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10 Keys to Selling Your Business for Profit and Satisfaction

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By Martin Zwilling

Your business is the key to your legacy and your future. If you decide to sell, it pays to do it right.

There comes a time in the life of every business owner when you need to move on to something new, retire, or let your business go to someone with new energy and ideas.

As a business advisor, I always have qualms about recommending this move, because the process of selling your business can generate more pain and loss than continuing to run it yourself.

Since I’m not an expert in this area, I was pleased to see a new book, “Exit Rich,” by a couple of leading authorities on how to do it right, Michelle Seiler Tucker and Sharon Lechter. They not only focus on the positives, but include some succinct advice on what not to do.

Their top items of guidance resonated with what I have seen in my own experience, paraphrased here as follows:

1. Don’t wait until you are burned out or lost interest.

Selling your business requires the same energy and passion as growing it. Once you have lost that edge, and potential buyers will sense it quickly, the value of your business will trend down quickly. You should plan an exit strategy, and optimize your activities and timing to get top dollar.

2. Refrain from telling associates that you are selling.

It’s amazing to me how people always assume the worst. Especially if people hear rumours of your interest in selling, they will assume that you are fighting bankruptcy, being pushed out, or your personal life has fallen apart. Limit your disclosures only to business brokers, and serious potential buyers.

3. Don’t decide to do it yourself, without professional help.

Selling your business is much like starting it, and not something you can do in your spare time. The critical tasks, which require professional skills, include packaging the business, actively marketing it, negotiating terms, and due diligence. Trying to do all this yourself is a recipe for disaster.

4. Depend on a business broker.

Selling a business is not just selling a business property. The buyers are different, the rules and contracts are new, and focused marketing is required. I recommend contracting early with an experienced M&A advisor or business broker, and following their lead, rather than finding a friend.

5. Don’t negotiate based on current month-to-month lease.

If your location is key to the value of your business, make sure you have a long-term lease, or at least a guarantee of renewability. What you don’t need is a buyer dealing directly with your landlord to get your key asset, leaving you with no leverage and minimum value for the sale.

6. Don’t price the business based only on your instinct.

Selling a business, like any other asset, requires a realistic appraisal of value. Many owners have no appreciation for the value they have built up over the years, while others tend to always have an inflated view of their worth. Neither perspective is good for credibility or a fair result from your sale.

7. Don’t disclose proprietary information without an NDA

I have found that entrepreneurs often don’t appreciate the need for intellectual property or their “secret sauce” when looking for an investor, and are quick to give away the details when selling the business. Not getting a signed non-disclosure before negotiating can cost you dearly in value.

8. Sign with a buyer with proper due diligence.

Just like potential buyers will do the due diligence on you, you should be as thorough in checking their credentials, intent, and history. Don’t risk your business, your personal legacy, and your time on unqualified buyers and scams. This task is a key one for your professional business broker.

9. Never grab the first buyer’s offer without a plan B.

The evidence I see indicates that less than forty percent of business sales come to fruition the first time around. Create a sense of urgency by setting up back-to-back buyer meetings, and letting potential buyers see each other. Always be ready to talk about future growth plans, as an alternative to a sale.

10. Also never assume that selling to an employee is quick and easy.

Here the evidence is strong that sales to employees don’t work out well. Most employees have a limited perspective on the role and financial requirements to be an owner. In addition, normal negotiations may cause employees to become emotional and leave the business or work against you.

I always remind business owners that their business is likely their most prized possession, and the sale is one of the biggest decisions in their life. It’s a very complex process, as well as an emotional one.

From your own experience, you know that complex decisions should never be made on emotion. Get good professional help here, and enjoy the legacy you deserve.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Martin Zwilling

Sourced from Inc.

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The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Clubhouse

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By Gabrielle Bienasz

The audio-chat app offers a dauntingly vast collection of groups and events for business owners. Here are some recommendations to cut through the noise.

Feature Image Credit: Barbara Corcoran, Elon Musk, and Daymond John. Image: Getty. Illustration: Chloe Krammel

By Gabrielle Bienasz

Sourced from Inc.

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Former Amazon Executives Just Shared the Company’s 4-Step Innovation Process

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By Soren Kaplan

Amazon’s unique approach to innovation helps teams “work backwards” to create breakthroughs

The best business strategies focus on meeting and exceeding customer needs and expectations. This means envisioning customer problems as well as ideal solutions to those problems before actually developing a product or service–and this is exactly how Amazon innovates.

Amazon’s secret to innovation is the focus of a new book, Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, two former Amazon executives who started working in the company in the late 1990s. As noted in the book, Amazon’s “working backwards” process includes four steps:

Step 1: Define the customer problem or pain point

Start by determining what the customer problem is that you’re trying to solve. If you don’t know what that customer problem is, then you won’t be able to build a meaningful solution. Identify customer pains that are not going away and are persistent and repetitive, like how many aggravating clicks it takes to purchase a product.

Remember that if you have a clear idea of the problem you are trying to solve, you will be better able to develop a working prototype or minimum viable product (MVP) quickly. If you focus on the wrong problem, the product won’t be viable when it reaches the masses.

Step 2: Define the ideal product solution

After defining the right customer pain point and problem, brainstorm and describe the ideal solution or product that will help. Remember that the right solution may require bringing on new staff members or individuals with different skill sets and ideas. Don’t allow this to be a barrier or a constraint; rather, look at it as an opportunity to grow your business more quickly.

Focus on what would be the ideal product solution from your customer’s point of view and then act on that. The book shares that this is the same way that Amazon developed Amazon Web Services (AWS), by engaging and empathizing with target customers more closely and helping to establish entirely new business categories that didn’t exist before.

Step 3: Work backwards from the ideal customer experience

In this step, you assess and define the ideal customer experience, and then identify challenges or issues associated with making your new product or service a reality that achieves the experience. During this stage, it is very important to be as detailed as possible to identify the technical, financial, legal, partnership, and other hurdles you’ll have to overcome to bring this ideal product to life.

Step 4: Refine and repeat previous steps

Continue to iterate and operate using “sprints” that focus on short-term milestones. The perfect product, service, or customer experience usually doesn’t occur on the first try.  As the authors wrote, all of Amazon’s most successful products required iteration over the course of many months, and sometimes years.

Most of us have heard about the age-old idea that we should “start with the end in mind.” That’s exactly what working backwards is all about. But it’s also more than that. Yes, you need a vision of what you want to achieve. But you also need the tactical tools and approaches to get you there. When you focus on the customer in everything you do, innovation moves from an ambiguous concept into a concrete way to change the world.

Feature Image Credit: Photo: Getty Images. Illustration: Inc. Magazine

By Soren Kaplan

Sourced from Inc.

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Why agencies need to embrace the new Free Lances

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By Jon Williams

The Liberty Guild’s chief executive responds to Campaign’s analysis on the health of creative agencies.

I read Campaign‘s article about the fallout from WPP’s capital markets day. I’m not sure it’s entirely fair of WPP’s chief executive, Mark Read, to lay the “didn’t reinvent quickly enough” thing at the feet of the creative shops.

It’s clearly true, but as I remember it (as an EMEA chief creative officer of a WPP network), the barrier to reinvention was also the fact that WPP would never sign off any margin relief to do anything. That and the institutional immune system in agencies that tries to attack anything acting differently or entrepreneurially. Anyway. Financial performance has been in decline for years. On that, we agree.

Further down the piece, someone was talking about a supposed “shortage of talent” to capitalise on growth opportunities. We can argue the toss about whether or not there is a shortage in agencies. But in the market there is absolutely no shortage of talent. It’s just that agencies are looking in the wrong place. And if they should happen to find it, they are just not set up to work with the growing global pool of A-list “independent” creatives, strategists, technologists and entrepreneurs that are the key to growth.

There is an incredibly talented crew out there for whom the agency Kool-Aid has curdled. All ages, all genders, all over the world, don’t understand why they need to work all the hours god sends and have zero work/life balance when there is an alternative. There is an exodus to the portfolio career. Some have private clients, some work with a number of agencies, some work directly with brands, some are entrepreneurs, some have personal projects. They flourish.

On the whole, they haven’t been forced to work from the kitchen table by a global pandemic: they made the explicit choice to jump off the burning platform and find sanctuary.

You can find them in the north of Scotland, on the west coast of France, a beach in Indonesia, Crouch End, Goa, Wherever. Technology allows the creative diaspora to go wherever it damn well wants to, in a way that couldn’t happen just five years ago. Technology has changed the game for good. And the pandemic has only expedited this process.

But here’s the rub. As I was leaving my big old network job, I excitedly explained my start-up idea to a European chief creative officer. A mate. Someone I rated.

He raised his eyebrows and said: “Wow, so you’re going to do that with freelancers?” He sort of spat that last word and at the same time left it hanging in the air. That’s the issue there. What is it with the pejorative use of that word?

In a more chivalrous time, when knights wore shining armour and rode white horses, the Free Lances were the elite. A warrior class for hire. Tied to no one. Not your poor plodding foot soldier. Not pawns on the battlefield for a top-down feudal system (bit too obvious for a network analogy?) – but the best and most skilful crew money could buy.

By Jon Williams

Jon Williams is chief executive of The Liberty Guild and the former chief creative officer at Grey Group EMEA.

Sourced from Campaign

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Digital Digest with Gabrielle Robitaille, World Federation of Advertisers

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By The Association of Advertisers in Ireland.

The Association of Advertisers in Ireland are delighted to welcome Gabrielle Robitaille, Digital Policy Manager, World Federation of Advertisers, as a guest for our next Toolkit webinar on Tuesday March 30th.

In this session, Gabrielle will provide the Toolkit group with a summary of latest developments, expected next steps and WFA action on all relevant EU digital policy files likely to have far-reaching impacts on the digital advertising market. Gabrielle will look at:

  • Recent moves to regulate online platforms via the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act and how these could result in increased transparency in the digital advertising market and support advertisers’ brand safety efforts;
  • The state of play on the ePrivacy Regulation, which will set new rules on the use of cookies within the EU;
  • Plans to introduce an EU-wide digital levy and how this could have unintended consequences on advertisers;
  • Proposals to introduce new rules on transparency in political advertising and how these could inadvertently impact commercial advertisers.

When: Tuesday 30th March
Time: 10am – 11am
Register here

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The 3 kinds of intuition you need to make tough decisions

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By Mark Crowley

Author and speaker Mark Crowley explains how great leaders use their data-driven business mindsets and tap into a kind of intuition that transcends the instinctive, gut-based one to be successful.

Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell and Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, we’ve all been sternly warned about the risks of employing intuition when making important decisions. In his book Blink, Gladwell asserts that while our unconscious thinking is “a powerful force, it also can be thrown off, distracted or disabled.” And in his classic, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman stresses that gut instincts can fail us when we unwittingly apply familiar patterns of experience to unrelated circumstances or situations.

The truth is, most of us have spent a lifetime developing our rational minds and rely solely upon their counsel when making consequential life choices. And we know that in business today, innumerable companies such as Amazon have placed data at the centre of their corporate cultures—and routinely rely on metrics to find the best ways of growing their businesses.

In light of this, it may come as a surprise to learn that some of the world’s most successful leaders and innovators intentionally tap into their intuition before making critical decisions.

In his new best seller, How to Lead: Wisdom From the World’s Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers, Carlyle Group cochairman David Rubenstein says Amazon’s founder and CEO is actually a perfect example.

“Jeff Bezos is a brilliant guy who has built a great company—a data-driven company,” Rubenstein told me recently. “But most people who’ve become very successful, certainly in the business world, had an idea—an intuition—that pushed them forward. It wasn’t analysis. Like the best decision-makers, Warren Buffett makes investment decisions in minutes. And, in my opinion, if Steve Jobs had relied on analytical thinking, he never would have built Apple.”

If you’re wondering how great leaders managed to square their data-driven business mindsets with a routine reliance upon intuition, it’s because they most often tapped into a kind of intuition that transcends the instinctive, gut-based one about which Gladwell and Kahneman both had concerns. There really are three kinds of intuition. An understanding of each will profoundly enhance the success of all your future decision-making, not to mention prevent you from making choices you end up regretting.

“Expert knowledge” intuition

“Thinking fast” is where our most common understanding of intuition comes in. As Kahneman describes, it operates automatically, quickly, and sometimes impulsively. But while Kahneman asserts that gut instincts can be wrong, they can also be right when applied to familiar patterns and challenges.

For example, an experienced nurse walks into a hospital room and tells a new nurse that the patient is about to go into cardiac arrest. And within the next hour, it frequently happens. While the nurse may later be unable to explain how she “knew,” through her experience, she learned to identify subtle cues such as how a patient is breathing, their colour, or some other signs she locked away in her unconscious. And when she recognizes these patterns again, she takes quick action.

“Implicit knowledge” intuition

When any of us is faced with a new problem, with no experience in solving it, our common approach is to think about it, scratch our head a little, and inevitably stop working on it. But then, while in the shower or out on a run, we experience a sudden epiphany where, voilà, we’re guided to the solution. Allowing our minds to process the problem behind the scenes often provides the answers we need.

College student Nikola Tesla was mocked by one of his professors after he proposed creating the first alternating-current-driven motor. Stumped by how to make it, Tesla and a friend went out for a walk—to discuss poetry—and the insight came to him. “The idea came like a flash of lightning,” he wrote, “and in an instant, the truth was revealed.”

Albert Einstein often stressed the value of intuition and described his own theories as “free invention of imagination” rather than the result of rigorous analysis. “There are no logical paths to these [natural] laws,” he wrote.

Even modern-day real estate brokerage tycoon and Shark Tank investor Barbara Corcoran believes she owes much of her success to trusting her inner knowing. Here’s how she described it:

“You really have to listen to that inside intuition. And it’s kind of weird, I think, for me, because everything in our education system says listen to your left brain. Everything we’re taught is listen, analyse. A leads to B, leads to C. But in real life, it doesn’t work that way. A leads often to F, and then comes back to B. And so, the only piece of your mind that’s able to grasp that, and see the truth, is your intuition.”

“Nonlocal” intuition

According to researchers at the HeartMath Institute, numerous studies have validated the existence of a form of intuition that author and medical doctor Deepak Chopra says “allows us to eavesdrop on the mind of the universe.” While our rational minds operate on the basis of our five senses, nonlocal intuition seems to access not just information stored in our subconscious but also a deep storehouse of knowledge and wisdom, perhaps best described as universal intelligence.

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, for example, always had access to financial analysis and predictive data, but he also proved to have an instinctive feel for what products, store design, and culture he wanted his customers to experience. By his own admission, he routinely acted on his intuition and, in effect, followed his heart.

The truth is all of us have intuitive feelings like these all the time, but we’ve been conditioned to ignore or discount them. That’s because they’re an aspect of human intelligence we often don’t believe is appropriate or reliable. Nevertheless, we can all recall times when we overrode an inner voice or feeling that urged us not to take a job, trust another person, or send an email. And we can relate to Oprah Winfrey when she said, “The only times I’ve made mistakes is when I didn’t listen.”

Researchers at the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship studied serial entrepreneurs—people who had built multiple businesses with great success—and discovered that 80% of them intentionally relied on intuition and knowingly integrated it with their cognitive capacities when weighing options. In other words, they purposely acted on hunches tied to a feeling that it was the right choice and embraced the idea that what they sensed was no less valuable than empirical data and analytics.

More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle said, “Wisdom is intuitive reason combined with scientific knowledge,” a conclusion that reminds us that our minds and hearts are intended to work together. And that’s the important insight successful leaders such as these clearly understand.

When faced with an important decision, they run the numbers and perform all the critical analysis. But right before they make the final call, they ask their inner wisdom to weigh in. Most importantly, they routinely trust that whatever feeling it yields will guide them to making the best possible choice there is to make.

In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Trust instinct to the end even though you can give no reason.”

Feature Image Credit: [Photos: Mahmudul Hasan Shaon/Unsplash; Stacey Gabrielle Koenitz Rozells/Unsplash] 

By Mark Crowley

Mark Crowley is a best-selling author and a global speaker on employee engagement.

Sourced from FastCompany

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Is Your Offer Not Selling? Try These 3 Fixes to Make It Irresistible.

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There’s almost nothing worse than the feeling you get after days – weeks even – of sharing your offer on your various social media platforms, and getting nothing but a couple of sympathy likes from your sister on your posts in return. But that doesn’t mean that you should throw your offer in the trash.

If you’ve already checked the more obvious reasons this offer is a flop right now, like:

  • Do you have an engaged audience that knows who you are and what you do?
  • Are you showing up consistently enough for your posts to perform well in the algorithm?
  • Have you triple-checked your links and checkout system?

…then it’s time to consider that the problem isn’t necessarily with you, your offer, or anything technical – the issue is probably how you’re positioning the offer itself.

Is it a priority for your customer right now?

Can you make it one? We’re living in a tumultuous time; you have to consider the real-life circumstances in which your ideal client is living right now when you’re presenting them with a buying decision.

A stumbling block I see a lot of new entrepreneurs fall prey to is that they’re positioning their offers only to the highest tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Self-Actualization. It usually sounds something like “helping people to step into authenticity and be their best self.”

Which sounds great, right? Except it’s really not most people’s top priorities at this moment.

According to his model that describes human motivation, Maslow says that people can only focus on climbing to the next tier if they feel secure in the one they’re already in.

So for someone to feel safe and confident in their buying decision to invest in a self-actualization offer, they must already feel like they’re on stable ground in their physiological needs (air, water, shelter, food); their safety needs (personal safety, employment, resources, health); their relational needs (friendship, intimacy, family); and their esteem needs (respect, self-esteem, freedom).

How can you position your work so that people will get the results you know you’re capable of giving them – but also shows them how your work will benefit an area of their life that they’re potentially more interested in upleveling right now?

Offer carrot cake, bring them carrots.

One of my mentors, Scott Oldford, shared this analogy with me at the beginning of our work together, and it forever altered the way I position my offers. For people who are struggling to figure out how to share their self-actualization offer in a way that creates more urgency, this one mindset shift will radically change your sales results.

Unless you’re me, you’re probably not ordering carrots when you sit down at a nice restaurant. There are so many more appetizing things than carrots on the menu – why would you do that to yourself?

Carrot cake, on the other hand, is delicious and moist and has cream cheese on top – I mean, who can say no to that? The thing is…it’s called carrot cake for a reason. There are still carrots in there!

What if the problem with your sales isn’t that your offer is bad? What if the problem is actually that you’re positioning it in a way that makes people want to hold their nose and ask for the check early?

My favorite way to find the carrot cake in my carrot-y offers is to flesh out the intended results:

  • What is life going to look like for my client when they’re on the other side of this offer/experience? (More money in their bank account? A nicer office? A more well-developed plan to execute with their team?)
  • What sounds will they hear when they’re on the other side of this offer/experience? (The pride in the voice of their significant other? The cha-ching of their PayPal app receiving money?)
  • What will things feel like for them when they’re on the other side of this offer/experience? (Will they be wearing nicer fabrics? Will they drive a nicer car with fine interiors?)

The clearer you can make this picture and the more effectively you can communicate those intended results to your clients, the easier it will be to make sales.

Be a product of your message.

One of the questions I hear a lot is, “how much sharing is too much?” And what they’re really asking is: How can I be transparent and honest with my audience without looking messy, so I can maintain my authority and position of leadership?

In this highly evolving world where people want to know who is running a company, what their values are, and if they’re walking the walk – it’s no longer a choice for entrepreneurs to “keep it strictly professional.”

The thing is, you don’t have to go full-influencer mode for you to give your audience the opportunity to know you, like you, and trust that you’re both knowledgeable and capable enough to help them with the thing your offer claims it will.

After you figure out what the delicious carrot cake positioning is for your offer, it’s up to you to show your audience that you are a living, breathing example of what it looks like to experience the results that your offer is promising.

Use your social media platforms to share your own experience, your stories, and your client experiences (with permission of course!) – alongside your sales posts. Your audience will begin to see that it’s a no-brainer to work with you because you’re clearly so good at what you do.

So in case you were thinking that you just need to invest in a better logo, or get another set of professional photos done, or hire someone to do intensive market research – consider that the solution may be a whole lot easier than that.

Confidence in yourself, your offer, and your ability to carry buyers from Point A to Point B is going to be the thing that seals the deal for your potential buyers.

Feature Image Credit: skynesher | Getty Images

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Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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7 Ways To Make a Profit on TikTok: Here’s How

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By Jamie Johnson

TikTok is currently one of the fastest-growing social media networks in the world. And recent reports estimate that the company will surpass 1.2 billion active monthly users in 2021.

This kind of rapid growth means that there are plenty of opportunities to build a following on the platform. And once you’ve made a name for yourself, you can start to monetize that following.

7 Ways To Make Money on TikTok

Best of all, you can use TikTok to start creating multiple revenue streams. Let’s look at seven ways you can start making money on TikTok.

1. Donations

If you have at least 1,000 followers on TikTok, then one of the easiest ways to start making money is by accepting donations from your followers. TikTok has its own currency, and users can buy coins and donate them to their favourite influencers.

Relying on donations is not a reliable way to make money on TikTok because you’re at the mercy of your followers and whether or not they feel like donating. But it is an option, and it’s an excellent way to make a little bit of money in the beginning.

2. TikTok Creator Fund

The TikTok Creator Fund is a program where TikTok pays you directly for the content you create. Essentially, the program is a revenue-sharing model where TikTok pays you a portion of the money they earn on advertising. The amount you make is based on your total audience and engagement.

The Creator Fund is the only way you’ll get paid directly by TikTok, but the program has received mixed reactions. For one thing, you need to have at least 10,000 followers to even be eligible. And it’s not entirely clear what factors payment is based on.

And some users have complained that their engagement dropped after signing up for the program. But it may be worth your while to sign up and see if utilizing the TikTok Creator Fund is right for you.

3. Advertising

What if you’re not interested in creating content for TikTok but still want to find a way to make money using the platform? Well, if you have your own products and services you want to promote, you might consider paying for TikTok advertising.

TikTok ads last 9 to 15 seconds and are a great way to promote your brand. It will help you reach a younger audience that is often less receptive to other forms of advertising.

4. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to earn money through TikTok. As an affiliate, you promote the products and services of other companies. When a subscriber follows one of your links and makes a purchase, you’ll earn a percentage of the money they spent.

Many people like affiliate marketing because it doesn’t require that you create your own products and services. And regardless of the type of niche you’re in, there are endless products and services you can promote.

And if you get a large enough following, you can build up a hefty income through affiliate marketing. However, affiliate marketing is most effective when you’re promoting companies you love and fully support.

5. Brand Sponsorships

If you’ve built up a significant following on TikTok, brands will be willing to pay you good money to feature them in one of your videos. You’ll create a video for your audience endorsing that company’s product or service to your followers.

Unlike affiliate marketing, you’ll be paid for the content you create, whether anyone buys the products or not. And brand sponsorships can be very lucrative depending on how many followers you have. If you have a large following, you could earn thousands of dollars for a single video.

If you’re interested in pursuing brand sponsorships, just make sure you’re selective about the companies you work with. Just like with affiliate marketing, it’s the most effective when you promote companies you’re passionate about.

6. Offer Consulting

If you’ve cracked the code on how to build a following on TikTok, many people will be willing to pay you good money to learn that information. So you may be able to utilize your insights and offer TikTok consulting services.

Before you move forward with any type of consulting arrangement, make sure you outline the terms and deliverables in a contract. And it may be worth your while to negotiate a revenue-sharing agreement. That way, if any of your clients see massive success on the platform, you’ll receive a piece of their earnings.

7. Sell Your Own Products

And finally, one of the best ways to make money on TikTok is by selling your own products. It may take time for you to get to this point, but selling your own products will give you more control over your brand and income.

When you sign up for the Creator Program or use affiliate marketing, you’ll only get to keep a portion of the money earned through your content. And that company could change the terms of your agreement at any time.

But when you sell your own products, you get to keep 100% of the earnings. And this will allow you to build your own brand and set yourself up for success in the long run.

Final Thoughts

TikTok can be a great way to build a following and start making money as an influencer on the platform. But just like any other business, you’ll have to put in the work first. Take the time to develop a relationship with your followers, and be thoughtful about your monetization strategies.

And only promote products and services that you really believe in. This will give you the best chance of success in the long run.

By Jamie Johnson

Jamie Johnson is a freelance writer who covers a variety of personal finance topics, including investing, loans, and building credit. In addition to writing for GOBankingWrites, she currently writes for clients like Quicken Loans, Credit Karma, and the US Chamber of Commerce.

Sourced from GOBankingRates

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5 Ways to Monetize a Website

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COVID-19 has made 2020 a tough year. Millions of people have lost their businesses, jobs or had to accept a reduced income. Due to the pandemic, it is now common to find people searching the internet for ways they can make money online during these challenging times.

You may be among those looking for a way to earn online not only now but hope to find a money-making venture that makes you more prepared should a new pandemic happen in the future.

This is why website monetization has once again become a widely searched topic.

Although it has been tried, tested, and proven to be a great way to earn money online, many people have feared trying it out. This is mainly because creating a website that will generate an income for you requires patience, which many people lack.

Many individuals have started websites but given up along the way because of the challenges in sustaining and consistently creating content.

But if you want to start a website or want to revive your site, now is a perfect time. With lockdowns happening all over the world due to COVID-19, more people are spending their time online.

So if you’re able to create a good website, offer an excellent product or service, and successfully market your site, you should have loads of web traffic. It is this website traffic you can use to earn from your website. Here are the top ways you can monetize your site.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate means to connect. When you do affiliate marketing, you connect with other businesses and earn a commission from selling their products or service to your website visitors.

Amazon has one of the most popular affiliate programs you can join. When you sign-up for their program, you will be given a link to include in the content you write to recommend various Amazon products on your website.

When people click on the link and purchase the product, you earn a percentage from the sale.

There are many affiliate programs out there. So do your research and look for the ones that suit your website’s niche.

Be sure to disclose to your audience that you’re using affiliate links for transparency.

2. Sell a Product or Service

Here you may need to rack your brain a little. With so many products and services available nowadays, it can be a bit difficult to stand out. But it is possible.

Look at what you’re passionate about and then find a problem within it. The simpler the problem, the better.

Once you found it, create a solution by way of a product or a service.

The good thing about selling your product or service is that you get 100% of the sale amount, unlike affiliate marketing, where you only get a commission.

3. Resell Your Website Traffic

Once you get thousands of visitors on your website, you can join platforms like Google Ads, Ezoic, or Mediavine to place advertisements on your website. When your website traffic sees or clicks on these ads, you get paid for it.

Alternatively, you can reach out to advertisers yourself and charge them to advertise on your website.

If your website numbers are still low, you can pay for a traffic service like ultimatewebtraffic. This web traffic seller can provide your website with 100% human and highly targeted website traffic.

4. Charge for Membership

This is a sure way to get paid with your website. For example, you could create exclusive content, then ask your website traffic to pay you a fee to access this content.

The content you provide has to be of the highest quality and not readily available to make your visitors see the need to pay for it.

Content on a membership website can include research, webinars, or podcasts.

5. Sponsored Posts

With a big website audience, you can reach out to companies within your niches that would be interested in your website traffic.

When you reach out, you can offer to publish an authoritative blog or video about their product or service and link to them. Include them in your regular newsletter, or place their ads on your site.

This can be done regularly. Only, be cautious of some brands because if you seem to be a bit biased toward their competitor, you may be seen as a threat to them.

Just make sure you know what you are doing and let them know your goal with your review or sponsorship deal.

Conclusion

While staying at home due to Covid-19 is not exciting, you could make the best of it and start a website that could earn you a regular income long after being done with this pandemic.

Monetizing a website is not a walk in the park, though, so here’s a quick checklist to see if you have what it takes to take on the task.

  • Attitude

As the age-old saying goes: your attitude determines your altitude. There is much truth behind that kernel of wisdom.

Monetizing a website is a long-term investment and may need time before you see dividends. You should have the right amount of patience, perseverance, and motivation to push through.

  • Goals

Your goals should be S.M.A.R.T., which stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely.

  • Skills

Creating a good website will need some set of skills. You will need to plan, write, design, and even code a little.

Don’t worry if this seems like plenty of tasks to do. If you have good team management skills, you can hire people to reduce your workload.

You should also have a thorough understanding of how to buy website traffic. If you don’t, the best way to get immediate traffic is to work with a traffic service like web traffic experts. This web traffic provider can drive thousands of visitors to your websites within hours of paying for their service.

I wish you all the best in your website monetization efforts!

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Sourced from INFLUENCIVE

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Are You Doing the SWOT Analysis Backwards?

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By Laurence Minsky and David Aron

There are few tools more ubiquitous in management, marketing, and other key business functions than the SWOT analysis: It involves listing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing your firm, division, functional area, or other aspects of your organization, products, or services. The results of a SWOT analysis can be (and almost always are) presented simply as a 2 x 2 grid, with one dimension representing the internal versus external factors, and the other depicting positive versus negative valence.

The problem is, as typically conducted, the SWOT is not really an analysis or diagnosis at all. It is simply list and categorization of the internal and external situational factors related to the subject that you’re evaluating, usually produced during a group brainstorming session. The resulting document is typically less than insightful and does not offer a clear path to action. It is simply an elegant organizational tool. That might be part of its attractiveness — besides its catchy acronym — and a key reason for its popularity.

There are a few reasons that SWOT, in its current form, falls short of desired outcomes. First, the traditional 2 x 2 grid layout for the analysis, which encourages users to present all of the information on a single PowerPoint slide or piece of paper, often leads to exceedingly short, often one- or two-word descriptions. This desire for brevity also often leads to shortcuts in thinking. In our experience as both consultants and teachers, for instance, we’ve found that an important attribute like “price” might be listed as a strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat without any further explanation. The SWOT offers no analysis or insight as to whether the price is too comparatively high, if competitors can undercut it, if a firm can run a promotion, or any other factor related to pricing.

Second, the SWOT analysis is surprisingly difficult to interpret, primarily because of the lack of a hierarchy. All four quadrants of the grid are emphasized equally. It is merely a snapshot of the current situation — or, worse, a snapshot of what’s currently on the minds of brainstorming session attendees.

Third, our natural instinct is to jump to solutions, particularly when it comes to listing opportunities. In too many cases that we’ve seen, SWOT users misinterpret what “opportunities” are, presuming that they are recommendations of “what could be done.” For instance, we once saw a bicycle tour service provider list “create a mobile application with a live map” as an opportunity. But this isn’t an opportunity in the SWOT sense of the word; rather, it is merely a recommendation that has not been fully processed. Rather, an opportunity might be the growth in the adoption of voice technology. Another: That phone apps are becoming easier to develop, yet the competition isn’t using them.

Despite these issues, SWOT can still be helpful tool for insight or planning if you change the way you use it. How do we mean? By turning the SWOT process on its head.

Drawing from our experience coaching leading brands and thousands of students, as well as building on the research of others, we have found that the traditional approach of identifying internal factors first (strengths and weaknesses) and then moving to external factors (opportunities and threats) just isn’t effective. To improve the inventory collection, you should start with the external factors, then turn your attention to the firm’s internal ones.

There are several reasons we recommend taking this approach. First, these environmental conditions exist not only for your firm but for all competitors. In effect, the external factors create the arena in which the competition takes place. Managers must adjust their strategies to reflect it, even as this environment changes. Since no business operates in a vacuum, it is the context around it that helps determine to what extent any particular internal attribute is relevant. Meanwhile, focusing on the external factors first can get you thinking more broadly about the internal factors, reducing the risk of myopia. In other words, taking this approach can lead you to uncover internal factors that you might not have otherwise considered.

Then, once you complete your inventory, you can actually use the factors to conduct a true analysis that can result in strategic recommendations for planning. Specifically, here’s how we recommend proceeding.

First, gather an inventory of relevant environmental conditions — the threats and opportunities. At this stage, don’t worry about whether these are positive or negative. Remember, we don’t want to take shortcuts. There are existing tools designed for organizing an environmental scan, such as the PEST, PESTEL, and STEEP, but don’t feel limited to these tools. If you have other preferred tools to help you organize the external factors, you can use them.

Next, explore internal strengths and weaknesses. Here, too, ignore whether they are potentially positive or negative. Your first job is to inventory the attributes. The relative positivity or negativity of a factor included in the inventory may again be a function of the external environment. At this early stage of the analysis, it is more important that the factors are included than how they’re categorized beyond simply being external or internal. Don’t settle for one- or two-word descriptors like “price” or “technology.” Explicitly spell out the situation with a detailed phrase or a sentence.

Generate recommendations with a simple sentence. With your external and internal inventories in hand, generating recommendations is now much easier. Simply consider each external factor’s relationship to each internal factor. To help, you might want to complete this sentence:

Given the condition of [external factor], our ability to [internal factor] leads to our recommendation that we [recommendation].

You may find that some external factors will not readily apply to certain internal factors, which means they might not lead to a recommendation. Yet, given enough time or with a creative group working on this analysis, you might develop options that you would not expect to reach, based on combinations of external factors and internal factors.

Let’s take an example, using the external factor of an economic recession as a starting point.

In a traditionally conducted SWOT analysis, one might include the objectively internal attribute of “price” in all four of the cells because it’s a strength (the firm’s product costs less to purchase than the competition’s), a weakness (people have less money to spend on the product), an opportunity (the firm can afford to run a price promotion), and a threat (the competition can easily undercut what the firm charges). This is not an analysis; it is merely a set of poorly supported suggestions.

In our model, the template listed above could lead to one or more thoughtfully developed recommendations such as:

Given the condition of our current recession, our ability to realize cost savings over our competitors leads to our recommendation that we reduce our price.

The model doesn’t stop there. Several other recommendations might flow from the use of this template, under the stated conditions. For instance, following the prescribed process for the analysis, the external factor would then be combined with another factor from the internal inventory, and then another, with each possibly (but not necessarily) leading to a unique recommendation:

Given the condition of our current recession, our ability to maintain strong relationships throughout our distribution channel leads to our recommendation that we offer discounts to our channel partners to help them weather the storm.

Or, for a perceived weakness:

Given the condition of our current recession, our low brand recognition leads to our recommendation that we target this brand for reduced marketing support, in favor of our stronger brands.

By looking at the external conditions, in conjunction with internal attributes, a set of clear-cut and supported recommendations can be generated. And this should be your goal: Using an analytical tool to help you identify a wide range of possible actionable outcomes. The process is straightforward and demands attention to a range of internal and external factors, and the results are recommendations that are more thoroughly developed and grounded. Try this approach the next time you’re asked to generate a SWOT and see the power of it for yourself.

By Laurence Minsky and David Aron

David Aron is Professor of Marketing and Director of Graduate Programs at Dominican University. A frequent conference presenter, his research on consumer satisfaction and marketing pedagogy has been widely published in academic journals.

Laurence Minsky is an Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago. His most recent books include Global Brand Management, The Activation Imperative, and Audio Branding.

Sourced from Harvard Business Review

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