Everyone can do it (with expert help)

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Gal Baras

This is a guest post from my biggest and best client (she’s also my wife, but read it anyway). She told me, “You can’t tell people what it’s like not to know anything about online marketing, because you already know. I’ll write a post for you and you just publish it and show it to anyone who is non-technical like me”. So here goes. Enjoy.

As a blogger with tens of thousands of readers every month, I am often asked, “How did you do it?” usually with admiration for this success. I usually feel uncomfortable answering (my parents always told me to be modest), but I am going to stretch myself this time and answer everyone once and for all, without being shy about it.

Whether you know me from Family Matters, Be Happy in LIFE or The Motivational Speaker, you know how strongly I am into the “You can do it!” attitude. I am a life coach and an educator and ever since I started my first business at the age of 25, this has been my motto – I can do it! Everyone can!

I often use the quote “If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right” as one of my life coaching favorites. I am in the business of happiness and my slogan is “Happiness is a choice!”

Even success on the Internet is a choice, isn’t it?

If you have a business and want to open it to the Internet, if you want to get more business online, if you want to have tens of thousands of readers or a stream of buyers, if you want to know how to be successful at Internet marketing, sit tight and enjoy the ride.

A free event for suckers

[I know the word "suckers" is strong, but it is not my choice. This is what people ultimately call themselves when they realize what has happened to them. I have heard it enough times to know]

The first time I came into the Internet world was when Gal and I did our life coaching course. While everyone was working on establishing a practice, Gal, who had been an IT manager, was focusing on our online presence. By the end of my course, we were the only people, out of about 50 coaches, who had a site and a business card to give potential clients. After a while, our roles became clearer – I was an educator with over 20 years of experience and knew nothing about computer technology and Internet, and Gal was an IT professional with over 20 years experience and knew a lot about it. So I did the offline work and Gal did the online work.

The first thing you learn about starting a business on the Internet is that everyone can do it. I remember the first seminar I attended. You may have had the same experience yourself. It is a free event that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in one day. The food, the venue and the free gifts are nothing compared to how many suckers come to those events for the promise of sitting on the beach in a swimsuit with a laptop, sipping cool drinks and watching the dollars appearing on the screen every day and every hour.

The suckers’ slogans

Gal and I went to our first event as life coaches. It was an awesome weekend. It was a great seminar and I learned a lot. For 2 days, they promised the world “Be your own boss! Work 3 hours a day! Money will be coming out of your ears!” and … “Everyone can do it!”

I have to say I almost believed them. I wanted to believe them with all my heart, but because our life coaching course had promised exactly the same thing, I had the suspicion there was a pattern there. Luckily for us, it was not a test of our trust. We just did not have $10,000 to buy the product on offer. We were shocked that our fellow coaches spent so much money just weeks after they had spent thousands of dollars on the life coaching course.

If you have ever heard these slogans about trying to build a business on the Internet, be warned, someone is convinced you are a sucker and might be taking you for a ride.

Seminars that teach you online business have a system to convince you that everyone can do it. They show a woman who could hardly type and has a family to support in order to attract parents who want to make some quick cash and say she did it within 3 months in her spare time, in-between doing her daytime job, taking the kids from one activity to another, doing housework and oh, I almost forgot, a huge debt she was trying to pay. Or, they show you a group of teens without any capital who came up with a brilliant idea that became a hit overnight. Those events are like a magic show – you know there is a trick, but it is done so beautifully that you just accept it. You buy into the illusion.

What kills me every time is hearing the presenter say, “I’m a successful person and I’m here to teach you how to make money effortlessly, have lots of time off and have all the luxury you want”. I especially hate the word “effortlessly”. The harder life is for you, the louder you hear how effortlessly it can be done.

I always have the same question to those speakers – “If your system can make you a millionaire overnight, why would you spend your time sleeping away from your wife and kids, sleep in a different hotel every night for 200 days in a year to convince us, suckers, to buy your product? Why aren’t you on the beach next to some amazingly blue water working an hour each day and drinking tequila? Isn’t it because you are too busy running workshops?”

I never ask it out loud, because I know the answer. I have 30,000 readers a month because I understood that not everyone can do it. I certainly could not!

Overnight success

I swear to you I have tried. I spent hours studying the same course with Gal. The Internet marketing guru said to us, “You need $90 to buy a website and hosting and an hour a day. Everyone can do it.” I sat 4 and sometimes 5 hours a day, watching videos, reading, summarizing and trying to implement, but pretty quickly, I realized that our Internet marketing guru’s “overnight success” had taken about 8 years and the reason he was successful was that he sold Internet marketing products to aspiring Internet marketers. It was a closed market – people who were making money by convincing others they could make money using their own products. They even have affiliates that sell to the same people. It is like a feeding frenzy. There was so much dishonesty there (MLM, or “direct marketing”, is the same).

My product was a coaching service. I did not want to tell my client they could make a fortune from my coaching, because it was just not true. Every time I watched Gal programming something, I freaked out. I wanted a business, not a course in HTML, PHP, CSS or any other strange acronym. I wanted to work with my clients, do my workshops and sell my books, not to sit in front of the computer all day long.

So many readers come to my site because I decided to give up trying to prove that everyone can do it by doing it myself. Instead, I focus on what I do best and allow the Internet marketer in the family to do what he does so well. Coaching and doing Internet marketing are two different skills and focusing on one leaves much less time for the other.

All my life coaching buddies wanted a website and spent months learning something that Gal did in 2 weeks. In the meantime, they neglected their life coaching practice and got nowhere in both areas.

The reason I feel uncomfortable when people ask, “How did you do it?” is because I did not do it, at least not on my own. Someone had to take my parenting advice, my books and my coaching services and publish them so that many people would actually get to see them.

My message to you is that the online world is big and keeps expanding. Yes, at some stage every business will have a site, even if only for presence. If you want a business online, if you want buyers online, if you want a website even just as an online brochure with your contact details, stick to what you do best and let those who know Internet marketing do the rest for you.

The same applies to any business service and even to family and parenting services, such as accounting, public relations, gardening, construction and architecture. In the same way you would not reinvent a smart phone and prefer to buy one that has been developed by experts, using expert services can produce better results (perhaps more expensive upfront, but cheaper over time) and allow you to concentrate on what you do well and enjoy doing.

You just have to let go of the illusion.

Life is much better this way.

Happy days,
Ronit

My Site Has a PR5!

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Gal Baras

C H E C K T H I S O U T !

I was showing someone this site as an example and quickly checked my Google PageRank (PR). It was 5!

In the past, whenever someone offered me SEO services, the first thing I did was check the PR of their site, their keyword density and so on to get an impression of what they have been able to do for themselves. More often than not, the site looks good, but has a PR3 or lower. That, of course, made me wonder what potential clients might think of my own site, if they discovered its PR.

I worry no more, for my site is in with the best of them.

Life is good,
Gal

P.S. If you ever want a PR5 for your site…

Word Count for Firefox & Chrome

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Gal Baras

This may not be strictly related to online marketing, but in the course of my work, I often have to count the number of words and characters in a given text (like page titles and descriptions). If you’ve ever used Microsoft Word, you know how that works.

Well, before Firefox 4.0, there was a nice add-on to do it, but it’s not compatible with the new version (how annoying). So I’ve had to resort to desperate measures.

Just kidding. Firefox allows the creation of JavaScript bookmarks, so you can put anything into them, really, and perform useful tasks like counting words and characters with a click of a button. In fact, Chrome provides the same mechanism, so this works on both browsers.

Thanks to as post by Joe Maller and another one by Media College, I had everything I needed. The code is this:

javascript:d=window.getSelection()+'';%20d=(d.length==0)?document.title:d;%20alert(d.split('%20').length+' words, '+d.length+' characters');

To install this “button”, drag the WordCount link to your Firefox or Chrome bookmarks area and you’re done. Just select some text, click the “button” (you can test now by clicking the link above) and a message will pop up with those numbers for you.

Note: when selecting text, make sure there are no trailing spaces or you will get an extra word and, of course, an extra character (this may happen when you double-click or triple-click).

Enjoy,
Gal

Market Leadership

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Gal Baras

I often hear people talk about “market leadership”, wanting to be “the market leader” or even to “dominate my marketplace”. Many business and marketing seminars hype their audiences up with these and similar terms.

But these concepts cause the opposite type of think to what actually brings success.

You see, in order to succeed in business, online or offline, we must let the market lead us, rather than trying to lead the market. There is one of us or maybe even 50 of us in the business, but the marketplace, particularly online, is endless. There’s no way we could lead it anywhere.

What we need to do is pay attention to where the market is headed and position ourselves there as a good supplier that delivers products and services to the heart of what the market wants and needs. In other words, we need to follow our clients’ lead.

Who needs to dominate and endless market anyways?

One of the best sayings I’ve every heard about online marketing was this:

Instead of dragging your message across the land to your audience, why not just drop it into the river?

Basically, what this says is that instead of focusing on what you have to offer, packaging it beautifully, putting up signs about it, calling out to anyone who will listen to tell them about it and putting up a great website to sell it, you’d be better off finding out what people need and tailoring the perfect product or service for that. They will then ignore the packaging, come up with messages of their own, spread the word to all their friends and sell your product or service for you.

Where your website is concerned, by the way, if you create it so it looks beautiful to you and your product or service is featured brightly and with hyped up statements, you may very well sell nothing. On the other hand, if you take the time to study you clients first and build a site that they will like, a site that uses their language, pictures of people like them and their favorite way of using a site, they will carry you again to online sales and online profits.

So trust in the market and let your clients lead you to success.

You can use online services like www.reputation.com to help keep your PR in check. It’s always good to be aware of how the market may respond to any decisions you make.

Sites for the family and for local business

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Gal Baras

It’s been a while since I posted something, mostly because of the summer break here in Australia. But I’ve also been busy working on some great new sites and launching them and now is the time to tell you about them.

Tsoof Baras

As you might have guessed, Tsoof is my son. He’s only 15 years old, but already starting Year 12 and a fabulous musician. Tsoof sings, composes exciting music and plays percussion like a pro.

The new site features a lot of what I’ve learned about using WordPress to build websites, along with some nifty SEO work to get the site ranking and Tsoof working in no time.

Pain Relief Kinesiology

Maria Brady is a really energetic and positive woman, who just loves to help people feel good. He specialty is kinesiology, but she also uses foot joint mobilization and herbal essences to sooth and heal bodies and souls.

This site was optimized for local searches with Google Places and special keywords.

Plastic Injection Moulding

Manufacturing in China seems to be the way of every company these days and that can be scary for the uninitiated. This is why providing Australian management, guarantees and quality control is so important when engaging a plastic injection moulding company.

Nicet Industries has an office in Brisbane, so clients deal locally and in English, but it manufactures moulds and plastic parts in China, so clients get incredible savings.

More sites coming soon. What about yours?

Gal

Google Search Results Have Changed (again)!

Posted on November 10, 2010 by Gal Baras

So here I was, showing some small business owners how to get more business online in a webinar, and I suddenly noticed that the Google Search results page (or SERP for short) is behaving differently. Here is a quick summary of what’s new.

Google Places

New Google Search Results page

Results from Google Places (formerly Google Maps or Google Local Business) now appear a lot like organic web results, with the following differences:

A red map marker
Contact information
A link to the Google Places record with the number of reviews that place has received, if there are any
A map, showing red markers for all the Google Places in the search results, which (OMG) slides down over the advertising sidebar when you scroll down!

Page Preview

New Google Search Results preview

Keeping up with the Joneses Bing, every result (except subscribed links) features a magnifying glass icon to the right of the title. When clicked, the pages goes into Preview Mode and starts showing scaled-down images of the listed pages when you hover your mouse over them.

In Preview Mode, all the magnifier icons turn a darker shade of blue.

When another magnifier icon is clicked, the icons return to the lighter, duller shade of blue and hovering over search results shows nothing.

What does this change mean?

To me, this change shows that Google is investing a lot of thought into making their search engine user-friendly and providing relevant, useful results as quickly as possible. Since Instant Search, results appear in a heartbeat, but now we can also scan then much faster and avoid wasting time visiting the wrong pages.

Moreover, local businesses have gained an enormous boost to their search presence by getting full exposure within the results, as opposed to the crammed listings they had before.

The only ones who may not like this recent change are Google advertisers who now see the sliding map object hiding their ads from view when the page is scrolled down, but this may not be so bad, because the map starts above the ads at first, so if the person searching chooses to scroll down, the top ads are probably not interesting to them anymore and might as well be hidden.

Oddly enough, I believe that pushing down the sidebar ads may actually increase clickthrough rates for the top positions in the sidebar.

Have an eventful day searching,
Gal

You don’t know what you know

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Gal Baras

For the past few months, I’ve been facilitating a Small Business Online workshop. Small Business Online is an Australian government initiative to help small business owners create web presence for their business and get business online.

The material is excellent and provide a solid foundation for working with online marketing specialists and web developers. For people who are in IT and want to build their own site (or one for their wife’s business), the course provided many opportunities to gain perspective from experienced consultants and even have their specific sites reviewed.

The main messages of the workshops were:

Small business owners can’t focus on too many things. Therefore, they should do what they do best and engage professionals. So we gave the participants some great advice on how to select and get the best out of their Internet professionals
Small business owners are typically action-oriented and want to do things, but getting business from the Internet requires setting business goals, developing strategies and measuring results. So we tied every technical decision area back to business objectives
Small business owners are familiar with every little aspect of their own business, but they are often blind to the bigger picture. For example, they may know their clients on a personal level, but they have no idea how the people who don’t buy from them think, so they can’t attract them. So we showed them ways to find out “where the wind is blowing”
Small business owners often apply offline, local thinking to their online venture and can’t see the true potential of the global web.

In the last session, Phil Hoffman (the program organizer) and I were talking (again) about why the participants should hire professional Internet consultants to help them and at some stage, I said, “You don’t know what you don’t know”. That’s because professionals keep their knowledge up to date and small business operators have no hope in Hell of doing that while running a business, so they are very likely to miss important stuff.

But then I thought about something else – “You don’t know what you DO know”. That’s because whenever I look at a client’s business with my Internet Vision, I see potential products they could sell worldwide, ways to engage their market and incentives they could use to inspire action and they just go, “Wow! I could never think of THAT”.

And that’s the point, folks. You don’t know what you don’t know, but you also don’t know what you DO know that somebody else may want to pay you for. After years of doing something, you think it’s easy, but it’s not easy for everyone.

Brokers in any market add value to their clients by being able to find and match products and services. It may not seem like much, but to a client in dire need who can’t find what he needs, the value is incredible.

Great web developers, graphic designers, copy writers and online marketing specialists add value to their clients by making their sites more robust, faster, more appealing, more compelling and generating more profits than the clients could do on their own. In most cases, the cost is incurred ONCE and the benefits are ONGOING.

If you live in Queensland, I invite you to register on the Small Business Online site (click the banner below) and plan to attend the upcoming webinars. I’ll be there too.

Talk to you soon,
Gal

What will compel you to buy?

Posted on August 12, 2010 by Gal Baras

This is a question that was posted on LinkedIn:

Will you make a purchase from a stand-alone Landing Page that you’re visiting for the first time?
To elaborate, lets take a sample scenario. You’re surfing around, looking for some particular service vendor (products are much easier to sell online, I believe). You click on a sponsored result, and come to a page – a stand-alone landing page that lists their package offerings, with a call-to-action to buy. Lets assume that the page is of decent quality, and you are kind of inclining towards these guys.
Signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form – a typical visitor would probably do that. But would you actually spend money and buy something from this page? What would impress you enough to go “wow” and immediately start subscribing to their services?

Here is my answer.

Personally, I look for the feeling of safety when I buy, which is made up of several components:

The identity of the seller must be clear, preferably verifiable, and there must be a way to communicate with him/her offline
There must be conditions under which I can get my money back and a clear method of doing that. If a third party is involved (like Clickbank or PayPal), that’s even better, because I will feel protected
It must be absolutely clear what I am buying through the content, the images, any videos, testimonials and so on. For some things, the only thing that will make me buy is a demo, but screen captures come pretty close in most cases
The testimonials must appear to be from real people, who have gotten actual value out of the product/service and who describe their personal experience in sufficient detail to inspire my trust. Any website link and the testimonial is disqualified as biased. People who have just finished a workshop have not done anything with their new knowledge, so they are heavily discounted. Real, personal, raw life experience = trust
The way things are laid out and the style/tone of the text give me a feeling. If the writer is confident, I will buy. If the writer tries to sell too hard, I will not buy. Good things are easy to sell, because their value is readily apparent. If the seller is not convinced he/she can sell without an effort, there must be something wrong with their offer
I HATE pop-ups. If anything pops up, that’s the end for me

Although the question was about standalone sales pages, my answer is just as relevant for anything you do online. Tricks don’t work! At least, they don’t work for long. Search engines, social networking engines and website visitors are quick to learn and will always find out the frauds.

The more real value you provide, the easier it will be to present it. Your feelings about your product, your service, your company and yourself as a person shine through your website pages and you can’t fake them.

As a life coach, I believe deeply that the world is our reflection and that by working on our inner peace will give us better results than trying to manipulate anybody or anything else. It’s the same when trying to sell something online. Love your product with all your heart. Truly feel you would buy it yourself and the sales will follow.

This is why I am an ethical Internet marketer.

Happy online business,
Gal

The Truth Will Set You Free

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Gal Baras

This is one of the reasons I love doing business on the Internet. In Cyberspace, you can be yourself and there will always be enough people who will think you’re pretty cool and, if you’re selling something, will buy from you and say “Thank you”.

Most of my clients have an offline marketing mindset when they venture online for the first time. Offline marketing is all about branding and creating an image for your company, or so they think, because they’ve seen all those TV ads for “big money” companies.

By Internet marketing is very different.

According to the world population clock, there are 6,860,146,847 people in the world today. Let’s say that only 10% of them have Internet access. That’s 686,014,685 potential customers.

Can you ever hope to service them all? Nope.

Could you keep in touch with all of them, even if you have a large team? Not likely.

Is it possible that out of these people, 1 in 1,000 will love what you offer and want to buy it? Yep.

That leaves us a nice group of 686,014 people. For a small operator, even that’s a big undertaking and it’s probably best if they don’t all take out their wallet or sign up on the same day.

So why not be yourself? Why pretend and work so hard to create a false image? After all, once people actually come to your business, they will quickly find out what you are really like and, if it’s not as advertised, they might just go away.

The main purpose of having a website is to have yourself represented online 24×7 and for as many prospects as possible to find out more about you, learn to trust you, buy from you and then tell all your friends about how wonderful you are, so that they too come and visit your website, except they will jump straight to the buying step.

This is why I always tell my clients to find ways of being present on their website – through the text style, through the images, through audio strips and video clips – so that website visitors will quickly discover who you really are and get excited from your personality. Attracting lots of traffic with promises you can’t fulfill is pointless. Attracting a continuous stream of visitors who will feel at home with you, buy and refer others is very much to the point and will create an endless online business for you.

So be yourself online, because you’re worth it!

Gal

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