Master Your Fears, Kickstart Your Business!

It can be said that the most effective marketing is the marketing you do. This means that, above all else, some marketing is better than no marketing at all. Whether it be flyers and bulk-mailings, internet marketing, articles, networking, or events, something is better than nothing. I find face-to-face interactions and events to trump the rest, but I would never part with my business cards and speaker’s packets. They are part of a fuller picture.

That said, I think we often fail to make an important distinction. Part of the work of marketing is sending the message, and part of the work of marketing is preparing the channel. We’re sending the message when we write a blog post, when we attend an event, when we follow-up with someone who has given us their email address. We’re preparing the channel when we install Wordpress, when we choose a template, when we sign up for an event, when we design a business card, when we create a newsletter-sign up on our website. Do you see the distinction?

Without the channel, the message has nowhere to go, but we need to avoid spending all our marketing time preparing the channel. Yes, especially when getting started, a lot of time will be needed setting up channels of communication with our market, but the clock is ticking and we need to get that message out too. Why spend all the time developing a channel without testing it along the way? What if it turns out the channel you’re building does not really work for your target market? Wouldn’t it be better to find that out sooner than later?

It’s like buying a motorcycle that needs a few repairs and a few cosmetic things corrected, but not riding it until everything is perfect. You’re not going to learn about how the bike truly handles for a long, long time. You might not even enjoy the bike once it’s all done, or you might not realize there are other more pressing matters on it that need addressing until you’ve poured significant time and money into it.

Yes, work on setting up channels of communication, but also experiment, work with them. Get your message out, even if you don’t have all the ducks in a row. Experiment. Measure the results. Don’t wait for the perfect website, the perfect templates. Experiment as you go! As I say in my workshops…. Lather, rinse, repeat!

And keep the shiny side up!

There are not enough hours in the day for you to meet each person, to cover each networking event, to plan, to produce and deliver your product and service. Marketing may be at the very bottom of your list – and suffering from a dangerous lack of attention. And, if you’re a solopreneur, it’s all up to you. It’s a shame you can’t walk through a copier and make a few clones of yourself, right? Well, you can. You can speak to your customers through a blog while you’re also doing all the other things to get your business going and keep it flying. It’s like making a copy of yourself. The blog never has to sleep or eat or take a coffee break. It’s always there, waiting to be found, and if you’ve grown up with the Internet, it’s how you’re finding people and businesses and the things you want to know anyway.

So, how does one use a blog to grow their business? Here are 6 techniques I’ve found to growing business with blogging.

Deliver value before they buy

The most frustrating blog posts are the ones that begin with a compelling title, “How to Lose 5 Pounds in 2 Weeks” and then after a few paragraphs of why it’s important to maintain a healthy weight they end with a link to a “paid” report that you have to buy to learn how to lose 5 pounds in 2 weeks. Arghh! Especially in this day and age, customers will rarely buy from you if they don’t find you credible, and they will use the value you provide on your blog as a factor in deciding if they want to buy from you. And that means you need to deliver value to them before they buy. If you’re a business coach, you can provide useful articles like this one on how to grow your business. If you’re a chiropractor or wellness expert, you can provide articles about relaxation techniques you can do while sitting at home. If you’re a realtor, you can provide articles like how to find out about schools in the area and how they are doing. These are all examples of providing value before they buy.

Stay on message

Do you know your niche? Then write to it! If not, there’s no time like the present to decide what your unique offering is and who your ideal client is. This is important! Get some help with this if you need it. Get out the trusty old business plan and review it as often as you write. Use it to keep you on target. If you’re a realtor, your blog’s power is diminished when you stop offering posts of relevance to people interested in buying or selling a home. If you’re a social media marketing expert, your blog’s power is diminished when you write a post about the latest Tom Clancy novel.

It is okay and wonderful to use “off-message” concepts and ideas that you relate to an on-message topic, like a post on the “Top 3 Things Small Businesses can Learn from the Avatar movie.” But, you need to remember that the on-message topic is most important, and consistently writing on-message will build your credibility and authority with your future customers.

Blog consistently and frequently

A blog that is updated once every few weeks or once a month will simply fail to gain (or hold) onto readership. Google will not rank highly websites with stale blogs. Frequent updates are important to the search engine’s algorithms. Frequent updates are also key for the people that you want to attract to your business. Simply, it is the rare blog that can hold onto readership when the blogger posts irregularly and infrequently. To have an effective blog, with a growing readership, you must commit to a plan, you must make blogging a regular part of your marketing plan and campaigns. Several times a week is a minimum. Daily is best. Try an experiment. Switch to daily or nearly daily blogging for two weeks and then evaluate your site’s traffic and stickiness (how often people stay around) – I bet you’ll see a positive difference from frequent blogging!

Write a compelling title

Cute titles are fun to write (and I’ve written many) but they are unlikely to draw in new readers. The blog post title are some of the most valuable keywords – the search engines rank the titles highly – so when you choose a title, choose a title that you think your prospective customers might search for. Examples are “How to Use a Blog to Grow Your Business,” or “Which Mill Creek Schools are the Best?” If appropriate, include a placename (e.g. Mill Creek) since a lot of people have learned to narrow their search results by including towns and cities in their searches. Yes, the occasional play-on-words title is great to mix things up, but the meat and potatoes of your titles needs to be food for the search-engine.

Spread the love

Find and visit sites of related businesses and devote some time to staying abreast of what they’re doing. Use a aggregator like Google Reader or FeedReader to make it easy to stay on top of a couple blogs. And then, spread the love. Post comments to those blogs and provide feedback on their articles. Be sure to include your URL and avatar so readers of the blog (and the blogger themselves) can come find your business. It’s like networking without even having to be there!

Make Your products and services visible

You are not blogging for blogging’s sake. To translate all those wonderful visitors into customers, you need to make it easy for them, when they are ready, to take the next step. In a visible but not annoying way, the pages with your blog posts also need to provide compelling blurbs and links to your products and services, to your special upcoming events and promotions. Make it so when they are ready to buy, they can simply do so.

A Call To Action

OK, you’ve got some valuable information here. When are you going to act on it? How about today?! With these six techniques you can use your blog to build attention and following for your business and establish your credibility and authority in your niche. And with that, by having your product or service visible, you can convert those loyal blog followers into loyal customers and grow, grow, grow! Don’t put this off another day.

The numbers don’t lie. I looked back over my plan for the last couple of weeks and its there in black-and-white. I knew it was an audacious plan, and that I wasn’t going to hit all the targets. But I am very glad I had the plan. Because it was an experiment, and it involved “failing faster.” And now I have a sense of where to direct energy next. Although I didn’t hit every goal, I think it was a successful experiment. I learned a lot.

I wanted to blog so often, write articles so often, attend networking events so often, and I accomplished many of those things, and left a few on the table. I wanted to take Sunday off, and yesterday I largely did, except for one tweet.

The point of the plan is not to shame or chastise. The point of the plan is to put a framework around important activities for my coaching and speaking business, and I highly recommend everyone have such a plan, for life or work. A short set of things you want to accomplish in a short time span.

This isn’t about a month or a quarter or a year. I recommend two weeks. Then look at your progress and plan the next two weeks.

And, if it works for you, take Sundays off.

When you fill out the plan, you’ll get a sense of the activities you avoid doing. When you complete the plan, you’ll get more info on that too, and you’ll get a sense of how realistic your expectations of yourself are. When you prepare the next plan, you can take what worked for you, and (in the case of a business) what resonated with your customers, and feed that into the next two weeks.

Two weeks to new insights, new momentum. Two weeks makes it hard to give up, to stop.

As Confucius once said… “It does not matter how slow you’re going, so long as you don’t stop”

I’ll roll out a downloadable with an easy to fill in two-week plan later this week. Check back soon.

Cheers…

…Allen

A bunch of us had a great get-together yesterday to talk about our businesses and how things were going. I asked everyone if there was anything they were struggling with and if they’d like to share it with the group.

We had a lively discussion on taxes and marketing with facebook and the like. And yet, looking back, I wished I had asked a different question – is there anything going exceptionally well that you’d like to share?

Often, too often, we focus on the things we’d like to fix and we fail to celebrate the things that have gone well. We obsess over our shortcomings and don’t feed our strengths. Marcus Buckingham is right… We need to discover and develop our strengths even moreso than we tend to our flaws. There is a balance, a harmony to be sought here.

So today, reflect on the things you’ve recently done well, celebrate them and find ways to feed them, to develop them even more, and to share them.

Cheers…

…Allen

The subconscious can be an incredibly powerful force. When we gain awareness of the things holding us back, the subconscious can go stealth on us, subtly influencing the decisions we make, even as we consciously think we’re fully attacking whatever problem or opportunity or change we want. We may cut back on the big meals, but the subconscious emotional eater finds ways to get a few mochas in that day – and we don’t even notice it – other than the $10 missing from our wallets. We know that getting our message out is important, but we allow the subconscious to guide us toward filling our calendar with safe ways of doing it, and safe is code-word for ineffective.

There is a way to expose our inner saboteur. Keep a log. Write it down. This is why nutritionists advise their clients to keep a log of what they eat. It turns the lights on and leaves the critters nowhere to hide. This is why personal finance gurus recommend that people carry a notebook to track where their money is going on a purchase by purchase basis.

And this is what I saw a few days ago when I reviewed my marketing plan for my speaking and coaching practice. I had filled it with less effective techniques (good techniques yes, but not as effective as others) and left no room for more effective techniques (e.g. I only had one face-to-face-meet-people event planned in the entire two weeks).

Change takes effort, and it is possible, but we also have to watch out for how our fearful subconscious can undermine that change. And laugh, because it’s amazing in a way how this unseen hand can move us. But then take it head on – turn on the lights through keeping notes – track your progress – monitor your balance.

And become a master at ending the art of self-deception.

Keep the shiny side up!

…Allen

Another day ends, and while a lot was accomplished, I found myself moving many items on my to-do list forward to the next day (thankfully my great to-do list from Remember the Milk makes that easy.) But it’s always with a sense of loss or failure that I move anything to the next day. It’s not that I’m undisciplined or lazy, it’s that I try to cram too much in.

A technique I learned years back needs to be applied again. The top 3. The top 3 things I want to accomplish today. Instead of having 8, 9, 10 items on the to-do list, it needs to be just 3. The other items can be parked in the future, and I can pull them back when the top 3 are accomplished.

So, how to pick the top 3?

Well, you must take care of those things that are urgent first. Like deadlines. They need to be in the top 3 of course. And if you find the top 3 are always the urgent item, then you need to work on not letting those deadlines creep up on you.

Urgent aside, we turn to important – and not just the things we enjoy doing. Entrepreneurs usually have no trouble finding time to develop their product or service, but avoid financial and marketing tasks. Make a point of having a financial or marketing task in the top 3 daily if you can, or a few times a week at least.

And when you knock out all 3 on a given day – give yourself a pat on the back. Savor the moment and cheer your discipline.

And if it’s sunny, take the bike (powered or unpowered) out for a reward ride.

In the chilly February morning air, parents and cub scouts marched along Main Street in Monroe on their way to a flag ceremony. The ceremony was marking the 100^th year of scouting. We had all parked by the old condensery smokestack and were covering the few blocks between there and the massive flag pole near the center of town. We were a jolly little bunch.

We walked by one shop after another. Not as many storefronts were empty as used to be, which was great. In a gym on the corner, people were working out – that business had started a few years ago and was drawing in the clients. A few doors down, the Emporium, an “antiques and buttons” store was closed and empty – it had only been open a year, if that. Antiques and buttons? Yes, there are quite a few antiques stores in Monroe and Snohomish, and yet many have closed, like Black Cat and now Emporium.

I am often amazed at some antique stores’ hours. They are open from 11 to 3 on a few days of the week, or something else unusual like that. More like country town museum hours than business hours. My wife and I have looked through many of these shops, but I’ve never actually seen anyone buy anything. You can imagine my curiosity is peaked now. Are all the sales on eBay?

Understanding the value proposition, understanding the target market, understanding the cash flow – these things all intrigue me, it’s one of the reasons I love working with small businesses – and so I have a mission for this week – to visit an antique store or three and talk with the owner – to understand how their business actually stays in business.

Perhaps I can find an antique store specializing in motorcycling?

Everyone struggles with something. My personal demon? Perfectionism. I want to make all the right decisions. I don’t want to make a mistake. I especially don’t want to make a very visible or very expensive mistake, especially with my business, my passion. I want the perfect track record. And this demon is no good for me, no good for my business. It’s time for an exorcism.

All too often, it manifests itself as procrastination, as putting off a decision or action because when I decide, or when I act, I want it to be perfect. That’s the canary in the coal mine – that’s the indicator that perfectionism is in play for me – and that’s the first step to overcoming this – identify what real-world things happen as a result of perfectionism. For me, when I see myself putting something off, that’s when the flashing red lights go off.

The other thing I must consciously do is accept that I am not going to have the whole picture all the time. I’m not going to know everything that’s going to happen – it’s impossible. So, instead, when breaking down the big goal into manageable chunks it is important to start doing the first chunk even when all the chunks aren’t fully understood. Like any good biker knows, I need to go with the flow and be open to what the road brings.

Perfectionism is a joy-stealer. Entrepreneurs pour their passions into their work, and when perfectionism is in play, that passion gets robbed, negated, destroyed. Don’t let that happen! Your passion is ultimately what makes or breaks you.

The release from perfectionism is simple in theory, difficult in application. It’s about saying to yourself “It’s OK that this is not perfect – I need to get it out there or make this decision in order to make space and time for the other things that are also important to me.”

It’s about saying “whatever happens, I can handle it.” Not about putting out sloppy work – but releasing ourselves from overly-critical and unsustainable judgments about ourselves – detaching from the unrealistic criticism we dump on ourselves or that we is dumped on us by others.

Unsustainable – ultimately that’s what perfectionism is, and it’s also what it means for a person’s life or business. Perfectionism is simply an unsustainable habit. It needs to get kicked to the curb (with laughter and joy) each time it rears its head, before it tries to take you or your business with it.

“It is OK that this is not perfect.” “Whatever happens, I can handle it.” Smile. Laugh!

What is your struggle? Is it perfectionism? What is your canary-in-the-coal-mine, your indicator that you’re in its grip?

Keep the shiny side up…

…Allen

I recounted to a breakfast gathering of entrepreneurs yesterday how, when I was first learning to ride a motorcycle, I had taken a spill. I was turning and braking onto a gravel road (a big No No) and the bike slipped on the gravel. In a matter of moments I found myself and the bike on the ground, my left leg stuck under the bike, gasoline dripping out of the carbueretor onto my pants. I kill-switched the engine and wriggled myself out from under the bike just in time for a neighbor to pull up.

“Those things are dangerous,” he said.

“I’m alright,” I replied as a non-response to what he said as I righted the bike. I inspected the bent clutch lever and rubbed my sore leg. After a few minutes, I got her started again and continued on up the road, wiser to the gravel.

Like riding a motorcycle, running your own small business is risky too (although in this day and age, corporate employment is not guaranteed either.) You will learn some things the hard way, you will take a spill or three.

And there will be someone there, at just the wrong time, to look over and tell you how dangerous it is, and how foolish.

Don’t listen to them.

At the end of the story, I drew the parallel and encouraged the breakfast gathering to not just ignore the naysayers, but to assemble a group of advisors, mentors, peers, cheerleaders, and even a business coach (and I’m taking new clients – LOL). But seriously, find people that can mentor you – perhaps help you avoid a few falls, a few spills – and find people that will encourage you when you do fall to get right back on the horse and try again.

So many entrepreneurs go it alone – and they and their businesses suffer and often fail – why not bury some of that pride, some of that fierce independence and instead gather and connect with others. Share the stories, learn what they have learned, encourage and uplift.

Who’s in your gang? Who’s got your back?  Who’s there when you need a hand?

How professional are you? No, seriously. How disciplined are you in the development of your business? Not just the day-to-day affairs, but how disciplined are you in networking, marketing, research and development? Is there a weak spot that could use reinforcement or growth? I bet there is. I know I have the activities I gravitate toward, and those that get postponed. It’s human nature. And being human is wonderful and something that should not be lost. Freedom to choose what we do is part of why many of us became entrepreneurs.

That freedom is fully realized only when we discipline ourselves to take care each day of the parts of our business that we find challenging, overwhelming, or might like to avoid. When we discipline ourselves to do the blog entry, to follow up with contacts we just met, to send that press release, to do all the things that keep the engine of our businesses humming, then we make space in the future for freedom – we make space in the future by not letting everything pile up.

We protect our freedom and our joy of in our life and work when we discipline ourselves to take care of the important and challenging tasks – before they become urgent and challenging.

In fact, this is the third day of a 28 day experiment in discipline. To commit myself to blogging each day – to provide value to the small business community each day. I love talking and writing, but something about daily blogging always seemed overwhelming. And so, I decided to commit myself to 28 days (the month of February), and see how it moves me, helps the community and how it propels my business forward.

Perhaps there is a discipline you’d like to commit to for your business. Pick something and make it a daily commitment. Don’t let it slip. Do this for 28 days and measure the impact.

And let discipline create space for your freedom and your business’ success.