Tag Archives: marketing

Free eBooks To Jump Start Your Business

Here are some free ebook resources to help jump start your business or your marketing of it.  I’m reviewing some different ways of storing your ebooks and best ways of reading them.  I started out by putting that info in this post but decided that some of you who collect ebooks just like to do it on your computers and are not into tech gadgets or eReaders.  So here it is, plain and simple, business books you may want to select from and add to your collection:

Getting Online Business Start Up

Getting Online – Starting Your Blog

money making niche sites with wordpress

How to Develop Money Making Niche Web Sites With WordPress

Social Media For Marketing

Social Media For Marketing Social Media for Small Business by Duct Tape Marketing is also giving away their own ebook on using social media for marketing.
Social Media for Small Business

Internet Marketing and Traffic

Marketing

Working from Home

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Marketing With Free Ebooks

Book cover of

Book cover via Amazon

I want to share with you a couple of books you definitely want to read, for their marketing content, as well as for a couple of templates on how to market by giving away ebooks.

The latest project by marketing guru Seth Godin project is Tribes.  This book explores the idea of tribes and how leaders “lead” in today’s world. One of the many ways he’s marketing it is by giving way an ebook about it:

“The Tribes Q&A ebook is here and it’s free

Qacover Dozens of volunteers, working together, put together this ebook:

Download TribesQA2.pdf

[last one didn't work... try the link above. Sorry.]
Yours to share or print or email, but please don’t sell it or change it.

Not only is there a juicy insight on every page, but I’m comfortable saying it’s the best designed PDF I’ve ever seen, worth making into a template for your next project.

Enjoy it.”

Social Media for Small Business by Duct Tape Marketing is also giving away their own ebook on using social media for marketing.

Social Media for Small Business“You know I’m a big fan of the use of social media for marketing a small business. Having said that, I’m really a fan of social media done right for small business. That means that some of the tools won’t be right for you, the ways others use some of the tools won’t be right for you, but the power contained in the new way people expect to communicate – and therefor you must learn to communicate – is something that every small business must come to understand.

Standing out and marketing a business takes work, but many of the social media tools make that work much easier and, for the small business that gets that, creates a tremendous competitive advantage. In my ongoing effort to help small businesses understand, prioritize and use social media tools, I teamed with Microsoft Office Live Small Business on a new very practical e-book called Let’s Talk: Social Media for Small Businesses. It is available for download for FREE.


Becky McCray at Small Business Survival suggests adding value on the back of your business card by including a conversation starter, such as offering something for free related to your business.  In this instance she’s offeringa free ebook on the back of her card.
Add value on the back

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Network To Promote Yourself, Your Product Or Service To “The Hidden Job Market”

An example of a social network diagram.

Image via Wikipedia

Yes, Virginia, there is a “hidden job market”. Reports estimate that as many as 85% of jobs aren’t advertised. Networking is one way to get at the “hidden job market” , those unadvertised jobs.

First, understand there are all levels of networking.

Level 1.  As Joan Runnheim recommends: Tell everyone you know that you are looking for a job. They just may know of someone who is hiring. Develop a contact list including: family, friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, co-workers, former co-workers, neighbors, doctors, dentists, and lawyers. If you live in a large city, chances are you can find a job search support/networking group to attend. Remember, more contacts equals more job opportunities.

Level 2. Get involved with organizations and non-profits where you can be helpful and highlight your skills at the same time.  Listen carefully to others’ needs. “Try to understand what others see as your value proposition. Take the initiative and volunteer advice, knowledge or other valuable information first, without being asked to do so. Once you have demonstrated that you can provide value, “says Executive recruiter William Werksman, ears will perk up.  You will begin to be on people’s radar.  You never know who in that group might need someone with your demonstrated skills, either now or sometime in the future. Once you make a contact, nurture it.  Stay in contact. Try to be helpful when called upon.  The more you can demonstrate your ability, the more likely someone will recognize it as a “must have” for their organization.

Level 3. To ratchet the game up a notch, more power comes when you tap into an existing network.  As you know there are all kinds of existing networks, and by now you should have tapped into many of them: your own professional network, all varieties of business networks, leadership networks such as those run by United Way or your Chamber of Commerce or high profile non-profits which call on movers and shakers in a community.

Joan Runnheim, M.S., founder of Pathways Career Success Strategies, a career consultant, gives her views on networking and marketing yourself in Career Success Through Self-Marketing – AdvancingWomen.com

“Marketing shouldn’t be limited to advertising companies. Finding a job or enhancing your current position requires good self-marketing skills. What is self-marketing? Basically, self-marketing is communicating your benefits to potential or current employers. Think of yourself as a “product” and explain to employers what differentiates you from other “products.”

Why is self-marketing important? Landing a job or improving your current position requires effectively selling your skills, abilities, and knowledge to employers.  You can’t sell yourself if you don’t get out there and meet people or tap into much larger networks which will get the word out about your value.

Today is a good time to start.

To read this entire article go to Career Success Through Self-Marketing – AdvancingWomen.com – Careers-Employment.

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Finding A Product To Sell Online – Don’t Marry It, Test It

The :en:headquarters of :en:eBay in :en:San Jo...

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Just because a product sells like gangbusters on someone else’s site, don’t assume it will sell on yours.  Your product has to fit in with your overall expertise and what your site is about in order for people to go there and look for it, much less buy it.

Even if a product fits your site and its personality like a hand in a glove, don’t assume it will sell.  The pricing may not be right, the market may be saturated, the stars may not line up right.  Who knows why some things sell on any particular site and others don’t?  You can’t be clairvoyant: you’re not a mind reader, you’re a web marketer.  Everyone has 20/20 hind sight.  That’s why the best plan is to just put up a product and test it out.  It either sells or it doesn’t.  Sometimes you can tweak it…tweak the price, tweak the offer.  But often people just aren’t interested in buying that product from your site and that’s all you really need to know.  And there’s a very simple way to figure this out.
Whether you wish to sell ads related to your content, or join an affiliate marketing program or sell your own products on your site or on Amazon or eBay, there are a lot of moving parts to get right on a website and you will need to make a lot of right choices along the way.  The way to do this is by testing: testing ad placement and color, testing content, testing product categories, testing various suppliers and vendors, testing affiliate marketing programs to see which ones work for you.

Those who take the time to test everything they are doing are the ones who eventually become successful in whichever field they choose.

I can’t begin to tell you how many things I’ve tested.  I’ve tested travel, which I thought might be convenient for business customers: zero.  I’ve tested business ebooks: nothing.  I’ve tested many, many products, all of which came to nada, nothing. Even in  the two core revenue producers on the AdvancingWomen.com site, advertising and employment recruiting, I’ve been through a dozen morphing and transfiguration experiments, starting with Doubleclick Ads, from the day they were born, to some new European ad company which sweet talked me into believing they were going to take the Net by storm, but all they did was truly anemic revenues and give me one more learning experience.  All this was before I morphed my way into a successful combination of Google ads, text ads sold from my site, and some proprietary ad networks. It just took time and testing.

Same with a Job Board or employment recruiting facet of our site at Careers.AdvancingWomen.com.  I was a part of every one of what seemed like a half dozen permutations of what eventually became CareerBuilder.com. That was ok for pocket change. What I began to realize was that big job boards who wanted you as an affiliate wanted the demograhic you had captured but in no way wanted to promote your site, and why should they, as they would be creating their own competition?  Basically they were getting the benefit of your traffic and assuring that you didn’t compete with them or join another competing job board like Monster.com. It worked pretty well  for them, but not necessarily so well for you. Ultimately, I was able to start Careers.AdvancingWomen.com , our own job board which guaranteed a.) I would be building my own brand and therefore an asset I could invest in and  b.) I would not be giving up 50% of the revenue up front.  It just took a lot of testing to arrive at a successsful combination of revenue streams to support the business.

There are many product testing examples as well. Mom-and-pop team Cheryl and Gary Casper started small, like many do on eBay, first looting their own garage, even snatching up VHS copies of their daughter’s Cinderella and Sleeping beauty then moving on to sell their neighbor’s cast offs.

As they learned about online auctions and particularly the eBay environment, the Caspers moved on up the selling food chain.    They now sell $15,000 to $20,000 a month in goods on eBay.

How did they do it?  Trial and error.

After their home started overflowing with neighbor’s cast off products, the Caspers turned to drop-shippers–companies that charge others to sell their products then ship directly to buyers. Although this looked good at first – removing the risk of buying the merchandise, the inconvenience of storing it and the hassle of shipping it—there were definite drawbacks. The Caspers were selling about 40 TVs a week but about half of those arrived damaged at the customer’s home.  The Caspers needed more control over the quality of the product which was shipped to the customer.  They also set out to identify a product category which was less crowded and more profitable than electronics on eBay.

The couple used eBay itself as a research tool, and began going to Chamber of Commerce meetings to find people or companies with products to sell.  They discarded many possible products including Star Wars light sabers and gumball machines.

Ultimately the Caspers decided on auto floor mats, an item with as much as 75 percent profit margins, even after paying the dealer.  The Caspers put as many as 50 mats up on eBay, at $16 to $125 each. Once or twice a week, They buy the mats they’ve sold from a Houston-based auto surplus company.

“If I only wanted to make a few hundred dollars a day, I’d be done by noon,” says Cheryl.

So, the  best advice is probably to use  your common sense to figure out what would be a good product or service for your site to offer.  Don’t spend an excessive amount of time trying to ponder all the variables.  Just put it up.  If it makes money, keep it, if it doesn’t drop it.  That’s the benefit of testing.  Oh, and if it makes money, expand it. That’s the road to success.

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Art Of The Incremental: Start With Your Core Competency

A pair of aces is arguably the best hand to be...

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I’m all about the art of the incremental. For one thing, that’s what bootstrapping is and I am inveterate bootstrapper.  I recommend it to you as well.

Entrepreneurs have been doing this for centuries: starting from where they are with what they’ve got and seeing what works.  This is a time- tested process: if you want to start a business you do two things:

1. Analyze the true nature of your unique assets and core competencies to figure out how they can become a basis for a business.

2. Try small, low stakes testing in the actual marketplace to determine what actually works.  Do more of what works and cut the losers. Keep doing low stakes testing and raise the ante on the winners. ( Didn’t I tell you my very successful father insisted I learn to play poker because it was like the game of business?  It’s not about the cards you are dealt but how you place your bets.  You fold on bad cards and quietly build the pot on the sure winning hands.)

As you practice the art of the incremental , you will be learning your business from the ground up and you will soon learn when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.  But, my advice, is to start small and build gradually

Author Diane Helbig has some helpful thoughts on this as well in Keep Your Message Simple | Small Business Trends. She says:

“No doubt you’ve heard the term ‘core competency.’ It refers to that which a company or person does best.

The best way to build a business is to start out offering only what you do best.

Why? For a couple of reasons:

  1. It gives you one thing to focus on; to build a marketing message around.
  2. It helps you define your target market – those people who need that thing.
  3. It helps others land on who you are and what you offer.

In short, it provides clarity. It keeps you and your prospects from getting confused.

Too often small business owners try to offer everything under the sun. They think there’s value in being a one-stop shop and they’re afraid that if they don’t offer more things they’ll miss out on business.

Set yourself up for success by starting out simply. Focus on the thing you do best and market that product or service to that target market. Build your business from the foundation of your core competency.

Once you’ve established your company as a solid entity, you can add products or services and develop a menu of offerings. Be sure to add things that make sense – things that go along with your core product or service.”

How will you know what products or services to offer? Unless your customers have been asking for a particular product or service from you, you probably won’t know.  You will have to rely on small scale testing.  As someone once put it, “Starve the problems; feed the opportunities.”  Or, take a close look, then, as my father would say, “Know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.”

Let us hear from you.  Tell us your start up experiences.  Have you learned “the art of the incremental”?  How did you do it?”

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Don’t Raise Money – Bootstrap A Niche Market Online

This is the third in a series on financing your business.  But this time we’ll discuss starting small, counting your pennies, inching your way up, (commonly called “boot strapping”, pulling yourself up by your boot straps) until you are making a profit.

Martha Stewart at a 2006 Cynthia Rowley fashio...

Entrepreneur Martha Stewart Image via Wikipedia

One way to do this, with low barriers to entry, ie. not much money to start, is to launch an online business in a niche market. Many entrepreneurs are willing to risk their careers and their homes and work until they drop in order to own their own business. The problem is there are a lot of really big players with billion dollar pocket books chasing the same markets. What to do? One answer is to think small, or at least smaller. Consider a “niche” market.

Defining Your Niche

First you have to discover what your niche should be. One way to approach this is to zero in on what niche you would excel in, which would make the most of your own special knowledge and talents. Just as Martha Stewart started by baking and catering out of her home kitchen and with a flair for elegant living, not to mention superhuman drive and perfectionism, and Debra Fields’ had her cookie recipe, you probably have your own unique talents, interests and aptitudes,if you look deep enough. It may be found in your ability with graphics, or your talent for getting an office organized or inspiring people to join your project. Being smart about specific,marketable things has value; it is “the raw material from which financial results are produced”. Taking a hard,objective look at yourself, assembling a knowledge and skills inventory, allows you to find your particular niche, something you do better even than others in your same field. It is a way of narrowing and refining your niche so you can focus on only those things you do best and know more about than those around you. This should tell you also what niche market you should target.

Sometimes this happens in a more evolutionary way. You set up a dot com on the Net to sell books and the next thing you know, Amazon.com turns into Godzilla, about to stamp you under his giant foot. Do you stand there, stare Amazon.com in the eye and go head to head in combat? You do no such thing. You think through your best niche and move a step in that direction. Let’s say you start marketing rare old books. If Amazon.com moves in that direction, you start marketing rare old books on Texana, a quite profitable business, believe it or not. In other words, you keep moving another step away from the center of the market. And eventually you’ll find a niche which is too small for Amazon.com but may be specialized enough so that it requires considerable expertise for entry. And that’s what you have to dig deep into yourself to find… the area you can execute better than most people, a market too small for the giants, but extremely profitable, perhaps because you have the field almost to yourself.

Using the niche concept, you have positioned yourself for success. Build a reputation and the giants may even send people your way for products they don’t stock.

And there are other benefits in a niche market business model:

Financing

You won”t need as much money.

After you’ve exhausted the savings you’ve set aside to sustain you in the beginning, hit on your family and friends first, just not too much. You want to be able to look your mother or your sister in th eye when you go other to holiday dinners.

Don’t try to play with the big boys too soon. Prove up one part of your plan at a time. Start small, keep building, look good before you go to your bank or your first real investor.

(See
Start Your Own Small Business Using More Ingenuity, Less Cash

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The Net….And The Telephone….Don’t Use Any Gas

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The Telephone Doesn’t Use Any Gas | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing.

Our old pal and electronic mentor,  Duct Tape Marketing, posts this good tip about conserving time, energy and money while maximizing results:

“Technology and data speed advances have made the use of web meeting technology a no brainer for even the smallest of businesses. In the fast paced world we live in, the ability to get a group of folks together online is such a powerful way to conduct business.

As more and more folks use this technology (and with $4/gl gas) it even starts to make sense for the local business to conduct meetings across town. Think about how many times you have jumped in the car, driven 30 minutes to make a 10 minute presentation, chit chatted for another 20 minutes, jumped back in the car for another 30 minutes and, let’s see – invested 90 minutes in that 10 minute presentation. As you utilize web and other tools such as web collaboration tools and teach your customers to use them as well, your effectiveness and efficiency will soar.”

The post goes on to mention all the webinar or webcast technology tools available and suggested ways to use them such as Interview An Expert and Peer To Peer Seminar.  For the complete post go to The Telephone Doesn’t Use Any Gas

AdvancingWomen has it’s own ways of conserving time and energy using Net tools.  We use CentralDesktop.com a collaborative platform that let’s us work with our partners or colleagues throughout the U.S. and in a number of other countries.  We are all looking at, uploading, updating the same project management tools, including Milestones, Tasks and Documents.  There’s a webinar feature which we haven’t personally used yet on that particular system, although we’ve had a number of training Webinars on WebEx regarding our Job Board and some other aspects of our website. And we do use  Skype from time to time, since there are some colleagues who prefer being up close and personal and seeing us via webcam when we talk.  ( I have a feeling many of us, particularly women, might feel we have to be a bit more presentable than we sometimes are in the middle of a harried day at the office, to be seen on camera, and often across the globe to people we may never had met in person.  None the less, a moment of sprucing up does the trick, and it’s well worth it to make a more personal connection with a colleague, all without paying for an ounce of gas, much less a flight ticket.)

If you have other tips on using the web to save time and money, please share.

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3 Strategies to Market Your Business In Tough Times

AdvanicngWomen.com Career

Many small and home based businesses know they need to market and yet, have little or no money to do so. But don’t ever let this be an excuse not to market. Even on a limited budget you can promote and gain visibility for you and your business.  In fact, in tough times, marketing becomes both your flotation device and high intensity beacon, keeping you afloat and putting out a signal where you are and how to find you, attracting whatever business remains out there to head your way.

The following three strategies have proven extremely effective for countless businesses as they can for you.

1.Press Releases - Very effective and they offer a great deal of credibility when published. You must have a well written release that is pertinent to the media source you are sending it to. You can distribute press releases both online and off.

A quick Internet search under media resources in your city will bring up radio, television, newspapers and magazines in your area. To find online resources do a search under “free online press release distribution.” Here is one list  of Free Press Distribution sites although a few of them may now charge.

PR Leap does charge now, from $49 -$149 depending on the types of features you want.  However, what AdvancingWomen.com likes about PR Leap is that is somewhat less expensive and gets you exposure in social media sites like Twitter and Delicious with embedded video and tags. You also can include images, PDFs, and MP3s.  It hits the big news services like AP and UP; its releases are sometimes on the front page of Google News, and the releases go to book marking sites Delicious, Digg, reddit, and Stumbleupon.  In other words, instead of focusing just on print media,  PR Leap ( and possibly some of the others)  is very Net savvy and social networking friendly. That is something you should look for.

Next. Before you sit down to write your press release you need to figure out a couple of things like:
-Who is your target market?
-What is your target media?
-Who is the contact person at the media outlet
-Do you have an attention-grabbing headline?

You can get some help on writing a press release from the following sources:
Publicity Insider, How To Write A Press Release

And a professional press release template is at Duct Tape Marketing.

2. Articles – Writing articles is a great way to gain recognition as an expert in your field or specific industry. By providing practical information, you can reach targeted audiences. You can also gain a lot of links and traffic to your own website. This can create  opportunities for you and your business.

3. Presentations - One of the most effective ways to market your product or service is to offer a complimentary information seminar. When you provide great information that is of interest to your market you have become a resource before you are a vendor.

By positioning yourself as a resource you are marketing in a very unique way.

Hosting a presentation can be virtually expense free. You can offer to do a presentation at a staff meeting for a client. Many large companies have brown bag lunch speaking opportunities.

You can host a meeting open to the public at your local library. Be sure to send press releases to the local media when you are offering a presentation open to the public.

Many associations, including your local Chamber of Commerce, are constantly seeking presenters who can provide timely and content driven talks that benefit their members.

When you apply one of the three recommendations to your marketing mix you definitely will benefit. When you apply all three the results can take you and your business to the next level.

For the original article go to AdvanicngWomen.com Career

Contributors: AdvancingWomen.com, and Kathleen Gage author of  FREE eBook Street Smarts eMarketing Tips Guaranteed to Jump Start Your Internet Presence to Put You Miles Ahead of the Competition http://www.streetsmartsmarketing.com/free-ebook.htm


Go to Your Edge and Push Past It

Go to Your Edge and Push Past It | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing.

AdvancingWomen.com talks quite a bit about putting yourself out there, recognizing the edge of your comfort zone and reaching deep inside yourself to summon all your resources and move beyond it to the next level.  It is not a single act, it is an ongoing process, like exercise to become more fit. So we are in complete agreement with author  John Jantsch who posted this excellent advice on pushing past your edge:

“There is a thread that runs through most Eastern spiritual practices, such as Yoga or meditation, that urges the practitioner to go to the edge of comfort and push just past it before returning. The idea behind this is that the place you push to becomes your new edge for the next time.

Personally I think this notion applies very well to the small business and marketer.

One of the best practices you can adopt in growing your business is to continually look to marketing strategies and tactics that make you uncomfortable and then add them to the mix. Since marketing doesn’t always come naturally to most small business owners this indeed can take intentional practice. The thing though about moving beyond your edge is that you don’t really need to know exactly how you are going to do it, you simply need to commit to doing it and breath.

Here are a few suggestions that you might consider.

  • Contact a local organization and offer to provide a workshop on something you are passionate about.
  • Contact an industry publication, including blogs, and offer to write a killer guest editorial or post
  • Contact an industry rockstar or journalist and request an interview for your podcast or blog
  • Contact a high profile talk show and pitch your killer trend story
  • Pull out a blank sheet of paper and create a list of goals that take your breath away

None of this is that hard by the way. It’s simply a decision. You can’t phone marketing in and expect to grow, you’ve got to go deeper and deeper, day by day, and push beyond your comfort edge.”

For more, see John Jantsch , Entrepreneur, Marketing Coach

7 Time-tested Ways to Dig Out from a Recession

7 Time-tested Ways to Dig Out from a Recession – from Duct Tape Marketing.

Take this medicine in case of “economic downturn”….. if you just need some extra mojo to get you revved up and going again.

The author says these seven strategies, applied effectively, can help you make your business recession proof and unswayed by the various and inevitable cycles in the economy. ( And Advancing Women agrees they sound like solid advice to get you moving and re-energized again.)

1) Partner with other businesses – Proactively creating strategic partnerships is a great way to generate new leads and build long-term momentum.

2) Reactivate past customers – Reach out to lapsed customers and make them an apology, promise to never ignore them again, and make them a smoking hot deal to come back.

3) Get out from behind the computer – Building personal relationships is always in style.  Make it a point to go to several industry conferences every year. . Go visit your customers and ask for referrals.

4) Speak at events, hold workshops – Marketing is essentially a trust building game. Few things build trust more efficiently than getting in front of a group of potential customers and sharing your expertise in an educational setting.

5) Fix your follow-up – lead generation and conversion is not a one shot deal. By automating your multiple follow-up messages, scheduling routine marketing touches and sending the occasional thank you, hand written note, you can stay top of mind when the buying and referral decisions are made. The longer the sales cycle for your industry or service the better your follow-up needs to be. There is so much that technology can do for you here, let it!

6) Repackage your products and services with offers to act – This goes along with differentiating really, but sometimes you’ve got to give that tired old dog a new look. Find simple ways to relaunch yourself, your people, your products, your services, your packaging, to give yourself a new start in your market. Make them an offer they can’t refuse, make it so bold they must rehear you.

7) Fix the marketing gaps – In every way, shape, and form that your business comes into contact with your prospects and customers it is performing a marketing function – good or bad. Make sure that every single contact is a performing a killer marketing function for your business.

Good times or bad, these 7 tips should always be the bedrock foundation of your business practices.  For the entire post, go to 7 Time-tested Ways to Dig Out from a Recession