The Zen of Running your Own Business
When it comes to satisfaction, nothing compares to owning and operating your own business. Everyday is exciting. You wake up energized, full of ideas and objectives to be accomplished. When you launch a business that is something you really want to do, your chances of success are high and (as the psychologists say) you become "self-actualized."I spent over twenty-five years in entrepreneurial and corporate environments. Sometimes it was fun. Sometimes it was drudge work. And then there was the corporate politics, artificial deadlines, and incompetent bosses to deal with, not to mention driving at two hours daily through exhausting traffic. I don't miss it.Now, I work out of my home office and have a virtual company made up of knowledgeable executives who like myself leverage our vast experience to mentor start-ups and small businesses. We hold meetings (when necessary) at Starbucks overlooking the Pacific Ocean surf.It is amazing how much you can accomplish in a day when you're not bothered by the minutia and frustrations that are the price of working for someone else in exchange for getting a steady paycheck. Your workday becomes very targeted. And if it's a nice day, there's always time to "smell the roses," go for a bike ride along the beach, or just take a break to reflect on life.Don't get me wrong. Starting a business takes a lot of work. You will work harder and longer during the first couple of years than you ever did when employed by someone else. There will be victories and defeats. Some days you will wonder how you are going to pay the bills this month. You will learn and overcome adversities. You will grow. You will grow a lot! But mostly it doesn't seem like work, because you are making your own decisions and building a future for yourself. You are your own boss. You get to be creative and test new ideas. And when you succeed, it brings a special sense of joy and satisfaction. I look back over the past five years since launching my own consulting business and my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner. With the ugly economy and layoffs, maybe it's time for you too to take an entrpreneurial leap. One door closes and another opens. If you do your homework upfront and are prepared to dedicate yourself for a few years, you may find the rewards in both your business and personal life to be overwhelming.Labels: entrpreneur, small business, small businesses
Five Low-Cost Marketing Activities for Small Businesses during a Recession
With the recession gathering steam, 2009 looks to be a tough year for small businesses. Belt-tightening on marketing budgets is a natural reflex to diminished sales. However, it would be a huge mistake for a small business to shut down marketing in a recession because marketing is essential to surviving a downturn. And fortunately, there are effective marketing activities that can be conducted for little or no cost to help keep your sales alive.
Marketing promotion doesn’t have to cost a bundle to yield results. Some of the most effective marketing activities are inexpensive and require little more than investing your time to make them work for your business.
Here are five inexpensive marketing activities a small business can do to keep existing customers coming back while creating new ones:
- Fine-tune your Website. Go over your site from the perspective of a first-time visitor. Are visitors able to discern what your site is about and why they should do business with your company within the ten seconds that you have to capture their interest? Is the site easy to navigate – can visitors readily find what they are looking for? If your business is selling online, is the purchase process simple to use and fool-proof? Do you offer complementary items for sale during the checkout stage? And finally, have you at least performed basic search engine optimization by including meta, alt and header tags, as well as populating your page titles and textual content with keywords relevant to each page? If that sounds like gibberish to you, check out sites like www.WilsonWeb.com to get helpful non-techie site tuning tips. Take an hour or so to perform an audit of your Website – it will ultimately yield big returns for your business!
- Nurture your customers and prospects with a monthly email newsletter. Use “push” marketing through an email newsletter to stay in touch with your customers and prospects. Gain their ineterst by providing valuable information. This allows you to promote your products or services directly to potential buyers. Include incentives and create a sense of urgency. Insert click-through links to special pages on your Website that are germane to any offers or subjects promoted in the newsletter. Use low-cost ($30-$50 monthly online services like www.ConstantContact.com which offer professional newsletter templates and email list management. Just remember to “drip, drip, drip” on your clientele to remind them of the value your business provides.
- Include your Website address on all correspondence, especially business cards and emails. Add a tagline to emails under the signature block that promotes your business. For example, “World’s Largest and Most Affordable Supply of Custom Widgets.”
- Do press releases. These can be simple one-page releases announcing new products or services offered by your business, your latest achievements, new employees, management changes, new markets, discount programs, etc. – basically anything of public interest. Press releases are free advertising! Distribute them online to targeted geographical locations or audiences by using inexpensive services like www.PRWeb.com ($80). Don’t worry - these services show you how to set up the release. Make sure to include a link back to your site to provide interested readers with more information or drive traffic to an online sales funnel. And since online press releases get picked up by other Websites, newsletters and blogs as “filler content,” they help to create one-way links to your Website from a variety of complementary sites, thereby enhancing your search engine ranking. Don’t forget to mail your press release to local hard-print publications as well!
- Advertise weekly or monthly promotions on your Website and in your newsletter to generate new sales and keep your customers coming back. If appropriate, you can even get a unique Website address (e.g., BigSale-TailorMadeSuits.com) for about $10 that points to a page in your Website where the promotion is presented in detail along with possible online purchase options. You can also add this unique online address to flyers or small ads in your local paper or industry periodicals.
With a little effort, your small business can have an effective marketing program for minimal expense. And now is the time to try new things and learn new marketing skills while you may have some slack. If you master the above activities, they will continue to provide a foundation for inexpensive marketing once the economy recovers. So make an investment in your future by starting with just one of these proven marketing techniques. Then tackle the others. You will be surprised and pleased with the results!
Labels: economy, inexpensive, low-cost, marketing, recession, small business
Small Business Marketing During a Troubled Economy
Is there any doubt in your mind that we are entering a deep recession, perhaps the worse one since the Great Depression? How will your business survive this downturn? Bet that question has been keeping you up at night!
When the economy tightens, there is often a natural inclination among small businesses to cut costs across the board. This can be a healthy move. Certainly, there are business expenses you are now incurring that could be curtailed or eliminated. However, drastic cuts in marketing is not one of them.
In an economic downturn, continued marketing is key to survival. It's simple - without sales, you go belly up, and effective marketing generates sales even in a recession. The key to survival is to step back and re-orient your marketing dollars to activities which contribute to cost savings while still effectively maintaining visibility among targeted audiences.
For example, if you run ads in a trade periodical, just start running smaller ads if this medium is critical for your business. If you do television or radio ads, cut back to just those time slots that generate the most sales.
And most importantly, invest your valuable marketing dollars where you get "the most bang for the bucks." In good or bad times, this means placing an emphasis on Internet marketing. Why? Just consider:
- Internet marketing reaches a worldwide audience on a 24x7 basis. And over 70 percent of people now surf the Internet when looking to buy a product or service. A Website and domain name costs about $60 annually. Figure another $1,000 to $6,000 (depending on complexity) to have an experienced pro develop a site for your business and optimize it for Internet search engines so it eventually bubbles up on the first or second page of Google for your keywords. This is a pretty cheap price to gain a worldwide sales vehicle that works around the clock for your business.
- Flyers, direct mailings and hard-print advertising in newspapers and magazines are expensive...very expensive. On the other hand, online pay-per-click (PPC) advertising (when done right) delivers high-quality sales leads for pennies or a just a few dollars each. A typical medium-size newspaper ad might cost $600 or more for a short run. For the same amount, you could run PPC advertising for one or two months. Hard-print advertising is a shotgun approach whereas PPC advertising targets potential customers at the exact moment when they are looking for a product or service just like the one you offer. And, you are only charged when a prospect actually clicks on your PPC ad. Otherwise, it's free advertising! Plus your business gains immediate Internet visibility while your Website gains search engine ranking.
So don't cut your own throat by discontinuing marketing during this economic downturn. Rather, make your scarce dollars go further by shifting promotional activities to Internet marketing. But employ a professional to help your business. As many before you have discovered, you'll get results sooner, avoid costly pitfalls and save money overall.
Time to Start a Home Business?
Maybe you are wondering if it's the best time to start a home business, what with the ailing economy and all. The answer is that it is always a good time to start a home business IF you have done your homework first.
Here are some tips:
- Don't just jump in - take time to do your homework. Research your target market. Scope out the competition. Determine how you will differentiate yourself. Identify the risks and how you will deal with them. Develop a launch plan - what do you have to accomplish and in what order? Develop some financial projections - what can you realistically expect in terms of costs, revenues and profits? Fortunately, the Internet is a wealth of information. The more time you spend on this step, the more pitfalls you will avoid and the less costly your start-up phase will be.
- Plan on developing a Website. You need a Website today to be credible. Ideally, your Website should be an online marketing platform for generating business. But it's not enough today to just put up a Website and sit back. Unless it is optimized for search engines, your Website will remain invisible on the Internet. Also, make sure to add Google Analytics to the Website so that you can analyze visitor behavior and make tweaks accordingly. Go to www.smallbizsmartmarketing.com if you need help. We'll give you a free consultation.
- Market your business. Take advantage of the free online listings offered by Google, Yahoo, Kudzu and SuperPages. Look for inexpensive advertising opportunities in your local press. Do an online press release with an embedded link back to your Website. Distributed free articles about your business subject online (again with an embedded link back to your Website). Send flyers or postcards to your local target market. And add a free online newsletter subscription box to your Website - email newsletters (in which you can promote your business) cost less then a penny each to distribute.
- Lastly, monitor your progress, and make changes as necessary based on the feedback you receive. Be sure to compare your actual financials to your projected financials. Are you on plan, or do you need to make changes? Are your expectations proving true?
Running a home-based business during retirement is a great way to generate supplemental income! But don't be fooled. The planning and start-up phases take a lot of work if you are going to be successful. Don't be in a rush to launch your "great idea." The more time you spend upfront in the planning phase, the better your odds of success.
Labels: home business, planning, roadmap
Do the Business Plan First!
I'm constantly amazed by how many entrepreneurs just jump in and start spending money on websites, marketing, etc., without having first accomplished their homework. Then after several months and maxed-out credit cards, they turn to someone like myself to help them understand why they are not getting any leads or generating any business. In almost every case, these fledgling millionaires failed to complete a business plan before leaping into the unforgiving world of commerce.
A business plan forces one to apply logic and rationale to "bright ideas." Done right, it highlights the risks, tests assumptions, helps to identify winning strategies (if there is one), and presents the expected return on investment in cold hard numbers for different scenarios.
Completing a business plan before launching a business will not guarantee success, but it will give you a much better chance of succeeding. Rushing to market without a business plan almost always results in expensive surprises and ultimate failure.
Having a business plan provides a targeted roadmap and benchmarks against which progress can be measured. It also alerts you to "bailout" opportunities if things are not going as expected. And it will help you to avoid costly pitfalls. In short, preparing a rigorous business plan upfront will more than pay for itself.
Labels: business plan, entrepreneur, Internet marketing, small business
Launching a Home Business Offer Many Benefits
In today's economy, many people start a home-based business or work part-time to make ends meet. Regarding the former, having a home business offers many benefits besides additional income.
First, it is exciting to start your own business, to pit your experience and wits against the world and become successful. It keeps you engaged with the outside world and the business community. You learn new things; you meet interesting people, and you continue to grow.
And there are considerable tax benefits too. Did you know that health insurance costs are deductible? This is a great way to take the sting out of the high cost of health insurance for Baby Boomer retirees who are not yet 65 years old. And your home computer equipment, automobiles, supplies and even home office space are fully or partially deductible too! Of course, you should check with your accountant or use a package like Intuit's Turbo Tax for Home and Business to confirm the exact deductions to which you are entitled.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of launching a home business is the gratification one receives from being the captain of your own ship. You control your time. You get to plan your own strategy and make all the decisions. It is invigorating and yes, even fun. When you're doing something you enjoy, it's not work.
Need help with mastering online marketing? Take a look at
wwww.smallbizsmartmarketing.com. We can help. Baby Boomers who are thinking of starting a home business should look at
www.babyboomerlifeboat.com to get an idea of the how to approach it and the challenges they can expect.
Baby Boomer Lifeboat
Several "Baby Boomer" members of our organization (
Pacifica Endeavors LLC) have expressed concern about the impact of the economy on their ability to retire. On June 24th, their fears were confirmed:
The decline in home values has reduced the prospect of comfortable retirements for the majority of near retirees, according to a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) .“This extraordinary destruction of wealth will have tremendous implications for millions of families as they enter retirement,” wrote report co-author Dean Baker. “Coupled with a very low personal savings rate, this means that many people will only have Social Security and Medicare to rely on in their retirement."As many as two-thirds of Baby Boomers in their 50's and 60's are believed to fit the above profile. Sure, most have some savings, but for the majority their retirement plan was anchored by presumed home equity.
So, after much hand-wringing and a few drinks, the question among my colleagues quickly became, "Is it possible for Baby Boomers to
comfortably retire if they do not have a large 401K, a big pension, an inheritance, or an executive golden parachute to sustain them?"
Being Internet Marketing professionals, we decided to do what we do best - research the subject....and the answer is "Yes." BUT, Baby Boomers with financial shortfalls have to be willing to make changes in their life styles to do so.
We discovered a wealth of information and Websites that can help Baby Boomers on their journey to retirement. So much information in fact that we decided to consolidate it in a new Website:
http://www.babyboomerlifeboat.com/.
Pacifica Endeavors will maintain this site as a public service for fellow Baby Boomers. God knows, it looks like the majority of us will need it!
Labels: Baby Boomer, Boomers, retire, retirement, social security
