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Posts Tagged ‘small business’

Four Fast Fixes for Local Search

By: Brian Horn on: March 24th, 2010 10 Comments

As Google beings to take “search” to next level (i.e. Google’s real time search), more and more people are beginning to niche to their cities or neighborhoods for certain searches.

Targeting local visitors is critical if you serve the local market (totally “obvi”). The cool thing is…it is WAY easier to rank when you add a local modifier to your search term (i.e. easier to rank for “houston financial planner” than “financial planner”).

Optimizing a website for a locally oriented business includes all the steps of on page and off page optimization along with a few tweaks and additions. The following steps will ensure that your website marks its presence in the local results.
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What Do Small Business Customers See?

By: Dan Kennedy on: March 4th, 2010 10 Comments

On Monday, I wrote about the importance of customer or client relations.

I explained my belief that each customer you can acquire has tremendous long term value and that most small businesses fail to understand and work to preserve this value.

Now, here are some customer relations tips I urge you to consider for your small business:

Make good customer relations a priority in your business – think about it, brainstorm it, talk about it with your employees, work at it.
Manage first impressions – first impressions are lasting impressions. America does judge a book by its cover. It’s very difficult to overcome a poorly managed first impression.

If telephone contact is the source of first impressions for many of your potential customers you should give very careful consideration to how the incoming calls are being handled in your stores or offices. Many businesses lose a tremendous amount of business by bungling this first telephone contact.

If the first impression happens by the prospective customer walking in the door you need to give thought to specific procedures for meeting and greeting that person.

If your business is a public retail business I believe you need to give a great deal of attention to the store environment. It’s interesting to observe businesses that have historically had lousy environments and had that accepted by everybody as just the way it is, now losing their markets to new competitors who concentrate on environment.
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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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Master One Thing and Make It Your Own

By: Dan Kennedy on: December 10th, 2009 5 Comments

In the 1900’s, America was so crazy for harness racing that over 1,000 tracks dotted the country, and THE sports celebrity of the time was a racehorse, not a person.

His name was Dan Patch.

In 1901, Dan’s rookie year of racing in the big league – the Grand Circuit – he won every race in which he competed, and began flirting with the 2:00 mile, then the bar of greatness for a Standardbred. By mid-1902, tracks and bookmakers refused bets on him, forcing him to be raced only in non-wagering exhibitions.

For the rest of his career, his only opponent was the clock. His second owner, who had him from that 2nd year on, paid $60,000.00 for him — $1.3-million in today’s dollars. In 1903, Dan Patch set a world’s record of 1:56-1/2, racing by himself. A life-threatening illness impaired is 1904 season, but he still managed to break his own record, hitting 1:56.

In 1905, 200,000 people came out to see him tour….64,000 at the Minnesota State Fair, an astounding 82,000 at one exhibition in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And he set another record at 1:55-1/4.

Which would stand for 20 years before being broken, and 1:55 pacers are in the top tier of harness racing yet today. He was truly a super-horse, possibly the greatest racehorse who ever lived – because he performed at a peak level without requiring competing horses to egg him on.
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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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The Greatest Strategy So Few Small Business Marketers Are Willing To Use

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 26th, 2009 4 Comments

Never discouraged by futility or resistance, I continue to teach and preach the profound advantage available only through precise message to market match. And I have another instructive example.

The big sporting goods, hunting, fishing, camping and apparel company ORVIS offers its customer mailing list with ethnic and religious selects, so you can obtain only the Jewish or Catholic or Muslim or Hindu buyers, or only the Asian or African-American or British or Irish or Italian or Hispanic buyers….and by merging Orvis’ list with InfoUSA lifestyle selects, you can get only Democrats or only Republicans…so you could, for example, get only Irish-Catholic Democrats, by age, gender and geography.

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Critical Copywriting Strategies for Marketing a Small Business

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 23rd, 2009 4 Comments

Around here, on Planet Dan, we say “Copy Is King”…and we focus on the Message (and on Message To Market Match). But, as the highest paid professional, freelance direct-response copywriter working today, I can afford to tell you…and do tell you….things other copywriters will not. While it must be on target, copy gets credit for only 20% to 25% of a successful direct-mail piece/campaign, ad, web site, etc.

Another critical element is the ‘who’ reading the copy. In direct-mail, this makes careful, thorough, precision list selection and segmentation critical; in online marketing, it has to do with where traffic is being obtained from.

Then, another critical element is the presentation of the message. In face-to-face, person-to-person or person-to-group selling this may encompass the salesperson’s attire, personal appearance, body language and voice inflection; his props, visual aids, demonstrations; even the environment in which the selling is taking place. In media, there are seven major items on the Presentation of Message List.
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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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