Make Money by Shop

What an interesting concept: corporate culture. However, we see it all the time. Every corporation has one, good or bad.

There was a significant regional bank, since absorbed, that always projected a snooty, unhelpful, holier-than-thou attitude. Most of my experiences with the bank at any level were filled with their ego and arrogance. It was always distasteful, and I was told by many employees how little they liked their company as they were treated with little respect.

This is a corporate culture — low mutual trust or respect, intense control by management, careful, precise, micro monitoring of employees, low pay, no goodwill from customers, no appreciation from employees, meaningless incentives and meager raises — this generates a similar attitude at all levels., distrust and lack of respect. It starts at the top and permeates downward.

I have done business for years with another national bank, Citizens, and since I travel a lot I manage to visit branches all over the region. I have always been treated exceptionally well, as if each branch I would go into was my local branch where I am well known and friends with all the employees. Again, a distinct corporate culture nurtured at the top and permeates downward, throughout the business.

Review your corporate or small business culture and evaluate whether or not it is working for you and your business.

Maybe you need to inspect it and make changes. Maybe it is not projecting what you want it to project. Maybe it starts with you. Change your approach and attitude and change the entire culture of the business.

Remember it starts from the top and filters down.

I was with my wife today, Saturday, shopping, not unusual, as this is a job she particularly relishes, and she loves to shop with me as she ‘uses’ my card, when we shop together.

She has been anxious to buy a new pair of UGGs, as hers is beaten to shreds, and she loves them.

We went to a shoe store that carries a full line, and as she was examining them and trying them on, she exclaimed, “These are not as good as my ‘originals’”. She examined them further and discovered they were made in China.

In a huff, she said to me “let’s get out of here.” I asked her why she was not buying her UGGs. She said, “I am angry, I feel duped, how can UGGs of Australia be made in China? I do not want them. They are not as good as they used to be when made in Australia” she said. “I cannot trust them, as clearly they are willing to deceive me. UGGs from Australia cannot be made in China. It is now a scam.”

Off we went. She will buy something else. She will never buy UGGs again, and will tell all her friends as she was a diehard fan and now feels jolted.

Here is the point. My wife is not very political, at all as in zero. For her to walk out of a luxury purchase, paid for by me, of something she wants very much and could have a choice from a huge inventory of styles and colors, is a most remarkable, unprecedented event.

While I would not consider this a trustworthy sampling, or survey, I do believe I was witnessing a reaction common to many consumers, and you as entrepreneurs should be aware of this wave of customer awareness and attitude as it is extremely important and valuable information

One might ask, is it an isolationist attitude? No I do not think so. Is it prejudicial treatment? No, no evidence of this.

It is a pure economical and consumer consideration and fueled with mistrust and belief that the quality of Chinese made product is below acceptability, and that it is highly likely that many important socially meaningful standards are being violated to bring this product to our shores cheaper than domestic goods, including child labor, unhealthy and unsafe working conditions, and sub-standard pay.

We are losing jobs and China makes everything we buy. The people are getting pissed off. They are saying enough. We want quality at a fair price and we want it made in America, not China as we cannot trust China at all and we can still trust the American system more, although they too are pushing their luck. Other international markets are deemed totally acceptable and ‘better’ than American made, but not China. The American consumer does not trust China or its products. Beware of backlash.

On the opposite end of the spectrum but for the exact same reasons, quality and value, the American auto industry has been beaten at their own game because of better quality, perceived integrity, better quality, and more value from the foreign auto makers than from our own manufacturers. Thus the market place got turned over to them. The foreign auto makers paid attention, listened, and delivered quality products at a fair price.

Pay attention, listen, ask, watch, respond, satisfy the consumer and win big. This is how you can compete against the larger national players. Small business owners can read the wind and respond quickly. Small business owners do not have to sell their customers out for a few pennies more of profit.

UGGs of Australia sold out what made them great, Australian made. Maybe they will make more money making their product in China but they will lose out in the end.

What are you are doing? Make certain it makes sense in today’s market; it is much more demanding and critical than ever before.

Deliver quality and value.

Good for them, good for you.

From the time Ken began his career in retail sales he dreamed of one day being a small business owner. The hopes were to one day own and operate a shop. His plan was to use his sales and marketing degree while combining it with his love of athletics and his nostalgia for his childhood hobby of collecting memorabilia. He would sell a variety of sports cards, such as football cards as well as baseball and basketball. He felt this would be a great basis for his business but knew that in order to be a viable, money making business he would have to sell more merchandise. Owning and operating a successful collectibles shop takes knowledge not only of products but of marketable merchandise as well. What should an owner carry and what quantity is necessary? Additionally, what prices work for the customer base in a particular area and will an owner broaden the customer base by promoting a healthy internet business? The following are some of the most useful tips for small business owners as they seek to set up shop.

• Find the correct balance between being an exclusive niche business and a run of the mill mass merchandiser.

• Determine if the business will have solely a local focus or if it will be more widespread. Many businesses benefit from involvement in distant markets or through shipping services.

• Know the products and product lines backwards and forwards.

• Keep price points competitive and realistic.

• Use effective marketing strategies to promote the new business.

• Know in advance that long and often unpredictable hours will be required.

• Consider any staffing needs you may have and how you will address them.

• Be familiar with insurance requirements as well as all legal issues prior to opening.

• Carefully identify what types of technology are available to automate and simplify the experience of customers.

• Invest in retail consulting services to assist you in finding the most effective location for your business.

Being a small business owner is filled with challenges and details. For the small business owner who is able to handle the demands involved in ownership and who is able to present customers with the products they are looking for at the price they can afford, there will always be money to be made. Knowing what products work in your environment is perhaps the biggest key to making a business a success. Creating a store with products that are too niche oriented will certainly limit success. Striking the right balance between offering unique and hard to obtain items, while being accessible to a large majority is indeed a trick but something that a successful small businessman or businesswoman is able to master. By keeping in mind the preceding ten tips, a small business owner can be well on the way to experiencing success in the retail realm. For those like Ken, who have a dream that they hope will one day become a reality, proactively investing time and energy into researching business start up information will prove to be a very useful exercise.

Article marketing research can make you an expert using almost any niche you want.

I will say right up front there are a few things you shouldn’t mess with.

Stuff that can hurt people are the kinds of things you should leave to the real experts. Just because heart disease pays high in AdSense doesn’t mean you should try and exploit the niche. How would you feel if someone took your advice and ended up in worse shape.

In saying that there are thousands of other niches you can get to know just by doing article marketing research.

It really isn’t that hard for someone who has never fished to become an expert at fishing.

I use 3 places to help me become an expert on a niche I want to work on.

Of course the first place which is a wealth of information is the Internet.

The second place which is a place I spend a lot of time at is the library.

The third place which is often overlooked are book stores. I can get lost in a book store for hours reading new releases on subjects I have choose to write about.

I do want to warn you that in no way, shape or form am I telling you to copy other peoples material. That’s the way to go if you want to put a quick end to your marketing career.

The title says article marketing research and that’s what I mean.

You need to look up information, read lots, teach yourself and then write about it. You need to put your own spins and angles to make the words belong to you.

I don’t take very kindly to people copying my work so I don’t imagine people would be very happy if I were copying theirs.

At the end of the day after you have chosen a niche you should focus on getting enough material to write at least a dozen articles.

I suggest you try and enter niches that interest you. There is nothing worse than doing article marketing research on topics that totally bore you. Some people can do it very well but for the most part people just get bored and either walk away or never finish.

Writing articles can easily be the most potent weapon you have in your arsenal for promoting and bringing traffic to a website. You do have to like to write and read or you could find yourself in trouble very early in the game.

So if articles work for you then stop wasting time, get a niche you love and start your article marketing research.

Optimizing images is very important when optimizing any website or blog. If images are optimized correctly, they can bring a huge amount of traffic to your site. Image optimization is highly advantageous but the most underused when it comes to optimizing websites to increase rankings and traffic.

Depending on niche and images used, one may be able to attract a great deal of extra visitors easily with very little additional work. Following are a few points you can put into practice when optimizing your website:

1. Insert Keywords in your Alt text

This step is the most useful and important when optimizing images. Select a keyword or phrase which is relevant and popular to describe your image and web page. This alt text should be inserted in the code for your image file.

For example:

Here are a few more specific rules:

If the image is just decorated text, put the text in the alt attribute
If the image is used to create horizontal lines, bullets in a list or other similar decoration, it is fine to have an empty alt attribute (alt= “”)
If the image represents a lot of important information, try to summarize it in a short line and ass a longdesc link to a more detailed description.

2. Optimize the page with the image
Optimizing the actual page for search engines improves graphic images search. Search engines also look at text surrounding a graphic image to determine relevancy. It is recommended that descriptive text with your targeted keywords be placed immediately before or after the image itself. Also text within the anchor tag and next to the anchor text is especially going to influence image-search rankings. If you do a search for any term on Google Image, you’ll find a short description of around 20 characters below every image; the keyword is listed in bold as well.

3. Name images with Descriptive Titles
If you have an image of Bill Clinton, you could use the term “bill-clinton.jpg” to name your image file, instead of just using the original file name which could be something like “c789.jpg”. You can name the images exactly the same way as my alt text.

4. Determine overall content relevance using AdSense
This method can be used specifically used for Google Image Search. It is not very important to follow this but it is very useful to determine the relevance of your content with respect to your image. It will tell you how Google thinks about the overall theme of what your page is about. Keep changing your content until the AdSense unit on the page reflects the keywords you want to target. This method does not only apply to Google images but it is a generally a helpful method and it improves your overall latent semantic indexing. Your site will appear more relevant to Google for targeted keywords and phrases.

5. Use Social Site Tags for your images
If you are using images with little or no textual content, it will be useful to tag your images using internal tagging or social tags like Technorati. This may add more weight to your image and help it rank better. And if you are uploading your images using Flickr, remember to use appropriate keywords as well.

6. Make your image file accessible to search engines
Check that your robots.txt file does not restrict search engines from accessing your image files. Try not to use javascript links on image files as it will limit search engine access as well.

7. Hotlink Images from Google Search Results
Type a search query for the image you want. Then visit the original web page and copy the image location to your own website (hotlink it). Your website might show up high among image search results. Most of the images in the top row are actually hotlinked and rank better than the original image source. Well this method is frowned upon by most webmasters because it violates copyrights issues.

8. Use Images about ‘Hot topics’
Deliberately use images to catch visitors who are searching for hot topics or trending topics. Through Google Trends you can find this out. Make sure your content is relevant to the image used for more impact.

9. Add an optimized web page on your website and link the image to that page. Users can access this page via the ‘back’ anchor on the new page when they find your page through Google Image Search.

10. Monitor the Number of Indexed Google Images
An important aspect of Google Image Search optimization is to monitor how many images on your website are indexed by Google if you have taken the right steps to optimize your image. Just type site: vinfotech.com and check the images indexed for vinfotech. Instead of vinfotech.com, just type in your website to get indexed images.