How Can You Stay Fit While Traveling for Business

January 15, 2014

How can you stay fit while travelling for business
For business owners work life balance is of paramount importance. With the amount of work they have it is easy for small business owners to ignore their own fitness. After all, who can afford to spend time on workout when you can sign one more customer account. This could be dangerous not only to your health, but also to your business’ financial health.

Imagine this scenario. You are going away on business. You’ve got all the clothes you need. You are bringing your tablet. You’ve got all your business papers in order. You are just missing one thing: your fitness plan. Just because you’ll be away on business doesn’t mean you can’t still work out. Most resorts and even smaller hotels have workout or fitness rooms these days. Here’s how to stay in shape, regardless of whether you’re flying half-way around the country or just taking a short trip out of town.

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Filed Under: Operations Tagged With: ,

Does Your Small Business Accept Customer Payments via Phone or Mail?

January 15, 2014

Customer Payment
While an increasing number of customers prefer to pay via credit or debit card online these days, a large number of consumers still prefer to pay over the phone or via snail mail. Furthermore, not all customers are comfortable with providing credit card information with these types of payments and would prefer to write a check instead. For this reason, business owners who want to make it as easy as possible for customers to make their preferred forms of payment should have a merchant account that offers not only electronic credit card payment processing, but phone and mail payment processing as well.

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Filed Under: Operations Tagged With:

7 Fantastic Tips for Building Great Brand for Small Business

January 13, 2014

7 tips for creating great brand for small business
Building a brand for your business can create long-term competitive advantage and add thousands of dollars of additional business. Branding your business is all about giving the audience something to remember you by. All the greats (names like Apple, Samsung, Coca Cola and Nike) know that you have to become a part of consumer culture if you want to be a household name. It is equal parts knowing your audience, as in the case of Old Spice, where the target audience was receptive to over the top masculinity, and knowing your product. In today’s landscape, you have to be proactive if you want to develop a brand that will resonate with consumers. We describe below 7 fantastic tips you can use to build and sustain great brand for your business.

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Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Where is My Package? How Online Retailers Can Plan for Busy Season

January 10, 2014

How online retailers can plan for busy season
As an online business owner, you must know when to expect a major increase in the number of orders you’ll receive. After all, it’s no mystery why some major retailers increase their workforces by tens of thousands of people during the holiday season.

There are plenty of other times outside the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas when your business could see a spike in orders, and if you are not prepared to manage them, you could end up with dozens of unhappy customers, and less-than-stellar online reputation that will undoubtedly turn those high volume order periods into non-existent order periods.

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Filed Under: Operations, Technology Tagged With: ,

4 Must-Haves for Freelancer or At-Home Small Business Owner

January 8, 2014

4 Must-Haves for the Freelancer or the At-Home Small Business Owner
When you own your own business or work as a freelancer from home, you don’t have to answer to anyone but your clients to reach your goals. At the same time you don’t have higher-ups providing you with all the tools you need to make your work day go smoothly. Whether you’re just starting out as a small business owner or freelancer or you’ve been at it for a while and think there must be more efficient ways to run things, invest in these must-haves.

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Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: ,

Small Business Owners: Are you using E-Commerce to Grow Sales?

January 3, 2014

Shopping Cart
E-Commerce sales continue to grow at rapid pace. Online retailers such as Amazon and eBay have been growing at double digit rate for the last several years and are expected to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Traditional brick and mortar retailers have recognized this trend and have started to take aggressive actions to increase their online presence. Every single retailer is focusing on integrating traditional and online shopping with the ability to order for online items right from the store and return items purchased online to the store.

Small business owners can benefit equally well by including ecommerce channel with their traditional operations. As I will explain below, when you consider what is required to set up the ecommerce operation and the resources available to do so, it becomes a no brainer to set up an online store. You can improve sales by tapping into this additional channel to get customers who otherwise would not visit your traditional store.

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Filed Under: Sellers, Technology Tagged With: ,

How to Bring out the Best in Your Employees

January 2, 2014

How to bring out the best in your employees
No business owner or leader wants to hire mediocre employees. They all want the best employees to work for them – those who will provide best customer service, develop the best products, and in doing so help the business grow. The reality is it doesn’t quite work out this way. It starts with hiring a really good employee, who is eager to learn new things and contribute to the business. After some time, however, this passion starts to fizzle out and the employee gets stuck in the rut of doing everyday chores. The end result is the business owner doesn’t get what he had hoped when he hired the employee.

So, what motivates employees to continue giving their best to their employers? What can business owners do to bring out the best in their employees so it creates a win-win for both employees and employers? Here are some tips.

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Benefits of Outsourcing IT Support for Small Business

December 21, 2013

Benefits of Outsourcing IT Support for Small Business
Yesterday I went to a store to buy an electronic toy that cost about $100. When I went to the checkout the clerk told me their computer systems were down. Either I would have to wait for up to 30 minutes for them to fix it or come back later. What? Who has time to wait for 30 min or go back again in this busy Christmas season? Needless to say he lost my sales along with the sales from many other customers like me. Such is the important of having reliable computer system in your business. When it works well it can help businesses tremendously, but when it goes down it can result in lost sales, unhappy customers and lost productivity.

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Filed Under: Technology Tagged With:

Why your Business Needs to have a Website

December 20, 2013

Why your business mush have a website
As a small business owner if you have not yet created a website then you have been leaving in cave for some time or just don’t care about improving your business and sales. The internet revolution of the last decade has enabled all kinds of businesses to develop web presence. It is becoming easier to create and operate websites to the point where even 10 year old can do it within hours. It used to cost thousands of dollars several years ago to create a presence on the web. That is not the case anymore. You can setup and operate a website for as little as hundred dollars now. So why do you need to have a website?

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Filed Under: Technology Tagged With:

Flash Marketing – The Power of One Day Events

December 20, 2013

Flash marketing
Few marketing events provide as much return on investment as flash event where you select a theme and arrange entertaining and engaging program to match the theme housed within an elegant venue. You can find examples of this type of events during new product launches or major corporate announcements. The surprise factor resulting from the event theme can generate lot of buzz and media coverage. The more out of ordinary and intriguing the event the better media coverage and higher return on your investment you will receive.

The key to success for this type of events is to plan in advance and create a theme that highlights the message you are trying to deliver. In addition, you need to have a surprise for the participants and media so that when they finally come across it their mouths are wide open and can’t stop posting the pictures on social media and they keep telling their friends about it long after the event is over. So, how can you plan and execute such an event? Read on to find the tips.

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Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: ,