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Finley Robinson left his pastoral career of over 20 years so he could work with his wife to build her online fitness business.  He and his wife have 3 lovely children.  And people kept asking them for advice on how to handle various child-rearing situations.

So in true entrepreneur style Finley started a side business giving advice to and working with parents of children ages 3-13.  

In today’s episode we talk about the one thing that you need to have in order to be successful, whether working with customers, raising a family or just life in general.

We also talk about:

• Inflation as a catalyst for finding ideas for new products and services
• The necessity of making your business all about your customers (and not about you)
• How that can be difficult, being humans, so what to focus on instead
• Why empathy, urgency and clarity matter, and not just in a marketing sense
• Whether intuition about what other people are thinking and feeling be learned
• Generosity mindsets, why it matters and how it can be applied when “selling”
• The genuine struggle about believing in our value as entrepreneurs and how that impacts us when it's time to raise prices
• The difference between value and worth  and how we know what it is that customers value about us
• Techniques for being good listeners, asking the right sort of questions and the “Ladder Of Abstraction”

So whether you’re a business owner, a parent with children ages 3-13 or both, this episode has a lot of wisdom sprinkled through it.

Have a listen and see what you think.

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Have you ever tried to put a new habit into practice? 

And maybe it didn’t go so well?

Well, there’s a reason for that.

In this episode, Mindset Results & Psychosocial Recovery Coach, Louise Evans, explains the 5 things that you need to think about BEFORE you start working on building a new habit that’s 5 times strong and faster than your old habit.

We talk about:

• Louise's journey into entrepreneurship
• Who Louise helps (it’s surprisingly wide-ranging)
• How what you eat  can have an impact on how easy or hard it is to change habits
• The 5 things you need to ask yourself BEFORE you start working on changing that habit
• How to tell whether you're living YOUR best life, or whether it’s actually someone else's vision of your best life
• What to do if you've gotten so lost, you no longer have a vision of what your best life could be
• Building heart centered habits five times faster
• The role of accountability and being true to yourself when changing habits
• Procrastination.  Is it a good or bad thing?  What causes it and a useful technique for getting past it

So if you’ve been working on changing your habits or building a new habit, have a listen.  What Louise has to share may help.

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For a lot of people, making the leap from employee to self-employed consultant is a huge, scary step to take.

Because of that, many never make that leap, instead preferring to remain in the safety of their current job, even if that job is boring, unsatisfying, or worse, exposes them to a toxic working environment.

In this episode, I talk with Nitish Verma from Essence Networks, who took a carefully considered, step-by-step approach to making the change from government employee to self-employed consultant.

We talk about:

• The transition journey Nitish took while still an employee in order to get himself ready to make the leap
•  The 3 key questions he asked himself (and his network) that helped him position himself so he was ready at the right time
• The value that stable governments add in enabling anyone to start their own business
• Why a learning mindset was critical to Nitish’s success
• Why having a process for getting feedback from people he’s worked with, helped Nitish get testimonials
• How Nitish has been successful in focusing on a niche within a niche and use his experience and skills to bring value
• Nitish’s open invitation for further discussion

RESOURCE MENTIONED:

Paper:  https://www.academia.edu/67420142/Auditing_for_Sustainability_The_urgent_need_for_a_community_centric_approach 

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When Chris “Mercer” Mercer started growing his Measurement Marketing business, he didn’t have a lot of money to put into ads.  So he developed a strategy that helped him get leads without a lot of effort.  And he continues to get leads from those same sources even today.

How did Mercer do it?

He adopted a guest podcasting strategy.

And in this episode he shares exactly how he went about it and how you can, too, even if you speak on podcasts that don’t have many listeners.

We talked about:  

• Why not wanting to use analytics is like wanting to use diet pills to lose weight
• How working in a narrow niche can make it seem difficult to attract your ideal audience
• How Mercer got started using guest podcasting as a marketing strategy
• Unforeseen long-term benefits of using a guest podcasting strategy
• Hype and profitability
• Why a “spray and pray” approach to marketing
• Mercer’s process and pro tips for landing guest podcast appearances
• Tips for people who would like Mercer to be on their podcast
• Why it doesn’t matter if the podcast you are a guest on only has 2 listeners
• How to be a good podcast guest
• Brands and bridges

So if you’re looking for more leads, whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been in the business game for awhile, have a listen to what Mercer has to say about guest podcasting as a marketing strategy. 

There’s a lot of value there.

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Are you doing these five “A” things in your business?

• Being super clear about who your Avatar is
• Automating repeatable processes
• Analysing your data
• Honing your Appetite for learning
• Taking Action

If not, it’s going to be extremely difficult to get your business to grow to the size you want.

In this episode I talk about:

• Each of the 5 “A”s, why you need them and how they support the growing process
• How easy it is for us to get one of those “A”s, Avatar Clarity, wrong and why it took a naughtly little boy messing with his mum’s work laptop to help me understand that
• How a quiz can make it easier to do all the 5 “A”s well, without spending any extra time or energy.

If that sounds like it would be helpful, have a listen.

And if you’re interested in getting started on a quiz for your business, head over to my 30-minute free training on how to choose which type of quiz to use.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Saying “no” to things or to people can create intense dissonance, especially for people who like to help others.

In this episode, Counselling and Clinical Psychologist, Katrina Streatfeild, takes us through a number of ways to deal with the guilt and the dissonance.  And she explains how to say no in a way that leaves the other person feeling heard, understood and valued.

We talked about:

• Why sometimes saying no is the best thing for the other person
• Three questions to set the stage for saying no
• Why your priorities matter
• Dealing with stretch moments and associated guilt
• Engaging our "wise" minds
• Making "choice moments" count
• What to do when you really need a crystal ball
• Why a growth mindset is vital
• When beating yourself up is like burning money
• Techniques for dealing with people pleaser dissonance
• How to say no, without sounding horrible about it

There is so much that is helpful in this episode.

If you’d like some help with learning how to say no nicely and with style, be sure to have a listen.

And please share the podcast with anyone else you think it would help.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Russell Pearson, host of The Marketing Report and Your Consulting Business podcasts has years of experience with business branding.

In my experience, working with startups, branding is something that the business owners initially  obsess over.  But once they’ve picked their logo, font and brand colours, tend to ignore some of the more important aspects of branding.

In this episode Russell talks about:

• Networking and why there needs to be a better way of doing it
• His “Barrel” concept for finding new clients
• How business branding is far more than just a logo. 
• What true marketing is, who does it and what it means
• Intentionality versus manipulation
• Why you need to niche down and how to do it successfully
• 3 key questions to ask when niching down
• Changing and adapting in order to take our businesses global
• Mindset, branding and change
• What “brand” is
• Business owner versus practice owner - what’s the difference?

Whether you agree with Russell or disagree, there is plenty of food for thought in this episode about living your brand, niching down, and networking more smartly.

If those topics interest you, have a listen.

Resources Mentioned:

• The Marketing Report Podcast - https://russellpearson.com/marketing-podcast/ 
• Your Consulting Business Podcast (iTunes) - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-consulting-business-podcast/id1643441325   
• More Info About The “Barrel” Free Download - “Clients On Tap” - https://russellpearsonprograms.com/
• Website - https://russellpearson.com 

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Not that long ago, virtual reality was just another emerging technology that most businesses didn’t see a need for.

Well, that might be changing.

In this episode I speak with Zerafina Zara who is an expert in the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (XR) spaces.

And we talk about:

• How Zerafina's interest in dance set her on a path towards working with virtual reality
• What a Holographic Stage is and how it might be used in a business
• Whether small businesses might be able to use some of the amazing capabilities that these technologies bring to create new opportunities to better serve customers and grow
• Why augmented reality might be better for business meetings than Zoom
• The benefits of VR meetings for introverts
• Why making rollercoasters the first thing you try on VR is a bad, bad, very bad idea
• Whether the Metaverse actually exists
• Your online avatar, relationship building and communities
• Evoking emotional states with VR and promoting a sense of self-agency and control
• According to the gurus, how long you'll be spending in a VR headset per day for work (the answer might surprise you)
• Whether VR could be used to help people with disabilities and some of the ethical considerations around that
• An example of using VR to enhance the coaching experience

It’s a fascinating interview about a subject that has the potential to really change how we interact in the business world.  And it’s something that you, as a small business owner, should be starting to think about now.

If that sounds interesting to you, have a listen.

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Have you ever seen a billboard or advertisement that just stuck in your head?  One that you remembered months, if not years later?

What is it that makes those marketing messages stick?

In this podcast episode, I talk about some marketing messages that I saw in my recent travels and why those messages stuck like velcro to my brain.

RESOURCES

“How To Choose Which Quiz To Use” Free Training:  https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/how-to-choose-which-quiz-to-use-training/ 

Podcast Rescue:  https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/podcast-rescue/id1644925604 

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If thinking about using SEO to increase traffic to your website makes you feel seriously overwhelmed, then this episode may help.

It’s a case study where podcast host, Trudy Rankin sits down with SEO expert, Graeme Knight from New Route Digital to talk through the results of an SEO audit he ran on a neglected website.

The goal? 

To show you the process from start to finish of starting to use SEO in a serious way to grow website traffic numbers.

In this, and subsequent episodes we’ll be walking you through the process, the data and the outcomes, warts and all.

We talk about:

• How we're widening out an existing case study to include a more in-depth SEO approach
• The sadly neglected website I want to revive
• What Graeme’s SEO audit process involved
• Getting a sense of what to do first and how to deal with all the “things” that need doing
• What “relevance scores” are and why they matter
• Picking which keywords to start with
• Why search intent matters when looking at keywords
• Art versus science when it comes to picking the right keywords
• My lightbulb moment for future content creation
• Is it possible to shortcut the whole process?
• Keyword cannibalisation
• Getting started with a Backlinks gathering strategy

If you’re interested in following along on this experimental (for me) process, have a listen.

We hope you find it useful.

Here's the link to the website page we've been working on.

https://themenopauseeffect.com/7-top-natural-indian-home-remedies-for-menopause-relief/ 

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