Promote Your Home Based Business To Market Effectively

How To Promote Your Home Based Business On A Shoestring Budget!

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:55:43 +0000

Getting customers is the key to success in any business. There are many ways to promote your home based business – the only way to know which ones are best for your business is to test. Here are some tips for getting customers without spending a fortune!

1. Tell everyone you know that you are starting a business AND ask them to tell everyone they know. Word of mouth is a great way to promote your business, especially if your business is local. And best of all, it’s FREE!
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2. Join your local chamber of commerce (especially if most of your customers will come from your local area). Networking won’t get you customers over night, but you never know where you’ll find business – and where you’ll find others to help promote your business. Plus, you’ll also get access to a variety of services, discounts, etc.

3. Advertise in your local newspaper. Many local newspapers have sections for new businesses, and this is a great and cost-effective way to reach customers in your area!

4. Post flyers and hand out business cards whenever possible.

5. Advertise in national magazines and newspaper your customers read. Trade magazines are a great way, to target your advertising - and reach the exact people who need and want what your business offers. Even a small classified ad can generate a large return.

6. Create a website. Whether your business is local or national, putting your business online is a must these days. Even if you don’t sell anything that can be bought online, you can provide valuable information to prospective customers through the Internet.

7. Promote your website in all of your literature – business cards, stationary, emails, etc.

8. Learn how to “optimize“ your website to get free traffic on search engines such. as Google and Yahoo. You can select specific terms that customers use in your industry, and you can promote your business world-wide - or just in your city.

9. Use Pay-Per-Click advertising on Google and Yahoo. You can select the terms your customers use to find information they are looking for, and pay each time they click on one of your ads. You can set the amount you pay for each click, test your ads quickly, and gain visibility quickly in the search engines (getting high rankings for free does take some time).

10. Advertise in print and email newsletters your customers read and websites your customers visit. This is another great way to get your business in front of the right people, without spending a fortune. Offer free information (course, newsletter, how-to booklet on your industry, buyer’s guide, etc.) to increase the response rate.

11. Write articles and submit to magazines, newsletters, and websites to share your knowledge and make yourself an expert in your field. Establishing credibility and gaining visibility will make people want to do business with you!

12. Create a follow-up plan to stay in contact with people who respond to all of your ads. The more you can keep your business in front of potential customers, the more likely they will be able to find you when they are ready to buy what you offer!

How To Promote Your Computer Repair Business

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:55:09 +0000

More and more people use computers everyday and need professional help when problems occur. Providing those services can be a profitable business, but how can you stand out from the crowd?.More and more people use computers everyday and need professional help when problems occur. Providing those services can be a profitable business, but how can you stand out from the crowd?

- Be professional. You will sometime be unable to save their data or their broken motherboard, but you can explain why while keeping it simple. And there are few software problems you cannot solve at all, so do not admit failure unless necessary (repairs that would cost more than the computer’s value for example). You will gain a reputation as an expert, not to mention people will come to view you as honest, which can be invaluable if you have a serious problems one day.

- Always have business cards on you. You never know when you could end in a discussion about computer, giving you a perfect opportunity to sell your services. You can also leave cards on community boards and the like.

- Likewise, make sure your customers have an easy way to find you and call you back. Put stickers with your contact information on all computers you fix, or at the very least, give your business cards to all your customers.

- Don’t underestimate your personal network. Your family and friends will most likely be happy to help you promote your business. After that, the news will spread to friend of your friends, who will be quick to recommend you if you do a good job fixing their computer.

- Do something special for your customers, a little extra they cannot get anywhere else. Most people will install Antivirus and firewalls, but you can go the extra mile and add useful open source or freeware software like Open Office to your standard installation routine. Games, especially cards and board games, can be a pretty effective bonus for no additional cost, except a few minutes of your time to install.

- Make yourself visible to potential customers! Classified ads in the local newspaper, or a few flyers left on the counter of a friendly shopkeeper can go a long way. You can also add special offers to your flyers or for people who mention your ad to make them more attractive.

As you can see, you can do a lot of things to improve your image and promote your business. Just use your imagination, and you can surely find an original way to promote your services and grow your business. But never forget, your customers are your greatest asset, treat them well!

How To Promote Your Affiliate Marketing Programs

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:54:28 +0000

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to make some residual income online. If you use your affiliate marketing properly, you can actually make a fair amount of money. But you have to market your affiliate programs and utilize the Internet to its fullest potential, otherwise your affiliate marketing will be a bigger waste of time than raking leaves in the fall. Here are some tips to help you take advantage of the Internet when you’re affiliate marketing.

START AFFILIATE MA…

START AFFILIATE MARKETING WITH YOUR OWN WEBSITE

The obvious starting place for an affiliate marketing campaign is your own personal website. Whether this is a blog, an online portfolio or an online business, affiliate marketing can make your site a bit more profitable. As long as you have some site traffic, affiliate marketing can work on just about any kind of site that you have. When you’re choosing affiliate programs for your site, do your best to make sure that they correlate to your content, or try to skew the link names so that they do, and make sure that the links that relate most closely to your content appear first. The object is to make sure that people go to the links, so make them as enticing as possible.

FIND MESSAGE BOARDS FOR YOUR AFFILIATE MARKETING

If you can, find message boards to post your affiliate marketing links on that, again, relate in some way to the link. If you can, include links both at the end of message board posts and in the content. Gear your posts to the link, so that they seem like a natural extension of your topic. Before you start posting on all kinds of message boards though, make sure that the board allows affiliate programs in posts. If they don’t, then your post will be deleted, and if you break these rules often enough, you might be blocked from posting again on that or other message boards, especially if you are operating in a specific niche. Not only that, but people are less likely to click on links on a message board that frowns on affiliate marketing.

DON’T FORGET ABOUT THE POWER OF CHAT ROOMS

Chat rooms are a great way to get in touch with a number of people who already spend a lot of time on the Internet. Many chat rooms allow you to create a guest user profile or a one time only user. You can go in and promote your affiliate programs and convince people to visit the links in real time. This gives you the benefit of being able to respond to any questions or hesitations people might have immediately. You can really act as a salesperson, much more so than if you were to simply paste an affiliate program on a website somewhere.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE PYRAMID STRUCTURE OF SOME AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

Many affiliate programs will give you partial profits of people that you sign up to become affiliate marketers. This can often be more profitable than using your own actual links, if you’re good at getting in touch with people. If you dedicate most of your affiliate marketing time to finding other marketers, then you can establish an organization that functions without a lot of input from you, leaving you time to grow your base instead of trying to find places to post your links. Of course, you should not neglect to work on your tier of the organization, both to make sure that you get some income from yourself, and out of respect for the person who brought you into the organization.

How to Put Law & Order into Marketing Your Legal Practice

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:53:48 +0000

First in a series of three articles

Regardless of your law firm’s focus – criminal, civil, corporate, family, business, etc. – the greatest challenge most small to mid-size firms face is the lack of a strategic and disciplined approach to business development. Relying on referrals does not a strategy make! And waiting to get serious about marketing until that major case is wrapped up is way too late.

Whether you’re frustrated with past marketing efforts that have been expensive, time-consuming, and haven’t paid off…or you think you can’t afford to take a sophisticated, results-driven approach to business development like the big firms do, guess again. While your firm may not have its own in-house marketing expert on staff or the generous marketing budgets that the larger firms enjoy, you can systematically and affordably attract more clients than you ever thought possible. It just takes a thoughtful strategy that leverages the laws of marketing, and an ordered approach to stay on track.

Laws of Marketing

First and foremost, marketing is NOT about brochures, websites, advertising or cold calls. These things may or may not be tools that make sense for your firm, once you’ve leveraged the laws of marketing.

There are two basic laws of marketing1 that must be mastered by professional service providers who want to stop wasting time and money on ineffective marketing efforts. They are:

1. Build your base (carefully craft your message)

2. Reach out to your market (build and nurture relationships)

Here’s a quick look at what each of these laws requires…

Build Your Base. This law means spending thoughtful time defining your firm’s niche, developing language that grabs your prospects’ attention, articulating what makes your firm stand out from other firms offering the same services, demonstrating your value, and illustrating your firm’s authority to deliver better than all other choices.

Unfortunately, 90% of professional service firms ignore the law of “build your base” and rush to communicate about their firm without a carefully articulated message. This leaves your target audience unconvinced or, at best, confused about how your firm can serve them better than all others vying for their attention. Invest a little time in building your firm’s base, and you’ll be ahead of most of your competitors.

Reach Out to Your Market. This law involves developing and implementing a system of strategies to build and sustain relationships with your target market and current clients. They are executed both offline and online. They are done systematically and repeatedly. They work in synergy to create an unstoppable buzz and attraction to your firm that takes on a desirable life of its own, once you’ve put them in place. These strategies include things like networking, direct outreach (personal or mass mail), PR, articles and speaking, keep-in-touch systems, using technology to attract, develop, and retain relationships; tapping centers of influence, developing joint ventures, launching a client relationship strategy, using a customer creation system, pursuing a relationship selling strategy, introducing a win-win fee strategy, and developing next-level strategies for current clients.

Orderly Conduct

This is the hard part for most law firms…making marketing happen is a function of carving out the time from precious billable hours – not an easy task! However, you can do it, especially if you take a disciplined and orderly approach to staying on track. This means you have to…

Get focused. Schedule a meeting with key decision-makers in your firm to discuss making a commitment to marketing. You don’t have to make any major decisions at this first meeting, except determine how much time you can commit weekly to your firm’s marketing efforts. Start small (2 hours per person) and put it in your schedules. Then schedule your next marketing meeting to discuss the results of your homework, the attached Are You Ready for a TurningPointe? marketing assessment!

Get organized. Use the results of the marketing assessment to stimulate discussion about where to start. At this point, if you’ve not done market strategy and planning before, call in an expert. It’ll save you lots of time in the end, since you’ll START with a strategic marketing plan that makes sense for your firm and is realistic to implement.

Some basics to consider when developing your plan include:

• Keep it simple; don’t take on too much at once. Spread out your deadlines.

• Identify a mix of short-term, easily implemented goals and longer-term, harder-to-implement goals. Build in some quick “wins” for an immediate return on your investment.

• Prioritize but be flexible; be willing to change dates or put things on hold when other marketing priorities make sense (which means you don’t stop, you just shift).

• Identify the obstacles (people, time, money, lack of expertise, etc.) that could derail you and plan tasks for how to overcome them.

• Plan for how to make marketing a reward, not a punishment. Build in rewards for people who take time from billable hours to market.

Stay on track. At a minimum, guard one hour every week for a status check on your marketing plan – even if you’re a solo practitioner, that means making an appointment with yourself! The mere act of focused thinking or discussion about marketing every week will make an enormous difference in your ability to attract more clients.

Once you have a smart plan in place that’s realistic (see Get Organized, above), all you have to do is focus on taking one step at a time, then another, and another. Each small marketing task builds momentum and before you know it, you’ve implemented a major goal. The key is to keep moving…or if you stop, get restarted. It also helps to have “accountability” to an outside party, who keeps you on track through regular telephone and in-person coaching sessions.

The Defense Rests

So your practice has a stellar track record of client victories, you do good work that you care about, and you know your contribution makes a positive difference in the lives of your clients. What if you could reach more clients than you ever thought possible with all that you offer?

Apply the laws of marketing through an ordered plan of action that keeps you on track, and you will. Case closed.

References

1 Middleton, R. Laws of Marketing TeleClass. Action Plan Marketing, Inc. 2003.

How To Start Making Monetized Money With Adsense, The Basics

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:53:03 +0000

The basics of Adsense. Adsense is considered as one of the most powerful tool in a website publisher’s arsenal. It enables a person to monetize their websites easily. If used properly, it can generate a huge and healthy income for them. However if you are not using them rightly and just maximizing the income you squeeze from it, you are actually leaving a lot of money on the table. Something all people do not like to do.

Start by writing some quality content articles which are also keyword incorporated. There are a lot of people given the gift of being good with words. Writing comes easy for them. Why not make it work in such a way that you will be earning some extra cash in the process.

How you can start earning money with Adsense can be done easily and quickly. You will be amazed at the results you will be getting in such a short period of time.

There are actually three steps to put into mind before you begin writing your ads and having an effective Adsense.

Quality content site. Build a quality content site incorporated with Adsense ads that is targeting the subject and keywords of your articles and websites. This is where all that you’ve done initially will go to and this is also where they will prove their worth to you.

Keyword search. Find some popular subjects, keywords or phrase. Select the ones which you think has more people clicking through. This is actually a keyword selector and suggestion tool that some sites are offering to those who are just their Adsense business.

Writing articles. Start writing original content with keywords from the topics that you have achieved in your search. Take note that search engines are taking pride in the quality of their articles and what you will be writing should keep up with their demands.

The proper positioning of your ads should be done with care. Try to position your ads where surfers are most likely to click on them. According to research, the one place that surfers look first when they visit a certain site is the top left. The reason behind this is not known. Maybe it is because some of the most useful search engine results are at the top of all other rankings. So visitors tend to look in that same place when browsing through other sites.

Some of those who are just starting at this business may think they are doing pretty well already and thinking that their clickthrough rates and CPM figures are quite healthy. However, there are more techniques and styles to generate more clicks to double your earnings. By knowing these techniques and working them to your advantage, you will realize that you will be getting three times more than other people who have been previously doing what they are doing.

Finally, Adsense has some excellent tracking statistics that allows webmasters and publishers to track their results across a number of site on a site by site, page by page, or any other basis you wanted. You should be aware oft his capability and make the most of it because it is one powerful tool that will help you find out which ads are performing best. This way, you can fine tune your Adsense ads and focus more on the ones being visited the most rather than those who are being ignored.

To really start making money with Adsense, you should have a definite focus on what you wanted to achieve and how you will go about achieving them. As with any other kind of business ventures, time is needed coupled with patience.

Do not just ignore your site and your Adsense once you have finished accomplishing them. Spare some time, even an hour, making adjustments to the Adsense ads on your sites to quickly trigger your Adsense income.

Give it a try and you would not regret having gotten into Adsense in the first place.

How To Stand Out at Your Next Trade Show: Engage All The Senses

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:52:16 +0000

In the hyper competitive world of trade shows trying to stand out from the crowd can be quite challenging. It seems that everyone has a nice display, great graphics, brochures and the typical ball point pen or koozie with logo which makes it difficult to be different.

At a typical trade show your eyes and ears are pretty much being taken care of, but what about the sense of smell, touch and taste? Here are a few strategies that can help engage all the other senses.

Smell – Smells can create quite an emotional response in most individuals. In fact, you probably have a fond memory attached to the smell of your grandmothers freshly baked cookies or the smell of wood in your fathers workshop. For example, every time I smell gasoline I think of working at my grandfathers gas station as a child in the summer. ScentAir, based in Charlotte, NC, offers scent delivery systems that are normally used in retail, medical and entertainment venues but can easily be adapted for the trade show floor. The company offers over 1000 scents and can even custom create a branded scent just for your company.

Touch – Touch is how we learn as children and is also a valuable learning tool as adults. Put products in clients hands, let them try them out. Try not to see what your sell as museum pieces that no one can use. A more subtle approach in engaging touch is through your feet. The only thing I hate about walking the show floor or working at a show is how my feet feel afterwards. By the end of the day I find myself looking for soft carpets to walk on so why not take advantage of this dilemma. The Comfort Channel offers quite a variety of foot massagers and many of them are quite portable. Invite prospects in for a nice foot massage while discussing how you might be able to help further their business. You can also help your prospect to remember you on the way home. For most trade show attendees the way to and from the show is via plane. Instead of the typical pen promotional item why not give away branded inflatable neck pillows. They are quite affordable and can be found at ePromos.

Taste – Taste can be quite a challenge as we most often taste things by eating. Some shows will enable you to give out food and others won’t so make sure to refer to you exhibitor manual. You can purchase branded food items with you company name and or logo. Most commonly seen at shows is mints, but there are plenty of other options like candies, nuts, even wine. Another strategy with Taste is to send out food after the show. A great example of this would be to send a pizza to a hot prospect for lunch with a slice missing. In place of that slice would be a piece of paper saying that your companies solution is the missing piece of the puzzle.

In the end your goal at any show is to stand out, get noticed and walk away with as many potential leads and business opportunities as possible. The above solutions are only a part of the puzzle but one that is most often overlooked.

How To Seek Out Your Competitors

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:51:29 +0000

The best way to seek out your competitors is to try and buy whatever product or service it is you’re planning to sell. Enter the market as a customer, and find out what options you would have.

Where to Look.

The best way to seek out your competitors is to try and buy whatever product or service it is you’re planning to sell. Enter the market as a customer, and find out what options you would have.

Where to Look.

It might be tempting to just use a search engine and go by the results that turns up, but you have to remember that plenty of business still takes place outside the Internet. You should also make sure that you pay attention to more traditional methods of advertising, such as the yellow pages, or your local newspaper. It’s worth cutting out and keeping any ads you find, as they can be good to refer to when it’s time to start your own marketing.

Do What They Do, But Differently.

Notice that I said ‘differently’, not necessarily ‘better’. Don’t assume that you’ll be able to improve on established businesses if you’re doing the exact same thing as they are – they have years of experience, after all. What you’re trying to do is distinguish yourself in the marketplace, so that people who are looking for something specific in your chosen industry will come to you.

There are a number of tried-and-true ways of altering existing products to make them succeed in the market.

The Price-Quality Line. You may find other businesses that only offer a very high-quality service, and accordingly charge a premium price – or you might find ones that only offer heavily-discounted rubbish. Consider taking their products to the opposite end of the market. If you can offer a product of only slightly worse quality at half the price, then people will jump at it – and, likewise, there are always people willing to pay the most to get the best.

Provide a Service. It is perfectly possible to sell products of the exact same physical quality while providing a better service – to the customer, quality and service are almost the same thing. There are companies out there who can sell computer software that their customers could get almost for free, simply because the customers like to have the support services that they get with their purchase.

Likewise, if service is all you do, then it should be pretty simple to provide a more attentive and personal service than your competitors. ‘One-on-one business’ gives you a great opportunity to become friendly with your customers, and that’s often worth its weight in gold to them.

Make it Simpler. Many businesses offer great products, but they’re pitching them to very technical customers. If you’re an expert in your field, you will very often find that you can build a great business simply by selling the same thing as your competitors, but going to some trouble to explain and market it to a wider section of the public. Anytime you start using some new technology, the chances are that someone along the way had to work out how to make it simpler. Few new technologies or inventions come pre-packaged for consumer use.

Change the Design. Make it smaller, or change the colour, or make it easier to open and fix. There are all sorts of ways to subtly redesign a product and give it all sorts of bells and whistles that customers will really appreciate. You might even be able to buy products, modify them, and then sell them on.

Build Alliances.

Despite what the word might lead you to think, you don’t always have to be competitive with your competitors. You might find that they have extra work sometimes that they wouldn’t mind sending over to you, or you might find that they’re willing to give you advice on starting up (if not for free, then perhaps for nothing more than the cost of a few drinks!). Of course, you shouldn’t go giving away all your secrets or giving them any other advantage, but that doesn’t mean that you should keep away. Pay special attention to any problems that they say they’ve had, or anything they do that seems to sell especially well.

Believe it or not, your competitors can be your best allies in this home business game, especially if they’re home businesses themselves – over time, your competitors might even become your friends.

How To Set The Just Right Tone For Your Promotional Marketing Materials

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:50:39 +0000

Here is a helpful exercise on how to research and prepare promotional marketing materials to bring the right people to your business.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.

How to Take Your Law Firm to the Next Level

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:49:54 +0000

How to Take Your Law Firm to the Next Level
Third in a series of three articles

SO you’ve done such a good job at bringing in new clients to your firm that you’re swamped with business, your firm is large and growing, and all parts of your marketing system are in place and running smoothly? Congratulations!

If you can confidently answer “yes!” to the following metrics, then you’re ready to take your practice to the next level:

• Is your firm’s mission perfectly aligned with your market?

• Do your marketing efforts create exactly the relationship your customers most want and need?

• Are your services well packaged, presented with a What’s In It For Me? punch, and priced at various levels?

• Do you know exactly where and how to promote your firm’s services?

• Does your marketing system routinely and predictably create the kinds of new customers your business requires?

What happens next in many successful firms, however, is not good news. Instead of sticking with what’s created success in the first place, the focus shifts away from a marketing mindset. Instead of being an essential lens through which people in your firm view their role, marketing as an every-day focus fades from importance. After all, why continue to invest the time and resources on marketing when you’ve got more business than you can handle now anyway? And shouldn’t you spend time on what’s now important, like internal operations, serving current clients, and other more urgent priorities?

The answer is an emphatic NO! Not only will you erode all the hard work you’ve invested get to where you are, but it will be much harder (and expensive!) to turn your now larger and more complex ship around, once you lose that marketing mindset.

The truth is, that once your firm gets more successful and, by definition, more complex, your energy and focus turn naturally more inward. As your business grows, it takes on a life of its own in the form of meetings, policies, training, politics, and reports. The larger your firm gets, the more energy is directed inward – it simply takes more planning, management, and systems to keep things running smoothly.

So how do you keep your firm from being consumed with internally focused activities? By developing and executing a strategy to…

Keep your firm’s mission alive, real, and relevant in the marketplace. Think of your firm’s mission as the “magnetic north” in your compass. For everything you do, constantly ask, “what difference does this make in the lives of our customers?” If it makes no difference (or the wrong difference), then why are you putting resources into it? Build this line of questioning into decisions you make and resources you allocate.

Create and maintain laser-like internal alignment with your external mission in the marketplace. Everyone’s job should have a direct connection to serving the customer. That means tying rewards and consequences to how everyone at your firm contributes to building client relationships. Even if someone has no direct client contact, they’re supporting someone who does. Connect the dots between what they do and what it means to the client.

Create new customers for old packages. Chances are, you haven’t saturated your current target market. Don’t let the basics that got you to your current level of success fade away. And what about new target markets? What successful services do you have that you could offer to another segment?

Create new services for old customers. Do a little research…ask people on your “front line” what they think your customers need. Ask your customers directly or hire an outside firm to ask for you. Find out why you won and lost business. You’ll be surprised, inspired, and motivated by what you learn.

Create new packages for old services. Take what you know or do and put it into a new format or offering. You can create workshops, CDs, e-books, mini-books, on-line content, workbooks, checklists, and more out of just about any professional content you know or work with. Think beyond just charging an hourly fee for your services. “Productize” what you know by offering people helpful tools they can use.

Ensure you and your leadership team are role models for the rest of your firm on how to create lasting relationships. What behaviors, words, standards, and approaches create lasting relationships with both clients and employees? Make sure your senior team walks the talk and, if they don’t, fix the problem. If you can’t model how to create lasting relationships at the top, others are less inclined to do it well.

Deliver on your firm’s brand promise through solid practice management. The mark of a true professional is when your firm’s own act is together. It’s not enough to be experts in your field, backed by the credentials and experience that are important to your target clients. You must also engage in continuous learning about your profession, your clients’ industries, and how to professionally manage your firm. Your firm’s leadership must act as a role model for how you want to be perceived in the marketplace. Are these high standards to set for your firm? Absolutely. But then again, you’ve already proven you do the basics well.

Resting on your laurels will only go so far.

Sooner than you think, loosing your focus on marketing will put you back to square one, scrambling for clients and worried about cash flow.

Except this time, the stakes are higher, your profile in the marketplace is higher, and you have a lot more to lose. So why go there? Take your firm to the next level, and be confident you won’t have to look back!

References

Putman, A. Marketing Your Services. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1990.

How To Test Your Sales Copy

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:49:08 +0000

You’ve got a website and it’s selling some copies of your product. You want to sell more, but how do you properly test the changes you make in order for you to know how you are improving your sales?

Internet Marketers talk a lot about testing your sales copy and your website, but very few talk in detail about the methodology of this testing. It is very easy to get confused and undo the changes that were increasing sales!

I remember when I was at school in my chemistry c…

I remember when I was at school in my chemistry class performing experiments to blow things up, make acids to eat through the table and stain my lab coat and being taught how to properly test an experiment. What is interesting, is this is probably the most valuable lesson I got from the chemistry class (apart from the effect certain metals have when exposed to water). It is certainly the lesson that applies the most to my life now.

My chemistry teacher was an interesting man, he didn’t tolerate people who didn’t listen or didn’t want to learn but he was a passionate man when it came to chemistry. His fingers were stained from handling chemicals and he took an almost perverse pleasure in gassing the class or waking them up with a sudden explosion.

Then one day when he had given us a series of experiments to perform, he taught us about testing. When performing an experiment there are often many things you want to change in order to perform the experiment properly. The trouble is, as an impatient teenager waiting for lunchtime you are tempted to make all the changes at once.

“No lad,” the teacher told us, “You can’t make all the changes at once. If you do that, how are you going to know which change to the experiment caused it to work?”

Of course, this concept hadn’t occurred to any of us, we were all just interested in lunch.

He leaned back in his chair into his reminiscent pose, “In order to properly perform this experiment you need to make a single change at a time and then measure the results. Then, and only then, will you know which change performs the best and gives you the desired results. Sure you can make all the changes all at once, but what if you undo the change that works?”

These very words came back to me when I started my Internet Marketing career some years ago. If I am making changes to my websites or sales copy to monitor the conversion rate then I need to make a single change at a time, drive a sufficient amount of traffic to it, and then analyse the results.

If the conversion rate has increased, then I keep the change. If it has decreased, then I discard the change.

By performing my website testing this way you will know exactly which changes best affect your conversion rates (and profits) and be able to stack them on top of each other to gain the highest possible conversion rate for your site.