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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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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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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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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5 Ways Small Business Can Attract Big Clients

Winning business from the Fortune 500 is a great way to put your company on the map.

Tackle unsexy jobs that big companies find inconvenient or, if they face high labor costs, unprofitable to manage. At Standard Functional Foods Group in Nashville, CEO Jimmy Spradley (right) attracts food conglomerates by offering to make new or smaller brands of foods like granola bars, helping clients avoid small production runs. By consolidating orders from multiple firms, he's built a profitable business and expects sales of $150 million this year.

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http://money.cnn.com//galleries/2012/smallbusiness/1204/gallery.winning-customers.fortune/index.html

15 Big Little Things You Can Do in 15 Minutes

 

After 15 years of yo-yoing up 15 pounds and down 15 pounds, I finally realized that the long, slow, low-impact exercise routines I’d been suffering through weren’t working. I needed something different—dramatically different—and I found it: CrossFit. CrossFit is an intense strength and conditioning class that drives you to work at your maximum intensity for the minimum amount of time needed to get your workout for the day done. How long is that? On average, about 15 minutes. Most of the folks in my class are firefighters and police officers, which means that I, as a humble management coach and corporate trainer, am at the bottom of the heap when it comes to physical fitness, emotional resilience, and overall heroism. Nevertheless, I am doing the same workout, scaled to my ability level, as our finest and bravest. And in six weeks of 15-minute workouts, I have dropped a size, increased my strength, and, most important, radically changed my perspective on efficiency.

CrossFit started me thinking: What other things could I—and my coaching clients—do more effectively in short bursts of 15 minutes rather than dragging them out over time, or even not making time for them at all? Where in our work and lives does our no-sweat approach cost us productivity, a competitive edge, and even our ability to renew and recover?

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Go Guerrilla: A DIY Guide to Product Launches

Joshua Waldman is what you might call an online-marketing machine. He knows how to build and feed social networks as a springboard to opening doors and achieving results. What's more, he's willing to share everything he knows.

When he realized that social media are the key to unlocking job opportunities, he wrote "Job Searching With Social Media for Dummies."When his book catapulted to the No. 2 position among Amazon.com business books and won features on CBS, ABC News, Mashable and mediabistro.com, as well as such publications as the Chicago Tribune and U.S. News & World Report, I asked how he did it. His answers provide a guide for anyone launching products in today's networked world.

Barbara Findlay Schenck: Every new product marketer craves media coverage. How did you get it?

Joshua Waldman: My biggest asset was a list of 500 top bloggers and media people, segmented into 11 groups, so I could send different and appropriate messages to different people.

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3 Slick Analytics Dashboards to Monitor Your Business Website

If you’re running a company website without an analytics dashboard, you may as well be stumbling around in the dark. Building a viable and sustainable web presence in any industry is all about understanding the needs of your users and tailoring your service to fit their needs — how can you do that if you don’t even know what your users are looking at or how they got to your website?

The good news is that analytics dashboards simple to implement, and they also come in a variety of shapes and sizes to suit the needs and goals of your small business. While some people swear by Google Analytics or the tracking plug-ins found organically within their specific web hosting or content managing service (think WordPress analytics), there’s a lot of information you may not be getting from these sources. For example, while Google Analytics does a great job tracking individual page vies, it doesn’t necessarily break down any meaningful social sharing or referrals. You may want to know why a specific webpage on your site garners major traffic, but Google Analytics will only note that it comes from Facebook.

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Network Better Than Bill Clinton: 6 Ways To Build Bonds Faster

Do you like networking?

Me neither. I often want to run screaming from cocktail parties.

Yet I do like people–they are endlessly fascinating. And this, my friends, is how you can learn to love networking.

Here’s the key: The more you help people get what they want, the more they’ll help you. When you’re networking, you’re not just looking blindly for people who can give you stuff; you’re looking to create another kind of family—people you care about, people who will care about you.

“Palm Up”  Networking

Have you ever noticed there’s a physicality to the “gimme”? There’s a way people look at you when they want something: eager, impatient, and expectant. Sometimes they are leaning forward, as if preparing to grab. They’re watching for their moment, and if they don’t get it, their disappointment is reflected all over their face. Ick.

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10 Video Tips for Businesses on Pinterest

Grant Crowell is a multimedia writer and marketing analyst who’s been covering the online video space since 2006. Connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him at @grantcrowell.

Since Pinterest was founded in 2008, it’s proven one thing: People love their visuals. And it looks like the site is becoming a hot space for online video marketing opportunities as well, with its recent integration of the Vimeo platform.

The video platform addition makes sense, given how video continues to grow on the network. For example, despite Pinterest’s “no-follow” links rule to third-party sites, videos on the site are being indexed by Google at a rapid rate. In late March, Google had indexed 1,170 Pinterest videos. By mid-April, that figure jumped to 5,870 video results — an increase of more than 500% in just three weeks.

What that should tell brands and marketers is that now is the time to start looking at Pinterest as a video marketing vertical. Here are ten tips on how to get the most out of using video on this site.

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The Ultimate Digital Customer Service Guide

In our recent Customer Experience Series, Mashable dove deep into the mysterious alchemy of customer service. Those who own their own business will tell you: Getting (and keeping) customers is not easy. There are so many different factors that must work together perfectly within a company to ensure that fans of your brand stay happy.

Whether its making sure that your ecommerce platform doesn’t drive your users crazy or organizing your social media to build your community, forethought is key to a premium customer experience. These articles will give you comprehensive knowledge of many facets of digital customer service, with expert advice from community managers, CEOs and web designers.

Here’s a roundup of all of our articles, brought together into this handy guide. To read more, click through to the full article, and you can access the entire series here.

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10 Smart Risks That Every Business Should Seek Out

Being a risk taker in business is not the same as being reckless. Nevertheless, the word “risk” has a negative connotation to most of us, implying danger and possible loss. For true entrepreneurs, risk is viewed as a positive, with its implied challenge to overcome the unknown and hitting the big return.

In fact, risk is an integral part of life, as well as every business, yet so few people learn to manage it properly, or even want to think about it. One way to learn is to understand better how successful entrepreneurs approach risk, and look at actual strategies they use for success.

I found a great summary of key strategies used, with life stories, in a book titled “The Risk Takers,” by Renee and Don Martin. Here is their list, with a little prioritizing and comments of my own:

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How a 9-Year-Old Entrepreneur's Business Went Viral

At YoungEntrepreneur.com, we regularly bring you stories about innovative startups and their wide-eyed founders. But even we were in awe of 9-year-old Caine Monroy, who last summer constructed a makeshift arcade out of cardboard in his father's auto-parts store in Los Angeles.

He started off catering to the shop's visitors. Now, though, his business has become the main attraction, with excited children and television crews filing through daily, all clamoring for a turn. A $1 ticket gets you four spins at one of five arcade games and a $2 ticket gets you 500 spins. The industrious lad also sells $15 T-shirts -- like the one he wears -- that display "Caine's Arcade" on the back.

That attention has turned into big bucks for young Monroy. It's not clear how much money he's made from ticket and T-shirt sales, but in donations alone, Monroy has already raised more than $178,000 through his website, CainesArcade.com. Those funds are devoted to paying for his college education, he says.

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Tips Offered On Building Your Business From Scratch

Starting a small business presents huge challenges, but many who’ve succeeded believe it’s worth all the struggle. Here are some tips we hope will help you as you build a new business. Do you have any suggestions to share with other entrepreneurs starting out?

Starting Up

Creating your dream business. Take a look at the story of one couple who has built a multimillion dollar business out of a game they once played with their kids and a $100 investment. It took courage and lots of hard work, but now listen to these entrepreneurs talk about what small business ownership means to them. Yahoo! News

Buying a franchise remains an option. One business adviser says this remains a good route for baby boomers looking for an option beyond the workaday world. If this is something you’ve thought of, read on! The Executive Suite Blog

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Marketing 2015: Be Prepared to Be Surprised. Very Surprised

Some steps marketers take are easy. They feel like baby steps, being a little shaky on the legs, but in retrospect they are not so difficult. For example, Facebook fan acquisition…. Many brands have mastered that. Read all about MTV’s journey to 100 million fans here, Disney’s here.

Social media marketing takes new skills, for sure, but the beauty of social media is that most of us can acquire those skills – it is a democratising medium. By definition it is accessible.

So I don’t imagine social will be a big differentiator going forward. It simply can’t be. My view, expressed elsewhere, is that the wrong data model lies behind social, anyway. 

Outside of social, a few marketers are taking on a much larger remit, like becoming the source of innovation for the enterprise.

In that role the marketer helps redefine the purpose of the business.  If marketers don’t do that, then CIOs will or innovation will be left to languish with the Chief Innovation Officer, a title without a strategic role in many organizations.

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Why Entrepreneurs Succeed - and You Can, Too

 

All it takes to become an entrepreneur is a big idea and a million dollars – right? Len Schlesinger, president of Babson College and co-author of Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future, argues that’s a pernicious myth – and it may be harming your career. With lifetime employment long gone, every employee needs to take responsibility for their own career and develop an entrepreneurial mindset: “Entrepreneurship is a skill that enables people to effectively cope with the uncertainty and unknowability that exists in the modern workplace, and effectively take action.”

But if you believe starting a business – or simply being innovative within your current company – requires a huge amount of cash or a world-beating idea, you’re likely to feel overwhelmed. Instead, embrace the secret that successful entrepreneurs have discovered: “If you want to start an entrepreneurial activity, you don’t need a big idea,” says Schlesinger. “You just need something you want. You don’t have to wait for this magic to come to you in the shower; if you keep tinkering at it, something’s likely to happen.”

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How to Get in With the Big Guys



Written By Cindy Vanegas,  FOXBusiness

After sealing three deals with players in the local trucking industry, Tucker Robeson said he knew that in order to scale CDL Helpers, an employee retention and management consulting firm focused on truck drivers, he’d have to make inroads with a larger firm.

Robeson, the company’s co-founder and CEO, used his alumni network to convince Lawrence Transportation Company to agree to a 90-day trial.

“We focused on making our target company better and the lives of the people who run it easier,” said Robeson.

Finding a way into a major corporation can seem daunting. However, through persistence, strategy and bargaining the path to partnering with big business will have fewer roadblocks.

Ilana Eberson, president of The NYC Business Networking Group, recommended that entrepreneurs make relationships on the lower levels and have a list of benefits that they can provide the company.

“I always go in with a give instead of a take,” advised Eberson.

Read more: http://smallbusiness.foxbusiness.com/entrepreneurs/2012/04/05/how-to-get-in-with-big-guys/#ixzz1rDm5QpeL

Entrepreneurs Network for Success

Networking…as entrepreneurs we do this almost instinctively, but are we taking the wrong approach when networking for our small businesses? Here are some resources that may help.

Networking Advice

What Reid Hoffman can teach you about connecting. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or not, networking is the key to your success. Realize that as an entrepreneur your ability to connect will define the direction your small business takes. Bloomberg Businessweek

Even businesses without Websites can network online. A surprising number of small businesses don’t yet have Websites, but that doesn’t keep them from networking online. LinkedIn specifically creates a hub for entrepreneurs even without other Web presences. The Sydney Morning Herald

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Psych! 5 Brain Tricks to Make Customers Buy

Want to increase your revenue? It's time to get smarter about how your customers' minds really work, suggests a new book.

Fact No. 1: People aren't always rational thinkers. In truth, research shows that a huge amount of decision-making is actually based on subconscious factors.

In both his new book, Brainfluence, and in a recent interview, Dooley offered several ways to use "neuromarketing" to do a better job persuading consumers.

 

Read More: Psych! 5 Brain Tricks to Make Customers Buy

Effective Networking Takes Commitment and Clarity

These days the word networking has any number of meanings and context.

There’s social networking, the kind of networking you do wherever two or more of you are gathers and of course that pesky wiring together of far flung computer nodes that might come up in a random search on the term networking.

I’m at SXSWi this week in Austin and hidden in all those tweets and posts from giddy geeks gone gonzo is the fact that this event is one of the premiere networking events for people in the online and interactive world.

Read More: Effective Networking Takes Commitment and Clarity

How Brands Are Using Promotions to Market on Pinterest

Pinterest’s traffic and engagement are spiking, and marketers want a piece of the action.

After launching branded profiles, many businesses are now developing promotions on the platform, encouraging users to follow the profiles of individual brands and pin items from their websites.

Most recently, British Midland International (BMI) launched a “Pinterest Lottery.” The airline has posted a series of boards on its Pinterest page, featuring numbered and logo-clad photos from five destinations: Beirut, Dublin, Marrakech, Moscow and Nice. Users are asked to repin up to six images. At the end of each week, the company will choose a number at random; the users who had repinned the image with that number will be qualified for a chance to win a pair of free return flights to any BMI destination.

Read More: How Brands Are Using Promotions to Market on Pinterest

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

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?