What does this have to do with small business?

Absolutely nothing.

But it is INCREDIBLY motivating, inspiring, and touching to celebrate one of the biggest inspirations of our time.

Here is a video that I just saw on CNN and thought I’d share it with everyone. It features a guy who took and old past time of paper football and turned it into a new business.

Great idea!

Enjoy!

How important is networking to your business? It’s real important!

Jeffrey Gitomer explains networking this way, “Networking is life skills and social skills combined with sales skills. It’s business leisure conducted before and after work — as opposed to business frantic, which is conducted from 9-5 (the exception being lunch).”

Many of you think that networking takes too much time and it’s not fun. When I network, I make sure that it is fun! Here are just some of the things that I do to make networking fun:

- Take this person out for a round of golf or to a sporting event?

- Send them a dozen HOT Krispy Kreme donuts to their office on a Monday morning to wish them a successful and prosperous week?

- Cut out a clipping in the local newspaper of their kid winning the local spelling bee and sending it to them and their child along with a “Congratulations” card?

- Send a pizza to their office around lunch time with a note on it saying that lunch is “Compliments of YOUR Company”

With all this talk about networking, it leads us to our next question:

WHAT DO I NEED TO BE A GREAT NETWORKER?

There are only really 3 simple things that you need to be a great networker:

1. Business Cards — You don’t know how many conventions that I have gone too that people have “accidentally” left their business cards at home. If you are a person that does this, then you are just giving away free money to your competition. I try to bring way more than what I think I will need that way I can give everyone 2 or 3 of them because remember they have friends and other business associates.

2. 30 Second Elevator Speech — You will need to make sure that you have a 30 second elevator speech that briefly tells people what you do, engages them, and makes them want to ask more questions about your service or how you can help their event.

3. An Official Networking Plan — What market are you going to attack? Go after one or two markets and make a plan for networking. If you try to do anymore than 2 you will fail miserably and be very disappointed. Also make sure that networking is something that you truly desire to do. People can read you like a book and they will know if you truly want to be there or not. If you truly have the desire and motivation to be there, you will reap great rewards from networking.

Networking works great when you use the two-word secret: SHOW UP! Get a great attitude, some business cards, a short commercial and you will find much success in networking.

Let me ask you first, do you love your job as a business owner? For most of you this should be an easy question. If this is not an easy question, then you may want to consider why you are even own a business.

For those of you that love your business, have you ever figured out the reason why you continue to be successful in your business? It’s likely not the way you mix different songs or how much equipment you have, but rather the way you treat your clients.

NOW IT’S TIME TO FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR CLIENTS!

Your clients are the reason you are successful today instead of being just a bedroom DJ. Yeah, that’s right. They obviously felt something towards you to make them want to book you for an event. Now it’s time to turn the tide and fall in love with your clients.

Love is a powerful word. Webster’s Dictionary says that love means “to have a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person.” I know that this is getting pretty deep for some of you, but it’s the reason that you have been given the opportunity to do what you love. It’s also the reason that your clients will come back to you year after year to use your entertainment services for their events.

What do I mean when I talk about falling in love with your clients? When was the last time that you called your clients just to say hi? Did you send a sympathy card when you heard about the loss of a family member? Did you cut out the photo of their son/daughters on the front sports page and mail it to them? Did you call them and offer to take them to a collegiate football or basketball game because you had extra tickets? Did you send them a nice birthday card on their birthday? Did you offer to take them out to lunch or dinner just because you had some time during the day? Instead of going golfing by yourself, did you invite a couple of clients to go with you so that you could hang out with them and they could also meet each other to network with one another?

You might think I am crazy, but these are some of the things that you should be doing if you want to fall in love with your clients. This will keep the relationship happy for many, many years to come. If you decide stop loving your clients, like all relationships, you will most likely BREAK UP or be DIVORCED! After that, you will be left out on the street looking for new love.

Cherish the clients that you currently have and show them the love and appreciation that you have for them. If you continue to do that, then they will continue to love you unconditionally throughout the journey of your career, providing you with substantial income every year.

In the business world, you are out there in the competing against other small businesses and large businesses like Wal-mart, McDonald’s, etc all the time. And you have to try and keep up with marketing against all of these other companies. You also have to try and provide as many services that these companies provide in order to make yourself stand out as the solutions provider.

It’s a tough road as many of you know. Do you want more business? Of course you do! Why not make some new friends first? When I am talking about friends, I am talking about the florist, the photographer, the caterer, the banquet facility, the limousine company, etc. After the friendships begin flowing, then the real business will also begin.

You may be asking yourself what I am talking about. I am talking about the power of joint ventures. Joint ventures are still today, one of the most underutilized relationships that a business can have.

What are joint ventures? Joint ventures are when two or more businesses come together, share their resources, customers, expertise, etc for the benefit of both businesses and everyone’s customers.

Here is just an example of one of the joint ventures that I coordinated: January and February are normally dead for us. It is also usually that way for many of my business friends too. We decided that we would put our resources together and sponsor a Valentine’s Day celebration at one of the banquet facilities whom I am also business friends with. The sales manager at the banquet facility loved the idea, because they were making money on a night that they probably wouldn’t have been booked anyways. The florist was happy because they got a lot of flower sales because of the promotion, sold additional flowers at the event, and did some marketing after the event to all the guys who came offering them a chance to sign up for flowers to be delivered monthly to their significant other (which they sold a lot of). The photographer made some nice money taking photographs of couples and upselling packages. The limousine service made more money than they normally would on that night because they charged per ride, instead of an hourly rate. The hotel was happy because they booked a large amount of rooms because of the extra people who wanted to stay over.

Overall, everyone was EXTREMELY happy. You are probably thinking that this took a lot of hard work in order to pull it off. In fact, it wasn’t that tough at all. Why? Because every person that I choose to be a part of this event, I have total confidence in. They are total professionals and experts in their industry. We all pitched in our expertise, figured out the numbers game, and then threw out our client lists for marketing purposes.

At the end of the night, we totaled everything up and we had OVER 400 people attend the event. We were hoping for 200 people, but were totally amazed at the results of our marketing. People raved about it and wanted it again the following year. The best part of it all, we all made more money than we hoped for and all the vendors were equally excited about doing it again.

I don’t usually tell this to many people, but I guess I am telling the world now. I have made MORE MONEY with joint ventures in all my years of business THAN ANY OTHER BUSINESS PROJECT I HAVE EVER DONE. I am serious about this.

There was one joint venture that I did with a local charity. I won’t go into details now, but I might talk about the joint venture later. Anyways, I worked TWO Friday nights a month and made just over $25,000 per year. This took about 10 hours a month of my time. I continued this event for over four years until I moved out of the area. It was all because of the networking I did to build the business friendships that led to the joint ventures.

What are you going to do with your business? Make a list of all the people that you already know and where they work, what they do, or what business they own. This can include other vendors, suppliers, competitors, businesses with the same audience or community, your bank, or maybe even your service providers. Make sure that whoever you decide to start a joint venture with they are cooperative instead of competitive. This will make or break the success of your joint venture.

Start piecing the puzzle together and see how you can work together with your friends to make EVERYONE more money and bring each other more success. Believe me, if you do it right and find the right combination, you will be very successful. Good luck and happy joint venturing!

If you remember back to the old days when you were in elementary school, many of you will remember having a diary or journal in class. Even though technology has rapidly changed since you left elementary school, the concepts have not. What we considered diaries and journals back then are widely known today as blogs. Blogging is taking the online world by storm. It is the fastest rising new activity on the internet for successful companies and can be a great way for you to market your business.

Blogs?? What the heck is that? Blogs, otherwise known as web logs, is both an online diary or journal and a guestbook. Anyone can set-up a blog account or function on their website and then post entries on it. There are TONS of different free blogging websites out there that provide with you place to do your blogging at no charge. Blogger.com and WordPress.com are two of the bigger free sites in which you can setup your very own company blog.

Since many of you already have a website in place, I highly encourage you to start your own blog for your company and link your website to it. There is no excuse why you can’t start one up. It’s free and it can help you increase your business.

Here are some reasons why starting a blog is a great business move:

- Blogs allow you to stay in touch with your clients and their guests. What better way to come home from an event, post a few pictures in your blog (which you can do), and write a summary of the event with a thank you to all of those who attended.

- It’s a great way to get more testimonials. One of the many features that a blog has will enable your clients and their guests to post comments about the pictures, event, etc. Your clients will love this because they will see how much fun everyone truly had by the words they type in your blog. Also, potential clients will be able to see how much fun you provided at the event. It helps build your reputation instantly.

- A blog is not difficult. As weird and wacky as the word is, you would think that you would have to know some secret coding in order to have a blog. Nothing is further from the truth. You don’t need to know ANYTHING about HTML or other web designing skills to make and post blogs. Most bloggers use HTML editors to help in the blogging function so that you can make everything look prettier. These very easy to use and require very little technical skills.

- Blogging is a great way to build your reputation as an expert. You don’t need for this to be just a place where you post event pictures and summaries. You can also write articles for the niches that you are in and post them. Provide some advice to potential client. Even post links to great deals for your clients that you have found from other vendors. All of these types of information can help lift your reputation as an expert in your area.

- It is a big help to your page ranking and will help get your website closer to the #1 spot. Blogs are so rich in content that search engines can’t get enough of them. Make sure that you are posting new content to your blog often so that it is constantly attractive to search engines.

- Blogging is cheap advertising. Blogs can be a great venue for advertising because of the number of people that will visit and potentially come back as long as they know it will be updated regularly. Plus, it’s FREE……..how much cheaper can you get?

I don’t think I need to give you any more reasons to start blogging today.

Sometimes online marketers get clueless when it comes to unleashing the full potential of paid eZine advertising. To advertise the product or service directly to the subscribers of the paid Ezine he or she is advertising for is one of the most common dilemmas of the internet marketer.

Not without ifs and buts, this can be a wise method. For one, the advertisement must be compelling and attention grabbing. Secondly, there is no telling if the eZine’s subscribers constantly practice a buying habit until you put some money to find out.

For those who are on tight budgets, it will is risky to invest even a small sum of money to a number of Internet Marketers. But if done right, eZine advertising can still be rewarding  in spite of the risk factors.

Thus the solution: the marketer would be wiser if he or she uses eZine advertising to build his or her mailing list. It makes sense, anyway. Since some eZines display more than one sponsored advertisement, you can grab the subscriber’s attention by giving a free or risk-free product or offer through your ad.

When the subscriber clicks on your ad, he or she can opt into your mailing list in exchange for the free offer, which can be a free report or even a trial service.

By getting other eZine’s subscribers to subscribed to your own allows you to follow up with them in the future and thus build up that list. While you are not making a hard sale through your advertisement just yet, giving your subscribers information on what’s new to you site, and new offers or promotions would yield you sales in the future. You must learn to take each opportunity as it comes your way.

What makes a website good are the features and content that keep your visitors coming back for more. There is always a purpose behind every website creation. Though some are created for personal use, like a portfolio that simply aims to gain an audience to have its contents viewed, majority are created for companies and online businesses that aim to provide product information in the goal of making sales, or basically just providing service over the internet to earn. It is often observed that some visitors are captivated by visual designs, but it in reality; visitors are generally looking for their needs to be fulfilled. Think of it this way: if you are the website visitor, how would you react to it?

Navigation

As previously discussed, a web designer must learn how to think the way your visitors think.

Scenario A: Website with good navigation (2-3 hyperlinks to target page)- well planned in terms of placement and design.

Scenario B: Website with poor navigation (takes forever for the visitor to reach his/her target page) – hard-to-read navigation fonts and poor placement of the navigation buttons/bar.

In Scenario A, a visitor will always want to be able to access his/her target page. For example, the individual comes across your website, and is interested in the product sold, but wants to find more information. He/she will simply click on the product photo or product name and get to the detailed product information page. He instantly finds the navigation with no trouble, and enters the particular product information page.

As for Scenario B, a visitor stumbles into the website, and would also like to find out more information about the product. Unfortunately, due to bad placement and fanciful font-types, the visitor takes forever to find the right link to click to, or worse, he/she even fails to find the navigation bar. Even when he/she eventually does so, links to the product information are nowhere to be found.

Example: Home > About > Products > Product image > Etc… [A few more clicks] > Product information

In both scenarios, we clearly see that a website with characteristics similar to that of Scenario A is definitely more navigation friendly, therefore more rewarding, and in other words unquestionably better!

Affiliate marketing is not a magic formula that is readily available for everyone who is always looking for the successful market that gives the biggest paycheck. In reality, it is a lot more complicated than that. It is good marketing practices that have been used and proven over years of hard work and dedication.

There are tactics that have worked before with online marketing that may not be applicable today, but there are also tactics that work effectively in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these top three marketing tips, you will be able to able to increase your sales and survive in the affiliate marketing game.

What are these three tactics?

1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding on what the product can do to those who buy them. Including testimonials from users who have already tried the product will also come in handy. Just be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

You can also write articles highlighting the uses of the product and include them on the website as an additional page. Make the pages attractive compelling and include calls to act on the information. Each headline should attract the readers to try and read more, even contact you. Highlight your special points. This will help your readers to learn what the page is about and will want to find out more.

2. Offer free reports to your readers. Whenever possible, position them at the very top side of your page so they simply cannot be missed. Create auto responder messages that will be mailed to those who input their personal information into your sign up box. This will make your subscribers feel they are acknowledged and valued. According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect.

Only two things can possibly happen with the web page alone: closed sale or the prospect leaving the page and never return again. By placing useful information into their inboxes at certain specified period, you will remind them of the product they thought they want later and will find out that the sale is closed. Be sure that the content is directed toward specific reasons to buy the product. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch.

Focus on important points like how your product can make life and things easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email. As much as possible, avoid using the word “free” because there are still older spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk before even anyone reading them first. Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do not avail of your products and services.

3. Get the kind of traffic that is targeted to your product. Think of a person who visiting your website that has no interest whatsoever in what you are offering. They will be among those who move on and never come back. Write articles for publication in e-zines and e-reports. This way you can locate publications that are focusing on your target customers and what you have put up might just grab their interest.

Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600 words in length. By continuously writing and maintaining these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.

Always remember that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your product or avail of your services. If you can generate as much as 1,000 targeted hits for your website in a day, it means you may have just made 10 sales based on the average statistic.

The tactics given above does not really sound very difficult to do, if you think about it. It just requires a little time and an action plan on your part.

If you at least put an effort in trying to use these tips for several affiliate marketing programs. You might be surprised that it can end-up maintaining a good source of income. You might just be able to survive in this business where other marketers fail.

Moreover, think of the income that will come your way.

Earn From Your Mailing List By Way of Affiliate Marketing!

Building your own mailing list is a good way to start if you are an affiliate marketer who wants to make good earnings from referring your prospects to other people’s product or service for decent commissions.

Your mailing list of hungry prospects can be one of the best investments you will ever make, as it is time and effort worth spending on. When you strike on a Joint Venture and have a new product or service to endorse, you can look no further than your own mailing list.

It is not uncommon to hear about most affiliates not making money from affiliate programs, in fact there is more than 90 percent of them, but this often results from the same amount of effort focused on least effective methods.

While having your own mailing list, by a long mile, is not the only effective affiliate marketing method, you can make affiliate sales very quickly even in the next few hours after sending a sales message, provided that your mailing list is huge and responsive.

This is often true, because owning your own mailing list for you to endorse products and services to is one of the fastest-producing results, beating other affiliate marketing methods imaginable.

If you look closer, the flourishing affiliate marketer who gets ahead of the pack is the one who successfully built a huge and responsive mailing list of prospects.

The usability of your website does not rely on how brilliant your website design is. If there is difficulty in grasping the content of your site, then your site is as useful as an empty shell. What’s the purpose of your website and is it filled with real content? Here are some tips to maximize the usefulness of your website to ensure it functions are served most favorably:

The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, it is best to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. While having 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font like what most sites prefer to use as they look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can navigate your site with ease, and make sure they find what they are looking for.

Ensuring that your site loads fast keeps you from losing your visitors. Most internet users leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.

Last but certainly not the least, it pays to test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in upholding your professional image than making sure there is absolutely no broken links, so be very mindful about that.