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Extensive Research On How To Build Wealth From The Comfort Of Your Own Home.
Your voice will give you away
Jan 13th
It’s extremely difficult to read a speech and sound as if you mean it.
For most of us, when reading, posture changes, the throat tightens and people can tell. Reading is different from speaking, and a different sort of attention is paid.
Before you give a speech, then, you must do one of two things if your goal is to persuade:
Learn to read the same way you speak (unlikely)
or, learn to speak without reading. Learn your message well enough that you can communicate it without reading it. We want your humanity.
If you can’t do that, don’t bother giving a speech. Just send everyone a memo and save time and stress for all concerned.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
How to Give Online Shoppers Confidence in Your Website
Dec 19th
We’ve all been to those websites of dubious origin. You know the ones. They look cheesy … fly by night. They’re the online equivalent of the guy selling video DVDs or “designer” handbags out of the back of a van in an alley.
And then there are the sites that don’t exactly look suspicious (and may in fact be legitimate). But still … you don’t have enough information to be sure. No big brand name backs the site to give you confidence. The site has no contact information on it. And there’s nothing to indicate who or what company is actually going to fulfill your order or performt he services.
You’re not the only one who doesn’t trust these sites. In fact, lack of trust may be wider spread than you think.
Kikscore, a company that has created and provides an online trust seal for small business websites, recently conducted a survey. The survey found that a whopping 90% of online shoppers have abandoned a shopping cart at one time or another, because they were worried about being defrauded on a site.
According to Rajeev Malik, CEO and Co-Founder of Kikscore:
“[People] hear almost monthly about large data breaches, they hear stories of ID theft, credit cards being stolen and service providers scamming customers. As a result, there is really a culture of fear that shoppers need to get over prior to either buying online or trusting information about service providers enough, to call them.”
Another interesting point from the Kikscore survey: ”… over 60% of website visitors are more likely to buy from a site that posts information and details about the management of a small business.” So those About Us pages should be more than an afterthought.
What should you do if you have a website and want to instill credibility? Here is a checklist of elements to give your small-business website credibility to online shoppers:
- Company full name (not just your Web domain name)
- Your own domain name – Don’t have your website reside as a subdomain off a bigger site (e.g., NOT: companyxyz.cheapwebsites.com). Instead, you want your Web address to be something like: CompanyXYZ.com.
- Complete address and phone number – Ideally this information should be at the bottom of each page.
- Contact Us page or form
- About Us page – This should contain enough information so that it is clear yours is a business here for the long haul. When possible, include the founder’s or owner’s name. Show your business is REAL. For more information, read: 5 Must Haves for Your About Us Page.
- Photos – Include high-quality photos of some of your products. Or, if you’re a solo professional such as a consultant or Web designer, then a picture of you.
- Description of your business, products, services – Be crystal clear on what your business does and products/services you provide. The clearer and more specific you are, the more you convey that you know what you’re doing and your business is competent. And remember — shoppers research before they buy! Even if they’re “just looking” that’s the first step toward buying.
- Customer testimonials – Even one testimonial from a real customer is helpful. If you have just one, put it right on the home page. Over time you can add more as the business generates a track record.
- Trust seals and seals from industry associations – Trust seals (Kikscore, Truste, Trusted Business, McAfee Secure) and Web seals from associations such as the Better Business Bureau, are a further sign that yours in a credible business. Make sure you have permission to use any seals.
- Media mentions – Mention any publicity your company has had. Also, publish your own press releases on your site, in a section called “Media” or “Press.” A company that publishes press releases shows that it expects to grow.
- Lack of typos / grammatical errors – Proofread your site’s copy! Twice!
- Logo – While you don’t need the most beautiful logo in the world, having a logo (even just professionally drawn text of your company name) says your company has brand value.
- The best design or template you can afford – Let’s face it: you only have a few seconds to make a great impression. If your website appears amateurish, confusing or unprofessional, what does that suggest about the attention you give to the rest of your business?
- Social media follow buttons – If you have social accounts such as Twitter and Facebook, put follow buttons on your website. It’s proof of social validation when they see your followers and see you interacting with the public.
[Editor's Note: The above list adapted from a Q&A session the author did on the D&B Credibility Insights blog, on the topic of website credibility.]
Online Shopping Photo via Shutterstock
How to Give Online Shoppers Confidence in Your Website
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
An Easy Way to Give More to Charity
Nov 28th
As the holidays near, you may be thinking about your charitable giving strategy. One way you can give more: using a search engine or shopping site that donates a portion of profits to your favorite cause.
GoodSearch.com is an example of this. The search-engine, powered by Yahoo!, gives a penny to a designated nonprofit for every search you do. (You can select from a list of about 102,000 nonprofits nationwide, or invite your favorite charity to sign up.) The idea, says co-founder JJ Ramberg – host of MSNBC’s Your Business – is to make donating to charity easy and “part of everyday life.” She started the site with her brother, Ken Ramberg.
Since its 2005 launch, GoodSearch has expanded and now offers more ways to increase charitable donations to your favorite cause. GoodShop.com, a sister site that launched in 2007, gives donations of 4 percent to 12 percent of your online shopping bills at more than 2,500 retailers, from Walmart to Nordstrom to Staples. (You can also download coupons that provide donations.)
GoodDining.com, which launched in early November, gives up to 6 percent of your restaurant tab at more than 10,000 restaurants nationwide.
You can make it easy for yourself to use GoodSearch by downloading the site’s toolbar onto your Web browser. You can also set up a profile on the site to keep tabs how much of a donation GoodSearch has made to your charity due to your searching and buying activity.
Ramberg says the sites have so far given roughly $8 million to charity. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has received the biggest donation through the sites, collecting more than $43,000.
Businesses interested in supporting environmental causes, for instance, have many options – from the Nature Conservancy to Clean Air Cool Planet to local river clean-up projects. If your favorite local charity isn’t already listed on GoodSearch, filling out a quick application form can get it on there.
Ramberg suggests that small businesses with employees can bolster their charitable-giving power by downloading the toolbar onto employees’ computers and encouraging them to use GoodSearch and GoodShop when they make work-related purchases, such as office supplies. She says:
“That way, they don’t have to think about it.”
While a penny per search may not seem like much, it can add up. If you search 25 times per week, and buy, say $30 worth of stuff per week from an online retailer that generates a 5 percent charitable donation,GoodSearch would donate $1.75 per week to the charity of your choice — or $91 a year.
An Easy Way to Give More to Charity
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
A great way to give thanks…
Nov 24th
for the privileges we’ve got is to do important work.
Your job, your internet access, your education, your role in a civilized society… all of them are a platform, a chance to do art, a way for you to give back and to honor those that enabled you to get to this point.
For every person reading this there are a thousand people (literally a thousand) in underprivileged nations and situations that would love to have your slot. Don’t waste it.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
Work From Home. Give Yourself The Financial Freedom You Deserve.
Nov 4th
Perform Work For Companies Who Need To Spread The Word About Their Business And Get Additional Exposure For Their Products.
Work From Home. Give Yourself The Financial Freedom You Deserve.
Give away $218 self growth freebies and make money
Sep 19th
1. You offer the free ebooks and mind power audios worth $218.45 2. They see an offer of over 250 self improvement products for just $37. 3. You earn 70% & 4. All love the free gifts – win/win 
http://www.yourinstantsuccesslibrary.com/affiliate .html
Give away $218 self growth freebies and make money
Give to Get Appointments
Sep 8th
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
One of the surest ways to build the trust required to do business these days is to be able to demonstrate your willingness to give, to add value, before you ever ask for anything in return.
Certainly you’ve seen this dynamic play out in the act of referrals. You’ve probably also seen or felt the impact of this mentality in the offering of free white papers, how to seminars and evaluation sessions.
But what about in a lead generation environment where you’re trying to create awareness and land an appointments? What about using this thinking in situations where you are essentially trying to get the attention of a prospect that doesn’t yet know you exist? Can the give first mentality be used to open doors and create enough trust to get you invited to tell your full story?
Here’s a simple campaign that I’ve seen do just that.
- Acquire a highly targeted mailing list from Hoovers, InfoUSA or Jigsaw.
- Send an email and postcard to a small number, say 100, using variable data printing on the postcard to display the prospect’s name big and bold.
- In the email use the prospect’s name only in the subject line.
- In the body of the email and for the postcard copy simply state that you have a few ideas on how they could get x (x = more clients, better return, few errors, more done, etc – it’s what you sell) – don’t add anything else about you or your solution, just keep it to that one line and add a link to a personalized landing page (using a pURL) from a service like SendPepper. (there are lots of services that can accomplish this, but I really like the features from SendPepper)
- The personalized link and page features the name of the prospect and provides five or six of your best recommendations or tips. Don’t hold back, give them some really good information and advice. The content of this page can be segmented for different variables, but for the most part the actual content will be generic, but still valuable with a personalized feel driven by the pURL technology.
- If you’re using an integrated tool like SendPepper, you’ll get notification when someone visits their page and you can then follow-up with even more great information and a call to action, such as an appointment, evaluation or presentation of more customized ideas.
A couple things to note:
This works at a far higher rate than simple bulk mailing because of the personalization and because you’re offering something of value that is easy for them to consume and simple to understand.
Too often we try to spell out multiple offers in hopes that something will stick – keep your message dead simple and intriguing and you’ll get far more response.
Keep the batches small so you’ll have plenty of time to follow-up immediately and analyze what’s working and what’s not. Most services allow some amount of split testing as well.
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Give and get
Jul 4th
The stability, power and longevity of a tribe is directly related to the way it is treated by its members.
When many of them seek to take, to enrich themselves and to find a loophole or advantage, the group is weakened.
Culture and management are not the same thing–when we strengthen our organization, when we encourage and respect our fellow employees, management follows. Group up, not top down.
Society and government are not the same thing either. The tribe we get is the tribe we build.
I don’t think we can abdicate our responsibilities within a tribe to the leader.
The opportunity is simple: the more each individual gives, the more each of us end up getting.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
Give Yourself Permission to Suck
Apr 18th
Give Yourself Permission to Suck
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
When I was growing up I decided I wanted to play the guitar. I loved music, appreciated songwriting and wanted to be able to play and sing. As anyone who has ever tried to learn an instrument or anyone that’s lived with someone trying to learn a musical instrument can attest, at first you’re going to be really, really bad.
jeffmcneill via Flickr
But, if your desire to play is significant and you push through with practice, eventually, something magical can occur. Now, I never practiced enough to expect to rise very high in my musical career, but I did advance to the point where I could earn money, tips and drinks by playing in the bars in the town where I attended college.
The point is, if you want to achieve any level of success in your business one of the things you must do is give yourself permission to be bad at the things you don’t know how to do.
I encounter business owners frequently that tell me they are bad at this thing or that thing, or they fear they can’t master this important skill. The thing about holding back or caving in to fear is that it zaps your passion and kills your art.
There are so many things you must do in order to build a business and with most of these things you’ll have no idea how to do them properly and no experience to draw upon other than what you witness around you.
If you succeed in business at all at times it’s because you push through, fall down, and get back up to assess what you’ve learned.
The thing is though, many business owners just flat ignore some of the steps they must take in order to move their business forward with momentum because they don’t think they know enough about how to do something, or they don’t think they like that kind of work, or someone told them they’re no good at something.
If you’ve ever felt like your business is stuck and you keep bumping up against some unseen force that won’t let you move forward, look no further than yourself. The enemy is you and your unwillingness to do the things you must even though you’re afraid you’ll fail.
I’m not really trying to give you a pep talk here, this is straight on practical advice. You’re going to suck at many of things you need to do and that’s okay, that’s how you get to where you’re going.
There’s a chapter in the wonderful book Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott titled Shitty First Drafts. Lamott describes a process of writing that involves getting something down on paper, without analysis, knowing that it won’t be very good, but also knowing that it’s the only way to get to the second and final draft. Unless you’re willing to write something very bad, you’ll never get to something beautiful.
When I realized that in order to build the business I wanted to build I would have to write every day, I just started to write. I had never really written this way and I was very bad at it. I didn’t want to be bad at it, but I gave myself permission to because it was the only way I was going to get somewhere I wanted to go. (Your ego has way of helping sometimes because I probably didn’t think some of my first works were as bad as they really were.)
When I realized that in order to build the business I wanted to build I would to have to get up in front of audiences and speak, I just started to do it. I had never done it before and I was very bad at it. I didn’t want to be bad at it, but I gave myself permission to because it was the only way I was going to get somewhere I wanted to go.
I’m by no means a great writer or a great speaker, but I’ve stuck with both long enough to get to the point where they are essential elements of my business and brand because I knew they had to be.
So far no one has been injured or killed by my doing either and that’s the point. Give yourself permission to be bad at doing the things you want and need to do and you might find that your art flows more easily.
So, by this point you might be saying, “But I don’t know how to get started with . . . ” – blogging, accounting, analysis, speaking, selling, hiring, SEO, or any other of a myriad of necessary activities I’m no got at.
That’s part two for tomorrow’s post – come back won’t you!
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Biz Owners to Google: Give Us More Online Technology and Education
Jan 9th
We small business owners have long been the kings and queens of do-it-yourself solutions. When we are starting out, we have more time than money. As startups we focus on do-it-yourself solutions because we cannot afford to pay others to do for us — yet.
Later, as our businesses grow, we start hiring staff and outsourcing work to outside providers. Even so, we’re likely to continue doing a lot of work ourselves because it makes economic sense and because by nature many small biz owners are hands-on and like it that way.
So it should come as no surprise that asked for our wish list for 2011, small biz owners put on the list “more education” and a desire for more tools to run our businesses.
This information came out as part of the Google Wishes initiative. Late last year, Google asked small business owners and entrepreneurs to “share our 2011 aspirations.”
The results are in, and they paint a picture of business owners who are serious about growing and improving their businesses, and looking for tools and assistance to make it happen.
First, we business owners love online technology, and want more features. Seventy-six percent (76%) wanted more features from online tools. Also, according to Leslie Hernandez, Product Marketing Manager, Google Small Business Team, the small business owners who responded ” … acknowledged that referrals are now happening online through social media channels and, as such, you want to understand how to use these online tools. You also want more out of your websites. Ultimately, you said you want to do more online to run your business more efficiently and spend more time concentrating on your customers.”
Another thing on the wish list: more education, as well as help to get our businesses started. In other words, we small business owners know that we need more knowledge if we’re to run our businesses more efficiently and effectively.
Biz Owners to Google: Give Us More Online Technology and Education
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
