Competition can be a scary thing, but it can also be useful, if handled correctly. Few industries or markets are only large enough for a single player, which means that there is little reason for anyone to be afraid of their competitors. Instead, if companies welcome their competition, they will soon discover that they can benefit one another.

For example, two web development companies might initially think that they are in direct competition. However, the reality is that both companies get much of their business via referrals, for which there is no competition. Having a partnership with another company means that each company can quietly outsource their extra work when they’re busy, maintaining a positive outward appearance to their clients.

This can benefit both sides, since idle workers are expensive, so accepting the work, even at a reduced rate, benefits both businesses. Likewise, the ability to get additional workers when needed on an ad hoc basic minimizes the expense of keeping a large staff.

There are other ways as well in which companies can not compete, for example, targeting slightly different markets, or offering variations on the same service. In either case, there can even be the ability to share clients, allowing each company to focus on what makes them different from their competitors, instead of getting hung up on what makes them all the same.

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1. Competition and Anti-Trust Law
2. Competition is Healthy
3. Unique Value Proposition Turns into a Business

If you want instant credibility, write a book.

Interesting logic, considering that many writers are people I wouldn’t necessarily want speaking at an event, or even consider credible because of their writing. For some, writing might have the opposite of the desired effect, by demonstrating their own lack of credibility.

However, for someone who does have credibility, just an inability to demonstrate that credibility, writing can provide a simple route to publicizing credibility.

First, the fact that you could come up with sufficient material for a book on a given topic shows that you have knowledge on the subject (though the quality of that knowledge would require actually reading the book).

Second, writing can help you organize your own thoughts on the subject, and help you define what it is your own expertise entails. The fact that you went through this process provides a measure of your credibility.

Having written copious amounts on this site over the past 2 years (over 400 posts and approaching 200,000 words), I considered this exercise of writing a book to be interesting, to say the least. Whether or not I choose to publish a book, the act of writing one could prove to be useful, and if ever I should need to demonstrate my credibility to someone who does not know me, I can always send them a copy of my book.

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1. Writing Proposals
2. Lessons Learned from the Corporate World
3. Enchanted with Enchantment

The banner seemed to contain fairly current information – it had a cancelled class and a new class starting, both pieces of information being about a week old. Not too bad for a gym with a relatively stable schedule.

The Twitter feed was more disturbing. It had not been updated in about a year. Looking around at the rest of the site, signs of neglect were everywhere. Schedules were out of date, information was no longer current.

It had the feel of a passing fad.

In social media, and online in general, being current is incredibly important. If some information is clearly dated, visitors will quickly leave. While a website and a Twitter account are by no means expensive, they can cost quite a bit in terms of lost business.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find motivation to keep going, but persistence is required. It took 9 months of writing articles on this site before I made my first sale that I could attribute directly to my writing, but it paid for that effort. Even when you think there are no visitors reading, you continue to write, to update, to maintain a sense of freshness.

You never know when the big break will come, and you don’t want to have only yourself to blame for not being prepared.

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1. First Steps for a New Business
2. Social Media is Not a Strategy, but you need a Social Media Strategy
3. Bad Marketing Pitch Raises Scam Alert

In some businesses, it has become the practice to request a portfolio, or a sample of the candidate’s work against which their abilities can be assessed. However, many businesses shy away from this practice, and some candidates are reluctant to provide copies of their work for a variety of reasons.

What methods does your business use to assess the competency of potential employees prior to making an offer

Naming a Business

There are a few common methods used for naming businesses. In general, though, naming a business should be a serious endeavor, as it will continue to be used to identify your business long after the reasons for choosing the name may be relevant.

Named for the Owner

The simplest, often used in service-based businesses, or those which have grown out of a consulting or sole-proprietorship, is to simply use the name of the owner[s] as the name of the business. Common examples include Dell, HP, Ford, Lloyd’s, Harry Rosen, and many others.

The industries in which this is fairly common are legal and accounting, in which the people involved in the business are highly relevant to their clients, or fashion, in which the name of the business is the name of the designer behind the business.

Named for the Product

Other businesses name themselves after what they sell. This can serve a business well if the name is chosen to be both specific and vague such that it covers its market effectively, and can outlive the life of any of its specific products.

Examples of such businesses include Home Depot (which caters the home renovation market) and Business Depot (servicing the business market).

Named for the Vision

Some businesses use their name as a derivation of their vision. As an example, No Frills is a grocery store which tries to keep everything as simple as possible. Best Buy includes an association with good deals as part of their name.

One additional factor to consider when choosing a name is that there needs to be an avoidance of brand confusion. If there is another business with a similar sounding name, even if they sell a different product, you need to be sure that your target market will not confuse the two businesses. This includes looking for a domain name that is easily associated with your business, and the domain most easily associated with your business is not owned by someone else.

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2. Effective Marketing Strategy
3. Question: Who Does Your Business Taxes

If you think that offering excellent reasons for your thinking will change anyone’s mind, you might be new on this planet.

In business, it’s important that you understand this because it relates to how you turn prospects into customers. That is, what type of arguments should you be presenting to convince someone that your product or service is worth spending their time and money on?

The key is that while facts cannot be ignored, they’re also not the most important piece of your marketing and sales pitches. Purchases are driven by emotion, and so you have to connect with your prospects at an emotional level. Sure, you need the facts to back you up, but they should not be the basis of your arguments.

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2. Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts
3. You Have to Love What You Do

Reaching the target market is a fairly simple problem, though implementing the solution may not be easy. Once you understand which groups make up your target market, you can determine using a variety of processes where your audience receives information from, how they make purchase decisions, and then make sure you are placed accordingly. The placement itself may be complex, or expensive, but determining where to be placed is neither.

However, a low conversion rate is much more difficult to diagnose. As an example, I could offer a book on this site, and the sales might be less than hoped (as an aside, I’ve never offered anything for sale on this site, so this example is complete hypothetical). I could look and determine whether or not people were looking at the book via Google Analytics. I could look into how people find the book, and how many buy the book.

What this teaches me, though, is merely a statistic – it does not provide a reason why fewer people complete the purchasing process than start it. Is it because it takes too many steps to complete the purchase? Is the book too expensive? Perhaps the topic is boring and no one wants to read it. Any of these is possible.

To complicate this further, even if a prospect told me why they did not follow through with the purchase, I may still not gain much valuable information. For example, I might be told the price was too high, but lowering the price might not have increased the number of sales sufficiently to cover the difference. That prospect in particular might not have purchased even at a lower price, because the price was not the core issue!

The prospect might have declined to purchase because they couldn’t see the value in what I was offering, and used the price as an explanation – it was too expensive for an unknown entity. To convert them, I would need to explain to them what the value is in making the purchase, except nobody told me that was a problem.

Good marketing involves listening to prospects, and hearing what isn’t said. Are you talking to the right person? Have you addressed their true concerns? Does the person you’re talking to need approval from someone else in their organization, who may have a different agenda? In other words, beneath the cover of the excuses for no purchase being made, what was the real reason that the prospect didn’t become a customer?

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1. The Difference Between Marketing and Sales
2. Know Your Audience
3. Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts

Social Media is even less like radio or TV, in that there are many aspects to social media, each of which is a tool on its own. Perhaps this is where the confusion arises – does the creation of a Facebook page, a blog, a Twitter feed, some presence on Linked In – do those add up to a strategy?

As many business people I know who utilize Social Media heavily in their marketing efforts will tell you, using the tools does not make a strategy, though a strategy uses the tools. A coherent Social Media strategy understands the role each of the tools can play, the type of work needed to balance the various aspects to Social Media against one another. The strategy involves more than just the tools, but also how they will be used.

Will the Twitter feed be used to showcase products, or will it be for chatting with the target market?

Will the blog focus on issues internal to the company, or external to the industry?

Who will manage the Facebook page?

The answers to these questions, and many more besides, result in the creation of a sound strategy, one which has an objective, and shows how the various tools will be used to bring the goal closer to fruition.

For example, my strategy with my blog here is not to promote my own work, or my business. It’s to help showcase my expertise by talking about issues relating to my target market. While occasionally I will talk about my business, it’s not really about that – it’s about issues potential customers might want answered. Ultimately, some of the readers of this blog may choose to work with me, but only because I’ve already established credibility with them through my writing (over 170,000 words to date).

Strategies don’t need to be complicated, but they need to involve more than just a tool, or set of tools. Social Media is a set of tools – not a strategy.

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1. Business and Social Media – Part 2
2. Using Social Media the Wrong Way
3. Business and Social Media – Part 4

The suggestion I made came from a piece of advice provided during a course on business planning, and that was to pick 3 marketing methods they wanted to use. One would be their primary method, being allocated 50-80% of their marketing budget. One would be the secondary method, garnering 15-30% of the budget, and the third would be a minor player, getting as little as 5% of the budget.

The result of this breakdown is that each aspect to their marketing plan will be given its best chance to succeed. The method deemed to be likely to see the widest success (in their case, creating channels to promote their product) would be given the highest priority. The method which is likely to do somewhat well gets just enough resources to be useful, but not so much as to detract from the primary marketing effort.

The third marketing channel is what I call the wildcard. There is the off chance that something a bit different will work. It might be a pet theory of the business owner, or something a manager in the company stumbled on and wants to try. Rather than risk the entire venture on this, a small budget (and corresponding time and effort) is given to the plan, just enough that it can succeed, but not so much that it interferes with the other, more central plans.

I found this interesting, because there are many things in business that deal with the number three. Timelines are often short by a factor of three, budgets in the initial years can be off by as much as a factor of 3. Strategies are made in groups of three – this week, this month, this year.

Marketing is just one more aspect of business that should be running off the number 3.

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The true reason for having multiple plans is when there is an outside factor which can influence whether or not a plan is feasible. For example, if you’re planning a camp outing, you don’t have control over the weather. Plan A would then be for a beautiful sunny day, while Plan B would be in case it rains. Since you won’t be able to control this factor, having a second plan (or a third, as the situation demands) would be perfectly reasonable.

In business, however, having multiple plans can actually hamper your ability to succeed at your primary plan. Setting up your business, you have a path of how you would like to grow your business. Some parts of that plan are flexible, others are not. However, all your planning should be dedicated toward removing obstacles to Plan A succeeding.

As soon as you start to devote effort toward a secondary plan, you diminish the effort put into Plan A. Suddenly, with obstacles arising in your chosen path, it becomes easier to say you’ll switch to Plan B, rather than persevere toward your original goal.

To flip this around, not having a second plan can seem foolish – it’s known that life rarely follows along our ideas of perfection. As such, how can one justify not having a recourse?

The answer is that the recourse is to plan better – think through the various possible scenarios, all the things that could go wrong, and plan for them. If your flyers don’t generate a lot of leads, then you’ll adapt your marketing strategy to use direct mail postcards. If the average customer spends $50 in your store instead of the planned $75, you’ll implement a plan to increase the number of customers.

However, in the big picture, all these actions and plans are to achieve a single goal, whatever that might be. Plan B is merely one of several plans for when Plan A needs a bit of tweaking to succeed.

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1. Effective Marketing Strategy
2. Plan for the Worst, Hope for the Best
3. I Have a Great Idea – What Now?

If you have an idea for a new business, a product, or a service, the first thing you need to do is to get customer validation – that is, confirm that someone with no ulterior motive (that rules out your parents/siblings/kids) would pay for a good execution of your idea. For more details on this aspect of getting started, read my earlier post on Starting a Business.

Assuming you can get your idea validated with a paying customer, it’s time to do some thinking about your ability to succeed at your project. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons that some advocate writing a formal business plan – because it will make you think about some of the questions you really should be answering:

• Who is your competition?
• What are they doing?
• What are some of the industry rules, processes, or expectations?
• How will you set yourself apart?
• What are the barriers to entry?
• What are your start-up costs and your operating costs?
• Where will the money to run the business come from?
• How will you make money, and how long will it take to prove profitable?

There are, of course, many other questions that a business plan covers. It will walk you through an overview of your business, industry analysis, marketing plans, sales, operations, finances. It will enable you to see the bigger picture of your own business before you risk a single dime.

I recently advised a couple of people who were setting out to build a business. Both were creating online stores to market and sell their products, and wanted to know what it would take to succeed. In both cases, the products were high quality, with a corresponding price tag. In one case, there was a large start-up cost in terms of machinery, other than that, the two businesses were quite comparable.

For both, I advised they start with the most basic eCommerce system available that could be quickly installed and configured, although it’s longevity for their business was questionable. The reason was that the system is free to install, and can get someone non-technical running with an online store in a matter of hours (this includes many kinds of reports, product management, newsletters, etc). However, once both their businesses start to be profitable, I suggested that they then invest in a better eCommerce solution, which would be more pricey.

In other words, both needed to understand that the distribution channel would not set themselves apart, and so they shouldn’t be focused on it (even though both would be primarily marketing via their websites). However, their product needed to be as good as possible, and that’s where the energy was directed.

If you want to succeed, you need to understand what it will take, and which parts of the road are not important. For the unimportant pieces, push it out to the most time- and cost-effective solution, while for the important pieces, spend the time and money to do it right.

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Perhaps the author was unaware of the implications of their message, though I find that unlikely, and suspect that author was perfectly aware of the implications of the appearance of the landing page. The result was a marketing pitch that had all the appearances of a scam.

If you’re in business and looking to design your website, there are better ways to get people’s email addresses and communicate with your target market than to offer them something free before you’ve convinced them that value exists. As such, there are a few fairly simple rules to follow when designing your site:

1. Keep the design simple, with subdued colors. The page shouldn’t appear to be shouting its message, but rather to be displaying its message in a cool and calm manner.
2. Provide information, or something of value, without asking for anything in return. This can be pages of your site with tips and suggestions, a public blog, or a free PDF that can be downloaded in a single click.
3. When asking for an email address, explain what you’re going to do with it – what kind of emails will you be sending, how often, and will you share the address with anyone?

Failure on any of these might gain you addresses in the short-run, but you will find that people will either ignore your emails when they start arriving each morning, mark them as spam (which eventually can impact people who actually read your emails as well), block you, or report you. As well, if the people who’ve given you their emails are active on any of the social media sites, they may pass along the information about your practices to their friends.

Perhaps this is the confusing aspect to this form of marketing. Your website is a place where you can post information about yourself, what you’re selling, and your expertise. Social media is a place where you can interact with your target market. However, pushing a hard-sell at your target market is little different from being an aggressive telemarketer – and most people have learned how to block such people out of their lives.

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The first thing that needs to be realized is that getting validation that the idea is a good one has ramifications for how to proceed. Some potential clients can help by working with you to refine the service or product. Other times, you have to go off on your own and figure it out.

One of the biggest mistakes someone new to the business world can do is to go out and try to raise capital. The reason is quite simple – you don’t know yet if you actually need any. Sure, it would be nice to have a budget of millions that you can spend on fancy offices and a huge staff, but do you NEED it?

The first approach, therefore, should be to determine how much of the product or service can be developed with what you have – namely, yourself (and any partners you may be working with). Commonly known as bootstrapping, you should be trying to build out with the minimum amount of resources possible.

If that’s not possible, see what you can get by reaching out to your network. People don’t expect to work for free, but you may be able to barter something of value (and note that shares in your business currently have little value at all) for work.

Don’t forget that you need to be thinking about multiple aspects to your business. You need more than just an idea, product or service – you need to be able to sell it. If there are legal ramifications to that, make sure you work them out up front. You may need a marketing plan, you might need to work out pricing schemes. If you know someone who’s been in business, talk to them – you should try to get a mentor if you can, if only to steer you clear of issues that you might not need to face.

However, start your approach with an eye toward frugality. That doesn’t mean trying to pay less than the value of a given item, but rather determining if you need the item in the first place. There’s a gray area between good enough and perfect, and usually, perfect isn’t worth the effort over good enough (though of course there are many exceptions to this).

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1. I Have a Great Idea – What Now?
2. From Idea to Capitalization
3. A Novel Idea

I clicked the link, and found myself looking at a marketing pitch for a course on how to get other businesses to pay you to get a listing on Google. After watching for a few minutes, my scam radar starting beeping. One of the images just seemed wrong:

The map was accompanied with an explanation that the items marked with letters were businesses who had claimed their listings, while those without letters (just a red dot) had not. Money could be made by listing a business for someone who doesn’t know how to do it, and then get paid a maintenance fee to keep up the listing.

This didn’t seem correct, and further investigation showed that the dots are actually for businesses who have ALREADY claimed their listings. The reason some are marked with letters is simply because they’re on the current page of Google listings. Not only that, but there is no maintenance fees to keep up the listing – once you’re listed, you can forget about it. A quick check online directed me to another page, which had the details of the scam, and so I passed it back to Jill in case she didn’t realize she had just posted a scam to her feed (the other posts from her I had read didn’t seem to be scams, after all):

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no response from Jill regarding her dubious post.

What is interesting, though, is that what triggered the scam alert was an actual lie – that is, what the map represented. Anyone even somewhat informed on Google would be aware that their statement was simply wrong, and therefore everything else claimed in the pitch (which is quite long and includes pop-ups trying to get you to buy a $97 course) is likely erroneous too. While marketing pitches are not always known for their accuracy, they do try to avoid flat-out lying.

Marketing is meant to draw people in, to lure them with the promise of something big, whether income, or a change in a formerly routine task. However, they should not be lying to people, because once the sale goes through, the truth will come out, and you’ll have some upset customers. (While some businesses thrive on negative publicity, it usually is not a recommended course of action.)

So, if you’re planning on creating a marketing pitch, make sure it’s accurate to reality. If it isn’t, someone will find out, and they may then decide to send some negative publicity your way.

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1. Beware Your Pitch – Dragons’ Den Pitch Ends in Court
2. Marketing – Paying Attention to What is Not Said
3. Putting together an Elevator Pitch

These are common spins on how to set your business apart from the competition, but we wanted to take this a step further. Eventually, we landed on offering a custom service that would be given to her clients at no charge, for as long as they were her clients. In the short-term, this might have reduced the amount she could charge each client, but it would also ensure that clients would stay with her for many years.

Working in IT, I went to determine how complicated it would be to build the web application we envisioned. I came back a day later and realized that the application itself, what we had considered to be a unique value proposition for one business, could actually fill a void in the market. That is, many of her competitors and non-competitors (i.e. people offering the same service to a different geographic market) would love such a service, and would likely pay to use it.

The assessment continued to the point where a price could be placed on developing the application, as well as sales models for it (usage and membership fees), as well as marketing angles (it’s a B2C service, so market it to other businesses). The whole business could actually be run in conjunction with her existing business, taking little effort to set up new users on the system (most of this would be automated), but would require significant effort upfront.

What ended up happening is that a business was created for the sole purpose of giving a unique value proposition to ONE client. However, anyone who wanted to use the business, even competitors, could do so – but for a price. That is, we found a way to get the competition to pay to be the competition.

When looking at a business, and its approach to attracting customers, sometimes it will be discovered that something that was added to the business to make it more appealing is actually part of another business. When that’s the case, it might be smart to spin that part of the business off into its own entity, so that you can charge your competitors for using what you give away to your clients.

Related posts:

1. Strategic Partnerships with the Competition
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The price, however, is what hit the business hard. A typical home would cost about $500 to get set up with the system, significantly more than what the average homeowner would pay. While cheaper that hiring someone to put up and take down the lights each season (which was estimated at about $750 for the same home), most homeowners are hanging the lights themselves to save the money.

However, one Dragon saw past that flaw, and focused on a market that would be only too happy to pay for such a product. Stores and offices, which typically do hire people to hang the lights, would see this product as saving them money. While in the first year the savings might be relatively minimal, by the second year, the savings can be quite significant.

Jim Treliving, with 350 branches of Boston Pizza to outfit with lights, calculated the savings in his first year at about $80,000. The following year, this number would triple with no more outlays needed. The money for the investment ($200,000) could come directly from the savings in the first two years of using the product.

The problem, however, was valuation. While the product was clearly good, sales were still non-existent. The million dollar valuation had to go, but the question remained how to balance out the $200,000 with the company. On air, the counter offer of 35%, which converts to a valuation of about $570,000 was accepted. The premise, of course, is that the business can do quite well.

It’s unclear from the site whether or not the deal has gone through. While they are clearly celebrating their airing on CBC, there is no indication that they have actually adapted their business model to approach businesses rather than homes. Why they would choose not to target stores is, to me, a mystery, since those are the customers who can afford their solution, and are likely willing to spend it to save in the long run.

However, more interesting is the fact that Carl and Maria learned on the Den that the focus of their business, or the market they should be aiming for, was not the same as what they came on the show airing. The question, though, is how well they learned that lesson, and whether or not it will translate into a stronger business, with or without dollars from the dragons.

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1. Solid Business Wheeled Out of the Den – With an Invitation to Return
2. Reduce Debt or Increase Savings
3. Say No to a Million Dollars – Again

With recent developments, the nature of the products was changing, and it was realized that this person is actually a fantastic marketer, but not a salesman, much to many people’s surprise.

The difference between the two, however, is quite important, and in growing businesses, these two roles will eventually diverge from one another.

The marketer is concerned with getting people to look at the product, to consider its merits, sometimes in light of competing products. He listens to what potential customers are saying about the product, and requests changes to be made to the product. He does not, however, work with real products, but rather with demo versions, wish lists, and spec sheets.

The salesman deals with a completed product, getting people to actually pay for it. He will follow up on leads created by the marketers to get people to pull out their credit cards and pay. He will work on pricing models, support contracts, and return policies. He will focus, in short, on getting the working product into the end user’s hands.

The skills needed for both these roles are similar, but not the same. If you see your product struggling to be adopted by your target market, think about whether the problem is one of knowledge in the market at large, or in closing deals. Do your potential customers know about your product, and how it fits into their view of the world? If not, the problem is likely one of marketing. If, on the other hand, people know about the product but are not buying, then your problem may be in sales.

Knowing your problem is one of sales at least gives you a place to start your research into why people are not buying. It might be because you don’t have appropriate staff to follow up on leads, or it might be because your product fails to fulfill the needs you think it does.

However, at least you have been able to narrow down the problem into a set of solvable questions.

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3. Sales in the Online World

Entrepreneurs often think that if they don’t act quickly, the opportunity will disappear. And there’s never been anything more false than that.

The initial reaction to this is that Arlene may have erred in her statement – after all, opportunities come and go, and rapid action is often needed to take advantage of a given opportunity. Reflection, however, shows that Arlene’s years of experience are coming into play as she highlights one of the critical issues with an entrepreneur’s mentality.

It is true that opportunities come and go, and that action is required if you are to take advantage of such an opportunity. However, even when action is required, it should never be done on the basis of it leaving, but rather, because the opportunity is a good one. That is, the action should be taken because after careful evaluation (which is not necessarily a slow process), it was determined that the benefits of the opportunity are worth pursuing, and you are capable of succeeding with it.

As an example, a person who manufactures custom jewelery may have the opportunity to get featured in an internationally read magazine. This would have the potential to seriously increase her exposure, and then sales. However, reflection would show that since she crafts each order herself, the realistic limit on the number of orders she could fulfill is much smaller than what that exposure would provide. As such, the exposure would have some short-term benefits, but until the infrastructure is in place to handle a major increase in volume (for example, using some junior designers to produce the work once it has been designed, with a hiring structure that is easily scaled), the opportunity would actually be bad for the business.

This has happened to many businesses, where they over-extended themselves, and then found themselves unable to meet demand. The action that precipitated the situation was often one of lost opportunity – or rather, a refusal to acknowledge that some opportunities should not be acted upon. If a business wishes to be successful, they need to learn to reflect and to act on careful evaluation relative to the amount of risk the opportunity can create.

And yes, sometimes you will have to act, and sometimes you will have to make decisions quickly. But the decisions should be based on logical evaluations, not emotion.

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2. A Good Entrepreneur Knows How to Listen
3. Handy Solution Catches a Deal

The first pitch was from a pair of entrepreneurs from Vancouver, pitching their clothing line, Skyler Clothing, which they said would soon be the next Lululemon. Having worked at their business for four years, it came as a surprise that Christina Marcano and Hayley Gregg were still in debt, and perhaps because of some hard lessons learned.

During the recession, their diversification into having their own stores, rather than focus on online sales and use of various shopping channels turned the business’ finances into a nightmare. Three of the stores were eventually closed, with the fourth, their headquarters, being kept. While the products were good, and they learned much about how they could have handled the recession better, the company was under severe financial strain.

While they did not get a deal, they did get a piece of advice from Jim Treliving – close the last store and focus on getting the wholesale marketm selling to distributors, rather than trying to create their own shops, a rather expensive proposition.

In the other case, the entrepreneur had been in business for fourteen years, and had a solid product. Olivier Soap made creams and lotions that when presented by Pierre Pelletier and Clarence LeBlanc were well-received, but despite his strong business, they failed to get a deal.

The business had several stores, and was looking to move into the business model like Arbonne, in which people pay a small fee to represent the company, and then earn a commission from any sales they make. The problem was that such a strategic move required a significant amount of cash, something the business seemed to have in short supply.

While the model might work, and the products seemed to hold up under scrutiny, the dragons were still not interested. The reason, perhaps, is that the business is in a stage of transition, which makes the investment more risky than most. With a business using an established model, while there is risk that the model might not work, the business can be assessed based on past performance with that model. When, however, a business starts to tread new ground, investors may shy away for the simple reason that they have no means to assess the current owner’s ability to run such a business.

Is diversification a good thing, or a bad thing? It really depends on what stage your business is in, and what you are trying to do with your business.

When times are tough, it may be better ton focus on one or two models that are known tone profitable. While this may hinder your ability to act on new opportunities, it can also limit your exposure to risk.

Alternatively, if your business is stable and profitable, then looking to diversify, whether in the form of new products or services, or to try new marketing and distribution models, may be a wise strategic move. Finding an investor at the same time, though, may be difficult.

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While I thought the book was quite good and made sense, it didn’t really hit home with me until I did a product demo for one of my clients. At the demo, I was showing their main salesman how he could present the product I had built for them to his prospective clients.

I made a first presentation in which I outlined the technical merits of the product, and how it satisfied all the needs of the client. I showed how it addressed both the needs and the wants of the prospective buyers. However, while the salesman listened patiently, he clearly could not use my presentation as the basis for his own sales pitch.

After a break in which we discussed other aspects to the product and project, I decided to present the pitch again, and this time, I presented on the basis of emotion.

I touched on the problems, the pains, the established feelings of existing products. I discussed the concerns, the wants of the eventual users. I talked about the people involved in the decision. Finally, I demonstrated the answer in the newly developed product.

I didn’t get involved in the facts (what are the margins, cost of distribution, market size, IP), because marketing doesn’t care about the facts, at least, not during the presentations. Marketing should be concerned with the story. If needed, the facts are available to back up the story, but it’s not part of the pitch.

How are you selling yourself and your products? Are you continuing to throw the facts at your prospective market, or are you connecting with your audience and telling them stories that happen to involve your product?

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When the most recent request for articles came in, I decided to run a basic calculation of what that article would cost me, and whether or not it is worth my while to write for yet another site. Essentially, I was trying to predict what the return on my investment, or ROI, would be based on the new exposure.

The first part of this was fairly simple. Writing an article for another site, once I have a topic or subject selected, takes me about 15 to 30 minutes on average. Writing one such article a week puts the cost of the article at about $50 of my time, considering that I will also have to spend some time thinking of a topic to write about. For a given site, I would write about one article a week, which translates into an annual cost of $2,500 worth of my time.

The second part was harder – how do I compute my conversion rate for my site? As mentioned above, the purchases made on Amazon are negligible, and so do not factor into the equation. What I needed to determine was how many people would contact me, via my site, for more information about a service that I offer, and how many of those would eventually become clients. Additionally, since some projects are really small, and others fairly large, determining the average revenue generated by a single client is a fairly complex task.

Additionally, many of the clients I’ve acquired via my site have required additional work on my part, and have actually been driven to my site by my efforts elsewhere on the web. Gaining additional readers on my site might have a measurable value, but without direct interaction, it could have no value at all.

The question bothered me – how can you calculate the potential ROI for gaining additional exposure for a site which has no direct revenue model, and is being used almost exclusively as a networking tool to gain introductions to new people?

Through discussions with several other people, I determined that the question I was trying to answer had no simple answer – it was asking what value I place on an introduction, and what value I might place on getting thousands of introductions in a short period of time. Does this have value? Absolutely, but perhaps not one that can be quantified.

The value of my time, therefore, could not be measured against the potential return, since there is no metric available for this purpose. As a result, I decided to take the opposite approach, and determine my potential loss if I did not write additional articles.

In this case, the loss would be exposure of a non-quantifiable value, but I would gain 30 minutes per week. Since I don’t have additional writing to do, I would also reduce any associated stress. I could focus on writing articles for this site, which would improve the quality of content here, thereby increasing the likelihood of gaining introductions to my readers.

As such, the case was closed – for the purpose of marketing, I didn’t really need the additional exposure, and so would not, in general, write more. For other reasons, such as supporting a cause, I might write, but it would not be for the sake of additional leads.

I value my time higher than those abstract potential returns.

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