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The economy has changed – for the better! Gone are the days when big business was the goal of all entrepreneurs. In the Kindle article, Thriving in the New Economy, Diane Helbig and Marilyn Landis explore how the economy has changed, the impact those changes have had, and how you, as a small business owner, can harness these changes to not only survive, but to thrive.
Marilyn and Diane believe that small businesses are the drivers of the economic recovery. All small business owners should read this article to better understand how they can master the methods of success in today’s economy.
One of my favorite daily rituals is reading the paper over a cup of coffee. And if I could read The New York Times or the Plain Dealer on demand, then nothing could be better.
I’ve been using FlipBoard on my iPad and iPhone daily. I find that when information is laid out in a newspaper format, it’s just easier to read.
So if you’re a newspaper fan like me — but wold rather read your paper digitally, then you need to check out this interesting app I just heard about. It’s called PressReader. PressReader is NOT like FlipBoard. PressReader is will only show you NEWSPAPERS. Not only that — but it will show you a PICTURE of the newspaper — digitally. It’s actually like seeing the paper on your ipad. I know it’s hard to explain. Just imagine that high-resolution digital photos were take of your favorite papers and brought to your iPad. Then you open the photo, zoom in, zoom out and the best part is — you can flip through the pages just like you would a book or newspaper — only digitally.
Curious? You’ll have to download it for yourself and see.www.pressreader.com
What I Liked
I liked the focus of the app on newspapers and newspapers from all over the world.
I also liked that you got to try 7 of them for free. This is good because you really won’t know how much you’ll like or use the app until it’s installed.
Of course, you’ll have to subscribe to the papers to get the information – so there is a cost involved. You can read paper by paper for $.99 per download or for $29/mo you can read anything and everything you like.
Who will enjoy PressReader?
If you’re like some of my friends and love to read actual papers from around the world — or you have to read papers from around the world, the subscription is worth it. Or, if you’ve moved away from your favorite paper and still want to keep up with what’s happening in your hometown. This is a great tool.
Strange stuff that crossed my mind
On the one hand, this tool increases the distribution for newspapers. I can recall that our local Akron Beacon Journal had (or maybe still has) a digital version which is exactly like this — it’s a digital picture of the paper that you can flip through – and this actually has merit if you want to get a coupon or see something that isn’t readily available in the online version.
Another interesting thing is that the PressReader newspapers look like they had to be printed to exist in this format. The pictures are extremely high-resolution and high quality, but they still look like pictures of papers that were printed. It’s just something you have to experience.
And I encourage you to give it a shot. Download PressReader and try checking into the world from your iPad
A guest post by Sam Peters
As a DIY marketer or entrepreneur, you’ve surely read multitudes about the benefits of marketing through social media websites. Chances are similarly high that you’ve entertained advice about blogging for your business and brand as well. It’s in considering the particular avenues and strategies associated with these marketing platforms, however, that the real difference between great success and mediocrity looms.
In the entrepreneurial spirit of things, it’s a common sentiment shared by many of us do-it-yourselfers to want our own original platforms in the electronic domain, and in particular, to own a unique and relevant domain name from which to launch our brand or blog. However, the reality of the incredibly widespread use of the internet dictates that this is often not a possibility. Sure, there are tons of available domain names out there still, but the chances of one of them fitting perfectly with your brand’s sleek conceptual image is slim.
It’s for reasons like this, as well as others, that guest blogging can be a hugely important tool in generating new leads and giving new audiences a taste of your brand. Here we focus on 3 of these reasons for your marketing strategy consideration.
- Easy Self-Promotion: Guest blogging offers a great way to promote yourself and your business from various already-popular sites. Perhaps the biggest advantage of this is the ability to use sites that often have a great domain name and a high SEO ranking as launching points for your brand or website. Companies like www.1800vending.com have great, entrepreneurial idea-specific domain names that immediately generate hits just by virtue of their domain.
And while this specific domain doesn’t happen to be a blog, the number of similarly relevant domain names taken by blogs with viable guest posting options is huge: blogs just like the one you find yourself on now as a matter of fact.
- Unique Audiences: Nearly as extensive as the number of blogs out there (over 170 million), is the number of different topics covered by these sites. The benefit of guest posting on a wide array of blogs, and thus to a hugely diverse audience, as opposed to blogging solely on your own individual, single-topic site, should be fairly obvious: a much greater and diverse exposure.
Instead of writing about one topic, try guest blogging about a number of different brand-relatable subjects that can draw various potential clients and customers in from all over the blogosphere. Consumers appreciate a company that shows great diversity and versatility.
- Less Restriction: Guest blogging or posting also carries with it a greater amount of freedom than solely blogging for your own site. As a guest blogger, you not only have the option to use various and diverse blogs as platforms for your business as discussed in the previous point; you also have a similar amount of personal freedom in terms of when/how often you post. Maintaining a successful blog brings with it a good amount of time dedicated to posting regularly and often to keep readers interested and regularly following your blog.
As a business owner and DIY marketer, the unfortunate reality is that we often don’t have the time necessary to maintain such habits. Guest blogging then, offers a unique solution to that problem, by affording us great avenues for generating more viewers, and the freedom to post when and where we want without worrying about losing expectant, regular followers.
While being an entrepreneur and a general DIY kind of guy or girl can at times be quite challenging, there are some great solutions out there to meet these many challenges we all face. Among others, guest blogging is one of the best avenues used in a successful and diverse personal marketing campaign, and should be strongly considered as a part of your strategy for success.
A guest post from Jenna Smith
Although it’s a bit of a departure from the traditional topic for this site, I think it’s safe to say that saving money is something that interests us all, especially small business owners. And with more and more large companies hopping on the green business bandwagon, you’ve got to wonder if there really is something more to it than just keeping up appearances. Indeed, if one does just a bit of research, it certainly appears that there is much more to it than that. The following are just three of the ways that going green can save you some money, increase revenue, and keep employees happy in the process.
1. Cloud Technology
Many big businesses are already reaping the benefits of this relatively young technology, both in financial and green faculties. Cloud computing, and remote access technologies from companies like Vivint can provide numerous green benefits for your business, as well as additional security options. One of the more notable offerings of cloud computing is in allowing your employees the freedom to work from home certain days of the week or month while still having remote access to all the important business information and files. This can increase productivity, employee morale, be less of a strain on the environment by reducing emissions associated with commuting, and also save time and money also associated with travel to and from the office.
In this same vein, other considerations to keep in mind are Vivint security options and their green utilities, which can keep your business safe, energy efficient, and easily remotely monitored as well. Finally, IT costs are drastically lowered if you adopt a cloud strategy, as almost anything that needs fixing can be worked on from a remote location by a knowledgeable professional.
2. Out with the Analog, in with the New
If you’re still using a printer or fax machine for company-to-company communications via paper, you may as well be stuck in the Stone Age with Fred Flintstone. More and more we are seeing traditional business practices being transitioned over to paperless computing methods. Not only does using more up-to-date computer software save you money on supplies and costly maintenance, it also saves you time, which any good business professional knows, is money. In addition, getting rid of all the paper transactions associated with your business is more environmentally sound, and can often times save you money with financial institutions that often offer some relief for paperless banking.
3. Do Green Business
Although small businesses can’t always be as choosy as big corporations when it comes to who they do business with, if possible, try to build green business connections. There are a couple of reasons for this. Making green connections builds the value of green-minded companies, which in turn encourages other companies to join in the effort. This helps the environment as much as it increases your business’ ethical profile, and can thus land you more and more solid business as the green revolution picks up more speed, which it certainly is doing.
Like most efforts that can save your business money, doing a bit of research about green options goes a long way. Look into the options and read about some of the benefits bigger companies are receiving by using cloud technologies and other green products.
This is a guest post from Jenna Smith
QUESTION: Where are you at with your business?
Are you a startup looking to branch and network with possible investors? Are you a financial advisor looking to develop an online presence? Or are you a small business owner looking to push your sales to the next level?
More importantly, what are some simple steps you can take moving forward?
First, let it be said that growing a business can be impacted by many factors: a changing industry, an altered economic landscape, new technologies, new legislation, etc. One of the most rapidly accelerating trends is integrating the tools that a content management system can offer to better incorporate marketing. But just because you’re marketing online doesn’t mean that you have to use online promotions.
Feel free to find promotional items that reflect your brand. Many online marketers use promotional companies like Inkhead in order to maximize their resources. This is especially the case for small businesses who are carefully cultivating their consumer bases. Whether you’re looking to improve your brand or you’re simply looking to make some side revenue off your blog, small businesses would be wise to adopt robust integrated strategies for affiliate marketing, social media, and e-commerce. Here are a few initial ANSWER(S):
Affiliate marketing—Affiliate marketing is a way to generate money from other companies by promoting them with your blog. There are different models of how this works but the most popular form right now is using services like Skimlinks to syphon money off online merchants by providing links to their products and services. Depending on which CMS you use, you can probably find an excellent tool to help you with this. WordPress, for example, has a very efficient Skimlinks plugin, as well as a wide variety of other affiliate marketing tools that link your company or blog into a paying network of online retailers and marketers.
ANSWER: something you can do RIGHT NOW to begin your affiliate marketing venture, is to install the Skimlinks plugin on your WordPress blog.
Social Media—It’s hardly necessary to opine the benefits of successful social media campaigns. Companies big and small, in every niche of the stratosphere, are using social networks to leverage their brands and understand their customers. WP has a war chest of social media tools, such as Share This, Social Bookmarking, Gregarious, and I Love Social Bookmarking. Many of these tools also allow you to analyze your blog metrics.
ANSWER: Optimize your blog for sharing by creating social media buttons on your blog using one of the previously mentioned social media plugins.
E-commerce—E-commerce isn’t just for Amazon and eBay anymore. Selling products and services online is now a more popular retail model than traditional commerce. The most successful e-commerce sites are equipped with high tech carts and transaction services. Again, WordPres is a good option for integration because it provides plugins like Cart 66, WooCommerce, Shopp, and others.
ANSWER: Create an online store using one of these plugins.
For these reasons and more, affiliate marketing, social media, and e-commerce are powerful online strategies for small businesses and freelancers that you can use right now to increase sales and traffic. These functionalities give companies a chance to integrate the newest marketing and revenue-generating techniques into their blog dashboards. Don’t miss out on the chance to grow your business organically through clever online integrations.
The following is a guest post from Jenna Smith
The small business world has eaten many entrepreneurs alive as they struggled to move their companies into volatile markets. Many small business owners have discovered the importance of establishing an energetic online presence, where many consumers are doing more and more of their shopping and business transactions. They’ve also realized that it’s better to protect your online reputation than leave it up to chance. SEO and link building can make your business’s blog rise high in search results. But once readers find your company online you need to be sure they will be willing and able to share it with their networks of friends and associates. That’s why the following online tools are crucial to small business owners looking to leverage the blogosphere:
Social Media—Are you using the most valuable promotional tool since the invention of television to paint your business’s blog across the Internet? If not, you need to check in on some quick Twitter and Facebook tutorials and learn how to get your blog listed in niche Twitter communities and ‘liked’ and ‘shared’ by hundreds of loyal fans on Facebook.
Podcasts—Podcasts are on the rise more than ever and are an excellent way to redirect fresh traffic to your site. When people are driving they can’t watch television, so they listen to the radio. Similarly, when people are absorbed in physical tasks they can’t sit down and read your blog, but they can listen to your podcast.
Guest blogging—Make a name for yourself as an entrepreneur and generate excitement about your business by writing for someone else’s blog. This creates a rich backlink for you as well as the potential for many more links and spots on blogrolls.
Social media aggregators—Promote your site to social media aggregators like Streamy, Flock, and FriendFeed. These sites collect users activities across a wide variety of social media sites and consolidates them in one place, making their information more actionable.
RSS feeds—By giving your blog an RSS feed, which is usually offered as an automatic service by most content platforms, you give your readers a chance to subscribe to your blog. Building your subscriber base is one of the most crucial elements of adding to the value of your site.
Bookmarking—Submit—and allow your readers to submit, via plugins—your blog to social news aggregators like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, delicious, and BuzzFeed. These sites bookmark your content for millions of online readers.
CMS—Take advantage of the incredible tools offered by content management systems. With its vast number of social media plugins, CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal make the commercial world a more friendly, efficient and exciting place for small business owners.
Combined, the tools listed above can make for a powerful portfolio for small business owners looking to tap new markets. If they are utilized correctly, these methods can turn an ordinary business with little online presence into a powerful enterprise with thousands of new subscribers and customers.
This is a guest post by Derrick Hayes
How did I get here? Why do I do the things I do? These are two important questions that we sometimes never look into. Are you a freshman in business trying to avoid the sophomore or jinx that could arrive.?
No matter who you are or where you are in life, we all have to make transitions to new positions. The way in which you move forward will impact lives for generations to come.
From this day on I want you to take a look within and search for greatness. I was inspired to present you with a 6 step process called S.E.A.R.C.H., so that with every transition you will be placed in a better position.
The S is for School. One of the greatest transitions that you can ever make is when you decide to go to school. You have the chance to not only choose a college or university, but also to declare a major. The more in life you learn can increase what you earn. There are two things that people will always pay, and they are what you know and what you show. Take it upon yourself to learn as much as you can and give back even more.
The E is for Experiences. The second transition that you can make is to get some experience. Don’t wait until you get out of school in order to see if you have chosen the right career path. While competition is fierce for internships and co-ops you can find great opportunities by networking with friends, family and alumni. The knowledge you have gained only becomes powerful when you place it in the right occupation that can make the most of your abilities.
The A is for Adjustments. After you take what you learn and apply it you get to truly find out what you are good at. Make a mental list of your strengths and weaknesses in and outside the classroom. See what adjustments you can make now and the ones that you can make later so that you can improve. Success in life is about making adjustments.
The R is for Resume. One of the biggest mistakes that we can make is not to resume what we started. Making adjustments are important but staying focused and never quitting has even greater significance. Resume your life. Resume your education. Resume your career. If you stand still long enough your opportunities will begin fill with dust and rust. If you ever find yourself in this position, give that complacency a shake off so that you can take off.
The C is for Confidence. When you keep moving in life and don’t let the little things turn into big things it will give you confidence. The opportunity to believe and be successful with each transition is available to you right now. Ask the people around you what makes them successful? If you see that no one around you is successful then you need to socialize with some new people. When you have confidence doors will not just open, but stay open.
The H is for Happiness. Confidence breeds happiness. When you are happy and walk into a place people will see a smile on your face. Have you seen the movie The Pursuit of Happyness? In the movie the father tells the son, “Never let anyone steal your dream.” Most of us give our dreams away.
What makes you happy and what can you share to make a difference? S.E.A.R.C.H. for the answers and your next transition will lead you to a better position
Derrick Hayes is the Author of 1 WORD Is All It Takes, Creator of Derricknyms, Developer of the app Motivation To Your Mobile, Nominator of Today’s Honoree, and blogs at the Encouragement Speaker.
Retailers know how crucial the holiday season is to their success. It can make-or-break 2011 – and set up 2012 for failure or triumph. With only 13 shopping days until Christmas, what can a retailer do to boost sales the rest of December, as well as keep momentum going into 2012?
To do this, both online and brick-and-mortar retailers can think about these four strategies:
#1 Market Holiday Promotions on Social Media
These campaigns are great because they’re easy and free – words to retailers’ ears. Additionally, they also increase a retailers’ customer reach beyond the holiday season. For example, retailers can create a promotion that promises a discount worth “X percent” the day before Christmas after they receive “X number” of Facebook Likes. After the holidays, the retailer can continue to promote and share marketing information on the Facebook user’s News feed.
#2 Work with Check-in Programs to Build Loyalty
Chances are, the next customer to walk into a store is either putting away their smartphone, on their smartphone or about to get on it. App vendors are offering some great retail check-in solutions to help retailers connect with smartphone-savvy customers. ShopKick, for example, allows retailers to place sensors throughout their store and actually incentivize customers to walk to specific sections. Apps like this will keep customers coming back after the holidays to get more loyalty points.
#3 Offer Free Shipping, Reduced Shipping or In-Store Pickup
Customers love free shipping. In fact, a recent study by comScore found that 78 percent of online holiday shoppers rate “free shipping” as something they actively seek out – or will determine whether or not they make a purchase. Retailers should offer free or reduced shipping, and heavily promote this across their online properties. Additionally, retailers can also offer in-store pickup. This is a great tactic because some customers don’t want items shipped to their house. Additionally, it allows the retailer the opportunity to make additional sales to the in-store customer. Store experience and familiarity will also increase the likelihood the customer will return to the store later.
#4 Extend Return Policies to Encourage Gifting
Because many customers aren’t purchasing for themselves, loosening the return policies will increase the likelihood of that extra purchase. Already have a great return policy? Promote it. Customers that see you have a have a large return or exchange window may be more likely to make a “risky” purchase.
Michael Koploy is an ERP Analyst, and frequently writes on his company blog about trends in the retail industry and small business POS software. He can be reached at michael@softwareadvice.com or @POSAdvice.
I have a client that is using CVENT for their surveys and event evaluations, so when I saw this article about how to keep surveys present, but unobtrusive, I took a closer look.
Many companies opt to do customer surveys at intervals — rather than keeping them always open. But giving your customer the ability to give you feedback when THEY want to give you feedback is one of the most important things you can do.
In this article, Cynthia Spitalny gives several great tips on how to keep your survey open on the web without upsetting your web visitors.
- Keep the link or icon for the survey in an unobtrusive spot. Ensuring that your customers have the best user experience while on your web presence is important so having them take your survey – while very important to you – should be secondary for most of your customers. Keep the link or icon in a discrete but confined space.
- Remove the link or icon if a customer opts to not take your survey at any point. Like most company surveys, you ask your customers if they would be willing to take your survey. If customers opt to not take the survey and those customers can be identified when they log back into the website/portal/etc, then be sure to remove the link. No means no, and you want to keep your customer base happy.
- Offer appreciation and gratitude for those who take your survey. Customers are bombarded by so many things these days that for someone to take the time and complete your survey, this is worth thanking them. Be sure to acknowledge those who completed your survey and offer gratitude and thanks for helping you get closer to achieving your objectives.
It’s business planning time and I, for one am taking a serious look at restructuring my business, bringing on more virtual team members and becoming more efficient and more profitable.
Small Business Trends has pulled this list of useful links in the area of delegation. I’m checking them out — you should too.
From social media to almost every other aspect of your business, tasks can be delegated or outsourced as needed to improve productivity. But when you delegate or outsource your operations, be sure that you keep an eye on quality and that you manage the key components of your business effectively. Delegating responsibility for certain tasks does not mean ignoring your business or letting it be run by someone else.
Thoughts on how to delegate. This post is about delegating social media efforts, but it could be about delegation in almost any part of your business. At some point you will most likely need to get others to handle some of your tasks as your business grows. Make sure they can handle those roles. SEO and Social Media Marketing
The key to small business success. Small business success, like success in so many other things, doesn’t mean avoiding mistakes and doing everything right. Instead, the key is to understand that when things go wrong you must not quit. Maintaining momentum is what’s important. The Frugal Entrepreneur
How to outsource needed projects. From Website design to research projects, you may need work done for your business that you don’t have time to do yourself. No problem. Here’s a simple video overview of how to outsource where required. ScottFox
Promoting from within. Another way to delegate workload is to ask your current employees to take on different roles and perhaps take up more of the slack, but beware. Asking for more work out of existing employees will cost you more, one way or the other. Bloomberg Businessweek
Building the virtual team. Creating a virtual team is another way to expand your business while delegating responsibility over a larger group. But creating an effective virtual team takes effort. Here are some things to consider. Startup Professionals Musings
How to get started. No matter what business you operate, it’s important to understand the basics. You can delegate many aspects of your business and outsource much of the work that needs to be done, so long as you take care of what’s important. Yahoo! Small Business Advisor
