Strategic Services Business Tips newsletter, Issue #020

This month we have……

INDEX:
Strategic Services One Minute Tip
Power Quotes
This month’s Business Resource
Sponsored Resource
Editor’s Note.

Strategic Services One Minute Tip:

In business the main goal is getting as many customers as possible but is this necessarily the right goal? Too often we spend a huge amount of time chasing a customer who in reality is unlikely to do business with us. We wine and dine, take them golfing, or to sporting events but in the end it never comes to doing serious business.

In cases like this you have to be hard-nosed about it. Dump them and spend your precious time hunting out new clients who are likely to do business! Think back to your school days. You desperately wanted the boy/girl sitting opposite to notice you. You did everything you could and yet 12 months later there was still no progress. just misery and heartache!! How much better it would have been to have taken the hint early on and find someone who really wanted to get to know you!

Do you have prospective clients who you can't convert? If so, take a long hard look. Are they worth the continuing effort and heartache?

Power Quotes:

"Don't let the learning from your own experiences take too long. If you have been doing it wrong for the last ten years, I would suggest that's long enough!"
Jim Rohn

Strategic Business Resources – Articles & Tips:

Use the 80/20 Rule

The 80/20 rule is as applicable to individual salespeople as it is to a large sales force. Fully eighty percent of your success as a salesperson will be determined by your attitude and only twenty percent by your aptitude. Some people feel that attitude is ninety percent of success in all human endeavors involving other people, but we can quite comfortably use eighty percent as a figure for the purposes of this article.

Develop a Positive Attitude

A positive mental attitude, or a constructive and optimistic way of looking at yourself and your work, goes hand in hand with sales success in every field and in every market. The development of this unshakable attitude of cheerfulness and enthusiasm is your springboard to greatness as a salesperson, no matter what is going on around you.

Learn Your Product Well

The twenty percent of sales effectiveness that comes from product knowledge and professional selling skills is terribly important as well. It is only when you are thoroughly knowledgeable about what you are selling and thoroughly skillful in your ability to present it effectively that you develop the calmness and confidence upon which a positive mental attitude depends.

Upgrade the Quality of Your Thinking

The quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life. If you improve the quality of your thinking, in any area, you improve the quality of your life in that area. By using your mind, your ability to think, you become a creator of circumstances rather than a creature of circumstances. You move from being powerless to being powerful. You determine everything that happens to you by the way you think about it, in advance. You may not be what you think you are, but what you think, you are!

Change Your Inner Attitudes of Mind

The most rapid and positive changes in your personality and your sales results come about when you change your thinking about yourself and your possibilities. When you reprogram your subconscious mind so you feel a sense of unshakable optimism and self-confidence, every part of your life begins improving immediately. As William James of Harvard wrote in 1905, "The greatest revolution of my generation is the discovery that individuals, by changing their inner attitudes of mind, can change the outer aspects of their lives."

Expect the Best

The very best salespeople have an attitude of calm, confident, positive self-expectation. They feel good about themselves and they have absolute faith that everything they are doing is contributing toward their inevitable success. They are cool, relaxed, happy and cheerful about their lives and their careers. They know, deep in their hearts, that they are good at what they do, and their customers know it as well. Often, their customers decide to buy from them even before they've made a sales presentation or described their product or service. They are the champions, or superstars, of selling everywhere, and you can be one of them by developing the same attitudes and attributes that they have.

Action Exercises - Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action:

First, resolve today to develop and cultivate an attitude of calm, confident, positive expectations towards yourself, your customers and your career. Expect the best!

Second, take complete control of your thinking and concentrate on the solution rather than the problem. Look for the good in every situation. Be positive and cheerful, no matter what happens.

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How to Write an Ebook & Make your Knowledge Sell!

The hardest part of writing is the first sentence.

When you look at the whole project, it seems like an impossible task. That's why you have to break it down into manageable tasks. Think of climbing a mountain.

You are standing at the foot of it and looking up at its summit vanishing into the clouds. How can you possibly scale such an immense and dangerous mountain?

There is only one way to climb a mountain - step by step.

Now think of writing your ebook in the same light. You must create it step by step, and one day, you will take that last step and find yourself standing on the summit with your head in the clouds.

The first thing you have to do, as if you actually were a mountain climber, is to get organized. Instead of climbing gear, however, you must organize your thoughts.

There are some steps you should take before you begin. Once you've gone through the following list, you will be ready to actually begin writing your ebook.

Beginning Steps to Writing an ebook

First, figure out your ebook's working title. Jot down a few different titles, and eventually, you'll find that one that will grow on you. Titles help you to focus your writing on your topic; they guide you in anticipating and answering your reader's queries. Many non-fiction books also have subtitles. Aim for clarity in your titles, but cleverness always helps to sell books - as long as it's not too cute. For example,

Remedies for Insomnia: twenty different ways to count sheep. Or: Get off that couch: fifteen exercise plans to whip you into shape.

Next, write out a thesis statement. Your thesis is a sentence or two stating exactly what problem you are addressing and how your book will solve that problem. All chapters spring forth from your thesis statement.

Once you've got your thesis statement fine-tuned, you've built your foundation. From that foundation, your book will grow, chapter by chapter.

Your thesis will keep you focused while you write your ebook. Remember: all chapters must support your thesis statement. If they don't, they don't belong in your book. For example, your thesis statement could read:

We've all experienced insomnia at times in our lives, but there are twenty proven techniques and methods to give you back a good night's sleep.

Once you have your thesis, before you start to write, make sure there is a good reason to write your book.

Ask yourself some questions:

* Does your book present useful information and is that information currently relevant?

* Will you book positively affect the lives of your readers?

* Is your book dynamic and will it keep the reader's attention?

* Does you book answer questions that are meaningful and significant?

If you can answer yes to these questions, you can feel confident about the potential of your ebook.

Another important step is to figure out who your target audience is. It is this group of people you will be writing to, and this group will dictate many elements of your book, such as style, tone, diction, and even length. Figure out the age range of your readers, their general gender, what they are most interested in, and even the socio-economic group they primarily come from. Are they people who read fashion magazines or book reviews? Do they write letters in longhand or spend hours every day online. The more you can pin down your target audience, the easier it will be to write your book for them.

Next, make a list of the reasons you are writing your ebook. Do you want to promote your business? Do you want to bring quality traffic to your website? Do you want to enhance your reputation?

Then write down your goals in terms of publishing. Do you want to sell it as a product on your website, or do you want to offer it as a free gift for filling out a survey or for ordering a product? Do you want to use the chapters to create an e-course, or use your ebook to attract affiliates around the world? The more you know upfront, the easier the actual writing will be.

Decide on the format of your chapters. In non-fiction, keep the format from chapter to chapter fairly consistent. Perhaps you plan to use an introduction to your chapter topic, and then divide it into four subhead topics. Or you may plan to divide it into five parts, each one beginning with a relevant anecdote.

How to make your ebook "user friendly"

You must figure out how to keep your writing engaging.

Often anecdotes, testimonials, little stories, photos, graphs, advice, and tips will keep the reader turning the pages. Sidebars are useful for quick, accessible information, and they break up the density of the page.

Write with a casual, conversational tone rather than a formal tone such as textbook diction. Reader's respond to the feeling that you are having a conversation with them. Break up the length and structure of your sentences so you don’t hypnotize your readers into sleep. Sentences that are all the same length and structure tend to be a good aid for insomnia!

Good writing takes practice. It takes lots and lots of practice. Make a schedule to write at least a page a day. Read books and magazines about the process of writing, and jot down tips that jump out at you. The art of writing is a lifetime process; the more you write (and read), the better your writing will become.

The better your writing becomes, the bigger your sales figures.

In an ebook that is read on the screen, be aware that you must give your reader's eye a break. You can do this by utilizing white space. In art classes, white space is usually referred to as "negative space."

Reader's eyes need to rest in the cool white oasis you create on your page. If your page is too dense, your reader will quit out of it as soon as their eyes begin to tear.

Make use of lists, both bulleted and numbered. This makes your information easy to absorb, and gives the reader a mental break from dissecting your paragraphs one after the other.

Finally, decide on an easy-to-read design. Find a font that's easy on the eyes, and stick to that font family. Using dozens of fonts will only tire your readers out before they've gotten past your introduction. Use at least one and a half line spacing, and text large enough to be read easily on the screen, but small enough so that the whole page can be seen on a computer screen. You will have to experiment with this to find the right combination.

Of course, don't forget to run a spell and grammar check. You are judged by something as minor as correct punctuation, so don’t mess up a great book by tossing out semicolons randomly, or stringing sentences together with commas. (By the way, that's called a "comma splice.")

Last of all, create an index and a bibliography.

That's it! You've written a book! Now all you have to do is publish your ebook online, and wait for download request from your website visitors.

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Article reprinted with permission from Strategic Services. All rights reserved. Helene Malmsio has been a successful business entrepreneur for nearly 30 years and has been operating Strategic Services group of Companies since 1987. For more information on how to publish your own ebook, and to get your own copy of our free self publishing ebook, go to http://www.buybooks-online.com

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Editor’s notes:

Charles Sykes, the author of DUMBING DOWN OUR KIDS, provided for high school and college graduates a list of eleven things they did not learn in school.

In his book, he talks about how the feel good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality, and set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1.
Life is not fair; get used to it.

Rule 2.
The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3.
You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both.

Rule 4.
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.

Rule 5.
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.

Rule 6.
If you mess up, it's not your parents fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7.
Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes, and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So, before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8.
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9.
Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off, and Very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10.
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to Leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11.
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

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Thank you for joining us this month, I hope that you have found some extra motivation and inspiration in your business endeavors for this month.

To update yourself on our new business resources or to check out the free business resources , just go to: strategic services site

Your Editor,
Helene Malmsio.

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