Get More Clients Online

Joe's Goals

Joe's Goals is a quick, free service that lets you track your goals, be they business or personal.  Use the simple single page interface to set up daily goals and track them with just a click. Watch your daily score to gauge your success and use negative goals (or vices) to confront and overcome bad habits that finally need to get the boot. Share your success with your friends and family or post your personal score badge to your blog or MySpace page. Add as many Goals as you want and update them all from a single interface.  This is a great tool to help you track your marketing goals each week.

Start setting your goals here.

Marketing Plan: How to Create an Internet Marketing Action Plan That Gets Results

There's no doubt about it -- keeping up with your marketing tasks can be overwhelming, whether you choose to market via networking, print advertising, or through a strategic set of online techniques.  As I have a virtual company and can work with clients from around the globe, I don't like to limit my marketing to local efforts.  Having a viable presence online is more important to me and seems to work best for my company. Therefore, I primarily concentrate on things I can do to bring visitors to my website and demonstrate my expertise to them while they are on the site.

Recently inspired by a blog post that I had read, I decided to create a regular daily, weekly, month, and quarterly marketing to-do list.  First, I brainstormed a list of ideas of marketing tasks that I perform regularly, and others that have remained on my to-do list for awhile, as I've never gotten around to them.  Then I categorized them into either a quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily task.  On the third examination of these tasks, I went through and culled all but those to which I thought I could realistically commit on a regular basis.

Below are the tasks that comprise my online marketing action plan.  Add them to your own online marketing to-do list as appropriate, or substitute other tasks that are a better fit for your business.

Quarterly Tasks

1.  Send out post card campaign to targeted national media list promoting myself as an expert.  Prior to mailing, have VA call contacts to update list.
2.  Request testimonials from new coaching clients, membership site members, product purchasers, and speaking gig hosts and update appropriate pages on my sites.

Monthly Tasks

1.  Update my blog with new reading lists, recommended resources, products, etc.
2.  Update the media page on my site with links to new press coverage I've received, press releases I've submitted, and story ideas I can offer to the media.
3.  Write promotional copy for free list building teleclass and have VA submit teleclass to major event promotion sites
4.  Create handout for free teleclass and conduct teleclass.
5.  Send out at least three feelers for potential online collaborations/strategic alliances or joint ventures with other sites, speakers, etc.
6.  Create one new information product and upload it to my sites for sale.
7.  Check click-through and conversions with ezine and banner ads and determine whether to renew for another month.
8.  Research and find one new online advertising resource to try.
9.  Write a press release based on one of my articles and submit through PRWeb.com.

Weekly Tasks

1.  Check on my Google, MSN, and ClickRiver PPC ad campaigns to ensure they are still current and relevant and update any bids for any keywords on my list where I have been outbid.
2.  Write an article for my email newsletter.
3.  Find a great resource to recommend in my newsletter and write a personal article for email newsletter.
4.  Send out the email newsletter to list.
5.  Publish the article on my website.
6.  Archive the ezine to my site.
7.  Have VA publish the ezine content on my business blog and on my social networking blogs at MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Ning.
8.  Have VA submit the main newsletter article to articles banks and distribution lists.
9.  Create a podcast from my article and distribute to podcast sites.
10.  Answer a reader-submitted question and post response in blog. 
11.  Create one additional blog post on Monday and set it up to publish on Tuesday.
12.  Review my Google Alerts and find a new blog with a respectable Google Page Rank and comment on a post.
13.  Do a Google search for keywords that best describe my business and see where my site shows up in organic search.  As needed, conduct SEO tweaks on my sites for betting rankings

Daily Tasks

1.  Read the blogs to which I subscribe and post comments as appropriate.
2.  Review the emails from the discussion lists/forums to which I belong and post comments/questions as appropriate.
3.  Log into my social networking profiles at Facebook, Linked In, SelfGrowth.com, Twitter, and Ning and approve friend requests. 
4.  Spend about 15 minutes each at Facebook and SelfGrowth.com making friend requests, commenting on pictures or videos, or responding to emails.
5.  Send 1-2 updates to Twitter and Facebook profiles about what I'm doing at the moment.

When you have your Internet marketing action plan outlined with quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily tasks, your prospecting well never runs dry.  Many online business owners are so wrapped up in working on their business that they don't make time to work in the business, like performing regular marketing tasks.  Consequently, they often experience slow times in their business because they begin to market themselves only when the prospect pool has dried up.  If you create and follow an Internet marketing action plan, you'll never be hungry for clients again!

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this blurb with it: Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals learn how to automate their businesses, leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more clients online. To claim your FR*EE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at OnlineBizU.com. Ask Donna an Internet Marketing question at AskDonnaGunter.com.

Life in the Backside of Nowhere

When Hurricane Rita ripped through SE Texas in 2005 and took out all utilities for about 3 weeks,  I got my first taste of life in an area of a city that's apparently last on any service restoration list. I was living in Beaumont at the time, and all of my services were restored within 3 weeks.  Eric, who lives in Orange, a city of about 20,000 that's about 25 miles east of Beaumont on the Louisiana border, had to camp out at my home in Beaumont because it took between 2 weeks to 2 months longer to restore his major utilities (electricity, phone, and cable) to his neighborhood in Orange. His home is in a middle class neighborhood right off the freeway and well inside the city limits, so I found it quite surprising that it took so long to restore utilities.  I later discovered that the restoration timetable in this neighborhood was on par with those neighborhoods way out in the country.  Go figure.

In the last week, the nightmare of utility outages in the fair city of Orange has struck again. The entire city was without electricity for much of last Thursday when there was a fire at a transformer station.  The entire day was pretty much shot for business. Then, on Friday, a construction crew cut through a major telephone artery and left much of the city without phone and Internet service.  Upon reporting the outage, I discovered that the estimated repair time was one week.  I thought, "You've got to be kidding!"

Fortunately (and this is the first time I have used this word in this situation), I live in a neighborhood in which DSL isn't offered, so I was forced to buy broadband service from the cable company.  Eric already had some very poor quality DSL service at the house when I moved in, but the quality is such that the phone company refuses to sell the service in this neighborhood any longer.  Initially we tried sharing his connection, but his online gaming activities slow the service down to a crawl, which made it impossible for me to run my business online.  Therefore, I had to buy a second broadband service for my business. And, the phone company also doesn't offer basic voicemail service here, so I was forced to get my phone service through Vonage to get access to the voicemail services I have used for years in my business.

Consequently, I was able to stay in business this week.  Had I not had the cable service, I guess I would have taken a week of forced vacation, or camped out a friend's house or hotel room in Beaumont.  I maintain a basic landline phone (that I rarely use) as my "hurricane" phone because during Hurricane Rita, the phone service was restored much faster than the cable service.  Now, it looks as though I need backup broadband service, as well.  We have that, although it wasn't planned, and there aren't any options in this area to work remotely, i.e. a Starbucks with wireless Internet access.  Since the recent outages have affected the entire city, a remote location probably wouldn't have service, either.

How redundant do your systems have to be to w*rk at h*me?  Since this city has, hands down, offered the greatest number of challenges with utility connections, perhaps it's time to relocate to civilization..

BTW, the we finally got phone service back on Tuesday night, 2 days short of the week-long repair estimate..;->

Creating a 6-figure income online

Q:  How do the people that start out like you and I within a very short amount of time make a 6 figure income?  What's the catch that we are all missing?

Deborah White

A:  Hi Deborah--

The "catch" is that most of them aren't making a 6-figure income in a short period of time.  In most cases, or at least in stories I feel I can believe, the "overnight" success actually comes after 3-5 years of hard work to get where they want to be.  For example, my coach, Alexandria Brown, the Ezine Queen, (I'm in her Marketing Mastery program) started building her online business roughly around the year 2002 or so, but it's only been in the last 3 years that her income has truly skyrocketed.   In the intervening 3 years she was slowly building her business just like the rest of us, until suddenly she "arrived", so it appeared, out of nowhere.  One of the key ingredients to her success, I believe, is that she found a niche and stuck to it.  So many times I see my clients flounder and change their minds about what they want to do (I am also terribly guilty of this), without giving themselves a reasonable amount of time to build their brand and get known in their field.

Even now that she's "arrived", she's still working full days to build the business, although she does have a large virtual team that supports her.  The moral of the story is that the 4-hour work week, for most of us, is simply a myth.

The Internet is littered with get rich quick propaganda, and for a very select few, it may truly happen that quickly.  However, for the most part, the ability to do that is simply hype and involves the selling of false hope to a desperate audience.

And, if it were truly so easy to get rich quick on the Internet, wouldn't everybody be doing it?  <g>

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.

Two Quick Ways to Hose an Online Business

I just love living in the land that time forgot -- not!  Yesterday afternoon, the power went off twice, for a total of about 2.5 hours.  The first time we were without power for about 1.5 hours.  Since this happened around lunchtime, I went out for a bite to eat, but came home empty-handed.  The entire city was without power.  So, it was PB&J for me for lunch.

When it was restored, it took me about 15 minutes or so to power up all of my office equipment.

Then, a scant hour later, bam!  It goes out again.  For all practical purposes, my entire afternoon is lost at this point.  I turned off and unplugged everything again and decided to catch up on some reading.

I had finished my reading and was just dropping off to sleep when the power came back on again.  By this time it was close to the end of my workday, so I decided I was taking a nap rather than powering everything back up again.  I just really didn't have any confidence that the power would stay on.  Well, it did, as I discovered when I woke up 2 hours later..;->

The power outage wasn't due to any bad weather.  Apparently a transformer station caught fire.  Fun stuff.

So, today I'm back up and running and try to make a phone call from the house phone and discover there's no dial tone.  Eric then told me he lost DSL service earlier today. I hadn't noticed because we have a second broadband connection in our house that's cable broadband from Time Warner cable for my business, and my phone service is through Vonage. I report the outage to AT&T and they tell me that the repairs will be made by next Thursday, a week away!  That's completely ridiculous.  Phone service is out over a large portion of town -- businesses can't survive without phones for a week!

We had this situation with phone service outage happen during Hurricane Rita in 2005, but that was understandable, as that hurricane devastated this entire area.  This particular outage has been caused from someone cutting through a major phone line while doing construction downtown.

The great irony in all of this is that I keep an AT&T  landline for my biz that I rarely use as my "hurricane" phone.  After Hurricane Rita, AT&T (then called SBC) had the phone service back up and running in 2-3 weeks. It took Time Warner Cable about 3 months to restore cable service.  As my phone and Internet connections stand now, I'm in big trouble if another hurricane lands in SE Texas if Time Warner hasn't improved its ability to recover from disasters.

So, here we sit again, without access to a major utility.  That's all it takes to really hose your online business -- take away your power and take away your phone/Internet access.

Think I can advertise with smoke signals?? LOL

Tip of the Week: SnipURL

Ever have a URL that is much too long to repeat aloud to someone, or is likely to get broken when you paste it into an email?  Now, with SnipURL.com, you can create a short URL that will take your visitor where you want her to go.

Simply create an account on their site, and then copy and paste your long URL into the Long URL box.  Hit the Snip It button, and you instantly have a shortened version of the URL.  You can create a private key in your setup to protect your Snips, as well.  The benefit of creating an account is that you can log in and manage and refer to your Snips as often as needed.  If you don't create an account, you can still snip a URL, but there's no way to track your snips.

Start snipping your URLs here.

Note From Donna: Weekend in Australia

I had the pleasure of spending most of last weekend on a cattle farm in southern Australia.  I can see that you're a bit puzzled, wondering how in the world I made a trek from the US to Australia and back in a weekend..<g>.  Well, I never left home, but my journey was courtesy of a little Australian television series called McLeod's Daughters.  My future mom-in-law got me hooked on this series when she sent a DVD set of Season 1 of the show to Eric last year for a birthday gift.  Eric didn't really care for it, but I was hooked.

It revolves around the lives of 5 women, two of whom are sisters, who single-handedly run a sheep and cattle ranch in rural southern Australia.  I love it because the women are real -- they deal with everyday problems that affect us all -- money, love, relationships, finding meaning, etc.  My favorite part of the series is that the producers don't try and "pretty" everything up.  The show is shot on location at a run-down farm in Australia, with the paint peeling and boards creaking.  The cast is often filmed getting really dirty and grimy when they're shearing the sheep or running a cattle muster.  Apparently flies are pretty commonplace there, as you often see the cast batting flies away from their faces during a scene.  Some Americans compare the series to the 80s US television series, Dallas, but it's so much better than Dallas ever thought of being.

The show does have its soap opera moments, however, and has gotten more soap operaesque in succeeding seasons.  I just finished Season 6, and it looks like I'll be waiting awhile for Seasons 7, as I don't think that season has made it to DVD yet in Australia, and the show is completing its final season, Season 8, this year.

It's amazing at how quickly you'll pick up language phrases after immersing yourself in a culture for a large part of a weekend.  I'm apt to say that I "stuffed" something up (messed up) or make reference to my good "mate" (friend) or tell you "no worries" instead of saying "you're welcome."

So, g'day, mate!

To your online success!

Donna Gunter, Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Online Business Coach/Manager

Press Releases: 10 New Rules to Get a Flood of Traffic from Online Publicity

by Donna Gunter, The Online Biz Resource Queen (TM)

I started submitting press releases in the 80s when I was a college student to help promote one of the many activities I coordinated as the vice president of service for a national service fraternity to which I belonged.  Since that time, and especially since the advent of Internet marketing, the philosophy behind the strategy of submitting press releases and measuring the success of a release has completely shifted.  The number of clippings from newspapers running your release used to be considered the hallmark in determining the success of a release.  That's no longer the case.

In today's marketing environment, submitting press releases online is a very viable strategy for attracting attention to your website and to your business. However, the strategy is very underutilized by online service businesses.  Why? Because most of us are still operating under the rules of traditional press releases. Many of the traditional rules of writing press releases no longer apply in today's Internet marketing age.

Here are 10 new rules for online press releases that will help you get better results from your Internet marketing:

1.  Write for consumers, not journalists.  Today's online press release is really written more for the consumer of your products and services rather than members of the media.  The media may, indeed, pick up your release and create a story or interview you based on that release.  However, what is more likely to happen is that a consumer who is searching online for a solution to his problem will stumble across your release and be compelled to take the action that you specify in the release.

2.  Set a goal for the release.  Do you hope to sell more ebooks, drive traffic to your site, sell tickets to an event, or promote a teleclass? This is how you measure the success of today's press release.

3.  Determine your target audience.  Just like with any other marketing effort, being able to address the needs and concerns of your target market is key to creating a successful press release.  If you have more than one audience, you may want to create more than one release.

4.  Include your call to action.  Do you want to invite the reader to pick up free information on your site, register for an event, or buy your newest book?  The call to action that you desire needs to be included in the final paragraph of your press release.

5.  Create a compelling headline.  The headline for your release needs to be compelling and interesting enough to get the searcher to open and read your release.  If you struggle to come up with compelling headlines, take a trip to your local supermarket and read the headlines on the magazines that are placed near the checkout lanes. Women's magazines, Cosmo in particular, have excelled at the headline game for years, as it is the headlines on the cover that help them sell magazines.  Study their headline formulas and see how you might apply them to your own business.

6.  Promote all activities.  No longer are press releases reserved for newsworthy events.  Submit a press release for anything that happens in your business: the launch of a new website, your presentation at a conference, the release of a new ebook, election as an officer to a professional association, etc.

7.  Optimize for searches.  Before completing your release, do a quick keyword search using the free keyword research tool at Wordtracker.com.  Optimize your release for 2-3 relevant keyword phrases for which you want to be found that have a fair amount of search traffic.  Include these keywords in your headline, sub header, first paragraph, and body of your press release. 

8.  Write for longevity.  In the days of the traditional release, a press release was only available for a short period of time and then disappeared forever.  Online press releases, however, hang out for years on websites and can be found in searches several years after their initial release date.

9.  Include links.  Unlike the releases that appear in print media, your online press release can contain several links to various pages on your site.  You may want to direct readers to your home page, to a specific landing page or product page, or to an event registration page.

10.  Pay for release.  There are many free press release sites online.  The dirty little secret of these free sites is that your release is never submitted anywhere.  It just sits on that free press release site, never to be seen again.  If you truly want your release to be seen online, pay for that privilege.  I use and highly recommend PRWeb.com for this service.  For their basic submission free of $80, you can get more than ample distribution of your release all over the Web.

Press releases are a great tool to help you in your Internet marketing efforts.  Begin slowly, and plan to submit one release per quarter at first, and then move to monthly, and perhaps eventually to weekly.  By doing so, you'll make your site more relevant to search engines, drive more visitors to your site, and position yourself as the well-known expert in your field.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this blurb with it: Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals learn how to automate their businesses, leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more clients online. To claim your FR*EE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at OnlineBizU.com. Ask Donna an Internet Marketing question at AskDonnaGunter.com.

Online Pricing Strategy

Q:  This may seem funny but I have always wanted to know why *everyone* prices their products ending in a "7." You know, $47, $97, $1997. Is there an unwritten code amongst Internet marketers or they just superstitious?

Diane Fusco
http://www.thrivingandtranscribing.com

A;  Hi Diane!  It may seem like superstition, but there's actually legit thinking behind this pricing strategy in the psychology or perception of pricing.  As you may be aware, many business starting pricing items at $19.95 or $19.99, for example, because that price was "perceived" to be lower than $20 and more units were purchased at the $19.95 price than when the price was set to an even $20.

The strategy is the same for online pricing, except that the pricing seems to work better online when ending in a 7. I believe there was a study done several years ago that perpetuated this strategy (may have been an informal study), but I can no longer remember who did it or where to find it.

As in any marketing strategy, testing is the key.  Try a few prices ending with 5 or 9 and compare sales when you change to a price ending in 7.  You'll want to keep the price that delivers the best sales for you.

Got an Internet Marketing question?  Ask it here: AskDonnaGunter.com.

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