Marketing & Strategy
Advice: Finding your virtual salesman
This month is a weird topic, but stick with me: the challenge to you as a business owner is to find yourself a virtual salesperson. Let me explain. A *virtual* salesman is a person who is not employed by your business whatsoever, but has a vested interest in actively telling others about your business, your products, and the wonderful service you provide. The trick is in finding them.
Advice: Bowing to a higher authority
I’d suggest that as an individual, we don’t need to be able to amass 100% of the skills we need all by ourselves – in fact, we simply can’t – and that apart from the odd moments of epiphany, we gain our skills and experience by absorbing information from other rich sources – our own stable of mentors. So – who are my own ‘rich sources’ of pure gold? Who are my mentors? Let me introduce you to a couple…
Advice: So, what do you do?
Just like the bad pick-up lines from days gone by (shudder), your opening line to a prospective customer can sometimes be a make-or-break thing: it’s the first opportunity you have to get across what you do with a bit of passion, and a bit of flair. This first contact is often called the ‘elevator pitch’ – if you only have 30 seconds to explain your business to someone you’ve never met, how would you do it? All it takes is a little navel-gazing, a little pre-planning, and some guinea-pigs to practice it on… Ready? Let’s take a quick look!
Advice: How to turn web visitors into web customers
In 1943, Abraham Maslow proposed his “hierarchy of needs” – food, safety, love, respect & acceptance – a series of 5 levels that were the building blocks for every human’s existence. In 2009, I’m proposing a new set of 5 ‘needs’ to be able to turn a web visitor into a customer.
Advice: The ‘one percenters’ – a list of small things every business should/shouldn’t do
If the world of business was able to borrow just one phrase from the world of AFL Football, then I’d hope it was the concept of the ‘one percenters’ – the idea that it’s all the little tiny things that players do that win the game for their team. Get enough ‘one percenters’ going your [...]
Advice: Keeping It Simple, Stupid.
Global financial crisis, or *no* global financial crisis, some downtime over Christmas and January is a great time to do some serious navel gazing into your business, take a good hard look at what has as what hasn’t worked in 2008.
‘Keeping it simple’ is just a realisation that over-complicating your business might not be doing you our your customers any favours – the chances are that if *you* get a little confused with your product or service offerings, your customers are certainly scratching their heads, too.
Advice: Search Engine Optimisation 101
Search engine *what*? Yes, yes, sorry if I use too many ‘big words’ this month, but for a lot of businesses, ‘optimising’ your site so that it appears higher in the big search engines is well worth the effort.
So, up front: what is search engine optimisation?
SEO (*much* easier to write than ’search engine optimisation’) is the process of preparing your web site so that it ranks higher on the search results page of a search engine. The aim is to be seen before your competition – and even though it may or may not result in more clicks through to your web site, at least you were *found* – from that position, you can work on ways to increase your conversion/click-through rate. If you consider the reverse position, where your web site does not feature at all for a given search, then trivial things like your conversion rate won’t matter at all if no-one can find you.
So how the heck to we make sure our site is featured prominently for any given search? And how do I make sure my site is listed before my competitor’s site?
Well, I’m glad you asked. Read on…
Advice: The Cashflow Crunch: Who, what, when and how to survive one
So what really is cashflow? Why is it so important? And how the heck is my business going to survive this trend? Important questions – and if you don’t already know the answers, then it’s vital for your business that you read on…
Advice: Plan A: How to write a good business plan.
A business plan should never be an anchor or a dead weight dragging your business down – and it should never be an onerous task to put one together.
The good news is that there are 3 wildly different types of business plans – each one focussing on a different business purpose – and one of these types of plans should suit your needs perfectly, without undue effort.
Advice: Starting Something New – A ‘How To’ Guide
It all starts here: with the tiny seed of an idea. Perhaps it’s extending your current business into a market of a competitor; perhaps your ’something new’ is to find a synergistic product or service that you can promote alongside your current range, but that cross-sell each other, and boost your total sales figures.