Baby Boomers Building Businesses
I hope I didn’t overdo it!
I’m referring to GiveAways!
I hope I didn’t get carried away … I just realized that I’ve signed up for ten different giveaways for the month of February.
Thankfully, they aren’t all happening at the same time, but it still seems like a lot to be promoting. It’s not like I have a huge list already and that’s what worries me. I don’t want my small list to think I’m only promoting giveaways. I think that will definitely give them cause to opt out of my list.
One thing I learned about GiveAways today it that I have to promote them. If you don’t, they down grade my account. That happened today. I was downgraded from contributor to a basic member in an event I hadn’t realized had started … so I hadn’t promoted it.
Apparently we get a 48 hour warning of needing to promote and then later, a 24 hour warning to start promoting.
I missed the warning emails. I don’t usually check all emails over the weekend and in this case, I didn’t check that email account until after supper Monday as I had a few other appointments that kept me off the computer. So by Tuesday morning, I was downgraded.
So I need to figure out a better way to promote and too track how and what I promote so I don’t miss an event in the future.
In the mean time, I need to set up some tweets and prepare an email to send to my safe lists. I don’t want to be down graded again.
I finally had my first coaching session … the ones I signed up for almost a year ago. But that’s a story and a half.
You see … at the beginning of March last year, I attended a webinar by some guy named Kevin W and was sold into the concept of learning all about SEO and then applying it to create a client list of businesses who need SEO services. Sounded good to me – and I figured even I just learned about SEO and used it on my own site, I’d be ahead. So I signed up. It was a lot of money and it went on my credit card. And the best part was that this course came with 8 personal coaching sessions.
When I had my first call with the “office” last March 24, I told them I’d start the program in May as I had a daughter getting married and it was getting down to those last weeks before the wedding. We agreed that I’d start as soon as the wedding was over.
Well, life has a way of changing plans. Oh, the wedding was fine and it was a beautiful day … and then I realized that I would have to move before the end of May. I hadn’t planned on that, but I started packing … after I spent a week looking for a new home.
And that ‘s when life really happened. Accidents that is … and it meant that my life was impacted as I began months of therapy and recovery. Little did I know that it would be months before I would be able to sit at my desk or work on my computer.
In fact, it was October before I could be on the computer for 30 minutes at a time. And that’s when I tried to find how to start my course. By December, after countless returned emails and many unsuccessful calls, I had concluded that the whole thing was a scam. I couldn’t find the website, the office phone number, my coach or anyone who would acknowledge any of it existed.
Then in mid January I found an email in a folder on a different computer and it was enough to give me hope. I finally found an office who believed my story and could verify what and where I was suppose to be getting this training.
And I started the process of getting on the coaches calendar. It was sort of an intro call – and I told her what I have done in the past three months. I showed her my website and told her that list building was my niche. This should mean my coaching will be more focused as I am more focused than I was in October.
I have some suggestions from her as to how to improve the site and I have a week to implement them. It can only get better.
Which reminds me, in this weeks session with Angela, we talked about making first impressions, especially when we’re dealing with social media. In fact, she had our permission to critique all of our websites, so one by one we pulled up the group mates websites and discussed the pros and cons of each one. I was really nervous as I’ve respected Angela as an online guru for several years.
As it turns out, everyone really loved my site. The colors are great and the layout is eye catching and easy to read. The only real “critque” is that for a site about list building they all thought I should be building my own list - so they gave me some advise as to where to put my opt-in form should be. So between that advice, and my coach’s advice, I think I have a bit of revamping to do in the next week.
Oh … and why did I tell you the long story of my battle in connecting with my coach.
Well, I learned a MAJOR lesson and I want to share it with you. We may be on the Internet and using a computer … but I still need a paper trail. I could have saved myself a LOT of head ache and heart ache IF I had printed my emails and my receipts. If I had had those, I would have been able to start me program months ago.
Lesson learned. .. I will be printing and making an accurate paper trail of my business.
My advise to you – Make a paper trail of your business.
Now I’m off to revamp my website.
The week has been a busy one … doing all the regular Twitter and Facebook promotions. Sometimes I find it a bit of a challenge to think of what to tweet about – I have not trouble promoting the other tweeters in my group, but I also need to give them things they can promote for me.
Apparently, the rule of thumb to be a good twitter is to have at least 5 tweets before tweeting one that has a URL in it. So that means – at least 5 bits of content before promoting something about my business. So everywhere I go or anything I read, I’m watching for great quotes or one liners. As for tweets with URLs, well, that’s never a problem as I’ve got several giveaways to promote.
Speaking of giveaways, I will admit although I was very skeptical in the beginning, I am getting steady opt ins to my list. And what I’m really impressed with is that I’m not having too many opt outs. That makes me feel good … means that the sequential emails set I created for the giveaways is providing the subscribers with enough content as they are staying on the list. I’m definitely tracking which giveaway event is getting the best results. Thank goodness for excel spreadsheets.
The other day was the first webinar with Angela and Tatyanna and we had the first lesson in PR or promotion. I know I will learn a lot as PR is a totally new arena for me. She challenged us to consider what our goals are in regards to our marketing. Too many business owners just market and have no goal in mind. That’s bad PR.
I need to take a look at my products and consider who I am creating the product for. Apparently the question really needs to be …
What transformation do I want my clients to experience? Then I need to figure out write down which three types of customers I want to target. This means getting really specific, but it’s key to creating a good promotion around it.
I guess this session on PR came at a good time as I’ve spend a lot of time this week working on my ebook. I want to create another product that I can add to the giveaways as often I’m allowed more than one gift, but I only have one right now.
So I’m working on a project about creating traffic to my site. I think I’m about 75% done in the writing and then I need to spend some time formatting it. It’s too late for most of the early February giveaways, but it needs to be finished for late February. Remember, writing the ebook is only the first step – I’ll need to convert it to pdf and then create a web page, download page, thank you pages and another set of emails for this list. This is a different target than my first gift, so the emails will need to be different.
I see lots of writing in my future. So I’m planning for that. I’m sure as time goes on, I’ll get faster at this, but for now, I’ll just admit that I am enjoying it.
Remember, I’d love to hear of your experiences so feel free to leave a comment. Learning together helps both of us.
I really can’t believe it’s already February.
Looking back, I think I accomplished quite a bit last month, so I thought maybe a month in review would be appropriate.
On January 1st, I:
During the month of January 2011 I successfully
I created two new Twitter accounts
I promoted all three of them with active tweets – with the results of now haveing twitter followers on my accounts as follows:
I’ve had two main promotions twitter and the give away. In total, I have 102 people in my auto responder that a month ago was empty. Last week, I decided to also reactivate some of my safelist accounts that I had set up a year ago and were in “vacation” mode. After doing that, I sent my first email promoting the final days of the GiveAway to over 50,000 safelist subscribers.
January was the month I made my first sale online and signed on my first customer.
I have a new customer in my list / auto responder system and I spent some time with them training them how to use it!
I also earned some commission and received a PayPal payment over the final weekend of the give away. To say I was a little surprised is an understatement as I didn’t even know you could earn cash as a give away contributor. Pleasant surprise. It wasn’t much – but it counts as a sale from a January promotion
Looking back, I am thrilled at where I am today. I would say that I’m thrilled with what the progress report tells me. I love what I’m doing and I know it’s only going to get better in February.
Leave a comment and tell me about your first month online.
