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A Home-Based Business Online November 19 Editor: Elena Fawkner Publisher: AHBBO Publishing http://www.ahbbo.com Contact By Email 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 8. 10. 1. Hello again and a warm welcome to all the new subscribers who have joined us since the last issue! This week's article looks at branding your business. Many small business owners overlook this crucial start-up step of creating a corporate identity because they think it's something only the major corporations do. Not so. Even a small business needs to brand itself to differentiate itself from the competition. In this week's article we look at how to go about doing exactly that. As always, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this week's issue. Remember, this ezine is for YOU! If you have comments or suggestions for topics you would like to see addressed, or would just like to share your experiences with other subscribers, I want to hear from you! Please send comments, questions and stories to Contact By Email . 2. People are busier than ever and the world around them hasn't changed. Groceries still need to be bought, deliveries still need to be made, gifts still need to be bought, etc. You can take advantage of the needs of these hyper-busy people by running an errand service. In essence, what you do is run errands for people and get paid for it. Think it sounds like a kid's business? Well, you won't make kid money! If you are in a good sized metropolitan area with steady clients, you can make $15 to $20 an hour. You won't need much to start off with. You'll, of course, need a reliable car or, better yet, a van. The only real expenses at the start are: business cards and business stationery; a pager; and postage. Make a list of large businesses in your area, ones with large numbers of well-paid executives, such as banks, headquarters of large manufacturers, etc. You should then compose a letter detailing your services. List as many timesaving services as you can think of: grocery pickup, dry-cleaning delivery and pickup, post office errands, gift-shopping services, food pickup and delivery, etc. Note: Don't transport people unless you have the proper licenses. Also, if you deliver messages, there may be state utility regulations you'll need to check into. Emphasize to these people how they will BENEFIT from your service: more time, less worries, less stress. Be competitive with your pricing. Call other delivery services in the area and find out what they charge, whether hourly or by the job. Make your prices competitive and your services personal, and you'll get the edge. Four other good ideas for publicizing your services: advertise in charity event publications that are read by executives; get permission to post your business card at dry cleaners, grocery stores, bakeries, upscale food stores and delis, etc.; produce press releases about your services showcasing a unique aspect of your business, i.e. you specialize in delivering wedding cakes, for example, and get them to all the newspapers and local magazines in the area; and notify senior citizen organizations about the services you offer. Hints: Know your way around your area extremely well so you can plan the quickest route to efficiently accomplish all your errands. Be assertive, both with potential clients and with places you are visiting for a client. Be friendly, and you'll get more return business. Also, be confidential in respect of your clients. If you're willing to hustle, you can make it in the errand business. Once you get that first steady client, if you're good, you can count on word-of-mouth business. Then you'll really be rolling! ------ There are many more ideas like this at the AHBBO Home Business Ideas page at free home based business ideas with more being added all the time. 3. © 2017 Elena Fawkner If you think only big corporate names need to think about things like brand names, think again. Your brand says a lot about you and your business, and that's as true for a one person home- based operation as it is for a multinational conglomerate. In this article we look at how creating a strong brand for your business can help you set yourself apart from the pack and lay the right foundation for the future growth of your business. WHAT IS A BRAND? Your brand is more than just the logo on your letterhead and business cards or your business name. It is your corporate identity. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what you do and how you do it, while at the same time establishing your relevance to and credibility with your prospective customers. Your brand is also something more ethereal. It is how your business is perceived by its customers. If your brand has a high perceived value, you enjoy many advantages over your competition, especially when it comes to pricing. Why do you think people are prepared to pay stupid money for items of clothing with the initials "CK" on them? Perceived value. Perceived value as a result of very effective brand promotion resulting in very high brand awareness. Now, I'm not saying we all need to rush out and start creating brands that are going to be recognized the world over. Most of us simply don't have the time or other resources necessary. What I am suggesting, however, is that it is possible for your brand to dominate your niche. WHY DO I NEED TO CREATE MY OWN BRAND? => Differentiation We touched on this in the previous section when we looked at what a brand is and how it can be used to increase the perceived value of your products and services. The main reason for creating your own brand is to differentiate yourself from your competition. New websites are a dime a dozen. So are home-based businesses. You need to constantly be looking for ways to set yourself apart from your competition. Your brand can do that for you. => More Effective, Efficient Marketing Another good reason for creating your own brand is to make your sales force (even if that's a sales force of one - you) more effective and efficient. Imagine if you didn't have to spend the first 50% of your time with a new prospect explaining who you are, what you do and how you do it. What if your brand had already communicated that for you? You can spend 100% of your time focusing on sales rather than educating your prospects about your business Another benefit of branding is that the efforts you expend increasing your brand awareness through promoting and marketing your brand to your target market automatically transfers to your products and services. So, even when you're advertising your brand, you're indirectly also marketing your products and services. HOW DO I CREATE MY OWN BRAND? OK, so you're convinced you need to create your own brand. Where on earth do you start? We saw earlier that your brand needs to say who you are, what you do and how you do it. It needs to do all these things at the same time as establishing your relevance to and building credibilty with your prospective customers. Needless to say, it is absolutely essential, if you are to build your own brand, that *you yourself* have a firm grasp of who you are, what you do and how you do it. If not, you're going to have the devil's own time getting that message across to anyone else, let alone establishing your relevance and credibility. => Write A Mission Statement So, let's start by creating a mission statement. What is the mission of your business? Obviously you're in business to make a profit. But making a profit is a byproduct of a successful business. Focus instead on how you choose to achieve that profit. What are your core values? A good place to begin thinking about your mission is to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Put yourself in their target market. Let's say your business is web hosting. If you're in the market for a web host, what things are important to you? Different people will be looking for different benefits but you can bet that they want their website to be accessible to site visitors so reliability will be high on their list. Price is also likely to be high on the list as is 24/7 technical support. What about add-on features such as unlimited email aliases, cgi support and what-not? These things will be highly important to some and less important to others. So focus on the benefits that are likely to be highly relevant to the majority of your target market. Let's settle for our purposes on reliability, price and technical support. Your mission statement might read something like this: "I strive to earn a fair return on my investment of time and money by providing affordable webhosting with guaranteed 99% uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support". That's a pretty general statement and if you decide to focus on a particular niche of the webhosting market, such as small business, you may want to more narrowly focus on that group in your mission statement. Now that you've written your mission statement, you can begin thinking about creating a brand that reinforces and supports your mission. So, getting back to the fundamental questions of who you are, what you do and how you do it, you can now begin to think of your business in these terms. You're a webhosting provider, you host websites of small businesses and you do that by offering cost-effective webhosting solutions, guaranteed 99% uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support. When you create your brand, you need to keep the who, what and how firmly in mind but also use the brand to establish your relevance to your target market and build credibility with that market. Let's turn now to the nuts and bolts of creating your brand. => Describe What You Are Branding List out your business's key features and characteristics, your competitive advantages and anything else that sets you apart from your competition. Using our webhosting example, you'll focus primarily on the objectives from your mission statement namely, reliable, cost- effective webhosting solutions supported by 24/7 technical support. => Identify and Describe Your Target Market Decide whether you want to target lthe entire webhosting community or only a segment of it such as small business websites. Describe your market. => List Names that Suggest the Key Elements from Your Mission Statement The key elements from your mission statement were reliability, cost-effectiveness and customer service. List names that are suggestive of these elements. Let's use Reliable Webhosting for our example. (I don't claim to be a creative genius.) Don't limit yourself to real words, though. A coined name with no obvious meaning is a perfectly legitimate name provided it conveys something about your business. You will find coined names easier to trademark and secure domain names for too - a definite plus! => List Tag Lines that Reinforce Your Mission Statement We'll use: "Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price your small business can afford". I know, I know. You can do much better, I'm sure. HOW SHOULD I USE MY BRAND? => Create a Logo for Your Brand Your logo is NOT your brand but your logo should allow your brand to be instantly recognized by those familiar with it. To this extent, your logo helps create and reinforce brand awareness. The logo you create should be able to be used consistently in a variety of different media. It should be suitable for corporate letterhead and business cards, as well as for your website and corporate signage (if any). You do NOT want a confusing mishmash of logos and banners and heaven knows what else. Everything you produce needs to use the same, consistent style of logo so that, over time, your logo becomes synonymous with your brand. Instant recognition is what you're going for here, so don't dilute it by using several different logos for different purposes. => Consistent Usage of Company Name, Logo and Tag Line Going back to our webhosting example, putting the brand name and tagline together, the physical manifestation of your brand will be: To establish brand awareness, this branding needs to be used consistently and frequently in everything your produce, whether that be letters to clients, business cards, brochures, quotations, invoices, advertising, promotion, on your website, on the front door of your principal place of business and on your products. And don't forget to be consistent in your use of color schemes. These can be powerful brand reinforcers. => Marketing and Promotion of Your Brand Once you've created your brand, you need to market and promote it, in addition to your products and services. This is how you establish your credibility and relevance to your target market. You can hopefully see why your brand needs to be suggestive of your mission statement. If, at the same time as you're selling your products and services you also push your brand, your brand becomes synonymous with your products and services. And vice versa. A properly descriptive brand and high brand awareness amongst your target market will allow you to more easily introduce a wider range of products and services when they're developed without having to start by again selling who you are, what you do and how you do it first. Your brand has already presold YOU. Your job then is to sell your products and services. ------ use the autoresponder copy which contains a resource box; and (2) you leave the resource box intact. 4. => Tip #1: How to view the properties for multiple hard drives all at once Open My Computer and select all your hard drives by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on each drive. Next, right-click on any one of the drives and choose Properties from the Context menu that appears; Windows will create a single dialog with tabs for each drive. It also works for floppy, removable and mapped network drives. So you can knock off a lot with a little effort and be done with it! => Tip #2: How to keep your desktop icons from jumping back to attention every time you move them By default, Microsoft made the Auto Arrange option the default. If you want free-flowing icons, you'll need to turn this option off. Right-click the desktop and select Arrange Icons. In the resulting menu, you'll see a check mark next to Auto Arrange. Select this option (or deselect it). Back on the desktop, try to relocate an icon. It should work much better. 5. "Hi Elena: "I've been wanting to do this for a while, but life can get very busy!! "I started Lifeline a couple of years ago when it looked like I was going to be out of work. After talking with some trusted friends, I decided to build on the strengths that had gained me success in business and strike out on my own. Now I'm working at home exclusively and able to devote more time to building Lifeline. With the power of the internet, the possibilities are endless. While my clients are generally local, I'm not limited by distance. "Getting traffic to my site and getting them back again and again is my challenge. I am really unclear how to submit to search engines. I also want to develop an e-zine and/or offer a new article regularly that will pull potential clients back to my site often. "I built my site using FrontPage. I found it generally user friendly. I'll look forward to your comments." Carol Gouveia Lifeline Office Services 905-824-9365 ------ Carol's is an example of a really great home-business idea. Essentially, Carol's business involves helping businesses out when they have a temporary overflow of office work. Great idea. Now, how to harness the power of the internet to generate business ... Carol's business is one that can and should be promoted both offline and online. As far as online promotion is concerned, Carol understands that it will take repeat traffic in order to generate business from her site. Carol's problem, however, is that her website, although setting out the basics of what her business offers, doesn't contain anything in the way of content that would attract an audience in the first place. Someone would have to be specifically looking for her type of service in order to find her site. And even then Carol may not be found if all she's relying on is being listed with the search engines. My advice to anyone in this situation is to broaden the appeal of your website. Add content and benefits that will attract visitors and keep them coming back. Carol's business is ideal. There are any number of subjects Carol could write articles about and post at her site or publish in a weekly ezine. For example, how to organize a home office; how to keep proper track of business expenses and revenues; time management tips; productivity tips and so on. The list is endless. These content items should then be specifically submitted to the search engines and other online directories to increase the chances of visitors stumbling across the site. A weekly ezine will allow Carol to keep in touch with website visitors and generate repeat traffic to her site by people wanting to check out her archives. As for Carol's comment that she's unclear how to submit to search engines, there's really no mystery. All you do is go to the engine itself, say http://www.altavista.com for the Alta Vista engine, drill down until you find the category that is relevant to your site, and look for the "Add URL" link. Just fill out the form and submit it. It will take several weeks before you're listed. For a good, centralized listing of search engines and online directories, I recommend Virtual Promote at . Personally, I don't spend too much time on the search engines. In my experience, relatively little traffic comes from these listings with the best traffic generator being reciprocal links with complementary sites. Seek out webmasters of complementary but not competitive sites and propose a reciprocal link. Virtually all webmasters are looking for good reciprocal link partners so you shouldn't hestitate to put yourself out there and make the first move. Get going with that ezine, too, Carol, and submit your articles to all the article submission services you can find. That is a great way to recruit new subscribers. ------ If you want your site seen by thousands, write and tell me about it! But make sure it's one you've created yourself or have had created especially for you. No self-replicating affiliate sites please. 8. Subscription Management To SUBSCRIBE to this Newsletter:
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10. Contact Information Elena Fawkner, Editor A Home-Based Business Online Contact By Email http://www.ahbbo.com
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