Welcome 2010!!!!

I just came across a list of the top 10 Business Ideas as recommended by Springwise.  www.springwise.com is a fantasitc site - they have spotters all over the world who spot new business ideas, report back to Springwise and the results are emailed out to subscribers on a weekly basis - a great source of inspiration.

Check out their top 10 list at http://springwise.com/businessideas2010/ (a couple of them are a bit obscure!!)

Get Better Results From Your Newsletters

Building a database and making sure you market to it regularly are of key importance in building your business, so you need to make sure you understand how to make this work for you.

Things to remember -

• make sure your newsletter is only 20% about trying to sell your reader something, and 80% about giving them useful advice and information,
• make it informative and easy to read,
• Keep content short and sweet - only 1 or 2 topics and maybe 2 or 3 small ads,
• Use bullet points rather than endless paragraphs of text,
• Test all your links before you hit send,
• Put in a nice colourful picture,
• make sure you use a newsletter package that has detailed reporting so that you can see what articles are being read and what topics are not working,
• be consistent in sending out - once a month is a good time frame. The average person on your database will need to hear from you 6 or 7 times before they consider buying,
• survey your database and find out what they want to read about;
• Don't just offer discounts - offer value adds instead. There are so many sales on year round these days that a 15% or 20% discount doesn't mean much anymore. Look at doing an affiliate offer with another supplier - offer their products as an add on, and maybe offer them some of yours for them to use as an ad on.