How to Spot a Small Business Opportunity

There are many small business opportunities right under your nose. But you have to look at the world around you with fresh eyes and listen with newly tuned ears. New local ordinances may help you come up with an unheard of business. Where others see trouble, look for opportunity to start a new service or to make an innovation in an old business model. As a small business entrepreneur the world is yours.

A small business opportunity may be waiting in the talent of your hands. Do you garden, fix your car, or do bead work? Whatever you know how to do there’s a market for it, especially if you add a new twist to your idea. You can sell those plants at auction sites or how about starting an emergency car repair service and bring your shop with you? Expand that bead work talent into making and selling art jewellery. There are sites where you can sell your jewellery art.

The green industry is wide open. Do they have recycling where you live? If not, consider starting a recycling business. Or if there is a private one already, then start a pickup and delivery service for people’s recyclables.

To help yourself with finding the small business opportunity that’s right for you think about these personality traits and see which is like you.

• Are you concerned with improving the things around you? Maybe you can modify some type of business to make it better.
• Do you like to give advice? Perhaps you can teach people to do something and create an e-book to sell teaching the process. It could be a small business advice book.
• Do you have a dynamic personality? Then as a small business entrepreneur, you’re business will be branded by your charisma.
• Are you creative? Your small business opportunities are available on the internet at sites where you can sell, photography, music, screen savers, and your writing skills.

Many colleges offer a small business advice services so be sure to check out what is offered locally. They cover areas like startup plans and marketing; forums; proposal writing; branding; and various ways to use the internet to advertise and grow your business. These are usually free of charge.

The internet also offers a variety of advice that may help you.

The Small Business Administration is chock full of help for the small business entrepreneur including a plan tutorial and outline, financial assistance, local resources, and a lot more. There are many ways on the internet to promote your small business online. You can post ads, talk in forums, join social marketing sites, use traffic exchanges, and banner exchanges, add your signature to all of your emails and so forth.

For those of you who look to do business online and you need traffic to provide you with potential customers, linking is a good way to get traffic to your site whether you’re promoting your internet business or using a site to promote your brick and mortar business.

This small business advice should get you rolling and building your entrepreneurial future.

As always, I wish you well with your business endeavours.

Until next time,

Dr. Ande,
Creator of: The 30 Hour Business Plan
Author of, 65 Tips for Affiliate Marketing Success
Host of, Dr. Ande’s Marketing Radio & Biz Talk with Dr. Ande

Building Your Business: The Beauty of Upselling to Maximize Your Profits!

The key to understanding upselling is to analyze your product or service line and order sales to see which are commonly sold on the same order. With this valuable information you will see patterns for complementary products and you can use that to put together a custom shopping cart. Cross Selling is an upselling tool that will maximize your attachment rates…and your profit! In the business you will also hear this referred to as “Attachment Rate”. Attachment rate is the measure of how often you sell one product in tandem with another product.

Here’s how Upselling works
When your customers or clients are shown one of the products from your ordered list based on the purchase(s) they already have in their cart, they are then offered complimentary products that many may not have thought about. It’s the same principle of having the “single candies and trashy rag mags” by the checkout counter. People tend to impulse shop.

This is where your research comes in
Many custom shopping carts add the “Cross Selling Tool” features. Some allow you to choose the top 4 products that you would like to feature. Let’s say that you are a website reseller and your research shows that a customer who purchases a domain name also purchases hosting 35% of the time; purchases WebSite Tonight® 25% of the time; and occasionally adds on a SSL Certificate or Private Registration. When you set up your shopping cart Cross Selling Tool you might want to offer hosting to be the number one product offered with a domain purchase; WebSite Tonight® as the number two product, and so on.

This tool will encourage customers to purchase the complementary items that go along with the products they already have in their cart.

You have to do your due diligence and test this tool over time to see what combinations work best for your customers and their needs. If you operate an online store, or offer digital downloads it’s a good idea to see if you shopping cart offers this tool. Then select your check-out special products, based upon your research and start seeing your sales increase today!

See you next year!!!

Dr. Ande
Step Up 2 Success