Internet Marketing For Solopreneurs

I have been participating in coaching social networks and lists for many years, and have seen many new coaches asking the following questions:

How to become a certified life coach?

How to become a life coach?

And many more questions just like these.

These are all good questions, but what these coaches should be asking about is:

How do I get clients for my coaching business?

This is the most important question that all the coaches - new and seasoned - should be asking. Without clients, it does not matter what kind of title, preparation, education or certification you have. Without clients you will not be able to share your coaching gifts with anyone.

So my challenge to you today is to fist ask yourself - how do I get clients for my coaching business? If you don’t have a satisfactory answer to this question, ask others. Ask your coach. Ask your colleagues. Ask people on social networking sites you are a member of. Look for information on getting clients, so that you can build a successful business and share your coaching gift with others.

Don’t be satisfied until you create a plan for getting clients online. This is the only way you will become successful as a coach.

Biana Babinsky

Many business owners are very concerned about their revenues in today’s economy. They usually have only one source of revenue - their services. So when just a few of their clients stop paying for their services, their revenue takes a big hit. If your revenue will take a huge hit if just a few of your current customers stop doing business with you, listen up! You must create more income that you can
add to your revenue model. Doing this will help you shield yourself from revenue going down dramatically when just a few of your clients decide to stop doing business with you.

Here are other income streams you can add to your business immediately:

- E-books. An e-book is a digital document that is anywhere from 30 to 500 pages. Create e-books on topics that are of interest to your target market and increase your revenue with every e-book sale.

- Teleclasses. Teleclasses are classes that taught over the phone. Teaching teleclasses is a good way to demonstrate your expertise and increase your revenues at the same time.

Material taught and discussed during teleclasses can be reused to create special reports, audio and other products.

- Audio Products can be delivered in two different formats. They can be instantly downloaded from your web site any number of popular audio formats, or you could burn them onto a CD and physically ship the product.

Either way audio products will help you increase your revenues since many people like listening to
information instead of reading it.

- Affiliate Programs. Even if you do not have your own products yet, you can still increase your revenue by promoting other people’s products. You can do that through affiliate programs. When
you register for someone’s affiliate program, you can promote their products and receive commissions every time you sell a product.

You can earn 40% commissions on my very popular products when you sign up for my affiliate program at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zsaff

- Multimedia Products. You can create a large multimedia product by combining a few different formats of the same product. For example, when you teach a teleseminar, you can bundle together the teleseminar, its audio recording, a transcript, etc, and create a large multimedia product that you can sell.

- Advertising. You can sell advertising on your web site, blog and in your newsletter and create yet another income stream.

- Brainstorm and get creative! There might be another product that I haven’t mentioned but that you can create and use as an income stream for your business.

As you can see, there are many different products you can create for your business. Having many products and many income streams will help you keep up your revenues in any economic times.

Join my online business mentoring program to discover how to create different products and make money with them. You can start your membership for just $7 at http://www.MarketingSalad.com

Biana Babinsky

I have seen thousands of business owners do it. A business owner, let’s call her Carol, offers a great service, and she designs a whole system for her clients to get through her service and achieve amazing results. Carol sees the amazing results her clients are getting and, quite correctly, attributes the results to the system that she has created for them.

However, when it comes to her own business, Carol resists setting up a marketing system. Instead, she just tries using different marketing techniques, hoping that one of them will turn out to be the technique that will bring her all the clients that she would ever need.

She tries blogging, article marketing, social networking, search engine optimization, using each technique for a few days and then moving on to the next one. She starts her own list for which she now has 24 or so subscribers.

None of the techniques have really brought in customers, so three months later she goes back and starts from the very beginning - blogging, article marketing, social networking, search engine optimization, again for a few days each. Her list is now at 39 subscribers, but again, nothing is happening.

This is exactly what I have seen many business owners do. They rapidly switch between many marketing techniques hoping that one of them will provide all the clients that they need. None does, so they start over again, still hoping for clients….

The problem here is that they have no system in place for using online marketing techniques effectively. It is not enough to just apply the techniques; you must have a clear understanding of why you are bringing people into your sphere of influence, what happens with those people and how can you continue to communicate with these people to turn them into customers.

Here is a Three Step Online Marketing System For Getting Clients that you can use:

Step 1. Use online marketing techniques to identify your target market and drive your target market to your web site.

In this step you will apply online marketing techniques such as social networking, article marketing, business blogging, etc. But you need to apply them effectively, so that your target market will recognize that you can help them and visits your web site.

Step 2. Turn the web site visitors into leads. The web site visitors that you have acquired in Step 1 are now browsing your web site. Now either they will leave your web site and never come back or you must turn them into leads on the spot. You can accomplish this by offering them something of value in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter.

Step 3. Turn your leads into clients. Again, you must have a system in place for this - you must have an effective follow-up system that helps you turn your leads into clients.

Create an Online Marketing System for your business today. The System will make a difference between doing the same thing over and over again and not seeing results and actually starting to get clients from your online marketing efforts. I will be teaching how to create an Online Marketing System for your business during the How To Get More Clients Online Teleseminar Series. Register for the Teleseminar Series now at
http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zmarketing

Biana Babinsky

I have been getting questions from many coaches lately about how they can use Twitter as a part of the online marketing strategy for their coaching business.

I really enjoy networking on Twitter! It has been useful in many different ways - I have done research, connected with potential clients, found joint venture partners and am working on a few new projects, all thanks to Twitter!

Here are five tips to show you how to use Twitter to promote your coaching business:

- Do Market Research. Connect with members of your target market and see what they are talking about. Are they experiencing issues that you can help them with? This is an opportunity to find topics for new hot products that you can create!

- Get Help And Information On Many Different Topics. I follow different people in different industries, who share lots of useful information. My connections share information on social networking, marketing, new interesting web sites, trends, and lots of other things.

- Create Personal Connections. Twitter gives you an opportunity to connect 1-on-1 with many different people, from potential clients to people you can do joint ventures with to people who you have always admired but have never talked to.

I love being able to chat with people whose newsletters I have been reading for a long time!

- Let Your Followers Know About Your Blog Posts & Articles. Don’t keep your blog posts and articles to yourself - share them with your followers! Twitter is great for sharing your blog posts and articles with other members.

And you can use twiterfeed to have your posts post to Tweeter automatically, saving yourself time. For example, this blog post will be appearing on my Twitter page.

- Promote Your Teleseminars And Other Events. You should spend a lot more time on networking, helping and connecting with others than on promoting yourself, but it’s perfectly fine to let your followers know about your teleseminars and other events you are holding from time to time.

Just don’t make ALL of your twits about your events - your followers will lose interest and un-follow you.

There is a ton of other things you can do on Twitter - create joint ventures with other business owners, get newsletter subscribers, find people to teach teleseminars with, find business and marketing resources, find vendors, ask for recommendations, etc. It is a great social networking web site that can help you promote your coaching business. Check it out and join it!

And for more information on how to use Twitter to promote your coaching business, get the How To Use Twitter To Promote Your Business Audio Guide at http://www.marketingsalad.com/tt.html

Biana Babinsky

I publish a weekly newsletter on getting clients online and I am often asked how this newsletter helps me and my business succeed.

There are many ways that my newsletter helps me:

- My newsletter positions me as an expert

- My newsletter helps me showcase my expertise

- My newsletter helps me build relationships with my subscribers, every single week

- I re-use the articles that I write for the newsletter on my web site to get more traffic

- My newsletter brings in more clients and more sales. Every time I send out my newsletter there I see many product sales.

All of this from just sending out a weekly newsletter!

It is no wonder that when I discuss the above with my clients, they want to take action and start their own newsletter! So their next question is how to get more newsletter subscribers.

I use many strategies to get subscribers. I believe that the best to get subscribers is to have a system in place for using online marketing techniques to get subscribers.

First in the system is your free gift - a gift that your target market would love to receive. Offer this gift to everyone who subscribes to your newsletter.

Next, tell everyone about this free gift, so that they subscribe to receive it! For example:

- If you are doing an off line speech or a presentation, pass around a sign-up sheet to enable participants to receive your gift and get on your list.

- If you have a business blog and are blogging, have your gift offer prominently displayed on your blog.

- If you are writing and distributing articles, make sure that everyone who is reading your articles is able to sign up to receive the gift.

Share the information about your free gift with everyone in your target market! You can dramatically increase your product sales and build your client roster if you have a large list full of your target clients, ready to hear from you.

If you don’t have a system of getting people on your list yet, I recommend that you sit down today to brainstorm how to create such system and how to use all the marketing that you are already doing to build your list.

Want to learn my favorite strategies for building a list? Join me for the Top 5 Strategies To Build Your List Teleseminar at http://www.marketingsalad.com/build-list.html

Biana Babinsky

Some coaches I know have 2-5 clients, have a few people subscribing to their list every month and have 100-500 web site views every month. Of course they would like MORE - more clients, more subscribers and more web site visitors.

How can they go from 2-5 clients to 15-20 clients, to hundreds of people joining their list and to thousands of web site views every month?

Here are my thoughts on this:

First off, congratulations! If you have a few clients, people are joining your list every month and you have steady web site traffic, it looks like some of your marketing is working!

The next step is to track which marketing is working, because it is very important to know what is actually producing results. So my first question is: Are you tracking your efforts to find out EXACTLY which of your marketing efforts are bringing in the results?

If some efforts are already working, why not increase these efforts and see if they bring you more results? Marketing is not about creating breakthrough, award-winning campaigns. Marketing is about finding out what works for you and your practice and using what works to get MORE clients, subscribers and web site traffic.

My next recommendation is to streamline your marketing and create a marketing system that you use to move people around your marketing funnel. Create a system for getting people to your web site ==> getting them to subscribe to your newsletter ==> using your newsletter to offer them coaching and your other products.

You can do this by:

- Driving qualified traffic to your web site. Article marketing is great, but you need to use it consistently in order to get more web site traffic. I recommend my clients to submit at least 5 articles a month to article directories.

Other ways to drive traffic include search engine optimization, having your own blog and blogging on a consistent basis, participating in online networking where your target market networks and more.

- Once your get the traffic to your web site, make sure you can convert it into newsletter subscribers. Create a nice free gift that you can give away, such as a free report, audio recording, etc and promote it on EVERY page on your web site. Doing this will ensure that no matter where people have entered your web site, they can subscribe to your newsletter.

- Use your newsletter to promote your services and products. Now that you are adding subscribers think big about what they need, create products that they need and offer them to your subscribers.

As you are working through your online marketing strategy, see if you want to publish your newsletter more often. When you publish your newsletter every two weeks, or even weekly, you will be able to share more with your subscribers, get them to know you better and get them to buy your products and services.

Need more help? Check out more blog posts on list building:

- How To Use Your List To Get Clients

- Coaches, How Often Do You Send Out Your Newsletter?

- What To Do With Your Social Networking Traffic

More information on list building is available in the Grow Your List Home Study Course available at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/znews

Biana Babinsky

Linda Dessau has just written a book, The Customizable Style Guide for Coaches Who Write: Look Smarter, Write Faster and Get Better Results from Your Writing. Since I always talk about how coaches need to be able to write well to be able to market themselves, get clients and create products, I decided to interview Linda about the book and about why writing is so important for coaches. Here is my interview with Linda:

1. Linda, why did you decide to write this book?

There were a few reasons, Biana. I’ve heard from a lot of coaches over the years that they’re hesitant to write, or hesitant to publish their writing, because they’re worried it’s not good enough. I want to help them get over that, because I LOVE helping coaches polish up their writing. But if they can’t get over this hump we can’t get to this stage.

Another big reason was so that I would have a desktop resource for all of the things I was constantly looking up as I was editing. As I heard once in a seminar, a great editor doesn’t know everything, but she knows where to look to find the answers.

2. Could you please explain what a style guide is?

Sure! A style guide is basically a collection of writing rules and guidelines that you can refer back to when you’re writing anything for your business (including articles, emails, special reports, books and more).

3. Why do coaches need a style guide?

It will save you time and energy while you’re writing, because you’ll have a clear cut answer to the writing questions that come up. And if you’re like me, and the same question pops up over and over again, it’s guaranteed that you’ll handle it the same way you did the last time it came up. If you always refer back to the same style guide, your writing will have a consistent, professional appearance and that helps to reinforce your credibility and your brand. And Biana, you and I both know how important those things are for a successful coaching business.

4. What’s the one mistake you wish coaches would stop making in their writing?

Trying to say too much. The coaches I’ve worked with are so prolific and creative, and sometimes they don’t know where one article ends and the next one begins. When it comes to articles, book chapters or each section of a special report, try to make just one main point, and then support it with sub-points.

5. What did you learn about writing a book that you can pass along to your clients? What is your one recommendation to a coach that wants to write a book?

Here are a few key lessons I learned:

- Books can change a lot from beginning to end, so draft your outline and then make room for the book to become what it’s going to be.

- Talk about your writing process as often as you can, with people who will offer enthusiastic support.

- People are incredibly generous! My volunteer reviewers gave me such a valuable perspective as the eyes of my potential readers.

- Invest in the support people you need to get the best finished product– I worked with a coach, (Kathy Mallary), an editor (M. Lisa Forner) and a designer (Victoria Vinton).

6. Tell us more about the book: is it a book or e-book? Are there any bonuses included with the book?

This is a print book only; I really wanted coaches to use it as a desktop resource. There are online bonuses as well, available on an exclusive readers-only website. There’s a list of troublesome words and phrases to watch out for, writing tools such as a sales page generator, a template to create a customized style sheet, links to all of the resources in the book and updates and additions as they become available.

7. Who is this book aimed at?

The Style Guide was written exclusively for coaches, and the entire second half of the book is dedicated to mapping out the specific writing projects that coaches use the most. That being said, I noticed that the virtual assistants who reviewed it for me found it just as helpful. I’m sure most service professionals and other small business owners could relate these guidelines to their own writing needs.

Looking for more information about Linda’s book? You can learn more about it and get your own copy at The Customizable Style Guide for Coaches Who Write: Look Smarter, Write Faster and Get Better Results from Your Writing.

Yesterday, August 6th the blog tour kicked off in great fashion with Chris Dunmire at Creative Slush. Great start Chris!

Tomorrow, August 8th, the blog tour continues with Teresa Morrow with her own interview with Linda.

Are you having a hard time explaining what coaching is to potential clients? Many of my clients ask me how I describe what coaching to my own potential clients and connections. Every few weeks I have a client, who is a coach, ask me how I deal with explaining what coaching is to someone who I want to become a client.

Well, first of all, I do not explain what coaching is to my potential clients. And I don’t recommend that you do that either. It will take a lot of time, your potential clients will get confused, and most importantly of all, they are not interested in coaching.

Your potential clients are interested in what’s in it for them, in what you can do for them. They are interested in results they will achieve when working with you.

For example, at networking events, I tell people I network with that I help business owners get more clients for their business. This is short, very much to the point and makes the person interested right away. This is because I just told them how they can benefit from working with me.

Notice, I didn’t start explaining what coaching is, how it works, etc. What I want the person to remember is how they will benefit from working with me. That’s it.

Take the focus away from yourself and tell your potential customers who you work with and how you can help them. For example, if you are a parenting coach, people you are networking with would much rather hear that you “help parents get along with their teenagers” than hear a long explanation of what parent coaching involves.

Having a clear message about what you do that you can deliver to potential customers is going to make a huge difference to your business. When your potential clients hear about benefits they can get from working with you, they stop and listen. And if they like what they hear, they hire you.

My How To Create A Marketing Message That Will Get You Clients Audio Recording gives you the step-by-step process for creating a marketing message for your business. You can get it at http://www.marketingsalad.com/marketing-message.html

Biana Babinsky

I received this question from a coach recently:

“I am a career coach and have been coaching one-on-one for the past few years. I decided to start creating group programs and a few months ago I offered a Coaching Group option to my newsletter subscribers. Basically, I envisioned it as a group of 5-10 people who would get together on the call twice a month and ask me questions about their careers. I promoted this a lot - through a networking group, my newsletter, web site, seminar sites - but could not get a single participant. What am I doing wrong? How can I get people to sign up for my coaching group?”

Biana’s Answer: What strikes me from your description is that you are just offering a Career Coaching Group. That is not enough for me to make a decision if I need your group and if it would work for me.

Is the group for people in their 20’s, just starting their first jobs? Is it for people in middle management trying to move up? Or is it for people trying to switch jobs? Or maybe it’s for people who are unemployed and need help landing a job asap?

As you can see, there isn’t much information about who exactly you are doing this group coaching for, so your potential customers are not sure if it’s for them. And if they are not sure, they will not sign up.

So how can you create a better group coaching offer? Don’t just call it a coaching group, name it something meaningful, name it something that will communicate value and give people an idea about who it’s for, so that they can self-select either in or out.

For example, my How To Make Thousands Of Dollars With Teleseminars program tells you right there, in the name the value and who it is for. It teaches people how to create extremely profitable teleseminars. So, if you are in the market to learn how to create effective teleseminars, you will know from the name that this program is for you.

So do not call it a coaching group. Instead, create a very specific program for your target market that helps your target market solve one of the problems that they are experiencing. To get the most people register for your group you will need to offer them something they really want. For example, if your target market are college students looking for their first job, how about a program on landing a great job right out of college.

The next things you want to do is to create a compelling sales letter for your program. And then you need to create a good marketing plan to market the program.

You need to give your target market enough information about your program, so that they can say: “This sounds like a program that will help me solve the problem that I am experiencing. I really need the solution and this program offers it to me!”

Once you get your target market to think this way, you will get many members for your group!

For step-by-step directions for creating effective and extremely profitable group programs that your target market needs, grab my How To Make Thousands Of Dollars With Teleseminars at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zteleseminars

Biana Babinsky

I was asked on one of the calls I did recently about what steps I would recommend to take for a coach who wants to take their coaching from a part-time hobby to a full time profitable coaching business.

It takes time to re-adjust and what you need to re-adjust the most is your way of thinking about what you do. When you have a hobby, your priority may not be making money. When you run a business, your priority is to have a profitable business that brings in income.

You also need to re-adjust the way you think about marketing. Marketing is the cornerstone of your business and helps you bring in clients. If you are not marketing your business you will not be able to have a successful business, it’s that simple.

Here are some marketing tips to help you take your coaching from a hobby to a successful coaching business:

- The very first thing to do is to decide on a good target market for your business. Before you can bring in clients consistently, you need to decide on WHO these clients are. After all, if you do not know who your clients are, how are you going to bring them to your business?

Make a decision about who your target market is. Knowing your target market will help you make other decisions and will help you simplify your marketing. And we all want to simplify our marketing :)

- Decide on marketing techniques you’d like to use to market your coaching business. It is great if you want to use blogging, and social networking, and article marketing, and public speaking, and e-mail marketing to promote your business. However, don’t start using them all at once!

The best way to market your business is to pick one technique, master it, start using it on a regular basis and then move on to the next one.

And remember, you don’t have to use every marketing technique you have heard about. For example, I have clients who enjoy public speaking, who speak often and for whom public speaking is one of the most effective techniques for getting clients.

On the other hand, I have a client who says that she would never ever do public speaking, it’s just not for her. Her favorite marketing technique is blogging, she is good at it and she uses her blog to generate interest in her business.

Pick the techniques that you enjoy applying and you will be more successful with them.

- Have a marketing plan! Create a plan for bringing in more clients, marketing your business, etc. You are much more likely to take action if you create a plan and put it on paper.

Members of my online business mentoring program have access to thousands of dollars worth of resources on creating a marketing plan, picking a profitable target market and using online marketing techniques to promote their business. Get immediate access to all these resources by joining us at http://www.MarketingSalad.com

Biana Babinsky