Today's Entrepreneur - Promoting Your BusinessWritten by ReGina Crawford-Martin
Today’s Entrepreneur By ReGina Crawford-Martin President of G Styl Productions Incorporated, Cleveland, OH Independent Writer Promoting Your Business Your business is registered, business cards and letterhead are printed, you purchased office equipment, and rented a storefront to set up your office. Why don’t you have any clients/customers? Other than close family and friends and your landlord, who else knows you’re in business? Now it’s time to promote your business, and here are some ways to accomplish your goal of gaining clients/customers. One: Networking Groups and Events. There are tons of networking groups all over globe, and these groups have events where its members can meet face-to-face. Most of these groups are free to join, or have a minimal fee. The key to successful networking is to make sure you join a group that will allow you to meet potential clients/customers for products/services you offer. You don’t want to join a group whose primary interest is cooking, when your business is computer repair. Also, you don’t want to join a group whose primary objective is to leave business world behind, and strictly socialize. Before joining a networking group or attending an event, make sure you know mission and purpose of group and/or event. When attending a networking group that meets your needs, be sure to have plenty of business cards on-hand to distribute to other attendees. Nothing says unprofessional as an entrepreneur looking for business, who needs to write down his/her information on a cocktail napkin. Also, pre-script and practice a thirty (30) second commercial about yourself, your business, products/services you offer, and products/services that you need. Be sure to keep it to thirty seconds, especially if there are a lot of attendees. Don’t give to many personal details about yourself, and don’t recite your complete business plan to group. It is extremely important that you present have/need scenario at these events, so that attendees know that you plan to utilize their products/services as well as offer your own products/services.
| | How I wrote an e-book and started earning $6,000/mo.Written by Noelani Rodriguez
I have perfect job. I don't work at all, at least according to my friends. When I do work, I work at home. I get paid every day. And I get paid more than just about anyone I know. I write and sell e-books on Internet. I'm writing this little article to inspire people that are looking for same things I was looking for just a couple of years ago: financial independence, a work-at-home option, some prestige, and oh yeah, that little thing we need called a creative outlet. When I go to parties and tell people that I write and sell e-books they almost always say "what's that"? But that's OK, that's just part of being an "e-book publisher". My story started out in 1996, when I was a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Network Engineer, flying around world in a "monkey suit". I dreamed of a way that I could sell some study guides to some of guys I was training and other people on Internet, and so I wrote six documents in Microsoft Word that I began to sell at $24.95 each. I started a web site, and eventually I had a 140 links to it and a nice search engine ranking (a luxury today). I sold my study guides on my web site, even producing an income of up to $1,500 a month. I didn't know it but I was selling e-books. At that time I didn't have freewheeling "semi retired" lifestyle that I have now because e-books at that time took a little bit more work: I had to get a merchant credit card account. Trusting engineers would send me their credit card info in e-mail and I would process each order by hand every night. If people wrote checks, I processed those too. I handled customer service and "order fulfillment" for my orders: I would e-mail each engineer their study guide and sometimes make printed out copies of them, selling printouts and processing those orders too.
|
