Sabado, Abril 21, 2012

Build a strong business with strong customer relationships

Spending the time to maintain strong relationships with customers will keep your core business healthy. Following up with them is essential to strengthen these bonds.

Most businesses spent time attracting customers to a product or service, trying to win their trust and then ending the whole process with a sale. That tactic seems obvious to most people. What often is neglected is the post-sale follow up with customers, particularly when it comes to online businesses. We should look at the time after a sale as an opportunity not only to improve our products but also to establish long-lasting relationships with our customers.

It takes much more effort to win a new customer than to maintain a relationship with an existing customer. But maintaining current customer relationships is just as critical and I’d even dare to say, more important than gaining new customers. What can we do to keep our established customers feel appreciated? You need to follow up with your customers.

7 Ways To Advertise Your Business For Free


1. Free directories: directories are perfect for customers that are searching for a particular topic. What’s great about them is that you only have to post once and they are good for long periods of time. It saves a lot of your time when you don’t have to resubmit your information every week or every month. The bad news is most of your traffic won’t come from here. I still feel it is worth it to get your link out there. Just take one day and set it aside for posting to free directories. You won’t need to do it again for at least 6 months.

2. Classified Ads: These are great for work from home businesses. Think about it. Where do people go when they are looking for a job? That’s right-the classifieds. The only downside to classified ads is that you have to resubmit them quite frequently. Once you find which classifieds bring you the most traffic you can concentrate on them and weed the others out. So it is really more time consuming in the beginning, and doesn’t have to be later on when you get the hang of things.

10 Questions To Consider When Growing Your Business

Here's a provocation for the coming year, decade, century or millennium.

By now, you've set a working direction for the year, established clear-cut objectives. Your first-iteration plan to reach them should be in place. This now seems like an ideal time to rethink the whole thing, doesn't it? After all, one of the effects of internet time is that plans are subject to change just as soon as - or perhaps even before - they are written.

Along these lines of thinking, perhaps there are some items you missed. Maybe there are issues you didn't have time to consider, or even things your mind touched on, but quickly passed over to deal with more urgent and pressing events. If you are off-cycle, and on the verge of a new period, you can use this exercise ex ante, rather than ex post. To help you stimulate your neural pathways and hopefully create an idea or two, I offer the following thoughts for your consideration. These "considerations" are not sequenced in order of importance. I think they are important.

8 Golden Techniques To Get People To Love The Rules

Different things motivate different folks. Some people are motivated to enhance their appearance while others are motivated by prestige or sexual conquest. Others are motivated by money. When it comes to work, many people are not motivated to do much of anything except show up and collect a paycheck. It is our job as managers to create an environment in which employees are inspired to do a better job and forge.

A recent Gallop Poll stated that about 20% of people queried described themselves as “actively disengaged” at work. Most of these people also said that they were not given the proper tools to do their job or that they were not given clear directions for completing the task. From this Poll, we see statistics that are astounding. These employees who are being described as “actively disengaged” are costing employers more than 300 billion dollars a year! This same Poll showed that these people are more likely to go hooky or to be late and are also described as less enthusiastic to their jobs.

5 Techniques To Hyperforming Employees

As a manager strides into the office among the staff, he has the power to positively shift the outlook of the employee for the entire day.

Words, gestures, even the expression on your face spell the difference in how an employee perceives your opinion of them. These unconscious actions tell the employee what they mean to you and how valuable they are to you as a manager and to the organization.

Letting the employee feel needed and appreciated is a key factor to maintaining maximum employee morale and motivation. If your employees feel that they play a key role in the company by the work they provide, then they are much more likely to say that they like their job and to strive to better themselves at that job. For many, feeling valued is just as important as high pay, and promotions.

5 Steps To Maximum Productivity

In every business too much time is wasted by owners and senior management on non productive acivities. The result is lower productivity and a significant loss of profits. Here are 5 simple ways to get rid of non productive tasks and boost your productivity.

Do you know that you get 80% of your results from just 20% of your time and effort and consequently 80% of your time is virtually wasted on non productive activities?. Once you realize this it is easy to take advantage and either reduce the hours you work or significantly improve your productivity.

The 80-20 rule was first discovered by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto a hundred years ago.  Using this knowledge is incredibly powerful in combating the "not enough hours in the day" mentality of today's society.

7 Common-Sense Tips for Managing People

This leadership article covers the essential ingredients for managing people, and reveals secrets your employees aren't telling you! Discover why honesty, integrity and good interpersonal skills are imperative as a manager, supervisor or team leader.

“Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.” Albert Schweitzer

1.You set the standard: Work as hard, or harder, than your employees. Be a role model when managing people. Strive to know more than your best employee (or best sales rep) about your product line, industry, and their jobs. This doesn’t mean you have to know everything. Still, educate yourself. I frequently hear in my seminars, “My boss has no idea what I really do in my job. The challenges, the pressures I face, and the time constraints.”

5 Reasons You Should Outsource Your Online Tasks

If you've been online for a while, either as an internet user searching for information or an online business owner, you might have seen the ups and downs of netpreneurs.

You may also, for some extends, get frustrated by the result of your online activities. Especially if you are an online business owner. You just don't see any substantial growth of your online business.

What went wrong? You might think. You've bought all the manuals. You've followed all the how tos. You've set up all the necessary softwares.

You start to think about being cheated by those so called 'experts'. You become afraid of failure in pursuing online business success. You start to think to just quit.

But, don't quit!

10 Things That Lead to One Great Meeting

Most leaders consider a person's ability to lead a meeting when making decisions about promotions. Here are ten tips will that will help you look like a leader by holding effective meetings.

Here are ten things that you can do to make your meetings more effective.

1) Avoid meetings. Test the importance of a meeting by asking, "What happens without it?" If your answer is, "Nothing," then don't call the meeting.

2) Prepare goals. These are the results you want to obtain by the end of the meeting. Write out your goals before the meetings. They should be so clear, complete, and specific that someone else could use them to lead your meeting. Also, make sure they can be achieved with available people, resources, and time. Specific goals help everyone make efficient progress toward relevant results.

5 Action Ideas to Deal with Difficult People

Do you find it stressful dealing with difficult people? This article provides five simple steps that will show you how to deal with difficult customers, colleagues, or your boss!

When was the last time you had to deal with a difficult customer? It was probably and external customer but perhaps it was an internal customer, such as a member of your team, a colleague or even - your boss!

I'm sure that you always want to provide exceptional service to both your internal and external customers. However, in the real world, things go wrong and mistakes are made. These "customers" will often judge your level of service based on how you respond to a mistake. Do it well and they'll probably forgive you and possibly even say positive things about your business or your abilities to other people.

4 Powerful Ways to do Market Research and Uncover a Profitable Niche for Free


Aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners are often misled or misguided on the topic of how to properly conduct market research that uncovers a profitable niche. The path most unsuspecting entrepreneurs take is by ending up at keyword tool or database to begin their search. As a keyword research expert and founder of one of the leading keyword research services on the internet, I can say with firsthand experience that keyword databases are not the first place to look nor should be even considered. Here’s why.

The primary keyword databases that are currently available to the general public only give search counts on a limited amount of data that accounts for 1% - 2% of the actual searches people do around the entire world. They can only predict (emphasis added) the real majority of searches that are being done on the big five search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com which hold 97%-98% of the keyword data. Most importantly, keyword research only shows what keyword phrases people are using in the search engines to search for answers, not what people actually buy on the internet. Just because a group of people search for specific terms or brand names does not mean that’s what they purchase. That’s a key distinction many entrepreneurs and business owners tend to gloss over.

3 Good Online Business Situations When It Makes Sense To Use Paypal.

Learn when to use third party processors like paypal and when to use other online merchant processing systems. Different online merchants have different needs.

Every day, a growing number of people venture into the world of online commerce, or ecommerce, in order to sell their goods and services online.  When merchants first venture into the online realm, they can get in over their heads by using solutions that are too costly, too complex, or just have way too many features than what the merchants truly need.

The good news is that there are solutions that allow the first time online ecommerce merchant the opportunity to sell their products and services with much less committment and cost on the part of the merchant.  Solutions such as Paypal offer the first time ecommerce merchant the opportunity to go into the online realm and get their feet wet without drowning.  One must follow the standard safety precautions associated with solutions such as Paypal and they can be on their way to earning an online income.

4 Essential Things To Build Your Email List

Many people would think that building their lists would take hard work and a lot of time to build and collect names and addresses. This is not so, it takes a bit of patience and some strategies but in doing this list, you open your site and your business to a whole new world of target market. Take the effort to take your business to a new level, if traffic increase and good profits are what you want, an opt-in list will do wonders for your business venture…

Internet marketing may have developed a rapid surge for the past few years. As more internet based businesses are being established, you need to develop new marketing skills and knowledge to keep up with the competition and to cope with the changing in Internet business world.

2 Things Your Ecommerce Website Must Have

Most customers today prefer to shop online. Online shopping is so accessible and convenient. This is the reason why most business persons put up their own ecommerce websites. Most ecommerce websites are bound to success, but is yours? 

Online shopping is the latest trend among customers. Why would you still go to the shop personally when you can do shopping from the comforts of your own home?

Biyernes, Abril 20, 2012

5 Affiliate Mistakes to Avoid that will Increase Your Sales


Avoiding these common affiliate mistakes will significantly increase your sales and commissions

Affiliate Marketing is one of the best ways to make money from home and affiliate programs provide anyone with internet access a chance to make a living on the internet. Affiliate programs are usually free or very cheap to join, easy to get started and typically pay commissions on a regular basis, so more and more people are turning to them as a means to start a home based business. However, there are a few mistakes affiliate marketers tend to make that hurts their business tremendously.

Avoiding some of these common mistakes made by affiliate marketers should quickly and easily improve your chances of making sales and increase your affiliate commissions. Here are five of the top mistakes made by affiliate marketers:

5 Common Mistakes Made By New Affiliate Marketers

Five common mistakes made by new affiliates are detailed along with tips on how to overcome them.

You’ve just signed up for this fantastic new affiliate program. They have great products, free referral websites, training, pre-made ads for you to copy and the best compensation plan on the internet. This is the best affiliate program on the internet! Put a few ads out there and you’re on your way to becoming the next internet millionaire. Right?

Before you break ground on that big mansion on the hill, here are a few mistakes many new affiliate marketers make that you’ll want to avoid.

Miyerkules, Marso 21, 2012

A Successful Business Financial Projection Can Be The Key To Securing Financing


A business seeking capital can’t afford to underestimate the importance of business financial projections. A business financial projection is simply forecasting your sales and revenue to the lender. This information is important because it is a key indicator to your ability to repay a loan.