Sunday, May 23, 2010

Some Business Investments Can Have A Huge Payoff--Later.

"If I had eight hours to cut down a big tree,
I'd spend 6 hours sharpening the axe."

-- Abraham Lincoln


I absolutely love this quote and it speaks many things to me so succinctly. It speaks about preparation. If you are in sales and working on some big clients, spending three fourths of your time in preparing will generally have a huge payoff. Lawyers do that all the time. Their court time is so small in comparison with their preparation time and that is what makes all the difference in the outcome.

If you're growing your business, much of the time you spend will be not directly earning money or profit, but it can be extremely beneficial in influence which will ultimately lead to much greater income and profit. Some of that can be done through networking and this can be done in many ways, such as through local Chamber of Commerce, Business Networking Groups like LeTip, BNI and hundreds of others, at trade shows and events, through your website, blog, newsletter and other Internet publications. It is this last one that I want to deal with in this piece.

Not having a website is like not owning a phone. It is a must. It should be effective and it should not stand alone if you want it to work for you. A blog. A blog is just a website for the most up to date content and it allows you to show even more personality in your business and have some fun and gain influence. An email newsletter is a perfect way to stay in touch with all of your current clients and prospects. You can gain more influence to people who find you through others, so it is also a great networking tool. You can post it on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites as well to let more people become familiar with it. These tools, when working together are extremely powerful and beneficial.

The website needs to be current and constantly expanding. Shoot for a page a month to continually add to it. Everything is searchable by search engines, but if it isn't on your website, it cannot be searched. The blog need not be updated daily, but should have 5-10 posts per month to be more effective. Everything on a blog is also searchable. The newsletter list should be growing every week. You may only send it once a month, but your database should be constantly growing.

Through time, all of these products become a symphony of activity on the Internet, all of them working together like a well-oiled machine directed toward your business enterprises and your continuing success and growth. It is the consistency of these activities that pays off big. Doing these for a short time or one time is of extremely little value in comparison. Your web properties will continue to give you influence as they are expanded and continually improved. 

We recommend that you find a service that will help you take care of insuring these things are all done well and done on a consistent basis. This is one of our specialties. Our Trend Setter Package recently announced has completely revamped our Internet services at a fraction of the previous cost. Now every business can afford the Internet presence of a much larger business. And the services mentioned above is only a part. There is much more that will get you up in the search engines, along with social networking. Visit our new website at http://www.upwardtrend.org/ for more information.

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