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1. Announcements/Offers

What are they Saying about ‘Explode Your Practice™’?

“I have already listened to at least 6 hours and my ability to open my practice has been accelerated by at least 3-6 months. Hearing David’s real life advice to coaches has made a huge difference for me.

This will take months off my learning curve. I won’t have to go through the frustrating trial and error process which costs time, money and clients! Thank you, David!”

Jeannie Crowell
Oregon, USA
jcrowell @ bendcable.com

Get your ‘Explode Your Practice’ CD set at:
www.ExplodeYourPractice.com

Two Week Productivity Challenge!

Congratulations to everyone who completed the two week productivity challenge!

You can post your results and see other’s results here.

Would you like to see another one? If so, post it at the same place, here.

Core Dynamics Recordings now available

Hundreds attended the introductory teleclasses to discover Core Dynamics for themselves. Tom Stone has made the recordings available for SolutionBox subscribers here:

www.SolutionBox.com/special.htm

(Click on the links in the table with Introduction to Core Dynamics Coaching)

The Core Dynamics Coach Training Certification Program is an unprecedented combination of the power of Core Dynamics with the precision of the International Coach Federation Core Competencies.

Due to the demand of SolutionBox subscribers, three new start dates are available for this one-of-a-kind program. Listen to an introduction and demonstration, and sign up today:

www.SolutionBox.com/special.htm

2. FEATURE: How to Get Noticed by the Media

One of the best ways to ensure you’re in demand as a coach is to become known as an authority in the field. And the quickest way to get that sort of visibility is to get media coverage.

An interview on television, radio or in the newspaper is sure to command attention while giving you instant credibility in the eyes of potential clients.

“Great,” you’re saying. “So, how do I get the media to notice me?” We’ll get to that….

First, we want to make the prospect of interviewing you as easy and attractive as possible. If you are accessible, interesting, and already have key background information handy, journalists are going to be much more likely to follow through with an article.

So let’s start by gathering some basic information about you. This is what you can use to create your media kit – or even better – your online Media Room.

Give journalists something to work with, and a reason to put your story on paper or over the airwaves.

(At the end, I’ll show you my Media Room so you have an example to go from.)

Step 1: Gather your information

Biography

First, write your biography. (No, not an entire book.) Start with the basics: a few paragraphs about who you are and what you do.

Then think of several interesting tidbits that might make you stand out. They don’t necessarily have to be related to your coaching. The fact that you are an expert weaver, have tried bungee-jumping, teach ballroom dance or build robots in your spare time could be the very thing that sets you apart.

Articles and Media Appearances

If you’ve already been featured in any articles or made any broadcast appearances, gather up those resources as well. You can reproduce articles (with permission) on your website or printed packet.

List your appearances, or – better yet – convert your audio or video to a web-friendly format.

FAQ

Come up with some basic questions and answers about coaching – FAQ, so to speak. Journalists who are unfamiliar with coaching will find it helpful to know that, no, it’s not therapy … and yes, everyone can use a coach.

Testimonials

Include a few well-chosen testimonials. (You should already be in the practice of asking your clients to provide a few kind words for you to use in your promotional materials.)

Photos

Finally, if you don’t have current head shot photos, now’s the time to get it done. The key word here is “current” – you might love the photo you had taken in 1996, but does it reflect who you are right now, in 2006? If you’ve got beautiful silvery hair (or none at all 😉 ), don’t let it come as a surprise to the people who will be lighting you during your television debut.

The beauty of the web, in particular, is that you don’t have to choose just one photo – you can post a variety of your best shots for the media’s use. Include a few candid-style photos as well. Imagine how much easier it is for a journalist to publish your story when they have the option of using an existing photo.

If you’re creating an online media room, be sure to link to high-resolution photos (300 dpi) from your gallery page. Web resolution graphics look terrible when printed.

Step 2: Edit and organize

Enlist someone – a friend, a colleague, your mentor coach – to take a look at what you’ve gathered. Is anything missing? Do you need to streamline anything?

Work with your web (or print) designer to present your information in a user-friendly format.

Remember, bullet points are your friends; they keep things easy to scan for busy journalists.

At the very least, you want to provide your bio, testimonials, FAQ and your gallery of photos.

Then, your clip file (previous articles and appearances) – and don’t despair if you don’t have one; you will soon!

If you want to go the extra mile, add a page of possible story angles and ideas. Are you the bungee-jumper we talked about earlier? How about “Extreme Coaching for the Most Extreme Sport: Life!”

If you’re more of a homebody, you could offer to talk about the Zen of domestic tasks. Get the idea?

Finally, make sure that your contact information is accurate and easy to find. If you provide an email address only, be sure that it’s one you actually use.

Step 3: Get the word out

Your Media Room or package is ready for prime time. Now you need to get people to notice. (I told you we’d get there!)

Put together a short letter of introduction and email your local media outlets. Include a link to your media room.

Offer to do a demo coaching session. (Remember that journalists may not be able to accept a ‘free’ session that has been given a dollar value, but would be allowed to participate in a demonstration.)

Keep in contact with your media contacts by sending press releases, lead ideas, and always get back to them right away.

***

Need ideas? Take a look at my own Media Room at:

www.life-coaching-resource.com/mediaroom.htm

Action

1. Pick one area to focus on this week. Write your biography, schedule your photo shoot, gather your testimonials, etc.
2. Post at the blog what you plan to do by when for accountability.
3. We’d love to see your finished media room when it’s ready, so you can post that at the blog as well.

Enjoy!

P.S. Got a comment on this article? Add it to the BLOG

1. Announcements/Offers

‘How to Get 95% of Your Clients From the Internet’

Want advanced training in setting up an internet, automated client-making machine?

On DVD and CD Rom? With 12 months of online mentoring/web coaching, and a complete money back guarantee?

Grab a copy of your full professional training course here:

http://www.InternetClients.net

The Affiliate Masters Course

Now you can find out how to build a viable affiliate program so that your business can pull in income any time. Best of all, the Affiliate Master Course is free. By investing 10 days of your time, you can learn step-by-step how to:

• develop a site concept
• brainstorm hundreds of profitable, related keywords
• build that themed site full of money-earning keyword-focused content pages
• attract targeted, motivated traffic that clicks on your recommendations, and buys from the merchants you represent.

You can’t put a price on this kind of experience-based knowledge, but lucky for you, it’ll cost you nothing. Check it out here – Ken really knows what he’s doing:

Affiliate Masters Course

Coach Training Free Audio – and Registration Deadline!

Access this powerful demonstration of Tom Stone’s coaching
technology (11 min audio):

http://tinyurl.com/yljbxc

And the deadline to register for Tom’s exciting certified training program, and get the full range of bonuses, is 5pm Wednesday:

Training Special

Newsflash!Tom has announced a new remote training option for those in other countries or remote cities who would have trouble traveling to the face to face training. AND – there’s a new live training date coming up for January/February. So get your registration in before the deadline.

Enjoy!

David

2. FEATURE: Get a Top Google Ranking

This article provided courtesy of Google…I felt these tips from Google were so important I’d republish them here as an article for you:

WEBMASTER GUIDELINES

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

When your site is ready:

• Have other relevant sites link to yours.
• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
• Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project (Editor’s note: We haven’t heard of people having success with this for over a year now) and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. TheGoogle crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical guidelines

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you’re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Sitemaps.
• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
• Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.

QUALITY GUIDELINES

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines – basic principles

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. (Editors Note: Google prefers you don’t us products such as WebPosition Gold, such as we recommend and have used, that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.)

Quality guidelines – specific guidelines

• Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. * If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If a site doesn’t meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index. If you determine that your site doesn’t meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and request reinclusion.

You may also be interested in…

How do I add my site to Google’s search results?

How can I create a Google-friendly site?

Article Copyright Google.com

* * *

If you’re interested in more information on this, step by step instructions on how to optimize your site to rank #1 on Google can be found in the bonuses available in my Internet
Clients Professional Training Program.

Action

If you have a web site:

1. Pick 2 actions to complete this week that will optimize your web site based on the Google guidelines.

2. Share at the blog what action you are going to take and post again when you have completed your task.

If you don’t have a web site:

1. Based on the guidelines sketch out an idea for your web site.

2. What is the next action you need to take to get a web site? Share at the blog what action you are going to take and post again when you have completed your task.

Enjoy!

P.S. Got a comment on this article? Add it to the BLOG