US Finance World

What’s affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners this week?

HEY, UMAIR, LIGHTEN UP The business world keeps an eye on Egypt. Forbes’s Brian Wingfield discusses the business of evacuation. Umair Haque writes in the Harvard Business Review that Egypt’s revolution is coming to an economy very near you. “The challenge of the democratic, developed world,” he writes, “is a quieter rebellion: against a bankruptcy not just of the pocketbook but of meaning. It’s not to take a stand against a dictator, but to take a stand against an unenlightened, nihilistic, hyperconsumerist, soul-suckingly unfulfilling, lethally short-termist ethos that inflicts real and relentless damage on people, society, the natural world and future generations.”

A BIG WEEK FOR THE INTERNET The Internet gets turned off in Egypt. The United States mulls doing the same. Slate’s Bruce Gottlieb writes about the subtle, obscure and legalistic ways the government controls the Internet. Oh, whatever … it

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Yesterday the White House launched its Startup America Partnership, a private sector campaign that is part of recent initiatives by the Obama Administration to better support—and thus wring more jobs out of—high potential ventures. The campaign isn’t limited to early-stage companies or specific sectors or regions. “Our focus is as much on what we think of as ‘speedups,’ not just startups, says Startup America’s chair, Steve Case, best known as co-founder of AOL and an architect of its ill-fated merger with Time Warner. “Our primary focus will be on accelerating the growth of high-growth companies. They have to be demonstrating that they’re pursuing some product or service that really has the potential to scale. With the capital or mentoring or partnerships or what have you, they can break through and go to the next level.” Beyond spurring more of this type of ‘growth’ entrepreneurship, metrics for the campaign’s success are fuzzy. “We’re soliciting ideas f

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For many small business owners, blogging is not merely a hobby. It can be one of the most effective ways of generating exposure for a business without spending a lot on advertising. Well-written blogs will attract visitors from all around the world and people using search engines will easily find your business.

Blogging need not be a time-consuming task for a small business owner. If you set aside an hour per week to add content to your website it will soon grow as a resource. Just make sure that the content you choose to add is relevant and useful and not simply something designed to try and trick the search engines! Write for visitors, not for Google.

The great thing about corporate blogging is that it allows you to reveal more about the human side of your business. People reading your blog will get to know you and therefore feel more confident about purchasing items from you.

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For some reason you are a single mother – divorce, death of a spouse or abandonment, but if you want to continue your education and raise children yourself, there are plenty of grants for single mothers available to you with some qualification requirements.

The grant system has one important advantage in addition to monetary gift, it imposes no restrictions on sourcing other funding. Both federal and private non-federal agencies can be applied in order to cover the extra costs of studying. So, even if one grant probably will not cover all the costs of college, you can always ask other resources to complete your education. It should be noted that you are not limited to tuition once obtained money. Many other expenses when it comes to education can include laptops, books, travel and housing costs.

Applying for grants you need to choose a growing industry, such as IT or medicine. Read more…

Talking about business success is always great and uplifting. Talking about business failure not so much, why is that?

All too often failure is seen as a bad thing, not as an experience, a valuable lesson or the next important step on the ladder to success. Failure is painful, it dents our ego, but the truth is failure often teaches us more than success. We just need to learn to see failure as an opportunity to make it better next time.

You may say, there won’t be a next time, because you lost not only your shirt. This typically only happens if you discount failure, people who understand that they can also fail, often take far fewer risks.

Here is the thing, a good business plan includes the possibility of failure. Try it, make failure part of the plan, it can be very liberating.

Tagged as: 9 Steps to Building a Successful Website for Small Business, advice for entrepreneurs, BizLaunch Seminars, entrepreneurship, growing small business, marketing on a budget, small business, small business advice, small business success, Toronto, young entrepreneurs

Last week I sat around with six important people in my business and discussed our marketing plan for 2011. We determined that we need to get more e-mail addresses from our customers so that we can send them promotions more efficiently. We want to avoid the printing and postage costs of direct mail promotions, which will be good for us, for the customers and for the environment. Sorry, printers.

But relying on e-mail has its own issues, and there’s one that I’m particularly concerned about. Many people are familiar with price elasticity, which relates to how many sales are lost or gained as the price of a good goes up or down (if sales stay relatively strong as the price rises, the good is said to be price inelastic).

I think there’s a similar issue when it comes to e-mail promotion, and I have taken to calling it e-nnoyance elasticity, which refers to how many people will unsubscribe to your e-mail list as you increase the number of e-mails you send out (if you can send out a lot without people unsubscribing, your e-mails are e-nnoyance inelastic).

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