Ten Things You Can Do To Improve Your Business

1.  Realize that business isn’t always fair.  Change what you can, accept what you must and keep moving forward.

2.  Think, then act.  One impulsive action or moment of anger can cause you a lifetime of heartache.

3.  You are in business for fun or to make a profit. Robert Townsend put best when he said, “If you aren’t having fun or making a profit, get the hell out.”

4.  Spend time marketing each day.  Even 15 minutes daily on marketing and planning will pay big dividends.

5.  Accept the judgments of your customers.  What YOU think or what the highest executive thinks pales in comparison to what customers think.

6.  Forgive and move on.  We’ve all gotten the shaft when running our business or in our career.  Hanging on to the pain hurts you much more than the person you resent, despise (fill in the term most appropriate to your pain).

7.  Don’t be afraid to fail, but do things wrong quickly.  It’s better to try and fail than succeed at doing nothing.  It’s also imperative that you do things wrong quickly before wasting lots of money and missing lots of opportunities.  Use testing and analytics in your marketing…test to find out what works best, measure for insight and understandings.

8.  Keep learning.  Keep your mind open to new ideas, activities and approaches.  Invest time and money on improving YOU.

9.  Appreciate what you have in your business and your life…the people, the opportunities, the joys and even the sorrows.  All of them enrich your life.

10.  Dream On.  It started with a dream and should continue with your dreams.  As Aerosmith says, “Dream On.”

Thanks RSS Ray!  The Wild Web Women at Web Marketing Therapy love you!!

RSS Ray is a business guru and host of the Online Marketing with RSS Ray Radio show about Online Marketing (show that airs Wednesdays at 1pm EST on http://www.wsradio.com)

True to form, Caroline Donahue has provided us with another fabulous post about how to play to win in the game of business. Read on for your inspiration of the week!

Caroline–Thank you so much for yet another fantastic post! WMT blog followers-enjoy!

**Guest Post from Caroline Donahue of Remabulous Coaching.

Business can be a game: Three tools that help you play to win.

Let’s face it- given the choice, you’d prefer to win in your business, right? You’d love to celebrate a tremendous victory, a slam dunk, or slide that championship ring on your finger.

So how do you make the equivalent happen for your work?

These three tips will help propel you to a higher RBI when you apply them consistently:

1. Focus on the outcome you are seeking. I have to thank Jariek Robbins, who I have been working with the past two months, for this one. If you focus on your outcome and measure your progress by how close you are to that outcome, you are more likely to succeed. Rather than making a lot of to-do lists that feel like obligations and busywork, simply shoot for the goal you want. Fall in love with results, not the elaborate process you have created that you think will take you there. You have succeeded when the end goal has been reached. Put your attention there.
2. Train your weak muscles. Many of us are taking on new roles by becoming entrepreneurs and owning businesses. I like to think of familiar skills as large muscles- biceps and quads that we can count on to carry a heavy load. However, we have a lot of other skills we need to learn and these are like the tiny muscles you find out about after a yoga class that tried new poses. Don’t expect all yoru skill sets to perform like large muscles. Do smaller reps of new activities or get help. For example- writing is a large muscle set for me, but bookkeeping is a small one. I can write for hours, but if I tried to do all my bookkeeping, I might tear something. Be gentle on yourself when you learn something new, practice regularly for short spans of time, and you will race ahead!
3. When you fall off the horse, get back on. A batter who makes a good hit one out of three times is considered exceptional and probably commands a huge paycheck and even more respect in the game of baseball. Yet we expect ourselves to hit 100% of the pitches that are thrown at us 100% of the time. This gives us no room for failure, which is one of the greatest learning tools out there. Congratulate yourself on the hits you make, and know that you will lean from those who pass you by. If you choose to take a lesson from each unexpected outcome, you will win every time a ball gets thrown your way. And if you gave up each time you missed a pitch, or never got back on the horse after you fell, you would be wasting that knowledge you worked so hard to gain. Failure is knowledge, too. The approach to failure Spanx founder Sarah Blakely describes above in this video is particularly useful- check it out!

So, try these tips out this week. If you focus on outcome rather than staring at a long laundry list of to-do items, I am sure that will push you ahead all by itself. But do remember to avoid straining new skill muscles will too much pressure and catalog those unexpected twists of fate as more value in your experience file and I am sure you will be slamming business baskets in no time!

Keep up the good work!

________________________________

Caroline Donahue is the founder and owner of Remabulous Coaching, which serves and entrepreneurs and business owners through business coaching and training in video marketing.  Caroline has over ten years’ experience working both in the worlds of psychology and the arts. She holds a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology and Expressive Arts from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and also trained at Johns Hopkins University, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, and in Expressive Arts at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. She works in person and through phone sessions, workshops, and teleseminars. Look for a new package that incorporates business coaching AND video training coming soon! When not firing up the creative community, Caroline is an avid reader, novelist, knitter, film fanatic and conscious bookkeeper.  She eagerly awaits the opportunity to work with you on creating your dream job as well as your dreamed-of life.

I was inspired to write this post because of a very enlightening conversation with a fellow marketer last week.  She works for a publishing company and opened a Facebook fan page a few months ago.  I was impressed with the large following she has managed to build and asked her “How do you do it?”  How did this company get so many people on Facebook to care enough to become fans?  Here is what she revealed:

First, she shared that she had to convince the “powers that be” in her organization that having a Facebook page would be a good idea.  They feared what many business managers fear- not having total control over what is said about them publicly.   She was able to address this by assuring them if there is negative talk about their company- it will be said regardless.  It would be preferable that it is said in a place where they can address the issue and listen to the feedback.  Perhaps this could even lead to an improvement in the near future.

Her next step was to organize the masses and utilize the company’s staff to launch the page. She held a meeting with the entire staff to explain what a Facebook page is and the purpose of it.  She answered their questions and addressed everyone’s concerns.   She also requested that the employees of the company open a Facebook profile and become fans of the page.  She was pleased when this resulted in the page obtaining around 30 fans.  However, she found the momentum stopped there.

She continued to post information on the wall about their products hoping this would attract interest from the Facebook community.  When this approach failed, she realized the most valuable lesson any social media marketer or business owner can learn.

People do not always care about your product or service.  They care about THEIR issues and finding solutions.

Once she figured this out, she approached the company Facebook Page with this lesson in mind.  Her goal was to become an industry resource for people in her field.

She joined Facebook pages and groups similar to hers to see what they were doing.  She participated in these communities by contributing to discussions, answered questions, and shared information.  She also researched the best resources in her field and began posting relevant links to articles and blog posts that offered helpful advice and tips.  She also sent fan updates frequently so the exhisting fans would have a reason to come back to the page.  In doing this, she began to attract more fans.

She revealed that she also sought any opportunity to promote their Facebook page.  She posted a link to it in the signature of her email and told me she saw a big spike in new visitors.  She also found that posting media such as photos and video and tagging them with relevant keywords attracts new visitors.

What I learned by our discussion is there is no magic program or quick fix to launch a successful Facebook page for your business.  While the service is currently free (take advantage while it still is!)- is does require planning and hard work to build your own online community.  But the payoff is tremendous!