Marketing is more important than ever. Here are some hints how to spend your advertising budget wisely.

1. Find out who is interested in your products in services. You can’t be all things to all people. You need to target a particular segment of the population.  They must have the money to be able to buy whatever it is you are offering (seems obvious but is sometimes overlooked).
2. Don’t neglect offline marketing – there are still lots of people out there who are not computer literate, who prefer real letters and who need your services or products. Read the rest of this entry »

Today Charly and I talked more about Twitter. We talked about the benefits of integrating twitter with you blog. By tweeting about a blog post you have just made, you can start a lively discussion with this post as a starting point.

I was wondering how to make sense of the “twitter stream” and Charly explained that it is like walking into a room full of people who are all having conversations and you just join one of these ongoing conversations.

You can refer people to each other on Twitter which makes for great networking. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I was asked a question: “What do think people remember about you, your company or your service?” The answer might surprise you:  Customers remember particularly bad experiences and never forget those and they will remember outstanding, great experiences. Everything that is in between, they simply forget. Later in this post are two stories that serve to illustrate this point. Read the rest of this entry »

Today Charly and I talked about “Twitter”. It is an amazing phenomenon sweeping the internet.

What is Twitter? It is a microblogging engine, each “tweet” is limited to 140 characters or less. Or, to describe another way, it is like an SMS chat but instead of two people chatting it can be any number of people creating a lively discussion.

On Twitter there are “Followers”. Your followers can see anything you write and you can see everything somebody you are following is writing. There needs to be a balance between following and being followed. You cannot be selfish and only accumulate followers and not follow anybody else. Choose wisely who you follow – you don’t want to end up following a spammer. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we talked to Inez Bracy from
http://www.discoverthegeniuswithin.com/

Inez is a Lifetstyle Transitions Coach, helping Boomer women over 50 to uncover their passions, dreams and desires to start living the lives they always wanted to. Often, there is a very practical and compelling reason to start “a new life” like the loss of a job or another life crisis. Quite often it is a certain restlessness that is felt within by a lot of women – they are very successful in their careers, earning good money but something is missing. They are not complete or fulfilled.

Most people are masters at running away from themselves, staying unfocused, finding lots of excuses not to stop and look within.

Inez will ask clients: “What are you willing to do to create the life you desire?” This is a very challenging question. Once you set up your own plan (with Inez’s help) she will help you follow through.  It is astonishing how many roadblocks we put into our own way.  Suddenly we cannot get over a hurdle that we set up for ourselves. this is where Inez’s help comes in -  she has all sorts of tools at hand and has been trained in various modalities to make the process as fast and efficient as possible.
Listen to Inez’s talk here, you will gain many valuable insights:

For more information go to:
http://www.discoverthegeniuswithin.com/

Till next time,
Connie and Charly
www.stretchyourmindandbody.com

In this post I would like to talk about things that make people run from your list and hit the “unsubscribe” button – the very thing you want to avoid as much as possible.

Recently my inbox had reached such a state (1467 unread mails!!) that I had to do  some serious virtual house cleaning.  I couldn’t manage any more. Not only did I delete everything that even had the faintest smell of “hype”, I unsubscribed from lots of so called “newsletters”. I love content rich newletters, especially the nicely laid out ones with some colour and pictures in it. I got one recently where a sunflower was in the top right hand corner and this sunflower was stretching and opening up – I really enjoyed that image.

I  understand that not everybody has the technical resources and know-how to do something fancy like that, but anybody can produce a neat looking, clean layout that is not too cluttered and which is easy to read.

Here are just 4 reasons why your clients will hit the unsubscribe button and run:

Content – I really dislike emails that have no valuable content at all. I am supposed to get a newsletter, I want to learn something, be entertained or even read a provocative article. I don’t want an email full of links leading to sales pages with “one time” and  “urgent” offers that contains no information whatsoever.

Being treated like an ATM – I want to be valued and looked after and not just “milked” for every cent somebody can get out of me. I don’t mind good offers and I will look at them but when I see an email full of links and not much else I just run away.

Getting the exact same email from a number of marketers (even the same subject line). This tells me that the sender of this email hasn’t even bothered to add a few words of his own or what he thinks about the product he is promoting, whether he/she has tried the product out him/herself, whether they think it is good value and what flaws the product may have. Nothing is perfect in this world and I am much more inclined to buy from somebody who gives me an honest opinion. The product may have flaws but it still might the best on the market in its category.

The “wrong link” or sorry, “wrong date” trick. I am really fed up with this one – you get an email about something and then, a day later or so you get another one profusely apologising about the link being “wrong”, or “overloaded”, the “servers crashing” or some other obscure reason why you should click on the “new” and “good” link. Do you think your clients believe you?

I know you want to get ahead and make sales but you want a long term, sustainable business – treat your customers the way you would like to be treated. It might be a much slower process but it will pay off  in the long run.

Connie and Charly

from

http://www.stretchyourmindandbody.com

3) Sending duplicate emails

There are two varieties of these emails. One is where a person
sends out an email that is word for word the same as another
marketer.

This happens when marketers are promoting the same product and they
simply cut/paste an email that the product owner has provided for
them.

This annoys me to no end.

The other variety is when I am on multiple lists for the same
marketer and that marketer sends the same email to each list. So I
get the same email for every list that I belong to for that marketer.

This is very easy to avoid and shows me that you don’t care enough
to take a couple of extra minutes to do things right.

Results of both of these? Unsubscribe…

4) Oooops! Wrong Link

Am I the only person that this drives them nuts?

You get an email from a marketer and then a couple of hours later
you get another mail explaining that they messed up and here is the
correct link!

Is it that hard to test your email before you send it out? No.

If you do screw up a link in your mailing then include an extra
special bonus or discount with the correction. Make it something
that hurts YOU in the wallet and will teach you to take a few extra
minutes to test your links next time.

Those are just a few of the things that will cause me to hit the
unsubscribe button pretty fast. I did some more of my virtual house cleaning the other day. This
time I went through my email and unsubscribed from about 40
newsletters.

Tomorrow I will be visiting the Royal Easter Show in Sydney. It is a huge event with the major theme being the country, farming, animals, food production, wood chopping, rodeos, trail bike stunts and much more.

One of my personal favourites are the exhibitions put on by the various regions of New South Wales that showcase their produce. Every year a winner is chosen. I don’t know how long it takes to actually put the exhibit together. You can see a couple of videos here:

Have a good day

Connie and Charly from

www.stretchyourmindandbody.com/blog

Today we spoke to Laura Whitlelaw,  an expert resume writer from

http://www.bestchoice4resumes.com

The first thing to remember is the fact that potential employers are inundated with resumes. They only scan the resumes and you got about 10-30 seconds to get noticed – so a very targetted and professionally written resume is of utmost importance. Read the rest of this entry »

We would like to wish all our readers a happy Easter Break. Regardless whether you celebrate Easter in the traditional sense or it just gives you a chance to have a break – maybe you can use the time to think about a new beginning, let go of old patterns and simply have some time to yourself.

Some of the greatest ideas come when we have chance to daydream and just “hang loose” for a bit.
Happy Easter

Connie and Charly

from

http://www.stretchyourmindandbody.com/blog

Recently an article was published that reviewed a number of studies that were done to find out whether aromatherapy would be helpful in easing depression.

As you might be aware Aromatherapy can be used in many different ways. All these studies looked at the effect of essential oils when they were used as massage oils.

Remember: essential oils must never be used straight from the bottle, they are very powerful and can be toxic – for massage they must always be mixed with a carrier oil. If you want more information on Aromatherapy in general we recommend you go and get yourself this free book in which we wrote an article about aromatherapy: http://stretchyourmindandbody.com/blog/wonderful-law-of-attraction-in-action Read the rest of this entry »