Successful Blog

The Proper Business of Text Messaging

by

young business people group have meeting and working in modern bYou’ve got all of the right social media tools to help your small business out, a Facebook page, Instagram feed, Pinterest boards and a Twitter handle. Now what?

What else is your marketing calling out for? Are you working on text messaging to your client base?

If not, this is something you should consider as it’s a huge market to reach clients and increase their loyalty and longevity.

Mobility is Key

Because so many people have mobile devices these days, and keep these devices with them at virtually all times, mobile marketing has become a great platform to reach customers.

You won’t want to miss out on this market, and with a text messaging service, it’s all the easier. It’s just a matter of choosing the right one to fit your needs.

As the article, “How to choose the right text messaging service for your business” looks at, keep these ideas in mind:

  • Do some research – Find out the different services that providers offer, and decide what options you are looking for. Do you want it all, or will you be happy with a basic text messaging service? Check out how fees are calculated while you are doing this, because your budget is something to consider when choosing options.
  • Look at client support – You don’t want to get stuck with text messages going out willy-nilly, or encounter other issues with no help or support. Read some reviews and find out how the different services manage a problem and how much support they offer. You’re paying for a service; you should be able to count on support.
  • Compatibility – Make sure the text messaging service is compatible with the mobile service providers in your area. You want to be able to reach the major providers and if you have some smaller ones in your client base, those, too.
  • Look for someone willing to work with you and your needs – You want to be able to trust your text messaging service, just like you want your customers to trust you. Not only do you want support if there’s a problem, but you should also be able to look to your service for advice on what’s best for you. At the very least, you don’t want them pushing something you don’t need.
  • Talk to colleagues and other small business owners – Whether in person or via social media, reach out to similar business and see who they are using and if they are happy. You know how important work of mouth is, tap into it.

Any new endeavor is exciting and a little nervy.

Check into some different text messaging services; see what they offer and how each fits your needs.

Soon your customers will look forward to that weekly text from you, and your business may increase before your very eyes.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Heather Legg is an independent writer covering topics related to small business, social media and working from home.

How to Stand Out as a Brand When You’re a Young Company

by

By Rachel Fowler

A Princeton survey reported at SmallBusiness showed that not less than 67% of Americans favor small business.

With this in mind, I decided to try my best in small business in America right after graduation. It has been a long journey with lots of painful mistakes. So to save you time, I decided to give you some of my personal tips on how to stand out as a brand.

Make it clear what your brand is. Merchandising, products and logo are very important but not as important as your brand. It is mostly about the experiences of your customers summed with visual elements and customers’ interactions. Take into account that your PR company, your internet publications, mentions and even your social media should be presented in the exact same tone to get your customers’ trust.

Stand out from the crowd of competitors. Unless you have designed a new source of power that can replace oil and gas, you have to be different in order to stand out from the crowd of competitors. Pinpoint your strong sides that make your brand unique. Don’t forget to include your differentiation in your marketing materials.

Make great products. No one will doubt that the key to being successful among small business companies is to have great products. If your product is lacking quality or service, no PR company will help you. Word of mouth is the best marketing tool and you should use it well. Getting your customers to recommend you to their friends is a big deal, which shouldn’t be underestimated. 

Ensure that your customers know the face behind the product. Most small businesses fail because of the repetitive absence of the owner. Take the “Kitchen Nightmares” television show as a simple example- no restaurant can stay open, if the business is being run by itself. You have to be everywhere and literally know everything that goes on in your company. Your employees will look up to you and if you are not engaged, neither will they be.

Make a recognizable name and logo. It is important to make an effective logo at the beginning. Changing logo and worse the name of the company can be quite costly down the road. It should be recognizable and reflect the nature of your product as much as possible. For example, if you have a dog company, your name should be closely associated and recognizable among your target audience. Take “Woofies” and “Doggone Natural” as examples. Both names reflect the nature of the product and are easily recognized by customers.

Make a value proposition. This shouldn’t be confused with a price. The value means to think what your customers need, instead of thinking what you want from them. Put yourself in their shoes, spend a day with your customer, and see what he/she likes, what are his/her hobbies, day routine, job, budget problems. Only after you understand the needs of your customer you will understand the value of your product.

What are your lessons learned starting out as a young brand/company?

This is a post by Rachel Fowler, a recent graduate from NYU. Right now she works as an independent contributor at http://pumpic.com/

Featured image via Flickr CC: kenda bustami

Beach Notes: Unchain My Logs

by

Our first thought that this was a Beach Sculpture, then we looked around and we saw people using tires as exercise equipment.
It was obviously part of a fitness program
It just goes to show you can make a business out of anything, even chains and pieces of wood.
The mind boggles.
logs tied up on the beach

 

Authors Bios: Suzie Cheel is the Heart Whisperer at Suzie Cheel You can find Suzie on Facebook and on Twitter as @suziecheel

Des Walsh is a Digital Disruption Navigator at Des Walsh Dot Com You can find Des at LinkedIn and on Twitter as @deswalsh

Managers Need to Formulate a Strategy

by

Chess SuccessBusy managers are like busy mothers.

They get it from the top (spouses, in-laws, and teachers) and they get it from the bottom (kids).

Just like time-strapped mothers, busy managers are ground zero for everybody’s problems, including supervisors, owners, employees and even customers.

Think about it. No irate customer ever says to a surly employee, “I want to speak to your colleague!”

Moms Have All the Answers

Well, moms may not have all the answers, but they have all the answers to a busy manager’s problems.

If busy managers want to stay focused and in control amid all their responsibilities, taking cues from busy moms is a good place to start.

Let Them Eat Cake

When the kids are inconsolable after a loss of a big game, moms know just what to do.

Whip out the cake mix. Nothing makes a kid smile faster than a waft of chocolate cake baking in the oven.

Beleaguered managers trying to placate dissatisfied customers so they can get on with their day need to adopt the same strategy.

Pull out the treats and lay on the icing. Everybody likes “free.”

Simply commiserating with the customer’s trouble and quickly opening up the candy jar (of free products, services, etc.) will oftentimes turn an unhappy customer into one willing to take the treat and run.

Given that every business deals with unhappy customers from time to time, the manager can head-off minor issues before they become major problems. In order to be in control of your business situation, check out the article “7 Tips for Busy Managers.”

Teach Them to Fish

Even busy moms secretly love to be needed.

The sweet sound of, “Honey, where’s my tie?” or “Mom, have you seen my hamster?” is enough to melt a mom’s heart.

But she’s also smart enough to give her needy family enough tools so she can hide in the tub with a juicy novel when necessary. Show me a mom with a new bottle of bath bubbles and I’ll show you a kid with a new hamster cage.

Busy managers need to empower their staff to make decisions independently when the manager is not around or can’t be disturbed.

Teaching decision-making skills to underlings not only frees up the manager’s time so they aren’t pestered by small nuisances, but it helps to bolster employees’ morale and sense of worth in the workplace.

(This sense of worth, by the way, has been scientifically proven to enhance employee engagement in the workplace.) This is not delegation.

This is empowerment on a deep and meaningful scale that can lead to higher productivity levels in the department for which the manager can take partial credit, along with their staff.

Give Away the Answers

Busy moms are masters of organization and communication. Busy moms receive a white board as part of their initiation into motherhood, which are hung where everywhere will see it, right next to the refrigerator.

The white board contains all the info the family needs.

What needs to be bought on the next grocery store trip, what time mom will be back home, when the baseball try-outs are, and how many days are left until Christmas.

Busy managers can give away the answers by keeping their bosses in on the loop. Instead of waiting for a request for a status report, email weekly updates to the boss.

Rather than being called in to a long meeting for a short 5-minute presentation, print out a 5-slide PowerPoint presentation with the information and ask the secretary to hand it out in your absence. Giving away the answers ahead of time saves busy managers from losing ground during a hectic work day.

It could be argued that moms invented the skill of managing.

It’s not a stretch to see how managers can benefit from the lessons of mom.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Kate Supino writes extensively about best business practices.

How to Minimize Blog Load Time and Increase Subscribers [WordPress]

by

By Jessy Troy

 

Your blog load speed is both a ranking and usability factor. The faster your readers can access your site, the more they will actually stay and become your subscribers.

While it’s possible for more advanced webmasters to go in and alter a number of areas for their WordPress blog, those who are less code savvy or who have more time restrictions may prefer to use a simple plugin instead.

There are three major WordPress plugins to increase site load-time: W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and Minify.

How Caching Speeds Up Your Site

W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache center around the “caching” concept. The standard way that WordPress pulls up your entry is by sending a mysql query to the database. While this won’t normally take long, large numbers of visitors can overwhelm your database server. By eliminating this unnecessary step, cache plugins will speed up the load-time on any site and make a truly dramatic impact on popular blogs.

W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache

Both of these WordPress plugins, which are designed to increase site load-time, have a long history and are used by a number of major sites. One of the big differences between the two is that, unlike many other caching plugins, the W3 Total Cache makes a cached copy of every detail of your site.

This includes your theme, images from your entries, widgets, and anything else that you may add to your site. The company behind W3 Total Cache has research showing that site performance improves 10 fold or more when compared with an unmodified WordPress blog that lacks any form of caching plugin. While not quite as thorough, the WP Super Cache has similar positive effects.

This caching functionality includes a setup that allows for full browser caching from your visitors. In layman’s terms, your visitors will only have to load the page once, since their browser will effectively be able to capture a cached version of the site for future visits.

Cutting down on all the queries to the WordPress database can also save on bandwidth. Bandwidth has been reduced by up to 80 percent for users of these plugins. If you’re using WordPress hosting, that can mean avoiding a slow down due to traffic spikes. If you are using your own hosting, this can mean saving bank.

Better WordPress Minify

Better WordPress Minify

Better WordPress Minify takes a very different approach to speeding up your site. Rather than caching the information that you already have, Minifty compresses all your Javascript and CSS files, getting rid of unnecessary code. Depending on how many CSS and Javascript elements you have, this may make either a minor or truly substantial difference.

Even if you choose to go the extra mile by doing everything else possible to speed up your site, having plugins like these is important for minimizing your load times. As the start to or final touch on your load-time optimization, using one of these WordPress plugins to increase site load-time is vital.

Never Forget the Basics

No matter which plugins you use, nothing will help if your hosting provider is awful in terms of delivering your content to the web user.

I don’t have too much experience with WordPress-friendly hosting solutions (I am definitely not a techie) but I know this one is pretty good and reliable too.

If you are not sure what slows your pages down, do use this tool: You can compare any page of your blog with another one that seems a bit faster!

Page speed

Is your WordPress blog fast enough? Please share your thoughts and tips!

 

Featured image via Flickr CC: William Warby

Author’s Bio: Jessy Troy is a creative writer and editor at Social Media Sun. She Tweets as @JessyTroy.

Keeping Your Core – How To Still Be You and Grow

by

Any type of growth is hard. It’s hard to grow and not lose who you are – physically, personally and in your business. No matter what, there’s always going to be something you leave behind.

When you were a child, you left behind your short stature and your nose-picking (did you leave that behind?) to grow taller and become an adult. But when you grew up, you kept part of you – maybe it was your mom’s nose or your humorous personality. Sure, you changed, but you were still you.

In your business, things are more fluid, you don’t have permanent fixtures that remain by default, like your mom’s nose does. It can be a much harder process to grow your business, leave the baby stuff behind, but keep your core intact.

So that’s what we’re diving into – how to grow and keep your core intact. It’s actually a simple process, but we tend to ignore it when we’re growing our businesses. It’s essential, though, if we want to keep our core intact.

How to still be you and grow:

  • Assess your core:
    • What are your businesses core strengths? Why do your customers keep coming back? What makes your business unique? What brings in the most revenue?
  • Find the superfluous and bottlenecks:
    • What could you leave behind and few would notice (i.e. processes, products, etc.)? What feels like it’s holding you back?
  • After you’ve done steps 1 & 2, make a plan to intentionally protect and pour into the core while you cut/fix the superfluous and bottlenecks. Then follow your plan and adjust as needed.

But what does this look like practically?

Say you run a bakery and your sales are growing so fast, it’s hard to keep up. The bakery’s tagline is “Fresh. Local. Handmade.” You bake everyday, multiple times a day so everything is fresh. You use only local ingredients and you deliver locally. You make every item by hand. Your best seller is your blueberry oatmeal bars. Customers are happy with the quality, which you attribute to the items being fresh. Your customers love that you use only local ingredients and that you have local delivery. You’ve gotten good WOM advertising because of your local delivery. This is your core. Some things haven’t been working great – a gluten free line hasn’t been selling, expanding delivery to further counties hasn’t been promising and your inventory system can’t keep up. You’ve also spent money on advertising space in a local publication that hasn’t yielded a solid return. These are your superfluous and bottleneck items and.

From this assessment, you should be able to create a logical plan that helps you keep your core intact as you grow. This means you should continue to focus on fresh and local and protect and grow those strengths. However, no one seems to notice or care that items are handmade. You’ve been looking into a machine that can make your oatmeal bars in less time, for less labor, which would help you meet market needs. Since you’ve assessed your core and know what you need to protect, you can more clearly make that decisions.

When businesses grow, they move toward chaos. It takes intentional persistence to ensure your business’s core stays intact while it grows. If you commit to protect your business’s core as it grows, you’ll likely find that you still have the essential parts intact, just like you still had your mom’s nose after you went through puberty.

 

Image info: Original image by John French.

About the Author: Lindsey Tolino comes alongside artisans, craftsman and people monetizing their passions to help them create healthy businesses. She shares her heart at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino or connect with her on Google+.