Credit: Grant MacDonald

When first learning a healing modality, you need to get the nuts and bolts down. If you’re learning hypnosis, for example, it’s ESSENTIAL to know the steps of leading someone safely into and out of deep trance states.

When you don’t know the basic steps of a healing modality, two things happen. First, you’re much less likely to quickly and safely get the results your clients want. Second, you’re likely to look unprofessional (even foolish) to anyone who knows what they’re talking about.

Surprise! It’s very similar when it comes to effectively growing your healing business.

Learn Basic Marketing Steps First

The world of healing and personal development is more sophisticated than ever before. It’s an uphill road – some people even find it impossible – trying to grow a practice without things like a well thought out website, a regular newsletter, and a consistent presence on social media.

If you’re not consciously and consistently using 2-3 marketing strategies to grow your spiritual business, then start here.  You don’t have to learn them all. Just pick at least two marketing strategies and learn the basics.  If you need help finding something to fit your needs, contact me.

Intuition is The Key to Powerful Marketing Results

In any healing modality, a real master knows MUCH more than the basic steps. He or she knows how to use the power of intuition to get to the places that clients are stuck very quickly.

Intuition is also the secret to growing your business faster and with less expense.  The better you become at deeply understanding what’s going on for your potential clients, the faster your transformative business will grow.  Use your intuitive powers to explore questions like:

1) What do I know about my ideal client?   Think about both outer characteristics (age, gender, what they do for work, etc) as well as inner chacteristics (qualities that define them, things that are important to them, etc).  Learn to weave what’s important to your ideal client into your marketing and you’ll get better results.

2) What problem or perdicament is my ideal client facing?  Helping businesses grow the fastest when their owners are crystal clear about how the people they serve are stuck and what they want in their heart of hearts instead.  This is, in fact, the same intuitive circuitry that healing masters use.

Wrap Up

One of the reasons marketing feels so yucky – yes, that’s a technical term – to so many spiritual practitioners is that most of it is very mechanical.  Mechanical marketing is a turn off to most spiritual people.

At the same time, trying to grow a helping business in today’s environment while ignoring these powerful tools is sabotaging your dreams.  Instead, invest in learning some basics and than continue on to more heart-to-heart level communications.  

What have you found to work in terms of bring more intuition into your client attraction plan?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the form of a comment below.

Opening screen from Charan Surdhar's new video

Like many helper types, when I first met Charan Surdhar her alternative therapy practice was stagnant.  Today, thanks to a powerful combination of mindset work and an effective marketing plan, Charan’s business is growing. And, she’s having FUN doing it!

Would you also like to grow your business and have fun? 

Who Can You Serve the Best?

Charan is a trained geneticist who used to work in a lab.  She wanted to have a larger impact than was possible in that role.  So, she trained in a number of energy healing tools like EFT and Reconnective Healing.

The first question you need to ask when you’re ready to grow a business is “Who can I serve the best?”. Charan decided it was conscious parents who were either trying to conceive but were having a hard time or who had an inherited disease – like cancer or diabetes – that ran in their families.

She felt excited about helping parents in these situations. Your excitement (or lack  of it) comes through in all of your marketing. Charan’s joy and enthusiasm are the energetic foundations of her success.

Combining Facebook and YouTube

Once Charan knew her focus, it was time to decide how to get her message out.  She knew that there’s a large population of energy psychology and spiritual people on Facebook.  That was a natural place to start meeting people who would be interested in her message.  She soon built up a following of over 1400 engaged friends.

But there are limitations of what you can effectively share on Facebook. Charan wanted a way to bring out more of the depth of her business.  She felt like YouTube videos would be a perfect match.

Knowing her audience, she put together a fun and helpful video that would appeal to conscious parents.  It’s called Bursting the Bubble on Infections.  Here it is:

The Results of Fun and Meaningful Marketing

Because it spoke to her audience of conscious parents, Charan’s video went viral through her Facebook connections.  The video had over 375 views in it’s first 48 hours.

Charan’s business continues to grow.  She’s been invited to numerous radio shows and recently was a presenter at her first telesummit (The Enlightened Mom’s Summit).  Her colleagues and potential clients are coming to her with questions related to health, genetics and conception.  Charan’s having FUN with all this growing recognition.

If you’d like to see her in action on Facebook, click here.

3 Ways to Increase Your Marketing Effectiveness

1) Get clear on who you can best serve. All effective marketing is built on this understanding.

2) Find a way to connect with more of this audience. Charan didn’t wait around for people to find her.  She actively joined the energy psychology and spiritual community on Facebook.  Figure out who your audience is and then join the party! 

3) Make sure your passion for this audience comes through in everything you do. If you’re having trouble letting that passion show, that’s a mindset issue.  Get some help clearing these limitations or they will sabotage your success.

Though these strategies sound simple, most spirit based entrepreneurs aren’t using them.  If your business growth has been stagnant, I’d encourage you to take an honest look at how you can implement more of these foundations.

Update on 5/31/2011: Charan’s video now has close to 2,000 views and yesterday she received this message from Dr. Christine Northrup:  “This video is wonderful.  And medically accurate.  It’s also done very, very gentle and respectably.  I will share it!  Thank you!!”

What’s worked for you in terms of creating fun, meaningful and effective marketing?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the form of a comment below.

Credit: Ron Almog

So you met with this wonderful potential client.  They “get” what you do and they understand how you could help them.  You’ve talked about working together, the number of sessions it’s going to take and the fee for your services.

And then .. NOTHING.  Or one of those “it’s not the right time” or “I just don’t have the money” emails.

What do you do when they’re not ready to buy yet?

Remember Your Center

This can be quite hard on your ego.   It’s easy to question yourself or the viability of your business.  Negative money feelings can creep in.  There’s often a vibrational plunge.

(Maybe I’ve been down this path once or twice?  )

As a person on a conscious path, now is the time to remember that you are more than your ego.  And, it’s time to open up your spiritual toolkit, find a centering tool that feels like a good fit and USE it.

Look at Your Follow-up System

After recentering, many clients facing this situation ask: “Should I contact them?”

If you’re asking this question, it probably means you’re not clear about your follow-up system.  Give yourself the gift of not having to go through this soul searching ever time someone doesn’t sign up.

Instead, be proactive.  For instance, I developed a simple process for my free chats.  First, someone contacts me via email with a “short summary” of their situation.  If it feels like a potential fit, we set up a chat.  If not, I refer them on.

In the free chat, I have several questions I’ve developed that help me quickly get a sense of their situation.  Being asked insightful questions also increases the feeling of trust that your potential clients have for you.

Then, within 48 hours after the chat, I send a 2-3 paragraph email that does 3 things:

1. Appreciate them for making the time to chat
2. Summarize their current situation and what they want to change
3. Remind them of specific action I recommend (i.e. sign up for coaching group)

This simple system raised my conversation rate by more than 20%.

Give Them Something to Climb

Lastly, it’s important to recognize that many spiritual entrepreneurs don’t have enough steps between “stranger” and “paying client”.

For instance, imagine a beautiful 2 story office building.  On the first floor are a waiting room, some bathrooms and the cafeteria.  All the important stuff is on the second floor.

Now imagine there was no elevator or stairs to help someone get from the first floor to the second.  In this situation, very few people would get to the good stuff.

Instead, give your prospects enough steps to make getting to the next floor easy.  I do this through blogging, my newsletter, social media and free presentations.

Through “try before you buy” strategies like these, you can relax into the knowledge that you will grow the relationships with people who aren’t quite ready to buy yet.  Many of these people will become paying clients – if they get a better view of your great offerings.

What have you found to be helpful when someone isn’t ready to buy from you yet?  What questions do you still have?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the form of a comment below.

Several people have already written good posts summarizing the conference.  Two I recommend are Mei Mei Fox’s  Social Media + Mindfulness = Infectious Enlightenment and Beth Kanter’s Wisdom 2.0: Living Consciously in a Connected World.

Given that you all are passionate about conscious business and success, I wanted to share with you some of the more surprising messages we heard from leaders at companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zappos, and the like.

Here are the 3 Most Surprising Success Lessons From the Wisdom 2.0 Conference:

1) Inside factors contribute twice as much to success. Meng Tan of Google is a software engineer turned “jolly good fellow”.  Really – that’s what his business card reads.  Meng qouted research that says our Emotional Intelligence skills are twice as important to long term success as our outer skills.  Google created their School of Personal Growth because it’s good for business.

While few would deny that having strong career skills are important, it’s easy in the daily shuffle of our work lives to treat Emotional Intelligence as a luxury.  Meng and other conscious business leaders reminded us that it deserves priority treatment.

Tony Hsieh

2) High touch is more effective than high tech. Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos, a company that does more than $1 Billion per year of online shoe and apparel sales.  He told us that the most effective sales technology that Zappos uses is “the telephone”.  According to Tony, too many businesses get lost in the shiny new technologies of our age and forget to build “genuine emotional connections” with their customers.

The Wisdom 2.0 panelists reminded us that technology is just a means to connect with more people.  They advised us to treat every interaction – each phone call, tweet or web page – as an opportunity to build heart to heart connections with real people.  “High touch is more important than high tech” is Tony’s motto.

3) The most important connection is the one with yourself. Tami Simon is the founder of Sounds True.  During a panel called Wisdom Teaching in the Internet Age, she said, “The most important connection with technology is the one with yourself.”

Tami spoke very candidly about the tendency to “reach for the Blackberry” when we’re feeling nervous or down.  Instead of going for that momentary rush of an email or Facebook update, take a moment to notice your emotional state.  I came away from the conference with a deep commitment to notice my inner state before I push the send button.

If you weren’t able to attend the conference live, all of the sessions were video taped and will be posted for free over the next few weeks at the Wisdom 2.0 site.

Is Twitter a waste? Can you really attract awesome clients on Facebook? How come some people seem to get BIG results from social media marketing and others don’t?

Attract More Clients With Humor

Remember when Grandma told you that you attract more flies with honey than vinegar? I’d like to suggest that FUN is a form of online honey. Let’s take a look at two very successful people and how they use humor as a client attraction tool.

Humor as a Shoe Magnet

Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos.com, a online shoe company that sells over $1 billion per year. And, he’s proud of being a little weird. In fact, he’s such a strong believer in fun as a business strategy that one of Zappos’ 10 Core Values is “Create Fun and A Little Wierdness.”

As I write this post, Tony is listed as having almost 1.7 million followers on Twitter – that’s a LOT of free attention. To give you a sense of Tony’s sense of humor, today he Tweeted:

Hosted screaming contest w/ 120 kids of employees. In other news, stores report an unexplained increase in sales of Excedrin.

In total, 499 of Zappos’s 1400 employees are on Twitter to date. While no employee is forced to tweet, the company actually gives classes on Twitter success. Humor is an integral part of what they are taught.

The Vibration of Laughter

That’s fine for the CEO of a $1 Billion dollar a year company Paul. But, most of you are coaches, healers or small business owners of one kind or another. How could you have more fun in your marketing and survive?

Jeanette Maw is a Law of Attraction coach that charges $350 per session and is booked solid. You’d think that a Master coach with a global business is pretty serious, right?

Let’s take a look. Recently on Facebook, Jeanette posted:

Nice. Just left the office to go eat breakfast and realized I already have. When did THAT happen? Hope it was good. Maybe I should practice more “presencing” today. Ha!

If you follow Jeanette on social media or listen to one of her teleclasses, you’ll soon realize that FUN is one of the reasons that people are lining up to work with her.

3 Ways to Use Fun to Attract More Clients

1) If you’re going to make fun of anyone, make it yourself. Unless you’re a budding political satirist, it’s much safer to stick to poking fun at yourself.  Even comments made in jest can unintentionally alienate your prospects.  Jeanette is a master at laughing at her own humaness in a very attractive way.

2) Notice the idiosyncrasies of your field. EFT and meridian tapping, for instance, is weird looking stuff – there’s plenty of material for comedy routines here.  People in your field will love it if you help them find and celebrate your common weirdness.

3) Connect up with other humor magnets. One of the secrets to my practice going from zero to global in 15 months is that early on I got good at finding other people on social media who were fun to play with.  Sharing good times and field specific humor with other leaders in your niche build your esteem in a very natural way.  Even though your not in high school anymore, who doesn’t want to play with the cool kids?

Though grandma grew up BF (Before Facebook), she still knew that vinegar wasn’t going to catch many paying customers. Perhaps it’s time for a little more fun in your social media presence. After all, it only costs a smile.

Is your content inspiring?

These free things that you offer to inspire someone into becoming a paying client are called content.  You only have to offer free content if you want paying clients.

5 Tips for Creating Inspired Content

I assume if you’re still reading this that you: 1) want paying clients and 2) are open to offering great content.  The question becomes, how do you regularly come up with content that inspires people to say our 6 favorite words, “Do you have room for me?”

When you put 6 vibrant spiritual people on a question like this, you get some high vibrational answers.  Thanks to the members of the Thursday Mastermind group for 5 Tips for Creating Inspired Content:

1) Increase the number of juicy connections in your life. Carolyn Myss said, “We evolve at the rate of the tribe we are plugged into.”  If you want to create highly attractive stuff, it’s a good idea to have plenty of affirming and creative people in your life.   Social media sites are one place to find LOTS of these kinds of connections.

2) Practice mindfulness in your everyday life. Reality check – a thriving conscious business doesn’t mean you only practice spirituality during business hours.  When you start appreciating your everyday life more, you will naturally start to notice inspiring imagery more often.

3) Believe that you have valuable things to share. There are things that you know that others don’t but want to.  Use your spirituals tools to clear the self-negating voices in your head that tell you that you don’t know enough.  As you clear these limiting messages, you’ll be able to share what you DO know in increasingly inspiring ways.

4) Use your FUN voice. For millennia, the best spiritual teachers have always had a sparkle in their eye.  Your prospective clients don’t want to hear from a mindless (or worse yet, grumpy) robot.  They want to hear from a unique, vibrant human being.  Preferably one wearing a smile.

5) Consciously eat inspired content by others. Almost every spiritual tradition counsels us to stop and appreciate before we eat.  With that same sacred intention, regularly find and enjoy tasty content that other people create.  Don’t limit yourself to only your field of interest – a diverse diet of sacred stuff is good for the soul.

Inspiration is a natural outgrowth of a strong  energetic foundation.  These 5 tips will support you in creating the kind of free content that will allow you to attract more business in a relaxed way.

I’d love to hear any additional tips or thoughts you have in the form of a comment below.  Thanks for reading!

The result of this work is that the word “STRESS” is now a part of our everyday vocabulary.  We have begun to understand the effect of stress on our physical and emotional well-being and it’s a topic of conversations everywhere.

Success and Your Wiring

In January 2010, the well known business blogger Seth Godin wrote a post called Quieting the Lizard Brain.  This was one of the first popular acknowledgments of the role our nervous system has in success.

As a reader of this blog, you know that what’s happening in your mind and spirit effects your success profoundly. So before you rush off to that latest training in how to grow your business (even the one that I’m offering), let’s take a look at the three parts of the human brain and what they mean for your success.

It’s All About Survival: The Lizard Brain

Right where your skull meets your spine, sits the oldest part of your brain.  It’s concerned with the basics like eating, mating, and avoiding getting killed.  It is wired for strong emotions like fear and rage. When it’s activated, it takes over everything.

When a person or a team is being run in this manner, they tend to be guarded, reactive and resistant to new ideas.  Change and challenges are cause for great alarm and often lead to attacking whoever brought them into awareness.  Do I have to say more about what this means for success seekers?

Placating Heirarchy: The Dog Brain

The next part of the brain is the cerebellum or mammalian brain.  We’ll call it the Dog Brain.  It’s organized around repeating pleasure and avoiding pain.

When the dog brain is leading, choices are focused on social acceptance and placating hierarchy.  Decisions tend to focus on things like what to wear (the blue or black suit?) to fit in and how to keep up a level of performance that is acceptable to others.   While there’s lots of talk about excellence and innovation in business, the reality is that dog brain thinking is the norm in most organizations and the people who work in them.

Engage and Innovate: The Human Brain

The most optimistic part of all this brain stuff is that researchers like Stephen Porges say that we are hard-wired to connect, engage and innovate.  This is the cortex, our very human brain.  It’s our natural state, how we are born into the world.  However, it gets trampled under stress by the earlier part of the brain parts.

When a person or a team is operating from the neocortex, engagement is natural (scientists call it “social engagement mode”) and innovating together so obvious it’s like talking to a fish about water.  With corporate values like “Embrace and Drive Change” and “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness”, Zappos is my favorite example of a highly successful business operating from this consciousness.  When this part of your brain is in charge, you will naturally find yourself co-creating innovative and valuable solutions.   This is the key to effortless success.

Neuro-tech: The Technology of the Future

Later this month, I’ll be joining key players from companies like Google, Twitter, Zappos and Facebook at a conference called Wisdom 2.0.  The conference is focused on the need for mindful use of today’s technology.  Today’s leading edge companies know that in a noisy market place, getting anyone to listen to your message requires RELATIONSHIP and ENGAGEMENT.

Many of you know I’m a big fan of energy psychology tools like EFT to create this foundation for success.  My friend Soren Gordhamer, organizer of Wisdom 2.0, teaches mindfulness practices for this purpose.  There are many ways of activating this neurology.  The one thing that tends not to work is ignoring it.  That’s a strategy best left to the lizards.

In addition to being a remarkable book, there has been a very high level of interest in the book. Recently, the Social Media Examiner did an interview with Seth where he describes how he created this “firestorm” of interest using social media. It’s a great example of how authentic engagement leads to big results.  Click here to read the interview.

So you have decided that for you, Right Livelihood means offering the world your heart based services.  You know that in order for you to serve the world, the world has to know you exist. Your task is to help people to find out about your work in a spiritually aligned way.  What’s the best way to do this?

Get Familiar With the Menu

What’s the first thing that they do once you have settled in at a good restaurant?   After you have a glass of wine or sparkling water in your hand, your server goes through the menu with you.  They give you a sense of each dish available and what it’s key flavors are.

Too many new entrepreneurs approach their online marketing decisions like fast food.  Your spiritual business is SACRED – it’s way too important for this grab it and go approach!

So before you jump onto the latest online marketing craze, I want to invite you take a deep breath and join me for a relaxed look at the 7 Most Powerful Marketing Strategies for Spiritual People:

1) A Dynamic Website

You may have heard the term “Web 2.0″.  What is it?  The key word is INTERACTIVE.  Instead of just an online version of a brochure (my name is Paul, these are my services, here’s how to contact me, etc), a dynamic website is always growing and changing. You add information about upcoming events, have questionnaires, and give people who visit your site a chance to comment on what’s there.

The Inner Skills: On an energetic level, a successful dynamic website is created through an attitude of ongoing service, clarity about your purpose and a willingness to authentically present yourself.

The Outer Skills: Success means adding new content over time and basic website management skills.

Spiritual Example: The Wisdom 2.0 Summit site.

2) Social Media Marketing

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past 5 years, you’ve heard about the recent boom in social media sites.  For instance, Facebook just passed Google in number of regular visitors in the US.  In social media marketing, you connect with people on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and combine genuine relationship building with authentic marketing.

The Inner Skills: For social media success, you need a mindset of authentic interest in others, deep listening and clarity about your business.

The Outer Skills: Strong writing, time management, and community organizing skills will go a long way towards social media marketing success.

Spiritual Example: Deepak Chopra on Facebook.

3) Blogging/Vlogging

Blogging is simply an online journal about a topic that you are interested.  It can be in written or video form (known as vlogging).  With this strategy, you share the latest in your topic area as well as helpful thoughts in the field.  You also have the option of having your readers add their thoughts in the form of comments.

The Inner Skills: Good writing (or video) skills plus passion for and clarity about your topic are the foundations of success.

The Outer Skills: You need to know your topic area and know the technology of creating and maintaining a blog.  You also want to have the relationships that allow you to stay current with what’s happening in your field.

Spiritual Example: Law of Attraction Coach Jeanette Maw’s blog.

4) Video Marketing

Video is becoming increasingly important on the web.  Youtube is best known video sharing site, but many others exist.  In video marketing you use the medium of video to share your passion and your knowledge about your topic.

The Inner Skills: Video requires a high level of comfortable with being “out there”.

The Outer Skills: Producing and editing video, presentation skills, lighting.

Spiritual Example: EFT and LOA Coach Brad Yates’ Youtube Channel.

5) Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a fancy way to say people telling their friends about your business.  It usually involves sharing something of high value for free with the intention of inspiring people to share with friends and colleagues.

The Inner Skills: Solid belief in what you offer and the skill to share it a way that stands out from the crowd.

The Outer Skills: You need to produce good content and package it in a professional way.

Here’s a link to 47 Examples of Viral Marketing success.

6) Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the first forms of online marketing.  Though it’s influence is declining, it still can be a powerful marketing strategy.  As the spiritual business owner, you inspire people to share their email with you by offering a free ebook and/or a great newsletter.  Then, you send regular emails with tips, updates and information about your area of expertise as well as relevant information about your services.

The Inner Skills: Authenticity and ability to transmit your passion in words.

The Outer Skills: Strong copywriting skills and technology skills such as autoresponders and email management programs.

Spiritual Example: Attraction Diva Jen Blackert has built an email list of 10,000′s.

7) Organic Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves the appropriate and deliberate use of deliberate keywords in a natural way in the text of your website.  You do this so that search engines like Google and Yahoo will list your site towards the top of the list when someone does a search for keywords related to your business.

The Inner Skills: Clarity.  Clarity.  More Clarity!

The Outer Skills: Keyword research skills and strong language skills.

Example: One company’s results with SEO.

I hope this post has given you a sense of what main marketing options are available to you.  No one is going to be an expert in them all – I usually recommend to new clients to look for 2-3 to start with.  Then, we come up with a custom plan to combine them in synergistic ways.  That’s a topic for another blog post.  In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions in the form of a comment below.

On one level, the answer is – it DEPENDS.  On who you want to connect with.  A computer programmer looking for a tech job wants a different network than a crystal wielding new age healer seeking more clients.   It’s like that old saying grandma used to say, “Different channels for different folks.”

Most of the readers of this blog are coaches, therapists, consultants and healers of one variety or another looking for more clients.  Practicing what I preach, I recently asked the question “What’s the best social network?” to energy psychology fans on a number of social networks.  The results were clearer than a healing stone.

Facebook is the SECOND Best Social Network

The always lighthearted EFT and LOA guru Brad Yates immediately chimed in, “The Energy field”.   This lead to a number of comments like this one from EFT practitioner Jade Barbee:

Right now, Facebook feels best.  But, I echo what’s been said – the woo hoo freakin’ energy field is where it’s at.  

As someone who is not ADHD enough for Twitter, I really Like Facebook the most!  It goes at my pace. Yet I can reach enough people should I desire to do so.

Coach and Law of Attraction fan Terry Marquez Wildemann had this insightful comment:

I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.  I prefer Facebook because it’s so visual and easy to use.  Linkedin would be my second choice. I was super active on Twitter and over the last few months am on maybe once a week. I was recently told by a marketing guru that the life span of your average twitter person is about 3 months.

Facebook is the Largest, Most Fun and Effective

As has already been said, Facebook is the easiest social networking site to make sense of visually.  It’s also full of fun and high energy people – there are currently over 400 million people on Facebook.  You can find wonderful people to support your success goals no matter what they are.

Like anything else, there are strategies that are more and less effective on Facebook.  I’m curious – what has your experience been with Facebook?   What questions do you have about how to attract more of what you want there?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the form of a comment below.  Happy manifesting!