POST CATEGORY : Marketing

StartupNation’s 2008 Home-Based 100 Competition Is Underway

istock_000002517308xsmall1.jpgStartupNation has just announced their second annual Home-Based 100 Competition  sponsored by Microsoft Office Live Small Business.   The top 100 home-based entrepreneurs will be ranked in 10 very unique  categories.   The categories are: best financial performers, most innovative, boomers back in business, greenest, yummiest, wackiest, grungiest, recession busters, most slacker friendly, and most glamorous.   Entries will be taken until midnight Pacific time on September 30, 2008.   The top 100 winners will be announced mid-November.

If you would just like to browse thru the current nominees and place your votes, you can do so here.   There are a lot of interesting small businesses to vote for.  …

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You’re Not After Clicks: You’re After Sales!


My thanks to a special guest blogger, Caroline Melberg of SmallBusinessMavericks.com. This is a content and practical advice packed post, take your time and absorb.

It’s no secret that in today’s world, online success depends in large part on how much traffic you drive to your site. The amount of traffic you get depends on your search engine optimization. When your site is primed for search engine optimization, you get tons of traffic coming to you for free. Great, right?

Of course! You see, on the web you have a choice – you can pay Google or Yahoo tons of your hard earned cash for PPC clicks, or you can search engine optimize your site to drive new customers to you.…

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Caffeine and Small Business

ePrize, the worldwide leader in interactive promotions, today announced the launch of a new technology specifically designed for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that delivers interactive promotions to enterprises of any size. ePrize’s Caffeine Promotions Platformâ„¢, available at www.caffeinenow.com, offers smaller businesses the power to build and deploy advanced and fully customized online sweepstakes, instant-win, and coupon-based promotions in fewer than 10 minutes, anywhere in the United States, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

Caffeine’s unique technology makes it easy, fast, and efficient for small businesses to develop and deploy an end-to-end interactive promotion campaign without the burden and risk of development, prizes, security and compliance.…

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Presentation Skills for Entrepreneurs

Presentation Skills for Entrepreneurs is now available at The Great Big Small Business Show.

This week is a mashup of 6 different podcasters discussing various aspects of Presentation Skills for Entrepreneurs.

(Below is the transcript from my portion of this weeks Great Big Small Business Show)

This is one of my favorite topics, I have been giving presentations for just about 25 years and I have learned many lessons along the way. Today I want to share with you what I think are the Top 3 keys to Delivering an Effective Presentation.

Key Number 1: Focus on your audience.…

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How to Build Client Relationships

A few years ago, before I started my own business, a friend and I set out on a research project. We wanted to know why some people could make an effective relationship with someone very rapidly and others would take much more time and sometimes they would never get to the point of having a good relationship.

We were doing this study in the context of selling, why would some people get to a trusting relationship quickly and therefore have a higher likelihood of sales success?

Of course we felt that trust was the key to a successful sale of anything that is complex and expensive.…

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4 Ways to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Customer Relationship Programs.


Strong customer relationships are like money in the bank, literally.

Our world is constantly changing, big box retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot are dominating the landscape, promoting the promise of “one-stop shopping”, and the Internet is making it easier to make online purchases with limited human interaction. On the surface, these changes make it seem as though the customer is only concerned about swiftly making their product selections and racing to the check-out counter as quickly as possible.

Reality says that buyers are concerned about a lot more than one-stop shopping, speed of check-out and price. One of the other major deciding factors buyers are using to make a decision about what to buy and from whom is based on a dying art customer relationships.…

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MARKETING: 4 WAYS TO MEASURE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP PROGRAMS

Strong customer relationships are like money in the bank, literally.

Our world is constantly changing, big box retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot are dominating the landscape, promoting the promise of “one-stop shopping”, and the Internet is making it easier to make online purchases with limited human interaction. On the surface, these changes make it seem as though the customer is only concerned about swiftly making their product selections and racing to the check-out counter as quickly as possible.

Reality says that buyers are concerned about a lot more than one-stop shopping, speed of check-out and price. One of the other major deciding factors buyers are using to make a decision about what to buy and from whom is based on a dying art, customer relationships.…

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