Like most big Apple launches (iPad, Macs, iPod, etc…) they know that if you just do one thing, you can get everybody talking about it. And that one thing is…

Be Awesome!

It’s no coincidence that Apple’s stock jumps up and down during and before a big product launch. When they launch a new product, the world reacts. Fans clamor over how soon they can get their hands on it. Tech sites scramble to for the early scoops and instant updates on features. It’s a big deal.

But it’s only a big deal because the product is good; more than good.

Case in point, you can go ahead and try to launch anything, but if it’s not worth talking about; if it’s not amazing… then well, nobody’s going to talk about it. It’s like the people who still send out press releases announcing their CEO is speaking at an event in Idaho. Big whoop. Nobody cares about that. It’s a complete waste of time. It’s not news.

To do a launch correctly you have to make sure you have something worth talking about.  And that’s the hard part. What’s worth talking about at your business?

Remember, your audience isn’t everybody, it is probably more like the people in your industry. You don’t have to impress the world like Apple does. You just have to impress your target market.

So again, what’s new and amazing with your business? Don’t know? Can’t think of anything?

Then it’s time to start thinking about how to cook something up. What does you product or service do that nobody else can? There has got to be something unique about your business that your competitors can’t do? This is called your unique value proposition (UVP). Figure out what this is and say it loudly, otherwise, why will your customers choose you over your competitors?

Once you have your UVP figured out, you can begin to start thinking about how to leverage a launch of your product/service. Think of a launch like a Hollywood movie trailer. They put out a teaser video enticing us about something that is coming. Then, when the movie is released, we all go running to the theater to see it, thus creating a large opening weekend profit number which pretty much defines the success of a movie nowadays.

Plan your big launch day a few weeks or a few months out and tease your customers with your big news. Create videos and podcasts around the launch and release them on YouTube and your blog or website. Leak out small bits of information ahead of time for the media to grab on to. Build hype!

Then, on your launch day, hold a launch event like Apple does. No, you don’t have to invite 50,000 people. You could do the entire event virtually through a live webinar, or Google hangout. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Invite the media to join the launch and answer questions for them and your customers. Have fun with it! Make it an event that people want to be part of.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget to be awesome.

The post Launch Your Small Business Like The iPhone 5 appeared first on Small Business Trends.

If she buys, it’s a conversion.

Now imagine 1,000 customers walk into your office over a year’s time, and 10 percent of those customers end up buying from you. You just converted 100 customers at a 10 percent conversion rate! That’s a good thing!

Those customers obviously appreciated your sales message, how your office looks and your overall presentation, which is why they bought from you. Now imagine if you could increase that 10 percent conversion rate to 11 percent, or 15 percent, or even 20 percent?

Wow! How much more money would you be making every year with those numbers? So you would do your best to make sure that your office was professional and clean, and your sales pitch was practiced, right?

If you’re doing it offline in sales meetings and with your printed materials, why wouldn’t you take the same care and preparation online with your website, your blog and your landing pages?

For your small business, the same sales process that happens in your office is happening online, but you may not give it as much attention as you need to.

You may be trying to sell your product or service, or get more email newsletter signups, or get more downloads of your new ebook or white paper. But if you’re not doing it the right way with high-quality landing pages, you’ll never get the conversions you need to see your conversion rate increase.

So what is a landing page? A landing page is a single Web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.

• A landing page is not your website.
• A landing page should not have website navigation.
• A landing page should not try to offer more than one main focus.

Effective landing pages work because they focus the potential customer on the direct benefits of one specific offer. This allows the customer to decide to take an action, or to not take an action. Either way, you win. It’s when a potential customer gets distracted that you lose, because they haven’t been forced to decide either way. Indecision is the enemy of a great sales pitch.

So How Do I Create High-Quality Landing Pages?

Here are some resources that can help you create effective landing pages.

Premise is a plugin that works with WordPress. It allows you to create landing pages off of your website or blog. You can download a set of free landing page templates for Premise to get an easy jump start on landing page creation.

Unbounce offers a set of Web-based landing page tools that you can use to build your landing pages online quickly and easily.

Invesp offers a white paper entitled “30 Principles of Landing Page Design” where you can pick up even more tips on great landing page design and implementation.

The bottom line is that until you seriously focus your online efforts with good landing page design, you’ll never be able to reach the pinnacle of high conversion rates that can explode your company’s bottom line.

The post Convert Website Visitors to Buyers With Landing Pages appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Be Remarkable
If you want to be remarkable, you have to do something remarkable. Look at all the influencers in your industry and you’ll see the same thing. These are people or businesses that have done something that makes a difference, or gets attention, or really makes a mark. You simply cannot become an influencer without doing something remarkable. Other influencers know what it took to get to their position, and they are looking for new members of the club who understand that they need to do the same thing. Unfortunately, doing something remarkable requires effort and a lot of hard work. If you can’t do that, you’re out before you were even considered. Get to work.

Be Consistently Remarkable
It’s not enough to be remarkable just once. Top influencers take it to the next level and do it over and over again, on multiple levels. Anyone can get lucky one time. Influencers know that and want to see you perform consistently. The point is, once you wow the world, be prepared to do it again.

Be Better
You know how you get respect from your peers? You become better than they are. Influencers aren’t going to let anyone into the club for just being good. They get pitched 1,000 times a day with “good” concepts. They want exceptional, not “good.” They want people to wow them and who are potentially better than them.

Be Humble
If you walk into a room full of people and start talking about how you’re the greatest that ever lived, you’re probably not going to get much respect. You have to earn respect from influencers. The only way to do that is to come into it with a humble attitude. Tip: It’s always better to let your fans and customers who love you talk you up, instead of doing it yourself. If you’re doing something remarkable, that won’t be a problem. The top influencers in your niche will be watching and listening.

Be a Cheerleader
Nobody likes an ass-kisser, true. But if you want to get the attention of a top influencer in your space, you should spend a certain amount of time focusing on promoting that person’s projects and information. Comment on their blog consistently, and intelligently. Retweeet their tweets. Share them on Facebook, and Google + them. They’re paying attention, believe me.

Be Ready for the Spotlight
You’ve made it into the club! Congrats! Are you ready for it? You’re now one of the influencers in your niche. This means that you’ll now get contacted multiple times a day from people who want to “pick your brain,”  want you to mentor them, or want you to promote their idea. If you don’t come up with a kind way to help them, they’ll call you a jerk and blast you on social media.

It also means that you can now raise your consulting and speaking rates. You can garner a book deal just from your clout. You can launch a new product, or service and sell it easily without having to convince people to buy it. Get to work. The influencer club is ready for you. Are you ready for it?

Don’t forget to head on over to the Small Biz Trends Influencer awards and vote for your top influencers.

The post How to Join the Influencer Club appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Unfortunately, we all know that’s not reality. As small business owners, we work day and night to reach that dream for ourselves. And we know, through experience, that there’s no “easy button” we can push to achieve it.

But isn’t it frustrating to watch as others continue to succeed by selling the dream that we know isn’t possible?

You know who I’m talking about. Those guru-type slimy marketing promotions that tell you things like, “Make $14,023 a month at home in your underwear with no effort!” or “Making money by pushing buttons has never been easier with this revolutionary system!”

We all know those systems don’t really deliver on their promises. The only people getting rich are the gurus selling those scams. But the truth is that the reason they continue to offer these scams the way they do is because it works. Humans like to buy the dream.

Take a deep breath. I know, it’s frustrating. Because that’s not you and me. We don’t make promises of overnight success. We run real businesses where we try to solve real problems for our customers.

But there’s an opportunity to learn something here and use it to our advantage. If you look at why people buy, it’s usually for a different reason than you think it is. For example, people don’t buy a fancy diamond engagement ring because of how it looks. They buy it because of how it’s going to make their lives better and how it’s going to make the other person feel. They’re buying “forever!”, not diamonds.

In another example, people don’t buy Nike products because they’re any higher quality than Converse or New Balance or 100 other brands. They buy Nike because Nike sells “winning.” They’re buying the dream. They want to be labeled winners.

So next time you see a guru trying to sell something you know is full of false promises, don’t get angry. Instead, use it as a lesson to think about what you sell, and more importantly, what and why people buy from you. Then use that lesson to improve your marketing message for more sales, leads and publicity.

Stop over at Unguru.me and join a community of like-minded business owners.

The post How to Sell Like a Guru, Without Being One appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Often we’re too focused on giving our customers too much. When you go to the barber, he doesn’t give you a menu of haircuts. You sit down, tell him simply what you’d like done, he pulls out his tools and cuts your hair. All very quickly and without fuss, which is the reason most men still prefer to go to a barber rather than a “salon”: It’s simple.

Now, if you were to sit in that same barber’s chair and he gave you a 20-question survey about what type of hairstyle you prefer before he started cutting, you’d not only be annoyed, but most likely never go to him again.

Let’s look at an online example to further prove the point. Imagine you’re visiting the e-commerce store of your favorite pet supply retailer. You need a new collar for your Labrador, Bella. Upon arriving at the site’s dog collar section, you find 20 different types and brands of collars. There are fancy collars, cheap collars, chain collars, collars for small and big dogs, collars with diamond studs on them, fashionable collars, and many more. Whew… you’re faced with lots of choices.

“Great,” you say. “I love it that this store has so many choices, I came to the right place.”

But perhaps it’s not so great. Having too many choices might be a problem. You just wanted to get a collar. You were ready to buy one. But now, well, you’ve found out that there a lot of decisions you need to make before you buy one. You think to yourself, “I had no idea there were so many collars. I like so many of them, I don’t know what to choose.”

So you didn’t buy. You were ready to, but you didn’t. Chances are this has happened to you at some point in your buying life, and chances are what happened was that you were ready to decide, but the explosion of choices either confused you, or made you realize that you weren’t ready to decide. Effective sales and marketing is all about helping the customer make a decision, and simplicity is necessary to make that happen.

Here are some ways your site might be confusing customers:

• Poor navigation so your customer has to figure where to go
• A poor unique value proposition (UVP)
• Too many choices of products and services without a clear indication of which one is the right choice for the customer
• Tons of drawn-out copy that nobody wants to read
• Requiring a customer to register before they can buy from you

Are you guilty of overcomplicating customers’ choices on your website? Think about ways you can make it simple–and you’ll find that making the sale gets much easier.

The post The Universal Truth of Selling on the Web: Simple Wins appeared first on Small Business Trends.

The video below talks about YouTube from your perspective and will give you some insight as to why you need to have your videos on YouTube, and how to navigate the site so that it works for you. Otherwise, why do it?

The post YouTube 101 for Small Businesses appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Relationships Matter

Sounds familiar right? As a small business owner, you get it. Success is usually linked to the professional relationships you build over time. So the theory is that the more relationships you have, the more success can come your way. Who can argue with that?

So, what exactly is Linkedin.com?

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 30 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.

Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals.

Here’s a short video about what Linkedin.com is and how you can use it to create more relationships, and more success for your small business.

The post Using Linkedin As A Small Business Owner appeared first on Small Business Trends.

What is bizSugar?

If you’ve felt overwhelmed by the massive amount of business information online, then this site is for you. bizSugar is a social bookmarking and networking site for small to medium-sized business owners and managers. It allows you to submit, share and vote for the best business information links on the Internet.

bizSugar makes it easier to learn about new business strategies, tactics, trends, and news. You can discover websites that provide answers to many of your business challenges, meet other business owners and managers that share your interests, and help others by sharing your knowledge.

Ever been to digg.com? If so, you get what bizSugar.com is. It’s just like that in functionality, but for business content only. That means that you can avoid all the pop culture stories about Britney’s dog that aren’t going to help your business make money. That’s a good thing.

I’ve created a short video below to help you understand how bizSugar works and how you can use it. Please enjoy. Next week, a video about how small business owners can use Linkedin.com.

The post Social Bookmarking and Networking Using bizSugar.com appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Boy, was I wrong. And I’m very glad today that I wised-up and reversed my thoughts and embraced Twitter as a valuable tool for my business.

What is Twitter? According to the Wikipedia…

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

For you, the small business owner, Twitter is an amazing tool that can expand your reach to customers and potential customers. It can allow you to stay in touch and connect with thousands and thousands of people instantly. It can help drive your brand and communicate with customers in a way that you’ve never been able to before. And so much more.

Want to know more? Here’s a screencast video of how & why you should use Twitter from a small business perspective. Got any questions? Hey, contact me on Twitter!

The post How and Why To Use Twitter For Small Businesses appeared first on Small Business Trends.