Successful Blog

5 Smart Ways to Differentiate a Successful Business

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Grant Tilus

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Did you know Americans create more than 500,000 new businesses every month? It’s true, but only 50 percent of those businesses will still be operational within five years. While the amount of new businesses every month is encouraging, our rate of failure is unfortunate and must be improved upon.

5 Smart Ways to Differentiate a Successful Business

One way you can increase your business’ chance of celebrating its five year anniversary is to differentiate your business among your industry peers. Stand out from the crowd. Use these five ways to differentiate to build a smart and successful business. Each key point provides real-world examples of what you can do to improve your business.

1. Focus on the Customer

The best and often the most successful entrepreneurs create businesses they are so passionate about they will do anything for their customers. Over time many business owners tend to lose focus and begin straying away from having the needs of their customer be a top priority. However, by maintaining a customer-centric focus you will create a positive customer experience that will allow you to build your brand all while creating a loyal base of repeat and new customers.

Example: Stuffed Giraffe Shows What Customer Service Is All About

2. Be a Social Media Juggernaut

In our digital world social media cannot be ignored by even the smallest of businesses. Focus on creating a unique social community by engaging and educating your customers about your brand in a way that’s both entertaining and helps them feel connected to your business. We all know it’s easier to keep customers rather than finding new ones; social media can help you do both.

Example: Impressive Small Business Facebook Pages You Can Learn From

3. Don’t Focus on the Competition

Every smart business owner has conducted a SWOT analysis for their business venture. Far too often business owners get caught up in the threats of competition, which causes their own business to suffer. However, by focusing on the unique opportunities your business has to offer you will help it stand out among the rest as a clear and distinguished option for your targeted customer base.

Example: Your Competition, Isn’t

4. Make It Personal

Creating personal connections is part of human nature. In the midst of creating a business we subconsciously hide our own personality, and that’s not necessarily the best thing to do. Customers need ways to connect with businesses beyond the advertisements and sales pitches. By being transparent and humanistic your customers can begin to create a relationship with your business and become more than just a customer. Tell your story and learn your customer’s story as you build your business.

Example:


Papa John Telling the Papa John Story

5. Keep Things Fresh

Changes within your target market, technology, and the economy often require your business to make adjustments. In order to stay relevant and continue building a successful business it’s important to assess and refresh your business’ activities. The businesses that are comfortable maintaining the status quo are the ones that are failing to prepare for true longevity. As a business owner you need to be asking, listening and responding to changes in the market and your customer base in order to succeed in the long term.

Example: Living Business Plans Help Businesses Flow with Future

Differentiate your business in 5 smart and social ways to build success. Use social avenues to focus on and connect with customers personally by sharing stories. Then you can let your competition worry about you.

What successes have you had with differentiating your business in smart and social ways?

Author’s Bio:
Grant Tilus is an Inbound Marketing Specialist at Rasmussen College. He creates superior content and blogs about accelerated bachelor’s degree programs, other online business school degree programs or inbound marketing best practices. Feel free to connect with Grant Tilus on Twitter and Google+.

What Is Perfect in Business Thinking?

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Stardards Are Agreed and Repeatable.

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When I was in publishing, I spent a lot of time with editors, designers, marketers, sales reps, finance folks, and C-Suite executives. Each of them had different goals for success. Each had different ideas of what drives a successful business. Almost all of them wanted to do a great job for the company and for themselves.

But young product designers and builders that I worked with often had unrealistic aspirations and goals. They set a standard for the products they worked on. Their standard was that the products be perfect.

A standard is an agreed, repeatable way of doing something.

Perfect isn’t a standard. Perfect isn’t a repeatable way of doing anything.
Just as important, they would have been hard pressed to get the rest of the company to agree to their definition of perfect.

That idea of a perfect product worked against them.

What Is Perfect?

Those designers desperately would explain how to design the perfect product. Meanwhile, the sales reps, finance folks, and C-Suite executives each had their own definition of what perfect means in that context.

Perfect is in the eye of the beholder —

  • to the product builders — a writer, editor, illustrator, coder, programmer — a perfect product is structurally sound, without error, and elegant
  • to the designers a perfect product is aesthetically pleasing, easy to use, elegant
  • to the marketers a perfect product is new, compelling, and innovative
  • to the sales reps the perfect product is one that sells and stays sold
  • to the finance folks, a perfect product sells and makes money at the same time
  • to the C-Suite executives a perfect product seems to be one that does all of those things
  • to the only ones who count — the customers — a perfect product meets their needs, makes their lives easier, faster/simpler, or more meaningful.

Clearly the idea of perfect wasn’t the same from one team to another. Perfection is experience and perception, not a standard.

What Is Perfect in Business Thinking?

A quest for perfect is unattainable. What perfect judge would decide when we’ve succeeded?

The stress of perfection makes us less human. Our flaws and foibles, expertise and experience round out our thinking and define our appeal as unique beings. Perfect in business thinking is both strong with vulnerable. It takes wonderfully imperfect humans to truly connect a business to its customers.

It doesn’t matter whether our offer is a product or a service. If we focus on the work, it’s easy to forget the people. Yet, we’re do the work to attract, connect with, and serve people. Solid business thinking defines perfect work by how well it delivers value.

We can build in shiny bells and whistles that we decide will make our work perfect. If the folks we’re serving don’t see, need, or want the noisemakers we’ve built in, we’re not adding value. We’re adding cost — our time and energy to build them, their time and energy to avoid and ignore the ringing and whistling. (Unless they miss them completely, which is benign, but still a drain on our resources.

There’s no such thing as a perfect product. Even if we could achieve one, I’d go for the a product that attracts, delights, and serves customers. If a product serves the customer exactly as the customer wants and needs it to … To me that is perfect in business thinking.

When the next project comes — or even as your move forward on this one — here are a few imperfect suggestions that will get you closer to perfectly satisfying those customers …

  1. Unravel any rigid definitions of a perfect outcome to make room for new thinking. Don’t confuse wrong and different.
  2. Remember that perfect isn’t about you. Don’t define what’s perfect for customers. Let them tell you.
  3. Ask questions. Ask the people you serve to describe their “perfect” outcome. Do this before, during, and after a project. Do it often when you’ve encountered a problem.
  4. As you gather information from the people you serve, use it to set a true standard. Then live UP to it. An agreed upon, repeatable, and predictable standard makes business easier, faster, and more meaningful.
  5. Pay attention and keep tweaking until you’ve aligned your goals with your customers. Do more of what works. Stop what doesn’t.

Don’t try for perfect work. Like the young product builders and designers, any definition of perfect work will be flawed if leaves out customers. Perfect work in business thinking is outcomes and solutions that fit your customers’ needs as they see them. Show up consistently with generosity and your best reasoning. Be outstanding at seeing, hearing, and responding to people.

Make things easier, simpler, and more meaningful. Your work will be better than perfect. It will be irresistible.
And that’s perfectly appealing.

What’s your definition of perfect in business thinking?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Blogging Tools of Engagement that Attract Attention

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How to blog series

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Grace Nasri

6 Tools of Engagement

There are currently billions of webpages indexed across the world today; as the number grows, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate one blog from another. The six sites below have created tools to help bloggers increase engagement, attract attention, and differentiate their blog from the rest.

1. FindTheBest’s Interactive Widgets: Adding interactive widgets to blog posts is one of the best ways to drive user engagement and increase time spent on your site. FindTheBest () a data-driven comparison engine, offers hundreds of product and service widgets to enhance posts and reviews. The interactive and customizable widgets (http://www.findthebest.com/widgets) have an added bonus of being monetizable—bloggers receive 100 percent of all affiliate revenue.

2. Visual.ly’s Infographics: Infographics have grown in popularity over the past year, partially because it’s easier for most people to consume and retain information presented in the form of an image or graphic rather that pure data or text. Visual.ly allows bloggers to create customized infographics for their blogs. Other sites like Stat Planet, Tableau and ManyEyes are starting to pop up that make it easy to build customized infographics.

3. Flickr’s Photos: Posts with photos, graphics or other illustrations not only look more enticing, but they can also drive traffic from image searches; when photos are saved with relevant keyword tags, they will show up in an image search and when a user clicks on the image, they will be taken to the affiliated blog. In addition to Flickr, sites like WikiMedia’s commons and Google’s image search are also great sites to find relevant images and graphics, but be sure that the licensing allows for republishing.

4. Pixlr’s Photo Editing Software: For bloggers who don’t have Photoshop but want tools to be able to edit their photos before posting to their blog, Pixlr’s Editor provides online photo editing tools for free.

5. Vimeo’s Videos: People consume and digest data through different formats and channels, while some are more drawn to text and data, others find video content more engaging. Sites like Vimeo make it easy to upload, share and post videos. But Vimeo isn’t the only video sharing site. Site like Blinkx, Vimeo, UStream and YouTube are some other great places to find engaging videos relevant to your blog post.

6. SpeakerText’s Video Transcription Service: Video content, while highly engaging, is not easily searchable by search engines. Video transcription services like SpeakerText specialize in transcribing the content on your video, which helps search engines index your content.

Maybe you’re using one or more of these already. Try the rest. Keep alert for tools that will raise the engagement on your blog.

What tools of engagement fuel your blog?

Author’s Bio:
Grace Nasri is the managing editor at FindTheBest, a data-driven comparison engine. Her articles have been published in The Huffington Post, Reuters, VentureBeat, The Street, Technorati, Asia Times and more. You can see a full list of her articles at GraceNasri.com and can find her on Twitter as @GraceNasri

 

5 Important Reasons to Hire Professional SEO Services

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Prarthana Majumdar

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5 Important Reasons to Hire Professional SEO Services

When you take your business online, it becomes vital to hire professional SEO services. It is the SEO experts who take care of optimizing your website to search engine requirements. That will help you achieve the boost in traffic that gets search engines to move you forward in their listings.

Here are 5 important reasons to hire professional SEO services:

  1. Professional SEO services are designed to increase the visibility of a website and facilitate in better traffic flow along with improved profit sales return.
  2. SEO professionals take the help of various SEO tools and techniques like keywords analysis, link building, on-page, off-page SEO, directory submission etc. in order to increase your webpage ranking in search indexes.
  3. A website can rely on a professional SEO service to make choices that generate quality and relevant traffic.
  4. Using the right set of keywords suggested by a professional SEO service will work in attracting related traffic flow to a website.
  5. Link building, another essential aspect of professional SEO services, can seriously increase the popularity of a website among the top search engines.

Make sure that you choose these services from cost-effective and affordable SEO service.

Author’s Bio:
Prarthana Majumdar is an expert SEO writer with considerable years of experience. This article has been solely written to provide you with an expert SEO solution and guide. To learn more on these SEO topics like professional SEO services and affordable SEO service visit his website.

Where Might You Find Business Opportunity in the Healthcare Industry ?

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Make Money in Healthcare? You need not be a Physician Anymore

The growing popularity and demand for different healthcare products and services has made healthcare industry a safe and lucrative option for most businessmen. You need not just be a physician for making money in health care.

If you study the healthcare industry, you’ll know its amazing rate of growth. Read along to know how and why you should really invest in the health industry.

What Comprises the Healthcare Industry?

Healthcare is a vast industry comprising of provision of medical products, equipment, and services. These help in protecting, extending or increasing the quality of a person’s life. The industry consists of a network of interrelated providers with various areas of expertise, all coordinated to varying degrees to keep you healthy.

According to Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), healthcare industry can be classified into the following two categories:

  1. Pharmaceuticals, Biotechnology and Life Sciences
  2. Health care services and equipment

Healthcare industry is a complex interrelated system which encompasses different things right from stethoscope manufacturer, physician, pharmacy to medical technicians and a lot more.

Where Might You Find Business Opportunity in the Healthcare Industry?

We are living in a health-conscious society, where everything comes down to good health. There are a number of different reasons that have led to increase in healthcare expenses. Some of these reasons have been listed below:

1. Increase in awareness
According to recent researches, the most searched topic on Internet is love, which is closely followed by topics such as beauty, fitness and health. Healthcare industry is evolving rapidly, and more than being seen as a crisis, it is now being taught as a way of life. Recent researches have shown a significant increase in health care expenses, which has further boosted healthcare industry. This awareness has led to growth in sales and demand of multi-vitamin tablets, supplements, herbalife products etc.

2. Aging Population
Venerable members of our ever-increasing society are another reason that has led to increase in healthcare expenses. It has been estimated that for the next 19 years, 10,000 individuals would be turning 65 every day! This means that by 2030, the percentage of population over former retirement age would have grown from 13% to 18%. The elderly people avail medical services more frequently as compared to other people.

3. Unhealthy Lifestyles
Though there has been an increase in awareness about importance of good health, people are largely afflicted by poor lifestyle oriented diseases. There has been an increase in sedentary lifestyles and the fast food fad has led to binge-eating. Unfortunately in most developed countries like the US, 65% of adults are overweight. It has also been observed that only 31% adults exercise on a regular basis, and 50% of kids exercise enough.

The increased stress levels and other unhealthy lifestyle habits have also led to increase in risk and diagnosis of diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity. With average life expectancies now approaching 80 years, the health care industry has many reasons to expand!

4. Recession-Proof Industry
Unlike other industries, the health industry remains relatively undisturbed by variations in economy. People need health care services, even during times of economic slowdown, and this industry is believed to keep growing. Such a safe and lucrative option is undoubtedly excellent for most entrepreneurs.

Where Might You Do Business in HealthCare Industry?

Increase in medical and healthcare expenses has been one change which has been constant in the past few years. The constant aspect of this change has been the continuous increase in health care expenses.

Most entrepreneurs have been working hard to find better solutions to old problems, and launch new businesses. The aging and unhealthy population in today’s world has burdened healthcare system, which has led to increased demand, expenditure and scope for businesses in heath care sector.

The consistently increasing expenses of healthcare have been identified by most entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs then later came up with franchise options along with new and innovative ways to make profit from this massive and complex health industry. Some areas emerging out from this competent healthcare industry are:

  • Health IT – Information technology is undoubtedly the backbone of health care industry in today’s world. There are innumerable entrepreneurial opportunities in health care IT field. Entrepreneurs today are working to create new programs and systems for electronic health recordings. N ew machines and innovative technologies are needed in operating rooms and doctor’s office. Ambitious entrepreneurs also look out for lucrative opportunities in fields of preventative care, nurse-care facilities, or nurse-managed clinics. As millions of dollars in incentives and a wide range of federal funding are available for solid offers in these areas, these fields are a potentially lucrative business option for serious entrepreneurs.
  • Concierge Healthcare – Another health care trend that has recently come up is the Concierge Healthcare trend. The concierge healthcare system helps most people evade long waits to get appointments or waste time in waiting rooms. Most people are willing to pay extra money for extra convenience. Doctors now provide on-call medical care, same day appointments, and even house calls. It is another lucrative business opportunity for most entrepreneurial.
  • Domestic Medical Tourism – Most insurance companies are aware that medical costs and quality of care can have some dramatic variations between various hospitals. Many entrepreneurial opportunities can open up for medical firms if they come up with competitive domestic travel programs.

    • Revolutionary changes can occur, if consumers are empowered with more choice, control and convenience.

    Make sure you start off any new health care venture only after studying the market properly and researching well.

    Author’s Bio:
    Priyanka Iyer writes about benefits of good health, herbalife products and skin care. If not writing she is busy with her books, dance classes and travel jaunts.

    Blogging Tips: Finding Your Voice

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    How to blog series

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    Rob Pell

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    Why Is Finding Your Voice Important?

    If you’re just starting out, it’s difficult to know how to address your audience. From the first instance, that audience won’t actually exist; you will need to build it gradually over time. This makes it even harder, how are you supposed to know how to speak to someone if you don’t yet know who you’re speaking to?

    This why finding your voice is important. The specifics of who you are addressing or talking to do not matter; what matters is finding a voice that suits your style, subject matter and personality.

    Personality

    Writing a blog is not the same as producing news copy. You might be writing a blog about a very recent or developing event and so are tempted to write it in a ‘newsy’ style: don’t, newswriting is a stilted, stripped back and very artificial style of writing. It is used to give the reader the information in the most clear and concise way possible, with little elaboration other than what is necessary.

    Try to resist the trap of falling into a newswriting style because once you’re in it’s difficult to get out of. We’ve all read the papers and seen news broadcasts; we know all about ‘the news’ register. If you start your blog post with something along the lines of “Soft drinks giant Pepsi have announced record breaking profits following the release of…” you will very quickly get locked in to that newsy style.

    The audience of a blog is looking for something more than just news; they require personality, rather than the cold and clinical form of news copy. Let this shine through; sprinkle your copy with opinion and comment; use a conversational tone; drop in clauses like “I don’t know about you but…” or “my thoughts on the subject are…” and give your writing the space it requires to breathe.

    Structure

    Of course a blog post does have its own duties to fulfill. For example, it must be interesting and informative. When you begin a post, note down the different points you want to cover beforehand and plan a structure which allows you to retain your personality and conversational tone without resorting to a banal listing of the facts.

    Planning in this way will give your work structure and life and will allow you to tailor your article towards a specific outcome. It also keeps the blog sharp and concise and allows you to avoid losing your way as can happen when we become absorbed in our writing.

    You will want to include your key phrases in your blog, but do not over do it with these. The primary thing to maintain is your blog’s quality; as long as it is engaging, informative and fun to read you will retain a good core audience. If your blog posts have awkward key phrases shoehorned in all over the place, are difficult to read or are nonsensical, it doesn’t matter how good your SEO tactics are, you are going to lose any new audience members you bring in for the simple reason that your page just isn’t up to scratch.

    Finally, always remember to enjoy your blogging. This is paramount and will shine through in your writing.

    What helps you find your voice, the voice that connects with your audience?

    Author’s Bio:
    Rob Pell is a technology enthusiast, all round geek and happy employee of Simplifydigital, the UK broadband, digital TV and home phone experts. Simplifydigital are accredited by Ofcom and provide independent consumer advice on digital services.