margins of cell phone service users is high enough to make it worth the losses.