You MUST develop the marketing skill.

Folks, I have met lots of nice, honest people who are very, very good at what they do. Yet time and time again, before I’ve had a chance to realize it and intervene or help, they’ve gone out of business for lack of clients. Why the heck does this happen?

For the average business start-up they spend 60% of their time doing admin work, 30% of their time making good on their business promise and only 10% on marketing. This is upside-down. Most businesses and business owners should spend over 50% of their time rainmaking and have delegation and management systems to download to.

It starts with marketing. I don’t know what it is, but I suspect not knowing how to pull it all together or what to do next has something to do with it.

Do you consider marketing your business’ weak point? Do you say to yourself “I am not a marketer”? I will tell you right now, this is hogwash and you should stop telling yourself that immediately, before you start to believe it. Small business marketing isn’t voodoo. It is a LEARNABLE skill that, like any other, you can teach yourself, practice and develop. The only constraint is time and effort to gain the knowledge in an efficient and effective manner.

This is where everyone gets tripped up. It takes a lot of work for the average small business owner to to sift through he
NUMEROUS sources of marketing information, make sense of it all and apply it to their businesses.

So, I’ve been hard at work making this super simple for you. I want to help you become a small business marketing master and I am willing to show you how.

In just 12 sessions with my new LIVE training program “The Marketing for Real Results Fundamentals Bootcamp”, you will LEARN the marketing skill in the most efficient and effective way possible. I’ll show you how to confidently market your business so that you can always feel in control. When you are done, never again will you think “marketing” and feel that lump in your throat.

Here are some of the things we will learn:

• How to create a powerful marketing message that makes people WANT do business with you
• How to identify and focus on your natural market – those who REALLY want what you’ve got
• How to communicate what makes you awesome, so your clients only want to do business with YOU
• What you MUST know about your competition to make intelligent strategic marketing decisions
• How to use positioning and branding to increase customer confidence
• What NOT to say in an elevator speech, and what to INCLUDE so that it brings in MORE leads
• What you MUST include for your marketing for your customers to BUY
• How to track results so your can SPEND LESS and GET MORE out of your marketing dollar
• Which are The RIGHT technology tools to make life easier
• How to use Direct Marketing to DRAMATICALLY increase your business
• How to Educate your Leads and Turn them into Clients with less EFFORT
• How to Advertise like a PRO
• How to create a simple, don’t-bog-me-down, Marketing Plan, so you ALWAYS know what to do next

Best of all, when you sign up, you get my Special “Recover your Money” Bonus: ‘Business Generator Email/Letter Template’ (a $99.95 value). for FREE.Why? Because I want you to recover your tuition quickly, I will give all participants my surefire, business generation email/letter template in the very FIRST session. This template is something I use with small business owners to create QUICK results with LITTLE effort. This template has brought in $830, $1670, $2140 and in some cases over $4000 worth of business within a few days. This will be yours, FREE, when you attend your first session.

The workshops start on November 4th and there are limited seats to ensure you all get the attention you need.

Get all the details here >>>
http://m4rr.com/fundamentals

P.S. Hurry, because seats are limited to 15, no more!

5 Simple and Economical steps to Make an Impact without Breaking the Bank

For many small businesses, it may seem futile to try and compete against heavy-hitting corporations with seemingly bottomless marketing budgets. So how do you resonate with your target market without shelling out big bucks? Guerrilla marketers know that instead of money, we can invest time, energy and creativity and beat out the big boys and their budgets.

Here is a 5-step easy, economical way to get the word out that won’t break your small business marketing budget:

•    Go grassroots. Hitting the pavement and making personal connections can go a long way toward establishing a name for yourself and getting word-of-mouth flowing. The key here is to identify who you will be spending your time on. Who is an influencer of what you sell? Who recommends or nixes its purchase? A wedding cake business better be spending its time on brides-to-be because they are usually the key decision-maker of this purchase. An innovative baby-carrier should be speaking straight to new moms.

•    Go where your market is, front and center. If you’re trying to drum up clients for your wedding cake business, visit the shops of the local bridal district, distributing fliers to sellers of formal wear, stationery, flowers, and more. Heralding the benefits of an innovative new baby carrier? Approach moms at the mall who appear frazzled by the squirming infant in their arms.

•    Fine-tune your message. For effective marketing collateral, content is key. Take the time to craft an attention-getting, value-adding message that will resonate with your target audience. A tepid or passive message is uninspiring and won’t be remembered and your results will reflect this. Create a marketing piece that delivers all the right messages and get it into the hands of the right people.

•    Let them experience it. If you’ve got something good, giving it away can lead to a huge boon for your business. When a wedding cake business took out a table at the mall on Saturday, it brought in its biggest, most beautiful cake with a big clock that said the cake will be cut and served at precisely 1:30pm. Hordes of people stuck around or came back to eat some cake and take away a brochure (which naturally included the picture of the cake). The baby carrier company let women try their product for an hour while shopping. Many cam back after an hour to buy it. Both companies earned back their investment that day. A strategic giveaway can often cost less than an expensive marketing campaign and yield just as positive results.

•    Follow-up. People don’t necessary act on their own. You have to remind them you exist. The tables surrounding the cake had lots of “return slips” and pencils. To get a marketing kit, you had to fill out a paper. If you did, you are probably more interested that just getting a free piece of cake. The company assiduously followed up on these prospects and found them to be very qualified and closed a lot of business.

What is your best tip for competing with the big boys? Let me know below!

Why Your Business Needs a Blog

Five years ago, every business had a website. These days, it seems every business has a blog. Typically written in a journal-style format, these interactive articles are popping up all over the Internet, with more than 40 million blogs currently in existence. No industry is exempt—from lawyers debating the latest intellectual property laws to candle merchants raving about the benefits of aromatherapy,we’ve got ‘em all. In fact, you are likely reading this on my my small business marketing blog, right now.

Why are blogs so popular?

The answer is content, content, and more content. People love finding the exact information they are looking for and blogs, especially well-targeted blogs, provide it.

When they’re done right, blogs offer a valuable benefit to the reader. A well-researched, well-written blog article should provide your readers with informative, relevant, and entertaining content that helps them make more confident buying decisions. But what can it do for you and your business?

• Creates a sense of community. Many blogs offer readers the option to comment on the content presented, encouraging interaction and increasing the reader’s emotional investment in the website. This ongoing dialogue increases the chances of repeat visits to your site.
• Gives your business a personality. Any website can peddle pet care products. But when you supplement them with useful articles on grooming, bathing, and personal anecdotes about your own animals, you’ll be more likely to create a connection with customers and gain an edge over the competition.
• Boosts organic search traffic. By its very nature, a blog is a dynamic and constantly changing entity, making your site more appealing to the Yahoos and Googles of the world. By including strategic keywords and internal and external linking, you’ll increase the odds that your site will earn higher rankings in search engine results, increasing your flow of web traffic.
• Requires a very low cost investment. With the plethora of free blogging tools, such as WordPress and BlogSpot, getting a blog engine up and running is as easy as a few clicks. Publishing articles won’t cost you a dime, although you will have to invest the time required to write the content. (Avoid copying text verbatim from other sites, as this can potentially cause your site to be flagged and delisted by search engines.)

If you’ve got the time and the inclination, adding a blog to your website can be a great way to engage your customers, establish a public face and personality for your business, and provide a platform for promoting featured products and services that are very relevant to your readers. And you don’t have to be a techie to take part—with today’s user-friendly applications, anyone can become a blogging expert within minutes.

How do I start blogging?

Interested in blogging? I recommend Wordpress as a blogging platform. This is what I use for my blogs. It is incredibly flexible and has a very large community of users who are constantly making it better. Speak to your web designer about integrating a blog into your existing website. Or, contact us and we’ll recommend one of our “M4RR Approved” partners, who are carefully selected for the quality of their work, their professionalism, and their marketing chops (the latter is surprisingly hard to find in a provider sometimes).

Blogging is big commitment. At least one a week, or more, you have to add fresh content. If you have never blogged before, it can be hard to get yourself going and into the habit. It’s kind of like exercise. The good news is that it does get easier as time goes on! If you have any doubts about your ability to keep blogging on a consistent basis, then I recommend you start working with the simple, free, hosted version of Wordpress found at Wordpress.com. Unlike its brother Wordpress.org, which you would install and integrate into your current hosting service, Wordpress.com is hosted by the good folks over at Wordpress and you don’t need a hosting account or any techie knowledge to start. You can be up an running within minutes.

The downside to all this convenience is that you won’t enjoy the same flexibility and benefits of a self-hosted version. For one, you won’t have complete control of its look and feel — you will have to choose one of the preset “themes” from the library. Also, the day you decide to move to your own blog (and trust me, that day will come), you will probably sacrifice some of the organic search traffic you developed with your Wordpress.com site. Speak to a really sharp web professional, or even better an SEO specialist, to help you minimize this impact.

As with most marketing tactics, the key now is to understand how it fits with your overall marketing stategy and then take action! If you are motivated to begin, talk about it or ask us a question below. If you have a blog, share it below. Happy blogging!

Yet another small business marketing resource?

Yes, I know what you are thinking. There are plenty of small business marketing resources that you don’t read, so why read this one?

Fair question.

To start with, in reading many other marketing resources I get the sense of being lost and of not being able to make heads or tails of the mass of info on the site. It almost felt like it had no beginning and no end, just a bunch of info thrown at me and leaving me to my own devices to decipher. This made me think that readers would embrace a a fresh, simple, inviting and organized site.

Next, I always thought that some of the marketing resources out there at best insult the intelligence of the reader,at worse are pure garbage. A so-called “marketing guru” hawks a entire website and marketing program centered around a topic that could have been covered in a few pages of text but opts to stretch it with useless filler. Enough! There is a need for a marketing blog for smart people written by people who assumes a smart readership. I’m not talking business degree smart, I’m taking “I own a business” smart. If you’re sharp enough to start and run a business, you don’t deserve to be made into a fool by marketing shysters.

But don’t take my word for it. Give us a try for about a month. Get our free download and sample our regular e-zine. Check out some articles or blog posts and see for yourselves. I hope you enjoy your stay.