Have You Taken Up Residence On Your Couch For December?

Sitting on my couch, among my new set of cushions, reflecting on 2009 and thinking ahead to 2010, I’m struck by how certain times of year lend themselves particularly to this kind of introspective thinking.

Easter, with the promise of spring and new life, September with the start of the new school year (and even us grownups still remember that feeling!) and of course Christmas with the impending New Year.

Funny old days, in early December, are they not?   It’s very, very dark, at both ends of the day, and recently it’s felt like it’s never going to stop raining.  One can hardly remember the sun or the sunny days of Summer and it seems an awfully long way off to next summer, that’s for sure!  The couch seems the best place to be, with Strictly or X-Factor on the TV and the heating on full.

The New Year is coming quicker than lightning but all we want to do is wind down to Christmas!

On the one hand some of the country go into a spending spree and Christmas decorating spasm, and on the other hand, some people are quietly emailing tales of woe, stories of quiet desperation and harsh self-criticism about another year gone by – wasted!  Months of procrastination, prevarication leading to …………….absolutely no results.

Do you secretly feel really cross because your 2009 has not progressed you to where you want to be, financially?  Perhaps you have been one of the pension holders or property investors affected by the credit crunch in some way or other and you rather hopefully had all your eggs in one basket?

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£10k In 90 Days | Day 4 | How To KISS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:10 — 5.8MB)

The Money Gym has just launched The Boardroom, an easy, quick, flexible way for your business to access a crack business team comprising 18 of your very own non-executive directors, plus Judith Morgan and Nicola Cairncross.  As part of the launch of The Boardroom, The Money Gym is offering a 33% discount on the 1st year membership (offer closes midnight 31st October) and Nicola & Judith are hosting a daily BlogTalkRadio show, where they help each business caller work out how to create an extra £10k in just 90 days from their existing business.

Today’s caller on The Money Gym “£10k In 90 Days” Challenge on our BlogTalkRadio show was our Really Useful Internet Day’s lucky winner of a Boardroom place for 2009/2010, Suzanne Barnett.

Suzanne is an experienced trainer and owner of a training company, previously selling all kinds of software and computer training into the corporate market, which, in spite of an excellent reputation, for obvious reasons has found the going pretty tough recently.

On one of her first Money Gym weekends, Judith and I were able to encourage Suzanne to think about moving away from the corporate market and aiming her company services at small business owners who are faster at making their minds up, in charge of their own budgets and generally in some sort of pain around learning to use computers more efficiently to make more money.

Suzanne has subsequently teamed up with fellow Money Gym member, Eileen Bowley (who came joint second in our “Gold For Christmas” competion you may remember) to deliver high quality, on demand, virtual computer & software training.

At the recent “Really Useful Internet Day” the girls entered the Gary Vaynerchuk challenge, and after some rigorous coaching by Nicola on their brand, ended up buying on the spot the domain name http://www.KeepItSimpleSoftwareTraining.com (or KISST for short).

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Business Success | Need A Dream Team Board Of Directors?

Is your business successful but you are working way too hard?  Is your business stuck right now and you don’t know how to take it to the next level?

Are you feeling a bit burnt out with your business and losing enthusiasm fast?  Is your business at a crisis point but you don’t have anyone to talk to?

Perhaps you have what seems like an insurmountable obstacle to success and you can’t see your way round it, under it, over it?

Well, we know just how you feel – because Judith and I have both been there!

Several times.

So get a cuppa, because I have a story to tell you…..time to read and digest, 5-10 minutes tops.

When I was at burnout with the Money Gym in 2006 and thinking of giving it up, what I really wanted was a business mentor or business advice that I could trust.  From a proven successful business person, not some time-for-money consultant from the government bodies.

Or – eureka!! a Board Of Directors to work with on an ongoing basis.  I didn’t need investment but I badly needed experienced advice on how to grow the business from something good that had sustained me (and the hotel!!) very well for three years but which I was trapped working “in” rather than “on”.

I loved the clients and the great results they got but I really couldn’t face going through the 10 Financial Intelligence Modules again with one more new client, lovely people or not.

Not good.

And worse, I felt ungrateful because most coaches would kill for a lovely niche business like The Money Gym with great demand, that captured people’s imagination and which almost sold itself .

I also wasn’t massively keen on giving up any shares which investment would have meant.

So I was researching and networking to find out how the whole non-executive Board of Directors thing worked.  Non-exec meaning that they didn’t do any of the work but advised me, coming to a board meeting once a quarter to hear about progress and make suggestions.

I was looking everywhere – both online and offline for them.

Then, bummer, I discovered that each Director (Sales & Marketing, Finance, Operations) would expect to be paid about £10,000 – £15,000 per annum plus expenses, unless they invested in the business and you gave away substantial amounts of shares.

I also had Steve to consider, as we were partners in our internet business by then, but he did loads of work in The Money Gym too and if I was giving away shares in the Money Gym then he should get some.

Remember the E-Myth way of looking at it?  I knew that, when designing a successful business, you need a director for each key area – and those are…..

The Five P’s

Promise – the marketing & sales
Product – operations / delivery / production
Pounds & Pence – the finance
Place – office, equipment, telecoms etc
People – customer service & partners / staff / freelancers

I wanted to do the Promise, was delivering the Product but didn’t want to anymore and didn’t have time to create other products, needed help urgently with the Pounds & Pence because while self taught, I didn’t know how to strategically plan our finances, Steve did the Place, and People, but wasnt’ massively keen on the latter LOL

I also knew it had to be someone I respected so that I would up my game.

So I outlined the qualities of the new business partner I wanted

1. Knew & believed in the Money Gym ethos (ex-client?)
2. Ideally had coaching skills so that they could do the coaching for me at least for a while
3. Good with people so we were forced to improve out customer service
4. Had PROVEN successful business background as most of the Business Link / Enterprise Centre advisors had no real business experience, and swapped time for money.

When I was driving along one day

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Business Websites | Improve Performance Quick

Do you have a website for your business?   If so, would you like three quick ways to improve its perfomance?  Get you more traffic, make sales, make you more money?

1.  Check that you have a good Meta Title, relevent Meta Tags and a great, compelling Meta Description.

You would not BELIEVE how many expensive, corporate looking sites don’t have the basic information in the code of their index page, that the search engines need to list your site in the results, if someone is looking for a site like yours.  It’s easy to check, even for a non-techie.

Just right click on the background of the front page of your blog (the coloured area, outside the white page bit) and choose “View Source” or “View Page Source Code”.

Quite near the top you should see some words enclosed by the little chevrons which are tags.  I can’t reproduce them here as they screw up the layout of this email but imagine the word title had a chevron at each end.

title Your site info here          /title

Then, further down, you should see something that looks like this:

meta content=“money gym, nicola cairncross, blog, blogging…………..” with about 10-20 of your top relevent key words and phrases in.

Then you should also see your meta description, which is what Google shows the public, if someone searches on your key phrases and your site is shown.

meta description “Wealth expert & Money Gym Founder Nicola Cairncross shares the secrets about becoming wealthy, how to grow rich & become a millionaire, wealth creation, success thinking, the law of attraction, making more money, working from home, property investing, building a business to love and internet marketing.”

2. Add articles to your blog or website that contain your highest traffic keywords, to get more of the same.

Look up “entrance keywords” in your Google Analytics or on Alexa.com and make a note of the Top 10 or 20.

Write the article (or review someone elses!) but make sure to include the keywords in the Title of the article / blog post, and again in the first line of the article.  Sprinkle it throughout in a natural, conversational way.

Two of the biggest key phrases for The Money Gym are “how to be a millionaire” and “how to become a millionaire”.  When I posted my article “How To Become A Millionaire” containing the link to the report of the same name, using the guidelines above, and then, on the same day posted an article about “How To Be A Millionaire (Right Now” and tweeted it, which went onto Facebook too, our traffic tripled that day.  Now all I have to do is set that tweet to be sent out automatically every day perhaps, via SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater) and that will continue to bring traffic.

3.  Put yourself & your website in danger of making some money!

One of the first things a visitor should see is a free gift which you give away in return for their name and email.

If you don’t do this, you are losing the opportunity to follow up with all the people who are interested in your product or service but who are not yet ready to buy.  This follow up can be automated, and spread over as long a time frame as you like.

You can decide if you are going to share these leads, or keep them for youself (and you can set up your mailing list accordingly).  If you are in an industry where your competitors buys leads you can make a serious extra income from renting out those leads (via someone reputable like Hilite DMS).  If you are buying leads at the moment, you could reduce your lead generation costs dramatically.

And we all know that a reduction in overhead is like a pay rise!

A great tool that is evolving all the time is www.Alexa.com and if you don’t have Google Analytics you should skoot over there now and put your website URL in the Site Info section.

You will be able to see the keywords and phrases that bring your traffic currently, the demographics and age of your visitors and all sorts of other useful information.

Have you found this article useful?   I hope so, because I wanted to demonstrate to you the kind of knowledge we have and how easy it is to utilise it.

Because we are going to be sharing a lot more of this down to earth, practical, easy to use, yet dynamite information with you at our “Really Useful Internet Day” in Central London, on Saturday 10th October.

If you are a small business owner, or service provider, or solo professional trying to attract more clients, can you really afford to miss it?

I don’t think so!

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/internetday/booking.htm

See you there!

NIcola

p.s. Don’t forget that all the ticket money is being donated to The Big Issue, who help the homeless help themselves.  I love that strapline, don’t you?

Top 5 Business Mistakes – Pt 3

This week I started to share with you the Top 5 Mistakes most self-employed people and business make, when trying to make money?

What were those Top 5 Mistakes?

1.  We are unclear about what we offer
2.  We are unclear about who we are offering it to
3.  We keep ourselves a secret!
4.  We imagine we are doing things when we are actually just thinking about it
5.  We don’t believe we are worth it (and often undercharge!)

Let me elaborate a bit…..today I’ll cover Mistake #3.

1.  We keep ourselves a secret!

Many times, when talking to Money Gym clients about why they are not achieving the ezine signups and sales they would like, whether it be their own products or affiliate sales (where you recommend other people’s stuff and earn commission), I am shocked to hear that they expect to make sales from tiny trickles of traffic.

I tell them, over and over again, something that I was taught by my first business coach Chris Barrow, it takes getting in front of 1000 people to make a sale.

This formula comes from Chris’ background in financial services sales – a tough environment – where he reckoned that you had to call 1000 people to get 100 to talk to you.

You have to talk to 100 people to get 10 appointments.

You have to get 10 appointments to make one sale.

Let me qualify this as I think the word “sale” is misleading.  It suggests that if you are a “better” or more aggressive sales person, you can convert more appointments to sales.

I prefer to say that, if you can get 10 appointments to discuss whether your product or service is a fit, for that potential client or customers problem or pain, then one person will BUY.

See the subtle difference?  They will buy, rather than you will sell.  Takes all the pressure off you actually.

So, following this through, assuming that you get in front of enough of the right kind of people, with a great solution for their problem, then they will buy your solution.

He went on to say that you need to build a reservoir of potential future customers who know who you are and what you do, and more importantly what you can DO FOR THEM.

Filling the reservoir in the early days is hard work.  Imagine a little stream running along the ground till it meets a big hole, and starts, very slowly to fill that hole up with water.  Eventually it will, and then, for every new drop that goes in, a drop will spill out and those are your customers.

That reservoir is filled up out of the 100 people you talk to, out of the 1000 calls.  The 10 people are the ones that express at interest in your product or service.  The one person out of the 10 is the one that buys.

Tranlating that for a second to the online world, we say that you need 1000 unique visitors coming to your website, to be able to attract 100 potential future customers into your reservoir of people who know who you are and what you do, and how your solution can help them.

You need to ask yourself this burning question!

If I need to get in front of 1000 people to make a sale, how many sales do I want, and how quickly can I get in front of the required number

But what do we do, when we are new in business?

We keep ourselves a secret!

We take tiny marketing actions rather than huge marketing actions.

We put notices on boards in supermarkets and health clubs.  We give a few cards to our hairdressers, our garage, our friends.

In short, we do everything we can to avoid exposing ourselves to the large numbers of people that we need to expose ourselves to, in order to build our reservoir and make the sales.

So now you know that, what can you do differently?

Think about the billion people online, on broadband, right now.

Think about the huge overseas markets coming online and getting access to Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and the other big search engines.

Think about the easiest, fastest, cheapest ways to get in front of thousands, hundreds of thousands if not millions of potential future customers.

Start with a blog, even if you haven’t thought of a product or service yet.

Tell your story, your story of discovery, your tale of venturing out into the big wide online world.

I’d love to read it!

YOUR 3 ACTION STEPS:

1.  Read the rest of my emails this week

2.  Listen to Richard White and Daniel Wagner’s webinars on www.MoneyGymRadio.com – they were great!

3.  Join Money Gym Silver or come along to one of our “Money Gym Presents…..” workshops in Central London.

THEN WE CAN HELP YOU TO:

1.  Start a blog right now even if you don’t know what to sell – tell your story of discovery.  The search engines will come and then so will the visitors.

2.  Look for good products or services, sign up to their affiliate schemes and recommend them to your visitors.

3.  Think about your expertise, skills, knowledge, experiences and wonder if any of the billion people online could learn anything from you.  Create ebooks, how to manuals, camtasia videos, memberships sites.  Then go out there and find the people who need you and want to buy from you.

Sound good?

Great!

See you there!

Nicola