I hope you are enjoying your summer.  I have been enjoying some special times with my family and getting out and having some fun.  Here I am….  on a bike ride at the beach. We spent some days at my Mother-in-laws,  just a few blocks from the ocean.  After spending so many months on bed rest,  I now feel a freedom this summer. It is rewarding to hold Abby, who is now 2 months old, and also finally free to just go for a walk or ride a bike.  Being in bed and the hospital was a lesson in being thankful for the blessings in my life.  I have learned to enjoy many of the little things.

So today I want to share something that may seem so little to you, that you may have forgotten this blessing in your business.  It is your email list!! 

If there is one thing to be thankful for it should be everyone on your list.  Every class I teach, every person I reach, and all the foundation I share is based on one simple technique….. it is email marketing. Yet, so many business owners dismiss list building, and even those who have started still just ignore the one thing that will increase their paycheck.   So today I am going to share some email marketing secrets for you.  My hope is you are motivated to start sending emails and telling your list that you are thankful for them.

First rule in list building is to remember all roads lead to your list!  If you are still confused by what is your list? This is your email marketing database.  You build this database when you are networking and online through social media, blogs and videos.

But do not forget you need an online place to keep your list.  I recommend aweber and here is my affiliate link.  http://list.workwithliz.com.  I have been a loyal client for 6 years, and I have tested and tried every other service,  nothing compares. You cannot use a free service, or something fancy thinking it will be cheaper or better. I promise you from experience, that aweber is the KING. (Most top marketers use aweber in one way or another)   I can segment my list, build many different list, and have the highest open rates I have ever seen.  This just does not work with any other service.  This is the place to start building.  http://list.workwithliz.com

I just mentioned open rates, this is very important when you start emailing your list.  You will want to test headlines, and try out different formats for your emails.  You can write a newsletter, include pictures or just a simple email. Whatever you choose, make sure you are tracking and watching what gets the most results. Every list is different, but every list needs consistent emails.

Your list is like a best friend, you must keep building the relationship.  Keep in touch at least weekly, be supportive, encouraging, share your secrets and help your list with what they want to learn.   Here are a few secrets I have learned, and I have a very high open rate…..

• Write your emails like you are writing to your best friend, to one person, not to a crowd
• Have a subject line that is catchy
• Make is personal, people like to hear what is happening and what is working
• Stay away from canned newsletters, there is a trend to buy content.  If you buy, then personalize
• Share, share and share.  Your secrets, your formulas, what is working and what you are struggling with
• Be consistent, actually more is better.  Weekly, twice a week, or more!  Less than once a week and your list will drop
• Make videos and share pictures
• Give credit to others

If there is one thing I could tell you to do to make a difference in your business, go out and start building your list, then love your list.

Thank you for being part of my list, and part of my life.  I am thankful for you!  You have been there with me as I grow, change and make mistakes.   You have been there to help me enjoy the success.

I wish success for you and want to help you each step of the way.  Comment below or email me with any questions.

~Liz

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You keep hearing about having a self-hosted wordpress website. You know this could be the solution to all the website headache you are dealing with, but you just are not sure what or how to do it.

You know this will release you from web-designer bondage, and give you the control you want. You can finally get more leads and clients can find you in the search engines. You just are not sure if you can get it to work for you.

To see the results you want, you have to put some actions into learning wordpress. You need to start actually doing your site. Here are a few tips, to help you get going. Do not make these mistakes when you get started….

1. Your sidebar (widgets) isn’t your hall closet

You know that hall closet you’re afraid to open because all the stuff shoved in it might come tumbling out and hit you on your head?

That’s what a lot of WordPress sidebars look like.

You have stuffed your sidebar (widgets) with your ads, your social media icons, links to your most recent tweets, photos of your Facebook fans, and on and on. On that sidebar might be a link you’d really like your site visitor to click on, but if they can’t find it, you might as well not have it there.

The solution? only put the necessity on your sidebar. If a widget doesn’t add people to your list, put money in your bank account, or get someone to take an action you’d like them to take, remove it.

2. Make it easy to find what’s on your site.

If you own a library of books, does it make sense to house the books in separate buildings by the month they were acquired?

Of course not. You’d end up walking from building to building, searching for the book you wanted.

Set up your categories for your market and what they are searching for. You may also want to have a search widget on your site, so visitors can use a keyword to find what they are searching for.

3. Clean up your permalinks

You work hard to create content for your site, so you want Google, Bing, and Yahoo to find it. Make it easy for them by using short “road signs” that point to your information.

How do you do that?

The first step is to go to your >settings, then >permalinks. Click on the custom structure and put in %postname%. This will instantly start showing your title in the link, instead of just a date. This will allow the search engines to find your content, you can even start to learn some SEO tricks.

Another quick improvement is to use the built-in WordPress permalink field at the top of the editing page to revise your links before you publish them.Eliminate unnecessary words, and make use of keywords in your description.

Don’t stuff it with keywords — make sure the end result is pleasant to read.

4. Make use of titles and descriptions

When you share your posts and pages on Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, these services pick up a page title and description to go with the link you share. This is also what turns up in a search engine.

Most people use to decide whether or not to click on your link based on the title.

That makes the title and description some of the most important text on your page!

In my wordpress course we show you how to use Scribe to edit the page title and description.

5. Add images

Images add beauty and interest to your pages. They can have a search engine optimization job to do, too.

Every time you upload an image to your website, you have the opportunity to add a keyword in your image title and alternate text fields.

The title tag for your image generates the helpful little text that appears when someone hovers over that image.

And if for some reason the image is unavailable — or your reader is using an assistive device to view your web page — the alternate text tag is the text they’ll see in place of your image.

Again — they need to make sense. If it’s a story about tires and you’ve used an image of a muddy tire, don’t just call it “Tire.” Call it “Best Tire Brand for Muddy Roads,” or some other text that describes what people will find in your content. And make sure the alternate tag accurately describes the image you’re showing. This isn’t a place to stuff random keywords, it’s just another way to make it crystal clear what your site is about.

6. Focus attention with free offer and aweber subscription

The goal is to get site visitors to take action. Tell them what you are going to give them in order to join your database (List). Remove distractions and focus their attention with a well designed widget at the top. You can simply do this with your aweber form creation.

If you are using thesis theme you can also make a landing page. This is explained in the wordpress workshop.

7. Don’t forget the footer

Down at the bottom of your WordPress site is the footer area.

It’s where you can include a copyright message, a link to an important page, or information about who owns your website.

Many themes allow you to expand this area into content section where you can include a short bio, an opt-in to your email list, links to popular posts or pages, and more.

Have a wordpress question? Don’t be shy: let us know in the comments below.

If you have not heard of David Neagle I recommend you check out his site

Click Here To See David’s Website

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Just a few weeks ago, I had only heard of David Neagle, but was not really a big fan.  I was just a follower, to me this meant I was on his email list and watched some of his videos and listened to a few trainings.  I enjoyed what he taught.  What had got me interested to get to one of his events was a live stream I had watched. He coached a business owner about how we cannot equate time and money.  Many of us chose how much we charge based on how much time it takes us to do the work, where as our rates should actually be determined by the value the person will get from the information.   Our thinking is always that time equals money, and the way to make more money is to work more time, or charge more per hour.  Neither of these is true, and in fact if we set up our business we will get both more time and more money.  This simple idea was very interesting to me and I watched David coach people to sell programs that they currently were selling for $500-$1000 and charge ten times more.   Once I saw people do this and get results, I was intrigued to learn more about this guy named David Neagle.   I had never had such a mindset shift in a short amount of time.

So when I saw tickets to his event pop-up in my email box, I knew I wanted to check it out.  The event was many months away, and David being the great marketer that he is, knew just how to get me to attend.  He offered so many bonuses for getting the tickets, including a class that cost almost triple as if the tickets were purchased many months before.  I convinced my friend Ann, from irresistiblemarketing.net to come with me.

The event was incredible and different than most of the business events I usually attend.  This one got deep, and by deep I mean that every issue you are having or have ever had in your life was brought to the surface.  This was a business event that had only a small portion to do with our business.   I learned that many of things we are doing in our business are because of thoughts and events that happened many years ago, even back to our childhood.  We have a pre-concieved notion of how something is supposed to be.  We bring that thought into our business and in turn we struggle in different areas.  He started off by telling us that if there is no profit in business, we are running a charity.  Most of us are running a charity.  A business is about profit, and the goal is to make profit.

To start off David shared his journey.  This opened my eyes to some of the differences of those people who make themselves a success.  David was only making about $20k a year.  He had never known anyone to make more than this.  He knew he wanted more, even after an accident where he almost died, he waited for something to happen.  He thought that was the sign that something was going to change, and when nothing changed, he didn’t understand.  He finally realized if things were going to change, he had to be the one to change.   As he worked 6 1/2 days a week, was miserable, and still could not pay his bills, he thought he was stuck in a box that he could not get out of.  He couldn’t afford to get ahead, he could not even get by.   He explained he was ANGRY!  This anger was what was affecting his life.   He finally accepted he needed to change his attitude, and he said these 3 things on the job changed everything for him and can for anyone, whether it is a job or your own business.   1- Be honest with what needs to be changed.  What needs to be changed is you.  Most people work to go home, instead work and act as if you love your work.  You must show that you love what you do.   2- Work with the best of your ability.  Each and every moment pull out the absolute best you can be.  3- Treat everyone, and this means everyone with total respect.  Show this to your boss, employees and every customer/client or anyone you meet.  Show them respect.    Once he did these 3 things, within a few months he had doubled his income.  He was making 40K a year, he said he thought that was the top of the world.  He had never really known anyone who made that much money.

David went on to teach what he calls the basic principle of the universe which is more life.   Everything is always working for more life, and we need to understand this as our foundation.  We also spent time focused on changing the rules.   We are always playing by the same set of rules, which is why we are getting the same results.  How can we look outside the box and play by a new set of rules.   Everything you need to reach your goal is already here.  You do not need to go searching for anything else.  But the catch is you will only get it when you are ready.  The minute you make an excuse it all stops.   If you are willing to make a transformation or a change, you can bring in anything you desire.   We met people who went from making $100 a day, to now making $100,000 a month, and all within a short time frame, some withing 6 months.  Once your brain can realize that you need a new set of rules to play the game.   All games have a set of rules, do you know the rules and are you playing by them?  If you do not have the result you want, you are playing by the wrong rules.

If you have the desire, the want and need are there.  There was many people who were trying to manifest, they were saying positive affirmations, had dream boards and doing all sorts of different things.  He showed us that our brain is like a rubber band, even when we stretch it that as soon as we let go, it will go right back.  He explained the only way to get the results was to break the rubber band.  This could only happen with thoughts, feelings and action, this would produce results.  The results do not need to be the results we desire, it just has to be results, this is how we can start to break that rubber band, or some people might refer to it as our sub-conscious mind.  We were all asked if we were willing to do what is necessary?  So ask yourself if you are willing to do what is necessary to change yourself, which will change your life and your business.

We spent alot of time talking about money.  I was suprised to find out how many other people worry about money.  It was not just me!!  A big AHA for me was when I realized that when I make more money, that worry does not go away.  I believed when you make a ton of money you no longer have to worry about money.  This is not true.  He actually turned this thought around in my head, in order to make money I have to worry about money.  Just a different type of worry.  I need to know how much money I need, to the penny.  If I do not know how much money I need each month to pay the bills, then I am not worrying enough about money and I will not make enough.  We need to worry enough about money that we know how much we need and how much to make.   Money is just paper and we can make it any time we need it, but to make the money we must know how much we need.

He also talked about the negative side of worry about money that we need to get rid of.  Most of us hold money as our God.  We put money before all things in our life.  I did not believe this, I never thought I was putting money before anything.  But I learned and so did most of the room, that we are making money a God because we spend so much time and energy worrying about it.  With every decision we make, we are making the decision based on money.  Have you chosen your home, your car, your children’s school, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, all based on money?  When you are shopping are you looking at price tags and you are choosing all areas based on money.  If money itself had value the value would not flucuate.  So money itself has no value, it is the value you put on it.  Who told you that you have to work for money? Working is the worst way to make money.  It is actually self worth and self respect that is keeping you broker.  If you want to know what is important to you check out both your calendar and your check book.  Those 2 things show you what you are really doing with your life.  Your time and how it is spent will determine if you will ever be successful.  How you spend your money will show how much you are worrying about money, and if you are spending and counting the pennies as you should.  You should know where every minute and every penny goes.  Once you get this under control and meet you monthly needs only then can you start to make more.

Napoleon Hill says that opportunity comes disguised as missed opportunity or defeat.  We were testing on this several times at the event.  How many times are you passing up making money or a good opportunity because you are telling yourself it is not an opportunity or possibly it is a defeat, something you do not want.   You are responsible for your own success or faily.