February 23, 2012

Dear Friend,

Imagine one day your phone rang. It was a woman who saw your ad in the newspaper. She told you that your headline caught her attention and that it was the first time in years that she felt that someone might be able to help her. She then practically begged you for some time for you to perform your healing on her.

Imagine you have a booth at a holistic healing trade show. People keep walking by and stopping in their tracks as they look up at your sign. Their eyes widen, they then look at you and walk toward your table to learn more and to talk to you. You have by far the largest crowd in the room, and they are eagerly gathering around the booth that people tell you is fascinating.

Your fellow practitioners are asking how you do it. Just a few months ago you were struggling just like they are. They want to know why people call you from your ads. "What makes them work?" they ask. You now have several doctors referring you patients, and they are among your highest paying clients. Your peers tell you that they can't even get their calls returned from doctors. "What did you say to them?" they ask you in amazement.

For the first time in your life, you have money to travel. You pay less attention to price tags when you shop. Finally, the things you've wanted to improve around your home are being done. Yes, eating out at great restaurants is wonderful, isn't it?

This need not be a dream. It can be

your reality and I can show you how.

You have a great gift. You have the ability to help people heal themselves. Most of the world is suffering in some way. Their dis-ease is a mystery to most of them. Their doctor prescribes one or more medications. Perhaps surgery is recommended. Many walk around in casts for months or years. But the origin of the dis-ease persists.

You know you can help them, don't you?

Since beginning your practice or healing art, you've been asking yourself, "How can I attract more clients needing what I do who will pay me what I'm really worth?" Instead, you've built a small following of word-of-mouth clients who are willing to pay you a small fee. You'd like to charge them more, but you fear you'll repel them if you do. What will be left, then?

Your small ads haven't really worked the few times you've advertised. But then again, you haven't had the money to advertising more often with bigger ads. That might be the answer. Or would it?

Marketing and sales seem to be complicated subjects that may hold the answers. You'd love to learn them, but deep down you feel that you just don't have the stomach for what they'd require of you. It may even feel like it's some sort of superpower enjoyed by people in other businesses, but one YOU were not born with.

Maybe it's a good thing you don't have that "superpower". You don't want to hard sell people in order for them to come to you. And you don't want to mislead people with advertising full of hype. That's just not you.

You've bought a few books on marketing, thinking you might find some answers there. But they were thick, confusing textbooks written in a language you don't speak.

The answer is much simpler that you think.

Just like the people who come to you after years of suffering, and who are amazed at the seeming simplicity of your lifting of their dis-ease, you'll be equally amazed at the solution to your lack of well-paying clients.

Isn't it true that many of the people who come to you simply need their blockages lifted or their energy properly channeled? Your communication with your audience of potential clients is exactly the same.

You've probably been blocking people from responding to your message without even knowing it. You've been telling them how wonderful you are at your craft, the many healing modalities you provide, the way it all works, details about your life or your practice, and maybe some historic explanations of it all.

Hard to believe all that could be

working against you, but it has.

I've seen and heard all this from the holistic practitioners I've gone to and those I've made as friends. I've heard these frustrations and felt bad for their struggles and inability to attract LOTS of qualified, well-paying clients. So, I decided to do something about it.

I am a marketing professional and I've been in sales most of my life. I've put together multimillion-dollar transactions with Fortune 100 Enterprises and worked with dozens of small businesses creating advertisements, web sites and marketing strategies that have grown their businesses.

I am a speaker, author and teacher of sales and marketing whose passion is illustrating to you how fun and profitable it is to properly communicate about your healing art. I love showing you how to discover the true emotional benefit of your practice and how to phrase that in a way that acts like a magnet drawing in people eager to pay your worth.

I have written a book called Holistic Business Bounty, The Holistic Practitioner's Marketing Success Formula. Within this easily read 89-page book, I demonstrate how the very communication you have put out to the world has been preventing the very success you so desperately seek.

Within this book, you will discover the secret of great marketing. And you know what? It's actually MUCH easier than you think. The blockage I will help you eliminate is the painstaking descriptions of your work, the details of your practice and the long verbiage about the wonders of your healing modality. The secret is actually contained within what you are now reading. Can you see it?

I will illustrate the secret to you in plain English

within Holistic Business Bounty.

Now, I admit I am not a holistic healer. My wife is a very talented practitioner of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), but I have no talents in this regard. I am a sales and marketing guy.

You'll find many books on marketing written by holistic healers. All of them that I have seen miss the key points of great marketing. They also seem to make marketing hard-hard to read and hard to implement.

If you like simple and fun, this book is for you. I hate technical jargon and long, detailed explanations. Great marketing for your practice need not be complicated. You just need to get to the simple, fundamental emotional benefit of what you provide. If it is complicated for you, it will feel complicated to your audience, and therefore, they will not respond to it.

Do you like to listen to your books?

If so, you'll love the audiobook version I am throwing in as one of the bonuses. This is an unabridged reading by me of the entire book. The audiobook comes as two MP3 files that can immediately be loaded on to your iPod or played on your computer.

After reading Holistic Business Bounty, you will:

• Make more money by attracting more clients willing to pay you what you're truly worth

• Finally know exactly what to do with your web site so that it brings in more clients and becomes itself an extension of your healing powers

• Be comfortable with your response to, “I need to think about it”, or “It’s more than I can afford”, or “My insurance doesn’t cover this.”, etc.

• Reap far more benefit from your next trade show exhibition

• Understand how to grow your influence and your practice through blogging

• Create advertising that gets your phone ringing

• Have a very simple strategy for succeeding with your practice

• Know how to write emails that bring you business

• Be skilled at getting power testimonials

• Better understand your mindset about money. Are you repelling it without knowing?

• Have the inner confidence to become much more successful with your practice

Plus, receive these great bonus products for FREE

This is one jam packed ebook. You’re getting a wealth of marketing knowledge within these easily readable 89 pages. Read it cover to cover or pick out the subjects within it that interest you. Rather listen away from the computer? Then enjoy the bonus audiobook MP3 download version that can be put into your iPod.

Here’s what you will learn from the book:

Chapter 1: Branding

We take a different look at branding. Your brand represents the customer experience with your product or service. Yes, your brand includes things like your name, logo, colors, tag line, etc, but that’s just the window dressing. I'll show you how to make your brand attract clients with the things they care about.

Most holistic practitioners (and small businesses in general, by the way) don’t know what their brand is. They’re so focused on their logo and tag line, that can’t see the much bigger picture. In this chapter, we’ll take you through the process of discovering the deep-down emotional benefit of what you offer your clients. You’ll clearly see that “big picture”.

Once you are clear on your product or service’s emotional benefits, your ads will have a magnetic force that attracts exactly the people you want as customers. If you’ve been wondering why your ads don't work, it’s because you haven’t been shown what we’ll illustrate in this chapter.

Not only will people be attracted to your offering, but when people resonate with your brand message, they are much less concerned with your price. Think about it: If you are absolutely convinced that Holistic Business Bounty can grow your practice, does $37 matter that much? Of course not. Hey, maybe we should charge $137!

Another important branding component is your understanding of your customer. Are you crystal clear on the type of person that comes to you? Can you clearly describe him or her?

We’ll show you how to identify your customer and we’ll also suggest a way that you can use that information to target your ideal customer with pinpoint accuracy in your ads, your web site and all other marketing materials.

Chapter 2: Advertising

“We tried advertising and it doesn’t work.” This is one of the most common phrases we hear from holistic healers.

The reason your advertising doesn’t is work because you haven’t yet read chapter one of our book on discovering who your customer truly is, and how to create a marketing message that attracts him and her.

Most advertising contains lists of features and technical details about the product or service. Since the reader doesn’t really want those features or details, most people don’t respond.

Holistic Business Bounty will show you how to write an ad for your practice that will be as if your client wrote it herself specifically for her. She relates to the message because it reflects her needs in a way she connects to at a deep emotional level.

But it’s not your fault. No one showed you how to communicate your service in this way. You just followed what the others did, which is to list a bunch of features and technical attributes about your service that YOU like and then hope for the best. I'll show you how to stop gambling with your advertising dollars.

You’ll also see illustrations of different types of ads. Not all ads are alike. Some ads don’t even have to look like ads, and we’ll show why they work and how you can create them for your practice.

We’ll even demonstrate good examples of using humor and show you how to talk about a serious subject while being entertaining. We’re all looking for a little entertainment and it’s a fact that entertainment helps get people’s attention, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of your primary message.

Chapter 3: The Internet

Very few holistic practitioners are thrilled with their web site. It needs to be updated, but you’re not clear on what to do. You’re not sure how to make it show up on the search engines, and everything you’ve read about search is overly technical and sounds expensive. You’ve also heard a lot lately about blogging, but aren’t sure why you should start, and even how to begin.

It all sounds very confusing, doesn’t it?

Holistic Business Bounty will show you the simple attributes of a good web site. You don’t need fancy animations or thousands of pages, just clear and persuasive content. We’ll give you some easy to follow design tips and some common mistakes made by holistic healers.

If you don’t yet have a web site, we’ll show you how to create one that serves its purpose without costing you a lot of money. We’ll explain in plain English how to get your site name, and how to get your site up and running.

Want to know the secrets of effective email marketing? We’ll show you how to send emails that get read and how to do it professionally so that your recipient’s spam filters don’t stop your emails from getting through.

Of course, we explore the very popular topic of getting ranked higher on the search engine results. There is a lot of mystery and confusion surrounding this topic, but we make it easy to understand by showing you a holistic relationship between your site’s content and the subjects for which your prospective clients are searching.

We remove the technical jargon and give you simple explanations for what search engines are looking for and how you can satisfy their requirements.

Chapter 4: Your Marketing Plan

Does this sound like the chapter you might skip over?

We’ve made the creation of a marketing strategy into an interesting topic that relates more to chapter one and your branding that just creating a big to-do list of promotions, advertising and numbers.

We will take you step by step through a unique process through which you will create a fascinating identity for your client. Perhaps call it method marketing, we show you how to get inside your client and benefit even more from chapter one.

You’ll also get the opportunity to view your client’s competitive choices in a new light. It’s not just other practitioners in your healing modality that compete for your client’s time and money, and we’ll show you what and who they are.

In the end, you’ll have a compact, easy to follow plan that will serve you as a roadmap so that you can make intelligent, planned decisions regarding your marketing.

Chapter 5: Nuts and Bolts

This is the chapter where we tackle a number of important topics not discussed in the prior chapters, or at least not in great enough detail. For each topic, we give practical advice and provide plenty of rich examples that illustrate how to capitalize on the advice for your marketing.

We cover:
• Business cards for good communication
• Prosperity through client and prospect lists
• Growing your business through speaking
• Public relations power tips
• Professional looking brochures
• Winning with trade shows
• Phone skills of a pro
• Email subject line secrets
• Getting powerful testimonials

Chapter 6: Articles

Last, this is the chapter where we entertain you with some of our most popular blog posts on a wide range of topics.

We’ll explore why so many holistic healers tend to be living a sustenance existence instead of having the wealth that their healing abilities should bring them. We call this post, “Insufficient Funds: The cure for being broke”. This may be worth the cost of the book in itself!

Other posts include stories on ants, spaghetti sauce, video games, SpongeBob Squarepants and how each of those weird topics can teach you something valuable about your marketing.

You just won’t get content this rich and rewarding anywhere else on the web. I promise.

Read what your fellow practitioners

say about Holistic Business Bounty:

"This is a wonderful book! The Holistic Healing profession has needed a clear, value-aligned and practical guide to marketing, and Michael Lake has finally delivered it to us. I hope everyone wishing for a more abundant practice will read and implement his terrific marketing advice."

Linda Mitchell
Founder
Holistic Mentorship Network & MARCI

"What a powerful book! I find this book to be an incredible resource of practical and creative marketing tips to apply right now in taking my holistic center to the next level. I encourage my fellow Holistic practitioners to get a copy today. Even if you apply one of two suggestions it's well worth the small investment. Michael Lake over delivers with this material. Thank you Michael!"

Steve Munn
Founder Director
ClearPoint
Center for Holistic Living & Education

"I've spent the better part of my 13 years as a holistic practitioner searching for the secret to marketing my healing arts. My library full of marketing books has gotten me no closer because most of them were written by healers trying to teach marketing. They were all dry and theoretical, and they provided little practical guidance to help me build a more successful practice.

Michael Lake and his book Holistic Business Bounty has been like a valuable treasure that I've finally discovered. The book talks about marketing in a way that I can clearly understand. The writing is entertaining and down to earth, the exercises throughout have provided me with a great deal of insight about how to now effectively communicate with my audience, and the wisdom within this little book has re-energized my enthusiasm about the power and potential of good marketing. Anyone wanting more from their practice MUST read this book."

Kathy Leone
Holistic Healer

"As a Seimei practitioner, I've always struggled a bit about marketing my practice. Michael's ideas, however, have opened my eyes to a way of attracting more clients that feels right for me. Maybe the book should be titled "Great Marketing Performed Holistically!"

Betsy Freichtinger
Seimei Practitioner

"In my business as an author, coach and motivational speaker, I work to guide my audiences and assist them in "getting clear" about their life. I found the succinct and clear principles that Mike Lake outlines in Holistic Business Bounty, to be guiding lights that help me promote my business and offerings in ways that yield bountiful results. Thanks, Mike, for helping me "Get Clear" on how to market myself!"

Anne Palmer Moss
Speaker, Author, Life Coach
Transitions, Inc.

“As a book store owner, I’ve seen a lot of technical self-help books. What immediately struck me about Mike and his book Holistic Business Bounty is the simple accessibility of it. Mike has a gift for making a seemingly complex topic like marketing simple and entertaining. Throughout the fun of reading this book, I’ve ended up learning things to which my reaction is, “That’s so simple. Of course!” I highly recommend this terrific book to anyone, healer or non-healer who is ready to cut through the complexity of how sales and marketing is usually explained, and start growing their business.”

George Nitti
Baby Grand Books
Warwick, NY