Growing a Business

Your Guide to Social Media Tools and Uses

As I mentioned in The Weakest Link – Your Social Media Marketing “Killer App” social media tools empower you, using tools that are largely free, to maximize your business’ exposure and interaction, connecting and staying in touch more often and with more people than you ever could before. Now I’d like to talk about how. [...]

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Be Realistic When you set your Measure of Success

All of us plan for success in our businesses. That IS the goal after all. To be successful. But how exactly do you determine IF you have succeeded? Regardless if you are a start up or an established business, you need to establish, right up front, during your business planning process, what success will look [...]

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The Weakest Link – Your Social Media Marketing “Killer App”

By helping you maximize “weak ties” Social Media Marketing provides small businesses with a powerful tool that doesn’t need an overwhelming amount of complexity to be useful. Its power is based on the simple human desire to be connected and the tools that now exist to enable you, as an individual to fill that desire.

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Does your business have a disaster recovery plan?

That is a scary question for lots, if not all businesses. We spend so much time focused on getting our businesses started, and then successfully running our businesses, that we give very little thought to disaster recovery planning. Really, planning for disaster sounds like we are betting on failure. Betting against ourselves. Yet we think [...]

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Social Media Marketing: The Marketing Skills you can learn from Obama

I was fascinated by the analysis of the Obama campaign. In many ways, Obama’s campaign and its success is a big, bright, “LCD sign” of the times. New media has come of age in a very public way. Most people seem to agree that the campaign used a number of techniques to capture an audience and [...]

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Achieving Success

by Cidnee Stephen of Strategies for Success, www.strategiesforsuccess.ca Let’s face it, at some point in our businesses we are faced with at least one insurmountable obstacle – one that challenges our passion, taps out our resources, and pulls us far, far out of our comfort zone. Many business owners give up at this point, wave [...]

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Not Everybody is Your Customer

This is hard to write about, and hard for business owners to accept. It seems so negative. Still, it seems like we all need a fresh reminder. Bill Cosby said it well: “I don’t know the secret to success, but I do know that the secret to failure is trying to please everybody.” This reminds [...]

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Dealing with Rising Gas Costs

If you travel by car for business or to commute to and from work, you are probably looking for ways to cut the costs of traveling. An article on eHow.com gives tips on how to maximize fuel efficiency when you travel. Here are a few tips from this article: Plan the trip so as to [...]

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Flaws or Opportunities?

Did you know that problems with your products are not necessarily going to make your customers dissatisfied? At least, not in the long run. Instead, they can provide an opportunity to turn customers into evangelists for your customer service. Think about this common scenario: you boot up your computer, ready to work (or play a [...]

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Using the Bplans.com Cash Flow Calculator

Cash flow is how much money is coming in to your business, generally sales, and how much is going out, as bills paid. Cash balance is how much money you have in your business checking account. If there is no cash in the company coffers to pay the bills, the payroll, or the taxes, you [...]

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