3
5 Skills Every Small Business Owner Should Master
Any small business owner or marketer must be a jack-of-all-trades. Entrepreneurs have the drive to go for the gold, but they also need to have the expertise to back it up. Here’s a rundown of some of the skills worth investing in: 1. PowerPoint For any marketer, Microsoft PowerPoint is the quintessential program used in […]
Continue reading
1
11 Rules to Follow When Creating Successful Websites
Considering that the Internet is home to 2.2 billion people who spend their time online, having a successful website is the fundamental part of any business’s success. Consumers find and share information online, and they make buying decisions based on what their friends see and share. The Internet is interactive, and at the center of […]
Continue reading
1
How Open Sourcing Ideas Can Be Good for Your Business
When I was in college, one of my favorite places to study was deep in the lesser-used stacks of my college library. Just being surrounded by towers of books somehow made me feel smarter. Remembering that environment reminds me that there are no secrets in libraries. I could walk down an aisle and open a […]
Continue reading
Amsterdam College Teaches Grad Students About Entrepreneurship
The team from left to right: Lara Hakkert, Marjin van der Linden, Cassey Shapiro, Marieke van der Werf, and Maarten Dan Dunnen I was recently contacted by Cassey Shapiro, a graduate student studying at Vrije University in Amsterdam. She pitched a great article about her school and the unique entrepreneurial focus of a collaboration between […]
Continue reading
Unleashing the YouTube Inside of You
More viewers watched online video than TV in 2012, according to SundaySky. Nearly 200 million viewers watched 456.6 million content videos for an average of 6.3 minutes, while sitting through 105.4 billion ads. Video attracted 56 percent of consumer web traffic, along with 20 percent of mobile phone users and 50 percent of tablet users. […]
Continue reading
Affordable Social Media for Small Business
You know you need to be on social media, right? It’s been pounded into your head enough. Everywhere you turn there’s a blog post or magazine article on the importance of small businesses having a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly, Google Plus. And a lot of these articles will tell you that the way […]
Continue reading
4
Small Business Hiring: Dos and Don’ts from Someone Who’s Done It
Hiring your first few employees is exhilarating; you’re building a team of people who will help you build your business into an empire (or at least a venture that will enable you to pay your mortgage). But while it’s exciting, hiring people is also exhausting, frustrating and sometimes, even depressing. Before building the initial team […]
Continue reading
1
The $100,000 Question: To Get an MBA or Not?
If you were told you could make a median base salary of $120,000, you’d be crazy not to jump at the chance…right? Yet society and the entrepreneurial community are widely questioning the value of graduate degrees in today’s workplace. We hear stories of the Steve Jobs’ and Mark Zuckerberg’s of the world, who became billionaires […]
Continue reading
1
How to Unleash the Potential of Your Brand Ambassadors
The power of brand ambassadors is undeniable. A 2012 Nielsen study reveals that 92 percent of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as word-of-mouth marketing or recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising. And with the continued explosion of social media, mobile and other technology tools, creating […]
Continue reading
Why Brand Ambassadors are Underutilized by Businesses
According to Wommapedia, a leading Internet resource on Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM), 72 percent of people claim that reviews from family members or friends exert a great deal or fair amount of influence on their purchasing decisions. This is just one of many statistics pointing to the importance of word-of-mouth endorsements from people who […]
Continue reading