Women: How to Let the World Know About The Businesses You Own
“The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Is the Hand that Rules the World.” That well-known saying is the title of a poem by 19th Century American poet William Ross Wallace. And if you look at the dramatic increase in women small business ownership, today you might say that the hand that rocks the cradle is attached to the arm that is pulling the American economy out of the doldrums. According to data released by the US Census Bureau in August 2015, between 2007 and 2013, the total number of US firms grew by merely 2 percent. However, over that same period, the number of women-owned businesses grew by 27 percent. It looks to me that when going get tough, women don’t go shopping – they go out and start their own businesses. That impressive growth rate, by the way, means that women entrepreneurs are starting about 1,200 business every day. With those impressive figures in mind, it’s appropriate that October is National Women’s Small Business Month. According to the Association of Women’s Business Centers, there are nearly 9.1 million women-owned enterprises, employing some 7.9 million workers and generating more than $1.4 trillion in revenues. Further, revenue and employment growth among women-owned firms tops that of all other firms, with the exception of the largest, publicly traded corporations. Success creates opportunities and the success of women-owned businesses creates more opportunities for women and I recently saw an example of this when I was browsing the aisles of the local Sam’s Club. Sam’s Club and Walmart are featuring the official Women Owned Logo in both stores and online. The Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) in the United States and WEConnect International globally are certifying women majority ownership as well as responsibility for operations and management, and issuing a logo that shoppers can watch for. I know that there is a significant group of buyers who like to support small businesses owned and managed by women, but in addition to that, companies are increasingly on the lookout for women-owned sources of supplies. Qualifying for the official Women Owned Logo can be the first step to becoming a qualified supplier for a wide range of larger industries. I think our society in general has become more sensitive to supporting new groups as they begin to compete in commerce. Also, Millennials are noted for their sensitivity to social awareness and making it a priority in their lives. If this holds up as they grow older, I believe that something like being officially designated a women-owned business will be even more valuable. In some cases, a designation like this could be the noticeable difference that gives you an edge when it comes to making certain sales. The bottom line is that if you qualify for the Woman Owned Logo, going through the application process could be a very smart business...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: 41 Lifecycle emails and a desert island list…for starters
It’s like everyone had busy schedules this week so they couldn’t write paragraphs; they went for lists and single sentences instead. You’ll want to print out some of these and tape them to your refrigerator. Marketing and sales The 41 lifecycle emails listed in this post will keep you busy and ringing up sales for a long time. Pressed for time? These 15 one-sentence chunks of online marketing advice that you can use today were written with you in mind. Everyone knows they have to do social media marketing, but many are making a variety of small mistakes that are sinking their efforts. See if you’re guilty of these errors. Small business retailers: If you want 2016 to be even better than 2015, take these four tips to heart. Purposeful content marketing beats the shotgun approach everyday. These five tips will help. Leadership, management and productivity Hollie Hoadley of CSConsulting shares her “desert island list” of five small business tools…given your desert island has an Internet connection. Do you know the location of the nearest Small Business Development Center? This article by Ty Kiisel will make you want to seek it out and head over there. If you have a unique value proposition, your small business can command premium prices. Get the full picture in this article on Steve Chou’s “My Wife Quit Her Job” blog. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Bizfi came out with an API that lets partner companies offer direct lending solutions to their small business customers. Politics, government and the economy We’ve been watching the stock market go up and down like a fourth grader’s yo-yo. But do all these Wall Street fluctuations make an impact on Main...
read moreDiscover How These Two Web Design Trends Can Boost Your Engagement
If you’ve ever wanted to say something like, “As far as I’m concerned all web designers can go to you know where!” – it looks like your request has been granted. Okay, I’m not talking about what immediately popped into your mind when I wrote that opening with the reference to the “h-word.” I was actually referring to two hot (there’s another word that begins with “h”) web page design trends that start with that letter: The Hello Bar, and The Hero Image. Web designers have been leaning heavily on these two trends recently and if you don’t know what they are by their labels, you have certainly seen them both…a lot. Turbocharge your CTA The Hello Bar is that thin red (usually) band that appears at the very top of a homepage that advertises something, such as a sale on an item or an pitch to sign up for a newsletter. The Hero Image is a very oversized graphic that takes up most of your screen when you load a website’s home page. While one of these is very tiny and the other quite large, they are both popular right now for the same reason: they have impact. Even though the Hello Bar is small, it grabs your eyes and almost seems to cast a spell on you and make you go click on it. The Hero Image just smacks you in the face and says, “Look at me!” It’s usually a great image that gives us an immediate feel for what the site is trying to accomplish. Hello Bar is a third-party service that offers a free plan (displays ads) or premium plans (no ads). There are also various plugins available for WordPress sites that accomplish the same thing. If you aren’t getting the results you want with your website call to action, do some additional research on your Hello Bar options and start testing. This footwear site really illustrates what the Hero Image design is all about. If you would like to have one of the new single-page design websites, a Hero Image might work well for you. You’ll note with this footwear site that its design urges you to keep scrolling down. This tactic was developed to overcome people’s reluctance to clicking and being forced to load additional pages. Send in a hero I think that Hero Images are best suited to ecommerce and blog sites. A great image will immediately engage a visitor and if you’re selling a product, you can usually communicate a lot with an oversized image. If you have a new website in your future, or are considering a redesign, give some thought to how you might use a Hello Bar and/or a Hero...
read moreConsidering a Groupon? 5 Pitfalls You Must Avoid
A friend lives in a townhouse and it’s about time to pressure wash the exteriors. The homeowner association got a few bids, but one owner spied a Groupon deal, which would have been significantly less expensive. He tried, unsuccessfully, to talk all the other owners into jumping on the Groupon deal. Had he been successful imagine what the owner of the pressure washing business would have been thinking. First he’d be elated that so many people snagged his Groupon, but when he started to do the work and realized he was going from neighbor to neighbor in this one townhouse complex, he probably would have been steamed. Chances are the homeowners would have all scheduled their cleanings at different times so his crews would have been driving to, setting up, and breaking down at the same location multiple times. It would have been extremely inefficient. Groupon, and similar discount systems, have worked out well for many small business owners, but often the story is exactly the opposite. You need to understand some of the pitfalls of using deep discounts for customer acquisition and have a clearly defined rationale for choosing Groupon or one of the other “daily deal” type of promotions. Here are five questions to ask and points to consider. Are you making a single sale or starting a relationship? How often does a homeowner hire a pressure washing service? Answer: not often. The owner of that small business couldn’t reasonably expect consistent follow-on business from the customers he served via the Groupon deal. A restaurant, on the other hand, if it impresses a Groupon customer, might expect to gain a “regular.” Have you done the math? If you’re selling a product, be sure you know exactly what your costs will be if your Groupon offer maxes out. Will you lose money on every sale and can you afford that, especially if almost all of the demand crashes down on you at once? This leads us to the next point. Groupon buyers are often procrastinators. I’ve heard from some small businesses that have posted Groupon deals that the people who take their offers tend to wait until just before the expiration date to cash in their Groupons. Typically, the business generated by these kinds of deals doesn’t spread out nicely over its given period of time. This can be especially disastrous if your Groupon deal expires around the Christmas shopping season. You’ll find yourself deluged with orders from Groupon customers and regular customers. You may struggle to meet demand and end up with some unhappy Christmas shoppers. Groupon buyers are often low-end shoppers. Some people look for “deals” more than they look for specific products and services. They get their emotional satisfaction from thinking that they got a “steal” rather than from the inherent value of the product or service that they are buying. Rather than stick with your small business and buy more of what you offer, they just start looking for the next insanely discounted thing to buy. Deep discounts can hurt your brand. Ultimately, if you’re trying to differentiate your small business in the marketplace, you need to do it with something other than a low price. You don’t have Walmart resources that allow you to operate on razor-thin margins. Further, when your full-price customers or...
read moreHow to Make Big Money on YouTube…Or Not
A friend who’s an avid fly fisherman occasionally posts videos of his exploits on YouTube. He’ll never forget two things about his little hobby: The time a fellow fisherman recognized him out on the stream because he had seen his videos (it happened just once), and When Google deposited $100 to his bank account that he earned through the ads that run at the beginning of his videos (this also happened only once, in about three years). Granted, the YouTube audience of middle-aged men who while away their spare time watching fly fishing videos online is rather small when compared to other YouTube demographics, but few of us are going to make any significant change through Google’s AdSense program on YouTube. So the question becomes: What piece of the puzzle does a YouTube channel provide in the success of a small business? In a small way (a very small way) I think my fisherman friend’s first point above gives us an indication of how useful YouTube can be to a small business owner. Even without trying, he achieved a measure of branding success. He was recognized. For him, fly fishing is just a hobby. However, if he decided to become a fishing guide, for example, he could post a significant number of videos on YouTube and probably do a good job getting his name out to his most valuable prospects. If establishing your authority has any place in your marketing strategy, creating a good YouTube channel with fairly deep content is a great idea. Jason Calacanis, whose videos are very popular on YouTube recently put it this way in a New York Times article: “YouTube is an awesome place to build a brand, but it is a horrible place to build a business.” In fact, you might want to steer clear of even joining Google’s AdSense program and running ads on your videos. According to those who have been working hard at generating revenue via ads, the odds are heavily stacked against you. First, Google takes a big cut out of the ad revenue; some estimate it at 45 percent. Second, the downward pressure on ad rates is enormous, and finally, so many content creators are competing for eyeballs that it’s almost impossible to get enough views to generate real money. With all of this negativity as a back drop, why would you want to bother cheapening your small business’ videos by running ads that aren’t going to impact your bottom line anyway? Of course, using your YouTube videos to sell your own products and services is a different story. Discovering the right blend of informative content to promotional content within a video can pay big dividends for your small business. Further, as I said above, establishing your position as an industry or product authority is always to your benefit. (By the way, Google won’t deposit money you’ve earned from YouTube ads until the balance due hits $100. That’s why it took my friend a few years to reap his handsome profit. He tells me his current balance is $27 and he’s praying that he lives long enough to see it hit the magic $100 mark again! His views have been falling...
read moreWhat You Absolutely Should NEVER Outsource in your Small Business
It’s so easy to outsource projects and tasks in your small business today that the possibilities seem endless. In fact, your small business can economically accomplish a lot of things that yesterday could only have been achieved by a much larger company with significant resources. However, it’s wrong to think of your global outsourcing ability as some kind of panacea to all of your operational and growth problems. Yes, the solutions are probably out there, but a bad outsourcing decision can be more costly than not outsourcing. Let me give you a simple guideline to internalize before you go crazy with outsourcing: Never outsource what you don’t understand. Maybe right now you have a thought kicking around inside your head like one of these examples: I need a WordPress website. I need a shopping cart. I need social media marketing. I need public relations. I need customer relationship management. I could go on and on with the list and you can probably add several of your own small business needs to it right now. Most of the items on my short list can be accomplished by outsourcing, whether it means hiring a freelancer or an agency, or signing up with some kind of cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS). However, if you don’t really understand how these things work specifically in relationship to what you need – today and in the future – you can spend a lot of money on something that you’ll end up replacing very soon. For example, you don’t need to know how to program an online shopping cart yourself, but you need to know if you want one that connects to your inventory, has APIs that allow it to connect to a fulfillment service, allows for coupons, can be easily modified, etc. In other words, you need to understand shopping carts from an operational point of view. If you think you can find an experienced shopping cart coder and just hand off the entire project, you won’t get what you need. After the shopping cart is installed, you’ll spend the next weeks and months on a costly and frustrating adventure of discovering what you should have asked for the first time. If you scan my list above, you’ll see that some are technical items and others are more closely related to small business sales and marketing. If you’re a technical person, there’s a good chance you don’t have the best understanding or feel for marketing so you’ll want to outsource some of those tasks. The converse is true if your background and passions are in marketing. Many of today’s most successful startups are founded by partnerships where technical wizards join forces with sales and marketing pros. These types of Yin-and-Yang founding teams are often necessary in today’s startup environment where technical and sales success are equally important in order to achieve marketplace viability. When small business owners are about to go into a hiring mode, I tell them to make sure they have job descriptions in place. This forces them to understand what it is that they really need to have accomplished by the new hires. The same principle applies to outsourcing. Be sure you understand your needs and what can actually be accomplished before you dump a project into the lap of a contractor...
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