Internet Marketing For Solopreneurs

It has been just twelve days since we launched the FREE 5 Keys For Getting Clients During Recession special report, and we have already had well over 2,500 downloads!

My goal is to get the report in the hands of at least 5,000 business owners this December, to help them change their marketing mindset and get clients during these economic times. That way they will be ready to get the ground running and start getting clients once January starts!

This is where I need your help. I would love it if you could share the information about the free report, “5 Keys For Getting Clients During Recession”, with other business owners. And I would like to give you a gift for doing that. Keep reading for more information.

Here is how you can share information about the report:

1. Recommend the report to a few of your contacts by letting them know that they can go to http://www.EffectiveOnlineMarketing.com to get the no charge report, “5 Keys For Getting Clients During Recession”

2. Click here to reprint one of my articles. You may reprint articles in your blog, in your newsletter or on your web site. Each article provides valuable content for your readers, so you will be sharing useful marketing information with them. The Author Box contains information about the report.

3. If you are on Twitter, please twitter about the report by letting people know they can download it at http://www.EffectiveOnlineMarketing.com

4. If you use social bookmarking tools, you can bookmark the blog post I wrote about the report,
http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/marketing/c/2008/12/04/609

If you take any one of the steps above (or you can do all of them!), I would love to give you my “How To Turn Your Visitors Into Customers” special report at no charge. This report sells for $17 on my web site, but it is yours at no charge for helping me spread the word.

Once you let people know about the 5 Keys For Getting Clients During Recession special report, fill out the contact form at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/contact/ and let us know that you have shared the information and we will send you the link to download your copy of the “How To Turn Your Visitors Into Customers” special report. No proof necessary; we are doing this on the honor system.

Thank you very much for helping me help 5,000 business owners get clients! I really appreciate it. And don’t forget to get your own copy at http://www.EffectiveOnlineMarketing.com

Biana Babinsky

This article is an excerpt from the “5 Keys For
Getting Clients During A Recession” Special Report, available for you, FREE, at http://www.EffectiveOnlineMarketing.com

I have taught hundreds of business owners how to market online and get clients. What I always find interesting is that some people who have hired me to work with them didn’t need to be taught marketing. They knew a lot about marketing, what kind of marketing techniques were available and how to apply them.

What they actually needed help with was changing their marketing mindset. Many business owners feel that marketing has an aura of sleaziness around it. They feel that marketing is somehow dirty and an honorable business owner should not be engaged in it. They don’t feel that they should market - they feel that their customers should just find them and come to them.

Unfortunately, customers can’t just find you on their own. They need to know that you are out there, that you are an expert at what you do, and that you can help them with their problems. You must market to communicate all of that to them.

The good news is, though, that marketing does not have to be sleazy or dirty. Marketing can be fun, honorable and ethical and still be effective. And the first thing that you need to do to market ethically and effectively is to change the way you approach marketing.

You need to create a good marketing mindset. This kind of mindset will not sabotage your marketing efforts, and it will help you get the best results from marketing. It will also help you identify marketing techniques that will make your marketing authentic, as well as effective. What’s better than that?

Here is how to create a marketing mindset that will help you get clients, fill up your teleseminars and multiply your profits honestly and ethically:

- Be honest with yourself. Understand that you must market to get clients and be successful. You will be able to pick how you market, but you must do something to bring in clients.

- Understand what marketing is. Marketing is a process designed to introduce your target customers to your business, to invite them to request more information and to get to know you.

- Realize that you are not pushing things on people that people don’t want. Rather, your potential clients need your help and your expertise enables you to provide that help.

Your potential clients have real problems and they need real help. When you market, you let them know that you can help them. What can be more valuable than that? You are not trying to sell them something they don’t want, but something they want and need!

- Find marketing techniques that you enjoy the most, and start using them! Of social networking, article marketing, search engine optimization, blogging, which ones do you like the most? You will get better results, make a difference for your clients and enjoy marketing in the process!

Make your mindset work for you - you will help more people, get more clients and will be happy about the way you market your business!

For more information on how to market your business in today’s economy, download my FREE report, “5 Keys For
Getting Clients During A Recession” Special Report, at http://www.EffectiveOnlineMarketing.com

Biana Babinsky

What are you thankful for this Thanksgiving? No matter what you are thankful for, don’t just be thankful around Thanksgiving. Make it a habit to say thank you every day of the year. Take the time and say thank you to your clients, vendors, colleagues, mastermind group members, and all of the people who have helped you make your business successful.

Here are four ideas to help you say “thank you!”:

- Offer A Referral Bonus. Everyone likes to be thanked for something they have done, but what they like even more is getting something in addition to the thanks. If you have people who send clients your way, why not say thank you with either a monetary bonus or a gift? People love receiving unexpected bonuses and will be more likely to refer more clients to you in the future.

You may want to set up a formal referral system to offer referral bonuses and get more clients referred to you. You can also set up a formal affiliate program or you can do this informally. If you offer products such as seminars, teleseminars, e-books, etc, an affiliate program can greatly increase your sales.

- Offer An Unexpected Testimonial In Social Media. Did you receive exceptional service from someone you are connected with on social networking web sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or others? Thank them for their help publicly instead of privately.

That way you will help the person who had provided great service for you to get more clients. This is the best way to thank them.

- Thank Your Clients By Underpromising And Overdelivering. You like your clients and you want to help them as much as you can, right? You can do that by underpromising and overdelivering on everything that you help them with.

- Just Say Thank You. This is a very simple, yet very powerful technique to thank someone in your business or life. Thank your clients, your coach, your assistant, everyone who in any way is responsible for your success.

Take a moment and thank someone today! You will be glad you did.

How are you thanking people in your business and life? Post a comment and let us know!

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

When I got online in the 90s, the Internet became a hobby of mine. I discovered e-mail and the web, forums and social networking, and really enjoyed the Internet. As I was using the Internet, I saw huge possibilities for doing business online. I started looking into running an online business. After some time my hobby became a business.

I love my business - I help business owners get more clients and make more money online. My business model is creating multiple streams of income, by offering both products and services to my clients.

As my hobby became a business, I was in need of a new hobby. In early 2000’s cooking became my new hobby. It started with me wanting to replicate different foods that I had tried at restaurants. But as I started cooking, I started to really enjoy it. I also realized that being able to cook meant that I could create food that was both healthy and delicious. Cooking has been my hobby for some time, and in this time, I have given out a lot of cooking advice and taught many people how to cook, and, more importantly, how to enjoy cooking.

And after a while of enjoying cooking as a hobby, and becoming passionate about it, I am doing it again! I am turning my hobby, cooking, into a new income stream. I just launched a new blog, Tasty Galaxy, Easy Cooking For Busy Professionals, to help busy professionals cook healthy and delicious meals. I am looking forward to developing this blog in the next months, and turning my passion into an income stream, using my online marketing expertise. Just saw that the blog is already getting traffic from search engines, and this is after being launched just last week!

I will be documenting the steps I am taking to turn this blog into an income stream for members of my online business mentoring web site, MarketingSalad.com.

To get access to all the information on how I am turning the blog into an income stream, register to become a member now at www.MarketingSalad.com

And now that my passion for cooking has just become an income stream, I will be looking for a new hobby to take up :)

Biana Babinsky

After last week’s post on Three Step Online Marketing System For Getting Clients, I got a few questions from coaches who tell me that they are using a similar system to promote their business already. They now want to leverage the system to increase the number of clients they have, and they are wondering which step they should be working on.

First, let me remind you what the Three Step Online Marketing System For Getting Clients is:

Step 1: Identify your target market and drive your target market to your web site.

Step 2: The web site visitors that you have acquired in Step 1 are now browsing your web site. Turn them into leads!.

Step 3: Turn your leads from Step 2 into clients.

So, which step do you work on if you would like to add more clients to your business? Well, there are a few different ways to look at it:

You turn your leads into clients in Step #3. Let’s say that typically you get 1 client for every 150 leads that you get. This means that for the next 900 leads you will enroll 6 clients. How can you increase the number of clients you enroll?

- If you keep the same rate of turning leads into clients, you will need to get more leads in order to get more clients. If you get 1,800 leads instead of 900, you will be able to enroll 12 clients instead of 6.

- Or, you can work on improving your closing techniques, so that you can enroll a client per 100 leads. That way, without increasing the number of your leads, you can get 9 clients out of your current 900 leads, instead of just 6.

- You can also improve the quality of the your leads. The more qualified your leads are, the fewer leads you will need to work with in order to enroll a client. If you have 900 more qualified leads, you may be able to enroll 9+ clients instead of the usual 6.

The bottom line is that there is always room for improvement in your system for getting clients for your business. If you do not have all the clients that you need yet, review your online marketing system to see which steps you can improve upon to enroll more clients.

To learn how to create an effective marketing system that helps you get all the clients that you need, join me for the How To Get More Clients Online Teleseminar Series that starts tomorrow. Register for it now at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zmarketing

Biana Babinsky

There are many advantages to planning your marketing:

- You will reach your goals faster because you map out your goals and your actions.

- You always know what to do. Instead of wasting 15-30 minutes every day just trying to figure out which marketing tasks need to be done, you will know exactly what to do.

- You will never waste your time re-doing the same thing because you will know whether you did it or not - it is all in your marketing plan.

Ready to create your own Online Marketing Plan and become more successful? Then join me for the FREE 5 Keys For Creating Your Online Marketing Plan Teleseminar this Thursday.

To register go to http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/mt/

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

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