eAction

There is no shame in admitting that you need to learn to be a better business person. More astute in decisions, and more skilled in marketing, or whatever area you sense a lack.

The smart thing to do, once you recognize your lack is to seek out the right knowledge, or best of all, a mentor who already knows those topics well. Ask for help. Even if you must pay for it. Generally, those who have forged a path to their success are willing to admit they both taught themselves and learned from others, so they don’t mind sharing their knowledge.

Until they are besieged by people who are lazy and expect them to do it all for them. Then they begin to back off. No one likes an attack of leaches.

Instead, ask nicely, and try to return the favour once you are able.

I do not remember now where I read or learned this tip, but it has proved very useful to me. It works for books and other physical products you are selling online and from home.

Well before you go on a family vacation, or to a wedding, reunion, funeral, or whatever, prepare one particular briefcase or suitcase with all you need to make impromptu sales.

Sure as anything, you’ll be striking up a new acquaintance with someone, and as you are talking, you realize that you wish you could hand them your card, or brochure, or show them your book. Oh, for an order form, when the person is eager to buy!

Therefore, pack this case with your books or products, with order forms, or invoices/receipts, with extra brochures and literature. If you are set up to take credit card payments, make sure you have your processing materials along too.

This case can stay on your car, but when you’re talking to someone at a reunion, for instance, you can say, “Just a moment; I’ll get you something from my car.”

If you are on a long road trip, don’t forget to have extra business cards in your pockets or purse, so that when you enter a public washroom and notice a community bulletin board, you can add your card to those on display there. Even a small mini-poster, might do well.

As you are handing out one business card, you might pause and ask, “Do you know of anyone else who might be interested?” if that person says, yes, offer them a second card to pass on to that person.

In any case, remember to scatter your “seeds” generously far and wide. You never know where your harvest might sprout and bring you results.

Speaking of cards, you know they don’t have to be the regular 2.5 x 3″ size, right? If you are making them yourself, on your computer, try bookmarks and mini-posters. I’ve found I can get a lot more information on them, and they stand out better.

It is still a good idea to have regular business cards too; some people just don’t approve of us if we appear to colour outside of the traditional lines. But I have only met with good responses so far when I hand out my 4″ x 11″ mini-posters that list all my genealogy products, or that include a picture of my novel, and a short write up on it, and the different ways to order it.

My main problem is to remember to hand them out more frequently. I get too busy talking, and forget!

Have you ever made a promise or vow to someone before God as your witness? (We know He witnesses everything, even our thoughts).

I was reminded just now that if we do not keep our promises and vows, God has said in Ecclesiastes 5 that if we do not keep our vows, He will be angry with us and destroy the work of our hands.

If it looks like all your efforts are going down the drain, or becoming ruined, stop to ask yourself, what vows or promises have I made to anyone, family, friends, business partners, the public, to God? Then consider if you can hurry up and keep your promises after all.

This is important. It might save you from financial ruin!

You sign up with an affiliate program. You get a coded link to their site, which they tell you, is YOUR web site. Now you are to promote it and get crowds of people coming to see it, and sign up and thus - you will earn commissions.

The main, the best way to do that promotion, is to have your own web site, which you can control and fill with helpful information, and where you provide interesting links to your coded affiliate site. Some of your visitors will click that link, and go check it out.

But what if you have no web site of your own? Then what can you do?

Well, I would highly recommend getting a little site of your own, but if you can’t, or you want to, but it will take some time, and you need to promote the affiliate link quickly… then, here are four ways you might try;

SURFING
1. Join surfing programs and list your affiliate site there. As you surf regularly every day, and see other’s sites, they will be seeing yours.

Proviso: they are getting fussy and will not allow you to enter programs that they know to be scams or on the shady side. Read the fine print.

FREE CLASSIFIEDS
2. Write up some good one, two and three line ads about your program. Then do a search for Free Classifieds sites, and copy-paste your ad into the appropriate spaces.

Proviso: Some classified pages will only allow you one line. Almost all owners of the classified sites will flood your email with their ads! So be sure to get a web mail address to use just for this, and make sure it is one that allows you to mark and delete large quantities of junk mail with a click or two.

SIG LINE
3. Create a catchy signature line for your emails with the link to that program’s site included. Send friendly emails to as many people as you can, and make sure your signature automatically is included each time. You can go visit forums and discussion groups and set your signature in your profile so that every time you make a post or comment, your signature with that link will appear.

Proviso: This is slower, one-on-one almost, but can be most effective. Use this method, no matter which others you choose.

BE A GUEST - LEAVE CARD
4. Be an outgoing, friendly visitor to as many other sites as you can find. Look for a guest book, or feedback form, and leave a friendly, complimentary note about the site and your common interests. Include your program URL under your signature.

Proviso: Spammers are also doing this, and causing people to delete their guest books. There is a danger you’ll be included with them, and banned or blackballed, so you’ll need to be extra tactful and gracious.

I have rejoined DisciplesCross, a make-products-at-home program as an affiliate because I had someone asking if she could sign up under me. (This one didn’t work in the surfing programs because it went dynamic).

Dad got the kit from a friend, and has gone into making the crosses in a big way. I’m learning now about marketing physical products to wholesalers. If you think this is your best path too, and need a kit and program to sell, take a look at DisciplesCross.

Yikes, my feature got rather long again today! So let me just leave you with this great quote to encourage you;

“No tool, in and of itself, has great importance. But placed in the proper hands it can create a masterpiece.” (Joni Eareckson Tada)

Were you good at playing Hide n’ Seek as a child? If you were you probably knew intuitively how to do good searches. Maybe you understood the nature of the hide-ers and where they were likely to be. Or you could quickly eliminate all the places the other kids would NOT go to hide, and focus on checking the likely places.

One thing I think I’ve learned to do better in the last year or so of my seven years online is how to do more effective searches. I seem to enjoy it more too, now that I have got better at it.

I use the Firefox browser which has a Google search bar at the top right, and there is a bigger one on the start page. You can also install the Google search bar on your other browsers at no cost. It only takes a couple of minutes.

There are, of course, hundreds of search engines, and you might have another favourite. Google has an excellent reputation and is handy, so I reach for that first, but I also have SearchIt! on my quick access browser bar, and whenever I need to do a more refined, special search, I can open that in a second.

But if no one is offering courses in doing searches, how does one get the knack?

By trial and error - in my case. So let me save you some time with helpful tips.

1. Make sure you have a search bar very hand. If not, install one like Google, (just visit their site, click some links, and it will come in and make itself to home on your computer), or visit the SearchIt! , and drag the URL to your browser’s button bar.

2. Spend a few hours trying out searches. Try putting your own name in that blank search box. You might be surprised to discover some of your friends have mentioned you on their sites! Try putting down your favourite hobbies. You’ll wander off as you click on links and explore all kinds of fun sites in that genre. You’ll see pictures and read info, and… oh, you’ll have a great time! Just keep coming back to the results page and click another link.

Are you about to buy something? Put that item into the search bar and see if you might get it cheaper some place, by ordering it online. I will click about six or seven links, with a right-click of my mouse, and then on the fly up menu I click “open another tab.” Then I visit them one after another and compare prices, and discoveries.

3. As you’ve done those searches, you will have noticed that some words brought up oodles of links, and some not so many, or none. It’s time to develop skill in how you choose the keywords you put in the blank.
- try different spellings eg. jewellery, jewelry,
- try putting quotations marks around a phrase, eg. “antique canning jars”
- when I saw that most of the sites for the jars search were using the term “fruit jars” - I did another search using that term, and found many more sites.
- use operator symbols like +, or, not. (study up on how and when to use each)
- when you’d like a picture, click on images to search the net only for those
(same with groups, or news)
- check out and try the Advanced Search form, and read the Advanced search tips page every once in a while. You’ll learn a lot from that.

Remember, no one is charging you for the amount of time you use to search. It’s all a question of how diligent you want to be. If you’ve got the time, go for it. Eventually, you’ll get so skilled, that it won’t take but a few minutes for many common searches.

4. Make notes. After a couple of hours, or when you want to tell someone later what you found, you’ll have a hard time remembering which site had what. I keep my text editor program open all the time, and as I’m making discoveries, I’ll highlight and copy paste the url and the key bits of info into a blank document. Draw a line, and then put down the next. Days and weeks later, I can pull up that document and go back to exactly the place where I found something.

5. When you really want to research a topic still more thoroughly, try out SearchIt! That will throw up some extra windows on you, and you’ll need to do a few more clicks, but you can choose from 19 Search categories in Step 1. Depending on your category choice, your Step 2 choices can be anywhere from half a dozen to more than a dozen search types. And again, depending on your choices, you are allowed to put in one or two search terms or phrases in Steps 3 and 4.

It looks complicated at first, but as you test and play with it, you’ll be amazed at the refined searches you can do. SearchIt! gets into corners of the net that you would never think of looking on your own! It’s originally designed to help those who are planning a new web site, but you can adapt it for anything and everything else you have a mind to.

Whether you are trying to run a business online, or simply for your own pleasure and curiosity, you are doing yourself a huge favour if you learn to do good searches.

Do a search on the keywords for your business site, including what your competitors are already doing on the web. You might discover they are leaving a huge gap that you could fill. Or, you might discover that a certain aspect of your work is very much sought after by people using search engines, and you’d be wise to include a higher profile on that aspect in your site. When they arrive, present them with more than enough info on that keyword or phrase! They’ll practically camp on your web site!

Make sure they see a way to reach you.

Don’t be afraid to learn something new. The unknown often seems scary, but count up the times you learned something and it turned out to be very useful to you. Maybe you even gained a new skill. See? Good things happen when you tackle a new learning curve. Be brave and climb!

While you start sing to yourself, “Climb, climb up Sunshine Mountain, faces all aglow…”

Maybe not today, but once you have learned this new stuff, you’ll find gratitude welling up inside that you were brave enough to get at it.

Why, others will even praise and commend you! What’s to lose, but your fears?