Your unique selling proposition (USP) explains to you and your audience why your products and/or services are preferable over someone else’s products or services. Figuring out and writing down your USP is an important part of helping you develop a profitable business. To be able to create a working USP you’ll need to: Understand Your Target Audience – Who exactly are they and what problems do they have that you can solve? Get to Know Your Competition – How is your competition serving your audience? Know How Your Product Provides Value – How does your product provide value and solve problems for your audience? Know Why You Created It –…

If you’re in business long enough, it’s going to happen. Someone is going to say something bad about you online. It may or may not be true. It will be upsetting, and it will cause you to doubt everything you believe in. But, there is a way that you can turn bad online reviews into a demonstration of your company’s values and dedication to customers. Take a Time Out and Get Offline When you first see a bad online review your heart will likely stop, then start beating really fast. You’ll feel hot, and you’ll be bothered. It will hurt your feelings, and it will make you angry. But, it’s…

You know you’re supposed to blog to help bring traffic to your website. However, it’s important to have a plan about what you’re going to blog about, what format everything will be in, and to understand what your goals are. Without knowing the point of your blogging you won’t be successful. 1. Your Blog Should Be on Your Website Don’t create a blog separate from your website. Your blog should be on the website you’re trying to promote. You want to bring traffic to your most important asset, so most of the content that you create should be right on your own website. That includes blog posts, articles, videos, graphics,…

Whether you like it or not, Google owns most of the share of search engine traffic. Therefore, it’s important to pay attention to whatever Google is doing, including Google+. Google+ seems to want to be the Facebook, Twitter and Skype all rolled into one. And, it’s succeeding. But, the reason you need to be involved with Google+ is that Google Search is going to rank your involvement with their social media higher than they would someone else’s social media tools. Google Features to Use in Your Business Google Adwords – Linking the two together with social extensions is an important way to ensure that all your plus 1s are linked…

You hope your website conveys certain values and ideas to your audience such as: You’re a professional You can do what you say you can do You care about your audience’s needs But, so often web design is sadly deficient in projecting these ideas. Business owners make mistakes designing their websites by not looking at their websites from their audience’s perspective. Before designing a website for your business, consider the following factors: Who Is Your Audience? You should be intimately aware of exactly who your audience is. What do they like? What is their age, sex, and other demographics? How does this knowledge affect what type of website you need…

So many times businesses offer discounts to new customers, forgetting about the customers they already have that are loyal to them. One way to combat this problem is to create a customer loyalty program. There are many ways in which you can do this, and the methods vary depending on whether you have an online business or a bricks and mortar business. Let’s go over some easy ways to create a customer loyalty program. 1) Punch Card – If you have a bricks and mortar store, one of the simplest methods for creating a loyalty program is to set up a punch card system. Each purchase you punch the card…

If you are writing a book to increase your influence and get the word out about your business or service, you might consider using paid reviews as a way to promote it. But are literary reviews worth it?