About: Charly Leetham

Website: http://askcharlyleetham.com/

Profile: Charly Leetham is an Online Business Implementation Expert and Small Business Coach. She is dedicated to bringing useful and free information to new small businesses to aid in their success. With many years experience in managing business for employers and herself, Charly shares her many experiences and insights with readers.

Be The General Of Your Army

It is very easy for a business person to become so ‘bogged down’ with doing everything for their business, that they lose focus on ensuring that they do the important things that will ensure success.

Now this has several effects – the main one being that we rarely get anything done WELL.  We’ll get things done – but we are typically so strung out that we just do whatever we can to finish the job.  The other thing that seems to happen is that we are tired and ill – a lot!

For those business people fortunate enough to have staff and contractors – trying to be the soliders instead of the general only annoys them – because we end up doing their job instead of ours. Read more

Where Do You Find Your Target Audience?

Once you’ve defined your target audience, you need to start talking to them.  This is possibly the one thing that really trips business people and affiliate marketers up – just where and how do you talk to your target audience and get them to visit your site?

The answer is quite simple really – but it does take dedication and time to achieve.

You need to interact in the places that your Target Audience is.  I’m going to talk in the sense of an online business for this article, but the principles are the same for an offline business as well.

Let’s look at speaking directly to a target audience who want to teach their bird to sing.  Think about where these people may be looking for the ‘answer to their question’.

In this article, I am going to discuss places where you can find your Target Audience and help them get to ‘Know You, Like You and Trust You’. Read more

Finding Your Niche: Using Surveys

Following on from my last article, let’s talk about finding your niche and a few practical examples of how you can ‘listen to your niche’.

If you’re just starting up, online or offline, you can ask your potential target market what problems they need answers to by using surveys.  Surveys work nicely online and offline.

There are a number of ways you can conduct a survey – which don’t have to cost you much, if anything at all.

One way of conducting a survey is online – and there are several excellent resources to do this (and all of the ones below offer a free account): Read more

Finding Your Niche Pt 1: Listen To Your Potential Clients

The first thing to creating any business, online or offline, is to find your niche. I know – you’ve heard this before – and so have I, on so many different occassions and it becomes frustrating – because HOW do you find your niche?

The majority of the advice around is that you find out what people are searching for, what problems they have and address those specific problems.

This is all good and well – but I found it really hard to ‘get excited’ about something that I knew very little about and had even less interest in. I also didn’t want to be promoting something just because it was “hot” at the time – it felt all a bit ‘me to’ like. Read more

Do You Really Need A Business Plan?

What is the benefit of a Business Plan?  There is an awful lot of work involved in creating a Businss Plan – and is it really worth it?

Well, I think the proof is in the pudding!  One of the main benefits of a Business Plan is that it really can help clarify your thinking and planning.  I coach a lot of clients who are developing their business plans and I am always amazed at how their embryonic business ideas become solid and defined as we work through the plan. Read more

Do You Know Your Client?

I am often asked about the places to advertise for businesses.  I’m sure my standard answer fails to inspire most business owners however, it is the best answer to give.

My standard answer is ‘  A bit of a wishy washy answer on the surface and one that definitely means that more research is required by the Business Owner. Read more

Why Is Marketing Important

Do you realize that Marketing is important to your buiness? Well, many a business guru will tell you that Marketing is definitely one of the pillars you have to build your business with.

Do you know why is Marketing important to your business?  I had the pleasure and privilege of interviewing Sharon Tieman (Madame Marketing) and she had some interesting things to say about marketing your business:

[audio:sharontiemansnippit.mp3] Read more

Email Deliverability Tips

Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification. Read more

Do The Math – If You Want To Stay In Business

Managing your small business successfully comes down to a combination of things. However, in the words of one of my favourite Small Business Mentors – Madame Marketing (Sharon Tieman), there are two critical factors you need to consider. You need to be good at Maths and you need to be good at Marketing.

If you’re not good a Maths, you’re more likely to go ‘broke’ quickly. If you’re not good at marketing, you’ll go ‘broke’ slowly. Read more

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