Don't Do What I Did and Why It Took Me So Long to Figure This Out

by Julia D. Stege, MFA

@magicalmarketer

Sometimes the most obvious things are just not so obvious to me. I know I'm not alone in this. Looking back, it seems that my brain was on hold for the last several years while this obvious thing was escaping me. Now that I'm clear on my direction, the lack of clarity I had decided was OK for me and my business feels unbearable and unfathomable.

What happened was simply that all the while I have been talking about authentic marketing, I had resisted standing fully behind what I REALLY loved about my business and instead responded to what I speculated would be more successful. I prioritized my activities and my passion often came second. You could catch me talking about it now and again, what my true love is, what my real forte is, what my favorite conversation in the world is. To hear me talk about it you'd wonder at my willingness to do anything else, anything that was not centered solely on the passion of my life.

Can you guess what I'm talking about? Those of you who have taken my classes before can likely guess. I'm talking about Branding from the HeartTM : How to share yourself authentically in a way that promotes everything that you're up to. I have created a process around the funny little question from the BEE-ing Attraction PlanTM, "What makes me and my perfect customers tick?" and combined it with what I call Magical Keywords to help anyone brand anything completely authentically. My not-so-secret desire is to discover the beauty and magic in women entrepreneurs and progressive thought leaders and help them get the message out in a way that uplifts inspires millions of people to transform the world. On a practical level, I help people promote themselves consistently by sharing what's most important to them in a way that attracts their perfect customers.

And though I call myself an "intutive branding artist," and I have talked about Branding from the HeartTM and held classes on it and offered small consulting packages, I have emphasized teaching social networking because people knew they needed that, and they didn't understand branding (or so I thought). I have taught Social Networking classes for 4 years now, and though I have focused several classes on Branding from the HeartTM , I have never gotten around to creating a well-documented system, a home study course or a signature program for my this unique process.

And the reason it took me so long to
figure out that this that I was using my mind, and sometimes (especially in my case) the mind is a scary place to be.

You see, my poor brain is full of so many ideas of how to market, what to market, social networking, websites, blogs, and webinars, and on and on, I got confused about what I need to teach, and so I switched it up quite frequently and offered a huge array of services. I did well and increased my income in a down economy, but I was afraid that the thing I love the most, the thing I am a natural at and which I truly feel can transform the world, would not sell. I was listening to inner gremlins telling me, 'not now' 'people won't get it' and 'you're not ready.' This left me constantly responding to the needs of others without really working out what I wanted to focus on, my unique gift for the world.

So now that I've seen the light (and listened to my own inner guidance) I am creating a new signature Branding from the HeartTM System this year, and kicking it off with an Authentic Branding Summit starting in a few months. I feel as if all my energy jets are on full tilt and I'm blasting forward in the way I'm meant to be. And I'd like to invite you to help me get started with this.

I need your input to make
this system really great.

On Thursday, March 31st at 11 am PT I am sponsoring a no-cost webinar called, "Julia Answers All Your Branding Questions" where I'll be doing just that.  I want to hear from you the biggest questions you have about branding, about getting the message out, about your visual and verbal identity, about how to share what you do with incredibly clarity of purpose. I want to know where you struggle the most, what keeps eluding you, and what would make the biggest difference in helping you share your message with the world.

So here's the deal: I'll answer all your branding questions in exchange for some information from you. The registration form for the webinar includes several required question fields that I need you to answer to the best of your ability. I know it will take a bit of extra time on your part, and to express my appreciation for your heart-felt answers, I'm offering you free all-access pass to my Branding from the Heart Tele-Summit this summer including unlimited download of all 13 session recordings that I will be charging $197 for during the promotional launch in May.

I'll also be compiling answers to your questions for my presentation on the March 31st, and I'll be selecting a couple of folks from our audience to coach live during the webinar. So let me know what you're struggling with and I'll do what I can to help you move through that into the kind of clarity I am experiencing now.

HERE'S WHERE TO REGISTER FOR THE NO-COST WEBINAR 'JULIA ANSWERS ALL YOUR BRANDING QUESTIONS' ON THURS. MARCH 31ST 2011 AT 11 AM

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/680729106

Let me help you skip the years of avoiding the obvious that I have suffered, and let's together create your authentic heart-felt brand.

Go forth and attract!

Are you ready for a brand that is a true reflection of your vision, your purpose, your personality and your attraction plan? Shining your light to the world is your destiny. Let me help your light be a beautiful, authentic and wildly attractive one.

Apply for your complimentary Magical Strategy Session at http://www.magicalstrategysession.com/ or call Julia at (707) 823-3316 to schedule your appointment.

Is Your Website Welcoming?

A welcoming website is key to successful online marketing, yet sometimes what makes a site welcoming seems elusive. We know when a site isn’t working, it’s boring, or too busy, or you cannot find what you’re looking for, or it’s just plain confusing. But how do you make a site wildly attractive to your visitors and inspire them to take the right actions?
There are a lot of elements to a successful website, and different considerations depending on your business, but I have narrowed it down to four steps that are vital to any kind of business.

1) Clarify Your Message and Address Your Visitors’ Needs: The first step to creating a welcoming website is to clarify your unique attributes, what’s most important to you (ie your soul purpose) and how you help your clientele, and share this in your site copy. Start with your Welcome Message for your Home Page and make sure that it:

1. Addresses Your Visitors Problems and Needs
2. Illuminates Your Purpose and How You Can Help Them
3. Outlines What’s on the Site and How to Find It
4. Directs Visitors to Take a Specific Action (sign up for free download, call you for a complimentary consultation, invite them to a free class.

Now take the same approach to each of your following pages, making sure to speak from the heart about your history, your offerings, your resources and how to contact you. You don’t need to write a lot, just be clear in your message, how you can help them, and what you want them to do.

2) Make Your Site an Online Oasis: One of the most overlooked aspect to a welcoming website is the look and feel. Many marketing gurus tell you not to worry about pretty graphics, just use red headlines, arrows and opt in boxes to drive action. However, these techniques are over used and do not take in to consideration how the page makes your visitors feel. Another tendency these days is to use a pre-designed theme that many other businesses have used as well. Though the site may be beautiful, it is not unique. To ensure that your site is visually appealing, unique, and reflective of your purpose, make sure to:

a. Consider your message and purpose and what symbols represent you. Take a look around your office and living areas to see if there are common images that you tend to collect. Take note of what imagery makes your heart sing, what colors light you up, what fonts feel like you.

b. Go online and find images, or go through a stack of magazines while considering your purpose and personality and download or tear out images that appeal to you. You can use a paint program to arrange images on a vision board, of if you have magazines, a scissors and glue will do. Make your own special visual arrangement that can either be scanned and used on your site, or given to a designer as inspiration for an original design.

c. Incorporate your symbology, color scheme, and font choices in your website graphics. If you are using a pre-designed theme, select unique photos or if you are feeling creative, create montages with several images you love to create a unique site banner. Otherwise hire a designer to create custom site graphics for you, and make sure she sees your chosen pics.

d. When you love the look and feel of your site, it will look and feel great to your perfect customers, and they will get you on a more visceral level.

3) Integrate a Blog Into Your Site: Maintaining a welcoming site means keeping the content fresh and pertinent to your customers. When you have an integrated blog on your site, it boosts the value of your site to visitors, and Google loves fresh content. Your site will come up better on searches when you blog frequently. Many of my clients opt for a custom designed Wordpress site with integrated blog for consistency of look and ease of use. Once programmed, these Blog Sites are easy to maintain yourself.

4) Promote Your Site to the World: Once your site is a true reflection of your purpose, you will want to direct people to your site from various popular sites online, such as

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Wordpress
• LinkedIn
• Squidoo
• HubPages

When you network online authentically and share your purpose, people become interested in you. When you link back to your site from your social networks and blogs, it helps to boost visitorship, interest, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

I look forward to seeing your welcoming sites. Feel free to post your sites below and let us know if you are having any challenges in creating an online oasis for your business.

Are you ready for a website that is a true reflection of your vision, your purpose, your personality and your attraction plan? Shining your light to the world is your destiny. Let me help your light be a beautiful, authentic and wildly attractive one.


Apply for your complimentary Magical Strategy Session at http://www.magicalstrategysession.com/ or call Julia at (707) 823-3316 to schedule your appointment.

What a Little Kindness Can Do For Your Marketing

by Julia D. Stege

When we're thinking about marketing ourselves, we often think about practical matters, like how to reach our target audience and inspire them to buy something from us.  After all, marketing is about promotions, right?

Well, yes and no.  Marketing in the traditional sense used to be about targeting a niche and urging people to buy (sometimes scaring them in the process.)

But marketing can be about so much more than inspiring sales. Marketing can be about uplifting people.

I realize how strange this can sound to folks who fast forward over TV ads and spend way too much time deleting spam from their email inbox.  The fact is not enough people see marketing as a way to uplift people.

But you can I can be different. We can take an industry that has gone astray and make it our own.  And while we're at it, lets see if we can start a real trend.

What we can do is use the various mediums for marketing (like Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Ezines, and our own Websites) and use them to uplift and empower people.

We can promote other people, for starters. Retweet their Tweets, Share and Like their Facebook posts, or write kind words of praise on their Wall.

We can spread uplifting ideas that foster self-love, encourage transformation, and give people a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Whatever we do with the intention of spreading love and kindness has got to be a good thing.

And pssssst, guess what? You're bound to attract a perfect customer or two while you're at it.

Go forth and be kind, my friends. And please share in the comments below about how you're uplifting others online.

Marketing: for Love, or Money?

by Julia D. Stege, MFA

When you think about marketing, if you're like most people, money will dominate your view. It's understandable. Marketing costs money, marketing gets you to spend money, and hopefully marketing will help you earn money. 

But have you noticed that when you're too focused on the money, it's harder to attract perfect customers? There's an air of desperation about you perhaps, or just a tinge of something cheesy or inauthentic.

Most success coaches, especially those with a spiritual perspective, say that if you're too focused on the money, you're less likely to experience true fulfillment. Marsha Sinetar wrote, "Do what you love and the money will follow," and Joseph Campbell famously said, "Follow your bliss, and doors will open." 

If only we would all remember these words when we are marketing! Even those of us with a business that is an expression of our purpose often see marketing as a necessary evil and do it exclusively when we need more money. 

But what if we thought of marketing as a way to share our passion with the world?  And what if we marketed when we were excited about our passion and our offerings and the myriad ways we can help people? 

Can you imagine the people you would be attracting
if you marketed for Love?

This is my piece of advice for the week: Market for Love. Share what you love most about your business, even if it's not the part of your business that brings you the most money.  Write a blog post about your life purpose and don't worry about producing an immediate result. Focus on how you can serve others from the heart and write something inspiring to them.

Here is the entire Campbell quote. Remember this as you are sharing your purpose with the world.

"Follow your bliss. If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be. If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else." Joseph Campbell

Julia Stege is called The Magical Marketer because she helps conscious entrepreneurs to attract their most perfect customers with a unique combination of intuitive branding, wildly attractive websites, law of attraction principles and social networking strategies. Download Julia's free Attraction report and instructional videos at http:://www.MagicalMarketingToolkit.com.

Time for a New Attraction Plan

by Julia D. Stege, MFA

It' the new year and everyone is talking about clarifying what you want in your business and in your life. Most coaches will encourage you to make a list of your goals for the year at this time.

To create a client attraction breakthrough, instead of just a list of goals, I like to create a new Strategic Attraction PlanTM. My plan focuses on the most important relationship to my business (in my case, customers) and includes all the qualities of my perfect customers, my purpose and theirs, and what I want including goals, boundaries, and ways of being. It is by far the most powerful tool I have found for getting what I want quickly.

To create your attraction plan, you will write the answers to four questions. I suggest creating a new page for each question and allowing space to revise and add to your plan every day this month. Keep a diary of what you have attracted (Signs of Land) and review the effectiveness of this activity at the end of the month. If you notice great results, I recommend creating a new plan every month and revising it daily.

Here are the four questions and the explanation for how to answer them.

1) What are the qualities, characteristics and attributes of my perfect customers? This is a long list of what I like about my perfect customers, what they're like, their personalities, how they treat me, the resources they have, how they find me, what is important to them, how they act, and so on. I can think of folks I've loved to work with in the past and what I liked about them, or I can think of client situations gone awry and what I would prefer. What kinds of people have you always wanted to work with? Describe them here.

2) What makes me and my perfect customers tick? Another way to put this is, "what is my true life purpose?" When you clarify this and begin sharing it with others you will realize that your perfect customers have a mission that is quite aligned with yours if not exactly the same. It is our soul fire that is the source of our attracting power. When our perfect customers get what makes us tick, they recognize us and choose us.

3) What do I want my perfect customers to expect from me? If you have ever felt at the mercy of other people's expectations, this is your chance to be proactive and determine what you want others to expect from you. Write down the offerings you want to deliver, how you want to be perceived, what you want to acheive, and what you want your days to look like.

4) Who do I get to be to attract what I want? For each item under number 3 that you have not yet 100% attracted, write it down here again. Then ask yourself, "who would I have to be to attract this?" What word or phrase describes the way you would be if you attracted this? Write it down next to the item you want to attract. Now go forth and be that quality and watch as what you desire is drawn to you.

Signs of Land

It is important to take note of what we are attracting on a regular basis. When a sailor approaches land from sea, there are signs of land long before actual land is sighted, like certain weather patterns, or particular birds, sea mammals, and plant life. Similarly when we set course for what we desire in life and business, there are signs along the way that what we asked for is coming. Perhaps you asked for clients who are fun and someone calls from a game company, or you have asked for a more spiritual experience of business and you attract an inspiring teacher as a client. Taking note of these "signs of land" will help you to acknowledge your progress and flow toward the realization of your dreams.

Magical Marketer Julia D. Stege, MFA helps people attract their perfect customers with a unique combination of Law of Attraction, Wildly Attractive WebsitesTM, Branding from the HeartTM, and smart Social Networking strategies. If you're ready to start attracting your perfect customers now, get Julia's free Magical Marketing Toolkit at http://www.magicalmarketingtoolkit.com . WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include the entire article including this bio at the end.

A Rumi New Year Greeting

May you touch the sky
with your heart-felt message
in 2011, and beyond.

Love

Julia

How to Develop a Habit of Conscious Attraction

Law of Attraction says what we experience in life is largely due to how we think about life.  As Success Mentor Zig Ziglar put it,

"It's not what happens to you that determines how far you will go in life; it is how you handle what happens to you."

And Wayne Dyer said, ""The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind."


If you have noticed that bad things keep happening to you, or that good things keep not happening to you, the culprit is your attitude of thought.  These days it's easy to blame the economy, the radical changes in technology, and other issues facing the world, for our personal challenges. 

But the fact is that some will thrive during challenging times, and some will not. Why is that?

The difference between the two groups is one will think about what they want and the other will think about what they don't want.  Both are using the power of attraction, but one is using it consciously toward their betterment and the other is unconsciously focusing on what's wrong.


The key to attracting what you want no matter what is happening to the economy or the world is focusing on what you want with positive expectation.  And I would add, stubbornly focusing on what you want despite the latest bad news or hard times hitting others in your line of sight. Get Help Here

Can we stop focusing on the problem and still solve it? The challenge is that we have developed a habit of thinking about, talking about, commiserating over, and trying to fix our problems; and that will only cause our problems to grow. 

We need to develop a habit of conscious attraction, one that is focused on our goals, dreams and aspirations.  When something challenging occurs in our circumstance (we are after all humans on the planet Earth... stuff happens) we need to habitually focus on the solution, the upside, the silver lining, and remain centered in our belief in well-being. This will bring all manner of positive people, opportunities, and ideas to us that will continually help us move forward rather than being sucked down into the morass of self-pity, suffering, and failure.


So how can we develop a habit of conscious attraction? Many say that it takes 40 days to create a new habit.  If we do something every day for 40 days, it will become an integral part of our lives. Therefore, I recommend creating your Attraction Plan and refining it for 5 minutes in the morning and 5 minutes at night every day for 40 days. The key is to notice where your mind takes you down a dark path, and then create an opposite scenario for your Attraction Plan that allows you to think of your problem in a new way.





This is challenging to do on your own, which is why I have created the 40 day program, "Client Attraction Breakthrough: How to Attract Clients Fast in Any Economy" starts when you register, and I've slashed the price on this program by more than 1/2 since I offered it last year, only $101 instead of $249 which was the price for last year's group.


TESTIMONIALS
Here are some of the comments from my previous Client Attraction Breakthrough Groups about the success they attracted through this program:


"Delightful Success is my experience from the continunation of reviewing my Client Attraction Breakthrough Plan. I add to my understanding Daily and feel inspired with the direction I am guided to with this practice. This brings me new joy in my business!" Laura Mathieson


"My wonderful new client who adores me is paying me another month in advance, so two months total! Thank you & mille grazie, Julia & my SAP!" Christine Heuber


"This message is to let you all know that I will not be able to attend next week's Attraction class. On Friday, I was offered an opportunity which I believe supports and aligns with my personal desires at least for the next few years! Thanks for your support." Cynthia Isaac


"Part of taking my life to another level involves my personal growth in the arena of integrating this new marketing paradigm with the principles of the attraction plan. Again, thank you Julia, and thank you all in the group for being such wonderful catalysts for my growth. It is empowering and encouraging to know I am not ALONE on the journey." Lynette Streeter


If you would like to join us and receive support for developing a habit of conscious attraction, CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE AND REGISTER.  Client Attraction Breakthrough is offered as part one of my Magical Marketing Series.

Go forth and attract!


Love
Julia


PS: Did you miss my landmark webinar with Iyanla Vanzant last week? You can still access that video free of charge on my website for a limited time only.  GO HERE:
http://www.graphicgirlz.com/teleconference.html