This Week In Small Business: Big Bang Theory, Downton Abbey, Zero-interest loans and more
“Downton Abbey” may have recently aired its final episode on PBS, but it managed to make its way into our discussion of small businesses for the first time! (What do you think of Mrs. Patmore as a small business owner?) But don’t worry, we also have a lot of practical advice for small business owners who aren’t serving the British nobility. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Where will you find the best small business or small business owner on television? The Simpsons? Modern Family? Shark Tank? Big Bang Theory? Downton Abbey? Need funding? Here are your top five alternative options for funding your small business or startup. A zero-percent loan? For real? Here are all the details. Leadership, management and productivity If an SEO agency promises you the sky, beware, and know how to protect yourself from shady search marketing. Social media is fantastic for customer service…as long as you avoid these 10 common mistakes! Do you think that Apple’s refusal to cooperate with the FBI might be a publicity stunt? You want to be honest with your customers, but apparently you shouldn’t tell them when your Googling… Marketing and sales New to social media? This short article will introduce you to four ways you can use it to built rapport with your prospects. Local Adwords campaigns can be confusing, yet when they are done right, they can be profitable. This article will get you started down the right road. Are you ready to hand over some of your marketing to a social media star? It might be a good idea, especially if comedy will serve your brand well. Your blog is one of your most powerful marketing tools. Use some of these 105 tactics to promote it. Sales effectiveness: Do you really know what it takes to make a sale? Neil Patel checks in with advice on combining SEO with content marketing to maximize your web traffic. And when you need more fundamental SEO advice, this no-nonsense article will give it to you. If you’re a local retail small business, you need to understand the three ways location-based marketing is shaping retail. Politics, government and the economy It took 20 years, but the federal government finally met its goal of awarding 5 percent of contracts to women-owned small businesses. Two views of the economy: Strong. Weak. Choose one…or better yet, read both articles. The IRS is making it even more difficult for small businesses to provide healthcare options for...
read more3 Keys to Keep Your Small Business Team Performing ‘In the Zone’
Have you ever had moments in your life when you felt like you were “in the zone”? It might have been during a sporting event, but I’m more interested in your professional life. As a small business owner, I’m sure there have been times when you’ve been so intently focused on a task that it almost felt like time stopped because you were accomplishing your goals so efficiently and effortlessly. Sometimes it feels like it takes us two hours to accomplish a 15-minute task and then occasionally it seems like we can get a two-hour job done in 15 minutes – or at least it feels that way. These moments are precious. At the end of completing tasks when we’re “in the zone” we feel excited and even energized. On the other hand, when we’re struggling with a task, we feel drained and unmotivated. A secret to productivity in your small business it to keep yourself and your employees in the zone as much as possible. There has been some good work done in the area of human performance and three principles have emerged that you can leverage in your professional life and as you lead your small business team. We seem to have internal triggers that help put us in this mental “sweet spot” and when you can pull those triggers in yourself and with your employees, you have a far better chance at achieving the highest levels of small business productivity. Here they are: 1. The optimum degree of difficulty. When tasks are too far above our ability or two far below our ability, it causes problems. When they are too difficult, frustration quickly sets in and hampers our ability to move forward. Also, from the purely practical point of view, when tasks are too far above our ability level, we spend more time researching the solutions to the problem than we do applying the solution to the problem. When tasks are below our level of competence, we get bored. We tend to shirk these kinds of tasks; we let them slide. Sometimes this can sneak up on us. For example, if your best sales reps are never challenged with new accounts, they will begin to give less than their best effort on their existing accounts. The key here is to give yourself and your team tasks that push the envelope to some degree, but not to overdo it – at least not on a regular basis. Stretch your team, but don’t break them. Further, stretch them in one direction at a time, which brings us to the second point. 2. Clear goals. When you assign tasks, including those that stretch the members of your team, be sure they have clear goals. Imagine a runner setting out on a race, but having no idea where the finish line was located. The runner would just lope along aimlessly. It’s the same situation with small business productivity. If your employees don’t know the goal – and this includes their ability to truly understand the goal – they won’t develop the intense focus that delivers the ultimate level of productivity. This means that first you must know the goal and have the willingness and ability to communicate it to your team. 3. Immediate feedback. Have you watched any professional auto...
read moreTips to achieve the best product photography and dominate your niche
The signs are all around us. It didn’t take Instagram long to pass Twitter in users. Video is exploding. Infographics and memes rule the day. We’re living in an age where visuals are the preferred means of communication and this has huge implications for your website. Not only should you be translating some of your social media marketing into infographics, you need to pay careful attention to the photographs you use on your website. If you have any experience buying or selling on eBay – or even Amazon – you will have noticed that there are always several sellers peddling the same items. Very often the top seller will be the one with the best photography. Imagery relays messages The thing about the images on your site is that they communicate immediately. If the photographs on your web pages are inferior, it sends an instant message to visitors. It takes a person a little while to read the words on the page, but if those words are accompanied by bad photographs, a prospect may never even get to the words. In some cases you can use stock photographs. However, let me warn you: Generally speaking, stock photographs look like stock photographs, and after a while you begin to see the same stock photos on many sites. This is less than ideal. If you feel you need to drop some stock photos into your site, be selective. Dig through these sources: Unsplash New Old Stock Picography Pixabay continues to be the largest single source of photos you can use without royalties or even attribution, but I think the three I mentioned above will yield photos that are seen less often around the Internet. However, it will be a bit more difficult finding photos to fit your needs on those sites. Product shot photography What I really wanted to discuss here today are the original photos you post on your site. If you post photos to feature products that you sell – online and/or at your location – your photos must be superior. Settling for anything less than the best product photography is a major error. For many small businesses, product photography falls into two main categories: the isolated photo of the product itself, and lifestyle photography that captures the product being used in a real life situation. With a simple seamless background, you may be able to do a great job with your product photography. You want to use soft, diffused, indirect lighting so you can avoid creating harsh shadows. Many amateur photographers want to place their subjects in the bright sunlight thinking that the strong light will help create a good picture. Wrong. It just creates harsh shadows. If you’re taking photographs outdoors, put your subjects in shaded areas away from direct sunlight. DIY product photography You can create your own setup for product shot photography, if your products aren’t too large. A simple piece of white paper that is taped to a wall or box so it gently curves upward behind the item that you are shooting will do the trick – if the area is bathed in diffused light. When you want to capture your items in “lifestyle” settings, the situation becomes more complicated. You have many more variables you need to control. In this case, it...
read moreHow – and Why – to Create and Use Facebook Dark Posts
This may seem like one of those enigmatic Zen Koan riddles, but I promise you it’s not: When can an unpublished Facebook post be more powerful than a published Facebook post? First, let me strip away one of the layers of mystery: By “unpublished” I mean not published to your Facebook timeline. As you know, the items small businesses publish on their timelines seem to be getting into the newsfeeds of fewer and fewer followers. This, of course, is part of Facebook’s campaign to increase ad revenue. And to be fair to Facebook, their management wants to keep the typical user’s news feed sharply focused on the posts that will interest each user. This has given rise to an ad that is going by the unfortunately sinister label of a Facebook dark post. Your next questions may be “What is a Facebook dark post?” and “How do I create a dark post on Facebook?” – so let’s go there. Facebook dark posts Dark posts on Facebook are simply posts that are not distributed organically; you pay for them to be distributed to a specific group of people or a broadly defined demographic you specifically want to see a certain post of yours. If you have a decent sized fan base on Facebook, or a good email list, those people can be your targeted audience when you create a Facebook dark post. However, navigating through some of the steps is a little confusing, so let me share a handful screen shots and instructions that should help get you started. The first step is to create your post in a Word document, or have any other materials (a photo for example) you want to share via this “dark” post ready. The next thing you’ll do from your Facebook homepage is select “Create Ad.” Follow that with “Boost Post” when you’re asked what the objective of your campaign is. At that point you can select a post you have already published, or create a new post. (This is the option I was preparing you for above when I suggested you have your post materials ready). Your Facebook dark post audience After you create your post you’ll be asked to set your audience for your ad. This is where you can target the exact fans, followers or customers that you want. You can identify them by Facebook id, email addresses, phone numbers or mobile advertiser IDs. After this point you’ll be asked to set your budget and then you’re ready to rumble. But before we leave the topic, let’s quickly look at why you might want to use a dark page post on Facebook. First, as I said above, there’s a good chance that many of your organic posts aren’t reaching as many Facebook users as you would like. And among the people they are reaching, some of your posts may not be of much interest. In other words, if people are beginning to see your posts as spam, it’s better that they don’t see them at all! The key to success with any list – whether it be a snail mail list, email list or list of Facebook followers – is segmentation. Once you know how to create a dark post on Facebook, you can use this tool to match posts to the right...
read moreFour ‘Organize Your Home Office Day’ Productivity Boosters
Organize Your Home Office Day comes but once a year…even though it’s something we should probably do on a quarterly (or maybe even monthly or weekly) basis. For many of us, our home offices become our comfortable little nests where we spend the single biggest part of our days and because they are such familiar places, the tendency to let them get messy and unorganized can be a problem. Let’s give ourselves some quick reminders and encouragement so we can make some progress on improving our home work environment. While it’s not easy to measure, when our home offices are pleasant and well organized, it puts us in a position to do better work and be more productive. 1. Clamp the cables I might have titled this one “Tame the technology.” There are all kinds of cool cable and tech organizing gizmos on the market today. Do yourself a solid and head down to Staples or any nearby large office supply store and see what they have. Stock up on some items, haul them back to your home office and bring order to the spaghetti that’s probably coating the sides and back of your desk. 2. Clear the clutter Survey all your work surfaces for items you’ve left out but don’t use any more. Declutter your work area. This is the first magic trick that house stagers use to make a home that’s up for sale seem more appealing to prospective buyers; it works just as well for your home office. However, take it one step further with your home office. Don’t stop at clearing the clutter from the tops of tables and desks, clear the clutter from your computer desktop as well. The more files you have taking space, the slower your computer runs. See if your computer has software that will help you reclaim and reorganize disk space. If so, run it according to instructions. 3. Discard some documents Related to clearing away the clutter is tossing documents that are no longer relevant. Do you have a file cabinet that’s beginning to fill up with documents that are completely outdated? Take a half hour to leaf through them, tossing out as many as possible. In the process you might also find some things you’ve forgotten about that will serve as fresh inspiration or guidance for your small business. The same principle applies to your computer. One folder that definitely deserves review is your “Downloads” folder. It can end up storing hundreds of files that we use one time – or not at all – and these files can be huge. Often images will end up in our Download folders and they take up a lot of disk space. There’s a good chance that you can toss out everything in your Download folder. 4. Look at your layout Finally, take a step back and see if you might want to rearrange your home office layout. Is it in the best location? Do you have a window? Natural light? Some people like to move thrier furniture very often and that can be a good idea. For some reason, freshening areas up by rearranging the major furniture items seems to pump new energy into the spaces. It’s good to get out of ruts. And if you don’t have a desk that...
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