Blah, Blah, Blog

Here is a question someone with a brick and mortar asked me recently, and I wanted to address it here because I think this is a common one:

Here’s a story that illustrates that. My Mom owns a real Tea Room. I built a site for her with the business hours, contact info, events listings, menu, pictures, etc. Every time a new customer walks into her business she asks them how they heard about her. Many of them say a friend referred them, but a large number of them say: “I saw your website.”

Who would think that people would Google a tea room? But they do! When was the last time you sat down and Googled to find a local business? I did it just a few hours ago. I have NO idea where my phone book is. The dsl is always on and it’s so much easier to search online.

So if you have your own site, people can find you online. If you don’t… well… they won’t.

Keeping Up With Your Customers

If you have a website you can gather your clients and customers email addresses. Offer them a free article, report, a coupon code, a recipe, whatever is appropriate to your target market and ask them to sign up. Send out a newsletter every month letting them know of your newest product or service offering. Remind them to make an appointment or reorder product. Give them some informative content in the form of tips or what have you.

Not everyone will hire you or patronize your business just because they landed on your site. But they’re gone forever and won’t ever turn into a customer if they never hear of you again. A newsletter lets you keep in touch.

This leads to the third reason you should have your own site:

Extra Income Streams

Let’s say you are a financial planner. You earn money selling your financial planning services by the hour. If you had a website and sent out a newsletter, you could recommend products to your subscribers/clients that will help them with their financial concerns.

For instance, an online budgeting system or a subscription to a magazine on finances. You can use your affiliate link for this product and earn additional income. A customer who already trusts your expertise and values your opinion is likely to take your product recommendations seriously. You can write these product recommendations on your website too.

What about creating your own information product? Why not write an ebook with your best tips and offer it for sale? You could do this easily by simply asking yourself what the top questions of your clients are. Answer the questions and you’ve got a product to sell.

More Customers

What’s not to love about that? But how does a website help you get more customers? In addition to local search, your website will make it easier for the media to contact you. If a reporter is looking for a good quote from an expert, they often go online to search.

Should you hire someone else to build your website?

I actually don’t recommend this. Why? Because you give control of your marketing over to someone else. Hiring a web designer can be expensive, and the ongoing updates you’ll pay them to do will add up quick. If you build your own, you can add content quickly. Content that drives free search engine traffic, that showcases your expertise, and builds trust in you.

But what if you don’t know html?

Then use an Easy Site Builder. These are so easy to use that even the most beginning-est beginner can have an attractive, professional looking site. Easy Site Builders use templates (this one has hundreds to choose from) so all you have to do is add your content… which is much like using an email program or text editor.

Give it a test drive, it has a 10 day free trial. I’ve used this one to build several sites and I highly recommend it. It also features a built in newsletter management system and hosting in the price.

A website is more than an online business card… it’s a marketing tool that works for you 24 hours a day.

Because really, a little knowledge and a lot of sweat is what it takes to make money online. It’s so easy to get stuck in the minutae, and it’s easy to be an everlasting student of internet marketing and never really get going with your plan.

My friend, Nicole Dean, has just launched a fun new site with business ideas for moms, and it looks promising. She’s offering instructional ebooks to teach you how to do it, plus (and this is cool) an audio Success Story for each business idea to help you with motivation and to show you how others have had success with the idea.

In her usual goofy way (check out the pic on the home page!), she’s come up with a very interesting website name and even a mascot “Babs VonScambuster”. You’ve got to check this one out: Just Add Sweat

And, if you’re not interested in the home business ideas she offers… get on her list because they’re adding four new books and audios very soon.

Keeping motivated long enough to meet your goals with your business, that is
Today on Wahm Talk Radio, Kelly talked about a Mom who said her greatest challenge in her business was her inspired/depressed cycle of feelings. She needed consistency.

I struggle with this sometimes! When you have challenges and obstacles that inevitably arrive, how do you respond? To keep on keeping on, and think positively, is a real challenge sometimes.

I got permission to share this wonderful report on Self Improvement in Business. It discusses ways to meet your goals, how to use gratitude to change your state and attract more success, seeking out resources like mastermind groups and coaches, and other tools that can help you through the slumps and bumps in the road.

You can get it here:
http://www.CarrieFAQ.com/self-improvement-secret.html

This might seem off topic for an internet marketing blog, but please bear with me for a moment.

One of the things that can be challenging as an online business owner who works from home is figuring out how to balance everything. If you’re a work at home Mom, you’re juggling child care, housework, errands and shopping, before you’ve even started with your business tasks!

Anything we can do to automate our lives and make things a little easier is a good thing, no?

That’s why I love my menu planner. It has several benefits for you:

It helps you feel on top of things. When you always know what’s for dinner, you feel better about the entire day and you can focus on your work (and the kids) with less stress

You’re going to eat a more nutritious diet automatically since you will be less likely to run by a fast food joint when you’re out of food or don’t know what to cook

You save money because you eat out less. Homecooked meals are cheaper.

You also save money at the store when you go in with a plan. No impulse buys and wandering the aisles aimlessly trying to make sense of things with little kids in tow.

Your family is happy because you’ll be spending more time around the family dinner table, something that research has shown leads to happier, healthier adolescents.

Now, we all know that making a weekly menu has benefits. The trouble is, we often don’t want to take the time to do it. That’s why menu planners are such a lifesaver, especially for the work at home.

There’s a cool new menu planning service that features healthy recipes and even recipes for picky kids. The menus, recipes, instructions and even shopping list are sent straight to your
email inbox. You can get a free report by clicking here:

http://www.menuplanningcentral.com

I just got wind of something and am so excited about it, and had to share! If you’re in the Atlanta area, you must come to this seminar.

A long time mentor of mine, Rhea Perry, is coming to Fayetteville to host a 3 hour seminar on internet marketing. I interviewed Rhea some time ago on my podcast, and was so impressed with her.

Let me give you a bit of background on this woman: She is a homeschooling mom of SEVEN kids in the hills of Tennessee. Her son, while still in his teens, became a booming eBay entrepreneur, and she got bit by the internet marketing bug. She hosts online marketing conferences at her home and has drawn the likes of Armand Morin and other big time netpreneurs.

Since many of you are involved in net marketing or want to learn more, I had to let you know about this seminar she’s hosting this Thursday in Fayetteville GA.

She’s going to cover:

* eBay
* Real Estate
* Internet Marketing, especially affiliate marketing

And the cost per family is just $15! Again, the session is on Thursday, May 31 will begin at 7 PM and will end at about 10 PM.Babies are even welcome at this event.

To register your family, visit http://www.RheaPerry.com/atlanta/and tell Rhea Carrie Lauth sent you!

I will see you there

Some of you might know that April 23-29 is TV Turnoff Week. I think that watching too much TV can have a negative impact on your business and financial life. It turns out that there is research to back that up. Here are some interesting findings.

These quotes come from a nify little book called Simple Secrets for Becoming Healthy, Wealthy and Wise:

“A 1995 study showed that TV changes our view of the world and can encourage us to develop highly unrealistic and often damaging conclusions that serve to reduce our life satisfaction by up to 50 percent.”

I find it interesting that people who join direct sales or network marketing businesses are often told to go on a news fast while they build their business. Why? According to the book,

“Watch TV for any length of time and you will inevitibly come to the conclusion that virtually everyone is very rich or about to die a horrible death.”

Then it talks about an Alaskan tribe who had no TV until 1980, until one of the tribal elders obtained a set, and it completely destroyed their culture. They became greedy and wasteful. Both greed and wastefulness impact your financial fitness. Robert Kiyosaki, author of the RichDad PoorDad books, says that greed is one of the main reasons that the poor and middle class stay that way. Instead of spending their money on assets that could pay them long into the future, they waste it on things; in other words, materialism leads to financial ruin.

“A 1998 study showed that TV watching can triple your hunger for possessions while reducing your personal contentment level, by about 5% per hour of daily TV watching. “

Personally, I’m convinced that there is a connection between TV viewing and the likelihood of meeting your life goals, for several reasons. To save time, I’ll copy and paste an article I wrote several months ago on this subject. Let me know what you think.

4 Ways TV Is Bad For Your Business

Is TV hurting your business productivity? I’d like to demonstrate that watching television can actually harm your efforts towards financial freedom.

1) TV watching encourages passivity

Watching TV requires less energy and initiative than any other activity. (Did you know that while watching television, your metabolism actually lowers to a level between resting and sleeping?)

It’s obvious how this tendency towards passivity and dependence could be bad for your business. Being an entrepreneur requires creativity, initiative and a lot of work. The habit of watching TV works against those traits by making you lose the human struggle of doing nothing versus doing something. In a word,tv viewing encourages laziness.

2) TV makes you tired and depressed

Have you ever watched tv for two or three hours at a clip, only to get up from your couch in a fog, a haze, not really aware of why or how you had wasted the last few hours of your life? Did you feel tired or curiously wired? Depressed?

TV is stimulating to the nervous system but since you’re physically and mentally inactive, it’s all build up with no climax. It takes a lot of energy to succeed in a business endeavor. If you’re using TV “to relax”, why not take a nap or get some exercise? They’re both health-promoting activities that also relieve mental stress.

3) TV promotes a negative philosophy

Most of the content of television is negative and sarcastic. When you watch the news, you’re viewing tragic events that are very unlikely to ever happen to you. This creates unnecessary worry, which stifles activity.

In order to succeed in business, you need a positive attitude. You need to believe that you can achieve your goals, that you have personal power. One study of college freshman showed a link between a lot of tv viewing and a negative view of businesspeople. It’s not surprising that many success coaches in the network marketing and direct sales industries encourage new recruits to go on a “news fast” for the first 6 months of building their business. Certainly time can be better spent by working on the business, but it’s more than that. Watching the news can give you a negative worldview. Is there ever anything positive reported on the news? Good news just doesn’t sell.

During down periods, why not read inspirational books, or study marketing material in order to hone your sales skills? I’ve noticed that everyone on tv is either independently wealthy or poor and struggling. The haves never go to work, just like they never eat or brush their teeth before kissing their perfect bedmates!

And the have-nots are stuck in a cycle of debt, despair, overwork and the inevitable family problems that result. Are these extremes something you want to spend a lot of time considering?

4) Television Sucks Up Valuable Time

The average American spend 4 hours a day watching television. You’re probably exceptional and don’t watch that much, but even still, there are many more productive things you could be doing in the time that you do watch. One way to save time is to get your news online. You can read the latest headlines and click on more information and spend only 15 minutes getting the day’s news stories. Time spent watching tv is time you’re not growing your business.Why not take a moment to think about how TV may be impacting your financial future?

So what do you think?

For some Moms, the income they earn at home is very important. It’s not fun money or pay down the credit card money. It’s survival money.

For some, working at home is an absolute necessity because of a special needs child. These Moms have additional health care costs, special education costs, and other extra bills that many of us won’t ever be faced with.

My friend recently Mila Sidman blogged about her son, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, and some of the challenges she has faced in her daily life. She calls herself lucky to be able to work from home and she’s urging people to donate to Marketers on a Mission, a group of internet marketers who are offering valuable business information in exchange for a donation to the cause.

She says: “All proceeds will go to the Pioneer Learning Center, a school that helps children on the autism spectrum including Asperger’s, ADD, and other social integration disorders.”

If you can do so, consider making an offering.

Have you guys heard of Kim Lavine, author of Mommy Millionaire? I came across her book while having one of my weekly “get away from the kids for two hours at Barnes and Noble and have coffee” dates.

I just visited her website and came across her “Ten Tips”, and had to share. I printed these out and am putting them where I can read them daily because I agree so much with what she has to say.

You can see more here: Mommy Millionaire

I asked a few of the bloggers who joined me in my 30 Posts, 30 Days Challenge to share their results. Here are some of the results they experienced:

More Traffic:
“I had just started my blog when we started this challenge, so I had less than 5 unique visitors per day at the beginning of the 30 days. Now I have about 25 unique visitors per day. I realize this is still small traffic for a blog, but it’s a huge improvement, so I’m thrilled.”

More Publicity:
“Thanks to the 30-day challenge, my blog is full of fresh content. And as a result, I was interviewed by a reporter … who found me – through my blog! Since my blog was pretty new when Carrie issued the 30 day challenge, I’m not sure if the reporter would have found me if I had not participated in Carrie’s challenge.”

Better Ranking:
“Thanks Carrie for daring me to do 30 posts in 30 days on my blog. The results have been amazing. My technorati ranking has gone from 130,000 to 67,000. I am Totally thrilled. So thanks for the little push to do my daily blogging. I am up to 500 unique visitors a week now on my blog.”

Personally, I’ve found that my traffic has doubled in the past month and I’m getting more comments from you, my readers.

Care to share your results?

We’ve had a couple of latecomers to the challenge, they are:

Melissa of Business Mums Network
Leslie Strickland Independent Beauty Consultant

A couple of the bloggers have asked if they can invite others to join the challenge, and I say Yes! The more the merrier. Start your own challenge or do a blog Carnival, in which everyone blogs on one particular theme and links to all the other participants.

You might see a big jump in traffic to your blog.