Blog is moving to www.romanz.org

Hey everyone. Who i am kidding there are only a couple of people subscribing to my blog and one of them is myself.

Nevertheless, I am moving my blog to wordpress platform and a domain www.romanz.org is not just redirecting now but actually pointing to my new hosts. I moved the domain to a different host, so you might need to wait till your DNS is updated to get the page.

I am getting a bit more serious about my blogging, inspired by a lot of people and hopefully the new site would be a new great beginning.

I am still working on a custom theme and layouts for everything. Can't wait to get everything sorted out and just enjoy the writting not struggling with my blog.

Back to Fundamentals :post by Monica O'brien

Getting back to blogging is not as easy as I thought. Not only I stopped writing, but also I stopped reading any of the blogs I used to read. I don’t even remember what blogs I read. This is how much the job pre-occupied me for the past two years.

I really liked today’s post on ProBlogger by Monica O’brien who manages Twenty Set. Which is a blog I am going to include in my blogroll, since it is still pretty empty. I learned from it that I am part of millenials, and I all my life I felt like I am not alone :)

I am not sure if Monica has business degree, but she covered all the fundamentals of business strategy:

1) Figure out your strategy to compete: there are only few of them (differentiation, low cost provider, best type provider)

2) Identify the environment: customers, competition and the demand, swot analysis

3) Develop your marketing plan

4) Set achievable and measurable goals and go ahead with implementing your plan.

I thinkMonice and I just recapped for myself what should I do with my new idea of starting a business. Research, plan and implement! I am slowly recovering from 9-5 ...

Getting back to blogging

Wow wow wow, first blog post in more than a year? What happened to my grand blogging plans and even bigger business plans?

What happened is the lack of time (or commitment) for my blogging and my job in a corporate world of North America. Like a lot of other people I have let the corporate machine to grind me down and to affect me not only during my long working hours. I started to lose who I am.

Recently, I have thought a lot about my old blog and plan to build an internet business from user generated content. This is my first little step to getting back my old self, to regain the control of my life and not let the job to dictate how I am going to live my life.

I think anyone who ever worked in fast paced corporation would know how I feel. In anyways I am back, with more experience now and I am determined to follow through with my plans. I am not going to give up to the rat race!

Power of Blogging - Photonics Spectra

I was checking today who visits my blog, and I saw a lot of visits from Illinois – where I spent almost 4 years going to school. I found out that someone was searching for blog posts about the place where I did my internship Laurin Publishing. That was actually my first experience with real world marketing and its challenges. It was a good school for me and I was sorry to leave all the guys there, but I had to move to Toronto. So now I feel a bit bad about putting everything I did there in such a favorable light in my resume. From what I figured that someone also subscribed to my feed, so please shoot me an email or leave me a comment when you have a chance. I miss you all guys and remember my lessons!

Demand the respect from customers

Yesterday I went to see prospect for a third time that has an office 30 miles away from me. The reason I went to see him is because he wanted to buy a lot of services at once, and of course I was giving him a discount for that.

When I got to the office the situation changed, he wanted to buy only small distribution of his flyers. I said “It’s fine with me, but I will have to charge you the regular price” his response was “We got to talk to my boss”. So here I am in the room surrounded by two managers and the guy with whom I talked before, wasting my time and haggling for the price. Guys wanted a discount saying that don’t know our company and don’t trust us. He proposed to do a larger quantity, but with more discounted price.

My response was no, no, no. I said that it is first time for me doing business with them too and I see no reason why we should start our relationship with the discount. So I walked away from a bigger sale, but whatever I got from them I sold for a regular price. Yet I was proud of myself.
Even though you are selling something, don’t think you on a lower level than a prospect – you are on the same. You both are in business and they got to treat you with the same respect you treat them.

Confessions time

I thought I will come back to blogging fairly quickly. However, without the habit of having the blogging filter it doesn’t come as easy as I thought. Especially now at a Christmas season which is the busiest time for both retailers and marketers. Hard month, but at the same time I wish all the months in the year in terms of dollars would be like that. May be we can do with the clever marketing efforts? Anybody have any ideas on how to increase business in January? Any super smart plans?

Aikido Sales

On a little free time I have I study Aikido it is a martial art, sort of peaceful jujutsu. The main idea is to use the power of your opponent. The motto is relax, get out of the way and blend with the power of your opponent. I actually try to transform this into my sales style. When you make a pitch don’t make one, let your prospect come to you and then blend with it. Ask a lot of questions, let the client tell you what they need and then satisfy those needs. Sounds easy, but it is amazing how many people forget about it. Remember nobody likes to be sold, but everybody likes to buy – let them buy from you, don’t sell. Relax (no sales pressure), get of the way( don't hit the objections head to head) and blend (identify, confirm and satisfy their needs).