Breaking 100 RSS Subscribership For The First Time

Another milestone broken and another one made. Earlier on yesterday I realised that I had broken the 100 RSS subscribers for the first time ever in Blogtrepreneur history. I just want to keep this short and sweet but it really shows what determination can do and how 6 months of hard work can return great dividends. Hopefully its onwards and upwards for this site and my aim now is to break 200.

By the way if you’re reading this post now the subscribership levels may have dropped, but read here for an explanation on how Feedburner counts subscribers by Rick and Andy.

And finally, an RSS Graph (click to enlarge):

How Many Comments Can I Get On This Post?

Lately I’ve been noticing a decline in the number of comments and commentators surfing around Blogtrepreneur. Maybe its been because the main people have been away on holiday, or maybe they’ve just moved away from my blog :(. Either way I thought it was time to get user interaction levels on the up once again.

Today I want to do a little experiment. How many comments can I get on this one single post? So far throughout my whole blogging history, my best performing article has been “5 Ways To Piss Off An Entrepreneur“. This netted me 12 comments and 13 trackbacks thanks to Problogger’s Group Writing Project.

But I want this to change. So if you’re just browsing, take a few seconds to leave a comment to let me know that you’ve dropped by - and spread the word so that I can get an extremely high number of comments on this one post alone! Thanks and let’s all share the success. Maybe we can break a new world record and enter into the Guinness Book!

Seven Surefire Steps To A Scorching Sales Pitch

Having a decent sales pitch can be one of the most important parts in the success of your business. While some may say that a good product can sell itself, others may argue that a salesman must show enthusiasm in his own item through his sales strategy or speech. Of course this may sound easy in theory, however for introverts and shy people, you must be able to talk the talk to be able to walk the walk of business success.

Below are seven surefire steps to clinching that deal and to giving you more money to go home with at the end of the day!

1) Smily Introductions - Nothing can beat that One Hundred Dollar Smile to the customer, and its this first impression that will help you with the rest of your sales pitch. Tell them your name and your cause with a nice wide grin and they’ll be struggling to keep the money in their pockets!

2) Question Your Customer? - Asking probing questions may seem nosy but in fact its a proven way to get the person involved in your pitch. For example if you have a product that will improve your golf, then why not throw in a rhetorical question, “Its so hard trying to get that handicap down to single figures isn’t it?!” Then that’s where your product will come in to solve their problem! Also finding out more about the customer’s life can help you to focus your sales speech more on their daily problems and your solutions.

3) Tell Them The Low Down On Your Item - After the brief introduction and a rhetorical question or 2, reel off the information about your item or your service. Know the ins and outs and every single piece of fact about what your item does, how it can benefit the customer, feedback that you may have received from other people and anything else that will help to improve your sales conversions. Be excited in what you’re selling and people will be enthusiastic too.

4) Throw In Some Extras - Its the classic car salesman situation, “Buy our brand new Ford Mondeo and we’ll throw in air conditioning, electric seats and a windscreen wiper all for free!” Chances are that the price you’re paying covers all of these items twice over, but the reality is that customers love to know that they’re getting stuff for free - so add complimentary features to your service and see your customers’ eyes light up.

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Preparing For Christmas

So Christmas is fast approaching. By my calculations I make it exactly 1 month to this day! The festivites have already begun around me on the net and in my everyday life. This weekend Im helping my mum at 2 Christmas Parties at local schools. My Mum is a jewellery saleswoman and is a bit of an import/retail pro - so Im learning the ropes of business through her. It also gives me a chance to try out sales techniques and to earn a bit of cash on the side!

On the WorldWideWeb, Darren Rowse has been writing a great series of articles on How To Fine Tune Your Blog For Christmas. These have been really helpful as this is Blogtrepreneur’s first Christmas - Im pretty excited about the whole thing.

One issue which I had to address was my mounting Blogroll. So I took some time out to go through each link and see what my colleagues were up to. To my disappointment, I found many blogs bare - some were not working at all, whilst others obviously hadn’t been updated in months. So with great sadness I finally removed some links from my sidebar. While Im appreciative of the other blogs linking to me, I want to offer my readers some high quality links where they can get good information on Entrepreneurship.

In total I was forced to remove 9 blogs from the left sidebar, however I have still kept some blogs from my first link exchanges on the net - just to remind me of the people who helped me to be where I am today. Im still grateful to everyone who has supported this blog by continually reading and commenting. So thanks!

Lately I’ve also been having to make difficult decisions. At school, my Young Enterprise company is just receiving its first order so this means that we should be up and running with proper products in a few days. This has meant however, lots of time thinking about the idea, trying to sell to individuals and updating spreadsheets and the like. Very tiring work! Also, my academic work seems to be slipping. I feel that Im spending to much time on the net, so now my main goal is to prioritize my work. This means that I can up the posting here even more with more efficiency, and still have time to exceed in my studies. This will require sheer determination and discipline - but I think I can do it!

‘Tis the season to be happy, so I’ll try and make this next month really interesting for me and you. Keep reading and commenting to keep this blog alive where so many others are falling behind!

Data Deposit Box - Backing Up Your Files!

Sponsored Post: This post is sponsored by DataDepositBox.com and thus I am being paid to write it. However it does tie in nicely with another point I was going to make about backing up your files, which Burt has also written about!

Today, backing up your files can seem like the most boring job in the world and chances are you havnt backed up your stuff in ages. Copy and paste jobs are simple but require organised hard drives which many of us simply don’t have today (I have word documents, HTML pages and pictures strewn all the way round my hard drive!).

CRON jobs are available but they can take up valuable disk space and may slow down and decrease the performance of your computer. What better way then, to have a program automatically run backups of all of your important files and folders 24/7, and have them sent to a secure data centre? The minds behind this business model are Acpana Business Systems Inc. who have made Data Deposit Box.

Registration through their online form is easy (there’s even a free trial) and once you’ve downloaded the program (for free), you can set which folders you’d like to be backed up. Then:

“Whenever you’re online, Data Deposit Box backs up your data automatically. There are no procedures to follow. No Schedules to set. You can never miss a backup window.

Throughout the day Data Deposit Box watches your files, looking for changes. When a change is detected, our backup engine extracts the changes, compresses them, encrypts them, and securely transfers them to our secure data center.

Once at the data center, your data is stored in this encrypted form. We use the strongest encryption available to ensure that your confidential data is kept safe and secure. Even our administrators do not have the ability to access your data. Your privacy is important. Your data can only be accessed by you.”

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