Small Business Blog

Archive for March, 2010

To start a business and have it up and running successfully, you will need to think of some realistic business management plans. With these plans and your dream in mind, you will have to work through the initial difficult stages to build up good business management strategies and the ways to achieve them. Your business-management skills may be the crux between mediocrity and success.

The first and most important step in a good business management plan is to set clear specific goals and objectives. It is easier to achieve goals or objectives that are distinctive and focused. In addition, it will take lesser time but produce better results continually. As such, design your strategies to achieve your objectives. It makes good business sense to organize the “to-dos” for each day so that there is better focus on every task.

Another important business management trait is align your own personal goals and objectives with that of the company’s and give them full focus until each task has been completed. The more time you spent on perfecting a skill, the lesser will be the time taken to complete the task.

Another purpose of setting goals and objectives is to create a way to measure performance and track accomplishments. Such goals and objectives have to be challenging but achievable. You need to be creative and innovative in order to achieve the specific goals and strategic objectives set up in the business management plans.

At the same time, create your company’s mission and vision statements and find solutions on how to implement or accomplish them. Outline the performance targets and the ways to achieve them. This is to avoid going in different directions. Define the company’s passion and the methods to excel in it. Such business management strategies will strengthen the company’s competitiveness in the industry. In addition, setting up long-term goals will determine the company’s position in ten years’ time and mark out the path to achieve them.

Some entrepreneurs may confuse activity with productivity. Most of the entrepreneurs who succeeded have the ability to identify and categorize specific activities that are extremely crucial or create an extraordinary significance that will contribute towards the overall success of the business. More time will then be allocated to ensure that these are carried out thoroughly and effectively. A successful entrepreneur also has an in-build drive that motivates them to persevere and make things happen. This is one of the most important business management traits.

Another business management characteristic is to know how to respond to industry changes and market conditions. A successful entrepreneur will learn through other people’s knowledge and efforts especially those of their clients or competitors. Capitalize on these new ideas or concepts and your business may expand with lesser efforts contributed and within a shorter period of time.

Due to continuous changes, good business management is an ongoing process to constantly evaluate strategies and monitor performance to see if there are better ways to accomplish the goals and objectives or whether improvements and adjustments need to be made. This may even lead to changing the company’s mission or vision statements.

Looking for internet book marketing tools that are practically hands free? Add these three tools to your arsenal and you’ll be certain to sell your book.

Internet Book Marketing Tool # 1 Website Marketing

Possibly the most critical tool for a self published author is your website. A well optimized web site, meaning that people searching for your information can find it quickly and easily via the search engines like Google or Yahoo, means targeted traffic and customers are led directly to your book.

A well written landing page that captures email addresses and sells your information can sell thousands of books. Add a few pages of free content that provide immediate benefit to your reader and credibility to your status as an author and you’re well on your way to becoming a ‘profitable’ self published author.

As a self published author, your website can offer a variety of pages to their visitor including:

• Ezine/newsletter subscription

• Free Articles and/or short stories

• Bio

• Sales page

• Links to stores

• Shopping cart to purchase directly from the website

• List of appearances/promotions

Internet Book Marketing Tool # 2 Ezine Marketing Magic

Ezine marketing is not only a great way to build your opt in list, it is a fantastic tool to sell your book, your information products, and any affiliate products that you choose to endorse. Additionally, it provides you with a constant means of communication to your target market and the ability to provide them with quality information that will benefit their lives. The time saving aspect of this tool is that you don’t have to struggle to come up with content. You’ve already written your book. Pull one or two useful paragraphs from your book, round it out, and you have an ezine article!

In addition to publishing your own ezine you can contribute to other relevant ezines, just make sure that you provide a link back to your own website and product line. You can also purchase inexpensive ad space in relevant ezines to market your book. For example, if your book is a small business book, you can purchase ad space in other small business newsletters and link directly to your website.

Internet Book Marketing Tool # 3 Rave Reviews

Reviews are the proof to others that your book is worth the money it costs. Reviews can be used in your publicity package, in your press release, on your book’s back cover, on your website, and even on your business card. They are a valuable and economic expert marketing tool. Visit our website or click on the following link to learn more about secrets to getting rave reviews.

Internet book marketing doesn’t have to be an all consuming struggle. It’s true that the more time you spend marketing your book, the more you’re going to sell. But why not use a few tried and true marketing tools that drive traffic and sales to your book with little or no work from you?

Below are some of the crucial items you should have on your Blog. Take a look at this list and your Blog and see how you measure up. I can tell you that I did it myself and I had to create an action plan to fix my own Blog.

You see, just because I know what needs to be done doesn’t mean I always have time to implement it myself.

It is like the shoe cobbler’s children going to school with their shoes falling apart. I am so busy helping clients, I don’t have time to work on my own things.

The same may be true for you. You are so busy but you know you want to, actually you need to, Blog. So you start it and don’t necessarily have everything in place.

That’s OK. The key is to find out where you are lacking and create an action plan so you can take steps towards getting everything in place,

So, here is your checklist. Do you have:

A strategy in place? Do you know why are you Blogging? What are you hoping to accomplish? Do you know how often you have to Blog, what types of posts you need in order to accomplish your objective?

A posting schedule? Ideally you should have at least 2 new posts a week, and up to 5. Less than 2 is too little, and over 5 is often too much (unless you are a great writer and have lots of news and information to share, so you aren’t just writing fluff).

A comment policy? Do you moderate? If so, how long does it take to approve comments.

An ‘About Us’ section? Since Blogging is about connecting, sharing information and creating dialog to form relationships, you need to be sure to tell people who you are and what you are all about. Including contact information is a good idea

A Blogroll? Be sure to include NON company links. Point your readers to sites/blogs that you think THEY would be interested in reading. Yes, you can add your website, but please mix in some non-company sites as well to show people you are truly interested in being a resource for them.

RSS subscriber buttons? Give your readers a way to subscribe to your Blog, via a feed reader. Feedburner is a quick and easy way to get this done.

Photos, graphs or charts to create visual interest.

Videos to engage users.

Personality and opinions so people feel they are really hearing your voice and not just some regurgitated industry news.

Links back to relevant pages on your website.

A custom header graphic that doesn’t take up too much space but shows that your Blog is uniquely yours and not just some out of the box Blog platform that has no customization. Some people choose to have their header match the look and feel of their main site.

So go check out your Blog right now and see how you measure up.

As a business owner, I know you read business books, which is good. However, you have to be able to read what’s relevant and skim over what is crap. What I mean to say is that too many books paint a way-too-flowery picture of business ownership and entrepreneurship. They never really describe or do justice to how difficult and stressful it is to own, run, and grow a business. I want to talk about the impact of stress and fear on your success.

I was listening to a Robert Johnson song (for those of you who don’t know, Mr. Johnson is one of the early, and great, blues players of the last century) and he wrote a song that talks about trouble, fear and stress. For entrepreneurs and sales and marketing folks, it can ring very true.

“I got stones in my passway and my road seems dark at night.

I got stones in my passway and my road seems dark at night.

I have pains in my heart, they have taken my appetite.”

I think stress and fear grow even heavier once you go above $500,000 to $1,000,000 in revenue and have 5+ employees. That’s when you start to have headaches. That’s why when I read a business advice book, I prefer books written by people who have actually run companies and who give you the harsh reality of having a business with all the gruesome details.

Of course, the other side of the coin is that owning your business has an upside. You can, if done correctly, have a business that makes you wealthy (which is the idea) or at the very least, something that provides you with a great income.

My mentor, Dan Kennedy, has been very straight with me about stress. Basically he says: If you want the four-car garage, the vacation home in Maui (insert your favorite vacation spot), the office building, etc., you have to learn to manage stress.

The question to ask yourself – Do I want a job that is low-to-stress-free? Or, do I want to become rich? If you want no stress, you might work a counter job for Starbucks or McDonalds. There’s nothing wrong with those jobs – it’s just that your level of success and income is dependent on the level of stress you can take and/or learn to manage.

The key is *learn to manage* the stress – and what causes it, fear.

If you can manage a lot of stress, then building up a company is for you. It’s just a fact of life. The reward of ownership comes with more stress and you have to simply learn to carry more than most. I wish I could tell you that’s not the case. It would be nice to be as flowery as so many business books. However, I’d rather be up front with you.

Fear of failure stops *most* of us from achieving what we are capable of. And I did say most of us. I am absolutely certain that everyone is capable of being a successful entrepreneur or a sales rep if they consistently make 20% or more above goal each month and year. However, it is the fear of failure that stops most of us. The fear is wicked.

How does one “manage” stress and the fear that causes it?

What I do is look directly at the fear I’m feeling, stare it in the eye, see what I’m stressing about – and then I push it away, eliminate it. There is no other way around it. If you want to succeed at anything you have to rid yourself of this terrible pattern. As regularly as it tries to show up, just as regularly push it away. It surfaces? Push it away (manage it). I’m sure you get the picture.

“Teach a man to fish and he will never go hungry in his lifetime”

The proverb above can be perfect analogy for Business management. Precisely because, after you learn business management skills you can be certain that you will not be looking back, you will gain enough knowledge and confidence to manage your own business efficiently and effectively.

You will then acquire an insight into the effort and hard work you will have to have to put in your business, business management skills will, as always help you sail through any hardships you may be presented in the world of business management.

Effective business management needs planning and doing various activities at a time, but to do that you need to be fully knowledgeable in your respective field in details. You can also utilize business management books that are widely available online and off-line to help you gain learnings and expertise in this field. A business manager also has to understand business performance, the financial aspects of a business for without which he will bring no good for a business. Effective management needs to have creativity that is, with limited resources, can still extract development.

Creativity Management techniques

There are many strategies for enhancing creativity management. For instance, there are a number of methods of generating novel ideas, several methods of making diverse ideas, various methods of generating large numbers of ideas and several methods of elevating the frequency of idea generation.

But, it is of great significance to realize that techniques–although there may be thousands of them – are only one element of the creativity management process. Inside the scope of the creativity management framework, they fall in the creative thinking against critical thinking domain.

Can creativity be learned and enhanced?

Utilizing the scale of creativity: a)as a number of ideas generated, b) the variations of those ideas, c) the value of those ideas and d) the frequency of their production, we can scale creative output at any point in time.

After that, we can push individuals through a series of learning process, measure them again and find the + or – displacement.

Comprehending mechanisms such as the experience curve, adaptive and generative learning and automisation all show that creativity enhances with practice.

Once you are able to develop these creativity management, surely, you will be able to make good progress in your chosen business.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing are usually used interchangeably, however, these are two different ideas, albeit somewhat similar. But, it is simple to determine between the two. Marketing is the method of attracting and keeping clients while sales is the actual selling of the product or services to the clients. In medium and large sized businesses, people designated for marketing and sales often do not work together, but it is critical to the success of a business for this to be so.

In small businesses, marketing and sales operations are commonly done by the same person, or the business owner. In such a case, there are no communication constrains because only one person is doing the work. The entrepreneur will always make sales and marketing together flawlessly because they are aware of everything that is happening and do not miss out on anything.

Copyright (c) 2008 www.markinglisblog.com

In order for a business to be successful it is essential that it must have a management system capable of ensuring the business can achieve its goals and objectives. The ISO 9000 series of standards relate to Quality Management Systems however as businesses will tend to have one system, formalizing the system to focus solely on quality will have no real benefits to your business. Therefore, it will be necessary to move away from a system focusing wholly on quality, to a system that focuses on all the characteristics of your business.

The main reason your business is in existence is to highlight the requirements and expectations of your customers and other persons concerned (employees, suppliers etc) to accomplish an advantage over you competitors. In addition to this, another objective must be to gain, sustain and develop your businesses performance and resources.

As a means to achieve improvements within your business you should ensure that your business employs the key principles that are fundamental to ISO 9001:2000, these are:

- Customer Focus;

- Involvement of People;

- Leadership;

- Process Approach;

- Factual Approach;

- System Approach;

- Continual Improvements;

- Mutually Beneficial Supplier Relationships.

Following the principles highlighted above ensures that your business focuses on what your customer actually requires and not what they think they require. In order for your business to move forward successfully it is essential that you run it in a methodical and well thought out manner that is highly perceptible. To achieve success from your business you must ensure that your business adopts a business management system which will ensure that continual improvement is constantly being driven by the management system. If your business is to develop and have a business management system that will allow growth and sustainability, you will have to ensure that you build a management system that is focused on your customers. To achieve this objective your business management system must contain systems and processes that are easily understood by the individuals within your business. It is also crucial that these systems can be managed easily and improvements made if they are necessary without any detrimental affect on the day to day operation of your business. The processes within your management system must be capable of being measured to ensure they are performing as required. It does also mean that when setting these key performance indicators, intelligent thought is given to the areas that you are measuring. It is worth remembering that individuals are likely to improve in areas in which they are being measured. Therefore it is critical that any process measuring is carried out in areas that will benefit the system and your business as a whole.