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The internet has completely changed the business world. It has changed the whole concept of how to be successful in a home business. It has also provided the opportunity for many to give up the 9 to 5 world and seek their dream on the internet. Some have made this transition seem easy and others continue to struggle.

Have you been thinking about making this change? Do you have what it takes to make this a successful move? Let’s take a look at a few of the things that ultimately decide who makes the grade and who goes down with the ship.

1. Work at something you enjoy. There is nothing quite like enjoying your job. It puts a whole new perspective on the world. If you like what you do, working becomes a pleasure instead of a chore. Some of you are probably thinking, yeah right, work is not something to enjoy but rather just a pain that we have to endure.

If you decide to work from home, pick out something that you will enjoy. If you don’t enjoy what you are doing, it will become the same pain as the job you have now. You may enjoy it at first, just because you are home or just because it is new. That will wear off and when it does, you had better be doing something that you enjoy or you will be one of the passengers on the sinking ship.

2. You must be disciplined. It is very easy to start wandering when you are working on the net. The internet is full of fun and interesting things and it is very easy to find yourself surfing or looking at something totally unrelated to your work.

An email arrives that looks interesting and you decide to go check it out. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, you all at once realize that you were working.

When I first started working on the internet, I found that it was taking hours to do a forty-five minute job. Use your work time wisely. I have interests that I like to explore but I have learned to do that at other times. When I go to work, I concentrate on working. I have cut my work time down tremendously since I impimented this technique.

3. Don’t expect to be successful overnight. So many people have heard the internet success stories and think wealth will come fast and easy. You are starting a business and building a successful business takes time and effort.

I would not discourage anyone from seeking their dream on the internet. I never enjoyed going to work for someone else every morning. Be realistic when you start out, don’t expect success to just fall in your lap. If you go in with the expectations of making a big income your first few months, you are most likely going to be disappointed.

4. Be prepared for change. The internet is ever changing and to be a successful business person on the net, you have to be willing to change as well.

You will find techniques that worked last week are antique this week. If you want to be successful working on the internet, you must keep up with the times. There is a lot of great information out there and I suggest that you devote some time each week to looking to find these new ideas.

Check out other businesses in your field and see what they are doing. Initiate contact with other business owners in your field. You may not only learn something new but joint ventures are one of the most succesful means of doing business on the net.

The internet is a great place to work. If you make that decision to venture out into cyberspace as a means of earning an income, take some time and find something you like. Create good work habits, don’t have unreasonable expectations and be willing to change.

These things alone are no guarentee you will be a success but it is at least a good road to start down.

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But who’s growing your business while you’re busy tending to your clients’ needs? What are you doing to attract and maintain a steady stream of qualified, motivated prospects? How do you find and keep interesting clients who pay you what you’re worth? Like most professionals, you may not be able to answer those questions because the answer involves marketing.

Sure, referrals can be a decent source of new clients, but they’re only one approach in a system of balanced strategies for guaranteeing you’ll have many desirable clients for as long as you wish. It doesn’t matter how many referrals you get, if you don’t know how to build and extend the potential relationship that each referral represents.

As a Smart Person, you have lots of options at your disposal for attracting more clients to your firm. And they don’t have to include the expensive things that spring to mind when you say “marketing,” such as slick brochures, advertising, or direct mail.

However, your professional expertise alone will not differentiate you in a crowded marketplace?nor will it bring clients to you. You’ve got to let them know you exist and help them understand why you’re different ? why you are uniquely qualified to address their needs. This is called positioning. It takes some thoughtful, creative work to nail this first, most important step in attracting more clients.

Once you’ve determined your positioning, you have four more major steps that will bring clients to you and your firm: packaging, promotion, persuasion, and performance. Each step requires that you are able to communicate with your target client audience in a variety of ways that they can understand ? in their need-based language, not your expert language.

In a nutshell, here are some of your strategies for each major step to attract more clients:

Positioning: niche, specialty, specialness, reputation, unique competitive advantage, client-centered worldview, saying no, commitment, no Plan B, congruence, self knowledge, re-niche

Packaging: knowledge-sharing, articles, reports, surveys, web sites, slide decks, CDs/cassettes, videos, books, mini-books

Promotion: knowledge-sharing, speaking, writing, networking, referrals, newsletters, e-newsletters, letters, postcards, calls, teleclasses

Persuasion: listening, diagnosis, openness, curiosity, visioning, education, presentations, asking, recommending, assuring, sharing

Performance: competence, solutions, results, keep promises, manage expectations, intelligence, creativity, guarantees, thank you’s, commitment, walking the talk, innovation, persistence, integrity, generosity, alignment inside firm, staying in touch, management competence

Chances are, you’re on a learning curve in one or more of these major steps. Even if you’ve been in business for years and have built a successful firm, taking your practice to the next level means setting new metrics, ensuring your niche hasn’t grown stale, and learning new ways to reach that next stage in your firm’s growth or maturity.

For larger firms, maybe now it’s time to pay attention to how your firm delivers on your brand promise ? do principals, management, and staff really “walk the talk” of what you promise in the marketplace? Or are you, like many professional service firms, a cobbler whose children have no shoes?

Or perhaps you serve “internal clients” inside of a very large organization, and need support or buy-in for the services your department offers. You can put these principles and strategies to work for your work to get noticed, get invited, attract positive attention, and get buy-in.

So what’s a Smart Person to do to attract more clients? Here are some suggestions:

Raise the role of strategic marketing in your practice to a conscious level. Get it on the agenda and apply your smarts to it, just like you do with any other crucial aspect of your business.

Create a niche for your practice ? you cannot be all things to all people. However just because you enjoy working with a particular market or prefer a special approach, it doesn’t mean your target clients will. You need to understand the difference between a good niche and a bad niche, and strategize accordingly. Lynda Falkenstein’s NicheCraft is an excellent source of ideas.

Position yourself to others through their worldview, not yours. Instead of saying, “I’m a strategy consultant,” start with “I help (Fortune 500) companies (increase market share).” Obviously you’d tailor the statement to fit who you help and what problem you address, but you get the idea. For tons of information on how to get this right, Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing is the guru on what he calls creating an “audiologo.”

Develop a system of marketing strategies that both attracts new clients and helps you retain the ones you have. Start with the metrics of what you want to change or improve in your practice and tie the system to driving those metrics.

Develop an action plan that translates your marketing system into specific tasks, with real assignments, deliverables, and deadlines.

Commit to and put a system in place to keep you on track and motivated as you work through your plan. Build non-billable time into your business model dedicated to marketing. A rule of thumb is at least 20% of your firm’s time should be allocated to marketing.

Get expert help and resources for any of these suggestions, including implementation. For many professional service firms, this requires getting away for a day or two of focused thinking and discussion among key people. When you consider that stakes, it’s well worth the time and effort.

There are actually two more “p’s” in marketing. Intelligent, effective marketing requires a great deal of patience?and the ability to see this not as a series of transactions completed in a few weeks or even months, but as a relationship-building process with your current and future clients over time.

Marketing really is a life-skill and something to learn as one of your core competencies as an educated professional. Now that’s being smart!

References

Argyris, C. “Teaching Smart People How to Learn,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1991.

Falkenstein, L. NicheCraft. New York: HarperCollins. 1996.

Middleton, R. “InfoGuru Marketing Manual.” Action Plan Marketing. 2002.

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Writing articles can do all of these and more. You can vital get exposure for your web site, or the product / service you are promoting by writing articles.

This will not happen over night, but if you write one article a week the number of links you can build up for your site will grow steadily, and each one of those links helps you
become more visible on the internet, helping your potential customer base find you rather than your competitors.

Why go the all the trouble of writing and submitting an article, well these are some of the benefits of submitting articles

Increased number of back-links to your website
You can targeting different keywords and key phrases
Ge links back to your site from your article content
Authoritative back-links – establish yourself as an authority on your product or service
Increase traffic to your website
Increase your search engine position

Why we need to Write and Submit Articles?

1. Free advertising
Promoting your web site by writing and submitting articles is the best way of creating more visibility for your website, product or service. It is free to do and all it takes is your time to write the article. How often do you get the chance to advertise your business free of charge and at such length?

2. It isn’t hard to write an article about something you know as well as your own business
Writing an article about your business is not that hard, after all you talk to your customers about every time you have a conversation with them, so why not make a few notes about the these conversations and then turn it into an article.

3. Increase the links to your website
Once you have published your article you will immediately gain incoming links to your site making it more visible on the web and in search engines, an article about painting equipment from an artist would be considered to be highly relevant by the search engines.

4. Establish yourself as an expert
Giving your opinion and views, especially when backed up by facts and figures set you up as an expert in your field.

5. Articles last longer than adverts
Article you have published in directories will be around for a long time, so an article you wrote two years ago comparing the qualities of different oil paints will still be driving traffic to your website today.

6. Multiple links from one article
Articles also encourage others to promote you and your website by using your article, including the link to your site, on their web site, or blog, another way to increase traffic to your site

And did I mention that it’s free!

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To make a business endeavor a success the people behind it must be good in communication. It is the idea of what you communicate and how to communicate that matters. Good communication is thus, the link that connects business and clients. It is also the controlling factor that links all types of businesses.

One of the most effective ways to communicate about any business is the use of promotional materials like postcards, business cards, posters, flyers and the likes.

Let us discuss the significance of the first item. Postcards are usually rectangular shaped piece of paper or cardboard with the significant details of the business on it.

Why are they popular to businesses? The ultimate reason is to make a sale. However, before a sale can take place there must first be familiarity with its products and services. With regards to this aspect, postcards can be used. Be sure that postcards have retention value in order for customers to easily recall them. As a result, it will drive them to buying or subscribing of your products or services.

Another reason is to follow up on customers. At first sight, the postcard may not get the goal of the company thus, it needs considerable amount of follow ups. Retention is the key factor to yield forthcoming sales.

Third reason is to update regularly. The details of the business might have change with time and strategies thus, we have to consider these changes and come up with an updated version of rush postcards.

After the updates and the usual hi’s and hello’s to the customers, the next thing to do is to check out its affectivity to the sales world. This phase may be called ‘checking out customers’. Moreover, postcards are needed to be sent in order to refresh the customers of your products and service especially the latest ones.

Postcards are powerful marketing tools that can convey message through its colorful, clear and striking images and crisp texts. Full color postcards are the most effective type of postcard used by businesses. This is because of its enigmatic effect on the eyes and emotions of the viewers. Try to capture it in your postcards as well. All you have to do is place moving pictures and texts that way, you can very well catch and seize your viewers decision so as to be favorable to your business!