To read the entire unedited article, click on How do I Create my ‘A’ team?

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Why Most Teambuilding Programs in Singapore will not work!

Teambuilding Lessons From Growing Orchids

Things happen in life so that we become stronger and wiser from our mistakes. In fact, in the last 2 years, Deep Impact’s growth as a  Impactful Teambuilding company were a result of mistakes that we made and learnt from. It was the commitment of not making the same mistakes twice that helped us to become much better.

It is also important to learn from other people’s mistakes, so that we do not need to pay the price they have paid for it.

Listen to Starbucks founder and CEO, Howard Schultz  on why Starbucks can command a premium for their coffee, why you need to celebrate your mistakes and Starbuck’s philosophy.

As some of you know, I am part of the Asia Professional Speakers, Singapore (APSS). As speakers and trainers, we have decided to do what we do best and give back to the community by presenting a seminar called “Raise Your Game”. We will donate all the money we have collected from this seminar to the Singapore Cancer Society.

In this program, you will get to listen to top notch speakers in Singapore on Mindset Change, Increasing Productivity, Attracting people to you, Steps to raise your career, increasing your memory power, service excellence and much more!

Date: 1 Mar 2010
Time: 0845-1730
Place:Singapore
Lecture Theatre 23, 3rd floor,
SIM Headquarters, 461 Clementi Road
Cost: $188

To register or donate, click here.

Here is the line up of speakers:

Play a Higher Service Game in 2010…and Win
Ron Kaufman

Lessons from Everest:
Climbing High when Everyone Else is Feeling Low
David Lim CSP

5 Key Steps to Success to Consistently Raise Your Game
Shirley Taylor

Turning Everyday Struggles into Everyday Greatness
Dr William Tan

Simple Strategies for Becoming a Magnet for Success
Christian Chua

Raise Your Career, Raise Your Team and Raise Your Life!
Michael Podolinksy CSP

Raise your Game by Maximising your Memory Power
Nishant Kasibhatla

To register or donate, click here.

I appeal to that you come for this event. As you learn and be empowered, you are also giving back to the community. Let’s do our bid and show love for our fellow friends.

Do forward this blog link to your friends!

Well… I can’t argue with that logic… hehehehe

In my previous blog post, I asked people to define “what is leadership to you?”

There were a lot of great definitions and answers that were contributed and allow me to share with you mine.

Leadership is all about INFLUENCE. It is about who listens to you when you speak and how much influence you have over them. People who have higher influencing ability tend to have a larger group of people following them. If you want to know whether you have strong leadership ability, it is pretty simple. Just look behind and check if anyone is following you.

Most people tend to find leaders by their titles given to them, eg. he’s the group leader or she’s the director of this department. However, I want to caution you that this is the lowest level of leadership. This is because you can be a leader by position, but that does not mean that you will be able to lead people by their hearts. A higher form of leadership exists where people follow you simply because of what you say, stand for and believe in, rather than your position.

So, how do you influence more people? I would like to suggest that there are many ways, but I will list down a few principles:

1.    Move in integrity. When you are integral in your life (meaning, your thoughts, actions and speech are coherent), people will have more faith and trust in you.

2.    Willing to spend time and invest in people. When you develop a person’s life in some area, whether through coaching. mentoring or teaching, you are demonstrating that you are truly interested in their growth.

3.    Establish clear communications. Everyone knows exactly what you mean and will not misinterpret your message. To have less communication breakdown, you will need to spend time with people (point 2).

4.    Lead themselves well. A great leader leads himself or herself well, with or without people around them. They understand that their credibility and consistency is important before people listens to them.

It is in my firm belief that anyone can develop in their leadership ability, since it is an observable behaviour. However, to be a great leader, you must have outstanding character and talent as well. Before you lead others, lead yourself first!

Now don’t get me wrong, I would not go here into deeply analyses of niche marketing and mini sites strategies. The subject is too big to discuss it in one single article. Rather than this, I will try to outline couple of things which been overlooked and might influence in a good way your mini Net empire profits.

First time first, you have to understand WHY a niche market can be so profitable. Well, the answer is simple: just because people need to find quick answers to their SPECIQUE problems. And the fastest way today to reach information are the search engines. That’s why niche markets, mini sites and the search engines cannot be considered separately.

A niche market offer the right kind of information to a crowded mass of searchers. It’s TOTALLY focused around one subject, and ONLY ONE. This way searchers are coming “right to the point” and become highly targeted visitors to your web site. These overlooked niches represented huge business opportunities that could quickly change your life and put you on a path to Internet success.

So I’m not kidding when I’m saying that 90% from your mini site success reside in founding a very profitable niche market! A wrong niche market (or the topic of your web site) can mean a wasting of time (and money) on trying to (pre) sell something no one wants, or is even looking for.

The equation is simple:

good niche market + a nice mini site + top position on search engines = solid monthly profits!

But from where profits come? There are two ways: either you promote on the mini sites your own products or services, either you build them up around an affiliate program or a joint venture association. A short look around the Net life will tell us that we have a winner on the second one — by far this is the most used method today.

When it comes to mini sites, most folks think at a web site with 1-4 pages. This is totally wrong. It can works for some niche markets for a period, but on a long run I’m certain will not. That’s because of the search engines and their continue improvements. And what would be a mini site without getting free traffic from them?

Let me explain!

It’s all about your web site structure and your ability to build search engine friendly web pages. And you have to understand that your niche market will not live forever. Through the time, more and more people will come and build web sites around your niche market. Don’t make the mistake of considering yourself the only smart guy on the Internet.

To assure always top 10 positions on your niche market, you have to build a proper web site, with a very flexible structure and compelling information.

By “flexible structure” I mean an internal web site dispossess so you can easily allow search engines to find your new web pages. Ideally would be to start with 5-12 pages and a maximum of 2-levels deep. This will allow spiders to index your site quickly and to score ALL your internal pages!

Even more, if you use an affiliate program on your mini site, consider that your merchant company will always try to build new products. Better will be to do businesses with a company which frequently create/improve new products related to your niche market. More products is equal to more separate web pages.

With multiple pages on your site, you’ll concentrate each page on a different keyphrase, thus increasing the number of ways people could find your site!

Better yet, if you find more affiliate products for the same niche, consider to build multiple mini sites and link them together. Build a mini net empire around a niche market and watch how your profits will soar from the thin air.

Nothing beets your competitors more rather then your own mini site niche empire!

The great thing with mini sites: their running totally on autopilot. Even if you do nothing, it will continue to generate sales month after month using the search engines. Well, at least as you score well on the top 10 of major players. But could it be another way to generate profits faster using mini sites, since a good listing for a new web site can take up to 8 weeks?

Yes, by using the pay-per-click search engines, which by far are the most targeted ways of bringing prospects to your web site. In this case, just forget about search engine optimization and try to focus on compelling ways to pre-sell your merchant product(’s). But PPC is a number game and if you use them from the start, you are half blind.

So if you want to play the niche marketing and mini site game, I would suggest first to start generating traffic from common free search engines. Once you’ll know exactly how much a visitors will “worth” to your new mini site, you can go on PPC promotions or other profitable Internet marketing strategies. But never BEFORE!

Final Thoughts:

Mini sites build around a niche market has been and will be a successful financially from a poor numbers of visitors. It depend only on YOU to convert a higher percentage of them into buyers. And of course to get as many as you can of their personnel informational and to follow-up them later down the road (I bet you miss that!!)

Phil Wiley, the author of “Mini Site Profits” book, considered by many Netpreneurs (including me) to be the definitive work on mini sites, and a must-buy for anyone who wants to know more about the subject, explain into a recent interview:x

“A mini site doesn’t have to be made to sell a product, but the kind I build are designed to make sales… to make a profit! I think mini sites will survive as long as search engines survive in their current form.

If they all end up becoming pay per clicks you might not want the hassles of handling 20 to 100 sites, but that’s not to say they’d stop working. Even if you had to pay for all the traffic, that wouldn’t really matter too much once you know that the site makes so many dollars for so much spent you can just leave it running on autopilot.”

Further, when potential customers do internet searches for broad terms like these, they’re usually in the very beginning stages of their buying cycles. People usually do lots of research on products before they buy, narrowing down their search words each time to be more and more specific, until they find exactly what they want. You want to catch people at the end of the buying cycle, once they know what they want and are ready to purchase it.

The more specific you can get with your market focus, the better chance you’ll have of attracting buyers. So, instead of focusing on “wedding dresses,” focus on a very narrow market, like “maternity wedding dresses” or “spring wedding dresses.” It will be easier for your marketing efforts to stand out when you use niches like these, and your chances of making a sale will be much higher.

It’s also best if you can find niche markets that have a lot of hungry buyers. In fact, the more desperate the buyers, the better your chances will be of selling to them.  Finding hot niche markets with ready buyers isn’t difficult. All it takes is some basic research. Scan the headlines of magazines and see what themes develop among the article titles.

Chances are, these are the topics people are interested in. Then, search the Internet for information about these topics, using narrow search terms. If you get lots of results returned to you, including paid ads, then you’ve found a hot niche.

Donald Trump, America’s biggest real estate tycoon shares in his book: Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life:

Do not view any failure as the end. Learn from your lessons quickly, then move on. Do not dwell on the failure. Start thinking big again. Fill your mind with thoughts that make you feel good, plans for the future, past successes, good things your friends said about you, anything that puts a positive spin on your inner dialogue.

Learn the art of forgetting. Move on and do not give a thought to the bad things that have happened to you. Do not be an idealist, wishing things were different, wishing bad things had never happened, and wishing you lived in a fairy tale world where everything turns out right. Do not wait for everything to be perfect before you start taking action again. Be a realist. It will never be perfect. Just resolve to do better, then move on, forgetting the past. View every failure as a step on the way to ultimate success. Remember, persistence plus learning from mistakes equals success.

Source -> www.deepimpactonline.com

Are coupon affiliates feeling the effects of the credit crunch as consumers close their pocketbooks prior to Christmas and ‘hoard’ their cash for perceived essentials?

These and other questions are inundating industry newsletters, blogs and discussion forums.

Uncertainty around the elections also does not help to allay fears and most retailers are expecting a slower start to the Christmas season.

This does not necessarily mean that online retail is in for a poor year, in fact I contend that this year consumers will be more price conscious than ever and may turn to the web to fond the best gifts at the best prices.

My prediction and recommendations to our clients:

• Discount your high value items
• Issue credit crunch coupons
• Focus on customer acquisitions even if it’s a very low price item
• Compete on service and delivery
• Offer free items and additional value on first purchase
• Band together with non-competitive retailers and bundle products - share the cost and the
  customer.
• Implement “bill-me-later” or a payment plan for high value items. (yes I know credit is what got you here in the first place, but discerning buyers may still want a repayment plan at low or no interest)

Communicate with your affiliates! They’re in the same boat - if your products don’t sell we’re all going to have a meager Christmas!

I may be contrary in my opinions, but I believe that online marketing is going to be the stellar performer in the short to medium term, as more companies and consumers turn to the web to find better deals, more competitive offers, more relevant service providers and yes, better prices.

The recovery may not happen overnight, or even next week - but it will happen. It’s human nature after all to want to celebrate, even in, or should I say, especially in bad times.
Our challenge is to ensure that we position the relevant offers to the right consumers and ensure that they’re comfortable in spending that which they have budgeted with us, rather than a competitor.
So, fellow affiliates and merchants, are you ready for the challenge? ]]> http://www.vipinverma.com/affiliate-marketing/economic-crisis-what-does-the-future-hold/feed/