A good article to read for someone who is interested in striking out on their own in the business world. It asks the reader 10 important questions that they should really ask themselves to know if they would make a good entrepreneur or not.
Click the title to read more of and to rate this article

A few years ago I was sitting in my office at the hotel in which I worked wondering why it was 11:00 p.m. and I was still at work and not at home with my family. It was winter in Massachusetts – cold, dark and dreary. The Night Manager arrived about 11:30 p.m. and I drove home on desolate streets More......


entrepreneur, start up, business, corporate

An excellent article on how to make the most profits from your current clients. It takes 7 times the money to get a sale from a new client than to get a sale from a current client. Using the client database is a great way to get more sales, and drive up a businesses income.
Click the title to read more of and to rate this article

If you run a small business you can increase your profits through database driven mailings. It's a lot cheaper than conventional advertising, and the returns can be far greater. So where do you start?

First gather those precious names and addresses. In fact, you might already have quite a few More......


Tags: customer - database - client - mailings - marketing

A good article on the basics of presenting and presentations. In terms of running a business, it is vital to get your point across, and mastering the art of presentations will only improve your communication level to your customers, business associates and employees.


One of the biggest factors the author mentions is the power of eye contact with your audience. It would be interesting to see however, if the same techniques would hold true for other cultures, or for female presenters vs. male presenters...

Click the title to Rate this Article

Question: How do you know if an engineer is an extrovert?

Answer: He looks at your shoes when he talks to you! I am allowed to say that, coming from a family of engineers, but it’s exactly to the point of this month’s column on the art of successful presentation design and delivery. At the heart of all successful presentations is a presenter who maintains proper eye-contact with members of the audience at all times.

Microsoft estimates that with over 300 million copies of PowerPoint installed world-wide, something like 3 million presentations are given every day. What they don’t say is that roughly 2.9 million of those are completely ineffective in achieving true knowledge transfer, what presentations are supposed to be about in the first place.

Knowledge transfer occurs, for the most part, when you are able to keep every member of the audience on the same page throughout the entire presentation. Unlike a written report, where the intended audience has the luxury of acquiring the embedded knowledge at his or her own pace, a presentation is actually an event where knowledge transfer is a rather ethereal event; information appears on the screen and is discussed for a fleeting moment in time, and then disappears.

To understand the relationship between an on-screen presentation and a written report (or worse – the presentation printed as a hand-out), think billboard versus magazine ad.

Look me in the eye

To keep the audience together, you first must start with a presentation that allows you to stay engaged with the audience, as opposed to either the screen or your notes. When you lose engagement in business presentations today, you invite audience members to wander, and that’s when the Blackberries blossom.

A key element to successful engagement involves learning proper eye contact, which requires you to hold contact with individuals for anywhere between 3-7 seconds, or until you have completed one thought. At which point, you pause and move to another person and do the same. Most presenters look at one person no more than ½ to 1 second at a time, if that, and then only when they’re not looking up at the ceiling or down at the floor. Or, with extroverted engineers, your shoes.

Modern presentation theory teaches a conversational approach to presenting, because that’s the way to maximize both comfort and trust between you and the audience. By practicing some fairly simple eye contact techniques, you can deliver to a group of 500 without ever feeling more anxiety than you would when discussing your job to friends around a lunch table. Most people find that hard to believe until they’ve received some training, but when you get it down, it’s rather powerful stuff!

People like to talk about themselves, about what they do, and about what they know. Your presentations should be like that. Use the screen to keep yourself in a pre-set direction, use it to list all the points you want to be sure to make, but deliver the presentation itself from the heart. People care somewhat about content, but what moves them to interest is hearing how you feel about it. To get across emotion, you want to be conversational.

Reading is NOT fundamental

Your job as presentation designer, therefore, is to create visuals that further this process rather than hamper it. Your slides need to contain only as much information as is necessary to start the conversation, and allow you to continue it while engaging individuals in the audience with your eyes. You are not there to read slides - the audience could do that quite easily for themselves, thank you. If you’re reading from the screen, you’re not engaging the audience. If your eyes are anywhere but in contact with a listener, the audience is actually dis-engaged.

The other problem with trying to deliver a presentation that contains lengthy streams of prose is that the people who came to hear you speak can read words about 40% faster than you can speak them - 250 words per minute for them vs. 150 wpm for you. It is the equivalent of having a minivan that waits until the last minute to pull out into the road in front of you, and then proceeds to drive 40% slower than the speed limit you were pleasantly exceeding.

When there is too much information on the screen, especially in the form of sentences, not only does the reading process rob the audience of their precious time, it also leads to breaking the essential bond between you and the audience that occurs only with constant eye contact. When you project up TMI, you are forced, by design, to turn your back to the audience as you read from the screen.

As practitioners of the conversational approach know, nothing works more to bind you with the audience than the proper use of eye contact, summed up with this rule:

If eyes aren’t locked then your jaw must be.

With a visual so complex that it forces you to read from the screen, this all-important component to proper presenting is lost, attention erodes, and the only contact your audience seeks is with people at the other end of their wireless devices.

The solution, then, is to restrict the volume of information at each exposure to that which can be absorbed by both you and the audience in just a few seconds - 10 at most. The proper procedure for achieving transfer of information from the screen to the audience involves a fairly simple 3-step process, but that deserves an article all to itself.

---

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, a national consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos. For free tutorials in print and video, go now to: http://www.publicspeakingskills.com.

This is a good reference article on where to find very cost effective decent quality research information. In our businesses, knowledge is the thing that will make or break a business plan, and knowing where to find it is a big key to gathering the information you need to make informed decisions.


This article also makes a distinction between primary and secondary information and how you can use secondary information. A good marketer will not only know what their target market needs, but also what their target market needs prior to purchasing their product, while they have their product, and then what their target market will need AFTER purchasing their product.

Read on for more, and if you like it, feel free to let the author know by clicking on the title and leaving a comment.
Click the title to Rate this Article

Without doubt, understanding what a customer’s wants and needs are is one of the most important aspects of running a business. You must know your customer. For the most part your customer will buy on emotion, especially for products or services that are not a necessity and where there are a number of suppliers for the same item. Understanding and defining why your customer shops the way they do is your key to success.

There may be a number of factors that are common amongst your target audience for your business service or product. By researching and finding out what these are, you will be able to see what areas you can focus on where there is a need, and what areas will not interest them. Write down what your ideal customer will looks like, behaves like and wants from you. Seeing your business through their eyes will help to highlight your strengths and any weaknesses you might have.

Where can I find information about my customer?

There are a number of resources that you can access at LITTLE OR NO COST to you, that can help provide accurate impressions on your customer and their buying habits. Also, these resources will help you define and research potential markets that you had not yet considered for your business.

Firstly, research and access all the SECONDARY data that you can. Secondary data is data that has been gathered by someone else for a different and specific purpose. Often, this data contains information that you can utilize and apply to your own needs. For example, the research may relate to how people spend their money in the home, and you may want to know what people and how much they spend on tools for the shed. This secondary data could well provide the information on the amount they will spend, where they will shop and why, and what type of customer will do the shopping.

Places and Sites that you can visit to begin gathering secondary data:

* Ibis World (http://www.ibisworld.com/) - The IBISWorld US Industry Reports provide you with immediate access to vital information on 100's of industries. They are continually adding more industries to eventually cover the entire economy in depth.

* LibrarySpot.com (http://www.libraryspot.com/) - a free virtual library resource center for educators and students, librarians and their patrons, families, businesses and just about anyone exploring the Web for valuable research information.

* Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/) - The Internet Public Library (IPL), is a public service organization and learning/teaching environment full of information and resources to help educate you.

* US Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov/) - The Census Bureau serves as the leading source of quality data about the nation's people and economy, providing the best mix of timeliness, relevancy, quality, and cost for the data they collect and services they provide.

Having gathered any secondary data available, you might find that you still need some information relating to your customer and niche market. The best way to do this is to gather what is called PRIMARY data – information that you gather for your own purposes. There are a number of ways that you can do this. For example, you might choose to call people out of the phone book and ask them to complete a survey over the phone. You also might choose to go to the local shopping complex and interview people you meet. This second idea is very useful if your product is something that is already sold through retail outlets, as you can talk direct to customers that could become your customer in the future!

If you have never written a survey before, visit the site below as a great starting point:

* How to Write a Good Survey http://www.accesscable.net/~infopoll/tips.htm - this site has a description of each step in writing a survey, and some useful links and further articles about the gathering of information by using surveys.

Don’t be afraid of gathering your own information - it can prove to be an invaluable exercise. Not only do you gain a more complete understanding of the needs of your customer, but you increase your own knowledge and understanding of the marketplace. This places you in a better situation when building and expanding your business.

---

Matthew Tibble operates http://www.BusinessPlanningMadeEasy.com, a site dedicated to business owners to help them achieve their business goals. A combination of sales and marketing experience over the past 9 years & a strong passion to help small businesses improve their success has led to the development of business and marketing planning services. Please visit http://www.businessplanningmadeeasy.com or email info@businessplanningmadeeasy.com.

This article talks about the need of using offline methods of marketing as well as online methods. I agree somewhat but disagree with the statement that email is fading fast... I don\'t think that is the case. BAD email is fading fast, which is good for the people who are serious.

The SPAM problem can be gotten around by using an email list service that has been ok\'d by most of the major ISP\'s. It makes your mail more compliant with the SPAM laws and it also makes it much easier to manage your email tasks. A tool such as this email program can really make a difference in the success or failure of your email campaigns.
Click the title to Rate this Article


If you were a contestant on Jeopardy and the answer was "Postcards," what would the question be?

How about:

"What is one of the most incredibly effective, yet under-utilized methods for driving qualified buyers to your business or website?"

Many businesses think postcards are a little old-fashioned for this era of Internet Marketing, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Online marketers are discovering that using email lists as an effective form of marketing is fading fast due to the unfortunate avalanche of SPAM (unsolicited commercial email)! Internet Service Providers and individual consumers are now trying to filter out the ever growing glut of SPAM. But, unfortunately the software developed to assist in SPAM control is not terribly accurate and a very large amount of legitimate communications between a business and its customer base is being unintentionally blocked by these filters.

And even if the email does get through, it is often lost among the other 200 or so emails in the receiver's inbox and simply gets bulk deleted. As a result, email is no longer a reliable method of maintaining contact and building a relationship with customers.

Yet, most small businesses do not have large budgets to conduct full fledged direct marketing campaigns. The humble postcard comes to the rescue! The humble postcard can serve both online and offline businesses well, driving traffic to both brick-and-mortar stores as well as commercial websites.

Famous copywriter Gary Halbert says most people sort their mail over a waste basket. As they mentally separate the mail into two categories, junk and personal, the junk mail drops directly into the wastebasket unopened. But the postcard is already open. It is small and easily read at a glance so the likelihood of the message getting through is increased greatly. And at the same time the production and mailing cost remain economical.

Postcard advertising and postcard marketing are back in vogue. Marketing postcards can be sent to customers as personalized postcards for any number of occasions, including holidays, birthdays, special events, or special offers and they help to economically keep businesses in touch with their customer base and develop that all important relationship between the business and the customer. Promotional postcards should be in every marketer's bag of tricks!

---

About the Author

George Dodge is owner of Postcard Marketing Campaigns a resoruce site where you can discover how to create winning postcard marketing campaigns for building your business on a budget.