Welcome to the Blogsite for The Growth Coach

by Michael Neuendorff on March 20, 2010


Just a quick welcome post to let you know where you’ve landed. I’m a small business transformer based in Northern California. I work with small business owners and independent professionals to be much more successful in their business and life. If you’re here to read my blog, you’ll find it just below this post. Please share your comments. I’d love to hear from you.

If you’d like to learn about how I can help you to get better results with your business, then give me a call at 650.373.2022 or schedule a free 30-minute consultation with me by visiting my online calendar. If you’d like to talk with existing clients I’d be happy to provide you with multiple referrals.

I also write from scratch a monthly newsletter designed to help readers grow in the areas of Strategic Business Ownership, Sales, Marketing, and Public Speaking. If you’d like to try an issue, sign up free over on the right. Just for doing that I’ll email you a valuable list of 100 Guerrilla Marketing Weapons you can apply to your business right away.

Thanks for stopping by!

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PR, PR, Where Are You?

by Michael Neuendorff on July 16, 2010


Every week I sit down with small business clients to talk about how they can grow their businesses. We talk about social media, traditional advertising, face to face networking, their website and so on. What we rarely talk about is PR. Why is that? Well, for starters because I’m not a PR expert. It’s never been my thing and I don’t even feign an in-depth knowledge. Secondarily, it’s because PR seems to matter less now since traditional news outlets are seemingly less relevant every day. And if that’s the case, then isn’t PR becoming less relevant?

The answer is no. However, it is changing. Where PR seems to be going from my viewpoint is online. I’ve just done a simple search for online press releases and came up with lots of rich links to robust websites offering online press releases. There are numerous ones offering free online releases. Here’s a few: 1888 Press Release, Free Press Release (name kind of says it all, doesn’t it?), i-Newswire, and PRLog. Each one has information to help you write an effective press release and gives you lots of options to enhance it. Almost all of them offer additional features that do cost money, but I was surprised at low little some of these premium services run.

When you think about why you have a website, blog, use Twitter, it all boils down to the fact that you want to be found online. Well, online press releases can help you achieve this goal another way. Where it’s a little different, and perhaps challenging, is that you need to have some news around you or your company. It can’t just be Tuesday and you feel like sending out a press release. It needs to be Tuesday and you’re launching a groundbreaking new product.

We all go through periods like this when we do have something newsworthy to share, or at least it feels like it. So, let’s not forget to consider a news release. One blog I read called The PRoactive Report, states that 98% of journalists start with a Google search when working on a new story. Well, I’d like my news to be part of what those journalists find. If I have a newsworthy item that coincides with an article being written, Bingo!

These online releases can also have links embedded that lead back to our websites or videos, our logos, pictures of our products, and lots of the keywords we want to be found for. Almost sounds like a dream come true when you think about it.

We really need to be careful not to ignore the areas we don’t know a lot about when it comes to marketing our businesses. Otherwise we could really be missing the boat. Adwords comes to mind as being in this category for many small business owners. Me included. I’m doing something about Adwords though by starting to bone up on the whole subject of Pay Per Click advertising. Next up for me, is learning more about online PR. I want to be a marketing consultant that knows about using this vital area of marketing that’s intersecting with SEO and social networking for my business and those of my clients.

How about you? Let me know how you use PR to grow your business or you’re not, why not. If you know of other good resources to learn about using online press releases, please share those with me, too.

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Improve Your Sales With a Multi-step Process

July 2, 2010

In a recent sales coaching workshop I lead, the number one takeaway mentioned by the attendees was learning about having a multi-step sales process.
My definition of a multi-step sales process is having numerous options to take people through besides contact, appointment, close. Many people in sales have just the one step, which is to [...]

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You’re In A Competition

June 18, 2010

Recently I wrote on the necessity of being remarkable. Today let’s talk about the mindset you need to have at all times if you want to win in business: You are in a competition. You may not know what you are up against when you start the day, but you’d better play to win [...]

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We Must Be Remarkable

June 14, 2010

In John Jantsch’s new book, The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business To Market Itself, he talks about a podcast interview he had with Seth Godin. In the chat, Seth says that if you’re not getting referrals, it’s probably because you, your business, or both, are boring. Yep, boring.
Hmm, am I boring? I don’t think [...]

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Social Networking Via Blogging

June 9, 2010

It’s great to blog as part of your online marketing strategy. Every time you blog you create a new page on your website that gets indexed and is made searchable. It’s a beautiful thing. The more posts you write, the more pages are indexed and generally your site traffic increases.
Is blogging social networking though? Not [...]

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Sameness is the enemy of the speaker

May 24, 2010

I just finished a weekend with Steve Siebold and Dawn Andrews at the Bill Gove Speech Workshop. This is the premier workshop for speakers worldwide and has been for the last 63 years. I now understand why it’s so esteemed. The content is very rich.
When you go through a learning experience like this people ask [...]

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Becoming A Graduate Of The Bill Gove Speech Workshop

May 23, 2010

As of 3 pm Pacific Standard Time today I became the latest graduate of the highly esteemed Bill Gove Speech Workshop. I’ve been excited about professional speaking since graduating at the top of my Dale Carnegie class in 1998. Since then I’ve studied speaking, steadily improving my skills. I now speak publicly each and every [...]

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Never Forget The Concept Of Lifetime Value

May 17, 2010

In the last month I’ve had two very bad customer service experiences at places I regularly patronize. In both cases the lifetime value of my repeat business meant nothing to the perpetrator of the bad service. Bad, bad strategy to not pay attention to this incredibly important concept. I’ll share these two events with you [...]

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How Crush It Changed My Approach To Small Business

March 30, 2010

Crush It is a very popular book written by Gary Vaynerchuk. It tells the story of how he took his dad's liquor store from 4 million to 50 million in annual sales through a big emphasis on social media and creating a brand around Gary and the store.
I strongly recommend it for all small business [...]

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How About A New Direction For Your Business?

March 25, 2010

There's a lot of talk about developing a niche for your business and
that's how to become successful. By doing this you'll get 'niche and
famous'. There is some truth to this. If you try to be all things to all
people, then you're unlikely to be remarkable at doing any of those
things.
But what if your niche isn't [...]

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