Follow these step-by-step best practices to growing the single most important marketing asset in your business: your email list.

A while back I posted about the importance of assigning more importance to list-building vs. growing your social media following. Not saying the latter isn’t important. In fact, social media is indispensable for…growing your email list! 

But your social media efforts should not be first and foremost about growing your audience, but about leveraging your audience to grow that list. And why’s that so important? 

The Importance of Building Your Email List 

In the aforementioned post, a couple of the reasons cited were the fact that an email reader is much more receptive to your message than an Instagram- or Facebook-scroller; and that an email will reach an exponentially higher percentage of its intended audience than will any (unboosted) social media post). 

Furthermore… 

Most people who visit your home page...

Every year-end I set aside time to just think…about the past year and the year to come, both in terms of my business and my personal life.

And over the years I’ve developed a pretty powerful questions-based methodology that I share with my clients. I’d like to share six of my business-related questions, which could deliver a breakthrough for you and your business in the year to come.

How can six questions do that?

First, we’re all moving so fast, working on so many things, that we forget to pause and just look around – and find breakthrough business insights and solutions hiding in plain sight!

Second, we coaches are all familiar with the concept of intentionality – yet we forget its potential power in our own businesses: Powerful questions beget intention, which helps us stay focused on what is essential, and in turn begets directed action on those essentials (and helping steer us clear of NON-essential stuff that’s self-defeating!).

This...

I recently wrote about how a “virtual mentor” helped me double my business in the space of just two years. Readers were astonished by how easy it can be to “hire” one. Some had already been “employing” one without realizing it!

If you haven’t yet read that post, let me explain…

What Is a Virtual Mentor?

An ideal mentor, as online marketing guru Amy Porterfield puts it, is…

 “…someone who has been in the trenches before you…who has succeeded in similar ways and accomplished things that you want to accomplish.”

We coaches could all use a good mentor to guide us on marketing, admin best practices, business strategy, etc. Maybe you’ve hired a mentor coach or a business coach, or participated in a mastermind.

If you’ve got someone like that in your corner, Yay!

A virtual mentor is all the above who you can learn from without ever speaking to or corresponding with them. Or paying...

Feeling stuck in your business? Consider a mentor. Want quick results? For free? Get a virtual mentor. Here’s how it helped me double my business in just two years.

Working in our business day in and day out, we often get stuck. We’re not sure where or how to grow. Or we know we need to up our game in social media, our website design or marketing generally, but there’s so much advice out there that it seems there’s too much for any of it to be useful.

Oh – and we’re crazy-busy. So, in the chaos, we don’t move forward with anything dramatically new.

This is why an absolute key for focus and growth in our coaching business is to have a mentor.

And here’s the good news: We can have a mentor we’ve never met, spoken to or even corresponded with. A virtual mentor.

Whether a leader in your coaching niche or a marketing or business-building influencer, a virtual mentor is someone you’ll follow online, whose free tools you’ll...

Been a while since you posted a new blog? Social media pipeline all dried up?

As a result, maybe not getting as many fresh eyeballs to your website lately as you’d like?

You’re not alone. I recently surveyed a bunch of random coaches’ blogs and Facebook pages and found that:

• 70% hadn’t posted a new blog in nearly a year.
• Their most recent Facebook post was, on average, six months ago.

And it’s quite understandable...

Writing is hard – especially longer-form writing (blogs, video scripts, podcast outlines). For most people, it’s among the most effortful work there is. Plus, as solopreneurs, we have a gazillion other, more pressing things to do, so writing often stays on the back burner.

And as someone who writes not one but three blogs and maintains content across 13 different social media channels…Hey – I feel your pain!

But I’ve figured out some ways to make writing easier and faster.

And what follows are a handful of...

I’ll start with a horror story...

A fellow coach recently told me over dinner that her Instagram account, with 7,000 hard-earned followers, had been suddenly and without warning…shut…down.

No reason was given other than, “The account has been removed for violating our terms of use.” And trust me, this coach is NOT someone who’d violate anybody’s terms of use. She couldn’t even guess as to what she might have done wrong. And good luck trying to talk with anyone at Facebook/Instagram – not even a freakin’ bot.

Through a miracle, and only because she knew someone at the company, she was able to get her account and 7,000 followers restored. But she vowed, “Never again! I will never be dependent on a platform that has that kind of control over access to my audience.”

(She then informed all her followers that she’s leaving Instagram, inviting them to join her on an emerging text-based platform, where she has...

The Power of Delegation is undeniable. Yet we hesitate or avoid hiring help. Maybe these “hidden benefits” can tip the scales for you!

The benefits of delegating tasks are mostly obvious. And just in case those obvious ones aren’t totally obvious to you, I’ll recap those in a moment.

Yet despite the obvious benefits of delegating – or in the context of us coaches and solopreneurs, hiring virtual assistants and/or consultants – so many of us have hesitated to, or avoided, making such hires, for a number of reasons. (I recently shared the Top 10 Signs It’s Time to Hire a VA, and also the Top 6 Reasons We Hesitate or Avoid Hiring a VA or Consultant – which can without a doubt help us grow our business.)

 (A quick note: by consultant, I mean someone who specializes in a narrow area, typically technology or software. For instance, I have two go-to consultants for my WordPress websites, one for my Kajabi website and course...

Why Is It So Hard to Hire a Virtual Assistant or Consultant?

I’m going to share the Top 6 Reasons We Might Hesitate or Avoid Hiring a Virtual Assistant to help us in our business – and the important thing they all have in common.

There are lots of pain points around this topic for coaches and other solopreneurs.

And it’s not just when thinking about hiring a VA, but any kind of virtual help: hiring a consultant, or an online business manager – or even just going on Fiverr to hire someone for a relatively simple project.

But based on my own experience and in the surveying of scores of other coaches whom I coach on business-building and productivity, I’ve boiled down the Top 6 Reasons Why We Hesitate to Hire Virtual Help…

So if you’ve been hesitating, deliberating, procrastinating, you’re not alone, and my guess is you can relate to most if not all of the following reasons…

ONE: I’m not sure exactly what to hire someone ...

Have you been thinking about hiring a VA or consultant to help you in your coaching business? Or adding an additional one? But maybe you aren’t sure if it’s the right time to pull the trigger?

 Well, I’m here to help, by sharing the…

Top 10 Signs It’s Time to Hire a VA or Consultant (or add another one!)

#10: You keep thinking about it!!

If you’re thinking, “Wow, maybe I need some help,” then you probably need some help.

#9: You’re doing more social media, onboarding, billing, bookkeeping, website troubleshooting, etc., than…coaching!

And the only one of those things listed that is a pure revenue-generating activity is…the coaching.

#8: You continue to do things you absolutely HATE doing

or SUCK at!

And we keep doing these things, why? Hmmm.

#7: You continue to do relatively simple tasks, just cuz you like to do ‘em.

Or, you keep doing simple repetitive tasks someone else could/should do because,...

7 Secrets for Emails that Convert to Clicks: Simple, Proven Tips for Getting More Traffic to Your Primary Content

In two previous posts, I shared ways to increase traffic to your blog – or any ‘primary content’, whether blog, video or podcast – by making some simple improvements to your Copywriting (e.g., better headlines, titles) and by increasing your email Open Rates and social media post engagement. 

But even if you were to double your email open rates, you’re still NOT DONE optimizing. Because once you’ve gotten your subscriber to open the email or read the social media post promoting your primary content, there’s still the job of getting them to read through it so they make their way to the link to that blog/podcast/video – and then the job of getting them to click on that link! 

Increase Traffic to Your Blog by Upping Your CTR

In other words, we gotta up our click-through rate (CTR). And...