business - Tahereh

Change your Life by Changing your Habits

October 4, 2017 No Comments

Take your life out of autopilot and win opportunities.

Look at your days. How many times are you doing things based on your decisions? How many times are you doing things based on your feelings?

It is very important to know, when, we are on autopilot throughout our days. We form our days based on either decisions or feelings. Feelings are based on our habits and past experiences.

Because of our habits we feel good or bad doing something. If you have a bad experience in the past doing a specific task, you would not feel motivated or feel good doing the same task today.

If you are in the habit of eating lots of sugar, not eating it will give you a bad feeling and eating it gives you pleasure. Now if you have to stop eating sugar and decide on reducing your sugar intake; guess what?! The first days and weeks you will feel miserable no matter how right your decision has been. After several months of not eating sugar you will form this new habit in you and now eating sugar will make you feel bad.

This simple example shows how many other things are in our life that we basically do just because we are used to doing them and it gives us sense of pleasure. But can we live life to the fullest if we only rely on our habits. Especially if those habits are formed based on our poor lifestyle routine.

If you want to make changes you have to take control of your life by making more decisions. Mel Robbins has a great techniue that teaches us how to bring your life out of habits and make it based on decisions.

We all know what is good and what we have to do. We all have that inner wisdom in us. But that sound in us is only active for few seconds. Then it vanishes by thoughts, excuses, and habits.

How can we make ourselves listen to our inner wisdom? This is where Mel Robbins introduces the 5 second technique when you have 5 seconds to make the decision. Whenever you are in a situation to make a decision see what comes to your head first then count 5 4 3 2 1 and then do it.

You can practice and see the miracle in this technique when it is hard to come out of bed in the mornings. Instead of hitting the snooze button count and jump out of bed.

When seeing a yummy cake on a table and you know you want to break the habit of eating sugar, count and look somewhere else. Make your decision and if you can, even throw it in the garbage.

The reason that you count and do the tasks is to prevent you from thinking. Your mind brings you your habits and reminds you of your past experiences just to protect you. It convinces you to not do anything different. Just to keep you on the safe side. But how can you make any changes to your life if you don’t change your habits?

After doing this technique for few months you will see how different your life has become because of the new habits you are forming which are based on your sound decisions.

You will enjoy waking up early, being on time for meetings, going to gym, reading more books, talking to friends, and spending your time wisely. And you will feel bad eating sugar, wasting your time in front of TV watching useless shows. And many more things that you used to do and were ruining your days but you were not noticing it because it was part of your habits and your mind made you feel good and safe with them.

Let’s change our life by changing our habits TODAY!

Business

5 ways to drive more Business through Digital Marketing

September 20, 2017 No Comments

Optimized Website:

Website is what you need to have to introduce your business, services to your audience and make connection with them and deliver your message. Your website should be well optimized for search engines. Meaning that when people search for products or services that you are offering search engines bring them back the results. You want search engines understand your website and your business in order to put your site in front of the users.

Your website should have a professional look and be user friendly. Your website is your first impression. You want to make the right impression. If you are expert in your field and you believe in your services then your website should show that. If people come across a poorly designed website, they’ll leave, they can’t trust you. I know we should not judge the book by it’s cover but this is business and not lala land. People judge a book by it’s cover unless they have heard so many good things about a specific book that then they don’t care about the cover and just pick the book because they know the author and the title. Now if they know the author and the title and see a nice cover, that would be even better impression.

As a start up business you have to take care of your first impression. It is the essential to get customers. Once you have them, then you and your services make them to come back. Your website should convey a tangible sense of trust and that can be done through a great looking design that is easy to browse and understand.

So make sure you have a professional looking website that is clean and delivers your message. It is easy to browse and people can easily find your services, can read about you, and find more information based on the service they are interested in.

Content:

Make the content of your website related to what you are offering. Use your keywords in the content of your site. So that search engines can find the keywords and bring your site up when someone is searching using similar or exact terms.

Have blog section and post regularly on your blog. Don’t start selling your services or products on your blog. No one is interested in these kind of posts. Make the need for them to have and to use what you are offering. For instance if you have women fashion line your posts can be around fashion and how women can look good. For instance you can write about “What different body types should wear to look good”. “Common problems when women go shopping”. And many more ideas…

You want to give your audience a reason to follow you and visit your site on a regular basis. When they need something that you are offering automatically they know where to go.

Mobile:

I am sure you already know the importance of mobile. People browse through their mobile and find businesses using their mobiles. Even you do the same too. So it is very important to have a mobile responsive website. Mobile responsive means to have a website that changes when people browse through mobile. Why does it have to change? To make it more readable and easy to browse on mobile devices. If someone comes on your site using mobile and your site loads slow or doesn’t change according to the device, don’t doubt that the person leaves.

The WordPress platform or even Wix give you websites that are responsive and change according to the device is being used. You don’t even need to do anything extra they care of this through their designs. If you currently have a site that is not mobile responsive stop reading this and go change your site. God knows how many clients you have lost just because of that. Google first looks at your site and if it is not mobile responsive, it gives you a negative point and shows related websites that are mobile responsive first.

Optimize for users:

It is important to have a site that is easy to browse and understand by your audience. If people come to your site and close it right away, google keeps record of that and over time it makes your site less visible to users. This is called bounce back. If you have high rate of bounce back you should double check the content of your website with the keywords you are using, and services you are offering to make sure all are related. Don’t use keywords and tags that are not related to your post or services. If you are giving online ads make sure your ad is in line with your keywords and the service you are offering. Search Engines wants to give users (people that search for something) the best possible experience. You should give your audience the best possible experience too in order to rank higher by search engines over your competitors.

Onsite SEO:

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Onsite SEO means things you take care on your site to make it optimized for search engines. This includes the content you are writing on your site, the heading you are using, the name of the images you have on your site, anything that is written in text and can be read by search engines. Make sure to use your keywords and make your site the most relevant result to what you are offering.

Business

Be positive, give value, solve problems, and be genuine

September 15, 2017 No Comments

When advertisers build their business around the strategy of talking directly to the customers, they become slaves to the math of interruption marketing. -Seth Godin

If you see yourself as a business owner who advertises her business directly to your consumer, know that you are following traditional interruption marketing. This might be the answer to your question that “I am very active I talk to everyone I see about my business, I spend a lot on ads but I don’t get enough money in return to even cover my costs”.

In modern marketing, the marketer creates an environment where the idea can replicate and spread among consumers.

How can you do modern marketing?

You have probably heard about making tribes. Tribe is where you find a connection between you and your target market. Tribe is where everyone feels comfortable being in it and feels belonged to that place. Tribes help you offer more than your service or product to your target market. You can offer free education on what your target has interest in. Tribes connect you deeply with your audience and makes them part of who you are.

Stop selling. Don’t interrupt people to talk to them about your product. See what they need. And indirectly put your product in front of them. Make them ask for your product. Find the interest areas of your target and be where they are. Be creative and give solutions through your service and product. Let them know what it is in it for them. Be positive, give value, solve problems, and be genuine, these are the best marketing tools you can use to start your business.

Business, Project Management

Is a wrong decision, often better than no decision at all?

July 24, 2017 No Comments

According to the HBR magazine yes it is. “High-Preforming CEOs understand that a wrong decision is often better than no decision at all. ” Study of executives show that 6% received low score because they made wrong decisions. And 94% received low scores because they made too little or too late decisions.

Jerry Bowe, CEO of the private-label manufacturer Vi-Jo is an example of a decisive CEO who doesn’t wait for a perfect time to make his decisions. According to the article in HBR he makes his decisions when he has 65% certainty about the answer. When making decisions he asks these two questions from himself: “What is the impact if I get it wrong? And, how much will it hold other things up if I don’t move on this?”

This is a great approach for everyone who is involved in decision making in some sorts. You can also use this approach for making decisions in your life and finally start on tasks that are waiting so long to be done just because you are waiting for a perfect time to make the decision about them.

Of course waiting to receive information that can make your decision making more precise is valuable as well. But you need to know how much you can wait or how harmful making or not making a decision can be according to your situation. But Learning from decisive CEOs once you have some certainty, it is much better to make a decision to make things move on rather than keep everything wait.

There are definitely many decisions in my in my life that I have to make and I am not 100% certain about the answers. Now that I am thinking, there are decisions that are 5 or 7 years old and I didn’t do anything about them just because I wasn’t 100% sure about what would happen after. I think it is time to move and make the decisions and act like a decisive CEO who prefers to move, make things go, learn from mistakes, and make things happen.

Here are 4 behaviors of successful leaders according t the HBR:

1) Deciding with Speed and Conviction

The highest IQ executives sometimes struggle the most with decisiveness. “While the quality of their decisions is often good, because of their pursuit of the perfect answer, they can make too long to make choices or set clear priorities – and their teams pay a high price. These smart but slow decision makers become bottlenecks”

2) Engage for impact

Successful CEOs know that they should address stakeholders need. They know how to engage people and get team and stakeholders to buy-in.

3) Adopting Proactively

CEOs are consistently facing different situations. They have to excel at adopting. In fact those that adopt are 6.7 times more likely to succeed.

4) Delivering Reliably

Successful CEOs consistently follow through on their commitments. “A key practice here is setting realistic expectations up front.”

Business, Life Style

Go, Make Something Happen

July 23, 2017 No Comments

Seth Goding says it right “ Go, Make Something Happen”

Opportunities are endless. You just need to start it. But keep few things in mind. Don’t lose your full time job or whatever you are doing now to cover your financial needs for the sake of this new journey. Start this on the side. One because you don’t want to be financially dependent on it on the first few months. As soon as you see yourself financially dependent on it you may do things that you may not have wanted to do initially and those things might change your path against your favor. Also if you don’t see the result you expected or if you see yourself in debt and in need of money you’ll give it up.

Do the new thing with pure love. This suppose to be what you would enjoy to do your whole life. So make sure you are putting your heart and love in it. Once the grounds are set, shape it. Shape it so that people would see exactly what you are seeing in it. Then inject values in it. You want to pass value to your consumer through your new endeavor. Then get help. Help for business and marketing matters. Because these things matter. Now you are at the stage to expect receiving. Receiving a bit of what you expected to receive. Give it sometime. 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, until you see you are making a bit more than what you are making on consistent bases. Congrats, you just made something happen. Now make sure to continue being awesome, and rock with it.

If you are among those who have made something happen and are now living on that, make sure to leave a comment and tell us how you are feeling, how was your journey and leave a link for us to get to know you and your business a bit more.

Business

Who Will Win? You or Them?

July 22, 2017 No Comments

Who Will Win? You or Them?

Digital world has made it possible to see results right away. You can see what your competitors are doing. Where they post links. What ads they use. How many visits they get. And just compare these data with yours.

You can see and compare what successful businesses are doing different. You can run websites on different SEO tools to get so many data on how they are performing. It is easier than ever to learn about successful corporations and apply what they do to your business.

SEO and Digital Marketing gives you the chance to see results right away. Not only you get information about your competitors, [in which you can use them to your advantage], you can also get results on your performance and your audience’s reactions to your campaigns and ideas almost right away.

Here are free tools you can use today to learn about your online performance as well as your competitors’. Knowledge is power. Learn as much as you can about your competitors, their performance, and their online actions so you can act more strategically with targeting your audience.

Similar Web: https://www.similarweb.com

You can see number of visits, ranks, bounce rate, visit’s duration, countries most visited, referral links, and many more helpful data.

Quick Sprout: https://www.quicksprout.com/

Moz Local – check if the business is Local: https://moz.com/local/search

Business

Emotional brand building

July 20, 2017 No Comments

“We humans are emotional creatures. We make our purchase decisions based on how products promise to make us feel.” That’s why great brands always try to make emotional connection with their consumers. This has to come even before showing off the features of the products or services.

Basically brands have to answer the “why” question. Why people have to buy my product? Why should it be important to them? And the answer should always be emotionally connected to what the consumer feels.

A great example is Nike’s “Just do it” campaign. It is one great example that shows how emotional connection triumphs over selling products. Through this campaign Nike didn’t talk about it’s products and runnig shoes. It allowed the athletes to talk about their achievements and rewards through their own emotional words without ever mentioning Nike. People could instantly connect with the campaign. They were so inspired by the stories that were sending Nike notes on how this campaign has changed their life’s bad habits. People get “Just Do It” tattoos! Through this campaign Nike could show that the brand is not about selling products. It is about celebrating customers, changing lives, and inspiring people to be at their best.

Another great example of this is Volvo’s ad. The story in the ad is strong and makes the right emotional connection with their audience. The ad is about Volvo’s safety feature. Throughout the ad you follow story of a girl with a future she is picturing and telling her mom. At the end Volvo’s safety feature is the only reason she survives from a car crash. As a viewer you picture Volvo as a car that gives you your dream future by saving lives.

Stories and storytelling is a great way for brands to make emotional connection with their audience. Emotional connections make long term relationship with consumers and connections that last.