Three keys to small business marketing

I tell my clients, “You have no business until you have clients and the key to getting clients is marketing”. As an entrepreneur you need to focus on marketing when you are starting your business. I recommend that you focus on the areas below even before you make any big investments or worry about getting paid clients. Without the information you gather from the three keys below, you will be shooting arrows in the dark and then wonder why your great idea has gotten you nowhere.

I understand that you may feel overwhelmed when they think of marketing, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Below are three key areas for you to focus on, which will make the difference between having an expensive hobby and having a revenue generating business.

1. Do your homework –research your target market and the need for your product and service. Make sure you are clear about the problem you are solving and who you are solving it for. Find out who the competitors are, how long they’ve been in business, market share, etc. Then think about how you are different? How are you better? What is your unique value proposition?
2. Interview your target market – find the throngs of people that will love to buy what you have to offer and ask them, what they want. I would recommend doing an interview in exchange for a trial of what you have to offer. This way they can tell you what they really need and also give you feedback on your product/service. This is your opportunity to just be curious. Don’t assume you know what they want or what they will say about what you’re offering. Just be curious, you’ll get a lot more out of it this way.
3. Incorporate the feedback – now you are ready to take all the information you have gathered and make changes as appropriate. Whether it’s to your overall strategy, delivery mechanism, etc. you will have the information you need to successfully launch a marketing campaign to get real paying clients.

If you did one and two thoroughly, you will have people anxious to buy your product or service, or at a minimum will know where to go to find your ideal customer. Keep in mind, just because you do this when you start out, doesn’t mean that you stop there. Marketing will be a natural part of your business moving forward, and building up that muscle is really important to your success.

Five steps to breaking out of the corporate world

Check out the post I did for www.examiner.com on how to leave the corporate world and start your own business:

http://tinyurl.com/mydw9k

The Millionaire Mind

I’ve had a number of clients recently say they’ve read/attended “The Millionaire Mind”.  These clients also seemed to know, or at least were familiar with, some of the NLP processes that I use during my coaching sessions, thus I was intrigued about what it was they were learning through “The Millionaire Mind”.  I was also intrigued because I’ve adapted my WealthyMind materials into what I’ve called “The Empowered Mind Workbook”, which is focused 100% on self-alignment, which will help you achieve all that you want.

Anyway, true to the Law of Attraction, I received “The Millionaire Mind” book as a gift, within weeks of thinking that I really needed to read the book.  So I started flipping through the book and found that much of it is very familiar to me.  Some of it was new, or at least positioned in a different way, which allowed me to pull some really great nuggets of information from it.

One nugget I’d like to share with you is listed below and is in regards to “Negativity”.  The reason this jumped out at me was because I was recently having lunch with an ex-colleague and dear friend of mine, when we got on the topic of how happy we were and what a bummer it was to connect with other people that weren’t feeling as happy and at peace these days and how it felt like such a drain on energy to be talking to people who were constantly complaining.

Now, don’t get me wrong, we work as coaches with some folks that are in this pattern however, the difference is that these people, whom we work with, are making a real commitment to making whatever changes are required to help them live a happy and fulfilling life.

So, this activity, that is outlined in “The Millionaire Mind”, really spoke to me, and now I’m passing it along to you!

Good luck and report back with your experience!

Seven Day Challenge

For the next seven days, the challenge is to not complain – out loud or in your head.  You can only speak in “positive” terms.  In a way, this is like forcing yourself to see the “silver lining” in every situation.  As I’ve mentioned before, gratitude has been proven to help your immune system, and in a way, being positive and refraining from complaining, is a bit like being grateful!

So start today!  Carve out seven days of “no complaining” and away you go!

Life Happens

As many of you know, I have two blogs, this one, which is aimed more to “personal development” and the other, which is focused on “professional development”.  My posting on the SuccessfulHR blog is one that is relevant for both sites, therefore, I want to share it with you here:

http://successfulhr.wordpress.com/

I hope it helps you a little when “Life Happens” to you.

Have You Sparkled Today?

A business coach I’ve been working with is really big on “inquiries”, which are questions that you post somewhere to act as a reminder of something you’d like to work on.

Through the holidays mine was – “Have I been present and peaceful today?” It was the first time I used the technique, and found it extremely useful.  Given that the holidays can be stressful enough on their own, it was great to be reminded to breathe.  This worked so well for me, that I’ve adopted a new one – “Have I sparkled today?” And guess what?  It makes me laugh every time I see the little green post-it with those words.  It reminds me to not take myself or life so seriously and I find that I’m being even more productive!

So, I invite everyone to pick an inquiry for the week or for the month.  The important thing is to have it be fun and be positive (no sense in having an inquiry that yells at you).  I encourage you to post your inquiries in the comments section so that others can learn from you!

Bringing in the New Year

I am bringing in the new year with a whole lot of optimism and gratitude.  I know that things will continue to improve on a global scale and I will continue to do my part to help them improve. I look and see many people not only surviving, but thriving.  What makes them special? In all my research, training, reading, etc. I realize that it is the combination of optimism, gratitude and being true to who you are.

When you are being true to you and being grateful for what you have, it is much easier to have an optimistic view on life.  This will then be the catalyst to help you manage your state of being and open you up to seeing all the possibilities around you. It will unlock your potential to solve what may have seemed like insurmountable obstacles. It will give you the key to enjoy your life and to live.

Why not give it a try? Here’s a quick tip on how to get yourself aligned to survive and thrive:

1. What are you grateful for?
2. Who do you need to be to be authentically you?
3. What’s great about an obstacle in your life and how can you enjoy the process of resolving it?

Happy New Year!

Changing with the times

It is so fascinating to me, to see how my plans continue to evolve and morph.  Since my last posting, I’ve launched a new HR Coaching Program: http://www.insightscc.com/resources/HR_Coaching_Program.pdf that is gaining a great deal of momentum. I’ve decided to part with my business partner on the WealthyMind and minor things like changing my newsletter from Constant Contact to Aweber.

Change is always so constant and so wonderful, in that as one thing ends, some thing else is always begining.  Since making changes to my strategy and focusing, I’ve found more and more opportunities that I would never have seen.  I am working on a relaunch of my website, and even created a plan on some longer term Personal Growth initiatives.  I find that I continue to evolve and expand in ways I never thought possible.

I am grateful to all those around me, my new husband, family and friends.  So many good thoughts and gracious words that come my way and how free and happy I feel in pursuing my dreams.  So although things continue to morph and change, and sometimes I don’t even know where it is going, I am grateful for the journey I’m on, and I’ll just keep on trekking!

Beliefs and Our Reality

I’ve been doing a ton of research on the concept of beliefs, preparing for a class I am co-facilitating designed specifically around this notion of how beliefs (among other things) can either help or hinder our success.  It is fascinating to know that the limits we perceive in our daily lives have root in the beliefs we hold to be true for ourselves. Not only that, most often the core beliefs (which tend to give us the biggest problems) were ones we created when we were little kids and had very little information to discern what was happening in the world around us.  What does that mean exactly?  Well let me give you an example:

When I was young, 8 or so, as my family watched a slasher movie, I overheard the following comment “Pretty, skinny girls always get it!”  Well at 8, I wasn’t sure what “get it” meant, but from the sounds of it I didn’t want to find out! Shortly after that, I found all sorts of evidence that “Pretty, skinny girls get it”, mostly it seemed that they would come to some sort of violent death or at least be left for dead after some brutal attack.  It wasn’t hard to find this evidence, TV, songs, movies, etc all confirmed that “getting it” was no good.  Pretty soon I started putting on weight, and struggled with it for YEARS.  It wasn’t until recently when I was trying to find out what sorts of beliefs was I holding on to that were preventing me from being at the weight I wanted, when I stumbled onto this notion that I’d been carrying around for so long!  My life all of a sudden made sense!  I now knew why it creeped me out when I got too much attention from “strange” men and why my weight had been yo-yo’ing all these years! Now it was time to take my life back!  I did some NLP Belief Change work that helped a great deal.  I am now on my way (in an extremely effortless way) to getting down to my goal weight.  It absolutely feels like magic.

Although I wont share the details of the process I used, I will leave you with some questions you can ask yourself, to help loosen some of these limiting beliefs.

• How have you known this belief is true, until now?
• Is this belief always true? For everybody?
• What is the positive purpose for holding this belief?
• How would you know this belief wasn’t true? And what evidence (see, hear, feel) do you have for that?

These questions will start shaking the belief up a bit creating space for you to consider more possibilities.  The one thing I find that works tremendously well, with limiting beliefs, inner critics, negative emotions, etc. is determining what the positive purpose/intent in holding these things to be true.  By acknowledging and somehow incorporating that intent into your solution, allows you greater flexibility than remaining in inner conflict.

If you want more information on the specifics, please feel free to send me an email @ silvia@insightscc.comor post a comment.

www.insightscc.com

Taking time to breathe

We are all running at a frenetic pace and sometimes we forget to breathe.  Yes I know this is a natural process, and you don’t really forget to breathe in and out, but how often do we forget to take a DEEP breath. Taking a moment to just allow ourselves to be? It is as if we feel guilty in saying, I am going to take a moment for myself.  There is something about how society views “me” time as being selfish, but in fact if we took time for ourselves, we might let that person in our lane, or we might say good morning as we pass someone by in Starbucks.  If we were kinder and gentler to ourselves, it would be easier to be kinder and gentler to others.  So I encourage you, take a moment to just breathe, and do it every day!

www.insightscc.com

 

Excuses

Have you ever noticed how many excuses we make in a day? Excuses for not reading, not doing work, not getting into relationships, you name it, we make them! Here is a little cathartic poem I wrote, which exhausted all my excuses and I was left with no choice but to Workout! Enjoy – Silvia www.insightscc.com

“Too Much”

by Silvia Siguenza

 

It’s time to go work out.

I am feeling,

Too Unmotivated,

Too Tired,

Too Lazy,

Too Busy,

To go work out right now, but I promise to go later today.

 

It’s later, but I still can’t go.

I’m feeling,

Too Fried,

Too Hungry,

Too Stressed,

Too Anxious,

To go work out right now, but I promise to go tomorrow.

 

Its tomorrow, my alarm is shouting at me.

I’m feeling,

Too Weak,

Too Depressed,

Too Embarrassed,

Too Overwhelmed,

To go work out right now, but I promise to go… at some point.

 

Where are my chips?

Where’s my soda?

Fries make me happy.

What about that brownie?

Anyone eating that?

What?

No, I wasn’t going to work out today!

 

I guess I should go work out now.

But, I’m feeling,

Too Broken,

Too Lost,

Too Lethargic,

Too Apathetic,

To go work out right now, maybe tomorrow.