Military Transition: Successful Marketing Strategies

The Most Important Skills

You Must Learn

In Order to Succeed In the Civilian World

(Part 12)

Learn how to create a successful business using excellent marketing strategies

In our last article, we discussed the topic of being your own boss by starting your own business.  Owning your own business is a true accomplishment, but in order to succeed you need to:

1. Have a passion and true interest in the business you want to start.
2. Create a business plan.
3. Organize you long-term and short-term goals.
4. Create a budget – do not go over board and dig yourself deep in dept.
5. Market your business being with the most effective tactics that cost the least amount of money implement.
6. Communicate well with your clients and create make sure you create excellent customer service.

Today we are going to go over the best and most effective way to marketing your business.  After finishing your career with the military, you will probably have only a limited amount of money to spend on your business.  You do not want to take a bunch of loans out.  Debt is the last thing you want to have when starting a new a new business.  In addition, trying to get a loan in this economy is hard to do and if you do, the interest rates are absurd right now.

Realistically you have to invest in order to profit, but the key is using the least expensive and the most effective strategies in the beginning.

The least expensive and most effective marketing is word of mouth.

Yes, it is true.  Word of mouth is you are the best and most effective marketing took.  Have you ever gone to a cocktail party, some one says something, and before you know it within an hour, the whole party knows about it.

It is the same thing for a business.  When some likes your work or your product, they tell someone and before you know, you are the man!  It doesn’t even cost you a penny.

In this day in age, I would recommend the internet as your second best marketing tool.  However, be careful, there are many scammers out there that will tell you that they can create you this great business website and before you know it, you spent a ton of money on a website that cost more than you are profiting.  If you do your research, you could create your own website by yourself or with the help of a few people that know what they are doing and are going to charge you a reasonable fee.

A website is definitely an important part of marketing. Your site promotes your products or services online.  In result, this will help you obtain a large number of cliental or sell tons of products in the end.  Like any good marketing tool, it must draw a targeted audience that is interested in your services or your products.

The problem is the online world is growing increasingly competitive. It is not enough just to put up a website—you have to understand what people are searching for and how they search.

Think about it. I bet you would be ecstatic to find ten, twenty or one hundred orders for your products or a bunch of people emailing you because they are interested in your service that you provide. If that is your vision, then you have to build your website smart and you have to build it right.

You have to build a niche website—a site that attracts traffic that is already looking for what you have to offer. Whether you will be selling a product, info-product or a service from your site, this is what you will need:

1. A website that places high in the search engines for your important keywords—the words your visitors will search for in order to find you.
2. The ability to publish a newsletter helps you keep visitors coming back for more.
3. The ability to publish a blog and RSS feeds.
4. The ability to focus on what you do best without having to worry about the technical end.
5. Templates that will allow you to set up your eBook website design quickly without stress or hassle. To build your site, you simply type in your text.
6. A shopping cart that will take your orders while you are asleep, while you are hanging out with your kids or sitting by the pool on your vacation.
7. Tools that will automatically submit your web pages every time you build new ones and will check to see if the search engines have dropped your pages and resubmit them without you having to get involved.
8. A traffic analysis tool that will tell you how much traffic your website is obtaining, which pages are the most popular and the position of each of your pages on the most important search engines.Tools that help you determine which search terms to use to build your site.
9. A manual that outlines a proven formula for success that even a newbie can use to build a web business that receives targeted traffic 24 hours per day, seven days per week. I use authorsden.com.  There cheap, easy to set up and millions of people go on it each day.  I also use godaddy.com. There also a good website company to use.  WordPress.com is another website organization that has become popular in the last two years.

The most important page on your website is your home page.  The home page is the page that makes the visitor decide if they are going to stay, if they are going to buy your products and if they are going to come back.

 What will make your home page interesting? Good design plays an important part in your site’s overall effectiveness. However, it is not the flash that will interest your audience. It is not the jingles that will connect you with your visitor. It is the benefits – the ‘what’s in it for me’ list that create interest and even desire. Create a home page filled with benefits and it will pull your visitors in. What you say your product/service can do is much more attractive than a beautiful web page with weak copy.

What will make your home page interesting? Good design plays an important part in your site’s overall effectiveness. However, it is not the flash that will interest your audience. It is not the jingles that will connect with your visitor. It is the benefits – the ‘what’s in it for me’ list that create interest and even desire. Create a home page filled with benefits and it will pull your visitors in. What you say your product/service can do is much more attractive than a beautiful web page with weak copy.

Remember, do not go overboard.  Take it day by day.  Organize your thoughts and information, make sure you look at where a majority of your customers are coming from and ask them how they heard about you.  This will help you decipher what types of market strategies are the most effective for you business.

Next week we will go over other strategies to help you become a successful entrepreneur once you left the military and entered the civilian world.