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POPS7 Things that Will Make You a Better Coach I’m always on the lookout for ideas that will make me a better coach. Here are seven ideas that I’ve gathered over time. Some of them will surprise you, I hope: 1. Take a vacation. Coaches (like many other people) are overworked. A vacation puts everything aside for a while and allows you to enjoy yourself. And your clients’ problems will percolate in your subconscious while you’re tanning on the beach.
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POPSBad Publicity On The Web – Part 2 Bad publicity on the web is a type of online marketing. It’s a type of marketing by a dissatisfied customer against you! In the last post, Bad Publicity On the Web – Part 1, I talked about some ways to deal with negative feedback in sites like Ebay, Amazon, Guru, and others. But there are two other types of negative publicity you can get which are harder to deal with: Scam reporting sites and hate sites.
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POPSThe Key To More Business I don’t know a single business that doesn’t want more customers. Sure, there might be brief seasons in your business when you think "I just can’t handle any more customers right now" but those seasons pass and, overall, the need for customers continues. This need for customers can come from the same set of customers (in other words, get your current customers to buy more from you) or from new customers...
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POPSWhen Clients Have Poisonous Peers I am currently coaching a business owner who works hard in her business and has been successful in the past. She came to me because her business had started to decline and she wasn’t sure why. We explored a number of things and, in every case, she had been doing the right things for a while then everything went downhill at once: Her offerings dramatically diminished in quality. Her marketing diminished in effectiveness and quantity. Her service was no longer stellar. We slowly worked backwards from her current lack of success to where things started to fall off of the cliff. And I’m sorry to report that the reason stems from a single person.
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POPSBad Publicity On The Web – Part 1 Bad publicity on the web is a type of "marketing". It’s marketing by other people to convince your prospects to shop somewhere else. But it’s not necessarily out of our control. Recently, I was online shopping for a hotel for a trip. I found one and read the comments of people who had stayed there.
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POPS8 Scary Things That Entrepreneurs Do With Halloween nearly here, there are ghosts and jack-o-lanterns on our minds. (And probably some candy on our minds, too). So, in celebration of this scary day, I’ve listed 10 scary things that entrepreneurs do that could destroy their businesses:
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POPSHow To Get More People Linking To Your Site In the world of online marketing, getting people to link to your website is an important marketing strategy. Google changed the rules with this idea when they included in their search algorithm that every link to your website is a vote for your website. Since then, website owners have wondered how to get more links to their website so they can create a higher PageRank and thus appear higher in search rankings.
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POPSCoaching Success: Time Lags For brand new coaches who find that there might be long periods of quiet between one client and another, one of the best things you can do is identify your time lags. I did this early in my career (it was unintentional, I confess, but it turned out to be a "happy accident" and I now recommend it to coaches). By "time lag" I mean...
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POPSWhat’s Your Coaching Style? Each one of us is unique: Our personalities, experience, education, and successes all contribute to give us a coaching style. What’s yours? I’ve given some thought to some of the more prominent coaching styles I’ve seen and have listed them here. It’s not an exhaustive list, nor have I tried to provide a balanced look of good points and bad points. These are a collection of observations. It’s helpful to gaze into the mirror occasionally and...
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POPSBack to Basics: Linking With HTML Code I realize that there are a lot of tools and resources out there that free up the average person from having to know a lot of html code. There is website design software that allows users to drag and drop WYSIWIG elements while the coding it done automatically in the background. Or, you can hire a web designer to design your site for you. But once in a while you need to know just a wee little bit of html code, particularly in the area of using html to create links...
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POPSBusiness Lessons Learned From An Inspiring Story I like to read about business success stories and then draw lessons from them to apply to my own business and to share with others. Recently, I read about an entrepreneur in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. You can read about the business owner and his invention here but I’ll summarize the article below and draw out a few lessons that you can apply to your business.
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POPSDo Cheap Articles Work? In my research into online marketing techniques I’ve noticed (we’ve ALL noticed) that there are two kinds of online articles. There are the articles which make sense and have a beginning, middle, and end; and, there are articles which seem to have little purpose beyond being keyword stuffed. Their sentences look something like this: "Are you curious about internet marketing? Many people are curious about internet marketing and those who want to know more about internet marketing can find internet marketing sites online simply by searching for ‘internet marketing’."
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POPSWho Is Sitting Across the Table from You? So you’re thinking about lunch. You’re wondering who to get a quick bite to eat with. You call up your friend (who happens to be another coach) and you go out. You talk about clients. You enjoy your lunch because you share the same problems and you envision the same opportunities. Perhaps it’s time to revisit who you eat lunch with...
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POPSThe Tipping Point To Acquire New Clients In the journey that a prospect takes towards becoming a customer, they are in control and receive free information to help them make a decision. But there comes a point in this timeline when the prospect hands over their money to you, the coach, and entrusts you to do your job and deliver what you say you are going to deliver. I call this the tipping point. The point where a prospect tips into being a client. It’s a difficult decision to make. Just think about the last time you made a major purchase like a house or a car. House hunting or car shopping was fun: You saw new things and you dreamed about the possibilities. But it felt like there was an invisible hand holding you back from handing over your cash!
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POPSSix Tips to Create Better Press Releases Press releases are still among the best ways to generate attention and traffic online. Articles are meant to be unbiased, knowledgeable content to position you as an expert and advertising is mean to be totally biased content to position you as the right choice for buyers, press releases fall nicely in the middle. On the one hand, they are more biased and "you-focused" than articles should be; on the other hand, they are more approachable than advertising and potentially more credible (because they aren’t quite as blatant as advertising).
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POPSPresenting Like a Pro It’s a shame that public speaking is one of the biggest fears people face, especially since it’s almost a requirement for many small business owners. Entrepreneurs need to make presentations from time to time and, when they do, they need to push beyond their fear and capture the audience’s attention: Presentations might be made to make sales, to acquire investors, to raise awareness, to position your brand, or to deliver your product or service to your customer.
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POPSDo You Work In Your Business or On Your Business? Michael E. Gerber developed the E-Myth strategy for small business. There are a number of useful ideas and tools that he espouses in his E-Myth books but one of the ones that stuck the most with me is the simple phrase: Work on your business not in your business
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POPSCoaches on Coaching This is a great video about coaching. It’s actually just a 3 minute teaser for a much longer (paid) coaching video but it’s still a fantastic synopsis about what coaching is from different perspectives. But it’s not just a video for beginner coaches: I’m a coach and every time I watch this I think "hey, that’s a great way to think about coaching". It gives me a new perspective and "refreshes" my thinking on what my opportunities are with my clients.
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POPSEmployee Training Employee surveys often reveal that they rate the quality and enjoyment of their jobs on more than just the dollar figure on their paycheck. Obviously, that’s an important part of any employment equation but it’s not the only thing and business owners are consistently surprised when one survey after another reveals that training is high up on the list of factors that make an employee love their job.
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POPSA Place for Professional Coaches Professional-Coaches.com is a place for professional coaches to find and share tips, information, resources, strategies, and even just casual exchanges.
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POPSGenerate More Customer Interaction with Google Forms One way for businesses to get more customers to buy is to generate more interaction on their website and to help them create customized products and services. Imagine how a new customer would respond when you contact them to deliver a solution that is already partially custom-tailored to their situation.
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POPSFeeling Scatter-Brained? Small business owners have a lot to do and the relentless forward march of time can be stressful. It’s hard to get everything done that you’d like to get done. (Heck, it’s hard to get everything done that you need to get done). You schedule, you prioritize, you delegate, but it still is an overwhelming flood of work. The solution is simple...
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POPSAgility: The Secret To Success Small businesses have an inherent and often unrealized skill: agility. They can bend and move quickly, according to market demands. However, entrepreneurs don’t realize it because they’re often wrapped up in their product or service or brand development. But when you work with larger companies, that’s when you begin to realize just how agile smaller businesses are.
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POPSMy Online Marketing Bookmarks Over the years that I’ve been doing online marketing, I’ve found several sites that have proven to be useful for a number of reasons. And I’ve bookmarked them. Here they are, for your convenience.
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POPSTime Management Tools What you’ll notice about this list is that these solutions aren’t necessarily all about plunking a task into a spot on the calendar. Some are tied more closely to the calendar while others are more project-oriented. Some just need to keep basic lists while others need a really robust system with charts and calendars and lists.
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POPSYour Most Profitable Customer Segment Quick, name the most profitable segment of customers in your business. Most business owners who answer this question will usually answer based on a demographic segmentation. For example, they might say "married women, aged 20 to 40". Knowing these segments is helpful. But if your answer was like one of those answers, you’re missing out on a slightly narrower and even more profitable segment!
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POPSManaging Your Online Identity Like Hansel and Gretel, everywhere we go we leave breadcrumbs about ourselves in the form of profiles, bios, information and data. There’s the website and the blog that we all have. And we’re familiar with our profile page on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and other similar sites. There are other sites that can gather info on you and your business crawling the web for links. Every article we publish online has a bio which is a breadcrumb. Every link we message we leave in a forum is a breadcrumb. Every tweet we post is a breadcrumb. When we add all of these together, will people find you? And what will they think?
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POPSWhy I Don't Market My Business Locally Some people market their businesses locally. And a new trend toward "hyperlocal" business is increasing in popularity, as if we are like prodigal entrepreneurs who journeyed far and wide and then returned to the family in the end. But let me give you a devil’s advocate view of local marketing; the reasons I don’t market my business locally.
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POPSWhy the "Same Old Thing" is a Good Thing Do you want to make more money in your business? Do you want to drive down expenses? Do you want to work a little less so you have more time for family? The answer to achieving these things just might surprise you: The answer is that you need to do the same old thing.
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POPS5 Questions to Ask Your Customers Our clients often find that they are not achieving the success they want on their own so they come to us for assistance. Our job, then, is to understand what they want to achieve and to help them. To do this, we need to move past the surface issues and get to the real root causes of the issues. Here are some questions to help you do that.
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POPSHelpful Online Marketing Resources This is a list of useful online marketing resources that you might find helpful. We have. They include the most famous, most helpful internet marketing resources around.
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POPSShould I have a newsletter? Emailed newsletters (sometimes called autoresponders or ezines, but which we’ll just call "newsletters" here) offer a number of advantages and disadvantages and we’ll talk about them in this blog so that you can make an informed decision:
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POPSBetter Business Partnering As a business owner you can only do so much on your own. You bring a set of skills to the table and, admittedly, there are skills that you probably don’t have. There's a very valuable option to you can take to accomplish great things. Create a win-win situation...
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POPSWhat is your 'ultimate business success'? Is the vision you have for your ultimate business success achievable through the steps you’re taking now? In some ways, this entire "staircase" exercise is an exit strategy exercise but it involves a greater emphasis on the steps you need to take today to get there.
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POPSThe Missing Ingredient: Your List You're working hard to drive traffic to your site. You set up hubs everywhere. You're getting traffic. But are you only giving them 2 options instead of 3, a most vital option? Are you losing your prospects or getting permission from them to market to them later?
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POPSGet More Done...Mad Scientist Style! Some days, when you look at your schedule, you probably think that an extra pair of hands would be helpful. Unless you’re a mad scientist working in your mountaintop laboratory, it’s not likely that you’ll be able to attach an extra pair of hands and arms from your shoulders any time soon. You need...
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