On an expressway, with speeding cars and high risks associated with taking eyes off the road, outdoor hoardings or billboards have their tasks cut to the bone. It’s getting more and more difficult to keep wayfarers interested in your ad and perhaps even make it work. To get the most off your billboards and outdoor advertising, you should consider implementing the following:

One idea/message per billboard: Too many businesses shoot themselves when they tend to have too much posted on that hoarding out there. Keeping it simple might be clichéd but that’s because it works. The radical new rule today is to have just one message or one single idea to be communicated to prospects through your billboard ad. Usually intriguing questions will be the safest bet in this regard.

White background colour and a dark colour text: Don’t bother with a great artist for a graphic designer (you will need a graphic designer, nonetheless). Get a white background with black/red/dark blue text in huge fonts. That gets your graphic ready. Period. The effectiveness of this combination has been proven time and again and there’s no need to get creative while it hurts your bottom line.

Shock and awe: Most entrepreneurs have messages that don’t impact. Most of the messages are either hyped or too timid. Find a way to “shock and awe” them. Say something intriguing, shocking, and controversy-cooking. Don’t doubt yourself and don’t sound unsure. Say what you want to in a way that holds your prospects’ attention.

Call to act: Most advertisements just say it and leave it. Even though it might be obvious that you expect your prospects to call or email you, say it. Put your call-to-action loud and attractive no matter how obvious it might be. While you are at it, focus on only one call for action. Don’t ask your prospects to do this and that and then this.

Did you ever put a hoarding, outdoor display or billboard up?

No Comments »

Do you have too much to do and barely anytime to execute? Have you been piling up ideas on your table but didn’t inch forward to make even one single idea come to fruition. Do you feel that you are swamped with work every day? The reason all of that happens is lack of planning and then executing plans made. To make it easy for you, the secret to effective planning is called “Sequential planning and execution”.

The phrase is self-explanatory but getting to the bottom of it takes years of training and mind-boggling effort on your part to get things done. It’s usually easier said than done.

Sequential planning consists of getting tasks under a separate head (depends on the project at hand) and going at it sequentially. If you need to develop a plan for marketing your website, for instance, you could make a list similar to this:

Marketing yoursite.com

SEO/SEM
o Articles and product descriptions ( 5 per day)
o On page optimization
o Off page optimization
o Blogging with SEO targeted posts ( 3 per week)
 PPC
o Yahoo PPC
o Google Adwords
 Linkbuilding
o Creating satellite pages – squidoo, bukisa, and hubpages with relevant content
o Commenting on other blogs
o Linking to other blog posts within yoursite.com/blog posts.
o Requesting other webmasters to manually add your links…
 Newsletters and email marketing
o Create opt-in form
o Start building a list of Interested subscribers
o Send out regular emails loaded with content.
 Free Methods of Advertising
o Forum Marketing
o Q &A sites
 Article Marketing
o Ezinearticles
o Goarticles
o Work.com
This is just a sample plan for marketing and by setting clear objectives to each of these heads here with the elements within, you are well on your way to planning your success. It’s because this is difficult work that most people fail at it.
No matter what project you have at hand, you could develop sequential plans such as one shown above and execute it come what may.

Have you done sequential planning before? What are your thoughts about it?

No Comments »

Entrepreneurs or small business owners are all always hard-pressed for time which in turn means money, doesn’t it? However, time is abused relentlessly and much of this abuse happens either because small business owners tend to neglect the true value of time or too many external factors because time delays that these entrepreneurs don’t have control on. No matter how you look at it, time (and hence money) is lost. Sad thing is that it can’t even show up on the income statements. Here are some of the biggest time wasters for an entrepreneur:

The Internet: It must be a joke to say that the Internet – which is the place where some web-based entrepreneurs and those who have ambitious e-commerce projects tend to work on each day – is actually the biggest time waster available. Add some Facebook, Twitter and other social media exploits on the web along with checking email thousand times a day and it starts to get dangerous at this point. If you have anything to do online, you will need to ration your time well or outsource most of the work you could have done without. There’s Elance, Odesk and Guru to help you do just that.

People scratching on your watch: Too many people tend to scratch on your watch and demand time from you – your employees want to be trained on something or the other, your customers take a lot of time from you( I guess this should be on priority anyway), your family needs your time. Your friends drop in unannounced, etc. There are phone calls to attend, conferences to attend and places to travel because someone else asked you to. Well, you have a choice. How important is it to meet someone in the middle of your work? Can’t you ration these demands or at least prioritize them? They aren’t the ones with lofty ambitions and dreams of wanting to start, run or maintain a business or to get rich; you are. Don’t allow them to get to you; be so busy that you have no time to meet anyone.

Your lazy bones: Could you guess that you could be the biggest reason for wasting time each precious day? It could be about your lack of motivation to work on your business, laziness, a tendency to take it easy or a complete nonchalance to results. You could be the reason why you haven’t made it big yet and the difference is tremendous when you start putting your time to good use. Read a book in the elevator or in the airport while queuing up t board planes or when waiting for clients. Use every minute of your time productively and see what that does to you.
Forgive me for being clichéd here but “time is everything you have now”. Make a decision – what price do you put on your time anyway?

No Comments »

Branding is a big thing – at least most of the Fortune 500 companies and scores od ad agencies would make you believe so. However, if you look at it all closely, you will realize that it is really common sense. Simple things often lead to phenomenal changes in the world of branding and it is usually these elements that seem to make the decisions:

Sensory Perception: Most of our decisions are based on the sensory feel conveyed to us through one or more of our five senses. The more you remember these fundamentals in all your branding efforts such as advertisements, Press releases, online marketing and other ways of branding, the more closer you get to getting your prospects to convert into buyers. Think of ways you can enhance the sensory perceptions of your prospects in as many ways as possible.

Seductiveness: There’s got to be something enticing, exciting and truly attractive about everything you do in the case of branding your products and services. Many companies today do spend thousands of dollars without keeping this rather simple and fundamental principle of “seduction” in all their outgoing messages, advertisements and other forms of communication with their customers.
Message strength and a call-for-action: If there’s nothing truly captivating in that message that goes out in your advertisement, don’t publish it. I know it sounds a little harsh but I think that’s the truth. If all you got is your company name and address on your advertisements but you know now that isn’t exciting for a prospect at all. Also, it’s important that every message that goes out should have a bankable call-to-action.

Recurrence: No branding message can take precedence in prospects’ mind if it isn’t recurring. Your advertisements should not only be visually appealing and have strength in the message with a call-to-action tagging along but also be recurrent enough for prospects to remember it. That’s one of the reasons why email marketing has emerged as the best vehicle to bring in recurrence and is aimed at groups of highly-interested and targeted prospects.

No Comments »

Q & A sites – a part of social search — are a growing trend on the Internet today and provides immense leverage for entrepreneurs looking to promote their products, services or businesses. Users ask relevant questions on these sites waiting for experts (or other users) to answer their queries. Business owners too can leverage the Social Search scene by being a part of the vibrant Q &A community on sites related to business and entrepreneurship:

Business.com: Askoholic posted a great review on business.com Q & A section and I urge you to read up more about it to get a better understanding on how business.com Q &A works for you. Business.com is blessed with some great, targeted traffic and that can be good for you as a business owner since all you need to do is to establish your expertise and provide valuable information in the form of answers to the information-hungry users on the site. The traffic there should help you leverage your presence on the web to an extent.

Focus.com: Although focus.com has its focus on not just business but also on a few other related functions such as technology, operations and human resources, it is still a great site to be on and get your voice out. The layout is great and it makes for a great investment of your time out there. Put your business up and start contributing valuable information there for the benefit of your readers while tapping into a little traffic that should come your way.

Start-up nation: It’s been around for a long time and I have always been active on this community. Start-up Nation has grown from a simple forum to a full-fledged business/entrepreneurial community by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. The users are always ready to burst at your questions and answer your problems with enthusiasm and interest. You will rarely find spam answers to your questions and some users go to great length to give you advice for free that consultants would charge a bomb for.
Have you come across any other Q &A sites that business owners should go to? Please list them out for us here.

No Comments »

Have you been looking for some great business ideas? Did you feel the pinch for not being able to come up with some really awesome and profitable business ideas to start your entrepreneurial journey? There are some cool ways to explore and find business ideas effortlessly (Ok, there’s no such thing as no effort!). Here are some ways you can use to have your business started based on a great idea:

Go roam the world: Travel is the greatest teacher, they say. It is believed that a person who is well-travelled usually has better experiences to relate to; there’s also a side benefit of interest for entrepreneurs. If you are looking for some business ideas, the best way to pick up some ideas is to travel around the world and see what kind of businesses are popular in the host countries you visit. Barring a few cultural nuances and political issues, if the businesses you look at seem to work in those countries, chances are that they can work in your country too.

Look at franchise business opportunities and get ideas: I am not for franchising; somehow, I feel that when you become a franchise business owner, you don’t tend to flex your entrepreneurial muscles to the fullest extent. However, looking at a directory of franchise opportunities could very well be your ticket to entrepreneurial freedom. Look at the listings and see if you can model a business based on business opportunities that interest you. You never know if your business could be developed to be franchised later on, would you?

Keep a continued interest on your industry: Just by keeping on top of information with regards to your industry, you could see if there are markets that are hugely under-served. It could be possible that you could come up with products or services which are a hundred times better but you could price it for 10%lesser than your competition’s average. Perhaps you could focus more on the customer service or make buying easier for your prospective customers.

Business ideas are usually all around you; it just takes prudent analysis, an alert mind, and an enthusiastic but entrepreneurial take on everything happening around you.
Say, have you found your business idea yet?

No Comments »