When trying to build their business, a lot of entrepreneurs blame the fact that they aren’t successful on just needing to get better at what they do.
I think people get this from their years in the workforce. When you got a performance review, your boss would usually talk about ways to improve performance, and a lot of times it involved getting a certification, learning a new skill or software, cross-training in another department, etc.
You know what though? If you are a business professional and have some level of expertise, you know more than a lot of people out there! There is someone who would love to know what you know, and in that way, you offer value to them.
Now, I’m not saying that additional training is important. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs use the excuse of wanting to get more training/skill/knowledge/another certification as a way to avoid taking that next big step, stepping up, and really marketing their business and seeing the success they deserve.
“Marketing is more important than mastery”.
-Ali Brown
Marketing is THAT important. And if you’ve been holding back until you get that next level of education, I challenge you to STOP! It might take a major shift in the way you’re currently thinking about your business, but think about it this way: it doesn’t matter how much you know, if nobody knows about you, you’ll be out of business before you know it.
How can you best showcase the expertise you already have?
A quick, easy and low-cost way to get started showcasing that expertise is online marketing. You could write a series of articles on a topic that a lot of people have questions on, or a How-To series. Share little mini-tips regularly on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Use some of this content, and create short videos that you put on YouTube. Fill your blog with all of these different pieces, and you might just be amazed at your own expertise!
Not only does this increase your visibility and get you out of your own head, it helps you get more clients through the Know Like and Trust factor. People will see your expertise, they’ll get to know you, and they begin to trust you. And that is an awesome way to start a new client relationship.
If you’re ready to embrace your current expertise and start marketing yourself online, there are lots of articles here on my blog, and online, to get you started. But if you’d rather have a system to work from to help you generate expert content and increase your visibility, take a look at my Social Media Content Creation Kit. It’s a step-by-step system for quickly creating lots of content for your blog and social media. It lays out a simple strategy for creating a content calendar, generating original ideas for your own content, and quickly distributing it across the web, so you build up the expert presence online that you deserve!
Announcing our next free teleclass on Tuesday, August 10th at 3pm Eastern
If you’re like many solo business owners, you’ve probably dipped your toe into the world of online marketing & social media. As you may have found, though, if you don’t have a strategic plan for social media, it can be time-consuming, and not always produce the results you’re looking for.
And there are so many different pieces to online marketing, you may find yourself jumping from one “latest and greatest” tool or fad to another, with no plan, and no results to show for it.
Wouldn’t you love to be shown an easy way to decide on a complete online marketing & social media strategy, set up the tools and systems to get it done quickly and efficiently (instead of spending all day on it!), and even have the entire system to give to a social media manager, virtual assistant (or even your teenager) so this marketing plan can work for you, while you have time to work on your own genius ideas?!
Join us on this free teleseminar on Tuesday, August 10th at 3pm Eastern to learn
- A simple way to create a social media strategy that can be easily communicated to your assistant
- 3 handy tools to run (almost) all your social media marketing
- Guidelines for things your assistant should not do when managing your social networks
- 5 Tips on finding the right person to help, and the important things to communicate to them
- And one easy-to-follow system to streamline all the pieces into a recurring Online Marketing calendar, so you & your assistant always know what’s coming up, and what’s expected (an easy way to avoid the stress and hassle of marketing tasks falling through the cracks!)
As a bonus, you’ll receive a copy of our Social Media Strategy File to use for yourself, and a sample Marketing Calendar to ensure you see just how easy this can be to put into place.
So whether you’re a successful solo professional that has decided there’s not enough time in the day to do it all yourself and need to outsource, or are just getting started and want a system to follow yourself, this call is for you!
Register Your FREE Seat on this Teleseminar NOW!
Tuesday, August 10th at 3pm EST
Can’t make the call live? No worries! Be sure to register, and we’ll send you a copy of the recording.
Filed under Free teleclasses, Marketing Tech Coaching, how to use a VA for social marketing, internet marketing, social media VA · Tagged with creating an online marketing strategy, free teleclass, how to create a social media strategy, how to delegate my social media, online marketing virtual assistant, social media manager, social media virtual assistant
Last Friday, I gave you step one of my 2 part Spring Cleaning Challenge for your online marketing. If you didn’t see it, check out Part 1 here:
Hopefully, you’ve taken the time to go through and do that. Not only is it just good practice to look through your site every so often, it may remind you of things you started, but didn’t finish, or ideas you had that are primed for execution now!
Item 2:
Go, right now, and take a look at the analytics or stats for your website and blog. And if you don’t have some sort of analytics set up, we need to fix that. Pronto! Please!!
Look closely at what your highest sources of traffic are. Can you do more with them? For example, if you are getting a high number of visitors from Twitter, maybe you could spend some more time there, and phase out another site that isn’t even showing on your traffic sources right now.
Or, if you’re getting a lot of traffic from a few articles you submitted months ago, maybe now is the time to put a specific article marketing strategy into place, and generate lots more traffic through the regular submission of fresh articles.
Or maybe, you’re getting traffic from a collection of websites and blogs of people you know, work with, or that are affiliates of yours. This is a great one, because it’s quick and easy to deepen the relationship, and generate more traffic from the same sites. You can do this through regularly commenting on their blogs, starting conversations with them in social media, becoming a guest contributor to their blog (you already know their audience is interested in your content!), or simply asking them! A quick email is a great ice-breaker. All you need to say is that you’ve noticed a lot of traffic coming through from their site, and you wanted to thank them for it. You can offer to guest post for them, or suggest that there may be the potential for a Joint Venture between the two of you. And if they’re affiliates of yours already, just ask them what they would like in order to promote you better, and earn more commissions.
Finally, once you know where the highest sources of traffic are, take a good hard look at where you’re spending your time. If you spend hours every week writing articles, but don’t see article directories as a major traffic source, maybe that time would be better spent somewhere else. This isn’t about creating more tasks for you to do (because almost all of them will probably offer some value to you), it’s about knowing where the biggest return on your time investment is, and focusing your efforts there.
Have you been struggling with figuring out your analytics, creating a
system to automate some of your marketing tasks, or any other Marketing
Tech headache? Got a question and wish you could just pick the brain of
someone that works with blogs, social media and shopping carts all day
long? Join our next Marketing Tech Q & A call! For only $17, you get
access to our hour-long Q & A call where you can ask all those questions
that have been bubbling around in your brain!
Check it out at www.marketinggeeksinc.com/marketing-tech-qa
Have you been struggling with figuring out your analytics, creating a system to automate some of your marketing tasks, or any other Marketing Tech headache? Got a question and wish you could just pick the brain of someone that works with blogs, social media and shopping carts all day long? Join our next Marketing Tech Q & A call! For only $17, you get access to our hour-long Q & A call where you can ask all those questions that have been bubbling around in your brain!
This is it, only mine is white!
This past weekend, I got super excited when I happened to find the absolutely perfect kitchen “island cart” at one of my favorite stores. My kitchen is on the smaller side, and we don’t have a ton of cabinet space, so I’ve been looking for “just the right” piece of furniture for my kitchen for a long time. So when I found one that was just perfect, you know I snatched it up and raced home with it! I then spent a good portion of my weekend (which was rainy and cold, by the way – spring has left Michigan for the moment!) completely reorganizing my kitchen.
While I didn’t see this particular episode as spring cleaning (it was more excitement!), I think that spring still gets a lot of us in a mood to clean things up and refresh our surroundings.
And if now is a good time to get rid of old winter clothes that no longer fit, it’s also a great time to freshen up your website, your online presence and your marketing.
Just like clothes in your closet, there are probably tasks in your marketing plan that no longer fit and serve your business. And at the same time, there might be a buried treasure hiding under all the junk – something you’ve forgotten about or didn’t know you had in the first place!
You may be spending lots of time on a social networking site that no longer has the audience you’re wanting to connect with. Or maybe your business has evolved, and you’re still getting traffic to your website, but have never checked to see where it’s coming from. And if you don’t know where you’re getting interested visitors from, how in the world can you go out and get more?
So here is a little Spring Cleaning Challenge for you:
Item 1:
Go through your website carefully, and make sure it’s up to date. While things like copyrights, email addresses and phone numbers may seem obvious (and please get at least those right!), look at things like
- Is your pricing current?
- Do you have events listed that are way old?
- For those events that are over, do you have recordings? If so, are they available? If not, now’s a great time to make those available for download – either free or paid. Look, we just created a fresh new freebie or product!
- Do your newsletter/autoresponder signups and website contact forms work?
- Is your bio current? Check your website, as well as your social media profiles, article directory sites, and anywhere else you have yourself listed.
On Monday, I’ll give you part 2. But over the weekend, take a look at your website and get that current!
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