Wealth Dynamics Test for Entrepreneurs

1. The Creator - Builds innovative products

Examples: Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Richard Branson

2. The Star - Builds an influential brand

Examples: Oprah, Paul Newman, Bill Clinton

3. The Supporter - Builds high performance teams

Examples: Steve Ballmer, Jack Welch

4. The Deal Maker - Brings deals together

Examples: Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch

5. The Trader - Buying and selling commodities

Examples: George Soros

6. The Accumulator - Buying and holding assets

Examples: Warren Buffet, Paul Allen

7. The Lord - Controlling cashflow producing assets

Examples: Lakshmi Mital, Ingavar Kamprad

8. The Mechanic - Creating a duplicatable system

Examples: Michael Dell, Ray Krock

Traffic Building – Search Engine Marketing

Without any doubt, Search Engine Marketing is the most important digital marketing channel – especially for customers acquisition.

Clients turn to search engines when seeking products, services, information – they search online for you and your products/services. Do you get why it is so crucial to be visible in search engines results?

Here are the 2 main techniques used In Search Engine Marketing:

1. SEO – search engine optimization
2. PPC – Pay Per Click

SEO

The aim here is to achieve the highest possible position or ranking in the natural/organic listings. So what do you do to optimize your website position in different search engines?

First of all, you must understand how these results are produced. Search technology involves 3 main processes:

Crawling: identifying relevant pages for indexing; it’s performed by robots, also known as spiders

Indexing: this is a lookup table created to unable search engine to find the most relevant pages in response to searcher query 

Ranking: a lookup is not sorted in terms of relevance. The results will be displayed based on many ranking factors. We will explain in details in a moment

Query request and results serving: through the searchers IP, the location is assessed and the query is ‘passed’ to a relevant data centre. This allows for most accurate search results for the particular searcher.

Ranking Factors:

Site submission. Every new and not submitted site, should be submitted. This will ‘inform’ search engines that your site exist.

Keywords analysis. The keyword phrase relevance is the key to successful SEO. How should you analyse and set you keyword phrases?

Step 1: Identify the popularity of search term, its relevance and competitors. We recommend using free Google tools: https://adwords.google.com

Step 2: Assess how the company is performing for these keywords. Use tracking tools and tags to do so.

Step 3: Identify gaps. Recognise the biggest potential for improvement.

Step 4: Set goals and select keywords you will be targeting. These are the keyword phrases you want to be visible for.

How can I improve search engine ranking?

It’s not that easy, but fortunately there are some common factors which have big influence on search engine rankings. In a very simplistic way, there are 3 very important factors which can be managed easily:

1) On-page optimization
2) External Linking
3) Internal link-structures

On page optimization

As Google states: ‘ Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears  on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query’. As you can see, the number of times you use keywords on the page isn't enough! Some of other factors: 

• Frequency
• Occurrence in heading <h1> <h2>
• Occurrence in anchor text of hyperlinks
• Markup, eg. Bold
• Density
• Alternative image text
• Document meta data (title, meta tag, keywords meta tag)

External linking

The number and quality of the links determine your site rankings. Your site should deliver valuable content. If you only offer services, you can always add a few pages such as ‘Useful Resources’. Your visitors will share and recommend the website to others.

Another option to build quality external links is by identifying potential partner sites. Useful resources: Directories of links, Niche online-only media, Press Release distribution sites, Social Networks.

TIP: You can search on google:

<keyword phrase> + directory

<keyword phrase> + ‘Add URL’

<keyword phrase> + ’Links’

<keyword phrase> + ‘where to buy’ etc.

Today the quality of the links is even more important than number of them.

Internal link structures

The most important thing to do is to use keyword phrases within the anchor text of hyperlink (www.yourwebsite.com/searchenginemarketing as opposed to www.yourwebsite.com/hs749f). You may also consider the internal links to pages you want to rank well and be found by the visitors.

PAID PER CLICK

It is a similar technique to conventional advertising. The ad is displayed when the user searches for the specific keyword phrase.  There are a few advertising programmes: Google Adwords, Yeahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, MIVA.

The main characteristics and advantages of the PPC are:

• The advertiser does not pay for displaying the ad. Cost only occurs when the ad is clicked on.
• The PPC advertising is highly targeted based on the campaign settings and keywords.  
• The PPC have good tracking system
• Much simpler than SEO
• PPC are posted within a few days, while the SEO takes weeks if not months

Some disadvantages:

• Competition and expensive
• Not always cost effective
• Knowledge required setting up correctly and analysis. It is quickly changing so the person needs to keep up to date with these changes.
• Managing campaigns is time consuming – require checks

Effective paid search ad checklist:

• ü  Relevant search terms and keywords in headline and body
• ü  Specific offer
• ü  Specific benefits listed: free delivery etc.
• ü  What is unique about your offer
• ü  Including numbers
• ü  Use of CAPS
• ü  Use of characters: !,?, & …
• ü  Distinctive words
• ü  Squeeze in a call to action
• ü  The web address visible

Summarizing, it is important to have an employee who is knowledgeable and trained to optimize your website. Alternatively, you can outsource the search engine optimization.  

Characteristics of Great Logo Design

What is Logo? 

First things first. OK, so what is logo? As per BusinessDirectory.com, definition logo is: ‘Recognizable and distinctive graphic design, stylized name, unique symbol, or other device for identifying an organization. It is affixed, included, or printed on all advertising, buildings, communications, literature, products, stationery, and vehicles. Not to be confused with a brand, which identifies a product or family of products. Also called logotype.’

What makes a good logo?

The main five characteristics of great logo are:

1: MAKE IT UNIQUE

McDonald's logo

Your logo should be designed in the way to stand out from the crowd, be easily recognized from the others in the same market space. It does not always need to say what a company does. Let’s take Ferrari – it’s logo isn’t a car. Apple isn’t a computer or smartphone.

2: MAKE IT ADAPTABLE

Can you imagine this scaled up to the size of a wall?

Coming back to the main focus, your logo should reproduce well on a small scale as well as a large scale. If it doesn’t, this may leads to problems with brand’s value and clarity. Important tip: it should also look well in black & white (e.g.: fax machine).

Apple logo 

Strong logo should evoke the same meaning whether it’s placed on a business card, leaflet, website or billboard. Simple design allows for size flexibility. (This reminds me of my previous work space canteen…They’re refurbishing it and put the wallpaper on quite a large wall. Management were so excited about choosing the perfect ‘picture’, yet the end results was very disappointing (rather funny for most). They choose coffee beans as a theme… Can you imagine the photo below scaled up to the size of the wall? I do not need to say how it looked like, do I? ;-)) 

3: MAKE IT APPROPRIATE

A logo needs to accurately reflect company’s culture, values and communicate with the targeted audience. Logo should reveal the essence. It must be relevant for its intended audience. Design for the kid’s TV show (fun) will be much different from the accountant’s (more serious) one. This is where market research is critical and before starting any marketing campaign, you should have a marketing plan. Apart from the symbols used, colours play a major role in logo design. Different logos are associated with different meanings in different cultures. Example: white in Europe and USA means innocence, good, cleanliness etc. but on the other hand In China, Korea and some other Asian countries white is the colour of mourning and funerals. This emphasise the importance of thinking about colours as a reflection of your brand values and the services or products you sell.

4: MAKE IT TIMELESS

London Underground logo

So what makes Logo timeless? Neutrality. Clean lines, symmetry, modernist structure are the timeless quality. ‘Leave trends to the fashion industry’- Dave Airey. When it comes to logo, your brand identity you do not want it to be fashionable as it comes and go, you want it to ‘survive’ years to come. You want it to be as effective in 10, 20 50 years as it is today.

5: MAKE IT SIMPLE AND MEMORABLE

Nike Logo

Simplicity makes a logo design easily recognizable, versatile and memorable. The whole point is about designing a logo which is unique without being overdrawn. Keeping logo simple makes it memorable.Innovative and original Logo designed to fit your business/website profile taking into consideration it's character and values

On-line presence: How to write a Marketing Plan?

The Marketing Plan is a highly detailed, heavily researched and, hopefully, well written report that many inside and possibly outside the organization will evaluate. In many respects, the Marketing Plan is the most important document produced by marketers as it not only helps to justify what has occurred in the past, but is critical for explaining where a company intends to go in the future. 

The Marketing Plan is widely used by both large large corporate marketing departments and also by small startup companies. It is particularly important for marketers who seek funding for new projects or to expand existing products or services.

Purpose of having Marketing Plan:

• helps to fully understand the results of past marketing decisions
• helps to fully understand the market in which the business operates
• sets future goals and provides direction for future marketing efforts that everyone within the business should understand and support
• is a key component in obtaining funding to pursue new initiatives
• often helps to avoid costly mistakes

Main reasons why businesses undertake a Marketing Plan:

1. Needed as part of the yearly planning process within the marketing functional area
2. Needed for a specialized strategy to introduce something new, such as new product planning, entering new markets, or trying a new strategy to fix an existing problem
3. Is a component within an overall business plan

SIMPLE 6 STEPS MARKETING PLAN

1. Purpose and Mission
2. Situational Analysis
3. Marketing Strategy and Objectives
4. Tactical Programs
5. Budgets, Performance Analysis and Implementation
6. Additional Consideration

There are many other ways to develop and format a marketing plan - this depends on the business.

This plan is aimed at individual products/services and product lines, however, it can be adapted fairly easily for use in planning one or more strategic business units. The page length suggested for each section represents a single-spaced typed format for a plan focused on a single product/service. Obviously for multi-product plans lengths will be somewhat longer.

It is assumed that anyone developing a Marketing Plan possesses a working understanding of marketing principles. If you do not, it is suggested you spend considerable time learning about basic marketing or simply hire someone who has the knowledge and can save you both: time & money.

GET YOUR MARKETING PLAN PREPARED BY MARKETING SPECIALIST TODAY

Click here: Get Marketing Plan Professionally prepared for your business

Top 6 on-line presence and on-line visibility benefits for business

Internet Marketing and your on-line brand image is important because it aligns with the way consumers make purchasing decisions nowadays. Researches indicates that there is big increase in number of customers using web, social media and mobiles to carry out products and services research before making final decision of purchasing.
On-line tools are cost effective and efficient ways of creating brand image, enabling to build a strong relationship with customers through personalized communication. This seems to be more and more important for the customers – direct, personalized communication.

Benefits to your business

Convenience

You do not need to worry about store opening hours anymore, paying overtime. The customers can browse your offer online at any time. What a convenience, he?

Targeted Advertising

Focus on advertising entirely on people who are actively engaged in looking for your products and services. The return of investment is much better!

Broaden audience & more income streams

Internet allows you to put your business in front of thousands of people around the world. It enables to overcome barriers of distance. You can sell goods in any part of the country without setting up local outlets, widening your target market. You can also build an export business without opening a network of distributors in different countries. This opens new income streams - revenue increases!

Faster adaptation

In an increasingly competitive world being flexible and able to adapt quickly to market demands is important. Having website and proper on-line visibility your business can adapt faster to those changes.

Huge savings

No need for paying high newspaper’s fees to advertise. No need to invest in expensive billboards. Internet marketing is much cheaper.
What is more there is no need for commuting during the rush hours, waste money and time frustrating.
Property rental? Stock for your store display? With running your business on-line you can forget about it and keep your inventory costs low.

Relationship and Personalisation

Internet tools helps in increasing customer retention levels. When a customer has ordered once, you can maintain good relationship with them by sending a follow-up e-mail or follow-up call to say thank you. You can engage and help them by personalised and special offers, invite them to review products. You can build your own community.

These are only a few most important benefits of proper online presence and internet marketing to business.

Are you taking advantage of these opportunities? If not, maybe you should think about it? Don’t you feel like you are missing out?

If you feel like you would like your online presence to benefit your business, please CALL 01256-807-052.

Having a website already? We are happy to offer you a FREE WEBSITE REPORT Please call us today: 01256-807-052 or request a free report by filling in a form on the right.

Please visit: www.b-m8.com

Why Start Ups and Small Businesses need Online Presence

What is Online Presence and what it means

Most of the Small Businesses use their website as a business card or an online brochure. Nowadays the beauty of the internet gives us new opportunities. Even though the business remains the same, the tools available are changing, technology is moving forward. There is no more 'chance' for a change, there is a requirement for the changes to be applied. I would even risk the statement that in current environment, having or not having the online presence means 'be or not to be' for every business.

Some of the most essential components of Online Presence are:

• Website
• Blog
• Social Media Business Pages
• Google Places
• Online advertising

Behind these elements, there is a backstage of course. Market research, SEO, analytics, planning are the examples of what is happening behind the scenes. Let's put it this way - opening a high street shop will not guarantee you will get business and having online presence will not guarantee business for you.

Your business must have good online presence, good online visibility, but the tools available must be used efficiently.

Why Start Ups and Small Businesses need Online Presence

The answer is simple - most of the potential customers do not look for you by browsing phone directories or yellow pages any more. Customers are becoming more and more demanding. They want to see what other people say about you, your business, products or services. They go online and check reviews, comparing available options. That is why your business needs to be presented in the trustworthy, easily accessible way. You need to give your customers information they need, present your product or service in interactive, engaging way. Finally, you must allow for the two way communication with your customers by adding new channels to the existing model - this is where social media comes to the game.

I am sure you can add much more to the above, because there is a lot more to be added. I have however tried to concentrate on the most important basics.

Please feel free to share your views and comments.