Category: Online Biz Tips

Here is a helpful exercise on how to research and prepare promotional marketing materials to bring the right people to your business. When I do this exercise with my marketing students, we always have a lively conversation that not only sparks solutions but also leaves participants feeling enthused, inspired, even excited about showing up in the marketplace.

The themes we explore and the fun we have doing this exercise are so central to an authentic approach to small business marketing that I have decided to highlight them in this article.

First, let us stipulate that somewhere in the world there are prospective clients or customers who will fit you and your work “just right.”

(If this does not feel true for you yet, then you have work to do. Perhaps you need training, practice, or mentoring before you can attract “just right” customers. Or perhaps, like I did with my art business, you are trying to make an avocation into a vocation. For now, let us assume that you are in the right business with the right skills.)

Second, let us assume that “just right” clients are those who get great value from working with you just the way you are. These are clients who share enough of your standards and values that it is easy to develop mutual respect, appreciation, and benefit. With these two assumptions in mind, here are some unconventional yet highly productive questions to help focus the image, tone, and message that will attract clients who fit “just right.” Answer them quickly to tap into your creative subconscious. There will be plenty of time later for thinking about the answers and deciding when and how to use them in sharing your gifts with the world.

1. If your work were a color, what color would it be?

2. What shape would it be?

3. How big would it be?

4. What texture would it have?

5. If you pressed it with your finger, what would happen?

6. If your work were a popular song, what song would it be?

7. Who would be singing?

8. How loud?

9. If your work were an historic personage, who would it be?

10. If your work were going to a party, what would it wear?

11. If your work had a typical mood, what would it be?

12. If your work were a plant, what kind of plant would it be?

13. In what environment would it thrive?

14. If your work were an animal, would it be domestic or wild? How big?

15. If your work were a meal, what kind of meal would it be? (Fast food? Haute cuisine? Mac and cheese?)

What is the point of questions like these? Simply this: Answering them can reveal aspects of your personality that inform and augment the work you do. By surfacing these unique associations, you will be unearthing imagery and attitudes you can use to set the tone for your marketing so that it is easy for your “just right” clients to differentiate you from other people doing similar work.

Try this exercise – it could be the start of something beautiful.

Creating (or buying) high quality content for your site is without a doubt one of the most important activities you can do. Content truly is king. You want to consistently add good content to your site. This is what will attract people to your site, and more importantly bring them back. Most people won’t buy something until their 3rd time on a website. You want to give them as much of a reason to comeback as possible, and nothing does that better than good quality content.

Content will also catch the eye of Google. If you are creating a new blog post in WordPress every time you add content, that is a separate page that can be indexed in Google. The more pages you have in Google, the more chance people have to find you AND the more powerful your site is to Google itself (better Google rankings).

Fresh content is another big favorite of Google. A site with fresh content will out rank one with stale content all things considered.

Great content is also a traffic driver. You can try all of the traffic techniques you want but NOTHING will top your content going viral. If your content is good enough, people will share it. Social media makes sharing things so easy now, that nothing can compare with the traffic driving power of “word-of-mouth”.

If you want to build backlinks, drive traffic, increase your Google rank and create repeat web visitors – then you need to create good content on a consistent basis.

What is money? A child might say that it’s something rich people have and poor people don’t. An engineer might go into a detailed and lengthy explanation, but we all know that money is what really “makes the world go around.”

In the business world, money is the definition of success or failure. That’s why it’s vitally important that every entrepreneur has a good understanding of money – even if their business is still struggling to get off the ground.

Have you ever noticed that people who have a lot of money are magnets for more money? I’ve listened to the gripes and accusations of onlookers who accuse them of being born with a silver spoon in their mouth among other things, but it’s more than that. The secret is that they UNDERSTAND money.

Financially successful people can spot opportunities to create more money in a heartbeat. They understand the money system and how it works. They know the magic of creating money. They have experience under their belt.

Understanding money is a key ingredient to becoming someone who has money, and fortunately it’s getting easier instead of harder to do just that. Think about it. A checking and savings account used to be the only options within realistic reach of the “average Joe”. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that there’s an amazing menu of options available at any bank or savings and loan company you walk into.

What does that mean? It’s time to get busy and become students of money. If we’re going to have a lot of it, we need to understand how to invest and manage it. I can already hear it… So what if you don’t have much to manage and invest at the moment! Prepare for the future

Here are 3 easy steps to get started…

1. Think like a millionaire

I know that’s tough to do, when you’re struggling just to pay for your overhead, but attitude is half of the battle. If you think like successful business owner, you’ll soon find out that money really is attracted to the “rich.”

2. Become Financially Literate

There are a million-and-one self help books on the market for people looking for information on money investments. Learn from the best. Find a few reputable authors and read, read, read. Subscribe to money magazines and “The Wall Street Journal.” Read what the rich read.

3. Make Informed Decisions

Once you know the ins and outs of the money world and have studied the successes and failures of others, it’s time to put your knowledge to work. When the opportunity knocks, you’ll be ready to open the door and greet it with a confident smile.

Your new knowledge and attitude will make you a marketer to be reckoned with. No more slouching around and pointing fingers at the rich marketer down the block. You’ll be one of them. You’ll have the tools to use every opportunity to create more success.

Customers love to help themselves. They can get what they want when they want them not when someone else is ready to serve them. This is where e-business can really make a difference, by extending your existing customer service systems over the Web. Web-based or online service allows your customers to find out what they need at the touch of a button, anytime of the day or night. Whether its actual transactions or account details, they will appreciate a better level of service, making it easier for them to do business with you. All within a secure web environment.

But as a customer you are probably wondering why it is better to opt for online printing than the traditional printing service. Well for one, online printing service allows you to produce and order documents with just a few clicks of the mouse. The web-based printing company will receive your order, print them and ship them right at the comfort of your home. The efficiency, convenience and ease that are offered by online printing can present a lot of benefits to you. When you are looking for the lowest price for your print job, all you have to do is do some comparison shopping until you see the lowest bid. You need not write bid letters to find the vendor that best cater to your printing needs.

Say for example you have a poster that needs to be printed as soon as possible and in huge quantity. After surfing through the net you find this site that offered you an incredibly low price. Great! Not only will you save money but you will also be able to track the progress of your print job without the hassle of missing phone calls from the sales person. And you also have the advantage of having several choices in layout, ink, paper and typefaces when you are having trouble with your design.

But as they say there are always two sides in a coin, if there is a yin there’s always a yang. So even if online printing has its benefits, of course it has its downsides. First off, going online for your printing needs necessitates you to do it ahead if time. If you need your poster printed by next month you have to start that online search as early as today. Remember that delivery and printing may take a few days so do it ahead of time. Additionally, there is lack of personal interaction with the vendor and lack of control over the job when you go for online printing. The Internet is your only way to track the progress of your print job. So you need to have lots and lots of faith to your printer. When you are able to trust your printer, you will have less worry of not getting your print job the way you want them to be.

Nevertheless, modern technology has brought a lot of options when it comes to print jobs. Online printing has offered customers and printers alike a brand new way of doing business. That is why; sometimes the best service is no service.

1. Listen to (and write down!) the questions your clients ask. They’re clues to the problems you can help them solve. They’re also topics for your next article, talk and e-newsletter. Don’t invent this stuff – just listen!

2. Plan and write out your next sales conversation. Got a meeting next week with a hot prospect? Write down the words you will use to find out who the decision makers are, what the budget is, the scope of their problem, and how you’ll ask them to take next steps. If you have no idea how to do this, send me an email and I’ll help you think through it.

3. Read a marketing article. Most non-marketers don’t go out of their way to read about marketing. A painless way to stay motivated, though, is to read one new article every week. Start here: YOUR BLOG HERE 🙂

4. Pay attention to the marketing messages all around you. See if you can pick out the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) and call-to-action (what they want you to do). Practice thinking like a marketer.

5. If you manage others who perform your client work, visit a client with your employee to show interest. This keeps you fresh and demonstrates your commitment to the client. It also shows the client that there’s more to your organization than their sole point of contact.

6. Give a copy of this article to your staff and ask them to come to the next staff meeting prepared to talk about the ideas that this generates. Ask people to commit to one new task. Have them give a progress report at the next meeting. Rinse, repeat.

7. Draft a 3 or 4-question survey to do short, conversational telephone interviews with your target audience to find out what they struggle with…what’s on their wish list…what they want from you.

Do NOT ask them if they want to buy anything from you. This is a relationship-building task, NOT a sales call. That comes much later. Ask others you work with to pick two clients or prospects and call them. Compare notes and discuss your findings.

8. Think of small solutions that you can offer to important problems. Or small solutions to little problems. The key is to think small. It’s less intimidating for your customer to “sample” you and makes it easy for them to take a first step.

9. Practice saying your Positioning Statement out loud. To the mirror. In the car. In the elevator. If you don’t know what your Positioning Statement is, that’s a problem. Email me and I’ll give you a hand.

10. Visualize doing any one of these things successfully. Really – it’s what professional athletes, speakers, performers, and successful people do all the time. Visualize it, and it will be so.

The next time a scientist tells me they can’t market, I’ll know better. These ideas clearly prove that theory wrong!

1. Lack of Focus – It is important to focus on one niche, website or method at a time. You don’t want to multitask between 500 things. You will never learn what works and what doesn’t unless you focus on one thing and give it a fair chance. The added focus will ensure you see results as quickly as possible.

2. Buying Every Product – I spent a lot of money on money making systems, turnkey solutions, push button cash generating reports etc… To be perfectly frank, I got ripped off a couple times. Not only that, I lost my focus because I had bought reports on 20 different ways to make money. There is nothing wrong with buy these reports, but you don’t have to buy everyone you see.

3. Not Following Through – If you buy some sort of product – then make use of it. Don’t just file it away. Buying a product is useless unless you USE it. This is exactly why I wasted so much time and money. I would buy a product or system and then never follow through on it. I wouldn’t get results right away so I would give up. I did this over and over again with no results. If you don’t follow through on your campaigns you will not make money.

4. Underestimating Sales Copy – This came up on 4 out of 7 marketers lists. It is something I wouldn’t have thought of — but it instantly hit home. Never underestimate the power of sales copy. It is definitely worth learning. My major issue was never believing those long sales pages would ever work on anyone – since they have NEVER worked on me. I assumed people were like me – but I was wrong. Luckily I learned my lesson early. If you are thinking of investing money into your online marketing – consider a high quality Sales Copy course. Even a basic understanding will dramatically increase your results.

5. Lack of Confidence – The above 4 points came from other marketers, but this last one came to me. You need to be confident when you are working online. You will hear people in the outside world doubt you, and people on the online world can be downright brutal. Don’t listen to them. If you are intelligent, willing to learn and hard working you can and WILL success making money online. Don’t let anyone talk down to you. If you fail, pick yourself up and keep trying. There is money to be mad, and you can earn it. Don’t believe otherwise.

Learning from your own mistakes is a quick way to learn. Even faster than that though, is learning from our mistakes. That takes out the time you waste making mistakes in the first place 🙂

Video: Brad explains what document sharing is and how you can use it to get traffic to your website.

CPC (Cost Per Click Advertisers) – These sites let you place ads on your site that when simply clicked earn you money:

Google Adsense

Adbrite

Chitika

Kontera

Clicksor

CPA (Cost Per Action Advertisers) – With these sites your web traffic must click an ad and then follow an action (usually a purchase):

ClickBank

Commission Junction

Linkshare

ShareASale

Max Bounty

Amazon

CPM (Cost Per 1000 Impressions) – With these companies you will earn a set amount of money for every 1000 displays of an ad. Note – most of these sites require a certain high amount of traffic per month before they will approve your site.

Burst Media

ValueClick

Tribal Fusion

If you want to start monetizing your current website, or build a website that is monetized from the start – check out the options above and you are sure to find some sort of offer that you can use to make some money.

You’ve written and compiled an E-Book. Now you have to decide how much to charge for it. Finding the right price is essential to the success of your product. If you charge too little, people will think it’s of little value, and they won’t purchase it, or even it they do buy your book, you will have to sell thousands of copies to get to the point where you can begin to see a profit. If you price it too high when compared with your competition, you will find yourself steadily lowering the price, which will cause you all kinds of new problems in the future. For example, if you sell your E-Book at first for $39.99, and later reduce it to $24.95, don’t you think the people who bought it for $39.99 are going to be PISSED?

Choosing the right price for your E-Book is one of the most critical parts of the marketing process. The first rule of pricing E-Books is to never underprice. Determine the highest price your audience can afford, and then if you find your book isn’t selling, you can always reduce the price. Before you take that step, make sure you are promoting your book like crazy on the Internet and on websites. The price should be aimed at bringing in profits, but you should never forget that price is one of the factors that people use in judging the value of your E-Book ? before they buy it. So always start with the highest price, and then launch a mega-marketing campaign.

Pricing an E-Book is particularly difficult because E-Books are a fairly new commodity. Since they are digital, the value of an E-Book is as confusing as the understanding of what digital actually is to the average layperson. This means that we must look at E-Books in a different light in order to determine their actual worth in this brave, new cyber world.

Let’s look at the difference between a book in print and an E-Book. A printed book is an object you can hold in your hand, store on your bookshelf, even hand down to the next generation. It is priced on factors such as paper stock, design and production costs, and marketing.

But the fact that unites E-Books and print books is that they are composed of ideas. It is the ideas in these books that have the ability to change, or possibly transform, people’s lives.

What do you think an idea is worth when evaluated against the cost of paper and ink?

It is the IDEAS that are valuable! That is how you determine the cost of your E-Book.

What should I charge for my ideas?

There are all different formulas and methods for determining the correct price for your E-Book. Let’s begin with honing in on your ultimate goals.

Decide if your goal is to get wide distribution and maximum exposure. This goal is aimed at drawing customers to your business or service, or to establishing the credibility of your reputation. If this is your main goal, you should aim to keep your price on the low side. Some authors have even priced their E-Books at a profit loss to draw a high number of new customers. The key is to find a price that maximizes your profits and the number of books you sell.

This is an excellent pricing strategy if you are looking to acquire long-term customers. Long-term customers are extremely likely to buy from you again and again as long as the first E-Book they buy is of exceptional quality and beneficial to the customer.

However, if your book contains valuable and more importantly NEW information, references, or techniques then you should aim to price it on the high end.

After you figure out your goal, you must figure out what your audience’s need is for your E-Book. For example, does your book solve a particular problem? If it does, and solves it in a way that hasn’t been written about in one hundred other E-Books, you will be able to achieve high sales at a high price. If your book solves a problem or answers questions in a new and unique way, you should price your book as high as you can go. You will achieve larger profits this way, but bring in fewer customers. Just make sure the question or problem that your book solves is one that is important and relevant to the majority of your market audience. If your ideas are not common knowledge, or you are presenting a brand new technique, you will be able to sell books at a high price. Just be prepared for your competition to undercut you on price as soon as they hear about your book.

Keep in mind that the above pricing strategy is temporary. Eventually, you will cease to sell books at this high price. So figure out in advance how long you plan to offer your E-Book at this high price, and when that time is up, change your pricing strategy.

If you want to see large profits over customer draw, aim for an audience that is looking for easy solutions to their problems at a low price. If your book is aimed at solving one particular problem rather than general advice, then you can charge more. Start at the highest price the market will bear to bring in the largest profits, and plan to discount the book a number of times throughout the year.

Marketing Strategies

The key that unlocks the sales potential of your E-Book is to find a single sentence that becomes your selling handle. This sentence states what question or problem your book answers and the benefits your E-Book can provide. Then be sure to use that sentence in every piece of sales and promotional material, and every time anyone asks you about your E-Book.

Besides promoting your books assiduously online, there are several other strategies that can help you sell more books.

One is to give something away for free with your book, such as a valuable bonus item. Or bundle several E-Books under one price, which lowers the price for each E-Book if they were sold separately.

An effective technique for figuring out a price is to send out a survey to your current customers. If these customers have already bought an E-Book from you, ask for their opinion in terms of price. Do this by creating a sales page for the new book, but don’t include a price on that page. Instead, add a number of links to survey questions that ask pointed questions to aid you in assigning a price to your E-Book.

Another strategy is to test out prices by creating a number of duplicate sales pages with different prices on each page. Make sure your sales copy is exactly the same on every page, and includes your selling-handle sentence. Then figure out for each page the conversion ratio between visitors to your site and sales of your book. This will tell you what your optimum price is.

Ultimately, if you’ve written a book that solves a problem or presents a new technique, your book will bring in both traffic and profits. So be sure to write that selling-handle sentence that sums up what problem your book solves and what the benefits of your book will be to the customers who purchase it. And then watch your market come to you!

Social Bookmarking could be one of the best things that ever happened to websites and blogs.

Basically Social Bookmarketing sites allow users to create a set of content bookmarks. These bookmarks are organized by tags, which are (usually) arbitrary words or phrases the user can assign to content. This gives the user a way to classify, rank and organize content using tags. The most popular Social Bookmarking Site is del.ici.ous, which has millions of users.

Social Bookmarking sites have an intrinsic advantage over search engines and other bots — people choose what to bookmark rather than relying on a program to categorize and qualify content. There is an implied quality in something that someone has taken the time to select.

Social Bookmarkers read other people’s bookmarks and add them to their own if they like them. There are also RSS feeds so people can see what others are tagging, which I think is really cool, and a textbook example of viral marketing.

About 4% of my referrers this month are del.icio.us related, including .8% off the home page, meaning that people click on my link when they see it pop up in their RSS feed. I get a goodly amount of traffic from technorati as well, but I would call that site a business bookmarking site, so I’m not going to mention it here.

I only provide a facility on AffiliateBlog for del.icio.us tagging. There is a terrific WordPress plugin called Sociable that allows direct tagging for tons of Social Bookmarking sites. If you don’t have it as part of your blog you should get it and install it today. This blog is being redesigned and should be done in a few weeks. The new design will incorporate Sociable.

So…what can YOU do to get the social bookmarking virus ramped up? I see two basic considerations:

1. Write good content. Darren Rouse had an interesting observation about del.icio.us items that make it to the top of the site. You can take a look, but basically he observes that lists, how-tos, technical articles and humor get to the top faster.

2. Give people the tools to bookmark easily. If you have a blog, use Sociable. It’s terrific. If you have a site, there are plenty of interesting tools that will help you make it easy for your visitors to bookmark your content. AddtoBookmarks.com is a good one.

There are Social Bookmarking sites popping up all over the place. Here are the Top 10. Where did I find them? In someone’s bookmark list on Listable, of course.

Del.icio.us

Listible

Digg

StumbleUpon

BlinkList

Spurl

Magnolia

Furl

BlogMarks

Reddit