Small Business

All sales start with a simple conversation. It may be a conversation between you and a potential client or customer, between one of your clients and a potential referral, or between one of your colleagues and a potential referral. An effective sales cycle is based on turning these simple conversations into relationships of trust with your potential clients over time.

How do you motivate employees without money, or at least inexpensively? The good news is that it may be easier than you thought; others have done it, and if they did, so can you.

What are some of the key trends affecting small businesses?  And more importantly, what do these trends mean and what kind of opportunities will they lead to for your business?

Wading into the fast-moving flow of social media can be daunting to a small business owner with very little time on his hands. So Inc. has boiled down 30 tips — from using social networks to generate leads to what not to say in your blog.
Here are 30 social media marketing tips for the time-strapped but socially curious CEO.

One of the biggest misconceptions with online marketing is that social media is only for large brands. Truthfully, a small business that invests its time wisely can improve customer (or client) loyalty and traditional word of mouth marketing efforts.

Today there are far more effective, and economical, ways to get the same – or better – results than traditional media.

Despite lip-service to two-way communication, branding has often been a one-way effort: we decided what we wanted people to think about our companies and designed marketing and communications that made that happen.

Here is a short (and by no means a complete) list of ten articles that encapsulate the art of the start-up. Most were published during 2009 and are extremely educational and full of practical tips that we have applied to our business.

If you are an entrepreneur of any kind, it doesn’t particularly matter where you are in the process. Whether you’re just starting out freelancing in your spare time or you have a thriving business and you’re looking to expand, there are always new resources that can help you along in the entrepreneurial process.

You just launched a new product. You want people to tell others in their social network. You want word of it to spread like a virus from person to person, eventually resulting in more buzz, attention and sales.
And you want to do it using the internet. Purely online. No TV, newspapers or radio. No print ads. Assume you’ve already done all of the above (you should have) and just want an online strategy that will work.

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