three ways of increasing bussiness

The fact is, there are only three ways to expand business...
Option #1 – Increase the number of customers

You increase the number of customers you have by reaching new customers 1) with your existing offering or 2) developing a new offering. Ideally you will leverage the offering you have to enter a new market or expand the reach in your exisiting market. Three key questions to answer to increase the number of customers are:

Who has a real need for the product/service I’m selling? Does my product meet that need in a manner that either saves money or provides additional value?
How much, if anything, are they spending to address that need today?
How many of those potential customers are there? How do I reach them? Answering these questions meaningfully necessitates market research. Sponsored Links
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Market research is a prelude to selling. It teaches you a great deal about what you will need to know to effectively reach these new customers such as what to say, how to say it and to whom.
For example, our company just completed a national market research study that provided our client with the issues and challenges facing its target market. Using the research, which provided a keen understanding of the needs and wants of its customers, our client developed messaging and marketing materials that resonated not only with existing customers, but with new customers as well. Response rate to their lead-generating events have doubled.

Option #2 – Increase the frequency of purchase

The quickest path to increasing the frequency of purchases is by making it as easy as possible for your existing customers to do business with you repeatedly. Another way to look at this is providing additional customer value – and ultimately building customer loyalty. If you make it easier for customers to buy from you, relative to your competition, then you will continue to win their business. This, of course, assumes your products or services are comparable or superior to your competitors.

Outside of customer loyalty programs, here are a few areas to consider improving:

Responsiveness to requests, calls, emails
Accessibility to the customer’s primary contact
Consistency in offering
Follow-up and follow-through on meetings
Accurate and timely billing.
While these may seem like common sense, consider how many vendors you no longer use because they were too difficult to do business with. Don’t become one of them to your customers.
Option #3 – Increase the number of units sold

By default you will increase the number of units sold when you increase the number of clients and frequency of purchase. But you can also increase the number of units sold by understanding how to add value. If you want to sell more products or bill more hours, providing a value-add benefit or solution will begin to strengthen your customer relationship. If you are to consistently add-value to the customer relationship, you need to fully understand how your customers interpret, define, and quantify the value they receive from your products and services.

Here is a consumer example: A restaurateur offered existing customers 20 percent off for parties of 4 during lunch and early dinner. The idea was to add value to his existing clients by providing them with a benefit they could share. Result: His lunch business went up by 88% in one month and by 53% over the campaign. On the frequency side, he experienced 71% retention of his customers when he dropped the campaign after 3 months.

Finally, don’t forget, to see real results, you must start with what you already know about your customers. It is the market research, customer knowledge you already have, that is literally a hidden goldmine of profit that can grow your business and increase your company's top line. It is this customer-focused information that will provide the foundation for generating more sales, retaining and cross-selling customers, and acquiring new customer business. Armed with customer-focused information, you will know which is the best way to grow your business.

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small bussiness and internet marketing

In continuing my series on internet marketing, I want to share with you some of the best places to submit your articles to get results.

1. Lists.
There are three sites that currently have lists that are very popular, and will get you included in these highly popular sites:

Yahoo Groups
MSN Groups
Google Groups

To find groups to list your articles, I recommend that you do a keyword search on each one using the keyword of your topic plus “article lists”. This should yield you good results as this is what I do.

You can also browse the categories.

I’ve had the best luck with Yahoo Groups, so here are some groups that I recommend:

The Write Articles - This is a group that I own that I am the moderator for. A top ranked site recently contacted me, and our RSS feed will be featured on their site, and this will give the writers on this list a lot of free publicity. This group accepts small business, internet marketing, copywriting, website building, computer, and writing articles.

These highly popular groups belong to Shelley Lowery. They get a lot of traffic, and she focuses on different topics. Please make sure you read the guidelines. Otherwise, Shelley will reject your articles.

Article Announce - Writer & Publisher Exchange is the first and ORIGINAL article announcement list. This announcement list includes all article submissions.

Article Announce Home - Home and Family oriented articles.

Article Announce Health - Health and Fitness oriented articles.

Article Announce General - General Interest oriented articles.

Article Announce Internet - Internet oriented articles.

There are many others. These will get you started and put your articles in front of thousands of publishers.

2. Article Directories
With article directories, it’s as simple as doing a search in your favorite search engine to find these directories. Here are some of my favorites, and they’re all highly ranked:

Article City
Go Articles
Click for Content
Ezine Articles
Idea Marketers

Many of these sites require an account, but it’s free.

3. Forums
Forums are often overlooked as a place to promote your articles, but they can be very effective. Like article directories, all you have to do is a search in your category combined with the search term “forums”, to help you find what you are looking for.

Here are a couple of forums I recommend that deal with internet marketing, and they accept articles:

Warrrior’s Forum
Profits.cc

Forums normally require that you sign up for an account, but it’s free.

4. Individual Sites
Finally, if you surf as much as I do, you’ll find a ton of sites out there that accept articles. The important thing here is to do your research, keep a bookmark file, and every time you find a site that you can submit articles to, bookmark it.

Read the publisher’s guidelines. You are more likely to get your article accepted if you study the guidelines before posting.

Remember, this technique will not only help you with the search engines, but it will brand you as an expert in your field, and it will drive traffic to your site, as well as building relationships, which will make you sales.

Little Agreement on Spyware Guidelines

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer
1 hour, 38 minutes ago



NEW YORK - Many anti-spyware programs scour computer hard drives for those data-tracking files called cookies that we often get from Web visits. Microsoft Corp.'s tool does not. And there are disputes aplenty about whether certain widely used advertising programs circulating on the Internet are clean of spyware.

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No surprise, then, that there's little agreement on what should be considered spyware, and what adware is exactly. Or on whether adware, which delivers ads, is a form of spyware or a breed apart.

Consumers are confounded. Is their computer-cleaning overzealous or not thorough enough? Are they removing useful programs with the dreck?

No less vexed are makers of anti-spyware software. They're beset by legal headaches, constantly challenged for what their products define and target as malware.

"It certainly distracts us from the job at hand," said David Moll, chief executive of Webroot Software Inc.

Help may be on the way. Led by the tech-advocacy group Center for Democracy and Technology, the anti-spyware industry is crafting definitions and plans to eventually set up dispute-resolution procedures. A draft is expected by late summer.

"A definition is the foundation," said Ari Schwartz, the center's associate director. "If a consumer's going to make a decision in the marketplace about what they have and what software they are going to use, it's helpful to have a basis to do that on."

Similar efforts, however, have failed before.

Part of the challenge stems from how the term "spyware" evolved.

"It started out as being called spyware because a lot of it was spying on people and sending personal information," said Dave Methvin, chief technology officer with tech diagnostic site PC Pitstop. "It's a catchy, quick word that is always easy for people to understand and say."

But the term stuck even as some of these programs, in response to consumer complaints, began sending back less data and became less sneaky.

In some people's minds, spyware came to include programs that change Web browser settings without asking or trick users into racking up huge phone bills by making the equivalent of "900" calls to foreign porn sites.

"`Spyware' has sort of become the euphemism for any software I don't want," said Wayne Porter, co-founder of SpywareGuide.com.

The result is chaos.

Microsoft, for instance, chose not to scan cookies because many sites need them to remember passwords and otherwise customize a surfer's experience. Cory Treffiletti of the online ad agency Carat Interactive says cookies help sites identify repeat visitors so the same ads aren't shown over and over.

But other spyware hunters flag cookies on the grounds that they help advertisers track behavior. EarthLink Inc.'s Scott Mecredy says anti-spyware programs have gotten sophisticated enough to distinguish good cookies from bad.

Then there's the question of whether "spyware" includes adware.

Claria Corp., formerly known as Gator Corp., has sued several anti-spyware companies and Web sites for calling its advertising software "spyware." PC Pitstop rewrote some of its materials as part of a settlement.

Even "adware" isn't good enough for some.

Joseph Telafici, director of operations for McAfee Inc.'s security research unit, says the company now gets one or two complaints a week, compared with two or three per quarter last year from companies whose programs it has dubbed spyware or adware.

McAfee is in the process of assigning a full-time lawyer.

Symantec Corp. sought to pre-empt a lawsuit by filing one itself, asking a federal court to declare that it had the right to call Hotbot.com Inc.'s toolbar adware. Hotbot did not respond to requests for comment.

Symantec still faces a lawsuit by Trekeight LLC, whose product Symantec brands adware.

Though it has yet to sue, 180solutions Inc. takes issue with "adware," preferring "searchware" or "sponsorware." "Adware" has become too linked with bad actors, and the industry needs more differentiation, said its chief executive, Keith Smith. Most anti-spyware vendors, however, still put 180solutions in that category.

Aluria Software LLC says one company, WhenU.com Inc., has changed its practices enough that it is now spyware- and adware-safe.

But America Online Inc., though it uses Aluria's technology, prefers a different test: What its users think.

AOL found that users overwhelmingly choose to rid their computers of WhenU's SaveNow application when anti-spyware scans uncover it, so AOL continues to list as adware.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that many legitimate programs — including Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and Web browser — send out data without making the user fully aware, one of the common attributes of spyware.

And many programs that spy do have legitimate functions — people may run a keystroke recorder to monitor spouses whom they suspect of cheating. Or they may willingly accept adware in exchange for a free game or screensaver.

Anti-spyware software companies say they leave removal decisions to customers, though many users simply follow their recommendations, failing to distinguish the mild from the malicious.

"If an anti-spyware company recommends that the software (gets) blocked, consumers will typically block it," said Keith Smith, chief executive of 180solutions. "It doesn't matter how good an experience they have with it."

Alex St. John, chief executive of WildTangent Inc., says anti-spyware companies have an incentive to overlist programs: It makes their products appear effective. Better definitions, he said, would help clear his company's game-delivery product.

"We want to do anything under our power to be clearly defined as a legitimate, upright consumer company," he said. "We would love to have something to adhere to."

Guidelines could give anti-spyware vendors a better defense.

For consumers, said Tori Case of Computer Associates International Inc., "if we start using the correct terminology, we can demystify it a bit and help people understand what the real risks are."