It takes the Chinese bamboo tree 5 years to break through the ground. Change and growth do not happen overnight. WE must constantly grow ourselves.
For me…. Leadership is continuous growth. An entire lifetime event.
How do we continue to grow:
– Read – books, newspaper articles…
– Attend seminars
– bookclubs
– speakers clubs
these are a few things that I do. Hope this helps-
Another social media platform that is used frequently is Yelp. When I first began in business, I never thought of the power of Yelp. You would think it is not as powerful as the other social media platforms. I read an article just recently that Yelp receives over 200 million viewers a month. Yes, I said over 200 million, that’s not a typo. I believe that Yelp is your silent giant. If your business is listed on Yelp, you must start the process providing proof of business. In addition, you will need to add additional information like business address, phone numbers, and a website URL (address). As you add to your business profile, it is helpful to your customers if you add photos of your service or if you are a restaurant, a menu and pictures of your food. You can offer an incentive like coupon or a promotion offer for a visit or a comment. Yelp offers low cost options to advertise from $25 a month to more expensive options depending on what you need. I use Yelp multiple times a week as a consumer, whether I am seeking restaurant, a service or to find some fun. You should not neglect this option
what is PPC advertising.? I know you are thinking, oh gosh more techy lingo. This one will be easy for you to remember. PPC known as pay per click or cost per click is an internet advertising model used to drive internet traffic to your website. You would pay a search engine or a website owner to advertise on their page. When someone clicks on your advertisement, you pay your host (the person that let you advertise). This form of advertising is widely used by businesses large and small. There is unfortunately a charge that you will have to pay to use this service. Why would you use it? Many businesses use this because they know that their customer base uses the internet to seek out their needs. How many times have you used google or siri to find an item or location of a business? Most of us use these search engines on a daily basis to find what we are looking for. The moment you take out a paid ad on a search engine, your good or serviced can found through a search . The customer is then directed to your website. There is a downside. PPC advertising can be costly and if you are operating on a low to no advertising budget, you must look in to maximizing key terms or words. Only start with a low-cost campaign and only continue to use the words that are driving the most traffic to your website. The search engines will show you graphs, and which keywords were most successful. There is some hope though, many of the larger search engines offer a free credit or incentive to join their service.
Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. It takes grit, grind and consistency. You must be willing to fight for your dreams. There are many challenges for the new business owner. You have a passion for what you are doing. What do you do when you don’t know what the next steps are?
When we are ready to market our business, we tend to be open to all types of advice. We follow these nuggets of advice. We discover that what worked for them does not always work for our target market. The result of this is draining your bank account. Please don’t let that discourage you, there are many things that you can do to that that promotes your business.
I know you are thinking, what do I to start… So glad you asked. I would start with an email list.
Lets talk about an email list and marketing. I know you think this is very basic idea, but it essential to build an email list so you can follow up with your potential clients. Email marketing is one of the easiest ways to market. There are several companies that can make this process easier, for example Aweber or mail chimp. This is a way a business owner can sent promotions to several thousand clients at time. Most small business have a high success rate using email services, which in turn pays for the minimal cost of the service (which is less than $100 a month). Don’t be fooled though, in the beginning this a little labor intensive. What do I mean by labor intensive? It will be a tedious and daunting task to collect and entering all those email addresses. It will become more routine over time. It will be easier when you are adding a few at a time or update (eliminate old email and edit contact information). It will be rewarding once it is complete.
Today I’d like to teach you about the three most important start up marketing tools you need to get and keep new customers.
None of these will work if you don’t have a quality product/service to back you up!
Here are the key steps for putting together your start-up marketing tools:
Today you’re going to learn how to find a target market of potential customers so you aren’t wasting precious resources on blitz marketing. So, the two questions you have to ask yourself are:
Once you figure this out you will know who is more predisposed to purchase your products/services. Then, you find other businesses with the same customer base who you can customer share with. Come up with an incentive and great arrangement to encourage both of your customer bases to shop at both of your stores.
The basic concept is this:
You want to find existing businesses who have the customer profile that you are looking for to market your products/services to.
Then strike up a relationship with those business owners to work out an incentive for customers to purchase from both businesses.
Educate them about what, you may be thinking. Well, consider this, many businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you NEED to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers. These are people you already know to be a good sales potential…they’ve already bought from you!
Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and less time trying to sell old products to new customers and you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality and branding position.
Here are a couple of key elements to use to retain your current customers:
Today we’ll talk about shameless self-promotion. That’s right, I said it! Shameless! After all, we are learning from Paris Hilton here.
It’s all about self-promotion! Self-promotion comes in many forms and you can use different tactics to get your name out there. Look at politicians! Talk about self-promotion and in some not so discreet ways, at that. But, seriously, consider some of the major superstars we all know. Madonna, Donald Trump, Howard Stern and Bill Clinton, just to name a few.
We all self promote. Did you raise your hand in class to show the teacher you knew the answer? Of course! That’s self-promotion. This is the kind of self-promotion we are talking about. With dignity, class and the knowledge to back it up. If you self-promote only to prove you don’t really know what you’re talking about, you’re going to lose business.
Natural self-promoters are the former and I want to tell you about the three major traits they have and use to build themselves and their businesses.