-•- UltimateBizSource.com Newsletter - Issue 170 -•-
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The UltimateBizSource.com Newsletter is an e-zine that is dedicated
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Site Of Interest
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I'm sure that I've mentioned this site at some point in the past, 
but some sites are worth another mention. If you run a website or
a newsletter of your own I'm sure that you are already well aware
that it can take tons of time to come up with fresh content each 
week. Maybe it's just me, but there are plenty of times when I'm 
stuck with writers block and I simply can't come up with anything
interesting to write about. When I get stuck, I head over to this
week's site of interest, http://www.ideamarketers.com/. This site
is basically a place where content providers publish articles for
website and newsletter owners to include in their publications. I
have been visiting this website for years and I highly recommend 
it for anyone who has to come up with content on a published or 
pre-determined schedule. Just as with most sites that offer free
content, the authors that publish to this site often require that
you include a little indication of where the content came from, 
but in the grand scheme of things this isn't a huge price to pay
for great content. I know that it can often take hours to write,
edit, and re-edit my content before it's ready for prime time. I
know that all the hours I put into content creation are valuable,
and that's why I love a service like this. I can only afford to 
spend a certain amount of time each week on writing new content,
and once I'm beyond my limit writing new content cause me to lose
out on profits I could have made elsewhere. Stop spending all of 
your time writing articles and put some time into other areas of 
your business that will really put some money in your pocket. I
don't know if all of you can use this site right now, but this is
one site that you should add to your bookmarks. They've been here
for years, which is always a good sign that they are doing just
about everything right.

 
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Featured Guest Article
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6 Changes You Can Make to Increase Business Profits

by Marcia Yudkin

I read once that something like 30 percent of all
drinkable water gets wasted on the way to the consumer
by leaky pipes.  Likewise, your business may be
letting potential revenue drip away, to be lost
forever, all over the place.  Use this checklist to
make sure you are taking best advantage of all the
opportunities for earnings that would be arriving
safely if you only plugged up those holes.

1. Improve your followup.  According to the National
Sales Executive Association, only about two percent of
sales occur on the first contact.  Eighty percent of
sales require at least five contacts before the
transaction occurs.  That means that if you put out
your sales message just once or twice, you're barely
out of the gate.  Those who might eventually buy are
hardly even beginning to pay attention.  You must
repeat that message again and again before it wakes up
busy people to what you are offering.

2. Put your marketing activities on schedule with a
plan.  I see a lot of businesses bedeviled by the
"feast or famine" syndrome, where they stop marketing
when times are good and therefore have no pipeline in
place bringing them new leads when the economy slows
down.  They get busy marketing, but there's a time lag
before new business comes in, and when it does, they
stop marketing once more, keeping the cycle going. 
Instead, invest time or money in creating a marketing
plan that tells you what to do each week or month to
keep business continually flowing in.  If it's too
much for you to handle, hire assistants or outsource
it to hungry but competent colleagues.

3. Increase your personal productivity by working at
your most creative times.  Once I incited a firestorm
of criticism on CompuServe's PR Forum by revealing
that I hardly ever spend more than one hour writing a
press release.  Other PR professionals opined that I
couldn't possibly create decent work that quickly. 
Well, I do, and here's my secret:  following a process
that creativity researchers will tell you is used by
top scientists and inventors, I absorb all the facts
and define the challenge for myself, then go to sleep,
take a walk or step into the shower.  Within a day, my

unconscious mind brings me a "Eureka" experience with
a terrific headline.  The rest of the press release
pours out right after the headline.  Had I sat down to
try, try, try to write that document, it would take
triple the time and not reach the same quality.

4. Stop unproductive marketing activities, boosting
your profits.  Advertising pros know that most
advertising doesn't work, but they continue to spend
like crazy because part of it does.  If you can
identify which marketing efforts of yours are not
giving you a return, and stop spending money and
energy on those, you'll be earning more from what you
spend.  Admittedly, it can be difficult sometimes to
pinpoint what actually brings in customers and
clients.  However, if you begin asking each new buyer
how they heard about you and keep track of the
answers, patterns almost always emerge.  One graphic
artist learned through this kind of research that
nearly all her clientele came from word of mouth and
none from her ads in the local business journal.  Of
course, the opposite discovery could have happened,
too.  Don't assume, find out!

5. Market more often to your customer base - much more
often.  Hardly anyone stays in touch with existing and
past customers often enough.  They think they might be
"bothering" their clientele by letting them know about
new products, opportunities to buy before a price
increase, success stories of other customers like
them, and so on.  Nope, it's not so.  On the 
contrary, staying in touch ensures that you stay in
the awareness of people who have done business with
you before, so that when they need you again, they
come to you rather than go to your competitors.

6. Hire help for mechanical tasks or a virtual
assistant to help manage communications.  Feeling
overwhelmed?  If you can make, let's say, $100 an 
hour doing what you do best, you should not be
spending too much energy on routine things like
stuffing envelopes, doing errands like going to the
bank and the copy shop or putting together slides for
your upcoming lecture.  Instead, pay someone $25 an
hour to get those to-do's accomplished and free you up
to get more high-paid work accomplished.  An exception
to this principle is when you do the repetitive tasks
as a break or rest from money-making activities that
tire you out.  

Increasing your productivity means increasing the
income from your business without spending more hours
working.  Get started on at least one of the above
today! 

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Marcia Yudkin  is the author of 6
Steps to Free Publicity and 10 other books.  She runs
a private member site, MarketingforMore.com, which
supports business owners who are growing their
businesses. Learn how to avoid the most common pricing
mistakes in her free report, "Charge More & Get It,"
available from http://www.marketingformore.com/survey.htm .
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What Are They Thinking
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Why do so many people forget to back up their data? Sure, hosting 
companies have backup services in place, but they are not perfect. 
Even if your hosting company is perfect with data backup, what if 
you get a spam complaint and your host pulls the plug? What do you
do then? You would probably like to think that your host will give
you access to your files, but not all of them will! Backing up the
data on a website is very easy to do, and it's something that all 
webmasters should be doing. People spend days, weeks, months, or 
even years building their sites, collecting opt-in prospects and 
making their sites the best selling machines they can, but aren't
spending even five minutes a week to make sure all that hard work
is protected. What are they thinking? How can people take so much
time working on something only to put their future completely in
the hands of someone else? Who's to say that your hosting company
is doing things right? Their data backup systems are designed by 
humans, and as we all know, humans are known to make mistakes from
time to time. I know of one person who was paying for data backup
service, but the hosting company forgot to add their databases in
the backup system. This person's site crashed and although they
were able to get back the HTML and images, they lost all of the 
content in the database and more importantly, their entire list 
of 50,000+ prospects! What were they thinking? Five minutes each
week could have saved them hundreds of thousands in lost revenue,
but I guess that five minutes of time was too much for them to 
put in each week. I really don't have any idea why people aren't
willing to do their own backups. What are they thinking?

 
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