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The Value of Good Diction in Business Today

Have you ever noticed when watching a movie or a prime time television show that you can always understand the diction of those actors in which English is not their ‘mother tongue?’ We see and hear actors with German, Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arab and African accents, to name just a few, who all speak clearly and distinctly.

In searching for a video tutorial recently, I found a young man describing exactly what I wanted to learn. The problem was that I could not understand what he was saying. After about 90 seconds of trying to decipher his English, I clicked off his channel and searched for another. Sadly, this young man lost potential business from me because of his diction. For all I know, his tutorial may have been the best on the web; however, I will never know that.

If you are running your own small business, is your diction as good as your product or your service? If not, you should consider improving it. Even if the majority of your workday is spent primarily on the computer in which you seldom speak, it is important that your communication skills are working for you and not against you. From the largest to the smallest, websites are now offering video, conference calls, and webinars and this is where you communication skills will matter. While your own website may not be at that point yet, your success could depend on it in the near future.

Because of the furious pace of business today, your message must to be heard and understood the 1st time you say it. The need to continually repeat yourself is a waste of time and money because it is unproductive.

My advice to improve your diction is as follows.

1. Get an audio book (with the printed version as well) and record yourself reading a couple of paragraphs. Listen to the playback and compare it to that of the professional reader. Be honest in your analysis. Take note of how you say your words and also your speed.

2. Speak English at home. Many whose accents are heavy are speaking in their native tongue among family and friends. To improve your diction, you must practice talking more in English so that you begin thinking in English.

3. Enroll in an accent reduction or a voice training course. In both cases, you will gain control over your diction as well as your speed by retraining your inner ear to listen more closely to your words as you enunciate them.

I love accents and am not an advocate of trying to eliminate them. My advice is not to get rid of your accent, just clean it up. Do not allow poor diction to limit the success of your business. Clear communication is vital no matter what language you speak.

How Socia Media Influences How We Do Business Today

When you are working your business and it could be any business:

1. Connect with ALL the people you know.

2. Connect with the friends of your friends.

3. Connect with the people you want to know.

It doesn’t matter what business you are in because the same techniques work whether it is your own business and you need a sales force to help you build your sales, whether it is affiliate a relationship marketing where you will looking for people who have similar interests and would be interested in the product you are selling.

When you are looking for people to help you grow your business you should also consider:

1. People that share your values and interests
2. Ambitious people who are looking for more
3. People who traditionally use what you sell
4. People in transition: divorce, relocating, life change, job change
5. People in depressed industries: real estate, banking, construction, interior design, insurance, and retail sales
6. People suffering job burnout: teachers, nurses, and anyone on the job too long
7. Unhappy disappointed network and affiliate marketers, which consists of over 20 million people

Why is this important in today’s workplace; because the job market has changed and more and more people all working from home. In general, the general public needs to change their concept of what a job is. For many years, people have gotten comfortable working for someone else in an office. Those days and jobs are gone forever. Companies are looking for ways to lower their costs, therefore, instead of going through the middleman and selling their products through retail, they are going right to the consumer and using both affiliate and relationship marketing or multilevel marketing to sell their products through word-of-mouth marketing.

Word-of-mouth marketing works this way: a company will sell their products through affiliates or distributors. In some cases, you can join for free and then upgrade later where you pay a nominal fee and as an affiliate or a distributor you can earn a percentage of the sales depending on what the company is offering. For the manufacturer or software designer this means they can keep the overhead low by working from home themselves and using websites and replicating websites to market their products through their sales force. This is where word-of-mouth marketing comes into play. For instance, social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram are growing in popularity.

As an affiliate or a distributor with a company working from home you need to consider branding yourself as opposed to branding the company. The life span of working with a multilevel marketing company may not be more than two or three years. By branding yourself as opposed to the company, then someone will learn to know and trust you, therefore, when ever you change companies are products you sell, they will follow you into any business. The best way to do this is by offering training. With the use of say Google hangouts where you can invite people to eight presentation where you are educating them on a specific topic and then offering them your opportunity which just happens to be incorporated into your topic then you are gaining their trust and their belief in you.

You can also use the opportunity of being an affiliate or distributor as an opportunity to generate income for yourself while you build your own business. We have come full circle from where we were in the beginning of the 20th century back to the small businessman, but technology has helped us to become a global marketplace where we can build contacts and a following anywhere in today’s marketplace. Bite working for ourselves we have the opportunity to make an unlimited income, as opposed to, working for someone else when they limit your potential income.