How To Avoid The Costly Mistakes That Cripple Small Business

Whether you have been in business for years or are just starting out, you need to recognize these costly errors before you can learn how to avoid them.

These are the deadly traps that too many small business owners fall into:

1. Getting wedded to an idea and sticking with it for too long - Don't stay married for life to a single idea. Ideas are the currency of entrepreneurs. Play around with as many ideas as you like to discover which ones create money and lasting success.

2. Operating without a viable marketing plan - A winning marketing plan captures the attention you need to surround your enterprise with the right calibre of people; employees, customers, suppliers. There may be a 100 disparate ways to market your business but an exclusive viable plan implemented effectively, efficiently, and consistently will be results driven, eliminating guesswork.

3. Failing to appreciate market forces - Changes in customer preferences and advances in competitive products and services can leave you stranded in the dust unless you take the trouble to get to know your market and your customers well. It is essential that you appreciate what customers want now, what they're likely to want in the future, how their buying patterns are evolving, and how you can become a constant resource for them even if you don't have the right products and services for them right now.

4. Ignoring your cash position - Customers do not always respond to superior products in the time frame that you think they should. You'll need plenty of cash to sustain operations in the interim. Cash is king, so be on your guard as to how it flows in - and out.

5. Ignoring employees - The management and motivation of staff is one of the biggest challenges facing the business owner. Without patience, persistence and people skills, problems quickly multiply - and morale, productivity and profits can easily be destroyed. Always make your people your first priority.

6. Confusing likelihood with reality - The successful entrepreneur lives in the world of likelihood but spends money in the real world. Be realistic in all of your commercial undertakings.

7. Operating without a sales strategy - Without a strategy for selling, there is no effective way to gauge the financial growth and progress of a business. You need a realistic map that identifies where the sales will come from, how they will come - and from whom.

8. Playing the Lone Ranger with no back up - You are the key to it all but you cannot do everything yourself and continue to grow at the same time. Even modest success can overwhelm you unless you hire the right staff and delegate responsibility.

9. Operating with no mastermind on board - Most small businesses expand faster when there is someone around with a few grey hairs to cast an experienced eye occasionally on overall activity. Your elder statesperson could operate for you as an executive director or part-time consultant.

10. Giving up - Not every successful entrepreneur gets it right first time; some fail several times before they strike the core formula that does it for them. So, if you are failing, go ahead and fail. But fail fast and learn from the experience. Then try again with this new wisdom. Never give up and never suffer either.

Knowledge is the key

The birds of the air have the knowledge (and the wings) to get from one destination to another on time, every time. They have no need of travel schedules, passports, currency exchange, traveller checks, or any other restrictive man-made paraphernalia to staunch their progress. Flocks of swifts, for example, are so confident of their navigational prowess they catnap on the wing on journeys spanning thousands of miles.

They have an instinctive fail-safe route plan.

So too will you when you learn how to avoid the ten most deadly mistakes in minding your own business.

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Old Habits Die Hard in the Third Age Years…

I spent a lifetime in retailing and I’m still at it in retirement; albeit virtually.

You know how it goes.

You put up a web page and throw in some stock.

Your page begets another and another and another until one day you’re looking at a site that’s got more stock than Bloomingdales.

But you can’t stop…

The old sourcing skills are making a comeback, sharpening their talons, and coaxing you to duck and dive, bob and weave to find still more stock at even better prices.

So you build another virtual retail store and then another and another and another until you’re looking at an empire.

Then you diversify…

If you are upmarket, you go downmarket.

Why not?

There no shareholders breathing down your neck or smart ass vice presidents demanding that you pull in the reins.

And so you build a bargain basement store and another and another until you’re looking at Wal-Mart.

Expending your energy in this way is fun; it’s therapeutic, and if you go about matters in the right way, it doesn’t cost a thin dime apart from hosting fees – and it can be hugely profitable.

In between times you are still knocking out the odd bestseller just to keep your hand in.

But even now you can’t stop…

You dig deep into the inner recesses of the psyche and draw down expertise that has been rusting away for eons in the vaults of the supraconscious.

Ideas leap out at you from nowhere; you create courses on creative writing, starting a business, offline marketing, online marketing, maximising on retirement, and what have you.

So you build more websites and more websites and more websites and now you are busier than ever you were when you thought you were working.

So how am I doing with all these third age activities?

I’m not hurting…

Most mornings my inbox is crammed with cute little messages like ‘Invoice from Clickbank’ and ‘You have money at PayPal’ and so forth.

But don’t take my word for it.

Visit one of my stores and judge for yourself…

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Writers Scribble

Affiliate Revenue – Part 4

The last few weeks have been taken up with preparations for the launch of my latest online venture.

You may recall in a recent email how I started to dabble in affiliate reselling and met with immediate and albeit unexpected success.

Now I am taking the experiment a quantum leap forward with the launch of a portal website featuring 12,000+ ClickBank products plus a sprinkling of the best of the latest affiliate reselling opportunities.

Window dressing the storefront

I have already tweaked the system so that at will I can do an instant makeover of the 12 featured products.

For a month I shall leave them as they are to monitor returns.

Thereafter I shall rotate these from a choice of 100 alternatives

Will surfers use the search box in my system’s portal?

I think the answer must be ‘yes’; especially when you consider this endorsement from no less than personage than a ClickBank Vice President,

"This system has serious tools for serious ClickBank affiliates"
Jennifer J., Vice President of Client & Customer Services, ClickBank.com.

How well will my system perform?

That’s anyone’s guess but I have a sneaking suspicion that it will be a case of softly-softly, catchee-monkey.

If I am wrong and it suddenly takes off, I‘ll let you know in Part 5…

http://how-to-products-xl.com

How to Write 1000s of Zero Cost Articles Effortlessly, Set Up Your Own Submission Center And Place Them In the Top Hubs Free of Charge!

Whether you are a newcomer to online marketing or you’ve been in the trenches for some time, you need to learn how to write zero cost articles and harness their amazing power to drive hordes of visitors to your website and email inbox.

You will miss out on a goldmine of potential buyers if you do not…

1. You need a kit where you are in total control of operations
2. You need a kit to countermand ever-changing search engine vagaries
3. You need a kit that outstrips all other forms of web promotion
4. You need a kit that constitutes the ultimate weapon in viral marketing
5. You need a kit that exerts infinite influence in article exposure
6. You need a kit that produces an ever-increasing stream of links
7. You need a kit that builds lists of pre-qualified prospects
8. You need a kit that works for any niche opportunity
9. You need a kit that taps into a goldmine of browsing buyers
10. You need a kit that attracts incremental sales
11. You need a kit that grows your business at zero cost
12. You need a kit that has the power to make you famous online
    
    You need to be in the right place at the right time and you are…

You have just found the all-encompassing zero cost articles kit

What you will learn from the Zero Cost Articles Kit

How to research the topic before you write your article
How to use keywords and phrases to stimulate interest
How to use magnetic verbs to trigger impulse buying
How to command the reader's subconscious
How to use subheads to catch quick readers
How to create mental movies in the prospect's mind
How to educate, inform, and motivate the reader
How to address the WIIFM questions on everyone's lips
How to think like the people you want to influence
Why simple words and short sentences work best
How to develop the power of speaking with authority
How to avoid over-egging the clichés
How to paint word pictures that drive visitors in hoards to your website
How to craft articles that zing like bullets shot from a bell

You will also learn how to incorporate the age-old strategy for successful zero cost article distribution

Writing editorials; not ad copy
Why you must be totally truthful in your claims
How to start with an eye-grabbing headline
How to fire your biggest gun in the first sentence
Why you must fire the next biggest in the next 2 sentences
How to roll out the remaining text on in crisp chunky paragraphs
How to break it up with occasional subheads
How to keep your dialogue conversational
Why you must restrict the word count to acceptable limits
Why your resource box is the catalyst to successful article distribution
How to choose your core keywords
How to prepare the ‘description’ copy
How to become accepted as an expert article author

You will finally learn how to set up your very own
Article Submission Center

It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s free to create, and you will have the top 130 hubs at your disposal to submit your articles free of charge, time after time, from your very own personally generated submission center.

The choice is yours but you know the old saying:
buyer beware…

You could opt for one of a range of high-priced alternative products - but you may find it leaves you short on information on how to effectively write your articles and you end up doing rather more than you bargained for at the outset.

Your guarantee of satisfaction

You have 60 days to try out the Zero Cost Articles Kit at your leisure and you must be 100% satisfied with the product or you may request a refund which will be honored without quibble.

It will cost you just $37

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I Never Made A Dime From Affiliate Reselling Until…

A friend in Atlanta sent me a private email directing me to a website he thought I ought to check out. He knew I was disillusioned with affiliate marketing and had all but chucked in the towel.

And with good reason; I had never earned a dime for all my efforts spanning almost three years. But I’d spent money; money I’d accumulated from marketing my own produce, loads of money on this and that piece of software promising to get me out of the rut and into the money.

But it never happened

That is until I opened my friend’s email, visited the website he suggested, and had my eyes opened to where and how I had been going so wrong for too long.

What I was witnessing is the only genuine training and resource center on affiliate reselling that I have ever come across; no hype, no hard-sell, no rash promises; just a whole raft of workable tools, tips and techniques – and all in bite size chunks that even the newest newbie would have no problem in understanding.

I read the solitary web page from tip to toe, read it all again, and decided to try out just one of the recommended strategies and give it a week or so to produce even a glimmer of a result.

Here’s what happened just a few hours later…

I signed in at ClickBank to check on the returns for my own personally generated products only to discover that small unidentified amounts had been tricking into my account totally $157. These represented my first ever affiliate commissions and by the end of the day had amounted to $210.

Not a bad return on my subscription fee of less than ten dollars for lifetime membership to this remarkable resource center. And now, four days later, and although the daily totals are smaller, the money is still trickling in each time I clock into ClickBank.

I intend to implement the remainder of the strategies one by one in the hope that the bigger bucks start rolling in - but even if they don’t, at least I now know that I can make money from affiliate reselling.

I cannot and will not promise that my treasure trove discovery will work as well for you but if, as I was, you are struggling to make a breakthrough, you could do a lot worse than visit this innovative center.

Good luck!

Jim Green is an entrepreneur and bestselling author with an ever-growing string of niche non-fiction titles to his credit. You read more about the resource center he has just been discussing at this website…

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