What Are the 7 Proven Principles of Business Success

The 7 Proven Principles to Business Success will overcome whatever limitation you have. Think of it as a recipe for success in business. All you have to do is first of all learn what the 7 principles are, and then apply them, in order. When you follow this recipe all of your challenges will fade away.

Why do you own a business? Isn’t it because you want a LIFESTYLE? You didn’t intend to work long hours,
be stressed, have little time off and be hassled with staff and customers did you?

Isn’t it time you made some changes for the better? After all, if you want to change some things in your life, you have to change some things in your life. If you’re ready for a change here’s the magic recipe you need to follow…

Principle 1: Work on yourself to understand people.
Business is all about people isn’t it? You have them as customers, you employ them, but few people have realised the absolute key to success is understanding people at a much, much higher level. You sales and marketing skills are determined by what you know about people. Your leadership skills with your staff to get them to perform as well as you do is determined by your knowledge on people.

So what’s the best way to learn about other people? Easy, learn about yourself! You’re a people and the more you learn about yourself the more you automatically learn about other people.

Principle 2: Learn business success principles.
There are so many principles to business success, but I’ll emphasise just a few. One is, you’re in business to make a profit, not just turnover. Turnover is a job, whereas profit gives you a LIFESTYLE. Your aim should be to increase your net profit percentage of turnover, as this allows you to grow and pay yourself whatever you desire.

Net Profit percentage comes from improving everything you do, not just doing more of what you already do. How you answer the phone, how you greet people face to face, how you write your ads, improving your communication and leadership with your staff. All of these are areas to improve.

Another principle of business success is cash flow. Cash flow means having the cash in your bank account that should be in your bank account. If customers cost you money before you get any back, that’s negative cash flow, if you get cash before you incur a cost that’s positive cash flow. The better you get at getting money up front with deposits and getting people to pay on time the better your cash flow.

Principle 3: Set goals and have a plan to achieve them.
Until you set a goal you don’t have a reason WHY you will improve your business, therefore the HOW doesn’t matter. People have to know why, before how. You’ll want to know how to grow your business once you have set a written goal.

When you have a goal its time to look at the relevant strategies for your business. I know of over 300 strategies, but most people can only think of about a dozen. Strategies are like tools. If you go to build a house with just a hammer, a saw and nails you will be building it for a long time. Business is the same. When people don’t know what strategies are available or suitable to them how can they effectively grow their business?

A Business Growth Plan is simply the order of implementation of those strategies beginning with the highest priority strategy. When you have documented goals for 3, 6, 9, 12 and 24 months with a list of strategies in order you have a Business Growth Plan that makes growing your business EASY!

Principle 4: Turn your staff into a TEAM.
Unfortunately business owners are trying to do it all on their own. They often don’t train their team regularly with team meetings or one on one allocated time every week. I believe you have one role as a business owner, to be a great teacher! Your aim should be to teach everyone in your business how to do everything you currently do, better than you do! And what does that then make you? Obselete! When business owners think no one can do my job as good as me, they are digging a big hole for themselves they will never get out of. Then they wonder why they are stressed, tired, work long hours and this happens more and more as the business grows. TEAM stands for Training Everyone Achieves More!

Principle 5: Build foundations for growth.
If you want to build your business to provide a great lifestyle you need to put foundations in, just like building any building. If you don’t intend to really increase your profits then you don’t need foundations. If you want to seriously increase your net profit percentage (even without increasing turnover) you must have strong foundations. When they build a skyscraper they don’t build up, they dig a big hole down.

The foundations in business are 2 things. First, having documented systems. A system is just a best way of doing something that everyone knows and uses that has been identified and written down. It helps consistency and efficiency and as you grow people are accountable to the systems, not to you the owner. That means you save time checking on everyone. Systems only work when you have worked with your staff to turn them into a TEAM.

Secondly, measuring everything is part of building foundations. If you haven’t measured your Key Performance Indicators how will you improve on them? Increasing Net Profit percentage of turnover comes from improving everything you currently do, remember?

I could write a book on measuring, it’s so important, I can’t emphasise it enough. When you’ve measured all your KPI’s you’re ready for…

Principle 6: Implement EFFECTIVE Sales and Marketing.
Everyone in business is already doing sales and marketing but how effective is it? You know when you have effective sales and marketing, here’s how: you won’t get so many price shoppers as your marketing already has “sold” them on buying from you. Your marketing is so effective you only have to run it a third as much because you can’t handle the increase in customers it brings you. And you’ll know your sales and marketing is effective because you put your prices up 20% and also increase your conversion with the price rise!

People in business don’t take responsibility for their sales and marketing and as a result they don’t get the results they desire. If you learn sales and marketing by paying a professional for a few months it will be the best investment you ever make. Once you learn the principles of success you can then add to them yourself, but often you need an expert to get you started.

Principles 7: Manage the business.
Unfortunately businesses aren’t managed at all well. You can tell by these examples… decisions aren’t based on numbers, there aren’t documented systems, regular weekly team meetings aren’t happening nor is weekly one on one team training.

Management is all of the above; it’s making decisions on numbers. e.g. you measure how many customers you serve in a week for each team member and measure the number of new customers each week and then work out your team can service 5 customers each per week. That means if your marketing can produce 5 new customers and if you’re at maximum service capacity you need to be thinking about getting a new team member very soon.

This is what management is, training your team weekly, documenting systems, measuring numbers, making decisions on numbers, setting goals and helping your team to achieve their own.

When you dedicate time to learn and then follow all 7 Principles, in the order above anything is possible. I’ve had clients increase their monthly turnover by 1,000% in just 5 months when the business wasn’t growing at all and the owners did it with ease and grace, no stress at all!

What’s your growth potential? Are you realizing it yet? If you’re not growing at 50%-100% a year you’re possibly not growing as fast as you could!

Technorati Tags : business people marketing learn

If you’re going to be successful in internet marketing, you need to build a list. It’s the number one key to opening the success floodgates. Because you can market to your list whenever you want. It’s a resource you can tap at any time and generate income.

OK, but how?

Here’s what you need to build your list:

• Your Landing Page
• The Bribe
• The Thank You Page

The Squeeze Page – The squeeze page is the first thing your visitor is going to see. This page is the one that asks them for their email. That’s why it needs to look like a professionally designed page. It’s also got to be free from distractions. And your call to action must be clear!

Failure to include a great “call to action” will result in failure. Your call to action tells the visitor what to do. You opt-in rates will take a dramatic nose dive without it. Oddly, if you don’t make it clear, people will be confused and end up doing nothing.

One way to really spice up your squeeze page is to add a compelling video to the page. Adding video will help keep your visitors attention. And you can repeat the call to action several times int he video. And you can have the video just tell them to fill in your form after it’s done playing.

If you don’t know how to make video, don’t worry. Hiring out-sourced help to do it for you only costs $150 – $250. Or you can get email list tools that give you squeeze page templates.

The Incentive – The second component is the reason they are opting into your list. People need a good reason to part with their email address. Email privacy is very important to most people. This means your bribe needs to be very attractive.

The only way to make this work is to provide real value. That means you make it something people would actually want to receive. And can benefit from. This can be:

• A PDF report
• Software
• A video tutorial
• An email series

You’ve got to create some great content. And make it both helpful and informative. And nothing sells like “free”. If you make it good enough, they will give you their email in exchange.

Once again, don’t worry if you don’t know how to create the freebie. It’s super easy to hire someone to create it for you. Simply tell them what the topic is and they can write the content. For example, you could have them write a 5-part email course. You can have ghost writers create emails for under $25 an email. And whole thing will only cost a hundred and fifty buck.

Or again, you can find complete list building packages for sale online that include an email series. There are two important things about the email series. First, it must provide value to your subscribers. And it’s nice if it earns you some money, too. Mixing some affiliate products into your email series is a great way to do this. Affiliate products are easy because you don’t have to do anything at all. And it enables you to generate cash right away from your new list.

Your Confirmation Page – Finally, you need to consider your opt-in confirmation page. After subscribing to your list, your visitor is redirected to this page. It’s a great idea to give them some valuable information right on the thank you page. This helps them feel they’ve made the right decision giving you their email. It also sets the foundation for your relationship with them. It also makes them more likely to open your emails.

Again, a simple solution to this is to get an email marketing package that includes everything. Or you can go the DIY route. You can either write the content pages on your own. Or have someone ghost write for you.

Final thoughts

It makes no difference whether you build your opt-in, bribe and thank you page. Or pay a freelancer to write produce it all for you. Or if sign up for a “complete package” solution. It’s just important that you start today building your opt-in list. Because as soon as you’ve got your own list . . . You can basically write your own meal ticket.

The Most Important Aspects of Blog Marketing

Blog marketing is a combination of many things all put together to make one great blog that is successful and that has many readers. However, if you think that you have done everything possible, chances are that you have not. Or that you should do more. When you are working on marketing a blog, you never get to a stopping point. There is always something that you can do to continue to grow and make your blog well known. What are these things you ask? Keep reading to find out.

Blog marketing will keep you very busy. If you have more than one blog going that you want the highest and the best rankings for, you may have to hire some help. However make sure that you have good content. If you do not have good content, there is no reason for your readers to come back to your blog after their first visit. Keep writing good content as well. If it starts to go down hill, you may find that your reader status does as well and that could hurt you in the long run. Good content is key.

Something else that many blog owners do not realize when they are marketing their blog is that it needs to be updated. Post content in your blog regularly for the best results. Maybe once a day is good for you? Perhaps you are more comfortable with one post a week? Whichever it is, be consistent with it and know that it will pay off to continue posting as you should.

Just having a blog about anything, or random subjects is not always a great idea. You have to have a niche market in order to market your blog successfully. For example, lets say one day you made a blog post on the current news, and the next day it was on your current marital situation. You will not be able to keep a blog audience posting off the wall things time after time. Find your area of expertise and run with it. You can be an expert on that market in your blogging community. Readers will go to your blog daily to find out what it is that the expert is going to say next. It really does work this way.

Make sure that your blog design stands out. You don’t want your blog to look and feel like everyone else’s, so make it different. Having your own look is a huge plus in the blog marketing world. You will find that most blogs all look the same and you can have your own look by just using HTML and adjusting the code to suit your taste. You are going to see that this will truly make a difference with your blog as well as your readers. Try to get a theme that is going to match the market that you are promoting in your blog. Doing so will make it look even more professional.

Do you know SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. If you are not familiar with SEO, you need to get that way and fast. Using SEO will help you to market your blog to the fullest extent possible. Optimizing your blog posts as well as the HTML will get you results that you will love. Studying everything that you can find on SEO will help you immensely. You will find that there is so much more to bog marketing than just making a post on your blog everyday.

If you don’t all ready, be sure that your blog has the RSS feeds. Having these feeds will allow others to be able to link to you blog. Having many links a huge part of blog marketing that you want to take advantage of as well. When someone uses the RSS feeds from your blog, they are able to get the posts that you make, and will give you a link back from their blog, or website, whichever they posted it on.

The most important thing in any web business is traffic – lots and lots of traffic. Of course you also need to have a valuable offer for your visitors – a reason for them to transact with you. What you do with the traffic when it gets to your site could be any number of things. So, the critical step is to generate a steady flow of visitors.

Let’s talk about how to generate traffic…

Here are a few of the most popular way to get traffic to your site – for free:

• Web 2.0 Methods
• Article Marketing
• Video Marketing

Let’s talk about each of these.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is the name given to websites that get their content from their users. What this means for you is that you can join into the community and add your own content. And because of the highly interactive and popular nature of these sites, Google and other search engines “index” their content regularly. And that’s important to you because it means that Google and the other search engines treat links from these sites as more meaningful than links from other sites. And any links in your content that point to your own sites count as a strong “vote” in favor of your sites – lending you credibility in the search engines. This is the hidden benefit of using Web 2.0 sites. There are many more web 2.0 traffic tactics we don’t have time to get into here, but this will get you started.

Articles Sites

The next thing we want to talk about is article marketing. Article sites are in essence web 2.0 websites. Article directories are sites where users (including you) can upload articles they have written. And just like other web 2.0 sites, you get all the SEO benefits from having your content on them. But you also get the extra benefit of other users taking your article and putting it on their site. And in return for getting to use your content, these other users include links back to your website that gives you further search engine ranking and more free traffic. In order to get the most free traffic make sure you:

• Do your keyword research
• Write your article for the keywords you’ve chosen
• Hyperlink these keywords to your website – both in the content of the article and in your author’s info section.

Video Sites

The last of this group is video marketing. Once again, this is really a sub-set of web 2.0. So, just like article marketing, video marketing enables you to add content to authority sites. The extra top secret benefit of video marketing is that it’s much easier to rank for competitive keywords than in any other medium.

Here are just a few video marketing tips:

• Get a YouTube account
• Make your profile uncluttered by turning off all the modules
• Add tags to your profile
• Make sure to include in your profile a link to your site
• Add 1 or more videos to your profile
• Include your keywords in the title, description and tags

In closing…

This is a great overview to get your started generating massive traffic to your site.

Let’s talk about some powerful ways to get free and automated traffic coming to your website.

But, first…

Keyword research is really the first step in getting traffic to your website. The reason this is so important is that you are going to be building content and traffic sources for specific keywords. Which means you need to put some thought into the keywords you’re targeting.

A couple things to keep in mind when doing keyword research:

• How competitive are the keywords you’re going after? This involves doing some competitive analysis to determine the ease of entry for each keyword
• Will the keywords you’re targeting bring buyers? Some keywords will bring lots of traffic, but none of them will buy. You want to generate visitors ready to buy.
• Will these keywords bring affiliates? If you want to build a huge business, you’re going to need affiliates to help you. This means that some of your traffic focus should be on getting affiliates to your site.

This is critical to your business, but it takes a lot of time and effort. Hiring someone else to do it costs a lot of money. Which is why practically none of your competitors will do this! If you’re smart you will use website traffic software to help you with this process. This way you get this critical step done fast and done well.

Once you know your keywords…

Only after doing your keyword research correctly can you start targeting these keywords to get you traffic.

Here’s a short list of sneaky traffic techniques:

• Surveys
• “Help” Websites
• Video Sharing Sites

Surveys

People love filling in surveys. You can use this fact to provide “sticky” content for other website owners. It’s a win-win. They get a great perk on their site and you get a link back to yours. The beauty of this is that it generates website visitors for you with no work on your part. Most people think surveys are just for collecting data, but in this case you don’t even care about the answers. So, get creative and make up a survey that’s wacky to get other people interested in putting it on their sites.

“Help” Websites

Maybe you’ve seen these help sites where people post questions and other people answer them. But, like the surveys, that’s not why you’re going to pay attention to these sites. You are going to generate traffic, leads and sales from them. Of course, the process of digging through these sites and pulling out the content info of leads for your business is very time consuming. But a much smarter method is to use website traffic software to do it for you. These tools put the whole thing on auto-pilot and just deliver the leads to you each day.

Video Websites

Video is huge and sites like YouTube and Vimeo are extremely popular. YouTube is one of the most highly traffic and search websites on the entire internet! So don’t miss out of this incredible source of free website traffic.

Even if you don’t think you can make a good video. One super easy thing to do is take an article or website you’ve written. Then simply record yourself reading the text and you video the screen with a simple screen capture program. And like anything else, there is software available that will turn articles into videos for you automatically.

Summary

Figuring out how to get some visitors to your site is not hard at all. It just takes a little time and some ingenuity. You can even use software to automate most of what we’ve talked about.

So, start right now and:

• Step 1 is researching your keywords
• Next, set up a survey or two with viral appeal
• Build your traffic traps
• And don’t forget about video