Coaching For Success
Business Success
Making Seminar Promotion Pay
Jun 14th
Not All Seminars are Classroom Led
Some of the conventional marketing tools never lose their relevance with changing times. Seminars are one such medium of promotion which has been in use for a very long time. They have advanced with changing times and a lot of innovative techniques have evolved to make them as useful as possible. This article discusses various techniques that are used to build a successful seminar for promoting your business.
‘What is a seminar?’
Basically a seminar is a presentation made in front of an intended audience with the aim of promoting your products or services and add customers to your business by adding value to them in the form of knowledge. A seminar revolves around a message which you wish to convey to the audience. The more effective the message and the way it is communicated, the more likely the semiar will be a success. So, there are some basics which must be followed while developing its content.
‘The content’
A presentation is always identified by its title. In order to get the attention of the maximum number of people, the title should be very catchy tagline. There must also be a sub-heading explaining the benefit your product/service offers and explaining what you intend to convey from your catchy title. If your seminar is informational i.e added value at one level in order to get people to buy higher priced products you must ensure the content is very good and useful to them, the expression is ‘an eyeopener’ or an ‘a ha’ moment.
The body of the content must carry forward the effect of the catchy title. The content must be as concise as possible and must be presented in an effective format. Wherever it is possible, you should use bullet points instead of wordy lines. The words used in the content as well as used by the presenter during the presentation must be persuasive in nature, yet light and not sales pitch like. The words should spontaneously create an attraction, for example-’Please’, ‘Free’, ‘Save’ etc. Through persuasive words you can hold on to the attention of the audience. The content must end with a thanks note along with a call to action like highlighting benefits of early purchase.
‘Add-ons’
In order attract the audience to become customers you can offer them additional benefits. ‘Early bird offers’ can be made where you can offer special discounts or gifts on early purchases. You can also mention ‘Money back guarantees’ to give them reassurance. Online ordering facilities always work well especially alongside easy finance options given to facilitate the purchase. These simple offers can get many customers attracted to your product. You can publish the testimonials of successful customers which authenticates your product.
‘Different forms of seminars’
A seminar may not be always a presentation in front of a sitting audience. It can be in various forms like- a flyer intended for pitching with a cover letter; an e-mail campaign where the content is mass mailed; an advertorial, which is content in form of an advertisement; an online advertisement; a referral campaign where you can ask your old customers to refer your product to new customers and offering them incentives in return; a simple radio or TV infomercial where the content of seminar is moulded as an infomercial. The seminar presentations can also take place in PR events. Whatever the form of seminar is, the intention is to convey an effective message to a target audience.
A successful seminar ends up generating a lot of customers for your business and moreover it builds up a long term relationship with them. Once you develop a relationship with your customers, you start expanding your network. The most important thing is to hold on to your network by constantly following up with them. Remember, a successful business runs on a successful network.
Why Writing Good Copy is Important
Jun 10th
Good Copywriting is Key to Online Success
Writing good content for your website to gain an increase in your sales and traffic is quite hard to do. To be successful, you need the ability to produce useful and effective content, which you can use to target your preferred audience. Many people employ article writing services. If you employ such a service, you could potential save a lot of time which you can use on other parts of your business.
For your content writing needs, you must either study a bit to get good copywriting skills (online or otherwise) or be able to employ a reliable content writing service who can provide your site with useful content on a regular basis who also understand that effective SEO requires regular addition of fresh content to your website.
Good, informative and usable content can be an asset to your business online. Quality content helps your site generate more traffic and improved search engine rankings. Effective website content writing can potential ignite the interest of visitors to your site and probably increase purchases of your products or services.
Sometimes in an attempt to create unique copy we do not always get it right things like speeeling mistakes (pun intended 
) or poor grammar can really hurt your site, in most cases it may well go unnoticed but can if noticed repeatedly have an adverse effect on your sites credibility. Even some professional services get it wrong sometimes as well; this tends to happen not always but mainly when English (if your in the US or UK like me) is not the writers’ first language.
This is not solely on them as it is your responsibility as a business owner to check that the language used is right for your audience and that the spelling and grammar sound correct. If you really are unsure about the grammar read it out aloud, if you do this and it doesn’t work for you, it probably does work for your audience either.
Effective copy writing requires you to be good at research, it also requires you to know a little about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) in order to help drive traffic to your website and help to increase your sites popularity in social groups and for search engines. If you are using WordPress for your blog as I am here the best way to help your articles drive traffic is a plugin called ‘ The All in One SEO Pack’ if you go to plugins and then add new you can type the name in the search and it will come up and even auto install for you.
However the mastery here is still in the copy you write and the detail you put in requires concentration to ensure you correctly cover what is most important in that article i.e. if it is the promotion of a product, make sure that you state the problem and why that product is the answer.
Also important to good copywriting is the use of keywords appropriate for the content in order for search engines to read and understand what relevance the content has by the weight and use of the keyword (Caution – do not add more keywords than necessary – your article will be seen as spam and it will be a problem for you because search engines can demote or remove a site for excessive use of a word).
Try using persuasive words and life example that people can relate to in order to draw people to your copy use ‘you words’ instead of ‘me word’ i.e our product will enable… instead try ‘your product will enable you to be… the change is slight but by saying your product, you are placing them in the situation that their product will enable them to…the mindset is key to persuasive and understated selling techniques.
Good copy can make help your sites credibility and ranking, bad copy can leave you with many undesirable effects, it is best if you are unsure of what to write or how to hire someone to do it for you there are many good sites like textbroker.com that can hook you up with a good writer.
If you do not want to pay someone indefinitely to do the job of writing copy for you then, pay attention to the way the person you hire writes, look at the English, Grammar and spelling, how they use keywords and the describing words they use. After a time you will get the hang of what makes a good article or not, then if you have the time and the inclination go for it yourself.
Approach to Running a Successful Business
Jun 5th
Business Success
‘First Step-Vision Statement’
A vision is a statement should reflect your future ambition for the business. It represents the very ‘purpose’ of the existence of your business, which stand irrespective of your competition. A vision statement sets a ‘mission’ for your company, which is the target set to accomplish your vision. Apart from the mission, there are some core values and principles which you stand by, these values must be also incorporated in the vision statement.
‘Identify Strategies’
If a vision statement is your business’ guide stick then identify the strategies is the next natural process that you will adopt to move forward towards your vision by fulfilling your ‘purpose’ and achieving your ‘mission’ guided by your ‘values’. You define strategies keeping in mind the competitive scenario and other business environment factors like economic policies of the government. You must create short term as well as long term strategies and measure their impact from time to time to fine tune them, all these strategies must be evaluated and fine tuned.
‘Sustained Business Runs on Revenue’
A business runs by the revenue it earns. Thus, you need to have avcloser look at your financials which consists of your balance sheet and Profit & Loss statement. Accordingly you need to build a ‘revenue model’, which represents your financial baseline along with the forecast of future revenues. On the whole, it indicates your current income sources and the future earnings. The forecast of future earnings is done by analysing the past trends and your plans for future growth.
‘Growing Your Business’
Your business consists of various stakeholders who are affected by and who affect the business directly or indirectly. These stakeholders are mainly- business owner, the business corporation and the external entities like tax authorities. Your endeavour is to grow your business as well as satisfying these stakeholders. Also, the business must be financially sound and free from debts or other liabilities. Thus, the business assets must be protected legally as well as financially.
‘Marketing and Sales’
The crucial part of any business’ success or fail hinges on its ‘marketing’. It is an important function of any business as it is the one which help gain visiblity for your product allowing lit to be sold in the marketplace. Marketing encompasses the process of promotion of your product among your target segment of customers by positioning your product in such a way that they perceive some value in it. You can use various offline tools like Newsletters and PR activities; or online tools like social Media and webpages for promotion. The marketing strategy helps captures the customers’ needs, by convincing them that your product will satisfy their need or desire and also will utimately help close the deal by selling them the product and realising the revenue.
‘Continuing the good work’
Once the business starts generating revenue, you have to make sure that you keep going and measuring what works and removing what does not. Apart from the revenue and resources, you must focus on your team. You must understand that your employees are one of your most important assets. As a leader you should keep them motivated so that they stay committed to helping your business grow. You have to instil motivation by providing them focus, setting a purpose, encouraging team spirit and by recognising their efforts and rewarding them. As a leader, you should exemplify yourself by demonstrating character, capacity, credibility, courage and clear communication among you team. All of these things are needed to help your business become and stay successful.
