by Julie Warner | Business Services
Like jam and cream go hand in hand, so too does networking with running a successful business. But many of us dread walking into a room and introducing ourselves to a bunch of strangers.
Here are some valuable tips that have worked for me over the years:
Networking Glamour!
1. Get there early. Showing up early at a networking event is a much better strategy than getting there on the later side. It is quieter and people won’t have settled into groups yet, making it easier to find a conversation partner.
2. Ask opening questions. Don’t wait for someone to approach you. To start a conversation, simply walk up to a person or a group, and say, “May I join you” or “What brings you to this event?” Don’t forget to listen intently to their replies.
3. Ditch the sales pitch. Remember, networking is all about relationship building. Keep your exchange light and informal – you don’t need to do the hard sell within the first few minutes. The idea is to get the conversation started. People are more apt to do business with – or partner with – people whose company they enjoy.
If a potential customer does ask you about your product or service, be ready with an easy description of your company – practice this often!
4. Share your passion. Win people over with your enthusiasm for your product or service. Leave a lasting impression by telling a story about why you were inspired to create your company. When you are passionate about what you do, it is contagious and when you get other people to share their passion, it creates a memorable two-way conversation.
5. Smile. It’s a simple, but often overlooked, rule of engagement. By smiling, you’ll put your nervous self at ease and come across as friendly and inviting to others. Remember to smile before you enter the room, or before you start your next conversation.
6. Don’t hijack the conversation. Some people who dislike networking may overcompensate by dominating the discussion. Don’t forget: The most successful networkers are good at making other people feel special. Make eye contact, repeat their name, listen to what they have to say, and suggest topics that are easy to discuss. Be a conversationalist, not a talker.
7. Remember to follow up. It’s often said that networking is where the conversation begins, not ends. If you’ve made good connections, ask the best way to stay in touch. Some people like email or phone; others prefer social networks like LinkedIn. Get in touch within 48 hours of the event to show you’re interested and available and mention something you discussed, so your contact remembers you.
Keep on Networking!
by Julie Warner | Real Estate
1. When looking to invest talk to real life investors rather than sales people.
2. Know your borrowing capacity and research various states rather than staying in your own area or postcode.
3. Surround yourself with ‘like minded’ people when building your property portfolio
by Julie Warner | Internet Marketing
Internet Marketing offers limitless opportunities for income creation by accessing the power of the World Wide Web. With access to the online masses, you have the potential to reach an unimaginably immense audience with your products, marketing and promotions. But how do you begin to tap into the power of the internet?
PPC, or pay-per-click ads, although popular, are expensive. Used incorrectly, these can result in a tremendous loss of money and the traffic can dry up as soon as the investment capital does.
Enter article marketing – a free way to reach thousands of people very quickly, bringing long-term traffic to your website on a daily basis.
So what is article marketing? Put simply, article marketing is the writing of free articles that point back to your website or product. These articles are submitted to article directories across the internet, and from there they can be used by other people for content on their websites, with the condition that your author bio box remains in tact. This is the true beauty of article marketing – a few minutes of your time can yield months of results!
I personally recommend you write your own articles if you want to provide your visitors with the highest quality level of information about your business. I’ve included a couple of the tools I personally use to create my own content at the end of this article.
Let’s look at the basics. An article is approximately one page of text, using Microsoft Word. Articles generally contain between 400 and 700 words, and are informative and helpful to the target audience. You can find word count programs on the internet. My favorite is: http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/countwords.shtml – you paste your article into the box, click “Calculate Words”, and it immediately tells you how many words are in your article. You can even take the code from this site and put it onto your own website. It’s completely free.
When writing articles, stick to topics you know well. Or find an article similar to the one you want to write, read it a couple of times, and then rewrite it entirely using your own words. You can also get some ideas from several articles, and then combine them into a totally new article. You can even purchase PLR (private label rights) articles and use them on your site as-is, or alter them and submit them to article sites (be careful with this one – you must change them enough to be unrecognizable from the original, or you will be flagged for duplicate content).
To get your articles circulating on the internet, these are the most important sites available: http://ezinearticles.com, http://goarticles.com, and http://articledashboard.com. These three, in my experience, have the most users and the most clout with Google. They are all free to register with and submit articles to. Just be sure to follow their rules (especially EzineArticles), to keep from having your account suspended or your articles rejected.
Finally, make sure you create a bio box that will draw readers to your site. Your author bio should give a little info about you and give the reader incentive to come to your site. This is where the traffic comes from, and the amount of traffic good articles can generate will blow you away! Write useful articles, and you will find ezines and websites beginning to publish your articles, bringing in more traffic from their readers/visitors.
So what are you waiting for? Go write your first article, and get that traffic flowing!
Article Writing Tools And Resources
Need help writing your own blog or website content? Here are some of the most powerful and time-saving article writing tools available on the market today:
Article Assistant – This free software allows you to create content on any topic for your site in just a few minutes. I use this powerful tool when I need to come up with new ideas for content quickly, or when I have an idea for a topic I want to write about and want to gather useful content I can edit into an article very quickly without spending lots of time doing research.
For more details about this free tool go here: Article Assistant
Content Composer – This powerful content writing software is made by the same developers who created Article Assistant, but it takes things to a whole new level. It is a serious content writing tool that allows you to create many unique variations of the same article for posting content on many different sites without getting penalized by search engines as being “duplicate” content. It also comes with a host of built-in features, such as allowing you to set up permissions for giving ghostwriters access to the tool to create articles for you, checking to see if your content is being used on other web sites without your permission, integration with the Article Announcer software (see below) and a whole lot more.
For more details go here: Content Composer.
Also, if you are interested in discovering the cash-pulling copywriting secrets that can turn your sales letters into explosive cash machines, then check out Power Copy Club – an online membership site where members learn how to master the art of sales copywriting and ad creation, how to create short copy, long copy and how to do video sales letters the right way. As a special for our valued readers and site visitors, we have secured a complimentary FREE Lifetime Silver Membership Pass to Power Copy Club. This membership is normally valued at $47, but you can access it for FREE today by clicking here: Power Copy Club Free Lifetime Silver Membership Pass.
InternetAdworks
by Julie Warner | Internet Marketing
More and more webmasters are experiencing the dilemma of how to increase the flow of traffic to their websites. Without traffic you can’t grow your business. It’s as simple as that.
During the past few years many methods have been developed to try and solve this predicament. While many of them work for a while, there are those that do not make even a small impact.
One of the methods that have spawned many success stories in driving traffic to websites is viral marketing. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something they find informative, entertaining or amazing with others.
Many companies try to capitalize on this behavior to spread their products and increase the popularity of their company or their website. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behavior. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video, or other forms of media or communications that try to catch a person’s attention and then motivate that person to forward on the message to others in an ever-growing exponential manner.
For example, you could create a valuable, information-packed viral pdf report that you send out to customers, or, if your company allows people to become affiliate resellers of your product or service, then even make your report "brandable", so that your affiliates can then add their affiliate links to your report and send it on to their prospect lists.
This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any company to utilize. The benefits of a successful viral marketing campaign greatly overshadow the initial cost of developing and implementing this marketing scheme. Any website can benefit greatly from using viral marketing strategies.
The problem, is that it is quite difficult to intentionally come up with a viral marketing campaign that is guaranteed to succeed. There are, however, tools that you can implement on your site which will give your business the possibility of going viral, should your product or service provide users with such positive results and an exciting customer experience that they will feel naturally compelled, motivated or incentivized to tell others about you.
Tell A Friend Script
One of the easiest methods to apply viral marketing to your site is by using a tell a friend script. This is a simple program or script that you can add to your website. Generally, tell a friend scripts are installed in pages where a person can easily send the viral media or link to the page to their friends, family members, work associates, or even their own customers.
The basic concept of a tell a friend script is that a person inputs their name, e-mail address, the recipient’s e-mail address and then sends the media or page link to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldn’t think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the sender’s name as someone that he or she knows and trusts.
Tell a friend scripts eliminate greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for a wider spreading of this marketing method. It can sometimes be quite sneaky in its use, but it is also very effective.
With the e-mail sent and opened, the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. Using a "tell a friend" script like Viral Friend Generator allows you to reward your referrers with a gift (e.g. a downloadable report, or free access to a product of value to the referrer).
Once the recipient has received your message, then the process begins all over again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see can go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting in greater numbers of potential customers.
Tell A Friend Script Implementation
A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require any complicated programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.
In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It is then just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script that best fits with your plan, then downloading it and installing it on your intended web page.
With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic to your site and potentially increase your profits significantly, but also be prepared for the fact that your campaign may not get the mileage that you have expected of it, and it may take some time before it gets spread or shared around. The good thing, however, is that this strategy can be set up once and then be left to run as an automated system, so that, over time, your exposure online increases as more and more people see your ads, then forward your promotional message to others.
Viral Toolbars
Another viral marketing strategy is to use a viral toolbar. This can either be a downloadable toolbar for your browser that allows the owner of the toolbar to incorporate some form of promotional message while providing the toolbar user with useful functionalities, or a service like the Viral URL Shortener that allows you to earn affiliate commissions from shortening your URLs (e.g. for sending messages on Twitter).
If you find a successful viral marketing strategy, then not only will traffic to your sites explode, but the sky will be the limit as far as your potential to make money online goes. Study the successful viral marketing strategies of other companies, experiment with a few viral tools and strategies yourself and you will soon discover what works best for your business.
If you are interested in learning different ways of making money online, then check out Web Profits Club – an online membership site where members learn about the best money-making strategies available today and shave years off their online business learning curve. As a special for our valued readers and site visitors, we have secured a complimentary FREE Lifetime Silver Membership Pass to Web Profits. This membership is normally valued at $47, but you can access it for FREE today by clicking here: Web Profits Club Free Lifetime Silver Membership Pass.
InternetAdworks
by Julie Warner | Internet Marketing
Improving and improving again your membership website is what will keep it dynamic and making a steady and reliable income. It is a law of nature (and the Internet) that everything either grows or dies. Constant improvement of your membership website will insure it grows and lives.
The content of your membership website needs to always be kept up-to-date with relevant and useful information. Keep your eyes open and all of your feelers out for information that your subscribers will find interesting and helpful. If you have always relied on only print information up to this point, try adding some audio or video. People today prefer to hear or see information rather than just to read information. Setting up audio or video feeds to your website isn’t very difficult and can make a huge difference in the traffic and membership.
Each e-zine or newsletter should be filled with vital and timely information so that your subscribers eagerly await the next issue. Spend as much time and energy as you need to insure that your e-zine or newsletter isn’t just deleted when it hits the in-box.
Use your autoresponder to your greatest advantage. You already use it to send out emails and ezines and newsletters. Now use it to send out vital NEWS FLASHES. Make the autoresponder get the attention of your subscribers.
If you don’t already have a blog, forum or message board on your membership website, then set one up as soon as possible. Members like to have input and you will benefit greatly from constructive member input. You can ask them what they would like to see on the website and then act on suggestions that are viable.
Invite a guest who is a guru in the field of your website theme to participate in an online chat discussion. Set a specific starting and stopping time and be sure to outline the discussion topics.
If you’re interested in starting up your own membership site, or turning an existing membership site into a more profitable online business, then check out Membership Marketers Club.
InternetAdworks
