Recent Articles
How to Make a Great Ad Campaign for Your New Product
Selling a product has never been more of a realistic goal for more of the population than it is now. Thanks to the development of technology it is now incredibly easy for anyone with an idea to make that idea a reality and to start selling their ideas as physical products. There are many avenues through which to do this, from using 3D printing to have designed cut out of material with lasers, to injection moulding and other forms of digital manufacturing.
Then, whether you decide to buy your product in bulk and sell it on at a profit, or to sell directly from the source using a print on demand service, all you need to do is to introduce your idea and you have a fully functional business that can make you a profit.
So these days, rather than the initial manufacturing, the most difficult part of the process is getting the word out and creating an audience. Of course the internet can help you here too though, and all you need to start generating sales is a good advertisement and the right PPC service.
But how do you make that ad campaign a success? Here we will look at some tips to help make your product sell as much as it deserves to…
Use a Professional
If you don’t have amazing design skills, then creating an advert yourself can be a bit of a challenge and often a mistake. This is an investment, and if you don’t put a little time and/or money in up front then your product just won’t sell. Keep this in mind then and be willing to track down someone who can do a really great job for you.
If you don’t have lots of cash this needn’t be a problem – just head over to a webmaster forum such as Digital Point or Warrior Forum, and then ask if anyone can provide the service for a cheap rate. You may be surprised to find that you can get an ad made for $10 or less. Otherwise you can try asking a friend or someone you know who happens to have a knack for design.
Alternatively if you do make the ad yourself, be sure to use the right software such as Photo Shop and to spend a lot of time making a high def image. Refer to other ads online for inspiration.
What to Include
In terms of the text to include you are now walking a fine line, and what’s important is that you include enough hype to make it sound tempting, but without lying or mis-sellling. Bear in mind that for a pay-per-click campaign you’re going to pay each time someone visits the page but one those who really want to be there are going to earn you profit in return. If you are ‘tricking’ people into clicking your ad, then your conversion rate will be low and your overheads will be unnecessarily high.
Instead then, include as much detail as possible – say the price even and precisely what it does – and this way you will only get clicks from people who are at least potentially wiling to spend that much money on your product.
The article is written by freelance writer Sara Brown, who has been in the field of writing since many years. He also writes for Berkeley Sourcing group, a plastic injection molding manufacturers for small business in California.
Facebook Marketing
6 Terms Every Facebook Marketing Professional Should Understand
Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising: How to Access 600 Million Customers in 10 Minutes
Facebook can be a very useful marketing platform for small businesses, but it comes with its own set of jargon that small-business ad buyers will quickly need to master. It’s important to understand what terms such as “reach and frequency,” “cost-per-click” and “impressions” mean in the context of Facebook Marketing.
In their book Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising: How to Access 600 Million Customers in 10 Minutes
Here is an excerpt from a feature in Entrepreneur covering this subject:
1. Impressions. Every time an ad is displayed, a user could potentially read the ad. Facebook calls that an impression; it’s an opportunity for someone to see your ad. For example, if an ad has 1.4 million impressions, then the ad had 1.4 million opportunities to be seen.
But that doesn’t mean 1.4 million separate people have had the chance to see the ad. The estimated reach for this ad is 200,000, the number of Facebook users who meet the criteria that the advertiser has selected for people the advertiser wants to see the ad.
If an ad has 1.4 million impressions and an estimated reach of 200,000 people, we know that, on average, each of those 200,000 people has had seven opportunities to see the ad.
Most people don’t click on an ad on the first impression. As users browse Facebook, moving from page to page, the same ads are displayed multiple times.
If the ad title is good and the ad image is compelling, the ad may capture a Facebook user’s attention and they may actually read the ad. If the user clicks on the ad, he is taken to a new destination specified by the advertiser. Facebook captures and reports the number of times all users have clicked on each ad.
One of the first questions everyone asks is “How well is my ad working?” There are many measures, but we’ll focus on whether the ad encourages users to click.
2. Click-through rates. Facebook reports how well an ad encourages a user to click, in a statistic called the click-through rate (CTR). This identifies how many impressions it takes, on average, before a user clicks on the ad. CTR is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. If your ad had 1,000 total impressions and users have clicked on the ad 10 times, then your CTR is 1%.
3. Landing pages. The page that is displayed after a user clicks on an ad is called a landing page. The advertiser specifies the landing page when the ad is created in a field called destination URL.
You can send a user who clicks on an ad anywhere that doesn’t violate Facebook’s landing page policies. You may send users to your own web page or you may send users to other locations within Facebook — such as a Facebook page, event, application or group.
4. Cost-per-click. Facebook does not display ads out of the goodness of its heart. It wants cold, hard cash. You have to provide a credit card before Facebook will even think of displaying your ad. Once it has your payment information, it lets you create an ad. During this process it asks if you want to bid for clicks or for impressions.
If you choose to bid for clicks, you will be charged only if a user clicks on the ad. You can specify the amount you are willing to pay for a click, the cost-per-click (CPC), starting at one cent per click. If you say that you are willing to pay a maximum of 45 cents for a click, then that is the most you will be charged for a click.
Technically, you are bidding on the ad space, against other unknown advertisers. Initially, the higher your bid, the more likely your ad will be displayed. After a few thousand impressions, additional factors affect the cost of your ad, including the click-through rate and whether users “like” or complain about your ad. The good new is that Facebook reserves the right to “lower the price” you pay per click, and usually does.
5. CPMs. You may also select to bid on impressions instead of clicks. In the Facebook interface, pay per view is labeled CPM, short for cost per thousand impressions. (Mille means 1,000 in Latin.) You can pay to have your ad displayed 1,000 times whether or not anyone clicks on it.
6. Reach and frequency. Ads display on Facebook multiple times to the same user. The number of individual people who have seen your ad during a specific period is called reach. The average number of times each individual user has seen your ad is frequency. But as the frequency gets high, you face ad fatigue. Even if the ad is excellent, your prospects stop clicking on it because they have grown tired of seeing it.
Perry Marshall and Thomas Meloche lift the curtain to the 600 million potential customers on Facebook. They seek to show you how to reach them, convert them, and keep them as your fan, friend, and customer for life. Do you agree it is a “Must Read” for anyone wanting to make a success of Facebook Marketing? Let us know by sending us your comments and observations in the Comments section below.
Why People Buy Online
In considering why people buy online it is important not to jump to conclusions when devising marketing strategies. Pitching to penny-pinching shoppers looking for the cheapest price won’t generate much of a profit, if indeed any profit. If you focus on them your business is highly unlikely to have much of a future. You will be on the road to insolvency in no time at all. Far better to look beyond the price when determining why people buy online. This excellent article by Steve Lindhorst, author of “Selling On The River” and “Amazon – The Quick And Dirty Guide” highlights one of the main reasons why people buy online, namely convenience:
Penny-pinching shoppers won’t help you earn much (if any) profit. So don’t give in to them. Don’t get into the habit of lowering prices just to grab a few quick sales. Competing on price hurts you and the market you’re selling in. It’s a losing proposition.
With gas at nearly $4 per gallon in the U.S. the fuel savings alone make people want to shop online. Do the math. If I saved the price of one gallon of gas per week for a year, I’d have around $200 extra to spend.
And think about the time. Driving from store to store to find things. Some people are realizing the benefits of doing all of their holiday shopping online. Even if they pay a little more than retail, they can still save money overall when considering the fuel costs, and the cost of the time involved.
You may have heard the recent news that Amazon is positioned to become a serious player in the home improvement market. With Amazon Prime, and Super-Saver Shipping, Amazon can provide next-day delivery in many cases. You can bet the buyers will weigh the convenience vs. cost and opt for convenience when they can just go online and get what they need, delivered to the front door.
As Steve rightly says, competing on price is not a smart strategy. Who doesn’t agree that applies to off-line as well as on-line businesses?
There are so many reasons – besides the price – that people buy online, we should never have to stoop to lower and lower prices.
Let the price-droppers have the next sale or two. They’ll sell out with little profit to re-stock. Then you can continue to charge a fair, market-based prices for your items.
But if you ever feel like your sales are sliding simply because your prices are too high, reflect on what you offer. Just think of the great service you provide for all of the procrastinating, nostalgic, secret-psycho-clowns of the world. Now that is real value.
You can read the rest of this excellent article here: http://www.multichannelsurfer.com/9-non-price-related-reasons-people-buy-online-9/
As well as convenience, Steve covers eight other reasons why people buy online which you can catch up on via the link to his article. Do yourself a favour and catch up with those reasons and resist that temptation to sell yourself and your business short with excessive use of loss leading offers. Don’t forget to send us your comments directly too, either here in the Comments box or through one of our Social Media platforms.
The Most Important Setting To Change From Default In WordPress
The most important setting to change from default in WordPress is the permalink for your post. If you fail to change this setting it will almost certainly guarantee failure when it comes to ranking in search results.
I love WordPress for many reasons. One of them is it’s simplicity to use, even for those of us who are “technophobes”.
The permalink is the URL which will appear for each post you publish on WordPress. The default setting is a number, eg https://21stcenturybusinessentrepreneur.com/?p=123 but if you leave this setting unaltered you are blowing a key element of how your page will rank on the search terms you’re aiming to be found for. If you’re in any doubt, take a look at this article which I recently featured on my Social Media pages: How Exact Match Domains Have Weathered the Penguin Storm. It’s on a slightly different subject but take a look at the title. You’ll see the subject neatly appearing in the URL. Then go on to read the article itself, if you still have any doubts about the importance of the URL including your subject title.
If you look at the URL for this post itself you see http://21stcenturybusinessentreprenur.com/the-most-important-setting-to-change-from-default-in-wordpress/. Decide for yourself whether that looks better than a group of numbers and symbols, but the new format will immediately tell visitors what the page is about before they click on it. Even more critically, the words in the URL will also be highlighted in search engine results if your post is relevant to the search query.
To change your permalinks all that’s required is a quick visit to the Settings >> Permalinks option. Then click the Custom Structure option and enter /%postname%/ From now on your page title will automatically appear in your URL title for that page, giving it both a much more professional appearance and massively transforming it’s potential for appearing high on the search engine rankings for that title.
If you want to further enhance this, shorten the post slug when you are writing an article, if you don’t want the URL to use all of the words in your title. All quite easy alterations but one’s which will massively boost your page’s prospects of being found. That’s why it’s the most important setting to change from default in WordPress. If you’ve any questions or comments, send them to me in the comments box below or through one of my Social Media pages. It will be great to hear from you.
Long Tail Keywords
It’s All About the Long Tail
By “long tail”, I’m referring to the typically longer keyword phrases that are very specific to what your website is selling and what people are looking for. These phrases differ from the more basic, primary keywords that are heavily searched (cleverly called the “head”). I’m certainly not referring to the primates at your local zoo!
For example:
| Head Keyword | Long Tail Keyword |
|---|---|
| mountain climbing | California mountain climbing tours |
| laundry detergent | environmentally-friendly laundry detergent |
| hardwood floors | recycled pine flooring |
| cribs | convertible wood baby cribs |
The long tail of keyword research is absolutely fundamental to your online success. Because they have less competition from other websites, long tail keywords give you a much better chance of ranking highly in the search engines – and that means more visibility for your website.
And here’s even better news: the people who search online using long tail keywords are far more likely to become buyers! These specific keywords trigger significantly higher conversions than general terms and phrases.
Something else that may surprise you: The long tail of a keyword represents a far greater number of searches than the head. In a 2008 report, Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, revealed that for any given topic, the top 100 keywords account for just 5.7% of all website traffic – while long tail keywords account for the remaining 94.3%!
Above: An illustration of the huge number of low competition, high conversion alternatives that can be found in the long tail of primary keywords.
So what does the long tail mean for you? Target a large number of long tail terms, and you can generate lots of highly targeted traffic. According to SEO expert Mark Nunney, “To be profitable, most websites must rank well for hundreds of thousands of keywords (I would say millions, but I don’t want to scare you!).”
Since there are so many potential long tail combinations that searchers may use to find what you offer, you’ll likely need to create more pages on your website. Luckily for you, Google – the world’s most popular search engine – loves sites with plenty of pages, and tends to reward them with higher rankings!
Are you the wiser now about long tail keywords? Let us know your views, plus any questions you might have, in the comments box below as we’d love to hear from you!
When Your Mentor’s Business Goes Bust
Most people would agree that if you want to succeed in business, then you need to have a great business mentor. But have you ever considered what would happen if your mentor’s business went bust. If you think that could never happen, then consider that has been the experience of some of the greatest businessmen. Richard Branson’s mentor, for instance, was Freddie Laker.
So what does actually happen when your mentor’s business goes bust, and more importantly what lessons are there to be learned?
Here’s a great little article I came across on this very subject by Mark Anastasi, author of The New York Times Bestseller The Laptop Millionaire: How Anyone Can Escape the 9 to 5 and Make Money Online
Here are Mark’s considered observations on this subject:
In the past few months, even as my own business has gone from strength to strength, I have observed:
– Mentor #1: lost £2 million pounds when the UK real estate bubble burst.
– Mentor #2: went from £3.75m a year to having just 300 pounds to his name, because of a nasty divorce.
– Mentor #3: lost 75% of his assets and became an alcoholic when his wife left him
– Mentor #4: is being accused of setting up a Ponzi scheme and defrauding investors of millions of euros
– Mentor #5: went from $10,000 a month in passive income to zero when Google introduced the ‘Penguin’ update and his sites disappeared from the search engines.Here are the 4 lessons I’ve taken from this:
1) Don’t be lazy. Don’t be greedy.
In almost every single case they got too greedy, and that proved to be their downfall.
If you are motivated by a sense of purpose, a mission that gets you excited about life, rather than just ‘doing it for the money’, you probably won’t experience these sorts of life ‘crashes’.2) Always add more value
My business has grown year after year for 8 straight years because I’ve kept creating content and events that people enjoy, value, and benefit from. Profits may not be stratospheric, but are consistent and sustainable.
Money is nothing but the measure of how much value you are creating for other people.
Or, like Brian Tracy says, ‘You get paid in direct proportion to the amount of value that you deliver according to the marketplace.’
Does your business mentor have a sustainable business model?3) Don’t rely on just a single source of income or traffic.
If your business is reliant exclusively on Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. you don’t have a business. Instead, use the Internet and these aforementioned websites to build a list of loyal fans, subscribers, and clients that want to do business with you over and over again, for years to come.
4) “Happy Wife, Happy Life!”
My South African friend Craig often reminds me of this saying. ‘Happy Wife, Happy Life!’
A loving and nurturing relationship, and having a supportive partner, can be the best asset on your quest for financial independence.Oh, and a fifth lesson:
What was it about my own mindset that attracted these specific individuals into my life?
Was it naivety? Is this part of growing up as a business owner? Or was it my own greed glands kicking in? Article In Full
Another standout probability of a mentor going bust, is the likelihood that they will rise again as the strength of the mentality that enabled them to originally rise to the top will still be there to help them rise again, albeit older and wiser. Freddie Laker after all, rose again after his spectacular fall, as have many others. As one of the lyrics in the well known Frank Sinatra song “That’s Life” puts it:
Each time I find myself flat on my face,
I pick myself up and get back in the race.
Hopefully the experience of your mentor’s business going bust is something that won’t happen to you and the better your mentor is, the less likely it is to happen. If it should happen then this article will help you to stay on track with your own goals. It would be good to have your own thoughts on this subject, especially if you’ve seen your own mentor’s business go bust.
Pinterest Marketing
Pinterest has been the hottest Social Media phenomena of 2012 and Pinterest Marketing for those who master it, is definitely a very hot online traffic source. Assuming you understand the basics of getting started on Pinterest, let’s take a closer look at the fundamentals to successful marketing on Pinterest.
One of the best articles to come to our attention is undoubtedly this one from Phil Stone in his article Pinterest Marketing- 3 Pinterest Marketing Strategies. Phil declares that the three primary Pinterest Marketing Strategies are:
1. Repin
2. Make Comments
3. Follow others
This is because manually promoting your Pinterest account requires you to connect and interact with other Pinterest users. Let’s take a closer look at Phil’s article:
Any repin on Pinterest will give you opportunities to drive traffic. On Pinterest when you repin another’s pinned picture, they get notified via email. Hopefully they will follow the links to your account and see where you pinned their picture, giving you an opportunity to have them look through your boards. The obvious need here is to have boards that interest your new visitor to the point that they consider following your links to the site you are promoting.
Making comments is a great Pinterest marketing strategy that can drive traffic too. When you hold your cursor over a pinned picture you see the “comment” tab, the “repin” tab, and the “like” tab. When you make a comment is stays with the picture, so whatever you say has the potential to catch peoples’ attention and drive traffic- so say something thoughtful. You might even consider some kind of “call to action” if it’s appropriate. In addition, Pinterest will notify the person who pinned the picture that a comment has been made and give them a link to respond to your comment, again giving you a chance to drive traffic.
When you follow others on Pinterest you definitely will have the potential for driving more traffic. Each person you follow gets an email notifying them that you are following them and either says that they are already following you, or gives them a link to allow them to go to your account and follow you. So each person you follow is an opportunity to connect with someone new and drive traffic to your promoted sites and pages. Full Article
Phil has not included “liking” as one of his Pinterest Marketing strategies but don’t underestimate it’s value as your “likes” will usually be reciprocated, especially if you use it imaginatively with brand leaders and others who are active in your chosen field(s).
Do avoid excessive self promotion. Pinterest’s early popularity is partly due to it being largely devoid of spam and excessive use of automation tools so if you indulge in those strategies, you may well find it counter-productive. As with other Social Media Networks, never start by thrusting your opportunity, product for sale, or paid service you offer. Saturation use of your own publicity and products will be extremely offputting and will probably turn any followers you acquire away in droves. Do use those materials but mix them in with a variety of other images and photos to make a board interesting and appealing in its own right. If you offer value first you can then build a relationship based on trust, which might then develop into an opportunity to directly solicit your contacts.
If you’ve yet to become active on Pinterest you really are missing out on a great source of quality free traffic and a host of potential contacts and traffic. Do feel free to connect with me on Pinterest, I usually follow back. Also do send me your questions and/or comments if you want to discuss Pinterest Marketing further.
How Credible Is Klout?
How credible is Klout? Is it really true that people are being refused jobs in Silicon Valley because they have Klout scores below 50? It’s also been rumoured that airlines have been offering free upgrades to people with high Klout scores and likewise, that some restaurants have given priority to customers if they have a high Klout score.
If you find it hard to believe then you should take a look at this article by Seth Stevenson on wired.com. Stevenson recounts stories of interviews being cut short when lower Klout scores for interviewees were pulled up by interviewers and how these job applicants had greater success when subsequently boosting their Klout scores. He also raises these stories about the unseen power of Klout:
At the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas last summer, clerks surreptitiously looked up guests’ Klout scores as they checked in. Some high scorers received instant room upgrades, sometimes without even being told why. According to Greg Cannon, the Palms’ former director of ecommerce, the initiative stirred up tremendous online buzz. He says that before its Klout experiment, the Palms had only the 17th-largest social-networking following among Las Vegas-based hotel-casinos. Afterward, it jumped up to third on Facebook and has one of the highest Klout scores among its peers.
Klout is starting to infiltrate more and more of our everyday transactions. In February, the enterprise-software giant Salesforce.com introduced a service that lets companies monitor the Klout scores of customers who tweet compliments and complaints; those with the highest scores will presumably get swifter, friendlier attention from customer service reps. In March, luxury shopping site Gilt Groupe began offering discounts proportional to a customer’s Klout score. Read the full story here
If it is going to carry this sort of influence, it’s got to be time to assess how credible is Klout. An interesting article on this subject recently appeared in The New Yorker courtesy of Nicholas Thompson. He argues Klout is evil but can be saved. Here are a sample of his views:
Klout grades users on a scale of one to a hundred based on some proprietary algorithm that counts how often your comments are retweeted, liked, or shared. If you want your score to go up, tweet more and get influential people to retweet you. Don’t ever go on vacation. If you’re on a social network, Klout gets your score, whether you’ve ever logged into the service or not. Think of a mercenary socialite, holding a calculator and trying to figure out who to invite to a party based on import. Then put whatever number she arrives at on every guest’s lapel. That’s Klout. Rick Ross has a score of eighty-five; Rick Santorum has a score of eighty-two; Rick Perry has a score of sixty-six. Rick Astley has a score of forty-seven.
The idea is very clever, and very timely. There are all kinds of ad-hoc ways to figure out how influential people are on social networks. You can count their Twitter followers. You can figure out the ratio of followers to the number of people they follow. Or you can divide their followers by their number of Tweets. Klout takes those indicators, adds a few more, and then just gives you a number. Klout doesn’t equal real-world clout, but, as the ratio of Ricks demonstrates, the numbers are pretty good.
But clever ideas are not necessarily good ones, and Klout is designed in a way that makes it likely to fuel both unhealthy obsession and unhappy competition. When you log into Klout, it makes it easy to see, in order of score, exactly how all your friends rank. The number is more personal than those used by other social networks, and Klout displays it prominently.
The structure of social networks subtly changes the way we act. And Klout seems to encourage nothing good. To make your score go up, you have to tweet out of obligation, and you have to try to influence the other influencers. Read more
There’s certainly a place for a reliable gauge of a person’s influence in their areas of expertise, but is Klout the appropriate tool? How reliable are it’s mysterious algorithms? It certainly baffles me that I appear as an influencer in certain countries far away from me which I’ve neither visited nor expressed an opinion about. Do real influencers tear their hair out trying to play the Klout system? I suspect that most don’t give a damn but the danger is that by default a distorted gauge of how genuine an individual’s influence is being produced where groups of users with nothing better to do can pump out floods of tweets on automation to share between each other to boost their ratings on Klout. That surely cannot be the way to gauge genuine influence.
In his well argued article Nicholas Thompson believes Klout can still fulfil the role it seeks, provided it changes in some key areas including allowing privacy options. Is that your view or is there a need for a more credible alternative to Klout to emerge? Any comments would be warmly welcomed.
Google Business Page – Have You Moved There Yet?
Does your business have a Google Business Page? If you’re a business which has invested time and money by the bucket load investing in a Facebook business page or operate a business which promotes other businesses on Facebook there’s a chance you might be a bit underwhelmed by the recent changes to Facebook business pages such as the imposition of the Facebook timeline on all pages and the ending of the option of choosing a “Welcome Page”, complete with SSL certification plus offers encouraging new visitors to like the page and join an e-mail list for that business, as it’s landing page.
There’s no mileage in complaining about these changes. Facebook obviously owns Facebook so if you want to be active there you have to sign up and comply with their terms and conditions and dance to whichever tune they wish to play and make the best of it. There is massive mileage however in looking for alternatives and one of the best of them must be a Google Business Page.
You might not be too interested in my views on this but you probably ought to be extremely interested in those of Guy Kawasaki. At the last count he had approaching 85,000 subscribers on Facebook as well as over 63,000 likes on his “Fan” page there, 1.52 million account holders have added him on Google Plus and over 721,000 follow him on Twitter, so when it comes to the major players in Social Media he’s right there at the top. He was recently interviewed in the leading online Social Media publication Social Media Examiner by it’s founder Michael Stelzner about his new book about Google+ What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us
You have likely heard the buzz about Google+ for some time.
Perhaps you’re wondering why so many marketing professionals are focusing heavily on the new social network.
In this article, I sit down with Guy Kawasaki, the original Macintosh evangelist. You’ll discover why 99% of his efforts are now focused on Google+.
Guy reveals his Google+ strategy and talks about his new book, What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us. And it’s very different than his other books. It reveals extensive details about how to benefit from Google+.
Mike: Guy, why should businesses consider Google+? What are the major advantages?
Guy: Businesses should jump on Google+ because it’s the Wild West, so you can stake your claim, as opposed to breaking through the noise on Twitter and Facebook.
Also, Google owns the river called search traffic. It can point this river any way that it wants.
When Google introduced the concept of “social search,” it turned SEO upside down. Now when people search on Google, they see the actions of their friends on Google+. That’s huge.
It means 1) you want people to circle you so that when they search, they see your posts and 2) you should post about what you want your followers to know you for.
If I were running a business, I would be thinking, “Why wait until I have to buy real estate in Manhattan? I should get in now and grab all of the followers I can before Google+ hits the mainstream.”
Mike: You have been a huge proponent of Twitter for some time, and later Facebook. Where does Google+ fit in for you with the other social networks and why?
Guy: I fell in love with Google+ because of the ability to edit posts, the more elegant user interface and the quality of comments.
Today, 99% of my social media effort is on Google+.
This is just an outline of Guy’s views and predictions of the future for Google+. Whether 99 per cent is an exact figure or not, it can’t help but be noticed that although it is the newest of the Social Media networks, Google+ is where the highest number of his followers are. You can bet that he would have weighed up everything before opting to focus the majority of his efforts on Google+. He certainly won’t be doing it just for fun or for the hell of it. If you’re intrigued, read the rest of the article in Social Media Examiner itself.
For even more guidance on how to make the best use of Google+, plus whether you should operate a personal account on Google Plus and/or operate a Google Business Page download the Kindle version of the book itself, What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us
If you’ve got any questions about using a Google Business Page or an opinion to express, we’d love to see it in the Comments box below.
6 Skills Every Entrepreneur Must Possess
Being an entrepreneur is no joke. It takes hard work and diligence to get a successful business off the ground and running smoothly. In order to do this, you need to be knowledgeable and skilled. But skilled at what, exactly? You have to be a master at your trade, of course. And here are six more skills every entrepreneur must possess in order to become successful.
Time Management
When you’re trying to put your ideas into action and run a business, it can seem like there are never enough hours in the day. That’s why it’s essential to make the best use of the time you do have. Good time management skills will help you get more things done in less time, which means more time left over for other pursuits and spending more time with that family you forgot you had.
Organization
Some people are naturally more organized than others. If you tend to live in chaos, it’s a good idea to learn some organizational skills and techniques that will help improve your workspace and beyond. When you suffer from poor organization, you become inefficient. Being able to find what you need is so important, as is maintaining all the little details that come with being an entrepreneur. And there are a lot of little details.
Networking
You aren’t in this alone. There are lots of people out there that can help you thrive as an entrepreneur. The trick is that you have to find them, and you do this by networking. If you can learn to effectively network with others, you will be able to form invaluable connections with important people like potential investors, mentors, and customers alike. You can never underestimate the power of good networking skills.
Closing the Sale
Being able to close the sale is a skill that many people have trouble with, but as an entrepreneur you have to learn. It’s not just about being able to make a good sales pitch. You have to be able to expand upon that pitch and turn it into an actual, accomplished sale. There are lots of techniques that will help you close a sale, and mastering what works for you is so important to the overall health of your business.
Leadership
In many cases, entrepreneurs are born leaders. To be an entrepreneur, you have to take risks. When you’re a good leader, you can convince others to take them with you. Also, your business is only as good as your employees. When you’re an effective leader to them, you have a team that will go above and beyond to help your company grow because they not only believe in it, they believe in you.
Communication
If you aren’t good at communicating, you’ll find often find yourself frustrated when your message doesn’t come across as you intended. Mixed messages can be extremely damaging to your business, as well as your relationships. Basic communication skills will help you get exactly what you want, and help you effectively promote and run your business.
Ben Sharp is a successful small business owner. He gets fresh ideas for running his business by being involved in small business owner networks.
