Do not be too pushy

People hate salespersons that are too pushy and keep on nagging to sell. They are sure turn offs. Never consider your prospects as a disposal box of your product. If you find your prospect is not interested in your product, leave it there. If you become too pushy, you may end up losing the prospect forever and incur bad perception of your brand.

Don’t lose hope

With a failed trial or series of trials do not lose hope, it will show on your face and you may appear boring, sad and cold to a good prospect too. If you are not enthusiastic about your product or service, you can’t expect your prospect to find interest in it too. Staying motivated from street to door, under every circumstance, every atmosphere is important as it’s you who are ‘face’ of the brand. So appear enthusiastic, pleasant, motivated, and persuasive. Remember, your prospect is literally a ‘prospect’ for you, not your customer, so don’t expect him or her to be too receptive. They are the people who are not actively looking for your product and your visit is unexpected, interfering. Conversion rate in this type of sale is low, so accept the fact. In a failed attempt, just think it was a bad one and move on to the next with a winning attitude. Celebrate each successful sale, and stay motivated.

Little planning can be helpful

Rather than being random and ringing all doorbells on your way, with piled up rates of failure why don’t you start planning a bit and secure more chances of success? Good planning and research may help you. Know who is your target audience, where they are located, what promise they expect from you, what is their trust level, when are they available and receptive to your presentation, what motivates them etc. Choose locations accordingly. So before starting with your sales call do a thorough research on the demography and psychograph of the desired target group. Also, do not reach them in inappropriate time. Strike a balance between quantity and quality of calls.

And you are there. Go and shoot, win and celebrate.

Why you shouldn’t read blogs?

The correct headline should be: why you should not read too many blogs. And the answer is because reading too many blogs takes time which else could have been devoted to taking action. Reading too many blogs would paralyze you. There are so many blogs out there, each one of them presenting different point of view, calls to different part of your mind. How can you respond to all?

How many should you read?

As many as you can in maximum two hours of time. I know I have been very liberal in allotting time to blog reading and I should have only asked for one hour. But we need to go slow when persuading people to change habit, or else our effort will not bear desirable result.

In the beginning, you should read and understand fully as many blogs as you can in 1-2 hours every day. Not a single minute extra should be wasted on this activity. But over time, you should reduce this time spent on blogging to 45-30 minutes.

What should you do in spare time then?

You should read books, industry journal, watch documentary, do research, or talk to people. In short, you should engage yourself in activities that give you more benefit. It is more about ROI on time invested. Some good blogs, like this one, do give you higher ROI on your time, but surfing through low-quality blogs take away from the overall benefit you get from reading a blog post.

Reading blog can be advantageous, and it often is, but indulging too much into it will reduce your productivity. So be judicious in your time allocation.

So what is the bottom line?

The bottom line is this: you must read various blogs, but your reading should not be limited to blog reading only. You should read from other sources as well. The varied your sources will be, the richer your experience will be.

There is another fact, and it is related to objection handling. No matter what objection your clients have, or what problem they say they have, you can handle it and that too by following a set of steps given below.

Sincerely listen to what he has to say

Do not object or stop your client from speaking his heart out. Cutting him short is a sign of weakness. Let him speak not only and try to understand his point of view on the matter at hand. More so because he may himself tell you the answer to the objection he has raised.

Make him talk

If your client is not the kind who bares his heart out then make him talk. Ask questions that will make him reveal more about the objections. More often than not clients reveal the solution when talking about their objections, so make them talk.

Ask questions related to the objection your client raised

Ask questions to unearth the reason behind the objection raised by your client. Quite often, the issue raised by the client is mere a disguise (or external appearance) of the real objection he has. You need to ask relevant questions so that you can unearth the real reason behind his denial to make a purchase now.

Do not try to prove them wrong

Proving your clients wrong is the worst thing you can do in a sales situation. You are not there to win a debate, so do not go with that mindset. Let you client speak about his problem, and except that whatever he says is write, after all he is the one who is there stuck in a problem.

Be gentle to him, and even if you have to say that your client is wrong, say it in a way that it does not hurt his ego. It should not appear that you are playing the one-upmanship game. Make him realize that you are trying to solve his problem by understanding his point of view of the situation.

Take notes

This is vital, and notes taken when the client was talking will also help you in addressing his concern. Take notes, but not in a way to break is stream of thought. Your note taking should go undetected.

The things I have discussed above about objection handling are very important. You need to cultivate yourself in such a way that the above given objection-handling technique becomes part of your nature. Inculcate these into yourself, and practice it until it becomes your nature.

See his point of view

If your client is angry of you then try to find out the reason for his anger. Do not just judge the situation from your point of view only. You may be right, but it is the client who has to decide if he liked your work or not. After all, he is in better position to say whether your article or content will meet is his goal or not.

Do not argue, let him do the talking

No one wins the argument, so do not invest time in that. Let your client do the talking. This will help you understand his point of view, and will also vent his anger out. Do not interrupt, and speak only when he is done. Afterward, patiently explain everything, and logically build you case and tell him why you think the content in question will work.

Offer rewrite

Do not fight over the content, if you do not wish to lose that client. If your client is not satisfied by the output, offer a rewrite. Tell him you will rewrite everything to meet his expectation, and before you do that ask him about his particular requirement, in terms of style, presentation, and structure of the content that you are supposed to rewrite. Take every step necessary to remove the ambiguity from the project. This will help you rewrite it.

If your client’s anger is just then this will pacify him, and if it isn’t then you cannot do anything about it. But still, you should try to understand his point of view and solve the issues he has.

For a business owner, outsourcing any business process that is not its core is a not good but great strategy. I am not saying this to put bread on a family’s table in a third-world country, I am saying this because doing things that you are not good at will cost you doubly— (a). You will not be able to produce quality work, (b). And you will end up wasting time that could be invested on doing things that you are best at.

I do not play baseball nor do I play golf. I even do not know their terminologies. How do you think I will fare, if I take a baseball bat or club in my hand? I may hit a home run by fluke, but I cannot repeat it. So, if I were wise, I would have played chess or cricket, instead of going for baseball or golf. By not doing so, I have not only made fool of me, but I also end up wasting precious time I should have invested on games that I know.

It holds true for business processes as well. If you are a programmer who has started a small company, or if you are an existing small business owner that is good at manufacturing and marketing then you should outsource designing, SEO, marketing works to outside vendors whose core competencies lies in these fields. They will do better job at significantly lower cost. And the cost incurred will be even less, if you outsource your work to the third-world countries.

Did you say quality? Don’t worry, not everyone is bad there.

Benefits of outsourcing

• It frees up your time that you can devote on doing things you are good at.
• It can get you better result at a fraction of the cost incurred if you had worked on that.
• The work quality is often good.
• It will help you speed-up the process of product creation, testing, and delivery.
• You will get a bigger team to think on the problems that your customer’s face. Who knows, you may get a brilliant insight from there.

Above, I have just a few of the benefits. I do not claim here to know all the benefits, and I am sure, you can suggest countless more benefits of outsourcing. Why do not you post your comment here?

Well for starters, carry a notebook with you wherever you go.  Of course in the modern age of technology, a smart phone or a PDA can serve the same purpose.  Anything that enables you to quickly jot down an idea while you’re on the run.  Frequently ideas hit us whey you’d least expect, and you have to be ready to write down that idea so that you can save it for use when you have the time.  That’s one of the best ways to stay fresh and full of new concepts.

Make sure that you read as often as possible.  For a writer, reading is a great weapon because gaining knowledge influences you to think.  With that thinking about a certain piece you’ve read, comes new ideas or concepts you’ll be motivated to write about.

Try having a running dialogue with someone else in the industry, or even the audience of where you write.  See what their feelings are on your writing, or what’s going on in the common culture that relates to what you write.  That can give you plenty of ideas because you’ll see how someone else thinks.  That may influence you to write a new topic, or an old topic rewritten from a different point of view.

Always keep up on the news as much as possible.  Current events are what get the most reads, because the majority of internet searchers are looking for information regarding news.  Keeping current, and relevant to where the world is in this instant is key.  Plus all the different news stories are bound to influence something that you’ll want to write about.

But, I can tell you about the traits that are common among all types of quality content.

Traits of quality content

• Not repetitive: This is the first trait of quality content. It is not repetitive. If your article touches upon topics that are not or rarely written before than you will be considered authority in your field.
• Well researched: A high quality article is often well-researched. It does not dwell on the “as I think,” “I believe,” “I suspect” statements. It is also often supported by links and bibliography
• Entertainment quotient: Quality content is high on entertainment, regardless of complexity of the topic it covers. Writer of an entertaining article uses simple language and humor to keep the tone light when he describes complex topic. Humor is important.
• All-inclusive: Do not rush for finishing an article soon. Try to cover every aspect of a topic that you are writing about. A good article goes beyond 500 words and covers almost every aspect of the topic at hand.
• News with a view: Breaking news is not forte of every blogger. Most of the bloggers cannot do that as they do not have right people at the right place, therefore, you should consider elaborating on the breaking news with your unique view on the topic. Think hard, you will develop a point of view.
• Thought-provoking: An article that stirs your thought or gives you a critical outlook about the subject at hand can be clubbed with quality articles. A quality article also gives a new point of view or tends to challenge the assumption held by people at large.

Next time when you write check your content for these traits.

Reason 1: To express what you feel

We express ourselves, we do it daily, and we do it in huge chunks. We talk about how we feel about certain government decision, certain blog, certain people, certain ideas, certain system, etc., but what about “what are you doing” questions? Well, twitter asks you this, and it gets all sorts of answers in maximum 140 characters. This is a great way to express yourself by giving bit-size information, rather than bearing the burden of need lot to say

Reason 2: To listen what others have to say

A good communication is the one in which you listen double as much as you speak. People will listen to you only when you will listen to them. It holds true with twitter communication as well. This tool help you listen to what people has to say, and to understand their point of view on the matter as well.

Reason 3: To strike conversation

Twitter is not Instant messaging (IM) service, but still you can strike conversation here, Use @your friend’s name to send a reply to what your friend has to say, or send a direct message (or DM them in twitter term) and begin the ping-pong game of conversation.

Reason 4: To know where is your friend

In most of the cases, your friend will tell on her own that where she is and what she is doing. If you are following your friend closely then I am sure she will tell you all about her there. As the news has come to me, twitter is going to allow geo-stamp (geographic location stamp) on the tweets, which means you can tell from where your friend has tweeted.

Reason 5: To sound knowledgeable

You do not need to be an Einstein to sound knowledgeable, you just need to be on top of the news, and what too is better than twitter in achieving that? Follow what you love most or what your peer group wants to hear from you and talk as if you own the information. Twitter can help you in doing all this.

Definition of Marketing

“Meeting needs profitably” is the core on which the gigantic frame of marketing is standing. And when I say, marketing meets everyone’s needs profitably then I mean it for every stake holder. For consumer it is to buy solution at the best possible price, for organization it is to grow at rapid pace, for investor it means to maximize the return on Investment, and for marketer it means meeting their goals.

How can we achieve this goal

All these needs are not mutually exclusive; they can be met all at once. But for this one need to broaden one’s horizon to include other’s point of view as well. To achieve this we need to consider the following:

• Marketers need to be honest when assessing consumer’s need and/or when selling their products to meet their monthly, quarterly, or yearly target.
• Investor needs to empathize with the consumer, and marketer who are interacting in the market. They should not just focus on more and more and even more return. Being too greedy is not the answer to their problem.
• A business should understand that the number of consumers will always be limited, so they should avoid getting trapped in “perennial growth” cycle. Growth in market share, sales volume, profit, etc., should be chased but not as fiercely as companies are doing. Too much greed is not good.
• Consumers should learn to trust the marketers, and should tell them about their needs, desires, ambitions, values, etc.
• Consumers need to understand that they need marketing and marketer to search for the solutions to their problems. Marketers are not some crooked wizard.
• Consumers need to understand that for them marketer is a time-saving device, a need analyzer, and a search engine that help them find what they need.
• Regulator should see if everything is going all right. Regulator should be honest in analyzing the market condition, and if everyone is doing what he or she is required to do.
• Businesses, marketers, and investor need to be more socially responsible. They need to care for the well-being of consumers. They should think of how they can make a world a better place.

Do not think that I am someone else. I, myself is a marketer, but like most of my fellow, I do not take people for a ride.

Writing group

Join a writing group in your neighborhood. Make sure it is not very far because distance works as a deterrent for many new writers. If you could not find a writing group in your neighborhood, form one.

Book reading club

Become a member of a book reading club. This will help you refine your existing ideas, and it will also help you get new ideas. Reading is the best advice that can be given to a writer. A writer who does not read cannot produce a good quality work for long. If there is not any book reading club in your neighborhood then form one.

Socialize with writers

Talking to fellow writers will help you unearth many hidden issues, and it will also help you find answers of many unasked questions as well. A practicing writer can become a better guide in telling you how to write, how to use different writing tools, and how to keep your writing simple yet powerful.

Meet someone who is not like you

Meeting a person who is not like you, and who has different point of view, desires, values, etc., will give you a good understanding in human nature. Meet a person of such standing and reflect on the experience you have by meeting him, and the experiences he or she shared with you.

Leave your couch

This is important. Your couch has become your comfort zone, or is it your chair that has become your comfort zone? Challenge yourself and break free. I am asking you to leave your comfort zone, and try meeting new people, and experiencing new things. The more experience you will bag, the better accomplished writer you will become.

On numerous occasions, we have inklings about the thing we want to write about, but we cannot convert it into a good article because we do not know from where to start and what to write first to convert the idea into an article. In the situation like this, a pre-written powerful headline comes to our rescue. It works as a guiding post for us, which shows us the end of the article. The pre-written headline will tell what you should write to fulfill the promise it made to the readers of your blog or website.

Let’s say, you have to write on a topic related to health and you have some idea about what all should be covered, but you are not sure from where to begin writing. Should you start saying why health is wealth; or should you start by saying the things to do to have a healthy life; or is talking about the detrimental effect of stress on our life what you want to write about?

In the above example, you can see that each topic is different and will require different treatment. Is this why you are confused? Now, look back at the above written topic again, but from a different point of view. From the point of view of a headline. Let’s write the headline first, and see how we fare.

“10 Stress-relieving Tips for a Healthy Life”

Or

“How to lead Stress-free, and Happy Life”

Or

“Health, Wealth and Stress”

You may have noticed, although, each of them deals with the same subject, each of the three headlines needs different treatment. Each of the headlines suggested above tells us what we have to write about. They help us organize our thought in a particular way.  A headline set course for us, and it also tells the reader what kind of article is coming. It is a promise made by you and fulfilled by the article.

A headline sets a goal for us that we must reach by shaping words and sculpting sentences to give it a form of an article.

Sometimes, instinct gives a good indication about what topic will get warm welcome from the readers, and what will be ignored as if it never existed, but instinct cannot be a reliable guide, if you have to write daily or regularly for any magazine, newspaper, online magazine or blog. You need a more reliable system then the instinct has to offer.

Before working on developing any idea into an article or a blog post, you should check how it does on the following parameter:

Do you have something new to offer?

The chances are quite high that the topic you are going to write about has already been covered by the magazine or blog you are writing for. Even if they have not covered it, their competitors must have done that. Do you have anything new to say about the weight-loss program you are going to write about? Any new development or a new angle? Even a fresh point of view can offer the required newness.

Does your writing flow?

If you want people to read what you write, your articles and blog posts need to flow. No one likes bumpy rides. Your words and sentences should help them glide through the paragraph after paragraphs. Do not use jargons, and keep the structure as simple as the writing idea permits. Always remember, your readers have limited time, and in this time, he can either read your article or do other things like, watching television, listening music, or write on Facebook walls.

How will it connect with the reader?

This is the most crucial point. You have a groundbreaking idea, and your writing style makes you hell of a charmer, but still your visitors are not falling over each other to read your piece, why? May be because you have targeted a wrong market, and the readers here are too smart or too stupid for your kind of articles. People will read only if you step up or step down (depending upon where you are) to their level. Can the reader connect with your article?

What’s the use?

Imagine this: you have come home after a long tiring day at office, and you turned on your laptop to read something, or picked a magazine to browse through. Your eyes happen to find an article that has a nice juicy headline, interesting sub-headlines, and even the first few lines are written wonderfully. You couldn’t resist but read it till the end, but here comes the bomb. The article has nothing to offer but a nice flowing style of writing. It doesn’t add even a single word, sentence or idea to your repertoire of the existing knowledge. You feel wastes. Your reader will feel the same, so make sure you are writing because you have something valuable to offer.

Will it entertain?

The entertainment value of any article should not be underrated. People do not read your article just because they feel you are going to redeem them. They do not think that way, nor are they here to get enlightened, though they will not mind it, if the redemption and enlightenment is offered sugar-coated in entertainment. You do not need to preach to send the serious message across. Do not think readers are so blunt.

Well, always reread anything you’ve written a few times, to ensure that your sentences flow naturally, and to clear up any grammatical mistakes you may have made.  Good policy also suggests reading your pieces aloud, as it’s a fantastic method to double check how your writing sounds on the whole.  Reading aloud will give you the opportunity to make sure that everything flows properly, and that all sentences sound complete.

Another widely used, and remarkably effective tactic, is to read in reverse.  This is helpful for weeding out those cursed grammatical errors that you may still miss despite completing two or three rereads.  When you read your piece in reverse it eliminates the brain’s tendency to remember what you’ve written, which can cause you to skip over mistakes without even knowing that you have.

When restructuring a sentence never add more words to the sentence than were originally there, always cut the excess.  The problem with most first drafts of any piece of writing, is that they are much longer than necessarily needed.  Focus on condensing your concepts into as few sentences and paragraphs as possible, that way you can form a short concise work that will appeal to a broader audience.

These are just a few quick editing tips, there are many, many more concepts when you really get more in depth into what the editing process can do for a piece of writing.  But follow those guidelines and you’ll find yourself well on your way to becoming a better, and more complete writer.

MVC or Model-View-Controller is a design pattern that separates a program into three components, the View, the Model and the Controller. The View refers to the component that appears to the user. It is the code that generates what is shown to the user and it also receives input from the user as needed. The Controller on the other hand, refers on the code that determines what action should be taken when a request from the user is received. Finally, the Model refers to the section of code that does the processing of the request and also saves or retrieves data for the user before handing it back to the View.

Now, let’s focus on this design pattern in the web application programming point of view. MVC is currently being implemented by two of the popular web programming languages. It is used in J2EE through the Struts, Spring, and JSF frameworks while it is also implemented by Ruby through the Rails framework. Other languages also have similar frameworks available though not as popular as those mentioned. Lately, Microsoft has also released an update for their .NET framework to support the MVC pattern.

What really makes this pattern so powerful is that it allows an application to be built independently from each other. This means, changes made to the implementation of one component should not drastically affect the other sections. This is especially beneficial for teams working on a program. Some of them can be working on the View component; creating the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code that allows for a more pleasing web interface for the user. Others on the team could be working on the business logic of the program, focusing on how the data is processed and saved or retrieved from the database. Most importantly, the controller can be used to direct where requests are sent and to what page will the information be displayed.

Let’s trace how a request is processed in an MVC pattern. Let’s start with the request coming from the user. The user usually makes their first request by invoking the initial page of a website by entering the website’s URL in the browser. The controller catches the request for the initial page and invokes the proper action which makes the proper calls to the model components that accomplish the necessary processing. Once all the required information are gathered, the page is rendered by the view and the page is shown to the user.

Volumes can be written about the MVC pattern and its intricacies so for more information, you may visit WikiPedia for more information and links to MVC frameworks for your programming language of choice.

From a logical point of view, touchscreen devices are more intuitive. Instead of using several keypresses on your phone to navigate to a menu, you can simply touch an icon on the screen to accomplish the same task. In this arena, the iPhone must be the most popular and innovative device, prompting other cellphone manufacturers to follow suit and create their own “touch” phones. Before the iPhone came into the scene, most touchscreen devices made use of a stylus or similar tool to interact with the device. However, they were not as successful as the iPhone in their implementation. The touchscreen was more of a novelty than a tool that one can rely on when using the device, thus the need for a keypad or keyboard to still be attached to the device.

Then came the iPhone. The touchscreen on the iPhone was made the primary input tool. Everything you had do on the iPhone, you can do with the touchscreen. And it wasn’t just a normal touchscreen that was included in the phone. The iPhone also offered multi-touch input. Multi-touch allowed the user to use two or more fingers at the same time to touch the screen and provide a more intuitive way to interact with the phone. You can now zoom in or zoom out a picture with the use of your thumb and index finger with a pinching motion on the screen.

Microsoft also had it’s eye on touchscreen technology for a long time now. In 2007, Microsoft displayed a working version of their Microsoft Surface device which was designed initially to be used for kiosks found at hotels, restaurants, shops, etc. The Microsoft Surface looks like a small table that had an interactive touchscreen for a tabletop. The user can touch the screen, or even just put different objects like cellphones and digital cameras on top of the device to allow the user to gain access to the information on those devices or to transfer data into those devices. It can also detect a glass placed on on top of it, allowing the Surface device to display animation or even display a menu of wine choices. Credit cards can also be placed on top of the Surface device allowing one to pay for their bill without the need to call the waiter.

Touchscreen technology has also reached the gaming console world. With the release of the Nintendo DS, gamers were immersed in an all new gameplay style that was never before experienced in other devices of its kind. This allowed game programmers to design games with more innovation which would be impossible to create with traditional game input mainly in the form of the joystick and buttons.

And this is just the beginning. The number of touchscreen devices are only bound to get larger in the coming years. As demand for such devices have increased considerably this year, more and more companies have started to put forward their own offerings. While Apple still leads the pack in the touchscreen cellphone and media player markets via their iPhone and iTouch products, other cellphone companies are closely behind with their own offerings.

Cellphones you may want to consider when purchasing a touchscreen phone, are:

• Apple iPhone 3G
• Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
• Sony Ericsson Xperia X1
• Samsung Omnia SGH-i900
• HTC Touch HD
• LG KP500 Cookie

If you are looking for a touchscreen PC on the other hand, you may want to check out the HP TouchSmart. It features multi-touch similar to what the iPhone and Microsoft Surface has. And as demonstrated by Microsoft, it works beautifully well with their upcoming Windows 7 operating system which should replace Windows Vista in the near future.

Truly, the touchscreen revolution in gadgets and devices is nigh! Once the price of the devices come down to levels that are more affordable to the common person, it is not impossible that there will come a time that all devices will have an interactive touchscreen as a standard method for input.