Coaching For Success
Posts tagged Small Businesses
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.
Just How Important Is it to Keep the ‘B’ Word in Mind When Designing a Website for Your Business?
Jul 8th
Negotiating The Business Maze to Success
Branding is something we commonly associate with big multinationals. Pepsi, Nike, Coca Cola, McDonald’s and other companies use branding effectively to spread their business worldwide. But how can branding benefit a small Internet business? In an Internet business, barriers to entry are low and everybody can start a business. Under these circumstances, branding becomes a necessity. Here is how to do it.
Find Your Voice
When you design a website for your business, it is tempting to look at what others are doing and act the same. After all, that will instantly make you look professional. But if you are too similar to others, you will also be bland and uninteresting. That is why you should think of a way to stand out. Create a unique voice or a unique point of view that will send a clear message that you are a master of your area of expertise. Look how Gary Vaynerchuk created a personal brand with his WineLibrary.tv website.
Create a Unique Visual Identity
Your visual identity should go with your voice. Create a logo and design your website so it stands out and complements the way you express your ideas (hire an Internet business coach if you need help). Having a recognizable visual identity will help you because people remember images better than words.
Spread the Word
Having a successful Internet business is all about making connections. We live in the era of social media, which gives a huge advantage to smart entrepreneurs who create a personal brand. Use Twitter and Facebook to get to know people. Befriend both industry leaders and potential customers, present a unique spin on your area and, with time, you will be recognized as an authority.
Branding is not a cure-all. But in a world increasingly cluttered with advertising and “me-too” businesses, it is an excellent way of standing out and making your Internet business profitable.
Three Tips on Search Engine Optimization especially for Small Business Owners
Jul 7th
Starting an Internet business is an exciting adventure. It requires a small initial investment, which gives Internet business owners with bright, creative ideas a good chance of success. If you are a small business owner, these three Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips will be of great help.
Develop Great Website Content
If your website content is bland and generic, people will consider your product bland and generic. Too many sites think they can get away with writing robotic articles filled with little more than keywords, but they are wrong and it will hurt their business. This strategy will get people to their website, and get them off the website in a matter of seconds.
If you are targeting specific keywords (and you should), centre your content around those keywords. Use grammatically correct English and make the tone of your writing conversational. Also, submit articles to other websites to build your expertise.
Use Social Media
When you provide great content, you also have to provide a way for visitors to share your articles. Visit some popular websites. How many of them have Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and other “tell your friends” links below every article? This simple feature allows your visitors to spread the word of your business just by clicking a link.
Analyze Your Success
If you have a successful Internet business, do you know if you are earning as much as you should be? A tool for analyzing visitor statistics, like Google Analytics, allows you to see how many people are coming to your site and, more importantly, from where. If you use pay-per-click campaigns, this will allow you to see how many people are coming to your site. Additionally, you will see how many of those visitors end up buying your products. This will allow you to change your ads and your landing page to see how different marketing messages, page layout, and page content affect your income.
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
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.
