2. Answer elephant in the room questions: What do you charge? What if I don’t like it? Can I get a refund? These questions make or break traffic movement toward sales. Granted not every business can answer these questions (complex consulting, legal practices) but even businesses that can, somehow shy away from it. What is the point of hiding them? You will eventually answer them anyway. The ones who can’t afford you go someplace else and the rest rise up.

3. End your section with a call to action. Call us. Email us. Download this. Give them a path to walk once they get to the end of the page.

4. I built a webinar last week. The outline spanned 22 pages. I finished it. Then went back to it after 24 hours and re-read it. I deleted the whole thing and rewrote it. Its sin: not simple enough. You write copy from your business perspective but you edit it through your customer’s eyes. This is for them. Worth remembering.

5. We are all so screwed up when it comes to writing for our business. It is almost a switch turns in our head and we have to use big complicated words. When you are finished writing the first draft, read it out aloud and record it on your iPhone or on your PC and then play it back. Is this the way you would talk to me if I was on the phone right now with you? You would not use the words like “value added services that excel in multi disciplinary verticals”. Probably not. Write the way you talk. You will actually start to enjoy what you write more.

“Russell,

I really enjoyed the article you wrote regarding re-framing thoughts into positive action.

I participated in and then moderated a leadership course a couple of years ago. One of the things that impacted me the most was from the book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. It is the thought that you can decide how you are going to react in any given situation when many people believe they have no choice in their reactions.

In September of 2008 after being in the insurance field for twenty-two years, I decided that being good at something was not enough reason to stay in that field. I completely switched gears and went into business with my daughter, Candice Carson.

We have a restaurant. Neither of us had any restaurant experience but she is a good cook and I’m a good sales person so I figured we would be fine. On September 1st we signed the lease for our restaurant. A few weeks later the economy imploded and there wasn’t a dime to be had from any person, bank or otherwise. We looked around and decided that it was a great opportunity to keep our price point slightly below our competition but raise our quality of food and service. (I’ve eaten out enough to know how terrible service can be.)

With no thoughts of failure or even the possibility of failure, we opened our doors on December 1st. The first few weeks felt like acts of futility. We would get up and arrive at 5:00 AM to bake our pastries and make our fresh soups, etc. and then at the end of the day we would have to throw it out. This happened for one week.

At the end of the week I said “Okay, I’m going to sell some food.” Out the door I went with samples of our Cinnamon Rolls and Pumpkin Bread. I would fill several “To Go” boxes and then write our “Special of the day” along with the price on the front and deliver to every place that had at least 5 or more employees. All of a sudden people started coming in. I told them we didn’t have a marketing budget so word of mouth was our marketing. “If you like the food please come back and bring a friend.” Every day someone would come in and tell me they had brought a friend and new customer.

By February 1st we were breaking even and all the bills were being paid. I was only angry because I thought we should be breaking even the moment we opened our doors. I had no idea that normally wasn’t the case. I learned that if you believe it can be done, then it can be done or what you don’t know will not hinder you.

We have been open now for 18 months and we just expanded our restaurant. Things are going extremely well for us.

Oh, what I didn’t mention was that my daughter was pregnant with her first child when we opened the restaurant. He was born February of 2009 just short of three months after our opening. I am extremely lucky to work with my daughter. We have a great staff and I love what I do. I’m very happy that I decided to re-frame my thinking.

Thanks again for the great article and for allowing me to tell you my story.

Deborah Bellotti
The Buzz Restaurant
Springfield, MO”

2. Asking for 3 references and then doing the grunt work of checking on them is first best thing you can do to insure you are hiring the best.

3. The second best thing: scope of project and everything else with it has to be in writing. Business 101 lesson and surprisingly ignored by a large number of freelancers and clients.

4. When I find great people to work with, I ask them who else they know. Wizards tend to keep company with wizards of equal power. One leads to many.

5. I don’t argue over pennies. My time is worth something. So is their time. What are we winning in the end anyway except few minutes of gloating in our heart (“I won”) and beating them to a sour expression? I pay up because I want the best.

6. What kind of customer would tolerate the crummiest experience? Who do you want? How do you want to be treated? See #5 again.

7. Once I have found the best, I try to help them by sending them as many referrals as I want. I don’t ask for anything in return. They do remember this and bring even more passion to my and my referrals work.

8. Shortest route to my heart is where a freelancer insists on a phone call so she can better understand what I am trying to do with a project before they even take the project.

9. You get what you pay for. Always.

10. My first impressions come from a freelancer’s website and especially the way the way they describe what they do. Passion is hard to hide.

2. Our business is a reflection of us personally. You are not Dr.Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde. There are not two of you. In our personal lives, we work very hard at maintaining what we have. Every morning is a battle to keep the good life we have built around us. But life does not have market share and competition. Business does. What works in our marriage and family (keep the fort up) will not work in business.

3. Make boxes about your business. Every major part of your business goes into a box. Here are my boxes: acquiring new business, keep existing clients happy, delivering what client pay us for, introducing new services, promoting our business, keeping the people who work for us satisfied and managing money.

4. What can we try in each box before the month is over?

5. Take something as simple as public speaking. Most of us fear it. Yet trying Toastmasters for six months might make us realize that with another six months we can simply kill this fear outright.

6. It is one thing to have a Plan B for something that might happen. Yet another to feel the need to invent boulders so you can write a Plan B. The head says ‘It cannot be that easy to try something otherwise everybody would be trying new things. Something has to + must go wrong.’

7. Most bloody noses are not given to us by our competition. Those guys are as scared as we are. We are the ones who are beating us down every morning trying to stop us from trying anything new.

8. Your business is about doing certain things a certain way. Newspapers sold classified ads for decades in the same exact way. Weekend deadlines. Call in. Pay by word. Pay for bolding the headline. Pick a zone to show the ad. Pay an atrocious markup for an ad that will mean nothing within 6 hours of being published. It worked for a long time and nobody ever felt a need for trying anything. Then Craig’s List. Now everybody is for trying new models. Question is that if you are going try to swim when you are drowning, why not take swimming lessons beforehand?

9. Google get trashed every time one of their new side initiatives fails. We should applaud their courage in being who they are and still willing to try and fail publicly.

10. There is no wall separating the ones from who try a lot and the ones who are fearful. Take one step. Then one more. Now you are on the other side. Welcome.

2. Change the picture. Logo, pictures of you, stock images, attractive folks, funny images, cartoon or something else (saw a picture of Billy Mays last night superimposed on Old Glory for a sales training course).

3. Test short copy vs. long copy on the ads. Conventional wisdom is that short copy always works better on Facebook. Conventional wisdom is always wrong about marketing.

4. Change the headline. Statement to question. Demographic to affirming belief. Disagree with norms. Challenge.

5. The words that never fail to grab attention: Free. Sex. New. Get.

6. Gender. Who buys from you all the time? Is there a bias? If your buyers are all women than why show your ads to guys?

7. Workplaces. Very powerful. You get very few people unless you are targeting GM but your small budget can buy you massive impressions on them.

8. Local business? Change the geo-targeting. If you are just running an ad for 50 miles, make it less. Flip it over.

9. Regional business? Ever thought about expanding your business to a different area? Why not test before opening an office to see if there is any interest. Setup a different campaign though.

10. Pay up. Know you CPL. Know your CPS. If your profit is in thousands and you freaking out over pennies than you need to get over your internal queasiness. It will hold you back from building a great profitable business. Not competition. They are as screwed up as everybody else. This is bigger than them. Understand the fear so you can fight it.

2. Who is sending you the customers that you end up loving being in business with? How can we spend all of our efforts on that path? Do we care about just having customers (Wal-Mart) or the ones we really want above all? (Niemen Marcus)

3. A client asked a question today about our website, “Why is it so simple?” She was surprised that I don’t have a 30 page website since I know how to write copy for the web. It is simple because a) I like simple things and b) the things we want the incoming traffic to do (email us, call us, join our email list, read our blog, and learn about our services) are all served by 3 pages plus a blog. No reason to add another 30 pages when 3 will do.

4. Does every single inch of your web real estate serves THE REASON you build the website for in the first place?

5. What is THE REASON you build the website? Brand awareness? Get leads? Sell something on the spot? Create an expert persona? Sell you? Get people to call you? There is one big thing you wanted this website to do really bad for you. Then you started building it and sometime we all forget. Worth remembering though.

6. All things change. What used to bring you customers (SEO for instance) may no work that well in the New Economy. You may still get clicks from search engines but are they still turning over to sales as they used to? What about Facebook? What about search engine ads? What about everything those use to work 24 months ago?

7. Show your website to 5 people who are not your customers or work for you. Ask them to figure out WHAT you do, WHO are you for? How long does it takes for them figure that out? Are the answers even correct? Your traffic cannot buy anything from you if they cannot figure you out first.

8. If you building something new, before you build it, make a mockup in Photoshop. Much easier to do #7 before spending time and money building something that you have redo.

9. Web design. SEO. Usability. Attractiveness to potential customers. They are sadly not one thing and you will rarely find one individual who is well versed in all. Find a world class shop that is made up of exceptional folks who look at web design from a marketer’s eyes. Investment worth doing.

10. I know the goals for my website. I get tempted to add this and that because I see somebody else doing it. But they have their goals. I have mine. I backspace. I subtract. See #3. But I have clarity about what why we build the website in the first place. That clarity is worth a chase.

2. Retailers do a better job at this. Most sellers of invisible don’t. You need a great looking landing page tab that explains in one glance WHAT you do and WHO are you for. It will help you get more fans from your ads and word of mouth traffic.

3. You already have emails of all of your past customers. Ask them nicely and give them a good reason (See #1) to come and join your new Facebook Page.

4. Put 3-5 Wall postings before doing #3.

5. Run Facebook Ads not just on your obvious keywords but also what your clients like. For example if you sell legal services to small business owners in Denver – the most obvious keywords to run Facebook Ads will be small business owners, business owners, CEO etc. How about showing your company to people who read Inc. magazine and like E-Myth Revisited and the 10 recent Amazon business best sellers and live in metro Denver?

6. Setup a Facebook Event once you have couple of hundred fans: a webinar just for your Fans. Put it out there on your Page Wall, send an email notification (via Facebook) and run an ad about the Facebook Event that is just shown to your Fans. It introduces new fans to your company services.

7. Just because you are selling the invisible does not means that you have to be invisible also. FaceBook is fast become one of the biggest video sharing website. Think about replacing the About Us page with a short video that tells ‘strangers’ who are you, why you do what you do and what drives your company. Upload the video to your Facebook Page.

8. Instead of blowing your own horn, get two present clients to do a video interview where they explain how their business was helped by your services.

9. Promote your trusted vendors. Ask them to do the same for you. Everybody gets good targeted exposure. Everybody wins. A real estate agent can promote a mortgage banker they trust and have used in the past. She can repeat the favor on her page. A web design company can promote a graphic designer firm that specializes in logos and print materials. They can do the same on their own Page.

10. If you have a local office location that is bigger than one room – invite your Facebook Page fans to come and join you one day for coffee or cocktails. It is a great way to turning a virtual click into a real world handshake out of which good things will come out for your company.

2. Have a landing tab where Facebook users are getting something: coupon, promotion offer, gift certificate, free download – something that catches their eyes. With millions of Pages fighting for your customer’s attention, it is no longer enough to say, please fan us up. People are getting Page fatigue and the bar is rising very fast.

3. If you use an email marketing service then add your Facebook Page URL to your signature.

4. Make a simple 3 by 2.5 inches business card with nothing but your Facebook Page URL and hand it out to your daily foot traffic.

5. Run ads on Facebook. It gives you good local targeting so you only show ads to people who are around your local business and can become actually customers.

6. Get 25 fans as quickly as possible. Start by asking friends and family to LIKE your Page. Once you hit 25, login in to your Facebook account and jump to Facebook.com/username and get your branded Facebook address. www.Facebook.com/Maisanos looks much better compared to the really loooooong web address Facebook initially gives you when you create your Page.

7. Use a long and good picture instead of a little square that Facebook gives you by default. You can go as long as 200 by 600. They look sharper and make your Page stand out in Facebook search results also.

8. Make a coupon. Save it as a graphic (JPEG or GIF or PNG). If you don’t know how to use graphics software, make it in Microsoft Publisher or Word and use free software like http://JingProject.com to capture the screen and save it as a graphic. Pictures get shared on Facebook. When you upload you coupon on Facebook as a graphic, you increase the chances of it being shared. Wildfire is a great and easy to use app on Facebook for creating coupons.

9. Ask your Fans to share your coupons back to their Walls and friends. You don’t ask. You don’t get. Be nice about it though. Make good coupons that make people happy to share.

10. Don’t make your Page all about coupons or just PR pitches. When you find interesting stories, links, PDF’s, videos besides just your business, share them. People are not going to drop out which might you excited about doing more but they will hide your updates in their Newsfeed. Look in Facebook Insights (free reporting tool provided by FaceBook to its Page Owners) and look at the Unsubscribed number. If that is rising every day, your customers are fans are telling to tell you something. Stop!

2. Is every single step in your follow-up campaign made up of emails? That is way too much dependence on one media. If Salesforce and Godaddy – two companies who sell technology solutions can use every thing available to them to convert a lead into a sale: phone, email, webinars, personalized emails, video – and then what excuse do we have left for not doing everything?

3. There is one step that should happen immediately once a lead opts in that will rock your sales numbers. For some it is a follow-up phone call. For some it is an invitation to a webinar. For some it might be an email. Are you testing different shakes and see which one bakes the sale faster or is it the same old sequence build five years ago?

4. Either attract the leads toward you (with a webinar) or go to the leads (with a real world handshake included event). Money likes movement. So move.

5. You have three ways to use online video in your follow-up: either to show a past client’s satisfaction with your company; to demonstrate a whiz bang feature of whatever you sell; to talk to them like a human being and letting them know a little more about you and what drives you and your organization.

6. Most follow-ups treat everybody the same way. Once I opt in to your list and even though I came to your event and I attended your webinar and I saw two videos YET I am still getting the same emails as the folks who never showed up to any of the above. They are not the same.

7. You are going to end up with leads that are not considered hot anymore by anybody in your team, may be even by yourself. I beg to differ. 90 days old. 120 old. Instead of taking the lazy way out and unleashing the auto-responder email sequence on them all over again – why not create a separate path altogether for these old leads? There is gold there if you are willing to dig deeper.

8. Your leads have expectations of you. They have played this game before. They know the moves that are coming toward them (ever notice how many people opt-in to download the free whitepaper or report and immediately opt-out so they don’t have to deal with the barrage of incoming emails to them from you?). So what are going to do the blow their expectations away?

9. How many follow-up steps you have? 3 or 10? Which one worked the best? What if your follow-up campaign only consisted of them? If your best closing percentages come from a handshake… why are we wasting time on sending out emails? O.K. I understand, we are doing this because everybody else is doing it and how can you have a follow-up campaign without email? That is blasphemy. But may be the time has to come for you to be a heretic as long it results in happier customers and more sales.

10. Knowing bumps sales. You don’t need a $50,000 CRM to figure out that there are certain common features about the people who go from click to customers for you. You know your customers better than anybody else. What is the X factor?

2. May be it is a store. May it is a consulting service. May be you are launching a membership site for business owners. The only goal you have when you turn the OPEN sign on is to make the first sale. That is when your idea actually turns into reality.

3. Build a list. From day 1. A permission based email list. If you are a local business (with or without a location) than try building a mailing list. RSS subscriptions are fine but our email list is an asset. Just ask Groupon.

4. Think not in terms of absolute success or absolute failure. That is just adding drama to your life. Think in terms of ‘testing’. A Facebook Page might be good for you. Or may be not if none of your customer base uses Facebook. But instead of worrying about it. Test it out. Give it 60 days and if nothing happens despite your efforts then focus your efforts elsewhere. It is not a failure. Just a test. And know you know.

5. There are always somebody else, who has been in your part of the world before you and who is selling successfully to the customers you want. Finding who they are and what they would like from you to endorse you back to their world is something that should be on top of your list.

6. Try writing a blog. Try doing a podcast. Try doing some videos. If you a business that lends to good pictures then take lots of pictures and put them on Facebook or Flickr and embed them in your site. You are new. Everything is allowed. Try everything to see what you like. You will be surprised that you have talents that you never thought you possessed.

7. Go out and meet people who make up the part of your world. Go to business networking meetings. Go to community events. Go without an ulterior motive of “I need to come back to make sales”. Instead think of meeting people and letting them know about you and your new business. You never know what doors they might open up for you.

8. The startup days are special. You are going to remember them with nostalgia and a grin 24 months from today when you are kicking ass. So why not live and enjoy every moment also?

9. No matter what type of business you are in, you will be dealing with people. Becoming better at speaking, writing, negotiating is a skill that is a huge asset to own. Toastmasters are a good place to start that learning.

10. Look in your life. You already know one person who has done well with their entrepreneurial life. Take them out to lunch, tell them about your business and ask for advice. Make this monthly lunch with somebody you admire and like for their business prowess into a business habit.