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Posts Tagged ‘small business marketing’

Learn How to Drive Your Business

By: Robert Skrob on: August 20th, 2010 1 Comment

Anyone can create a business, but few create businesses which generate millions of dollars. I’m not talking about a business that generates $1 million in annual revenue; I’m talking about creating a business that generates $1 million—cash—to you, each year.

It takes four things to build a business to provide you with $1 million a year in spendable, personal income. It just so happens, it also takes four things to drive a car. It will help me teach you by explaining these four things in the context of driving a car.

THE GAS PEDAL
The speed in your business is determined by the number of new customers you are adding every day, every week, every month, and every year. Your new customer acquisition is the “gas pedal” that determines the speed with which your business grows. How adept you are at putting new customers into your business will determine your growth rate. Similar to driving a car: the accelerator pedal determines how fast your car goes. While there are a lot of other factors determining whether or not you get to your destination, the gas pedal provides the speed for getting there. You must have a system for identifying potential clients and converting them into customers. Otherwise, it’s like going down the highway at 10 mph. You’re going to get there, but not very quickly. If you invest in building a customer acquisition system for your business, you will have the opportunity to quickly build a million-dollar business.
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How To Keep Your Customers From Using The Competition

By: Dan Kennedy on: March 9th, 2010 6 Comments

Yesterday I wrote about how important first impressions were to customer relations.

Now, I’d like to turn our attention to what you can do to foster customer retention.

Later in the game the customer relations process evolves into follow-up and follow-through.

How would you react if…

… you got a call from your car dealer service manager a week after having some repairs done just to make sure everything is okay?

…you got a call from your doctor the evening after treatment just to check up on you.

…you got a questionnaire in the mail from a restaurant you dined at soliciting your comments and suggestions.

Some business people tell me that’s looking for trouble. I disagree. I think it’s looking for rapport, loyalty, satisfaction and repeat business.

If follow-up turns up a lot of dissatisfaction you need to make some changes. The dissatisfaction is there whether you discover it or not.

How would you react if you got a thank you note a few days after buying a new suit from a clothing store, you got a birthday card from your insurance agent, you got a free dinner gift certificate as a thank you from a hotel chain, you got a personalized luggage tag in the mail as a gift from your travel agent?
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Leaving Comments Can Make You Famous and Get You More Business

By: Brian Horn on: January 13th, 2010 119 Comments

I know that many of you readers come here, read what you want, make use of the information you want and go about your day without ever leaving a comment.

One of the main benefits of a blog is the ability to start a conversation directly with me, Dan, Bill, Mara, Russell Brunson, Jim Palmer, Mike Capuzzi, Robert Skrob…or any of the other authors…and even the other readers.

So, if you have been a silent reader of this blog and want to know the benefits of leaving comments, let me give you some tips on why you should be doing it.

1. You’re Alerting The Author (and Dan & Bill) to Who You Are.

If you regularly leave comments on this blog, we will start to recognize your name. Don’t forget the hundreds of small business owners and entrepreneurs who read it daily. They will start to recognize you also.

If you leave some really interesting comments, we may even ask you to “guest blog” some day.

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Five Key Strategies for Lasting Small Business Marketing Success Online

By: Brian Horn on: December 30th, 2009 3 Comments

Every small business owner wants their web site to be wildly successful. If your small business has a web site, you know that you can ramp up traffic to your site with pay-per-click ads or by improving your search engine positioning, but then what?

Getting prospects to your site is only the first step in web marketing.

What happens next?

If you answered, “Getting site visitors to buy”, you’re both right and wrong.

Most small business owners are so focused on trying to ‘get the sale’ that they forget to include the key elements in their site that motivate prospects to buy. Without these, you could be attracting a flood of traffic without seeing the results in actual sales.

Are you making this mistake?

Try out this small business marketing strategy…
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Before You Choose Behavior, Choose Its Purpose

By: Dan Kennedy on: December 8th, 2009 1 Comment

Our dog’s favorite activity is stealing crumpled wads of paper from my waste baskets and racing around the office with them, tearing them up into little tiny pieces spread from north to south.

She is a shredder with no receptacle. She is an interesting dog in many respects. Notably her fierce independence. She will play with a crumpled ball of paper thrown for her but she prefers picking one out, standing onhind legs, and taking what she wants.

Even after a leg operation, she hates being picked up to a couch, chair or my lap and wants to jump and get up there on her own. Too bad more people don’t have such a profound preference for self-reliance.

Cleaning up her paper mess, once before a work day here with Sydney Biddle Barrows, and a few days later,before a consulting day with Ron LeGrand and Entourage, made me think about the making of messes and the cleaning up of messes. This is nothing new for me to mention, but I thought I’d mention it just the same,as so many entrepreneurs make so little headway so slowly because of their aversion to messes.
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Even Santa Claus Can Be a Niche

By: Dan Kennedy on: December 1st, 2009 5 Comments

There are riches in niches for your small business marketing…I nag again, again and again.

This year, the first official international convention of The Almagamated Order of Real Bearded Santas was held in Branson, Missouri, attended by over 300 professional Santas with real beards (a niche within the Santa niche!), plus some Mrs. Santas and a few nebbishy elves horning in on the fun.

I was at a National Speakers Association Convention in the late 70’s not much bigger than this – now NSA has 5,000+ members and is the trade association of that industry.

Our Information Marketing Association is headed in the same direction.

And, with 80+ local Chapters and more getting going, size of our annual SuperConference increasing, etc., Glazer/Kennedy Inner Circle becomes an international association of a size to be reckoned with.

EACH of these associations and all others (there are thousands) represent a lucrative niche market for somebody. And I am again going to nag, nag, nag about riches in niches; about finding a small market or slice of a market that you can focus on.
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Shout It From the Rooftop

By: Dan Kennedy on: November 13th, 2009 6 Comments

It’s funny how problems change.

At one time, my biggest challenge was making money. This year I paid considerably more in taxes than I once had as my hard-to-imagine-hitting income goal.

These days, neither I or most of my clients and coaching members seem to have any trouble in the income department.

The biggest demographic trend we’re all adjusting our small business marketing to is mass affluence. For most of my clients, businesses I’m involved in, and personally, our biggest problem is spending money productively.
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VOTING OPEN! – Glazer-Kennedy Infomarketer of the Year 2009

By: Mara Glazer on: November 5th, 2009 5 Comments

The annual Information Marketer of the Year competition is now LIVE ONLINE! You can vote for your favorite contestant right on Facebook at the Official Glazer-Kennedy Insider’s Circle fan page (http://www.facebook.com/glazerkennedy). This year’s contestants are Jonathan Jay, Robin Robins, and Carl Smith.

Log onto our fanpage on Facebook (if you are not a fan already, this is the time to sign up). Click the “Video” Tab at the top of this page where you can view the videos featuring the presentations made by the contestants. Make sure to vote for your favorite contestant by clicking the “like” button under their video (voting closes Saturday November 7th at Noon).
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Using Sex in Small Business Marketing

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 22nd, 2009 5 Comments

Sex in small business marketing has long, long been used, for a wide variety of products, appealing to men, and to women.

It can be subtle “ like Cadillac’s woman driver: the question slyly asked by the sexy woman: when you turn your car on, does it return the favor?

…overt “ think after-shave ads.humorous “ people my age remember football star Joe Namath in pantyhose.

…branding “ think Playboy, think GoDaddy’s Super Bowl commercials…think Hooters.
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Make History with Your Marketing…Every Single Monday

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 20th, 2009 6 Comments

For several years, I was “the small business marketing guy” assisting a schizophrenic human potential/wealth training organization which, as its main sales activity and deliverable, put on a 3-day seminar every weekend – and had to draw from 300 to 1,000 people to it every week.

A good percentage of those people were returning many weekends in a row.

Traveling from all over the country to Phoenix.

I learned pretty quickly that, every Monday morning, we had to come up with the big idea for the big promise of how this coming weekend’s event was going to be dramatically different, bigger, and more amazing than last week’s.
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