Why you should think about changing your business model

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Posted on 30th September 2010 by Krishna Gupta in Business Intelligence

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This post is the fourth in a series of excerpts from OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with Rita Gunther McGrath, co-author of The Entrepreneurial Mindset, and MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth.

As a business owner, you should have some type of business model in place. This model is usually determined by your specific unit of business (your product or service). Sometimes, you can make a huge difference in your industry by changing your unit of business.

Take for example the cement company Cemix. They came to the conclusion that just providing ready-mix concrete wasn’t good enough. They decided that people cared more about the timely delivery of the concrete mix. So they built a business model around the delivery instead of the actual product. This is also an example of changing the operating rules of your industry by altering the buyer/supplier relationship.

A story that illustrates this mode of thinking is the Blue Mountain Arts company. They took a popular print business and expanded into a free online greeting-card business. The owner then looked to change his business model through monetizing it by pairing it with the flower industry.

Here’s where he held on to his chips for a minute to think about his strategy. He knew the flower industry would be quite a challenge to break into, and knew it would be too difficult to differentiate his business. So he changed the whole model by cutting out the call center, the intermediary distribution, reducing time and costs.

Though it may be honorable to work hard and fight against your competition, there doesn’t always need to be competition. You don’t have to change your entire business, but you should always look to see if you can be doing business differently… better.

Getting started with PR

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Posted on 29th September 2010 by Krishna Gupta in Business Intelligence

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This post is the second in a series of excerpts from OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with publicity expert Paul Hartunian.

If you’re a newcomer to the publicity game, it helps to understand some basic rules. Here are two fundamental principles that will greatly enhance your efforts to generate publicity for your business.

Rule #1 for PR novices: Start small.

Do your first radio interview with a radio station of a hundred watts or less. (You can find out how much power a station has by looking in any media directory.) Working with a small station will minimize your jitters and allow you to get comfortable with how radio interviews work.

Ditto with newspapers. For your first press interview, go with a paper that has a circulation of 1,000 or less. Again, you’ll find the numbers in media directories. Once you get comfortable with small media outlets, start working your way up to the bigger ones.

Interestingly, the bigger you get in the newspaper, radio and TV worlds, the more professional the interviewers get. They know how to make you feel comfortable, which makes the interview a lot easier.

Finally, don’t get too excited. When asked to give an interview, many business owners see it as their “once in a lifetime publicity opportunity.” As a result, they get overly excited, have unrealistic expectations, and come across as nervous or unprepared. Or worse, they violate the unwritten rule of never giving a sales pitch during a PR interview.

Stay cool, calm and in control. Once get into the flow, you will begin to see publicity opportunities all around you.

Rule #2: Don’t expect instant results.

Too often, business owners send out a very good press release but nothing happens. So they throw in the towel and give up on their PR efforts.

But reporters are like crafty old bass lurking in the fishing hole. They rarely bite the first time you throw out a line. Instead, they wait to see what you do next.

A week later, send out a second press release. This will pique the reporter’s interest further, but chances are he still won’t respond. However, the reporter is getting to know your name.

A week later, send out a third press release. If it, too, contains information that will be useful to the reporter’s readers, listeners or viewers, you may soon receive a phone call. At the least, the reporter will keep you in mind the next time he or she needs an expert on your topic.

Why do reporters play it so close to the vest?

Put yourself in their shoes. They have the potential to give you what amounts to thousands of dollars worth of airtime or space in the newspaper. Before they give it away, they want to make darn sure you know what you’re doing.

PR isn’t like winning the lottery. It’s a gradual process of building relationship with various media outlets. Provide useful information each time, and after a while the results begin to flow.

So start small, be patient and stick with it. Your rewards will come in time.

Small really is the new big

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Posted on 28th September 2010 by Krishna Gupta in Business Intelligence

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This post is the third in a series of excerpts from OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with Rita Gunther McGrath, co-author of The Entrepreneurial Mindset, and MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth.

Small-business owners need to concentrate on turning limitations into advantages. For example, one of the main advantages you’ve got is your ability to create customer intimacy. You have the capacity, when you’re at that size, to really get to know your customers on a very personal basis, designing a very special experience for them – a true fit for your clients.

Your clients will come to trust you with their needs and feel confident that you’ll be able to help them even without them having to specifically ask for anything. You also have the distinct ability to customize in many cases. But as good as it is to cater to your clients’ needs, make sure you’re not overextending yourself – make sure you’re getting payback for it.

A third advantage to being a small-business owner is that you’re closer to your customers than a large organization, so it’s easier to get the insights about where they’re going. You can actually be much more proactive and respond quickly to them rather than wait around for customers to start complaining.

In this way, you can really collaborate with your clients, asking them questions and determining exactly what they need and how you can best serve them. You need to actively participate with them, observing them, being part of their experience. That’s the key, make sure you’re always active with your business – your clients will notice.

So now that you’ve created a positive and delightful client experience, you made yourself memorable. Congratulations, you now stand out. And now you’ve given people something to talk about – they’re going to tell all of their friends how great your service or product is.

By keeping a pulse on your clients, you constantly keep tabs on what you’re doing right, and what you can do to improve.

This article is written by OneCoach Team!

Generate big publicity for your small business

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Posted on 27th September 2010 by Krishna Gupta in Business Intelligence

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This post is the first in a series of excerpts from OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with publicity expert Paul Hartunian.

Public relations is mandatory for small businesses, yet most small-business owners have no clue how to get it.

PR is essential for two reasons.

First, most small-business owners operate on a very limited budget, so they need to get the greatest value for their dollar. Second, PR provides credibility that you can’t get from traditional marketing venues such as sales letters, advertising and Web sites.

When a story appears about you or your business in a newspaper or magazine, or on radio or TV, you get instant credibility. People trust the information because it comes from a third party. You can’t get that from traditional marketing, and you can’t get it anywhere else for free.

How to get publicity for your business

Every business can get publicity by following three basic steps.

1. Forget what you think you know about publicity.

Most people think they need a “hook” — something dazzling, exciting or unique — to generate PR. Not true! To get publicity, simply give people information they want.

For example, suppose you bought a new house and needed to landscape the yard. If you’ve never hired a landscaper before, how do you know what to look for? Now, suppose a landscaper in your area sent out a press release on how to pick a landscaper or how to avoid common landscaping pitfalls. Wouldn’t he rise to the top of the list of landscapers you want to talk to?

Similarly, suppose your current house needs a new roof and you aren’t sure whether to replace the shingles or upgrade to tile. If a roofer in your area put out a press release on how to evaluate and select roofing materials, wouldn’t you want to talk to that roofer before anyone else?

Shingles and landscaping pitfalls are not dazzling. But people want to know about them. Bottom line: mundane works fine for PR as long as it contains information people want.

2. Provide “foundation” information.

Foundation information is news about your product, service or business that may not be new or interesting to you, but holds great interest to your prospects and helps them solve small problems.

For example, if you run a plumbing business, consider setting up a “do it yourself” plumber’s help line. Set aside an hour every Friday afternoon to take calls from people with questions about plumbing. No charge and no sales pitch on your part. Simply tell people what they want to know about their plumbing issues. Or, set up a website that shows people how to make simple repairs, such as replacing a washer, without calling a plumber.

Will this cost you some small jobs? Probably. But when the people who call in have a broken pipe or need a new water heater, who do you think they will call? Some random plumber out of the phone book, or the plumber who took the time to help them fix a small problem for free?

3. Give people information they need.

What do people need to know? Again, it’s the little things. If I have a leaky faucet should I call a plumber or try to fix it myself? If a fuse blows, is it an isolated incident or a sign of a bigger problem? These kinds of issues will almost always get some press coverage because the information helps people in times of need.

Don’t think you need to shock or amaze the world in order to get media coverage. Tell people what they want and need to know about your business or industry and they will think of you first when it comes time to use your product or service.

How to get Success from Internet Marketing?

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Posted on 26th September 2010 by Krishna Gupta in Macinfosoft - Official |SEO

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Search engines have four functions – crawling, building an index, calculating relevancy & rankings and serving results.

The complicated algorithms of search engines may appear at first glance to be impenetrable, and the engines themselves provide little insight into how to achieve better results and gain more traffic. What little information on optimization and best practices that the engines themselves do provide is listed below:

SEO Info from Yahoo! Webmaster Guidelines

Many factors influence whether a particular web site appears in Web Search results and where it falls in the ranking.

These factors can include:

The number of other sites linking to it
The content of the pages
The updates made to indicies
The testing of new product versions
The discovery of additional sites
Changes to the search algorithm – and other factors

SEO Info from Bing Webmaster Guidelines

Bing engineers at Microsoft recommend the following to get better rankings in their search engine:

  • In the visible page text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your site.
  • Limit all pages to a reasonable size. We recommend one topic per page. An HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 KB.
  • Make sure that each page is accessible by at least one static text link.
  • Don’t put the text that you want indexed inside images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is not displayed inside a company logo.
SEO Info from Google Webmaster Guidelines

Googlers recommend the following to get better rankings in their search engine:

  • Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as cloaking.
  • Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
  • Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
  • Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Our Search Engine Optimizer Engineers are passionate about what they do and help you to get best out of Search Engine Optimization and/or Search Engine Marketing services from Macinfosoft.

If you are as excited as us then get in touch with us and let us know how best we can serve you to get more leads and generate more traffic to your website. Drop in a mail to contactify@macinfosoft.com

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