How Do You Know If Your Business’s Website Design Is Good?

How do you know if your business’s website design is good? It all depends on your website visitor. How they view your site and the purpose that it serves. You have less than twelve seconds to grab your site visitors’ attention and hold them on your site. So creative design is VERY IMPORTANT. Also you must make sure that your website can reach as far and as wide as possible. This means realizing that there are a lot of site visitors that use high-tech devices to access your website. These days, people can browse the internet using their mobile phones. Making sure that you follow the correct guidelines that we recommend will ensure that 95% or more of site visitors will be able to access your website.

Let’s start with answering a few questions. Such as: What would you like to feature? What’s your target audience? Is it kids, teens, yuppies or seniors? Married? Single? Will it be in plain text? Full color? Or would you display flashy images or videos from the internet? Perhaps a little bit of everything? So, when you’re planning the design of your website, you must take all of these things into consideration. This is essential in effective lead generation for your business.

Now to the design. You want to start with a clear design and layout. Don’t exaggerate the use of Javascripts or Flash that can affect the major functions of your website menus and sub menus. Make sure that important information is easily accessible on your site. Also, avoid using any colors that may be irritating to your visitors eyes. If you want people to visit your website on a regular basis and do business with you, you want to make sure that every time they visit, they feel soothed and relaxed. This is because loud colors and schemes may disturb site visitors and discourage them from returning to your website. You can always follow the basic primary colors when you feel at a loss. Yet most people use the color wheel.

The overall look of your website should follow the basic types of color schemes. There are 3 types: Analogous, Complementary and Monochromatic. Analogous color schemes make use of colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. Complementary color schemes are those colors that you combine that are directly across from each other on the color wheel. Monochromatic color schemes are those same colors with different hues. The colors used in any color scheme needs to be balanced with the overall design of your website. Professional advice from a good website design company will benefit you greatly in determining the effect of those color schemes on your website. This ensures that you’re able to effectively connect with your site visitors.

Next, use a uniform theme that is clear and concise throughout your web site. Themes are the overall design of your website. Every page of your website should have a connecting factor to other pages by making use of a consistent layout and color scheme. Also, each page should stand on its own, making use of images and information that would be appropriate to the product or service that you offer to your customers.

In addition, pay careful attention to your use of fonts. Fonts are the styles of lettering. The two basic types are serif and sans serif. Of the two, the san serif is being used by most websites because their content is easier to read than the serif fonts. When choosing a particular font to be used in your website, it’s vital that you know how much lettering your site will have and ensure that you use the same font throughout. Using too many fonts of different shapes and sizes can become unpleasant and overwhelming to your site visitors. As before, seek the advice of a good website design company on the best fonts to use for your site.

Another good tip is to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) when designing your website. In this way, the content and navigation bar will have a consistent look and feel. Since the outline is arranged to take place through CSS, no matter what, it will appear as an “eye pleasing” design. The CSS design techniques also allow you to play with sophisticated layouts without making your website “out of touch”. Keep in mind, simplicity is beauty.
Remember the goal of your website design is to connect with yours site visitors, make them feel comfortable and not scare them away.

Your web site must also be USER-FRIENDLY. It should be easy to navigate, highly memorable and very useful to your site visitors. A site map is also good to use. This is essentially the “table of contents” for your site. It enables your site visitors to more easily determine what your web site has to offer. Also, you want to leverage eye catching graphics, engaging photos and flash to give your site an exciting look and feel.

Lastly, your contact information should be strategically placed above the fold (the portion of a web page that is viewable without scrolling) of each page.  Make sure that your contact information is able to viewed on EVERY PAGE of your site. This way, your site visitors won’t have to go back to the “Home Page” or “Contact Us” page of your site just to find your contact information.

In closing, the elements of good web site design are simple if you follow this advice. You can be confident that your visitors will enjoy your site and return to it time and time again.

From The Minds Of Wharton
Wharton Business Foundation
www.WhartonBusinessFoundation.com
(888)4-WHARTON (494-2786) ext.17
info@whartonbusinessfoundation.com

Get Appointment Setters, Virtual Assistants, Telemarketers, Search Engine Marketing Specialists and more as low as $299 per month! Get Top Rankings in The Major Search Engines AND convert the increased traffic to your site into paying customers! Wharton Business Foundation is one of the foremost respected consulting firms helping business owners grow their business and their income to the next level. With clients spanning across the nation as well as around the globe, our name has become synonymous with cutting edge expertise and timely intelligence. Though many of our clients know us for our business building experience, marketing, internet marketing and sales training expertise, we are quickly becoming known as the Premier Outsourcing Firm in the continental United States.

What Is A Site Map?

Do you usually wonder what to do next whenever you visit a certain web site? Well, you can always rely on site maps. A site map is a list of pages of a web site available for surfers or site visitors. This can be either a document in any form used as a preparing tool for web design, or this can be a web page that enumerates the pages on a particular web site, usually organized in a hierarchical way. This usually helps site visitors and search engine bots find their way on the pages of a web site.

What is meant by a “hierarchal way”? Simply put, it’s just the visual model of the pages of a web site. Site maps help crawlers navigate through a web site that has more than one page by exhibiting to the site visitor a diagram of the entire site’s contents. It’s very similar to a book’s table of contents in that it makes it easier for a site visitor to find information on your site without having to go through your site’s many pages.

Not all web sites will have a site map because the less difficult a site is, the less need there is for a site map to guide site visitors. Site maps can also be used to give additional information about your site, such as the date it was last updated or how frequently you update your site’s pages. In addition to regular site maps, you can also create a site map to give search engines specific information about specific web content including images, video, news, code search and geographical information.

A site map can be very beneficial to you when:
•Your site has dynamic or active content.
•Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by search engines like Google.
•Your site is new and has just few links to it
•Your site has a large archive of content pages that aren’t properly linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

If you happen to have several different websites, you can simplify the process of making and submitting site maps for all of them. Simply create just one site map that includes URLs for all of your web sites. Then save the site map to a particular location (provided all of your sites are verified in webmaster tools).

Finally, site maps do not guarantee that all of your links will be searched. And being searched does not guarantee indexing by the search engines. However, a site map is still the best assurance for getting a search engine to learn about the content of your web site.

From The Minds Of Wharton
Wharton Business Foundation
www.WhartonBusinessFoundation.com
(888)4-WHARTON (494-2786) ext.17
info@whartonbusinessfoundation.com

Get Appointment Setters, Virtual Assistants, Telemarketers, Search Engine Marketing Specialists and more as low as $299 per month! Get Top Rankings in The Major Search Engines AND convert the increased traffic to your site into paying customers! Wharton Business Foundation is one of the foremost respected consulting firms helping business owners grow their business and their income to the next level. With clients spanning across the nation as well as around the globe, our name has become synonymous with cutting edge expertise and timely intelligence. Though many of our clients know us for our business building experience, marketing, internet marketing and sales training expertise, we are quickly becoming known as the Premier Outsourcing Firm in the continental United States.

How To Drive More Traffic To Your Web Site With Craigslist And Other Online Classified Advertising Sites

First thing you need to remember is that, reaching the top doesn’t happen overnight. So, you must have a lot of patience. And yes, at this point, patience can be a skill if you want to drive traffic to your website. Years ago, when the internet first became really popular, business owners could promote their products and services on free classified web sites and make an easy buck or two. Yet five years after, everything slowly went downhill. There were so many ads on these sites that it got “eaten up” by junk and a lot of people stopped looking at them to make purchases. For some reason, however, web sites like Craigslist.org, Kijiji.com and Backpage.com brought back to life free online classified advertising. In fact, today, they provide a good opportunity to promote your products or services.

Craigslist is one of the biggest websites in the world. Craigslist gets over 10 million visitors per day! This generates over 4 billion page views per year. Millions of people have had success marketing their products and services on Craigslist and other online classified advertising sites. It only makes sense for you to tap into traffic that is already there and waiting for you.

These sites provide free classified advertisements on almost anything: jobs, housing, pets, sales, personals and more. Start out by compiling a shortlist of Craigslist and the best classified ad sites on the internet. After you make your selection, keep in mind that these sites have differences as to the popularity and the image. A good way to compile a shortlist, is to seek expert advice from an experienced internet marketing company and ask assistance from the experts who in turn have their own experiences on the matter and can tell you the good from the bad.

Your next step is to set up your business’s profile and submit your classified ad. Many of the sites syndicate their ads. This means that your ad is sent out to a lot of other sites that run free classified ads. So one submission can result in hundreds of postings for your business! Also, if you write, design and optimize your ad well, you’ll increase the chance of your ad making it to the first page of Google where it can remain for weeks. In short, you drive new free targeted traffic to your site as well as new sales leads for your business.

Also, pick the right category for your ad and don’t just put it wherever you want it to. The category you choose will determine whether your target market will actually see it. The bottom line is to connect with your target market when they’re searching for your product/service and get them to either call in or click your link and go to your website for more information.

To be successful in leveraging free online classified marketing, you must have a well defined strategy. This starts with a well written compelling ad that gets them to your web site. You want to direct them to a page in your site that offers them something for FREE provided that they gave you their email address and maybe other contact information. This way even if they don’t buy from you right away you can continue to market to them until they do.

Lastly, online classified ad sites generate RELEVANT TRAFFIC to your web site. And remember, the more relevant your traffic, the greater the number of sales conversions that you get. These are a few simple strategies to get you started leveraging online classified ad marketing into your internet marketing campaign.

From The Minds Of Wharton
Wharton Business Foundation
www.WhartonBusinessFoundation.com
(888)4-WHARTON (494-2786) ext.17
info@whartonbusinessfoundation.com

Get Appointment Setters, Virtual Assistants, Telemarketers, Search Engine Marketing Specialists and more as low as $299 per month! Get Top Rankings in The Major Search Engines AND convert the increased traffic to your site into paying customers! Wharton Business Foundation is one of the foremost respected consulting firms helping business owners grow their business and their income to the next level. With clients spanning across the nation as well as around the globe, our name has become synonymous with cutting edge expertise and timely intelligence. Though many of our clients know us for our business building experience, marketing, internet marketing and sales training expertise, we are quickly becoming known as the Premier Outsourcing Firm in the continental United States.

What’s The Difference Between “On Page” And “Off Page” Site Optimization?

The terms “on page” and “off page” are two important words to familiarize yourself with if you’re new to the art and science of search engine optimization. They are an integral part of the SEO process used to increase website traffic. Although there’s a big difference between the two, you must understand these optimization techniques if you’ll be leveraging SEO as one of your tools for online promotion of your growing business to drive more traffic for your website.

On Page optimization is the foundation for your SEO process by which elements of your web site are designed in a way that it qualifies for a high ranking when specific keywords are typed. Off Page optimization, on the other hand, as the name indicates, is the work that needs to be done off the pages of your website. This is done to improve your web site’s search engine page rank and increase your web site traffic. On Page optimization by itself will not guarantee that your website gets good ranking unless performed in concert with off page optimization strategies. This means, both on page and off page optimization techniques need to work hand in hand for you to get the results that you want.

On Page site optimization – Deals with Internal linking (linking pages of your site to one another), your web site coding, creation of a sitemap and good quality content. Optimizing also includes identifying the target keywords or keyword phrases that your target customers are searching for. These keywords should be included in your web site’s URL, title tags, Meta tags, headlines, subheadlines and body text. Next, internal linking is done between the pages of your web site whenever required to make it more attractive to Google. All of the major pages of your site should be linked to your homepage. The creation of a sitemap is needed so that all your web pages get listed by the search engines. In addition, good quality content is absolutely vital to get the most out of the search engines. Your site content should have compelling information that is written to appeal to your customers first and the search engines second. Lastly, ensure that your html code is error and warning free.

While the above mentioned On Page factors are needed for on site optimization, the following factors should be avoided: Don’t use “black hat SEO techniques” to increase your serp (search engine result page) rankings> For example, hiding links or text by making them the same color as the background of your web pages. This is cheating as you’re trying to hide or conceal something from your viewers solely for the purpose of increasing your search engine rankings. Also, make sure that you don’t create mirror sites, or two different sites, one for the search engines and the other for your site visitors. You should have only one site. These tactics very well may cause your web site to be “banned” by the search engines. Also, avoid posting duplicate content as much as possible. This means both NO Plagiarism, unless you give a credit to the original source, as well as not posting identical information on your web site as you do on your blogs and other sites. Simply change the wording around of the content when posting it on your web site if you’re also posting it on other sites.

Off Page optimization, on the other hand, are the techniques which are done off of your web pages to improve your search engine page rank as well as your web site traffic. These include: building quality links, link popularity, relevancy, directories and social bookmarking. Building quality links for link building purposes which include industry relevance, page rank and authority sites. Link popularity can be completed by using social networking sites, blog commenting, forum postings, articles, press release promotions, directory submissions, link baiting, classified ads, and back links from social bookmarking sites. The last factor of off page optimization is to have high quality, informative and organized content for visitors to which they will have easy access such as blogs and article directories.

In simplest terms, on page optimization includes all the activities done on your web site while off page optimization are all the activities that take place off of your web site. Having an effective strategy that leverages both will improve your search engine rankings and drive highly targeted relevant traffic to your web site.

From The Minds Of Wharton
Wharton Business Foundation
www.WhartonBusinessFoundation.com
(888)4-WHARTON (494-2786) ext.17
info@whartonbusinessfoundation.com

Get Appointment Setters, Virtual Assistants, Telemarketers, Search Engine Marketing Specialists and more as low as $299 per month! Get Top Rankings in The Major Search Engines AND convert the increased traffic to your site into paying customers! Wharton Business Foundation is one of the foremost respected consulting firms helping business owners grow their business and their income to the next level. With clients spanning across the nation as well as around the globe, our name has become synonymous with cutting edge expertise and timely intelligence. Though many of our clients know us for our business building experience, marketing, internet marketing and sales training expertise, we are quickly becoming known as the Premier Outsourcing Firm in the continental United States.

What Is Page Rank And How Do I Get It?

You may be asking yourself the same thing. PageRank is a value that Google made to determine how important a particular web page is and how it positions itself with other web pages. Simply put, it’s how a webpage ranks itself with it’s competition. The more links a particular webpage has, the more important that page becomes. It serves as a digital vote to that page every time a link is created. The more the links created, the more votes are cast on that page.

The term Page Rank was named after one of the founders of the Google search engine, Larry Page. It’s interesting how it came into being. At onetime, webmasters would only link to pages that they thought were interesting and important to their viewers. Because of this, Google determined to use the number of inbound links, or IBL, to a certain page to judge the weight of that page. The “weight” determined where to put that page in the SERP or search engine results page. They made a scale of measurement from 0 to 10 and produced a toolbar that can be displayed in Internet Explorer that will indicate the Page Rank value of any page being viewed in the browser. 

Having quality information on your web pages would surely help to raise your PR over time. Links connecting to your content from other websites will also help the GoogleBot understand that your site is important to others. This would increase the PR as well. The value is being ranked from 0 to 10, ten being the highest value that your site can get. For some reason, however, getting a ten doesn’t always mean that you get higher search results. Oddly enough, a site with a ‘0’ PR can even rank higher than those with a ten. This is because the content of the actual site is considered more important. Although PR is one of the more valuable components, it’s not the end all. There are about 200 different factors as to how your website can gain position in search engine result pages for any keyword search. Google factors in what other people think about your site as well. Quality information is also very important. And remember to ensure that your site content is understandable to GoogleBot as well.

Having some basic knowledge of SEO would be very advantageous to you in building up your PR. In case you’re not well versed on the subject, you can always search Google and read their webmasters guidelines. You’ll find one of the best ways to get the coveted back-links from other sites is by getting natural links which lead to the pages of your site. These natural links are links that people include in their site that lead back to yours. These can be acquired through sharing content via RSS feeds, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, social bookmarking sites and even article directories.

There are also unnatural links. These are used just for the purpose of getting higher PR. These type of sites are called FFA (Free For All) sites or link farms. Link farms are sites that solicit you to post your links to their site just for the purpose of increasing their popularity also yours. Don’t do it! Otherwise you can very well be banned or taken out of Google altogether. Google is taking strong steps to make sure that they take out all these link farms that just want popularity and offer nothing else.

Following these few simple methods will help yourweb site gain higher PageRank and the results can be very rewarding for your growing business.

From The Minds Of Wharton
Wharton Business Foundation
www.WhartonBusinessFoundation.com
(888)4-WHARTON (494-2786) ext.17
info@whartonbusinessfoundation.com

Get Appointment Setters, Virtual Assistants, Telemarketers, Search Engine Marketing Specialists and more as low as $299 per month! Get Top Rankings in The Major Search Engines AND convert the increased traffic to your site into paying customers! Wharton Business Foundation is one of the foremost respected consulting firms helping business owners grow their business and their income to the next level. With clients spanning across the nation as well as around the globe, our name has become synonymous with cutting edge expertise and timely intelligence. Though many of our clients know us for our business building experience, marketing, internet marketing and sales training expertise, we are quickly becoming known as the Premier Outsourcing Firm in the continental United States.

How To Write Your Company’s Mission Statement

Why do you need to write a mission statement for our company? Well, the reason is simple. The mission statement is a reflection of how you look at your growing company, how you want other people to see it, what your company’s main purpose is, how it benefits your customers and how it would stand against your competition.

The next step is how do you actually write it? You might think, couldn’t you just copy some old quotations from you’re an old English book or sayings from the I-Ching and put it on your company’s mission statement. How about outsourcing it? Good try, yet not very original, my friend. When writing your company’s mission statement, make sure that it would be heartfelt by anyone who reads it. It should connect with your readers. It should reflect your company’s purpose, what your company is ALL about. Your mission statement should clearly state why your company exists in the first place. As well as how you see the future of your company, your goals and objectives.

Also don’t rush it. Writing a mission statement for your company doesn’t have to happen overnight. It may take days or even weeks to finish it. Get lots of suggestions from employees, partners, board members, customers and other people you feel would make a difference. Brainstorm with them and review once you’ve gathered all the information that you need to write a powerful mission statement. Be open to new ideas and suggestions.
Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day, so what’s the hurry?

Always remember the KISS formula. Keep it Short and Simple. You don’t want to bore your readers with long paragraphs. Your mission statement should be short enough to remember, articulate clearly what you do and what value you provide to the market place. Make sure your mission statement is timeless. It should still be just as applicable 5 years from now as it is today. Also ensure sure that it’s possible to achieve, yet not too easy or idealist in nature.

Next, review what you’ve written. It may take a week of editing and tweaking to develop your perfect mission statement. Have your team look at it and determine if they understand and can relate to your company’s strengths and vision. Once you’re done, your mission statement will be your guide to attract new people, new resources and new customers for your business.

Finally, your mission statement is a powerful public relations marketing and branding tool. Post it to your website, add it to all of your marketing collaterals, leverage it (or portions of it) in your social media marketing and make it a requirement that all of your employees learn it and memorize it. Actually make it a condition for them earning their bonuses. Now every time you hold your annual stockholders’ meeting, conducting a sales training or just simply any company get together, discuss your company’s mission statement. And always hold yourself and your organization accountable to whether or not you’re living up to it.

From The Minds Of Wharton 
Wharton Business Foundation
www.WhartonBusinessFoundation.com
(888)4-WHARTON (494-2786) ext.17
info@whartonbusinessfoundation.com

Get Appointment Setters, Virtual Assistants, Telemarketers, Search Engine Marketing Specialists and more as low as $299 per month! Get Top Rankings in The Major Search Engines AND convert the increased traffic to your site into paying customers! Wharton Business Foundation is one of the foremost respected consulting firms helping business owners grow their business and their income to the next level. With clients spanning across the nation as well as around the globe, our name has become synonymous with cutting edge expertise and timely intelligence. Though many of our clients know us for our business building experience, marketing, internet marketing and sales training expertise, we are quickly becoming known as the Premier Outsourcing Firm in the continental United States.

How To Use Branding To Grow Your Business?

Not only big companies or corporate names need to think about branding , this can also be applied to small businesses as well. Branding says a lot about you and your business, and this certainly true for a home-based, one person operation to a multinational company. This only means one thing, that having a good brand name or branding strategy can add a couple of figures to you sales. It doesn’t promise you to become large company overnight (no strategy will!), yet it will give you steady and visible results before you know it.

Your business, service or product’s most valuable asset can be it’s brand. It’s your corporate identity. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what you do and how you do it. It’s how your business is perceived by your customers. With a powerful branding strategy your company’s market position can actually be elevated. For example, you can go from “the low price leader” to “the top choice for professionals”. Once your brand has a high perceived value, you can charge a premium for your products and services well beyond what your competitors are charging. It’s even possible for your brand to dominate your niche.

Also, the value and recognition of your business, service, product and yourself determines marketing potential. Therefore, branding is a basic part of building your business. Clients, consumers and customers should always remember your name, products and services so they can easily refer it to others and this can also build loyalty for repeat transactions.

Here are a few tips that can get you started on how you can use branding to grow your business:

Develop Your Business’s logo – A good logo will give the first impression and fast recall of your company. One of the most important factors is to ensure that it doesn’t imitate any existing brand designs for copyright issues. It’s suggested to get a simple and catchy brand name that comes with a simple logo.

Develop Your Company’s Core Values – Review your company’s mission statement. If you don’t have one…write one. Your brand reinforces and supports your mission. Take a look at Pizza Huts mission statement and core values.

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We take pride in making a perfect pizza and providing courteous and helpful service on time all the time. Every customer says, “I’ll be back!”

We are the employer of choice offering team members opportunities for growth, advancement, and rewarding careers in a fun, safe working environment.

We are accountable for profitability in everything we do, providing our shareholders with value growth.

Have a PASSION for excellence in everything we do.

EXECUTE with positive energy and urgency.

Be individually and collectively ACCOUNTABLE for growth in people, customer satisfaction and profitability.

Find reasons to RECOGNIZE the achievement of others and have fun doing it.

LISTEN and more importantly, respond to the voice of the customer.

Think SAFETY first.

——————————————————————————————–

Think about how their mission and core values are demonstrated in their brand. Think about their logo, advertisements, commercials, employees and management, fulfillment (when you place your order) and customer service. Get the idea? An additional word on fulfillment and customer service. Develop high standards of customer service so that clients feel that you’re always willing to go the extra mile to solve their problems. Remember that customers who get good customer service, come back and bring more customers with them.

Develop A Strong Public Image – Be consistent, it’s important that your business keeps a single character or appearance. This means having a consistent message, trademark, publicity and company values. You do this by integrating your brand strategies through your company at every point of public contact. This will help build company loyalty that will reflect to your customers. The internal workings of the company must always be in place and shouldn’t be changed. This will help build the company’s dependability and will connect powerfully with your clients. Developing a company image and strictly adhering to it will result in your customers appreciating your service as well as your employees. By letting the business stand for something that you believe in, more and more customers will start appreciating your brand building your reputation. And reputation is something that every business would like to have, yet only a few get.

A strong brand will also project an image of a large and established business to your potential customers. People usually associate branding with larger businesses that have the money to spend on advertising and promotion. Once you create an effective branding strategy, then it can make your business appear to be much bigger than it really is. An image of size and establishment can be especially important when a customer wants reassurance that you will still be around in a few years time.

A strong brand projects an image of experience, reliability and quality in your business. Many people see the brand as a part of a product or service that helps to show its quality and value. It’s commonly said that if you show a person two identical products, only one of which is branded; they’ll almost always believe the branded item is higher quality. Most people believe that a business won’t put their brand name on something of poor quality. Also branded businesses are more likely to be seen as experienced in their industry, products and services, and will generally be seen as more reliable and trustworthy than an unbranded business.

Develop Strong Marketing – Another good reason for developing a strong branding strategy is to make your sales force more effective and efficient. When your market recognizes your brand, you don’t have to spend a lot of time with new prospects explaining who you are, what you do and how you do it. Your brand already has already educated and built credibility with them. So now you can invest almost 100% of your time on sales rather than educating your prospects about your business.

Develop New Products And Services – Another way that branding benefits your business is that the efforts you make increasing your brand awareness, through promoting and marketing your brand to your target market, automatically transfers to ALL OF YOUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES. This includes any new products and services that you roll out in the future. So, even when you’re promoting your brand, you’re also indirectly marketing all of your products and services. And this means that customers for one of your products and service will be more likely to buy other products and services from you as well.

Separate Yourself From Your Competition – The main reason for creating strong brand for your business is to differentiate yourself from your competition. A strong brand will deliver your message clearly, confirm your credibility, connect with your target market emotionally, motivates your prospective customers to buy and concretes their loyalty. So it only makes sense to understand that branding isn’t about getting your target market to choose you over the competition, yet it’s about getting your prospects to see you as the only one that provides a solution to their problem. Consider Jerry Garcia’s insightful statement:

“It’s not enough to be the best at what you do; you must be perceived as the only one who does what you do.” – Jerry Garcia

To be effective your branding must be strong, you must have a well defined strategy, your expertise and message has to be clear. Or you’ll get no results. For example, many years ago, there was only one local market. If you wanted to buy soup you simply went to the market and bought soup. Then came supermarkets with 6 different types of soup. If you didn’t recognize the other soups you’d most likely buy Campbell’s. Remember people buy brands not products and services. A brand promises the same positive consistent experience every time. Empowering you to buy with confidence and making your decision easy. So it was easy to make a buying decision. Yet now there are literally millions of companies on the internet locally, nationally and internationally. All competing for local markets in the US! So now powerful branding is even more important than ever before!

In closing, to succeed in branding you must understand the needs and wants of your customers and prospects. To effectively use branding to grow your business, you must invest the time in researching, defining, building and promoting your brand. When done correctly, your prospective customers will draw this simple conclusion, “I’d have to be an absolute fool to do business with anyone else except you…regardless of price”.

From The Minds Of Wharton
Wharton Business Foundation
www.WhartonBusinessFoundation.com
(888)4-WHARTON (494-2786) ext.17
info@whartonbusinessfoundation.com

Get Appointment Setters, Virtual Assistants, Telemarketers, Search Engine Marketing Specialists and more as low as $299 per month! Get Top Rankings in The Major Search Engines AND convert the increased traffic to your site into paying customers! Wharton Business     Foundation is one of the foremost respected consulting firms helping business owners grow their business and their income to the next level. With clients spanning across the nation as well as around the globe, our name has become synonymous with cutting edge expertise and timely intelligence. Though many of our clients know us for our business building experience, marketing, internet marketing and sales training expertise, we are quickly becoming known as the Premier Outsourcing Firm in the continental United States.

What Is Branding?

What does a person remember whenever they think of their favorite book, restaurant or even a celebrity? The brand! Yet what is a brand? A brand is a name or symbol that’s commonly known to identify a company or its products and services and separate them from their competition. A well-known brand is the one that people will recognize, even if they don’t know about the company or its products and services. These are usually the businesses’ name or the name of a product, although it can also include the name of a feature or style of a product. Yet still, few only know its marketing function or the meaning of branding itself. Well, there’s a huge connection between the two and this might help you improve your business.

“Branding” is a basis for marketing and can not be separated from your business’s action plan. It’s more than just a fancy label that you give to a product. A business, law firm, school, museum, celebrity, perfume, a country (yes even a country!), or even YOU can be regarded as a brand. When marketing to customers, you must win both the logical and EMOTIONAL argument. Winning the emotional argument is what branding is uniquely designed to do.

Branding is both an art and a science. One of your goals is to link your brand with the emotions, feelings and memories of the positive experience that your customer has when then buying your product or service. You can also link the overall ‘branding’ of your company or product to a logo, symbol, or even design features that identify your company and/or its products/services. Remember, people buy brands not products and services.  A brand promises the same positive, consistent experience every time.

So how do you determine your brand? Here’s a simple branding exercise. Ask yourself, “what do my customers experience when they use my product or service?” Write everything down that comes to mind. As you do so, you’ll see your brand take shape. Answer questions such as: Do they feel more comfortable, do they believe that they’ll be more popular, do they believe that they can run faster, work more efficiently, will they experience more reliability, will they feel happy, satisfied, sad, more sensual, etc.. This exercise is useful because, you may also detect some areas in your brand that may need improvement.

In closing, your brand resides within your customer’s hearts and minds. It is the sum total of their experiences, perceptions and expectations. Some of which you can directly influence and some you cannot. By clearly defining your brand, you’ll clearly define what you REALLY offer to your market. And having done so, you’ll now stand out heads and shoulders from your competition.

From The Minds Of Wharton
Wharton Business Foundation
www.WhartonBusinessFoundation.com
(888)4-WHARTON (494-2786) ext.17

info@whartonbusinessfoundation.com

Get Appointment Setters, Virtual Assistants, Telemarketers, Search Engine Marketing Specialists and more as low as $299 per month! Get Top Rankings in The Major Search Engines AND convert the increased traffic to your site into paying customers! Wharton Business Foundation is one of the foremost respected consulting firms helping business owners grow their business and their income to the next level. With clients spanning across the nation as well as around the globe, our name has become synonymous with cutting edge expertise and timely intelligence. Though many of our clients know us for our business building experience, marketing, internet marketing and sales training expertise, we are quickly becoming known as the Premier Outsourcing Firm in the continental United States.

Uh…Marketing Good…Not Marketing Bad, So Easy Even A Caveman Could Do It!

Not CONSISTENTLY marketing to your prospective and existing customers is bad. Why? It has to do with what we call “The Buying Spectrum”. Think of a grove of orange trees. Once the oranges are in season they begin to ripen. Now it’s time to pick the ripe ones. Yet do you think that all of the oranges on all of the trees ripen all at the same time? Of course not.

So you go through picking only the ripe ones and leaving the green unripened oranges still on the tree. Now that you’ve gotten all of the ripened oranges you leave the orange grove never to return right? Wrong! Yet this is exactly what many businesses do.

Simply put most businesses run some ads, have people calling in for more information yet only focus their attention on the people who are actually ready to buy right now. They completely discard the other people who called in yet didn’t buy. Understand that these people will buy what you sell at some time. It just isn’t right now. It may be 3 weeks from now, 6 months from now or 2 years from now. So how do you get their business as well?

Think again of the orange grove. Instead of picking only the ripened oranges and leaving the grove never to return, think of nurturing the grove. You consistently water it, fertilize it and weed it. And as each and every orange ripens you pick each and every one. Your prospects are no different. You must nurture them along the sales (buying) cycle as you’d nurture the orange grove. You consistently maket to them, educating them about your product or service and how they benefit by doing business with you.

Then as they are ready to buy 2 months from now, 6 months from now or even 2 years from now, you “pick” them all! Realistically, you may not get them all yet you’ll definitely get the majority of them. By adopting this approach, you’ll wind up with the lion’s share of the market.

From The Minds Of Wharton
Wharton Business Foundation
www.WhartonBusinessFoundation.com
(888)4-WHARTON (494-2786) ext.17
info@whartonbusinessfoundation.com

Get Appointment Setters, Virtual Assistants, Telemarketers, Search Engine Marketing Specialists and more as low as $299 per month! Get Top Rankings in The Major Search Engines AND convert the increased traffic to your site into paying customers! Wharton Business Foundation is one of the foremost respected consulting firms helping business owners grow their business and their income to the next level. With clients spanning across the nation as well as around the globe, our name has become synonymous with cutting edge expertise and timely intelligence. Though many of our clients know us for our business building experience, marketing, internet marketing and sales training expertise, we are quickly becoming known as the Premier Outsourcing Firm in the continental United States.

Ever Wonder What is Social Media?

If you’re like many business owners you’re probably wondering, what exactly is social media? If you don’t know what it is then your business is missing out on a tremendous marketing and sales tool. Also, without a thorough understanding of Social Media, you can wind up paying a company a lot of money to do it for you and not get the results that you want. So there’s a simple solution, let’s learn what social media is and what it isn’t.

Social media is a term that includes internet programs and systems such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other things typically thought of as social networking. The idea is that they are media designs with social components and public communication channels. These are built to be distributed through social interaction, where people can easily access and drive up their popularity through the use of voting and tagging.

Social media supports the human needs and wants for social interaction, and uses the Internet to transform broadcast media (one to many) into social media (many to many). It supports education and information; and also transforms people by not just being consumers yet also producers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated communication. Okay, now we have some of the technical stuff out of the way.

On the surface, you might think that people who stay in front of their computers would have a sorry social life. Yet a recent survey, conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, found that those who use the Internet and mobile technology actually enjoy a bigger social network than those who do not. These are the people that are more likely to join discussions, make friends and basically keep in touch with friends and family.

If you’re a business owner, you may find unique ways of promoting your product or service through social media. You may want to thank Facebook and Twitter the next time you organize a seminar, launch a new product or service line, hire for a key position or even reach your sales quota.

So what are the common forms of social media that can help your business?
• Electronic media with sharing, search engines (like Google) or your own mobile phone.
• Concepts, expressions and statements that are not only easy to remember yet hard to forget and that excite others to repeat it.
• Grass-Roots direct action information distribution such as public speaking, seminars, events, installations, performances and demonstrations.
• Print media designed to be re-distributed and shared to others.
So what are something’s that are NOT social media? Well the answer is simple, older forms of media such as magazines and newspapers that are simply places for content to be surrounded by advertisements

From The Minds Of Wharton
Wharton Business Foundation
www.WhartonBusinessFoundation.com
(888)4-WHARTON (494-2786) ext.17
info@whartonbusinessfoundation.com

Get Appointment Setters, Virtual Assistants, Telemarketers, Search Engine Marketing Specialists and more as low as $299 per month! Get Top Rankings in The Major Search Engines AND convert the increased traffic to your site into paying customers! Wharton Business Foundation is one of the foremost respected consulting firms helping business owners grow their business and their income to the next level. With clients spanning across the nation as well as around the globe, our name has become synonymous with cutting edge expertise and timely intelligence. Though many of our clients know us for our business building experience, marketing, internet marketing and sales training expertise, we are quickly becoming known as the Premier Outsourcing Firm in the continental United States.