Online Business Is A Marathon

Online Business Is A Marathon

If you are familiar with marathons then you know that no one has ever gotten out of bed one morning decided that they were going to be a marathon runner and a day later they are not only running in one, but completing it.

Twenty six miles.

Think about that.

It takes months if not years to build your body up to the point where you can run one of these events from start to finish.

 

Running a successful business is no different. You have to build your endurance levels. When learning to run you expect that pain and set backs will be part of the territory. Why would it be any different for those of you who wish to run a business?

The day will come, after weeks or even months, when you are running your business smoothly. You are now one amongst many racing toward the finish line. You are a member of the pack and you will finish the races sooner or later. Winning it is of course something that you have never taken seriously. People from all over the world are competing with you. How could you ever hope to beat them.

You can, because you must.

Winning is why races are run. You are here now because you want to improve. You want a bit of inspiration. You want to hear that the finish line is the property of no one. The trophy does not have a name on it before the race is won.

Your online business can be the biggest and the best on earth. The size of your business and the impact that it will have on your life is up to you. The winner of this race is largely a choice that you will make with the decisions you make and the daily effort that you are willing to put forth.

Good luck and please take a moment to share this post and to check out my new ebook. You will find an image link below.

 

 

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The Business of Decision Making

The Business of Decision Making

-Tom Hanks’ Character in You Got Mail.   “The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. So people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self.”-

 

Not everyone can make a decision and that is why not everyone can own and operate their own business. You have a business. You were able to make that one decision that has led to many more decisions that got you to the point where you are now.
The question is, “What happens next?”

This question comes up more times than we can count during a given day. We make so many decisions that we have reached a point where we only notice the big ones. I am here to argue that no one decision is any bigger than another. That every decision we make is equally important.

 

A so-called small decision can lead you to the thing that will change the life of your business forever. The difference between those who make it and those who look back to an opportunity where they could have made it usually comes down to deciding whether or not to take a risk and it is not usually a great financial risk. The risk is usually in time spend and trust me I know how precious time is in the life of a business person. The second risk is in committing to a learning curve.

The reason that you are here reading this is that you are ready to be talking into making a decision and I am not going to try to do that.  Instead I am going to suggest that you backtrack and look at recent opportunities that you bypassed.

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1 FREE Audiobook Credit RISK-FREE from Audible.com

Low Cost Social Marketing

Low Cost Social Marketing

Face it, social marketing is become more and more a part of the online business world. You may not be good at it, but you are going to have to do a little of it or else your business is going to suffer.

Normal I would recommend using an online service that promotes your business through email marketing. Today I am going to look at something easier and you can do yourself. It is sort of set up and go.

The thing that I am going to talk about today is called Onlywire. It is a one stop shop of sorts that redistributes your content online. It does this be connecting all of your social media platforms. You post on any of them and then it is re-posted on all of them.

Why would you want to do this?

First it allows you to personally reach more people.

Second it will boost your SEO. This re-posting gives you back links and back links rise your google page ranks. The higher you are ranked the more visitors you will receive.

OnlyWire

I have always tried to be a do it myself kind of guy and if you are the same then this Onlywire can be a big part of doing it mostly yourself. You are doing the work and all that Onlywire does is turbo charge how fast it gets out there and around the web. It had done wonders for my websites. I run eleven separate websites and blogs and there is no way I could promote them all without a tool like Onlywire. Also the cost of using it can be as low as about seven dollars a month. And you can try it for the first month for absolutely free and unlike many services they really do mean free trial.

Today I would like you to visit Onlywire and give it a try.

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Promote Your Blog

Business, Changing Your ways

Business, Changing Your Ways

-You can’t do today’s job with yesterday’s methods and be in business tomorrow.-

We must change and constantly alter the way that we do business to stay ahead of the competition. While always being aware that the competition is not just those who we are aware of, but those who are just starting out. They have probably looked at business such as yours and have entered the marketplace with new ideas and a willingness to exploit all the new business technologies that are available.

The problem with running a business that has been around for a while is that the greatest obstacle to change is success. If you have enjoyed a little success then you will be the one most reluctant to change.

I understand, why change something that is working for something that may or may not work better? Why employ the use of new marketing tools?

 

 

The answer to this is obvious. They work. Marketing techniques like social marketing and email marketing work. Email marketing returns over twenty-five to one on every dollar invested. Social marketing is a fantastic way of growing your business and building a brand name. Getting to know a customer on a one to one basis can really help your business over the long-term. When you really know a customer and stay in constant contact with a customer they become yours. Your customer, a customer who will advertise your business by telling others about your business. Telling about the qualities of your goods and services.

If this is not happening with your business then you need to make some changes. Go back to the beginning. Look at the business that you wanted to run and then examine how close you have come to building that business. What changed? Where did your go off course and why?

What good choices did you make and what wrong turns did you take?

Business, where it is brick and mortar or an online business, is about growth and change. Look at your business as a living thing and if a living thing is not constantly growing and changing then it is dying.


Social media management for exceptional companies

Business Success, The Measure

Business Success, The Measure

“I never fail. It’s just that the people around me succeed more than I.” – Carroll Bryant

You only have to live up to your standards of success. Others will spend time comparing you and your business to those around you, but this does not mean that you have to. Yes you are competing with other businesses, but you do not have to measure up to their standards. This is your business. You started it for a reason. You had a goal in mind for how much you wanted it to grow and how quickly. You had financial goals. You had targets in the area of sales and traffic. Your online business is your baby and no one else should be allowed to dictate how you are going to raise this baby.

I am not telling you to have no standards. I am telling you to have your own standards. I was once in a relationship with someone who constantly compared my progress as a businessman to others. I was pleased with my slow, but steady progress. My business was growing at the rate that I had expected. There were good days and bad days. I had expected this, but they had not. They had expected my business to be booming. For it to be a finish product in a matter of a few weeks when I knew when I started my online business was going to take more than a year to reach the level that I had envisioned. That relationship ended because of expectations. The good news is that I was right and now am very pleased with the level at which my online business has reached.

Do not allow others or the world at large to put undo pressure on you. Business is difficult enough without the added voices constantly whispering you are not moving fast enough. You are not making enough money. Block out these voices and keep moving forward. No matter what you have to keep your eye on your prize and not theirs.

Good luck with your business and please take a moment to share this post with others. I have a traffic goal for this month and I can not reach it without you guys telling others about my site.


Good Business In Not About Luck

Business Is Not About Luck

 

“Luck is what happens  when preparation meets opportunity.”-Seneca, Roman Philosopher

Maybe you have heard it said or even thought it yourself, If I get lucky my business will make more money.


Luck is what we make for ourselves. Luck is not magic. Luck is being prepared for that moment when hard work and planning meets with opportunity. We do not stumble over new business. We do not have new and loyal customers fall into our laps. Those new customers to our online businesses are something that we have planned for. We found ways to reach them and better yet got our existing customers to bring them in for us. We have provided great services which the existing customer has told others about. We have supplied world-class goods which the existing customer has told others about. When the new customer arrived to our store front we were ready to greet them. Ready to provide what they needed and sometimes what they did not know that they needed. You  held onto their basic information after the first transaction and then found ways to market to them over time and by doing this you created a repeat customer.

What I am telling you is not something new. It is something that the experience of others have taught us all over time. You are going to have to work hard, but before this you are going to have to learn how to work smart. Wasted effort is worst than no effort at all. Wasted efforts kills time and time is the one thing that can never be replaced.

To grow your online business you are going to have to learn new methods. You are going to do some trial and error testing and then you are going to put into action what you have learned. The hardest part of this is just making up your mind to do it. Every great achievement in life usually begins with a simple choice made.

TigerDirect

Advertise To Existing Customers First

-“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise” –  Ted Turner

Who knows about your business?

Are you getting the word out?

Do the right people know that you exist?

The right people meaning those who could be potential customers. Unless you are independently wealthy your business will not be able to exist long without them. Sure there are those customers who find you and the best thing that you can do is to treat them so well that they will tell others about your business and how it was to deal with. In other words the best way to advertise your business is to get others to do it for you.

This site is a business and the best way to grow it is to have you as a visitor to share my post and to tell others about this site. Then have that process repeat itself until this site is getting a flood of visitors. Those visitors sign up for the services that I promote or click on the google ads at google displays here and in my idea world I am a millionaire in no time.  It sounds too easy, but it has actually worked that way for some who have started information based websites.  What every your online business is you need to first do a great job at it so that your customers will advertise it.

Next you must advertise to these customers. I know that it seems strange to advertise to people who have already purchased something from you. Just look at it this way, imagine that you are running a restaurant instead the online business. The best customer for any restaurant is someone who has already eaten there. They know the quality of the food, drink and service provided. This customer will welcome hearing about something new that their favorite restaurant has to offer. A new menu item or a great upcoming sale.

The same holds true for your online business. Advertise to the existing customer first. Tell them about something new that your online business has to offer. Go out there and make them a returning customer through deals and email marketing.

Then after you have perfected this you will go out and get more customers through things such as social marketing. In the new world of online business social marketing is a great way to introduce yourself to new customers.
I know that you have a number of questions about what I have suggested. The most important one is why should you do this.


The answer is the only one that matters in the world of business whether it is brick and mortar or online business. You will do this things because you want to make more money. Because money matters. We want to grow our online businesses because we want to increase our cash flow. The only reason to increase our work load is to increase our bottom line.

I encourage you to do what it takes to generate more money. It is not being greedy and even if it was I believe that a great man named Gordon said that Greed is good.  Let them call you greedy as long as they end that sentence with millionaire.

Let’s advertise and grow that customer base. Okay, could you take a moment to stumble us on Stumbleupon and to share this post with a friend.


Business Opportunties

Business Opportunities

 

Most of us never recognize opportunity until it goes to work in our competitor’s business. –P.L. Andarr

How many times during the life of your business have you looked back at an opportunity that you considered taking and did not only to see that they were taken by someone else and turned out to be a big success?

We normally kick ourselves for these mistakes and move on promising at the time that you will never make that mistake again. The next time a good business opportunity comes along you will jump at it.
The truth is usually the opposite. We make the same mistakes over and over again. If we are risk takers we take risk while if we are risk averse we find or create excuses to not do what in our guts we know is the best thing for our businesses.

 

I interact constantly with people who visit this site. I am often thanked by those who have taken advice found here or signed up for a service suggested here. I have yet to be told by someone who tried email marketing or social marketing that it did not work for them. I have yet to be told by those who tried some of the supply channels that I have suggested that it was not worth the effort.

-The sure way to miss success is to miss the opportunity. –Victor Chasles

Your goal as a business person should be to take advantage of every opportunity. Look at an opportunity that comes your way in the same way that you would look at a turnover in a football game. You have been given an extra possession of the ball. You have basically been given a free shot to score. When you decide to do nothing it is the same as deciding to kneel down on the ball when you are in the red zone. Why do you do this and then wonder later why is it that your business is not growing?

I can tell you that email marketing always results in turning a profit when done correctly. The only reasons not to try it is either you are too scared to do it or you believe that you are not intelligent enough to do it.
If you are scared I can not solve that problem for you. If you doubt your intelligence I can tell you that it is mostly point and click. The services do most of the heavy lifting. You started a business. You pay your own bills. You understand how online business works. If you were able to find this site and read this post you are easily capable of understanding email marketing and many of the other services I will suggest to you over the months and years to come.

Here is a basic tutorial on Email marketing. After it I will include a video about a service that I really like. They offer a free trial so you do not have to invest any money. If it works for you then and only then will you spend anything on the service and the average return on investment in the email marketing arena is over twenty to one.


Emails for Small Business with Constant Contact

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eBid. Online Auctions with no listing fees

Government Liquidations And Auctions

More About Government Liquidations

We have all heard for many years that our government waste too much money. That our tax dollars are going down an endless hole. With the bargains to be had at many government liquidation this appears to be true. They spend amazing amounts on money to buy high end and expensive items for any number of departments. The departments realize that they do not need them any more or to justify their existence need to re-order the same things each year. So it is out with the old and in with the new.

What happens to the old?

The government does what they call a liquidation. They put these expensive items up for sale to the highest bidder at an auction. The cool thing about this is that the highest bidder can be any one. It can be you. To start the new year they have dropped what an opening bid can be down to a mere fifty dollars. Buyers are getting thousands of dollars worth of resealable merchandise for as little as fifty to a hundred dollars.

This is a great deal for those who have built retails stores around these deals. This is a great opportunity for those who wish to develop a steady supply stream for their online business.


GovernmentAuctions.org Free Trial Membership

Signing up at Government Auction is free. You can browse the categories and see if they have inventory that fits your store model or one that you would like to create. Thousands of sellers are buying everything from surplus clothing to electronics at a liquidation price and making huge resale profits. Today I am suggesting to you that you visit them and see if anything from surplus vehicles to scrap metal, from cameras to computer software, might interest you.

Good luck guys and please take a moment to share this post with a friend.


GovernmentAuctions.org Seized Jewelry


Give Yourself A Job

Give Yourself A Job

-A lot of people quit looking for work as soon as they find a job. – Zig Ziglar

 

The economy has hit all of us hard and some of you very hard. Getting a job has become what seems like an endless journey. The more that you have looked the more discouraging it becomes.

For some, hope has turned to prayers and prayers to despair. It is a cycle that has repeated itself all over the country. No matter what the talking heads on cable news say about a great recovery taking place and things getting better you know that is not the case in the world that you live in.

The job hunt has to come to an end. You know what you are worth. You know what you are capable of. You beyond anyone else in the universe know what you have to offer a future employer.

My question for you is why don’t you become that employer. Hire yourself on a commission basis. In a way this is the way that most online businesses pay the bills and salaries. Most of the money I earn comes indirectly from Google and its Adsense program. People visit this or one of my other sites and they click on one of the Google ads that are placed on the site. Google gets paid for this and then they pay me.

In a direct way I place ads for companies on my sites. I offer information about the company’s product and if someone purchases that product I get a direct commission. This commission can be as low as fifty cents and as much as two hundred dollars.

Who hired me to do this job?

I did. I hired me. I was earning a solid living and still do as an online retail seller. I sell at online marketplaces like Ebay and Amazon. That experience is why I created this site. I wanted to make it easier for people who do that to earn a living. I wanted to make it easier for them to get the things that they need to grow their business and their profits.

I have been told by some of you that I have done a fair job at that. In the process, thanks to some of you, I have grown this new business that I am into. This business where I earn commissions. Where I work on a commission basis.

How do you hire yourself?

First you will need an idea for what type of online business you wish to run. If it is online retail you will need to find a steady source of supply. That will cost you something to begin with. Just like stocking any store you will have to pay for inventory.

Or you could create a business that sells things that you do not have to pay for. You could sell digital items. They come in many forms such as ebooks, courses, music and software. Below is a video about one company that provides these types of products for your business. You job will be to market their products online. Many people earn a living doing this. A site like payloadz can help you find these products.


Payloadz 180 X 150

Next is a site that provides links for your site. You market these links and earn a commission. It is a good job to have and millions of people earn a living by working with Linkshare and other such commission sites.

LinkShare_300x250

You will need a place to set up shop. You can construct a free page to market from by putting together a Blog and Blogger.com. You can sell merchandise from your blog. You can put up links and banner ads on your blog and collect Adsense their as well. It is a great place to begin to learn to build a money-making site.

You could buy hosting for your very own website. There is a full instructional page on this site. I would suggest that you visit it if you want to learn how to DIY your own website. The reason that you want to own your own website is that you get to create a name that you own. You will market this name and grow a following for a site that you have complete control over. You can add what ever you wish to the site. You can sell space on the site to paid advertisers. Paid ads can earn you a steady income if your site generates enough traffic.

Creating a job for yourself should be a consideration and if you already have a job does it hurt to have a second job online. If all you do is sell retail online would it hurt to add second income stream. Linkshare is free to sign up at and to use. They get paid when you get paid. This is mostly the case as well with Snagasale.

Okay that is it for today. Take a moment to bookmark this site and if you like this post please share it with a friend.