6 Traits That You Can Adopt to Succeed in your business

Successful Businessmen have more in common with each other than just their bank accounts - for some business men, striking it rich took courage, salesmanship, vision and passion. Find out which traits are most common to the seven-figure bank account set, and what you can do to hone some of these skills in your own life.

 1. Independent Thinking

Successful Businessmen think differently. Not just about money, about everything. The time and energy everybody else spends attempting to conform, Successful Businessmen spend creating their own path. Since thoughts impact actions, people who want to be wealthy should think in a way that will get them to that goal.

Just look at David Geffen. A self-made millionaire with $4.5 billion to his name in 2009, this American record executive and film producer was college dropout, but made millions founding record agencies and signed some of the most prominent musicians of the 1970s and '80s. Although he didn't take what many assume to be the usual path to success, his tireless work ethic and sense of personal conviction about artists' potential allowed him to rack up a sizable fortune.

 2. Vision

Successful Businessmen are creative visionaries with a positive attitude. In other words, wealthy people not only have big dreams, they also believe they will come true. As such, wealth seekers should set lofty goals and not be afraid of uncharted territories.

Bill Gates, the world's richest person in 2009, did just that. The American chairman of Microsoft (NYSE:MSFT) is one of the founding entrepreneurs who brought personal computers to the masses. Gates jumped into the personal computers business in 1975 and held on tight, creating Microsoft Windows in 1985. When consumers began to bring computers into their homes, Gates was ready to profit from this new age. 

 3. Skills

Writer Dennis Kimbro interviewed successful people to determine the traits they had in common for his book, "Think and Grow Rich" (1992). He found that they concentrated on their area of excellence. Successful Businessmen also tend to partner with others to supplement their weaker skills. If you don't know what you are good at, poll friends and family. Use training and mentors to refine your strong skills. (Want advice from some of the most successful investors of all time? Check out our reading list in Ten Books Every Investor Should Read.)

4. Passion

Billionaire investing guru Warren Buffett says "Money is a by-product of something I like to do very much." Enjoying your work allows you to have the discipline to work hard at it every day. People who interact with money for a living, bankers for example, often love creating new deals and persuading others to complete a transaction. But finding your dream job may take time. The average businessman doesn't find it until age 45, and tends to be 54 (on average) before becoming a millionaire. (Find out how Warren Buffett's passion for investing led him to a billion-dollar fortune in Warren Buffett: The Road To Riches.)

5. Investment

Millionaires are willing to sacrifice time and money to achieve their goals. They are willing to take a risk now for the opportunity of achieving something greater in the future. Investing may include securities or starting a business - either way, it is a step toward achieving great financial rewards. Start investing now. (Want to get started but don't have much capital? Read Invest On A Shoestring Budget.)

6. Salesmanship

Successful Businessmen are constantly presenting their ideas and persuading others to buy into them. Good salesmen are oblivious to critics and naysayers. In other words, they don't take "no" for an answer. Millionaires also have good social skills. In fact, when writer T. Harv Eker analyzed the results of a survey of 753 millionaires for his book, "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind" (2005), he found social skills were more important than IQ. Just look at Donald Trump. His fortune has fluctuated over the years, but his ability to sell himself - whether as a TV personality or as the force behind a line of neckties - has always brought him back among the ranks of celebrity millionaires.

Social Media Marketing

Before we get too far into this topic, I think it is worth defining what 'social media' is. It has recently started to become a widely used term that means different things to different people.

So the following gives a good definition of what social media is:

'online technologies and practices that people use to share their opinions, insights and experiences with each other. Information can be shared as text, images, audio or video via blogs, message boards, wikis, RSS, podcasts and social networking sites'.

The heart of social media is the ability of individuals to interact with other people so that they feel involved and part of a community. A big part of this phenomenon is the activity of finding, sharing and recommending products, services, events and experiences to like-minded people. This is where social media crosses over with marketing.

Social media can be a great way to have your website promoted online by word-of-mouth.

If you can get people to talk about and recommend your services to their peers, it is more powerful than any marketing you can buy. So how can you get started?

How Can You Make Social Media Work for You?

The good news is it is easy to start the process of using social media to promote your website.

1) Create a MySpace Page

MySpace (www.myspace.com) is the largest and best-known social network (although more recently Facebook has been growing in size). At these social networking sites, individuals can create profiles about themselves and then invite similarly minded people to become their online friends. When someone becomes a friend, you can communicate with them and subtly direct them towards your own website.

Setting up your own page is simple and free. Go to www.myspace.com and follow the instructions. Put up a brief description about yourself and a link to a more detailed biography page on your own website. Remember, the goal of this page is to drive people to your own site so make sure you get plenty of links included without overtly promoting your website.

Spend an hour every week developing your site and building your líst of friends. Invite relevant people to comment about your website.

2) Add Bookmarking Links to Your Article Pages

A big part of the social web is the ability for people to build lísts of their favourite sites or articles. People with similar interests can then share their lísts and benefit from other people's recommendations. If your website has free content, you should make these articles easy to bookmark or add to favourites lísts. There are a lot of internet sites that now host and share bookmarks. You can add links to these sites to your article pages.

There are two ways of doing this. You can go to each of the leading bookmarking sites and download their code and links onto your site. The ones that you should include are:

Digg - www.digg.com
Technorati - www.technorati.com
Del.icio.us - del.icio.us
Reddit - www.reddit.com


However, if you go this route it can be time consuming and you will omit many of the potential bookmarking sites. The alternative is to put a link to AddThis.com on the foot of each page. This gives your users access to over 30 bookmarking sites.

3) Add an RSS Feed

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication, depending on who you ask. RSS allows people to be notified every time new articles are added to your website so they can keep up to date with your content.

Ask your developer to create some RSS code for your website and then put a link on all of your pages to the RSS code page. The link should be a small orange rectangle with the letters RSS in white.

Publish your RSS feeds at Feedburner to encourage distribution and interest.

4) Email to a Friend

Enabling people to easily email an article to a friend is not typically bundled under the heading of social media marketing, but in my view it is another way to encourage people to share and recommend your content. Add an 'Email a Friend' link to all of your content pages.

5) Add a Forum

Having a Forum on your website is a great way of building a community around your subject area. Monitoring the forum will both give you a chance to understand what people are discussing and promote your expertise by adding your own comments.

The downside of a forum is it does need to be carefully managed. You need to allow people to make negative comments so they don't feel they are being censored, but you have to stamp out aggressive behaviour, personal insults, spam and meaningless rubbish. This can be time-consuming work, so don't bother with a forum unless you have the time to do it properly.

Non-technical people can pay to use vBulletin. More technical people can use a free opensource solution such as PHPBB.

You can register your forum with BoardTracker to make it easier for people to find.

6) Create How-To or Product Review Videos

It has nevër been easier to create short videos that can demonstrate your expertise. How-to videos are very popular. For example, if your website is about Making Monëy on eBay, you could create a short video on "How to Take Perfect Photos for Your eBay Listings". Make sure you have your website URL on the opening and closing sequence of your video to promote your website.

Post your videos on YouTube and Google Videos. Give it a catchy title and teaser to get people interested. Also link to the videos from your own website.

7) Share Your Photos

If you have photos related to your subject area, post them on photo sharing websites such as Flikr and PhotoBucket. For example, if your website is about steam trains, take a camera to your next steam train show and post the pictures on these sites. People searching for steam train images are likely to try these sites. They can then follow the link on the photo to your website. P.S. Remember to include links back to your own site from the images.

8) Create a Blog

Blogs are very simple content sites where short articles are listed one after the other on the home page. They are usually used to write about current events or comment on news.

Some successful content websites are blogs. Some are much more like magazines with feature articles. If your site is more feature-based, consider starting a separate blog that can be more informal and brief. Update the blog every day even if it is with just one- or two-sentence comments. Blogs that are infrequently updated quickly löse their audience.

Use the blog to drive traffíc to your main website.

You can get basic blogging software for free. Try Wordpress or Blogger. For a managed service, try Typepad.

In many ways, today's social media technologies are still fairly primitive, but I can say with confidence that the phenomenon that they have created - of customers taking control of the buying process - is here to stay. Customers will continue to get stronger, so publishers, manufacturers and anyone else with customers better start listening to what they are saying.

One word of warning for the social media marketer is that once you decide to adopt the social media marketing techniques, you are inviting people to comment about your service. You must be ready for negative as well as positive feedback. Good companies listen to the feedback and make positive changes. Poor companies ignore it or worse still, call their lawyers to fight it. If you jump into the social media world, be ready to participate, listen, learn and take action.

building site content to enhance your site traffic

The design and layout of your web site is important, but your potential customers are visiting your site to see the goods or services you can offer them. Content is what drives traffic to your site, so you must ensure that the information you place on your web pages is engaging and relevant to the customers you are trying to attract.

Scanning not reading
Writing for the Web is different from writing for print, mainly because people don't read online - they scan the content. Therefore, the content you publish on your web site needs to be more scannable than it would be for a print publication.
You may need to revise or possibly rewrite your existing text to suit this style.
• Write concise sentences.
• Keep paragraphs short.
• Use subheadings to break up content.
• Use list formatting when possible.
• Provide a summary or overview of key points for longer articles before providing the details.
• Avoid using all capitals for titles.
• Provide clear, concise calls to action.
• Keep layout and formatting to a minimum.
Less is more
Space is valuable on your web site and should be made use of, but if you fill every inch of your page with blocks of text, animated bouncing icons and flash media fireworks, you'll give people a headache. Too much information is distracting and can result isn a slow upload causing people to leave your site before it is even loaded!
Getting rid of all those words that no one is going to read has several beneficial effects:
• It reduces the noise level of the page.
• It makes the useful content more prominent.
• It makes the pages shorter, allowing the users to see more of each page at a glance without scrolling.
Two ways of reducing the the amount of words on a page are the removal of any happy talk and needless insturctions.
Happy Talk
Happy talk is the introductory text that's supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is, or to tell us what we're about to see in the section we've just entered. Happy talk conveys no useful information, and it distracts the user from what is really going on on the page.
Needless Instructions
The main thing to understand about instructions is that no one is going to read them - at least not until the user has tried and failed a number times. And even then, if the instructions are wordy, the odds of the users finding the information they need is pretty low.
When designing your web site your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close as possible. When it is necessary to have instructions keep them to a bare minimum.
Keep making more content
The content that you place on your website must also be regularly updated. If your site has the same products and information week in and week out, you'll see a clear reduction in traffic.
The content you create for your site's pages is an ongoing process that you should make a priority. Even small changes to your homepage can secure a surprisingly high level of repeat visits, as customers want to know what else you have that they might be interested in. Over time, these customers will become your regular customers as they know that your site will contain new products or services that are going to interest them.
Relevance is also a major factor in keeping potential customers on your website. You can't create compelling and engaging content if you don't know who your customers are, or what they are looking for from your business. Always strive to understand your customers in as much depth and detail as you can. This information can then be used to improve your existing website, or enable you to build a new one that will attract and hold your customers.

Think like a millionaire to be a millionaire

What is a millionaire mind-set? I keep asking myself this question. Are there really certain characteristics that help hopeful entrepreneurs realize those dreams of being rich and successful?

According to a recent study of self-made millionaires headed by Dr Barbara Walls at Chicago Business School, apparently 80 per cent of the tycoons put their success down to possessing certain characteristic traits.
The researchers conducting the study found that self-made millionaires had a number of character traits in common, and to which they accredited their business success.

These were:
Can't Resist A Challenge
All tycoons quizzed admitted that they could never resist a challenge - particularly when they had been advised against it.

They each had the willingness and courage to take that "leap of faith" and risk everything to start a business, regardless of lack of resources. They have the self-belief to carry on against the nay sayers and doubters, and the passion to keep going when times are tough.

For instance, Alexander Amosu, 33, who made his first million composing ringtones for mobile phones, says: "There are many times when people have said to me, 'What the hell are you doing? You're wasting your time.'"
"But I don't get put off when people are negative - it spurs me on. If you don't try something then you have failed yourself"
Another millionaire who can't resist a challenge is Mark Ellingham. When he first came up with the idea for his Rough Guides to foreign countries, he was told that the name was 'off-putting'. Against all advice, he published them himself - and later sold the company for £10 million.
Most self-made millionaires admit to being manically optimistic. As one pundit remarks: "For them, the glass isn't half full, it's positively spilling over!"