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Posts from the 'Dances With Gurus' Category
September 4th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
At my Microcredit peer group meeting last night, one of the people at the table remarked that business as a solo professional can be lonely at times.
Not “alone,” mind you. If you’re in business for yourself, you may see customers, clients, prospects, vendors, and other folks in the course of your day. Hardly what you’d call “alone time.”
But who can you really talk to about your business – which for many small business owners is also a significant chunk of their lives? And if you don’t have anyone, isn’t that a lonely feeling?
Peer groups like Microcredit definitely help, because they put 5-10 people in a room together, for two hours once a month, to talk about specific business tutorial topics and the individual issues businesses face around those topics.
While that’s good, I got to thinking about this on the drive home last night, though, and what sprang to mind was the idea of the company retreat.
You ever go on one of those? You’re off-site for a day or a week, relieved of your regular duties, and free to focus on a specific business-boosting agenda.
It’s a space for brainstorming, for defining business strategies and objectives, and course correcting – seeing how you’re already doing, and figuring out what you need to do next.
Departments and groups in large organizations go on retreats, and in small companies, sometimes the whole company goes.
As solo professionals and microbusiness, we don’t have that. What we DO have are bootcamps – multi-day workshops, either in person or via teleconferences. And I’m excited as all get out because we’re going to one we’ve wanted to go to for a long time.
 Alexandria Brown, the former “Ezine Queen” who recently re-branded her business and expanded her focus, is holding her last-ever Online Success Blueprint Workshop this November in Los Angeles. We got the home-study version a couple of years ago, and it was a big help when we started to change our business around in 2006.
Now, as we gear up to make another big change in our business, we’re thrilled that we’re gonna be live and in person for the event. 250 small business owners will be there – so far, it’s 90% booked, from what we’ve heard, which means there are only about 25 spaces left.
Lani and I can’t stress enough how powerful it is to remove yourself from your business for a few days, and learn not just from a master marketer, but from fellow business owners who know what you go through on a day-to-day basis, and know how to support your ascent.
That’s why we’re telling you about this event on the blog, and including the link for you to learn more. That link itself leads to access to a series of free recordings where she shares the formula she used to turn her services-based business into a more lucrative model - those recordings alone are more than worth a click through. (The link is also an affiliate link, which means if you click through and eventually sign up for the bootcamp, it doesn’t cost you any more, and we get a little commission.)
We’d love to see a huge New Hampshire contingent there, too, so if you’re in the Granite State and sign up through us, we’d like to say thank you with:
- A free “Revenue and Visibility Kick Start” session with us any time in 2009 ($500 value – just give us a minimum two-week notice for scheduling)
- Access to three “Mastermind Smackdown” sessions, where all takers can join us in our office and fire away with your brainstorming, business-building, and marketing-related questions (10am-3pm on Monday, November 24th; Wednesday, December 3rd; and Monday, December 15th - and lunch is on us)
And if you have any questions for us after you read the information about the Bootcamp, just drop us a line!
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July 15th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
 We’re members in Melanie Benson Strick’s “Ultimate Wealth and Success Circle” coaching program, and part of it includes access to their forums. Lani posted this little story under the title “Cool things, small world, serendipity abounds”:
So I recently joined a local networking group that’s just celebrated its one-year anniversary called “Women Inspiring Women.” Leslie Sturgeon, the President and Founder, has already demonstrated an authentic bent toward being truly supportive for our biz in many ways, including asking Allen and I if we’d be open to putting on workshops on blogging, branding, social networking, etc. in the future. (Heck yes!)
Soon after I joined, Leslie asked if I was available for an evening phone call. Of course, I said yes. We ended up chatting about everything under the sun for 2+ hours, which was fab, but the thing that drove her to want to connect to me in such a powerful, intentional way is this:
She had recently heard about this amazing lady named Melanie Benson Strick. She’d been reading Melanie’s ezine and checking out some of her blog posts, etc. One day she decided to take Melanie up on an offer to check out a CD on “How to Get Out of Overwhelm.” You know, get the CD and only pay for the shipping. As she was listening to Melanie in her element, she heard a familiar voice talk about a breakthrough. This familiar voice was laughing, and mentioning her husband Allen, and sharing a story about how she went from five calendars all over the house and office to one main calendaring system after just 20 minutes with Melanie.
Turns out the voice this woman heard was mine.Moral of the story?
It’s a very good thing for a community leader and networking maven to hear you rubbing elbows at a boot camp with the visionary behind Success Connections.
Leslie now knows I’m on the “bleeding edge” of success-minded lifestyle entrepreneurs, that I’m spending my time and energy pursuing the things she’s trying to infuse in her own life and networking group.
I just love this kind of serendipity, don’t you?
Great little story, right? Well, Melanie saw it, and said:
This is such a great story, thanks for sharing it!
I hope you don’t mind but I have to post this on my blog…it’s a great story and it made my whole body tingle when synergy shows up like this!
Which she did, here. And she also referenced it as part of the regular content in her weekly communications to the Ultimate Wealth and Success Circle as well as her Fast Track to a 6 & 7 Figure Lifestyle Business groups.
That’s how easy it is to make content work harder for you - sometimes, you don’t even have to create your own to get your message, mission, and vision “out there”!
Posted in All About Content, Dances With Gurus | 1 Comment »
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June 24th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
I’ve been listening to “Coach Deb,” aka Deborah Micek, in the second of a series of calls being hosted by Marketing Mentor Adam Urbanski on Social Media Networking. The third call, tomorrow, is about Facebook, and the fourth call, Thursday, is about creating an “Integrated Social Networking Strategy.” You can listen live to either or both of the last two calls, and get recordings/transcripts of all of them along with bonuses, at FromContactsToContracts.com.
Adam says that, with Twitter, he was able to make contacts and connections very rapidly - even with people after whom Adam had been chasing via phone and email without success. Deborah says that even if you aren’t ready to start using Twitter, grab your name on there without spaces and without underscores, either of which brands you as a latecomer or late adopter. Get your brand, company name, and products names, too!
Here’s a sample of the nuggets of information I gleaned from the call - some of this is paraphrased as best as I could catch it here while listening to the webcast:
Top 10 Reasons You Could/Should Be Using Twitter:
1. Enables you for quick, instant communication with your “tribe.” (You can even use a separate account to send messages to a private “tribe” to their cell phones.)
2. For brand recognition. You can tweet to other folks directly with the “@” sign attached to the beginning of your user name (without a space), and because you’re using a brand or company name as your user name…you get the idea.
3. Reputation management. If you don’t have a presence, you don’t know what people are saying about you, you can’t respond appropriately, and you can’t join the conversation.
4. Research and knowledge.
5. Trendspotting.
6. Being on the bleeding edge of what’s going on in the world (or your world).
7. Strengthen the bonds between friends, colleagues, and JV partners.
8. Attract new clients. (Not actively going after them - it’s more subtle than that.) And it’s purposely NOT the #1 reason you should be on Twitter.
9. To find and connect with influencers, and keep in touch.
10. SEO. It’s one of the top SEO options for online research. (Look at TweetScan.com for an example.)
Rules to Play By on Twitter:
1. Business is ALWAYS personal. Twitter gives you the ability to get personal with your audience. The watch words: Transparent and authentic.
2. Captivate, use influential language, and give people a reason to continue a conversation at your blog if you have more to say on a subject.
3. Have contests.
4. Think about (and ask about) what clients love about you, and let that shine through on Twitter.
5. Write as though you’re talking to one person.
6. Use a 1:8 ratio of tweets that are at all promotional, versus: Being a resource for people; talking to people and about people; sharing links, resources, and blog posts from other folks; connecting with people, etc.
7. Don’t send people to sales pages or landing pages - send them to your blog.
8. Every 10, 12, or 20 tweets, ask your followers a question.
9. Attract and connect on Twitter - convert on your own site/blog.
10. Give people the opportunity to be a resource to you - people naturally want to be helpful and valuable, and you don’t have to know everything.
Hope this is useful to you! Again, check out FromContactsToContracts.com to get more detailed, real-time access. And check out Deborah and Adam on Twitter as well.
Posted in Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing | 1 Comment »
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June 23rd, 2008 by Lani Voivod
I just found out George Carlin died. #$%@.
 Carlin, a #$%@*^’ primo example of how to “A-Ha Yourself!” because he grabbed hold of his authentic innards and threw ‘em out on the buffet table of life for all to feast and gorge, if they could handle his wicked, wonderful, wacked-out flavor.
Muther-#$%@*^’ Carlin. One of the top 10 Content Anarchists of all time (and right now I have no idea who the other nine might be - everyone else I think of is paling in comparison).
George muther-#$%@*^’ Carlin. A fearless philosopher, thinker, commentator, observer, comedian, and truth sayer. Genius behind (and star of) 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, and three books. Showstealer of dozens of movies and TV shows. Five-time Grammy winner, nominated for four Emmys, and 2008 recipient of the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.
“I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.”
Thank you for doing your civic duty, Mr. Carlin — for crossing that line, over and over again, showing us how silly we all can be, and calling us all on our *#@$ %^&* whenever we needed it. Your scathing wit and infinite wisdom will be missed. Luckily, I know you’re not too torn up about your own demise, cuz you even riffed on the ridiculousness of death:
“I’m getting old. And it’s OK. Because thanks to our fear of death in this country I won’t have to die — I’ll ‘pass away.’ Or I’ll ‘expire,’ like a magazine subscription. If it happens in the hospital they’ll call it a ‘terminal episode.’ The insurance company will refer to it as ‘negative patient care outcome.’ And if it’s the result of malpractice they’ll say it was a ‘therapeutic misadventure.’”
Peace be with you, you ol’ %$&*#@%^*& you. And I mean that in the most loving, respectful, reverent way a nice girl can say it these days without being censored, fined, or dismissed as unprofessional.
(Maybe some day I’ll have the %^**@ you did to just come out with it, without worrying about the consequences.)
Posted in Dances With Gurus, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"? | No Comments »
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June 5th, 2008 by Lani and Allen
We took a deep breath, and jumped.
That’s the best way I can describe our leap into signing up for Melanie Benson Strick’s coaching program, the Fast Track to a 6 & 7 Figure Lifestyle Business.
We’ve just had our first mastermind call this evening, and we’re thrilled that we’ve reached the point in our business where we feel confident that investing in her coaching program is the next step for taking Epiphanies, Inc. to a new level of success.
It’s not our first time in a coaching program. We were in Adam Urbanski’s “Platinum VIP” marketing mastermind group from June 06-June07, and we were so green in our business, working with Adam really helped us to get started in the world of educational marketing. Adam, we would never have made it this far without you. 
We’ve gotten to the point now in our business where mindset, belief, and delegating to a team are probably the most critical challenges we’re facing, and Melanie’s the perfect person to help us in this area.
This first module we’re going through is designed to set the baseline, so to speak, with an eye on the areas of our business we’ll be working to improve over the next 5-6 months. It’s almost daunting to see how low we scored in the initial assessment, but heck, that means there’s nowhere to go but up, right?
Ultimately, our goal is threefold:
- To continue to help our million-dollar-revenue clients implement the latest content development and marketing success strategies, to boost their reputation, visibility, and bottom lines.
- To share what we learn, so we can help NH’s lifestyle micro-preneurs and adventurous small business owners to build their businesses powerfully, confidently, and strategically, through workshops, teleclasses, and other educational programs.
- To own the “A-Ha!” (bold insight PLUS joy-filled action) once and for all.
This opportunity to shift and grow with other 6 & 7 figure business owners around the country is invaluable. We’ve re-jiggered our lives to make the time to work on our business, not just in it, overcome our fears, stop second-guessing ourselves, and turn concepts like the 80/20 Rule and the Law of Attraction into allies.
Are you interested in us sharing this journey with you on our blog? Please leave us a comment and let us know.
Posted in Dances With Gurus, Entrepreneur Diaries, Masterminding | No Comments »
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on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Dances With Gurus, Entrepreneur Diaries, Masterminding.
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April 16th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
 We received this sales email (subject line: “How to commit business suicide”) last year from Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero of Red Hot Copy, whom I’ll hopefully get to meet at an event I’m going to on Saturday. I’ve removed the final portion of it, which relates to the pitch for her in-person workshop that happened in October 2007.
In it, she does something a little beyond what I normally see in sales emails. It has the typical elements - for example, a strong opening, problems, and other solutions pitched as ones to avoid for the purposes of the email.
What’s different is every time I re-read it, I truly feel like she does take it personally. It’s a great example of the “form, not formula” idea I’ve heard from Robert McKee. She hits all the notes of the sales email format, but it’s not like she’s following a paint-by-numbers template.
Instead, she’s poured her own personality and passion into her content, in a conversational, informative way.
Let this be an example of how great content spans every part of your business - and it can’t possibly be great content without your own unique voice, tone, and style layered throughout.
The worst thing you can do in your business is to trick yourself into thinking you can get by with limp, lifeless copy. I see entrepreneurs do it all the time, and it gets me hopping mad.
Here’s the deal - NONE of your marketing works without strong copy. PERIOD. No sales letters sell for you round the clock. No emails get read. Money drains out of your business like water through a sieve. And you may not even realize you have a leak.
It’s a real problem.
Of course there are definitely ways around this problem - once you recognize it exists. You can break out your credit card and hire one of the better copywriters. Just be prepared to have enough room to accommodate our fees. (Right now I get between $15,000 and $25,000 a project - and I’m on the CHEAP SIDE of what my colleagues charge.)
If that’s in your budget, it’s a worthwhile investment, I promise. But if you’re like most entrepreneurs it’s not.
That doesn’t change the fact that you need good, strong copy for EVERY ASPECT OF YOUR BUSINESS. That includes copy for:
=> Websites
=> Email blasts
=> Video and podcast scripts
=> Newsletters
=> Press releases
=> Articles
=> Brochures
=> Flyers
=> Postcards
Are you starting to get the picture? And the competition is fierce.
The average person today is exposed to over 3,500 marketing messages a day! That’s 24,000 messages A WEEK! 1.7 million a year and climbing!! Barnes and Noble bookstores have over 130,000 titles to choose from. Most grocery stores have over 30,000 choices vying for your attention. (Walgreens has a measly 15,000 choices and they’re doing okay.) Then of course there are a slew of other marketers trying to do business with your customers! Everyone is competing for ATTENTION. But check this out. . .
=> People don’t buy because of clever slogans or graphics;
=> They don’t buy because you say you’re the best;
=> They don’t even buy because you have a truly great product;
They buy because you have the answer to making them richer, happier, or better looking - because YOU are the SOLUTION to a problem they want fixed!
If you appear salesy, people resist. That doesn’t work (especially in today’s skeptical society). In your copy, you have to COMMAND their attention, solve their problem at no risk to them, answer every one of their objections, show how to get the fastest results possible and gain their TRUST. If you can do all that, they MIGHT be open to giving your product a shot.
I didn’t mean to go off on a rant, but I am passionate about this subject.
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April 9th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
Can I be totally honest for a second?
Sometimes, I just don’t get it. Social media, that is.
I mean, intellectually, I understand that social media is the Next Big Thing, that over the next few years it’ll become as indispensable as the Internet and email eventually became, and it’s going to be the next tech bubble and burst on Wall Street.
But sometimes, I don’t see the point of it. I have profiles set up in LinkedIn, Facebook, Ryze, Twitter, Squidoo, and so forth. But I’m not always confident about the value setting up and spending time on these sites actually contributes to my business. As an attendee said, at a recent workshop where we were presenting, “Sometimes I think you people are just fooling around all day,” referring to those in the assembled group who said they were blogging for their business.
 Then I happen to read an issue of Melanie Benson Strick’s Success Connections ezine, where she says:
I have a new obsession that is really paying off.
Recently I was introduced to two social networking sites that have made a HUGE impact on my leads and have introduced some wonderful new clients into my programs. As a quick example, one person who read my blog posts from MySpace ended up purchasing my Get Out of Overwhelm and Create your Lifestyle Business CD set. Then he immediately called me and joined the Fast-Track to a Lifestyle Business Mastermind. He then went on to join my Platinum Elite coaching program. You can do the math but let’s just say it was worth over $15k to my bottom line (plus I have a wonderful new client to work with).
Yes, you read that right. One client, worth $15,000 (and probably more, considering his lifetime value to her). I’d assume this is the “results not typical” example, but Lani and I know Melanie, and based on what she’s saying in the rest of her note, there’s more where that came from.
Notice, too, one other thing she says in there, which I put in helpful bold font for you. Melanie’s having the blog posts from her website piped in to her MySpace page through the magic of RSS feeds.
That means Melanie didn’t have to create additional, brand new, constantly refreshed content exclusively for her account on MySpace. She multi-purposed her content. And you can do the same thing with Facebook, Squidoo, and many others.
As lifestyle entrepreneurs and million-dollar business owners, we all want to give our clients and customers the best service and value we have to offer. But we also have to make money at it. So if you (like me) ever doubted the value of being on social media sites, here’s one hard-dollar bit of proof for you.
Posted in All About Content, Dances With Gurus | No Comments »
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April 8th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
Our buddy Kevin Skarritt flagged this post about “Managing urgencies” by Seth Godin for his staff and strategic allies recently, and wanted to hear everyone’s insights on it.
Godin’s solution for making sure you keep your focus on your goal, rather than the fires you have to put out in your business, is this:
I guess the trick is to make the long term items even more urgent than today’s emergencies. Break them into steps and give them deadlines. Measure your people on what they did today in support of where you need to be next month.
Ah…but how do you make your long-term items more urgent?
In the corporate world, managers can make the long-term goals more important for their employees by tying those goals to performance reviews, bonuses, salary boosts, and so on.
But what about the lifestyle entrepreneur? The solo professional? The micro-enterprise or small business owner?
Variations on the “How do you make your long-term items more urgent?” question have launched a thousand careers. From business coaches to motivational experts, helping people achieve their goals is a multi-billion-dollar business, and the success stories - no knock against any of them, it’s just life - requires a “results not typical” disclaimer.
In the face of so many people, with so much more experience, I’m not going to presume that I have the revolutionary answer to this question, the one that would make Epiphanies, Inc. become the be-all, end-all of personal motivation.
What I can tell you is that I made one small change, and it’s made a world of difference for me.
We have a number of clients, and I have a weekly to-do list for them. I draw my daily to-do items from that, and work in any “urgent” stuff as need be.
Previously, I used to put the to-do items for our own business at the bottom of lists. In 2008, I started putting them at the top.
Three months later:
- I’ve blogged much more for our business this year than I did over the same period last year.
- I’ve produced more articles.
- I’ve gotten our information products onto our website and available for sale (after a year of having them created).
- I’ve had more sales and lead-generation conversations than I did all last year.
In other words, I’ve become more of a business owner working on our business, rather than just being a technician working in our business.
Ultimately, trying different things until one stuck has helped in making the right things urgent. It’s not perfect - there are still things on which I need/wish/want to prioritize for our business - but I’m headed in the right direction, finally.
Posted in Dances With Gurus, Insight + Action, Lessons Learned | No Comments »
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March 18th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
“How does Twitter make money?”
This is what Lani asked aloud the other day, and for now the answer seems to be, “With venture capital funding.” So on a lark, we Googled “Twitter business model” and found this post from Allen Stern wondering the same thing, but a few months earlier. I can’t seem to find his answer, but I did find a different post from Jason Calacanis, with 3 ways Twitter could become a billion-dollar business.
(Good grief! Riding a 140-character microblogging engine to a billion dollars? Maybe Twitter’s worth paying attention to after all.)
That said, I noticed two of Calacanis’ three options were based in the old school “Interruption Marketing” world. If you’re not familiar with the term, here it is, contrasted with “Permission Marketing,” from the Wikipedia entry on Seth Godin:
Advertisements on TV and Radio are classified as ‘interruption marketing’, which interrupt the customer while he is doing something of his preference. Thus he introduced the concept of ‘permission marketing’ where the business provides something of value to the customer and thus obtains his permission and then does marketing.
And since Seth Godin wrote the book on Permission Marketing, he oughta know!
With that said, if you were reading the “tweets” of the people you follow, and were suddenly presented with an ad every so often, that looked just like a regular tweet, would you be happy about that? Or annoyed?
That’s the scenario in two of the three business models Calacanis proposed. Granted, I didn’t start a blog empire and sell it to AOL like he did, so maybe I’m not the best guy to ask, but it seems to me that Interruption Marketing just isn’t right for Web 2.0 places like Twitter.
Though I was late to the discussion (his initial post was back in January), I added comment #37 to Calacanis’ post with some other potential money-making, non-interruption-marketing-based ideas. That’s just one of the many great things about blogging - no matter when the conversation started, you can join in.
And I’m just a guy sitting at the kitchen table, with his socks still wet from having stepped through a snowbank to give his wife her laptop, as she was heading out the door to drop our son’s play pal back at his house, on the way to a MicroCredit-NH peer group meeting. (Whew! That’s a mouthful if you read it aloud.)
But I’m also a guy with a half-decent opinion, which is now sitting out on the blog of a heavy-hitting, influential guy who’s being read by a lot of other very interesting folks. Which is pretty cool.
I guess there will always be a place for interruption marketing - it still gets a response, and even if it’s much, much less than it was, if it can be quantifed, it can be sold. But I think when we look back, we’ll see that Permission Marketing may have knocked Interruption Marketing for a loop, but Web 2.0 put it down for the count as we know it.
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