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Posts from the 'Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!"' Category
September 27th, 2007 by Lani and Allen
Content vehicles - the means by which your message and mission gets out to your ideal audience. You know, like press releases, articles, blog posts, teleclasses, workshops, podcasts, vlogs, social networking pages, and the like.
So many to choose from, but c’mon, let’s be real. You can’t do ‘em all at once. You have to pick and choose the ones that suit your budget, resources, realities, goals, and vision.
But…but…how do you evaluate them and decide which ones to run with?
We recommend you run ‘em through the FIRES:
- Fun - Complements existing assets, is comfortable, exciting
- Implementable - Skills and tools are available or can be had
- Realistic - Achievable within timeframe and existing workload
- Energizing - Creates momentum, revitalizes and inspires
- Strategic - Supports the goals and bigger vision of your company
Use a 1-5 rating system, where “5″ is highest and “1″ is lowest. Take a look at the content vehicles that strike your fancy. See which ones score the highest. They’re the ones you’ll want to use to FIRE UP your marketing efforts, increase visibility, build your brand, and (ultimately) boost your biz profits.
 Hey - want immediate access to insider knowledge on more than 12 of the easiest, most effective, and most affordable ways to market your products and services for long-term success and profitability? Interested in getting a blast of ideas, information, and recommendations about the content vehicles available to you?
Check out “The A-Ha Action Guide: How to Turn Your Most Powerful Ideas Into Profitable, Joy-Filled Action” and get the answers, insights, and direction you’re looking for!
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September 5th, 2007 by Allen Voivod
I’ve got a bit of a confession to make:
Over the years, we’ve been much better at giving testimonials than we’ve been at asking for them.
If we haven’t weighed in publicly on why testimonials are so valuable, allow me to do so in four quick bullets.
1. A testimonial isn’t coming from you. Of course YOU love your product or service. But what does your client or customer think of it?
2. A testimonial is authentic proof of goodness. If it has a full name attached (and even a web address), your prospects can - if they want - dig deeper and hear more from the horse’s mouth.
3. A testimonial reflects your prospects’ wants and needs. By sharing testimonials, you tap more directly into your prospcts minds than you could with the same message coming from your sales or marketing messages.
4. A testimonial tells a story that connects with its readers. A simple “I like it” isn’t a testimonial. A true testimonial wraps the positive feedback in emotional story elements. And people buy based on emotion - they use facts later to justify their emotional decisions.
These are just a few reasons why it’s good to collect testimonials for your business. But as it happens, it’s also good for business to GIVE testimonials.
 For instance, in February 2007, we gave this testimonial to Alexandria “The Ezine Queen” Brown for her Online Success Blueprint Workshop home-study course:
After working our butts off for several years as “freelancers,” we put all our work on hold so we could radically reinvent our business. On March 6, 2006, we met in our living room. Our first order of business was to press “PLAY” on our CD player. Why? Because we had invested in your Online Success Blueprint, and we were determined to give 100% of our attention to it. We knew you held the answers to our financial freedom.
Now, less than one year after that fateful meeting, we’re on track to make $150,000 - $200,000 MORE than we did last year…and that’s without any new clients. (Did we mention it’s only February???) Your OSB course gave us the specific steps to take, the strategies to implement, and the mindset to succeed – AND it inspired us to take bold actions we hadn’t had the courage to pursue previously. Your course literally changed OUR course. And now that we have our second child on the way, we’re more grateful than ever that we trusted you with our success. THANK YOU, ALI!”
- Lani & Allen Voivod, “The Content Lovers”, Epiphanies Inc., Gilford, N.H., www.epiphaniesinc.com
Granted, she’s not the only person whose materials we’ve studied - and we’ve worked more closely/personally with other people, including a certain “Marketing Mentor” I’ll mention in part 2 of this testimonial rant on another day - but Ali helped us lay much of the groundwork that got us to where we are today.
And here’s how it’s good for business: Ali’s using that testimonial on her website for the live, in-person Online Success Blueprint Workshop coming November 8, 9, and 10 to Los Angeles. So everyone who sees that page has a chance of finding and connecting with us.
And she’s promoting that workshop to an ezine list of over 21,000 people. 21,000! Not to mention any other joint venture promotions she or her affiliates have done for other large list memberships.
What’s more, she’s offering a series of free teleclasses in advance of her workshop, and I’m going to be speaking on the live call tonight at 8PM Eastern to the 500 live attendees, plus the 2,000-or-so other folks who register for the call so they can receive the free MP3 recording to listen at their convenience. That’s up to 2,000 more exposures to coaches, consultants, authors, speakers, and other solo-preneurs - a very targeted audience, if I may say so.
In short, the act of GIVING a testimonial has served as a marketing tool for our business! Cool, huh?
So, if you, like us, are not so good at collecting testimonials yet - or you feel shy about asking, resist asking, fear asking, whatever! - then try it the other way around for a while, and send a few unexpected testimonials out to the folks whose products or services made a big impact in your life.
Posted in Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | 1 Comment »
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August 13th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
We’ve got this client. It’s a good-sized company in a specialized field bringing in about $10 million of revenue per year, with hopes of doubling, tripling, and quadrupling that figure as soon as possible.
They’ve been talking about getting a blog up and running all year. They’ve heard the benefits from us and from others. They’ve hemmed and hawed. They’ve groaned and stalled.
Last week Allen wrote their marketing gang an email, hoping to find a way to get their blog up and running as quickly and easily as possible, once and for all. He led off by using us as a first-hand example:
First, a blogging testimonial. In July of 2006, the Epiphanies, Inc. website had just over 1,000 unique visitors. In July of this year, we had 22,667 unique visitors.
Of our marketing content activity during that time, blogging was the A#1 item, with a dash of article marketing and a press release or two thrown in. It took about three months before we started seeing the upward curve, but boy, has it been steep ever since.
If you want to drive more traffic to your website, blogging has to happen. Period, paragraph.
Now, that year between July ‘06 and July ‘07 has flown by. We’ve been soooo busy (and yes, a tad overwhelmed) learning better ways to: assist clients, manage our time and commitments, leverage our passion and know-how, and “be the tide that raises all boats” (one of Allen’s favorite sayings!), we’re just now realizing the implications and advantages of such a wonderful traffic increase.
More and more often, people are letting us know they’ve learned valuable things from our blog, or they’ve enjoyed an entry or three, or they found us recommended on someone else’s blog or site, etc. It’s a little scary (”What do they know? Which entry did they read? Did I share anything embarrassing? Was there a typo? Do they really think I’m lame?”), but so is business, right?
Our blog is imperfect.
It’s an unapologetic work in progress. About half of the things we had hoped to add and implement never made it to fruition.
And yet…
We’ve made connections through our blog; been published in a wonderful book alongside award-winning authors and laudible experts in the fields of writing, marketing, and creativity; and created a searchable, indexed history of the information we’ve learned and the ideas we’re passionate about.
As business owners, we all know the pain and frustration of tabling soooo many hopes and initiatives because of lack of resources - like time, support staff, money, energy, etc.
That being said, not a week goes by during which one of us doesn’t sigh a big fat sigh of relief that we started blogging when we did, and we’ve got an easy, wicked cheap way to connect our approach, advice, and musings with the online world.
As our own implementation of the other marketing tools and tactics we recommend to friends and clients gets a little bitty bit better every month, we realize how lucky we were to have gotten at least one big marketing ball rolling - the blogging ball - especially the one that’s delivered the most OOMPH for the effort.
Soooo, what are YOU waiting for? 
Posted in Blog Bits, Entrepreneur Diaries, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | No Comments »
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on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Blog Bits, Entrepreneur Diaries, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!".
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July 16th, 2007 by Lani and Allen
But first, the slightly-related bonus tip: This post was inspired by an email we wrote to a business asking about email campaigns. Here, with some modifications, it’s about to be re-purposed as a blog post. Later, it’ll be converted into an article we send out through AhaArticles.com (our link to the very fine article submission service we use). As a time-crunched entrepreneur, take every opportunity you can to re-purpose content for as many audiences as possible - like we’re about to do with this email campaign info!
So, you wanna use email as a marketing tool. Great! As part of your overall marketing mix, email can be great for:
- Maintaining regular contact with your audience
- Automating that contact for maximum effectiveness and use of your time
- Creating marketing pieces that can easily be shared with others
Now, if you’re like us, you get all fired up to start writing, and you wanna dive right into it.
And to that we have to say, “Whoa, Nelly!”
Because if you’re going to spend the time creating the campaign, wouldn’t you feel more confident about its potential if you stopped for a few minutes to make sure you get as much out of the effort as possible?
Yep. Thought so. Pleas, grab a pen and paper, or pop open a new Word doc, and consider these seven items:
1. Define the purpose of your campaign. For some, it’s outright sales. Others are meant for relationship-building. Your reason may be entirely different, but be clear on exactly what one thing you hope to achieve.
2. Identify your target audience. Is it your own in-house list? A specific subset of that list? A partner’s or affiliate’s list, or maybe one you’ve purchased? This lays the foundation for knowing the answers to the next questions, all of which are crucial to the success of your campaign.
3. Honor your audience’s expectations. Are they used to all sales emails from you, or do you mix it up with information-rich touches? Do they get text-based emails, HTML emails, or both? How often are they getting email from you already? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you craft a campaign that isn’t off-putting, confusing, or ignored by your audience.
4. Respect the Form/Function balance. Is this a one-shot email, or is it intended to be a series? This affects things like the structure and length of the email content, the level of aggressiveness in your sales pitch, and the call to action you put out to your audience.
5. Manage your expectations. Industry averages for “successful” campaigns can range from a .03% response rate (for a huge-yet-generic list) to well over 50% (for a highly-niched list with a highly-relevant offer). Look at the performance of previous emails the target audience has received. Be realistic about where you fall in that range. Email campaigns are truly designed to be tested, tweaked, and retested over and over again, so don’t expect to hit the ball out of the park with your first big “Send.”
6. Mind your ISP manners. How you send your emails matters a lot! Are you planning to send your marketing emails straight from Microsoft Outlook? Check your Internet Service Provider’s policies about bulk emailing. (You may have to send emails out in small batches, for example.) Personally, we use the email/newsletter/list management service provided with AhaCart.com, and it’s worked well for us so far. You don’t want to go to all the trouble of setting up any kind of email campaign only to have it blocked, spamified, or put into the dreaded junk filter.
7. And most importantly, make sure your campaign fits into your overall marketing strategy. Done right, this email campaign will be integrated with other marketing channels. (News releases, articles, and blogging are our faves.) And hopefully, it’ll be part of a regular Content Plan that lets your audience know you don’t just want them for their money.
Ideally, your email campaign will keep your audience engaged with you - regardless of whether they’re ready to buy at the moment you email dings into their inboxes. Because as we’ve been told time and again, people don’t buy when you’re ready to sell. People buy when they’re ready to buy.
And the simple trick to success is this: By implementing consistent, “Dignity Marketing” based communications, you’re bound to be there when the buying time comes.
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
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April 7th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
Several years ago, I read a fantastic Get Fuzzy comic that has never left my brain. I think I cut the comic out, but I can’t find it, and I’ve now spent about an hour searching for a picture of it online, but alas, have come up empty handed. (D’oh! I KNEW I should’ve spent the $$ to put it on a T-shirt or coffee mug!)
 It was one of the comics where Bucky the Katt was sharing his great and vast worldly wisdom, and he declared this memorable, inalienable truth:
“You can wordify anything if you just verb it.”
 Bucky’s meow-usings ended up being Nostradamus-like, as evidenced by a rad article I read on VisualThesaurus.com last month by “Sparrow,” a “pundit poet” with a keen eye on the languaging culture:
An excerpt for ya:
CEO-talk is big on verbifying: “I’m almost ready to greenlight the Douglas project”; “The Board will be conferencing Tuesday”; “We may have to outsource some of the tech work.” One feels that the immense power of the CEO can bend nouns into verbs, the way Superman bends iron bars.
What can YOU verbify today, this month, or this year to become part of the collective culture? An idea? A signature product? A service? Think about it - it’s yours to invent.
Allen and I unwittingly did it by saying “A-Ha Yourself!” to anyone who will listen. Now it’s up to us to keep explaining what that means, until it’s as clear to you as it is to us.
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business (and get creative AND effective with your own marketing efforts), sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in All About Content, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | No Comments »
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on Saturday, April 7th, 2007 at 11:46 am and is filed under All About Content, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!".
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April 6th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
You have an idea. A business. A passion. Something to say.
The question is: How important is this to you?
“Well, I have a website/blog/brochure/business card,” you say. And that’s a good thing. You should. They’re all part of your self-marketing efforts. They’re all virtually essential these days. You want to have your information retold, repackaged, and reinvented in various forms, to suit your audience’s content consumption preferences.
So why not take it a step further and turn your singular information, concept, strategy, philosophy, process, or knowledge into an eBook?
Make it interesting. Make it readable. Give it titles and subtitles, sidebars and sass.
Make it easy to download and email.
Share it with people, groups, websites, and associations that would find value in it, or be entertained by it. (Or preferably, both!)
More than anything, make it available…for FREE.
“But, I don’t have time to spend on creating and developing a FREE eBook?!!” you yelp. “Why the heck would I waste my time/energy/billable brain power on that?”
Well, don’t you already?
Don’t you already think about your own passions, ideas, business, systems, or solutions in a fairly obsessive way?
Wouldn’t you like a clean overview of your might and mission to hand off to prospects, fans, clients, consumers, strategic partners, website visitors, email recipients, and accidental tourists so they could sample your wares? Experience your voice and style? Scan over your offerings? Dig into your ideas? Benefit from your expert status?
Essentially, consume a premeditated, decently configured version of YOU?
What’s more, wouldn’t it be valuable to YOU to put your fleeting thoughts and down-the-rabbit-hole analyses into some semblance of order and refined context?
Hey - we’re talking a free eBook here. It doesn’t have to be a $20,000 project. Make it neat. Format it nicely. If you can get a designer to help it look good, that’s a plus, but if that’s not possible right now, let it go.
Most importantly - HAVE SOMEONE PROOFREAD IT so you don’t embarrass yourself, or worse, lose business because of grammar, spelling, or blatant nonsensical communication skills.
If you still don’t think it’s worth your while, check out what a free eBook did for marketing messiah Seth Godin. (Seth even has a simple “How-to” on the subject on a Squidoo lens, here, in addition to downloadable examples of his own free eBooks.)
Don’t make it harder than it is. If you’ve just got 10 pages, turn it into a Special Report or White Paper. You can always expand or add to it over time.
Bottom line: People can’t learn to know and love you - your products, services, passion, advice, know-how, brilliance, ideas, insights, offerings, deliverables, voice, style, personality, vision, business, unique promise of value, philosophies, etc. - if you don’t give them anything to know and love.
 For a stellar example of a useful, informative FREE Special Report that generated more than $100,000 in new client revenue in less than two months and took about two weeks to create, check out the “The Secret to Making Your Business GO NUTS in 2007!” 18-pager we created with Acorn Creative. It’s really good stuff!!!
Posted in All About Content, Fun With Marketing, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | No Comments »
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February 19th, 2007 by Lani and Allen
If you’ve never heard of “Squidoo,” or the “lenses” you can build there, no worries. Until last week, we were clueless about it too. But here’s why it’s worth knowing about…
The brainchild of marketing maven Seth Godin, “Squidoo’s goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search.” Their words. Acorn Creative’s Kevin Skarritt puts it this way: “It’s like MySpace, but for ideas.”
Basically, you can sign up for a free account on Squidoo, and create a mini-website (called a “lens”) there. We just did our first a few days ago! Of course, you may be asking yourself: “Umm, Lani & Allen - exactly why should I bother with Squidoo?” Four quick reasons:
- Share your knowledge.
- Build credibility in your niche.
- Increase your traffic and search rankings.
- Earn money.
Now, since we only started a few days ago, we have the barest of toeholds in Squidoo. So of those four reasons, we’ll benefit from #3 even if we do nothing else. Why? Because now a very popular website has links on it that lead to our website and blog, which will lead to higher search engine rankings for us.
And it only took about an hour to look at the site’s FAQs and build that first template-based lens. Now, if you’re not sure if it’s for you, just read the answer to Question #5 on the FAQs, “Who Should Build a Lens?”
And if you find yourself on their list of 10 types of people who should have a lens, then go for it!
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business (and delight you with some copywriting zing), sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | 1 Comment »
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January 26th, 2007 by Lani and Allen
It’s funny how the little things in life can hijack your brain.
We started off by being mildly intrigued by Mack Collier’s weekly “Top 25 Marketing Blogs” list a few months ago.
The intrigue morphed into energetic spectating: “Who’s up? Who’s down? Who’s new? Who fell off the wagon?” And now, today, we’ve finally admitted that this list is no longer a spectator sport. We want to PLAY on it!
We want to be with the popular kids! We want in the secret circle! We want validation! Proof! Pizza! (Okay, we’re both just hungry right now, but you know what we mean.)
Just this morning, we have told Mack we will use getting on his exclusive list as the motivational marker to FINALLY take our long-overdue trip to Montreal to see what the French Canadians are up to. (We’ve wanted to go Canuck ever since we moved to NH three years ago, we just keep putting it off.)
So thanks, Mack. You’ve become integral in our personal and professional goal setting strategies. Funny how we solo-preneurs can choose to advance our business in the most unconventional and seemingly arbitrary ways. It’s a perk, we tell ya!
Interested in learning new ways to deliver YOUR ideas, insights, and content to the masses? Sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in Fun With Marketing, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | 1 Comment »
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January 24th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
Okay, this is slightly incestuous, but I had to give a “blod” (that’s a “blog nod”) to my friend and biz associate, Kevin Skarritt.
As I type - and my feverish 4-year-old son is leaning against me in his oozy delirium - Kevin and Allen are creating #2 of FOUR amazing information products that comprise our “Business Breakout 2007” package, available to the public on January 31st! (If you want to find out more - and even get a special deal! - on this exceptional collection of information, go to www.GoNutsin2007.com, sign up for the free special report, and take a look at the “hidden” page on the other side. You don’t want to miss it!)
Despite the fact that he and Allen were burning the midnight oil last night, Kevin took a moment to blog about his post-recording buzz…and say really nice things about us in the process, such as…
This is what Allen and his business partner (and lovely wife) teach to all of their clients. How to create “bold insight and joy-filled action” in your business! They call it “A-Ha-ing” yourself.
If this is how a business owner can feel after a 17 hour day, then COUNT ME IN EVERY DAY. Well, not for the 17 hour part. You know what I mean! Have you A-Ha’d yourself lately??
Since “A-Ha-ing Yourself” is more of an experience than an easy-to-explain concept, this blog entry is a kind and wonderful gift to us. It shows us - and Kevin’s blog readers - we deliver value, we’ve got something special to offer ultra-talented entrepreneurs and business professionals, and perhaps most importantly, that the “A-Ha-ing Yourself” process is understood, appreciated, and adored by those who have experienced it.
Thanks, Kev. You da BOMB, baby!
(And not to be a nag, but do you think I could have my husband home before tomorrow this time?)
Want to increase the number of “A-Has” you have in YOUR life and business? Sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
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