What business are you REALLY in?

Many businesses spend thousands of dollars branding everything they do to create a familiarity with their prospects and customers and yet, sadly, miss the boat completely when it comes to their service.

In the last week, I experienced each of the following:

1. A credit card company sent a replacement card — two months after the original expired.

2. I have an advertisement in a print newsletter under a promotion. I inquired how much it would cost per month to continue the ad. Three emails and two weeks later, I got a response.

3. A printer promised a quote within 72 hours — it came 6 days later, after two follow-up calls.

What do the three companies above have in common, aside from losing my business?

Quite simply, their service is atrocious.

You’ve most likely heard the term “relationship marketing” — before you can interest your prospects in purchasing anything from you, it’s best to build a relationship with them.

The goal in relationship marketing is to give your prospects a reason to know, like and trust you.

That said, before you try building a relationship with your prospects, you must ensure that your service is the best in your industry.

Service is one place where “good is NOT good enough”.

Regardless of your industry, there are several other businesses that do the same “thing” you do. By providing impeccable service, you stand head and shoulders above the crowd.

Impeccable service is about a lot more than returning emails within 24 hours and offering a guarantee you stand by. It’s about building your business from the ground up with your customer in mind: you must give them things they don’t even know they want.

Here’s a quick example from the car industry:

Heated seats. While I never would have thought to ask for them or listed them as a “need” when searching for a vehicle, I love them and would hate to be without them. A renegade somewhere in the car industry said “Hey, what if we put a heater in the seat to make our customers even more comfortable?”.

THAT is service: providing something we didn’t even know we wanted. The same can be said for the first refrigerator, which revolutionised food storage for ever.

Coaching Challenge:

What can you do differently, not better. . .but DIFFERENTLY, in your business which will make you the clear choice over your competitors, regardless of price?

As an example, one of the things I do is send every new ezine subscriber, who provides their mailing address, a f’ree gift via snail mail. My business is all about providing the best possible service in the most automated and systematic way.

What statement can you make about service in your business? If I asked 5 of your customers, what would they say?

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For the past 5 years, Sandra Martini has been showing self-employed business owners how to get more clients consistently by implementing processes and systems to put their marketing on autopilot. Visit Sandra at http://www.SandraMartini.com for details, compelling client testimonials and her free audio series “5 Simple and Easy Steps to Put Your Marketing on Autopilot”.

Leverage Your Time & Talent to Help More People & Make More Money

When I first went into business for myself seven years ago as a marketing and public relations consultant, I struggled with setting my fees. Even though I had been making a good salary working for someone else in this capacity, at first I found it difficult to set my fees at what they truly were worth.

Then I learned about “dollarizing” (a topic for another article) and about looking at the results that I was creating for my clients. I also had to build my confidence and comfortability in telling prospective clients what my fees were without stammering… :)

I don’t struggle with this anymore, for a few reasons. One reason is because I KNOW what a difference I can and do make in my client’s business. And another reason is that I have loads of clients, past and present, who continue to TELL me what a difference I’ve made for them in their business. Both of these have helped to build my confidence and comfortability factors in setting my rates.

Now it’s easy for me to say that my coaching rates are $350 an hour, or that a private mentorship with me starts at $5000. Obviously that means I have fewer clients than I did when I was charging $350 a month (as opposed to an hour), but it also means I work one-on-one a lot less, which frees up an incredible amount of time for me to with with as I please.

And, by packaging my knowledge into information products, I actually help MORE people now than ever before, and I love that!

Now, my business has gone through more than one iteration over the last seven years, so I don’t want to give the impression that this happened quickly for me, because it didn’t. But it could happen for you a lot faster if you implement some of the tips I’ve given you here:

1. Consider yourself the expert.

Why wait for someone else to crown you something? Seriously, if you didn’t think you knew what you were doing, you wouldn’t have taken the leap into entrepreneurship. So make yourself the expert and put yourself out there as such.

Why? Because you’ll build credibility faster, your name will be the one that comes to mind when people are in need of what you offer, and because it will allow you to command higher fees that people are willing to pay.

People want to hire someone who is an expert in solving their problem. For example, I started out as a generalist in marketing and public relations (and web development), and I did ok money-wise as such. Then I started focusing on working with entrepreneurs in marketing their business, and financially I did better. Now I focus on online marketing for a specific niche (solo service professionals) using the multiple streams marketing and product funnel model, and my client base and income has increased exponentially! My business is also a lot easier and much more fun!

2. Increase your income by increasing your fees.

Like I did, most of my clients struggle with this issue at first. It’s normal. They’re afraid of losing clients (they will), and of charging themselves out of their market (they won’t). But, among other things, I encourage them to remember that if they charge more, they don’t need as many clients, and by having less clients, they will have more time and freedom to do the things they enjoy (and even more so if they create products to offer to their niche – see #3).

If there’s still resistance, I suggest that any new clients they accept, they do so at their new higher rate, and keep their current clients at their old rate.

3. Package what you know.

Stop trading time for money and start packaging what you know. By this I mean creating information products that you can sell to your niche that helps them solve their problem at a much lower rate than working with you one-on-one.

This has made a huge difference for me particularly since I lost a lot of weight last year and now I can promote diets that work from personal experience.

There are many ways to leverage your time and talent, but these three will get you started in the right direction to building a more satisfying business for you ~ one that gives you the freedom to enjoy both your work and your life.

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Alicia M Forest, MBA, Multiple Streams Queen & CoachT, founder of ClientAbundance.com and creator of 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success SystemT, teaches professionals how to attract more clients, create profit-making products and services, make more sales, and ultimately live the life they desire and deserve. For FREE tips on how to create abundance in your business, visit http://www.ClientAbundance.com .

I was thinking last night how much uniforms in nursing have changed over the years. When I was a child, nurses used to wear stiff starched uniforms which served little practical purpose at all. These tightly fitting all-in-one dresses seemed to be decide to accentuate the curves rather than to help with the job in hand. Maybe that is why so many men fantasise about nurses. Modern nursing uniforms are clearly designed for practical reasons. With short sleeves and easy fitting trousers they allow for freedom of movement, which is essential for the demands of the job. They stem from the basic nurse scrubs uniform, which was once confined to the operating theatre. Then the powers that be realised this serviceable design was easier and cheaper to buy for everyone.  So staff of all grades and roles wear very similar stuff, breaking down barriers between doctors, nurses and support staff in the same establishment.

Any individual who is looking for legal advice from a qualified Personal Injury lawyer would do far worse than to consult the company of O’Hanlon, McCollom & Demerath. They are a well-regarded company who have handled many personal cases of people who have been injured at work or on someone else’s premises. If you have been injured through someone else’s actions, they are the people. As an Austin Personal Injury Lawyer they are experienced personal injury lawyers who can advocate on your behalf. The qualified staff at O’Hanlon, McCollom & Demerath work hard to get the return that you deserve. These professionals, experts in personal injury litigation, will fight hard for your full recovery.
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Read why we are retiring in Ecuador

That’s a question that we get asked all the time.

We have recently returned from a trip to Ecuador and are planning our return in July 2008. The italics are what we wrote on our website before travelling to Ecuador. Read on and find out why.

After arriving in Ecuador and spending a couple of days in Quite, the second largest city in Ecuador. We then headed up North to Cuenca, the third largest city in Ecuador to seek out some properties we had viewed on the internet.

For $360 per month we rented a fantastic apartment in Cuenca. This included, internet, cable TV, and a lovely lady who came and serviced our apartment once a week, plus a bag of washing and ironing. Great value. You can take a look at the apartment by Clicking Here.

We rented this apartment for almost two months and since our departure it has had a few updated features so the rent has now risen to $400. Still well worth a stay.

“Ecuador seems like a great place to start looking as it has been ranked as #2 by International Living. ”

This is what we wrote on our website before we left and now having experienced Ecuador first hand we have definitely fallen in love with it.

You see we have lived the main part of our lives in Australia. We love the adventure of new places and people and have both travelled the world.

“John, at almost 57, is old enough to retire early. The research my partner did into Ecuador goes back 10 years and has led us down this pathway. Initially John’s interest in Ecuador was for health, lifestyle and environment just to mention a few.”

As for myself, Dixie, I am a few years younger than John but also do think about our retirement and how will we survive on superannuation and any other savings and investments. I also became interested in Ecuador and decided to do some researching of my own.

To my amazement I found that real estate is extremely cheap and we would be able to buy a beautiful property with everything we need and be left with plenty of money to live on and start some part-time income activities like import-export, internet marketing and perhaps even start a health retreat in “the valley of longevity”. Many other visitors to Ecuador have decided to stay after experiencing its delights, so we won’t be the first – although maybe one of the small minority of Australians.”

Yes I was truly amazed at the properties we saw while in Ecuador. We love Ecuador and bought an apartment for $60,000 USD in less than two weeks. We decided to buy gold bars some years ago so these were cashed in as funding.

If you would like to find out more about properties contact Kathy Gonzalez in Cuenca. She and her partner David Morrill speak English and are a great source of information.

Our children at this point are all young adults so the timing for us is right to go and be adventurous. They all have jobs or are at university. So now we are taking the plunge and taking an exploratory trip to Ecuador for around 7 weeks to see and feel for ourselves.”

Now we are back home and have been on the exploratory trip and fell in love with Ecuador and its people. Our new website will be “Andes Artisans” and we will be sharing that with you soon.

Find out more about Ecuador here. Take a tour of our site.

Even better still subscribe to our ezine and read our back dated issues of our journey to date.

Hasta Luega John and Dixie

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Join Dixie and her partner as they share their experience on living in Ecuador. http://www.retire-in-ecuador.com

Use Your Own Information Products To Make Money Online

There are various ways that you are able to use to make money online. You just need to discover the appropriate opportunity for you. Locating the right opportunity for you to do could be difficult but if you take your time, you’ll surely find something. Did you realize that anybody can produce their own information products and become very successful with it?

When people get online, it is usually to look for information or to buy something. You can take advantage of this and give them what they are looking for. If you know how to write or how to make software already then you are in good shape. Most people want to make their own information products but they don’t know how to do it. Read more »