yourdoku /Foter

This week I heard a terrific tip for getting more people to register for your free teleclass.

Wherever you advertise your class, whether on your website or in an email, don’t put the time of the class – just the date. You’ll find that many more people will register for the class to find out when it is. What a great way to build your list!

If you provide another opportunity to listen to your call, either live or recorded, even those registrants who can’t attend at the original time will still be able to hear your call.

Give it a try and let me know how this works for you.

rshartley /Foter

There’s a basic technique I use regularly that has a big effect on how I experience my days. It seems way too simple to make so much difference, but I promise if you give it a try, you’ll notice a change in how you feel.

What am I talking about? Breathing. That’s it. What’s that you say? You already breathe? Well, good! You wouldn’t be able to read this blog post if you weren’t breathing.

I’m talking about taking one or more deep breaths, where you fill your lungs fully and exhale slowly. Doing this has a powerful effect on your body. It

• sends more oxygen to your brain,
• slows down your heart rate,
• stabilizes your blood pressure,
• and reduces tension in your muscles.

When Should You Breathe Deeply?

Several situations in daily life benefit from this technique. If you’re in conflict with someone – or heading in that direction – taking the time for one or more deep breaths can calm you, reducing your internal tension. It also allows you time to choose your response rather than simply react. Taking a moment also gives the other person a chance to think things through.

Maybe you’re experiencing a different type of stress. It could be sudden, like a near accident on the road or a call from school about your misbehaving child. Or it could be ongoing, such as financial stress or being the caretaker of an ailing relative.

Whenever you feel either type of stress, take a few seconds to breathe deeply. Not only will your body relax, but your brain will be able to decide how to handle your situation more effectively.

It’s Good for Business, Too.

This technique is also useful within your business. Whether it’s dealing with an unhappy customer or handling the overload of too many projects, taking a moment to just breathe can give you some perspective and the calm you need to manage the situation more productively.

This may seem overly simplistic to you, and it certainly won’t resolve the difficult circumstances we all find ourselves in at times. But it will help you cope with those circumstances in a more relaxed and productive manner.

What other techniques do you use to deal with stress?

I ran across a blog post today by John Tabita  with a hunting vs. farming metaphor for attracting clients: http://www.sitepoint.com/hunting-or-farming-which-type-of-prospecting-is-best/.

I sometimes find myself focusing my days on hunting activities more than farming activities since the results are quicker and so those activities can feel more urgent. Maybe you’re like me in needing to remember that important tasks need time and focus just as much as urgent ones. This article was a good reminder.

Where do you spend more of your time, and how does that work for you?

This is the season when exclamations of joy abound. But does rushing from store to store and party to party create joy? Is joy measured by how many presents we open or the number of lights we hang on our houses?

The stores and parties often generate more stress than joy. And by now, we all realize that presents and decorations, while fun, don’t result in deep feelings of contentment.

This quote from Marianne Williamson was in my local Sunday paper this week:

“Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.”

We frequently walk through life thinking we’ll be happy as soon as something happens: we get the job, we have a child, we win the lottery. Or even something smaller: it doesn’t rain today, our partner comes home in a good mood, we have a good hair day.

Marianne suggests that we already have joy in our lives, but don’t always recognize it. We take for granted so much in our day to day lives that we don’t take the opportunity to see there is much to be joyful about in our lives right now.

This may be easier to recognize if you’re financially stable and have a loving, healthy family. But even those in more unfortunate or even tragic circumstances still have reasons for joy in their lives.

I often feel joy just seeing the beautiful colors in the trees here in the Northeastern fall, or the snow on the tree branches in winter. It’s hard not to feel joyful when you see a small child laughing. Do you have someone you love who loves you? Nothing’s much better than that.

By the way, all this is just as true for our businesses. We tend to spend a lot of time focused on what we’re not doing and the money we’re not making. Even with the most positive attitude, we’re looking forward toward achieving our next goal.

During this holiday season and heading toward a new year, take time to reflect on the clients you have right now, the expertise and experience you have to offer, and the blessed freedom you have as an entrepreneur to decide how to structure your life. Even if you’re just getting started and don’t have lots of success yet, you can savor the excitement of embarking on a new adventure with all its possibilities.

Recognizing how good things really are is closely related to be grateful, I believe. And feeling grateful leads to joy.

What are you grateful for right now?

We all know that having a large, responsive list is the best asset you can have to make money online. Did you know you can get someone else to build your list for you?

If you know – or can find – someone who serves the same audience as you, but is not a direct competitor and has a good-sized list, you can propose a deal that benefits both of you.

You will offer to be interviewed and give away as much of your expertise as you can to this partner’s audience. In exchange, your partner will promote the call to her list.

How Does This Build Your List?

1. The very least your partner is likely to agree to is to mention your web site to the audience a few times. Some of these people will visit your site and hopefully, subscribe to your list.
2. The most common and popular way to build your list from being interviewed is to offer the audience a free gift. The host shares a URL where the gift can be found. When the listeners go to that URL, they are asked to opt-in in order to receive the gift. This is a direct and powerful way to build your list.
3. One more way to benefit from being interviewed is if the host will allow you to promote a product or program. This is tricky because neither you nor the host want the call to sound like just a sales pitch, but if handled properly, it can work. There must be lots of good content and a little promoting. This would not only build your list, but possibly also make you money! And your host can be an affiliate so he makes money, too. Some hosts will not want to do this for fear of alienating their list. Instead of providing value, they may be seen as just trying to sell to the list and lose credibility.

If the call is recorded, you and your partner can negotiate who has the right to use it, and whether it will be sold or given away for free.

This technique for attracting new people to your list works well since the audience is in your target market, you’re displaying your expertise with information that’s useful to them, and due to the implied referral to you from the host. Since this audience is in your target market, they’re likely to be responsive to your marketing if they do opt-in.

Meanwhile, the host’s value to her audience is enhanced by providing this valuable information you’ve shared.

Of course, it goes without saying that you must be compelling and share content valuable to the listeners to receive any benefit or build a good relationship with your partner. If you don’t, no one listening will go to your site, opt-in, or buy from you. And your partner’s credibility with his list will be diminished.

You can solicit standalone opportunities to be interviewed. You may also seek out the chance to become part of a telesummit with a theme you can speak to. With a telesummit, you have to opportunity to get in front of all the participants’ lists, so it can really leverage your visibility.

There’s also a way to be the host interviewing others and build your list. We’ll discuss that in a future post.

Have any of you grown your list with this technique? How did it work out for you?

Do you ever find yourself with a zillion things to do, but you’re so overwhelmed by it all that you don’t seem to be accomplishing much? Even with so much to do, the feeling of overwhelm can sometimes paralyze us so that paradoxically, we don’t get anything done. I feel that way fairly often and I hear about it from nearly all my clients as well.

I have a solution that works every time.

First, take a blank piece of paper and write everything down you need to do. This includes business tasks, personal to-dos, and activities for self-care like a long bath, reading your favorite novel, or getting eight hours sleep. We can’t forget our self-care!

Writing everything down will solve half the problem. By getting it all out of your head and onto the paper, you don’t need to think about everything at once. And you know you won’t forget anything because it’s on the list. You can sort the list by category or by priority if you wish, but it’s not essential to the process.

Then, pick the next thing on this list that you want to do. What is your number one priority to get done right now?

The last step may be the hardest.

Work on that one item you chose to do and don’t think about anything else until it’s done. In our era of multi-tasking and busy-busy, this might be hard for you. If your mind strays to another task, remind yourself that it’s written down and you won’t forget it. Or if it’s something new, write it on your list and put it out of your mind.

Once you’ve finished that task, pick the next one and focus only on it until you’re done. Rinse and repeat.

It’s like what they tell you to do when you meditate. If you start to think about something, acknowledge it and let it go. In fact, this isn’t actually a coincidence. Just as in meditation, we’re striving to become mindful of the moment we’re in and focused only on the now.

OK, maybe you’re thinking this all sounds a little woo-woo for you. Well, to be honest, the whole “mindful of the moment” concept does come from Zen Buddhism. But who cares? It works!

Getting all the clutter out of your head will free up bandwidth to actually accomplish something. And focusing only on the task at hand will create a feeling of calm rather than the chaotic busy-ness you had going on.

Give this technique a try the next time you feel overwhelmed. You’ll get more done and feel calmer doing it.

If you’ve been around online marketing for any time at all, you’ve heard about joint ventures and how valuable they can be for building your business. What you may not know are the variety of ways you can structure joint ventures.

(In this article, I will refer to a product, but this may also be a service or program.)

1. Endorsement Marketing

This is probably the best known and most often used style of joint venture. One person promotes the product of another person.

For this to work well for both parties, the promoter must have a fairly good sized list to promote to and must believe in the product’s value and benefit to her audience. The product creator must be willing to offer the promoter something – usually a commission – for each customer that comes from the promoter’s list.

Sometimes the product creator also grows his list of prospects even beyond those who become customers. This can happen, for example, when there’s a free call or webinar the promoter’s list is invited to. People who choose to attend opt-in to the product creator’s list and some then also become customers. The product creator can now develop his own relationship with these people.

The benefits to the promoter include the commissions, being seen as a helpful resource to her list, and a relationship with the product creator that may provide additional benefits in the future.

2. Co-Authored and Co-Promoted Product

This is a traditional partnership where both parties help to create the product and both promote it to their lists and elsewhere. They may even enlist other joint venture partners to promote to their lists via endorsement marketing.

An arrangement like this works best when the partners have complementary expertise. The resulting product is more valuable than one either partner could create on her own.

The partners’ audiences should both value the product being created. It’s also simplest if the two partners have lists of roughly the same size.

If either the list size or the level of expertise is skewed too much in one direction, the financial agreement may offer one partner more than 50% of the profits.

Another style of partnership might have one partner creating the product content while the other handles the marketing and e-commerce mechanics. I’ve seen this work quite successfully.

Either way, the benefits to both partners include creating a superior product, getting visibility to the other partner’s list, and having a built-in accountability partner so the project moves ahead.

3. Thank You Page Marketing from Subscribers and Buyers

This technique is a simple, passive endorsement. It’s so easy I’m surprised it’s not used more.

The idea is that when someone opts in to a list or buys a product, he lands on a thank you page. On this page, he sees an offer to opt-in to another’s list or buy another’s product. The link for the offer will be the site owner’s affiliate link so she will get a commission if he ends up buying something from the other person.

While there’s an implicit endorsement of the product, the site owner doesn’t need to do anything other than put the offer on the thank you page. And the product creator only needs to provide the offer copy and an affiliate link.

While simple, this technique can be very effective. The subscriber or buyer has just taken made a commitment to the site owner and is still in that frame of mind when arriving at the thank you page. He may well be willing to make a similar commitment to the other business owner in this moment.

4. Collaboration Product

This can take one of two forms. First, a relative newcomer to the market can gather a group of veterans to participate in creating and marketing the product. For instance, each person could write a chapter in a book around a particular theme.

If each veteran has a decent list and they all market to their lists, the product could sell well. The profits could be divided between the newbie, who’s getting paid for organizing and physically (or digitally) creating the product, and each of the veterans.

Even if there aren’t huge profits, each veteran benefits from having a published book (or whatever the product is) and from being associated with all the other veterans. The veterans’ expertise spills over on the newcomer, and he develops valuable relationships with the veterans. Depending on how the deal is structured, he probably grows his list as well.

The other form of collaboration consists totally of peers. One person recruits colleagues to contribute to a product and they all market it and share the profits. The organizer may benefit a bit more to compensate for her additional effort. This might be in her share of profits or that customers land on her list.

5. Telesummit or Websummit

A telesummit (held on the phone) or websummit (online webinars) is quite similar to a collaboration product except instead of a product, there’s an event.

The organizer – either newcomer or veteran – recruits people to interview around a specific topic and these calls or webinars are scheduled for people to listen to. These interviews may all be scheduled in one week, several times a week over the course of 2-6 weeks, or once a week for months.

Typically, telesummits are free to listen to when scheduled. but may have a fee to access after the fact. Often, the person being interviewed will have a free gift for listeners that requires they opt-in.

The benefits to the interviewees include getting exposure to the other interviewees’ lists, growing their own lists by giving away their free gifts, and showing their expertise.

The benefits to the organizer include growing her list since listeners must subscribe to attend, revenues from selling the recordings afterward, and sometimes affiliate fees from sending listeners to get their free gifts through an affiliate link. The organizer also gains visibility as an expert from interviewing the experts and develops relationships with these experts that can be valuable in the future.

Telesummits can be complex and time consuming to organize, but the benefits can be huge.

Now that you have several ideas on how to use joint ventures to build your business, go forth and partner!

And if you had a great success with one of these methods, or if there are any other ways you’ve benefited from partnering with others, leave a comment and share it with us.

Hopefully, you’ve developed the habit of regularly publishing blog posts to your own site. Have you considered branching out and becoming a guest blogger on others’ sites?

Posting articles on other blogs will expose you to a broader audience and boost your reputation as an expert in your field.

The posts you create will include an author box at the end with your name and web site address. If readers of your post appreciate your article, you may get new visitors to your site and even new subscribers to your list when they click through the link in your author box.

Also, if the publisher of the blog is willing to put an author tag on the post for you (and you’ve set up a Google profile), your photo will show up next to the post in Google search engine results, giving you even more visibility.

So there are clear benefits of becoming a guest blogger, but how do you go about becoming one?

First, find some blogs with good sized audiences in your target market, but where the site owners are not direct competitors of yours. You want to find the blog of someone who provides something different than you, but to the same people.

Write a blog post suitable for his or her audience and send it, along with an offer to provide more posts on a regular schedule. It could be one or month or more, depending on what you and the site owner agree to.

Can you use one of your own blog posts as a guest blogger?

You can, but there are drawbacks:

• Blog publishers may not wish to use a “recycled” post.
• If your target market reads your blog and one or more of the blogs you’re a guest for, they’ll see the same article in multiple blogs.
• Search engines will only list one of the duplicate blog posts, and it may not be the one at your site, so you may be damaging your own site’s search engine position by reusing blog posts.

Of course, to implement this strategy, you’ll REALLY need to be disciplined with your writing schedule. You don’t want to slack off on your own blog posts, or fail to meet your commitment to the blog owners with whom you have arrangements. But if you can pull it off, becoming a guest blogger can be a terrific way to become more visible and valuable to your market.

In the last post, I shared some tools I use to help me generate blog posts. This time, we’re going to discuss techniques and habits you may want to consider to help you create blog posts on a regular basis.

Many people are concerned that they won’t be able to think of anything to write about. One technique is invaluable in alleviating this concern. Keep a notebook with a page of topics. Every time something comes up with a client that you think might be useful to others, write it down. When you see an article, blog post, or content on a website that triggers an idea, write it down.

As you start doing this regularly, you’ll find that you begin seeing potential topics everywhere. Once you’re mindful of capturing ideas for posts, you’ll end up with enough to write about for months in advance. When you’re ready to write, just pick a topic and go!

The next issue is about when to write your blog posts. There are several possible habits you can develop here and I’ve seen people use each of them successfully. First, pick a day (or days) of the week and do a blog post every week on that day. I have a few clients who are very disciplined about this. One writes a post every Sunday to be published and emailed to her list Monday morning.

Another option is to create an editorial calendar – that is, plan out your posts for several months and up to a year in advance. Then pick one or more days once a month or quarter, and just sit and write blog posts. For example, you could plan posts out for three months and once a quarter reserve three days to write and edit all the blog posts for that quarter. Once you post them in your blog with the correct future publish dates, you’re all set until the next quarter.

The method I use is a little more ad hoc, but it can work as long as you stay somewhat disciplined. Whenever I get inspired or have some time on my hands, I sit down with a list of general categories for blog posts, see what ideas come up, and start writing. Once I get in the “writing groove”, I can blast out two to four posts in a couple of hours.

This technique is particularly useful if you find yourself with some time on your hands and no internet connection. You can just open your text editor and go.

The danger with this last technique is that you won’t get the time or inspiration frequently enough to post as often as you wish, so a certain amount of awareness of your timeline and how many posts are currently scheduled is necessary so you publish consistently.

When you actually sit down to write a blog post, there are also techniques to help you structure it. Some people are able to just start writing and when they finish, their post is ready to go or just needs a little polishing. Most of us, though, need to think a bit more about our little article before we start writing.

A technique I learned in high school English class works well for me. (Wouldn’t those teachers be amazed!) When we learned to write essays, we were taught they should be comprised of an introduction, three to five points, and a conclusion. And that’s how I construct my blog posts. One difference, though, is that in high school, each point would be one paragraph. It’s important to have short paragraphs with a lot of white space with online content, so I often divide one point into multiple paragraphs.

I’m able to design the structure in my head and then write it. If that’s tough for you, go ahead and write down an outline containing at least your three to five points. It also can be helpful to wait until the rest of the article is done to write your introductory paragraph and the title. By then, you should have a good idea what your post is about.

I hope you’ve discovered the tools and techniques you need to post to your blog regularly. Comment and share your experiences. What works for you? What doesn’t?

A recent post discussed the idea of being consistent – and persistent – with your marketing activities. Today, I want to talk about updating your blog regularly.

As you can see if you look through the archive at my site, posting on my blog regularly is often a challenge for me, so I’ve given this topic a lot of thought. What tools, techniques, and habits can one use to generate a consistent stream of blog posts?

Let’s start with tools – always the way to my techie heart. One very cool WordPress plug-in is called Editorial Calendar. This plug-in is only used within the Dashboard. You can choose to see between 3 and 5 weeks at a time and each post you’ve created appears on the calendar. This allows you to schedule posts weeks into the future. They don’t even need to be completed posts. You could layout your intended content just by creating future dated posts with nothing but a title, which can be changed later.

By creating a schedule of blog post topics, it’s easier to see what you plan to write and when each post is needed. As long as you get the post written before the future date you’ve scheduled, you’ll be good.

Another tool I recommend is perhaps the simplest – a text editor. I use TextPad (http://www.textpad.com/), but Notepad or any other text editor will work as well.

I use the text editor to actually write my posts. I don’t like to do it right in the WordPress Dashboard because I may not always have an internet connection when I’m writing, and God forbid I somehow lose the connection – and all my work! – before I save it. Working locally in my text editor – where I frequently save the file – is safer.

The reason I use a text editor rather than MS Word is that it’s much easier to cut and paste from a text editor to WordPress than from Word. Word often inserts a lot of unnecessary formatting garbage into the post under the hood. In the best case, it’s a lot of extra stuff the browser and search engines will need to sift through to get to the actual content. In the worst case, it will mess up the formatting of your post. I can’t tell you how many times a client has asked me to fix the formatting of a post after they’ve pasted its content from MS Word. So use a text editor, not Word, to write your posts!

The last resource I want to discuss today is a good royalty-free stock photo site to get images for your blog posts. Images make your posts more interesting for your audience to read.

I’ve used iStockPhoto (http://www.istockphoto.com/) for years. They have a large selection and a good search mechanism. Their prices for small photos has gone up considerably recently, though, so I also look for images in free galleries. These sites may not have as wide a variety of quality images, and the search function may not be as helpful, so it can take more time to find an appropriate image. Your trade-off is time vs. money, so you decide. Another paid site I’ve found good images at recently is PixMac (http://www.pixmac.com).

Are there tools you use to help generate your blog posts? Leave a comment and share with the class!

Next time, I’ll go over some techniques and habits that can enhance the likelihood of generating blog posts regularly.