Supervisory in Business

In the world of business, there is only one cardinal truth; customers equal business. If you don’t have the customers, then you don’t have the business. If you don’t have the customers, then you won’t have the business for very long. This is why the 20th and 21st centuries have been the centuries of advertising. As consumers, people are inundated with requests to buy products or be a part of a business. Companies spend millions to get people to buy their products. So, what can you do when you are a small business? Can you spend millions to get those customers? Not likely.

What you can do is provide your customers with something they will like and appreciate; customized ceramic mugs. These mugs can be a part of any small business marketing plan because they are cheap and effective. How can something that does not cost much, like customized ceramic mugs, be so effective? The answer comes in their long, pardon the pun, shelf life. When we look at newspaper ads, they last a few days to a couple weeks. A few hundred or thousand people see these, and even less actually act on the ads. So, for $200 to $2,000, you have brought in 50 customers to your business. Television ads bring in more people, say 200, but they cost as much as $10,000. That is often more than a small business can afford. Promotional items like customized ceramic mugs on the other hand are much cheaper. They cost $10 and they can bring in 20 customers. That is the only type of marketing that actually brings in more people than dollars paid. These people may be spread out over months or years, but they come in nonetheless.

Promotional items stick around for years. They sit on shelves in homes and are brought out when they need to be used. With customized ceramic mugs, they are brought out for coffee and drinks and others see your logo and company name on them. This can go on for a decade and that allows more and more people to see your business logo. So, you can buy a customer a mug now, and still be reaping the benefits years down the road. Not bad for ten dollars.

If you want an effective marketing plan for your small business, then you should look at marketing yourself through promotional items like customizable ceramic mugs. These mugs can be many different colors and designs, and they can feature everything from your company logo to your customer’s name. By giving away these mugs, you help to create customer loyalty and develop a long business relationship that can go on for years to come. There are few other types of advertising that can do this, and do it so well. Don’t ever underestimate the power of promotional items in your own small business marketing plan for your company. It is effective, cheap and you feel the rewards for years.

As most of us already know, multilevel marketing (mlm) is a swift growing industry. It is a solid foundation that is set up so that even the average joe can become wealthy. We all know that this doesn’t typically happen, but why? Why does the average person fail in multilevel marketing? Since there are so many companies out there and they are all set up a little differently, I am going to narrow it down to 4 reasons.

1. Fear–Most people are afraid to get started. Fear will prevent them from approaching someone about their business. If your fear of failure outweighs your ambition then forget about mlm. There is no promise of a paycheck every week. There is no promise that people aren’t going to laugh at you. Before you can be a success in mlm, you have to feel good about what you are doing. You have to sincerely believe that you have found the goose that layed the golden egg. If you try to be phony, your prospects will see right through you. You have to have enough confidence in your company that you know that if you get rejected, then they are the ones that are missing out. If you feel bad, it should be that you feel bad for them and the fact that they have passed up such a solid opportunity. Believe it or not, there are companies like this out there. So, if you don’t have this kind of confidence about your company, then you need to be in search of a different one.

2. Rejection–Many people in mlm today do most if not all of their marketing on the internet. However, many people still do their marketing and prospecting face to face. You will deal with rejection either way, but the face to face marketer has a harder time with the rejection. This makes total sense because of the fact that they have gotten to know their prospects in a more personal setting. And, a lot of times they already have a friendship of some sort with the person. If you have been at it for awhile, chances are this part doesn’t even bother you anymore. You have realized it is not personal. If you are new, this is a bump in the road that you will soon get over. Many of your closest friends will snicker. Again, if you are part of a good company, you will be able to deal with this. For the internet marketer, you will still deal with rejection, but if you keep your prospect on a professional level and let the company do the selling, you will be okay.

3. Impractical product–Considering the state of our economy, we honestly can’t expect people to buy our “magic juice” or overpriced “accessories”. Of course, there will always be some out there who can’t live without it, but the average working class citizen just can’t afford the extra expense of it. In this case, you may not want to drop your current company, but maybe pick up another more practical company.

4. Hit and miss mentality–Some people want others to treat them like their mlm business is a real job, but they don’t want to treat it as one. Whatever your company is, you have to make yourself a schedule and stick with it. You must treat it as if you have just invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in it. If that were the case, I am quite certain it would become a top priority as it should. If you are with a good company, and stay consistent and don’t give up, then your mlm can yield even better results than a physical business.

I have been in mlm for awhile now and I have seen people give up for all of the above reasons. The only way that an mlm will get you to where you want to be is if you stick with it. You must have a company that you believe in. You must have practical products or services. You must be willing to work. And you must have a plan of action so that you can work consistently and stay in the game. The final piece of the puzzle is you. You are the determining factor in your success. How bad do you want it to work? Why? As for me, I have found a company that I am completely confident in. I have seen success. And as for the why…well, i come up with new whys everyday.

Last week, I attended a webinar on the future of marketing. While you have to deal with what is going on in marketing in your daily business life, it’s also important to know what you’re working toward. You can’t get somewhere without knowing where you’re going so I thought it would be interesting to share some of this information with you.

3 ways Web 3.0 is changing the marketing landscape

1. Bye-bye keywords. While keywords will still play a role in search engine marketing, Web 3.0 is more than the keywords itself. Founder of Bintro.com claims that semantics will play more of a vital role than keywords. What he means by semantics is that he sees copy going away from keywords and more towards conversational sentences that make sense. We’ve seen some of this already with blogging. Blogs tend to have more of a conversational tone that readers on all levels can enjoy and learn from.

2. Going mobile. The United States has been a mobile society for quite some time now, but the future of mobile phone use across the globe is expected to increase. The widening reach of mobile phone use will be answered by Web 3.0 with more and more transactions taking place on mobile phones. It is expected that 50% of the world will be using a mobile phone by the end of 2010. Again, this is not in the United States. This is the world.

Think about what mobile phone transactions will do for business. Picture this. You’re out to dinner with your spouse. While you’re in the lobby waiting for your table, you strike up a conversation with the gentleman sitting next to you and learn he is the ideal client for your product or service. You hook him and he bites. He wants to buy. You pull out your cell phone and process his purchase with his credit card and your cell phone–all in the lobby of the restaurant. You can complete the transaction right now while the sale is hot, rather than having to send an invoice when you return to the office tomorrow or send them to your website and hope they make the purchase.

3. Videos marketing. We’ve seen the popularity of videos emerge online with the invention of sites such as YouTube. Web 3.0 is going to take the use of videos one step further when it comes to marketing. It’ll be less about interrupting your customer’s experience and more about creating an experience. Instead of buying a pop-up window ad that pops up when they type in a web address or land on a website, your video ad will be on the website they’re visiting. Most Internet users realize that if they click on a banner ad, for example, that they will be directed away from the site they are on. With a video ad, however, when they are ready to hear and see what you have to say, they can hit the play button and watch the video without ever leaving the site they have come to visit. This enhances the customer’s visit to the site rather than interrupting it.

Change is on the horizon in how you market and conduct business online. It may change the way you write your marketing copy, accept payments for your products and services, or the types of advertising you buy for your business. Web 2.0 changed the way we do everything online and Web 3.0 continues to alter our approach. Be aware of these changes and start to prepare your marketing efforts now so your business benefits from these changes in the future.

I believe that most of us really want to have a holiday in Paris. But each year, especially in a high season there are people all around the world will visit Paris just to see Eiffel tower for them who have never been to Paris. It may be difficult to get a hotel in high season if we do not booked it before. We may need to book the hotels few months before we visit there. We can find and book a hotel from hotel Paris or hotel Avignon. And then to go around the city, we can use open tour bus Paris in Paris. In Paris there are many objects that are needed to be visited.

Design matters. In fact, design matters a lot right now in Internet marketing. I spend quite a lot of time on packaging my information products and designing web pages. You can’t afford to have these look amateur or cheap. Regardless of what’s been said about “not judging a book by its cover,” people still buy things based on what they look like, not on what they contain.

On my web sites, I usually create two types of landing pages, using two different design variations. One of them has a headline at the top. There are some bullet points that talk about benefits. Then there is an opt-in section at the bottom.

The other design is a modified modern version. There’s a video clip at the top. The headline appears underneath that, and the opt-in section is again at the bottom.

These are essentially the same, the only differences being the use of the video and bullet points, and the placement of the headline. But they do attract different prospects. Many prefer to read information, while others prefer to see and hear it. We could have incorporated both on the same landing page, but in testing, we found this works much better.

One general rule I have discovered is that, for opt-in pages, it’s best to design it so that there is no scrolling required. When you have to scroll, you have to look around and figure out what’s going on. Instead, it’s best to show everything, right there at once in a single window. The whole offer appears on the screen just as soon as it pops up.

I try to make all the things I design for information marketing—especially web pages as well as information products—so simple that nobody could screw them up. I make it so it’s impossible to not figure things out.

A good rule of thumb to use, by the way, is a combination of something called eye gravity along with dominant visual elements. Let me explain how those work.

We have been trained through hundreds of years of type and print appearing in newspapers and books to start at the top and go down the page to the bottom. That’s what’s meant by eye gravity.

We also read from left to right in the Western World, so there is a pre-existing visual hierarchy. We can use that hierarchy to our advantage in information marketing, too. We want to put our dominant visual element—the largest one, which is usually also the main or most important one—at the very top.

So at the top, you put your biggest element, whether it’s your video, your picture, your headline, or whatever the largest one is. The second biggest one, which should roughly be half the size of the first one, goes underneath that one. Then the next one should be less dominant and go underneath.

So now you know why we designed our two landing pages that way. A huge video goes above a headline. A headline goes above bullet points, and so on.

Don’t get all fancy. Don’t use lots of fonts and colors and all kinds of fancy graphics. That just distracts. Watch what Apple does. Go look at their website. I look at it regularly and borrow design concepts from them.

Usually Apple will have a page that’s one font and one color. The headline is bold and the sub-headlines are bold and a little smaller. Then, the copy is smaller than that. It’s all aligned left. It’s just simple, simple, simple, but it looks so clean.

Look at the details. Notice how the lines are spaced. Notice how they’re aligned. Notice what font they’re using, too. These guys have the best designers in the world. They get paid the big bucks to make these designs.

Being overly creative and original with design in information marketing is typically a waste of time and money. Learn from the professionals. This is an area where copying is good. So make your designs simple. Don’t get complex. Make everything obvious. Design matters.