Small Business Brief / Current News

7 Ways to Turn Miss(ter) Modesty into a World-Class Freelancer

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:13:14 PDT

Self-confidence and business: Jaden teaches us what we can learn from the freelancer's approach. "Expressing inadequacy or uncertainty can cost you precious time and money. Clients just want their job done. All they want to know is that you can do it. And you can! We all have different levels of self-confidence and this changes throughout our lives. With age and experience, people tend to gain more confidence. Here are seven tips to help you excel now."

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Want Subscribers to Confirm? Get Creative!

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:03:00 PDT

Someone signing up for your email list is only the first step. Are you enticing them to confirm, or are you losing them before they even make it onto your list? Learn how to get more subscribers to confirm.

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Not Getting a Rise out of your Elevator Speech?

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:03:00 PDT

Will Kenny talks about the reality of the "elevator speech." Read a few books and websites with marketing advice and you'll soon encounter a discussion of the "elevator speech," the compact little monologue you're supposed to have prepared to deliver at a moment's notice at networking opportunities and chance encounters.

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10 Ways to Use LinkedIn That You Never Thought Of

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:35:15 PDT

LinkedIn is a great resource for any professional, especially those in business. This post provides some new and interesting ways to use LinkedIn as more than just a simple profile social site.

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Hiring Part I: Conducting Background Checks

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 07:47:25 PDT

When it comes to background checks, employers should be aware of the reasons for performing a background check, what basic information to request, and what legal boundaries exist to protect an employee's privacy. NFIB discusses this topic.

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Increase Traffic To Your Blog By Caring For Your Visitors

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:26:34 PDT

If you want more traffic to your blog, all you have to do is give back to your visitors.

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The Art of Shameless Self Promotion

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:59:57 PDT

Self-promotion does not have to be obnoxious. Discover the secrets to subtly and effectively blowing your own horn.

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What's The Point Of Getting 10,000 New Visitors To Your Website When Your Conversion Rate Sucks!

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:54:44 PDT

We are so pleased when we see numbers like 5,000, 10,000 visitors per month to our websites, and for others even more. But the real question is how many of those visitors are turning into customers?

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Online Accounting: State of the Market

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:54:01 PDT

Accounting software for small business and personal use is increasingly moving from the desktop to online. However, compared to other office software, this transition to online has been relatively slow.

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30+ Plugins to Make Your WordPress Blog More Social

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:52:52 PDT

WordPress blogs are getting increasingly social, giving readers the ability to bookmark your site to a number of services, get to know you better in more ways than just your comments section (and vice versa), and view your activity on a variety of social sites. We've compiled a list of more than 30 plugins that will let you make your WordPress blog more social.

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timeXchange Taps into Your Social Graph to Manage Your Relationships

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:52:52 PDT

Would you use a time-tracking application to help you determine and manage your "real" social network? timeXchange hopes so, with some of its latest updates. Instead of becoming stagnant as a tool that merely tracks time for employees, contractors or the self-employed, timeXchange is going the social route, hoping to use its service as a way to provide more immediate value as a relationship-management tool that focuses on working relationships.

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Control Your Cash Flow

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:28:14 PDT

With a credit crunch and many banks tightening up or eliminating lines of credit, it's important for business owners to maintain a steady cash flow. Here are five ways experts say you can start the process.

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Verisign’s Personal Identity Portal Is Half Way To Password Bliss

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:16:55 PDT

Verisign's new Personal Identity Portal isn't the sexiest application out there to help you manage passwords. But it has Verisign's strong reputation for security behind it, and it is a surprisingly easy way to manage website credentials.

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How a Business Could Use Friendfeed For Collaboration

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:16:55 PDT

I was squinting at Friendfeed today, and I realized that it could really work nicely as a business collaboration tool in a few different ways. Between all the various aggregation points, and the "rooms" function, I think the platform has everyone one would need to cook up a collaboration environment.

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A Small Empire Built on Cuddly and Fuzzy

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:46:24 PDT

Meg Frost, a 36-year-old design manager at Apple, started cuteoverload.com three years ago to test Web software. Within months, it became an online institution, drawing about 88,000 unique visitors a day - about the same as the political gossip blog Wonkette.

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NFIB Sends Healthcare Message to Congress Through "The Faces of the Healthcare Crisis" Booklet

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:46:24 PDT

NFIB began promoting "The Faces of the Healthcare Crisis: Small Business in America," a collection of stories that profiles small business owners on the frontlines of the healthcare crisis, to Congress before recess. NFIB is taking these stories to Congress and the next Administration to ensure the needs of this important constituency are fully considered in any proposed healthcare reform legislation.

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50 Easy ways to Improve Your Twitter Experience

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:10:50 PDT

Are you making the most of Twitter? Learn about the tips and tools you can use to make Twitter work for you. Tweet smarter!

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Advertising For Professional Service Firms

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:10:50 PDT

Many experts are encouraging professional service firms to abandon traditional advertising in favor of on-line, pay per click advertising. Changing the advertising vehicle isn't enough to solve the problem - professional service firms need to address the underlying strategic problems first.

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How Much Is Your Website Or Blog Really Worth? Your Numbers May Surprise You.

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:13:02 PDT

According to cubestat.com, Twitter ‘s net worth is around 2.5 million dollars and can command $3500 per day in Ad revenues. That might be small potatoes for some design companies but could be a great supplemental income for your design business... that brings me to my next point.

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Konnects Official Launch: Filling the LinkedIn-Facebook Gap

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:48:40 PDT

Konnects is a social network entering the crowded realm of business social networking, seeking out those users that are caught in limbo between the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook. Konnects isn't as restrictive as LinkedIn, and more business-oriented than Facebook.

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Search Engine Optimization Tip #14: Fix Duplicate Content

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:36:29 PDT

For this seo tip, let us talk about fixing duplicate content on your web site. Google does not like duplicate content, and it can hurt your rankings.

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How Small Businesses Can Survive The Storm

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:56:38 PDT

Four-dollar gasoline can put anyone in a foul mood. Heap a ton of cranky customers on top of already skinny margins and you have a recipe for pain among the tens of thousands of gas stations in the U.S. That's precisely why, when it comes to weathering the latest economic storm, retailers of all stripes ought to pay attention to what their petrol-pumping brethren are up to.

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5 Ways To Succeed On StumbleUpon

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:36:09 PDT

Here are 5 etiquette tips from the Online Marketer Blog to help you succeed on Stumbleupon.

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I'll Take Links And 11 Gold Medals Please

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:35:24 PDT

A lot of successful "linkbait" is launched on the heels of breaking news or changes. We can't anticipate the future but we can plan around upcoming events, holidays, elections etc and write for them NOW. That way when the time comes you're ready and there before the competition.

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How I Turned My Mediocre Website Into A Million-Dollar Business

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:39:17 PDT

You do not have to have the lowest price to make sales. Erica Douglass explains how she went against conventional wisdom to create a million dollar business ($1.1 million, in fact).

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12 Tools I use for Blogging (and for business)

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 04:03:14 PDT

These are tools (both free and low-cost) that all business bloggers should have.

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4 Simple Guidelines to Becoming More Social While Maintaining Your Success

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:38:13 PDT

John Kuck writes, "Most of us have heard the cliché about the single freelancer who works around the clock from their home, devoid of any social life and consequently a sense of real purpose and meaning. The nature of freelancing lends itself to late nights and long hours, and we tend to shut out the world around us. We focus all of our energy on clients and deadlines, but we lose focus on one of the essential pieces in the pie of life: social interaction."

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How to Find your Passion (& What You Should be Blogging About)

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:48:26 PDT

A good blog on what you should be blogging about.

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Two Things You Should Never Tell Clients

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:31:18 PDT

Honesty with clients is important, but there are two pieces of information you should never reveal, no matter how many times they ask, or how many ways they ask.

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Small Biz Tips For Negotiating With "Big Players"

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:29:33 PDT

Informative discussion on tips for small business owners when it comes to negotiating with the "big boy" players. Many of their tactics are revealed as well as ways to successfully negotiate and respond to them.

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An End To Ranking Reports Is An End to Analysis

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:52:24 PDT

Some folks say ranking reports are useless, and they are rather vocal about their reasons for thinking so. Some SEO firms still offer ranking reports, and they've got their reasons for doing so, as well. Who's right? Stoney explores the issues.

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Exclusive Interview with Google's Peter Greenberger, Team Manager of Elections and Issue Advocacy

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:30:05 PDT

Semgeek is proud to present an Exclusive Interview with Google's Top Political Online Marketing Evangelist, Peter D. Greenberger, who's been at the forefront of Google's Online Advertising for the 2008 Presidential and Congressional Races....

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How to Sell Against the Tide

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:30:05 PDT

Every industry is subject to its own conventional wisdom. Try to identify the conventions in your industry and consider what might happen if you turned a handful of them upside down. You'll probably come up with a lot of ideas that would never fly. But you may discover one or two that are so crazy, they just might work.

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The Seeds of Success

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:30:05 PDT

Business is blooming for 1-800Flowers.com, but it wasn't always that way for founder Jim McCann. When you're a small-business owner yearning to be big, it's easy to get discouraged -- especially if you compare yourself to the bigger companies that are already successful. But it's useful -- for your morale, your sanity and your strategizing--to remember that most big businesses were once small, too.

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Marketer of the week: Jennifer Laycock unleashed

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:21:27 PDT

Meet Jennifer Laycock, a successful and eclectic online marketer with a huge following. Just read her interview answers to see she's not afraid of trying new ideas and taking on the establishment.

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Study: Online Ads Get Performance Boost from Branded Content Sites

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:21:27 PDT

The study, titled "Improving Ad Performance Online: The Impact of Advertising on Branded Content Sites," found that marketers who advertised on branded content sites experienced much higher brand favorability and intent to purchase scores than those who advertised on portals and other kinds of Web sites, as well as through ad networks. The study used Dynamic Logic's MarketNorms database to gauge the impact of advertising across a variety of different Web environments.

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The Squash Blossom Solution

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:27:34 PDT

By pioneering a high-end niche in agriculture, the Joneses discovered a way to escape from the commodity-based farming that had bankrupted them.

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What Every Business Owner Needs to Know About Web 2.0

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:25:02 PDT

People are communicating via the web. You already knew that, but did you know that some of them are talking about your business? Do you know what they're saying and where they're saying it? With millions of blogs, there are tens of millions of places for people to talk about your business... here's what you MUST know about Web 2.0

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8 Tips for Creative Solopreneurs

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 07:14:15 PDT

Ilise Benun lays out eight tips for individuals trying to make a living on their own. Topics range from how to choose your niche market and clients to knowing your worth and dealing with the money side of things.

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Merging Business and Marriage = Multiplied Challenges

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:23:44 PDT

Have you ever thought of starting your small/home business with your spouse?? If you have done so or have such plans, then let me caution you… Get ready to face number of challenges and risks.

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