Tag: Business Building

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Tips to Getting Your Small Business Started

Getting your business started can be the most complicated, overwhelming, and essential part of your business. Not knowing what to do or ignoring what is required to succeed can make your path to success more difficult. It can also hinder it altogether as there are many things you need to understand in the first phase of the business to be successful. Without these key components, you will likely make a few mistakes or miss a couple of deadlines as you work to get back on track.

 

The following are a few tips to help get your small business started right:

 

Choose The Right Business Idea

If you want to get started right, you must choose the right business idea or model. Don’t start a business you don’t really care for because you have the wrong idea of what success will look like or be like. In other words, if you don’t like doing the work now, you won’t like doing it later when you have the revenue either. So it would be best if you enjoyed the work to keep it functioning long term.

 

Understand Your Target Audience

Get to know your target audience as much as possible right away, and don’t ever stop. Your target audience is vital to the overall success of your business as they are the ones that provide you the resources to grow. If you don’t understand them they will likely move on. As a result, you make it more difficult to find and retain new customers. Remember, it is natural to change, and your target audience will too, which is why you must keep up with the relationship and communication.

 

Create The Right Social Media Accounts

Be sure to open and use the social media accounts your target audience uses the most. Certain age groups, places around the world, and niches use different platforms, so it is important to take notice of the ones they use first or at least to support them. For example, if you want to create YouTube videos but know most of your audience uses Instagram, you can edit the video to share teaser videos. Then, when they see the teaser video on Instagram, they are likely to go to YouTube to see the more extended version.

 

Understand The Required Resources and Finances

Educate yourself regarding business finance. This includes paying yourself, what it costs to create content, accounting systems, other tools, and so much more. A poor grasp of finances is one of the most common reasons businesses fail, which is why you should set it up correctly and find the appropriate funding first before you get started.

 

Complete a Business Plan

A business that skips a business plan is sure to fail. This is because a business plan helps to ensure your business idea is viable and profitable in the long term. It helps to identify each marketing strategy and how you can stand out against your competition. Plans are essential to making sure you deliver everything you need to run and grow a successful business now and in the future.

 

Don’t let the lack of proper information prevent you from being a successful entrepreneur. Be sure to follow and implement each of these tips to get your business started right. Many people fail due to a poor start, but you can be sure your path to entrepreneurship is successful with these tips.

Why Every Business Needs a Business Plan

 

 

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Four Important Tips on How to Pick the Right Business Idea for You

If you want to ensure you are on the right track to becoming a successful entrepreneur, you need to pick a profitable business idea that aligns the best with you. If you don’t understand or care about the concept you are trying to pursue, you will more likely create products that don’t provide value or are of poor quality as you lack the desire to research or improve your skills.

 

The following are four essential tips to keep in mind when picking the right business idea for you:

 

Recognize the Life You Really Want to Live

In other words, if it takes a twenty-four-seven commitment and the life is not what you can envision doing for the rest of your life, then you might want to reevaluate the business idea. Be sure you can handle the work required to achieve the revenue instead of what the revenue might allow you to do.

 

The fact is, you won’t have those rewards when you first get started. Therefore, you must be able to handle the work to achieve it. If you don’t enjoy the work, you likely won’t enjoy the business even if it generates your desired income. So take the time to break down the work you want to do for the rest of your life to ensure the business idea you pick matches.

 

Focus on Your Skills and Experiences

What skills and information do you correctly possess that can be shared and be valuable to others. Remember, you don’t need perfection or expertise to share, so don’t let that slow you down if you have some knowledge and a strong passion for it. The more you understand and enjoy the business you create, the more successful you will likely be.

The Time Management Techniques to Learn as a New Entrepreneur

Test Before Making a Commitment

Believe it or not, commitment to an idea is not required to get started. It does not make you a failure just because you decide something isn’t right for you. In fact, most entrepreneurs go through many different ideas before one finally makes sense to them.

 

The world has so many different opportunities that it would be impossible to know without trying first. However, you can’t focus on what you get in return when trying this method. You must only focus on the work and what is required of you. This is only to determine if you enjoy the work and can handle it in the long run. You can’t let revenue be the ultimate factor. While you want a profitable business idea, that doesn’t mean you should reach for the one that makes the most money, especially if you don’t enjoy it.

 

Visualize the Final Outcome

Visualization is a powerful tool that can help determine obstacles, challenges, or things that may get in your way of success. As you come up with ideas, imagine your target audience, what products you will create, and the overall lifestyle you can live to accomplish it.

 

Starting with the wrong business idea does not mean you will not be a successful entrepreneur one day. However, it can make it hard to find the motivation and resources to continue down this path. Starting with a business idea you genuinely want to pursue and ignoring the many “get rich quick” business schemes is the only way to be sure you do what is required to succeed. A successful business takes consistent and daily work to see rewards. Through passion and care of your idea, you know you will get the work done to see them.

 

 

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Five Steps to Creating an Amazon Kindle eBooks Business

Kindle publishing has the potential to create a six-figure or more business. With Kindle Direct Publishing, any writer can now publish their books, grow their audience without an established publisher, and still generate large profits. In fact, Amazon allows writers to create the stories they want and keep control of their products. Making Kindle Direct Publishing a powerful business model to choose if you are a writer or desire to become one.

 

These five steps will help you to create and run a profitable Amazon Kindle eBook business.

 

Step One: Find Your Amazon Kindle Books Category or Niche

Research through the top sellers in the Kindle store to see which genre inspires you the most. These genres let you know what products are in demand. While you want to create your own story, you still need to find and develop one people search for on Amazon to build a profitable business. Even if you author a terrific book, you won’t have a great time selling it if people are not interested in the genre.

Step Two: Create an Amazon Seller Account

To sell your books on Amazon, you must own and pay for an Amazon Seller Account. This costs about $39.99 a month plus any royalty fees, depending on the size of your book. For example, if you price your book below $2.99 and above $9.99, you will be charged a 30% royalty fee for using Amazon’s services.

 

Step Three: Develop Eye-Catching Book Covers

The first thing readers see is your book cover and title, so make it eye-catching. Your readers should get a basic understanding of what genre they will read just by looking at the cover. For example, a romantic novel will have a couple cuddling, while a beginner’s guide to cooking will want to have food and cooking equipment to draw in the right readers.

 

Step Four: Write Quality Content and Descriptions

The most crucial step of all is to create a story or book worth reading. To make a profitable Amazon eBook business, you need to create a series or more than one book on related topics. This way, you create fans of your work who will read your new books no matter what as they know they will enjoy your genre.

 

Step Five: Tease and Promote Your Books

Before your book officially launches, let your readers know what is about to come. Take parts of your book and create short stories, guides, or templates that can be useful or valuable to your audience now or until they can purchase the full book.

 

Follow these five steps to launch and run a successful and highly profitable Amazon Kindle eBooks business. The more quality content you write and share on the platform, the more revenue you will generate.

 

Common Community Building Obstacles that Can Hinder Your Success

 

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Five Tools to Grow an Engaging and Valuable Brand Community

Brand or online communities allow you to reach more potential customers, increase your revenue potential and credibility as a brand. However, these benefits do not come easy as they require a highly engaged community, constant interaction, and unique content. Thankfully, many tools can either automate or make the process easier and faster to accomplish. This way, you can spend your time where it matters most, creating more value for your target audience.

 

The following are five tools to utilize to grow an engaging and beneficial brand community:

 

Fuel Cycle

 

A marketing research cloud that drives brands to communities with powerful insights and information that can improve the success of your business. The information provided on this platform helps you perfect your brand message, transform the customer experience, and work more closely with your target audience to make important decisions in real-time. In addition, their user-focus interface and smartphone application are specifically designed to increase engagement and participation.

 

Sprout Social

 

This community-building platform offers many tools, such as managing all your social profiles from one dashboard instead of signing in to each individually. This can really help you collaborate more with your coworkers and clients while also getting more information to help you deliver even more of what your customers want.

 

Brand24

 

This social media monitoring solution can help you find any conversations online about your brand, products, and even your competitors all across the web. In addition, this information can help you create more products, services, and engaging content for your audience as you stay informed about what people are talking about even outside your personally owned communities.

 

Grytics

 

This system enables you to build your community engagement with real-time data and analytics established by insights into your community. As a result, you will gain useful knowledge about your community’s needs to develop closer and more profitable, mutually beneficial relationships.

 

Taggbox

 

If you’re interested in encouraging and using more user-generated content in your communities, this option offers that to you. It enables you to curate social media content that you can embed on your website or really any screen. In addition, engaging with your audience on their own content will encourage even more discussions and thus create even more user-generated content.

 

Give each of these different tools a try to see which one benefits you and your community the most. Remember, just because one doesn’t work doesn’t mean the other won’t either. Each tool solves a specific problem. Overall, tools allow you to streamline the community building process to create more relevance and value for your target audience. The more value you provide, the more profits and other benefits you gain in return.

 

 

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Social Media Marketing

 

 

 

 

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Common Community Building Obstacles that Can Hinder Your Success

Like any business advertising or marketing strategy, there are bound to be obstacles that can hinder your success. For this reason, understanding some of the many common obstacles to community building now will prevent them from destroying your results in the future. In addition, knowing what to watch out for can mitigate the problems and help you be more successful than your wildest dreams.

 

Here are four common community-building obstacles that can hinder your success and tips on how to avoid or improve them:

 

Unique and Valuable Content

 

Continually creating and sharing valuable content is no easy feat. Repurposing content, sharing boring promotions, or expecting your community to do most of the work won’t help you either. Instead, developing and sharing content that is unique to that platform will inspire more engagement.

 

Asking questions and getting to know your audience more by figuring out their needs and frustrations will provide you with endless content ideas. What keeps them up at night? If you know your audience and what makes them who they are, you will know what content to produce. If you’re not sure, ask them.

 

Platform and Tools

 

Not using the right tools or platform for your target audience is the first mistake many make. Just because a platform is easy for you to use doesn’t mean it will translate to your audience. If you use a platform or software not used by the common public, you must add additional content to teach them how to use it and why they should even try. Working with difficult tools or confusing information will only deter them from participating or showing up. Instead, pick a well-known tool, and even if it’s not perfect, stick to it if that is where your audience is.

 

Market Competition

 

Competition is inevitable, and it only gets bigger the more avenues or tools you use for your business. However, doing the right research on your competition and developing superior resources makes it a non-issue. You can always do better.

 

One strategy is to find and join your competitors’ groups within your niche and see what comments and information they receive. Then, watch how they answer their customers or help lead them toward purchasing. Then, as you learn, find ways to make it better with your distinctive touch.

 

Consistency

 

Finally, but certainly not least, consistency is a common struggle to many businesses who start a brand community. Finding the right balance of content to share and working with your members’ schedules is the best way to achieve this. Adopting and learning automation tools will also help perfect consistency. Consistency shows your members that you are there to value them, not use them for money.

 

Knowing these common obstacles should provide you with the tools to build a more successful brand or online community from the start. Consistent materials, schedule, and image with the right tools and education are essential to running a profitable and valuable brand community. Keeping up with your industry and always supplying valuable and powerful content can be a lot of work but is crucial to the success of your community.

 

Harness the Power of Consistency

 

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Essential Community Building Statistics to Know

If you want to grow a community or build one around your brand, you must know the facts. Statistics show that if you’re going to start a business, building a community around it is vital if you’re going to succeed. Fortunately, many consumers are looking for more information directly from the source to build relationships with honest and valuable brands. They seek trust and validity before they can make a purchase or commit to a brand.

 

The following are some essential community building statistics to know to further promote and grow your brand:

 

  • Nearly a 1/3 of Users Follow Brands Using Social Media – Because so many social media users and those who love being part of communities follow brands using social media, it tells you that if big brands are doing it, it can work for you too. So, you really don’t have to be Red Bull to benefit from building community.

 

  • Ninety Percent of Buyers Report Using Positive Online Reviews to Make Their Purchase Decisions – Reviews work according to buyers’ own words. They like reading positive reviews to help make their choice.

 

  • Almost Thirty Percent of Online Customers Report Using Brand Communities for Research – Many people who want to buy things feel more comfortable going to a community run by the brand to find out what customers are saying and get a sense of the integrity of the creator.

 

  • The Common Community Objectives Include: Customer retention, lower support costs, and innovation – People who create communities cite these reasons for spending a lot of effort developing engaging and informative safe communities for their customers and interested parties.

 

  • Only 40% of Small Businesses Compared to 75% of Large Corporations Build Communities – This is likely because it can be a lot of work to set it up and keep it running. However, with the advent of so many options, it’s getting a lot easier to do it.

 

  • Over 95% of Adult Smartphone Users are Using Social Media and Brand Groups – Because so many people in the USA (77%) have smartphones having a mobile-friendly community will pay off since most users love being involved in brand groups using their technology.

 

  • Almost 90% of Business Leaders State Community Building is Essential to Growth – The main reason for this is that it’s one more way to help lead your ideal customer through the buying journey successfully.

 

The fact is, online or brand communities are what sets you apart from your competition and can further solidify your chances of success. If you want increased awareness, recognition, and loyalty, then running a community is vital. Overall, these statistics prove the power and benefits online, or brand communities can provide to businesses.

 

A Comprehensive Social Media Influencer Checklist

 

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Questions to Answer to Build a Successful Brand Community

Taking the time to question your motives, inspirations, ideas, and goals is important to building a solid and successful business. Developing a brand community that benefits both you and its members is no exception to this fact either. It allows you to truly identify what you need to achieve your goals more efficiently. In addition, creating a solid plan of action ensures you build a strong and active brand community from the beginning.

 

The more you understand and work to improve before building your community, the more likely you will succeed. Online communities allow you to form better connections with your customers while giving them a sense of purpose. In addition, they increase your brand awareness, recognition, and trust as long as they start with the right foundation.

 

Here are five questions to answer and evaluate to build a successful brand community:

 

Question One: Why do you need to build a community, and how will it support your target audience?

 

Knowing what’s in it for your group is really important because that’s how you’ll sell the idea of joining your community to them. When you tell them why the community exists and exactly how it will support them, they’re going to be more likely to want to join because you’ve told them why.

 

Question Two: Where should you start and grow your community and why?

 

Knowing where your audience likes to get their information and which social media platforms they use most will help inform you about what type of community you need to build. For example, some audience members are more likely to join Facebook groups over joining a community on your website. It will depend on what your audience wants and needs.

 

Question Three: What kind of actions do you want your community to take and why?

 

What do you hope each member of your community does to make their lives better or solve their problems as part of your membership or group? As people join, it’s imperative that you tell them what to do next. Whether filling out their profile information, creating an introductory post, or answering a survey, letting them know what to do and why you want them to do it will ensure more do it.

 

Question Four: What products or resources do you need to form an engaging and active community?

 

Make a list of all the products, services, and resources you need to create the engaging community you want to create. For example, do you need to invest in a customer service bot, create a self-serve FAQ, or something else?

 

Question Five: What key performance metrics should you track to ensure you achieve your community goals?

 

There is much more to success than likes and even engagement if none of that leads to sales. Therefore, your metrics should include matching your actions with increased revenue, but you also want to study engagement.

 

Filling in these questions is essential to outline the initial framework of your online or brand community. Understanding your value and showing how you can match that value with the needs of your audience ensures you have the resources and understanding to build a successful community. The community only returns what you put in. Therefore, starting with the right framework and knowledge secures maximum returns.

 

 

Six Strategies for Successful Community Building

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Five Important Principles of Authentic Community Engagement to Learn

With more social media and online communication, being genuine and trustworthy are two important characteristics many consumers are looking for from businesses more than ever.

 

With authentic engagement and communication, you can foster communities that work together to empower each other and your brand. It provides the knowledge you need to improve your products while also helping the members solve problems that can then be used to improve their lives and others. It’s about being real, inspiring your community, and doing your best not to mislead or misdirect them.

 

The following are five important principles to learn and incorporate to inspire authentic community engagement and grow your business:

 

Get the Community Involved and Active Right Away

 

Don’t wait until you have a lot of members to start publishing information and activating the community. At first, your community may feel a little lonely until you get more members but keeping it active and full of information that will still be there when people join is very important to building a dynamic and vibrant community.

 

Encourage Trust and Integrity

 

Set the rules of your community to establish trust and highlight your integrity to the group. As you communicate openly with members of your community, others observe and become more trusting of you as they notice how much integrity you have.

 

Foster Community-Led Solutions

 

As a business owner, you need to create and or find solutions for your ideal customer’s problems related to your niche and your expertise. The impressive thing about having a community is getting input to create more solutions from the people who need them.

 

Be Consistent, Clear, and Open with Communication

 

It can help to create a branding guide that includes your business personality and voice to ensure that all content and communication are consistent, clear, and accurate. It’s a lot easier to be open when you know for sure where your values lie and how to ensure you stick to them.

 

Empower and Support Your Audience

 

The best thing about a group is that you will have one of the best advantages in empowering and supporting your audience. After all, you want them to succeed, and if they succeed, you do too.

 

Create powerful and informed content that serves your members and only your members — meaning don’t just automatically share content that has been shared in other places unless you changed it in some way or added additional meaning to it by connecting it to a success story or a point you want to share. The more personal the content being shared in the group, the more likely your members will come back and engage with each other. Content is how you keep your target audience interested and involved, so make it worth it.

How Community Member-To-Member Engagement Grows Your Business

 

 

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Common Business Problems that Building a Community Can Solve

If you are struggling to build your business and looking for ways to improve, building an online or brand community may be the best solution. In fact, it is likely the tool you’ve needed all along.

 

The following are five common business problems building a community can solve:

 

Poor Return on Investment

 

While email lists, advertisements, and your blog are all fabulous ways to generate interest in your offers, there is nothing more effective than truly getting to know your customers more intimately. If your ROI is not what you want it to be, but your customers are otherwise satisfied, a brand community can help you fix that problem.

 

You can create the community free or for a fee. It’s up to you. It really does depend on your niche and your business model, but you can test out various ways to run your community. Once you have a captive audience that you can communicate with regularly, they will start buying more, and your ROI will improve.

 

Poor Cashflow and Intermittent Revenue

 

Whether you provide services or products, or you’re an affiliate with no products of your own, if you work within a particular niche, your income is likely not consistent if you have not built a community of avid and hungry buyers. Having a membership-based community, whether paid or free, can stabilize your cash flow like nothing else.

 

In your communities, you can offer them the first peek at new products and services, get more feedback, receive more customer reviews, and even get your members to become brand advocates and recommend you to others much easier than you can without having a community.

 

Poor Credibility, Trust, and Awareness

 

Communities humanize businesses, and once that happens, your audience will start trusting you more. The credibility that you end up with after creating more awareness through community building will jumpstart your creative juices and end up helping you become even better in the eyes of your customer base due to all the inside knowledge you’ll gain by being part of your community.

 

Poor Business Growth and Stagnation

 

If you have grown as far as you can with what you are doing, consider building a community. An active and engaged community can really boost your growth and end the stagnation you’re experiencing. Even if you haven’t sold a solitary product yet, building an active community will generate new revenue.

 

Finally, you can vastly improve your customer service by setting up an active and involved community. Not only will your members offer each other community peer-to-peer support, but you’ll also be much more in tune with what is going right and wrong and learn better ways to help your members in the way they desire.

 

 

Four Ways Community Building Improves Customer Service

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Four Ways Communities Improve Customer Experience

Just one bad customer experience can destroy your reputation as a brand or small business owner. Research suggests that consumers are willing to spend more revenue on businesses that have excellent customer service.

 

In fact, a report conducted by The Economist states that 59% of the consumers surveyed are willing to reach out or find other businesses in hopes of a better customer experience. Building a brand community provides the customer experience you need to prevent this from happening.

 

Here are five ways communities can improve your target customer experience:

 

Communities Humanize the Support Process

 

Most consumers are very tired of being just another number or worse, a wallet, and not even thought of as humans. Small business owners are uniquely positioned to offer customers the most human support possible through their use of communities. If you participate, they’re going to see you as a real human with real feelings, and due to that, they’re going to buy more.

 

Communities Improve Customer Engagement

 

Not only will your customers engage and discuss your products one-on-one within the community, getting current ideas and insight into making use of your products and services, but they will also be more likely to respond to you and answer your questions due to the ease of communication in a group environment.

 

Communities Provide Clear Customer Insight and Understanding

 

While the community is mainly for your customer, the truth is, you will gain a lot from having a community. You’re going to learn more about your customer, and that will help you understand what they truly need from you within the bounds of your niche.

 

Communities Streamline the Customer Service Process

 

Offering more avenues of customer care to your customers will make them feel even more heard. It’s hard to provide phone support as a small business, but the next best thing is a community that allows them to publish their questions and find answers in your FAQ or by using your bot. Plus, sometimes you’re going to be there live to help.

 

In the end, making sure your customers have the best experience possible when communicating or engaging with your business prevents you from destroying your reputation or business altogether. Remember, most businesses have to shut down within ten years. The major contributing factors to these shutdowns include poor customer service and not prioritizing your target audience. Building a community provides you more control and tools to ensure you give the best customer experience at all times, anywhere around the world.

 

Four Ways Community Building Improves Customer Service