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View this issue online at www.todayscoach.com/Jan2004/011404.html
Thursday, January 15,
2004
An
Interview with Mitch Meyerson, Creator of the Guerrilla
Marketing Coach Program
Welcome
to another edition of Today’s
Coach. You’re
in for a treat! Recently,
I had the privilege of interviewing Mitch
Meyerson, the founder and creator of the widely
popular Guerrilla
Marketing Coaching Program.
In this interview, Mitch previews his new book Online
Marketing Superstars: Inside Secrets From The Most
Successful eMarketers of Our Time.
This
definitive study interviews Seth Godin, Jay Conrad
Levinson, Terry Dean, Marlon Sanders, Jonathan Mizel,
Declan Dunn, Alex Mandossian and Corey Rudl to mention a
few.
Thomas
Leonard was one of the marketing geniuses featured in Online
Marketing Superstars.
Read on to learn about how Thomas got selected
and what made him such an outstanding emarketer.
In an exclusive offering, Mitch is making the
chapter of the book on Thomas available at
no cost to Today’s Coach readers. We
thank Mitch for his generosity and encourage you to
learn more about his books, and coaching programs by
visiting: http://www.MitchMeyerson.com
Mitch
is also one of the keynote speakers at the 3rd
Annual CoachVille Conference, The
Business of Coaching:
Make Your Own Magic in Orlando, Florida, June
2-7, 2004. Mark
your calendars--you won’t want to miss this superstar
and many more! This
is shaping up to be a conference like no other. Stay
tuned as we release details in the coming weeks!
But
first, we have a truly special opportunity.
It’s nearly a year since the passing of our
founder and friend, Thomas Leonard.
CoachVille wants to share a unique opportunity to
remember “T” through a fascinating project, “Conversations
with Thomas”.
His legacy lives on.
Keep
playing,
Conversations
With Thomas
A
Unique Opportunity To Celebrate an Extraordinary Man
As
we approach the one year anniversary—February 11th--
of the death of our founder Thomas Leonard, we
recognized that so many will be thinking about his
extraordinary vision and creativity, and we wanted to
honor that in some way.
Back
in June, we introduced you to an idea for a weekly
e-course or website "Conversations with
Thomas". What better way to remember Thomas
than to share a series of real life examples of how the
work or the man himself made an impact on those around
him with those who never got to meet him but share in
his legacy.
Here's
what we are looking for:
-
Stories about your experience, from the
humorous to those that made a profound impact
-
Personal emails that illustrate his wit and charm
;-)
-
Wisdom that you gained (either through your
interaction with Thomas in person or through his work)
-
Anecdotes; Coaching Moments
-
Teachings that affected you (and your life)
-
Provocative questions that he asked you
-
Quotes; including those used by people who don't
know they are quoting Thomas :)
-
Aha! Moments (even years after the 'event') - or
"living truths" - those pearls that keep on
evolving their meaning while remaining true!
-
Photos
-
Real audio clips
-
Thomas did quite a bit of 'rug pulling' (what we
affectionately called 'being coached by t'), we would
love to archive your experience and comments!
-
Places where Thomas is being remembered and honored:
newspapers, web sites, online guest books, etc.
-
Anything else you would want us to include in the
e-course or website
-
Any other comments, suggestions or thoughts you have
on the subject
We
would love it if you shared lesser known aspects of
Thomas, as well. He was a truly inspiring leader,
but he was also kind, warm and loving, as well as funny,
playful (and nuts!) at times. We would love to
hear it all!
Please,
send your input to heidi@coachville.com
with
"Conversations with Thomas" in the subject
line by Wednesday, January 21st.
If you have already signed up to participate in
the Conversations with Thomas e-course, we will be
contacting you, as well.
Online Marketing Superstars: Inside Secrets From The Most Successful
eMarketers of Our Time
 Thank
you for joining me today, Mitch.
Let’s start off talking about your new book.
What’s the inspiration behind it?
Online
Marketing Superstars was written to answer the question,
”Can
you really make money on the Internet and if so how?”
This
study was a natural addition to content in the Guerrilla
Marketing Coach Program.
In the last year and a half I became fascinated
with the
Internet, as many people have, but the thing I
discovered is that most coaches are not making money
online. There’s this illusion that when you get online,
without much effort or money, you will soon have clients
rolling in.
Yes,
“The Field of Dreams”
I
experienced the same thing.
I put out a great web page, but nothing happened.
I learned quickly that putting out a webpage is a
lot like ‘winking in the dark’. People just don’t
know you’re there. So I got this idea one day: What if I interviewed the top online marketers in the world
and found out what made them successful?
Over the next 14 months I spoke with 24 experts
like Seth Godin, Robert Allen, Terry Dean, Marlon
Sanders, Jonathan Mizel, Declan Dunn, Jay Conrad
Levinson, Alex Mandossian and Joel Christopher. I
grilled them on how they made the money they did.
I wanted to know exactly what worked and what
didn’t so I could help small business owners do the
same. The
final book is over 400 pages and contains seven audios
that I call “Million Dollar Marketing Secrets.”
I
found out that if you come up with a good idea you can
get famous people involved if it promotes what they are
doing. It was a win-win because I got access to this
amazing body of information, and they benefited through
increased exposure as well.
What
marketing strategies did you find most useful for
people?
One
of the biggest mistakes I found people make is that they
feel like if they are a good coach they can make money
on the web. But it is important to know that the
internet requires specialized marketing skills. It’s
not the same as off-line marketing.
Because
small businesses do not have a big budget or a brand
name, we have to essentially do “two step marketing”
on the internet. This means capturing their names and
email addresses and having a strategic follow-up plan.
Confidence, the number one reason people choose a
particular business, is built through professionalism
and repetition. The
beauty of the web is that we can automate our follow-up
with technology.
Ultimately
people buy from business owners they know, like, and
trust. When a prospect comes to our website, they
don’t know us, and probably don’t trust us.
So, you must have a strong presentation.
I tell my clients never to cut costs on the
initial look or professionalism of your website because
it reflects back on you and your business.
I see a lot of coaches making this mistake. You
only have one chance to make a first impression. The
good news is that through Guerrilla Marketing there are
lots of other ways to cut marketing costs.
It
is important to remember that when capturing email
addresses you need to offer strong incentives--such as a
special report like
“7 Steps To Tripling Your Website Traffic Even
if You Are On A Shoestring Budget.”
Don’t just offer an ezine. Everyone’s got an
ezine these days, and people are overrun with email as
it is. As an example, I offer a Free 8 week Online
Marketing Superstars mini-course with Flash audio.
Did
you know that the average person who lives in
metropolitan areas is exposed to more than 3,500
marketing messages a day?
So it is more imperative than ever to break
through the clutter of the Internet with great content
and a USP. This
requires you find a niche and
become a good copywriter. Superstar Yanik Silver
details his 12 point copywriting system in his chapter.
I
encourage all my coaches to create their own products
for sale and it
can actually be easy.
One of many ways is to record a call or
interview, have it transcribed and convert it to a PDF
file. Then
write a killer sales page. Products don’t need to be
intimidating.
One
more point on websites—Internet guru, Seth Godin, says
that people are essentially like monkeys when surfing
the web—they’re always looking for one thing-- the
banana. When someone goes to your website, what is the
banana? What exactly do you want to them to do?
If you give people too many offers, they may get
confused and leave. That’s why we need to develop
simple web pages that get people to respond to a call to
action.
Thomas
Leonard is one of the online marketing superstars you
feature in the book.
How did you get connected to Thomas and what made
his marketing so compelling?
When
I first found out about CoachVille, and I saw that the
membership fee was only $79, I said to myself,
“You’ve got to be kidding!” It was so much lower
than anything else I had ever seen on the internet.
I thought he was either nuts, or a genius that I
didn’t know about yet. Clearly the second was true. I
signed up right away—and with the affiliate fee, it
was a no brainer. Pure
brilliance. Thomas
got me motivated in exactly one minute to do business
with him.
Let
me read you an excerpt from the Thomas Leonard chapter.
I asked Thomas, “When you first launched CoachVille,
you priced it at an unheard of $79 lifetime fee.
How did you come up with this model?”
Thomas said, “Our objective, given CoachVille
was so new, is that we wanted people to take their left
hand and then slap themselves on the forehead like ‘I
could’ve had a V-8’ if they didn’t join on the
spot. We really wanted to make it so compelling that it
wouldn’t require any convincing for them to join.”
And that’s exactly what he did. He made it an
irresistible offer.
Then
Thomas got a ton of subscribers within a few short
months. Talk about building a business on the spot!
And we all know he had tons of wonderful material
and that’s why it was so compelling. That was the
first point of brilliance that I noticed. In watching
Thomas, what was really groundbreaking for me, was how
much he did virtually. I thought it was pretty amazing
that not only could you take the class live, but you
could hear it on real audio. Today, everybody’s
recording things. But when Thomas started doing it, it
wasn’t common.
Thomas
was fearless—in the way he crafted his offers, the way
he just constantly put it out there.
The thing about Thomas that I most respected is
that he wasn’t afraid to make mistakes.
He tried so many ideas and most of them were
remarkable and the ones that weren’t he learned from.
I see so many people craft the perfect program
for a year or more, and end up never getting it out.
Right—waiting
for the perfection, whereas Thomas always used to look
for the perfection in the moment.
And
then of course, he had this wonderful notion of an
R&D team where you can really be in conversation
with people on ideas.
I thought it was a great way of including people
and also to get feedback and do research in your own
backyard.
We
talked earlier about 2 step marketing and CoachVille
continues to utilize that model now.
Membership is now free.
Thomas was never interested in making money on
the initial lead, he was looking for people to become
lifetime customers.
Tell
me more about this quality you saw in Thomas—this
fearlessness. Why
do you think it is so important in marketing your
business?
In
my experience working with coaches, people are shy about
marketing themselves. It’s not just coaches, it’s
most people. It’s hard to put out to the world,
“This is my idea” because there’s the potential
fear of rejection. But the truth is a bunch of people
aren’t going to like it, no matter what you do. With
the fearlessness Thomas had, he created things and threw
it out to his R&D team and then to the public pretty
quickly. The fearlessness was not being concerned about
what people thought to the point that it stopped him. You always knew Thomas was going to follow his own path. That
is fearless and that is also a very amazing quality in a
person.
If
you could sum up how Thomas was such an amazing
marketer, what would you like to leave our readers with
in regard to that aspect of his legacy?
As
I mentioned earlier, Thomas followed his own path, and
in doing so, created a new path and things that had
never been done before.
That is amazing in it’s own right. And he
always trusted himself enough to pave these new paths.
But
then he also had very specific strategies, like
CoachVille underpricing the market to get lots of new,
potential lifetime customers. He was extremely generous.
He gave away much more than you would ever
expect.
The
whole concept of adding value-
Adding
value, the law of reciprocity--people were so happy,
they wanted to do business with him.
That’s brilliant marketing, even though he may
have been coming from a place of giving.
Any
final thoughts you’d like to share about Thomas?
On
a personal note, I sent him an email one day to tell him
how much I admired what he was doing and that I had
heard he was launching a graduate school and it sounds
really interesting.
He sent me an email back that stunned me because
I didn’t know him that well. He said, “Mitch, I really appreciate what you have to say
and because of what you’ve done for the coaching
community through your Guerrilla Marketing Coach
Program, I’d like to comp you into the Graduate School
of Coaching.” I
was so honored. To get the comp was great, but to get
the acknowledgment from Thomas Leonard, was even better.
That’s
really a testament to the man that he was.
He could very well have been threatened by you as
a competitor and instead, he reached out to you.
Well
said. He definitely had an attitude of abundance. I
think that’s really the final statement about
Thomas—that people can come from that abundance
mentality and work together to achieve extraordinary
results.
You
mentioned earlier you’ve created an 8 week mini-course
for the Online Superstars book.
Tell us more about that.
People
can sign up for the course which is filled with tons of
content and includes Thomas Leonard’s Free Chapter
and real audio clips. It’s
an easy opt-in, so you can get the course right away.
That’ll give you a taste of what’s in the
book so you can sample it.
That’s part of internet marketing—it’s
called consumption theory. You want people to start
consuming whatever you have to offer. That begins by
giving them something for free. But then you also want
to remind them to read it, and that comes from setting
up something called a sequential auto-responder. It
provides a totally automated follow-up.
That makes internet marketing very attractive
because we often don’t have the time to follow-up with
every single person. So in the book, we’ve got a whole chapter on Automation,
and how to set that up, including an e-commerce site.
This
brings to mind the benefits of passive revenue—how you
can create a product once, set up a system, and make
money indefinitely.
Yes,
and we have an entire chapter on affiliate programs as
well. I
make quite a bit of money each month from affiliate
programs. These
have been set up on automated systems on my website so
that I can make sales again and again without doing any
new marketing. That’s one of my big goals—to have a
completely automated business.
Just collect money wherever you are. The book
describes exactly how to do that.
Another
great chapter in the book deals with Traffic Conversion.
It’s wonderful to have a lot of traffic on your
website, but as we all know, it doesn’t mean a thing
if nobody buys anything.
Traffic Conversion is all about understanding how
to write copy on the web that sells.
I know from my own personal transformation,
coming from being a therapist, the goal was always to be
sympathetic and not pushy.
The goal on the web is not to be pushy, but to be
assertive. Once again, people have a short attention
span. If
they don’t get hooked within 7 seconds, they will
leave. It’s
critical to have a skill set of how to write attention
grabbing content. That’s
a learned skill, but it has to be practiced. One of the
best tips I can give people is to model the successful
websites. The
first step with my Guerrilla Marketing Coach
Certification students is to have them research the
marketplace. In
the book, we give you the top sites to model. Click
here for more information.
I’m
a big fan of audio on a website because it can really
engage people. It
builds that “know, like and trust” a little bit
quicker. Throughout the program, I’m not just creating
a digital book, but creating a course where we integrate
the tried and true principles from the Guerrilla
Marketing material as well.
Let’s
talk about the business of coaching.
Would you agree that it’s one of the most
critical areas for a new coach setting up their
practice?
Absolutely.
In fact, I think this is what we need to focus on
more than anything and that is why I developed the
Guerrilla Marketing Coach program. You can be a talented
coach, but that’s not enough.
Coaches need marketing skills. The business of
coaching is about business. But most of us weren’t
trained in marketing.
So
what we do in the 12 week Guerrilla Marketing Coach
Certification program is actively learn how to market
without spending a lot of money. My style has always
been to be very strategic, simple and focused with
assignments. For most people, reading a book isn’t
enough. In
our tele-classes we do things like share the top 5-7
reasons a prospect would want to hire you as a coach.
We then share that marketing message with the
group to see if passes “so what” test. If not,
it’s time for fine tuning and feedback.
What
I have found is that many coaches get too vague in
describing their services and this is why so many
coaches are not attracting the business they desire.
When I ask people what they do many times they start
making it up on the spot.
They don’t make it compelling. This always
tells me they haven’t spent the time on marketing and
clarifying what they do.
And if they don’t know what they do, how’s
the public ever going to get emotionally involved and
moved to take the next step? The business of coaching
requires you become intentional about learning marketing
skills.
CoachVille
has declared the business of coaching our number one
initiative for 2004.
It
should be the number one initiative. The biggest barrier
I find is that many coaches don’t know what steps to
take to market themselves effectively. Here are some key guidelines to consider:
1) Model successful
coaches, study the copy on their websites and
incorporate elements that would enhance your own.
2) Write a list of 5-10 strong benefits of doing
business with you.
3) Find a niche and identify the core
problems they are facing—get clear on specifically how
can you can solve these problems.
4) Realize that there are dozens of Guerrilla
Marketing strategies that can be employed to spread the
word on your business- many can be found at
www.gmarketingcoach.com
5) Create a marketing calendar, check in with it
regularly and measure your results.
6) Find marketing partners and create win-win
referral relationships with them.
7) Build your mailing
list through online opt-in boxes and other means.
8) Be proactive and take consistent action
9)
Be patient as your marketing starts to take hold.
10) Be
a constant learner, study your marketplace and adapt to
change in it. If
you do you are bound for success.
Mitch
Meyerson is the author of six books and audios including
Six Keys To Creating The Life You Desire, When Is Enough
Enough? and When Parents Love Too Much and has been
featured on Oprah. He
is also the Founder of the Guerrilla Marketing Coaching
Program. The
next 12 week GM Coach Certification course begins
January 19. For info visit:
http://www.gmarketingcoach.com
 Three
brand new CoachVille live events!
The
Attractive Practice - Size Does Matter
The key to building your empire is to
have a HUGE vision for the future that you want to
create. The vision becomes the point of attraction
to an ever-expanding community. Then you have to
find ways to add value to this community by
tapping into the fundamental human desires to
connect, create and collaborate. This program is
for anyone who wants to learn how to move from the
practice of coaching to the business of coaching
from self-employed and working for the money to
creating a vision and systems that allow money and
people to work for you.
Join us in Atlanta,
GA January 22 - Click
here to register!
More more information,
please visit http://www.coachvilleconference.com/attractivepractice2004.html
Beyond
Proficient - Evolving as a Coach
Did you
know that causing problems is part of the true
craft of the masterful coach? Did you realize that
if you are coaching the person and not coaching
the environment, you are only doing half the job?
If you want to be on the leading edge of the
coaching field, you have got to be evolving faster
than the people you coach.
This total
immersion coaching experience will provide you
with an environment and tools for becoming a more
masterful coach confident in your craft. If you
are dedicated to growing as a person and evolving
as a coach, you want to be at this event!
Join us in Atlanta,
GA January 23 & 24 - Click
here to register!
More more information,
please visit http://www.coachvilleconference.com/beyondproficient2004.html
This
two-day program and optional one day practicum
will teach you EVERYTHING you need to know about
building a coaching business:
you
may know a few things about coaching, but running
a small business is a different animal! We'll tell
you what you need to know
there
are many different ways to package and price your
coaching services. We'll help you design the right
mix for your capability and lifestyle.
we'll
teach you a profound branding strategy call
situational marketing that will help bring perfect
clients right to you
Rule
#1: don't try to explain coaching. We'll tell you
exactly how to craft a compelling conversation
that will put you at ease in any conversational
situation.
Coming
to New York, NY March 5 - 7 and Atlanta
GA March 26 - 28 - Click
here for more information and to register!
Questions/Requests?
Please email events@coachville.com
For more information about
other CoachVille Live Events, please visit www.coachvilleconference.com.
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