Better Business Blog

Rejection Therapy: The Game You Win by Actively Seeking Out Rejection

Fear of rejection is a powerful motivator—or more accurately, anti-motivator. The sting of rejection is sharp (in fact, it actually causes something more like physical pain), probably because most of us consider rejection humiliating. If fear of rejection holds too powerful an influence over your choices, Rejection Therapy may be up your alley.

The free game has one rule: You must be rejected by another person at least once, every single day.

 

It's a simple but clever idea designed to help you build confidence and overcome your fear of rejection:

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35 Ways to Make Your Business Look Bigger

If you're going to compete with the big dogs, you've got to dress the part. Look more professional with these essential apps.

Current lack of budget, manpower, and resources aside, you know your bedroom start-up has what it takes to compete with industry leaders. But do your customers know that?

If you're not doing it already, it's time to start dressing the part.

What follows is a list of cost-effective tech tools that will help you look bigger and more professional—without the crippling overhead.

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What Makes Someone Leave A Website?

Attracting a potential customer is hard enough. Grabbing their interest and retaining them is even more difficult. It’s important to design your site so that user frustration is kept to a minimum, thereby maximizing customer retention. Below are some examples of what not to do when designing your website. Information sourced from: econsultancy.com, bx.businessweek.com, usability.gov and forrester.com.

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Guide To The Must Read Blogs For Entrepreneurs

In between attempting to produce great content, tracking down people to interview, looking for advertisers, and creating a deck to pitch for our first angel investment, I have been taking notes on all of the different sites in the community.

There are so many great founders out there; I find it extremely helpful to learn how they built a business, and hope to one day be at their level. As I was reviewing my notes, I thought that it would actually be a great post to share.

Everyone has different styles, but they all end with the same result: phenomenal content. Loquiveri hopes to put the different pieces of the puzzle together to create our own style, following the lead of the great companies before us.

Read More: Guide To The Must Read Blogs For Entrepreneurs

FLAWSOME: why brands that behave more humanly, including showing their flaws, will be awesome http://trendwatching.com/trends/flawsome/

10 Tools to Make Your Marketing Videos Wow

Video has become an essential marketing tool. It’s a great way to tell your story, show the human side of your business and communicate highly complex ideas in an easy to digest manner. But while video has the power to deeply engage, it also has the power to bore the viewer to tears—and creating compelling video is different than writing, say, a compelling blog post.

Starting a camera and spouting out a thousand words of brilliant prose does not make a compelling video. There are proven techniques and tools that can help make your videos engage, hold attention and wow the viewer. Here are 10 tools that can help you get started.

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3 Ways Women Can Push Through the Glass Ceiling

Jorge Calderon was a venture capitalist who wanted to invest where others weren’t. He found his under-served market: women- and minority-owned businesses.

Only problem was, he couldn’t find entrepreneurs in that niche. He was sure they were there; he just couldn’t find them. So four years ago, he started Springworks to show women and minority innovators how to catch the eye of venture capitalists.

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Online Marketing News: Facts Tell & Stories Sell, Start-up Tips from Tech Giants, Mobile Skyrockets, Breaking Up With Customers

The History of Content Marketing

From the dawn of time people with things to sell have been using stories to attract, engage, and retain customers ala #optimize. The infographic above from the Content Marketing Institute takes us all the way through the evolution of content marketing and provides some meaningful insight into what companies have done in the past to generate results. You might learn a thing a two, plus it’s a great read.

 ”6 Start-up Tips From the World’s Biggest Tech Companies”  Every company has to start somewhere.  Famous companies such as Google, HP, and Microsoft were built on a set of core principals including creating long term customer relationships and listening to feedback.  This post provides tips from some of the largest companies in world on how to get through the start up phase of your business. Via Inc.

Read More: Online Marketing News: Facts Tell & Stories Sell, Start-up Tips from Tech Giants, Mobile Skyrockets, Breaking Up With Customers

Four Keys to Building a Successful Social Network

Social networking is big business. Based on trading on SharesPost, Facebook has a valuation of about $98 billion, though the enthusiasm also exists for other social media companies, such as Zynga, which has a valuation over $9 billion. Of course, the social game maker has built its tremendous business on the Facebook platform.

While leveraging a social network can be smart (here’s a recent piece where I discussed this), there still are opportunities to create independent social networks.

Read More: Four Keys to Building a Successful Social Network

No Free Lunch for Minority-Owned Businesses

Programs for minority-owned businesses that give entrepreneurs a leg up are more myth than substance. Two extraordinary business owners measure success differently, but they have one thing in common: They earned it. No special favors.

Sheraz Kahan is an Italian-trained chef who favors the flavors of Caribbean food. She was born in Toronto to Chinese-Indian parents. Menu items at Sweet Mamma’s Island Cuisine, her restaurant in Naples, Florida, have names like Alligator Bites, Rasta Pasta and Curried Goat.

Read More: No Free Lunch for Minority-Owned Businesses

10 Little Known Social Media Tools You Should Be Using -- Now

Social media is everywhere. It's in our homes, places of worship, schools and, of course, our businesses. Everywhere you look, people are using social media and are talking about it. And it seems that every week a new type of social site pops up.

And as the number of social networking sites grows, so does the number of services that are created to measure, track and monitor those services. What's a marketing professional to do?

Read More: 10 Little Known Social Media Tools You Should Be Using -- Now

The Downton Abbey Guide to Irresistible Narrative Marketing

Every content marketer needs to build relationships with readers.

To have a chance at achieving your marketing goals, you need readers who love what you do.

What if there were a blueprint for telling irresistible stories, for making almost everything you write have an impact in the hearts and minds of your readers?

Look no further than Downton Abbey for that blueprint.

What can a once-obscure period television drama teach us about effective writing, content marketing, and engagement online?

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Linkedin Testimonial For Ilana Eberson From NYCBNG

Thanks to Calvin Strachan for writing this wonderful recommendation on Linkedin.

“Ilana is amazing. I was seeking strategies to take my organization to the next level so I reached out to Ilana for advice, ideas and support.

Her responsiveness, her generosity and the real tangible value she provided me was off the charts. After connecting with her I truly felt she could transform any business. She is a genius.

If you're looking for a superstar, someone who can take your business to the next level, Ilana is the real deal. Ilana is an incredible business woman and I fully recommend her!”

February 20, 2012

Calvin Strachan, Director, The Toronto Power Group

 

 

Linkedin Testimonials For Ilana Eberson And NYCBNG

Thanks to Calvin Strachan for writing this wonderful recommendation on Linkedin.

“Ilana is amazing. I was seeking strategies to take my organization to the next level so I reached out to Ilana for advice, ideas and support.

Her responsiveness, her generosity and the real tangible value she provided me was off the charts. After connecting with her I truly felt she could transform any business. She is a genius.

If you're looking for a superstar, someone who can take your business to the next level, Ilana is the real deal. Ilana is an incredible business woman and I fully recommend her!”

February 20, 2012

Calvin Strachan, Director, The Toronto Power Group

 

 

Linkedin Testimonials For Ilana Eberson And NYCBNG

Thanks to Calvin Strachan for writing this wonderful recommendation on Linkedin.

“Ilana is amazing. I was seeking strategies to take my organization to the next level so I reached out to Ilana for advice, ideas and support.

Her responsiveness, her generosity and the real tangible value she provided me was off the charts. After connecting with her I truly felt she could transform any business. She is a genius.

If you're looking for a superstar, someone who can take your business to the next level, Ilana is the real deal. Ilana is an incredible business woman and I fully recommend her!”

February 20, 2012

Calvin Strachan, Director, The Toronto Power Group

How Do You Make Your Personal (or Professional) Landing Page Stand Out?

We've highlighted both the best personal landing pages and professional nameplate sites. We've even created our own. Despite all the different options, you have to do a bit of work to set your page apart from all the others. We want to know what you did to make your page stand out from the crowd.

If you've put together an awesome page and want to share it, make sure you do two things:

Read More: How Do You Make Your Personal (or Professional) Landing Page Stand Out?

22 Ways to Create Compelling Content When You Don’t Have a Clue [Infographic] http://www.copyblogger.com/create-content-infographic/

12 Important Steps some Bloggers Forget http://www.jeffbullas.com/2012/02/21/12-important-steps-some-bloggers-forget/

An Urgent Letter To Small Businesses Who Don't Understand The Importance Of Yelp

As a frequent user of Yelp and Seamless and other social web apps, I feel compelled to send a message to business owners with a bad rating or no rating at all.

Perhaps you've never heard of Yelp or perhaps you think it doesn't matter. Word of mouth and newspaper reviews were enough to bring in customers for the past thousand years. Why change?

What I want you to understand is that I and over 50 million other Yelp users like me will never be your customer.

Read More: An Urgent Letter To Small Businesses Who Don't Understand The Importance Of Yelp

Content Marketing: Use Your Voice

You and your company have a voice and content marketing gives you a chance to use that voice to connect a relevant message/solution to your target audience.

Content marketing — blogs, social media, articles, case studies, videos, infographics, etc — let’s people hear your message. It gives them a chance to see who you are, what you have and how you do what you do. It’s a tool that small businesses, even the hard core Do-It-Yourselfers, can use to get their message out.

 

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7 Worthwhile Content Marketing Links

This week on The Lede …

• How George Lucas Would Write a Blog Post
• Mark Zuckerberg’s 6 Ingredients of Success
• How to Make Your Content Go Viral
• The Difference Between Good and Great Content Marketing

If you want more links you can use than the seven we highlight here every week, follow @copyblogger on Twitter.

The Difference Between Good Content Marketing and Great Content Marketing
Mr. Pulizzi offers a compelling short history of content marketing, as well as a digestible list of six characteristics that will determine whether your content is great, or merely good. And don’t miss his formula for effectively sharing content on social networks at the bottom of the article …

Read More: 7 Worthwhile Content Marketing Links

9 Hot Facebook-Marketing Tips for Small Business

With 845 million users and a new IPO, Facebook has become an increasingly useful tool for brands. It's important for companies to have a strong presence on the social network.

Whether your brand is fully established or just starting out, launching a marketing campaign can seem overwhelming. But, several small and simple things give your brand a start on Facebook. Some of these marketing tactics are used by the biggest brands in the world.

Ready to put your brand in front of the 845 million? Here are nine time-saving tips for marketing on Facebook.

1. See if your vanity URL is available

Before you launch your brand presence on Facebook, check on your vanity URL. Find one that's simple and easy to remember.

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How to Redefine Your Business in a New Market

What happens if you get your market research wrong and sales don't take off?

You don't have to call it quits, but it's clearly time to consider a new customer focus--and fast. "You can't just say, 'If we build it, they will come,'" says Kevin Daum, author of Roar! Get Heard in The Sales and Marketing Jungle (Wiley, 2010). "You've got to go where the business is."

Here are three ways entrepreneurs have refocused their companies to jumpstart their businesses -- and you can, too.

Ticket Kick Founder Greg Meunder

Photo courtesy of the Company

No. 1 -- Change the focus of your service. When Greg Muender was a junior in college, he founded TicketKick, a San Diego-based company that helped contest speeding tickets for California drivers. Back then, in 2008, he thought pinpointing his core market--college-age men--was a no-brainer, given their high number of speeding tickets. In those early days, Muender's customers came almost entirely by word-of-mouth, and business was slow.

But about a year after starting TicketKick, Muender got a call from a driver who had received a ticket in the mail showing that a camera had caught him running a red light. Muender didn't know what to do for the customer, but he couldn't afford to lose the business. As he looked into the matter, he found that most drivers were stumped when it came to disputing red light tickets based on camera surveillance.

Read More: How to Redefine Your Business in a New Market

6 Online Video-Hosting Sites for Small-Business Marketing

Online-video technology is changing the world. Without it, the iPhone would not be near as interesting. Without it, citizen journalism would not be as compelling.

Smartphones, video cams and wearable cameras are just about everywhere. You can use one to share your company story.

YouTube is well-known for online video. Here are six other video-hosting sites you might want to know about for hosting your company video.

Animoto

This is one of my favorite video-hosting and video-creation sites. You can upload photo images and combine them into a hip video. You can add your own video and audio clips, too. The website says, “The heart of Animoto is its newly developed patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor.”

 

Read More: 6 Online Video-Hosting Sites for Small-Business Marketing

5 Ways to Market Your Brand on LinkedIn

LinkedIn provides plenty of marketing opportunities, but lets take a look at some of the lesser-known tools. Although not all are free, try making room in your budget for a few simple and effective marketing strategies.

Whether you’re looking to raise marketing awareness or drive sales, look for guidance from the LinkedIn team. Where else can you specify your target audience based on job title, industry, functional area and much more?

Try these five LinkedIn tools for better marketing.

Read More: 5 Ways to Market Your Brand on LinkedIn