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Tag: business

Don’t Let Irritable Online Marketing Syndrome Stop You

Every year, many one-man online stores and small e-tailers close their internet doors and drop out of the race without giving themselves a fair shot at success because of Irritable Online Marketing Syndrome (IOMS). IOMS, more commonly known as information overload, presents a real and present danger and although it sometimes attacks veteran online marketers, newbies and intermediate users find themselves especially susceptible to its volatile effects.

The site which provides extensive reports online marketing and objective analysis of online market trends, states, “Not only are online shoppers spending more online, they are buying more different types of goods. This opens new possibilities for creative Web retailers.”

IOMS works like this: Someone decides to sell a product or service on the internet. A search on the major engines for the term “internet marketing” reveals a billion pages representing several hundred or thousands of gurus, coaches, and wannabees.

After selecting a few, scanning their Web sites and downloading ebooks, newsletters, special reports, 7-day e-mail courses, etc., months or even years later, they find themselves either still not doing anything or accomplishing very little towards establishing their internet business.

You can find qualified help from almost every nook and cranny of the internet and therein lies the problem. A known factor stops anyone from acting on all of the available information, and that is put simply, a day consists of only 24 hours.

Having at your fingertips a storehouse of information can build your personal library, but it may also cause the death of your dreams of internet success – killing it off before it gets off the ground. Let me explain it the way a higher education counselor might.

Enrolling in a three-credit-hour class means you’ll sit in class for roughly three hours per week. However, if your goal is to make a high passing grade, you’ll need three hours of study time each week for every credit hour.

A three-credit-hour class will actually take up nine total hours of your time weekly. If you take three classes with the same credit hours, you will take nine credit hours, and you will need to dedicate a total of 27 hours of your time weekly.

The same applies to the study of internet marketing. The latest get-rich-quick schemes or techniques and promises of working one or two hours per day, often lure many would-be internet marketers who underestimate the time needed to understand and learn the real concepts provided.

IOMS rears its head when it comes to internet mastery; what you need to do in order to get schooled and not just hit and miss gaining of some knowledge. The sooner you recognize its symptoms, the sooner you can get treatment (change your diet of overwhelming information and select two to three courses of study) and move past its stifling effects.

October 2, 2020
Here’s How You Can Energize Your Business Everyday

Stress and repetition in our business or career can make us lose our creative fire and vision. How do we keep creating with freshness and authenticity? The key is to continually nurture and expand our creative energy. One technique that a few very savvy entrepreneurs use is to start each day fresh by destroying everything they were unwilling to let go of that they created the day before. This opens us to receive even greater opportunities.

Where do we find the physical, mental, and spiritual energy to create and sustain our business and stay true to our vision? Besides the obvious advice about diet, exercise, and minimizing stress, there’s a whole different area of energy that we can benefit from. That’s the creative vital power of our personal vision and the way we bring it out to the world.

Everything is energy. Even things we think of as solid and immovable, such as rocks and dirt, are chock-full of energy. The more alive the energy, the more power that’s manifested. That goes for anything from tsunami waves to megastar personalities.

It’s all a matter of freeing up the energy and expressing our innate talents and strengths. The key is to be able to find ways to nurture and keep expanding our creative energy. When we start out with our inspiration for our business or career we’re often exuberantly excited and inspired. If we see it clearly and put our full energy behind it, we can create a great expression of whom we truly are.

Over time with daily repetition and stress, our vision and creative energy can fade. With constant demands of meeting deadlines and making sales and profit goals, dealing with customers, employees, and competition, the daily grind of business wears us down. While we may have enough energy to keep up with daily tasks, it’s hard to stay inspired.

We’re challenged to stay true to our vision and keep growing with integrity. Our work life can start to feel like a straightjacket. We may ask ourselves “Beyond just surviving, what’s the point of all this?”

How do we free up our energy again? Better yet, how do we stay fresh and excited and open? How do we continually create something greater? What would it take to be in a constant state of free-flowing creative energy?

From my perspective, there’s a number of highly effective ways to nurture and expand our creative energy.

One technique is one that a few very savvy entrepreneurs use. It’s destroying everything that you were unwilling to let go of that you created the day before. Letting go of your success as well as your failure. In a September 2003 Inc. magazine article, Robert Redford talks about running the Sundance Film Institute by “Not resting on my laurels. Not repeating myself.” By constantly creating from a new place.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed. If we destroy what we were unwilling to let go of that we created the day before, our business doesn’t disappear. What happens is the energy of our business is freed up to become something greater.

You have to empty your cup before you can completely fill it again. That’s how to clear away distractions and connect with who you are. That’s when you begin to have the power to create what would truly fulfill you.

Conversely, when we keep repeating ourselves, not only are we not innovating, our energy stagnates. When our business innovation stands still we’re an easier target for our competition. Constantly doing without an ongoing source of creative energy and inspiration is draining. Being open and willing to receive inspiration is invigorating and sustaining.

You can ask yourself. Ask colleagues, ask the universe for fresh inspiration and energy. When we invite new possibilities into our life, there’s always a response if we’re open and willing to receive it.

Try asking this simple powerful question as you start your day, “What would it feel like for me to destroy everything that I was unwilling to let go of that I created with my business yesterday? What new energy, new ideas, new choices would I like to create my business with today?” You can still continue to expand on what you created the day before. You just start with greater openness and freshness. If that feels light and expansive to you, choose it and see what greater possibilities show up for you.

This may seem scary at first. Be with that scariness. Are you really scared or are you more aware, more excited? When we face the unknown with awareness and wonder, we wake up our creative power. To quote Albert Einstein, “One of our greatest capacities is the ability to be exhilarated in the face of the unknown”.

This article was inspired by the pioneering work of Gary Douglas, founder of Access Energy Transformation.

September 30, 2020
How to Create an Upselling Advantage for Your Business

What is an upselling advantage for your business? Upselling your customers is simply providing the next logical solution to your customer’s next logical need. It’s your job to always create that next logical need and continually sell and sell. There’s always one more thing to sell.

One of the major mistakes I find in dealing with small businesses is that they believe once their business has provided their product to the customer, that’s the end of the process. There’s nothing that can be more wrong with your business.

Every sale needs another sale because every need that’s satisfied will create still another need some time in the future. The conclusion that you should draw is that you must create the upsell and continue creating upsells as a never-ending logical step in the launching of an effective marketing mission.

You might say, I don’t have any product or service to sell as an upsell. My answer to that is, develop one.

Even if you don’t produce the product or service, someone else does, and that someone else gladly will pay you for allowing them to get at your client base so they can upsell your customers. There’s always something else to sell them.

The practical implications of up selling will most likely result in forming joint venture relationships. Businesses today operate differently than it ever has.

Another good example can be seen in the mail order flowers. On the average, there are actually 6-10 days from the cutting of a flower before a customer receives it and puts it in a vase in their home, whether as a gift or simply to brighten up their home. The lag time is caused by the traditional distribution system of wholesalers distributors and retailers. A real entrepreneur working literally years on an idea for flower delivery up to 9 days, created a direct from the grower to the customer via Federal Express. Today that generates $10,000,000 in sales. What was the entrepreneur’s product? It was an idea worth $10,000,000.

That business is merely a series of relationships between a catalog company, Federal Express, and several independent flower growers throughout the United States. It’s a business of joint ventures. Even though this guy didn’t actually have the product or service, he created one.

This leads to find Your Business Within Your Business. A real powerful concept is to challenge yourself, your clients, vendors, and employees to constantly search for new businesses within your business.

There are an unlimited number of offshoot businesses you can create. You could have an offshoot of consulting to those people that you sell to. You could then communicate and market and also do seminars and workshops.

For car dealers, they would provide extended warranties and insurance to new car owners. For a contractor, whether it’s heating and cooling, pools, pest control, or whatever, they can also provide annual service contracts.

An example would also be a pool contractor for instance might use up selling through the offering of an annual service contract to clean and service a pool four times a year. This can dramatically improve his bottom line. In fact, this can actually double the value of the customers by added income of 40% to you while they sign an annual contract.

Let’s say the service call for a pest control or a pool service call is $100 and there are 100 customers per year. There’s a gross of $10,000, which is $100 per customer. The Upsell strategy is an annual contract where you’re going to visit four times a year. The cost for each visit to the customer is $100, so the total cost at this point is $400 (before giving a discount).

If they buy today, you give them a discount of $150, of which $250 is the cost to the customer. If you close just 40% of these people, your new revenue is $10,000. 40% of 100 is 40 people times $250 which is the cost of the annual contract.

So, the new value of these 100 customers is $20,000 $10,000 for the service call ($100 x 100 customers), and another $10,000 for the 40 people who paid $250 for the annual contract. The value per customer is now $200. You made $20,000. You still have the same 100 customers. They’re now worth $200. That’s double the value.

What service can you upsell to your clients? Virtually every business can add a newsletter or an extra month of a diet plan for half the original price. Maybe a consulting service could be provided. The possibilities are endless. Let your creative mind work for your business instead of limiting to just one product or service.

September 29, 2020

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