Business and Economy Archives - Monetization Magic

Put Your Wallet Away: 3 No Cost Ways to Promote Your Business

When you start your business, you’re excited about it and you’ve told all the people close to you about your business. Maybe you’ve had a few sales and some interesting conversations about what you do and how you can help others. There comes a day usually within the first month or two of launching your business that you will realize that your business has encountered a lull and you’ve used up your warm market. You now need to begin to promote yourself and your value and speak to strangers about your new business.

There are many ways that you can promote your business. As you look around in your day to day life, you will see businesses promoted by billboards, TV commercials, radio commercials, direct mail pieces that you receive in your mailbox and internet advertising.

Why did you launch your business? You want to serve others and yet at the end of the day, you realize that you need to make a profit because everyday items need to be purchased in order to sustain the business. You may not have created a large surplus in which to pay for advertising and yet you still need to promote your business.

Rest easy, my friend, because my clients and I, myself, have created amazing amounts of money from my business while utilizing no cost ways of promoting business. Using no cost means of promoting your business frees up your funds to provide for you obviously more profits but also the ability to help others and from the tiny amount of value that you put out into the world, the ripples of your influence will radiate out from you and return to you in the form of people recognizing your value and needing your assistance.

All of the ways I will be introducing to you involve speaking to others. Speaking to another person is a great way to promote your business without incurring a cost. While you’re speaking with the other person about the value you have to offer you can also determine if you wish to invest your time in this person’s business to create value for them and move them to the next level in their awareness. This type of a conversation is often called a discovery session because you get to discover the person in front of you, either physically or virtually, and they get to discover you and what you have to offer. It is best to have no less than two of these meetings each week. This gives you the opportunity to start out in a low risk arena. We’ve all had one on one conversations and that’s all this is. No cost with the potential of great return. The medium you can use to have these conversations would be your own telephone or perhaps using Skype so that you don’t have to pay international telephone charges.

Once you have had the opportunity to have some one-on-one conversations, you may realize that you are now working more hours than you would prefer so the rest of the ways of speaking will move you from one-on-one conversations to one-to-many conversations. You can begin to hold your own teleseminar on the topics that will bring value to your ideal customers. While you’re bringing value, many who are attending your teleseminar will want to continue their studies with you and you would be doing a disservice to them if you didn’t give them an opportunity to continue their studies with you. You can also be interviewed by others and give their audience value. Generally, the host will allow you to provide their audience a way to connect with you further in the form of a gift that you would provide for them. A great no cost medium for teleseminars is FreeConferenceCall.com and it will provide you with your own teleseminar platform that can and should be recorded.

If you have content that lends itself to being presented in a visual manner, a third way is to create your own webinar. You can use Powerpoint slides or once you feel comfortable enough you can simply video record yourself for your webinar. You will still be providing value and an opportunity for your attendees to connect further with you just as you would with the teleseminar. The no cost platform that you can use for your webinars is called AnyMeeting.com and this platform will provide for 200 seats in your webinar. As you would with the teleseminar, you will want to record your webinar for reuse at a later date.

Once you begin to speak about your business outside your friends and family, you will receive great rewards in the form of feedback and clients. You don’t have to have it perfect when you begin! Just get out there and do it! Money is no longer an obstacle! Just as a baby learns to walk by trial and error, I would encourage you to call three people today and let them know when your first teleseminar will be held and ask them to attend. Whether or not they attend, hold the teleseminar anyway and record it. Once you’ve decided when you’re going to hold your teleseminar, I would love to receive an invitation. Really! Just reply to this ezine to let me know when you’ll be holding your first teleseminar. I love to hear about when a member of my tribe is taking action!

To find out 7 more no cost ways to promote your business, register for the upcoming no cost teleseminar to be held February 15th at 10 a.m. Mountain Time.

10 Ways to Expand Your Brick and Mortar Business – Part 1 of 2

By SoftwareGirl

httpv://youtu.be/QOsLdT4slsk

When I was a little girl, my family moved to New Mexico from New Jersey. In New Mexico, we only had 3 TV stations and they would only broadcast during certain hours of each day. The information broadcast on that TV station was selective and even back in those days, what they broadcast was determined by what would get the TV station the highest ratings. Everyday, I would see a commercial for a used car dealer who was in California and has some of the goofiest commercials I had ever seen. His commercials often featured his “dog”, Spot. His dog was often not a dog but would be an elephant or a tiger or some other wild animal. Sometimes I wondered if people would watch him just to see the day when dear ol’ Cal actually got eaten by his “dog”, Spot!

I tell you this to make this point…Cal Worthington was all the way in California and I was a little girl all the way in the desert of New Mexico…but I knew who he was. Cal Worthington sold a lot of cars when he ran those commercials. Eventually Cal passed away. Many years later, I had an opportunity to visit the great state of California. When I got there, what did I remember about California? You guessed it! I remembered ol’ Cal Worthington and his wild dog, Spot. I actually passed by the car lot and it was an event to me because I was able to remember all his commercials and the friends I was with at the time remembered him too.

Cal Worthington used TV to advertise his car lot and he attracted customers from the next town, the next county, the next state away. There are a lot of people in the great state of California and he advertised so well that a little girl all the way in New Mexico (954 miles away) and 30 years later remembered his car lot. Think about it, he was just another used car dealer and he found away to make his name known to a much broader audience. Within 10 years of beginning in the business, his dealership was #1 in the nation! He attracted so much attention that Johnny Carson even had him on the Tonight Show which had a national reach!

You are blessed because business owners now do not have to purchase TV air time to get our message out! We are able to rely on the technology that we have at our figure tips and our own ingenuity to promote our message.

To illustrate how this works, I’ll be using ol’ Cal Worthington’s business to show you how we could expand his business using today’s technology:

Website. Your website is the virtual hub of your business. The website could be used to show people the new car models, book appointments with customers to come in a look at a car, apply for car financing so that they could have the convenience of knowing that they were already approved for a vehicle before they arrived and they could just come in a pick out their new vehicle. They could schedule their normal service appointments, talk to a mechanic live via the website chat feature, order new accessory items for their new car or get a trade in value for their vehicle.

Keywords on the Website. Using keywords helps the search engines to direct customers to your website. Cal Worthington’s keywords might have been “Ford”, “dog Spot”, used cars, new cars, Long Beach, CA, and so on. Today, Cal Worthington dealership still exists and the keywords they use are as follows:

long beach ford, ford long beach, long beach ford parts, long beach ford service, used ford long beach, new ford long beach

If you like what you read in this article and would like to see how you can expand YOUR business, apply for a complimentary Action Strategy Session so that you can have a clear roadmap to take your busines to the next level! The Action Strategy Session is valued at $297.00 and will give you concrete ways that you can move forward in your business.

What IS an Income Producing Website?

By SoftwareGirl

Quite simply, an income producing website is a website that produces more money than what it takes to keep it running each month. Every business person knows that it takes money to have a website and to keep it running. There are domain names to be purchased and hosting companies to pay to allow your website to be housed on their systems. Typically this amount is less than $20 each month. Business owners don’t mind spending money on their business if they know that they are getting a return on their money. If your website is not producing money for you, it might as well be an unlit billboard on a desolate desert highway in the middle of the night! Fortunately, there IS something that you can do about it.

Begin by finding out who sees your website. This will simply tell you about the traffic your website receives today. Think of this as being point A. This will tell you the good news and the bad news. The good news is you’ll know where people are going on your website and how long they stay. The bad news is you’ll know how small the traffic stream really is. You can find out who sees your website by installing Google Analytics on your website and allowing it to gather statistics while you work on the other items in this article.

Think about your ideal customer. If you can identify one customer in particular, an actual person with a pulse and a name, that is best. What are this customer’s needs in relation to your business? What do they buy? If they were to look for something to satisfy their need or problem and they wanted to use Google to search for a solution to their need or problem, what would they type into the search field to find that solution? What location do you want to service? Where is your ideal customer located? These are the items that make up your basic key words for your website: customer problem, customer need, location, services offered, best selling items. Your keywords need to be used on your website and in the content that you produce for your website.

Your customers are interested in your products and services and they want to know more about your business. This gives you an opportunity to create meaningful content to place on your website. Sell the sizzle of your product!

Your website has the ability to sell your products and services even when your business is closed. Allow it to do just that by providing a way for your customers to book their own appointments, email you, buy products from you, interact with polls about upcoming products that you’re thinking about offering, finding out about upcoming events and purchasing tickets to those events. Make it easy for the customer to interact with your site and they will continue to come back.

Just having a website is a great first step. Setting up the website to work for your is a wise business move because it begins to work for you and will free up your time and resources so that you can concentrate on your core business.

Create Your Own Groupon – Part 2

By SoftwareGirl

Don’t cut your own throat.

Sometimes it’s ok to give an incredible deal as long as you know it will bring you more business not take money out of your pocket. This is especially true if you are a small business. You can do many things as a small business to expand your business that doesn’t cause you to lose money as in the case of our example bakery.

Have everyone who responds register for an awesome give-away.

When running the special, offer an even bigger ridiculous special for one lucky person. Have everyone who is getting the first special register for the 2nd one. On the registration, collect name, email and phone number. The name and email you can use to communicate with the customer later and the phone number is to notify the winner.

Use the media to your advantage!

While you’re having the special, take a moment out to have the media interview you on TV. Create press releases for your business. Do an exclusive interview on the radio. Make sure you record both interviews to place on your website and then you can include an “As Seen On” badge for your website.

How to create your own?

Perhaps you’re a little leary of partnering with Groupon for your business expansion but you do still want to do something? The good news is that you can. Hold a one day sale. You can do it online or in your business. Create 1,000 flyers with your incredible offer. Hire someone to place the flyers on doors within a certain radius of your business. Then follow the rest of the tips outlined in this article. This way you control your exposure and you can start small.

Use your small size to your advantage.

Small businesses are great because you can change direction on a dime! You don’t need to wait for some board of directors to approve your decision once you have come up with a great idea. You can execute it as soon as you want. You could do a one day sale every month. Consider partnering with a nearby school and offer them a portion of the profits of the sales from your one day sale. If the first one works out well and you still want to expand your reach, do another sale and hand out more flyers or include another school. You could also include another business for instance, if you’re a pizzeria and you’re having a sale, you could offer a free skate session from the roller rink down the street. Get creative, make some money and have fun!

What are some of the sales or Groupons that you have done in the past that have worked well? Let’s hear about it! Leave your comment below.

New Merchant Credit Card Account Service

By SoftwareGirl

What is it?

A merchant credit card account is an account set up with a bank to process credit cards. It allows a business owner to accept credit cards for purchases made in their business. The account is completely PCI compliant so your information and your customers information is safe!

Who needs it?

If you own or will be owning a business, you will need a merchant credit card account. The amount the bank charges for processing the credit cards can vary and some are quite expensive! I am able to offer VERY competitive rates for this service. If you are currently paying over 2%, we definitely need to talk!

How does this benefit you?

This benefits any business owner by lowering their overhead and increasing their profits. I am also able to provide equipment and give you the ability to accept credit cards using just your cell phone, if you have a need for portability. Doing business at the beach? No problem! This is a great option for those vendors that will be selling their products at the state fairs that are currently taking place across the country!

Does it really make a difference?

Yes! For example, let’s say your current rate is 2.75% and let’s say your rate is reduced by .75% down to 2.0%. A business with only $1000 in monthly sales would save $90 or 9% of their gross monthly sales in fees! That can make or break many businesses today! If you happen to be using PayPay and receiving a rate of 3% + $.30 on each transaction which is common, you’ll save even more! Over the course of a year, your savings really add up!

Would you like to learn more?

I would love to explain to you how I can help you to retain more money in your business by getting a better rate on your credit card processing. Simply fill out the form at http://monetizationmagic.com/merchant-credit-card-accounts and I’ll be in touch with you within 24 hours!

Blogging for Business Growth

By SoftwareGirl

Gone are the days when having a website meant that you had a cute picture of your store front with your business name, address, phone number and hours of operation. Today’s website needs to include a blog, social network connections, free give-away items, an area to get more information from the business, an area to submit an e-mail from the website, items for sale and in some cases an events calendar.

Does that sound like a lot of hats to wear in addition to your normal day-to-day operations? Actually, it’s a blessing rather than a curse. It’s a blessing because you don’t have to do everything yourself. You are able to hire someone else to do some of the work for you at a reasonable rate. Other tasks can be created once and automated so that you can get back to the normal operations of your business.

The websites of today can introduce several additional streams of passive and residual income to your bottom line. The optin area is used to gather names and email addresses for people who are interested in learning more about what you have to offer or perhaps to receive your monthly newsletter. The email addresses are fed to your auto-responder software to send out communication to your current and prospective customers to let them know key items about your business.

For instance, let’s say you have a heating, ventilation and air conditioning business. Every fall it starts to get cold and every spring it starts to get warm. Every month we’re supposed to change the filter in our systems. What if every summer, your email system automatically began to notify customers that they needed to contact your company to set up an appointment to have their furnace serviced to take advantage of the Early Bird special? What if every winter, your email system automatically began to notify customers that they needed to contact your company to set up an appointment to have their air conditioner serviced to take advantage of the Spring Early Bird special?

Customers might even choose to schedule their appointments and pay for the service prior to you performing the service. It’s convenient for them and would remove some receivables from your books. WooHoo! Instant cash flow! I can see your accountant clicking their heals already.

Your blog could be used to educate your customers on the proper way to install a filter or drain a sprinkler system. It could also be used to let your current and prospective customers that you regularly maintain the local soup kitchen for no charge just because you like to give back to your community. Your blog gives your business a human touch to an otherwise cold relationship. If your little business will be doing an exhibit at the local home and garden show, you can let your customers know to stop by and see you to pick up their coupon for one of your services along with something nice to drink. People like to do business with people whom they know, like and trust. You may not have time and resources to meet and greet all your customers, so put some systems in place to do that work for you.

Take a look at the website you have today. If your website is more like an unlit billboard in the night than a fully interactive, systematized money-making machine, consider having an Action Strategy Session with me so that you can begin adding more to your bottom line before your competition gets a hold of this valuable information. The normal investment for this service is $349.00. The Action Strategy Session is even priced for today’s economy because you can take advantage of the Take Action Special for $97.00. You may just find there are 10-15 different income streams that you can take advantage of that you hadn’t even thought about before your Session. Reserve your time at I’m always happy to help!