How to tweak people for fun and profit
Do you know what’s really popular? Unpopular opinions. There was a trending hashtag on Twitter the other day that reminded me of one of the best strategies to improve readership on your blog. The hashtag was #confessyourunpopularopinions. Saying something that goes against conventional wisdom or is contrary to the majority of public opinion always attracts attention. The trick is to take a position that sparks interest, gets people thinking, but doesn’t totally alienate half of your customers and prospects. Frankly, I’m often surprised how conventional wisdom can shift 180 degrees over time…and sometimes these u-turns happen fairly quickly. The diet advice we get falls into this category. A food we should avoid at all costs one year can become beneficial to our health the next. For our purposes, the point of taking positions that are currently out of favor is to make people think. They give you and your reader an opportunity to look at things from a fresh point of view. Further, these kinds of blogs can also generate more reader engagement and reaction than the average blog post. Want more blog comments? Be outrageous. To get started, make a list of the sacred cows in your industry or commercial sector: Are you in real estate? Make the argument that a price correction would be good in the long run. Do you sell appliances? Make the case that people should start washing their clothes by hand. Are you a restaurant owner? Tell fathers, sons, and daughters to make their mom a home-cooked meal next Mother’s Day instead of taking her out. I’ve tried to pick some points of view that I think are a bit outlandish just to give you the idea. You see, the goal here is to differentiate yourself from all the other voices out there. You could probably list 10 to 20 standard blog topics people write about all the time in your industry. Who needs another one of those? Finally, if you’re a good blogger, you can entertain folks with some wild ideas and then turn things around as you’re closing your article and make an even stronger case for the “conventional wisdom.” Or you could stick to your...
read moreBig banks approving more small business loans
While alternative lenders – like the web-based peer-to-peer enterprises – have been getting a lot of attention in the media, it’s the large banks that are really making small business lending “news” right now. Big bank loan approval rates to small businesses hit an all-time high in the June 2017 Biz2credit Small Business Lending Index. It jumped 0.2 percent over May, bringing it to 24.3 percent. This makes the eighth time over the last year that big bank loan approval rates have increased. By contrast, June loan approval rates at alternative lenders dropped by the same amount, 0.2 percent. Further they are more than 2 percent below where they were during June 2016. Rohit Arora, Biz2Credit CEO, explained the situation saying, “Approval percentages at big banks and institutional investors are at post-recession highs. The result is that alternative lenders get requests from less creditworthy borrowers. These are riskier deals.” Further, the recent Fed policy of gradually increasing interest rates is making it more attractive for big banks to lend. “For the third consecutive quarter, the Federal Reserve has voted to increase its benchmark interest rate to a range between 1 percent and 1.25 percent in a vote of confidence in the economy. This bodes well for big banks,” Arora said. “The interest rate increases are resulting in more profitable deals for big banks. This is incentivizing these mainstream lending institutions to approve a higher percentage of loan requests,” he added. Credit union loan approval rates inched lower 0.1 percent to 40.4 percent, a rate that’s down a little over 1 percent from the same time in 2016. However, according to Arora, interest rates aren’t dampening approvals at credit unions – it’s the pace and style of business today that’s leaving them in the dust. “In the FinTech era, credit unions have fallen behind because other categories of lenders have embraced technology. In the process, they lowered their risk, while many credit unions have remained somewhat old fashioned,” he said. “Credit unions typically process loan requests at a slower rate, and in today’s fast-paced economy, borrowers simply aren’t willing to wait. Credit unions are becoming less relevant in small business lending,” Arora explained. You can check out the full report on the Biz2credit website. ...
read moreHow to get a great ‘startup’ education fast and cheap
It doesn’t matter what kind of education you’ve had when you start a new job, some 90 percent of the information and skills you’ll need to be successful will come from hands-on experience. This is one of the biggest reasons I encourage people to start their own business. They will acquire skills more quickly through the process of launching and growing a business than through virtually any other means. And the beautiful thing today is that you can get all of this practical knowledge and insights with very little risk. Just open an online store. Not long ago I gave you a quick rundown on the best and least expensive DIY ecommerce website building services. If you use one of these you can get an online store up and running in a lazy afternoon. Literally. However, today’s advice isn’t specifically on that topic. I want to discuss some of the ways you’ll grow in knowledge and skills when you take the plunge and bring your brand new small business online. And, I’m going to start with the process of “building” your store. Interface skills. All kinds of web-based interfaces today are built around some form of “drag-and-drop.” That phrase makes them sound easy, and they are…but only after you’ve had some experience with them. You’ll climb a long way up the drag-and-drop learning curve by putting your website together. Design skills. Related to the previous point is the use of templates. Every app from the venerable Microsoft Word to email providers like Constant Contact offer templates. When you commit to a DIY website building service, you’ll want to opt for a pre-built template. You’ll then have some options to customize it. Ask others how it looks and encourage them to be brutally honest. You want to use this experience to improve your graphic design “eye” and skills. Merchandising. Build your store around something for which you have passion and knowledge. Start with just a few products – maybe only one. See what sells and what. You might be surprised to discover that some things you absolutely love, aren’t such a big hit with the general population. Pricing. Here’s the flip side of merchandising. People will buy virtually anything if the price is right. What merchandise can you feature that delivers the margins you need? Marketing and advertising. When success or failure depends on your ability to sell your products, marketing rises to a whole new level of urgency. Here’s something very cool: When you establish accounts with new web hosts, they often will give you $100 or $200 in ad credits with Google, for example. You can experiment and learn on another guy’s nickel! Customer service. Make a few sales and the importance of customer service will soon become very real for you. Because you’ve started a small, online e-commerce business, customer service will not be overwhelming initially, but it will teach you the importance of having systems and people in place should you decide to launch a bigger project someday. Networking. This is a tricky one. As an e-commerce startup you are sort of an isolated island in the middle of a huge online ocean. However, to be successful you’ll find that partnerships and cooperation with others is required. Developing those symbiotic relationships with other web properties will...
read moreThinking startup? Consider these three special U.S. states
People migrate to where the jobs are. Similarly, it’s generally a wise strategy for entrepreneurs to migrate to where it’s easiest to found a business. If that’s true, what should you be looking for? I suggest that you want a state with a good overall climate for business where you can easily find banks willing to lend to small business founders with a good plan. With those criteria in mind, North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia currently emerge as the overall winners. I’m basing this on Forbes’ yearly ranking of states good for business and Biz2Credit’s recent survey of state loan approval rates. Here are top 10 states with the highest small business loan approval rates: New Jersey (23.4% approval rate) New York (19% approval rate) Illinois (15% approval rate) California (14.2% approval rate) Pennsylvania (12.9% approval rate) Florida (11.1% approval rate) Georgia (10.2% approval rate) Texas (10% approval rate) Ohio (8.8% approval rate) North Carolina (7.9% approval rate) Here’s the Forbes ranking of the states that are best for business: Utah North Carolina Nebraska Texas Colorado Virginia Georgia North Dakota Washington South Dakota Those three states – North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia – represent a general demographic trend we have been experiencing in recent decades: The shift of people from the North to the South. Further, we know that even in the depths of the Great Recession, Texas was the lone star (pun intended), leading the way in job creation. To create its ranking, Forbes looks for low business costs, an educated workforce, and pro-business regulatory climate. Combine those qualities with more cooperative bank loan officers, and you have a winning...
read moreExplore the ‘unknown’ to propel your small business forward
Trial lawyers have an old rule: Don’t ask any question you don’t know the answer to. It’s good advice when you have a witness on the stand, but the opposite advice is better for small business owners: Ask the questions that you don’t know the answer to. One of the biggest ways to improve your product, service, or systems is to discover the things people won’t or don’t tell you. Sometimes these are negatives, like the customer service calls people end up not making. But other times the “unknowns” can provide positive, proactive information. This comes to mind because today I noticed that the hashtag #NetflixNeeds is trending on Twitter. I don’t know if Netflix started this, or some Netflix customers got it going. In any case, it gives consumers the opportunity to say what they would like to see on Netflix and also air some criticism they have with the way the streaming service operates. If you follow the business news, you know that the original content Netflix and other streaming services create is central to its growth. If the company notices patterns in the #NetflixNeeds posts, it might help them make programming decisions in the future. Further, by following up on the suggestions made in the social media, Netflix will probably get additional positive social media mentions. Can something like this work for you? Would you consider creating a hashtag like #AcmeWidgetsNeeds to see what your social media followers would say? If you don’t have the courage to put something like that out in cyberspace, it probably means that you know you have some work to do in some areas of your small business. If that’s the case, get busy fixing the problems. As a variation on this, you could create a hashtag that addresses the needs of your industry in general, such as #Whatlocalcoffeeshopsneed. An approach like this could reveal bigger surprises that might help you shape an aggressive and creative long-term strategy for growth. Whether you use a hashtag campaign or directly survey your customers, make it part of your company’s DNA to be always seeking the things you don’t know about your customers. 5 crippling customer service...
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