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Key Small Business Tips for Success

Small business tips for starting your own business can put you on the path to financial success.

The SBA says that the term small business includes concerns that are organized to make a profit and have fewer than 500 employees. In this post, small business includes work at home, affiliate marketing, network marketing and online home based businesses, and I will explore small business tips to help you achieve your business goals. These tips will help you get customers and generate more sales quickly.

Here are key small business tips and questions to consider:

1. Why do you want to start a small business? Starting your own business requires commitment. So, don’t proceed to do so unless you are prepared for long hours and frustration while you are establishing your business. For many, enduring this is well worth the potential of financial security.

2. Will you market a product or service? A service business is one where you offer your expertise to clients. For a product business, you will need to offer a tangible product. Typically, a product business is more expensive to launch than a service business.

3. Do you have a simplified business plan? The thought of writing a business plan is intimidating to most aspiring entrepreneurs. However, it is possible to write a one-page plan that tells the what, who, how and where of your business. You should keep it simple. You can add details as you go. Just get it started.

4. Who is your customer? Describe your target customer in as much detail as possible. Know their needs and wants. Know how you can provide a solution to their problem. This profile will help you create a targeted marketing message and save you time and money in reaching prospects.

5. What is your pricing? Pricing is an art and a science. You need to cover your costs and generate a reasonable profit. Doing research to see what your competitors are charging can help.

6. Are you watching your costs? Many entrepreneurs tend to underestimate how long it will take for their small business to turn a profit. Don’t burden your business with too many costs too quickly. To keep costs to a minimum, hire interns and outsource or barter for services.

7. What’s your plan for getting customers? One of my coaches says the secret to business success is spending 85% of your time doing things that will lead to sales and 15% of your time doing everything else. You’ll need a marketing plan. How do you plan on attracting prospects and converting them to paying customers? Design your advertising to generate sales. Your advertising should always include an offer and an easy way for prospects to respond.

8. Are you using social media? More and more businesses are moving to social media because their prospects are on social media. Only about 25% of small businesses are using social media to build their business. So, creating a presence on social media will give you an edge. This typically means building a fan page on Facebook. There are many resources you can use to build a fan page.

Here are some small business tips to attract more customers online:

1. Be sure to add local content targeted for your specific area.
2. Make sure prospects can find you online and offline.
3. Be very clear about what your business offers.
4. Participate on social media consistently.
5. Watch what your competitors are doing. See what is working and what is not working.

These small business tips require you to be consistent. It takes persistence to establish a social media presence.

If you act on the small business tips above, you will increase your chances of success, you will effectively leverage your time, and promote your business profitably.

5 Home Business Tips For A Successful MLM

One of the most lucrative (and alluring!) forms of home business is to join an MLM. Those who make it big, make it big! There literally is no ceiling to what you can earn, yet many earn next to nothing.

Most people spend all of their money over a couple of years, paying their memberships and wasting money on useless programs. However, with just a small nudge in the right direction, you can save your money and build an MLM in the most efficient way.

For that reason, I’ve put together some home business tips to really help you get going with your MLM.

Home Business Tips:
#1. Join the Right Team. Before you join an MLM, you should be sure that the team you’re joining will create the best atmosphere possible for your success. Are they going to help you recruit? Do they hold regular trainings? Will they answer your questions on the phone? When it comes to your success, you must be a little bit selfish and make sure that you’re in the right place.

#2. Use 3rd Party Resources. My favorite of the home business tips is this one because it will make your biz much more efficient and require less work from you. If you have a video presentation for your MLM, send your prospects there instead of spending an hour on the phone with them. Also, do 3-way calls with your more experienced upline.

#3. Brand Yourself, Not the Company. If you are only selling people on the benefits of the company, that won’t set you apart from the other 20,000 members of your biz. There will always be someone out there with more experience and more to offer, and your prospects will join them instead. However, if you have specific offers and bonuses to offer, advertise those. Advertise what you can give to them. That makes you 100% unique because no one else out there is just like you.

#4. Connect With Prospects/Leads. The more places you can connect with a prospect, the more they’ll get to know you and trust you. The best place to connect is over the phone. That way, they can hear your voice and really establish a relationship fast. Furthermore, always connect through email, and also on Facebook. If you have their email, you can search for them on Facebook.

#5. Get Proper Marketing Training. Marketers without proper training tend to spend their days on Google, looking for new marketing “schemes” or “do-it-all” systems that don’t really work. However, in order to have success, you must be able to have a steady stream of new prospects to talk to on a daily basis. That’s the only way to be able to recruit enough people to make a significant residual income.

By using these home business tips and building your MLM the right way, you’ll have a long-term, stable foundation for the future growth of your business.

Your success starts with you, so make it happen!

Erin Smith

Small Business Tips – The #1 Key to Small Business Success

Without a doubt, for small business owners to enjoy small business success, they must overcome multiple challenges. Interestingly, many owners feel that challenges from the competition, or increased overhead are their primary obstacles. However, to realize maximum success, they must learn one invaluable skill.

Typically, in the beginning stages of a small business, the owner will need relatively few employees. In fact, in the case of an online business, the owner may be a solo entrepreneur.

Quite frequently, the business will have a core group of employees that understand the business and the components of their jobs. A family owned business is a classic example of a core group of employees.

If the business is successful, it will have more customers, or more business from existing customers. This increase puts a strain on the effectiveness of the core group of employees. At that point, some owners make the mistake of allowing this inefficiency to continue. They are reluctant to make any changes to the status quo of the business out of fear of the unknown.

At the precise point in the evolution of a business when it is picking up momentum, the owner MUST train an employee to duplicate the skill sets required to run the business. In a very real sense, owners must duplicate themselves. If the individual they choose for this role is within the company, the position they occupied must be filled.

So, in effect, two individuals must be trained. Although training these individual(s) is time consuming, it is the #1 key to small business success.

Having a highly trained assistant, the owner dramatically increases the efficiency of the business, and allows for additional growth.