What follows are tips and tricks that will help you grow your customer base, gathered through years of experience and talking to customers.

When you’re a business owner, you never know when the next opportunity will present itself. Whether you’re a contractor, photographer or a real estate agent your livelihood depends on those opportunities, so you need to be familiar with every tool & tactic out there.

I’m a small business owner.

Most of my friends are small business owners as well.

I guess it’s something in the water. :)

No idea how this happened.

We talk a lot about how to increase our revenues, how to develop  customers, how to improve  the business relationship with our customers a little better.

I hope you realize, this little better is the cream of the revenue.

It’s the unexpected referral that came effortlessly and presented itself… like a bag of cash waiting to be picked up.

Or that surprisingly easy project, for one of your existing customers, that went so well it covered for 5 other projects…

So I decided to dig a little further, out of the comfortable reach of my close network, and started asking my customers, colleagues, even strangers I met for the first time.. I came off as a weirdo, but I learned a lot about this subject.

So here it is, the list of small details that made my life much easier, helped my customers remember me, and eventually, increased my revenues.  (please feel free to comment below, add your ideas, contact me directly etc. )

1. I will always keep my brand as visible as possible (post your logo on your car, get branded pens, t-shirts, hats, etc.). Keep visibility in mind at all times, when you park your car, when you print an invoice, when you leave a business card to customer. The more visible you are, the more customers will reach out to you.

2. Always carry a business card with you! Keep extra ones in your wallet and your car. It’s not just about having the card with you at all times, make sure that all your loyal customers have more then one to hand out to their network. When you complete a job, try to leave more then one at a strategic place.

3. Prepare a short sentence that describes what your company does best and use it whenever asked about your business. Help people become your ambassadors by providing them with the right words to describe your business.  You can ask your friends how they describe your business in one sentence. Keep in mind, less is more. Make sure it’s very short and your best qualities are mentioned.

4. When completing a job, always ask for feedback. ( face to face is best, online is even better ) You will not believe how much you will learn from those short sessions. After receiving feedback it’s the best time to ask for the next tip. Having a mechanism in place to make sure you collect reviews on review sites is highly recommended!

5. Ask your loyal customers for referrals! (don’t be shy)

This is a win-win situation; your customers will happily do it, and you can reward them in many ways (we can discuss those in a different post).

Get it into your system, asking for referrals. It will help you much more then any money spent on advertising or buying leads.

• Carry little branded giveaways with you at all times and generously hand them out to customers. Pens, hats, stickers, magnets, toys, key holder etc.
• Always be polite, remember that you are a one-man customer-support and sales department. You need to behave accordingly.

There is little tolerance to crazy professionals, and you’ll need to go through a long list of customers before you can allow yourself to become the “soup nazi” of your industry.

• Network with colleagues and other professionals. You never know who your next referral will arrive from. Go to events, talk to your customers and other suppliers. Get to know the leaders of your industry and study them.
• Talk and listen to your customers. You’ll be surprised of how much they will be willing to help once a closer relationship has been forged.

This is a universal truth, being receptive and open will help you tremendously with your customer relationship.

• Keep records and notes about all your customers. It will increase your conversion and will seem as though you remember everything about your customers (everybody likes to feel remembered).

Act upon those little notes. Make sure they are handy and available for you in real time.

• Send out personal branded emails to your network, with every special event on their calendar. Holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, etc.  I’m sure that a little reminder at the right time, is exactly what is needed in order to get to this little extra cream in the revenues I was referring to.
• Last but most importantly (and I’m sure that you know that already…): ALWAYS do the best work you can. If you deliver great results on time, your customer base will grow, people will recommend your brand to their friends and you’ll be swamped with work.

Well, reading this you might say, this guy is a full of xxxx, this doesn’t work in real life. One person cannot do it all.

Then I have to remind you that you do much more then that and much more everyday. Being a business owner is like juggling 8 balls at once, there is always pressure and time management is extremely difficult.

And you already manage to do all of that.

It’s that little addition that makes the difference.

So how can you do that? Well, you can hire a secretary, or a personal assistant. You can find out about different services that can help you.

Or you can just start one by one. Accomplish one and move to the next. It doesn’t have to be in that order, but you do have to start somewhere. Maybe in someone else’s list… but do begin today.

What do you feel are the main takeaways to growing your customer base?

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The Art of Growing Your Customer Base

How can online polls and surveys help grow your business?

With so much business conducted online these days, the sphere of internet marketing has become a huge field of endeavor in itself. The internet has given enterprises an unprecedented opportunity to not only build up a detailed picture of its target market – and even individual customers – but also to build interactive relationships with these customers and much more. To this end, there are many tools available, such as social media and email marketing, but when it comes to carrying out wide-ranging and effective customer research, there are few tools more powerful than online surveys.

Online Polls And Surveys Are Cheap and Wide-Ranging

The two major strengths of these lie with their cost effectiveness and wide reach, with business owners able to conduct the sort of market research that used to involve hefty fees to an agency employing mailouts or people hanging around with clipboards on street corners. Nowadays, surveys can be sent to as many email addresses as the enterprise requires, at very little cost. Indeed, when you realize how many online marketing specialists offer businesses a free online survey, it becomes clear that this important data-gathering can be done for a tiny fraction of the cost of old-fashioned phone or paper-based market research.

High Rates Of Response

One of the factors that makes or breaks market research surveys is the incidence rate. This refers to the amount of people surveyed who actually bother to respond. With old-fashioned mailings, people can put them aside and chuck them in the bin, while with phone surveys it is often difficult for respondents to view them as anything other than an annoyance and a distraction from their day. Online polls and surveys consistently register a far higher incidence rate because recipients can finish them as their own schedule demands and they are easy both to fill in and return.

Methods to Maximize Responses

Companies seeking to harness this high incidence rate – and indeed to maximize it – can also box clever by using its own email contacts and website to generate the list of recipients. Most savvy enterprises already encourage customers to subscribe to newsletters or promotional emails, so the regular or occasional request for customers on this list to undertake a brief online survey fits very neatly into this. With targeted customers receiving the surveys, you can expect the proportion of considered responses to be very high.

Use The Free Tools Available

When seeking to compose and distribute online polls and surveys, you will naturally want them to be as comprehensive and appealing as possible. The free online survey tools available from professional agencies are a massive help with this, offering such handy resources as templates, writing tips, plus automated software tools concerned with managing lists, optimizing delivery, tracking surveys and their responses and compiling reports on the data harvested. To ensure that these tools are used to the full, a business needs to be absolutely sure at the start what the aims of the survey are, and how the data that will be gathered can feed into its overall market research program. 

Help us out and take the online poll below. 

Will use this information to create future content.

The Survey as a Marketing Opportunity

One example of a well-crafted online survey is one that helps to promote a positive image of the company’s products or services. Questions can be written to emphasize their positive aspects, such as asking respondents to rate in order of importance such things as “high quality customer service”, “quality materials” and “fast delivery”. Even as you are discovering customer preferences, you are implanting positive thoughts about your products in a customer’s mind, as well as reminding them anew about aspects of your business you may have forgotten. 

Disadvantages – and what to do about them

OK, so far we’ve looked at the superlative advantages of online polls and surveys, but they are not without their weaknesses as well – the good news is that these can be managed and minimized. The major weakness of online polls and surveys is their propensity toward lower reliability than other methods. Statisticians refer to the subject of reliable survey results as panel integrity, which can often be low with online surveys since there is no independent oversight when they are being completed. To keep panel integrity at its maximum, enterprises can take several steps. These include only distributing surveys to customers already signed up to a mailing list, to allow for the verification of their identity; use survey software to set minimum times for completion (to prevent respondents whizzing through the survey mindlessly ‘ticking boxes’) and to purge the system of surveys which are returned with the same letter or number answer for every question (so-called ‘straight line’ results).

Policing Your Surveys With Online Tools

Software can also be used to monitor the email addresses given for the sending of discount coupons, loyalty points or any other ‘rewards’ for completing the surveys. Cheats can be swiftly identified by the use of the same address given multiple times for ‘different’ respondents. These can be purged from the survey results and the addresses blocked. Similarly, early questions in the survey asking for respondents’ personal and demographic details can be checked by the software against later answers to identify any inconsistencies caused by respondents using multiple identities. Finally, at least one question in the survey should take the form of a short ‘essay’ to weed out both those respondents who cannot be bothered to give considered answers and those who are using multiple identities (the latter will not bother to personalize such open-ended answers multiple times).

Analyze and Optimize

So you’ve sent out the survey and you’ve ensured that they are both well-crafted to maximize the incidence rate while also being well-proofed against low panel integrity. You will have a large amount of data to tabulate, organize and analyze. Again, most good free online survey software can do a fantastic job of all three of these tasks – presenting the data in graph and table form, as well as spotting trends and other patterns. For more detailed analysis, spreadsheet software or more advanced statistical apps are available. In short, there is no reason why any business should not be making full use of online polls and surveys to carry out extensive market research, increase the efficiency of their business and even keep tabs on the competition. The resources are already out there!

What do you feel are the benefits of polls and surveys?

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Want to know the secret to making list building easier?

The easy answer is to read through and apply the list building strategies outlined in this awesome blog post.

Of course it never seams to be quite that easy, right?

Continue reading and I’ll share with you some essential strategies that you can use immediately to start seeing an increase in your subscriber base.

Why should you focus on list building?

It’s the life blood of any business, without a list of people to market too then all you’ve got is a hobby.  Don’t look for overnight success, because 1 raving fan can become hundreds in just a few short days.

There are many ways in which list building can be performed, some are more effective then others but as always I recommend you start with one.  Many newbie marketers will quit before actually hitting their stride, it’s only normal to be discouraged if you fail a few times.  Those that learn from there mistakes will persevere and keep pushing forward.  List building works, but if it was easy wouldn’t everybody be successful at it?

Some of the most popular list building techniques include:

1. Email Marketing

2. Opt-in Offers/Squeeze Pages

3. Google Adwords

4. Facebook Ads

5. Article Marketing

6. Webinars

7. Video Marketing

8. Podcasts

Now that you’ve got a clearer understanding of what list building is and why you need it. The following is a collection of awesome blog posts that will provide you some additional strategies to get more out of list building.

List Building with Social Media [Podcast] by Amy Porterfield

Quick Recap: Amy Porterfield is well known for her expertise in Facebook marketing. So much so, that she developed a course called FBinfluence. This also reinforces what I said earlier, Amy focused on one strategy and built her reputation around it. Connect with @AmyPorterfield and she’ll tell you all about her initial failures, she’ll tell you how she continued to test different strategies until she found what worked.  The rest is history!!

In this podcast, Amy dives into social media list building strategies that will help you attract your ideal audience and strengthen your relationships beyond your social media platforms.

Below is an awesome video on how to build a list on Facebook, you’ll learn how to attract leads and make money using the largest social media site on the planet.

Have you had enough? Do you want to learn more list building and Facebook Marketing strategies? Grab a paper and pen and start reviewing these posts and make sure you take some notes.

8 Ways to Boost Your Business With Webinars by Lewis Howes

Quick Recap: Webinars have quickly become one of the most powerfulest form of all lead generation techniques.  There is no one more qualified to teach you about Webinars then my man Lewis Howes.  Lewis outlines eight essential strategies that will help you make your next webinar a success.

14 Ways to Get More Facebook Shares [Infographic] by Mari Smith

Quick Recap: Facebook shares are an important part of creating viral traffic, the more the merrier. In this post you’ll learn how to not only boost visibility but to also inspire your fans to share your content.

Facebook Photos: Sizes, Dimensions & Types by David Coleman

Quick Recap: Have you ever wondered how to create those large panoramic images above your Facebook time line? Look no further, this step by step guide will show you how to do it as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Don’t forget to check out Volume 1 & Volume 2 of the Awesome Blog Post series.

What list building technique are you going to master and become famous for?

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This weeks blog post and also the last one for the year will help you learn about various business strategies like Backlinking, Blogging, Branding, Email Marketing, Networking, Leadership and Social Media.

It’s a lot to take in in one visit, so make sure you bookmark this page, it will definitely come in handy as you start 2013.

Here we go, here are the 10 Blog Posts of 2012 to learn about business and marketing.

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1. 9 Email Marketing Tips to Turn Your Keyboard into an ATM Machine

Whether you are growing a brick and motor business or an online business you should have a database of your clients and prospects contact details. In online marketing, we say your list is your asset. Once you build a list you can turn it in to cash on demand. There are many marketers who do this,  while the remaining 95% are wondering how you do it.

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2. 

100 Books to Inspire Leadership and Create Movers and Shakers

Not everyone is a leader. Most people don’t want to lead. Not truly. A leader sacrifices, as opposed to a tyrant who crushes. Think back to the greatest leaders of all time.  They all sacrificed and suffered, but it was for a greater good that they took those risks.

A few leaders are born. They are the exception. Most leaders are made.   They set their minds on something greater and didn’t rest until they achieved it.   If you are one of these, then this list is for you.

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3. 

8 Tasty Blogging Tips

Blogging is probably one of the easiest ways to get a presence online. So easy in fact that you could have a blog up and running within 10 minutes and all for free. But this is just the beginning and there are many more bridges you have to cross before you can have a successful blog website.

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4. Top Social Bookmarking Sites for Backlinks

Social bookmarking sites have become increasingly popular these days as people tend to be more open to sharing their likes to either friends, family or even to the public. Bookmarking is simply tagging your favorite sites and sharing them to others on the web. A social bookmarking site allows those websites you like to be tagged, categorized and organized. These bookmarked sites can also be used by others to add to their compilation and again, share with others.

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5. 30 Inspiring Marketing Quotes from the Top Branding Experts

With inbound marketing quickly gaining recognition as the most innovative and cost effective form of marketing for business, plenty of people have something to say on the subject. So we’ve carefully selected the best 30 quotes from the world’s greatest branding experts, marketing thinkers and creatives to save you time.

Here’s what the top branding gurus have to say on the subject:

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6. 7 Business Tax Deductions You Don’t Know About

These days, more professionals are shifting from the role of full-time employee to freelancer, a movement that some refer to as a gig economy. If you have freelance income to report by U.S. tax day (Apr. 17), your taxes will be more involved than your colleagues’, who only have W-2 forms.

Whether this is your first year self-employed, or you’re an experienced entrepreneur, freelancing comes with a whole new set of tax issues. But you can still find plenty of opportunities to cut your tax bill.

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7. 8 Super Powerful Social Media Marketing Tips for Business

Marketing and Advertisement are the two major key factors which ensure success of any business concern, big or small. Where large businesses have enough floating capital to invest with, small businesses with their limited resources, do not have much options. Like a sign of relief, and an oasis in a desert, the launch and introduction of the social media networking chain has imparted enough opportunities to these business units, with limited scale of operation, to increase their revenue earning capacity, and thereby incur profits and success in their line of dealings.

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8. 7 Pinterest Clones To Expand Your Social Media Empire

So with Pinterest’s wild success in social media during the last half of 2011 and continuing through this year 2012, you knew some “Pinterest Clones” were going to have to find there way into the social media market. And without fail they have. 7 of them have gained some popularity and actually have decent sized user bases.

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9. 20 Productivity Tips for Small Business

Keeping a small business flourishing in a bad economy often proves to be a difficult task. Are you searching for ways to make your business more productive? Being an owner of a small business in this day and time often means working long hours and finding promising solutions to problems that threaten to sink the business.

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10. The Golden Rules of Successful Business Networking

Some people just have the habit of giving their business card to anyone they meet in a social gathering. This is not among the most prudent practices. The fact is that you should give your business card to someone only when you have a conversation with the person and that person will be interested to follow up. 

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As we say good bye to 2012, it’s important to implement what you’ve learned in this post into your own business.  You need to take plenty of notes, prepare a business plan and take action.

Massive, massive action !!

From all of these great blog posts, what did  you learn about?

Join the discussion by leaving a comment below and please spread the word by sharing this post with your friends.

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Building a brand is difficult, but fixing a brand after a PR disaster can be even harder. If your brand is thought of as being cheap, poor quality, or irresponsible, persuading people to give you a second chance can take a lot of work.  This is especially true now that social media makes it easy for one customer’s grievance (legitimate or not) to spread to hundreds, or thousands, of their online friends within minutes.

Fix the Problem First

When a customer complains, the first thing many customers think of doing is refunding the customer or replacing the product, and giving the customer some promotional gifts or vouchers as compensation for their trouble.  While this fixes the immediate issue, in that the complaining customer walks away happy, it doesn’t solve the real problem.

Popular Post: 30 Inspiring Marketing Quotes from the Top Branding Experts

The above course of action is good customer service, of course. However, if the unhappy customer buys from you again at a later date and has a similar problem, they’re likely to notice a pattern.  Do you want your brand to be associated with unreliable products?  A time-strapped customer may decide to choose another brand because they don’t want to take the risk of having to deal with your customer service department, no matter how helpful it is.  Most people just want a product that works first time, every time.

If you notice that you are getting lots of complaints about slow delivery, poor packaging or failing products, take those issues seriously. Preventing future complaints is just as important as reacting to the complaints you’re getting now.

Listen to Your Customers

Your brand is not necessarily what you want it to be.  Sometimes, a company’s vision lines up with how the customers see the brand, but that’s not always the case. Pay attention to the people that are engaging with your brand.  You may be surprised at the people that you attract. For example, a budget hardware manufacturer may find that their products are popular with computer enthusiasts that like to overclock their machines to squeeze every last bit of performance out of them.  If the manufacturer took measures to prevent overclocking, thinking that only price-conscious buyers were interested in their products, they would get a nasty surprise from the backlash they received.

Join the Conversation

If things start to go wrong, the first thing you should do is open as many lines of communication as possible.  Send out email messages apologizing for the issue, get someone to answer tweets and Facebook posts, and get extra people working on your customer service lines. Make sure that your existing customers know that their concerns are being taken seriously.  Send affected customers a refund, promotional gifts, or some other gesture (appropriate for the scale of the problem) by way of apology.

Popular Post: How To Build a Brand as Big as Apple

Once the immediate crisis is over, take some time to learn from your mistakes. If the problem was a bad product, send it back to R&D.  If your couriers were unreliable, find new ones. If it was a case of marketing sending out the wrong messages about the product, talk to the marketing team and make sure it never happens again. When you are sure that you’ve fixed the issue, you can get back to marketing your brand again.  Be consistent with your marketing, and run frequent, regular campaigns.  It may take a few months to see the impact of your campaign, but if you are consistent in your efforts they will pay off.

How important is fixing your brand after a PR disaster?

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For those who don’t know QR code or Quick Response Code to give their full name, are clever bar codes than can be scanned using a variety of devices to take you straight to a website or preform other useful functions.

The reason QR codes are becoming ever more popular is because now the majority of smartphones have these scanners built in or the capacity to download them for free. This means that the everyday smartphone users can quickly scan a code and be taken straight to the website or offer page without having to write the address down, this also means that they can go there and then lessening the chance of them forgetting.

It couldn’t be simpler getting a QR code. Simply preform a quick web search for “QR code creator” and many free websites pop up that allow you to simply enter your websites URL to generate a QR code as an image file. You can then use this anywhere to promote your businesses.

Due to the wide availability of QR codes and their scanners, using QR codes have become more popular in marketing. Businesses are keen to take advantage of this trend as it can really help when advertising your business successfully. There are many things you can do with QR codes and below a just a few that work really well.

Related Post: From Design To Hosting: Creating A Mobile Friendly Website

Marketing QR Codes on Business Cards

Business Cards are a great way to make the right first impression with potential customers. Adding a QR code to your business card can mean the difference between getting a quick visit to your website while they are out and about and them forgetting about it before they get home. A QR code can be used along with business information to make it quick and simple to get more details on you and your company.

Having a QR code linked up with your website can make you look much more technically professional, as many small businesses wouldn’t be expected to have this level of technical detail. The professional edge can mean the difference between getting a contract over your competitors and losing out.

Putting QR Codes on Flyers

Flyers are a great way to advertise your business and any up and coming event. A QR code is a great way to add interest to a flyer and potentially get more people to your businesses or events. A great way to market with QR codes when hosting an event such as special music nights at a club is to have nothing but a QR code on a flyer. It might sound silly but it plays on curiosity, meaning a lot more people will visit the website just to see what it is, rather than just being thrown away like many flyers are. This only works with certain niches but can be a very effective marketing tool when used correctly.

Having a QR code on a leaflet or flyer can mean the difference between it being used or thrown away, which is the fate of many standard leaflets that get thrust on passers-by in the streets. One great way to use a flyer with a QR code is to have exclusive offers that are only accessible when the code is scanned. This means not only will people become more invested in the business when trying to buy from you but they’ll also visit your website boosting your web presence and encouraging them to come back.

Using QR Codes with Invitations

QR codes can be used with invitations to make them much more effective and interactive. A great way to do this would be to have a QR code on the invitation which would lead you to a page containing the event’s information so all the guests would have to have is a small invitation rather than a large one or separate documents with information on. This not only makes your invitations great but allows guests to stop getting lost as you could even link the QR code up to an interactive map such as Google Maps.

Related Post: 5 Best Business Apps For iPhone Users

Printing QR Codes on T-shirts

Lots of business use T-shirts and other clothing to help advertise themselves effectively. Clothing on staff handing out promotions or even handing out free branded clothing has been time tested marketing tools for years. However now with QR codes the marketing potential of clothing is fantastic. Seeing a QR code on a T-shirt sparks peoples curiosity and makes them want to investigate further.

When handing out free promotional clothing what could better than having your companies QR code on it. Having your QR code on lots of clothing been warn in everyday life means having walking physical links to your company all around. QR codes are also great for promotions, why not have a T-shirt on your staff that says “scan me for 30% off” etc.

QR codes are the now trend in online marketing, they are cheap and easy to use and more businesses should take full advantage of them. I hope this quick guide has helped give you some useful ideas to boost you’re E-marketing.

How have you used QR codes to market your business?

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Today, businesses are learning new ways to enhance their blogs to get better results by attracting more and more customers. As per a study, those businesses who have blogs get 55 percent more traffic as compared to the ones without the blogs. However, businesses who have blogs, which fail to think outside the box. They are simply seen flooding their blogs with dry updates and happenings of their businesses. This is among the most common mistakes, which businesses today are seen committing. Hence, there is a scope for improving and enhancing your blogging efforts, which could help to improve your business. The following are some of the ways, in which you can improve your business through blogging.

1. Setting up proper content theme and right perspective plans

In your blogging efforts, you need to clearly describe your main theme, which your team could easily follow. You should be able to showcase the value, which you as a business owner are trying to cater to your customers. Hence, to begin with, you need a suitable name for your blog, which should be related to your business and its niche area. Make sure the content you produce over your blog should have relevant information about your products and services, which your business caters. You are supposed to set some specific editorial guidelines, which has to be followed by the bloggers, which could include subjects to be covered in your business blog along with the ways of writing posts.

Related Blog Post: 6 Painless Tips on Starting and Keeping a Small Business Blog

2. Make a good blogging team

When you consider blogging for your business, make sure you have a good blogging team since you would be focusing over your core business and other requirements. Select people who have proper knowledge of your niche area. The blogging team should be good in writing, you could even think of training them along with clearing up the editorial guidelines for effective blogging efforts. Sometime, the businesses have editors to finalize things about their blogs; however, you could have your own ways of working that suits your requirements and your team.

3. Make your business user friendly

A business blog could be called as a single place, where you get the opportunity to know your customers in a better way. You should have a two way communication with your customers. It must look like a proper talk between the readers and the bloggers rather than appearing to be a formal kind of conversation between you and your customers. You need to motivate your team members to express things in their own styles. You need to ensure that your blog should be diversified in nature rather than carrying a monotonous tone. Blogs are basically a place where you could connect with your clients, hence better avoid adopting the corporate style and then only you could prosper.

4. Always respond to opinions

Once you have given the opportunity to your customers or readers to air their views about different subjects you handle over your blogging platform, it is mandatory for you to respond to their opinion with satisfying answers. Hence, you should form a comment policy, which should be followed by your team. You are supposed to reply to their comments and have proper follow ups. It should convey the feeling of trust among your customers.

5. Establish yourself as an industry expert

Blogs are places where you can help in establishing your business as an expert or authority place in the industry. By effectively blogging, you could build a credibility of your business and thus people would start choosing you against your competitors by keeping the price and quality competent. If you start posting posts related to your niche areas, products or services or any other update in your industry over your blog, these things would prove out to be a wealth of information for your customers. By regular and quality posts over your blog could help you in establishing you as an expert in your industry.

6. Effectively use social media platforms

Social media is doing great these with exorbitant amount of people over Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc. Hence you could plan to make fan pages over these social networking sites to promote your blog posts and business over these platforms. You can render some expert support to your customers or readers coming over your blog via these platforms. You could think of posting your blog posts or links over your business fan pages, widgets and URLs, etc.

In fact, by using these platforms you can create viral effects over your blogs for your business. If you are able to create a good impact over these platforms for your brand, you could see your customers and fans/followers sharing a number of online marketing stuffs to their friends over the social networking platforms as they consider your business having the value. There is couple of tools including the Bloom tools Blog Manager, which helps you in a great deal to share marketing content over social media by being over your blog.

Final word

If you are serious about your business promotion and marketing, you cannot think of ignoring the blogging platforms. Blogs are helping different business to flourish among their customers in many ways. If you follow the ways discussed above in the article, blogging platforms could help your business go improve.

How will these tips help improve your business blogging?

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A/B split testing is like that magical spark between two people who have fallen for each other – irrevocably, but this time it’s an abstract object that turns first-time visitors into lifelong customers of a web business. With A/B testing, it’s all about the results. It doesn’t matter if it was love at first sight between your website and its visitor or maybe it’s something that developed over time. What matters is that the final outcome remains the same, and you’re able to achieve your objective through A/B testing.

Use A/B Split Testing When It’s Time for Change

Your regular routine for managing your website likely involves the following activities.

• Update your website content
• Update your readers about the latest additions to your website
• Create a campaign for new products and services
• Monitor your campaign and modify accordingly

Free Ebook from Unbounce.com:  The Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing

Overall, that’s quite a good setup you have. To start with, it shows that you are aware of how important it is for every website to have fresh content at all times. You also know that it’s important to be proactive when letting your target market know about any changes in your website or about any new products or services you’re launching. It’s good as well that you’re making sure to monitor the results of your campaign.

However, when all’s said and done, the numbers you end up with are just not as satisfactory. Your sales simply don’t do justice to all the hard work you’ve expended. Where did you go wrong? That is something A/B testing can definitely answer for you.

There are several reasons why you must change certain aspects of your website – including those which used to be the very reason you were able to enjoy high profit margins in the past.

• Target market – Their preferences constantly change or evolve, and your website must adapt to such changes.
• Competition – If there’s something that your competition is doing better than you then you need to figure out how to turn things around.
• Industry – New regulations or trends may affect how your business in general is perceived. A change in the overall design and target for your website may be called for to address such changes.
• Economy – Financial constraints on you and your market may eventually require you to look for more cost-efficient marketing strategies to rely on.

Understanding how such factors affect the overall performance of your website will ensure that you take each step involved in A/B testing procedures seriously.

Related Post: Conversion Optimization – 5 Seriously Simple Steps

How to Perform A/B Split Testing

A/B tests are first and foremost characterized by the features listed below.

• They can only test two versions of a singular component while all other components must remain the same.
• They must be conducted at the same time. There are software tools you can use for random subjects to see different versions of your website without causing any adverse impact on their overall experience while visiting your site.
• They require use of additional tools for interpreting and analyzing resulting data. These tools determine up to what extent data from A/B tests may be interpreted.

To illustrate by example, let’s say that you have a website which has a high click out rate but averages only a fraction of website hits per month. With A/B testing, you can determine what about your homepage you should change to increase website traffic. 

Horizontal versus Vertical Layouts

It may be a simple change, but it can affect a user’s overall perception of your website. Even if your products are still arranged according to popularity or price average, the presentation of your products would still differ.

For this type of A/B test, a six-week period will likely be sufficient for accumulating data. Other types of A/B tests may require more or less time. It depends on what type of component you are testing for effectiveness.

Data can be interpreted in various ways, but this will ultimately depend on what additional tools you’d be using. The best tools should provide key comparisons between the two layouts based on the following premises.

• Confidence index – This is the customer’s overall confidence rate in relation to what your business is offering.
• Conversion rate – This refers to the percentage of which the visitors of your website have been converted into actual customers or those who have made verified payments for your products or services.
• Conversion rate error – This is the margin of error in relation to the conversion rate provided by the program.
• Uplift – This reflects the overall effectiveness of the component you are measuring via A/B testing.

How important do you think A/B split testing is in sales conversion?

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Not everyone is a leader. Most people don’t want to lead. Not truly. A leader sacrifices, as opposed to a tyrant who crushes. Think back to the greatest leaders of all time.  They all sacrificed and suffered, but it was for a greater good that they took those risks.

A few leaders are born. They are the exception. Most leaders are made.   They set their minds on something greater and didn’t rest until they achieved it.   If you are one of these, then this list is for you.

Related Posts: 17 Free Business eBooks to Build Your Brand and Bank Account

The list is alphabetical and contains 100 of the very best books on leadership. Pick one up a week, and in 2 years you will have the same dynamic potential as the movers and shakers that caused change and progress across the globe and throughout history.

Ready? Begin.

1 – 10

1.    Age of Discontinuity, The: Guidelines to Our Changing Society – Peter F. Drucker
2.    Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors – Piers Paul Read
3.    Anything You Want – Derek Sivers
4.    The Art of War – Sun Tzu
5.    Authentic Leadership – Bill George
6.    Beyond Counterfeit Leadership – Ken Shelton
7.    Built to Last – Jim Collins
8.    Cigars, Whiskey and Winning: Leadership Lessons from General Ulysses S. Grant – Al Kaltman
9.    Competing for the Future – Gary Hamel & C.K. Prahalad
10.  Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will – Noel Tichy and Stratford Sherma

11 – 20

11.  Courageous Follower, The: Standing Up to and for Our Leaders – Ira Chaleff
12.  Credibility - James Kouzes & Barry Posner
13.  Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within – Robert E. Quinn
14.  Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose – Tony Hsieh
15.  Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us – Daniel H. Pink
16.  Effective Executive, The: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done – Peter F. Drucker
17.  Emotional Intelligence – Daniel Goleman
18.  Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage – Alfred Lansing
19.  Enlightened Leadership – Getting to the Heart of Change – Doug Krug
20.  Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done – Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck

21 – 30

21.  Extraordinary Leader, The – Jack Zenger & Joe Folkman
22.  Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization – Peter M. Senge
23.  First, Break all the Rules – Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman
24.  Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable – Patrick Lencioni
25.  Five Levels Of Leadership  - John Maxwell
26.  Forty-Eight Laws of Power – Robert Greene
27.  Founding Fathers on Leadership: Classic Teamwork in Changing Times – Donald T. Phillips
28.  Genius of Robert E. Lee, The: Leadership Lessons for the Outgunned, Outnumbered and Underfinanced – Al Kaltman
29.  George Washington on Leadership – Richard Brookhiser
30.  George Washington’s Leadership Lessons: What the Father of Our Country Can Teach Us about Effective Leadership and Character – James Rees

31 – 40

31.  Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t – Jim Collins
32.  Heavy Hitter Selling – Steve W. Martin
33.  How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie
34.  In Search of Excellence – Tom Peters & Robert Waterman
35.  It’s Your Ship – Michael Abrashoff
36.  John P. Kotter on What Leaders Really Do – John P. Kotter
37.  Knowing-Doing Gap, The: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action – Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton
38.  Leader’s Handbook: A Guide to Inspiring your People and Managing the Daily Workflow – Peter Scholtes
39.  Leadership – James MacGregor Burns
40.  Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box – The Arbinger Institute

41 – 50

41.  Leadership Challenge, The – Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner.
42.  Leadership Engine, The – Noel Tichy
43.  Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life – Kevin Cashman
44.  Leadership is an Art – Max De Pree
45.  Leadership Jazz: The Art of Conducting Business through Leadership, Followership, Teamwork, Voice, Touch – Max De Pree
46.  Leadership Lessons from the Civil War: Winning Strategies for Today’s Managers – Tom Wheeler
47.  Leadership Made Simple – Ed Oakley and Doug Krug
48.  Leadership Moment, The – Michael Useem
49.  Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun – Wess Roberts
50.  Leading Change – John Kotter

51 -60

51.  Lean Startup, The – Eric Ries
52.  Lessons from the Top: The 50 Most Successful Business Leaders in America–and What You Can Learn From Them – Thomas J. Neff, James M. Citrin
53.  Lessons of Experience, The – Morgan McCall, Michael Lombardo, Ann Morrison
54.  Lion of Liberty: The Life and Times of Patrick Henry – Harlow Giles Unger
55.  Management – Revised Edition – Peter F. Drucker
56.  Military and Political Leaders & Success: 55 Top Military and Political Leaders & How They Achieved Greatness – Business Daily Investor
57.  My Years with General Motors – Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.
58.  Never Give In! – Speeches by Winston Churchill
59.  No BS Ruthless Management – Dan Kennedy
60.  On Becoming A Leader – Warren G. Bennis

61 – 70

61.  On Leadership – John William Gardner
62.  One Minute Manager, The – Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
63.  Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul – Howard Schultz
64.  Power of Full Engagement, The – Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz
65.  Practice of Management, The – Peter F. Drucker
66.  Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence – Daniel Goleman
67.  Prince, The – Niccolo Machiavelli
68.  Profiles in Courage – John F. Kennedy
69.  Profiles in Leadership – Alan Axelrod
70.  Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature – Joseph L. Badaracco Jr.

71 – 80

71.  Quiet Leadership – David Rock
72.  Radical Leap, The – Steve Farber
73.  Rare Find, The – George Anders
74.  Resolved: 13 Resolutions for LIFE – Orrin Woodward
75.  Results-Based Leadership – Dave Ulrich, Jack Zenger, Norm Smallwood
76.  Revolutionary Strategies of the Founding Fathers – Scott Thorpe
77.  Robert E. Lee on Leadership: Executive Lessons in Character, Courage, and Vision – H.W. Crocker III
78.  Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader – Dinesh D’Souza
79.  Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The – Stephen Covey
80.  Story Factor, The – Annette Simmons

81 – 90

81.  Strategic Leadership: The General’s Art – Edited by Mark Grandstaff and Georgia Sorenson
82.  Successful Manager’s Handbook, The – Lisa A. Stevens, Carol J. Skube and David G. Lee
83.  Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard – Chip and Dan Heath
84.  Taking People With You – David Novak
85.  Tao of Leadership, The – John Heider
86.  Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln – Doris Kearns Goodwin
87.  Misssion, the Men, and Me, The; Lessons from a former Delta Force Commander – Pete Blaber
88.  Theodore Roosevelt on Leadership: Executive Lessons from the Bully Pulpit – James M. Strock, Ed Goldman
89.  Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us – Seth Godin
90.  Truth About Managing Effectively, The – Robbins, Fyock and Finney

91 – 100

91.  Twelve Absolutes of Leadership, The – Gary Burnison
92.  21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, The – John Maxwell
93.  Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits – Robert L. Townsend
94.  What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There – Marshall Goldsmith
95.  What It Takes to Be #1: Vince Lombardi on Leadership – Vince Lombardi
96.  Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life – Spencer Johnson
97.  Why CEO’s Fail – David Dotlich & Peter Cairo
98.  Why Leaders Can’t Lead: The Unconscious Conspiracy Continues – Warren Bennis
99.  Winning – Jack Welch
100. Wooden on Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization – John Wooden

In two years, you may have people looking to you with hope and confidence, and you responding with surety, mentally equipped to take the risks.  Feel free to add any of your favorites in the comment section.

Did we miss anything? What books have inspired leadership in you?

Join the discussion by leaving a comment below and please spread the word by sharing this post with your friends.

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Whatever it is, the budget you put in place for your marketing for the year ahead will shape the results you achieve. Now is the ideal time to define your marketing approach and the budget that will support it. In a recent Toluna survey of businesses, 40% of businesses surveyed stated that they did not feel that their marketing budget met all their marketing needs.

In tougher times, the marketing budget is often the first thing that is cut. Yet it is commonly known that companies which consistently market themselves in a recession perform better than those that don’t. So:

• How can companies budget better to create the results they want?
• What can companies do to budget effectively for the year ahead?

Related Post: 5 Tools To Improve Your Social Media ROI

1. Fit your strategy around your target market

Strategy is everything in marketing.  But a separate strategy for your marketing and your sales approach will not deliver the best Return On Investment (ROI). Now is the best time to review your marketing approach in 2011 and identify what worked – and what didn’t. Then, apply this important data to your overall sales and marketing strategy. Which markets are you trying to reach? Which audiences do you want to grow in the coming year? Match this with your marketing approach and plan your marketing spends in careful stages, so that each part of the plan flows from one stage to another. Use inbound marketing technology to track the behaviour of your target markets and ensure that you are using the most appropriate marketing channels to reach them.  This will help you get more from your budget in 2012.

2. Track your ROI on marketing spend

Your marketing data from the past year will provide a valuable insight into what will work over the next 12 months. So carefully track the ROI you’ve gained this year and identify the activities that have created the best results.

3. Be ruthless in assessing what is paying you back and what is proving to be a drain on your resources

Would these areas work better with a different approach, perhaps using inbound marketing to accelerate results and make them more profitable? You can also use inbound marketing technology to closely assess and analyse the exact payback from each area of your marketing plan – and feed this knowledge into the year ahead. Put a plan in place for tracking your ROI. Inbound marketing allows you to do this continuously and consistently, letting you to adapt and refresh your marketing activities accordingly.

4. Create a cross-channel marketing budget

Are you currently using all the appropriate marketing channels? Did your approaches in 2011 feed across the different channels to maximise results – or did you only focus on a couple of areas?

Recent research suggests that companies using social media or “collaborative Web 2.0 technologies” are achieving higher profits. (Source: McKinsey)

Are you one of the companies missing out on a better marketing ROI by neglecting or misusing social media and other technologies?

By using inbound marketing you can connect up all your marketing channels much more effectively, making it easier to retain any potential customers – whatever stage of buying cycle they are at. You can create a cross-channel presence that reduces the cost of building a receptive and responsive brand profile. This approach also makes it much easier to budget for the year ahead. It gives you a core strategy which then feeds out across all the channels – bringing you a better ROI for 2012.

Related Post: 10 Ways to Wow Your Customers

5. Adapt and update

While it is important to develop a clear strategy to get the best from your marketing budget, it is also important to continuously review and analyse your results. More conventional marketing approaches have traditionally made it quite hard to view the results as you go along. But new inbound marketing technology allows you to view the impact of every single aspect of your marketing approach – as it’s happening. Use this invaluable and on-going insight to adapt your strategy and ensure you make the most of your budget throughout 2012.

What is the secret to budgeting right for marketing in the year ahead?

Everybody wants to make their marketing budget work harder. So how can you ensure you do this in the months to come? Focus on your target market and what they’re doing. By using inbound marketing technology you can get closer to buyer behaviour and demand. You can use this insight to create more meaningful connections by building relationships across all the different marketing channels. This enables you to accelerate the relationships you build with your prospects. Instead of waiting for months to view the results, you can see who’s responding – and adapt your strategy to meet the demand there and then.  This ensures that your marketing spend is continuously matched with where it is most effective and that it feeds right back into your company’s sales and marketing strategy. Create your strategy, use advanced inbound marketing approaches to maximise your marketing impact and assess its impact while it’s live. Read this eGuide on What Exactly is Inbound Marketing to find out more how it can help you outflank your competitors.

How are you currently keeping your budget consistent and targeted to look forward to a better ROI on your marketing budget?

Join the discussion by leaving a comment below and please spread the word by sharing this post with your friends.

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