Okay, so you have made your business plan, have enough working capital, and studied all you can to finally start your own home-based business. You think you’re ready and you can’t wait to start the first day. But wait! Do you have a website?

A website is important for any home-based business. It is relatively cheap, easy to do, and provides enormous benefits for budding entrepreneurs. Here are just some of the rewards of having a website:

1. 24-hour online presence

Your own website gives you an online presence. Without a website, you are losing business. Potential clients can access your site and learn about your products and services.

2. It gives you a professional image.

At a time when almost everything is online, nothing frustrates a buyer than looking for a specific product but couldn’t find it because the company doesn’t have a website. A website gives entrepreneurs a professional image, creating the impression that you have made information about your business available.

3. Get valuable feedback.

Your website may have the facility for customers to post feedback—whether good or bad. Feedback gives you insights on what products your clients like and what are the ways to improve your business. Of course, this means allowing dissatisfied customers to post negative comments about you. Instead of deleting the posts, think of it as an opportunity to learn from your mistakes and to show clients that you are sincere in your transactions.

4. Save on costs.

A website provides financial savings. Instead of printing tons of brochures or flyers, you can just print your business card that shows your contact details and website. You can also save on postage costs because all you need to do is email your promotional materials to friends and clients.

5. Sell ad space.

You can earn money from your website by selling ad spaces. You can enrol your site in Google Adsense, this is especially profitable for sites that have high traffic.

6. Point-of-sale channel.

Many websites have the facility to accept credit card or PayPal charges. You can earn more by allowing clients to pay online. You can also expand your website by including a chat function which you can use to communicate live with your client. Potential buyers can ask about your products and get answers immediately.

7.  Expand your customer base.

Although your business may be focused within your area, don’t lose the opportunity to get clients from all over the world. Whether you’re selling wooden toys or providing consultancy services, remember that someone from out of town may need your services.

Another great thing about websites is that you don’t need programming skills to create one.

For those with little money, you can try blogging sites like WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal.

For a hosted DIY option with all the bells and whistles you can try WebCityPro, BigCommerce, Spitfire,

Once you get the hang of it, you can get your own domain name and hosting. But whether it’s a free or paid platform, a website is necessary for any business.

It is a huge learning curve, but heaps of fun.

If you have a business of your own, unless it is a large enterprise, the chances are that you probably do not already have your own designated marketing department. In fact, let’s face it… for most business owners, the “Marketing Department” cap is just another one of the many caps that they wear from day to day in their efforts to cut costs and grow a successful business!

However, like most elements of business, truly effective marketing is not something that the majority of people are able to “just do.” It takes talent and a good deal of training to develop this particular skill.  In fact, a good number of businesses simply are unable to stay afloat – especially in this economy – if they are not well marketed with creativity and intelligence.

With this in mind, there is no doubt that outsourcing your marketing activities is a worthy consideration. But how does one find the best marketing agency, and what is the best way to maximise the effectiveness of this important business relationship?

The DOs and the DON’Ts

There are a number of things that are vital to the development of a good marketing plan from your outsourced agency, and also a fair amount of things that must be avoided at all costs to make sure that things run smoothly. With this in mind, here are some of the most important DOs and DON’Ts for managing your outsourced marketing.

Talk This Over… Frequently

●     DO make regular communication the rule, rather than the exception!

You might be surprised how frequently this can be a problem for a business owner, but doesn’t it make sense that a marketing agency is going to need your input to discover exactly what direction you wish to take your marketing efforts? Just turning a marketing agency – especially one that is outsourced, because they are naturally far less familiar with the details regarding your company as a whole – is a recipe for disaster. Keep in close and frequent touch with the individuals that you have hired, and you are far more likely to be pleased with the outcome!

Money Talks, But Don’t Let It Dominate The Conversation

●     DON’T decide on a marketing agency based solely on price!

No business owner wants to pay more than he or she must for goods and services, but there is often a very good reason that an outsourced service is underpriced when compared with the competition. In some cases, it may just mean that the agency is inexperienced (which can be a problem, in and of itself). However, it may also mean that the quality is low, overall. It is certainly advisable to make sure that you compare the level of all of the services offered by an outsourced marketing agency before making a final decision… and do not let the bottom line be your sole consideration! It can actually end up costing you more when all is said and done.

Presentation Matters – For Both Of You

●     DO pay close attention to the agency’s own marketing efforts.

Often, taking a look at the amount of care and quality demonstrated by a marketing company’s own materials (their website, their business cards, their advertising efforts) can speak volumes about the future product that they will provide for you.

If a company is delivering a website and internet content for your business marketing plan, then the wisest business people will make doubly certain that the company has a first-rate website that they use to market themselves. If you are purchasing business cards and other products from a marketing agency, make very sure that you are duly impressed with what they are offering to represent themselves… especially before you turn your livelihood over to them!

There Is No Need To Protect Someone’s Feelings

●     DON’T be afraid to speak up and share your opinions… it’s your marketing!

Some business owners become a bit shy when working with outsourced personnel, and may show some reluctance to give constructive criticisms regarding the work that is provided.  The simple fact is that you are paying these professionals, and the bottom line is that they are working to provide you with your marketing – so you need to be pleased with the outcome! This is impossible if you swallow any concerns or critiques in an effort to be nice. Granted, it is important to be professional and polite, but at the same time, it is an enormous waste of time (and money, of course, which is no small consideration!) if a business owner allows marketing personnel to pursue an idea that they simply do not like.

Be honest and forthright, and tell the professionals exactly what you like, and what you dislike. This will invariably make for a better overall relationship, and a stronger marketing campaign overall.

Keep Things In Writing

●     DO keep a written record of the entire relationship

From the moment you decide to pursue an agreement with an outsourced marketing professional, through the drafts and the artwork and the give-and-take that is part of the creative process, until the very end of the contract… keep things in writing! Not only does this allow for legal protection of your agreement, but it is also one of the surest ways to keep track of what can be expected, and when. Frankly, without a paper (and/or digital) trail, there are just too many things that can go wrong with an undocumented outsourcing of your marketing efforts. If a marketing agency is reluctant to place things in writing, then the best idea is to thank them for their time, and move on to another possible partner who is willing to work more professionally.

Following these tips will help you as you take the step of finding the right marketing gurus to get your company’s name in front of the right audience. If you manage the task correctly, you will be able to reap the increased profits and growth that are the entire reason for the investment in marketing efforts in the first place!

This article was written by Timothy Ng. You can read more of his work at http://www.creditcardfinder.com.au/, where he has a number of comprehensive guides including credit cards for small business.

Most job seekers will use two documents in their job search; their resume and cover letter. That’s a good start, but how about professional bio as well? They are no longer just for authors, musicians and politicians. Anyone that has an online presence across social media and blogging (which is just about everyone nowadays) can benefit from one. This article looks at what a bio is, where it is used and why you need to get one written up sooner rather than later.

What exactly is a bio?

A bio is the story-based version of your professional life. The information provided is similar to that of your CV or resume but the format is less formal. You are free to highlight the bits of your career you are proud of and omit anything that won’t help you. As it is a story, you can throw in interesting snippets about yourself and thus injecting some personality into your bio.

The purpose of a bio is to tell the reader who you are and what you do, listing your experience and achievements, and backing your claims up with facts and figures. All these parts will form the credibility of your personal brand.

When is a bio used?

Your bio can be used a across a number of situations, here are a few:

• The “About” page on your website and/or blog, visitors click on this to find out about YOU, not the version of WordPress you use.

• The bio/summary/about section of your social media profiles. This is what most people will find when Googling your name. You will need a longer bio for sites like LinkedIn, a micro version for Twitter.

• In any marketing materials, proposals and quotes you send out to prospective customers.

• Submitted for public speaking, presenting or training pitches (for speaking, you could also use a one-sheet). Designed to give the event organizer a quick overview of what you can do and hopefully book you.

• Included in any publications such as books, e-books, reports, professional documents and even guest blog posts you author.

• Job search, employers will definitely look at your online bio and oftentimes request it along with your CV or resume as it is more concise than your other documents.

Why should you get a bio?

To stay professional and credible in the eyes of current and potential clients and of course potential employers. Every job seeker, career advancer and professional should develop his or her professional biography today. Whenever you email or leave a message for someone you never dealt with before, you can expect to be checked out online. Your bio is a brand building marketing tool that will entice the reader to want to contact you.

There is stiff competition out there and for you to differentiate, it’s imperative you have a well crafted bio that points out what makes you unique. Your professional bio gives a quick showcase of what sets you apart from the crowd. A bio tells whoever reading it that you are not just doing your day job to pay the rent, it’s your passion and you are proud to tell the world about it. Your bio is the foundation of your personal branding toolkit and it’s potentially the most important text you write in your professional life.

Conclusion

A winning bio can tip the balance in your favor. It’s all about first impressions, and your bio is probably read before you even meet the reader. A convincing bio allows recruiters, HR representatives and hiring managers to understand your strengths and achievements, hopefully leading to that great job opportunity coming your way.

The best part of having a great bio is that it can be used again and again, and you are free to update it whenever you feel like it.

This post comes courtesy of The Undercover Recruiter

If I told you that the key to creating meaningful business relationships is as simple as a smile, would you believe me? Now it’s true, the world has gone digital, a Condado Research reports 83% of customers prefer to contact a business via phone. However from a business perspective, this makes a face-to-face communication a great way your business can differentiate itself. Smiling can potentially create a competitive advantage in your industry by helping your salespeople seal important deals. This, all while creating long lasting relationships, which just can’t be mimicked on Twitter and Facebook.

Face to face communication can help you deeply engage with others. What many people fail to realize is that smiling is a way for us to engage with others on a personal level. It’s important to create a common ground. The famous quote “smile and the whole world smiles with you,” illustrates this notion quite simply. Below are some important facts that support smiling:

• A study at the University of California by Dr. Dacher Keltner showed that women who showed an intense happiness in their smiles indicated a happier future. The women from the study with the brightest smiles were more likely to marry by the age of 27 and to keep a satisfying relationship. – Daily Mall

• Though courtroom judges are equally likely to find smilers and nonsmilers guilty, they give smilers lighter penalties, a phenomenon called the ’smile-leniency effect. – Harvard’s Working Knowledge

• A happy smile, for example, is accompanied by activity in the brain’s reward circuits, and looking at a happy smile can excite those circuits as well – WSJ

• There are over 18 different types of smiles that are used in a variety of social situations. For instance, people can use a smile to say a hello, and they can also use a different type of smile to show their understanding of a particular situation. – InfoBarrel

• Smiling can also help over the phone. An old telemarketing trick is to smile when engaging with customers to make the voice sound warmer and friendlier.

When in doubt, smile. For many it may seem weird at first, but when people associate you with smiling, you are in. Majority of the way we communicate comes from our face. Smiling makes you look happier, and surprisingly improves the tone of your voice. People associate others who smile more often than not as more trustworthy, and confident. Keep smiling

Source: Resource Nation

Image credit: Forbes Blog

At last count, Facebook had over 350 million users, and this number is continuing to grow. It overtook MySpace as the Number One social networking website on the planet last year and is just behind Google when it comes to online traffic. Put your hand up if you aren’t using Facebook as part of your marketing strategy. Hopefully there aren’t too many hands.

In today’s world of social media you can’t afford not to have a business Facebook page. With the statistics I’ve just given you there really is no excuse. However, what I often hear people asking are how do I use it and what do I do?

Well one of the most important things to remember with any social media tool is they aren’t there for making blatant sales pitches. They are there to be used as a way to build relationships. That’s not to say you can’t sell your business via these mediums, but you need to be subtle in the way you go about it and there are a few different methods you can use:

1. Interact with your followers. Chat with them. Offer solutions to their problems.
2. Engage them by asking leading questions and getting them to enter discussions with you on topics related to your industry.
3. Post links to interesting blogs or websites that could be useful or helpful to them.

The aim is to be helpful and genuine and build up a reputation as being an expert in your field. A full on sales pitch will turn people off and they may even give you bad reports elsewhere, so be careful when directly promoting your products and services. Try offering teasers to products or some free information – everyone loves to think they are getting something for free.

So what is a Facebook page and how do you use it? On its website Facebook describes Pages as “a public Profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users.” The best feature of a Page is that users can become a Fan of your page when visiting. The advantage of this, of course, is that it updates their wall with the fact that they have become a fan, which in turn notifies all their friends on Facebook. The benefit of this to you is that this then becomes free marketing. On many occasions people will click on the links of things their friends have become fans of purely out of interest. What a great way to generate traffic to your page without costing you a cent.  Remember though that you need to engage them in the first place. Give them a reason to become a fan.

Another great feature is the Event tab. If you’re offering a service of some description and you want to give people a ‘Try Before You Buy’ experience you could create an event on Facebook such as a webinar. This is an online meeting or presentation that anyone can join. Distance is no object and your attendees could be based anywhere in the world. Market this as a ‘Free to Attend Event’ and before you know it the event becomes viral and you’ve got yourself in front of a market you never even knew existed. Just make sure you advertise the World Time Zone you are located in beforehand.

Last but not least there is the option of Facebook advertising which works in a similar way to Google Adwords. You can choose to do PPC (pay per click) or CPM (by page impressions). The beauty of this is that you can be very targeted with where your advert appears. For our American Academy of Wedding and Event Planning Facebook Page we chose to advertise to females in the US. The criteria we chose were:

• Graduated from college
• Interested in weddings
• Looking to start their own business

This limits the number of clicks you have and targets your traffic accordingly. On top of this you can also set your own daily expenditure limit in the same way as you can with your Google Adwords campaign.

My final advice on using social media of any kind is to be strict with the amount of time you spend on it. Set yourself a specific time of the day when you will work on your Blog, Twitter or Facebook and stick to it. Otherwise you will find yourself whiling away hours of doing nothing, as all these mediums are very addictive.

(Image laikolosse)

Annie was one of my favourite movies when I was a child and I think part of the attraction was the fact that Annie was the eternal optimist. I have been tarred with the same brush and it has certainly stood me in good stead for running a business. No matter what crazy ideas or schemes I come up with or how badly they turn out I never think of myself as a failure.

Too many times I hear Mumpreneurs bemoaning the fact that they are business failures because they don’t match up to their competition. This in itself I find fascinating because nine times out of ten they are not comparing themselves like for like. A good case in point is a close friend of mine who runs a great little online business from home. We were having a glass of wine over dinner and chatting about our businesses when she hit me with the line “I’m a complete failure as a business woman. I thought I could make it work but I can’t.”

To say I was a little taken aback by her outburst would be an understatement, as I thought she had carved out a nice little business for herself with a good income and a great lifestyle balance as she only worked on her business for about 15-20 hours a week. So, I asked her to explain what she meant by this sweeping statement.

She went on to tell me that someone else had started up a business in the same niche area as her and was doing far better than she was. It turns out they had recently won a huge contract with a national company and she knew she couldn’t compete with that as she didn’t have the time or the resources. She was almost in tears as she finished telling me and had written herself off as a failure.

I then asked her to tell me what her mission and goal for her business had been when she first launched the company. She started to tell me that her dream had been to establish a small business that allowed her to remain a part of the industry she loved whilst maintaining a work/life balance that allowed her to spend time with her children and work from home. She also added that the income was only ever meant to be supplementary and enough to cover her expenses and make a small profit.

As she was talking about her business her face started to light up as she realised she had achieved everything that she set out to do and more. So far from being a business failure she was a complete and utter business success story. What had happened is she had fallen into the trap of comparing herself to a company that had completely different goals to her. The competition she referred to wasn’t really competition at all as they were a larger company with larger goals.

The lesson to be learnt here is to keep track of your business goals. The goals you had when you first decided to launch a business will still be fundamentally the same, but they will grow and change as your business grows and changes. You need to revisit them on a regular basis. Competition is healthy and should be observed on a regular basis, but not at the detriment to yourself or your company, as it can make you lose your focus.  Keeping tabs on the marketplace and what is happening within it should be your primary focus when looking at your competition, not constantly comparing yourself to them.

Business failure or success is not determined by how well you are faring against others in the same marketplace but how you measure up against the goals you set for yourself and your company. The vision for your company should not be determined by what others are doing or not doing otherwise you are limiting your potential and what you can do.

Within my business at the Academy of Wedding and Event Planning we are constantly compared by potential students to another provider within the marketplace. So rather than focus on what the other provider is doing we look for the differences between our two companies. It is clear to me that we both have very different goals and visions for our company and therefore there is no comparison between the two. There is room for both of us in the marketplace as we both service different ends of it.

Business failure only occurs when a business is falling apart at the seams, running out of money, unable to pay its bills and has no customers buying their product or service.  If that’s not happening to you then you are NOT a business failure.

Maintain your business vision, revisit your goals on a regular basis and don’t limit your company by comparing it to the competition.

What a week. The media has been jam packed with coverage of the passing of music maestro Michael Jackson. To some he was a pop legend, to others hard to work out with his fondness for a childlike lifestyle.

Michael Jackson’s personal brand varied over the years.

The good? He is being remembered as ‘the king of pop’ with over 40 years of achievements in the record charts. He created unique dance moves and will be renowned for his moonwalk.

The not so good? He had a quirky passion for a continual change in his appearance. His love of childhood was magnified in the press with many curious and sometimes disturbing stories from Never Never Land.

So how do you develop a positive personal brand?

What is it that makes me stand out?

Start by identifying the qualities or characteristics that make you distinctive from your competitors or your colleagues. What two words would your colleagues use to describe you or your greatest strengths? What about your boss or previous bosses? Finally people who work for you – how would they describe you if asked?

When you’ve done that, sit back and ask yourself one more question to define your brand: what do I want to be famous for? It’s time to give some serious thought and even more serious effort to imagining and developing yourself as a brand.

So how do I market myself?

The sky is the limit when it comes to marketing yourself and your profile – your brand. Get involved in projects in the business, introduce yourself to new colleagues, showcase your skills or work on new ones. Start identifying your business champions, the people that will champion your career on your behalf.

Imagine a meeting being held with the senior management team and a new project being discussed and the question is asked: “Who should manage this?”  You want your name to be spoken, over and over.

The second important thing to remember about your personal visibility campaign is: it all matters. When you’re promoting brand, everything you do and everything you choose not to do communicates the value and character of the brand. Everything from the way you handle phone conversations to the email messages you send to the way you conduct business in a meeting is part of the larger message you’re sending about your brand. This is even more important for those working from home.

The key to any personal branding campaign is “word-of-mouth marketing.” Your network of friends, colleagues, clients, and customers is the most important marketing tool you’ve got. What they say about you and your contributions is what the market will ultimately gauge as the value of your brand. So the big trick to building your brand is to find ways to nurture your network of colleagues.

How do I know if I am doing it?

Put together your own “support squad”.  Ask colleagues, friends, peers, managers, and recruiters for honest, helpful feedback on your performance, development, and your value. It’s the only way to know what you would be worth on the open market.  It’s the only way to make sure that, when you decide to move up or on, you’ll be in a strong bargaining position.

-:-

Michael Jackson was many things to many people. Fortunately the press are being kind to him and remembering him for the huge achievements he had in life, not digging up the dirt of his past.

All of us have a chance to be a brand worthy of being remembered and talked about in a positive way.

How will you be remembered?

(Image Semio)