Category Archives for "Passion Driven Business Strategies"
You have heard the saying, “Never give up”, many times in your life. You have heard the saying, “Winners never quit”. So when you begin to have thoughts about quitting your job or closing your business you may get pangs of guilt coming at you from yourself and those around you. There is a stigma that quitting is what losers do.
But what if we don’t put the label of “quitting” on the action? Perhaps we are on a journey and now your path is leading you in another direction. Or maybe you want to change your mind. Maybe you thought this was what you were destined to do but now are having second thoughts. Does that make you a loser? Does that make you a quitter?
For instance, you might be a nurse. You became a nurse because you love helping people. You love nurturing and taking care of people. You like to help people heal from injuries and traumatic diseases. Plus, the pay is not bad. The shifts are long but you can work with more flexibility than many other careers. Think back to why you became a nurse. Now, fast forward to your current feelings. You may now feel burned out. Your cup is empty and there is no time to refill it. You are getting fatigued working long shifts and graveyard shifts or swing shifts. You end up getting 3 hours of sleep on those days. We can go on and on…
You may be at the crossroads. You still want to help people. You still want to assist in their healing. You still love to nurture and take care of people. The vehicle just needs to change. There is nothing wrong and everything right with that. You are not quitting. You are just changing vehicles.
In this time it is also very normal to change careers at least 3 times in our working lives because we are living longer, it is easier to learn to work in another field or career and our lifestyles change to fit our next path.
You might be a Real Estate agent who is wondering if showing and selling houses is really what you are being called to do. Perhaps you became a real estate agent because you enjoyed being with people, you enjoyed the smile on a new family’s face when they purchase their first home, or maybe you got into real estate so that you could invest in properties to build wealth for you and your family. Maybe you became a real estate agent because you like to serve others, help others, make a difference in their lives.
But now you may be wondering… while you love to serve others you also have bills to pay. Maybe you are not making the amount of income you need to make to support your family. And may be you are suffering from burn out because you have been burning the candle from both ends, not delegating your tasks, not creating systems that can be delegated, and not taking right action to reach your financial goals.
I have seen agents who are miserable, barely making enough to pay their bills, struggling with lead generation and getting enough business and yet, they tend to defend their decision to stay in real estate because of the stigma connected to quitting real estate. After all, being altruistic is something you want to be admired for. Being in real estate is not a career but a business. The mistake I see most often is agents who don’t treat their businesses like businesses. They treat it like a job. That will never work out. Employee mentalities don’t work in entrepreneur settings.
Perhaps you are working in corporate America putting in long hours and climbing the “success” ladder. You chose this path as the vehicle to reach security and have a great retirement. However, years into this grind, you start to see you are giving up too much of yourself and time away from your family. Something is going to have to give.
While the 3 of these scenarios are pretty different, what they have in common, is a chosen vehicle and a road to drive that vehicle on.
Now, maybe you have been thinking about how much you would love to start your own business and leave the 9 to 5. Maybe you are passionate about skiing and want to teach skiing instead of selling real estate. Maybe you are a nurse that knows natural healing alternatives and believe starting an online business coaching parents in how to deal with their child who has ADHD naturally is going to be much more rewarding while still fulfilling your desire to nurture and help others.
As long as you are changing the vehicle on the path you want to be on, that is perfectly fine. I have been hired by real estate agents, business owners and corporate employees to help them get more business only to discover they are not passionate about their business at all and they wish they could be doing something else. If your heart is not into it, the drive and tenacity you need to succeed will not manifest for you.
Interested in having a discovery session to go through your options? If you are contemplating changing horses ( vehicles) the best thing you can do is get an objective opinion and expertise to help assist you to make sure you are making the right decision.
Schedule your session today!
[CPABC_APPOINTMENT_CALENDAR calendar=”1″]Survey – What do you need to know now- Digital Marketing Strategies
We get so many requests for different topics that marketers, REALTORS®, entrepreneurs, small business owners need to learn.
So far on the survey the requests are:
Go here to take my survey now: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PZQYQGL
Please fill in the top 5 things you want to learn about in the order of importance to YOU.
I will be collecting the survey responses and putting the requests in order of the most popular request to the least. They are all important!
Then I will share with you how I will create your courses!
[bctt tweet=”Digital Marketing Survey: What do you want to learn about marketing online?”]It can be anything from newbies to advanced. What matters is you being able to get the information honestly and without a bunch of shiny objects so you can move forward with your marketing online.
In this article I am going to go over the what is working now when creating content. I will share with you what we are doing to get our content to rank quickly and get the Google bots to crawl our site often and index it.
Creating content should be at the top of your list of marketing priorities. Content creation has always been important. But since the Panda update which is in a constant roll out content creation has never been more important.
Google loves not just fresh content but also frequently updated content and also long content. You can also curate content with your added commentary and your own images.
Longer content is the new metric. We used to be able to write 300 to 500 word posts and they would fly to the top of the SERPS. That is changing. Also, searching behavior changes over time. Looking for answers to our questions is taking on a new meaning in search. We want to know in depth answers and how to’s not just a gloss over.
41% of businesses struggle with creating enough content according to Contently.
Our Wellington Chiropractor is on page one for many chiropractor terms but he was not on page one for Wellington Acupuncture which is another part of his practice.
Since we already have links going to his main website for chiropractic terms and I did not want to start a niche website just for acupuncture we decided to test out Google’s apparent love for long page content of over 2000 words.
I named a main page instead of a post the acupuncture terms that we want to rank for. Then I did the research for acupuncture and wrote over 3000 words of content on this page: Wellington Acupuncture Treatments. I added alt tagged imaged throughout the content for visual appeal, added bullets and sub-titles so readers can easily scan the content.
What Google research has found is that people who are really studying, researching, learning are staying on long content pages. Yes, they are still skimming and scanning but they are staying longer and tend to read more than average if the topic is relevant to their search.
So in this case, someone searching for information about whether they want to get acupuncture treatments or not is going to want to know everything about acupuncture in order to make a decision to call for an appointment or not.
Within 3 hours of publishing the page he was on page one for several geo tagged terms revolving around acupuncture. The phone is already ringing with patients who want to book acupuncture appointments.
The added benefit to writing long form content of over 2000 words is you can get an extra indexing spot in Google’s “in-depth” article index. That is something your competitors are most likely NOT doing!
It takes time and research.
My goal is to write one 2000 - 3000 word article each week.
A solution for you might look like this:
Add images to the page at one time instead of with each section to save time with the exception of your featured image.
You can also publish your content on week 1 and then add to it each week until you have the word count you want to achieve. This way you are only going back into your article to edit it, to save some time.
Personally I like to write my content at one or two sittings. Everyone has their own particular writing structure so follow what is best and most comfortable for yourself.
The biggest tip I can give you about content creation is to write first and edit last. If you suffer from perfection paralysis you need to get over it. Good is good enough. Struggling from sentence to sentence is going to take so long you won’t be able to write 2000 + word articles or blog posts or page content on your website.
Not sure how you are going to write to think of 2000 - 3000 words on one article?
Images will spark your imagination with more content you can write.
We process images way faster than we do text. Humans process images 60,000 times faster than text. That is a lot! Take lots of photos in your niche and also other things that you can use in your posts like:
Research shows that you should have one image for every 350 words of text you write.
You can follow the format I used for the Acupuncture page.
Add a video or a slideshow to your post, article or page for visual appeal and to interest the visual learners and viewers. Get on YouTube now- there is still plenty of room. Engagement on video is growing fast and furious. Don't miss out on this.
Read more about YouTube SEO and Periscope tips here.
Make sure to stay within one main keyword topic and its related keywords and use plenty of semantical terms throughout your content.
Google’s algorithm is smart but not no smart that it can read your mind. You still need to make it clear what topic you are writing about. Another perk to writing long content is that you have more areas and places within your content to sprinkle in your keyword phrases, their related semantical terms and topical relevant textual content.
To this point in this article we are at 625 words of content so far.
Here are some more ways to add more content to add to your article:
This technique also gives a nice visual appeal to your article along with helping you attain more credibility.
"When we talk about "content marketing," we mean the creation of storytelling material that attracts readers, viewers and listeners to a brand. Mashable
Writing in-depth articles which are quality rich and add value are more likely to get shared than short posts. Educating, informing and entertaining; these are the keys to getting your content shared across the social medial platforms.
Add quotes to your content articles, source your quote for credibility.
Answer questions. Make a list of all the questions that your customers, buyers, sellers ask you.
Gather your answers and write articles answering those questions. You don’t really need to create your titles in question format because the algorithms are now smart enough to know what question you are answering.
To write longer content write about more questions and answers.
Instead of the usual Top 3 or Top 5, change the content to Top 20 and Top 25, etc.
To a serious searcher, what do you think they would be more interested in, 3 or 20 things they can learn right now? Also, which one would Google like better?
Since Google is looking for “better” content it is natural that the math adds up to : longer content = better content. We know this is not necessarily true but to a math equation it is.
Check out this graph from SerpIQ from an in-depth study they did:
There is a perk you typically can get from writing longer content: more people tend to share longer content. This helps bring traffic to your site.
Keep a notebook, notes on mac or Trello with a running list of ideas to write about. Some of those you many never write about but the important part is to keep the list and keep on adding to it.
A huge time waster is sitting around trying to think of what to write your next blog post about. You can avoid this by keeping an ongoing list.
Take time aside each day - just 10 minutes will do- to get your idea muscle exercised. I like to keep mine in Trello. Here is a video tutorial playlist I created about using Trello to get organized and more.
Set a goal to come up with 10 ideas in those 10 minutes. 1 idea per minute.
Don’t judge whether they are good ideas or not. Just write them down. Of course some will be good and some will not be. The point is to get into the practice of writing them down.
Speaking of time, choose to write your content when you write the best. Some people write better at night and others early in the morning. Whenever that time is for you is when you set your time aside to write.
Make an appointment with yourself on your calendar to write and then don’t let other distractions get in your way. This is important marketing time. Your writing time should be sacred. Those around you also need to know this is your time to write, stop the interruptions.
You can also add more content by using words people who are seriously searching look up:
Add your keyword to the end of each of those words to create the layout for longer content.
Look at what your competitors are coming up for on the top 10 on Google SERPS in their lists and tip articles and do it better. Google your longtail keywords in Google’s incognito window. Check what content is ranking on the top 10 in the SERPS. Proceed to write a better, more in-depth article about the same topic. You may just outrank the competition using this technique like we did.
Add more detail to your content. Many writers in your space are not adding detail to their content. This can set you apart from the pack and help get you a spot on page one.
Go into detail on every step you write. This alone will add value and more words:).
Back up your claims with verified industry leaders. Most industry leaders publish all kinds of data, survey results and statistics.
Structure your content so that it is easy to read and easy on the eyes.
Before you publish your article make sure to apply the ‘Eye Candy’ test.
Is your article visually appealing?
Don’t make your content a wall of words. That is the fastest way to turn your readers off and they will click right off of your blog or website.
Easy ways to make your content visually appealing:
Some examples of these are throughout this post you are reading.
Make sure your content is:
People who read very fast stay on pages that have about 100 characters per line while those who read slow like to read about 55 characters per line.
Choosing a character count in the middle is best. Some tests show that 66 characters per line is best. Here are some results from some testing: http://webtypography.net/2.1.2
Also, setting your font size to 16 is now optimal. It is much easier to read.
Here are a few tips in capturing the attention of your readers longer:
Ask questions in your content. This causes the reader to hesitate and think on what you wrote.
Add your images and videos to your article or post so they peek “above the fold” encouraging the scroll.
Add down arrows for this same reason. People are curious.
The last step is to sprinkle your content with your long tail keywords and semantics of those longtail keyword phrases. Do this last so as not to stop your creative flow and the intent of your articles.
To learn more about writing with longtail keywords get started with Fast Track SEO.
Finally, make sure your article or blog page or page you are adding the longer content to is valuable to your readers. Make sure it is of high quality and relatable to your niche readers.
You want to write great content that your readers will stay on your page and read, then call you or connect with you to do business with.
By the way, I am now at 2010 words in this article. This is what it looks like to write a post or page or article with 2000 words.
If you would like to take this further ~ Text me to work with me: 561-502-1577
What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Minecraft and ArcadiaCon
Our son loves to play Minecraft. He and his friends get together on Facetime and then go into a Minecraft server to play together.
The other thing these kids all do is watch other people who play Minecraft. They can sit for hours watching their favorite “YouTubers” and Twitch live streamers. I thought this was so strange at first. Then I figured this was better than watching television shows. And now I am amazed at how much money these Youtubers and Streamers make. This is a real business.
This weekend we brought our son to ArcadiaCon which is a two day conference with the famous Minecraft YouTubers and Live Streamers. The highlight of the event was the “Meet and Greets” where all the kids get autographs and photos taken with these stars. You think people stand in Disney lines a long time?
As parents we are interested in understanding and knowing what our children are interested in. This is very important in parent/child relationships especially when the kids become teenagers. We show interest in his interests.
In my mind I was wondering what I am going to do to keep from being bored? I don’t play online games. I don’t have time to watch videos even though I make it a point to watch some with our son so that we know what he is watching.
I decided that I would enjoy learning! I love to learn! And I was sure there would be some tips we could pick up that I could pass along to you as well as implement in our own businesses.
The entertainment was hosted by some of these YouTubers. Then there were panel discussions and lots of Q & A sessions!
I love to learn about different businesses. So I was interested in the panel discussions.
They had panel discussions on YouTube video production and creation and Live Streaming panels. I also went to the Women’s Gamer panel because there are very few females in this gaming space in the monetization areas. The best panel was about “How to Build a Community”.
One of our son’s favorite YouTubers is @BajanCanadian who is 21 years old now and has over 4.8 million subscribers to his YouTube Channel. He is a great content creator. He along with other YouTubers create their own story lines in Minecraft and edit their videos.
They usually post 2 times per day and we are not talking about super short videos either!
He has over 1,267,610,142 video views!
How do you like those numbers! His earnings potential on YouTube are over $3 Million a year which is through YouTube’s revenue sharing. He is also involved in merchandizing which is always a very smart move when you have fans, especially kids! I posted a video of Bajan Canadian with our son below.
My greatest takeaways from Arcadiacon ( Minecraft event):
1. Community is everything when you are marketing yourself or your product online no matter what business you are in.
2. Creating your brand and tying it together with your community helps engagement and builds brand loyalty.
3. Care about your fans. Your fans love and adore you. Recognize them. Be humble and make their day better by interacting with them in your chat and replying to their comments.
4. Like kind attracts like kind. People who are like you will be attracted to your brand, your product, your service.
5. Network on line with fellow gamers. So in other businesses, reach out to your peers! There is enough business for everyone and then some!
6. Livestreaming tips: Send out tweets that you are live streaming. Periscope is great for business live streaming. Twitch is what most gamers use. Show your live stream schedule on your website page, your YouTube channel page, your tweets, on Instragram, etc.
7. Content creation is KING!!!!
8. Be consistent.
9. If you can create content to sell to kids- you have it made:)
There are parallels in the online gaming business with any other business that you are doing on the internet from selling real estate and blogging so that buyers will contact you as a real estate agent, mortgage brokers who are sharing information about the loan markets, consultants, information marketers, authors, bloggers, e-commerce businesses and so on. The list is endless.
In my consulting and digital marketing strategies business all 6 of these takeaways are important. In my husband’s real estate brokerage business all 6 of these takeaways are important.
Nothing helps your credibility more than to build up a community of loyal fans that rave about you and their results! Community is everything! Build your community. Respect your community and add value most of all to your community.
For instance, today in Listing Experts Academy which is one of my most popular courses and membership programs one of my students asked a question in our private Facebook group that is ONLY for members of the Listing Experts Academy.
In order to answer her question, I needed to look a few things up in incognito chrome window so I thought it would be better if I created a video to answer her question. I recorded the video and it was short, less than 5 minutes to answer her specific question. Then what I did was uploaded the video straight to the Facebook group so that she would not even have to click on a link to YouTube to get her answer.
She was so happy that I posted that video. It made her feel special and important. Is that not what most all human beings want to feel? Important and valued. She even wrote a testimonial of the service I provide to the group. I did not post the video answer for her to get a thank you from her. I did this to add value to her life and business. In what ways can you add value to your clients’ and customers’?
The YouTubers told the aspiring up and coming YouTubers not to worry about how many subscribers they have when they start posting videos on their YouTube channels. This was a very important tip. I agree so much with this no matter what business you are in. Creating and uploading YouTube videos takes a lot of time and we would all like to see results right away. That does not usually happen with YouTube. YouTube likes those channel creators that stick around for a while too so it benefits you to be consistent! Post on a regular schedule.
One of the questions that was asked over and over again in the Q & A sessions was technical questions like, “What mic do you use?”. While I understand kids asking this question when adults ask this question it is a sign that they are procrastinating or they are suffering from perfectionism paralysis. Good is good enough. Use your Mac’s internal mic. Use your iPhone earphone mic. It does not matter. Just start recording video! You should hear some of my podcasts! I record podcasts while I am driving using my iPhone earphone mic and my iPhone podcasting app. You can hear the A/C in my car running. But it does not matter because my fans want to hear from me. If the only chance I get to podcast is while I am driving, then that is what I have to offer and good is good enough!
Consistency gets hard when you get busy. It seems to be the one thing that gets left out when we are moving our businesses forward myself included. This is where delegation comes in. You must learn to scale your business by delegating. Even if you don’t want to scale your business, delegating frees up your time so that you can spend it doing other things like spending time with your family.
Create an editorial calendar and then create the systems you need to put in place that can easily be delegated to your virtual assistants. If you don’t have virtual assistants, I will set you up with my awesome virtual assistant team we use for our tasks that we can delegate.
Care about your readers, your fans, your followers! Add value! That is a no brainer across all markets and businesses but SOOO often this is overlooked and ignored. If you don’t treat your fans like gold, they will become disenchanted and move along. If you don’t treat your customers like gold, same thing. If you don’t respect your prospects by answering their questions, those prospects will not convert to customers.
Content creation is king! It always has been and becomes more so with each passing Google algorithm change, with each new market that is created and with each medium. We know now that Google does reward content pages with more than 2000 words of quality content. But that can’t be junk. So make sure your content adds value to your readers, your prospects, the searchers and your fans.
For video content, videos still need to be short and to the point unless of course you are a gamer. And of course it is determined by who your niche audience is. Bajan Canadian can create a 3 hour long video and millions of kids will still stay there and watch the video. But someone looking for a house to buy is only going to watch a video for about 30 seconds. Someone who is wanting to learn how to build a wordpress website is going to watch a longer tutorial than a house for sale video. Remember attention spans are very short.
I suggest that you create short intro videos to whatever your product or service is and have those who find your video and are interested to optin to your email list. Then you can start engaging them in a conversation through email and link to longer videos that are specific to their interests.
When these gamers are live streaming on Twitch, they are playing games and interacting on their chat rooms with their fans by talking to them live. They are creating a loyal following while they are creating content. They are content creators. Just like you and I are.
Live Streaming is a new media. We have video and now we have live streaming. This new media is full of potential for any business owner and entrepreneur who wants to take their business to the next level. This is where we are headed. Those who get in on the ground floor of this media will be able to make for themselves a strong foothold. It was so interesting to learn about this media.
How do I know that live streaming is something every real estate agents, business owner, marketer, producer, e-commerce owner, entrepreneur should be paying attention to and getting involved in?
When companies like McDonalds are sending their marketers to learn about live streaming in order to find the ways in which they can get their product in front of those consumers of live streaming… pay attention! The big companies are sponsoring these live streamers. They would not be doing that if they did not think that they can effectively market to those consumers.
Check out the app called Periscope on your iPhone. You can download the app for free. It is super easy to set up. You can then start live streaming right away. Set your Periscope settings to save your live streams to your photos. This then gives you the ability to upload them to YouTube for future product creation and content. If you don’t set this in your settings, Periscope only saves the live streams for 24 hours. During those 24 hours, all your followers can view that stream but they won’t be able to chat with you or send you hearts:).
Name a business and I will tell you how they can use Periscope! How about a dentist? How can a dentist use periscope. He can do live tutorials on caring for your teeth, how to brush them correctly, how to floss correctly. Not only that but he can set the stream to private and teach other dentists from all around the world his expertise. You can set your privacy settings on Periscope.
We do strongly urge you to NOT use the location service on Periscope especially if you are live streaming from home. Don’t tell people exactly where you are for security and safety reasons.
Like kind always attracts like kind. If this is the only take away that you get out of this article, you are so far ahead of your competitors! If you want to learn more about heart centered marketing and working your business from your passion, let me know in the comments below. I would love to create content for you about Passion Driven Business Success Strategies.
Networking 101: Always be networking! We get clients from networking on Facebook. We get business from paying it forward on Twitter. We get to help others find their way and making another person’s day by reaching out on social media to help. You can network in person or online. Networking online is great for introverts because they tend to be more assertive online. If you are too shy to meet and greet people in person, get involved in online communities in your niches and start networking. You may be pleasantly surprised how much you are appreciated. Remember my rule on networking: pay it forward first. Connect people together with other people outside of yourself. Allow them to chat with you and you ask the questions. This will make them feel important and they will love you for it. They will refer business your way.
And my biggest take-away is that it does not matter how young or old you are right now- you can make $1 Million a year or $1 Million a month in something as seemingly simple appearing as gaming, mainly by creating videos of you and your friends playing Minecraft or whatever game you are passionate about playing or by live streaming the same. Imagine the possibilities!
There are a million ways to make $1,000,000 online so find what you are passionate about and go for it!
Drive your business with passion. Do what you love and the money will follow!
As always, to work with me or join one of my programs text me: 561-502-1577 with your name, phone number again in the body of the text and your email address.