If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business. – B.C Forbes

Nothing is easier than starting a business except failing with that business. Whether you have decided to start a brick and mortar busines or an online business the easy part will be starting the business. You can put up a website with a store front and call it a business in less than an hour. That is the easy part. The difficult part is designing a business that is built to last.

A business needs both short and long term goals. You need to understand not only how to start it, but how to maintain the business and the early momentum, if there is any, that you have achieved. I designed this website to help other online business people to find way to grow their businesses.

Let’s look at a few goals that you have started with.

Building a brand name so that your business will become known to the general public.

Reaching a broader customer base through advertising such as email marketing.

Earning money. I not sure that all of you are aware of the fact that most businesses exist to earn money. There primary goal is cash flow. It should first pay for its existence. It has to generate enough cash to cover hosting fees and the cost of domains and advertising. Next it need to put money in your pocket. The site that you are visiting right now has a number of ways that it covers the cost of its existence and this is not even a store site. This information site pays for itself through adsense revenue. Through commissions from those who have signed up for hosting packages through hostgator and purchased domains. It also puts money in my pocket through the sale of my ebooks. Ebooks are a fantastic way to generate extra income from the written content at your site.

My advice for you is to take a day and consider what are the core business goals of your website or online business. Work or refocusing those goals if you are not earning the cash flow that you believe that you should.

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Who are you?
What do your sell?
What do you wish to sell?
If you operate an online business then I have news for you. You are a salesperson. Your job is to sell. It does not matter what you are selling. Selling is what you do. Some call it marketing and you can call it what ever you wish, but selling is what it will come down to.
You could spend the next few weeks or even months reading articles, watching videos and talking to those who have traveled this road before you. You can do all of these things, but in the end it will come down to you having to endure the learning curve of how to sell what it is that you believe in.
It could be information.
It could be books.
It could be digital downloads.
It could be tee shirts.

What it is does not matter nearly as much as that selling is the name of the game. You learn to do this by the act of engaging with the public. Social media, paid ads or email marketing. The path that you take does not matter nearly as much as that you do it each and every day. You show up to your online business as you would a brick and mortar business with two goals in mind. Find the customer and make that customer yours.
You came here to learn about running an online business. If you can not do the selling part nothing else matters. If you have ever watched Shark Tank you hear the same question over and over. What are your sales?
Sales?

You have to sell to earn a living. The most amazing product on earth is worthless without this part of the processes. The iPhone is the greatest item in the history of sales. It sells itself at this point.
Perhaps you have something that will be bigger than the iphone someday, but you will never get rich if you do not master the art of selling first.

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-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.

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.

Okay thank you for visiting. Could you take a moment to bookmark this post and maybe share it with a friend?

Online Business Plans

Online Business Plans

Your business plans have not gone exactly as you thought and you are at a loss what to do next. There will be days like this. Days when your online business plan is not the smoothly running machine that you thought that it would be. Days when plans that you knew would come off without a hitch have fallen apart and dark clouds are forming.

Let them form.

Allow yourself to take a few minutes or even as much as an hour or two to allow the rain to fall. To allow yourself to feel bad about how things are going. Then get back up. Dust yourself off and find a new approach to what ever problem has come up.

How do you do this?

The answer to that is largely up to you. I can suggest some things, but no one can do it for you. My advice is to check out the competition and see what they are up to. If they are thriving and you are not then investigate why. If their business is doing better than yours then you need to ask some question. Do this, but do not dwell on the bad day that you are having. Your goal has to be to put this day behind you.

Cheer yourself up by looking at new ways to grow you business. Find new ways to interact with your customer base. It will not be easy to start something new. It will be difficult at first, but all things are difficult at first. I promise you that over time you will get better at it.

Again I will suggest expanding your business with email marketing. If you can build a list of existing customers and keep in contact with them then you are going to make more money in the long run. Think about it this way. Who is the best possible customer? Those whom have already purchased a product or a service from you already. If you have provided a good product or a great service then you have a customer ready to return. We all return to stores that we are comfortable in. We all eat at those restaurants that have provided quality services in the past.

To better insure that you do not have another truly bad day at the office then I would suggest getting to know your existing customers better.

Okay, that is it for today. Remember to stumble us on stumble upon and to add us to your google plus.

Tag: email marketing

Online Business Goals