September 3, 2008

Are You Avoiding These Money Mistakes?... Establish
Yourself as an Expert in Your Field... A New Trend in
Business... In Order to Get, You Must Ask...
and More.

** Are You Avoiding These Money Mistakes?
By Adrian Newman, Founder of e-Wealth Daily

Marketing is all about getting the consumer to buy -- plain and simple. It combines a number of activities, from the way you price and package to your promotions. There is something to be said about the power of persuasion. Even though, as a consumer, you may think that marketing strategies do not influence you, you probably are affected more than you think.

Consumers want to know about your service and how it can benefit them, believe it or not. If something that you do will save them money, change their lives, decrease costs, or increase their sales, then they want to hear about it. The fact of the matter remains that marketing works to get the word out and influence potential clients.

Marketing that is done right is effective -- but not all marketing is done right. So, what are the mistakes that are holding you back? What could you have been doing up to now that has hindered the success of your efforts? What should you avoid in the future?

Here are some tips to avoid making mistakes with your marketing efforts:

-- Be sure that you have your target market in mind when you're putting together your marketing strategies. If you're directing your efforts at the wrong people, then you're wasting your time and money. You have to know who your target market is.

-- Spread around your promotional efforts. It's like investing -- you have to diversify. You see what works for you and have your message available to a lot of people. You don't want to put all of your money into one thing, because if that fails you're in trouble.

-- Don't forget to follow up with your marketing efforts. You can put a message out to the customer, but you have to follow up on that message by communicating with them personally. This means sending out e-mails and phone calls, and giving your customers personal attention.

-- Make sure that you're keeping track of your marketing efforts as well. You can put together a great postcard marketing campaign, but you need a way to be able to track its effectiveness. Give the customer a reason to bring the postcard back to you. This could mean a discount coupon or two-for-one offer or something similar. Create a way to track how well your strategy is doing. If you find that it's not doing well, then make changes.

Keep these things in mind when you're putting together your next marketing campaign or looking to fix existing ones. You want to be in tune with what the customer wants and what is working for your business. If you know these things before you start, then you will have a better chance of putting together a successful plan right away.

It's always a good idea to get great tips and strategies, but sometimes the best tips you can get are the cautionary tales and the mistakes that you can avoid. Those are the things that save you a lot of trouble in the long run and they are universal for all marketing strategies from now until you're ready to retire.

** Establish Yourself as an Expert in Your Field
By Doug D'Anna, the "Hundred-Million-Dollar Man"

A high-priced education from Harvard Business School isn't going to guarantee that you will make oodles of money. However, you cannot deny that people want some sort of guarantee on the service that you are providing them. They want to know that they are going to benefit from doing business with you.

It doesn't necessarily matter how much experience you have, or what type of education you have to back it up, as long as you are able to establish yourself as an expert in your field. Anyone can do it, even if you don't have the traditional credentials to back it up.

Your guarantee is that you know you can do the work, and that you will follow through on the promises that you make to your prospective clients. That is your guarantee. However, to attract them, you have to strategize a little more.

Relying on that guarantee is not enough when you're starting out. You have to find your first few clients before you can rely on your guaranteed results. You have to convince people to trust the results before there is any proof of them.

You also have to begin to establish yourself as an expert in your field. It's a daunting task to get people to trust you when they have never heard of you before or when there is no proof of your good work. Until you can say that you helped turn such and such companies around or until you have a portfolio of your work to show, then you will need to rely on your own strategies to get through to potential customers.

Establishing yourself as an expert in your field boils down to getting your name out into the public's view. If you put your name out there, then people can look you up and find information on you. The key is to find effective ways to do this.

What you want to happen is for people to be able to see that you are, in fact, qualified to provide a service. You want people to be able to discover that you have 20 years of experience in marketing, or that you have been creating web sites for a long time. Whatever the case, you want people to be able to get to know you before they meet you.

How is this possible? Well, through advertising, word-of- mouth praise and even some local publicity you could instantly be recognized as the go-to expert in your field. Take a look around, your local paper, stores at the mall and your chamber of commerce all provide ample opportunity for you to get the word out about your expertise.

** A New Trend in Business
By John Hurd, Chief Wealth Researcher

In essence, this new trend revolves a great deal around the concept of outsourcing.

If you're in the business of consulting or freelancing your services to individuals or to a business, you want to be sure that your service is going to be one that is easily translated into profits. In other words, will people buy what you're selling? The good news is that just about any skill and area of expertise can be turned into a business. Even better is that there is a relatively new -- well, newly popular -- trend sweeping the business world that will help you a great deal in your quest for wealth.

Outsourcing is becoming massively popular these days. Small and big businesses alike are turning to outside help to give them the boost that they need. It is not really a new concept, but has had a surge in popularity over the last few years, which is good news for you.

Here's the basic concept to get you thinking. Let's say you have a small business. You're running it as a sole proprietor, and you don't have any employees. This means that you're doing everything on your own. For some business models, this is easily done; for others, it's a little more complex.

Small businesses and even big businesses are now looking to outsource some of their work functions to other people, as opposed to hiring employees on a full-time basis. This is where you come in as a freelancer. A business owner would hire you on occasion to perform certain functions.

There are a number of reasons why outsourcing can be so appealing for these business owners. For starters, a small business owner might not be able to afford full-time help. It can cost a lot of money to hire someone, not to mention the time that it consumes to go through the hiring process. Not only that, but you have to train this person and need certain things such as benefits and retirement packages to ensure that, when you find someone good, they stick around.

Also, some of these functions aren't necessarily needed on a full-time basis. For instance, you might want to bring someone in to help you with your web site. This might be a one-time- only function or even something that they can do on a monthly basis. Either way, it's not something that would constitute you paying a salary to someone to do.

There are so many functions that can be outsourced that it leaves a huge window open for someone whose skills and expertise can be utilized to help other people get their businesses running.

**  In Order to Get, You Must Ask
By Michael Newman, Self-made Millionaire

Not everyone is cut out to run their own business; that's just the way it is. The same goes for pretty much anything: some are better golfers than football players, better gardeners than golfers, and better cooks than mechanics. However, just because a person may not have the desire to run their own business, it doesn't mean they don't want to get paid like they do.

And the fact is that there are plenty of people out there making good money working for someone else. The salaries people make working for someone else are decided by a number of factors, but the fact still remains that there is always the potential to earn more and build wealth as an employee. After all, most Americans are employees, rather than owners of their own businesses. If you're an employee who thinks they should be earning more at work, here are some tips that may help you in securing that raise you're looking for.

-- Show that you're worth it: Anything that helps support your case as a valuable employee will definitely provide assistance to your cause. Any work you've done that has directly benefited the company, extra time or extra tasks that you've taken on are also great examples of your work ethic and value to the company. Finally, if your work has contributed directly to an increase in sales or anything else that has improved the company's bottom line, be sure to point it out to your employer.

-- Know your market value: Do some research to learn what other people with same position as you are making. However, you should also take in to account any extra hours you've been working, additional tasks you've been taking on around the office, as well as the overall quality of your work. If you can find good comparisons of salaries of similar positions outside of your workplace, it can provide you with some decent leverage.

-- Start building a case: Some of the time, your boss may not know exactly how much work you have on your plate at any given time. Perhaps you're working on a number of projects and have been putting in all kinds of extra hours, or are making extremely influential decisions. In order to make sure they are aware of everything you're doing, talk about submitting progress reports or work summaries that outline everything you've achieved from project to project. This way, when you enter a meeting to talk about a pay increase, your track record will be clearly available for your boss to see.

-- Make sure the timing is right. The best time to negotiate a pay raise is during a performance review, which gives you the opportunity to talk openly about your involvement in the company. At the same time, during a performance review, your employer is prepared to talk about salary, which means you won't catch them totally off guard.

Just because you don't run your own business doesn't mean you can't get paid accordingly for the work you do. The next time you feel like you should be getting a bigger piece of the pie, try the tips I've outlined to get the pay you deserve.