There’s Money, and Valuable Lessons, in Turning Your Hobby into a Business
The best thing the Internet has done for average folks is lower the barrier to entry for starting a business and one of the paths most often walked is for people to turn their hobbies or crafting talents into a commercial enterprise. Some of the stories are wildly successful. North Carolinian Brandi Temple turned her passion for sewing cute children’s dresses with a Southern twang into Lolly Wolly Doodle, a multi-million dollar business by selling through Facebook. On the other side of the pond, West Yorkshire woman Kate Broughton was able to quit her day job in a bookstore and sell greeting cards and stickers via Etsy. eBay and a wide variety of plug-n-play ecommerce service providers also make it easy to offer your goods over the Internet. Today, budding ecommerce mavens can make the process as simple or as complicated as they wish. Business is the hard part However, success is seldom simple. Because of Etsy and the plethora of other selling venues, the competition is high. You need to have an excellent product and great marketing if you want to make a serious go at it. Because of this fact, many crafters, artisans and creators see ecommerce as a way to supplement their incomes or simply to pay for their hobby “habit.” But don’t let that discourage you from testing the waters. Also, I want you to see a somewhat bigger picture than might at first be apparent: directly selling your wares isn’t the only way you can leverage your hobby into a business. Consider starting a website and blog that helps establish who you are and what makes your products so fantastic. Build a following for your blog and in the social media. You might find that Facebook works for you, but, if you’re selling a craft item, there’s a strong possibility that Instagram or Pinterest – maybe even Vine – could be the best platform for you. An “all (or most) of the above” social media strategy may be the way to begin until you find which suits you best. Social media synergy Use social media to send visitors to your blog and vice versa. As you build your followers you not only build your pool of buyers, you are increasing the number of people who want to listen to what you have to say. At this point you can write and sell an e-book about your craft with insider tips and information. You can put together a webinar to teach people how to do what you do. You can sell ad space on your website or within your newsletter to businesses related to your craft or hobby. You can become your own horizontally integrated craft conglomerate! Now as I said earlier, this is difficult to pull off if you want to make it your sole source of income. However, in the worst-case scenario you will probably make a little money and get invaluable lessons in startups, social media marketing and ecommerce. I don’t see any downside in...
read more10 Low-Cost Ideas for Employee Appreciation Month
It could be that the fastest way to happy customers is by creating a team of happy employees. Good cheer is contagious and heightens the enjoyment in any setting. Further, enjoying their time on the job spent with coworkers is the biggest contributor to job satisfaction. With these ideas in mind, it’s time to pack March – employee appreciation month – with special events to show your gratitude. And while we’re taking special note of this in March, don’t think this is a “one-and-done” process. Make expressing your gratitude a professional habit. 1. Make it personal. Personally express your gratitude to each of your employees. This may be the most important step for you to take. While we are discussing employee appreciation month, this is an action item you need to schedule throughout the year. Provide yourself with whatever kind of reminders you need to be sure you get this done. 2. Establish a suggestion program and implement some of the suggestions. You can use the old “suggestion box” vehicle or bring it into the 21st century with a special email address assigned to suggestions: e.g. suggestions@mycompany.com. Follow-up is the important part of this 3. Give time off unexpectedly. Award your team with an early (paid) quitting time some day when you can work out the details. Another variation would be an extended lunch break. 4. Solicit ideas for retreats, seminar attendance and other off-campus events. Find out what kind of activities employees truly see as beneficial to their job performance and careers. Work these into your future plans. 5. Encourage continuing education. Let your employees know that you want to see them advance in their careers. If you can’t reimburse for supplies or tuition, introduce your employees to the wide range of free, high-quality training and college courses that are available online. 6. Play well with one another. Have employees bring in their favorite games and enjoy a few hours of casual fun. You can also stage a company-wide tournament to find out, for example, who is the best Connect Four player. Bring in a 1,000-piece puzzle for people to work on. 7. Plant a garden. If you have the space, give a little release time to employees who sport green thumbs. Some might be interested in preparing a plot of soil for a vegetable garden when the warmer months are here. 8. Give an inexpensive gift. Lottery tickets and Starbuck cards are inexpensive items that virtually everyone will appreciate. How about holding a drawing where the winner receives a professional house cleaning? (Toss my name in the hat if you do that one!) 9. Casual or humorous dress day. If your setting is more on the formal side, break the mold and go casual. If casual is standard, don’t wait for Halloween to allow costumes. I know some companies that have had fun with “dress like the boss” day; it can be hilarious when people point out your little habits. 10. See what your employees want to do. It’s very important that you make suggesting and planning these inexpensive acknowledgements a year-round routine. Don’t wait for employee appreciation month. Solicit ideas from your team on a monthly or quarterly basis....
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Learn From The Other Guy’s Mistakes
Last week was a time for confessions. I don’t know if it was because of Lent or what, but we were treated to a number of articles where otherwise successful folks confessed their marketing mistakes. The week also treated us to a number of good insights into increasing your personal productivity as well as the productivity and capability of your team. Marketing and sales Whoops! TopRight Strategic Marketing made several marketing missteps when it originally launched in 2006. President and CEO David Sutton shares their four biggest marketing mess-ups. It’s always smart to learn from other people’s goofs. Here are the toughest lessons the content marketers at Pepsi have learned in recent years. You should probably print out this list of classic marketing mistakes and put it on the refrigerator in your lunchroom. The big picture Customers aren’t following a linear path to buying anymore so there needs to be a revolution in marketing, says Fred Studer of NetSuite. If you’re familiar with the lingo of web marketing, you should find this “translation” cheat sheet helpful when you move into the app marketing world. ClickZ reports that 84 Percent of Millennials Don’t Trust Traditional Advertising. This poses some serious challenges. Make you life easier and your business more profitable with marketing automation. Here are seven proven benefits. Things may get crazy as brands try to figure out ways to get their message across on that teeny-tiny Apple Watch screen! Content, online and mobile marketing Content marketing needs to be central to your small business DNA, not just a small part of one person’s job. Here’s how to achieve buy-in. Get the most mileage out of your content marketing with these 10 tips to boost your share-ability. Adobe’s Giselle Abramovich takes an in-depth look at mobile marketing to help you determine if your current content will make the grade. Online marketing is driven by metrics. Will measuring “attention” become the new holy grail of data? Take a deep breath: Here are 47 things to put on your social media marketing to-do list. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to blast through many of them. Entrepreneurism, startups and venture capital There’s a direct correlation between failures and success. Are you doing enough of the first to achieve the second? Make time to check out the full Kauffman Foundation report on entrepreneurial activity between 1996 and 2013. The Gigaom blog had the brightest minds in the world writing about the merging of tech and business, but they couldn’t make the financials work. Goodbye Gigaom, it was great while it lasted. Silicon Valley may have a terrific infrastructure for entrepreneurs, but there is much to be gained by venturing elsewhere with your startup. Square became famous for the little credit card reading device that connects to smartphones and tablets. Now it’s trying hard to make itself the go-to small business financial services provider for small businesses. It’s not for everyone, but some entrepreneurs are funding their startups by using their 401(k), IRA or other retirement savings accounts without suffering any penalties. Here’s how it’s done. Management and leadership With so many big-box, deep-discount retailers around, how is it possible that ANY small businesses survive? Customer service expert Shep Hyken shares the answer. Want to put your head down on your desk and take a...
read moreMore Interested in Make a Difference than Profits? Social Entrepreneurship.
Over the last several years entrepreneurs heading up “disruptive” startups have been regularly making the headlines. They build a business around an idea that sets a seemingly intransigent old business model on its ear. The way peer-to-peer transportation startups like Lyft and Uber have disrupted the taxi industry is one of our more recent examples. What if smart and energetic entrepreneurs could “disrupt” a social problem and give us whole new ways at looking at solutions? That’s the heart of social entrepreneurism. We often counsel individuals to pursue what they love and what interests them. If social change is what captures your imagination, starting down the path to becoming a social entrepreneur might be your best life choice. Taking an innovative idea and running with it is central to both business entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs. Famous social entrepreneurs Some examples of social entrepreneurs through history would be John Muir, who worked to found the Sierra Club and the national park system; and Florence Nightingale, who established the first school for nurses in England. Just like entrepreneurs in the commercial sector, social entrepreneurs also need excellent fundraising and sales skills. The sources of their funds are mostly different than in those in business and can range from individuals to charitable endowments to government agencies and even to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter. Social entrepreneurs need to be able to sell people on their vision. However, if you are involved in a business and don’t want to walk way from the whole enterprise to start something new, it’s possible to create a not-for-profit arm of your company and become involved in social entrepreneurship. Also, far-reaching social responsibility policies are becoming increasingly important in the business world and they may impact the ability of future startups to succeed. Social responsibility and Millennials One of the widely noted qualities of Millennials is the value they place on social responsibility in the business world. Companies like Toms – famous for giving away shoes in impoverished areas – have won over legions of shoppers with strong views on social issues. In the same way, Millennials prefer working for companies that share their social concerns, typically these can involve issues of poverty, justice or environmentalism. In other words, as we move forward, I expect to see the most successful companies actively involved in finding creative solutions to social problems. They will have to do this to win Millennials as both consumers and employees. This is good news for entrepreneurs who share these concerns. By finding ways to incorporate social entrepreneurism into your plans you don’t have to leave your dedication to improving the world behind as you work on building your company. Additionally, you’ll find that many of the same skills you used to get your business off the ground will serve you well as you branch out into the social realm. Do you have a strong desire to be an instrument of change? If so find a social need and fill...
read moreWill Women Crowdfunding Sites Help Shape History?
When families in the typical American home were polled by the Pew Research Center on who makes the decisions in a number of household areas – including family finances – women came out ahead: 43 percent said women made more decisions, 26 percent said men made more decisions, and 31 percent said decision making was equally divided. Another finding was even more dramatic: when it came to managing the money, women decision makers outnumbered men two-to-one – 45 percent versus 23 percent. So perhaps it should come as much of a surprise that women are making some powerful moves in the world of crowdfunding. March is Women’s History Month, and I suspect that the increasingly important role women are playing in crowdfunding will pave the way to women making some history in commerce and beyond. Benefits of crowdfunding One thing I like about crowdfunding in general is that much of it is facilitated totally online. This may help to lessen the impact of gender bias in a very general way. Indiegogo, one of the pioneers in crowdfunding, reports that 42 percent of its successful campaigns are run by women. But when men and women are in the same room together, even with well meaning people, it’s sometimes difficult to look past gender stereotypes. Newly launched websites such as Plum Alley and MoolaHoop elevate the availability of capital to women even higher. They are developing a crowdfunding niche that specializes in helping women raise money. I noted in an earlier post on MoolaHoop that between 1997 and 2014, women-owned businesses increased in number by 68 percent, which is twice the growth rate posted by men. And this was before the entry of these women-focused crowdfunding sites! Lifting women from poverty When I say that increased entrepreneurship from women can change history, I’m not just talking about founding successful companies. The general well-being of society is closely associated with the general well-being of women. When women live in poverty they raise children in poverty and it tends to create a cycle that is very difficult to break. Small business formation is one of the best ways to break the cycle, and it’s probably a far more cost effective and long lasting way when compared to our welfare system. Recently, I spoke at the United Nations regarding the importance of empowering women economically. One of the organization with which I work, The Institute for the Economic Empowerment of Women, helps women in Afghanistan and Rwanda start and build businesses. Five hundred women have gone through our program during the past nine years and we have an 80 percent success rate. On average each Rwandan and Afghan graduate creates jobs for 22 and 28 people respectively. So we are witnessing significant economic development in these countries. Opening up a new front In the 1960s the United States declared “war on poverty” and we have spent trillions of dollars fighting that war. I don’t think too many people would argue if I said that so far our success has been fairly limited. Perhaps providing better access to funds for women-owned startups and business expansion projects will be like sending in fresh troops to fight the battle anew and bring victory into...
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