If you are in sales, great customer service and product knowledge are the basic foundation to your success. These skills will undoubtedly increase your production and earnings over time, but growing your business by word of mouth advertising and through past customers referrals will take time. Adding marketing and promotional products to promote your business will be an effective compliment to expand your business faster.If you are in the financial or real estate business, after you have completed a transaction and your customer is happy with your service, they may tell their friends and family for a few weeks. Unfortunately, after a few weeks the referrals will likely stop unless you maintain contact with them. A strong marketing and promotional campaign is a vital key to keeping up with your competition. Promotional campaigns use products that have your name, logo, and contact information on them to help you grow your business and develop recognition in your marketplace. When calling on your lead sources make your sales calls more effective and lasting by offering them useful products that will promote your services. Typical promotional products such as: pens, cups, flash lights, tape measures, and stress balls are all useful items in the real estate and financial industries. If you add a promotional campaign to your marketing endeavors, you should be able to lengthen the time your past customers and lead sources promote you and your business, thereby retaining a higher percentage of your past customers.Promotional items will also assist you in introducing a new services or products that you may want to offer. These new products and services may help you specialize and become more profitable. Becoming an expert in rehabilitation loans, first time home buyer down payment assistance loans, or zero down payment mortgage products and promoting your expertise through marketing and promotional products campaigns will decrease the time needed to capture new business and profits. You can create a marketing promotional campaign to maintain contact with past customers, reach out to new customers at events, or more effectively promote yourself through your sphere of influence. Creating an effective promotional marketing campaign will help you and your contacts spread the news of what you can offer. Promotional items should fit your business needs and can be used as closing gifts, informational pieces, generalized marketing, and employee retention and motivation.Creating an all-encompassing marketing system should utilize all aspects of personal promotion to reach your lead sources, these include: seminars, product knowledge, outstanding customers service, consistent contact, and retention systems to maximize your efforts. Developing a total marketing plan will enhanced your overall image as an expert and increases the likelihood that they will recommend their connections to you.
Best Way to Start a Photography Business
So you have a digital camera and you are thinking of turning your photography hobby into a successful business. But where do you start? From a logo, to a website, blogsite, domain name, email account, business card, camera equipment, lighting equipment, accounting software — you are feeling a little overwhelmed. The question is, what should you do first?Identify the one action that will make the biggest impactWhen starting any new business, you will have many things to do. The hardest part is knowing what to do first. Although, several things may be important, think to yourself, “what is the one thing that will make the biggest impact in launching my business?” For example, hiring a great accountant is important, but without any clients or income, this step will have very little impact in launching your business.Biggest impact for photography businessesGet a website! Getting a website will have the single greatest impact on starting a photography business. Certainly, word-of-mouth and referrals will bring you business as well. But, for example, if someone refers a business to you, what is the first thing you do? You go online and check out their website! Times have changed, getting a professional looking website is not difficult or expensive. There are many beautiful template photography website companies out there. You simply upload your own photos and content. You can even change the look of the website without any graphic design skills. Best of all, many of these companies help you set up your domain name and email accounts. These companies charge anywhere from $6 – $50/month on average. (Once your business is more established you may wish to hire a professional to design your website/blogsite – see branding below).What content should be on the website?Make sure to include your business name and location. So often I see photographers have forgotten to give their location! Don’t have a studio or a physical address? That’s okay. It is just important that you include the city and state/province that you work in. This is important for Google. You want your website to show up when someone searches for photography services in your city! For example, a potential client may type “Windsor Wedding Photographer” into a Google search. You want to make sure that you have mentioned on your website that you are a Wedding Photographer in Windsor!Also, be sure to give your contact information – email and telephone number. It is ideal to have this on your “contact” page, and at the bottom of every page on your website. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to contact you!Finally, write a little bit about yourself and what type of photography you do. People can’t hire you if they don’t know what you do!What images should I put on my website?Many new photographers worry that they don’t have enough photos for a portfolio page. Don’t worry! Less is often more. If you are starting a wedding photography business, put up some wedding related photos. Don’t have very many wedding photos? Try this: go to your local florist and buy a beautiful bouquet. Then take some beautiful detail photos of it. Ask a friend if you can take some detail photos of her engagement ring and wedding band. Slowly, as you get more clients your portfolio will grow and you can add more photos. If you are starting a kids portrait photography business and you don’t have a lot of photos of children – ask a friend if you can photograph her toddler for the website.I am by no means suggesting that you lie to clients about your level of experience. These are just some ideas on how to get supporting images for your website. Also, getting out there and taking more photographs is a great exercise in photography!Unsure of your company’s identity? What about branding?You always hear about people who haven’t started their photography businesses yet because everything behind the scenes, (branding, logo, studio, etc), isn’t perfect yet. They are afraid to start until everything is perfect. Chances are they will never be perfect – and they will never start. Your style and your company’s identity will become clearer to you the more you photograph. For example, you may decide that would like to photograph newborns only to discover, from experience, that you don’t have the patience. And you later realize that you really excel in the fast pace world of wedding photography.Things to think aboutThere are many simple/plain website templates out there that you can choose from, if you are still discovering your style and brand. You can refine the your website’s style later. Look at established companies – they are always updating their website’s style! Don’t wait until everything is perfect behind the scenes to start your photography company. You might just be waiting forever! Get your website up, because it is the one action you can take that will have the biggest impact on propelling your photography business forward. Good luck!
Beauty – Is It Physical Appearances or Self-Esteem?
Beauty is a universal concept that is hard to define, but is understood by all. In many societies, physical beauty is seen to have acceptable norms though some of these norms differ between cultures. We may have a hard time to explain when we are asked what is beautiful to us. However, if we were to point out a beautiful woman in a group, men and women do it easily and naturally. As the saying goes, when it comes to great beauty, we will know it when we see it.Not everyone admires beauty the same way though. Beauty is a subjective experience. It involves the individual’s feeling of attraction and emotional well-being. We often here the saying; “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. However, as society imposes its general expectation on women’s beauty, beauty evolves into a common expectation and a standard comparison between women.So what is a “standard” definition of beauty then? My best guess is, if we were to talk about women, it is the physical qualities that she possesses. It is the ability of the woman to give out intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the viewer’s senses. The admirer’s positive feeling of pleasure or goodness is usually derived from the woman’s body shape, clothes that she wears or how attractive her facial features are, amongst others.However, beauty can also be about the woman’s personality. It is about having compassion for and helping others, a shoulder to cry on, respecting others, respecting herself, project kindness to human and animals alike, loving others and of course, loving herself. This is described as inner beauty which comes about from having the right dose of self-confidence and a healthy self-esteem.While this is not usually the first thing that comes to our mind when we talk about beauty, inner beauty plays just as an important role in how beautiful a person appears to be. Maybe more so than outer beauty does.Inner beauty is not something that unattractive people say to our self to feel better. Inner beauty can be just as, if not more captivating as the external appearance can be.Inner beauty may be described as something that is experienced through a person’s character rather than by appearances. It is the real beauty of a person that goes far beyond just physical appearances.It is a woman’s inner belief that they are attractive that makes them more appealing to others. The glow of confidence and physical attractiveness comes from within her. Some of the most fancied personalities are not really physically attractive but their glowing confidence and self-belief makes them attractive to every member of the opposite gender.First impressions do not always depend on our physique or our facial features. We need to believe that it comes from within our self. That is where our true beauty lies. When we start a conversation, people will initially assess us; as pleasant or not-so-pleasant. As the conversation goes on, people will start to pick up the nice qualities and traits emanating from us, and people will then start to find us more and more beautiful or charming.When we love, appreciate and feel good about our self, we would feel more confident about facing and interacting with others. Outer beauty attracts glances while inner beauty makes someone stay. This is the secret to a healthy self-esteem.Naturally, we will notice a person’s physical appearance first. However, when a woman have bright eyes that flicker, a smile that warms the heart, a radiant glow that surrounds her when she walks into a room; she has obviously harnessed her inner beauty.The best part of inner beauty is the fact that unlike our outward appearance, inner beauty does not wrinkle, gray or diminish with age. It will only radiates stronger as we cultivate it.Only then will you see yourself as a truly beautiful woman.