Tap Into Your Own Talent

Tap Into Your Own Talent
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When I was searching for a career, my dad gave me advice I still follow today: Find what you do brilliantly, and do more of it. Over the years, I've learned that this philosophy enables you to find your niche and discover unique methods to achieve your goals.

As an entrepreneur, you often jump at any chance to expand your business. However, your business's biggest and best asset is you. It's your expertise that makes your business unique and leads to the most efficient growth opportunities.

The owner of a jewelry store frequently updated the gems she carried but was never able to dramatically increase her sales. She thought her clientele might buy a broader line of products, so she added religious statues to her store. But ultimately, her lack of familiarity with these items caused the strategy to fail.

On her second try at expansion, she decided to delve further into her core area of specialization. She bought jewelry designed and made by local artists. It paid off. Her current customers and her new artists spread the word about her updated business, and her store became a shopping destination.

Creating product extensions within your area of expertise expands your customer roster. Increase your chance of success by focusing on what you do best -- and do more of it.

1. Tap into the innate power behind what makes your business unique. Growing your business based on your inherent strengths allows you to discover dynamic expansion possibilities. Use your intuition, and ask your employees and colleagues for help on how to rework or redesign your core product to appeal to a broader market. For the jewelry store owner, it was her expertise in gems that allowed her to sell the stones in multiple ways.

2. Shift from selling to actively listening. Become relentlessly focused on broadening the appeal of your core product by engaging your customers. What new uses have they discovered that may not have occurred to you? Ask them to be direct and truthful, and keep a log of their suggestions. Tapping into this rich vein of recommendations allows you to jump-start new growth opportunities.

3. Convert the benefits customers share into product features. Use the recommendations offered by your customers to construct new uses for your core product. Regularly reinventing your product with fresh benefits keeps your customers interested and excited. It was Arm & Hammer's customers who informed the company of alternative uses for its top-selling baking soda product. The company has now expanded its core product into numerous other uses, including cleansers, deodorizers and beauty products.

4. Gain loyalty by thanking people creatively. Thanking people for sharing their ideas deepens customer loyalty. It also increases word-of-mouth advertising for your business. A sandwich shop owner who was famous for his use of cheeses decided to name his weekly specials after customers who made distinctive recommendations. They brought their friends and families into his store to see their names and pictures up on his "Say Cheese" board.

Keep your network of customers and colleagues informed of your product enhancements. Your enthusiasm will encourage them to tell others about your business. And more important, it will inspire them to share even more product-transformation ideas with you.

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Marketing With Myspace?

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For those who may not have heard of it, http://MySpace.com is an enormous "social networking" website that has taken the internet by storm. As of early 2007, it was estimated that nearly half of the American populace over the age of 14 had at least one account at MySpace, with the result of account numbers approaching 150 million as of this writing. Every day thousands of new accounts are created at MySpace, many of these for marketing purposes. But is it a good idea to use this vast resource for marketing and attempts at making money online?

The story goes that MySpace was originally designed with musicians and artists in mind, even thought its founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe were clearly tried-and-true businessmen themselves whose previous businesses included selling email addresses to marketers, resulting in numerous complaints about spamming. The long and tumultuous history of MySpace ended up with young Tom and Chris making a fortune when MySpace was bought by megamedia maven Rupert Murdoch for hundreds of millions of dollars. Murdoch promptly aimed to turn MySpace into another of his corpulent cash cows.

With such a background, it would seem that MySpace would be a rich mine for marketing and marketers, and many people believe that it is. In fact, many marketers have made thousands - some, rumor has it, even millions - of dollars on MySpace, and an entire industry of MySpace marketing techniques and products has cropped up, including ebooks, video courses and software. Some of these methods and products are legit, in the sense that they play by the MySpace rules, but a number of them violate MySpace's rigid "anti-marketing" terms of service. This fact has not stopped either unwary or unscrupulous individuals from using these services to create a massive amount of accounts with automated software that includes the ability to add thousands of friends per day, for example, essentially developing a huge "mailing list" to send messages and bulletins to. MySpace's non-marketing population, however, becomes peeved with the endless solicitations to download ringtones and engage in other marketing ploys. With enough complaints from the MySpace community, these accounts are quickly deleted, without notice. With such a large number of accountholders, however, not a few innocent individuals have gotten caught in this trap as well and had their accounts summarily removed. The question remains then, can the MySpace community bring fruits to its laborers? Technically, yes, because MySpace's purported purpose is to showcase talent and creativity, such that musicians and artists, for example, are actually encouraged to market or "show themselves off."

All of the marketing prohibition appears odd in consideration of the fact that MySpace itself appears to have been devised with the desire of targeting the youthful demographic of 18-35, with its large amount of disposable income. MySpace itself uses the personal information provided by users to sell to them, but its TOS are evidence that it is jealously guarding its market. Nevertheless, even while adhering strictly to MySpace's terms of service there are certainly "kosher" ways to make money on this megasite, and many will continue to do so. With an enormous online presence that has eclipsed even Google, it seems that MySpace and its bevy of hungry artists and marketers are here to stay.

By: Jamie Clarkson -

Jamie Clarkson has been making money online since 1997. For more information about Internet Marketing, you can go to supermarketingaffiliates.com.

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How to Delegate Effectively

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Many small-business owners believe they can save time by telling their employees both what to do and how to do it. After all, in most cases they initially had to do all of the jobs now held by their employees, so it makes sense to save them the effort of trying to figure things out for themselves…right?

Wrong. Delegation is a better approach, because it launches employees into effective, independent action and saves time and resources in the long run. Each situation and assignment is unique, but there are three simple yet powerful steps that you can take to delegate more effectively:

1. Understand whether you are making a request or issuing a command. A request allows the person to say, 'No, thank you,' whereas a command is not optional.

2. Be sure to make your request or command clear by including the following points:

The task you want done.
The reason it needs to be done.
When it needs to be done.
What resources (people, dollars, technology) you are making available for its completion.
What you expect the final product to look like.
How you will make yourself available to answer any questions.
An agreement on a midpoint check-in.

Faulty assumptions in any of these areas can result in problems and delays.

3. Don't skip your midpoint check-in. If, at that point, you find the person or team way off base, you may be tempted to micro manage the remainder of the project or task. Don't. Instead, reassess whether you made a crystal clear request and whether your people are capable and motivated. If you need to clarify your task then do so. If your people are not capable and motivated, then reassign the task.

Delegating effectively helps you make the most of your resources, allows for greater overall productivity, and launches your employees into effective, independent action.

David Peck
Founder
Leadership Unleashed
San Francisco, Calif.

From BusinessWeek.com.

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