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Janine Bolon: Hello and good morning. Welcome to this episode of The Thriving Solopreneur. What I am going to be talking about today is sending your cards on Saturday. It was something that I started early on in my career when my Mom had taught me how important it was to send thank you cards anytime somebody did something nice for you. Well, it definitely stuck. Throughout my career, I have continued to send cards. I had to start making time on Saturdays to send cards because my family would usually sleep in on Saturdays and I had a couple of quiet hours to handwrite cards for people on Saturdays. Over time, that did not work anymore because I started having more and more people that were doing wonderful things for me and I wanted to reach out to them because I am an author who writes in four different genres now. I have ten books to my credit. I also am an online course creator where I have fifteen different programs running at any one time in those for genres that I write about. My company produces four different podcast shows, so I have teams of people that help me make the world a better place through the content that I am sharing. When I first started opening my doors, I was ten years old, and I was selling earthworms to bait shops. That was the work that I did in Southern Missouri. But now that I work in all the areas that I work in, I had to really define for myself, “Okay, it is time for me to start living life my way.”
Janine: I want to encourage you as a thriving solopreneur that it is important that you start making the choices in your everyday life that will bring you closer to what you consider to be a successful life. Many people have very defined areas that they know make their life successful, but it is important that you spend time today focusing on what is it that is true success for you. There are a lot of different ways that people define this, and unless you define it for yourself, you will never hit the mark. You will always be striving for the next project, the next program, the next launch, and you will not ever give yourself time to just sit and go, “Wow, that really worked out well.” or “Wow, that was an absolute abject failure.” I have had several of those in my career, but I do not let it get me down. It is more like, “Okay. What can I do differently next time?” So, I really want you to ask yourself, “When am I successful?” And the answer to that is right now. You are a success by taking life into your own hands and creating a business and deciding that you are going to work for yourself. This takes a tremendous amount of courage. It takes a tremendous amount of fortitude and prosperity to be able to do this. I want you to just take a moment and say, “Look, you are a success because you are running your own business.” Now, whether that business is thriving and making money right now is not the point. The point is you are making the effort to carve out a niche for yourself and your family and I just want to congratulate you on that. Realize that you are a success right now.
Janine: Now, one of the most important aspects of your life is, “Are you creating it the way you want it to run?” All right? I highly encourage that you build the life you want first in your mind. What is it that you want to be able to do? And then, after you have defined exactly what kind of life you want, then go about creating your personal habits of success that are going to, stepwise and very methodically, lead you to that successful life you want. I make it akin to when you get ready to buy a pair of scissors. Well, you could be buying scissors for the garden. You could be buying scissors to cut hair. You could be buying scissors to cut fabric. When you say that you want to stay general, “What does my life look like in general?” That is good because it puts you in a good space on how to define for yourself, “What are the next steps?” But when you go to purchase those scissors, you might want to have a clearer idea of what it is that you are going to be doing with those scissors so that you can define for yourself, “Well, I probably need limb loppers because I am going to be pruning my trees.” Right? Very different type of scissors than for cutting hair. As you define for yourself what you want that life to look like, I encourage you to be very defined in that, otherwise, you are going to move into what we call the ‘state of burnout’ which is you are trying to be all things to all people and it is not going to work well for you because you are not defined, what your niche is, and what you want to do with your personal life Create the habits of success for yourself.
Janine: I talked about happy Sundays. I spend two hours every Sunday sitting down and defining for myself what my work week looks like or, “What am I going to spend my time on? Who do I need to reach out to?” I carve out time in my calendar to make that happen. What I do is I set up four hours a week where I am doing prospecting for one hour a week. One hour a week, I am doing follow-up. One hour a week, I am connecting with people. And one hour a week, I am building my master contact sheet, which is I am constantly adding to the people I know, and I am sending them to follow up. There are times where I am training my team or myself. I have discussed many of these in my other videos and my other shows. Feel free to go to my website at janinebolon.com so you can get special videos on each one of those. But I just wanted to let you know that with everything that is going on, one of the most effective ways that I have found to garner goodwill, not only the current clients I have but also those that I am hoping will become clients for me, I send them mail. I send them cards in the mail. You may be looking at me and going, “Janine, this is all fine and dandy but how do I go about making money with this?” Well, you need to set up systems that you continually reach out to your prospects and to the client you already have and continue to foster those relationships. I have an item on my website that shows how in order to get a customer, sometimes, you have to have four to eight points of contact with that person. Well, that is exhausting to an entrepreneur that is sitting here going, “I already am so overwhelmed. I do not know what to do. You expect me to create these systems for this?” And I say, “Yes, that is where I came up with the sending cards on Saturdays.” There are tools and systems out there that make it very easy for you to do this follow-up one day a week. Take an hour and just send cards to people.
Janine: I highly recommend the Greener Still program and I will be glad to help you with that, but I know that there are other card-sending programs out there. It depends on what you want to do with that. So, I first say to most entrepreneurs is, “How many addresses do you currently have?” And if you have a bunch of addresses, now is the perfect time to start sending cards. When I started making an effort to get the addresses of my clients and my prospects, I had two hundred eighty-nine already in my address book. But then in April of 2020, I made an effort to really move forward with that. As of today, this recording was March 2021, I am now at sixty hundred and twenty-two addresses. That may not seem a lot to some people, but hey, I am a solopreneur. That is huge. I have over six hundred twenty-two people that I am reaching out to and talking to through the direct mail program. The other thing I love about this is, sometimes, I get returned mail and the cards come back to me. I am like, “Hey.” I reach out to them on social media and say, “What did I do wrong?” And what is great is I am staying in touch with people’s lives no matter where they go because of that card-sending program. So, how many addresses have you asked for in your business? Even if you are an online business, you may want to start asking for those addresses so that you can help people out. I also know that you have met people on Zoom. How many people have you talked to on Zoom? Have you asked them for their address?
Janine: Also, if you are having problems with Zoom and the tech in your world, I highly recommend you go to janinebolon.com/Articles and you will find an article that says, ‘Cannot get on Zoom?’ There I have a checklist of things that you can do to make it better for yourself to get on Zoom. I also want to encourage you that if you are not sure where you can go to get to know more people, go to the Happy Neighborhood Project. That is a wonderful networking opportunity that you can sign up for and be able to meet different types of people. I also encourage you to look into SendOutCards. Yes, it is an MLM. Yes, I am an affiliate with SendOutCards. But I just want to share with you the power of sending cards as a follow-up because it has definitely tripled my business over the course of the last three years. I have a four-hour-a-week system that you can find on my website and I started teaching that to not only send out cards, but to Mary Kay, Young Living, Arbonne, and Avon affiliates have all come to me and said, “Please, help us with our businesses.” I have shown them how by sending cards on Saturdays, they can move forward. Also, when you go to my website, janinebolon.com, you can get a free book. I offer it free also on Amazon. It is called ‘The Thriving Solopreneur: Nurture Your Business In Just 4 Hours a Week‘. Please pick this book up. Whether you choose it as an e-book or pay the minimal fee to get it as a paperback and learn those systems that will make your life easier and help move you out of overwhelming and put you in a place where you know that you are spending four hours a week getting new clients for your business. I highly recommend it.
Janine: These specs are important to you by having a system which to build your prospect business is what keeps businesses intact and moving people through your work. Okay, so it was lovely being able to chat with you today. I do want to remind you that your Sundays are very important for determining what you want your workweek to look like, all right? I also recommend that I have free videos that you can find on how to connect and stay connected with people on LinkedIn. Just go to janinebolon.com/LinkedIn and you will see a series of six videos there where I and a business partner of mine also talked about how we work the LinkedIn system. It is important that you start sending your cards on Saturdays because it really does lighten people up. These are not cards that you send to sell people. You are not selling during these card-sending programs. What are you doing? You are reaching out and you are giving them, as I like to say, a hug or a smile through the mail. You are giving your clients and your prospects a smile through the mail letting them know you are thinking of them and that you hope that they are doing well. Face it. We have all gone through craziness in 2020, and it is always nice to receive a nice little personalized card in the mail. One of the things I would like to remind you is sending cards through the mail is a total game-changer. Just like Blockbuster video moved into Netflix. Netflix was a game-changer when it came to the video industry. Look at how iTunes was a game-changer for record stores. You almost cannot find a record store anymore. Amazon kind of worked out Borders. Borders kind of went out of business from that. SendOutCards are kind of the new feature for kind of pushing out Hallmark because it is just more effective and easier to have your cards printed off and shipped by another program.
Janine: So, what are some next steps that you can work into? I do not know if you know this or not, but I have a build your business boot camp and you can go to janinebolon.com/Bootcamps. You will find where I will be there helping you build your business up using the four-hour-a-week system. It is a boot camp that lasts for four weeks and I have one in April. I always update that webpage when the next one is coming online. You can go ahead and sign up for it and I would let you know the dates where we work for four weeks straight and I will help you move through your business from where it is now and help you move into a business that has systems and processes for doing prospecting, follow-up, connection, and how to go about training yourself to continue to build upon with processes and systems we teach you in this boot camp. So, it has been lovely being able to chat with you today about how you go about sending cards on Saturday. Just make the time and make the effort. You can start off by doing this by hand with whatever cards you have available to you, but then, I highly recommend that you reach out to me at janinebolon.com and have me teach you about the sending SendOutCards system that you can use where they address, stamp, and send the cards for you, but you are able to put highly personalized pictures and systems in place with SendOutCards.
Have a great day today. Define for yourself what is success for you and go after it full speed ahead. Have a great day. This is Janine Bolon with The Thriving Solopreneur.
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