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The customers are coming. Are you ready?

If you operate a retail store, you have less than one month to make a big success of this holiday season.

I’m sure you know how to run your store but I’d like to give you some tips to contribute to your success.

1. Few stores have enough staff working the floor. Schedule more staff than you need to work the registers and stock the floor. It’s stupid to operate with only sufficient staff to ring up sales. The goal isn’t to get the customers out the door as quickly as possible. Shoppers at this time of year have no idea what they want and are highly suggestible. You should schedule enough staff to keep the lines short at the cash registers and have sales people circulating the store suggesting items to customers. The goal is to sell as much as possible. If everyone is ringing up sales, no one is selling. Adding staff to work with customers will produce more sales. Retail help is CHEAP. A floor person can generate at least $100 per hour. Don’t be cheap, be smart.

2. Train your people. Retailers make the mistake of treating the holiday season as a “busy” time. It’s not just a busy time. The rules of engagement are completely different in November and December than they are for a busy Saturday in August. First of all, people are not buying for themselves at this time of year as they are during most of the year. This changes the whole shopping dynamic because people know what they like for themselves but find it much harder to choose something for someone else. The customers need more assurance. They want to know that their selections are good ones.

Teach your staff to help people shop for other people. NEVER ask, “can I help you?” Try this, “Hi, may I ask who are you shopping for? I might be able to suggest something great.” Do you want to knock your customers over with great service? Ask them “Is there anything I can do to make your shopping easier?”

Another big difference about this time of year is men will be shopping in stores or departments where they do not normally shop. Help them. Men are looking for a way to buy their way out of the season. There’s an old expression in retail that says women browse for a pair of pants and men hunt down a pair of pants.

Lastly, budgets mean nothing in December. People who had carefully planned to spend $50 on mom will spend $100 to get mom checked off their list.

3. Keep the goods on the sales floor, not in the back room. The store’s shelves must be full. When the amount of goods on the shelves begins to thin, the available selection looks picked over. That’s another reason to keep plenty of staff working. Small stores tend to stock and organize when things slow down. That’s the Sears way of doing things. You want your store as nice and full as possible when the most people are shopping in your store. As obvious as that sounds, you’ll seldom see it in practice. As soon as things slow down, around 9:00 p.m., everyone is folding sweaters and bringing out goods. Don’t bring carts on the floor during the busy time. But you can bring out goods in a constant flow of small boxes. When you bring a box out, watch the crowd flock to it.

4. Shock your customers with service. Offer to carry bags to their car. Offer separate receipts for each item. Sure, that’s a pain for you but it’s a wonderful service for the customer. Have envelopes handy and offer to put receipts in envelopes. You could run off some nice stickers for the envelopes saying something like, “gift receipts from Mandy’s Boutique”.

Get a pile of $5 cards from the food court or a near by coffee shop. You can probably get a big discount from your own food court vendors. If a customer spends over a certain amount, give them a card and tell them to take a break on you. Don’t advertise this. Just do it. Building goodwill through service is a lot cheaper than marking everything down 3 weeks before Christmas. Make it so fun to shop in your store your customers will tell their friends about you. Sell everything and you won’t have to take mark downs.

5. Offer gift boxes before the customer reaches the register. Show them a particular item in a box. You are selling convenience. Customers see your wonderful staff doing half of the project of wrapping their purchases. That’s much better than asking customers if they want some boxes at check-time and then just putting flat cardboard in their bags.

If you don’t have gift boxes, go get them, dummy! ANYTHING in a box will sell as you get closer to the end of the season. Display lots of items in boxes. Guys especially will appreciate seeing things boxed. It completes the picture. They see a robe hanging and think, “maybe she’ll like that”. They see a robe in a box and think, “I’m done shopping”.

You don’t need to box everything in the store. You can box samples for display. Next to the hanging robes, put one in a box. Your staff can switch it for the customer’s correct size and color. That’s a service, right? You should have a box for everything you sell. When people see a boxed item, they buy it.

5a. More about the box thing. If it’s in a box, suggest it. When guy buys a robe, suggest a nice boxed pair of gloves. Add-ons are easy to sell when boxed. Go to Sears and look around. They put screwdrivers in boxes during the holidays. Sears gets that part of the season right.

All 5 ½ of these items relate to giving good service. If you train your staff to provide extraordinary, remarkable, outstanding and incredible service, you won’t be discounting your inventory as early as your competitors.

Holiday shoppers want to finish their shopping, not to shop. Make it easy and fun to shop at your store and people will try to finish their shopping chore with you.

Do not run out of boxes. That’s inexcusable this time of year.

Have a great season!

Chris Reich, Author of TeachU’s Business Talk Blog
Chris@TeachU.com

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If you want to driving traffic to your website, one of the most important SEO tactics is link building. Link building can help to increase your ranking on popular search engine like Google and Yahoo and can also help you to increase your amount of referral links to your site. There are a variety of different ways that you can build links to your site, but you want to make sure that you use the most effective methods possible. The following are four of the best ways to build links to your site.

Online Directories

One of the best ways that you can build links to your site is by using online directories. There are a variety of different directories that allow you to submit your site pages to them. Some directories may be free, while others will charge a fee to list your website on it. It is also important that you have your website listed in the right category as well so you will bring targeted traffic to your website.

Press Releases

Another great way to build links to your website is to submit press releases to the media about your website. You can use press releases to present great information about your site to the online world, and there are many free press release directories to choose from. You can also submit press releases to other press release directories for a small fee as well. This will help to drive more traffic to your site and will also provide you with even more referral links to your site as well.

RSS Feeds

You can also use RSS feeds as a great way to build links to your site as well. This allows you to have your content on other websites by using an RSS feed. You can have your RSS feeds appear on other sites that relate to your site so you can send targeted traffic to your site. This is also another great way of building links so that your site will rank better on the search engines.

Related Websites

Yet another great way to build links to your site is to get your site linked on another website. This is not also the easiest thing to accomplish, but sometimes you can find sites that are willing to do a link swap with you. A link swap allows you to put up someone else’s link on your site, and in return they will put up your link. This is an excellent way of building links if you can get other website owners to agree to it.

Your ability to build quality links to your site can actually result in the success of your online business. Build a great deal of quality links to your site, and it will improve your search engine rank, which will in turn improve your business.

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There are many conflicting theories about color and layout of a website, however I would like to list a few rules that will help you improve your website visitor experiences.

I have seen literally hundreds of landing pages and websites that have great sales copy, are promoting quality products, and have a lot of potential to be a great, but the page looks horrible. Today we are going to focus on the readability and layout of a website.

The purpose of a landing page or website is to get your visitors to read what you have to say. Whether you’re selling products and services, or providing useful information, you need to be able to effectively communicate with your visitors for them to take the action you desire. That action could be clicking on a link, signing up for a newsletter, or purchasing a product. The size and color of your text play a huge part in communicating your message to your visitors. Having Black Text, on a white background is THE easiest form of text to read.

Using color schemes that clash, or cause the text to be difficult to read will many times cause your visitors to leave your page immediately. If you want to use a different color background or text color, make sure that readability is not negatively affected. Below are a few rules that will help you improve your website.

1. Do not use dark text with a dark background. Dark text on dark background makes it hard to distinguish text from the background color. Thus making your eyes have to focus harder.

2. Do not use text colors that clash with background color. White text on a black background has a “glowing” like affect that makes your text hard to read. Red on blue also creates a negative glowing affect.

3. Do not use large text for your main sales copy or body paragraphs. It is ok to use larger text for links and headlines, but the main text of your page should be Arial Size 2 (12pt). Arial Size 2 is the internet standard.

4. Do not waste the space at the top of the page with unnecessary graphics, flash, or banners that have no purpose. Simply listing the name of your website, or domain name is a very poor use of this prime real estate space. The first fold of your website is the most important space that you have because it is the section of the page that is visible as soon as your page loads. Do not take up this space with unnecessary graphics, flash, or banners. A Strong headline that states the benefit of your product or service is always better than a banner that has no purpose.

If you are struggling with site design or if its taking too much of your time, here’s some tools that can greatly help you.

Site Rubix: Not free but well worth the investment. Cost less than most website builders. This website builder enables you to create professional looking websites within 5 minutes, all without any Html knowledge.

DreamWeaver: This software is allows you to build visually appealing websites without Html skills, but may take you awhile to get past the learning curve that the software presents. DreamWeaver is one of the more popular but expensive website builders.

Nvu: It’s free, but will take you longer to make a website and generally the site will not look as professional.

Remember, your website serves a purpose, whatever that purpose is make sure your visitors can easily read and understand message. I hope the tips provided above assist you in creating a professional looking website that you can take pride in.

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The unique power of promotional products is the ability to place targeted marketing messages in front of people during their everyday lives in a manner which produces less waste than traditional marketing methods, but keeps the messages top of mind with prospects.

A broad definition of a promotional item is as follows: any useful item which contains branding (like a logo, marketing message or contact information).  The meanings of ‘useful’ and ‘branding’ have been stretched and expanded over the years, but the idea remains relatively simple.

For example, Google typically gives out tech-y items which are not necessarily related directly to their business.  Some examples include: a mini-fridge, a lava-lamp, or a digital picture frame.  These items are intended less for direct-response generation, and more to enforce their brand as a chic, retro-cool organization.

There are four attributes that your promotional products must possess in order to be successful:

Your promotional gifts must have four specific attributes to be successful:

1.  They must feature an effective marketing message:
The call to action is one of the most overlooked attributes of a promotional product.

2.  Audiences must be carefully selected for targeting and qualification:
Businesses just can’t afford to market to everyone.  The goal is to get your promotional gifts into the hands of trusted and prominent industry personas.

3.  Promotional items must be audience-appropriate:
The best case scenario of a mismatched product is no response, and the worst is negative PR!  Imagine sending a sausage and cheese gift basket to a vegan group…

4.  Timing is everything:
Even if your product, message and audience selection are perfect, it all falls apart with improper timing.  The only difference between a grandfather clock and a log is timing!

Partnering with a person or firm who is experienced in the world of promotional products is a great shortcut to making sure these four objectives are fulfilled.  Experience is the key to producing a well-timed, targeted, appropriate and effective promotional gift.

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If you have been marketing your MLM business online for any while, you must probably realize the importance of linking your website to others of similar content to get quality website traffic.

This strategy for generating website traffic can help the search engines, particularly Google to determine the importance of your website and therefore assign the proper page rank to you. The higher the page rank, the more website traffic you will get.

It used to be that the more links, the better, leading to higher website traffic.

When Google changed their algorithms a few years ago, however, the sheer number of links because less important for website traffic than the quality and relevance.

Many network marketers have one or more replicated affiliate sites they market. Getting quality website traffic that will convert to sign ups and sales is a common challenge in this case.

There are many tools available for automatically building links to your website. Link exchange directories are a good tool to get more website traffic.

Here are four methods to drive website traffic to your affiliate site:

Post Articles

Publishing and posting articles is one of the most effective ways to create organic website traffic. This gives you an advantage as it gets incoming links to your website. Well written articles bring more website traffic for a long time because they stay on the internet for a long time.

Optimize Your Website

Search engines will examine both the internal and external profile of your website to designate a rank to a web page. Internal profile of a website includes usage of meta tags, heading tags, keywords, targeted content, and internal linking of website. External  profile of your website defines thewebsites that are linking to your website.

Replicated MLM websites are typically optimized for the most frequently searched keyword phrases specific to a certain target market.

Anchor Text

Anchor Text refers to the clickable text of a hyperlink. Anchor Text can have a big impact on target website traffic as well as the search engine rankings.

Anchor Text lets the search engines know the content of the web page it links to. The right Anchor Text improves your website’s search engine ranking.

A good way to set up anchor text for an affiliate site is to purchase a redirect url and then put the anchor text using the correct keyword in that url.

Tools

Website tools can make your website user friendly, getting you more website traffic. New scripts and innovative schemes for the visitor help you get more inward links. This in turn builds more website traffic. You can offer free e-books, or introduce new exciting sections relevant to your website. This will make your website enticing for the visitors.

Getting more website traffic for your MLM business is a critical activity that can make or break your online marketing. Learning and consistently using a few simple but powerful methods will drive that website traffic that will convert to sign ups and sales.

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There are thousands of home based business opportunities on the Internet. They promise you a lot of hype, but very few of them can deliver. The truth is, that like anything else in life, you’ve got to put serious work and time into a home based business. Anyone that tells you otherwise is only out to get your money.

But there is a way to be in business for yourself and it doesn’t have to take an eternity to do it. The most obvious way to short cut the learning curve of getting into a home based business for yourself is to copy what others are doing that are already in business. A kit or DVD or ebook by itself can be a huge stepping stone to helping you start a home based business, but in order to keep it going, you’ve got to dig deeper than just that.

So how do you start a home based business? Here are 3 key elements;

1. Figure out what kind of business you want. It needs to be something you can find joy in doing. If you absolutely hate the work you’re going to be doing in your new business or if it’s boring, it’s going to be very hard to get it running and making you a profit. Do something that’s fun!

2. Keep it simple. For starters, keep your plan and business simple, and then add upon it as you progress. There are all kinds of businesses that you can start, but are they simple to implement? Can you start it today?

3. Start from where you are now. Whatever business you want to start, see if you can start that business from your current job now. For example, if you’re wanting to start a cleaning business, you could begin to offer your employer cleaning services. You can also offer cleaning services to the vendors that provide products and services to your employer.

These are just basic guidelines to help you in getting into your own home based business. At some point, you will need to inform yourself on how to start. But you need to be balanced and know that no matter what kind of ebook or kit you purchase, you are the key ingredient to success. You will need to consistently work at it until you’ve got it up and running. You may be asking yourself what kind of home based business is simple and quick to start without a lot of muss or fuss?

One of easiest and most lucrative businesses is the cleaning business. Believe it or not, every business needs cleaning. And they will pay you good money to do it. Best of all, cleaning doesn’t require fancy equipment or university degrees. You probably already have most of the tools you’d need to clean a basic office in your home right now!

The good thing about an office cleaning business is that you can get started with a basic vacuum cleaner, broom, Windex, trash bags, mop and a few cleaning fluids.

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