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Monday, October 11, 2010

The best protection for your hard-earned cash

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Saturday, July 24, 2010

A small business turnaround executed without injecting a single cent in more capital

The two principal shareholders of the small business stared back at me in disbelief as I calmly explained the simple rescue plan we would use to turnaround their ailing small business. Exhaustion and desperation were written all over their faces and in a way I felt pity for them.

The pair had already lost a small fortune in just one year of operation. The only reason why they had not shut down the damned thing was that they were hoping for some miracle that would recover at least half their life savings. Yes they had sunk in all their life savings in this floundering small business.

But then theirs is the story of hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs the world over who continue to launch thousands of new magazines every year without the very special skills that are required to run this complex and yet potentially profitable business. Others launch a small business with every kind of system except a simple selling system to constantly generate sales which is the lifeblood of any business.

Taking stock of the small business I was supposed to help rescue, I quickly came to the realization that all they had left at this bankrupt magazine now was a small demoralized sales team ready to quit the moment they found jobs elsewhere. No reporters, no writers, no budget to get good writers on board. How do you rescue a magazine without quality content and without funding? It can actually be done with a selling system.

I quickly called a meeting and tried to inspire the shabby remnant, assuring them that the magazine was now in good hands and that things would improve. Luckily they did not sense the cold fear creeping up my spine nor did they seem to realize that I had already broken into a cold sweat. In business there are no guarantees – you win some and you lose others. What right did I have to make all these promises? What if I failed in this assignment?

I proceeded to swiftly train the handful of sales people and changed them from advertising sales persons into “reporters”. They were to go out and gather information.

Gather information!? When you need revenue so badly? Actually the first step to turn around any business is to gather lots of information. But let’s see how it panned out with the small business magazine.

The information gathering was part of a simple system I had quickly designed consisting of the following steps,

1) “Reporter” calls up a potential client and books an appointment for an interview.

2) I accompany them to the interview and I do both a thorough and professional job of it.

3) After the interview, we make an editorial decision whether the material merited a feature article in the magazine or not. And if it did whether the story would end up being positive or negative. (Any publisher will tell you that bad news sells much better than good news.)

If it merited a positive story, we would go ahead and write the story and then later approach the same client to book an advertisement so as to get a double maximum impact in the same issue. Alternatively they would have their advertisement appear in a future issue.

4) If the story was negative we would avoid approaching the source to place an ad in the magazine. We would instead go ahead and write our big story with a little additional research from other sources. The reporter would then approach a competitor to the business in question (who was not in the same mess) for a brief comment and an advertisement to take advantage of the focus on the industry
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5) Other times an interviewer supplied us with a tip to pursue another company or organization for a lead story, which we would also do.

Using this simple system that maximized on the meager resources that were available, we literally killed two birds with one stone. The advertising space sales team were able to get very good quality leads for advertising sales and turned most of them into much needed solid sales. The big secret here is that they were able to use the writer’s interview session to build rapport with the client/news source.

Secondly, in the process we were able to do quality research work for all the stories we carried in the business magazine which improved our readership and the confidence of advertisers as well on the quality of the monthly business publication.

This was of course combined with some careful house-keeping where we kept a very careful eye on costs by designing a system that would monitor costs on a daily basis. Within 8 weeks the magazine was making a profit and in one year, if you came calling, you would not believe it was the same previously dying magazine.

Magazines can be very profitable. They can also be huge cash drains. It all depends on you doing the following;
- Creating workable systems for generating revenue through selling advertising and other systems for generating revenue from subscription and single copy sales. The systems you create must be so simple that the staff training required will be minimal.
It’s as simple as that. And that’s exactly how I turned around an ailing small business.
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You can read another extremely useful small business turnaround article by the same author.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Turnaround any small business with this big secret

I have seen it so many times over the years that it is almost boring now. Sales of the small business dry up and the owner gets increasingly desperate but they either run around like a headless chicken doing all the wrong things at the same time. Or they just sit around doing nothing. Either reaction has exactly the same result. The business continues to slowly but surely sink like the leaking Titanic in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And it does not matter whether you are talking about a bricks and mortar business or an online enterprise the scenario is usually exactly the same.

And yet most of these small businesses can be saved and completely turned around into profitability. It is all so simple that it pains me why there has to be so much pain and suffering and losses as small businesses with great potential go down when they could have been so easily saved.

The easiest surest way to turnaround any small business is to create a winning selling system that will start generating sales and revenues for the small business. It is like injecting blood into a dying man who has lost way too much blood, usually the recovery after the blood transfusion is almost instantaneous.

What is this selling system thing and why is it so effective in turning around any ailing business?

Almost any work can be systematic. "Systems" are how the military makes it look so easy to manage so many people and organize them into a ferocious fighting machine that wins wars. Systems are how good work gets done. Highly successful household names like McDonald's did not grow to what they are today by hiring people and then asking them to get the job done the best way they know how. Actually what McDonald's did was to carefully document systems that worked best for the business. The result is that it is simple for virtually anybody to duplicate the system and become successful at the business. It is simply a matter of working the system – if it is a good system it will respond and give you miraculous results.

You can imagine that this is even more crucial when it comes to the most difficult aspect of running any business. And that is selling whatever it is that you sell. Anybody who has ran any business for any length of time will know how difficult it is to generate leads and then find a way to convert them into actual sales. This is exactly what a selling system does for a small business.

Actually a good working selling system should constantly generate new leads and then gradually process them by moving them along a process until they are ready to buy. If you have designed a good selling system it should work like clockwork.

Even if your business is not doing badly, you need a selling system to take you to the next level. There are various ways to come up with one. For instance you can study the most successful companies in your industry and discover the selling systems they have adopted for their success. Always remember that success is never an accident.

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My ebook "How I turned around my ailing small business in 7 days flat" is packed with turnaround small business tips that are guaranteed to work and you can get it free if you visit the page right away.

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Dark Secrets of the Kenyan presidency


Dark secrets of the Kenyan presidency explores the office the presidency through some rarely-told (and some never-before-told) incidences surrounding this bigger than life office created by Jomo Kenyatta and the founders of the Kenyan nation. “This thing” they created grew and became an enormous un-tameable beast that has caused untold distress, suffering and death to Kenyans.

Kumekucha’s account is mostly angry and dissects this subject ruthlessly without fear or favour. The tone is very much that one of his blog which has received worldwide attention sometimes in praise and at other times in condemnation but is certainly a blog that cannot be ignored. The result here is a thought-provoking account that will forever change your views about this all powerful office which has the kind of powers under the constitution Kenyans have lived with for decades that would be the envy of any god.

The Kumekucha blog was launched in May 2005 by a blogger who only reveals his first name, Chris. The site continues to shape political opinion for many Kenyans locally and spread all over the world. This is the first in a series of books that will be published from information researched and written by the blogger known to his adoring readers and sharp critics alike as Chris Kumekucha.


What others have to say about it...


Interesting read. -Nairobi engineer-

It was too short. You left me hanging and craving for more. I sensed there was much more you would have said.
-Joel O.-

Good Book -via sms from John Githongo close to midnight-

Plenty I didn't know about Moi and Kenyatta so that Kibaki chapters looked rather thin in comparison. Was it lack of research or were you scared? - Owen-

Thanx Chris. The best political read I have had in a long time. -Avid Kumekucha fan-

I will give you the good and the bad and I will be brutal. The bad: the book is too brief, I spotted a few typos, you should have left out the Moi bedroom stuff. The good: I thought I understood Kenyan politics until I read this book, I honestly couldn't put it down so your pace is good, there is so much I didn't know about the presidency. Final verdict on a scale of 0 to 10 I would give your book 7. -Molly-

Chris, you'd better not be writing this from Kenya. -Concerned Kumekucha fan-

I have just finished reading Dark secrets of the presidency. I think you are an idiot Chris. This is a potential best seller and you are not advertising it. You can go on sleeping on a gold mine as you get cheered by immature youngsters in your Kumekucha blog. -Deleted comment left by an annonymous reader in Kumekucha blog-

(Kindly add your comment below. ONLY after reading the book)

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Get excerpts of this book Email; darksecrets@listwire.com for an instant response..

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Do you have problems getting lots of quality traffic to your site?

Anybody can launch a new website. It is so easy. And that is why we have so many websites that never receive any traffic. Meaning that their owners wasted all that cash for nothing. Some top web designers in Nairobi these days charge as much as Kshs 300,000 for a single website.

Any web expert will tell you that for your site to get traffic you need articles and quality content on it. And it needs to be written by a SEO (search engine optimization) expert so that it gets you plenty of traffic from Google. Google? Yes, that is where people start their search for anything they are looking for online, including the services and products you have on offer on your site. Well over 100 million people use Google daily!!! Yep!! 100 million!! Daily!!

Now there is a very simple solution where you can do everything for yourself. It is very simple to learn the tricks of the trade and get lots of traffic to your site. To start with you can get all the traffic-generating content you need for your site for FREE!

Get all the details HERE

Friday, March 26, 2010

Use free online advertising creatively to dramatically increase traffic to your blog

With effective free online advertising available on the web, it really is strange that so many bloggers still complain about lack of traffic. How do you expect to sit there doing nothing but complaining and grumbling and yet still expect to receive substantial online traffic? It just doesn’t work that way.

You really don’t have an excuse because the online advertising we are talking about here is FREE. So all you need to do is spend a little time posting free ads at the right places.

But for starters do make sure that regular visitors to the place where you are posting your free ad are your target audience or prospective clients for whatever it is that you are selling on your site. A new emerging trend where high traffic blogs allow free ads is interesting because you are guaranteed that the blog gets regular and frequent traffic since most of them tend to update content and create new posts almost daily. Secondly it will be very easy to verify the audience based on the content of the blog.

Start by summarizing the most interesting features on any particular post on your blog. Start with a very catchy headline because if that doesn’t attract interest nobody will read beyond that. Use a http://tinyurl.com or http://is.gd shortened url address to direct folks to your blog post. This shortened url is not hyperlinked and people will have to cut and paste it on a new window to access your blog. The most effective free online advertising blog I know does NOT allow you to create a hyperlinks in your ad pointing to your site. Which is just as well because this has SEO implications and Google discourages paid links in a blog corrupting the count of real organic links generated naturally pointing to the blog. Although you will not have paid for your ad in the blog, it is an ad all the same and Google will quite rightly assume that it may have been paid for.

You can go a step further and search for all blogs that would find your blog content relevant and then post genuine comments and refer readers to your blog post using a http://tinyurl.com or http://is.gd shortened version of your blog page address.

It is quite possible to built huge traffic to your blog using only this single free online advertising method.

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Use this popular blog to test your proposed free online advertising campaign. This blog receives visitors from all over the world. Majority are based in North America and the United Kingdom. Plus read about the real free online advertising secret behind the Google billions

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Free Online Advertising: The real secret behind the Google billions

Many people still don’t quite understand why Google has been so successful with their online advertising business.

Let me give you a hint by repeating a great marketing truth here. Here it is:

People will mostly buy when they are ready to buy.

Just think for a moment about a recent purchase you made worth at least $500 or more. It is unlikely that you did it as a result of being pushed or pressurized by some pestering salesperson. Chances are that you decided it was time to make the purchase and you purchased from the place you had easiest access to. It is that simple.

Now how have Google used this great marketing truth to make billions from PPC ads?

Thank you, I never thought you would ask. Here is the answer.

Google invented PPC (pay per click advertising). The whole idea behind the ads placed next to search engine results was to make them relevant. Yep!! RELEVANT. Meaning that for instance people searching for affordable laptops on the Google search engine would see ads next to the search results advertising affordable laptops and nothing else. Chances were that somebody searching for information on affordable laptops was looking to buy and were ready to buy. So the ads selling laptops would be very relevant.

And because it was relevant it would be welcomed as valuable information. Advertise the same thing on search results for affordable used cars and you would end up upsetting them with the same information that others find valuable. Actually there is a name online for unsolicited irrelevant information. It is SPAM. And in many parts of the world it is a criminal poffence to SPAM people. That is how upset folks get.

Now all this sounds obvious but the truth is that it isn’t. Most people are more interested in how many people will get to see their advertisement and will only ask about the target audience later. The Google guys realized early that relevance is much more important than hits and it is better to have your ad in a site where only 10 people see it and yet they are 10 people looking for what you are advertising and mostly ready to buy right away, than it is to have your ad on a site where one million people will end up seeing it.

It is that simple.

And so the way to make free online advertising work for you is to make sure that the people who read the site where you are posting your advertisement are the people you are targeting. If they are then chances will be higher that they will be ready to buy which will dramatically improve the response you get from your free online advertisement.

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Interested in testing your advertisement at a popular blog allowing free online advertising? What’s more is that they do NOT require any registration.

Does free online advertising work?

Free online advertising usually sounds too good to be true. Place a couple of ads online for FREE and get a better response than you would from paid advertising? That can’t be true. Fairy tales don’t happen in the real world do they?

Actually free online ads have changed many people’s lives. Have you heard of Craigslist? I know several people who make a living on advertisements posted at this popular free classified ads site.

But if you are looking for a catch, there is one. You need to know exactly the right words to use in your advertisement. And to do that you must have a pretty good idea of the kind of people who read the free online advertising site that you intend to use. If you get these two things right then free online advertising may be all you need to get thousands of qualified leads and customers for your business.

So how do you get an idea of the kind of people who read the ads at the free classified ads site that you intend to post your ad at? Read the ads already posted for starters and if there is any content you can read that too. This will give you a very good idea of the interests of the folks who visit that site and who will end up seeing your advertisement. This is very important because folks online are in a hurry and only have time for what they are interested in visiting the particular site they have landed in. Anything irrelevant or unrelated will be completely ignored. This is probably the most common mistake made by most people who have failed with free online advertising.

Blogs receive huge traffic and the huge advantage with them is that they are easy to classify and it is easy to determine the kind of readers that visit a particular blog regularly. Just from reading the main posts you will quickly grasp this. Be careful about the comments because the trend across the web is that people get very abusive and even vulgar in their comments. Especially if a blog allows anonymous comments. Still you will quickly find that many blogs that allow anonymous comments have very high traffic indeed. the huge advantage with placing your free ad in Kumekucha is that you will be able to reach thousands of Kenyans instantly.

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Interested in testing your advertisement at the very popular main Kumekucha blog allowing free online advertising? What’s more is that they do NOT require any registration.