Facebook - What you can do to protect your marketing!

Every woman and her dog are using Facebook to keep in touch, and let their clients know of great offers that they are promoting for the salon. There is even more reason to be cautious about who you let into your facebook world.

With over 700 million uses worldwide, it is undeniable that there are people out there that will drool over the idea of getting your information for their benefits.

Facebook Safety Tips:

Tip # 1: If you do not know them, don’t accept their offer to be friends. You wouldn’t let someone who you have just met move into your home, kick off their shoes and lie down on your coach. Don’t let them do this with your life!

Tip # 2: Only post on the net what it is that you want to be made public!

The personal information that you put on the web will stay on the web. And it is owned by someone else – not you.  So if you think that it is a closed conversation, and will not be repeated, then you may be in for a rude shock. You will find that the original post will have gone further than you thought. Internet scammers are always happy to take our details if we let them.

Tip #3: Manage your privacy settings.

Sixty percent of the social network uses are not aware of the default settings that are applied when you register. Follow these steps to help secure your facebook page.

- Read the Facebook Policy – (a nice glass of red will help) It will only take 10 minutes and will have a better understanding of what happens when you put personal information on the web.

- Goto the Facebook privacy help page – Here they tell you how to control any leaks that can happen on facebook.

- Customize your Facebook settings – This will make sure that you only share information that you are happy to share.

Tip #4: Keep Search engines out of your Facebook.

Don’t let search engines, like Google, see your Facebook site. It will put all your personal stuff on the web, in an indexed and orderly form.

Tip #5: Don’t believe everything you read. If someone is in financial distress, then CALL them first before you offer to send them money.  Always make sure the source of the info is real.

NOT yet a Member of the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program? Don’t yet have the power of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit? Click here to find out more and apply for a 90-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive of the entire system, including the Toolkit, one-on-one coaching (with our experienced coaches who are all salon & spa owners themselves) and access to the Members Only resources website.

Well, now there’s a solution. Finally, after months of research and development and many thousands of dollars, we’re about to launch the Facebook Toolkit for Salons & Spas.

But first, we’ve put together a series of FREE online videos that show why it is now no longer an option for salon & spas – if you want to be competitive, you simply must be on Facebook. It’s all about having an effective FAN PAGE to drive customers through your doors.

Here’s where you get the FREE online videos

There's money to be made by putting your business online...but you need to know how to see the wood for the trees!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, you would no doubt be well aware that the Internet is huge, and that it’s here to stay.

In fact….

According to Nielsen Research; of the 22 million people living here in Australia, a whopping 80%, or over 17 million of us are connected to the Internet, and that 30% (5.1 million) access it on a daily basis, and 40% (6.8 million) use it between 2 – 6 times each week.

This is just Australia. Internet users in USA total 240 million, Canada 27 million, and UK 52 million.

All over the world it is estimated that there are 1,966,514,816 (almost 2 Billion) Internet users, with a large percentage of them using it on a regular and consistent basis.

Certainly big numbers – So the questions you should be asking yourself is, how can you take advantage of all of this online activity? – And, how can you make money from it?

No doubt if you already have an email address, and a registered business, you have probably been bombarded with messages and emails from companies offering to build you a web site, or to get your current web site listed with the major search engines, or to send your message to tens of thousands of email users … But before you sign on the dotted line with any of these people, it’s helpful to maintain a little bit of perspective.
Sure – the Internet is huge, but simply blasting your message to tens of thousands of people in the online world would be no different to standing outside the front of your salon and yelling to everyone that passes by, or taking out a full page advert in the local paper, and expecting everyone who reads it to take up your offer – it’s just not going to happen!

It makes no difference whether you are running an ad in the paper, doing a letterbox drop, airing your ad on the local radio, or building a website; the rules are the same …

You have to deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right time.
Do your homework – Spend the time and effort to tailor your marketing strategy to attract the right audience (the type of people who will do business with you, have the money to, and are at a point in time where they need what you have to offer, and are willing to buy it right now). Then, once you have found where these people are, (what papers do they read? what other web sites do they visit?) go after them with the right message. The message that makes them sit up and take notice, and think to themselves … Yes, I need that! – Then make them an irresistible and compelling offer.

In a nutshell –
Don’t be fooled by the big numbers. The internet is simply another marketing tool, which if used correctly can add plenty of extra profit to your business.
Slice and dice the numbers, and work toward building your web site to attract the people who are looking for the products and services that you already offer, and then make the message on your website so compelling and attractive to these people – talk directly to their emotions, and you will be well on your way to having an effective online marketing funnel.

If you do NOT yet have a website – or the one you have isn’t making you any money – Worldwide Salon Marketing provides a specialist service to design and build one for you….not just any old ‘brochure’ site (a 12-year-old kid can do that) but one that actually gets, traffic, and makes you money.

Here’s one we recently put up online.

Here’s where you go to find out more about getting one built for you, just like that.

Salon owner and Inner Circle member Cherie Underwood is a passionate convert to the power of her salon's new website to attract customers

Every salon owner dreams of the day when she can get ‘off the tools’ and reap the rewards of all those hard years slogging away on the floor. Few take the necessary action to achieve that dream. One who did was IC Premium member (two years) Cherie Underwood of Femme Fatale in Jannali, New South Wales.

Elsewhere on this site we reported on how ‘my’ kind of marketing enabled Cherie to leave the salon under management while she stayed at home with a brand new baby. But it also gave Cherie the time to concentrate on being a marketer of her business (that’s where the real money is).

A few weeks ago, Cherie took up our offer to build her a client-generating website, designed not just to look ‘pretty’ but to get noticed in the search engines, attract clients who want to spend, and create ‘passive income’ – in other words, money while you sleep.

Our ‘web nerd’, Marty Owens, not only built the site, but also created a Facebook page for the salon, with ‘follow us’ links on the main salon site.

Here’s the link to Cherie’s new website.

Results were instantaneous. As Cherie revealed in an interview with her today, she’s over the moon…and delighted that it’s another cog in the marketing machine that’s already producing income.

Here’s the power that Cherie is referring to:  anybody Googling for a beauty salon in Cherie’s local area for a beauty salon might, for example, type ‘beauty salon Jannali’ in the search bar.

When I tested it, Femme Fatale came up right at the top of the organic Google search listings. That’s pretty amazing, after only a week online.

If YOU want a website that’s working so well, so quickly – just like Cherie’s – go here to find out more about how you can get one. Marty has TWO slots available in the next week. After that, he’s buried in more work.

Luxury comes cheap in Bali - and they get people through the doors with efficient, sophisicated marketing

Rightly, you no doubt have zero interest in my recent five-day break at a luxury private villa near the beach in Bali, where the staff outnumbered our party of eight by two to one, and you couldn’t move without a butler polishing something or mixing you a clever drink by the pool.

But you might be interested in how we came to be there, and how a little island in a third-world country has profitably embraced the kind of marketing that any salon owner can do, but few bother with.

When I first visited Bali 35 years ago, it was a dirt-poor backwater of rice paddies and fishing villages. Electricity was a rarity.

But for many Australians, for whom Bali is but a few hours flight away, the island’s allure these days is as a holiday in a tropical paradise offering a vast choice of luxurious, cheap accommodation, where the people are almost embarrassingly courteous, civilized and welcoming.

In the mountain villages, among the rice paddies and melon groves, the people are still poor by western standards. Yet on a bicycle ride down the mountain from the volcano at Kintamani to the cultural center of Ubud, we were greeted endlessly by smiling children dressed smartly in school uniform.

But the astounding growth of tourism in the relatively-affluent coastal resorts like Seminyak has spawned a new breed of Balinese; well-educated, hard-working, industrious. (Unable to sleep one night, I walked outside into the dark, warm tropical air at 4am to find a lone security guard patrolling the villa grounds, and was taken aback when he cheerfully stuck up a conversation in very passable English. A security guard!)

But the pay, even for the best jobs in the big villas, is low. One of our butlers told us he earned the local equivalent of about $170 a month. Which explains why you can build a luxurious three-bedroom villa, including land, for less than $250,000! Five full-time staff, maintenance and utilities will set you back $1500 a month.

Typical among Asian countries, small businesses – and there are thousands of them, tiny shops all selling the same sarongs, handbags and wood carvings – have absolutely no earthly idea about even the most basic direct response marketing methods – ‘my’ kind of marketing. They’re all competing on price alone.

But the island’s (often foreign-owned, locally-managed) luxury accommodation industry has become very sophisticated at cheaply and efficiently reaching a global market that was all but  denied it until a few years ago, save for the laborious and clunky work of travel agents.

To find our villa on the coast near Seminyak, I didn’t even leave my desk.  Google ‘seminyak villas’ and you’ll discover brilliantly-executed websites that give you virtual tours of the property, location maps, vast numbers of photos, testimonials, nearby restaurants, tour operators, even menus you can choose to be cooked by your private chef. You can book online, you can phone them up, or you can get your travel agent to do it for you.

Here’s the villa we settled on – for less than $100 a night per head.

They leave nothing to chance. As I often say, the more you tell, the more you sell. The Balinese accommodation industry has discovered the immense power and efficiency of the web to generate leads, drive sales, confirm bookings. They might not be the most adept at other forms of media – direct mail, outdoor displays, print media advertising etc – but in this particular media, they’ve become slick, sophisticated and experienced.

It’s a lesson in doing one thing, and doing it well.

Tegan Messineo and partner Brad with their freshly-minted twin boys.

It’s no surprise to me when Inner Circle members like Tegan Messineo of Body Firming & Beauty in Bunbury, Western Australia (who only got her Toolkit in December 2008) tell me they’ve literally doubled their businesses.

Tegan is a prime example of entrepreneurial thought AND action, one who doesn’t merely join the Inner Circle program, get the Toolkit and expect it to, of its own accord, leap off the shelf and gang tackle prospects as they wander past her front door, dragging them in by the hair.

Instead, she treated Inner Circle membership as the beginning of her education in direct response marketing, not merely as the ‘magic pill’ end to all her business worries.  As Tegan writes this week,

“I have been doing LOTS of reading on Emotional Direct Response Marketing and listening to heaps of cds…”

That’s pretty obvious by the intelligence and thoughtfulness of Tegan’s question re direct mail vs email:

“I have got my website up and running (http://www.bodyfirmingandbeauty.com) and we are offering a FREE $25 voucher. Now I have 2 choices:

Option 1-
Post voucher with letter, special offer and current price list out to client.
Post another letter 2 weeks after if they haven’t used up their voucher
Post a 3^rd letter
Post a 4^th letter out to the client (the voucher has a 8 week expiry on it)
Option 2 -
Set up auto-responder to email the voucher out once the form has been completed.
Set up the rest of the letters to be emailed out.

The email one is really cost effective and it saves a lot of time once it is set up and ready to go, however it is very easy for people to press X and get rid of it when it comes in. Where as in hard copy the client will have to open it and look at it before deciding what she wants to do with it. What way do you think will have the best response? (and I am almost certain that you will say………test them both hahaha)

Yup, you’re right. That’s exactly what to do – test.

And I would say this whether it be about beauty salon marketing or marketing for an accountancy firm. Email, sure – it might be efficient, but it’s nowhere near as effective as real mail.

I would run BOTH alongside each other, ie they get an email auto-responder plus follow-ups AS WELL as the hard copy equivalents, delivered at approx the same time. That way you can easily and quickly measure response right alongside each other, piece for piece.

And once you’ve set up the autoresponders they don’t cost you anything in time or money anyway, so you may as well put some effort into the direct mail while the email stuff runs by itself. You’ll soon know which is getting the response, but I’d bet my own mother it’ll be the hard copy stuff.
I would run BOTH alongside each other, ie they get an email auto-responder plus follow-ups AS WELL as the hard copy equivalents, delivered at approx the same time. That way you can easily and quickly measure response right alongside each other, piece for piece.

And once you’ve set up the autoresponders they don’t cost you anything in time or money anyway, so you may as well put some effort into the direct mail while the email stuff runs by itself. You’ll soon know which is getting the response, but I’d bet my own mother it’ll be the hard copy stuff.

But here’s what’s really instructive in Tegan’s question: the fact that she’s asking it in the first place says much about her new approach to her salon since joining the Inner Circle program. That new approach is itself recognition that she’s not IN the salon or beauty business, she’s in the marketing business. Marketing IS the business.

If more salon owners could take the blinkers off and recognize this fundamental truth, they’d begin to become business people – even entrepreneurs (there’s a difference!) instead of merely technicians who find themselves owning a business, however reluctantly.

If YOU want the kind of success that Tegan’s enjoying, but better yet, the real and tangible THRILL of discovering effective direct response marketing for salons & spas, and how it really can make your phone melt down with appointments, you need to join the Inner Circle program and get your own copy of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit® - the original and still (by far) the most comprehensive system of advertising and sales templates and strategies ever developed for the small salon or spa.

Click here to see if you qualify for a 30-day Test Drive of the entire system.

It’s little wonder it goes into the ‘too hard’ basket.

Traditional advertising – newspapers, direct mail – that’s pretty easy to understand. But online? In no other area have so many been so confused by so much ill-informed crap peddled by so many so-called ‘experts’.

Tracey Orr’s website generates half a million dollars a year in business for her salon in Launceston, Tasmania

But Tracey Orr is among many of our long-standing Inner Circle members who has ‘cracked the code’.

In this week’s Group Coaching Call* for Inner Circle members, Tracey revealed how three years ago she was like most salon owners: she thought her website had to be ‘pretty’, so she hired a web ‘designer’ who put up a web site that looked nice and made her feel all warm and fuzzy.

Only one problem: it didn’t make her a single dollar.

So she bit the bullet. Tracey signed up for the kind of website deal that makes the average run-of-the-mill ‘designer’ go pale. It came from our own web guru George Slater, who told Tracey

“I’ll build you a website that gets you at least three times what it cost in new business, or your money back!”

Three years later, Tracey’s website is bringing in – Tracey’s figures, not mine -

Half a million dollars a year!

Here’s what Tracey says about her website:

You can see Tracey’s site here

Tim & Kanny Reilly’s website for their Scottsdale salon generates $30,000 a month in business

IC member Tim Reilly of Scottsdale, Arizona, reports a similar experience.

When George took over Tim’s website and ‘George-ized’ it, the site soon began getting serious traffic, generating serious sales. In June 2009, Tim’s salon did a record $130,000 in sales – and according to Tim,

$30,000 came from their website

Here’s what Tim says about his salon’s website:

See Tim’s website here

IC member Michelle Weston of Northmead Beauty Therapy was annoyed she missed the Group Coaching Call, but listened to the recording in the Members area, and immediately emailed:

“George, as much as I love Greg and the rest of the team, I wanted to let everyone know YOU are my mentor!! YOU are the one!!! Despite us not having contact for sometime I am sure that if you checked out my website lately you know that you educated me very very well.
I love my website!!!!!  I am updating and adding to it nearly every few days!!!  It is my pride and joy and I am extremely proud of how I incorporate Greg and the teams marketing tools to my website.

When I 1^st spoke with you in 2005 I was working in my salons on clients 5 days per week.  Now I no longer work in the salon at all.  I have a front desk co-ordinator now and 10 other staff who are flat chat.  And I truly believe my business turned around when I first encountered you!!  I am now a web junkie like you and all I do is work from home when I work at all – my website is constantly generating $$$ and leads for new clients 24/7.  It has given me the opportunity to be able to expand into other avenues.

At least 50% of my business would come from my website too, just like Tracy at Absolute Beauty.I am forever grateful to you for giving me the time and the tools to turn my business and my lifestyle around.”

How to get the kind of results Tim, Tracey and Michelle are getting

George has just joined Position Me Online as General Manager. Surrounded by web experts who can actually make a site not only generate traffic but look good as well, he’s agreed to take on website builds for just SIX salon owners – and get them generating the kind of results Tim and Tracey and enjoying.

Inner Circle members: get in FAST. George will hold places for IC members for THREE DAYS – after that, he’ll take applications from all readers of this website, if places are still available.

Here is where you go to fill in the form - George will get right back to you.

*NOTE TO INNER CIRCLE MEMBERS:If you MISSED this week’s Group Coaching Call with George, Tracey, Tim and dozens of other IC members, log into the Member’s Only ‘sealed section’ here and you can listen in on the entire 1 hour recording, under ‘Coaching Call Recordings’

From time to time I get an email complaining that “all you do is talk about the salon success stories, but there are far more failures out there than successes, how come you never talk about them?”

Well, call me old-fashioned, but I’ve never actually been able to figure out what constructive use could be gained from hearing endless complaints and excuses for failure. The 80/20 rules holds good in all things, and in the salon & spa industry, just like EVERY other industry, 20% of the people will make 80% of the money.That’s just the way it is. Those stats have been immovable for decades, ever since the first studies were done in the 1950s. The ONLY choice you have is which group you will belong to, which side of the line you stand. In my business life, I align myself with the 20%, I look to them for inspiration, help, advice, mentoring – and ignore the 80% who complain ‘its the economy’, or “my customers are too mean’, or “my business is in a poor area”, or “my business is different…”.

So I’m going to continue feeding you all success stories, because they’re more valuable than stories of “how I failed because my miserable customers kept complaing about my prices so I kept discounting them and then the competition undercut me and eventually I went out of business…” Anybody can copy. Copy what works, or copy what doesn’t work. I figure it’s better to copy what works. Which brings me to a great ‘what works’ story. It comes from long-time Inner Circle member Michelle Weston of Northmead Beauty Therapy in Sydney.

How My Salon Website Brings Me a Steady Stream of New Clients

Most salon websites are the usual ‘pretty’ brochure-style sites, with lots of nice graphics, moving pictures of gorgeous models, some text about how wonderful the salon is, and not much else. As an instrument of selling, they are virtually useless.

Michelle’s website, put together by Worldwide Salon Marketing, can hardly be called ‘attractive’ in the typical salon sense. But, combined with well-crafted pay-per-click advertising, copy designed to sell, and good search-engine-optimization, it is devastatingly effective in doing the ONLY thing that websites should do – generate leads and sales.

You can see for yourself how ‘ugly’ it is compared with most of the so-called competition. http://www.beauty-salon-parramatta.com/

Michelle Weston’s website is generating business worth over $250,000 a year

That’s okay with Michelle.

“My website is my pride and joy so I am happy for you to share “some” of those secrets with other members.

“We are getting around 240 hits a day on our website – that’s up by 47% on the same time last year – we are getting 2 or 3 free gift vouchers downloaded – but they will come in and use those vouchers, and then they’ll re-book because we market to them via their email address,” says Michelle.

According to Michelle, her re-booking rate is 74%, but even if she’s converting only one of those clients per day into a long term client, that’s adding say, $1,000 a day to her annual revenue. Do the sums, and that’s around $250,000 a year in new business just from the gift vouchers downloaded off the website.

“I love that website, it’s my baby! Online sales will increase by a massive amount (we have done $300 in Gift Voucher sales online just today!)

Overall, with her website, Toolkit, coaching, Michelle’s business is up 42% July to October this year over last, her gift voucher sales are up 300% this year on last, and she’s well and truly on track to increase sales 08-09 over 07-08 by her target 50%.

“With most of my work now done for December and January well prepared, I will be stepping away from the business for the next month or so.  (Can you believe a salon owner would be saying that 2 weeks before XMAS – never in my wildest dreams!!) The next couple of weeks will just see me watch how well my systems are working and hopefully counting the $$$ and just pick up any slack and loose ends!!! I will be away with my family on holidays until mid-January.”

Here’s the lesson: what YOU think about your website (indeed, about ANY of your marketing material) matters not a damn. It’s what your CUSTOMERS think, and how they act on what they see, that matters, not your opinion, or that of your friends, family or your pony-tailed website designer.

People seem to get all excited about email marketing, as though it’s some kind of magic wand. It ain’t. Email (and the wider web, for that matter) is nothing more and nothing less than just another media to deliver your marketing message. Thus, same ‘direct response marketing 101′ rules apply to email as with any other media – newspapers, mailbox flyers, direct mail etc –

• Compelling Headline
• Great OFFER
• Guarantee
• Testimonials (social proof)
• Call to Action

But each media has its own peculiar quirks, and email is no different. It is illegal to mass-email a list of people you don’t know in the hope that a few of them might be fooled into taking action. (That’s the penis enlargement strategy). But email can be very efficient at marketing to your existing (known) customers. They already have a relationship with you.

(Having said that, while email might be efficient (cheap), it is known to be far less effective than say, direct mail, in terms of response.)

But when you do it right, it can achieve massive results. Inner Circle member Michael Curtis of Blush Urban Spa uses email extensively to market to his list of 7,000 opt-in email addresses. According to Michael,

“We sent two emails to our list, one at the beginning of last week and a follow up email a week later. In less than 24 hrs we sold – Special offer #1 ..33 x $117 = $3,861 and Special offer #2,  27 x $157=$4239…thats $8100. Not bad in 24hrs without rebooks and extra retail sales to be added. Then we sent out a reminder ‘extended offer’ email a week later. Total result, 118 sales, for a grand total of: $15,606!”

WHERE TO GET THE EMAIL TEMPLATE: Inner Circle members log into the members only ‘sealed section’ – you’ll find it in the ‘email marketing’ category. Plus, instructions on how to send out email in template form just like Michael does.

PLUS, for Inner Circle Members only: the actual ad used to generate 149 new clients worth an average of $3,400 each per year….(that’s over $500,000, to save you doing the sums)…

A famous American football coach – whose name I now forget – once defined confidence as being able to make a decision when you’re only 80% sure.

‘If you have to be 100% sure, that’s just procrastination’.

Which is to say, if you have to be 100% sure before you make any decision, you’re never going to make a decision, because you’re never (in business) going to be 100% sure. That’s both the joy, and the frustration of business – its uncertainty.

But you CAN reduce the risk to a manageable level, given the right education, guidance, and the right tools.

Angeline & Andrew Griggs of Nails & Beauty with Attitude in tropical Cairns, Queensland. A 59% increase in sales.

This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Inner Circle member Andrew and Angeline Griggs of Nails & Beauty with Attitude in Cairns, Queensland. When Angeline and Andrew were introduced to Worldwide Salon Marketing at the Road to Riches Super Conference in August 2006, they were on the verge of selling up. Things were grim, the tax man was after them, their business had reached a plateau, Angeline was buried ‘in’ the business.

But it’s amazing how things can turn on a dime. They were desperate to change their lives. They did something most salon & spa owners struggle to do…they

Made a Decision

Just over a year after that fateful day, Angeline walked out of her salon a ‘free’ woman – completely ‘off the tools’ for the first time. The following month, sales jumped by $20,000. Their sales are up by 59% overall. In the following 7-minute extract from an hour-long interview, you can literally hear the joy and relief in Angeline’s voice as she describes the incredible journey they’ve been on since that day at the conference in 2006.