Avoid Too Many Coupon Offers

Posted on August 29, 2010
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Coupons serve a valuable purpose for businesses. They offer a value incentive, and perhaps most important, provide a reason to contact your customers and clients.

Many companies have built their business by flooding the market with coupons during the extended grand opening period in order to get their name into the market area and woo customers from competitors.

Savvy business owners can use coupons as a loss leader to bring customers into their online or physical store, then make their profit on tantalizing upsells. This takes some skill and experience to get it right.

A word of caution is in order:

Coupons should never be your only form of advertising. They may form the basis of your promotional strategy in the beginning, but customers will soon learn to wait for the discount coupons to arrive before shopping.

After your initial grand opening, avoid too many coupon offers or risk losing customers who will pay full price.

Depending on your product mix, there are better ways you can provide value while still charging full price on your main source of revenue.

Consistent Daily Marketing

Posted on August 28, 2010
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Did ya miss me???

I didn’t think so, and that’s the point. Following a consistent daily marketing plan brings momentum, whether your business is offline, online or both.

But no one will miss you when you offer nothing.

“Build It And They Will Come” may be true when baseball players in spirit form pull strings in their dimension to bring spectators to the field. While it’s always better to align our energy, intent and actions, those of us in this material dimension must take more proactive steps to get our message heard by potential clients and customers.

It doesn’t cost very much out-of-pocket to ignore your online business when life throws you a few zingers. Unless you have set up a viral marketing system, you won’t get any traffic or sales, either.

However, if a competitive bricks and mortar business depends on high volume, consistent daily marketing is essential to cover the overhead and make a profit.

We’ll talk about methods of viral online marketing later, passive tools that can send potential customers to your site while you’re away.

If you wear most of the hats in your offline business, plan ahead for life’s disruptions. Create a basic promotional system that someone else could easily duplicate if you needed to turn over the reigns for awhile.

At the very least, design a standard coupon, branding promo, etc. that can be easily published when time is short. You can get creative again when life settles down.

It’s about your customer, not you. Without consistent daily marketing that benefits your clients, they won’t care about your business.

And they won’t miss you.

Making Money Versus Building A Business

Posted on June 15, 2009
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There is a difference!

Neither is right or wrong, but your business results will suffer until you recognize this difference and work the goal into your plan. Let’s use an off-line example to help you fully understand the concept …

Making A Quick Buck
Suppose you are a student or school teacher with a summer hiatus. Or you were laid off and need to fill in some cash to make ends meet until a job opens up in your profession. Let’s say a friend the landscape designer introduces you to the rewards of landscaping during the nice weather and needs good installers.

You just want to pay for your next year’s tuition, or help with the rent and household expenses. So you head to Home Depot, buy a few tools, install a few yards under the guidance of your friend, collect your fees and head to the next job. Hard work, but you make good money.

Now let’s suppose you realize how much you love breathing the fresh air, feeling the sunshine or the rain. Connecting with the earth energy and elements revitalizes your soul and the satisfaction of a transforming a yard with beautiful plants cannot be measured in words. Creating a beautiful landscape is your calling and you decide to make this your business and sole source of income.

But there are challenges. Landscape installation and thus your income is seasonal. Plus your friend just moved across the country, so you don’t have a steady source of clients. Are the easy money and your dream fading away?

Building A Business
Not if you employ strategies to create, build and sustain a business in the long run, versus the short-term objective of trading the least hours for the most dollars. Wise investment of time, energy and money early on will pay off in the long run.

To create a business that will grow and prosper, you may need upfront seed money. You’ll need to reinvest some of your profits. The needs of each business are different, but they all require a solid support team that may include teachers, accountants, attorneys, suppliers, employees, sub-contractors, technical advisers, and so forth.

Business Plan
You must take a long-range view past the next client and well into the coming weeks, months and years. A well-researched business plan is vital and the best starting place. In future posts, we’ll look into the elements of a business plan, but for now, start with research into every aspect of your market.

At the most basic level you must acquire all your financial facts including your cost of equipment, materials, delivery, overhead, employees or sub-contractors. Identify competitive rates for your service or product and a realistic estimate of your sales potential. Create a long-term plan for acquiring new business and re-selling your existing customers.

Promote Or Perish
You must learn cost effective methods to promote your business, then invest in advertising and promotions. If you’re just looking to make a quick buck, maybe all you need is a classified ad in the local newspaper, or a good Google Adwords campaign and a simple website if you’re selling online. To build a business, you may employ these tools and many other more complex, self-sustaining promotional strategies such as online or offline community involvement.

Continuing Education
Business owners can never afford to stop learning. This has always been true, but even more so with the fast pace of changing technology, which affects nearly every business in the modern world in one way or another. If you just want to make money, perhaps all you need is to educate yourself enough to make that single hit before you move on.

Create Multiple Streams Of Income
Business builders will eventually want to create multiple streams of income, once their business is sound. This strategy will usually involve the internet, even if your core business is offline.

Identify Your Money & Business Goal
You can see that the first step is to identify whether you want to simply make some short-term money, or invest in your future by building a long-term solid business.

Only then can you target the appropriate level of time, energy and money in choosing the right product or service and implement the most effective strategies to sell them. This applies as much or more to internet marketing as to the bricks-and-mortar world.

Time is too short to waste a precious moment, so start your business right!

Blog Posts Should Contribute To The Conversation

Posted on May 29, 2009
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We’re going to pick on Joan a little more, using her comment to our last post as an example of what not to do.

Whether you open a retail store on main street, an upholstery shop in your garage, or a website promoting a product or service, your success is dependent upon traffic — sufficient potential customers.

Other factors affect your profitability, including your costs and your conversion rate (the percentange of your visitors who purchase). But the challenge we all face is getting enough people to stop by and browse in the first place. Especially online.

How do they find you online? Most people head to the search engines first, so website owners strategize to become listed high in the search engines.

One of the more important methods to achieve a high ranking in the search engines is through links coming into your site. One tactic is to post on other peoples’ blogs, either with a hyperlink in the post, and/or a signature linking to your site.

Posting in blogs and forums is a perfectly honored and respected method of linking and promoting your own site. When you share information, or even ask a legitimate question that someone else can hop in and answer, you add value to the conversation and help make the site a livelier place to visit. Everybody wins.

This is where Joan comes in.

Take a look at our last post, a short message with links to some sites offering discount coupons. We hoped this would be helpful in your business and personal online shopping.

Joan’s comment, “Great Post, Thanks” contributed nothing to the original message. Presumably, her entire objective was:

(a) to achieve a backlink, and

(b) through her catchy tagline, to raise your curiosity and get you to click through to her sales page, which is a one-post blog with several comments that she most likely wrote herself in place of real testimonials.

The structure of her sales page is not the issue. In fact, you can learn a lot by studying her tagline and technique, and the clean, simple, focused design of her sales page.

Start Business Right is a blog about starting and operating a business. But Joan is only trying to pump traffic to her own business.

There is nothing wrong with that either. Online or off, many businesses successfully collaborate with their marketing. Most blogs, including this one, promote products or encourage readers to visit their other websites which, presumably, are designed to earn money.

Many blog owners encourage others to post, gladly allowing backlinks … PROVIDING the post offers something of value, something that contributes to the conversation or subject at hand.

Making money is one objective we all have for our businesses. Most of us, however, have a genuine desire to give something positive to the world and help other people whenever we can.

“Delete” “Delete” “Delete” … blog moderators delete “Great Post, Thanks” type comments every day. Spammers post these generic comments on other blogs in bulk, hoping to get past the moderators. Most never get published, or every blog would be filled with posts that waste bandwidth and readers’ time.

Although comparing business models is a subject we plan to cover in more detail in the future, we decided to use Joan’s post to demonstrate the good and bad of this traffic-generating technique, and also to address network marketing as a viable business. (And as long as she brought it up, we took the opportunity to tell you about our favorite health products as well!)

What is the take-home message here?

Posting on other blogs with a signature linking to your site is a great way to become part of the word-wide-web and increase your site’s ranking in the search engines. Just make sure that you share relevant information and create value to the community.

Under no circumstances, ever, should you use this blog-commenting technique to post generic or shocking comments designed only to benefit you through a link to your site.

You will lose credibility in the long run.

Save Money With Web Coupons - Useful Links

Posted on May 26, 2009
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Happy Memorial Day to our U.S. readers, and we hope you’re having a marvelous Monday wherever you are in the world.

Whether you’re working or relaxing as you honor those who served for our freedom, it’s good to save a penny where you can. Check out these sites to find money-saving coupons for all kinds of things, including travel, office supplies, web hosting - you name it:

     Click Here For Coupon Album

If you don’t find what you’re looking for at Coupon Album, try:

     Click Here For Coupon Craze

For our U.K. readers:

     Click Here For My Vouchers Codes

Clickbank Code Really IS Awesome!

Posted on May 20, 2009
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Before we move on and start covering the basics of business on and off the web, we’ve had a chance to review Michael Jones’ “Clickbank Code” training and have one final word:

AWESOME!!!

Before you finish Video 6 in the Introduction Module, you’ll save the price of admission with Michael’s tips on researching and using his Traffic Generator worksheet .

By the time you get through the rest of the modules, you’ll know exactly what to do and how to do it if you’re an internet marketer who has put up at least one website. 

If you’re brand new to marketing on the web, there will, of course, be a little more of a learning curve. But this course will show you what you want to learn so you’re not flopping around in the surf trying to figure out which way to turn next.

You can watch this short video to get a better idea if this is for you:

Link To CLICKBANK CODE Video

 

Clickbank Code New Training

Posted on May 14, 2009
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If you have even a remote inclination to use Clicbank affiliate marketing as one of your online revenue streams, then you owe it to yourself to check out “The Clickbank Code,” a new product being launched on Thursday, May 14.

Watch this video and decide for yourself whether it’s worth giving a try:

        Click Here To Check Out The Clickbank Code!

In a nutshell:

Over the past couple of months, Michael Jones has been doing some in-depth research into Clickbank. Toward the end of February he started experimenting with stringent details and analysis.

Mr. Jones was already an experienced internet marketer, but went into the Clickbank Marketplace as a newbie affiliate. He found some products to promote, and kept careful notes on EVERYTHING.

Michael Jones says the results blew him away because this was his first time ever as a Clickbank affiliate, and he made $48,506.66 in the first 4 weeks. And that’s starting out with no list, and no JV partners.

You could spend your life savings on all the different courses and ebooks and websites on affiliate marketing out there. Some of them are okay, others tell you what but not how, and of course, some are pure junk.

For an unbelievably reasonable price, this one looks to be complete, thorough and easy to follow.

Michael has documented everything on video, so you can see how he chose the products, how he gets his traffic, everything. You can literally copy what you see him do, and make easy commissions 24/7.

Michael Jones studied dozens of other affiliates and their promotions, and he found that 99.3% of them are doing so many things wrong that they are not succeeding at all, or to the extent they could be.

From picking the wrong products to banking on dud keywords for which they pay a fortune to advertise.

Michael says that making money from Clickbank is actually really easy, if you’re smart. In this case, being smart means studying his videos and other instructions and following them to the letter.

If earning all or part of your online income from affiliate marketing appeals to you, this could be your best opportunity of the year to start your business right.

Here’s that link again:

The Clickbank Code

Clickbank Affiliate - Great Way To Start

Posted on May 13, 2009
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One of the great things about starting an online business is that you can do most of the research and training at home, at any time of the day or night. And many online businesses can be started for very little money.

Free information is available all over the internet. So much that you can get overwhelmed and bogged down if you try to follow all of it.

The free information often provides good overview of “what to do.” Eventually, once you pick the type of online business you want to pursue, you will want to pay for a good “how to do it” course.

The important thing is to stay focused and don’t buy everything with a good sales pitch. (But you might want to study the sales pitch to learn what makes good sales copy!)

If you are considering an online business, promoting other people’s products to receive commission as an “affiliate marketer” is a good way to start. Many highly successful affiliate marketers set their businesses up to run on auto-pilot and avoid the headaches of managing their own product.

“Clickbank” is the primary source of high quality digital products used by most affiliate marketers.

To get you started, here is a free digital report with a great overview of how you can make money with affiliate marketing and the Clickbank Marketplace. We suggest you download and read it today:

Click Here for your Free Clickbank Report

Change - A Golden Opportunity

Posted on May 13, 2009
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It’s often quoted that people don’t change until the pain of change becomes greater than the pain of staying the same.

This is very true for many of us. When things are going great, why would we want to change anything? When our lives begin to falter, fear of the unknown induces us to cling to the status quo.

Let’s change the way we look at that.

Current economic and social upheavals provide an unprecedented catalyst. Now is a great time to make decisions that can help us tackle our ideas and dreams that we never had time for.

We are facing challenges. Let’s use this oportunity to create a more fulfilling and secure future for ourselves and our loved ones.

If you’ve lost your job or - heaven forbid - even lost your home, what’s left to lose by starting your own business?

Nothing!

But you have everything to gain, including your dignity and future financial security.

Folks everywhere are discovering that we have to re-train, and invest in ourselves in order to stay afloat. It may even require changing professions altogether just to make ends meet.

When you treat these challenges as golden opportunities and focus your attention and energy into following a new path, don’t be surprised when you achieve success and happiness.

P.S. If you are facing foreclosure, here is a free report that might give you some ideas about how to save your home. Click on the link below for immediate download.:

Click Here for “Insider Secrets That Can Stop Foreclosure”

Start Business Right!

Posted on January 13, 2009
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Are you looking for a new lease on life?

Perhaps you dream of the flexibility of working for yourself. Maybe you’re turning a hobby into cash,  starting a part-time business for a little extra cash, or looking to launch a full-time career. 

In the upcoming pages we’ll  break the daunting task of starting and running your own business into chunks of manageable tasks. Details can make or break any business, so you’ll want to get those details right from the start.

Broad concepts apply to any business, whether bricks & mortar or strictly online. From time to time, we will address all sorts of issues such as customer service, reports and paperwork, franchsie opportunities, etc.

In today’s reality, however,  successful businesses handling merchandise or services of any sort usually have a strong online presence.  Not only that, the internet creates new and unlimited opportunities for financial and personal freedom and expression.  

The most questions we receive are from people trying to learn their way through the online technological and strategic mazes. There is a huge learning curve, and it’s easy to get sidetracked.

Therefore, our primary focus will be on strategies to promote and present yourself and your business on the world wide web. Stay tuned for helpful ideas and information to help you start business right!