Category Archives: Business help

How to Start a Mastermind Group

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Napoleon Hill wrote about the power of mastermind groups and reported how Andrew Carnegie (the richest man in the world at the time) and others were using mastermind groups to their advantage.

Mastermind groups work in lots of places and lots of ways.

As Napoleon Hill wrote, you don’t even need the people in your mastermind group to be physically present or even alive to be in your group. Doing that makes your “group” an advanced form of talking to yourself but definitely works – I’ll talk about it a bit more later.

How to start a mastermind group

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Decisions. Decisions. Analysis Paralysis? What to Do?

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There’s often too much choice available.

Which means we can fall into the trap of using decision making to put off making a decision at all.

Sometimes that’s a good move – there are often good reasons that we’re being pushed to make a decision now, this instant.

But they’re not necessarily reasons that benefit us. More often, they benefit the vendor.

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How Not To Launch a Book: Learn from Paul McKenna

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Paul McKenna’s latest book launch (UK link here, USA link here) is almost an object lesson in what not to do when you launch a book.

There are so many schoolboy errors with this launch that if Bantam Press were my publisher I’d be having some very strong words and probably hunting either for a replacement publisher or deciding to self publish.

The launch date logic would sound good.

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Internet Marketing: Turning the Ordinary into Unique

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Often a very small twist or tweak can turn an ordinary business into a unique, extraordinary one.

Very often it’s the basics – customer service (Nordstrom in the USA, sometimes Waitrose in the UK) is often a really basic method that’s overlooked far too often.

A simple test is to step back from the market you’re in and ask yourself what you’d personally like to receive as a customer.

That’s what programs like AirBnB and Uber have done.

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How to Promote your Local Business for Free

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Promoting your local business doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg.

In fact, some of the best ways to promote your business are free or cheap because they don’t scream “advert” to your potential customers.

With a bit of spare time you can use these ways to promote for free – set aside a bit of time each business day to do this and you’ll start to get more leads and enquiries from the internet.

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Your Customer Comes First and Is (Almost) Always Right

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Whilst it should go without saying, does your customer always come first?

And do you allow them to think they’re right all the time?

Sure, customers aren’t always right – we’ll come onto that a bit later – but in these days of instant complaints, they need to think they are right or, at least, that their concerns are being heard and that you’re doing more than paying lip service to them.

Customers almost always have a choice. Even when there’s a near-monopoly as there is in search, they can still choose someone other than Google.

Depending on the country you live in, some or all of your utilities such as electricity and water could be a single option.

But for our businesses, that’s never the case.

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What’s the Best Way to Learn WordPress Web Design?

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Like most things that involve computers, in theory WordPress should be easy to use and you should be able to pick it up as you go along. Maybe with the occasional search in somewhere like YouTube for some help.

But does the theory match up with the real world?

Or are there some things that stay stubbornly hidden or difficult if you don’t know precisely what to search for so that you can find out the answer?

The answer is that it’s a bit of both.

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