Home Based Business Success

Customer loyalty is the key to reaching your business's profitability goal. The real money is on the back end of the customer relationship. It doesn't matter weather your home based business (or any other business, for that matter) exists primarily in the Internet marketing space, or weather you're running a home based business such as consulting, accounting, contracting, or computer repair. If you have a home based business you absolutely cannot afford to ignore where the lion's share of your sales and profit will come from; repeat business from your existing customers.

There's a saying in the so-called Internet marketing industry; “The money is in the list.” Leaving aside for a minute that the term “Internet marketing” describes a communication medium applied to marketing, not an actual industry, that's true not only for those of you selling online, but to any other type of business as well. A large part of the intrinsic value of your company is in your customer list. If selling your company is part of your exit strategy, having a long list of existing customers is going to be a large component of the value others see in your business. Simply put, you'll be able to sell your business for a much high price if you have a long list of satisfied customers.

When considering ongoing operations, having a list of loyal customers makes reaching your business profitability goals so much easier. Instead of focusing your marketing efforts on creating new customers within your target market, you can aim at a list of proven buyers. You're much more likely to generate another sale from a customer who you have an ongoing relationship with, and who has bought from you in the past, than one who knows little about your business, products, or services.

Think about it, would you rather have a list of 500 prospects, or a list of 500 accounts? I thought so. Weather you have a contracting business, accounting firm, or consulting company, having an ongoing business relationship means the customer will call you first when they need something, rather than seeking out someone new. People generally take the path of least resistance when trying to get something done. It's just human behavior, and marketing is nothing if not the study of human behavior. Calling your business when they need what you provide should be that path for your existing customers.

If your business exists in the online space, the ability to mine a list of existing customers for new sales is of incalculable value. Weather you're an Internet marketing newbie or a “Guru” building a list is of primary importance. One of the first thing that any new Internet marketer is told is “capture that email” so they can begin an email marketing campaign. While that is definitely an important part of generating sales and profits, a list of actual customers, not just prospects, is of much greater importance.

When someone gives you their email address in exchange for a report, e-book, or newsletter, all you know is that they have some level of interest in what you do. You really know little else about them. How qualified a prospect they are you'll not know until you begin your email marketing campaign. A list of actual customers, those who have already purchased from you is infinitely more valuable. You absolutely know they are a qualified lead because they have demonstrated such by handing over their hard earned money to your business in the past.

The reality is that if you have no customer loyalty, your business is just creating a marketing and promotional campaign, not a viable, long term business. Eventually you'll exhaust the supply of new customers in your market, or the ROI of your marketing efforts will be too high to sustain your operations.

Given the importance of customer loyalty, it's amazing that so few businesses create a formal customer loyalty strategy. Sure, many businesses have a rough idea about creating customer loyalty, but few formalize the strategy. Business owners will talk about good customer service, selling quality products, delivering them on time, exceeding customer expectations, and making sure they attend to the details that keep customers coming back. While all that is certainly important, it's not a formal strategy that can be refined over time to maximize performance.

To have a formal customer loyalty strategy, you need metrics that can be measured to determine the effectiveness of your efforts. That way you can see if your strategy is effective, and make changes in an effort to improve it. You'll know weather or not your changes are working or not and be able to create an actionable strategy. It points to discovering as much as possible about your customers, what motivates them to buy from you, and why they return. You'll want to measure their overall customer experience, and if possible, improve upon it. Your business depends upon it. A 1997 study by Patterson, Johnson, and Spreng found 78% of the decision to repurchase something from a business was based on customer satisfaction.

How can you measure and increase customer satisfaction and use it create a customer loyalty strategy? It depends on the metrics you use to define your customer's experience, but some of the more effective ones are delivery time, product selection, relative price, ease of use of your website, call back time, ease of contact, and satisfaction with the product / service as delivered . Some things, such as time can be directly measured and assigned a value. Others must be measured on a scale with multiple points. In many cases a 5 or 7 point scale is used to define such variables, with responses ranging from extremely unsatisfied to extremely satisfied or some variation thereof. You get the point.

To make your measurements even more effective, the different attributes should be weighted. This will help in defining which components have the greatest impact in the overall level of customer satisfaction. For example, satisfaction with the product or service may have more weight than delivery time. That will depend upon your customer base and the type of business you're operating.

One of the most important findings in the 1997 study was that meeting or exceeding customer expectations was the prime factor in reported customer satisfaction. It makes perfect sense, but if your business meets or exceeds customer expectations, they'll give little thought to using your services again, fail to do so and you create a disconnect in their minds that soon extends to their wallets. Basically you'll not get them to extract that Visa from their wallet again if they weren't happy the first time.

On the flip side, studies indicate that customers give little or no thought to using your business again if you exceeded their expectations. That's the best thing you can have, a loyal, repeat customer that automatically buys from you. Your strategy to create customer loyalty at that level should focus first on customer satisfaction and the customer experience, and second on ensuring that you are staying at the forefront of offerings in your field. As trends emerge, you need to be at the front of them in order to give your customers no reason to turn elsewhere to satisfy their future needs. They'll be your loyal customers untill the end, and that's the real key to reaching your buisness profitibility goal.

Have a great weekend, and here's to your home based business success!

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 02:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Getting free blog traffic can be one of the bset marketing moves you make. Your blog can be one of your most important marketing tools. It gives you a presence on the web, and you don’t have to know a lick of HTML, or master any software applications, such as Dreamweaver, to make a blog post. You can make a blog post extremely quickly, and use your posts to do any number of marketing tasks, from informing about your company, products and services, to announcing sales and special events.

The question faced by most marketers is “how to get more traffic to your blog?”. After all many niches are extremely competitive these days and without good, targeted traffic, your blog may as well be notes in your journal.

There are some things to consider before you initiate your free traffic generating plan. You could always pay for your traffic, through paid links and PPC ads, but this is about the kind of traffic you get fo’ nuttin’. If you’re starting out inour business with a minimal budget, that's the kind of traffic you need.

Where is your free traffic going to come from? You’ll have 2 main free sources; links from other websites, directories, and blogs, and SERPs. You want to get balanced traffic and not be too dependent on the search engines, who are notoriously fickle. You can be getting great traffic numbers from them one day, and way down in the results the next.

Links are great for two reasons. You’ll get visitors from the link itself, and you’ll get a vaunted backlink, one of the most important things in the algorithms most search engines use to rank web pages. To get targeted links in to your blog there is one tool that I’ve found to be extremely effective; the blog carnival.

Blog carnivals are themed blog events that are hosted by bloggers. In such an event other bloggers are invited to submit their postings to the host blogger, who then posts links to the submitted posts in a post of their own called a carnival. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the potential of such an event, especially for a business owner with a new blog, and relatively few inbound links.

Some carnivals will include any post that’s submitted, while others are extremely picky and only include the best 5 or 10 posts they receive. The great thing about carnivals is that they themselves tend to get ranked fairly highly by the search engines, and you can get traffic from them.

Where they shine however, is that they generate inbound links, and some bloggers have removed the “nofollow” tags from their blogs, meaning that you’ll get the full benefit of said links from the search engines to help increase your search engine rankings. In addition, you can choose the anchor text of the links, allowing you to build search engine rankings for your selected keywords and phrases.

Some of the carnivals have fairly high readership and you can get significant traffic from them if you have compelling post titles. You should also include a brief description of your post, both to assist the host, (although sometimes they’ll not use it, due to the theme of the carnival) and to provide exactly the content you want around your link. You’ll also get to showcase your writing talent and post content, which can help you get regular readership and subscribers, a real boon to your marketing efforts.

The other thing that you must do to ensure high rankings in the search engines is to optimize your posts, including the post titles. I wrote about this in a previous post with regard to search engine optimization. It is key that you title your posts so they read exactly as the keyword phrases people are searching for. There is a more in depth discussion of keyword optimization in a previous post on how to increase targeted web site traffic. The same thing applies to blog post titles as the titles for web pages.

These things should help you get more free traffic to your blog. Good luck and Good Business! 

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There’s a trend in sales and marketing that any business owner should be aware of. Failure to address this trend will result in lost sales, and repeat customers. The trend of which I speak is the increasing power of women as prime decision makers and consumers of once male dominated markets.

As a business owner, weather you exist primarily in the online or off line space, you absolutely must appeal to all your potential customers in order to maximize sales, profit, and efficiency. Yet many business owners, especially in formerly male dominated industries, completely or substantially ignore women in their marketing efforts.

This mistake can have devastating results to your bottom line. Think about this for a second. 80% of all checks signed in the U.S. are now signed by women. Women also purchase 80% of all consumer goods and own half of all U.S. businesses. They are the most rapidly growing segment of new business owners. That doesn’t sound like a market you’d want to turn your back on.

You may think because you sell auto accessories, consumer electronics or sporting goods you can ignore women as customers. Don’t; that would be a stupid and possibly fatal mistake for your business, because women actually buy, or are key decision makers in the majority of such purchases.

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, since 2003 women have bought more consumer electronics products than have men, so that worm turned a long time ago. In 2005 women purchased $65 billion wroth of consumer electronics, and influenced billions more. According to a survey in Sporting Goods Business, women influence 95% of all sporting goods purchases.

That means that if you have a home business that sells things, and there’s any chance that women are among your customers, you need to be making every effort to cater to their needs and wants, even if you feel that your business is more focused towards men.

How do you make sure your business is meeting the needs of your female customers? Women and men shop differently. They tend to process information differently than do men. When women are making purchasing decisions, they are more likely to ask questions until they feel they have a good grasp on a product, it’s features and benefits (you are selling features and benefits, aren’t you?). Men, on the other hand shop more like they drive. They won’t ask for nearly as much help as they may need to find what they’re really after.

Be sure you design your web site to give your women customers the answers they’re looking for. They’ll reward you by buying something from you. Women tend to be more brand loyal than men, a great thing for your business if you cater to their needs. Women have less tolerance for websites that are difficult to navigate and aren’t well designed and laid out than do men. If they can’t get their questions answered easily, they’ll shop at your competitor’s web site.

You should also tailor your product mix to be sure that your women customers can find what they may be looking for. Do a bit of research if you must, check with you vendors, offer surveys to your visitors and sift through your site logs to determine what products were the most popular to browse and buy.

If you sell aftermarket auto and truck parts, you may think that your business is the last place you’d find women shopping, but aghain, you’d be wrong. A woman is just as likely to be shopping for a Greddy turbo kit or a Dana 60 front axle with an ARB air locker as are men. Well maybe not quite as much, but you get the point.

In fact women buy quite a bit of aftermarket auto parts and accessories. According to the Specialty Equipment Manufacturers Association (SEMA), the industry association concerned with making sure every kid with a Honda also has a muffler the size of a coffee can, nice rims, and a pair of 12” subwoofers, women actually buy less hard core performance parts. What they do buy is alarm systems, floor mats, fog lights, window tinting, audio / video systems. 21% of women in a survey done by trade journal Aftermarket Business reported that they installed all their own aftermarket parts.

The point is that you not only have to meet the needs of your women customers if you’re selling weight loss products, cosmetics, and designer clothes. You have to make the same effort to meet their needs if you’re selling fishing supplies, basket ball shoes, aftermarket automotive accessories, and home theater gear. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table.

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 05:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

How to increase targeted web site traffic is one of the things that nearly all home based business owners would like to know. After all, no matter what you’re selling, and weather you operate exclusively in the on-line space or not, it’s vital for your businesses’ success. On the other hand, not getting that targeted traffic, the visitors that really want to buy, or desperately want to know more about your business, is a recipe for disaster.

In this business climate, even if you operate a business that has nothing to do with Internet marketing or selling online, it is key that you maximize the targeted traffic to your web site. Simply maximizing traffic will do little good, other than using up your valuable bandwidth. The traffic must be targeted for specific keywords that you want to be found for on the web.

How do you choose the proper keywords, and how do you help ensure you’ll be found for them? There are a few things to do when optimizing your site or blog to grab the traffic you want. Don’t have a blog yet? Get one, and soon. It‘s one of the most valuable marketing tools you can have, for many reasons, not the least of which is the way it can help increase your visibility and ranking with the search engines.

When choosing keywords to target your site for, there are specific things you should look at. First, you want to determine what will have the most value to your business. For example, if you have a business consulting firm, you obviously want to be found when someone does a search for business and consulting related terms, but it goes deeper than that.

Do you have a specialty within your general business discipline? If you operate in the physical space, what about geographical terms? You would do better to be found for people searching for business consultants in your area, if you are set up primarily to do consulting for local businesses.

The more direct your targeting efforts can be, the greater the value of the traffic to your business, and the better you can optimize your web site or blog to rank well for your specific keywords. There are many so-called ‘on page’ optimization techniques you can use to help your site rank well, but before you ever even get that far, you have to start at the top.

It all begins with the name of the page or site. If you choose it correctly, and optimize the title, and then the on page factors, you will have a much easier time of things when you are indexed, ten ranked by the search engines. You want to choose terms that people are actually searching for.

The reasons for this are two fold. Reason number one is that by choosing keywords that people are actually searching for you will obviously get more targeted traffic, simply because there are more people searching for those terms. But the second reason, and the more important one, is that you will provide value to your visitor. After all, if they are looking for a specific term that is what you want to be found for. Your visitor will have higher satisfaction and you will have a better chance of gaining a customer.

When choosing keywords, it pays to be specific in most cases. For example if you provide business consulting services, as in the example above, you would do better to be found for your specialty within the business consulting arena. By segmenting your broad area into a specific niche, you will be found by those visitors that will attach the most value to finding your site. Conversely, you will also be found by those visitors that have the most value to your business, because you are exactly what they’re looking for.

The secret you must know to increase targeted web site traffic - The most important takeaway from this post is this, however. It’s extremely important exactly what keyword phrases you optimize for. You can have multiple phrases, all specified, and all with the basically the same value to your visitors and your business. These can have subtle differences in phrasing, but the phrases can have wide differences in the number of searches that are performed for them, and perhaps even more important, the number of competing web sites that there are that rank for those keyword phrases. Here are some examples of what I’m talking about.

Take this post, for example. I didn’t choose the post’s title arbitrarily. It actually requires research. When doing research for exactly what the title of this post should be, I was confronted with several options. I knew that I wanted to do a post to help home based business owners get more traffic to their web sites and blogs.

What I didn’t know was exactly how those business owners were asking for help when they went to search for it in the search engines. That’s where the research comes in. I needed to determine the exact search terms that were being searched for, and how much competition there was for each. There may be some keyword phrases that have very high search volumes, but if there are millions of other websites out there that rank for those phrases (not an uncommon scenario) I would stand little chance of ever being found for them, no matter how good my content other on page factors was until I had hundreds or thousands of links from other sites pointing to this post (the number of high quality links to your site from other web sites is one of the primary factors used by the search engines when ranking your site’s pages).

The key then is to choose keyword phrases with a relatively high number of searches, but a lower number of other sites that are found when searching for them. As I mentioned above the difference between good phrases and bad ones is often very subtle, and here are some examples of just what I mean.

When doing the research for this post I found the following different phrases were searched for on Google:
increased web traffic

increase web traffic

increase web site traffic

increase targeted web site traffic

boost web site traffic

generate web site traffic

get web site traffic

 

As you’ll notice, there is very little difference grammatically between some of the phrases. However, the differences between them in terms of how many people searched for them, and how many web sites can be found when searching for them is huge. Here is what I mean. I’ll list those phrases again, followed by 2 numbers; the number of people searching for them each day on Google, and the number of web sites that Google ranks for each phrase.

increased web traffic                            195 / 43,000

increase web traffic                             209 / 42,000

increase web site traffic                               260 / 337,000

increase targeted web site traffic          22 / 22,000

boost web site traffic                           12 / 7,420

generate web site traffic                      9 / 13,100

get web site traffic                              9 / 37,300

 

Note how some keyword phrases have much more competition, and thus would be much harder to be ranked for than others, even though the differences from a visitor value standpoint would be slight. For example, although there are a comparatively large number of Internet visitors searching for the phrase ‘increase web site traffic’, there are also many other sites that show up in the Google search engine results pages (SERPS). That would make it a poor choice unless you were pretty confident that other factors would allow you to rank well in the results. A better choice would be one of the results that had far fewer competitors, so you would have a chance to actually be found for them.

To choose keywords and phrases that fit these criteria, you’ll need some help, but thankfully there is help to be found. There are several research tools that you can use when deciding on what to name blog posts or web pages. Google has a nice tool, the Google keyword suggestion tool. You can enter a keyword or phrase and it will show you a list of many other related phrases or keywords and how much relative traffic there is for them. You can also see how much advertiser competition there is for the keywords among Google Adwrods advertisers.  

Another one that I use on a regular basis is the free keyword tool from Wordtracker. It gives more detailed information such as specific numbers of visitors, and how many visitors the number one result on Google gives. Yahoo used to have a nice tool the old Overture as well, but it is no longer….RIP.

So, when trying to get the most targeted web site traffic for your businesses’ web site and/or blog, remember, it’s all in a name.

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