It was their busiest day in weeks!

Last week my client, Laura Crucet, called me because something was going wrong.

Business was unexpectedly slowing down. That day she got a phone call that let her know what might be the problem.

The caller asked whether they would be providing holiday catering even though they were closed for construction.

Yikes! They weren’t closed for construction at all! There was an article in the paper that said that there was a conflict between the landlord and the fire marshal… a conflict that was being worked out. But people read that article assumed that they were closed.

I wrote this article, and the next day they had twice as much business as they had been getting over the past two weeks.

I’ve been working with Laura and Fernando for almost a year. This is what Laura had to say about the experience:

“I first saw Mandy’s work for other people on social media. We were open to changing over to someone new, and we’re happy we changed over to Mandy. It’s gone from general writing and social media management to helping us curate our personality in the community.
 
The most successful thing Mandy’s done was during our recent remodel. People were confused, thinking the fire marshal shut down one of our locations. Business dropped off. Mandy wrote a press release, got it posted in the Monitor, and cross-posted it on social media.
This was late Thursday night. Friday was our most successful day in two weeks. Our business doubled compared to what it had been over the last two weeks. That’s what she does.
 
Mandy’s also helping us keep our wine events successful. They’re continuously selling out.
 
Hands down, I’m happy we hired her. She knows our style. She understands it’s all business, it’s nothing personal. If Food Network approached us, I’d feel comfortable approaching Mandy about that.
 
Our role in the community is always changing. You never know what’s going to come. We feel like she’ll be able to rise up to the challenge of that.”
 
Laura Crucet,
Owner of The Pig + Fig Cafe
 

If you have an event coming up, or want to get more people to come to your business, a press release might work for you.

Her secret’s safe with me.

Yesterday I was checking out the comments on another person’s blog and feeling very satisfied with myself.
You see, I had just wrapped up the first month of a content package. And the blog posts were ghost-written by me.
At the beginning of this month, the owner of this particular website gave me a spreadsheet of ideas, bullet points and links to sales letters.
From there, I researched the topics, got to know the products and every week I delivered a 1,500-word blog post and a sales email on a silver platter.
She continued to write blog posts and emails on her own. But this month she had twice as much content and it freed her up to work on her core offerings.
It was cool to see how her audience was reacting the blog posts that I added, and how she was using the content to direct people to her sales pages.
I have some space in my schedule for another client who needs a steady stream of blog posts and emails. Click here to sign up for a free15-minutee meeting.

The right way to approach revisions.

I’m working on a book about self-promotion for trumpet players, called “Tooting Your Own Horn – How to Promote Yourself as a Trumpet Player without Being an Obnoxious Blowhard.
I used Fiverr to get the cover made.
And when I saw the first version, I wanted to throw up in my mouth.

It was just… not what I had in mind.
My first instinct was to find someone else to do it. And maybe leave a bad review.
But I didn’t. Why?
One reason was that I didn’t have the budget to hire the person I really wanted to hire.
Another reason is that I hate it when I do something for someone and they stop communicating at the revision stage.
Whenever that happens to me, it hurts my business and stresses me out.
I’m the kind of person who follows the golden rule. I treat others the way that I want to be treated.
So I sat down with the book cover that I didn’t like and I tried to put into words why didn’t like it. The background was dark and murky, and you couldn’t see the trumpet player’s face. My book is all about making friends, connecting with others, and building a trusting audience.
The cover needs to have a fun and friendly appearance.
So I wrote an email to the designer, politely explaining what I didn’t like about the cover and what I was really looking for.

cover of Tooting Your Own Horn by Mandy Marksteiner

Because I hadn’t communicated that information properly in the first email. I had just given her the text with a “surprise me” attitude.
Now that we were in the revision stage I needed to give more specific directions so that we could get the job done without wasting her time or my money.
And a day later she sent me this version and it was EXACTLY what I wanted!
I loved it.
Two totally different book covers from the same designer. Rather than be rude, make her feel bad about herself, or fire her… I respected the time that she put into the project, had faith in her abilities, and used my communication skills to ask for what I wanted.

Tell your business story from the customer’s POV.

In a couple of days, you might find yourself sitting around the table, eating pie.

Your cousin or uncle or nephew will be next to you making small talk, and you mention work.

And a look of panic and confusion might sweep across their features… just before they ask, “What do you do, exactly?”
Happens to me all the time.

(But I have to admit it’s funnier when it happens to my husband… who always has to explain that plasma physicists don’t work with blood or TV’s.)

I’m sure it happens to you too.

And it’s not because your job is that hard to understand. It’s just that it can be hard for others keep track of what you do.

It’s up to you to make it memorable.

Earlier this year I wrote a case study that helped several people explain what they do for a living all at once.

Edj Ink (a printing and branding company run by Patrick and Lisa Brenner) hired me to write the case study.

They had done some branding work for the Supportive Housing Coalition, and I interviewed the people at SHC to find out how that re-branding job helped them explain how they help homeless people in Albuquerque. Take a look.

My Thanksgiving travel tragedy.

The sound was like nails on a chalkboard.

Worse.

Metal on bare metal.

The worst part about it was that I knew my brakes were worn down to a stub.

And that was very bad news, considering that I was hoping to embark on a long car trip the next morning.
I pulled into the garage, Auto-Doc in Los Alamos, and told him that I was about to go to Minnesota and I wanted him to make sure my Kia was roadworthy.
Well, it wasn’t. It was a rolling deathtrap, a tumble off a cliff just waiting to happen.
My brakes were completely used up in the back.
The good news was that he could get the job done right then and there and have me on the road in a matter of hours.
The bad news was that I didn’t have the money right then and there.
Which got me thinking about the way that I run my business.
I recently had a couple projects go wrong, where I ended up losing money rather than making it.
I won’t go into details.
But I will say that if those things hadn’t happened the way they did, I would be able to get the brakes fixed and be on my merry Thanksgiving way.
It was upsetting, but rather than drown myself in ice cream and self-pity, I decided to take a look at what went wrong with these projects.
What can I do to make sure that I get paid fairly so that I can give each project the time and attention that it deserves?
What can I do to make sure that I get the information that I need from my clients at the beginning of the project to make sure that there are no surprises and that we both understand the purpose of each piece that I write?
What can I do to make sure that my clients understand the writing process and will commit to each step?
Judging from these last two bad experiences, I need to change the way that I bring in clients, hammer out the details of the proposals and explain the process of working with me.
I’ve changed my services page to reflect those changes. People who are interested in specific services can sign up for an appointment via Calendly. They will have to answer a few questions, and I will find out if they have questions, before we move forward with the appointment.
The pricing is more set in stone than before, and I’m slowing down the process so that I can spend more time on each individual project.
I think these changes will help me deliver higher quality work, and my customers will be happier with the results.

In case you missed my digital marketing presentation…

Wednesday morning I gave a Mandy Marksteiner speaking in front of a projection screen and table with a cloth emblazoned: Los Alamos, New Mexico.presentation on digital marketing at the Los Alamos Chamber Business Breakfast.
If you didn’t make it, I’ll let you know what I talked about.
I don’t think it makes sense for anyone to try to do every possible thing online. Rather, choose the two or three most profitable and useful marketing methods, and do those things often and well.
That said, there were a few things that I recommended people try.

1) Make a bait piece and use it to grow an email list.
The bait piece should solve a problem that your customers face that is related to the product.

2) Email your list and make an offer every day (or at the very least, way more often than you do now).

3) Sell something.
After giving it some thought, it occurred to me that you can use LeadPages to do all three of those things. Click here to get a free trial.
Anyway, if you would like to use LeadPages to increase your sales, give me a call.

Introducing a better way to promote an art exhibit.

I have a lot of experience promoting man pointing at a painting on a pop-up gallery, while other patrons look onart.
The trick is to get people to come to the gallery.
And usually that involves planning events and parties revolving around the art.
The problem is that people show up in droves for art openings, but once the opening reception is over it’s hard to get people to stop by and keep looking.
Phil Noll is a nature photographer who has an exhibit at the Karen Wray Gallery in Los Alamos, NM.
When people walk in they are stunned by his photos. And they have a million questions about how he managed to capture those images.
So we planned a walkthrough of the exhibit and Q&A session with the artist.
We wrote an article that was published in both of the local papers (one paper published it a few days before the event, the other one delivered it hours before the event). We sent the article out as an email blast. And we shared the email blast on the gallery Facebook page.
Plus Phil shared it several times on his personal page.
We had no idea how many people to expect. I have to admit, I was a little nervous while I waited for 5:00 to arrive. (But I always get a little jittery before events… I want to know that my press releases brought in lots of people!)
We were all pleased when people started to arrive. The main room was packed full of people. There may have been more people at this event than there were at the opening reception.
(That gives me an important clue about the market we’re in. Los Alamos is full of well-educated… and well-off… scientific types. They want to LEARN stuff.)
Once the room was full Phil went from photo to photo and told the story of how he got that image. He gave tips on using the camera, told stories about getting stuck knee deep in snow or mud, revealed his secrets about how he achieved special effects, and he did his best to explain why the light looked so incredible in some of the photos.
My favorite part was how he told us how often there were 50-60 other photographers herding around a certain overlook. Often they would pack up and leave before he took his picture… or they would all be looking in one direction and he would find something incredible just by looking the other way.
It was informative. It was entertaining.
A lot of people in the marketing world call it “infotainment.” And I want you to use it in your business as much as possible because it is powerful.
People lingered after the presentation was over… asking questions. Phil (who totally rocked it, by the way) stuck around and let everyone look at his camera and his camera backpack.
Anyway, if you would like to try using infotainment to increase your sales, give me a call.

She scoffed when I told her I write emails…

  grumpy elderly woman with a butterfly necklace and a blazer tucked over her shoulderI was in the Delray Beach Marriott.

I had just wrapped up a solid two-hour networking extravaganza at the famous and insanely valuable Job fair at the end of AWAI’s Bootcamp.

I was in the middle of a gaggle of copywriters waiting for the elevators. We were hyper and jazzed about our careers and the opportunities that were afoot for everyone.

One woman was among us, but not part of the group. She looked like she just came back from the beach and she wanted to know what everyone was so excited about.

She pulled me aside and asked me, “What do you write?”

… and I was still in the groove, marketing myself and trying to stand out as an email copywriter. So I blurted out, “I write emails.”

“Emails??” she scoffed. “I thought you were a real writer… I thought you wrote BOOKS!”

All the other copywriters turned to look and hide their giggles… this lady was really bellowing at me and I could feel my face turning bright red.

I wondered when that damned elevator would show up because this lady was still scowling at me like I was the world’s biggest moron. Emails, indeed!

But, whatever.

I don’t have to impress her.
Because I can tell you for a fact that writing emails is totally awesome.

Just last week I was sending one email a day to my client’s list. We’ve been trying to sell tickets to an yoga retreat in Mexico.

The early bird tickets were $3,500 (and the regular price is $5,000).

Our goal was to sell ten tickets. I’m not a math genius, but I believe doing that would bring in $35,000.

Not bad for a bunch of stinkin’ emails!

The best part is that we sold more than ten. 🙂

I’m just really pleased to get some good results for my clients… and to go to bed knowing that the money that I charge is WELL worth it, because of the ROI that they are getting.

So, did I explain all that to the lady at the elevator?

Of course not!

Not with her giving me the stink eye like that… (Gosh, you’d think she’d be in a better mood after spending the afternoon at the beach!)
Anyway, if you’ve been thinking of using email to increase your sales, give me a call.

Was trick or treat on Mainstreet a SCARY waste of time?

I took my kids to Trick or Treat on Mainstreet last Friday with myperson in a neighborhood wearing a Ghostface mask and cloak kids.

It was fun, but I couldn’t help but snicker behind my mask when business owners claimed that it was a good way to get in front of people and give back.

Was it really?

I remember being herded from booth to booth, my kids waited for the candy to drop into their buckets.

But I don’t remember any single business giving me a reason to come in and buy something. Why would I become anyone’s customer?

Ideally, when you run a booth, you want to get people’s attention and stick around long enough to give some information that will make it possible to follow up and make a sale.

Like the owner of Sunshine Plumbing and Heating, who won the Powercircle Small Business Marketer of the Year Award.  He has a booth at a busy expo and drew people in by giving away balloons to the kids. (Similar to Trick or Treating).

Once he had people’s attention, he offered to give people a free copy of his book – a consumer guide to heating and air conditioning.

Now, not everyone is in the market for a heating and air conditioning system. If someone has no interest in getting that book, they might not be interested in becoming his customer. So they can take the balloon and go away.

If someone says YES to the book, they might buy something from him. He didn’t just hand over his book on the spot. He got their address and mailed them the book.

He also mailed them ten other pieces of information in the four months after the expo. When he finally sent the sales letter, he made $200,000 in sales from the people that came to his booth.

So when I see people shoveling handfuls of candy to kids and parents who aren’t even paying attention, I think, what a waste!

I want business owners to make the most out of these opportunities, and use their booths to start a real relationship with customers (that lasts longer than the one-second dopamine rush that comes when the Snickers bar plops into the pillowcase).

I want to see business owners think of a clever way to collect the names, email addresses, and addresses of possible customers and follow up and make a sale that can be traced back to the booth at the event.

It makes me sad to see waves upon waves of people walk past your booth while you give away shocking amounts of sugar… and maybe a business card gets passed out… but nothing happens after that. 🙁

… maybe this situation doesn’t lend itself to generating leads. But I’d like to think you could do it with some advance planning.

I’d love for someone to prove me wrong. Show me your system for turning the hoards of zombie trick-or-treaters into customers. If you did something that worked, I want to hear about it.

If you have an event coming up and you don’t want to squander your booth fee and your time… give me a call. My number is 505-515-7001. We can put our heads together and make an offer that will bring in leads that you can turn into sales.

Help, it’s too tight!

Have you ever taken tried something on in the dressing room only to find out that not only is it too tight, but you’re stuck? And now everyone in the store will hear your cries for help as you try desperately to loosen the zipper and release yourself??

… yeah. Me neither.
Well, something similar happened the other day when I announced my shiny new niche. I said, “I specialize in writing daily emails for people in the personal development industry.”
One of my email subscribers, MC, said that it doesn’t sound like me. He said, “It seems like you’re scaling back somehow (and maybe that’s what you’re trying to do).”

Before I go deeper into the feedback that he gave me and how I used that to revise my niche, I want to let you know why I felt it necessary to choose a narrow niche. Because I believe doing so can make it easier for me (and you… so pay attention) to market your business.

Many of my business mentors have given me the same piece of advice: Specialize and choose a target market. Doing those two things makes it possible for you to be the expert in your field, and it also makes it easier and more affordable to reach your ideal clients.

Joshua Boswell is a copywriter and coach who described a good target market as a group of people who are 1) easy to find… there are online groups, mailing lists, associations, etc. 2) they are interested in the products or services that you sell and 3) they have the money to pay your full price.

A wonderful thing happens when you identify this target market. You know where they are. You can start to create a mailing list. You can research their needs and find out how to talk to them. You can learn how to speak their language.

All those things make it exponentially easier to sell.

Ans while I’m already questioning whether “personal development” is the RIGHT target market, I’ll tell you how choosing a group might help me (and anyone else who cares to try) find clients.

OK. In the personal development niche, the first question I have to ask before I can find a client is “what kind of person am I looking for?”

One possibility is an author of a personal development book. An author could use my help because I could write an email series selling the book to people who opt into their list. I’ve seen authors in this industry hire copywriters like me. It’s only a question of finding them and attracting out the ones who can afford my services.

Once I have a direction, it was easy to go onto Facebook and search for groups of self-development authors discussing their books, how to market those books and get the word out about them. BINGO. All I have to do is get to know them and make an offer that would be appealing to them.

It is a step in the right direction, to say the least. Because without identifying a group, you’re staring into a sea of prospects… and you’re standing there chasing your own tail.

MC didn’t think that my niche sounded like me, though, and so I had to ask how he would describe what I do. (I got to say, I really appreciated the feedback. It’s hard to describe what you do, especially when you’re not sure how others perceive you.) He said: “Wordsmith and publicity guru for small businesses.”
I told him that I’ve been getting a little stressed out, and spread too thin. But he didn’t see it as a lack of focus, but rather a strength. “You are the type of person who wears many hats, so to speak. You don’t fit into the so-called experts’ categories, and that’s okay (I think). I have watched you expand your influence in this town, greatly, during the past two years. You take new things on and actually do them, which says a lot about you as a person.”
Well, shoot, now I’m blushing…
But after hearing that it seemed like a good idea to expand it to “personal and business growth.”
So to make a long story short, I’m still tweaking things. But I want you to see the value of narrowing it down. Doing that makes it easier to move forward with your marketing. It makes it possible to buy more targeted ads and write something that hits home. It makes it possible to create a mailing list full of people who will respond to your message. It instantly turns overwhelming marketing ideas into doable tasks.
Feel free to call me if you want help narrowing down your niche… or if you want to add your two cents on how I should narrow down mine.