And it can produce rapid growth like nothing you’ll have experienced before.

For example, holiday firm Airworld Tours added millions to their sales within 12 months largely from online lead generation, along with other ideas you’ll find in the marketing plan template.

In fact, several of my clients have spread from being small locally based business to operating nationally.  One client dealing in products with a four-figure price tag even receives orders from around the world now thanks to the strong Internet presence we designed together for his business.

But the challenge is that being successful online takes a great deal of knowledge.  Even selecting worthwhile companies to help you can be like an uncomfortable game of pin the tail on the donkey!

Most designers are so precious about the choice of fonts, colours and images that the exercise to create a new website becomes more like an art lesson than a business project to attract more customers.

What most designers don’t realise is that it’s the content of your site that will make the biggest lasting impression.  A pretty site is great for a first impression, but after that becomes largely a moot point if the content fails to impress.

Meanwhile the SEO and Adwords management services offered by most firms simply don’t work very well.  You end up paying over the odds to produce a small number of leads, while the few companies that master Internet marketing take the lion’s share of the business, leaving you with the scraps.

It’s very easy to blow £10,000 or more on websites and design without getting anything back that can produce leads and sales.

To help you, here’s a series of steps to put you firmly in the driving seat to building an effective portal for your business online.

Why Your Website Isn’t Working

Most small businesses throw up a website quickly and cheaply.  The home page shows some badly taken photographs and has text that starts with the headline “Welcome to our website”.  Nobody hangs around to read anything more, they go back to the search results and find somewhere that’s giving them a more useful result instead.

So the site (even if they’ve spent £10,000 or more) still doesn’t produce much, if any, new business for them.

That’s because it’s a blind stab in the dark – rather than being part of an overall strategy to produce new business, it’s simply a shop window without any passers by.

If youre marketing is going to produce results, you need to operate with a solid plan that gets results.

So let’s take a quick step back and understand the basics of marketing online.

How Internet Lead Generation Really Works

There are really three big elements to your online marketing strategy:

1. Your website
2. Your strategy to attract the right people to visit
3. Your email marketing strategy to follow up people who don’t buy

If you build a great website with the ability to sell, but have no suitably targeted visitors, it may as well not be there at all.

On the other hand, if you’ve got a diabolical website with lots of traffic, you’ll get the same results.

Finally, if you don’t capture details of visitors and then follow up with email, the chances are that you’re losing out on and additional 30-100% of sales.

The secret is to build a lead generation website and to have a strategy for your traffic that will produce results.

Your Small Business Online Marketing Strategy

First, your lead generation website is designed to offer something attractive and useful to your visitors in return for their names and email addresses.

This lets you build a list of potential new customers and keep in touch with them via email marketing (also see my email marketing tips)

The plan looks something like this:

Website Designed with Quality Content and Lead Capture Forms

Design your website to have lots of engaging content.  It wil make visitors want to check out other pages and also make them far more likely to return.

On each page, include a box to offer people an enticing download in return for their name and email address.

For example, if you look in the sidebar, you’ll see I offer my download, “21 Ways To Increase Your Profits in 30 Days”.  It’s also offered at the bottom of the page.

A Follow-Up Marketing Loop

Once you’ve obtained their email address, you can ethically send them email on a regular basis.

The idea is not simply to spam them to death with promotional emails.  You’re far better off acting as an educator to help them become better informed about your products and services.

Over time they will come to know, trust and like you.  They’ll be comfortably with the idea of finding out more about your products and services when they are ready.

Your emails mean that you are constantly reminding them of who you are, without annoying them with the hard sell.

A Traffic Strategy

Your small business online marketing strategy is completed with a one or several methods to drive traffic.

Depending upon your business, the most likely candidates to drive the best volumes of traffic will be Pay Per Click advertising with services like Google’s Adwords or Facebook’s PPC service and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which you can learn to do very successfully yourself.  Finally, for certain sectors social media for business can be a powerful lead source;

However, don’t go for social media first as a rule, unless you absolutely know that it is suited to your business.  It can be a real time-sink otherwise and shouldn’t stand as the central plank to your small business online marketing strategy.

But it’s not.

In fact, social media accounts for a small fraction of all sales leads that convert into customers online globally, according to a recent Marketing Sherpa report that analysed 270 million website visits.

So if you go after social media for business before you consider the big ticket online marketing strategies, it would be like trying to fish for minnows when you can see salmon jumping out of the water!

Here are the facts…

All Social Media For Business Combined Is Just A Fifth Of Google Search Volumes

When it comes to making sales, somebody has to visit your site and take some action before you make any money.  And while the big social sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and all the rest are clearly buzzing with activity, they seem to generate just a fraction of the traffic that converts into customers.

In fact, according to this article about social media for business from Search Insider, statistics from over 270 Million website visits show that under 10% of all visitors came from social media, while almost half of all traffic comes from Google natural search results.

If you want to produce the best results from your marketing, you need to do it scientifically.  Which means measuring and going after the areas that produce the most traffic.

Now, what I do know about social media is that it can be an incredibly powerful tool to use for making relationships with specific, targetted individuals.  So if you’re trying to network your way into a big contract with a specific firm, a good social media strategy might be a great asset.

On the other hand, the majority of small businesses just want to generate leads online with the minimum of cost and fuss.  In decent volume.

I have taught many of my clients how to exploit the internet for their businesses, including a payroll business, a heating engineer, a luxury travel company and many others besides.

The Secret is Not Social Media.

Social media takes a lot of time to do well and is only so popular because everybody who’s on social media will talk it up.

The figures speak for themselves.

So, while most businesses struggle to understand business internet marketing, it is not difficult to design an online marketing strategy that will quickly produce results.

In fact, if one strategy could be considered a “secret weapon”, it would be email.

Most people think that emails sent by businesses are spam, and they want to avoid becoming spammers.

Yet the reality is that email produces massive spikes in traffic to your website when you’ve had a bit of practice.

And that massive spike in traffic can turn into a spike in sales, too.  Or fill your restaurant.  Or get people to attend a webinar or seminar at an accountancy practice.  Or any other action you want them to take.

You may want to take a look at my email marketing tips post for further information on this topic.

It’s one of the first strategies I get all my clients to use and it never fails to generate leads from the internet.

Back To The Data – Social Media – Ho-Humm…

So from the same article linked earlier, it’s apparent that Google natural search listings are huge at 50% of the traffic.  Which tallies with our behaviour online, doesn’t it?

You want to buy something, you start by doing a Google search.  Then you visit a few sites.  Research and consider any reviews you found.  Finally you make your decision and either a website or a shop somewhere gets your business.

But the important point here is that Google was your tool for research.  While you may have chatted to some friends on Facebook or Twitter about it, the chances are that you researched a lot more yourself.

So when you ultimately made your decision to buy, if you bought online, you probably used a Google search to find a place to buy it.

And your customers are doing just the same, too.

So what’s your strategy to make sure your website is on page 1?

Forget social media until you’ve sorted out your website to work as a proper online lead generation tool, not just a shop window.

Forget social media until you’re building an email database (email is another massive traffic generator for website sales)

Forget social media until you’ve got as much traffic as you can realistically squeeze and afford from SEO and Pay Per Click searches.

And don’t go right to social media then, either.  Consider Facebook and LinkedIn paid advertising before you consider tweeting and other social strategies.  It’s way more hype than substance, and so let your competitors go chasing after it while you take the lion’s share of the business by being a wolf and thinking for yourself, not a sheep who follows the crowd.

In fact, for most entrepreneurs in the UK, who want to focus their efforts to produce maximum results, the advice is crystal clear.

Forget social media for business.

A deliberate branding exercise on my own business led to an invitation to write my book, Double Your Business, for Financial Times Publishing.

There are ideas here that any business could use to increase sales and customer loyalty.

When I tell people I’m a published author, they often ask how long it took to find a publisher.

I didn’t find a publisher, I say.  They found me!

I then explain that Financial Times Publishing approached me and asked me to write the book for them.

This wasn’t a complete accident – I was deliberately spreading my brand message on the web, and it caught the publisher’s attention.

It was all because of developing my personal brand by using big-business branding tactics.

Here’s the full story.

You see, while several well-known small business marketing experts say that branding is only useful for large corporations like Coca-Cola, and that you should stick to purely direct response methods, they’re missing a really easy and practically free extra marketing tool: brand promise and brand recognition.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that branding is something that your graphic designer does for you: that’s just creating a logo and choosing how to colour it in.

How To Create A Brand – What Do Customers Really Want?

Your brand is all about what your customers get from you.  It can take a lot of hard thinking to get it right.

So it’s not about you being established since 1983, it’s not about you having a red background with white writing on and it certainly isn’t about having a tagline that says something vague, like “quality, choice, value”.

This kind of twaddle says nothing to anybody, but corporate executives like it because they think it’s clever and captures the brilliance of their business.

So I got to thinking, what is it that my clients get from working with me?

A testimonial that Chella Heyes wrote about me on LinkedIn, said it best, “In two years, Lee helped me to double my turnover, motivate my staff, and work half the hours I used to.”

It got me thinking about how to get my message across.  I wanted to keep it really simple, to focus on what I most like doing.

Helping ambitious business owners to double their businesses in two years or less.

Or at the very least, to achieve substantial double-digit growth for their businesses.

So I decided to go from being one of hundreds of business coaches, to being the only Double Your Business Coach.

It didn’t come to me overnight – your brand is something that will rarely, if ever, change.

Next I wanted to create a brand logo.

My graphic designer came up with 20 or more ideas for logos, but none of them felt right.  None of them said double your business.

Finally, over a two month period, I came up with the little bar graph showing a small bar and the next one twice as big.

But that’s not the whole story…

Nine months after rebranding, I commented on a blog that I know is visited by publishers. I signed my post as The Double Your Business Coach.  While I’m not a big fan of social media for business, this targeted action produced a huge result.

The Editor Notices My Branding…

Within a few days, an editor from Pearson Publishing (the owners of Financial Times Publishing), the biggest name in business books, signed up to my list to read more of my writing.  The invitation to write Double Your Business arrived a few short weeks later.

Of course there is an element of luck to this story, just like there is in all parts of our lives.

But when you load the dice in your favour, lady luck smiles more often.

So now you now how to create a brand for your business, you can get started.

What do your customers really want from your kind of business?

If you don’t deliver what they want right now, fix that before you mess with your branding.

Then get to work – make your branding reflect it.

Your Brand Creates Loyalty and Trust…

Every single piece of marketing that you produce needs to use your branding.

It reinforces the reasons that you give your customers to do business with you.

The more familiar your brand is with your customers and target market, the more trust and loyalty you will earn.

It will differentiate you from your competition.

Make sure your brand reflects your customers’ needs and it can even become your unique selling point.

Coca-Cola is just a fizzy drink, yet it controls over 50% of the cola market on the strength of branding alone.

In blind tasting tests, far more people prefer the taste of Pepsi, yet most of us still buy Coca-Cola, even though it costs more.

Don’t let anybody tell you that branding is irrelevant; your brand can make a direct impact on your sales.

It generated a book offer for my business.

What will it do for yours?

If this post has given you some ideas about how to create a brand for your business, or you’ve got a view to share, I look forward to exchanging thoughts with you in the comments below.

That’s where this post comes in – with some examples of business visions designed to whet your appetite and get your creative juices flowing.I have previously written a post about how to create a business vision, but I didn’t give many examples from other businesses. This post fixes that.

In many cases, mission statement and vision statement are used interchangeably.

Other people prefer to have separate mission and vision statements, with a short statement of intent or direction often called the mission followed by a series of statements regarding things like employee satisfaction, customer service and other factors relating to the way in which the company will operate while pursuing its long-term direction.

My preference is to keep things very simple for small business. There’s no need for corporate waffle and mystique when running a business with under 100 people.

To this end, this blog post has business vision statement examples that demonstrate the long-term direction for the business, not all the bits hanging off it later on.

When working with one client, I asked him what his vision for his business should be and he reeled off a long list of things.  it was just too complicated, too long and convoluted for him to be able to repeat again without referring to his notes.

So before we look at some real-world business visions, let’s set some ground rules for what is expected from your vision statement.

• memorable, so it sticks in your mind and can be automatically spoken without having to think too hard about it
• serves a greater purpose, so that people involved in your business feel proud to be a part of it, rather than just making you rich
• focused, sticking a flag in the sand to say “this is what we stand for”
• can be publicly shared, so can’t include expletives or other statements that are illegal, unethical or immoral
• long-term, because anything worthwhile takes time to achieve; ideally your vision will stretch out to beyond 5, 10, or even 20 years or more

Business Vision Statement Examples

Here are three powerful examples taken from famous companies. You can learn a lot from these and along with the rules above use them when you develop your own business vision and mission.

Innocent Smoothies

“make natural, delicious food and drink that helps people live well and die old”

Coca-Cola Corporation

• To refresh the world…
• To inspire moments of optimism and happiness…
• To create value and make a difference.

 Royal Mail Group

“Our vision is to be demonstrably the best and most trusted Postal Service in the world.”

Are These Good Business Vision Statement Examples…

It might seem a little bit tongue in cheek for me to put the Royal Mail Group in the list of inspiring examples above. But the important point to be made is that the huge business of delivering parcels and post, with thousands upon thousands of staff and a heavy legacy of public ownership needs crystal clear direction.

If you were given the job of running the U.K.’s postal service, would you be brave enough to create such a bold vision?

When you're a leader in your industry, competitors will copy you, no matter what you do to stop them

One of my clients is facing two very unscrupulous competitors operating in his local area.

They have copied the broad layout and approach to their websites, they’ve copied much of his marketing and business idea.  But they are selling at lower prices.

He’s been incredibly frustrated by these thieves and has asked me for my opinion on how to deal with them.

Simply dropping his prices isn’t an option.  He offers a superior service and cutting prices would hurt his margins too much for the long term of the business.

It would prevent him from reinvesting to improve and develop, to stay one step ahead continually.

The only sensible answer, if he wants to continue to dominate in his field, is to be better than them in order to delight his best customers.

That means better service, better marketing, and better product.

Apple vs The World

In 1984, Apple unveiled the Macintosh, the first widely available computer with a mouse along with a graphical interface instead of just plain text on the screen.

It was a massive breakthrough thanks to Apple taking an idea that was created by Xerox but not doing anything further with it.

But what happened?

Microsoft took the idea and used it for themselves to create Windows.  Apple didn’t respond quickly enough with an improved Macintosh and so Microsoft stole the #1 spot and have dominated the desktop computing world forever after.

But Apple bounced back about 10 years ago, realising that they could do MP3 players far better than anybody else.

When they launched the iPod, industry watchers didn’t think it would succeed.

Now iPod is the dominant one, because it was designed to be the best from the start.

What To Do When You Get Ripped Off?

First of all, if you can reasonably do so, protect your unique intellectual property through patents and copyright.

But even this won’t cover you completely – you can patent or copyright specific things, but not ideas.

So for my client’s business, with these competitors continually hounding him, the best thing to do is take the high ground.

First of all, he needs to review his business model to make sure they haven’t figured out a better way to do things, more cheaply or more effectively.

If not, they must simply be earning less money.

Next, he needs to focus his actions and priorities to continue to grow by out-marketing, out-selling, out-promoting and out-performing his competitors.

Let them share the low value, late paying customers between them while he concentrates on those who value the quality of service he provides.

He should avoid talking about his competitors, instead positioning himself well above them.

After all, they’ll not thrive and excel in business if they are cut-throat cheap operators.

And he’ll become known as the quality operator in his field, who provides the best service and is therefore worth more to those who appreciate better service.

Competition Is A Fact Of Life…

It’s inevitable wherever there is a need that people for which people are willing to pay.

It’s the basis of the free market economy in which we live.

Apple invented the touch-screen smart phone when they unveiled iPhone.

That didn’t stop anybody else from copying the concept to come up with another touch screen mobile phone though.

Google released Android shortly afterwards and dominates in terms of volume of sales, through all the differnet Android models that Samsung, HTC and the rest are making.

And despite Android being a blatent rip-off in terms of “look and feel” of the iPhone, patents and copyrights have been unable to protect even a multi-billion company like Apple from this kind of intellectual property theft.

So how do Apple maintain their focus?

They remain resolutely on the high ground – their products are the most expensive and easiest to use.  For those who like the Apple experience, it’s worth every penny of the higher price demanded.

That’s why Apple has just 9% of the total mobile phone market, but makes 75% of the total profit in the market.

Not a bad position to be in, really, is it?  Gives them the power to re-invest and stay ahead.

So don’t worry about what your competition are doing.

Do what you do, better.

Aim to be the best – consistently.

Don’t let customers down.

Don’t let standards slip.

Innovate.

Lead.

Win.

John Carmichael pictured during a coaching session on Skype with Lee

John Carmichael realised that he needed to do something dramatically different if his Edinburgh-based business was to remain strong; the recession was taking its toll on the building trades, people he had known for years were hinting at closure, and news headlines offered a continuous diatribe of doom and gloom.

Doing his best to fight back, John followed the traditional tactics he could see his competitors using – putting more funds towards bigger and more frequent adverts, and updating his website.  He had minor success with Google’s Adwords pay-per-click service.  When leads came, he fought to win work by offering aggressive discounts.

Set against this background, his diary was pretty sparse where there should have been bookings, and the thrill of being in business was replaced with a fear about what the future might hold.

After laying off staff, he sat tight and hoped for a while that the economy would become easier again, but at the start of 2011, John decided it was time to get some fresh eyes on his business.  He found this website and was impressed by the testimonials.  He rang, we talked and he decided to engage my services.

My initial questioning suggested that John could improve things with a revised sales process (see Chapter 6).

John had already created a culture of strong customer service which we strengthened through introducing what he called his 10 Commandments of Super Service as part of his One-Page Growth Plan (see Chapter 5).   His team left clients’ homes cleaner than when they arrived.

Some advertising was generating leads, although we measured that less than 1 in 3 were converted into sales.  Introducing the 4-Step Sales Process and rewriting his quotations to use a variation on the AIDA principle very quickly turned this up to 50, much to John’s delight!

Next, we added in some carefully targeted marketing, aimed at specific customers using direct mail and Internet strategies.

Simultaneously, we did a detailed review of John’s prices. His quality of service was undeniably “premium”, and so – despite a recession – we increased his prices accordingly.

In tough times, the business is expanding, he has increased his fleet of vehicles and employed new engineers to handle the extra work.

The order book is full for 6 weeks ahead and John is excited and bullish for the future.

Within six months of working together, Superwarm Services sales had risen 98% – and by the end of a full year, his sales were up by 148%.

That’s another business doubled.

But that’s not the end of the story.  We continue to work together to push through to double his business again.

This case study is adapted from my book, Double Your Business: How To Break Through The Barriers to Higher Growth, Turnover and Profit.

Zoom Answer Call provides flexible and friendly call answering services to small and medium businesses across the UK.

Having started the business from scratch, as the business grew, founder Chella Heyes found herself needing to work longer and longer hours to keep on top of things.

With working days regularly stretching beyond 12 hours, she was seeing little of her young family and her motivation had started to fade.

Customers who had issues would speak only to Chella, rather than her staff, and while she could just about take a week’s holiday, she would find herself constantly worrying about the business, or on the phone sorting out problems.

Better Business & More Work-Life Balance

Chella was referred to Lee by another customer.

She had previously dismissed business coaching as irrelevent, but because of what her friend had already achieved by working with Lee, Chella agreed to meet and brainstorm a few ideas with him.

The Strategy

After the meeting, Chella was keen to make changes immediately and the coaching programme began.

Improvements included:
Powerful sales and marketing that delivers 10-20 new customers per month

Increased operational efficiency by 50%, slashing the per-customer cost and reducing stress levels for everybody

Management best practices that allow Chella to work just 6 hours per day

Organisation structure that allows long relaxing breaks, including 3 weeks off in Summer

In Chella’s Own Words

I was stagnant, I had no direction and there was no vision and subsequently no enthusiasm or team spirit in the business.

I met Lee Duncan in 2006 and I started coaching with him shortly after.

Lee helped me to achieve in 2 years, what I had been trying to achieve for 6 years.

Since working with Lee I’ve experienced a massive turnaround both in the business and myself. I’ve rekindled my desire to be in the business, I’m more successful and I’ve created a world-class team.

In 2 years, Lee helped me to double my turnover, motivate my staff, and work half the hours I used to.

But perhaps the last words belong to Chella’s daughter, who at the tender age of four noticed the change in Chella at home and said…

We like you happy mummy, we don’t want grumpy mummy back!

Two weeks after recording this video, Trevor sold a franchise for The Leaflet Delivery Company in Bedford. Not only has he achieved more than double his own sales in less than a year, but he’s also managed to create a full franchise system and bring on a new franchisee too.
If you would like to grow your business, fill out the contact form now.

I have been inspired by Jobs because of his passion and profound ability to relate to his customers and deliver precisely what they want.

He did not invent the MP3 player, yet the iPod is the dominant force now in mobile music.

When I grew up, I listened to a Sony Walkman and bought several generations of them over the years. The Sony Walkman was mobile music.  Every other player simply imitated what Sony created.

When MP3 players emerged I found the whole experience of trying to put music onto them too difficult and clumsy, so I didn’t bother.  The iPod was a revelation, integrating a great source of music at a reasonable price (iTunes) with a player that is incredibly intuitive and pleasant to use.

When Apple entered the mobile phone market, they re-invented the genre with the iPhone and gave us another device that showed an incredible understanding of the customer experience.  Make it wonderfully easy to use and beautiful to look at and people will love it.

Yet Steve Jobs was a university dropout and took the road less travelled.  He was sacked from Apple 10 years after creating it with his friend Steve Wozniak and went on to create Pixar and come back to Apple as its saviour in the mid 1990s.

In this speech he gave at Stanford University he gives inspiring advice for anybody in business – and life.  If you have a passion for business, you will enjoy this.  If you don’t have a passion for your business, it might make you stop and think about why are you doing it…

When help arrives, are you paying attention?

Nobody could be blamed now for forecasting another recession, a second dip because the whole world is just too badly screwed up by the greedy bankers and the egos of the politicians.

But for most small businesses, it doesn’t feel like the first recession ever really went away.  Trading is very tough and you’ve got to take clear action to protect your business.

When times are tough, some people simply trust to luck and hope it will get better soon.

Here’s a true story that sounds just like a joke I know (I’ve included the joke later on for you)

Many years ago, I went to see a man who ran a building supplies company.  His business was in real trouble.  A friend of his had asked me to go see him.

A quick warning – it mentions God a few times.  I don’t have strong religious convictions, but religion is central to this story (and it gives an important lesson too).

So we met at his offices and went through the problems in his business – there were plenty staff who didn’t care, high costs, customers who kept going bust without paying him, cut-throat competitors, suppliers who wanted cash before they would deliver to him.

The list just kept on going.

He seemed like a truly broken man, his eyes almost glazed over in acceptance of some terrible burden that he had to carry.

I told him it didn’t have to be this way.  That he could fix things if he would just try doing some new ways of doing things.

He shrugged his shoulders and said, in completely genuine tone, “I trust my God to look after me.”

He went on to explain that he was a very religious man and that the only thing that kept him going was his faith.

I was left speechless.  This man had a family to feed.  A community in which he lived to feel proud.

I understand religious faith.  But faith is about believing you are doing the right thing, not sitting back and praying that some mystical force will do it for you.

I tried to help him.  He was in such trouble, I was scared for him.  I told him three things he needed to do in the next month to start turning things around.

But he just stuck to his guns, saying, “What can I do?  I am just one man.  In God’s will I trust.”

Talking to my mutual friend later, he told me this man had failed in business several times already, by doing exactly the same thing – sitting back and hoping it would fix itself.

They say that the definition of madness is to keep doing the same things and expect different results.

In which case, this gentleman was living proof of the saying.

Here’s the joke…

A man lives in a house in the country and has devoted his life to God.

His government decide to build a dam downriver, which will cause the land all around him to flood.

When planning to build the dam, they send him a letter offering to buy his house off him at full price, and relocate him somewhere better.

He writes back and tells them, “No thanks, in God I trust.”

As the dam is built, the water gradually starts to build up.  They send a boat down to his house, and offer to take him to safety.

He smiles and waves to them, “No thanks, in God I trust.”

The water gradually builds into a deep river and they send in a helicopter.  They find him sitting on the roof, smiling serenely.  The winch man is lowered down to him and…

He smiles and says, “No thanks, in God I trust.”

A week later, having been swept away by the rising floods, our man arrives at the Pearly Gates of Heaven…

St Peter is surprised to see him, wet and bedraggled with a look of surprise and bitterness spreading across his face.

He says to St Peter, “I have devoted myself to God.  I was not swayed when the government destroyed the beauty of the countryside.  Why did He not save me?”

St Peter replied, “Didn’t you get His letter, His boat or His helicopter?

The problem with “In God I trust” is that it’s excusing you from taking any action.

It says that you are helpless.  It’s up to some supernatural force to decide how the dice will land.

Look around at successful people and you spot one thing about them all – they fight tooth and nail when things get tough.

They don’t just sit back and hope things will get better.

If they were religious, you can bet they would say that “God helps those who help themselves.”

I do not hold strong religious beliefs, but I do believe in this saying.

Doing nothing right now is not an option.  Too many people depend upon you to take decisive action to protect them.

Right now, you need to do whatever you can to help yourself, to provide for your family and to protect all the hard work that has gone into your business over the years.

Dark tides are coming our way, carrying much doom and despair, rising jobless figures and unrest from the unions (who are just as bad as the politicians).

So whatever you are doing, if things aren’t going right and your business is at risk, try something new.

Don’t throw everything at one wild strategy, but try new things out and make sure you measure the results.

While I don’t suggest you spend hours on social media for business, if you need more customers, you can use the free marketing plan template to build a marketing plan to produce results for you.

Don’t give up.

Whatever your personal convictions, focus on doing what you need to do and you will get through this.