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AHBBO Home Based Business Information
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_______________________________________________________________ A Home-Based Business Online _______________________________________________________________ Issue 161 : November 25, 2012 Sent to 14,448 Opt-In Subscribers Editor: Elena Fawkner Publisher: AHBBO Publishing http://www.ahbbo.com Contact By Email _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ IN THIS ISSUE _______________________________________________________________ 1. Welcome and Update from Elena 2. Home Business Idea of the Week 3. Feature Article - Branding Your Business 4. Surveys and Trends 5. Success Quote of the Week 6. Advertise with AHBBO 7. Subscription Management 9. Contact Information _______________________________________________________________ 1. Welcome from Elena _______________________________________________________________ Hello again and a warm welcome to all the new subscribers who have joined us since the last issue. What's in a name? 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. This week's feature article looks 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. For those readers in the United States and Canada, happy Thanksgiving (not to mention four day weekend!!). As always, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this week's issue. Remember, AHBBO 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. _______________________________________________________________ Control your own future! Work from home & earn what you're worth! Sick and tired of being SICK & TIRED? Ready to take control of your health and financial future? If you answered "YES" to these two questions, good chance I have what you're looking for! No need to look for another deal! I'm being mentored by Mark Yarnell. He taught the only MBA level course at Harvard on Network Distribution and earns well over 60K/month! _______________________________________________________________ 2. Home Business Idea of the Week - Event Planner _______________________________________________________________ An event planner is someone who arranges special events on behalf of clients, either corporate or private. The client will tell the event planner what kind of event is proposed and the budget for it. The event planner then arranges the whole thing including finding the right venue, issuing invitations, catering, transport to and from the event, and accommodation. In addition, the event planner will be responsible for meeting any special needs of attendees and, in the case of corporate functions, probably also the availability of presentation facilities such as audiovisual equipment and the like. The first step is to ascertain the client's objectives for the event and whether it is a corporate or social event. Often, corporate meetings will also include a significant social aspect so the event planner for a management retreat, for example, may also need to arrange for sightseeing or entertainment in addition to the corporate side of the event. Once the objectives are clear, the event planner will then work with the client to set a budget for the event and decide with the client where to hold the event. The event planner needs to know who the attendees will be and where they are travelling from so that accommodation and transport can be arranged as necessary. In addition, the event planner will arrange for catering, communications, labor, meeting facilities, printing and supplies, entertainment, speakers, gratuities, awards, insurance and anything else that may be required for the specific event in question. The event planner, of course, relies on third parties to actually provide these services and will have an established network of contacts with suppliers and vendors among caterers, hotels, travel agencies, printers, furniture/ equipment hirers and so on. Event planners vary in their approach to billing. Some take as their fee a fixed percentage of the total cost of the event (say 10 - 15 percent). Other charge clients on an hourly basis. In either case, event planners will require a deposit (usually a percentage of the budget) to be used to make advance payments. The beginning event planner should expect long hours and low pay when first starting out. The money will improve with experience and reputation, but the hours will always be long because although the planning occurs during the day, the event is usually at night or on the weekend. Personal qualities required in an event planner are leadership, organization skills and attention to detail. A calm disposition is essential as the event planner will have to cope with many last minute "disasters" and personalities. ----- This is just one of over 130 ideas from the new "Practical Home Business Ideas From AHBBO" e-book. Find out more at unique small business ideas . _______________________________________________________________ Loans For the Self-Employed BORROW UP TO $50K from your retirement account if you own a business or have 1099 income. AVOID TAX PENALTY. The Self-Employed 401(k) loan is new for 2017. Take advantage of it NOW! _______________________________________________________________ 3. Feature Article: Branding Your Business _______________________________________________________________ © 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 the 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: RELIABLE WEBHOSTING Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price your small business can afford. 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. ------ include the following resource box; and (2) you only mail to a ------ practical business ideas, opportunities and solutions for the work-from-home entrepreneur. http://www.ahbbo.com _______________________________________________________________ Efficiency - the Mother of Profit ! Organize or - demise ! A fully equipped Cyber - Office is your best Friend & Partner. Budgeting +Reception +Planning +Contacting +Prospecting +Mailing +Advertising +Qualifying +Interviewing +Conferencing. A fabulous and valuable tool to lift productivity and bottom line. _______________________________________________________________ 4. Surveys and Trends _______________________________________________________________ © 2017 Ryanna's Hope The following is an extract from the current issue of Larry Wack's excellent weekly, "Surveys and Trends". Subscribe using the link below for the full issue. ------ ------------------------------------------------------------ THE TREND IN CATALOG BUYING ------------------------------------------------------------ Americans who shop from catalogs are loyal mail-order shoppers, making an average of 15 catalog purchases each year, according to a new study from the Direct Marketing Association (the DMA). In 2001, 30 percent of catalog shoppers made between six and 10 purchases, 31 percent made between 11 and 25 purchases, while 11 percent placed 26 or more orders. On their most recent catalog order, shoppers spent an average of $135. The study also shows the continued convergence of catalog and Internet shopping: While 69 percent placed their most recent catalog order via the telephone, 14 percent ordered from the catalog's Web site. Forty-one percent of catalog shoppers had also shopped online during the last year. ------------------------------------------------------------ DISTURBING EVIDENCE OF BIAS? ------------------------------------------------------------ Today's online travel market is highly competitive, but also reveals remnants of favoritism among providers and distributors, making consumer education critical. Research by CRTL beginning in 2017 showed disturbing evidence of bias in the way these sites presented fares to the consumer. Research in March and April of 2017 by CRTL that while the problems of bias have improved somewhat, issues remain that consumers need to know about. The independent ticket-booking sites need to address basic disclosure issues ... from describing how their technologies work, to clearly disclosing business deals they make with airlines that might affect the price of fares, or their position on a screen. The six largest integrated travel Web sites confirmed to CRTL that they receive various forms of compensation from airlines, despite the fact most U.S. carriers have recently eliminated the payment of base commissions to travel agencies. Sites also should better separate airline and other advertising from screens of available fares, so the consumer is not manipulated into making a choice based on strategic placement of an ad. Fees should be more clearly disclosed, earlier in transactions ... not at the end after a consumer has invested valuable time selecting a flight. ------ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ 5. Success Quote of the Week _______________________________________________________________ The choices that make a significant difference in our lives are the tough ones. They're not often fun or easy, but they're the ones we have to make, and each is a deliberate step toward better understanding who we really are. -- Alexandra Stoddard _______________________________________________________________ 9. Contact Information _______________________________________________________________ Elena Fawkner, Editor A Home-Based Business Online Contact By Email _______________________________________________________________
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