I was very frustrated a few days ago. I had a plan to make zucchini pancakes and serve them with a Skordalia dip, a Greek dip made out of potatoes, garlic, lemon juice and olive oil. I have tried this dip at Greek restaurants, and it is always very garlicky and delicious. The pancakes were made from grated fresh zucchini, eggs, breadcrumbs and spices. They came out great - golden brown and delicious.

Then the time came to make the dip, and that is the part that made me frustrated. I had reviewed many recipes online, and they all seemed very simple. Just blend together all the ingredients, and you have a great garlicky dip. Well, I did that, except that my dip looked and tasted like drywall putty. Somehow the starch in the potatoes bound up in the food processor and created a gelatinous mess.

At first, I was really frustrated. Many recipes for the dip that I had read seemed rather simple. I am a good cook, so why couldn’t I make a very simple recipe work? But after a while I decided that there was no reason to be frustrated. I decided to do some research, and create a plan for making the dip the next time so that it comes out much better.

Are you frustrated with your business? Do people around seem to be able to be doing much more and getting more clients than you are? Learn how to stop being frustrated with your business at Frustrated With Your Business? Here Is How To Change That!

Are you frustrated with your business? Does everyone else around seem to be doing better than you are? Do they all seem to be getting clients, building their lists and creating successful businesses much faster than you? Do you sometimes feel like throwing in the towel and doing something else?

A few days ago I was very frustrated myself. I found an easy recipe for a potato dip, but when I made it, it was just a mess instead of being a tasty, garlicky dip that I expected. At first, I was frustrated. I am a good cook, and I teach others how to cook using my easy recipes. So I naturally thought that it would be very easy for me to make the dip. When the dip didn’t come out, I became frustrated and almost decided to never try making it again.

After sometime, though, I created a plan for trying to make it again. I am going to review a few different recipes again to see where I had made a mistake. Then, I will adjust the amount of ingredients that I use. And then I will try making it again.

If you are frustrated with your business, let’s put together a plan to help you go from being frustrated to getting results with your business:

- Acknowledge Your Frustrations. Everyone gets frustrated from time to time. Business is not about never getting frustrated. It is about being frustrated, understanding what frustrates you and then creating a plan for ending that frustration.

When something in your business is frustrating to you, it is a good time to take a hard look at the way you run your business and to make changes that will make your business better.

- Find The Source Of Your Frustrations. So what exactly are you frustrated about? Do you hate your web site? Does it take a very long time to get just one client? Do people unsubscribe from your list faster than they subscribe?

There are a ton of things going on in your business, and they can all be really frustrating if you let them to. But instead, create a plan to use these frustrating things to build a more effective, better business.

- Create A Plan. Now that you know which part of your business is frustrating, let’s create a plan to deal with it once and for all.

Is it your web site that frustrates you? Look into making changes to it or creating a new, better web site altogether.

Is your sales cycle way too long? Look into make your sales cycle shorter by finding more qualified leads and offering both products and services.

Can’t get any newsletter subscribers? Create a plan that helps you build your list every day.

During the free call, Four Keys For Creating Your Online Marketing Plan, I will show yo how to create an Online Marketing Plan for your business. This plan will help you attract more clients to your business. Register for the call now at
http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/mt/

A lot of people ask me how to get more traffic to their web site. After all, the more traffic you get, the more clients you will get, right? Well, it is not so simple. The more targeted traffic you get, the more clients you get. Untargeted traffic isn’t worth much. Untargeted traffic isn’t interested in your products and services.

This means that the first step you must take in getting more targeted traffic is making sure that all the traffic techniques you are using are bringing targeted traffic to your web site. Here is your plan for getting more traffic to your web site:

Decide WHO You Want To Come To Your Web Site

This is the most important steps that you will take when you attract online traffic to your web site. Before you can bring traffic in, you need to know exactly what kind of traffic you want to come to your web site.

The people that you want to come to your web site are people in your target market, it is as simple as that. When they come to your web site, you will be able to invite them to sign up for your newsletter and check out your products and services.

There is nothing worse than spending a lot of time on bringing in traffic, only to realize later that the traffic you are bringing in isn’t interested in what you have to offer.

Create Web Site Content

In order to attract traffic to your web site, you need content. If you are using search engine optimization, you need text that you will optimize for search engines.

If you are using social networking web site to bring more traffic, you need a blog to share information and then invite people on social networking web sites to read your blog posts.

The more quality content you have on your web site, the more traffic you are going to get.

Use Online Marketing Techniques To Get More Traffic To Your Web Site

I already mentioned that you need to bring targeted traffic to your web site. This means that when you are looking for marketing techniques to use to get more traffic, you need to look for the ones that bring more targeted traffic to your web site.

Get the free Four Keys For Creating Your Online Marketing Plan Audio Recording to learn about the most effective online marketing techniques to use to get more traffic to your web site.

Get the recording at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/mt/

A few months ago someone had asked me for my pesto recipe. This person wanted to make pesto and pasta for dinner. This was her first time making pesto, so I gave her my recipe, as well as some tips for making pesto. A few weeks after that, I asked about how the pesto came out. Turned out that she was so afraid that her pesto wouldn’t come out that she didn’t even bother trying to make it.

Basil and Parsley Pesto

In my many years of cooking, I have had quite a few times where the dish that I was making didn’t come out the way I wanted it to. Pasta with pumpkin came out tasting way too sweet. Salt didn’t melt completely in my chocolate chip cookies, so they ended up having crunchy salt crystals. I have severely overcooked green beans on a number of occasions. My dough didn’t rise a few times. And the list goes on. But I tried, and then I tried again, trying to correct the mistakes I made the first time.

The same holds true for my business. I have tried marketing techniques that didn’t work. I have tried them again, correcting mistakes I had made the first time. Sometimes it worked; sometimes I had to move on to the next marketing technique that worked much better. The point is that you can’t be successful until you try. Yes, you will fail sometimes, but you will succeed other times. If you are afraid of failing and you don’t even try, then I absolutely, 100% guarantee that you will not succeed.

Discover how to get away from being afraid of failing and start taking action in this article: Are you Afraid Of Failing?

Are you so afraid of failing at something that you would rather not take action at all? Many heart-based service professionals are afraid to fail at marketing. They think:

“What if marketing doesn’t work for me?”

“What if I offend people I am marketing to?”

“What if they think that my services are not worth the
money I am charging for them?”

“Who am I to teach people anything?”

After thinking all these thoughts, many service professionals decide to stay where they are and not take action at all. Their reasoning goes something like this: “If I am going to fail anyway, why should I even try?”

Well, there is one sure way to fail, and it is not taking action at all. If you are not taking action and marketing your business, you are failing at attracting your perfect clients to your business. You are failing at helping them achieve their goals. You are failing at creating the business that you love. Here is how to start taking action:

- Change Your Thinking. The next time you are planning your marketing, ask yourself: “What if I succeed?” instead of “What if I fail?”. Imagine how great you will feel when you see real results from your marketing. Imagine how great it will be to attract the clients to your business that love to work with you and who you love to work with.

Imagine knowing working with great clients and seeing them get great results from working with you. Marketing is worth doing when the end result is doing the work that you love to do, with the clients you love working with.

- Find Marketing That You Love To Do. When you love doing what you do, it doesn’t seem like work anymore. Instead, it seems like you are doing something fun every day.

There are many things that you can do that help you market your business including blogging, article marketing, search engine optimization, teaching teleseminars and many more. If you like speaking, start offering no charge teleseminars to increase awareness for your business. If you like writing, use article marketing to share information about your business.

Find the strategies that you enjoy and start taking action with them. When you use marketing techniques that you enjoy, you will get better results and you will have fun marketing!

- Take Action One Step At A Time. You know the saying, “Question: How do you eat an elephant? Answer: One bite at a time.” This saying applies to marketing as well. If an action that you need to take is “write 100 articles and submit them to article directories”, I can’t blame you for not taking action on it. This is an enormous task, and every time you even look at it, you are completely overwhelmed.

Instead, break this action into much smaller actions, such as “write one article and submit it to article directories”. Writing one article is much more manageable than writing 100 of them and will help you stop being afraid of failure and take action instead.

Happy March! I am very excited that March is here! To me, this means that spring is here and very soon flowers will start blooming and nature will come back to life.

Last month, for my birthday, we went to a great Greek restaurant. I love Mediterranean food, and there was lots of great food at the restaurant. Fried zucchini with a fabulous garlic spread, grilled octopus, Greek sausage. All of these dishes had fabulous bursts of flavors. This is why I really enjoy Mediterranean cuisine - lots of herbs and spices translate into real bold flavors in food.

Speaking of bright and bold, what kind of bold statements will you make with your business this spring? In today’s article I am sharing with you three ideas to help you make a bold statement with your business, provide more value to your clients and bring in more revenues.

Spring is in the air, even despite all the snow. Many stores have been promoting spring merchandise ever since February. The stores are hoping that the brightly colored Spring merchandise will get people excited about spring and about shopping at the stores. You can use the same technique to create excitement about your products and services.

Springtime is usually associated with rebirth and a new beginning. It’s also a particularly auspicious time to start a new marketing campaign. As warmer weather arrives and spring starts, more people will be interested in starting something new in their lives and their businesses. Offer them a compelling reason to work with you to help them start something new, and you will get new clients!

Here are three ways to start your spring marketing and get more clients:

Offer A Spring Special To Your Potential Clients

Everyone likes a special, and your offer may be just that one extra push that your potential clients need to start working with you!

Offer a discount on one of your popular products, or create a bundle of products and offer the bundle at a special price. This way your clients will get more of your products that they need.

Do Your Spring Cleaning

Not the spring cleaning you usually do in your closet, but do a spring cleaning of your current offers, products and services.

Review your lineup of products and see whether any one of your products needs to be retired. There are many reasons to retire a product - maybe your business is moving in another direction, and the product doesn’t fit anymore. Or maybe you are creating another product on a similar topic. If you find a product that should be retired, offer a spring cleaning special on it for a few weeks, and then retire it.

Doing this will help you increase your revenue and will help you finally set a deadline and retire an older product to make way for new products.

Start Using A New Marketing Technique This Spring

Spring is the time for starting something new, so get started by using a new marketing technique to bring more clients to your business.

Start a blog, start writing articles to do article marketing or finally join social networking web sites. A brand new marketing technique means a brand new stream of potential clients coming to your business.

Start something new this spring - become a new member at the online mentoring group for heart-based service professionals, and get help with getting clients for your business. Spring has started, so join now and start getting all the members’ benefits at http://www.MarketingSalad.com

I am very excited to share with you this interview with Shel Horowitz. He is the award-winning author of Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers and Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. Shel Horowitz is awaiting publication of his eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).

As a copywriter/marketing and publishing consultant, Shel helps authors, publishers, and entrepreneurs with marketing plans, book jackets, website copy, press releases, etc. He also turns unpublished writers into published authors, step by step.

Shel’s been featured in many major media, including repeat appearances in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, and elsewhere. An expert on affordable, ethical, and effective marketing, he’s been using social media marketing all the way back to 1995, and since 1996, it has brought in the majority of his income. Shel speaks frequently on social media, book publishing, frugal and ethical marketing, and business success through ethics and Green principles. He’s the founder of the international Business Ethics Pledge.

Biana: What inspired you to write your book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First?

Shel: Reading the news in the early part of this decade, when it was filled with scandal after scandal–Enron, WorldCom, and all the rest–I had an insight that the frugal marketing methods I’d been advocating for years were also highly ethical, and that success was actually *easier* for ethical businesses than for crooked ones.

Biana: How did the principles of putting people first when you market change the way you market your own business?

Shel: Well, I’ve always put people first ever since I started my business in 1981, but when I started actively talking about it, being public about it, I started to attract a much better class of client. At that time, the bulk of my business was people coming in for a one or two quick jobs, like a press release and a back cover for a book, and then they’d be gone. I still do those kinds of things, but I’ve found that more of my clients want to stay with me a while. They want to hear what I have to say about their overall marketing strategy, and hire me to carry out many more pieces of that strategy. Sometimes, they actually want me to produce their book, start to finish. This has built a nice floor in my business, because I don’t have to be in constant marketing mode when I have steady clients.

Biana: Can you give our readers your top three tips to help them transform the way they do marketing, based on your principles?

Shel:

* Follow the “Magic triangle” of honesty, integrity, and quality
* Build partner relationships with other ethical businesses that already reach your best prospects, and let them open doors for you
* When you have high standards of ethics and a cooperative attitude, you can turn customers, suppliers, industry experts, and even competitors into ambassadors for you

Biana: What’s next for you? What are you going to be working on in 2010?

Shel: It’s going to be a big year for me. First, my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, will be coming out–it expands on the concepts in Principled Profit to really see the business world through an eco-oriented lens, and unlike the self-published Principled Profit, it will have the support of a major publisher.

Biana: Please tell us more about your book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, and how the readers can purchase it.

Shel: Principled Profit may have been the first book to really look at all of these issues together. Most business ethics books are all about being ethical because it’s the right thing to do and it keeps you out of jail. That’s true, but it’s a only a little piece of the whole story. I chose to slice it differently: the focus is that business ethics is a roadmap for business success. when you look through that lens, amazing things are possible, and Principled Profit really goes through that piece by piece, with examples ranging from solopreneurs to the Fortune 100. the book won an Apex Award for best book in the marketing/PR field, was republished in Mexico and India, was endorsed by more than 80 entrepreneurs form Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield and MarketingSherpa founder Anne Holland on down–and I think this book has begun to make a difference in the way the business world is starting to think.

Through the end of the year (or until I run out of books), I’ve cut the price substantially from the original $17.50: $11.95 for single copies, and lower prices as you buy more. A whole case is just $4 per book, or $2.50 per copy (that’s 86 percent off the list price) if you buy out the stock. It makes a great holiday gift for sales and customer service people, customers, and entrepreneur friends.

Here’s the link: <http://frugalmarketing.com/newsletters/2009/11/04/a-life-changing-11-95-gift-for-the-entrepreneurs-in-your-life/>

Are you putting your heart and soul into your business, but clients just aren’t coming to you?

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So if you love your business, but hate marketing, grab this report to learn the information you need to start attracting your perfect clients to your business!

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Here is a question I have received from many coaches - “How do I get more coaching clients online?” I am sure you have wondered about that too! In this article I am sharing with you steps that will help you create a plan to get more clients for your business.

Who Are Your Clients?

This is the very first question that you must ask yourself. After all, if you do not know who your potential clients are, whom you want to attract to your business, how are you going to find them?

Create a profile of your perfect client - what do they do? How old are they? Are they male or female? What do they need help with?

Once you know who your perfect client is, it is going to be much easier to attract them to your business.

What Are You Offering To Your Clients?

If you are not bringing clients to your business, the reason may be that you are not offering what they really need. What your potential clients are looking for are solutions to the problems they are having. If that is not what you are offering them, they will not contact you to work with you.

For example, you are a weight loss coach, and one of the problems for your clients is overeating and gaining weight during the holiday season, you may want to offer a coaching package that deals with gaining weight during the holiday season.

Create An Authentic Message That Describes Your Offerings

Now that you are offering your services as a solution to your potential clients’ problems, you must communicate this to them.

To do that, you need to create an authentic message about your offerings that you are going to share on your web site, in your newsletter, on your blog, etc. When you share an authentic message that speaks to your target market, you are going to attract many clients to your coaching business.

Share Your Message With Your Potential Clients

Once you create the message, you need to start sharing it. Use social networking web sites, article directories, as well as your own blog and newsletter to connect with your potential clients and share your message.

Invite Your Potential Clients To Take The Next Step With You

As your potential clients get to know you through your message, social networking web sites, your blog and your newsletter, they are going to start wondering how they can learn more from you.

Don’t leave them wondering! Make sure that is always simple for your potential clients to take the next step with you by getting on your list.

For more information on how to get more clients for your coaching business, get the How To Get More Clients Online Home Study Guide at http://www.EffectiveOnlineMarketing.com

If you have been paying any attention, you heard that Twitter was hit by a denial-of-service attack, and people I know have been experiencing Twitter withdrawal.

So what do you do if you suddenly have all this extra time on your hands? Here are a few things you can do:

1. Write A New Blog Post. If you want to succeed with social networking, then you must blog. Your blog is the place that you can use to share tips, connect with your social networking connections on a deeper level and promote your expertise.

You should blog on a regular basis, so that you can share your blog posts on a regular basis.

2. Facebook. There are tons of things to do on Facebook - learn how to use an application you always wanted to use, update your group page, start your Fan Page or join my page

3. Re-write One Sales Page or Squeeze Page. You can always improve you on a sales page or squeeze page. Pick a page you haven’t updated in a while, and re-read it. Now make changes to make the page more compelling.

4. Write An Article. Write an article of interest to your target market and submit it to article directories to get more web site traffic!

5. Optimize Your Web Site For Search Engines. Find good keywords that your potential customers use to find your services and then use those keywords to optimize your web site.

Please comment and tell us what you did when Twitter was down!