Professional TV ads for small business?
Why do all cable TV ads for local businesses have to look like they were shot on a friend’s video camera with a budget of $10? Spot Runner doesn’t think it has to be this way. This interesting service offers a library of professional produced ads with professional voice-overs PLUS online media buying for a...
You still want meetings. Here’s how to make them useful. – Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
Great post over at Signal vs. Noise about making meetings useful. Especially in small businesses (where you don’t have the luxury of lots of employees, middle managers, etc, etc) making meetings useful is critical. Otherwise they become an increadible time waster and reduce productivity significantly. That said, I’ve worked in plenty of big businesses that...
Everyone’s a Critic
I’ve been doing some research lately on creating *good* PowerPoint presentations, particularly presentations for business plan pitches and also presentations to help teach business planning. What I’ve found is a lot of critics. Everyone knows what bad PowerPoint looks like. Everyone can point to a million bad presentations. From Seth Godin and his “really bad...
Bosses too busy for business planning
The article below highlights some interesting statistics from a recent UK study on business planning within existing companies. Not surprisingly, the majority say that they don’t have the time to plan while at the same time acknowledging that planning is critical to success. The million dollar question is this: How do you make planning a...
Great Marketing Advice
Anne over at MarketingSherpa.com has a great feature summarizing the results from a focus group study examining how people use search engines and paid inclusion results to research and purchase products. Read the complete summary, and find out where to download the full focus group results. I highly recommend subscribing to MarketingSherpa’s email newsletters. For...
The eBay Business Plan
Is there such a thing as an eBay Business Plan? Is it different than a standard business plan? The answer is no. At the end of the day, the issues faced by an eBay business are much the same as a traditional brick-and-mortar business or a typical online store. eBay businesses still have the same...
Where to find free market research
ClickZ is working on a series of articles focused on finding free market research information. The latest in the series focuses on resources from the US Census and the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. I am consistently amazed at the amount of free information that is made available on these two sites....
Blogging for Business
In their latest issue, Fast Company has an interesting article about blogging for business – how companies are using both public and private blogs to increase communication with customers, encourage better internal communication, and market new products. What I found particularly fascinating was the idea of using an internal blog in business to share ideas...
