Marketing experts like Jay Conrad Levinson, Joe Sugarman and Jay Abraham agree perfectly on ONE THING: The first thing you must do to promote your product or service is to identify your exact potential buyer. Here’s one way to find your ideal buyer online:

1.  Set up a free email account (hotmail, yahoo, etc.).

2.  Sign up for all the e-zines that match your business or consumers’ market by using this new email account. This website lists all the big and little ezines: http://ezines.nettop20.com.

3.  Compile a list of keywords for your business type in order to search out all potential ezines.

4.  Go to the websites of your clients and competitors and subscribe to their newsletters using the new email account.

5.  Read through the ezines each week to find out which ones are quality newsletters, who is writing articles for them, and how large each subscriber list is.

6.  Contact the best ezines to ask if the publisher would review your website or service.

7.  Post messages with your opinions and expertise to the subscribers.

8.  Write articles to share with the ezine publishers. Remember, they have to produce new content for each issue, so your offer is greatly appreciated.

9.  A great way to leverage other writers who are already contributing to these ezines is to email them and comment on their articles. Mention that their writing caught your eye because your expertise is in that business area and you respect their insights. You might create a great strategic alliance. Of course, visit the writers’ websites and sign up for the ezines.

10.  Consider placing ads in the best ezines. If you can, contact other advertisers who said they make money from their ads.

Just begin investing time to communicate with others in your marketplace and you’ll find a herd of buyers. And don’t forget to stop and smell the roses. You just might be someone else’s buyer as well.

Til next time,

Coach Mo

P.S. I just want to make clear that while this is a great way to begin and grow your online marketing, it is by no means an exhaustive list. Your marketing plan should be more comprehensive and inclusive of all your initiatives. Check in later for more offline marketing strategies.

You know, sometimes, a day off is a good thing. When people meet me and I tell them I am a business and leadership coach, it’s an unspoken but strong expectation of me to “always be on my p’s and q’s”. And then when they learn that one of my degrees is in Psychology, fuhgeddaboutit! They wonder if I’m analyzing them, or if everything that comes out of my mouth is some psychobabble Dr Phil gobbledigook (did I spell that right?).

Well, guess what, I am a spiritual being having a human experience just like you. I don’t have all the answers, and I certainly don’t have YOURS. But what I CAN do as a coach (and what we as human beings ideally will do for each other) is create the environment where you can find your own answers and implement them successfully.

I am a HUGE proponent of walking the talk. The people who know me well know that. I can’t teach what I don’t know, and can’t lead where I don’t go. But I also think that those who seek evidence of perfection are the ones paralyzed in their own inaction.

If you’re waiting for someone to lead the way perfectly before you make a move, you’ll be waiting a long time. I invite you to honor those who didn’t wait to have all the answers to dare to make a dream come true… those who didn’t procrastinate in the name of “it has to be perfect” in order to launch their business… those who never read a parenting book or took a marriage class in their life, but loved their spouses and children deeply and may have messed it up along the way.  Honor them, and be one of them.

It’s part of being human, people! Being human is messy, it’s not a dress rehearsal, things slip through the cracks, opportunities are missed, pain is caused and received. But you know what, that’s what makes us so glorious: To be able to experience abject pain, rejection, failure, and yet get up and try again. You can’t walk the talk unless you stop talking and take a step… and then another… and then another… and when you fall, get up and keep walking. You might need to stay on your knees for a bit to catch your breath, but then you get up and keep walking.

My job as a coach is to be the one that dusts your knees off and helps you back up again so you can continue your journey. But YOU must walk it. It would be robbery if I or anybody took that experience away from you.

In the meantime, know that there are times when the coach falls on her knees too, and there are a few people around me that dust my knees off and help me back up again so I can continue walking MY talk. At the end of my life, I can confidently say that I didn’t spout off theories and suppositions. Instead, everything I ever shared was because I was a big player on the field of life, living fully entrenched in the human experience, not on the sidelines waiting for someone to make a foul so I can call it.

Wooo…. had to get that off my mind, y’all!!!

After nearly five years at the helm and facing criticism over Hurricane Katrina recovery, Hector Barreto will be replaced by Steven Preston, an executive at a public company.

Hector Barreto, the head of the Small Business Administration, resigned after facing months of criticism over the agency’s handling of recovery efforts in the Gulf Coast.

Steven Preston, his replacement, was previously a senior vice president at The ServiceMaster Co., a publicly traded firm

The thing that concerns me here is that they budget for the SBA is being cut yet Mr. Baretto and the SBA were able to back the largest number of loans ever. This leads me to wonder if the criticism of Mr. Baretto regarding the handling of Hurricane Katrina is justified. It seems Mr. Baretto was fulfilling his mandate to the best of his abilities but was hamstrung in the end by the force of nature, Katrina, and Mr. Bush and the Bush administrations propensity to cut the SBA’s budget. Not to mention the fact that Mr. Bush is constantly talking about creating a society where people are able to fend for themselves.

If you want people to fend for themselves then you have to create an environment that allows people to pull themselves up. Owning and running a small business is definitely a great way for a person to make their lives better without relying on the government. You might say to me that the SBA is an example of the government fending for people and I would agree with you if they were giving the money away but these are loans that we are talking about here. They are something that the business owner has to pay back. The SBA does more than back loans and, in fact, many of the services are free but they are services that enable a person to succeed not create a dependency on the system by that person. For example there is free training and counseling on running a business. This enables a person to be more successful and to rely on the government less.

I congratulate Steven Preston, the new head of the SBA, and wish him luck. Mostly, I hope that he strives to restore the budget of the SBA, leverage that budget as much as possible (following Mr. Baretto’s lead) and enable as many American small business owners as he can to succeed.