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Work from Home

Market Your Service As Well As Your Products

December 9, 2010 · 1 comment

As a small business owner you most likely spend a fair amount of time focused on effectively marketing your products. From price lists to promotions to marketing materials and more, much of your small business management activities are centered on describing your products and encouraging customers to buy them.

But if all you do is market your products you are missing out on a huge opportunity to make your business more successful. If you want to maximize the potential of your small business then you need to learn how to market your service as well as your products.

Your products and the competition

It doesn’t matter what kind of products you sell in your small business; from auto parts to furniture to books to candles, your products are probably not entirely unique. There are competitors out there selling the exact same (or nearly the same) products as well, and their number one goal is to convince customers to buy from them rather than from you.

And when the products are virtually the same, the next area where you of course attempt to compete is on price. The problem then becomes what happens if your competitor offers the same or similar products at lower prices? Maybe they cut a better deal with their suppliers, or perhaps they have lower overhead and administrative costs; regardless of the reason, if they sell the same thing at a lower price it’s going to cut into your business and reduce the amount of money you make.

So what are you supposed to do?

Using service to differentiate your business from the rest

The answer lies in successfully marketing your service as well as your products. The term “your service” refers to everything you do surrounding the product itself and related to how you interact with your customers. Examples of service might include:

Free or discounted delivery
Expert advice and consultation
Expanded access to customer service specialists
Personalized order taking and attention

So as you’re looking for ways to differentiate your business from the competition and create effective online marketing strategies, paying attention to service can be a huge winner in terms of creating greater small business success.

A really good example of this comes from the world of retail, where giant retailers have gone in to communities and many smaller businesses in those communities have gone out of business due to the substantially lower prices the larger companies charge for the same or similar items. Small business simply can’t compete directly on price in these situations.

But some small businesses have managed to succeed and even thrive in areas where larger companies are in place because they have smartly found ways to market their service as something of value beyond the value of the products themselves. Perhaps it’s a small grocer who takes phone orders, makes home deliveries, or insists that a courtesy clerk helps each customer carry their groceries out to their car. Whatever it is that sets them apart from their much larger competitors and is viewed as having value by their customers is a terrific tool for marketing their business in terms of service as well as in terms of products.

You can put this concept to work for your small business as well. Think about the service you provide and how it contributes to the value your business offers to customers. Once you have identified these things you can incorporate them into your marketing efforts and chances are you’re going to see positive results.

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Who To Believe When Experts Give Conflicting Advice

October 1, 2010 · 0 comments

No doubt we’ve all been there … some guru tells you how to do something for the best results, then another expert tells you to do the opposite!

Who do you listen to?

Well, sometimes it is possible that one of these people doesn’t really know what they’re talking about. However more often you’ll find they are, in fact, both correct.

You see, there are so many different business models and different reasons for doing things. So those pieces of conflicting advice may each be correct for THAT PARTICULAR BUSINESS MODEL.

For example, someone may tell you that they make a lot of money from having AdSense ads on their web site. Yet another leading marketer advises not to have any unnecessary ads on links on your site in order to achieve the best results from your site.

This is a classic example of both experts being correct. For some web sites including ads is a great way to make money online. While for sites set up for other purposes, it’s vital to have as few links on your site as possible.

So the first thing to do in this situation is to determine the aim of your web site. Is your aim to sell a product or service, to share information on a topic, to grow your database, to get industry recognition and credibility, for like-minded people to come together and share or to make money the easiest way possible?

Once you know the aim of your site, look for someone who’s able to advise on the best way to set up a web site for that particular purpose.

Once you are clear on the purpose of your site you’ll find it so much easier to know who to listen to.

Similarly, if the conflicting advice you’re receiving relates to your business in general, advertising or other forms of marketing … whatever area it relates to, again consider first what your main aim is.

You can, of course, try the different strategies for yourself and see which gives you the best results, but usually, from a general perspective, you’ll find the expert’s advice does work best for that particular model.

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7 Simple Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Strategies

September 3, 2010 · 0 comments

Whether your small business operates primarily online or primary in a bricks and mortar location, a web site is an important part of your overall business success strategy. To get the most benefit from any web site it’s critical to make sure its search engine optimization (SEO) is maximized.

There are over 200 algorithms that are used by search engines to determine your web pages’ ranks and these can change at any time.

You can pay a professional SEO company to optimize your site but many small businesses don’t have the funds available for this, especially in the very early days of operation. However there are a number of things you can do to optimize your website that will help your site to be found more easily in the search engines.

Let’s take a look at seven simple SEO strategies you can use to accomplish this goal.

Strategy #1 – Research relevant keywords

This is the critical first step because it helps you identify the search terms your customers and potential customers are using most often when they are searching for the products and/or services you offer. Identifying these most relevant keywords makes it possible to start incorporating them efficiently and effectively into your web site.

Strategy #2 – Use these keywords in your page title, description, and meta-data

Once you have identified the most relevant keywords, be sure to include them in your page title, web site description, and meta-data. This ensures search engines will find your web site and include it in search results for those keywords.

Strategy #3 – Use these keywords in your domain name

If at all possible, find a way to include the most relevant keywords in your web site domain name. This further ensures it will be highly ranked by the major search engines.

Strategy #4 – Use these keywords in your text

It’s also important to weave the most relevant keywords into the text content of your web site because this affects search engine rankings as well. The way you use them, though, is important; they need to be a natural part of the content rather than just words used as often as possible on the site. If you go overboard on the quantity of keywords and don’t use them in a way that makes sense you may actually end up with lower search engine rankings as a result.

Remember … write for your readers first, search engines second.

Strategy #5 – Name your images

Every image on your web site, whether it is a graphic, a picture, an illustration, or the like, should be named with relevant keywords in mind. Search engines don’t capture information about the visual content of these images, but they do capture information about the file names and the file context.

Strategy #6 – Backlink effectively

Search engine rankings are based both on the content of your web site and the links between your web site and other web sites. They look not only at the quantity of links, but also at the quality of links; in other words, when you have a backlink to a web site with high rankings and high relevance to your web site and keywords that backlink is given greater weight by the search engine’s algorithm.

Strategy #7 – Publish new content regularly

Once you have your web site up and running with great search engine optimization, your work is not finished. Search engines also pay attention to how often the unique content on your web site is updated. If you don’t update content regularly the search engines will interpret that as being a negative and will lower your rankings; if, however, you update content regularly then the search engines will interpret that positively and will raise your rankings accordingly.

There are many other strategies most people can do themselves, however, if done well, these 7 steps alone may be enough to get your website found on page one of Google for your main keywords.

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Should I Syndicate My Articles?

August 3, 2010 · 0 comments

Many website owners question the benefit of syndicating the content and articles they write for their own site. In fact, they even fear that syndicating their content may cause them to receive search engine penalties for duplicate content, or actually make them competitors with the sites they syndicate to.

None of these concerns are really worth stopping you from syndicating, however. There are many benefits to syndicating your articles, including:

Creating Brand Name Awareness – As more people have access to your articles from multiple sources, you create awareness for yourself and your site, and establish yourself as an expert in your field.

Generating Traffic to Your Site – Your syndicated content should link directly back to your site, which, quite simply, brings you more readers and should help improve your business.

Increases Your Search Engine Ranking – As you generate more traffic to your site along with more backlinks to your site, your ranking in the search engines continues to get higher. This, in turn, generates even more traffic to your site.

One of the main keys to syndicating your articles is that they link back directly to your site. You want your work to always point back to you, rather than generating traffic for the sites you’ve syndicated to. This helps you ensure that you’re not competing with the sites who publish your content, and helps the search engines determine that you are the original source of the content.

Like anything else, syndicating content does have some downsides, like the possibility that the site you syndicate to might decide to modify your articles, even though your licensing agreement prohibits it. Issues like this can be sticky and time consuming to remedy. However I’ve found these types of issues of only minor concern, far outweighed by the benefits of article syndication.

Fears about duplicate content are not an issue here either. I’ll cover duplicate content in more detail in another post but in general, the search engines aren’t going to penalise you for syndicating your articles.

For most small, micro and home-based businesses, syndicating articles is an extremely effective way to get your name out there and create awareness for your own site.

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Why Do Some People Succeed While Others Fail?

July 12, 2010 · 0 comments

Have you ever wondered why it is that some people follow through and achieve success with something while others either don’t follow through – e.g. they buy a coaching program or book and never use it – or they follow through but don’t seem to achieve positive results?

I have. Many times. And it’s really frustrating because if someone buys my product I truly want them to use it and to achieve results from it.

I know it’s not just me because I’ve had many discussions about this topic with several colleagues in the last couple of years.

Thankfully, John Reese and Frank Kern, two well-known and highly respected internet business professionals, wanted to know the answer to the very same question. So they asked one man who was sure to be able to explain this … Anthony Robbins. Better still, they recorded this interview so we can all benefit from it.

Click on the link below to watch this recording:

Tony Robbins Interview With John Reese And Frank Kern

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