What color are your marketing materials?
May 14, 2007
Color is important in marketing, and you need to be sure that you’re using the colours that put the best image across to your customers. The colours you choose will depend upon the type of business you’re in. Consider the following colors, and the feelings they create, when your customer sees them.
White - Pure, clean and youthful. Medical companies often use this colour, in their marketing materials.
 Black - Powerful, elegant, seductive, mysterious. If you want to add a bit of mystery to your image, or if your want your product to have seductive appeal - a hint of black will go a long way. Think Black Magic chocolates. For years, their seductive ads dominated the tv screens, and the packaging of the chocolates is almost completely black.
Red: Exciting, passionate, and racy, urgent. Red is one of the most powerful colours in marketing, as used well, it can inject excitement into your brand, and can also create a sense of urgency to encourage customers to buy now.
Orange: Vibrant, cheerful, energetic and playful.  If you want to portray your company, as a fun company to do business with, this is a great colour to use.  This colour can also lift moods, so if you’re marketing your product as something which will help the customer feel better this is a good colour to use.Â
Are your marketing materials creating the image you want to convey to your customers. If not, it might be time for a complete overhaul of your branding.
Starting a Business? Be careful of the advice you take
May 13, 2007
When starting a business, think carefully about taking advice - especially if it’s free. Internet forums are a particularly bad place to go for advice. Why is this? Well, for a start 95% of people on there will be average (remember 5% of people control 95% of the wealth in the world.
If you want to build a successful business yourself, you don’t want to be average, so you can’t afford to take advice from average people.
Of course, you will find some successful business owners on forums, but it is difficult to seperate them from the wannabies, as the wannabies will go out of the way to assure you they are experts by regurgitating info they’ve read elsewhere - even if they’ve had no business experience at all.
Seek out people with a proven track record, and don’t be afraid to ask. Even though they’re busy people the majority of successful business owners will be flattered that you asked for advice, and will be only too happy to help.
Also read as many books and autobiographies by successful business entrepreneurs as you can. You will not only learn how they achieved business success, but they will often share their business mistakes too.
 On the subject of mistakes, don’t take advice from a business owner who claims to make no mistakes, as they obviously haven’t learned from them.
Top Small Business Web Site Of The Week
May 12, 2007
My top small business web site of the week goes to the entrepreneur section of forbes.com. If you’re struggling to write a business plan, this week Forbes are featuring a picture guide to writing a business plan in pictures.Â
Given that they reckon you’d need to pay at least $5000 to get someone to write your business plan for you, their guide is extremely useful.
Work from home business success - is it possible?
May 9, 2007
Thousands of people want to work from home, but is it really possible to make a home business a success?
 Many successful businesses have been started at home, and it’s a great idea to start your business at home. Starting a business from home enables you to keep down your overheads, and put what finances you may have into growing your business. This alone will put you on a faster path to success than some extravagent office ever will. However, unless you intend to work alone forever, you will need an extremely large home. At some point, most small business will need to move to a large office space.
I started my plumbing business from home. This was possible because our administration is reduced due to the technology that plumbers use. However, I’m under no illusion that I could continue to work from home, nor would I want to.
Some people are concerned that starting a business from home will make them seem small, and they won’t be able to attract customers.  This is far from true. Unless your business is of the type where customers will be visiting your office or premises on a regular basis, most don’t care where you operate from. In fact, many of them will appreciate that you are cutting your overheads, and therefore passing more value to them.
Even people who have already made it big in business will often start a business from home, if they don’t have a legitimate need to acquire business premises straight away. Even though he was already rich, multi-millionaire Duncan Bannatyne, of Dragon’s Den fame went on to start a nursery business from home. After selling his successful nursing home business, Bannatyne decided that his new business could just as easily be run from home. When his home became too small, he simply bought the house next door for £150.000 and knocked through the wall. He later went to sell that business for around £24 million (over £40 million dollars).Â
So don’t feel pressurised into wasting money on fancy office premises when you’re starting your own business. If you choose to work at home initially, you can become just as big a success as anyone else.
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