Rebecca is a coach. She wants to help women who have experienced bad relationship breakdowns. She’s got a basic website together, printed some business cards and a leaflet but she hasn’t a clue where to start finding her new clients.

She’s been along to a local networking event and met an approachable chap called Simon. Simon runs a coaching business too and is proudly tweeting and updating his Facebook profile at regular intervals during the meeting.

Rebecca has heard of Twitter and Facebook. Both seem to be in the newspaper headlines most weeks because of some footballer or Big Brother star that have got themselves in trouble with a tweet or two.

But how do you use Facebook and Twitter in business?

But she’s not really understood why anyone would use them in their business. Simon is full of enthusiasm. He tells her that he spends most of his day tweeting, commenting and liking and proudly explains that he’s up to 5,412 Twitter followers and it won’t be long before he has reached his maximum number of Facebook Friends.

Simon is “talking” to people all over the world and he’s always on the look out for the latest app that will help him reach out to more people. His Klout score is up, he’s listed on all the Twitter directories he can find and regularly checks (and tweets!) his influencer ratings on any website he can find that shows it.

Impressive Stats, Simon!

Rebecca is impressed and is very excited to get back to her office to sign up to all the websites Simon has recommended.

She spends the next couple of weeks sorting out her new accounts. She begins to realise that what seems simple to start is beginning to get more and more complicated. Rebecca decides she needs to learn as much as possible about this new social media world and reads every blog she can find.

So much to learn … and most of it for free

She starts signing up for all the dozens and dozens of free webinars and teleseminars that promise to show her the “quickest and fastest way to make money on social media”. She’s trying out a couple of websites that promise to give her 10,000 new followers in the next month … all automatically, without her having to do a thing except grant access to her account.

She begins downloading apps on to her phone to help manage her social media accounts so she can keep up with it all, even when she’s away from her desk. And she loves having an email come through alerting her to a new follower – after all, it’s only polite to check them out, reply to them and try to start a conversation every time.

Rebecca is beginning to feel like she knows what she is doing. She’s loving all this social media stuff and spends hours on it every day. She’s even been able to give other people advice on how to set up their profiles and has even written a few articles for her blog on how best to use social media to grow a new business.

But wait!

Wasn’t Rebecca a coach? A coach who wanted to focus on helping women who has experienced a relationship breakdown?

What has “how to use social media to grow your business” articles got to do with dealing with emotional rejection?

Why would you be impressed with social media influencer scores when all you care about is how to mend your breaking heart?

The reality is that Rebecca may have a few thousand Twitter followers, be chatting to friends on Facebook all over the world and got herself a 87% influencing rank according to one website, but her bank balance is looking rather small.

What’s happened to the income?

All this focus on the latest social media sites and the applications that are designed to improve your effectiveness and efficiency in building a business has only resulted in Rebecca feeling very, very poor.

Yes, a few clients have called up and arranged some 1-2-1 sessions. But these few clients are not going to allow Rebecca to feel her business could support her, let alone her family and partner’s expectations for her to contribute to the household budget.

Unfortunately, Rebecca has become victim to the virus that is infecting today’s entrepreneurs and small business owners …

… The Magpie Syndrome

This excerpt has been taken from Karen’s new book due out on the 1st February.  To find out more and how you could get your hands on a special VIP copy, go to www.ShinyShinyBook.com (If only to check out my Brownie picture from when I was 9!!)

Wanted to share a BIG lesson I’ve learnt over the past couple of months.  Recently I’ve joined the Nigel Botterill’s Entrepreneurial Circle.  Love him or hate him, you can’t deny he’s been rather successful over recent years.  And it’s exactly that reason why I am loving the stuff he does.

But the BIG lesson I’ve learnt is a pretty obvious one really.  But with all obvious stuff, it only needs one person to flip something around and phrase it in a certain way to make total sense to you, doesn’t it?

Nigel claims (and I’m sure this is to be true!) that out of all business owners:

1% are super successful and very wealthy
4% are rich and doing very well
15% at getting there and making good money
60% are getting by
20% are struggling

It probably won’t surprise you that these figures reflect the infamous 80:20 rule.  And this is how I learnt my BIG lesson.

What these figures mean is that 80% of my competitors are doing it wrong!  And 80% of your competitors are doing wrong, too.

So stop copying what everyone around you is doing …. and start focusing your energies on doing something different to make you stand out from the crowd.

And that’s my BIG lesson.  Cool, hey?

When it comes to marketing workshops, programmes and webinars the number one BIGGEST mistake small businesses make is spending time developing the content first.

I ran a session at the Web Tech Club last month on how to run virtual events – teleseminars and webinars – and this was my biggest rant of the session (and I do like to rant!!)

Typical Small Business Owner

Here’s what happens for most coaches, trainers and consultants:

“I want to run a workshop. I’ve been told this is a great way of making more money in working with more clients.”

Good thinking

“What topic shall I do?  I know, I love talking about growing tomatoes (OK – run me on this one!!).  I could easily run a whole day workshop on growing tomatoes.  I love tomatoes.  I’ve got stacks to say about tomatoes and my clients really need to learn more about growing tomatoes.  I’ve seen how they treat their tomato plants!”

OK – it’s good to focus on what you are good at.  There’s no point trying to promote something that you are not an expert in.  BUT … assuming you know what your clients need is WRONG WRONG WRONG!

“I’ll spend the next couple days planning out what I will deliver during this tomato growing workshop.  After all I want to be confident in what I am selling.  If I’ve got nothing to say then it’s going to be tough to promote it.”

Huh?! You’ve already told yourself you are an expert in tomato growing.  Why do you need to convince yourself first that you’ve got enough to say.  Of course you have!!

2 days later …

“OK, got the content together. Really pleased with the way I’ve designed my workbook.  I could sell that as a separate product.  Glad I spent that £65 on getting a graphic designer to come up with template and front page for the workbook. It looks very professional. I feel ready to sell it now.”

Gulp!! You’ve spent £65 on graphic design already but made no money from the workshop?

4 days later …

“No one is interested!! I’ve emailed everyone I know and no one is in the slightest bit interested in the best way of growing tomatoes.  What a waste of time.  I’m never going to run another workshop again.  I’m no good at this.”

There goes another demotivated, hacked off business owner whose dream was crushed at the first hurdle.

The 3 questions you need to answer first

This is why you must NEVER EVER spend time creating content for a workshop, product, book or anything else until you know these things:

1.  Your target audience – who do you want to work with?

2.  What is their pain – what keeps them up at night?  (What you think it is, is often no where near what it really is!!)

3.  What is it that you can deliver to soothe their pain?

And before you write the content, you promote it!  That’s right.

You work on your sales page, explaining what is your client will come away with and benefit from.  You may well have the course or content outlined as Week 1, Week 2, Week 3 or in chapter headings.

But you DON’T write the actual word for word content.

Sell before you write the content

You go out and sell tickets or pre-launch orders to make sure that your target audience will buy before you spend the time creating the content.

I know it will seem scary at first to sell something you haven’t finished, but I promise you that after the first time of doing it this way, you will never go back to your old ways!

Copy Cat

Earlier this week, I got an email from a new subscriber to my newsletter telling me that one of the biggest challenges they are faced with was that people were copying their brand and ideas.

Now, I just want to be clear that I’m not a legal expert!  If someone has stolen intellectual or creative property, then there may be a legal case.  Plagiarism is illegal  - but speak to legal expert to be sure; someone like Suzanne Dibble who is a legal expert.

People copy successful people

But the problem with this problem is that this ain’t never going to go away if you ever want to be successful!

I remember getting all hot under the collar in my first year of business when a “friendly competitor” launched a brand new workshop programme that had almost the identical name to mine.  Shock, horror (plus lots of expletives that I couldn’t possibly share here!!) was my immediate reaction.  ”How very dare she!!”

I went in to full scale rage that spread over several days.  I walked around, muttering under my breath, wondering what I could do to put a stop to her plans.

It’s easy to get angry

But what good did this do me?

1.  I didn’t really have a leg to stand on.  My workshop title wasn’t exactly trademarked.  Nor where the words that I used unique in any way.

2.  When I started to work through my anger, I realised that I had actually taken the idea of “my” workshop title from a couple of other workshops I had seen promoted on the web.  Although I thought I was being unique, I wasn’t really.  I had taken inspiration from others to help me in my own creativity.

Every book we read, every advert we see and every person we interact with is going to give us inspiration and ideas.  It’s not stealing when you put it together with your own uniqueness and twist.  If you ask a graphic designer to copy a well known brand’s logo, then yes – you are probably going to get a solicitor’s letter through your door one day.  But take well known logos along to the meeting to show them what you like and what you don’t like, is all part of the creation process.

3. The negative anger that I felt weakened me.  I was incredibly unproductive that week.  Instead of focusing on promoting my own workshop programme (which was doing rather well!), I turned my energies in to destroying my own productivity.  Not good for growing a business, is it?!

4. Did the other person really care about what I thought?  No!  Did she really do a better job of what I was doing? No!  Someone can steal your brand and all your ideas but you can never steal “you”.  And at the end of the day, it’s “you” that your clients and customers buy in to.

Most of the time it’s a mindset battle that’s worth fighting … not a legal one

This was never going to be a legal advice blog post.  And for goodness sake, if you feel you have been legally wronged, then get talking to a legal expert and put a plan in place.

But never stew over this.  Having seen several colleagues of mine over the years get all bent out of shape over other people stealing their ideas, I saw their anger and frustration hold them back on their own plans.

When you are successful, people will always try to copy you.  A compliment, as many of you may say.

But, don’t waste your precious energy and time getting angry with them for it because they can never be “you”.

What do you think?  Disagree or got something else to add?

Personalised emails and letters aren’t anything new.  Since the days of mail merge, it’s been relatively straight forward to insert people’s names where ever the magic code gets added.

However, as technology gets cleverer and cheaper, personalisation becomes more accessible for businesses like mine and yours.

Take the huge growth in personalised birthday cards, for example.  Moonpig hit the market a few years ago and now we’ve got sites such as Clintons and Funky Pigeon all jumping in.

Yesterday, I posted a video blog showcasing some clever marketing from Cancer Research that my husband received a few weeks ago.  Technology now even allows us to personalise videos!! Clever, if not a bit spooky.

But personalised videos may be stretching your budget!  It certainly isn’t something that I am looking at doing (yet!!).  So, how can you make your communication more personal?

Your email marketing

Always ask for someone’s name in your sign-up box:  First name is good. There’s no need to ask for surname too unless your business communicates tend to be in a more formal way ie Mr Smith rather than just Tom.  Ask for too much info as sign-up stage and you will create a “hassle factor” which will put people off rather than encourage.

Salutation:  If you send out an email newsletter, then you probably do this already.  But a simple Hi Tom at the beginning of your welcome section sets the tone.

Subject Headings:  Over use and this can be spammy, but sprinkle the odd first name merge code in your subject headings and it can make your email stand out in a bulging inbox.

In the body of the email:  Remember, you can use name merge codes where ever you like in your email.  Again, over use and this can be really spammy.  Think of it as a conversation you have with someone – you just wouldn’t keep using their name when speaking to them.  But use at points where you want someone to take notice, this can be very effective to jump someone in to action.

Your blog

OK, using names when someone visits your blog may be a little trickier if they haven’t actually subscribed anywhere.  But there are a couple of clever WordPress Plugins that help personalise your blog.

What Seth Godin Would Do:  This plugin recogonises where your visitor has come from and whether they have visited before.  You can then set a specific welcome message at the top of a blog post to reflect this.  For example “Hey, thanks for checking this out from Twitter” or even “Welcome. As this is your first time, why not subscribe to our blog feed here”

Thank Me Later:  This clever little plugin gives me the option to send a personalised thank you email to readers who leave a comment for the first time on my blog.  All automatic so no extra work needed once it’s been set up.

Your direct mail

Again, same principles as with your email:  think about your headline, your salutation and the body of your letter.

Personalised postcards & thank you cards: For one off thank you cards, it’s cheap and simple to head on over to Funky Pigeon. Or if you want to order in bulk use someone like Personally Corporate.

The trick to successful personalised marketing

The trick to personalising your marketing without it becoming spammy and dripping with insincerity is in the way that you deliver it.

I’ve blogged many times before about automating your communication without becoming robotic, and the trick is really in the tone and the phrases you use.

Being personal with your clients is a great way of standing out “from all the rest”, especially if you do it with a sense of humour and a smile on your face.   But write the words around that name merge code like you mean it.  Write how you would say it if you could be right there in front of them, in person.

Give it a go and let me know what results you get!

There’s nothing new about personalised marketing.  We’ve been able to mail merge for a long time now but this particular campaign from Cancer Research caught my eye the other week.

I’ve been meaning to video it and show you, so here it is.  What do you think?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5gRBsxQumQ

There is nothing quite like a live event – workshop, seminar, launch, sale, product demonstration – to get your marketing working for you and attracting more of the right clients.

Ever since I started up in business in 2004, I have found myself including some kind of live group event in my overall marketing plan. In the early days, back when I was a Life Coach, I fumbled around and offered group Life Coaching workshops

Fumbled was the operative word here as I was lucky if I managed to get more than 4 people to turn up at any one event. After running three such events, I decided banging my head against a brick wall was a more effective way of making money … so I stopped.

But after a long summer of very little in the way of clients, I decided to pull myself together and get back to running events again. It wasn’t the way I was marketing them that wasn’t working; it was what I was offering. People just didn’t want a group Life Coaching session; first big lesson learnt in event marketing success!

Since that summer I haven’t looked back. Live events – virtual and “real-life” – have been part of the CanDoCanBe marketing mix for the past seven years appearing as profitable revenue streams, PR and product launches.

And there is no reason why event marketing can’t work for you.

When I work with small business owners to help them with their own marketing strategies, I often encourage them to include some form of live event in to their business mix.

But I’m not a trainer!

I know that some of you reading this may be thinking “but I’m not a trainer, I don’t want to run a workshop”. Event marketing does not always have to be about selling training workshops.

Event marketing can include product demonstrations, free events to enable you to upsell what it is you offer, networking events, Q&A forums, special sale days, try-before-you-buy opportunities … event marketing can work for those of you who sell products and services.

The possibilities of getting a group of customers together in the same room are only limited to your creativity.

So when done right, why does event marketing work so well for small businesses?

Here’s why:

1. Time sensitive deadlines

If you are offering something all day and every day, there is often very little pressure for a customer to buy from you. They may want what you have to buy, but life gets in the way and it’s easy to put off their buying decision until tomorrow and the next day.

A live event will happen at a specific time on a specific day. If someone wants to attend your event, they are forced in to making a decision and committing to you.

2. Gets you closer to your customers

There is nothing quite like bringing a group of customers together in the same room to get to know them better. And for them to get to know you better. Face to face relationships improve communications and people will buy in to you at a deeper level.

It’s also a great way of getting your customers to meet each other. Social proof that other people like what they like!

3. Instant feedback on what you are marketing

If your live event is not going well, you get instant feedback don’t you? Eyes glazing over, folded arms, snoring(!) are all signs that what you are offering is not of value. But don’t let this put you off. Imagine when things go great. People are straining at the back to see what you doing. They are scribbling notes furiously. The audience is asking lots of questions; showing an interest.

It means you are on the right track and offering stuff that people want. Plus it’s great for your own personal motivation when you realise that people love what you offer.

4. Allows you to upsell your bigger offer

Let’s say you are a website designer. Your average customer spend is £1,000 and you are finding it challenging to find enough of the right people to spend enough of the right amount of money with you. Offering a two hour informal session at your office on how SEO works or how to start your own blog, could be what your customers are interested enough in to express an interest in what you do.

£1,000 may be too much money for them to consider right at this moment, but a £35 workshop that gives them practical advice is an easier buying decision to make. Once they come to see you in action, spending that £1,000 budget on a new website is a whole load easier!

5. Increases your hourly rate and adds a revenue stream

If your business focuses on offering services to 1-2-1 people, then the challenge is often finding enough people to pay you to meet your earning targets. No matter how successful your marketing is, if you are charging your time, your time will be ultimately capped by the number of hours you can work.

But by giving a group of customers an opportunity to work with you in one day, not only do you reach out to more people, you can dramatically increase your hourly rate. For example, you may be charging £125 per person for your legal advice per hour, but how many people are you seeing each day to make up your monthly earning potential?

If you were able to offer a group legal clinic for £95 per person for a three hour workshop and had 10 people attend, your hourly rate has more than doubled. (Simplistic I know as you have to consider preparation time too, but you get the picture don’t you?)

6. Gives you something else to offer to your customers

Flogging the same stuff day in, day out can get rather tedious. For both you and your potential clients. A live event that you run every three months, for example, can be a great way to break up your communications and have something “new and exciting” to tell people.

7. Focus to your marketing plan

This is my favourite reason by far! Because an event is at a specific time on a specific day, you have to pull your finger out and market it! There is no dithering about and dragging your heels. You’ve got to get out there and tell people about your event.

You have to get a plan together: press releases, email promotions, leaflets, personal letters, postcard mailings, adverts, Twitter campaign, radio interviews, website landing pages, pay-per-click campaign … how ever you decide you are going to get the message out there, you have to plan it and DO IT!

And because you are starting with an end date in mind, it makes it very easy to work backwards to help you decide when you have to action certain things. You don’t want to be turning up to an event with a whole load of empty seats, do you? What better focus do you need to get your marketing working hard for you?!

Adds zing to your 6 month marketing plan

So, if you are after just one thing guaranteed to add a rather large zing to your marketing plan for the next 6 months, it’s get two or three events lined up. Make sure these events are what your customers really want (not what you think they need!!), decide on a date and then get to it.

Event marketing done right is a great way to give you that proverbial rocket and help you attract more of the right clients.

Photo Credit: OrangeJack

Southbound Tunnel entrance in April 2011

Hindhead Tunnel now open!

Yesterday saw the opening of the Hindhead Tunnel; a £371 Million road bypass project almost completed. It boosts to be the longest road tunnel in the UK measuring at 1.1 miles and is a most beautifully designed – almost TelyTubby like in appearance – piece of engineering work.

The A3 is a very busy duel carriageway that cuts the village of Hindhead in half and the traffic lights (just 400 yard from the end of our road) have become notorious in causing anything from 30 minutes to 3 hours of delay to both Southbound and Northbound traffic up and down the South East of England.

I moved to Hindhead with my family ten years ago when the plans for the Tunnel were still being debated. Hindhead back then was – in property prices – the poorer sister to the more desirable area of Haslemere. As the Tunnel project looked to be imminent, we decided the house we liked would be a sound financial investment. Once the Tunnel opened, Hindhead would become a village again; the juggernauts and lorries taken away from the centre.

It took some persistence!

But that was ten years ago! We honestly thought that a project like this would be approved much sooner. Campaigning for a new road started back in the 1970’s and yet it took more than 35 years for plans to be approved.

It took years and years of persistence campaigning to find a solution that suited the majority and approval from the Department of Transport.

And finally this week, we will see both Southbound and Northbound tunnels opened.

Your small business marketing activity

What’s this got to with your business and marketing activities?

One of the reasons why so many of you fail at your marketing is because of a lack of persistence.

You may have read some where that it takes on average of 7 times to be in touch with someone before they become ready to buy from you. As the average consumer gets more and more savvy and competition gets more and more competitive, this figure for most of you will actually be far higher!

I have had clients subscribe to my newsletter and receive it for two years or more before they feel ready to invest in business coaching or one of my products to help with small business marketing. It can take ten, twenty or even thirty times to be in touch with someone before they will buy from me.

It’s too easy to give up on your marketing efforts!

But it’s easy to give up. It’s easy to decide that after you’ve left one message for that potential client, if they haven’t called you back within the week, you’ll drop them from your follow up list. After all, you don’t want to appear desperate do you?

It’s too easy to right off that direct mail campaign in which you posted one voucher to a few hundred prospects. You only got one response back so direct mail mustn’t work for you.

It’s too easy to publish a few tweets and start up a Facebook Page only to give up after a month because it’s not generated one spark of interest.

What if the campaigners for the A3 road bypass gave up after ten years? After twenty years? Or even after thirty? Yup, that’s right. We wouldn’t be enjoying a juggernaut free road through our village.

Hang tough. Be persistent and believe that if your proposition was good enough to shout about the first time, it’s good enough to keep on shouting.

You need constant and consistent follow up!

Hands up if your website is floating around in hyperspace, attracting no more than a few dozen clicks every month?

It’s easy to fall in to the trap of getting a website up and running, only to hold your head in despair because you are not getting the online traffic you thought you were going to get.

You are struggling to find enough clients from your face-to-face networking so using the internet has to give results; and fast! So why isn’t your website being found? And what can you do about getting found on Google?

Buying in SEO – search engine optimisation – expertise can be hideously expensive. And to budget for a few hundred pounds every month for Google Adwords is a waste of time if you don’t know what you are doing. But for a business owner like you, who is probably on a low cost marketing budget, there are certain steps you can take to make sure your website can get found by the right people online.

Take control of your website content

I’m not suggesting you start learning HTML and CSS and mess around with your own website coding, but once a site is set up for you, there really is no need to keep relying on your website designer to make every little adjustment and change to your website. I have met many small business owners who hate their website, complain that it does nothing for their business and yet don’t want to make any changes because of the expense of using their website designer to do it for them!

Blogging platforms such as WordPress.org and Squarespace.com allow you to take full control of your website content once the site has been set up for you. It really can be as easy as editing word documents before clicking that publish button to make the changes live on your website.

Many website designers who build websites on WordPress.org offer content management training as part of the package; a solution I highly recommend you explore.

Know exactly what your clients are searching for online

Being top of Google’s Page One for “life coaching” may sound impressive, but if your potential clients are looking for “tips on how to deal with redundancy” or “how to change careers”, then your “life coaching” keyword focus is going to get you diddly squat!

And if your visitor statistics are showing good figures for the “life coaching” keyword, make sure they are just other life coaches checking out the competition! How are those visitor rates converting to genuine interest in what you offer?

Keep your website content relevant

The more niche and focused you are on the content on your website, the more likely Google is going to give you higher search listings for certain keywords. Redundancy may be your niche area but if you try to cover all the bases such as graduate options, mid-life crisis and what to do after retirement, Google is going to get confused about what your website is all about.

This is a common problem that many of you will have with your website and it may be that you end up having two, three or more websites to promote the various services and products that you offer.

Overwhelming thought? Start with one area of your business first and get your website focused on this! Better to spend time refining your current website to specialise in just one area of your business and create additional websites over time as you see success in this strategy, than have a “one size fits all” website that is doing nothing for you!

Website page titles and descriptions

Did you know that Google will show your pages higher in the search listings if the titles of the pages and their description show exactly what you want to get found for?

If you had written a book about how to make career changes after redundancy and had not included this phrase in either the book title or description, then Waterstones is not going to know where to put your new book in its’ stores. It’s not going to get found!

Check each page title and description to see how well it matches the content on that page and the keywords you want to get found for.

Add content to your website

A five page website is OK. But five pages are not going to give Google much to refer to and bring you up in relevant searches. Google loves content and the more relevant content you have on your site, the more likely the right pages are going to appear on the right search listings.

Yup, that’s right; blogging is not just for those who love to write. Blogging is there for businesses that love to get found!

Avoid flash when building your website

Animations and fancy graphics may look lovely but if there’s no text, Google can’t read it and won’t put you in the search listings. A client of mine couldn’t understand why her website never came up in Google, even when she tried searching for her specific name. Her teenage son had beautifully designed her site but, as it was all built in flash, it was one big image. It was never going to come up in any search results because Google could not read it.

Are you telling anyone about your website?

It’s one thing to make sure Google will be able to show your website up in relevant search results, but to rely only on this is suicide. You have to take control over your website and make sure you have a marketing plan.

“Build it and they will come” is not a philosophy that you can afford to follow. You have to take responsibility and decide on an online – and offline! – plan on how you are going to attract the right clients to your website.

Remember to add “you”

A big mistake many small business owners make is to forget to add content about themselves. If someone wants to try to find you after meeting you at a networking event or has been recommended to speak to you but hasn’t got your phone number, you want to make sure your website comes up in a Google search of your name.

You are often the reason why your clients come to you, so you’ve got to make sure “you” are found easily on Google!

Want to discover more about your Googleablity?

Check out this month’s Web Tech Training Session – How To Manage Your Googleablity. Practical, no-nonsense advice on how to make sure you get found on Google!

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