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Personalization is the latest technology that the internet has granted markers in different businesses. Companies can provide their customers what they exactly require or offer recommendations on what they would like to have.

If you go online now, you will find that shopping has been made more appealing. Once you buy an item or search for an individual item more than once, search engines record your online activities. This information is later used in target marketing where you will be given suggestion on things that you that fit your lifestyle.

Questions to Ask Yourself

You should begin by identifying your target audience. This will help you focus on a more manageable group. To improve your customer’s experience online is “what are the steps they follow in buying products and services online”. This is a vital aspect of your digital marketing strategies in the sense that it will help you understand their needs.

The other question that you should ask yourself is how you can effectively use the information in their decision-making to offer better online experience to them. Adjusting your technique to fit with their journey is your ultimate weapon to success.

What are the steps in customer’s decision making?

Brand Recognition

Potential customers need to recognize your brand before they can visit your site. You should take your time to create awareness for your business by investing in advertising campaigns. Find out what other brands in your niche are doing to create awareness to their customers. Learn from their strategies and strive to find how to be better by using unique techniques.

How familiar are you with them?

Knowing how to make your customers familiar to your line of business can be a challenge. However, you can effectively make them familiar with creating an interactive environment. Here, you can use your social media platforms to showcase your products and services. Employ tailored messaging and content marketing to help you introduce your customers to the brand. This will make them feel welcomed and want to know more.

Feeling at Home

Consideration is the one thing you should focus on to improve the consumer experience. Once your customers are familiar with your product, they would wish to see how you cater for their needs. Making them feel at home and considered will go a long way to building your brand. Torture them with attention and kindness by giving them a chance to ask questions and get sample tests on products. This will make them come for more next time.

Buying your products and becoming loyal customers

This is the last stage in consumer’s decision-making process. This is where they decide to buy your products and buy more in future from your brand. Once your strategy is working and you are landing more customers, continue using it. Also, look for reviews and feedback from customers for improvement and advancement.

Learning to make money online is not easy and if anyone tells you that all you have to is push some button or join some program and you will make a fortune overnight then you should be very careful and skeptical as the reality is that there are certain skills you must master in order to be successful and there is definitely work involved. If you have strong drive and are willing to put the time as well as some money to learn then success can be possible.

Affiliate marketing:

If you do not have any products or services of your own then it is still possible to earn income online as you can promote other people’s products through affiliate marketing. This can be a great way for the average person to get started as it is quick and does not require much money to get started. The first step is to pick a good affiliate product to promote, there are many good affiliate networks such as Commission Junction, ClickBank, Linkshare to name a few. The next step would be to decide on traffic sources that you can send targeted traffic to your affiliate pages. It is important to find a way to collect email addresses also from visitors as this will allow you to follow up with them over time and increase your return on investment.

You should consider using an auto responder service to generate an opt in list as these leads can be valuable in the long term for following up and offering other similar products. A key tip to keep in mind when choosing a product is to make sure that you believe in the product and that it is either something you are using or would consider using in the future. Keep in mind that selling is a transference of feelings so if you believe in the products and services then it will be reflected in the sales and marketing messages. In order to collect leads you will need to create a landing page with the opt in form. Be sure to split test multiple landing pages in your advertising campaigns and track your opt in rates closely. There are many good link tracking software programs out there so pick one that is in your price range and use it to track your campaigns closely. Use some of these tips to help you become more successful at making money online.

Do you have a website or blog you publish content to every day but still not able to get enough visitors?

Have you just created your very first blog and are keen to try out all the ways to promote it?

This article presents 10 smartest and most effective strategies you can use to promote your blog and instantly attract visitors who are genuinely interested in your niche.

1. Stop Tweaking / Modifying Your Blog

Are you spending too much time tweaking your blog to give it the right feel? Let me tell you, the overall design does not matter to your audience as much as your content does. Instead of tweaking your blog every now and then, focus on creating content that is fresh, engaging and informative for your readers and make them come back for more.

2. Creating Pillar Content

Producing quality content is one of the biggest challenges for bloggers because creating high-quality content on a regular basis isn’t easy. Good content makes a powerful impact on your audience, which is why it is important that you take the time to create the high-quality pillar content that can solidify your blog’s reputation. Pillar content refers to a series of posts that represents your blog’s best content. It includes all the great posts that you will refer new visitors to for their usefulness.

Great content serves as a go-to source for good and informative message for your audience within your particular industry. Pillar posts provide major support to your blog and are considered a very important component or staple of your blog. When you start promoting your blog, pillar content will serve as your bait to attract more traffic.

Once you have set up your blog, the very first strategy you should implement is to create relevant posts and populate your blog with some really new, yet interactive information.

3. Don’t Focus On Monetizing Your Blog Too Much

Many new bloggers create blogs to earn money. Although there is no harm in earning money, putting too many banner ads on your blog can become too distracting for your audience. If there are too many, they can make your blog look really ugly and they can actually take your visitors away from your blog. Do you still think this could be a great way to promote your blog? I bet you don’t. In fact, you should focus on building your email list and a targeted pixel list. Both of them will help you get what you’re desperately looking for, more visitors and more money by re-targeting your visitors through paid ads.

4. Research Your Niche and Find Out Who and What Matters

A very important step you should take before starting your blog is to thoroughly research your niche. You should need to spend know all the ins and outs of your niche and know who matters, for instance, who are the influencers, big players and small players contributing to the niche in their own capacities. You should make a list of all the competing sites, channels, podcasts, influencers, communities and groups that are working within your particular niche. It’s very easy with SE Ranking competitor research.

Ever felt that your website is not getting enough amount of traffic? Or you have visitors but they are not actually turning into paying customers. It is because you have only made an upright website but haven’t worked enough on the UX and UI elements for making the visitors turned to buyers.

Experts in the web development realm have been consistently providing great conversion tips to assure website’s success for the companies and here we are discussing the same for PHP websites. Well, there are innumerable ways you can boost the performance of your website but need to bring to play only those techniques that will deliver results in the shortest time.

Read on to know few of them which is appropriate and simple for every website irrespective of what it deals in or what type of visitors it targets.

Improvement in the Site’s design along with Navigation

While website development is not only about appearance, good looking sites do attract visitors in the first instance. So, you need to work on its overall appearance by putting great background graphics, motion UI elements, vivid colors. Further to provide smooth navigation use clear menus, minimise scroll down options and reduce distractions through too many links.

Place up-to-date and engaging content

The notion that “content is the king’ applies for all websites of all sizes, scales, and businesses. It is one of the biggest critical factors playing its part in search engine optimisation. Thus, you need to put precise, relevant and updated content that is well convincing for the visitors to avail your services.

Put enticing headings and clear CALL-TO-ACTIONS

To keep every single page attractive to the visitors, put alluring headlines and headings for the content and keep prominent Call-to-Actions to push visitors to the main page or checkout phase.

Create Buyers Personas to target the right audience

Figure out who are your targeted customers are and what type of information might interest them. Placing such type of content that pique their interests will help them relate to you and your site.

Go for A/B testing

To ascertain a good rate of conversion in your site, it’s about testing! A/B testing is one of the effective testing ways to enhance conversions of a web page. It splits up the audience into two equal parts and redirects them to two alternate versions of a page. The page getting maximum sales will help you know which version is apt for your site.

Use responsive or mobile-friendly design

According to the latest studies on the market scenario, a hefty percentage of population use only their phones to access websites either to seek information or any service. To go with this radical change and prevent your website from being lagged back, make sure your website responds to phones of different screen sizes and resolutions and works seamlessly in the mobile user interface.

Nonetheless, if you want your website to be swamped with a great number of visitors every day, you need to work on its design as well as performance. These tips focus on both. So, to every website owner out there who are trying to good business with their websites, make sure its core aspects are optimised and tweaked in to serve only and only the interests of the targeted audience.

ONE ~ Connect through Groups & Communities

First things first, you need to connect with online groups that are similar to your business. This allows you to see what your competitors are doing and what is working with customers looking for the services/products you provide. Though this is a vital step in your online business promotion, try not to push your business through these groups. You can include a link to your business’s website or blog at the end of your posts, but your primary goal is to connect not market.

TWO ~ Using Listing Services

Next, you need to make it easy for customers to find your business. Registering through listing services makes it easy for customers to find you using the search methods they are already familiar with. The three most notable choices are Bing, Yahoo! Local, and Google Places. Most businesses use these sites as they are popular across many users.

THREE ~ Optimizing the Search for Your Business

Along with getting your business name up where people are searching, you’ll need to optimize the way you word information. This optimization improves the likelihood that your business will pop up when that information is searched. This is called SEO and stands for Search Engine Optimization. There are many “how to” guides out there for more information on how to refine your SEO.

FOUR ~ Create a Blog and/or Website

A blog is a wonderful tool for customers to connect with your business and learn what it’s all about. This encourages them to stay with you over competitors as you can connect on a deeper level with your followers. Another amazing link a blog provides is allowing your customers to become email subscribers. This keeps your customers connected to your business and all the services/products you have to offer them.

FIVE ~ Social Media & Multimedia

Social media and multimedia are to a blog what SEO is to listing services. To get blog traffic, you need to post your content to social media sites so your customers can find you. Another benefit of the connections you generate through your online groups and communities is knowing what gets the most attention. Multimedia includes the use of videos to market your business. Online video marketing is actually one of the best ways to reach people as it requires very little work on their part to view. Video marketing is also a fun and simple way to reach your customers. Social media and multimedia are very important as many people are constantly connected to their social feeds.

Though it seems hectic, it is not impossible or as difficult as it appears to promote your business online. You just need to know where to start when aiming to develop your business online. If you use these easy methods, you are sure to reach the masses and increase your business. So, show the world the wonderful services your business has to offer. Bring your business to the people and the people will come to you!

Over the past few years, SEO has evolved faster than the previous decade. And this has made it harder for users to keep up with most recent updates. The launch of Penguin and Panda changed the way things worked in the past. In short, the way Google used to rank website has changed a lot. But if you want to reach your objectives, make sure you avoid some common SEO mistakes.

1. Avoiding RELEVANT CONTENT

In the start, Google said that it would rank websites that have the most relevant content on its first page. This statement is still valid. What has happened is that the search engine has become a lot better at achieving the objectives. In other words, now, Google is in better position to know what is relevant and what is not.

So, what you need to do is offer content that is relevant and avoid content is not relevant to your niche. Of course, the content should be informative and unique.

2. Following Tricks

People have been using many illegal ways of cheating the search engine algorithms for traffic, exposure and backlinks. Some of these tactics can still give you a temporary edge, but they are bad for your blog or website for the long-term.

So, you should avoid using low-quality, duplicate content, keyword stuffing, questionable redirects or cloaking for traffic. It may be tempting to go for these short-cuts, but they will just hurt your ranking, and may even get you banned for good.

3. Overloading your site

It has been a common perception that photos, videos and other graphics make a website more appealing for the viewers. To some extent, this perception is true; however, there should not be too much of it or your website will take ages to load. Your viewers don’t have all day to wait for your site to load. If your blog takes longer to load than other websites, the viewers will just click away. You will not only lose viewers, you will also lose ranking against other websites.

4. Making navigation difficult

Navigation is one of the most important factors for any website. It’s important for both viewers and search engines. Ideally, your viewers should be able to get the desired information from your website in one or two clicks. This may not be an easy task for you. So, what you can do is put important content on the main page of your site. This the users will be able to get what they want more easily.

5. Misunderstanding THE BACKLINK PROCESS

You may not want to be obsessed with obtaining a lot of backlinks. Although you don’t have to have backlinks from authority websites to establish your credibility, it helps a lot. However, what you need to do is try to get backclinks in a nature fashion. But it’s not a good idea to buy backlinks. This is one of the worst mistakes that you can make.

Quality content is the key to SEO success. Content doesn’t just mean your text contents. Images must be an integral part of your content strategy. At times, single images can be far more effective than your 1000 word blog post. It also helps you improve blog post quality and performance.

Images, Infographics, Videos and all other multimedia contents on your web page will help you in increasing the user engagement on your site and makes the visitors stay on your site for longer duration which helps in reducing the bounce rate.

Not just adding images to your contents, you should also optimize those images for better SEO performance. Optimization of images must be the one important aspect of your on-page SEO process.

If you are using images in your content, there are many aspects to be considered related to SEO.

Relevancy

Using images doesn’t mean that you should fill up your content with loads of pictures. You should use it only when it is required and also you should use images that are more relevant to your content.

Placement of your images is an another important aspect. It should be placed at a relevant location in your content according to your text content.

Use original images

Originality always helps in improving your user experience and your authority. Usage of original images will be helpful in improving your SEO performance. You can create original images with a graphic designer or you can take your own photographs with a quality camera. It is the reason top White hat SEO companies employ talented graphic designers for creating quality images.

If you are not able to employ an in-house graphic designer or if you are running out of time, you can always use high quality images from the web. But the important factor to be considered is it should be copyright free.

There are many tools available for getting copyright free images without any cost. The most popular ones are Unsplash, Flicker, Freeimages.

Image Size

Images are the main source for damping your site’s speed. And site speed is a crucial factor in your SEO performance. So, you should be extra cautious in using images without compromising your page speed.

It should not also affect your image quality, you should have a correct balance between. You can achieve this by reducing the file size by compression. You can use tools like Photoshop for compression.

File name

Search engine crawlers are visually impaired, it can even interrupt a 5000 word text content, but it cannot interrupt a single image and what the image is about. It is the reason using a keyword rich file names for your images is an important aspect in image optimization.

Google bots and other search engine crawlers can read your image’s file name and if it is named with your target keyword, it gives a signal to search engines about the image topic and thus helps your SEO performance.

For example, if your image is related to selling sports shoes, rather than using the file name as “IMG_89868″ you can use it as “Black_Tennis_Shoes”.

Alt text

Similar to the file name, search engines can read Alt text of the images. Alt text is known as “Aleternative Text”, is an HTML attribute used to describe the content of images.

You should use Alt text which is relevant to your images and it should be clear and descriptive. You can use your target keywords in the Alt text but be cautious about Keyword stuffing.

If you are not focusing on Image optimization, you are missing a huge opportunity in improving your SEO performance. You can use above mentioned best practices in your on-page optimization process.

American youth currently face challenging realities along their way to adulthood. With parents working longer hours and the absence of grandparents and other community adults who used to make up support systems, the intergenerational fabric of community has been frayed. Youth development strategies aim to reweave community fabric in a new way – one that takes the supports and opportunities young people should have, and re-institutes them in the context of young people’s realities today. While many of these realities are harsh ones, we know that young people themselves want to be involved in their communities. The importance of building positive youth/adult partnerships in this process cannot be stressed enough.

The mobilization effort is based on influencing three critical elements: information, attitudes, involvement. The transformation of each of these areas, both in the public and private domains, is a necessary condition for change. For example, in the area of information, the country is currently focused on collecting primarily negative youth information, e.g., teenage births, dropouts, and juvenile arrest rate. Inspiring a 180 degree shift, we need to collect information such as: average number of hours youth participate in after-school activities, computer to youth ratio in non-school hours, and the percentage of youth who hold part-time jobs. The three elements are intertwined, for how information is gathered and communicated impacts attitudes as well as how and if people choose to become involved.

Only through broad community commitment, strong public will, and diverse partnerships can youth development take root, go to scale, and be sustained over time. Ultimately, the mobilization must be supported by partnerships among all of the systems in a community that affect young people (i.e., education, corporations, health care, juvenile justice, religious groups, and recreation). To build these relationships and establish youth development infrastructures to improve developmental paths of adolescents will take at least 10 years.

Localities currently spending their resources on efforts to “fix youth” will need to pool, redirect, and increase their financial commitment to youth development. These additional dollars will ensure all youth equal access to supports and opportunities, especially youth living in economically distressed areas.

Our information on the services young people need, and use, is still hit or miss. Communities do not know what they have or what they need. They usually have no way to tell how well services are being used and what services need to be improved.

Good information is important for youth services for exactly the same reasons it is important for everything else. Accurate, accessible standardized information lets people find the services they need and use them effectively. It lets communities manage, evaluate and improve their services and determine the need for changing them, eliminating them, or developing new ones.

Many national efforts to measure outcomes presently use deficit-driven indicators to assess young people’s condition in society, such as teen pregnancy rates, juvenile crime numbers, and percentages of high school dropouts. Although these measures are important, they do not tell the whole story about young people’s experiences. Measures that reflect positive conditions and experiences of young people are also important.

The accelerated trend of the past decade toward empowering our nation’s young people to succeed has fostered a new awareness and commitment to this most valuable resource. Some basic questions are:

- How much do we currently spend?

- How much should we spend?

Some progress has been made through new initiatives in education finance reform and services integration, providing more effective delivery of social, health and educational services for children and youth from the classroom up to the government. This document establishes an initial framework and formula for assessing the financial resources and mechanisms necessary to move American society closer to this ideal. The following were found to be potential root causes of these trends in spending:

- Devaluation of adolescents.

- Lack of consensus on youth development.

- Lack of adequate and protected funding. Funds are not protected and dedicated in the manner necessary to sustain the long-term, comprehensive process that is youth development.

We can support the move toward the ideal by:

- Seeking new types of information.

- Building on the after-school momentum.

- Making a sustainable public investment.

Youth development is an investment that must be made by each sector of the wider community – public and private. Examination of the federal-state matching, local dedicated taxes an incentives for business and philanthropy could lead to models for providing adequate and sustainable funding for youth development. National intermediaries must work to cultivate this leadership at all levels of government, and at the grassroots, by creating constituencies.

Several states are taking the lead from California, Oregon and Illinois by offering state-sponsored retirement plans that encourage or require private sector employers to participate.

The plans are referred to as auto-IRAs because eligible workers are automatically enrolled, generally within 30 days of employment. The default contribution rate is typically 3-5% of a paycheck and the employee can stop, restart or transfer plan assets depending on their needs. Referred to as “public-private partnerships” by the Pew Charitable Trust, there is no cost to the employer. Proceeds are managed by a private financial firm management for a pre-determined fee. The plans are subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) like other sponsored pension and benefit plans.

This article provides an overview of the states that currently offer savings programs, as well as those that plan to do so in the future.

OregonSaves

Oregon was one of the first states to implement a savings program for employees of small businesses who are not otherwise eligible for a workplace sponsored pension plan. Titled OregonSaves, it is a state retirement program that is available to an employer or an individual planning for the future.

OregonSaves had almost $57 million in assets as of mid-2020. Employee contributions averaged $127 to $135 per month as of that time.

Enrollment is automatic for employees, with contributions being made through payroll deductions. Each employee account is portable and can be moved from one job to another.

All Oregon employers, regardless of employee size, must facilitate the State’s program for their employees if they do not offer an employer-sponsored retirement plan. The plan is working with small employers to make the process as simple as possible.

CalSavers

CalSavers is available to California workers whose employers do not offer a workplace retirement plan, self-employed individuals, and others who want to increase their savings. Plan participants contribute to an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) that belongs to them.

California employers with more than 50 employees must register with CalSavers by June 30, 2021 if they do not already sponsor a retirement plan. Registration is available to all California employers with at least five employees.

The CalSavers program opened statewide in July 2019 and had $4.3 million in assets as of mid-2020. On average, participating employees contribute $105 to $120 monthly. Like the Oregon plan, the default savings rate is 5% of the employee’s pay and employees are automatically enrolled after 30 days of employment. They can stop, restart or transfer plan participation at any time if they change employers.

CalSavers Retirement Savings Program is designed to simplify employer participation with no employer fees, no fiduciary responsibility, and minimal ongoing responsibilities. Employers that fail to offer participation in the plan as required are subject to fines.

In May 2021, a federal appeals court in San Francisco dismissed a legal challenge to the CalSavers plan.

Illinois Secure Choice Retirement Savings Program

Illinois launched its Secure Choice Retirement Savings Program in 2018. It is a state-facilitated retirement program that is open to employees who work for an eligible employer as well as other employees who want to enroll independent of their employer. Approximately 32,000 Illinois employees saved $8.5 million in the first year of the Illinois Secure Choice program, according to state reports.

The Illinois Secure Choice account is a Roth IRA for the employee. The default savings rate is 5% of gross pay. Employees are automatically enrolled through payroll contributions after 30 days of employment. An employee can opt out at any time. Plan participants are charged a fee of 0.75% of assets per year ($0.75 for every $100 saved), which pays for program administration and operating expenses.

The Illinois Secure Choice had 5,544 registered employers as of May 2020. There are no fees for employers to facilitate the program and employers cannot make contributions to their employee accounts. Employers serve a limited role as a facilitator. As of November, 2019, employers with 25 or more employees that have been in business for two years or more are required to participate in the program. Employers that already offer an employer-sponsored retirement plan are exempt from this legislation.

New Jersey Secure Choice Savings

The “New Jersey Secure Choice Savings Act,” was signed into law in March 2019, with a two-year time frame scheduled to take effect in March 2021.

The Act requires employers that have been in business for two years and have 25 or more employees to participate in a retirement savings program administered through automatic payroll deductions. Private sector employees of businesses of any size are able to participate in the retirement savings program. Smaller or newer employers could join voluntarily. Failure to comply will result in fines to the employer.

Employees will be automatically enrolled at the leve of a 3% paycheck contribution. The annual contribution maximum is $6,000 for those under 50 years old, and $7,000 for those 50 or older.

Connecticut Secure Choice Savings Plan

Connecticut employers with five or more employees must offer a retirement plan to employees, and private employers with four or fewer employees may choose to do so. Employees are auto-enrolled within 120 days of employment, and employees must be notified of their rights within 30 days. Employers are not permitted to make contributions to the program.

The Connecticut Retirement Security Authority, a quasi-public agency, was formed in 2016 to oversee the program. The state estimates that as many as 600,000 employees may benefit from the plan.

Tales from the Online Marketing Crypt #18

Why being mindful of clients’ perspectives can keep them supporting your business

We all have them.

Days when everything pisses us off.

In fact, I doubt there’s a human being on this planet who hasn’t been in a bad mood every now and then.

I know I sure have my fair share of them!

And for a variety of reasons too.

But there’s one thing we business owners have an unwritten rule about (well probably it’s written somewhere by someone) is that no matter what, we don’t bring our bad mood with us when communicating with clients.

Would you agree with that fundamental principle?

But how many times have you, as a client or customer, been on the receiving end of someone’s bad mood?

It happened to me recently and that single instance literally destroyed a 30 year working relationship.

I had a hair appointment with the same gal that I’ve been seeing for decades. She works out of her home and lives about 25 minutes away from me.

I know exactly how long it takes for me to get to her place and am typically on time, every time.

Except the last two appointments.

The time previous to this last visit, I had an emergency come up just before heading out the door. It was something I had to take care of or faced dire consequences (as in having a very angry client on my hands!)

It meant I was going to be about 5 minutes late for my appointment. I texted her when I was leaving stating I was hurrying over and will be a few minutes late.

She didn’t reply and never said anything when I got there. We had our usual girl talk that I very much looked forward to.

This recent time I needed to do a quick errand before my appointment. I completely misjudged how much time it would take me to get from that other location to my stylist’s place. Plus… I got lost finding my way there since I was coming from a different direction.

I didn’t want to risk taking any time to stop and text her and honestly thought I was just a minute away… except it was more like 15 minutes before I finally got there.

I’ve never been 15 minutes late for anything and I felt terrible. I apologized profusely but unfortunately, she wouldn’t hear any of it.

She was pissed.

So angry in fact, she first lectured me on “always” being late, citing my text from the previous appointment, and that she was sick and tired of constantly hearing, “sorry I’m late” as if I’m the only one that says that every time I walk into her room.

Disclaimer: I’m a Canadian. We apologize for everything, even if we’re 1 minute late!

Stunned at how mad she was, especially knowing I was the last appointment of the day, I apologized again and tried to explain why I was late and even offered to leave with my hair wet to make up for the lateness so we would still end in time.

I didn’t know what else to do to rectify my error.

She was so angry, she gave me the silent treatment and only grunted her “hold your head here” and “move to the sink” commands throughout the entire time there.

I did leave with wet hair, 15 minutes earlier than what our appointment time would have ended at had I been on time, vowing to never return again.

I fully realize I was the catalyst that set off her anger, and I also realize she had to have been having one helluva a bad day before I arrived, and I got the brunt of her wrath.

I get it.

But as a customer, a loyal one for 30 years at that, there’s no excuse whatsoever to be treated like that.

Never.

When I have bad days like what she must have experienced, I set aside whatever is going on and treat anyone who I speak with that day, whether it’s one of our team members, a client, a lead or even chatting on social media, with the utmost respect and kindness.

Even if they are the reason for my having a bad day.

It serves no purpose whatsoever to make the other person feel worse than what I am feeling.

I found this experience to be so distressing, I posted about it on Facebook.

I received a variety of responses, ranging from my owing her an apology (which I did) to justifying why she blew up, right over to demanding I fire her on the spot (which I ended up doing).

These kinds of responses go to show how we are all human and all look at experiences from our own lens and past history.

For me, I was taken straight back to elementary school when I was the victim of bullying quite a bit. A feeling I never want to experience again!

For others, they empathized with her where time is very important to them and get angry themselves when someone disrespects it. (I’m actually the same way – being punctual is a huge deal for me.)

One thing I have done as a result of this experience is to find the lesson behind it all. For one, I will definitely plan my time better and ensure I give myself enough time to do what needs to be done in time!

I also learned just how fragile our relationships can be.

She lost a client of 30 years – and I lost any further opportunities to visit with someone I’ve known a long time to get some of the much valued girl time I look forward to with each visit.

It doesn’t take much to destroy a 30 year working relationship.

Yes I realize I could reach out and try to mend the fences but I am choosing not to. At least not right now.

At the end of the day, this lesson goes to show how important it is for us all to keep our anger in check. To realize our anger is being received by the other person, and be aware of how they are receiving it with their own personal response. They won’t always understand where you are coming from because they’re looking at things from a different perspective.

So what do we do when we’re having a bad day and business must go on?

If you ever find yourself feeling angry, whether justified or not, here’s eight tips on what you can do to avoid creating irreparable situations with your clients:

Exercise. Go for a walk, head to the gym, box with a punching bag. Whatever works for you to do some venting.
Meditate. Or just sit quietly and practice deep breathing.
Yoga. Nothing is better at centering our emotions and getting back in touch with our bodies than practicing yoga.
Watch a funny show or listen to a positive podcast. It’s amazing how quickly your anger can turn around when you’re laughing or receiving positive energy from someone else!
Use the anger as motivation. If you can control the scenario that’s causing your anger, then you can do something about it!
Focus on something more positive. A great thing to do here is think of something you are grateful for and focus on why you’re so grateful about it. Putting yourself in a state of gratefulness will trigger those happy endorphins and will get you out of that pissy mood fast.
Get productive. Feeling on purpose can be quite energizing. If you have something that’s calling your name, get busy and shift your attention to that.
Write in a journal. A great way to release that negative vibe from your body is to write it out. Keep writing until you’ve vented everything that comes to mind. Even if it’s not the same thing that got you angry in the first place – just let it all out!

I’m curious if you have ever experienced someone either getting angry with you in a business relationship or did you lose your cool and get angry with a client or service provider? How did it turn out? What lesson did you learn? And do you have any other tips on how to let go of anger to share?

To your business success,

Susan

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

READ: Learn effective communication principles from an expert. This book from communications specialist Yvonne Douma is a must-read. It will be available on June 8th but you can get yourself on her notification list and grab some great bonuses if you purchase on launch day: REFRAME: How to Change Your Conversations to Resolve Those Messy Conflicts.
WATCH: Have you ever been frustrated by the lack of customer service from another company and vowed to never do business with them again? And most certainly never told anyone else about them? This is why customer service is so vital to business success as I explain in this eTip episode on why it’s the primary reason we have such a high referral rate: How Great Customer Service Gets You Business Referrals (on our website)
READ: I guess all of us have been on the receiving end of a situation where we are not satisfied with customer service. But how do you respond? Read this great piece from Kindi Gill who shares excellent insights on managing difficult client situations: Five Tips for Managing Customer Complaints (on our website)

Susan Friesen, founder of the award-winning web development and digital marketing firm eVision Media, is a Web Specialist, Business & Marketing Consultant, and Social Media Advisor. She works with entrepreneurs who struggle with having the lack of knowledge, skill and support needed to create their online business presence.

As a result of working with Susan and her team, clients feel confident and relieved knowing their online marketing is in trustworthy and caring hands so they can focus on building their business with peace of mind at having a perfect support system in place to guide them every step of the way.