Top Business Videos – Bite-Sized Food for Thought
August 31, 2009 by Adam
Filed under Business, Entrepreneurship
We seem to be bombarded on a daily basis with a huge variety of messages telling us how to run our businesses, how to market, how to reach decision-makers, how to be efficient and so on and so forth. Such a plethora of information is available to us within so many documents to read, webpages to crawl, white papers and articles to absorb that we often feel that we cannot focus and cannot devote the time to some of these crucial areas.
It is a lot easier to listen than it is to read and even better if we can receive our information in bite-sized pieces through short, yet powerful videos. YouTube’s popularity did not just happen, it is the consequence of a huge demand for instant and easily accessible media in our overstocked world.
From a business perspective, devote some of your attention to these three videos, each of which we feel has a powerful message which should help you with an element or two of your business. Bite sized, but with valuable insight or thought-provoking material.
1. Making sales has never been more difficult, especially in the light of new technologies that are changing our way of life. There are some cutting edge tools and solutions that could help you get on top of your relationships, build new ones and help attract visitors to the top of your sales funnel. Check out these options at Business Channel.
2. Do you find it difficult to see the big picture? You are not alone, as we all become engrossed in our internal operations and flounder around in ever decreasing circles. Sometimes it is good to step back and think about what you are bringing to the business world and what values are ingrained within your product or service. Its always a good idea to try and motivate your sales team or just yourself by understanding how the business world is framed. Food for thought here at Most Important Value.
3. Do you realize the power of the spoken word? Some experts suggest that we don’t and that on a daily basis we tend to approach our entrepreneurial efforts from a completely incorrect perspective. If we just take time to think about the image that we are portraying and learn from highly successful entrepreneurs, we can see that everything we say has a cause and effect:
Speak in Opportunities.
Share your motivational business videos with us?
Matthew Toren.
Top 3 Games Sites
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” said James Howell, way back in 1659. Who are we to argue with Mr. Howell? Every entrepreneur must take time to assuage the inner self and if you want to burn an hour or so here or there, you will find many game sites on the web. This is a huge market. According to comscore.com, one out of every two Internet users in the United States visits online gaming sites! This category has grown by a factor of 10 over the past year as compared to the Internet population as a whole and this may largely be due to the quest for cheaper forms of entertainment. Here are our top three picks:
1. Pogo
Pogo garners more than 10% of the marketshare in the United States within this category. There are a variety of different games to play, some are free and some require membership. Free admission causes you to endure pop-up ads which are very intrusive and many choose to opt for the low monthly membership fee. You can generally find anything you’re looking for here including word puzzles, casino games, arcade, board games, single or multiplayer formats. Pogo has the most diverse platform and a traditional approach to online gaming.
2. RuneScape
You can escape into a virtual world here, one which has remarkable similarities to our own hectic existence. For some, this may not represent sufficient escapism but for others there is a certain satisfaction to be gained from having to work hard to defeat your enemies and battle economic and social challenges. RuneScape successfully merges the traditional fantasy challenges, “monster” interaction and other graphics within a thirst for adventure, combined with social engagement. It represents a multiplayer environment that anyone can access. People of all ages and nationalities can melt into their own surreal world.
3. Winster
A wide variety of games are offered here including slots, poker and bingo and Winster has ad-plagued free membership options as well. Their approach is to “cooperate” instead of competing with others to win prizes. You start off by targeting your goal and then play to win points until you get your prize. Winster’s pitch is that you need to interact with the other players within this social networking game format for success. Performance-wise, server-lag is a problem and gamers report that Winster is not without its share of log-offs, crashes and disruptions.
Do you bet on your own favorite game sites? What are your top three picks, let us know?
Matthew Toren
How Much Should I Spend on Marketing?
It’s an age-old question in the advertising world: how much of my hard-earned money should I put into marketing my business and building more sales? Ask any marketing expert and they’ll tell you a different story. Some will say marketing is an investment and you should invest as much as you can, others will say you should contribute 10% of sales, others will say you should always spend more than your competitors.
The right answer is:
“It Depends on What You’re Trying to Accomplish.”
In 2004 Paul Dyson wrote an article in Admap Magazine and described 7 scenarios:
1. Percentage of sales: the budget is a proportion of last year’s actual sales, or next year’s forecast sales
2. Objective and task: objectives are set (turnover, profit, growth) and the budget required to meet these objectives is estimated
3. Competitor: the amount spent by competitors is used as a yardstick; a version of this is the well-known rule of thumb that share of voice should be at least equal to share of market
4. Affordability: the budget is the amount left after everything else has been accounted for
5. Historical: do the same as last year, with an adjustment for inflation
6. Executive Judgment: basically guesswork, but probably an informal use of one or more of the above.
7. Brand Led: a more scientific approach that uses research data and econometric modeling.
The approach would be: think about what you’re trying to accomplish and build your budget around that goal. For example, if you’re trying to lead the market in a service priced at $2000.00 month you could spend:
1. 10-15% of Estimated Sales: 2000 x 50 sales per month x 10-15% = $10,000-15,000/month
2. For the objective grow sales 20%: You could figure that $10,000 = 50 sales and therefore spend $12,000 and expect 60 sales.
3. You could research a competitor and discover that they spend $9000 therefore you could win if you spent $10,000
4. You could realize that you only had $10,000 to spend and just do that
5. You could just decide to spend $10,000
6. You could do a ton of research and modeling and come up with $10,000
Beware of the gut-feeling approaches. From our perspective, the more scientific your measurement, the more likely you can figure out what’s working.
Internet Marketing Takes Out the Guesswork
We love internet marketing because it is so exact in measurement. With tools like Google Analytics we know that a PPC campaign costs $10,000 and yields 50 sales: Here’s how the math works:
• $1.00 per click x 100,000 clicks = 50 sales = (50 x $2000 per product) = $100,000 revenue
• Each $1.00 click generates $10.00 in revenue
SEO is also very measureable with Google Analytics because you can sort by organic traffic:
• $10,000/month on SEO = increase of sales from 50 units – 100 units.
• 50 sales x $2000 = $100,000 revenue increase.
• $200 in SEO = 1 sale.
Old Media Depends on Fuzzy Numbers
Advertising in TV, Radio, Newspaper is a lot harder to measure. That’s why the old media ad world comes up with the difficult models like “Brand Lead” or “Executive Judgment.” If you use your gut to determine Ad spending, and sales increase, you’re a genius! If they don’t, you increase spending until you’re in line with your competitors.
Some Easy Rules to Guide You:
1. Pay very close attention to ROI: Don’t invest in advertising that you can’t measure.
2. Stretch Your Comfort Zone: Once you’ve determined to spend 10% of sales on advertising, think about what it would look like to spend 15-20%. If it would double sales, it’s a no-brainer.
3. Treat Marketing as an Investment: Think of it as you would a company. If it works, invest more. If it doesn’t work, dump it!
This is a Guest Post by Zeke Camusio who is a serial entrepreneur, Internet Marketing expert and founder of The Outsourcing Company, an Internet Marketing agency with offices in Aspen, CO and New York. Let’s Do It!, his blog, is read by thousands of people all over the world.
Which Web Content Management System is Right For You?
The choice of the correct web content management system can be critical to your aspirations. As margins are so thin these days your site design, appearance and rendition can often make the difference between success or failure. The website is your shop window to the world and it fully reflects your professionalism. You have but a fraction of a second to create that first impression to start off with and once the visitor is at your site, you must make sure that they are able to navigate and interact according to your intended purpose.
Choosing the correct web content management solution is a process of narrowing down your choices. There are many hundreds of different options available to you and your choice will be dependent on your needs as well as budget.
As flexibility is demanded in the marketplace these days, your WCM platform should enable you to rapidly respond to your market conditions and in general you should seek to simplify and not leave yourself at the mercy of technical paralysis.
For many webmasters, the choice between open source or commercial hinges largely on cost but you should know that whereas open source is invariably free to procure and to install, you may come up against costs on the backend should you run into problems. Top quality support is not always available right when you need it.
Above all else, your web content management system should be easy to use and control, enabling you to specify your branding with little or no technical restriction. SEO should be almost second nature and your system should come with the tools to make it so. As there are so many different ways of presenting your site these days, different browser standards and, lately, internet-enabled mobile devices, strive for flexibility within your system so that it may be optimized and rendered according to your visitor’s choice. Note that within a good content management system your site’s templates will be separate from content and you should be able to maintain total consistency throughout. As the site will be easy to update, it will be possible to refresh content more frequently and in response to your particular market pressures.
There are many highly specialized providers in the field of enterprise specific content management and you can further zero your selection based on whether you want to focus on Java or Microsoft.NET technology.
Within the open source options, Joomla, Mambo, Drupal and WordPress are front and center.
Joomla is a highly flexible CMS which allows you to create numerous modules and components within a fresh and progressive framework. The latest version, 1.5, marks a considerable improvement, yet while you may be able to install this CMS in less than 30 minutes, you may spend some time getting the hang of it.
Mambo is similar to Joomla, is quite powerful and is simple to use. Its control panel is user-friendly and the system is backed up by a growing community of forum support.
Drupal is considered one of the top open-source CMS systems available, especially as far as its architecture is concerned. This system may be more for developers though, so you’d need to tread warily. Some users find Drupal more functional than Joomla or even WordPress, but unless you are somewhat experienced you may be better off sticking to the others.
Wordpress has long been known as the blogger’s platform and it is at the very head of its game without a doubt. It is very simple to use, but remember that it is fundamentally not designed for extensive modification and may not be the best platform if you require considerable e-commerce functionality, for example.
Do you have any experience with other CMS systems?
Matthew Toren
