The Power of "Masterminds" Written by Heidi Richards, MS
Mastermind - Drawing from experience and knowledge of others to grow your business. A mastermind group is a group of people who meet on a regular basis to exchange ideas, seek advice of group and solicit feedback from. It is a resource center of new ideas. I have been involved in several masterminds. Most recently an online exchange between women speakers around world, which I started, and other one is an in-person meeting, which I was invited to participate in. Each of these have taken my business to a new level and I have made some wonderful friends. Highly successful mastermind groups work best when you follow these guidelines: 1. Choose people who have specialized knowledge you lack. Enlisting people with very different outlooks strengthens a mastermind group. 2. Make a time commitment and stick to it. Once a month generally works best. When you make commitment, don't allow anything except serious emergencies to interfere with your date. 3. Create an agenda to follow. This creates a sense of order during your meetings. Sample agendas might include open discussion at beginning of meeting and then focusing on individual challenges for, let's say 20 minutes each. My in-person group (of 6) focuses on one member's challenge each meeting with others offering their feedback or advice. Each member gets his or her turn to share. This is very powerful because each of us learns something from other's challenge. My online group meets in a "chat room" and we each ask a question (there are 5 of us). Then other 4 offer their responses. We meet for approximately one hour. We have open discussion at end of meeting if there is time.
| | How To Get A Pay Raise From Your Web SiteWritten by Lisa Packer
How many of visitors to your web site take action you want them to take? Whether you want them to buy something from you, sign up for your newsletter, enter your sweepstakes, or give you contact information to follow up on, you want them to do something. The percentage of visitors who actually do that something is called your “conversion rate.”Many web site owners are great marketers. They know how to drive a ton of traffic to their site. When results are less than what they had hoped for, they think answer is to spend more time and money generating even greater traffic. What they really need to be doing is improving their conversion rate. Picture this: If you currently get one sale (or subscription, etc) for every 100 visitors to your site, you have a conversion rate of 1%. But what if I told you that by making a few changes to your site you could increase that to two sales per 100, and double your income without increasing your traffic? The best part is that most often simple changes are all that are needed. Once you make those changes, you can forever “convert” a greater number of visitors without doing anything else different. So, without further ado, here are three changes you can make that will have greatest likely impact on your conversion rate:
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