Resource Articles, Uncategorized
Moms across the country are contributing to the family income from their kitchen tables and if you’ve thought about joining the movement there is no better time. The age of internet marketing has brought opportunities galore! Learn to be your own boss, how to maximize your impact and be seen as the amazing business women that you are, all from the virtual world. Creating a brilliant plan – with actual content and resources that you can use immediately – will help you increase the quality of paying customers. Developing an organized process is important because it allows you to ASK for what you are worth. Here are some hot tips that will help you to achieve amazing results as a first time business owner:
1. Marketing is the most important job you’ll do. As the CEO you’ll wear many hats, but the biggest job you’ll have is to market your business. How else will people know to find you?
2. Commit to 1 hour of marketing each and every day. If it’s easier, break it up into two 30 minute segments. Market in the morning before breakfast and again after dinner. But never miss a day, or you’ll fall behind.
3. Go Viral! Easier said than done, right? Not necessarily. If you are committed to staying engaged on a daily basis, it won’t take long at all for your conversations to get passed onto others. Plus, you will get better at the engagement with practice. Take time to build a marketing team of fans that will talk about you when you are not there.
4. Stand out. Engage your community and your fans with educational tips and tricks that will help you to be recognized as an expert in your field (as well as at your kitchen table!)
Julianne Wish, Member Contributions
Having a great newsletter can increase your business by as much as 5 fold – Or more, if you do it right! In fact, a newsletter is one of the most crucial tools in business, yet many beginning marketers miss out on it. Why is a newsletter so crucial and how can you start your own newsletter? Here’s the inside scoop.
Why a Newsletter is So Important
A newsletter is crucial because most people aren’t willing to pull out their credit card the first time they hear about someone. Instead, they prefer to get to know you and your content bit by bit over time. As they get to know you and realize you’re the real deal and that you can help them, then that’s when they’ll be willing to pull out their credit cards and make a purchase. To build this trust, you need to build a connection over time. A newsletter allows you to stay in touch with people even after they’ve left your site.
Getting Started With a Newsletter
The first step is to get an autoresponder service. There are many services, such as Aweber, GetResponse or iContact to choose from. If you have a shopping card system, that may have a built in autoresponder as well. Once you have your autoresponder setup, the next step is to get people to sign up for your newsletter.
The best way to do that is to have your newsletter on the front page of your website. Clearly tell your readers what they’ll get by signing up to your newsletter. Then ask them firmly and powerfully to join your newsletter.
Consistency
It’s important that you have a set consistency at which you send your emails. In general, anywhere from once a week to once a month is a good consistency.
If you send your emails more than once a week, people may start to think its spam. If you send your emails less than once a month, people will forget about you. Once you pick a consistency, stick with it so that people know what to expect from your website.
Building a Relationship
A lot of newsletter writers spend a lot of time on their headline. Because, that’s what gets emails opened after all. Right? Wrong. Your real headline is in the “from” column. People look at who the email is from more than the subject when they’re deciding whether or not to open an email. Your goal is to build a relationship with your readers, so that they know when they get an email from you that they’re in for a treat. It’s going to be interesting, informative and useful. You’re not going to spam them. If you build a relationship with them like that, then your emails will get opened – Almost every time.
Again, having a good newsletter can increase your business by many fold. Start by creating your autoresponder and getting signups. Then, pick a mailing consistency and start to build a relationship of trust with your readers.
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.
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Julianne Wish, Member Contributions
What is local marketing, and why do smaller businesses need to engage in it? This means targeting people in your area.
Obviously many businesses can go after people around the country. However, others can only do business with local customers.
Restaurants and financial planners are prime examples of smaller companies that do business with only local people. There’s only so far people are going to drive to do business with you if you have a physical location.
However, if you have a business that lends itself to national customers, you can also target local customers separately. There are some people that would simply rather do business with local companies. Therefore, you might want to do some local advertising apart from your national efforts.
So how do you get more local customers? There are a number of ways that work. Here are four you can start with:
#1) Newspaper advertising
This is one of the cheapest ways to target people in your area. When done right, it can be effective.
The problem with it is that it’s very untargeted. The majority of people reading the paper will not be interested in your product. However, if even a small percentage respond, it can be effective.
#2) Yellow pages
This is another one of the “traditional methods” of local advertising. It’s been around a long time, and when done right it can again be effective.
#3) Direct mail
This is hands down one of the top local advertising methods. This is where you buy a list of people in your area based on certain characteristics. You can choose based on age, gender, income level, etc. then you would send out an advertising campaign to them.
This way, you can choose exactly who you want to focus on. Therefore, it’s more targeted than the previous two.
#4) Internet
Online advertising is another effective strategy to get local customers.
So how do you convert traffic into sales? Now that you know how to drive traffic to your offer, you have to focus on making sales.
Get their contact information.
This should be your main goal, so you can keep marketing to them. The average customer requires at least four to seven touches before they do business with you. Therefore, if you give up after the first contact you are probably missing out on the majority of your sales.
Track each advertising source separately.
You might want to track each advertising method, so you can tell what’s working and what isn’t. For this reason, you might want to send the traffic from each source to a different place so you can tell what’s working and what isn’t.
The bottom line is, local advertising can be effective when done right. Implement these tips, and you will get your marketing efforts on track.
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.
Julianne Wish, Member Contributions
The goal of any business is to make money. And, we’re not just talking about the short term but long term goals of increased revenue. To that end, many businesses are missing out on a multi-billion dollar market: moms. Marketing to moms is the wave of the now and the future.
Why are moms so important?
Moms are enterprising. According to BSM Media Inc., mom spending is already over the trillion dollar mark. That’s more than the budget of some third world countries.
Also according to BSM Media Inc., almost 90 percent of moms consider themselves the financial head of the home. Her husband may bring home most of the bacon but it is the moms who decide how to spend it. They shop for everything related to the household: kids clothing, appliances, electronics, outdoor furniture, accessories and home improvement items.
Any husband that shops for these things is going to consult their wives before buying them. Why? Wives do the research into these products to find the best on the market. Moms influence as much as 85 percent of the purchases for the home. That’s over 70 million women we are talking about here. It doesn’t get any bigger than that.
Think about all of the tasks that moms handle in a day. They take care of the housework, shuffle kids from school to sporting events to other activities, cook dinner and manage the finances. In order to keep everything straight, they employ a wide variety of technology. It’s not uncommon to see a mom sitting in the park watching her kids play while listening to an iPod or browsing the Internet on her iPhone.
Moms are also savvy on the Internet. The trend for many years has been moms coming out of the workplace and starting their own businesses at home to spend more time with their kids. To that end, moms have developed a network of blogs, websites and forums designed to teach moms everything from designing websites, starting Internet businesses, marketing to other moms and managing their homes all the while. Their buying power increased exponentially with their knowledge.
Manly mistake?
Traditionally the only products marketed towards women were household products and cooking items. This goes back to the archaic thought that a woman’s place was in the home. That has been a huge detriment to many companies as they are beginning to see.
Women and moms have made an imprint in the man’s world in many areas. Women are not limited to office jobs; they are CEOs and CFOs. They don’t just surf the Web, they are becoming entrepreneurs with widening influence over Internet marketing. Having moms shun your product because you are not marketing to them means they are also spreading the word to other moms across the world (via the Internet) and in their own communities.
The future
Moms are influenced by other moms. Several generations of moms are coming together to influence the spending habits of major corporations. In the future the trend will continue. As moms become more “connected” in the world, their spending will increase. No product is off limits to mom advertising.
Moms do rule the world. Gain the support of savvy moms with your products and your business will reap the benefits.
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.
Julianne Wish, Member Contributions
The goal of any business is to make money. To that end, many businesses should be focusing on a multi-billion dollar market: moms. Marketing to moms is the wave of the future…and the wave of now!
Why are moms so important?
Moms are enterprising. According to BSM Media, Inc., the amount of money spent by moms is already over the trillion dollar mark. That’s more than the budget of some third world countries!
Also according to BSM Media, Inc., almost ninety percent of moms consider themselves the financial head of the home. The husband may be the one in many cases that brings home most or all of the money, but moms are usually the ones that make the ‘how-to-spend-the-money’ decisions. Moms shop for everything that is related to the household: clothes for the kids, appliances, electronics, outdoor furniture, accessories and home improvement items.
The majority of husbands who shop for these items will consult their wives before buying them. Why do they do this? It is because the wives tend to do most of the research into the products to find the best one on the market for them. Moms influence as much as eighty-five percent of the purchases for their homes. That’s a huge number of moms! Over seventy million!
Take a moment and think about all of the tasks that moms handle in a day. The tasks can include housework, driving kids to and from school and activities, cooking meals and managing finances. They need to keep all of these things straight…and to that they usually employ a wide variety of technology. It is quite common these days to see a mom sitting at a park, watching her kids playing while browsing/working on an iPad, iPhone, or other such mobile device.
Moms are typically quite savvy on the internet. For many years, the trend has been for moms, and women about to become moms, to come out of the ‘9-5’ workplace and come home to start their own business so they can be home with their children. To that end, moms have developed a network of blogs, websites and forums designed to teach moms everthing from designing websites, starting businesses online, marketing to other moms, all while managing their homes. With all of this additional knowledge, moms’ buying power has increased exponentially.
Marketing Mistake?
Traditionally, the only products marketed towards women were household and cooking products. This goes back to the old thought that a woman’s place was in the home. Many companies are now seeing what a huge detriment that approach has been to them.
Women and moms have made a huge imprint in what was traditionally a man’s world. Women are not limited to office jobs. They are CEOs and CFOs. Women don’t just ‘surf the internet’, they are becoming entrepreneurs with increasing influence over internet marketing. These days, having moms shun your product because you are not marketing to them means that they are spreading the word via the internet and in their own communities.
The Future
Moms are influenced by other moms. Several generations of moms are coming together to influence spending habits of major corporations. In the future, you can expect this trend to continue. As moms become more ‘connected’ in the world, their influence over spending will increase [as their circles of influce do].
Gain the support of savvy moms with your products/services and your business will reap the benefits.
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.
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