Anyone who thinks that the way to succeed in business is to be cheaper than the competition is highly likely to fail. Customers rarely buy on price alone. If they did, supermarkets would only sell their own “value” brands and never sell any premium products at all.

Yes of course there is a place in every market for being the cheapest, but unless you are an accounting expert, have a great deal of experience in marketing, or have vast cash reserves it is not a place you should ever choose to visit.

Consumers buy perceived value for money and they buy as the result of an emotional response to your marketing message or sales pitch.

If someone believes your product or service offers them value for money and your message stimulates the right emotional responses within them, they will buy.

Your prices should be based upon what it costs you to provide your goods and services plus a margin for profit. If you don’t calculate the costs carefully and fully, or you make your margin too small, then you will probably find that you are very busy, but making almost no money.

Take the time to sit down and calculate your costs thoroughly and do so as often as needed to stay up-to-date; remember, some markets have prices that fluctuate very rapidly, where others hardly change at all so make sure you are always working with the latest figures.

Another common problem in small business is that time and time again, small business owners set their prices too low out of a belief that they either they as individuals, or their products/services are somehow inferior to their competition. If this is you then you need to deal with these issues as a priority. If your products/services are inferior – find ways to improve them, period. If you lack belief in yourself, seek some confidence coaching from a life coach, business coach or similar. If you cannot resolve these issues then perhaps being in business for yourself is simply not for you.

So if you are in business for the long term and intend to make a success of what you do, then offering quality products and services at a fair price with exceptional customer service is the way forward. Yes, it will take longer to reap the rewards, but they will be sustainable rewards and you will have happy customers who go out of their way to recommend you to others.

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Your emails are a potential source of income.

Yes, even if you don’t have a website or blog, and better still, using email signatures properly amounts to free advertising!

If you run a small business, you probably send a fair few emails each week; messages to suppliers, customers, prospects, associates and other businesses and organisations.

Your signature at the bottom of these emails is a great opportunity to send a message out to the people you deal with about what you do and why it might interest them.

Here’s what I mean…

Let’s imagine you run a small business selling hand-made wedding stationery. Your email signature probably looks something like this:

Best regards,

Jane Smith
Hand-Made Wedding Stationery

But it could be:

Best regards,

Jane Smith
Hand-Made Wedding Stationery

This month only - Buy One Get One Free on Our Entire Range - call now for our latest brochure.

Or:

Best regards,

Jane Smith
Hand-Made Wedding Stationery

Visit our website today for 50% off our entire range of products.

There are only one or two elements you need to consider when writing email signatures:

Your Promotional Message
The content and structure of your message is very important. There is a simple formula for writing these kind of messages that is easy to learn. To find out more about it read How to Write Headlines that Sell.

Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks can be a very powerful part of an email signature. They enable the reader to go straight to the information or offer concerned without having to spend additional time looking for it.

You can include just one, or several links in your signature.

They can be to your own web pages and blog articles, newspaper articles about your business, other websites, other peoples products and services via affiliate links, your social networking profiles on sites like Facebook – pretty much anything really. To find out more about affiliate links, read Affiliate Programmes Explained and to find out more about social networking, read Inbound Links: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Once you’ve written your promotional message and added any hyperlinks, just look for “Signature” in the menu of your email software. In Microsoft Outlook 2007 for example, you just open a new message then choose Insert and Signature. Virtually all email software has a signature function – if you’re not sure where it is on yours, just click on help and type “signature”.

Now, every time you send an email or reply to one, your signature is added, either automatically or with a click or two. Just remember to update your signature regularly to stop it getting boring and being ignored.

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If you run a small business in the UK, there are literally thousands of places online where you can advertise free of charge.

All you have to do is fill in a few details. Many of them will even include a free link to your website or blog too.

Here are a few of my favourites:

Search Engines

Google

Google Local Business Centre

Yahoo!

Bing

Online Directories

Yell.com

Thomson Local

Touch Local

DMOZ

BT Tradespace

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To reach 10687 people, just hit send!

Email marketing is a great way to reach large numbers of existing and potential customers easily and at very low cost.

Unlike traditional direct mail, there are no production costs for the mail shots themselves, no envelopes to buy, no tedious envelope stuffing and no postage costs.

Next, consider that delivery is virtually instant, response data is automatic, statistical analysis is simple and most of your list maintenance is done by the subscribers themselves and you’ll soon realise that email marketing is a brilliant tool for small business.

So here’s how to set up your own email marketing system.

You’ll need:

1. A reason why people should subscribe to your list.
2. A method for collecting and storing email addresses.
3. A tool for writing your emails.
4. A system for delivering those emails.
5. A tracking tool to collect data about how many were opened, read, acted upon, etc.
6. To make sure that your email campaigns are ethical and legal.

Why People Should Subscribe to Your Mailing List

There are so many email newsletters out there now that you really need a good reason for people to subscribe to yours. Anyone who has spent any time on the internet at all knows that it’s easy to subscribe to a few email newsletters and before you know it, have an inbox full of junk. For that reason it’s not enough to just ask people to subscribe; you need to give them a really compelling reason to subscribe. The way to do this is to offer them something free, just for subscribing. Something they can download instantly is best – perhaps an eBook or an MP3 file, but be careful. Whatever your freebie is it needs to be of great value to your subscriber. It’s no good offering them some lame 4 page eBook that is really designed to get them to sign up for your expensive online course. The freebie needs to be of great value to them in itself. The best way to do this is to make sure that it is packed full of really useful information, tips, tricks and time saving advice. Yes, some of it could be about other goods and services that you offer, but most of it should be genuinely useful, free advice. As a general rule I would say it needs to be at least 20 pages.

Simplicity

Items 2 to 5 are simple. They are all provided within one system – an email marketing system. A good email marketing systems will collect and store email addresses, automatically deliver your free download, provide you with a tool for writing and delivering email campaigns and a system for collecting and anaylsing data after delivery.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of email marketing systems available, some good, some not so good, and some terrible. I have personally tried about 20 of them. Here are the best ones I have found to date.

Email Plug-Ins for WordPress Users

• Newsletter (WordPress Plug-In) – This is brilliant! The main system is totally free. There is a small charge for the upgrade which include statistics.
• G-Lock EasyMail (WordPress Plug-In) – Buy once and it’s yours to use without further costs.

Email Marketing for Everyone

• AWeber – Monthly subscriptions, externally hosted, very comprehensive system, set up multiple lists.
• GetResponse – similar to AWeber above.

Once you’ve chosen your email marketing system, set it up and put a subscription form on your site. Offer a free and valuable giveaway to subscribers and start collecting email addresses.

Next, write your promotional emails. Include special offers, discounts, promotions, latest news, tips, tricks, trade secrets and anything else that will make reading your emails worthwhile to subscribers.

How often should you send out newsletters? Think about your own experiences. Would you want to get a newsletter every day, week or month? My personal view is that quality beats quantity every time, but decide for yourself.

Finally, remember to check the statistical data regularly – it will help you to fine tune your future email campaigns.

Double Opt-In and SPAM

Like me, you are probably tired of getting unsolicited emails every day, i.e. SPAM. The latest one I got was from what appears to be a respectable business who looked my website up on a directory, then filled in my contact form with details of their latest offer. SPAM laws vary from country to country, but because you cannot know where your subscribers come from, you should always work to the strictest interpretations of what constitutes SPAM. Always remember, you cannot annoy someone into buying anything! To avoid annoying people, getting blacklisted and possibly even prosecuted, use a double opt-in mailing system like those above. For more information read wikipedia’s definition of SPAM.

For further help setting up your own email marketing system, read Email Marketing.

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Did the headline intrigue you?

I thought it might.

“So what is he talking about here?”, I hear you say.

No it’s not a new policy for some right-wing political manifesto in the run up to the general election. This article is about small businesses who are inadvertently punishing themselves and their sales figures.

Let me explain with a simple demonstration…

Pick up your local newspaper and turn to the classified advertisements; you know, the section with all the ads for plumbers, gardeners, aerial installers and handymen. Make a quick mental note of how many of them have advertisements with everything, or almost everything written in CAPITALS. Now open your national newspaper and find a few advertisements for large, High Street brands. How many of those large companies are using CAPITALS to the same degree in their advertising?

My point here is simple; research has found that as human beings, we are able to read lower case text quickly because our brains remember the shapes of words – we see words and recognise them very quickly, simply because of their physical shape. However, when something is written in capitals the shape of the words is lost; they all become uniform. The result is that we find it much harder to read them and as a result, our reading speed and concentration levels both drop dramatically.

Think about it… if you owned a business, would you want people to read your advertisements quickly and assimilate what you have to say easily, or would you want to make it as hard as possible for them to comprehend your message?

OK, so that’s a no-brainer.

So, for all you small business owners out there, do yourselves a big favour and learn a trick used all the time by big business (and one they are using right under your nose); – write your advertisements in lower case text. Using a capital letter to start a new sentence is OK, and so is capitalising the first letter of each word in a headline or attention grabber, (though neither are 100% necessary when writing advertising copy), but the rest should all be lower case. It will improve readability, improve comprehension and make reading your adverts quicker for potential customers. In turn, this should reflect in your conversion rates and ultimately, your bottom line.

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A shopping cart is a programme that bolts on to your website or blog.  It enables you to sell products and services on your website or blog and receive payments for them automatically online.

It is normally used in conjunction with a payment processing service like PayPal. PayPal processes the credit card, debit card, or bank account details of the purchaser independently from your site, so there are no issues for you about handling and storing sensitive personal information.

This gives the your customers the peace of mind that their financial information is safe and it gives you less work to do.

Once bolted on to your site, your shopping cart programme allows you to set up prices, stock codes, descriptions, sizes, colours and other options for your products and services.

To place the items for sale on your website, you then simply select them from a drop-down menu. Of course you could just cut and paste the PayPal buttons straight into your pages, but that means that you have to set everything up each time you do so, which can become very time consuming.

My favourite shopping cart is a plug-in for WordPress (this website and blog is written in WordPress). It is called WordPress eStore. I like it so much because it makes everything very easy to use, install and maintain, but most of all (and unlike many other shopping carts), it allows you to sell large digital downloads like audio and video files and deliver them securely be e-mail with time limited links.

Having installed your shopping cart, you can then import your PayPal transactions directly into accounting software like KashFlow and virtually automate the entire sales process.

So if you have products or services that you could sell online, get yourself a shopping cart.

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If you have a website or blog you probably know that inbound links are important – Google in particular rates high quality inbound links as very important. This is because Google knows that the content of your own website or blog is totally under your control, whereas the content of other websites and blogs is not. Google believes therefore, that if other sites are linking to your site, then your site must be worthy of those links in terms of its content for that to be the case.

But before you go rushing off to talk the world and his wife into linking to your website, you should know that there are good inbound links, bad inbound links and downright ugly inbound links…

Good

Good inbound links are those that carry with them an implied suggestion that your website or blog is worth visiting because it adds value for the user.  There are 3 ways to achieve this:

1. Links from highly ranked sites like online directories (e.g. Yell.com & Thomson Local, article directories, (search Google for them) and Squidoo. Simply list your site in directories, write articles and submit them to article directories and set up a Squidoo Lens. All of these will give you free, high quality inbound links.
2. Links from social networking/bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Add a social bookmarking button to your pages, (like the one at the bottom of this article) to make it really easy, (and virtually automated) for people to add links to your content from these very highly rated sites. There are literally hundreds of social networking sites. The button I use is available free from AddThis.
3. Links from other websites that are related to yours in some way by their content. Consider other sites that offer products or services that compliment yours, or perhaps trade organisations.

Bad

A few years ago it was standard practice to have a links page on your website and offer reciprocal links to pretty much anyone who wanted them. This is now a sure-fire way to get Google to demote you in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), because Google knows that the links have no real value to your site’s visitors and are only really their to gain inbound links and so impress the search engines.

Ugly

Link farms, link exchanges and pretty much any system that offers to provide you with automated or semi-automated inbound links are an absolute no no. Google especially will penalise you heavily for using them.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, the whole focus for your inbound links should be to get them placed on sites where they add value to the vistors’ experience. The diagram at the top of this page shows you the right way to do it.

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People are often confused by affiliate programmes. This article aims to remove that confusion and make the whole area of affiliate marketing clear and simple.

In simple terms, affiliate programmes are a way to get other people to promote your products and services in return for a commission payment.

The confusion starts when people are unclear about whether they are the vendor or the affiliate…

Vendor (Advertiser)

The vendor is the person who has something to sell on their website. This can be a physical product like a book or a pair of shoes, a non-physical product like an eBook or a a music download, or perhaps a service like a holiday booking, or website design. The important factor is that whatever you’re selling must be for sale via a shopping cart on a website or blog. This is because the affiliate programme software automatically records information which includes details of the transaction, value of the order, which affiliate to pay and how much to pay them. For this reason (in most cases) affiliate programmes are not suitable for orders that are taken manually.

Affiliate (Publisher)

The affiliate is someone who has a web presence which gets traffic. The affiliate places a banner advertisement or text link on their website, blog, Facebook page etc. which when clicked takes the visitor to the vendor’s website. Then, when the visitor buys from the vendor, the vendor pays the affiliate a commission for the sale.

Popular

Affiliate programmes are popular because it usually costs nothing to become an affiliate and often costs very little to become a vendor. The vendor installs some software on their website which runs the whole process for them and the affiliate signs up online, logs in, and then cuts and pastes the links and banners into their web pages, blog etc. Both can then log in to the system at any time to check on progress, statistical information, earnings etc. At the end of each payment period (usually monthly) the vendor then pays the affiliates any commissions due.

Affiliate programmes work because they provide the vendor with sales leads and the affiliate with income – and both for very little work because most of the work is done automatically by the software.

How to run your own Affiliate Programme (Be a Vendor)

To run your own affiliate programme you need:

• A product or service to sell
• A website or blog
• A PayPal for Business account (not a personal one)
• A shopping cart
• Affiliate software

If you want to set up your own website or blog, one of the simplest ways is to use WordPress.org which is free. You will need a domain name and a hosting account which are both available from Birch Hosting for just a few pounds a year. You install WordPress from your hosting control panel and then log in and start writing your site. Note: WordPress also offer hosted blogs at WordPress.com, but these do not allow you to use affiliate programmes on them.

Once you have a PayPal for Business account and WordPress site, you install a shopping cart plug-in . The best one I have found is called WordPress eStore because it is very easy to set up and use and unlike most others, it allows you to sell large downloadable files such as audio and video files.

The best affiliate software plug-in I have found for WordPress is called WP Affiliate Platform and again, it is very easy to set up and use.

How to Become an Affiliate

To become an affiliate, first you look for vendors’ affiliate programmes who have something to sell that is related to the content of your website or blog. Once you find them you sign up as an affiliate, log in and cut and paste the links into your site. There are literally hundreds of thousands of affiliate programmes to choose from so whatever your site is about, there will be something to suit it. Note: most affiliate programmes are accessible from links at the top or bottom of websites and most large companies have them.

Here are a few popular affiliate programmes:

• Amazon.co.uk
• Amazon.com
• PayPal
• AWeber

Affiliate Programme Brokers/Directories

Because there are so many affiliate programmes to choose from, it is often a good idea to start with affiliate programme brokers or affiliate directories. Both list hundreds of affiliate programmes and usually do so in categories so it is easy to find those that suit your business. One big benefit of using a broker is that as an affiliate you only have to log in to one site to get access to hundreds of good affiliate programmes.

Here are a few popular affiliate brokers to get you started:

• AffiliateFuture
• Link Share
• ClickBank
• Commission Junction

For affiliate directories, just type “affiliate directory” into your search engine.

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So you want a new website – great! But before you engage the services of a web designer and part with your hard-earned cash, consider a few points:

1. Will your new website look professional?
2. Is your content interesting to visitors?
3. Will your content encourage visitors to take action?
4. Will the search engines be able to read the pages?
5. Will the search engines consider your pages important?
6. What kind of return on investment are you likely to get?

Now let’s look at each of those in more detail…

1. Will your new website look professional?

Most professional web designers have got this one covered. The vast majority of them produce websites that look good. If in doubt, ask to see some of their previous work.

2. Is your content interesting to visitors?

Many web designers leave the text element of this to the client (you). Are you confident that you can you write content that is both informative and interesting to your potential visitors? The text your website contains can make the difference between visitors stopping to look around, taking a specific action, or just leaving in a hurry. Writing copy (marketing text) is a skilled job – it is as important as the look of your website. So make sure that either you, or your web designer can write good copy.

3. Will your content encourage visitors to take action?

If I visit your website, and I like the look of it, and then I read what you have written without getting bored, what will I do next? Will I leave? Will I place an order? Will I telephone or email you? Do you know how to encourage your website visitors to take action? Does your web designer? Make sure that your website content encourages visitors to contact you or make a purchase. If you don’t know how to do this, be sure that your web designer does.

4. Will the search engines be able to read your pages?

Imagine your brand new website is up and running. When the search engines’ spiders come visiting, what will they find? Will they find structure and content they can understand and index with ease? Will they find elements they cannot read or understand? Perhaps ‘Flash’ pages or pictures with no Alt Tags to explain them?

The worst web page I have ever seen was a one where the entire text for the page was contained within a picture file, thus rendering every single word invisible to the search engines!

3 musts here are:

1. Text should be text.
2. Images should have proper ALT TAGS to describe them properly to search engines.
3. Flash files should be avoided wherever possible because they are virtually invisible to search engines.

If your web designer disagrees with these 3 points, or even worse, doesn’t understand them, they simply have no idea what they are doing. But don’t take my word for it – read Google’s webmaster guidelines for yourself and get the facts from the horse’s mouth.

5. Will the search engines consider your pages important?

Search engines, especially Google (which is the biggest by far), want content. If your site contains unique, fresh and informative content, you are already on the right track.

They also want regularly updated content, which is why blogs (like this one you’re reading) are such a good idea.

Search engines want content that is focussed on a particular subject rather than wandering off at tangents because this means that it is likely to be interesting to readers who are searching for something specific.

Finally they want honesty. If your site has hidden text, elements that their spiders cannot read, cloaked links, secretly downloads nasty files, or generally claims to be something that it isn’t, the search engines will see straight through your deceit.

Remember, their business is delivering high quality search results to users, so if you try to deceive them, expect to be penalised. Conversely, if you deliver good, unique, fresh and new content in a well structured way, expect them to like it and promote your site more as a result.

Making your structure and content ’search engine friendly’ amounts to free advertising on search engines – and if that content is also interesting to your visitors, you are highly likely to get real results from your new website.

6. What kind of return on investment are you likely to get?

Websites that encompass all of the positive elements mentioned above will get more visitors over longer periods of time. More visitors to a website which has good content and encourages those visitors to take action, means more enquiries, leads and sales – you do the maths.

Find Out More

To find out more, read about our Search Engine Optimised Websites.

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The Irresistible Offer: How to Sell Your Product or Service in 3 Seconds or Less by Mark Joyner.

From the inside flap of the book:

Tic. Tock.

Tic. Tock.

Tic. Tock.

Three seconds.

That′s all you′ve really got to make the sale.

With consumers bombarded with thousands of marketing messages a day, they have to make purchasing decisions quickly, which means you have to make the sale just as quickly. There′s simply no time for you to make any offer besides the one offer that will work and work quickly—The Irresistible Offer.

But what is The Irresistible Offer? Simply put, it′s the best (and maybe only) true alternative to the traditional form of selling with its sentimental manipulation, marketing trickery, and decreasing effectiveness. The Irresistible Offer is so good and so easy to understand that buying from you becomes a no–brainer for your customers. But it′s not a one–time special or a “unique selling proposition.” The Irresistible Offer is the offer that defines your business and becomes your raison d’être.

Want an example? Domino′s Pizza grew from a single store to a $4 billion chain in large part because they gave their customers an offer they couldn′t refuse—”thirty minutes or less” or the pizza was free. The success of that offer is obvious in retrospect. But how do you design The Irresistible Offer for your own business in your own industry? This book shows you how.

In The Irresistible Offer, author and New Marketing guru Mark Joyner defines and explains this revolutionary selling philosophy, uses real case studies to show it in effect, and helps you quickly and easily apply it to your own business. He examines the elements that make up The Irresistible Offer and presents a formula for creating one of your own. Plus, Joyner provides practical tools that allow you to estimate the effectiveness of your offer in advance so you can plan accordingly.

For too long, selling has been about manipulating a message and manipulating a consumer. The Irresistible Offer presents a new, effective, and ethical way to sell based on what you′re selling, not how you′re selling it. Rather than manipulate your customer (who may resent it, after all), Joyner shows you how to manipulate your offer instead—so that customers find it, and your company, truly irresistible.

Find out more about The Irresistible Offer: How to Sell Your Product or Service in 3 Seconds or Less from Amazon with this link…

The Irresistible Offer: How to Sell Your Product or Service in 3 Seconds or Less

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