Coaching For Success
Business Tips
Building a Great Business Brand Through Blogging
Aug 11th
Continuing on from yesterday article on ‘Engaging your blog readers’ todays post is about building your brand through your blog. Blogs started as medium to share personal experiences. But they quickly became a tool for self-promotion. A popular blogger became a known name in the vast community of bloggers and readers. In marketing terms, they became the ‘brand’.
So blogs are, in a way, tools for building a ‘brand’ in the market. If you are going for internet business marketing, then your blog establishes a brand for your business. We will discuss some basic steps you can take to build a brand through your blog. It is assumed that you are writing a blog to promote a business and not for expressing personal incidences.
‘Pre-requisites for your brand’
Before you go and start writing a blog about your business, you need to have a unique identity which stands your brand apart. A ‘logo’ for any business is useful to help people recall the brand.
You must have a well designed business ‘logo’ which obviously should not be of made of copy and paste objects and should be original. A bit of creativity can help here and there are many sites online where you can get a cheap but professional logo made for or hire a contractor on www.freelancer.com.
Apart from your logo, you can have a catchy ‘statement’ or ‘one liners’ to describe the objectives of your business blog. You can use these to create a recall effect for the brand.
‘Use creativity in presenting the content’
You should try different things while presenting your business blog as a face for your brand. Describing your business in simple texts or images is not a big deal. Your objective should be to catch the attention of the visitors within the first seconds. ‘Controversial taglines’, ‘catchy slogans’ and ‘witty remarks’ grab immediate attention.
If you are giving great ‘offers’ along with your products or particular brands then you must highlight them in your blog by using good pictures and texts. You can make elaborations by using charts, diagrams or infographics.
‘Personalise your blog’
You are establishing your brand identity though your blog. This calls for your original thinking. You are free to express anything, the way you want to express it. The best way to catch the attention of people visiting is to freely express your thoughts.
You must develop a unique style of writing and expressing creativity. You can add personal business or professional pictures and videos to add life to your blog. In essence, you must not shy away from establishing your personal identity among millions of online users.
Visitors to your blog should be addressed in a way that makes them feel that you seem to talk to them directly. This is the best way to connect with the audience and getting them engaged in your content.
‘Regular promotion of the brand’
Promotion of your brand does not end with your blog. You need to publicise it. Social networks like facebook and twitter are great platform through which you can create your brand visibility among millions of users and communities.
They are the places where you can initiate discussions and can get instantaneous responses from the users. They are the best ways to expand your network and hence promote your brand.
A brand is something that makes you stand ahead of your competitors. It is the brand that instigates passion in you. Blogs are platforms where you can express and share this passion.
Disabled Employment Opportunities – How to Earn From The Internet
Aug 4th
Today we have a guest post which we thought worthwhile bringing our readers, showing how an internet business can level the playing field of opportunity for anyone, please enjoy.
Just because a person is disabled does not mean they must be confined to a wheel chair. Although people in wheelchairs are usually classified as disabled, there are other forms of disabilities. If you have a disability, some jobs may not be practical for you. Not only is it likely that you will be unable to perform certain tasks, but continuing discrimination may make it difficult to obtain jobs that are well within your capability. Although this shouldn’t happen, the sad fact is that it does. Instead of trying to find a job working for someone else, you are advised to be your own boss.
If you are interested in becoming your own boss, there are a number of different ways that you can go about making money. Many of those ways involve the use of the internet and working from home. This is why you and other disabled individuals may enjoy starting your own business or participating in an existing business opportunity, all because you can work from home. Working from home will not only allow you save money on travel expenses, but depending on your disability, it will eliminate the sheer hassle of getting to and from work.
One of the many money making opportunities you will find online involves the buying of private label resale rights. Private label rights are available for a wide range of products. These products may include software programs, a mass collection of content articles, or e-books. Of course, you can choose any product that you want, but you may seriously want to think about purchasing the resell rights to software programs. This is because everyone needs software – individuals, small businesses and larger organizations. The popularity of most software programs should enable you to make more money, when it comes to reselling private label software.
To begin earnng with private label resell rights software, you will first have to find a supplier. In most cases, you will find that the individual you are doing business with was the original creator of the software program. Software designers and developers often prefer to do what they do best, that is, design software – and they don’t want to worry about the marketing. They do this by selling you the resell rights to their software programs or other software products.
If you have the resources to buy the resell rights to some software then its well worth considering – if only to try it out. If you are disabled, private label resale rights could represent a great way to become financially independent. To make money with private label resell rights, you must sell your newly acquired product. There are a number of different ways that you can do about doing this. It is likely that you will find that many of these selling methods require a small amount of time and a small amount of effort.
Popular software selling methods include the creating of a product website, the use of online classified ads, the use of local classified ads, and the use of online auction websites. If properly used, all of these methods may be able to help you generate sales for the software program, which you legally obtained the resale rights to. Despite the fact that these selling methods are typically successful, it does not guarantee that you will find that same success.
Whatever your disability, whether you are in a wheelchair, or have communication or social difficulties, or lack the energy to work ‘normal’ hours, private label rights software my provide you with an income together with the satisfaction of working for yourself.
If you would like to do a guest post on our blog contact us now.
Tips on Adword Campaigns
Jul 30th
An ad campaign can make or break a company, if you do it well people will look at your products or services and if it is bad it will simply not generate you any revenue.
People tend to think of their ads and Adword campaigns as seperate entity to the core of their business, they look at it as help for the business and not as part olf the core business and traditionally this was and to an extent still is true, however when you have an internet business it just doesn’t nor shuold it work that way.
Many business owners spend extraordinary amounts of time and money building their online business presence yet spend little if any time on the advertising they do online which seems to defeat the objective they are trying to ultimately achieve which is to gain customers.
They spend very little real time in the creation process and almost none in the fine tuning and monitoring of weaknesses in the performance of their marketing campaign. Today’s post looks at a few tips how we can help are Adword campaigns perform better and cost less.
What is an Adword Campaign
An Adwords campaign is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising system, which means that advertisers pay each time a visitor clicks onto a specific ad that takes them to an advertiser’s website. Advertisers pay to create their ads with AdWords, and publishers get paid to display those ads on their web sites with AdSense.
Most online business owners who use AdWords use it to drive targeted traffic to their website by creating ads and choosing keywords related to their business, products or services. AdWords places the ad on Google so that when people search for your specified keywords your ad will show up.
It also places ads into AdSense placements on related websites all across the internet. AdWords is a pay-per-click system so you only pay when AdWords brings targeted users to your web site. It is a cost effective method of advertising as you can choose your budget yourself.
Choosing your Adword Campaign Keywords
Every business owners objective is to generate revunue and to that end they must sell his product or service effectively, this means that they need to attract customers, get them to the right place on their website to make a purchase, help them find the product they are looking for easily and make the buying process extremely easy and simple.
On top of this the business owner must be able to drive targetted traffic to the site and supply the right information to help the prospective customer proceed to purchase. But for this to work and for the Adwords campaign to work the business owner must first target correctly the keywords he will use in the campaign and these are not always the obvious ones.
What a business owner should do is look for words that best describe the function of the product or service, if the Adword is about your website in general then look for words that best describe it. However most internet businesses are looking to target a specific product or service and Adwords campaigns do tend to work better if you target something specifically rather than generally targeting your whole site.
Just like choosing the keywords for your site, only use those specific to the objective to bring traffic for that product, now this may seem obvious but you would be surprised how many people do this wrong, think customer not you when choosing keywords.
Next think of not only the one word keywords but also the combinations of two or three words a client may use i.e. a service that helps businesses grow online – single word business (very general not much use), business coach (more specific, but open enough to get maximum results, but could be still too general) or internet business coach (this is very specific and will ensure only people who enter this combination of words or similiar will potential click your ad as they are looking for someone like you).
Using Your Keywords for your Adwords Campaign
Once you have chosen your keywords that will best describe your product or service in the ad it is time to actual go to the Adwords site on Google and create your ad. If you choose the right keywords and they are used frequently enough by people searching, they will see your ad and choose to click it. The more frequently it is clicked is the higher the quality score given to that keyword. The higher the quality score the better the ad placement will be and the number of times it shows will also increase.
This is good for your business as a high quality score generallly means a lower price per click. So well worded precise ads can potentially gain you cheaper click cost if the quality score is high.
Keeping your CPC low
Obviously we need to control costs on any campaign and one of the best ways is to split similiar keywords and use them in their own campaign, another is to remove what is known as negative words i.e something that will not bring you a conversion, this could be any word which could potential induce a person to click your ad thinking they would get something else so for example you do sales of computers you would remove a word like repairs as you do not repair computers you only sell them. Ensuring you have your demographics correct so if you are in the UK do you want to service the whole of the UK or just your local town and finally ensuring you have a good landing page, all of these things will help to keep cost down.
It is the life blood of all online business that they need new customers, to get them you must advertise but this does not mean it should cost you the earth. When using Adwords remember to do you keyword research diligently and make precise ads that can help lower costs, try to think like your customers and most of all test your ads, if they are not working you really need to change them.
Planning for Local Marketing
Jul 23rd
Local Marketing
Local marketing is the current internet marketing buzz word that seems to be on the tip of everyones tongue at the moment. But for many newbies this is just another phrase in the long line of online phrases being banded about. So we thought we would do a short piece using the five stage planning methodology for our newbie readers to help them plan their local marketing.
When people discuss “local marketing” they are talking about a marketing message which will help a business in a specific location market their products or service to their local community. The term local can mean in your town, city, county or just your main high street.
The idea is you engage in activities that specifically promote your business within your area to meet a specific goal such as new sales. To do this to your advantage you should follow a few simple rules in planing your marketing campaign.
You need to firstly set out the goals or objective you wish your marketing message to convey. This is really important and is the most poorly done task of many small business owners wanted to market to their locale as there is an automatic assumption that marketing will work because you are the nearest to that prospective customer.
But how do you target that customer if you have no goal for your message or plan for what you want that marketing campaign to achieve – yes lots of people may see your ad but that does not mean it is useful to them or to you in terms of getting customers.
Second you must establish the market you want to reach, lets face it anyone can market to the masses – the question is, ‘Is your product or services suitable to them’, if not then you need to think who it is beneficial for and target only that segment of your local area.
Third is your message – what is it you really want them to know? is it how wonderful you are (do not use this strategy it will not work) or is it if you have X problem then we can solve it. Be creative with your message but also to the point.
Forth how much money do you have to spend and of that how much are you willing to spend? Delivering your message costs money – fact, the question should be how much can spending X potentially bring me in return on investment (ROI).
Finally what media will you use to deliver your message, there are so much to choose from many people say that offline mediums are dead, I personally disagree – done correctly they can work extremely well especially given the fact that there are soo many people vi-ing for business online. Online can be really great however as well if you target your campaign correctly.
In order to market well locally all that is needed is a generous helping of thought. If you want to get the best results for your money and time invest in the free process of planning first then implement after.
3 Tips to Help Your Internet Marketing Goals
Jul 21st
'The Chair Principle'
Like all new skills when you start off doing marketing whether online or off it is difficult to do. There is always a learning curve, which sometimes can feel so steep that you will never conquer it.
Many new online business owners start off by getting information from anyone of a numerous and growing source for guidance ‘a guru’ and some of the information is good and some bad, some expensive some cheap like most things, however sometimes doing this might not be the answer they were looking for as many people seem to spend more money, time and effort in what I call fix it plans that concentrating on the real reason they got into business in the first place.
This constant struggle to get this part of their business right leaves many new business owners seriously out of pocket and yo-yoing between the latest big product to do X (I am guilty here also 
). So I thought I would give a few quick tips to get off the treadmill, the bandwagon and on the road to recovery.
1. Don’t get distracted
This is a biggy as many people are distracted by the flashy sales patter and the glitz and glam, the promise of an amazing product, which will give them the ultimate way to do X (sound familiar), that’s because it is.
If I said to you now go to any search engine and type in Internet marketing products; millions, if not billions of results come back – why? Because for those who get into this and do it well there is lots of money to be made at the expense of your inexperience and mine.
Do not get me wrong some of these products are good, some bad and some darn right ugly. But this is not the problem, the real problem is with each product there will be a different slant on how to do your internet marketing and with that comes the downside of distraction, confusion, dismay and ineffectiveness to make, choices or get anything worthwhile done so success if any is extremely limited.
To be successful in marketing yourself, your business etc online you need to pick one methodology and stick to it as though your life depends on it and to an extent it does – your livelihood depends on it, your peace of mind and the ability to stay motivated all depend on not getting distracted.
If you put all your efforts into just that one product for internet marketing you are far more likely to succeed with it and see good results.
2. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
Now I know you all know this saying and it is true, try to think of what I call the chair principle – a chair has four legs and these legs make the chair study to sit on, if the chair has less than four legs it becomes unstable and you are more likely to fall down. Business is like a chair the four legs makes a better seat.
Not everything you do will be a success many things you do will not work or will fall over, Thomas Edison is famed with stating that I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. He had many failures on the way to success what he kept in mind was a single process which he continued to use and adapt till he found the right way to make it work for him and this is what you need to do.
What you need to do is use that product on more than one online vehicle to see which one will give you the success and money you had hoped for, it is okay to have more than one website to try to achieve your goal, if one does not work get rid of it try another but use the same product throughout. This is better than trying to make your business chair with one leg?
3. Never Give Up!
More often than not things will seem as though they will never workout the way you planned them, things go wrong, people become tiresome and Murphy’s kicks in at this point you may feel like jacking it all in and this is the time when I recommend you take a deep breath or a day off if necessary to get your mind right and start again.
Maybe the initial product you choose does not work for your product or service then try a different one but only if you know you have fallowed it to the letter and tried it fully because otherwise you’re back at tip number one again.
I leave you with two Edison quotes to feed your mind and soul:
‘Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration’
‘Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up’
Good luck with your Internet marketing efforts.
