Successful Blog

What Could Changes to EU Internet Mean to Your Business?

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Ideas and Infographics

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Changes in European Internet Access

The EU is in a digital race to decrease its dependence on financial services and improve its Internet access. What exactly is on this agenda?

Europe plans on making high-speed broadband connection available to all EU households by 2012 (a lofty goal given the time frame) and a 50% subscription rate of more than 100 Mbps by 2020. Because of the recession, EU countries are fighting to be the first to reach these goals in hopes of opening up opportunities for businesses.

So what does this mean to you? An increase in global Internet usage could mean more international business opportunities for you. To put this into perspective, let’s look at a graphic that visualizes this race.


Click image to open full-size version (via Interxion).

According to the infographic, the UK is leading the pack in the number of consumers purchasing goods online. Moreover, it’s B2B purchasers aren’t that much further behind. Yet despite so many people purchasing goods online (79%), only 15% of businesses are selling goods online.

That means there is a huge demand not being met. So while businesses in Europe are slowly trying to lessen this gap, there is prime opportunity for your business to steal some of the international market share. Especially if you are already in the e-commerce business, there might be an opportunity to gain international exposure easily.

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Author’s Bio:
Adria Saracino is a marketer and blogger. When not developing content strategies, you can find her writing about style on her personal fashion blog, The Emerald Closet.

Thank you, Adria!

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

Business on the Move – Literally – (Our next #SOBCon chat)

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Bradley GauthierSo many of us are constantly on the move as we go from meetings to conferences to offices…many spend more time on the road than they do at “home.” Even while traveling, we stay connected to our business, keep on top of strategies and tasks and continue to move towards our professional goals.  Bradley Gauthier will be joining us on April 19th to discuss how you can: stay productive while traveling, be more effective at using technology and continue to move your business forward while you are on the go.

Bradley has he been a serial entrepreneur for 13 years. Starting with a tech handyman firm, then building a successful website design firm during dot.com era, and then another successful Internet marketing firm, he had built what most entrepreneurs would see as a successful business. But he realized that these ventures were also sucking the life out of him. So in early 2011, Bradley said goodbye to it all, giving away most all of his possessions, and pursued a life of travel. All while building an education software company with the goal of improving the lives of others for current and future generations. He is now living the life of a Digital Nomad.

As a serial entrepreneur and a digital nomad, Bradley is the perfect person to share insights of building and maintaining a business on the move.

We’re sure you have a lot of questions for him. But specifically we’ll be focusing on these on the chat:

  1. How do you prepare for business while traveling? What are the necessities?
  2. What are your top tips for effectively using technology, especially while on the go?
  3. How do you insure that your productivity continues while traveling?
  4. How do you sustain your team’s productivity when you are traveling?
  5. Are there apps or tools that you would recommend?

Ready to know more about becoming a Digital Nomad? Join us for the SOBCon Twitter chat on April 19th at 1pm ET.

Influencing Decisions Part 1: 4 Things to Know Before You Propose an Idea

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IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Influencing Decisions

Be Prepared to Influence the Results

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The CEO was a great thinker. He made his decisions on the facts. As I watched him in meetings as people presented ideas with their best efforts to win him over, I learned a lot about what influences the decision making process.

One of the most important things I learned was what I should know to hedge my bets.

Influence is built on trustworthiness and connection.
To achieve those and meet our goals, it’s important to finely focus on the roads that will take us to our goal and the ways of inviting people to join us that move their mission forward as well.

4 Things to Know to Move Forward Before the Abyss of Next Steps

Whether we work for a huge corporation or sit at a desk in our living room, we can’t be successful without tapping into the influence of others who can help us make our ideas and our projects become real. Yet, we all also know the experience of leaving a meeting or ending a phone only to find that the decision we wanted fell off the table into an abyss called “Next Steps.”

Knowing a few things before we go into those meetings can influence the results significantly by building foundational trust in our competence and connecting our goals to how those we want to help will benefit.

    1. Know your short term purpose. Who are you and what are you building? Too often, we enter a meeting, write a blog post or email, or walk into a meeting without a specific and thoughtful goal in mind. Why are you there? Are you trying to rally support for a new idea? Do you want to change a plan in progress? Are you exploring ways to work together? Are you after funding to research the idea? Will you share something new you’ve discovered? What do you want to be true when the conversation ends?

    2. Know how this project will make the answer you want clear. Know how you’re going to make the project happen. Ask yourself before you meet, “What would be next if the answer is yes.?” Sketch out a plan of action and reasonable estimates for the costs and the resources needed to execute that plan. Do the thinking so that they don’t have to. Present a simple plan that can stand on its own.

    3. Know how your plan will bring relevant and positive results faster and easier. Establish context that makes your goal relevant to the audience you want to enlist. Why are you pursuing this goal and why would the audience want to align their goals with yours? Are you informing a large audience or a small one? How deeply do they need to know the details? ?How will you connect what you want to happen to what already is? How will the proposed project fit into what they’re already doing? How can you make your proposal mission critical to THEIR goals?

    4. Know how your experience will add value and mitigate risk. How will you establish your knowledge base as an expert? If possible, tie the proposed idea or project to something you’ve succeed at in the past. If you can’t, know what you’d expect based on your experience and be able to explain why you’re confident that together you can make this innovative approach a success. Research similar ventures. Be prepared to speak to one or two you know well.

Ideas are fun, but they’re not the genius that builds an economy. For no matter how ideas — genius or not — that get set on the “business table,” it’s the ones founded on solid thinking, realistic plans, and influential support from the right sources that develop into the next awesome technology or killer app we own.

If we do the strategic thinking and develop credible plans before we propose the idea, attracting the influential support of the right people is faster, easier, and more meaningful. In fact it could be said to be irresistible.

Be irresistible.

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

Thanks to Week 339 SOBs

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Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

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

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

Offline marketing strategies: Back to the basics

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In the pre-Internet era, business establishments did not have the options to resort to online marketing strategies. Conventional offline marketing strategies such as print advertising, discounts, special promotions, direct mails etc ruled the roost. Like the online marketing strategies, the aim of offline marketing strategies was same – to boost your small business. Anyways, despite the rapid surge of online marketing strategies, the importance of offline marketing strategies can not be denied even in the modern times. Basic offline marketing strategies still play crucial role in expanding your business. Here we discuss about some typical offline marketing strategies which are indeed helpful to boost your small business.

Print marketing

Advertising products and services in print media such as newspaper and magazine is a popular offline marketing strategy. Through advertising your products and services in the newspaper you can reach out to varied classes of people. Again, magazine advertisements aim at targeting a particular sector of the customers such as teens, women or the car lovers.

Broadcast

Radio and television are popular marketing platforms which are still being used very widely. The main advantage of broadcast marketing is that it reaches a large audience at a very quick time. In television advertisements, people can actually see how the products work. However, it is to be noted that advertising through radio and television is comparatively expensive than other forms of offline marketing.

Direct mail

Direct mails are used by many small businesses to augment customer base. This aims at raising the awareness of a product through letters, postcards, brochures and fliers. In direct mail method, a particular type of target market is aimed at. Moreover, this type of marketing strategy is costly too as it involves designing and printing costs.

Referral marketing

If a particular customer is satisfied with the product or the services that you offer, he or she may refer it to other customers. This way your client base increases through word of mouth or referral marketing. However, referral marketing is not any strategic marketing plan but it is useful to build up a loyal customer base. This type of marketing however does not require any cost. You, as the owner of a small business, should not entirely rely on referral marketing. Referral marketing should combine with other forms of marketing so as to reach to a wider section of the market.

Co-branding strategies

Co-branding is a smart offline business marketing strategy. Co-branding implies mutually beneficial marketing agreement between two business units. Two parties that embrace co-branding strategies do not compete with each other, instead the products offered by the two parties complement each other. Through this strategy you can attract those clients which you can not attract through other offline marketing strategies.

Loyalty programs

Even small business units can use these programs to expand customer base. Incentives are given to the customers to purchase more products. For instance, a movie theater owner may offer free movies to the customers on their fifth visit. This way, encouragement is given to the customers to purchase more units of a good.

Discount pricing

This is a very popular marketing strategy to augment your sales. Advertisements of discounts are given in radio, television or in newspapers. Giving bulk discount is a very popular practice. The aim of giving discount is to increase the sale of the product. However, while giving discount you should not compromise on product quality.

These are some offline marketing strategies which are still very much relevant. Even in this online era where increasing thrust is being given on online marketing, basic and traditional offline marketing strategies are very much required to keep your business in good stead. In fact, an ideal marketing strategy should be a judicious mix of both the offline and online marketing strategies.

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Author’s Bio:
Alex Brown: Alex is a prolific writer with specialization on various aspects of financial finance. His articles on debt, mortgage industry and personal finance are offer valuable guidelines to the readers.

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

Build a house made of bricks

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Rosemary O’Neill

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When my dad used to read me The Three Little Pigs, he’d put a lot of gusto into the Big Bad Wolf’s famous threat…”I’ll huff, and I’ll puff….and I’ll BLOW your house down!” He’s an amazing storyteller, and that one has stayed with me. I always strive to assemble bricks, rather than straw.

Every day on the internet, status updates, blog posts, pins, and various pieces of social flotsam and jetsam flow by. You’re probably contributing to the flow yourself. (I know I am!)

Today’s question is…

Are you contributing anything of lasting value, either to your business or to the world?

Take a look at last week’s social output and see whether any of it will:

  • Be true 3 years from now (evergreen content)
  • Add beauty to the world (original artwork)
  • Teach someone a valuable skill (how-to)
  • Build a searchable resource (SEO)
  • Help make your business case (customer support)
  • Lift others up (inspiration)

You’ve heard of the Three Little Pigs …
Which little pig are you?

The house made of straw – you’ve got a Facebook page, which you haven’t updated in a couple of weeks, and a website that’s “brochure-ware” from 2005. They aren’t linked together. You think you’ll get around to fixing it “someday.”

The house made of twigs – you’ve got an up-to-date website, and social accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but the content is not connected, and there’s no editorial calendar, no plan behind it. You spend the day flitting around from one platform to the other, ignoring your core business.

The house made of bricks – your website is an interactive, social hub, with deep resources for your customers. It’s optimized for search, and you put out a steady, consistent stream of varied content. Your audience responds and shares their own related content on your site, building a valuable asset that’s under your control. Your social streams are all accessible from one elegant, branded home.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day social whirl, and never take the time to make a blueprint for your house. My recommendation is to set aside a few hours a week to work on the plan, build an editorial calendar, and be sure you’re building with bricks.

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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out their blog. You can find her on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee
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