As a solo entrepreneur you can get overwhelmed trying to wear all the hats. If you are just starting out you are the CEO, the sales person, the book-keeper and the dish washer. You know that I mean? You might have heard the phrase create leverage and if so great. However, once you make that discovery you are now simply exposed to so many options it’s hard to know what to choose.
As a work at home business one of the goals is to create an experience for the customer that is as easy as if they were buying from a Fortune 500. So how do you make it happen?
One of the best things you can do is look for good products that can demonstrate value to the customer but involves little to no work on your part.
Here are 10 tools that are easy for the non techs but add great value to the customer.
1. www.Efax.com: EFax is an online fax service that eliminates the need for a traditional fax machine, another line and all the associated expenses such as paper and ink cartridges. You get a real fax number that's tied to your email.
2. www.Aweber.com: If you want to keep in touch with your customers automatically and personalize the communication an auto responder can be an important tool. For a small monthly fee you are able to create email campaigns or a single message and broadcast it to your customer list. There are a variety of ways to increase the personalization and as a result will help you develop a better relationship with the customer.
3. www.VoiceShot.com: How would you like to instantly send a voice mail broadcast message to one or thousands of customers at a time? Imagine the power of being able to send reminders, alerts, product announcements or even so interactive polls or surveys right from the web. There are no set up fees or monthly minimums. You simply pay for the calls that are delivered. You truly can call more than one person at a time.
4. www.SendOutCards.com: Have you ever wanted to send a thoughtful card to someone but forgot or it simply did not happen because you ran out of time? Well Kody Bateman CEO of send out cards has not only revolutionized the greeting card industry he has made it his mission to change peoples lives one card at a time. With over a couple of cards in the inventory you can send cards to anyone.
I love this product because in less than one minute you can choose a card, personalize it, even add a picture, write it with your own handwriting, put a stamp on it and hit send. This is no e-card that may never get opened. You can set yourself apart from the competition and touch the heart of people you care about with this revolutionary product.
5. www.AudioAcrobat.com: Audio Acrobat is easiest way to add audio to your website or email. Would you to create your own online radio show? Audio Acrobat helps you record conference calls, podcast, interviews, and more. You can also learn to create products such as marketable CD’s.
6. www.FreeConference.com: Have you ever wanted to give a tele-seminar but did not want have the money to get started? Or maybe, you wanted to put a group of your customers or support team on the line to mastermind. A great way to not only develop a bound with your customers but to develop your content to them is through tele-seminars or tele-classes as they are sometimes called.
If you are just starting try www.FreeConference.com . You will receive a phone number where up to 25 participates can call in and listen to your seminar, boot camp, book reading or whatever content you want to deliver.
As you grow in experience you can choose other companies that will allow a larger number of participates as well options such as recording and creating a MP3 file.
Conference calls are great leverage because you can speak to several people at one time from the comfort of your home.
7. www.freeonlinesurveys.com: Would you like to know what your customers are thinking? You should. It’s simple to do when survey them. You can use this free online service to tap in the heart and mind your customer and uncover what they want from you. In less than 10 minutes you can be up and running. It’s easy to use with no software to install.
8. www.ilovechecks.com: Current figures show that 20% of all online transactions are check-based and that more than 75 million Americans do not have a credit card. Now your business can accept online checks and get fast verification of account status. You don't even need a shopping cart to process online checks with their virtual terminal and ATMVerify services. Don’t lose business because you don’t take checks.
9. www.EVoice.com or www.EVoicePlus.com: If you are a start up or home based business you may not want to miss your customers calls or have them go to a voice mail. Providing a quick response gives your clients to assurance that you are a well run business.
The ability to answer a customer or get back to them quickly is a crucial part of customer service. There are several different ways to accomplish this. However, www.evoice.com and www.evoiceplus.com are two lost cost highly effective tools. EVoice allows the messages to be send to your email and with EVoice Plus your messages can go right to your cell phone.
10. www.PDF995.com: One of the keys to leverage your business is to create free reports, products, e-books and other publishing documents. The power of this strategy is once you develop a product you can either give it away or sell it over and over. You can even add free give-away rights which will allow someone to give your report away without changing any of the content. This can start a buzz and spread like a virus.
While there are only 24 hours in a day choosing the right tools can surely help you leverage the time. Think strategically when you are looking for products and service to help you build your business. Don’t just think about what you need right now. Always ask your self the question, “How can this tool help me grow into a million dollar business?”
10 Tools A Work At Home Newbie Can Use to Leverage Your Way to Success
Tools Clickbank Gives You
Before the world of the internet, you made money by offering services to customers. And part of what made you a success was a great set of tools. So to be a great car mechanic, you need outstanding wrenches and a good shop. A dentist has his drills and a stone mason his trowel. So we should not be too surprised that to be a success in the world of internet marketing, good tools will make or break you here too.
Clickbank is clearly one of the real hot online resources to make big profits from affiliate sales but you still have to know your tools and know your stuff to make it work. Anyone who takes advantage of Clickbank wants to become one of the great affiliates using the system. So like that smart mechanism, dentist or stone mason, using the tools that Clickbank gives you to become a success will make or break you in this virtual world of sales and marketing.
The ClickBank calculator is a powerful tool because knowing how to use it makes enables you to compute your commission on each product without having to have a degree in math. You can access the calculator at http://www.clickbankguide.com/calculator.htm/ Along with the calculator itself, this is where Clickbank lays out a table of most used prices so you can understand how the tool functions. With these starter tools, you can create your own price tables that will be your roadmap to success.
At "template" is a common format that you can use over and over again in any setting to save you from constantly coming up with a layout for a letter, a survey or some other form of communications. Often webmasters use one template for all the web pages on a site they are creating. It’s a great tool for standardizing what works and sticking with it. The tool set that ClickBank provides is a great source of such templates for you to supply to your affiliates or for you to use for your own internet marketing and merchandising.
Mass mailing through email is the backbone of any successful internet marketing campaign. While in this day and age, avoiding becoming a spammer is a science in itself, that doesn’t eliminate the need for a good mass mailing tool to add to your arsenal of tools you will use to reduce the work of running your online business. But because ClickBank knows that a tool to send out large amounts of emails to customers or prospective customers, they are there to give you a group email tool.
One problem that can become a nightmare to keep straight is what affiliates are to be considered future partners and which ones are future competition or "the enemy". So a tool to organize your affiliate contact list can be gold when you get a large affiliate list which will happen when you become successful. In addition to keeping tabs who are already onboard with you as an affiliate ClickBank's tools helps you track potential partners so you can contact them before they become "the enemy". Better to join up with successful internet marketers and everyone work together to get rich than work against each other and lose.
Keyword optimization may be one of the hottest internet marketing tricks of the trade to really drive traffic to your website. Keywords are what Google and search engines use to rank web sites so if you have your keywords "optimized" that means your web site will perform well on Google or Yahoo or one of the other big search engines. ClickBank can help with finding the right keywords to optimize so as you build up your online content and article base, you are naturally driving traffic online to generate revenue from your site marketing tools. Using this tool well is just smart merchandising online.
This is just a sampling of the types of tools that ClickBank provides to make you a success. When you are a success, they are a success so take the time to learn to use these tools well and to discover the vast array of other tools out there from ClickBank so you can use convert this knowledge into online gold for your internet business.
Tools for Easier And Convenient Blogging Experience
Just how great a blog is? It is really great, in the sense that you are allowed to show the world what you want to show. You just have your blogging account, sign in, locate your blog name, click a new post, put your title, web page link, and some parting shots from you, and publish your blog. Very easy isn’t it?
In addition, it is also good for online business entrepreneur. By the power of video blogging, you will be able to post advertisement of your products through blogs. You can also meet new people who can be your potential clients later on. The good thing is, you can do all of this for free!
In other words, blogs are not just bunch of online diaries where you post your experiences and feelings. It can also be used to talk about business trends and other related topics. Either way, here are some of the valuable tools to make your blogging experience a lot easier.
Tool No.1: Blog Building
Building a blog involves deciding how you want to host it. You have two options: If you are not inclined on the technical details involved in blogging, you have the option to sign up for a free account on a blogging site. If you are the other way around, you might as well consider building your own one.
Tool No.2: Blog Editing
If you are conscious of how your blog will look like after posting, blog editing is just right for you. It has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor which means you can write and edit at the same time. In addition, you will be seeing exactly what you blog post looks like as you are writing.
Tool No.3: Blog Posting
If you have a desktop tool, you might as well consider it instead of writing your blog from the control panel. You can create and save your post offline and upload it later on. It is usually convenient for your part if in case you are pre-occupied with other things and do not have time to write blogs everyday.
Tool No.4: RSS Generators
If you want to create a feed for your blog application, you just have to make one. Enter the necessary information, click submit, and you are already done.
Tool No. 5: Blog and Ping Applications
This tool enables the blog and RSS directories aware that you have already updated your blog. It is important especially if you own a business blog. By these regular updates, you will be notified immediately of several sites at once. Just a friendly reminder: Never use the application to inform directories that have an RSS feed for your site. You will get banned.
Tool No.6: Feed Submitter
Before using the updated tools, you need to submit your RSS feed to the directories. You can use this to get your feed indexed quickly. This will save you time because you do not need to visit ach site to get your website indexed.
Tool No.7: Pheedo Blog Network
It provides tool to web publishers to help them increase web traffic and monetize the content of their site. It also helps to optimize your web log by selling advertisement directly from your blog. It has the following features:
• It matches the environment of the advertisement with respect to the website.
• It reports the exact revenue generated from the website’s content.
Utilize these tools and make your blogging experience a different one.
What Tools Do I Need For Cake Decorating?
When you begin cake decorating, you can get by with a heavy duty mixer, icing tips, icing bags, cake pans, ready made or recipes for homemade royal icing, mixing bowls, spatulas, and metal icing spatulas. Later on you will want to spread your wings and expand your cake decorating and baking inventory. Below are some of the items you may want to purchase.
1. Rolled Fondant Icing White Vanilla, 2 pounds - $8.88. Rolled Fondant cake icing is a premium quality, non-stick, icing that is pliable and can be rolled out for cake decorating with a rolling pin or mechanical sheeter. This Fondant produces a satiny smooth and elegant finish to any cake. This product can also be used as a modeling paste to create decorative flat or 3-D pieces for your cake decoration.
This product has a mellow flavor and is delicious. It is very pliable and easy to handle . This product can be used over a thin layer of icing or a layer of powdered sugar so that it will not stick. Any cake will take on a beautiful, elegant look when Fondant is used. Different flavors of Fondant are available in various weights and flavors.
2. Buttercream Icing 3 1/2 pounds. Ready to use for cake decorating and icing. Price $8.95, 25 pounds- $46.89, 8 pounds- $16.01.
3. Hexagon Cake Pan- 16 gauge anodized aluminum, straight sides, Hemmed rim for durability, even wall thickness. Also available Cut Corner Sheet Cake Pan, Petal Cake Baking Pans, Heart Cake Pans, Square cheesecake pan with removable bottom, Oval Cake Pan Set, 10 x 2 Aluminum baking ring, Round Cake Pan Sets, Wedding Cake Pan Set.
4. Magic Line Round Cake Pans are made to suit all of your baking needs whether you are a professional or a novice at cake decorating. Set includes one 6 inch, 8 inch, 10 inch, 12 inch, and 14 inch pan.
5. Set of 2 round cake pans from 2 x 2 inch, to 20 x 2. Prices range from $4.84 to $34.10. 3 inch deep cake pans and pan sets at lower prices.
6. Round, fluted cake pans.
7. Non-stick angelfood cake pan.
8. 3 tier Cake and Dessert Stand - $29.29.
9. French Chef Rolling Pin - $6.99.
These and many more cake decorating supplies are available at ultimatebaker.com. This site has all of the newest gadgets and tools that will help with cake decorating. This site is an excellent store for all of your cake decorating needs, whether you are a home baker or a professional cake decorator, there are so many tools at this website, you will find it hard to choose. An excellent site for those who own a cake decorating business, you will benefit from shopping here because of their reasonable prices and their large inventory.
Cake decorating is becoming a large industry. Every celebration includes a cake to share with the participants. A cake decorating business can be a very profitable and fun.
Tools for Adsense
If you're just boarding on the AdSense train, and looking to find a quick way to make the profits you've seen all being pulled of all over the Internet, you might be interested in a couple of tools.
These software tools are designed to aid AdSense publishers in getting a better understanding on how traffic flows through their site. Some will help you in understanding which keywords gain you more money and which locations give you the best AdSense payment.
One of the best such tools available is AdSense Gold (http://www.profitbooks.com/go/astracker) which allows you to have a better understanding of which ads and formats actually get more clicks and which are useful or nearly useless.
This program works by tracking views and clicks on all the publisher's pages. It even goes as far as offering you the possibility to see which referrer each visitor came in through.
There's a free tool called SynSense (http://www.singerscreations.com/RSS/Posts/235.asp) which is more of an AdSense monitoring tool. This sits in the tray and offers actualized AdSense stats as you hover your mouse over its icon. It's a very nice tool for those which like to be informed on how their AdSense is doing at all times of the day.
Google provides you with stats in a csv format on their site. So someone made a tool that can automatically download such files and extract a lot of information from them. The name of this tool is CSV AdStats and it is available from http://www.nix.fr/en/csvadstats.aspx?q=download
It has a large number of features, including the possibility to highly customize reported stats, exporting data and charts to other formats. It's in French but the language can very easily be changed to English.
Of course any tool can only access these stats as often as 15 minutes but the authors are well aware of that fact and none of these tools will get you in trouble with Google because of that.
If, however, you're browsing content most of the time, and your tool of choice is the Firefox Internet browser, there's an extension for this program that allows you to view the stats in your status bar.
Again, this software is aware of Google's 15 minute rule and enforces its usage, 15 minutes being the minimum time between updates. The Google AdSense notifier for Firefox can be obtained from http://code.mincus.com/?p=3
There is also a program called Golden Keywords out there that helps you in getting the best keywords for your site. It's really efficient and very easy to use. It does come with a price tag though, it costs $49.95 and it can be obtained from http://www.regnow.com/softsell/nph-softsell.cgi?item=8616-2
So as you can see, software developers are making more and more programs meant to help you in your quest to maximize your AdSense profits. But before you go out looking for them remember that Google has a few features of its own as well.
It does offer some reports (albeit a bit more limited) and using the 'channels' feature is a good way of finding out which ads on your site are really bringing in most of the revenue.
Be on the look out as new tools appear daily and make sure to invest time in your site, as that is the real key in success with AdSense.
You need to have optimized niche website templates for best results. You may find the best adsense templates and blog templates at www.AdsenseTemplates.com (http://www.adsensetemplates.com). They are offering 100 fresh new templates every month.