Goal Setting to Achieve Exciting and Sustained Growth Without Burnout and Fatigue

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It’s that time of the year. Where stockings are hung by the chimney with care – and you’re madly scrambling around finding Christmas presents, planning menus, endless shopping and wrapping, working to close the year out, and planning for next year. I don’t know about you, but it tires me out!!

At this time of year, business owners set goals for next year.

Here’s what’s typically done – they answer one question “What do I want my sales to be next year? . . . or, How much do I want to make next year?”

And there’s nothing wrong with this. There’s usually growth, not necessarily significant growth, but growth. Or there are significant growth goals that are met with hard work and determination but end up just demanding more time from the business owner and eventually wearing him or her out.

Have you ever wondered what successful business owners do when setting goals? Or, put another way, how should goal planning be approached?

Goal setting should be done from a bigger perspective and worked backwards to short term focused goals.

But there’s a twist. Something else that should be an essential part of your goals if you want to experience exciting and sustained growth without burnout and fatigue.

What is it?

I’ll cover that in a moment, but first, it’s important that goal setting planning should be done in light of your overarching business objective.

My friend and private client, Michael Gerber, author of the mega best-selling book “The E-Myth Revisited” and his new bestseller “Beyond The E-Myth”, says that everything should be done based on your dream, vision, purpose and mission. Everything should be done in light of your dream.

If your dream is clear and defined, then wonderful, you are ahead of most everyone else. (I recommend reading Michael’s new book “Beyond The Emyth“.) But what if you’re dream is not clearly defined?

Start with answering these questions:

  1. What were your sales / revenues this year?
  2. What’s the fantasy for your business? What would you like it to be in 5 or 10 years? (pick a time frame that resonates with you)
  3. If it were 3 years from now, looking back to today, what would your business be like for you to feel really darn good about it?

This will give some bigger perspective.

If you want to experience exciting and sustained growth without burnout and fatigue, what do you do?

Answer these two questions:

  1. If I want to grow 50% next year, what do I have to do differently? What do I have to personally stop doing, or do less of, or have someone else do?
  2. What are the core essential things I have to do to grow 100%?

When I ask this question, clients typically say things like “I need to stop taking all the phone calls. I need to hire a personal assistant. I need to get organized. I need to stop getting involved in every little problem that seems so monumental at the time.” And the list goes on.

More importantly, they start thinking about their business in a different way. They start thinking about having great people and great systems in place.

So let me ask you, what systems do you need to get you to where you want to go?

  • If you had great systems and great people delivering your deliverable, creating a 5-star experience for your customers, would that help?
  • If you had a great sales and marketing system in place, delivering an awesome supply of leads and customers, AND if it is being manned and run by great people, would that help?
  • If you had a great management system in place, being run by great people, so you would know exactly what is going on in your business, would that help?
  • If you had a great organizational growth system in place, so that your leadership team is focused, with all oars in the water pulling in the same direction at the same time, would that help?

So while you’re setting your growth goals, also set a goal for what systems you want to get locked down next year.

If you look at things from this perspective, 2017 will be a fantastic year. And beyond that, 2018 and 2019 will be remarkable.

Make next year a great year, and have fun doing it.

Blessings eh!

P.S. We Simplify Small Business Growth. Our core focus is to Help Grow Small Businesses with Great Systems while Building Great People. If you need any help, with your goals or putting systems in place, let’s begin the conversation. It’s free. Go here to request a consultation: https://www.chrisgoegan.com/win

P.P.S. We have a number of new resources and training to help you simplify the growth of your business. We have a pilot program running to have a sales and marketing system running in your business in 90 days. If you are interested in this, watch your inbox in early January, or click on the link above to request a consultation.

Are Your Emails Leaving Money On The Table?

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In This Article I’ll Share One of the Most Overlooked and Mis-Used Ways to Increase Sales. It’s also something your competition will most likely NOT do.

One of the most underutilized marketing tools in businesses these days is the use of emails.

If you have 5000 people on an email list and you increase the effectiveness of your results by 5%, then you will have 250 MORE people that want to buy from you. Multiply 250 x how much a customer is worth to you. If you sell a higher end product or are a professional service business, and a customer is worth $10k to you, then you are leaving up to $2,500,000 on the table.

What about if you sell supplements or info products and have a bigger list?

Let’s say you have a list of 50,000 people, you sell a $50 product and 15% of the people open emails. Now suppose you increase results by 5%, then that means you have an EXTRA 2500 people reading your emails. (Please note, I typically like to see 30% open rate on emails so I downplayed the example here)

If an extra 2500 people that are already on your list but are ignoring your emails (or worse, you’re not emailing them), if these people buy your $50 product, then you have added up to $125,000 in sales.

To get these results, it does not require adspend and it multiplies the effectiveness of everything else you do. You just have to become a little better at something you are already doing.

Do I have your attention? Do you want to take some of that money off the table?

Everyone is always looking for the “next thing”. Since we have expertise in helping clients find, bring, nurture and sell people, clients always ask me “what is the next thing we should do?”

Here are some numbers that will boggle your mind and cause your pulse to quicken…

In my friend Ian Brodie’s book titled “Email Persuasion”, he cited these stats: “When the Direct Marketing Association studied the effectiveness of various types of marketing, email came out way on top with a return on investment of around 41 to 1. Nearly twice that of any other approach.

When data analytics firm Custora published the results of their 4-year study into the online buying patterns of over 72 million customers across 14 different industries, they showed that over 40 times as many purchases came from links in emails than from Facebook or Twitter.”

Ok. so how do you do it?

…. with effective email marketing.

Let me tell you a story…

I suffer from a constant conundrum. In my professional life working with clients, my tendency is to be bottom line pure information. In my personal life, I like to laugh, play, have fun and tell stories, especially with my wife and 4 kids.

So what’s the conundrum?

Someone told me a long time ago that “people buy from people”. If the whole relationship I have with my clients and my email list is purely professional and purely informational, then how much of a relationship do I have?

If I’m so focused on facts, figures and “how-to’s” (all important) that I forget to be personable with clients and my email list, then a relationship is NOT created.

I recently had someone say to me, “I wanted to work with you because of the pictures of your family on your website. You look like a nice guy that knows his stuff.” People will come to you for your knowledge and stick with you for the substance of who you are. (That’s how it is with dating and marriage too isn’t it?)

Shameless confession, I used to write a weekly email newsletter diligently for years until I got burnt out. It was great at the beginning because I started by telling stories and entertaining while educating. Then I switched to “How to’s”…

  • How to double the number of leads from your website with one strategy you can implement in the next hour
  • How to get a continuous and never-ending flow of high quality leads to your professional practice for $20 each
  • How to 10x traffic and conversions while cutting costs and minimizing risk
  • How to – ugh, if this is all you do you will get burned out too!!!

I got tired of the how to’s. I got burned out. I wasn’t having fun. I was beginning to feel like a mechanical robot.

And when I was doing purely “how-to’s”, the feedback and comments I got dwindled significantly – you could say it fell faster than a fat boy falling off a cliff! :)

… meaning – the people I was emailing got burned out too.

To make your email marketing effective, yes, have pitch content, have “how-to’s”, and please, please, please, please, please have the personal touch.

When you do this, you will be pleasantly surprised at how your sales (and enjoyment) will increase.

To your success,

Blessings eh!

P.S. Opt-outs are ok. They will happen. If people opt-out because you are being who you are, then what are the chances they would stick around and purchase from you and be a good client or customer?

 

 

“Guest Posting for SEO is Done”

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Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team shook the internet on January 20th when he said that he’d “expect Google’s webspam team to take a pretty dim view of guest blogging going forward.” (you can see the post on his personal blog here)

If you are posting articles and guest posts as a way to grow SEO rankings and links, you could be toast.

So who is affected by this?

It’s the low quality blog networks that feel the impact.

A lot of SEO companies will use blog networks and link farms as a way to get links to gain SEO rankings. They have built a number of sites, or have relationships with people that have a number of sites, and they use those sites as places to put articles (that no-one will read) for the sole purpose of getting a link back to the main site being promoted. The more links, the higher the ranking. Well, that’s how it used to work. Not anymore.

If you are doing this – stop. If your SEO company is dong this – stop. Like Panda and Penguin updates that devastated many businesses, this impact is being felt by many.

So what should you do?

The people that get into trouble are the ones that look for shortcuts to game the system. The people that win are those that know that the shortcut is to provide quality information and content in places that people will read it.

Quality blogs that are careful with link text are doing fine. We have not seen any negative impact with our SEO.

Search Engine Land, from their post “Stick A Fork In It, Guest Blogging is Done”, added this: In response to a couple hundred comments on his post, and perhaps to the discussion on social media, Cutts has added some extra information clarifying the intent of his post. He says he’s not referring to “high-quality multi-author blogs” and that he added “for SEO” to the title of his post:

“There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.”

I’m personally happy that Matt Cutts and Google are getting rid of the spammy kind of articles & guest posts. It will help those that write real content and put it on real blogs to provide real value and build real relationships with real people.

Immediate steps you can take:

  • Write high value content that people would be thrilled to put on their sites
  • Make sure the sites the content goes on has a following of real people that you would want to educate or have as clients
  • Have a way for people to get to your site to connect with you to get more information if they are interested (it’s ok to have a link back to your site)
  • Avoid any and all SEO’s that do article submissions and guest posts purely for the sake of getting links
  • Be VERY strategic about your SEO

Last point: the purpose of SEO is to get ranked high on Google in order to get more leads and customers. If you are doing a guest post on high quality blogs that are read by high-quality prospects that reach out and ask for more information or inquire about using your services, that’s accomplishing your end goal. No?

Blessings,

P.S. If you have questions or want help with your situation, SEO, or want more leads or customers, then email me at Chris@ChrisGoegan.com or Click Here to Request a Free Consultation

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Is this the year of the nerdy scientist?

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2013 is over and in the books. 2014 has just begun and is full of opportunities.

I’m not one to make New Year Resolutions. Earlier in life I did but when I looked back I found that most of the resolutions I made bored me so I wouldn’t stick with them.

Now, instead I make goals and evaluate and adjust them continuously throughout the year.

Whether you make resolutions or not, the point is it’s important to have goals and to have a plan.

From the 100’s of businesses I’ve worked with one of the biggest and most common problems is that businesses lack a plan. Sure they have goals like, “I want to take my business from $5 million to $10 million” or “I want to launch a new venture using the internet”.

Those are good goals. We can work with that.

Where it falls short is the plan – how to make those goals happen.

Speaking of falling short, (I’m 5’6″ and have been accused of falling short :) just about every business I’ve looked at over the last few years has had a major flaw when it comes to internet marketing.

They underestimated how hard it is to get things working. Internet marketing is HARD WORK.

Most people don’t like to hear that. That’s ok, most people don’t like reality either.

As you know I am a marketing consultant and we specialize in helping clients agressively grow their core business or launch new ventures into competitive spaces. We have solved many difficult problems where many have fallen short. And everything we do is based on a proprietary process called “Engineered Marketing”.

Why Engineered Marketing? If you recall, it stemmed from before when I started my career off as an engineer designing and building automated systems in the manufacturing and aerospace world.

We take the strategy, technical knowledge and the love of data of an engineer and combine it with selling in person, and selling online, to help clients duplicate their results.

So why am I telling you all this? (ok, part of it is a cheap plug for what we do!) But the other reason is, those ingredients are vital to be successful online.

My beautiful wife Naomi sent me an article. Here’s what she said “This made me think of you. You’re the best of both worlds – and then some!”

It’s nice hearing those words. How did I get so lucky to marry her? (And yes, that was another cheap plug. She gets all my articles and I’ll take any opportunity to score some points with her! :)

Here’s the article she sent. It’s relevant to your success: Click here: Is this the year of the nerdy scientist?

Blessings eh!

How a Client Lost 1800 People That Were Registered for His Webinar

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When you read that headline your first two reactions should be:

1. Ouch!!

and

2. Hey I’d like to have 1800 people registered for a webinar!

There are 2 big lessons here, so pay attention. I’ll also tell you why I wrote this post.

Getting 1800 people to sign up for a webinar was no small feat. It’s a huge success and a lot went into it. Needless to say, the client was happy.

Then I got the panicked call…

… “Chris, we’ve got a MAJOR problem. All 1800 people are gone. How do we get them back in?”

Me: “Ugh. What happened?”

Client: “I deleted them.”

Me: “How?”

Client: “I clicked the wrong button and now they’re gone.”

The webinar was a day away so we had a little over 24 hours to get this fixed. So a few questions later I figured out what happened. We had a series of webinars scheduled. The plan was to add the next webinar on to the end of the one we just completed that way everyone would be registered for the entire series. A few simple mouse clicks and it was smooth sailing.

Instead of that, the client created a brand new webinar series and closed the other one out. All 1800 people that were signed up for the series would no longer be registered since the client mistakenly closed it out. He figured it was a new webinar, so no big deal, he would create a new webinar and life would go on and everyone would be signed up. We were using GoToWebinar and if you’ve ever used it, you know that when you create a brand new webinar EVERYONE has to resubscribe. NOT an ideal situation.

Makes for an awkward moment “Uh, sorry, we goofed and deleted everyone so please sign up again. Oh, and by the way, we’re really smart and experts at what we do” … I’m sure more than a few people would be lost.

So I went in, cleaned up the mess and got the series back on track. The next problem was that we had to get 1800 names back in.

And there is no automated way to do this. Nope this was going to require some good old fashioned manual data entry. Posts were put in to my wife’s homeschool community for mom’s or kids that wanted to make some money, and the overseas team was working around the clock to get everyone back in.

The good news, we got everyone re-input with minimal issues. After a VERY frantic 24 hours, all 1800 people were registered once again.

Here’s why I wrote this post:

My client said, “Chris, this looks so easy that anyone can do it. Much like all of internet marketing. Internet marketing looks SO EASY but the reality is that it’s not. There are so many ways where you can get into trouble. Just look at what I did! You should really write a post about this to tell people that it’s not as easy as it looks”

This was from a client that is incredibly smart and VERY successful – much like most of my clients. Most of my clients have strong thriving businesses they are looking to take to the next level or are starting new ventures. Most have built successful 7 figure businesses and some have run Multi-Billion dollar companies.

BIG LESSON #1 – Internet marketing is NOT as easy as it looks. There are a lot of snake oil salesman that prey on ignorance and tell you it’s easy to make big money online. The reality is that while it APPEARS easy, it’s NOT. It takes a lot of hard work, understanding your market, having a great value proposition and strategy and using the right media in the right way to reach your market. It also involves understanding technology.

There are so many moving pieces that from experience working with hundreds of entrepreneurs and business owners, the only thing that is easy, is to mess things up. Just like this client did.

BIG LESSON #2 – you really need someone that knows what the heck they’re doing to work with you. All my clients are smart enough to figure this stuff out on their own, and I’m sure you are smart enough to figure this stuff out – EVENTUALLY. The problem is most people are so busy being successful that they don’t have time to figure things out on their own. If you have an hour a month, you can put someone else’s expertise to work for you to make more. Also, you can cut years off the learning curve by having an expert on your side.

Very rarely do I work with someone that is brand new to internet marketing. The reason why, is that they haven’t been burned badly enough yet and they fall for a bright shiny object that is pitched at them. Remember, fish chase after bright shiny objects. They also end up dead on the dinner plate.

The internet is a remarkable way to get business. And webinars are fantastic.

I would go into detail about how to get 1800 people to sign up for a webinar, but I’ll save that for another day!

If you had 1800 people registered for a webinar, how much revenue would that generate for you?

If you can’t wait for that article, or have a big goal you want to hit, then click here and sign up for a consultation.

Hope you enjoyed this.

Blessings eh!

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Is Your Email Marketing Leaving Money on the Table?

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One of the most underutilized marketing tools in businesses these days is the use of emails.

If you have 5000 people on an email list and you increase the effectiveness of your results by 5%, then you will have 250 MORE people that want to buy from you. Multiply 250 x how much a customer is worth to you. That is how much money you are leaving on the table. Do I have your attention?

Want to take it off the table? (duh, of course you would!)

Ok. so how do you do it?

…. with effective email marketing.

Let me tell you a story…

I suffer from a case of a constant conundrum. In my professional life working with clients, I like to be bottom line pure information. In my personal life, I like to play, goof off, have fun and tell stories, especially with my wife and 4 kids.

So what’s the conundrum?

Someone told me a long time ago that “people buy from people”. If the whole relationship I have with my clients and my email list is purely professional, then how much of a relationship do I have?

If I’m so focused on facts, figures and “how-to’s” (all important) that I forget to be personable with clients and my email list, then a relationship is NOT created.

I recently had someone say to me, “I wanted to work with you because of the pictures of your family on your website. You look like a nice guy that knows his stuff.” People will come to you for your knowledge and stick with you for the substance of who you are. (That’s how it is with dating and marriage too isn’t it?)

Shameless confession, I used to write a weekly email newsletter diligently for years until I got burnt out. It was great at the beginning because I started by telling stories and entertaining while educating. Then I switched to “How to’s”…

  • How to double the number of leads from your website with one strategy you can implement in the next hour
  • How to get a continuous and never-ending flow of high quality leads to your professional practice for $20 each
  • How to – ugh, if this is all you do you will get burned out too!!!

I got tired of the how to’s. I got burned out. I wasn’t having fun. I was beginning to feel like a mechanical robot.

And when I was doing purely “how-to’s”, the feedback and comments I got dwindled significantly – you could say it fell faster than a fat boy falling off a cliff! :)

… meaning – the people I was emailing got burned out too.

To make your email marketing effective, yes, have pitch content, have “how-to’s”, and please, please, please, please, please have the personal touch.

When you do this, you will be pleasantly surprised at how your sales (and enjoyment) will increase.

To your success,

Blessings eh!

P.S. Opt-outs are ok. They will happen. If people opt-out because you are being who you are, then why would you want them around?

Google Relents! … well kinda

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Last week Google announced that they knew what was best for your business by saying that they were going to take control of your Adwords account by changing how your ads show after only 30 days. (If you missed it click here: https://www.chrisgoegan.com/changes-at-google-what-you-need-to-know/)

My comment was that it seemed like “more government” and “big brother knows best”.

Maybe that’s a wee bit offside. Bottom line is that Google has NOT had a good reputation with their advertisers. Well, the small players like you and me that is.

Recently Google has been changing things up some. Maybe it’s the fear of being taken over by Facebook? Whatever it is, some of the changes have been nice. They now have a customer service department where you can get a live human being on the phone right away. Having live customer service is a good thing. (Buyer beware, I wouldn’t recommend doing everything they say, I tested their suggestions on a campaign and the results were disastrous – click costs went up, conversions went down, cost per lead skyrocketed, and quality score plummeted)

And now they just relented on their latest policy. They rescinded their 30 day window for taking control of how your ads are displayed.

… well kinda…

They are changing the window from 30 days to 90 days. But even better is they gave you an option to opt-out of this altogether. And they if enough people opt out may make it back to normal.

Here’s the link to opt-out: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/rotateoptout/

Decide what you want to do.

I have opt-ed out. And for my private clients I recommend they opt-out.

Oh, and if you decide to opt-out, it will take you less than 30 seconds. You will need your Client ID number which can be found in the top left of the screen. If you need help with this contact me at Chris@ChrisGoegan.com and I will be happy to help you.

Blessings,

P.S. If you want to know (in plain English) how any of this stuff affects your business, you can email me at Chris@ChrisGoegan.com or Click Here to request a Consult.

Changes at Google… What You Need to Know

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Google is changing things up (again!). If you’re not used to them changing the game you had better get used to it. They are a moving target and they will continue to change. Love ’em or hate ’em they remain a powerhouse for filling your business with leads and sales.

Google has recently made changes to it’s algorithms and this will affect you. If you are using Google, take heed. (If you’re NOT using them why aren’t you in the game? To get in the game, Click Here to request a Consult)

There are three areas that Google has recently changed:

  1. Adwords – keyword matching and ad rotation
  2. SEO -content and links
  3. Free Product Listings are now being replaced with PAID Product Listing Ads

Ok, there’s also a 4th that they just announced – Google Places is being replaced with with Google Plus Local. Have peace knowing that all Google Places pages are automatically converted to the new format. Google is making lots of changes in this arena and it will be interesting seeing the impact over time.

Here’s a BRIEF summary of each one:

1. Adwords – Keyword matching and ad rotation

First Keyword Matching: Google will include plurals, misspellings, and other close variants to your exact and phrase match keywords. The automatic default is to allow keyword matching. Keep this if you are only occasionally in Adwords and don’t care about minimizing costs or risks or about how well it performs. What this is really Google starting to blend exact, phrase and broad match so they can make MORE money from your account. If you want to maximize your returns, then it’s important to understand that this will create poorer performing and less than optimal campaigns. Every keyword is a different conversation, and altering them slightly can affect conversions greatly. Just by adding an “s” at the end of a simple search term can change it from a highly converting keyword to a “tire kicker” keyword. Smart Adwords marketers know this and have separate strategies and landing pages for both. If you want to turn this feature off, in your Adwords account go to “Settings”, “Keyword Matching Options” and select “Do not include close variants”

Next up, changes to the ad rotations. Ugh! What a pain in the butt that Google is doing this. The smart way to run campaigns is to play a game called “Beat the Champ”. Where you put two ads in a cage against each other to slug it out. The one that has the better click through rate is the champ. You retire the old one and bring on a new contender. Very powerful.

Well Google has determined they will take control of this from you and they will give 30 days (for now) to determine the winner and will give it the majority of the traffic. Makes it wayyyyyyy harder to test. This is horrible if you want control over testing because most times you want ads to run against each other for longer than Google “determines is best” … sounds like “more government” doesn’t it?

Brad Geddes who posted this on Google+was able to confirm from “multiple sources” at Google that any action in ad group, including pausing or un-deleting ads will reset the clock on your 30 days.

That means you can get around the 30 day rule by…
  1. Manually pausing ads and then reactivating them a few minutes later (I don’t know if there’s a minimum timeframe they have to be paused for).
  2. Set an automated rule, using Labels, that pauses all ads (with a Label you set up for this purpose) at a certain time and another rule that activates them an hour later (rules are only run on the hour). You could do this at 3AM on a Sunday (assuming that’s not a time your ads get much action) to minimize any impact and reactivate them at 4AM.
  3. Use the API to pause/activate ads.

What’s the big deal with this stuff? Why not just accept that Google knows what’s best for your business?

… it matters a great deal… competition on the internet is much more extreme know. Industries that were slam dunks 1-2 years ago have grown fiercely competitive and it’s only going to get worse. The days of “easy money” online are a thing of the past. As business owners we need every advantage we can get. And if these little things can change your conversions by 15 – 50%, don’t you think you should pay attention to it?

2. SEO -content and links

There has been a lot of unscrupulous SEO practices that have given companies short term success. For the last 3 years I’ve been predicting that Google would come down hard on this. Well, it has started. Google launched Panda and Penguin initiatives to improve the quality of search results. (Adwords is not affected by this)
Panda: was created to lower the rankings of low quality sites while ranking sites higher that have in-depth, valuable, well researched and useful content.

Penguin: was created to lower the rankings of sites that are spamming the internet to get higher rankings by creating a lot of garbage links (using black hat SEO). In other words, to remove web spam.

Note: None of these updates are finalized. Google is still modifying and updating the algorithms. It’s not uncommon to see your site rankings higher then lower then higher, which can be very frustrating for business owners.

Buyer Beware: some SEO and link building sites have gone out of business overnight. Companies that were exploiting loopholes in Google’s algorithms are paying the price. Companies that have been building reputation and rankings based on integrity (white hat methodology), while it’s a slower build, they are generally not affected by changes like this. Unfortunately a lot of SEO has been done by wolves in sheep’s clothing. Make sure you have a trusted source.

3. Free Product Listings are now being replaced with PAID Product Listing Ads

Google Product Search is getting a new name, Google Shopping, and a new business model where only merchants that pay will be listed. It’s the first time Google will decommission a search product that previously listed companies for free. The company says the change will improve the searcher experience, but it will also likely raise new worries that Google may further cut free listings elsewhere (source SearchEngineLand.com)

This is so new that nobody really knows how this will affect things. If it follows suit as everything else Google related, savvy marketers who understand Adwords and how to convert traffic will gain an unfair advantage over everyone else.

Hope this helps give you an understanding so you can take appropriate action to avoid losing position in the marketplace.

Blessings,

P.S. If you want to know (in plain English) how any of this stuff affects your business, you can email me at Chris@ChrisGoegan.com or Click Here to request a Consult.

Do Your 2012 Goals Excite You?

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Ok, it’s that time of the year. You know the drill. 2011 is done and 2012 is starting. So you reflect on 2011, if you hit your goals, what you did right, what you did wrong. Yada, yada yada.

And all this is good but if your goals don’t excite you, then it is b-o-r-i-n-g and the work becomes mundane.

My son got an air soft BB gun for Christmas. He’s wanted one for two years and has been looking at them with the same passion that Ralphie did in the famous movie “A Christmas Story”. And just like Ralphie he didn’t think he would get one. (“you’ll shoot your eye out”)

And then on Christmas morning he just about exploded with joy when he found one wrapped under the tree.

Immediately he was outside popping rounds off. He made a cutout figure of a “mean guy” out of a piece of cardboard and set that up as a target. He put several holes in the mean guy. Turns out he’s a pretty good shot!

He was so fired up for a couple of days and then he started getting bored of it. Every day shooting at the same thing gets boring. If all he did was shoot at the same target then the gun would be collecting dust in a week.

We did something exciting yesterday. We went for a hike in a canyon with his pellet gun packed in the backpack. He couldn’t believe that we were bringing it. I said we were off on an adventure. My kids LOVE adventures.

Once on the trail and away from civilization we took it out…. a boy, his gun and wilderness.

He was a little awestruck at first that he could fire it (and yes, I’ve trained him that it’s safety first). After a few awkward moments he fired his first round. Then we put up leaves on a fencepost and fired rounds into that. The leaf had so many holes in it that it looked like one of those snowflakes cut out of paper. He was so excited he could hardly contain himself. And this morning, he was out shooting at his homemade targets with a new vigor and enthusiasm.

I think it’s like that with our goals.

If we don’t have anything meaningful or worthwhile to us, then the work becomes mundane and we lack passion.

So when it comes to your 2012 goals, what goal or major objective excites you?

Are there new markets you want to break into?

Is there a new business you want to start?

Would you like to have automated systems delivering you a consistent flowing river of new business?

What is it for you?

 

Blessings,

Merry Christmas eh!!

/1 Comment/in /by

In the spirit of Christmas, here’s how the story of the Nativity might be told today through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Google Maps, GMail, Foursquare, Amazon…

My favorite part is where they hit the “Avoid Romans” button on Google Maps. Must be a new feature. :)

Hope you and your family have a very Merry Christmas.

Blessings,