Crafting your unique selling proposition (USP) is an important component in running a long-term, successful business. The process of creating and writing down your beliefs and values, and aligning them with your goals and strategy, will help you to create an action plan for success. If you don’t understand why you do something, and you can’t explain why to others, it will be difficult to create either products or materials to market the products. The USP Helps Small Businesses Differentiate If you have a small business, you won’t be able to compete on the things larger businesses often compete on, such as price. Instead, you’ll need to focus on one…

Plagiarism is unfortunately inescapable. The internet is a large place filled with people that have bad intentions looking to profit off of your talent. No matter how much time you spend working hard on a website, a photograph, a work of art or a piece of writing, there’s always someone out there who doesn’t care about your efforts and wants to use them for their own personal gain. It’s true that this may very well happen to you at some point but you don’t have to take it. You can fight back. Track Down the Source Quite often the people stealing your work will most likely be a single individual…

You know how it is – just as you get really comfortable on vacation and think this is your new life, it’s time to leave and get back to work. Nothing is better than a well-deserved vacation. No matter if you go camping, on a luxury cruise, or even take a staycation, it can be difficult sometimes to get back into the groove of work after having taken time off. But, you can do it if you know what to expect and plan for it. Use a Day to Get Prepared You can either start on the last day of your vacation or you can work into your vacation an…

Outside the photos you take of your products, the next most important aspect of displaying your products effectively on your blog or in your Etsy store is to craft compelling product descriptions. Without the right product description your target audience might not even find your store, much less your product. As you write your product descriptions, seek to answer the following questions: 1. Why is your item the one to buy? – What makes is super awesome and why would the target audience want to/need to purchase it? 2. What makes your item special? – Write down something really special about your product. Perhaps you were inspired by your father’s…

Hiring employees or contractors is an important way to expand your business. After all, each person you hire or contract with can essentially duplicate yourself so that you can expand your business in a smart way without working harder. But, it’s also important to have great people working with you to help lower your stress level while expanding your business and giving you more balance in your life. 1. Understand Your Business Inside and Out – Know what goes into doing your business each and every day. You want to know why you are doing it, who you’re doing it for, and what your goals are for the future. And…

It costs a lot less to keep a customer than to work on acquiring a new one. You can reduce costs and increase revenues substantially by turning the customers you already have into repeat buyers, turning your product cycle into a never-ending circle by expanding your customer lifecycle into infinity. So how do you turn customers into repeat buyers? Create Awesome Products – Your very first line of defense is to create great products. From your freebies to your high priced products, everything should be top-notch and high quality. If you are known for the great quality, word gets around and of course someone who buys something from you then…

It’s important to occasionally not only check up on who is linking to your site, but also what links you have linking out on your own site. Linking inventory isn’t hard to do today thanks to technology. Finding Out Who Links to You: WhoLinks2Me.com – Enter your domain name and this site will check to see who is linking to your site for free. Just install the code on your site and you can see who is linking to your site. It’s a good idea to find out this information. You can get a free account or a pro account. Zyaada.com – At this site you can get more free…

One of the very best ways to market online is to create a legion of loyal cheerleaders and fans, who at your command tell everyone they know about your products, services, sales, and information. Word-of-mouth marketing has always been the very best form of marketing and creates better and longer-term relationships with customers. Keeping customers long term saves money. Here’s how to get affiliates to help you with your marketing. * Use Well-Known Affiliate Tracking Software – If you use unknown affiliate management software, you may have trouble getting strong affiliates to sign up to promote your products and services. Currently aMember.com and 1ShoppingCart.com are very popular systems. Don’t try…

There are people who will give you tips to increase traffic to your website who don’t care if you ruin your entire business. All they care about is that they sold you an information product that “works”. Sure, these traffic-getting tips work, but only until you get caught. Then your business will be ruined because Google will block you out, and people will feel lied to. Keyword Mistakes – Avoid targeting keywords that aren’t relevant to your audience, the products or services that you offer. You also don’t want to overuse keywords, even if they are good, relevant keywords. This is called keyword stuffing. Keywords need to be included in…

Finding ways to get more shoppers to buy in your store instead of online can be challenging, but it’s not really as impossible as some might have you believe. You can bring an in-store shopping revival to life with just a little thought, study, planning and action. Use Email Marketing Use your online real estate, point of sale, and in-store QR codes to collect customer information so that you can market to them via email. Email is still the best way to engage with shoppers, offering them special in-store only discounts, as well as product education based on information that you collect from shoppers. Provide Online Product Education Shoppers typically…