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The Fine Art of Relationship Marketing The buzzword these days is "relationship" marketing. Just what is it? And why is it important? Relationship marketing is so much more than "networking. It's gathering support of your friends, peers, and business contacts. It's developing strong, lasting, unique relationships with your most valuable asset, your customer. It's what keeps people "coming back for more." It's an excellent way to shorten the traditional routes of building trust, create opportunities, increase valuable contacts, to achieve success and excel in business. 4 Ways to Get a Prospects Attention Fast Can you remember the last dozen advertising messages beamed at you today? Can you remember even one of them? Most people can't. 15-Minute Marketing: Lots of Results in Little Time Do you think you don't have enough time to market? Here's a solution that can help you get started on marketing, or any other task you've been putting off. Global Market in the Cyber world?Go and Get It ! With the Internet opening up the doorway to the global market, everybody is up and running to reap the maximum benefit of this widely used medium. Not only has Internet gained importance as an important medium of communication but also has given a platform to thousands of people to nurture their entrepreneurship and realize their dreams of self-employment. What Your Customers Want Your customers don't know what they want. And to assume otherwise is folly. When you begin relying totally on customers to be your product development department, you are asking for serious trouble. Loan Officer Marketing ? How to Target the Right Agents Once there was a loan officer, who marketed his services to some Realtors®. His story went something like this... Sell Big Ticket Items Now! - 1 Simple Step To Keep Your Fears From Holding YOU Back First, some background on today's topic. I've had a terrible week. Not terrible as in I got nothing done because I did actually get quite a bit done. But man, I struggled. And I didn't even really understand why. I have to admit, most of what I got done happened between Thursday and Sunday. Have you ever had a week like that where you struggled to get things done? Or worse yet, struggled and didn't get anything done? Or maybe it just FELT LIKE you didn't accomplish anything? I hate weeks like that and I rarely feel that way. So why was this week different? At first, I couldn't put my finger on anything specific. Looking back and replaying my week in my mind didn't cause anything to stand out either. In short, nothing really clicked as the cause for the way I was feeling and acting. So then I decided to do what I always do when I am trying to solve a problem. I just kinda let it go for a while and did something else. And THEN, I finally figured out what the problem was! It wasn't anything specific about THIS week. It was related to something I had done several weeks ago. And it's very ironic that this was the cause of my problem. You see, several weeks ago I had drafted my 90 marketing plan. This document describes what I plan to do in my Big Ticket Marketing efforts over a 3 month period. It's actually not that hard to figure out but it is something that you need to track closely and see which weeks of marketing effort have the biggest payoff. In other words, you want to track which things you did that resulted in the biggest payoff in sales, opt-ins by potential customers, joint ventures, branding, etc. Basically all the stuff we need to do to as part of our Big Ticket Marketing efforts. We want to repeat those things that give us the largest payoff in our next 3 month marketing plans and drop those things that didn't work out. And of course we always try new things that we think will work, as well. Anyway, the reason that I was struggling and feeling like I wasn't accomplishing this week was because... I was in OVERWHELM! I had a lot of tasks I wanted to accomplish, because I'm an ambitious guy. I want to do well and I have a lot of goals I want to reach. This is all fine, but the point of having a 90 day marketing plan is so that it will be easy to focus on the specific set of tasks that I need to accomplish each week by focusing on ONLY ONE main area each week. And normally, this system is very effective at keeping me focused. But, ironically, the act of creating the 90 day marketing plan made me look at everything I had to accomplish in the next 3 months and I was sort of stuck in that mode. I wasn't being effective at focusing on this weeks tasks because I was in OVERWHELM thinking about everything I had to get done, overall. Have you ever experienced that? I think we all have at one point or another. However, I am disappointed that I didn't recognize what was going on sooner. My background as a software engineer for Microsoft forced me to be pretty disciplined about focusing on what I needed to do and what our team needed to do every week to accomplish our goals. And sometimes the ship cycles lasted between 1.5 to 2 years. Plus I have a black belt in Hapkido (a Korean martial art like a cross between Tae Kwon Do and Aikido), which requires a lot of training discipline, patience, practice and long term view. But at the same time requires you to learn and work on smaller portions of the entire body of techniques, patterns, because that is the only way you can really learn what you need to know. Anyway, my point is that I should know better and yet I still fell into the fear from OVERWHELM. And I think everyone experiences not only overwhelm but other fears about what they want to do as well. The title of this article promised you a simple secret to keep your fears from holding you back - from selling Big Ticket Items. Can you guess what the secret is? I'll give you a hint. It's not really a secret at all. In fact everyone knows about this but unfortunately not everyone knows what to do especially in a case like overwhelm. Ready... the secret is ACTION! Yes, ACTION. Now you are probably wondering... "Hey, wait a sec, you just said you were in overwhelm, how can action possibly be the secret for that?" Napoleon Hill, in his book "Think and Grow Rich" said, "Action is the real measure of intelligence". Thomas Huxley said: "The great end of life is not knowledge but action." Intelligence means nothing, action means everything. I knew what I had to do this week and yet I was struggling to do it. I even had a 90 day marketing plan with each week spelled out for me and yet I was stuck. I got unstuck when I realized I was overwhelmed and decided to do something about it. What I decided to do was to take action. But the type of action I decided to take was influenced by my precious experience both in software development and martial arts. Have you heard of Kaizen? Kaizen is a Japanese word which basically means 'continuous and incremental improvement'. The word came from when the Japanese were introduced to the work of W. Edward Deming when he was stationed in Japan to help them rebuild after World War II. While there, Deming introduced them to what later became know as Total Quality Management. What I like about Kaizen is that it takes small action steps over time to solve problems. The beauty of this approach is that you can take something that currently seems daunting or puts you in overwhelm and start by only focusing on one small step that you can take to help improve the problem. The small step is so easy that you bypass your overwhelm and fears and just do that one small step. Then after a little while you introduce another small step and continuously improve the situation or problem until it is solved. So in this way you CAN take action, even if it is very small, and slowly over time each action you take has an effect that builds on all the others and creates an unstoppable force until your problem has been solved. The fact that the action is so small makes it easy for you to do SOMETHING and not focus on how much you have to do. Maybe a short example will help. One of my goals is to increase the readership of my articles and to get more people exciting about Big Ticket Marketing. One of the best ways to do that is to get my blog and my articles out to as many readers as I can. So this week, I wanted to get my Blog and my articles listed in as many E-zine and Electronic List directories as possible. I even have software to help me do this. Guess how many directories and list locations there are? Well... there are over 1000 just in the built in database in the software I am using. I kept putting this off, because I had a bunch of other stuff I needed to get done as well. But this was a major focus for me this week. Finally, what I decided to do was to just add my information to ONE directory or list every time I finished another task. Breaking it down so that I only had to worry about one entry every so often REALLY helped me make some progress in this area, without worrying about how many there were. I still have a long way to go, but my initial goal was to get listed in 20-25 sites and I'm currently sitting at 17. A few more sites and I will have met my goal! Plus, Kaizen is really how I study martial arts so the process is very familiar to me even when applied to something else. Ok, so the one 1 simple step you need to take anytime you have a fear to conquer or an overwhelming situation to deal with is to decide on one simple action that you can do in a very short amount of time that will ultimately help you solve your problem. Do this, and then increase what you are doing in that area by a little bit each time and before you know it you will have your problem solved. Try this! It works amazingly well with very little effort. And you get a huge amount of satisfaction knowing that you are taking steps to accomplish what you want to get done... and you'll be doing it almost effortlessly. By the way, if you want a great little resource on how to apply Kaizen, you should get The Kaizen Way - One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer. It's a relatively recent book and a quick read at 182 pages. You can find it on Amazon or at Barnes and Noble online. Maybe this is your first small action step. Also, check out the resource box below for some websites that will give you some resources you can really use related to your Big Ticket Marketing efforts! Assumption Based Marketing Vs. Fact Based Marketing One of the most common mistakes in marketing is making decisions based on assumptions rather than fact. You think of an idea for a marketing piece and believe that it is a great idea. You?re In Charge. Now What? For years now, you have been waiting patiently for that first opportunity to be put in charge of a group and show what you can do. It has finally happened. You are giddy with excitement and your head is full of ideas. You can't wait to implement, create change, and leave your mark. Before you charge up the hill, possibly leaving everybody else behind, there's something that you really need to handle first. Has the Internet Killed Off the Direct Mail Baron? 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What a pity we often force ourselves to go to a potentially great conference, but we're so busy worrying about the networking part that we forget to enjoy the event! Top 7 Ways to Get Your Products in the Hands of Celebrities Celebrities are the tastemakers that drive brand awareness and usage. Celebrities drive the direction of trends. For example there has been a huge resurgence in the Pabst Blue Ribbon brand. They are the second fastest growing beer in the US and they have not spent a dime on advertising. How did they resurrect this brand without spending a fortune on re-branding efforts? Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer has risen to the top through celebrities using the brand. Rock musician "Kid Rock" was seen wearing a PBR belt buckle and T-shirt and from there it's history. Here are 7 solid ways you can build your brand through celebrity and tastemaker usage without breaking the bank. Trigger Button Marketing Sometimes, experiencing bleak sales is a matter of failing to find your prospective customers' trigger buttons. Dont Use Yourself as Your Pricing Yardstick "I wouldn't pay more than what I charge now." The M-Word It was a real eye-opener to hear the perceptions people have about what it means to market professional services, as well as the anxiety the "m-word" (marketing) conjures up. It reminded me that, just because professional service providers have a lot of expertise in their chosen field, it doesn't mean they have the same level of understanding about the business of growing a practice. Make Out Marketing What is the single biggest fear of teenagers, business owners and CEO's alike?
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