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Monthly Archives
Good Marketers Know When To Meet
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All good marketing appeals to a large audience of people. Obviously marketing is targeted to specific sections of people, but the ability to offer some sort of marketing material that will appeal broadly across that target region of people is the end goal for any good marketeer. One of the best ways to come up with a good marketing plan is to conference with your clients regularly to make sure you are on the same page.
A great tool to use for conferencing is meeting scheduling software. The ability to get everyone together, especially if you’re from multiple locations on the globe is an essential part of a good marketing strategy. Emails can only do so much. To get the right inflection and get your points across to clients in short amounts of time consider using an online meeting software to reduce down time and wasted efforts. Asset Tracking Software needs to be used in order to maintain a healthy work flow.
Having a good work flow is essential to maintaining a good connection with your clients as well as creating a good working environment for yourself. The last thing you want to do is add more work for yourself simply because you’re not utilizing the most effective systems possible that are at your disposal.
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Tags: Marketing ToolsRelated posts
Go Freelance Young One - Free Kit
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Special offer: Get a FREE Work-at-Home Success Kit worth $50 when you sign up to find hundreds of freelance jobs.
If you’re like me you’ve got some side projects that make you a little extra coin every once and awhile. Thats all fine and dandy, but don’t you wish you could find projects easier and make more money at them in your spare time? I’m constantly looking for freelance projects that I can tackle with my spare time that will earn me some extra money fairly quickly. One of the best ways to take down some of your current debt is to pick up some freelancing projects and put the profits directly towards you’re debt.
Recently I’ve been frequenting a really helpful site that I’ve found quite a bit of freelance projects on that have made me a decent chunk of money. I do a lot of graphic design work on the side, when I’m not in marketing or SEO mode, and theres always been a pretty big freelance market for designers. Gofreelance.com has of course a ton of different categories you can look in, but I tend to stay in the graphics end of the searches.
Some of the features they offer include:
Instant access to fresh freelance and work-at-home jobs
Fresh jobs and projects every day
Exclusive news and updates
Special deals and discounts
Cool video tutorials
Work at home opportunities
Special reports and bulletins
Special 7-day trial
If you want to get ahead on some of your bills, freelancing is a great way to bring in some extra money without leaving home. Freelancers are a lot like bloggers in the sense that you have to find a niche you’re comfortable working in and can deliver projects on time and within customer specifications. You have to be determined and self driven, as most freelancers will tell you, the clients will go elsewhere if you don’t keep them happy.
Some freelance jobs I’ve found with Gofreelance.com have included typing up meeting notes, writing articles for magazines or companies, filling out data surveys, writing for discussion boards etc. There are a lot of niche markets for freelancing, some jobs that you wouldn’t think people would pay for, but they exist. Take the free trial and find out what you could be doing to earn some extra money with freelancing. Write for Discussion Boards: $1200 per week…Administer a Web Business from Home: $4000 per month…Find jobs for $2.95.
For a limited time I’ve managed to aqquire a special offer for new freelancers and old alike who want to work from home and make a little extra money. The link below will enable you to get a free work at home kit that has a lot of great information on how to start or improve your freelancing from home. Its worth taking a peek at, I found a few tips that I didn’t know myself. Check it out and sign up for the free trial, they’ve got a lot of interesting freelance jobs.
Special offer: Get a FREE Work-at-Home Success Kit worth $50 when you sign up to find hundreds of freelance jobs.
Tags: Freelance, Money
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Unexpected Entrepreneurial Ideas
Posted by admin
Sometimes the simplest of ideas can turn into a financial gold mine for anyone willing to devote some development time to it and see where it goes. Not all entrepreneurs have to be geniuses that come up with the next quantum leap of physics to be hugely successful monetarily. Simply taking an existing product or idea and improving it enough to become your own can get you started on the path to financial freedom.
Take for example wedding planning and everything that goes along with it. I’m knee deep in it myself at the moment (believe me its a pain in the ass), and anything that helps the process is a huge benefit. One of the easier but still annoying parts of a wedding is the photography aspect of it. For most weddings, there is a hired professional photographer, but most couples put out a disposable wedding camera or two as well for guests to capture candid shots of themselves.
While this is a great idea, it has been an issue for a bunch of years getting it processed and then no one but the wedding party ever sees it. Case in point for some entrepreneurs to come up with a business model that would make the process easier, faster, and more accessible for everyone involved. Taking into consideration that this niche market will always be lucrative, and never has an off season, this is a great idea to improve upon. Itheesnap.com has taken this approach and made what I’m assuming is a very profitable business model for disposable wedding cameras.
If you’ve got a few ideas that you’ve been kicking around for awhile, perhaps you’re trying too hard to reinvent the wheel. A good entrepreneur will take what is available to them and improve, and profit on it. The simple case study above shows that you do not necessarily need to improve the technology of the idea, but the process in which the idea exists.
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Tags: BusinessRelated posts
Take A Chance - Franchise
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Have you been dreaming about owning your own business for as long as you can remember? A lot of people want to go into business for themselves, and when they do they fail miserably. Why? Because most of them do not have the drive and motivation to completely follow through with the business plan that they laid out. Most of the time people don’t even take the time to lay out a business plan which is a crucial element in any business life cycle. There are ways to limit the risk factors involved in starting your own business however. One of those risk limiting paths is franchising.
Franchising you’re own store gives you the chance to own and maintain you’re own business, while at the same time having the backing and pre laid out business models from larger corporations to follow. This takes out a lot of guess work for the first time business owner. Franchise opportunities will break down a ton of different franchises you can get in on at the ground level or higher.
Keep in mind that owning your own franchise is a lot of work. Its a business just like any other, except you’ve got some support from the parent organization. This doesn’t mean you’re not going to have to work your ass off however! If you’ve tried to get your own business going, but just don’t have the capital to fully fund a new business, you might find a slightly easier path in franchising. Its worth taking a look at if you want to be your own boss.
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Strike Out On Your Own - Four Stages To Profitable Ecommerce
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With all the buzz at the beginning of the year about starting to delve deeper into the mysteries of Affiliate Marketing, I started to think to myself what could be more New Year appropriate then a post about shunning the conventional and embraces the unknown. Most of us have at some point or another dabbled with affiliate marketing which is just a fancy name for selling other people’s systems and products. For the new year why not start out with your own products and build an empire that you own completely. To do that you’ll need an ecommerce hosting site and some serious attitude.
The world of Ecommerce has certainly been embraced over the last five to ten years, but still has growth potential through the roof. Every year more and more people strike out on their own to embrace the internet and take their piece of the pie home. Chances are you already have a website or blog at this point, and thats ok, but for the new year I would suggest starting your new Ecommerce site with something easy and simple to set up. Perhaps you live near a golf course and can get your hands on lost golf balls, or you want to sell your own photography work. Whatever the case might be, you need to find a product that you can easily sell for profit. You may also look into a form of drop shipping, but again its a form of affiliate marketing.
I recently had the chance to check out some shopping cart software over at Americommerce.com which I found to be very useful in starting up an Ecommerce site fast and easy. They also offer hosting packages which allow you to set up a site in a jiffy. Whatever package you decide to use also comes with a Google Adwords voucher which comes in very handy for marketing. If you’re new to Ecommerce get a package that will handle all the transactions and back end for you, the last thing you want is to piece together a site that isn’t secure and doesn’t work.
Once you’ve gotten a package in place that you are satisfied with, go to the store and get a wall calendar that displays all the months on it. Take a big giant sharpy marker and outline the year into quarters. This will enable you to visually remind yourself what stage of development you are in for your Ecommerce site. I’m using an entire year as the timetable, this gives ample opportunity for each phase to be throughly tested, developed and implemented.
Setup Phase
Obviously one of the most crucial stages in any sites development cycle. For an Ecommerce site the main focus should be on what you are attempting to sell, and the back end system that will be handling transactions. Start out with a smaller package that can be upgraded as your site grows, there is no sense in getting the biggest package right out of the gate, chances are you won’t use half of it. So why pay for it?
Selecting an all in one package is a quick way to put yourself ahead of the game. You can always do it yourself i you choose to, but why not utilize systems that are in place behind the scenes where no one else but you knows who is powering your site. Look for a package that will give you a merchant account or at the very least take a super small percentage of each transaction. If you can find accounts that have lower the 4% per transaction you’ve found a good one.
Once you’ve got your package lined up and in place, start thinking about what you’d like for a design. One tip to keep in mind, keep it simple! Too many times have I seen sites that launch with all the hoopla and pomp of a presidential election only to fail miserably due to terrible planning and ease of use for the customer. For the setup stage picking a default template that comes with the ecommerce hosting isn’t that bad of an idea. You can always mess with the site design as you build up a client base.
One of the most important things to get squared away in the setup stage is your branding. This includes your logo, slogan, design colors etc. Once you’ve got these three main ingredients you’re well on your way. Most Ecommerce templates are run via CSS and can easily be changed to implement your chosen colors.
After that its off to the races. Be sure to view the site on different computers to see how it will look on varying screens, resolutions, operating systems etc. Run through a test order to validate the back end systems are processing orders ok, and be sure to test a small transaction with a test product to see if indeed money is credited to your account.
Stocking Phase
Now that you’ve gotten your site marginally setup and running its time to stock your site with product. Like any business inventory is a market driven commodity. Since you’ve just started your site, theres no data to reference for quantity and usage. Pick a relatively low stock point to start with for each product you will be adding to your store. If its a physical product you are selling, this will be influenced heavily on storage space for products as well.
Something to keep in mind when selecting products for your store is how quickly you can obtain more stock for an item if it becomes a successful product. Buyers hate seeing back ordered products and hate even more to wait for their shipments. This is the beauty of selling a digital product like “Google Adwords Profits”, its always in stock and you need zero physical storage space for it. For my own new years test Ecommerce site I am filling it half with physical product I already own, and half with digital products that I’ve created or own rights to.
Once you’ve stocked you’re store with some products, release it to the public. At first you won’t have many visitors and thats ok. Be sure to take this time period and register with all the major search engines. Doing this now gives you a few month run up to your advertise phase. By the time you’ve hit the six month mark you’re page should be indexed by all the major search engines and have some organic traffic coming to the site. This also gives your site some weight in age, and Google loves to look at domain age as an indicator of stable sites.
Advertising Phase
By this point you should have some traffic coming to your site via organic searches from the major search engines and some from word of mouth advertising etc. You should also have a pretty decent grip on how your software runs, and the ins and outs of your ecommerce hosting solution. Now is the time to ramp up the production and really promote your site to the masses.
One of the easiest ways to get people to your website is to utilize pay per click advertising on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. There are other networks that offer PPC (pay per click) advertising, but using the big three will give you a good base to start from. If you break the Advertising portion of the year down into three parts, you can run an ad campaign on each search engine in a different month. This will allow you to easily track which network is giving you the best results. For this to work optimally, you should run the same ads across all networks so you have a baseline comparison.
At the end of three months of advertising across different networks you’ll have a great set of data to analyze, and at that point you can enter the tweaking phase to really hone in on specific targeted keywords. During the Advertising phase you should also be utilizing social networks such as Stumble Upon, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook etc. All of these networks allow you to interact with other users on a more personal level and create a organic buzz for your site. If you specifically have something to offer for the social networking crowd direct them specifically to that product and let them explore your site from there.
Combining social network advertising with pay per click traditional advertising gives you a robust and multi themed approach, which in the end should provide you with a decent number of users coming to your site and hopefully buying very specific products.
Tweaking Phase
The tweaking phase is mostly about fine tuning an existing working entity. Your site should by now have entered a phase where it can sustain itself with traffic from social networks and organic searches. This will allow you to revisit your pay per click campaigns and select the campaign that worked best for your site in the advertising phase. At this point, take that campaign and double it. If you see an increase in sales, take some of the profit and reinvest it back directly into the advertising that got you the sale in the first place.
When tweaking ad campaigns, especially pay per click campaigns, changing a single word may influence your traffic tremendously. If you find an ad that works, keep it running, but at the same time start another ad that has the change in it. If you notice a significant increase in traffic from the changed add continue on with it. Otherwise leave the existing ad as is and continue to advertise with it.
This phase is also product related, by now you should have a sizable database of which products are selling well and which ones are total duds. If you’ve got items that are just clogging up space and are slow movers, give them the axe and boot them. Its not always a good thing to have a ton of items - sometimes less can be more!
So there it is, a brief and very outlined form of what you could do in the new year. I’m hoping to have my store up and running shortly and will maintain this schedule for a year. This should enable me to setup everything in a timely manner and test out my advertising completely before really blowing up the adverts for next holiday season!