Is Your Marketing Uplifting?

I'm a pretty sensitive gal, and it hurts me to see so many people freaking out these days. According to the news, most Americans are experiencing a lot of fear and stress over current events. This is made even worse by a fear-mongering trend in media and advertising. I want to counter that trend with a bit of inspiration.

I want to thrive just as I want my prospects and customers to thrive. But thriving depends on maintaining a positive outlook and achieving happiness no matter what's going on in the world. To contribute to the thriving of my contacts, prospects and customers, I must maintain an uplifting spirit and send out only positive, inspiring messages to them in my conversations, my ezines, blog posts, and social media updates.

What can you do to help uplift your prospects and customers right now?

1) Understand their Challenges: To help uplift your prospects and customers you first want to learn what their challenges and problems are, and meet them there. You will want to ask them what they're dealing with and start noticing trends. You can survey your elist and/or folks registering for your free classes regarding their biggest challenge. You will give people an immediate feeling of relief just by asking, and if you can offer hope of a solution, your customers will start feeling better right away.

2) Offer Words of Encouragement: Let your prospects and customers know they aren't alone in their suffering. Offer examples of those who have overcome similar obstacles, and encourage your peeps to be confident. Inspire them with stories of success from you and/or your mentors.

3) Give Away Effective Tips: Offer your contacts free tips through your ezine, social networks, articles, and free teleclasses / podcasts. Give them enough information to help them to get moving in the direction of their goals and dreams. Consider the information you normally exchange with all your customers at the beginning of your relationship, and see if you can develop that into a free offering that helps people whether they hire you or not.

4) Develop Inspiring Articles - whatever uplifts you will likely uplift your peeps too. Write about what uplifts you and send it out to your contacts. If even just one or two people are helped by your article, it can start a viral campaign of sharing. You will become known as an uplifter and your popularity will grow.

GOT UPLIFTING TIPS OF YOUR OWN? Please post your comments by clicking "Comments" below. We'd all love to hear your ideas.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it: Magical Marketer Julia D. Stege, MFA helps people attract their perfect customers with a unique combination of Law of Attraction, wildly attractive logos and websites, and smart Internet marketing techniques. If you're ready to start attracting your perfect customers now, get Julia's free Magical Marketing Toolkit at http://www.magicalmarketingtoolkit.com
See Julia's Law of Attraction Marketing Blog at http://loamarketing.blogspot.com

Expand Your Biz with Facebook ~ It's Fun!

My husband says it's stretching it to call it, "work."

There I am scanning photos from the late 60s saying, "Oh, this one's perfect!" as I upload one to Facebook and tag it with the name of a childhood friend. Or maybe I'm planting a flower on someone's "Little Green Patch," an act that helps save the rainforest. Sometimes I just write a little ditty on what I'm up to and send it out to all 403 (and counting) of my Facebook friends.

Yeah, 403 and more come each day. Sometimes it's a friend from college or high school, or maybe someone from my early childhood, or my current network. A lot of the time they're people I don't know but they find my profile interesting, or they connected with me through one of my websites, or from a Google search. Facebook is one huge community, 150 million and growing by about 10 million per month. I notice my friend requests and suggestions come in by about a dozen per day. This is a great way to let people know what I'm up to, what I care about and to NETWORK!

Facebook is so fun and such a great business tool that I've expanded my upcoming Attracting Perfect Customers Online 10-Week Webinar for Web Challenged Entrepreneurs to include a segment on growing your biz with Facebook. (see my flier for upcoming classes below) You really can do everything on Facebook: create a list, market your offerings, follow up with prospects, post a web page, invite friends to an event, post photos and portfolios, share links. It's quite a robust and amazing social network.

So for those of you who are ready to give it a whirl, here are some Facebook Tips to get you started.

Step One: Get a Facebook account already! Go to http://www.facebook.com and register. Write down your user name and password on a sticky note and post it by your computer so you don't forget it. You can connect with me there if you like!

Step Two: Set up your profile, and upload a photo of you right away. There's nothing as annoying as connecting with someone you haven't seen in a while, and going to their profile only to see that generic blue-boy silhouette. Spend the time to fill out your education and job information. You will be able to find old classmates and colleagues this way. Make sure you post a link to your website too!

Step Three: Have Facebook find your friends. Click on "Friends" and "Find Friends" to have Facebook search through your email account for people you've emailed who are already on Facebook. This is the fastest way to grow your network right off the bat. Once you're connected with friends, check out their friend lists for folks you know and request to be connected. You can also find mentors and people you aspire to be like and connect with them. Facebook makes it easy to create categories so you can sort your contacts.

Step Four: Share yourself authentically. The most compelling thing about you is what is most important to you. Share what inspires you, what you're challenged by, what you've learned. Post your own events and invite people. Create your own page and post notes on your latest discoveries. You never know who's curiosity you'll spark. Maybe your old school chum will show up at your next teleclass! It's happened to me.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it: Magical Marketer Julia D. Stege, MFA helps people attract their perfect customers with a unique combination of Law of Attraction, wildly attractive logos and websites, and smart Internet marketing techniques. If you're ready to start attracting your perfect customers now, get Julia's free Magical Marketing Toolkit at http://www.magicalmarketingtoolkit.com

Where the !$?BLEEP?*%! Should I Blog?

You have heard all about the importance of blogging by now. Everyone says it’s the way to bring your marketing into the new millennium, and I agree. It's becoming more and more common for business owners to blog as a way to boost their visibility, share information with their customers, and network online. And when you’re blogging authentically, your perfect customers are more likely to recognize you when they find you. They gain trust in you and become more likely to work with you.

What I’ve discovered is that certain blogging or social network sites rank better than others. Though every web hosting program offers their own blog software these days, not all blogs are created equal. It makes sense that a blogging tool owned by Google, or one that hosts Google Ads, would rank better than others. Here are the sites I’ve found most useful for regular, every day entrepreneurs to get to page one of Google for their niche keyword phrases.

Blogger.com
Blogger brags that you can be up and blogging in ten minutes with their program, and that’s true. This is why I chose Blogger as my main blogging tool, and the first one I teach in my 10 week webinar “Attracting Perfect Customers Online.” You can see my Law of Attraction Marketing blog. Since Google owns Blogger, your posts will rank well when you use this tool.

WordPress.com
WordPress is a pretty sophisticated blogging tool with a variety of possible options for customization. I personally find this tool more complicated to use but it is more robust and vastly customizable. I recently designed a WordPress blog for my client the Creative Sage, and if you look at it you will see how robust the sites are. With WordPress you can customize a home page and link it to a blog. In this case, 3 blogs are linked from that one home page. I’ve also created some simple WordPress blogs that even with very little content are getting to page one of Google.

Squidoo.com
Squidoo is a site where you can share your expertise on a topic. Google puts AdWords on these pages so they rank really well. They’re easy to set up and you can put cool modules on them like YouTube videos, Amazon.com products for sale, pictures from Flickr, and the all important links to your main sites. You can see my squidoo lenses here.

HubPages:
Like Squidoo, HubPages is a social network site for folks who want to share their expertise in any area of life. Here’s the HubPage that got to page one of Google in only 22 minutes.

My suggestion is to post to these 4 blogging sites on a regular basis to exponentially expand the visibility of your message. But even creating one blogger post or Squidoo lens that links back to your website will help your site ranking. So what are you waiting for? Get off your bleeping butt and blog!

Obama Tweets on Twitter! How About You?

Barack Obama is widely known as the Social Networking candidate. Last year he recruited Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes to build his own social network My.BarackObama.com , he was the first of all presidential candidates to capitalize on the strength of his Facebook groups and now he is by far the most popular person on Twitter.com, now surpassing Digg founder Kevin Rose by over 13,000 followers.

This is significant news for anyone studying new internet marketing trends. Obama has been successfully using these social networks to mobilize millions of people and raise tens of millions of campaign dollars. He has unearthed the power of Facebook (where he has over 1.3 million supporters) to organize real-world events and gain the Democratic Party nomination for president over Hillary Clinton, the former party front-runner. Some predict he’ll be able to use his advantage on social networks to beat out McCain come election day.

What Does This Mean for You?

Social Networks are not just for kids or political candidates. Business people can use these fun free tools to network with friends, associates, colleagues and family, and passively market to these folks just by adding short updates, links, and posts. Just as Obama (ok, Obama’s aids do the actual work) uses Twitter to update contacts on what he’s doing and where you can learn more about it, you can use Twitter to let followers know about your latest blog post, what you’re doing in your business right now, or your latest sale. After I publish this blog post, I'll surely go to my Twitter account to announce it and post a link.

Similarly, on Facebook it’s easy and fun to stay in touch with people without inundating them with emails. I’ve used Facebook as a tool to follow up with people I meet at business networking events as well as a fun place to connect with old friends.

Hey, if you’re on Facebook or Twitter, let me know and we’ll connect there! Once we're connected, send me a note if you want to learn more how to use these tools to your advantage.

Want to learn how to use Social Networks to Attract Perfect Customers Online? Check out my upcoming 10 week webinar for web-challenged individuals. I’ll be offering a free introduction to this webinar on September 19th to show folks how I got to page one of google in 22 minutes by sharing myself authentically online. See details at http://www.graphicgirlz.com/teleconference.html

Authentic Sharing Attracts Perfect Customers

Have you grown tired of the constant barrage of advertising messages bombarding you each day? The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that the average American is exposed to about 3000 advertising messages a day costing corporations billions per year. In the old paradigm for marketing, businesses are instructed to target their audiences and inundate them until they are brainwashed into buying.

If you’re like me and thousands of conscious entrepreneurs, you’re looking for a new paradigm for marketing, one that is authentic, one that recognizes and honors our intuition and chosen life paths, one that attracts rather than targets perfect customers. I’m here to tell you that we can get the word out about our products and services without brainwashing anyone or producing hype. We can attract our perfect customers by sharing ourselves authentically.

What You Seek is Seeking You

The Law of Attraction states that those with a similar energy are attracted to each other. How we are being, as well as how we are marketing, determines whether or not our perfect customers will be drawn to us, and whether they will recognize us when they do find us! There are people out there who are seeking you, your products and services as well as your personality, your approach, your mission.

When I consciously realize my perfect customers are seeking me now, my marketing takes on a different color. I realize that when my perfect customers find me (or my website, my post cards, my fliers, etc) they will only know me as who they are seeking if I am authentic and come from the heart in my marketing. If I am engaging in competitive marketing strategies or hype of any kind, my most perfect customers will pass right by me. But when I share my true self in my marketing, my perfect customers breathe a sigh of relief. They call me and say, “I know you’re the one I want to work with.”

5 Easy Steps for Attracting Perfect Customers

If you want to attract your perfect customers, there are 5 easy steps you can take today to get started.

Step 1) First, you want to determine who your perfect customers are. Get out a piece of paper and write at the top “The qualities of my perfect customers are…” and start making a long laundry-type list. Everything you can think of that you like in people you work with/for goes there like personality traits, how they find you, their resources, what they say about you, etc.

Step 2) Write a short statement of what your true inner calling is. This is also the true inner calling of your perfect customers, which you will discover as you begin attracting them. When you are authentic to your true passion and joyfully sharing your soul's calling, then you are ready to attract your heart's desire.

Step 3) Create another long list, answering the question “What do I want my perfect customers to expect from me?” Ultimately the question here is what do you really desire in life, what do you love to do and want people to pay you for. Answering this question will help you to create the business life of your dreams.

Step 4) On the back side of your Step 3 list, answer the question “What am I improving to become more attractive to my perfect customers?” Take all the items from Step 3 that aren't fully realized 100% yet and put these on your Step 4 list. Look at these items now and ask yourself, "Who would I have to be to attract this?"

Step 5) Get out there and share your mission authentically. Now that you are focused on what you want and you have clarified your mission, get the word out about what is important to you. Try creating a ’30 second speech’ for the next Connections meeting that truly reflects your purpose and mission. Use words that mean something important to you and watch as your perfect customers flock to you.

How to Relax and Attract Perfect Customers

Have you ever stopped to notice that being stressed and uptight is not a great way to attract perfect customers? I know it can be hard sometimes when you're wondering where the next customer is going to come from and you're looking at your bills that keep mounting. Believe me, I can relate.

But I have learned that worry ~ even one minute of worry ~ is completely 100% counter-productive to the results I want. Even if I forget for a second that my thoughts are creating my reality, and I take a long logical look at how I come off to others when I’m anxious, really it’s not an attractive picture. It’s clear to me that my perfect customers will not recognize me at all when I am not being my true, authentic self. And doesn’t that make sense?

Now coming back to the fact that our thoughts do create our reality, can you see how worry is working against your dreams coming true? In fact, worry is a negative future projection. In the book “The Law of Attraction,” Abraham-Hicks points out that even 17 seconds of continuous intention around a desire will start that desire coming to you. Unfortunately, focusing on a possible negative outcome, especially when coupled with strong emotion, is a powerfully creative act, though we may not like the outcome!

When I first read “The Law of Attraction,” I stopped to remember the last time I had spent a solid 17 seconds focusing on my positive intent without considering the opposite or my ‘shadow of a doubt.’ It was challenging to remember a time outside of a self-help workshop where I had stayed completely positive for that long. That was an eye opener! Now with my penchant toward negative thinking revealed, I am empowered to try something new, a worry-free approach to marketing.

learned that staying true to my purpose and focused on the positive aspects is vital to the Attraction Marketing process. Toward that end, I’d like to share some tips I’ve learned to RELAX, kick back and attract my perfect customers.

TIP 1: Be Kind to Yourself ~ spend 15 minutes doing something you love. Sometimes a whole day can fly past without me stopping to smell the daisies. Now I make sure to go out to my garden at least 15 minutes a day to be with my beautiful plants. What is your favorite thing to do? Stop what you’re doing now and go do that for 15 minutes. Notice how attractive you feel when you do what you love.

TIP 2: Make your Strategic Attraction PlanTM: One way to focus on what we like and want to attract is by creating our Strategic Attraction Plan TM (SAP) This simple 4 part plan helps us determine what is most perfect for us in our business and our life. Visit http://www.graphicgirlz.com/sap.html for a free 1 hour recorded lesson on creating your SAP.

TIP 3: Take Attractive Actions: It is always wise to take a proactive approach when marketing. The key is to make the act of marketing fun and expressive for you. Consider what you love to do and then look for ways to combine that with a creative marketing act. Maybe you love to do yoga… so grab your mat and your biz card, post card or flier and find places to post your ad on your way to yoga class. Or perhaps you like to party, so plan a party where you and everyone gets to show off their products and services. Or if you like to write, write an article or blog entry and send it off to your list. Obviously that’s one of my favorite fun marketing actions~!

TIP 4: Get Some Help: Sometimes you just need help getting your marketing engines running. You may need a new image, or a website update, or you may want to learn how to get to page one of google. I have a variety of offerings at different price points that may be a perfect option for you to start stressing less and attracting more of your perfect customers today. Visit http://www.graphicgirlz.com/ to learn more about Magical Marketing.

REMINDER: My 10 week Webinar for web-challenged individuals “Attracting Perfect Customers Online” starts Tuesday, June 24 at 3:30 pm pacific time. Call me and ask for your special discount: 707-823-3316. See http://www.graphicgirlz.com/teleconference.html for more information.

Networking in your PJs while watching soaps?

One of the greatest benefits of living in the technical age is that we can do all sorts of things from home just by going on the internet. We can shop, learn, be entertained, and connect with others without even getting dressed! As a social being, I like to go out in the world once in a while to network with other entrepreneurs, but there's nothing quite like connecting with others from all over the world without leaving my ergonomic comfy chair.

I have taken advantage of online social networks for many years and frequently visited sites like craigslist.org, care2.com, ryze.com (see my ryze at http://www.ryze.com/go/ggirlz) and tribe.net to meet people, share passions, and make business connections. Now, with the addition of sites like Hub Pages (see my hub http://hubpages.com/hub/Attracting-Perfect-Customers ) Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/magicalmarketer ) and Squidoo (http://www.squidoo.com/ggirlz) I can network even more effectively and get to page one of google almost instantly!

Often I sit at home in my PJ's (guess what I'm wearing now!) and share my passions, illuminate with tips, offer help and advice, check out the brilliant sharing of others, and this activity helps me to attract perfect customers. Sometimes I even do this while watching my favorite soap (recorded on TiVo). It's a really fun way to market and make friends. I cannot recommend this enough.

Here are some tips on networking online:

1) Find social networks that you really like and that reflect your personality. Care2.com is for folks who like to contribute to causes, Tribe.net has hundreds of topical 'tribes' for you to join, Ryze.com is for entrepreneurs, Twitter.com is a micro-blog community, Waccobb.net is for the Sonoma County, CA community (do you have one in your community?)

2) Join the group/s you like best and set up your profile. Make sure to include your picture, what you do for biz, your personal passions, your mission, and your offerings. Don't forget to include links to your website/s, blogs, and other social network pages.

3) Search your network for folks of like mind and heart and introduce yourself. Invite them to join your network. Join their network.

4) Visit your network often and spend time meeting folks, updating your profile, commenting on other folks' blogs and sites ie contribute to others

5) Join groups if your network has them. Find groups that reflect your passion and your offerings and share yourself authentically there. Contribute to others in the group at least as often as you promote your latest offerings.

6) Respond quickly to inquiries from others on your social network. Timing is everything. Let people know you appreciate their desire to connect and make efforts to really get to know them. See if you can get involved in their network of friends.

7) Create a blog or site where your latest interests, info, tips and queries are posted so folks can keep up with you and your offerings.

8) HAVE FUN! Magical Marketing is all about doing what you love to do and being open to receiving all you desire!

I have a free webinar on "How I Got to Page One of Google by Sharing Myself Authentically" on my home page. Check it out.

How I Got to Page One of Google and Yahoo by Sharing My Passion Authentically

The most attractive marketing to your perfect customers is a true reflection of you and your offerings. Those people who are seeking you and your services want to know you're the one when they find you. That is why I stress coming from the heart, sharing your passion authentically whenever you can. I have been taking this approach to Internet marketing for about ten years, but just last year when Google changed it's game plan, I started popping up on page one searches all over the place. What seemed to me a logical approach to attracting perfect customers online turned out to be the best way to appear like an authority to the search engines.

My tried and true online market place also turned out to be a top-ranking site to use, craigslist.org now ranking higher than amazon.com on search engines. I've been posting on craigslist.org for free since around 1999 with great success, and now my craigslist postings are helping my other sites rank better for certain key word phrases I'm using. If you only do one thing online, it should be creating craigslist postings of your offerings. I make sure I post one for each of my main businesses every week.

Some of the new social networking sites that we may associate more with teenagers turn out to be some of the best ranking sites out there, including blog sites like blogger, social networks like myspace and youtube and newer business networking sites like squidoo. Sharing yourself authentically on these fun sites is a way to develop the clarity of your mission while boosting your site ranking and being easily found online.

I've been playing around with some of these sites. You can see my most recent squidoo lens at http://www.squidoo.com/ggirlz and visit my other lenses from there. I hope you rank my lens!

Here's one of my hub pages. Let me know what you think of it! http://hubpages.com/hub/Attraction-Marketing-for-Conscious-Entrepreneurs
You can access my other hubs from there.

This spring I'm taking a group of entrepreneurs through the process of creating authentic online marketing that catapults them to page one of Yahoo and Google for a variety of "Magical Keyword" searches. My 10 Week Webinar for Web-Challenged Individuals is perfect for anyone who would like to delve into Law of Attraction Marketing while learning smart internet marketing techniques for being found online. Using the latest Webinar software you can literally 'look over my shoulder' as I guide you step by step in setting up your internet properties.

You can listen to a free 1 hour intro-teleclass recording called "How I Got to Page One of Google by Sharing My Passion Authentically" on my home page http://www.graphicgirlz.com.

You can also participate in my second live free introductory teleclass/webinar on this topic to take place on Thursday April 26th at noon pm pst. Just email teleconference@graphicgirlz.com with the subject "Register Me in Free Webinar 4_26_08" to join in the fun.

One of my favorite experiences is attracting my pefect customers online. I want you to have that freedom that I enjoy every day!

Attracting Perfect Customers with the Strategic Attraction Plan TM

Simple Plan is Proven to Make Marketing Magnets

As seen in the book "Attracting Perfect Customers" by Stacey Hall and Jan Brogniez

The Strategic Attraction PlanTM (SAP) is a simple 4-part process that empowers you to attract perfect customers and relationships. Using the SAP we can literally put our order out to the universe for whatever we desire to attract, and thus become a magical magnet for the life of our dreams. I use the SAP to guide entrepreneurs in creating a Magical Marketing Plan that reflects their true passions, Branding from the Heart that expresses their mission in a way that promotes everything they're up to, and Wildly Attractive Websites that spread the word to the world and inspire their perfect customers to take desired actions.

Step one for all of these is to create your Strategic Attraction Plan TM (SAP). Below I outline the SAP with some of my own variations gleaned from my own work with clients and some simple instructions on how to use it.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Take a blank piece of paper 8.5" x 11" and fold in half. Now you have a 4-sided piece of paper. Below are the questions to put on each side. (You can also do this in a journal, on a computer file, or on a napkin!)

I am focusing here on attracting perfect customers, but you can attract any relationship you desire using this plan. Just insert the relationship you are attracting (business partners, vendors, employees, life partner, family member, etc) where I have "customers." You can even use this to attract new qualities from people who are already in your life, including yourself!

SIDE 1: WHO AM I ATTRACTING? What are the qualities, characteristics and attributes of my perfect customers?

SIDE 2: WHO AM I? What makes me and my perfect customers tick?

SIDE 3: WHAT DO I DESIRE? What do I want my perfect customers to expect of me?

SIDE 4: WHO AM I BEING? What am I improving to become more attractive to my perfect customers?

NOW start filling in your answers under each question. Think about what you want and use positive language. (ie instead of "my perfect customer doesn't blame me when things don't go right" say "my perfect customer takes responsibility for their own experience of life")

Side 1: is a long laundry-type list. Everything you can think of that you like in people you work with/for goes there. This is meant to help you begin aligning with the kind of people you want in your business and your life. Consider their personality traits, what they say, the kinds of resources they have to give to you, how they find you, how often they refer you... whatever you can think of to describe your perfect customers goes here. This will help you to focus on what kinds of customers you want and thus start attracting them.

Side 2: is a short statement of what your true inner calling is, your soul's desire, your main life passion. This is what keeps you buring the midnight oil, it's what inspires you to get out of bed in the morning. The words you use to describe your passion are great words to use in your marketing because your perfect customers are inspired by the same things you are.

Side 3: is all about what YOU want ~ what you want to offer and what you want in your life. You want your perfect customers to expect these things of you - essentially you want them to expect what YOU want. These are the services, ways of being, types of products you are offering. This is also a list of the goals and aspirations you have in your life, and a statement of your boundaries. Ultimately the question here is what do you really desire in life, what do you love to do and want people to pay you for. What do you dream of doing? Your Magical Marketing Plan will be an enjoyable part of your life when you integrate it into what you love to do.

Side 4: is all about allowing what you are attracting to come to you. What you desire will come to you when you are aligned with your source, your purpose, your calling. We are creating our lives through our intensions and our willingness to become our desire. Since you have a list of your desires on side 3, take the ones that aren't fully realized 100% yet and put these on Side 4. Everything on Side 4 will appear first on Side 3. Then look at these items and ask yourself, "Who would I have to be to attract this?"
I often find that when I am being true to myself and joyful in my authenticity, all manner of things that I have asked for come to me.

I hope you find the Strategic Attraction Plan TM helpful. You can learn more about this methodoloy and my services at the Graphic Girlz Website.
I offer Personalized Strategic Attraction Coaching and Law of Attraction and Marketing Tele-Intensives

Listen to a Free Lesson on the Strategic Attraction Plan TM and how you can create your own Magical Marketing Plan: including a lesson on The Strategic Attraction Plan TM