Starting a small business is a fun and exciting, but an overwhelming, task. It takes a lot of patience and practice to get the business right. From the get-go, you will encounter some mistakes or delays due to lack of understanding or not enough time. For those setting up a new business, one thing that will be on your mind is how to make a profit. In this guide, you will discover the best ways to ensure your small business can make a profit.
Ask For Help
Asking for help as a small business is key to ensure you do not do everything by yourself. You will need the advice to expand your knowledge and facilitate further development of your business. Without help, you may suffer a loss by not being able to meet customer needs or know how to market your business correctly.
There are several businesses out there that focus on helping small businesses accelerate and create revenue, such as Stephen Hourigan of Elevate Ventures. Asking for help and advice is not something to be ashamed of. There are experts out there whose job it is to offer support in order to help businesses secure a financial profit.
Make A Business Plan
Market research is the core of a business plan and a business plan is your best protection against business heartbreak.
Of the many reasons to work through a business plan, the main one is this; when you’re done, you’ll know whether or not your proposed business idea can be turned into a profitable small business. When you get your business idea right and know you can stick to the plan, you will more likely stick to targets and be on track for making a profit.
Track Your Finances Regularly
Once you have systems in place for tracking things like time, expenses, and earnings, you need to keep an eye on those things regularly. Analyzing any changes can help you determine what’s working for your business and what isn’t.
Finance tracking is a startup essential that shouldn’t be overlooked. Without accounting for your incomings and outgoings, you will not know how much your business has made or spent. You will also lose track of how much more you need to earn to make a profit.
Ensure You Offer Good Service
A small business can gain a lot from spending time serving customers and meeting their needs. No matter what type of product or service you offer, providing a great experience to customers should always be a top priority. Doing so can help you build repeat business and even gain referrals, which essentially serve as free marketing.
Do everything in your power to absolutely delight your customer. Going above and beyond to deliver an amazing customer experience increases the chance of repeat bookings, and might inspire your customer to recommend your business. These are both positive levers on the unit economic model of a business.
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Whether through anecdotes or personal experience, we’re all familiar with business leaders who cut corners, inflate prices, make misleading product claims, slander the competition—and worse—yet sleep soundly at night. How can good people persist in bad business practices?
In conjunction with the spirit of the law is your business and personal ethics. Many people see ethics and business as separate entities. This belief is wrong. An individual’s business ethics and personal ethics must be aligned if one is to be a person of integrity. When a person of integrity does business, financial rewards follow.
When we build an ethical reputation, we will increase our profits.There is a positive relationship between business ethics and profitability. Our employees will be more dedicated to doing their jobs efficiently, and our customers will be more satisfied with our products and service. Loyal customers buy more products and give customer referrals.
Human beings are placed on Earth to grow spiritually, and honesty in business provides this challenge. The marketplace is a perfect testing ground for ethics. When this challenge is met, you can take satisfaction in your accomplishments and your legacy. You corrected your unethical behavior and embraced honest, transparent, and trustworthy business practices. Ethics is now taught to the next generation of businesspeople.
The Spirit of the Law
Of course, the letter of the law must always be met. But we should use a higher purpose in business decision-making—the guiding principle of the spirit of the law. A person may act in a way which is perfectly legal but not ethical. The key is to determine if a person’s deeds go beyond the letter of the law and reach the higher ethical standards of the spirit of the law.
After my salespeople learn the foundation of honest selling, I teach the higher levels of ethical selling, to go beyond the letter of the law. One of my favorite teaching examples is a time-honored story about the first offer.
Biblical and Contemporary Examples
It happened that a righteous businessman had some very fine wine for sale and a potential buyer came to him while he was in the middle of his morning prayers. The customer said, “Sell me this wine for such and such price.” The businessman did not answer, so as not to interrupt his prayers. The customer assumed that the businessman was unwilling to settle for the price offered, so the customer increased his original offer and said, “Sell me this wine for such and such price.” Still the businessman did not answer. This cycle was repeated with ever-escalating prices. Upon finishing his prayers, the businessman said, “From the time you made your first offer, I resolved in my mind to sell the wine to you. Therefore, I may take no greater amount than your first offer.”
The sages made this parable an example of proper ethical behavior, stating, “There would have been no question if he had said verbally, ‘I will sell you this for the price you offer,’ but even if he merely resolved silently in his mind to sell his product for the offered price, even if he did not articulate it, he must not go back on that resolution.”
This decision embodies the concept of ‘going beyond the letter of the law,’ to instead conduct your business within the greater spirit of the law, an ideal everyone should strive to emulate. The sages laud the righteous businessman for his exemplary behavior and proclaim the verse ‘speaks truth in his heart.’ The businessman ‘agreed in his heart’ to the original price; his silence was simply misconstrued by the buyer. Of course, making up one’s mind without verbalizing it does not constitute a binding agreement, but resolving to do so demonstrates an unusually high level of ethical behavior.
Two thousand years later in the twentieth century, the owner of a scrap metal business had a policy to always close his business for the Sabbath. The day after the Sabbath, he listened to numerous voice messages from a government agent offering to buy all the scrap metal in his possession for an urgent building project. Each of the buyer’s successive and obviously urgent messages increased the price because the government agent thought the initial offerings must have been too low. When the owner reviewed all the messages, he contacted the agent and explained that he would have accepted the first offer; he had neglected to answer the initial call, as well as all the subsequent calls, only because it was the Sabbath. He then indicated that he was prepared to let the government have all his scrap metal at the price of the first offer. The agent was so impressed by the owner’s ethical behavior that he made the firm extremely wealthy as the government’s main supplier of building materials.
Another example, what would you consider an advertorial? It’s an advertisement camouflaged to appear as a feature article. Is an advertorial legal—yes. But is it ethical?—no! By typesetting and carefully writing an advertisement as an unbiased opinion, the reader is misled, deceived into believing that the content is not commercial.
Print and Website Decision-making
Management should make business decisions based on delivering reader value. Beyond what is legal, does the magazine present promotional material as regular content? Is the ad-to-content ratio correct so the reader is delivered proper value? Does management investigate their advertisers to ensure that they have business integrity, and their product offerings are honest? Even an advertisement that has a negative reference to a competitor can harm your magazine’s or website’s reputation.
In today’s difficult financial times, is it wise to turn away companies willing to place expensive advertisements? Yes—if it is unethical.
When these types of questions factor into your decision-making, you are practicing the spirit of the law. Then, you will enjoy profitable long-term relationships with your readers and advertisers.
Ethical business is smart business. If you’re pondering what to do in difficult sales situation, and you’re unsure about whether it’s your responsibility to provide full disclosure by informing or warning the customer about a product’s limitations, then err on the side of caution, fairness, and goodness—go beyond the letter of the law. It may not be your responsibility legally, but it honors the spirit of the law.
About the Author
Joel Malkoff, a.k.a. the Ethics Giver, demonstrates that ethical business decision-making isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s the profitable thing to do. Over the course of his 45-year career as a business executive and entrepreneur, he has generated more than half a billion dollars in sales. A writer and speaker on ethical business practices and principles, he serves as general manager and vice president of a corporation that manufactures and sells medical and scientific research products worldwide. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he lives in Avon, Connecticut, with his wife, Lynn. Selling Ethically: A Business Parable Connecting Integrity with Profits is his debut book. Learn more at https://theethicsgiver.com/selling-ethically and https://www.amazon.com/Selling-Ethically-Business-Connecting-Integrity-ebook/dp/B08KSB9HY3.
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There is continuous competition among different pages online to get a higher page ranking. Different strategies are applied every day after some crucial changes only to get a higher rank than the competitor in the online marketplace.
Those working on their website for a very long period are well known for the SEO and its strategies, due to which they are ranking higher consistently, but newcomers face the issue.
They keep on thinking that the possible reason is that their page is unable to rank. To such people, the answer is SEO. The element missing in their online campaign is the SEO, a.k.a. Search Engine Optimization.
It is important that if you want to rank the website, then it should be properly optimized. If you cannot optimize it, it will be nearly impossible for you to rank your website.
If we take an overview, search engine optimization is just making some changes to your website to increase its visibility and ranking. If we see its importance, it plays an important role in the blog and business ranking online.
Some of the roles are described below in detail.
It Bring The Organic Traffic To The Website
The very first role of the optimization is to bring organic traffic to the website. If a person is looking for some organic growth and wants that their webpage gets some traffic automatically without sending any money, they should go for SEO.
Now there must be a question in your mind that SEO will increase the organic traffic reach, then the answer to this is simple. When a person inserts some keywords in their website as part of SEO, people will search from those words you have inserted in your website.
As they will search than Google start doing its work and see over millions of website. The pages where Google sees the same word as the visitor searched are shown in the Search Engine Result Page. That is why it is said that if your webpage is optimized, then there are high chances that your page shows up on the first page of SERP.
Due To SEO Crawler Will Be Able To Notice The Page Better
The crawler is the device that is used by Google to search among millions of websites published. It is a very simple concept that when a person searches online, then there are many websites out of which the crawler has to find the best content. Now the crawler has categorized the website. It will always ignore the website that has not done its proper SEO. If it is not done, how can good material be expected from such a website?
If your page has informative information, then it is also a waste as the crawler will not read it. It will select some page that has done its proper SEO no matter its information is as good as yours or not. That is why it is important to set it accordingly if you want your page to be noticed by a crawler.
Helps In Proper Advertisement
If you want to advertise your page, you must do SEO of your website; otherwise, the money you are about to invest will waste. People will invest money in advertisement copy but forget that they have to land the customer at their blog at last. That is why if the it is not good, then your first impression will not matter.
That is why it is said that if you want to advertise, get the SEO done first. It will work like a funnel, and every step needs to be smooth in the transition of advertisement to making that viewer a customer in which optimization of blog in the middle portion. You will notice the difference in return on investment with and without the SEO of the website.
It Plays A Major Role In Search Advertisement Ranking
All the marketers must be very well aware that when a page is willing to run a search advertisement, only the money paid is not important. With the bid, they place the score of the page must be high. If the score is low, then if you place a higher bid, you will not get the first position in search advertisement.
That is why to improve the score of the website; there is a requirement for proper SEO. You can contact the Just SEO company to get the optimization done. Now the website’s score will increase, and you will notice that you will get a good position with less money.
It Will Improve The Working Of Your Backlinks
The performance of the backlinks that you form on other websites is also dependable on the SEO that you will do. When you do the off-page SEO, then you add the backlinks to other websites. Now people will come to your website from the third party website. Now there can be two scenarios:-
If you have done the proper SEO, then the person who came will become your customer and regularly visit your blog afterward. He will notice that you have done some great work on your blog and are adding value to their life, which is very important for the page’s ranking.
The second scenario can be that after reading the backlink article, they get impressed and come to your website. Now, if the optimization is not done, then there will no mean of impression. It will ruin, and they will jump off, due to which the ranking of the site decreases.
Now it is your choice that which is the way you want to chooses for your site. But if you are smart enough, then you should go for the option of SEO. All you need to do is discuss the requirements and goals of yours from the online blog with the service provider, and they will help you make a strategy. After that, you will notice that how the rank of the it will boost up.
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Every company is looking for a way to grow its business. And this boils down to one simple thing, relationships. While often overlooked, finding business partners can yield significant advantages. It gives you the opportunity to increase your customer base, and market your company with minimal risk. But the hard part is finding like-minded business partners. How do you identify the right ones?
The Importance of Common Ground
If you want to create a mutually beneficial partnership, common ground is the best place to begin. Have a look at their values and if they align with yours, but also look at their ideal customers. You should also remember the importance of their journey. When you are trying to work with a company that provides something for you, it’s not just about the service, but understanding their journey can give you significant insight into their process. You can see that entrepreneurs like Haval Dosky, founder of Repeat Consultants, provide support but also understands it from the inside. Common ground, but also perspective, will help to cement the bonds.
Analyze Your Current Relationships
If you have a relationship with a potential business partner, you have to consider how the relationship benefits both of you. You have to remember the importance of forging relationships; it’s a lot of energy and time. Sometimes the best relationships are under your nose. And if you are in the process of taking action, it’s not just about what they can do for you, but it is about what you can do for them.
Find an Alternative Product or Service
When you are partnering up with a business, finding a company that has similar needs to your own is crucial, but it’s about making sure that you provide the yin to the yang. If you are looking for a company that compliments you, it focuses on the mutually beneficial aspects more than it being one-sided. For example, when you are a company that provides health products, finding a company that is compatible with you that ties in with your products are a fantastic way to help both sides.
Partnering With an Established Business
Thoughts may go to partnering with a startup, but it might also be in your interests to work with an established company. By identifying businesses with a strong social media presence or a large email list of clients will give you more suede. But it’s important to remember that you will be competing with other businesses. No doubt, they are receiving proposals on a regular basis. This is why you’ve got to envelop a good working relationship and focus on your networking capabilities. You can do it through a third-party, such as an outside business development firm, but this won’t have the personal touch.
Of all the essentials needed when it comes to developing a business, finding the right working relationships will provide you with the foundation for use to come. Partnering up with another business requires a lot of faith, functionality, and fantastic abilities. And finding a like-minded business partner is not easy, it requires a lot of leg work. But always remember that it’s about both sides now.
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eCommerce is one of the fastest-growing industries expected to occupy 22% of retail sales worldwide by the end of 2023. Though there is a lot of potential in the eCommerce industry, there is a lot of competition as well.
Many eCommerce companies manage to emerge as winners, while some show stagnated growth. In this article, you’ll learn about some of the common winning traits observed in top eCommerce businesses and how you can apply them to your own business.
1. Trustworthy Website
In the eCommerce space, building trust with your consumers is very important. Only when the users trust you will they be willing to have financial transactions with your business. So, having a trustworthy website is a common trait observed in most successful eCommerce websites.
Here’s how you can build trust with your consumers through your website:
Add abundant social proof in your website homepage, about page, and even product pages. You can add customers’ success stories, testimonials, trust badges, social media numbers, or anything else that will make you look like a trustworthy business.
Be transparent with your policies and ensure that the user is clear about your return and exchange policies. Disclose all hidden costs upfront and make your payment process as hassle-free as possible.
Display product reviews and ratings for all your products to be more transparent and real.
2. Premium Customer Service
Good customer service is key to running a successful eCommerce business. Top eCommerce businesses focus on providing premium customer service to ensure customer loyalty and increase repeat purchases.
You should try to be proactive with your customer service rather than being reactive. You can do this by adding self-serve solutions such as AI chatbots to your website. This will help clear most of the queries and complaints that your customers might have.
You should also try to use social media platforms for customer service. Create separate handles for customer service and ensure that you offer quick resolutions to your customers.
You can also set up Google alerts for your brand name so that you can monitor any mentions or reviews of your brand. Be it positive or negative feedback, ensure that you are quick and respectful with your responses.
3. Easy Returns, Easy Exchanges, and Quick Deliveries
Consumers today expect easy returns and exchanges from all eCommerce businesses. Statistics show that 92% of consumers will make repeat purchases if the returns are easy. Also, 67% of shoppers check your returns policy before making a purchase. So, having easy returns and exchanges is crucial if you want to improve your conversions.
Try to offer quick returns and exchanges for all the products for which it is possible. Ensure that you offer quick refunds for returns. You should also try to add exchange and return terms in each of your product pages, as this is one of the first things that the users will look for before making the final purchase decision.
Offering quick deliveries can also help you get ahead of competitors and offer a good customer experience. You can do this by ensuring that your eCommerce fulfillment provider has the capacity to offer quick delivery options such as same-day or next-day delivery.
4. High-Quality Product Images and Accurate Descriptions
No matter how good your products are, it is difficult to make good sales without high-quality images and descriptions.
Adding high-resolution images of your products from different angles will help your users get the look and feel of your products. This is one of the most prominent pain points of online shopping, and if you help your customers overcome this, then you’ll definitely see better conversion rates. You can also add product videos to get even better conversions.
It is also crucial that you add accurate product descriptions that state the color, dimensions, material, safety precautions, or any other important information about the products.
This step will make sure that your products look more trustworthy and appealing to your customers. Any objections that they might have that is stopping them from purchasing the products will likely vanish, which will again boost your sales.
So, perform thorough audience research and figure out the channels that your customers most use. These can be emails, social media platforms, online forums, marketplaces, or even mobile apps.
You can then devise a strategy that helps you promote your products across most of these channels. You can use these channels to create brand awareness or even for nurturing your existing customers.
Having an omnichannel strategy helps top eCommerce businesses to improve their metrics such as customer lifetime value, conversion rate, customer retention rate, and product sales. You, too, can improve these metrics by having an omnichannel presence.
6. Value-Packed Content
Offering valuable content is one of the best ways to bring your target audience into your sales funnel. When you add immense value to your customers by offering high-quality, relevant content, you earn their trust and become an authority in your niche.
When users start perceiving you as a trustworthy and credible brand in the niche, they will automatically drive towards making more and more purchases from you. So, ensure that you work on your content marketing strategy that exactly fits your audiences’ needs.
You can create content across various platforms such as website blogs, email newsletters, social media platforms, YouTube, etc. This, again, comes to audience research. Analyze and understand the platforms that work best for your ideal buyer persona and offer value-packed content on these channels.
Final Thoughts
Though any eCommerce business’s success largely depends on their products, other factors like their marketing strategy, customer service, and user experience also have a massive role to play in it.
Using the tips in this article, you can start working on the top common traits observed in successful eCommerce businesses, and you’ll soon watch yourself moving in the same direction.
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