Many entrepreneurs are wasting so much time!

You’re spinning your wheels doing things that aren’t making you any money or bringing in any new clients.  You’re even doing some of the very things and marketing strategies that ‘they say’ should be working but yet they aren’t working for you.

Does this sound familiar?

You have so much potential and such a great message or product to share yet you’re not reaching enough people. This is a shame.

Most of the time however this can be fixed pretty easily by watching how you manage your time better.  After all, when you free up some of your time by delegating, automating or systematizing that allows you more time for sales and marketing activities and that’s what brings in new customers and clients!

Many big gurus talk about time management all the time but they talk about the what and why and not really the HOW, the nitty gritty tasks and details of what you should be doing instead.

So here’s the real scoop on how to get more done and how to bring in many more qualified new leads every month into your business.

5 Steps to Managing Your Time Better So You Can Have More Time to Really Focus on Sales and Marketing:

1.  Calendarize Your Life for More Structure

• Plot fun, vacations, family time and self care into your calendar first
• Put blocks of time into your days so you can focus on specific projects and tasks
• Schedule key networking events (local and not) into your calendar next
• Then schedule clients and business calls or appointments

2.  Organize Your Emails, Paperwork and Files

• Funnel emails by type or category into folders in your inbox (especially newsletters)
• Save files, documents, emails for specific projects or clients into folders on your desktop to store, purge files over a year onto a CD to free up storage space
• Only print what really needs to be printed for serving clients, accounting or other
• If you must save old client paper files, put them in a box in your garage or office closet but purge them after a year at most

3.  Track and Analyze Your Time and To Dos

• Keep track of everything you do for business and personal every day 24/7 for a week at least
• Sort tasks that you do that you don’t like to do, don’t want to do or don’t do well and find someone to outsource them to
• Do this activity once every 6 months as more things will come up you can pass of.

4.  Hire Help

• Hire home help for yardwork, housekeeping, running errands, laundry, nanny, shopping, paying bills, cooking meals and more to free up your time for money-making activities
• Hire assistants for things in the above list that you aren’t good at, don’t like to do or just aren’t getting done that need to get done (like your marketing!)

5.  Systematize Social Media and Follow Up

• Develop or learn a system on how to reach 250 or more new people every week on social media, interacting with them, not just blasting information to them
• Develop or model after templates that can speed up your connecting online

Implementing these simple steps can make a big impact on the productivity and profitability of your business.  You’ll also find that you have time for a more enjoyable lifestyle.

Bio

Katrina Sawa is an Award-Winning Author, Speaker and International JumpStart Your Biz Coach who’s helped hundreds of small business owners take dramatic steps in their businesses to get them to the next level in business, revenues and their personal life. She offers one-on-one coaching, group coaching and do-it-yourself business-building products. She’s been featured on various news talk shows and radio shows including Oprah and Friends XM Radio. Go online now to get started with her Free Entrepreneur’s Success Kit and other free gifts at www.JumpStartYourMarketing.com/gifts!

Does your energy fluctuate over the course of the day – not a simply up and down, but a wild and massive high and low?

Do you drink lots of tea, coffee, energy drinks and wish you didn’t drink that many?

Do you get exhausted just turning up to work?

Well it is time for more sustainable energy in your life. It is easy to get a boost from an energy drink but with the artificial up comes a matching down afterwards. Having some healthy work habits will keep you on track and with more than enough energy for the days.

Here are 10 ways to build more energy in your day:

1. Have a focus - A lack of focus can lead to discontent. What is your focus for 2010? An overseas holiday, a new job or maybe further education?
2.  Daily Action - Once you have a focus, what can you do each day to move closer to your goal? It doesn’t have to be a huge thing but you must have DAILY action.
3. Ask for help - It is too hard to do everything yourself- so get help. Turn to family, friends, a mentor group or a professional.
4. Let go of past experience - Don’t beat yourself up if you didn’t quite do it last time, this time it’s different. Acknowledge the past but you don’t have to repeat it.
5. Take responsibility - Spiderman’s uncle told him, “With great power comes great responsibility”. The reverse is also true. “Great responsibility gives great power”. Take responsibility for your situation and your actions.
6. Look at what you can do, not what you can’t - Focus on the things you can do as they will lead to results.
7. Have a quarterly or monthly check point - You need to check you are on track. Have a check up each month or quarter to see how you are going, otherwise, how will you know if you need to do make adjustments?
8. Drink Plenty of water - Don’t forget the basics. Look after your body because you only get one. The best thing is drink plenty of water.
9. Exercise - Exercise helps you deal with stress and gets you out in the fresh . Plus it’s good for your body!
10. Laugh - Life is no where near as serious as you may think. Laugh and enjoy the journey

Your high energy, results focused, action oriented, no holds barred tour de force keynote speaker, MC and Trade Show Guru – The Get More Guy Warwick Merry ensures your attendees Get More from your event.
Visit www.warwickmerry.com or www.facebook.com/GetMoreGuy to find out more.

Warwick Merry
The Get More Guy

by: Karen Talavera

I preach a lot about getting email out of the silo it’s often relegated to within companies or marketing departments, and these days I think most marketers realize how important good email integration with other marketing (especially digital) channels and sales systems is to success. But once you’ve created a regular email communications program, or developed your smart auto-responders, are you remembering to strategically use email to strengthen and encourage relationships with your list members in other channels?

Yes, I’m talking about using email to grow and deepen connections with your people outside the in-box. Why would you want to do that? Lots of reasons, but here’s the biggee:

People use multiple media platforms for communication. Conversations started in one channel don’t just stay there. Simply because a customer signed up for your email doesn’t mean they’re not also following you on Twitter or Facebook and might want to communicate there too. If you’re a retailer or other brick-and-mortar business the dimensions broaden because your customers and prospects will interact with your brand in your storefronts, at your events, or both. Not to mention direct mail and telephone.

Today we have seemingly endless ways to research, shop and buy what we need and want. To an increasing degree, those purchase decisions involve multiple interaction points and channels along the path to a “buy” decision.

So the more platforms you build your customer relationships in, the stronger they become. Here are four proactive ways email can help you do this:

Link to Social Media

The obvious tactic these days is to direct your email subscribers to your points of presence on popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Less obvious is including a compelling reason why they should connect with you on social media in addition to email. Contests and sweepstakes can work well in building social media fan/follower bases rapidly, but don’t overlook couponing and the promise of exclusive treatment, content or access for your social network community members only.

Integration is easily done with graphic icons included in your email message or message template which link to your profile pages on social networking sites.

Drive Store Traffic

Need feet through the door? Invite your email subscribers to visit you in person instead of through your online storefront by using email for alerts, announcements and reminders specific to in-store sales or events. “In-store” only specials are a great way to direct response offline vs. online. Store openings, clearances, benefits, or community events are also great ways to draw your target market into your actual place of business.

Promote Events

For event organizers, email is an obvious pre-and post-event communications channel for delivering vital information to attendees, but how many of us not in the events business remember to promote where we’ll be through email? Anywhere you will publicly be is technically an “event”. Events are not just conferences and conventions, but also speaking engagements, charity benefits, community gatherings, meet-ups, seminars, workshops, teleseminars, webinars, trade shows, craft fairs, cross-country roadshows, festivals, sports games, concerts, networking meetings and countless more!

This one is vital, because chances are the majority of people on your email list will not have had the chance to interact with you offline or meet anyone from your company in person. Even if you’re a retail business and they’ve shopped in person, a store location might be the only place they’ve ever encountered your brand offline. In an increasingly impersonal world, people are hungry for face-to-face connections. Leverage every opportunity you can to make them.

Connect to Online Content & Community

Use email to both promote and drive awareness of your blog, videos, webinars, audio, or other content and information hosted online in order to gain subscribers, increase audience sizes and leverage distribution. For example, you can distribute new blog posts via email for those who’d like updates sent straight to their in-box (vs. checking an RSS feed). Here’s more about how to make your blog and email friends.

Plus, promote and feature the proprietary content and communities you host online from within your email by announcing it, linking to it, inviting comments, etc. Remember, just because they’re your email list members doesn’t mean they’ll know what you’re up to elsewhere online unless you tell them!

A major objective of your marketing should be that it’s memorable. After two weeks, people remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, but 50% of what they see and hear. Your prospects and customers are more likely to learn and retain information when it’s presented in multiple modes, and your content will get more attention if you offer people multiple formats by which they can consume it.

Helping your people interact with your content, and you, in multiple ways makes you memorable. And when they’re seeking a product or service in your category, the more memorable you are, the more likely they are to buy from you.

About the Author
Synchronicity Marketing’s Online Marketing Content Planner is a fantastic and super-affordable tool for planning your annual email, social media, blog and digital messaging calendar. Karen Talavera runs Synchronicity Marketing and writes about email, social media and other online marketing conversation channels on her blog Enlightened Emarketing. Follow her on Twitter (@SyncMarketing) or Facebook for daily tips on digital marketing trends, facts and new ideas.

There are very few business owners that I know who LOVE to sell! For most of us, heaven would be a never-ending line of wonderful customers — people who love who love us back.

They work with us because they get unparalleled value. Their needs and wants, perfectly match what we easily deliver and they never, ever, ever moan and groan about price. In fact, they can’t believe they’re getting such a great deal for the quality of product and service they receive.

This isn’t some pie-in-the-sky dream. It’s reality for those business owners who word a powerful four-step process that you can use to make marketing easy and effortless.

1. Identify Your Strength: What could be more fun than building a business all around the most wonderful person in the world? If you’re going to build a successful business, you will be spending a lot of time working on it. So you might as well be doing the things you love to do that you’re good at and that come easy to you.

2. Profiling Your Ideal Customer: The biggest mistake small businesses make is trying to serve EVERYONE? You couldn’t possibly service every single customer out there, so don’t try. Why not just work with your favorite customers. Difficult customers aren’t really difficult, they are just customers who want things that your system doesn’t easily deliver. Focus on those customers who appreciate your strengths and value them. When you’re profiling your ideal customer, focus on their demographics (size, location and industry) as well as their psychographics (what’s important to them, their communication style, etc). One of my favorite customer profiling tips is to create a collage or magazine cover focusing on your ideal customer. Choose a picture that most accurately represents your customer, then create articles and headlines that you think your customers would appreciate that you can help them with. It’s a terrific way to focus on your customer as a real person and not just a company.

3. Finding out what’s important to them: This is the most powerful part of your marketing. So many times, we focus on the features of our products and services and not on WHY these features exist in the first place.

4. Build an irresistible offer: Now that you have the list of what’s important to your customer, and how your business meets those needs, then you’re ready to start creating an offer they can’t resist. Combine what’s important to your customer, with what you offer and call out the payoff or the benefit that your customers will get and they will be hooked for a lifetime.

Becoming the obvious choice for your ideal customers doesn’t come from some magical marketing tool or strategy, it comes from combining your unique talents and strengths with what’s important to your customer and then creating a product or service offer that they can’t resist.

Once you have that, all you have to do is hang out where your ideal customer likes to hang out. You’ll be ready with a terrific branding story that’s rooted in your genuine passion and real customer need. Follow these simple 4-step plan and you’ll become a marketing magnet for your ideal customer, every time, regardless of price.

About the Author
Ivana Taylor is the publisher of DIYMarketers.com and the President of Third Force a firm that specializes in helping companies find their best customers and be the one they choose – regardless of price. She’s an expert and book editor for Small Business Trends and a contributor to AMEX Open Forum.

“I hate to market myself” is a very common complaint I hear from many of my clients. Some are introverts, who are naturally averse to self-promotion, while others just don’t realize that they also wear the hat of Marketing Director when they start their own business and unhappily discover that they are responsible for getting their own clients and customers. Trust me, it’s imperative that you get over this stigma (or move beyond it), for without marketing, nothing happens.

What are the best ways for introverts to promote themselves in a way that doesn’t feel overly promotional? Here are 6 proven strategies to help introverts easily and effortlessly market themselves:

1. Stepping into the shoes of your ideal client and target market. Do you understand what your target market needs and what their problems are? What about the biggest pain or complaint of your ideal client? Being able to accurately describe both your target market and your ideal client will help you greatly in understanding them. Take 30 minutes and jot down some notes about both and see if you can craft your target market profile and ideal client profile. Once you have created these, your copywriting for your web site, your ezine, and your emails becomes so much easier, because you can create each piece of your marketing content as though you’re sitting down and having a one-on-one conversation with a specific ideal client or member of your target market. What you have to say then feels authentic and not salesy at all.

2. Discover and use your “profitable essence.” I borrowed this term from visibility expert Nancy Marmolejo. By this I mean discovering what you’re brilliant at doing and getting recognition (and money) to do what you do best. Once you figure out what makes you unique, the notion of selling yourself dissipates, as you then find yourself effortlessly doing what comes naturally to you.

3. Share your knowledge. Introverts often value knowledge over people, and so what someone knows becomes more important than whom someone knows. Because introverts enjoy research and amassing knowledge, it becomes very easy for introverts to share what they know. How can you do this online? Easy. By writing a new article every week that is published online. Or, by publishing a weekly email newsletter. Perhaps you offer a value-packed giveaway from your web site that entices visitors to sign up on your list. Or, you offer much of what you know about a topic on your authority web site.

4. Teach what you know. Introverts may not realize that skills that they have are unique to themselves and aren’t a skill set that everyone possesses. Once realizing their uniqueness, many introverts like to teach others about what they know. This might mean delivering your signature speech at in-person association meetings, or perhaps holding a teleseminar or webinar and presenting your information online. Or, perhaps you seek out opportunities to be interviewed where you set the tone of the interview by providing a list of questions to be asked.

5. Seek out for 1:1 opportunities. Introverts function much better in small groups or 1:1 than we do in crowds. So, seek out opportunities to speak 1:1 with someone. Perhaps you answer questions on an online forum or ask others to submit questions to you. Or, you request prospects to set up 20-minute strategy sessions with you so that you can get a feel for what they might need and you can demonstrate to them what you can offer to them.

6. Network selectively. Yes, you can network as an introvert, but not all networking opportunities are created equal. The key here is finding groups in which you feel comfortable.

One of my favorite networking groups held monthly meetings where there was a guest speaker on a relevant topic. Part of the meeting entailed being seated with 7 other women where each of us got to deliver a 60-second elevator speech to the others seated at the table. If we wanted to know more, we passed our business cards with a note on the back to a particular speaker to follow up after the meeting or at a later time. Each meeting typically involved 2-3 rounds like this, so at the end of a meeting, each of us had a list of people who were eager and willing to hear from us. I loved this group because it structured my networking for me and I didn’t have to make idle chit-chat with people I didn’t know.

Another option is to participate in an online social network, like Facebook or Twitter, which gives you the ideal opportunity to connect with like-minded people 1:1 virtually.

Marketing isn’t an evil part of business for the introvert. Think of marketing as an extension of sharing yourself and your expertise with others who desperately need what you have to offer. These 6 strategies will help you successfully market yourself without sacrificing your natural introverted tendencies.

About the Author
Introvert Marketing Coach Donna Gunter helps professional service businesses stop the client chase and create online businesses that drive clients to them. Want to learn specific Internet marketing strategies that get results for introverts? Discover how to increase your online visibility in this free ecourse, Introvert Marketing Toolkit: 9 Strategies to Make a BOLD Impression Online, at ==> http://www.IntrovertMarketingToolkit.com