Have you heard this expression before? “Do You Eat Your Own Dog Food?” usually means “do you use your own products?”. When it is used in tech circles, it usually refers to a company using the products that it has created.

When I adopted this phrase to use with my coaching clients, I usually use it to discuss if the client walks his or her own talk. For example, if a financial coach who teaches others not to have debt is in a lot of debt himself, he is not eating his own dog food. And if a relationship coach teaches others how to find a fulfilling relationship, but does not have a fulfilling relationship herself, she is not walking her talk either.

It is extremely important to walk your talk and to be authentic when you are in business for yourself. When you are not walking your talk your potential customers will realize that you are not being authentic with them and will not be able to trust you. And if a potential client does not trust you, how can they do business with you?

This is another reason I only teach online marketing techniques that I have tried myself and that I know work. If you want to be successful in business, you must be authentic and always do what you say.

Now you. Do you eat your own dog food? Share with us how you use your authenticity in your business.

Biana Babinsky

After last week’s post on Three Step Online Marketing System For Getting Clients, I got a few questions from coaches who tell me that they are using a similar system to promote their business already. They now want to leverage the system to increase the number of clients they have, and they are wondering which step they should be working on.

First, let me remind you what the Three Step Online Marketing System For Getting Clients is:

Step 1: Identify your target market and drive your target market to your web site.

Step 2: The web site visitors that you have acquired in Step 1 are now browsing your web site. Turn them into leads!.

Step 3: Turn your leads from Step 2 into clients.

So, which step do you work on if you would like to add more clients to your business? Well, there are a few different ways to look at it:

You turn your leads into clients in Step #3. Let’s say that typically you get 1 client for every 150 leads that you get. This means that for the next 900 leads you will enroll 6 clients. How can you increase the number of clients you enroll?

– If you keep the same rate of turning leads into clients, you will need to get more leads in order to get more clients. If you get 1,800 leads instead of 900, you will be able to enroll 12 clients instead of 6.

– Or, you can work on improving your closing techniques, so that you can enroll a client per 100 leads. That way, without increasing the number of your leads, you can get 9 clients out of your current 900 leads, instead of just 6.

– You can also improve the quality of the your leads. The more qualified your leads are, the fewer leads you will need to work with in order to enroll a client. If you have 900 more qualified leads, you may be able to enroll 9+ clients instead of the usual 6.

The bottom line is that there is always room for improvement in your system for getting clients for your business. If you do not have all the clients that you need yet, review your online marketing system to see which steps you can improve upon to enroll more clients.

To learn how to create an effective marketing system that helps you get all the clients that you need, join me for the How To Get More Clients Online Teleseminar Series that starts tomorrow. Register for it now at https://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zmarketing

Biana Babinsky

I have seen thousands of business owners do it. A business owner, let’s call her Carol, offers a great service, and she designs a whole system for her clients to get through her service and achieve amazing results. Carol sees the amazing results her clients are getting and, quite correctly, attributes the results to the system that she has created for them.

However, when it comes to her own business, Carol resists setting up a marketing system. Instead, she just tries using different marketing techniques, hoping that one of them will turn out to be the technique that will bring her all the clients that she would ever need.

She tries blogging, article marketing, social networking, search engine optimization, using each technique for a few days and then moving on to the next one. She starts her own list for which she now has 24 or so subscribers.

None of the techniques have really brought in customers, so three months later she goes back and starts from the very beginning – blogging, article marketing, social networking, search engine optimization, again for a few days each. Her list is now at 39 subscribers, but again, nothing is happening.

This is exactly what I have seen many business owners do. They rapidly switch between many marketing techniques hoping that one of them will provide all the clients that they need. None does, so they start over again, still hoping for clients….

The problem here is that they have no system in place for using online marketing techniques effectively. It is not enough to just apply the techniques; you must have a clear understanding of why you are bringing people into your sphere of influence, what happens with those people and how can you continue to communicate with these people to turn them into customers.

Here is a Three Step Online Marketing System For Getting Clients that you can use:

Step 1. Use online marketing techniques to identify your target market and drive your target market to your web site.

In this step you will apply online marketing techniques such as social networking, article marketing, business blogging, etc. But you need to apply them effectively, so that your target market will recognize that you can help them and visits your web site.

Step 2. Turn the web site visitors into leads. The web site visitors that you have acquired in Step 1 are now browsing your web site. Now either they will leave your web site and never come back or you must turn them into leads on the spot. You can accomplish this by offering them something of value in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter.

Step 3. Turn your leads into clients. Again, you must have a system in place for this – you must have an effective follow-up system that helps you turn your leads into clients.

Create an Online Marketing System for your business today. The System will make a difference between doing the same thing over and over again and not seeing results and actually starting to get clients from your online marketing efforts. I will be teaching how to create an Online Marketing System for your business during the How To Get More Clients Online Teleseminar Series. Register for the Teleseminar Series now at
https://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zmarketing

Biana Babinsky

After I announced the How To Use Twitter To Promote Your Business Teleseminar to members of my online business coaching program, I started getting questions from many business owners asking me how can one promote their business in 140 characters or less.

Here is a list of 7 things you can do to promote your business on Twitter:

1. Use Your Profile To Display The Link To Your Web Site. It will help you get more traffic to your web site and it will let others on Twitter learn more about you.

2. Share Information About Your Events. I had 473 people register for my Online Marketing Plan teleseminar last week. Some of the people found out about the teleseminar on Twitter.

3. Share What You Do. But don’t keep saying “Hire me!” – doing this will not get you any clients. But naturally sharing what you do and who your perfect clients are will get you great results.

4. Post Your Blog Posts To Your Twitter Account. You can automate this part, or you can post your blog posts to your account manually. When your friends on Twitter are able to read your blog posts, they will be able to get to know you and your business better.

5. Help Others. Re-tweet messages of others that resonate with you, let your followers know about your friends’ events, etc. When you help others they remember it and, in turn, will help you.

6. Use Your Name. People like to talk to a person, not a business name. Use your name either as a handle, or at least have your name listed in your profile.

7. Promote Your Brand. Put up your logo, change your page colors to your web site colors, etc. Do as much as you can to promote your brand with your Twitter page.

So here are 7 things that you can do on Twitter to promote your business. There are many more things you can do – please use the comments to add to the list!

And for more information on promoting your business on Twitter, register for the How To Promote Your Business On Twitter Teleseminar.

Biana Babinsky

As you know, I am a bit proponent of using article marketing to market your business. This is why I am very excited to interview Christopher Knight, the CEO of EzineArticles.com:

Biana: Many of us have had careers before getting into online marketing. What is your background? What did you do before starting EzineArticles.com?

Christopher: Before EzineArticles I was the Founder & CEO of SparkLIST, a permission-based email newsletter hosting service provider. I’ve been involved in several dot com companies since the mid 1990s ranging from website design, web hosting, running an ISP and an email newsletter advertising network.

Biana: Please tell us how EzineArticles.com got started. How did you get the idea for it? When did you launch it? What inspired you to start it?

Christopher: EzineArticles.com started in November of 1999 and our team acquired the site from its original owner as part of a 30 site roll up. I had raised VC and went on a buying spree to acquire sites that provided value for email newsletter publishers. EzineArticles was one of the 30 sites.

The site was largely ignored between 2000-2004 due to other competing priorities and then in August of 2004 our team scrapped the entire site and started all over again. The old model for the site included only the article title, author name and article summary…and our site visitors had to give up their email address in order to get access to the full article. Seemed like a smart idea in the late 1990s but no longer a smart idea in today’s world.

Biana: How many authors/how many articles do you have at EzineArticles now?

Christopher: As of this interview, over 150,000 expert authors in 570 different niche markets have registered and we’re hosting a little over 1.25 million unique/original articles.

Biana: Why is it important for business owners to write and submit articles online?

Christopher: Business owners gain market credibility, exposure and traffic back to their website in exchange for writing and submitting short 450-700 word articles centered around their expertise.

They are essentially exchanging content for highly pre-qualified visitors/traffic back to their website.

Articles are usually ‘how to’ or do it yourself informational type articles and they are followed by a “resource box” at the very bottom of each article. The article body is where the expert gives of their expertise; the resource box is where they get to promote themselves and give a link to their website.

Example: If an business owner is an expert in Vacation Rentals and wrote articles about various beach, cottage and vacation rentals; the visitors who come to the expert authors website are already interested in the topic they are reading… hence they are pre-qualified visitors (the best kind!).

Biana: Can you give your top three tips for business owners who are just starting with writing and submitting articles?

Christopher: CONSISTENCY: Know article writing & marketing is not a one shot strategy. It’s important to be consistent over time. It’s a lot like advertising where you market your business every single month.

QUALITY: Your articles should be easy to scan, include bullet points, numbered lists and proper spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure. Articles must be original and unique / exclusive to the person who wrote the article, but does not have to be exclusive to EzineArticles.com (means you can also use your articles on your own website).

QUANTITY: After you master writing quality original unique articles, the only way to really succeed with this strategy is to build your article inventory over time. Every article you write is what I call an “article agent” that sells for you. More article agents = more articles out there attracting traffic for you. Build your article inventory into the dozens, then hundreds and eventually thousands of high quality articles.

Biana: Once we submit our articles to EzineArticles.com, how can we make them stand out among other articles?

Christopher: Considering less than 15% of our members write more than 10 articles; the easy way to immediately DOMINATE your niche is to enter yourself into the top 15% club of expert authors who write more than 10 articles! Yes, it’s this simple.

On the quality side, make sure your articles offer unique tips, tricks, strategies, and ideas that are not the same rehashed tips you see in every article written by a lazy expert copying some ideas found elsewhere.

Be sure to include your author photo and extended bio as this builds more credibility and gets you access to more exposure within EzineArticles.com as we restrict certain features to authors with their photo uploaded.

Biana: What’s ahead for the article marketing industry in the next 1-3 years?

Christopher: Every month the quality standards continue to raise and that means low quality thin content writers will find it harder and harder to get their content accepted by the best sites.

It’ll continue to take a higher volume of articles to make the same impact that a lower volume would do today. This is largely due to the rising content supply and competition… but again, remember that only a minority of expert authors publish beyond 10 articles. You should aim to be the expert author who writes way more than 10 articles.

There will continue to be a shortage of really high quality original & unique articles. Ultimately, there are no easy short-cuts to produce high quality work. You can stand out easily in the crowd of fellow experts by only putting out high quality work; but don’t be paralyzed by writing for perfection. Perfection is not necessary. Massive writing & article submitting action is if you want to be really successful.

I recently heard from a business owner who said that she watched TV for just an hour and it left her very scared of the state of the economy and how it was going to affect her business. My first recommendation was to turn off the TV and concentrate on her business and her customers instead.

But then I started thinking – what could she have in that one hour instead of watching the news that would have helped her with her business? Here are 10 things that take just 1 hour to do and that help you market your business:

1. Write an article that you can submit to article directories to market your business.

2. Spend an hour on Twitter networking and getting to know your followers.

3. Review your web site statistics to learn how your web site visitors are using your site.

4. Write a blog post.

5. Approve and welcome new Facebook friends.

6. Listen to a marketing teleseminar or audio recording. Here is one marketing audio recording for you to listen to: 5 Keys For Creating Your Online Marketing Plan Audio Recording.

7. Submit an existing article to article directories. You can submit it to 10-15 directories in an hour.

8. Reply to your e-mail.

9. Review one of your sales letter to improve conversions.

10. Do keyword research and find good keywords to use on your web site, so that you can get more search engine traffic.

So here are my 10 things you can do in just 1 hour to promote your business. I am sure there are many more – what are the things you recommend doing to promote a business that will only take 1 hour?

Biana Babinsky

There are many advantages to planning your marketing:

– You will reach your goals faster because you map out your goals and your actions.

– You always know what to do. Instead of wasting 15-30 minutes every day just trying to figure out which marketing tasks need to be done, you will know exactly what to do.

– You will never waste your time re-doing the same thing because you will know whether you did it or not – it is all in your marketing plan.

Ready to create your own Online Marketing Plan and become more successful? Then take a look at this FREE Tutorial for coaches: FREE How To Market Your Coaching Business Tutorial

Every time I review traffic coming to my blog, I see a lot of traffic coming from search engines. How do search engines bring traffic to my blog? Here is how:

– I come up with a post idea and write a blog post.

– I optimize the post for search engines and post it on my blog.

– The post gets indexed in search engines.

– People who have never heard of me before use search engines to find information. They see my blog post in the search engine, visit the post and read it.

Search engine traffic is very useful – if I look further into my statistics, I see that some people who come to my blog from search engines subscribe to my blog feed, subscribe to my newsletter and become clients. And search engine traffic is free – it does not cost me anything to get this traffic to my blog.

So how can you capitalize on this and bring free search engine traffic to your blog? Here is how:

Come Up With Good Topics For Your Blog Posts

It is not enough for people to find your blog posts using search engines. When they come to your blog, you need to convince them to stay and read. And this is done by writing interesting blog posts.

Optimize Your Blog Posts For Search Engines

Do research and find popular keywords that you can use in your blog posts. Then, use these keywords to optimize your post. Use a keyword in your blog title and use it in your blog post’s text.

Warning: do not use the keywords too many times in the blog text. A few mentions are ok, but too many will adversely affect your search engine rankings.

Get Links To Your Blog

Using keywords is not enough. In order to get good rankings in search engines, your blog must have other web sites linking to it.

There are lots of different ways to get links to your blog. You can participate in blog rolls and use article marketing and social networking sites and do many other things to get links to your blog.

Monitor And Make Changes Accordingly

Monitor your search engine traffic and analyze the keywords that search engines use to drive traffic to your blog. You may find keywords that you are not using yet in your statistics. Start using them to drum up even more traffic.

Keep refining your search engine optimization strategy based on what you learn in your statistics. Doing this will help you get more search engine traffic to your blog.

I discuss how to get traffic to your blog in the How To Get More Traffic & Readers For Your Blog Study Guide. Get it now at https://www.marketingsalad.com/blog.html

Biana Babinsky