Bits of Knowledge Post Series (less than 100 words)

Post 1: Blog Monetization
There are three main ways to monetize on your blog. Firstly, you can put advertising from a major advertising network (such as Google Adsense, Adbrite, BlogAds, etc.) and earn by clicks or impressions. Secondly, you can sell affiliate products, that is other people products and services and earn a commission. Thirdly you can sell your own products and services.

Bits of Knowledge Post Series (less than 100 words)

“Bits of knowledge” are a new type of blog posts that I will initiate. They are small posts with less than 100 words and they have an educational purpose. There is a lot of knowledge out there but one can easily get confused with all that education super-supply; “bits of knowledge” cut that clutter with condensed valuable information. I find that this new concept of mine is very useful, because one can learn something new or revise something already known, very easy, fast and mostly effortless. I hope you will find them useful too!

Networking

This is a call for comments post!!!

I have found many networking sites and webservices and I guess that they all have great features and services. Some of most distinguished are: LinkedIn, Facebook, Ryze, ZeroDegrees, Tagged, Orkut, Ziki, etc. I realize that it is almost impossible to register and be active to all of those. You may have to register to 2-3 but you cannot cope with more. Moreover I guess it’s extremely time consuming and requires a lot of effort to try all of these and find the best so I would like some feedback out of your experiences about the above and other networking webservices. Which do you prefer and why? Are there any special features in one of them that the rest are lacking? I am looking forward to building my profile into a professional way and I would like to know your educated views and opinions. Please leave your comments (which of the above do you personally use and why).

BusinessBalls

I have discovered a great site that I wanted to share with you. It’s called Business Balls (visit it at: businessballs.com). You will find there a great collection of articles about sales, marketing, management, HR and other business topics. Moreover there are lots of downloadable business tools and resources like PDF documents and MS office documents like word, excel and powerpoint. That collection is really huge and great. You can find a lot of templates, matrices and other cool stuff for business organization, better planning, reporting and feedback. Do pay a visit there and you will be really amazed like I was!

Why Second Life is a great marketing tool?

Note: This is not a thorough list but some quick thoughts that just occurred to me.

Because it is very unlikely that someone will randomly visit an unknown site (that is yours) to him/her. In second life someone may wander around and come across your virtual office or home.

Because it can be suited both for high and low involvement products and services: It can generate sales of products and services that are usually bought on an impulse (commodities, low involvement, etc). On the other hand it can create increased brand loyalty and preference (even brand awareness) for high involvement products (When someone visits one major brand’s store, a real shopping experience may be simulated).

Because everyone could freely network, join groups, make connections with others. In real world and even in other forms of online communication, sometimes things are more (not difficult but) complicated.

Some thoughts about salesmen

Salesmen should be ethical and moral; they should conduct business with integrity. They need to be communicative, to be good listeners, that is to be truly listening to the customer’s needs and to try to fulfill them; they need to be proactive and real costumer’s advisors. I can go on and keep typing salesmen must have traits and characteristics for ever… However the point that I want to make here is the following: Most of these things, the things that a salesmen must have and that without these one is almost bound to fail are not taught or learned in universities and business schools. These are not knowledge and education but personality characteristics and qualities that one should have or at least try to cultivate. I really don’t know in which degree sales can be taught and universities can train successful salespeople. I think that not everyone can become a salesman since not all people have the necessary personality traits and characteristics that are critical for such a job. One may learn all the sales techniques (from the basic to the most advanced) and still fail, while another one may not even attend a seminar about sales and be a brilliant salesman.

Networking & PR Planning

Public Relations are very important no matter one’s profession. Especially in sales, PR is really crucial. The most successful sale process involves making one stranger as an acquaintance, then transforming him/her into a friend and then into a customer. Sales from people that you have not transformed into friends are not repeated. You need to be remarkably good and in order to achieve that you need a loyal clientele. Another thing you need to bare in mind is the fact that you may not be a salesman but you always sell. If you are a doctor you sell health services, if you are a lawyer you sell legal services if you are a writer you sell books and thoughts, etc. Every job involves selling so every professional needs a customer base. Such a base can be build through networking and a good PR plan. So organize yourself and start: building connections, strengthening your weak relations (people you haven’t spoken for months), reinforcing your current affairs and acquainting new ones.

I have recently come to realize that a good pr planning actually requires having a specific list of contacts that you need to communicate each day. So, I sorted each of my contacts into groups based on a scale of significance and then I set a communication frequency for each group according to that scale. From that point it’s easy to organize whom you are going to call or email or meet each day of the week.

Back Again

Finally I am finished with the army. My military obligations are now almost fulfilled. There are a few days left and some typical paperwork and I am done. Freedom again! I hope I will start blogging dynamically again. I have some things to do and some goals that I want to pursuit as regards blogging. First I want to increase my readership: more readers, more loyalty. I want to blog more and be more frequent and consistent in my posts. I will also consider migrating into my own hosting “room”, changing blog title, template & design and making big changes in general. To be honest I have a good idea about that (it includes title, the design and the whole blog), but I will have to re-evaluate the necessity because that will involve a lot of work, effort and costs.

Being free again is great but I think that I have already too many irons into fire. So many things were postponed because of the army and catching up with everything and making amends for the lost time (1 whole year of my life) is really very difficult. So, actually, my claims to be free are only theoretically correct as I am already pursuing too many things and having too many commitments.