We made it!!

We are all in once piece after the big move, but I can’t say that for a couple of photo frames, some glasses and some things that have gone missing…

The move was as stressful as you can expect, although a big thanks goes to my friend D, for taking the kids off our hands for quite a while, and also to my sis in law who drove the massive truck down for us! She was the only one with a truck license and it was quite funny to see her tiny frame behind the massive wheel.

I have no internet access at the moment out at the farm where we are staying, so I have to come to mums house to hook me up. Hopefully I will fix that shortly after the new year so please bear with me if you’ve sent me an email and it’s taken a while to respond.

The kids are loving it here and  H can’t wait to start school on 30th Jan.

Keep an eye out in the new year for some new training courses and marketing products to help propel you all into a properous 2009!!

Have a very merry xmas and fantastic new year and wishing you all fun with your families and friends!

Em.

Small Business Marketing Ideas

Discover The 5 Most Effective Ways to Get More

Out of Your Advertising Dollar.

 

1) What do you want from your advertising? Why are you advertising in the first place? This step is crucial to get right before you undertake any type of advertising or marketing. Ask yourself the following questions. If you answer yes to more than one, then you need to do separate advertising campaigns. More on that later…

• Are you trying to raise awareness of your brand?
• Do you want more clients?
• Are you after more visitors to your website?
• Would you like to increase your database?

2) Know your target market. Who are they? And don’t just say the general public! You may have more than one particular market. Just ensure that you choose only one market per advert. The worst thing you can do is write one advert and try to get everyone in from it.

Your target market can be made up geographically- (i.e. a bakery may look for anyone within a 10klm radius of their shop) or it can be made up demographically (i.e. – new mums, business owners, women, football fanatics etc). You can then narrow that down even more to new mums with girls, or boys; AFL fans, or Rugby Union fans etc. The more you narrow it down, the more targeted your advertising will be.

3) Write your advert. Use the above steps to come up with the first few pieces of your advert. Your headline should capture the attention of your target market. You also need to utilize the headline to tell readers why they need to keep reading. This is called the ‘benefit’. Why should they read your advert? Try some of the following for examples:

• “Attention new Mums- Here’s how to get more sleep”
• “Recent research suggests new mothers are not getting enough sleep”.
• “Find out how to get more sleep now!”
• “Discover how to increase your profits in 1 day!”

4) Include Incredible Offers. Giving something away for free is one of the best offers. It doesn’t have to be a product of yours- try to build relationships with other business owners who share the same target market, but are not competitors. For example: An air conditioner installer may team up with the local air conditioning sales centre, and offer their services to the customers to install them. This way, the installer gets more work, plus the sales centre can offer a value packed bundle for their customer.

5) Include a Call to Action. Ensure you include a call to action and deadline in your offer. People always hate to feel they are missing out on something and the deadline will compel them to act. Utilise some of the following examples:

• ‘Hurry- competition closes next Friday! Email today to ensure you don’t miss out!”
• Visit us before 28th October to claim your Free Gift!
• Bookings close by 24th December- Call us today to ensure your placement!
• Come in to The Plaza on Friday between 8am- 1pm to receive your Free Photo

Live Life to the Fullest

I received an email from someone today with some funny anecdotes about living life, rather than step-toeing around and at the bottom of it was this quote that I find sums me up to a tee:

“Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways – Chardonnay in one hand – chocolate in the other – body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming “WOO HOO, What a Ride”

 

What about you? What are your thoughts on this??

Business Basics – 4 Crucial Elements to Success

Having ‘Faith’

You know, I used to listen to people who talked about having faith in everything they did, and my mind always thought about religious terms. Like, god, and Jesus and all of that as ‘having faith’.

I realise it’s not.

Well, it can be, if that’s what you believe in. But what I’m talking about it actually having faith in your beliefs. Having faith in whatever you believe in, and being honest with yourself about it.

I was always quite skeptical of ‘the secret’ when it came out. But I jumped on the bandwagon and got the movie, read the books, downloaded the audios etc, but nothing ever happened. And I realise now, that it’s because I didn’t really believe in what I was telling myself.

I have two stories I want to share with you all. One is about my father – who passed away in May this year. Well it’s a tale of the universe actually, but it concerns him…

For as long as I have been able to drive, or to even be able to look at cars in a admirable way, I’ve wanted a Suzuki Vitara. From the tiny little two door soft tops, right the way through, every time they bring out a new one, I renew my interest in the cars. And I’ve always said to myself, that I was going to have one. I never really thought about how that would happen, but I knew in my heart that I would have one (meaning that I was going to buy one. With what money I had no idea, but I was going to buy one). Anyway, my father recently got sick with an asbestos related illness and was sick for a year before he passed away. During that year, his solicitor put him into the class action suit against Hardies etc. He never saw any of his money, but both him and Mum decided to give me some to buy my new car -  A Suzuki Grand Vitara.

Now, this car will never replace my father, but it’s an example of the universe at work. So be very careful about what you dream about, and what you ask for,  because it can not always come to you in a good way.

The second story has to do with having faith. I believe Dad is around me all the time and truly looking out for me. Because I believe this, I have no problems in taking that step to get me out of my comfort zone and having faith in the decisions I make. An example of this is moving house.  After Dad passed away, we decided to pack up and go back home to the rest of our family, and give our kids the support and love of relatives and family. We had no idea how to get work(it’s a regional centre, so not a lot of work), no idea where we would live, schools for the kids etc. But, we made the decision to go, and low and behold, everything has turned out for the best.

Im amongst this, I decided to set a date for moving house. We still hadn’t sold our house, we didn’t have a place to go to, but I took that risk, believed in my faith, and made it on the 15th Dec 2008.  As of last week, we sold our house and have been able to move in with some family.

So, the motto here is to take that step – believe in yourself, your abilities, whatever it is. But trust yourself. Do it.

Don’t keep saying “when I” because nothing will ever happen. Make the decision first, and then everything will fall into place.

Do you have a similiar story to share?

16 wordpress plugins you must have

This list is fantastic, given freely by Robert at the Web Marketing How To Blog. I confess that I use almost all of these plugins.

Most people don’t realise that there are so many new plugins being added every day, and it’s so simple to install them.

So here is the list, and I suggest you visit Robert to get more ideas on how to use these plugins to the max!

WordPress is great right out of the metaphorical box, but there is a wide array of thousands WordPress Plugins out there that will help you leverage the platform and make the most out of it. Here’s a list of the 16 WordPress Plugins that you need to have to get your site ready for prime time and make the most out of it and the information it can feed you.

On to the list!

1. Akismet – Akismet helps protect you from comment spam. Very easy to use and extremely effective. You’ll need to get a free WordPress.com API key to use this.
2. WordPress.com Stats – Since you’ll be getting a WordPress.com API key anyway, go ahead and download this plugin that gives you basic but useful stats in a nicely formatted and easy to read style.
3. All in One SEO Pack – Gives you quick and easy SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your WordPress blog. Re-writes your page titles first, adds in meta keywords and descriptions, allows you to eliminate apparent duplicate content simply and easily.
4. Contact Form ][ -This is a drop-in form that you can use so site visitors can send you messages, as opposed to restricting them to comments on your posts.
5. Executable PHP widget – Sooner or later, you’re going to decide you need to have PHP snippets in your sidebar, and this modification of the standard WordPress text widget will allow just that.
6. FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plugin redirects all your feeds to your FeedBurner Feed so you can track them.
7. FeedBurner StandardStats – Helps you integrate FeedBurner’s StandardStats into your site.
8. Google Analyticator – Enables Google Analytics to log visitors and other critical information. This information is more detailed than some other stats but somewhat unwieldy for daily “how are things?” checking.
9. Google XML Sitemaps – Generates XML sitemaps usable by Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. This is critical to helping drive search engine traffic to your blog.
10. Popularity Contest – Allows you to rank posts by popularity using a configurable score based on type of view.
11. Show Top Commentators – This plugin encourages reader comments by displaying the most active commentators and their linked websites, if given.
12. Simple Tags – All sorts of great options for tagging your posts, managing tags, Related Posts, and more!
13. Subscribe To Comments – Notifies commentators of replies as they are posted so they can continue the discussion.
14. WordPress Database Backup – Backup your database on-demand or via basic scheduling.
15. WordPress Reports – Provides good at a glance stats from Google Analytics and FeedBurner data.
16. WP Super Cache – Enable caching for your blog to help you over the Diggs, Stumbles, and Slashdottings.

These are a list of the basic plugins you’ll need. You’ll notice that several revolve around WordPress.com, Google, and FeedBurner. These sites have a lot to offer and future posts will detail the things you’ll use them for.