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0:12 – What are your reflections for 2012?
1:28 – Don’t be afraid of making mistakes
3:03 – Are you doing your marketing in a manual way?
5:06 – Two tips to automate your marketing
Hi, Fiona Soutter here from Super Savvy Business with this week’s Business News update.
0:12 – What are your reflections for 2012?
With Christmas fast approaching, I’m imagining that many of you are planning to have a little bit of time off, a bit of R & R. And this is a perfect opportunity to really have that moment, just to sit back and reflect on 2012; specifically, how 2012 has gone for your business and how it’s gone in your online marketing strategies.
Many of you, I’m sure, are familiar with or have already read Stephen Covey’s book, ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ – in that story there is a tale about the two sawmen. There is one that spends a lot of time, he doesn’t stop and he saw and saws all day, but eventually, his saw goes blunt. However, there is another sawman who spends his time stopping to sharpen his saw, to ensure that he doesn’t get stuck, he doesn’t those roadblocks.
So perhaps, to make it an analogy, of course, spend some time over the Christmas <–> New Year break having that reflection time and filling your mind with some strategy: perhaps read some books or go back on some notes, or just do a little bit to see what you can do to move ahead next year and to be more strategic in the way that you approach your online marketing.
1:28 – Don’t be afraid of making mistakes
Now, speaking of books, I am an avid reader of books and I often like to share them with my community. This is one book that I read this year (‘It’s not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want To Be’, by Paul Arden), it is a very, very easy read, but it is full of so many beautiful gems. Here’s an example of one, the title is: ‘The person who doesn’t make mistakes is unlikely to make anything’:
“Benjamin Franklin said, ‘I haven’t failed; I have had 10,000 ideas that didn’t work’. and Thomas Edison said, ‘Of the 200 light bulbs that didn’t work, every failure told me something that I was able to incorporate in the next attempt’.”
I think that these particular quotes are very, very key for us as business owners. So often we feel paralysed and don’t make a move because we are scared of failing and making a mistake. But if you look at the majority of successful entrepreneurs and some of the biggest entrepreneurs around the world, many of them have had big failures; some of them have even gone bankrupt. But they can rebuild their business and build it even stronger again, because they have learned from those mistakes.
Another little gem that I love from this book has the title, ‘Don’t cover your ideas’. The author talks about is that ‘somehow the more you give away, the more that comes back to you. Ideas are open knowledge’ and ‘don’t claim ownership’. This really does lead into my next part of this business news update, which is all about a strategic shift in your thinking when it comes to your marketing.
3:03 – Are you doing your marketing in a manual way?
So, what I’d like to propose to you is: Are you doing your marketing in a manual way?
That means networking, one-to-one meetings, cold calling – all of those sorts of things. That could be really highly effective and can give you a high conversion rate, but it isn’t necessarily the most effective way to do your marketing simply because it is not scalable and it also takes up a lot of your time.
So the shift I’d like to talk to you about is: Can you move some of your marketing from manual marketing to automated marketing?
A perfect example of this comes from Robert Kiyosaki’s ‘Cashflow Quadrant’ book. In there, there is a story of two men who want to provide water for a village that didn’t have any. The first man got to the task straight away. He started filling buckets with water and carrying the buckets of water from the water source to the village. He started making money straight away. However, the other man went away and he did some planning and raised some capital and eventually after quite some time, he ended up building a pipeline.
Now, what was the moral to this story? Well, this pipeline then delivered water in a consistent and reliable fashion that was scalable. You see, the man with the buckets… there was only so much he could do: manually going back and forth, back and forth with the buckets of water.
So, if we draw this across to you and your marketing, what can you do to in your marketing with the online space to automate it so that you are not the one going backwards and forwards all the time?
5:06 – Two tips to automate your marketing
The beauty of this is that your marketing then becomes leveraged, scalable and frees you up to do more time doing what you want to do or, more importantly as a business owner, more time doing what you really should be doing in your business, because you are not getting caught up doing manual tasks.
Now, how can you automate your marketing?
There are some very simple strategies that I teach through the Savvy Mastermind program with my private clients and we are actually doing a whole training series on this. When it comes down to is using tools such as autoresponders (some of the autoresponders that I recommend are Aweber or if you are in a larger business, perhaps Office AutoPilot).
And when used properly, these tools allow you, in combination with the proper marketing strategy, to
attract customers, to capture their details and then to educate them. Once you’ve educated them you can warm them up and then show them that you are the right person to do business with. And that’s when you upgrade them into actually buying something or doing some business with you.
That brings us to the end of this week’s business Word Of the Week from Super Savvy Business. I’ve mentioned 3 books in this update:
- The first one was Stephen Covey’s ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’
- The next one is ‘It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be’, by Paul Arden, a very, very, good read – in fact, all of my mastermind clients are going to be receiving this as a gift for Christmas because I absolutely love it; there’s lots of great learning in it.
- And finally, the last book which I mentioned was Robert Kiyosaki’s ‘Cashflow Quadrant’
If you haven’t read any of these books, I suggest that you take the time to get a copy of them and you’ll learn so many wonderful ideas to implement within your business.
My name is Fiona Soutter from Super Savvy Business and we’ll see you in next week’s business Word Of the Week update.