Tag Archives: marketing

Don’t Start A Business Without a Marketing Plan

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Creating a marketing plan just sounds like so much effort and bother that many new business owners just don’t bother to make one. They think they can keep it “all in their head…”

 

Agreeably this is an area of Business 101 where most people absolutely fail.  A marketing plan is all about budgeting, planning and building anticipation and excitement about your business. It is all about promoting it, exciting prospective customers and having a big opening launch that introduces you to the world.

If you do not have the basics in place, such as a business launch, it is going to look to your customers and your employers like you don’t care. The lack of a launch disappoints your employees and partners and can often send the business into a downward spiral because of low morale. That low morale, in turn can translate into bad service for your customers who have less than stellar experiences with employees who simply are not enthusiasts at what they do.

Some people get by the whole matter of throwing the launch by saying they are going to have a “soft opening” instead. You are probably best to avoid the soft opening as it is a waste of time. When it comes to letting the world you know you exist you can’t be half pregnant. You are either pregnant or not.

 

If you are going to do a soft opening, do it for friends and family. In fact, don’t call it a soft opening at all. Call it a “dry run” and then throw a real launch that truly does announce to your customers, the neighborhood and the local media that you are a real business that has a lot to offer and celebrate on opening day.

The reason you do not want to have a soft opening with just friends and family is because even if there are aspects of your business that really suck you are going to not get honest feedback. That is because friends and family do not like to be perceived as “negative” and crush anybody’s dream.

 

The problem with throwing a soft launch for customers is that it can give you a bit of a bad reputation especially if they are feeling “practiced on.” If you are going to throw a launch, be sure to throw it for real. Bring your A Game to the table because a customer is not going to make excuses for you.

Basically a soft opening is a cop out. It is a term that really means “learning on the fly without a business plan!”

 

Finding the Best SEO Outsourcing Services

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If your business has a website that just does not seem to be making money then you might want to consider outsourcing the work of optimizing it to a company outside of the United States. People do this because it is a lot cheaper than hiring an American company to do it.

 

There are a number of things that the savvy Internet business entrepreneur should look for when shopping for these types of services before committing to a contract. It is important that you are careful about who you hire because the outfit that ends up doing your search engine optimization for you is, in actuality, the keeper of your branding, reputation and potential to have a great searchability in your search engines.

 
The best SEO outsourcing services should have:

 

  • An understanding of both the technical and the content aspects of SEO meaning that there will be a meshing of both context and content offered in order to enhance your site
  • An offering of both technical and content writing to enhance your chances of being boosted on Google and other search engine sites
  • A good creative team that is friendly and offers you free suggestions about how they might go about improving your site
  • An awareness of your branding and interview you about your preferences about your mission statement, what your business image should be and how that should be reflected in descriptions, content and articles about you
  • An offer to optimize your site using various social media platforms including Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter
  • Packages in place that include technical assessments of site efficiency and user-friendliness, the redesign and rewriting of content, blog creation and content supply, ezine article writing, sales letter writing and auto-responder email writing
  • A guarantee of more traffic; if the outsourcing services that cannot offer you a boost in traffic or raise in profile for your business in search engine results is not really doing it’s job
  • Will have a team that considers your business and budget in a personal way so that you can afford the change both in terms of price and time lost wile experts work on the site

It is very important to find seo outsourcing services that are ethical in their practices. This means that they do not offer to use techniques such as link spamming, keyword cramming or the plagiarism of content in order to boost your ratings.  These types of tactics can ruin your reputation.