4 TIPS ON HOW TO SURVIVE THIS ECONOMIC MELTDOWN AND BECOME A WINNER.

With the current global economic meltdown, you need to do different things to remain profitable. We are all feeling the pinch and it is not about to go away. Right now you need to develop a strategy to stay afloat.

This time you need to pull that book you read about leadership in crisis time. If you have no such book them I will give you some ideas, which will save the day if well implemented. The economy is ducking and diving like a Spitfire plane under fire and in such a case, we need to know how to navigate through the enemy line.

You need to behave like a general during war; you need unquestionable loyalty from your troops. This can only be achieved if you have undisputed leadership quality to steer your men away from imminent danger. Here is the tool kit you need to do become that general:

Quality customer service:
Quality customer service should be inherent in you business, this is not time to start; you need to have started yesterday. I have always said that customer service is too big to be left to one department; it should be the motto and the mission of the entire business. Make sure that you dazzle and wow your customers to make them feel that you made that business for them; after all without them you have no business.

Strategic innovation: Think innovation, innovation. Look around you to identify unoccupied territories, unmet needs, segment the market further and further, listen to you customers more to find unmet needs. Remember you competitors at this time are trying to survive but you are innovating, putting you ahead of them.

Become the undisputed leader across the board: Command respect from foe and allies alike. You must be there to offer leadership services to you team. They are looking up at you to carry the day for them, so please do that without failing.

To prepare for what comes next: This could be the beginning of the storm and it could be far from being over. Save where you can, not by cutting the marketing budget, but by reducing waste. Lease don’t buy, because at the end of the day, you need to make quick decision and unnecessary assets will be wasting you time. Like a soldier travel light.
This way you make it through the night.

With the above tips, you will win the war without many casualties. You will have a more strong business after all these. This meltdown could be an opportunity to grow your business.

Become the business leader we want you to be, rise up to the occasion by using the tested toolkit provided.

MARKETING ONLINE - GET TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG FOREVER

As a business blogger you must be having the desire to have many people like and come more times to your blog. You need to drive and maintain traffic. Traffic drives you. You also need to enjoy high search engine optimization. For you to achieve this, you must make your blog a brand. A brand so strong, that it will stand out against your competitors.
But how do you make your blog a brand?
Many times people use the word brand without actually understanding what a brand mean. The marketers define a brand as:-
• A name or a term
• A sigh, symbol
Thus a brand is a combination of a name, sign. A symbol well designed to enable identification and differentiation by the customers. Without a clear brand, your blog is a generic; your competition can attack you in ease. For your blog to get to the brand league, it must have what the marketers would call, the blog quality. This will bring your blogging ability out and make you succeed both in blogging and marketing online.
The blog quality is the ability of your blog to perform its function which includes retaining the visitors, reliability among other varied attributes. As a blogger, you need create a blog that will stand out as a brand. For your blog to become a brand it has to be maintained and protected, always remember a brand identifies you and so should be your blog.
Being a business blogger, you need a tool for the buyer as well as the sellers. For the buyers, your blog will help them in identification and elicits the perceived benefits. A brand is a promise to the buyers and your blog must be a promise to its visitors. It's a mark of quality and your blog must be a mark of quality.
To succeed in branding your blog must offer consistency, bundled benefits and it must never fail. Giving your blog a name and good colors is a good thing, but that does not make it a brand. For it to become a brand the blog must be more than just the name or symbol; it must capture the customer's preference/loyalty. Your blog must represent customer's perceptions, feelings, expectation and benefits of the product you are selling.
A branding expert suggests a brand reside in the mind of consumers and over time a brand develops good brand equity and so will be your blog.
As a brand your blog must develop a master plan based on its understanding of its primary customers, their needs and what drives them to buy from you. You as a blogger must understand what makes your customer tickle?
Your blog must deliver strength by:-
• Relevance to its core customers.
• Uniqueness.
• Differentiation from its competitors and other bloggers.
In summary, for your blog to become a brand, you must do the following:
• Your blog must offer unique selling proposition and be different in solving your customers need.
• Your blog must offer many benefits to its core customers
• Your blog must build its equality over time or it will lose relevancy and die.
In short your blog must live, survive and conquer. Based on that, how is your blog doing to remain become or remain a brand? Always remember branding is about the customer's perception your offer. This perception is based on how satisfied the customer is.
Make it happen and enjoy repeat traffic to your blog.

WRITING YOUR WAY TO MAKING MONEY ONLINE.

Growing you online business is not easy as many of us have realized. The key to internet successes is traffic, nothing else, no any other magic formula. Bringing traffic to your site and making them take an action is time consuming and at times very discouraging. It is totally a different type of ball game. I know most of us have tried many tricks in the books to achieve desirable results. If there was a book that would sell is a book titled “Getting traffic now”, and I doubt if it would provide any magic. Traffic is important because it is the fuel that drives any business. Well I am not about to write such a book, but I will tell you simple proven ways to drive traffic to your site.

First and foremost, the easiest thing to do is write articles. Write articles and post to article directories. This has worked for many entrepreneurs and should work for you too.

But what sort of articles should you write?

Like marketing, you need to identify the target group for your product. Identifying the target is important because you cannot write articles about weight loss, while your site is selling fattening formula. This would be wrong target and you will not get the right traffic and nobody will click to that Adsense advert or buy your fattening formula. It will be wasted traffic.

Article writing is part of your marketing activity and marketing means getting the right consumers for your products. For you to leap benefits with your article writing, target the right segment and the right customer for your products.

The other thing about article writing is keyword research. This is done by carrying out keyword research on the niche that you want to write about. Keywords research tools are available in the internet. Try Google Adword Keyword Tool, or Yahoo.

Many people go for the most sought for keywords, but this is very competitive. Popular keywords create great competition and your article may get lost and you may not enjoy the traffic you desire and eventually giving up. Get niches while researching for your keywords, don’t get very competitive keywords.

The other thing that could provide you with traffic is writing e-books and giving them away.

Make good e-books following the marketing principle I have detailed above. Target the right people and have links to your websites. The tick is to give them for free. This will create viral effect and you will see the benefits. It is as simple as that.

With the above tips you can start enjoying traffic to your site, however if you write only one article, you may never realize this traffic. Write more than 10 articles and submit to as many directories as you can and you will start enjoying traffic.

Try that and you will see the search engines will index you page. However remember that search engine look for fresh content, so don’t get free articles in the internet, it will be a waste of time, write fresh contents.

HOW MONEY HAS EVOLVED TO FIT TODAY’S ONLINE TRANSACTION.

They say if you do not know where you are coming from the you cannot know where you are going. By understanding the way the trade and money has evolved over the year will make you appreciate the role of different types of money in existence today. Let’s start by understanding the different business postures which have existed in this world. Some of those postures are old and dead, some are still around. We start looking at the historical changes in trading and different currencies used.

First there was subsistence stage, here we produced what we needed, our needs were few, however as life improved, we could not produce everything we needed. Trading came in and in the beginning there was the barter trade, here the mode of exchange was you bring your goats; I bring my wheat, them we exchange. This mode of transactions had its own shortcomings; for example how many goats for a bale of wheat? The method lacked standardization and measure, the buyer and the sellers had to bargain for the right amount of exchange for each commodity and this wasted time. Transactions took long.

Business realized that they needed a more standardized mode of transacting their business. They developed some kind of measures by using sea shells, ivory, animal skins among other form of exchanged developed then. India for example used their spice as a form of trading currency. It was the most sought currency then, making people search for the shortest way to India by sea.

Eventually the governments were becoming more focused on trade as a way of making that extra coin. These central governments developed some form of coins which were used by its citizens to pay for tribute and taxes. Precious and other metals were used in making these coins; the amount of the metal used determined the value of the coin. Gold, silver coins started getting into the business. Pirates flourished, if your stole gold coins from a merchant ships you could sell them and become rich.

Security become an issue and it was at this juncture that the governments developed the concept of central banks, here you could deposit your gold and get a receipt for the value. You could use the receipt for transactions; this receipt was and is still known as the legal tender. The legal tender is what we call money today. The money you have is equal to a specific amount of gold held at the country’s central bank and you can use it anywhere within that country and its value is standardized, i.e. 100 dollar bill has the same perceived value either in New York or Hawaii.

Now we have moved further to plastic money. All these efforts were driving to a point where one could get what they want anywhere anytime without much hassle. All was driving towards what we call today the marketing posture. There could be no marketing without the legal tender. The legal tender was the core of brick and mortar business. The plastic money is core of today’s on-line business.

To ignore the role of plastic money in our present day is a disaster because the customer is not the guy who lives down the street but another person in a foreign country.

TIPS OF WRITING EFFECTIVE MISSION STATEMENT THAT FITS WITH YOUR ENTIRE MARKETING STRATEGY

Many times you get into a company and the first thing that greets you is the receptionist and the companies' mission statement. The mission statement is either hanged in a huge board for all to see. It will also be on the top page of the brochure, which will be on top of the table at the waiting room.
To hang a mission statement for all to see is a great thing; however I have been reading many mission statements in my visits in many offices not in one country but in many and one thing come out clearly.
The mission statements of all those companies look the same, the only change is in different wording here and there, but they all generic, and no one is original. This prompted me to start studying anything written on mission statements and I am about to share with you some tips of what I have learned in my long search.
First, I think there is a lot of copy and paste when it comes to mission statements. Nobody wants to go back to the origin of mission statements and ask themselves whether that is the only way it can be written.
The other thing is that mission statements are written by the executives as part of the website and other office vintages, mission statements are treated like the doors, the interior decor and once they are written nobody in the organization ever refer or think about them anymore, they become like a memorial.
I have seen companies with mission statements indicating that their staff is the most valuable assets in their company and yet staff has gone on strike because of very justifiable issues. I have seen how in return the executive of those companies starting with the CEO treat the staff grievances and there is nothing about the staff being assets about it.
If you want to know that the mission statement is a creative work of some executives, ask any of the employees what their mission statement is and if you lucky to find anyone who knows what it is, they will recite it like a poem, a bible verse, their national anthem or a loyalty creed.
It is unfortunate that many mission statements are not executable and they mean less to the organizations they are made to guide; this is because they are just words that are hanged on wall as fad or fashion. It is just a trend that every office or business must have something called the mission statement, but why, very few know.
You do not want your mission statement to be like this, I am sure that you want your mission statement to be taken more seriously than your national anthem. If that is what you need, here are some few tips of how to achieve that.
To avoid all these problems of none adherence to mission statements, we need to write very effective mission statement and mean what we say. This easier said than done. But what is a mission statement?
A mission statement is guide to determine the basic business goals, culture and values of your business. It is written to help your business take a strategic position to exploit the available business opportunity. It is an enabler for your business success.
You mission statement must have your business philosophy for it to be taken in by the entire staff. It is part of branding because it must bring out your image and show the world what you stand for. Thus a poor written mission statement will affect how your brand is viewed.
For a mission statement to succeed it must have the following objectives:
• It must ensure uniformity and consistence of doing things in your business.
• It must act like a guide to create efficacy in the use of your resources through effective allocation and management.
• It must describe and help execution of your business culture and other values.
• It must act as a lighthouse that gives your business the ultimate direction.
• It must have synergy with entire strategic plan as it is the ultimate strategic tool.
• It must be looked at by the entire business as the anthem, or creed or mantra, because it is your organization's bible.
When making a mission statement, remember that it is core to your overall business strategy and objective. A mission statement must echo your business objective and if you find that it is not working in synergy, you then must change it. Remember it is not cast on the ark of covenant and that it cannot be adjusted.
A mission statement like the strategy is all inclusive; it is the glue that binds the different personalities and department of your business. To achieve this wholeness, involve everybody in you mission statement making and look for a way to accommodate as many as you can, after all they are the ones who will need to adhere to it. Have a referendum to vet your mission statement and have a tracking policy to see how far you are off the mark once in a while.
I have heard of business that hires agencies and other outsiders to make the mission statements for them, this is wrong. An outsider cannot define your business objective. Remember a mission statement is who we are, what we do, and how we do it and hence it is the heart of your business. How can a stranger even understand about your business?
You mission statement is so important to be left to strangers as it must include the following about your business:
• Your business goals and objectives.
• Your business philosophy.
• The description of your products and services in the shortest term possible.
• Your strengths, your values and other priorities.
Your mission statement must manifest itself in your company profiles. At times you read the company profile of a particular business and then read their mission statement and you can tell that they are as different as death and sleep. There must be no disconnect between the two. The mission statement and the company profile must echo the same theme, values, tools and other intrinsic of your business. Your profile is the executive summary of your mission statement.
Your mission statement is a product of your strategic formulation; it is a guide to all stakeholders of your business, who include your employee, your customers as well as the shareholders and the general public.
Your mission statements role is to help your business achieve its objectives and goals, for this reason it cannot be treated like a doormat by anybody, you have to fight for it. Before I finish this article I would like to tell you one African saying "the oilskin of a homestead cannot be used by strangers" this means you mission statement is very important to be left to strangers at all.
Always remember that without an effective mission statement, you are like a ship that has lost its direction.