State recognizes need for reaching businesses through new media

LACONIA, NH (3/31/09) - Epiphanies, Inc., a social marketing and success strategies company based in NH’s Lakes Region, recently was hired to help the Division of Economic Development utilize new media opportunities to retain and recruit companies to do business in the state.

“Social media is a vital component for today’s competitive marketing strategies,” says Allen Voivod, co-owner of Epiphanies, Inc. “Developing relationships with businesses throughout the state and in other parts of the country is essential to stay relevant and effective, using tools such as social networks, blogs, forums, podcasts, and micro-blogging. We’re very excited to help the Division of Economic Development increase their reach and get the message out that this is a great state in which to do business.”

“Our goal with social media is to reach out to the business community in a new and meaningful way,” explains Steve Boucher, Communications and Legislative Director for the Division of Economic Development. “I want to demonstrate that our team has a mastery of social media and engage a wide demographic that includes: Young professionals and entrepreneurs who represent our current and future workforce; CEOs from out-of-state companies who gain an introduction to NH in this untraditional way; and in-state business owners who we can educate on new media at the same time we’re learning.

“I feel supremely confident Epiphanies, Inc. is the company that’s going to move the bar in terms of our communications effort and I have a lot of faith in their expertise and enthusiasm,” Steve adds.

Epiphanies, Inc. will be helping Business Resource Specialists within the Division get up to speed on social media by providing them with assistance to develop their profiles on Facebook and by demonstrating how to use this resource to connect with current and potential NH business owners. Managers and key personnel will also be instructed on how to make use of the micro-blogging sensation, Twitter, to increase visibility, join conversations, share resources, and add an edge of radical transparency. Besides helping with social networking sites, Epiphanies will also add social media components to the state’s existing promotional campaigns and initiatives such as the NH Open Invitation, Innovation Rocks, and others.

“Ultimately, our plan is to help the Division develop a powerful social marketing and content ‘ecosystem’ that showcases the benefits of doing business in New Hampshire,” says Lani Voivod, who as co-owner of Epiphanies, Inc. with Allen has been growing a business and family in NH for more than five years. “By implementing Web 2.0 strategies the Division will demonstrate to the business community that it’s definitely not our grandfather’s state government. It’s interactive, accessible, and even — dare I say — pretty darn hip!”

Epiphanies, Inc. is also working with SilverTech, New England’s leading interactive agency, to establish a blog for the NH Division of Economic Development to act as the RSS-friendly information hub of the Divisions’ news, initiatives, events, and associated content.

About Epiphanies, Inc.
Lani & Allen Voivod, The Content Lovers of Epiphanies, Inc., help imperfect-preneurs and million-dollar businesses learn and use social marketing and success strategies to connect and prosper with the peeps who matter, and boost their visibility, reputation, and results. Get their free “A-Ha!” Success Kit, which includes the 7-day ‘A-Ha! Primer’ eCourse, their 22-page Special Report, “I Had an ‘Aha’ Moment - Now What?!” plus a free subscription to their Inciter ezine, at www.AhaSuccessKit.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Press 'n Such. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Al was in California back in February, and we didn’t think we’d be going back again that soon. But this was just too big an opportunity, at just the right time, to pass up.

The two of us will be winging our way to Laguna Niguel this Thursday for The CEO Factor Retreat, April 3rd-5th. Our business coach, Melanie Benson Strick, hasn’t thrown a live event for a while now, so in addition to the whole learning and networking and “sharpening the saw” thing, we’re excited to see how she runs a show.

As for the “CEO” in “CEO Factor,” it doesn’t stand for the traditional “Chief Executive Officer” is this arena. Melanie explains:

By CEO I do not mean someone who works 80+ hours a week, wears a power suit, and sits in meetings all day.

I’m talking about a Chief Entrepreneurial Officer, who has figured out how being a LEADER and surrounding himself or herself with the right team, actually creates more FREEDOM and more MONEY to have the kind of lifestyle they have always wanted.

CEOs know what allows them to create and PLAY (yes this is supposed to be fun!) their biggest game and anything short of that is simply not going to cut it.

Sounds great to us.  ;)  Truth be told, we’ve struggled with the team thing over the years. We’ve worked with three VA (Virtual Assistant) services in the last three years - one stepped out of her own biz to pursue a different opportunity, another wasn’t reponsive to any emails, and the third, well, we liked her, and might consider working with her again if we can only get out of our own way.

Which is part of what this Retreat is about. The word “bottleneck” gets used a lot, and we certainly could be moved out of the way to see more things get DONE in our business without feeling like we have to be the “doers.”

It’s also going to be an amazing opportunity to network and mastermind with other big-thinking 6-and-7 figure biz owners from around the globe, which is literally PRICELESS. Some of the rad entrepreneurs we’ll be hanging out with include:

• Beth Schneider, www.ProcessProdigy.com
• Chris Haddad, www.HaddadInk.com
• Michele Pariza Wacek, www.MichelePW.com
• Kelly O’Neil, www.UplevelStrategies.com
• Bernadette Doyle, www.ClientMagnets.com
• Wiley Long, www.ThePaleoDiet.com
• Sheri McConnell, www.SheriMcConnell.com
• Evan Marc Katz, www.EvanMarcKatz.com
• Ira Bloomfield, Twitter.com/MarketWelby
• Milana Leshinsky, www.Milana.com

Good old-fashioned face time with any one of these extraordinary business owners — let alone solid, interactive, immersive, transparent FUN with all of them! — is a gift from the gods for us, two NH spousal-preneurs and parents of two young boys who are determined to accelerate results and bring back bleeding-edge success strategies to bold-reaching businesses throughout New England.

For peeps who may be interested and who like to cut to the chase (courtesy of Melanie’s sales page):

Here’s a brief summary of what you’ll receive when you attend The CEO Factor™ Retreat:

• A highly interactive and experiential 3 days with tangible tools you can put into action immediately
• Live hot seats & Q&A sessions designed to help you get specific answers about YOUR business right on the spot
• A specific process for focusing on passion versus drudgery so you spend 80% or more of your time doing what you love
• A step-by-step system for identifying patterns and blocks holding you back and EXACTLY what to do to get past them
• Simple and systematic ways to exponentially increase revenue and profit
• A tool to help you clarify your role as a leader and the legacy you want to leave behind
• An assessment that will help you make sure the team you have in place is the one that can take you to 7 figure mark or higher
• Direct access to me and my coaching team
• Participation in a live mastermind where you will be able to implement strategies and try out tools right on the spot with other like minded entrepreneurs who will be there to support you and give you 5x the brain power you would have on your own

You’ll also get…

• Lunches & Continental Breakfast each day…
• Dessert Reception the night before to kick off the event in style
• Special Surprise “Hollywood” Type Event (this could definitely be a first for you!)

You will also walk away from this event with a:

• Roadmap in your hand that gives you the exact steps you need to take to achieve the success you want in your business
• 7 figure financial plan (balancing growth w/ investing)
• 7 figure dream team blueprint so you know exactly who to hire next
• Role Descriptions of key team members, including YOU as the CEO, so everyone knows what their focus should be
• Cutting edge tools and resources that every 7 + figure business owner has to have to create and sustain their empire business

Right event, right time, right person to have it, we’re sure of it.

If you own a business, you know your business evolves in strange and beautiful ways over the years. This year, we’re taking cues from the Universe and really upping our biz game, so we can help more passionate professionals, businesses, and organizations use social marketing tools more strategically and effectively, so they can get their message, mission, and vision out there to their Ideal Audiences. To fulfill our own mission and vision (and continue to have FUN in the process!), we have got to let go of the doing and LEAD with confidence and clarity.

Melanie is just the phenom to show us how to do just that…and so much more.

(And as if we needed any additional signs from the Universe that this is the right thing to do, we were able to name our price for a rental car on Priceline.com for the first time ever. This victory made us way happier than it probably should have.)

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Dances With Gurus, Masterminding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Time: 4 min, 37 sec. A quick listen!

Featured Expert: Allen Voivod, co-owner and Content Lover

Summary: Recounting an anecdote shared by John Daley of the Boston Police Department’s Operations Division. It involves the department’s commissioner, and what was more interesting to South Boston residents on Saint Patrick’s Day - public drinking or Twitter. (You get one guess.)

Teaser Quip: “If that’s not an indicator of the power of Twitter…I don’t know what is.”

Bonus: Check out the slides and audio from Social Media Breakfast #2, where John shared this story earlier today.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 4:07 pm and is filed under ADD Info Summits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Never heard of a Social Media Breakfast? That’s okay, you probably will soon - they’re on their way to a town near you. (Here’s the list of where they are already, and how you can bring one to your town.)

Here’s the deal, taken straight from their website:

The Social Media Breakfast was founded by Bryan Person in August 2007 as an event where social media experts and newbies alike come together to eat, meet, share, and learn. Marketers, PR pros, entrepreneurs, bloggers, podcasters, new-media fanatics, and online social networkers are all welcome to attend.

The breakfast series began in Boston and has now spread to more than a dozen cities throughout the United States and around the world.

Pretty cool, eh? Well, I’m going to the New Hampshire chapter’s next one this Friday, and considering my recent “Got an emergency? Tweet about it!” post, I think I’m gonna have a good time there. Here are the details, along with a link for our New Hampshire peeps to sign up for the event.

Theme for the second Social Media Breakfast: Government 2.0 (how utilities, organizations for the environment, and more work with and from municipalities and other entities using social media to achieve goals)

The second Social Media Breakfast NH (hashtag #smbnh) will be all about topics related to Government 2.0. In this struggling economy and shifting paradigm we need to be working together to be more successful and better weather the storm. We should be pulling in all aspects of technology, new media, old media and social media to succeed. This  meeting will help us lay the foundation for a richer, better education, tech and new media community in NH.

In addition to myself, who will be your host and MC for the morning, you will have three speakers giving three brief presentations on topics relating to the theme for the morning.

‘Electric Tweets’ - Why @psnh followers increased 1,700% in one week Public Service of New Hampshire’s Martin Murray will discuss the electric utility’s use of Twitter and other social media.

Boston Police Department is sending John Daley to discuss their web outreach efforts via Twitter and other media.

Now or Never Media’s Bill Curuway and his partners in clean air initiatives will discuss how they use social media to get the word out and reach out to municipalities for change.

Let’s make the new SMBNH crackle with energy and success! See you there!

Hey, for $7, you can’t go wrong. Check it out, and if you read this and go there, be sure to say “Hi!”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 12:10 pm and is filed under "A-Ha!" NH. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This is the first of two calls Adam Urbanski (aka “The Marketing Mentor”) is hosting to promote his Info Profit Success workshop at the end of April in Anaheim, California. His two guests, Relationship and Buzz Marketing Specialist Mari Smith and Barefoot Executive Carrie Wilkerson, will be sharing the stage with him, along with Red Hot Copy’s Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero and Twitter list-builder extraordinaire Craig Teich, tommorow’s call speakers. (Good grief - it’s been two years since I shared the stage with him and two other speakers. Where does the time go?)

In a mad scramble of typing, I’ve captured some of the highlights of the call. Adam takes his time, but I dare you to try to keep up with either Mari or Carrie.    He’s recording the calls, and he’ll be turning them into products eventually…but if you go to this site, you can register to get recordings of the calls for free while they’re hot!

Here’s the content of the call from my paraphrasing perspective…

The idea for the call - to teach you how to think like a millionaire entrepreneur.

It’s your job to move people out of skepticism - to help them transform their lives by working with you.

The Info Profit Success workshop coming up - it’s Adam’s quest to help people create massive leverage in their business. His three goals for the call:

1. To help listeners start thinking a lot bigger than they’re thinking right now.

2. To get people to start small, with digestible action steps.

3. To convince listeners to attend the event.

Just because the economy is slow, doesn’t mean the money disappears. Your ingenuity is your own personal bailout plan.

First up with the guests: Mari Smith! She’s a relationship marketing specialist, focusing on social media marketing since July 2007. An evangelist for the Facebook platform, Mari’s an in-demand speaker and creating her own association.

Her top three tips:

1. Assuming you already have a profile on Facebook, set up a Fan Page as well. It’s Google indexed, with tabbed browsing, and each tab has its own URL.

2. Take your blog feed, and import your blog through the Notes application to your Facebook Profile and Page. Viral visibility - when people comment on it, it goes into your news feed, and the feeds of all of their friends.

3. Set aside some time every day to be active on Facebook and a little more time to be active on Twitter.

More about setting up your Fan Page:

If you haven’t set up a Fan Page yet, great! Think carefully about the name of your Page, and have your keywords embedded into the title.

One critical application to add: Static FBML. Allows you to import your own rich media content, including opt-in boxes.

Mari’s a speaker at Adam’s event, and the main things she’ll focus on include Radical Strategic Visibility (making people think you’re everywhere all the time, when you’re actually just using the tools strategically) and lucrative joint venture partnerships.

Mari’s blueprint for quick cash - starting with $200, to make $5,000 in 30 days…well, you’ll have to register for the calls to hear that for yourself. As a last note, Mari adds, “Social networking will NEVER replace face-to-face networking.”

On to Carrie Wilkerson, the Barefoot Executive. She’s a WAHM and proud of it, with four kids and two of them “overnight” through adoption. She’s only been online 18 months, and she’s built a business that she says is on track to make 7 figures in 2009.

Her one thing she wants to get across: Fail fast, fail often, and then success cannot elude you.

Her top three tips:

1. Be consistent with your content and your character. You be you, and turn the volume up on you!

2. Quit looking at short cuts. Use systems and processes. Look at who you’re modeling - their using the same or similar systems as each other.

3. Quit underestimating yourself. Don’t undervalue yourself and overvalue the person next to you. We look at ourselves through the worst possible lens, and other people through the best possible lens. How about flipping that a bit, to look at yourself through the same lens that other people look at you through.

Her quick cash system, which she actually did starting in February 2008, she calls the Overnight Expert Model for associating with industry leaders. We can’t share it all here, but here’s how she expressed it in one great analogy: “Build the line to the movie theater, then ask the people what they want to see, while they’re waiting in line.”

We’re not going to be able to make Adam’s call tomorrow, but we hope this has been useful for you - drop us a comment to let us know if this blog post has been helpful and how. It’s time-intensive, but we’re doing our best to get the information out to you, so you can use it to boost your business and accelerate your results.

On a personal note - and if you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time - it should come as no surprise that we highly value Adam’s advice, and consider him one of the top information marketers in the country. We’ve been to three of Adam’s events since 2006, and they’re LOADED with cutting-edge information, practical advice, and a couple carefully chosen, top-caliber speakers. Adam’s 157% committed to delivering passionate knowledge, and you will not be disappointed with the information he and his guests share on these calls - or at the Info Profit Success workshop.

Posted in Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing | 1 Comment »

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

“Should We Call 9-1-1 or Just Tweet About the Fire?” That’s the tongue-in-cheek title of a post from last week over at TwitterHandbook.com (Warren Whitlock and Deb Micek’s site, though the blog doesn’t say which one of them wrote the post).

They were flagging a story on CNN.com about how some police departments are starting to use Twitter for getting timely information out to their communities - everything from Amber alerts to road closings, suspect descriptions to evacuation updates.

It’s a burgeoning nationwide trend, and here in New Hampshire, we find ourselves on the leading edge of the charge. Zak Stambor just posted a great feature piece on Ragan.com (the corporate communications powerhouse) about Martin Murray, senior corporate news representative for Public Service of New Hampshire. (That’s Martin at right, although I’m not sure why the image keeps coming out blurry on upload. Hmmm.)

PSNH is a big power company here in NH, and during last December’s ice storm (which left some towns without power for a week), Murray and his colleague Matt Chagnon tweeted continuously about the utility’s efforts to restore power across the state. The info got out to customers who’d found shelter with friends and family who had power; emergency personnel out in the field; and local media reporting on the extensive damage caused by the storm.

(Martin is a featured speaker later this week at the 2nd NH Social Media Breakfast - can’t wait to hear more about it from the horse’s mouth!)

I’m starting to collect stories like this one from all across the country for an upcoming workshop - if you know of any good ones, please share them in the comments! In the meantime, here are the top three things police, fire, hospitals, rescue organizations, homeland security, transportation, and public utilities can take away from the CNN.com and Ragan.com stories:

1. Public agencies are starting to see increasing value in social media communication tools like Twitter, and see traditional media communication tools like press releases decreasing in value.

2. In a crisis, people are hungry for news - and power outages won’t stop people from getting the news they want, when they want it. What’s more, they can become part of the news AND the dialogue around it using their cell phones to access social media outlets and the mobile web.

3. Even if you don’t quite “get it” yet (a position PSNH’s Murray was in when he first set up PSNH’s Twitter account in early 2008), just take the leap and start. Set up an account - it literally takes only a minute or two to start. Add your Twitter handle to your email signature. Use Twitter’s email searching function to help you find people you already know on Twitter. Add your Twitter contact info on every piece of communication you’re already sending out to your audience, community, and constituents.

And start tweeting today.

Posted in Social Marketing | 1 Comment »

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

When you dad says “Twitter is hot,” does that mean Twitter’s jumped the shark? Find out when Allen and Lani Voivod, co-owners and Content Lovers of Epiphanies, Inc., reveal who proclaimed Twitter’s hotness on national television this time, and where to catch the clips.

Posted in "A-Ha!" TV, Social Marketing | No Comments »

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 3:39 pm and is filed under "A-Ha!" TV, Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tonight, Ali Brown and Bill Glazer threw a teleseminar to promote the upcoming Glazer-Kennedy SuperConference. It was called “7 Recession Rescue Strategies to Combat The Challenging Economy.”

Somehow - after going to pick up the dog from the neighbor who found him roaming the streets after he bolted out of the car when I got home, and giving antibiotics to one child with an ear infection, and playing a Lego Indiana Jones game level with the other - I got everyone to bed just before the call. And here’s the notes I took from it!

Ali Brown: Where should you focus your energy for your business in these times?

Bill Glazer: Not in getting new customers (don’t ignore, but don’t focus here). Look at your customer list, identifying the top 20% (elite) and top 5% (very elite), and create special services, products, and pricing for the elite customers. Make ‘em feel like a VIP.

Then let them know how important they are to you, which makes them feel special, feel known. Bill’s partner calls this “putting an iron cage around your customer.”

Ali Brown: What is the #1 biggest missed opportunity entrepreneurs overlook?

Bill Glazer: It’s one of the seven strategies for the call tonight - it’s ensuring every new lead and prospect is being accounted for properly. Every business has a new account flow, and you need to handle new leads properly. Inspect what you expect. Just because you set up a system doesn’t mean it’s working properly. (Retail? Mystery shop it. Funnel? Go through it.) The beginning of the funnel is so important, so make sure it’s working.

Ali Brown: Let’s talk about leveraging relationships.

Bill Glazer: Offer your best customers incentives to buy more and different stuff from you. If you can’t create products and services fast enough to meet the demand of your best customers, then leverage your relationships with other businesses. (Joint ventures, partnerships, etc. - products and services created by people you trust, that you can turn around and offer to your customers.) 

 Ali Brown: Let’s talk about CV - Customer Value. Explain it, and what’s the fastest way to increase it?

Bill Glazer: It comes down to identifying bias in your list. Look at how much they spend, the average transaction/spending over a chosen period of time. It’s not about getting more people in the door - it’s about getting them to spend more when they come in the door.

The fastest way to increase customer value is to implement immediate upsell strategies. At Glazer-Kennedy, of people who buy a first thing and are offered a second, related thing immediately, 14.3% of first-thing buyers will also buy the second thing. The first step/sale is the hardest - the second thing is easy. It works online, offline, in every environment. 

Ali Brown: Look at what other businesses are doing to you. “You want fries with that?” You can see upsell strategies everywhere! Even on infomercials, QVC…you name it.

So, moving on to the next juicy tip - how do you increase prices without resistance from customers?

Bill Glazer: This is one of my favorite strategies. It’s going into a niche. Dan Kennedy says “There are riches in niches.” A plain time management book is maybe $20 in Borders, maybe $100 for an online information product. But if it’s specifically for lawyers, you can do it for $249. If it’s for lawyers specializing in elder care, you can offer it for $397. 

So look at what you already have, and see if you can customize it to create a niche product. Keep the generic product if you want, but look at your elite segment of your customer list, and create tweaked, niched products for that segment.

Ali Brown: Let’s talk about communication. All the recession talk affects people mentally, and they want to cut back. Is that what they should be doing with their marketing and advertising?

Bill Glazer: This is the absolutely WORST time to cut back on your marketing, because that’s what’s driving the business. Continue to communicate with your customers, and in fact do it more often, not less often. The great thing is, there’s a lot less clutter out there right now, less competition for your target market’s attention.

Look for more ways to communicate using low-cost, high return marketing strategies. And as long as you don’t bore them, you can NEVER over-communicate with your customers. Use “S&D” - “Swipe and Deploy” strategy. Look at what other people are doing, and think to yourself, “How can I use this in my own market and stand out from the crowd?”

Ali Brown: What the biggest mistake, which entrepreneurs should NOT do in challenging economic times?

Bill Glazer: Don’t emotionally throw in the towel! In recessionary times, people sometimes say it’s going to be harder to get speaking gigs, to sell products, etc., and wait it out. And six months goes by, and another six months goes by…and nothing happens. So take the time to invest in your education, be proactive, and don’t wait for things to get better. Take action to make it better yourself.

And when we come out of the recession, the economy is going to look a lot different. Dan Kennedy calls it the “emerging new economy.” So you have to get a handle on how it’s going to change, and waiting around and doing nothing isn’t going to help you in the long run.

Ali Brown: It’s also very important not to be alone, to be around positive people, to spend time with successful people, since your environment does so much to shape your success.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Dances With Gurus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

 In honor of the big Irish party, we thought we’d get a little more literal with our “Dances With Gurus” category on the “A-Ha!” Blog. JibJab had an Irish jig sendable video, and we just couldn’t resist featuring the five gurus who’ve ha the biggest influence on our growth as imperfect-preneurs.

Presenting: Adam Urbanski, Ali Brown, Melanie Benson Strick, Suzanne Falter-Barns, and Mari Smith!

Posted in "A-Ha!" TV, Dances With Gurus | No Comments »

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 4:56 pm and is filed under "A-Ha!" TV, Dances With Gurus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

So we’ve received questions from folks who heard about us going to Ali Brown’s Online Blueprint Success Workshop last year (through our YouTube videos or Lani’s testimonial on a promotional video for Ali’s recent “Create Your Own Economy” teleseminar).

As with previous years, Ali has packaged the content from the live event into a complete home study course. The big difference this time around is that the package is now on DVD - previous years were audio only. (That’s the package as pictured on her sales site.) And since that was the last time she’ll put on the live OSBW event, this is the last version of the home study course that’ll ever be available.

Since we attended the live event, we were offered the opportunity to provide a testimonial for the launch of the home study version. Ali asked for solid quantifiable numbers - dollars, percentages, anything to show concrete results, in exchange for a visibility opportunity on the sales page.

Normally we jump at these opportunities. But this time, Lani and I looked at each other and said, “We don’t have it to give.”

Don’t get me wrong - we’ve gotten tremendous value from Ali over the years, and we got a lot of value out of attending the workshop last November. It’s hard to put a number on it, though, for a couple of reasons:

1. Networking. We met great people at the event from all over the country (and a few international travelers, too). Some were people whom we’d previously connected with via email once or twice, some we’d been watching from afar, and some we’d never heard of until the event. In addition to the wonderful personal relationships we’re developing, the door’s been opened for terrific joint venture and affiliate opportunities - which we can’t put a price on just yet.

2. Exposure. At the event, we chimed in a lot during open Q&A sessions. That got us additional exposure with the audience (around 500 folks in the info marketing biz), and for those folks who invest in the home study course, they’ll be hearing about us in the recording, too. Add to that the aforementioned YouTube videos, and Lani on Ali’s in-house promo video to her 30,000+ ezine list - not to mention all the Ali Brown affiliates who promoted the teleseminar to their lists - and you get an idea of how big an exposure opportunity it was.

Sometimes it’s hard to quantify visibility opportunities, because you never know how many touches it’ll take before someone decides to take the next step with you. But you know that visibility is a necessity, so you try to leverage every opportunity you get. And that’s one primary thing we looked at getting out of this event.

3. Refreshers. We started re-structuring our business in 2006 by going through the audio of the 2005 version of the live event. We’ve revisited that content from time to time, and almost always found (or rediscovered) useful information for our business. When we went to the live event in 2008, some of the material was, in fact, familiar. What we were (pleasantly) surprised to discover was how useful the information still is, and that the updates made a lot of sense.

We’re much further down the path in some aspects of our business journey than we were in 2006. In other areas, we’ve had some false starts, let some things fall by the wayside and had to go backward to pick them up again, and put off still other things because of excuses, fears, and other common imperfect-preneur traits.

What I can say for sure is that if you’re just starting out in business, and if there’s even the smallest glimmer of possibility that you might package your knowledge and expertise into information products one day down the line, Ali Brown’s Online Success Blueprint Workshop is a fantastic resource for you.

Additionally, if you’ve been a solo-preneur for a while, doing okay (or even struggling a bit), and you’re looking to get better, more systemitized, and start making more money while working less, this home study course has many of the answers you’re looking for. I’d be lying if I said the results were “immediate” - if you’re diligent with the material, 3-6 months is a more realistic timeframe to start seeing improvements.

Even so, getting the home study course is like investing in an information well you can draw from again and again. The methods may evolve over time, but the principles, strategies and tactics you learn in the home study course will serve you for years to come.

Posted in Dances With Gurus | 3 Comments »

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Dances With Gurus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.