If you are looking for ways to start or expand a business, you may want to consider building a membership site to earn recurring income. These are paid sites where your customers are given access to exclusive data, insights, or secret tricks. Most often, customers need to pay monthly fees to access membership sites.

While this is a popular technique now among many internet marketing experts, isn’t it wonderful if you are the first to do this in your industry? If your business is related to the stock market, for instance, you can set up a membership site to give some hot tips and mentor starting traders.

The heart of a membership website is the value of information you are sharing with your members. It’s important to give something that will truly help your members achieve their goals. Otherwise, it will become a short-lived project.

If you are wondering about the strategic value of this venture, here are some key points:

• Captured Customers. Instead of selling just one product, you have more opportunity to promote all your products. The mere fact that they paid for membership means these customers trust you. It’s up to you to make the subtle moves.
• Steady income. With customers paying monthly subscription, you already have guaranteed sales. Take advantage of this opportunity by offering lower subscription fees for customers paying 6 months or 1 year subscription in advance.
• Low Cost. You simply need a domain name, web hosting, and a well-designed template with your company logo. Try membership site software for quick implementation. If you already have your website, then setting up will not be much of a problem.

You can learn more about launching membership sites by reading Entrepreneur’s Journey.

Some entrepreneurs want to be a remarkable leader in the eyes of their employees and colleagues. To do this, you need to assume different roles and management styles every single day. Today, you are the creative director and tomorrow you might be the inspirational speaker. As the front of your business, here are some roles you need to project:

The Oracle

Don’t let your employees, customers, and competitors know that you don’t know where your business is heading over the long haul – it will decrease their confidence level. Make sure you are familiar with the ins and outs of your industry. It is highly expected that you understand the future challenges and the market outlook for at least three years from now. Take time to read relevant journals or industry magazines and breaking news to stay updated.

The New Herodotus

If you can see beyond the future, make sure you know the past just like Herodotus, the father of history. It is great for public relations and establishing emotional connections with your customers. By sharing your struggles to succeed and all the hard work rendered, history creates the human aspect of your business.

The Charismatic President

Observing how former U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton had exuded powerful charisma, even in times of controversy, is something you should master. The Trump Blog offers 12 key moves to develop your charisma.

Why stop at this level if you can be a great business leader? Take time to read Leadership Turn’s very insightful post about the competencies of a remarkable leader.

Before deciding on who should write for your business blog, you might still be wondering whether your business website should even have a blog. My general answer is yes. Companies with a business website can benefit from having a weblog for a multitude of reasons, including staying fresh in the search engines. Here are some other perspectives:

1. Customer Evangelists offer 7 reasons to business blog.
2. Rohit Bhargava points 5 lesssons he learned while building up his blog and getting a million impressions in a week. Also check out his article 5 ways to improve your blog.
3. David at xfep asks if blogging is a skill worth having.
4. Des at Business and Blogging suggests that it is worth having, since blogging is a transferable skill.
5. To drive home the importance, Mack says that blogging is a strategy for companies, not a fad.

At the very least, a blog for your business can help you establish some authority in your industry. You don’t have to update it every day, but some consistency of posting schedule helps.

If you’re not convinced, feel free to comment here. State your concerns, what you’re hoping to achieve.

Word-of-mouth marketing is definitely one of the most powerful marketing techniques to build your brand identity. One critical task is targeting the influencers in your industry. They are considered the thought leaders who have this mysterious power to seduce our minds to follow their leads.

According to a research by eMarketer, the most powerful influencers are family, friends, and strangers having experience with a product. Education and religion also play critical roles, since teachers and religious leader have strong clout over a community. More importantly 93% of the respondents follow the influencers.

Buzz Law highlights the reasons why we should establish relationship with the influencers as soon as possible.

If you’ve invested wisely, you’ve built a great relationship with them. They know your name. They answer your email. They may not even be a fan or brand champion, but they trust you.

When it hits the fan, and you have great relationships with them, they will give you a forum to tell your story.

Paying your employees their regular salaries and giving away some bonuses will not guarantee that they will be highly motivated and loyal to your company. You should find ways to recognize their efforts and praise their accomplishments. Ideally, you should allot additional 3% on top of your payroll budget for employee awards and milestone celebrations.

While the impact of this effort is very hard to quantify, a pat on the back or simple thank-you notes are proven to increase motivation and commitment of your employees. In psychology, it is called positive reinforcement. Here are some simple ways to do this:

Award Your Star Performer

Recognizing top performers works both ways. It encourages the top performer to work harder at the same time inspires other employees to get that much-coveted title. To avoid any office politics, make sure you have a clear policy on choosing the top performer.

Reward the Team Not the Person

Depending on the nature of your business, you should reward the whole team instead of highlighting individual performers. This will further strengthen the concept of teamwork in your organization and minimize credit grabbing.

Celebrate Every Milestone

As the head of your business, find reasons to celebrate every small victory and big contributions of your employees. You can bring some pizza in the office or drink a couple of beers after office hours. The important thing is to make them feel you are grateful for a job well done.

An interesting twist on this management style is the public shame/praise model discussed at Service Untitled.

Finding a balance between aggressive selling and effective cash flow management is very important to sustain your business over the long haul. The reality, however, is that many entrepreneurs are more focused on achieving the top line or sales and very relaxed on collections of unpaid invoices. Aside from cash flow factoring, there are other ways to improve your cash flow and these are:

Set up Your Collection Policies

Even before starting your business operations, you should already have a strict policy on collections and your employees should fully understand this. It can be simple policy like a friendly call to remind your customers one week before the actual payment date. Having a working system helps track all your accounts and alert you of possible bad debts.

Negotiate for Longer Terms with Supplier

When dealing with customers, your negotiation stance is to get shorter payment terms, usually 30 days. However, do the exact opposite when meeting with your suppliers. Try bargaining for 45 to 60 days payment terms to give you enough time to collect your debts first.

Read 5 tips on how to quickly improve cash flow at CEO Consultant for some advice on cash flow.

Since many entrepreneurs do not have enough money to finance a massive awareness campaign, using viral or word-of-mouth marketing tactics prove to be very valuable. In fact, a powerful word-of-mouth marketing can turn your customers into your own sales force.

We already covered how video marketing works; this time you might want to consider contests as your awareness tool. Holding a contest is a classic tactic used way back before the internet era. Given the wider reach of the internet, it has evolved as a deadly weapon for many online businesses.

The key here is to make the contest related to the nature of your business. A good example is the IKEA Small Business Big Dreams contest. Entrepreneurs can submit the three-minute video about their business and its impact to the community. The winner will receive $5,000 cash and $50,000 makeover for his or her business.

The first thing you need to do is find an exciting contest relevant to your business. In our case, a logo design contest is very appropriate. (See our free blog logo campaign.) To ensure that this will build awareness and garner referrals, ask every contestant to refer their friends and family members who might also be interested to join. In case you plan to have an online contest, make sure that every contestant will provide their e-mail address and give at least 3 referrals.

If delighting your customers builds loyalty, prospecting is essential to expanding your business. This is the part of selling wherein you will be looking for hot leads or new customers to increase your sales and boost your profitability.

Often referred to as cold calls, these potential customers may come from customer referrals and your marketing campaigns, such as direct mails and online newsletters. Before you embark in this very challenging process, here some things you should know:

Rejection is Part of the Game

Don’t feel discouraged even if you are rejected 8 out of 10 times. Even the best salespeople in your industry cannot avoid rejections. Keep this mind at all times, to maintain the same passion in every conversation.

Act Now

Referrals are often compared to perishable products because you only have limited time to utilize them. Otherwise, your friendly competitor could snatch them away. Once you get a referral, stop contemplating and start talking with them. Every passing day might decrease the probability of closing a deal.

Use a Script

It would greatly help if you have a well-written script that you and your salespeople can follow. This will help you organize your thoughts, improve your presentation, and develop a professional image. Key success factors are your acting skills and your ability to converse naturally while recalling the script from memory. Role playing is a great exercise for improving selling skills.

If you want to know more about prospecting, visit Marketing Proof to learn the different personality types of sales prospects.

Can’t think of any good ideas to improve your business? Brainstorming might be of help to you. It is basically a team activity starting with the listing of ideas to unlock your imagination and discover the different solutions to your problems. In some cases it also advisable to have a brainstorming session alone.

All you need is a poster-size paper, pen, and coffee to boost your minds. Invite your reliable and outspoken employees to participate. You can either facilitate the session or assign one of the members to do it for the team. There are two ways to kick off your brainstorming session:

Pinpoint the Problems

A traditional trigger is listing down all recurring problems encountered by your company. This may come from your friendly customer service, sales, and marketing group. You may want to divide the problems according to process or department. For instance, late deliveries are categorized under distribution while annoyed customers are strongly connected to customer service team.

Word Association

If you are brainstorming specifically to write an advertising tag line, using word association is a more effective approach. This will help you link several keywords you can use that will strongly appeal to your market. You can visit the website WordAssociation.org to practice word associations and learn the most popular associations to common words.

You might also be interested to download a PowerPoint presentation on how to run a successful brainstorming session at Scribd.

One of the problems with running a business online is the pressing need for fresh articles on your company website - else risk stagnation of search engine results. Writing was hardly a requirement of most business owners, even in the first decade of the Internet. Now, with blogs so popular and so many people saying a business website should have one, you are probably considering it. A good blog can be an ideal branding tool for your company. But who should write for your business blog, and what should you write about?

Maybe you’re too busy, and you may not have a PR department, let alone people with writing skills. What about a comments moderation policy, handling comments, or commenting elsewhere? Should all this be handled by executives, C-level management, non-management employees, or a hired blogger?

If you decide to have a blog, these are concerns you must deal with. Basically, it boils down to this. If you don’t have someone capable of writing regularly - even short summaries - at least 3 days per week, you should either hire someone capable or put the decision to blog on the backburner.

Recommended Reading

Here is some recommended reading:

1. Chris Garrett’s How to business blog without being unprofessional, which is aimed at bloggers who blog for businesses. It’ll give you the perspective of any blogger you might hire.
2. Also check out the Bloggers for Hire blog, run by Jim Turner and Tris Hussey, who run One By One Media. Jim and Tris communicate with a lot of business owners and help them find suitable bloggers. Particularly read Hiring bloggers gaining steam.
3. David Dalka’s Where are the C-level people? which points out that having a non-blogger manage blogs might not be in your business’ best interests.
4. Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Introducing good bloggers and companies to hire them, which is referenced by all the articles in #1-3 above. Marshall writes about how he is currently getting a lot of requests to help hook up bloggers and business owners, and how he’s helping.
5. Liz Strauss’ Successful Blog talks about blogging, developing conversations, and in a general sense is about business blogging.
6. Debbie Weil’s BlogWrite for CEOs offers advice for executives who blog. She’s also the author of The Corporate Blogging Book.

Summary

I know everyone above except David and Debbie, and I know that most of them can help you in some consulting capacity. Some of them are even available for blogging. You can also drop comments in this post, and I’ll do what I can to help you find a blogger, or can point you to resources. (Your email address will not appear in the comment unless you actually put it in the body of the comment.)

We’ll cover what topics your blog should cover in a subsequent article: What is Your Business Blog About. Don’t forget to check out our sister Design blog, which covers various aspects of developing websites and weblogs, including general blogging issues for any type of blog.