Posts from — March 2010

Whether you are looking for a job, want to network for your business, find old friends or whatever else you want to use social networking for, this easy to understand and follow video can help! Watch this short video by commoncraft.

More From learnsmallbusiness

• Collaboration/Social Networking
• Seth Godin on social networking for your business
• Using Social Networking to Market Your Company

learnsmallbusiness Recommends

• Free Backlinks…..Get Backlinks Every Day!  (Chad Nicely)
• UPDATE: Page Rank 4 In 8 Months!  (Chad Nicely)

Ask learnsmallbusiness To Recommend Your Posts

Here’s another guest blog post by Mitch Mitchell. This one is about a subject I love talking about–outsourcing.

Take it away Mitch!

I’ve been a sole proprietor for more than eight years. During my first three years, I pretty much did everything for myself. Now, when you’re not making big money, there are some things that don’t make any sense for you to spend your money on. For instance, spending a lot of money on big marketing campaigns don’t make much sense because if you work for yourself it’s actually more about getting a few clients under your belt, making some money first to establish yourself, and then maybe thinking about branching out and becoming larger through big marketing campaigns.

Having said that, there were a lot of things I was doing that was driving me crazy. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the knowledge or skill to do some of these things, I just didn’t have the time to do them. And once I was on the road, I wasn’t even around to be able to do those things.

You really can’t do it all and be productive trying to do your career. Even if you’re a small business with a few employees, it behooves you to think of pushing some things onto other people so that you can have more time to do what you need to do to generate income.

One of the first things I did was hire an accountant. This was the biggest change I made, and it turned out to be the best change I made. At that point, all I then had to do was put my bank statements together, put all my receipts together in one place, and either mail it to my accountant or drop by her office and leave my stuff there. The only real paperwork I still had to do was calculate my mileage, since there is no way she could’ve done that for me.

The next two things I did was to hire someone to cut my lawn and someone to plow my driveway. As it pertains to my lawn, it took me three hours to get it done, and that was time I could use to do other things. As it pertained to my driveway, that sometimes takes me 30 minutes, and only if it’s light snow and not heavy snow. But there are times when I am out of town, and I didn’t feel right leaving it to my wife to take care of those things. So, hiring someone to do that for me save a lot of time and effort.

There are some other things that I have thought about from time to time that I could hire someone else to do, but in my mind I need to be busier before I go those routes. About twice a year I hire someone to come give the house a good cleaning, since my office is in my home. And a couple of times I have hired a local virtual assistant to help me with some paperwork.

Sometimes you have to weigh the money it cost you to spend on services that can help you out versus the time you lose while doing something else. Trust me, your mind and body won’t mind you getting some help from time to time.

Okay it’s me again.
I trust you learned something valuable about outsourcing from reading that post. If you’d like to hear more from Mitch, be sure to check his blogs out at the following locations:

More From learnsmallbusiness

• What to do when you feel like you just can’t get it together
• Why A Business Blog? Guest Blog Post By Mitch Mitchell
• Is There A Good Way To Market Your Business? Guest Blog Post By Mitch Mitchell

learnsmallbusiness Recommends

• What Can You Do With Craigslist?  (Chad Nicely)
• Twitter Marketing… Just Isn't Going Away!  (Chad Nicely)

Ask learnsmallbusiness To Recommend Your Posts

Here’s another gem from my friend, Mitch Mitchell. This time he’s giving information about something all business owners have to do to grow their business-market.

Take it away, Mitch…

As a sole proprietor, I can honestly tell you that I have tried every way I can think of to market my business. I’m sure you have also, but just in case you haven’t let me go through the different ways that you can try to market your small business.

1. Direct Mail. There are three ways that you can do direct mail. You can either create a sales brochure yourself or have someone create one for you and mail that. You can write a marketing letter, put it in a bunch of envelopes, and mail those out. Or you can go the postcard route, which can save you a lot of money, but doesn’t really give you enough room to tell anybody what you do. Now, if what you do is a general service such as lawn cleaning, making pizza, or fixing cars, you could probably get away with a short marketing pitch and an image. But if you do any complex services, a postcard won’t do you justice.

2. Email. Email offers you the ability to send out one letter to a bunch of people at once. Your marketing message doesn’t even have to be all that long in the letter. You can write one or two lines, add a link, and then send it out and hope people click on the link. If you use an autoresponder, you can even track who’s clicking on your links. The downfall is threefold. One, you have to find all those e-mail addresses and put them in individually. Two, if you sent out to many e-mails at once your host might think you’re spamming, and it’s a strong possibility that at least 25 to 50% of the people you send an e-mail to will either have your e-mails show up in a spam filter or be rejected as spam if you’ve never written those people before. Three, you could end up getting a whole lot of those e-mails back as either being rejected because of spam or because the e-mail address is no longer work.

3. Phone calling. Depending on what you do, picking up the phone and calling prospects might or might not be a good option. There are some professions are picking up the phone and making the calls yourself don’t look very professional. For instance, you wouldn’t expect lawyers to be making prospect calls. And, if you’re not a professional salesperson, you can get frustrated pretty easily when you keep getting a lot of answering machines, hangups, or people who keep saying no.

4. Social media. If you’re only marketing online, there are many outlets that you can try to market yourself through. You can add a blog to your website. You can try to advertise yourself on places such as Twitter or Facebook. You can join professional networking sites like LinkedIn. You can join online forums. If you go this route, you need to plan the time that you’re using these things, because it’s easy to lose track of time and waste your whole day.

In short, there is no one best way for making contacts for everybody. You have to choose what you believe works in your industry, and what your comfort level is in doing whatever it is you do.

Okay it’s me again.
Mitch gave some awesome advice concerning marketing your business. Try some of these tips and see which ones work for you.
If you want to hear more from Mitch, be sure to visit him at one of his blogs located at the following links:

More From learnsmallbusiness

• Small Business Tips For Women – Key Ways to Make Your Small Business a Successful One
• Why A Business Blog? Guest Blog Post By Mitch Mitchell
• You Can’t Do It All When You Work For Yourself-Guest Blog Post By Mitch Mitchell

learnsmallbusiness Recommends

• Learn How To Sell ClickBank Products  (Chad Nicely)
• 7 Steps To Create A Business Blog  (Chad Nicely)

Ask learnsmallbusiness To Recommend Your Posts

Here is a guest blog post by my good friend, Mitch Mitchell. In this post he gives some good reasons why you should have a business blog. Take it away, Mitch!

Sometimes I wonder just how far the computer age has gone. I say that because quite often I’m answering the same question over and over; why should I have a business blog. I’m going to give you a few reasons why you should have a business blog and how you can have a business blog.

The first reason you should have a business blog is to show your expertise in your field. Your website obviously should be the first place where you tell people what it is you do and try to give them as much information as possible. But a blog consistently allows people to see what you’re made of, and if there are any new changes in your industry you can reach your audience a lot faster.

The second reason you should have a business blog is because it helps to build up the prominence of your website if you have your blog affiliated with your website. Search engines love new content on websites, and your website will rank higher if someone is looking for your services in your area if your content is always fresh. All this basically means is if you wrote something on your blog even once a week, your website will benefit because something new has been added on some kind of consistent basis.

The third reason you should have a business blog is because it gives you an opportunity to show some personality and to interact with people who come to your website or your blog. Now this one is dicey if you’re someone who doesn’t write well or doesn’t have the time to keep up with the blog, let alone to respond to people who come to your blog and leave comments. It looks bad if you have a blog and no consistent content, or if you never respond to any comments.

This one can be addressed by hiring someone to write and manage your blog, which is a service I offer through one of my businesses. This may seem sneaky, but in actuality it allows you the freedom of having someone else researching your industry and keeping your blog up to date, responding to comments in your name, still allowing you to either respond to comments or write articles from time to time, and you may even learn some things about your own industry that you haven’t had time to keep up on.

I will say this however. If you decide this is something you want to do on your own, make sure you don’t define yourself so finitely bet you run out of things to say pretty quickly. There is nothing worse than a blog associated with your website or business that hasn’t had an update in three or more months. That can actually harm you more because people will think you don’t have enough imagination to take care of your own business, so why should they hire you to try to take care of their business.

Okay it’s me again…
If you want to get more information from Mitch, be sure to check out his two blogs at the following locations.

More From learnsmallbusiness

• Small Business Tips For Women – Key Ways to Make Your Small Business a Successful One
• Is There A Good Way To Market Your Business? Guest Blog Post By Mitch Mitchell
• You Can’t Do It All When You Work For Yourself-Guest Blog Post By Mitch Mitchell

learnsmallbusiness Recommends

• Here's My Five Minute Tutorial on Getting Ranked On YouTube!  (Chad Nicely)
• Learn How To Sell ClickBank Products  (Chad Nicely)

Ask learnsmallbusiness To Recommend Your Posts

If you’re using social networking for your business, you’ll want to watch this video. It gives 7 tips to help your social networking be more effective. Enjoy the video…

More From learnsmallbusiness

• Social Networking in Plain English
• Seth Godin on social networking for your business
• Using Social Networking to Market Your Company

learnsmallbusiness Recommends

• Here's My Five Minute Tutorial on Getting Ranked On YouTube!  (Chad Nicely)
• backlink  (Chad Nicely)

Ask learnsmallbusiness To Recommend Your Posts