This week in small business: Women in manufacturing and IT leadership positions…
We get some great business insights and challenges from the point of view of some very accomplished professional women this week. And Millennials, don’t miss the advice on how to achieve financial success. Leadership, management, and productivity Kathleen Buse, adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve University, makes the case from a business perspective that more women need to be in manufacturing leadership positions. Having a measurable and achievable strategic plan is vital to the success of your small business, says Jeffrey Kadlic, and that’s why he argues for a “documented road map.” You’ll do more GOOD if you aim to SERVE more than you aim to PLEASE. – Chris Edmonds Nothing is really “one-size-fits-all” (even those ball caps!), so Caitlin Aucal’s article, “Discover Your Productivity Style To Get More Done,” offers welcomed advice. Two senior women executives from Intel and Biogen explain the unique opportunities and challenges of Chief Information Officers in this Michael Krigsman ZD Net article. Marketing and sales It’s a question all business owners have at some point: How do I know that spending money on marketing is worth it? Brian Brennan answers. Eric Enge goes into some depth with his insights and instructions in his Moz article, “Reach and Influence: Your First Marketing Priority.” How would you like to maintain your holiday sales traffic throughout the entire year? Bethny Card delivers sales SEO strategy and how to use it. We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid. – Benjamin Franklin Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation JK Rowling wasn’t a publishing sensation until she was well into her 30s. So if you don’t fall under the “Millennial” label, you’ll be encouraged by Oliver Burkeman’s “Are you too old to find success?” that appeared in The Guardian. On the other hand, if you are a Millennial, don’t miss this MSN Money article on how to achieve financial success by Walter...
read moreThe critical keys to judging your social media marketing effectiveness
Less than three years ago, business writers were talking about social media marketing as “the next big thing.” Today it’s hard to imagine any business that doesn’t invest a lot of time – and sometimes money – in social media marketing. However, despite our wide acceptance and reliance on it, it’s important to occasionally take a step back and try to get a handle on our social media marketing effectiveness. This can help you discover the strategies that are working best, uncover those that are letting you down, and refocus your efforts for increased cost effectiveness and growth. The bottom line is that you need to make assessments based on your return on investment. This gets a little tricky because you may not have a “number” immediately assigned to every element that goes into your social media marketing efforts. For example, how do you value your time? Put a price on your head If you personally handle elements of or all of your social media marketing program, there are two ways to put a number on your time. First, you can estimate how much it would cost you to hire someone to do what you currently do. That’s pretty easy and straightforward. A second approach would be to consider the lost opportunities you’re experiencing due to the hours you spend on social media marketing and assign a number to that. Merely taking the time to do these two estimates will tell you something about the current state of your social media marketing effectiveness. If the value of your lost opportunities is greater than what you would pay someone to do your social media marketing work, you need to farm it out ASAP. There’s one more area to consider when you’re calculating your costs: paid social media marketing and the various subscription services you may be using. In a spreadsheet, you would have two columns, one for organic social media marketing and one for paid social media marketing, or you might call these social media ads. Judging your ROI on the paid ads won’t be very difficult, but be sure to include the time and money you spend planning them. After you have figures you’re happy with, you need to consider your goals and your progress against your goals. Are you building a following? If so, then you can quickly determine the cost of each new follower. Are you looking for a boost in sales? In that case, you need to be able to track sales back to followers. Do you want to build your influence? You need to assign a value on opportunities that have opened up to you due to your social media clout. Maintain consistency I’ll be the first to admit, that some of these numbers are going to be “fuzzy.” That’s okay if you keep two things in mind: You need to be consistent in the values you assign. Once you set them, stick with them. You’re looking for trends and “cause and effect” in the numbers over time. Next, I’ll explain these two points and why they are important for gauging your social media marketing effectiveness. Let me use the government’s monthly unemployment figures as a parallel example. It doesn’t matter if April’s unemployment rate was exactly 5.6 percent. What’s important is that it was...
read moreTaking the Pain Out of Invoicing for Your Small Business
It’s exciting to strike out on your own — to be your own boss. You’re passionate about the product or service you offer and you delight in bringing on new business. However, there is more to building a business than making sales. It’s the backroom administration detail that often drives entrepreneurs crazy. Last year, I hired a freelancer to do a project for me. She did a great job and I praised her work. Then I said, “Now be sure to send me your invoice so I can get you paid.” Months went by and I heard nothing from her. Finally, I called to remind her and she apologized and said she’d send it right away, which she did. This scenario isn’t uncommon for new business owners. They wear so many hats that some of the tasks that aren’t so exciting like invoicing clients or paying bills get pushed to the back burner. When this happens, small business owners often get a rude awakening in the not-so-early days of the business. Most entrepreneurs are creative visionaries and the operational aspects of running business aren’t their forte. However, managing your finances is imperative for a successful business. Here are some of the areas that every business owner needs to address in order to stay on top of finances: Cash, Inventory, Accounts receivable and payable, and Personnel. (This may not be necessary in the early days if you’re a solopreneur.) To help you easily categorize your expenses, I recommend designating a credit card to be used for business purposes only. Your card statements will itemize each expenditure so you can see where and how you’re spending money. Now, let’s talk about getting you paid. When I started my first business years ago, I used a word document and typed in all the necessary information and amounts for my clients. Then I’d drop it in the mail and wait. Today, there are resources to make the invoicing process easy peasy so you won’t have any excuses for putting it off. For example, check out Invoice Home. You’ll find over 100 invoice templates from which to choose so you won’t have to create your own. Plus, you can add a click-to-pay button so your customers and clients can easily pay you through PayPal. No more excuses such as, “The check is in the mail.” Of course, you can still download a PDF of the invoice and do it the old fashioned way — snail mail. The bottom line is while you love what you do, you work hard and you deserve to get paid in a timely fashion. Let Invoice Home help you build your business and watch your sales soar. Editor’s Note: This is an Invoice Home sponsored post. All thoughts and opinions are my own....
read more7 strategies for publishing a successful small business blog
I’ve featured small business blog advice on several topics over the years, such as: How to find topics to write on, Why a small business blog is important. How to best design your blog, and How to build your blog using WordPress. Today, I want to look at your small business blog content from a more strategic point of view. When you get the bigger picture of what you want to accomplish with your blog, you’ll find that it can be liberating. It will make it easier for you to choose topics and even deal with the mechanics of writing. 1. Establish your unique voice. When a lifetime friend of yours calls, you recognize the voice right away, don’t you? For most small business blogs, you want to establish that same kind of familiarity with your readers. When you start publishing a blog with the hopes that people will continually read it, you have to give them a reason to come back. If you set a poor tone, or are “all over the map” with your tone, it will be impossible to develop that relationship. 2. Inform and entertain. This relates to my first point. More people will love your small business blog if you entertain them while you’re providing them with valuable information. You don’t have to tap dance across their desks, but you must find interesting ways to deliver information. One way to do this is to understand that not every post has to give readers the meaning of the universe. Lighter posts that share a valuable insight or two and deliver a smile along the way can keep your readers coming back for more. 3. Get real. Use your small business blog to make you and your business “real.” Let your readers see you sweat, laugh, succeed, and even fail. Doing this, by the way, helps achieve point number two above. Remember, the goal of this kind of content marketing is to build relationships. It’s impossible to build a relationship with someone who refuses to share personal thoughts and feelings. 4. Don’t try to sell too much. Ultimately, the purpose of your small business blog is to boost sales, but don’t look at every blog post as a sales piece. Doing that will short circuit your strategy to build relationships and establish a long-term, devoted readership. 5. Write for your audience. This is the primary rule of all writing, but with a small business blog, it gets a little more complicated because you want your audience to be the same people who are likely to do business with you. Writing for CoSchedule, Ben Sailer offers a lot of information on how to find the target audience for your content marketing. If you haven’t explored this in depth, check out what he has to say. 6. Set goals. There are several different areas for goal setting and these should be both internal and external. Internally, you should have a goal for how frequently you commit to publishing. You should always hit that target! Externally, you will want to build your readership and perhaps track how often readers share an article you’ve written. Measuring your small business blog against your goals can help keep you motivated and examining what works and what doesn’t. That will put you on...
read moreThis week in small business: 2017 shaping up to be a very productive year!
If this week’s hot topics are any indication, we’re all committed to boosting our productivity in 2017. Are you in the club? If so, you’ll find a lot of advice to get you going in this week’s collection of curated content. Leadership, management, and productivity Ksenia Anske is a writer and if you write and want to boost your productivity, dive into this article that she has posted on her website. Do you schedule “airplane time” for yourself? That’s one of the seven easy “hacks” Caitliln Zucal offers to maximize your productivity. It’s not the sexiest of topics, but I think you’ll get some very useful advice from Braveen Kumar’s list of eight small business accounting tools. The biggest mistake you can make is listening to people who’ve given up on their dreams telling you to give up on yours. – Umair Hague How can you tap the market for the top Millennial employees? Change your marketing, says Wes Gay writing for Forbes. Keven Kruse contends that we should throw out our to-do lists and fix our calendars to double our productivity. Agree? And speaking of to-do lists, Stephanie Vozza has six items that should never make your list. Are you afraid that growth will ruin the vibe at your small business? If so, check out Erin Sherbert’s piece on the Salesforce blog. Here’s one for all of you contrarians (sort of): “Why Productivity Tools Don’t Increase Your Productivity,” by Arina Katrycheva. Marketing and sales “Don’t Get Mired in Marketing Minutiae,” is Martha France’s message. She offers five good tips to get you out of the weeds. Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something. – Plato In case you need more convincing: “5 Reasons Businesses Shouldn’t Keep Ignoring Content Marketing,” by Toby Nwazor. (I also like his emphasis on storytelling.) With 500 million people around the world using Instagram, it’s a great place for marketing. Brian Peters shares strategies to grow your Instagram account. Ted Dhanik is rethinking influencer marketing and putting the emphasis on micro rather than macro. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Watch out guys! Sarah Friedmann profiles nine women entrepreneurs to keep an eye out for in 2017. We say things like “It’s the Cadillac of bird cages!” Now we find ourselves saying, “It’s the Uber of Whatever!” Giovanni Rodriguez introduces us to the guy who wants to build the Uber of sales reps. The problem with youth is that it’s wasted on the young. That’s part of the lesson Rajan Thapaliya gives in his article, “Seven things I wish I knew as a Young Entrepreneur.” Politics, government, and the economy NFIB Chief Economist Bill Dunkelberg, former Dallas Federal Reserve Advisor Danielle DiMarino Booth, and I discuss why small business optimism is up sharply in this Fox Business video clip....
read more