Purple Envelopes - NOW You're Being You

I saw a great article today, Purple Envelopes:How to Grab Your Prospect's Attention. It's a great marketing tip, and a great example on how being YOU can really help with your marketing success.

Even if you don't do paper mailings, read the article. How can you apply this concept to your own marketing techniques?

On Being YOU

A few days ago, a client (let's call him George) asked me whether his marketing is "professional enough." He was worried that his text was "too personal" and didn't make his company look like a large company.

George is a very funny, likeable, insightful person. His email newsletter is extraordinarily humorous and real. He's always telling stories about himself and his nutty family in his articles, then relates those stories to the point of the article. George exposes who he really is to his customers and prospects, and they love him for it.

People are so numb to all the marketing that's coming to them. Let's face it, we ignore a lot of email and letters that come our way. But when I asked George what his open rate was on this email newsletter ("open rate" means the number of people who actually open his email as a percentage of the total number he sent), he said his open rate was 75%!! Wow!!! In this day and age when 40-50% open rate is considered excellent, 75% blows me away.

You really want to form a personal connection with your customers and prospects. In my opinion, it's crucially important for you to BE YOU, whether you're crazy or serious, spiritual or pragmatic. Let people know who you are and what you're all about. Don't try to hide behind a "corporate exterior," even if you're working with corporate clients. If there is more than one person in your business, it's okay to say "we," but don't say "we" if it's only you. (Why hide that you're a one-person business? It's a tremendous asset to be a one-person business!)

I'm so tired of faceless companies, and I bet you are, too. I'm not saying that you should expose all your personal problems and foibles which might detract from your message, but exposing your personality really does help to build relationships. It's a little scary to let people know who you really are, but it's also honest and full of integrity.

Me? I'm a lot of things, some of which you already know, and some that might be a surprise:

• I love being self employed. I'm an evangelist about it.
• I adore being in nature and hate crowded, polluted places. The photo above is my husband and I last autumn at the top of a mountain we hiked. We hiked Cornwall, England last year, and will be hiking Yosemite this year.
• We bought a house in the country last summer so that we could be in nature always. It's heaven. Okay, the deer eating my flowers isn't heaven, but the rest of it is.
• I have a distinctive laugh that people seem to enjoy. Which is cool, because I love to laugh! My sister and I have the exact same laugh, and when we get together the energy escalates through the roof.
• My family is loving, warm, supportive and totally insane. I couldn't live without them.
• My spirituality is simple: I believe we all are here for a reason, we all have gifts to give, and it's our responsibility as humans (and souls) to give these gifts to the world.
• I get angry at people who are being mean to others.
• I love to share what I know, and when I learn something new, I love to tell others about it. This is sometimes annoying to my family who really don't care about business plans or internet marketing. Spoil sports.

What about you? Who are you and what's unique about you? What are you going to share with your customers?

So go ahead, be YOU!

Four GREAT Interviews, For Your Listening Pleasure

As many of you know, I've been conducting interviews with successfully self-employed people for many years, and posting the audio of those interviews on my website.

I have four NEW interviews recently posted:

• Andy Wibbels
• C.J. Hayden
• Mitch Meyerson
• Michael Port
  

Listen to these free interviews here:
http://www.passionforbusiness.com/interviews.htm

Retirement Plans for Small Businesses

For many small business owners, just making your financial obligations month-by-month is difficult. But as your business grows and becomes more profitable, it's time to start thinking about saving some of that profit towards your retirement.

The IRS has a guide to help define the different types of retirement plans and how they affect your taxes. Publication 560, Retirement Plans for Small Businesses will help you wade through the information and select the right retirement plans for you (and your employees):

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p560.pdf

MSN AdCenter

According to this article by Merle in SmallBusinessNewz, MSN Search is launching a pilot program for their own version of Pay Per Click advertising, competing head-to-head with Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. I can't wait to get my hands on this! Google has a great interface for PPC, and Yahoo's is terrible, so it will be interesting to see what MSN has come up with.

If your organic search rankings are good in one search engine, and not so good in another, sometimes PPC is the way to go until you can do your SEO work.

IRS Tax Site for Businesses

Yesterday was the tax deadline for many small businesses in America, and with the USA tax deadline looming for sole proprietorships (April 17), you need all the business tax advice you can get.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has set up a tax page for businesses, which you might find helpful:

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/index.html

The page specifically for small businesses and the self-employed is here:

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/index.html

And for those of you who work from home, this Publication 587, Business Use of Your Home is invaluable (in PDF format):

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p587.pdf

Kauffman Entrepreneurial Index

You'll want to read this great report, The Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity for 2005, by Robert W. Fairlie (in PDF format). It includes research into entreprenuerial trends like:

• There are approximately 550,000 new business created each month in the USA
• Entrepreneurial activity is highest in the western portion of the country
• Rates of growth are highest in the construction industry

This report is easy-to-read and decipher and is helpful for any small business owner to see the trends for the past few years.

Best Business Cities 2005

The Milken Institute has released it's "2005 Best Performing Cities." It ranks large and small metro areas based on several business factors, including job growth and wage growth. If part of your marketing strategy is to sell to other businesses, you'll want to look at this report:

http://bestcities.milkeninstitute.org/

Are You Cut Out To Be Your Own Boss?

I had an interesting discussion this week with one of my clients. She's been in business for six months and is ready to quit. (I have permission to share her story.)

She writes,

"I give up. Starting a business is so much harder than I thought it would be, so much more time-consuming. I was hoping to be making a profit by now! There are so many things to do and I'm totally overwhelmed. People don't seem to want to buy my products and I feel totally rejected. I don't think I have the personality to be self-employed."

Hmmmm...interesting. Are there really personality traits that separate born-entrepreneurs from people who can't hack it?

I'd say yes. I've been self-employed in one way or another since 1981. I've known many self-employed people, and have been coaching and consulting them for years. And over the past 25 years, I see a pattern in successful entrepreneurs versus those who pack up and exit their business.

Here's my must-have list of personality traits for the successfully self-employed (in no particular order):

1. Tenacity.

2. Self-worth.

3. Humor.

4. Willingness to do the dirty work (the tasks that you hate to do).

5. Willingness to learn new skills.

6. A deep desire to be independent.

7. Willingness to take acceptable and calculated risk.

8. An ability to deal well with people.

9. A passion for what you do or sell.

10. Resourceful and creative.

11. Willingness to ask for help.

12. Self-disciplined.

13. Self-motivating.

14. Willing to do the personality "foundational work" to help yourself and your business.

Notice that I didn't list any business skills here. You can always learn the business skills you need, or hire someone to do the work for you who does have the business skills you lack. This list is about who you are and what habits you have. Changing your basic personality style will take effort. That's why #14 is so important: are you willing to do the groundwork, the personality foundational work, to set the stage for your success?

Naturally, there are some personality traits that are business killers, but that's another blog entry! :)