Tag: business planning

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A Quick Guide to Starting a Retail Arbitrage Business

Retail arbitrage is not just a hobby or side business. It is a business model that many follow to run highly profitable businesses. Retail arbitrage involves finding products created by other brands and manufacturers and then reselling them on Amazon, eBay, or Walmart for a profit. The goal is to find a high in-demand product for an affordable price, buy it in bulk and then list it on one of these platforms. The more products you source and resell on these platforms, the more revenue you can make.

 

These essential tips will help you start and run a profitable retail arbitrage business:

 

Use the Amazon Seller App

The best way to ensure you are sourcing products with a high-profit margin is to take advantage of the Amazon seller phone application. This app allows you to scan items to see their current sales price, sales rank, and potential return on investment.

 

Shop More Than One Store

Find more than one store to shop from, even if it is the same type of store. The more deals you can find with the most units, the more profits you can make. For example, if you find a candle that people are buying for $2 at a local store but know you can sell it on Amazon for $10, you will want to purchase and sell at least twelve or more to make a profit worth the work.

 

Verify Your Profit Margins

In other words, find products you can sell at all different price points. However, beware of your limits. Anything that provides at least eight dollars or more in return is where you should start if you want to start and run a profitable retail arbitrage business.

 

Price and Ship Right Away

Don’t let the product sit once you purchase it. Follow the instructions on how to properly ship your items to Amazon’s warehouse as soon as possible. Be sure to price the items competitively but fairly. In other words, if others on the platform are selling the same thing, don’t over or underprice them, as this will only hurt you in the end. Keep the price the same by fifty cents to a dollar keeping in mind your profit margins.

 

As you can see, you can’t just post any product and expect it to be successful. It needs to be an in-demand product and offer a good return on investment after being shipped to Amazon then packaged and sent to the new owner. For retail arbitrage to be successful, you must sell at a profit and find more than one unit. This means most successful retail arbitrage businesses eventually open a warehouse and hire employees to source more products and get them shipped to Amazon quickly.

 

 

 

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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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Essential Guide to Starting a Blogging Business

Did you know that in 2020 over four hundred million people viewed nearly twenty billion blog pages every month? What’s even better is that almost twenty-five percent of those who run a WordPress blog make a full-time living in the same year. These two facts show that creating a blog and turning it into a profitable or sustainable business is not completely out of reach.

Here are five tips to follow to grow a profitable blogging business:

 

Choose a Niche

While not a requirement, choosing a niche for your blog is the best way to turn your blog into a profitable business. This is because you can better perfect and target your audience when you don’t have too many topics to cover.

 

Develop or Invest in Quality Content

A blog is only as successful as the content it provides. If you just put up any blog post or re-share content others create without any unique twist or value, you won’t go anywhere. Successful blogs work because they know what content their audience needs or wants and delivers.

 

Be Interactive and Visual

While blogs are mostly written content, that does not mean you should avoid using pictures or infographics. Graphics add more creativity and interest to your post that keep your audience interested and engaged. Increasing audience engagement ensures your audience feels your offers are valuable.

 

Monetize Right Away

You don’t need to wait to start making money or develop ways to monetize your blog. In fact, monetization ideas should be created or at least thought of before you even purchase your domain or create your first blog. This way, you know the effort and time you put into your blog is a viable and profitable option. Waiting for your target audience to do the work for you won’t create the profits you need to be successful. Instead, you need to give the products to them.

4 Tips For Success In Home Business

Use Social Media and Email Marketing

The best way to promote your blog is through social media and email marketing. However, you can’t expect anyone to find you without a proper marketing strategy unless you create perfect SEO-rich content. Even then, relying on only SEO or keywords can be a slow and tedious process.

With these tips, you can grow the blogging business of your dreams. As long as you invest in the right content your target audience wants to read or consume, and use the right platforms for marketing your blog, you will be successful. Remember, blogging is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It takes dedication, passion, and consistency to deliver content your target audience wants to enjoy continually to grow your business.

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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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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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Four Simple Ways to Create Brand Awareness Through Communities

The first step to every marketing funnel includes creating brand awareness. Brand awareness is essential to growing a profitable and sustainable business. When potential customers know who you are, it is easier to form deep connections that prevent them from running to your competitor.

 

In other words, brand awareness influences the trust and credibility needed to make purchases, create loyal customers, and maintain a competitive edge. Building a community is an affordable and powerful way to get the brand recognition you need to be successful.

 

The following are four ways to create more brand awareness with your online or business community:

 

Ask Your Members to Share

 

This is the simplest way to get more brand awareness. For every piece of content you share with your audience, ask them to share the parts for public consumption. When you ask them to share and even incentivize them by developing a referral program, you’ll start building your community fast.

 

Create Surveys or Feedback Forms

 

While some members will offer their thoughts without your asking, the truth is, even inside a group, people are more likely to give you this information if you ask for it via a survey or feedback form, depending on what you want to know. So don’t be shy about creating surveys either.

 

If you’re trying to develop a new product, for example, use your community to help. Give them three choices on the title or ask them for feedback on the branding. This accomplishes two things. One, you will make a better solution with your audience’s help, and two, you are promoting it and developing excitement in your audience.

 

Develop Engaging and Shareable Content

 

Use the information you glean from your audience inside the community to develop more engaging and sharable content. Turn compliments into memes, take data and create an infographic, and try to produce content that your members want to consume and, more importantly, want to share.

 

Take Advantage of Platform Features

 

Depending on what platform you use, it will have a variety of features. Facebook, for example, enables you to create a variety of types of groups with assorted options to use bots, have forms, take payments, and so much more. While a platform like Mighty Networks offers a whole host of options too. Use the features within the platform. They are there for a reason.

 

It is easy to see that communities can create brand awareness that leads down a more successful path. It’s simple: if your customers don’t know you exist or have value to provide, you won’t be able to build a sustainable and profitable business. In addition, brand or online communities using social media make it easier to find and reach your target audience.

Six Tips to Improving your Social Media Story Content

 

 

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Five Important Ways Communities Increase Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty is what makes the effort of building and moderating an online or brand community so important. Member-to-member interaction, social proof, and the quality content provided within the groups inspire them to stay around and seek more.

 

These relationships also fuel them to share your communities or become brand advocates. Thus, saving you even more money while also increasing your potential to reach more people.

 

In other words, brand loyalty is essential to not only solidify current success but future success too. To grow a profitable and sustainable business, building a branded community is essential.

 

The following are five important ways communities increase brand loyalty:

 

Business-To-Member Communication

 

Communicating with your customers directly is an amazing invention of modern times. In the old days, you had to advertise on TV, radio, or various print means and wait to see what happened. So, it could be hard to tell if it worked for the reasons you think it did.

 

Now you can simply tell your members directly about your offers without the go-between. You can see when they view a message or respond to it and even see them talking to their friends in the group. But most of all, getting to send them a message right now that they’re going to get directly from you is an amazing thing and will keep you at the top of their mind.

 

Valuable and Engaging Content

 

It’s very important to understand that publishing anything just to put it in your community is not the goal. You want the content you publish and share with them to be valuable and engaging. You want them to look forward to seeing the latest content you share every day.

 

You want them to wait for it, excited for it to appear. However, that will only happen if you take the time to create desirable content based on what you know about them and how it relates to their need to use your solutions and products.

 

Member-To-Member Communication

 

This is one of the most important parts of building a community that will change everything for your business. Once your members start talking to each other about their lives, and your products and services, and how they help or don’t help, you’re going to end up getting the most invaluable information ever that will help you improve your products and make them think you’re a mind reader.

 

Special Offers or Member Discounts

 

If you promote outside your membership group or community, a terrific way to make the members feel special is to offer them some form of reward or a loyalty program. So many big businesses don’t understand how much it harms their relationship with their customer when they offer the new deals only to their new customers. Offer your members things you don’t offer anyone else because they are important.

 

Superior Customer Experience and Service

 

When you engage and spend time with your community every day, you provide customer care directly. As a result, they will perceive their customer service as better because they feel heard.

The more you nurture your customers and seek a relationship with them, the more likely they will become loyal customers or followers of your brand. Loyal customers advocate for your business and ensure the success of your brand now and in the future. Work always to keep your community engaged, be involved in the process, ask for feedback and reward them for improving your brand loyalty.

 

Six Ways to Use Communities to Promote Your Products

 

 

 

 

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Building a Community is The Competitive Advantage Your Business Needs

Research and statistics show that you must have a competitive edge to make it in business. No businesses succeed without fierce competition, especially with the advancements in technology and online communication.

 

The truth is, many of these exciting advancements destroyed common barriers to entry that most businesses had in the past – meaning you can start a business with next to nothing. Unfortunately, due to that, the competition only gets worse as more tools and resources are created.

 

Building a community around your brand will provide you with a competitive advantage because customers are increasingly dissatisfied with the kind of customer care they are receiving. A branded community can help you provide better customer care because as you build a community, you’re also building relationships that advance trust, which increases your ability to influence sales.

 

The following are a few ways community building helps you stay ahead of your competition:

 

  • Through Strong Member Connections and Relationships – People like feeling as if they belong to a community. Unfortunately, building community in our private lives is harder than ever. Everyone is busy, but creating these customer-centric communities can make your customers feel more connected not just with you but with the other customers as they converse and comingle.

 

  • By Being a Source of Endless Lead Generation – Every single person you get into your group is a source of more members. Because of this, once you start building a community, your reach will increase as your leads grow.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Landing Pages

  • Word-of-Mouth Marketing – Even if your customers only talk about your products and services inside the group, new members will still see the discussions, which will reduce their fear and help them make a purchasing choice for the products they see discussed within the group community. However, once a member becomes your loyal customer, they will start asking their friends to join them in the community because it feels good to share what’s good in your life.

 

  • Through Community Feedback and Engagement – One of the most important aspects to you, and from your viewpoint as a business owner, is the ability to read your customers’ minds. Of course, you really can’t do that, but by watching the discussions take off that you prompt and experiencing the feedback generated, the information you glean will become invaluable. Eventually, your customers will start claiming you can read their minds, and then you’ll stand far out from your competition.

 

  • By Being Unique, Fun, and Helpful – Face it, most businesses are not unique, fun, or helpful. But you have this amazing opportunity to stand out and be that for your customers in a way that benefits you both.

 

Overall, community building shows your target audience that you want to support them and their needs. Your community shows, and the information you provide shows them that you are willing to listen to them and serve them instead of your own needs. The more you focus on your target audience, the more you can easily stay ahead of your competition. Which is why building a community around your brand is the competitive advantage your business needs to be successful.

 

 

 

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Three Ways Online Communities Improve your Products and Services

One major benefit of online communities to the owner and business is that all the members’ information is available when engaging with others in the group or the content you publish. This information will help you re-work and improve your products and services to keep them interested and buying more.

 

When you think about this fact, it means that communities are just as important to you as they are to the members who join. It’s simple, the more you know what your audience wants, the better you can deliver a high-quality and valuable product or service to them in the way they want it to be delivered.

 

Online communities improve your products and services in the following three ways:

 

Through Specific Feedback and Reviews

Day 3 Increasing Traffic, Subscribers & Customers To Boost Your Bottom Line

Generating various ideas and insights by asking for and receiving feedback and reviews from your community is very effective. If you make it easy for them to leave their thoughts and even reward them for doing so, you can encourage them to provide deep insight that can affect future products and services substantially.

 

You can take an especially well-written and delightful review and turn it into a blog post, place it on your website sales page, or even turn it into a case study to help encourage more people to buy that product or service.

 

Through Commonly Asked Questions and Frustrations

 

Being a part of your community gives your audience a chance to ask questions and even express frustrations. You can do this by using simple Google Forms if you want to or using your own website and another form creator. Just provide the link to the group members and tell them how to submit their questions or frustrations to you.

 

When you do get the questions in, or the frustrations are expressed, use that information to help each person directly but also use it to design a current blog post with information that solves these problems or directs them as to where they can find a solution if it’s not through your products or services.

 

Through Education and Member-To-Member Interaction

 

Each time you provide content that educates your members, always participate in discussing the information you provided. Encourage the member-to-member interaction and discussion by calling out particular experts or members who have already been educated in that regard. And remember, all of the discussions and user-generated content on your membership site, community boards, or groups are yours to use as you will as long as you set up permissions when they joined.

 

As you grow your community, please take advantage of these options to see how your members feel about your current products or what they are searching for to help solve their problems. These options provide you with more information that can be used to generate even more content. It also gets them engaged and makes them feel like they are valuable and a part of something important.