Despite this disclaimer, these small gains in efficiency and effectiveness add up. In this first small business productivity tip I recorded for you with video, you will see how easy and flexible Microsoft Office’s AutoCorrect is to use. It’s a video done on the fascinating free tool, Jing.

In this video, you will see a demonstration of how to create an AutoCorrect text entry to shorten the steps on several types of entries.

 Examples of AutoCorrect Entries

• Multi-line address:

“mycompany” autocorrects to a “formatted entry”

My Construction Company
2211 S. Main Street
Covina, CA 91723

• Using initials to create the full name:

“cms/” produces “Carl M. Schwartzenheimer,” an unformatted entry

• Frequently used terms can be reduced to three characters:

“s/b” turns into “small business”

“sb-“ turns into “Small Business”

• Signature – you can use a few characters to get a consistent signature for the end of both your emails and your blog posts:

“Sig/optin”

Your closing line or tagline,

Your fullname

Would you like to attract people to your business?
Would you like to find it easier and more fun to make sales?
Get your copy of the ecourse, “your opt-in bonus” now.

Some of the benefits of using AutoCorrect:

• Reduce keystrokes, especially with the use of the Shift key
• Ensure the proper spelling of names you aren’t always sure you spelled correctly
• Get a complex things like the above signature line reduced to just a few easily remembered keystrokes
• You can also save text entries that use several fonts and different font sizes as well a color changes (this was not on the video)
• You can save things like lines with extra spacing

“shortline” generates the following short line with extra blank lines:

Using Microsoft AutoCorrect is easy, fun and fast. You can improve productivity with these little steps, a lot. Likewise, you can improve accuracy and even create multi-line entries like signatures with a call to action and a hyperlink.

If you are ready now for more tips on how to build your small business profits through strong relationships, including tips on productivity, Get your copy of the ecourse, “9 Steps to Finding Prospects Who Want What You Provide” now.

Building your profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle

Would you like to attract people to your business?
Would you like to find it easier and more fun to make sales?
Get your copy of the ecourse, “9 Steps to Finding Prospects Who Want What You Provide” now.

Related articles

• Sheila Hibbard Shares Her Top Tips and Marketing Advice for Small Businesses (socialstrand.com)

One of the services and functions of Aberle Enterprises is to be a clearinghouse for information that can benefit small businesses enabling them to build profits through strong relationships.

The following article, How small business can exploit Groupon, is one such article that can help your business with some very important insights on marketing strategies, whether Groupon ends up being of value to you or not.

Tim never fully bought into the courses twenty years ago on all of the slick lines for handling objections and for manipulating prospects with negative emotions like guilt and fear. Not finding what he wanted, he focused on developing friendships, asking questions then providing custom quotes. He gained a lot of loyal customers this way.

While he naturally built relationships, he felt something was missing in his skills. Now, with a tough goal like a 30% increase in sales, all of his sales and marketing efforts must kick it up a notch. At this time, he wants to move from unconsciously using relationship selling to mastering the skills and applying them consistently.

There are four levels of knowledge:

1. The unconscious salesperson who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know
2. The conscious beginner who starts to know what he doesn’t know
3. The conscious – and skilled user of this knowledge
4. The unconscious expert who uses this knowledge without thinking about it.

Salespeople too often Rush into Telling Prospects about Their Products

Although Tim is more accomplished than a beginner just because he has good people skills, he’s become aware that he is just now learning about relationship sales and marketing as something to study and master. For instance, following the traditional sales approach he learned years ago to use, he tends to rush into telling about his products and services too soon. He relied upon fancy presentations to impress.

Until You Listen, They Won’t

Now instead, Tim is beginning to realize that talking about how good he is or what he can do for them before really listening and understanding them is a waste of time. They are not ready to listen to you and don’t care about what you can provide yet. Tim knows now that he needs to ask about what they want to accomplish, why they want to do this, and how important it is to them.

He applied this approach today with a great deal of success. He’s still consciously thinking about the steps. But by listening first, he found out what his prospect really wants. A follow up question to a comment that his prospect made uncovered how much more his prospect already knows about Tim’s manufacturing process than he expected. This enabled them to connect more strongly. In addition, he had fun relating with his soon-to-be customer.

Having felt the truth of the statement that relationship selling builds stronger customer relationships, Tim is eager to continue his studies to improve his skills until he becomes the unconscious expert. After all, a 30% sales increase will take a lot of fine tuning.

Are you ready to have more fun while making more profitable sales for your small business? Get your copy of the ecourse, “9 Steps to Finding Prospects Who Want What You Provide” now plus regular articles on all aspects of creating strong relationships to increase your profits.

Building your profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle

john@johnaberle.com

Would you like to attract people to your business?

Would you like to find it easier and more fun to make sales?

Would you like stronger relationships with customers?

Don’t wait any longer to get “9 Steps to Finding Prospects Who Want What You Provide.”

Related articles

• Relationship Selling – Interview Your Prospects – Yes You Can (management2012.wordpress.com)

MailChimp, one of the leading email hosting companies, has long made their Resources http://mailchimp.com/resources/ material available to anyone wanting to go to their site. While you can set up a basic account with up to 2,000 names on your email lists for no charge, even people without an account can read of their guides.  They have a reputation for outstanding customer service.

Get Email Marketing Training in Guides Using Kindle, Adobe, and EPUB Formats

Recently MailChimp demonstrated their technological leadership as well as their commitment to customer service by not only making the MailChimp Guides available for reading online, they offer them to you for download at no cost. The exciting part comes when you download your choice of MailChimp’s Guides, you will get a zip file with three versions of the guide: Kindle Content, Adobe Acrobat Document and EPUB File.

While the Kindle has its own format at this time, virtually all of the other ebook devices will read the ePub format. So you can read it on your iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android or Sony.

Use Your Idle Time to Learn about How to Use Email Marketing

This means that MailChimp has made it easier for Tim Piper to get up to speed on his email marketing options for his small business. Even if he does not intend to do the technical work himself, he can get the basics so as to understand how to effectively use email to build stronger relationships. Thanks to the formats that MailChimp provides, Tim can use idle time when he’s waiting at a customer’s office to learn about email marketing.

You can use your idle time too, like Tim, to read up about email marketing. However, there is so much more you can so besides email marketing to improve profits for your small business. Get the ecourse, “9 Steps to Finding Prospects Who Want What You Provide  now plus regular articles on all aspects of creating strong relationships to increase your profits.

Building your profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle

P.S. Would you like to attract people to your business?

Would you like to find it easier and more fun to make sales?

Take action now to get your copy of the ecourse, “9 Steps to Finding Prospects Who

Want What You Provide.”

Related articles

• Wringing More Use Out of Email Marketing Databases (marketingvox.com)

Now Ted wants to design a customer satisfaction survey for his business. He intends to ensure that he knows how they stand with their customers and when they have a problem that he needs to address.

Most Businesses Fail to Ask the Right Questions on Customer Service Surveys

From his own experience traveling, he has found that most businesses are failing to ask the right questions on their customer service surveys. They ask you to rank your preferences and generally give you numerical ratings for customer satisfaction from 1 – 5 with 1 being totally unsatisfactory and 5 being far superior, yet their surveys lack any open-ended questions.

While these scales are convenient for data entry, by themselves, they are insufficient to truly understand why your customer responded as he did. For instance, why did Marilyn Jones mark her overall satisfaction a 3 when she marked 5 on all of the questions. What was it that so thoroughly disappointed Ms. Jones?

 Eight Steps to Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Surveys

1. Start with the attitude, “How can I best serve my customers?
2. Mentally put yourself in your customer’s place.
3. Commit to truly serving your customer. Don’t allow efficiency to hurt your customer experience.
4. Get a team of front line people who deal with your customers or clients together to do some brainstorming on several questions: “What do customers complain about?” “What do they ask for most often?” “What do our competitors have that seem popular?” “What do customers say they wish someone would add?”
5. Once you have the list of issues you think are important, create a matrix or grid where you list the items you want evaluated with two columns or two to three sections:
   1. Essential or Required / Nice to Have but Not Essential Comments
   2. Pick the most important items at this time. You might be able to have 20 to 30 items to rate. Don’t go beyond the one page except to offer room for comments and contact information on the back side, including the date and time of whatever service you provide.
   3. Ranking of Importance: This is your scale from 1 to 5.
6. Have space for Comments
7. Ask if you may get in touch with them to get a better understanding of their answers. Then give them the fields for their contact information. Ask for their preference of how to be contacted.
8. “What’s in it for me?” Remember to include some benefit for them to take the time to fill out your survey, like 1,000 frequent traveler points, a free upgrade when they stay again, or a 10% discount on their next manufacturing order or a free hour of consulting on their next project.

The easiest way to explain the problem with the questions that ask you to rank the importance to you about certain services or features is to look at hotel and motel surveys. Typically, they ask you to rank which features of the hotel are most important to you.

Does Your Survey Say You Only Care About Ranking Your Facilities?

Questionnaires that only allow for numerical rankings for specific items give customers the feeling that this survey is merely for some facility ranking, not to provide better customer service. Numerical ranking is easy to do data input then to generate a report.

Allowing for comments is messy and might require some real work. They might also mean you have to think about making changes. The plus side to asking for comments on customer satisfaction surveys is that you might actually get a better understanding of the answers.

Drawing from his own experience as a customer, Ted Piper knows the need for an easy way to give a business feedback. They need to know where they are doing well and where they fail to satisfy if they want loyal customers who are evangelists. He also realizes that the eight steps above will design a customer satisfaction survey that says, “We really care and want to make every experience with us wonderful.”

Do You Want to Go Beyond Customer Satisfaction Surveys to Customer Loyalty Programs?

Are you interested in learning about a variety of programs to convert customers into evangelists for your products and services? Gina Gaudio-Graves, on this teleconference interview, shares six different types of customer loyalty programs and so much more. Get your download of How Can You Use Customer Loyalty Programs to Grow Profits?

Building your profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle, Aberle Enterprises

Additional Articles on the Topic of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

First Person: The Value of Customer Satisfaction Interviews

That is why this article by Tom Szaky, the chief executive of TerraCycle, is of value. Although Szaky’s list is generally excellent, at the end you will find some challenges to as well as expansions on some of Szaky’s points, especially for small business salespeople:

My Top 10 Sales Tips

My biggest sales lesson came from a good friend who is now our head of Canadian business development (a fancy term for sales), Robin Tator. Robin taught me that sales is not about what you are selling, but about making friends and about getting someone to see the world the way you do. If you do that, everything else will take care of itself.

Sales can be a melancholy job. On one hand, many people (especially nonsales people) feel that it’s sleazy and lowbrow. On the other hand, it can be the most important function of a business. Until there’s a sale, there is no business. Personally, I’ve gone from thinking the former to believing the latter and honing my skills over a decade to where today I am effectively the chief sales officer of TerraCycle. I don’t know exactly when this transition happened, but it took me a few years to embrace the power of sales the way I do today.

I recently wrote a friend who is starting a nonprofit and suggested that the role of a company leader is to become the chief convincing officer. In the end these two titles are synonymous, because selling is really the art of convincing someone to believe and buy into your concept, whether by buying your product or service or by investing in your company or by working for your company.

Here are my top 10 sales tips, all of which have served me and our staff — including Jo Opot, pictured above — for years:

1.            You can sell only if you yourself are convinced:If you are not sold on the product or service, it will be an uphill battle to sell someone on else. Your lack of conviction will scream through.

2.         Be clear and direct: When pitching do not use complicated diction. Pride yourself instead on being able to explain the concept as quickly, clearly and simply as possible. This is important because the biggest problem in sales is client confusion. Confusion does not lead to a Yes.

3.         Pressure is an art: Creating FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) in your client’s mind can be a good thing because it will lead to serious consideration of your concept. In the TerraCycle world, we award brand exclusivity by country and by category. I often need to tell potential clients that their competition is also talking with us. The trick is to mention this once and to NOT rub it in, which is likely to anger them. No one who is angered into saying Yes.

4.         Know your client: Make sure to research your potential clients, know their challenges and their needs. One size hardly ever fits all, and you look much stronger if you care about the business enough to invest in the research. I can’t tell you how many times I get cold calls from sales people who don’t even know what TerraCycle does.

5.         It’s all about the presentation: Building an amazing deck is critical to the sales process. Practice it, memorize it and be prepared to shift your emphasis based on how the energy changes when you give the presentation. Internally, we always ask ourselves: “Is the flow of this deck right? Will it convince?”

6.         Be passionate and exciting: Most presentations are BORING! So create a show and make it exciting. Excitement is contagious – just like a yawn.

7.         If you don’t know the answer, do not guess: People will ask you tough questions, and you may not always know the answer. The person asking you may be testing you, knowing the answer full well. And if you fumble, it’s very hard to rebuild credibility. Do not guess.

8.         Answer questions directly and clearly: If you are asked a question and you give a “politician’s answer” – in other words, if you don’t answer the question – your credibility will decline, and you will hurt your chances of making the sale.

9.         Humor is a great lubricator: Funny stories always break the ice. Instead of using business cards, everyone in our company uses stamps (see right) to leave our contact info. It’s eco-friendly, it never runs out and it makes for a nice ice-breaker at the beginning of every meeting.

10.      You can always be better: Sales is an art, not a science. Which means it’s never perfect and can always improve. TerraCycle has a standard sales deck most of our associates use. We’ve gone through 94 versions in the last three years and version 95 is around the corner.

Bottom line: sales is a critical function that is more art than science, so hone your art. And please share any of the sales tips you’ve learned.

Read the Tom Szaky’s original article, “My Top 10 Sales Tips,” in the NY Times “You’re the Boss” Section

As promised above, here are some challenges and some elaborations to Tom Szaky’s “My Top 10 Sales Tips.”

3.         Pressure is an art:

This is a technique IBM used effectively for decades. I have never used it that I can recall. It’s manipulative. Find a positive way to get attention without needing to appeal to fear tactics.

5.         It’s all about the presentation:

I think that presentations are important in corporate sales. However, in small business sales, talking about what they are concerned with is the most important thing. Whether business-to-business or business-to-consumer, people want someone who cares about them more than about how great the salesperson’s company and products are or how fancy a presentation he can make. Yes, demos are convincing provided you built the relationship.

By the way, I’ve read numerous top corporate salespeople who point out that with major corporations too, it is critical to show that you listen, you understand their concerns, and you care about serving them, not just about your wallet. Until you do that, presentations are unimportant. You may entertain them at the same time they shut off and look for someone else who cares more than you do. (See point 6.)

8.         Answer questions directly and clearly:

I couldn’t agree more. If someone asks a question, don’t think you can tap dance around it enough to make them forget. If they cared enough to ask, anticipate that it is important to them. Be honest. Most people today over twenty, maybe over fifteen, have heard the sales pitches, what Szaky calls “politician’s answer,” and can recognize one within seconds.

Few things are a bigger turn off. Moreover, it immediately destroys or severely damages whatever trust you have built up. The only way to use such an answer is to make a joke of it, make it clear that you are joking, then answer honestly. I have, however, asked for clarification of what they meant or heard because I have made incorrect assumptions about what the prospect was really asking.

9.         Humor is a great lubricator:

I love humor and think it can break down barriers faster than anything. It can also offend faster than anything. Avoid anything having to do with race, creed, color, sexual orientation or sex in general.  Many people, myself included, will laugh despite being embarrassed or feeling something is really inappropriate for a business setting.

The problem is that we will often do our best to avoid the one who used in appropriate humor. If you have a funny story about yourself that doesn’t make you look stupid, use it. For example, I tell the story about my first experience with tamales as a young teenager. I grew up in Wisconsin and had never seen tamales before. I hated them because they were so tough and fibrous. No one told me I was supposed to peel that husk off them.

While sales is a lifelong learning experience, find confidence in your own opinions and stick to your values. It took me many personal successes in sales to reach the point where I would dare to write Challenges to Tom Szaky’s My Top 10 Sales Tips. After all, he’s CEO of an Inc. 500 company. If you want to really excel at sales and marketing and love what you do, then pick techniques that you can use in harmony with your values.

Building your profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle

P.S. Would you like to attract people to your business? Would you

like to find it easier and more fun to make sales?

Sign up for the ecourse, “9 Steps to Finding Prospects Who

Want What You Provide,” my gift to you for opting in.

Tips For Your Small Business Website – What Makes a Good One

As a small business, sales and marketing consultant, I have looked at hundreds of small business websites and blogs. Some were exceptionally good while some were exceptionally bad. One of the tips for your small business website regarding what makes a good site or blog is to remember the primary purpose of any marketing or sales activity: it’s to create customers and sales. To do that you must be able to communicate.

After over 30 years in sales and marketing as a salesperson, manager, vice president for a small business, small business owner and now as a small business consultant, I know deep down that the key to success with your sales and marketing efforts is your ability to communicate well with people, especially with prospects and customers.

The challenge, in particular for salespeople, is to get prospects to give them the time to build a relationship. You are busy. They are busy. The prospect who isn’t too busy to see you probably isn’t a prospect. Your purpose with your small business’ sales and marketing is to get prospects interested in advance of your sales calls.

Make a Good First Impression – 20 seconds versus 1/20th of a second
Websites and blogs can improve the chances of prospects being interested in seeing your salespeople. For decades, sales trainers have warned salespeople about the importance of making a good first impression. The rule of thumb used to be that a salesperson had 20 seconds to make a good first impression.

I’ve mentioned that everything seems to be speeding up. If you are a website or blog, you may only have 1/20th of a second to make a good first impression.

Things that affect the overall appearance of the site
Ask yourself the following questions:

•  How attractive is it?
•  Is it cluttered and crammed full of things?
•  Does it have complimentary colors or clashing colors?
•  Is there enough contrast so that text can be read or does your content disappear into the background, like black letters on a dark red background?
• Does it load fast or is it bogged down loading large pictures or other things that slow loading down?
•  Does it have lots of little flashing things that distract and sometimes irritate?
•  Does your site navigation make it easy to find things?
•  Do you have a way to get back to the home page from every page on your site?
•  Do you offer a search feature to make it easy for your visitors to find what they need?

Your Goal Is to Communicate to Your Ideal Customers and Prospects
The biggest error I see here is, in my personal experience, the hardest to break. You are excited about your products and services so you are eager to share everything you know. The ‘dark side’ of this passion for your products and services is that you probably rush into telling people about them who don’t care – yet. They are focused on their own problems and interests.

People Search the Internet for Information
Your website or blog needs to focus on your ideal prospects’ reasons for searching the web in the first place: information on how to fix a problem or reach a desired goal. You do this by the following:

• Speak about their challenges, not your specs, if you want to capture their attention
• Show by what you write and share that you care about them.
•  Get engagement by asking questions, build a relationship by focusing on their problems and desires, help them to come to know, like and trust you.
• Make your site visually interesting and engaging for your visitors by using graphics or photos, videos, audio recordings, and slide shows.
• Provide quizzes and surveys.
• Use bullet points and short sentences, boldface or italics and subheadings.
• Provide content rich Information – this is an opportunity to be seen as an expert

Call to Action
As a small business site, you really want to do more than provide information. You want to develop a long term business relationship. So ask your visitors to do something. You have three possibilities:

•  Opt-in to mailing list
•  Request a quote or contact you
• Buy your product

These tips for your small business website describe what your website or blog needs if you want people to stay, read, and take action. You have 1/20th of a second to make a good first impression. That’s how fast they may decide to stay or go. First, be sure that it is appealing: attractive, uncluttered, fast loading and contains some visually interesting features. Your content must speak to their problems or desires. Finally, build a longer relationship by asking them to take action, i.e. opt-in, contact you, or buy.

Original Article:
“Tips For Your Small Business Website – What Makes a Good One“

John R. Aberle, Yahoo! Contributor Network, Dec 23, 2011

There are so many elements to managing a successful small business that any little thing can make a significant difference between failing, surviving and thriving. These small business tips on what makes a good website show you some ways to tweak your site. If you want additional small business tips, get your FREE copy of  ecourse, “9 Steps to Finding ProspectsWho Want What You Provide,” my gift to you for opting in.

Building your profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle, Aberle Enterprises
Would you like to attract people to your business?
Would you like to find it easier and more fun to make sales?
Get your FREE ecourse, “9 Steps to Finding Prospects
Who Want What You Provide,” my gift to you for opting in.

Related Articles:
First Person: Every Small Business Needs a Website
First Person: 10 Small Business Website Gimmicks That Don’t Work

If you’ve read much that I have written, you know that gratitude is a core virtual that will help you move from struggle and surviving to thriving. Gratitude fills your heart with the true abundance of love. So from that viewpoint, thank you for being part of my community.

I hope you enjoy seeing and hearing this following wish:

May the Spirit of this Holiday Season bring you and yours joy, peace, health, love and prosperity now and throughout the year ahead, and the years after that. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or some other holiday, I wish you the best. I started this morning with a contemplation on the many people I know who have made my life better for knowing them. There are so many, I’ve missed some, but the exercise of expressing gratitude was fun.

Building your profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle, Aberle Enterprises

Related articles

• What’s In a Greeting? (bilerico.com)

Time for another View about Pressure

Interestingly, though, as a result of a conversation with my mentor, Gina Gaudio-Graves, the other day about Strategy Sessions, I realized that I needed a fuller view point on this issue. Gina is one of the strongest proponents of relationship sales and marketing in Internet marketing today. Yet she said that she doesn’t want salespeople to relax or they may never close. They need a sense of pressure. Think about it.

As a small business owner or salesperson, you do need tension in a strategy session or a sales call. However, the tension needs to be focused on your prospect’s situation as opposed to your ‘need’ to get this sale.

If You Place the Pressure, It May Become a Trust Issue

Prospects don’t trust salespeople when they can sense that you see them only as a wallet and your primary objective is to get their money. Serve them first. If you do a good job of this, the money will follow. After all, they are talking with you, a salesperson, because they want something to change in their lives.

Focus on Serving Them and Helping with Their Concerns

Your job during sales calls is to find out what your prospects’ challenges are and what they want to change or obtain. As a salesperson, once you know that, you need to help them feel or ‘see’ (visualize) what they want different. When you know and understand what they care about, help them become aware of the gap between where they want to be and where they are now. Ideally, show them what it is costing them to delay. After you reach that point, you can ask your closing question.

It’s helpful to chant or sing to yourself so that you can stay detached and allow them the freedom to decide. The idea is to keep yourself neutral. This way the tension at the close is all within your prospects. They don’t feel pressure from you.

After You Ask One a Closing Question, Keep Quiet

It is hard to sit quietly and wait for them to decide. But waiting quietly is respectful and a way of serving your prospects. The benefit to them is that it gives them the time and freedom to think about how important fixing that gap is. The benefit to you is that silence creates the tension for them to make up their minds.

If you get impatient and rush them by adding one more thing to think about or asking a question, you break their thought processes and their internal tension to decide. Not only is it rude to interrupt them, it also takes them off the hook. You just made the decision for them. They won’t be buying today because they will now have to “think about it.”

This sales tip is to remember that just by asking a closing question, your prospect naturally feels pressure. They create their own internal pressure to make the decision based on what they told you they wanted. You merely reminded them of the gap between what they want and where they want to be as well as the cost of not acting now. They will feel more pressure from their own desires than from anything you ‘sold’ them. You are there to help customers buy.

Related articles

• Best and Worst Questions for Salespeople to Ask (customerthink.com)

At Aberle Enterprises, we are interested in helping you build your profits through strong relationships. We’re going to add a new category this year, Live Your Higher Vision, because there is more to life than just making money. Profit’s important, but having a lifestyle is more so. We want to help you build your small business’ profits so you can enjoy a lifestyle.

Note: This post is based on the above video though not an exact transcript.

Extensive Background for Small Business Coaching and Consulting

I have an extensive background relevant to small business coaching and consulting. The following are the highlights.

• USAF Academy – one of the leading, if not the lead, institutions of higher education for leadership training
• Service Career:  9.5 years in U.S. Air Force – this focus on service colors my approach to business. I believe in service.
• Church Leader – again, I have served my church in leadership roles in several states.
• Speaker – I have spoken to groups from a handful to audiences of around 1,000 people.
• Sales & Marketing Career – My sales and marketing career resulted in my becoming the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for a small business in South Texas. I helped open and supervised our operation in Mexico, which we headquartered in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. I then opened the El Paso region for sales.

Track Record in Sales and Marketing

I have always been a strong believer in learning from people who have ‘real world’ experience. That was one of the reasons I loved the USAF Academy so much because 90% of our instructors had real world experience from having been out in the Air Force before becoming our instructors and professors. In the event you like experience and a proven track record too, the following are some of the highlights from mine:

• 1995 – As the head of sales and marketing for this computer dealer, I increased sales 40% over 1994 while I reduced sales reps 42.9%.
• My personal sales were $848,000.
• By 1997, my top 3 service contracts were worth: $625,125 per year.
• I started my own small business servicing computer printers – I grew sales and profits for five straight years.
• Due to rapid changes in industry in 2003, I sold our assets and returned to Southern California.
• I then worked as a small business consultant for 44 months for other companies, focused mostly on profit and expense control and organization for management jobs.
• In first 26 months, saved clients $2,328,207; my projected savings for 40 months: $3,581,857
• Consulting Clients: 130 clients for other companies and 45 as sales and marketing consultant
• I am now taking Bachelor’s Program with Directions University to master Internet marketing so as to better serve and help you, my small business clients.

I am committed to helping you build your profits through strong relationships. Additionally, I look forward to providing you with insights to living your dream lifestyle. When you live your highest vision, life is filled with joy, happiness and a sense of fulfillment, which goes beyond contentment.

For tips and recommendations on how to build your profits through strong relationships, either opt-in to my mailing list in the upper right corner of this page or go to “Join the Aberle Enterprises community.”

Building your profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle

Here is just a little bit of what I am grateful for in 2011: I made new friends, reconnected with old friends, took on an intensely productive relationship with my business mentor, Gina Gaudio-Graves. I have learned so much this year.

Dorothy and I are also grateful for the abundance in our lives. Most of all, we are thankful for the love of family, friends, and associates. I am thrilled about the work I’ve done with clients. There are few things as pleasing for a “teacher” as being present for that “ah ha” moment when a client gets it. I love helping people gain a new business skill.

We are thankful too for the things we received and for the things we have ahead of us still, for progress made on our dreams. Sometimes strangely enough, the blessing is in what we didn’t get that we thought we wanted.

I am excited about the major changes to the Aberle Enterprises Blog, which I hope you can see. I’m grateful for the compliment received from Examiner.com on my restaurant reviews as well as to Yahoo! Contributor Network for publishing my articles on Associated Content, Yahoo! Finance and recently on Yahoo! Small Business.

With a year this full, I apologize if I missed someone or something. My gratitude still extends to you too.

One of the things that makes this my favorite holiday is sharing time with family. Finally, as turkey is one of my favorite meals, I’m really looking forward to a great meal including turkey with our family!

Happy Thanksgiving, America, and anyone outside the U.S. who wants to celebrate with us. As I truly believe that abundance thrives on gratitude, I wanted to share with you this Thanksgiving Message for 2011. I hope your day is wonderful too!

Building profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle, Aberle Enterprises

Related articles

• The Attitude of Gratitude Changes Everything! (dailymuse.spiritlightinsight.com)

This past month has been one of intense growth and changes for the Aberle Enterprises Blog. These experiences provide the following blogging tips and tutorials for serving your audience better.

Blogging Tips and Tutorials

One of the toughest things for any business person is to attract new customers, new prospects or new readers. This is why so many of my articles are related to customer service. It is also why so many of my articles are related to marketing.

While there are exceptions to every statement, generally for small business people to make a sale, they must first establish some relationship. Your blog makes it possible for people to know, like and trust you which are the foundation for building any business relationship where you can help customers buy.

A Good Blog Site and Relevant Posts Will Engage Your Ideal Prospects

Obviously, before you can build the relationship, you must first become a magnet to attract people who are interested in the benefits of what you can do for them. Next, it is essential to a healthy small business to keep customers coming back and telling others about their great experience.

If you visit the Aberle Enterprises Blog, you will see the changes. Some people have commented already on how attractive the changes have made the site. These changes are meant to make it easier for you to find information that might be of help to you in your business.  Here are some of the obvious tweaks:

1. New Theme The most significant change is the new theme, MyInstantTheme for Business. It is designed to improve search engine ranking.
2. Dynamic Content Gallery You will see a rotating slideshow at the top of the page. Dynamic Content Gallery, a free plugin pulls pictures from your latest posts. On Aberle Enterprises, the selection is set to pull by category. Dynamic Content Gallery then displays an image from each category in turn.
3. Reorganized Categories You will find the Aberle Enterprises Blog has a lot fewer categories to make them more meaningful to you. Additionally, most of the remaining categories that serve a purpose now show up as “child” categories under “parent” categories.
4. Magazine Look – The most recent articles for each category show up below the category header. You can choose the number showing by how many you want on the page. The intent of this new theme is to make a blog more like a magazine so your readers can see what else is there to read. Gina Gaudio-Graves  recently pointed out that studies show readers are less interested in blogs now and more interested in magazines.
5. Thumbnail Pictures Thanks to the MyInstantTheme for Business, the articles on the home page can have thumbnail pictures too. Provided they are related to the content of the post, they will be more likely to grab the attention of your visitors. Additionally, they will improve your search engine rankings.
6. “Claim now!” Button You will find the look of the opt-in button changed in the upper right corner. Although it took a bit of work learning how to change the “Submit” button, you will find it now reads “Claim now!” Again, testing has shown that “submit” has very poor response for getting people to opt-in.

Example of a Parent Category and Its Subcategories

In the bullets above, you found that some of the changes include dividing categories inot parent category and its subcategories, called children or child categories. The following is an example:

Parent: Sales and Marketing

Child Categories:

• Blogs and Blogging
• Heart Centered Sales and Marketing
• Internet Marketing
• Marketing Strategies
• Sales Success
• Sales Strategies
• Small Business Sales and Marketing

You can find the categories on a navigation bar below the main site navigation bar. The parent categories show up with the child categories on the drop down menus.

If you have your own blog already, go to your Dashboard. In the left hand sidebar near the top, you will find Categories. You can add to, delete and edit your existing categories. In the Edit mode, you can chose to move it under another category. That’s how you change a parent to a child.

What This New Theme Could Mean to You

This theme has produced a major increase in the number of page views, the average length of a page view, and other statistics. The reason that this is important to you is that the number of page views and the length of time on your site indicate how engaged people are with your site. The more engaged they are, the more likely to become customers.

The main idea behind these blogging tips and tutorials for serving your audience better is to capture the interest of visitors to your site strongly enough to get them engaged. When they are engaged, they will read more and be more likely to take action when you suggest it, such as opting in to your community. People will rarely join your mailing list unless they decide you offer enough value to make it worth adding your emails to their inboxes.

The new look and changes to Aberle Enterprises Blog gave you a chance to see in action these blogging tips and tutorials for serving your audience better. As the ultimate goal of small business blogs is to sell something, you first must create some a positive relationship. This means getting your visitors engaged in your site, to read more and to want more. Aberle Enterprises’ blog now serves you better so you can serve your market better.

To find out more about making your blog the heart of your online small business presence, check out the FREE 30 Day IM Challenge course. I do encourage you, though, to take the advantage of the Gold Challenge Call upgrade for only $14.95. If you act immediately, this gives you access to a lifetime of blogging training calls — for just a one time tuition of just $14.95!

When you join us on the Gold Calls, make sure you say hello!  I look forward to meeting you on the calls!

Building profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle, Aberle Enterprises

More from This Author:

The following are other of my Blogging Tips and Tutorials articles:

How I Use Commenting on Other People’s Blogs to Improve My Search Engine Ranking

Can You Create Your Own Small Business Website Without a Website Designer?

What Does Google Consider Content for Search Engine Ranking?

Here is the information from that slideshow, “The Four Types of Content on a Website,” plus the fifth, which is “Slideshow.” I will cover it at the end with a screenshot of my Associated Content slideshow.

Slide1

The Four Types of Content on a Website
John R. Aberle
© 2011, John R. Aberle

To get the highest search engine ranking you can, you need more than just written articles.

Slide2

Search Engine Ranking Basics – 1
John R. Aberle
© 2011, John R. Aberle

Search engines see content as more than just written articles. The reasons driving this are that
• Google, Yahoo! and Bing are all concerned about making the Internet a better user experience
• They also want to make it accessible to more people

Slide3
Search Engine Ranking Basics – 2
John R. Aberle
© 2011, John R. Aberle

In a presentation on the YouTube API blog, three presenters covered “The YouTube Caption API, Speech Recognition, and WebVTT captions for HTML.” Naomi Black of the Accessibility Engineering team showed a graph for the world population on the Internet by country. She said that the number of people on the Internet who are deaf and hard of hearing in the United States alone is more than the population of Canada.

Slide4

Search Engine Ranking Basics – 3
John R. Aberle
© 2011, John R. Aberle

So the need for different types of content is significant.
What are the benefits to you to care?
– You will reach much larger numbers of potential customers
– You will reach them the way they prefer to learn
– You will get improved search engine ranking because the search engines are looking for people who use more forms of content than just articles

Slide5

Search Engine Ranking Basics – 4
John R. Aberle
© 2011, John R. Aberle

Search engines look for four different types of content on a website:
• Written articles
• Images (e.g. pictures, graphics, graphs)
• Audio
• Video

Slide6

1. Written Articles, e.g. blogs
John R. Aberle
© 2011, John R. Aberle

Image for Written Articles is screen print of Aberle Enterprises blog.

Slide7

2. Images – photos, drawings, screenshots, graphs, graphics
John R. Aberle
© 2011, John R. Aberle

Screen print for Images is taken from John Aberle’s Flickr Photostream.

Slide8

3. Audio – podcasts, online radio shows, mp3 files
John R. Aberle
© 2011, John R. Aberle

Screen print for Audio is taken from John Aberle’s PodBean podcasts.

Slide9

4. Video – YouTube.com, Vidler.com,
Animoto.com, Jing.com
John R. Aberle
© 2011, John R. Aberle

Screen print for Video is taken from John Aberle’s YouTube Channel.

Slide10

Search Engine Ranking Basics Recap
John R. Aberle
(c) 2011, John R. Aberle

The four types of content on a website that will improve your site’s users experience and make it more accessible to greater numbers of prospects are written articles, images, audio files, and video. Because your are helping the search engines in their objectives, they will reward you with higher search engine ranking, which leads to more generic (free) traffic.

Slide 11

Slideshow
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, the Slideshow is the fifth type of content on a website or blog. When I posted the slideshow on Associated Content, it was “The Four Types of Content on a Website.” I ignored Slideshow as a separate category originally because it is a collection of images.

Nevertheless, slideshows can go one step further than merely using multiple images. They can include the text on the images and/or add explanatory text. So you now have text, like an article, that the search engines can read and you have the attraction factor of a series of pictures or images.

Your Internet marketing goal, especially with your blog, needs to be to make the Internet a better user experience. There are five types of content which do that: articles, images, audio recordings, video recordings, and slideshows. The more types of content your use, the more effectively you will contribute to making the Internet a better user experience. In return, the search engines will reward you with better organic search ranking.

When you are ready to build your small business on the Internet, you will get better results faster with a successful Internet marketing mentor. Gina Gaudio-Graves, the JV Queen, has the best offer I know of to sample her teachings. Sign up for the free 30 Day IM Challenge course.

Building your profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle

Article Source: “The Four Types of Content on a Website,” John R. Aberle, Yahoo! Contributor Network, Sep 14, 2011

Fortunately, Mark found enough renovation work from banks on repossessions to keep them limping along. He brought in workers from his former crews as needed to get the jobs done.

Frustrated that Their Marketing Wasn’t Working, They Were Desperate

They were desperate to find more customers to keep their small business afloat. They wanted some business tips for success that really worked. The strangest advice they got was to stop advertising in media that appeals to everyone. Instead, they needed to focus tightly on a specific customer profile, one that is most likely to want the solutions they can provide.

Sally found information on the Internet that taught her to talk in her marketing efforts about their ideal customer’s pain instead of about Mark and her small business. She was then able to describe that pain which their prospects feel so strongly. Frankly, those prospects are so concerned about their pain that they are desperate for a solution that will remove the pain. Moreover, they don’t know what the solution really is or they would already have bought it.

By talking to people who fit their ideal customer profile, Sally began building relationships. She used a blog as the heart of their marketing efforts. Then, following the other advice she found on social networking, she built relationships which lead to referrals as well as to calls from people who really related to what Sally wrote about.

She Gave Away a Small E-book of Tips to Eliminate Their Pain

She created a free bonus to get people to join her mailing list: “Twenty Projects You Can Do to Increase the Value of Your Home in Today’s Tight Market and Get It Sold in Half the Average Time.” She has had the best response from that small ebook of any marketing she had done in the last three years.
Mark too Started Asking about Their Pain First

Next, she told Mark to focus on the prospects’ pain and to really listen to them describe their pain. Once he has made a strong connection and started a relationship, he can discuss a solution that will solve their pain for them.

These sales and marketing business tips for success are working. Their new efforts focus on first building relationships. To do this, they are listening to what their ideal prospects are feeling before talking about themselves. This has resulted in Mark being able to put three people back on full-time and another crew part-time. Their business has returned to being profitable giving them much needed emotional relief and a sense of hope for the future.

Are You Ready to Get a Solution to Your Sales and Marketing Pain?

If you too feel the pain and frustration of marketing that isn’t working, look into this free course on using a blog and the heart of your small business marketing, the 30 Day IM Challenge.

This collage combines the four types of content on one background with a title for John Aberle's blog post, “What Does Google Consider Content for Search Engine Ranking?”

Before you get to that answer, consider why the search engines put so much emphasis on content. Google, Yahoo! and Bing makes their income largely from selling advertising. The beauty of this is that you get access to an incredible service free. For this reason, their goal is to appeal to users better than their competitors. Like TV networks, their advertising rates are dependent upon “traffic”; TV advertisers call traffic “viewers.”

In order to excel at appealing to searchers, each search engine must do a superb job of enabling people to find what they want.  Thus, while the search engines index billions of pages, they must decide which of those pages show up on the first pages of search results. They do this based on how well those pages serve the needs of their searchers. People come to the Internet looking for information, i.e. content, that answers their questions.

Another term for information is content
Because ads are generally not content in the context of why people go to the Internet in the first place, be sure that your websites, blogs, and marketing brochures really speak to what your prospects and customers want to read.

In Google Webmaster Tools Help, the section for Webmaster Guidelines even spells out deceptive practices to avoid if you want to continue to show up in their search engine ranking.

Deceptive practices basically are those which present a different experience for the visitor from what the search engines bots find, such as using white text on a white background to hide a link. Again, the whole issue comes down to delivering the best user experience possible.

Although, thanks to YouTube and other video sites, searchers are looking for entertainment as well as information, the main reason most people go to the Internet is to learn something that will help them solve a problem or achieve some desire, like a new look or a vacation or something else they want to improve their lives. They find their answers in content.

The Four Types of Content on a Website
For the search engines, content is more than just text. In particular, Google has made it clear that they want the Internet to be accessible to all people, even those who cannot see or who have a problem hearing. Thus, Google looks for the following four types of content:

• Written articles
• Audio*
• Video*
• Slideshows*

*The interesting thing about audio, video, and slideshows is that so far, the search engines can’t “read” them for the content that is in them so be sure that you put a title to each, an alt title (alternate title for when either your visitor’s browser can’t load the picture or video file or the person has a problem seeing or hearing), and a caption. If the program you are using to create or to upload this non-written content accepts tags, be sure to use them. For our purposes here, tags are equivalent to keywords.

What’s in It for You to Use More than Just Written Content?
The reason it’s important to understand the four types of content Google looks for is that the amount of content and the variety of types of content in your blog posts and on your website affect how well your site will show up on a generic search. Ranking high on generic searches means that you can get the benefit of showing up on the first few pages free, while other companies pay thousands of dollars to get those positions using Google AdWords.

The answer then to, “what does Google consider content for search engine ranking?” is that they have four categories. To rank well in the search engines provide a good user experience with your content. And to make the images, videos and slideshows more helpful, include alternate titles. Avoid deceptive practices to just boost your search engine ranking. These forms of content then will make you popular in search engine ranking.

Building profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle, Aberle Enterprises

P.S. If you really want to improve your blogging results, check out this incredible 18 lesson course – FREE . It covers blogging and Internet marketing in fantastic detail. But best of all, there is one complete system to it.

P.P.S. You can also sign up for lifetime Gold Challenge Calls for only $14.95 if you take the opportunity when you sign up the 30 Day IM Challenge course. Attend weekly or download the recordings for as long as you want. These calls are also great for keeping up on what Google looks for when doing its search engine ranking

Building profits through strong relationships,

                    John

John R. Aberle

Aberle Enterprises

P.S. If you really want to improve your blogging results, check out this incredible 18 lesson course – FREE http://askjra.com/30day. It covers blogging and Internet marketing in fantastic detail. But best of all, there is one complete system to it.

You can also sign up for lifetime Gold Challenge Calls for only $14.95 if you take advantage of the opportunity when you sign up free the 30 Day IM Challenge course. These calls are invaluable. You can attend weekly or download the recording for as long as you want.