Turning Ideas into $$$$s takes WORK!
Are you always on the outlook for new ideas to turn your ideas into $$$$s?
Do you look at new promotional media and new ways to to get the word out about your product or service or do you do the same old
media (magazines, newspapers, Television)?
DIGITAL has CHANGED the WORLD
According to an article in Newspaper Death Watch professional marketers are changing their use of media, especially print. Depending on their target audience, they are using the media that is actually relevant to their audiences. That sometimes means digital. That could mean visual in places where their prospects frequent or it could mean finding new fun promotional techniques to help people reach their audience.
The professionals are aware that the world has changed.
(professionals meaning here people who are paid to do the promotion)
Competitions, social media promotions and games or contests allow direct and indirect promotion. They create fun and excitement. One such option is a scavenger hunt like the one currently being run by Firepole Marketing. (Wow do I admire what they are doing)
Now doing a contest or a competition, a scavenger hunt or even a social media campaign takes WORK.
You need to keep priming the pump.
You need to keep the excitement happening.
You need to track what you are delivering.
You need to keep people informed about what is happening
In the good old days of advertising, you designed your ad, placed it in your media and made sure that when people responded to the ad, your suppliers and staff could fulfill the orders. The work came in preparing the ad and making sure you could deliver what was promised in your advertisement.
In the second decade of the 21st century, you need to keep the energy and excitement going.
- You need to respond to the tweets,
- Support the Facebook likes, shares and comments,
- Answer questions and comments on blogs and
- Spend time and energy interacting with people to keep the excitement up.
And that is WORK.
Work that many small business people fail to understand or plan for.
Yes Virtual assistants can help you but only if they have clear, measurable goals.
The other day, Sherryl Perry, in Keep up with the Web wrote a blog on what to measure (Tracking Your Blog Post SEO Meta Tag Data). I asked Sherryl about how she tracks and I am hoping that she will write a blog around her answer to my comment. One thing – even to track takes WORK.
Writing a book takes WORK!
Writing a blog takes WORK!
Creating a product takes WORK!
Delivering a service takes WORK!
Building a relationship takes WORK!
Maintaining a relationship once built takes WORK!
Work is a four letter word but it is one that will help you earn dollars rather than one that gets your mouth washed out with soap (do they still do that?).
If you want to turn your ideas into dollars, you need to plan to work. And finding out what to work at, what to do takes PLANNING and PREPARATION.
Remember if you have the money to pay others to do the work, you are using the money that you worked for to save you time and buy the time and effort of others.
WORK costs – money and time.
What work are you doing today to help your ideas become the dollars you want? Share your work in the comments below. And yes that takes work but it helps get your message to a wider audience.
To your success in making those ideas = $$$$$s
How Has the Web/Internet changed Business?
The biggest effect that the Web has on business is that it is almost impossible (without outside information) to tell a tiny one-man-
Transactions matter to business?
band from a multi-national conglomerate!
Think about it:
It takes only a few dollars to buy an URL for a business.
It takes a little bit of time to set up an account with an ISP to house your pages, and a few more hours to set up a web site.
If you use WordPress or Facebook, and it would only cost you a little bit of time to have a Web Presence that is every bit as impressive as that of many of the largest multinational company.
With a little bit of effort (and a couple of apps) you can add a ‘shopping cart’, have a PayPal or Google account to handle credit card and virtual cash transactions, and you are up and running as a business.
Do some browsing and ‘surfing’ on the Web.
What is there on the pages you see that tells you the size of the business?
The chances are: NOTHING!
A one-person business can look as professional as one put out by a huge company. It can have as many products, and as many bells and whistles.
The fact is, business is all about transactions – you provide a product or service, and someone pays for that product or service.
In a bricks and mortar environment, the costs of having a store or an office or a slew of stores and offices are indicators of how large the business is. It is an indication of how wide the service is rather than how well the business is doing. The number of “branches” tells you that your are no longer dealing with a tiny one-man operation.
While the larger business may deliver more variety and the one man business may tailor better to specifics; it always comes down to transactions and the level of satisfaction for both parties.
On the Web, transactions are a critical part of the business, but a business with one transaction a week looks identical to one that has a million transactions a day.
That’s what the Web/Internet has accomplished: it makes every business equal in ways that could never have happened in a bricks and mortar environment. It has refocused business on the one thing that really matters: the individual transactions.
The transaction orientation is changing the emphasis of how we do business. It means that transaction costs can now be kept to a bare minimum. It means that buyers have the ability to look at the packaging and handling and buy exactly what they want rather than told and sold. Transactions allow for higher trust and relationship building. Transaction based business have no physical boundaries, no size limitations, no restraints.
Are you managing transactions or are you worried about SEO and web presence? In the comments, tell me what is preventing your one man business from looking like a big business?
Roberta
Passionate Purposeful Performer
Transactions are a key part of the 10 Critical Criteria.
Have you looked at how your business matches those criteria yet? Find out more about the criteria today.
A new world with Social Credit philosophies
Image via Wikipedia
When I first read through C.H. Douglas’s Social Credit (and a few of his other articles and essays), my first thoughts were: “BRILLIANT, BUT…”. They made sense; yet there seemed to be no way of the system being implemented. My conclusion, at the time, was that the whole paradigm was unworkable, even if it were accurate. So, I “forgot” about it.
Over the last couple of years, however, I’ve been watching the global economy become so complicated, so full of holes that I wonder if Douglas really did have the solution everyone has wanted from the very beginning. I still don’t see how we can implement it, without a major revolution; a major paradigm shift that will destroy much of the way we think the economy works.
It is ninety years since that book came out. Ninety years, with a depression and many small recessions, real and “technical”, while we’ve patched up the systems that haven’t worked and that just lead to the “same-old same-old”. Isn’t that one of the definitions of insanity: to do the same things in the same way and expect different results?
Can we afford to keep baling out existing industries, like the American car industry, where billions of dollars have gone in, and we are still not seeing a change in their fortunes? How many other industries are in a similar boat, although not as obvious to the average person that they are being propped up by money that isn’t resulting in the betterment of our societies and our communities? No, I’m not going to illustrate them. Anyone who wants to know has the internet and the World Wide Web available, and can do their own homework on this aspect. But look at real estate and the construction industry, and ask yourself why so many homes are under foreclosure or why so many owners have to sell short. The banking industry might need to take a share of the blame, but that’s only a small part of why the effect is happening. People can no longer afford to buy homes, and it is getting to the point where it is becoming unfeasible to even start a new business.
The point is that we can no longer afford to assume that the economies of nations will be able to expand “forever”. The world can’t produce enough food or other renewable resources to satisfy such expansion. We can’t afford to have 200 distinct nations, each with its own agenda. Nice as nationalism is for the various cultures, how we can preserve all the difference? We can’t afford for businesses to drive towards monopolies, and then be cut back, as has happened in the past twenty years.
Maybe we can’t afford to have full employment. After all, for about the last fifty years, we’ve been able to produce enough for most of the population with only a fraction (suggestion is between 20% and 25% of the employable population) actually doing the production of the goods and services.
When I looked at a table of New Zealand employment statistics (produced by New Zealand’s Department of Statistics) more that 10 years ago, I was surprised that the employment figures stated that one in eight employed people were involved with value adding work; the other seven were in management or support roles. I looked at similar statistics for other countries; the ratio was even lower – one country showed one in 20 people were in value adding roles, with 19 involved in management and supporting roles.
More startling than the ratio, the average rate of pay (salary, wages, etc.) for the support roles was at least double that of the value adding roles. That is NOT looking at the pay rates for the higher levels of management, which were often 1000 times as high as the pay for value adding roles.
Is there a relationship between the disparities of value-adding roles and support/management roles in numbers and pay?
Perhaps C.H. Douglas’s approach shows this relationship
No, I am not a proponent of the Social Credit political movement, which is relatively moribund in today’s world. But perhaps, it has the answers we need if our civilization is going to survive and thrive. Perhaps it is time we re-visited the philosophies of Social Credit. The book (and the various manifestos) is hard to read. Much of the content does seem like mumbo jumbo, but there is a great deal there that may just show the way to how we can institute change in a positive direction that works.
Article first published as A New World With Social Credit Philosophies on Technorati.
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Guest Blogging with Jon Morrow
