SMALL BUSINESS COACH
Your Business Plans Will Succeed
“Roll your works upon the Lord [commit and trust them wholly to Him; He will cause your thoughts to become agreeable to His will, and] so shall your plans be established and succeed.” Proverbs 16:3 (Amplified)
Lately have you found that your business plans are not going the way you…well…planned? The promise of Proverbs 16:3 is a sure-fire way to turn your situation around if you can do your part.
In the book, Hidden Treasures: Abundant Life in the Riches of Proverbs, Gloria Copeland explains, “When I first discovered Proverbs 16:3, I was so excited to find such a wonderful key to receiving God’s direction in my life!…At that time I didn’t have much confidence in my ability to make wise decisions. God was just beginning to teach me about listening to my heart. So I took this scripture and began to use it in my life and expect God to give me His thoughts. It worked for me!”
If it can work for Gloria Copeland, it can work for me, you, or anybody else. When we roll our work on the Lord, and our thoughts begin to line up with His thoughts, He promises that our plans will be established and they will succeed. The reason our plans will then begin to succeed is because they are not our plans at all; they are God’s plans. God has now given us His plans for the success of our business and His plans will always come to pass.
PayPal–Business Product Recommendation
Do you work with out of town clients but lack a merchant account? I have recently secured two out-of-state clients from my website. Before I start on a case, I require an initial down payment; but, I don’t have a merchant account set up to accept credit cards. So I started thinking about convenient ways these clients could make a payment. (After standing in line for 30 minutes to pick up a payment from Money Gram, I really started thinking about better ways.) I immediately thought about PayPal.
PayPal allows you to send money to people and make payments for purchases but it also has a shopping cart feature. The shopping cart feature allows for you to set up a button on your website to sell multiple items at a time, sell one item at a time, collect recurring or subscription fees, or accept donations.
Setting up a PayPal account is easy and it’s free. PayPal does charge a service fee like any other merchant account provider does. Click on the banner below to set up your account now.
Stop Promising the Big Breakfast
A while back my brother and I were talking and laughing about an episode of Sanford and Son when one of Grady’s cousins came to visit him. The first night on her way to bed she told Grady, “In the morning, I’m gonna make a biggggg breakfast.” The next morning rolled around she was “too sick” to make the breakfast. Not only did she not make a bigggg breakfast, but she “guilted” Grady into waiting on her hand and foot all day. At the end of that day she made the same promise. The next morning there was a new excuse. This went on for three or four days, with an excuse each day for why she couldn’t deliver on her promise.
This got me to thinking…how many times do we make big promises to our customers and fail to deliver? I’ve heard it said many times, it’s better to under promise and over deliver than to make promises we can’t (or don’t) keep. If we want to maintain our integrity we must keep every promise we make without excuses.
Jay Abraham’s Free Call To Help Us Become Masters of Recessionary Income
Is your business experiencing loss this year? I received an email about a free call Jay Abraham is offering. Jay Abraham is a brilliant copywriter and marketer who has written multiple multi-million dollar ad campaigns for companies over the years. So when I heard about this call, I thought I should share it with the world.
Jay Abraham’s call will be held at three different times: Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 11:00 a.m. EST; Sunday, March 15, 2009 at 5:00 EST; and Monday, March 16, 2009 at 10:00 p.m. EST On the call Jay promises to deliver the following:
- To show you an almost immediate way to prosper in this recession.
- To show you a way to secure your financial future.
- To help you find a fresh recession income source.
- To help your employer earn more profits (now that’s job security).
- To show you 42 separate, non-real estate, ways to make this terrible recession work “moneymaking wonders” for you, your business or employer–without requiring any capital investment on your part.
If you’re interested in hearing what Jay has to say, register here. Remember, this 2 hour call is absolutely free.
Creator of Your Business
I attended a Business Expo a few weeks ago and a speaker made the statement, “You are the creator of your business.” That statement got me to thinking about how God created the universe. The Creator created the entire universe one day at a time, pausing between each day to see that what He’d done was good and, when He made man, very good.Take a look at the sequence in which things were created and parallel that with how you can use this same pattern to create your business:
Day One: God created light. Light is representative of vision or planning. God also separated light from darkness. As you plan, your business vision will become more and more clear and the actual business will begin to come into being.
Day Two: God created the sky. The sky represents your business goals. What limits are you placing on your business? The sky is the limit.
Day Three: God created land. Land represents your foundation. What are you building your business on? Is it reputation, brand recognition, service, or integrity? What will you be known for?
Day Four: God created stars, the sun, and moon. These are representative of your customers or clients. The number and size of your customer base will serve as the benchmark for how well you’re doing in your business.
Day Five: God created fish and birds. I see these as partners and mentors. The partners could actually be business partners or they could be joint venture partners. Whichever the case, these are the people that are going to help you along the way and take you to a new level of business. The mentors are higher or further in their business tenure, so they can help you see things that lie ahead so you can anticipate and make adjustments.
Day Six: God created animals and man. The animals represent employees and man represents proteges. As you grow, you will need employees to help you in your business. God made man in His image and trains them and guides them to do things His way. Similarly, as employers we should find proteges within our group of employees to guide and train so that they can eventually be able to run your company or a company of their own.
I encourage you to be the creator of your own business!
How to Generate Profits On Line for Your Off-line Business
There are many ways to make extra money on the internet but let’s look at a hypothetical business going step-by-step from no on-line income to enjoying monthly residual income using just one of those ways.
First, capitalize on what you’re already doing. Since Emma had a coffee shop John told her she should start a blog about coffee–how to make various coffee drinks, the best coffee brands, anything interesting about coffee. But before she started her blog she needed to do keyword research to determine which words she should focus on or optimize in her blog. She picked the keyword “coffee drink recipes” and named her blog the same thing.
John taught her how to start a Wordpress blog and monetize it with Google Adsense. Google Adsense pays when someone clicks on an ad that is placed on your blog. Now Emma had two things to do each day to make her blog successful: first, she had to write a blog post every day and second, she had to drive traffic to the site.
Emma found the blog posts easy to write. Each day she’d take fifteen minutes to write about a favorite coffee recipe or about something funny that happened at the shop. The traffic driving, on the other hand, was a bit more challenging. First John showed Emma how to find and submit her RSS feed to various RSS directories. Next, John explained that they would work on establishing back links by creating Squidoo Lenses, HubPages, and writing Ezine Articles and linking back to her blog.
Emma was feeling overwhelmed. That was a lot of writing. “One article at a time” was John’s philosophy. So Emma decided to do one blog post per day, one Hub per week, one Lens per week, and one article per week. Emma worked her plan faithfully and within two months she was starting to see consistent traffic and a little income from Google ($100 per month).
Next John encouraged Emma to work her established (off line) customer base to drive traffic to her site as well. Emma got email addresses from her customers and began an autoresponder campaign offering coupons available only on her blog. Traffic grew and so did Emma’s Adsense profits.
Next time we’ll see how Emma implemented a second stream of online income.