Why You Must Dream Big

  I found this in my email box, and I think it will be very helpful to you my dear reader. It was sent to me by Early to Rise.

 

By Craig Ballantyne

The first few hours of my morning are pure bliss. I arise early and sneak down to the kitchen table in my loft apartment. The sixteen feet ceilings and windows to the south help to free up space in my heart and my mind as I go about my daily routine.

I sit at the large table, without Internet access, surrounded by the lush green scenery endemic to the Toronto skyline in early June. The early summer sun naturally lights the sky and lifts my spirits. It's a magical time of day.

I spend at least an hour to writing my daily Early To Rise essays and monthly newsletters. This is followed by thirty minutes devoted to daily inspirational readings and another fifteen minutes of seated meditation.

During these few solitary hours, everything is right in the world.

Create Your Personal Brand

By Brian Tracy

Just as surely as building a powerful brand is the key to differentiating a product in the marketplace and thus building a successful business, so creating a strong personal brand is the key to differentiating yourself from your competitors, thereby ensuring your own success as well as that of your business. Your personal brand determines how people respond to you, whether they listen to you, buy from you, how much they buy, what they are willing to pay, and so on.

Promises You Make
Your personal brand makes a promise: “If you buy from me, you will receive a specific value in return.” This promised value will be born from the values, virtues, qualities, and attributes by which you become known. For example, you may want to create a personal image—a brand—of a person who always operates at a high level of integrity, consistently walks the talk, is an exemplary leader, and goes the extra mile to ensure customer satisfaction. Who is your ideal customer? What values, virtues, qualities, and attributes will he be looking for in a supplier of your product? Do you match this profile? If not, do you have a burning desire to be this kind of person? These are the key questions you must ask yourself when beginning to build your personal brand.

How Deep Is Your Pocket: The Keys to Establishing Your Start Up Costs

Having established your potential capability as an entrepreneur and having your idea in place, the next stage is start the process of putting everything in place. One of the challenges of planning and getting a new business off the ground is to establish what your start up costs are going to be. At best, it’s going to be a stab in the dark or a wild guess, but there are some specific steps you can take to make your costings more realistic.

Why Estimate Your Costs?

But, before we look at where you can get help, we should consider why you need to get your estimated start up costs as near to reality as possible. Firstly, if you are seeking bank finance the dreaded Business Plan is required! The Bank Manager is not going to be impressed by a comment such as, “I think my start up costs are going to be around $10,000 but hey, who knows!”

The #1 attribute of a successful marketing message

The quality of your marketing is the number one factor in
determining if your business will be a success or failure. If your
company's marketing message demonstrates the value of buying your
product or service over that of your competition, your business
will prosper. If your marketing message does a poor job of
demonstrating the value of your product or service, your business
will fail.

Understand that all customers (B2B and B2C) care about the same
thing - if I purchase this item, what's in it for me? What
beneficial end result will I receive? And, will the end result I
receive from buying this item be better than if I bought a
competing item? Explaining to customers why your item produces the
most desirable end result is the job of marketing.

Biggest Marketing Mistake

The biggest mistake I see when anyone markets their business is that they start with one or two tactics, but have no clearly defined marketing strategy.  Tactics are specific ways to achieve your strategy, such as direct mail, speaking, writing, website etc – whereas a marketing strategy is the starting point; it defines the overall objectives and outlines a game plan.  

If you start only with tactics, you’re doing things the hard way because you may not be choosing the most effective marketing tactics for you.  Without a marketing strategy, the tactics you choose won’t be as effective because the actions will be scattered and not derived from a sound game plan with all your objectives integrated into them.  

You probably picked a tactic that someone else you know is using or that they recommended and you think it will work for you.  Well, it probably will because invariably all tactics work.  You’ll find that each industry has its own preferred tactic but this may just be a habit rather than the most effective way of marketing for that industry.  

Leveraging Your Financial Potential

By: Brian Tracy

Know the Right People
One of the greatest forms of financial leverage is contacts. Knowing the right people and being known by them can open doors for you that can save you years of hard work. The quality and quantity of your contacts and your relationships will have more to do with your success than perhaps any other factor.

Here are three things you can do to expand your list of contacts. First, make a list of the 25 people you feel it would be most useful for you to get to know. Develop a strategy to get to meet everyone of them over the next 12 months. Then make a list of 25 more.

Ten Keys To Business Success

Often in our business and life we wish we could have a key that can unlock that illusive door to success and open the in exhaustive vault of wealth to us!
Well the fact is success is a matter of grabbing one idea here, plucking one advice there and putting them together till we find the right formula for our business and life. This article was sent to me by The business and success expert, Brian Tracy, grab one or two ideas from here and see if you can make them add to your formula for success.


There are ten critical areas where your ability to think largely
determines the success or failure of your business. The greater clarity
you have in each of these areas, the better decisions you will make and
better results you will achieve.

One Fatal Mistake To Avoid In Your Business!

When building a business, the desire of all entrepreneurs is for the phone to never stop ringing, for the customers to be flowing in in their hundreds or thousands as the case may be. In a bid to achieve this, we usually fall into the error of becoming everything to everybody; it is a fatal error!

Many business people have gone through this mistake and they have various not so cheerful story to tell.
In today's global business space, it is actually suicidal to be the proverbial Jack of all trade...
So what is the way to go? Specialize! Specialize! Specialize!

To succeed in a competitive market place, a product or service must be specialized to perform a specific function and be outstanding at satisfying a clearly defined need of the customer.

How To Make Customers “Love” Your Marketing To Bits

Rule #7 – Appeal to emotional and logical buyers

This rule is one of my favorites. Most people buy based on their first impressions and emotions, then try to back their decision up later through the use of logic. 

Most people will not admit it, but they will buy something because it makes them feel good, look good or feel special.

In your marketing campaigns, you should appeal to both your buyer’s emotions and logic. Think of ways to sell your products such that it will appeal to their inner desires and states. Don’t just base your arguments on tangible and direct features of your products. 

Rule #8 – Sell but don’t ridicule

Too many advertisements or sales personnel make fun of their prospects. The moment prospects are offended by something you say, they’ll very rarely want to buy from you even though you didn’t mean to. 

How To Make Customers “Love” Your Marketing To Bits

Rule #5 – Put your best foot forward

Make sure all of your products and services are up to the standard. Don’t cut  corners or skimp on quality just because you want to make a quick buck. Cutting corners doesn’t work in the long run. 

For each new product I come up with, I insist that it’s of the highest quality possible. In fact, I’m almost a perfectionist. That’s necessary because paying customers want and deserve nothing but the best. 

Before I publish any of my ideas or techniques in print, I always insist on trying them out on myself first. Unless they work, they don’t make the cut. You should do the same for your business – If you were selling to a friend, would you be providing the same kind of quality? 

This point may be obvious, but many companies miss it. It disappoints me time and time again to see products fraught with flaws being released to the market. Recently I bought an MP3 player that had glitches all over the place. It makes people wonder why the manufacturer didn’t bother to iron out all these glitches before releasing it to the marketplace.

How To Make Customers “Love” Your Marketing To Bits

Rule #3 – Show them you’re only human

No one likes to know they’re buying from a huge, faceless corporation or a marketer who’s only interested in their money. That’s why in recent years, big corporations have been giving their business a personal face… to make their products and services more approachable. 

You should do the same too. 

Don’t be too stuck up with your target audience. Just because you’re the expert or authority in this subject doesn’t mean you have to act that way. Put yourself on the same level as your customers, and bend over backwards for them. 

Moneysupermarket.com co-founder makes £170m after selling stake

PARIS: The co-founder of a Flintshire based price comparison website has made £170m after selling a 15per cent stake in the company, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported on Wednesday.

Simon Nixon will remain a major shareholder at Moneysupermarket.com and keep a seat on the board.

He co-created the Ewloe-based site with Duncan Cameron in 1999.

Nixon is selling 80 million shares in the first major disposal of his stock since the website floated in 2007.

It is the latest boost in the personal wealth of the entrepreneur, who studied at St Richard Gwyn School in Flint.

US panel backs Samsung, bans older Apple devices

WASHINGTON – Samsung won a round in its long-running patent battle with Apple on Tuesday when a US trade panel banned the import and sale of some older models of the iPhone and iPad.
The quasi-judicial International Trade Commission said it issued a “limited exclusion order” for certain devices made by Apple, in a victory for the South Korean firm after a huge loss in a court fight with its US rival last year.

How To Make Customers “Love” Your Marketing To Bits

Rule #2 – Make your customers feel good

We feel good when we know we’re loved, treasured and special. There are many ways you can make your customers feel special. From dropping a surprise, handwritten note with every offer, to free gifts and special reports. 

You’ll be surprised at what some of these can do for your business. Make every customer feel special. 

•      Greeting cards during special occasions 

•      Priority order forms / Discounts

•      Newsletters with useful information

•      Special reports

How To Make Customers “Love” Your Marketing To Bits

Introduction

How do I make my products and services sell better? 

What should I do to make prospects buy my products or engage my services?

The answer is simple – Make people like you. It’s a fact: We only buy from those we like and trust. 

If you want your products to sell like crazy, apart from having a top-notch product… the next thing you should do is to make your customers like you. Make them feel good about you as a person, about your business and finally your products. 

Although I’m routinely “pitched to” by a variety of marketers and companies, I find myself buying only from those I like. This special report covers several effective steps to make customers “like” you.

How to Make Your Business Stand Out from the Crowd!

The goal of every business person is to ensure that his/her business stands out among the crowd, it does not matter whether the business is online or offline. Standing out among the competitors is actually one of the fundamentals of any marketing strategy.

If people do not know what you do, where you are or if you are hidden away among your competitors, you may be in trouble.

It is crucial to your business success to send out a very clear message that you are here, you are ready, willing and able to be of service and most importantly of all that you are great at what you do.

Now, there are numerous ways and methods to increase your chances of standing out from the crowd, and we will be exploring some of these ideas.

Promote Your Business from the Outside In

It is really funny how so many offline businesses have not seen the huge advantage in outdoor signage. Outdoor signage works seven days a week, 24hours a day, whether you are open or closed. Use it to its full advantage.

The Secrets of Powerful Letters From The Man Who Sold Coal By Train Carload

            Okay, the next secret from the ages comes from “The Robert Collier Letter

Book” by Robert Collier. This has long been out of print and very difficult to locate. Collier was able to sell almost everything under the sun and make millions. He started out selling coal by the train carload just through direct mail letters. Robert Collier’s book is practically the bible of how to write letters that get results...and right now I want to reveal to you how to use a few of his little-known secrets of effective sales letters.

            Collier tells where the idea for his famous “Will you do me a favor?” letter came from. He tells how he read about a manager whose company had been extremely competitive with another company and it was in this manager’s best interest that the two companies should join together. This manager figured that people feel most kindly to someone for whom they’ve just done a favor for. So he went to his rival and asked him for a favor, he wanted to know how to handle customers taking advantage of their terms. Well, this little technique helped to bring these two companies together.

How to Have A Money Making Online Presence Within the Shortest Time

Here is an article I believe is really invaluable. I can not actually remember where I got it from!

Online presence without a proper foundation is like a bridge without strong holding pillars. Social media can only be result-oriented and outcome-focused when and only when the strategy is right.

There’s a pecking order when it comes to structuring a complete online presence for your business. Being conversant with platforms like Facebook, Google+ Twitter or Pinterest doesn’t mean your content strategy, SEO and e-mail marketing are fuelled enough to last the journey.

In order to get the expected return on social media investment  and not to drain all of your efforts, there must be a combined effects between your social media reasons and expectations, proper content to increase your voice and of course e-mail strategy to exchange through.

The most valuable asset and joy of a healthy online presence is an engaged e-mail list and people that are enthusiastic to hear from you.  Between 500 and 1000 or more responsive e-mail followers trumps 25,000 Twitter followers every day when it comes to actually promoting the things that make you money.

If you want to achieve sustainable online presence that is outcome-focused, you have to focus on building a list of e-mail subscribers that want to hear from you and social media will become an instrument set to help you do more of that.

Dangote, Africa’s first $20bn man —Forbes

The President/Chief Executive of the pan-African conglomerate, the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, has become the first African entrepreneur to lay claim to a $20bn fortune, thus becoming one of the 25 richest men in the world.

This is on account of the stock value of his largest holding, Dangote Cement, leaping about three-fourths since March when Forbes released its annual ranking of the world’s richest people.

Dangote’s 93 per cent stake in the cement company is now worth $19.5bn, according to the magazine.

Dangote Cement becomes the first Nigerian company to achieve a market capitalisation of over $20bn.

Added to this are his controlling stakes in other publicly-listed companies like Dangote Sugar and National Salt Company of Nigeria, and his significant shareholdings in other blue-chip companies like Zenith Bank Plc, UBA Group and Dangote Flour; his extensive real estate portfolio, jets, yachts and current cash position, which includes more than $300m in recently-awarded Dangote Cement.

Magic Words That Increase Your Bottom Line

            Maybe you’ve heard the expression “sell the sizzle not the steak.” Well that’s Elmer Wheeler and his book “Tested Sentences That Sell” from 1937 reveals the ‘tested selling sentences’ that Wheeler uncovered by testing over 105,000 words on more than 19,000,000 people. 

            Doing so he found conclusive evidence that certain words would produce incredible differences in results over other words. And I’ll tell you all about them in a moment, but first it’s interesting to know the way this all got started. When Wheeler was an ad salesman for several newspapers he developed a fine sales presentation for retail merchants. He would come in and tell the retailers about his paper’s large circulation and how people who needed to buy shirts, hosiery, umbrellas, etc. would be done to their store to buy. But the reply he got was “So what?” The retailer would point to hundreds of people in the aisles of his store and tell Mr. Wheeler they come down here but they don’t buy.

Business Success: How To Think Strategically About Your Business (By Gary Lockwood)

Business Success: How To Think Strategically About Your Business (By Gary Lockwood)

Business Success: How To Think Strategically About Your Business (By...

Business Success: How To Think Strategically About Your Business (By...: Ready?... Set... Nah! NOW, we're getting nowhere!   At least once a year, most business owners, entrepreneurs, and professional...

How To Think Strategically About Your Business (By Gary Lockwood)

Ready?... Set... Nah! NOW, we're getting nowhere! 

At least once a year, most business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals begin procrastinating about doing their annual planning. 

Why is this such a daunting task? For many, it's because most of us imagine annual planning as a huge, time-consuming and difficult chore. 

What if it was easy and quick? 

What do you stand to gain from effectively planning for next year?

Six Strategies for getting BREAKTHROUGHS in YOUR Business

 Here is the concluding part of the article:

How to take advantage of LEVERAGING: 

Here, you will regularly examine the results you get from the investment of your time and money. Leverage to produce high-impact results is attained through support people, automation, outside specialists, smart delegation and shrewdly managed priorities. Many entrepreneurs are still operating under the mistaken belief that results are in direct proportion to how hard they work. 

This is why it's so important to make wise decisions about how you invest time and energy. Why do you feel that there's more to do than you can possibly do? Because there IS more to do than you can possibly do. You must make choices. Often very difficult choices. 

It is imperative that you are doing the right things, every bit as much as doing things right. You've heard of the 80/20 rule -- 20 percent of all activities will produce 80 percent of the meaningful results.