Month: November 2013

  • Why Not Reward Yourself When Setting Your Goals?

    Why Not Reward Yourself When Setting Your Goals?Goal setting is a vital part of business planning.  It helps to keep us on track and measure our progress.  Meeting goals makes us feel good and keeps us motivated.  So why not reward yourself when setting your goals?

    That’s not to say that you have to buy yourself a new car for every goal you achieve.  That could get rather expensive.  But the reward should be appropriate considering how lofty the goal was and how much achieving it impacted your business. 

    Small Rewards for Small Goals

    Why Not Reward Yourself When Setting Your Goals?Every goal doesn’t have to be a huge accomplishment.  Smaller goals keep us motivated until we can reach more significant milestones.  This is especially important when getting started.  It may take a while to build the momentum necessary to attain loftier goals, and we need to reward ourselves for the smaller things in order to remain focused on achieving the larger ones. 

    Smaller goals can be the steps necessary to achieve a larger goal.  For example, your big goal may be to have a certain number of clients in 6 months.  Breaking this up into gaining 1/6 of that number each month could give you a monthly goal to work for. 

    Deciding ahead of time what your reward will be can give you an extra incentive.  For small goals, you could pick out a purse or a pair of shoes you’ve had your eye on.  Putting a picture of the reward up on your office wall will serve to remind you what you can look forward to if you meet your goal.

    Big Rewards for Big Goals 

    When you reach your larger goals, you will have even more to celebrate, so your reward should be a big deal.  Think of a big-ticket Why Not Reward Yourself When Setting Your Goals?item that you have wanted for a long time, or perhaps a trip for yourself and your spouse or family. 

    The larger reward will require some advance planning.  It’s important to be sure you’ll be able to afford it once you’ve achieved the goal in question.  If you reach the goal and are not able to get the reward you had your heart set on, that will lead to disappointment.  And disappointment does nothing to motivate or boost morale. 

    Once you’ve determined that the reward is feasible, you could put up pictures to remind yourself of it just as you do with the smaller rewards.  This gives you incentive to work harder to achieve your goals in both the short term and the long term.

    Setting goals is important to a business, but rewarding ourselves for attaining them is equally important.  By giving ourselves something to look forward to, we can motivate ourselves to reach for the stars.  Once we get there, we will be ready to aim even higher so that we can continue to reward ourselves.   

    At Strategize Your Success we would like to help you with your marketing goals for 2014.
    Contact us today so that we can be your partner for the New Year.

    Read more

  • Diversify Your Marketing

    Diversify Your MarketingMany business owners will tell you that they experience a lot of fluctuation throughout the year.  Some months will have higher profits than other months, there will be an increase in demand for a particular type of product or service one month, and then the next month a different type of product will be in demand.

    This business phenomenon holds true for a business’ source of customers as well.  Some months, a business may receive a surge in word of mouth advertising, whereas other months it may receive orders from people who came across an ad that the business had placed. 

    Many marketing experts agree that it is important for a business to diversify its marketing methods.  This will ensure that leads are coming in from many different sources and that if one source is having a particularly slow month, the other sources should still be delivering plenty of leads.

    On the other hand, marketing experts caution against having a marketing message sprung out over too many places.  It can be hard to keep track of ads and know which ads are hitting the right target market. 

    Testing ads and keeping track of the results can help a person decide which areas are the best places for them to advertise.  Knowing this information can also help stretch an advertising budget. 

    There are many choices for where to spend advertising dollars.  If a person wants to advertise online they could choose to invest in pay-per-click ads, ad space that they buy directly from another website, as well as free options – including social networking and article marketing.Diversify Your Marketing

    There are many ways to find leads offline, including flyers, lead boxes, and ads placed in local newspapers and magazines, as well as referrals from current customers.  Depending on the type of business, a person may also opt to buy leads from lead companies.

    The marketing mix that works for one person may be to have one or two ads running, both online and offline, while another person may find that participating for a few hours each week in social networking and hanging up flyers around their local area is what works best for them. Just remember to diversify your efforts.

    Also, it may be somewhat tedious, but testing ads and tracking the results is the best way to find the right mix for your business.  Using an ad tracker service such as Google as well as linking ads to different URLs can help determine which ads are outperforming other ads. 

    Happy Marketing!

     

    We specialize in Google Adwords and SEO and we can be a huge asset to your business.
    Let us know if we can be of service to you and your business. 

     

    Read more

  • Researching Your Niche Is Vital

    Researching Your Niche Is VitalNiche marketing is one way to increase your business profits.  If done right, it will open up a new area of products and/or services that will benefit you as well as your customers.  However, before diving right in, don’t forget to do your homework.

     

    Niche marketing seems to be the hottest topic on everyone’s lips right now.  It sounds so exciting to tap into an as yet untapped market and make millions of dollars.  Don’t be fooled.  Someone may hit the mother lode but it is not the norm for every business.  And, they didn’t do it by luck.

     

    Researching your potential niche market gives a global picture of the chances of success for your idea.  Remember that your idea could be the idea of someone halfway around the world as well.  The difference will be how you go about checking out that idea and how you interpret the results.

     

    With so many websites and new online businesses starting every day, it is a wonder that there are any new markets to tap.  But, there are.  Finding them is the key and this takes time and patience.

     

    One way to see if your idea is viable is to use the Internet.  We all use search engines to find what we are looking for.  Search for items that fit the profile of what you want to sell.  It is always practical to check out the competition.

     

    If you get thousands of search results, this is probably too broad an idea to use.  It has already been worked over by others.  The chances of your business idea hitting pay dirt are not very good.  However, the search results can be used to see exactly what angle they are marketing to.

     

    When researching your niche, use as many search engines as you can.  Using just one as your guiding light will give you false results.  Also, you may find websites in other search engine results that you didn’t find in the first one you tried.

     

    Researching Your Niche Is VitalThe idea you have chosen doesn’t have to be chucked away in the trashcan.  Use it and refine it so that it zeros in on a more specific target than before.  This is what research is all about.  Can you imagine if you left out this step and went with your first idea?  The results would probably have been mediocre to disappointing if making lots of profits was the goal.

     

    Without the research component, starting a business in that market is like searching for a needle in a haystack.  For your dollars, you want to be sure that you are hitting the target.  Even if you already have a business idea and are looking for ways to expand, treat niche marketing like starting from scratch — put in the time to find out if your idea is sound.

     

    Are you looking for a business coach or consultant that can help you with your start up business or next great idea? Contact me today for a confidential consultation.

    Read more