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Closing Sales Using Joint Ventures

If you have a product but are relatively an unknown person, it can be dif-ficult to get attention to your website or product. What if you knew someone who already had an established sales funnel, complete with cus-tomers and sales? If you could piggyback off of their success, you could use this to sell better. This is what can happen when you find joint ven-tures.

You reach out to a well-known product vendors and offer to let them sell your product. In exchange, you give them a high percentage of the prof-its. Some are even willing to give 100% of the initial profits to the part-ner. Why would you agree to this type of arrangement?

There are several reasons. The first could be you are the one capturing the emails during the sale. These customers will be added to your list when they buy your product. The good news is the partner does all the selling, including any advertising and promotions. Your responsibility is to make sure you have a sales page that converts well. Sometimes, a good joint venture partner will take care of that for you.

Another reason is that you may offer upgrades, or cross-sells. As annoying as customers find these, they still work quite well. Otherwise, marketers would not concentrate their efforts on including them. In this instance, the partner’s percentage on these extras is smaller. Some sellers choose to keep 100% of the extra sales, but when you offer your partners part of this, they will be even more motivated to sell for you. If you offer an ex-tremely low-priced product as the first sell, they may not want to enter into a partnership with you. Giving a percentage of the extra sales could seal the deal.

As an aside, make sure your product is high quality. This should go with-out saying, but many people don’t heed this. If partners find that your product is receiving a high rate of returns, they may not want to work with you again in the future. Word also gets out to other potential part-ners, and you can burn many bridges and not just with the initial partner. Besides, you want to make customers happy. If you are only doing this for the sales, you won’t last long in business.

Joint ventures are a great way to get others to sell for you, providing you find the right partners, and you give them great products as part of the mix. It also helps to establish your products and brand.

Do You Have Full Sales Support?

You are great at getting leads. You call the leads, close the sale one after another. Your close rate is fantastic. In fact, they call you The Closer at work. Then, you enter it into the sales system and hope and pray every-thing goes smoothly from there. A week later you get a call from the cus-tomer wondering what’s happening with their order.

You can have the greatest sales force in the world, but it won’t mean much if sales are delayed or getting lost. The front end is doing its job, but the backend is not keeping up. It could be a system problem, or it could be staffing shortfalls. Whatever the case, this can be a worse condi-tion than not getting the sales in the first place. If you get negative re-views and comments because of these types of problems, this can hurt your business.

If you are the sole worker in your company, you may think you are ex-empt from this type of problem. However, if third-party companies are responsible for fulfillment or order processing it can affect you as well. At least when order processing is part of a company, there is something the company can do to change the procedures. When you are dealing with third-party companies, if you don’t get satisfaction, the only recourse is to try and find a different company.

Businesses will often test their sales flow to make sure all the compo-nents are working as planned. Sometimes they hire outside companies to handle these tests. You may have heard of the term mystery shopper. This is one class of company that can do testing for you. Having an out-side entity helps to keep from having bias entered into the process. If employees know the person who is testing out the process, it may not be as effective.

If there aren’t procedures in place for the entire sales process, the differ-ent departments are likely to point fingers at each other. Should sales handle calls from customers, or should that be a function of the customer service department? When procedures are implemented, this problem can be reduced in a significant manner. You won’t catch every situation, es-pecially in the beginning. But, you can handle them as they occur.

It’s an ongoing process that takes some time to get it right. But when you do, your customers will have a great experience buying from your com-pany.

Faster Sales Using Better Copy

If you are looking to close more sales, use a sales page to do it for you. Before you start typing away, however, you need to understand the dy-namics of good sales copy.

Describe the Problem

People go on the web to look for solutions to their problems. You want to position yourself or your company as the one who can provide that solu-tion. But, before you can get to that point, you need to connect with the reader. Describing the problem will give them the mental background needed to connect with them.

It’s critical to use storytelling as part of your sales copy. Tell a story of how a particular person (use a name) found themselves in a similar situa-tion as what the reader is going through. Can you see how this would make the reader feel welcome by doing that?

Let Them Know It’s Not Their Fault

At this stage, temporarily break away from storytelling mode and get into blaming the giant industry corporations for deceiving your reader. Let them know that as a result of the big, bad corporations’ actions, they are not at fault.

Empathize with the Reader

State how you or someone you know has been in this situation before and how you used your product or service to solve the problem. This gives the reader hope and shows they are not alone in their plight. Misery loves company.

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Don’t Make the Mistake of Not Updating Your Skills

Most people have the ability to offer some kind of service or product online. If someone is looking for what you do and it’s something they can’t do or don’t have the time for, they will pay you to do it. But you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. Demand for skills change, and that’s why it’s necessary to make sure you can offer multiple sets of skills. For this, you need to keep updating your skills.

Even when you outsource services to clients, you want to have knowledge of the basics on whatever you are offering. You never know if an out-sourcer fails to complete a task or does it incorrectly. You may not have the time to have them correct it due to deadline pressures. It’s during these times that knowing about what you are offering can help you to step in and finish the job. You want to avoid missing deadlines as much as possible. That is a difficult situation to reverse.

Of course, having dependable resources in the first place will limit this situation from arising. When considering outsourcers, have them do some jobs that are exclusively for you, in the beginning, to see how they per-form. Again, having a grasp on the basics of the task they perform will help you evaluate their skills. Once you are confident of their abilities, you can use those resources to perform work for your clients.

For the most part, the internet has made it quite easy for people to keep their skills up-to-date and learn new ones. There are plenty of websites dedicated to learning. Some have specific subjects while others are gen-eral purpose. You may need to pay for some courses, but you’ll be able to find plenty of them for free. YouTube is one place to look if you can get past the advertising and offers. Another free place that expands fre-quently is Khan Academy.

When you feel comfortable with your new skill sets, you can offer them as standalone services, or you can use them for add-ons. If you already have an existing client base, simply let them know that you can perform these extra services when they need them. Also, ask them if they know of anyone who may be looking for such services. You already have proven yourself to your clients so they should have no problem recommending colleagues. These types of referrals are your best sources for new jobs.

Even Online Businesses Need a Plan

As Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” One of the greatest reasons to start an online business is, it is easy to do. But that ease often comes with a price of not making a plan of how you will make it work. The dynamics of online businesses are easy. The execution is what throws a lot of people off. Trying to make it without a plan is at best, an uphill battle.

The plan doesn’t have to be an elaborate business plan. Keep it simple by specifying the type of people you are targeting (your ideal customer) and what kinds of products you are going to offer. Come up with a list of so-cial media platforms that would fit with what you are trying to sell.

Determine what kind of marketing channels you are going to implement. It may be content creation for your website, videos, instructional mate-rial, etc. Don’t rule out traditional offline methods like direct mail and flyers. These still work better than most people realize.

Whatever methods you choose, make sure you track your efforts. If you don’t know where your sales are coming from, you won’t be able to in-crease spending on those methods. And you will also be spending too much money on channels that are not as effective.

Another common problem when it comes to planning is not knowing what you need to do to become successful in your online business. When you first start out, you won’t have enough experience to determine the best path to execute. If this is the case, find a qualified program or mentor to get you on track. You can choose to use this just long enough to come up with a plan, or you can continue so that you learn the appropriate meth-ods and techniques to help you.

One of the biggest problems when seeking out help from others is whether or not they truly are qualified to give that help. Ask for some proof of what they have accomplished. If you get any feeling that they are not who they say they are, don’t be afraid to move on. It’s your money, and you don’t want them jeopardizing your chances of success due to a lack of experience.

If you come up with the right plan for your online business, you will in-crease your chances of making it work. It still will take a lot of effort, but the journey should be much quicker than trying to make it without a plan.

Getting Less Done By Trying to Do Every-thing Yourself Starting an online business is easy. Running an online business success-fully is a whole other ballgame. One of the biggest mistakes online busi-ness owners make is they try to do everything by themselves.

You believe you know what is needed to make money online, and you start to perform tasks to get there. But then, other things come up that get in the way. Bills arrive in the mail, so you pay them. Perhaps you get a phone call from someone who is interested in what your business has to offer. You spend an hour with this prospect. They decide to hire you. They ask for contracts and other documentation. Before you know it, your day is finished.

The next day, you are excited to get started on work for this new client and decide that you also need more clients. You do some prospecting online and send out some emails. You get a few nibbles from prospects asking for more information. You have to do some research to answer their questions. By the time you are done, your day is half over, and you haven’t done anything for the new client.

As you can see, running an online business often entails much more than you signed up for. You will continually find it difficult to manage actual work with prospecting. Something has to give. Either, you spend the ma-jority of your time with prospecting, or you spend it working for your cli-ents. You need to offload whatever you decide not to do, to someone else.

If you have enough work to justify hiring someone, then by all means, go ahead and do so. Of course, this means you may need to deal with payroll and offering benefits, etc. An alternative would be to outsource, so you don’t need to pay those benefits. Another great benefit to outsourcing is when you find someone that doesn’t work out as intended, you can choose someone else. The break is much cleaner than hiring an actual employee.

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Business Ethics: A Double-Edged Sword?

If you have your employees take training on business ethics, will they think that there is something wrong with the company that they had to implement a business ethics program? Customers may think the same thing.

It’s similar to asking for a lawyer when being detained at a police station. The police want to know why you are “lawyering up.” You must be guilty of whatever it is they are questioning you about. What is it that you are hiding that you need legal representation? Some people, especially those with enough money, will seek legal council anytime they have to deal with law enforcement. This is what they pay their lawyers to handle.

As for your company, could they be hiding something that you are not aware of? If you know about a potential company requiring ethics train-ing, would this make you stay away?

A more likely scenario within the next 15-20 years is that most companies are going to require this type of training. Too many people are trigger happy when it comes to lawsuits, so companies are taking measures to re-duce the possibility of these suits from happening. If this likely scenario comes to fruition, customers and employees will become less cynical or suspicious.

It’s already happening with larger corporations. Since they employ a fair amount of people, these people are becoming conditioned to this training and won’t be so critical further down the line. In fact, any of these peo-ple who decide to move on from these corporations to start their own businesses will be more likely to set up their own programs when their or-ganization becomes large enough.

Employees are not fond of having to sit through the training. It’s a boring subject matter and usually, lasts for at least an hour. The good news is that most of the training is via computer so employees can work at their own pace to break up the monotony. They usually have a deadline when they have to complete it and unfortunately for them, they wait until the last day and have to take the whole training in one sitting. But, they manage to muddle through it.

Even though it is common sense, not too many people get excited with this type of training. However, it can open your eyes as to how to be more ethical in your business dealings as well as with your colleagues and managers.

Business Ethics in the Banking Industry

This topic may appear to be an oxymoron. There doesn’t seem to be any ethics in banking these days. Bankers used to have this pristine and al-most sacrosanct reputation. They were the guardians of money and the preservers of the goodwill of the people. This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

Then again, the industry always seems to be tangled in corruption in some form or another. A look through history shows bank failures, market crashes, etc. In each instance, you’ll find the government had a role in helping the banks shoot themselves in the proverbial foot.

Consider the most recent banking scandal of 2008. Banks got mixed up in complicated derivative products that became a game of hot potato. But before you go blaming the banks outright, keep in mind that the govern-ment required banks to take on more subprime, a.k.a., risky loans. Banks needed a way to offload these loans. So, they put pressure on the govern-ment to relax the Glass-Steagall Act. This was the act passed after the stock market crash of 1929 that prevented banks from investing. It was actually one of the few acts Congress got right.

But, it’s unfair to force banks to take on these risky loans without some way of hedging. Congress lifted the restrictions of the Glass-Steagall Act, and banks were once again allowed to invest. If the banks stuck with sim-ple hedges, they probably would have made it through unscathed. How-ever, they started getting greedy and came up with all kinds of crazy de-rivative schemes that no one understood. They just paid out high rates, until they couldn’t anymore. When the well dried up, people started to panic.

Yet, the government stepped in like they always do and pointed fingers at all the various players except themselves. They started introducing overly restrictive regulations which forces banks to hire teams of consultants just to make sense of the new rules.

It’s not clear how the regulations will affect the banks over the long term. The smaller banks don’t have the same monetary resources to ad-here to the regulations and gives larger banks a competitive advantage. Already, smaller banks are being consolidated and acquired by the bigger banks, which reduces competition. That’s never good for consumers. The government doesn’t seem to be overly concerned with this issue. Could it be that it is by design? It’s a long-standing feeling with consumers that the large banks and government are in this together.

Can Business Ethics Be Taught?

Companies are made up of people that run them and work in them. Peo-ple who remain ethical in their business will never have to worry about doing something wrong. However, there are people who don’t have the best intentions of companies at heart. These could even be people who have had training (both in school and at work). The question becomes, can business ethics be taught?

The answer probably depends on each individual. If someone is taught ethics but decides to act in unethical ways, they either don’t believe in ethical behavior, or they think about it in terms of degree. It may be bad to get involved with insider trading, but stealing some supplies may be fair game. Then again, the bad behavior usually starts with small acts and people work up when they don’t get caught early on.
There is also indirect ethics (or lack thereof) where people see others do-ing something that is not on the level. They look the other way. Training in ethics would have you report the behavior. Again, for some people, it becomes a matter of degree. People also don't want to be labeled as a snitch, so it's often easier to simply look the other way.

Modern laws are making it more difficult for these indirect people to keep quiet. If they find out that you knew about a certain behavior, you can be brought up on legal charges as an accomplice. Of course, small in-cidents are not going to warrant the attention of law enforcement. They don’t have the time or the resources to handle those. The company will simply bring disciplinary actions against the people involved. But, if the incidents are big enough, it could bring about legal actions. This is not only expensive but may cost you your job and most likely some jail time.

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5 Surprising Benefits of Meditation You Might Not Know About

The most well-known benefit of meditation is stress-relief. Different forms of meditation have been used for literally thousands of years to quickly, and sometimes instantly, relieve and remove stress and anxiety. The LiveAndDare.com website has identified 76 scientifically proven ben-efits of meditation. They include lowering instances of depression and re-ducing anxiety.

Those mental benefits may seem logically linked to a practice where you calm your mind. However, some benefits of meditation may surprise you, including the following 5 beneficial effects of meditation you just might not know about.

1 – Meditation Makes the Teen Years Livable

High school can be a very difficult time, not only for teenagers trying to get through it alive but for their parents as well. The teenage years can be difficult because the human body and mind are changing so rapidly. This can cause self-doubt, frustration, confusion and sometimes a sense that the whole world is "out to get" the teenager.

Research from the Harvard Medical School shows that relaxation practices like meditation and deep breathing improved students' abilities to cope with hormonal mood swings, and the constant drama surrounding teen years.

2 – 'Meditation' Can Be Better Than 'Medication' for Chronic Pain

The Journal of Neuroscience reports on a study that shows you can save major money on prescription drug costs, while simultaneously relieving pain more effectively, with meditation. Pills often have bothersome and debilitating side-effects. This is not true with meditation, that proved more effective than pain medication for chronic pain relief in that study.

3 – Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) Relief

IBS can be frustrating, inconvenient, painful and embarrassing. The an-swer may just be to meditate on a regular basis. Research in one study shows an 8-week practice of mindfulness for stress-relief reduced IBS symptoms by an impressive 26.4%.

4 – Meditation Actually Boosts Your Immune System

Your immune system is the complex group of processes in your body that fights infection and disease. Stress and anxiety play havoc with your im-mune system, and this means you're more likely to become sick or ill from any cause. Meditating regularly slows the production of stress hormones like cortisol which naturally damage your immune system.

5 – Improves Fertility Rates in Women

Researchers are still not sure why this happens. However, there is an un-deniably correlated presence of notably higher fertility rates in women who meditate regularly, than in those who do not.

6 Meditation Benefits That Help You Climb the Corporate Ladder Faster

Are you climbing the corporate ladder in search of job security, better pay, more responsibility or personal power? If you are running the corpo-rate rat race and strive to advance as quickly as possible, meditation of-fers significant benefits. Aside from relieving stress, which as you know is constant in a competitive business environment, meditation offers the following 6 benefits that help you climb the rungs of the corporate ladder faster and more effectively than your coworkers who do not meditate.

1 – All meditation improves focus. If you can't FOCUS (Follow One Course Until Successful), you simply are not going to make it in the advanced levels of the corporate world. Meditation, especially focused attention meditation, can create a laser-targeted vision that allows you to cut through the constant clutter and distractions around you, finishing pro-jects and assignments quickly and productively.

2 – Meditation encourages objectivity, composure, clarity, and concen-tration. When you can objectively appraise any business situation, your value to your company increases dramatically. A meditation practice also improves concentration, helps you develop a clarity of vision, and guaran-tees you practice composure when things get stressful, essential advance-ment and survival tools in the corporate world.

3 – Meditation increases productivity. Whether you practice Kundalini or Vipassana meditation, or any of the other dozens of varieties, you will find yourself more productive. Incorporating meditation sessions through-out your workday will increase your productivity even greater still.

4 – Your problem-solving and decision-making abilities become stronger. Countless studies show meditation improves mental functioning and memory and dramatically decreases your chances of contracting mental health problems. This means your mental ability to attack prob-lems, solve them, and make smart decisions is enhanced with meditation.

5 – Meditation improves your social and emotional intelligence levels. Meditation trades your brain to react objectively and intelligently. This improves both your social and emotional IQs. Studies show that employ-ees with high levels of social and emotional intelligence are more likely to be chosen for leadership positions.

6 – Meditation is a mental and physical stress-reliever. This is probably the most well-known benefit of a regular meditation practice. What is amazing is that of all the many kinds of meditation, they are all very ef-fective for relieving stress and anxiety. No matter what form of medita-tion you decide to practice, you will experience less stress. This means fewer days off, not experiencing dread and anxiety on the way to work, and a better capability to compete in a stressful corporate environment than your coworkers.

7 Simple Meditation Tips for Beginners

Beginners to meditation often approach it with preconceived notions. In contrast to popular opinion, you don't have to practice a particular reli-gion, have a specific spiritual outlook or buy any equipment or accesso-ries to benefit from meditation. Beginners to this age-old practice have heard it is a great stress-reliever that also delivers other mental health benefits and physical rewards. Anxious to get started, would be medita-tion newbies generally have one big question on their mind ...

"How do I meditate?"

They often envision trying to achieve a cramped and painful lotus position while breathing stifling incense and repeating mystical chants as neces-sary for a meditation practice. Preconceived notions and ill-informed ste-reotypical misconceptions fill their mind. If you want to get started bene-fiting mentally and physically from meditation, the following 7 tips and practices will quickly move you from confused newbie to calm and fo-cused meditation veteran in no time.

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Send Better Emails Using Storytelling

If I gave you a set of numbers and rambled on with facts regarding those numbers, how likely would I hold your attention? If, on the other hand, I told you a story about a guy who defied the odds and somehow incorpo-rated the same numbers into the story, does this change the landscape for you? Will you be more accepting of the story?

Unless you came from another planet or are currently a robot, there’s a good chance you picked the second option, i.e., the story. Humans love stories, and it’s been that way for as far back as we go.

When coming up with engaging emails, it does not have to be an epic tale. You probably won’t have your emails made into a blockbuster mo-tion picture, but that isn’t needed. What is needed is to connect with your readers in a way that they want to finish reading to the end.

The best stories are ones that come from your own experiences. You, better than anyone, can tell those stories and how you felt at the time of those experiences. You can specify people who may have gotten in your way or others who may have helped. You can also suggest resources that helped you overcome problems, etc.

Obviously, not everyone will resonate with your story because not every-one is going through the same things you went through. That's okay. How-ever, you probably already targeted your list, to begin with, so the peo-ple who are on it have something in common. The story will be more in-line with who they are.

If you haven’t experienced something, you shouldn’t make it up. Even through writing, this will come off as contrived, and it won’t read well. If you still want to tell a story, try to find someone who has gone through what you are trying to tell. You can interview them on the phone, or you can send them a list of questions. If they agree, then this becomes your story.

To capture the story of others, have a rough outline of how you believe the story should go in your mind. This can help you ask the right questions during your interview. If you are off base, ask for a follow-up interview with a new set of

The closer we can get to portraying human experiences, the easier it will be for readers to relate. When you become a good storyteller, your emails will naturally be more engaging.

Tricks of the Trade for Engaging Emails

The following are not the kinds of tricks that will get you in trouble with your email provider or web hosting account. They aren’t meant to de-ceive anyone. In other words, they should be thought of more as tips ra-ther than tricks.

When constructing your email, make sure you add some links, preferably to your blog or website. This seems obvious enough, but people forget to do this. Don’t go overboard with it, but have a link near the top and an-other one at the bottom.

Create a follow-up series. Major autoresponder services have what is known as a follow-up series. As the name suggest, each time you add a message to the follow-up queue, it will get sent to your list. When new people sign up for your list, they will start at the beginning and the sys-tem will send based on rules you specify. For instance, if you have four follow-up messages and set at days 1, 2, 4, and 8, on the first day, sub-scribers will get a message. Then, they will get three more on the 2nd, 4th, and 8th day.

Consider creating tutorials and how-to emails. People love to learn new techniques, especially if they are hard to find. Create a follow-up se-quence with a set of tutorials. You can also expand this to have part of the tutorial exist on your website. This way, you can get them started in your emails, and then forward the readers to your website.

Another great idea for emails is to create a roundup. If you aren’t famil-iar with this, it is a gathering of useful and related posts or resources. You then comment on how those resources helped you in some way, or how you thought they could be useful for your readers. If you repeat the entire message on your blog or website, you can reach out to the bloggers who were included in your round up. This can get some of them to share with their friends. Other bloggers love to see their work portrayed in dif-ferent venues or blogs.

Here is a trick that works incredibly well. Reach out to a few of your cus-tomers privately. Ask them for testimonials, and include those in your emails. The best kinds of testimonials are when customers describe how exactly they are using your product. However, any positive testimonials will help with your email engagement.

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Getting Help for Your Website

Running a website takes up a lot of time. You need to create new con-tent. Then, you need to promote that content after you publish it. The content has to be really good in this competitive environment. If yours is not, another website with better content is right around the proverbial corner. A good plan may be to seek out the help of others.

Outsourcing

This will be the most expensive option and one that is not completely necessary. But, it probably will be the quickest. Plus, the fact that you are paying for your content means that you can be strict about the stand-ards you receive. If you don’t like what someone is producing, you can ei-ther ask for improvements or find someone else.

College Internships

One dilemma college students face when graduating is not having any ex-perience. How do they get experience when they haven't been in the workplace? If you advertise an internship, you can have them help you with your website, and they can get that much-needed experience. You may even be able to work with the school so that the student can get col-lege credits for the work.

Guest Posts

When your website gets a bit more known, you may find people starting to reach out to you to write for your website. They will do it for free in exchange for a byline which points back to their website. This can be a great way to get content created for your website and gives the guest poster some exposure to his or her website. One thing you want to stay away from, however, is guest posting exchanges. These have been re-cently frowned upon in the search engines.

Public Domain Information

Public Domain information is freely available to anyone for the taking. You can do as you choose with it, including commercial endeavors. There are several rules as to when something becomes part of the Public Do-main, and you should seek out the advice of a qualified professional. There are entire courses and books dedicated to this topic.

Private Label Rights

A Private Label Rights (PLR) product is one where valid holders of those products can use them as specified by the PLR agreement. These rights vary across the product creators. But, they often allow you to alter the content, sell it to others, and use them as giveaways for list building. If you decide to use these for your website, make sure you are allowed to do so and that you can modify them to enhance their value.

Great Resources for Website Owners

The following are some resources that website owners can use to get the most out of their websites. Be aware that these resources can change over time and others are constantly coming onto the scene.

Grammar Resources

Readers take you much more seriously when your website doesn’t contain grammar errors. The two biggest resources website owners can start with are: Grammarly.com and HemmingwayApp.com. Both have free and paid versions. Start out with the free versions and as your website becomes more established, you can decide if you want to upgrade.

Copyscape

It’s never a good idea to copy the work of others. It is okay to reference short segments of other people’s work as long as you give them credit. This is a copyright term known as fair use. However, if you want to en-sure your documents have not been published elsewhere use Copy-scape.com.

Amazon and Kindle

Amazon has a large amount of resources available to website owners. If you are in the beginning stages of your website, you will need to learn much about what needs to be done. They also have several resources for advanced website owners.

Keep in mind that you can also use Kindle books as ideas on what to write about for your niche. There are thousands of books available in just about any category. Sometimes, all that is needed is to scan the table of con-tents to generate an idea or two for your website.

Udemy.com

Udemy has many classes available for website owners. Udemy offers courses for free as well as paid options. When seeking paid options, make sure you search online for coupons as you can get large discounts for courses that you take. Sometimes, those coupons knock down the price to $0, which obviously means it’s free.

Hosting Reviews from HostingFacts.com

Website hosting companies fall in and out of popularity. As such, you want an updated resource to help you determine which host to choose in case you run into trouble with your current company. Since hosting is cheap, you have the option of signing on with multiple companies. This gives you the capability of switching if one company goes down and takes your site with it. You simply point your name server to the alternative company, and you’ll be up and running in minutes. It used to take several hours to several days for name servers to propagate through the system. Today, it often happens in minutes. That’s why this could be a viable technique to keep your website running.

How Much Advertising Should Be on Your Website?

If you start getting good traffic on your website, why not put up some ad-vertising to make money? This is what many new website owners believe, but it could be hurting them.

Online advertising isn’t what it used to be. Web users are becoming more savvy and sophisticated. They are ignoring banners and other ads. It's a concept known as ad blindness. In the early days of the web, you simply had to send traffic to your ad-enabled website, and you were sitting pretty as far as revenue was concerned. This is no longer the case.

It’s a good idea for new webmasters to keep the advertising to a mini-mum, if at all. Initially, your website is unestablished. Google doesn’t like websites that focus primarily on making money. Instead, if you focus on creating value for your readers, you will gain authority. Google will notice this authority and reward you with better rankings. As your web-site increases its rankings and authority, you can slowly incorporate some advertising where it makes sense.

Make sure when you add your advertising to test its effectiveness. Test where on the page it works the best and which ads are doing better than others. You can use the concepts of split testing and click through rates to get this information. Many advertising platforms allow you to add code to certain pages to determine the conversions of the ad placement. If you find that your advertising is not bringing you a good return, find other ways to make money with your website.

An alternative to advertising is affiliate sales. You contract with major companies, such as Target, WalMart, etc. They give you a coded link that you place on your website. Usually, this link is incorporated into the con-tent on your website. If visitors click on that link and purchase products as a result, you receive a commission from the vendor.

If you decide to use any form of advertising, and/or affiliate sales, make sure it is relevant to the theme of your website. You will confuse readers if you advertise baby carriages on a website about Forex Investing. Some-times, you can connect products in a unique and innovative manner. But, it should always fit into the message of your website.

Whatever monetization strategy you decide upon, make your number one objective offering value to your readers. This could be in the form of of-fering reviews on products, revealing scams, or it could simply be an up-date to what is going on in your life.

Issues You May Face as a Webmaster

Owning a website is a fun and exciting experience. But, once in a while, you are likely to come across some issues that get in the way of your ef-forts. Here are some common ones to consider.

Getting Hacked

Many websites get hacked. It’s a fact of life. If yours is one that has never been hacked, consider yourself lucky. However, it could be only a matter of time before it happens. The more popular your website becomes, the more likely it will be to get hacked.

One way to reduce the occurrence of hacking is to make sure you have strong passwords. This is for any aspect of your website. Your password for your registrar should not be the same for your hosting, and your host-ing should not be the same if you have a WordPress installation.

It’s understandably annoying to have to memorize all of those passwords, especially the more complicated they become. And they should be com-plicated. You should set them with uppercase and lowercase letters. Put some numbers and symbols in them if allowed. Try to make the passwords as long as possible. It would take a hacker several hundreds of years to brute force attack a password with 15 or more characters.

Not Having a Back Up Plan

Backing up your website or your hosting files is an activity that many webmasters put off until it’s too late. Many hosting companies will adver-tise that they back up your files, but you may have to wait days before they can restore it. If you do rely on them, make sure you are clear on what they include in those backups. Don’t just assume everything you put on your server will be part of the backup. Another issue is the frequency at which they perform backups. If they only do it once a month, but you update your website frequently, you could still lose important infor-mation.

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Don’t Overcomplicate Your Business Goal Efforts

Many business owners are under the false assumption that goals have to be a formal document, several hundred pages long. There are businesses who have been successful with goals written on a single page. While not every business will have the luxury of keeping their goals to one page, the consensus is to keep your goal-setting efforts as simple as possible.

Goals need to be usable. If you create a multipage document that is both unreadable and unmanageable you have wasted your efforts and your time. If the goals affect others, you will be wasting their time as well. When you set out to create clear and concise goals, people will find them easier to work with.

Start by listing out the major objectives of your business. Keep this stage high-level. It can be as simple as stating you want to increase your cus-tomer base by 12% within the next year. Another possibility is setting sales targets. There are no right or wrong answers during this first pass, and you can make changes as necessary.

After you are happy with your high-level goals, it’s time to dig in and cre-ate tasks that will accomplish the high-level goals. When you determine what these are, assign dates to complete them by. Determine any prereq-uisites for completing them. These could include funding, training, etc. The more specific you are with the tasks, the easier they will be to ac-complish.

If you have multiple people who are going to help you with your business goals, the next step is to match up who is qualified to perform which tasks. You also need to make sure they can accomplish them in the period given. It’s a good idea to ask them if they feel comfortable with the amount of time allocated. Some managers may even choose to add extra time as a fudge factor, to ensure successful completion. Other managers will try to undercut the time as a way to push their employees. Which way is better, will depend on the team.

Creating goals for your business is an ongoing process. It changes as the needs of your business changes. There can also be situations when mem-bers of the team leave before all the goals are complete. By keeping your goals and tasks as simple as possible, you will set up an environment where these situations will not have a big impact on completing the over-all goals.

Failure in Business May Be Due to a Lack of Goals

Businesses fail because they run out of cash. This is like saying people die because their hearts stop. Both are certainly true statements but what are the underlying reasons for failure and death? When you can figure those out, you may be able to extend the life of both.

One of the biggest reasons for business failure is a lack of goals. Many business owners tend to take a fly by the seat of their pants approach and to leave their businesses to chance. Would you let a house builder build your house without a blueprint? Most people would not, and yet, many business owners are doing the equivalent when they don’t set up goals.

Goals do not have to be elaborate or even formal. They just need to be realistic, and they need to have set time frames. Otherwise, there won’t be any way to track the success.

Not everyone knows how to properly set up goals for their businesses. Try to seek out advice from mentors or coaches who have experience in this regard. They can give you an outsider’s view about your business, and they can help you keep on track to ensure you are meeting your goals.

If you decide to seek help professionally, don’t skimp on the costs. You get what you pay for, all things being equal. However, there is nothing wrong with being demanding with the results that you get. If coaches are as good as they specify, they should be held to a high standard. Insist on some guarantee, just in case. Do a lot of research before making the de-cision. If someone doesn’t feel right, there is usually a good reason why. Trust those instincts. They will serve you well.

When you set up goals for your business, you may discover opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise found. Your goals will require tasks and those tasks will often require research. This research would never have been done if you didn’t set goals. It can open up your eyes to endless pos-sibilities. You may even find potential customers as a result of this re-search.

Running a business often entails evaluating probabilities. What is the probability that this product will sell? What is the percentage of online sales compared to traditional sales? And so on. If it’s widely regarded that businesses who set goals tend to do better than those who don’t why would you go against this probability? It’s clear that setting goals is the right thing to do.

Have You Considered a Career in Project Management?

Perhaps you’ve never thought of becoming a project manager. But guess what? If you are proficient with setting and achieving goals, you have a basis for a new career. After all, when you manage a project, you’ll need to create a list of tasks and put deadlines around them. That is similar to what you do when you set goals and create objectives for those goals.

When you work in a team, you may find yourself taking the lead on keep-ing track of the goals and tasks of your team. This responsibility could fall with your manager, but if you simply take it upon yourself, your manager probably won’t object. He or she is busy after all. It will also show lead-ership skills in you.

If you do take on this role, you will be acting as a project manager at that point, or at least the project leader. You will need to become familiar with the teams’ activities or tasks, and you’ll need to hold the team ac-countable.

You may initially take some heat from the team as you are not officially the lead. You took it upon yourself. But, if your manager accepts your role, the team will likely follow suit shortly after that. This transition will become easier over time, and the team will allow you to keep on top of their tasks.

There are some activities of a project leader that are outside the space of goal setting. You may need to ensure that the critical paths are listed and ensure that they are achieved before moving on to the next tasks. A critical path is when one task must be completed before a dependent task can even be started.

Another task that is outside the role of goal setting is communicating with the stakeholders of a project. These are the people responsible for mak-ing sure company initiatives are met (often the funders). When you are dealing with business goal setting, the stakeholder is usually your man-ager. A project leader will need to involve stakeholders during the lifecy-cle of the project (another term not typically associated with goal set-ting). In the early stages of your project manager role, your manager may still take the lead in dealing with the stakeholders.

There are other tasks that goal management would not cover that would be covered by a project manager. Some companies require formal train-ing to become a project manager. But, becoming proficient in goal set-ting is certainly a great first step in the process.

How Are Your Business Goals Progress-ing?

Without any ability to measure business goals, they become meaningless. You can set goals until the cows come home, but you can’t accomplish them. Using benchmarks and milestones can be of great help when meas-uring goals.

If you can find a benchmark on a particular goal or set of tasks, this can be used as a rough estimate of how long something should take and what kinds of procedures were used. This is by far, the best scenario because you have a guideline to refer. If you don’t find a benchmark, then you will have to make a ballpark guess. You also won’t know how successful the tasks were.

Milestones are a great tool to keep everyone in the game. You can either set up the milestones for each task or you can have one milestone for the goal. The person responsible for this particular goal will choose how to complete the underlying tasks, as long as they get them all done by the milestone date. Some managers will choose a combination of milestones for the goal as well as the tasks. In fact, a project management tool would summarize the milestones for the tasks and roll them up as a single date for the goal.

On occasion, situations will come up that make it impossible to get the tasks completed in time. They may need sign off from upper manage-ment, and this was not known when the tasks were set. The materials to accomplish the goals may not be available by a supplier and finding alter-natives push the dates out into the future. The person responsible for completing the tasks may rely on input from another department in the company, and that other department is not cooperating. These are all valid delays that a manager will need to account for If there are valid delays, try to reallocate the person who was working on those tasks onto something else. Perhaps he can help other members get their tasks completed faster. Or, the person experiencing the delays can perform auxiliary tasks for other team members such as getting signa-tures or information from groups willing to cooperate.

One of the key elements when measuring the success of business goals is communication. The team members need to make the manager aware of any issues they have so he or she can try to step in to facilitate the needed resources. Other team members may need resources from the team which will only be known by proper communication.

How to Stay Motivated with Your Busi-ness Goals

When you set up your business goals, you have an initial surge of motiva-tion. The planning stages are exciting because of what you may accom-plish by proceeding with your plan. However, as time passes and other as-pects of your job get in the way, you may feel less motivated to make those achievements happen. Here are some ideas on how to stay moti-vated.

Keep a written copy of your goals and tasks on your desk. Create a daily task list that you print out and keep near you as you work. Daily tasks are more granular than the task list that supports the goals. You can check them off as you complete them. Make sure those daily tasks are as rele-vant as possible to the tasks on the master list. It's understandable that you will have to perform tasks outside of the goals but try to keep those to a minimum.

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Don’t Bother Me with Those Fees!

You find a hot niche for your eCommerce business. You spend a few months to get your business set up. Then, you discover all the various fees you get hit with. No one told you about them when they sold you on starting up this type of business. Suddenly, that hot niche that you thought was going to bring profit margins of 25% has shriveled to a measly 10%.

Know your fees before getting started. You can easily contact suppliers and ask them what fees they will charge. For instance, many suppliers will drop ship for you but they charge you hefty fees. If you don’t ask, they won’t necessarily volunteer that information. These fees can seri-ously eat into your profits.

Unfortunately, you will come across fees while doing business that may not be apparent when at the research stage. If you want to sell on places such as eBay and Amazon, they will charge you listing fees. So, make sure you know what these are before embarking on your business.

Shipping fees are a big factor when running an eCommerce business. Some sellers overinflate their shipping costs to make up for low-profit margins on the products they sell. This can be seen by customers as de-ceptive. They are being enticed by a low price for the product and then get slammed with a huge shipping cost. If you partake in this practice, your customers will complain and you won’t get repeat sales.

Vendors don’t always make their shipping costs known. You need to make sure you ask questions of them to know exactly how much they are going to charge. Usually, when you buy in bulk, you should be able to save some money on the overall shipping costs. But, you will then be responsi-ble for shipping to your customer. You will need to negotiate rates with carriers to keep these costs down.

If you get your products from other countries, you will need to deal with international shipping nuances as well as fees associated with govern-ments and funding institutions. This can complicate the process and cause you to lose much of your profits.

After all of this, you need to make sure you consider taxes. More states are jumping on the bandwagon of charging sales tax even if the items are sold online. It’s been a contentious issue but one you still need to factor in. Do not forget about paying any other taxes you may be responsible for, as well.

Finding a Mentor to Find Your Niche

Niche selection is one of the most important aspects of succeeding in an eCommerce business. Why leave this to chance? The wrong selection can leave you trying to sell products that no one buys. Also, you may find a hot seller but the margins are so thin you will struggle to make any prof-its over the long run.

Hiring someone who has successfully taken on eCommerce projects can be a wise choice. But, there are many who will tout themselves as ex-perts but have little to no experience. Worse, you find your fair share of scammers as well. When you make your considerations for a candidate, ask many questions. Do a lot of research online to find profiles of success-ful people.

When choosing a mentor, ask what kinds of guarantees they offer. If they are experienced, this should not be an issue with them. If it is, simply move on and find someone else. You don’t want to deal with a situation where they offer you low-quality advice which produces bad results. They should know all the necessary components of your eCommerce business. Ask them to produce a plan before you agree to work with them. If it seems like it makes sense, then you can proceed with them.

Don’t be afraid to spend some money when doing this. In fact, paying more will save you in headaches and prevent you from wasting money. If you find people who are willing to mentor you for low dollar amounts, this could be a sign of inexperience or incompetence. eCommerce is a hot ticket item so good mentors are going to command high rates. You need to accept that if you want to work with a quality mentor, it’s going to cost some money.

Ask them for examples of what kinds of projects they have worked on in the past. While it is easy for people to pass off any website as one in which they claim they worked on, let them explain to you in detail how they set it up. Ideally, you want someone who has their own eCommerce set up and is still profiting from it. It’s okay if they had one and sold it for a decent price. But, try to see if they can prove the sale. That’s not al-ways easy to ascertain.

Make sure you have a way of measuring the success of your mentor. Work with him or her to come up with a set of deliverables that can help you keep on track.

Found a Hot Niche? Test the Waters First

You’ve run the numbers. Everything points to a particular niche that you feel will make great money. You contact suppliers, and they want you to order in bulk. That’s how it works. Even though you like the information you saw on the niche, you’re a bit skittish about ordering that much prod-uct. If it doesn’t pan out, you’re stuck with loads of it in your warehouse.

Instead of going down this road, why not test the waters first? What if you could order a few products and see if there is a market for them? There are several ways to accomplish this.

First, go further with your research and see what kinds of sales are hap-pening on eBay. They have a completed listings feature that allows you to see which listings actually sold and for how much money. This is the bare bones minimum you should do before ordering any products. Amazon also gives selling numbers which can be derived from a product’s sales rank. The lower the rank, the better (towards #1, etc.) After you complete this step, the next step is to buy the product at re-tail, if it’s available. Sell it for close to that number to find out how well it will sell. It’s one thing to analyze numbers reported online. It’s entirely different to measure actual sales from your own efforts. You aren’t ex-pecting to make any money when you do this. You’re only looking to scout out potential sales.

When you find a product that passes the first two tests, the next step is to reach out to the manufacturer and see if they are willing to drop ship the item. Drop shipping is a concept where you are responsible for taking the orders, but the vendor is willing to ship the orders on your behalf. It gives you the ability to sell while not having to take on a bunch of prod-ucts in your warehouse. Some products will do well with drop shipping, and you may choose to continue with this paradigm.

After you find a hot selling item, you can then choose to take on more product and buy in bulk from a distributor or the manufacturer. By using these techniques to get a feel for the “hotness” of the market, you won’t have to dish out a chunk of money until you have a strong indication that it’s going to sell well for you.

Helpful Resources for Your E-commerce Niche

It can be overwhelming to start an e-commerce business. There are many facets of the business, and it is constantly changing. While the resources on this page are subject to change, they can help point you in the right direction.

Amazon.com

Sellers should always start any search on Amazon. Even if you have no in-tention of using Amazon, the information you can gather from them is priceless. They are, after all, the industry leader in online selling. You can also use them to sell. They have a program called Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) where you can send your products to their warehouse along with shipping materials, and they will take care of the selling for you. They also handle the order and payment processing as well as returns by customers.

eBay.com

Although eBay has lost some of its appeal, there are still a huge number of buyers and sellers. They have shifted the focus away from auctions (although they still exist) to selling direct. They too can give great insight of what is selling online.

Shopify.com

If you decide to handle your own fulfillment, you are going to need a shopping cart solution. Shopify is one of the fastest growing companies in this segment. They offer a complete solution including the look and feel for your web presence, as well as its own payment processor. They also have great online resources and a team of experts who can help you at every stage of your e-commerce venture. They help you incorporate so-cial media into your solution.

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A Fantastic Method of Engaging on Insta-gram

Of all the methods that will help your business, this one will rise above. It is something people have been doing for many years (even before the in-ternet) and it continues to work due to the excitement factor. This method is to hold a contest on Instagram.

The best kind of prize to give out is your product. This is because people will associate the contest with your product and will make that connec-tion whenever you hold these contests. It can also get people who would not normally be buyers of your product to give it a shot.

Contests are a great way for brands to go viral. People share them like crazy. How cool would you be if you let ten friends in on a contest for a great prize? This is how people think when they share. They want to be the one who initially shared. They become the trendsetter among the group of friends.

What kind of contest should you run? That depends on what your objec-tives are, but one great contest to hold is to ask customers to upload pho-tos to Instagram of them using your product. This alone can get people in-terested in buying. However, if the prize is the product itself, you may want to choose something different. A popular alternative is to use acces-sories for the product.

If you don’t have a decent prize to give away, reach out to other vendors who may have something good to offer. They give you the product in ex-change for good PR for their product. You can mention their company as being the sponsor or you can let their product speak for itself. It all de-pends on the agreement you have. It’s probably best to choose vendors with similar products to yours or at least products that compliment your products.

Make sure that you follow all local laws regarding contests. The laws have become stringent and not following them could lead to serious fines. For instance, you may have to allow entry into the contest for free and spec-ify no purchase necessary. Of course, this may negate the strategy of get-ting them to buy your product to participate in the contest.

Use your imagination. You will find a way to incorporate contests. When you do, you should be able to increase sales of your product or get people on your mailing list. If nothing else, you will be able to increase your fol-lowing on Instagram.

A Thousand Pictures Are Worth How Many Words?

Instagram is all about pictures, images, or graphics, whatever you want to call them. You need great pictures to share to the platform. Mediocre pictures may still get shared. But, it’s an uphill battle.

It’s up to you whether you want to employ a professional photographer or do it yourself. Granted, a pro is going to be expensive. You don’t want to skimp on the quality or the experience. Too many people think they are getting a deal by using inexperienced photographers, but you get what you pay for.

It’s your business and Instagram for business is only going to get more competitive. Most of your competition won’t be using pro photographers, so you can consider that a competitive edge should you go that route.

If you do want to do everything yourself, make sure you set it up in a strategic manner. In other words, don’t post images whenever the muse strikes. Have a plan of many images and fit them in a way that makes sense to your brand. If you are planning a new product or service release, get the images ready to be released before that release date.

The graphics don’t have to be the highest quality available. In fact, most people are going to view on their smart devices and many won’t have high-end equipment. The web supports only a certain level of quality any-way. So, spending too much time on the highest possible quality pictures is probably a waste of time.

However, don’t skimp on quality. If your pictures are pixelated or they don’t present well on an average smart device, people won’t take you se-riously. Once you lose these people, it’s difficult getting them back. One person gone means dozens of people they won’t share your content with.

Those dozens will each have their own dozens, etc. This is not a good sit-uation for businesses to find themselves in.

Consider finding an average quality device to test out the images you plan on posting. You should be able to pick up a cheap device on eBay or Craigslist.org. There are simulators that you can find online as well that can be sufficient for this purpose. You may believe that everyone has the highest-quality phones but that simply is not the case. For this reason, you want to appeal to the lowest common denominator of quality.

Whichever means you decide to create your photos, they need to be com-pelling enough to be shared and then shared again. Otherwise, you are going to put in serious effort and it won't produce the benefits you had hoped.