Is web 2.0 a good technique to promote your coaching business online? With so many online networking sites and blogs out there, how can you find time to participate and still have enough time left for your business and your coaching clients?

I find it to be a great tool to promote a business, BUT I also find that it can take up a lot of your time if you are not careful about organizing your time. I have had clients who have spent 4-5 hours a day, every day on social networks, but could not show enough results to justify this much time spent.

Here is what I recommend that you do to maximize your web 2.0 results:

– Define your goals for networking online ahead of time. Your goals should always be building your list, increasing awareness for your expertise and getting more clients.

– Only network in groups that can help you reach your goals. This means that you should only network in groups where your target market networks. If you network in groups that are fun and social, but don’t consist of your target market, you will have fun, but will not get clients.

– Pick a few networking forums/groups/web sites and use them for a while. There are thousands of networking forums/groups/web sites available for you to network in. There is no way to participate in all of them.

Pick a few that are the most appropriate for your business and spend some time networking in them.

I don’t recommend jumping between groups all the time, as your goal is to become known in a group and be considered an expert. Every time you join a new group, you will need to spend time on establishing your expertise from the very beginning.

– Evaluate your results on a regular basis. Every month take a look at what you have accomplished by networking online and evaluate them. If after a while you are not getting results you want, you should re-evaluate how you network, where you network and what you do while networking.

Members of my online mentoring program, MarketingSalad.com learn how to use online networking to get clients. Join us now at www.MarketingSalad.com and discover how to use online networking effectively!

Biana Babinsky

Can you get more newsletter subscribers by using pay per click search engines?

Pay per click advertising can help you build your list, but it can also help you spend a lot of money fast :)

If you are just starting with a pay per click campaign, here is what I recommend:

– Learn about pay per click advertising and how it works before actually starting to use it. If you are not sure what you are doing, it gets expensive really fast. So learn before you jump in with your money.

– Spend time on finding good keywords that your target customers would use searching for what you have to offer. Good keywords are key to reaching your target market and
getting them on your list.

– Write effective ads. If your ad doesn’t speak to your target customers they will not click on your ad and you will not get them on your list.

– Test! Compare different keywords, different ads and see which ones produce the best results for you.

Also, I would not rely just on pay per click to get subscribers. There are lots of other techniques that do not cost anything to apply, such as article marketing, search engine optimization, blogging and more. I recommend using pay per click as one of your list building techniques, but definitely not as the only one.

I will be discussing how to use pay per click advertising during the Grow Your List Teleseminar Series. There is just one more seat left, so register now at https://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/znews

Biana Babinsky

In order to build your list you need to:

1) Have a great offer on your web site for new subscribers

2) Drive your target market to your web site in large numbers in order for it to take advantage of your offer and subscribe to your newsletter

You can achieve #1 by promoting your free report all over your web site. I recommend having your free offer front and center on each and every page of your web site.

And to achieve #2 you need to start working on using online marketing techniques to drive targeted traffic to your web site every single day.

There are many different marketing techniques you can use – search engine optimization, article marketing, blogging, networking, etc. The idea is to drive your target market to your web site, so that they can see your free gift offer and subscribe to your newsletter.

It is also a numbers game – the more traffic you can drive to your web site, the more people are going to subscribe to your newsletter.

Discover how to build your list faster during the Grow Your List Teleseminar Series. There are just a few seats left, so register quickly at https://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/znews

Biana Babinsky

So you are invited to speak in front of your target market. How do you maximize the results you can get out of this speaking engagement?

You can do that by inviting the people who are attending the presentation to subscribe to your newsletter.

During your presentation, I recommend passing around a sign-up sheet for your newsletter, asking participants for their name/e-mail address and permission to send them your newsletter. To make your offer more valuable, the sign-up sheet should have the information about the gift they will receive when they subscribe to your newsletter.

Don’t have a gift for your new newsletter subscribers? I recommend creating one, as this is one of the best techniques to get more subscribers for your list.

When you get their email addresses, you will be able to keep in touch with them and let them know about your upcoming events, seminars, and products. Doing this is extremely valuable to you as a business owner.

Want to learn more about free methods to build your list fast? Join me for the Grow Your List Teleseminar Series at https://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/znews

Biana Babinsky

How do you feel when someone unsubscribes from your newsletter? Do you feel a bit upset? Do you want to know why they have unsubscribed?

People unsubscribe for many different reasons. But since they do not want to receive your newsletter, they are not your ideal subscribers/potential clients.

Don’t spend your time thinking about why people unsubscribe. Instead, concentrate on making your newsletter the best it can be for people who are still your subscribers. These are the people who you will be able to share information with and also will be able to turn into clients later on.

There will always be people unsubscribing from your newsletter. This is because not everyone
is your ideal potential customers and not everyone is going to resonate with your message. This is exactly what you want to happen – you want them to self-select, so that you are communicating with the people who really want to hear from you. The more targeted your list is, the better conversion rates you are going to get from it.

There are two things that I recommend to my clients to concentrate on for their newsletters:

#1 is growing their list fast and getting as many subscribers as possible.

#2 is experimenting with their newsletter to find content/format that will benefit both you and your subscribers.

Discover how to build your list fast, register for the Grow Your List Teleseminar Series. During the Series I will share with you many effective techniques for building your list, and 95% of these techniques are FREE to apply.

Biana Babinsky

Many people have asked me how to price their ebooks. Should you price them high? Should you price them low? Should you price them somewhere in the middle?

I have seen ebooks priced as low as $7 and as high as $297. It is all about three factors – how much value your ebook offers, how well you can sell it (your sales copy + marketing) and how many people you can reach with your marketing.

Pricing is never exact and it is all you, your expertise, your market and your marketing abilities. Sometimes I advise my clients to have an introductory ebook offer and then raise prices afterwards. Sometimes you want to price it higher as soon as you release it and keep marketing at that price.

If you under price your product, your potential customers will be suspicious since you are offering a deal that seems too good to be true. If you overprice your product, you will not get many sales.

There are many factors that go into pricing of your product:

– The purpose of the ebook and the value of the ebook

– The topic of the ebook – is it very specialized or very general?

– Market and competition research. How do you distinguish yourself from others? Do you have a unique twist on the concept that makes the ebook/ideas/methodology uniquely yours?

Here are a few more ebook pricing resources for you:

– Free article, Are You Pricing Your Products Wrong?

– A step-by-step guide for creating, publishing, pricing and marketing ebooks, Make Thousands Of Dollars With Ebooks Home Study Guide

– Online business mentoring program, MarketingSalad.com. There I teach members everything about creating ebooks and marketing them online (and much more!). As a member you can ask me for recommendations for pricing your own ebooks and other products.

Biana Babinsky

Many people ask about how to create a business plan for a coaching business. Do you need one? How do you create one? Are there templates available?

To my clients I recommend the business plan to include:

– Your vision for your business

– Information/research for your industry

– Market research

– Your going forward plan for a year, at least.

– What you are looking to achieve.

What I find even more important for my clients is creating a marketing plan that helps them promote their coaching business.

Your marketing plan shows you specific actions you need to take to actually make your business vision a reality. I find that having a marketing plan is what motivates my clients to take action and start marketing themselves to get clients.

Your marketing plan should be specific. For example, if you are looking to get 20 clients in 10 months, your marketing plan should outline specific marketing actions that you are going to take that will get you 20 clients in 10 months. These marketing actions can be anything – building your list, search engine optimization, blogging, etc – as long as they help you achieve your goal of 20 clients in 10 months.

My How To Create An Effective Marketing Plan Audio Recording teaches you the step-by-step method of creating a marketing plan for your coaching business. It also includes a marketing plan template that you can use. You can get it at https://www.marketingsalad.com/marketing-plan.html

Biana Babinsky

It is not enough to have many newsletter subscribers. In order to have a successful business you need your subscribers to actually buy what you have to offer.

So the question becomes, how to make your newsletter subscribers more responsive to what you have to offer?

Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you make your newsletter convert better:

Are people on your list in your target market? If they aren’t, they are not interested in buying what you have to offer.

Do you offer your subscribers what they want? Your target market has to want, need and be able to afford your products and services in order to buy them.

Do you contact your subscribers too much/too little? Sometimes when my clients tell me that they can’t get sales from their newsletter, it is because they e-mail them too many times or too few. Much more often it is too few – if you send out your newsletter once every three months, your subscribers may just forget who you are.

Do you ask your subscribers to buy? In order to get people to buy, you have to ask them for the sale.

Is your list large enough? The more subscribers you have, the more sales you are going to be able to get from your list.

Discover how to get more newsletter subscribers and convert them into buyers with the Grow Your List Home Study Guide. You can find out more about it at https://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/znews

Biana Babinsky

Many coaches have asked me whether they should stop publishing a newsletter and just concentrate on publishing a blog.

The answer is no. Your newsletter is the best way for you to build a relationship with your potential customers and turn them into customers. One of the first things that everyone does when they get online each day is check their e-mail. Therefore e-mail is still the best way to reach your target market.

Your blog and your newsletter serve different purposes. Your blog is great for:

– Bringing in social networking traffic

– Bringing in search engine traffic

– Getting your traffic to subscribe to your newsletter

Your newsletter is great for:

– Sharing what’s new in your business with your target market

– Sharing useful tips and ideas with your target market

– Building relationships with your target market

– Turning your newsletter subscribers into clients by letting them know about your products and services

A blog is great to market your business, and so is your newsletter. The best way to use both is to decide where each one fits into your Online Marketing Plan, create goals for each one of them and use them to reach those goals.

Learn how to build your list with your blog and other marketing techniques in the Build Your List Home Study Guide.

Biana Babinsky

Do you have a marketing plan? If you run your own coaching, consulting or any other service business, having a marketing plan is very important. Your marketing plan will tell you what your goals are and how to take action to reach those goals.

What To Include In Your Marketing Plan?

I recommend that your marketing plan includes a list of your goals, a list of things that you are
going to accomplish and a list of actions that will help you get there. A marketing plan helps you go from where you are now to where you want to be.

Let’s say you are looking to get 200 more newsletter subscribers and 10 more clients in the next 3 months. Your 3 Month Marketing Plan needs to outline a list of actions you need to take and the dates for when you will take them in order to reach your goals.

For example, a marketing plan that I have all of my clients fill out includes a section on their goals/vision, a research section and a section on specific actions they need to take in order to achieve their goals.

Last week I taught members of my mentoring group how to create a marketing plan. You can get my marketing plan template and an audio on how to create your marketing plan (and online marketing mentoring with me) at https://www.marketingsalad.com/marketing-plan.html

Biana Babinsky