Freelancing and consulting can often seem like an impossible juggling act, but if you keep these seven practical business tips in mind, your business will go from strength to strength.

Work out what you’re best at and express it clearly on all marketing material – niche marketing is a simpler and more profitable way to grow your business, rather than trying to be everything for everyone. The more detailed your customer avatar is – the simpler it will be for you to find them, connect with them and offer something of value. To start creating your customer avatar think of the following questions:

• Who is my ideal customer? Who would I like to work with?
• Are they able to pay my fees? Will they be willing to pay my fees?
• What problem do they have in life, that my offering will help them solve?
• Why is it important to get it solved?
• How many of those customers are out there in the marketplace?
• WHERE… (do they work? Where do they study? Where do they live?)
• WHAT… (do they eat, drink, read, listen to, are interested in?)
• HOW… (do they look for new products or services, do they choose their suppliers, do they pay the bills?)

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I’ve recently attended a great webinar where I learned a lot about newsletter trends for 2010 and beyond. So I thought I’d share my learning with you and here are some points that you can implement now to get more business throughout the rest of 2010!

Testing is important

Use your open and click rates to determine the potential strengths and weaknesses of your own campaigns. From the results you can identify areas to test to improve performance. Try split-testing subject lines, FROM name, newsletter title. Research and surveys show that email marketing spend is expected to grow and expand to $2 billion in the US by 2014. The other increase in Marketers’ budgets was in Social Media. This means that if you are not using newsletters yet – don’t miss a chance to get started before it’s no longer a “purple cow” of marketing. continue

Guest post by Barry James, Angel Revolutions.

Are newsletters a waste of time? Yes and no!

But if they take too much time to write and too much time to read then they do just waste everyone’s time.

The pace of life is such these days that it’s difficult to find the time to read a full newsletter – even if most of it is interesting. (Let’s face it the ‘filler’ articles that make up the bulk rarely are).

How much more difficult to find the time to write the stuff – especially if hardly anyone’s going to read it! continue

Facebook has more than 400 million active users. Recently it reported more traffic than Google Search. Most of Facebook users are 18-37 – adults with disposable income to spend.

That’s why advertising on Facebook presents a fabulous business opportunity. You can drive traffic to your website, connect with a huge community of your target customers, promote your services, products and special offers. What’s more – Facebook offers very cost-effective advertising opportunity through its own pay-per-click ads. However you can do it for free by just creating a business page or a group.

Pay-per-click advertising

Facebook allows businesses to purchase image and text-based ads that can be targeted to a specific demographic based on age, location, gender, marital status, interests and more. Therefore a luxury wedding planner in King’s Lynn can target women who are 25-40, engaged, within 20 miles from King’s Lynn and are college graduates. It’s impossible to achieve such targeting with Google AdWords as all you can specify is someone’s location.

Ads are charged on a cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (or 1,000 impressions, CPM) basis. You can set up a daily budget and a bid per click or impressions. The minimum daily budget is $1. Facebook will show a suggested bid range displaying what other advertisers targeting your demographic are paying. To get good results you’ll need to bid somewhere in the middle of the suggested range. continue

We often come across small business owners without a definite plan to follow up on their leads. They keep a collection of business cards from networking events, and have address books where they record contact details. But these are often used at random, if at all, and are sometimes simply forgotten. So what is a database, how does it differ from the card collection and why should a small business have one?

The answer is simple. Would you use a typewriter to prepare a proposal for your customer? Probably not. Same reasoning applies to managing your customer data. The business database is one of the most important assets in your business and, if used properly, it can generate a steady stream of income each time you turn to it.

A database is essentially a collection of information about something, in this case – about your customers and prospects. The main benefits over collecting paper cards are:

• Access: you can share access to the information between multiple team members, which you can’t do with cards.
• Flexibility: you can access the information wherever you are, without having to carry a big pile of cards with you.
• Accountability: you can track how well your business is doing in closing sales and converting leads into prospects.
• Security: you can lose the cards or your bag, and all the information with it. If your database is stored online it’s safe and secure no matter what.

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