The 5 Step Marketing Plan Your Business Needs to Survive
This is a great and simple marketing system that any business can implement right away. It was shown to me by an Expert Business Coach named Terry Harris, who I highly recommend checking out. The best thing about it is, if you follow the plan, it cannot fail. Enjoy!
Step 1: Develop the first advertising vehicle and implement. Record this in an advertising calendar and a monthly tracking form. Run advertising for two months and analyze your return. If not successful, change it up and re-run it for one month. Once you have a successful advertising vehicle, continue to track it for estimating future growth potential. You will need approximately six months to determine its consistency in order to properly and accurately forecast your growth potential.
Step 2: Repeat step one. Once you have determined the second marketing vehicle is successful add the numbers to the first advertising vehicle and use them to give you a new future growth potential.
Step 3: Repeat step two.
Step 4: Repeat step three.
Step 5: Repeat step four.
At this point you should have a consistent and successful advertising campaign. With this advertising campaign you should be able to completely duplicate it at this point. Now that you have reached a successful advertising campaign you will be able to accurately forecast your future growth on a regular basis. Remember to periodically check all your advertising vehicles to make sure they have not dropped off in consistency.
Once you have become comfortable with executing and monitoring all five advertising vehicles you can now start to increase the number of advertising vehicles you are running.
I recommend adding only two more to start (taking you to seven total) with and track them to get them consistently functioning at the level you want. Once you have number six and seven at optimal performance you may now add in three more taking you to a total of ten.
Any more than ten can become overwhelming when still running your day to day operations.
This would be a good time to consider hiring someone to start handling your marketing and advertising efforts. You can start small and let the employee take on just a couple to start until they get acclimated to the system and can replicate your program.
Why you should know about Twitter’s Bootstrap
I’ve just discovered something amazing by the developers at twitter called bootstrap! You can go to the site in the link I just gave, but basically what it is is a solution to a large portion of the monotony of web development.
For those who design websites, you’re probably used to rewriting some standard elements in CSS to make the website look more standard and far less awful. You’re probably also used to adding many of the same javascripts to your websites as well.
What the bootstrap developers have done, is create a standard foundation from which you can start all of your web development projects. All you need to do is reference the bootstrap stylesheets and the javascripts in header of your new project, and you’re already off to a great start. It possibly may only save you somewhere between 5 and 30 minutes, but when you work on lots of web projects day in and day out, this can add up to a lot of time.
Another really thing bootstrap has done is adding a scaffolding and responsive layout standard. By using premade CSS elements, they have divided the width of each page into 12 segments, which you can use in order to make all of the elements of a page fit perfectly with each other in addition to perfect symmetry when you need it. If you have any type of design OCD like I do, you have to keep fixing the CSS until every pixel on the page is lined up, so with the scaffolding, this no longer takes a lot of your time. The responsive design simply makes all of the page elements relative and elastic, using percentages instead of fixed widths. This allows you to easily create a beautiful website design that will work on tablets and mobile phones.
These are just a few of the many problems that bootstrap fixes for web developers. To get started, I recommend downloading the full bootstrap package and finding one of the example sites to modify. That way you don’t get too overwhelmed with all of the new classes you have to work with. Once you reference all the stylesheets and javascripts in the header, the next best course of action will be to create a new stylesheet for your changes beyond the bootstrap foundation. That way, if the website breaks, you won’t have to search the vast bootstrap stylesheets to find out what went wrong, but will simply have to check the custom stylesheet(s) you created. This also makes it easier to create templates that transition into other website projects as well.
Also, if you haven’t figured this out by now, the site you’re looking at was designed with bootstrap. 
