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February 2006 Woman of the Month:

Ali Brown, The E-zine Queen

The Women’s Business Gallery is pleased to introduce you to this month’s Featured Artist, Alexandria (Ali) Brown, the E-zine Queen of the Internet. Her entrepreneurial story, which starts out the same as so many of ours, takes us on an odyssey that explores a whole new world of opportunities. A world in which we can reach staggering heights of business success if we give our pioneering spirit the freedom to “think outside the box.”

In the Beginning

Like many of us, Ali began her career as a “normal” working woman, employed by someone else. About seven years ago, though, when she was working as a copywriter for an advertising agency in New York City, she decided to strike out on her own. She says:

“I never realized I was an entrepreneur at heart until I worked for someone else. I thought I was dysfunctional because I didn’t like having a job. After all, my parents had jobs, my friends had jobs, and that was just the way you were supposed to go through life.”

Then when she realized that working for someone else wasn’t the road to happiness, or success, she took her future into her own hands. According to Ali,

“It was one of those situations where it was more painful to stay where I was than to take the chance and risk it all. That meant I had to stop thinking so much with my head and start thinking with my heart.”

(Sound familiar ladies?)

A Life-Changing Discovery

Once Ali made the break from her “real job,” she quickly learned that most of her time would be spent, not working for clients, but finding them. She had to market herself!

She emphasizes, “the marketing is more important than the mastery. You can be the best coach, consultant, author, or dog groomer, or have the best products in the world, but if you’re not good at getting the word out…AND getting people to RESPOND, you will never truly succeed in business.”

So she did what most of us do: she joined networking groups and attended their gatherings, and met with potential clients and asked for referrals, but she found the process slow and painful. One-one-one marketing was exhausting.

She didn’t give up though. One day, as she was reading a marketing article, she learned about the “7 to 10 Rule”–the one that says a prospect needs to see or hear your message 7 to 10 times before they’ll take any action. Eureka! She’d discovered the key to unlock the marketing mystery:

But how to follow up? More phone calls and one-one-one meetings? There had to be a better way. The answer came to her one morning as she was checking her email.

Marketing the Smart Way

“Hey,” she thought, “this would be an easy and free way for me to keep in touch with all these prospects I’m meeting.”

Emails wouldn’t require making those dreaded follow-up phone calls, or dragging herself to meetings and 6 a.m. breakfasts–and she could make contact with several people at once!

She knew, however, that she couldn’t just pitch people with her services every week — that wouldn’t win her any friends or clients — so she decided to give her subscribers something of value. Something that would show them she was a resource, not a pest. And her strategy worked.

Every two weeks Ali sent out her copywriting tips e-zine to a handful of subscribers, and before long, her emails were being forwarded by her prospects to other people, who forwarded them to others. All the while she kept working on her new marketing system: tweaking, testing, revising, and retesting, while her subscriber list slowly grew. And as it grew, she became known as not only a resource, but an expert at the process of growing a business with e-zine marketing.

She’s been interviewed by Entrepreneur magazine, written for corporate giants such as Dunn and Bradstreet and Scholastic Books, and her little “e-zine system that could” has taken small business owners to their own dizzying heights of success.

Today her “little e-zine” reaches more than 17,000 people around the world!

In just a few years’ time, Ali has moved from being a struggling freelance copywriter living in a tiny New York City apartment to being a sought-after speaker and workshop leader based in sunny California. All because she was willing to take a chance on herself.

Now Ali prides herself on helping other small business owners grow their own companies with her program, Boost Business With Your Own E-zine, a “step-by-step system to publish for profits,” and her Online Success Blueprint In a Box, which she designed especially for coaches, consultants, and solo-preneurs.

By believing in herself and following her heart, Ali’s investment in her own future helped her achieve a level of success that many people only dream about.

I see Ali’s success as a shining example of the possibilities available to all of us. If we only dare to dream, and match our passion with patience and persistence, we CAN make our dreams come true.

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Visit Ali on the Web at: EzineQueen.com and sign up for her Straight Shooter Marketing e-zine. This lady really knows her stuff!