The Hottest and Most Brilliant Business Tips for YOU – Marketing Success Resolutions and More

Our research ninjas at Credit Suite smuggled out ten amazing business tips for you! Be fierce and score in business with the best tips around the web. You can use them today and see fast results. You can take that to the bank – these are foolproof! Now these are marketing success resolutions you can keep!

Stop making stupid decisions and start powering up your business. Demolish your business nightmares and start celebrating as your business fulfills its promise.

And these brilliant business tips are all here for free! So settle in and scoop up these tantalizing goodies before your competition does!

#10. Say It Isn’t So! How to Tell if the Problem with Your Website is its Content

Our first jaw-dropping tip is all about something that skates a little too close to home – how to tell if your content is tanking. The Self-Employed offered three ways to tell if content is king, but yours should be deposed.

One method is of people not liking your content. But we’ve got to say, we’re not so sure about that. Why? Because this is missing one key component – the people need to know your content exists in the first place. Hence this brings us to one of our favorite topics: SEO. Without good search engine optimization, and sharing your content on social media, no one will know about it! And if they don’t know it exists, then they can’t like it. So in this instance, make sure your content is out there. If it’s still not liked then, yeah, it’s time to change that.

Or maybe your content doesn’t attract people. What does this mean? It’s that, if you’re putting out content, are people clicking on it, finishing reading, etc.? No one wants to read yet another sales pitch (seriously, we don’t). Even dry topics can get interesting with a creative spin. A website about a lumber yard is probably not a page-turner, but when that site shares projects and helpful tips, it gets interesting.

And their final bit of advice was to check metrics. As we’ve said before on these pages, measuring what you do is the only way you’ll ever figure out if something worked.

#9. Make it Short and Snappy

The next awesome tip is about plain speaking (and writing) in a financial planning practice, from the good folks at Advisor Web Marketing.

The truth is, this is good advice for any industry. While there are plenty of tough concepts out there, your readership will thank you, big time, if you use plain language.

So, what the heck does that mean? Does it mean I have to dumb stuff down?

Not exactly. Here comes a true story.

Before vs. Prior To – the Smackdown

Long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the planet, your intrepid blog writer practiced law. This meant a seemingly never-ending succession of depositions. A deposition is more or less an interview of a witness, done under oath. They’re used for trials, yes, but also for appeals, settlement discussions, and more.

The area of practice was construction law, and the side was the defense (for an insurance carrier). During a deposition, it was your blog writer’s job to poke holes in the stories of people claiming they were injured on a construction site. This could be either in the area of fault (oops, that’s not our job site) or how grave the injuries were (wait, you said you couldn’t walk, but I just saw you get out of your wheelchair and dance the Macarena).

Depositions always included the witness’s lawyer (that’s required). Now, only about a third of Americans have had any college. Therefore, the chances of deposing someone who had never been to college were high. As a result, your blog writer used easier terms, such as before and after.

Yet, inevitably, when it was the plaintiff’s lawyer’s chance to question their own client, they would use terms like prior to and subsequent to. This resulted in more than one witness not knowing what the heck their own lawyer was saying. And it also made the lives of translators harder, if a translation was necessary.

A minor shift in wording would have fixed that. Speak, and write, to your audience.

If you are as passionate about succeeding in business as we are, please help us spread the word about how to take the plunge and save time and money – and your sanity. And keep your marketing success resolutions!

#8. Comprehending Cash Needs

Our following life-changing tip concerns funding your own business. Small Business Trends comes through yet again with a fantastic list of all the things you need to take into consideration when it comes to funding.

Why and How Much?

They start with the basic question: what do you need the money for? You’re going to have to explain that to lenders (or your mom), so you’d better get that story straight now.

This leads straight into another basic question: how much do you really need? Knowing your specific needs makes this a far easier question to answer. If you say, ‘to run stuff’, well, that doesn’t help anyone. But if instead you say, ‘I need to buy a new or used (in good condition) machine’, then you’ve got something you can reasonably research.

What Kinds of Financing are Out There?

We tend to get more expansive when we talk about financing here at Credit Suite, but the article really just divvies up financing into three types:

1. Debt financing (loans, credit, etc.)
2. Equity financing (sell a part of your business in a swap for cash, to venture capitalists or angel investors) and
3. Bootstrapping (crowdfunding is included here, as is opening up your wallet and using your own funds)

If you’re not a fan of #2 or #3, then make it possible to get #1 through building business credit. And you should be doing that in addition to working on your marketing success resolutions.

#7. Squeeze Minutes Out of Hours Until They Beg for Mercy

For our next sensational tip, we looked at carving out time during 2019. Thrive Hive offered some great hacks for saving time.

Our favorite tip was to create content in advance, in anticipation of busier times when new content just plain can’t be created. For example, at the end of the quarter, your content team might be busy getting quarterly reports out. Or maybe you have a company retreat or training, and they just plain can’t get away.

For those sorts of times, stockpiling content is ideal.

And a related tip, to reuse and repurpose content, is also stellar. After all, if you did a July 4^th post in 2018, you probably don’t have to change it too much to make it work in 2019.

#6. Ready for Liftoff!

This tip is so easy, and it works! SendLane got together some of their best tips about how to run a successful launch. They do it with a series of emails which gently bring the customer down the funnel.

We think the best tips had to do with recording an event and re-running it. Of course we’re all busy (who isn’t?). And there’s also the matter of time zones. The United States has six when you count the mainland, Alaska, and Hawaii. If it’s 2:30 PM in Tampa, then it’s 9:30 AM in Honolulu. It’s unrealistic to expect everyone in every single time zone will be receptive to your message at the same time.

And even if your prospects are all local, some of them might work a late shift. Or your list of prospects might include insomniacs, or new parents (heaven help the person who’s both). By rerunning an event, or providing a recording when the prospect can rerun it at their convenience, you could be adding more conversions just by better accommodating more people. And that’s always worth a try.

#5. It’s That Time of Year Again – Your Marketing Success Resolutions are Here!

Grab this mind-blowing tip while it’s hot! While you’re thinking about how to improve yourself, seriously consider our marketing success resolutions.

The Content Marketing Institute put together a trio of stunning resolutions that aren’t just about marketing and business. They are also about how to improve yourself for the new year.

And no, we’re not talking about going on another diet, thank God.

Instead, the article provides an amazing hint to how to handle any resolution or challenge.

There’s a new set of 3 R’s: Record, Repeat, and Remove.

Record

Write it down! If you’re going to make plans for future improvements, then you’d best get them in writing. In that way, you can determine if you’re on track. And, given how busy we all are, you will remember your plans better (or even at all!).

Pro tip: be specific! Plans without specifics are just another word for wishful thinking.

Go big or go home – the idea here is, make your ambitions grand ones. Aspiring to the hard stuff is what makes us grow.

And make it a wild, out-there kind of an idea. Consider this: ten, twenty years ago, how many of us would have ever dreamed of hosting (or being hosted by) strangers somewhere in the world, and being paid (or paying) for the privilege? Yet that’s exactly what happens every day, thanks to Airbnb. That wacky, out-there idea was a game-changer.

And the final component of recording is to make it other-serving. That is, show others what’s in it for them.

Repeat

This isn’t just repeating success (although that’s a part of it). It’s also about reviewing the goal every single day. We’re not talking about more than perhaps 15 minutes in the morning. So review your goals. This will become a reflexive habit soon enough, and you’ll start to notice your fifteen minute review sessions are including some successes and positive steps in the right direction.

Remove

This one is about the distractions and clutter of our lives. Clear the pathway, and you’ll see the pathway. Not a bad philosophy of life. So, do you really need all of those notifications? Chances are awfully good that you don’t, so turn them off! Sorry, not sorry, Mark Zuckerberg.

And clean other stuff out. Drop off those email chains once your part is done. Have your bills paid automatically. Turn off the TV much of the time. Get that stuff out of there, and you’ll start to have the time to do what you need to get done. Really.

If you are as passionate about succeeding in business as we are, please help us spread the word about how to take the plunge and save time and money – and your sanity. And keep your marketing success resolutions!

#4. And Now a Word from Your Business Sponsor

Check out this spectacular tip, all about starting a business off right with sponsorship. Forbes, as always, offers winning advice.

Does your company run events? They’re expensive, eh?

Then why not get a sponsor? But not just any sponsor will do. The best tip we pulled from this article was to – you guessed it – quantify and measure your audience (see a pattern here?).

That is, the concept is to try out a few events just on your own. Who comes to them? Why? Get the numbers of demographics. Can you deliver tweens, Mommy bloggers, retirees, minority business owners, or some other niche? Know this information cold by getting the data.

Then you’ll have a true value proposition you can pitch to a potential sponsor.

#3. A Smart Start

It’s not your imagination: this winning tip can get you started in business!

Given the time of year, we thought about new beginnings. And what better way to start out than to pass on how to get your first client? The Work at Home Woman put out a comprehensive and virtually foolproof way to get that first client.

The trick to getting your very first client is to concentrate on getting just one client.

Say what?

Yes, really! The idea is a simple one, and it’s rather similar to getting a job. When you spray your shots and just apply everywhere, you don’t get a job. But when you concentrate on one possible job (or client), you spend time on perfecting your pitch and your offer. By concentrating, you also perform a pretty neat psychological trick – you make your one prospective client feel like they’re the only person in the world. Because you are to them.

Making a prospect feel valued should absolutely be one of your marketing success resolutions.

#2. Cross the Business Border – Here’s How to Take Your Company International

Our second to last unbeatable tip can give you a new perspective on selling outside the United States.

Score asks three vital questions about going international:

1. Where is your target international market? Of course this is a good idea: there’s no sense in expanding to, say, Switzerland if the product or service doesn’t appeal to the Swiss. But if you keep getting emails asking when your product or service will be available in Burkina Faso, then you might want to seriously consider going there first.
2. How are you going to budget for this? You’ll need to take into consideration exchange rates, and international shipping. And don’t forget: The United States taxes international income.
3. How will you dip your company’s toe into international waters? Do you need a translator? Do you need to better understand a country’s culture? Who knows the slang, and how business is really done there? How will you maintain brand integrity?

If you can answer these questions comprehensively, then going international just might be right for your company. So say bonjour to a new market!

#1. Get Ready for Your Business Closeup

We saved the best for last. For our favorite remarkable tip, we focused on improving YouTube content. Quick Sprout has ten easy tips and tricks to do just that.

We were particularly intrigued by their tip (which works for more than just YouTube) to check Google Trends. Find out what people are searching for, and how they are wording their searches, and you’ll more easily appeal to what they want and need.

So which one of our brilliant business tips was your favorite? And which one will you be implementing now? You’ve got to keep your marketing success resolutions, you know.

If you are as passionate about succeeding in business as we are, please help us spread the word about how to take the plunge and save time and money – and your sanity. And keep your marketing success resolutions!