When professionals strike out on their own, they seem to face their biggest challenges in the areas of sales and marketing. I know that sales has been a difficult area for me. The skills and attributes that make us good at technical and consulting work are not the...
Does this ever happen to you? I receive 3 or 4 e-mail “offers” a week that make me think “why in the world are you sending this to me?”. These messages are what I call semi-personalized (they use my name and maybe my business name) but I don’t know who they are. It’s...
Susan Gunelius’ Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps: Build the Buzz and Sell the Sizzle (Entrepreneur Magazine) is a practical, step-by-step guide to writing more effective advertising copy. The book begins by introducing the copywriting outline – a powerful tool...
One of the challenges facing small business owners who blog is coming up with things to write about. Here are 5 tips that I share with my customers to help them come up with ideas for their blog posts: Answer your customers' and prospects' Frequently Asked Questions...
I see a lot of marketing advice about how to "make my small business look big". Before you go about making your small business look big, ask yourself if that is what you really want. Or, more importantly, is that what your customers really want. I would bet that in...
Do you know about SCORE? SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives) volunteers serve as “Counselors to America's Small Business.” SCORE is a resource partner with the U.S. Small Business Administration. SCORE volunteers are real-world professionals with...
The Daily Drucker is one of my favorite books. It sits on my desk and I try to read it every day. Since I will be traveling at the end of this week, I was reading ahead today. The entry for September 4th is "Practices of Effective Executives". I feel these practices...
CRM and other business automation tools typically allow you to personalize the messages you send to your prospects and customers. This is usually done using some sort of field code and mail merge process. You create a template that looks something like this: Dear...
This post is mostly a reminder to myself but may benefit others as well. Not everyone wants to grow their business. Of course I know this intellectually, but, it is easy to assume that everyone does. These assumptions creep into our language and we may not even be...
LinkedIn is a popular tool for helping you build and interact with you business network. While LinkedIn is becoming ever more popular, there are still lots of questions about how small business owners can used LinkedIn to grow their business. I recently came across...