For beginners, the first step in growing your new business is to find the customers. For those of you who are already up and running, the next step (now that you have clients) is that you must continue to generate new business every month, even if you have dozens of clients and no time for marketing! Why? Because there might come a day when the clients are not there, a VERY lean month when the phone doesn’t ring. This is not the time to begin marketing; the time to market is now.
Here are some cost-effective tips on where to find clients. Please note that not every tip will work for everyone. It really depends on both the type of service you have and who you are marketing to. Persistence is the key here! Don’t give up after only one or two tries because it might take more. Remember that you are selling an intangible service that everyone needs, but none of them think that they need it, so it is up to you to convince them of its value — and this takes time.
1) E-mail signature – most email software programs allow you to put an automatic signature at the bottom of your emails. You know . those few lines of contact information at the bottom of an email. People love it when you make information easy to find. In fact, e-mail is such a part of our lives now, that most people are more likely to grab your phone number off your latest e-mail than to dig up your business card. So what should go on your sig file? Your name, title, company name and your company tagline. You should also include your address, phone, cell phone, fax number, e-mail address and your Website address. Now, also consider putting promotional info in your sig file, such as an offer for a free report or product, a free consultation or trial offer, company announcement (new client, new product, award won, etc.), a hyperlink to your latest press release, article, or Web site feature or an invitation to subscribe to your free e-newsletter.
2) Include a return envelope — If you’d really like a response from a personal letter, include a return envelope in it with a live stamp on it. It will increase your response or it’ll drive them nuts.
3) Post advertising circulars on all the free bulletin boards in your area, especially the coin-operated laundries, grocery stores, and beauty and barber shops.
4) Always acknowledge when something nice is done for you with a thank you letter. No, a call is not the same.
5) Write articles for magazines and newspapers. Each time your articles are published, you gain credibility and visibility.
6) Develop a “small town” marketing approach . Send out congratulatory notes for weddings, graduations, and birthdays.
7) Stand-by space — many publications will give you a contract for “stand-by” space. In this arrangement you send them your ad, and they hold it until they have unsold space, and then at a price that’s always one third or less than the regular price for the space you need, insert your ad. Along these lines, be sure to check in with the suburban and neighborhood newspapers.
Headlines — Use headlines on your website, brochure and sales kit. Talk about how customers will benefit from your services, not simply a list about what services your business offers. An excellent way to get attention is to boldly give the 5 or 6 key benefits of your product or service. Put the biggest benefit on top and list off the rest in descending order of importance. The best formula for creating headlines in marketing is “New product offers benefit, benefit, benefit.” Use this to create the headline of your press releases and advertisements, for envelope teaser copy, and for the beginning lead of your brochure. For example: How Would You Like To Get: Biggest benefit, Second biggest, Third biggest benefit. You get the idea.
9) Become a guest on as many of the radio and television talk shows or interview type programs as possible. Actually, this is much easier to bring about than most people realize. Write a letter to the producer of these programs, then follow up with an in-person visit or telephone call. Your initial contact should emphasize that your product or service would be of interest to the listeners or viewers of the program — perhaps even saving them time or money.
10) Provide GREAT customer service — this is the key to your success. If you tell people that you are going to give them more time, then you must take it one step further and value their time. Return ALL telephone calls and emails in 24 hours or less. This one thing has done more to grow Triangle Concierge than anything else we’ve done. Our reputation for fantastic customer service has given us more referrals than anything else.
11) Proof – nobody wants to be a fool, or get robbed. Before buying anything, everyone wants to know if the money they’re paying is worth the product or not? In this case, the proof is in the testimonials from your clients. Nothing works better than word of mouth because people want to know how the other person has benefited from your product.
12) Have no doubts! Want to know the secret of growing your business? The REAL secret? Change your words. I’m serious, change your words and you will change your life. Don’t listen to the negative people who are telling you that your business will fail in today’s economy. Turn your back on people who tell you that perhaps you should consider a 9 to 5 job. KNOW that can do this! Have no doubts about it and turn your thoughts to “I am going to succeed!” and “I can do this.”
By: Katharine Giovanni
Posts Tagged ‘New Business’
12 Ways to Market Your Business
January 29th, 20107 Steps to a Money Making Website
January 17th, 2010
Have you been considering setting up your own website to make money on the internet? Perhaps you already have a business or a business idea and want your own presence on the web. Or maybe you just know that you want to make money on the internet but have no idea what is involved.
To give you an idea of what is involved I will outline the 7 steps you need to take to set up your own money making website. This will give you the basics of what is involved and allow you to do further research and make progress in each of these seven areas.
*Step 1 – Your business idea
If you already have a business or a business idea, you can skip this step. If not, then spend some time writing a list of all the things that interest you. The chances of succeeding in your new business are far greater if you are doing something that you are passionate about. This way it won’t feel like you are doing a job when you start spending time on this. Don’t worry too much about a product at this point, just think about the things you like to do – perhaps you like cooking, or playing football, or foreign travel. Try to write down at least 5 things that you enjoy.
*Step 2 – Research your Market and Analyse the Competition
Once you have completed step 1, you need to find out if there is a market in the areas that you are interested in. At the same time you may want to avoid entering a market that is highly competitive. From my experience the best way to analyse this is by using a tool called Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com). Note that the trial version is a cut down version of the much more powerful full version and only includes statistics from one search engine rather than multiple engines.
Use this software as a brainstorming tool and type in your interests that you came up with in step 1 (or your original business idea). Wordtracker will return related keywords, which you can then select and add to your “basket”. At this stage it is best to keep an open mind and fill your basket with around 1000 keyword phrases. Finally you can do a “competitive analysis” on the keywords that you have chosen. This will allow you to see how many searches a day are done on a per search engine basis for each keyword phrase.
In addition to this you will also see the number of competing websites and a value called a “KEI” which is a “Keyword Effectiveness Index”. You have a better chance of succeeding if you choose keywords that have a KEI above 100. If the KEI is above 400, then you have an excellent chance of success.
Ensure that you spend sufficient time in this planning phase, repeating the above process again and again until you have a good set of related keywords with good KEIs. Once you have chosen your keywords you should check out your competition by typing the keywords into Google and looking at top websites for each keyword phrase that you have selected. The Google and Alexa toolbars can help you with your analysis of competing websites
*Step 3 – Choose a Product
If you don’t already have a product in mind, the next step is to decide on your product or group of products. Before you do this, try to do some research and find out exactly what your potential customers are looking for. What sort of questions are they asking? Google Groups are an excellent place for doing this sort of research.
One solution is to join some affiliate programs (related to your chosen keywords of course). Affiliate programs are usually free to join and pay you a commission for directing customers from your site via a special affiliate link. You can find a lot of information about affiliate programs by searching for “Affiliate Programs” on Google.
Another alternative is to sell your own product. This could be something that you have made yourself such as a craft item or an informative e-book, or a product that you dispatch using a drop shipping service. It is also possible to buy resell rights to e-books and software written by other people.
Before you make a final decision, work out what your profit margin will be and do a rough calculation of how much money you will make based on the estimated traffic from Wordtracker.
*Step 4 – Choose and Register a Domain name
The next stage is to decide on and register a domain name. There are many websites selling domain names and you should be able to get one easily for less than $10 per year. There is no need to sign up for a domain name with your web hosting company if they are charging more than this as domain names can be transferred easily between hosting companies.
Try to choose a domain name that has some of your keywords in it. It’s also an advantage to have a name that is relatively short and easy to remember.
*Step 5 – Find a Web Hosting Company
There are hundreds of web hosting companies available. Some even provide hosting for free. I advise against using the free services if you are setting up a business, as this can look unprofessional, especially since most of them use advertising on your site as a way to recoup the cost. This is fine for a personal website, but if you are serious about making money you need to choose a reputable web hosting company.
Ensure that you are happy with the disk space and bandwidth allowances that your hosting company provides. Other things to consider are the customer support services, reliability in terms of the percentage of down time expected and the interface for uploading files. There are many websites that offer reviews and comparisons of different hosting packages.
*Step 6 – Build your Website
At last, you are now ready to start building your website. Many people skip the research stage and dive straight into this part, but your chances of success are much higher if you spend time on the research part first.
Depending on your knowledge and experience in this area you may decide to do this yourself, or pay for a web designer to do this for you. If you are doing it yourself, it helps to know HTML, but there are also many web page editors such as Front Page and Dreamweaver which you can use to construct your website with little or no knowledge of HTML.
Try to ensure that your site is clean, uncluttered and easy to navigate and that it looks professional. Have someone proofread your copy to ensure that there are no mistakes. Also ensure that you use your keywords from your Wordtracker research in the title of your page, the headings and throughout your copy. Use one or two of your chosen keyword phrases per page and don’t overdo the use of your keywords as search engines may consider this as SPAM.
*Step 7 – Market your Website
Finally you need to market your webpage. It is simply not true that you can just build a website and wait for visitors to come without doing any form of internet marketing.
Internet marketing is a huge topic, out with the scope of this article. The sort of techniques that you may want to consider include reciprocal linking, writing and publishing articles, pay per click (PPC) advertising such as Google Adwords and Overture, classified and solo ads, participating in discussion forums that allow a signature in your postings and advertising on related (but not competing) websites.
These 7 steps take time and effort, but if you do your research and persevere you are likely to see excellent results.
Don’t forget, that once you have been through this process once, you can repeat it again and again until you have multiple websites making an income for you while you sleep, or relax on the beach!
By: Suzanne Morrison