Biana Babinsky is December's Wild WE of the Month. Biana is an online business coach, who helps coaches, consultants, virtual assistants, professional organizers and other solopreneurs promote their expertise online, gain more online customers and make more money online. Go to Avocado Consulting to subscribe to her newsletter full of marketing tips and ideas.

What services do Avocado Consulting and Marketing Salad offer?

I am an online business coach and consultant, so all products and services that I offer at AvocadoConsulting.com help business owners with their online marketing. My flagship service is online business coaching. I help business owners to promote their expertise online, get more clients and make more money.

MarketingSalad.com is the web site for group online business coaching. By becoming members of MarketingSalad.com, business owners will get access to online marketing lessons, marketing teleseminars, and business coaching.

How were they born?

I have been marketing online since 1996, doing my own projects, and helping clients with web design and online marketing. At the same time, I was working as a software developer, creating web-based enterprise software for a Fortune 500 company.

September 11th prompted me to re-evaluate my career. I really enjoyed working with my clients on their projects and helping them become more successful online. I decided that I wanted to continue doing this full time. So, in 2002, I became a full time entrepreneur and AvocadoConsulting.com was born.

As AvocadoConsulting.com grew, I started getting a growing number of requests for online business group coaching. Some of my prospective clients did not want to commit to one-on-one coaching, but still wanted a place to mastermind with other business owners, and get access to teleseminars and group coaching with me. So, in 2005 I launched MarketingSalad.com to help them do just that.

I sort of really fell into it. As soon as I got online (this was back in 1994), I started to realize that this was a great new way of doing business.

Since I have a technical background, I began creating web sites and helping others with their web sites. Then my clients started asking me about marketing their web sites online, and I started doing more and more marketing.

After doing this for a while and implementing many different marketing techniques, I developed the Effective Online Marketing system. The Effective Online Marketing system helps business owners find their target market, become known for their expertise, get more clients and, ultimately, make more money online. My system helps business owners generate leads to their business web site, day in and day
out as well as to create a compelling suite of products and services.

My current niche consists of business owners (coaches, consultants, virtual assistants, and other solopreneurs) who want to use effective marketing tools to help sell their products and services..

How did you come up with such interesting names?

As you have probably noticed, both names are food-related. I love to cook, so this isn’t entirely an accident. It took me weeks to come up with the AvocadoConsulting.com name. I spent many hours looking for a good name for my business. I even had a legal pad with hundreds of names written on it, but none of them seemed really “mine”.

Then, one day I was sitting at my dining table, looking at the list of possible names for the thousandths time. Right next to me there was a bowl with ripening avocados. I bought them the day before to make guacamole. So then I started thinking about possible names that had “Avocado” in it. The rest, as they say, is
history.

It didn’t take me nearly as long to come up with the MarketingSalad.com name. I wanted another food-related name, and it had to be relevant to marketing. A salad is a mix of different ingredients, and that is exactly what we do at MarketingSalad.com – members can create their own, special marketing mix that is tailored just for their business.

What's your favorite part about what you do?

:I love helping people achieve their goals and take their business to the next level. Teaching and marketing are two of my favorite things, and doing what I do helps me combine them together. What could be better?

Who have been your role models as you develop your business?

Women who know what their goals are and will do whatever it takes to follow their dreams have always inspired me. It doesn’t really matter what the dream is; it could be a singing career, being a CEO of a multi-national corporation or being a stay-at-home mom to two kids. The important part is having a goal and reaching for it. .

Why is it so important for women to create passive income streams and promote their businesses online?

Many of us have worked (or still are working) as employees. How does that work? You work for 8 (and often many more) hours per day and you get paid per hour (or an equivalent hourly rate if you’re on a salary). You exchange time for money.

Even if you are a self-employed coach, a consultant, or a virtual assistant, you are still exchanging your time for money. This approach is not scalable --- there are only so many hours in a week. Your maximum income is limited by your hourly rate. This also means that if you are not working one week, there is no income coming in.

Here is an example I give on my web site:

Hourly Expert charges $150/hour and is booked about 50 hours/month. This expert makes $150 * 50 = $7,500/month before expenses.

Diverse Income Expert charges $150/hour and is booked about 35 hours/month. However, this expert also runs a monthly teleseminar with 30 people, where the expert charges $40 to attend, and this expert also sells about $1,000 worth of products (books, e-books, digital reports, CDs) from his web site every month. This expert makes $150 * 35 + $40 * 30 + $1,000 = $7,450/month before expenses.

The Diverse Income Expert spends 35 hours/month working with clients, while the Hourly Expert spends about 50 hours/month. However, Diverse Income Expert makes approximately the same amount of money as Hourly Expert. Why? Because Diverse Income Expert has created multiple streams of income. Moreover, if the Hourly Expert goes on vacation for a week, his income stops. If the Diverse Income Expert goes on vacation, he is still making money through sales and seminar sign-ups.

From this example you can see that you can profit again and again from products (e-books, CDs, teleseminars, etc) you create once. This is something I teach to all of my students and my clients – you can create passive income streams by selling your expert products.

What does all of this have to do with online marketing? Once you create passive income products, you need to bring in customers to purchase them. This is where marketing and promotion come in. You need to market your products online, and market them consistently in order to get results.

What are some of the vehicles through which women can create products that will provide ongoing passive income?

There are several different products groups that I recommend:

- Digital products. These include e-books, special reports, booklets, etc. They are delivered to customers in digital format, usually as PDF documents.

- Audio Products. These can be audio files that can be delivered instantaneously over the Internet, or these could be CDs that can be physically shipped to the buyers.

- Teleseminars. A teleseminar is a seminar or a class taught over the phone (using teleconference services that allow many people to participate in a phone conversation).

- Mixing and matching. Once you have created a few different products, you can package them in a variety of ways by combining several products.

I strongly recommend that you create several types of products. Different people learn differently. Some prefer to read (they would purchase digital products), while others prefer to listen (these people are more likely to purchase audio products), etc.

Once women create a few passive income products, how can they market them online?

There are many online marketing techniques you can employ to promote their products. Creating and preparing your web site is the first step before your marketing campaign begins. Your web site should be easy to use, easy to buy from, and it should have some means for your visitors to contact you. I also recommend having a newsletter. Many visitors will not buy from you the very first time they visit your web site, but they will subscribe to your newsletter, and you will be able to keep in touch.

Here are a few online marketing techniques I recommend for promoting your web site, products and services online:

Optimize Your Web Site for Search Engines. Search engine optimization is the process of modifying web page content and meta-information to improve the search engine ranking of the page. Meta-information includes HTML tags(title, heading, emphasized text, keyword and description meta-tags), as well as the internal (links between pages on the same site) and external (links between pages on different sites) link structure of a web site.

Using good keywords to optimize your web site for search engines helps you bring targeted traffic to your web site.

Create a Business Blog. A business blog is an
excellent tool to toot your own horn, let the world know about your new products, and tell your target customers why they should do business with you, rather than your competitor.

Blog posts that are keyword-rich help you bring targeted traffic from search engines, and blog posts that are educational and interesting to read help you build relationships with people who read your blog. Strive to make your blog posts optimized and educational - that way you get the search engines and your readers interested in what you have to say.

Write Articles. Writing articles on your subject of expertise is an excellent way to get better known throughout your online community and to let target clients know about your expertise.

Syndicating (allowing other web sites to reprint) your articles also helps you build traffic to your web site. So how can giving the proverbial farm away help you build traffic? The terms of use of your article state that reprinting in any form is allowed only if the site that uses the article includes a resource box. A resource box is a block of text that appears after the article. It typically consists of 2-4 sentences that include your bio and a link back to your business web site.

The article's resource box is your chance to get the reader to visit your web site and thus generate additional traffic. This is why it is extremely important to make your resource box as effective as possible. The resource box must include a strong call to action (and a free bonus gift doesn't hurt either).

If you could give one piece of advice to all the Wild Women Entrepreneurs reading this, what would it be?

Here are three (for the price of one):

1. Set goals. Always know what you are trying to achieve. Without goals, you have where you are ultimately going.

2. Have a plan. Create a plan for your business – where do you want to be with your business in a year? In five years? What is your vision for your business? Do you want it to go global? Do you want to franchise it? Do you want to sell it and retire? Think big. Without a plan, you don’t know what comes next.

3. Market! Every day I see good businesses that offer useful products and services, have great logos and web sites and their owners are true experts in their fields. However, these businesses do not make money for one simple reason: their owners are afraid of marketing. Don’t be like them. Go out and market. Marketing helps get the word out about your products and services and bring customers to your web sites.

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