Special Speech

Sales leads are the lifeline of most small business owners, business professionals, and salespeople, especially in B2B marketplaces. Sales managers pressure their staff to get more sales leads and close more sales. But, you cannot close sales, even with the best sales closing techniques, without leads. It all starts with a lead.

So, where do you get sales leads? Where do leads come from? There are plenty of sources for leads with some being better than others. Here is my list of ways to generate sales leads:

Customer Inquiries: A customer inquiry about your product or service is the best source of new business imaginable. The customer has sought you out so you know that he is already interested in your product or service. In this case, it is your job to keep that customer and be sure that he does not look elsewhere. You need to know your product inside out, know the features and benefits, and make sure the prospect likes you. Your closing ratio should be highest with customer inquiries.

Customer Referrals: When a current customer refers a colleague to you it is the same as him vouching for you. There is nothing better than this as a “trust” factor has already been developed. He would not give you a referral if he did not trust you. This is a good reason to ask for testimonials from all your clients. Your closing ratio from customer referrals should be high as well.

Advertising: There are many places where you can advertise your services, some expensive, some cheap, and some free. This includes yellow pages, flyers, and online business directories, classifieds, and websites such as trade-pals.com, craigslist.org, and LinkedIn.com. Your closing ratio should be good with advertising as well.

Cold Calling: Not everybody can cold call well. If you make an attempt at cold calling be prepared to put a lot of time and energy into it and be prepared for a lot of rejection. A lot of busy executives and decision makers are unresponsive to cold calling; it is interruption marketing and that usually doesn’t work out well, especially if you called someone unknowingly that was on a “do not call list.” However, it is still possible to generate some new business through cold calls just make sure that it isn’t the only think you do to generate sales leads. Expect your closing ratio to be quite low with leads generated from cold calling.

Sales Lists: Companies such as InfoUSA, ZapData, and Dun & Bradstreet compile and sell targeted lists of contact names in specific industries, geographic locations, and company sizes of your choice. From this information, you can cold call, email, or do a direct mailing campaign to reach specific executives or decision makers. The closing ratio here should be better than doing random cold calls, but still not as good as direct customer inquiries or business referrals.

Tino Buntic’s website, TradePals provides free B2B and B2C sales leads to entrepreneurs and small business owners across The United States and Canada.

Online business has now been a trend in the modern day of doing
business. It is an effective way to make product selling and
responding to client orders or comments. With this trend, all of
us are hooked to do it. In order for us to build an online
business, here are the following tips that we need to know:

1. Register a domain. It is important to have this item because
you needed a contact to host the website you are planning. Of
course, you must make bargains with different sectors having
business like this.

2. Hosting account setup. Having a private account for your
website will truly help.

3. Create a simple web site. As we all know it, your website
will say all about your business. It will be your window to
potential clients. So when you make it, be read and be able to
attract huge number of purchases.

4. Upload files to the designated website. All information needs
to be placed in the website for all customers to know what you
are selling or marketing. Give them all the needed data. These
items will now serve as proofs that your product is good enough
to be patronized.

5. Auto-responding component setup. Customers make an inquiry
about a product or service is a nice start up business. For this
reason, an online form that will convince them to make inputs
related to orders, etc. is surely a hit. It is more effective if
you can provide an auto-responder because customers need not to
wait long for your answer.

6. Order process automation. The faster you transact business,
the more you win great number of clients. It is effective to do
it online because majority of the people are hooked on the
internet’s light.

Formulating a Great Idea To build any online business, begin
with its concept. Online business is more powerful than the
method of doing business before. Imagine, everyone has to
personally go to a store to buy items but now you can just do it
in a single click. After clicking the desired item, you will be
prompted to confirm payment details. Before payment was only
done in cash, but now, you need to have an ATM or credit card.
If everything is already done, then that’s it. You will just
have to wait for your ordered item to come in front of your
door. As simple as that!

If you plan to make an online business from the beginning, it is
vital to make sure you are starting with nice ideas for your
business. You must think what you can do best and start from it.
Widen your horizons by doing researches related to your
weaknesses. Make those liabilities of yours into great assets.
By doing these things, you will be a surefire winner of your
endeavor.

What are the in-demand products online? Based from surveys, the
following are the products commonly being bought via internet:
1. Computer products and accessories. It is high-tech world
nowadays and the need for computers and other devices are
increasing. This is a big source of possible sales because it is
will be noticed by the public.

2. Books and other references. Majority of the people loves to
read books of all sorts - it can be fiction or non-fictions,
biographies, academic subjects, fashion magazines, etc.

3. Travel packages. To advertise the latest tour packages and
cool discounts!

4. Clothes. What’s in and what’s hot in the fashion industry is
the usual content of this advertising.

5. Music (audio CDs). We all love music so it is another mine to
make business.

6. Gifts for all occasions. The many occasions we celebrate can
be a good source of income to all aspring online businessmen.

7. Investments. Investing money or capitalizing on a business is
one sure method to attract people. It has big impact because you
are proposing to them a way to make money.

The most important thing when you setup online business or all
businesses is to make a detailed plan. Plans for all the
expenses, the activities involved, the strategies that you will
be doing in your business and other constructive factors. If you
do this, it will keep you motivated throughout your business
from start to end - a successful way on top!

With tax season coming upon us, I decided to sit down with Amanda Mills of Loose Change, Inc. and capture some of the wisdom she’s gained in over 20 years experience as a financial and business management consultant for artists.

The tax system can be hard on artists. Artists just don’t fit into a typical career path of making a set amount of money and then increasing that slightly year-by-year.

Here are the 7 most important lessons I learned from speaking with Amanda about artists, money and taxes.

1. Make your passion into a business. Claiming to the world, the government and yourself that your art is a business is a hugely important step that requires courage and confidence. Reporting the income you generate from your art shows that you’re taking your art and yourself seriously.

Actions: Consider the beliefs that are underlying your decision of whether or not to report your earnings as an artist. And by all means, consider hiring a professional like Amanda Mills to help you out.

Amanda’s clients value her unique expertise and understanding of the arts because she takes them seriously. Other accountants might look at the small earnings of an artist and ask, “Why bother?” Amanda treats your identity and earnings as an artist with respect and gives them the attention they deserve.

2. Fund your passion with a supplemental job. A “day job” doesn’t have to be something that makes you miserable. If it is, it’s costing you a lot more than you’re earning and you’d be better off finding something else.

Look at the big picture - your supplemental job doesn’t have to be something you’re passionate about; its function is to provide the funding for what you ARE passionate about.

Here’s where a supplemental job can really make things easier with taxes. Let’s say your supplemental job is teaching at a university, and you make $80,000 a year. You’re also a sculptor, and you’ve established your sculpting as a business.

You spend $40,000 on your sculpting in a year. Because it’s a business, you can claim that as a business expense. So, instead of paying taxes on the $80,000 you earned at your supplemental job, you only have to pay taxes on $40,000. That could save you over $13,000 in taxes.

Action: Weigh out the costs and earnings of your “day job”. Consider the financial costs (child care, gas, transit, parking, clothing, supplies, training, etc.), time costs (travel time, time spent at work, bringing work home with you, etc.), mental costs (getting distracted trying to solve work problems when you’re at home, or other stressful thoughts related to work), and lastly the emotional costs (being miserable in a job you don’t like, interpersonal conflicts with colleagues, or feelings that the job or company is not aligned with your personal values).

3. Art is life and life is art. For artists, there’s much more of a blurred line between personal and professional life.

Whether you’re taking a trip, having lunch with a friend or seeing a movie, chances are that what you’re doing will influence your creative work in some way.

And if you’re not directly absorbing inspiration, you’re fueling it in your conversations, by talking about your work. And so these activities can often be deducted as business expenses.

Action: Keep track of everything you’re spending money on and keep notice of how it affects the business of your art. Get receipts for everything and keep these in a folder, envelope or box marked, “Expenses”.

4. Live at the bottom of the curve and keep your footprints small. Artists often have an irregular flow of income coming in, so managing cash flow can be tricky. It’s important to see the low times (when less money is coming in) as “normal”, and budget yourself to be able to live on that. Keep your footprints small by minimizing the costs of your lifestyle.

Then, when good times happen and some money is rolling in, you’ll be able to take care of some bigger things - get the car fixed, for example, or put some money aside for the next low time.

Action: Save three to six months of living expenses. Start small, just by putting aside one week of expenses. This is the best step you can take to reduce the impact of a fluctuating income.

5. Flatten your income. Artist incomes can vary wildly from year to year. One of Amanda’s jobs is to “flatten” a client’s income out from one year to another. Sometimes that’s purely on paper and sometimes that’s through strategic actions on the part of the artist.

It’s especially important that by your third year in business, you’re showing some earnings as an artist (that’s often the “red flag” point of time for the tax collectors).

Amanda recommends that her clients help this along by making extra efforts to book shows, apply for as many grants as possible, or by donating their artwork to charity.

Actions: Be mindful of the ebb and flow of your income, and how that will show on paper at tax time; not just this year, but in the history and future of your art business. Also, be sure and tell your tax preparation specialist about any upcoming opportunities on the horizon.

6. Think ahead and get your records organized. Contrary to the myth of the “flaky artist”, Amanda finds that most artists are quite organized.

Actions:

1. Get started by checking out the resources at Amanda’s Artbooks site (see below).
2. Find all of your revenue and expense receipts, sort them and add them up.

7. Come to peace with paying your taxes. Think of it as rent for your country. If you’re making money at your art, get someone to figure out what percentage of your gross income goes to taxes, and send in your taxes as regular payments throughout the year.

Otherwise, unless you’re incredibly disciplined at setting these amounts aside, you’ll end up scrambling to come up with this big lump sum of money at tax time. This is a recipe for fiscal disaster.

Action: Decide upon quarterly or monthly tax payments, or perhaps pay after you’ve received a big payment such as a grant or a paid lecture.

© Linda Dessau, 2006.

Linda Dessau, the Self-Care Coach, helps artists enhance their creativity by addressing their unique self-care issues. Feel like your creativity is blocked? Visit http://www.genuinecoaching.com to sign-up for your complimentary copy of the popular e-course, “Roadblocks to Creativity”. And for more information about artists, money and taxes, check out Amanda’s websites, http://www.loosechange.ca and http://www.loosechange.ca/artbooks.html

Copyright 2005 Ron Hutton

Just the right photo or graphic strategically placed on your website can go a very long way to achieving the desired effect, whether it’s motivating someone to spend their money, click a link, download a free report or just keep reading. However, finding graphics that are available for your use without copyright infringement can be a real challenge when you don’t want to pay a huge subscription fee for access to professional photos and graphics.

NOTE: This article has a free companion video tutorial that demonstrates how to quickly and easily grap copyright-free graphics for use on your website. The video can be viewed here:
http://www.gothrive.com/snag-a-photo.htm

As a marketer or webmaster you surely appreciate the fact that original graphics works on your website belong to you and as far as everyone else is concerned, the sign says “Hands Off”. It’s only fair. If your blood, sweat, tears and moolah went into the creation of your site’s graphics, you’d be upset if you found that someone else had blatantly stolen your copyrighted work and was using it for their own commercial purposes. That’s just not cool.

So, where can you go to find photos and graphics that you can use without having to spend an arm and a leg? Here are a couple of sites that offer tons of copyright-free pictures:

Stock.xchng http://www.sxc.hu/

I learned of Stock.xchng from another marketer and if I could remember this person’s name, I’d gladly give him credit. I’ve found the inventory of photographs available at Stock.xchng to be excellent, especially consider the cost! Here’s what you’ll read on their home page…

“Welcome to Stock.XCHNG, the leading FREE stock photo site!

Whether you just want to browse our huge image gallery or want to share your personal photos with others, this is the site for you!

Browse through the categories of our huge gallery containing over 100,000 quality stock photos by more than 9,000 users! Need a wallpaper for your desktop? Need a pic for your commercial website design? Looking for inspiration? Have a look around.”

Next…

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org

The following two paragraphs are quoted from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About

“Wikipedia was created on January 15, 2001 by founders Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and some enthusiastic collaborators. Three years later, as of December 2004, there were 13,000 active contributors working on over 1,800,000 articles in more than 100 languages. As of today, there are 700,437 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the amount of knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

All text in Wikipedia, and most images and other content, is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the GFDL license ensures the content will remain freely distributable and reproducible (see the copyright notice and the content disclaimer for more information)”

You’ll find additional supporting documents and links to documents explaining the terms of use for graphics available at Wikipedia. You may find this site to be very useful.

So, now you’ve found a photograph that suits your purposes perfectly, but it’s provided in a high resolution file format that just won’t resize well. You’ve tried altering the image dimensions in your photo editing software and the resulting image quality is just plain poor. Now what?

My favorite program that solves this problem is call Snag-It. This outstanding little piece of software offers lots of slick tools and features, but as it applies to this discussion, the simple screen capture function is indispensible. More information on Snag-It is available here: http://snagit.gothrive.com and the following video will show you just how quickly and easily Snag-It will give you the perfect graphic for your website. Go here to watch a short demonstration of Snag-It:
http://www.gothrive.com/snag-a-photo.htm

About the Author

Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran with a passion for coaching and training. Subscribe to “GoThrive Online”, for Free Video Tutorials for Internet Marketing and big juicy marketing tips in small, easy-to-chew, bite size servings. Free Video Tutorial Archives Here:
http://www.gothrive.com/free-video-tutorials.htm

Despite so much of efforts acne scars turned out to be extremely difficult to treat. In the past dermatologists have used several methods such as excision, punch grafts, and chemical peels as treatments. But we all know that the results of these therapies have not turned out to be fruitful and theses therapies have always given room to additional scarring to occur. Over the past several years, dermatologists have been working with acne laser treatment which the results now show is turning to be extremely beneficial and giving excellent results.

A variety of ways have been used to do acne laser treatment but the two major methods that have been proposed are:

Direct absorption of visible light energy by porphyrins. In this acne laser treatment light energy is absorbed by bacterium triggering production of toxic singlet oxygen which damages or destroys the bacteria. Almost any visible light source can be used, including narrow-band light sources such as the ClearLight and Blu-U, assorted IPL devices (broadband light) copper vapor lasers, pulse dye lasers and various orange/red light lasers or light sources. One very important factor is that these lights have absorption peak of porphyrins so the laser waves have the advantage of penetrating deeper in to the skin, but do not activate porphyrin as well.

Many researches have proven that to get good results of acne laser treatment combining the use of the pulsed dye technology with carbon dioxide laser vaporization can turn out to be an efficient way in treating scars. Atrophic acne scars where there is a breakdown of the skin have been found to respond most favorably to carbon dioxide laser resurfacing. The number of treatments necessary depends on the type of lesion and each individual’s collagen and wound healing response. Usually two or more treatments are needed for cystic acne scars. But one think that one needs to be clear about in this acne laser treatment is that the pulsed dye laser procedure is typically performed without general anesthesia. Local anesthesia is usually administered with a topical anesthetic cream, intralesional injections or nerve blocks. The immediate result may produce a purplish coloring. The treated scars are then evaluated 6-8 weeks later, where another treatment, at the same or slightly higher strength may be necessary.

The main reason for the increasing demand of acne laser treatment is its safety factor because acne laser treatment eliminates the risks of prolonged antibiotic use and retinoid therapy can be avoided, as well as the expense and inconvenience of prolonged topical treatments, acne medications, creams, gels, etc. Whether or not acne laser treatments should be used as first-line treatment for acne, or even for prevention of acne, remains unclear at this time.

Find out more about Acne Laser Treatment as well as other Health issues by visiting getacnetips.com and gethealthtips.com

© 2006 GetHealthTips.com

Many parents know that the best way for children to learn compassion and the importance of keeping commitments is by helping to care for a pet. Children learn from watching the adults in their lives. If a child can learn to treat an animal with respect they can take that lesson into later life. A cat can be a marvellous, loving companion for a child, but it is up to the adults in the family to ensure the cat and the kids live together happily ever after.

When you first bring a cat home, explain to your child that they will need to be patient, quiet and gentle to help the cat feel safe. Sit on the floor with your child and help him practice patience as the cat gets up the courage to come close. Let your child feed the cat a piece of food from his hand. If the cat is reluctant to come close, have your child gently toss a piece of food close to the cat. Once the cat realizes what your child is offering, the ice will melt.

Very young children can easily overwhelm a cat or kitten with their exuberance. Children under the age of five years should always be supervised when playing with or handling a cat. Children over 12 years can usually be trusted to be gentle, but be sure to occasionally check up on kids under 12 years when they spend concentrated time with the family cat.

You should remind children that they should not disturb a sleeping cat, or a cat that is using its litter tray.

Kittens appear to be amazingly flexible, and children often think nothing of draping a weeks-old cat over the crook of the arm and carrying it around like a toy, or picking up a kitten by the scruffof its neck. In this position, it is easy for the kitten to be dropped and seriously injured. Also, being carried like this leaves the cat feeling unsupported with it’s hind legs swinging in space.

The best way to carry a kitten or cat is to place one hand or arm under its front legs, and support its hind legs with the other hand or arm. This gives the cat a secure feeling. Teach your children not to carry the cat from one place to another. Explain that for the cat’s safety, they should always sit when they want to hold the cat, and should have their friends do the same.

Cats often have a mind of their own. Your child might feel like snuggling quietly at a time when your cat wants to play pounce. Impress on your children that if the cat ever struggles to get away, they should respect her wishes and let her go. A cornered cat will scratch and bite.

Encourage your children to exercise the cat by playing with appropriate toys. It is always tempting to play “catch my hand” with a kitten, because it is so amusing how fascinated they are with fingers. You should ensure that your children know the difference between playing and teasing your cat. If you teach a kitten that it is acceptable to swat and bite fingers, you’ll wind up with an adult cat that regularly attacks you. Not exactly the kind of cuddly cat parents want for their children.

About the Author

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