Autopilot Online Success » Time Management and Outsourcing

5 Step Formula For Generating Real-Time Leads Via Social Marketing

Karen Sielski — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:30:37 +0000

There are numerous ways to effectively grow your business using social marketing. Social networks like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, Tagged, and the professionally oriented LinkedIn are all the rage today.

When used properly, social networking sites can provide massive leverage to grow your business. But for many people, social networking can also be a huge time sink if you don’t know how to connect the dots and have people in your social networks buying from you.

You need to present your business in an appropriate way, without spamming or turning off your online friends, and potentially damaging your relationship with them forever. You’ve got to get them to know, like, and trust you before they will buy what you are selling, especially online. Your online success depends on this more than anything else.

Now I’m going to give you a 5 step formula for getting massive amounts of targeted, free real-time leads. I assume you’ve already chosen the appropriate social networks for your industry or business, opened your accounts, and established some friends.

What’s the next step? One of the best ways to form a solid business relationship with your network and get more sales is to host an event. It can be a webinar, teleseminar, or even an in-person event.

If you live in a remote geographic area, it will be more difficult to get a big turnout for an in-person event, but if you live in a populated area you can get a good turnout by following this formula. The potential is obviously huge for online events, especially if you do a webinar format.

Let’s dive into the details of the online success 5 step formula.

Step 1. A few weeks before the event write an online press release and submit it to a few free online press release sites like PressAbout and PRLog. Setup a google alert on the keywords you used in the press release. The keyword alert will automatically tell you when your press release gets published.

When the free online press release gets picked up, then go to paid online services like PRWeb and WebWire. You should start getting free, targeted web traffic from the press releases immediately.

Step 2. If you have a website or blog, write about the event on your website. Take the blog entry and turn it into an article and post it on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Post your event on EventBrite.com.

Step 3. Tell all of your social marketing friends about the event, and ask them to share it with their friends.

Step 4. Create a short Powerpoint presentation about the content of your event and yourself. Post the slides at SlideShare.net with a transcript.

Step 5. Turn the Powerpoint presentation into a video and submit the video on YouTube and TubeMogul.

Make sure to send people to your social marketing site or blog page that tells a little bit about yourself. Have people register for the event and send them an email reminder the day before the event and the day of the event.

Follow these 5 steps to generate free real-time leads, then provide valuable content at your event and you will be leveraging your time on social marketing sites into business sales, not just hanging out and having a good time.

To Your Massive Online Success,

PS – To learn more about how to generate tidal waves of traffic to your blog or website, get FREE Instant Access to the 15 Ways To Generate Endless Leads Training Series when you fill in the quick form at the top right. It will only take a few seconds, go do it now!

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Seth Godin and Tom Peters

Karen Sielski — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:15:52 +0000

This is a quick video by marketing legend Seth Godin and management superstar Tom Peters. I must admit, I hadn’t really considered the benefit Seth brings up, but after thinking about it I completely agree. Tom Peters will share the thing that has meant the most to him professionally in the last 15 years.

You will also learn the marketing activity these industry giants think is the best by an order of magnitude. You will want to make sure you prioritize this method in your marketing efforts.

I am a huge fan of Seth and love his books on marketing. I highly recommend his marketing best seller “Tribes”, especially if you are building your business online.

Enough suspense. To find out what these 2 industry leaders and talking about, click the play button to watch the short video below right now…

If you would like to get started with one of the most effective marketing strategy on the planet or would like to turbocharge your existing efforts, learn how here.

Think Enormous,

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Save Time and Increase Your Productivity With This Cool Tool

Karen Sielski — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:41:19 +0000

This one will be short and sweet, and can save you hundreds of hours, really!

Would you like to be able to speed up YouTube and other online videos and presentations, without having the presenters sounds like chipmunks? What if you could control the playback speed of recorded teleseminars and other audio files?

There are 2 tools I started using early this year and I really don’t know what I would do without them. They literally save me many hours each and every week.

The first tool is MySpeed by Enounce. This tool allows you to change the playback speed for internet videos! You can watch more video in less time. I find it invaluable for note taking and transcription.

Increase Your Productivity

All you do is add the MySpeed plug-in to your browser and a handy speed slider appears when you start playing a video. I’m typically able to watch videos at 1.5-2.0 speed. There is a free trial version so give it a try but be forewarned, you may get addicted like me.

The second tool is also by Enounce and it speeds up audio files. This product is called 2xAV and it is a Plug-in for RealPlayer or Media Player. 2xAV provides variable speed playback with natural sounding audio. It works for local files or files streamed from the internet.

These 2 tools increase my productivity by freeing up time to work on other tasks. Check out the free trials and increase your productivity today!

Yours In Success,

PS – I would love to connect with you on Twitter!

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Internet Virtual Assistant | 25 Tasks To Outsource

Karen Sielski — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:04:11 +0000

Here’s a list of 25 specific tasks that you should consider outsourcing to an internet virtual assistant, depending on your skills, priorities, interests, budget, and time:

Creating and formatting blogs
Posting articles to blogs
Building websites
Submitting online articles to article directory sites
Submitting online videos to video sites
Maintaining Facebook and MySpace – inviting friends
Creating social content pages on HubPages, Weebly, Squidoo, etc.
Creating graphics
Internet Virtual Assistant Tasks

Finding images for websites and blog entries
Posting Craigs List ads
Copy writing
Cold calling leads
Setting appointments
Creating and/or maintaining autoresponder campaigns
Landing page creation
Getting links back to your site
Creating web page templates
Formatting PowerPoint presentations
Marketing and product research
Creating content for blog entries, articles, PowerPoints,…
Publishing newsletters
Bookkeeping
Populating your twitter tweets
Software tool research and evaluation
Getting twitter followers

Leave a comment with additional ideas for tasks to outsource to an internet virtual assistant. Let’s see how big we can get the list!

To Your Online Success,

Karen

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Internet Virtual Assistant | Best Sources For Finding An Assistant

Karen Sielski — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:05:34 +0000

If you are looking for an internet virtual assistant, here are 5 services for finding a wide range of skills and talent.

Elance is great because it is a 1-stop shop where you can find web designers, web programmers, marketers, copywriters, administrators, IT consultants, grant writers, translators, researchers, graphic designers, video producers, etc. Choose from over 80,000 independent professionals around the world.

I have found excellent internet virtual assistants on Elance and highly recommend this service! It is the first place I go when I need a VA.

99Designs is the place to go if you need design work for a website, blog, logo, brochure, business cards, stationary, etc. Using this service you can get fast and inexpensive results. Their are currently over 34,000 talented designers in this community.

How does it work? 99designs uses a contest model where you specify a description of what you need and a cash “prize”. Various artists in the 99Designs community submit their entries.

You review all the entries, leave feedback, and request changes. You choose a favorite design from all the designs submitted. The winner receives the prize money.

This service is great because you can receive tens or hundreds of designs to choose from and only pay the winner!

Need a programmer? Then check out RentACoder. They currently have over 250,000 registered coders around the globe. Choose from a variety of price points, experience levels, skills, and services to find the professional that is right for your needs.

MYeReputation is an internet virtual assistant service that specializes in social networking. If you want to leverage the power of social marketing but don’t have the knowledge and/or the time to tweet or post content on blogs, article directories, online video sites, podcast sites, and presentation sharing sites, MYeReputation may be the solution for you.

MYeReputation will create you social network accounts, fill in your profile, invite people into your networks, and monitor your connections.

You will need to provide your MYeReputation assistant with content for your business but they take care of all the tedious, time consuming tasks of getting your content and message delivered to potential prospects on multiple social networks.

While not technically an internet virtual assistant provider, AskSunday is a source to consider if you need a personal assistant. They can schedule your appointments, purchase gifts such as flowers, books and gift certificates, coordinate and book travel plans, make customer service calls, etc.

Freeing up your personal time leaves more time to focus on your business. Or you can use the extra time to recharge, making you more effective in your business.

To Your Online Success,

Karen

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Internet Virtual Assistant | 7 Criteria For Selecting A Great Assistant

Karen Sielski — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:36:44 +0000

One of the most important aspects of hiring an internet virtual assistant is having guidelines for selecting your assistant. It is typical to have many assistants bid on your project, so you will need criteria for selecting which one you award the project.

In addition to waiting to see which virtual assistants bid on your project, you should proactively search for candidates you think are a great fit for your tasks and ask them to bid on your project.

Internet Virtual Assistant Selection

Here are the 7 criteria I use to evaluate internet virtual assistants:

1. Reviews from previous clients. This is crucial information. The ratings must be stellar. If there is a history of unprofessionalism, miscommunication, or schedule issues I pass without thinking twice.

2. The number of projects they have on file with the provider. If someone is new, they may have a cheaper hourly rate, but they have an unknown track record. It is not worth the risk. I avoid the unknown.

3. Do they have repeat business with previous clients? Many providers will provide this statistic. The higher the percentage of repeat business the better, but don’t expect this number to be extremely high. Compare their percentage of repeat business to other internet virtual assistants.

4. What does their profile look like. Is it complete? Do they show samples of their work? If appropriate, they should have their portfolio so you can see previous work.

5. How much initiative do they take to get ythe project? Do they seek me out in a professional manner to get selected for my project?

6. How long does it take them to do tasks? They may have a cheaper hourly rate than another VA but if it takes them twice as long to do tasks they may be more expensive in the end. If you have a specific task like submitting articles to article directories, ask them how long they take to do that type of task.

7. How do they communicate and report status? Are they available during my business hours or do I need to communicate with them in the middle of the night? Can I talk with them on the phone?

You’ll be amazed at how much easier your life becomes and how much more work gets done in your business, at minimal cost, with a great internet virtual assistant on your team.

Think Big,

Karen

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Internet Virtual Assistant | What Tasks To Outsource

Karen Sielski — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:13:13 +0000

I have used a $4/hour internet virtual assistant to do many tasks in my online business, allowing me to focus on essential business critical tasks. Now you might think you can’t get a quality assistant for under $5/hour, but I have and I know others that have too.

Internet Virtual Assistant Tasks

But you can get burned if you don’t approach getting a virtual assistant in a systematic way. You need to outsource the right tasks and then you need to find the right virtual assistant.

Here’s how you can determine what tasks to outsource. Start out making a list of the tasks in your business, categorized in the following 3 columns:

1 – tasks I can or should do

2 – tasks I know how to do, but don’t like doing or tasks that aren’t an effective use of my time

3 – tasks I don’t know how to do

You want to keep doing the things you do best and that make the best use of your time. Typically these will be income generating tasks. Tasks like talking with customers and prospects, researching products, strategic planning, writing great sales copy, automating your business, and relationship building.

Outsource anything that is tedious, repetitive, or that requires a skill you don’t have and that isn’t integral to your business. The more of these tasks you outsource, the more time you will have for income generating tasks, and the faster your business will grow.

Even in the early days of your business when you do not have a lot of income yet, outsource as much as possible and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your business will take off.

In the future I’ll share information on where to find a virtual assistant and how to evaluate virtual assistants.

To Your Outsourcing Success,

Karen

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