In these days of online business sometimes it’s easy to underestimate the importance of having a real, authentic connection with people. 

You may think it’s just part of marketing, but really its way more than that. 

Whoever you are, and wherever you are, you are part of a larger community.

You bring your wisdom and your light and this has a huge affect on each person you touch, regardless of your business. 

Whether you go to huge networking events or smaller more intimate groups, look for ways to have deeper connections. 

What I like is real sharing in a quiet space.  I want to find out something about the person I’m talking to and not just a marketing message. 

I ran a monthly group for two years that provided this. We had a maximum of 15 people and we also spoke one at a time and did real sharing!

I am just about to begin a new similar group and am so looking forward to getting to new connections that are deeper and include ways we can support each other.  It’s really about community.

However, many of the people in my tribe I have met online.  They live in Australia,  South Africa, Canada and England.

We met first on facebook or linked in.  There is one woman who lives in Paris who I first met  on facebook, she then signed up for my weekly biz tips, and then listened to one of my teleclasses.

She wrote me an email recently, thanking me and we had a lovely back and forth email conversation for awhile.

Those kinds of connections are so real and really helps me to see what a small world we live in.

Here are a few things you can do to build stronger connection to people you meet online!

1. Be authentic and tell your story. People want the real you.

2. Be consistent. If you only go on Facebook one a month, there is no continuity of connection. 

3. Re-share people’s posts if you really connect to their message. That person will feel your warm fuzzies and know what they wrote really touched you. 

Connect with me even more by coming to my Free training  “How to Powerfully Connect with Your Tribe.”

If  you live in Portland shoot me an email and let me know you are interested in my local groups. 

I’ll be doing one monthly drop in and also a year long mastermind group!

What kind of connections are the most powerful to you?  

What kind of help do you need?

How focused are you in the message you put out to your tribe?

If you asked people what your speciality is, would they be able to answer correctly?

Most people stutter when asked this question.  Some answer in generalities,  like  “I’m a massage therapist,”  or “I’m a coach.”

Others rattle off every possible thing they do just in case..

When you focus on your speciality you answer in a way that no one else could.  You are standing tall in your own footprints and people take notice.

Are any of these true for you. 
•  Having so many ideas and wanting to focus on them all
•  Not wanting to specialize because it means saying no to something else
• Shying away from making a plan based on sound business decisions

However, if you have a for profit business it is so important to focus in on what makes you special!

Your speciality is like a lighthouse beam. It will draw certain people to you because once you know your speciality you can create your messages and content that is like a magnet.

To figure out your specialty in requires real soul searching.

It means you have to dig in and listen to that wise part of yourself and find out exactly how you do what you do in a way that’s your own expression. 

Knowing your speciality on this deeper level will help you to grow your business, make more money and offer a higher level of service to your clients. 

Here are a few questions to help your process:
1.  What are you “really” offering to your clients that is uniquely your gift?
2. Who are the exact people that would most benefit from this offering?
3. Will people clearly see your specialty on your home page?

Stepping into your specialty is one of the 5 steps to transform your passion into money in your business. 
Find out about all 5 steps!

What’s your speciality?  Take a stab at it and share!

There are clear and easy steps to marketing your service to the world.

And if you follow those steps impeccably you will be successful and make money!

It is logic in the purest sense.

Likewise, if you don’t follow the steps, you will make less money and be less successful.

Of course, there are many ways to judge success depending on what stage your business is at, and it’s important to acknowledge all the successes at each part of the process.  

This can be very hard if you are always looking at what you haven’t yet done!

At the beginning, it might just be having your first client or deciding on a domain name. Later you also might judge your success on how many income streams you have activated and how much money is coming in. 

Regardless of what stage you are at, the very first step is always to Shift Your Mindset. This is not something you do once, and you are done! It keeps coming up, over and over.

You want to expand  and shift into your entrepreneurial mindset.
Michael Gerber, author the the  ”EMyth Revisited” explains this very well!

“The entrepreneur is our visionary, the creator in each of us. An entrepreneur is a person who takes an idea, product or service and does whatever is necessary to introduce it to the marketplace where it can produce revenue.”

Most people who begin their service business, struggle to become a real entrepreneur. He says, “They fail to see the business as a product as an entrepreneur would. Instead, they see the business as a job.”  

If you are a therapist, coach, designer, or other practitioner you might relate to this and have found yourself stuck in that place of working hard and getting nowhere!

So, the first place to begin is in changing your mindset. This has not been a black and white shift for me!

Every new stage I get to in my business, the issues come up again. One of the big ones for me has been my money mindset. 

Here is one example that snuck in when I wasn’t looking.
In an effort to be financially responsible, I made decisions to use Free Conference Call for my teleclasses. I have over 60 hours I have recorded in the last few years. However the quality is so poor that I can’t really make them into a paid product or event make them into a Podcast for i tunes.  

It saved me money but disabled my business!

It was actually my scarcity mindset that made the decision, but I didn’t realize it. I got fooled!  Now I have shifted to Instant Teleseminar which is high quality and also  will allow me to have webinars with slides. It’s not free but so worth it! Plus I am an affiliate so I can earn money just by referring people.  Again- an entrepreneurial decision.

Here is my link. Please use it if you want to do teleclasses. I highly recommend not making the same mistake I did!  

http://kayalikes.com/instantteleseminar

You can immediately become an affiliate as well and very soon you will be making money rather than spending it. Another mindset shift! 

Here are a few questions to answer that will help you to have more insight around step #1

How is your mindset disabling your business?
What changes to you need to make that would make you be more of an entrepreneur?
What is one small thing you can do today to make a huge shift?

Come back later to hear about Steps 2-5!

Many years ago when I was first starting out I heard the term, “joint ventures’ but I didn’t understand it. 

Like many solopreneurs- I was…well ..alone and had no idea what a joint venture looked like or how it worked. 

It sounded like some fancy business term and I felt left out of that world of real business.

I also didn’t want to tell anyone I didn’t understand because then they would know I was not very savvy! Crazy!   However I forced myself to admit it and hired a mentor who explained it to me.  I had one of these aha moments. I am all about connections and community and really this what’s joint ventures is about. 

If you feel at all like I did- I’m going to explain this really easily and show you how it will help you grow your business by leaps and bounds.

If you have products and services for sale, you know how important it is to get in front of the right people- those people who are potential  buyers; your niche and target clients.  

You want to build your email list to be large enough that when you do a marketing campaign, your emails will go to thousands of people instead of  20 or 50. One of my  mentors has a list with 50,000 people. I was in awe and wondered how she did it.  I paid her a wad of money to teach me and now I get it, and am passing it all on to you for FREE!

Here is Joint Ventures made easy!

Look for other entrepreneurs who are:

1. People you like, are authentic and operate from integrity. Why would you want to hang out with someone you don’t feel this way about?
2. Experts at something your niche clients want to know about. Something that compliments what you offer.
3. Successful, have a strong online presence, has a large list,  and/on social media. 
4. People you want to be part of your tribe! 

How do you find, connect and develop a relationship with  people like this?

•  Going to events where they are present.
•  Reading and commenting on their blog.
•  Connect on social media. Comment on their posts, interact.

It requires focus and intention but it’s part of developing any kind of relationship and it’s a two-way thing. If you put energy out toward someone and never get anything back you might move on.

Here are two easy ways to begin.

1.  Ask to interview them. You can do this on the phone and record it. Ask them to tell you about their business, how they started it, who they help and anything you think your client would like to hear about. You can do it live and invite people to come or you can put the recording on your website.  

You can give them the recording and they can put it on their site and you get exposure even more if this happens. Either way, this new person gets exposure and you have started a new relationship. You benefit because you have new content for your website and it builds your own credibility when you interview other experts. 

2. If you are more of a writer than speaker, you might ask this person to submit a chapter for an ebook you are writing. Your ebook can be short but on a particular topic and you might have a group of people submit a section.

If it comes out good, the contributors might also market this book to their group. Your expertise gets highlighted because it’s your book! You can turn it into a Kindle book and put it on Amazon. The options are endless!

I’ve done both of those things in the past and now I’ve invited a group of experts to be a part of my tele-summit. It has been amazing!! Each person has shared so much excellent business help and advice!  Have a look at it as this is another option you can do eventually. It has been lot of work to put  together but the results are amazing and gratifying.

It’s all about building my tribe, my community and offering more help to my clients.

What idea do you have for creating joint ventures? Can you see how it would help your business?

I have a love-hate relationship with email.

I imagine many of you feel similar and subscribe and unsubscribe constantly! 

It might make you feel a bit hesitant to send out too many emails to your tribe, in of fear of irritating people. 

However, email is an excellent business building tool if you use it correctly.  It provides:

• An instant way to communicate with masses of people in real time!
• Short and informal conversation without the usual letter writing rules.
• Hot links to web content, videos etc. 
• Photos, colors and visual prompts. 
• A way for people to re-share or forward it on in a moment!

It’s also true, if you use it incorrectly it can be counterproductive and not only not work, but be offensive.  Here are a few  essential rules to follow. 

1. Always focus on giving value to your exact niche/target group. This means you need to know who they are and speak only to them.

2. Build empathy first by identifying their problem you’re addressing.

3. Keep it focused on one main value you are offering!

4. Keep it short and to the point. Don’t try to offer the whole kitchen sink because people won’t read it and it will feel like it’s  just too much information. Next time they might not even open it because they will assume it will be long-winded again. 

5. After 4-5  ”giving,” emails you can then make a sales offer email. By then you have built trust and people are more likely to listen and be interested in your program or product.  In other words, you can’t sell until you have built up your trust bank account.

6. Have a valuable call to action- a FREE webinar, teleclass, a link to a longer article on the same topic,ask a thought provoking question that gets people more involved.  

7.  Use action verbs or benefits in subject line. “7 Tips for good emails,” or “How to fill your classes.”

8. Be consistent as people have joined your group because they want your help!

Some things NOT to do!

•  Calling your email a Newsletter because it connotes “long,”

•  Too small font size. The words need to jump off the page. 

•  Poor design and imagery that looks tacky and unprofessional. Better to send a text message if you don’t have the skills to make it look good!

•  Asking for people to write to you if they want to unsubscribe. No one wants to do that!  Make it easy, with an unsubscribe link at the bottom. 

•  Spammy subject lines; all caps, words like FREE and buy now.

•  Adding people to your list without their consent. Cardinal spam rule.  

Look at the lists above. Which things are your doing or not doing?  How could you improve your emails? Any suggestions or other ideas?