May 6, 2008 By Mary White
Becoming an active member of an industry specific trade association is one of the most important things any small business owner can do. Look for a well-respected national organization that has an active local chapter in your area, and investigate whether or not joining the group might be a good idea for you. First you’ll need to find out what types of benefits that national organization offers that might be beneficial to you. Then, you’ll need to attend a few local chapter meetings to get a sense of the composition and activity level of the group.
Getting involved in a professional organization in your field helps you meet other people who work in the same industry as you. Some may be your competitors, but it’s also likely that there will be a number of members who are potential clients and individuals who work in roles that are complementary to what you do. Getting to know other professionals, even those who are your competitors, can be very beneficial.
It’s a good idea to become connected in your industry. When you develop a network of peers, you’ll have access to a group of people who have a unique perspective on the challenges that you are likely to face as you operate your business. Developing a solid contact base that includes people in your industry can be a lifesaver over the years. It’s certainly reassuring to know that you have a group of people you can call on for tips and advice whenever the need might arise.
Of course, to benefit from membership in a professional organization, you have to make a commitment to get involved in the group’s activities. Attend monthly meetings and conferences regularly, and volunteer to serve on committees or as a board member as time permits. You’ll have a much better opportunity to develop solid contacts for yourself and your business when you reach out and connect with the other members of the group.
No matter what field you’re in, it’s likely that there is a professional organization for your industry. If you’re in the HR fields, you may want to consider joining the Society for human Resource Management (SHRM). The Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) provides excellent educational and networking opportunities for those who work in the nonprofit sector. Ask other people who work in your industry which associations they are involved with to identify the best groups for you to consider joining. You can also find a comprehensive list of different types of professional organizations on DMOZ.
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May 4, 2008 By Mary White
Now that you have a website for your small business, the next thing you need to do is figure out how to encourage people to visit the site. There are many different ways to drive traffic to your website. While many of the methods and techniques you can use to promote your small business website, are expensive there are also many things you can do to advertise your website without having to spend any money at all.
Getting free advertising for your website will certainly take a little bit of time and creativity. As a small business owner, your time is certainly valuable, but you also need to take advantage of every opportunity to promote your company without spending a lot of money. The advantages of seeking free advertising opportunities for your website are well the investment of time and energy, not to mention the benefit of financial savings.
1. Article Marketing
One of the most powerful ways to promote a website is to participate in online article marketing. Simply write a series of articles that are related to your business that provide potential readers with useful and interesting information. For example, if you were a financial site, you might write about “money news“. Include an “about the author” box and the end of each article with a few relevant details about and your business, along with a link to your website.
Once you’re written and proofread your articles, submit them to a few of the online article directory websites, such as Ezine Articles, Article Marketers, or one of the many other free article directories. Other website owners visit these sites to find articles they can reprint on their own sites. Each time someone picks up your article, you’ll be exposed to a whole new group of potential customers.
2. Reciprocal Link Building
Spend some time searching for other websites that reach the same customer base that you’re trying to attract. Assuming that the sites you find aren’t in direct competition with you, contact the website owners and ask about the possibility of a link exchange.
You and the other site owner, assuming you reach an agreement, will place links to each others sites on yours. That way, you have an opportunity to share traffic with another site that’s also working on marketing to your potential target audience. Building links to your website can also improve your search engine ranking, which can have a positive impact on your website’s search engine ranking.
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April 29, 2008 By Mary White
As a small business owner, the last thing you can afford to do is waste time. It’s important to remember that the key to effective time management lies with making the most of the time that you have. Everyone has the same 24 hours in every single day. People who seem to accomplish more than others don’t have more time than you or anyone else. What they have is the ability to use their time wisely.
Consider Time Management in Decision Making
When making decisions, it’s important to stop and consider what impact they are likely to have on your time. For example, putting off paying bills so long that you find yourself in the position of having to go and make payments in person is not a wise decision when it comes to time management. Making this choice will cause you to have to use your valuable time driving to a bill payment location, and possibly having to sit or stand in a very long line once you get there. It is foolish to put yourself in this situation when you could easily have taken care of the bill simply by mailing a check or calling in a credit card payment in a timely manner.
Organize Your Schedule for Efficiency
When you have to run errands or attend meetings, plan out a route that lets you get the maximum advantage from the time spent driving and the money you have to spend on fuel. If you are going to be in a particular part of town for personal or business reasons, give some thought to other errands that you can take care of while you are there. Maybe there’s a prospective client you can visit or a current customer you can stop by and see while you happen to be in the neighborhood. Of course, it’s important to call ahead to make an appointment rather than showing up at someone’s office unannounced.
Avoid Procrastination
One of the biggest barriers to effective time management is the all-too-common habit of procrastination. When you keep putting things off until another time, you’ll find that tasks back up on you very quickly. People who procrastinate find themselves having to run from one end of town to another, and end up barely making or missing deadlines. Procrastination not only causes people to have unnecessarily hectic schedules, it can cost money in the form of late fees and overnight package expenses.
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April 28, 2008 By Mary White
Looking for creative and affordable ways to promote your small business? No matter how small or large your marketing budget might be, reading The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guerrilla Marketing by Susan Drake and Colleen Wells is something that you need to do if you are an entrepreneur. The concept of guerrilla marketing is all about getting maximum benefit of spreading the word about your business to prospective customers without breaking the bank.
Many people refer to guerilla marketing efforts as grass roots marketing. No matter what term you use to describe these types of marketing activities, it’s a fact that this book will provide you with useful and practical suggestions for increasing awareness of your products and/or services within among your target consumer group.
The book begins with a practical definition of what marketing really is, and goes on to explain why marketing activities are necessary in any small business. You’ll learn about a variety of different traditional marketing techniques, and you’ll find out why some of the most widely recognized traditional strategies for spreading the word aren’t the best way to go in the modern age of internet marketing and consumers who have been conditioned to expect instant gratification for their product and service needs.
You’ll find a great deal of information about modern marketing techniques that can help you grow your business. You’ll learn what these techniques are and how you can adopt and use them in your own plans for growing your business venture. Some of the modern marketing strategies - referred to as modern marketing marvels by the authors - you’ll learn include: buzz marketing, stunt marketing, experiential marketing, ambient marketing, viral marketing, and stealth marketing.
In addition to finding out how to put some of the most up-to-date marketing innovations to work for your business, you’ll also learn about the importance of identifying influencers and putting them to work for you. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guerrilla Marketing also provides readers with a great deal of information on making the most of Web 2.0 in their marketing efforts, including details about using social networking sites, blogs, podcasts, mobile marketing, and - of course -email marketing.
If you’re ready to grow you business and you need some creative ideas on how to spread the word to consumers about the benefits of selecting your products or services, then The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guerrilla Marketing needs to go directly tot the top of your list of must-read business books. When you take the time to learn - and use - the secrets of low cost marketing as explained in this book, you’ll be on your way to building an increasingly successful business in no time at all.
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April 25, 2008 By Mary White
Do you own a small business? Do you have one or more business partners? Have you stopped to think about exactly what would happen to the business if one of your partners was no longer living? While no one wants to think that anything will ever happen to them or their business partners or loved ones, it’s a fact of life that no one lives forever. If one of your partners is no longer around, separate from the emotional consequences of losing someone you care about, you’re also likely to find yourself dealing with major financial implications for the business.
This is why it’s so important to make sure that you have sufficient key person insurance coverage in place for your small business. No matter how small or how new your business is, each partner should be covered by a sufficient amount of life insurance. Only you and your partners can make a determination of exactly how much insurance coverage is sufficient in your particular situation. Before making a decision, think about what the financial implications of losing one of the partners will be for the company.
If you have a buy-sell stock agreement in place, the business is going to have to come up with the money to purchase the deceased partners stock shares from his or her estate. Most small business operations don’t have large sums of cash lying around, so it’s important to make sure that the insurance policy will at least cover the cost of any necessary share repurchase, as specified in the terms of your particular buy-sell agreement.
However, this isn’t the only important factor you’ll need to consider. If one of your partners is no longer there, who will perform that person’s duties and responsibilities? It’s not likely that the other partners are going to have the necessary skills and/or time to take on everything the deceased individual once handled. That means the remaining partners will need access to money so they can recruit and hire someone to handle that portion of the business. Some of the life insurance proceeds, assuming there is sufficient coverage, can be used to offset this expense.
In many cases, business partners also put enough insurance in place to provide protection for their families. Often, entrepreneurs invest all their available resources into getting their business ventures up and running. A portion of the business owner life insurance policies may be earmarked to go to the deceased person’s family members in the event of a worst case scenario. Regardless of how the policy proceeds are likely to be used, it’s certainly important to make sure that each owner is covered by a life insurance policy.
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April 24, 2008 By Mary White
More and more small business are coming to realize the benefits of starting blogs. Getting involved in the blogosphere can be an excellent — and inexpensive — way to market your small business online. If you already have a website, building and maintaining a blog can be a powerful way to drive traffic to your site. The more visitors you attract to your website, the more opportunities you’ll have to market your products and services to new prospects.
When you start a blog, it’s important to spend time thinking about what type of information you can publish that will interest people in your target market. You need to publish well-written, informative content on your blog on a regular basis. Search engine experts suggest that it’s important to update your blog with fresh content at least three times every week to enjoy the maximum search engine optimization benefits of blogging.
You can write the content that you publish on your blog yourself, or you can use content from other sources. If you’re comfortable running reprint articles on your website, you can download free content from free article directory resources like www.EZineArtciles.com. If you don’t have time to write the content, but you want to make sure it’s unique, you can hire either a by-lined writer or a ghost writer to take care of developing content for you.
While who writes the content isn’t important, it is vital that the information be correct, useful, and well written. It has to provide information that people want, and it should be updated frequently enough to keep readers coming back looking for more information from you. The content should not be written as advertisements for your company. Use the blog to drive people to your website, and then use the site itself to market your company’s products and services.
If you want to raise the visibility of your blog, you can participate in online forums and social networking websites that are relevant to your target market and the content of your blog. For example, if you are in the business of marketing products and services to HR professionals, consider joining a forum that people who work in that profession visit frequently. Put a link to your blog in your signature line, and get involved in the discussion on the forum. This practice allows you to get links to your blog published where people in your target market are likely to see them and click on them.
When you’re looking for an affordable way to market your small business online, it’s really difficult to beat the benefits of starting your own blog. Just remember that running a blog is a process. If you consistently update it with quality, relevant content and market it using a variety of online marketing techniques, your business is likely to enjoy exponential benefits in terms of new customers and sales.
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April 20, 2008 By Mary White
Expert advice for American Small Business News Readers from Dr. J. Robert Beyster, founder of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and author of the book The SAIC Solution: How We Built an $8 Billion Employee-Owned Technology Company (John Wiley & Sons, 2007).
Question::
As my business grows, I am realizing that I have key clients all over the country. It is getting increasingly difficult to serve all their needs from one central location, so I am getting ready to open satellite offices closer to these key clients. Should I move forward with this plan, or would it be better to stick with a centralized business model?
Answer:
This is a classic dilemma for fast-growing small businesses—do you require your customers to come to you, or do you establish offices close to major customers, becoming more responsive to their needs in the process? While most customers would certainly prefer you to have a local presence, establishing and maintaining this local presence can be a time-consuming and expensive proposition.
Dr. Beyster found that establishing offices near customers offered the company definite competitive advantages. These advantages included:
First, SAIC could be more responsive to customer needs than could an office located hundreds or thousands of miles away. The company—which started with a handful of staff in a small office adjacent to a ballet studio—eventually grew to thousands of employees in hundreds of offices across the country. Each one of these offices was established to create a local company presence with key customers.
Second, key staff could “live with” customers, getting to know them on a personal and professional basis and becoming trusted and valued members of the customer team. Being a part of the customer team gave SAIC a distinct advantage against its competitors.
Third, it was easier (and often less expensive) to recruit employees who wanted to stay where they were rather than being forced to move to the company’s headquarters in San Diego, California. This gave SAIC an advantage as it established offices near customers throughout the country.
For further information, you can contact Dr. Beyster at www.beyster.com
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April 19, 2008 By Mary White
As a small business owner, do you find yourself struggling with finding the time and opportunity to schedule all the face to face meetings that you need to have? This is particularly challenging for individuals who operate virtual businesses or whose employees and/or customers are in a variety of locations around the globe. In such situations, it can certainly be impossible to get everyone who needs to communicate to actually be in each other’s physical presence when it’s time to hold a meeting. Even if it’s possible to get everyone together, the costs of travel associated with doing so can certainly be prohibitive.
Even in situations where the main problem with scheduling face to face meetings isn’t geography, sometimes getting people together can still be problematic. The fact that people are located in the same geographic region, or even work from the same office, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily easy to get them together for face to face meetings whenever needed. There are all kinds of reasons that people have trouble meeting face-to-face, including scheduling conflicts, the need to include a large number of people in meetings, and physical space limitations that make it difficult, or very expensive (if meeting space has to be rented), to get a large number of people in the same room at the same time.
Fortunately for entrepreneurs who deal with the challenge of needing to communicate with colleagues and associates without being able to schedule or attend face to face meetings, online meeting technology has developed to the point where it is neither difficult nor cost prohibitive to hold virtual meetings via the Internet. Improvements in online meeting technology have really simplified to process of connecting with colleagues located anywhere in the world on demand, with nothing more than a PC, Internet access, and an online meeting software application.
Small business owners can easily utilize online meeting technology to hold employee or client training sessions via the Internet. It’s even possible to hold staff meetings, sales presentations, job interviews, and many other types of activities typically conducted face to face using this powerful type of web-based technology. It’s truly amazing how easily you can communicate in real time with people spread out all over the world using one of the popular and readily available online meeting applications. Online meeting applications make it so much easier to connect and collaborate with customers, employees, contractors, and other colleagues than ever before.
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April 15, 2008 By Mary White
Wondering how you should approach the important issue of employee benefits? Art Brooks, Vice President of BeneTrac, shares his expert insight with American Small Business News readers on the subject of employee benefits for small businesses.
1. What are the benefits of offering a comprehensive employee benefits program for small business owners?
In offering their employees a comprehensive benefits program small business owners can also gain numerous benefits. These can include greater employee satisfaction and retention, increased ability to attract new employees, reduced sick time for employees and less down time for them in having to attend to family illnesses.
2. Why do you think some small business owners are hesitant to provide employee benefits?
Cost is often an important factor in deciding whether or not to offer benefits and which to offer. While small businesses can not always get the same price value on benefits packages that large corporations can, there are many options available that can be affordable, including those such as high deductible health plans with health savings accounts (HSAs). The latter have received increased interest as an alternative to traditional health insurance.
Many companies and individuals are drawn to the cost-effective nature of healthcare plans accompanying HSAs and the ability to save money tax-free, to name a few. The plans, which enable consumers to put up to $2,850 before tax into a HSA for individuals and $5,650 for families for premiums in 2007, require that plan owners also have a low-cost high deductible health plan (HDHP).
The high deductibles from these plans and other medical expenses can be withdrawn tax-free from the HSA, much like a bank account, and anything left over can be carried forward into the next year or saved for retirement. Other high-deductible plan options also exist. Another big consideration in implementing benefits is the time involved in administration.
3. Are there things small business owners can do to make benefits administration more manageable?
Appointing a single person to be in charge of benefits can help to streamline management and eliminate confusion. Technology can also be a big help in managing benefits. A good benefits management system, for instance, is able to accept data from multiple Excel spreadsheets, databases, and paper documents, and provides the flexibility to interface with all kinds of systems and data.
It can help employees and HR in the enrollment process by evaluating each enrollment activity and applying any necessary combination of rules, messages, prompts, and options specifically designed to meet the exact eligibility requirements desired. Many of today’s systems accommodate company-specific eligibility rules, employee classifications, etc., and provide multiple layers of security. Many link directly with carriers so that enrolling employees in benefits or making changes is automated and does not require information to be printed out and mailed to the provider.
Another big benefit is self-service. Enabling employees to enroll on their own can offer time and cost-savings possibilities and employee satisfaction at gaining access to directly access and manage benefits online. For HR departments and businesses, self-service can be a huge time saver and provide added employee satisfaction.
Reports available through benefits management systems also offer a number of benefits, including the ability to access multiple views, from big picture to drill down, to enhance decision-making.
Finally, some benefits management systems also offer integration and information exchange with programs for managing payroll and other aspects of business, providing added efficiency.
4. What advice do you have for small business owners who are thinking about implementing a benefits program for their employees?
Perhaps the best advice is to suggest that they contact a knowledgeable benefits consultant/broker. Most small businesses work hard just to develop and support their core business, and have little time left over for managing other tasks. A benefits consultant specializes in health, dental, and other types of insurance and will know what plan options are available to best fit a small business owner’s particular employee demographics and SIC Code. Wise counsel can help businesses to make the best decisions when it comes to meeting its needs for benefits.
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April 13, 2008 By Mary White
While most people realize that having strong communication skills is a necessity in the business world, many people don’t stop and think about the fact that having strong listening skills is just as important as being able to speak effectively. Listening, as a matter of fact, is an important part of the communication process. If no-one listens to what you say, you can’t possibly claim to communicate effectively.
Effective communication begins when a message sender is able to successfully convey meaning to one or more recipients, who understand the message in the same manner as the sender originally intended. Communication can’t occur without listening. If your message doesn’t get across to the receiver, then communication hasn’t occurred.
People often make the mistake of assuming that communication is the responsibility of the person sending a message. People who view communication in this manner see sending messages as an active process and think that receiving messages is a passive process. It’s a fact that message senders and message recipients bear equal responsibility in the communication process.
The good news is that anyone can learn how to be a better listener. Improving your listening ability starts by recognizing that being a good listener is something that can be learned. If you think that listening ability is something that will never change, it’s hard to focus your energy and effort on trying to listen more effectively.
It’s also important to recognize that listeners bear responsibility in the communication process. You can’t receive messages from other people if you don’t actively attend, or pay attention, to their words and actions. One of the most important things you can do to improve your listening skills is to focus on your ability to attend to messages.
When someone wants to communicate with you, it’s important to focus your attention on that person. It’s not physically possible for you to work on the computer, talk on the phone, and listen to the person who has just walked into your office at the same time. Ask the person in your office to wait while you finish your telephone conversation.
Once you are through, keep your hands off your computer keyboard and give your full attention to the person in front of you. Focus on what the person is saying, making sure that you understand his or her meaning. Ask questions to check your understanding at natural pauses in the conversation, but don’t interrupt the speaker. These are traits of effective listeners.
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