Coaching For Success
Posts tagged Business Owners
Top 4 reasons Why You Should Use An Internet Business Coach
Jul 9th
An Internet Business Coach Helps Put The Pieces Of The Puzzle Together
If your Internet business has stalled or you are just starting it, an Internet business coach can help you make the right choices and overcome your problems. If you are unsure whether a business coach can help you, read the following reasons why you should hire one.
When you are first starting a business, you are passionate about it, but most likely still not an expert. Hiring a business coach is a fast and easy way of learning the necessary skills, rules of thumb, and secret tricks of the trade that may take you years to learn on your own. That is why it is crucial to find an Internet business coach who is good at the job. Cheaper is not always better, especially when it comes to finding a true expert.
An Internet business expert can also help you set the right goals. If your goal is to start making $10,000 a month within two years, by that time you can either succeed or fail. A business coach can help you break your final objective down so that it includes smaller goals. Achieving those can both help you stay on track and give you a sense of accomplishment on the path toward the big goal.
Small business owners often do not have somebody they can turn to for advice. Even if your Internet business seems to be doing well, there are times when you get stuck. At those times, hiring an expert to help you overcome that obstacle can save you frustration and money. This way, you can use the business coach as the “Phone a Friend” feature in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
Finally, an Internet business expert can help you make sense of the multitude of different technologies, strategies, and technical tools involved. When learning how to use Facebook, Twitter, or Google Analytics, it makes sense to hire a coach to teach you what you need. That way you can focus on doing what you love the most.
Online Education Really is Necessary!
Jun 25th
Successful Internet Business Owners have an Internet Business Coach
Don’t you just sigh when you read yet another story about some successful infopreneur who did not get an education and yet still made X millions… telling you you do not need an education to make money online. The paradox being they are selling you education i.e. buy my product and I will teach you Z…
Rant over;-) seriously though while education is never 100% necessary to being successful the fact that there are so many people trying to sell you just that online should seriously raise questions in you as to the real importance of online education and its pros and cons.
We all know there is a lot of rubbish out there being bought by the unsuspecting and sold by the untrustworthy, equally there are a lots of amazing products that are hard to find, the expression ‘ can’t see the wood for the trees’ springs to mind. The fact is that many business owners who want to work or start an Internet business need good products to help and there really are good ones if you can find them through the noise.
The biggest downfall of most Internet business owners is the fact that they neglect their education in the pursuit of money, the allure of it given by some infopreneurs who tell you I earned X thousand in just one day… etc.
The point most made by these Internet business owners is they can hire the people to fill the gaps in their personal knowledge and while a valid and true point initially at some stage they will need to review and get educated to an extent in that area in order to manage that person effectively.
To be successful business owners need to be more self-dependent when it comes to understand the areas of lack of skill in order to formulate strategies to keep his business profitable under the influence of that lack, this can only be done through developing at worse a basic education in that area.
By doing so it helps to build the foundation for developing a more analytical approach to understand the factors affecting your business in order to clearly forecast the market and competitive scenario based on world or market factors. In these situations sometimes experience is not enough by building a proper education you can aquire business acumen.
As an Internet business owner you must invest some time and money in keeping yourself up to date by constantly educating yourself, it is an investment into your business’ future and distinguishes you from those who work for you, it allows you to have a wider perspective and scope on all the different parts of your business and how to best deal with them.
There are many ways to get that education, you can do courses online or you could do an evening course. The best way is to be mentored by someone else who who can assess your situation and help you to improve the areas where you lack knowledge.
Internet business coaches are best to do this as the hard bit is not buying information or courses it is assessing whether what you are buying is really what you need. Most business owners either buy information which is not the answer to their problem, courses which are way too time consuming or worse that are too in-depth or techie for them to understand.
By having an assessment with a business coach you will identify quickly what you really need from what you thought was good or just wanted and shown what type of things to buy (if necessary) and personally guided through the learning process, something no amount of bought Internet merchandise by an infopreneur can do.
Hence, every internet business owner should not to neglect their online education and make every effort to pursue it with the help of an internet business coach.
Marketing Strategies Part Two
Jun 17th
Marketing Planning
In part one we discussed the different between what business owners percieve customers want and what potential clients want and need this was a case or product/service V people/brand allure. I discussed why people/ brand allure was a natural winning combination for any business and hopeful gave you some food for thought in changing the strategy you maybe using by looking at whether your business was inline with customers wants and needs. Today I want to look briefly at the process you need to follow to plan an effective marketing strategy for your business.
The objective of your marketing plan is to grab the customer and retain them for as long as possible, this is easier said than done, however following a step-by-step approach can guide you in the right direction. Below I have broadly set out a marketing plan.
1. Define business objective – You would be amazed at how many business owners we at The Internet Business Coach speak to who just can not define the objective of their business (Note: STOP! if this is you before continuing to read do this). How can you approach a potential customer if you cannot answer this. Your objective/s need to be short and succinct – if you can not do it in 100 words or less something is wrong and you need to rethink!
2. Establish market environment variables like competitors, customers’ behaviour. If you never study the competition, your business stands to lose, ask yourself if they are more successful than you what is it that they are doing that you may not be doing or getting right, what brand allure are they using to attract customers, how and most importantly where are they marketing? Is their marketing targetted at specific groups? All of the answers to these questions can help you overcome any current issues you have with gaining new business. Customer behaviuor is very important and as mentioned yesterday customers do not buy products/service but people and brand.
3. Define your market and customer profile. – to define your market you must first define your customer profile, i.e. where are they,? what is their key problem? then you can look at the market, where can you find them?, how do you reach them and so on.
4. Define your positioning, branding, pricing and promoting strategies – We discussed your positioning and marketing brand in part one and will discuss in more detail pricing and means of promotion in part three.
5. Establish an implementation plan. – At this stage you have already done most of the true hard work and now you need to think about how you use all of the data you collated to implement and execute your marketing plan of action. This in itself is no easy feat and if planned incorrectly can cost you time and lost money. Take time to write this down look at the time period over which this specific plan will be implemented and how this will get done i.e. your marketing mix.
6. Allocate financial and human resources. – The key here is to ask yourself how much of this can I do myself, what do I really know and could someone else do it better. If you know in your heart that you cannoot give this task X hours per week/month of undivided attention because your business demands are great or you simple do not know enough or the learning curve for you will be to steep then you really need to allocate enough money to your marketing campaign to cover outside help and the acual marketing itself ‘ it is better to plan to cover this cost in your product/service sale price then to try to do everything and end up doing nothing or half doing it where you ultimately end up with no new business and financial loses.
7. Identify the metrics for plan evaluation. – Basically this is a fancy way of saying what method/s you will use to monitor your plan and by what will you measure it i.e. collection of data, resources, schedule, quality, scope and problems. Keep reading the posts on this blog for how to do this.
8. Implement the plan. the D-Day of your hardwork is finally here in the words of Nike’ Just Do IT’.
9. Evaluate its effectiveness based on the set metrics – Now you are at the stage of checking to see if what you thought was going to happen and if not why not and how to change it, if it did go according to plan, how to contniue to do it or get potentially better results.
10. Define opportunities for long-term market development on the basis of the results. – This one speaks for itself, if it did not work well tweak, if it did rinse and repeat. In part three we will look at online and offline marketing, see you then. If you like this article and wish to republish it please leave it intact crediting it with a do follow link back to http://www.theinternetbusinesscoach.co.uk/blog
Hiring A Freelancer
Jun 12th
Image of Freelancer.com
Running a business is a difficult task as you need to monitor numerous tasks and formulate a strategy to optimise the quality as well as the cost of your business operations. In traditional business all operations are looked after in-house. However, present day businesses deal with many complex operations which can make it hard to look after all of them simlutaneously in an effective manner.
This brings us to the concept of ‘outsourcing’ to a freelancer, which is the process of involving an external party to handle a specifc task for your business. It is basically a contract given to the third party to handle some or possible all the different elements of your business. Outsourcing/freelancing is a recent phenomenon and has many advantages in it.
One of the main objectives of outsourcing to a freelancer is to save on costs. When you hire someone to do a specific task who is already skilled in that area, it can potentially save the administrative and training costs on your part as well as allowing you more time to concentrate on what you do best. Apart from the aforementioned benefits you should also find labour available at a lower cost.
You may not want to hire sometimesfull time as you have no need i.e. you may have a small requirement for a particular project wherein hiring full time employees and getting them trained proves more costly than outsourcing the job to a freelancer. If this is where you are at the first thing to do is clearly identify that task and its specifics so that you can write a clear, concise and informative job post.
No business is expected to have full expertise and specialisation in each and every business operation. The idea of hiring a freelancer is to gain that specialised skill temporarily in order to complete your job. You should accept no less than the industry standard, from your freelancer unless you want to. This can be achieved through interviewing them, asking for proof of qualifications and any industry traing or portfolios, the good freelancers will not mind these questions the bad ones well seem to disappear.
The better freelancers will welcome these questions as they probably perform similar operations for multiple clients, hence it is easier for them to prove the standard of the work output. One of the great things about freelancing is that the freelancer is on a contract that must be completed satisfactorily before they are paid which makes them legally held accountable for the quality of work, clearly more of an advantage than having someone fulltime.
Outsourcing gives you multiple options to choose the best freelancer suitable for your requirements. Once you choose the right organisation or a person to perform your job, you can then concentrate on your core business activities. It also provides you the flexibility in your business strategies. If you want to expand, you can hire third parties on an ad-hoc basis to meet sudden challenges or if later on the size of your business decreases, you can easily stop employent of your freelancer.
Hiring a freelancer allows the inter-mixing of resources including human capital among two or more organisations and hence overall knowledge base of a business expands. Thus, a business can flourish even if it is dependent on hiring freelancers who are not a part of it.
Freelancing has shown very good results in the past and is beneficial for both main business owner and also for the freelancer who might otherwise be unemployed . All you need to do is to identify the job to be performed and then choose from the vast array of sites online to help you find a freelacer i.e. freelancer.com, guru.com, limeexchange.com etc to get the right freelacder for your job.
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.
