5 Small Business Tips from the Bottom of Santa’s Bag
Not many people know this, but after Santa finishes his deliveries on Christmas morning, he always finds a few extra gifts at the bottom of his bag. The big guy has been gracious enough to share with us five of these that were intended to go to some hard-working small business owners. As with your holiday meal leftovers, these will appeal to a wide range of tastes and can be consumed in small bites. Enjoy. Boost your online reviews. Get a group of local small business owners together and have a “review party.” Post online reviews of one another’s businesses and also give each other constructive criticism of your businesses – online, brick-and-mortar, customer service, etc. Imprint yourself and your team with habits. Good habits can boost productivity. Develop routines that turn into habits in your operation. When you have good habits you can stop sweating many of the small details. Habits are to our personal and professional lives what automation is to operational and machine processes. Consider charging for something you currently give away for free. Do you have a freemium that you use to pull people into your fold? If you always give it away for free, you’ll never get good feedback on it. If you start to charge, people will take the time to tell you what they don’t like about it and you can use that information to improve it. There aren’t many “early adopters” in the B2B world. Coming to market with a cutting-edge service in the business-to-business environment is difficult. Businesses like to see a track record. Thinking evolution rather than revolution is usually the sounder advice. Listen to the marketplace. Use tools like Google Alerts, Mention and Talkwalker to monitor what people are saying about you and your competitors, and make strategic use of the insights you gain. If you have physical locations, use secret shoppers to give you a clear picture of what really happens in your business. Relax through the end of the year. Enjoy New Year’s Eve and all the traditional New Year’s Day TV-watching. But when you start to get rolling in the coming year, try to make good use of at least one or two of these...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Looking back and looking forward for tips and tactics
Looking back over 2015 and projecting forward over 2016 give us some interesting and informative articles this week. Also, be sure to catch the NFIB video on why it’s great to be a small business owner – that may be the best way to start your year. Leadership, management and productivity There have been a lot of good 2015 roundups in recent weeks. This one from Gene Marks should give you some inspiration and guidance going into 2016. Should you be outsourcing your content creation and distribution? Here are the tradeoffs. If you need some great quotes to propel you into 2016, you’ll find them in this article. Dealing with health insurance issues is something that will never go away. This piece from Zane Benefits covers what small business owners need to know about health insurance reimbursement. Marketing and sales In the tech world, the website Medium is one of the go-to content marketing sites. Find out if it would work for you and your small business. We hate traffic on our commutes, but love it on our small business blogs. Check out these three blog traffic growth hacking tips. If you want to get a good handle on creating word-of-mouth advertising, you need to understand the three types of audiences that drive it. Have a new website? Be sure you have this SEO checklist covered. Forget about “get to the gym more often,” these seven marketing resolutions are probably more important – and more realistic – for the new year. Sometimes celebrities have the most shocking marketing strategies and maybe small business owners can learn a few things from them. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Barnaby Lashbrooke, founder and CEO of Time etc, says that freelancers are the key to increasing startup activity. John Rampton also has a lot to say about freelancers and startups. This short video from NFIB tells us why it’s great to be a small business owner. It’s good to remind ourselves of these personal and professional rewards. Politics, government and the economy It’s time to read the tea leaves for the 2016 economy and there are some indications that small business hiring trends spell bad news. On the other hand, female small business owners seem like they’re pretty upbeat. The NFIB takes a good look at the big issues poised to impact small business in...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Mining 2015 for Marketing Gems
Are we nostalgic for 2015 yet? Probably not, but we saw a few good articles last week that look back at the year to pick up some marketing and management lessons. Leadership, management and productivity Gene Marks writes a regular small business column for the Washington Post. Here he shares his favorite stories from 2015. The list is rather eclectic, but I think these Bill Gates recommended books will boost your small business acumen. Not all small-business borrowing is the same. This article follows it via a lifecycle perspective. Separate the fact and fiction of succession planning in this overview by Glenn Ebersole. Cyber attacks on big business make the headlines, but small business owners are also under siege. Don’t let yourself be misled. Marketing and sales Blogging is central to almost every content marketing strategy, so when you can boost your traffic by a factor of four, it’s a very good thing. To be successful at word-of-mouth marketing, you first need to really understand your target audience(s). Download an app and you can get personalized marketing tips from Google. In another 2015 “Best Of,” Joe Lazauskas surveys content marketing…so does Kimberlee Morrison. These 25 Do’s and 25 Don’ts should help guide your small business social media marketing in 2016. Learn how to write posts that will rank highly in Google search results. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Is there meaning in being a small business owner. The head of the SBA says yes. Politics, government and the economy Small business hiring seems to be swinging to part time employees. Does that bode ill for the economy...
read morePerform these tech checks to assure your small business success in 2016!
This post is sponsored by Samsung. All thoughts and opinions are my own. As one year comes to a close and we start looking forward to the New Year, many of us take a little time to reflect on where we’re at in our personal lives and the smart small business owner will also take a good look at the status of the business. And today, when technology and the business of technology are changing so quickly, it’s especially important to do a year-end tech check. Here are some important areas you need to examine. Review Internet connection options Between cable providers, telephone providers, Google Fiber and others, your options for lightning fast Internet connections are constantly improving. Take stock of what you currently have and compare it to what’s new in your location, or even what’s planned in the near future. Get the best financial deal and fastest connection possible for your situation. Review cellphones and data plans The IRS has made it easier for small businesses to provide cellphones for employees. They have eliminated the reporting hassles for small business owners. For a variety of reasons – including app control, data security, and phone number ownership issues – it may be time for you to provide smart phones (such as the popular, versatile and powerful Galaxy lineup of phones) for your team. Further, in the same way that high speed Internet connections are becoming more competitively priced, cell phone provider data usage plans are in a state of flux – to the benefit of consumers. If you employ any road warriors who use a lot of data, contact providers and see if you can get a sweeter deal. Upgrade to Windows 10 If you’re running Windows 8 or older systems in your small business, you should move to Windows 10. It’s one of the better updates to the Windows operating system and it’s proving popular with small business owners. Your team will find that its interface is fast and familiar, it should boost productivity and increase security. If you’re upgrading from Windows 7 or 8, Microsoft has made the process easy and free. Windows 10 running on one of the fast, long-battery-life Samsung laptops will improve the productivity of your team, enhance company loyalty and make your employees generally all-around happy campers. Review cloud services For a wide range of reasons, the future of any small business that wants to stay competitive is in cloud computing. Review your commitment to moving data and services to the cloud. This starts as simply as leveraging the tools provided by Google for Work, to signing on with all kinds of Software as a Service (SaaS) providers. Carefully compare SaaS providers for services such as payroll, marketing, accounting, data storage and backup, and other critical small business operations. One of the benefits of going with a proven SaaS leader is that you can feel more confident about data security procedures. The top services will keep up with best cybersecurity practices. That will lighten a major burden from your in-house IT department. Website review When is the last time you’ve taken a good hard look at your website? If it still looks like it was designed in 2009, you have major problems. Frankly, you might not be the best person to judge whether...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: 2015 Digital Marketing Insights, Tools, Tips and more
As we draw the curtains on 2015, we double down on data and digital marketing. We’re also still debating the strength of the economy, nationally and worldwide. Leadership, management and productivity Airlines are proving that passengers are willing to spend more after having a customer service experience via Twitter, so don’t overlook this valuable communication tool. Meetings. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. See how they relate to your culture’s organizational leadership. If we allow ourselves to be distracted, it can kill productivity. Here’s how one successful owner of a $20-million luxury brand fights distractions. Bad online reviews can haunt your small business almost forever. Devise a strategy to counter those complaints. Trying to fund expansion? Discover how to find SBA real estate loans for your small business. Marketing and sales Data driven marketing is where it’s at today. But you need to be using the right data to make any real progress. With so many brands competing for consumers’ wallets, it’s critically important to make the best use of social media to pitch your brand. Everyone is doing content marketing, but for real success you need to be sure your content is better than what your competitors are publishing. Analyze the competition. Also, avoid these four content marketing mistakes. Review this checklist of 10 great blogging tools and find the ones that will work best in your small business. For many small business owners, their financial success is tied to the success they have growing their opt-in email list. Be sure you’re doing everything you can to grow yours. Have you established a healthy tension between sales and marketing in your small business? 2015 saw Periscope and Meerkat launch. BLAB also made its debut. Discover five ways to use BLAB in your digital marketing program. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Start ’em early. Here are five ways to teach your kids to be entrepreneurs. Attention entrepreneurs: Are you making any of these 14 mistakes with your digital marketing? Politics, government and the economy If you operate a “cash-only” small business, you need to read this cautionary tale about how the IRS caused major problems for Nick’s Roast Beef. It looks like Big Apple small business owners are generally optimistic about revenue growth and hiring. Will the rest of the nation follow suit? (If this NFIB infograhic is on target, the answer may be, “No.”) There has been a lot of attention paid to global trade pacts in 2015. But if the world economy stumbles in 2016, that might be an even bigger...
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