Archive for the ‘Your Business Website’ Category

Interview with Danielle Keister, Founder of the Administrative Consultants Association

By Danielle Keister | April 18th, 2018

Last month a colleague asked for an interview with me, and I thought I would share my answers with you here as well.

Your Name:

Danielle Keister

Name of Your Business:

I am the founder of the Administrative Consultants Association (ACA), a professional organization for those running administrative support businesses. I also run my own administrative support business supporting solo attorneys who practice in the areas of business, intellectual property and entertainment law.

Years in Business:

I’ve been in business since 1997 when I officially took out my business license; longer if you want to include the years I did this work on the side informally. I originally started the organization now known as the Administrative Consultants Association (ACA) in 2005.

Q1. Tell me about starting your business. Why did you start it?

My husband died without warning in 1995, leaving me a young widow with a daughter to raise on my own. An unexpected loss like that really makes you question life and what you want out of it, how you want to live, what you want for yourself and your children, etc.: Are you living life on your own terms? How happy are you in the 9-to-5 grind? Is my child really getting the best of me if I’m tired and working all the time just to make ends meet? What kind of life am I providing for her? Is this really all there is?

I had previous forays into a few side businesses that I never really took anywhere. It was after the loss of my husband that I decided to get serious about taking the skills I had and turning them into a real business I could make a viable income from to create a better quality of life for myself and my daughter. I didn’t want to be a 9-to-5’er the rest of my life.

Q2. What is your role/job? What sort of responsibilities do you have?

I would say “job” is the wrong terminology to be using here since we are business owners, not employees. Some people may think that is pedantic, but consciously understanding the difference between employment and business ownership and having a business (not employee) mindset begins with using correct terminology.

In all my years of mentoring, what I’ve found is that those who never truly get over employee mindset and continue to work with their clients as if they were still employees don’t survive long in this business.

This is why I continue to clarify the distinction and make sure everyone I come across “gets” it. I want people to succeed in this business, which really starts with developing that all-important business sensibility.

As a solo business owner, I wear three hats: 1) I’m the CEO responsible for the development and direction of my business and making important decisions about the business; 2) I’m the manager responsible for managing all the moving parts and taking care of administration of the business; and 3) I’m the service provider — the craftsperson whose skills are the stock and trade of my business services.

Q3. What is your typical day like?

Very generally speaking, on a typical day, I wake up according to my own internal clock (I haven’t used an alarm clock in years).

Once I get up, I do a little yoga and stretching, eat, and then get cleaned up and dressed for the day. I fully admit to working in my bathrobe every once in awhile if I don’t have any plans to go anywhere that day, lol. But most of the time, leggings or long skirt with a comfy but stylish tee is how I roll.

I don’t like to rush into the day and prefer to check emails and get things sorted in my in-box as the first thing I do.

There is a lot of talk in many online places that discourage this, but I prefer the opposite and find this email clearing and organizing step much more conducive to my productivity for the rest of the day.

I then tend to dive into client work around 10 or 11 am (I always joke with people that my brain doesn’t get juiced up fully until around 11 am).

Depending on what’s on my plate for that day, I may work until between 4 and 6 pm. But it really varies, depending on the day’s workload, what priorities are in the queue, and what else I’ve got going on.

If the work in my queue gets done early, I don’t jump into the next day’s pile. I go enjoy life!

It does take discipline, though, not to fill your free time with work, work, work.

I think for most of us, our first instinct is to get as much done as quickly as we can. But that is really counterproductive and keeps you on a hamster wheel. It’s not good for you and ultimately it ends up not being good for clients.

You have to be diligent about respecting your own boundaries (which in turn trains clients to respect them as well) and give yourself lots of breathing room so you don’t burn out in this business.

At some point around noon or 1 pm I’ll knock off for lunch, maybe go somewhere to eat.

I also try to get a good walk/hike on most days (try being the operative word here lately). Depending on the weather, sometimes that’s first thing in the morning, sometimes it’s around midday, sometimes it’s later in the evening.

It really all depends, and this is the beautiful thing that I’ve created in my business: the freedom and flexibility to be able to listen to my own natural rhythms, structure my business around my life, and do what I want, when I want, while still taking great care of my clients. (I never sacrifice their needs; it’s all a matter of setting proper expectations and boundaries.)

I’ve also created what is essentially a 3-day work week (you can get my entire business management system here):

Mondays are my Admin Days where I take care of the admin in my own business or working on my business.
Tuesdays are my meeting days that I reserve for telephone meetings and appointments with clients and others.
Wednesday through Friday is when I do client work.

For the past few years, my life has been extra stressed caring for a sick, elderly dad. In full disclosure, I’ve really let my own self-care down. I’m beyond grateful I’ve built a business that allows me to do this for my dad, but it’s not easy and still comes with a cost that has taken a toll on me. Making my own self-care a priority again is something I wrestle with on a daily basis and am currently working to improve.

(For a more in-depth snapshot of my typical day, check out this post.)

Q4. What is the best thing about owning your own business?

As touched on above, the freedom and flexibility to live a less rushed/forced life; the ability to live according to my own natural rhythms and internal clock; and the ability to structure my business and its policies, procedures, and protocols so that I have plenty of time for life (or whatever is most important at any point in time; for me, right now, that is my dad).

I never ever want a business where I am living to work instead of working to live.

One of the things I’m always saying to my clients and colleagues is that your business should support your life, not suck the life from you. It took a lot of fits and starts, trial and error, and course correction, but I’m very proud of the business and income I’ve created today.

I also love that my daughter was able to see that self-sufficiency and determination modeled and be a part of my business journey.

Q5. What is the hardest thing about owning your own business?

Well, I’ll be frank with you: business ain’t for sissies, that’s fo sho!

I was extremely fortunate to have had some opportunities come up that gave me the financial means to take care of myself and my daughter while I started my business.

And later I was also fortunate to have a significant other to lean on during the rough spots, of which there were many, make no mistake.

It takes an extreme amount of perseverance, determination, self-motivation — and time —to get a business to a point where it’s actually solvent and sustainable and eventually profitable.

And, of course, everyone’s mileage and set of circumstances will vary. You just take advantage of everything you’ve got going for you, figure out the rest, and if you can get past all that, the rewards are amazing!

Q6. What advice do you have for someone wanting to start a business? What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started?

One of the reasons I started the ACA was to provide others with the knowledge and easier path in starting their own administrative support business that I didn’t have way back when. I did it all without knowing there were others doing what I was attempting to do.

One thing that was pivotal in my success was realizing that a secretarial service is not administrative support.

Secretarial services are project-based businesses where the person does something here and there for drive-by clients.

It’s an inherently volume-driven business, one that requires you to always be on the hunt for your next clients and projects, even while you try to complete the work in front of you.

It’s a plodding, exhausting way to try to make a living and extremely difficult to get profitable.

Once I realized that, instead of project work, I could provide administrative support being an ongoing right-hand to a handful of regular clients on a monthly basis instead of a constantly revolving door of one-time or sporadic clients and rinky-dink projects, that’s when I cracked the revenue code.

But it took me a few years to get to that realization and figure out how to structure things properly.

Now, I base all my training and business education products around that basic tenet so that others won’t waste so many months or years.

I show them how they can build a business based on retainer clients (which is where the bread-and-butter is) while still taking advantage of project work that comes along that is of interest to them (which is gravy).

Another bit of advice I have for folks is not to take shortcuts with the business startup process. Every step helps build your business mindset and sensibility.

People get impatient with the process and want to jump ahead of themselves and it’s really to their detriment and that of their clients.

I’ve seen more businesses shutter their doors because the owner didn’t put the proper foundations in place before taking on clients.

Don’t rush things. There is a little bit of back and forth involved as you figure things out, but beyond that, there is a basic step by step process involved in any business start-up. Don’t skip those parts:

Do the business plan.
Learn how your local, state and federal taxing and licensing works and what your responsibilities/obligations are.
Don’t take on clients before you’ve got at least a basic website up and mapped out a rudimentary set of policies, procedures and protocols. Your website is an incredibly important tool in properly educating clients about the nature of the relationship and bridging understanding so that you attract your right, most ideal clients. You will find that having something there to start with is going to be incredibly helpful in building, growing, and honing your business from there.

These are all exercises that help you create the strong foundations you need to be able to get — and keep — clients. The problems with clients and not getting the right ones happen when those things are absent.

If you were interviewing me, what other questions would you have for me? Let me know in the comments!

No, You Don’t Need to Publish Pricing on Your Website

By Danielle Keister | March 7th, 2018

4 Comments

I heard the most ridiculous thing this morning.

Yet another internet marketer was telling people that it’s a matter of respect to publish pricing on your website, that you are being “manipulative” if you don’t publish prices so that a “logical, rational, open-hearted, responsible ADULT” can decide whether it’s in their price range.

This is the kind of thing cheapskates say.

And I’ve got news for them: respect goes both ways.

In fact, what’s manipulative and dishonest is them implying that you are manipulative, dishonest, and not an open-hearted adult if you don’t publish your prices.

Playing to the lowest common denominator is a race to the bottom of the client barrel, folks.

Nothing good comes from listening to those who merely want you to make it easier for them to pit providers against each other on price so they can get something of value for as little as possible.

Let me set you straight. Not posting pricing has nothing to do with being manipulative or coercive.

It’s the fact, plain and simple, that more conversation is needed with a provider before cost can be determined.

Because here’s what “logical, rational, open-hearted” adults also know: their needs are not going to be exactly the same as the next person’s needs and, therefore, cost can vary depending on differing particulars and variables.

If you need your fence painted, would you want a one-size-fits all price?
If your fence area is much shorter than the mansion down the street whose fence is taller and covers vastly more square footage, would you expect to be charged the same amount of money?
And what needs are important to you when it comes to your fence?
Are you looking for more of a quick, slap-dash, cosmetic kind of job and aren’t much more invested in it than that?
Or are you looking for something that shows more obvious high quality work that involves more prep and skill, but will stand up better to the elements as well as increase curb appeal and property value?
Do you need a special kind of paint or color?
Is long-lasting, mold-resistent paint important to you (which comes at a higher cost, but requires less maintenance and repainting)?

Do you see how more in-depth one-on-one conversation with a live, actual person here is vital?

There is more probing and questioning a provider must engage in with you in order to identify the needs, values, and results that are important to you individually before they can give you an appropriate price.

I don’t think anyone can call that anything but reasonable, rational and client-centric.

And consider this… how many times when you’ve needed services have you called around and ended up choosing the person/service that you felt the most “good” about, simply based on your actual conversation and interaction with that person/business, regardless of the price and despite how much conversation was needed?

You simply came away feeling like they cared a little more about you as a person than the next provider, about what your goals were, about the quality of their work, about doing a great job for you and making sure you got the right price for your situation.

We’re talking about human to human services here, not boxes of cereal along the grocery aisle.

Professional services (which includes the professional service of administrative support) aren’t commodities on a shelf, one exactly the same as the next.

And value-based pricing, if you follow the methodology I teach, isn’t based on an hourly rate.

The ingredients required to support one client are not necessarily going to be the same ingredients the next client needs. So there isn’t a nice, neat, one-size-fits-all price you can publish.

Providing administrative support, and professional services in general, involves more details than simply buying a box of macaroni sitting on a store shelf.

Out of respect for all parties, you owe it to both the client and yourself to require some further conversation apart from the website so that you can both get certain vital information from each other, determine where and whether you can help, and see if there’s a good mutual fit so that you can then determine what their particular plan of support would cost.

That’s something that has to be done on an individual basis, not on your website.

And rational, reasonable adults — who have a vested interest in finding real solutions and getting the right help and are not merely shopping for the cheapest provider — understand this.

Instead of publishing prices, have a conversation on your website about your approach to pricing and why you don’t publish prices. Rational, reasonable adults are perfectly capable of understanding this.

In fact, it will make perfect sense to them once you bring it to their attention. They’ll actually appreciate it and feel better knowing that you have their best interests at heart, which is exactly why one wouldn’t publish pricing.

It does clients a disservice to treat them all the same (hmm, sort of like they were nothing more to you than interchangeable boxes on a shelf).

But you can’t get more meaningful insight or learn more about them without further conversation.

The happy byproduct of that conversation, incidentally, is that they also get more insight into why they would want to choose you.

And I’ll let you in on a little secret: In a sea of websites all trying to be generically the same (and whose skills and polish tend to be just as low-grade), not publishing prices (and stating the reasons why) will be a competitive advantage that makes you stand out and will attract better, more ideal clients.

It is precisely because my ideal clients are rational, reasonable, and intelligent adults that I do not post pricing on my website. They are smart enough to understand why an actual conversation is in order first.

So, I don’t publish pricing on my website because:

I am not interested in working with every ham-fisted knucklehead who stumbles upon my website.
My ideal clients are rational, reasonable, intelligent adults able to grasp the necessity of further conversation before pricing can be determined and discussed.
Each client is a unique individual who deserves more than a generic, one-size-fits-all solution.
Each client is a human being, not a dollar figure, who deserves my time and sincere interest in learning more about their particular circumstances, goals and obstacles.
I care about providing each client with a custom, personalized — not generic — plan of support that will get them the results they’re looking for and is priced accordingly. That’s not something you can generically publish pricing for.
I don’t sell hours or bill hourly. Because selling hours actually works against achieving the results clients want to see in the most expedient way possible.
The price of one client’s administrative support plan is not necessarily going to be the same as the next client’s, if I’m truly taking their individual needs and interests into consideration and not just trying to make as much money off every one of them as I can.
If someone is only looking for the cheapest provider and my not posting prices helps them move on, that is exactly my intention. It’s part of my organic process for sorting the ideal from the unideal before they contact me.
I don’t offer half-baked quick fix schemes. If my not posting prices helps move them along to someone else, that helps me reserve my time for more ideal, better qualified client candidates and consultations. This is again by design, not accident. (Looking for quick fixes is a telltale sign you’re dealing with a cheapskate who will not only devalue the work, but you and everything else along with it.)
It’s just not that simple.

There is much more to say about this topic in order to fully grasp all the nuances of posting or not posting prices. I encourage you to read more here about the pros and cons of posting/not posting pricing on your website.

And if you want — if you need — to charge more than $5/hour and you don’t want to be stuck with a poorly earning practice the rest of your life, you need to learn how to price and package your support in a way that speaks to clients and what they care about (none of which requires you to publish pricing or compromise your high standards around client care and discovery), and you need to learn how to have the whole pricing conversation that goes along with that.

I have three products that will teach and show you exactly how to implement those things, step-by-step:

Breaking the Ice: Complete, Step-by-Step Guide for Confidently Leading the Consultation Conversation and Converting Prospects into Well-Paying Monthly Clients Who Can’t Wait to Work with You (GDE-03)
Value-Based Pricing & Packaging Guide: How to Price and Package Your Support Value & Expertise — NOT Selling Hours (GDE-39)
Build a Website that WORKS (GDE-40)

If you want better clients, if you need to improve your skills when it comes to talking with clients about price, if you want to have an easier time getting clients and consultations, there simply no way around it: you must increase your knowledge, understanding, and skill in these three key areas.

Educating Prospective Clients Has Nothing to Do with Convincing

By Danielle Keister | November 6th, 2017

2 Comments

You never want to play the “convincing” game in trying to get clients.

“Convincing” is when you waste your time and energy pleading, wheedling, hyping, and otherwise trying to beg and bribe people into working with you.

Talking about how cheap and “affordable” you are and discounting this and giving free that is a form of bribing.

It’s also the way you devalue and debase yourself and reduce the perception of value of the solution you offer in the eyes of clients.

If this is what you have to do to get people to work with you, you’re talking to (and attracting) the wrong audience.

BUT for someone to tell you that you don’t need to educate your prospects about what you do is the height of arrogance and marketing stupidity.

Talk is cheap coming from those who haven’t run an administrative support business in over 20 years. They don’t know the first thing about marketing (much less working with actual clients in the 21st century).

It absolutely IS always your job as a professional service provider to educate your would-be clients.

Educating prospects isn’t about “convincing” anyone to work with you or trying to “sell” them on your solution. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The only people who think that are those who confuse “educating” with “convincing.” That’s because they are marketing illiterate.

Educational marketing or education-based marketing, as this is known in marketing circles, operates on the premise that your clients are intelligent enough to know what they want and make their own decisions. What they need from you isn’t a sales pitch (i.e., “convincing”), it’s information with which they can make an informed, intelligent decision.

Educational marketing isn’t about being invested in the outcome (i.e., getting the client, by any means necessary).

It’s having the healthy professional self-esteem to know that not every prospective client is for you, that you aren’t for everyone, and through an intelligent informational dialogue via your website, you and your right clients will be better equipped to determine fit and choose each other.

Educating your would-be clients and site visitors is about demonstrating an understanding of your target market’s business and industry and the challenges and obstacles they face.

It’s about shedding light on the solutions you offer and the ways you can help them and solve their problems.

It’s about helping them see and understand your solutions in the context of their business, what your support and work together might look like, and how their circumstances can be improved.

None of that is about “convincing” anyone or devaluing yourself and what you offer.

Yes, be a client snob. You only want to work with and invest your time in those who want to work with you.

Those who have a problem you can solve don’t need convincing; they just need to know you understand, how you are unique from anyone else, and why you might be the best choice for them.

This is how educating them in the way I speak of helps them. They crave this information from you, especially in a sea of websites all mindlessly reciting the same, boring thing.

But anyone telling you that you don’t need to educate your market about your solutions knows nothing about marketing.

In fact, educating your market in the right way — educating, not convincing — will help you get more ideal clients and consultation requests.

How to Get Clients

By Danielle Keister | August 10th, 2017

0 Comments

Getting clients is a process, not an event.

You aren’t going to get them by selling your service like you were hawking a Shamwow.

Drop the tiresome, disingenuous, robotic “elevator speeches” as well.

No one likes being sold at. All that does is make people feel like you’re looking at them like they’re your next meal.

It certainly doesn’t foster any real, meaningful connection (and they won’t be able to get away from you fast enough).

There is more finesse involved in marketing a professional service-based business and developing honest rapport with potential clients.

It’s also not that difficult to do:

Decide on a target market. A target market is simply an industry/field/profession you cater your administrative support to. This will give much-needed focus and direction to your administrative solutions, website marketing message, and marketing efforts. In turn, this will make you more interesting, memorable and compelling to potential clients. To learn more about target marketing and how it will help you grow your practice more quickly and easily and make more money, get my free guide on How to Choose a Target Market.
Always be learning and studying your target market’s industry and work nearly as well as your own, almost as if you were going into that business yourself. It will help you understand them and their common needs, goals and challenges more intimately. This will naturally elevate your conversations, marketing message and solutions, making you more attractive to potential clients and raise your value to them.
Network with your target market. This simply means putting yourself out there and talking to the people in your target market (these are your would-be clients after all), contributing to their conversations, adding your ideas, being helpful and making friends. Comment on their blogs. Join their online and offline forums and groups. Attend their business conferences. Read their publications and look for opportunities to get in front of their audience (e.g., Do they have newsletters you can publish or advertise in? Can you interest them in articles or a guest column written by you? Can you purchase ads?).
HAVE A WEBSITE!!! It’s not enough to only have a Facebook page or LinkedIn profile. People want to learn more about you on their own before they will ever contact you for a consultation. Your business website is that vital link that connects your networking and marketing to the next step in the conversion process: pre-educating prospective clients, setting proper expectations and understandings, and prequalifying your ideal clients while organically weeding out those you don’t want. You want to let your website speak for you at this stage. It’s job is to inform your site visitors and potential clients in more depth about who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and how you help them (i.e., how you improve their business and life). Not only will this help you get more consultations, the people who contact you will be more ideal and informed in the way you need them to be and far more likely to go on to become actual clients. If you need help building your website, implementing a proven client-getting process, and crafting your marketing message to get more clients and consultations, get my step-by-step guide, Build a Website that Works.
Direct everyone and everything to your business website. Put the link in all your online and print marketing collateral. If anyone you converse with wants to learn more about what you do, send them to your website. Instruct your friends, colleagues and associates to send people to your website (not give out your email or phone number) when they want to refer someone to you. Provide useful resources your target market will find of value and interest (e.g., a report, a guide, an instruction manual, some kind of e-learning), and invite them sign up from your website to receive those items.

Is the haphazard hunting-and-pecking, trying to reach anyone-and-everyone method working for you?

No? Give these steps a try then and see how much faster and easier you can grow your practice and get clients.

There Is No Secret to Marketing

By Danielle Keister | June 27th, 2017

2 Comments

There is nothing magical about marketing.

There’s no closely guarded secret still waiting to be revealed to you.

There are no heavenly curtains to part and rain clients down upon you — if only you could find the draw cord.

A lot of people also waste huge gobs of time trying to cobble DIY SEO together.

They think if they can just crack the SEO code, millions of clients are going to mystically materialize out of the airwaves, and they won’t have to lift a finger to get them.

I’ve got news for you: That’s not going to happen.

And, your least qualified client candidates will be those who accidentally stumble upon your site on the internet.

SEO is the last thing you need to be concerning yourself with.

Here are the straight-up facts:

It’s true that there are some foundations you need to have in place first before marketing, such as your website, which is THE single most important conversion tool for your business.

BUT your website can’t be set up any ol’ haphazard way.

To get results (i.e., consultations and clients), it needs to instill trust, rapport and credibility.

To do that, there are some presentation basics you must follow.

You also have to understand the conversion process and have an intentional system in place to educate site visitors, in the right way, about what you do and who you do it for, organically prequalify your ideal prospects, and then move those folks to the next step in the process: the consultation.

My Build a Website that WORKS guide shows you exactly how to do this.

Beyond that, you are simply going to have to get out there and TALK TO PEOPLE.

This is the ONLY “secret” to marketing and getting clients.

You can’t hide behind your computer and be silent. Nothing is going to magically do that work for you.

Choose a target market (which is simply an industry/field/profession that you cater your admin support to) so you can focus and hone your message.

And then get out there (online and/or in person) and interact with them:

Join their groups (online and off).
Learn their business/industry/profession.
Ask questions.
Ask more questions.
Inquire about what their common goals and challenges are in their business/industry/profession.
Read and comment on their blogs.
Pay attention to the kinds of topics and conversations they have in their industry forums.
Write articles/blog posts for them and their topics of interests.
Find out what their industry associations and publications are and think about the ways you might be able to get published or in some other way get in front of their audience (e.g., can you take out an ad in their trade journals? Can you interest them in guest articles/blog posts?).

It is THESE interactions that will bring people to your website, which then should be set up to do the job of moving the right ones to the next step: the consultation. (My guide shows you how.)

At its core, marketing is very simply like making friends: introducing yourself, asking about others and being interested in them, and partaking in conversations and being curious and sociable (not salesy). No miracle marketing tonic needed.

Dear Danielle: What Is the Best Approach to Physically Obtain Quality Clients?

By Danielle Keister | July 6th, 2016

0 Comments

Dear Danielle:

I am very new to the Administrative Consulting business although I have almost 20 years of experience supporting senior-level executives. I agree with you that we are so much more than “virtual assistants” and I would like to attract customers who understand that and value what we bring to the table, if you will. Therefore, my question to you is now that I’ve created a website and all other social media accounts, what is the best approach to physically obtain quality clients? Eventually, I may narrow my target but for now, my target is Small Business Owners. Thank you. —ND

Hi, ND. Welcome and thanks for reaching out. 🙂

Sounds like you’ve got the perfect background and a solid body of experience to offer clients. Wonderful!

Of course, there’s much more to business than simply knowing how to support clients and do the work, as you realize.

Learning how to run, manage and market a business and get actual clients (much less good ones) is a whole other skillset and area of education in and of itself.

This is why your question is more of a training one, rather than something that can be answered in a simple blog post.

It requires a more in-depth, systematic process of learning to understand the components, dynamics, and psychology involved.

To get that kind of knowledge and learning, I will refer you to my step-by-step self-paced training guide I created specifically for that purpose: How to Build a Website that WORKS!

This guide is centered around your website because your website IS the critical link in connecting your marketing and networking to actually getting clients, and not just any clients, but the kind of clients you want to reach: quality clients who understand your value.

This involves pre-educating your site visitors so they are in the right mindset, setting the right expectations, and prequalifying clients to help ensure you are productively spending your time in consultation with your most ideal and likely client candidates.

In the process of going through the steps and exercises, my guide also gives you a crash-course in inbound marketing because the two go hand-in-hand. You can’t set up an effective website and conversion system that gets results unless you understand all the components and mechanics involved.

Another thing I show you how to do in my guide is how to articulate your value and write your marketing message (and I have a clever system that helps you do that, no writing talent required; couldn’t be easier).

This is where having a target market is absolutely vital.

If there are any “secrets” in business and getting clients (and there aren’t), this is it.

And that’s because it’s not so much a “secret” as it is an area of misunderstanding and resistance for so many people.

You mention that right now your target is “small business owners.” But that isn’t a target at all, you see.

“Small business owners” is merely a demographic, and a very vague, general one at that which isn’t going to be helpful to you in any meaningful way whatsoever in creating a compelling marketing message and getting those ideal clients who value what you do.

It’s like saying “people” are your target market. That’s literally anyone and everyone in the world — which is the opposite of a target market (which by definition is a specific market).

A target market is simply an industry/field/profession that you cater your administrative support to. That’s it. However, it’s a vitally important component in getting those quality, ideal clients who understand your value that you wish for.

And this is where people struggle because they resist the idea that they actually expand their attractiveness and opportunities if they narrow their focus to one specific group.

Because here’s the thing: you can’t articulate your value in any truly meaningful, compelling way until you know who it is you are providing that value to. And that requires you to decide what industry/field/profession that will be.

Because it’s all relative.

Your value — what you provide, the solutions you offer, how you deliver those solutions and the results you create — all depends on who your audience (i.e., target market) is: who they are, what their commons interests, needs, challenges and goals are, what work they do in their profession, how their businesses are run, who their clients are, how they get those clients, and so much more.

You have to decide who it is you specifically intend to help in order to identify, understand and articulate your value in a way that speaks to these things as it relates to them. Otherwise, all you’ll ever accomplish (by trying to create a message for anyone and everyone) is being generic and forgettable.

To stand out, to create real meaning, to get focus and direction for your message and your marketing, you need specificity.

That specificity (i.e., deciding on a target market to cater your administrative support to) is what is not only going to get you more ideal clients who value what you do, it’s also going to make your business and marketing easier, you’ll have an easier time charging higher fees and making more money, and you’ll be able to get more clients more quickly and easily.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to download my free guide on How to Choose Your Target Market.

Start there, decide on a target market and then get my marketing/website guide, and you’ll be well on your way to getting those ideal, quality clients who absolutely understand how valuable you can be to them.

What Are You Proud of About Yourself?

By Danielle Keister | June 8th, 2016

11 Comments

It’s always a great exercise to reflect and engage in some positive self-coaching whenever you need a little pep talk.

It’s also a great way to identify some of your superpowers.

And what are superpowers really but part of the unique value combination that only you bring to the table.

Make these a part of your website and marketing message!

By enumerating these special traits and characteristics, not only are you helping paint a portrait of your personal and unique value proposition, it helps attract your ideal clients and weed out the bad ones. It’s a useful way to organically prequalify clients.

As an example, here are some of the things I’m really proud of:

I have always created my own opportunities. Like when my daughter was a year old and I was ready to get back in the workforce. I was still really young and the job market at the time wasn’t that great. I created my own volunteer opportunity doing admin at a nonprofit family services organization, which allowed me to brush up my existing skills, learn new ones, and gain some more recent references. I treated it just like a job, going in for set hours three days every week for six months, learning everything I could and even helping them improve on some things as well. It was a wonderful experience all the way around and helped me get a really good paying job afterward. Superpowers: Resourcefulness and Ingenuity
I always pay those who work for me. It’s always been important to me walk my talk and treat those with whom I work with respect. As an industry mentor, I’ve heard far too many stories of colleagues getting stiffed by colleagues or otherwise being devalued. I also remember this one rotten client I had way back in my early days of business. This guy was constantly cheating and not paying those he hired to do something for him, not turning in payroll taxes (both those withheld from employee checks and the employer-paid share), paying employees late, even neglecting to turn over child support monies to the reporting agencies — all while buying himself Harleys, condos and spending lavishly on himself at every whim and depriving himself of nothing. He constantly pled ignorance or oversight, and in my naivete, always wanting to give someone benefit of the doubt, I chose to believe him. After counseling him over and over that employee monies are not his to spend, that he was going to get himself in trouble with the IRS and other agencies, that it was short-sighted to use and abuse the people he engaged to do work for him (and I wasn’t going to lie for him or play scapegoat), I finally had to fire him in complete disgust and contempt. I can’t imagine treating people like this. All my people get paid before I take a dime, and that’s the value I live by. Superpowers: Honor and integrity

These are just a couple of things I’m proud of about myself. By enumerating these superpowers, traits and values I hold dear in my marketing message, it gives my prospective clients and website visitors a picture into my character and better attracts the kind of client with whom I want to work.

By spotlighting the fact that I hold honesty, integrity and respect in high esteem, I’m more likely to attract those kind of clients while organically repelling the ones who don’t fit that criteria.

What about you? What kinds of traits and experiences in your life or business are you most of? What unique superpowers do they translate to? I’d love to hear your stories!

PS: If you need help turning your business website into a marketing machine that gets you clients and consults, check out my guide How to Build a Website that WORKS (GDE-40). This guide gives you a crash course in inbound marketing and business modeling, step-by-step instructions for setting up your site architecture based on my proprietary lead capture and client conversion system, and my proprietary plug-n-play system for articulating your value and creating your unique, compelling, education-based marketing message that gets you more clients and consults.

Dear Danielle: Do I Need an Address on My Website?

By Danielle Keister | September 15th, 2010

4 Comments

Dear Danielle:

There’s a conversation going on in another forum regarding addresses. Some people think it’s important to have one on your site and others think it’s unnecessary. What’s your opinion? –KH

I’ve spoken on this topic before on more than one occasion. Let me take the slightly longer road in answering because it’s important you understand the psychology behind this.

One of the reasons we talk so much about standards and serving ourselves first in business is because our industry continues to really, really struggle in this area.

A big part of the problem is the term “virtual assistant.”

When you keep calling yourself an assistant, it’s hard to look upon yourself as a business owner.

On top of this, and very often because of it, many people in our industry literally do not understand that they are business owners.

They really do think they are simply assistants, only they are now working from home.

And like good little assistants, they let clients tell them what to do in their own businesses.

They think it’s all about the client and whatever the client wants, needs and demands. <Give that good little girl who knows how to follow orders a pat on the head.>

And that just doesn’t help anybody.

It certainly doesn’t help those colleagues grow successful businesses (and by successful, I mean a business — not a hobby — that is solvent, self-sustaining, and earns them an actual living).

And whether they understand or realize it or not, it doesn’t help clients who much prefer not to have to shoulder the burden of leading everything in the relationship. (That’s what they come to the professionals for.)

But if they aren’t looking at you like a professional, they’re looking at you like a trained monkey (i.e., employee/assistant), which puts us back to square one.

You don’t have a business if you aren’t leading it and aren’t making any money.

Thus, getting over employee mindset, remembering that you are a business owner, having standards and making sure the business meets your needs first and that you get to say how it all works and how it doesn’t, is a constant and necessary conversation we have.

You’ve heard the saying, “You can’t care for others unless you first care for yourself.” That’s exactly what all that is about.

But then there are some folks who get carried away with all that to the point that all they think about is themselves in business.

They declare (and we’ll use the topic of the question here), “Well, I don’t want to put an address on my website. I don’t need to and I don’t have to because I’m virtual!”

To that I say, what on earth does being virtual have to do with anything? A business is a business.

They forget that being in business is about being in a relationship with clients. And a relationship is a two-way street. It’s not all about you (me, me, me, me, me) and what you want and what works for you.

Yes, you get to say how things work in your business. Yes, you get to have high standards around the kind of work you do, the kind of clients you work with, and the kind of money you charge. You can not truly and superbly help clients without those things.

At the same time, there are some considerations you must be willing to extend to clients – because you don’t have a business with them. And the bottom line is people are people.

So having an address on your site isn’t about what’s important to you. It’s about what’s important to the clients visiting your site.

It’s about helping them view you as credible and legitimate. It’s about trust, instilling confidence, and helping them feel safe about potentially doing business with you.

It’s not for you that an address should be on your site, it’s for the benefit of your would-be clients, and helping put their minds at ease.

Long story short, YES, it’s absolutely vital to have an address on your website.

It doesn’t have to be a physical address (and if you run a home-based business, I would absolutely tell you NOT to use your home address. It’s unsafe, and you do not want clients or strangers showing up on your doorstep out of the blue).

Get a post office box instead. If a post office isn’t close to you, businesses like Mailboxes Etc. come to mind. Alternatively, you can get a mailing address with a service like Earth Class Mail (which is a phenomenal service, by the way).

I would add that besides an address and phone number, put some kind of photo of yourself on your site, in your email signatures, in your forum profiles.

Get a gravatar so that when you post comments to blogs, people see your smiling face.

Being able to “see” who they are talking with goes a LONG way in establishing trust and rapport and facilitating conversation. It helps folks see you as a person – rather than a nameless, faceless entity – and they’ll remember you much better when they have a face to go with the name.

What Does an Administrative Consultant Do for Me, You Ask?

By Danielle Keister | February 22nd, 2010

11 Comments

Here’s a client education video for you.

Feel free to use it on your website to help explain to clients what you do and how you help them as someone who is in the administrative support business.

Yes, You CAN Write Articles to Market Your Business

By Danielle Keister | July 20th, 2009

1 Comment

How do you think you will get prospects into your pipeline if they don’t know you’re out there?

Article marketing is one of the simplest and least expensive methods for marketing and promoting your business (often costing nothing but your time).

It’s one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website and improve your SEO (search engine optimization) at the same time.

Yet business owners come up with all kinds of reasons to avoid article marketing.

In this article, I’m answering all your objections. No negative self-talk allowed. You CAN do this!

Objection #1: I don’t think I’m a good enough writer.

No one is asking you to be Hemingway. In fact, some of the best articles out there are those that are down-to-earth and from the heart.

All you have to do is be yourself, write conversationally (like you would in real life) to your target market on a subject they care about or a problem or question they want advice on.

Objection #2: I don’t have anything interesting or of value to say (I’m no expert).

You’re a human being, aren’t you?

Unless you are a mannequin, you have thoughts. You have opinions. You have experiences. There are things you are passionate about.

Not to mention, you’re a business owner with some skill and knowledge in your field or else you wouldn’t have gone into business, right?

You have something to offer and that is yourself.

It doesn’t matter that the topic may have been covered a million times before.

No one else can write from your perspective, in your voice, with your personality and your unique insight.

Your right clients need to hear you so they can get to know, like and trust you.

Objection #3: I don’t have enough time; I’m too busy with clients.

That’s great that you have clients. But clients aren’t necessarily permanent fixtures in your business. They move on for all kinds of reasons.

Sometimes, it’s you who outgrows them.

Even if you have more business than you can handle at the moment, it’s always a smart idea to maintain your marketing presence to keep those prospects flowing into your pipeline.

One article a month is completely doable even for the most time-strapped entrepreneur.

Objection #4: I don’t have enough time; I’m too busy trying to get clients.

That’s exactly what article marketing will help you do, silly. 😉

Article marketing is a way to drive traffic to your website, which is what you want prospects to do.

Articles help increase your expert status in the eyes of would-be clients; they see you as an authority in your field.

Articles give them a chance to get to know you, which is what establishes rapport and gains their trust and confidence in you.

Articles also lend to the laws of attraction and intention: your right clients will be drawn to you and want to learn more about how you can help them by clicking through to your website.

Objection #5: I don’t know what to write about.

Here’s my own simple technique: Imagine you’re at a networking function. You’re talking shop with the business owner next to you, getting to know each other.

The business owner, now knowing that you are in the ___ business, asks you about ___.

Your answer to their question is your article!

It really is that simple. So go to those business get-togethers. Write down the questions that current and prospective clients ask you. These are the topics for your next articles.

What to Do Next with Your Articles

Post them to your blog.
Publish them in your ezine.
Post them on LinkedIn.
Post links to them on your social media accounts.
Shop them around to the professional publications of your target market.
Identify the popular expert blogs of your target market and ask to them to guest-post your article.
If a particular article topic proves to be especially popular (i.e., gets a lot of feedback and/or comments), expand it into a white paper or guide for your target market that you can use a free or sign-up give-away.

© Copyright by Danielle Keister for the Administrative Consultants Association. You are granted permission to republish this article only if used without alteration in its entirety with this copyright notice, title, article content, resource, and links left intact.