Category Archives: One Minute Tips

The Ethical Way to Grow Your Email List

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The Ethical Way to Grow Your Email List


“The money is in your list”

If you’re marketing yourself or your business online, you’ve probably heard this saying by now.

Your list is your database of prospective customers and qualified leads.

And, the bigger your list, the better your sales prospects.

Today I am going to show you exactly how to grow your list, quickly and ethically.

Why Grow Your Email List?

More Control:
In addition to building trust with your qualified leads, your very own list gives you more control over how and when you market to your prospects.

So, when social media sites like Facebook change their algorithm so the people who like your page can no longer see your posts, you have a backup plan to get in touch with your community.

Marketing To Older Consumers:
Many people prefer to receive communications from companies via email.

By adding email marketing to your toolbox, you ensure you’re communicating with your prospects and customers the way they want to hear from you.

More Cost Effective:
It’s a lot easier to market to people who are already on your list than try to market to people who don’t know you at all.

Your list is made up of warm leads as opposed to cold leads..

How to grow your email marketing list?

Step One: Identify your target market.

Know your audience and what their pain points are.

Step Two: Create a freebie offer.

By creating a freebie offer, you’re creating an ethical bribe or a lead magnet.

You’re going to trade your prospects a free copy of whatever you’re about to create in exchange for their email address.

It goes without saying that your freebie needs to be irresistible for people to give up their email address.

Tips to creating a freebie offer:

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer when they are shopping for what you sell.

  • What questions do they have?
  • What objections do they have?
  • What should they be looking for when they’re comparing providers?
  • What maintenance costs should they be aware of?
  • What do they need to prepare for before they buy?

Spend some time with these questions and answer each one.

The answers you provide are a first draft of your freebie.

From there you can flesh your freebie out a little bit more.

Take what you’ve written, and add a cover page and an “About the Author” page.

The next thing you know, you’ve got a three-page document that’s a valuable resource for your prospects!

You can call this document an ebook, a report, a whitepaper, a freebie, a guide or a download.

Spend some time on creating a headline that piques curiosity, some examples are:

Step Three: Collect Email addresses.

So once you have your freebie or your guide created, then what?

Well, you’ll need to get an email marketing software that provides you with a Sign Up Form you can add to your website.

I like MailChimp.com.

They’ve got a really easy way set it up.

As soon as someone gives you their email address, they get the freebie in their email newsletter box automatically.

(HINT: Ding what you said you would is a great way to build trust with folks that you are trying to sell to. )

So, the heading above your signup form should be worded something like:

Get Your Free Copy Of the Report Instantly (title of the report) when you subscribe to our newsletter.

Spend some time on this heading, so as to make your freebie IRRESISTIBLE

Please note: If you’re based in Canada, this practice will also cover your bases with the Canadian Anti Spam Act, as the prospect has actively given you permission to market to them via email.

That’s it! Those are your 3 easy steps to growing your email list ethically!

Bonus Tip: The Follow Up Sequence.

To be effective in converting your list members to customers, you need to have a follow-up sequence.

Be sure to send out emails to your list of qualified prospects on a regular basis.
But remember, you want to provide value and not spam your list.
The general rule of thumb is for every ten or eight emails you send, one can be selling.
If you found this video helpful, please like it and consider sharing with your network.

How to Repurpose Social Media Posts to your WordPress Blog

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This Clever Tactic Will Cut The Time You Spend Blogging in Half

Blogging is time consuming.

It’s because of this that so often blogging gets put on the back burner.

However, Companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website – (Source Hubspot)

I’m going to show you exactly how to slash the time you spend on your business blog- by 50%.

By repurposing and summarizing posts you find on social media you can:

  1. Cut the time you spend blogging in half
  2. Attract more links to your website
  3. Piggyback off popular content to get more likes and shares.

Check out this video for exact, step-by-step instructions for how to repurpose social media posts on your blog.

Write a blog for your business in only 5 minutes:

Step One: Open Your WordPress Blog

If you’ve got a WordPress site, make sure that you’re logged in and you’re in the posts section.

What I want you to do is click on “add posts”.

Step Two: Go to a Social Media Site

Now, I’m going to go to Facebook, I’m going to take a look at an article that I want to share with my website visitors. For example, I’ve got one here that talks about the Remembrance Day ceremonies in the Calgary Herald.

Step Three: Repurpose The Media

First, I’m going to open this up in a new tab.
I’m going to click the link; open it up in a new tab.
I’m going to save this image as well.
I usually need to click on it first. Click on this, and right click “save image as”. I’m going to call it “post1”. Now I have the link and the image.

So, add new post. I’m going to call this Remembrance Day Ceremonies in Calgary.

Here what I’m going to do is I’m going to copy a little bit of this text here, then:

  1. I’m going to paste it into the blog.
  2. I’m going to write this text that says “Click here to read entire article.”
  3. I’m going to select this text here and click the link button.
  4. Here is where I’m going to copy the link of where the article actually lives.
  5. I’m going to paste it in the URL.
  6. I’m going to click “Add link”.
  7. Then, I’m going to add the image. Click “add media”, upload files, and then it’s in my downloads–post1.
  8. Select the image that you saved from the article itself and then click “insert into post”.

Step Four: Add your two cents worth:

What I need to do is add my two cents worth, so it’s not complete plagiarism.

I’m going to format it so it’s like a heading. Because this is regarding Remembrance Day, I want to make sure that it is published on that date, which is a little while ago.

Step Five: Publish

You can post this anytime in the future or in the past as well. Click, “okay” and “publish”. And we’re done.

Isn’t that easy?

If you liked this post, please share it.

I’d love to hear your blogging for business challenges and what your thoughts are on repurposing social media posts!

The Real Cost of A Digital Marketing Plan

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The Real Cost of A Digital Marketing Plan

I’m actually going to flip this on it’s head a little bit and talk to you about the costs of not having a marketing plan.

I’m actually going to flip this on it’s head a little bit and talk to you about the costs of not having a marketing plan.

Here are 5 ways that having a marketing plan will save you a lot more time and money in the long run.

 

Number one reason to have a digital marketing plan: confidence.

Having a marketing plan gives you more confidence.

Why?

Because you’ve done the numbers and you are making informed business decisions.

Let’s face it, most businesses out there actually fail.

So knowing what your market is, knowing that there’s demand for it and you have some odds of success will make you more confident in your business.

And you’re not risking a whole bunch of money and a whole bunch of time on a guess. You are making informed decisions.

 

The number two reason to have a digital marketing plan: control.

Imagine, instead of reacting to every new shiny tool that comes out online, you’re calm, collected and in control.

By creating a digital marketing plan based on numbers, you would be proactive instead of reactive. Imagine- no more wondering – “Geez, should I be on Periscope?”

If you have a plan in place that’s backed by numbers, it will make you much more confident to ignore things that come up that may not be right for your business.

 

The number three reason to have a digital marketing plan: increased effectiveness.

As an entrepreneur, your time is limited, so being effective is critical.

If you have a digital marketing plan, you can then figure out what elements of it you are going to delegate.

As entrepreneurs, we’re super busy and we wear many, many hats. So we need to be able to delegate repetitive tasks that don’t necessarily require our immediate attention or constant attention.

 

The number four reason to have a digital marketing plan: staying competitive.

If you are creating a plan and reviewing it at least once a year, that will make sure that you stay competitive.

Let’s face it, marketing especially in the digital age is chasing a moving target.

One of the laws of physics is that order descends into chaos very quickly.

So in order to stay competitive you need to keep on your marketing, checking in on it, and evaluating your efforts to make sure that they’re working – which is what you want.

 

The number five reason to have a digital marketing plan: Being empowered.

Lastly, having a digital marketing plan will empower you.

How?

You will be much more empowered because you’ll have an automated sales funnel in place which will actively work to reduce the cost of your leads.

By creating a sales funnel you’ll first find out how much each lead costs, and then what your conversion to sales ratio is, and finally, you can work to optimize your ratio and decrease your costs.

What are these five benefits worth to you?

Can you see the cost to you and your business of not having a digital marketing plan?

I would be very excited to hear what your experiences or how this helped you in the comments below.

Also, feel free to share this amongst your friends and family if you feel that this was valuable.

Thanks so much for watching!

The Marketing Lesson I Learned From Being A Grinch This Christmas

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Grinch

Am I alone at feeling irritated when Christmas merchandise pops up the day after Hallowe’en?

The reason I feel irritated is it just feels like too much, too soon.

In short, too pushy!

In applying this to how we market our businesses, there’s a great lesson here.

 

Pushing for sales online can push our prospects away!

 

 

Sell, Sell, Sell doesn’t work online – it’s about getting people to know, like and trust you.

Building visibility, likeability and credibility are pre requesites for successful social selling.

Are you pushing too hard on social media or other online spaces?

What could you be doing differently?

Tell me!

 

 

 

Give me 2 minutes and you’ll be a master at measuring your web marketing (Part 1 of 3)

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If you’re wondering how to measure the effectiveness of your web marketing efforts, then look no further than Google Analytics!

Google Analytics is a free tool you can use to measure your website’s traffic & web marketing efforts.

If you have Google Analytics set up on your website , but aren’t using it, keep reading;  as a wise man once said:

“you can’t improve what you don’t measure”

In today’s Marketing Minute we’re going to cover how to use the reports found under the Acquisition section of Google Analytics. This is the first in a series of three articles on how to use the reports found in Google Analytics.

Are my web marketing results improving over time?

You’re likely spending a great deal of resources marketing your business online – when you add up the cost of your website and time spent on social media and email newsletters, it’s mind boggling to think that the vast majority of business owners do not measure their efforts for effectiveness.

Once you’re logged in, set the date range up on the top right hand side to compare your results to last month. This way you can get a good idea if your results are improving over time.

Date-Range-Analytics

Where is my website traffic coming from?

Once you’re signed in, on the left hand side click on Acquisition and then, Overview.

From there you’ll see a pie graph, which will show you the different sources of your website’s traffic:
website-traffic-top-channelsIdeally, this is going to be diversified, showing traffic from:

  1. ‘search’, which is search engines like Google,
  2. ‘direct’ – people typing in your website name directly,
  3. ‘referral’ – websites that are sending traffic to you,
  4. ‘social’ – your social media sites, and
  5. ‘e-mail’ – from your e-mail newsletter.

What websites are sending traffic to my website?

From Overview, then click on Referrals.

This is particularly useful if you have a domain name set-up for a particular campaign that is forwarded to your website or if you’re paying for any directory sites like bigyellowbookcompany.ca.

Here’s where you can see if you’re getting enough traffic to justify paying for any additional marketing efforts. You can see by how much traffic you’re getting as well as how engaged those people are that are coming from those particular websites.

How engaged are my website visitors?

Engagement can be measured by

  1. Session Duration shows the time that people are spending on your website when they come from that particular site
  2. Pages/Session shows the number pages that they’re looking at.
  3. Bounce Rate is also something to keep an eye on as well. That’s the amount of people that come to your website and leave right away. Ideally, this will be as low as possible.

traffic-sources

How effective is my social media at sending traffic to my website?

Once you’ve taken a look at that report, the next thing I want you to do is go to Social and then Landing pages. This is fantastic.

This report will show you what pages and how they’re performing as it relates to traffic from social media websites.

So if you’re writing a blog post a week, (like I recommend that you do), you can see what blog posts are performing well and which ones aren’t.

Again, you can look at

  1. how much time people are spending on your website on each of these specific pages
  2. and how many pages are they looking at after they land on that particular page.

how-much-timeAgain, if you’re promoting a particular page, say, using Google Adwords, or promoting a specific page by posting your blog posts to social networks, you can see what pages are working and which ones aren’t.

Don’t be afraid to change & tweak your website pages & their headlines to increase your engagement and your performance of your website.

If you found this valuable, please share and/or comment. Thank you so much for watching!

The most common (and avoidable) mistake you’re making marketing on social media

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The Most common and avoidable mistake you're making marketing on social media

 

If you don’t know the difference between traditional and social media marketing best practices, you’re likely making this huge mistake.


Consider, before the internet, how did businesses promote themselves?

Some examples of traditional media are Yellow Book ads, Flyers, Radio Ads, TV Ads, Billboards.

There are hundreds of other marketing methods that pre-date the internet, all of which possess three characteristics:

  1. Polished, approved and proofed.

Each ad or script went through a proofing process and approval of the artwork and the language far before it ever went public.

  1. One way dialogue.

The dialogue is very much one-way. It rarely if ever elicits reciprocal conversation or two-way dialogue.

  1. It’s about selling.

The language is very much sales oriented. There’s usually the value proposition and a call to action.

Bottom line, these are sales tools that are selling.

Here’s the big difference between these types of tools and social media marketing.  

Are you ready?

The biggest difference between traditional media and social media:

Social media websites are NETWORKING Tools, NOT selling tools.

It’s so important I will say it again.

Social media websites are not SALES platforms, they are NETWORKING platforms.

Social Media is different in that instead of the one-way, proofed and professional media, it’s about building relationships, creating community and trust.

One of my favourite ways to illustrate the nature of social media marketing is ask you to imagine engaging on social media as if you’re going to a networking event.

It’s virtually unheard of to come out of a networking event with a contract and a cheque.  

You will come out with business cards of your new contacts who have given you permission to nurture that relationship.

You’re given an opportunity to go from someone they know, to someone they know, like and trust.

And then, when they are ready to buy what you’re selling, they will buy from you as opposed to your competition.

This is what social media marketing is all about. It’s about nurturing relationships and building community.

Why Social Media works as a sales tool:

If you’re beginning to think you don’t have time for networking and you should go back to your hard-selling or traditional marketing tools, think about this:

Consumers are getting smarter. Currently subjected to over 3000 ads a day* they’re getting sick of being sold to. Consumer behaviour has evolved and so should you if you want your business to survive.

To thwart TV ads, people use PVR technology.  Unsolicited emails are blocked by spam filters.  Junk mail flyers are redirected to the landfill. Cold calls are ignored with caller ID and Voicemail.  

People are getting more determined to control what media they’re exposed to and it’s getting harder and harder to reach them through traditional media.

 

Yet these same people are spending hours a day engaging on social media websites, watching videos online and searching things on search engines like Google.

It’s human nature to want to connect with others. It’s here on social media we can connect, engage, convert and share our experiences with others.

It’s the Place– (one of the 4 P’s of the marketing mix)- to be.

If you’re looking for fish you have to go where the fish are. Similarly, if you want to get in front of your target market you need to be on social media.

Similarities between Traditional & Social Media:

Consistency– you need to be seen 7 times at least before a consumer registers your existence. Your messaging and frequency of exposure should be consistent in order to remain top of mind.

Value Statement– you will always have to clearly and concisely communicate what value you provide.

Professional- you still need to be professional, but it’s more like the casual Friday version of professional.

Differences between Traditional & Social Media:

Messaging- Traditional media tools are sales tools- social media is a networking tool. As such, your messaging needs to be more geared to getting people to know, like and trust you rather than buy from you right away.

Two-way conversation/Transparency- Because of the conversational nature of social media, consumers will steer much of the conversation. You can’t control what they post about, but you will be expected to respond in a timely manner, addressing comments both good and bad. As such yourself and your organization will become more transparent on social media than with traditional media.

Please note, consumers will be talking about you, whether or not you’re listening. You won’t be able to stop this behaviour by declining to participate. It’s better for your reputation to be present and do damage control where and if necessary.

Increased Consumer Expectation- Our culture has very much evolved to be on-demand, always-on and technology driven. The expectation is that you are on social media daily and respond within an hour.

Paid, Earned and Owned Media-

Instead of just paid media, like billboards and ads, social media offers us the opportunity for increased exposure with “earned” media.

Earned media we create that gets shared due to the value it provides to consumers.

Owned media refers to our web assets- our web page, Instagram account, Facebook pages- these are properties online which are under your control and serve as a media channel.

So you can see, there exist great opportunities for capturing your ideal client on social media.  

This is an excerpt of Amazon’s top rated ebook, Social in 17 and the Social Media Training workshop of the same name. 

Battle-tested tips to having more time (from 10 years of entrepreneurship)

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how-to-have-more-time

 

The number one biggest complaint that I hear from my clients and most entrepreneurs is that they just don’t have enough time. So today I’m going to share with you my battle tested tips on how to have more time.

Why do you want to have more time?

Well at the end of the day, none of us gets out of here alive…

So you want to make sure that you’re enjoying your life and accomplishing the things in your personal life and in your business that you want to accomplish.

The number one thing I always recommend is to prioritize and plan.

 

Prioritize & Plan:

What this means is you start working on your business instead of in it doing day to day tasks.

By setting aside some time to plan what your priorities are on a given quarter, a month, a week or a day.

By blocking out chunks of time to work on the specific tasks you’ve identified as high priority, then you will find that those big things get done and you have more momentum in your business.

You will be much more effective and create more time for yourself.

Document & Delegate:

The second tip that I recommend is to document and delegate.

If you’re anything like me or any other small business out there, you may find you’re doing the same tasks over and over again.

So why not document exactly how to do that exact task and then delegate it to an administrative assistant, a contractor that you might be working with or maybe you can even rope in a friendly teenager to help you with some of that web marketing and online stuff that you might not be so good at?

Some of the tools I use to document and delegate are Basecamphq.com and Atlassan.com

Take Control of Your Time: Start saying no.

You might feel guilty at first but then you’ll be so happy and feel so free that your calendar’s all freed up!

Make sure that you are only saying yes to things that are actually a priority for you and that feel good. People will understand if you’re polite about declining.

And remember to take some time and go on vacation and get offline.

When you are less accessible, people tend to respect your time more and they also often times will figure things out on their own.

 Also, some of these tasks will just fall away naturally. For example, I had it on my list absolutely forever all summer to take a pair of pants and to make them into a pair of shorts.

And guess what – I didn’t do it all summer. And now it’s fall and I don’t need shorts anymore. So, done! I don’t need to worry about it.

Ask for Help:

Let’s face it. There’s certain things we’re good at and other things we aren’t so good at.

When it comes to specific niche tasks in your business like your accounting, legal or web marketing processes, it just makes sense to outsource these tasks to someone who can do them faster and more accurately than you can, because it’s their speciality.

Make Less Time:

And the last thing is to make less time for specific tasks.

If you’re anything like me—if you give yourself an hour to accomplish a certain set of tasks, you’ll spend that entire hour doing it. But if you only take 15 minutes then that false sense of pressure will make you work faster, be more focused and be more efficient.

Focus:

Another way to get more done faster is to stop multitasking.

Your brain can actually only focus on one task at a time and takes precious minutes to get refocused after an interruption.

If you find it hard to focus, you can use an online software to block you from checking social media accounts, or email. One of these apps is: Get Cold Turkey

If you like this tip, please consider subscribing to my channel to get one in your inbox every single week. And I’d love to hear your comments as to whether this was helpful, if I missed anything or if you think that these tips are not what you would recommend for saving time. Thanks so much for watching!

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5 easy steps to identify your target market

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5-easy-steps-to-finding-your-target-marketHi. Welcome to your Marketing Minute. My name is Laurel Lindsay and I’m here to help you identify your target market!

Now why would you want to identify your target market?

Well there’s several benefits to knowing your target market.

It’ll save you a ton of time, money and frustrations spent on your marketing because you’ll know who you serve. And when you know who you serve, you can communicate more effectively to them, attract them to your business, generate more prospects and convert those prospects to sales–which is what we all want, right?

Put that money in your pocket!

So how do you do it?

Well if you have an existing business already then you’ve got a gold mine of data that you can use.

Step One: Analyze the customer demographics that you have:

Ask yourself

  1. How big are the businesses typically that you’re serving?
  2. How many dollars in revenue do they generate every single year?
  3. What’s the position of the person that you’re working with in the company?
  4. Or, is it a micro-business?
  5. What’s the geographic location?

Just start looking for patterns and similarities around your existing customer base.

Step Two: Survey your existing customers:

Ask them:

  1. Why did you come to me?
  2. What problem did you have?
  3. Why did you pick me out of any other business out there out of all the competition?
  4. What value did you get from our interaction?
  5. Did you feel the pricing was good or bad?

Surveying your customers and asking them questions like this will provide you with a ton of data on your value. And you can use the exact same verbage from your existing customers to speak to your perspective customers which is fantastic.

Step Three: Brainstorm

Now if you don’t have any customers yet, don’t worry. Your 3rd step is where you would jump in on brainstorming.

Start thinking about things like:

  1. What do these people need?
  2. What is this imaginary audience that I’m serving?
  3. What do they actually need from me, not what do they want? So for example they need their toilet fixed as opposed to having, say, a cheap bill, right?
  4. So what do they need?
  5. What are they curious about?
  6. What kind of questions do they need answered before they are ready to lay out their cash?
  7. What are they ready for?
  8. Maybe they are not ready to lay out cash, but are they ready for a call with you?
  9. Are they ready for an assessment?
  10. Are they ready for an e-book?

When you start to gather that information together, you get an idea or an “avatar” of who your prospect is.

And the demographic information may not necessarily be the same, but if you get the psychographic information together around what their needs are and who they are or what their personality is like, then that will give you an audience to speak to.

Step Four: Check in with yourself.

Then go ahead and reflect on if that feels right to you.

I know this may sound a little bit airy-fairy but if you already have existing customers, think about the ones who are most profitable that you love to work with. And contrast those with the ones that are a bit of a pain in the hiney.

You want to focus, where-ever possible on working with people that make you feel good and generate profits for you.

Step Five: Test and Refine

And then lastly, test. So you have this hypothesis now on who your target market is, go out and try and market to them and see if that works. And then look at the data that is provided through Google Analytics or any Social Media reporting tools and refine accordingly.

And so that’s how you figure out who your target market is. It’s a bit of a trial and error, a bit of science and a bit of gut-feel.

And if you liked this One Minute Tip, please don’t hesitate to subscribe to my channel. You’ll get a new tip in your inbox every single week. If you found this valuable, please consider sharing with your network. And thank you for joining me on how to identify who your target market is. Wasn’t that easy? That was easy!