Internet Marketing For Solopreneurs

I just finished reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, a professor at MIT.

Since I tend to read everything from a marketing perspective, it was interesting to see that many of the things he discussed were applicable in business and online business. For example, one of the first examples that he discusses was how different choices for an online subscription will influence buyers’ decisions.

Other discussions that I found interesting were that many people would prefer something that is free (versus something better, but not free), why we are willing to spend a lot of $$ on a cup of coffee, and why paying more money for pain medicine will make you feel better.

A very interesting look into why consumers behave the way they do. Check out the book at Predictably Irrational

Biana Babinsky

I have heard many business owners say: “I want a nice looking web site for my business.”

They find a web designer and the web designer delivers exactly what the business owner asked for - a nice looking web site. The business owner really likes the look and feel of the web site, but after a month or so the business owner notices that nothing is happening with the web site. No one is using the web site to find out about the business and contact the business owner about his products and services.

It seems that when a business owner says: “I want a nice looking web site”, what the business owner really means is “I want a nice looking web site that brings in clients and markets my business”.

Once the business owners realize that their nice looking web site does not deliver clients, many opt to hire another designer for a re-design. I have talked to quite a few business owners, who have had their web sites designed and re-designed many times, all without producing the desired result (services and book/product sales).

The truth is, having a nice looking web site is just not enough to get sales. In addition to having a nice looking web site you need to heavily market it - optimize it for search engines, have a newsletter list, write and publish articles, start a blog and more.

Getting a web site designed is just like getting a brochure made for your business. It is nice to have a brochure, but until your potential customers see it and decide to buy your book, nothing will happen.

Exactly the same is true for a web site. Until you start getting your target customers to come to your web site and stick around long enough to buy your products and services, nothing is going to happen either.

Some web designers may include some marketing into their design package, but many don’t. This means that it is up to you to get your web site marketed. Here is what to do:

- Make sure that you know who your target market is. Your web site should speak to your target market, so your first step is knowing who your web site will be speaking to.

- Design a marketing plan for your web site. Yes, you may not have a web site yet, but knowing how you will market it will help you in the long run.

- Decide what you will need on your web site in order to market it properly. This may include a blog, pages optimized for search engines, articles, etc.

- Now, talk to web site designers and pick the one that will help you not only with design, but with marketing of your web site. It is very important that your designer is aware of your marketing plan, and will be able to implement the web site-related pieces of the plan.

Need help creating a marketing plan for your web site? Join my online business mentoring program to discover how to create a marketing plan for your web site.

Biana Babinsky

About Biana: Biana Babinsky is the online business coach, expert and author who teaches coaches, consultants and other business owners how to get more clients and make more money online. Join her online business mentoring program at http://www.MarketingSalad.com for online business coaching, support and masterminding with other members.

A few years ago a client of mine asked me when he will be able to stop marketing. “Well”, he said, “I am marketing to get more clients. Once I have enough clients I can stop marketing, right?”

I said: “Imagine that two of your clients decide to stop working with you. You will immediately need two new clients, but you will not be able to get them immediately because you are not marketing.”

After talking about this for a bit, we came to a conclusion that he will never be able to stop marketing.

Has anyone ever stopped marketing? Only if they closed their business.

Think about commercials you see on TV every day. The commercials that we see on TV are commercials for huge companies whose names everyone knows - Pepsi, Ford, etc. Everyone knows what their name is and what they do. But that does not stop them from using commercials to promote their brand and promote their new products.

So when should you stop marketing? The answer is never.

If you do not have enough clients in your business, you need to continue marketing. But even if you have enough clients (and have more clients on your waiting list), you should still continue to market your business. Here is why:

- It takes time to convert a lead into a client. Imagine you need new clients all of a sudden, but you have no one in your pipeline. If you haven’t marketed in a long time, you will not have any leads or prospects to convert into clients, and, therefore, you will have to get started by marketing for leads and prospects.

If you always market your pipeline is always full and you always have plenty of prospects to turn into clients.

- You reach new potential clients every time you market. That’s true! Every time I market, whether I am doing search engine optimization, speak in front of a group or teach a class, I get in front of people who didn’t know about me before, but are now exposed to my expertise.

Every time you market you reach new potential clients who have the potential to turn into real clients - how cool is that?

- You get more product sales. Even if you do not need one-on-one clients, marketing is going to help you get more product sales and use your multiple streams of income to increase your bottom line.

Need help with marketing? Join my online business mentoring program, http://www.MarketingSalad.com to learn directly from me how to create a successful online business. Click here to join for just $1 for your first month.

Biana Babinsky

Biana Babinsky is the online business coach who teaches her clients how to get more web site traffic and clients online. Join her online business mentoring program to discover how to use the Internet to get over 98% of your clients! Join now at http://www.MarketingSalad.com

A few weeks ago I wrote an article on how to stay in business and get clients during an economic downturn. One of the recommendations I made in that article was to create products, such as e-books, classes, audio, seminars and more that you can offer for sale to those who don’t want to spend the money on your services.

Your products cost less than your services, so when your potential customers are not willing to spend money on your services during the downturn, you can offer them your products. This way, both of you win! Your potential customers will still get help that they need and you can still make money with your knowledge.

The products will also help you create multiple streams of income for your business, so that you do not have to rely just on your services to bring in revenue.

After that article came out, I have been getting many e-mails from readers. Quite a few of you asked
me what to do if you are not ready to create products yet, but you do want to create multiple streams of income in your business.

The answer is to use someone else’s products through an affiliate program.

So how do you pick affiliate programs to join? Here are some tips:

- Pick an affiliate program with many different products that will be of interest to your target market.

- It is even better if you already used a few of those products, because that way you will be able to recommend them.

- Join that program, learn a bit about the products, and start promoting them.

Need an affiliate program to join? I would love for you to join my affiliate program and use my popular products to create passive income streams for your business. You can sign up for my affiliate program absolutely FREE and for every sale that you refer you will earn 40% commissions. Register for the affiliate program, FREE, at
http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zsaff

And when you register for the affiliate program you will also receive an invitation to a no charge training session I am doing for my affiliates on May 6th. During this session you will discover the step-by-step process to use my products to create many passive income streams for your business. I will teach you about which products to promote and how to promote them, so that you can save time and not have to learn everything on your own.

To get an invitation to the training session, register for the affiliate program, FREE, at
http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zsaff

Biana Babinsky

Many years ago I was working on a web site project for a client. It was almost done, but there was an important part that I needed to completely finish the web site. The client needed a programming script for the web site. I wrote her a script that did everything but one thing that she needed.

It took me a long time to troubleshoot the script, but I still could not get that one thing to work. I really wanted to be done with the web site, so that I could move to the next project, but before I could be done, I needed the script to work. After spending another week on that script, I finally asked another web developer about the issue I was having. In about an hour I had a working script!

I was very excited, as the project was done! I billed the client, we checked and released the web site and I moved on to the next project.

As you can see, taking the next step is great and liberating. If you are stuck trying to figure something out and you can’t move on, here is what I recommend. Take some time and decide what this next step should be. Then, decide if you can take the step on your own, find an expert to ask questions about taking the step, or hire someone to help you with it.

For example, take a look at the next step that you should take in marketing your business. You may want to start a blog, but aren’t sure which software to use. Or, you may want to do article marketing, but aren’t sure how to get started. In this case the best way to take the next step is to find an expert who can answer your questions and recommend the best way to do that.

For the past few days I have been helping members of MarketingSalad.com, my online business mentoring program taking the next step to accomplish their goals. I am dedicating this week and next week to this task, so if you need help in finding the next step to take, come join us at http://www.MarketingSalad.com!

Biana Babinsky

About Biana Babinsky: Biana is the online business coach, expert and author who teaches coaches, consultants and other online business owners how to get more web site traffic and clients online. Join her Online Business Mentoring Program at http://www.MarketingSalad.com to learn how to market your business better online!

Is your business in balance? Or are you working on 25 projects and 15 marketing initiatives at once, all while thinking: “I should really be using this brand new social networking site that I just heard about!” ?

If that sounds like you, it is time to re-think how you do business and see if you can prioritize your actions, while still accomplishing everything.

Here are some of the things I do in order to achieve more balance in my business:

- Automate everything that I can. Lots of things can be automated online - scheduling of blog posts, automatic product fulfillment, ezine software, etc.

Take action: Take advantage of technology to automatically get people subscribing to your list, downloading your products, registering for your classes, etc.

- Outsource tasks that I don’t enjoy doing and can’t automate.

Take action: Take a look at everything you are doing and see which ones can be outsourced.

- Long term scheduling. I always know what’s coming up for my business for the next 6+ months. That way I can plan the tasks I need to do, marketing I need to do, etc.

When you know what’s coming up long term, you can schedule backwards. For example, if one of your goals is to have an ebook written by the end of October, 2008, you know that there are tasks that need to get done every month/week/day in order for this to happen.

Take action: Create your marketing plan!

- Multiple streams of income. Creating products, such as seminars, ebooks and my mentoring program has really improved my work/life balance.

I can have as many or as few one-on-one clients as I want. (I usually have 3-7 clients at any given time), and I don’t put my marketing efforts into getting one-on-one clients.

Instead, my marketing is concentrated on getting leads for my business.

Take action: Create multiple streams of income for your business!

Biana Babinsky

About Biana Babinsky: Biana teaches coaches, consultants, virtual assistants and other business owners how to get more clients, create multiple streams of income and run a successful online business. Join her mentoring program at http://www.MarketingSalad.com to discover how to create a successful online business.

And, more importantly, is it worth telling? This is what an article on CNN is asking, Everybody has a story — but is it worth telling?.

While the article is specifically about memoirs, I think it applies to other genres as well. As someone who works with authors on self-help and other how-to non-fiction titles, I always recommend to my clients to do research to see if there will be demand for their book/e-book before they actually write it.

That way if you decide to go ahead with your idea, you will see how realistic your projected numbers are, and how much demand there is in the market for your idea.

Biana Babinsky

One of the most important concepts in online marketing is a landing page. A landing page is a page where your visitor lands to do something. It could be a page where your web site visitor lands following a link from your PPC ad. It could be a page where your web site visitor lands to purchase your ebook. In short, it is a page, where your web site visitor comes to take action.

The best rule to remember about a landing page is one action - one page. What is an action? An action is the action you want your web site visitor to take on the landing page. The action can be subscribing to your newsletter, buying an e-book or registesting for a telseminar.

The most successful landing pages don’t try to be all things to all people. Rather, they concentrate on getting a user to take one action and one action only. When someone lands on a landing page like that, they only have two options - take action or leave.

So, what about your landing pages? If your landing pages are not producing results, it is time to take action!

- Review your landing page. Are you only asking your web site visitors to take one action per page? If you are asking them to take more than one action, make a change to ask them take just one action.

When I helped a client change her landing page for a teleseminar to only have one available action to take, she was able to double her sign-ups!

- Review your web copy. The sales copy on your landing page is very important as well. Does it convince your web site visitor to take action? If not, you need to improve your sales copy to make it convince your visitor to take action.

- Review your marketing. How do you promote your landing page? Do your promotions help you qualify your visitors, so that the ones who do come to your landing page are already targeted customers?

I will be talking about effective landing pages during this month’s MarketingSalad.com teleseminar. You can register for it at http://www.marketingsalad.com/websites.html

Biana Babinsky

Do you need more clients for your business? Getting more clients is a goal of many business owners, but not all of them are able to bring more clients to their businesses. This is happening because many business owners are not using the right marketing techniques for getting clients.

Many business owners market randomly, instead of concentrating on effective marketing strategies that have been proven to be able to bring in clients over and over again. I recommend that you use these three marketing strategies in your marketing plan no matter which marketing techniques you use and no matter what kind of marketing you do. Doing this will result in more clients for your business…

Continue Reading 3 Keys For Getting More Clients

This is the conclusion I came to after analyzing how thousands of coaches, consultants and other online business owners market their business online. In fact, the majority of business owners are wasting their time by marketing online.

Why is that? Many coaches, consultants and other business owners have spent hundreds (sometimes thousands!) of hours on driving traffic to their web sites. However, even though they brought traffic to their web site, they did not turn this traffic into customers. All the time that they spent on driving traffic to their web site was a complete waste of time!

So what can you do about this? How do you stop wasting time and get started with using online to actually get results for your business?

In order to do that, you need to create a strategy for how you are going to use your web site traffic. You need to have a strategy for driving traffic to your web site AND you need to have a strategy for using your web site for turning this traffic into clients. If you have millions of people coming to your web site every day, but your web site isn’t doing anything with them, you are not going to make a single penny from all this traffic.

Once you have a comprehensive strategy for dealing with your traffic AND you have a web site that implements this strategy, you are going to be able to turn your web site traffic into prospects and clients.

Stop wasting your time marketing online! Discover how to create and implement an effective strategy for using your web site to turn your web site traffic into clients during my upcoming teleseminar, How To Use Your Web Site To Get Clients at http://www.marketingsalad.com/websites.html

Biana Babinsky