Article Contributed by Kendall SummerHawk
While a rosier global economic forecast may still be a few months away, smart entrepreneurs are taking control of their cash flow now, and wisely implementing simple strategies to increase how much they make and how much they keep.
Good news is, it’s surprisingly simple to take control of your cash flow right now. And, what’s really cool is that once you put these strategies into place, your business will thrive even during times like these, which positions your income to soar once the rest of the economy emerges from this cycle.
The trick is to take an active role in how you create the income you want, as opposed to sitting back and passively waiting for “your luck” or “things” to change. Creating more money flowing into your business has nothing to do with luck, and everything to do with knowing the right actions to take.
Which is why I’m sharing five simple tips to help you get a handle on your cash flow now, so you’re sitting pretty in the “money driver’s seat.” (These tips are excerpted from my Certified Money, Marketing and Soul™ Coach training program.
1. Where’s The Money Coming From?
Now is the time to take a look at how many income streams you have and discover where you have untapped opportunities to offer a wider selection of services. For example, if you offer 1-on-1 services and maybe the occasional teleclass, then now is the time to plan the launch of a new teleseminar series, a 6-month high-end program or begin to offer 1-day intensives. This will dramatically increase your cash flow with very little additional effort on your part.
2. Raise The Value — And Your Pricing — Of What You Already Offer
If you haven’t changed your services in a while then chances are you’re not only significantly undercharging, but you’re probably also giving away too much for too little. The first thing I do with my clients is help them redesign their current service offers so they’re offering greater value to their clients, at a much higher price. Everyone wins because your clients get a better package and you’re leveraging your time so you make more money in less time.
3. Start Tracking Your Income…Daily!
Every day I write down the total amount of money I’ve brought in. At first you may think you don’t have enough coming in to bother with this type of tracking. Trust me, by paying attention to money in this way, more of it will flow towards you, faster and faster. Every client I’ve coached to take this action has reported making more, faster!
4. Know What Your Money Bug-a-Boos Are
Money is a highly emotionally charged topic so you may have unfounded beliefs, old values or unsupportive behavior regarding money that no longer serve you. This is normal so don’t sweat it; just do something about it. For example, if you assume people won’t pay more for your services or you frequently offer discounts, this tells me your money bug-a-boo is being too quick to judge what your clients value.
I recommend checking out one of my programs or home study courses. These resources will help you make dramatic mindset, and behavior shifts, regarding money so you’re no longer held prisoner by the past.
5. Consider This Popular Way To Even-Out Your Monthly Cash Flow
My monthly income used to spike and dip like a roller coaster, until I added membership (continuity) programs to my business model. Once I did, I had steady, reliable money flowing in. Since then, I’ve redesigned my entire business to be 75% membership based. Every business has the opportunity to create a membership program of some sort.
There’s even a company that offers horse vitamins on a monthly, auto-ship basis (to the tune of several hundred million dollars per year!). So get creative or get coaching on how you too, can add continuity to your business.
Solving Cash Flow Issues Simply Means Being Creative
Keep your approach to solving your cash flow issues simple. Most of all, be willing to look at what is working, and what is not working so you can let go of old habits that are costing you too much in terms of your time and potential revenue. This may mean refocusing how you spend your time but the results will be well worth it!
About the Author
Kendall SummerHawk, the Million Dollar Marketing Coach, is an expert at helping women entrepreneurs at all levels design a business they love and charge what they’re worth and get it. Kendall delivers simple ways entrepreneurs can design and price their services to quickly move away from ‘dollars-for-hours work’ and create more money, time, and freedom in their business. For free articles, free resources and to sign up for a free subscription to Kendall’s Money, Marketing and Soul weekly articles visit www.kendallsummerhawk.com.
Author: Pamela Swift
Article Contributed by Michele DeKinder-Smith
Launching a product can mean lots of things to a business. It can mean branching out and snagging a new buyer in a different market. It can also mean creating residual income for a service-based business. And it may be just the thing needed to turn a struggling business into a cash cow. This article examines things three of the five specific types of female entrepreneurs (also known as “Janes”) should keep in mind as they plan for (and launch) new products.
Go Jane Go
She is passionate about her work, and has no problem marketing and selling herself, so she has plenty of clients—but she’s struggling to keep up with demand. She may be a classic overachiever, taking on volunteer opportunities as well, because she’s eager to make an impact on the world and may really struggle saying “no”. Because she wants to “say yes” to so many opportunities, she may even be in denial about how many hours she actually works during the course of a week. During the worst of times, Go Jane Go may tend to run herself ragged or feel guilty about all the things on her “to do list” that aren’t getting done quickly enough to satisfy her exacting demands.
If you’re the Go Jane Go type, you should think long and hard before deciding to develop a new product or service right now. Yes, you may have come up with something truly innovative that will help the market you serve. But remember that not everything needs to be done at once. Sometimes, when you have a great idea, you don’t need to say “no” – but you DO need to say “not right now”.
Create a special file for yourself to house all your fantastic ideas. Before allowing yourself to put another item on the “active projects” list, first require of yourself the discipline to make room for it! This is especially important if you are feeling like your plate is too full already.
When you truly feel ready to commit to the new product or service launch, several things can make it easier for you to experience success without frustration:
1. Find something you are doing now that you can remove from your list or delegate to someone else. This will give you time to work on the new project. Alternatively, hire someone (even part-time, virtually) to design and implement the new product for you, under your direction.
2. Estimate how many hours of your personal time the new project will take. Then triple your estimate. (As a Go Jane Go, you’re excellent at what you do–but you may not realize just how much effort you’re putting into tasks. To preserve your sanity, you need to give yourself plenty of cushion for the inevitable unexpected events.)
3. Don’t just put it on your list–actually put each step on your calendar. This way, you are assured of reasonable timelines, rather than falling behind and feeling like you have to do a major crunch at the end.
Merry Jane
This entrepreneur is usually building a part-time or “flexible time” business that gives her a creative outlet (whether she’s an ad agency consultant or an artist) that she can manage within specific constraints around her schedule. She may have a day job, or need to be fully present for family or other pursuits. She realizes she could make more money by working longer hours, but she’s happy with the tradeoff she has made because her business gives her tremendous freedom to work how and when she wants, around her other commitments.
As a Merry Jane, when you come up with a new product or service idea that you are considering launching for your business, you want to make sure it really makes the most of your time. Before you begin, make sure you put in a step to research your market’s interest in the product first. A simple way to do this is to reach out to some of your current customers today to find out if they are interested in the overall business idea. Using your blog, you can ask provocative questions about the topic and see if it generates response. You can also send out a quick survey or even call some of your most trusted customers on the phone. Choose the method based on the size and type of customers you have.
By putting this step in place, you can feel confident the new idea is worth the investment of your time to develop. And, by reaching out to your customers first, you will likely gather information that will help you refine and strengthen the idea even further, ensuring yourself a successful launch.
Accidental Jane
She is a successful, confident business owner who never actually set out to start a business. Instead, she may have decided to start a business due to frustration with her job or a layoff and decided to use her business and personal contacts to strike out on her own. Or, she may have created something that served her own unmet needs and later found other customers with the same need, giving birth to a business. Accidental Jane enjoys what she does and is creating a satisfactory level of income.
If you’re an Accidental Jane, you love where your business is right now, so you may feel uncertain about whether to launch your new product idea or not. The key to making this decision lies in visualizing the various scenarios that could play out if you did decide to launch it. By creating a “pros and cons” list for each of the scenarios, you can determine which path is most likely to create results you desire. Below are some probing questions to ask yourself about your new product idea before taking the additional steps to create it:
* Will doing this be something I really enjoy? Will it give me “job satisfaction”?
* How much time will it take to create this new product the right way? Am I willing to add that many more hours to my plate? Are there things I can give up to make room for it, without diminishing my income or happiness?
* What if this new product really takes off? If there’s more demand that I can serve right now, what will I do? Will I feel comfortable hiring people to help me? Will I feel comfortable letting go of other work I’m doing today to make room for it? If it really took off, how would it change the financials of my business and how I spend my time?
* If this new product doesn’t work out, how will I feel? Will I be willing to invest additional time required to fix it or market it to make sure it works? Will I feel like a failure or do I see this as an important opportunity for personal growth, even if it fails?
Since Accidental Jane is generally happy with the way things are right now, using these questions as filters to determine whether or not to launch a new product will help her make sure she doesn’t “accidentally” create results that take away some of her joy or income.
Even though all three Janes– Go Jane Go, Merry Jane and Accidental Jane– have distinct ways of doing business, each can benefit from the launch of successful new products and services. The key to doing so lies in appreciating herself and her own business needs, and pursuing new opportunities in a way that will really serve the life she wants to live.
About the Author:
Michele DeKinder-Smith is the founder of Jane out of the Box, an online resource dedicated to the women entrepreneur community. Discover more incredibly useful information for running a small business by taking the FREE Jane Types Assessment at Jane out of the Box. Offering networking and marketing opportunities, key resources and mentorship from successful women in business, Jane Out of the Box is online at www.janeoutofthebox.com.
As you may have seen, Denise Wakeman and I are running a social media usage survey to help define what people most want to know about social media. We’ve gotten over 200 responses so far (and please feel free to add yours, if you wish!)
The results are interesting so far, with one of the biggest complaints being how much time social media takes. Even more than that, people are wondering how to monetize their social media efforts. And this combination of factors got me thinking.
What appears to be happening is that people are investing lots of time on the social networks, but not enough time using social media as a content sharing and distribution mechanism. Most of all, people want a process and system for using social media more efficiently, and for seeing more returns from it.
In the interest of saving you some time, and increasing your social media efficiency, I have 5 tips to help:
1) Schedule regular time for social media. I’m fond of saying that social media is a time suck. This means that, without boundaries on your time, chatting on Facebook or tweeting on Twitter can take up your entire day. This will have negative impact on your business. So, instead, schedule time to attend to social media each day, and resist the urge to network all day long, especially if you don’t have a clear and definite business outcome in mind. I tend to schedule an hour in the morning to connect with my social networks, and I have one of my assistants handle all the daily friending back, following back, processes, reducing my time commitment and letting me focus on conversations and connections.
2) Let technology do the heavy lifting. You can be more social media efficient if you use technology to help you. One example would be to set up content distribution and syndication processes. (Denise & I will be sharing tips and ideas for this in the near future.) Another way is to use software programs to help streamline your efforts. I like and use Tweetdeck, for example, which lets me monitor Twitter, Facebook, and now, recently, LinkedIn. No matter what you need, there is probably a piece of software that can help you do it faster or better.
3) Reduce the noise. There are just three main things you need to focus on in social media. The first is gaining attention. The second is making connections. And the third is being consistent. You can do this without any technology at all. It’s fine to be interested in new gadgets and new advances in technology (and I confess, I’m a girl geek at times)- but don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed and forget the basics of marketing. You must be noticed, make connections, and show up regularly.
4) Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose. The better you are at repurposing your content, the easier your social media marketing will be. Aim to get at least 10 uses out of every blog post, every interview, every video you make. Stay in touch with what your target audience needs, and provide it for them faster, and easier, and quicker than anyone else. Seek to create dialogues and conversations around your content. You’ll learn what people most want to know, and you’ll always have good ideas for new content to create.
5) Tie your social media efforts to your business goals and optimize for them. What this means is that you need to have an idea of what you want social media to DO for you. Do you want to become the household name in XYZ industry? Do you want to get 10000 people on your email database? Do you want to be picked up by major media as an authority or expert? Like any other business arena, you have to know what you want to achieve and lay out a strategy to achieve it. And then you need to do the work. If you’re spending a lot of time in social media, but not feeling like you’re getting enough return, I would suggest that maybe you want to step back and reassess your goals. Don’t take part in social media waiting to see what will happen. Have an idea of what you want to create, and use the social media tools to create it. The clearer your objectives, the faster you’ll reach them, helping balance out your time and return on investment.
Social networking is not the only facet of social media you should be paying attention to. Use the social media sites to build your platform, drive your brand, and send visitors to your website. These kinds of results are trackable and monetizable.
Dr. Rachna Jain is Chief Social Marketer at The Mindshare Corporation. Rachna works with speakers, consultants, authors, and small business owners to develop and execute effective social media marketing strategies. Her proprietary persuasive social media process (sm) focuses on building influence, credibility and visibility online. This translates into greater recognition, increased website traffic, faster lead generation, a shorter sales cycle, and more opportunity for her expert clientele. She blogs regularly at The Mindshare Blog
Categories
BIZNESS! Newsletter Issue 94
Successful Business Marketing: What Does Your Marketing Archetype Say About You?
When it comes to business marketing, most people brainstorm a billion different tag lines then wonder why none of them sound or feel like “the one.”
The problem is all that brainstorming isn’t every effective because it’s relying on the wrong information to start with. Crafting a tag line—or any of your marketing copy such as sales letters, email promos, flyers and titles—first starts with understanding your unique style and personality. The best way is to know your “Marketing Archetype.”….
Continued in BIZNESS! Newsletter Issue 94 >>>
– Design Your Own Blank Label
– Take Time Off with Perq
– A Bottle Of Transformation
– iStopOver and Rent
– Friendship Chips
– Unlock the Door with FaceID
– Rivetz Customized Flip Flops
Continue reading these top stories in the BIZNESS! Newsletter >>>
– Money and Marketing: Avoid 4 Business Model Blunders
– Celebrate Your Limitations for Life Success
– Women Entrepreneurs And Their Greatest Starting Lineups
– Improving Customer Experiences – Is It Still Important Or Is Price The Only Thing That Matters?
– Twables.com
– Opportunity Knocks, Jane Answers
– Close Too Quick and You Lose Profit
Continue reading these top stories in the BIZNESS! Newsletter >>>
Can’t stand your demanding boss anymore? Start your own business! Before that, be sure to subscribe to our free informative newsletter. BIZNESS! is jointly published by CoolBusinessIdeas.com and GetEntrepreneurial.com What you get in BIZNESS! – the latest new business ideas, small business advice, business tips and info and entrepreneur resources. Everything you need for your brand new business!
Free 28-pages PDF report (worth $38) – “Cool Business Ideas in 2009” – included with your subscription. Learn more here.
Google search is going to start looking different in the next few months, as Google has signed a deal with Twitter.com to start indexing tweets.
Similarly, Microsoft has signed deals with Facebook and Twitter to start indexing updates in the search engine Bing.com.
These changes mean your wisdom won’t be shared just with those in your immediate tweetstream or newsfeed, but could, perhaps, be listed in the search engines and archived for the world at large.
These moves are good for those of you focused on providing unique content and topic relevant tweets – you will have more ways to be found and noticed.
The downside of this process may be two-fold, though. First, your tweets may not remain indexed as long, so your ranking won’t stay constant. The reason I think this is because the rate of tweeting is so high, and newer tweets will always be considered fresher (and therefore potentially more relevant) than older ones. So any ranking you get may not last that long.
The second downside would be for content that is repeated or duplicate- likely only 1 tweeter will get credit, so this may drive down the number of retweets. Some would say this is a good thing, especially for content like quotes, or #follow friday, but we’ll have to see how this shakes out.
In order to benefit from this new search engine capability, focus on providing good strong content (I know I said this already, but it bears repeating), and try to phrase your tweets uniquely. In the beginning, at least while the algorithm is being worked out, I imagine that unique languaging will be initially counted as unique content. Later on, we may see a shift in this as content and context is also considered. (Kind of like latent semantic indexing for tweets.)
It will be interesting to see if adding tweets to the search engines will improve user experience, or will be seen as just that much more noise.
Dr. Rachna Jain is Chief Social Marketer at The Mindshare Corporation. Rachna works with speakers, consultants, authors, and small business owners to develop and execute effective social media marketing strategies. Her proprietary persuasive social media process (sm) focuses on building influence, credibility and visibility online. This translates into greater recognition, increased website traffic, faster lead generation, a shorter sales cycle, and more opportunity for her expert clientele. She blogs regularly at The Mindshare Blog