Marketing your business is easy when you can make it fun. Creating a quiz is a great way to engage with potential customers and grow your email list.
How many times have you fallen down a Buzzfeed hole taking quiz after quiz? Which Friends character are you? Which Disney Princess is your BFF? What’s your spirit animal?

These quizzes have two things in common. They give a quick result with little effort and they tell us something about ourselves. Imagine how powerful this could be if it also gave us some kind of real value too. It can, and this is the beauty of creating a quiz to grow your list. My quiz is my number one opt-in for list growth. I am going to give you my tips for creating your own quiz to grow your email list.

Identify a topic that speaks to your ideal client

To create a quiz that builds our email list we first have to come up with an engaging topic that supports our brand. What is the number one problem that you solve for your clients? What kind of answers are they looking for when they come to you?

When we talk to our clients or customers we have to ask a series of questions to help us solve their problem. For example, if you are an interior designer you will need to know what room your clients want to update, what’s important to them in a room, what their style is, and budget they have allotted for the project. Creating a quiz around finding their style would not only be a fun way to answer some of those introductory questions but also make them feel like you really understand what they want.

Your quiz shouldn’t replace you or answer your clients biggest questions. That would be a tall order! It should be a step in your process, and flow cohesively with how you get your clients the transformation they want.

Creating an engaging quiz

After you have chosen the right topic for your quiz you have to formulate the questions and answers. You will want to make sure to keep it simple, remember it’s supposed to be fun, and make sure it only takes a minute or two to complete. I suggest thinking about the outcome and working backward to help you create leading questions. Need more inspiration? Check out these quizzes by fellow entreprenerus.

Adding Value

You can use the delivery of the quiz results to give some extra value to your potential clients. Each one of my results has a downloadable pdf that they can use to help them in their business journey depending on where they are based on the result of the quiz. Adding more value gives you a chance to show your expertise and what it would be like to work together. This opportunity to build know, like, and trust creates more warm leads for your business

Connecting with your Email

Just getting someone on your email list isn’t enough to ensure more clients on your calendar. You have to continue showing up and positioning your self as someone who can help them. I like to do this with a welcome series. As soon as someone enters their email to get their result they are added to my email list in MailChimp. Over the course of the next week, they get 4 emails from me telling them who I am, what I do, who I do it for, and what kind of content to expect from me. I also take this opportunity to add more value with a free workbook they can download and a link for a free coaching call. This is how I convert potential clients into paying clients.

Are you ready to create your quiz?

When I made my first quiz I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I could put it all together. I looked at tons of plug-ins and did hours of research on Google. I did finally find a way to make the quiz function the way I wanted, but it was time-consuming and not quite right.

Luckily I found a perfect solution with Interact! I was able to remake my quiz and publish it in one hour! Interact makes it easy to not only create personality, scored, and assessment quizzes, but it easily integrates with your email system and website.

There are lots of features included, like analytics, that make getting the word out about your quiz and managing subscribers easy. You can add tags so you know which subscribers are coming to your site from your quiz. With the click of a button, you can create a pop-up, embed, or grab a link to your quiz so you can start collecting email address and building your list.

Click here to get started today!

We all want to see more abundance in our lives and now is an excellent time to prepare your garden and plant your seeds so you can bring more money, creativity, and opportunity into your business. The first step is to create a space for more clients, ideas, and time to live your life. Nobody gets into this crazy entrepreneur life to be chained to their desk, but we all find ourselves in that situation at some point in our journey. It can be overwhelming to know where to start, but doing a few things a day can clear the way for a surge of good things in your business while leaving your mind feeling clear and focused.

These are some ways to get started.

Clean your workspace

Junk blocks creativity. Even if you don’t have a designated room for your office make your space a place that is clean and organized. Get rid of things you don’t need and make cleaning your desk and office part of your regular routine. Even if you don’t have a designated room that is just for your office make your point of vision just about work. Clear out your yoga ball, ironing board, mail, and laundry. Those are all distractions reminding you of things you could be doing.

Clean your mind

Facing your inner critic –  We all have an inner critic. I am definitely the meanest girl I know to myself. You can’t ignore the voice because it just get’s louder, but you can deal with. Write down your ugly reel of all of the things your inner critic says. Realize that those words are a projection of your fears and your way of protecting yourself. “You can’t do this” really means you could get hurt so just don’t try. Read each one aloud and say “thank you, but I got this.”

Do nothing – Take a break from launching, comparing yourself to others, and generally beating yourself up. Instead, think about what you really want. What is important to you and what is your ideal day? Rather than take another course, do some of the things that make you feel good and take advantage of having a flexible schedule. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It can be simple like going for a walk. Sitting on your deck and eating lunch, or meeting up with a friend for coffee. The idea is to create white space in your day because this is when the ideas will flow and come with ease. Don’t believe me? How many great ideas have you come up with in the shower?!

Clean your business  

Start with your desktop – I am the worst about just saving stuff to my desktop and coming back to it later. It can add up to a huge mess and something you avoid dealing with. Organize these files and then take one folder from your organizational system each day and clean it out. If you don’t really have a system. I recommend not using your computer, but setting up folders to save work on Dropbox or Google Drive. Not only is this very convenient for backing up your work and sharing with clients, but it will keep your computer performing faster by not taking up your memory.

Dig into your systems – Everything you do from sending invoices to onboarding clients should be a system that is so clear you could write it down and hand it to someone else to execute. Start a Google doc or Evernote note and start doing this. If you spend one week writing this down as you go through your day it really is doable. The reason you want to do this is that when you actually write down the process you can then see how you can make your systems work better, faster and with more ease. A side bonus of this exercise is that it will help you build confidence that you know what you are doing!

Finish with an assessment– There are so many things you can do here, but start by identifying what is holding you back. Write down a list of what is not working in your businesses. This could be your VA, a tactic for getting new business, your work hours, or a part of your business that you hate doing. Number them from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most troublesome. Pick one of your fives and tackle it. It’s amazing how just letting go of one thing will give you the energy to start knocking out your list.

SEO is something that as entrepreneurs we are all interested in because we need people to find us so we can serve them with our amazing services and products. You don’t have to spend hours at the computer, become an seo on youtube expert, or pay lots of money to have better SEO. You can implement these three things today to increase the traffic to your site. I am going to toot my own horn. Are you ready? I last month I used these simple tactics in a website redesign to double a clients web traffic in just three weeks!

Create New Content
The easiest way to have your site index better is to update your content.  Think about when you are Googling for information and you see an article from the current year, versus an article from a couple of years ago. You are going to pick the newest information because you assume it’s the most relevant. This is the same way Google views sites. Having a blog and writing at least one post a month is a great way to do this because you are building up your credibility in your field while keeping your site content fresh.

If you don’t have a blog check your site quarterly to make sure your information is current. If you do a guest post, collect testimonials, or have an online portfolio don’t forget to update your website with this content to keep your site current and index better with Google or other search engines.

Use Keywords

Think about Google like a big filing cabinet that categorizes information for easy retrieval. Google scans through your site with a big highlighter(easier to think about than a complex algorithm) and marks key words to file your site in the right folder. It’s important to use the right keywords and use them often.  What words describe what you do? How can you be more specific? For example, if you were to search online for a photographer you would get a ton of results. What if you added a location, and then a detail like wedding? What combination of words would people use to search just for you? A short keyword for a photographer would be  photographer, and not very efficient as far a keywords and search results go. A long tail keyword like destination wedding photographer Hawaii is more specific and will give a better result when searched. Think about the filing cabinet. Google will search through all of the photographers, then the wedding photographers, then destinations, followed by Hawaii. What other keywords could you use to define your business? What makes you different? Who is your ideal client?

Tips for finding the right keywords.

Type in some words in the google search box. See what predictive words they insert for you. You can do the same thing with Pinterest. When you type in a word in the search box you can see what other words come up so you can see what topics are popular. This not only tells you what keywords to use but also what kind of topics you should write about.

Now that you have your keywords you are probably wondering what to do with them! Three places you should use your keywords is in your post title, your image titles and descriptions, and in your content. If you are using WordPress I really like the Yoast SEO plugin. With this plugin, you can add all of the meta information and keywords for that page without accessing the HTML for your page. This is especially nice when you are sharing your blog post or website pages. You will have a full summary of what the content is about instead of just the first few lines of the first paragraph which may not lure people in.

Write Clear headlines

Headlines throughout your site are surrounded in HTML by h1 tags. This stands for headline 1. Any type editor you have used will give you a list that says headline 1, headline 2, headline 3 and so on. Headline one has your largest typeface and the type gets smaller as you go from headline 1 to headline 4. When Google sees this the bots get their highlighter out because they know this is important information. The bots consider the first use of a headline tag and all headlines and content on your first page to be the most important when categorizing your site for search results.

What this means for you is using those keywords in your headlines, site title, and positioning statement are powerful in improving your ranking and getting in from of your ideal customers. Instead of just saying words like services or using fun or vague titles use the words that clearly say who you are, what you do and who you do it for.

Who you are, what you do, and who you do it for, is known as your positioning statement. It should be clear and to the point. You can be creative with your tagline but your positioning statement should be clear and to the point. You can download a worksheet to help you write yours here.

Putting It All Together

Now that you know how to use updated content, keywords, and headlines to increase your SEO you can apply these practices by creating an SEO roadmap of your site.  An SEO roadmap is how you are communicating with search engines. It’s your SEO strategy. The first step is to take a thorough look at the current content on your website. You can copy and paste all of your content into a Google doc and highlight the information in the following steps or look at your website and write the information down.

Step 1. Write down your positioning statement.

Step 2. Write down your headline one and headline two words.

Step 3. Write down any words on your first page that repeat any words or correspond to what you wrote down for steps 1 and two.

Step 4. Look at the images on your site. Do the titles for these also correspond to the words you wrote down for steps 1 and two?

Step 5. Look at your last 10 posts. Write down your headlines and look through the content of the post. Write down the words that repeat the headline or correspond to the headline subject.

This should give you a different view of where you stand with your SEO and how to make it better. These are all things that you can do FOR FREE to get results, after you do this, you can start thinking about obtaining quality link building services.  Creating fresh content using clear headlines and keywords will increase your visibility and grow your business.

Taking a day to be CEO like Mr. Andy DeFrancesco and plan out your business for the year can seem very overwhelming. You start off excited and daydream about where your business could be this time next year. Then you fall into panic somewhere along the way thinking about how to make it happen. I have a 5 step strategy for you to take big goals and break them down into easy actionable steps

Taking a day to be CEO and plan out your business for the year can seem very overwhelming. You start off excited and daydream about where your business could be this time next year. Then, you fall into panic somewhere along the way thinking about how to make it happen. I have a 5 step strategy for you to take big goals and break them down into easy actionable steps. Let’s see it here!!! READ MORE

Have you been curious about how to add a little woo to your business?  I love using the phases of the moon to create space to set intentions for my life and business. If you love astrology you can take this as far into the woo world as you want. If it’s not your jam this is still a fun way to create routines for setting goals and thinking about your business and personal growth. How it Works New Moon.Tomorrow (January 16th) is the New Moon is the new moon in Capricorn. Think of the new moon as a blank slate, a clean palette or a fresh start. Ask yourself, “what do I need and wish for?” You make a list of 10 wishes. You can keep them and look back at them throughout the month. The two weeks between the new moon and the full moon is a time of growth and sowing seeds. Full Moon.  The full moon is a time to reflect on things that are blocking you from your goals. Ask yourself, “what do I need to let go of?” Make a list of things you want to let go of. You can make a ritual around burning the list (you know you did this with pic of an ex!), or you can simply throw the list away. The next two weeks is a time of letting go and reaping what you have sewn. Then, the cycle starts all over again. Putting it Into Practice Each new moon falls under a different zodiac sign. You can use the elements of each sign to guide and amplify the magic behind your wishes. This months new moon falls in Capricorn. Capricorn rules future security, handling responsibility, reaching goals, success/recognition, management skills, authority figures, releasing controlling tendencies. Wishes around future needs would include time, old age, and retirement. A sample wish could be, I want to easily find myself saving for retirement.  Wishes around handling responsibility would include self-discipline and incompetency. A sample wish could be I want all fears of incompetency in my writing lifted from me. Wishes around goals would include ambition, using opportunities, and defining goals. A sample wish could be I want to easily find myself making the most out of the networking opportunities I have to grow my business.  Wishes around success include accomplishments recognition and social status. A sample wish would be I want to experience positive recognition for my design work. Wishes around management skills would include respect, delegating responsibility, being in charge. A sample wish would be I want to easily find myself achieving a work-life balance that allows me to make money and have time to do the things I love. Wishes around authority figures would include bosses, tradition, fathers. A sample wish would be I want to easily find myself having a closer relationship with my Dad. Wishes around releasing controlling tendencies would include lack of joy, pessimism, and fear of new approaches. A sample wish would be I want to easily find the joy in my work and family time. Want to know more?! You can download all 12 months as part of my Planner for List Makers for only $12 here. Free January Download  Have fun and I hope all of your wishes come true! Let me know how it goes!

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Your brand story is your why. It’s the thing that motivates you to get up every morning and be an entrepreneur, even when it’s really hard. It’s also the heart of how to grow your brand. Your story is what connects you with people who will love and support you, not just your products and services. We have so many choices when it comes to the purchases we make. Those choices are made easier when we support the who and the what behind the product or service. We want to feel good about what we are supporting with our dollars. Think about a time when you bought a product because you loved the person who made it. What was it about their why, their mission, or personality that made you a fan?

You don’t have to have a story like TOMS to be interesting to people. You just have to be yourself.  READ MORE

Pinterest and Mood Boards go together like peanut butter and jelly. There are so many beautiful images on Pinterest, they get to know what you like, and you can save them with the click of a button.  But how do you transform all of this inspiration into a brand style?
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First of all, what is the spaghetti phase? If you have a business trust me, you do know what it is. It’s that feeling of floating in the ocean at the mercy of the tide. It’s that portfolio of work that says you will do any kind of project for anyone. It’s the mixed message from a last minute Instagram feed I just need to post something images. You are at the phase in your business where you are just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. READ MORE

The whole process of picking a platform, hiring a designer, and setting up hosting for your website can be really exhausting. For most people, it’s like trying to communicate when you don’t speak the language (but that’s a bad example considering that you can acquire Translation Services Singapore from anywhere). You can be totally spent before you ever even get to the design process. Lots of people want to DIY their site. Maybe, you feel really comfortable with tech, want to have control of the process, or maybe you just need a site on a budget. I am going to break down the process, translate the web speak, and give you tips on building a great site, DIY style.
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I have a confession to make. Anything to do with cars makes me want to hide. If my car has mechanical issues, you may find me curled up in a ball. It really stresses me out, because I don’t understand anything about cars. My fear is that because I don’t even understand the language, I will get taken advantage of. They could totally make something up and give me a huge bill. Of course, I would pay it because all I really know is that I need a car that works.

I started thinking that’s probably how people feel about web design. Designers and developers are as foreign to some people as alternators and engines are to me. If the thought of hiring a web designer or choosing a platform makes you want to curl up in a ball, read on as I break it down for you.

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Branding is so much more than your colors or your logo. If you haven’t heard me say this before you have probably heard it somewhere. Color and design are so much fun to talk about though! It’s like when you want to paint a room. You move all of the furniture and cover it, you clean and tape the baseboards, then finally you get to paint. I love that first roll of color! That’s how it is with branding. You do all of the prep work with your brand foundations, your mission, vision, and values. Then, you get to paint your brand identity.

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In breakups, it’s a common exit line to say, “it’s not you, it’s me”. This train of thought is that it’s kinder to the other person’s feelings or ego to shift the blame to oneself. It’s just not a good fit. There is no blame. One person is not wrong, while one person is right. The two individuals are just at different points in their journey to make a connection. READ MORE

Are there times when business is slow or you just need some extra cash? Maybe, life is too busy to take on another big project, but you need to keep the profits flowing. Ask yourself, how can I make $100 today? There can be a quick fix. It can also give you some insight about how to up your monthly cash flow. READ MORE

There are so many different ways to build a website! You can do all of the coding, just the design part, or a mixture of design and code. New options are coming out all of the time.  All of the options can be like a shiny object, diverting your attention as you try to find the best choice for your business.

I recently rebuilt my site using a WYSIWYG plugin for WordPress. I was skeptical that this would make my site slow or not perform in the way it was promised. Fortunately, I have to say, I love it. In addition to my original site built with WordPress and Foundation, I used Elementor to update. As a developer, I am used to having a lot of control. Although the platform isn’t perfect, it made web design fun, while allowing me to maintain command of the site. Are you intrigued?

Read on to find out more about what I like about Elementor. READ MORE

What store do you LOVE to buy clothes from? The place where if you need an amazing new outfit last minute for a date or a function, you go there first.

Lot’s of places sell clothes. That’s their business, but consumers BUY from brands. The brands you love sell goods or services that align with your expectations of quality, value, style, and service. In exchange, you become repeat customers who support them with your money and your praise. As a fan, you don’t just continue to buy, but you share your love through social media and recommending that brand to your friends. You can even be a walking billboard when you wear new and elegant dresses similar to prom dresses 2022 trends which are so much popular today. These amazing gowns and dresses are like the ones at C&M Tee Fashion Collections and people are asking where you got it. READ MORE

Back in the day, people used to read these things called newspapers. They were paper rectangles folded in half and sold flat so that the most important stories were at the top of the paper or, above the fold. Above the fold now applies to web design. It is the portion of the site that can be seen on your screen without scrolling. This is the most important part of your website. READ MORE

I love Seth Godin’s definition of branding, “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”

What this means is people ( you, me, your bff) buy from companies we become loyal to because they meet our expectations for customer service and product value (think Target). We become fans of businesses that we identify with because of their company values (think TOMS) or personality (think of your favorite maker on Instagram) READ MORE

It’s officially summer and for many of us, it’s a slow time in our business. I love snow cones, pool days, and road trips, but I also really love to work (and have money in my bank account!).  If you are feeling a little freaked out and maybe underprepared I feel ya! The good news is you can actually use this time while you are not working in your business, to work on your business and make more money when business picks up again.

This is the perfect time to work on your business!

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I was at my local Tuesday’s Together meeting and a photographer was talking about how she struggles with pricing because when people say they can’t afford her she feels bad for them and drops her prices. Do you feel the heaviness of this? She feels bad for them because she is compassionate, but then she devalues her work and takes money from her own family by dropping her prices. That doesn’t feel good either. READ MORE

As creatives, we are never good at just one thing. You have probably also heard this referred to as multi-passionate. The great thing about having so many interests is that creativity feeds creativity even when they are different disciplines. I love switching from the structure of web design to the freedom of abstract painting. I love painting and I always get ideas for colors and patterns that I can use in my print and web work.

The only hiccup is that this can make it hard to choose which direction to go in when starting a business. When you are good at web design, illustrations, and sewing, how do you pick? Most people can’t choose and try each one or all at once. READ MORE