Well it’s certainly good for the ego. I know a number of marketers who pride themselves on being inaccessible to their customers.

You MUST go through their support desk or PA to get anywhere near them.

Now I’m not posting this because I’m some sort of ‘my door is always open’ marketer because I’m bloody not – I value my family and private life far too much for that

But if you’ve been around me for a while then the chances are you know that you can always get in touch with me. I have a ticket desk that my support teams answer because otherwise I’d spend all my time dealing with lost download links, login URLs and testimonial requests

But the stuff like interview requests, JV offers, partnership offer and the like ALWAYS get to me and most of the time you’ll get a personal reply.

This isn’t always the case with online marketers though…

Some years back I was going to invest several thousand dollars for personal mentoring from a well known guru dude. I was pretty sure he was the right person to guide me through something I was setting up and contacted him to request a five minute chat.

It was like trying to contact bloody ELVIS

I was fobbed off by his support woman (a bit lower down the food chain and she’d have been living in a friggin’ POND), and then after a week when I did get some response he told me he wanted a non refundable $500 to speak to me on Skype for five minutes

I decided he was an ‘up his own arse’ tosser and the coaching thankfully never came off

I say ‘thankfully’ because I later heard bad tales of how he has a rep not being too accessible for his paying clients either

There is a school of thought that recommends getting paid for ALL your time, even the five minute consultations with prospective personal clients. I can see why that might be a good idea

But I don’t agree with it.

Instead train up your support to ask a few questions that will weed out the tyre kickers. And don’t forget that spending five minutes chatting to prospective clients allows YOU to know if you want to work with someone too. So it’s not all one sided.

The moral of the story?

Get yourself good support as soon as you can afford it to free you up for the important things, and spend time communicating with your readers. You’ll pick up some high value customers and you won’t take yourself so bloody seriously either

Comments welcome

 

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You wouldn’t believe who’s selling, sharing or being extremely careless with your email address

Here’s something that will wobble your wellies if you get results anything like I did

Create a ‘catch all’ email account. You can do this in Cpanel in your hosting account

A ‘catch all’ is the kind of email account that lets you put anything you want in front of the @ symbol and treats it as a separate email address, but it still comes into your inbox

So for example if you sign up to The Warrior Forum your could use the email address:

warriorforum@yourdomain.com

if you signed up to my list it could be

tonyshepherd@yourdomain.com

if you sign up to another marketer it could be

billybigballsguru@yourdomain.com

You get the idea?

Make a note of which email address you used for signing up for whatever site

Then wait until the emails start coming in

All will be fine for a while but then you’ll probably notice how you start getting unsolicited emails from other marketers and companies.

I have email addresses that I only ever used ONCE to sign up for someone’s list, that is now being sent upwards of TEN emails a day from some spammer or another. This has happened to a worryingly high number of email addresses that I’ve only used once and mostly in the IM arena

And some are being used several times.

If anyone can answer WHY this happens please drop me a line at the ‘contact Tony’ tab at the top of the page because I’d love to know

Remember all that ‘we will never share your email address’ bollocks that you still see on opt-in forms?

Yeah right, as safe as a nine pound note

It might not stop the spam coming, and the lists you sign up for might not be the ones actually responsible for the leak, but it’s bloody interesting to see who is ‘safe’ to sign up for and who isn’t.

 

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I just got off the phone with a potential new coaching client.

One of the scariest things he had to say was how hard it was to actually contact any of the previous mentors he’d hired, some of which he’d paid up to $9,000 to work with.

See how instantly you can get a potential client onside just by being willing to chat to the and answer any questions they might have?

Make yourself available

I know we’re supposed to be running ‘automated’ businesses that are ‘hands-free’ and on ‘autopilot’ but sometimes it’s nice to pick up the phone and chat to another human being.

I had a fun and interesting conversation with the chap this morning and we managed to put together a personalised coaching plan for him that I fully expect will take his business to the next level and beyond.

It does you good to know that the people who spend money on your products are REAL people not just metrics on a spreadhseet.

Lot more fun too

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