Posts from — July 2008

Leveraging Relationships as a Strategy to Develop Your Business

It’s not about just getting something from the other person, it’s also about mutually helping each other. Both parties must be winners at the end of it and this is how you build a good base to an ongoing successful business relationship.

Collaborate or Stagnate

Whether you want to work with a charity, a trade association, a community group or other businesses, one secret to deliver your message is networking through collaborations.

You can use collaboration to:

• Leverage your time and money
• Share resources
• Earn passive income
• Cross promote activities
• Gain major visibility
• Break into a new market
• Establish your identity quickly
• Expand your product/service offerings

How Tos

1. Value and Resources — Value is often measured by a desired outcome. You also need to understand the difference between owning and using a resource. With strong relationships, you can gain access to the resources you need, even if just for a specific project.

   • Cultivate purposeful relationships with a true exchange of value.

   • Strong relationships are necessary to access resources you can’t purchase.

   • Building relationships is about exchanging your own value for the tools you need to serve a customer.

2. Choosing the Right Target — If you need web developers, you will not approach a stock broker. Sometimes you might need to leverage relationships with multiple parties to achieve one goal, so planning your way through is important.
   

   • Approach those people who have the things you need, but be ready for a fair exchange.

   • Soft relationships skills can help you do more with less by filling the needs of those who can advance your objective.

3. Cross promotion -Focus on solutions to your target market’s pain or desires and go win win.

• Use tools like raffles, email blasts, affiliate commissions to promote each other

• Use cobranding strategy if you are entering a new market. Find yourself an established partner who will instantly give you credibility and reduce market penetration overheads.
• Build up the name of the business your are promoting at your best, you will get it back in a way or the other.
  

Bookmark my Post

Asking for vote requests and bookmarking too often might be detrimental to you in many ways, people might even unfollow you if you don’t pay attention. Again it boils down to the frequency that you do it and also what type of information you are providing. It is always a good thing to entertain your followers by giving away different types of interesting information rather than just posting your latest blog post on twitter. Also, make sure you don’t give too much information about your personal life to your business followers, they might not want to know what you wearing or how you enjoyed sex last night. It might be an idea to use two profiles for two selected audiences if you wish to do that. I got a least 30 hits from that. Following the right people is also something to keep in mind, I do get some spammers with sexy pictures who have tinurls in their tweets that I just ignore, it is a matter of quality and not quantity.

Slow Twitterers

If you just signed up to Twitter account and got a few hundreds of followers, make sure that you put something interesting up there that gives some value at least twice a week. Just saying hey I have a new blog post up there once a week might not necessarily help. It took me at least a month go to start putting updates at least 10 times a day, but yet again I am trying to focus on quality rather than quantity. Think Think Think, be logical and see from your follower’s perspective, are you harassing or boring them?

By Outsourcing, You Can;

1. Control operating costs
2. Improve efficiencies through economies of scale
3. Improve speed and service
4. Level out cyclical or seasonal fluctuations
5. Eliminate peak staffing problems
6. Provide the best quality services, products and people
7. Be reliable and innovative
8. Provide value-added services
9. Increase customer satisfaction
10. Establish long-term, strategic relationships with world-class service providers to gain a competitive edge
11. Enhance tactical and strategic advantages
12. Focus on strategic thinking, process re engineering and managing trading partner relationships
13. Benefit from the provider’s expertise in solving problems for a variety of clients with similar requirements.
14. Obtain needed project management and implementation consulting expertise
15. Acquire access to best practices and proven methodologies
16. Spread your risks
17. Avoid the cost of chasing technology
18. Leverage the provider’s extensive investments in technology, methodologies and people
19. Reduce the risk of technological obsolescence
20. Increase efficiency by consolidating and centralizing functions
21. Keep pace and minimize the impact of rapid changes in technology without changing your infrastructure
22. Reduce the overall management burden while retaining control of strategic decision making.
22. Reduce overheads, free up resources
23. Minimize capital expenditure
24. Eliminate investment in fixed infrastructure
25. Offload non-core functions
26. Redirect energy and personnel into the core business
27. Free your executive team from day-to-day process problems
28. Focus scarce resources on mission-critical projects
29. Get access to specialized skills
30. Reduce need for internal commitment of specialists
31. Save on manpower and training costs
32. Have access to a larger pool of talents
33. Avoid paying Employee Tax
34. Get more out of the man hours you pay for
35. Leverage world class Technology and Resources at very low costs.
36. Build a Virtual Team and have a global delivery model
37. Get more for your money, i.e have a higher Return On Investment

Would appreciate your questions and comments so that we can build up on this.
Many Thanks
+| Rajeev |+

Don’t Spam
It might a good idea grabbing two Twitter accounts in order to avoid spamming and separating your and your blog posts. E.g you might want to have an account where with @yourblogname which you subscribe to all sorts of internet marketing feeds and also use this to put up your daily blog posts. Then have @yourusername Twitter account for your daily twitters where you occasionally give heads up when putting up your best posts. The key thing is to avoid using your account to just put up your blog post links or marketing stuff, it should be a small percentage of the amount of Twitters you put a day

Is there a limit

You may have sensed that you cannot always get away twittering your latest blog post. And it depends a lot on how often you Twitter. Say you Twitter 30 times daily, it wouldn’t harm one or two links to a blog entry a day but if you only twitter a few times a week and it always seems to be a blog entry, I will definitely get tired of them pretty quickly. A good ratio of about 10-15 non marketing twitters for every 1 marketing you and a cap of 1 per day might be a good approach. If ever you worried you aren’t twittering enough to make your feed seem less spammy? Just make sure you reply to some people you follow, which also has the added bonus that when they reply, other people might see it and follow you too.

Get a killer Headline

If you are thinking about posting a link to your blog entry on Twitter, then at least make an effort to get a killer headline that works within the character limit of 140 words. This is one of the unfortunate problems with Twitterfeed, a program that will automatically send blog entries to your, surprise surprise, Twitter feed. First, don’t repeat your blog name, especially if your headlines tend to get cut off at the end and especially if your blog name is a lengthy one. When it comes on my Twitter feed, I see who has posted it, so cut out the repeating of the blog name and give me a better headline. And if you use a tinyurl.com link, it will free up space for more characters in your headline.

Would be happy to hear your comments.