There are a number of misconceptions people have about marketing that makes it hard for them to get results. In the SOS 4 Your Business
in Business Blog Talk radio show I discussed them with host Yvonne McCoy.

Topics discussed were:

• not putting all your marketing eggs in one basket
• using the marketing medium your customers use
• having a marketing message geared to your audience
• marketing is usually a long-term strategy – you’re a farmer not a hunter
• and more

Listen to the replay of the show at SOS 4 Your Business or here by pressing play below.

Follow the money

First, you need to measure your money. Are your books up-to-date? Bookkeeping isn’t just for tax time. You need to keep them current so you can predict cash flow and see what products and services are profitable.

Cash flow is obvious, but looking at what areas are profitable is just as important. I knew one business owner who upon looking closer at his books, realized his best selling product was actually losing him money.

While the direct cost of the product was less than the selling price, the cost of servicing it meant he actually lost about $100 per unit. By eliminating that one product, although his total sales went down, his profits shot way up.

Do you know what products or services are most profitable? Look at your books. If you’re not sure how to determine profitability, ask your bookkeeper or accountant.

What’s your web traffic?

Measuring your web traffic is another important measurement to track. You need to know how many people are visiting your site, how many are subscribing to your RSS feed, how long people are staying, where those people are coming from (did they find you on Google, from Facebook, from someone else’s site), and what pages they’re looking at. You also need to track trends from month to month. Knowing whether traffic is increasing or decreasing is more important than total numbers.

Google Analytics can tell you what keywords people are using to find your site. This can help you figure out what type of blog posts to write, what kinds of headlines you should have, and even insight into new products.

Social Media stats

Social media stats are somewhat misleading and difficult to measure. Having a large number of connections, doesn’t necessarily mean your social media efforts are profitable. You can have a large number of followers but if they never engage with you or take action, they’ll do you no good.

Also, you can’t get a straight measurement of profitability. If you run a Google Adwords campaign, you know how much you paid per click and what percentage of people bought your product. You can tell right away whether this campaign is worth your time and money.

With social media, it’s occasionally very direct. For example, recently I made a post to LinkedIn. About 10 minutes later I got a message through LinkedIn from a colleague asking if I do training on marketing with Facebook. I was floored because I thought he knew what I do. After a brief meeting over coffee, I ended up with a $1,000 client.

However, most social media efforts are much less obvious. For example, I know before I do business with someone I check out their social media profiles. I always check out their LinkedIn profile and look closely at their testimonials. However, they may not be aware that I did this, nor how much of an impact that had on my decision.

Likewise, I often see people follow me on Twitter, then connect on Facebook, then sign up for my email newsletter. Later when they become a customer, how much of that business can be attributed to social media? I would never have made the sale if they weren’t on my email list, but they never would have been there in the first place if not for social media.

Your challenge

My challenge to you is to check your stats this week.

1. Get your books up-to-date if they aren’t already. Then notice which products are most profitable. Are there ways you can increase sales of these products?

2. Check out the traffic to your website. Has it increased or decreased from last month? Where is that traffic coming from? What keywords are people using to find you? If you’re getting a lot of traffic from one source, look for ways to get even more. For example, if Facebook is sending a lot of people to your website, vow to spend an extra hour this week on Facebook. If you don’t already have Google Analtyics set up on your website or blog, make that your first priority.

3. Notice whether any of your customers are connected with you on social media. If there’s one site that is working particularly well, spend an hour this week working on planning ways to be even more effective on this site and how to engage with your connections.

Finally, put a reminder in your calendar to do this check each month. You can set up a recurring appointment with yourself to monitor your progress. After all, if you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Do you monitor your stats regularly? How has that helped your business? Or are you a seat-of-the-pants kind of person? Please leave a comment and share your story.

Step 1. Know where you are now

You can’t achieve anything until you know where you are now so pull up some stats. Print out your financial statement for the first six months of the year.

What? You haven’t done your books for this year because you just finished last year’s taxes? Then you need to take a step back and do step 0 – get your bookkeeping up-to-date! The first rule of business is manage your money!

Next, look at your RSS subscribers, your email newsletter list, daily/monthly visitors to your website or blog, your Facebook friends and likes to your page, your Twitter followers, your LinkedIn connections and what other stats are important to you. Record them on your calendar so you have a measuring stick to go by.

Step 2 Review your goals

Pull out your 2011 goals from January and see how close you are to achieving them. Are there goals that are no longer relevant? Are there some that you’ve already reached? Are some right on track? Celebrate your successes. Treat yourself to a glass of wine at your favourite restaurant or a new pair of shoes. Pat yourself on the back for things that are right on track and plan to continue what you’re doing. For things that aren’t working, congratulate yourself for noticing. Now figure out what you need to change to get back on track to achieving your goals. For goals that are no longer relevant, write some new ones.

If you neglected to create goals for 2011, now’s the perfect time to start. Or if your goals no longer feel right, let’s create some new ones. You’re in business so I suggest you pick a target of how much money you want to earn by the end of the year. Or, it could be a monthly amount you want to achieve by December.

Next, break that goal into smaller chunks. If you’ve set an income target, how will you get there? Do you need 15 new customers by the end of December? Do you need 15 new customers each month? Figure out what you need and write them down – set intermediary goals. For example, if you need 15 new customers by December 31^st, set a goal of 7 by September 30^th. Are you planning to launch a new product? Set a launch date now.

Step 3 Review your marketing

Next, decide what marketing you will do to achieve your goals? Are you ramping up what’s worked in the past or trying something new? Ideally you should be doing both. Create a marketing calendar with your plans for the next 6 months. Make sure to include at least one thing that makes you a little uncomfortable. In my experience, it’s when I step outside my comfort zone that I get great results.

Step 4 – Tell someone

Having someone act as an accountability partner will help you achieve your goals more quickly. It’s the secret of most successful business people. My natural inclination is that I need to do everything myself – if I need help I’m not an entrepreneur, or I’m weak. And I’ve seen that same sentiment in far too many other business people. But it’s a myth that any successful person did it all alone. The real secret of success is knowing when to ask for help.

So find someone you trust to help keep you on track. It could be a coach or it could be another business person. It’s doesn’t matter – just find someone to share your goals with who is willing to meet regularly to help keep your feet to the fire.

Step 5 – Take action today!

An imperfect plan implemented today will always beat a perfect plan that’s perfect in every way but never sees the light of day. So take one action step today towards achieving your goals. Then take another tomorrow. And the next. And so on until before you know it it’s December 31^st and you can be proud of what you’ve accomplished.

Andrea J. Stenberg

My goals for the second half of 2011 include publishing The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur’s Guide to Marketing with Twitter as well launching a new Facebook marketing audio course and a joint venture project that should be completed soon.

Please leave a comment and share your goals or an action you took today.

What did he mean? You don’t have to be the best to be successful. The people who get ahead don’t worry about being perfect. They get off their butts, take action and get their products to market.

So here are my thoughts on why imperfect execution is better than perfect planning

Work your plan

While I’m the first one to tell you that planning is important, I know that too often planning can be a form of procrastination. Rather than getting down to the work, you keep tweaking the plan. Get a plan in place and start working it. Over time you can tweak the plan as you see what works and what doesn’t.

Beating the competition

How many times have you seen a competitor release a new product that is just like the brilliant idea you had a year ago but is still in the planning stages? Don’t you kick yourself when that happens? I know I have. Let’s learn from our mistakes; when you have a brilliant idea quickly create a plan then work on execution so that someone else doesn’t beat you to the punch.

Get results now

Customers don’t buy your plan. People have to know how to buy from you, so make it easy. A less-than-perfect sales page, advertisement, or social media campaign will get infinitely more results than that piece of paper with your plan on it that never gets implemented. Whatever method you choose to market with, get on with it. You’ll get better as you go.

You can do better?

How many times have you seen somebody else’s product, read somebody else’s book, or been to somebody else’s seminar and thought to yourself “I can do better than that”? Well if you really can do better, prove it! Nothing is perfect. If those less-than-perfect competitors are selling, get off your butt and get your better product out there too.

You’ll feel better

You’ll feel better. Seriously. That frustration you feel every time you look at your plan but don’t see any forward action will go away. Sure you may feel some trepidation, some nerves, as you get started. But as Dale Carnegie said: “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence encourage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”

So if you have some new product that has been sitting in the back your mind, or new marketing strategy you been planning to attempt, quick tweaking the plan! Go out and get busy.

One of the things I do is use binders. Each project has its own binder, as does planning. This has been a relatively useful way to keep track of ongoing work (when the labels don’t fall off the binders).

New ideas were little harder to track. For a while I was doing the Post-it note method. Every time I got a new idea I’d write it on a Post-it note and stick it up on the wall next to my desk.

This didn’t work for two reasons. One, after a while the Post-it notes just became visual noise; I just didn’t see them anymore. The second reason is the mental clutter they caused me. Although I can block out the content on the Post-it notes, I still knew they were there. Although I wasn’t consciously aware of it, it was causing me constant stress.

I moved away from the Post-it notes to whiteboards. Now whenever a garden idea I could just write it on the whiteboard. The nice thing about the whiteboard is it’s one continual surface so it’s less visually cluttering than Post-its.

However, the whiteboard method isn’t perfect either. It’s great for recording an idea as it occurs to me, but what do I do later? Eventually the whiteboard gets full. I needed some way to deal with the ideas.

Then I thought about Microsoft OneNote. This is a software program that comes as part of Microsoft office. I knew it was part of the package but hadn’t looked at it. Last week I decided to open it and take a look. I’m glad I did.

OneNote is designed for the entrepreneurial ADD brain. You can have different folders for different projects, and different pages in each folder. You’re not stuck to writing an orderly fashion as you would be in a word document; you can put notes anywhere on the page. You can import PDFs or JPEG’s; you can even add audio. You can also hyperlink between different factions within OneNote.

This has been a really freeing tool for me since I started using it. I’m able to take pieces off my whiteboard that I want to implement, and create a kind of plan. As I get new information, new details, new action items to add to this plan, they’re easy to add with OneNote.

When the things that held me back from using OneNote is the fact that I don’t always do my planning and brainstorming sitting at my desk. In fact, I often find it is better for me to leave my office entirely when doing brainstorming. Additionally, I have both a desktop and a laptop machine. I was worried about not having my OneNote document on the correct machine.

Then I had a brainstorm. I’ve been using Dropbox to share documents with customers and colleagues. Why not use it to share my OneNote between computers?

That’s what I’ve done. So now I’m using my whiteboard to record ideas that pop up when I’m in the middle of another task. Then, at a later time, I can take these ideas and add them to my OneNote document. Now I can access this document regardless of which computer I’m using. (If you’d like to see how to add OneNote to Dropbox read this blog post on RetroHack)

Andrea J. Stenberg

Have you been using OneNote in your business? Please leave a comment and tell us how you use this piece of software,

1. Choose Your Sessions

Unlike some conferences, at Podcamp you didn’t have to register for individual sessions ahead of time. Even so, I spend a good bit of time looking over the sessions and the speakers. Before I got there I had a list I really wanted to attend.

However, I didn’t carve that list in stone. I know from past experience that sometimes the best sessions are not the ones I was expecting. So I kept my ears open. There were a couple of sessions I attended solely because some else said the speaker rocked. In each case, they were right. Being flexible about the sessions made for a better weekend.

2. Plan Who To Meet

Registration for Podcamp is public – you name goes on a wiki when you register. There was also a LinkedIn group and Twitter hash tags for the event. In spite of this, I didn’t see anyone who I really felt I needed to meet.

However, I didn’t just throw up my hands. I decided one of my goals for the weekend was to meet five interesting people who I would want to contact later and continue the conversations we had.

Setting this goal was very important for me. Although many people who know me personally may not realize this, I’m actually very shy. My natural inclination is to sit in the back of the room and not speak to anyone unless they speak first.

But setting this goal of people to meet forced me out of my shell. Whenever I sat next to someone, if they looked at all friendly, I started talking: about the speaker, about the weekend, about the weather. It didn’t really matter, it was just to start the connection.

The net result, I have eight people I want to keep in touch with. Not only that, one of those people has already contacted me.

3. Go with a Friend

While attending on your own is okay, going with a partner is even better. There were several times during the weekend when there were sessions occurring simultaneously that I wanted to attend. Going with my friend meant we could see more sessions and compare notes later.

I also got to meet more people than I would have on my own. My friend ran into a couple of women she knew from social media and introduced me. I was able to introduce her to others as well. Being a tag-team meant we could get more out of the weekend.

4. Be Social

Most conferences have some sort of social event – cocktail hour, drinks in the pub, a coffee corner. Go to them! This is usually where the best networking takes place. You can sit down and have a longer conversation than you can between sessions. And because these parts of the conference involve food and drink, everyone is more relaxed. There is something innately human about connecting over a meal.

Remember my comment about being shy? Social events are where having a buddy can really help. I might not (probably not) have attended on my own, but for us shy types, there is strength in numbers. It’s a lot easier to join a group having a conversation when you’re not on your own.

Additionally, because we each have different interests and met different people during the day, we were able to introduce each other to new people in the evening.

5. Implement

While there are many reasons to attend a conference, learning something is usually a main one. But sitting in a lecture or workshop doesn’t do you any good if all you do is take notes. When you get home you need to actually implement some of what you learned.

You don’t have to do it all at once. In fact, you may need a few days just to process what you learned. Reread your notes, debrief with your conference buddy, monitor the conference hash tags to see what others thought, write a blog post. It doesn’t matter what you do, just make sure you spend some time to absorb the material.

Once you’ve decompressed, pick the best and add them to your business. Even if it’s only one or two things, commit to implementing them. It could be adding a new plug-in for your web browser or it could be an entirely new marketing system. It doesn’t matter. Just pick one and vow to add it to what you do. You spent the time and money to attend the conference. Get some ROI on that investment.

6. Follow Up

If you collected some business cards from some interesting people, don’t let them gather dust in the corner of your office. Plan to spend some time in the first few days after you get home connecting. At the very minimum, follow everyone you met on Twitter. If they were interesting enough for you to grab their business card or write down their Twitter I.D., surely they’re worth following on Twitter.

Next, visit their website. Find out a little more about who they are and what they do. You don’t need to check out everyone, just the handful you know you want to stay in touch with.

Finally, in the first week after the conference, make that first real connection. Send them an email, invite them to connect on LinkedIn or pick up the phone. It doesn’t matter. If you had one real conversation with this person make the first move. Trust me, so few people do it, you’ll stand out from the crowd.

Of course, I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will just in case. Don’t send them a sales pitch. Just a brief “nice to meet you”, a reminder of what you talked about and maybe a link to a resource or blog post (by someone else) you think they might find helpful. You started a conversation at the conference. Now you’re trying to keep it going. Later, once they’ve had time to really get to know, like and trust you, is when you can move on to the sales conversation.

If you follow my conference plan, you should get a lot of value out of the next event you attend.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Have you been to a conference lately? What did you take home from the event? How did you ensure to meet the right people? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

On the plus side, this was three weeks BEFORE my warranty ran out. When was the last time you ever heard of that happening? I thought they were designed to break three weeks after! Not only that, but about a month ago I had purchased an external hard drive and had been backing up my data. I should have everything I need.

The downside is by the time I send the laptop off to Dell, they fix it and send it back, it will have been at least two weeks. I can’t run my business without a computer for that long.

As a result, Friday was one of the most stressful days I’ve had in a long time. By the end of my marathon session with tech support, my brains were melting out of my ears. All I was good for was having a nice glass of red and watching truly mindless t.v. Anything with a plot was beyond me.

I didn’t want to go out and buy a new computer; I’d have my old one back probably better than new in a few weeks. Not to mention I had not budgeted for a major purchase right now.

Guess all my brains hadn’t leaked out my ears because I made a few quick phone calls and found some friends who had some spare hardware I could borrow. It pays to have geek friends.

I picked up the parts, put them together and after a full day of geekiness by my husband, we got the borrowed computer up and running. Then I saw the problem. The borrowed machine had only 300 megabytes of RAM. My laptop had 2 gigabytes and I still found it too slow. I tend to have at minimum four or five programs running at any time. The loaner couldn’t cut it. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I could load Office onto the thing at all, never mind some of the more memory intensive programs.

After another sleepless night I looked at my husband. I needed a new computer now. Monday morning we headed off to the store, looked at a few machines and bought the cheapest one that had everything I need.

Now it was time to set it up. I had to clear space on my desk for a 20” monitor! Wow – so much bigger than the laptop screen. Then figure out how to get all the cables attached. Then boot it up.

Next, I had to figure out how to navigate Windows 7 (the laptop was still on XP). It’s amazing how much any change to a computer slows you down. Even the new keyboard is causing me troubles. A few items are just not quite right and I’m always hitting the wrong key.

Then came the time to start reloading software. It took almost a day and a half to download new versions of stuff like Tweet Deck and Firefox and install everything. My husband worked like a dog and was able to save my email address book. But my saved messages are still unreachable as are my calendar appointments. Don’t know if I’ll ever get them all. Still don’t have all my bookmarks from Firefox, although I’d been saving most of them to Delicious so that shouldn’t be too bad.

How to Avoid this Mess in the Future

While I had been doing some things right, I hadn’t really planned properly to protect myself. As a result of my failure to plan, I’ve lost three full days of work and still have some catching up to do. However it could have been worse. Here’s my disaster prevention plan for the future.

Two computers

While buying the new computer very nearly caused me to have a heart attack when I heard the total bill, it is the smartest thing I’ve done. Once I get the laptop back I will have two computers that are fully functional for my business. The odds that both crash as the same time are slim so next time this happens I’ll be able to keep working without a major disruption.

Better backup – Automate everything

While I did have the external hard drive, it still isn’t quite good enough, so I plan to build is some redundancy to my systems. First, I’m following the advice of several people and plan to purchase an online backup system. Why? Because a hard drive can fail. Also, in the event of a fire or theft, all my equipment could end up being lost at once. An additional plus, if I’m away from home I can access my data even without my laptop. Off-site backup will ensure I am never caught out again.

The second redundancy will be to start using Google Calendar. This way all my appointments will be accessible to me any time I have an internet connection. I don’t have to give up my desktop calendar to do this: Mozilla Thunderbird has a plugin that will automatically sync the two calendars.

Third, I’m going to ensure all my bookmarks get copied to Delicious. No more lost links

Finally, I have a friend who has all his email copied to his Gmail account. This way if his email crashes he still has them saved. I’m going to ask him how he does it and start doing it myself.

Final thoughts

If you are like a lot of small business owners you aren’t fully prepared for computer catastrophe. I lost three full business days (and an entire weekend) and I had been backing up stuff. If you didn’t fully backup your computer data yesterday, you are vulnerable. If you only have one computer capable of handling the software you use, you are vulnerable. If you rely on your memory to perform backups, you are vulnerable.

Please learn from my mistakes and put systems in place today that will protect you and your business from catastrophic computer failure. Trust me, when the day comes and disaster strikes, you’ll be glad you did.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Have you ever had a computer die? How did you recover? What systems do you have in place to protect your data? Please leave a comment and share your experiences.

Table of contents for Using Google to Market Your Business

1. Using Google to Market Your Business
2. Using Google to Market Your Business Part 2: Google Analytics
3. Using Google to Market Your Business Part 4: Google Keyword tool
4. Using Google to Market Your Business Part 3: YouTube

I have to confess that I’ve been dragging my feet about using Google Analytics. Everyone was telling me how important it was but it just didn’t seem like a priority. My web hosting gives me fairly good stats on traffic, keywords people were using and the countries visitors are from. What more could Google Analytics do?

Apparently, a lot!

First you can track how many visitors came to your site, which pages they visited and how long they stayed. You can also see how these people came to your site; did they type in your URL, click a link from another site or come from a search engine.

If you notice certain sites are sending you a lot of traffic it’s worth visiting those sites to find out why. Perhaps you can do something to further encourage them to send traffic your way.

When looking at search engine traffic, you can not only see which search engines are sending you the most traffic, but also which keywords are the most common sources of traffic. Even more important, you can see which keywords sent you quality traffic. A keyword that sends a smaller number of people to your site who stay, visit a number of pages and eventually purchase is far more valuable to you than a keyword that drives tons of people to your site who take one look and then “bounce” off your site.

You can also separate paid keywords (ie Google Adwords) from organic keywords (searches). This will allow you to focus your advertising on keywords that actually lead to sales, thus reducing the amount you spend on people who don’t buy.

You can also look at the top landing pages for your site. Not everyone will arrive at your site at your home page. They may enter at any point. You can not only see which pages are the most popular entry to your site, you can see which are the most effective. If you see a popular landing page where lots of people are bouncing, you know you need to make some changes to that page to encourage people to stick around.

If you sell products from your website you can track which products are most popular, where the purchasers live and how they came to your site. This is important information to know when planning your marketing. If you know a large percentage of your customers come from Washington State you’ll want to focus your advertising there.

By tracking when and where people leave your site you can stop and rectify problems. For example, if you notice a large percentage of people are leaving mid-way through the purchase process you can revisit your process to see if it’s too difficult or not providing enough information.

The biggest problem with Google Analytics is there is almost too much data for beginners. It’s hard to know where to start and what to track. Particularly if you are just starting out in business it can seem like more trouble than it’s worth.

However, even if you’re not quite ready to take the time to learn how to use Google Analytics correctly, it’s worth putting the tracking code on your site now. That way, once you are ready to start analyzing your traffic you’ll have some history to look at.

To get started go to www.google.com/analytics and sign up. To learn more about all the different analytical tools, check out Google’s Conversion University.

Join me next week when we’ll explore Google’s keyword tools.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Are you using Google Analytics? Please leave a comment and tell us what you track and how it helps you run your business.

And although I can relive the beginning of the school vicariously through my son, I also use this time to start fresh myself. The summer is mostly over; the mornings are cooler, the leaves are starting to turn and I feel less of the urge to take off for a day at the beach.

And even though I begin each January with a new vision, goals and action plan for my business, I often also use the beginning of September as a time to take stock of where I am. Am I still on track or am I falling short? Are my goals still valid or do they still need tweaking?

The beginning of September means there’s still a third of the year left to go. Summer vacation is over and if I put my nose to the grindstone I can still accomplish a lot by Christmas.

Although I have learned the hard way that my goals and vision are not something I can write down and forget, I still need some prompting to really take a hard look at what I’m doing.

Here are some of my personal back to school activities:

1. Review my goals.  I need to took at my written goals and ask myself am I on track, are there tasks I’ve neglected, have I completed some goals, are there new priorities that should be added?

2. Review my finances. This is one area of my business that has been a trouble spot for me in the past. I have often trucked along merrily without taking a good hard look at the money side of my business. However, when I do keep my books up to date and focus on the bottom line, I find things very quickly start to look up. It really is a law of attraction thing. Turn your focus to something and you get results. So, I look closely at my financial projections and results. The more I look, the healthier things soon become.

3. Recommit to my action plan. During the summer I created a new work schedule. I commit specific days of the week for specific goals. For example, instead of writing a blog post each day, I commit one day each week to writing blog posts. This had made me much more productive because once I’m in a writing mode, I don’t have to switch gears to do something else. It also means I have to make fewer decisions. I look at the day of the week and know what tasks I need to be working on.

4. Reorganize my office. Yesterday I made my son tidy his homework space, organize his school supplies and backpack. It’s time I did the same. My office isn’t as bad as it’s once been, but it’s not perfect. From my desk I can see a sweater I haven’t worn for two months, some old bills that need filing and a curtain I purchased for my bedroom. These are all on me. However, I’ve had some help with the clutter. My father-in-law bought a bunch of books then passed them on to my husband. My husband decided I would want them (I don’t) and piled them on the couch in my office. Grrr. I have enough problem with my own clutter, I don’t need help from the rest of the family.

5. Get to work. All the planning and goal setting in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t get anything accomplished. So now I’m off to get some work done.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Do you also consider September a new beginning for your business? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts. What will you be doing this week to start the real “new” year?

Table of contents for Using a Mastermind Group

1. Using a Mastermind For Your Business
2. Using a Mastermind For Your Business – Part 2 – How to choose members

Yesterday I wrote about the benefits of being part of a mastermind group. However, any mastermind is only as strong as its members. So if you are creating (or joining an existing group) choose wisely.

How many?

Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule about what’s the optimum number for a successful mastermind group. It really depends on the group’s goals, frequency of meeting and personalities of the members. If you’re planning on meeting weekly, a group of ten may be unwieldy and take too much time for each member to get heard. However, if you have a long monthly session, a group of ten might be perfect.

For more frequent meetings, smaller is better. A mastermind of two people can be very powerful. I currently have someone who I speak with by phone twice a week. Now most of our calls are more for accountability than masterminding, which means they can be short. However, when one or both of us needs more help, we can plan longer calls to give support or brainstorm.

The advantage of a mastermind of two is also its disadvantage. Eventually you get to know each other and your businesses really well. When you have a problem, you don’t have to give much background because the other person understands your business and its history. However, because you know each other so well there’s a temptation to turn the meeting into social time. And while occasionally this is fine, you need to stick to business if you want to get results.

A larger group will give you more perspectives. When it comes to brainstorming or feedback you may get better results from having more brains to pick. The downside of a larger group is it can become unwieldy, therefore having a chair person may be a necessity. To ensure the chair doesn’t become the den mother of the group, it might be a good idea to rotate this job.

Who to invite

As I said before, a mastermind is only as strong as its members. So choose wisely.

First you want someone who is committed to their business, to improving and to the mastermind. If they’re not committed, they won’t be a regular attendee and that’s really of no value to you and the other members of the group.

They also need to be committed to helping others. You don’t want someone who is only in it for themselves. That will poison the group. But someone who will put as much energy into finding solutions for others as themselves is priceless.

Members need to be at similar levels of success. If one person is aiming to take their business from six figures to seven while another is still trying to break five, the group won’t be on a level playing field and someone will end up feeling shortchanged.

What industry the members are in doesn’t matter. In fact, having someone whose business and industry is completely different than yours can be a real asset. Blind spots you may have because “everyone does it that way” may jump out to someone outside your field. On the other hand, people in similar industries may share your problems and readily understand what you’re talking about without needing a lot of background. Ideally, you should have a nice mix of industries represented in your group.

Getting Started

Decide on your goals for the group. Are you looking for daily or weekly support with a little brainstorming or do you want less frequent, more in-depth meetings? Then choose a number you think fits your goals.

Look through your contact list for people who fit the bill. If you are planning a group of five to ten people, don’t feel you need to find them all yourself. Once you get a couple of people on board, ask them to invite suitable members.

When you have a group assembled, set up an initial meeting (by phone, Skype or in person). Introduce your ideas about how the group should function and have a discussion. Decide on frequency, length of meeting, group goals, agenda, chairperson and style of meeting.

Once you’re agreed, set a date and start masterminding.

Andrea J. Stenberg