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Posts Tagged ‘Review’

How to Market Your Business – Small Business Marketing Book Review

Small Business Marketing is another great example of practical, proven, step by step marketing strategies that you can take straight to the bank.

Marketing really is the life blood of any business the big challenge most small business owners have very little knowledge about marketing and how to effectively do it, mainly because most have never be taught how to do it.

Many business owners go into business because they have acquired certain skills in their trade and believe they can provide a better product or service than what the market is currently offering, and most never really think that they are in the marketing game too.

You see it doesn’t matter what your business is, you could be a house painter, auto repair shop or an accountant for example however we are all in marketing whether you like to admit it or not.

So what is marketing?

If you look in the oxford dictionary it says “noun the promotion and selling of products or services. ” If you are not marketing your business how are you still in business? Marketing comes in various forms and Small Business Marketing covers most if not all of them.

Things like word-of-mouth and shows effective methods to get the word out, how to maximize your current marketing efforts, to showing you how to market your business on the internet whether you are a local or global business.

Small Business Marketing is a fantastic read and a must for any business looking to get maximum results from the least amount of effort.

Did You Know?
Your Customers Are Looking For You Online Right Now!
Let Them Find You And Not Your Competition…. It’s Easy Than You Think.
Watch This Free Video Lesson!

Barnes and Noble “Nook” Review

Library eBooks – Barnes and Noble Nook allow you to read DRM-protected ePub books from the library Adobe ePub (if the library uses OverDrive).

ePub Support – In addition to Library ebooks this allows you read isolated ePub books and protected ePub books from ebook stores that support Adobe DRM.

LendMe – For definite books B & N lets give them out once, this feature has a lot of rumors, Note that it is only allowed when publishers gives a permit, although it seems that there are some best-sellers that allow it.

Color touchscreen 3.5 – This enhancement the 6 eInk screen very well.

WiFi Support – Nook has 3G connection WiFi for ebook store for Surfing (also for e-book store where 3G is not accessible.)

BrowsingInternet is faster, since it is through WiFi. While you should have WiFi to use the browser is much faster than kindle’s 3G internet connection.

MicroSD card slot – This is an important advantage if the 2 GB memory that comes with Kindle and the Nook is not enough.

Nook Browser – The latest nook browser is very high-quality. It’s very usable for surfing, news and supports YM Classic version. It only works Through WiFi.

Custom Screensavers – You can add your own photos as your background.

Disposable battery - The battery of nook is disposable though there are barely ever reports of Kindle battery failures and Amazon change batteries for .

Better Screen contrast – A combination of contrast of the screen a little better and the thin black border around the screen of Nook eInk make it more readable.

There are many additional features to be considered as the advantages of nook from kindle.

Browse in Store – When in B&N stores you can read some books for free for up to an hour in a 24 hour time period. Don’t find this to be a significant advantage – if you’re in a store you can read any paper book for as long as you like.

Lend Me – Listing this again as it might not be as big an advantage as B&N paint it to be. You can only lend a book one single time and to one friend only.

Support for Sony Store Books.

Retail Presence – You can go into a B&N or a Best Buy and try out the Nook. Strongly recommend trying out the usability and the weight before buying the Nook.

Sudoku and Chess – these two free games are good for entertainments.

Nook Cover Flow – When looking at books you’ve purchased or browsing the Nook store you can browse books by their covers.

Support for PDB (it’s a format used by eReader.com and Fictionwise.com ebook stores - both are owned by B&N).

Free WiFi in B&N stores.

Barnes & Noble did a good job and the incorporation of a browser makes the nook very convincing.

To learn more about wireless reading device or the eReader devices click on Amazon Kindle review or Nook reviews or read the eBook reader comparison.

Cieaura Mlm Review) Scam Or Legit Mlm Network Marketing Business Opportunity?

CieAura is an interesting MLM business to review and one which I’ve enjoyed putting together. This is unbiased and I hope informative, so let me know if it’s the kind of review you want to see of the CieAura MLM business by leaving a comment and your thoughts at the end. Here goes;

Here’s your unbiased CieAura MLM Review…

At the helm of CieAura you can find Ken Rasner, an Internet Marketer with a solid reputation in the field and a long track record.  With a captain of the industry in the pilot box, you know that even though CieAura is one of the newer ships on the MLM seas there is not much chance of its hull getting rammed.

CieAura takes a stand in a niche where customers want results within minutes.  They concentrate their efforts in the areas of pain, insomnia and fatigue relief.  The delivery system they use is in the form of a patch; subsequently, you don’t have the stigmata of a pill pusher attached to the product.  Combine that with instant relief and you have a product which should take a good chunk of the market.

Between Ken Rasner and Randy Mitchell, another well experienced marketer who has been around the block, you would expect to see a solid compensation plan and they deliver nicely.  Initial start-up cost is low at but of course you need some product to push so you will have to invest in one of their inventory packs as well.  There are three versions to choose from:

1.    CieAura Home Pack.  This gives you one month’s worth of patches for pain, insomnia and fatigue.  It also gives you a Commissionable Sales Volume (CSV) of 60.

2.    CieAura Business Pack.  Your product is multiplied by three with Bonus Relief Pack thrown in for good measure.  Your CSV is raised to 200.

3.    CieAura Premium Advantage Pack.  You receive a full stock of 36 one month supplies and 12 of the Bonus Packs.  You also get 750 CVS and a membership to the CieAura Founder’s Club.

What it boils down to is the more you spend, the more commission percentage you will receive.The sliding scale commission gives you anywhere between -0 for your personally sold merchandise and -20 for any of your upline sales.  Upon your admission as a CieAura Associate, you are also entered into the Global Bonus Pool.  You start off with a 3% commission from the total sale count in the company and once you hit ,000 the percentage gets bumped.  Another performance is given for your team sales.  This spreads across 7 levels and are anywhere from 10 to 30% according to the rank of you and your team members.  If you’re able to make it closer to the top of the food chain, you are granted
expense accounts for vehicles and insurance as another bonus.

The combination of a well rounded MLM structure, good bonus system and a product in a niche that claims a 0 billion market which hasn’t been totally saturated makes CieAura a worthwhile endeavor for anyone willing to give it a shot.

Chet Holmes Ultimate Sales Machine Book Review By Darin Spindler

Darin Spindler review’s Chet Holmes’ book The Ultimate Sales Machine. This is a great book that I just learned about a few weeks ago. It’s a national bestseller and it’s been there for quite some time.

Chet recently joined up with Tony Robbins and they’re putting together a great program for small business owners, so you may want to check that out also.

But this is a great book, and I’m just going to review one of his concepts in here that is an old concept but he really makes it simple, clear and easy to understand. He calls it developing your Dream 100. And in many circles, like real estate, they used to call it farming.

Essentially, you go out, you get yourself a list—a small list—only of a hundred of your dream clients or the dream prospects that you want to be a part of your restaurant or your business.

So we actually are implementing for one of my businesses the Dream 100. We actually have our list of a hundred, and we’ve started to work it. And we’ve already got results in just a few weeks, so it’s fantastic. But the premise of it is this.

You get a hundred people on your list, and you focus intensely on them. So you’re sending them bigger packages. You’re sending them bigger pieces of direct mail. You’re contacting them more frequently. So instead of buying a list of 10,000 consumers, you buy a list of a hundred of the ideal ones. And since you’re going after a hundred ideal ones, you can really, really focus in.

Now, Chet talks about a great example in the book. He talks about a restaurant that he attended and went to frequently because he has some food allergies. So they were very aware of that, and he didn’t have to tell them each and every time. Since he dines with clients often, that’s kind of a hassle for him to go through what he’s allergic to all the time, which is understandable. Every time you’re out with clients, you don’t want to explain that you’re allergic to fifteen different things. So this restaurant paid very close attention, and they understood that. And it was a high-end restaurant.

They had a lot of tables open on Monday night and Tuesday night, so Chet said, “Hey, let me help you out. Let’s try and fill this restaurant up and I’m going to help you out as long as every time I come in here, there’s a table for me and my wife when we want to eat.”

So he helped them out; found a hundred homes in a very affluent neighborhood, and sent them out a package of information. I’m not going to give it all away, what’s in the package, because he talks about it in the book, and really to be fair, I think you should go get Chet’s book.

So he talks about how they mailed out a restaurant menu and they put it in a big envelope. They also had a gift in there, and I’m not going to tell you what the gift is. You’ll have to buy the book in order to get that. They then followed that up with another series of information. So what you want to do is look at how can you do this in your small business.

As an example, it’s all about using more steps in your marketing and not less. It’s not about less media. It’s about more media. So one of the ways that we do this in our business is with seminars. So we send out an 11×17 mailer in an envelope to a list, a smaller list that we know will respond.

We also use postcards. There’s usually a series of three postcards. We also do a series of three faxes where we’ve got fax numbers. We generally send between three and six emails. Then we also use two or three telemarketing steps. So when we’re trying to get a hundred of our dream customers to an event, we spend a heck of a lot of time and energy on a smaller list, not a bigger list.

So what I would recommend you do is go to Barnes & Noble or Amazon, get The Ultimate Sales Machine, sit down for the weekend, read the book, and then see how you can implement it into your business.

I hope you enjoy the book. It’s fantastic.

It says, “Fill the enclosed water sample with tap water from your kitchen sink, complete the questions at the bottom of this card, place the bottle and the questionnaire, hang the bag back onto your front doorknob and call this phone number for pickup.” So on the bottom, there’s a questionnaire that actually helps him determine what my water needs might be.

Darin Spindler review’s Chet Holmes’ book The Ultimate Sales Machine. This is a great book that I just learned about a few weeks ago. It’s a national bestseller and it’s been there for quite some time.

Chet recently joined up with Tony Robbins and they’re putting together a great program for small business owners, so you may want to check that out also.

But this is a great book, and I’m just going to review one of his concepts in here that is an old concept but he really makes it simple, clear and easy to understand. He calls it developing your Dream 100. And in many circles, like real estate, they used to call it farming.

Essentially, you go out, you get yourself a list—a small list—only of a hundred of your dream clients or the dream prospects that you want to be a part of your restaurant or your business.

So we actually are implementing for one of my businesses the Dream 100. We actually have our list of a hundred, and we’ve started to work it. And we’ve already got results in just a few weeks, so it’s fantastic. But the premise of it is this.

You get a hundred people on your list, and you focus intensely on them. So you’re sending them bigger packages. You’re sending them bigger pieces of direct mail. You’re contacting them more frequently. So instead of buying a list of 10,000 consumers, you buy a list of a hundred of the ideal ones. And since you’re going after a hundred ideal ones, you can really, really focus in.

Now, Chet talks about a great example in the book. He talks about a restaurant that he attended and went to frequently because he has some food allergies. So they were very aware of that, and he didn’t have to tell them each and every time. Since he dines with clients often, that’s kind of a hassle for him to go through what he’s allergic to all the time, which is understandable. Every time you’re out with clients, you don’t want to explain that you’re allergic to fifteen different things. So this restaurant paid very close attention, and they understood that. And it was a high-end restaurant.

They had a lot of tables open on Monday night and Tuesday night, so Chet said, “Hey, let me help you out. Let’s try and fill this restaurant up and I’m going to help you out as long as every time I come in here, there’s a table for me and my wife when we want to eat.”

So he helped them out; found a hundred homes in a very affluent neighborhood, and sent them out a package of information. I’m not going to give it all away, what’s in the package, because he talks about it in the book, and really to be fair, I think you should go get Chet’s book.

So he talks about how they mailed out a restaurant menu and they put it in a big envelope. They also had a gift in there, and I’m not going to tell you what the gift is. You’ll have to buy the book in order to get that. They then followed that up with another series of information. So what you want to do is look at how can you do this in your small business.

As an example, it’s all about using more steps in your marketing and not less. It’s not about less media. It’s about more media. So one of the ways that we do this in our business is with seminars. So we send out an 11×17 mailer in an envelope to a list, a smaller list that we know will respond.

We also use postcards. There’s usually a series of three postcards. We also do a series of three faxes where we’ve got fax numbers. We generally send between three and six emails. Then we also use two or three telemarketing steps. So when we’re trying to get a hundred of our dream customers to an event, we spend a heck of a lot of time and energy on a smaller list, not a bigger list.

So what I would recommend you do is go to Barnes & Noble or Amazon, get The Ultimate Sales Machine, sit down for the weekend, read the book, and then see how you can implement it into your business.

I hope you enjoy the book. It’s fantastic.

Investment Books Review #2: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator – a Timeless Classic

This is Edward Lefevre’s story of the legendary speculator Jesse Livermore – and Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is full of trading wisdom.

Although written 83 years ago, its wisdom and insight are timeless, being often featured as one of the top ten investment books of all time – and this is a book every trader should read.

Jesse Livermore – A Trading Legend

The book follows the exploits of Jesse Livermore and his colorful trading history.

He made and lost tens of millions of dollars, speculating in the stock and commodities markets during the early 1900s.

At one stage, he made million dollars in just one month – imagine what this amount would be worth today!

The Importance of Money Management

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, though, are not so much lessons in how to make money – but how you should protect what you have.

The book is a witty and entertaining read – but the real value of the book is the insight into a traders mind, and how our emotions cause us to lose more than we should – if we don’t trade with discipline.

As Livermore says:

“Losing money is the least of my troubles. A loss never bothers me after I take it. I forget it overnight. But being wrong – not taking the loss – that is what does the damage to the pocketbook and to the soul.”

Can you associate with that? – I can!

“All stock market mistakes wound you in two tender spots – your pocketbook and your vanity.“

Yes, we all hate taking losses, but at the end of the day, you have to forget your pride – as Livermore says, but you need to keep losses small.

The Myth of Market Timing

Whilst the book is rightly seen as an insight into trader psychology, it also makes an important point in relation to market timing, and trying to PREDICT market turning points.

As Livermore correctly says:

“One of the most helpful things that anybody can learn, is to give up trying to catch the last eighth-or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world. They have cost stock traders, in the aggregate, enough millions of dollars to build a concrete highway across the continent.”

He’s Right!

Many traders make the mistake of trying to predict market turning points – and follow methods such as Gann and Prechter – but the fact is, the best way to make money, is to wait for confirmation – before entering the market.

You miss a bit of the move, but so what? – You will make money overall, as the odds will be in your favor.

Predicting the market, nearly 80 years after Livermore’s death, is still a major mistake traders make today.

A Sad Ending and a Lesson

This book was published seven years before the 1929 Crash.

Although Livermore avoided losses in the crash – he got out before the crash – he made the mistake of going back in too early – and lost heavily.

The market falls of late 1931 and 1932 drove him to bankruptcy – and eventually to suicide. This shows how even great traders like Livermore, could not keep their emotions out of trading – we all know it’s hard to do, but it’s an essential part of trading success.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator remains one of those books that is a true classic, in the eyes of all who have read it.

If you have not read it, do so – it will bring a smile to your face, and give you trading insights you will remember forever.