Blog

"I try, but I don't feel I have enough content to provide on a regular basis." This is a comment I recently saw from a fellow business owner on Facebook. I know the feeling "“ no matter how much you've learned, all that knowledge can suddenly become strangely elusive when you try to dig bits of it out to share with your audience! Here are 5 strategies I use to overcome that problem: 1. Write down a list of your areas of knowledge. This includes all the problems you help your clients solve, positive outcomes you help them... Read More

I was recently speaking with a woman who wanted to turn her wisdom into a book, but wasn't completely sure how to convey her ideas. Maybe you've been in that position, too: you have knowledge, wisdom, and experiences that could change people's lives, but you aren't sure how to organize and share them in such a way that the people who need them will be drawn to them, absorb them, and easily understand and implement them. In this blog post, I'm going to share four quick, simple steps you can use to organize your thoughts into books,... Read More

I was planning to write this on Tuesday, but I decided to share it a bit early, becauseI'm celebrating a new accomplishment: I just published a class on SkillShare, called Low-Cost Marketing for Small Businesses and Freelancers ... and for a limited time, you can get it for FREE. In this 68-minute class, you'll discover how small businesses and freelancers can attract leads while spending little or no money on advertising, and convert them into clients without feeling guilty, pushy or salesy. You can access this class, and thousands of... Read More

Guest blogging can be highly lucrative, if you do it the right way and in the right places. Not only does it boost your search engine rank by creating backlinks to your site, but sharing your expertise with other people's audiences exposes you to potential clients who wouldn't have known you existed otherwise. I've personally made well over $10,000 as a direct result of my guest blogging efforts. But as a site owner, I've also seen would-be guest bloggers make mistakes that waste their time and that of the businesses... Read More

When I receive a proposal for a guest post or evaluate a client's education-based marketing, there's one mistake that will make me say "can't publish, must revise" faster than almost any other. A mistake that wastes your audience's time, and will make you look useless in the eyes of your potential clients. That mistake is saying "learn how to X", "research how to Y", or "figure out how to Z". Why is this type of teaching point so unacceptable? Imagine if you were sitting in math class, and your teacher said, "Now figure out how... Read More

Sometimes, you need to focus for a long period of time without getting distracted or bored. Whether it's writing a blog post, mapping out the content for a group program, finishing a project for a client, or anything else that requires a protracted period of mental concentration, I've found that having pleasant, non-distracting music in the background can be invaluable. It helps me to concentrate, and it makes the task a lot more fun. If you need help to concentrate on your longer and more mentally taxing tasks, here are some of my... Read More

Guest post byBrad Shorr . By now you should know that it doesnt matter how good your product or service is if you dont have the marketing skills necessary to drive customers to do business with you. The same idea applies to Internet marketing, where developing a high-performance lead generation website is absolutely crucial for any business to succeed. The number of products and services that sell themselves is so small that its insignificant. You simply cannot afford to have anything less than a fully functional and highly... Read More

When you try to raise curiosity in your potential clients, are you actually getting them interested, or just confusing them and turning them off? There's a right way and a wrong way to build curiosity. I recently participated in a #wattpad4 conversation on Twitter , where fiction authors congregate to discuss their craft. While the conversation was focused on fiction books, one of the participants gave a piece of advice that applies very strongly to marketing: "It's crucial that the opening line be CLEAR. Any questions the... Read More

Don't you hate it when you're supposed to write some content for your business, but you just can't figure out what to say in the first few sentences? One of the biggest challenges for a writer is knowing where and how to start. I've noticed this in my capacity both as a marketing copywriter and a novelist - sometimes, the first scene or paragraph is the hardest. This challenge stems partly from the fact that the first sentences are the most important. They're the ones that help your readers to decide whether or not to keep reading,... Read More

Are you selling something your clients know they want? Or are you offering a cure for a disease they don't know they have? A little while ago, I was scrolling through my Twitter feed, and I came across this gem from Calvin and Hobbes: It reminded me of a recent conversation I'd had with one of my clients when I suggested that she change the name of a chapter in her course. Why did I want her to change it? Because her potential clients don't know that they need the mindset she was describing. And if they don't know they need... Read More