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This past week I volunteered my time for the “Ask the Expert” segment over at the QuickBooks Community forum (second year in a row). I answered questions from members of the community about Web 2.0 and online marketing.

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Lots of great questions — you guys made me think! Here are some of the topics:

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• How do I grow RSS subscribers?

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• Setting up a website for the first time

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• Blog vs email newsletter

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• How many social networks do you need?

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• Any SEO packages or tutorials you’d recommend?

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What I liked best was being able to talk one-on-one to answer specific questions. It’s quite a bit different from writing regular articles or columns. Definitely more like having a personal conversation.

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I wasn’t able to answer all of the questions — sorry if I didn’t get to yours.

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Start here to read all the Q&A. When you get to the bottom of that page, remember to click in the lower right corner on the “Next” button — it’s a little hard to see unless you’re looking for it.

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This is a post from: Small Business Trends

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I Answered Away about Online Marketing

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The other day, our dinner conversation turned to job-hopping. Those of us over 40 can remember the days when spending less than five years on a job was considered unreliable and erratic behavior, and that probably meant that there was something wrong with you because you couldn’t hold down a job.

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In today’s fast moving marketplace many of us can expect to experience several careers in our lifetime. So that means that it’s never too late to make a change, figure out what we’re meant to do and get out there and do it.

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Then along comes “Workination. Are You Fascinated With Your Career?“

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The title, “Workination,” is a combination of the words “Work” and “Fascination.” Todd Royer has done what many business authors failed to do; tell you that what he wants most for the reader is to have a “Fascination for the work that they do,” whether that work is their life’s calling, or a job that will take them to their career.

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Todd Royer knows all about career change. His experience as a small business owner and the founder of DiscoveryTech, a technical recruiting firm, specializing in consumer products and materials research has led him to write “Workination.” This is a great little e-book for anyone searching for or changing their career.

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“Workination” is a short, easy read. But more importantly, Todd has written it in second person, and his words are like chicken soup on a freezing day if you’re in the process of trying to figure out what your work calling is.

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If you’re reading this and don’t have a job, don’t like the job you have, or you’re just thinking about making a career change, then this book will be like a heart-to-heart with a best friend.

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Here is one of my favorite quotes from the book:

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“Progressing in a career, in any field, is about developing the consciousness and habits of career building. In other words, stepping away from those daily tasks to reflect on your fascination with the future.”

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And for those of us that grew up thinking that if we did all the right things, worked hard and were loyal employees he says:

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“Don’t wait for others to take care of you. The days when a parent-like corporation provided step-by-step promotions based on diligence and hard work are long gone. You are responsible for your own career decisions”

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The other aspect I like about this book is how it’s organized. It starts with YOU, the reader and your level of confidence, and then takes you through the process of visioning who you want to become in your life. Then once you’re clear on those things, he just dives into what I like most, practical actions you can take – like how to leave a voice mail message:

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“When you leave voicemails, leave your number near the very beginning of your message. You can leave it at the end also, but make sure, when the listener replays the message (to copy your number) they won’t have to wait while the full message repeats.”

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Then there are more tips that you can actually convert to actions for yourself and say: This week I’m going to focus on:

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• Volunteering to do the tasks no one wants to like making phone calls, taking minutes, etc.

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• Speak slowly and loudly on the telephone – be professional. Most people won’t notice when you do it right – but boy do they notice when you do it wrong.

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• Clean up your workspace

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• Develop your people skills; fall in love with the people you work with, try to turn work into play

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These are just a few, and there are many, many more helpful, logical suggestions that will help everyone who works with people be memorable and well thought of.

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Sometimes we all forget that we are a living, breathing advertisement, not just for our companies, but for ourselves. Todd helps us all to remember that having the work and career of your dreams is as much about how “choosable” we are to those we want to choose us as part of their team.

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This is a post from: Small Business Trends

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Book Review — Workination: Are you Fascinated with Your Career?

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From the SBA website:

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“The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) was created in 1953 as an independent agency of the federal government to aid, counsel, assist and protect the interests of small business concerns, to preserve free competitive enterprise and to maintain and strengthen the overall economy of our nation.”

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Good stuff. If you are thinking of starting a franchise, or for that matter, any type of small business, there are a multitude of free tools that the SBA has for you to use. Here are some of them (from the SBA website):

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1. Small Business Planner

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This section of the website starts off by providing a list of questions to get you thinking about entrepreneurship, and what starting a business of your own would entail. There is also a long list of characteristics that successful entrepreneurs seem to have in common. There is an assessment tool that helps you decide if you really are ready to start a business of your own.

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2. Starting Your Business

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This area of the SBA website starts off by suggesting that you find a mentor, that can help you with all of the necessary steps to small business ownership. One such mentoring group is the Service Corps Of Retired Executives (SCORE). This is a non-profit resource “partner” with the SBA, but is not a U.S. Government agency. There are almost 400 SCORE offices around the country that provide free counseling to future small business owners. Former executives and business owners provide one on one counseling to prospective small business owners on a completely volunteer basis.

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Next, a comprehensive section on financing, including how to get start-up capital, business cost estimation, break-even analysis, and much more. (Much!)

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Other headings in this section include How to buy a business, how to buy a franchise, naming your business, deciding on a business structure, protecting your ideas, information on what business licenses to obtain, choosing a location, and even an area that discusses leasing your business equipment.

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3. Managing Your Business

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This section begins with the management side, and includes everything from essential leadership elements needed to have a successful business operation, to setting up a proper business meeting,  delegating duties, how to network in the community, setting up business round tables, and business ethics practices. If you would like to learn about how business and technology go hand in hand, there is even a section on just that topic.

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4. Exit Strategies

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How many people think about how they will exit the business they are thinking about starting? An exit strategy is an important part of setting up a start-up business, because it will impact the way you will grow and run it. This part of the SBA website is focused on teaching you ways to get the most value out of your company when and if you decide to sell it. Recommendation’s include getting the right legal help when you make the decision to sell. Some folks wait until they have a potential buyer. Also discussed are business valuations, working with CPA’s,  releases and announcement of a pending sale, and several other important steps to be taken.

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5. Tool Section

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This part of the SBA website has many tools that you can use at no charge. There is “Library and Resources” section, which has subheadings such as laws and regulations, statistics, publications, a glossary of business terms, and even some success stories thrown in. Finally, you can view videos, listen to podcasts, engage in monthly chats, and download a plethora of business forms for your start-up.

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As you can see, the SBA of today, is not the SBA of 1953. The SBA has gone Web 2.0. Like us.

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About the Author: Joel Libava is President and Life Changer of Franchise Selection Specialists. He blogs at The Franchise King Blog.

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This is a post from: Small Business Trends

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Small Business Tools From The SBA

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One of the trends that many big companies have been slow to recognize — but smaller nimbler companies have jumped on — is the market of Internet entrepreneurs. Internet entrepreneurs means businesses that are online-only or have an online business model, or where a substantial portion of the business involves online operations.

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Such businesses have unique needs that are very different from their more-traditional, brick and mortar cousins. Online businesses tend to be heavy users of online software applications. They conduct a higher percentage of their business processes and transactions online — they may invoice online, buy products primarily online, pay bills and invoices online, and prefer to be paid online as well.

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They are naturally more savvy when it comes to social networking, because after all, that’s where they get most of their business from. Many are freelancers and often hire other freelancers or small businesses, instead of hiring employees.

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Blogtrepreneur has come up with a list of 101 useful resources for online entrepreneurs. This list is useful in 3 respects:

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(1) Obviously it is a helpful list of services for online entrepreneurs — you’re bound to find a few useful resources.

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(2) The list is revealing in how this segment of online entrepreneurs work and operate their businesses. It’s very telling in what’s important to them and what products they need. A list like this is a form of “word of mouth.”

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(3) The majority of the products and services on the list are by smaller companies (with obvious exceptions like Google and PayPal). Smaller entities have been fastest to catch on to what this market segment needs, often because it is what THEY themselves needed and so they created a solution to meet their own needs.

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This is a post from: Small Business Trends

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The Online Entrepreneur - Products They Need and Who Provides Them

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Entrepreneurs are having all kinds of fun with their RSS feed icons on their websites.  Elevating them to the tops of the pages, “above the fold” as they say.  Dressing them up.  Designing their sites around them, in some cases.

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Some of these icons are gorgeous.  Others are downright cute!  Like the Search Engine Guide’s RSS icon in the dog bowl (pictured left).

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And it’s all part of a bigger trend in which, slowly but surely, entrepreneurs and business owners with blogs are catching on to what RSS can do for them.

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My latest post over at the OPEN Forum site reviews RSS icons and what all this attention on RSS icons signals.  Have fun with it:  Those Crazy RSS Icons and Why They Matter to Your Business.

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This is a post from: Small Business Trends

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NOT Your Typical Geek Article About RSS

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Now that the evidence is pretty strong that we’re headed into an economic downturn (or are already in one), I thought I’d identify some mistakes that many entrepreneurs make in bad economic times.

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1. Failing to take advantage of decreasing costs. Most businesses are both suppliers and customers at the same time. To provide its product or service, your business needs to purchase the inputs and materials that you use, and you need to hire people to make your product or service. When demand slackens, your suppliers are hurting too. So often you can strike a better deal to cut your costs by paying your suppliers less or hiring better people at a lower cost.

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2. Thinking the only way to increase demand is to cut price. Price cuts aren’t the only way to stimulate demand, and they aren’t the best approach for entrepreneurs. On average, entrepreneurs are more successful when they compete on service, quality, or something other than price. So shifting to price cutting in a recession is often a losing strategy for entrepreneurs.

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3. Failing to recognize increased competition. In a recession, competition accelerates because more businesses are chasing less total demand. In addition, when unemployment rises, people start businesses because their opportunity cost of doing so goes down, further increasing competition. So the need to have a competitive advantage is even more important in a recession than in a booming economy.

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4. Forgetting that some products, or even whole businesses, are counter cyclical. When customers cut back on their spending, they often substitute one product for another. For instance, in a recession, people might cut back the number of steak dinners that they eat out. But, because they still want to treat themselves, they increase their purchase of cheaper foods, like pasta, making pasta a counter cyclical product. So, entrepreneurs need to avoid assuming that demand for everything goes down in a recession.

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About the Author: Scott Shane is A. Malachi Mixon III, Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of seven books, the latest of which is Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths that Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By. He is also a member of the Northcoast Angel Fund in the Cleveland area and is always interested in hearing about great start-ups. Take the entrepreneurship quiz.

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This is a post from: Small Business Trends

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Four Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make in a Recession

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So I think somebody struck a nerve. So what do you think of this tip to save money:

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Fire people who are not workaholics. Come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. Don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it. Go work at the post office or Starbucks if you want balance in your life.

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That’s from Mahalo founder Jason Calcanis, late last week, on his blog. He titled his post How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips). So he’s the one calling his tips "really good," not me. Some of them are pretty good tips, but I think they got lost in the storm.

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Responses came fast and furious. 111 comments by Sunday morning. Other blogs reacted too: one of the best of them was from 37 Signals, titled Fire the Workaholics, which concluded:

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If your start-up can only succeed by being a sweatshop, your idea is simply not good enough. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that can be implemented by whole people, not cogs.

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That one has 90 comments on it. Two posts about it — one by Michael Arrington agreeing and another disagreeing –  have about 350 comments between them.

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Jason, meanwhile, got hit hard, with some strong words. He quickly toned down the original, striking out a couple of the more quotable phrases. And, to his credit, he shows the edits too, in the post you’ll find when you go there.

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Fire people who are not workaholics. don’t love their work… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it–go work at the post office or Starbucks if you’re not into it you want balance in your life. For realz

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What’s going on here? I think it’s culture shock; war between worlds. These are not simple disagreements. There is a whole lot of aggression and anger in the comments.

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There was a joke I heard first in Mexico City. Maybe you’ve heard an English version, but this is a translation. It’s related to all of this.

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A man walks into a crowded cantina and starts shooting two six guns in the air, getting everybody’s attention. He draws a line across the middle of the bar and issues an order: "I want all the fools on one side of the line and the jerks on the other."

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"Wait just a minute," says one man in the crowd. "I’m no fool."

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"Then move to the other side of the line."

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That’s what this controversy is trying to do to startups and people running startups. It’s pretty much either or, if you believe the flow and direction of the comment storm: fool or a jerk.

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And I don’t think it’s that simple. I see at least two other issues rolling around vaguely in the middle of this. And perhaps a way to bring them together.

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First, how do you define success? Every so often somebody reminds us that it’s an important question. But we get lost in the startup tension, or maybe that’s the startup culture. I think all we have to do is ask the question, as a reminder. There are so many shades of gray between the back of plain old failure and the white of fabulous billionaire success. Some people want to have a life, and they want the people around them to have lives. And it’s not like there aren’t examples of startups that respected people and balance. On the other hand, there are lots of stories around. One person’s obsession is another’s passion. You can paint that picture how you want. Do you want to be coach the kids’ soccer team or (have a very small chance to) be on the cover of magazines?

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The second issue is founders with blinders. They want the whole team to share the obsession but they forget that only a few of the top founders actually stand to share the pot of gold at the end of that very-hard-to-catch rainbow. Sometimes its leadership, sometimes its selfishness. It’s insisting that everybody buy into their private dream, which sometimes is shared, and sometimes not. I’ve seen that kind of driven-and-driving-founder at work. The younger Steve Jobs was like that at Apple during the Macintosh gestation in 1983. Philippe Kahn had a lot of that when he build Borland International in the middle 1980s. I saw it again from a comfortable distance in the late 1990s, with dot-coms and their hard-driving work-is-everything atmosphere. That reminds me of the late 1990s in Silicon Valley. Back then it happened all over. I knew a company that raised $45 million venture capital in its first year, hired more than 100 employees, nobody over 30, and brought in dinner almost every night and offered video games and ping pong in the office. The 12-hour days were the norm. The long hours, the lack of balance, the obsession is supposed to be shared by the whole team, but, in many of these cases, the supposed rewards at the end of that long trek won’t be shared by the whole team.

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It can be a bit like the one-size-life-fits-all syndrome, except in this case it’s the one-size-no-life fits all. Does that work? It didn’t for that company I knew, which (because a legal settlement so required it) shall remain nameless. It did for Apple and Borland. I don’t think that works very well for very long for anybody, at least not for any extended period of time. But then again, some of the people who say that it works have a whole lot of money. 

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And how do we bring it together? I think it might be value. Believing in what you’re doing. I’ve known companies, and teams within companies, that believed that what they were doing in the business mattered, to them and to the world. There’s a very special feeling that you get when you walk out the door at the end of the day with the feeling that you’ve spent your time making the world better, not worse. Some companies are built on making things better, while others are built on getting money out of people’s pockets. Some companies respect their customers, some companies bilk there companies. You know who you are. Does that make it better?

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About the Author: Tim Berry is president and founder of Palo Alto Software, founder of bplans.com, and co-founder of Borland International. He is also the author of books and software on business planning including Business Plan Pro and Hurdle: the Book on Business Planning; and a Stanford MBA. His main blogs are Planning, Startups, Stories and Up and Running.

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This is a post from: Small Business Trends

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Startup Culture Shock: Is Startup Life Life?

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All this week I will be answering questions about how to promote your business online using Web 2.0 and other technology tools.  But if you want to ask a question you’ll have to chase me down over at the QuickBooks Community site, where I am the Expert in residence this week. 

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This is your chance to pick my brain.  What do you want to know?

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Insights about running a site like this; how to grow RSS subscribers; email newsletters; how I use LinkedIn, Twitter or  Facebook and what those sites are good for.  Join me over at the QuickBooks Community and ask away.

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This is a post from: Small Business Trends

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Ask Me Your Questions About Online Marketing

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It seems like everyone is fixated by recession talk. 

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Everywhere I look people want to know if we’re in a recession.  Turn on the nightly news or the 24-hour cable news, and you’re treated to one dismal economic statistic after another. 

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I’ve been interviewed 3 times in the past week about recession and the outlook. 

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Are small businesses being hurt by recession? (”yes, some are being hurt, but not all – it’s situational”)

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What should small businesses do during times like these? (”run the numbers before expanding, delay big expenditures, but otherwise business as usual”)

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Will the tax stimulus package help? (”rebates will put a little extra cash in our pockets as consumers, but hardly be a blip for most businesses, except maybe retail which will get some benefit of consumers spending those rebates”)

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Let me state it again:  I am not worried about recession. Worry about macro-economic issues is a waste of precious mental attention.

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Do I think we’re in a recession?  I’m not a trained economist, so maybe I am not the best person to ask that.  But, yes, I tend to agree with billionaire Warren Buffett when he said recently that by common sense standards we are in a recession.

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However, that doesn’t mean you should have a negative outlook.  

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History is a wonderful thing, and it tells us one very important fact:  recessions are temporary conditions.  We’ve never had a recession that hasn’t been temporary.  At some point the economy will start growing faster again.  Meanwhile, consumers continue to spend and businesses continue to do business, even during recessions.

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I would never suggest that you ignore negative economic news in pollyanish oblivion — that would be foolish.  Just take it with copious grains of salt.  Most of the news over-emphasizes the negative, because that’s the nature of reporting news, especially during an election year.  Right now we are being bombarded with election season rhetoric.  The candidates naturally want to display that things are bad so that they can talk about how much better things will get if they’re just elected.  You’d do the same thing if you were running for President.  We had this same heightened attention on the economy back in 2004 before those presidential elections.  Once the election season was over, the economic talk was not nearly as negative.

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Plus, glum numbers are rarely put into relative terms.  If a statistic is relayed in a 90-second news blurb, I just don’t know HOW to feel about that statistic.  Am I supposed to feel terrible because payrolls went down 17,000?  Worried?  Re-assured because it wasn’t worse?  What should that 17,000 mean to me — anything?  And when it is said that this number or that is at the lowest level in four years, I want to ask “but how low is it historically?”.  I want to know — and rarely hear — how that number might compare with 2001 or 1992 or 1985 or 1932. 

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Rich Karlegaard writes in this week’s edition of Forbes magazine along the same lines, in Four Wrong Reasons for Pessimism.  One of the points he brings up is that the glum economic mood is tied to a reflection of unhappiness with President George Bush.  No matter which political party you belong to, you have to admit he is not a popular President right now. That colors the perception people have of how well the economy is doing. Seventy percent think the economy is off track, the same percent that are not happy with President Bush. Yet, as Karlegaard writes: “When asked about their own individual economic prospects, half of Americans say they feel positive about the future. About their lives, 84% say they are satisfied.”

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And that’s the point. Your personal or your business circumstances are not the same as the Economy-with-a-capital-E. So much of running a business successfully is about your own mental attitude – whether you approach issues positively – and your daily decisions.  The day to day factors have more impact on the success of many small businesses than do macro-economic issues. 

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For sure, if you’re in a housing or mortgage related industry, things have got to be tough in many parts of the country right now. And some businesses are being especially hard hit, such as if they rely on gas or heating fuel (landlords, businesses with fleets). I feel for you, if you are in one of those industries being hard hit right now.

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But aside from selected industries, if you’re like me, your business is probably more affected by day to day issues, rather than macro-economic issues.  I’m more focused on the possibility of one of our computers being on its last legs, or making sure that all data is backed up, or growing traffic to this website, or finding affordable help to run this business, or pricing issues. What’s more, these are decisions as a business owner I have more control over than macro-economic issues.

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You can have a far greater impact on your business’s success by focusing on issues within your control, than by being a fatalist over a gloomy jobs number. 

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This is a post from: Small Business Trends

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Why A Positive Mental Attitude Matters During Recession

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