Month: December 2011

Categories
Branding

Lessons About Warming Up Your Brand . . . From Parties

Article Contributed by Erin Ferree

Do you ever feel like your brand’s a little bit chilly? Like it’s too professional or boring? Or you’re distant… not as cozied up and close with your clients as you’d like to be?

Why not warm it up a bit? Warmth in your brand can make it seem more alive, open, passionate, and even both interesting and interested. The warmth is a sign that your small business is run by a real person and that you care about your clients.

A warm brand also does a lot for your client relationships. Warmth will create a better connection with your clients, make nervous, shy or hesitant clients feel welcome and at home buying from you, encourage engagement and conversation around your brand, foster goodwill and up your likeability factor. It can also increase your client attraction significantly, because people are attracted to warmth and openness – instead of feeling shut out in the cold.

In this season of open houses, holiday parties and rekindling relationships… you can learn a lot about warming up your brand from the parties you go to. The best holiday parties create a natural, easy “warm and fuzzy” feeling in everyone’s hearts.

Here are a few ways that you can create that feeling in your brand for your clients:

  • Focus on how you want your clients to feel. Parties create an emotional experience – they create happiness, celebration, closeness or even reflection. Instead of trying to tell your clients just what’s happening, or how it happens… use words and images in your brand to evoke a specific feeling.
  • Design your brand to create conversation. Whether or not there’s great conversation at your party depends on a few factors: lighting, music, whether you have games or dancing, and how comfortable your guests are talking to each other. If you want to create conversation in your brand, design opportunities to start and encourage conversation. To make this happen: ask questions. Create open-line teleconferences. Hold a “fireside chat” where the focus is more on talking and less on teaching. Introduce and connect your clients to each other to create community.
  • Bite-sized nibbles (of information) are the way to go. Unless you’re at a sit-down dinner party, maneuvering with a plate full of food can be tough – and it’s even harder to enjoy what you’re eating. In your business, how are you filling your clients up with information instead of breaking things down for people so that they can enjoy it one bite at a time? It’s tempting to show off all of your expertise and information, but that can make it harder for your clients to learn. One of the greatest ways you can serve your clients is by breaking things down and making it easy for them to learn, understand and use.
  • Be upfront about what you expect your clients to do. When you’re invited to a party, it’s natural to ask, “what can I bring?” Clients want to know what they need to bring, too. For example, when I design a website, I let the client know what they’re expected to bring to the table – like website copy, website hosting, their headshot. I even provide a handy checklist so they can work through it and make sure they’re organized. How can you do the same in your business?
  • Welcome a new client warmly in their first moments with you, and let them know what to expect. When you show up at a party, the host says hello, tells you where to put your coat, shows you around and makes sure you’ve got your first drink in-hand. How are you settling your clients – and even your subscribers – in? And how can you make that part of the experience better?

These are just a few of the lessons you can learn from a holiday party about warming your brand up. As you go to parties this season or reflect on those you’ve been to, what lessons do you see that you can implement now in your brand?

About the Author

Erin Ferree is a branding coach, design genius and strategic thinker. She loves connecting the dots between passion and profit, mixing strategy and inspiration and shaking things up. She’s branded over 450 small businesses in the last 10 years. Erin works with entrepreneurs who want to help more people and create an open, honest, inviting brand with integrity – instead of using icky, pushy, sleazy marketing tactics and trickery. Learn more at http://brandstyledesign.com

Categories
Online Business

Tips for Online Merchant Account

MyISPFinder: Veteran merchants and first-time entrepreneurs alike have been needlessly buffaloed by the prospect of setting up online merchant accounts. It isn’t nearly the hurdle many people think it is. Once you have figured out the basics of what your business needs are, such as mobile capabilities or maybe you need insured services, you will readily find qualified assistance when you need to have it. Compare fees and discount rates, and make sure you are only going to be charged for services you actually use.

Below are some tips to use when you are in the market for a merchant account provider.

  • Research – Programs vary greatly, even within a single company, so even before you contact anyone about setting up an account, you should determine what you and your business require for service.
  • Glossary of Terms – A good site to visit is merchant-accounts.com, which can help answer questions you have about any of the terminology used by your merchant bank or credit processor.
  • Contract – Contracts can be tricky, even when the terms and wording are clear, and this is because your business needs may change dramatically, well before your existing contract runs out. Will your contract be flexible enough to adapt to new criteria?
  • Hidden Costs – The discount rate, which is the percent of each sale that goes to the merchant account provider, statement fees and transaction fees are standards, but compare what different companies charge. Know what charges apply in the event of refunds.
  • Support – Sometimes the way things are handled when problems arise can be every bit as important as business-as-usual. If you work with a company that can troubleshoot and remedy problems quickly, it can mean the difference between a successful holiday business season and one that is just so-so.
  • No App Fee – There shouldn’t be any application fee to start an online merchant account, and you should be very wary of any company that requires one, no matter how attractive the rest of their presentation looks.
  • Technical Reliability – Some companies can be far ahead of others on the technology curve, and it will pay you to find out how your account is handled. Are transactions processed quickly? Are deposits credited promptly? Are statements issued properly?
  • Secure? – As important as speed and accuracy are, so is security. You will be handling sensitive personal and financial material, and great harm can be done if your merchant account/accounts are not secure.
  • Accurate Records – Needed to help with taxes and planning, timely record-keeping is essential to any well run business. Whether you are using these records to plan future expenditures and investment, or if you are preparing a tax return, money and time savings are a direct benefit of good record-keeping.
  • Mobile Business – Square, co-founded by Jack Dorsey, the driving force behind Twitter, is an app named for the shape of the small card-reader that attaches to many “smart” phones, allowing mobile vendors to process credit card sales from almost anywhere. The app is fast becoming popular with artists, crafters and others who require mobile capacity from their credit processor.

Take the time to ask questions and make comparisons, and then go make some money!

10 Tips for Setting Up An Online Merchant Account for Your Business [MyISPFinder]

Categories
Online Business

Is Your Website Like A Jungle?

Article Contributed by Erin Ferree

The jungle is dark, humid and dense. Birds of all kinds sing and call, while other animals rustle through the underbrush. The adventurers hack through the plants with their machetes to blaze a passable trail. It’s hard work, and it had to be done so they have a clear path to get where they’re going.

Is your website like that jungle?

Recently, I met someone at a conference and wanted to learn more about them while following up. So, I carved out a few minutes to check out their website.

I was totally and completely unprepared for what I found there. 87 pages of information about their services. Not 10, not 20… 87.

This is a common mistake that small businesses make – they put all the information they possibly can about their businesses on their website, and make a mega-huge website!

They think that if they just make the information available, then maybe someone… anyone… will stumble upon it and hire them. That they have to put everything they have out there in order to get attention.

And then they’re surprised when their mega-website doesn’t bring them a flood of clients. But here’s what happens: their site becomes dense and thick, and people who come to the site get overwhelmed by all of the information available.

They take one look at your menu – with all the pages and sub-pages (and sometimes even sub-pages) and then they have to make a decision. Will they start to hack their way through the jungle of your website, or will they click away from your site?

You don’t want your client to have to make that decision.

Like those adventurers in the jungle that we talked about earlier, your website visitors need a passable trail through your website. They need that clear path to get them into conversation with you.

When your visitors come to your site, they need to make the transition from finding you, to learning the information they need to know, to contacting you and connecting further. And you want to do this simply and quickly as possible… while keeping their desire and need to talk to you high.

Here are a few quick tips to clear a path through your website that will make it easier for people to go deeper with you:

  • Create your website with your ideal clients’ questions and needs in mind – what do they most want to know when they arrive?
  • Dedicate some time at least every 6 months to review and prune your site as needed – and to identify areas where you could improve what’s there.
  • Remove old offerings that don’t apply to your current genius or your clients’ needs.
  • Strive for relevance – don’t treat your website as a trophy case for all you’ve done and developed.
  • Keep page counts low, and navigation simple.
  • Test shorter-form sales pages against long ones and see what works better for your audience (short is working well these days).
  • Swap long ebooks and dense copy for short and snappy video.
  • Choose a first step that you’d like people to take in your business and direct the bulk of your website’s energy towards making that happen.
  • Be discerning with your copy – if it’s not impactful and interesting, then ditch it (if you don’t want to delete it forever, you can switch the page to a “draft” in WordPress).
  • Put only your best work in your blog and/or portfolio. Weed out the rest.
  • Focus your efforts on getting visitors to sign up for your mailing list so you can take your conversations further there.

Which of these tips will you start using today to create more connection with your website visitors, and to clear their path to working with you?

About the Author

Erin Ferree is a branding coach, design genius and strategic thinker. She loves connecting the dots between passion and profit, mixing strategy and inspiration and shaking things up. She’s branded over 450 small businesses in the last 10 years. Erin works with entrepreneurs who want to help more people and create an open, honest, inviting brand with integrity – instead of using icky, pushy, sleazy marketing tactics and trickery. Learn more at http://brandstyledesign.com

 

Categories
Online Business

Should LinkedIn Shareholders Worry?

Article Contributed by Tanner Mangum

When LinkedIn went public with its IPO, stock prices immediately skyrocketed. This is not uncommon with tech stocks when they first hit the streets. Investors sometimes seem to get a little star-struck when it comes to tech stocks, possibly because everyone wants to be in on the ground floor of the next Apple or Amazon or Google.

LinkedIn might not be on that level, however.

When LinkedIn first went public, shares of its stock soared to an incredible $122 a share. For some investors, it might have seemed as if they’d finally found that elusive golden goose so many had long sought. With the passage of time, however, shares of LinkedIn dropped down to around $60 a share, squelching any long-term dreams of endless riches.
Right now, LinkedIn is in a very precarious position. The stock is valued at approximately $72 a share, but when it first appeared as an IPO, its underwriters listed it at around $45 a share. Now, there hasn’t been any great change in LinkedIn’s numbers or subscribers, so there is no rational reason for the stock being valued at this level.

Not to stir up the pot, but this is potentially dangerous.

When LinkedIn is valued at a level that does not make any logical sense, prevailing wisdom indicates that the price bubble could burst at any moment. Right now, analysts are actually basing LinkedIn’s price on speculation. At the same time, it almost appears the analysts are completely pushing aside any potential risks.

This is the path to a stock smashing into the ground. When analysts attempt to actually influence the market by pumping up one side of a company’s value while also pushing down concerns about a company’s potential risks, the potential is definitely there for an entire house of cards to come falling down.

I like LinkedIn. I probably log into it once a week, though. Job recruiter’s aside, does this social networking site justify logging in everyday? Is there still room for a huge upside?

Is there a stiff wind heading towards LinkedIn or am I blowing things out of proportion?

About the Author
Tanner Mangum is a passionate traveler, future ironman, and an Apple Junkie. He lives outside Salt Lake City, Utah.

Categories
Success Attitude

10 Ways to Realize Hidden Opportunities

Article by Jeff Beals

“Great moments are born from great opportunities,” said the late Herb Brooks, one of the world’s most famous hockey coaches.

Brooks certainly seized opportunity during his career.  He agreed to coach the 1980 U.S. Olympic team that beat the “unbeatable” Soviet Union in Lake Placid, New York during the famous “Miracle on Ice” game on the way to winning the gold medal.  It was a modern-day “David vs. Goliath” matchup. Many coaches would refuse such an overwhelmingly difficult job.  In fact, several did.

But Brooks saw opportunity in the monumental challenge of leading a bunch of young, amateur, college all-stars against the essentially professional players of the Soviet Union and other European hockey powers.

That opportunity paid off, to say the least.

Whether you’re talking about sports, business or any other subject matter, seeking, finding and capitalizing on opportunity are among the most important things a professional must do.

There’s one big problem with opportunity, however.  It is often hard to find and even harder to harness.

“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations,” said Charles Swindoll, an American religious author.

I agree wholeheartedly with Swindoll’s characterization.  The best opportunities are often hidden.  They are often located in places we least expect to find them and are presented by people we least expect to provide them.

That reminds me of the old story that sales managers like to share with their young trainees: “On his way back from a three-day fishing trip, a multi-millionaire visits the showroom of an upscale, luxury car dealer.  The salespersons, seeing an unshaven, disheveled, poorly dressed man, essentially ignore him.  Offended, the multi-millionaire buys a top-of-the-line model the next day from a direct competitor.”  There are a lot of ways to tell that classic missed-sales-opportunity story, but they all sound something like that.

If opportunity is so important to our success, and so difficult to find and recognize, we need to focus more of our energy on it.  Unless you’re naturally good at it, finding and capitalizing on opportunity needs to be a deliberate focus:

Open your eyes and ears – we can no longer afford to be indifferent, or even worse, oblivious to the world around us.  Be on the lookout for ideas that could lead to new opportunities.  Even more important than eyes and ears, keep your mind open too.  Many of us miss opportunities, because they don’t fit into our pre-existing paradigms.

Remember that all people count – sometimes we get so obsessed with the “right” people, we miss out on valuable opportunities from people, who on the surface, can do seemingly nothing for us.

Fight through the fear – one of the biggest reasons we miss out on extraordinary opportunities is because we are too afraid to leap.  Herb Brooks wasn’t too afraid to leap; we shouldn’t be either.

Let your creative juices flow – the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Albert Szent-Gyorgi once said, “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”  The more creative you are, the more opportunity you will discover.  See the world in a different way, and doing things like nobody else, and just watch the opportunities that manifest.

Take risks – As the old saying goes, “nothing risked, nothing gained.”  Unless you take a chance and do something new, you’ll keep running into the same old opportunities.

Work really hard – “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work,” said the great inventor Thomas Edison.

Set meaningful goals – make those goals specific too.  The more you clarify what you really want, the quicker you will recognize it when it shows up.

Find quiet time – many people have found great opportunities, because they prayed for them or spent time meditating about them.  Such activity creates focus in your mind, and a focused mind is a powerful mind.

Believe – visualize success and tell yourself that good things will come.  A positive mind is more receptive to hidden opportunity.

Prepare – as the old Boy Scout motto says, “be prepared.”  You never know when the perfect opportunity will open up.  If you’re not prepared, you might not act on it quickly enough.  In his autobiography, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said he believes in “relentless preparation.”  He constantly prepares for crisis, so he will perform properly.  Same thing applies to opportunity.

About the Author:   

Jeff Beals is an award-winning author, who helps professionals do more business and have a greater impact on the world through effective sales, marketing and personal branding techniques. As a professional speaker, he delivers energetic and humorous keynote speeches and workshops to audiences worldwide. You can learn more and follow his “Business Motivation Blog” at JeffBeals.com.