7 Golden Business Nuggets Of 2006

It's funny this is the most important thing I learnt from Alex Mandossian during a 2-day Internet marketing seminar...

...instead of the more than 80 strategies taught by him and Armand Morin!

"Appreciate and show gratitude for everything, count all your blessings rather than finding faults or blaming others for your situation!"

Realise that everything you have is a blessing from GOD and give thanks everyday:

- your body, soul, spirit
- your spouse, family, relatives and friends
- your business partners, associates, network, contacts, environment
- your skills, tools, resources
- your shelter, possessions, properties, cars
- and too much to mention I need another lens...

Ever heard of this...

"I once was distraught because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet." - Unknown

Live with an attitude of gratitude!

Right now...I thank GOD for Squidoo so that I can share this golden business nugget with you and you're reading it now; for Seth Godin and his team for creating it; for Dr Mike for introducing Squidoo in his Web 2.0 FREE Call, for Tiffany Dow's inspiration on Squidoo social marketing

I challenge you to list down 10 things that you are grateful and thankful for in your current situation now...

This looks simple enough but it never occurred to me in this manner...

I first heard about it from these two outstanding Internet marketers from Singapore, Jo Han Mok and Ewen Chia.

That is, if you have MONEY (or budget), you can consider outsourcing the tasks at hand.

On the other hand, if money is tight but you have TIME (of which what our precious life is made of), do it yourself.

Here's a GREAT TIP:

"NEVER NEVER NEVER start your day reading emails... Instead, start your day with a REVENUE-GENERATING ACTIVITY of say 45 to 60 mins!"

For online marketers, a revenue-generating activity is not reading, listening or learning something. It is activity that generates income such as writing an article, putting up a web page, creating a tool for your affiliates, or even continue to write your ebook.

So, Internet marketers just starting out on a shoestring budget most probably had to do most of the stuff by themselves till there is a steady income stream. At that time, with MONEY, it's essential to outsource the tasks.

Outsourcing is in line with Business Nugget #7 where we must automate our business as much as we can.

That's right...

A business system is merely a series of processes. For example, in the case of an online marketer, it is crucial to set up business systems in place to market your products and/or services.

To make it clearer, let's say we want to market a ebook. Your business system could look like this:

Process #1: You set up pay per click ads to drive targeted traffic to your name squeeze page

Process #2: Your name squeeze page captures the visitors' names and email addresses and redirects them to your sales letter which markets your ebook

Process #3: Your autoresponder follows up by sending a sequence of emails to your prospects

Process #4: Once a prospect buys, he/she will receive a welcome email giving him/her the website address to download the ebook

As can be seen, the business system above comprises four component processes.

Every process must function well in order to generate profits on autopilot. If there are not enough opt in's, then there is a challenge of driving more traffic besides using only pay per click.

Thus, by looking at a business system as a series of processes, we can tweak the system by troubleshooting or enhancing one or more of these component processes so as to improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the business system as a whole.

When I started my own computer integration business years ago, my ex-colleague wished me well, "Do what you love, the money will follow!"

I believed that whole-heartedly, doing whatever I loved in my business...

So, since I love the technical stuff, I did the techie jobs like building, installing and configuring those computer servers and networks (without which you won't be reading this lens right now) and then leaving out the marketing to trial and error.

Although I did fairly well, I didn't realize back then the importance of marketing. If only I had put MARKETING first, and then my OPERATION second, that business might have scaled into...well, you know what I mean.

So, many Internet marketing gurus have repeated this same message again:

"You're first in the business of marketing, and then in your own business!"

Follow this nugget and your business will surely increase...otherwise, I wish you good luck.

It is easy to assume what our customers really want...

It is also easy to create products and hope that that's what your clients need.

However, instead of pretending to be the marketing genius, a better way is to adopt the time-tested Socratic approach of asking the customer.

By asking the customers, you give them an opportunity to respond with what types of products/services would help solve their problems at hand.

Thus, the real marketing genius is actually the customers because by asking them and knowing their needs, it would be a piece of cake to develop and/or source for products and services that meet their needs rather than play the guessing game.

All businesses need customers in order to make a profit.

Going back to fundamentals then, there is always a cost and there is always a price.

However, have you ever heard of people who never want to spend a dime on advertising? I do...and some of them are even self-proclaimed gurus :-)

In other words, these types want to earn $1 by investing nothing. They want a free lunch and not realizing that they are indeed investing their most precious commodity - their TIME.

I was fortunate to learn from one Internet marketing guru these profound words:

"It's easier to invest $1 and make $2 than invest nothing and earn $1."

It puts things into perspective rather than just focusing on the cost of advertising, for instance, and not focusing on the profit (which is the PRICE less the COST).

Let me put a more concrete example here.

For example, you're an affiliate marketer running a campaign (for more info on affiliate marketing, click here)
you have a choice between utilizing paid and free traffic generation methods such as:

(a) Pay per click advertising - which means you advertise online with little text ads and pay whenever someone clicks on your ad

(b) Forum marketing - which means you participate in online forums and recommend the product you're promoting which is absolutely free

On the surface, option (b) appears to be the obvious choice.

However, if the affiliate product you're promoting has a high conversion rate, then option (a) might be a better choice. Say you earn $2 for every $1 you spend in pay per click advertising, would you not hope to spend as much as possible?

When I started my small business eons ago, I never did realize that I owned a job.

Before that, I was an employee with a government organization, drawing a good salary...in other words, having a job.

It was hard at the beginning - took me like three years working 18 hours everyday - to finally make the business profitable.

And I thought that was all... I was handling all the technical operations of the company in addition to servicing my clients together with my business partner.

Though we had many employees, it dawned on me after awhile that my clients didn't want them to service their companies. They only wanted either me or my partner!

Looking back, there isn't a well-planned process in place whereby it does not matter whoever services the client. This is what I got myself into:

"I owned my own job!"

I can't get out. I became indispensable - ever heard of that?

I'm glad I learnt this from an Internet marketing guru that once a business system is running, that's the time to automate it.

In the case of an online business, the most important piece of the parcel is to put an autoresponder to good use.

If you're not using such a service yet, get yourself a trial for the World's Smartest Shopping Cart system.

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Thanks for your time and effort...and just drop me a mailif you have time to let me know at roger (at) rogerloh.com

Thanks for reading these business nuggets and I sincerely hope you can start to apply some of these to whatever business you're doing, online or offline.

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