Affiliate programs may be the easiest online business to
start running. Why?

With any online business you must have a product or service
to sell. First you must create this product or service and
then you must be able to fill orders.

Selling your own product or service also means creating a
website, learning how to write ad copy, setting up a
marketing plan, being able to accept payments online and
obviously doing the work. If you’re selling a physical
product then you will need to make or buy the item, package
it and pay for shipping costs. If you provide a service
than you will likely have to start by doing free jobs to
build your credibility and then when you are charging for
your service you are still limited by how much work you can
actually handle.

THE MAGIC OF AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

Affiliate programs are a great way to get started in an
online business. In fact there are even some ‘Super
Affiliates’ who are making fabulous incomes from affiliate
programs. So, what ARE affiliate programs?

Affiliate programs allow you to sell another company’s
service or product and make a commission on every sale or
lead. You do not even need to build a website or handle the
transaction. Your job is to drive traffic (customers) to
your affiliate link.

An affiliate link is a special URL code that will identify
customers coming to the company’s site from your
advertising. It will likely be the website address with a
code attached to the end.

Some affiliate programs also have tiers. That means if
someone who is interested in SELLING the product comes
through your link and signs up you will also get a small
percentage of THEIR earnings.

HOW DO I CHOOSE A PROGRAM?

You should research the popularity of some of your
interests. Try to determine if people are buying that
product or service online. There are many sources for
finding that information including free ones such as the
Overture keyword tool.

When you have found an area that is popular then type the
subject along with ‘affiliate program’ into your search
engine and see which programs have services or products for
that area. You can also use an affiliate program directory.

When you have found a program that looks interesting you
should read the terms of the program. Make sure that payouts
are not based on a high commission earning or you may never
see your money. Also try to choose programs with high
commission rates. Often you will find ebooks and
downloadable software has the highest rates as there is no
physical product to make or ship. If you are satisfied with
the terms then you need to sign up - usually a simple
process.

START MARKETING

The reason affiliate programs are so great for beginners is
that you only need to focus on marketing - not making - your
product.

Many affiliate programs have information on how to market
and give you tools such as banners, product feeds and more.
You can also look for other information on marketing
including writing articles, creating pay-per-click
campaigns, commenting in online forums etc. As you gain
experience marketing you will make adjustments to your
selling and start creating a wonderful income!

Brennan Howe is the owner of http://www.opportunity4all.net -
Intenet Opportunities for the Average Person. Sign up to
receive a 10 part internet marketing course and free downloads.

You are serving great food. Your establishment is new, spotless and inviting and yet you are not getting the repeat visits that you expect. What’s up? What’s going wrong?

The answer may lie with your people skills…

Why do people come to your restaurant?
By now you should know why people frequent your restaurant…or at least you should know why they don’t.

They do not come for cheap food. It’s cheaper at home and there is certain to be cheaper restaurants than yours.

They certainly come to eat different foods that they cannot make at home but there are plenty of similar restaurants to yours.

So you will have worked out your “unique selling benefit” and you will have marketed that. They don’t come back and you have to discover what it is that is not providing the benefit that they were expecting.

Often the answer is with your people.
Customers come for the total experience. It will not matter whether the food is excellent and the coffee outstanding if the waiting staff is unfriendly and distant. Their evening will have been ruined and they will not come back again.

When you employ front-of-house employees their technical skills are not as important as their attitude.

You can teach a person the technical skills but it is almost impossible to teach them to change their attitudes. If your applicant finds it difficult to smile during her interview then she is certain to be an unsmiling distant waitress. She is not for you.

A warm and friendly applicant with little experience is by far the better prospect.

What about your own people skills?
In our consulting we quite often see managers whose dealing with patrons is excellent but with staff and others atrocious.

Never give your staff a ‘dressing down’ in front of customers. It makes customers uncomfortable at best and downright angry if they have established a rapport with the staff member.

Your attitude toward staff should be one that leads them to better service and higher morale.

Will they ever need strong criticism? They sure will…but keep it between yourselves.

http://ww.profitstrategies4business.com

About the Author

Kelvyn Peters CPA is one of the longest serving Australian Tax Agents. He registered as tax agent in 1962 and was accepted as a CPA in 1964.

He has become much sought after as an educator and speaker on small business. One organisation says that the highlight of the annual meeting is Kelvyn’s ability to present the audited statements in a humorous way.

Kelvyn is famous for his ability to rescue ailing small businesses.

http://profitstrategies4business.com

There was a time, back in the 20th century, when everyone wanted
to have their own online shopping cart system. By 1997,
Amazon.com had served their millionth customer and was really
starting to impress regular folks. The internet looked like a
realistic way to do business, maybe even for small businesses.

So soon everyone wanted a shopping cart, got one ready to go,
and… nothing. They didn’t get any traffic. Then came the
website submission hounds with programs like SubmitWolf. It
worked for a time, though some submitters turned into spammers
and thus began the game of cat and mouse between spammers and
search engines.

As the number of websites grew, and around 2000 when Google, who
had partnered with RedHat and Yahoo, began to become a real
force, it was no longer enough to have a website and submit
it… at least not for small businesses online. Sure, about $66
billion dollars in in goods was sold online in1999, but mostly
by big players who already had bricks and mortar momentum. If
the new guy on the block wanted a piece of the action, he had to
get smart and stay smart.

Cue the SEO experts, a growing herd of geeks with a profusion of
theories about the directories and search engines. Some search
engine optimizers were ethical and followed the rules set by
search engines. Others practiced “black hat” SEO. The search
engines guarded closely how they rank pages but some SEO
devotees put all their energy into trying to reverse engineer
those algorithms, to discover the magic formula, and find holes,
however temporary, to exploit.

By the dawn of the 21st century, some basic “white hat” SEO
principles had solidified, and the fad had shifted from shopping
carts to informational websites. You can’t optimize something
that doesn’t have information, and the more you have the better.
Also, a lot of internet junkies prefer the purely digital and
neither had, nor wanted to have, any physical products to sell.

But digital purists need money too, so various revenue sources
have been explored - from running advertisements (clunky old
banners and the dynamic AdSense variety), to helping others sell
their goods through affiliate programs, to developing their own
digital goods, like ebooks, special reports, even programs and
web utilities. These paths have already been trailblazed, but
you still must to choose the best one for you. If you have a
product, you’ll want to use the internet to sell it. If you
don’t have one, you could develop one. If you don’t want to,
sell other people’s. If you don’t want to do that, just run ads.

Let’s forget, for the moment, that these all depend on incoming
web traffic, and just focus on the pros and cons of each revenue
source:

1. Selling physical goods requires warehousing, shipping,
returns, and heavy customer service. It’s a significant
investment of time and/or money, but this has the highest
revenue potential.

2. Just running ads is much less work, especially with if you
don’t have to deal directly with the advertisers. However, the
earnings per click are quite low, so you need a lot more traffic
to make good money. And not all informational topics are
profitable. For example, searchers for entertainment and sports
information don’t tend to click on ads or buy anything.

3. When you promote other people’s goods as an affiliate, you
sit between the last two options- it can pay better than ads and
be less hassle than hard goods. But you still have to provide
content on profitable topics, and you need to be a comfortable
and effective salesperson for the products that pay your bills.

4. Developing and selling your own digital products is at least
as much work as selling hard goods, but requires much less
overhead. You can write an ebook, turn it into a pdf, and get it
onto a website with very little money.

5. And we shouldn’t end without mentioning that you can also
sell your services online. If you write about what you do,
whether you’re a web designer, lawyer, doctor, psychologist,
carpenter, whatever, you can get web visits from prospects in
your local area and turn those people into customers.

If you think affiliate marketing is easy money, think again. You have to work just as hard at affiliate marketing as you would for any other website. Some get involved in affiliate marketing thinking they can just set up a one page website with a link and they will start raking in cash. Some people think that they will convert at a one to one ratio for every click when that is not the case. Many don’t take the time to research markets, select their keywords, apply good content, optimize their web pages, and set advertising budgets. Those are the people that fail.

If you get involved in affiliate marketing then you should try to avoid throwing up a crappy site because it will not work. Take your time and research your market. See how many search results there are for your main keywords. See how many searches per month your keywords get by looking at the overture search tool. After that task is completed take a few months to optimize your website for search engine. The reason that should be done is because just relying on pay per click (PPC) can be very expensive. You would be better off waiting until you are getting some search engine traffic.

The main things in affiliate marketing are to not rush into it. Do your research and do not just rely on PPC advertising. Doing so will only waste your time and money and leave you frustrated in the end.

- Excerpt from Richard Saporito’s latest e-book “How to Improve Dining Room Service”

This Tip will Help Maintain the Staff Schedule Keeping the Dining Room Service Staff Tight and Content which is Essential for Pleasing Paying Guests.

Staff scheduling is closely tied to dining room customer service and crucial for keeping your staff tight, happy and well connected. In every way, a balance must be achieved by matching the dining room service labor needs to forecasted business.

There should be a system whereby the staff shift availability days can be communicated in writing to the person who makes up the schedule. A simple staff shift availability sign-up sheet posted conspicuously will do. Each staff member should work a balanced amount of shifts throughout the week. If the schedule maker is burning out staff members with extra shifts or scheduling too many staff members to work only 1 or 2 shifts, it will subtract from customer service. Usually, a restaurant will get more efficiency from staff members working 3, 4, or more shifts per week rather than only 1 or 2 shifts per week. Though at times, one may have to bend this guideline to keep the work schedule filled, but it should be kept to a minimum. Constant communication with the staff while staying abreast of their available work shifts will facilitate the scheduling process immensely.

The person who makes the schedule should be highly aware of the projected business in the restaurant. The schedule should contain the correct amount of labor needed to provide a proper level of service for each work shift. Seasonal aspects, (e.g. busy holidays/slow summers), special occasions, private parties etc. must be figured into the schedule. Any outside activity that may affect business in the restaurant such as food festivals, parades etc. needs to be taken into account. If there are separate dining rooms, the busy times must be properly forecasted for each room especially if one dining room is more popular such as showing off a special type of décor or providing entertainment on certain nights. If there is outdoor seating, the weather should be watched for it can change quickly.

Forecasting helps to schedule the correct amount of staff with the perfect balance always being sought. If there is light scheduling on a day that gets very busy, the dining room customer service will be slow and inefficient –affecting sales and reputation. On the contrary, if there is heavy scheduling on light business days, it will become frustrating for waitstaff will be working very few tables while draining the payroll.

Generally, the schedule should start Sunday; therefore it needs to be posted by Thurs. or Fri. of the previous week. Excel spreadsheet formats are great for scheduling organization. The schedule should be posted in an easily viewable location with enough copies available for all staff. Staff phone lists should be printed, copied and made readily available to all. This improves communication especially for work shift substitutions.

This leads to the substitution process for staff work shifts. There needs to be a Substitution Book readily available with blank spaces for names, upcoming dates and work shifts for the next 1 to 2 months. If a substitution made, the information must be recorded with the date and shift time a.m/p.m. etc. It must be initialed by both parties involved in the substitution and finally initialed by a manager ensuring no mistakes in communication. A substitution mishap may result in a shift not being covered.

Scheduling may look great for payroll cost control, but it must be remembered that dining room service staff are real people with real lives whose cheerful and efficient service is what restaurants are dependant upon. The schedule maker needs to be understanding towards the staff’s schedule requests, but should not roll over and play dead (again, balance). It is impossible to please everyone 100% all of the time, but a proper scheduling balance will truly have a positive effect on restaurant dining room customer service and staff.

*** It is better for a manager or service consultant to handle the schedule at the initial phases of a new operation and should be monitored by a second or third person especially if the restaurant has just opened. Some mature restaurants may let a senior member of the service staff handle the schedule because there is better communiqué’ with schedule concerns. Please use whichever system works best for the establishment for the staff schedule is a strong part of customer service and should not be taken lightly.

Topserve Inc. is a Restaurant Service Consulting and Waiter Training Company.

Richard Saporito, founder, has over 25yrs. of restaurant service experience in many large, diverse and profitable establishments. Since the age of 15, he has worked in more than 20 New York City restaurants and uses this past successful experience to help restaurants achieve their desired customer service goals-understanding it may be the difference between success and failure.

Richard Saporito, President, Topserve Inc.

http://www.topserveconsulting.com
info@topserveconsulting.com
888-276-4808