One of the best things that you can ever do for your online business is becoming an email marketing expert. By learning how to master email marketing, you give yourself an advantage that others only wish that they could have. As an email marketing expert, you give yourself the chance to achieve predictable results. You’ll be able to rely on your numbers and estimate how much money you’re going to make each month.Some people tend to believe that email marketing is on the decline but I TOTALLY disagree. I believe this because I practice email marketing everyday, and believe that I am an email marketing expert myself. The first thing on my marketing task list everyday is to implement an email marketing strategy that will boost my conversions, boost my click through rates, and boost my leads to sales ratio. This is how I’m able to scale in my business each month.So what kinds of things should you be doing and know how to do to propel your email marketing results right away? I want to give you a few tips on what you should be doing so that your overall online marketing efforts are balanced by the results that your email strategy is doing. Because once you master the email side of things, everything else in your business becomes a lot easier. Here’s one thing you can start doing to become an email marketing expert in a short period of time:1) Track your link clicksIn most email autoresponder programs (such as Aweber, GetResponse, Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, etc), you will have the opportunity to view how many people on your list clicked on the link(s) in your emails. All you have to do is simply make the decision to turn this option on or off. It’s that simple. And you want to do this because it makes a huge difference in email sequencing.You don’t want to send out emails blindly without knowing what kinds of results you’re getting. Let’s say for instance that you’re getting 100 leads per day onto your mailing list, and it takes you an average of 10 emails to get a sale – when they’re spaced out 3 days apart. Here’s what you want to recognize, because it could alter the amount of profits that you make exponentially.Regardless of how far apart you’re spacing each email out, if in the 5th email you send you realize from the numbers that 4% of your 100 new leads are unsubscribing in that email, but in all of the rest of the emails you’re getting click through rates such as 30% and you’re getting sales… this should be a clear indication that the email needs to be revised – or totally removed altogether.By changing or removing that 1 single email, you could save yourself 4 leads – that could continue to stay on your list and even purchase from you in the future. And depending on your product price, and your cost per lead, this could be the difference between a lot of revenue for you – or mediocre to NO revenue for you at all. So as an email marketing expert, this is one of the things that you need to spot and take notice of so that you can make as much money as possible. Here’s another way to become an email expert in no time at all:2) Only mail to good and qualified leadsSome people believe that all leads are good. You will find that some people generate leads in any way that they can so that they can feel good about themselves, and post pictures of their large lists in forums and Facebook groups. This is not a good idea. Only generate and put people on your email list who are interested in what you have to offer – or who have purchased something that is really close to what you have to offer.I know some people who love the idea of solo ads. Solo ad marketing is when someone has an email list, and they allow people to mail to their list for a fixed price. Then once the mailing is over, they allow somebody else to mail to their deadbeat list in all in attempts to con them on the idea that their list is golden and supreme. This is not at all true. You should never attempt solo ad marketing.As an email marketing expert, the best kinds of leads to mail to are leads that you generate yourself. You typically do this via some form of display or pay per click (PPC) advertising, joint venture, viral marketing, or referral marketing campaign that you implement. But with solo ad marketing, how do you know how the leads where generated? Are you going by what the list owner has told you?You don’t know this person. They could have bought a 100,000 email lead database from some bulk lead company for $10, and are charging you $80 for every 100 leads that they send your message to. Not only do they scam you and you get no results in the form of income, but you could also get your website blacklisted. An email marketing expert would know this and would stay away from this form of marketing – because they know it’s a waste of time and money.To truly succeed online email marketing is essential, so becoming an expert is a necessity. Never rely on list brokers or buy email lists from someone. Generate leads from people who have sought YOU out, and know your conversion rates. When you have leads coming in from paid advertising and free marketing, you’ll lower your cost to get each lead, and you’ll be in control of what happens in your business.Which would you rather have? An unpredictable email campaign or a predictable one? This simple factor alone will save you 5-10 years of heartache and waste of time. This is something that you truly need to consider. If you want the most success in your business as possible, become an email marketing expert starting today.

How a Personal Brand Plan Benefits Your Business Brand
You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Truer words were never spoken, and they apply to both you and your business.If you’re a store owner, for example, you know that if someone has a negative interaction the first time they visit, they’re going to walk right out, and likely never come back. They might even tell a few friends.But if they have the time of their life on their first visit to your store, you’ve got a loyal customer for life. And again, they might even tell a few friends.But what about if you’re someone who works with clients? Someone who hopes to be a leader, a speaker, an author, an entertainer, a consultant?Perhaps you’ve done the hard work of building your business brand, with a logo and professional website to match.But your business brand is only half the battle. Because if you want to stand out and reach your ideal clients, then you need to spend just as much effort on understanding, developing and maintaining your personal brand.While personal branding is critical for all business people of all genders, the reality is that women are so often conditioned to be meek and mild. So while anyone can benefit from the tips I’m about to share, I highly recommend that women, in particular, listen up (so they can get the confidence to speak up and stand out!).Why You Need a Personal Branding Strategy
Women often ask me, ‘how does a personal brand contribute to my business?’Branding takes work and effort, and business leaders are tuned in to ROI. So they often want to know how a personal brand can benefit their business, before putting in all the effort.In short, your personal brand is a representation of your business, and people will judge you accordingly. The reality is that people do judge a book by its cover.So creating a brand is like the cover for your business. You want that cover to not only stand out, but also to be a true reflection of who you are, and what your business is all about.And whether intuitively or directly, most people believe that how you do one thing is how you do everything. If your personal brand is haphazard, lazy or nonexistent, that will reflect on your business whether you want it to or not.On the other hand, when you align your personal brand with your business brand, you’re much more likely to not only connect with the right people but also turn them into raving fans. So that’s the ‘why’ of developing a personal branding strategy. To learn more about how personal branding dovetails with professional branding on our website.Now let’s get into the ‘how.’Creating A Personal Brand
If every journey begins with a single step, then the first step on this journey is to embrance your personal brand.That means being confident in who you are. This calls for authenticity. Honesty is important over all else in branding – being genuine builds trust, and trust builds customers.
This can be difficult for women who are often raised to be people-pleasers and all-things-to-all-people.That’s why you need to keep your target audience in mind.When building up your brand you need to define yoour ideal client.And then realize that only your ideal client matters. Not everyone has to like you, and that’s OK. Remember that the people who don’t embrace your brand were never likely to be customers, anyway.So be confident in who you are. Own it! Own your personality and don’t be afraid to share it with the world. Embrace what makes you unique, and share it with the world. READ:8 Personal Branding Mistakes that are Hurting Your Business
Personal branding blunders can repel customers. But how do you avoid them so you don’t actually harm your business?Here are the biggest personal branding mistakes to avoid.Read more online.Examples of Building Your Brand and Building Your Business
In my role, I wear lots of hats. Our Canadian-based agency provides just about every service you could require for digital marketing: logo and graphic design, custom website design and development, SEO and SEM marketing, social media marketing, content writing, copywriting, newsletters, and strategy consulting.And while I love all my hats, I think what I love most is working one-on-one with small business owners and entrepreneurs to help them define both their personal and professional brands and use them both effectively.It’s so powerful to help women have their ‘aha’ moment of getting crystal clear on who they are and what they have to offer. For example, our good friend and (now retired) client Dana Smithers is a woman who lives, eats and breathes her personal brand. Always the ‘lady in red,’ Dana is a shining example of integrating her personal brand with her business brand and her whole life.Our client Katherine Hartvickson of Quantum Ascendance is another shining example of creating solid and consistent personal and professional brands.Katherine is a high performance leadership and HR Consultant, as well as speaker and best-selling author.She is also a powerhouse personal brander, infusing professionalism and grace into everything she does. This includes regular insightful blog posts and a longstanding social media presence that establishes her as a go-to expert.And like we’ve covered, it’s important to fully embrace who you are.For example, our client Yvonne Douma isn’t afraid to show her playful side! While her company Douma Leadership offers serious services to entrepreneurs looking to improve their communication skills, Yvonne brings an infectious lightheartedness to her work that her clients love.So instead of forcing herself into the ‘somber businesswomen’ role, Yvonne embraces who she is, with a social media presence that reflects the fun, family-oriented person she is.Don’t get us wrong: Yvonne is a super serious entrepreneur and consummate professional who also shares incredibly insightful tips and strategies to establish herself as an expert in her field (for example, see our talk on communication skills on our website).But that doesn’t mean she needs to shoehorn her personal brand into something that just isn’t her.Branding Tips for Women In Business
So once you’ve got a little clarity on your personal brand, what comes next?Here’s are some tried-and-tested ways to build your personal brand:Optimize Social Media
The best way to effectively use social media in your marketing is to be consistent and create authentic engagement.Social media is not a tool to sell your business. Instead, it offers a wonderful opportunity to share your personal brand. Keep your social media presence consistent in order to build and enhance your personal brand awareness and develop a “know, like and trust” factor with your followers.Learn some more tips on how to create an effective social media strategy with us online.Develop An Appropriate Content Strategy
A good content strategy is important for so many reasons, one of which is establishing your personal and professional brands. We’re all familiar with the phrase ‘content is king,’ so it should be no surprise that well-written content is one of the most important elements of your website and marketing materials.Now, the right content strategy will look different for different companies. It can include:
Website content

Webinar/Teleseminar registration pages

Product and service sales pages

Blogs and newsletter articles

eMail Marketing / Newsletters

Social media posts

Press Releases

Print marketing materials

Ultimately, the goal of all content should be to showcase your brand, appeal to more clients, gain conversions and, ultimately, increase business.If you’re new to content marketing, we have some great resources to help you get started:
How To Create Blog Content to Attract Your Target Audience

How To Convert Newsletter Signups Into Customers Without Feeling Sleezy

How To Engage And Inspire With Interactive Content Marketing

Accept Praise With Grace
This is a personal fault of my own, and I suspect it’s something many women struggle with. It’s sometimes tough to respond to a compliment, but I highly recommend you take a moment and accept it. Part of owning who you are is being grateful when people recognize it.So instead of shrinking back and deflecting compliments, accept praise with graceAnd don’t shy away from your accomplishments, either! It’s not bragging if you simply list your accomplishments and let them stand for themselves.Find your Community
Surround yourself with your target market. That way, you’re more likely to be spending time with people who are more likely to respond to your personal brand.Not everyone appeals to everyone, so put yourself in places where your ideal clients will be present. Mixing water with oil will just cause you unnecessary problems.By placing yourself in the right setting and letting yourself shine with a strong personal brand, you will lead yourself to your ideal clients. The opposite – trying to be all things to all people – just leads to hurdles that are best avoided.You can connect with your community at networking and community events, and never underestimate the importance of a great Facebook group!Work With A Branding Expert
If you’re an entrepreneur, then I have no doubt you are good at what you do. But what you do may not be branding and marketing.Remember, personal and professional branding takes a lot of time and effort. It can also be a little intimidating.You’d outsource your accounting if numbers make you cross-eyed, and you’d outsource your building management if you were swamped for time. Similarly, it’s often a great idea to outsource your branding and marketing if you feel like you’re in over your head, or if you just don’t have the time to dedicate to this important work. That’s where our team can help, with consulting and branding strategies to help you get to the next level. I can’t wait to learn more about your business goals!To your business success,Susan

If you want to achieve that internet marketing lifestyle that you read about online, you need to think about how you can increase productivity while working at your business. The great attraction to working online and setting up an online business is so that you can work from anywhere you happen to find yourself. Online entrepreneurs have discovered that the internet offers a way to earn an income without having to work for someone else in an office and commute to work each day. Earning your living this way means you can be more flexible and work into your schedule other activities that involve your family.The internet is flooded with many business opportunities which promise or infer that an instant internet lifestyle is a reality when in fact no such opportunity exists. Setting up an online business requires effort and hard work especially when you first start out online. Thereafter things do become easier but you still need to be marketing for sixty to eighty per cent of your time. If you increase productivity in such a way that you can get those marketing tasks done in less time, then you will have time available to do the things you have dreamed of doing. That was the reason you set out to build an internet business, but you will only achieve that if you discover how to increase productivity and focus on the tasks you need to do to move forward.We increase productivity when we get things done in a shorter space of time. This fact then brings up the question of how do we get more things done in less time? In order to do more productive tasks we need to set up tools and systems that keep us organized at work. This involves managing our tasks with a “to do” list and a tool for storing and retrieving information. I have always written my “to do” list on a piece of paper, and used files to record important information that I need, until I discovered better productivity tools on the internet that were free to use.While “to do” lists and notebooks are nothing new to many of us, if they are used to maximum effect can greatly enhance and increase productivity for us. For example, do you find that your work is constantly being interrupted when you think of something you need to do later, or your focus is lost when you phone rings or you remember an errand you need to do? When these little reminders come into our minds we lose focus. We stop what we are doing and turn our attention to that task. When you get back to your desk or computer, it takes time to get back into your work again.When I discovered Gqueues I was able to quickly go in and schedule a task for that item that popped into my head and then immediately continue with my work. The result was that my head was cleared of the reminder and I knew I had dealt with it in a way that I would be reminded about it when I reviewed my tasks later in the day. Gqueues helps me to set up a system that takes control of my tasks, allows me to review them when I need to, and presents me with a set of the most appropriate tasks I need to do.To record reference information I use Evernote. It acts as my online notebook where I store all kinds of information and that way I will not forget anything. Both of these productivity tools can follow you where ever you go as they can be accessed on your mobile. Productivity tools like these can help you to keep track of the information that you will need and manage your tasks so that you keep doing the most important ones to build your business online.

Although there are some home maintenance repair projects around the house that you can do yourself, this isn’t always possible. Sometimes a repair project is too complicated or too dangerous for you to attempt on your own, and then you need to choose from among the many available home repair contractors in order to get the repair done safely. However, you want to make sure to hire someone who is reputable.When you are looking into home repair contractors, you want to make sure to check out their reputation. You might want to start by asking your friends and neighbors if they would recommend anyone, and then look for online reviews of past customers as well as asking the contractors themselves for references you can call. You want to find out whether the contractor did a good job and whether or not they would hire him again. Make sure that they are registered, licensed and bonded.Once you have some home repair contractors to choose from, you should get written bids from each of them that include what work is to be done, what materials are necessary, and how much they will charge to do the work. Check with each to see what sort of warranty or guarantees they offer on their work. You want to avoid any offers that seem to be really low. These might be due to the contractor using cheap materials. Or the contractor might be bidding low – then after getting the job he can add more expenses to make up the difference between his cost and what he’s charging you.After deciding between your choices for home repair contractors, you should get a very detailed written contract from the one you choose. This should include all the details that were in the original bid, but it is now more legally binding than it was in the bid. Make sure that the contract states who is responsible for cleaning up after the work is done.You don’t want to find yourself with a home contractor that isn’t reputable and doesn’t do the work that you require, so do your research and make sure you get everything in writing.

1. Engine Automotive Oil Additives or “Snake Oil”? Oil additives have failed to deliver for years.In August 1992, a brilliantly written article exposed the repeated failures in the claims of the oil additive (engine automotive and trucking) industry. The article was entitled Snake Oil – Is That Additive Really A Negative? It was written by Fred Rau and was originally printed in Road Rider magazine, now Motorcycle Consumer News. That expose provided the basis for what we in the industry knew: oil additives are a means of lifting money from the wallets of uninformed consumers.Many in the engine automotive industry were already skeptics. We’ve heard all the promises of friction reduction, longer lasting engines, and fuel savings. Repeatedly, such want to be solutions failed to live up to the hype. With over thirty years in the field, I was a full blown skeptic with dozens of oil additives’ experience under my belt.However, an experienced entrepreneur in the field of “toll blending” for heavy duty industrial solutions drew on his expertise to create an environmentally safe, friction reducing, motor oil additive, solving the one problem oil additives failed to overcome.Now, if the problem is truly solved, the benefits are obvious:- less friction means engine automotive protection- less heat means engine automotive friction is reduced- longer engine life means a surge in engine automotive performance- less friction/heat produces a drop in engine automotive related expense- less friction, heat also leads directly to increased engine automotive fuel economyMotor oil, as a lubricant, works but is not always sufficient. When it gets hot, motor oil breaks down, vaporizes and burns. The oil industry has been quite innovative, using different additives to combat this process. Motor oil additives consisting of zinc compounds, molybdenum (“moly”), chlorinated paraffins, and others. The problem with all these additives (apart from plugging oil passages and toxicity) is they are only suspended in the oil.But, you say, that’s the way to get the additives to the hot spots needing friction protection. You must suspend the oil additive in the oil so it is carried to the engine parts needing protection. That’s standard theory.Yes.And that’s been the guiding assumption for the oil additive industry all along. Suspend the oil additive in motor oil and let it be carried to the friction hot spots.2. The “necessary assumption” also provides the problem with engine automotive “theory”.Repeat: Suspend the oil additive in motor oil and let be carried to the friction hot spots.So, what’s the problem?The problem is, the oil additives do not permanently adhere to internal engine stress points. It’s presumed in all oil additive engineering approaches that the motor oil is going to carry its oil additive to the high stress points of the engine. This is where the extra lubricating properties are needed.In that necessary assumption also lies the problem.As an engine works under heavy load conditions, pressure and friction build up at some of those metal points. The result? The oil is suddenly “missing in action”. It burns up from excessive heat or is “squeezed out” (exceeds its load bearing capacity) due to excessive pressure.Either way you end up with “metal on metal”. The additives themselves can’t work because there isn’t enough oil present to suspend them. It’s been squeezed out or burned up. Put bluntly, an additive can only be where the motor oil is present.Remember, if oil additive engineering is relying on an additive’s suspension in motor oil to do its job, then engineering is also stuck with the limitations of the oil’s properties to withstand heat and pressure.Note. The additive must be able to withstand heat and pressure to a greater degree than oil or “Why bother adding it?”.3. Solution: What if an oil additive actually starts to perform at the temperatures and stress where oil normally fails?The solution was an additive already meeting industrial needs concerning friction and heat build up.Carried by the motor oil, it comes to friction points…- engine rings against the cylinder wall-bearings-camshafts-lifters-valve guides-turbo charger-oil pumpHere it does something that no other additive has ever been able to accomplish. This oil additive disassociates (molecularly) from the oil and literally adheres to the metal at the point of friction, leaving a soft metal carboxylate film that can out perform motor oil as a lubricant in a high friction/heat application (as can be seen in the pictures/test results referenced at the site below).So this lubricant, unlike oil, whether it be synthetic or petroleum, actually starts to perform at the temperatures and stress where oil normally fails. Remember what happens inside the engine, when fuel ignites at the top of the compression stroke and the piston is moving down the cylinder. There, most of the oil on the cylinder wall gets burned up.But this additive doesn’t burn up like the motor oil carrying it. It molecularly embeds itself into the pores of the cylinder wall. So, when the piston is traveling back up the cylinder, the additive acts as a lubricating agent and is always there.So, in summation: since you’re getting rid of the friction, then you’re getting rid of the heat generated from it. That means your oil lasts longer. It doesn’t get contaminated as quickly because those high friction points are being adequately lubricated. Adequately lubricated, they will cease to be high friction points, running cooler, the oil will pass through those points without burning which creates harmful acids and sludge.Most importantly your engine can last longer, run more efficiently, and the fuel that was being used to overcome the friction can now be used to move you down the road to where you need to go.