Remarkablogger

 

 Remarkablogger Client Call - Vicki Flaugher [53:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Vicki Flaugher is a woman with a dream. She’s on a mission to help women become entrepreneurs at SmartWomanGuides.com. She knows the power of blogging. She had doing pretty well for herself, and had even caught social media maven Chris Brogan’s eye. She did what seemed appropriate: day-to-day writing of posts, taking advantage of some affiliate sales opportunities as they came up, and working with clients to help them become fully-realized businesswomen.

But she didn’t really have much of a plan for her blog or her business. There was no ultimate point towards which these activities aimed. If Vicki really wanted to help female entrepreneurs as much as possible, she needed to come up with a set of more concrete goals, like rungs in a ladder reaching up to the highest expression of her mission.

Vicki agreed to allow our call to be recorded so I can promote my blog consulting services (and by extension, SmartWomanGuides.com). You get to listen to an actual blog plan taking shape during our conversation, as I lead her through the process of creating her ultimate vision.

You can see what Vicki’s blog looked like prior to our call below. It was a standard blog template that had some good points (which Brogan liked) but it was not good for reading or navigation.

In the course of our talk, the broad vision that Vicki began to realize meant that she would need a design that brought the emerging SmarWoman brand to life and made it easier for readers to see important links to services and products.

The new design makes it easier for readers to orient themselves to important content based on why they came to the site. Many of Vicki’s readers are women who are just beginning to contemplate starting their own businesses or improving their business acumen. But the old design didn’t have a “start here” for new people.

Driving newsletter subscriptions was also identified as a much more important goal than driving RSS subscriptions, because her audience was far more likely to prefer an email subscription. There’s only so much space on the page, so newsletter subscriptions were emphasized and RSS subscriptions were de-emphasized.

This is just the first stage, as well. Development of a professional logo is also underway. Now Vicki has some pretty audacious plans for what SmartWomanGuides will become.

What we did during this call was the same thing I have been emphasizing in my recent posts about blog planning and strategy: figure out your end game, your ultimate goals, and determine the steps it would take to reach that. Try to see everything as a continuous timeline of progression starting now and leading into the the future you desire.

We did a lot of that right in the call, and it was only an hour long. At the end of the call, I gave out her next steps for detailing her plan and bringing it to life. And after the call, she did the most important thing of all: she took action and made the first steps of her plan a reality. Now she has set a chain of events in motion that will lead SmartWomanGuides.com to become a preeminent resource for women entrepreneurs.

I invite you to listen to this call and hear for yourself how I work with Vicki. Listen with your own ears how she takes my suggestions and works with them, how she figures out what she needs to do for herself as she answers my open-ended questions. Imagine yourself in Vicki’s place, getting this kind of mentoring and guidance for yourself.

You don’t have to merely imagine this kind of success. It can be yours.