Better Business Blog

7 Tips for Networking

Networking goes hand in hand with running a successful business.

But many of us dread walking into a room and introducing ourselves to a bunch of strangers.

I've been asked to share my best networking tips at a meeting today of the National Association of Women Business Owners in Philadelphia. Here are the most valuable tips I've come across – and put to work myself – over the years:

1. Resist the urge to arrive late. It's almost counter-intuitive, but showing up early at a networking event is a much better strategy than getting there on the later side. As a first attendee, you'll notice that it's calmer and quieter – and people won't have settled into groups yet. It's easier to find other people who don't have conversation partners yet.

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10 Blogging Tips for 2012

Are you getting the most out of your blog? With the explosion of social media sites and a whole range of blogging and content sharing platforms at your fingertips, you should take another look at your blog. Is it still serving its purpose, reaching your customers and making the most of available resources? Here's a checklist of questions you should be asking and things you should be considering when evaluating your blog and planning for 2012.

1. Is blogging the best platform for your business? By now you probably already know about the success of new, highly visual online outlets such as Pinterest and Instagram. If your business depends on people seeing big, beautiful photos of your product or location, maybe these are a better fit. You could also look at blogging through Tumblr, which supports multimedia sharing well. And if you have the resources and manpower, you can always do both, using a photo-sharing site to showcase your visual appeal, then integrate these into longer traditional blog posts.

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11 major public relations mistakes (and how to learn from them)

“There is no such thing as bad publicity,” unless your company’s latest advertising campaign completely backfires and angers countless loyal customers. Even the most established brands are not immune to a faulty public relations blunder — including household names like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola — and it takes more than an apology to correct a company image and recover lost revenue.

I asked a panel of successful young entrepreneurs to share a misstep made by a major brand, and what they’ve taken away from the experience as seen from afar. Here’s how they learned from other companies’ mistakes and how they’re using the new knowledge to improve their own businesses.

Name one major PR blunder that you’ve seen a major brand make recently. What one lesson should all entrepreneurs learn from their mistake?

The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC leads  #FixYoungAmerica, a solutions-based movement that aims to end youth unemployment and put young Americans back to work.

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How To Close Big Business Deals

You don't climb the biggest hill in your neighborhood the same way you would tackle Mount Everest. Changes in scale require a big shift in tactics.

Let's start with the seven things that make your big sale different than your average size sale:

1. Size: Obvious, sure, but worth the mention. Adding a couple of zeros to the deal can change more than just the sweatiness of your palms.
2. Complexity: The bigger the deal, the more moving parts. Moving from 100 loaves to 100,000 loaves may not change the recipe–but it increases the logistical complexity of getting the bread to the market.

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Ever gone through PayPal reports hell? You will love SlowPal

 

PayPal claims over 100 million active user accounts, but a lot of people hate the company, for a variety of reasons. Love or despise it, it has become hard to ignore and avoid the e-payments juggernaut whether you are an online seller or buyer.

Enter Shoply, which aims to democratize online retailing of goods and services for small businesses worldwide. They hate PayPal too, but they realize that it’s become too big and powerful for them to sidestep the online payments giant.

One particular frustration of the Shoply team with PayPal is its slow and tedious transaction reports system. If you’ve ever used PayPal to peruse though and search for transactions in your account history, you will know that it is prone to crash and is often as slow as molasses in January.

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How American Express Found Its Social Media Groove

American Express went from virtually zero social media presence in 2009 to being hailed by Advertising Age as the “real winner” at South By Southwest this year.

How did AmEx do it? Leslie Berland, SVP of digital partnerships and development at the company, attempted to retrace the brand’s steps during a talk at Mashable Connect, and then dispensed a few social media tips on Friday.

Berland highlighted two major inflection points in AmEx’s social media marketing history: its introduction of Small Business Saturday and its promotion of Sync at SXSW. The former started with a “lofty goal,” which was to “start a movement,” Berland said.

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Why Has New York Become a Paradise for Tech Startups?

Asking budding entrepreneurs where they’d like to build their next startup often elicits the same three-word response: New York City.

Over the past four years, there’s been a 40% spike in startup financing in “Silicon Alley” — a bigger increase than anywhere else in the U.S.

Cities around the world are increasingly looking at New York, rather than San Francisco or Silicon Valley, as a model for nurturing startup growth through policymaking and urban planning.

What’s New York’s secret to startup success? According to Brad Hargreaves, founding partner of startup co-working space General Assembly, the answer is twofold: it’s half the fault of the financial collapse of 2007/2008, and half the result of intelligent public planning and policymaking.

Thousands of the city’s brightest coders, says Hargreaves, were working for the finance industry when the bubble burst. As companies sank, those software engineers were either let go or abandoned ship — leaving some of them free to spark New York’s startup explosion.

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The Top Five Sites for Keeping Up With Creativity and Design

 

If you are not in a core creative business like design or art, how do you keep up? Yes, we also need to parse huge amounts of information across our careers, but you can’t afford to ignore trends in the creative trades.  It’s a creative economy and we need to know what is going on.  Here are five curated design sites that can help. I like to dip into them from time to time – it’s not part of my every day information intake but it’s essential reading.

If you prefer to learn through social networks there is a compilation of design/creative social networks at this blog. And a great article here on Forbes about Fab.com, the designer goods retailer. I generally don’t have time to browse catalogues but do have time for sites that gently remind me of their work, through the email.

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7 Tremendously Efficient Ways to Re-Share Content

There’s a really interesting thing that happens when you start writing a company blog. Suddenly you realize that you've managed to amass 50 or 100 posts. (If you're not quite there yet, don't worry; you will be before you know it.)

That many posts is a nice collection of thoughts and ideas, not to mention a lot of effort. So why not get the highest return for your work? This means getting that content out to wider markets, so that more people have access to your message. The trick here is re-purposing that content—and the possibilities are endless. Let's look at a few.

1. E-book, report, or white paper. Suppose your business is in interior decorating. You could grab your posts related to color mixing and create an eBook titled, Color for Interior Design Made Easy. You might sell this publication, or offer it as a free download.

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The 3 Essential Qualities of a TRUE Social Media Expert

No, really, I'm awesome with this social media stuff...

Right now, there are literally thousands of businesses out there in the world looking for social media help, advice, and guidance. And like any other industry, the social media realm is full of “legit experts,” “not-so-legit experts,” and “please-call-me-a-guru-even-though-I’m-not experts.”

Personally, over the last 3 years, I’ve seen many “experts” in this industry come and go. I’ve also seen many companies hire smart people and get huge results while at the same time there have been handfuls of others hire supposed “experts” that have done nothing but put a hurt on the company’s P & L statement with their false promises and frankly stupid social media strategies.

Throughout this process, I’ve seen definitive trends and qualities that dictate the most successful social media (including content marketing here) experts and the ones that might talk big but have very little to back it up.

3 Essential Qualities of a True Social Media Expert

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10 Blogging Tips for Marketing in 2012 http://www.openforum.com/articles/10-blogging-tips-for-2012

B2B Lead Generation vs B2B Advertising: What You Need to Know

Among paid media and advertising tactics, lead generation programs are a key source of leads for B2B marketers, especially in the enterprise technology space. Tell a B2B publisher that you are interested in lead generation and the majority will point to some form of white paper syndication program they offer.

For the sake of this post, lead generation programs refer to publisher programs that promote your content and capture registration. These are contacts or inquiries, not sales leads, but in keeping with the terminology publishers use, we will refer to this as lead generation here.

In enterprise technology, publishers like IDG, Information Week and TechTarget have nearly turned these programs into a science, with guaranteed leads volume and a myriad of filtering and qualification options driven largely by email and newsletter promotions.

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Baby Boomers: America's Hottest Group Of New Entrepreneurs

Aging in America has changed – and I for one, think it’s for the better. We are living and working longer and feeling good while doing it. Was it Oprah who first said, “50 is the new 40?” I see it at MBO everyday as I watch expert professional Baby Boomers leave corporate full-time positions to become America’s hot new entrepreneurs.

Rather than taking a bow with traditional retirement, many boomers today are forging fulfilling encore careers with independent work. Today, there are five million boomer independents in the U.S. and it has never been easier for these senior professionals to design a second solo act. Facilitated by the rise of cloud and mobile computing and social networking, boomers are easily able to leverage their intellectual and social capital to start solo businesses and earn continued income and professional kudos.

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The Insanely Simple Secret to Copyblogger’s Success http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2012/05/03/the-insanely-simple-secret-to-copybloggers-success

5 Lessons from an Unconventional Entrepreneur Who Raised Millions

Crowdfunding may be changing the rules of the financing game–witness the nearly $8 million plus that the Pebble smart watch raised on the site Kickstarter — but many entrepreneurs still want to raise venture capital.

And though seed money is flowing, as you’ll see in Forbes’ Midas List, it isn’t as easy as some news reports would make you think to raise equity capital. There’s a small universe of businesses that actually raise this form of financing. According to CB Insights, venture capitalists only invested in 785 companies in the first quarter. While that’s the second highest number in nine quarters, it obviously represents just a handful of all of the startups that are out there.

So how do you get your hands on some much-needed investment capital? You may get some ideas from Amanda Steinberg, founder and CEO of DailyWorth, an online community to help women build their net worth that now generates “multimillion” dollar revenue through advertising deals with companies such as ING Direct and OppenheimerFunds.

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6 Business Lessons From 50 Shades of Grey

Have you heard about 50 Shades of Grey?

If not, either you’re a guy who has no woman in his life, you’re living in a cave or you’re a guy living alone in a cave. Women everywhere are buzzing about this bestselling erotic novel, which tells the story of a wealthy entrepreneur’s affair with an innocent college student. First-time author E.L. James has been mobbed at book signings, interviewed on TV and given a seven-figure contract with Vintage Books. Ellen DeGeneres read snippets from the novel aloud on her talk show, Barbara Walters discussed it on The View and Time magazine named James one of its 100 Most Influential People of 2012.

As I read about James’ phenomenal success, I couldn’t help but draw some business lessons from her story.

1.  You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. James, a fortysomething TV exec, openly admits her books started off as “fan fiction” based around the characters in the wildly popular Twilight vampire novels. What plot there is also borrows elements from everything from Pretty Woman to Jane Eyre. When James published 50 Shades as a free e-book, she apparently struck a nerve, and the book took off. I can think of many business ideas that weren’t brand-new but became wildly successful by building on an existing product or service with a little tweaking. (Domino’s Pizza is one case. That company made billions by offering a 30-minute money-back guarantee.)

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There's No Need To Hire A Lawyer When These Sites Let You Do It Yourself

Four years ago, Michele Ellson created an online community newspaper,The Island, in Alameda, Calif., under a limited partnership. But she didn't hire an attorney to form the LLC or file the paperwork.

Instead, Ellson turned to LegalZoom, where she spent $552 to gain access to the forms and have attorneys review the paperwork and file it with the state. "I was looking for something easy to use and one where I knew what to pay up front," Ellson says.

Ellson is one of an increasing number of consumers trying their hands at being do-it-yourself lawyers. Last year, Google Ventures poured $18.5 million into Rocket Lawyer, which boasted 70,000 users a day and doubled its revenue for four years running, according to a Forbes report. And LegalZoom, according to its website, has served more than a million customers.

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When the Product Is the Marketing, and Vice Versa

Not that it happens often, but sometimes the product itself is the marketing. And in those rare cases, businesses thrive without organized marketing.

Normally, great marketing beats great product. But these are those beautiful "if you build it, they will come" cases that can be especially exciting to watch.

As I write this, I'm reviewing a startup that looks to me as if it could be one of those product-driven successes that thrive without much focus on marketing planning. Yesterday, the founders showed me their video-rich and design-rich web building platform. It looked incomplete, but really good. And the creators had very little to say about marketing.

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Who Googled You? This Website Knows

After a date, a pitch or a job interview, there’s a good chance you’re going to get Googled. Online reputation manager BrandYourself now helps you figure out who is searching for your name.

The startup, which helps individuals control Google results for names through SEO, launched a new feature on Tuesday that shows users where visitors to their BrandYourself profiles work and where they’re located.

BrandYourself built a database of organizations’ publicly-available IP addresses in order to create the feature. They use it to match IP addressees of profile visitors with the companies that own those addressses.

Visitors most frequently reach BrandYourself profiles through Google, but the feature works the same way if visitors reach a user’s profile from another search engine or website.

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10 Tips For Keeping Your LinkedIn And Business Connections Fresh

Keeping connections fresh is entirely about giving. You are giving someone attention, and you are not asking for anything. It is a pleasant contact for them. And it makes a huge difference. If someone hears from you, even once a year in an email when you don’t need anything, then when you ultimately do need something, it is very comfortable for both parties. But if you haven’t connected with them at all in five years and suddenly, out of nowhere, ask them for something, it becomes very uncomfortable for you and potentially annoying or easy to ignore for them. You may recognize this situation from having been on one or both sides of the exchange.

If you have kept the connection fresh and updated, not only will it be much more natural and comfortable when you need to reach out, but the other party will be much more inclined to actually help you!

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12 Timeless Link Building Tips for Business Blogs

Link Building for Business Blogs Doesn't Need to Be Risky

As a key component of a hub and spoke online marketing strategy, blogs can be very effective for social media network engagement, online PR, customer service, and as search engine optimization assets. While there are numerous cases studies of business blogs (I like to think Online Marketing Blog is one) providing tremendous value, blogs are simply software tools and what you get out of them is in proportion to how well you know how to use them.  One of the common areas of lost opportunity with business blogs is link building.

Despite Panda, Penguin and maybe someday “Zebra?”, updates from Google to further filter out what constitutes useful content and links on the web, links will always be valuable for attracting traffic.  Some online marketers chase exploits, tricks or shortcuts only to get spanked by a black and white named-animal update from Google.  Why not spend that creativity on something of value and competitive advantage that withstands the advancing filters applied by search engines?

Here are a few timeless tips for building natural links that will attract and engage customers to your business blog:

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5 Ways to Turn Twitter into Your Most Powerful Social Media Tool http://www.jeffbullas.com/2012/05/01/5-ways-to-turn-twitter-into-your-most-powerful-social-media-tool/

Three Requirements as Marketers, Agencies and Publishers Converge

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Communications, the publisher of BtoB Magazine, announced the creation of CrainsSocial, a new marketing services group offering social media solutions to marketers. This is one more introduction in a long line of changes that are blurring traditional roles in the marketing landscape.

Not only are the trends towards digital, social, mobile and content changing the B2B marketing landscape, the roles of agencies, publishers and marketers in that landscape are blurring as well.

As these lines move, the role marketers need to take is shifting as well. Here are three of the key changes marketers need to make. Please share your additions in the comments below.

1. Own It

More than ever, you need to own and enforce your overall strategy. Without traditional AORs as a natural lead for agency coordination and integration (AOR relationships dropped from 50% of companies to 15% in the last decade), you need to take on this role directly. Every provider will look to push the boundaries of your brand and marketing guidelines. You must ensure these pushes are coordinated and moving in the same direction.

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Small Business in a Tizzy Over Big Google Changes?

The latest Google shakeup, called the Penguin update, has some online small business owners scratching their heads. The purpose, experts say, is to punish over-optimization, but what does the change really mean in practice and what specifically does it mean for your business? Don’t panic! We’ve rounded up some of the best resources on the Web to help you understand things better.

Inside Penguin

From the horse’s mouth. Want to know what’s really behind the new changes at Google? Why not start with a post from Google’s Matt Cutts about what’s going on from the search engine’s perspective. Google Webmaster Central Blog

Overview of the latest update. So, what is the latest Google update all about? What does it mean, why do you need to be concerned about it and what will it ultimately mean to you? Read a detailed look at the changes in store. Business2Community

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Top 10 Highly-Desired Skills You Can Teach Yourself

On countless occasions, you've likely said to yourself "I wish I knew how to do ______." Then, of course, life got in the way and you put it off until you could find the time. Maybe you wanted to become fluent in a language, learn a new instrument, start performing your house repairs, or a master a myriad of other skills. With the vast amount of knowledge online, you're now your only excuse. Here are the top ten most highly desired skills that you can teach yourself—and should.

10. Repair Just About Anything

Sure, you don't need to repair anything anymore. You can just pay someone else to do it. But where's the ingenuity in that? Plus, who wants to waste a bunch of money on simple tasks you can handle on your own? If you've adopted the DIY spirit, learning to repair your own stuff is one of the easiest and more rewarding skills you can acquire. It's especially fruitful because as you learn new things, you can put them to use right away. So how do you teach yourself? We've outlined tons of repairs you can learn on your own to get you started, but if you're looking for something specific there is no shortage of how-to videos available on YouTube and VideoJug. There will be occasions when you do need to call a professional, as you're not going to be a master repairman (or woman) instantly, but do remember that there is an opportunity when things break: you can learn how to fix them.

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