If you have a website, it serves one purpose – to sell something

Whether you’re selling goods and services or ideas and opinions – websites are about selling. If you have an offer, you want people to buy it. If you like something, you want people to try it. If you believe something, you want people to believe it too. And if you know something, you want other people to know it as well.

It doesn’t really matter how you slice it, the point of a website is to sell something. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a website? To display pretty pictures for everyone to see? Of course not. Websites are about selling because as people, we’re selling all the time. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

You see, selling is merely an exchange of something that’s valuable to someone. That’s it. Selling is nothing more than an exchange. It’s nothing to avoid, be concerned about or even fear. We’re selling all the time. I’m selling you my opinion right now. And if it has value, you’ll buy it and make it part of yours.

I think where selling gets a bad wrap is when we remember those annoying little experiences when someone was trying to pressure us into something we didn’t want. You know what I mean. The appliance salesman who really doesn’t get that sales is about relationship rather than the next commission to be made. Or the car salesman who follows you around the lot when you just want to look around. In these cases it’s pretty obvious that some sales people just don’t understand that selling is a natural, human process. They try too hard, really. And from our experiences with these sort of people, we feel icky about selling.

But there’s no need to fell bad about selling. As I said, we’re selling our ideas, our thoughts, our beliefs and our opinions all the time. So really, selling is as natural as having a conversation. And it’s through conversation that we go about selling –

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even on our websites. We use the conversation on our websites to develop relationships with people who may want to buy what we offer (e.g. what we’re selling). That’s the entire point of having a website.

So here’s some pointers I’ve put together to help you with selling on your website – and in your business as a whole. Use these suggestions and don’t be afraid to see yourself selling what you know, think or believe. Embrace it and find a new freedom in giving what you have of value to people who value what you know.

1. Don’t try to sell. If someone’s contacting you, they have some level of interest already. Find out what their want or need is first. Then, give them the information they need to make a choice. On your website, identify their problems and help them see that you can help them solve them.
2. Engage people. One of the most important aspects of selling is engagement. You want to engage your prospective clients and customers fully. Use your website to meet people where they are and engage them in conversation. Stay in the conversation as it organically moves toward a transaction. Not all will, but if you engage more people will buy than not because you’re showing them you care.
3. Care damn it! Really care about the people who you engage and who visit your website. Caring is the single most important aspect of selling. Listen to what they want, be empathetic about where they are and just give a crap about them as people. They’ll know the difference.
4. Be authentic. Selling is a natural as having a conversation. But we don’t often approach it that way. All you need to do is be yourself. People will naturally gravitate toward you when you’re real with yourself and with them. And forget all the sales techniques and just be a person trying to help people. You’ll refine how as you go.
5. Be transparent. Be a real person being real with people. Read that again! If you don’t know something, be honest about it. There’s nothing wrong with finding out the answer and getting back to someone. People will be pleased when you say you don’t know. More importantly, it will build trust with them.
6. Know what you’re selling. Clarity in what you’re selling is so, so important. If you don’t know, you certainly can’t share it and if you can’t share it you can’t sell it. So find out everything you can about what you’re selling. See it from different angles and approaches.
7. Know why you’re selling it. So often overlooked is this question of why. But you must know the answer. Is it just to make money? Or are you wanting to make meaning and a difference in people’s lives? If your product or service is about helping people, then know it and sell it that way.
8. Know who you’re selling too. This is so often missed…you’ve got to know who you’re selling too. Not the person so much, as their need, their likes, their dislikes. That means, listen. Listen to what their need is first. Get as much information as you can about what they believe they need.
9. Match your solution to their problem. If you listen well, people will tell you exactly what problem they’re trying to solve and specifically why they called you to solve it. At that point you merely need to match your ability to solve their problem to the problem they believe they need solved. Don’t change or reframe their problem for them , reframe your solution.
10. Remember, it’s okay to sell. Selling isn’t a dirty thing. Remember what I’ve said above, we’re selling all the time – our thoughts, our ideas, our beliefs, etc. So selling is natural. The oddities come in when money’s involved. And there’s nothing wrong with selling what you have to someone who needs it and making money, even a lot of money, from it. It’s just an exchange.

Now, don’t treat this like every other blog post

Really, I mean that. Don’t just read this post, leave a comment and then go on to the next thing to do. Use what I’ve given you here. Sit down with it and look over your website, your marketing, and how you convert your prospective clients. Refine your sales process. And if you don’t have a sales process, create one. Honestly, it will make a massive difference in how you do business.

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I’ll even make the 10 key points here into a PDF for you to download. Just click the icon at the right and you’ll download the 10 keys here right away. No email address or opt-in of any sort. All I ask is if you find value, share it with your friends:

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Remember, selling isn’t a scary thing and it’s not a bad thing. Selling is a natural part of being a human being. So embrace it. You can sell with integrity and give your more people the chance to be helped through your products and services.

How comfortable are you with selling? What’s your own sales process?

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from darma communications on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

It’s just the nature of creating something – specifically creating something that involves other people. And if you’re selling anything – ad space, products, services, etc – you’re creating something for other people.

So when you find out you’re marketing isn’t working like you thought or that your great idea isn’t seen as such a great idea by the people in your market – what do you do?

When the sales slow down and the bills aren’t getting paid – what do you do?

And on those days that you have no motivation, no real desire to grind away at making your business work – what do you?

In other words, what keeps you going?

For me, personally, it’s my vision. Certainly it’s the goals I want to achieve, that’s part of it. But it’s not all of it.

What keeps me going is wanting to live the lifestyle I want – to have a flexible schedule and to be able to work from the hotel while my family is enjoying the beach. Or the ability to work a 3 day work week (3 long days, mind you). Or the opportunity to work at night in the summer so that I can spend the days with my wife and kids. Or taking 4 day weekends to go camping. Or taking a day off so my wife can rest when she’s sick. And the list goes on. For me, as I said, I want flexibility – having the flexibility in my schedule and my location that allows me to do more of what I want when I want.

But I don’t just want to talk about my lifestyle or dream about it – I want to actually live it. And living it means actually taking the time when it’s available. It means being active and spending gobs of time with my kids. Ultimately it means balancing work with life.

You see, I don’t want a life where I’m bogged down by my work. If I did, I could go out and work for any corporation, put in less effort and allow someone else to dictate my lifestyle. Sure, I want – and do – make a nice living. But I don’t want my pursuit of money to become more important than what’s most important to me – quality time with my family, hiking, my spiritual practice, etc. All these things I put above making money.

BUT, I still focus on making money – as a means to the ends I wish to live by. So I work in my business to make money solely so I can have the lifestyle I want. And that’s what keeps me going on the days when it’s just not so easy or comfortable to work for myself.

So that’s me. How about you, what keeps you going when it’s less than easy?

(note: image from Potatojunkie on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

If it’s the latter, there are steps you can take to help you go from business duress to business success.

Last week I introduced 4 simple questions to help you start and grow your business. They are the same 4 questions I use with my clients every day. They’re purposefully simple. Yet behind their simplicity lies all the depth and detail you need to create a successful business. Answer these questions fully and you’ll be on your way.

So let’s review what the four questions are:

1. Who you are?
2. What you do?
3. Who you do it for?
4. Why do you do it?

Pretty simple, huh? Now answer them. Get our a piece of paper and write down your answer for each question. Go ahead. I’ve got time to wait for you while you do so.

Now, take a look at your answers and see what you’ve written. Is there a question you couldn’t easily answer? Is there a question that you couldn’t answer clearly at all? Be honest with yourself – your prospective clients will.

Now, let’s go a little deeper. Each of the four questions has layers – layers of detail, layers of information, and layers of complexity. Let’s break it down a bit:

Who You Are…?

First, as a human being. What are you talents, your gifts and your passions? What are your shortcomings? What areas of your life could you use some help with? What areas of your life do you want to hide from? How do each of these questions translate to your business?

For instance, if you believe you’re not a good writer, it’s good to know that so that you can do something about it. Perhaps you hire a copy editor or take a copy writing course. Either way, you need to know where your strengths and weaknesses are so you can either utilize them or get help.

Once you identify who you are as a person, as I mentioned above, you want to know how you – as a person – translate to a business owners. Are you organized? Do you use systems? Do you outsource any of your tasks? Do people tend to feel comfortable with you? Do you have any issues with selling (read: Hate Selling, Well You’re Doing It All The Time)? What knowledge do you have of using your website or social media to promote your business? How effective is your marketing strategy? The list goes on, really.

Ideally, you want to be asking yourself how you are with every aspect of owning, running, promoting and evaluating your business. And don’t worry if you don’t know something or have large gaps in your abilities. All you have to do is ask for help.

What You Do…?

The primary answer here, of course, has to do with what you do for a living. In other words, what are you in business to do?

But it goes deeper than that. You want to also consider what your service actually is and does. Meaning, you want to consider your business offerings from the stand point of what problems they solve for the people in your target audience. In essence, you’re not just providing a service but providing a way to solve problems in people’s lives.

For instance, let’s say you’re a life coach who helps women through career change. Your offer is likely so much more than just a career coach. You may have a background you can call on that gives you a market advantage. You may have gone through a career transition yourself. You may be able to provide emotional or psychological support in a different way than your peers. Whatever the offer you make, just be certain that you’re bringing your full self, with your complete background into play here. Just remember, what you do includes what you have done.

Who Do You Do It For…?

As with the previous question, this one helps you focus more precisely on what you actually have to offer. In this case, it’s not about the offer itself, but who you’re offering it to.

Who do you do it for asks you to go deeper than demographics. You don’t just serve, for instance, women between 45 & 60 who are looking for a second career. You want to narrow your focus down to a specific type of client who fits perfectly into your specific set of abilities.

And you want to think of what problems the people in your target audience are facing. What sort of stopping points are they hitting as they are, for instance, going through a career change? Speak directly to those in your marketing.

Ideally, who you do it for is one person. Just remember that there are 100′s if not 1000′s of that one person out there waiting to find you and your service. Make it easy on them by identifying exactly who you help.

Why Do You Do It…?

Ultimately, this may be the most important question of all to ask yourself. After years of working with hundreds of clients on their websites and coaching them on increasing their business, I’ve found that the most successful business people make meaning.

While making meaning may not be, in the short term, the more important than knowing what you do and who you do it for, eventually it will be. That’s because as business owners, we need to make meaning. It may sound airy-fairy, but it’s true. I’ve seen it with dozens of clients who are successful in one area but burn out because the business they made successful isn’t making the meaning they want in the world.

So your business, to be successful, needs to make meaning. And it needs to make meaning to one person – you. It doesn’t really matter what I think or anyone else. What matter is that your business makes meaning to you. In other words, you are contributing something important to you to the world.

Do you know what that is? Do you know what impact you have on the people you touch? Do you know how your offer is making meaning in the world? Take it deeper…

The key to a successful business is clarity

To create, grow and maintain a successful business you need one thing more than any other – and it’s not even talent. You need clarity! Clarity with your business will set you free from the confusion most small business owners face.

So why don’t more life coaches, holistic practitioners and other service-based business owners take the time to find clarity?

Lots of reasons, really. The biggest one is likely fear of something. Fear of hard work. Fear of not being able to do it. Fear of being boxed in by a vision and plan. Fear of putting in the effort to get clarity only to find that you have none. All these, and more, get in the way of you finding clarity and, hence, stop you from growing a successful business.

But you know the neat thing? You don’t have to get that complex. Fear is a complex thing. Fear is what makes the process bigger than it needs to be. All you have to do is begin by answer the three questions – who you are, what you do and who you do it for. That’s it. These are the seeds you need to plant, then nurture, so they can germinate and grow into a living, thriving business.

And let me know how it goes…

How well can you answer the 4 questions in your business?

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from mikecogh on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

Depending on who you listen to, there’s so much you need to do in order to successfully launch your business. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re a life coach, business consultant or holistic healer, launching a successful business takes time, energy and even a little bit of money.

More than anything, you need a plan. You need to know what you’re about and how your service will help other people. That’s the first step. Some would say you next need a business plan, a marketing plan and a clear revenue model (you do need to know how you’re going to make money, after all).

But I think it’s much simpler than all that.

Sure, a business plan is good. I coach my own clients on creating business and marketing plans so they can both keep themselves on track and see their progress. So using traditional business plans is something I highly recommend.

Yet, I’ve found it helpful to begin any service business with 4 simple questions. These questions provide the foundation for all else. Answer them fully and you’ll have the beginnings of your business plan, an outline for your marketing plan and you’ll know how you’ll make money. You’ll also have an idea of who your client is and what their needs are.

What’s more, these four questions give you a chance to simplify the whole business development process. You may still want to formal business plan or work through how you’ll market your business. Yet it can be less necessary as long as you can stay focused. I’ve had a handful of clients take just the answers to these four questions and go on to both build successful life coaching and holistic healing practices.

So what are the four questions?

1. Who you are?
2. What you do?
3. Who you do it for?
4. Why do you do it?

See how simple this is? Now there can be other questions to add. Depending on the client I might add ‘how do you do what you do’ or ‘what do they need.’ But honestly, even these questions are pretty much covered in a thorough answers to the four questions. Plus, I find simplicity wins out most of the time.

Now I know that the answers to each of these questions can be full of complicated processes, complex systems and overwhelming business structures. And having run a business for more than ten years, I know there’s much to do to be successful.

Yet clearly answer those four questions and you have a basic business plan. Answer the four questions and you have the outline for a marketing plan. Answer the four questions and you have, at least a beginning, for how you’re going to make money in your coaching or healing practice.

To be continued…

My Friday post this week will dive a little deeper into the four questions. We’ll take a look at just how answering these questions leads to a solid plan that even you can execute. And we’ll see what happens if you don’t know the answers to these questions. So stay tuned…

In the meantime, I want to hear from you. How would you answer the four questions on your coaching practice, holistic healing practice or other type of service-based business?

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from laurakgibbs on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

What is your business about?

Is it about branding and marketing? I’m sure it is. Is your business about sales and profits? I sure hope so. And is it about making some difference in the world? Ideally, that would be nice.

But branding, marketing, sales and making a difference require one thing – relationships. Ultimately, business is about relationships. Doesn’t matter whether you’re selling products or pitching services, ultimately people buy because they trust you. And trust comes from developing a relationship – even if that relationship is built from content on your website.

Whenever I work in my business, make plans etc, I always think about people. I remember that it’s people that I’m doing business with not some segment of niche market (though I may use the terms). And I remember that my own clients hire not my business, but me; they hire me. While they may like, want or need what I know or can teach them, ultimately they’re working with me because of the relationship we’ve built – and are building.

Solid businesses, especially independent and small businesses are built on relationships.

That’s always been the case and it will continue to be the case going forward. Which is why I’m such a big fan of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Sure, Cluetrain’s been around a while. Yeah, many others have said the same things – perhaps even better – since. But I still like the original. I like the way it’s put together. I like that it can be definitive and yet explorative at the same time.

For me, Cluetrain remains the quintessential work on how businesses are relationships and markets are conversations. Probably my favorite section is a piece written by Doc Searls where he describes a conversation he had with a Nigerian Pastor named Sayo:

…After hearing (about ‘markets are conversations’), he acknowledged that our observations were astute, but also incomplete. Something more was going on in markets than just transactions and conversations, he said. What was it?

I said I didn’t know. Here is the dialogue that followed, as close to verbatim as I can recall it…

“Pretend this is a garment”, Sayo said, picking up one of those blue airplane pillows. “Let’s say you see it for sale in a public market in my country, and you are interested in buying it. What is your first question to the seller?”

“What does it cost?” I said.

“Yes”, he answered. “You would ask that. Let’s say he says, ‘Fifty dollars’. What happens next?”

“If I want the garment, I bargain with him until we reach an agreeable price.”

“Good. Now let’s say you know something about textiles. And the two of you get into a long conversation where both of you learn much from each other. You learn about the origin of the garment, the yarn used, the dyes, the name of the artist, and so on. He learns about how fabric is made in your country, how distribution works, and so on. In the course of this you get to know each other. What happens to the price?”

“Maybe I want to pay him more and he wants to charge me less”.

“Yes. And why is that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You now have a relationship”.

Their conversation goes on to talk about the importance of relationship in public markets. ”Transaction still matters, of course. So does conversation. But the biggest slice in the social pie of the public marketplace is relationship. Price is less set than found, and the context for finding prices is both conversation and relationship. In many cases, relationship is the primary concern, not price.”

In essence, price matters – but not as much as relationships. Just think about the recent purchases you’ve made. How often was it just about price and how often did you pay a little bit more because you had established a relationship with the seller? Branding, marketing, selling and good will all have their foundations in relationships.

So in creating your business, in running your business and in marketing your business, why not make it about relationships first? Sure, you absolutely need to know who you are, what you do, why do it and who you do it for. But once you know that, the rest is about building relationships. And relationships begin with conversation. And now, we’re back to using your website, your email list, social media and search engines to get into the conversation. This is where successful businesses are built.

What specifically are you doing to build relationships in your business? How do you nurture your current and post clients? And how to you build those relationships with prospective clients?

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from dbarronoss on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

Poke around the web and you’ll find numerous opinions on why, as a small business owner, you should be blogging.

Some say you should blog to increase your reach. Blogs can certainly help you reach a larger audience faster, and often cheaper, than your usual website. Toss in social media and you can gain a large following quickly. So it’s gotta be reach, right?

It could be. But increasing the reach of your website doesn’t mean you’ll land more clients or get more customers. The blogosphere is full of bloggers who have tons of traffic and are making pennies.

Another oft-quoted reason for blogging is search engine optimization. And it’s true, there are some pretty major SEO benefits to blogging. Blog posts tend to be more keyword centric since often they’re on a specific topic. Then there’s the backlinking opportunities that can come with a well-written blog post. So it’s gotta be the SEO factor, doesn’t it?

Well, maybe. But that’s not what I’m thinking. SEO drives traffic and while traffic is important, getting more traffic doesn’t always mean more sales. It could, but not always.

Then there’s those that say you small business owners should be blogging to grow a community around your business and create brand loyalty. I’ve been someone who’s built my businesses through conversation and relationships, so community is definitely important in building a successful business. And brand loyalty is a plus as well.

But I think that each of these are putting the cart before the horse. I think focusing on reach, traffic and community is useless unless you position yourself effectively in your market.

I’ve worked with hundreds of small and service-oriented business clients over the past thirteen years. Many have had great offers and understood copy writing. They’ve known the importance of keywords and building a following. But what they often lacked was one of the most fundamental aspects of running a business: how they positioned themselves and their offer.

Some think of positioning as just branding. Others see it as image or identity. Neither are wrong. Yet, I define positioning a little differently. I see positioning as what your target audience believes your business provides. In other words, can you clearly illustrate that you have the solution to your target audience’s problem. It’s how you communicate what you do.

But to clearly and successfully communicate what you do, you must have that clarity yourself. And that’s what blogging affords.

When you blog, you write often about your business, your knowledge, and your capabilities. You share stories about how your product or service has been uses by your customers and clients. And you provide valuable proof of the effectiveness of your offer.

Yet you also have the opportunity to let people respond to what your write. They can certainly respond in the comment box. But they also respond through how often they share your posts on Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon. They also respond by how long they stay on the page. And they respond by whether they clicked links in the post or a call-to-action at the end of the post. All of this is feedback on whether people are getting your content or not.

With a blog, you can take this a step further. You can also display your expertise in solving problems your audience face – whether personal or professional. You can offer advice on dealing with circumstances and write specifically to their needs. Then you can watch the response. If it’s positive, you know that you’re communicating well about what you do. And if not, you know that you need a bit of work.

In essence, your blog allows you to find the most effective way to communicate with your audience. It can help you refine how you talk about your products and services so that your readers can clearly understand what your business offers. But more importantly, you can use your blog to display exactly how your offering can help them solve the problems they’re facing.

The bottom line is that before you drive traffic or focus on keywords or even build a community, make sure people know what you do. They won’t buy from you if they’re not clear what you’re about. But once they are, in other words, once you’ve positioned yourself well, then you’ll find that more people will buy from you because you’re talking to the right audience in the way they want to be communicated with.

And needing work is fine. It’s what having a business is all about. You need to allow your business to never be finished – to always be changing.

So small businesses, especially, can use blogging to experiment with how they talk to their audience. With a blog, they can explore different avenues for communicating. But moreover, they can find clarity in their business.

So how are you using your blog to find clarity in yours?

(note: image from horizontal.integration on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

I know it’s a big question. And I know it’s a question that you can break down into categories.

However, for just these next few moments, don’t think about the parts of your life that you can answer yes about. And, don’t consider that you’re sort of doing what you want with your life or that you’re close. For the next few moments just answer the question – honestly: Are you doing what you want with your life? – yes or no?

For me, personally, the answer is no. May sound odd since I have pretty rich life. But I’m not doing exactly what I want with my life. Sure, I’m successfully self-employed with a business that continue to grow each year – even in this crazy economy. Yep, I’ve been blessed with four phenomenal children and the most lovely of women a man could ever dream of as my wife. What else could I want?

Yet there are areas of my life where I don’t feel settled; where I still don’t feel that I’m living to my potential. There’s even areas where I feel a bit off from my life’s purpose as though I’m wandering. And neither my wife nor I are settled on where we live. We’re grateful for our house and large yard, but we don’t feel like where we are is really ‘home’ yet.

Then there’s my business. If I keep doing what I’m doing, we’ll live comfortably for years to come. Building websites, coaching clients for marketing, business and social media strategies and helping build my client’s following as been good to us. No complaints there (and thank you, by the way).

However, it’s clear to me that I’m not fully tapping my potential. There’s so much more that I want to do; so much more I can do with my business. But it means changing things. It means getting out of my comfort zone and shaking things up a bit. It means trying something new and taking risks. Something that was much easier to do when I didn’t have a family to support.

Now by risk, I’m not talking about closing down or destroying my business so I can go after some new endeavor. That’s not risk – that’s stupidity. The risk I’m talking about isn’t about putting my life or my family in danger. Rather, I’m talking about the risk that puts my comfort level in danger. It’s my comforts that keeps me where I am. And while being comfortable isn’t bad or wrong, it can keep me back from growing my business and improving my life.

William James, the pragmatic American philosopher once wrote, “Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second. Give your dreams all you’ve got and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.”

Yet, to find our second wind, we have to get out  of our comfort zone. To get outside our comfort zone we have to be willing to push ourselves past our fear, past our disbelief, past our self-limiting thoughts and continue striding toward our dreams. If you can walk a mile, you can strive to run a mile. If you can run a mile, you can push yourself to run two. In other words, with a little learning, a little striving and a bit of hard work, you can go further, faster than you ever dreamed possible.

And while it may seem fitting at this point to share with you the areas if my life where I feel I can be more, I’d rather not at this point. This article really isn’t about me, my process or my own dreams. No! This article is about you. It’s a call from my heart to yours to ask you to take a risk; take a risk toward what you really want to be doing. And work at it. Give it your attention, your efforts. Stride to your dreams…and watch for your second wind.

You’ve made it to the bottom of this article. So what will you do now? Will you just go about your day believing those limiting thoughts about what you can’t do; what you can’t have? Or are you going to take a risk in the direction of your dreams?

I know what I choose.

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from Two Steps Behind on Flickr, some rights reserved)

I’m constantly amazed at the amount of content that gets published to the web every single day

If I just count myself, I probably published a total of 100 website pages from 1997 to the end of 2006. Since then, however, I’ve published more than 2000 articles/posts on the web between my 3 websites, articles I’ve submitted, guest blog posts and content I’ve written for the membership sites I’m a resident expert in.

That’s remarkable. And if you consider that I wrote daily from the beginning of 2007 until some time late 2008, it’s even more remarkable that I’ve produced that much content. Interesting thing is I’m not close to being as prolific as many of the bloggers out there.

But what’s happening with all this content? How are people using it once it’s published? Or two weeks later? Or a year later? Is there something more we can all do with our content then just publish it online and move on to the next post? Perhaps there’s something more we can do with all this content – something that generates income.

What I suggest is package up some of this content and create informational products. Doesn’t matter whether it’s ebooks, e-courses, video tutorials or audio programs, informational products can generate massive revenues. For instance, I know a number of small business owners who are making mid-to-high five-figure incomes each month off of a handful of electronic products they’ve developed. That’s every month. That’s a lot of text-link ad click-throughs.

Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we should sell just any old content. Nor do I suggest that we should stop producing free content to put on our blogs. Not at all.

But think about it. You’re taking the time to write useful content. What’s more, people are enjoying and gaining benefit from yoru content. Why not package it for them as themed pieces and offer it at a reasonable price? Seems logical, doesn’t it? Not only does it give you a chance to make a little cash off your writing, your ideas, your knowledge; but it also gives people who love your work a chance to support you. Everyone gains.

Yet there are many reasons you may want to consider creating an info product. Here’s five:

1. You probably already have the content for an info product. If your blog content is niche focused, it’s likely you already have content to create an info product from. All you’d need to do is compile your posts, organize them and do some edits and you’ve got an ebook that you can sell.
2. You’re going to be writing content for your blog anyhow. Maybe you have some content for an info product, may not. But your future blog posts (podcasts and vcasts too) can be crafted to be the content that makes up the core of an info product.
3. People want what you know...and they want it the way you explain it. If you have people finding and reading your blog, and if you’re number of feed subscribers continues to increase, this one should be obvious. They’re all reading because they like and want what you’re writing.
4. Your readers want to support you. Contrary to popular belief, people want to support you. Give them a way too. If you put up a ‘donate’ button, they may click it and make an offering – but how much. Instead, offer them more value by producing a product and they’ll support you even more by not only buying but possibly spreading the word as well.
5. Info products can increase your readership. Create a product – whether free or for sale – and bloggers will likely write about it. If they have it, they may review it. If they enjoy your blog, they may promote your products. Either way, an info products gives people something of great substance to share with their readers.

There are other reasons, for certain. For instance, your info product will always pay you on time – something I know some ad services don’t do. Or that your info product offers very long-term passive income potential regardless of pageviews. Not to mention, the info product is yours and once it’s created you get all the revenue generated.

And if you’re wondering how to get an info product developed, published and distributed, I happened to have written about that for you already.

So what’s stopping you from using your blog to create an informational product?

(note: image from users_lib on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

Lots of people are in business for the same reason. Heck, if you’re a coach, holistic practitioner or any type of service provider, it’s likely that at least part of the reason you’re in business is because you want to help people.

There was a study done at M.I.T. a few years ago* in which the increase in brain function was measured with a number of different stimuli. Basically, what they were trying to find out is what sorts of things get the brain excited. What they found was that the #3 most brain-exciting stimuli was money…#2 was sex.

But the stimuli that recorded the most brain activity – most excited the brain – was altruistic behavior. In other words genuinely doing stuff of purpose for other people. Like me, you may say, “sure, that makes sense.” But the reason I remember the study is that altruistic behavior got more than twice the response in brain activity as sex did. So doing things of meaning for people creates a massive biological response in our brain in comparison to sex. To me, that says something.

How do you feel about your work?

Just stop and think for a moment – how do you feel when  you do something for someone else? Not something you’re forced to do. Not something you’re even paid to do. Think about when  you go above and beyond what people expect from you to give them something they weren’t expecting. How does that make you feel?

Define it anyway you like, but doing ‘good deeds’ in a genuine, caring manner, makes you feel pretty good. I know it makes me feel good. I can even feel the added bounce in my step and my overall good feelings. Could this be an experience of what our brains are experiencing when we do something for another person?

My guess is yes!

What’s more, I would venture to say that there’s a measurable, hormonal response in our bodies when we do things for others. It’s probably been studied somewhere, I just don’t know about it.

So what’s it all mean for my clients?

What I’m getting to is that every time you interact with a healing or coaching client, you have the opportunity to do something good for them; you have an opportunity to make a difference in their life. And if you’re in business to make a difference in people’s lives, why not be aware of it? Why not try to do it more often? Why not look to help your client in a way that better’s their life – rather than just give them the service they’re paying you for.

This is something I, myself, had to recently be reminded of. Not that I wasn’t doing things to change my client’s lives – I was, I get feedback on that point all the time. What I was forgetting is why I got in business building websites and coaching clients.

It’s easy to get bogged down with business

And that’s what happened to me. I started being a website designer, a business coach, a marketing advisor or a social media consultant (all things that I do) rather than remembering that I was in business to make a difference in people’s lives.

You see, I figured out long ago that I could take things I was good at and use them to help individual business owners (like coaches, healers, etc) better their lives. For instance, when I build a website, I put my client’s business goals at the forefront. This often means that their websites get them more client, which increases their income and makes their life better. And that’s because for us independent business owners, our personal lives are directly tied to our business lives, making it difficult to have a peaceful life when you don’t have a solid, dependable business.

That’s why I’m not a website designer, a business coach or a marketing advisor

I may use those titles and even do the work required of each. But I’m in the business of making people’s lives better. I do it through building websites for my clients and teaching them how to use them effectively to get more clients as well as how to do all sorts of things better in their business. That’s my means.

But my end is that through what I know I can make a difference in my client’s lives.

I’m just glad to be reminded of what my own business is really about. It changes how I see who I am, what I do and how I do it. It brings a deeper sense of satisfaction for my work and a stronger caring for my clients. And, perhaps most important, it reminds me to consciously look for ways I can make a difference in my client’s lives.

How are you making a difference in your client’s lives?

If you’re providing a service of some sort, the impact you have on your clients is making a difference in their lives. Do you see that yourself? Is it something that happens as a result of the work you do? Or is it something you’re consciously aware of as you work with clients?

I’d love to know how you’re making meaning in your client’s lives.

Let’s talk about it.

*note: If you know of this study, please forward me details on how to find it. Thanks

(note: image from HEREFORDCAT on Flickr, some rights reserved)

Whether it’s been remodeling my kitchen, building a pole barn, learning to kayak or developing websites, I’ve been one of those people who like to do things myself. Usually I read a little, research a little, make a plan and jump right in. And it’s worked pretty good – most of the time.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with doing everything yourself. It’s certainly serviced me well. I’ve learned a great many things and have gained a number of skills over the years. And the confidence I’ve gained in doing things myself has led me to take on projects I might otherwise shy away from doing myself.

It’s also meant that sometimes things don’t go so well. Sometimes I waste more time and spend more money than I would have having a professional help me. For instance, redoing the lighting in my kitchen during a remodel. What would have taken an electrician and his crew less than a day took me 5 long days doing it myself.

So while I’m definitely an advocate of doing it yourself, there’s times when doing it yourself isn’t wise…

What are you willing to do?

Planning for success is one thing. Executing for success is another.For instance, going back to my kitchen remodel, when I think of tiling my backsplash behind my countertop, I cringe at the idea. Now I’ve tiled before, so I know how. And, I know just enough to know that the backsplash is more tedious and time consuming because of all the little detailed cuts involved. So I hired that job out.

It’s the same in your coaching or healing practice. There’s plenty of things you should be doing to increase your reach, market your business and get more clients. But how much can you really do on your own? How much time to you truly have to learn it all on your own? More importantly, how much are you willing to do on your own?

Knowing when to get help.

To be successful with your business – meaning getting more clients, or selling more products or courses – it’s important to know when you can realistically do it on your own and when you need help.

With most coaches or healers I speak with – many who aren’t my clients – it becomes painfully obvious rather quickly that the reason their businesses aren’t full of clients is because they’re trying to do too much themselves. They believe that by doing it themselves they’re saving money and increasing their bottom line. The thing is, nothing could be further from the truth. The real truth, though it’s difficult even for me to admit all the time, is that…

You can’t do everything well that you do yourself.

It’s a hard truth to swallow sometimes, but it’s true. Trying to do everything in your business yourself will lead you to going crazy, wanting to quit or working so much that you never enjoy the reasons you began working for yourself in the first place. None of these are good. All of these lead to burnout and little success. And most of us know what that looks like.

Take marketing, for an example. You know you need to market your coaching practice to eventually end up with more clients. But what you do? How do you market effectively? How do you reach the people who are looking for what you offer?

And once you do, how do you convert them into leads, move them along into becoming prospective clients and then convert them into paying clients?

All this is a process. Each step has a number of proven solutions and task that can help you land more clients. But which do you choose? And if you do choose a program to follow – such as Robert Middleton’s Action Plan approach or Mark Silver’s Heart of Business model – how do you know you can even implement what they’re suggesting?

It’s okay to get the help you need.

It really is. Not only is it okay, it’s necessary to get help in order to be successful. Apple, Inc knows this which is why they have a Board of Directors from diverse backgrounds. Richard Branson of Virgin fame knows this which is how he can run dozens of companies under the Virgin moniker and have nearly all of them successful.

A little closer to you and I – every single person you know who’s been successful, either offline or on, has done so because they’ve asked for help from people. The gurus of marketing, whose programs you’ve probably bought – have learned what they know from other marketing experts and then adapted it for their own business. The highly successful coaches out there have hired people to teach them how to be successful and grow their businesses to such levels. Even your friend from your coaching course has likely hired someone to help them learn how to build a website or write marketing copy or build a list.

Somewhere along the way, those who are successful have asked for and gotten the help they need.

So what’s stopping you from getting the help you need?

Truly? What’s stopping you?

Is it the cost? Just ask yourself how you expect to make more money all on your own. Can you do it? Well if you can – forget what I’ve said and get to it. But if you can’t then you need to seek out someone who can help you. Failing to do so is actually costing you money in lost opportunity and growth.

I went through this one myself and realized that if I paid a coach (a really good coach) $2000 per month for their help that in a few short months I’d be making enough to cover what I was paying him – meaning I’d be breaking even. And everything after that would be increased profit for me. So I figured, if he can show me how to make back his fee in a few months, then he could show me how to make much more than his fee. And it’s worked.

That’s why I say that if you’re not getting the help you need – it’s costing you money. It’s costing you lost growth

Is time the issue? Well, that’s something that just has to be broken through. Time is an issue for every type of business owner – coaches and healers included. You simply have to make time to work on you business while you’re working in your business. I say it that way on purpose. Working in your business is all the stuff you do to get paid – work with clients, bookkeeping, followup, etc. Working on your business is visioning, planning, developing new products, etc.

You must be working on your business to grow. It’s so vital to your growth that if you don’t, you won’t. Meaning, if you’re not working on developing new parts to your business, then it’ll be very difficult to make more money than you are now.So you need to set aside so many hours each week for doing things to expand your business. And what should those things be? Not to be trite, but that’s why you’re asking someone to help you – so it can be specific for you, your vision and your business.

Whatever is stopping you from getting the help you need, push it out of the way. You can find someone who will help you. Just be sure to find someone you trust, who  you communicate well with, and who you feel you can collaborate best with toward reaching and increasing your business goals.

Can I help you? Possibly. Best that we have a short phone conversation first to see if we’re a good fit for each other. But even if we’re not, keep searching for someone who is. It’s just that important! But if you want to talk with me, here’s how to get a free consultation.

Are you currently getting help from a coach, a business consultant, an advisor, a marketing guru? How’s it been? And if not, why not?

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from H4NUM4N on Flickr, some rights reserved)

And one of the most popular ways to get a website is by using one of the do-it-yourself website services – such as GoDaddy’s Website Tonight Service.

Many of these do-it-yourself services sound great. Just think about it, these services let you select your own website design, add your own content, and publish your own website. Sounds pretty easy (though often it’s time consuming) What’s even better is often the price. Usually for under $20 a month you can have a website.

But what’s the trade-off? Is there something you’re missing with these cheap packages? Or is there something potentially detrimental to your coaching or healing practice? Do you even own your own website?

The Story of Lisa, Stay-at-Home Mom & Life Coach

Those are some of the questions Lisa and I talked about last week when she called me asking about getting a website for her new life coaching practice.

Lisa is a stay-at-home mom with two young daughters – one in second grade, the other four years old and not in school. She’s a mom first and a life coach second. For her that means she wants to have a small number of life coaching clients booked each month, but not so many that she can’t care for her daughters’ needs. So she doesn’t need some large, expensive website. She wants to be able to edit her own content without spending a lot of time, as she calls it, ‘being techie.’

After looking around the web her first thought was to use GoDaddy’s Website Tonight system. “It’s great,” she told me. “I can choose a design, add my own content and then publish it. And the costs are very cheap – just $10 per month.”

Coaching Websites on The Cheap, Oh the Limitations

What she was saying is true – she could get a website for just $10 per month. And GoDaddy isn’t the only one who offers services like this. You can get a website from Yahoo! Small Business, SiteBuilder, 1and1 and just about any major hosting company for less than $20/month. Seems like an amazing offer, right?

By price, it may be. But for the average life coach, business coach or holistic practitioner, is it the right option for your business needs?

Well, as Lisa and I began talking about what she wanted to do with her website – both now and in the next year – some things about this $10/mo website became clear.

• First, Lisa would have to choose between GoDaddy’s handful of designs – all of which looked dated, flat and, as she put it, ‘unprofessional and unfinished.’
• Second, Lisa would be limited to the colors that were already provided by each of the GoDaddy designs. So she couldn’t really make the site feel, in any way like her.
• Third, she was limited to a number of pages based on her plan. Need more pages than your package – the monthly fee goes up.
• Fourth, because of the colors and layout, her logo wouldn’t fit on the designs.
• Fifth, she couldn’t add the features – like a newsletter signup form – to her GoDaddy website, as far as she could see (though if you pay more monthly, there is a widget system available that will let you add outside web code like forms)

Ask the Most Important Question

Those five she got on her own as we started talking. But was the fifth point – and the most important point of all – didn’t come out until she asked me this question:

“Dawud, if I want to stop using GoDaddy, what do I need to do to move my website?”

The Biggest Problem with Do-it-Yourself Website Services

That’s when I had to tell her that the biggest problem with these services is that you can’t move your website – because your website is not yours! That’s right, that coaching or healing website you’ve put so much of your time and effort into isn’t yours – you don’t own it. GoDaddy does.

She said, “What do you mean it’s not my website, I’m paying for it?”

It’s true, she is paying for it. She’s paying for the hosting on GoDaddy’s servers and for the privilege to use their templates for her design. But she doesn’t own any part of the design itself. So once Lisa stops using GoDaddy for hosting, she loses her website all together. The only thing she can retain is her content. But only if she gets it off “her” website before closing the account.

Most people who use these do-it-yourself services don’t realize that if you decide to host elsewhere, be it for development, service, pricing, etc, you loose your site. So in essence, you’re either stuck with the service they initially chose or they have to start all over when they want to move.

This isn’t a bad situation for a personal or club website. Even for some small, brochure-style business sites it’s fine.

But for any business owner – a coach, a healing practitioner, etc – who wants their website to be a hub for growing their business it’s certainly less than ideal. Not only do you not own your website, it often difficult or impossible to alter the designs you can choose from to accommodate the needs of your growing business. What’s more is that you’re forever held captive by the service you’re paying monthly – stop paying equals no website.

If You’re a Coach, Healer or Other Type of Service Provider, You Must Own Your Website

The bottom line, really, is that as a business owner:

• you want to own your website.
• you want to be able to customize, update, alter and change your website without limitation.
• you want to be able to customize your look and feel of your website to match you so that your audience can get a solid feeling of who you are.
• you want to be able to move your website around without penalty if you have poor service from your host (does happen).
• you want to be able to easily add new content, pages and make edits any time you want – without limitations.

And as I said earlier, you can get a business-ready, fully-functional, easy-to-edit website without spending thousands and thousands of dollars. Want to talk about how, just contact me.

As a Good Coach, I Want to Be Fair

To be fair, there is one advantage to using do-it-yourself services…start up costs. You can often get a website off the ground for a very small investment – usually under $50. This may work well for you if you have little cash flow as you’re starting your business.

If you choose that path, my advice is the same to you as to my dear friend Lisa…Get a professionally designed website as soon as you have enough cash flow to do so. The investment will pay dividends even in the smallest coaching practice. Especially if your designer has the skills to help you develop and execute a web-based strategy for growing your business.

My advice: own your website right from the start. Go through the development process with a designer that can really help you craft your site into a marketing hub for your business. You really can’t measure the gains from working with a professional.

And, you can contact me anytime to discuss your website needs and how they can get met on for your specific situation and budget. And trust me, the best solution isn’t always working with me. The best solution is the one that’s best for you. I can help you with that – even if we don’t work together.

So, have you used a do-it-yourself website service yourself? What was your experience? How did you find it limiting?

Let’s talk about it.

note: image from Alexandra Moreau Photography on Flickr, some rights reserved)

So what is it exactly that separates you from the life coaches or business coaches you see being more successful than you?

While you may think that successful coaches are such because they have some advantage over you – think again. Sure, it happens sometimes that a business coach has the right connections and almost falls into success. Or that a life coach just finds the perfect niche market that’s been waiting to be lead.

But most of the time their success came because of a few simple principles that they practice in their business every day. None of these are difficult to learn. None of them are difficult to do. Yet each of the five steps I list below are essential to having success as a coach. Follow them and you’ll find that you’ll accomplish more than you probably thought was possible!

Step One: Keep your eye on the goal

You know how it goes. Let’s say you develop and market a new coaching program for your clients. When you start, you’re filled with enthusiasm. But time passes and while you’re still happy about the project, but you start noticing the difficult things.  More time passes and you’re no longer enthusiastic at all. However, you keep going because you know it has potential. Finally, you start to question why the heck you are doing this in the first place. Then it happens.  A new coaching project pops up. You feel excitement start to build again, but for this new project instead of your current one. You decide this one will be MUCH better, and jump ship to pursue this new, exciting opportunity. Sound familiar?

Fortunately, there is an easy remedy for this. Commitment!

I know, that seems too simple, but it’s true. Setting clear, realistic goals is essential to your coaching success. As is being committed to completing the journey whatever it takes. If you continually bail out on your goals, you are training yourself to believe that your goals are not important. And as your goals seem less important, you will be tempted to quit before you even start. Instead, set daily reminders about your goals so they stay fresh in your mind and you will stay encouraged to achieve them. Make the resolve to finish what you start – no matter what – and you will be shocked at how much you can accomplish!

Step Two: Manage your work efficiently and don’t procrastinate

If I could only tell you one thing about how to manage your coaching workload, it would be to make a plan and stick to it as much as possible! Proper planning is the key to saving time and getting things done. Without a plan you’ll find that days and weeks go by without you accomplishing much of your goals. Usually your work will suffer. And I guarantee you without good planning your coaching practice will suffer. So prepare ahead of time, ideally the night before. Make a prioritized list of things that need to be done on a day to day basis and resolve to finish those tasks no matter what!

For some people, completing all the tasks on their prioritized list will be easy. However, others may run into procrastination issues. Why do people procrastinate?  Often times, they are trying to avoid a difficult task. It’s no secret that tasks that take longer are less desirable than those that can be completed quickly.

Many people decide to do desirable tasks first, regardless of how important these tasks are. The problem with this is that people sometimes fall into the trap of unconsciously allowing themselves to be consumed by enjoyable “busywork” instead of more important tasks.

Making a resolve to finish the biggest, most important tasks first (enjoyable or not!) will give you a sense of accomplishment that will make the other tasks on your list seem like a breeze. Do this, and you will keep procrastination at bay!

However, others procrastinate for deeper reasons. Sometimes procrastination is due to fear of failure. No one wants to be embarrassed by a lack of knowledge or skills, so it’s easy to try to avoid doing those tasks that make you afraid or uncomfortable. However, it’s important to realize that motivation comes from within. Coming to grips with personal issues is the first step in realizing why you procrastinate. Once you do so, you can start taking steps to chance.

Step Three: Learn from criticism

Let’s face it, it can be hard to hear someone tells us our faults as a coach. But criticism can be much more useful than you may think. If you take the time to listen and evaluate various criticisms, you’ll often find the keys to reaching your full potential as a life coach.

It really is in your best interest to accept the criticism, apply the suggestions, and grow throughout the process instead of allowing yourself to become defensive or upset. I’m not suggesting it’s always easy to do. I struggle with certain types of criticism myself. And none of us like to hear what’s ‘wrong’ with us or our coaching practices. But if you can wade through the difficulty and adapt to the feedback, you will find jewels hidden in the mix.

By learning to accept criticism, you will see yourself grow in ways you never thought possible.

Step Four: Keep a positive outlook

In order to achieve success as a coach, a holistic practitioner or any other sort of service provider, you need to think positively about yourself and your chances for success. Many coaches mistakenly believe that being positive and thinking optimistically is just part of someone’s personality – either you’re born an optimist or you’re not! But this isn’t true at all. Optimism is an acquired habit. It’s a skill that can be learned and developed – and then used to motivate your and your coaching practice forward.

In order to become optimistic and motivated, you need to become conscious of  ’that little voice inside.’ I’m not being smug here. You know the voice. You even could tell me what it says to you sometimes. And I know you’ve pushed it away whenever it made you feel weak or small.

But now it’s time to listen to what it says in situations. Catch yourself saying something about what’s going on. If it’s negative,  immediately stop and put a positive spin on it. So a negative thought like “I don’t know how to market my coaching practice” could be changed into “I can learn how to market my coaching practice.” Try doing this for a month, and I think you will be absolutely amazed at how energized you are about not only your work, but your life in general!

Step Five: Leave time each day for reflection

This is way more important than it sounds. Self evaluation and self reflection is something every coach, every healer and every business owner should be doing on a daily basis. How else can you know whether your day was efficient and successful?

And since it’s so easy to get caught up in the motions of ‘go to work, see clients, come home,’ you want to do something to breakdown the monotony on it. You need to break the patterns of ineffectiveness to create more effectiveness – lack of success to create more success. Truly successful life coaches and business coaches know that reflection is one of the best ways to keep yourself on the fast track to success.

Try this exercise:

At the end of the day, try to reflect back on the hardest part of the day, then ask yourself the following questions:

• What did I learn from that experience that will help me in the future?
• How can I that experience to help improve myself or my future?
• How can I do better next time around?

And really be honest with yourself. If you’ve been screwing off, then admit it to yourself. Then go back through each step and take something you can do from each. Just remember that there is always room to learn and to grow into greater and greater levels of success. Your self reflection time will pay huge dividends in your coaching and your personal life. Not bad when one thing can reach many aspects of your life. Just remember to do it daily – even if only 5 minutes.

To sum up, being a success coach is really not a mystery – not at all. These 5 steps are a beginning. And, they’re a powerful beginning. There’s enough in these 5 steps to double your business in the next 12 months. I’m not kidding about that. You just have to do the steps, use them – apply them to the best of your ability. If you miss a day, then miss the day and start again the next. But don’t leave them behind.

Here’s to all the success you could ever want.

I’d love to hear what you’re doing now as a coach to create the success you want. Something? Nothing? You have no idea?

Let’s talk about!

note: image from m4r00n3d on Flickr, some rights reserved)

Do you know that you’re not really marketing your coaching practice to a target audience, that you’re not communicating to a niche market, and that you won’t find your next coaching clients if you ‘engage a marketplace?’

It’s so true. Yet most of the websites that promote life coaches seem to think that’s exactly what they’re doing – talking to a market or an audience.

Is your life coaching website getting you coaching clients?

If you ask a life coach whether their website is getting them coaching clients – most often the answer is no. I know this for a fact because I teach coaches how to use their websites – really their entire web presence – to build a following and get more coaching clients. And most of the life coaches I work with come to me with website copy that is trying to speak to an audience.

So if you’re not speaking to an audience, who are you speaking to?

Now let me clarify for a moment. I do use terms such as target market or target audience all the time. Sometimes I add purposefully add ‘the people in your target audience’ to a statement. And, every single time I say talk about markets or audience you can assume I’m saying ‘people.’ And to be even more specific, I actually mean talking to a single person – one-by-one – over and over so that you’re really talking to thousands of individual people.

And this, it seems, is where life coaches – and business coaches, spiritual coaches, leadership coaches and just about any other type of service provider – get their marketing all wrong. You’re not talking to a market, you’re talking to people.

Your coaching clients are not an audience, they’re people.

Of course you know this. But do you use it in marketing your coaching practice? Do you think about it when  you’re speaking with a new potential coaching client? And do you keep it in the forefront of your thoughts when you’re making decisions about your business?

If not, you need to. You need to remember, all the time, that you’re talking to people.

People aren’t interested in hearing from businesses.

Are you? Do you want to hear from a business or would you rather hear from a person?

Well, you potential coaching clients aren’t any different. They don’t want to hear from a business. They don’t want to talk to a service provider. And seldom do they seek coaching.

Now that’s not to say that don’t want coaching or that they can’t benefit from working with a life coach. That would be like saying that you shouldn’t eat vegetables because the don’t taste good. That’s not true.

But what is true is that you, as a coach promoting how your coaching service can benefit people, want to know what people want. More specifically, you want to know what the people you can best serve through  your coaching practice want, need and even expect.

Show your future coaching clients who you are

The way to do this isn’t by crafting more enticing marketing messages. It’s not by creating some fancy sales materials or producing some slick product. Rather, you meet people by first being a person yourself. Show them your human side. Let them see that you’re not just a coach who runs a business and wants to get more clients. Instead, show them that you’re a human being who cares about people and want to serve them by helping them overcome their problems and concerns.

And there we find the most important point – meet the people you want to serve – the people you can best serve – where they are. They’ve found your coaching website most likely because they’re seeking answers, wanting help, looking for direction or needing to solve a problem in their life. Meet them in it and then show them the way out. This is what makes an effective coaching website.

Just remember, people are seeking answers and direction, not marketing messages and sales pitches. Meet them where they are.

As a life coach, or any other sort of coach, how are you best meeting the people you want to serve with your coaching practice?

Let’s talk about it.

note: image from caruba on Flickr, some rights reserved)

Most of the time the coaches give me answers that have to do with getting more traffic to my website, getting more people on my list or getting enough coaching clients. The interesting thing is even my other clients – healers, therapists, authors and other service providers – give me similar answers.

While it true that as a life coach you may need more traffic to your coaching website or you need more coaching clients in your practice, it may not be the most pressing problem in your coaching business. And often, getting more traffic to your coaching website isn’t.

But for most of my coaching clients, the most pressing problem can be elusive. This is because usually the most pressing problem in your business has nothing to do with your marketing or generating traffic to your coaching website. Rather it usually has to do with how you actually DO your business.

Think about it for a moment.

Let’s say I could triple the number of contacts you get from your coaching website in the next month (which is possible, by the way). What would happen? Could you actually manage having that many more potential coaching clients contacting you about your coaching services? How effectively would you be at converting these potential clients into actual coaching clients? Or would you end up dropping the ball on a whole bunch of your potential clients?

If you’re like most life coaches I’ve spoken with, you likely believe that more people contacting you means more coaching clients paying you.

Yet, that’s not always the case. More often than not, you need to prepare yourself, your business, your business processes and your coaching practice for this sort of growth. So you need to know how to deal with such a large influx of potentially new coaching clients. Which means to continue to have a successful coaching practice you must have solid systems in place to manage these sorts of situations.

Now how these systems get created is neither difficult nor overly complex. It’s simply a matter of knowing what your business problems are and what you need to do about them in order to grow your coaching practice. After that, you simply figure out how to adjust your already existing business practices to support the growth. But if you don’t make adjustments to how you do things, the growth you experience will likely not be significant and will almost certainly not be sustainable. So if you want to get more clients in your coaching practice, you must consider how you’ll handle not only the coaching sessions, but all the things that happen to gain that coaching client.

So as a life coach, how do figure out what your most pressing business problems are?

The easiest way is through Reverse engineering. Start with the end result. Consider what challenges you’d face if you had double, or even triple, the number of people contacting you about your coaching services, for instance.

Another way to find your most pressing problems is think about the task in your coaching business that you least enjoy doing. It’s pretty likely that you’ll find some issues there. For instance, there was a timein my own business when invoicing my clients was a pain for me. Of course, it presented a huge problem for me that I dreaded doing the thing that got me paid. So I had to look at this and find a new way to invoice my clients – a way that would be easier and much less time-consuming. I found my invoicing solution and now I can invoice clients so quickly and easily that I rarely even think about it, let alone dread it.

So you want to look for the things that aren’t working in doing your business. Find the holes in your coaching practice and fill them. To fill those holes, start thinking in reverse and consider what you’re doing well, don’t enjoy or simply don’t know how to do. Start there. Consider all the steps along the way. Write it all down, turn it upside down and now you’ve got the outline for a plan. Focus on the issue closest to where you are now, and you likely have, at least one of, your most pressing business problem.

Plan your coaching practice for success

We so often tell our coaching clients to plan for success. Why couldn’t that mean imagine the success you want and work backward to where you are today? It’s a little secret – and it works!

What is the most pressing problem in your coaching practice? In your business? And what are you doing about it?

Let’s talk about it!

note: image from tashland on Flickr, some rights reserved)

Want To Increase Sales? There’s almost limitless methods for doing so.

Be in front of your audience when they need you.

That’s it. That’s the key to increasing your sales. Think about it, when you’re at a restaurant, do you care with the bathroom is? Not til you need it, right? Or an ATM. You likely pass dozens of them every day and don’t notice them, right? But what happens when you’re out of cash? Every ATM comes into focus. What’s more, you might scurry to find one.

So many small business owners don’t consider this when they market their business. They work hard on their vision and business plan. Then they focus on their offer and how best to communicate that offer to a target market. Ideally, they’re wanting to position themselves as an expert in a select niche market.

But no one cares that you’re an expert until they need an expert. In other words, no one cares that you can solve a set a problems until they are faced with those set of problems. Then, they go out and look for a solution.

As a business owner, you want to find the most effective ways to get your business, your expertise, your solutions in front of people when they need it.

I know what you thinking…how do I know when people need what I have to offer?

The simple answer is, well, you don’t. But you can spend time identifying a clear niche in which to spend your marketing efforts (and budget). And you can use search engines, forums, social media (blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc) and your website to make yourself more visible to people as a whole. The more people know what you do, the more potential for your work to passed on to someone who needs it.

For instance, you can use SEO and SEM to target specific key phrases that people may be searching for when they’re looking to solve their problem. But be specific and highly targeted. If you train poodles, you likely aren’t going to get much return for optimizing your site for dog trainers. But if you optimize your site for poodle trainers in New England, now you have a specfic niche you’re targeting. And when people need their poodle trained, and live in New England, you’ll likely get found.

Same is true with social media. Use your blog and profiles on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, among others, to establish your expertise. Then openly share with people who you are, what you do and who you do it for. If they don’t need your services, they may know someone who does.

And there’s other approaches as well – forums, blog commenting, article submission, etc. The list goes on. Just remember that you want to present your expertise at the time when people most need it. If you allow that to be your guiding light, you won’t be marketing in the dark. And more people will buy – today, even.

Are you targeting your audience at the times they need you most? If so, how’s that working for you? And if not, why not? Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from Troy Holden on Flickr)

Many small business owners focus on creating the best products and services based on their skills, knowledge and abilities. Then they go out and find people who need or want what they have to offer. Sometimes it works and you build a successful business around it.

But more often, especially, it seems, with small business owners in either service-based business or who are just starting out, it doesn’t work. They create services, for instance, that they would want or that they believe other people would need. They build some structure around their ideas, create a marketing message, build a website and off they go – feeling like they’re going to change the world.

Then reality sets in. Few people visit their website. Fewer, yet, contact them about their offerings. If they don’t get discouraged and give up, they often go looking for either a business coach, or take courses in marketing and copy writing. In turn they get sold the idea that if they were just clearer in their marketing message, people would flock to their business.

Now that’s true, to some degree. The the clearer your messaging and the better your copy writing, the better your overall marketing can be. So it’s not a poor plan to use a business coach (some consider me one, so I can’t knock it), or focus on your copy writing. But that doesn’t always relate to selling more of your services and making more money.

What’s missing is your audience.

Now when you take a good marketing or copy writing course you should get plenty about identifying the demographics and psychographics of your audience – and that’s good. You likely get as well a hefty dose of customer-focused writing – and that’s certainly helpful. It’s just both are premature.

The question so few small business owners ask themselves is – what do the people in my target audience know they need? Let me repeat that – what do they know they need? That’s the key to marketing – finding out what they know they need. Not just what they need, but what they know they need (I’m repeating this on purpose).

So is there any reason not to develop your services and products around what your audience knows they need?

How would meeting your audience where they are change your business?

Let’s talk about it!

(note: image from Sidereal on Flickr)

If Mr. Shaw is correct (and I think he is) then all progress – hence all success – happens when you adapt your surrounding conditions to meet your specific situation.

Think about what that means in your business.

So often, small business professionals get caught up in playing follow the leader. They find some system or program – some marketing philosophy or method for copy writing – and they follow blindly. They think that because this method has worked for others, that it’ll be great for them.

What they don’t see is that when we’re always a follower we’re always at the whims of the what’s around us. And when the marketing plan doesn’t work for them they either figure they’ve not learned enough or that they can’t learn it at all. So they either spend more time as a follower or they quit.

But successful business – whether you’re a coach, consultant, therapist, widget maker, etc – isn’t found in following the leader or conforming to the masses. Successful businesses are built out of stepping out of line and finding your own path.

I liken building a successful small business to hiking, which I’ve done plenty of in my short life. Sure, you can follow the trail that’s been cut and see some great scenery. It’s easy, just walk and let the trail be your guide. Or you can decide to bushwhack; getting off trail and taking a risk. It’s when I’ve gone off trail that I’ve discovered the most serene mountain lakes, amazing meadows full of blooming flowers, glaciers hanging off unimaginable cliffs and easy access to ridge lines that lead to breathless views – none of which I would have seen if I’d remained on the trail.

The same is true with your business. Be willing to cut your own path. At the very least, explore off trail. Don’t just be a follower who adapts his or her self to the conditions that already exist. Rather find your independence, become your own leader and make the conditions that surround you work for you and your business.

How can this be pragmatic? Don’t just settle for following someone else’s marketing plan. Learn it, adapt it to your business – rather than your business to it – and leverage what you learn to generate more business. If you’re learning copy writing, don’t just learn the formula. Instead, learn the formula and then figure out how you can adapt it to your specific way of communicating and to your specific business model.

In other words, own it. Own what you learn by making it part of you and adapting it to how you work best. Learn it, adapt it, own it! And be as unreasonable as your business success allows.

So what can  you do today to be a little unreasonable; to go off trail or to adapt your surroundings to your business?

And if you’re unsure, consider how you’re allowing your surroundings to dictate how you do your business – and share it in the comment box.

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from mutbka on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

Are you one of those business owners who’s not tracking your business activity, tracking your marketing or recording how you spend your time each day working on your business?

If you are – you’re certainly not alone. Very few small business owners are measuring their business activity these days – especially on the internet. And even fewer – way fewer – have an established system for tracking and evaluating the effectiveness of each of the most important parts of their business.

This is a HUGE MISTAKE!

I don’t mean the sort of mistake where keeping your business opened is threatened – though it could come to that. I mean that you’re missing an absolutely fundamental part of running a successful business. Just ask anyone who is successful. They’re going to tell you that they key to their success is:

…doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

It doesn’t really matter your field or your niche. If you’re an engineering firm who makes $10 million per year, you need to track what’s happening in your business. If you’re a life coach making $40,000, you need to track what’s happening in your business. And if you’re just getting started, you want to track what’s going on in your business.

Why? Because what you don’t measure – doesn’t exist.

Strong statement, I know. But just consider it for a moment: Can something that’s not being measured really, truly exist?

Now before we start playing a game of semantics about what measuring means – let’s consider a couple of definitions:

To measure means to ascertain the size, amount or degree of something by using a marked standard or by comparison with a known object.

AND

To measure means to take an exact quantity or fixed amount of something.

So you don’t have to use a ruler to measure something. Your eyes measure everything you look at all the time. You don’t need a ruler to know the difference between a long board and a short one. The same is true when you look at a number of something. It’s usually pretty easy to gauge the difference in number between a line of ants on the ground and the number in and around an ant hill. So you’re taking measure of things all the time – that’s how our minds catalog our experiences. Hence, everything you see and experience in your life is because you’ve measured it in some way.

This is why I can feel comfortable in saying, “what you don’t measure – doesn’t exist.”

So let’s move from looking at the world around us to looking specifically at your business. Do you know how many people view your website? Do you know where they come from, what pages of your site they’re reading most and what pages of your site they’re leaving most from? If you have a website – you should. Just those four things alone can tell you a great deal about the effectiveness of your website in marketing your business.

Now, if you’re not measuring and looking at those statistics, are they happening any way. Sure, there are. But do you know anything about it? No, you don’t. This is why I say they don’t exist. The events are happening – xx number of people are reading your website each week – but because you’re not tracking that information and then using it to evaluate your marketing, the visitors really don’t exist to your business. Without knowing whether you have 10, 100 or 10,000 visitors this week, you can’t really know what they did on your website. And if you can’t really know what they did on your website, then you can’t use any of the information their visits left you about how well your website is doing. And if you can’t use that information, then the visitors really don’t exist. They don’t exist because you don’t know anything about them that you can use in your business.

The same is true whether you have a website or not. Following website statistics isn’t the point here. Rather, the point is to have a system setup to evaluate your business at different times, in different manners to find out how well you’re doing – and – to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.

That’s why every business should begin with clear business objectives or goals in mind. And those goals or objectives should be prioritized in importance so that you’re always leading with the most important objectives. Once you know your objectives you want to create a method for measuring and evaluating the efforts you’re putting out to meet each of them. This way, you can know the most important thing to know in marketing:

…what’s working and what’s not.

So are you measure your business efforts? If so, what are you doing, how often to you review your marketing? And have you found it necessary to stop doing an activity because it wasn’t helping you reach  your business goals?

Let’s talk about it.

Oh yeah…I’ll be speaking live on this topic further during The Self Employment Telesummit beginning on September 10th. I’m joined by some amazing presenters such as Molly Gordon, Pam Slim, Mark Silver, Sean D’Souza, Sonia Simone, Nancy Marmolejo and a host of others. Seats are filling up so register today.

note: image from ppdigital on Flickr, some rights reserved)

If you have a small business website it should serve one purpose – generating sales

Sure, it should inform your visitors of your offers and give them social proof of your abilities through testimonials. Without a doubt, your website should generate and capture leads. And most importantly your business website should move your visitors toward buying your offers.

While there’s nearly infinite ways to do generate sales, a few necessary pieces need to be in place on your business website in order to generate more sales effectively. Most of this is really common sense. Yet after the more than 20 Business Website Assessments I’ve done in the past month, these basic elements are consistently being missed on small business websites.

Yet, these basic elements are so fundamental that you want to be sure you’re not missing them on your website.

1. Ineffective use of Page Titles

Page titles are part of the HTML code on your website. Usually you’ll see the page title in the top bar of your web browser window.

While it serves a number of purposes, it has two very primary, and important, functions. First, it is an important piece in keyword optimization for SEO. No effective SEO strategy is complete without including keywords in the page titles. For effective SEO, each of your business website pages should have unique page titles. These page titles should include the keywords that you’ve optimized for each, specific page.

Secondly, and perhaps even more important, your page titles are used as the main, linked text in search engine results. It’s the large blue text you see in the graphic below:

Effective page titles tell people what they’ll find when they click through the search results into your website page. Ideally, your page title will show a benefit the searcher can gain from visiting that page. The best page titles will increase click-through rates from search results, increasing your visitors, your leads and potentially your revenue. Spending any time SEO without optimizing your page titles for conversion is a poor idea.

Of the 26 websites I’ve evaluated in the past month through my Website Business Assessment, every single one of them were not using page titles effectively. If you have a small business website, you may want to look into this.

2. No Clear Business Objectives

Your small business website is nothing more than a marketing tool. On its own, there’s nothing magical it can do. It’s merely a servant to how you want to use it to market and promote your business.

As a marketing tool, your business website needs to be considered as part of your marketing plan. when you create a marketing plan you identify objectives – the things you want to accomplish through your marketing efforts. Then you set out to do the tasks that will accomplish the objectives.

Your business website, as a marketing tool, needs to also have clearly identified business objectives. In other words, you want to be absolutely clear what your goals are with your website. Sure, it could be getting more clients. But there’s a process involved in getting more clients. And your website is a place to implement that process.

But to go a step further, it’s not just enough to state your business objectives and then go about using your business website to accomplish them. You need to prioritize your business objectives. You need to decide that this one objective is the primary mission of my website. Then do everything you can think of to get your primary objective in front of your website visitors, blog post readers and anyone else who will see your website.

After you identify your primary business objective then decide on the second and third most important things you want people to accomplish on your website. Make each of those visible at the most opportune time in your business website. Just make sure they don’t trump the primary objective.

An example that came out of the 30-minute follow-up call I do with every Business Website Assessment came from an alternative healer. She had her signup box for joining her email list on every page of her site. Yet, when we spoke, her primary objective was a free consultation time. The email signup was important – actually her secondary objective – but was not as important as the free consulting time. So we discussed ways that she could adjust her website to make the free consulting time more visible and more appealing. What’s great to here is that after two weeks she’s gotten 6 more inquiries than she usually had.

Be clear, ultra clear, with your business objective, prioritize them and then design your website around them. Doing so, you’ll find much greater success using your business website to promote your business.

3. Few or No Enticing Action Steps for Visitors to Take

In every case in the past month, the websites I’ve evaluated have had few, if any, direct action steps. Action steps, I define, as what you want your visitors to do when they arrive a to a certain point on your website page. Every page of your website needs to have clear, easy-to-do action steps – even your bio page. Actually, especially your bio page.

To have easy-to-do action steps it helps to have clear business objectives. If you know the objectievs of your website, the action steps you want your visitors to take simply become an extension of your primary, secondary and tertiary objectives.

The key here is that the steps are easy for your visitors to complete. Remember, this is the point of conversion. The action you’re asking your visitor to take will directly engage them in your business. So this isn’t the time to get cute with language or too wordy. It’s not the time to explain a bunch of things about what you can do for them. Simple, easy-to-understand, to-the-point content is what you want here.

The best action steps are the ones that combine your business objectives with the wants of your visitor at the moment. When their wants meet your objectives, you’ve got a conversion – a list signup, a consult inquiry, a seminar registration, a product sale, etc. Ultimately, your website’s copy should almost always be about moving people toward an easy-to-do action step.

Now, I keep saying easy-to-do for a reason. On three occasions this past month, I’ve done Business Website Assessments on business sites where the action steps visitors were asked to take were way too complex. In one case, the primary objective was an email list signup in exchange for a free product. The business owner, wanting to get as much from the conversion as they could, insisted that first the visitor signup for a list, then verifiy their email address, then fill-in a “short”, 16 question survey, then verified their email address again, and then they finally got the giveaway product.

All this was explained up front so there was no misdirection. But the business owner wasn’t getting many signups. So I suggested moving the survey in the process to the end and don’t require it. Deliver the product and then offer the survey. I spoke with the business owner yesterday and in the past week he’s tripled his list signups and doubled his survey respondents. Make the process easy.

And…make it easy to find. Don’t hide your action steps like I’ve seen on a number of websites.

Of Course, There’s More…

And there always will be. But when it comes to having an effective business website for your small, service-based business, these are the three most common mistakes I’m seeing during a Business Website Assessment. They also happen to be three of the most critical pieces to having a successful business website.

Perhaps it’s time you find out what’s working and what’s not working on your website. Or what you can do to make your website more effective in reaching your business goals. I’ve got a few slots available still for Business Website Assessments. Signup today.

Are you making these mistakes with your business website? How about your blog? What will you do to change it?

Or do you feel your website is dialed in and performing exactly how you want it to? Tell us how you did it.

Let’s talk about it.

note: image from TopTechWriter.US on Flickr, some rights reserved)