My Path to Success

Faith To Do Any and All Things

Dreams of Hope

When I was a child I remember looking through the Philadelphia Magazine that came out every month. In the back of the magazine were fabulous mansion-like homes that were advertised for sale. I used to tell my heart, “One day I am going to purchase one of these homes for my parents.” I used to dream of living in a beautiful home with lots of space with my mother and father.

My Life, My Path

As I grew older, I lost those dreams to life and all the things I experienced. In the back of my mind, those dreams lay dormant until I became an entrepreneur.

The path that has led me to the enormity of my success has been through the deepening of my faith. I could write a book about not having an ounce of faith to believing all the things that have helped to shape my life, my happiness and my success.

The path to my ultimate success has been learning and applying God’s commandments as well as His principles, deepening my faith and belief in the Lord has led to great success, not only in my businesses, but in my life as well. My faith has helped me to build the businesses of my dreams.

Now, I’m back to dreaming and believing that I am going to receive the home that I always knew that I would buy some day.

4 Festive Tips for Holiday Social-Media Marketing

Happy Holidays!

The holidays are a special time of year, highlighted by the three F’s – family, food, and … fighting? I don’t mean fighting over who gets the last drumstick or whether Home Alone is better than A Christmas Story. I’m talking about retailers and brands fighting for consumer attention during the busiest shopping time of the year.

The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the biggest opportunity brands and retailers have each year, but it’s also incredibly competitive, so it’s crucial to reach and communicate with your customer audience in the correct way.

One way to do so is through social media. The holiday season is filled with social posts about gifts bought, deals found, and complaints of poor customer service. Now like never before, brands and retailers have the ability to connect directly with their customers and create a more personal shopping experience.

Here are four tips for how brands can get savvy with their social media marketing during this year’s holiday madness.

1. Drive that local cheer.
The holidays experience in New York is different than in San Francisco. Your messaging should reflect that. Leverage geo-targeting tools to know from where your customer is. Then you can create content they can relate to and messaging that resonates with a personalized brand experience.

2. All I want for Christmas is user-generated content.
How do you connect with audiences when they are already inundated with advertisements? You make them the hero. Businesses that can actively leverage user-generated content are the ones that will drive deeper connections with fans. Most people today are programmed to ignore ads. Showcasing authentic photos of your audience drives your intended message while encouraging a deeper, emotional interest from new and loyal fans alike. Relate to them with real people, in real moments, using your product and services.

Your featured fans get credit and interaction, audiences find trust in real people using your product or service, and your brand will better understand what motivates your audience. Everyone is jolly.

3. Deck the social walls.

The best way to harness a viral lift is to showcase your interactive experience. Remember, the more observable you make a campaign, the easier it is for your fans to imitate.

Create a social hub with aggregated content from multiple social channels on your website or microsite to capture audiences online. Your consumers can then share with their social community when you feature them, extending your reach. But don’t forget about in the store. Providing social displays, with easy calls to action at physical locations, are a simple, yet effective way to generate engagement.

4. Multiple chimneys equal multiple presents.
Facebook is still expected to be the channel of choice for holiday social spend, as 92 percent of marketers are planning extensive campaign efforts for this one platform. But 73 percent of marketing professionals think Instagram is going to be the breakout platform for this year’s holidays.

Don’t silo yourself to one social-media platform. Instead, create content on the appropriate channels for your audience, each with native content focused exclusively to that channel. Your Facebook posts, Instagrams and Tweets should drive the same idea, but the content should be customized to resonate best with each channel’s unique community.

Think of your various social media channels as your own little elves, and put them to work for you this holiday season. Utilize these tips and you’ll win the holiday retail battle while leaving your customers filled with joy.

Amir Zonozi

11 Reasons Why Your Website Doesn’t Sell

A well-designed website organically grows a company’s business and reinforces branding.

A study by Nielsen Norman Group found that users stay on a website for an average of 10 to 20 seconds. Visitors hang around longer only if they find something worthwhile during those initial glances. For a business, every second counts.

Several factors may strip a website of value. Here are 11 problems that affect a site’s presentation alongside fixes to immediately apply to help drive greater user engagement and better traffic.

1. Low-quality visuals.

Many have written about the power of visuals in communication. A 1986 study by the University of Minnesota’s Management Information Systems Research Center with 3M support found presentations using visual aids 43 percent more convincing. A website’s potential can be held back by the inclusion of low-quality visuals.

Marketing expert Govind Agarwal recommends having high-quality photos to grab viewers’ attention, increase social shares and even boost overall SEO if pictures are tagged appropriately. Labnol.org offers a list of places for finding free professional images.

2. Lack of reviews or testimonials.

If its website does not have testimonials, a business is missing out on an easy and effective marketing tool. Customers are discriminating. Merely telling them of the strength of product or service is not enough anymore. Testimonials can help create trust for a company’s offerings and quell concerns customers might have about making a purchase. Derek Gehl, CEO of the Internet Marketing Center, has shared guide to using testimonials and choosing ones that are suit an audience.

3. Lacking color savvy.

Another factor that might cause weak sales on a company site is its color scheme. Much research is being done on visual information that’s hue-related. Many entrepreneurs probably already understand the importance of branding. A powerful brand sets the company apart from the competition and makes the business instantly recognizable to consumers. But it can lose credibility with users if its website is adorned with an unimpressive color scheme.

For a crash course on color theory, reference Smashing Magazine’s in-depth guide. Determine what the company’s brand should convey to customers and be sure the website has an appropriate color scheme to match.

4. Outdated information.

Scroll down to the bottom of a webpage to where a copyright date is listed. Is it still recent? According to Small Business Trends, a website appearance that looks out of date is an instant turnoff to customers.

Clients want to see that a company has put in effort to stay current. This includes regularly adding new content and refreshing existing copy.

5. Hard to find.

The best website in the world is useless if no one can find it. An entrepreneur need not know much about search engine optimization to develop pages that are easily discoverable by search engines and consumers. Gwen Moran has recommended a strong domain name, carefully optimized page titles to accurately reflect the content inside and using keywords effectively.

6. Not being mobile friendly.

A business website may resemble a work of art when opened on a desktop computer, but if it does not display well or function on a mobile device, the company will lose out on a growing segment of the online audience. Shopify, a leading ecommerce platform, looked at data from more than 100,000 websites that use its platform and found that slightly more than 50 percent of shopping is being done via mobile. To ensure that a website is mobile responsive, check these actionable tips.

7. Difficulty in finding contact information.

Ever needed assistance in a store just when all the sales associates seem to have disappeared? In retail, that should never be the case. Online, it shouldn’t be either. If a customer has a question or needs help, the site’s contact information should be easy to find. Being available on demand, such as via live chat, can also help a business better engage customers, reduce costs and boost sales.

8. Misdirected focus.

Customers want their experience on a business website to be focused on them. This means including sections that answer their questions and address their needs. An easy fix is including a frequently asked questions, or FAQ, page. The Content Marketing Institute recommends highlighting top questions, with timely answers and making the archive searchable. When possible, simplify the user experience by making answers accessible within one click. Customers want fast, helpful information.

9. Requiring sign-ups first

Forcing users to sign up on a company site before they can access can deter engagement. It puts an artificial hurdle between customers and the company’s products. According to user-experience blog UX Movement, aggressive sign-up forms make readers hesitant to divulge personal information for fear of receiving spam. In many cases, consumers assume the value they’ll receive won’t be worth the price they pay in sharing an email address. Make each visit count and do not corner users into doing anything they’re not comfortable doing.

10. Audio or video the autoplays.

One way to surely annoy a site’s visitors is to set audio and video on pages to autoplay. In an editorial, Troy Dreier, senior associate editor of StreamingMedia.com, wrote, “Sites are overusing autoplay, and it reflects badly on the whole online video industry.” Unfortunately, publishers, desperate for revenue, are still happy to deliver autoplay ads. To minimize disruptions to the reader experience, limit a clip to five seconds or less or offer a pause or stop button if it runs longer.

11. Painfully slow load times.

Digital audiences are impatient. Even if a website is filled with incredibly captivating media, it may experience high bounce rates if pages take too long to load for readers. Visitors highly value their time, so build a fast website that caters to their needs at lightning speed. Compressing images and large files is an easy way to guarantee quicker load times. Use a tool like Smush.it to shrink files and optimize a site’s performance.

FIRAS KITTANEH
CONTRIBUTOR
CEO at One Mall Group, Entrepreneur, SEO and Ecommerce Expert

A New Path

New Creations – God’s Virtuous Women Entrepreneurs

If you’re lost in life and you don’t which way to turn, now is the time for you to start a new path in your life. Creating new paths can be an exciting time. Whether it’s your path to a new found business or a path that will allow you to begin to build new relationships, it’s time to rejoice!

Life is filled with so many different avenues that sometimes it’s hard to choose which path you should take. I believe in letting God create my paths for me. When God has spoken to me and He has equipped me with all the tools that I need to do whatever it is He tells me, I know that I am on the right path and I am excited to see His plan unfold right before my eyes, always one truth at a time.

My New Path

A few months ago a good friend of mine told me about this priceless opportunity that I was very skeptical about at first, but because of her sincere heart and great business knowledge and understanding, I decided to give this life-altering business a try.

She told me about this organic detoxing tea that gave her great health benefits that she had never experienced before. Before ordering the tea I asked her a few important questions because I was worried about potential side effects. She kindly informed me that with this detox there were absolutely no side effects. I wasn’t sure if this detox tea would take my appetite away, dry my mouth, give me headaches or just make me sick overall. She told me that she had been drinking the tea for a few months and she had lost 7 pounds in eight days. I was concerned about trying the tea because I had had an embolization and I was afraid that the tea might make me worse.

Well, after believing my dear friend, I decided to purchase the tea for just $38.95 which also allows you to become a distributor as well. I thought what a great company to be able to purchase the tea for such a low price and then become a business owner with my own website.

I got the tea about five days after placing my order. Two tea bags makes a gallon of ice-tea. I drank 16 oz of the tea in the evening hours before going to bed. The next day the tea did exactly as my friend told me it would do. It cleansed me thoroughly. After about the third day my back pain was gone and I was feeling so much better. I didn’t even have any cramps. I was elated. I felt healthier than I did before I had the embolization and the weight on my stomach has melted down.

Laying a sustainable foundation is the key to your success.

I am now embarking on this new plan and I am beyond thrilled and I’d love for you to join me.

Total Life Changes

As an entrepreneur I have learned many life-changing things that have helped to prosper my life and my businesses. Total Life Changes is a part of my new found journey and what an amazing journey it has been. If you want to lose weight, be super healthy and make an amazing amount of money, then Total Life Changes is the answer!

I am delighted to share this awe-inspiring opportunity with you so that you too can become healthier than ever, physically and financially.

If you have any questions, please send me an email and we can talk more about this life-changing opportunity that is truly altering lives around God’s glorious globe!

Blessings.

Cynthia G. Boyer

cyndisdesignz@gmail.com

3 Tricks to Building Value When You Sell

Focus on Business

There are two things businesses can focus on when selling: features and outcomes. Often companies spend way too much time rattling off all the perks of a product or service and gushing about their own business (“We have the best technical expertise”) and less time focusing on the prospect and the solution. This can lead to lost customers and sales.

Instead, focus on the end result by asking questions like, “If you could solve your top three challenges, what would that mean for your company in terms of increased revenues?”

Before you can start selling outcomes, you need to understand how to identify which result to sell in any scenario. Here are three tips to get you started:

1. Learn about your prospect’s challenges. Every qualified prospect has challenges you can solve, but you need to understand exactly what those challenges are.

Once you’ve learned what your prospect’s challenges are, you need to understand how important a solution is to your prospect. Remember all businesses have a lot of challenges, so they must prioritize them. If the challenges your outcome would solve aren’t at the top of your prospect’s list of priorities, then it’s time to move on.

Related: 6 Secrets to a Successful Sales Meeting

2. Understand and clarify your prospect’s goals. After you have identified your prospect’s challenges, you need to help him become clear about his goals. What is the prospect really looking to accomplish over the next year or two? What challenges will absolutely have to be solved in order to achieve that? This is where you want to start talking dollars and cents, this is where you build your value.

When you get prospects to articulate the revenues or profits they are losing due to their current business strategy, the massive value for you are selling becomes clear.

3. Create clear objectives: Now that you know what your prospect should be accomplishing, it’s time to create tangible objectives for your potential relationship. This means targeting particular metrics, like level of revenue increase, decrease in costs and new customer visits. By creating clear objectives, developing a budget for a solution with a prospect is painless and isn’t about the price.

Related: Five Strategies for a Winning Sales Presentation

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Marc Wayshak

Marc Wayshak is president of Game Plan Selling. As a sales strategist, he created a system aimed at revolutionizing the way companies approach selling, based upon his experiences as an entrepreneur, All-American athlete and years of research and training. A graduate of the University of Oxford’s MBA program and Harvard University, he is the author of Game Plan Selling and Breaking All Barriers.

The VWE Newsletter

The Presence of the Lord

As I sat down at my kitchen table, I glanced out the window; I was in awe of the Lord thy God of Israel’s breathtaking magnificence and the glory of His majesty. Mesmerized by the endless rows of the lilies of the valley, I began sending prayers of thanksgiving unto the Lord thy God of my life for His sweet and eternal presence that is forever sealed in my heart and deeply rooted within my soul. I sing praises, I give honor and I magnify the Holiness of the One and Only Living True God, my Lord and Savior, my Father, Who Art in Heaven from everlasting to everlasting.

Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honor, and power, and might, be unto our God for ever and ever. Amen. Revelation C 7, V12

Directing Your Path

God’s and Direction

As Jesus leads guides and directs me I follow Him I walk in all His ways and I Hearken unto His voice I am grateful that I am able to discern what He is telling me and I thank Him for His plans for my life.

Your Prosperity

When you step outside the door of your home, you will see your prosperity. It lives inside you and it’s all around you.

Forever present, God’s countenance and glory are upon you, illuminating your path.

God has a harvest of riches awaiting you; from wisdom and knowledge, to silver and gold, to rubies and diamonds; it’s time to get your inheritance. It begins right here and it’s exclusively designed to help you transform your life. It’s time to get excited as you are about to be empowered and uplifted. We have doorways that lead to avenues that will help you see things in a whole new different Light!

What Entrepreneurs Need to Know Before Starting a Business

Mark Cuban is known for being outspoken and no-nonsense when it comes to business. This week, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, investor and owner of the Dallas Mavericksparticipated in a question and answer sessionon popular social news site reddit where he discussed all things business, basketball and, of course, Shark Tank.

When starting a business, Cuban said every entrepreneur needs to know that it’s not so much about having a killer idea as it is about being completely prepared to take a product or service to market. “Everyone has ideas, most don’t do the work required to get the job done,” he wrote.

Another thing aspiring business owners need to keep in mind: Sales are the most important aspect of a small business, Cuban wrote. “No sales, no company.”

Below, a sampling of Cuban’s points that were related to business and entrepreneurialism.

On finding motivation as an entrepreneur:
I daydreamed for motivation. I didn’t lie to myself and talk about my passions and how if I was passionate enough about something I could be successful at it.

I was lucky. I grew up knowing that hard work and smart work has a greater impact on results than being passionate about something.

On needing a master’s degree in business administration to be good at business:
I think an MBA is an absolute waste of money. If you have a hole in your knowledge base, there is a ton of online courses you can take. I don’t give any advantage to someone in hiring because they have an MBA.

On funding tech startups:
There is a HUGE bubble in the Valley for tech startups. The valuations have gotten out of hand. When valuations go up beyond the reality point, the funding goes down.

It’s almost become like the movie business was 10 years ago. There was so much dumb money coming in and so few actually making money that the suckers finally wised up.

On how many of Shark Tank deals wind up getting modified or canceled:
We get the chance to do due diligence after the show. As a result you uncover things that were not brought up in the show, so it’s not unusual for a deal to fall through in the DD phase. I have had things like people who never paid their taxes, people who lied on the show, people who didn’t think that if they spent money on their personal credit cards it should be considered an expense. You name it.

There is so much pressure on the entrepreneur during the show that sometimes they say what they think we want to hear rather than the truth. The DD helps us separate the two.

On the most ridiculous thing pitched on Shark Tank:
The ion watch deal was pretty much it. You can’t come on expecting to scam us. We will nail you.

On Shark Tank being scripted:
Shark Tank is not scripted at all. When the entrepreneur walks into the shark tank the ONLY thing we know is their first name. NOTHING else.

The only “scripted” part of the show is this. . . the producers tell us before every show. . . if an entrepreneur looks like they are going to cry, shut up and let them. They love tears. That’s the only scripting.

Different Types of Affiliate Marketers

What are the Different Types of Affiliate Marketers?

Author: Evan | Filed Under Affiliate Networks, Affiliate Programs, Affiliate Resources

Okay, so what types of affiliates, publishers, and partners are there really out there for Advertisers to work with? There really are so many different types, it’s such a large industry. Over the last 10 or 12 years affiliate marketing has really exploded. I mean it’s really a worldwide phenomenon. Here are some of the various types of affiliate marketers that are out there for Advertisers to affiliate with through networks like CJ, Linkshare, and Shareasale. It’s not a given that you will end up working with these types of affiliates, but if you recruit properly you will gain these types of affiliate marketers.

Webmasters – Webmasters are people building sites and people who own sites. There are an infinite number of webmasters out there who are in various stages of expertise and development of their website, or multiple website, that will likely have signed up for a CJ or Shareasale, and you can meet them through there and you can also flat out contact their website if you find it and say, “Hello, I found your website, I’d love to partner with you. This is pay out we can offer.” If you do it in large amounts you’ll get a certain amount of response.

Search Affiliates – SEO, PPC, media buying – there is a whole crop of affiliates who spend their own money and really try to leverage the search engines, Facebook advertising, and various other paid advertising models in order to generate an ROI for themselves with affiliate offers. This is a whole sub-culture, really you could say, because they are usually very entrepreneurial business minded, smart people, testing different things. These are affiliates you want to have as partners as long as they are following the right procedures and rules. SEO and media buying affiliates can really drive a ton of traffic and revenue for you. So these affiliates need to be catered to and made friends with.

Bloggers – bloggers are great for posting content about your company, reviewing new products, you can send them samples, you can say “hey review our product on your site, here is a sample”, which can be very effective at spreading the word. Not only that, anything bloggers write about tends to rank organically in the search engine. So its never bad when you have a blogger who is willing to promote your company or do a product review for your company as an affiliate. Mommy bloggers are very good affiliates and there’s probably an infinite amount of mommy bloggers that aren’t even in affiliate marketing right now that can be approached and proposed a business deal where they are being compensated on what they produce via their blogs.

Coupon Sites – couponing has become very, very big. It has really exploded in the last couple of years with the recession, where people are going searching for coupons for particular merchants prior to purchase and they also find merchants before even thinking about purchasing via coupon sites. It’s a little bit of a double edge sword, in that you will get additional volume from the coupon sites, but you will see coupon sites sort of capitalizing on organic rankings related to your company name and the word “coupon code.” So you have to sort of take the good with the bad and really try to maximize the good and not really trouble yourself too much with who’s ranking organically with your company name and the word coupon code, because it’s going to happen as soon as you launch an affiliate program. But there is a tremendous amount of potential with coupon code affiliate sites because they likely have member bases and they usually drive a lot of traffic.

Review Sites – review sites are pretty popular among affiliate marketers. Affiliates will build a site that reviews five or six different advertisers in a particular niche, hosting is big with review sites, also dating, phone companies, flowers, basically anything where you can take four or five different advertisers and put them on one site and then drive paid search or organic search through those pages that feature different reviews, usually in a chart format. The affiliate would then earn a commission whenever he refers business to anyone of those advertisers. So that’s a very big and well converting demographic of affiliates traffic.

Loyalty Portals– loyalty portals are very, very big. These are companies who have large membership basis and they are able to expose your advertiser offer to the membership base and there may even be a cash back component. There is many, many loyalty portals out there that you can place your offer in and it’s on a performance basis, so they have to be hunted down. Mall Networks is a good example of a loyalty affiliate publisher.

Incentive Programs – This is where you are running into volume, but you are also running into possible issues because people taking actions when they are being awarded points can tend to skew down quality of leads certainly and then possibly sales and possibly increase the return rate. Virtual currency is another — it’s a quickly growing industry that kind of was born out the social networking thing where people are earning virtual currency and then there is companies who leverage affiliate advertisers to let people redeem their virtual currency and make purchases and save money and so forth. But again, a double edge sword, as you can get good volume, but you can also get some “iffy” sales and some sales that can tend to have a higher return rate.

Email Marketing – Email marketing has been around for years and it’s gone through a few different revolutions let’s say and it went from the wild west to something a little more regulated, and from what I can tell its pretty much the wild west again. It’s all about getting into the inbox. My recommendation is being very picky with it and don’t use everyone but pick maybe four or five email vendors that can blast your offer on a performance basis and just make sure everything is CAN-SPAM compliant and you shouldn’t have issues, and it should be an additional revenue source for you.

Partnerships and Business Development– who in your company is handling business development? Is it someone who is pro-actively reaching out? Is it someone who is going after companies saying, “Hi I found your website or I found your company, we would love to partner with you on a rev share basis. Here is what we pay out by join our affiliate program and running it through our direct tracking program on site.” So you have to reach out to a lot of possible partnerships in order to get handfuls, but once you have a really good partnership on rev share or CPA basis, it tends to be a good producer and it tends to last a long time. So always look for partnerships and it kind of falls outside the realm of affiliate marketing. It’s one of those things you handle internally with a Biz Dev person, a business development director, that should be a very proactive person who follows up a lot. Yhey can definitely be going out and getting rev share deals for your company.

Big Web Properties – Big Web Properties are great! What’s better than a site that gets a couple a million visitors a month with your banner on it. You have several large websites in the affiliate networks, one that comes to mind the Meredith Corp, they publish 10 huge magazines and huge online web properties. Big web properties are definitely more receptive to CPA deals and rev share deals than they ever have been and the more inventory they have, the more they need to fill that inventory with something that converts for them to make the money, hence affiliate offers.

Traditional Media – You can get TV, print, and radio on a CPA basis on a rev share, it’s doable, it can be done, it has been done, I’ve done it myself. You have to propose these deals to the different media outlets and individual stations and say, “can you run some of your remnant inventory with our ads, and we’ll pay you on a performance basis, we’ll set up a dedicated 800 number, we’ll set up a coupon code, a dedicated URL.” You can run traditional media on a performance basis. So look for those type deals as well and there are few companies that specialize in that.

Phone Calls – generating phone calls on performance basis, usually done on a per call basis or a warm transfer basis or live transfer where you are paying extra amount for that transfer to the call centers. But there are companies out there who will do it on a strictly per sale basis. So you just have to find those companies and get your company kind of in with them and run the campaign. See if it works for both parties. If it does you continue, if not you move on and say thanks for trying or you can do it on a different metric and see if you can make that work.

These are some of the various different types of affiliate marketers you can work with on a performance-basis! Hope you enjoyed the read. You can see that are so many different types of affiliate marketers that can be brought into your affiliate program. You definitely good, competent affiliate management to bring in and then work with all these different types of affiliates. You have the knowledge now go leverage it!

Evan Weber, CEO
Experience Advertising, Inc.
954-662-8010
evan@experienceadvertising.com

– See more at: http://experienceadvertising.com/what-are-the-different-types-of-affiliate-marketers/#sthash.98Vsqtoh.dpuf

Category: Women Make Money