Blowing Our Own Trumpet, Banging Our Own Drum

I know we've talked before about the value of writing your own books and articles, and thereby raising your profile and your position in the eyes of your audience and potential clients.

We think the message bears repetition, though, and not least because our own books are designed at least in part to achieve the exact same things for us and Cinnamon Edge. So we would be very remiss if we didn't point you to our particular example of using books to promote our business.

That most of these books will be helpful to you in your business is another good reason to remind you about them! So, you can learn about Simple SEO, Competitor Analysis, The Brand of YOU, and other aspects of marketing, by reading our books. Hopefully, you will also learn about our expertise and writing ability, and be encouraged to approach us at Cinnamon Edge or Cinnamon Edge Publishing to help you with your website, SEO, marketing and book writing.

But if all you learn is to follow our example and use the written word to educate your potential customers and promote your own business, we'll still have succeeded!

If you want a short cut to us and our expert help, call us on 01284 767 193 or email info@cinnamonedge.co.uk !

Roy

Missed Opportunities and Second Chances

One way to reconnect with your audience is with an apology. A lot of email marketers have latched onto this with their 'accidental' broken links. How this works is simple: they send an email with a link to a free product or an offer. Then, within an hour, they send a second email, apologising for the broken link in the first one. Very often, this second email gets a better open rate than the first. The original link might or might not have been broken, but the second email also gets more click-throughs.

Now, this email trick is getting a bit tired, and the effectiveness must be falling (but since some well-known Internet marketers are still using it, perhaps not). We've never used this method ourselves, although we have genuinely sent a few emails with mistakes that needed correcting!

What brought this to mind was being reminded, late on 1st March, that it had been World Book Day. Now, you may know we've published a lot of books ourselves in the last few weeks, and tying in our promotions to World Books Day was an obvious opportunity. The fact is, we missed the opportunity. Strangely, perhaps, so did 'the world's biggest book store', Amazon. Or, if they didn't miss it, they certainly didn't draw it to my attention.

Amazon might have their reasons for not promoting something that could be said to be aimed at 'real world' bookstore customers, but I imagine they could have cashed in big time if they'd joined in - especially with Kindle books being so easy to download. In other words, available instantly.

Easy Competitor Analysis, available from Amazon

As for Cinnamon Edge Publishing, we also missed the boat - except that it has given me something to talk about and a marketing lesson we can all learn from!

Roy

Bury St Edmunds Publishers Test a Giveaway

As part of an ongoing marketing experiment, Cinnamon Edge will be giving away most of our highly-acclaimed books for one day only - that's this Saturday 11th February.

So, for around 24 hours, anyone visiting the Cinnamon Edge Website, or going directly to Amazon, will be able to download all but one of the company's books free of charge. The remaining one will cost you all of 77p!

Find all the books, with links to descriptions and reviews, at http://www.cinnamonedge.co.uk/publications.

The books will return to normal prices on Sunday - not that they're expensive anyway, ranging from less than a pound to under seven pounds ($0.99 to $9.99 USD), and two of the books will still be free from Bookboon.

But you might as well get the others for nothing while you can. If you do, please be kind enough to 'Like' the pages on Amazon and leave a review if you've time. Thanks!

Remember, the offer is for Saturday only, at http://www.cinnamonedge.co.uk/publications.

Roy

PS. You can also find us on Amazon, under Roy Everitt and/or Jacqui Carrel.

Another Marketing "How to" - Easy Competitor Analysis

Our latest book for business owners is written by Jacqui and entitled "Easy Competitor Analysis"

 

When I talk about Competitor analysis the first reaction is often, "What’s that and why would I need it?”

The second one is, “And how would I do that?”

The answers to both these questions are in our latest book!. To put it simply, competitor analysis is finding out all about your competitors’ businesses - what they do well, what they could do better - and then using that knowledge to help your own business.

Easy Competitor Analysis takes you step by step through the process and makes it simple for anyone to do.

You’ll be surprised at what you can find out!

I’ll also show you how you can outsource some of this if you would rather not do it yourself or you're just short of time.

The book also includes a link to the accompanying worksheets on our website - there’s no extra charge for downloading these very useful resources!

Jacqui

Using Books in the Marketing Mix - Part 2

One of the things a book can do is help to define you and your business. Writing and publishing a book makes you more "expert" but it also makes it clear to people what you're about. So, if I wrote a book about cycling (which I probably will) that straight away tells anyone who sees it that cycling is my "thing".

An example of this is Jacqui's book about How to Become a Foot Care Professional. Jacqui has given a lot of help and advice over the years to various health professionals, therapists and the like, on marketing and developing their businesses, so working with the Foot Care Centre and the College of Foot Care Practitioners was right up her street. Publication of the book will help to spread the news that Jacqui is an expert in that area and, as a specialist in that particular niche she will command more respect and attention from people looking to grow a business in foot care or something similar. They'll also get a lot of great information from the book, of course!

My (Roy's) book, Really Simple SEO for Business Owners will help to spread the message that I'm expert in fast and effective Search Engine Optimisation. It also says that I specialise in it, to some extent, and a specialist is usually taken more seriously and becomes more sought-after than a generalist.

You can do the same in your business. Become an expert and be in more demand (and maybe higher-paid) as a  specialist, by writing a book about your area of expertise.

Roy

Search Engine Domination - Free Course

As a preparation for our Search Engine Domination Workshop, we've created a free course in seven parts, available on its own search engine domination website here.

The course will help you take control of your market by dominating the search engine results and you'll be taken through the essential parts of the process step by step.

Once you've started getting the free course you may well feel you would like to attend our half-day workshop on June 9th. You can register for that at http://onlinedomination.eventbrite.com but please talk to us about special deals for sole traders and multiple tickets.

With or without the special deal, it's a great price for search engine domination!

Call us on 01284 753912 for information.

Roy

Search Engine Marketing

If you're wondering what 'search engine marketing' actually is, you're not alone!

When we started to put together a list of the topics we wanted to cover in our workshop on 11 May we soon realised we would have absolutely no problem filling an entire day.

But with our teaching and training experience, as well as day to day contact with the real world through running our own business Cinnamon Edge, we're confident we can give everyone who attends the SEM workshop at Bury St Edmunds Farmers Club astonishing value for money.

Frankly, each session we have planned will more than repay you the full price of the day's training. Multiply that by four sessions, plus the Q and A and interactive elements, and your business will be quids in by the end of the day!

We have had to limit the numbers in order to give everyone who attends this workshop our full attention and the best possible value, so tickets are already in short supply.

So, if you want your business to be ahead of the competition by using the most cost-effective marketing medium ever invented, can you afford to miss this one-off workshop?

You can book your place directly through our preferred ticket suppliers, Eventbrite, or call Jacqui on 01284 753912 to discuss multiple tickets and our first come, first served special deals.

Roy

Next Time - Search Engine Marketing

Our next Bury St Edmunds marketing workshop, on 11th May, is on the subject of Search Engine Marketing.

It's a one day event in which you will discover how to promote your business effectively online, using your website and other web properties to increase your:

• Subscribers
• Prospects
• Customers
• Sales
• Profits

We'll be adding more details about marketing workshops to our website very soon.

You can book your seat(s) for this all day event on Search Engine Marketing at http://www.learnsearchenginemarketing.eventbrite.com

Roy

Marketing Workshops with Cinnamon Edge and Bury Chamber of Commerce

Thank you to those of you who took part in our survey at the start of the year, where we asked you what marketing-related workshops you would be interested in attending during 2011.

In your answers, you said one of the subjects you would most like to know more about is the changes Google has recently made to local search and Google Places.

On that front, I have some bad news and some good news:

• The bad news is you missed our first workshop of the year, on Google Places Changes (it was on 11 February).
  
• The good news is we’re running it again on 31 March.
  

We received lots of really positive feedback from the first event, and the re-run will be even better. The price for the workshop is the same as before, and you can still benefit from our early bird discount.

(If you’re one of the first two sole traders to apply you can save even more.)

The new event is on our Eventbrite page, at http://newgoogleplaces.eventbrite.com

We have one before that on Business Writing, at http://bestbusinesswriting.eventbrite.com - that's on 23 March!

And ALL this year’s marketing workshops are at http://marketingworkshops.eventbrite.com

We're also running workshops on Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Domination, Mobile Marketing, Staging Your Own Workshops and even Writing Your Own Book - a great marketing tool for your business!

Have a look at the full list on http://marketingworkshops.eventbrite.com but seats at the first two are very limited - and the discount is still available - so book today.

Roy

Get up to Date with Google's Changes

We will be running an 'emergency workshop' on the fall-out from the changes Google made to local search in November which are still causing confusion and dismay to local businesses around the world.

By allowing ourselves a couple of months for the dust to settle we have been able to get a firm grip on the implications and the next steps that all local businesses need to make if they are going to profit from the increasing use of local search by customers and clients.

Roughly 80 percent of all searches for local services and products begin online. That means you NEED to be the company your potential customers see when they start that search. We'll show you how.

The workshop - the first of a series we'll be staging in conjuction with the Bury St Edmunds Chamber of Commerce - is this coming Friday at 9.am, at the Active Business Centre (St Andrews Castle), St Andrews Street South, Bury St Edmunds.

Full details and how to book are at http://googlechanges.eventbrite.com/ and the full list of courses is at http://marketingworkshops.eventbrite.com/.

Book now and get ahead of your local competitors!

Roy

Don't Market Her, Search Me

Pop on over to RoyEverittDotcom for a little trip around Europe, the origins of names and the difference between search engine, Internet and online marketing.

Oh, and the invasion of a foreign power (well, a tiny bit of it) by the brave folk of Bury St Edmunds, England.

Oh, and Shakespeare's secret place in the world wide web. How he would have wondered!

Roy

Marketing For Life Coaches

Hello again,

Not everyone is aware that my wife, Jacqui Carrel is a life coach, as well as being the other half of Cinnamon Edge. And there are a lot of life coaches out there these days - in fact, it's said to be the UK's fastest-growing profession.

So, it follows that to be a successful life coach, you need to be:

1 Very good at coaching

2 Very good at marketing

Luckily, Jacqui is both. But not everyone has the time or the inclination to learn a profession and learn how to promote themselves. Even those who know how, don't always have the time and energy to devote to marketing.

The problems of learning to do both things is amply addressed in Jacqui's new manual, just released, The Life Coaching Manual.

But for those life coaches for whom marketing remains either a problem or a chore, we also have a solution: specialist life coach marketing from yours truly. Apart from contributing chunks of marketing ideas and methods to The Life Coaching Manual and co-authoring The Complete Marketing Manual, I've also helped and advised other life coaches and similar professionals with their marketing and promotion.

So you know, if you're a life coach looking to promote yourself more effectively, or a new or prospective life coach looking to get started, you've come to the right place.

I know you want:

• More leads


• More referrals


• More higher-paying clients


• More payable hours and fewer spent promoting yourself


• To move closer to YOUR dreams, more quickly

All of which you can get from Cinnamon Edge. If you're a new life coaches or you're business isn't bringing you the rewards you hoped for, you should buy The Life Coaching Manual. All business people who want to do better should take a serious look at The Complete Marketing Manual...

And if you want more personal hands-on help with your marketing, especially if you're a life coach, you should contact me.

Roy Everitt, Specialist Life Coach Marketer.