4 Steps to Help Your Retail Business Thrive in Post-Coronavirus Era

As lockdown measures begin to relax and some sort of “normal” returns, many business owners are wondering how to proceed. After months of reacting to changes and challenges, what steps should they take now to survive the post-coronavirus era? Here are some key steps that will help you do business successfully as we move into this new stage.

Create Survival Scenarios

After months of COVID restrictions and challenges, many businesses across the country are already in the early stages of their response to the pandemic. In order to survive, however, planning must go much deeper than simply being reactive – planning must be proactive. Create different scenarios for how you will respond over the coming months. For example, what will you do if the worst is over in three months, six months or twelve months or more? What actions will you need to take to survive each of these scenarios?

Know Your Customers - Better than Ever Before

Before, it was more than enough to put your customers first. Now, customers are more cautious than ever before, so you will need to know them better than ever before. To stay competitive, each of your offerings needs to be hyper-relevant. Rule out nothing. New relationships and collaborations have emerged, retailers are changing the way they do business and customers expectations have been reshaped. Make sure you really know what they want, what they need and what they prefer – their demands will be remarkably different than they were at the start of 2020.

Jump on the Digital Bandwagon

If you haven’t already, now is the time to take advantage of all of your options. From launching an ecommerce site and boosting payment processing options to increasing your social media presence, make sure your customers have convenient options and constant support. Use your social media platforms to provide answers, useful information and keep them engaged. Provide valuable content that keeps them coming back. Treat the current situation as an opportunity to offer online fulfillment and build the foundation to thrive in the long-term.

Commit to the Long Haul

Above all, commit to the long haul. For retailers to survive, they need to manage their finances over both the short- and long-term. Commit to making whatever changes are necessary to secure your business’ future, whether it’s cutting expenses, boosting profits or securing additional capital. Use the scenarios you have created above to develop clear, measurable focused objectives that you can easily track and redirect as needed. Taking this vision and combining it with strong leadership will help ensure your business thrives in the post-coronavirus era.

Where to Get Merchant Support?

Does your business need help secure merchant services during this time? Could your business and customers benefit from more convenient payment processing options, for example? Check out the wealth of information Best Payment Providers has to offer. Find everything from industry news and payment gateway’s to merchant accounts for tech support.

Author Bio: Payment industry guru Taylor Cole is a passionate payments expert who understands the complex world of merchant accounts for tech support. He also writes non-fiction, on subjects ranging from personal finance to stocks to cryptopay. He enjoys eating pie with ice-cream on his backyard porch, as should all right-thinking people.

4 Great Ways To Kick Your Affiliate Marketing Business Into Top Gear!


Every business needs to thrive irrespective of the product. This is how it becomes a lucrative option, and this is also the case with an affiliate marketing business. If you want a successful internet marketing career then get started on your business of affiliate marketing without wasting time.

  1. Choose the Right Affiliate Program

The choice of the perfect affiliate vendor is paramount when it comes to thriving in an affiliate marketing business. Moreover, it's important that you choose an affiliate program that has a solid reputation. Try and avoid affiliate programs that have been in operation for a very short period of time.

  1. Be Above Board

An online business, be it an affiliate marketing business or any other, thrives on reputation. If you earn a reputation as an honest sales person, you are sure to reap rich dividends. Never cheat or lie when it comes to making a sale.

  1. Article Writing

Get a hang of either writing good articles, or getting them written from various sources. Bear in mind that the article must be pertinent to the product and must offer relevant information on the same. Make sure that you optimize the articles by writing keywords.

  1. Article Marketing

An important facet of a thriving affiliate marketing business is the promotion of the articles that you have written. Write a good article, optimize it, and then submit it to the various article directories. Such article marketing will have a truly cumulative effect when it comes to attracting targeted traffic to your site.

When combined, these methods will trigger a surge of commissions into your account.

Affiliate Article Marketing in a Nutshell


While there are a myriad of strategies to earn money online, one of the most popular is affiliate marketing. However, even in the subset of affiliate marketing there are many ways to make a buck online.Affiliate Article Marketing is the best way.Writing articles and submitting them to article directories constitutes affiliate article marketing.Again, articles are submitted to article some reason, Google and the other search engines give a lot of credit to article directories. There are millions of articles submitted daily on these sites, on virtually any 's just take the case that you want to be an affiliate for a product that demonstrates how to make money online. Let's just keeping going with the example and assume that it's a guide to making money online with clickbank.Let's use making money with clickbank as your keyphrase.Making money with clickbank is the keyphrase that you want to rank highly for.Enter the affiliate article marketing aspect. Articles on how to make money with clickbank should now be can get some great ideas from the sales page of the product you want to promote. This sales pages is sometimes called a squeeze page. Perplexing, isn't it?You are an affiliate of a product if you promote --but do not own-- it. Then, the owner gives you a commission on every sale made through your website. So, affiliate article marketing is one of the best ways to attain great you are finished writing, it can be sumitted online.A lot of people forget to do this:Put your backlinks in the signature box area of the article, when submitting it. Backlinks point back to your site. Anchor text in the backlinks is very important. If you don't know what this is, I encourage you to just look up basic HTML.Remember, each article can only be submitted to one article directory site. The search engines easily pick up duplicate content. This can compromise your affiliate article marketing efforts for sure. Pen more writings, get more backlinks, climb higher in the search engine rankings. Thanks! Now go out and do some affiliate article marketing!

Getting Your Finances In Order

You may not think of getting your finances in order as a top priority. That is until you discover that your credit is less than desirable. Unfortunately, a large percentage of the working population doesn’t pay attention to their credit score. Thankfully, if your credit score is low, it's not a number you have to live with. 

Getting Started

The first order of business is to acquire a copy of your credit report. You are able to apply for one twice each year for free. Once you have it, you can review it to see if there are any discrepancies. If it appears to hold a true accounting of your past payment history, you can use it to begin restoring your good name. 

Excessive Debt

Most people have several credit cards, a mortgage, and one or two car loans. You may also have student loans and medical bills. Too much debt can leave you cash poor with no money left over each month to enjoy life. Consolidating the debt into fewer and lower overall monthly payments will free up money. You can take out a personal loan from your local bank. However, if your credit is poor, chances are you won’t meet the criteria. Thankfully, there are other lenders with less stringent guidelines. Go online and look up loans Duncan, OK. This will allow you to consolidate your credit cards and small debt into one lower payment. 

Other Ways to Save

To pay down your existing debt you need to spend less. Avoiding wasteful spending by bringing your coffee and lunch to the office and eating meals at home are a few ways to begin the process. Carpooling or taking public transportation, using coupons at grocery stores, and shopping after the holidays will also save money.  

Bundling Services

You probably have car insurance and either homeowners or renters insurance. Chances are you have them through two different companies. If you carry insurance with the same provider you can save ten or even twenty percent less. Bundling services is also beneficial with gas, electricity, cable, and internet available through the same provider. 

Establishing a Budget

A budget is a wonderful tool to keep you on track with your finances. Unfortunately, it only works if you stick to it. Collect all your bills and make sure to include semi-annual and annual payments so that your budget accounts for all your yearly financial obligations. Once you have the numbers in front of you it’s much easier to see where you can make improvements to your spending. 

Raise Your Credit Score

It takes many years to acquire an excellent credit score and only a couple of late payments to lower it. While the rating system may seem unfair, it’s a fact of life. The good news is that you can raise it slowly. There are certain factors that will help you to achieve a higher score sooner. One is to reduce your credit card balances to less than 40 percent of the available credit limit. Another way is to reduce the number of credit sources and make payments on time. Having a mortgage, a car loan, and two credit cards in good standing will in return provide a good credit score. Whereas too much extended credit from many sources, along with maxed credit cards and late payments, will give you a poor score.     

Bump & Upselling In Marketing


This is probably one of the most easiest, quickest and most profitable techniques that business people have at their disposal yet it is rarely used.

Let me explain what upselling is. Upselling is basically offering the customer more at the point of sale

Let me give you some simple examples of upselling in the real world.

Say you run a small website design company and you have a person on the phone ready to order a simple 3 page website which cost ?200. While you?re talking to the person you could offer them an extra website page plus 5 extra email addresses for an additional price of ?50. The normal price for this package is ?300. You tell them you are offering this because you wish to thank them for using your company and this offer is only available right now.

Let?s do some figures now?

Before you used your upselling you had 100 people purchase your 3 page site at ?200.

100 x ?200 = ?20,000 = ?5,000 Profit (25%)

Total profit = ?5,000

Now because the upselling offer only costs an extra ?10 to set-up you make the remaining ?40 in pure profit!

Let?s say 30% take your upselling offer?

70 x ?200 = ?14,000 = ?3,500 Profit (25%)

30 x ?250 = ?7,500 = ?2,700 Profit (36%)

Total profit = ?6,200

So with a simple upselling offer you could add an extra ?1,200 profit for every 100 clients you sell to! That?s an increase of 24% which was virtual effortless!

Things to remember

? Always tell the consumer why you are offering this special price and clearly & passionately explain the benefits for taking this offer.
? Tell the consumer that this is a limit offer only available right now! This will create a sense of urgency in the consumers mind.

Gordon McNevin

Why A Professional Website Designer Is Necessary To Build Your Business Website?


Website designing is not a piece of cake as it sounds that anyone can claim to be web designer after reading some articles and tutorials. Web designing can be a laborious and time consuming job especially if you talk about a professional web design. Thus, you need to act wisely while hiring web design services and select only professional website designer who have enough experience in relevant field. Among various advantages following are the major that can be seen in professional work:Professionalism in website layoutHiring a reputable web design service allows you to sit back and see. At least you can relax that your website is being looked after by the professionals and you would see the difference. What's more? All of this small stuff that will occupy your time and energy can be treated with. And at the end when you will be provided the final version, then there would be no regret for not doing yourself. I am pointing towards the likes of theme colors, font selection, images and text alignment; those little things show the professionalism in web design.Up to dated with latest tools and trendsProfessional web design service providers are far more likely to be up-to-dated with the latest tools and technologies also online trends of the time. At the same time as you might take hours just to know what is latest tool and may be couple of hours more to learn it if you didn't use it 's true there are numerous websites out there that teach you from scratch how to make website design. However going through each of these is really a prolonged process, and could take several weeks to finish.Time savingIf you decide to build website by yourself, that is pretty cool idea but think about the time you will need in web planning and designing, mainly if this is a business venture. You'll likely require to spend plenty of hours to set up your pages, content, and mastering HTML. A professional can do all this for you most likely for less than your time is worth.Website design is doorway of your business, and many people know your business because of your website. If you have a poor design, then it can seriously damage fame of your business that can take several months or may be years to regain if once gone. On the other hand a best website design can aid you a lot in achieving desired goals in minimum time and grapple.

Trust Issues Dealing With a Modern Public


Marketing is about trust. It always has been. From telemarketers requesting a few minutes to conduct a survey, to field marketers, offering free samples of a new soft drink, to charity-workers in the street, collecting donations. It all comes down to how much trust the general public is willing to invest in the person they are communicating with. This, according to the Q2 2012 Consumer Privacy Index, is not a huge amount, by any stretch. By their reckoning, 91% of people frequently worry about privacy, and over 53% do not trust firms to protect their personal data. Finally, 88% of adults interviewed said that they do not do business with companies which they have doubts about.But why the mistrust? Since shortly before the dawn of the new millennium, people have been becoming increasingly paranoid about personal fraud, particularly so-called 'identity theft'. While this is not a threat unique to the 21st Century, the advent of the internet has certainly made it a more accessible one. Similarly, as more and more of our business is conducted via-computer, there develops a much more lucrative market for hackers and viruses designed to steal information. From these assumptions, it is possible to deduce that the technology market, and the public which uses it, have (in some ways) left behind industries still trying to adapt to a changing market.The situation is not unredeemable to any extent. It simply requires originality on the part of the marketing industry. Here are some examples of ways in which one might improve public faith in one's campaign:Personalisation of Campaign:A friendly face can change everything. Online marketing is easily dismissed by people browsing, or can even be automatically filtered-out by built in programs in web-browsers. In fact, according to a study reported by Nielsen, only 47% of people trust online marketing. Contrary to this, tangible conversation between people, either by-phone or in the street, allows for a far more personal connection, and greater faith, as it humanises the campaign.Re-assurance of Safety:It may sound basic, but a surprising number of marketing efforts fail to mention the safety measures that they put in-place to protect private data. People are far more likely to invest-in something which they understand, so talking prospective customers through whatever process their data will undergo is a good idea.Incentive and Marketing Appeal:An appealing, original marketing campaign is likely to impress consumers, as well as to support ideas that the product, brand or firm that it represents is legitimate and well-organised. Traditional marketing techniques are still very effective, but delivering them to impress actually helps to improve credibility in the eyes of the public.Of course, there are endless ways to impress-upon a target-market the credibility, reliability and overall safety of a campaign. In the end, it boils-down to convincing an individual that their information is both necessary, and safe, and the extent to which this convincing must reach varies by-case.

Qualified MLM Leads


New entrants to MLM might be satisfied to find any leads when they're starting out, but they soon learn that qualified MLM leads are what are the most coveted. It is relatively easy to get some basic information out of someone, but when they come and ask you about your product or MLM business it means they are already interested.Be stressed about any company that attempts to convince you that the leads they'd like to offer you are qualified, you might ask by precisely who. Obtain your own leads to be certain they're not recycled, old or irrelevant.Build Your Own List of Qualified LeadsBy acquiring all your leads you could have already begun a relationship with the people in your list. In some cases you have answered their doubts by way of e-mail thru your blog or web site, or perhaps you have met somebody in person. You can not ignore these qualified MLM leads though; people that are keen to break into the MLM business are consistently being approached by other recruiters.If you have got a blog or internet site, train yourself if you have time about S.E.O, because this is going to drive more free leads which will opt in to get some more information. Merely by composing well SEO'd content employing precise key terms and phrases often, it is straightforward to encourage increased free traffic and more visitors to your website. Naturally you might definitely employ a backed suggestion system like MLSP within your multilevel marketing business which will permit you to have a flow of revenue while you build your list and get more experienced.Turn Your Customers into AffiliatesAdvertising your product on your blog will bring purchasers, and there's absolutely nothing folk enjoy more than saving some money currently. You can also provide an affiliate chance to your customers to further enhance profits and build your team.A fair number of individuals will join to get a reduction on what they are purchasing, but others can see the great chance to market the product and make themselves some extra cash. If they join, they will enthusiastically market it to other folks they know. These are a couple of the best leads available.Getting E-mail & Premium LeadsEmail leads can also become fantastic leads though it could take about ten or so e-mails for the prospect to feel that they think that you are real. Adding a relevant video of you chatting about your product to an early e-mail may help to save a little time and address any concerns and simple questions a few individuals may have.Delivering mails on Fridays and Saturdays isn't a great idea, as most families are doing other activities.Premium leads are acquired by a visitor filling in an opt in form on your blog or site; these forms include all of the prospect's important info including a telephone number.Many of these people are taking a look at a bunch of opportunities so do not let those qualified MLM leads go cold, or enroll in someone else's offer because you have waited too long to talk to them.

How To Start On Your Own Affiliate Marketing Venture?


Affiliate Marketing has become a relatively easy and convenient way of earning money, thus, attracting quite a number of followers. For those who are new to the business, they have quite a lot to learn before they get to reap the bigger fruits of affiliate marketing. In fact, there?s so much to learn, it is quite difficult to focus on where and how to start on your own affiliate marketing venture.

The focal point of affiliate marketing, or of any business enterprise for that matter, is the product. No exchange ever happens if there is no product involved. For those who are new to affiliate marketing,

The following tips regarding what kinds of products an affiliate marketer should promote are perfect for beginners. For those who are more experience in affiliate marketing, however, do not fret. You might also get a few tips from this article (or this article might just confirm what you already know, which is? all that bad, either).

The first step in choosing a product to promote using affiliate marketing is not being too specific just yet. Focus on a certain group of products you might find interesting enough to sell, and soon, we?ll get to the part where you choose the specifics of what you?ll be promoting.

For starters, CHOOSE A TYPE OF PRODUCT YOU BELIEVE IN. Promoting in itself is a great task, the main focus of all your affiliate marketing activities. For those who aren?t exactly experts at promoting just yet, you might have to rely on your belief of the product above anything else?the more you believe in the benefits your products have to offer, the easier it would be to promote them. Anyway, if you, a real human being, find your product good enough, you might discover that other human beings find it good enough, too.

For those who are simply starting out, you might find it easier to PROMOTE A PRODUCT THAT IS ALREADY POPULAR. Promote those with brand names that stand out. Competition might be fierce, but since your product has already been able to establish a name on the market, it would be much easier to sell. A few newbie affiliate marketers think that promoting lesser known products would be easier due to the smaller competition.

They can?t be any more wrong. The fact that they are newbies promoting unknown products makes for the worst combination of all. Yes, competition might be fierce, but if you are just as fierce with your marketing strategies and promotions, you will eventually find yourself earning just as well as more experienced counterparts.

DO A ?MARKET RESEARCH.? It sounds like an expensive activity to undertake, but it isn?t. All you have to do is be observant. Try to observe people around you: family members, friends, strangers passing you by on the streets, and people you ride with on the public transit. What products are they using?

Put yourself in their shoes and try to think what kinds of products they might like to purchase. Ask them, if you have to. Try to observe how they react to certain product names, and how they do not when it comes to others. You might find yourself flashing a light bulb once in a while. Take advantage of what you have learned. They might come in handy as soon as you gain the information, or at a much later time.

Once you know what kinds of products you would want to promote, it is time to narrow down the list. This might be, initially, a tad confusing, but once you have established the categories of products you would like to promote, this part becomes much easier to undertake.