Every Friday edition of the Marketing For Owners Podcast features a Weekend Challenge for you to help you grow your business. These are always done on paper using just a regular old pen or pencil — the object here is to write down the steps you are going to take to move forward in your business.
I hope that each of these challenges inspire you as they have inspired me. To get the full experience, follow the orange link button to the episode to see the full explanation and details.
The challenges are in reverse order and they will all help boost your business.
Weekend Challenge 430 -6 Marketing Tips that Work
- Drop Letters or Cards into the Neighbors of Your Clients:So this could be, so if you, if you actually visit clients for real, whether it’s sales or whatever, and when you got a real client, have something preprinted. A letter or a card.
- Put Your Best Ad Copy on Your Vehicle:Now this is going to be controversial. Because when you’ve got a van or a truck or something, I know you want to put a massive great logo.
- Print an Offer on the Back of Your Business Card:So, say you could print, you got ad copy. But it must have a call to action. But even better is an offer. Something, you don’t want just plain old inquiries, you don’t want people to put you in a patch. You want people to contact you.
- Instead of Discounts, Give Trials of Other Services:And that generally means a free trial. So instead of saying something like for every, if you buy a cup of coffee or if you are going to coffee shop, instead of stamping a card that says, for every 5 of these, every 5 stamps, you get one free.
- Hand Out a Signed Iron Clad GuaranteeNow this takes some nerves. How confident are you in your services? Are you good, are you good at what you do?
- Create Expiration Dates for Your ProductsIf you want people to buy more of your products, you need to tell them how long it’s going to last for. It’s no good saying, this will last forever. Because no one believes you.
Weekend Challenge 425 -Would You Refer You?
- Show Up On Time:Many of us are thinking “Great, hardly rocket science Jon” but tell the plumbers, tell the people who have said “I’ll be there at your home to fix something at your home in the morning between 8 and 1 or something like that and you think “What? I have got to wait in all morning”?
- Do What You Said You Were Going to Do:Do I really need to explain that? If you told someone you’re going to do something, do it. There you go.
- Finish What You Said You Were Going to Do:Yes, builders, construction people do not do that thing where you do two thirds of a job and then you go off and start another job and then you leave people in the lurch thinking “What happened?
- Charge What You Said You Were Going to Charge:The money. Don’t at the end of it say “Well I had to use a few more things so it’s going to cost you another 50 quid”.
- Say “Please” and “Thank You”Yes, be polite. We, the customer, the person that’s paying you have invited you to come and practice your services on us, on our property, whatever and we are paying you our hard earned cash.
- Train Your Staff to Do the SameDon’t assume they will do the same. Don’t tell them on day one “do this, do that” write the process down, laminate it. You haven’t got a laminator?
Weekend Challenge 420 -Much Better Than a Business Development Plan
- Write Out Your Idea in One Paragraph:No more reams and reams of pages. You are not writing a novel and no one is really going to read it. Write out short succinct sentences.
- Write Down Your Assumptions:There are 4 real areas to include — Who are your customers? What problems do you solve? What solution do you provide? Will they pay me
- Create a List of Questions and a Script Based on Your Assumptions:You are creating a new department or project for your business, you are going to invest time and money and employ people and you are going to hope it works.
- Use it On Customers:Don’t just sit on it. Use it! What are you scare of? What are you worried about? Are you afraid that they are going to be annoyed with you? Don’t worry!
- Compare Their Answers to Your AssumptionsRemember the assumptions and ideas you made at the beginning? Now, you are going to compare your customers answers to the assumptions from earlier.
- Rewrite #1 and #2Go through this cycle several times over the course of a few months until you get a list of something that the customer says “yes I would pay for that service”.
Weekend Challenge 415 -Should You Exhibit at Trade Shows?
- Is Is Right For You?:Now what I mean by that, is this — is it right for you to exhibit specifically? So it may be a good exhibition, a good show, or something to go to. But is that one specifically going to work for you?
- Invite Guests To Meet You:Yes. Invite people. People you know. Even place a Facebook ad. Or send an email out to your list. Say we are exhibiting at… get people to come to the exhibition and meet you there.
- Have Clear Goals and Train Your Team:This may sound obvious, but I visit lots of trade shows and recently, I am talking about this because I’ve been to a couple lately.
- Your Back Drop and Display:The messages must be clear. I have walked through these things and I’ve stood there, staring at a stand.
- Follow Up Fast and AccuratelyAh. And same with these 2. I’ve gone up to people. I’ve talked to them, I spent ages. I’ve been very interesting in services. I’ve given my card and I’ve said, ‘yes please get in touch with me. That’s of interest.’ And no they don’t.
- Plan a Day Off Work to Follow UpNow after the event, most of us go home. We go back to our real lives, we do the laundry, we got to go back to work like this was on a Sunday.
Weekend Challenge 410 -How to Get Maximum Value by Visiting Events
- Make a Plan:Now this may sound obvious, or it may sound silly, depends on your point of view. But when you visit one of these places, you may be paying to be there, but you’re certainly taking time out of your day.
- Plan to Meet Your Contacts:Now what I mean by that is, is people that you already know. Find out who’s going from your circles. You’ve got twitter, Facebook.
- Find the Official Hashtag:Now social media. We all know about social media. It’s all good stuff. But usually events have an official hashtag.
- Plan to Make New Contacts:Yes. Events aren’t just for learning. They are for meeting people. There are speakers. There are top people. You will be amazed who visit, who visit these.
- Make Brief NotesNow first of all, take your own notebook. Do not expect to be given pads, pens, paper. Take your own notebook. You should have a notebook.
- Plan a Day Off Work to Follow UpNow after the event, most of us go home. We go back to our real lives, we do the laundry, we got to go back to work like this was on a Sunday.
Weekend Challenge 405 -Find Prospects and Turn Them Into Customers
- Know Your Ideal Customer Profile:So, to get started, if you listened on Monday, I talked about something similar about improving response rates by knowing who are your customers.
- Use Your Customer’s Language:Use your customer’s language or use their language. Do not speak in official corporate tones.
- Found Out Where They Hang Out:By hang out , I mean, where do they look in forums? Do they read online publications? They read magazines, they read newspapers. Do they read types of blogs? Do they look at Facebook?
- Give Them Good Information:That’s what people are after. When people use Google, they are looking for information. For instance, I wanted a new tripod for my little iPhone to make podcast with.
- Show Expertise and AuthorityNow that goes hand in hand with the one before. Let me tell you my friend, you are an expert. If you are a roofer, mentioned this the other day.
- Train Them to Take ActionWhat I mean by train them to take action is don’t assume anything. So, when you’ve written an article, when you’ve put a post on Facebook or you’ve written a tweet or something like that and you’ve given some information.
Weekend Challenge 400 -What I Have Learned from Recording 400 Podcasts
- Engagement Trumps Numbers Every Time:engagement trumps numbers every time. So you could have 20,000 Twitter followers, you can have a subscriber list of 100,000, of 50,000, of 10,000 but if nobody is reading the stuff, if no one is commenting, if no one is engaged, if no one is listening, I could put this out into the ether, if no one is listening, what is the point?
- It’s Not About You, It’s About Them:The person, your listener, your reader, your e-mail reader, your customer, your potential customer, they rightfully are not interested in you, they want to know what’s in it for them.
- Talk Like a Friend and Not Like a Company:Have you ever read those corporate e-mails? Or read those corporate websites where they have that stock photo image of a bunch of multiracial women, men, different colored hair, all wearing suits, all smiling, all shaking hands?
- Refer to Short Stories:So when you are explaining things, make them relatable to your audience.
- Entertain and use Humor to Accompany Anything You DiscussWhether it’s figures, even if you’re giving a presentation to someone like a PowerPoint. Are you one of these people that does that pour point thing?
- Ask Them to Take ActionHave a call to action, a C.T.A. and make it simple. So if you say to someone on your website, the end, “If you’re interested in this, phone us and we’ll be glad to help.”
Weekend Challenge 395 -Pricing Your Products and Services
- Do not Round Up or Round Down Your Prices:If you are a gardener or a painter and decorator or a builder or something like that and you come up with a price for someone and if you work it out it comes to say £907, don’t just say, “I’ll do it for 900.”
- Whatever You Plan to Charge, Charge More, Go Higher:The reason for this is because you’re going to say “Well, that won’t work in my industry.” And I’ll be blunt here, I and many other business advisors and marketers are so tired of people saying “Oh, it’s, different in my industry.”
- Go to the End of a Number Series:So when I said don’t round up, do go to the end. What I mean by that is — say that a number series goes up to 100, so you go up to 99, instead of charging 69 or 79 or 89, charge £99.
- Add Choice Options:So when you offer someone a price, they have the option of buying it or saying no. When you offer three options, they have to make a choice of which would be their preferred option.
- Think ContinuityIf you offer anything as a product or as a service, try and get someone to pay a regular price to have you come back regularly.
- Think Value, Not PriceNow I think this is a Warren Buffet quote, “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.” And that is that my friend.
Weekend Challenge 390 -Ideas for Your Lead Magnet
- A Top 5 Resource Guide:For example — if you are a photographer, why not do a guide with your top 5 choices of the best photography gear?
- Top 5 Most Popular Posts:Now, I am talking the top 5 most popular posts on your website. So to save your potential readers and customers time of having to wade through all your posts, give them a top 5 list of your most popular ones.
- Q and A About You:How about writing down a lot of questions and answers and having a colleague interview you? You can do the interview on video on a camera or an ipone or even just audio.
- How to Save Money Checklist:For example, we sell fire extinguishers in my fire safety business and fire safety supplies, so we could do a checklist on how to save money when purchasing your first fire extinguisher or something like that.
- Facts and Myth ListingsNow, again, you are going to create an industry guide for this. For instance, if you are in the fire safety business, you could offer a one pager about the facts and myths of fire safety industry.
- Free One on One Session With YouNow, you can get this from us as well. Now, don’t think you can’t do this. If you are in business and your customer calls you to talk to you about your services, you would gladly give them a quote wouldn’t you?
Weekend Challenge 385 -Some Questions to Ask from Your Website
- Why Would Anyone Come to Your Website?:So I want you to look at your website and to think, because your website is important. This is the 21st century by the way. Why would anyone want to come to your website?
- Can I Find the Same Information on Amazon, the BBC, or New York Times?:People come for information, but is that information readily available on the big websites where everyone goes, or msn or places like that or newspaper sites. Things like that.
- Do You Deserve to Get Visitors?:How much effort are you putting in? And that’s it. Really. How much effort are you putting in? So when did you last update your website?
- Who is the Website Aimed At?:So if you were Joseph Phean Hair Dressers, who is it aimed at? Is it aimed at your female clients, women in the town where Joseph Phean lives and within a radius of 10 miles? I don’t know.
- Have you Considered Mobile or Tablet Traffic?Now what I mean by tablet, I am talking IPad, iPad, galaxy note, kindle, fire, google, who knows what. Oh, Microsoft surface and all those kind of things, you know tablets.
- What Do They Do Next?So when someone comes to your website and looks at it and they read it, they check stuff out and it’s good. It’s got information. It’s got services, they’re interested. Then what? What you actually want them to do?
Weekend Challenge 380 -The AIDA Formula Explained
- Move Away From Interruption:Get out of the office, get away from home, go to Starbucks, go down to the beach, you don’t need the Internet for this, you can write this down on a pad, you can write it on an iPad, on your laptop, you don’t need to be connected.
- Attention:Now attention is in effect the headline and the lead paragraph, also known as the lead in sales copy writing. Quite obviously, the headline, the e-mail, the subject line or something like that, has to grab the attention.
- Interest:Here is where you’re going to list out the facts to show where they are now, their current position and how this that you’re going to talk about will benefit them.
- Desire:Now here is where you build up, you’ve got their attention, you’ve got their interest, you’ve piqued their interest, now you want to their desire, okay.They need to want this.
- ActionYou must tell them what you want them to do. And of course, this isn’t always a sale, this might be to sign up, to opt in, to go to an event, to register for something, for a course, to get a free book, who knows?
Weekend Challenge 375 -Easier Selling in 6 Steps
- You Need a Target Audience:If you are trying to market or sell to the general public, you will fail miserably. You will waste your time and money and advertising space.
You will waste effort and you will waste energy. - Define Their Problem:When you are trying to market your product or service, more often than not, your customers don’t know that they have a problem.
- Explain Why Their Attempts of Fixing This Problem is Not Working:Remind your customers or potential customers of how they have tried to fix it and how it has not worked.
- Explain How You Found the Solution:This is how you found the solution and how it came about. It is just a wonderful thing. You have to tell people about that.
- You Have to Reiterate the Wonders of This but in Relation to ThemIn step 4, you explained to them how you find the solution, how it improved everything and made everything better, now you have to explain how this will help them.
- Tell Them What to Do Now, Then, or When You Want Them to Do It: Buy now. Add to Cart. Get Yours Now. Or, if it is a special offer, “sign up before”, “register before”. It may even be “grab your download now”. You get it. But you need to tell them what to do.
Weekend Challenge 370 -Creating a Lead Generating System
- You Need a Presence:That can be off-line or it can be online. Obviously the easiest way is to do this online, a presence is your website.
- You Need Traffic:And by traffic we mean footsteps, finger clicks, people; people need to visit your website and to see what you’ve got for them.
- Have Some Kind of Offer:Now this is the part where it asks them for, your advert or whatever, asks them to give permission to give their e-mail address or their address or their phone number and their details and their contact details in exchange for what you offer.
- You Need a System to Capture Information and Deliver on Your Promise:So in other words, you need, in the online world, you need an e-mail service provider. Common ones are Mail Chimp, AWeber, Convert Kit, InfusionSoft, and organizations like this.
- You Need to Follow UpNow please, I’m going to say this a few times, follow-up, follow-up, follow-up!
- Make An Offer:Now don’t make that offer straightaway, you need to have contacted somebody, like, six, seven, eight, nine times before they’re at the place where they think “Yeah, we can trust them.”
Weekend Challenge 365 -5 Steps to Take When Sales are in the Toilet
- Remember How it Was When Sales Were Good:Honestly –sometimes you need a pick me up, you need some confidence, you need to get back in there, you need to get ready, to get fired up, you’re going to look to rediscover things, so just think back.
- Visit or Phone Your Top 20 Customers:Visit, actually physically visit, or if you can’t do that, telephone your top twenty customers and ask them questions.
- Write Down the Top 5 Benefits You Give Your Customrs:Benefits are from the point of view of the customer, so when it’s got park assist, that’s a feature, the benefit to the customer is no longer do you have to be scared to try and park, parallel park in public, because this car will do it all for you and make you look like a pro.
- Get Every Customer’s Email Address:When I say every customer ever, I mean ever. I don’t mind if it’s five years ago. And if you weren’t collecting e-mails, shame on you, you should have been, because e-mail is free.
- Start Talking to Your Customers Via Email Every WeekThat means weekly, once a week. You don’t have to wait to write it five minutes before it’s due to go out like doing your school homework, you can write two at a time.
- Find a Marketing System and Follow it to the Letter:Yes, so let’s be blunt here. You have allowed, for whatever circumstances, it may not be your fault, but you were the captain in charge of the ship, same story it comes down to you.
Weekend Challenge 360 -Double Your Email Response in 5 Steps
- The Subject Line:Now this is obvious to many people. But if your subject line is not enticing enough in the first place, nobody will open your email.
- The Layout:Layout format whatever you want to say. Think about your emails. People are going to often read them on mobiles. If you have some fancy templated email that’s been designed for you by a designer. The chances of it working in every email provider and every single mobile device is small.
- The Content:The content actually has to be interesting, especially if you are going to write an extremely long email.
- Call to Action:Every email needs to elicit a response like I just said. Click. Go to this page on a website. Tell them at the end what you want them to do.
- Your SignatureThat is your opportunity. This is so simple. Just go to. Don’t pay someone to have something that just doesn’t display and the images they put, different images on and places attachments and stuff.
- Get Rid of the disclaimer at the Bottom:One of those disclaimer images, footers that is about yay long and it says this content is for the person who designated any whatever whatever. Please get rid of that. Who told you to have that? A lawyer?
Weekend Challenge 355 -How to Be an Entrepreneur
- Have Written Goals With Deadlines:Goals without deadlines are just simply goals and dreams. Ones with deadlines are the goals you are actually going to take action on and finish before the deadline.
- Know Your Unique Ability:You should not be doing everything. You should not be packing boxes. You should not be opening the posts. You should not be taking customer service calls on the phone.
- Delegate Effectively:When you need to get rid of those tasks you shouldn’t be doing, it doesn’t mean that they don’t need to get done, they just need to be given to someone else to do.
- Know Your Company USP and Make it Truly Unique:Your USP — or your unique selling position is basically what sets your company apart from the others. What makes you fantastic? And put that in the perspective of the customer in the features.
- Communicate Your Vision ContinuouslyNow that you have your new USP, people need to know about it. You have a vision. Why did you go into business? Why do you think you can do it better?
- Systematize Every Single Task in the Business:The reason for that is the people who systematize it is the people who do it, so by systematize, I mean write down what they do and how they do it.
Now, once they have written down a system, then you teach them how to do it.
Weekend Challenge 350 -How to Create a Project
- Give the Project an Effective Title and Deadline:If you don’t have a deadline, then it is never going to get completed.
- Look at the End Results:Look at the end of the project to see what it will look like once all the steps have been completed. Look at how it contributes to the future, how it is going to help, etc.
- Write Down Objectives and Problems:So, we would write down the objectives and problems the, what is missing, what don’t we have now problems. Then against those, we write down each of the strategies or steps that is needed to fix it.
- List Out Strategies and Set a Deadline for Every Single Task:Take each one of those strategies and list them out on paper. Then, assign responsibilities to your staff for each one and give them each a deadline. Be sure to do this with every single task or strategy on that list.
- Add Every Single Part of That to a CalendarFor example, when we set out the email strategy, we decided it would take 2 weeks to create 3 months worth of emails. We decided to allocate a maximum of one hour per day to this task. So between 11 and 12 each day, for two weeks, we slotted in something to be done.
- Now Implement It and Actually Do It:Get the project started, stick to the deadlines and keep a check on it. Be sure to keep a project diary where you keep reports of how it’s going.
Weekend Challenge 345 -6 Reasons to Stretch Your Goals
- Get the Mindset:First of all consider how old you will be when you possibly retire? Now of course we are automatically going to think 65 years old, who knows?
- Describe Your Future Life:Describe your future life. Write it down. Think about what you want. Don’t just think in terms of goals. Don’t say I want to be a millionaire. I want a porch, I want this.
- Foundations Need to Be Built:When we talk of goals where it’s quite often we are in sprints. I mean if anyone’s read Scrum, you know it consist of a lot of sprints.
- There is No Quick Fix:There just simply isn’t. Anyway so don’t go for it, don’t think I need to make more money. I mean I have people write to me all the time, I always invite people to write in, email me anytime by the way.
- Just Give Yourself More TimeNow Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach talks in times in quarters of centuries. He said think of 25 years, 25 years contain one hundred 3 month periods. A lot can be done.
- Take the Stress Off:I would love you to take stress out of your life. We are pressured by what we hear other people doing. Now you may have listened to my podcast for a long time, you may think, ‘Oh Gosh Jon! it’s easy for you. You are great at everything.’
Weekend Challenge 340 -What I Have Learned in 340 Podcasts
- Batch Up Your Work:Yes. Record. If you are doing interview, podcast or things do them in batches. John Lee Dumas for example, famous for his show Entrepreneur on Fire, he does seven interviews a week.
- Have a Backup Plan:Now stuff is going to go wrong. Absolutely so have an alternative. What else can you do? So for instance in podcast thing, there are going to be glitches. Recently I had Jordan Harbinger of the Art of Charm.
- Be Consistent:Now I record an interview every single Wednesday. I record a podcast, a short just 10 minutes podcast Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.
- Stay on Topic:The subjects that I talk about and I write about on the blog and talk about on when I speak, are all around marketing for small medium sized business owner or marketing team and around tips to make your life better, to make it less stressful and to build your business in a way that’s easy, using a proven system.
- Leverage the Brilliance of ExpertsNow the best example of that is my Wednesday expert interview series. Quite simply I find the top experts in the online marketing space so there are people like Omar Zanhom of 100 Dollar MBA.
- Do More of What Works:That seems like a kind of a strange thing to say but very very simple. If something works well, do more of it, if it’s not working, don’t do it anymore.
Weekend Challenge 335 -6 Quick Ideas to Boos Your Sales
- Phone Your Top 10 Clients:You can phone more. I am just going to say 10. I don’t care who they are. But you should know who your top ones are.
- Change Something:Change something in your business, change the website, change an offer, add a new product or something like that. Just do something differently and then tell people.
- Give a Discount Off Someone’s Next Order:So whenever you deliver your goods, your services or an invoice, you must do something like this to, you must somehow contact a customer, somehow.
- Add a Profitable Upsell to Each Order:Remember the old McDonald’s upsell lingo — “do you want fries with that?” What about yourself?
- Call the Neighbors of Your Top ClientsIt doesn’t have to be you, it could be your salesperson if you have them or your rep, or your delivery person.
- Find a Partner and Swap Offers:What that means is say for example, we are a local fire extinguisher supplier. We probably don’t sell security alarms, something like that for businesses.
Weekend Challenge 330 -How to Create a Social Media Plan
- Create 15 New Boards on Pinterest:As an example we’re gonna pick Pinterest, okay? Because not everyone is doing Pinterest so I’m just going to use that.
- Follow 12 Influencers and Brands With Similar Content:So in mine at Fire Safety, I’d go and find a couple other fire safety businesses, but also in verticals, you know in a similar thing, I’d also find a couple of business organizations or trade associations.
- Pin 3 or 4 pieces of Content from Your Blog Every Day:Now you also need to Pin from other places, so go to sign up for something like Feedly. Follow a bunch of blogs there of ones that are of interest to you, and when they have good stuff, Pin it.
- Re-Pin 3 pieces of Influencers Content Every Day:Now you’re re-Pinning so there you’ve got twelve, it doesn’t matter. Right?
You don’t have to do them all, you might want to pick just six or four a day, but re-Pin three pieces from each of them. Probably more sensible to do something like say four of the twelve. Re-Pin. - Use Pinterest Size Portrait Images for Your PostsNow if you look at our posts, such as our Wednesday Interview post, you’ll see that the main image at the top of the post is a huge Pinterest style. So it’s going to be a portrait style, meaning that shape.
- Place the Pinterest Share Button on Every Single Post:That means you’re going to place it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and if you’re big on Instagram that as well, on every single one. Because these are not for you.
Weekend Challenge 325 -Try Something New
- Add a New Social Media Platform to the Mix:If you are not using Linkedin, you probably should be. People will look for you on Facebook and Twitter. I am going to suggest you add another one — how about Instagram or Pinterest?
- Change the Style of Your Blog Writing:Now, I am assuming you re blog writing because that is how your customers get to know you, like you and trust you, so you should be writing on your blog.
- Enhance Your Blogger Outreach Efforts:Like I mentioned above, if you link to the blog or website of the example you are showing in your post, you can link to that persons’ website, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
- Commit to Making One Video a Week:Now, if you are watching this, it is a video. But this video has also been re-purposed and turned into a podcast, an audio version, and a blog post on the site.
- Add 3 More Emails to Your Auto Responder SequenceThe more you add, the longer your sequence will send out.
- Delegate a Task to Somebody New:Now what I mean is delegate a task to someone who you have not delegated to before.
Weekend Challenge 320 -Your New Marketing System
- Presence:The presence in the marketing system is this — you require a website, it is the hub of all your activities.
- Profile:So for example say it is going out and meeting a client face to face to introduce the companyYou need to be on the right social media because your audience or your potential audience, your potential customers are using social media.
- Potential:Are you only talking to those potential customers, the people who may, who either are or may be interested in what you have to offer?
- Permission:Everyone wants to know what an expert uses and they won’t necessarily go and buy it but they just want to know.
- NurtureWe need to nurture, we need to talk to people, we need to give them more information on things they are going to be interested in over a period of time until they are ready to buy. Not everyone needs your service or product today.
- Preacher:This is the part where we do everything we can to impress them. Once they have bought we will impress them no end.
Weekend Challenge 315 -Remove the Barriers to your Success
- You Need to Find Your Unique Ability:You are fantastic at something and I’m talking in relation to your business.
- Devote a Portion of Your Week to Doing Just That:So for example say it is going out and meeting a client face to face to introduce the company.
- Develop an Automated Marketing System:The reason I say that is because if you build an automated system where this happens on its own, then you can do the things you love.
- Block Out Regular Free Time Away From Work:Find some time you need free time you need to keep yourself your mind free as well.
- Create Goals That Take You Towards Your SuccessCreate goals that take you on a journey towards the right strategic goals. That each one moves you that bit closer to get to getting that.
- Measure Your Results:Do this every single month at the end of the month. Start the following month measure the results monthly and reward yourself.
Weekend Challenge 310 -Six Steps to Improve Your Marketing in 2016
- Develop a Marketing Strategy:Find a system and follow it. Pick something. So we have the 7 P’s of Modern Marketing, or what I like to call the Perpetual Sales Cycle, which ever you prefer. Doesn’t matter.
My system, our system, it’s proven, it works and it’s not just me. Others use this way more successfully than I do. - Use an Email Service Provider for Your Outgoing Marketing Messages:There are many to choose from. You can google them. We use Aweber and Mailchimp because they are very low priced, and, in fact, there are free trials on those.
- Decide What to Measure and Then Measure it and Track it Monthly:Keep a note of those. At the end of the month, top them up. Yeah, then you’ll find out. ‘Oh, gosh. Look, 50% of the people saw an ad in the newspaper. Do more of that, etc., etc.
- Produce Regular New Resources on Your Website:Now by resources, I mean downloads such as eBooks, or courses or videos or how to’s or cheat sheets or check lists.
- Be in Control of Your Marketing and If Possible, Bring It In-HouseDo it all in-house. You do not need a marketing degree, you do not need to have gone to college.
- Find a Coach to Keep You On Track and Moving Ahead:Don’t do it all on your own. Every single top successful person has a mentor and they have coaches.
Weekend Challenge 305 -How to Enjoy Your Business
- You Have to Make a Positive Choice to Enjoy Your Work:Your worst enemy in everything is you. Everything comes down to you. Your competitors are you. Your success comes down to you. It is all in your mind.
- Talk to Your Team about Your Plan and Your Vision and Involve Them:Share with them why you do what you do, what your favorite things are, why you started the company and what you think the company will look like in a couple of years.
- Write Down Goals That Can Be Achieved :Don’t set goals like, we want to double our sales this year. You need to set goals that are attainable and achievable.
- Contact a Competitor :Competitors are only that in your mind. They are simply business owners doing the same job as you.
They share experiences. They know what you know, they have things in common with you, so you should think of them as colleagues. - Contact Your Customers RegularlyNow, I am talking about your top customers. It is great to talk to all your customers, but there are top customers (you know who those are right?).
- Get Yourself a Coach or a Mentor:Have someone who can bring something to the table. You do not want a friend or mate.
Find someone who is in your industry and is near retirement, and ask them, “I am doing this in my business and I would like to get your advice. Can I take you out for coffee and pick your brain occasionally?”
Weekend Challenge 300 -A Better Way to Hire Your Team
- Look for World Wide Talent:Do not restrict yourself. his is the World Wide Web and people communicate via e-mail, via Skype, via messaging systems, via text, via anything, via Facebook, via groups, via forums.
- Hire for Attitude:Do not worry too much about talent. Hire for attitude, or say higher for character, those are the two words that I would implore that you use when you interview people, even locally.
- Have Every Position Covered by Someone Else : Now of course that doesn’t mean that for everyone you have to hire two people, but say for instance, in your marketing team, you may have somebody who writes blog posts, a writer.
You may have someone who does your social media. Why can’t those two people cover each other? - Have Your Worker Create the System :For instance you are teaching how to do a post on Facebook. Simply screencast yourself, record your screen and what that means is you use a free software like ScreenCast-O-Matic or CamStudio or Jing.
- Communicate OftenFor example you are in America and the person is in the Philippines, communicate with them all of the time, do not ignore them.
Never, ever assume that the person knows exactly what to do; it’s probably better to assume they don’t until they’ve been there awhile. - Make Them Feel a Part of the Business:Do not allow somebody, and this applies to all your staff, all your team, do not allow them to just feel like they are an employee, make them feel part of it, that means involving them in your plans.
Weekend Challenge 295 -Challenges You Must Master in 2016
- Outsource Staffing:I’m not saying to sack all your staff and to outsource everything but to learn to outsource some tasks. So for example if your images need photo touch up or anything, don’t go to someone down the road.
- Systemizing:If you know how to do it, you have a system it’s in your head. Just get it down on paper or get someone to write it down, preferably the person doing the job.
- Involve Your Staff More : There are a lot of responsibilities on your shoulders and again I have the same but the thing that made a big difference in my company was once I started involving my staff, talking to my staff, eventually I promoted people.
- Talk to Your Customers :Go and meet them, make any excuse. It’s easier to keep a customer than to get a new one so make an effort to impress them and keep them.
If you talk to them and ask for their opinion, they’ll help you with product development. - Ask For ReferralsGo speak to them and say this is great isn’t it, you enjoyed this, you’ve been buying from us this last two years, what do you think is good about us and then they’ll tell you.
- Build a List:Add email addresses, all of your existing customers, add them, you are allowed, that is not spam. You’re not going to spam people, you’re not going to send them offer after offer.
Weekend Challenge 290 -Six Types of Content You Can Create Easily
- Easy Curated Content:You can see where you’re discussing an article, you refer to the article, you don’t plagiarize it, you link very directly to their articles, which gives you the reason for discussing them.
- Listicles:These are list articles, and yes, it’s a funny word. In Buzzsumo’s recent commentary on, the track articles and what is the most popular, they pointed out what works the best.
- Transcripts : If you make videos, and you should be making videos, you should be teaching, you don’t have to be doing podcasts like this, but you should be making videos, how about getting it transcribed?
- How-To’s :Everyone wants to know how to set up, how to change the headlamp in your Ford Focus, how to create the best birthday cake ever, that kind of stuff.
- StrategiesNow these may seem like, how to’s, but what I mean by strategies is plans. People want to be told exactly how to do something.
- Case Studies:How long have you been in business? You must have a case study, you must have a customer. How about ringing them up? Because they will get the publicity as well from linking to them and their name, or their social media in your article; they’re going to love it; and who would not want to be interviewed?
Weekend Challenge 285 -Change Your Focus in 2016 and Start Winning
- Build Your Business With Every Action:Your business will survive if it has continuous growing funds; a business that stands still dies, it withers on a vine. A business must grow to survive.
- Make Lead Capture the #1 Aim:Now just one proviso, if you sell products, you of course can make it sell, but even in that case, number one is to capture leads, not many people will dive in and buy instantly.
- List Building Should Start Today : If you’re in business and you are not list building, which means capturing e-mails and contact details, possibly names of people, potential customers, then you’re losing out.
- Longer Email Marketing Sequences :Your e-mail sequence is where you have an auto responder, you write an e-mail and leave it in there and it says when to send it.
- Create Quality Content that Teaches and AnswersPeople are searching online for answers.They are not searching for products, they want answers. We sell fire extinguishers at Fire Protection Online and fire safety gear, people want to know what type of fire extinguisher do I need for my hairdressing salon?
- Create Opportunities to Sell:Remember what I said at the beginning, the focus is on raising money on getting income, selling stuff or services, so look for those opportunities, make it a rare but make it a regular.
Weekend Challenge 280 -My Special Kindness Christmas Challenge
- Give Thanks to Individual Staff and Team Members: What I mean by giving thanks is not giving them cash bonuses.I mean to be grateful, to take them aside — and when I staff, I don’t mean staff as a whole. Take an individual and tell them specifically why you think they are wonderful
- Think of New Ways to Give Thanks to Customers:Now — what that means is you are going to have to impress your new customers. Don’t think your work is done because — it’s never done!You need to start working on them to make them buy again. You want to make them a permanent customer.
- Contact Existing Customers and Say Thank You :With older customers, we tend to get complacent and think that just because they are buying from us, we don’t have to do anything else.
- How You Contribute to Your Community :For example — how about sponsoring a local kids’ sports team? You may think this is a marketing thing, but I bet you will feel good about it and it will help you to give back to the community.
- Be More SocialHow about putting a list in Twitter of your customers. Have one of your team members create this list and then communicate more on Twitter with them.
- Be More Grateful for Your Staff Members:Just be appreciative. I have a feeling if we appreciate everyone around us in life, then that will make this a joyous Christmas and that will develop into a fabulous 2016.
Weekend Challenge 275 -6 Steps to Becoming an Industry Leader
- Realize You are An Expert: Yes, unless you can convince yourself, you might as well not bother listen to the others.
- Backup What You Say About Yourself:In other words, tell people you’re an expert. So I have just in effect told you I am a marketing expert.
- Write or video “how to” instructions :You know stuff because you read the trade magazines, you talk to other people, you have been doing it for 5, 10, 15 years; maybe not for yourself, maybe in a previous job, you know the in and outs.
- Contact Others and Create Curated Content Together :Now when I say contact others, I mean contact other people in your industry, not the person you think is your arch rival, although they are not really your rival, they are a colleague in your industry, you’re all after the same thing.
- Attend Industry EventsTrade associations, you have conferences, things like that; if you’re not attending these, why not? Why aren’t you learning?
- Get Information From Your Staff and Team:Explain why you are doing this to your staff, explain what this is going to do, oh this is going to further the business, how it’s going to further their position, them.
Weekend Challenge 270 – Change Today or Start Planning Your Business Funeral
- Get a WordPress Blog and Start Blogging: Blogging is just communicating with your clients, if you’re not communicating, you’re not up to date, you’ve lost them.
- Register Your Company Name on Every Social Media Platform:The chances are someone, somewhere in the world is starting a business up that has a similar name to yours and they’re going to grab your Twitter handle if you haven’t got it.
- Choose the Best Social Media Channel That is Effective :Choose one that suits you and use it every single day; or learn how to batch and do a week’s worth on a Monday for 15 min.etc.
- You Tube Vidoes That Teach Your Service :You will be amazed at who will read it. You will be amazed how many of your competitors don’t have those and how many people will come to you for that kind of information.
- Start Collecting Emails:Contact those people weekly or every other week about something. So grab an A Webber or a Mail Chimp account or something like that, you’re not going to be e-mailing them from your own thing.
- Ask Your Staff and Team if They Can Help:Tell them, sit them down on Monday, tell them that this is what you have been advised to do, who can help, how can they help.
Weekend Challenge 265 – Tasks You Should Not Be Doing
- Bookkeeping or Accounting: Your bookkeeper has been trained for this and they know how to do it and do it professionally.
- Office Admin: There are virtual assistants, general assistants, local people who would fit the bill nicely — all kinds of people out there that is suited to do this kind of work.
- Making Appointments : I am talking about phoning up customers here and setting up times for you to go out and visit them.
- Email Admin :Teach your new hire how to answer emails the way you would. Show them — they will gradually learn.
- Packing Boxes, Shipping, and Deliveries:Do not – I repeat – do not be the type of person who packs or ships or delivers your own boxes – -that is unless it is part of the service, like a farmer or something like that.
- Open Up and Lock Up at the End of the Day: Do you think that you have to show up first? Why? What respect does that get? Don’t! Just allow someone else to be the one to open up. Be sure to have a backup just in case the other person cannot get there to open up.
Weekend Challenge 260 – Create 6 Months of Content Answering These 6 Questions
- Common Questions: Write down the 10 most common and relevant questions that have ever been asked — these are regarding your business.
- What Should They Be Asking You?: Write down 10 questions that customers should be asking you.
- Staff Face to Face Contact Questions : Now, for this you need to designate one of your staff member as the one who goes and visits clients. Then, ask them, ‘What questions are you asked the most when you go and visit our customers?”
- Staff/Client Questions You Should Be Asking :Now, this will be the same staff member from above. What questions do they think customers or client should be asking?
- Ask a Friend or Relative Who is Not Related To Your Business:Ask them to tell you 10 questions that they would ask about your business products or services.
- Write Out the Complete and Honest Answers to Two of these Questions Every Week: By doing this, you will have 6 months of content with 2 posts per week.
Weekend Challenge 255 – Improve Your Web Content in 6 Easy Steps
- Read Your Post Out Loud: Yes, it may sound silly, but read it out aloud. Now I don’t recommend you do that when other people are around and I don’t mean while you’re walking down the street.
- Edit Your post with Free Software: First of all, use Grammarly. Now we use it primarily for every post. We run everything through it.
In fact, I have it constantly running in Google Chrome, in my browser on my Mac. - Does Your Headline Stand Out? : If people read your headline and it isn’t appealing, they won’t go and read your article or your post in the first place, so it doesn’t matter how good your writing is.
- What Does Your Format Look Like? : Now this is one of my top pet peeves. On websites in web copy, I just cannot stand to see huge blocks of text in long paragraphs.
- How Big Are Your Images: Your images need to be large. These days everyone’s got a fantastic camera on their smartphone, or you might even have a proper DSLR camera like a Canon or a Nikon.
- Time to Tell Everyone About Your Updates: Don’t just post it and share it on Facebook or tweet it and then hope that that’s it, your job done.
Weekend Challenge 250 – 6 Steps to Instantly Improve Your Business
- Not Taking Responsibility: There is always an excuse. Take ownership of when you make a mistake. Now, what you will find when you do this is a weight lifted off your shoulders.
- Complacency: Wise up my friend – get modern. Stop complaining about your competitors and get with the times.
Don’t be complacent. - Blaming Competitors for Your Failings : Cut it out. It is not them. They are a competitor in your eyes, but they are a colleague in the same industry in their eyes.
If you start looking them as a colleague instead of someone who is there to steal your business, you might be able to speak with them and get some very useful knowledge. - Not Completing Things Before You Decide They Don’t Work : Have you ever taken a training course that is long and after you tried it, you think, this is boring. Then after a while someone asks you how it went and you have to say that you never finished it?
it is because you did not put the effort in. You need to realize that is the problem with this. - Controlling Everything and Not Delegating: Stop doing that. You are not a control freak. When you started, you were hopeless. You have spent years getting to where you are. Do you need people to help? Yes you do
Weekend Challenge 260 – Answer These Questions and Get 6 Months of Content
- Common Questions: Write down the 10 most common and relevant questions that have ever been asked — these are regarding your business.
- What Should They Be Asking You?: Write down 10 questions that customers should be asking you.
- Staff Face to Face Questions : Now, for this you need to designate one of your staff-member as the one who goes and visits clients. Then, ask them, ‘What questions are you asked the most when you go and visit our customers?”
- Staff/Client Questions Should Be Asking : Now, this will be the same staff member from above. What questions do they think customers or client should be asking?
- Ask a Friend or Relative Who is Not Related to Your Business: Ask them to tell you 10 questions that they would ask about your business products or services.
- Write Out the Complete and Honest Answers to 2 of the Questions Every Week: By doing this, you will have 6 months of content with 2 posts per week.
This is also things your customer wants to know! You will be amazed at what a difference this will make.
Weekend Challenge 265 – Tasks You Should Not Be Doing
- You Should Not Be Doing Bookkeeping and Invoicing: Now, I am not talking about taking notes for your invoicing.
If you are the one that quoted the price, you should make the notes, so that your bookkeeper who is a professional, will have the details to invoice the right amount.
Your bookkeeper has been trained for this and they know how to do it and do it professionally. - You Should Not Be Doing Office Admin: I know you might be thinking, it won’t take long, but really? It will take longer than you think.
It needs to be done all of the time. You cannot get on without this happening. Who is going to order your stationary, answer your phone, and more? - You Shouldn’t Be Making Appointments: I am talking about phoning up customers here and setting up times for you to go out and visit them.
- You Shouldn’t Be Doing Email Admin: You Might think, “Oh I’ll just answer my emails over breakfast.” What does your spouse think about that? What do your kids think about that? Do you think that is healthy?
- Stop Packing Boxes, Doing the Shipping, or Do Deliveries: Do not – I repeat – do not be the type of person who packs or ships or delivers your own boxes – -that is unless it is part of the service, like a farmer or something like that.
- Don’t Open Up and Lock Up at the End of the Day: Now, you might think that this sets a good example. You are the first one at work and the last one to leave. Who told you that this was a great practice?
Where did you get that bit of information from?
Weekend Challenge 265 – Tasks You Should Not Be Doing
- You Should Not Be Doing Bookkeeping and Invoicing: Now, I am not talking about taking notes for your invoicing.
If you are the one that quoted the price, you should make the notes, so that your bookkeeper who is a professional, will have the details to invoice the right amount.
Your bookkeeper has been trained for this and they know how to do it and do it professionally. - You Should Not Be Doing Office Admin: I know you might be thinking, it won’t take long, but really? It will take longer than you think.
It needs to be done all of the time. You cannot get on without this happening. Who is going to order your stationary, answer your phone, and more? - You Shouldn’t Be Making Appointments: I am talking about phoning up customers here and setting up times for you to go out and visit them.
- You Shouldn’t Be Doing Email Admin: You Might think, “Oh I’ll just answer my emails over breakfast.” What does your spouse think about that? What do your kids think about that? Do you think that is healthy?
- Stop Packing Boxes, Doing the Shipping, or Do Deliveries: Do not – I repeat – do not be the type of person who packs or ships or delivers your own boxes – -that is unless it is part of the service, like a farmer or something like that.
- Don’t Open Up and Lock Up at the End of the Day: Now, you might think that this sets a good example. You are the first one at work and the last one to leave. Who told you that this was a great practice?
Where did you get that bit of information from?
Weekend Challenge 260 – Answer These Questions and Get 6 Months of Content
- Common Questions: Write down the 10 most common and relevant questions that have ever been asked — these are regarding your business.
- What Should They Be Asking You?: Write down 10 questions that customers should be asking you.
- Staff Face to Face Questions : Now, for this you need to designate one of your staff as the one who goes and visits clients. Then, ask them, ‘What questions are you asked the most when you go and visit our customers?”
- Staff/Client Questions Should Be Asking : Now, this will be the same staff member from above. What questions do they think customers or client should be asking?
- Ask a Friend or Relative Who is Not Related to Your Business: Ask them to tell you 10 questions that they would ask about your business products or services.
- Write Out the Complete and Honest Answers to 2 of the Questions Every Week: By doing this, you will have 6 months of content with 2 posts per week.
This is also things your customer wants to know! You will be amazed at what a difference this will make.
Weekend Challenge 250 – 6 Steps to Instantly Improve Your Business
- Not Taking Responsibility: There is always an excuse. Take ownership of when you make a mistake. Now, what you will find when you do this is a weight lifted off your shoulders.
- Complacency: Wise up my friend – get modern. Stop complaining about your competitors and get with the times.
Don’t be complacent. - Blaming Competitors for Your Failings : Cut it out. It is not them. They are a competitor in your eyes, but they are a colleague in the same industry in their eyes.
If you start looking them as a colleague instead of someone who is there to steal your business, you might be able to speak with them and get some very useful knowledge. - Not Completing Things Before You Decide They Don’t Work : Have you ever taken a training course that is long and after you tried it, you think, this is boring. Then after a while, someone asks you how it went and you have to say that you never finished it?
it is because you did not put the effort in. You need to realize that is the problem with this. - Controlling Everything and Not Delegating: Stop doing that. You are not a control freak. When you started, you were hopeless. You have spent years getting to where you are. Do you need people to help? Yes you do
Weekend Challenge 255 – Improve Your Web Content in 6 Easy Steps
- Read Your Post Out Loud: Yes, it may sound silly, but read it out aloud. Now I don’t recommend you do that when other people are around and I don’t mean while you’re walking down the street.
- Edit Your post with Free Software: First of all, use Grammarly. Now we use it primarily for every post. We run everything through it.
In fact, I have it constantly running in Google Chrome, in my browser on my Mac. - Does Your Headline Stand Out? : If people read your headline and it isn’t appealing, they won’t go and read your article or your post in the first place, so it doesn’t matter how good your writing is.
- What Does Your Format Look Like? : Now this is one of my top pet peeves. On websites in web copy, I just cannot stand to see huge blocks of text in long paragraphs.
- How Big Are Your Images: Your images need to be large. These days everyone’s got a fantastic camera on their smartphone, or you might even have a proper DSLR camera like a Canon or a Nikon.
- Time to Tell Everyone About Your Updates: Don’t just post it and share it on Facebook or tweet it and then hope that that’s it, your job done.
Weekend Challenge 250 – 6 Steps to Instantly Improve Your Business
- Not Taking Responsibility: There is always an excuse. Take ownership of when you make a mistake. Now, what you will find when you do this is a weight lifted off your shoulders.
- Complacency: Wise up my friend – get modern. Stop complaining about your competitors and get with the times.
Don’t be complacent. - Blaming Competitors for Your Failings : Cut it out. It is not them. They are a competitor in your eyes, but they are a colleague in the same industry in their eyes.
If you start looking them as a colleague instead of someone who is there to steal your business, you might be able to speak with them and get some very useful knowledge. - Not Completing Things Before You Decide They Don’t Work : Have you ever taken a training course that is long and after you tried it, you think, this is boring. Then after a while, someone asks you how it went and you have to say that you never finished it?
it is because you did not put the effort in. You need to realize that is the problem with this. - Controlling Everything and Not Delegating: Stop doing that. You are not a control freak. When you started, you were hopeless. You have spent years getting to where you are. Do you need people to help? Yes you do
Weekend Challenge 245 – How Do You Follow Up?
- Email Replies: In your company you will get emails, so how do you follow up? So what I want you to consider, when you write these down is leave a little space in the second column, and write down email inquiries and then just jot down who, when, and how fast.
- Telephone: Now again, put that in the first column. In the second column write who, when, and how fast. So if there is a telephone inquiry, of course, you may actually answer the phone but you may have to reply that person with some more information, do you do it right then?
- Invoices : An invoice is following up. If you do a job for somebody, you need to charge them. I can’t think of the number of times when small businesses do jobs for us and we have to chase them to send them an invoice.
- Exhibitions and Events : If you are accepting business cards from people, what are you doing with them? Are you scanning them, are you writing them down, are you putting them in a bucket?
- Networking and Chance Meetings: If you or your staff go to a networking event or a chance meeting with somebody, take a contact detail.
For instance, if you have a company van with signage on it, and someone sees it on street and says,
“Oh, do you do fire extinguisher services? That is interesting. Can I give you a card, and have you get back to me?”
Weekend Challenge 240 – 5 Types of Lead Magnets
- Ebook: It’s the most common. And so it’s the easiest to make. However by being the most common, it means it’s common. It has to be special. It has to be good.
- Short Course Now generally, you want a five or seven day short course by email. Pretty simple, this is very simple. If you provide a service, then you need to teach people how you do that service.
- Video : How to, videos are a great lead magnet. If you’ve got something that can be demonstrated, such as recipes, if it works on TV, it works on video. This is, if any of you are watching this on the video, on the website, or on YouTube, you can see. I can talk to you and explain how to do something. These are like ten minutes.
- Live Training : You can do it via a webinar, via Google hangout or hangout on air, or you can do a webinar using GoToWebinar, WebEx, that kind of thing.There are many programs that do this and provide all the service. Just look up online webinars. GoToWebinars is most common.
- Checklists and Cheat Sheets: People will sign up for those. If you write a big blog post, make a summary checklist, a cheat sheet, the short version and just put half way down, ‘Grab the cheat sheet’. People sign up.
- White Papers: White papers have more in-depth studies, more detail, more highbrow of what you are selling. That kind of thing, very informative. Just look up and Google ‘white paper examples’. It’s easy.
Weekend Challenge 235 – 5 Types of Content People Actually Want
- Pick a Topic that Teaches a Lesson: First off, you need to choose topic articles that teach a lesson. Now please please please, don’t waste your readers’ time; if you waste their time they won’t come back.
- Listicals: Now, let’s talk about lists of related recommendations. That is, “listicles” which is a great term for it, but you’ve seen them everywhere such as Buzzstream and Buzzfeed.You will see, “51 Ways to Write Content That Sells”, “27 Sites to Find Pinnable Images” “32 of the Best Bloggers to be Following” etc, etc.
- Videos : Don’t forget that YouTube is free. I’m doing this on an iPhone, my iPhone that I had in my pocket, that is now on a tripod.Yes I am at the beach and yes it’s freezing cold by the way, but it’s put on YouTube, and that YouTube video is free.
- Podcast Episodes : So notice that when I do my podcast I’m not chatting about what I had in Starbucks or the coffeehouse I visited in Deal.I’m not going to talk about that, I’m not going to walk along the beach and tell you about that, those things are for Periscope, Life Stream, and the more real life raw image type stuff.
- Checklists and Cheat Sheets: People love summaries, there are entire websites where people summarize books, these things people pay to be members of because they can’t be bothered to read the whole book; or before they commit to reading the whole book, they’d rather hear that someone tell them it’s worth their time.
- Shareable Images: You want to make your images look good, make them big enough to be shared, which means no thumbnails. Your website should reduce the image to the right size.
Weekend Challenge 230 – How You Can Improve Your Talents Without College
- Decide Your Special Talent: Decide your special talent and define it in one keyword phrase. So for instance, landscape gardening, something like that. Volkswagen car mechanic, something like that. Marketing.
- Are You the Best One For the Job?: Second, now this is quite important, are you the best one to be doing it in your business or in your life? So you might actually think you’ve got a talent, is there someone in your business who is better than you?Come on, be honest. Or are you good enough, could you, should you get to be the right level or should you be outsourcing it?
- Search Amazon’s Top Book List?: So, when you look at a book in Amazon, a business book or something, when you go down, scroll down, there’s the list, it says this is like number 1323 in marketing books or something like that.Click on the title marketing books and it will go to the chart and it will show you the top 10. Just find the top three that are related to your keyword.
- Find the Top 3 Blogs on the Subject : Find the top three blogs, or podcasts, on the subject, the ones that specialize in that subject, So if it’s direct mail, just Google “direct mail, blogs”, “direct mail bloggers”, Or “bloggers” and then in quotations, “direct mail”.Do search it, you will find, it doesn’t have to be like the top three, there’s not going to be some list that says oh these are the Top three, but ones that consistently, up.
- Find the Top 3 Online Courses The reason I say three is you can do five, I don’t want you overwhelmed, three will do, one will do, for now, one at a time.Go to Google and search for “direct mail”, “a free course direct mail”, “direct mail, free course”, “direct mail free courses”, get it? “Free training, direct mail”, something like that.
- Look for Courses Here: Find online courses at places like Udemy, CodeCademy, SkillShare and Lynda.Now those services are going to be paid but they are very, very low priced and they’re going to teach you much better skills because they are taught by people who do this stuff, honestly, and you can learn in your time at your leisure As fast or as slow as you want.
Weekend Challenge 225 – How Well Do You Know Your Customer?
- Is Your Customer Make or Female?: If your customer is 60% male, 40% female, I mean not at the same time, then we are going to say that is predominantly male, okay? Don’t say, we have a bit of both. Yeah, I know you do have a bit of both; we’re looking for the main things.
- What is His or Her Age Range?: Now if you’re looking for age range, look for a general age range demographics of that people use. Google “age range demographics”, or “age range questionnaires” and you will see, look at images, Google images, you will see bunch of examples and people say up to 18, 18 to 24, 24 to 34, 35 to 45 and over 55, 65 plus, all that kind of stuff.
- What is Their Title or Job Position?: Of course, they may not have a job. They may be the domestic engineer, or housewife, or even a househusband.They may be unemployed, self-employed, it doesn’t matter, I don’t care, but that is their title, put it down whatever it is, you want to drill down to find these out
- What Are Their Pain Points? : For instance, that man buying flowers on his way home. So the pain points, he’s upset his wife, he’s on his way home, he needs something in a hurry, but he doesn’t have time to get a proper gift.That’s a pain point, so time, speed, convenience, cheap, we’ve all been there.
- Where Do They Look For Inspiration?: And I mean inspiration in their lives. Now something we need to get straight is so for instance, say your demographic is the office manager and you’re looking at a type of business, the person who buys is a person, they are a human, an individual, so we’re looking at the individual.
- What Are Their Objections?: What we mean by that is, what’s their problem? So, their objections may be a high price, it takes too long, it’s a hassle, I don’t like being given delivery charges, it’s too far away, I want to see it, I want to try before I buy it; these types of objections, so you can figure that out.
Weekend Challenge 220 – How to Create Your Website Re-Design
- Find a Template That You Like: Our choice to find templates is Studiopress by Genesis. Go to their templates page and look at all the various templates they have available for purchase.Remember that you need a WordPress blog to use these templates.
- Decide What You Are Going to Want on the Homepage: Look at the templates on Studiopress and see what their homepages look like. They have designed them so that you can get a feel of what it would like and what kinds of things to list on your homepage.
- Select Your New Webhost: Now the web host is where your blog is parked. There are web hosts that specialize in WordPress websites. You might say, but I already have a web host. Take my word for it, you might need a new one.Now if you know me, you know I am going to recommend only the good ones and the affordable ones.
- Find a WordPress Designer on Fiverr: Now, I don’t want you to have to learn how to do WordPress design. There are people out there that know how to set this kind of thing up.For this, we are going to work on outsourcing and find out how to use other people to get this sort of task or project completed.
As a starting position, I am going to stay to go to Fiverr.com. - Order It: This is a starting point for a new journey for you and your website. Because of you upgrading now, I can start telling you all the fun and free things you can use that will start bringing in money.
- Look Over Your New Design: Hopefully, your new site will look similar to your current site. Look around and ask yourself questions like, “Will this change my customers lives in any way? Will it better what they do in some kind of way?”The answer is probably not – from the start. You still have the same old content just in a different place. This is where you need to get your Fiverr designer involved again.
Weekend Challenge 215 – How to Do Better Keyword Research
- Google: When you are searching Google, not at the top, but somewhere at the bottom, Google puts up “also related to” results. These are a bunch of other results, so what Google is telling you is that these other results are somewhat related to your keyword that you searched.
- Amazon: Amazon has products and books galore. When people come in and search the Amazon toolbar at the top, Amazon brings up related searches to the things that it thinks are relevant to what you searched for.
- Amazon Reviews: The chances are that there will be a book about whatever it is you are selling. There will also be products related or the direct product that you are selling, and there will be reviews from genuine users. Some of these are extensive and very thorough and very well written.
- Quora: Quora questions is a lot like Yahoo answers. Lots of questions have been asked and answered into Quora over the years and people have taken the time to answer them.Go into Quora and search for your product or service, and then put a question in that you think might get asked about your products.
- Forums: There are forums for everything. I drive an Audi, and recently I had to have a part repaired on my car. The repair garage quoted 150 pounds and it was something really simple. That is $250 American dollars and I thought, you have to be kidding me.
- Blog Comments: There are blogs that relate to what you sell. You can go to places like Technorati or any blog directory and look for blogs that are related to your product.There will be a ton of information here, but what you are looking for here is not the person telling all the information, but you are looking for what the real users think.
Weekend Challenge 210 – The 6 Metrics You Must Know to Make a Profit
- Profit Margin: Now, this is obvious — you need to know your profit margin, but it’s very important to know the difference between the profit margin and the markup.
- Conversion Rates: Now what this means is that for so many actions, how many of them were successful? So for every 100 people that land on your website, 2 of them buy something — that is a 2% conversion rate.
- Segment Conversion Rates: This is the same as I just explained, but this will be from a different traffic source. So for instance, your conversion rate from paid traffic to your website, such as Google Adwords, that’s going to be highest, because hopefully you are targeting your keywords, against your organic traffic.
- Cost Per Acquisition: From all of the above things we have already discussed — sending your sales staff out to make calls, delivering products, etc — how much does all of that cost? Do you actually get a sale?
- Customer Retention Rate: You are going to spend all that effort getting a customer, why not try and keep them? Now, in mobile phone companies, big organizations talk about customer churn.They have a rate of customers that leave. Now, they try and reduce their customer churn rate, but I would say, increase your customer retention rate, because that is more positive.
- Customer Lifetime Value: This one is SO important. Successful marketers will know how much their customers are worth over a lifetime. People who start from scratch have no idea.
Weekend Challenge 205 – How to Monitor, Gather, and Respond to Customer Feedback
- Use Email: You have to ask people that use email contact forms and if you do, enable people to give you feedback, ask them to give you feedback then enable them to actually do it and tell them how.
- Get Reviews: Another way of getting feedback is to ask for reviews. Now, this for most is very scary because when someone’s written a review, they are sharing what they think of your service.
- Have Your Customers Take a Survey: You can use surveys such as SurveyMonkey and Google Docs with Google Docs or Google apps account. You have free Google surveys and SurveyMonkey is free.
- Face to Face: Ask them face to face or over the phone. Yes, customers are real people. It doesn’t matter what you do. Some you will meet but some in my case in the Fire Protection Online site, we don’t meet customers ever, but we still can speak to them on the phone and we ask them specifically what they think of things.
- Feedback: Monitor feedback from your customers. The other one is to monitor feedback is people also give feedback without you asking. Social media, blogs, comments on other sites, forums, and just things like that.
- Targets :Set targets for your feedback. Set targets to reduce complaints, reduce problems, reduce returns, and increase the speed of response, things like that. Again, make the experience for your customer better.
- How to Respond: Respond honestly and quickly every single time. Respect your clients, respect them taking their time to give you information about you. Your client pays you their money, their hard-earned money.
Weekend Challenge 200 – 6 Tips for Overcoming Procrastination
- Start Your Work Immediately: Before you check emails, get coffee, etc.
- 2 Things: Choose 2 things to do first every day and get those done.
- Don’t Be a Perfectionist: Just get started and fix things that need fixing as you go. Nobody is looking. You haven’t started your blog yet because you don’t think you have enough material.
- Set a Deadline: If you have a set deadline for getting something done, it will help you to stop procrastinating.
- Understand Why You Procrastinate: Understand that it is a problem because you’re not getting enough done. You pretty good at getting stuff done but you may be dragging it out.
- Get An Accountability Partner: Now I’ve taught often about masterminds, about support networks and everything but on a particular task or as purpose, get yourself an accountability partner.
Weekend Challenge 195 – Six Lessons I Learned from Straight Outta Compton and NWA
- Be Confident in Your Decisions: In other words, trust your gut. These guys started something new. Not only did they start something new, they started something new again and again and again.
- Learn and Learn Hard: Now this is something that most are guilty of. We’re very envious of other people’s success and we don’t think we can attain the same because they make it look so easy.
- Understand the Numbers: Spoiler alert they’re going to get ripped off by an agent. Okay most of us in our business avoid finance numbers. I know plenty of people who do and so it’s not surprising. It’s very common. We don’t know.
- Know your Market and What They Want: They were in it, they had a personal understanding and that’s why they succeeded because they provided a music style that everyone else told them would not be successful and today you’ve got people like Jay-Z and a ton who have built a business based on what NWA set the path to. Okay, so know your market.
- Partner With People That Have Complimentary Skills: Now this is important. Don’t partner with people who are just like you because what are they bringing to the table other than conflict because they’re just like you and eventually you are going to figure they’re not doing it right?
- Hustle: You’re may be thinking, it was easy for them. But remember I said you may never see the finished product. When they started playing clubs and bringing new music, how do you think people would get to hear about them if no one had ever heard of that music before?
Weekend Challenge 190 – 5 Daily Rituals of the Small Business Owner
- To-Do List: When you get up, decide what two things from your to-do list, you are going to complete today and make sure those will be completed before you do anything else.
- Two Things: Start working on those two things, one at a time by the way, before you answer a single email, before you look at your emails or before you return a phone call, or before you take a meeting.
- Write 500 Words: This one I know some of you would frown upon, but I want you to write five hundred words. It doesn’t matter what it is, write about anything, a blog post, a letter to a customer, a thank you letter.
- Five People: Contact five people directly via social media and communicate with them. Now that’s a tricky bit. So when I say contact, I mean they could be a customer, they could be someone in need.
- Time For You: We have to look after ourselves. Set an appointment, put it in your diary. Try and make it the same time every day so it becomes a habit. A walk, or some exercise.
- Learn Something: I know I said five, but I’m giving you a bonus. Number six is not just always over deliver, beat people’s expectations. Over deliver, they’ll remember you for it. Number six, your bonus is “learn something.” Every single day, learn something by listening to a podcast, or reading a book, listening to a podcast is what you’re doing now, thank you number six done.
Weekend Challenge 185 – Are You Scheduling Downtime?
- Your Electronic Usage: I’m going to ask you to attempt to turn off your internet or broadband for the day. “What?!” you are saying. Yes. Now, this is on a day on the weekend.
- Sleep is Important: The next one is get more sleep. So try and get eight hours. Remember, eight hours of sleep; not eight hours of going to brush your teeth and get undressed, etc. Eight hours of sleep.
- Why Not a Massage?: Unsurprisingly, this comes from Carolynn; get a massage. Have you ever had a massage?
- Leave the iPhone at Home: When you go out, leave your iPhone at home. That’s like switching off broadband, isn’t it? Scary. Or if you think “Oh, I have to have it,” switch it on to airplane mode. It’s simple.
- Just Rest: A final one is to give yourself permission to rest. Do you ever get the day when you think “I’ve got too much to do”? Hmm? I do. Give yourself permission to rest. It will wait. It just will. Take a break to have a rest. You will feel refreshed and you’ll get back to it.
Weekend Challenge 180 – How to Improve Your Sales
- Get More Sales: I want you to make some phone calls. This is the hardest thing, but you know full well if you stand in front of a customer, you can do it.Decide who you are going to phone and spend 30 minutes of each day phoning people.
- Visit People Every Week: Visit somebody every single week. Quite often as bosses, we sit and we don’t go anywhere. We don’t visit anyone.We don’t do anything. We don’t do anything like that. Visit people!
- Keep a Chart of Your Results: Write down how many phone calls you have made, how many appointments you got from those phone calls because that’s really what you’re going to try and get is appointments to go and see people, and then you can sell them face to face.
- Keep in Touch With Your Top Clients: You’ve probably heard before it is much easier to sell again to somebody than to get a new customer. Those top clients will buy off you again and again and again, so keep in touch with them.Ask them questions, tell them how wonderful they are, ask for their advice about whatever they do. Things like that.
- Ask People for Referrals: Now this doesn’t matter whether it’s current customers or old ones. It could be ones that you’ve just sold to or ones that have been customers for ages that you sold to a while ago.Get in touch with them and ask them for referrals.
- Follow Up Immediately: When you get a lead, when someone makes an inquiry, make it your absolute aim to get back in touch with them as soon as possible and to keep in touch with them again and again.
Weekend Challenge 175 – How to Build Your Personal Brand
- It’s Time to Decide on Your Brand: You have to think what problems you solve. That’s what people have. You need to think of this from a perspective of your customer or your potential customer, okay? It’s a little bit more than just what you appear to do.So if you are a carpenter or sheet metal worker or something like that, that as a bit ordinary. There’s lot of those your brand needs to stand you out differently from everybody else.
- You Need to Write on a Blog: You need to be writing. You need to have yourself or somebody else write for you, but you need to be giving out information that needs to be controlled by you in the format you decide in your brand –speaking your brand name, speaking your message, giving the information that you know about for your public.
- You Need to Keep up to Date: Things change. Not only do you need to keep up to date with marketing and media, you need to keep up to date with your business, your trade, what’s going on, what’s new, what’s happening, who’s not doing it right, who’s doing it great, what’s coming, etc.
- Create a Memorable Story: You don’t need to make everything up. Everybody has got a story. Find that story and tell it consistently. People remember the story then they’ll remember who you are. Yes.
- Speaking Engagements: Speak on stage even at small local events and attend networking events and conferences. Again, some of you are going to think, “Ugh!” But who said building a business is easy?If you think it’s tough and don’t want to do it, then, yeah. We’ll wait. We’ll wait if you don’t mind if you can just leave by the exit over there.
- How You Dress: Dress appropriately when in public. You may want to be a lazy whatever. You may want to wear shorts, scruffy T-shirts and so on. In fact, I go to internet marketing events and a lot of people dress down because they think you can do marketing while sitting at home in your pajamas.
Weekend Challenge 170 – Your Monthly Marketing Housekeeping
- Remote Customer Touch Points: We need to review what I call remote customer touch points. Now a lot of us have businesses, especially my fire protection business.So, remote customer touch points would be your telephone greeting, your paperwork, yes and your packaging. Paperwork is everything from a letterhead to a business card to your invoices.
- Marketing Theories: Have you conveyed your marketing theories to all of your staff? That includes temporary staff. That includes people you wouldn’t imagine such as perhaps your cleaner or your apprentice or your interns.
- Customer Greetings: There are two ways of greeting your customers; one is in-house and that would include any visitors including reps because you never know who may become a customer or who may be wanting to recommend you.
- Referrals: Referrals are the lifeblood of the perpetual sales cycle. Once you get your sale from your customer, you’ve put all that effort into getting them, you want to put some effort into making sure they come back for more.
- Elevator Speech: The final is your elevator speech. Personally, I hate the term elevator speech. One, because in the UK, we have lifts and our lifts are quite often only like one or two floors high so you’ll be down in a few seconds. But it’s your introduction. What does your company do, what do you do? Get that message straight.
Weekend Challenge 165 – Which Processes Need a Little Improvement
- Best Processes: Select five of your best processes (remember we talked about the 80-20 rule and working on things that you’re good at).So, let’s start with five processes that are real needle movers, that if you made them better, they will have a real difference on the bottom line or on the progress of your business.
- What Is Great About Your System?: Now, for each of the five processes, write down three things that are great about the system, three results they get, and three ways they make your life better.
- What Is Not So Great?: Then, I want you to write down three things that are not so great. and three things that are bad about the system, etc. So you will write down three things for each of those things listed for 2 and 3.By the end of that exercise, you will have 15 bad bits of the process, things that can be improved. But, at the same time, you will also have 15 good ones which will enable you to reach over, pat yourself on the back and to say, “Well done, Jon. I did quite well with that. Yeah, I’m proud of myself.”
- What Needs Improvement?: Now, you are going to pick five of the bad things that you wrote down that need lots of improvement. Out of the 15 you just wrote down you are only going to pick just 5 and write them down.These are the ones that you’re going to aim to improve first. Don’t worry. You’ll get to the others. In actual fact, some of the others might get improved at the same time as a knock on effect. I’m sure the benefits will be seen in a couple of weeks.
- Who Will Do Those Tasks?: Now, the final step, remember we talked about working on your strengths, and not weaknesses. You are getting ready to implement that into this challenge because, I want you to write down next to those 5 things you just listed, who will be completing each one.Some will be your name and those are things that you are good at. But, the things you are not so good at or the things you don’t like doing, which is quite often in my case, then put somebody else’s name next to it.
Weekend Challenge 160 – The Power of Saying No
- Core Strengths: I want you to write down your core strengths.
- Tasks: Over a period of week or so, every day write down every task you do just after you’ve done it. At the end of the week, summarize and find out what stuff you do, what stuff you shouldn’t be doing, and what stuff you should be doing is another way of doing it.
- Tasks You Don’t Like: Next step, by the way, what tasks are you doing that you do not like doing? Yes, you have a choice!Write those down.
- Just Say No: Next one, write down, what are you going to say ‘no’ to from next week? What are you going to stop doing?
- How Will You Say No: Now the next one is to write down how will you say no. Form a sentence and practice it, because this is not going to be easy. You’re going to struggle in saying “no.” Practice it and have a fixed answer.
Weekend Challenge 155 – How to Be a Better Blogger
- Facts and Research: Be accurate and responsible with your facts and research, so check all the facts in your posts.
- Publishing Schedule: Be consistent and stick with a publishing schedule. Create a publishing schedule that works for you and then post those regularly every day of every week.
- Be on Topic: Don’t go off on tangents. Stick to your niche, don’t go off talking about all things about your personal life or something like that.
- Be Respectful: Don’t waste their time. Give them good stuff if you want them to stay there. Be professional, be business like. What I mean by that is, write in a professional manner or pick your persona, your avatar, your ideal customer and write for them but be, if you’re a business, be businesslike. Don’t talk in text speak.
- Images: Be visual with images and use portrait style where possible. Portrait style, that one, as supposed to Landscape style, which is what you’re looking at this video in. So, if you turn the camera sideways, portrait style.
- Communicate: Be communicative and reply to comments. Reply to tweets, DMs, which is direct messages, and talk to clients.
- It’s Not About You: Don’t just make it all about you. People want to hear from others. You’re not going to be at the end of all of the information.
- Give Something of Value All Times: If you haven’t got something to say, you don’t need to blog or post every single day. If you haven’t got enough to say and you haven’t got enough people to write, don’t try and promise to do it every day.
Weekend Challenge 150 – How to Stop Your Emails from Stopping Your Work Flow
- Time of Day: Select regular times of the day to answer emails.
- Email Provider: Do not use normal what you call web-mail with your host, Hotmail or Live or whatever it’s called now. Just use Gmail or Google apps same thing but that’s the more for bigger businesses.
- Garbage Email: Unsubscribe from all the garbage that you keep looking at and thinking uh and then deleting. Just unsubscribe from it. You don’t need to know it.
- Use Filters: Next thing, filter things into folders to keep your inbox clean. If there’s something that you want, that you need, say, invoices that come into your accounts address filter them direct into the accounts, one.
- Auto Reply: Use an auto reply to explain to people that, “thank you received your message.
- Short Answers Are a No-No: Don’t reply with inane short answers saying “thanks”, “great”, “LOL”. Don’t use waste of time email thread extending answers.
- Email Managers: Use Evernote or Trello or Wrike. Don’t manage them from within your email inboxes, that’s not what it’s for.
- CRM Software: Use a CRM, Customer Relationship Management software such as Insightly, for managing and keeping in touch with clients and managing the way you deal with them.
- Personal and Work: Then finally, separate your personal and your work emails and do not answer personal emails during your working day.
Weekend Challenge 145 – What We Have Planned at Marketing For Owners
- What are You Going to Do?: Grab Your Pen and Paper and write this down: What are you going to do? Is it going to be a report, an ebook, an update, a new channel, a test.
- Next Week: What Can You Get Done Next Week?
- New Thing: What new thing can you get done at the end of this month?
- End of July?: What are you going to get done at the end of July?
- Next Quarter: What are you going to get done by next quarter (July-September)? – This one will be longer because it is a 3 month span.
- End of the Year: What are you going to get done by the end of the year?
Weekend Challenge 140 – Get Organized With a Content Calendar
- Months: Make 12 rows for the months. So you’re going to have 12 rows in your spreadsheet. They are for months.
- Seasons: Second part, you are going to put them into four seasons. For those of you that have forgotten, winter, spring, summer, autumn or for America, fall! Same thing by the way if anyone didn’t realize.
- Themes: So we’ve got 12 months, four seasons and then four themes, general themes. In each one, I want you to come up with three themes on each season, so three parts of it. So if that was the fire protection in the summer, you’ve got one would be cars driving holidays.
- Working Titles: Once you’ve got those, then create five to ten working titles. What I mean working titles, just a rough title! You can come back to it later. To give you an idea for each theme row, so 12 months, four seasons, three themes per season, five to ten working titles per theme.
- Deadlines: Give yourself a deadline. Say how many you’re going to do per day, which days,etc.
Weekend Challenge 135 – Using Influencers to Boost Your Website Traffic
- Visit a Blog: Grab your pad and pen and visit a blog like AllTop, Technorati, Topsy, FollowerWonk, and BuzzSumo and search for relevant websites based on keywords matching your niche.
- Rank Them: Make a list and rank them in order of importance according to Google.
- Twitter: Find their twitter handle, and watch what they are talking about on Twitter, and then you are going to tweet them and get into the conversation.
- Comment: Leave a comment on a post that they have written.
- Social Media: Share some of their content on your social media.
- Email Them: Now you are going to send them an email letting them know how much you have been enjoying their work.
- Sell Yourself:Now that you have told them all about how much you love them, now it’s time to sell yourself. Write them another email talking about how much you love their work, and then introduce them to your work.
Weekend Challenge 130 – A Simple Trick to Increase Your Sales
- Main Service: Write down the main service that you offer.
- Maximum Service: The next thing I want you to do is to write down the absolute maximum perfect service that a customer could ever wish for — the Rolls Royce of your service.
- Basic Service: The next one is to write down the very, very basic level. So, again, back to the fire extinguishers. The absolute basic level is you buy a fire extinguisher, you pay for delivery, job done. That’s it, we’re out of there. The customer can find their own maintenance, they can install it themselves, etc, etc.
- Price: Now, what I want you to do is write down the price of your current service. Then, calculate what would be the price of that maximum one. So you have to work it out, I know it’s difficult, but you’re the expert, you can work this out.
- Name Your Services: So next, I want you to give them a name — and yes, you can call them Platinum, Gold, Silver. You can call it Ultimate, Standard, Basic. Give them three names, so name your services.
Weekend Challenge 125 – How to Build Relationships With Influencers
- Create a Spreadsheet: You’re going to create a spreadsheet preferably in Google Docs, in Google Sheets because it’s online, it’s stored, it’s free, it’s easy to update and you can share and get to it from where ever you are.
- Influencers: On that spreadsheet, you will create a column called Influencers.
- Tweets: There will be two further columns each called, Tweet 1, and Tweet 2.
- Blog Comments: You are going to create two more columns, one called Blog Comment 1, the second, Blog Comment 2. Followed by two more columns. The first one is Blog Comment, Blog Post 1, Blog Post 2. Actually call it Blog Post Share.
- Blog Post Share: Now you are going to create two columns labeled — Blog Post Share 1, Blog Post Share 2. Might make more sense.
- Email: Label a column with Email.
- Email Reply: The last column you will have is Email Reply.
- How to Use it: Now that you have your influencer spreadsheet, visit this post to get the details on how to use it.
Weekend Challenge 120 – This Frustrates Me More Than Anything Else
- Homepage: Grab a pad and a pen and just start writing. Now, the first thing is, I want you to look at is your homepage of your current website. Does it have your logo in the top left-hand position? Does it have your phone number in the top position or even in the footer?
- About Us: Let’s look at your “About Us” Page: When you read the ‘About Us,’ does it say, “We are a blah, blah, blah, blah company. We do this. We do that. We do this and the other.” or does it actually tell you who you are? Or does it tell the visitor, rather, who you are?
- Contact Page: Now, let’s look at your “contact” page: Has your contact page got a phone number? Has it got a fax number? Has it got an e-mail address? Has it got a physical address or is it just simply a form? If it’s just form, you will not get trusted.
- Social Media Profiles: Next, let’s study those social media profiles: When you click on them, do they actually go directly to the page or do they bring up some kind of ‘Share’ or ‘Tweet this!’? People want to look at your Twitter profile. They want to look at your Facebook or your LinkedIn.
- Lead Capture: What about lead captures? Lastly, how many lead capture opportunities are there? And by lead capture, I mean, in a form where someone enters their name and their e-mail address and clicks the ‘Submit’ button. How many are there?
Weekend Challenge 115 – How Questions Can Provide All Your Content
- Questions: Write down 10 questions that your customers ask on a regular basis about anything they ask to do with your products or services, or your business.
- Friends: Go to a friend outside of your business and ask 10 more questions. Ask your colleague or friend — If you were a customer of mine, give me 10 questions you’d ask. Just ask me anything about my business; I want to write them down.
- What Would They Ask?: Write down 10 questions your customer should be asking.
- Customer Type Words: Now at the end of this, you have 30 questions from the outside so — you are going to pick out certain words and terminology that are different to yours. Ones that seem “customer” type of words. Write those down.
- Schedule: You are going to design a schedule with a deadline to create a written answer for all 30 questions. Now, don’t forget, that’s 30 pieces of content. If you’re going to do one a week, that’s 30 weeks!
Weekend Challenge 110 – What Can Your Customers Do For You?
- Questions: Write down the questions that you are going to ask those top 10 customers.
- Contact your Customer: via Skype, telephone, or face to face and ask them questions. Choose open ended questions that don’t require a yes or no answer.
- Brand: Ask your customer about your brand, what they feel is important.
- Competitor: Look at your competitor and decide if you want to do some of the same things and ask your customer for input.
Weekend Challenge 105 – What Problem Are You Solving?
- Services: Write down what you do and what service you provide.
- Problems: Write Down 10 problems: These are problems your customers might have and why they want you to solve them. Put it in their words not your words, remember it’s all about them not about you.
- Solutions: Now look at those 10 things that you’ve written down and write down the solution you provide.
- Most Popular Problems: When you get to the end look back and pick the three most popular problems, the three that come up most often.
Weekend Challenge 100 – What is in a Modern Marketing System
- Columns: Make columns on a sheet and label them — “Presence”, and write next to it “Website and Social Media”.
- Customer Profile: Write down –Potential — customer profile. I want you to then write down and describe your perfect customer. Have you done it, yes or no? Have you written a one-page description of you perfect customer, yes or no?
- Lead Magnet: Permission: Lead Magnet. I want you to write down every method on the home page and every single page of your website to capture a customer’s email address as a minimum in exchange for something; a course, an eBook, something a lead magnet.
- Auto-Responders: Do you have an auto-responder email service like A-Weber, Mail Chimp, Infusion Soft, or one of those. Yes or No? If so, how many do you have?
- What Will You Change?: Now, look at the things you have listed that say no and then to decide what you are going to do about it.
Weekend Challenge 95 – This One Simple Question Will Turn Your New Clients Into Referrers
- Top 10 Customers: Write down your top ten customers.
- What Did They Buy?: Write down what the last product or service was that those 10 customers bought from you and when they purchased them.
- Call or Go See Them?: Write down whether you are going to telephone that person to go and see them or whether you are just going to call in without any notice and pop in to see them– choose one or other.
- What Will You Offer?: Now, you need to decide what you are going to offer to them when they refer you to their friends or colleague. What are you going to offer that friend or colleague to make your customer look good?
- Deadlines: I want you to write down the deadline of when you are going to have contacted all ten clients.
Weekend Challenge 90 – Why You Should Tell People What You Don’t Do
- What Do You Do: Write a bullet list of what you actually do in your business.
- Don’t Do: Next, make a bullet list of what you don’t do.
- Don’t Like Doing: Now — write down what you don’t like doing.
- Make a List: Make a list of the things that you have done, but you hate doing and are a pain in the neck for you.
- Stop Doing These: For the last step, write down 5 things that you are going to STOP doing. These will be what you will tell your customers you don’t do anymore.
Weekend Challenge 85 – Why You Should Create An Online Course
- Learning Styles: Write down any learning style that you have done over the last two years. This can be anything from podcasts that you have listened to (if you are listening here than you can write down Marketing For Owners), courses you have taken, emails you have subscribed to — write them all down.
- Delivery Style: Next, write down how those were delivered — did they come in the form of a video, email, ebook, etc.
- Length: Next, write down how long each one was. Did it stretch out over the course of 2-7 days, was it one video every day for five days — write it down.
- Likes and Dislikes: Now, think about each learning style you have listed. Write down what you liked and did not like about each course, and be honest with yourself! You know how you like to learn something.
- Delivery: Now, decide which learning style you like best and decide if this is how you will deliver your own course that you are creating.
Weekend Challenge 80 – How to Form Good Habits That Stick
- Write Out “After I” _____________ and then the words “I Will” _________________.
- Good Habits Then in those dashes, fill in 3 possible good habits you can accomplish, such as, “After I have my first cup of coffee, I will_________________.
- Keep AddingEach month or two after this, add a couple of more good habits to your list.
- DeadlinesSet a deadline date to finish it.
Weekend Challenge 75 – What Lead Generation Magnets Are We Developing Right Now?
- Guides Write down 5 possible guides, processes, or reports that you think will be of use to your customer.
- Can I Do This Myself? From that list, choose two that you think you can produce yourself or with a little help.
- Choose OneNow, from that list of two, choose one and get started on it.
- Deadlines.Set a deadline date to finish it.
Weekend Challenge 70 – What Did I Learn This Week?
- What Did I Learn? Write down five things that you learned this week from any source.
- Where Can I Learn? I want you to add three sources where you think you maybe able to learn things for free.
- Now Do It! Implement it , because if we don’t do, we don’t get.
Weekend Challenge 65 – What Did I Get Right This Week?
- What Did I Do Well?Write down 5 things you did right and did well this week.
- Why Was That Good?Once you have written those down, go back and write underneath each one, why that was good and the result it will give your company.
- How Can This Move Me Forward? Write down how this will help you to positively move forward in your company.
Weekend Challenge 60 – What Did I Do Wrong This Week?
- What Did Not Go Well? Write down 5 things you didn’t do well this week.
- What Can Make it Better? For each of those 5 things you did wrong, write down one thing you can do to make that thing better.
- How Can I Improve? Write down how you are going to improve things next week to try and battle through and stop this thing from happening again.
Weekend Challenge 55 – What Progress Did You Make Toward Your Goal Today?
- Major Goals. Write down one of your major goals that you will accomplish in the next 90 days.
- Achieve This Week. Write down what you would like to achieve this week to get you towards completing that goal.
- 5 Steps. Write down Monday to Friday, and then the five steps that will get you to the end of that goal if you did those and completed that weekly progress.
- Get TeuxDeux. Next, go to teuxdeux.com. Sign up for a free trial if you’re not already using it for your Monday to Friday progress steps. Enter in those to-do’s. ‘
- Get Them Done! Now, the easy part — do them!
Weekend Challenge 50 – Are You Making It Easy For Your Customer?
- How Do I Contact My Customer?Grab your pen and paper and think about how and when you contact your customers.
- What Ways? Write down your websites, email, quotes, letters, phone calls, voicemail, text messages, and any other way that a customer may contact you.
- Which Is the Easiest? Look at each of these and determine how easy it is for the customer to find your phone number, email address, and website address.
- How Can I Improve?Write down the ways you can improve your contact information.
Weekend Challenge 45 – How Well Do You Know Your Customer?
- Create Your Ideal Customer. Write out one page for your ideal customer. Create a name for this customer and find a picture to go with it. This is all for visual purposes.
- Write Down Everything. Write down everything you know about this customer. Yes, you have to make this up. Yes, you may have to brainstorm with a colleague.
- Create a Full Story. Write down a full story — the town where they come from, how far do they drive to work, what car do they drive, what do they think about on the commute, etc. Get into their mind.
- Problems? Write down their problems and how you plan on helping them solve them.
- How Can I Solve Those?Now figure out how you are going to help solve those problems and write that down as well.
Weekend Challenge 40 – Price is Not Important As You Think
- Who Are Your Competitors?Write down your top 5 competitors.
- Prices? Next to each one write down whether you think their pricing is low priced, average priced, premium priced, with premium being expensive or high.
- Compare Yours and Theirs. Look at each companies website and products and see if their pricing matches their look and feel.
- Where Do I Fit?Look at yourself and see where you fit in. Is it too low or too high based on your competitors?
- Price Rise. Now, look at your prices and add a price-rise.
Weekend Challenge 35 – How Often Do You Contact Your New Leads?
- Number It! On your paper, draw out three columns. On the left, you can write one to ten.
- Method of Contact. In the next column, you’re going to write the method of contact.
- How Many Times Should I Contact?In the third column, write down how to start working on contacting them ten times.
- Get On It! Now — start contacting them via the ways you wrote down.
Weekend Challenge 30 – Why Are You Doing This All Yourself?
- Make Columns. I want you to draw three columns with the first column being the thickest one.
- 10 Jobs You Do. Write down ten jobs that you do in your business that you enjoy doing. Write them down in the left column.
- What Do You Dislike Doing? Write down ten tasks you do not like doing. Write them down in the left column.
- What Hardly Gets Done? Now come up with ten little five-minute, one-off, hardly-ever-done tasks.
- Who Could Do Those? In the second column, I would like you to write down who else could do each of those tasks.
- What Can I Outsource? In the third column, select ten tasks that you are going to try to outsource in the next four weeks.
- Deadlines!Set yourself a deadline to get them completed.
Weekend Challenge 25 – Your Client Can Tell You Everything You Need to Know
- Survey Questions. Write down three survey questions, three things that you think would teach you something that you don’t know or that you want to confirm.
- What Will You Use? Go look at SurveyMonkey, look at Google Forms and decide which one you want to use.
- Send It!Monday, you’re going to send that out to your customers and you’re going to find out some great information.
Weekend Challenge 20 – How a Plumbing Company Created Their Unique USP
- Brainstorm.I want you to start brainstorming USP’s. I want you to brainstorm everything you do, every aspect of what you do, where you meet with a customer, just the parts that meet with the customer.
- Customer’s POV. Now, I want you to twist it and put it from the customer’s point of view.
- List It. List those out and then see if you can come up with a new Unique Selling Proposition that is going to interest customers, going to stand you out from the crowd.
Weekend Challenge 15 – Is Your Guarantee A USP?
- Guarantee. Write down your guarantee. If you don’t have one, you need to develop one.
- Other Companies. Look at companies like Zappos and see how their guarantee works for them.
- Write. Write one out, decide that’s going to be yours and put it in place.
Weekend Challenge 10 – What’s On Your Website?
- Main Pages. Go to your website and print off the main pages.
- Critique Yourself. Look at those pages and critique them yourself. Ask yourself if they are good enough, when was the last time they were updated, are there images and if so, are they good or are they grainy, too large, or too small, and do the images make you look professional?
- Change Something. Decide what you would like to change and then change it.
Weekend Challenge 05 – Who Are Your Customers?
- Typical Customers.Think about all your customers, the ones that are the most typical.
- What Do You Know?Write down as much as you could possibly know about those customers.
- Go Back Over Everything. On Monday, re-read what you have written again and see if it describes that customer.
