e- [eee]  (used in combination) A prefix that stands for “electronic” and refers to information technologies, business and almost anything connected to or transmitted over the internet.

If you were to ask me what one single method I would recommend to reach your customers and prospects on a regular basis, I would say an e-Newsletter hands down! Mind you, I am not saying that an e-Newsletter should replace every other form of marketing and advertising that you do. There are many benefits to the other methods, but dollar-for-dollar e-Newsletters are the way to go. In fact, there are so many benefits to this form of marketing and communication that it warrants a full featured article.

Awareness – Let’s start with the obvious. Just as with any other type of marketing, you want to build awareness of you and your product or service. The old rule of thumb is that it takes seven contacts before someone makes a buying decision. I’ve recently read that seven is actually pretty light now. With e-Newsletters, the number of contacts you make only depends on the frequency you send out your e-Zine (another name for e-newsletter).

Relationships – With a written e-Newsletter, you are able to build a relationship with your customers and prospects. Every issue you send is packed with usable and valuable information that your readers will look forward to receiving. The relationship you build is that of a trusted advisor. The more and more you give through sharing ideas with your readers, the more and more they will view you as the authority that you are.

Immediate – This benefit is two-fold. One, the e-mail, when written and sent, is immediately received by your target audience. You do not have to wait for that direct mail piece to be printed and delivered. You don’t have to wait for the Sunday paper to hit or for your audience to tune in the station you are advertising on. With e-Newsletters, you only have to wait for your readers to check their inbox – which with some people is as frequent and involuntary as breathing.

The other side of Immediate is the type of response you can get. If your e-Newsletters are providing valuable information and ideas and contain an effective call to action, a simple click of the Reply button gets the ball rolling. This has the potential for being much more immediate than picking up the phone and making a call.

Inexpensive – Many e-Newsletter services are very, very inexpensive compared to other forms of marketing and advertising. Although most are fairly user friendly to set up, it may be worth the added expense to have someone create your account, develop your template, build your re-direct pages and get it working exactly the way it should. But once that expense is out of the way, you can reach up to 2500 readers for $30 (depending on the service you use).

Think of that! Thirty bucks a month to reach 2500 people that are looking forward to hearing from you in each and every issue. What’s more is with most services you can send e-mails out as often as you want – once a month, once a week or even once a day! For thirty bucks? Seriously!? That’s a no-brainer!

Track Activity – This is a very powerful tool that is built in to most e-newsletter services. Say you send out your e-Newsletter to 268 readers on Thursday morning. As soon as your readers begin to open it, you can start getting live reports on how many people opened it up and more importantly, who is opening it. If you have links in your e-Newsletter that direct your readers back to your website, you can see those as well. This kind of market research is invaluable information for you.

Gain Insight – Once you’ve sent out your e-Newsletter and read your activity reports, you can discover how effective it was based on your reader’s actions. If you find that you are getting higher open rates on one particular topic, you may want to consider writing about that topic more frequently.

Segmentation – After gaining insight into what topics your readers are more interested in, you can very simply segment your main subscriber list into topical lists and send just those readers more detailed communications or even special offers that they may be interested in. This is the ultimate in tracking your marketing efforts and targeting specific audiences with exactly what they want and need.

Commitment – Everything above details the overwhelming benefits of sending out e-Newsletters. However, there is a time commitment that you must be willing to give in order for your efforts to be successful.

At a minimum, you will want to send out your e-Newsletter once a month. My recommendation is once a week. You may think find a few extra hours a week to do this would be impossible, but once you get into a groove it become part of your weekly routine and budget your time accordingly. Make the commitment, stick to it and watch the response you get. It will be like no other!

CAUTION! – Do not send out “ME”-Newsletters!! Your readers will not want to read about you every week. Your e-Newsletter is not a weekly or monthly advertisement – at least not directly. Your e-Zine must contain valuable information for your readers to use regardless if they ever pick up the phone or hit the Reply button. If your content falls short of that, your readers will get in itchy trigger finger to hit the UnSubscribe button and then they are gone!

Recommendation – When I started my e-Newsletter, I researched over a dozen services and tested eight of them. The service that I felt stood head and shoulders above the rest is Constant Contact. To learn more about it, you can visit constantcontact.com or you can call (989.546.7355) or e-mail me (workinghard@helpingusellu.com) with any questions you have.

googlicious [goo-guhl-lish-us]  -adjective 1. describes a website that is appealing to the on-line search engine Google, therefore achieving a higher page rank;  2. describes a website whose Google search listing description is appealing to its users which results in a higher click-through ratio

Last week we looked at how a blog can be beneficial to promoting your business. To re-cap a few of the major benefits, a blog can help you become more personable and more approachable as well as help you be viewed as an authority in your industry or market. A blog can also help you get information to your customers, prospects and followers immediately, build brand and business awareness and help you gain insight to what is in your customer’s head.

This week, we will look at how implementing a blog can be a huge benefit to your business’ website. Adding a blog to your website is like giving it a shot of steroids or WGH – “website growth hormone!”

In general, the biggest difference between a website and a blog is that a website typically is much more static than a blog. In other words, the content of a website remains largely unchanged for longer periods of time, where a blog’s content is quickly and easily changed as frequently as you need or desire. It is the consistent content feeding that helps your website become more Googlicious!

I don’t want to get too much into SEO (search engine optimization) in this article as there are many, many ways to optimize your website to achieve higher and higher page rankings in the search engines. The only optimization I want to look at is as it relates to the benefits of your website having a blog.

Starting off, I mentioned last week that I thought Blogger was a more user friendly blogging tool in that the drag and drop functionality is easy to use, change, update and publish. However, there are two major drawbacks. The first is that a Blogger blog does not share your website’s domain name. The blog address will typically look something like this: yoursitename.blogspot.com. The second drawback is Blogger typically functions outside of your website and your site’s server.

The blogging tool that avoids these drawbacks is WordPress (www.wordpress.com). Although it is a little more rigid, it plugs right into your existing site and shares your site’s domain name where it would look something like this: yoursitename.com/blog. The major benefit to this is how and how often the search engines will now crawl your website.

Alright, let’s bring it back in a little bit. Let’s assume you have a modest website built with maybe 6-10 pages where most of the content on each page is pretty descriptive but doesn’t change too often. The search engine “robots” are continuously out there crawling around the web looking for new, fresh content. Since your website is pretty static, the robots won’t crawl it very often. This lack of activity negatively affects your site’s page ranking – or at least it doesn’t help it any.

Now let’s assume you add your WordPress blog as a plug-in to your website and it shares the same domain name.  Let’s also say you post a couple articles, thoughts, ideas, tutorials etc. per week. Now when that robot is out there crawling around, it is finding your fresh content from your blog, and since your blog and website share the same name, your site’s ability to climb the page ranks in the search engines increases exponentially.

One very important thing to keep in mind pertains to the content you are adding to your blog. The articles, thoughts, ideas and other entries you post should be of high value and be relevant to the content of your website. The same pertains to any links that you provide in your blog entries as well. Don’t ask me how, but those robots are pretty slick at detecting genuine posts.

With that said, let’s call it good right here with this article, otherwise we will get away from the primary focus of why you should really consider adding a blog to your website – to increase traffic, sales and profits! If you have questions relating to this article, feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail. And as always, thank you for stopping by!

blog [blawg]  -noun 1. short for weblog – (world wide) web + log;  2. an on-line diary;  3. a chronological log of thoughts or information that is posted on a web page

Have you ever heard a word you’ve never heard before, and then it seems like you hear it all the time? Or what about when you bought your new car? When you got it, it seemed pretty unique because you hadn’t seen any or very few of them on the road. Then you saw a dozen of the exact same car – same kind and color – from the time you drove it off the lot until you pulled it into your driveway for the first time!

Well, it’s been that way lately with blogs. I’ve been working on and updating mine more and more. I’ve been receiving more and more questions about them lately. And I’ve been learning more and more about the benefits of having and maintaining a blog. So this week, we will look at the many benefits of blogging for your business.

Whether or not you have a website, a blog carries many benefits for your business. Next week we will look at the benefits of a blog as a complement to your website. But for this week’s article, we will look at the benefits purely based on the merits of a stand-alone blog:

• Quick and easy – Setting up the blog template can take a little time, both to learn how to set it up as well as the time it takes to actually do the set-up. However, once the blog template is set up and published, it is very quick and very easy to add content to your blog in the form of thoughts, information and communication as well as advertising specials, promotions and new product announcements.

• Very inexpensive – If you do not have the time nor desire to set-up your blog, one can be set-up for you for as little as a couple hundred bucks. From there, the only investment you have is your time as there are no monthly or annual hosting fees you have to pay to keep it active.

• Become a friend – Because you are writing in your own voice and in your own style, your customers and prospects that are reading your blog can connect with you in a unique way and in a unique tone that cannot be felt through a static website or brochure. Even the prospects that don’t know you, will soon feel as if they do.

• Become an authority – When you verbally tell someone something, you are a resource. However, when people read something that you have published, you become an authority.

• Provide immediate information – If you have something that you need to broadcast to your customers and prospects, the quickest way to do it is through a blog entry. Many people that follow your blog will subscribe to it. As a subscriber, they receive notification whenever you post a new entry.

• Accessible and approachable - When people read your blog, they connect with you on a different level than through a website or your company brochure. You have a one-on-one conversation with every person that is reading. If they have a question or a thought about your entry, they can post a comment which further establishes a sense of accessibility and approachability.

• Gain insight - When your customers and prospects read your blog and leave comments, you begin to obtain a better understanding of what they are thinking and in turn what they expect. You can also track the number of hits you get on each post which digs even deeper into the mindset of your customers. This kind of information is priceless and is very difficult to track with most any other medium.

• Build awareness - The rule of thumb is it takes seven contacts with a prospect to make a sale or become top of mind when they think of your product or service. With a blog, you can have dozens if not hundreds of contact opportunities with your customers and prospects in a very short amount of time.

Starting out, I am using the blog to post my weekly newsletter articles for people that do not subscribe to the newsletter. (Shame on them!) As it grows in followers, I will begin to add additional posts with other tips and ideas.

Once you decide to get into the Blog world, here are a few tips and resources for you to use to start your blog and to successfully and effectively use your blog to grow your business.

• Don’t get too carried away with using countless gadgets/widgets. (You’ll learn what these are when you set up your blog.) My advice is to only use those that add value to your blog.

• Speaking of value, and this is VERY important, be sure that your blog entries are thoughts, ideas or information that provide value to your readers. It is ok to plug your products or services, as long as each post isn’t a blatant commercial. You’ll gain a good following by being a resource, not a pitchman.

• Be consistent and be patient. The growth, success and power of your blog will not happen overnight. It might not happen in a month. It may even take half a year or longer for it to build momentum and really take off. But the key is to build it, feed it, promote it and allow it to work for you. Make a commitment to post at least weekly. Eventually, a couple of short posts a week with valuable information will be great. Again, the key is “valuable content.”

Well there you have some good stuff to get you going. Good luck with your blogging adventure and journey. Let me know how it is going and when you got it up and running, send me an e-mail with a link to it.

slump [sluhmp]  -noun 1. a period of decline or deterioration; 2. a period in which a person performs slowly, inefficiently, or ineffectively.

A couple weeks ago we looked at your Confidence Journey from building a foundation, becoming passionate and creative and finally entering an altruistic state of confidence. As a result of much positive feedback and a few reader questions, this week we will look at how to handle one of the biggest challenges you’ll face throughout your Confidence Journey – a slump.

The following is one letter in particular that pretty much summarized and echoed the questions from the others.

Hey Scott,

I’m very confident and comfortable in the product I sell because I know it works and I know we’ve got a quality team.  My question is this – do you have any tips for keeping that confidence UP in a slower market?  I went through a really slow month (May) and it got me in the dumps and made me begin to question my abilities, but now all of a sudden, I’m on fire again!  All through May I was driving myself crazy trying to figure out what I needed to tweak, what I was missing, what I needed to do better to get my numbers up and I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong, so then the self doubts and the questions started.  But now the confidence is way back up.  So at any rate, any tips for keeping confidence high through the lows?

Thanks,

Angela

This question and the others are excellent, excellent questions. However, let’s focus on Angela’s as the basis for how to keep your confidence while working through a slump. Starting out, she appears to be on the right track with reviewing the things she was doing in order to get better and break through her slump. This can be an effective course of action when dealing with many situations as it can help you identify where you may be slipping and get you back on track.

However, this can also have you spinning your wheels wondering what is going wrong. The downfall here is when you are looking for what is going wrong with what you are doing, it starts chipping away at your confidence. And when you don’t find anything to tweak or change, your confidence really starts taking a hit! My good friend Lisa would refer to this as looking at your situation from a “deficit” perspective.

Conversely, a shift in perspective may help not only break through a slump, but keep and strengthen your confidence along the way. This paradigm shift moves away from a deficit perspective to focus positively on your situation from an “asset” perspective.

(Keep in mind for the purpose of this article, we are focusing purely on “how” you can keep and build your confidence during a slump. The “what’s” that you can do is for a different article.)

Digging a little deeper into the asset perspective as it relates to making your “tweaks,” rather than look at what you may have been doing wrong or what you were missing (mentally processed as a weaknesses), look at what you have done or are doing great that led to your successes (mentally processed as strengths) and make your tweaks and reinforcements off of them. This will strengthen and build your actions and activities to push through a slump. This will also keep you focused on positive actions and feed your confidence.

One last thing on confidence… Remember that confidence and attitude is a state of mind. It is something that we can consciously control despite what we are going through. It may be tougher at times, but we can choose to persevere and take actions that build our confidence. With time, effort and attention, sustained confidence and positive attitude will eventually become second nature. If you have not yet seen the movie “Pursuit of Happyness,” it is an excellent example of pushing through your slump and maintaining your focus that in turn keeps and builds your confidence – even among the bleakest of times.

Wrapping up, your circumstances may make it more challenging sometimes, but remembering to look at those circumstances from an asset perspective keeps you focused, energized and confident. It is then – with focus and confidence – that you will be able to see the opportunities and the doors that are opening up to you, rather than the road blocks that are being thrown at you.