7 Tips to Help You Face and Conquer Your Blog Content Fears.
Recently I spoke at a major small business conference about building a celebrity brand. During my remarks, I covered myriad tips and tricks to establish you and/or your business as the “go-to” expert in your community or field. Afterwards, however, the questions I received most concerned blogging. While the majority of the SMBs in the audience recognized the value of a blog, the most common excuses for not having one included: * Want to, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet, * Started but I can’t stay motivated so I’ve let it slip, and * Started but I honestly don’t know what to write about. Do any of these excuses sound like you? If so, stick with me for a couple of minutes while I try to give you the confidence to stop making excuses and start building a successful business blog. Make a Commitment. Ideas without action mean nothing. So stop talking about your blog, and get started instead. To avoid feeling overwhelmed make a commitment to once or twice a month and put it on your calendar. Then stick to your schedule. Find Your Voice. What is it you have to say to your audience? What expertise do you want to be known for? If you’re like me, you have opinions about many topics. But before you use your business blog as your personal journal, think about what will benefit your customers the most and share your knowledge. Write About Topics You Know. Because you’re experienced in your field, I’m sure you have a significant amount of knowledge stored away. However, you may be thinking where do I start. An easy first step is to consider the normal questions you get from your customers. Use those FAQs as the beginning of your blog content development. Write About Topics You Don’t Know. You may be thinking this tip is counterintuitive to what I’ve already said, but it’s not really. If there is a subject you’d like to know more about for your business, I’m sure your readers would be interested as well. So do some research and share what you learn. Sing Someone Else’s Praises. Use your blog to highlight a great customer success story. It builds rapport with your customer and gives you good content too. Additionally, if there is a particular product, book or service you like, share it with your audience in your blog. Go Online for Additional Resources. If find yourself suffering from writer’s block, you’ll find a wealth of ideas online. Visit online forums to see what is on people’s minds. Sign-up for Google Alerts using keywords relating to your business to see what’s happening in the news. Quora.com is a site where people ask open-ended questions and you can sign up for alerts there as well. Personally, I like to use keywords in social media platforms to see what is trending. Spread the Word. Don’t expect that when you start your business blog they will come. Be sure to spread the word via social media and email marketing. A business blog can be an excellent business building tool. I hope I’ve helped you conquer your content fears so you can get started...
read moreSurvey Says: Trump first choice for President among small business owners
Entrepreneurship and small business need to be front and center during this election cycle. After all, Americans are concerned about their economic future, and entrepreneurs are critical to getting the economy back on a strong growth track. Now with Super Tuesday results giving Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton the lead, who would be the best for small businesses. The nation’s 28 million small businesses represent 54 percent of all U.S. sales and have provided 55 percent of all jobs since the 1970s, according to the Small Business Administration. And these entrepreneurs plan on making their voices heard by voting. According to a recent Manta survey of more than 8,000 small business owners, a stunning 60 percent plan to vote in their state primaries and caucuses. Additionally, the survey found found Donald Trump was the number one choice for our country’s top Executive Office. The economy, healthcare, tax reform, government regulations and immigration are critical issues for small businesses. So I culled together some information on the top two candidates to date so you can understand who would be best for your small business. Health care. Secretary Clinton says she wants to be the small business President, but while her husband served in that role, Clinton led the effort for extensive government control of the health care system. At that time, in response to changes While her husband was president, Clinton led the effort for extensive government control of the health care system. At that time, in response to charges that small businesses could not afford her plan and jobs would be lost, she declared, “I can’t be responsible for every under-capitalized entrepreneur in America.” Currently she says she wants to keep build on what works in the Affordable Care Act. She acknowledges the need to lower health care costs and her website says “we need to demand lower drug costs.” If President, she will defend the act from appeal. Mr. Trump is alling for the repeal of Obamacare and supports health savings accounts (HSAs) and a national marketplace that enables health insurance competition. According to a PBS.org report, Trump called Obamacare a catastrophe during remarks at the Iowa Freedom Summit in January. It’s been five years since the passage of the AHCA which promised small business owners lower health care costs and more choices. None of that has happened. Instead, small business owners continue to see their health care costs increase. According to a National Small Business Association survey in 2014, “91 percent of small businesses reported increases in their health plan at their most recent renewal while 96 percent reported increased health insurance costs over the past five years. TAXES AND TAX REFORM Mr. Trump’s tax plan would lower individual rates, with a top rate of 25%. There would be four brackets (0%, 10%, 20% and 25%). Regardless of how a business is structured, it would pay no more than 15% in business taxes. The plan would eliminate the death tax, the AMT and the marriage penalty. Increased taxes mean small businesses that are already struggling have less and less money to reinvest in business growth, hiring employees and developing new innovative products and services. The death tax often results in a business closing its doors or going deeply into debt to pay the taxes upon the founders...
read moreNew free app empowers small business owners
Editor’s Note: This post is sponsored by Staples. All the comments and opinions are my own. Let me give you some bedrock business principles and share a couple of corollaries: * If you can’t measure it you can’t control it, and * If you can’t control it, you can’t grow it. Those are simple enough and easy to understand, but implementing the means of measurement and control aren’t quite so simple and easy. Here’s what I’m getting at: Because of the Internet and the fact that so much of our small business infrastructure today is computer based, we have more data at our disposal than ever before. That’s the good news. However, the bad news is that all of this business-critical information is located on different websites and different apps. This makes accessing and analyzing the data difficult; it can be like herding cats. It would be great if someone made an app that combined all of your small business’ most important metrics in one easy-to-use graphic interface so you can almost instantly get an up-to-date picture of how your small business is performing. This, and more, is what Staple’s new free app – Quick Wins – does for you. It essentially creates a metrics dashboard that gives you all your vital information from: * Facebook, * Twitter, * Google Analytics, * QuickBooks, and * Shopify. Instagram and MailChimp metrics will be added soon. Further, Quick Wins keeps all of these essential metrics synched across virtually all of the platforms you use. If you commute via train, you can grab your iOS or Android smartphone or tablet and instantly take the pulse of your small business. I think virtually every small business owner will immediately see the value of this, however Quick Wins goes even further. Based on what your metrics are saying, the app makes suggestions on how you can improve your small business performance. Let’s be honest, ideas are the currency of the day and it’s easy for small business owners to burn out trying to come up with the best ideas to drive growth, for example. Having a source of free, customized suggestions is invaluable. There’s one more component of this app that I need to mention in this quick overview: community. When you start using Quick Wins, you join a like-minded community of small business owners and managers, where you get to share ideas, success stories and failures. It’s undeniable that there is strength in numbers and the good thing about other Quick Wins users is that you know they are folks who are serious about moving their small businesses forward. The mere fact that they’ve downloaded, installed and are using the app shows that they’re committed. It’s sort of a self-selecting process that eliminates those who aren’t at your level of involvement. You’ll be trading ideas with small business owners who share your aspirations, but at the same time, you’re certain to find many who have experience in areas that are new or less familiar to you. They’ll help you grow in certain areas, while you will do the same for others who are using the Quick Wins app. I think Quick Wins really represents a new level of maturity in app development. For the last several years, we’ve been seeing a lot of...
read moreYou’re Never Too Young To Play With Your Business Ideas
Good work ethic, passion for making dreams a reality and tenacity are the stuff entrepreneurs are made of. And it’s never too early to start solving problems. If you can solve an existing problem before your ninth birthday or even before your 16th birthday then you are fantastically driven and motivated. Now, more than ever, youth are in control of their futures. Exploring entrepreneurship as a career path is healthy not only for determining your economic future but also because the skill set you develop as a young innovator is transferrable, according to Frank Pobutkiewicz, founder and managing director of Whiteboard Youth Ventures. Whiteboard Youth Ventures creates youth entrepreneurship programs for high school students. “Money management, team work and collaboration, technology proficiency, public speaking, pitching new ideas, and critical thinking are essential skills needed to thrive in the 21st century,” Frank says. And he’s right. Children are kicking butt and becoming millionaires even before they reach high school. 17-year-old Raymond Wang, for example, won the world’s largest high school science competition in May 2015, taking home the $75,000 prize money for inventing a new way to keep germs from spreading in airplane cabins. Jan. 17 is Kid Inventor’s Day, which is why I’m going to share with you why it’s important to instill an entrepreneur spirit in your child. What Child Entrepreneurs Do Differently Massachusetts-based Whiteboard Youth Ventures is not a one-time stop. The organization recently launched an advanced four-week summer program to help students bring their product to market earlier and start their companies sooner. “Our students’ success is our only definition of success,” Frank says. The biggest challenge of working with youth entrepreneurs is “unteaching” them what they think is expected or right, according to Frank. Yet, the students aren’t afraid when it comes to taking risks or testing different concepts. They may take failure personally but they bounce back quicker than most adults do. To be a successful innovator and entrepreneur you need to ask the right questions and believe in your ideas. Child Entrepreneurs Making Headlines And that’s exactly what these child entrepreneurs have done. At 17 Leanna Archer is a seasoned entrepreneur. She started her full line of natural hair products based on her Haitian great-grandmother’s secret recipes. Her company’s annual revenue is more than $100,000 and she sells her products to customers in 80 countries. Her net worth is pegged at more than $3 million. Robert Nay’s Bubble Ball mobile gaming app made him an overnight millionaire when he was just 14-years-old and three years later, his first game has been downloaded more than 16 million times. Now, at 17, he is a successful businessman. Strategies To Foster The Entrepreneur Spirit In Your Child Starting a business at a young age helps children to build leadership and critical thinking skills. It also empowers them to turn their ideas into actionable problem-solving solutions. Here are my strategies to instill the entrepreneur spirit in your child: * Make them realize the importance of solving problems * Help them take risks, take those chances otherwise they will never know what it’s like to fail and get back up on your feet * Motivate them to pursue their passions and turn those passions into projects that can help solve real-world problems * Show them what hard work...
read moreYou May See a Plain Cake Pan – But an Entrepreneur Sees an Opportunity.
It was January 1957, when an accidental entrepreneur, Walter Fredrick Morrison (“Fred”), sold the rights for the Pluto Platter (later known as the Frisbee) to the Wham-O toy company. (The name may have come from the Frisbie Baking Company.) As legend has it, Fred and his girlfriend were tossing a popcorn lid back and forth when the idea came to him. Soon the two discovered that cake pans actually flew better and were easier to obtain. So they started a little business selling “Flyin’ Cake Pans” on the beach in Santa Monica, California. After completing a tour of duty in World War II where Fred learned about aeronautics, he designed a flying disc he called the Whirlo-Way and found an investor who paid for molding his design in plastic. Today, the Frisbee can be found in the more than 45,000 sporting goods stores nationwide, ringing up sales of over $26 billion annually — not to mention hours and hours of fun. Small businesses are responsible for most of the innovation in the U.S. and creative entrepreneurs such as Fred provide our economy with a competitive advantage. That’s why small businesses will take the forefront in driving our economic recovery. Look around you. Is there a flying cake pan in your future? Do you have other great “accidental entrepreneur” stories you can share with us?...
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