Successful Blog

A 5 Point Plan to Differentiate Your New Business

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Jacob E. Dawson

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Building a new business is challenging, frustrating, exhilarating and rewarding. If you’re embarking on the journey of entrepreneurship, it will be the hardest yet most satisfying adventure you can imagine. You will have a million things to take care of on a daily basis, and a seemingly endless check-list of tasks you need to undertake in order to reach the success you’re striving for. In addition to discovering your customer’s pain-points and creating a great product to satisfy their needs, you’ll also need to take care of the books, understand the legal requirements and make sure you can keep your head above water as you approach profitability.

A 5 Point Plan to Differentiate Your New Business

If that seems overwhelming, you can take a deep breath and relax. There are plenty of valuable guides for new business owners. in order to give you a helping hand, which is why we’ve put together a 5-point plan to help you differentiate yourself from competitors once you’ve entered the market with a new product.

  1. Embrace Your SmallnessEveryone has dreams of building a giant business that experiences hockey-stick growth and explodes onto the market. That’s fine, but one of the best ways to turn a weakness into a strength is to embrace it. Acknowledge the small size of your business in the early days and use it to your advantage. People love to root for the underdog, and will often support you and your business more eagerly than they would a larger, more established company.
  2. Pour Your Personality into the BrandIn addition to embracing your small size, you can also help to build a strong customer relationship by pouring a lot of your own personality into the business. Large corporations are renowned for feeling faceless in their customer communications, and this is a huge point of differentiation that you can use to your advantage. You can cleverly insert quirks and idiosyncrasies into your brand character, helping your business to feel unique, friendly and approachable.
  3. Encourage One-On-One ConversationsWhen you are establishing your new business in the marketplace, marketing and promotion are some of the most difficult parts to get right, especially when you have a very limited budget to work with. There are, however, a few ways to maximise what you have by utilizing the power of word-of-mouth, by finding your most passionate customers and lavishing them with attention. When you invite them into your world, share your business’s journey and give them access to unique insights & offers, you can turn a customer into an evangelist – someone who will passionately share your business with the world – maximizing your valuable marketing dollars in the process.
  4. Show Yourself as a ‘Hands-On’ ExpertIf you can’t compete with larger businesses pound-for-pound, you have to find other ways to outdo them. One of the best ways to do this is to establish yourself as an expert in your field. Write informative blog posts and ‘how-tos’, start finding forums and seminars that you can speak at, seek out public-relations opportunities where you can show your expertise through the media. Before long your customers will see you as an expert in your field, strengthening your business reputation, and enabling you to compete with larger, less hands-on competitors.
  5. Tell Your Personal StoryYou know that starting a business is one of the hardest journey’s that you can embark on, so why don’t you share the challenges you encounter with your customers? When they know much effort you put into offering them the best products and services possible they will become more attached to your brand and feel much more invested in your future success. Let them see the ups-and-downs and your willingness to share will be repaid with stronger customer relationships and, eventually, a successful business.

I hope that this 5 Point Plan to Differentiate Your Business has given you some ideas and inspiration to help you to sharpen your new business and begin your journey towards success! What are your thoughts about these techniques, and which ones do you think that I’ve missed? Do you have any personal experience that you can share with us? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Author’s Bio:
Jacob E. Dawson writes for Delivery Hero, the best way to find local home delivery . Jacob E. Dawson is an entrepreneur, marketing and SEO / SEM expert with a passion for making the most of every day! You can follow him on Twitter as @jacobeddawson

 

Thank you for adding to the conversation!

How to Build Something You Can’t Build Alone

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The Power of Community Focused in the Same Direction

Whether you count yourself in huge corporation, a small team, or feel you’re the only member of an entirely unique group. If we hope to move forward, we all could use a more strategic view. We can chase our dreams. We can hire an evangelist. We can put our noses to the grindstone. Still the truth of the matter is we’re social beings and we build better things together than we’ll ever build alone.

The best dreams are built with insight from a variety of viewpoints. The best ideas and innovations are fleshed out with minds and voices that approach a problem from differing points of view. The best communities come together around participation and personal investment. And we’ve all seen the power of a community focused in the same direction.

Leaders want to build something we can’t build alone.

How to Build Something You Can’t Build Alone

When we think of social business, the tools may have changed, but the people haven’t. We’d still like our lives to be easier, simpler, and more meaningful than just getting up each day to go to work. Invitations attract us. Aspirations move us forward. Focus brings us to a clear path. Relationships well-chosen lighten our load. Quality raises our investment. True collaboration brings out our better selves.

Great leaders who build great things understand that human nature and engage it to fuel their goals. If you want to be that kind of leader — one who attracts, inspires, guides, focuses, connects, and unites — here’s how to build something you can’t build alone.

  1. Be a Magnet, not a Missionary. Quit converting and start attracting. Understand and respect our different, yet symbiotic purposes. The community needs the goods, services, and economic contributions of growing businesses. Growing business need the support and patronage of loyal communities.
  2. Have and Share a Vision. To make a thriving business, start with a long-term loyal, internal community of employees. They will build and protect a healthy innovative culture, promote the values of the business, stay with the company, develop expertise with coworkers, and live to serve customers.In any community, it’s not the how or what of work that builds connection and loyalty. It’s vision and mission. The underlying vision that unites us toward building something that we can’t build alone. A community needs leadership to set and invest that vision and so that they can feel smart, safe, and powerful in investing too.
  3. Know How to Choose the Easiest, Fastest, Most Meaningful Next Move Strategy is a realistic plan to advance a position over time by leveraging your unique opportunity. Recognizing opportunity and getting where you want to go is impossible if you don’t know where you are now. Position is informational — It’s part part property and packaging, part size, scope, and systems. Position is relational — it’s part values and relationships, part mission, vision, and perception. The most advantageous next positions look only slightly different than the place we already are. Deeply study your position and you understand the true value proposition of your brand.
  4. Lead with Relationships Choose the people around you — employees, vendors, partners, customers — wisely with deliberation and intention. They are the people who will build your business with you. Likewise, choose your sponsors and the businesses you support with equal thought to how they build your community and your life.
  5. Even Cheap Is Expensive When the Model Is Doesn’t Work Start a new business and you’ll soon see, that numbers reflect history. Without history, questions are what we use to generate the numbers we use. Numbers are important and useful, but they are as deep as the questions we ask. When we aggregate the numbers into a graphic they become shallow and flat. What I just saw will forgotten in an hour. What I just bought won’t win you my next dollar. Haven’t we figured out yet that impressions, circulation, and hits in general are short-terms goals and NEVER have been attributable?
  6. Understand the Power of Collaboration If communities and corporations, align our goals and head in the same direction the results could be amazing. But first we each have to know where we’re going and negotiate from the SAME SIDE of the table, recognizing that we’re stronger together.

Leaders make work and life easier, simpler, and more meaningful. Sometimes we do that simply by letting folks see what they see, know what they know, and do what they do … because other people see, know, and do valuable things that we can’t see, know, or do.

Leaders who need no one, lead no one. Don’t hire a staff, engage people who contribute. Don’t build a coliseum, raise a barn.
It’s irresistibly attractive to build something you can’t build alone.

How will you be a leader this week?

Be a leader.
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

How a Blog Contributes to Your Business Model in Crucial Ways

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Alex Summers

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Why Blogs Are Necessary for Small Businesses

If you have a business, you should have a blog. Period. This is because you need a way to communicate with customers at all times. A blog allows you to communicate product updates, allow customers to suggest new products or features and have a way to be visible at all times. Visibility is important when you are a small business.

Here are crucial ways a blog contributes to a business model:

A Blog Improves Sales

Having a blog allows you to sell more goods. This is because you can link your blog to the section of your site that sells your products. Customers can even find your blog without you having to do anything to attract that customer. Optimizing content for search engines will improve sales by pushing your blog higher on search engine results. Most people will click on the first or second result that appears.

You can get sales training online from many sales and business professionals through a quick online search.

A Blog Allows You to Interact With Others In Your Niche

You can connect with other niche bloggers who are writing about the same topics you are. A company that sells sports memorabilia would want to connect with other businesses that sell sports memorabilia. Having those connections makes it easier to improve sales because there are other businesses who could refer their customers to you. You may have something that their shop may not.

Perhaps you are a better option because you are closer to where a particular customer is located. You don’t get that referral, if you don’t connect to other businesses.

A Blow Allows Customers to Communicate With You

A good conversation on your blog can be great for SEO. Remember that there are usually 100 people reading your forum for every person who actually comments. Your blog could be where people learn more about your products or services. Make sure that you are offering an interactive experience for your customers. Give them good recommendations in an attempt to drive sales of certain items. Customers will generally follow your advice if it is sound enough.

Every small business needs a blog in order to survive online. It will allow you to be found by more people. It can get your referrals from other businesses that you connect with. Your blog can also be a great way to influence customers to buy certain goods or services that your company offers. Make sure that you are taking advantage of this wonderful tool that is available to your company.

Author’s Bio:
Alex is a blogger, freelance writer and recent college graduate. She currently performs market research for an online marketing firm when she is not contributing her own thoughts and observations to the online community.

Thank you for adding to the conversation!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Thanks to Week 353 SOBs

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Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

Purple SOB Button Original SOB Button Red SOB Button Purple and Blue SOB Button
and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

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They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

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Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

6 Steps to a Business Blog that Attracts Customers

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How to Blog Series

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Marya Jan

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Small Business Owners Can Make a Blog a Customer Magnet

Do you have a business blog?

Or, do you feel like rolling your eyes when people tell you to get one?

Who reads a business blog anyway? Aren’t they places where business owners talk about their star employees, new products in the pipeline, latest on advertising efforts, and publish other bits and pieces of information that nobody cares about.

In other words, they publish incredibly boring stuff.

Well … not necessarily.

And it doesn’t have to be that way for you either.
Your blog can be a customer magnet.
Don’t you want to bring more customers to you?

6 Steps to a Business Blog that Attracts Customers

Here are six small steps you can take right now to ensure that you never go down that path – path that leads to boredom and ultimately abandon of your site. These are six steps to a small business blog that draws customers closer to you.

#1 Publish non-promotional content

The first thing you can do is stop promoting your products and services on your blog. Really, trust me on this. Your blog is not the place to that. Your website is, your online catalogue is, not your blog.

People don’t sign up to hear from you if all they are going to hear about your fabulous products – which no doubt, they are. People sign up because you post some interesting and engaging content that they don’t want to risk missing any of it.

For instance, I subscribe to my son’s speech pathologist’s business blog. Yes, she has one, and a fantastic one at that. (My son has Asperger’s Syndrome so he needs help with social skills and pragmatics.)

I have signed up to her blog because she routinely publishes stuff about what’s new in the world of ASD therapies. She recommends great resources, and what’s happening around town. She highlights successes of her other clients (with permission, of course). She tells parents quick tips that we can follow at home.

What a great blog she has where she publishes such useful content that people who can’t even afford her services now, sign up. And they might eventually, in future.

#2 Offer a freebie for email opt-in

Speaking of signing up, the whole purpose of blogging is to capture first time visitors email addresses straightaway, before they leave your site and forget all about you.

It really helps if you offer them some incentive – an ethical bribe if you may. My son’s speechie has got a 7 page report on how to find the right speech therapist for your child and when to do it. Indirectly plugging her service? I don’t really care, the tips are solid.

Think about if, if you have a child who doesn’t speak at age 3, would you not opt-in for information from a credible source?

Offer a freebie, and turn your blog into a lead generation machine. Psst … that’s the why you are blogging anyway.

#3 Publish content regularly

This is a topic of hot debate. But before you start freaking out, understand that your business blog is different from those huge blogs that everybody on the planet seems to follow.

Often, they have teams producing content for them, and either they are news sites masquerading as blogs, or blogs who grew big over a period of time. The owner usually monetizes them by placing advertising on them do they need an infinite number of visitors and hits to their site. Hence, they often update multiple times a day.

Your blog is different; you can get away with updating once a week. That is what I do and it works for me.

#4 Make yourself human & position yourself as an expert

Are you a huge company or a small business? I am thinking the latter.

While you may not have a really corporate voice on your website, it will still pay to come across as a living, breathing human on your blog.

You get to engage with your readers, who could possibly be so impressed with you that they will eventually buy from you.

Even if you don’t, isn’t it a good feeling to show your human face and just chill?

Like Sonia Simone of Copyblogger says, create Know, Like and Trust on your site. Get people to know and like you by being approachable and talking about your company’s mission. Post content that will get them to trust you.

And let’s not forget that we only buy from people we know, like and trust.

#5 Give your blog an audit

If you already have a business blog, give it a cold, hard look. If this blog was written by somebody else, would you subscribe?

Is it easy to navigate or feel cluttered? Does it look professional in its appearance?

Think about what sort of content are you publishing. Think about the frequency and length. Really think about the headlines. Which brings us to our final point; writing to earn people’s attention.

#6 Write like an A-list blogger

And lastly, do you know why most business blogs stink?

It’s because they person doing blogging has no clue how to blog in the first place. Blogging is a genre in itself, and in order for you to get people interested in your content, you must do as the Romans do.

Make your posts screen friendly and easy to read. Make them scannable using subheadings, bullets, bold and numbered lists, in the body of the post. Refrain from using long paragraphs. Make them short to really break up the text.

Keep your posts short – aim for a length of 500 words. You can write that in an hour. Think of this time as an investment in your business. Or, if you can’t spare a single minute, hire a freelance blogger.

Author’s Bio:
Marya Jan is a proud content creator for Open Colleges, (an education provider with awesome business and writing courses. When she is not busy blogging for them, she can be found helping small business owners revamp their blog content at Writing Happiness.

Free But Far Reaching – Social Media Giants That All Businesses Must Consider for Brand Management

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Arba Hana

Twitter boasts around 500 million active users sending 340 million tweets daily. More than 900 million people sign in to Facebook every day, spending an average of 15 hours per month on the site.  YouTube has 490 million unique visitors per month, and they watch 2.9 billion hours of video every month.

Social media has worked itself into the fabric of our everyday life, and the potential for customers new and old to see your brand via these social media channels (and a few others) are very high. Each one is free. If you’re not representing your brand on social media, you’re missing out.

Learn more about some of the best, free but far reaching social media giants on internet that all business must consider for brand management.

 

Facebook:

Arguably the largest and most heavily used social media platform is Facebook. Virtually every industry targeting any age group or gender can find their target market on Facebook, where grandmothers “like” photos of their teenage grand kids and bosses comment on their employees’ photos. Using Facebook Pages, which were introduced for businesses in November 2007, you can personalize your Facebook presence and target the segment of Facebook’s widespread demographic user that applies to your business.

Facebook Pages let you integrate your brand seamlessly into the platform. Big, bold cover images allow you to show off your brand “personality”, and status updates, photo albums and polls can let you develop your brand voice and interact and engage your customers. Facebook allows you to customize  “apps”, or tabs you’re your Page to highlight products, run contests, add disclaimers or show off a variety of other content. Facebook Offers for fan pages, which is a free service for Facebook page admins, is one of the newest features available to build your brand. The Facebook Offers feature is as easy as posting a status update, and is a great way to promote a new product or service.  Fans redeem Facebook Offers via their smartphone or from an email that’s mailed to them after they get the offer.

Twitter:

The second largest social media heavy hitter is Twitter, a micro-blogging platform in which users send 140 characters into their “stream”. Anyone can read the messages, called “tweets”, but registered Twitter users can follow others, respond to tweets and forward their friends tweets to their own stream (a practice known as “retweeting”.)  Twitter’s demographic is a bit more limited than Facebook – 35% live in urban areas, the median age is 31 and users tend to have a lower income than Facebook users. The lingo might sound funny – and the platform might sound confusing – but Twitter is one of the most powerful ways to monitor what people are saying about your brand in real time and address issues before they turn into a major PR problem.

To use Twitter to build your brand, search for and follow users who are your target market and location. Make sure you monitor your mentions and search for keywords applying to your business.  Create lists (another great Twitter feature) with other businesses in your industry, other local businesses or national industry news outlets or brands, and retweet interesting articles; this can help you build your industry expertise. There are many Twitter management platforms available, such as TweetDeck and HootSuite, to make the hefty job of  monitoring Twitter easier by letting you display columns of streams (such as mentions, specific lists or retweeted messages) on one screen.

YouTube

If a picture says a 1000 words, how many words can a video deliver? YouTube has silently answered that question by growing leaps and bounds since its start in February 2005. Companies are finding this video sharing site, on which users can upload, view, and subscribe to, comment on and rate videos of all types – from professional shot and editing pieces to music videos to amateur smart phone videos.

Build your brand on YouTube by thinking outside the realm of traditional head shot interview pieces or scripted marketing videos. Video blogging, or vlogging, is a great way to establish your company’s voice and show the personality behind the brand. Product demos can give your customers the “try it before you buy it” look at your products that could tip the scales in the favor of a sale. How-to videos can show your customers you’re an expert in your field, and as an added bonus, are the type of videos social media fans love to share with their friends. The majority of videos out there aren’t professionally made, so don’t let the technology of video editing keep you away from using YouTube to build your brand – all you need is a webcam and an outline!

An added bonus of using YouTube is increased search engine rankings. After Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in November 2006, YouTube videos started showing up quite often in searches, and have become increasingly weighted. YouTube videos not only let your customers get to know your brand, but they can also bring new customers to you through search engine traffic.

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Arba writes on topics related to branding and marketing. If you are looking for brand management services, you can try this brand consultancy service provided by some of the best in business.