Coaching For Success
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About The Internet Business Coaching
Mobile Apps That Will Help Increase Your Productivity
Nov 29th
For internet business owners, the hope is that the next few weeks will be the busiest shopping season of the year. In fact, if the forecasts are correct (and online retailers certainly hope they are), this will be the biggest shopping season since the recession started.
Tools Of The Trade
With all this activity, which means managing inventories, fulfilling orders, etc., everyone involved in e-commerce internet business will be stretched to the limit. Fortunately there are some wonderful tools out there to help mitigate the time crunch.
Here are some of the best.
1. Sugar Mobile For iPhone
To make life easier for the busy merchant on the go, SugarCRM, which supplies an extremely popular customer relationship management suite, recently introduced a new option to access the suite from the iPhone. It allows for extensive customisation, providing for a specialised mobile CRM experience that is available anywhere, even at the Christmas table.
2. Zendesk For Mobile
Customer support can differentiate one company from another and can mean the difference between retaining a customer for life or never hearing from them again. By providing apps for all the major mobile platforms, Zendesk has made it possible for companies to create, track and respond to support tickets while on the go.
3. Mzinga Mobile Apps
Having established itself as a major player in the social software sphere (Ford and Amazon are two of its customers), Mzinga has made its CRM suite, known as OmniSocial, available as customisable apps for the Blackberry and iPhone, and provides both external, customer-facing solutions as well as internal solutions.
4. Jive Mobile 4.5
Customer-support communities powered by Jive have become extremely popular with businesses, which use them to increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs. These customer service social networks are now available for all major mobile platforms as Jive Mobile 4.5, providing a set of apps which can be both internally and externally facing.
5. Roambi Mobile ES3
This is a mobile application focused on business intelligence data, including analytics. It’s currently available for Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) and provides various views of data, including a pie view and a trends view, in addition to 4 other types of views. Thus, your vital business data can be available to you at all times in various formats.
These are some of the better tools available to internet business owners to try to better manage what they hope will be a hectic schedule over the next few weeks.
For help and advice on using these tools and others to help better manage your resources, consult a UK internet business coach, who will bring a wealth of knowledge to maximise the use of your time and resources.
Make Sure Your Logo Design Is Inspiring And Appropriate
Nov 28th
Having a top quality logo for your internet business can be a real game-changer and should not be taken lightly. Over time a great logo can bring instant recognition to your brand and people will come to you for what they need through the trust you’ve managed to develop in your brand.
Characteristics Of A Great Logo
A great logo should let consumers know quickly and effectively how you’d like your brand to be perceived and should be attractive and captivating while retaining an understated feel. It needs to be recognizable and yet adaptable where the web is concerned, but most importantly it must be in line with your business objectives.
One look at a company’s logo can often tell a consumer all they need to know about how that company operates. For instance, if your logo is clear and straightforward, that would indicate to a consumer that yours is a no-nonsense, what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of company, whereas if your logo is more complex and tricky to decipher, it could mean that there’s something different about the way your company approaches business. At the end of the day, your logo should be appropriate to your brand.
Examples Of Excellent Logos
Bread and Butter Records
Simple and effective yet elegant at the same time, the logo represents a turntable, the bread and butter, if you will, of the DJ collective this logo represents. Note the small black dot in the middle of the slice of bread – the logo can double as a sticker for an actual vinyl record. Brilliant!
Cafe Expresso
The cup of coffee at the heart of the logo tells you immediately what to expect from this company, while the 3D touches to the lettering hint at the brand’s creativity. Expresso could either be an indication of the speed of service on which this company prides itself or just a play on the word espresso. We tend to lean more in the direction of the former.
Circus of Magazines
At first glance, you see the circus tent aspect of the logo, but, on closer inspection, you see a portfolio of magazines unfurling before your eyes. Simple genius in action for a site that acts as a clearing house for new and used magazines.
Snooty Peacock
The use of a peacock and it’s beautiful plumage immediately points to the elegance of the company, while turning the plumage into a lady’s hair along with additional subtle touches tell the consumer this is all about high fashion.
The Waterfront
Representing the junction of land and water, i.e. the waterfront, this logo conveys the concept brilliantly with the rippling water effect at the base of the “w” and its reflection in the water. Used for a waterfront apartment complex, appropriately enough.
The benefits of an appropriate and inspiring logo for your internet business are far-reaching and profound and can reward your care and attention manifold.
A UK internet business coach can help you design and create a logo that’s both creative and appropriate and will help your brand stand out from the competition.
5 Tips To Getting The Most Benefit Out Of Commenting
Nov 26th
Making comments on other web sites and getting links back to your internet business‘s web site is one of the primary methods of getting exposure for your brand and should be a weapon in every business’s search engine optimisation (SEO) arsenal.
This is a great way for you and your company to share your thoughts and opinions, get yourself recognised as an expert and get your brand recognised in the form of increased exposure.
Not All Comments Are Good Comments
When you do comment on other sites, it’s important to make sure you provide quality, informed posts to develop the trust and respect of users reading your posts and to get your brand noticed. If not, you run the risk of being regarded as a “spammer” whose only goal is to get a link back to your site, and thus actually end up damaging your brand.
To help you make sure your comments are appropriate and meaningful, here are 5 tips that you can use on your own and others’ web sites.
Five Tips To Guarantee Comment Engagement
1. Take Part In The Ongoing Conversation
If you find a comment thread that is relevant to your business, you’d want to add something meaningful to the conversation that can enhance not only your reputation, but that of your brand. Adding a comment that is irrelevant and/or completely off-topic not only doesn’t help anybody, but can do irreparable damage to your credibility as an individual and ruin the reputation of your brand.
2. Rewarding Positive Contributions Shows You Care
If somebody leaves a noteworthy comment on your web site or blog, just take a moment to acknowledge that comment with a comment of your own or by sending an email. This will help foster relationships and encourage further contributions.
3. Bring A Halt To Disruptive Behaviour Immediately
In the same way you should be quick to reward positive behaviour, you should probably act even more quickly to stamp out disruptive behaviour. If you’re doing the commenting, avoid engaging in threatening or inflammatory remarks, as this could lead to you being banned. You yourself should be equally swift to react to such behaviour by banning the IP involved. Act swiftly and positively and you’ll be doing your part to help stamp out negative behaviour.
4. Back Up Comments With Supporting Data And Arguments
It’s one thing leaving a comment and providing information or insights, but supplying supporting arguments and/or data adds a whole new dimension and immense value to that same comment. The supporting information you provide may be a link to another site or a written piece detailing the research you’ve done, but, either way, everyone benefits in the long run.
5. Be Upfront About Personal Interests
If you’re making a comment and representing your company or business, it’s always best to be as transparent as possible and to make it known that you have a vested interest. Otherwise, you’ll end up being exposed later and the damage could be far-reaching.
Commenting is a great way to spread the word about your internet business, and to foster a sense of community on your own web site.
A UK internet business coach will work with you to develop the art of making your comments valuable to the community and to furthering the influence of your brand.
Use Optimised Press Releases To Boost Your Rankings
Nov 25th
One of the best and most accepted ways to generate publicity for your internet business is to create optimised press releases. But, what exactly are press releases? When we think of press releases, we generally think of them in the context of news releases. Those still exist and are still used, but online press releases in the context of business are more akin to publicity blasts or advertisements that can be used to generate much-needed publicity for a company to help grow it and establish its brand.
Make Them Easy To Understand
Press releases, like your web site’s content, should be written so they’re easily read and understood. Getting thousands of users to see your press release can actually harm your company’s reputation if it’s obvious it’s been written solely to please the search engines.
So, although optimising your press release for the search engines is important, like your web site’s content, it also needs to be written for human readers. Failing to do so can do more harm to your company than good.
What Is An Optimised Press Release?
The first thing that needs to be made clear is that any publicity is NOT necessarily better than none at all if the publicity itself is poorly managed. So, although you may decide to take on some of the PR tasks yourself, it should be borne in mind that the creation of effective optimised releases requires knowledge of public relations writing as well as the ability to enhance the release with keywords specifically for SEO purposes.
A professional expert in online PR can provide these same services for you as well as handling the distribution and any other aspects of your campaigns.
Other optimisation techniques include adding photos and graphics named using appropriate keywords to stimulate interest, as well as embedding video and/or audio clips. Bear in mind that a press release can also double as a web page; in fact, companies on a low budget can often get ranked just using well-optimised press releases.
Running A Press Release Campaign
Having determined to embark on a press release campaign, a commitment to the process is required, meaning that releases need to be scheduled, results evaluated and finally adjustments made where necessary.
To achieve optimal results, it’s essential to provide quality content and it’s recommended that releases be published prior to Wednesday and at least 4 releases be published annually.
A well-run press release campaign will increase your internet business‘s relevance and, as a result, its page rank, and can be an integral part of your company’s search engine optimisation (SEO) programme.
A UK internet business coach can help you set up and run your press release campaign and advise you on how to make maximum use of press releases.
Yahoo Offers Personalised Deals Locally
Nov 24th
If you are an internet business owner, you can’t fail to have noticed the surge in interest in local search, both from users and search engines. So, like most of the other major search engines, Yahoo! is moving vigorously into the local search field. Witness the launch of Local Offers, in which Yahoo! has established partnerships with both offline and online merchants in order to provide local offers online.
Time To Get Personal
The concept of local online is really taking off with new sources of advertising and content appearing all the time. All well and good, but consumers no longer want generalised offers and content; they want to see all this stuff personalised and tailored to their particular wants and needs.
And this is where Yahoo! Local Offers comes in, because it aims to streamline the presentation of personalised content for the end user by removing all the complexity and barriers to getting relevant local deals.
Yahoo! Offers Massive Audience
Yahoo! has more than 180 million U.S. visitors and so can provide its online partners massive potential for user targeting and engagement, and the possibility of sizable business growth for its merchant partners both online and through local foot traffic.
Amongst the partners at the initial launch of Local Offers were such big players in the deal field as Groupon, Coupons.com and Tippr,
amongst others, and the number of partners is likely to grow substantially in the future as companies see the possibility of getting their brand in front of Yahoo!’s huge audience. They’ll benefit from the reach of such a large partner as Yahoo! to provide them with badly-needed exposure courtesy of Yahoo!’s massive distribution channel.
This is great news from the consumer’s standpoint, since they are generally inundated with both online and offline offers, leaving them feeling overwhelmed and a bit punch-drunk from the advertising onslaught. This new service will aggregate deals from several special deal sources and present them to the consumer at once instead of piecemeal, reducing the feeling that they are being bombarded and making them much more open to new offers.
Make A Deal With Yahoo!
Local Offers is open to all businesses offering “deals” whether that be companies offering a “deal of the day” or direct marketing.
So, how do you go about getting your company on board as a partner in Yahoo!’s Local Offers programme? It’s currently still in private beta, but one option would be Tippr.com, which is a group buying site already partnered with Yahoo! in the Local Offers programme. If you get your company affiliated with Tippr and use their PoweredByTippr group buying platform, your company can also participate in Local Offers and offer your own daily deals. The consumer gets more (and better) deals while the merchants get exposure to many more consumers, hopefully resulting in many more customers.
Get a huge boost in exposure for your internet business by offering daily deals through Yahoo!’s new Local Offers service.
A UK internet business coach can work with you to set up daily deals for your company and get massive exposure for your brand through Yahoo!’s Local Offers programme.
