Email Marketing Services for Product-Based Businesses, Consultant

5 Tips for Better Product Photography

Having crisp and clear photos of your products is so important. In this online world, product photography is your only chance to convey the quality of your product when clients can’t touch and feel them before they buy.

While professional photography is ideal, it might not be feasible for a new business to make the investment just yet. So, it’s helpful to have a few photography tricks up your sleeve until you can outsource. Here are my best tips for better product photography that you can do yourself.

Idea to Market: 6 Resources for Manufacturing Your Products

When that big idea hits, it’s hard to know where to start to turn it into a product. You know you need a manufacturer, but don’t know a thing about finding one.

Manufacturing is intimidating. It’s a necessary step that must be conquered in order to turn your product idea into a business. For product-based businesses, it is undoubtedly one of the biggest barriers to starting.

With patience and persistence, it can be overcome. The journey won’t be easy. You will make mistakes, major investments and learn a lot about the world of manufacturing extremely fast.

Whether you’ve been making your products yourself up until now or are starting with an idea, this list will get you started on your search.

Three Steps to Taking Your Business to the Next Level

You’re building your business from the ground up–you ambitious-go-getter, you.

You’re being prudent in your spending, getting your hands dirty doing every task you know how to do and learning quickly how to do those you don’t.

You’ve got grit that would even impress Gary Vaynerchuck.

Yet despite the growth and successes in your business, you’ve trapped yourself in the “I’m a little business” mindset you had when you first started.

Grow Your Business With The Resources & Skills You Already Have

You’ve likely heard the quote by Theodore Roosevelt, “comparison is the thief of joy.”

It is the thief of joy. It’s also the thief of success.

Comparison often leads to a list of excuses that can prevent us from reaching our goals.

Have you ever looked at a competitor or similar business and said, “she’s more successful because she has x, y and z and I don’t have that. That’s why she’s successful and I’m not”? She has an education, no kids, an investor, a celebrity connection, artistic talents, an engaging personality, money to hire a professional photographer or whatever it may be.

Her set of circumstances and talents is different than yours, but she’s not successful because her set is better or more profitable.

She’s successful because she’s figured out how to use what she has. She’s been able to take her unique set circumstances and turn them into advantages.

Best Practices for Growing and Maintaining Your Mailing List

Your mailing list enables you to build trust, keep you connected to customers, communicate the purpose and brand of your company, and dramatically increase your sales.

It’s one of the most effective marketing tools you have.

If you aren’t seeing results from your mailings, it’s time for an overhaul. Here are five checks for your mailing list strategy.

Using Your Mailing List to Increase Revenue

There’s only one area I wish I had given more attention to when I started my handbag business–growing my mailing list.

It took me years and many missed opportunities before I recognized my mailing list as one of the most valuable assets of my business.

A mailing list gives you the ability to directly communicate with customers who want to hear from you, create relationships and generate income on demand. It is one of the most powerful business tools you have.

Three Steps to Business Success

After 14 years of managing and growing my handbag business, I made the decision to close it.

My customers were sad and expressed their desire for me to continue. It was nice to know my company and products would be missed.

Sadness was never an emotion I felt from the decision, though. How could I be sad about being successful? I accomplished my goals.

My handbags were never sold in a major department store, I never had employees and the business never hit seven figures in a year.

How to Get New Customers Without Using Social Media

Social media is not your business. Well if you’re Mark Zuckerberg it is, but I’m guessing you’re not him.

Somehow as business owners, we got brainwashed into thinking social media is our business.

Somehow running our businesses have turned into focusing on growing our list of followers, getting more likes on posts and having a presence on every social media platform. We even put links to social media on our websites and icons on our promotional materials–valuable locations we would charge any other company an advertising fee for.

From a 9 to 5 Job to Entrepreneurship: How to Make the Transition

For years as an entrepreneur, I wondered what was the “thing” that made a business successful. What was the secret that successful business owners weren’t sharing with the rest of us? Was it a lucky break? Financial backing? A good connection to a powerful person?

Sure, each of those would be helpful, but the real “secret” is doing the work.

We can take courses, read articles and fill our heads with knowledge, but until we put it all into action with our full effort, it’s useless information.

As humans, we use excuses as crutches to building the businesses we dream of–“I’m too tired to build my business when I get home from work, I’m not educated, I have kids, I don’t have enough money” and the list goes on.