While being very successful reaching the top of your heap, it can be a very deceptive trap to “relax and enjoy” that status. No matter where you are in your market position, it is never guaranteed.

Bloomberg Businessweek points out, “Popularity is not a state of grace. In business, it is treasure hard-won on the battlefields of product development and marketing, then leveraged or squandered or stolen back,” in a recent article. Look at what peanut butter has to do with it and how the Apple iPhone envies Jif.

The marketplace can be, and usually is, very fickle. What is today’s “must have” item can be the one on the trash heap tomorrow. You may have a delightfully unique product that the marketplace simply loves. About the time you are enjoying your top-of-the-market position, be sure a competitor has a better version with more features about ready to release to challenge your position.

Certainly, you may have worked very hard and spent late nights and weekends bringing your venture from an idea on the drawing board to the top of the success pinnacle. It’s only natural to want to take a little rest; and everyone in that position should do so. However, after that well-deserved rest and a few deep breaths, begin planning your next version, venture, or direction, before your competitors take those opportunities from you. In other words, get back to your hard work.

“But,” you may say, “I’ve worked hard for a long time and I don’t want to work hard anymore.” That is reasonable, but if that is your desired direction, sell your company or hire an excellent manager and pay him or her well to take over the hard work.

By the way, when you go to the Businessweek article, check out all the examples at the bottom.  Here are some examples: Wal-mart and bananas, Nike Air Force 1, Honey Nut Cheerios, White Cars, Vodka,

To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Turning Small Businesses Into Large Ones!

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2010, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.

Ramping up your business is easy to do, right?  Before settling on that conclusion, check this. A careful understanding of your market and your customers is essential.

Now that you have launched your new product or your new company, the sales are starting to roll in. Your beta testers have been enthusiastic and you have made some changes in your original design to comply with their suggestions.

You have thought about adding more personnel to produce your product, handle sales, and gain access to new markets. You have looked into expanding your offices and perhaps your manufacturing area.

Things seem to be rolling with a truly bright future.

However, there are some truly dangerous pitfalls at this critical period in your business life that may derail the best ideas and plans.

The Harvard Business Review has an excellent article, 3 Mistakes Made in Scaling up New Ventures. In it the HBR points out some of the very important subtleties new business owners or managers may overlook. Failing to carefully understand these points risks the very real possibility of the early failure of a truly promising start.

Here are the essential points made in the article:

1. Realize that customers are not the same as users

Key to low cost airline Ryan Air’s growth was the recognition that airports, not passengers, were the real customer. Ryan Air was the first company to realize that municipal airports represented a very large market that could be systematically tapped. So instead of focusing only on passengers, Ryan Air went to smaller, less known airports typically owned by a municipality that was hungry for business. Bringing lots of users to the airports stimulated side benefits: more spending in cafes, more taxis and buses, more store revenues and more business for the locality. These side benefits were so great to these municipally owned airport “customers” that in many cases, Ryan Air was able to persuade small airports to pay Ryan Air to land!

2. Recognize that first users are not the same as scaling users

In the computer games market, the first users are generally not the scaling users, namely the regular players that pay good money for the game. Critical for the success of the game is to get the early users to play the game for free and suggest improvements, but to blog it widely as being good. Quake, launched by John Carmack was an ideal example of how acceptance by this “first user” transformed the later market. id software launched an early version of Quake in February 1996, directed specifically at pioneer users who were encouraged to trial the product for free. The early users were highly proficient at games and provided many ideas for the game’s evolution (”mods”), posting changes to the game on line, which encouraged others and started an upward spiral of sales, modifications and debugs. id software finally launched a pioneer user-redesigned Quake, with pioneer user “rave reviews” to an eager mass market of final customers users who paid for the product. Suggestions and even complaints by early users can be used to powerfully reshape the initial offering. In fact in our work with startups we encourage venture managers not to count early sales as revenues at all, but count them as market research inputs.

3. Anticipate that first products are not the same as scaling products

Early versions of products often feature different attributes than the mass markets users will want. Expect that your prototype product will need to evolve into a much simpler, but more robust, offering for the long-term mass market. It’s a typical “beta tester” approach, frequently used in software development, but it applies to all types of companies and new ventures.

Learn more about these excellent points in the rest of the HBR article here.

To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Turning Small Businesses Into Large Ones!

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2010, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.

Anyone who has or will publish anything digital on the Internet and even off has or will have material stolen.  It is not whether but merely when that theft will occur.

Mr. Royce Tivel has written an excellent article on how to combat plagiarism both directly, by contacting the thief, and indirectly, by advising domain name registrars and website hosting services of the illegal use of your material.

Paul

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Plagiarism Detection: How to Win Against Thieves Who Steal Your Articles
Copyright (c) 2010 Royce Tivel
Select Digitals
http://selectdigitals.com

Plagiarists love your original content published at EzineArticles
and other honest publishers because it ranks high in Google’s
search results. The trouble is that plagiarists do not include a
link back to your site or author credit–because they do not
publish the resource box or include a link back to the article
source. Here are 5 steps you can take to protect your content,
detect plagiarism, and get unauthorized copies of your content
removed from the World Wide Web:

1) Include copyright and author information when creating your
articles.
2) Set up an early detection system for finding plagiarists.
3) Identify and contact the offenders.
4) Identify and contact their registrars or hosts.
5) Submit a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint.

1. INCLUDE COPYRIGHT AND AUTHOR INFORMATION WITH YOUR ARTICLES

The first step in the war on plagiarism is to provide copyright
information in the article body as well as author information in
the resource box. Within the article body, you can include a
copyright notice and the article title with it’s date of
publication. Here is an example of what I use at the end of my
articles:

Copyright © 2010 [Your Name Goes Here] [Your Site Name Goes Here]
[Site URL Goes Here].
[Article Title Goes Here], [Date Published Goes Here]

If you can do so, use an active link for either the site name or
site URL. Depending on the publisher’s article-submission
requirements, you may not be able to use an active link or domain
name in the article body. Even if these are permitted, all active
links and URLs in the article could be stripped by the
plagiarist, although a non-hyper linked reference to your site
might still remain–especially if the plagiarist is using
software to automate the theft.

You can use the resource box to positively identify yourself as
the author and can include an active link to your web site or
blog. Here is an example:

“About the Author: [Your Name Goes Here] has written extensively
about [What You Write About], and more. Visit his/her web site at
[Your Site Name Goes Here], [Site URL Goes Here], for additional
content on these subjects, including many images related to
his/her articles published at [Publisher's Name Goes Here].”

I would *strongly* recommend using an active link to your site
in the resource box. An honest publisher will include the
resource box, will not tamper with the article body, and will
provide a link to the article source. If a plagiarist strips out
the resource box or neglects to include a link to the article
source, the chances are still good that the copyright and author
information will be left in the article body.

2. DETECT THE PLAGIARISM EARLY

Plagiarism detection begins by setting up an early warning system
for plagiarists. I estimate that 90% of all article theft is done
when the article is first published. The worst offenders appear
to be plagiarists with blogs. Today, content can be easily
gathered with content-aggregator software through RSS (Really
Simple Syndication) feeds, manipulated, and placed on a blog.
“White hat” content aggregation that includes author credit and
article source information is great for authors–but “black
hat” manipulation of the aggregated content, which removes the
author and source information is just plain article theft.

Many WordPress sites are using the Multi User (MU) version and
offer “members” a free WordPress blog as a sub-domain. An
offshoot of WordPress is BuddyPress–and I have found plagiarized
content at these sites, too. I have found that there is little or
no supervision or monitoring of the “members.” I have also
found that the administrators of the MU sites will terminate a
blog when they receive a report of plagiarism. In the case of a
subdomain on an MU site that has plagiarized your material, the
registrant in a lookup will be the “owner” of the domain who is
responsible for the sub-domains. Your plagiarism detection system
must first identify the plagiarist before you can report them to
the administrators.

Because of the blog problem, a Google Blog Search on the title of
the article, a keyword, a phrase, or a “snippet” from the
article–using quote marks around the search term(s)–is probably
your best *no cost* tool for plagiarism detection. Jonathan
Bailey at plagiarismtoday.com has this advice for searches:

“I would focus not on titles but statistically improbable
phrases within the work, 8-10 words long. Those produce good
matches and are easy to find in a work.”

Once the search is completed, and if there are results matching
your quoted search query, you will be able to look through the
results for plagiarized content. I would certainly want to check
out a search result that came neither from my web site nor from
my article publisher.

Google’s search results include a title (blue), a snippet (black
text), and a URL (green). The URL will include the domain name of
an offending site. Clicking on either the title or URL will take
the browser to the actual blog or web page. The domain name will
also appear as part of the URL in the browsers address bar.

Even if the snippet of a search result contains plagiarized text
from your article, the title or URL may take you to pages with no
trace of your article. This can happen when your plagiarized
article is published by the plagiarist, gets listed in Google,
and then the plagiarist substitutes his own page content for your
article: the plagiarized content remains in the snippet but the
links go to the plagiarist’s own content, thus hijacking your
traffic! The remaining “footprint” left by the snippet can be
enough to shut down a site or blog.

A great feature of the Google Blog Search comes at the bottom of
the results page. At the end of the results are options for
setting up email alerts–the early warning system–so you can be
notified when sites use the search term in the future.

You are most likely to see plagiarized results show up within the
first few days of publication; so, I recommend that you set up
your alert to receive an email once each day. You can end the
alerts at any time. The alerts can be limited to blogs or contain
comprehensive results for the Web as well: for my alerts, I elect
the “comprehensive” option for email alerts.

3. IDENTIFY AND CONTACT THE PLAGIARIST

The best way to identify a plagiarist is to do a “whois” or
similar “lookup” on the domain name. Using a “whois” lookup
for the domain name will display contact information for the
domain-name registrant. In my experience, plagiarists do not
usually leave contact information on their pages, but the domain
registrant is required to include it when the domain is
registered–but plagiarists do not always include valid contact
information! If you do not find valid contact information for the
registrant, you can contact the registrar about this.

Depending on the lookup service used (internic, domaintools,
domainwhitepages, etc.), the contact’s email address might be an
image and not text. In that case, you will have to type out the
email address. Here is the registrant’s information from a
lookup of my web site:

Address lookup
- canonical name: selectdigitals.com.
- addresses 71.18.121.106

Domain Whois record
- Queried whois.internic.net with “dom selectdigitals.com”…
- Domain Name: SELECTDIGITALS.COM
- Registrar: ENOM, INC.
- Whois Server: whois.enom.com
- Referral URL: http://www.enom.com
- Name Server: NS5.IXWEBHOSTING.COM
- Name Server: NS6.IXWEBHOSTING.COM
- Status: ok
- Updated Date: 19-feb-2009
- Creation Date: 08-feb-2004
- Expiration Date: 08-feb-2011
- Last update of whois database: Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:45:21 UTC
- Registration Service Provided By: NameCheap.com
Contact: support@NameCheap.com

Registrant Contacts
- Queried whois.enom.com with “selectdigitals.com”…

- Registrant Contact:
Select Digitals
Royce Tivel
261 SE Craig RD #3
Shelton, WA 98584

- Administrative Contact:
Select Digitals
Royce Tivel (rtivel@selectdigitals.com)
+1.3604261221
261 SE Craig RD #3
Shelton, WA 98584

- Technical Contact:
Select Digitals
Royce Tivel (rtivel@selectdigitals.com)
+1.3604261221
261 SE Craig RD #3
Shelton, WA 98584

- Status: Active

- Name Servers:
ns5.ixwebhosting.com
ns6.ixwebhosting.com

- Creation date: 08 Feb 2004 16:50:50

- Expiration date: 08 Feb 2011 16:50:50

In the case of selectdigitals.com, all of the information
necessary to contact the registrant is available. In my
experience, registrants of MU sites have responded promptly to my
complaint and have removed the offending “member”; so it is
worthwhile to make the attempt and allow two or three business
days for a response. This gives the registrant a chance to comply
with the original publisher’s terms of service or to remove the
content completely.

Sometimes, the registrar or registration service will provide a
“firewall” for a registrant. At NameCheap.com, this is called
“WhoisGuard.” The registrar’s contact information is given in
the lookup and emails to the registrant are forwarded without
giving away the registrant’s “real” contact information.

Your goal in contacting the registrant is to get the article
published accurately, completely (including resource box), and
identified with the complete article source. You can help the
honest publisher by supplying the article title, a link to the
article source, and a copy of the resource box. You might not
always end up getting everything you ask for. At the very least,
though, you should be identified as the author and there should
be an active link back to your site.

I have found that contacting a plagiarist by email is the least
effective method of removing plagiarized content. Still, this
attempt should be made to give the honest publisher a chance to
make necessary changes. Also, the fact that you have made the
attempt will give more weight to your complaints sent to the
registrar, host, or to Google. Give the suspected plagiarist two
or three business days to respond.

Translating Your Documents into a Foreign Language

If you are trying to contact a registrant, registrar, or host in
a foreign country (non-English speaking, in my case), you can
take advantage of the Google Translate service. I first create
the letter in English and then use the translator to convert it
into the foreign language. It is very important to test any links
you wish to include in the translated version: you might have to
modify a translated link so it works. My practice is to email the
letter in English (my native language) together with a translated
version. Note: I suggest “plugging” the translated copy back
into the translator as a check: translating back to the original
language might reveal problems with the translation that will
have to be fixed.

4. IDENTIFY THE REGISTRAR OR HOST

A lookup of the plagiarist’s domain name will include a list of
the domain-name servers (DNS). From the DNS information listed in
the lookup above, the web host is clearly identified as
“IXWEBHOSTING.COM“:

Name Server: NS5.IXWEBHOSTING.COM
Name Server: NS6.IXWEBHOSTING.COM

A lookup on a DNS will yield additional information about the
host used by the plagiarist–and the host’s contact information.
Here is some of the information available from a lookup of
“ixwebhosting.com”:

Host Contact Information
- canonical name ixwebhosting.com.
- addresses 98.130.254.120

- Administrative Contact:
Said, Fathi fathi@ecommerce.com
1774 Dividend Dr
Columbus, OH 43228
US
6147079374

Similarly, a lookup for the registrar listed in the original
“whois” will result in additional information about the
registrar. A reputable registrar or host will provide information
about reporting copyright infringements.

Registrars often use resellers for the business of domain
registration. The resellers also have stringent policies against
abuse. For my domain, the reseller is listed in the original
lookup as follows:

Registration Service Provided By: NameCheap.com.

Contacting the registrar or host is probably the most effective
way to take a plagiarist’s site or blog off the air. Here is
what I typically do. I create a Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA) complaint, just as I would for a complaint written for
Google, except I do not use a title directed to Google. Both
hosts and registrars take these complaints very seriously and, in
my experience, take fast action to block the offending sites from
web access. Give the registrar or host two or three days to
respond before going any further. I use this format for my
complaints:

1) To: [registrant, registrar, or host name]

2) Date: [date and time]

3) Identify the copyrighted work,

4) Identify the offending web page, including the search query
used to find it (”tower trainer 40″),

5) Provide your contact information,

6) Provide contact information (if any) for the plagiarist (the
email address you used for the registrant),

7) Include specific language as to the accuracy of your
complaint, and

Optional: If I have additional information, I put it here.

When you identify a plagiarist from another country, it might
seem like an impossible task to get the content removed, but you
might be surprised. Recently, I was able to get a web site
blocked by a Korean registrar, co.cc. After identifying the
registrar, I looked at their terms of service and here is what I
found:

“You agree that you will not upload, distribute or reproduce on
the Web Site:

a. any copyrighted material, trademarks, or other proprietary
information without obtaining the prior written consent of the
owner of such proprietary rights….”

After I submitted my complaint to the domain service registrar,
co.cc, I got a response the next day:

“Dear Sir, In reponse to your request, we have suspended …,
the domain won’t work with co.cc domain for now.

However, I would like to inform you that we are just a domain
service registrar. For that reason, we do not have any authority
over deleting original web site. It seems keep happening no
matter how many times we block up this kinds of sites, abuser do
not stop abuse co.cc domain.

Please let me know if you face this kind of issues in the any
future, I will try to take prompt action.

Thank you.”

The response reflects, I think, the frustration registrars and
hosts feel in dealing with the huge problem of plagiarism. In
this case, even though the site did not get deleted, it is no
longer visible on the Web. If the site still remains in Google’s
search results, a Google DMCA should take care of the problem.
Jonathan Bailey has this to say about contacting registrars:

“…even though it can work, I tell people to avoid sending
notices to registrars as almost none will actually revoke a
domain over a copyright issue. They will only do it if there is
an issue with the domain itself. Your interaction with co.cc was
the exception, not the rule (for better or worse).”

5. SUBMIT A GOOGLE DMCA COMPLAINT

If nothing else seems to work, you can FAX a DMCA complaint
directly to Google. Google has both legal support and AdSense
support. Each support group has it’s own FAX number for DMCA
complaints (legal: (650) 963-3255; AdSense: (650) 618-8507). For
action against a Google blogger, you can file a DMCA complaint
online.

If AdSense is on the site along with the plagiarized content, a
DMCA complaint to Google AdSense support just might hit the
offender in the pocket book. Revenue from AdSense is often the
primary reason plagiarists use your articles–your valued content
draws increased traffic to the AdSense site.

A useful add-on for FireFox users is SeoQuake. When this add-on
is activated, hovering over an AdSense ad will bring up the
“AdsSpy” with a link to information about the plagiarist’s
AdSense ID. The plagiarist’s ID can be included with the DMCA
complaint.

Plagiarism, Plagerism, Plagirism, Plaigarism

You don’t have to know how to spell “plagiarism” to join the
fight against plagiarists. You can still detect plagiarism and
join the war to remove it by

* Putting your copyright information in the article body,

* Begin plagiarism detection right away,

* Identify the plagarism and the plagarist,

* Try to contact the plagiarist and resolve the issues,

* Contact the registrar or host about the plaigarism,

* File a DMCA complaint against the plagiarist, and

* Contribute your ideas and experiences with respect to
detecting and fighting plagiarism by joining a forum on the topic
or, better yet, write your own article.

After four years of college and after writing this article–I can
still misspell plagiarism with the best of ‘em. My favorite way
to misspell it is, “plagerism.”

Copyright © 2010 Royce Tivel Select Digitals
http://www.selectdigitals.com/
Plagiarism Detection: How to Win Against Thieves Who Steal Your
Articles, May 26, 2010
———————————————————————
Royce Tivel has written extensively about digital photography,
Adobe, radio-controlled (RC) airplanes, WordPress, travel,
and more. Visit his web site at Select Digitals
http://www.selectdigitals.com/ for additional content
on these subjects, including many images and resource
links related to this article.

— END ARTICLE —

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Turning Small Businesses Into Large Ones!

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2010, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.

Massachusetts Senator-elect, Scott Brown and family

Photo from www.BrownForUSSenate.com

Yes, this is written with a dirty little secret as its motive.

It applies to all businesses. But it has nothing to do with the actual election!

… almost nothing …

This article has nothing to do with the historically staggering rebuke of President Obama’s policies, the agendas of the Pelosi House and Reid Senate, or the fact that Scott Brown, a Republican, has won Massachusetts Senator Teddy Kennedy’s Democratic seat yesterday. It as nothing to do with politics, either Democratic, Republican, or Independent. It has nothing to do with the fact that the most politically liberal state in the union has now sent a conservative senator to Washington.

OK, almost nothing.

This sea-change in national politics is historic; it will affect us all one way or another.

But none of these is my point!

The fact that, among many other headlines and articles, you chose this one to read should tell you something.

The headline is newsworthy AND enticing with information to be revealed–the dirty little secret.

When you connect your subject lines and headlines–emails, articles, ads–to something current that people are hearing and reading about, you have just struck marketing gold!

I know, you think I’ve been a little sneaky, don’t you?

Headlines, email subject lines, and ads that tie in with current events that your customers are reading and thinking about–that they have feelings about–will drive your readership and response rates through the roof!

Anything you send your customers that addresses those feelings and emotions is going to be a top-of-the-list, must read for them.

The next time you want to really boost your readership and response rate to something in your business, try to connect it in some way with what your prospects and customers are currently hearing and seeing in the headlines and on the TV and radio.

Do your research and make the connection of something in your business or product line with the current headlines your customers and prospects feel emotionally about. Remember to move quickly–timing is everything. The emotion can fade very quickly.
To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Turning Small Businesses Into Large Ones!

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2010, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.

The Shreveport Convention Center was the location for the ninth annual Ark-La-Tex Boat Sport and RV Show and Fishing Tournament this weekend. The event had a moderate attendance in spite of the very cold weather for this area. The weather certainly did not intimidate the vendors who filled the floor with boats, RVs, and other wheeled and water sport craft.

Two businesses at the show stood out in their marketing distinction. Each is a true “guerrilla marketer.”

1. One of the larger boat displays was staffed by ProGator Boats owner, Leroy Moore, and his nephew, Ted LeMay. Moore produces the double hull fiberglass boats in Benton, Louisiana. ProGator and Gator Bay are his two lines of for the fresh and saltwater fishing  and boating enthusiasts.

Here is a truly brilliant marketing move. Moore’s ProGator and Gator Bay hulls are so rugged he offers a 10 year stump guarantee. If one of his boats strikes a stump and sustains structural damage to the hull, Moore will fix it free of charge. How’s that for a guarantee!

Of course, with the ProGator and Gator Bay hull designs, Moore could have just as easily offered a 25-year guarantee, but he pointed out, “Nobody would believe me.” Yep, that is a hazard of producing too good a product!

2. Another exhibitor with a unique marketing twist was The Lakecaster of Jasper, Texas. The Lakecaster is celebrating twenty years as the #1 promotional magazine for lakes Sam Rayburn and Toledo Bend. Their attractive print magazine is loaded with fishing news, tournament results and commentary, and other very interesting articles.

Managing Editor, Patty Lenderman (phone 409-384-3441), pointed out their unique twist in serving their advertisers. Lenderman offers any advertiser in the print edition of the monthly magazine a free online ad on the Lakecaster’s website at no additional charge. If the advertiser has a website, the ad links the viewer directly to that website. Could your business use exposure to the lake communities and visitors of these two popular lakes?

That is certainly what any organization with both a print edition with advertising and a website should be offering, but most haven’t figured it out yet. Email Patty Lenderman at editor@lakecaster.net.

If you have a small business catering to the outdoors recreation crowd, you may want to consider a booth at next year’s event. Here is another annual event that may be a fit for your business exhibit this year or next.

Check out other articles.

To your business success!

© 2010 by Paul Elliott. All rights reserved worldwide.

Many businesses are begun with a few ideas scribbled on a paper napkin. While this is all well and good, the truly successful business must have much more important planning and research to operate well. Furthermore, the plan should be in written form. Writing the plans down forces the owner to put the plan ideas into concrete, understandable form. That will be important as a definable benchmark to which to refer later.

Every business should have a business plan, a topic for another discussion. Within that should a carefully considered and researched marketing plan. Most business plan forms have the marketing plan forms or instructions included, though, surprisingly, some do not do a very effective job of this.

There are several reasons why a written plan is important. It is important to have the ideas written as a foundation to which to refer later. It will continue to grow as your business grows. If you exercise the discipline to rewrite it when you believe a slightly different direction is in order, or that you would like to pursue another product line or territory, you will proceed in a much more orderly and considered manner.

To Organize Your Thinking
Every business has many things going on at the outset and changes are inevitable. A clearly written marketing plan will serve as a reference for the question, “What were we thinking about when we started this business?”

A written marketing plan helps keep the founders on a single, well-defined path. It also helps avoid getting sidetracked onto unprofitable or unplanned, less important activities.

To Demonstrate Your Commitment to Your Business
A written marketing plan shows others that you are truly committed to your business and that you have carefully thought out the important elements of your marketplace.

Potential investors, suppliers, and employees will all feel more comfortable dealing with a business that has a clear analysis and understanding of the market, the customers, the competition, and direction to be pursued by the business in solving the problems successfully.

To Measure Your Progress
When you have a distinct market direction for your business, you can set up goals and a timeline against which to measure the progress of your business. Regularly checking your business marketing plan, you can make any adjustments necessary in the plan or in your projections to keep your business growing in a realistic and profitable manner.

This helps confirm that your idea was a good one. It also helps you understand where you may have missed something that needs to be revised in some manner.

To Guide Your Employees
Too often businesses make marketing decisions and plans without ever consulting or informing the employees. This is an avoidable mistake. An important use of the marketing plan is to be sure all employees know what the business owner is doing and hopes to accomplish. Furthermore, they will better understand how they fit in and how they can make the project more successful. Never forget that your employees have a “frontline” perspective that may be very important to consult before making additional plans.

The well-written business marketing plan is as essential as the blueprint is for a building. Certainly there will be adjustments and periodic corrections, but it provides the overall direction and path to success in the marketplace that no business should ever try to proceed without.

To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Turning Small Businesses Into Large Ones!

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2009, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.

Yes, as we discussed in the last issue, the marketplace has undergone a rather radical change in the past thirty years. With the numerous options available to today’s consumer, he or she behaves differently than in years – and centuries – past. With the rapid changes in the marketplace a person in business can become wealthy or poor much more quickly than in generations past.

Using outdated business approaches can quickly sap a business’s resources with very little or even a negative return. Does your business use “push” marketing? If so, quickly changing may … I say “may” … save your investment! A failure to do so will most assuredly doom your business.

“Push” marketing means you are presenting your product or services to your potential customer, showing the features, handling objections, and asking for the sale. This old approach in essence was pushing your product or service on your customer. This leaves a lot of the burden of the customer’s decision up to him or her including how your product or service will solve the customer’s problems. Push marketing is a business-focused manner of doing business. Today’s customer no longer has to put up with such a “pressured” exchange, one pushed upon him or her by the business owner.

“Pull” marketing, on the other hand, is somewhat the reverse approach. It is a customer-focused manner of doing business. The idea is that you pull the customer to your business and the decision to purchase by standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him or her to solve the problem. You educate the customer in the process. In other words, your customer is making the decision, not only entirely voluntarily, but eagerly – with your help, of course. It is never a confrontation, nor does the customer wonder whether he or she got a good deal.

You no longer present your product and depend on the customer being able to see how the product solves his or her problem. You begin the process by exploring for the problem or problems for which the customer needs solutions. Then you present the various solutions available and the comparative advantages and disadvantages of each from the customer’s perspective. In other words, you are engaging the customer sufficiently to join him or her in the solution as a helper rather than an adversary. Of course this will require several adaptations on the part of the business.

First, your attitude toward your customers must change from him or her representing a single “sale” to being a recurring customer. You must spend more time winning that customer’s trust. This is an investment which should be a part of your business’s strategic backbone, not something to be avoided or shortened as much as possible. This is all part of developing the affinity bond with your customers.

Think about it. Each of us prefers to do business with someone we know, like, and trust. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Trust is the most effective emotion for your customers to have regarding you and your business. However, trust is not easily obtained in business; yet it is clearly the most valuable asset your business can posses. The sequence is as follows: know, like, and trust. First a customer must get to know you. Then, he or she will come to like you, and finally, come to trust you.

Think of yourself. What things do you like in a business? What things do you not like? What irritates you in a business? Use these to begin restructuring your thinking about your own business. It is your responsibility to improve your customers’ experiences with your business. If you don’t those customers will not have any motivation to get to know you further, much less learn to like or trust you. Soon they may be in your competitor’s business instead of yours.

We will discuss building the affinity bond and the proper care and feeding of your customers in later posts.

The marketplace has undergone a rather radical change in the past thirty years. Today’s consumer has many more options than have previously existed. This has in turn changed the way the consumer behaves. I hasten to add that that we human beings have not fundamentally changed but our options have. Therefore, we have changed our behavior to do things the way we prefer rather than having to do things the way the businesses and sales people prefer we do as has been the case in generations past.

The first change that gave us consumers more options was the availability of easier travel. No longer did we have to walk or ride an animal to the store. We could drive. That meant we could select from a larger number of stores. Flying gave us even more options. With better, cheaper transportation, we no longer had to order from catalogues.

Once travel was more available stores could stock more merchandise since the market area now included more people. First there were department stores and now there are the mega stores sometimes called “category killers” such as Walmart, Target, Lowes, and Home Depot.

Along with the improvement in travel came great improvements in communications. First we could order from the catalogue by phone. Now we have the Internet that can be used for research as well as online ordering.

The cell phone now has many more features than simple voice communications. It allows us to do enhanced surfing and shopping via the Internet. In a very few years, cell phone advertising will become a predominant form of reaching the customer directly in a very targeted fashion for the business owner.

If you are a business owner or marketer, it should already be obvious that changes in consumer behavior require many alterations in product or service presentation to appeal to the consumers’ newly discovered options. Furthermore, your adaptation must be rapid. To fail to do so will put you in league with Montgomery Ward, Circuit City, and other dinosaurs that failed to adapt adequately. Sears is another example of a huge company that failed to adapt rapidly enough almost too long to survive. Whether it will ultimately survive remains to be seen.

Of course, the Internet has changed the scene more than any of us could have imagined twenty years ago. Various estimates are that 25% of online searches have “local intent.” Google tells us that that figure is often 50% depending on the material being searched for. Now add in the cell phone searches and that figure jumps to over 75% in some areas. Also there has been an increase of 68% in searches with local intent in 2008 alone among cell phone users.

Add to that the knowledge that the Bell Telephone System is desperately trying to get out of the printed Yellow Pages, and you recognize that we are seeing another massive change rapidly developing. Like it or not, cell phones with their ability to search the Internet will dominate the market place in the next few years.

What is the local business’s take away? The only businesses that will survive will be those who have a website to promote their products or services, and they will begin using the Internet and cellular services as some of their important advertising media.

We will discuss other marketing methods and tips in later posts.

During difficult economic times when business is down, the overwhelming temptation is to trim everything often by a set percentage across the board. This is a natural, yet misguided impulse. When a business owner or manager tells me, “We have no choice but to trim our marketing budget,” I ask what he or she considers “marketing.” Too frequently the reply is, “Advertising.” While advertising is a very important part of marketing, it is only a small portion of the marketing any business should be doing.

Simply on the surface I would suggest that if you need more business, you should be doing more advertising rather than less.  However, the proper answer is a little more involved than that.

Too often businesses have little idea what the actual amount or money or business a particular marketing effort, such as an advertising campaign, is generating. As small business people we should design into every marketing effort the ability to track precisely what the yield is for that effort. If we cannot do that, we should consider the money spent on it completely wasted. Such tracking is fairly easy and inexpensive but is essential to marketing analysis. How much revenue is generated? Did it make or lose money? Did it generate new customers? Did it contribute to the bond with the business’s customers? How do all the campaigns we have run compare with one another in these categories.

While businesses often succeed during good economic times without doing this, the ones that do apply these principles are much more likely to succeed — even grow — during poor economic times.

Closely allied with tracking one’s marketing is that of testing. However, only if a business has an effective tracking program can it implement an effective testing program. I suggest that a business test everything! I have seen the change of a single word in a headline produce a ten-fold improvement in sales! This seems phenomenal but illustrates what a good tracking and testing program can produce.

For example an ad run weekly in a local newspaper can tell you a great deal within four to six weeks. Test headlines, type size, text color, the offer, wording, ad size, border style, and ad position to start, but resist the temptation to test more than a single element at a time. Keep good records of your results. Of course, this demands that the other people in your business understand what you are doing so they can keep good records as well. Before long you will develop a much better sense of the more effective techniques. You can then refine them and make them even more effective by continuing the tracking and testing process.

So, should you be doing more advertising during poor economic times? I can’t tell you without the tracking and testing data, yet I can say you should be doing more marketing of which print advertising is merely a part. Tracking and testing data will allow you to modify your marketing mix based on scientific testing results. Though print advertising is essential to most businesses, do not limit your marketing thinking to print advertising.

To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Turning Small Businesses Into Large Ones!

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2009, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.

Your List is . . . Everything?

To your business success!

Let me help you grow your business today!

Paul Elliott

paul @ MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com

Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog

© 2009, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.