Fresh Business Info – Thursday, March 7, 2013

by admin on March 7, 2013

4 Keys To Successful Social Media Marketing in 2013

Like everything technology related, social media marketing has evolved over the past few years.

Think Before Adopting the Latest Marketing Fad

Before you buy into a new, shiny marketing tool or technique, first make sure it’s right for your company. Often your existing ideas, product lines, and channels have more value than you think.

4 Skills Every Well Rounded Internet Entrepreneur Should Have

One of the questions my readers often ask me is which theme I use for my online store.

Changing the Social Channel

I’ve been asked to speak at three different social media related events over the next few months and in each case I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the future of social media.

Feeling Lost In LinkedIn? 5 Elements of An Optimized LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn has quickly achieved top status as “the” business to business social networking destination.

Chevy Proves Long Form Content Marketing On A Mobile Device Can Work

When it comes to content marketing the prevailing thought among marketers is that the longer the content the less likely it will be used on a mobile device.

Mind Shifts for 21st Century Leadership

In my last post we chatted about the limitations of yesterday’s leadership approaches. Now, let’s chat about how we can shift our leadership styles.

Social Network Advertising: Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn? Let’s Compare

If you want to spread your presence around via social networking, you’re probably wondering what’s worth it and what you should throw in the bin

6 Steps to Win More Retainer-Based Business

If your agency offers digital marketing services like SEO, social media, email marketing, PPC, chances are you’re in high demand. AdAge reports that digital is the fastest growing business area for agencies of all types.

5 tips for startup founders from startup founders

Building a new tech company from the ground up is incredibly hard. Here are some tips from founders and co-founders who have already scaled that mountain that might help ease the journey for others..

Working Too Much or Too Little? 3 Tips for Finding Balance

The independence of the entrepreneur isn’t a myth. As a young founder, you’ll find that there’s no such thing as a nine-to-five routine, and the freedom that comes with that flexibility may wind up as invaluable.

Personal Finance Round-Up: Understand Your Financial Decision-Making Process

If you regularly read articles about investing and have a strong understanding of how the stock market works, then you likely feel that you can make sophisticated, proper choices when it comes to your portfolio

Investment Banking or Entrepreneurship

Have you ever been faced with a decision that you feel will impact the rest of your life? How about when that decision is between two alternatives that both have balancing pros and cons, opportunities for success and personal growth, and are equally appealing in terms of your desire to pursue them.

7 Sales Steps to Making Your Buyer’s Decision Simple

One glance at your inbox and you’ll understand how today’s buyer has more on their plate than ever before. They can hardly bear to add more complexity to their world, especially the challenges that come along with buying and implementing your new offering.

Why Too Many Choices Will Hurt Your Small Business

There are a lot of choices for consumers. In fact, the 16,000 Starbucks’ locations in this country serve over 20,000 choices of what to drink. This is why the line moves so slowly!

12 Creative Ways to Get Customers to Open Their Wallets

Young Entrepreneur Council an invite-only organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/12-creative-ways-to-get-customers-to-open-their-wallets-2013-2

Beginner Steps to Effective Business Networking

I started by converting the good ole’ paper forms to digitized databases for insurance agents. For an added fee, I also downloaded the data to a Palm V with automatic syncing.

Maintaining Your Startup’s Focus

In many cases, a new venture falters for obvious reasons–not enough capital; before its time; founder fatigue … the list goes on.

Customer Service: Be a Buoy

Customers are trying to survive and thrive. They reach out to us especially when they are in trouble. They don’t want help. They want to float to greatness. Will you be their buoy?

Powerful ways good design propels business

“It is a mistake to confuse design with merely good looks and decoration. Good design is borne from the core of a business’s expression of mission and all of its various communications needs — from how it talks about its products and services, to how it interacts with its customers, to the experiences it provides when people visit its websites, conferences, stores or offices.”

Don’t Make Customers Pay For Your Digital Marketing Mistakes

One of the biggest reasons people get into trouble marketing their small business online is the common perception that our digital communications are free.

Amplify New Business with Fresh Email Marketing

Effective email marketing campaigns call for the creation of segmented email lists based on the content that prospects view and download on your website, the information they provide via your calls to action (CTAs) and the comments they make about your content. Email marketing allows you to bring a personal touch to your brand.

The Master List of the Collaborative Economy: Rent and Trade Everything

My next Open Research report (see my body of research) will be on the Rise of the Collaboration Economy.

Expert Advice for New Entrepreneurs

Starting something new (especially a business!) can be overwhelming, intimidating and downright scary. And since I have already written extensively about this topic, I decided to reach out to the CarolRoth.com contributor network of business owners, experts, advisors and entrepreneurs to find out their best advice for new entrepreneurs.

I Finally Found Success Promoting Web Hosting as an Affiliate

I’ve tried promoting more web hosting companies than I can remember at this point, and I largely had disappointing returns.

22 Young Women Entrepreneurs and Their Companies to Watch

Rent the Runway is a membership-based website that rents high-end designer apparel and accessories on a 4- or 8-day basis.

AlleyWatch Official Event – March 12th – Accelerators and How They Can Benefit Your Company

We all know that the Series A crunch has made the landscape tougher for attracting financing. Securing investment in the seed and early stages is critical, but whom you secure it from matters, too.

How do you become the fastest growing eCommerce site in the history of the internet? [VIDEO]

Every year they aim to re-invent, re-create, re-imagine what the company is doing. This has resulted in some phenomenal growth.

Actifio Raises Additional $50 Million to Advance Leadership in $44 Billion Copy Data Storage Market

Actifio™, the radically simple copy data storage company, today announced it has closed a $50 million investment round led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, ATV, Greylock Israel, and North Bridge Venture Partners, targeted towards further accelerating Actifio’s record bookings growth. With this new investment, the company will focus on accelerating long-term sustainable growth, investing in their global go-to-market model to address the $44B copy data storage market* opportunity and reshape how data is managed by the enterprise.

10 Essential Marketing Skills Every Person Should Know

Marketing is the foundation of any brand. Without a good marketing campaign you’ll never be able to achieve your goals and visions for your project. Whether you are a one-person army or have a team of workers aiding you, these 10 essential marketing skills are ones you need to familiarize yourself with.

Successful Project Management: Lessons Learned From Richard Branson

Prolific entrepreneur Richard Branson is known as a daredevil, both in business and extreme sports. He’s not afraid to dive into new business ventures. His name is synonymous with risk-taking. So if there’s one person in this world that can teach us how to manage projects, then that would be Virgin’s adventure-driven owner.

How to Motivate and Inspire Your Team

As a manager you have to juggle many responsibilities. You are the safety net, the leader, the one who makes sure everything runs smoothly. You are who answers to your employers when those under you make mistakes. You are the one who decides how to run your particular branch or team. All of these are the hats you wear, and it can be exhausting.

The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets

Many in our entrepreneur community still believe that to be visionary, we must merely execute on a seemingly good idea and ignore all doubt.

Small Businesses Continue to Air — and Vent — Obamacare Opinions

The winter storm hitting the Washington area today prompted the House Small Business Committee to postpone a hearing on health-care reform, but the panel this week continued to post sometimes heated comments from entrepreneurs on the changes employers may be facing under the law.

The World’s Youngest Billionaires: 29 Under 40

There are 1,426 billionaires in the world this year. They are the wealthiest of the wealthy

Jill Zarin: From The Real Housewives to a Successful Entrepreneur

I recently spoke with Jill Zarin, who was previously on The Real Housewives of New York City. She appears regularly on a variety of national talk shows to address topics as diverse as politics, style and advice.

9 Tips on Running a Successful Kickstarter Campaign from 3 Women Who Have Done It

I love small business stories. I find the purpose, the passion, and the suspense intoxicating. It’s no wonder then that the site Kickstarter has become a (not so) guilty pleasure for me.

The Economy of Punishment

We love hearing historical stories about Robin Hood-like men, about bank robbers, pirates and outlaws on the run. Criminals form part of our collective imagination and are part of our origin story.

How to Make Space for Social Media

Few professionals were sitting at their desks in 2004, eyeing the empty slots in their calendars and wishing that somebody would just invent a new way of communicating to fill those long and lonely minutes. People’s calendars were already full.

6 Ways Obama’s Affordable Care Act is Good for Your Business

I’m sure you’re watching closely as the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) is being rolled out. It’s critical to you if you provide health care to your employees; health care is a cost that always goes up and can hurt your bottom line.

Top 5 Ways to Sell Technology in 2013

With budgets still tight, companies are reluctant to adopt new technology without a compelling reason. Sales guru Tom Searcy shares five approaches that will help you make the sale.

Google’s 10 Best Mobile Apps

Ten apps you should be using–or, at the very least, learning from.

5 Questions Startups Must Ask To Better Understand Your Target Market

Understanding your target market is the heart of a smart startup strategy. Your target customers’ needs will define everything from your branding to your product development process

5 Ways Startups Are Using Vine

Startups and small businesses are already experimenting with the new mobile service, creating and sharing 6-second videos with their social media fans and growing Vine followers.

Does Your Business Need Cyberinsurance

The Ponemon Institute has estimated that it can cost as much as $200 for each “compromised record.” What can this mean when it happens to a small business that has limited resources to recover from such a mess?

Entrepreneurs Launch CROWD IT, a Crowdfunding Site For Small Business

CrowdIt (www.crowdit.com), the crowdfunding site for the “New American Dream,” is launching an entirely new approach to crowdfunding with a clear mission – to extend beyond just funding by incorporating much-needed expert advice, peer review, collaboration and business networking into the core functionality of the site.

Wefollow Re-Joins the Social Media Influence Fray

The site started out by tying influence directly to follower counts, a measuring stick that soon became meaningless as millions of users gamed Twitter to gain fake or quid-pro-quo followers rather than real audiences.

Six Reasons Your Startup WONT Raise Capital

Here are Six Reasons your startup will never raise capital

5 reasons why the new Twitter Ads API is great for social media marketers

Twitter’s recent announcement of an Ads API hardly comes as a surprise. The rumour mills have been predicting this for nearly two years now, and with Facebook and LinkedIn already having made similar moves, it was merely a question of just when this was going to happen.

3 Considerations for Creating a Sales Training Curriculum

Planning your sales training curriculum for 2013? At this time of year most sales training managers are into planning for the year ahead

[Infographic] 2013 Is The Year Skilled Workers Are In Demand Again

According to an annual survey conducted by compensation data and software provider PayScale, Inc. of employers on their compensation best practices, uncovered rare optimism about the economy and increasing business confidence.

Selling – An Analysis of Information Deprivation

CSO Insights published an interesting research report – Leveraging Sales Intelligence to Advance Relationships. One particularly telling finding was – 17% of the companies in the study had sales force information systems with advanced applications like web crawling techniques and trigger event capabilities that provided their sales team with in-depth information about their customers.

Customer Communities, the Queen of Content Marketing

Especially for small businesses, this is one of the biggest challenges of inbound marketing—how do you create great content on top of everything else you have going on, like oh say, creating a top-notch product and running a business

North American Customers Transforming Customer Service

As the head of NA Sales Operations for Genesys I am lucky to be in a unique position to talk daily with some incredibly smart customer service people in various industries who are leading the way in transforming customer service. For my first blog I wanted to provide a few snippets from customers I have spoken with in the last couple weeks.

Small Business Advice: Risks of Responding (Or Not Responding) to RFPs

Regardless of whether or not you respond, and whether you target price buyers, value buyers, or relationship buyers, reviewing RFPs provides insight to an organization’s current or anticipated issues and what it needs to meet its business objectives.

How B2B Companies Are Utilizing Instagram For Social Media Marketing

In today’s digital world, more and more businesses are using images with short messages on social media platforms like Facebook,

How to Use Video to Market Your Small Business

If you’ve thought about producing a video for your small business, but you’re not sure where to start, here are some tips on the basics to point you in the right direction.

Using Google Analytics to Measure Social Media Conversions

Instead of haphazardly throwing posts and engagement out into the digital sphere, a social media marketing strategy is needed. In fact, a recent Social Media Benchmark Study found a correlation between a company’s social communications and a consumer’s likelihood to purchase and overall perception of the company.

Enabling Customer-Centric Businesses: Real-time Customer Analytics With SAP HANA

Analytics are important to the way we do business. They help us learn more about everything from who our customers are to how effectively we are doing business with them. The more efficiently we can analyze the data, the better able we are to understand and serve our customers.

Creating Proposals That Sell

It used to be a dream contemplating the possibility of someone contacting you for a proposal versus having to go through all of the traditional steps to finally get to that point in time of presenting. Today that dream is reality, yet it sadly lacks perfection. However, merging the best of the traditional sales world with today’s online networking requests will produce excellent outcomes.

10 Tips for Better Event Marketing

According to a recent Event Marketing Institute study, more than 80% of respondents agreed that event marketing is important to their organizations – and more than 40% consider it critical.

Responsive Web Design Solves Marketing’s Growing Multi-Screen Problem

According to Google, nearly 75% of users prefer a mobile-friendly site. Further, 50% of people said that even if they like a business, they’ll use that business less often if its website is not mobile-friendly. Consumers have high expectations for companies to provide a great website experience on every device, and are increasingly less patient with websites that are not mobile friendly

Should You Eliminate Teleworking to Increase Sales?

In case you haven’t heard yet – Best Buy appears to be following Yahoo!’s lead on teleworking.

For Success: Take The Emotions Out of Decision Making

Every major sport has a trade market. It’s one of the main ways that teams try and make moves to either win now, or build for the future. As an avid Celtics fan, I have watched my team make good and bad moves over the years.

The Opportunities of Data Driven Marketing

Senior marketers increasingly understand that success is achieved when content, distribution and insight work together to drive marketing and demand generation efforts. “Integrating multichannel campaign execution, content management, and analytics into a single platform is crucial,” says Anoop Sahgal, a senior marketer at Adobe.

Using Reference Groups in Marketing

Identifying and using reference groups in marketing are important because reference groups influence the attitudes, goals, aspirations, opinions, and information that determine customer standards and expectations regarding your business and your products or services.

Jane Austen’s Guide to Brand Management

Brand management might seem like a relatively new concept in our Internet-driven world, but one only has to look to classic fiction to realize that this concept has been pervasive for centuries.

Focusing Content Marketing Efforts to Better Educate Adult Consumers

At Kuno, and in digital marketing in general these days, we often talk about mapping our content marketing efforts to coincide with our sales funnel and developing educational top-of-the-funnel content.

The Art of Guerrilla Marketing to Boost Your Business

Guerrilla marketing is one of ways to create a huge buzz around your business. Essentially, the aim of guerrilla marketing is to trigger the viewer in a shocking or sudden way.

4 Simple Steps to Turn Web Traffic Into Customers

One of the main goals for launching a website is conversion. Conversion is getting people to act and take action in a manner you want. Newsletter signups, filling out a contact form, clicking on links and ultimately purchasing your products or services are all conversion points.

How to Construct Today’s Winning Marketing Department

Marketing has been around a long time – and so has the marketing department. Much of the organizational chart for marketing was built to accommodate the deployment of outbound or interruption-based marketing. Early adopters of inbound marketing are finding that the traditional marketing organizational charts impede the efficient deployment of inbound campaigns

5 Content Marketing Guidelines for Catching the Big Fish

When content marketing, it is important to follow a few simple guidelines to ensure that no matter how many blog posts your writers are able to pump out per week, it’s always worth coming back for more

Tell the Story of Your Brand with Content Marketing

In today’s globally connected world, it’s more important than ever for companies to build their brand identity. While in the past, a brand could present a solid identity via television and print advertisements, today brands are dynamic and ever-changing.

Why Near-Term Prospects in the Stock Market May Be Limited

The investment climate is at a crossroads. While the market bias is slightly positive, there’s still a sense we could be headed for a market correction.

Affiliate Marketing for B2B: Grow Your Business with a Virtual Salesforce

Are you wondering if you can leverage the potential of affiliate marketing in your niche? Internet marketing brings you infinite possibilities in terms of expanding your business.

The Best Lead Verification Methods

It’s no secret that low lead quality is the main challenge that many marketers struggle with. Due to complex interconnections and distribution models, lead quality has been steadily decreasing over the last couple of years

How to Become the Preferred Vendor

There is nothing magical about the answer but there are a number of steps to adhere to so that your clientele knows you have their best interests in mind. The principal is key to building business but unfortunately most often these steps are ignored.

Is Your Business Lacking the Power of Merchant Accounts?

You can have everything you want in an instant. Are you lethargic minutes before that big presentation you have been preparing for these past few months? There are coffee shops to choose from at every block in your neighborhood.

6 Questions Content Marketers Should Ask Before Hiring a Journalist

In a blog posted in January, Content Marketing Institute Founder Joe Pulizzi spoke of the rise of once-traditional journalists working on the brand side as one of three critical content marketing trends that signal big industry changes ahead.

How do You Sell Marketing Automation to Internal Stakeholders?

You have decided to purchase marketing automation software and now you need to present your business case to internal stakeholders. Who do you need buy-in from and what is the language that each of your executives want to hear?

5 Quick & Easy Small Business Startup Ideas

Starting a small business online is now quicker and easier than ever, but you still need a good idea that’s going to allow you to make money fast.

Small business funding: Three sources of working capital for your small enterprise

If your business needs an injection of cash to tide you over from one order to the next, then it’s worth approaching a specialist lender. In the latest extract from our free ebook 50 Ways to Find Funding for Your Business, Enterprise Nation founder Emma Jones identifies three good sources of working capital for start-ups and growing businesses.

What Can Marketers Do To Manage And Leverage Big Data

Information. Big Data. The amount of – and access to – business transforming information is changing what it means to be a marketer.

The crucial art of finding business partners

I’ve written about this matter extensively in this blog – I can’t over-emphasize how important finding the right partner is. In fact, I think I can say that for my case, this factor has been THE biggest factor determining a startup’s success or failure.