Developing A Marketing Plan

Marketing, advertising and branding makeup your business image.  If they reinforce one another and communicate a unified message, then your business image will result in a clear identity that people can recall.

Marketing, boiled down, is the combination of all your efforts to get people to remember your business.  It includes everything from how you answer the phone to how you deal with complaints to how you design your signs, logos, letterhead and promotions.  Marketing, more than anything else, is what builds your brand. An identifiable brand is the hook that gets people to remember your business.  And, if they remember you, they will likely buy from you.

When framing your business, you want to create a distinctive personality and a memorable brand, by marketing a consistent theme.  Developing a marketing plan will help you do just that.  To get started, consider the following:

1.  Determine the purpose, size and budget of your marketing campaign.
2.  Decide what medium (or media) works best for your business, brand and budget.
3.  Come up with marketing materials that build on that brand.
4.  Test the materials.
5.  Once you are convinced that you have a marketing method that works, roll it out.

For more details and a step-by-step system to create a simple, effective and affordable marketing campaign, take a look a Marketing Plan Pro designed by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing. Marketing Plan Pro contains a structure to complete a well thought out actionable plan and allows you to monitor the progress you are making. It includes great instructions with the videos embedded of John Jantsch giving helpful tips along the way.

Virtual Assistants – An Alternative to Hiring Employees

If you don’t want the expense and responsibility of hiring employees and finding space for them to work, consider hiring a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants are independent contractors who work from their own home or office, handle duties for you, and communicate with you via telephone, fax, e-mail or messenger service.

Virtual assistants are especially good at handling pesky administrative duties such as collections, marketing, travel planning, research and accounting. They might even help you create your own website, newsletter or schedule appointments. They are typically very affordable — charging only for the time you use. Best of all, by hiring a virtual assistant, you get all the advantages of having an assistant without the associated overhead — no employment cost or taxes, no rate for office space, etc.

Below are some resources for locating a virtual assistant best suited for your needs:

• 247Virtual Assistants
• AssistU
• International Virtual Assistants Association

6 Tips To Use Your Blog To Market Your Business

As you may already know, a blog is an excellent tool to let the world know about your business or your product, to connect with potential customers and promote your expertise. Knowing how to maximize your blog’s impact, however, can be challenging. Here are six tips to help you do just that:

1. Blog Consistently. Many small business owners get excited about blogging, post 3-6 times, and then stop. To get the desired effect (search engine and human traffic), you need to update your blog on a regular basis. Aim for three to five times a week, at least until you build up your readership. You can then scale up or down as needed. The search engines will love your new content and keep coming back to index it. Potential customers will like your new content and return to read your blog.

2. Use Your Blog For Branding. Your blog is an extension of your business, so make your blog represent the essence of what makes your business unique. Your brand, including your business name, logo and purpose, should represent your business identity; your unique position in the market.

3. Use Search Engine Optimization To Optimize Each Blog Post. The purpose of your blog is to get people who are in your target market to read your posts and enter your sphere of influence.  Thus, you should use a keyword research tool to find phrases that are related to the main subject of the post, and weave them into the content of the post.

4. Have A Special Offer On Your Blog. Offer a free special report, free ecourse, or preferential notice of new product releases or discounts on services in exchange for signup on your mailing list. This will transform people from casual surfers who just happened to find your blog to newsletter subscribers.

5. Share Information About Your Events, Products and Seminars. You may think that everyone has already heard about your upcoming teleclass on life and work balance or your e-book about achieving financial success. Not so! The person reading your blog might be hearing about you for the very first time, so they have no idea about your teleseminars or products unless you specifically tell them.

6. Avoid overselling. Overselling will dramatically reduce the number of your blog readers. Do, however, let your blog readers know about your seminars and products. If you don’t tell them, nobody will.

A blog is an excellent tool to generate additional web site traffic, get new newsletter subscribers and sell more products. Use your blog to introduce potential customers to your business. Keep your content fresh and they will return to learn more.

Employee or Independent Contractor?

Deciding to hire an independent contractor can often be advantageous and cost-effective for a small business.  Although an independent contractor often performs similar duties as an employee, your obligations toward an independent contractor are minimal compared to an employee.

Unlike employees:

• An independent contractor is not subject to minimum wage and overtime requirements.
• An independent contractor generally is not eligible for employee benefits such as vacation, health insurance and retirement plans.
• An independent contractor is not covered by employment discrimination statutes.
• You are not required to provide an independent contractor with workers’ compensation insurance.
• You need not pay any portion of an independent contractor’s Social Security or Medicare taxes.

These benefits will save you money and hassle.  But, if a worker is not truly an independent contractor, the results can be severe.  Potential liabilities include payment of back taxes, interest and penalties to the IRS for a period of at least two years, as well as back pay, front pay, cost, attorneys’ fees and compensatory and punitive damages in litigation expenses.  In short, the consequences of misclassifying employees can be devastating.

To ensure proper classification of your workers, the guiding principle to remember is control and who has it. For a worker to be classified as an independent contractor, he or she should be both physically and economically autonomous of your business.  Independent contractors control the process of when and how they do the work.  You have the right only to the ultimate result of the independent contractor’s work, not the means and methods used to accomplish the result.

Although using independent contractors can be an effective way to minimize costs and increase the efficiency of your small business, you must properly classify your workers.  While control is not the sole means of establishing independent contractor status, it is a determining factor which could make the difference between ongoing business success and bankruptcy.