Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

On the weekend I attended a workshop by Australian copywriting expert Pete Godfrey.

The room was full of a variety of people and I was pleased to hear that it wasn’t all about Internet marketing. There was a lot of advice handed out for small business owners in any market and plenty of people in the room were from traditional companies who do normal things like sell widget type stuff - you know, physical goods offline. People like mechanics and printers were in attendance, and also a few people looking to become better sales writers like journalists and budding freelance copywriters.

Today I want to pass on some of the biggest lessons from the workshop that every small business owner needs to think about.

The Money Is In The Relationship

Pete was quick to point out that the money is not in the list but in the relationship you have with your members. He teaches that you need to foster a “tribe”, a group of core customers who buy from you not just because of your good service, but because they have a real vested interest in you and what you do.

To facilitate relationship building Pete recommended the use of a newsletter, but in this case not your typical online email newsletter (though Pete certainly agreed you want one of them too!), but a print newsletter you send to people via oldschool snail mail.

The Print Newsletter

Pete showed a copy of his print newsletter that he charges $49 a month to subscribe to and also a copy of a free print newsletter one of his clients use (a car parts wholesaler).

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When I first started a “real” business I was already in a position of positive cash flow, but it wasn’t because I had inherited money or because my parents had funded my business project, it was because of two reasons…

1. I had successfully generated a few hundred dollars a month from hobby projects - these were not things I considered real businesses, just websites I loved to work on that made a trickle of money.
2. I had a casual job.

I was 19 when I first became interested in computers (before that it was all about console gaming) and by my early twenties I was capable of putting together a website. My sites were not well designed, but functional, just text wrapped inside a few tables and basic graphics. My beginner training was with the free hosting service Geocities, so just getting text and pictures to appear were you want them to on a page was a challenge.

What I did have during this period was ample time, and that was definitely my biggest advantage. I lived at home, had minimal expenses and was attending university. As many college students understand, your university days can be very flexible depending on how good your work ethic is, and my work ethic was not directed at my textbooks or assignments, it was focused on the Internet.

After a few years playing around online, I settled on a few projects long enough that I made money. As people who have read my business timeline know, my first “cash cow” website was MTGParadise.com. I used the income from this site, plus money from my casual job at a computer helpdesk at my university, to fund my next business, BetterEdit.

During this period I started several other businesses, including an English school called Aussie Tutor, and plenty of different website projects, all of which failed in a traditional sense - they cost more money than they made. I never borrowed money to fund any projects, I used my energy and creativity, income from my job and the steadily increasing cash flow from my website and went from project to project.

You Must Have Something You Can Leverage

If you are considering starting a business you have two resources you can leverage -

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I’ve been closely watching the RSS count at SmallBusinessBranding.com and late last week it finally ticked over the 2,000 mark.

Congratulations to Rob, Ed, Kevin, Freya, Krishna, Sean, Drew, Steve, Brad and all the previous Small Business Branding authors who have written for the site at one point in time.

Small business is a competitive industry to write in and reaching 2,000 daily readers is a fantastic achievement, testament to the consistent value the current authors produce.

If you haven’t visited for a while you have missed plenty of great articles coming from the diverse team of small business fans and experts. Why not visit Small Business Branding today and subscribe to the RSS feed.

We are always interested in recruiting new writers to the Small Business Branding team, so if you have a thing or two to say about small business, please get in touch.

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We recently added new members to the writing roster at Small Business Branding. I’ll formally introduce them all once they have their first article up on the site, but for now you should come visit to see the new faces.

If you haven’t been to SmallBusinessBranding.com recently and you are interested in small business marketing branding I suggest you wander by soon. There’s lots of great articles going up from some very interesting people all with unique experiences in the small business world.

Comments Are Welcome

I can speak from experience when I say I love it when people leave comments on my articles because it shows you are really reading my writing. If you visit SmallBusinessBranding.com and you enjoy an article from one of the authors or have something to add, please make sure you leave some comments. I know the authors would really appreciate your input and feedback, so don’t hold back!

Go visit now –> www.SmallBusinessBranding.com

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It’s the end of another month so it’s time to thank the sponsors and recap the content from my network of blogs.

Thank You Sponsors

A big thank you to all the people and organizations who offered sponsorship and donations.

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Content Recap

Here is what has been happening at Small Business Branding.

• Don’t Make My Mistake - Test Your Systems Regularly - A made a boo-boo with one of my email lists that cost me three weeks worth of subscribers. Read what happened and how to prevent it happening to you.
• How To Market Your Small Business With Blogs - I’ve been reading Robert Scoble’s Naked Conversations book and it inspired me to write this article about blogging for small business.
• How Much Do You Love Your Business? - Steve Balmer, Microsoft CEO goes a little bit crazy in this speech. Watch this video to see the man in action.
• Sell Benefits, Not Features - A gentle reminder about selling benefits to your customers and not focus on how good you are or your product is.
• The Small Business Success Secret - A special secret I use that is the key to a lot of my success online.
• 7 Tasty Tips To Market Your Small Business Offline - A short report listing 7 techniques you can use to market your business offline.
• Are You Forgetting To Backup? The Backup Checklist - A surprising thing happened to this blog one morning when I woke up - it had been replaced with another website (hacked!), which prompted me to write this piece on backing up vital things in your business. Includes a checklist.

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