Month: September 2007

Categories
How-To Guides

How To Attract Clients

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Mind Petals: Here are a few simple ways to apply the Law of Attraction to get the right clients:
You might ‘call’ your clients in innovative ways. Instead of reaching out to your customers and clients in traditional forms—e-mail, voice messages, or even IM—think of ways you can make an appearance in their daily life instead. This is the basis of branding, but can be used in creative ways. Try a hand-delivered thank you note for a recent lunch, or a unique gift after a presentation that you both attended. Making sure the client has you on ‘top of mind’ can help generate further business with very little effort.
It’s also advantageous to be genuine with your marketing efforts. Much of marketing yourself may seem like ‘schmoozing,’ but being genuine in your relationships and partnerships will help things flow with ease. When you both have a goal or intention in mind, the process is much simpler and much more natural.
You can also try predicting the response you want. If you have a ‘gut feeling’ that your client, or prospective clients, may be interested in something you can provide, find a way to highlight the value for them and send it their way. Sometimes simply spelling out how something can help them is all it takes to capture their interest.
Finally, look for ways to move towards a richer relationship. Attracting clients doesn’t always lead to a direct sale—maybe you can reach out to them for referrals, building your portfolio of other work, or simply as a resource. Knowing how to nurture and maintain relationships involves a positive, growth-oriented mindset and your intention can help guide you towards long-term clients with much less resistance.
The Law of Attraction for Snagging New Clients [Mind Petals]

Categories
Work Life

Game Break

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Entrepreneur: A recent survey by PopCap Games shows it’s a trend employees say helps them alleviate stress and, as a result, become more productive. In fact, the survey found that 84 percent of white-collar workers surveyed felt “more relaxed and less stressed out” after taking a short game break at work. But perhaps the most surprising results represent the senior executives surveyed, including CEOs, CFOs and presidents. Compared to their colleagues, senior executives reported a much higher frequency of play at work. 70 percent said they play “during work, when I need a short break” versus 49 percent of other gamers. And the survey discovered 71 percent of senior executives play on average for about 15 minutes or longer during each game-playing session in the office.
CEOs Admit to Gaming at Work [Entrepreneur]

Categories
Recommendations

Happy Birthday Customers

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Inc.com: Everyone likes presents on their birthday — including your customers. Creating a “birthday club” could ensure that you have many happy returning customers.
Birthday Connections, a new service launched by Moving Targets, a Perkasie, Pa.-based direct-mail marketing company, allows small-business owners to create and send birthday offers based on specific demographics and geographic areas.
Such birthday programs are ideal for restaurants, nail salons, and other types of retail businesses that have limited ad budgets and not enough time or expertise for new marketing campaigns. Birthday Connections works with business owners to define a range of people they want to reach. Using Moving Target’s database technology, Birthday Connections can compile a mailing list for customers in a certain ZIP code, age range, gender, or even income bracket.
Business owners then create the terms of their offer — whether it be a free dessert or a 25 percent discount during the month of the customer’s birthday — and then choose the format for delivery, either a birthday card or a letter. Companies can also choose to use a pre-designed card or have Birthday Connections create a custom one for them with their company logo.
Birthday Connections then mails the offers around the month of each resident’s birthday. Based on market testing results, Birthday Connections will help business owners create the best offer for their company.
Looking for a New Way to Woo Customers? Try Birthday Presents [Inc.com]

Categories
Online Business

Top Five Aspects For E-commerce

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RajeshShakya: E-commerce web site design is nothing different than a traditional web design, but requires a few more extra functionalities and components to handle financial transactions. For those additional services, you will have to rely on third parties. Many startups are intimidated by the process and they do not build web sites that are capable of e-commerce transactions. I am trying to give you just a brief idea of what it takes to design e-commerce sites. I will write different aspects of online business in my future posts. Suggest you to study some of the these aspects of e-commerce site development before you start.
Transaction Security
One of the most important aspects of e-commerce web site design is security that creates confidence in consumers doing online transactions. You need to make sure that your visitors can safely and securely input their personal details, credit card information and shipping information into your online payment system.
Payment Gateway
To build web sites that accept online payments, you will need to incorporate payment gateway services for processing credit/debit cards into your ecommerce web site design. Payment Gateways are connected with your bank through your merchant accounts in those banks.
Look and feel
Aesthetics is another important aspect of e-commerce web site success. It helps to make your visitors spend their time in your site. Competition is so fierce on the Internet.
Software and Applications
There are many different software products and e-commerce applications that can be purchased and even available in the for of free and open source software to help you with your e-commerce web site design and run your online business.
Hire the professionals
If you want to build websites that are e-commerce ready, but don’t have the e-commerce web site design experience needed to accomplish the task, you can hire an e-commerce web site design professional to help you with the trickier portions of site development.
Five Important Aspects of Online Business [RajeshShakya]

Categories
Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneur Profile: Richard Crasnick

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LATimes.com: Richard Crasnick rode in three championship parades with the Los Angeles Lakers, wrote speeches for a basketball legend named Magic and toured Europe with Olympic gold medalists. But the biggest sporting event of his life is playing out in a drab warehouse in Carson, using a thin triangle of leather less than half the size of a credit card.
Crasnick is president of FIKI Sports, which stands for “Flick It and Kick It,” a two-person business that includes his lifetime pal, Craig Matthews. They are betting on a sport that couldn’t be more low tech in an era of sophisticated game consoles that contain more technology than a supercomputer did 10 years ago.
Paper football is played by two people sitting across a table or desk. The “ball” usually is a sheet of notebook paper folded into a flat triangle. Touchdowns are scored by flicking the triangle until it hangs over the edge of the table without falling off. Points also are awarded for “kicking” the ball with your finger through your opponent’s goal posts — formed by his or her index fingers and thumbs.
Crasnick’s version, projected to bring in $1.5 million in revenue this year, is the result of a shared daydream with his brother, Michael, 16 years ago. They took a paper football, wrote the then-Los Angeles Raiders team logo on it and slipped it into a small plastic bag to mimic packaging.
After a long drive, tabletop football scores big [LATimes.com]