If you're new here, you'll want to be sure to get your free report and subscribe to the monthly e-zine and, perhaps, subscribe to the RSS feed, as well. Thanks for visiting!

One of my favorite presenters at Market Your Way to Wealth this year as Lisa Cherney who talked about zeroing in on your “juicy” benefits and highlighting our “juicy” benefits.

Basically, if you identify who your ideal clients are — the clients you absolutely love working with — and then identify all those wonderful, unique benefits and solutions that you offer especially for them, you’ll attract more of your ideal clients into your business.

Of course, Lisa isn’t the only one talking about this. Remember Maria Marsala? I interviewed her for the Women’s Business Gallery a little over a year ago and she talked about it, too. It makes sense, if you’re going to grow a business that you love, why would you want to have clients that you don’t love as a part of it?

Anyway, here are some of the golden drops of juiciness that Lisa shared with us.
Continue Reading →

Last night I watched the “Will Ferrell Special” episode of Man vs. Wild with Bear Grylls. This episode is just a small part of the overall marketing strategy behind the release of Land of the Lost, a remake of one of my favorite childhood Saturday morning shows. And it also taught me a valuable marketing lesson.

In the show, Will and Bear are dropped into the Arctic Circle and have to survive for 48 hours while trekking to their pick up point. At the start of the show, Will states “I don’t even like camping.” Will was his typical goofy, deadpan self throughout the show, but you could also tell that it wasn’t easy for him either.

And it occurred to me, sometimes you need to step out of your comfort zone to market your products and services. If you just stick to what you’ve always done to market your business, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always gotten. Are you satisfied with that?
Continue Reading →

When I conducted a survey of all my readers a few months back, one of the top questions was “How do you market services? Is it different than marketing products?”

That gave me pause. For on some instinctual level I knew that marketing services and products was both the same and different, but I had never articulated this before. So I did a little research to help me focus my thoughts and what I found is that the experts are pretty much divided on this topic.

There are those that believe marketing is marketing, regardless if what you offer is a service or product. And then there are those who beg to differ. But here’s how I see it: The basics of marketing apply to both products and services, just the specifics need to be tailored to what you are offering.

Let me explain.

Products are tangible goods. You purchase a product … a soccer ball, a cup of coffee, a book, a trash compactor … and you get something that you can touch, see, feel.

Services are intangible. You can’t touch a diaper delivery service. You can’t see coaching. You can’t feel concierge services. At least not in a direct way.

And this is the key difference between the two: tangibility.

With a product, it is easy for the consumer to evaluate what they are about to purchase. They can look at it. Kick the tires. Taste it. Listen to it. Experience it in a way that doesn’t really cost the seller much. But with a service, the service provider would have to give up valuable time and energy to give the client a similar sampling experience.

So, marketers of services have come up with a number on low-cost, ingenious ways to offer a “free taste” or “test drive” of their services. Some are free, others are at a nominal cost.

• Newsletters
• Special Reports
• White Papers
• Seminars
• Teleseminars
• Workshops
• Group Sessions

Of course, marketers of products use these techniques, as well, but with a different emphasis and intent. What I plan to talk about in this month’s Monday posts is how to use a variety of marketing techniques to market products and services and how you might use them differently, depending on what you market.

So, now you’ve taken a look at what you want to accomplish in 2009 and you have an idea of how you want to accomplish it. You’ve done an internal check to make sure you have the mindset to support you and you’ve evaluated your website to make sure it supports your goals as well. So how do you you pull all this information into a cohesive plan to make 2009 a success? Just follow these simple steps.

1. Create your mission statement.
Answer these three questions as succinctly as you can:

• What solution or solutions do you provide?
• Who do you provide them to?
• What problem does this solution solve?

Now complete this sentence:
Continue Reading →

Now that you’ve done some planning for your business, determining the projects you want to work on and the niche you will be serving, let’s take a look at your website. Is it in alignment with your goals for 2009? When was the last time you gave it a little freshening up?

If it’s been more than 3 years since your last website makeover, you should seriously consider re-vamping your website. Here are some things you should take a look at:

1. What is the purpose of your website?
Is it currently serving that purpose? There are lots of reasons to have a website, in fact many business owners have different websites to serve these different purposes. So, why do you have a website? Once you know that answer, make sure your website serves that why.
Continue Reading →