If you work in management in any way, shape or form, chances are that at some point in your career you are going to have to propose something to someone. This could be a proposal to your boss to start work on a marvelous new project, a proposal to an investor or a bank for an injection of cash into the company, or an approach to another company for some form of co-operation. What all of these have in common is that you, as the person making the proposition, are trying to get something from the recipient. This immediately puts them in a position of power in any negotiations, so it is vitally important to impress and make yourself out to be competent and worthy of their time, effort and investment.
All business proposals need to meet some criteria before sending them off to anybody. Firstly, be original. Copy-pasted form letters impress people as much as junk mail through the mailbox. If you want your recipient to give you the time of day, extend them the same courtesy. Write your proposal, make it individual and tailored to them and their needs, and be as frank and honest as possible. Don’t try bullshitting, as this will more often than not make you look like a complete idiot. At the same time be confident and straightforward, and don’t try pandering to their egos or filling valuable writing space with aimless platitudes. Make your point, make it clearly and concisely, and sign off with a simple “Yours Sincerely/Truly/Faithfully,”
However, this does not mean that your proposal should be dull and boring. Let your personality show through to a point—the occasional joke or anecdote is often appreciated and helps remind the recipient that you are an actual person and not some automaton paid to hammer words on to a keyboard and not say a damn thing. Don’t ever be informal, but feel free every now and again to prove that you are actually a real person.
Keep your language jargon-free and as simple as possible. Avoid acronyms if at all possible—nothing is worse than reading a business proposal that looks like something you expect to find in the top-secret drawer at the Pentagon. Read it through three or four times, run it through a spellchecker, get someone else to proof it, and then read it yourself one last time for good measure. It is impossible to stress the importance of good writing in any proposal. Clearly set out the aims, goals and needs of your proposal, in a format that makes sense. There are hundreds of business proposal templates floating around on the Internet, so don’t be afraid to research styles and layouts.
Lastly, always keep the reader in mind. Stress why they should be part of this grand plan you have envisioned, and what the advantages are to themselves or the company of going along with your madcap little scheme. At the end of the day this entire endeavor is for their benefit, so do not forget that fact while you are putting your proposal together.
Do you believe in magic? If you do, that’s great—it means you’ve got a youthful spirit, and that will invariably help you to live a longer and happier life. However, you should probably dispel any notions of magic when it comes to your website. If you don’t do any marketing for it, you’re certainly not going to magically attain site traffic.
Getting Internet users to visit a website is consistently one of the most difficult tasks a small-business owner can undertake because of the time and money involved. However, if you plan on surviving on the Web, you will need to make efforts to optimize your website.
Search engine optimization (SEO) starts with a properly designed website. Now, it may be extremely tempting to make your own website through the site builders that you are usually provided with through your site hosting service, and this may be your only option starting off as a bootstrapped business, but your site will fall significantly short of effective optimization. You see, there’s a wonderfully intricate world of coding and design techniques behind the curtains of your website. These features help search engines find the relevant content within your site and naturally rank them higher in the search engine results pages (SERP’s).
So, as much as you might be able to save a few bucks designing your own site, you’d be better off saving yourself a significant amount of time by creating a single home page as an online business card; a credibility measure for people checking out your business. Then, when you get some positive cash flow going, you should put serious consideration into hiring a professional Web designer to help you out. Unfortunately, you may feel a little nauseous when you see how much it can potentially cost you to get a quality website up and running. However, if a site is properly designed and optimized, the front-end costs will be justified by the business it brings you on the back end.
And if you finally get the cash flow to make such a purpose possible, you’ll want to make sure you don’t just jump in with the first option you come across, getting sucked in by the appeal of virtual bells and whistles. Absolutely always look for live samples of a site designer’s work. In addition, you should make sure you ask them about what measures they take to optimize your site’s design. If they can’t provide you with specific information regarding optimization, then chances are they’re just providing you with a cookie-cutter template, and that’s most certainly not worth the heavy price tag.
And as was mentioned in a previous article, if you can’t afford a necessary item for your business, barter before you go broke. Before you opt for outside professional help with your website, look through your list of friends and business contacts to see if there’s someone who can trade services with you. Site design is one of my specialties, so I welcome any and all questions you might have on this topic—I’d love to help steer you in the right direction!
This is a guest post from the very talented Patrick Walsh. Patrick has 20+ years helping big, small and bootstrappers like us see that our current marketing and advertising isn’t working for us as well as it should be.
His Company Map business Growth Strategy helps you to optimize your message in the three critical areas of business, you’ll discover the profit power you have, right now, within your business just waiting to be tapped.
When you make an advertising claim, don’t think about it in terms of coming out of your mouth; instead, think of it in terms of it entering your prospect’s ears.
When you do this, you will realize how ridiculous, non-compelling, boring and flat-out stupid much of the advertising you see and hear sounds.
What we’re trying to accomplish here is simple; we are going to discuss a common sense evaluation you can use to judge whether or not your ads, ads you’re spending GOOD money on, are any good.
Wouldn’t you like to know if what you’re writing and spending your advertising budget on is any good–before you actually spend the money?
The first evaluation you need to use is pretty simple. It is also, however, the one most likely to be failed. It is called, simply…
Well, I Would Hope So!
Whenever you say anything in your advertising or marketing, ask yourself if the prospect will immediately respond to what you’ve said with: “Well, I would hope so!”
To illustrate this; write on a piece of paper why a prospect would favor your business over the competition.
Then use the “Well I Would Hope So” evaluation and see if the answers hold weight.
Let me give you an idea by giving you some of the answers from other industries. A huge printing company gave as their number one reason to choose them over the other sixteen zillion other printers: “We help the non-professional print buyer understand the various options available.” Here’s what you should say to that kind of claim: Well I would hope so! You’re a printer! Isn’t that what you do? See how ridiculous that answer sounds?
An insurance agency claims in their advertising that “they’ll be there for you when you have a claim.” Well, I would hope so! What else would they say?
See how this works? Just read any headline or any claim out of one of your advertisements and then see if it spawns this response: Well, I would hope so!
These usual, lazy communicator claims, are like your barber telling you that your hair will be shorter after it’s cut, or the gas station telling you you’ll have more gas after you fill the tank.
Always, always, always use this important evaluation question whenever you make any claim.
Go ahead and take this test right now.
Answer the question: “why would anyone choose you over your competitors?”
Then honestly evaluate your answer against the “Well, I would hope so!” evaluation.
If you can’t come up with the answer instantly and articulate it well, you can bet that your customers don’t know why either.
We’ve all heard of people flipping real estate; buying the house for a low amount, doing some minor/major work on renovations and then selling for a profit. Now people are doing the same thing with websites, site flipping. But is it a fly by night profession or another great business avenue for people to take? In this article I want to dig a little deeper into the subject. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Concerns about site flipping
There are a few arguments I see a lot when talking about site flipping, one I see the most being the fact that quick built websites are ruining the quality of the internet. In my opinion, you can’t hurt the quality of a place with billions upon billions of websites already floating around google. Searching for “clinic” in google brings up 115 MILLION results. Now, building websites targeting this keyword really will not make a dent in he amount of quality information out there. So regardless if people think its wrong, you can still do it for and make a profit for it.
Build with quality in mind
Even if you’re putting up a website to just sell, you should still treat it as a website you’d be proud to tell people you own. Flooding the page with 20 ads but only have 500 words is not something (in my opinion) to be proud of.
If flipping is your game and you want to make a go of it, as always it starts with great content, a desire to make it work and a determination to keep going. I am a shining example of an entrepreneur who loves the thrill of the build, it is almost like a high but coming off it when heading into the “maintain it” stage of the lifecycle is when I get extremely bored and restless.
This is not uncommon, look over the history of the vast percentage of the fortune 500 companies and you will find that usually the founder is not the person running the company any longer.
So if your unique ability is in finding a niche, building a following, passing it off and doing it all over again this could be a very profitable business model for you.
In this economy – flip the coin over
With the daily economic doom and gloom that is shoved down our throats, it’s hard to remember that we are in the middle of one of the best buyer’s market we have seen in a long time. History has proven that more millionaires are created in a recession if you take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves when people are scared.
Buying websites may be one of the easiest of these markets to get into because I don’t think there is a lot of “noise” in this market yet. This blog is an example of the power of this. I had been looking and learning everything I could about online marketing when I stumbled on the marketplace at sitepoint.com and found this site for sale. It was inline with my passion, had a great community and I saw that I could provide value to the readers and have a place to build credibility for myself without having to start from scratch and presto here I am.
Now when this economy turns around I will have an asset that I can choose to keep or be able to sell when it is the right time to do so. I believe that in the future websites that have strong ranking, a big following and good content will catch the eyes of bigger companies wanting to get a foot up on the competition.
Either way I’m left with choices and that is never a bad thing.
In todays market, a blog can set you apart from your competition in terms of your reach to specific demographics, so its no wonder why there are many blog design companies coming up on our radars. I believe this is a valuable Bootstrapping Resource so I wanted to make sure I shared my top five blog design companies with you.
Blog Theme Machine
We may be a bit impartial to Blog Theme Machine because this is the company that designed this blog, but there are real reasons behind why we like Blog Theme Machine. Not only are their blog designs great and high quality, their prices are very competitive compared to other designers on the market. This is our #1 choice for anyone looking to have their blog taken to the next level. Feel free to check out their portfolio and see why we recommend them as our number one choice.
Garry Conn
We’ve recently had the opportunity to discuss some blogging tips and resources with Garry and feel that he is a genuine blogger who loves to design. When we asked Garry to write up a small blurb for this article, his reply was this: “My name is Garry Conn. I help and teach people how to make money online with a blog. There is a lot to learn in this line of business. First impressions are important. Does your blog look professional? It is optimized for not only search engines but also users? Visit www.GarryConn.com to learn more.”
Unique Blog Designs
Viewed by many as the heavy-hitters in the blog design realm, Unique Blog Designs stepped onto the scene making big waves when they redesigned two of the webs top “make money online” blogs: John Chow and Shoemoney. Since then, they have grown their business to huge standings. We give major kudos to the entire UBD team because they’ve done something revolutionary on the internet and chose a niche that was wide open and ran with it. Plus, their designs are great!
Brian Gardner
Brian Gardner of Brian Gardner Media is the sole reason (in our opinions) behind the latest craze in WordPress Blog Designs: “Premium Themes”. What Brian has done with his Revolution Theme was definitely a changing point in how people design their blogs. If you’re looking for a magazine style wordpress theme, Revolution is the top notch deal when it comes to Premium Themes. Brian also designs custom wordpress themes if you’d like something custom
Adii “WordPress Rockstar”
When you think of a Rockstar, you think of a flashy, in your face type of person. Adii is a WordPress Rockstar but is a more laid back version of what you perceive a rockstar to be. With a great skill-set and design ability, Adii is responsible for some of the webs best blog themes to date. Working with companies like Unique Blog Designs and various others, there’s no reason Adii is a wordpress rockstar. Check out his personal blog which documents his journey to becoming a full time freelance designer and showcases some of his work.
Did we miss you?
If you are a blog design company or freelancer and would like to be featured in an upcoming list of Blog Designers, please feel free to contact us and let us know about yourself.