Learn what you can do to be successful in your business, even in a recession

Learn What You Can Do to Be Successful in Your Business, Even in a Recession!

News reports contain plenty of bad news about the economy that can make an entrepreneur fear that it is not possible to be successful during a severe recession. Utilizing the right tools and mindset, it is very possible to be successful. Here are some things other profitable companies have done to grow profits during economic downturns.

Turn off the news and think about this: Customers will still spend money in a recession; they just become more selective on where to spend their dollars. They look for what appears to be a better deal, whether it is better pricing, better customer service, a special add-on, easier sales process, and more.

Even during the Great Depression (that began in 1929), consumers were still spending. Companies that survived, and even thrived, got creative and took action. Here are just a few examples from that time period:

* Kellogg and Post were once pretty close competitors until the Great Depression. Kellogg came out swinging, with heavy marketing; Post took the no-growth strategy — thinking they needed to save money and not spend it. Kellogg overtook Post, and Post has never caught up.

A similar situation occurred with Chevrolet and Ford. Chevrolet increased their marketing and had a large market lead over Ford for many years.

* Proctor and Gamble began a huge branding campaign by being the first company to sponsor radio soap operas, which was a significant form of entertainment and relaxation for listeners. Their name became a household word and remains so today.

* Bixler Jewelers, credited as the oldest jeweler in America, saw a drop in customer traffic and decided to open a free lending library in the store. This creative service addition brought more people into their store, and also kept their current customers coming back. In time, sales began to increase. Bixler Jewelers survived the Depression and are in existence today.

* A.E. Schmidt was a billiard table manufacturer when the Depression hit. They diversified and sold janitorial supplies to restaurants. They also sought new markets for their billiard tables, approaching the US government about the need to provide inexpensive and positive activities for those in government work camps during the long, boring evenings when they weren’t working ? and billiards became one of the top activities at those camps.

* Cornell Iron Works was a specialty ironworks provider. In the Depression, they broadened their market so that they not only made specialty railings, grates and stairways; they also made plain metal siding for delivery trucks and security doors.

Some entrepreneurs saw opportunities that others didn?t see during the Depression, and took them.

* Warren Buffet?s father, Howard, noticed that many brokerages had closed or were not taking new customers, yet there were still some people who wanted to invest in stocks, so he opened a brokerage.

* Walt Disney knew people still wanted entertainment, and provided it at a low cost through animated cartoons.

* Ever hear of Monopoly? The rise of this game occurred as another form of cheap entertainment. A small investment for the Monopoly game became a way to see hope in the future, and as players developed their money making skills, they could pretend they were real estate barons.

There have been severe recessions since the Great Depression ended, and during each one, new and existing businesses were built to great levels of success.

Two companies that began business in a recession are Domino’s Pizza and Toys R Us. They thrived by using new marketing models. Domino’s Pizza created a marketing campaign that no other pizza company had: if they didn’t deliver the pizza within 30 minutes, the customer did not have to pay for it. Toys R Us transferred the warehouse store concept to selling toys — a first for that niche.

A very short list of some other companies that started business during economic downturns include: Wrigley Gum, UPS, NewEgg, Super 8 Motel, Microsoft, Symantec, Nantucket Juice, Zippo Lighters and Hewlett Packard. These companies are giants, and are well-known by multitudes!

What are the main keys to success in these examples?

1. GET CREATIVE with marketing, business models, product diversification and positioning, and,

2. SEEK the opportunities that others do not see, and,

3. TAKE ACTION, because of, and in spite of, the economic news.

Don’t get caught up in the fear that is being propagated on the news channels. Instead, focus on what you can do to create you success, regardless of the current economy.

How secure is cloud computing

How Secure is Cloud Computing?

If you are an executive of a large company, one of your responsibilities is to make sure that all your employees are using the right software and hardware so they can do their jobs properly. It is not enough to buy just the hardware. You also need to buy software licenses so that your workers are equipped with all the proper tools. And when new employees come in, you have to make sure that the current software license lets the new user work. This task alone can be quite stressful. To make things easier, you must make use of cloud computing. But what exactly is cloud computing, and how can it help your company?

Cloud computing is a style of computing offered as a service over the internet that is often virtual and dynamically scalable. One of the most often used is email hosting. The best thing about it is that users are not required to learn the technological infrastructure that supports them. Cloud computing will take care of it all. Most applications cloud computing uses are business related such as an email server platform. Users can access them through a web browser. You may wonder why it is called cloud computing. Well, the term ‘cloud’ is actually used as a metaphor for the Internet and the idea is composed of a combination of platform, software, and infrastructure services. The actual software, however, are kept securely on the servers rather than on your computer.

The truth is you may have used some sort of cloud computing and may not even aware of it. You already have an experience with cloud computing if you have an email account with Hotmail, Yahoo mail, or Gmail — these are popular Web-based email services. What you do is to log-in to your email account remotely instead of running an email program on your PC. But is cloud computing really secure?

A lot of people admit that cloud computing is here to stay, and pretty soon millions and millions will be using it as well. Many companies are really worried about this due to the security concerns that come with jumping the firewall. Furthermore, how can you trust the cloud if you don’t even know where exactly your data is being stored? The worst thing that could happen is when its systems are down, you are down as well. And if you did not purchase all those servers to run the application, there would be no local systems for back up.

But others are saying that there is nothing to worry about because the security of data in cloud computing is quite the same as with the data security at a remote data center. This means that data at the majority of companies actually has higher security risks in their own environment compared to a well-managed cloud.

The best thing to do is to teach your team about cloud computing. To learn more about the security implications of cloud computing, you can go to Cloud Security and other trustworthy online resources. To ensure data privacy, make sure that you always know where your data is stored and who has access to it and who doesn’t.

Internet marketing in your facebook page

Internet Marketing In Your Facebook Page

Instead of just having one website for your online business, you can make a similar one that can be available to your target audience. An example of this is making your own pages in social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook. Different kinds of people from different parts of the world spend a significant amount of time in their day just snooping around other people’s pages, meeting other people and staying connected to their social world. You can find small business internet marketing tips that discuss how to use your page for promoting your business and take advantage of so much social activity and here are just a few that you can adapt.

When it comes to advertising in social networking sites, the easiest to work with is Facebook. They give you an option on which campaign you would like to use, pay for impressions or pay per click advertising (PPC). Upload a picture of your product or an image that best represents your business. Give it a catchy title, a brief description and your target customers and location and you are good to go. You can bid on how much you are willing to shell out for the advertising period. In Facebook, the minimum is a dollar but you can increase it according to your budget. This advertisement has a schedule. They will give you an option on whether you want it to appear from the day you have programmed it or with a specific time and date. If you are done programming all of this, you can review your ad and if you want to make changes after a few days, you can do so.

Aside from this pay per click advertising, make your own page in Facebook and use search engine optimization marketing strategies. Select the best name for your Facebook page and never ever change it. Changing it will lose your spot in bigger search engines like Google. It is best that you use your company name and add a relevant keyword in it. Facebook will disable updates for pages with general names and regard them as spam.

Next, select a good URL name for your Facebook page. This is the username that the site uses to identify you as a member. This will also be an easy access to the larger database of the site. But before you can even have one, you must have at least 100 fans in your page. It’s either that or you increase your friend list to a hundred or more for you to be eligible for this option. It works like a website search engine optimization. People enter the keyword or a part of your keyword and your page appears together with other pages that have similar keywords.

So, if you do not have that number yet, focus on the content of your page. A strategy here is to incorporate keywords that you use in your original website to your page. On the info tab, makes sure that you put keywords in your descriptions and put your links there. This way you are able to deliver more exposure to your original website as part of your small business marketing tips using a Facebook page.

How-to create a 3-tier funnel for active leveraged income for coaches

How-to Create a 3-tier Funnel for Active Leveraged Income for Coaches

Do you have a plan to flow more money to you and increase your revenue this year? Have you even thought about it? If you do have a plan, how do you intend to go about doing it? Would you get more clients, write a book, or increase your prices?

Well, I’m here to tell you, that if your plan doesn’t include active leveraged revenue, you might as well forget it.

What exactly is leveraged revenue?

There are two types of leveraged income: leveraged and active leveraged.

1. Leveraged income leverages the work of other people to create income for you; such as writing an eBook and selling it through affiliate websites. The key with leveraged income is that you are utilizing other people and the work they are doing on your behalf to make money, rather than you doing it all by yourself.

2. Active leveraged income is the ability to provide your service in the form of a product, on a mass-market scale. Although it does require your direct participation, your ability to make money has increased because you’re delivering it to larger groups of people.

Workshops, conferences, and teleseminars are excellent examples of active leveraged income opportunities where you deliver at a one time event, to a large group of people, for a large return on initial investment. Home-study courses are another example where you put together a product package (one time event) and sell it to many, either through affiliates, back of the table sales at speaking engagements, or on your website.

The process is simple: First, figure out what service you can productize that people will buy over and over again, then create a way to deliver this product to a large group of people.

How-to Create a 3-tier Funnel for Active Leveraged Income

1. Design your high-end productized service first. Then work backwards from there.

2. Have the remainder of your products and services funnel into your high-end event.

3. Create three tiers:

+ Low: something in the $97 or below range. For example, a home-study course that includes a CD, checklist, assessment, book or eBook for $97

+ Middle: something in the $197-497 range. Such as, a three-month group coaching program or online teleseminar. They key here is that it is structured, at a specific time, for a limited period, and geared toward getting a specific result. A three-month program that has regular group calls, downloadable mp3 files, and 20-pages of documentation per week could easily be priced at $297.

+ High: something in the $500-997 range. This would be your platinum one-year program. It could include one-on-one coaching with you each month, monthly group mastermind calls, monthly expert calls focused on a specific content where you interview people on a specific topic, and one or two live events, all for between $500-900 per month.

First, outline your high-end product or service. This is the one that folks probably won’t buy now, although they will be ready to purchase in 2-3 years, after they get to know you and have tried out your other products and services. At this point, don’t go into too much detail planning it all out. Just outline it. From an energetic standpoint, when you writing down and seeing what this product or service will looks like, you’ll begin immediately attracting it to you.

Then develop your first and second tier products or services to flow into your third tier service. Create content that can be leveraged from the low-end of your offerings to the high-end. Make everything compliment each other, so that you create one product to use multiple time.

What’s your plan to flow money to you and increase your income this year? After reading this article, I bet it includes actively leveraging your productized services to get the most buck for your time. Follow the directions on how to create a 3-tier funnel for active leveraged income and not only will you increase your revenue this year, you’ll save yourself time and money, too.

How to be successful working from home

How To Be Successful Working From Home

The idea of working from home appeals to a lot of people. There are often stories in the media of different people who have given up their nine to five office jobs and have managed to run a successful business from the comfort of their own home. The idea may seem appealing but it is not always that simple to pull off, in this article I am going to give advice on what it takes to make a home based business work.

Anyone who works from home needs to be able to separate their home life from their work life. This might seem quite simple to do but in reality it can be quite difficult. When you go to work in an office you do not even think about the washing, the washing up, the television, the ironing or the fact that the house may be untidy, you are able to fully focus on the job you are doing. When you are working from home all of these duties are in your face and it can be very easy to fall into a trap where you are doing more household work, than your actual business work. It is therefore very important to be strong and disciplined. I have been working from home for around ten years, I set myself my own hours, for example I will work from nine in the morning, until two in the afternoon. I have an office which I will only leave if I really need to, maybe to make a drink or to go to the toilet. I love to watch the television, therefore I do not have a television in my office.

To succeed at working from home you need to have a great deal of self belief in your own ability. There are likely to be peaks and troughs, some months you are flying away but in others everything seems to go wrong. Having a confidence in your own ability is essential in helping you to ride through the negative periods.

I always feel that it is worth saving money from the periods when I am doing well to cover the periods when the business slows down.

People who work from home need to be able to keep motivated. There is no boss to make us work or other people to bounce ideas off. Some people find that working from home can be quite lonely and soon return to an employed environment where they are able to have greater contact with other people. It is important to remember all of the benefits of working from home when we have a drop in business or when we feel a bit lonely.

In my opinion there is nothing better than being self-employed and working from home. I am sure that many other people could also make it work as long as they have the right attitude.