Charlotte Howard Consulting Blog

A joint venture is when two or more businesses join together to work on a project for a set period of time. Doing online joint ventures can increase your chances of beating your competition, increasing your sales and profits, saving time and money, getting valuable referrals, and increasing your market share.

The following are the top 10 online joint venture ideas:

1. A simple joint venture would be exchanging text links or banners with other related web sites.

2. Share a web site with another business with the same target market. You both will be marketing and advertising the same web site which means double the traffic.

3. Exchange testimonials or endorsements for each others products or services.

4. Combine your products or services together with another businesses into one big package. You could split the profits.

5. Do you have and product or service that doesn’t sell good? Offer it as a free bonus for another businesses product or service. In exchange ask for a small portion of the profits.

6. Offer to insert a promotional ad for another business into your product package. Just ask them in return to do the same for your business.

7. Trade e-zine or auto-responder ads with similar businesses.

8. Team up with related businesses to create an promotional e-book to give away. Publish your web site ads in the e-book then just give it away for free.

9. Host a virtual trade show or seminar with another business. Include each other’s promotional material on the web site.

10. Create a freeware program with another business. Include a promotional ad for each of your businesses in the program. Submit it to freeware and freebie sites.

No matter what kind of enterprise you are running, may it be a big business or not, you can further expand it if you know the tricks of the trade especially when dealing with your customers. Here are some ideas that can help you become more successful in the field of your chosen industry.

In doing business, getting complacent is not an option. Even if the business is doing well, do not get too confident as it may not last for long especially today where the market is highly competitive.

1. Be more creative and do not settle for the same old tactics. Keep in mind that customers constantly look for something new. Check what’s out there, know what your competitors are offering and see if you could offer something much better. By doing so, not only would you keep your loyal customers happy, you would also have the chance to get new clients.

2. Listen to what your customer have to say. It is really advisable to have a designated sector for customer support which can be contacted for any concerns regarding the products and services being provided. This will help you in assessing the changes necessary to improve on the current status of your business.

3. Be sure to attend to the letters being sent out to your customers. Most business and customer-centered letters are written in a very cold manner with impersonal tone filled with jargons and terms that seem to be only used by lawyers. Use a more friendly and conversational approach in delivering the message to your customers. Keep the messages you send warm and interesting so that people receiving them would be more receptive to whatever it is you have to say.

Also, practice brevity. Be straight to the point to keep the pages short. Put yourself in the shoes of your target market and think as if you were the one reading the letter.

Bottom line, customers always come first. Be sure to focus on what your customers want and care about.

As more internet based businesses are started, the need to develop new marketing skills and knowledge is a very crucial part of business. More and more marketing strategies are being discovered and developed to cope with the changing face of business.

The demand for online marketing tips and strategies have drastically grown and a new form of business has been born. While there are companies that are very eager to help your site and business build a clientele for a fee. There are also many ways that can spread the word about your sites in a more cost free way. One of this is Opt-in email marketing, also known as permission marketing.

Opt-in marketing requires the permission of a willing customer to subscribe to your marketing materials, materials that take form in newsletters, catalogs and promotional mailings via e-mail. The more opt-in marketing mail is sent, the more chances there is to catch up on more sales. To do this, you must build a list of all those who wants to subscribe to your opt-in marketing list.

From your list, you will get your targeted customer, this is a good list since they already have shown interest in what you have to offer. These are the people who have liked what they have seen in your site and have decided they want to see more and maybe even purchase what ever product or service your company and site has to offer.

Many people think that building their lists would take hard work and a lot of time to build. This is not so, it takes a bit of patience and some strategies but in doing this list, you open your site and your business to a whole new world of target market. Take the effort to take your business to a new level, if traffic increase and good profits are what you want, an opt-in list will do wonders for your business venture.

There are many sources and articles in the internet available for everyone to read and follow in building a list. Different groups of people have different approaches in building an opt-in list, but no matter how diverse many methods are, there are always some crucial things to do to build your list.

Here are 4 tips:

1) Put up a good web form in your site that immediately follows the end of your content. While some may say this is too soon to subscribe for a website visitors application, try to remember that your homepage should provide a quick good impression. If somehow a website visitor finds something that he or she doesn’t like and turns them off, they may just forget about signing up.

A good web form for subscribing to an opt-in list is not hard to do. Just write a simple short statement about how they would like to see more and get updated about the site. Then there should be an area where they could put in their names and e-mail address. This web form will automatically save and send you the information they inputted. As more people sign in, your list will begin growing.

2) As mentioned in the first tip, make your homepage very, very impressive. You need to have well written articles and descriptions of your site. Depending on what your site is all about, you need to capture your website visitor’s fancy. Make your site useful and very easy to use. Do not expect everyone to be tech savvy. Invest in having good programming in your site, make your graphics beautiful but don’t over do it.

Don’t waste your time making the homepage too overly large megabyte wise. Not all people have dedicated T1 connections, the faster your site gets loaded, the better. Go for a look that borders between simplicity and sophisticated knowledge.

3) Provide good service and products. A return customer is more likely to bring in more business. Even a satisfied customer will recommend a business always. Word of mouth and recommendations alone can rake in more business than an expensive ad. As your clientele roster grows so shall your list. With more members on the list, the more people will get to know about you and what you have to offer them.

4) Keep a clean and private list. Never lose the trust your customers have in you. If you provide e-mails to others and they get spammed, many will probably unsubscribe to your list. Remember, a good reputation will drive in more traffic and subscribers as well as strengthen the loyalty of your customers.

Autoresponders are without a doubt one of the best marketing tools you can use to make your business more productive. It is a widely used tool that will automatically respond to requested information after someone input their contact details. Some Autoresponder programs even allow you to send a blank email to request information.

An autoresponder can be a powerful tool to help you to keep connected, educate and stay connected, to the people who opt-in to your lists. Autoresponders can even keep you connected with your target market while you are away or asleep. But you can also have people opt-out of your lists if you don’t use your autoresponder effectively.

So how do you use an autoresponder effectively? How do you keep people opted-in and coming to YOU?

….Find out how to use autoresponders to your business advantage on the next Works Team Monday Night Training Webinar!

Building Relationships Offline is just as important as business building online. However, most people can ‘t figure out how to use both in combination to reap the best results. When building your business it requires you to have a lot of things in place and one of the most important tools is a plan of action to be exposed to your local target market as well.

If you aren’t utilizing the internet in marketing your business you are missing out – BIG TIME! But what about offline marketing? Did you know that Ann Sieg starting utilizing attraction principles offline before she even realized what attraction marketing was?

With people’s busy lives and hectic schedules it can be difficult to build and keep business relationships. On this training, we’ll share offline strategies to help you build and keep relationships strong in your local area, nationally and even internationally.

One of the tools we’ll be discussing allows you to leverage the upcoming holiday season and keep connected with your customers, potential customers and business associates all year long!

Whether you are just starting your business or have been building your business for a while, you’ll gain insights in offline marketing strategies to help you create stronger business relationships and increase business.

Last week The Works Team training focused on Building Business Relationships online,but this coming week we’ll focus on offline strategies. And we’ll be sharing a tool that Ann Sieg refers to as one of her “secret weapons”! Read more and register on The Works Team blog.

About the Author: Charlotte Howard is a Business Consultant and Founder of Charlotte Howard Consulting LLC. Grab Charlotte’s FREE click by click training for Newbie Traditional Business Owners and Newbie Network Marketers.

Copyright © 2009 Charlotte Howard

Hi There,

I hope you are all having a wonderful day! I just wanted to quickly let you know about our business building topic for this week’s Monday night call @ 9pm EDT. Anyone is welcome to take a peak at our free training to help them with guidance on building their business.

A lot of entrepreneurs realize that the internet is a powerful way to market their businesses and are getting ready to start a website, or they already have a website, but aren’t sure the best way to attract visitors to that website.

If you ever have concerns about how to implement this training. Remember you can call your works team leader and we will have the Q&A chat feature available as well.

So here we go!

Topic: Website Strategies that Effectively Attract Your Target Market & Promote YOU

On this webinar we will discuss website options, what strategies are most effective in attracting your best target market, some tips and tricks to save you time, and how to create a central website presence that promotes YOU. Whether you are just starting to get a website going, or you’ve had your website up on the internet for a while, you’ll gain valuable insights to help increase your online traffic and take your business to the next level

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Here’s the link
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https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/585954170

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you haven’t already joined the new WorksTeam site, get the affiliate link from the WorksTeam member you are working with. Even if you are joining at the f.ree level you need to use your WorksTeam sponsor’s affiliate link. You no longer have access to the old site, so you need to join on the new site, even at the f.ree limited access membership level.

If you aren’t currently working with anyone, here’s my link:
http://www.BusinessBuildingSimplified.org

What Ann Sieg said about our training?
http://www.BusinessBuildingSimplified.org

Click on Testimonials tab to learn more

Our generation will definitely imprint an unforgettable mark in history. Computer technology has been innovated and improved. Surfing the internet is now one of the pastime activities of the youth and not only that, people of different walks of life do enjoy surfing the net.

But what are the activities that people enjoy in surfing the world wide web? Actually, there are lot of things to do in front of your internet connected computer. You can now have your reports done and submit to your heads in no time at all; blogging is also good where you can have your personalized blogs and let the world learn updates about you. Not only that, you can also communicate with your relatives abroad and see them moving inside your computer monitor. Amazing right!

Internet can also link you to your old friends. There’s nothing impossible with internet nowadays. If you have any concern on anything under the sun, you are just keywords away from them. You just have to browse the proper keywords and there you go, you will be brought in the topic you have chosen.

In meeting and connecting with your old friends, there are social networking websites that could be of help. One of those is the Facebook. Facebook, previously known as Thefacebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users are asked to identify themselves through the group organization they have setup. Networks are organized by city, school, workplace and region to link one with other people.

In Facebook, you can send personal messages and upload pictures to update your colleagues, relatives and old friends to know your whereabouts. Mark Zuckerberg founded the Facebook while studying at Harvard University. At first, it was exclusive to the students of the said university but later on was expanded to other colleges and expanded further to all the university students and finally to anyone aged 13 and over. As of now, there is 175 million users worldwide and keeps on multiplying each day.

A lot of comparison has been made with Facebook. Media often compares the said social networking website to MySpace but the major difference of the two is actually the level of customization. The other site allows its users to decorate their profile layouts using CSS or Cascading Style Sheets while Facebook only allows plain text.

Facebook has a number of features such as the following:

· Wall - this is a space on the user’s profile page allowing friends to post messages for the other users to see

· Pokes – this feature allows users to send virtual “pokes” to each other

· Photos – this feature allows the sure to upload photos and organize them in albums

· Status – allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions

· News Feed – it appears on the user’s profile page and appears on every user’s homepage and emphasizes information regarding the profile changes, upcoming events and birthdays related to the friends of the user.

· Facebook Notes – this one allows tags and images that are imbeddable

· Chat – users can now communicate with friends using this feature

· Gifts – you can now send virtual gifts to your friends and these will appear on the profile of the recipient.

· Marketplace – this features allows the users to post free classifieds

· Facebook Beta – this is a significant redesign of the interface on selected networks of the user

TWITTER

Twitter is a social networking and micro – blogging service allowing the users to send and read updates of the other users. These are text – based posts of up to 140 characters in length and is called tweets.[2] Twitter users can receive updates via SMS and RSS or through applications such as TwitterMobile, Twinkle, Facebook, Tweetie, Twitterific, Twidget and Feedalizr.

A word or phrase prefixed with a # sign is called hashtags and this may be used in tagging tweeter messages. This enables tweets on a particular subject to be found by simply searching the net for their common hashtags, provided that the user tagged their tweets.

Number of twitter users keeps on increasing and the registration of new members is evident on its everyday records. Features of Twitter have been also improving. And with Twitter, you might as well create a constant communication with your old friends, classmates and colleagues.

YOUTUBE

Youtube is video sharing website that allows users to upload, view and share videos to their person of interest. In February 2005, Youtube was founded by the three former employees of PayPal. It was bought by Google Inc in November, 2006 and has become subsidiary of Google.

You have to register if you want to upload videos but you can watch video clips even if you don’t have Youtube account. Accounts of the registered users are called “channels.”

Unregistered users can watch the videos, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Accounts of registered users are called “channels”.

There are also some restrictions and these are included in the terms of service of Youtube. Uploading of pornographic videos and violating copyrights are strictly prohibited. Registered users over the age of 18 are the only people allowed to watch potentially offensive clips.

As a registered user, you also have the rights to post your comments on the videos or spam them. Other users may reply your posts or tag them as good or bad comment. Youtube is doing a great job in providing educational, romantic and informative video clips.

LINKEDIN

LinkedIn is a business – oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003. As of today, it has 35 million registered users and is still multiplying everyday.

LinkedIn allows its users to maintain a list of the contact details of the people they know and trust in their chosen field. People included in your list are called Connections and you can invite anyone to become a connection.

List of connections can be used in number of ways.

· You’ve got to know more people and learn things from each of your connection. The connection of their connections which are called the second degree connections can be extended further to another set of termed as third degree connections.

· You can find jobs and opportunities in doing business because someone in your connections will recommend you.

· People looking for employees can list and post their jobs and search for potential candidates from the pool of applicants.

· Job seekers can review the profile of the hiring individual and determine which of their existing contacts can introduce them.

The feature LinkedIn Answers is similar to Google Answers and Yahoo! Answers because just like the two, it also allows users to ask questions and the community to answer those. This feature is free. Its only difference from the two is that the questions here are potentially more business – like and the identity of the person asking and posting comments is known.

Other feature called LinkedIn Groups allows users to set up new business relationships by letting you join alumni, industry, professional and other relevant groups.

The newest feature is the LinikedIn Polls which is still in alpha.

Mobile version of the site is launched in February 2008 and is available in six (6) languages: Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and English.

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and LinkedIn are just four of the interesting websites we can visit when surfing net. Knowing that there is a bond linking you to the world is something exciting and fabulous. Fantastic, isn’t it? That’s what magic of technology means.