Monday, November 24, 2008

How to Make Money Using Market Research

Market research can be very complicated if you are not sure what you have to do. If you want to do market research you can hire someone to help you but it is cheaper and easier to do it on your won. However, if you are doing your own market research there are some things that you should keep in mind.

To start with, you should always remember that the information you collect will only be as good as your market research sample. You should always be careful when choosing your research sample. Your research sample must meet two basic criteria; it has to be relevant to and representative of the entire target population. This is the only way that it will truly reflect what you want it to. When you are doing your own market research it is always a good idea to choose an area of people to question that you do not know. All too often when the interviewer knows the people being questioned some form of bias may find its way into the results. If this happens then the results are not valid and reliable.

You should always design your market research questionnaire carefully. You questions should focus specifically on what you want to know. Be careful that your questions are not too personal because some people do not want to answer questions that involve money earned and money spent. They are more willing to ask general type questions. If you offend the people in some way they will not be willing to fill out the questionnaire at all.

The market research questionnaire should be kept short and to the point. People become bored and restless if they are asked to fill out pages and pages of questions. If at all possible then you should always try to keep your questionnaire to about one page or a little more.

The most important thing when conducting some form of market research is that you have excellent skills for recording information. Before you start doing your market research then you should always practice and refine your recording skills. You could look at how others have collected and recorded information, or you could do some practice samples on friends and family

Monday, November 17, 2008

How To make Money By Writing An Irresistible Joint Venture Proposal

Writing a joint venture proposal is really just a fancy way of saying to your potential partner, "Hey, let's do a deal."

In fact, I've had far more success with brief, to-the-point proposals than I ever have with a stereotypical ten-page document packed full of corporate jargon.

The truth of the matter is that regardless of who your potential partner may be - whether they're an ezine publisher, a competing business owner or even if they're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company - they're all going to be asking themselves the same question when they receive your proposal:

"What's in this for me?"

More specifically, they'll be wondering exactly how you might be able to benefit them and their company.

Therefore, the most crucial component of your proposal is obviously going to be explaining "what's in it for them". Now, before I get into more details about this, it is important to note that you must have something of great value to offer your potential partner.

It is absolutely crucial that your offer is laser-targeted, relevant and highly beneficial to their clients - as well as very lucrative for your potential partner. It's also very important to research your potential partner (and their company) in order to see what they would most likely be looking for - and it's not always more money, believe it or not.

With this in mind, let's take a look at how to write your proposal so that it pushes your partner's "buttons" - to the point where they'd have to be insane to turn down your offer...

What is your potential partner looking for specifically? Find this out by talking to them, reading their mission statement and researching them - as well as how they make decisions. This will reveal the "button" that you'll need to press as you describe the benefits of the partnership (ie. more profits, something new to offer their clients, giving their business a new edge on competition, etc.).

Make an offer they can't refuse. Again, this will also take some research, but within reason, you should bend over backwards to accommodate your potential partner and make it as profitable for them as possible. Remember that the clients you acquire from a joint venture will purchase from you again and again - and it's usually the "backend profits" after the JV where the real money gets made...

Make it as easy as possible for them to say "yes". People in general are obnoxiously lazy. Many of my proposals have been rejected simply because it either seemed too complicated - or it sounded like too much work to them, regardless of how lucrative it was. Simplify your proposal, and if necessary, take on the majority of the workload - remember that you're sitting on a goldmine!

Show them the money. Don't be vague when it comes to potential earnings. Logically explain to your prospect how much they could reasonably earn from the partnership. It is very important that you do not simply make an "educated guess" - base your predictions entirely on your current marketing stats, sales conversion rates and other real data. This is likely the most overlooked - yet crucial - part of any given JV proposal.

Be personal. A "canned" or impersonal proposal likely won't even make it more than ten seconds before getting tossed in the garbage. Relate to your prospect and emphasize their values by validating their interests, goals and passions. Also, if you want to really make an impact, send your proposal as a hard copy via FedEx. Email is simply too easy to ignore, erase or forget about.

Add a real sense of urgency. You want to subtly hint to your potential partner that you won't wait long to hear back from them - which is true, because if they say "no", you'll have to find someone else anyway. Word this in such a way that it compels them to action either way - but don't be overbearing, deceptive or unrealistic.

And most importantly, build rapport with your prospect. You must understand that the majority of business people - especially those that are very successful - would much rather work with someone that they know, like and trust than a complete stranger. In fact, it's crucial that you do this before you even send them a proposal...

Well, there you go.

You now have everything you need to start easily persuading potential partners to do business with you - as well as putting together some obscenely profitable joint ventures.

Apply these tactics to your own business development strategy and watch your response rates skyrocket!

Monday, November 10, 2008

How to Make Money By Breaking through Your Customer’s Doubts

Expert marketers and sales people know that product resistance is often part and parcel of selling your products and services. It may be because of a particular concern on the product that’s preventing your prospective customers to buy from you. Or it may also be that they’re hesitant on how effective it can be to their situation.

Most of the time, your target audience will be able to express it verbally. But when resistance is non-verbal – meaning, your target audience’s face reflects confusion – you just need to read between the lines, and interpret the body language and expression.

While managing your target client’s hesitance to your sales speech, it would indeed be very difficult for you to do that. Nevertheless, experienced marketers would tell you that such reaction is actually a good thing. It means that even with an objection, your target clients are actually considering your product if not for a few concerns they have. These then should be properly addressed in order for you to turn then into buying customers.

Trained sales agents know this. And as a business owner you should too. Most often than not, the concerns brought up by your target audience may not be the actual issue they’re concerned with. In fact, it may just be that they’re not sure of how they should convey what they need to know from your products and services. This then makes it difficult for your target clients to agree to what you are offering. Unless you understand and overcome the issues pertaining to their objection, you as a business owner will never be able to get your target customers to agree to buy your product or avail of your service.

This is what is important when handling customer resistance to your product. Your prospects are simply unwilling to make a commitment to buy from you. This is certainly the hardest part in any selling process. When you ask your prospect to agree to a sale, yet the prospect hesitates, or worse, responds with a resounding ‘no’, you should be able to overcome that. Most successful business owners can vouch that when you are able to rise above the rejections, you’ll more likely to get customers who are not only one-time buyers, but repeat business clients as well.

What you need then is communicating with target clients in order to convince them to consider your prodcuts and services despite the issues. You can do this by requesting a commercial color printing company to produce marketing tools that would best clear up the issues in the client’s minds. It’s all about providing assistance so that your prospect can finally make a decision – which is hopefully to your advantage.

The good news though is that not every customer can resist your offer. There were many times those buyers close a sale even without you convincing them to do so. Since they are convinced that the product is good for them, you don’t even have to introduce or say your sales speech. All you got to do is to point them to the right direction and you’re on your way to being successful in your marketing campaign.

Monday, November 3, 2008

How to make Money By free Blogging

One of the best ways to truly monetize any site is to find ways of reducing existing costs. Paying monthly fees for a hosting centers, web templates and designers, domain names, and quite frankly, for your time tweaking layout and publishing back and forth can be very costly.

If you attempt to lower your own investment in these services you run the risk of poor support, downtime and even losing your service providers, and, even worse, your customers.

There are a multitude of hosting centers today and you typically cannot find anything cheaper than $5.00 a month with any kind of decent support. So, by the time you add the costs involved you're spending $60 - $300 a year on these services.

Is there a way to do this for free? The answer is 'yes'. Use a Blogging service. If you think about it a blogging service is just a hosted site with pages being your entries. There is no reason to think that you can't create entries that mimic a classically hosted site. Yes, you might find yourself constrained with some design freedom - but the payoff is much higher. Why?

1. Blogging services like Blogger.com and Wordpress.com are free and are built on massively parallel and high scaled architectures that are a dimension greater than 95% of any hosting provider. The downtime is very low.

2. You get automatic content management tools that help you deliver content faster (that's what Search Engine Optimization is all about) and spend less time worrying about your design or paying for designers.

3. You get the latest and immediate publishing services such as RSS feeds, Blog submissions and search engine submission.

Some have asked me if it is possible to get a hosted blog domain that is shared such as blogspot ranked in the search engines. The answer is an absolute 'yes'!

Search engine care the most about content and quality links. In fact to help answer this question I decided to create a test blog to see if I could manipulate it's ranking as easily in Google. After 8 weeks of optimization it was ranked #5 for my primary search term and #7 and #8 for my secondary terms.

So, if you don't have time to worry about designing a site and managing it's content I would strongly suggest using a blogging service. My personal pick is Blogger only because of the freedom they give you to add scripts and modify the templates to your liking.

Wordpress has better layout options and more complete blogging features but will not allow scripts. There are some newer blog tool options as well that I haven't tried yet such as new Microsoft Live Spaces.

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