Sharon sends out daily updates via email so you can stay on top of her latest news, blog posts and more. What follows is one of her daily updates.

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June 17, 2013 Update

Welcome to a brand new week! I hope that you had a fabulous weekend and got some fun in. It’s a new week and a time to kick it up a notch. My summer “Earn More Doing Less” program is about ready for prime time. We’ll have the information ready by tomorrow for the program.

In today’s update, I’ll be sharing with you a survey I’d love you to complete and some Monday Motivation. Date Header:

Can You Help Me Out?

If you have a few minutes, I’d really appreciate it if you could complete a brief survey at my blog. There are some free-form questions so I can learn more about the topics that interest you so that I can create both free and paid training to help you reach your goals.

If you complete the survey, you’ll also be entered into a drawing where I’ll be choosing one person to get free access to my “Earn More Doing Less” summer training. The deadline is June 30th, 2013.

Monday Motivation: The Secret to Tackling Anything and Everything

A common reason that many people fail to succeed is that they feel so overwhelmed that they end up taking no action at all.

I’ll share with you a simple technique that can help you avoid feeling overwhelmed so that you can get more done and in less time.

Take whatever end result you’d like – just one at a time – and break it down into anywhere between 3 to 5 major milestones or sub-goals. Pick the one milestone from this list you’re most excited about and break that down into tasks.

Focus on working through that list. Once you’ve done that, tackle the next milestone and so on.

This is a very effortless method but it is incredibly effective. It takes away decision making while you’re in “action mode.” You just zoom through what you need to get done.

Practice awesomeness daily!

xoxo

Sharon sends out daily updates via email so you can stay on top of her latest news, blog posts and more. What follows is one of her daily updates.

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June 14, 2013 Update

Today I have a recap of the past week’s posts, offerings and a couple of social media tidbits you may want to be aware of.

Keep your eyes opened on Tuesday –  I’ll be rolling out  summer training series for entrepreneurs at EarnMoreDoingLess.com.  It will be a fantastic series geared to helping you add a zero to your income within the next year. Plus, I’m making it affordable for anyone.

Things You May Want to Check out

Twitter Tests Analytics Features For Users – Twitter is now testing offering its analytics feature to non-advertiser users. The analytics dashboard displays the number of click-throughs, retweets and favorites. If they roll this out as a free service to all users, this could be a game changer for those using Twitter for marketing.

What Brands Need To Know About Facebook Hashtags – Facebook became to roll out functional hashtags like those used on Twitter, Instagram and Vine. Hashtags are both clickable and searchable.

Recap of This Week’s Content from My Businesses

What’s your business’s back-up plan?  If you conduct business online like I do, you will definitely find these tips useful toward building a plan B for when something comes up.

Creating content that offers value (Part 2) last week, we talked about five ways you can generate useful content to attract attention  and establish your reputation.  Part two adds the another five, plus illustrates ways you can assess how your new content strategies are hitting the mark.

Risks of Country-Code Top Level Domain extensions and why .com is always a less risky direction for startups and new businesses to take, when researching domain names.

Free Training & One-on-One Consulting

Free Live Training – How Free May Be Sabotaging Your Success – I’m giving a repeat run of my free live training session on how to deal with brain picking.

One-On-One Consulting – You can now easily book one-on-one time with me. I’m offering short brain picking sessions as well as more involved topical sessions.

Practice awesomeness daily!

xoxo

Sharon sends out daily updates via email so you can stay on top of her latest news, blog posts and more. What follows is one of her daily updates.

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June 13, 2013

As I write this, I’m on my third day of having the flu. Fortunately, it’s not the type of flu where I feel like death would be a preferable option. But it has been bad enough that I’m not able to get a whole lot done. My head feels like a marshmallow!

I was struggling this morning to come up with something to write for today’s update. Then I realized what I’m dealing with right now is a perfect topic to address. If you’re running a business, what is your contingency plan if you were suddenly unable to perform your normal work? Do you even have a contingency plan? You can read more about it here.

Practice awesomeness daily!

xoxo

Seriously, it’s not that bad and since I am so active in different things online, the odds are that I’m going to run into a problem or two along the way. I have a pretty high tolerance for stress and since I am emotionally and otherwise prepared for the times that things don’t work out as planned, the end result isn’t as bad as it could be.

That said, I’ve seen a lot of clients and business associates almost lose their businesses overnight because of one or more “bad things” happening that they weren’t prepared for. They had no back-up plan in place.

At the same time, I’ve seen many smart business owners who were prepared to be able to make it through some very tough predicaments and come out at least even, if not ahead. Some have even been able to turn a situation around to their advantage.

Which group would you prefer to belong to? I bet the second and not the first!

Coming up with a contingency or back-up plan for the times when something doesn’t work out as planned is a huge part of a smart entrepreneur’s overall business strategy. It’s about being ready to handle the “what ifs” that life can throw your way.

Steps To Prepare a Contingency Plan

Let me walk you through the steps involved with preparing a contingency plan.

1. You likely have a business plan and operations manual of some kind at your disposal. (If you don’t, you really should prioritize creating these documents, even if it just you in your business.) These are excellent tools to help you prepare your contingency plans.

2. Set aside a fairly reasonable chunk of time. For most small businesses, 2 or 3 hours is generally sufficient.

3. Go through your business plan and operations manual with a notepad in hand and jot down any possible things that can go wrong (more on this later). You’ll want to include 3 things in this list:

a. What could go wrong

b. How will you know that there’s a problem

c. The effect that this “bad thing” will have

4. Once you’ve made your list up, go back and categorize each item on your list as an A, B, C or D. Category A’s are those things where, if they happened, your business would literally shut down. A category B would severely hamper the running of your business. C’s are things you’d need to address immediately. D’s are those events requiring action, but not necessarily immediate.

5. Ideally, for both A’s and B’s, you’d take the time to map out full contingency plans. In the case of the A’s, you’d also want to make back-up arrangements where necessary now (or as soon as you could). For the C’s, you’d want to at least have some ideas in mind.

6. Create a monitoring system for the A’s and B’s. The idea is to be able to know as soon as possible when something goes wrong so that you can minimize the impact.

The Good and Bad News

Let’s start off with the bad news first. Based on the time I’ve been in business, I can pretty much guarantee you that no matter how much time you spend on preparing back-up plans, when something actually does go wrong, it’s going to be a 50/50 shot at best that it’s even something you might have considered, never mind planned for.
Given that, why am I even suggesting that you go through the previous exercise? Well, there are a number of reasons why.

1. It can help you become emotionally prepared for the day when something does go wrong. Just being able to recognize that it’s not a matter of if something will turn out badly, but it’s a question of when it will happen.

2. Even if you spend a few hours thinking about the “what ifs” and none of what you think could happen ever happens, it’s not time wasted. It’s an excellent way to help you develop crisis management skills. The development of contingency plans is a dry run.

3. It can help you identify when you have a problem by knowing the critical points within your business that you need to monitor.

4. Even if the odds are only 50/50 that you’ll have a plan ready for something that goes wrong, that means that half the time you will be prepared.

5. All of the above contribute to less downtime for your business (or a component of your business).

Examples of Things to Prepare For

If you’re not certain of where you start when putting together your back-up plan, here are some things you may want to include:

Your hosting company goes out of business

• The website gets hacked
• A key employee quits without notice
• A key supplier goes out of business unexpectedly
• You become sick
• Your merchant account gets terminated
• The company providing your mailing list management service goes out of business.
• Your ISP goes down

Contingency Plan Assistance

If you’d like to bullet proof your business to the extent possible and need some assistance, I’m offering one-hour sessions to help you do this. You can book a session here, now.

Sharon sends out daily updates via email so you can stay on top of her latest news, blog posts and more. What follows is one of her daily updates.

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June 12, 2013

I’ve been battling the flu the past couple of days so this will be a short update.

Are You Risking What You’re Building Online?

If you’re starting a new business and bootstrapping it, one of the things you shouldn’t skimp on is choosing a domain name. I say this not from the perspective of someone in the domain business, but as someone who genuinely wants to see more start-ups succeed.

In the wake of the introduction of new top level domains, many cash-strapped entrepreneurs are choosing to opt for domains that aren’t .com, .net or .org. At our blog at Domainate.com, we’ve covered many of the reasons that this is a bad idea so I don’t want to repeat all of them here.

We have a new post up today “Another Recent Country-Code Extension Outage Highlights Their Risks” that illustrates another reason: the potential risks. I suggest checking it out to better understand the risks and potential trade-off.

Registration Open For My Next Free Live Training

If you missed my free training this week on how free may be sabotaging your success, you can register for the next one now. It will be taking place on Thursday at noon PDT/3 pm EDT/8 pm London, England.

Practice awesomeness daily!

xoxo

Sharon sends out daily updates via email so you can stay on top of her latest news, blog posts and more. What follows is one of her daily updates.

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June 11, 2013

Yesterday, we had the first free live webinar for Converting Free to Paid. Like everything else, it was a great learning experience. Some things went wrong. During “practice,” it took much longer than during the actual event. I seemed to speed things up! We scheduled it for 4 PM Pacific time to try and accommodate the most time zones, but attendance ended up being poorer.

Needless to say, it was a disappointing experience for the team. But as soon as it was over, we looked at what happened, got input from others with more experience in this area and then we strategized on the changes we’re making moving forward.

I’m sharing this because I know many people will just give up or let things run their course when the outcome is not what they expect or hope for. They don’t try and figure out what went wrong and make corrections moving forward.

Sometimes I hit a home run on the first try, but often it will take me several attempts to get the results I am aiming for. My overall success rate is a lot higher than other people not because of getting the home runs on the first try but because of being able to look objectively at results and make changes.

How to Create Free Content That Offers Value

If you want your free content to stand out and get attention, it absolutely must offer value to your audience. I’ve written a two-part series on how to do this. The second part is now up. You can read it here. If you enjoy the post, I’d appreciate if you could share it!

One-On-One Sessions Now Available

Work is absolutely insane for me right now. I’m not able to take on clients for large-scale projects or anything requiring more than an hour here and there. But to accommodate demand, I’ve now opened up some time in my schedule for topical hour-long sessions for start-ups, profit acceleration and productivity as well as shorter brain picking sessions for as little as 10-minute increments. For the 60-minute sessions, I’m offering a substantial discount through the end of August.

You can book through Facebook here. If you aren’t on Facebook, you can book here. You’ll be able to pick a convenient time and remit payment through either of those links.

Practice awesomeness daily!

xoxo

Last week, I shared the first 4 of 9 ways to create free content that offers value. If you didn’t read that post yet, you can check it out here. Today I’ll be sharing with you the other 5 methods and how to conduct a self-assessment.

5 Ways to Create Free Content That Offers Value

Method 5: Use Research and Study Results

Using research and study results can help boost your credibility in the eyes of your visitors. There are a couple of different ways you can use research and study results:

A. Interpret the Results: You can link to a study, provide a summary of it and give your take on the results.

B. Use the Results to Support: You can use the results of research and studies to support your argument or position on a certain topic.

Method 6: Ride the Wave of a Hot Topic and Create Urgency

Reporting on a hot topic can be beneficial in a number of ways. If something is in the news and you can spin your coverage in a unique way, it is likely to draw more clicks and attention. You can benefit from getting extra search engine traffic and inbound links as long as the topic remains hot.

This method can be extremely powerful when you are able to tie in the topic directly to your own offerings to create a sense of urgency. Here’s an example of this: let’s say you offer Facebook advertising training. Facebook rolls out a massive number of changes. You can write a blog post outlining these changes and wrap up by either an invitation to work with you one-on-one to help navigate the changes, attend a free webinar you’re giving on the changes or steer them to a Facebook training program you offer that has been updated to take these changes into account.

Method 7: Tackle Objections

What are the different objections people have when it comes to purchases your products or services? You can create valuable content that refutes one of these objections in a way that creates attention and interest. For example, you can provide a case study demonstrating real results.

Method 8: Go Beneath the Surface and Share Insight

If your products and/or services offer solutions of some kinds, there are typically various issues at the root of the problems your buyers face. If you’re able to show people that although they think their problems are caused by A, B and C, but in fact they aren’t and are caused by X, Y and Z, you’ll be offering them valuable insight.

Method 9: Curate the Best

One fabulous way to add value to your content is to curate the best resources you come across on a topic. Don’t just put a random list of links together! You’ll want to only source the best and also include some personal comments on each link.

Curation can serve as an additional traffic driver and source of inbound links. You can contact the authors of the content you are linking to once your content is live. Often they’ll be delighted and, in some cases, may mention that you included their content.

Start By Conducting an Honest Self-Assessment

Now that I’ve given you some ideas on how to create content that is rich in value, I want you to take some time to do a totally honest self-assessment.

Gather up the free content you’ve put out there over the past 3-6 months. Go through each piece as if you were a prospect and ask these questions:

• Does your audience offer value (based on one or more of the examples I’ve laid out)?
• Will readers, listeners, viewers be illuminated or enriched?
• Does it encourage people to take action and/or engage?
• Does it add to your credibility as an authority?

Review the 9 ideas I’ve offered and see how they can fit into your content calendar moving forward.

Coming Up

If you enjoyed this post, I’d love for you to check out the free live training I am offering “How Free is Sabotaging Your Success”. Once you register for it, you’ll be able to get information about my Converting Free to Paid training program.

What did you think of the 9 ideas? Do you have others to add? Please leave a comment below!

Image credit

Sharon sends out daily updates via email so you can stay on top of her latest news, blog posts and more. What follows is one of her daily updates.

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June 10, 2013 Update

Welcome to a brand new week! I hope that you had a fabulous weekend and got some fun in. It’s a new week and a time to kick it up a notch.

In today’s update, I want to give a reminder of the free training I’ll be giving today and offer you some Monday motivation.

Reminder: “How Free May Be Sabotaging Your Success Training” is Today!

Did you register for my free living training “How Free May Be Sabotaging Your Success” yet? It takes place today. In this one hour session, I’ll be sharing with you some insights on how much “free” may be costing you and give you some actionable steps to take back control. You can get more information and register here.

Monday Motivation: You Don’t Need to See the Whole Staircase

One of my favorite quotes was said by Martin Luther King, Jr., “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” I’m sure most of you have heard this quote before, but have you considered what it means and how this applies to your own life?

Often people have a goal in mind but they can’t see every step involved with reaching that goal. In fact, just the idea of figuring out all of the steps can be overwhelming enough, that many people choose not to take action at all. Does this sound like you?

In my own life, it’s rare that I know every single step I need to take to reach a goal when I start working towards it. Even when I think I do know every step, things happen that I don’t expect so I need to make changes with my next step.

If there’s something you want, you don’t have to have all of the details worked out now to get it. Just figure out what the next step is that can help bring you closer. Take daily action and you’ll get to the top of the staircase!

Practice awesomeness daily!

xoxo

Sharon sends out daily updates via email so you can stay on top of her latest news, blog posts and more. What follows is one of her daily updates.

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June 7, 2013 Update

What a crazy week it has been! TGIF! I’m looking forward to the weekend ahead and heading to the beach and Farmer’s Market. I hope you have some fun planned for the weekend too!

Each Friday, I’ll be recapping the highlights of the week . I’ll be including some great things I’ve stumbled across, as well as what’s been new on my side, in case you’ve missed it.

Things You May Want to Check out

10 Most Common Social Profile Pics and What They Really Mean – When you upload a new profile pic on Facebook or Twitter, what is it really saying about you? Is the photo some throwback to better looking days? Or are you trying to flaunt some new relationship to the chagrin of your ex? Well, whether you just posted your latest duck face or some picture from last night’s rave, your profile photo means a lot more than you think! Here is a great infographic featuring some of the most common profile expressions seen across the social web and what they actually mean.

Honey: A Social Network For Businesses That’s Flexible Enough To Fit Any Workflow – A look at this new enterprise social service that rolls the functionality of corporate intranets, company-specific wikis, and email lists into one beautiful package.  It’s currently free for teams of up to 10 people. It looks like a super idea, but being in the domain business, I’m always skeptical about any kind of SaaS offering that is not using a .com domain.

Amazon Invests Millions In Original TV Shows To Get You To Buy More Diapers – Amazon is joining its streaming video peers and putting millions of dollars into creating original content. Their reasons are a bit different from their competitors.

Recap of This Week’s Content from My Businesses

How to Create Content That Offers Value (part 1) - How to create valuable free content to generate interest in your business, establish yourself as an authority and create trust with your prospects.

What to Look For When Buying a Domain - free training about picking a great domain name.

The Impact of Google’s Latest Penguin Update - Google Penguin 2.0 Update – what exactly happened?

Don’t Forget My Free Live Training

Do you have a hard time dealing with brain picking requests? Do you struggle with knowing what to give away for free versus what to charge for? Do you have a difficult time saying no?

You can get solutions to these problems on a live training session I’m offering, “How Free is Sabotaging Your Success: Discover How You Can Take Back Control.” The training is absolutely free and you can register here.

Practice awesomeness daily!

xoxo

Sharon sends out daily updates via email so you can stay on top of her latest news, blog posts and more. What follows is one of her daily updates.

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June 6, 2013 Update

Ahhh… Balance…

I’ve had several back to back high productivity days. Tuesday, for the second day in a row, I made an attempt to go right to bed from work. Although I was exhausted, sleep didn’t come. The result? Wednesday was pretty much of a write-off day for me and I had a difficult time getting into the groove. When a lot of fantastic things are happening with business and you’re riding a wave, it’s easy to forget about keeping balance. I love what I do so that makes the line between work and play somewhat blurry at times. I know many of you reading this are like me.

Having the occasional late night working is okay. Having a string of high-volume work days back to back is okay. But no matter how “okay” you feel at the time, it’s important to make sure to take enough downtime. I’ve been burned out before. One day of feeling icky is enough to remind me how injecting daily non-work fun is a must. Full days off from work are a must. It’s almost a must to remain highly productive.

Google Penguin 2.0 Update – What Exactly Happened?

We’ve been getting clients left and right asking us to provide our take on the latest Google update. Many of them have seen their search engine rankings plummet. A few saw gains. My partner at Domainate.com, Steve Jones, wrote an analysis on the Penguin 2.0 update based on what we’ve gleaned so far. Our recommendation: focus on offering valuable content as always; it’s the safest long-term strategy.

Domain Training Program

For the past several years, we’ve offered twice a year domain training workshops in San Diego. These events require a lot of energy and are expensive for us to put on and for participants to attend. We’ll be rolling out an online version of our program in a few weeks. It’s a comprehensive 12 week program geared to everyone from the novice domain investor to corporate domain buyers to the more experienced domainer. To get notification when we launch and a huge discount off the registration fees, please visit DomainBootCamp.com.

Practice awesomeness daily!

xoxo