I’ve spent the last couple hours thinking about where I want to be at the end of this year. Last year was a tough year for me as the business grew faster than I was able to keep up with. This has caused me to have to regroup and rethink my next moves.
1. Customer service has to be at the front. There is nothing I’ll ever do with my business that will be more important than customer service.
2. Never ever stop. There are times when I want to through my hands up and walk away; those are the times I need to work my hardest.
3. Never lose my cool. No matter what the problem always remember that no one is getting out alive. It’s all just a game.
4. Simple is always better.
5. Plan, strategize, and organize before making any moves.
6. Answer every email in person; never try to automate an opportunity to communicate.
7. Never try to sell anything, just be a friend.
8. Target a market and go after it, do not try and conquer the whole internet.
9. Always remember that internet marketing is nothing more than common sense and persistence will always win.
10. Never play for the money; it’s all about the business.
11. Track everything
12. Work at making my website stupid proof.
13. Network more.
14. Start an affiliate program.
15. Write a contract for every job.
Silicone Bracelets
I’ve been working with a silicone bracelet site for the last two months and I’ve had quite a time with it. The biggest problem is that none of the search terms will bring in enough traffic to amount to a whole lot. I’ve thought about this a good bit and decided to create sub-domain names and try and come up with a couple search terms for each of the sub-domain names.
A couple of the sub-domain names are a lot closer to being finished but I decided to start marketing the bracelet sub-domain name first because I felt it would be able to bring in more traffic then the others. Some of the search terms we came up with should be fairly easy to rank for like Buy Bracelets, Basics Bracelets, Attractive Bracelets, Create a Bracelet and many others.
I want to see if I can get the search terms showing up in the search engines in the next 7 days as well as get the sub-domain name to get 2,000 unique visitors per day in the next 7 days.
I’ve got nothing against Edelman or Wal-Mart but 101 Dumbest Moments in Business has got Wal-Mart and Edelman listed as #1 on the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business.
#2 is none other than Northwest Airlines who handed out a book to their employees “101 Ways to Save Money” and then started laying them off. The book talked about not being ashamed of diving in a dumpster if you see something you like.
#3 was McDonald’s who gave away MP3 players in Japan that came with their very own family of Trojan horse viruses, when loaded to the computer they capture passwords, user names, and other data and then forward them to hackers.
There are some pretty good ones in the list, if you have time you should check out the site.
It’s important that you understand, while you need a good design and name that will help you stand out from the competition, your site visitor could really careless about your design. The site visitor is there to serve their need.
They are either looking for information, to purchase a product or to be entertained. Your site design should help them meet their needs, while at the same time branding your business into their minds. Adding unnecessary flash and moving text into the design because you think it looks neat, is not going to do this.
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It’s important that your design stands out from the competition. If someone lands on your site today and returns tomorrow you want them to remember your site and not wonder rather they’ve been there before.
The design needs to blow away the competition while at the same time being clean and easy to use.
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