Pareto’s Law – The Definitive Guide to Bigger, Easier Profits After you’ve heard the adage “work smarter, not harder” for the gazillionth time, you probably want to gag. Reading Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, you’ll find it again; this time, swallow the gag reflex and pay attention.

It comes in the form of Pareto’s Law, the 80/20 principle (another teaching point that’s been around the block more times than a new driver in a Mini Cooper). Never mind. You really do need to learn this principle – and put it to use – if you want to boost the bottom line and still have time for a life.

Even just the title of Ferriss’ book should be enough to nudge your imagination. What would you do with a workweek that only lasted four hours or less? If it’s really a possibility – and it is – it’s worth taking another look at something that actually works, and not just looking, but putting it to use.

Here’s how it works: Pareto says you get 80% of your results (good or bad) from 20% of your input (what you do). In business, it can look like this: 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. That means that you’ve got a dead weight factor of 80% among your client base. They’re requiring an inordinate amount of work, and are only producing a small portion of your revenue. Translation: not good.

How do you put this principle to use to boost your profits?

1. Track everything.
First, you’ve got to be able to know which clients are the most profitable. If you’re not keeping track of this info, start. If you’re in an MLM selling health and beauty products, you need to know which clients buy the whole anti-aging line – on the autoship plan, and which buy the occasional mascara, if you call them… after seven attempts to reach them. It works the same way for every business – product- or service-driven, from haircuts to custom-built private jets. That same 20% of your customers are easy. They know what they want. They buy it from you. They’re happy. You’d better know exactly who they are.

2. Know that 20% like you know your own dog.
You want to be able to pick these customers out of a lineup because you know them so well. What makes them such great customers? What trends do you see? How do they like to be contacted? What are you providing that compels them come back for more? How did you find them? Where can you go looking to find more just like them? By taking the time to get to know them, you can learn a lot – it’s time well spent. Essentially, by learning all about these customers, you form a blueprint for your ideal customer. With this blueprint in hand, you take the first step in designing your customer base.

3. Be picky.
When you’re new in business, you’re so grateful to have anyone come through the door that you’ll put up with a lot just in hopes of making a sale. It’s not a good precedent to set for your business, but it happens. The trick is moving away from that as quickly as possible. Given the choice, why would you gather unpleasant, high-maintenance, penny-pinching customers who tax even your best customer service person’s patience? Instead, you could assemble a group of loyal, quality-driven, appreciative clients who value what you provide and make doing business a pleasure. It’s a matter of choosing quality over quantity, at first.

4. Get into cloning.
Well, not really. But you do want to redirect your efforts from how you used to do marketing and sales – anyone with a pulse – to attracting more who fit the blueprint of your ideal customers, and by spending more time and energy on the customers you’ve got who are already ideal. You can find more of these precious gems by asking for referrals, by going where they go and doing what they do, and by doing everything you can to provide exquisite service to them.

5. Systematize it.
You’re probably not in the position to just go willy-nilly firing clients who don’t meet your dream come true blueprint. But you can definitely make sure that your new clients are the ones you choose. Set up a ranking system so you’re able to keep track of your clients and their profiles. Customize your service so you spend the bulk of your resources on the most productive clients – while still providing excellence to your B-list clients.

It’s always possible that today’s 80%-er may become tomorrow’s best client – or they may introduce you to that dream client. Regardless, your goal is to provide excellence to all clients, while actively pursuing the ones that’ll make your life easy and your business boom.

An internet business isn’t something you want to jump into without any training – but with a bare minimum of tech skills, anyone with a computer, internet access, and a hobby or interest can build a business.

Additional Resources on this topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

How to Utilize these Powerful Web Tools to Funnel Traffic to Your Primary Website or Use them as a Stand Alone

Is your website pulling in the kind of targeted traffic you thought it would? Maybe your e-commerce site has way too many products on it and choosing which products to promote over the others is proving too much. Enter the wonderful world of mini sites, funnel sites, and one page sites.

Call them what you will, but these very simple and concentrated one page sites will literally act like a website on steroids and help you to achieve your main objective when it comes to online marketing; increasing your targeted traffic and increasing your bottom line. Gone are the days when all you had to do to promote your business was to spend your advertising dollars on TV, radio, or in print with the newspaper. Now the world in which we live is a digital one and because of the major search engines like Google, the rules of advertising have changed forever.

I wrote about this back in September of 2008 and the game, while it has changed a bit, has only changed more so to the digital side. In order to effectively get your business name out there and be successful you have to funnel a steady flow of traffic to your main website so that visitors will buy what you have to offer. But you also have to balance that with a healthy mix of interest so that those same visitors will want to spread the word about your business.

There is no better way to accomplish these goals than to have a strong single keyword rich mini site, funnel site, or one page site. When done correctly, these product specific sites will be custom made to target the exact traffic you want from the search engines and the best part is that these leads will come ready to buy. All you need to do is follow the process outlined in the Action Guide and begin to build yourself a super optimized one page site based on the most profitable aspect of your current business.

What you will find is that you will ultimately begin to build up a trust and rapport with the visitors that go to these mini sites and once a trust has been established you simply use the content within to divert them to your main site to show them the product or products that you want them to be buying. In other words, you are acting as the Pied Piper and leading them exactly where you want them to go. Think of it as being an affiliate marketer for your own products.

Now this should not be confused with the phrases doorway, gateway, or bridge pages. Why? These days those types of sites or pages are considered SPAM and what faster way to online death is there than SAPM? These types of tactics may have worked in the past, but Google and the other big boys of the search engines quickly grew tired of their manipulation of the rules and so the rules changed in relation to optimization all together.

In order to be successful with mini sites now there are a good number of factors that should be considered and to be successful you need to:

Grow Niche Oriented Traffic: By owning your own free, targeted, and motivated traffic you can grow your business and use your niche oriented traffic to fuel traffic for your primary site.

Diversify: If you are a small business owner you have to protect your income and build your equity by monetizing your traffic. Use new and improved models to help you diversify into other areas.

Build Equity: By building your list of qualified traffic via resources such as e-zines you will not only build trust over time, but your list will grow and grow. The end result is an increase in your online equity.

Increase Conversion Rate by Pre-Selling: Yes you can get a good number of visitors to your website by advertising, but that isn’t nearly as effective as getting the visitors to your site via an in-context link. In fact, the conversion rate can be 20-fold if the visitor is pre-sold and thus clicks onto your website versus just clicking because they were lured by advertisements.

Build Confidence: You can create a rapport between you and your visitors using quality, authoritative content. This will end up making you an authority in your given area of expertise.

The bottom line is that you have to have these funnel sites in order to constantly feed pre-qualified traffic to your current corporate or e-commerce site. Remember, the traffic you generate with these one page monster sites are yours and they are not dependent on a huge amount of money that needs to be spent by way of advertising. What’s more, your funnel sites will continue to grow over time producing more and more traffic which will ultimately mean an enormous gain to the all important bottom line.

Scribd is a social networking website that is catching on at a rather quick pace which allows anyone to publish their documents and images and make them available for the World Wide Web. With Scribd you can easily turn almost any type of file such as PDF, Word Document, or Excel Document into a web document that can be viewed for the entire online world. Scribd offers the perfect solution for those that do not have a website and makes sharing your thoughts with the world a breeze.

Scribd has over 35 billion words in its arsenal which means it is many times bigger than such free publication sites as Wikipedia and others. The site has over 10 million documents publishes and boasts tens of millions of reader and viewers each and every month. So how do you get involved?

Membership to Scribd is free and creating an account is as easy as a few simple steps. Once you create your account you are given a number of ways in which to upload your files such as:

Copy and paste your text documents.
Type in the URL of existing work you have published on the web so long as you own the rights to it.
Upload files directly from your hard drive.
Use your desktop upload tool to publish multiple files at the same time.

Once you begin to contribute to scribe you can build a personal profile and then begin to build your social networking community. You can find others with similar tastes and interests and subscribe to their work and share thoughts, ideas, and even leave your comments. Others in turn will begin to subscribe to your works should they be interesting enough and they may even use some of your information in their own websites. Plus, published documents on Scribd are typically indexed rather quickly by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Ping. It all boils down to your published work having the ability to go viral in a very big way provided it is good quality work.

This not only means increased opportunities for individuals spreading the word about their work, it also gives internet marketers in the know a distinct advantage.  Internet marketers can use Scribd as a whole new source of social networking leads and find others that are interested in what their clients have to offer. By carefully matching content with members, a win, win situation can occur as a member will get something they have been looking for and the internet marketer’s client gains further exposure.

As with any other social networking website that is online today, Scribd has some finer points and some not so finer points. Here is a breakdown:

THE GOOD

Use of iPaper: Scribd uses a technology that is powered by Adobe Flash called iPaper. iPaper allows document to be embedded on web pages much in the same way as videos from YouTube. What this means for you is that you do not have to know any fancy computer lingo, download any software, nor do you have to have a website in order to publish your work. With Scribd you can publish your work with just a few clicks of the mouse.
Privacy Settings: With Scribd, you decide who can and cannot view your files. You can choose to share a document with the entire world, or limit it to certain members within the site community; it is all up to you. You can set different parameters for each article or you can set a blanket parameter for all.
No Commitment: Once you decide that you no longer want your files to be viewed, you can easily remove them from Scribd. You can keep files active for a day or forever; again, the choice is yours.

THE BAD

Searchablity: Scribd is a bit unorganized and it is sometimes difficult to find what it is you are looking for. Scribd continues to make strides in this department and has various ways to navigate through the website, but you are usually left with a good number of things to sift through before you find what you are after.
Plain site: Compared to other social networking sites, Scribd is not all that flashy. While that is not necessarily a bad thing, some may view it as a negative.

Scribd is relatively new when it comes to social networking and has only been around since 2007. But the website and its community continue to grow by leaps and bounds. With the ease of uploading documents and the growing number of members it is easy to see why Scribd is rapidly catching on in the ever popular world of social networking.

Are you a traditionalist in relation to marketing strategies? Yes? Then it’s time you came into the 21st century. In today’s world, outbound marketing is one of the old strategies. Outbound marketing includes direct mail (junk mail), e-mail, cold calling, and traditional advertising methods. Typically, these methods generate a 1 to 2% response rate. This sounds like shouting to the forest to find a weed. Are you really happy spending your hard earned money on such a low return for your investment?

Outbound marketing techniques are becoming useless. Most people sort their mail over the trash, discarding anything they do not recognize. Spam filters and delete buttons eliminate annoying and unwanted e-mails. The do-not-call list grows by the day. If you choose to break the rules and call these people, you face hefty fines. Radio and television ads do still work, however, expect to spend a lot of money. You can use these outdated and expensive ideas like most businesses, or you can come into the 21st-century and use inbound marketing techniques.

What is inbound marketing? Simply put, inbound marketing involves using your website as a base of operations to reach out to the Internet and draw people in to view your webpage and potentially buy your products.

How do you get started?

· First, you need a good website that has your products available for sale, a blog, and possibly a community forum. If you don’t know what these terms mean, then research them.

· Get a Facebook page. What? Facebook is a popular new social networking site. You can use pictures, add friends and business partners, and share information about your business. The biggest benefit to Facebook is that many people use this site to find information about others. By joining, your business can now be searched on this popular site potentially bringing new buyers to view your sales page.

· List your website in the directories like Yahoo. Just having your webpage listed in the directories canl help potential customers find your website.

· Start building backlink relationships. To optimize your website rank on the search engines, build relationships with other sites that link to your webpage. This includes reciprocal backlink agreements with other sites, submitting articles to content directories, affiliate marketing, blogging, forum posting, and writing press releases.

· Spend some advertising dollars on website marketing. Just as there are traditional marketing companies, the internet has its own set of marketing professionals.

· Make sure that your website captures information about your visitors. You worked hard to bring them to your site, now encourage them to leave their e-mail information. One way to do this without turning your visitors away involves creating a newsletter. Sending out weekly information to e-mail subscribers allows you to build relationships working toward the day when you begin offering your product.

These are just a few of the many options available to your business on the internet. While it’s okay to still use traditional outbound methods, it is inevitable that the virtual world of the internet is the marketplace of the future.

My inspiration for this article came from a great imformative website I just found: http://www.hubspot.com/

Are you the type that looks to make sure no neighbors are around to check your mail? Maybe you are the type that likes to keep your doors shut at night, stay home during the weekends and stay in your comfortable circle of friends and family. If you are introverted, at any level, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t network or own a business. In fact, being introverted and networking has a large set of perks if you know how to use your personality correctly.

This means that you officially have permission to stay in your comfortable world and allow your business to grow at the same time. All it takes is learning exactly how to use your personality as a skill. The first part to networking always includes introducing yourself to a potential customer or person. At this stage, make sure that you know what you are going to say. You don’t have to brag about your business, just be firm in your identity.

One way to make sure that you can network as an introvert is to place yourself in the roles that you are comfortable with. You can be a back support person in several areas, such as in a volunteer group. All you have to do is introduce yourself and leave the rest to those who meet you back in order to start building the relationship.

After this point of networking is when the real introverted skills can kick in. That is where you let others connect to you by listening. This is one of the best skills that any business owner can have and builds relationships among customers quicker than any other way of networking. Of course, engaging in the conversation and asking some questions will also help. However, with an easy introduction, combined with listening, customers will quickly move into trusting you, appreciating your business and wanting to come around more to see what you are doing.

Owning a business doesn’t mean that you have to change your personality. Instead, you can build on it. Using what you do best, especially through listening is an easy way to gain customer momentum.

For more information on marketing, contact Mark Bove at www.youronestop.com.

You know the pitch, you know your business, you know you have a great product or service. You also have a customer looking at you, hopefully, gathering information about your identity and who you are. How do you make sure that the conversation carries into an action? Close the sale. Knowing tactics that move beyond the hard sales man and into a relationship with customers is key to opening doors for long term customers and relationships.

Most are familiar with closing sales from the sales man in the white tie. Among entrepreneurs and other businesses, this doesn’t have to be the case. You can close the sale by simply knowing that is your goal. From this, you can work towards this goal by building relationships with your customers during the conversation.

Tip #1: Pay attention to the customer. They will reach a point when they are ready to buy. You can tell through their body language, their words or even from the way they look at you. Know when to move in and ask if they are ready to support your business.

Tip #2: Have a complete conversation. You don’t need to follow a script, you don’t need to ignore questions. Your conversation should be based around giving knowledge and allowing the customer to see exactly what you are about. More than the sale is building strong relationships and a business identity that not only closes the sale, but keeps customers coming back.

Tip #3: Add value to your sale. Let your customers see exactly why you are pitching your product. Offer free samples or free trials to let your customers know that you believe your product or service is completely worth it.

Closing sales doesn’t have to be a formula or an uncomfortable question of ‘are you ready to buy?’ Instead, you can make it part of a conversation, where you know that your product is good and that offering it to customers will help to build a longer relationship.

For more information on how to close sales, contact Mark Bove at www.youronestop.com.

The phone rings on the other end and once again, it’s an unrecognized number. No matter what side you are on, you know that it is going to be an unknown voice with something to sell. That has been the pattern, and what is going to be expected again. The uncomfortable situation of the voice on the other side of the line has become so unpopular that it has gained the term of cold calling.

Despite the unpopularity of cold calling, it can still work for you and what you want to do with your business. The main concept to keep in mind with cold calls is to take them out of the freezer and warm them up in the oven. The voices on the other line will be much happier, and you will have more options for reaching the right customers instead of wasting your time and money.

How do you warm up your calls? First, approach it a little differently. Stop focusing on selling something and focus instead on building your business identity. How about preparing yourself to have a conversation and introducing who you are? Customers appreciate you taking the time to let them know what you are calling about. This means that your tone, the approach you make in the first 10 seconds and the ability to connect through the line are going to be your main strengths.

If you want to take your cold calls, warm them up and make sure that they stay heated, don’t make completely cold calls to begin with. The best way to approach this is to find your target market before you start dialing. Gather demographics on those who are in your region and would be interested in hearing from you. Get connections and references to start a conversation before you call. Pick time frames that fit your demographics and business. Take into consideration the people on the other side first, and those on the other side will then have more time for you.

The trick to cold calls is to do them, but don’t keep them cold. Through some easy techniques, you can find yourself making calls that allow you to make better connections and gain more business momentum for the long run.

Business owners everywhere know that their livelihood depends on making a sale. The ability to craft these different sales and put them together just right is what allows you to gain your image and identity as a business and to gain momentum with your products and services.

How do you go about sending the word that you have a business that offers something unique and different? Why not just ask for referrals? This is an easy way to allow a friend or acquaintance to direct you straight to another person who is interested in what you have to offer. Because it is referred to through another loyal friend or acquaintance the likelihood of closing a sale from a referral increases substantially.

How do you make sure you get the right referrals? Begin with deciding who you would ask the referral from. Some of the easiest individuals to ask are those who are already using your business; the customers. If they are happy with your services, they will also be happy to refer you. Why not take this a step further? Typically, customers have their own circle of individuals that they work with and trust. If you are working with a customer that is in a business, there are plenty of connections and links in that business that you can get referrals from, like the board of directors. Don’t be afraid to ask about a customers circle.

One of the best tactics to use is to not stop with the name. This is not only good business sense, but also establishes a relationship between you and the customer and the individual or set of individuals who you are being referred to. Understanding how they fit with your business, why they would be interested in your products, what they are using currently or even their interests and personality can all help to connect you even closer to new prospects from the old ones. After this, close the deal for the referral and set up a time to contact them.

Of course, always remember, relationship building in a customer to business comes first. If your customer is uncomfortable with the reference information, try to find a way to make them settled. Showing that you are not going to be the ’sales guy’ and are interested in knowing the reference first through your choice of conversation will help you to find a better way to connect with those you are asking information from.

The art of getting referrals is as simple as building relationships and asking a few questions. From here, you should be able to gain momentum in your business identity and the connections that you have. The result is a boost for your business.

For more information on how to get referrals, contact Mark Bove at www.youronestop.com.

Owning a business doesn’t just mean that you hope for a magical wand to bring you customers that want your product or service. Even though some fairy dust might be nice in adding to the mixture, there are better ways for you to find the right set of people who are interested in your business products and services. Taking aim for customers is a large key in finding the best ways to boost your business.

How do you find customers? You don’t just want to go out into an area and start advertising, calling or e-mailing millions of people. In fact, that type of solution is going to cost you money instead of bringing you in customers. Why? Because it wastes your time on hundreds of people that don’t need or want what your business has to offer.

Instead, the best way to find customers is by finding a target. These five simple definitions of how to approach finding your target market will help you to define exactly how to get interested parties into the interests of your business.

1. Define demographics. Age, location, gender, income and career fields can narrow down your search. How does this fit into your business?

2. Define lifestyles, opinions, activities and attitudes from demographics that fit with your business concepts.

3. Define specific qualities about your product or service. If you were on the other side of the counter, what would attract you to what you have to offer? Why is it unique?

4. Define how your product or service meets the needs of the demographics. To those you target, it should be as valuable as water.

5. Define how your product or service helps to solve problems, save time or meet specific needs for other businesses or individuals.

After you have defined all of the demographics and qualities, then you can begin to find your specific target market. You can easily combine all of the information you have gathered and find groups and individuals that fit your business model and image. The result is saved time, energy and money with a boost for your business.

For more information on how to find your target market, contact Mark Bove at www.youronestop.com.