The secret to building a successful small business is in your mailing list. Communicating with a targeted list of potentially interested clients who may be prepared to spend money with you at some point in the future will ensure you have a constant and consistent flow of revenue 12 months of the year.

One sure fire way of encouraging more potential clients to trust you with their email address is to offer something for free in return.

Opt-in offers can create enormous opportunities to build your list … but the problem is that so many of you doing it wrong.

It’s easy to convince yourself that just because what you are offering is free, your potential clients give a damn.

They don’t!

Getting people to sign up for free stuff in today’s market place can be harder than actually selling your products and services. And anyone who has decided to follow the sheep and merrily stick a “subscribe to my newsletter” link on their home page will probably left scratching their heads wondering why no one is signing up.

People are more reluctant to share their email addresses because of the threat of being spammed with promos after promos. The offer of receiving a free email newsletter worked five years ago … but not now!

Yup, your opt-in offer needs thought, needs work and needs some careful planning.

Here are some key questions to help you come up with an opt-in offer that is going to have potential clients queuing up to hand over their email addresses.

1. What are your target clients’ BIG problems? There is no point guessing here. You have to know exactly what keeps them up at night because what you are going to offer needs to help solve at least one of them.

2. What quick fix solutions have you got? Trying to solve all their problems in one free CD/EBook/Video is just not going to work. You’ve got to give your potential client something that will enable them to see results immediately.  The more specific and focused the benefits are, the better. If they see results immediately, they are going to come back for more … and this time be more prepared to invest in what you are offering.

3. What name are you going to give your opt-in offer? It may be feel cheesy to call your offer “The 5 Deadly Secrets to XXX” but headlines sell! If you are after inspiration, get yourself copies of any of the women’s weekly mags. Those front pages sell and it’s because of those carefully crafted – if not incredibly cheesy – headlines. Use their formulas and see how you can apply it to your opt-in offer.

4. Will what you offer solve all their problems? Now don’t go too mad and give them all the answers too quickly! Give enough away to help them to stage one but offer the whole process and your potential clients won’t have a need to spend any money with you.

5. What format should your offer be in? A PDF report or ebook is by far the easiest and simplest product to create, but is that the best format for your potential clients? A five part video series or downloadable MP3 audio may be more useful.

And why not consider posting something they touch & hold? The cost of production, post and packaging may be worth the cost of getting that postal address, rather than just an email address.

6. What different offers can you make to different types of people? Having a one-size-fits-all offer may not work across all of your marketing. You will find that within your target audience, there will be smaller niche problems to address.

For example, a fitness instructor may have a 5 part video series on offer on their home page, but targeted marketing to pregnant women can be made more effective by directing them to special landing page where they can download a report on “The 6 mistakes most pregnant women make when exercising”.

7. What is your follow up going to be? It’s all very well collecting email addresses but if you don’t plan out how you are going to build a relationship with your new subscriber, they will just be a number on a database. What other valuable stuff can you send them? What offers are you going to make to them to give them an opportunity to spend money with you? How are you going to ask for referrals?

The money is in the list … but only if you communicate with the people who are on it!

Summing up …

Don’t opt for a blah blah offer. Forget about offering that dull and boring monthly newsletter. It will waste your time and any money you spend marketing your website.

Think, do some work on creating the right opt-in offer and plan out how you are going to direct the right people to your opt-in offer page.  It will make all the difference!

P.S. If you want to check out my latest carefully crafted opt-in offer, then head on over to my Facebook Page. Once you like my Page, you can choose to receive a rather fabulous interview on how to go about constructing your own Facebook Landing Pages.

Isn’t doing business with your competitors crazy?

However, did you know that one of the quickest ways of attracting new clients to your business is to use other business’ databases?

And that even includes using your direct competitors.

Now I am not suggesting in the slightest that you are to break in to their offices overnight and steal their client information! But what I am suggesting is that you collaborate and look at what joint ventures you can create.

Joint ventures are when two [or more] businesses join forces to create a more powerful force in the marketplace. Think of as two heads are better than one.

Or more importantly, two databases are better than one!

Let me give you an example.

Jenny is a fitness trainer. She works primarily with her clients on a 1-2-1 basis but is finding it hard going fitting enough sessions in to her day whilst still generating the income that she is aiming for.

She has decided to start offering group sessions and fitness training programmes as a way of working with more clients, increasing her cash flow yet reducing the number of hours she works. But the big problem is her database. It’s just not big enough to market her programmes to.

So rather than spend hundreds of pounds on advertising in the local newspaper or even more on buying a database, she decides to seek out other businesses who have the clients she is looking for.

She approaches her local gym.  Some may think this is a crazy idea as her local gym is a direct competitor of her business, but the manager of the gym is interested in talking. Although they have staff working there, they haven’t really got their act together in regards to personal training sessions and motivating their members.

You see, although they have a strong membership at present, very few people are coming in and using the gym. And they know when this happens, they start getting lots of cancellations.

By offering the gym members a discount on Jenny’s fitness programme, this gives the gym a great benefit to add to their membership subscription without it costing them a thing. It should also encourage the members to train more in the gym in between Jenny’s sessions because they are more motivated to train by themselves now they feel fitter, thus reducing the chance of cancellations.

OK, so this story is hypothetical.  This could be too crazy for a lot of gym managers who just wouldn’t entertain this idea and turn Jenny down flat.

But we are in a very interesting economy at the moment. Sticking with the norm and assuming that a particular business will not want to talk to you is, well frankly madness!

Many businesses are experiencing huge slowdowns and one of the advantages to you is that slowdowns cause problems. If you can solve the right problems, it’s good for your business. And of course, good for the other businesses, too.

More and more businesses are looking at joint ventures and building collaborative partnerships – even with direct competitors! So doing business with your competitors really isn’t such a crazy idea.

The trick is being able to create an offer that benefits both parties, plus their customers.

If you are struggling to attract the right clients to your business, joint ventures could be the quickest [and cheapest] way of moving your business forward right now.

Who could you start talking to and create a win-win situation for you both?

I came out with this phrase during a client session last week.  Not sure why I was thinking about food (!) but I was on a rant about about creating value and stuff that stood out.

The problem with buffets, where you offer everything all at once, is that they can be over whelming.

I am sure you all love a good all-you-can-eat buffet at certain times.  It feels good to go up and cram as much as you can on to one plate.  But the problem is that you probably don’t want to go do it again very soon.

Buffets can look sad and tired very quickly.  Especially after several people have been up to pick before you!  They are often the cheap option when catering for large numbers of people.

It’s easy for buffets not to be very special 

We went to Antigua last Easter and stayed in a wonderful all inclusive beach resort.  The buffets were lovely.  But after a few nights, well … we ended up going to the a la carte restaurants.  Even though we had to pay an extra surplus for our meals, the buffet concept wore thin very quickly.

So why was I talking buffets with my client?  My client was launching a new programme and was offering a free webinar to promote it.  We got on to the topic of content for the free promotional webinar and she explained she was planning on offering a taster of the 3 modules of the programme.

No!  (I started my rant!!)  Don’t offer a bit of everything.

Where’s the value of that?

Far better to focus the time you have (in a promotional webinar you’ve only got 20 to 40 minutes) to make a real difference to your potential clients’ lives.  Cover one topic in detail.  Give them something useful.  Something practical. Something that they go away and do right there and then.

Because if you can give them something that works for them, they will want more.  And more is what you can give them with what ever programme you are offering.

If they don’t want more, that’s perfectly OK.  Not everyone will buy, of course not.  But these people will more likely go away and rave about what it is you offer to others.

Be laser focused with your promotional offer.  Cover one topic in detail and you will see better results than trying to lay out the whole programme as a buffet before them.

Most small business owners who use email newsletters in their marketing don’t send enough emails!

I bet most of you who use email marketing stick to sending out a monthly newsletter, don’t you?  ”I don’t want to annoy my subscribers”, I hear you say.  But, here’s the problem.

An email newsletter that goes out once a month is, well, just 12 emails a year!  That’s right … only 12 emails a year!

But not enough time to write email newsletters!

Now if you came to me and explained that you struggle to find the time to write one email newsletter a month, let alone two, three or even four, then that’s another issue.  If you decide to embrace email marketing, then either make the time (coz you certainly won’t find it!) or delegate the setting up and scheduling to someone else, such as a virtual assistant.

But if you are worried about over emailing someone 12 times a year, then I’m afraid you may be wasting your time.

Your potential clients and customers need reminding.  They are all time-poor individuals who would love to have their problems solved by you.  But if you are not there reminding them – more than 12 times a year! – then I’m afraid they are just going to forget who you are.

The spamming dilemma

Back to this spamming dilemma.  If you were to send out an email once a day, then yes;  your subscribers will probably be unsubscribing in their droves and probably report you for inappropriate emails too.  But one person’s spam is another person’s essential reading.  If you are sending your subscribers valued content along with your promotions and events, then keep sending them great stuff.

An email has such a short life span that once received, it is either read and actioned on … or deleted.  It’s not like a letter or postcard mailed out which can hang around on someone’s fridge door as a reminder.  An email is usually gone as quickly as it is sent.

Once someone has had enough of you, they will unsubscribe.  They don’t want to buy anything from you, so why would you want to keep sending them stuff.  But for the people who would love to read more of your stuff but sometimes (and quite often!) don’t have the time to read more of your stuff, keep sending more of that stuff to them.

Be there at the right time

I promise you that, one day, they will take the time to read it. And that’s usually the day they’ve made a decision to have their problems solved by you.  If your email doesn’t arrive, how are they going to remember you?

Quick example: I ran a Web Tech phone-in clinic last week.  Recording available to members, but free to attend to anyone on my newsletter list.  The people who showed up on the day where the ones who responded to my “Last chance” reminder.  And boy where they pleased they made the effort to show up because the session was a fantastic.  They all agreed that if I hadn’t sent out that one last reminder they would have missed out.  And I would have given them a poor service!

Yes, I got un-subscribers from that last email, but the ones who responded where pretty pleased I had sent it. They read and actioned it … there and then.

Don’t be afraid of spamming

Of course, measure your successes and if you over-send you will notice your subscriber numbers dwindle.  But for goodness sake, think beyond a monthly newsletter!  12 times a year is not enough.

Photo Credit: Arnold | Inuyaki

Do you change your business to suit your tech tools? Or your tech tools to your business?

As you start to embrace technology within your business – whether it’s a new email marketing system or web based accounting package – it’s easy to feel unsure about whether you are making the right decision.

Perhaps you have a website built on flash by your teenage son. It’s looks beautiful – and it didn’t cost you anything apart from a month’s worth of washing when he was back from Uni – but it can’t be found on Google (Flash can’t be viewed by search engines, hence its inability to get found!).

Perhaps you are feeling pretty chuffed with your free shopping cart system. You’ve not shelled out any cash, but you are getting frustrated with setting up your new workshop. You’ve now delayed the date three times because you can’t the system do what you want it to.

Sticking with the wrong tools?

How many tech systems are you sticking with just because you haven’t got the time, energy or mental capacity to work out if there is a better system out there?

Is it better to keep using the same systems and just fit your business around them? Better the devil and all that, especially when you are not paying out much for them. But when certain tools and systems are stifling our creativity and growth, then surely it is time to change.

Email marketing systems are one of those tech tools that it is easy for a small business to out grow. When I first started using email newsletters in my business in 2004, I went with Constant Contact. It was – and still is – a great newsletter system. But even with the recently added new features, it still isn’t an email marketing system to support selling products and programmes online. It misses the power of a decent autoresponder system.

Autoresponders are my number one recommended web tech marketing tool. They allow you to put your online relationship building in to turbo drive. So when I started using 1ShoppingCart for my workshop and ebook selling, I was able to start building a set-and-forget marketing system. But I loved Constant Contact’s email newsletters so much that I stuck with them and ran both systems side by side for more than 18 months.

When enough is enough

Cracks started to appear. It wasn’t a surprise. I was running my email campaigns on one system and starting to build my customer list on another. When someone unsubscribed on one system, I had to manually check that they were taken off the other! Duh!

Finally I took one of the leaps of faith, sucked in my breath and got it sorted. Delegating the project to a Virtual Assistant was the key to success.

5 years later and the change of email marketing system happens again. Not part of my big plan, but this time it was 1ShoppingCart that was stifling my business. No matter how hard I tried to understand why, 1ShoppingCart refused to work their recurring payments with PayPal. One off payments, not a problem. But monthly recurring payments for my Web Tech Club membership site, nope!

I came up with a sticking plaster (Completion NOT perfection!). Send new members directly to PayPal. It worked beautifully with Wishlist Member (the WordPress membership plugin that I use), but my VA still had to manually add new members to 1ShoppingCart to get the system to work. I could have stuck with it. No one seems to notice this sticking plaster. But I knew it could be better. I knew people wanted to use their credit cards, rather than just their PayPal accounts. And even though I could do this with PayPal Website Payments Pro, it still wouldn’t work with 1ShoppingCart.

Plus my other big problem was that I couldn’t use the 1ShoppingCart affiliate programme. Without the orders coming through the system, affiliates would have no way of the system allocating their recommended members to their account. And when you have person after person asking you how to sign up to your affiliate programme because they love your product so much, it can get you down when you have to admit you can’t offer one!

Turning away business because your systems can’t offer it?

So here where these web tech tools were, helping me run my business. But stifling it all the same. It had to change.

I could have gone down the merchant account route, but after an awful experience of trying to get Worldpay to work with 1ShoppingCart the previous year, it was 1ShoppingCart that had to go. My tried and tested shopping cart system that I had recommended to my clients for the past 5 years was on it’s way out.

I’ve ended up with Premium Web Cart and Aweber (PWC doesn’t offer an email marketing system so you have to set up a system such as Aweber along side). The system is still not fully set up, but finally my affiliate programme can be launched very soon.
It’s not easy. I am not advocating changing your email marketing systems – or any other web tech tool – just for the sake of it. But if you are “making do” just because you haven’t got the time, energy or mental capacity to change it, make the time, energy or mental capacity to do it.

I know I may well be giving you a huge project to think of here. However, what would be the difference to your business this time next year, if you did change one of your web tech tools?

Web tech tools can make us more productive and increase our marketing power, but when certain tech tools stifle our business, then surely its time to invest and change.

Do some emails drive you mad?

How many email newsletters have you signed up to over the years? Whether it’s a free report you’ve asked for or to get the latest news, it’s become the norm for many businesses to be capturing those all-important email addresses.

But how many of those email newsletters that you’ve signed up have been any good? How many have added any real value to your day?

And how many have been nothing more than clutter and spam in your inbox.

When an email subscription works, it can work very well in deed. Take note: email marketing should become a critical part of your business strategy. But when done badly, your emails can be causing your potential clients problems.

And problems ain’t what you want to be offering, are they?!

These are the 5 most complained about problems that emails can cause. And I bet you have found yourself cursing over one or more of them yourself. So, check to see if you are offering any of these problems. And if so, sort them out.

Get added without being asked – Top of the Pops and coming in at Number One, is my favourite email grip. Business card dumping and website mining. There are still plenty of you out there who feel it’s acceptable to upload lists or manually add email addresses to your email newsletter, without having asked permission from the person.

Email marketing gets the best resulsts when it’s permission-based, so don’t be lazy. Work out a real reason why someone would want to receive emails from you and offer your emails as an opt-in service only.

Can’t read them – As more of us are using smart phones and tablets to read and send emails, our screens are getting smaller and smaller. Fancy, graphic based newsletters may look great on a 13” screen, but when squashed in to an iPhone it just makes you want to hit that delete key.

Your subscribers may prefer text based emails, too. Images can work well for designed based businesses, but if certain email servers block certain graphics, you’re left with pretty ugly emails that may not be able to be read.

Keep your newsletter design simple. Keep it to one column. And avoid those magazine styles, unless you’ve done your research and found out that this style actually works for your business.

Too many – You must have come across this one! You’ve signed up for a free report and before you know it, you’ve had 4 emails in the first 24 hours … 3 of which have been recommending (selling!) affiliate products. Wooooooh there!

Yes, you can’t be shy about selling your business. You’ve got to make your offers to your subscribers as you aren’t a free publishing house (are you?!). But watch your scheduling, especially at promotion time.

You may find you have to spend some time and emails to build up the trust from your subscribers. Give some value before you go for the sale – make friends first – and you’ll find you won’t need to go heavy and “make the sale”. You are not a hormone-induced teenager trying to score on their first date!

Too few – On the opposite end of the scale is not receiving enough. A lack of consistency will dilute your efforts and will only make your subscribers wonder who you are. They may well have forgotten who you are if they signed up for something over a month ago before getting any follow up.

In fact, I got an email from such a business today. It must have been at least 2 months since I had heard from them last and yet they were obviously gearing up for a promotion. Hmmmm.

Be in touch with your subscribers regularly – at least once a fortnight if you are serious about marketing your business. Little and often goes a very long way.

Can’t unsubscribe easily – Grrrrr! Another common problem that really shouldn’t be here if businesses used proper email marketing systems. Replying back to an email with “unsubscribe” in the subject heading really is a pain. And as for having to re-submit your email address once you click through to a web page … well, talk about having to jump through hoops.

Once your subscribers have had enough of you, make if easy for them to leave. A “one-click” unsubscribe button is offered by all the major newsletters systems, so there is really no excuse for not being able to offer this. You don’t want your subscriber clicking that “spam” button do you?!

Any more common complaints you would like to share? Do add your thoughts below.

Do you really need a shopping cart to sell on the web?

This question came up from a recent webinar I ran for a mumpreneur group.  I was taking the group through online payments and how to get started taking credit cards via your website.

PayPal is a great place to start.  And yes, I know not everyone enjoys the PayPal process – but it is recognised as the number one way of paying for stuff on the web.  It doesn’t take long to set up an account and you could be taking payments via your website within a week.

But as I was taking the group through shopping carts, someone came up with this great question – “Why should I use a shopping cart system if I can use Paypal to do it all for me?”

PayPal is a wonderful system to safely and securely take credit card payments over the internet.  It may take your customers’ contact details – postal and email addresses – but one thing it ain’t is a customer mailing system.

And this is where a shopping cart system comes in. A shopping cart system gives you the ability to collect your customers’ details for you to use for future relationship building.  The most expensive customer you can ever get is always the new first-time customer.  And when so many small business owners focus all their energies and marketing budget on finding and attracting new customers, it’s easy to see why they don’t seem to move forward and grow their business.

Some of you may just sell one “widget” and that’s that.  But one “widget” does make a business and I am sure – at least I hope! – most of you have several “widgets” that your customers can buy from you.  An e-book for £9.99, a 3 month programme for £495, 1-2-1 coaching and mentoring, a DVD series or live training events – what ever you sell, you are probably building a range of “widgets” for your customers to choose from.

If you were to use PayPal to process your website orders, take the payments and send confirmations to you for you to send them the relevant “widgets”, your marketing is going to be focused on chasing that new first-time customer over and over again.

But use a shopping cart system, you will be able to see at a glance which customers have bought what, send out relevant emails to follow up sales, offering suggestions on what they can buy next.

You will be able to send out a regular newsletter, maintaining contact and gently reminding them that you are there next time they need something that you offer.

You will be able to set up affiliate schemes so that the people who love your “widgets” can recommend and make commission on these recommendations.

You will be able to create sign-up forms for your website so that people who aren’t quite ready to buy from you, can part with their email address in exchange for a free report, online course or video series.

So yes, PayPal can sort out your “Buy Now” buttons and provide a secure system to take credit cards, but you also need to consider your long term business growth.  You need to create a permission-based marketing system so you don’t have to focus all your marketing efforts on chasing new first-time customers.

It’s so much easier and much more fun re-selling to the same people over and over again!

And by having all your customers – both present, past and future – under the same roof, it helps keep things simple for you.

If you are looking for a shopping cart system, then I can recommend the system I use.  1ShoppingCart may feel rather overwhelming to start with, but it really does give you everything you need to run an efficient and effective marketing system and I’ve been using 1ShoppingCart for the past 5 years. Click to check out 1ShoppingCart for yourself.

Disclaimer: The link to 1ShoppingCart is an affiliate link however I only recommend products via affiliate links if I personally use them.  Every referral gives a me a small commission and if it works for me, then I’m very happy to recommend it to you : )

Photo Credit:  CraigCloutier

You may know that I rant on quite a lot about the importance of capturing email addresses from your websites and blogs.  Building up a list of email addresses of potentially interested clients is one THE most essential marketing activities you can do as a small business owner.

But how much would you be willing to spend on getting just one email address?

I was clothes shopping in Guildford at the weekend with my 10 year old daughter.  After waiting in changing rooms in Primark and doing my very best to avoid the likes of Jack Wills and SuperDry, we ended up in GAP.

A few T-Shirts and pair of jeans later, we made way over the cash register where I was asked if I was a member of GAP VIP.  ”Here we go again”, I thought.  ”Another bit of hard selling to sign up for some loyalty card.”

But when explained me to me, I was most impressed.

They offered me a 30% discount on the spot for just writing my email address on a notepad that they took from under the counter.  GAP just gave me the best part of £10 off my purchase for handing over my email address.

£10! That’s how much they were willing to pay for my email address. (OK I know they didn’t actually pay out the money, but that was money that didn’t end up in their tills.)

And what about all the people who probably handed over a fake email address in exchange for that 30% discount.  I am sure there would have been plenty of people who would do this – I know I have in the past.  So let’s say that for every real email address, GAP would actually have to collect at least 5.

That £10 could easily become £50 that they gave away for just one perfectly valid email address.

GAP have obviously done their calculations and worked out that a brand new email address could be worth hundreds, if not thousands of pounds over a lifetime of one of their customers.  £50 is probably a small price to pay for them, especially if you consider the customer is spending money in the first place to get their discount.

So how much is an email address worth to you?  Are you doing enough to get email addresses from your potential clients?

I know I am probably not – and it’s given me plenty of food for thought to review my processes and offers.

Just wished I had ended up spending more money to get more value for my 30% discount. Oh wait, that’s what GAP wanted me to do!!

Doreen knew it was time to get someone in to do her recycling!

How to hire a VA

I was interviewed earlier this week by Carmen MacDougall, one of the leaders in the UK Virtual Assistant industry.  She was putting together a book for VAs looking to build up their client list and wanted to find out how I went about hiring my first VA.

It was more than 4 years ago that I took on my first VA – someone who helped me with my business remotely, without the need of coming to my office or offering an employment contract. (And no – a virtual assistant is not one of those virtual animated people who pop up on websites to offer assistance as one person admitted to thinking!)

The interview reminded me of the struggle and confusion I felt when I first decided to take the plunge.

You see, I bet we are alike.

You run your own business.  And you probably are, like all good entrepreneurs and business owners, a bit of a control freak!

When it’s your business … your clients, your blood, sweat and tears … it’s really hard to start handing over some of that responsibility to someone else.  Someone who – let’s be frank here – you are not sure you can really trust.

What happens if they send out the wrong email to the wrong person?   What happens if they end up offending a new client which results in them cancelling the contract you’ve just agreed?

What happens if they lose all your files and mess up your accounts system?

All over-the-top, drama-queen emotions – yet perfectly reasonable thoughts from a business owner like me and you.

But if you carry on running the business in the same way you are at the moment, you probably know that you are going to drop some balls yourself.  Trying to do it all by yourself is guaranteed to result in you being the person who sends out the wrong email and messing up your invoices.

So when is the right time to take on some extra help and hire a VA?

Here are some of the danger signs:

• You have become a slave to your inbox.  Every time you respond to an email another 5 magically appear, which means you never have a chance to get on with business development.  Or writing that book you’ve promised yourself you are going to write!
• You are missing messages on your phone.  You are out with clients and it takes you at least 3 days before you manage to phone someone back … and you are losing potential new projects on the way.
• You are spending hours sending out information to clients such as training packs, terms of engagement letters, quotes and proposals.  You sit by the printer waiting patiently for everything to come off before you dash to the post office to get it in the last post of the day.
• You have projects such as “set up email newsletter” or “get Facebook Page sorted” on your to-do-list for week after week.
• You find yourself sat at your desk on a Saturday morning working out the last 6 months of business receipts whilst your family go out for a day trip to a local park
• You are missing out on having that “every other Friday” that you promised yourself to spend with friends – working for yourself meant that you were you own boss … but it feels like you are chained to your laptop and can’t get away.
• You forget to send out this month’s invoices … because you are too busy!  Cashflow starts to look a little tight.
• You are frustrated by your website as several of the pages are so out of date that you have stopped sending potential clients there to look at it.
• You struggle to find the time to book plane and train tickets and often find yourself missing out cheaper seats because you’ve left it too late to organise.

And the reason why I know these danger signs is because I have had them all at some point in my own business.  Got all of those T-shirts!

This was one of the big things that I shared during the interview with Carmen earlier this week.  By the time I came round to getting someone in to help with my business, I was in such a whirlwind of thoughts and big ideas that trying to explain what I needed help with was tough.

When it’s all in your head and you’ve trained yourself to thinking “it’s quicker if I just get on and do it” – you know you’ve got to slam on the breaks and take the time out to get some help.

Because if you don’t you will only end up suffocating your own success.

So when is it the right time to get a VA?

Before you begin that new project.  Before you decide to launch that 6 month VIP programme.  Before you launch yourself in to a frenzy of project juggling.

Break off one small part of your business – such as your live events, book project or new product you’re planning to launch – and focus on getting help on this.

If you do, you will find it far easier than trying to get help with that whole mountainous business of yours.  And you will have stronger foundations to take on more clients and projects without taking more of your precious time to do it.

It can take 3 or 4 months to establish a good working relationship with a VA but once it’s there, the sense of freedom is wonderful.  Knowing that there is someone else to do the things you hate to do and not able to do so you can concentrate on what really matters.

And you never know – you could find yourself working that 3 day week after all

If you are thinking about hiring your first VA or you’ve already had your confidence knocked when someone you’ve hired just hasn’t worked out – then check out my quick and easy course “How to Hire a VA“.  Follow the steps and you will find the right person for you in a matter of weeks!

So you started a blog … but you just haven’t got round to writing articles for the past few weeks.  Or is that months?!

What about your email newsletter?  You started with good intentions but things got … well, a bit busy.  And you haven’t sent one out for a few months.

It’s OK.  It’s a common problem.  Constant and consistent marketing is tough, especially when it comes to writing articles.

But the worst thing you can do when your blogging or newsletters have lapsed is apologise for it when you have finally taken your pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard!).

I see it time and time again.  An email comes through starting off with “Hi, it’s been a while. So sorry! It’s just business is so busy I’ve just had the time to write a new blog post/newsletter.   But it’s OK – I’m back!”

Never draw attention to the fact that you just haven’t made the time to blog or email.  Never highlight the fact that you, quite frankly, haven’t been able to prioritise this all important, value added part of your business.

For those readers and subscribers who have missed you, will be delighted to hear from you again.  But for those who haven’t missed you, will only realise that they haven’t actually missed out on your articles and content.  And may well be slightly peeved off that you haven’t made the time to do this already.  Now, where’s that unsubscribe link?!

And once you’ve apologised and told your readers and subscribers that you’re back … then you’ve set yourself up for a fall if you lapse once again!

No, never apologise!  Just get on and do it.  Don’t draw attention to your failings, no matter how guilty you feel.

Just get on and do it!