One of my favorite (and most profitable) are teleseminars.  Teleseminars are basically training sessions that are delivered over the telephone or through a webcast. As technology has improved, teleseminars have become one of the most preferred ways to conduct business training or promoting products and services. There are many benefits of teleseminars but the most important one is that participants do not have to commute. You can host or take part in teleseminars from virtually anywhere — home, office or even halfway across the world. And you can generate great revenues.

Benefits of Teleseminars:

• You do not have to leave your office to conduce a training program. Unlike traditional training courses where you had to consider travel time in the mix, you hardly have any disruption of your day. All you need to do is be right in front of your telephone or computer with fast and reliable Internet connection (with Skype or VOiP) at the scheduled time.
   
• As mentioned earlier, you do not need to travel. Therefore, you have a lot of time at hand to complete other tasks or prepare for the teleseminar. The stress involved with traveling and reaching the venue on time is taken away.
   
• The cost of hosting or participating in a teleseminar is extremely cost efficient compared to other methods of training or promoting a business.
   
• Most teleseminars range from 30 - 90 minutes. This means that they are extremely focused and you can get a lot of relevant information that you can immediately put into practice.
   
• Most teleseminars have a Q and A session. Participants can get instant solutions to certain issues that occur in a business scenario. Based on other people’s experiences, you learn which pitfalls should be avoided
• You can connect with your clients and prospects in a way that helps them and increases your expert reputation

One of the drawbacks of teleseminars occurs when the featured speaker is not engaging and uses jargon throughout the call. However, by being aware of the need to communicate in a way listeners can easily digest the information, you would be wise to add teleseminars to your marketing mix. The revenue possibilities, along with the ability to educate your clients can’t be beat.

My colleague and friend, Kathleen Gage, is an expert on profiting from content rich teleseminars and she has prepared a free report that you need to read.

Access the FREE report here,

The Truth About Making Money with Teleseminars

This can be a great marketing strategy to include in 2009!

Janis

You spend endless hours prospecting, going to business networking events, speaking to groups, or making sales calls. Maybe you even purchase lead lists.A certain percentage of the prospects you connect with will become clients-maybe anywhere from 1% to 10%. But what about the other 90%?

You’ve put all that effort into contacting these potential leads and introducing them to your services. You wouldn’t have wasted the time if you didn’t think they fit into your target market. At this point, many small business owners move on to a new group and look for the next 10%, rather than developing a follow up system that will gradually warm up that lead list until many more buy.

A similar situation occurs when you do a trade show or speaking engagement. You get lots of business cards and then get so busy you forget to follow up, or you follow up weeks later when the lead has turned cold. I’ve seen this happen with many clients.

This is called Follow-Up Failure and what it means is that you have wasted 90% of your hard work!  Developing a follow-up system and automating it is vitally important, especially in this economy.

A strong follow-up system can mean the difference between a 10% sales conversion and perhaps as high as 50%. It can also mean that although you didn’t sell product A to these people, they may buy product B or service C down the road. In addition, they may become a referral source for you.

Establish a relationship of trust and prove to them you’re the go-to expert by maximizing your follow-up system and they may become big fans. Here are 5 ideas for your follow up system

1. Ask them to opt-in to your newsletter
2. Then send them a series of pre-loaded information packed e-mails or a mini e-course
3. Hire someone to call each person and set up a “get to know you” phone conversation
4. Invite them to a company event
5. Send them a free report, e-book, video or white paper

I’ve had newsletter subscribers who have never spent a penny with my company refer clients to me and send new leads my way. Some of them have even become my affiliates and they sell my programs to their clients.

Up to 35 motivated business owners will be accepted into my upcoming Maximum Business Growth Coaching Incubator, and if you’re one of them you will learn how to create a follow up system that will have you turning what you thought were like cold leads into hot prospects.

For more information and to secure your FREE TRIAL, visit:

Maximum Business Growth Coaching Incubator

We’ll set up a time to talk and we’ll determine if this is right for you. You can ask questions and teach me about your business, challenges and goals.

Janis

  All you hear is doom and gloom these days and it can lead you to bunker down, close the hatches and hold tight hoping it will all pass.But since you had the courage to start a business I think you know better. I’ve never been more optimistic as I am now. If you seek out the opportunities that are all around you right now, you’ll be amazed at what you find.

The only thing that could keep the blinders on is FEAR -False Evidence Appearing Real. Fear can make you overly cautious; it can make you cut back on the exact 2 things you should be expanding now, and that’s marketing and mentoring.

Let’s look at marketing. This is the time to really:

1. Increase how often you connect with clients so that they buy from you more often
2. Build new relationships-this is easy with social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter
3. offer special packages and bonuses to increase sales
4. Cut out marketing and networking that is not producing results. Your marketing plan needs to be lean and mean.
5. Make your marketing messages very benefit focused. That means your elevator speech, your website headlines, your e-mails. Always focus on a benefit that you can provide rather than on what you do.
6. Make sure you have an opt-in form on your main webpages. Ask people to sign up for your mailing list and give them a great, benefit driven free report, e-book, audio, tip sheet or video if they do.
7. E-mail or call these people to see how you can help them.
8. Use the phone. People are overwhelmed by e-mail and they often appreciate the personal touch. It will really increase your sales.
9. Pro-actively ask for referrals
10. Actively seek joint venture partners who can send a stream of sales your way

What you should avoid doing is sitting tight and endlessly worrying about how you’ll keep sales coming in. The time and energy you waste on those negative thoughts will only keep you stuck and can lead to a self fulfilling prophecy.

In the past year alone I’ve spent about $7,000 on education and mentoring. Over the years, mentors have been responsible for helping me learn new strategies and reach big goals. My mentors have coaches and mentors as well. We all need a strong support team of the right people because so many of us work alone or with a small staff. Working with the right people can help you gain new skills, systems, resources and know-how,  pinpoint what’s holding you back so you can change it, and help you be accountable for taking action.

Many of us spend some time over the holidays planning for next year. I want to challenge you to think big, think outside the box, imagine the ideal business situation and then plan to achieve that.

If you want mentoring and guidance and you’d like to learn the step-by-step proven systems that will help you reach those goals quickly, I’ll be accepting 35 people into the Maximum Business Growth Coaching Incubator which starts in January. These 35 people are going to dramatically increase their sales next year. If you would like to consider being one of them, you can get more information and sign up for a risk free trial here:

Maximum Business Growth

Janis

One of the biggest mistakes small and solo business owners make is doing random, or what I call “shot in the dark” marketing, and expecting great results. With this approach you place an ad here, an article there, and maybe go to a networking event. It’s like throwing a dart at a target in the dark and hoping you hit the bull’s eye.

Why doesn”t this approach work? The problem is that since there is no overall strategy, plan, measurement or follow through, the results are minimal and random. I’ve seen people working so hard and still not getting results and this is one of the reasons.

Using a “wheel and spoke” model can get your started in the right direction.

The wheel and spoke model is where a number of “satellite activities or strategies” help to send leads or clients pouring into your business,  website, blog or product page, which is represented by hub of the wheel at the center.

You can use this model for your marketing. If your goal is to get 50 new clients this month, put that goal in the center or hub of the wheel. Then create the spokes with the marketing activities you’ll do to get those clients.  With marketing, I recommend only using 3 spokes so you don’t get overwhelmed and confused with too many. So if you choose, for example, online marketing, direct mail, and networking as your 3 marketing spokes, you stay focused on those and carefully measure the results to see what’s working.

I developed a “wheel and spoke” business building system called the Maximize Your Profits Now Model. Here is what it looks like:

Download Model

In this model you have 10 different profit strategies working together to send a flood of clients into your business. You can learn more about how it’s used here:

Maximize Your Profits Now

Using this model will help you focus your marketing

You can also use a similar model to drive targeted traffic to your small business website. Simply create a series of mini-websites (the spokes) with just a few pages each. Better yet, create them for free in blog format at http://www.wordpress.com/.  For just a few bucks a month you can get a unique web address for each mini-site. Have each of them link to a product or service on your main website, which is the center of the wheel.

In minutes you can create a mini-site for each product, service or market you serve and then create a links back to your site. Add a new post or article on a regular basis and each time you do it goes out on RSS feed and is picked up by the search engines.

You can also get others to link to your mini-sites to send traffic to them that flows through to your main site. This is a strategy used by many savvy online entrepreneurs and it will work for any small business. It’s not a lot of work but the dramatic increase in traffic can’t be ignored.

Come join me for a free tele-class on December 11th to learn more about my

 Breakthrough Marketing System Tele-class

 And please leave me your comments!

Janis

Did you ever realize how much knowledge is in your head that other people need, want and are willing to pay you for?What most business owners don’t understand is that in less than a week you can author an e-book without difficulty. It doesn’t matter if your expertise is accounting, yoga, jewelry making or real estate. There are thousands of people who want to learn what you know and are willing to pay for that knowledge. And the Internet provides you with an easy way to reach them. Not only will an e-book provide you with a way to sell your knowledge, there are other advantages to writing one as well.

An e-book will identify you as an author and expert. This gives you a good bit of leverage with prospects who are considering doing business with you. It gives you an edge over your competitors and sets you apart. It’s a way to vastly increase your status as the “go-to” person.

Most people hesitate to write an e-book because they think it will take months like a print book. But e-books don’t need to be nearly as long or complex. You can record your content by just speaking into a microphone, uploading the file and having it transcribed. I use a transcription service that charges only $25 for each hour of audio, which is about 24 or 25 pages.

Creating a cover for your e-book is also easy. There is easy-to-use e-book creator software that works well with Adobe Illustrator and has pre-loaded templates to which you just add some additional graphics and text, or you can outsource the cover for very little money to someone who does this kind of work.

And best of all, for some reason e-books generally sell for more than print books. So your profit margin is exceptional since you have no per-sale costs.

E-books can be used to generate income in a variety of ways. Here are just a few:

• sell it on your website
• attach a dollar value to it, then give it away for free if people opt-in to your mailing list. These are hot leads interested in what you have to say.
• you can list in on e-book sites where thousands of people search by topic
• you can sell it on E-bay
• you can offer to sell it through Clickbank where other marketers will choose to sell it as your affiliate. Clickbank is a place where over 10,000 products are available for business owners who want to sell additional products that they didn’t actually create. They become your affiliate sale team and Clickbank handles paying your affiliate and you. They take care of everything and make it easy to be a “seller”.
• you can add your book to someone’s Amazon store where similar products are sold in your niche
• you can find other joint venture partners with a similar target market who would be willing to sell your e-book for a percentage of sales
• you can give away your e-book and ask others to give it away, while embedding lots of links back to your web sales pages into your e-book so readers click through.

Those are just a few ways to make e-books generate cash for your business. With the economy struggling, it’s time to think outside the box and try new marketing methods and strategies to generate sales. E-books are easy and give you a great return on investment.

You have no product costs because an e-book is downloadable. There are no printing or mailing costs. If you are a local business, with an e-book you can share your knowledge and sell to a worldwide audience. The possibilities are huge.

If you want to learn more or are ready to create an e-book in a few weeks, I highly recommend my colleague Ellen Violette, known as the E-book coach. She has helped hundreds of professionals turn their knowledge into cash in a short period of time.

She’s offering a FREE tele-class,  “7 More of The Biggest Mistakes
People Make Authoring an e-Book and How to Avoid Them”

It’s taking place Thursday,November 20, 2008 5:30 p.m Pacific/8:30 p.m. Eastern call.

Register Here

It’s a preview call for her upcoming Quick-Start 3-Day  eBook Authoring Teleseminar Workshop and if you’re in on the call she will give you $121 in free gifts.

Ellen is the BEST when it comes to teaching people how to create their very own ebooks (and she does it in just 72 hours or less!)  She’ll also make the recording available but try to make it to the call live if at all possible to get her the special gift.

Janis