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Are You Aiding & Abetting E-Myths?

We are going to embark upon a journey through the world of e-myths and debunk them to help you avoid falling into the e-myth trap.

First, let’s take a minute to talk about what an e-myth is. An entrepreneurial myth, or e-myth, is an assumption that anyone can succeed at business with:

• Desire
• Some capital
• Projected a targeted profit

This sounds great, but it just not realistic. Think of starting a business as a marathon. Sure, everyone starts out of the gate at record pace, but after a few miles people start slowing and some drop out entirely. Building a successful business takes stamina and agility.

The reality is that there are many different facets to a successful business and none of them can be ignored if you plan to find success.

Let’s take a minute to talk about entrepreneurial seizure. This defines the roller coaster of emotions that comes with starting, nurturing and the potential failure of a business.

The emotions that occur, in order, are:

• Exhilaration
• Exhaustion
• Despair
• Sense of self-loss

This is usually cause by the e-myths and assumptions we talked about. You can get your hopes so high on instant success that even the smallest lag and you are sent into an emotional tailspin. This is also brought on by the stark realization that you can’t do it all and will need help in the areas where you don’t have the knowledge. Now, faced with limited choices you may feel like you need to back out and hide, but don’t do this. Use our GUIDED TOUR (click on TOUR tab above) to get the business coaching you need to avoid feeling overwhelmed and defeated.

Put Them in a Trance

We’re going to go through the 5 essential keys to a successful and reusable marketing campaign launch. Once you have these basics down, you can use them over and over again.

The 5 essential keys are:

• Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
• Put an effective sales offer to work
• Avoid the marketing pitfalls
• Use a world-class marketing perspective
• Get results!

We’ll go through each one of these, so you can see exactly how to use them and how they all affect the overall outcome of your marketing campaign.

Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Take the time to ask yourself some questions from the prospective of the customers/clients. What would it take to get your attention? What needs do you have that need to be met? What are the promises you want fulfilled?

Once you know the answers to these questions you can start putting together a plan to meet these needs. Then take a look at what USP your competitors are using to help you develop your own USP. Your USP is what you are “promising” your customers/clients. This is what’s going to set you apart from your competition.

Put an effective sales offer to work

To develop an effective sales plan, you need to:

1. Put together a headline that gets immediate attention.
2. Share benefits of your products/services speaking from the customers’ perspective.
3. Identify the specific needs met by your products/services.
4. Make it easy to do business with you by offer guarantees.
5. Share your specific sales proposition.
6. Walk your customers/clients through how they should respond and act.
7. Motivate with a call to action.

What this all means is, you need to put together what makes your products/services special and compel customers to buy. If they don’t feel like they NEED your product, they won’t buy. You need to answer a question, solve a problem or feed an obsession.

You need to provide them with all the information they need to make an informed and confident decision. Buyer’s remorse is one of the worst things that can happen.

Avoid the marketing pitfalls

There are 5 major marketing pitfalls many businesses fall into and you should avoid:

• Ignore market testing and push on with an inaccurate plan.
• Offer an incomplete case, or reasons, throughout their marketing plan.
• Fail to notice the needs of their prospective customers/clients.
• Fail to diversify their marketing options.
• Fail to get market opinions on their offers.

These are all areas to avoid. If you’ve been working through these lessons, avoiding these pitfalls should be easy and natural.

Use a world-class marketing perspective

World-Class marketing perspective is important, especially if you want to attract customers/clients from all over the world. You can do this a number of different techniques and activities:

1. Keep a marketing journal and scribble down anything innovate you see.
2. Keep encouraging your marketing department, or yourself, to try new things and dump the ones that aren’t working.
3. Order from your own company under a different name and analyze the process of ordering, shipping, online store, customer service and the product itself. This will show you where the areas for improvement in the customer experience.
4. Read every quality ad you can find and keep a file for future ideas to consider.
5. When out in public, watch how consumers behave in different situations and how they consider their purchases.
6. Step down a notch or two and work on the front lines with your sales and customer service staff.
7. Continuously acknowledge your staff, vendors and customers. Everyone works and shops better when they feel appreciated.
8. Always listen to feedback from employees and customers.
9. Continuously test markets, ads, and marketing techniques. This is the only way to stay successful and know what’s working and, more importantly, what’s not.
10. Offer more information in your marketing than anyone else. The more information you offer, the more products/services you’ll sell.
11. A great marketing plan can only get better. Continue to fine tune and refine your marketing plan based on testing results and feedback.
12. Be classy in your marketing. Make sure your marketing and advertising fits your company image, products/service and quality.
13. Improve your best marketing areas and drop those that aren’t working.
14. Focus on what you say, not how you say it. The best marketing ideas turn into the best marketing naturally.
15. Develop all your ads, campaigns and sales materials with an attention to compelling and factual information.

By using these techniques you can put your name out there to the world and become one of the top brands in your industry.

Get results!

The last area we are going to talk about is the best-satisfied customers. If your customers aren’t satisfied, you’ve wasted all your marketing resources and all chance of positive word-of-mouth advertising. You can satisfy your customers by:

• Providing quality products/services
• Providing high quality customer service
• Providing a low-pressure, highly informative sales experience
• Taking all the risk away with a great guarantee

To generate more business there are a couple of simple techniques that work every time:

• Build your database with a contest.
• Do regular mailings with sales, discounts, or other incentives.
• Find other creative ways to keep your current customers coming back for more.

“As long as the reward is directly related to your product or service, you can’t lose. Why not get started today? It’s so simple, it’s so seldom done, and it’s so profitable. And that’s the bottom line.” Jay Abraham

It is so simple! So, why aren’t you starting today? We can help you put together a great marketing plan that will get you results. Try our GUIDED TOUR (click on tour tab above) and find the tools and resources you need built by some of the biggest names in the marketing world.

Do It Like the Big Dawgs!

Today we’ll take a look at how the kings of industry wine, dine and otherwise cajole prospects.

Most of successful professionals use a series of information-based ads that build emotion and a call to action. These are much more effective than a standard company branding advertisements. The same principles that go into putting together a high impact (and, often, high priced) ad campaign can be adapted to fit your needs with similar results.

Here are some ways to put together and execute a professional, effective ad campaign:

1. Put together a short report that’ll you’ll automatically send to prospects when they contact you. This should include a short description of your business and what you specialize in. Don’t forget to include case studies, samples or other proof of your success.
2. Consider newsletters as a way of educating and informing customers about your industry and services offered.
3. Offer a free seminar, webinar or other lecture to build awareness of your business, but make sure you make the information pertinent to your target market and find speakers who are respected and known in the industry.
4. Buy an existing business, introduce better marketing and grow this new business faster than a “from scratch” business.
5. Always test different versions of your ads to find the most effective ones.
6. Use direct mail marketing to grow your business.
7. Put together a database of previous customers and send them new information or a new product update.
8. Offer incentives such as frequent purchasing benefits, loyalty programs, referral programs or others.
9. Approach large companies who may need your services and negotiate a deal to be their exclusive expert in your field.
10. Donate time or materials to local charities to show support in your area.
11. Offer public clinics/classes for the general public to come along and discuss what they need that’s free and approachable.
12. Organize seminars your customers/clients can pay to attend by putting together a high-perception value package.
13. Approach local newspaper by offering to write a weekly column about your area of expertise. Don’t ask for money, just a byline and bio.
14. Develop a weekend or other destination seminar for customers/clients, not only does this give you an action-packed weekend with the most important people, it gives them a tax-deductible business adventure.
15. Take a good seminar and turn it into written form as a home study, member site program, audio or video program.
16. Approach large companies and offer to give seminars to their employees, investors or management.
17. Be willing to bring in new clients, even if at an initial loss because it will likely pay off later.
18. Regulate your marketing budget to maximize the potential income from them to hit the next year and try to push back advertising costs for the next year to offset your expenses.
19. Make offers to target markets or target market businesses to pay them for referrals or shared databases.
20. Give away something free to everyone who brings in a print version of your advertisement. This is a great way to see which ads are giving you the most bang for your buck.
21. Continually consider what new products/services you can offer to current customers/clients.
22. Develop a mail order division of your company.
23. Offer a proposition to your competitors to trade customers/clients you were both unsuccessful in selling to.
24. Use different marketing tactics as an excuse to attract new customers/clients with new offers and goodies.
25. Offer a “you-choose-the-price” program. This is especially good for product you just can’t seem to sell.

So, there are 25 great ways to market to other professional and businesses. Some other great ways to get your name out there for little or no cost are:

• Get involved you in your community-volunteer, donate to local events, etc.
• Join your local Chamber of Commerce and attend the networking and other activities throughout the year.
• Join a local, state, or regional professional associates for further networking opportunities.
• Become a board member of a local organization.

Advertising should never be your only method of marketing, there are a myriad of ways to get your name out there in a way that feels personal to potential customers/clients.

“Effective advertising…must be used to get your name out to the public. If your name is not familiar to people, they will not come to you.” Jay Abraham

If you’re not sure where you start with your marketing plan or how to reach out to your local community, competitors, customers/clients and others who could influence your business in a highly positive way, try our GUIDED TOUR (click on TOUR tab above) to experience the tools and resources we have to boost your business to the next level and beyond.

PR Equals Free Publicity

There are three key areas of public relations you can use to boost your advertising results ten-fold over your paid advertising.

The key to public relations is in:

• Public relation or publicity
• Merchandising
• Promotions

With a solid plan in place that encompasses all these areas, you’ll have a great approach to use public relations in the best way possible.

Public relations include all that is the media. Don’t limit yourself. The attention of newspapers, television, radio, magazines, bloggers, ezines and more are all equally powerful. Online marketing is just as, if not more, important as conventional media.

Here are the steps to get noticed by the media:

1. Put together a press release for your company. The press release should be relevant to your target market and address consumer interest, not just announce your business.
2. Compact your press release to include one hook and one angle. Choose the most attention-getting to make sure the media person you are sending it to is interested in reading it.
3. Put your press release in professional formatting. With press releases you need a dateline, the most important information at the top, facts, figures and wrap it up with contact details including who and how. Print the press release on your letterhead.
4. Send your press release to all television and radio stations, local and metro newspapers, national newspapers, industry magazines, and any other form of media that reaches your target market. Don’t forgot to include relevant blogs, ezines, press release submission sites and to industry professionals.

More importantly than a perfect press release is to make sure you have addressed the needs of your target market in the products/services you offer and made that clear in the press release. If you are provided people a solution to a problem, a way to avoid a problem and an opportunity to enhance their life the media and public will be interested.

If you have a connection (or the ability to get a connection) with a celebrity, this can practically guarantee you’ll get attention. Make sure you are offered newsworthy information, and then follow up with media outlets to make sure they are publicizing that information.

“One of the most powerful techniques every business should use is free publicity. As the name implies, there is no cost, just the time and effort required to attract attention to your business.” Jay Abraham

Our GUIDED TOUR (click on TOUR tab above) can show you how to put together press releases that work! Check out how the pro’s do it and craft the perfect press releases for your business.

How Well Do You Know Your Vendors?

It’s extremely important to build relationships with your vendors and those around you can bring in new customers/clients and increase awareness of your company branding.

The people you work directly with on your products and services are really the ones with the most to gain when you find success. By taking the time to get to know them, you’ll find a whole host of opportunities you didn’t realize were there.

Look for great ways to offer your vendors rewards for helping grow your business and everyone wins. One of ways you can do this is by offering performance based incentives that are much larger than their normal charges.

Here’s the step-by-step process to putting together a partnership with a vendor:

1. Approach all the vendors you work with and offer an incentive based on performance.
2. Put the generous incentive plan together from their perspective, even take suggestions.
3. Develop a clear, concise and easy to track incentive plan, this will increase competition between vendors and therefore higher performance levels.
4. Encourage subsequent sales instead of focusing only on the initial sale. By doing this you can give away more of the profit from the initial sale to your vendors and make higher profits off the back end products. Encourage:
5. Future sales
6. Upsell better and more profitable products/services
7. Cross-sell to additional products

5. Create an incentive plan that’s irresistible to your vendors by offering generous, exclusive compensation.

Think of all the vendors you work with and the creative ways you can put together an incentive plan that entices them to be part of your business. Use their talents, capabilities and connections and you’ll both be winners.

Putting together an incentive plan doesn’t have to be a complicated process. Use our GUIDED TOUR (click on TOUR tab above) to come up with some great ideas and put your incentive plan together for maximum results.