Category: Business

Business And Social Networking

Business And Social Networking Sites – How They Can Be Helpful

You will come across a large number of social networking websites nowadays on the web, such as Facebook or Twitter, and almost all of them are over-subscribed, with hundreds of thousands of people continuing to join them every day. People with different backgrounds, varying interests and unusual goals in life head to social networking portals so that they can find people with similar interests or preferences, or to simply communicate with friends. What’s amazing is that most of these web portals have millions of active users at any given point of time during the day and that number is actually increasing every hour. Along with that, the amount of posts and written pieces available over the Internet are increasing too. With rapid advancements in the field of information technology, this number will keep on increasing, along with large number of internet-based businesses that thrive on them.

Propagating Your Business Via Social Networking Sites

With social sites being pretty huge now, they are exceptional internet tools where people can meet and interact with buyers and sellers alike. Today, individuals, or rather consumers prefer seeing businesses on social networking platforms or social media websites as opposed to corporate websites. If you’re considering starting a business of your own but you don’t really use sites such as Twitter or Facebook, you won’t really be able to achieve your full potential. If you aren’t a member of any of the leading Internet directories, that’s an added negative mark… In today’s internet-based business world, having a good online presence is key to your success! On tight budget? Don’t worry, such tools are an extremely cost-effective approach to marketing and promotion, certainly more cost-effective than offline marketing.

Leading Portals

If you are already running a business, you might have already done a lot of homework while selecting the most appropriate social networking medium for your business. Some of them, such as Facebook or Twitter, are very helpful for your marketing campaigns, public relations as well as useful in generating profits. These networks can help you in reaching your business goals a lot sooner, you just have to choose the portal that will work best for you. Most the time, businesses enter the social networking world so that they can improve their brand awareness, create a buzzabout their products or services, and also to enhance B2C, C2B and B2B communications. Their core objective is creating a presence and using such websites and tools as a podium to cater to existing customers and to find new ones. In short, these types of sites are a vital tool for expanding your brand name on the world-wide web.

Which One To Opt For

While you are choosing one of these sites for your business, you need to consider where your target market and audience spends most of their time. It could be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even your own company blog. Generally the larger social networking sites are the way to go.

Need For B2B Portal For Printing And Packaging Industry

Printing Industry at a Glance

Printing is one of the oldest industries of the world. Since industrial evolution it had been among the top ranked industries for export and import. With Industrial evolution there was huge revolution in the way printing happened across the world. If one takes a look it had evolved from primitive printing ways to now digital printing way. Printing caters to number of other industries eg: packaging, textile, media being few of them. In today’s world of packed and ready made products packaging industry is one of the most voluminous sectors along with Media and Textile. With ever evolving science and technology, printing machinery has reached perfection and is still improving. And hence there is a huge community of manufacturers, dealers, buyers and sellers across the world that are constantly looking at new innovations in machinery and adopting themselves accordingly. Apart from the main machinery industry, printing industry serves as market place for many other supply products. There is huge requirement of various types of Inks, printing base material, dyes, etc. These supportive industries are huge in them and are part of one major printing industry.

Traditional Business places

As all other sectors, printing industry is also an evolving industry. It has evolved to a stage where suppliers, dealers, manufacturers have good presence on internet. But still the main source of community building comes from Exhibitions. Printing industry caters to huge and high budget exhibitions. There are number of international and national exhibitions all over the world. This is one industry that pioneers the export and import trends making world a real small village open to trading anywhere and everywhere.

Internet presence and its impact on Printing as a business community

This being one of the primitive industries, hence this community has strong adherence to traditional ways of exhibiting but at the same time it has adopted the growing web impact with equal vigor. There is very strong individual presence of all stake holders on web, most common way being a website, still its surprising that there was not a single community platform over web. The only known name in such community is amvtrade.com, which gives a platform to all the stake holders distributed across the world to come face to face in an most friendly and easy way.

B2B portal

B2B portal for this sector provides a platform for printing machine manufactures dealers, suppliers and others who are involved in import and export of related commodities. Such a platform is today’s necessity to make world a small trading place. Various benefits of this kind of platform are as:

  • It gives worldwide exliosure to small lilayer.
  • It’s much economical tool to be visible globally.
  • Exhibitions have limitations of lilace and time where as liarticiliating in 24X7 online exhibition is much easier without hassles of travelling to far of lilaces.
  • It offers better bargains to buyers as on one click lirices and availabilities can be checked across the world.
  • Brand liromotion has far better results if online liromotions on B2B liortal are used.

Its time this industry takes a leap in the sky of international trading and becomes one of the most innovative industries by its ways of trading. B2B portal is the answer. Good luck for your next printing machine deals.

Free Business Listing Is the Ideal Process to Reach Potential Customers

The concept of free business listing is very contemporary in the field of online marketing. This is undoubtedly an innovative method to promote your local business through some excellent networking solutions and business advertising procedures without any confusion of spam. This can give a wide approach without costing a single penny at all. You can reach up to a wide range of targeted mass leaving your competitors a far behind. It is an absurd to analyze the importance of internet marketing in this complicated and very competitive scenario of the recent times. Getting the chance to appeal to the targeted mass without any cost is undoubtedly an addition to the benefit. This can bring you up to the mark to the mass in comparison to the other competitors of the same field.

This is the ultimate chance for your business to make people aware about its existence and its services. There are a number of potential customers in the market. Due to the various constraints in the marketing field sometimes it becomes impossible for you to reach each and everyone. Getting such a scope to reach to the mass is an immense chance through enlisting your business in the free chart of any portal. The beneficial factor is that your customer will come to your door for your services finding your existence in the market through free enlisting. In this manner your business can be benefited of free listing. Internet will be the method by which the customers come to know about your existence. You will be entered within their list without any cost.

You company can get a grand existence in various search engines including Google and many more just like that. You will be added in the directory which is beneficial without any doubt. You will be benefited in both ways. You can have the chance to increase the traffic by enhancing your presence on the internet. Even you can get an instant boost as well through a perfect ranking over the search engine. You should make the free business listing more attractive to get a perfect service. You should not take the listing for any consideration just because it is free. You need to submit enriched content so that the search engines can get you indexed.

You can mark a huge difference in your business getting such a chance to enlist your service. Lead generation is the basic benefit for any small business and this is the perfect platform. Even you can make your advertising more attractive and catchy by adding the log and images of your business on the listing. Sometimes your business location can be mapped on Google as well. Moreover, such listing portals have categorized listing type of business and you can have your presence in that category. You will be enlisted within your own segment so that the surfers can get you easily on the web.

The portals constantly update their database which is good for your listing. At the very initial stage you do not need to expense a single penny either for the listing but after sometime you have to pay a tiny amount of money. It is not a big deal for you to pay in comparison of the amount of business you are getting from such listing. It can not be an issue to spend some money on such a grand advertising policy for your business. Promoting your company is the basic requirement for your company and you have to attract as much as potential customers you can to your business. Free business listing gives the chance to give you the solid promoting scope for your services.

Hire Professional and Effective Web Design and Development Company

People, into the business, need to have perfect and professional website or portal in context to their business along with your customer needs. You need to consider several points if you are planning to build your business website. A website should reflect business products or services and characters of a real business. If you really want a good website, you may hire an individual or company that provides the web design and development services within your budget.

The main purpose of web design and Development Company is to create attractive websites so that entrepreneurs can promote their businesses online. The websites created by professional companies are an effective way to attract more customers to a business. They help you to attract more valuable customers to your website and reaching the target audience by building websites for a competitive edge and attribute. Whether small or large websites, they use their creativity, technical capabilities and knowledge required for the successful execution of any project.

Before making any final decision you must aware of the basic web design ingredients, exact purpose of the website, what products or services you want to promote etc. The website designing mostly depends on what you want your website to represent. The web design & development companies offer complete solution to bring your business a spirited edge. The idea of developing websites from professionals is to give a better brand image for you among the visitors.

Most of the professional web designing company also offers content for your website. The content on each webpage should be understandable, unique and according to your customers’ interest. Suppose if you are not satisfied with your current content, you may change it or opt for another copywriting service provider.

After the designing and development of a website next step is to plan the marketing strategies of a website so that it will be more visible to people. It can be done through proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. The companies also help you to understand and choose effective domain names for the website. The SEO experts use proper Meta tags, create external and internal linking, optimize each web page and content of a website and perform various SEO activities to make your website more visible and high rank positions in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.

Benefits of hiring web design, web development as well as SEO service provider at one place

1. Save precious time and money.

2. Generate business revenue on a large scale.

3. Improve brand image worldwide.

4. Make communication with your customers and other contacts more rapidly.

5. Attain worthwhile business profile over the internet.

If you are looking for similar company, you are at the right place. Spaculus is a leading Web design and development Company in India where you can get complete solution of your website. It helps you to extend your business relations and keep ahead of your competitors with the various effective and professional web design services. It also offers outstanding and superior affordable SEO services to maximize traffic to your website. Business application development services ensure to achieve maximum ROIs and boost business performance. For more details, visit us at spaculus.com

Best Google Website Tools in 2018

Google Analytics

In this digital age, the importance of data to a business/website should never be underestimated. In fact, without proper tracking of website traffic, a business is literally lost, especially when it comes to how to optimize the website and make full use of it.

Whether your website is run in the form of a personal blog, news portal, business or corporate page, ecommerce store, Google Analytics is considered an essential tool for every website. The more you use this highly powerful Google tool, the bigger advantage you have.

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. You can create goals and conversion tracking to get the most of your analytics information and use it to improve your website’s content, user experience and optimization for better online sales.

Out of so many features in Google Analytics, I think the ability to identify the Source / Medium to your website is one of the best website tools. Based on the data shown, you can find out if your marketing efforts have been paid off or not. This can provide a solid reference for your next decision making in enhancing your website performance.

Google Data Studio

Trust me, for beginners, you might be overwhelmed by all the amount of data shown in Google Analytics. To be frank, sometimes you just need a simple report with chart, graph or pie to summarize the performance of your website.

Here is a free tool from Google called Google Data Studio, which gives you everything you need to turn your analytics data into informative, easy-to-understand reports through data visualization.

Analytics has always been a challenge for digital marketing, however, Google Data Studio allows you to create customizable data visualization and report. Besides, you can even share with your clients – a huge plus especially if you are working in a big group.

Quick tip: You can check out Google Data Studio Gallery to duplicate their samples and modify to your website use. After that you will be able to change and edit the metric according to your needs. Quite amazing, right?

Google Search Console

Previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, now rebranded to Google Search Console, this free web service is designed for webmasters. It allows you to check the indexing status and optimize the visibility of your websites.

This free tool is a MUST for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The power to track your site’s search performance is the most precious data to understand what the audiences want for your site.

Once the website is tracked by Google, you’ll be able to view your organic search results right alongside the performance statistics for the organic search queries. This information helps you better understand how paid text ads and organic search results work together. If you analyse deeply enough, you will find many opportunities like identify relevant search queries that have low organic traffic volume and target these keywords in Google AdWords. This will increase your overall traffic, tailored to the objective of your website.

Google My Business

Are you operating a brick and mortar business? If you are, this free tools from Google is one of the most local SEO strategies to strengthen your website. Google My Business is a powerful tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, like Google Search and Google Maps.

As smartphone penetration in Malaysia approaching 100% by 2018, the majority of Malaysians are using smartphones for navigation, searching for instant answers or browsing social media platforms. Your business and brand need to be found online with the correct information.

Make sure all the listed information is correct, up-to-date and reflect your business. Remember, those info will appear when people search for your office or physical store via Waze or Google Map. We often see some of the business hasn’t updated their address, phone number and business hours to the latest. Wish to gain my traffic to your website?

You should try the new the features from Google My Business called “Posts”. The published content will display your image and short description with call-to-action link to your intended URL. For example, blog post “Should I hide or even remove client inquiry on my Facebook?” will appear at the bottom of our business info.

Google Keyword Planner

Building a website without keyword research is exhausting and time wasting in long-term. In order to reach the right customers with the right keywords, you should use Google Keyword Planner to discover relevant keywords. Inserting those keywords into your website will ensure your content remains relevant.

*To access Keyword Planner, you need to sign in to your Google AdWords account at http://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner. Create the account is free of charge and fast.

Yes, it’s completely free, you can find new keyword ideas that are relevant to your product, service and target customers. Keyword planner will show you the search volume data in historical statistics which is one of the most important key factors for your website.

Furthermore, the data from keywords ideas is a useful tool for SEO to your website. Analyse the information and turn it to your next content marketing strategy. Based on the search terms data, you should have plenty of ideas what should can be inserted to your text to make it more relevant to your audience.

Google Tag Manager

This free tool helps you update tags and code snippets on your website and mobile app quickly and easily. You can insert JavaScript and HTML tags used for tracking and analytics on websites in Tag Manager without touching the back end of the website.

Many websites do not deploy tracking function or have unreliable data collection because of messy codes injection. To solve this, we highly recommend using Google Tag Manager to consolidate and manage all your tracking codes or scripts.

The best example of using this tool is to use Facebook Ads. While more and more businesses are spending on Facebook Ads, most of them do not install Facebook Pixel into their website for conversion tracking, optimization and remarketing purposes.

Facebook Ads is already integrated with Google Tag Manager for smooth and easy installation. All you need to do just click and follow the instructions given without any need for complicated coding.

Test My Site from Think With Google

In order to rank well in mobile Google Search, your website should have fast loading speed and a mobile-optimized website. Use the Test My Site tool from Think with Google to check your website score on mobile performance. After a few minutes, you will receive recommendations on improving website performance across all devices.

Nobody wants to wait for slow websites or browse non-mobile friendly websites. The suggested time is 3 seconds from Google, which means if your site doesn’t load completely within 3 seconds, most people will most probably go elsewhere.

Just insert your email address and you will obtain the detailed analysis about your website. The content of the report is simple, but provides valuable insight into how Google ranks your website speed.

The report will become a crucial reference to your webmaster or web developer to further optimize the website. If you need even more in depth report about how Google renders and indexes your website, you should use the PageSpeed Insight tool.

Google PageSpeed Insight

If you have web developers or web designers that really want to understand the factors to increase your website speed, give PageSpeed Insights Tool a try and check your score on your website’s speed and optimization.

The latest version now shows the data from your First Contentful Point (FCP), the measurement when a user sees a visual response from the page. DOM Content Loaded (DCL), as well as the measurement when HTML document has been loaded and parsed.

PageSpeed Insights is handy in providing insight on how Google indexes your website differently for desktop and mobile versions.

Here are some website speed optimization tips from PageSpeed:

  • Avoid landing page redirects

  • Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold contents

  • Enable compression

  • Leverage browser caching

  • Minify CSS

  • Minify HTML

  • MInify JavaScript

  • Optimize images

  • Prioritize visible content

  • Reduce server response time

Google Trend

Wish to see the latest trends and data from Google? You can search anything via Google Trends and even narrow down to specific country or category. This tool is useful to identify latest trends or viral news in your location.

Ideally, once you identified a trend, you can craft new blog posts, new promotions or ideas that reflect the said trend.

Don’t forget that you also can view the interest traffic of search terms using Google Trends.

With this, you can spot the best time to launch specific campaign. This is helpful for seasonal campaign or annual promotion because you can discover the best timing for your ad hoc digital marketing campaigns.

Google Alert

If you want to be aware of a particular topic and all the related information that bubbles up in the news, you can have them all automatically delivered to you with Google Alert and get notified every time when your keywords or phrases have new updates.

Google Alert is good for simple keyword monitoring, with updated on every mention of those keywords being sent to your email inbox for almost real time notification. Of course, you can choose the frequency at which you’ll receive them – once per day, once per week or even get them as they just happen.

A useful tip when creating the Google Alert is to avoid using generic keywords but create alerts that are more unique to your website. The more precise the keywords, the more relevant are your alerts. For that, you should utilize the search filters wherever possible, such as languages, region or sources.

Summary

So, that’s it, above are the 10 must-have free Google tools to improve the performance of your website. Make full use of all tools from analysis, research or monitoring to achieve the objective of your site.

What are your favourite tools from Google? Do you know any other Google tools that we should cover? Let us know in the comments below!

Real Estate Professionals Turn to Digital Marketing

This is it, Dubai property professional are redefining them marketing campaign via the digital property marketer. Dubai real estate property classified on line have gain the sudden interest from professional who want to reach global audience and reduce the cost of the printing press. In the past the market was so reactive with the investor but since the spread of the financial crisis around the globe.

From almost a decade professional was reluctant to market them self through the digital network. At the booming time the market was so active and well profitable enough that way.

Today the task force for each professional is to learn a new way, a way that the West has use since a decade in that industry. Now property professional have redefine them self to be more pro active in that way to attract new buyer to them industry via large property portal or them own website as well. Webmaster of high experience is required to build and optimize the rank position of platform to catch up with the internet wave e business. Few web Portals have anticipated that the web portal support in the Middle East region was a need in the near future.

Portal with different new way of presentation has emerged. Of course the past creation of the web portal from the West has inspired those new applications in a fresh way of expression.

Dubai property Portal have all ready submit several quotation from numerous developer, and real estate brokerage firm who has decided to pass the crisis in force by continue them marketing via the digital screen network and even stop them printing press expenses.

New wave of promoting Dubai properties is on is way, the printing has reach is top and the pixels is pressing is power full word. Since marketing digital advertisement can be targeted, more efficiently because it reaches a larger audience who can also more be define via city, country and timing of the day, month and year.

World wide property portal have proof them efficiency since a while compare to the Mina region. This new wave of the explosion of the internet is posing new challenge to bring business to the UAE.

Centrally Manage Human Resources Administration

Management of human resource provides solution that connects the people, processes and knowledge essential for an organization. For employees, centrally managed human resource administration, enables organizations in streamline processes, increase access to information, and reduce HR-related paperwork and costs. For this companies has been outsourcing Hr services and the offshore company handles it by efficiently. Managers who are on Hr positions handle it efficiently through knowledge of rules and regulations.

HR Services are a portal solution based on the skills and experience and designed to get employees, from the corner office to the shop floor, more involved in the HR process. These Service provides capabilities of employees to communicate, share documents, timeliness records and access policies, procedures and other HR-related information.

Users also have an access to seven work flow request types, including vacation requests and expense claim approvals. Therefore, those employees easily locate information, initiate, and manage processes in real time.

The self-service aspect of the system also deflects repetitive inquiries regarding benefits, holidays, etc., freeing HR staff to focus on more strategic activities that gives proper satisfaction to our human resource.

This is a cost-effective strategy for an organization and manager. Employee Self Service Portal enables businesses to roll out specific administrative functionality to all employees in a cost conscious manner, enabling them to centralize human resource management and achieve greater efficiency throughout the organization. That has the potential for a company to grab the opportunity in an organization.

Therefore, many sites provide the organization streamlining your administrative processes and providing outsourcing human resource and development of the workforce. So that, big amount of money could be saved to certain extent. By outsourcing Hr services to India, the company would developed it marketing concern and concentrate on the core business to develop the potential work more easily.

Do You Have A Winning Export Business Strategy?

There is a famous saying that, `Behind every successful man there is a woman’. The same holds true for business too… `Behind every successful business, there is a strategy. One has to be extremely careful when working out their strategies for the export market. You might get away with improper plans in the domestic market but the export market is harsh & cruel. As it is the export oriented market is a extremely competitive one with people working on the minutest of margins, so it is important to grab hold of an opportunity and stick with it. Targeting your market, keeping reasonable prices, having a proper & efficient distribution channel etc. are the keys to a successful export oriented business.

Marketing Strategies for Export Business: Marketing strategies for the export market is not too much different from your local marketing strategies. Different countries have different ways of looking at the same product; hence it is best left to your distributors in a particular country to look after the marketing strategies for that country. Do not overload yourself with all the work. Concentrate more to see that the distribution & production channels are running smoothly. Logistics is one point that one should take care of along with stock positioning. Suppose you have a surplus stock of goods in one European country and there is a shortage of supply of the same product in another European country. It makes sense to forward the excess goods in the European country to the European destination that is facing the shortage. Not only will you save out on money, but also the goods will reach the required market much faster. One should also have a decently designed website along with their own domain. I for one, would never conduct business with a person who had a Yahoo email id.

Set your priorities right: Before you embark on your export business you have to set your marketing objectives properly. Remember, you are an unknown face over there and your potential market will know about your products if they are exposed properly. Having one’s website does help and a properly designed webpage with search engine optimized pages that come up in the top 10-30 results helps a lot in marketing your product properly. Even then, it is suggested that one advertises in the proper media for a couple of weeks running. Once you have been able to reach out to the potential buyers, it is the quality of your product which will market itself. Word of mouth advertising is the most successful means of getting ones goods promoted and it does not cost a copper. Your agents should be able to chalk out an advertising blitz for you, or if you so prefer, you can use the services of an international advertising agency.

Know your clientele: One needs to be sure that the product they are marketing is of international standards. What might be good for your country might not be for other countries. Most foreign countries have stringent `quality control’ laws and one should be aware of the same. Good and loyal customers are hard to come by and hence you should assure that you follow up your sales with god after sales service. Treated properly, these same clients will spread news about your products and hence earn you more clients. One should pay special attention to their distribution and after sales centers in foreign locales. They should be managed by a reliable person who should report back directly to you.

Effective Suggestions For Marketing Small Business Start Ups

If you are the owner or manager of a new business, it is important to make potential customers aware of your products or services. There are various strategies and techniques you can use for marketing small business start-ups, it is essential to analyze various factors in full before drawing up a final plan. There are two basic avenues you can go down when it comes to raising the profile of your business. There are traditional offline methods that are useful dependent upon the exact sector and location of your company, and online concepts that can reach a wider audience.

You will need to set yourself a strict budget when it comes to marketing. As a general rule, online techniques are a lot more affordable than any other methods. In many situations you can even advertise and promote your business online without spending any money.

It is of the utmost importance, that a new business has an easy to navigate and professional website. Whatever the sector or industry you are involved with, a portal can offer a platform through which the market can come to learn about your business and services. As almost every home in the country now features a PC and a broadband connection, if you did not have a website you would be leaving a huge pot of gold untapped.

Consider how most of us use the net. There are three types of websites that consistently receive the highest number of visitors. If you can place information in these portals, you can boost your profile dramatically. Social networks, video sites, and the search engines are the most popular.

To receive a high placement in all the major search engines, you will need to familiarize yourself with the concept of search engine optimization. This is a technique whereby you integrate various keywords in to the content used on your web pages, which may be queried for by visitors to a search engine.

Do not underestimate the benefits of adding information about your business to a social networking site. If you could create a fan page or group page, soon you can have interest from a wide range of geographic locations.

Many people now use the net to check out videos. If you put together a handful of interesting and informative how to guides, and then add back links from the pages they are hosted on, you can increase the traffic to your own portal dramatically.

When comparing traditional marketing strategies, it is important to think carefully about the audience. Television ads are often too costly for a new business. Newspaper and radio advertisements can be cheap, though may not be seen or heard by the right demographic.

It is of great value to constantly up date you marketing plan to be more effective. Over time you will come to understand which strategies are the most rewarding, and which are a waste of time and energy.

Freelance Writers: How to Develop a Niche with No Experience & Make it Profitable for Years to Come

One of the things I’ve learned in my 19+ years as a freelancer and recruiter in the editorial industry is that freelancers should develop a niche.

“BUT,” you may wonder, “how do you develop a niche with no experience?” It’s actually relatively easy and can be done in three easy steps.

1. Make a list of your experiences, likes, hobbies, etc. Why? Because the first step in developing a niche is to go with your strengths. Even if you have no professional experience in an area, if you like it, chances are you will work to become proficient in it.

For example, in my professional life, I’ve been a real estate agent, a loan officer, a credit counselor, a recruiter and a legal copy editor (among a few other things — but we’ll just stop here). Remember, this is just professionally.

My hobbies are running, real estate investing, reading historical romances, sewing, interior decorating and designing ethnic pottery, among a barrage of other things (I have a very active mind and a hint of ADD!).

Now that you have this list, what do you do with it?

2. Target lucrative markets: Not every interest you have will make a viable niche market. This may be because they are not willing to pay for your services, don’t need your services and/or there aren’t enough of their type to market to.

With your list in hand, choose markets where: a) your services are needed on a continual basis; b) your asking price can be met with relative ease; and c) there are sufficient numbers to market to.

Also, you might want to consider competition; as in, how much/little do you have? While there is always room for one more company to offer a product/service, my thought process is why fish in a crowded pond.

Go after a market that not many others are targeting. Sometimes this market will reveal itself in your list of professional experiences and/or hobbies. Other times, you may have to work harder to find it. Just make sure that however you choose your market, you keep in mind the points mentioned above.

Now that you know who you want to market to, how do you get those all important first few jobs which lead to samples, references, etc.? Simple.

3. Do low-cost/no-cost work: Always try to get paid for any work you do. You can target local charities; do work for friends with businesses; contact start-up companies, etc. Your mission starting out is to get those first 4 or 5 jobs under your belt.

If you’re not having any luck landing paid work, try this. Target a company and do the work without asking them (eg, rewrite their badly worded brochure you received in the mail; rework their ineffective web copy; design their logo; etc.). Then, contact them with their original and your NEW, improved version. Not many businesses will turn down improved work they don’t have to pay for. Just like that, a legitimate credit!

Even if a company refuses, you can still use it in your portfolio. Just change the name of the company to something that obviously reflects that it’s a fictitious company with the caveat that the name has been changed, but the revisions made were to original copy.

Now, you’re on your way!

Exit mobile version