This Week in Small Business: The Rise of Messenger Apps
The evolution and increased importance of messaging apps for marketing gets a lot of attention in this week’s roundup of top articles. You need to see how your small business will fit into this new marketing world. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Facebooks’ Messenger app is already the second most popular app in the world, but Zuckerger has an even bigger vision for it and it could become the “app for everything.” If you’re looking for excitement, you might consider jumping into an industry that’s ripe for disruption. Three are described in this Forbes article. Marketing and sales It looks like the future of social media will be in messaging apps. Will your brand fit in? Step one in social media marketing is discovering which platforms are best for your small business. And once you’ve done that, you need to get a grip on the trends that are here to stay. Jeff Barrett, SEO of Status Creative, outlines four things small businesses should do to succeed with inbound marketing. Need to do something to increase online sales? The three ideas presented here should get you moving. You may – or may not – need to hire an SEO firm. At least try these 16 DIY SEO tips first. Digitalux CEO Daniel Scalco lists five B2B marketing strategies you need to consider. Today you have to weave a good narrative to engage and lead prospects. These five tips for effective small business storytelling will help. Leadership, management and productivity Unfortunately it’s not just the major brands and big government websites that are in the sights of the hackers. Small businesses are increasingly under attack by ransomware. To do things right you have to know the mistakes to avoid. Here are five common small business mistakes. We recently noted “World Backup Day.” If you don’t have solid backup strategies for your virtual world, you need to read this article. Really. Small business owners should be on top of the seven important trends listed in this article. They include fintech, the rise of the Millennials, and more. Politics, government and the economy As the primary season drags on, it looks like small business owners are losing confidence in virtually all of the candidates. Two streams of history crossed paths recently: U.S. Relations with Cuba and the gig economy. William Fenton has an interesting take on the situation in his cautionary tale. (No)surprise! Small business and big labor are on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to government...
read moreHow one strong, guiding principle can save you money and prevent problems
There is something I’ve noticed about the most effective leaders and it’s true no matter what field they are active in: The have a few strongly held, guiding principles that govern their actions. They don’t have a list of 20 priorities, because they are guided by a small number of overarching principles that are able to provide consistent direction whenever they are faced with making a decision. Let me give you one of these and show you some of the implications that follow. Here is a principle that will serve you well in your small business, and in any other endeavor you choose to pursue: Do it right the first time. When you do a task correctly the first time, you: Save materials, Save time, Prevent personal frustration, Meet deadlines, Please your customers, Eliminate the mistakes caused when something has to be redone Raise the quality of your output Raise your competitiveness, and much more. One small business owner may have a problem meeting deadlines. That owner may decide to attack the problem. However, had that same owner instilled a company culture that was dedicated to “doing it right the first time,” that delivery problem may have never occurred. The commitment to doing it right the first time would have revealed weaknesses in the system or organization and they would have been corrected early on. This brings me to a major component that is required to do it right the first time: systems. For small business owners, it’s always wise to install a system which has “doing it right the first time” built into it. Further, when you implement systems that fold together related parts of your operations, you get additional advantages. What I have been describing up to this point are some of the strengths I see in the Sage catalog of products and services. When you can integrate and seamlessly coordinate processes such as payments, accounting, expenses and payroll, it saves you a lot of money, prevents errors and eliminates redundancies. A product like Sage 50, for example, gives small business owners far greater efficiency, and because it ties together various critical business areas, it delivers the insights required to make the right decisions. In other words, it gives you a “system” that provides answers. From my experience as a small business owner, and from talking to hundreds of small business owners across the country, one of the most frustrating things they have to do is “go hunting for answers.” When you have a solid system in place that does things right the first time, the answers aren’t so elusive. And by the way, if the frustration of going on “wild goose chases” resonates with you, you should take a careful look at Sage’s newest product, Sage Live. It was designed from the ground up to deliver real-time answers to the important questions that small business owners face. So what are the few guiding principles that give you direction each day? If you can’t state them directly and simply, you many not have any. Let me urge you to make “do it right the first time” one of the guiding principles you live by and instill in your small business team. Image: “João Zeferino da Costa – Moisés recebendo as tábuas da lei – 1868” by João...
read moreOwners ask: What are the advantages of cloud computing for a small business or startup?
Imagine this scenario (and it’s not uncommon): An office worker wants to start her own business. She decides to try affiliate marketing. She finds a product she believes in and researches its affiliate marketing program. It uses one of the major online-affiliate programs. She heads over to Squarespace, creates an account and designs an ecommerce site using one of its templates. Looking sell more in the future, she’ll set up a credit card account with Stripe because it integrates easily with Squarespace. For the immediate future, because she’s an affiliate, the vendor will do all the shipping. This is about as simple as an online business can be, but it demonstrates many of the advantages of cloud computing for a small business. For example, she didn’t have to hire anyone or even get help from a consultant. Let’s list some more: She was in business in a matter of hours. She could easily scale her business and add other products. Squarespace and Stripe are essentially responsible for keeping up with best security practices and providing backups. She didn’t personally own any hardware that could go down. She could easily change her line of products. She didn’t have to make a large initial investment. I used founding a small ecommerce site for my example, but all of the productivity and cost-effectiveness attributes I listed apply to almost any business using a cloud service. When you consider a cloud service, half of the benefits are the service you get and half of the benefits are the headaches you don’t get. (This ratio changes depending on the specific cloud service being discussed!) The following short list features cloud computing services that have proved themselves to be deliver advantages to small business owners. Office 365. As much as we love to hate Microsoft, its Office 365 has proven to be a real winner with small and medium-sized businesses. You get cloud-based storage, all of the Microsoft Office software (including updates). One business subscription lets you install the software on five devices and with its cloud storage you those five devices can access and edit your documents from virtually anywhere. Basecamp. Keep everyone on the same page with this project management cloud service. Many small businesses depend on Basecamp and one of its best features is its ease of use. Google docs. If you don’t want the expense of Office 365 or don’t feel like you’re tied to the Microsoft Office applications, Google Docs, with its related Google Drive is a great choice. You can author and edit documents online, or download them. It can easily work with documents created by the Microsoft Office software suite. Dropbox. This convenient cloud storage system makes every article or list that discusses the advantages of cloud computing for a small business. A basic, free account gets you two gigs of cloud storage that you can access just like another folder on your computer. Salesforce. With Salesforce we’re moving beyond computing basics and into a specialized cloud-based application. Salesforce gives small businesses extremely powerful customer relationship management tools, such as custom dashboards, e-mail marketing, sales forecasts, real-time data sharing, basic customer service and more. This gives you and your team the ability to “multiply yourselves” and compete with bigger organizations. Sage Live. Since I mentioned Salesforce, I need...
read more3 Paths to Passive Income Through Affiliate Marketing
There’s never any shortage of people interested in finding the best ideas for passive income businesses, and successful affiliate marketing programs are certainly among the top candidates. But anyone who has made an attempt at establishing an affiliate marketing business that actually makes some money knows that it’s not easy to accomplish. You can work like crazy and invest a lot of time establishing a blog or website and ever get the passive income source of your dreams. I suppose that one way to discover a successful affiliate marketing business is just to try one thing after another until you hit something that works. But starting out with a good strategy will, in the long run, be less frustrating and more rewarding. If this has been a dream of yours, here are three strategies that will help you, as an individual, find what may be the best affiliate program based passive income business. Affiliate marketing success There is one key to success in affiliate marketing – traffic. Some small percentage of your traffic will buy through the affiliate links you post on your website. This will prove to be a fairly constant number, so any increase in traffic will translate to an increase in your passive income. The riddle then becomes how to get the traffic. 1. Find something new. When a new product becomes available in an affiliate program, there aren’t as many competitors in cyberspace trying to lure in prospective buyers. This makes life easier on you. If you’re quick enough, you can even grab an exact-match domain name, like “polkadotwidgets.com.” The Rakuten/Linkshare Affiliate Network, for example, makes it easy to find companies who are presenting new affiliate offers. 2. Niche curation. This strategy requires two things: You need to define a very narrow area of interest, and You need to establish your authority. You could, for example, become the go-to person for hot sauce recipes and then sell the various brands of hot sauces that you use in your recipes. The sauces and spices you use should be rather hard to find so that your fans will prefer the convenience of buying through your website over tracking down the ingredients on their own. This strategy is idea if you’re already passionate and knowledgeable about something. 3. Ask Google what you should sell. If you already have a blog, start running AdWords ads on it and see what kind of ads Google places on your site. That will tell you what Google thinks your visitors are interested in, and hey, Google knows quite a lot about the people who read your blog. Keep track of the products and services that Google features on your pages for a while. See how you can categorize them and then start looking for those products and services in the popular affiliate marketing programs. Also, don’t forget that some companies run their own in-house affiliate programs – if you can’t find a product you think would work well for you offered through one of the third-party affiliate programs, go straight to the company itself. Passive income success and SEO There is one more very important requirement if you want to establish a stream of passive income through the affiliate program model: You need to be good at small business search engine optimization...
read moreCollaborating at a distance: The best project management tools and techniques
Much is being written about distance employees, freelancers and virtual assistants. The advantages of using these kinds of employees or contractors in your small business are many. However, there can be as many pitfalls as advantages if the small business owner isn’t careful. It’s easy to fall into the trap captured in the old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind.” You need to be sure that you are collaborating well and in many ways that means powering your small business with the best project management tools and techniques. Let me start by discussing the best project management techniques in this situation. I can’t stress the importance of communication too strongly. When you’re working with a anyone at a distance, it poses all kinds of communication problems. People can’t read your body language and they don’t have enough personal exposure to you to “anticipate” what you’re tying to say. This really means that people at a distance have a hard time grasping the full depth of what you want to communicate. Another obstacle here is that the person who is at a distance will have distractions that you are unaware of. If you were dealing with someone working in the same office, you would know immediately if that person was too distracted to give you his or her full attention and you’d just come back later. You won’t know this with a distance worker. It may seem like you have the worker’s attention, when in reality, you don’t You need to use more than one channel to communicate with your distance workers: Email, Chat, Voice or video, and A cloud-based project management system. I’ll mention a few of the best software project management systems in a moment, but first let’s look at the other forms of communication. Email. When you have a lot to discuss, commit it to an email and be sure you and your employees have their email well organized. Create a folder system. In some email systems – Outlook, for example – you can create tags. In Gmail you can create labels. Chat. Slack is a chat service designed for work teams. Slack allows you to organize communication into channels and everything is searchable. Collaboration is its strong suit. If you have team members who are not under the same roof, but need to work together as if they are, give Slack a spin. Voice or video. Virtually every freelancer and virtual assistant I’ve worked with has used Skype, so if you’re going to jump into that world, grab a Skype account. It works as an instant messenger, phone service and video-phone service. People are starting to use Google Hangouts for meetings. These are video sessions that offer a lot of flexibility. For instance you can also message, share screens and change the camera between people speaking. Further, every session is recorded and available via your YouTube channel. There are a number of good software services to check out as you search for the best project management tools and techniques. I use Basecamp because it’s powerful yet not too complicated. Others worth a look are Asana and Trello. A basic Asana account for as many as 15 team members is free. Basecamp offers its first “basecamp” for free and then has three paid packages: $29 per...
read moreHow to reduce cycle times, improve quality, boost profits
Right now there are a lot of memes making the rounds in the social media that poke fun at Ikea. The general idea of most of them is to tease the Swedish furniture maker about all the instructions users have to follow in order to assemble the items they’ve purchased. Honestly, although Ikea instructions (and names) are rather cryptic, they do a pretty good job of showing people how to put their items together. However, it doesn’t always feel that way at the time! This puts a focus on the concept of how to reduce cycle times in your small business. By this, I mean the necessity of reducing processes down to their fewest number of steps, organizing them ideally and therefore accomplishing things more quickly. Further, when you lower the number of steps in a process and reduce the cycle time, you eliminate the number of places where your employees can make errors. In many cases you’ll also find that you can reduce materials and paperwork. Add all of these efficiencies up and they equal greater profitability in your small business. The enemy of reducing cycle times in your small business is the we’ve-always-done-it-that-way mindset. The principle of reducing cycle times is one of the cornerstones of traditional manufacturing quality assurance, but it’s a principle that can be applied to virtually any business, including small business service companies. Pick the low-hanging fruit Take a fresh set of eyes to review your processes. If they haven’t been documented, get that done and be sure that no one leaves out any step they do. When things become habit, we do them without thinking; don’t let these steps escape your documentation process! Eliminate redundancies. When two or more departments have to work together to accomplish something in a small business, they often duplicate one another’s work. Down deep, they just don’t trust the other group or person. Principle: Do it right the first time and you don’t have to do it a second time. Get your entire team involved in these reviews. Look for paperwork that gets filled out but never looked at again. Cut the red tape. Streamline timing There are a variety of strategies that help you complete tasks more quickly. Review the sequences that you use. Can they be reordered to make them more efficient? Don’t be afraid to experiment. Switch things up. One of the most important things you’re doing when you start on a journey to find how to reduce cycle times is to get people thinking differently and accepting new ideas. Ask questions like, “Who are you always waiting on for them to finish their work?” Find out where the bottlenecks are and propose creative ways to eliminate them. Maybe having some materials “pre-staged” would greatly improve throughput. If your processes all seem to be linearly organized – A then B then C then D – look for processes that can be done in parallel. Maybe two departments can be working on a project or product at the same time, then everything would come together at the end. Systemize, automate, outsource Above I said that you must systemize and document your processes. However, don’t see this as something that is done once and you’re finished with it. Your documents should be constantly updated as your...
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