Entrepreneurship, Self-Employment, Starting a Business

Keep Business and Personal Lives Apart

January 11, 2012 Dan Boudreau Leave a comment

personal_business_lives When it comes to owning a business, newbies often make the mistake of combining their business and personal affairs. As a business owner, it’s healthy to separate yourself from your business and treat your business as a separate entity.

A little investment of energy early on can bring huge dividends later in the life of your business. For example, set up a business bank account, rather than mixing your business and personal expenses – your accountant and bookkeeper will both be thankful. You will also enjoy the benefits: less confusion and lower accounting and bookkeeping costs, particularly when your friendly neighbourhood tax auditor comes knocking.

New owners have a tendency to dovetail their personal and business lives, usually in an effort to save a few dollars. I have done this in the past and it only leads to difficulty. Any savings quickly evaporated when it came to sorting out the mess later.

Think of your new business as a separate entity, like having a baby, building a house, or hatching an egg.

Here are some ways to separate your business from your personal life.

Separate your personal time from your business time.
Coach your customers to contact you during your business hours.
Train your friends to contact you during personal hours.
Consider yourself to be an employee of your business and pay yourself a wage.
Open a business bank account, pay business expenses from that account and pay your personal expenses with your wages.
Establish separate telephone and fax numbers for the business.
Create a separate Internet and email presence for the business.
If you’re home-based, create a separate space for the business and if possible, have a separate entrance for customers.
Even if your business is a proprietorship for which the tax authorities view you and your business as the same entity, set-up your business with its own bookkeeping and accounting systems.

There are some great payoffs for separating your personal and business affairs. You will:

√ Know your personal and business expenses

√ Be more effective at calculating costs and setting prices

√ Find it easier to deal with auditors

√ Lower your bookkeeping and accounting costs

√ Be better prepared if you decide to sell the business or bring in a partner

√ Have more peace of mind

With much to gain and little to lose, I urge you to consider your business to be a separate entity from yourself.

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Myths About Owning Your Own Business

Pros and Cons of Being Self Employed

Book Launch

Business Plan or BUST! Hits Amazon Best Seller List

January 10, 2012 Britta 1 Comment

Press Release Nov. 24, 2008

In less than 24 hours Dan Boudreau’s book, Business Plan or BUST!, skyrocketed from a sales rank of #5,208,502 all the way to the best seller list at Amazon.com.

Prince George, British Columbia (PRWEB) November 24, 2008 – Dan Boudreau, Author of Business Plan or BUST! believes in miracles today! He also believes in perseverance, hard work and sticking to a plan.

On November 17, 2008, Dan’s book held the unflattering sales rank of #5,208,502 on Amazon.com. This meant that more than 5 million books were out performing his book at Amazon.com.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Business Plan or BUST! occupied a different position at Amazon, as Dan’s book shot upward to the best seller list in all 3 of the categories it’s listed in:

#2 in Business Plans

#4 in Home Based

#37 in Entrepreneurship

“After publishing, it became clear that the book wasn’t about to market itself and that nobody else, including Oprah, was going to promote it for me.” Boudreau said.

It can be costly and time consuming for an unknown, self-published author to get a new book into bookstores. The competition for space on the shelves is fierce, and bookstores need to stock the best and fastest selling books.

Boudreau refers to this “absence of uptake” on the part of bookstore owners as “a serious speed bump” for new authors. And it makes sense. The marketing of new books by unknown authors is risky and for the most part, unprofitable. Besides, says Boudreau, “The responsibility for marketing a self-published book clearly lies with the author.”

So he turned to what he calls the ultimate marketing tool – the Internet. He studied successful authors to determine what’s really working.

Boudreau learned about a marketing technique called the “e-blast” that appeared to be working for best selling authors like Dr. Wayne Dyer, Dr. Joe Vitale and Jack Canfield. An e-blast involves the engagement of several opt-in list managers to help by getting a message to their list members on a specific campaign day, and to get each of those managers to contribute a special bonus gift for the occasion.

To learn how to organize an e-blast, he enrolled in the Best Seller Mentoring Teleseminar offered by authors Peggy McColl (Your Destiny Switch) and Randy Gilbert (Success Bound).

Boudreau says, “This campaign was successful because of the efforts of many people, who helped to organize the event, the partners who mailed to their lists, and many friends and family who helped to get the word out.

“As well as achieving best seller status and selling books,” says Boudreau, “the biggest benefit of all has been the relationships we’ve built with savvy list managers throughout Canada, USA, and the UK.

Randy Gilbert, Best Selling Author of Success Bound, says “Everybody wins with the Best Seller Mentoring strategy. The author wins by selling books and gaining profile. The list managers win by attracting potential customers, and the customers get an amazing selection of bonus gifts with each purchase of the author’s book.”

Boudreau is already planning an e-blast to launch his next book, RiskBuster, which will be published early in 2009.

To see the Business Plan or BUST! Best Seller Book campaign in action, visit businessplan.riskbuster.com.

Macrolink Action Plans Inc. provides business planning tools for curious and serious entrepreneurs and hosts the RiskBuster Practical Business Plan Oasis at www.riskbuster.com.

Affiliates, Book Launch

Five Things That Can Thwart Your Eblast

January 10, 2012 Britta Leave a comment

Recently we used a marketing technique called the “eblast” to launch my new book, RiskBuster. Within a few hours the book made #1 in the Home Based Business category and the best seller list in three categories both on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca. What most authors might find interesting about this fact is that it wasn’t an accident; it was a planned effort and it wasn’t expensive to do.

An eblast is the act of partnering with opt-in list managers who agree to email their subscribers on a pre-arranged campaign timeline, usually 24 to 48 hours. List managers who participate are known as joint venture partners.

The idea is that, during the campaign period, all of the partners email their lists a warm invitation to visit a landing page or sales letter. If all goes well, the sales letter compels visitors to buy the product. This was the third time we’ve used the eblast method, with similar results in each case.

Although an eblast can bring amazing results, it’s not free to set up, and there are number of challenges that can thwart entire effort. Here are some of the complications that can kill an eblast:

A partner doesn’t send out the email invitation to his or her list. Considerable effort goes into building relationships with partners whose subscribers are potential buyers. It takes a fair bit of jostling to get the right partners to mail during the scheduled timeframe in order to build momentum and traffic. For a variety of reasons, the emails sometimes just don’t go out, which reduces the volume of emails and limits the potential for sales.
Targeting the wrong lists. If the eblast is to be successful, you will need to partner with list managers whose subscribers are interested in your book or product. No number of emails will result in sales if the target recipient doesn’t need what you’re selling.
Bad sales copy. All the email hits in the world are for naught if the sales copy on the landing page is uninteresting or ineffective. A well-written sales letter will catch the visitor’s interest, answer all of the main sales objections and lead the visitor to click on the “buy now” link.
Broken links in the infrastructure. In our case, we wanted to drive traffic to the Amazon website to buy the book, and then return to our website and enter a confirmation number in order to receive a handsome number of bonus gifts. The website infrastructure included roughly 35 different web pages. Any broken or missing links between the pages can result in frustrated or lost customers.
Technical failure. If for any reason your server or your website goes down on the day of the campaign, all your efforts are lost. Fortunately this has not happened to us, but we’ve always had technical people handy to deal with any glitches.

The good news is that all of these challenges are manageable, and the risks can be minimized.

An eblast is an Internet marketing method that should be of interest to any author attempting to sell books in today’s marketplace. I recommend the technique to authors as one part of a multi-pronged marketing strategy. The biggest win of all is the expanding global network of marketing alliances and the amazing friends we’ve made in several locations throughout the world.

Interested in joining Team Oasis? Become a RiskBuster Business Plan Oasis affiliate. We offer 55% commission on ebooks and 25% commission on membership and printed books.

http://www.riskbuster.com/affiliate-program/

Business Planning, Entrepreneurship

Everyone Needs a Good Business Plan

January 10, 2012 Dan Boudreau Leave a comment

everyone_plan Mention the need for a business plan to the uninitiated, and they will likely give you a lot of reasons why they don’t need one. But anyone who has successfully completed a business plan knows it is a healthy learning process that enables you to manage risk and confidently start or grow your business.

Keep the body of your business plan brief. Attach important detail and supporting information in the appendices. In the body of your plan, make reference to the appendices so your readers will know where to find details.

Write for your average reader. Don’t try to baffle your reader with big words. Explain any terms that might be confusing. Break the complex down until it becomes simple.

Clarify your assumptions for the reader. You will be doing some guessing. If you’re assuming an interest rate of 8 percent, say so. Use only the safest assumptions, and use them sparingly.

Support your narrative and financial assertions with relevant documentation. There are a number of possible appendices that might add to the credibility of your business plan. For example, if your resume will help your reading audience to understand why your experience qualifies you to own and operate the business, attach it to your business plan.

Don’t slag your competitors. They are not necessarily enemies, just people who have similar goals to yours. When describing the competition in your business plan, never be critical of them; focus on your strengths and positives rather than the competitors’ weaknesses and negatives.

Prove your business case. First, identify any potential flaws or reasons your business might fail. After that, if you still have confidence in the idea, go all out to prove the business case. In its simplest form, this means ensuring that your business can survive in the gap between supply (cost) and demand (price). If you can’t prove your business case find a different business or get a job.

Eliminate inaccuracies and inconsistencies. A good business plan will increase your confidence by enabling you to minimize uncertainty. On the other hand, mistakes erode confidence. Always have someone proof read your draft plan before attempting to use it to apply for a loan.

Don’t make your reader to go fishing for information. Create one complete, cohesive communication package that makes it easy for your reader to read and understand.

A good business plan template provides you with a checklist so you don’t miss important points, and a sensible structure in which to organize your thoughts and information. A business plan makes it possible to identify and solve potential problems before you risk your house equity or savings on a business venture.

For a free business plan template visit http://www.riskbuster.com/tools/

Related Articles:

Make a Plan to Succeed in Business

Eight Tips for Planning Your Business

Does Your Business Plan Prove Your Case?

Your Business. Your Plan. Your Way.