Doug McIsaac

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There are very few people I know who are as knowledgeable about strategic business planning as Doug McIsaac. He's a very talented, "under the radar" expert who has a natural knack for finding simple strategies to dramatically increase your profits. Doug is my go to guy for innovative Internet Marketing ideas and I think he's crazy for sharing all of his secrets.

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Online Expert Series Week 7 – Stephanie Chandler — From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur

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Online4Offline is in the 7th week of our 12 week online marketing expert interview series. Our goal is to help you supercharge your business as we enter the last 100 days of 2008.

During this series we will introduce you to proven techniques and tools to expand your business online and offline. Our presenters will include coaches, marketing consultants, authors, software providers and other “in the trenches” entrepreneurs.

This week out guest is Stephanie Chandler. We’ll be discussing how you can use information to build you business.

Stephanie is the author of several business and marketing books including:

– From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur (John Wiley & Sons)

– The Author’s Guide to Building an Online Platform (Quill Driver)

– The Business Startup Checklist and Planning Guide (Aventine)

– Marketing Your Business Online (Stephanie Chandler Enterprises, LLC)

She is the founder of http://www.BusinessInfoGuide.com, a directory of resources for entrepreneurs and http://www.TheBusinessGrowthConnection.com, a marketing company specializing in electronic newsletters.

Join us on the call Wednesday, October 22nd at 11:00am MST / 1:00pm EST / 6:00pm BST

You can listen online: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/online4offline Or dial in (347) 945-7951

Can’t make the call? Sign up for downloads of the calls at http://www.Online4Offline.com/experts/

Asking questions

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I caught myself the other day giving my opinion on a market I really didn’t know. I was telling a gentleman some subjects that he needed to focus his energies on developing content for his market. But after I sent him the post I thought to myself…I really don’t know his market. So I resent him an e-mail explaining that I had made a mistake. A mistake that is made far too often by normally intelligent people. We feel that if we like an idea it must be the right idea.  That’s foolish and most if us do know better.  We always need to test. Repeat after me “I am NOT my market.”

I know some of you will say, “But I am the correct demographic.” You’re not, you’re too close to the decision. You can probably connect to the market and you may be correct more often than others, but you still need to test your ideas.

How do you test, it’s simple you ask questions.

But I don’t have a list. I understand, I’ve been there myself and am constantly in the same spot when I enter a new market. What do you do when you don’t have a list? Here are some ideas:

  1. Find someone that has a list and ask them to ask their list. If you present it as part of a JV offer it will work some of the time. “I’m working on a new product that I think would be a good complement to your current offerring. Would you be interested in doing a JV? I would like to start the prelaucnh by asking some questions to make sure that we’re headed the right direction”
  2. Run an AdWords campaign for your keywords and send them to a page asking them what their biggest question /challenge/concern is about your subject. George will walk you through setting up your first AdWords campaign at Online4Offline.
  3. Go to forums and look for the most common questions or make a post asking for everyone’s biggest challenge/question/concern. You may start some competition and you may find JV partners doing it in a punblic forum can be a double edged sword.
  4. Set up Google Alerts and see what others are saying about your subject.

I recommend doing a combination of these to get you closest to the correct answer.

We must ask our market what they want if we expect to be successful.