No Matter what it is ….. your hobby … your dream … your pass time… It could be fishing …. it could be coaching sports …. it could be music or photography…. Whatever it is , there is a platform here for you to develop and expand your passion into a business online.
Check it out…… You future Path
There are many tips on how to create time for yourself and to manage your time in your business. Here are several items that may just help you remember the basics.
Do not allow someone else’s lack of planning destroy your time plan. Many people find it hard to turn someone down especially if it is a customer or a good friend. You more than likely have your day planned as to what needs to get done in your business and then along comes someone and wants you to “help” them in whatever problem they are having with their website, etc. Most of the time, the reason they are having trouble is lack of planning on their part or lack of understanding of some basic rules of software or programming. If you stop and interrupt what you are doing, it will impede your progress in your own business. Learn to just say “no” when the time is not right for you. Of course, if you are free to help, then that is fine as well. But, make sure that you are not being “used”.
Make time to train – If you have assistants or others that help you in your business, take the time to train them in specific tasks that will free up your time. This way, you will spend less time taking over tasks that they cannot complete and interrupting your productivity flow. Keep the things you need to work and to train in places where you can find them rapidly. Keep your filing system organized and don’t just file haphazardly, but logically and systematically and you will find that the work flows a lot smoother. Teach your assistants to do the same so that you can access what they do as well.
Switch tasks when you get stumped and cannot come up with the right solution to a problem – This makes your mind relax and stop concentrating on the problem. Somehow the mind, however, continues to work on the problem. When you go back to the problem, relaxed and refreshed, the mind jumps back in and the solution is usually revealed. Putting off a decision sometimes is the best path if you are not sure you do not have the right solution.
See if you can make routine tasks automatic – Do you have letters that need to be sent many times to clients? Do you have questions that are asked over and over again? Are there special situations that are resolved in the same way many times? Try to think through your business and the time being spent and put a series of autoresponder messages together that you can send when necessary. This will free you up tremendously for time to spend on tasks that are more creative and challenging.
Make appointments with yourself to do the important steps in your business – In other words, take the time to analyze what you need to do to grow or to keep control of your business in a better manner. There may be tons of pressing situations that are demanding attention, but you also need to have some time to be able to make important decisions and to think and plan on the important, rather than the mundane, items of everyday business.
If you take control of your time and your management skills you will find that your business continues to grow and prosper. You will be a much more relaxed and creative person and have a lot more fun working your business.
Working online has a difficult set of challenges. The cause of
not making the amount of money desired is often boiled down to a
few crucial mistakes.
One of the most important items necessary to succeed online is
the ability to know what is desired and the way to accomplish
that goal. There are many ways to make money online some of
which are noted below:
1. Market e-books – There are both self-published and those
e-books where rights are purchased.
2. Sell software – Most times this will be purchased with
rights, but software can also be created by others. Expect to pay
a lot for software creation.
3. Start a membership Website – Keeping customers coming back
for more content is paramount. Giving a good volume of items
help retain customers and create that residual income.
4. Creating a blog, Facebook pages, or Twitter pages – Ads and
marketing products on these websites as recommendations will make
money. Adding your own ideas and words to the pages will let
your customers and friends get to know you better.
5. Creating your own e-book or product – This is a best way to
create income, but can also take the most time. The product can
be created by others and many people online do just that. Just
be sure the wording and phrases reflect the tone necessary for
sales. Also, there should be no spelling or grammatical errors
as this will simply show a lack of professionalism.
6. After you have a couple of your own products, an affiliate
program can be started. Remember to offer enough money,
generally 50-75%, to entice sales from the affiliates. Having a
good affiliate software package is especially important in this
situation. There are several programs on the market, such as
, Pay Spree and many others.
Doing a search on Google.com will enable comparisons.
7. Starting a service such as web design, hosting, or problem
solving for others is also a great way to gain income. It might
be surprising that you know so much more than a new person coming
online. Everyone is grateful to have help with some of the
technical aspects of marketing online.
8. Working in a local defined market is becoming very lucrative
recently. The best feature of this is that your “local“ market
can be anywhere in the country due to the Internet. Helping
businesses achieve more customers through quick response
applications on their smart phones are growing by leaps and
bounds. Picking up local customers in high traffic and high
turnover types of businesses such as car dealers, restaurants,
beauty shops, car repair shops, and retailers is very easy right
now. All business owners will be willing to pay to get more
customers as they see it as a win-win situation. Advertising in
the yellow pages and elsewhere is too expensive these days and
does not produce results like the mobile ads.
These are just a few of the ways to make money online. The key
is to focus on one situation until money is made consistently and
then move onto doing more of the same, or adding to the business
with a new dynamic profit source. Working online requires time,
work and effort. It also requires the skill to know yourself and
what will keep your attention.
Doing the right things consistently will result in an online
business of which to be proud. Having an online business will
never create boredom or lack excitement. Continue to give to
others what they want and need to live their dreams and your
business will flourish by leaps and bounds.
What does “marketing” mean to you? What does “Sales” mean to you? Some of us define the two words in a similar way but in reality they are different.
Regardless of what type of business you run, Sales is about cash today, money in your pocket, the proof of your competing in the market place and the value of your product.
When your sales rise there are only a couple of reasons 1) Existing customers are buying more or 2) New customers are starting to buy from you. For you and your business either way this is Good news…Sales are Good!
However, when Sales are falling the opposite is true… 1) Former customers are buying elsewhere and 2) New customers are not being attracted to your business. Not Good news!
Here’s where we need to focus. No one really talks about rising or falling marketing because unlike Sales, Marketing is not easy to measure. Good Marketing is about communicating useful information to prospective and existing customers! It’s about getting feedback from your existing customers to help you enhance your demonstrable superiority of your products and services.
For someone in the restaurant industry using the finest ingredients to create superior quality dishes over your competitors standard out of the box/freezer methods. For someone in the service industry, using simple systems as followup cards or calls to show that you care about your customers experience with your company goes a long way over competitors that don’t follow up. It’s all about communication!
Home grown marketing really comes from the heart not a hired firm that big companies may use. You know your customers and you can develop a marketing plan that is affordable and effective for your business, no matter what type of business you own.
The key to business is repeat customers and in order to have repeat customers you have to have superior products / services that are worth coming back for. Once you provide a great customer experience and WOW them, you then continually keep the lines of communication open to keep improving your products / services according to their needs. It doesn’t matter what type of business… these principals work!
Make Marketing claims only if you can deliver. Don’t make a claim you can’t back up! Consumers need real people to deal with not some hyped up AD or campaign claiming promises you can’t keep. Be real with your customers and they will become your best marketing tool by far!
Here are a few fundamentals to keep in mind when making a Marketing claim:
Attribute of your product or service
How the product is made
Who makes the product
What benefit does the product provide the user
Who else uses the product
Pick one of the above to focus on based on your type of business / customer / service and get your customers feed back via…questionaire, email survey, etc.
Communicate with your existing customers regularly, ask them what benefits they have with your products/services, ask them how to improve your product / service and be sure to give them an incentive to refer your business to their friends, family, business associates etc.
Being the Little Guy in Marketing can be fun when your Home Grown Marketing efforts come from your heart and knowlege of your customers needs. Have fun with it and remember you don’t need a huge budget for Home Grown Marketing but you do need a to set aside a regular budget for your marketing efforts. Invest in Home Grown Marketing and your business will grow and your regular customers will become your word of mouth marketing force.
If you need any assistance with any of your marketing efforts, let me know, I’d be glad to help you in any way I can. You don’t need to spend big bucks to get the results you’re looking for!
Can you really get things done at the local wifi coffee shop ?? Not half as much will get accomplished. As a matter of fact, you are much better off finding a qiuet , distraction free environment either at home or in your office.
Most online business experts will be frank with you and say they work very hard in a distraction free zone. Some want you to think that you can cruise on down to the local Star Bucks, drink moca whatever lattes and money will start spitting out of your laptop! This isn’t reallity. The real deal is that I and others who run Online Businesses do it the old fashioned way by making a plan in an environment that will stimulate action and results. Simple planning and Time Management is the key!
Some of us work better in the early morning and some at the other end of the day when everybody else in sleeping. You need to find your sweet spot and utilize the time to your advantage. Here’s a sample template that I try to follow most days.
I find the key for me is to make sure I take those 1/2 hour walk breaks and keep up my excercise routine. Do things you like, don’t make it misery. Find someone to play raquet ball, find a pick up basketball game, Jog, play hockey, whatever it is just do it. The exercise will keep you energized for your work.
Creating good will with good customer service seems to be a lost
art. Clerks seem to be in a rush, not able to answer a customer
question, and sometimes are even rude or non-attentive. The day
of caring about a customer seems to be gone, but maybe just a
little training can bring the word “service” back to the retail
shopping experience. Many people will go out of their way to
frequent a store that has a great customer service and shows this
in the way the business is conducted.
The old saying still holds true: “People do not care how much you
know or what you sell, until they know how much you actually care
for them and their opinions and ideas.”
Even when the customer is seemingly wrong, the clerk should be
trained to say, “Our store does certainly apologize for the
mistake and please give me a chance to make it right for you.” A
caring clerk can keep a customer and give them the opportunity to
shop at the store again by acknowledging what went wrong and that
the store does listen to their problem. If a clerk does not have
the authority to make the problem right as the customer desires,
he should be trained to contact his supervisor so that the
customer knows that the problem is serious from the store’s
standpoint as well.
Some good sentences and thoughts for the training sessions are:
1. “We appreciate your business. Please return when you need
our services again.”
2. If a clerk is not sure about something, train the clerk to
acknowledge that they do not know, but they will find out and
then go to someone that knows the answer. It is the clerk’s job
to find information to make the sale, not the customer’s job.
3. “What is most convenient for you?” This could be a delivery
time or how they are paying for an item, maybe offering them an
interest free time period. This makes the customer feel
appreciated and maybe even surprised that the clerk does ask
about what is convenient for them.
4. “What can I do to help you today?” This shows that the clerk
is ready and willing to do whatever is necessary to update the
customer on items in the store and shows courtesy.
5. Feedback is often overlooked. If a questionnaire is
available, have the clerk present it so that the customer has an
opportunity to give ideas and suggestions on how to improve
customer service.
6. A smile goes a long way to letting the customers know that
the store’s personnel are glad they are shopping in that
particular store. No one wants to talk to a clerk that is
frowning and seemingly bored in helping showcase the store’s
merchandise.
7. A basic “Thank You” is critical and often overlooked in the
rush of retailing products. That customer helps keep the store
alive and prospering, and that means the clerk’s job and many
other jobs as well.
8. Good customer service always starts with a “Yes” attitude.
Clerks need to have this attitude and know the management will
back them up as they try to make the customer’s shopping
experience a good time.
If these simple ideas and suggestions could be carried out in
every retail store, this would create a much more fun and
interesting experience. We all have to shop, so why not make it
as pleasant as possible, thus creating good will, and that will
flow into more profits for the retail establishment.
If you want people to find your website in the search engines
like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, you need to be doing SEO, which
stands for ‘search engine optimization’. SEO is a set of methods
and techniques that that can help your website rank better in the
search engine results pages. A higher ranking means that more
people will see your website when they use the search engines,
which in turn leads to more visitors to your website.
SEO can be a complicated subject, which is why there are so many
freelance consultants and digital marketing agencies offering SEO
services. However, if you are running on a tight budget and can’t
afford to hire a professional, there is a lot of SEO you can do
yourself. Here are five SEO actions for beginners that you should
be using on your website.
1. Choose your keywords wisely. When you are
planning your website’s content, you should do some research
about which keywords to use. Keywords are the search terms that
people use to find websites in search engines. Think carefully
about your target audience and consider what they might type into
a search engine when they are looking for websites like yours.
You can use tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to help
you with your research. When you are starting out, aim to have a
list of no more than ten keywords that you will optimize your
website for. Once you are ranking well for these ten, you can add
more keywords to the list.
2. Use your keywords in the title tags of your web
pages. Most SEO experts agree that a web page’s title
tag is one of the most important factors for how that page will
rank in the search engines. You should always ensure that your
title tag includes at least one of your keywords. The title tag
should also describe the content of the page in a concise and
accurate manner. This helps the search engines to decide how
relevant the page is to a particular search term. The more
relevant a page is, the higher it will rank in the results for
that search term.
3. Use your keywords in the HTML heading tags.
Heading tags (e.g. H1, H2, H3, etc.) also give the search engines
a big clue about how relevant the web page is to certain search
terms. So, as with title tags, you should ensure your heading
tags contain your keywords. As a bare minimum, every web page
should have one H1 tag that includes the same keywords that are
in the title tag.
4. Check the keyword density in your website
text. The frequency at which your keywords appear in
your website’s body text (known as keyword density) also helps
search engines to match your web pages to relevant search terms.
How often keywords should be used is rather a moot point among
SEO experts. Some believe that stuffing a page with keywords is
beneficial to search engine rankings, while others think that
‘keyword stuffing’ is viewed as a form of spam by the search
engines. As a general rule, for a web page that has about 400-600
words of body content, use the main keyword once in the first
paragraph, once in the last paragraph, and once somewhere in
between.
5. Use your keywords in ‘alt’ tags. Every image
on your website should have an alternate text, or ‘alt’ tag. This
is not only important for accessibility but it also provides you
with another opportunity to let the search engines see your
keywords. Alt tags should describe what the image is. Make sure
you include your keywords in these image descriptions.
If you follow these five SEO actions for beginners, your website
should stand a better chance of ranking well in the search
engines.
If you need any help with SEO or any of your internet marketing needs, please feel free to Contact Me
After a long career in the Food Service Industry and owning my own Catering Business for many years, I tend to use food stories in my writing.
Now if this was a recipe for …. Let say Chicken Broccoli Ziti for 6 people I’d say :
I get side tracked sometimes when I’m Hungry (must be that Italian up-bringing).
Short and sweet , this is the RECIPE :
SEO + LINKS + TIME = WEBSITE SUCCESS
Let me know if you need any assistance putting together a recipe for success !
Steve DAngelo
Email Me at : steve@stevedangelo.com
Phone # : 603-321-1671
This is the final part of the series, ‘Getting Started the Right Way in Internet Marketing’. This article will focus on one very important part of off-page SEO namely linking.
The previous article was all about backlinking. The more backlinks coming from reputable sites and blogs pointing to your website the higher will be your site’s search engine ranking. The coveted target is to get your website listed on the first page of Google, preferably in the number 1 spot (it is said the number 1 spot on Google for any keyword receives on average 41% of all the traffic).
Steady backlink building will gradually push your website up the rankings. But there is a way to speed the process up.
Do more than just build backlinks from reputable sites and blogs pointing to your website. Make these reputable sites and blogs point to each other also. Suppose you wish to target the keyword, ‘Betta fish diseases’.
You can build web 2.0 properties like Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger, WordPress and Weebly sites with articles containing the anchor text ‘Betta fish diseases’ hyperlinked to point back to your website.
To increase the ‘link juice’ of these links, have articles within each web 2.0 property point to another web 2.0 property also. For instance, the Squidoo lens could have a link pointing to the Weebly site (besides pointing back to your site). The Weebly site (which also points back to your site) has a link pointing to the Hubpages hub. Then the hub points to your website as well as back to the Squidoo lens. This is called a link wheel.
Each keyword you target should have its own link wheel with links pointing back to the web page on your website where you have an article with the targeted keyword as the title. Each web 2.0 property is like a spoke in the link wheel. And the more spokes you have the more ‘link juice’ goes back to your website.
The most powerful effect of the link wheel is that it connects each of your web 2.0 properties with each other and each one back to your website. Then when the search engine spider finds one of these web 2.0 properties, it will be led to the next one and the one after that and so on. Building link wheels is a powerful way to boost your search engine rankings because the spiders find your site easily with all the links leading it from one site to another and eventually back to yours.
That concludes the 9-part series on ‘Getting Started the Right Way in Internet Marketing’. Now all that is left is for you to take action by applying each of the ten parts one by one.
The previous article in this series was about on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This article will focus on the other aspect of SEO, namely off-page SEO. Combining these two aspects of SEO will almost guarantee a high ranking in the search engines for your web page.
Off-page SEO is highly dependent upon one thing – links from other websites to your web page. Generally, the more links you get, the higher your search engine ranking. But there are several conditions to that. These conditions mostly revolve around one main characteristic – the natural appearance of these links.
What do the search engines consider naturally appearing links?
Here are three criteria:
1. They must be from different IP addresses
2. They must have varied anchor texts
3. They must appear gradually over time.
So the most important thing to do to increase the ranking of a web page would be to create links back to it that fulfill these three criteria. Here’s how to do it.
To make backlinks come from various IP addresses, post links to different websites that are of the same topic or niche as your web page. One good way to do that would be to search on Google for the main keyword of your niche + blogs or + forums or + news etc.
For example, if your web page is on keeping betta fish, search for Betta fish keeping blog or Betta fish keeping forum. Then visit the websites that are listed in the first and second results page and look for places you could leave a comment, ask a question or post an entry. Usually blogs, forums and news portals allow you to leave your name, email and website with your comment. By inserting your website URL, you will gain a backlink from that blog or forum to your web page or website.
Another thing to do is to create these websites yourself. Search engines have high regard for certain web 2.0 properties like Squidoo, Hubpages Wetpaint, Weebly, LiveJournal etc. Likewise, they also rank certain social bookmarking sites very highly, like Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Stumbleupon and so on.
By creating your own websites on these web 2.0 properties and leaving entries on these social bookmarking sites, you will be getting backlinks from varied IP addresses. However, you must abide by the rules of these web 2.0 properties because most of them frown upon too many backlinks in one website you create and you might find your website suspended.
One more thing most people do to create backlinks from various IP addresses is to write articles and post them in different article directories. The top article directories that the search engines favor are EzineArticles, GoArticles, Articlesbase and Buzzle.
Next, you need to vary your anchor texts. The best anchor text would be the one containing the keyword you are trying to rank for. Suppose you want to have your web page appear on page one of Google for the term ‘Betta fish diseases’ then you would use the this term to hyperlink back to your web page. But if this is overdone and there are no other anchor texts used, this throws up a red flag to the search engines. So vary anchor texts by including some generic ones like ‘Click Here’.
Finally, create these links over time. If a few hundred backlinks are done all of a sudden, it does not appear natural. But building links over time will result in a gradual increase in search engine rankings for your web page or website.