Transferable Skills To Gain In College

When you are getting an accredited degree from a good college, it is important to remember that you never just end up with the degree in question. In many cases, you will find th

at there are some employers who are very interested in employing you for the skills that you pick up along the way. As you are making your way through your college degree, remember that you are there to learn many

things. Don’t assume that the degree is all that you will take with you from college. Take a moment to consider some of the valuable transferable skills that you can pick up:

Writing
Writing clearly is something

that is still greatly valued. You may be slightly surprised to hear this, especially in our world of ultra-short tweets and emails, but the truth of the matter is that the more clearly you can write, the more people you can reach. If you want to say that you are a good communicator, writing clearly is an essential skill. Look at the papers that you write and consider what the graders have to say. You will discover that this can help you communicate your needs and wants in your future career.

Leadership
While you are getting your degree, don’t forget to throw yourself into your extracurricular activities. You will find that this is something that can make a huge difference when it comes time to talk about leadership experience. When you are in college, everyone has some common ground to build off of. Think about where you are going and what you want to do with your career. If you have a cause or an interest, see what happens if you try leading a group on it. This is something that can make you a significantly more desirable candidate when you are looking for your first post-college job.

Organizational Skills
If you are someone who has good organizational skills, you will be an asset to any company that decides to hire you. Organizational skills keep you on track no matter what you are doing, and at the end of the day, you will realize that they can help you do your job in a way that other skills won’t. If you are organized and can handle things in a timely manner, you’ll find that you are head and shoulders above where your competitors are. Take a moment to consider the transferable skills that you might have to offer after getting your degree. Chances are good that you have more than you think you do!

Why Promotional Items Benefit Young Businesses

Promotional marketing items have the power to thrust a young business to quick success. When used correctly, promotional item

s will bring in customers and spark interest. The great news is that there is an overabundance of items to choose from, and that is a good thing.
Every small business just starting out can benefit from using promotional items.

Curiosity Is A Powerful Thing

Developing the mindset that everyone is a potential customer can really help you market yourself and your business. Seeing decals on a car with the business name always makes a person curious. If you have ever been on the highway and noticed a car with a business logo, that is a promotional item at work. There’s a good chance you remembered it and looked it up later.

Free pens are another popular promotional item. Everyone likes pens. If the pen is kept in the bottom of a purse, it will resurface one day to be used. The owner of the pen will think of your company every single time. Curiosity is a spark that can be obtained by using these types of tools.

Promo Tools Trigger Interest

Promotional tools from a company like Inkhead.com are designed

to trigger an interest. When you wear a t-shirt or a hat with a company name, it will get people talking. They are likely to ask you questions about what you do. Being creative and unique with your items will garner even more interest. When you can draw in conversation and potential customers that easily, it makes your business run smoother.

No One Knows Who You Are - Yet

A young business is fresh and new. No one really knows who you are. No one cares. Promotional tools give them a reason to care. A way to get connected to your business, what your mission is and what you offer. It gives you some footing in the community too, which is what new businesses need the most. Within a few months, more people will recognize you as a reputable business or a service they want to use.

Promotional tools can help you market a new business from the ground up. They give your business an identity, and also allow you to get active with potential customers. You can use them for yourself and employees, but you can also hold promotions with free promo items. This allows your customers to promote for you. You are guaranteed more success with promo tools than you are without them.

The Steps to Setting up a Successful Online Store

Creating an online store is important for any new or established business that needs to expand its sales beyond its local area. An online store can be added to almost any website, but in order for it to significantly increase a business’ sale

s; it needs to be customer friendly.

A good online store will provide a showplace for a business’ goods and services and have an accurate and reliable way for customers to purchase these products or services. By opening an online store, a retail business will be able to sell everything that it typically sells from its brick and mortar store.

Of course, in order to get online customers to buy, it will be important to have a customer friendly website. To start, it is important that the virtual store can be found. List the popular products on the homepage of the store, rather than cram a single page full of a variety of products. By doing this, search engines will display the website when potential customers do searches for specific products.

Next, make the website easy to search. Simply placing a generic search engine on the site may not be good enough. Constantly check how well the search features on the website work by pretending to be a potential customer. Consider how a customer who doesn’t know the exact name of what they are searching for will be able to find something on the website.

Finally, consider how a potential customer will make a payment in the business’ online store. While it used to be common for a small business to accept payments over the phone, nearly every online store today has a virtual shopping cart and can accept debit cards and credit cards.

Remember that very few customers will want to trust a new company with their specific bank account information, so many will want to pay with a credit or debit card. Because of this, it is essential that a business have their online store set up to accept these types of payments.

Most importantly, the merchant account service that a business chooses to use with its online store should have excellent customer service. Payments should be processed quickly and customers should be able to easily access their receipt. Ideally, the customer should get an immediate receipt after he or she makes a purchase. In the event that there is a problem, such as a charge not going through correctly, the matter needs to be dealt with

quickly.

How an 800 number can save you and your customers money!

When trying to give your business an edge over your competitors, there are a number of things which you might be tempted to do. You might try a shiny new marketing campaign by making use of social media to promote awareness of your brand. You

could tempt new customers by offering them discounts on a number of your products. You may even try to hold some sort of even outside your office and try to get a celebrity to make an appearance.

While all those ideas are useful when it comes to generating income, what a lot of businesspeople value is trying to save money wherever they can (e.g. Turbo Tax free edition). If any savings come without compromising any part of the business, then that’s fantastic, but if there was something that could save both you and your customers money, you might think of it as being mere fantasy. However, there is something that can do both, while also having a number of other benefits for

your business.

Your company’s phone number helps to play a big role in attracting and retaining customers, and the amount charged for each call can help to either encourage people to get in touch with you or have the opposite effect. 0844 numbers are seen as being cost effective for businesses and customers alike because, as a freephone number, customers don’t have to pay a penny each time they ring one, whilst to get their hands on one, businesses only need to pay a one-off fee with no renewal costs each year to pay.

The fact that they’re cheap to buy and don’t cost anything once bought means that, compared to buying another number, an 0844 number can save businesses a lot of money every year, and the fact that they’re widely recognised by many people as free to dial, this will encourage more customers to get in touch, which could lead to more business coming their way. Other benefits of having an 0800 number include looking good in advertisements, giving the impression that your company has a wide reach and because they’re famous, being easy to remember.

Successfully Starting Your Own Business

A lot of people in America have great ideas. They are so confident in their ideas that they want to test them in the marketplace. For most, this means starting their own business. Starting a business is certainly a risky proposition. However, there

are some ways to make sure your new business is a successful one:

Know What You Are Going To Do
Good business owners know exactly who they are selling to. They know who the customers are, where to find them and how much they will pay for the product and service. Marketing ideas are drawn up long before the company actually opens its doors for business. When the business does open for its first day of business, there are a line of customers ready to spend their money.

Use Technology To Your Advantage
New business owners don’t have a lot of money to market their products. Some

of the administrative functions of your job could take up a lot of time as well. Using the Internet could solve both of your problems. For example, you could outsource all the medical billing to an online service provider.

Using social media allows your company to market and advertise at an inexpensive rate. Affiliate marketers are a great source of sales leads if you play your cards right. Remember that your customers are online all the time looking for great new products and services. Be there to cater to their needs.

Be Ready For Setbacks
There are going to be setbacks no matter how well you plan. A company that is successful when it opens could still suffer from growing pains later on. Something could happen that you weren’t planning for such as a defective product or an angry parent who doesn’t want their child to use your product.

Bad publicity could temporarily derail your dreams of become a millionaire business owner. You have to be able to roll with the punches and get the customers to trust you and your brand again. Hiring a PR firm may be a good idea if you can get someone who will do

the job for a low fee.

Starting your own business is a great idea if you are willing to put in the time and effort required of you. Make sure you have a solid business plan from day one. Otherwise, you may put yourself at a disadvantage from the start.

Freelance Careers Worth the Effort

Working as a freelancer can be challenging. You have to work hard to get clients, and when you do get them, then the hard work really begins. Basically, you’re doing the marketing and the labor. You’re doing everything!

Nonetheless, there

are some freelance careers that are quite lucrative for students entering the job market. Along with being lucrative, many people find that they can grow their business by doing freelance work while they work a steady job at the same time. Here

are a few freelance jobs you may want to look at:

Green Design Consultant
For students with an interest in the environment and design, the green movement has set up some interesting opportunities for freelancers. Whether you major in architecture, design or even engineering, business and home owners are looking for green design consultants that can help their business thrive in the green market. If you have an interest in working outside, interesting freelance careers focusing on green landscaping, waterscaping and even agriculture are becoming more and more available each year.

Specialty Freelance Writing
Freelance writing is

a fairly common career, but with many magazines and newspapers suffering from low sales, it’s getting harder to acquire staff positions. Instead of just writing copy or advertising materials for whoever comes along, consider specializing and becoming an expert in a certain field. Most of the sites on the internet that pay writers are looking for experts that can provide authoritative information on a particular subject.

Pre-med, pre-law, philosophy, government, and architecture students at a CBT college in Miami or a New York State college, for example, will have a specialized skill set, so they can write efficiently on their subject matter. You might have to hustle for work, but when you get it and do a good job, clients will return to you, often increasing your paycheck over time.

Social Media Expert
Social media has become a huge part of the way businesses attract clients and spread their message to consumers. Many companies don’t know how to make the most of social networking sites like Facebook, so they need to bring an outside consultant in to market their company effectively. Social media experts often work with in-house advertising teams to help companies grow, so a degree in advertising will be beneficial here.

When you’re thinking about getting into any freelance business you need to consider how saturated the market already is. Work in a field that still has room to grow and do something creative in your efforts. This will make it easier for you to get new work and continue to expand your business.

Find Customers: 4 Ways to Reach Your Target Market

Even with a great product there is risk that you'll never find the people you made it for. Every entrepreneur struggles when attempting to connect a good idea to the public, but there are a few tricks that can help fix this problem. We sat do

wn with a group of successful startup founders and asked them “How do you reach your target market?” Here's what they had to say.

  • Connect with businesses in your market: After failing to reach customers directly, Judge.me pivoted to partner with other institutions in the same niche.

    “I target marketplaces and try to partner with them for their dispute resolution. I only just started selling this way, but the results so far are encouraging.”

    By going to markets rather than attempting to attract one customer at a time, this startup was able to grow their user base much faster and see better traction. - Peter-Jan Celis (Judge.me)

  • User Test, then user test again: It's true, your marketing woes will be greatly diminished if

    you do a huge amount of user testing before launching. This is one of the easiest but most overlooked aspects of building a product. Let real people tell you how to build it and other real people will like the result.

    “It’s all about products. Our users love us. We give them tools to share the app and they do the rest. We are constantly in tune with our customers to make sure we are giving them what they want and the rest takes care of itself.” - Brett Martin (Sonar)

  • Sponsor Events in your Field: Be active amongst the people who might use your product. A great way to do this is to be a supporter of big meetings; it's simple enough to set up and doesn't take a lot of work. A word of caution though, it's not enough to simply write a check and hope for the best, you've got to be present at the events you're sponsoring and show that your business really wants to connect.

    “Any time we can be at or sponsor an event, it’s a big win for us, because that’s when people need cards – when they are at there meeting.” - Ketan Anjara (CardFlick)

  • Use Crowdfunding: Platforms like Kickstarter and Indie go-go are great ways to not only test the market, but also bring in some positive cash flow. It's a simple process to list your idea, and if it resonates with customers you'll get the “kickstart” you need.

    “Kicksarter is a way to get pre-orders for your game and find out how many people will like it. It’s also a great way to get traction and for people to hear about your business. - Richard James (Evertide Games)

There's an unspoken rule that many entrepreneurs buy into called the 80/20 rule – 80% marketing for every 20% time spent building product. Even if you make something awesome it will still need customers to become profitable. Have you had success using strategies to reach your target market? Please add to this list in the comments below!

This is a guest post by Josh Haynam. Josh is an entrepreneur and student, his latest project a blog for entrepreneurs features interviews with over 100 CEO's

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