Category Archives: Small Business Tips

I’ve heard it said that marketing is simple; tell people what you do, and tell them over and over again. For the average small business, I think that marketing should be that simple.  Small-business professionals wear multiple hats and their demands require simple and effective execution.

However, marketing is only this simple with one key piece in play: you have to know what you really do and why a prospective customer should come to you.  Knowing what you REALLY do can lead to simple and easy marketing messages and will help dictate what types of marketing you do.  Here are a couple of questions to ask. Read On

Do you have the world’s fanciest office? Leather couches, beautiful windows, only corner offices, fountain drinks flowing freely and halls gleaming with cleanliness and importance. Or maybe “office” is a generous word to describe the laptop perching precariously on your crumb-covered kitchen counter.  Guess what?  I’ll never know!  It’s 2011 and chances are you do business on the internet.  Thanks to the internet, with the careful execution of a few fundamental tips, you can look and act like a bigwig and no one will know the difference. Here are our two cents:  Read On

Social media matters. Sure, some may see it as a fad, but it has been proven time and time again to bring real results to businesses that use it correctly. Not only does social media influence SEO, but it also has a significant impact on your branding, marketing, and PR efforts as well. For those of you who haven’t pushed your business into the social media yet, or for those of you who have, but still can’t quite grasp it, consider these tips. Read On

Ready for a second grade story problem?  Oh, good.  Let’s say you buy a few packs of delicious bubble gum for fifty cents each.  Should you sell them to your friends for 75 cents or for a dollar?  This may seem like a no-brainer: charge as much as you can and laugh all the way to the bank.  But let’s say there are 10 kids who want to buy gum.  Three of them will buy from you if you charge $1, and seven of them will buy if you charge 75 cents.  Go ahead, crunch the numbers.  (I’ll wait here.)  Done?  If you charge $1, you make $1.50 (50 cents profit each on three packs of delicious bubble gum).  If you charge 75 cents, you make $1.75!

The takeaway here (beside making me want some bubble gum) is that how much you charge depends on what you want. Does the price you charge make any difference?  Well, if you consider whether you make money and stay in business a difference, then, yes.  The right price can lead to booming business, and the wrong price can put you out of business.  So what’s the trick? Read On

Let’s face it: a company that wants to be seen as credible needs to have some sort of online presence. A lot of companies have websites and can benefit from Google Places, but what about companies that don’t have any online presence?

The companies without websites can really benefit from this free product by accessing a phenomenal 97% of customers searching for local businesses like theirs online. This, in a lot of cases, can make it or break it for some startup companies who are working to get an online presence and don’t have a lot to spend. Read On

Two things I spend a lot of my time doing are exercising and online marketing. Although they aren’t related activities there are a lot of commonalities. For example both take planning, commitment and knowledge. Going to the gym to for an hour a week isn’t going to keep that whole pizza off your gut, thighs, or butt. Likewise when you have a PPC campaign selecting keywords once a month or quarter isn’t going to make much of difference on your bottom line. Read On

Where Do I Start?

When looking to improve your online presence, you need to ask yourself a couple of important questions in order to focus on a goal. Do I want to increase my brand awareness, generate more leads, increase sales, or do I want to do a combination of all three?

Read On

Want a free copy of the best selling book The Orange Revolution? Read to the end.

For the past few years I’ve been studying what makes the best teams different. Why do some work groups create breakthrough results—even in the midst of this great recession—and others, well, don’t. And in 2008 and 2009 we conducted a 350,000-person survey and wrote The Orange Revolution. Read On