What to Do to Help Your Local Shop Survive in Midst of Competitors?

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Starting up a business or a local shop is not so easy. There are many Dos and Don'ts that you have to keep in mind. The rise and fall of your local shop depend on how you take it and implement your project. The level of competition is very high; there is a competition even among local shops and local sellers. So, what you should do to help your shop survive in the market world that is full of competitors? Let us just discuss the requirements needed to stay up even with the intense competition.

1. Create a customer-centric culture

If you are running a local shop, you have to make sure that your shop is customer-centered. There are many local sellers who make a huge mistake by forgetting to keep the customers first and tending to focus only on the target profit which results in the downfall of their business. In this case, the best option to do so is to create a one-of-a-kind culture at your local shop that expands upon people's expectation. Your local shop will grow only when customers love what you give them. No matter how big or small your local shop is, always stay as close to your customers as possible.

2. Never compete on price

Many small businesses make the biggest mistake when they feel that the only way to compete in the market is to undercut the competition on price. This makes them drop their prices to unsustainable levels. However, this pleases the customers, and, many customers will come in, yet, you will nearly lose money with every new order. This usually happens in a busy market where you will find your local shop running as fast as it can, but it can barely give you any money to keep your operation afloat.
So, what is the other the way that you should do?

Well, try to reposition your local shop and instead of using price as a tool to attract customers, focus on the service you provide. In a saturated market, you will always find someone or the other with a price lower than you. You will need to find a new way to stay unique; for that, try offering personal services. If your service is appealing and attractive enough, you will likely gain many customers and at the same time, you can increase your price.

3. Understand prospects' challenges of your local shop

You do not sell a product or service, you sell a solution to your prospect challenges. You need to have a clear understanding of whether the solution you have to offer is the right fit or not. No seller can say that he is free from competitions and challenges; but, how you deal with those challenges and how to bring a suitable solution can help your local shop stand out of the crowd.

4. Being distinct

To sell out in the market you have to be unique and different. Local sellers who can effectively separate themselves from the masses of other sellers will reap massive rewards. Offering unique and attractive service can help you generate more sales. It is important to study the market simultaneously and employ innovative strategies designed to regularly introduce new products, services, or processes.

5. Favorable opening hours

It does not matter whether you are up on a 24/7 basis or for a few hours, choose the timings where it is favorable to the customers. Being a local shop, you have to examine your local customers and track which timing has the highest flow of customers. Making a customer's shopping experience more convenient is a vital part of building competitive strategy.

6. Offer online ordering with quick delivery

As we are growing with technology, it is also important to stay at the same level as other big competitors or even higher if possible. Online shopping has become a trend these days. Getting your products showcased online can help you get more customers and generate more sales. Making of quick delivery is equally important to attract customers. Customers have the option to other sites or shops where delivery is made quick and convenient.

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How To Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

WHAT is Affiliate Marketing and HOW Does it Work? For Beginners!

How To Start Making Money Online As An Affiliate Marketer

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The field of affiliate marketing is probably the quickest developing way to make money online. After all, billions of ordinary people use internet every day. Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to target potential customers regardless of their location in the world.

For this reason, it isn't surprising that a huge number of people make a considerable amount of money through affiliate advertising and marketing. Many skilled affiliate marketers end up making more money in this field than they did in their previous job, and hence some of them even resign their normal 9-5 job and pursue affiliate marketing full-time.

A Quick Overview On Affiliate Marketing
Now that we have a little idea about the capacity of affiliate marketing, Let's dig in and discuss what it truly includes.

The easiest way to describe affiliate marketing is when you help another company sell their products online, and then you get paid a commission for each sale you bring to them.

If you are promoting a product priced at $200, and the company pays you 10 percentage commission of the sale, you would make $10 for each sale.

However how do you refer sales? You can begin promoting your seller's products on your website, which receives targeted site visitors in the same niche as the product you are advertising. For example, if you have a website that sells makeup you would not advertise health insurance, but instead you could promote makeup related products. Every time one of your website's visitors clicks on your affiliate link which was supplied to you by the seller, you will be paid a commission.

How To Choose A Good Affiliate Network
One of the largest errors new affiliate marketers make is becoming a member of nearly each affiliate network they encounter. This is without a doubt considered to be a totally incorrect technique. That is due to quite some reasons.

Firstly, being an affiliate marketer is an undertaking which calls for a lot of awareness. So, if you try and work with many affiliate networks at the same time, chances are that none of your initiatives might go as planned and consequently, none of them might end up being very successful.

Secondly, focusing on just one or a few products without a doubt will let you research them thoroughly before you start to promote them. This method also helps you refine your strategies, making the required adjustments, and thus making your marketing a whole lot more powerful. An effective approach will yield better outcomes, and reward you for your efforts and time.

Thirdly, make sure you do some research on the affiliate network as there are some networks that will only pay you once a month which might not work for you or worse they could not pay you at all. I am not telling this to discourage you from being an affiliate marketer, but instead I want you to succeed in finding the correct network and products to market and make your commission.

There are affiliate networks that resort to "shaving", a very common exercise in affiliate marketing where the networks display a discounted number of sales than what you referred, consequently paying you drastically less in commissions.

Hence, to avoid been a victim to this action I would suggest that you stick to known and trusted affiliate networks. In any case, they only way you will succeed with a network is if you are comfortable with them and the products you are promoting.

How To Start Getting Sales As An Affiliate Marketer
Getting instantly to the point, some affiliate marketers use social media web sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more, for doing associate marketing, other decide to build out their own site. Getting your own site is an exceptional approach to affiliate marketing, because it gives you control over everything.

So we will focusing on affiliate marketing using your own site moving forward. First matters first, as mentioned earlier, you will want to find an affiliate network you're comfortable with. This includes being knowledgeable about the products you are promoting, so that you don't come to be selling products you don't know anything about.

Amazon's Associate Program
That being said, many marketers look at Amazon's associate marketing program as one of the best. It's possibly the most trustworthy network, and has a large inventory of products to promote and get your commissions.

This offers you a possibility to promote nearly any product in the market, or pick a niche with low competition and you could be earning commissions in less than a week.

Finding A Good Keyword
That is considered to be one of the hardest parts of marketing. You simply cannot blindly choose any keyword and expect to start making sales quickly. One of the reasons why many affiliate marketers fail is due to using a wrong keyword.

If you are new to the affiliate marketing, you are going to want keywords that have low competition. Start your keyword research by finding long tail keywords with a low search volume, that means much less money, but not really with the ones that have large competition.

You may test the top 10 and 20 results and do a few studies to discover if you may outrank them. Review keywords being used by the competition to determine if they are using identical key phrases you are looking to target. If they are, and they have a high authority website in that niche, I would recommend that you keep away from that niche, and opt for a brand new, less competitive.

Quality Content
This is significant. If you think you will make a lot of money creating items that doesn't help the visitors in anyway, you are very wrong. Although your goal is to earn cash by means of referring visitors to the offer, you will have to offer one thing of importance to them. Merely posting your hyperlinks along with lame sales pitches like "this is a wonderful solution, purchase this product via my personal hyperlink and get a discount", and so on, you might be only heading to disaster.

If you decide to join Amazon's associate program, you could write an informative article on your homepage and include your primary keywords and some secondary keywords throughout the article. You could have the purchasing guidebook, and write your brief opinion of each product you are marketing. Remember that the greater the cost of the product you market, the greater the commission.

Backlinks
We realize it's probably the trickiest method to accomplish, unless you are an SEO guru. Contacting site with high authority and guest posting on these sites is a really well-known means of getting great backlinks. These great backlinks, along with guest posting in related sites in your niche will get you ranked on the first page of the search engines as long as the keyword you chose has really low competition.

However, even when your site doesn't reach page one, as long as you have guest posted on a number of sites in your niche, you will be bringing substantial amount of targeted traffic coming from these sites. So that it is a great tactic anyway.

Mistakes To Avoid
Now you are aware of the process to becoming a great affiliate marketer with your own website, I want you to also keep in mind some of the most common errors brand new affiliate marketers make.

Not Providing Any Good Value
Though we've got covered this item, it's certainly important to remind you if you try to be extreme with your words to pressure the visitors to click on your affiliate link, it's likely being deemed as junk or spam by many websites.

Rather, it's suggested to help these individuals select the right solution determined by their particular wants. This method makes these individuals feel more, which in return will check out the products you are marketing based on the value in your article.

Product Research
Numerous online marketers will not do proper product research to gain knowledge on the product they are promoting, instead they are only worried about the amount of commission they will earn per sale regardless whether it will provide value to their visitors. This is an oversight, and will at some point lead to your readers not relying on anything you tell them.

Tracking Your Links
When you begin advertising on Amazon or even some other affiliate network, it will be beneficial to track your affiliate links. It can help you find out which website is doing more sales and then you can make your other websites have the same kind of setup.

Final Thoughts
I would like to say that despite the fact that affiliate marketing can be very fulfilling, it has a steep learning curve to it. You might face disappointment on numerous occasions prior to making a nice amount of money online.

That said, affiliate marketing it's suited simply for individuals who are likely to deal with several failures, but will come back with a positive attitude and willing to learn from their mistakes.

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How To Use Google Trends! Market Research To Compare Keywords, Topics & ...

Starting a business - Market Research

7 Easy Steps to Conducting Your Marketing Research Plan!

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Marketing research is a process used by businesses to collect, analyze, and interpret information used to make sound business decisions and successfully manage the business. In other words, it links the consumer to the marketer by providing information that can be used in making marketing decisions (i.e. B2C or B2B). This can not be implemented without the use of a MIS (Marketing Research System) to gather, sort, analyze, evaluate, and distribute needed, timely, and accurate information to marketing decision makers.

Here are the steps to implementing a marketing research process.

1. Ask yourself if there is a real need for marketing research. It's not only the first step to take but a very critical one as well! Research takes a lot of time due to the overload of secondary information available on the Internet. It's ideal to think that it takes months or even a year to completely finalize a marketing research agenda. The other factor you will need to consider is the cost of doing it, especially if you hire an agency to do it for you. What you want to compare is the value of the information vs the cost of the information. If the value of the information is worth the cost and time of doing it, then by all means, go for it buddy!

If you're still unsure, here's a few quick guides to go by to determine that marketing research is not needed:

a) The information is already available

b) The timing is wrong to conduct marketing research

c) Funds are not available for marketing research

d) Costs outweigh the value of marketing research

2. Define the problem. This is the most important step (assuming you've decided to do marketing research). If the problem is incorrectly defined, all else will become wasted effort! Keep in mind that the need to make a decision requires decision alternatives. If there are no alternatives, no decision is necessary. For example, let's say your sales are down by 30%, therefore becoming a problem with your revenues. Your alternatives may be to see how well ads #2 does compared to ads #1 in terms of sales. Use secondary data sources to develop ideas further into the research.

Here's a powerful technique to use in order to pinpoint important problems and receive information all in one: create a focus group! Here's why:

a) it generates fresh ideas

b) allow clients to observe their participants

c) understand a wide variety of issues

d) allow easy access to special respondent groups

3. Establish objectives. Research objectives, when stated effectively, can provide the information needed to solve the problem you have from step 2. All of your objectives should be what you want to study in your market research and specific as possible.

Here's a quick checklist of what to include in each and every objective:

a) specify from whom information is to be gathered

b) specify what information is needed

c) specify the unit of measurement used to gather information

d) use the respondents' reference to re-word the question

4. Determine research design. There are 5 different designs you can choose from to get the information you need, such as descriptive, exploratory, causal, and diagnostic research. Descriptive research describe market variables. Exploratory research allows you to get information in an unstructured way. Causal studies is to try to reveal what factor(s) cause some event to happen. Diagnostic research focuses on the sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

5. Choose method of assessing data. Secondary data is more easy to access than primary data, such as online surveys. However, if you are into the traditional way of doing data collection (i.e. telephone, mail, F-2-F), they all still have a place in marketing research. The questionnaire that you present to the respondents must be worded clearly and unbias.

Here's a few pointers you want to remember when creating the forms for your questionnaire:

a) use nominal, ordinal, interval-Likert, interval-S-D, interval-Stapel, and ratio measurements

b) questions pertaining to each research objective (step 3)

c) questions pertaining to attribute, attitude, or behavior

d) have 1 open-ended question (I would definitely keep this at a minimum, if I were you)

6. Determine sample plan and size. Your sample plan should describe how each sample element is to be drawn from the total population. The sample size tells how many elements of the population should be included in the sample. In other words, the purpose of the sample plan is to give you representativeness, while the sample size gives you accuracy!

Here's a small but important task to take to prevent or minimize nonsampling errors from occurring: validate your participants by re-contacting!

7. Analyze and report the data. It's always good to go back and run tests on the information you have to screen out errors that may occur. Once you have all that you need for the research (pie charts, bar graphs, statistics, survey, etc), you want to be sure to create a report of it. Carefully present the research report in a way that communicates the results clearly, yet accurately to the client.

Remember marketing research is all about connecting the dots. The more information you know about your consumers, the more you bridge together with your consumers. The more closer you bridge together with your consumers, the more miles you create for long-term customer relationships. Go for it!

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