Debbie LaChusa

Here's a great example of follow up that I wanted to share. A few weeks ago I attended a networking luncheon and expo. I met a few people over lunch, traded a few business cards ... you know the drill. I didn't really expect to hear from them again as that is typically the case. It's one of the reasons I'm not big on networking. Most people just don't follow up. That's one of the reasons I only recommend "Laser Networking" in my 10stepmarketing System.

But I must say I was pleasantly surprised by one woman's follow up. A few days after the luncheon I received an email from her that said ...

"Congratulations! You were selected as the third prize winner of our raffle at the Women's Business Center of California Expo in San Diego on September 18, 2007. As third prize winner, you're entitled to a one-hour Business Marketing Consultation...." The message went on to provide details on how I could claim my prize, and thank me for my interest in her company and services.

I knew I hadn't entered her raffle, but as a marketer I was impressed with her follow up and at the same time curious to know how this strategy was working for her. So I contacted her and asked. She shared that while they do an actual drawing for first and second place prizes, they send everyone who gave them a business card this "third place winner" email. She said they typically get a 20%-30% response rate, and their goal is to sign on 1-2 new clients per expo.

I have to say I love her creativity. And, as a lead generation tool, with typical direct marketing response rates falling in the 1% to 3% range, I'd say she's doing quite well with this strategy.

If you're interested in checking out the company behind this clever follow up marketing strategy, you can learn more at www.cocoassociates.com

Do you have a creative marketing strategy you'd like to share? I'd love to hear about it. Post a comment and share.

Here's another great example of follow-up. Last week my twin sister Valerie and I went to an inexpensive mall photo studio to have a portait taken. I am getting ready to publish my Twin Connections book and I needed an updated photo of the two of us for the book. I wasn't looking to spend a lot, but I wanted something better than just a "backyard snapshot" so this place fit the bill.

We had our portait taken, we selected one pose and walked out the same day with a handful of prints, for the book and to share with family. I figured that was the end of it.

A couple of days later I received an email from Picture People, the place we had gone for the portraits. The email included a link to an online gallery of the photos we had taken that day, with instructions on how I could easily order more prints. Of course I logged into the gallery to view the photos again. After all, they had taken close to 20 photos and we had chosen only one.

While I wasn't in the market for more prints in this particular situation, I can imagine many other situations where I might be. Or, where I might want to send a link to the online gallery to family or friends so they could see the photos and make a purchase if they want.

This is a great example of following up after the sale. I'm sure it's an automated follow-up that is programmed into their marketing system. It's also a great example of Relationship Marketing, something I advocate in my 10stepmarketing System.

Does it affect my opinion of Picture People? Absolutely! They went that extra customer service step and it made an impression on me.

By the way, here's the photo we had taken! We're fraternal twins ... can you tell?!

Do you have any great follow up stories to share? Post a comment!

Is your website suffering from "Field of Dreams" syndrome? You built it but no one is coming!

If so, you I'd like to invite you to join me next Wednesday night, October 10th, for a special teleseminar: "How to Use Article Marketing to Generate Tons of Traffic to Your Website ... For Free!"

Click here to find out how you can join this teleseminar for free!

I will be sharing how I tripled my website traffic in a matter of months, using the concept of Article Marketing, at zero cost! Learn what topics you should be writing articles on to generate the most traffic, the ideal length your articles should be, the best places to post your articles for maximum pick-up, and how you can re-purpose your existing content to save time.

This call is free for all Step of the Month Club members (along with a whole host of other great benefits!). Not yet a member? When you sign up for your free, 30-day trial membership you can join me for this informative, how-to call, and it won't cost you a dime! Click here for all the details and to sign up for your free, 30-day trial membership.

Are you familiar with the Henry David Thoreau poem, "Follow Your Dream"? If not, let me share it ...

If one advances confidently in the direction of her dreams and endeavors to live the life
which she has imagined, she will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

I've had a print out of this poem in my office since I first opened my own business back in 1998. It's a great reminder. But just last week, I had a stark realization ... I realized I was no longer following my dream, I was CHASING it. Hanging on too tight ... working too hard to make things happen the way I think they should happen, getting frustrated when I wasn't getting the results I wanted from my marketing plan. Quite different from following a dream and simply advancing confidently in that direction. Heck, I was beating down a path!

It's easy to get caught up in trying to achieve your marketing goals. After all, what are plans and goals for? But as I have been reminded several times over the past few weeks, it doesn't really serve us. And it is definitely not a peaceful way to live.

So I am re-focusing and getting back on my path to FOLLOW my dream. Yes, I am still going to work my marketing plan, but I am not going to hang on quite so tightly.

How about you?

Have you heard of "The Dip"? It's a book by Seth Godin, bestselling author of Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable (which is a great marketing book if you haven't read it). The Dip is about "when to quit and when to stick." I recently picked up the audio version of this book and it had some great insights that I thought I'd share. If you're an entrepreneur who has ever faced a challenge in building your business, I know you will relate to this.

In any business, or just about any endeavor, results typically follow the same curve. You get immediate results and you get excited, but after that you very often go into a "dip" and your results stagnate or fall off. Picture a dip - that's pretty much what it looks and feels like. According to Godin, The Dip is where most people quit. Things get tough, and they give up.

How many times have we heard success stories that include tall tales of everything that person had to go through before acheiving success? But how many of us quit when the going gets tough?

According to Godin, the difference between success and failure comes down to one thing: when you quit. He advocates that if you stick it out through the dip, you've got a shot at becoming the best in the world.

But he also says that sometimes you need to quit. So how do you know when to quit and hen to stick? That's what this book is all about. Bottom-line you have to consider if you have reached a dead-end, or if you are still making forward progress.

So, has your marketing plan hit a dead end, or are you just experiencing The Dip? It's a valid question. This book helped me see the answer more clearly, maybe it will help you, too.

If you want to check out The Dip, you can pick it up here.

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)

A few weeks ago I posted a comment about the Yearbook of Experts. I've since learned a bit more about it and wanted to share. First of all, I just found out the deadline for the 2008 edition of the Yearbook of Experts is November 15, 2007. However, you can save $100 if you sign up before October 31, 2007. I've also arranged for you to get an additional $100 discount when you purchase through my special 10stepmarketing Page. That's a total savings of $200!

If one of your marketing goals is to establish yourself as an expert, this may be something you want to add to your marketing plan for 2008. I am trying it out for the first time and I'll be sure to share my feedback as the year goes by, but in the meantime, here are a few of the membership benefits to consider...

You will get a profile at www.ExpertClick.com. You can see my profile here.

You can distribute 52 news releases, with no per-release charges, at NewsReleaseWire.com (I LOVE PRWeb, but at a cost of $80 to $120 per release it can add up. I'll be curious to test the difference between these two services)

You can tag your listing with up to 39 keywords, to help the media find you as a source for their stories.

And remember, you can save $200 if you order by October 31st AND if you order through my special 10stepmarketing Page.

Have you ever heard of Dottie Walters? I hadn't. Well let me tell you, she was a working other and an amazing woman. When I learned more about Dottie from my friend Terri Marie, I happily agreed to be a part of a wonderful package Terri was putting together, designed to share Dottie's wisdom and knowledge.

As a result, you now have the opportunity to connect with one of the most incredible women of our era. Her wisdom, her speaking ability, her storytelling and her counsel were sought after worldwide, by some of the biggest names of our time. Icons like Napoleon Hill, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and Earl Nightingale called the late Dottie Walters, their friend.

Top entrepreneurs like Jack Canfield consulted with the great Dottie Walters. In fact, it was Dottie who suggested the follow-up title to the first successful Chicken Soup of the Soul ™ book be called, “A Second Helping.” Dottie’s amazingly clear thinking, told them, “Since it’s soup, why not a second helping?”

Dottie helped people see the obvious next step and made it so easy for them to climb it.

And now you have the opportunity to get the secrets of Dottie's amazing success.

Before she passed away, Dottie Walters spent several years with her friend, author and producer Terri Marie, who worked with Dottie to capture the essence and special knowledge of Dottie’s incredible life. Dottie wanted to pass along her most valuable lessons to those she would not be able to meet while she was with us.

Dottie had a special term, “Friends of the Mind.” They were folks like Ben Franklin, Amelia Earhardt, and Einstein who helped her out of many difficulties. Dottie was the “Never Give Up!” lady.

And now Dottie can become your “Friend of the Mind.”

You can learn more about the amazing Dottie Walters and get your own Solutions Package from Dottie Walters here.
It's a great value and a wonderful investment in yourself and your success.

Dottie was a giver. All her life, she gave her best to the world. In her final legacy, “The Solutions Package” is Dottie’s valuable and enlightening counsel. In both the downloadable ebook and her set of last interviews, Dottie offers fantastic and very practical advice on success, sales, life and solutions. Advice that helped so many reach the top of their field. “The Solutions Package” is Dottie Walters’ template of success. Now it can be yours.

I encourage you to learn more about Dottie Walters today.

One of my clients just told me about an online networking site called Meetup.com. I had never heard of it so I decided to check it out. You can search by group topic and/or location. So I decided to search on small business marketing groups in my zip code. I found 14 groups in San Diego, including the local Glazer Kennedy Chapter I'm already a member of.

Then I decided to search on Work at Home Moms and I found another listing of groups. Lastly I checked out Women in Business and there was yet another long list of local groups, including one called San Diego Wild Women Entrepreneurs that I just had to join to find out more!

I'm not into the typical rubber chicken networking meetings, but I would love to find a group of like-minded female entrepreneurs to network and mastermind with. As I begin thinking about my 2008 marketing plan, these groups will be one thing I'll be researching further.

How about you? Have you heard of, or tried Meetup.com? If so, I'd love to hear about your experience. Post a comment.

Weekly Marketing Success Podcast: "Testing ... Testing ... Testing!"

When I say the word "Test" what do you think of? Those dreaded algebra tests in high school? For many people, the word "test" does not bring up fond memories. Well, I'm here to tell you as small business marketer, you should embrace the word "test." In fact, when you hear the word "test" it should make you smile and want to dance. Okay, maybe that's taking it a bit far. But let me explain what I mean.

There are many questions that arise when you are doing your own marketing, especially if you are not an experienced marketer. And frankly, many of these questions also come up for experienced marketers.

How much should I charge for my products or services? What's the best way to market? Should I advertise and if so, where? What headline will best get the attention of my audience? The list goes on and on.

Listen as I share how testing can provide the answers to these questions, and just maybe put more money in your pocket at the end of the day.

Click Here to Download MP3/Audio

(length 3:51 minutes)

If you use email marketing to market your business, you know you are required to comply with the CAN-SPAM law or risk being labeled a spammer and fined up to $11,000 per violation - ouch! And if you were not aware of this, you need to educate yourself right away.

One of the requirements is that you must include your valid physical postal address in all of the email you send out. So what do you do if you work out of your home and you don't want to share your home address with the world? Well, it means you have to rent a mailbox.

P.O. boxes are cheap, but do they really constitute a physical postal address? Up until recently, I had understood they did not. That was until I participated in a recent discussion on Aweber's blog. Aweber is in the email marketing business, and is the company I use to manage all of my email marketing.

It turns out the CAN-SPAM law, like many other laws, is somewhat open to interpretation. Several bloggers questioned whether a P.O. Box was a physical postal address and shared that they had been advised it was not. So these folks had done as I have done - they had chosen to get a mailbox at the UPS Store, featuring a true physical postal address.

In the end, the answer to the question was never truly resolved, with the advice being, if you are at all uncertain, check with your attorney.

Well, I'm not sure what your attorney would charge to advise you on this, but at about $160 per year, a UPS Store mailbox is a great solution. It also makes it easy to receive shipments because someone is always there to receive them.

If you'd like to read a discussion about this topic on Aweber's blog, you can do so here.

Have you dealt with this issue in your own business? If so, I'd love to hear how you handled it. Post a comment and share!

It seems everyone is in a hurry these days. With all of the technology we have at our fingertips, allowing us to do everything fast, we now want that same speed when it comes to our marketing. After all, if you can communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the world via instant messenger services, why shouldn't you be able to get instantaneous results from your marketing?

And, lately, this is the question I been getting a lot from business owners. To answer that question, there are some forms of marketing where you can get almost instantaneous results. Take pay-per-click advertising for example. You can pay to put an ad up on Google, you can have that ad on the first page of the search results for your specific keywords within 10-15 minutes, and you will be able to track your results in real time.

You'll be able to see if people are clicking on your ad, and of those people you'll be able to see who is buying. And you can fine-tune your ads, and your landing page sales copy to constantly improve your results. That's pretty quick results. And that's one of the reasons I love the Internet. Because you know pretty quickly whether or not what you are doing is working.

It's pretty much the same for direct marketing, but it usually costs more.

Other forms of marketing take the slow and steady approach. Things like Article Marketing, Public Relations and Advertising can do a lot to establish your business and generate awareness, but the results may come a bit more slowly.

I suggest you include a mix of "fast" and "slow" marketing tools in your marketing plan. After over 20 years in marketing, it's still the most effective way to build long-term results and a business that can stand the test of time.

Article Marketing is one of my favorite small business marketing tools. Not only is it free, it is also easy to do, and can generate great exposure for your business, and do wonders for your website traffic. In fact, when I launched 10stepmarketing, I used Article Marketing to ramp up my website traffic very quickly - in fact I tripled my website traffic in a matter of months.

But many small business owners and solo-professionals have questions about how to use Article Marketing to market their business. What should they write about? Where should they post their articles? How long should their articles be? How many articles do they need to write before they start seeing results?

So many questions. And I will be answering all of them, along with any other marketing questions, in my monthly Step of the Month Club Q&A Call on Thursday, October 25th at 5:00pm Pacific Time (8:00pm Eastern Time).

This call is free for all Step of the Month Club members. If you are not yet a member and you have questions you'd like answered, you can join free for 30 days. To get your 30-day free membership, please visit www.10stepmarketing.com/SOMCmembership.htm

On Tuesday, October 30th I will be sharing the 3 Marketing Musts for your business in a live teleseminar offered by The Barefoot Executive, the definitive resource for work at home women.

When you join us on this call you will receive an interactive marketing notes guide for the call, plus a full recording and written transcript of the call.

All this for only $19! I'd love to have you join us! You can get all the details and register for the call here: 3 Marketing Musts for Your Business

I just found out about this very cool, free online testing tool. It's call Split Tester and it will help you predict if your early split test results are reliable. That is, will they hold up over the long run? This is great because it allows you to test for a shorter period of time, which can save you money, yet still get results that are reliable.

You can use this to help you make decisions with your Google Adwords ads, or landing page copy, because it measures conversion rates.

All you need to test your results are your total number of clicks and your clickthrough percentage rate. Google Adwords gives you both. You enter both sets of these numbers for the two different ads you are testing to find out if your split test results are reliable.

I have used this recently to help me make some pricing decisions on a new product and this tool has helped me make those decisions faster than I could have otherwise. And the sooner I finish testing my pricing, the sooner I can start offering this new product for sale to the masses. So in this case, time absolutely is money!

If you're not yet using Google Adwords, and you'd like to learn how, I highly recommend Perry Marshall's book, A Definitive Guide to Google Adwords. It's inexpensive and very comprehensive and easy to read. Plus, Perry Marshall has a free, five-day ecourse that is also very helpful.

Today is Halloween and you know what that means ... kids everywhere will be donning costumes and trolling for treats. But it also means something else ... something to your business. It means we are well into fourth quarter and it's time to start evaluating how well our marketing worked this year so we can begin planning our marketing for 2008.

November is a great month to review your tracking. The whole purpose of tracking all of your marketing is so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn't work. Simple really. That's why tracking is such an important step in The 10stepmarketing System.

So schedule a day soon to sit down and review all of the marketing you did this year, and how well it performed for you. Did each marketing activity bring you new clients? Generate sales? Add names to your prospect list? If you discover that some of your marketing activities didn't accomplish any of these goals, then you will want to seriously evaluate whether or not you want to continue using them. Your marketing should be generating results, and if its not you need to make some changes.

What if you didn't track your marketing this year? If that's the case, now is a great time to start thinking about how you can track your marketing from this point forward. Use coupon codes or unique web page addresses in your ads, your articles, or your press releases. Send speaking engagement audiences to special web pages or make them a specific offer that you can track back to them. Or, if nothing else, when you make a sale or get a new client, ASK them how they heard about you and jot it down ... keep a written record.

Without tracking, you don't know which marketing is working and which marketing is not working. And, there's a pretty good chance you are wasting your valuable marketing dollars and time. And I don't know about you, but I don't have time or money to waste! That's why I include tracking worksheets in The 10stepmarketing System - to make tracking easy.

Click here for an example of the type of tracking worksheets I make available in my 10stepmarketing System. It's a Microsoft Excel file that is already set up to make tracking your marketing activities easy. This one is my gift to you ... just think of it as a Halloween "Treat!"

I hope it will help you better track your marketing!

And, remember, the longer you track your marketing, the better you get at marketing YOUR business. And if you can spend less time and less money on your marketing and get better results, don't you want to do that? Having a marketing plan, and tracking your marketing activities are the BEST way to do so! And remember, that's exactly what The 10stepmarketing System will help you do.