BOLLYWOOD SURKHIYAN

Why You Won’t Sleep Tonight Until You Discover 5 Secrets to Gain New Customers

Is your business growth starting to plateau or stagnate? It’s easy to sit back, take the foot off the accelerator and watch the sales roll in, especially if you are satisfied with how well your business is doing. But keep in mind that if you slack off too much, your competitors will soon catch up and eventually put you out of business.

Marketing your business is even more important than ever if you want to succeed in challenging economic times. Competitors are closing their doors – which means more potential customers for the businesses that do survive. Today is the best time to take steps to revamp your marketing efforts and respond to the needs of your target market. In these times, it’s going to take more than “thinking outside the box” and goodwill with existing customers to secure the survival of your business.

What you need are new and innovative ways to bring attention and profitable sales to your business instead of depending on the “old ways” to get people to learn about you. Here are “5 New & Innovative BE’s” to market you business during challenging economic times. Use these little known ways to increase your market share and watch your business soar.

1. Be Resourceful – It’s Not Stealing, It’s Called “Market Research”

Steal, don’t invent your success from scratch! Watch what other successful companies do – take their innovative ideas, adapt them to your own business and then apply them.

For example, even small or mid size businesses can benefit from carving out a unique image for their vehicles (whether you have 1 car or 100). Think of how quickly you recognize a yellow taxi cab, an emergency vehicle, a Linfox truck. All of these well known icons have been developed because of necessity, purpose and design. You don’t need to spend $1000 to make your branding impactful and memorable either – stickers, magnetic signs and personalized license plates can start from as little as $150. On an average day commuting back and forth to work in traffic, how many vehicles do you think you might see? Statistics indicate that in a busy city like Melbourne, the average commuter is exposed to 5000+ vehicles/hour. That’s 5000+ opportunities to get your brand and contact details out there for very little cost. Can you afford not to try it?

Do yourself a massive favour and STOP concentrating on selling 1 thing to 1 person. What can you do right now to sell your product/service in bunches or bulk? If you are a bookseller, look for opportunities to form alliances with schools, book clubs or companies to generate large orders or group sales. Coaches and trainers may want to consider holding workshops and seminars to increase their leverage and reach. Even if you are in the dry cleaning business, you could arrange to stop by a corporate office on Friday to pick up a pile of orders and then deliver the clean, pressed garments on Monday. I don’t care what business you are in – if you can sell to one person (or business), you can make more money for virtually the same time and effort selling to 10 or 100 people (or companies). Think about it – thinking BIG and selling BIG is the best use of your time.

You may even want to go so far as to consider bribing a “significant other” in order to attract a new, dream client or get in front of a key decision maker. If there is a person that you really want to meet but you can’t seem to get your foot in the door to have an appointment with him/her, you may want to get resourceful and win the backing of a key motivator – i.e. the producer of the radio host’s show, the spouse of the client, the EA (or right hand) of the decision maker etc. Find out what that person likes – whether it’s chocolate, flowers or tickets to a sports event or music concert – and use it to build a relationship and get your foot in the door with the endorsement of this influencer. You will find it pays huge dividends to be sincere and generous!

2. Be Partners – I’ll Scratch Your Back, If You Scratch Mine

This strategy follows along the same lines as what we just discussed above. Question – if given the choice at a networking function, would you rather find one potential customer or a strategic alliance that could help you win 10 customers?

This is not a trick question – of course you would rather develop a relationship with a complementary business or strategic partner who can recommend or refer you to many customers. But how many of you go to events and spend the majority of the time talking about what you do and trying to sell your products/services to anyone who will listen? You only have one mouth and two ears – the key to getting the best result and really growing your business is to use each in the correct proportion. Spend at least 2/3 of the time asking questions and really finding out (1) what is important to the other business and (2) who their customers and suppliers are. Great companies develop great people who really know how to listen. Unfortunately in most prospecting or networking conversations, both people are just waiting for the other person to finish! If you are not listening, you are likely missing opportunities and buying signals.

Be patient and persist – sometimes the synergies are not immediately obvious. I was at a networking event myself last year and met a woman with a small IT company. On the face of it, our businesses really had very little in common. However, after chatting for some time I discovered that one of her suppliers was a company that I was very interested in working with and she also had many contacts (from her previous career in HR) that could be extremely beneficial for my business. She also revealed that she really needed solid business content for her website and ezines that I could provide very easily, at no cost and with little incremental effort on my part. Always think Win-Win.

The easiest way to find potential partners and alliances is to start off by making a list of all of the businesses that might be interested in working with you. Where else does your ideal customer shop? What other products and services do they need? What are they interested in? Get as many ideas down on paper as you can and then sort by order of priority – write a note on your to do list each week to contact 5 people or businesses from this list to set up a meeting and discuss ways that you can work together to become even more successful.

It may be as simple as having a commission in place for referrals between you or as complicated as providing special pricing to customers on bundled packages of goods. Perhaps you may even want to offer free trials of your product to the best customers of your new alliance? This may make perfect sense if the acquisition cost of a customer is high in your industry or if you are looking to break into an established market where there are well known players who dominate the market.

When looking for potential partners, contemplate:

o Businesses in your same industry

o Businesses that sell items that naturally go along with what you are selling

o Businesses that sell similar items but do not compete directly with you

There are an unlimited number of options available – the ways that you can work together and produce a mutually beneficial result are limited only by your imagination. Consider:

o Giving out promotional materials on behalf of your partner with every sale

o Trading existing customer and mailing lists

o Selling your products cooperatively

o Holding a closed door sale or VIP night where both companies cooperate to offer excellent value and enticements

o Linking to each other’s websites

o Offering tickets to a joint workshop or seminar

o FREE trials/demos to best customers on each other’s database

o Combining sales teams or shipping on bulky items (or items that go out each month)

o Press releases out to media or best customers about how you are working together to make it easier/better for your customers

o Coalition loyalty (giving great value back for purchases by customers across multiple brands)

o Writing a joint newsletter or combining materials into a book or audio file that customers can get for free

Remember to do your due diligence and thoroughly research your potential partners online and offline. Google searches are an excellent way to get a preliminary feel about your potential partners and it will also reveal how committed they are to promoting themselves and growing their business.

3. Be Out There – Master PR & Social Media

A good press release should be between 200 and 400 words. Less is more. The priority is to give only enough information to whet the appetite of the reporters and entice them to contact you to for the main course.

Most make the mistake of thinking that a press release is the opportunity to give every conceivable fact and overload the media with data. A press release is really just an elevator pitch–something you could comfortably say to someone in about 30 seconds. You wouldn’t dream of giving a three-hour lecture in order to get someone’s phone number at a bar. Similarly, you don’t need a 1,000-word press release to get booked in a newspaper or on a radio show. Keep it short, news worthy and intriguing.

The story should be about how what you do/sell relates to something newsworthy or will help the audience to fix an annoying or costly problem once and for all.

Did you know that most individuals and businesses are posting press releases purely to boost website traffic? A press release is much more than just a way to get media attention and free editorial. It can also be a great way to increase the organic traffic you get from Google and other search engines. The online press release services focus time and money on search engine optimization and rank extremely well in search results. You can literally piggyback all of this for next to nothing! All of these links create more ways for your potential customers to find you PLUS you receive the added bonus of appearing to be the expert in your field. You can literally receive thousands of visits to your website, without paying a dime on advertising.

Aside from organic traffic, search engine optimization has the potential to produce radio and TV bookings months after your release is sent out and long after you have forgotten that you even sent it! Think about it, a busy, overworked journalist, booker or producer may search on Google for “self sabotage experts” only to find your well-written, opinionated and informative release appearing on the first page – and a direct link to your website!

In addition to the above, social media and viral marketing are the latest phenomena to generate massive exposure and rocket people/companies from relative obscurity to international fame. If you are not involved (or don’t even know what I am talking about), you need to seriously assess your commitment to your business. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Linked In, blogs etc. are just some of the many ways to build your community and get the “word out” globally about what you do, your products and services, for little or no cost.

In my experience working with the Top 22 brands in this country, 90% of their customers lived within a 10km radius of their office/store. However, the biggest competitor to almost every single one of these businesses was the internet – not another physical location or office. Yet most companies focus on marketing to a set pool of customers. They fall into a fatal trap of doing mail drops and advertising in local newspapers to customers within a certain distance from their store. There is a huge fallacy in this level of thinking – if 20,000 people live within 10km of your business this year, you can bet that the same 20,000 (or similar group) also live within the same radius next year. You are effectively marketing to the same group of people over and over again but you are not reaching many new customers or addressing your #1 competitor – the internet.

Your customers are online right now looking for various goods and services and they are watching the YouTube videos, Facebook profiles and blogs about your competitors. If you continue to ignore the power and reach of the internet, you will do so at your peril. If you want to build a successful business and prosper despite what is happening in the global economy, you need to educate yourself on what is available and what will work best to build relationships with your potential customers. Many of these mediums deliver audio and video right to the computers of your customers – what better way to make a good, personal first impression?

And don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Baby Boomers and retirees are not online. A recent national study showed that this demographic was one of the fastest growing consumer segments in online research and purchases for travel, insurance, health care and several other categories. No matter what business you are in, someone somewhere is selling a similar product/service online and is capturing the trust, interest, permission and sales of your potential customers. When is NOW a good time to do something about it?

4. Be Direct – Ask For Referrals

Chances are your best customers hang around with or know other [potential] best customers. Asking for referrals is the best way to capture opportunities and acquire new customers that have the ability to become best customers.

And speaking as someone who knows, the best way to encourage a customer to refer new customers to you is to offer a referral bonus. Do not fall into the trap of blindly offering them a $20 bonus, 15% off or free merchandise for every new sales lead. The key to preserving the relationship and building the lifetime value of your existing customer is to give them a valuable offer (if possible) on a product they do not already purchase from you. Giving them a discount on what they would already buy erodes your profitability on existing sales. This is not a good strategy for you in the long term.

You want to increase their business with you by introducing them to additional products and services that they could buy from you. The key is to identify something that is of value and give them an irresistible offer. Make it easy for your customer to refer others to you – keep your offer simple and concise. Consider holding a special by-invitation only event where they can bring a friend and remember to follow up with a hand-written thank you note and their bonus in a timely fashion. Statistics show that a simple, personalized thank you (with no actual offer) has the potential to increase sales by 12-18%!

In my experience, this simple and effective strategy is overlooked by about 90% of businesses. This is by far the most lucrative and cost effective strategy to get new customers. If you are not doing it, you are likely missing out on about 20-25% of sales from top [potential] customers. Can you afford to continue throwing money out the window on mass advertising when you are not doing this 1 simple strategy that could cost you less than $1/customer?

It is not enough to casually ask your customers to come back and bring their friends – you need to put it in writing and make it worth their while. You are essentially asking them to sell your business for you and they will gladly do it, if you reward and thank them for their effort.

5. Be Unique – Do What Others Don’t

Stop right now and make a list of everything that you (and your competitors) do not do for your customers. Next, I want you to start asking customers what they want. If you want to succeed you will take a good hard look at both of these lists and find a way to do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to win customers and keep them. Those who are unwilling to do this will never build a truly successful business. End of story.

I had a couple come to me once for advice and coaching – both the business (they were partners in a retail shop) and the relationship, were at the breaking point. The husband said to me “I don’t understand it. I do everything humanly possible for my wife and she doesn’t appreciate me and I don’t think I can possibly do anything more to satisfy my customers – they are never happy and always want more.”

My answer to this age old dilemma is simple and it applies to both relationships and business. “Sounds like you may be doing a lot. Too bad it’s everything BUT what your partner and customers want.”

Let’s take a moment of silence now to contemplate the obvious implications of this poignant story for your own business…

I don’t really care what you are doing or how hard you are working. There is no prize for volume or quantity here….what counts is quality. Are you giving your customers what they want and are you willing to do whatever it takes to give them what they want? More of the “same old same old” is not going to differentiate you from the pack, build trust, win customers and grow a business.

Take some time today to really think about what you offer and how it could be improved (either simply or via a complete overhaul) to revolutionize your business. If all of your customers were to leave today, what would you need to do in order to attract new customers? Consider:

o Everyone loves a freebie – can you offer a free trial or sample?

o Do you offer a guarantee that takes 100% of the risk out of trying your product?

o Is someone (who is respected) willing to endorse your product/service?

o Are you on the cutting edge of technology – are your products/services able to better fulfil a need or fix a problem?

o Do you make it easier than your competitors for customers to buy from you?

o Can you offer free installation or maintenance?

o Is there a unique way to introduce what you do to prospective customers – without all the pressure of a typical sales meeting?

o Can you offer free upgrades or special financing terms?

o Can you negotiate other products/services for your customers at no charge?

o Can you create a sense of community for your customers that will be perceived as valuable?

o Do you incorporate customer feedback into your product improvements or customer service standards?

o Do you offer free training, manuals and assistance?

o Does the relationship with your customer begin or end with the sale itself?

o Do your team members believe in the product and are they willing to go the extra mile for your customers?

At the end of the day, price is never the determining factor. People will always be willing to pay a fair price for a superior product and for the peace of mind that comes with excellent service and a strong guarantee. If you solely focus on having the lowest price, it will eventually put you out of business. Take stock of what the competition is not willing to do and what your customers want most from you. Do something unique – listen and be willing to do whatever it takes to deliver what they want. Anything less, is simply a lot of time, energy and money wasted on all the things that don’t really matter.

Make Bold Marketing Statements With Pull-Up Banners

Today, business networking is a popular term in business communities. If you’re not attending at least one networking function a week to promote your company, it’s time you considered doing so. More and more small companies, in particular, are finding business networking to be an effective way to get their company known through word-of-mouth.

I’ve often been impressed by the degree of preparation that goes into such events. Typically, networking meetings will open with each attendee doing a 30 second elevator pitch, briefly presenting the products and services their company provides. Then, one or two business owners are called upon to present on a topic pertinent to the group, be it on Internet marketing or Google AdWords or sales conversions or different trends in the marketplace. This is then is promptly followed by a handing out of business cards. At this point, you’ll typically hear conversations turn practical: “My neighbour’s looking for his roof to be fixed, can one of your roofers give him a call”. “Our office manager needs to hire a temp, can Tom call her this week to set something up?”, as the attendees swap business leads.

Whether you are new to business networking or a seasoned veteran, you might consider investing in a Rollup Banner. If you haven’t heard of Rollup Banners until now, don’t be particularly surprised. Although they have been in existence for decades, it’s only in recent years that they have become the next-best-thing to the company PowerPoint presentation and website.

If you’re wondering what’s a banner, and more particularly what’s a rollup banner, that’s a valid question. It certainly leaves a doubt in a lot of people’s minds. A banner is like a canvas, used pretty much like a film screen to project the company’s image, vision and ethos. And once they have served their purpose, banners are folded or rolled-up into a neat compact size.

Rollup Banners a special breed of banners. They are banners which are retractable banners, meaning quite simply once you’ve shown your audience of potential clients the banner, it’s rolled up discretely. Think back to your school days when the geography teacher would show you places on a wall-hanging map. Rollup banners are pretty much the same concept.

What better way to jazz up your networking 30 second elevator pitch than to have a banner to show your audience? This would make what your business pitch much more memorable than if you were to hold up a business card, or even a flyer. It’s a common fact that the 30 second elevator pitch seldom appeals to the visually-oriented members of an audience because most presenters need more than 30 seconds simply to set up an overhead projector. The simple process of unclipping and setting up, effortlessly, a banner stand will get heads turning. And be forewarned, you’re as likely to get audience members coming up to you afterwards to ask you where you got your nifty banner stand, as you are likely to get business enquiries. And this is the ideal moment to hand out your business card and ask them to call you during the week.

Brand recognition comes with hearing and seeing the same business messages over and over. If every time you attend a networking event, you show the same banner, not only will you likely impress your audience with your dexterity, but you’ll start gaining a new following. One sure-fire technique to know if your sales projections are on target, or not, for the upcoming fiscal year, is to ask yourself how often you managed to get the company image into circulation. Image sells. Enquire about getting a company banner today.

Link Popularity – Step by Step Guide to Attracting Inbound Links by Becoming an Authority

There is no better way to develop link popularity then by using step-by-step methods or guidance to attract inbound links than by becoming an authority within your niche. If you are using article writing as your primary means to attract links and subscribers this is easy to do. I personally submit 15 to 20 articles per day on several niche categories which in my market. Several of those categories I hold the number one authority position because I have submitted the most articles on that niche topic.

Once you have achieved this your readers and the market will see you as an expert in your niche or feel. If you are able to provide them with article content that solves a problem they are experiencing more than likely they will link to it from their blog or website, listed in a social bookmarking site or better yet send out a re-tweet through twitter. Each of these methods will attract a large amount of inbound links.

So how exactly do I do this? What are my methods to becoming an authority in each of my target niches?

Follow these steps:

1. Keyword research. Find out what words and phrases your niche audiences using when conducting searches on the top search engines like Google. By using the Google keyword tool you can easily find this information out. Strive to develop a list of 10 to 20 keywords and phrases in each of the categories you are targeting.

2. Article writing. By submitting keyword optimized articles to the top article directories online you can attract a large amount of inbound links and eventually link popularity. By looking at how many articles have been submitted by the top author within the categories you want to submit articles for you will know what topics to write on. Now the obvious takes over; writing more articles on that category than the top person. The easiest thing to do is find those categories within your niche with the lowest number of articles submitted. Focus your articles than around that topic and make sure that you are using the key words and phrases you developed in number one above when writing your titles and article content. Also make sure that you are writing about methods to solve a problem that your target market is experiencing. This is the information more than likely your readers will find it interesting and link to from their websites and blogs which will give you inbound links. Once you submitted enough of articles to claim the top spot in a category make sure you take advantage of that and list yourself as the number one author index category on whatever article directory it is. This will give you added the influence over your audience.

If you are out to attract prospective customers and develop your online presence and exposure, you owe it to yourself and the financial future of your business to learn everything you can about Internet marketing.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just finished my brand-new step-by-step guide to developing Internet marketing business success, “27 Habits of Internet Marketing Super Stars”

How to Become a Victoria’s Secret Model

Becoming a Victoria’s secret model is a daunting task. Millions of hopefuls dream about being a model and landing a contract with Victoria’s Secret. Showing up at the office of Victoria’s Secret in your bathing suit with a box of chocolates is not going to work.

Top 10 insider tips to becoming a Victoria’s Secret Model:

1. Get someone to take your picture. As simple as this sounds you will need this snapshot to approach a credible model agency. The agencies that assist with the casting of a Victoria’s Secret Model are going to want to see what you look like on film.

2. Go to the open call at Ford or Elite in New York City. These two agencies are primarily responsible for negotiating the contracts of Victoria’s Secret models. An open call is a time agencies put aside to meet new models. Call them and ask when they have “open calls” or look for that information on their website. When you arrive be sure to look amazing and have the snapshots in hand.

3. If you get rejected, get busy. Approach local modeling agencies where you live with your snapshots. If you get signed prepare to make friends with professional photographers. You will need those images to get the attention of Victoria’s Secret.

4. Register yourself on modeling websites. Use Google to find them. The world needs to know you are out there.

5. Get measured and be realistic. The ideal height of a Victoria’s Secret Model is 5’9″ standing barefoot with body measurements of 34-24-34.

6. Be Skinny. You must go to the gym. Stop eating junk food. If you are not naturally this thin but have the basic body type of a Victoria’s Secret model hire a nutritionist and a trainer.

7. Be on the cover of Vogue before you are 18 years old. Greatly increases your chances.

8. Enter the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show Competition. In 2009 Victoria’s Secret had open calls in October in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami to launch the career of an unknown model. There are presently four requirements to be in the competition. Models must be female, between 18 to 30 years of age, from the United States and a minimum of 5’8″ tall (barefoot). The competition is once a year. Google it and look out for it.

9. Be professional. Be on time. Don’t stay up late and party before shoots. Be nice.

10. Get to know Edward Razek. For the last fifteen years Edward Razek has been the man behind the casting of Victoria’s Secret. He is responsible for choosing who walks down the catwalk and who appears in their advertisements. He has been instrumental in launching the careers of Heidi Klum and Daniela Pestova to superstar status.

For secret insider tips on how to become a Victoria’s Secret model or how to become a successful fashion model please read my blog at:

Small Business SEO Tips and Tricks

Before getting into tips and tricks, here is some background information about SEO for small business owners.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a strategy in web development or design that usually includes post-design promotional activity intended to enhance recognition of a site by search engines. The goal is having your small business website appear on or close to page one in Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the other major search engines. The result, especially being listed #1 on page one, may mean more traffic driven to your website with the ultimate goal of visitors converted to buying customers.

SEO may also mean a person, or Search Engine Optimizer, who is a direct employee or outside contractor with the responsibility of adjusting your small business website programming code, site content, and promotional activities to achieve page one with search engines. Like any profession, the performance level may vary widely from one to another.

Brick and mortar small business owners often launch a new website and expect the site to take over as the front line of marketing their product or service. This can be a mistake. Others just want to enhance their image by showing sophistication with a www domain that presents more content than will fit on a business card or brochure.

The first group wants traffic driven to their site, yet few small business owners truly understand Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, so some fall victim to persons offering SEO services for a fee. For the second group, just being online with a website that never changes meets their expectations, and they realize success depends on direct customer contact and marketing. A third group is similar to this last group, except they expect that just having a website will magically bring instant fortunes.

If you didn’t guess by now, there are no tricks to search engine optimization. Tips for SEO success should be based on proven techniques with long term positive results. Tricks that try to manipulate results by deceptive means, may succeed short term but will eventually fail.

Search engine algorithms for establishing ranking like Google’s PageRank are secret. The best one can do is guess how and why they change by tracking each quarterly update. Most watchers of PageRank, or PR for short, are trying to unravel what Google finds important and then manipulate their strategy to improve their ranking in search results. That could be a mistake. If adjusting strategy means manipulating what some think is important, too often they resort to deceptive means with short term gains.

I’ve written many times that deceptive practices will backfire. You will be punished. If you track PR, or follow the advice of SEO gurus, then you’ve heard the cliche “Content is King”. My position continues to be that the secret to search engine optimization is designing sites for visitors first, and then adding original quality content often to get noticed by people, and search engines.

“Content is King” needs to be changed to “Original Quality Content is King”. Traffic is meaningless if visitors don’t stick around long enough to be converted to paying customers. I believe that the tweaking of algorithms in 2007 and the downward shift in overall PR for so many sites is more than a temporary adjustment. Furthermore, I do not believe that Google is punishing website owners who provide original quality content. Instead, I believe that millions of websites set up and tweaked just to trick search engines are being caught and punished, and the PR scale in 2007 has shifted downward for quality site owners to fill in that void and redefine the PageRank range.

Small business website owners need to understand best practice SEO strategies. Here’s some search engine optimization advice that I published on my website in 2007. First is the main course from my menu to feed search engines that used an analogy comparing search engines to restaurants. Following that list are practices to avoid from that same article on my site.

Positive Search Engine Optimization practices to consider:

1. Keywords in the Page Title

2. Keywords in the H Tags

3. The Age of Your WWW Domain

4. The Size of Your Website

5. Backlinks (inbound links to your pages)

6. Keywords in Text Links

7. High Quality, Original Content

Negative or deceptive SEO practices you should avoid:

1. Do not have affiliate only advertising pages. You need original content.

2. Do not have over optimized pages. It won’t help SEO and may confuse your visitors.

3. Do not have link schemes, inbound or outbound. Deceptive practices will backfire.

4. Do not have identical content hosted on two separate domains (mirror sites).

5. Do not have plagiarized content. It is illegal, and search engines can tell.

6. Do not have foul language as in cursing, or content that is hateful or racist.

In conclusion, continue to evaluate your small business website strategy for SEO. Take advantage of the best practices and avoid the negative or deceptive methods, and you can succeed. The majority of small business entrepreneurs service a local market, so the ranking of your pages compared to the world could mean that very high PageRank is impossible. By following the tips given here, you may have enough to edge out your local competition, and that’s probably all that matters.

5 Steps to Prevent Death By PowerPoint

1. Number of slides

If you are making a Sales Presentation, I’d limit yourself to six slides. If you can’t sell yourself in six slides then you’ll never be able to sell yourself. Most sales books will tell you, that you’ve got about 5 minutes max to get a client’s attention.

After the six slides you might then want to get into individual benefits or product slides at the client’s request. Use PowerPoint Hyperlinks to get you from one part of the presentation to the next.

2. The Text

How Much Text?

The short answer is as little as possible…Generally if somebody can read the PowerPoint and understand the presentation without any further help, then it’s too much text. Many trainers talk of the use of slogans, but to define that a little more:

Simple Slides

Short Clauses

No Articles

Few Verbs

Size 32 best

Surprise me

Memory jogger

Max 6 lines

Should you reveal line by line or all at once… Well there’s a big debate and my view is that if you have a big surprise in the text then don’t show your hand! Otherwise I’d show all points it gives both the presenter and audience an indication of the flow of the presentation.

3. Graphics

In simple terms, if you’re going to talk about the diagram in your presentation then its an asset, if it’s just there to make your slide pretty then its a liability. An old boss of mine used to say that every presentation needs to have one killer-image that people will remember. Even if that image takes you longer than the rest of the presentation it is time well spent.

Designing Graphics

The ideal graphic is one specifically made for the presentation by a professional. Failing that consider the following options:

For numeric information, use Excel to create graphs and then copy and paste them into your PowerPoint. (Excel has much better control over graphs than PowerPoint)

Use the insert -> diagram option to make semi-customised content.

Use Google Images to try and find the specific image you want.

Use the drawing toolbar to combine your images effectively.

Thumbnails can be useful navigational items for training Presentations, because they provide a quick visual reference for students to see what aspect of the subject the lecturer is referring to.

4. Multimedia Content

Generally speaking I try to avoid multimedia content and unless you are highly technically adept, I’d advise against using any kind of sound or videos in your presentation. Be aware of the following pitfalls:
Linked files do not transfer well from one PC to another. The best method to make presentations portable is to use the package for CD option.

Check your audio before giving the presentation and make sure you take all the required cables. (Plan B, one presentation with sound and one without)

NEVER assume you can use the Internet during a presentation. It’s always best to ensure all content is on your PC.

Make sure you use the same version of PowerPoint on both PCs. (If you can’t check your presentation carefully before giving it.)

Don’t use more than one fade and more than one transition per slideshow, unless this is going to be used in a kiosk, you want the speaker to be the focus of attention not the flashing graphics.

5. Front Page

In many cases the front slide will be shown before your presentation and this is a great opportunity to get the audience excited about what you are going to say, make sure your frontpage has:
The name of the presentation clearly displayed

You have now designed some wonderful slide, so now all you have to do is speak about them!

9 Compelling Business Benefits of Gmail Cloud Computing For All Your Office Productivity Needs

Deploying Google’s Gmail for my start-up internet marketing business has allowed minimal and secure IT administration of my 8 websites (28+ email accounts). Supporting a mixed operating environment which includes Microsoft, Ubuntu and MacOS, multiple browsers, and document file formats from Microsoft Office, Open Office is made possible and easier with an in-the-cloud computing environment like Gmail.

So why would you consider cloud computing like Google Mail for your business, especially an SME (small medium enterprise)?

In a two words – security and compliance. E-mail security, web security and message compliance are the underlying benefits to solid business reasons to have your mail and office documents served through Gmail.

Compliance to Security and Retention Requirements

Whether your organization is 1 person or thousands of people in size, you are faced with accounting, legal and government regulations and standards that dictate acceptable levels of IT security and records retention for all electronic files and e-mails. Gmail can help ensure compliancy plus provide you with real business benefits in streamlining your document and email management. Deploying Google Mail is just smart business. Some benefits include:

1) Organizing and Filing (Archiving) your email the anyway you want it.

Google uses labeling as a way to file and organize your emails. You can tag an email with multiple labels. For example, an email from your accountant with tax information could be label as “Corporate Taxes”, “Accountant”, “IRS”, “Revenue Canada”. Gone is the restriction of having to choose only one file folder to which you move an email.

2) Keeping Email conversations or threads linked together.

Appearing like cascading file folders, emails on the same topic (subject) will be kept together in your inbox or to the multiple archived labels you have assigned. No searching for the email trail or thread of emails about a particular subject. They are visually represented like a group of stacked file folders.

3) A free unlimited storage repository for all your email and messages forever!

At 7 gigabytes per gmail user account and growing as of August 2008, the Google mail tagline is ‘ you’ll never need to delete another message’.

Takin’ Care of Business, instead of computer or IT Administration

Reducing the time spent on administration of your computer storage, security, backup and recovery allows you to spend more time building your business. Manage all your email accounts entirely from within one or two Gmail addresses. Once set-up, Gmail offers this low administration environment.

4) No Mail is downloaded or stored on your server, desktop, laptop or PDA. This eliminates any stress or administration angst associated with:

– searching for emails stored and scattered across multiple client devices – some emails on your PC , some on your laptop, some on your PDA

– scheduling backups of your email, contact list and documents

– recovery (and loss) of email & documents due to client device loss, failure or theft

– expanding storage capacity due to continuing email and document growth and retention

– remote or mobile access for all your email, attachments and documents

– managing, consolidating and keeping intact multiple email addresses and personalities

– off-site backup of select files for SOHO or Small Businesses

Document creation, management and simple online collaboration

5) Use Gmail online Office Suite to create, manage, store your business documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Read and write Microsoft Office formatted documents as well as all the open document variants. Securely stored at Google, eliminate HDD file storage and backup. No more MS Office licensing fees to Microsoft.

6) Store images and pictures using Picasa Web Albums. Manage your images on your PC using FREE Picasa Software – crop, adjust, special effects.

7) online chat and messaging integrated, stored and managed just like your email.

Reducing the complex e-mail security threats to your corporate data

8) Google yet again has an very intelligent SPAM filter that checks each message content and therefore does not arbitrarily blacklist the email address, just the specific email due to content. No emails are downloaded to your PC or an office application; therefore, no waste of bandwidth or risk of infected emails on your hard drive.

9) Google’s anti-virus checking is also performed away from your computer. All attachments are checked at the Google server for viruses and, if infected, flagged/moved to SPAM right away. No infected e-mail ever arrives on your computer’s hard drive.

Traditional server or computer-based email systems download ALL your email, passing it through a spam/anti-virus filter on your computer. This is a waste of bandwidth usage (downloading spam email) and, even worse, exposes you to the additional risk of having spam and virus-infested e-mails get closer to your data files on your computer hard drives?

So why you need to seriously consider using Google Mail for all your office needs?

– Complete office mobility – via any browser, access to your email, documents, images, chat

– Access anywhere, anytime through any browser

– No backups required of email, office documents or contacts

– Manage multiple user profiles and email accounts in one convenient place

– Includes Anti-Spam and Anti-virus checking away from your PC, Laptop or Server

– Gmail Free Unlimited file space

– Next to No Mail Administration.

Gmail is the perfect Mobile Office Utility for Small Medium and Enterprise businesses. Google Mail Cloud Computing environment will allow you to focus on your business operations and growth. Implementing the Gmail in-the-cloud computing model for your email security and compliance makes a whole lot of sense.

Keep your head in the clouds!

Tips On Doing Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is the process of or a series of steps that one takes in an effort to make their website or other online assets more visible to others when others are searching for content online using search engines. This is also often referred to as positioning one’s assets to be found by “organic” searches as opposed to “Pay Per Click” (PPC) where you pay a fee to the search engines themselves so that they will help your site to stand out and be found.

So what actually is involved in this process called SEO? What are the steps you want to take to build out your online assets so as to be more easily found? My list below is by no means complete but it will serve to give you a solid overview to tasks you can complete to make your site more visible.

Search Engine Registration: The first thing you will want to do is to get your website registered with the search engines themselves. Most search engines offer you a method whereby you can tell them about your site and site ownership and you can also tell them what webpages exist on your website through submission of a “Sitemap.xml” file to them.

Search Engine Indexing: Next you will want to tell them more about your individual webpages so that this information can be stored and “Indexed” in their internal databases for use when people are making “Organic” searches. Each search engine has their own method of accepting your webpage indexing requests for example; Yahoo-Bing allows you to submit 10 webpages for indexing a day and Google, the largest search engine in the world today, provides you with a webpage indexing request tool called “Fetch as Google” where you can enter your pages to be indexed. Remember when using this tool to register each page as a standard webpage and also to register these same pages separately for mobile pages if they are “Mobile Responsive” in construction as Google maintains separate databases for mobile pages and to get found organically on a cellphone, you will need to have them registered in this second database as well.

Link Building: This is the art of building links back to your site from other quality Internet locations usually owned by others. This is often done by leaving posts on other forums, asking other site owners to link their sites with yours, building a presence on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit, etc. and tying your presence on those sites back to your website, writing articles and press releases that mention your site, posting videos to places like YouTube and Vimeo that tie back to you, publishing e-books and more. The more “External Backlinks” you can create to your site, the stronger your site looks in the eyes of Google and other search engines and the better your site will rank within those engines organically.

On Site Optimization: There are also things you can do within your own website to strengthen your SEO rankings with search engines. You will be wanting to do keyword and keyword phrase research as you build webpage titles and write content for those pages, do the same for images you use so they are well described, link pages together so they can keep people on your site longer by easily giving them more access to additional related content on your site, create “Anchor Text” on your site which means taking strong keyword phrases and embedding hyperlinks to other locations on-site and off-site behind this text.

Content Creation: Write your website content in such a way that the webpage title and description are supported by your content words as close to the top of each page’s content as possible as this helps to validate these pages as being real and of value to the search engines when they render pages to their own content consumers.

Use of Videos, Audios and Images: Use them liberally on their site as search engines know that people to prefer to watch videos, look at pictures or listen to audios more than they like to read text – so use this strategy and be sure to richly describe them within your webpages’ “meta-data” and to also submit them for indexing to the search engines as well. It is tedious work, but will pay significant dividends to your site over time in terms of its visibility.

Build your webpages to be “Mobile-Responsive”: These days, search engines such as Google will not even display pages that are not responsive to people making “Organic” queries for content through them. If your webpage is not responsive, you will not be found.

Build Webpages Natively: Build your webpages natively as opposed to using templates wherever possible and test them for speed of loading. If your webpages and in particular your mobile webpages do not load completely within 2-4 seconds, your page will be penalized or not even be displayable through organic searches. Template pages tend to be “Fatter” so they take longer t load – which is why I make this point. Also keep your image sizes small – 4 megabyte images take much longer to load than 20K images…

Keyword Competitive Analysis: Do competitive analysis on your keyword research and where you place with those keywords in relation to your competitors. Look at what is making it to page one in an organic search for keywords and phrases you wish to rank for and research how hard it would be to displace them to get your content showing on page one of a search – and there are a number of tools out there that can help you make this job easier. Bottom line though is that you want to get to page one when ranking for the words and phrases that you choose and how you use them for SEO effect on your site – you don’t want to do all this work to rank on page 10 where much fewer content searchers get to.

Use Search Engine Dashboards: Search engines build informational dashboards for you to use to see how they are seeing your site and what errors they are finding on your site and they often offer suggestions for fixes and improvements. Use these dashboards! Get all you can from them about your site’s quality, make the fixes and let them know when you have fixed it so they can “recrawl” your site to register that it has improved. Doing this work is very important to maintaining good search engine rankings.

In summary, above are just some of the core things you will need to do to have a shot at getting to page one in search engines organically. Organic SEO takes a lot of work but those that put in the time to do this work on their sites are rewarded with organic traffic to their sites. Improving organic SEO should be a continual process for any company trying to do business online. Traffic is money and if others are doing this and you are not, they will be the ones making the sales you want to get. Often, doing this well means business survival itself.

Blogging Tips For Beginners

You may already have a blog or want to start a new blog so here are blogging tips starting from choosing the blog name (domain name). Please read following 25 blogging tips to build better blog.

Following are Blogging tips useful before starting a new blog or writing new post. These are important for search engine optimization.

1) First do the keyword research for the blog topic / subject. Finding popular keywords related to your blog or your post topic is must. You will need at least 2-3 keywords to be used in blog title and around 10 keywords for post titles to start with.

2) Try to use the keywords in domain name, blog title, post title, post content,hyper link, ALT tag, TITLE tag etc.in a natural way.This will help you to get higher search engine ranking.

3) Try to limit no. of your labels / categories around 20. Use tag cloud or label cloud if you want to save space. If you have many topics on one blog try to regroup and relabel. If totally different topics are mixed on one blog and has sufficient no. of posts for each topic then start new blog for that topic.

4) Do not copy old posts of a blog on new blog.You can get penalized for duplicate content.You need to remove old copy from the search engine and then add same post at new blog.

5) Use post title optimization widget on this blog for blogger / blogspot blog so that you get better search engine ranking. WordPress bloggers can use plugin like All in one SEO for meta tag and title optimization.

Following are blogging tips related to look and content of the blog.

6) The look and layout of the blog should be nice, neat and beautiful so that it can create good impression on the visitor and he should feel to stay more and visit again. Content quality should also be good for this.

7) Navigation and layout should be such that visitor should be able to find the recent posts, labels very easily. So if Recent posts and Labels are near top of side bar it will be visible in first screen of the blog and the visitor will have a quick idea of what the blog is about and can jump to his topic of interest quickly.

8) Use pictures, images wherever possible to make your post colorful and attractive. Do picture / image optimization as described in my earlier post. No need to use large images, you can use medium to small images.

9) Loading time of the blog should not be very long or visitor will run away before the page opens. So keep check on what widgets / code you are installing and does it slows down the loading. If you are loading pictures, make sure that the file size is not big.

Do not use BMP files, you can use jpg, png files. Also check image size. You can do all this using photoshop. As sometimes images load slower from external sources, check that also.

Blogging tips related to writing and visitors

10) Write your post after proper research and gathering total information. Do not write too long. Use grouping, paragraph, sub titling for arranging the information in post body.

11) Writing language should be easy to understand and wherever possible write in humorous way. If visitor enjoys your post he will come back.

12) Give links to useful resources related to your topic. Also give links to your earlier posts with proper anchor text wherever possible. This improves internal linking of your blog.

13) Encourage the reader to participate / comment. You can also run some contest or survey on your blog and keep some prize for that.

14) Use beautiful and professional looking theme / template and header image for your blog. There are many free templates available so you can easily get one suitable to your blog. Choose 3 column template which uses full 1024 X 768 resolution.This gives you more space.

15) The font color and size should be such that blog should be readable in different screen resolution. Other blogging tips to increase readers and revenue.

16) Burn your feed at feedburner and provide subscribe via email facility for your RSS feed.

17) Check your blog visibility and feed in different browser.Especially in internet explorer and Firefox.

18) Try to increase your RSS feed subscriber and use AdSense for feed to display Google AdSense on the feed.

19) Use Google AdSense or other advertisements in post body, right hand side bar and below the header. Use AdSense link unit with labels or links or below header. Match background color of AdSense with blog or post background color.

20) Read my post on blog traffic tips to build traffic from sources other than search engine.

Following are precautionary blogging tips

21) There should not be many outgoing links (pointing to other websites / blogs) in the post or side bar. Remove unnecessary outgoing links. Place all outgoing links near bottom of right hand side bar or footer.

22 ) Do not buy or sell links for link building.

23) If paid posts are must for you keep it minimum or have separate website / blog for paid posts or articles.

24) As said above do not write same post again ( duplicate content ). Do not edit old post titles and content for search engine optimization.

25) Do not have METATAGS only for main home URL of blogger blog, as it will be used for all the post and you will get duplicate metatag error in Google webmaster tools. You are also misguiding and confusing search engine by having same meta tag for all posts. So you can use script / widget which can give different METATAGS to individual posts. WordPress blogger can have METATAG for individual post by using All in one SEO plug-in.

Affordable Banner Ads – How Much You Should Spend to Get the Best Results

As a marketing expert, I am often asked to assess new methods of advertising for my clients. One recent request came from a car accessory company who has a very successful e-commerce website as well as an Amazon store, both of which I created, manage and maintain. By reviewing daily reports on Google Analytics, I am fully apprised of how many visitors arrive at his website, where they come from, what pages they view and how long they spend, among many other parameters. Through our ShopSite shopping cart, we also have extensive reports about which products sell best.

One of the most valuable pieces of information among all this data is the source of referral. This client is extremely fortunate to have developed a very loyal following among previous customers who liberally discuss their interests, purchases and post photos of their prized custom-enhanced cars on a number of popular, special-interest automobile forums on the Internet. Each time my client is recommended, his URL address for his website is posted within the discussion thread which in turn gets repeated whenever anyone comments or asks further questions on the subject. As a result of this, his website has hundreds of linkbacks which has driven his search rankings up to the tops of any relevant Google searches. We can only count our blessings. Of course, his impeccable business practices, unique products and excellent customer service have given his company an enviable reputation for reliability which he works hard to reinforce on a daily basis.

In an effort to show gratitude to these forums and their participants, he has suggested many times that we look into costs for banner advertising, which is a certain format of advertising used on websites with a variety of payment options to choose from. And, dutifully, I have requested media kits and cost information from a number of forums only to be stymied by the intimidating prospect of buying ads by the number of impressions as opposed to some more traditional mode of measurement. Having been in this business for over 35 years, we get a little flummoxed by common claims of exorbitant numbers of visitors per day which seem somewhat far-fetched, to say the least. However, with recently established auditing procedures set up by an organization called The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), buying banner advertising by number of impressions is now more comparable to buying print advertising by audited circulation figures, as an example. This is not to say that every Internet banner advertising claim is audited but at least there are guidelines and standards with which to correspond.

Despite our reservations, the need and desire to advertise to such an appropriately targeted market remains, so we’ve finally bitten the bullet. Having visited the site of a particular automobile forum of interest, one which boasts 170,000 unique visits (note: “visits” not “visitors”) per month, I was immediately attracted to banner ads which appear prominently in key spots on the page. I quickly learned that those ads are placed by Google who only entertains advertising budgets of immense proportion. I know this is true, having been left in limbo waiting for Google sales reps to give me the courtesy of answering my picayune cost questions, which so far has proven futile. However, in repeated efforts to learn more from the endless documents Google has available on every possible facet of this subject, “image” (banner) advertising through Google can be on a “cost-per-click” basis, the cost of which is determined by bids submitted by competitive participants within a given industry, or on a “cost-per-thousand” (cpm) basis based on number of impressions the ad receives and a predetermined budget you arrange with Google. Your ad is then placed on a particular website or group of websites you specify, or is circulated among Google’s choice of appropriate websites based on keywords you have selected. Unless you have a sizable budget to invest in this program, Google does not encourage your participation.

If you haven’t heard of “affiliate marketing, it is appropriate to discuss here. It is the popular relationship between a website with ample traffic, an online merchant who wants to place a banner ad to draw interest to his product, service or website, and sometimes a third-party Internet ad placement service who acts as a liaison between suitable high-traffic websites and appropriately related banner advertisers. Google itself is an affiliate marketing service as described above, as are Yahoo and countless others all over the Internet. Besides arrangements for pay-per-click, there are also pay-per-sale and pay-per-lead setups, all of which require payment of a commission by the banner advertiser to the affiliate at an agreed, predetermined rate. This could be the equivalent of pennies or dollars, depending on the relationship and contract. And it is based on the age-old tradition of rewarding anyone who contributes to your sales by fruitfully promoting your product or service. If you think paying by ad impression is worrisome, paying by click is even more terrifying when you read about cases where advertisers rack up thousands of dollars worth of commissions due because someone from a competitive business targets your ad with a clicking scam designed to put you out of business with hundreds of meaningless clicks! While these are the exceptions, it is enough to undermine your courage.

Alternatives are available, however. It is possible to bypass Google and other affiliate marketers by placing ads directly on a website you choose for merits you openly recognize, without any strings attached for profit-sharing. In our case, we appealed to the automobile forum’s marketing department which offered very reasonable banner advertising rates through a professional, attentive and eager sales rep who was happy to guide us through the entire process, including late at night and on the weekend!

First we decided on a large banner size of 728 x 90 pixels, also known as a “leaderboard,” which is a horizontal unit about the size of the window on a window envelope. As long as we kept the banner ad file size to 20k, we were allowed to submit either a static ad or an animated Flash ad. But we were warned that it is quite difficult to get Flash ads down to 20k and would be charged extra for a size that exceeded 20k.

The client agreed that we should try to make the ad a Flash version because it gave us the option of showing more than one product and delivering more than one message, all while attracting attention with the ad’s movement. After working on the ad’s construction, the smallest I could get the size down to was 25k. But, as always, even after 35 years, I learned a couple of tricks in the process thanks to Google searches which provided some tips on file reduction by some knowledgeable people who are unbelievably generous with their free information.

What contributes to oversize in a Flash SWF file are a number of elements including size and type of Photoshop images used, failure to convert every layer’s components to symbols and the number of frames used in the ad (or length of time the file needs to complete its action.) By addressing all of these parameters, I finally got the file down to 20k and, as a result, we were charged the flat fee of $130 per 50,000 impressions for a contract total of 300,000 impressions over a 3-month term, or $780. That’s less than a penny per impression. Certainly that is an affordable rate to test the market both for ad effectiveness and market reception compared to the need for a $20,000 minimum budget with Google.

A day or two after the ad had been placed and started running in rotation, taking its turn appearing in the very same ideal spots as the Google ads I had seen, the ad rep contacted me to say that when the ad is clicked on, our website opens in the very same window the ad occupies, the skinny 728×90 pixel space, which obviously is not what we had intended! All of our tests had shown the website opening in a new full-size window. Luckily, the ad rep said if I can fix the ad to open a new window when clicked upon to accommodate the large website page, he would restart the contract at no additional cost. (Talk about customer service! What a rare, exceptional human being!)

Self-taught at everything I do, I needed to solve this new challenge with an appropriate script within the Flash file to open a new window when the ad was clicked upon. Although I thought I’d have to specify the size of the window needed, I discovered through trial and error that the new window which opens is entirely dependent on the size of the window of the users’ browser, any size of which would be acceptable in this instance, since it would surely exceed the relatively “tiny” size of our banner ad.

Upon submitting the new file, the ad rep confirmed that the problem was solved. A new large window opened when the ad was clicked upon displaying our website in all its glory, and the contract was restarted from zero.

What prompted us to use this particular forum for our banner advertising test was its focus on a model of vehicle which is least popular in our product sales history. We attribute this phenomenon to a supposition that this model of car attracts a younger market who may not be as affluent as older drivers who buy lots of our products for vehicles that appeal to a more mature taste. But our choice of product advertised is one that appeals to every market worldwide because it is so desperately needed by drivers of the make of car in which we specialize, regardless of model. This is crucial to accurate measurement of the banner ad’s effectiveness.

While we are still grappling with a number of variables which can affect banner ad visibility, such as how often it appears to the right audience at the right time, something which is common to all other types of advertising as well, we can see through Google Analytics at this early stage of review that a respectable number of website visitors are coming directly to the page to which the ad is linked. It is not common for visitors to know the exact address of that special page thereby making it their “landing” page. With this knowledge, we can safely assume that those visits are a result of the banner ad. Otherwise, Google Analytics tells us the name of the source of referral, which could be Google, Yahoo, a specific automobile forum URL or any number of other possible referring sites. In the case of the banner ad, the referral is called “direct,” meaning that the user’s click brought him to a specific address without depending on the use of a keyword or search term.

Still, there are other concerns which control the effectiveness of a banner ad. Just as technology was developed to rid the TV viewer of the necessity to sit through annoying commercials which interrupt programming, there is similar technology which blocks banner ads from a website visitor’s experience. Combine that with the limitations surrounding reception of Flash animation on certain mobile devices and you begin to understand the many constraints which affect banner advertising success.

As with any advertising or marketing efforts, it is fair to say that our expectations about banner ad effectiveness are hopeful for an actual return on investment in the form of increased sales, but at the same time, realistic if the only benefit is one of corporate exposure, professional image and product awareness. In time, all promotional efforts contribute to a cumulative rate of success. As businesses, this is something we accept as going with the territory. And as a final rationalization, we take solace in the adage “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”