marketing fundi

Nobody hesitates to see a doctor when they have a broken bone. Toothache? Phone the dentist. Financially ill or business in the pit? Muddle along on your own. What for? Get a coach, employ a ‘financial or business doctor’. Don’t go it alone.

Top athletes depend on their coaches for peak performances. The top teams in basketball, ice hockey, football and more perform in line with the abilities of their coaches. Top politicians employ personal coaches, people serious about diets have nutritionists helping them.

Becoming a serious financial or business expert will be much easier if a coach is there to help. This may be an intimate one on one relationship or may be spread amongst a series of people whose advice is absorbed and followed.

The coaching relationship may include consultations or phone calls. It may just be offered via newsletters, blogs, podcasts or articles in newspapers and magazines. Find the one that appeals and that speaks at the right level of competence for easy absorption.

Add a mentor to this mix or a mentoring group of people. It is easier to try a new field if there is support. A coach might be too aggressive. A mentor might be a better choice. Either way it is important to find support to ensure that assistance is on hand.

In line with finding the right coach and mentor, it is also important to find the time to practice and apply oneself. All top performers spend more time practising than participating in their game. This is the same whether following the careers of grand chess masters or a Roger Federer on the tennis court.

These top achievers have one thing in common. They relentlessly work to improve their game.  Tiger Woods spends hours hitting the ball (and other activities!), David Beckham kicks the ball one hundred times and recording artists spend hours in the studio.

Practising to become an expert business person is relatively painless. It even costs very little if you try your luck at becoming an internet marketer. The entry level capital required is minimum. In fact it’s just a computer and access to the internet.

Or alternatively allocate a small sum of money, an amount that is affordable, and invest on a trial and error basis. Learn using small steps practising along the way. However, the coach is not only essential in helping to increase the income. Learning how to budget and reduce unnecessary debt is as important in the quest to become a financial expert.

Many people might find the practice period to be boring and unproductive. Yet it is a necessary component towards any kind of expertise. Anticipate that some of the practice sessions will not exactly sparkle with excitement.

It’s the same with all new skills. There is a period where the basics have to be learnt and acquired whether learning to play the piano or riding a horse for the first time. None of these are particularly fun. But if persevered with, they can bring untold pleasures. This is the case with acquiring some business expertise as well.

Make 2010 the year of finding a good coach and practising a lot. It will pay off handsomely.

The stock markets in 2009 were the place to make some nice profits. The FTSE in London rose by 22%, Germany’s Dax by 23% and France’s Cac by 22%.  These gains have been attributed to the recovering global economy.

The global financial system stabilised over this period and it appears a major recession has been averted. Most asset classes felt the effects of concerted effort, co-ordinated across markets, of policy intervention by governments.

US shares also performed well. Despite a last minute drop by 1% on New Year’s Eve on the fears of further instability in the financial markets instigated by a cry for further bailout help for US mortgage lenders, the broad-based S&P 500 index was up nearly 25% on the year.

The Dow Jones gained 20%. The technology-driven Nasdaq index doubled those same gains by rallying to a startling gain of 45%.  Yet, in comparison to China’s gain, these disappear into insignificance.

China’s main stock index rose 80% during the year 2009. Economists predict that the Shanghai index could move higher during 2010 backed by the improving economic recovery, stable policies implemented by a supportive government and continued optimism.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index rose by a particularly encouraging 52% while even the slightly more stuttering economy in Japan led to a 19% increase. The Japanese economy is still suffering from deflation in the midst of a fear of a recession.

Most economists fear that these gains are unlikely to be repeated. It is most probable that governments will withdraw economic support and cut stimulus packages.  There are some fears that without these stimulus packages the economies might struggle.

To a certain extent stimulus packages could have masked the underlying problems and falsely created a rosie glow of optimism. On the other hand should the stimulus packages continue, the real problems could very well be covered up for a further year leaving 2011 to be the year where the real pieces are picked up.

Commodities were not left behind. Crude ended the year with an increase of 78% showing off the biggest annual climb in about 10 years. Gold price touched new highs in 2009 hitting a high of just over $1,220.00 an ounce. That worked out at a rise of about 25% for the year.

All in all the year 2009 was a prosperous one for investors.  The same can hardly be said for the man in the street. Headlines proclaiming job losses were never far off the front page of newspapers.

Especially in the US continuous declines in employment opportunities created much financial stress. Unemployed numbers stood at 15.4 million in November 2009 at 10%.  According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics the rate for adult men stood at 10.5%, adult women at 7.9%.

Population groups suffering the most were teenagers at 26.7% and blacks at 15.6% unemployment. In other words, problems were most stark for those working in the unskilled labour market.

How can this situation be reconciled? The stock markets show a comeback of massive proportion whereas in stark contrast unemployment figures rose to unacceptable levels. What solutions are there?

Plying ones trade as an internet marketer is a fairly new profession. It was unheard of a few years ago to consider making a living by offering a good or service. Even the online giant of Amazon has only been around since 1995. That’s hardly a long time never mind a life time although it does feel like longer.

It has taken the people a bit longer to start considering the internet as a way to make money and to develop a career in. Mostly it could be attributed to the fact that the internet runs on a technology fairly foreign to the normal person or non-geek.

Having to cope with technical issues is a frightening concept and many people would have hesitated to try their hand at internet marketing. It’s so much easier to set up a table at a fair and sell goods that are tangible and where one can use a plastic tupperware bowl for the cash register. A fascinating talk on technology is worth checking here.

Do you know how to create graphics on a computer? How about using HTML to put a web page together, know any of that? Would you know how to set up a shopping cart? Can you check the statistics for your traffic to see what sales campaigns are working? Does that sound like it is all too much for you to try?

What has changed then? It’s the availability of tools such as WordPress that has changed the online environment. This innovative online application was first available in 2003. WordPress allows ordinary people like you and I to easily set up a blog and be ready to publish our words of wisdom for all to read in a matter of moments.

It’s not only WordPress that has set us non-geek people free of the technology that had held us back in the past.  A slew of little software applications are now available that help with such things as shopping carts and traffic analytics. A plethora of free template designs and graphics available at no or little cost allows even the totally inept marketer to upload something passable onto the internet.

These tools have opened doors for marketers to venture into the technologically challenging environment of the internet. No longer does one have to be a computer geek to be able to set up a website as a lot of help is available to make the task so much easier.

You don’t even have to be a qualified graphic designer to produce good looking sites. It’s not necessary to be a famed journalist as one can buy good quality articles from online marketers that are topic specific and appropriate to ones field. And one can bring in low cost technical assistance if one is really stuck.

What it means is that the tools and information on the internet have made it easier for marketers to set up shop on the internet. Of course those marketers who are creative, have a flair for copy writing, can spot a good product to sell or have a great own product do have an advantage as internet marketers.

The one thing the internet offers though is a low cost entry into the world of buy and sell and a huge, often free, library of information to assist even the newest of marketers to make a successful go of it.

Of course it’s not as easy as that. You still need to find those customers before you can sell anything. And that in itself is not as straight forward as one might think. Having people walk past your table at a craft fair is easier than getting shoppers to click through to you. But it can all be learnt. So no need to run away in horror. Give it a go.

This hot topic is being talked about everywhere and not only on the internet. It is often associated with people who show off with a picture of themselves clutching an oversized  cheque that shows hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of earnings - for one month!

This kind of ill-gotten publicity has given internet marketing a bad name. It has resulted in an old-fashioned gold rush where many people are bringing their shovels and sieves and are hoping to pan near somebody who has already found the motherload.

In typical Wild West style the snake oil sales people are out there offering instant cures. They promise untold riches in three easy steps if you follow their lead. They tell you it’s all about easy easy easy, success is guaranteed, money will flood in within a few days, no more worries. Trust us. Pay us.

This entire hype has resulted in many people running around on the internet just like headless chicken do in a farmyard. They jump from one ‘big’ solution to the next. None of them are working for them. It’s easy to understand why. The fundamental principles of marketing are being ignored.

For all those people, and for anybody who is new to the concept of internet marketing it might be a good idea to sit back, take a deep breath and have a look at what internet marketing is really about.

In reality, just like opening a shop on the main street, internet marketing is about the ordinary concept of selling and buying.  You offer something for sale and somebody comes along and buys it, or maybe decides not to buy it.

The only thing that is different is that it’s done digitally. In other words the internet marketer uses the internet to promote and sell his goods. This brings with it many benefits and a whole stack of disadvantages which the internet marketer has to learn about before he can become a success.

It’s no different to trading on the high street. Lessons have to be learnt. In fact many of them are quite similar to what the owner of that little dress shop had to learn. The basic principles of trade have been around since the early days of humanity.

Learn these principles and add new ones that apply to the internet before launching yourself into this commercial environment. And having a fair amount of patience is also a good character trait to have. It’s not as easy as many people try to tell you and success is not to be had overnight.

Just as McDonalds started with one restaurant many years ago and grew into a huge empire, so can you start a tiny business on a website or blog and grow it into an empire. The only thing to remember is that it took McDonalds 15 years of hard work and much experimentation before it really took off!

As with all types of business, knowledge and patience will be useful when trying out internet marketing!

Something that I noticed, in fact bowled me over, was the courtesy of the Asian people. And I wondered at the time whether we parents in the so called developed West are letting our children down by not teaching them better manners.

But then it’s more than our children. An interesting post on Tom Peter’s blog about civility and how it affects the bottom line came up at the same time as my experience with polite Asian people. Not only are we not teaching our children good manners but we are also neglecting to insist that our staff exhibit good manners to our customers.

Flying from Heathrow London to Bangkok in Thailand I sat next to two Asian girls. I’m going to guess they were Thai. I didn’t really speak much to them, they were part of a larger group and busy with their own community and I was happy to just vegetate in front of the movies. Three of those later…

Everytime they wanted to get up to the toilet they helped me with all the goodies on my small table, to lift, tuck in earphone cables, hand cups to other people to hold and in general in a gentle manner help as much as possible to make the interruption as hassle free as possible.

This genteel and friendly service has continued to be part of my experiences as I traveled to my final destination being Hanoi in Vietnam.

It was therefore quite interesting to see that several business books have recently been published that deal with the ‘power of civility’! And how this affects the bottom line.

It has been noticeable for some time now that good service is hard to come by. As customer you are lucky to be treated with indifference. That has become the standard now. It’s outright rudeness that is the more common story.

In fact any company that has staff who are friendly is so instantaneously noteworthy and memorable that people talk for days on end as to how shocked they were at this extraordinary level of service.

As much as companies need to take stock and realign their staff’s thinking toward the customer it is parents and child minders who really need to get back to basics. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the principle that children have the freedom to behave and do as they wish. Maybe the idea of common courtesy could be brought back into the curriculum. It certainly will help business.

What about the rest of the world? Would we have as much strife and war if people learnt to respect each other? Would be worth a try. No cost involved!

More than anything else, for the internet marketer looking to generate income with an online business, signing up to an affiliate program is one of his best options available. It’s also one of the biggest growth areas in online business right now and for new marketers a course offered by experienced affiliate marketer Anthony Kirlew could be a good move.

What does the term actually mean? Simply stated it’s a program where you earn commission by introducing visitors or buyers to another website.

There is a trend towards calling this form of marketing performance marketing. In other words if a visitor who you sent to the site views the page, signs up to a membership site or buys a product, you get paid for that performance.

There are several types of affiliate marketing and some do not require a visitor to buy anything for you to earn a commission. A visitor to the site may just need to sign up to a newsletter or sign up to a site such as a dating site.

A visitor may also just click on an ad and you can earn some commission on that. The most commonly known of this is Google’s Adsense. Most bloggers have taken part in this program. A few years ago when the web was not quite that populated with bloggers, these click through ads paid out fairly handsomely.

Nowadays this is no longer the case and you would need a blog with huge amounts of monthly traffic to earn a living with Adsense advertising on your blog. These ads are generally text ads but there are increasing numbers of graphic ads being offered as well.

Regardless of the effectiveness of click through advertising commission most bloggers do have some text link ads on their blogs. It is one of the easiest to set up and this is something technically challenged bloggers can do themselves.

The bulk of the revenue made in the affiliate marketing space is commission based. About eighty percent of earnings are made via the revenue sharing form of business. As a prime example one needs go no further than Amazon.

In fact Amazon has been credited with being the first serious online shop offering affiliate marketing opportunities. Although other smaller traders worked on this before Amazon, it is this huge online retailer who really got it going and in fact has patents on many of the processes involved.

Amazon does make it fairly easy for somebody to sign up as an affiliate. The process is straight forward and the advertising material that you may use on your blog is good. The only real problem is that Amazon pays a very small percentage on a sale. In other words the commission is low.

Amazon is therefore very much like Google Adsense where you can only make some money if your blog or site has high amounts of traffic, for high traffic read hundreds of thousands of visitors.

For the average blogger this kind of traffic is not a reality and neither Google nor Amazon’s affiliate programs are of much use to them when looking to make a living. However there are many other vendors - that is people or companies offering goods for sale - who offer a much higher commission structure and these are definitely worth signing up for.

The third affiliate program type is a cost per action program. Nineteen percent of affiliate revenue is earned through this form of commission payment. A cost per action program would be one where the affiliate gets paid for inducing a visitor to sign up for an opt in e-mail list for instance.

These are the three predominant affiliate programs currently on offer for Internet marketers. Deciding which one would suit you the best would depend on your interests and what kind of serious traffic your blog attracts. If you are new to this form of business you might want to attend a course being offered by an experienced Affiliate Marketer.

Read, watch, listen and do is the winning combination that this new Multi-media eCourse offers you.

What is on offer is a Multi-media eCourse on “How to write Articles for maximum Effect”. The course consists of 21 chapters and 14 videos providing you the student with a seriously comprehensive guide on how to write articles.

The course is a product of true team work between Andrew Rondeau and myself. Andrew compiled the excellent video material while I provided the written content. It’s designed to offer a whole range of different learning opportunities. For those who prefer to read, there’s a comprehensive book. For the more visual people the videos will let you watch and learn.

And the fourth way to learn? You send in your articles to have them evaluated and some positive feedback sent back to you. Read, watch, listen AND DO. How many courses do you know of that offer you such a variety of ways to grasp the material and to immediately practice what you learnt.

Why would we put so much effort into an eCourse that teaches you how to write articles? It’s because the written word is back with a vengeance. You can do nothing online unless you can string some words together into compelling copy.

That applies to whatever you want to do. Write an article for your blog? Definitely. Post an article to an article directory to promote your blog and products you are trying to sell? Of course.

What about commenting on other blogs and on forums, setting up a page on Facebook? Yes, most definitely. Presentations? LinkedIn profiles? Twitter tweets, quick comments on social bookmarked sites such as Digg? Yes, yes, yes!

You need to be able to write. What the telephone killed for a while, that skill of writing beautiful letters, has come back with the online world demanding you write to express yourself and to communicate with people.

It doesn’t matter whether you have a blog, are an internet marketer selling products, building a profile online to help your offline career prospects or just having fun with your friends on Facebook or MySpace. You have to be able to write.

Does it always have to be an article? Of course not. But the same principles apply to whatever format you will be writing in. This eCourse presents 21 chapters that cover a wide variety of topics dealing with the written word. And the videos show you visually how to go about it.

Some of the content covered in this eCourse: What to write about, Who are your articles meant for, How to do research on your topic, Why the format is so important, You must have a compelling title, Get rid of those erros, Just do it - start writing, Overcome the dreaded writer’s block, You can make money with your articles and more.

There are 21 chapters jam-packed with information for you with 14 videos for you to watch and learn from. To get your free extract, a full 6 chapters of this book with video access visit the How to write articles for maximum effect site. It’s not going to cost you anything and you will most definitely learn something.

Pity Gary Vaynerchuk doesn’t voice his opinions more often. Of course he does every day on his wine channel. But his uptake on the world of business can be refreshing and illuminating. Business people should take note.

His latest one is about AOL’s business model. And it makes for excellent watching. The point Gary V makes is that AOL has been quietly generating a mass of small very focused niche sites. And funneling visitors to them via their mothership that is AOL itself.

Nothing new you might think. Well, it probably isn’t, but still deserves some discussion. The market has become specialised. The internet has allowed people and companies to offer products and services within minute fields and be successful at it.

Check out this leather briefcase site. One would imagine that an offline retail shop might not be able to sustain a business being so highly specialised. However, reaching the whole world via the internet, this business can. A speciality leather case site. Old fashioned design and quality. Expensive. Would have to be.

Imagine what this business would need to do to survive in the offline world. Would have to pay very expensive retail space in an exclusive shopping area because being in a local high street wouldn’t provide sufficient customers.

It would need to advertise in expensive magazines, promote their product at high profile and exclusive events such as horse shows and racing meets. The mind boggles as to how much they would have to pay on adspend.

Online they can do it. Grow the business slowly, get much feed-back and consumer endorsement and promote yourself via trusted social media voices who actually get to use your product and admire it genuinely.

Getting back to Gary V’s video. What he is offering is a solution to the media that is suffering from the onslaught of the free social media online blues. Become specialised. Find and promote the niches, offer more than the free media can provide and convert your business to a new revenue generating model.

For instance online newspapers may give their sports writers more space than the previously available four or six pages at the back of the paper. Really provide space for analysis, video footage, podcasts, expert opinion, statistics and more on any sport from popular football to lesser known sporting activities such as tossing the khyber.

But then the newspapers are online already and it’s not helping them. Of course. But view their online offering. It’s not much different to the printed version except that the content is kept available rather than lining the bird cage. But there is no difference to the actual offering.

Possibly what the media has lost sight of is that they are in the business of providing information and news. They have been focusing on eyeballs for so long, they have forgotten what they are about. Get back to basics. Provide tons of information and in ways that readers would like and you may be able to monetise this offering in ways it’s not working in print anymore.

What does that say for small businesses or any size business for that matter? It could mean you need to be a super specialist in your field and have immense value to offer.

Back to basics then, isn’t it.

Watch Gary’s video here.

Do the big boys make a meal of that! Huge expenditure on software applications to enable them to build customer relationships. Why one wonders. What went wrong that they need to resort to those expensive toys?

It’s something that I thought of a day ago when my friend who runs a self-catering accommodation business in Cape Town forwarded me an email conversation she is having with one of her overseas visitors.

She had spent quite a bit of time telling her visitors what changes had been made and how much nicer the accommodation would be if they came back for a repeat visit. It was like friends talking. And her visitors agreed that they would like to come back in February the following year.

That’s customer relationship marketing. No fancy software required. So what can a business learn from this?

Let’s get back to basics. What Cheryl from At Cheryl’s does is the following. And these are real easy steps to follow. She treats her customers with respect. Not exactly novel in concept but something the big companies have mostly forgotten how to do.

She genuinely cares for her customers. Also a foreign concept to the big boys. And she shows her caring in the most straightforward way by always putting her customer’s well being ahead of anything especially her own comfort.

Cheryl has her own way of building a relationship by being genuinely interested in her customer as a person. As much as it’s a business transaction, mostly anyway, she nevertheless will learn (without snooping) about her customer’s family, pets and background and will remember this information should they ever come back.

With the result that her people come back again and again because they know they will get treated well. They also know that the place will have been improved because Cheryl listens to customer feedback. They know they will be remembered fondly and will be made most welcome again.

Aren’t these the absolute basic business skills that are so easy to know and implement mainly because you yourself would like to be treated that way. So why shouldn’t you treat your customers the way you like to be dealt with yourself.

When did this easy to understand principle become so complicated that one needs to buy in special software to handle it? And why do big companies disregard this entirely and totally? It’s because the customer has become a cost centre not an asset.

For whatever reason they don’t do it it doesn’t matter, it’s surely bad business. Just as an aside I have just recently had horrific service from BT and Atlantic Gas & Electricity, so bad it was beyond understanding. I will never ever be a customer of either of these companies again once my current relationship has been severed. Never!

John Kador’s book called Effective Apology could be a book that should be prescribed reading to everybody working. In fact it seems suitable consumption for anybody living in present times.

Why restrict this to the now. It could be required Business School material in the future as long as company policies seem to determine that the customer is a number rather than a human being.

The principle of never apologising affects an organisation from bottom to top. It’s probably written into the procedure manual of most large companies. At no time are staff members allowed to admit that the company could have made a mistake. If you do you are fired or worse.

What Kador says an apology does is to show your ‘willingness to value the relationship rather than being right’. That is not entirely the whole story though, surely. Just looking after the business relationship puts the apology back into the we don’t care category. We apologise because we want to make more sales.

Maybe it’s the same thing, just looking at it from two different directions. Somehow it seems cold to consider an apology something to keep a relationship going rather than to acknowledge having made a mistake.

Would a company have an apology system purely to keep the customer happy, or should a company have a policy whereby staff admit that they, or the company, were wrong and the natural next step is to apologise.

One could imagine, especially in the litigious USA, that a company would be reluctant to admit to having done something wrong. Would this open them up to expensive law suits one would wonder.

On the other hand are US citizens so ready to sue because nobody ever admits to their mistakes. Look at medical mistakes. Even if they amputate the wrong limb, say an arm instead of a leg, you can rest assured that the US hospital and doctors involved in the procedure are not going to apologise and admit that they made a mistake.

The same applies when you are involved in a traffic accident. You get out of the car and blame the other driver even if you have just rear-ended somebody because you were talking on your mobile and not watching the traffic ahead of you. It’s to keep your insurance company happy you remind yourself.

What is truly surprising though is that John Kador presents some interesting facts and figures of what savings companies have if they are willing to apologise.

Yes, savings.

It costs less with respect to claims if employees are prepared to apologise if an error has been made. Kador provides an example of an organisation willing to apologise.

A Lexington VA hospital has an average malpractice settlement figure of $36 000 even though the States average for hospital malpractice settlement is around $413 000.00. And that remarkable difference is attributable to the hospitals policy of apologising.

It seems that people are after all not that ready to sue or if they do they will accept less money. They do this provided they are heard and their grievances taken seriously leading to the relevant people actually apologising.

Isn’t it strange that a common courtesy such as an apology is so rare that it had to be written about in a book and proclaimed by Tom Peters the Business Guru to be a ’strategic competence’. Whatever happened to just being a nice person, a ‘mensch’.