As Google moves toward a semantic approach, focusing more on the big picture of a search as opposed to keywords, producing creative content is going to be more important than ever. This is where the idea of reverse guest blogging comes into play, and it's a big reason that I suspect this will be a huge business trend in 2014.

The idea behind reverse guest blogging is that you, the website owner, find guest bloggers and ask them to offer content to your site. Many small business owners often find themselves saying, "I have plenty of people reaching out to me to post on my site, I don't need to spend my time trying to find more."

It makes complete sense, but the idea of reverse guest blogging looks at it a different way. In fact, that reaction is exactly where so many potentially go wrong. To answer the question above, you aren't necessarily finding bloggers for your blog because you don't have enough, it's because you want the highest quality bloggers (and therefore content) possible.

And chances are, the "highest quality bloggers" aren't knocking at your door.

The Benefits of Reverse Guest Blogging

You Build Stronger Relationships

That is, if you're the one reaching out to an author. Chances are you've seen a great writer on other blogs, so reaching out to them lets them know that you value and enjoy their writing.

The Editor Remains in Control

Because they are going out and finding authors that are known to produce quality and really "get it."

Sometimes dealing with a flood of emails from people you don't know can be overwhelming. If you do the reaching out, you know you're guaranteed to get something good that doesn't need as much editing. You can count on that for the site.

Quality Bloggers Bring in Quality Audiences

A great blogger likely has a few thousand followers on social networks, but even more so, they might have a few loyal fans who love to read their writing. If you can bring that audience to your blog, you should be able to improve your visibility through social shares as well as backlinks.

It's also important to realize that this doesn't need to take the place of any other strategy you might have in place. The traditional way of guest blogging, letting others come to you and ask if they can contribute, is still a great way to get fresh content onto your site. However, reverse guest blogging can supplement that and help keep you in control.

How Does Reverse Guest Blogging Work?

To make reverse guest blogging work for you, you're going to need a plan. There are essentially three steps:

1. Figure out what you want out of a guest contributor. How often do you want them to contribute? Is there a particular subject you want discussed? Who is going to be in charge of managing this relationship?
2. Make a list of all the authors you may want to feature. After you make a list, consider doing a few searches to find other writes who you aren't familiar with.
3. Go out and try to connect with those authors and talk with them about this opportunity.

If you can't get the authors you had originally wanted, don't get discouraged. Figure out who they are connected with (possibly other writers on that blog) and do your outreach there to try and make yourself known.

After all, it's important that you and your blog are something the author knows as much as it is the other way around.

How Do You Find Quality Bloggers?

Step number 2 above is definitely easier said than done. If you're an active reader of articles about your industry, you likely have a few bloggers in mind who you'd love to have featured.

It's always best if you see them as a guest contributor elsewhere (sometimes staff members at large papers won't guest blog), but in either case, it can't hurt to ask. Try not to aim too high at first, but don't sell yourself short either.

You might not get the star writer of USA Today, but if you focus on your specific industry and stay away from major news publications, you might very well be surprised.

Begin Reaching Out

What about after you're done making your list of authors you've already read – then what? Next, it's time to find new authors that might work. Consider doing a few different things:

• Twitter search "guest post [topic]" to find bloggers.
• Google search "guest post by; guest blog by; etc." and then your topic. Also consider doing this search on sites you like to see if you can get a list of their guest bloggers.
• Ask others you know in the industry if they have any recommendations.
• Use a tool like Follwerwonk, a popular tool for outreach that lets you filter and sort results.

Have you ever tried reverse guest blogging?

The post The Reverse Guest Blogging Trend in 2014 May Be Huge: How it Works appeared first on Small Business Trends.

If you are a big user of the Google Talk app for Windows as a way of communicating quickly with your business partners or team, be aware.

Google will retire the Windows app for Google Talk in the first few months of 2014.

The Google App team says users will still be able to access Google Talk through their Gmail accounts while online or through certain third-party services.

But in an official announcement sent to Google App administrators, the team said users have already found another chat option:

Many users are switching to Google+ Hangouts chat, which offers better support for multiple devices, group conversations, and rich content such as images and locations.

The Google App team says Google Talk users will begin seeing notifications about the end of the Windows service in the beginning of January.

The Google Talk app for Windows will continue operating for the first two months of 2014 after which users will no longer be able to gain access.

Though it may be a pain no longer being able to easily open Google Talk directly in Windows, fortunately business users still have plenty of other chat options.

Alternatives to Google Talk for Windows

In addition to using Google Talk in Gmail or Google+ Hangout chat, as far as we know chat in Google Drive isn’t going anywhere. This makes it easy to chat while collaborating with your team on shared documents.

Outside of Google, of course, there are many options including Skype and newer services like SpreeCast, both of which offer chat features.

Bottom line: You’ll likely have no trouble finding a variety of chat alternatives now that Google Talk for Windows is shutting down. Your biggest annoyance will probably be re-connecting with some or all of your active contacts depending upon the platform you choose.

Image: Wikipedia

The post Google To Retire Windows App for Talk in 2014 appeared first on Small Business Trends.

For small business users reliant upon the latest mobile technology, the terrain may be shifting.

The largest provider of mobile phone service in the U.S., AT&T, was one of the last to eliminate voice minutes in favor of unlimited calling. But the move was part of a strategy to change the company’s business model, moving from charging for voice service to charging for data transfer.

Now it seems AT&T is pushing to reduce or eliminate phone subsidies which enable rapid and inexpensive upgrades of mobile devices. For business users these upgrades can be critical to keep up with equally rapid changes in technology.

AT&T Introduces ‘Next’ Program

Of course, AT&T is promoting these changes as a benefit to help users upgrade their phones faster — but at a price.

Here’s how it works.

A new pricing plan, AT&T Next, lets you upgrade to a new phone within 12 or 18 months instead of waiting up to two years for the standard contract to expire.

But there’s a catch.

In addition to your monthly service bill, AT&T will charge a “low monthly installment” essentially to finance the cost of your phone over 20 to 26 months.

If you upgrade, the financing payment continues to cover the new device. However, if you keep it and pay it off, the added installments will be removed from your bill and you’ll see some savings.

AT&T Chief Says End of Big Subsidies Is Goal

AT&T is hardly being secretive about its intentions. Company CEO Randall Stephenson announced the move away from subsidies at a recent investor conference in New York, CNET reports. And another AT&T competitor, T-Mobile, got rid of subsidies earlier this year.

Still, the new strategy seems a bit unfair to customers given the cost of devices is essentially already covered by high service fees, TechCrunch observes.

The result will be higher costs for small businesses and other users seeking to upgrade or add smartphones. It will also require you to look more carefully when shopping for a mobile plan.

One other option is to look at prepaid cell phone plans with a smartphone purchased upfront to determine whether this might make more financial sense for your business.

Image: AT&T

The post AT&T Will Stop or Reduce Subsidies on Mobile Phones appeared first on Small Business Trends.

It's that time of year – the time when hacking coughs, sneezes and nose-blowing ring through every small business. How can you deal with sick employees at work and keep them healthy (and productivity high) during cold and flu season?

3 Tips to Avoid Having Sick Employees at Work

Encourage Sick Employees to Stay Home

The benefits of having a sick employee come in to handle his or her work are far outweighed by the risk that the person will infect the rest of the staff. However, if employees feel penalized for staying home, they won't do so.

One study found that staying home just one day when sick reduces the chance of co-workers' catching the flu by 25 percent. Staying home two days cuts the risk by 40 percent.

If employees are worried they'll get overloaded with work while they're out, try letting them work from home. At the same time, don't require employees to work (even at home) if they truly need to rest.

Keep it Clean

Colds and flu spread in winter because people are more likely to spend time inside in an enclosed environment. Keep that environment as germ-free as you can by making sure your office is properly maintained.

Keep disinfectant sprays on hand and regularly spray down door handles, break room surfaces, bathroom faucets and anything else that lots of people touch all day. If your staff shares tech tools like tablet computers, handheld bar-code scanners, desktop computers, cash registers or headsets, make sure you have the appropriate cleaners and cloths to disinfect these surfaces at the beginning of each shift or when people trade off their equipment.

Also, keep tissues and lots of hand sanitizer on hand – consider having some available in every room.

Encourage Healthy Habits

Post signs in the restrooms and break room reminding employees to wash their hands with soap. Also post signs reminding employees to clean equipment that is shared.

If your business offers health insurance that covers flu vaccines, encourage employees to get vaccinated. Since many people don't want to make a special trip to the doctor's to do this, see if your insurer offers any type of mobile vaccination clinic. Some medical providers will come out to businesses and provide flu shots for a fee.

Even as a small business, you may be able to band with other local businesses to get this service or piggyback on a bigger company in your office building that is bringing in a flu shot clinic.

This article, provided by Nextiva, is republished through a content distribution agreement. The original can be found here.

Sick Photo via Shutterstock

The post How to Keep Your Office and Employees Flu-Free This Winter appeared first on Small Business Trends.

A few months ago, I reported that premiums on employee health insurance rose faster than inflation once again this year, with single coverage going up 5 percent and family coverage increasing 4 percent. In that post, I explained how the rising cost of employee health insurance has led to a declining fraction of small businesses offering coverage.

But dropping coverage isn't the only way that small businesses react to the rising price of employee health insurance. A recent survey of a stratified random sample of 921 small businesses conducted for the National Federation of Independent Business by Mason Dixon Polling and Research identifies several other ways that small businesses respond.

In the table below, I show the fraction of small businesses that told the surveyors that they took different actions in response to premium increases. (Each business could report having taken more than one action; in fact, the average was 2.7.)

Source: Created from data from the National Federation of Independent Business ACA Report

The survey shows several important patterns:

1. The most common way small business owners respond to health insurance premium increases is to take less profit. That's telling because, as I have written here before, health insurance premiums have risen faster than inflation for many years, while small business profits have been declining in real terms. While I can't show a causal effect of rising health insurance premiums on the decline in small business profits, the negative correlation between the two is alarming.

2. The next most common response to the rising cost of employee health insurance is to boost business productivity. It's important for policy makers to recognize that more small businesses react to rising health insurance costs by becoming more efficient than by passing the higher costs on to workers or by cutting headcount.

3. More small businesses respond to rising health insurance costs by cutting investment (40 percent) than by cutting wages (37 percent) or increasing the share of health insurance that employees pay (30 percent). That's surprising for two reasons. First, many economists argue that higher health care costs should get passed on to employees in the form of lower wages and lesser benefits. Second, many economists expect small businesses to respond to higher employee health care costs by investing in labor saving technologies because machines don't need health insurance.

4. Less than a third of small businesses raise prices in response to increases in their health insurance premiums. The inability to pass on increased benefits costs may be the reason why many small business owners have seen their profits squeezed in recent years.

5. Two of the least common actions that small business owners take in response to the increased cost of employee health insurance are to cut head count and reduce employee hours or to take the health insurance tax credit. As the survey found, these actions were only undertaken by 17 percent of small businesses. That's ironic because supporters of the Affordable Care Act frequently argue that small business owners will take the health insurance tax credit, while opponents often claim that small business owners will cut head count and reduce employee hours in response to the new law.

Health Care Photo via Shutterstock

The post How Small Businesses Deal with Rising Health Insurance Premiums appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Well, it wasn’t much of a battle really.

In fact, as it turned out, the whole thing was handled quite amicably.

And that’s what impressed us about this story.  It’s about business owners getting together and resolving an issue quickly and professionally – before it got out of hand.

So let us tell you the story of how three independent grocery store chains settled a dispute over a beloved confection — “Killer Brownies.”

Killer Brownies, pictured above, are a gooey confection that includes caramel and nuts in the brownies.

The story starts years ago.  Rick Vernon and Larry Uhl, co-owners of West Point Market in Akron, Ohio, had been selling the succulent treats exclusively in Northeast Ohio for years.

Baked fresh in their upscale grocery’s bakery, the brownies were made from a special recipe passed down by Vernon’s dad Russ. He’s the former owner of the market and is now in retirement.

The elder Vernon had actually gotten the recipe from yet another independent grocery store owner, Larry Ehlers of Larry's Market in Brown Deer, Wisconsin.  Ehlers, who reportedly had adapted the recipe from a Betty Crocker cake mix box, was a friend of Vernon’s and gave permission to use the recipe.  (At this point Larry’s Market steps out of the picture.)

Back in Northeast Ohio, Killer Brownies became associated with the West Point Market over the years — so much so that the market’s loyalty program is actually called “Brownie Points.”

Because of the iconic brownies’ close connection with their store, the owners of West Point were surprised when a competitor, Bueh­ler's Fresh Foods stores, started selling the same brownies — under the same name — in local stores.  Buehler’s, which is based closer to central Ohio, also has stores in Northeast Ohio within local shopping distance of West Point Market.

Bakery Spat Over Killer Brownies?

How did this dispute happen? Well, it wasn’t a matter of corporate espionage like you hear about in the big business world.

In fact, it just boiled down to a simple misunderstanding — and a licensing arrangement that included exclusive geographical rights.

You see, years ago Russ Vernon of West Point Market had provided the rights to the recipe to his friends, the Mayne family, with the understanding that they NOT market them in Northeast Ohio. The Maynes own and operate the Dorothy Lane Markets of Dayton, which is about 200 miles away in southwestern Ohio.

Are you still with me?   Let me recap the geography for you.  The recipe started on the back of a cake mix box.  It was adapted in Wisconsin by one grocery store owner.  Then it was shared to another in Akron, Ohio.  From there the recipe made its way to Dayton in southwestern Ohio — all except for the rights to market the brownies in Northeast Ohio, those being retained by the Akron store.

Now that you have the geography down, let’s get back to our story.

Down in Dayton, the Maynes got a bright idea. Why not license the brownies nationally and potentially serve an even larger customer base?

And that’s how Killer Brownies eventually made their way back up through central Ohio to some stores in Northeast Ohio.

Unfortunately, through an oversight, Dorothy Lane Markets entered into a licensing arrangement with Buehler’s without realizing that some of its stores were also located in an area competitive to West Point Market.  That meant that Killer Brownies were now being sold competitively against West Point Market, in its exclusive Northeast Ohio territory.

Norman Mayne, CEO of Dorothy Lane Markets, told the Akron Beacon Journal, ”We made a terrible, terrible mistake and it's 100 percent my fault.”

While the resulting mess-up might have resulted in an ugly legal battle if unreasonable minds had been involved, it was settled simply enough by these small and midsize business owners.

Buehler’s has been cooperative about it, despite the effort and expense of licensing and marketing the brownies for a short time.  "It was an honest mistake. Because of that, we will not be selling the Killer Brownies," Bob Buehler told the Akron Beacon Journal.  Buehler’s Fresh Foods decided to pull the product from their stores, website and Facebook page. But they are considering perhaps altering the recipe and offering the brownies later under a different name.

However, dispute solved — all before Christmas.  One business lesson remains:  geographic licensing rights can be a tricky thing.

This Recipe’s a Killer

Finally, if you won’t be in Dayton or Akron any time soon, here’s the recipe for Killer Brownies for you to try at home:

1/4 lb. (1 stick) plus 5 tbsp. butter

1 (18¼-oz.) package chocolate brownie or chocolate cake mix

2/3 cup evaporated milk

1 tbsp. water

3/4 cup walnut pieces

1 cup caramel ice cream topping

2/3 cup chocolate chips

Confectioners' sugar

This is the West Point Market recipe as published in the Akron Beacon Journal.  You can get the mixing and baking instructions here. (We won’t give you the calorie count as it would probably spoil your enjoyment.)

Enjoy, and Happy Holidays!

Image: Killer Brownies from West Point Market website

The post Ohio Grocery Bakeries Battle It Out Over … Killer Brownies appeared first on Small Business Trends.

With it’s high price tag and touted high-powered features, the new Mac Pro isn’t for every business user. But reports now indicate those who have ordered the desktop or plan to will probably wait months to receive it. Speculations on the reasons include the fact that the Mac Pro is the first Apple product to be assembled in the U.S. in a decade, which may have caused some delay. The highly anticipated cylindrically-shaped Apple desktop starting at $2,999 was previewed as early as October.

Mac Pro Delay May Stretch to March

The Apple Store now gives February as the earliest shipping time for the computers, which went on sale recently on the website. But some customers have received shipping quotes as far away as March, reports 9to5 Mac. The tech site also says most Apple retail stores are only taking orders for the computer at this point. Speculation is that customers paying $500 per year for a Joint Venture membership entitling them to special perks at the retail locations may be responsible. These customers may have already snatched up most of initial allocations for the brick and mortar stores.

New Apple Desktop Could be Worth the Wait

Of course, if all of Apple’s claims and those of early reviewers are true, the desktop could be worth the wait. At least that’s true for the special niche of professional business users at which the new computer is targeted. An official announcement on the Apple website, says the computer possesses:

• flash storage operating at 10 times the speed of a conventional desktop
• eight times the graphic performance of the last generation of Mac Pro
• as much as 60GBps of memory bandwidth to allow editing of full-resolution 4K video while simultaneously adding special effects.

Earlier this year in an official release announcing the new Apple Pro, Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Philip Schiller explained:

“The new Mac Pro is our vision for the future of the pro desktop, everything about it has been re-imagined and there has never been anything like it.”

What’s the overall conclusion? Some customers may certainly be annoyed by the delay. But for Apple’s core customer base, including the niche user for which this device was created, a shortage of product will only strengthen the demand. Image: Apple Inc.

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What business trends are on the foreseeable horizon heading into the new year?  Let’s jump in and explore what I feel are the top three listed below.

2014 Business Marketing Trends

#3 Social Media

A couple years ago this was #1. For a variety of reasons, however, the shine of social media has lost a bit of its luster.

This past year both Forbes and USAToday reported how social media isn't working for small businesses in pieces titled, "Why Small Businesses Are Losing On Social Media" and "Study: Social Media a Bust for Small Businesses."

Both were in response to a 2013 survey released from Manta research revealing that over 60% of small businesses reported they don't see any ROI (return on investment) on their social-media activities.

That's a big number and a strong indication that while many may have been partying with social media these past couple years, a lot of those folks are now feeling a hangover. It's seems that the people making the most measurable money on social media are the folks charging you to tell you how to do it.

That said, social media certainly isn't going away and it will continue to be an important element of a business marketing plan. In 2014, it just won't have the lure it's had in past few years.

#2 Mobile

While everyone has a cell phone, not everyone has a smart phone. And, certainly, not everyone has a tablet. But in 2014 more people will have both. Which is why more businesses will be conforming to a mobile market in 2014. It's also the reason web designers are experiencing their biggest spike in business since 1997.

It's called responsive web design which means that the site design will look as good on a mobile device as it does on a desktop or laptop. At this point, most don't. In 2014, they'd better. Also, more and more business is being done remotely and virtually requiring more and better mobile devices.

Lastly, mobile towers are expanding and networks are getting better and faster every day.

1# Online Video

You'd think that something that's been around forever would be fading away. The opposite has happened with video. There are multiple reasons for this, The continuing serge in video-friendly mobile devises, the fact the Google has made video much more search friendly, and the simple fact that video is the most engaging of all media.

The explosion of Web video has spawned new monikers like "Explainer video." That term didn't even exist a couple years ago and it's now one of the fastest growing searches on Google.

You've heard the saying, "You can never be too thin or too rich." For 2014, add, "or have too much video."

Trends Photo via Shutterstock

The post 3 Key Business Marketing Trends for 2014 appeared first on Small Business Trends.

He may look like an over-sized Holiday decoration. But, in fact, this is a guy in a snowman costume. And he specializes in scaring passers-by while a video production team records the results for their exclusive YouTube channel.

Check out Freaky the Scary Snowman in this video from his channel.

Just call him Frosty the Snowman with an attitude! And yes, the videos can be great content for sharing with your social media following or perhaps in a seasonal email. (Be careful when selecting the video to use, though. Some definitely may not be “safe for work” due to language — people say the darndest things when they’ve just been scared out of their wits!)

But, this tall wintery stranger can also teach us a few things about running our own businesses. For example:

• Be creative to engage your customers. The passers-by this guy surprises certainly can’t miss him. And his YouTube channel has nearly 500,000 subscribers and receives nearly two million views monthly.  Who would have thought that a guy-in-a-snowman-get-up could achieve that kind of engagement? It’s due to the creative way it’s carried out.
• Never miss a branding opportunity. There’s not only a YouTube channel – but Freaky, the Scary Snowman also has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. And there’s even a Scary Snowman bobble-head available for sale.
• Be clear about what you want from partnerships and money-making ventures. Freaky, the Scary Snowman, is much more than a guy in a snowman costume who likes to scare people. (Well, a little more, anyway.) A fan page gives very specific analytics for the team’s channel and videos as well as demographics. And the site provides potential business partners with a list of collaboration and sponsorship opportunities and how to contact him for more information.

Maybe we could all stand to be scarier snowmen in our own businesses, too.

Image: The Scary Snowman

The post Business Tips from Freaky, the Scary Snowman appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Merry Christmas!

Before you groan, assuming this will be a long rambling boring letter, I promise to keep it short.

The year 2013 was a year of milestones for the team here at Small Business Trends LLC.  I’d like to share a few:

• You may have noticed that we increased our original reporting of small-business specific news.  Along with regular columns and expert contributions, we now regularly publish 5 to 7 items daily.
• We’ve started doing more profiles of individual small businesses.  We’d love to hear from you if your business has an interesting story that you believe others can learn from.
• We started doing more coverage of mobile devices, due to reader interest.
• Our team grew.  In addition to myself as CEO, we now have a Chief Technology Officer, Chief Operations Officer, a news editor, a social marketing maven, and a Chief Strategy Officer.  We also have a part-time Community Manager. That is in addition to regular columnists, journalists and experts.  Check out our About page for more details.
• A new responsive design for the site was rolled out in November.  Feedback has been good – we’re glad you like it.
• We worked quite a bit on implementing a CDN and managed to cut the site load time in half since January 2013.
• Traffic and readership has grown, and we’re glad you like us.
• Our two Awards programs were more popular than even — the Small Business Book Awards and the Small Business Influencer Awards.  Congrats to all nominees and winners.
• Our other sites are growing – Tweak Your Biz and BizSugar have both grown during the year.

While we get tons and tons of mail that make it difficult to respond to everything, we do try hard to read everything and reply on social media channels.

I plan to write a full year-end business report.  Until then, a gigantic THANK YOU to each of you.  Big thanks to our sponsors, too!

I know I speak for all of us on the team when I say we’ve made many many friends during the year, and treasure each and every one of you.

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!

Ornament image via Shutterstock

The post A Christmas Letter to Readers appeared first on Small Business Trends.

A few years ago in the depths of the recession, the idea of being able to sell your business might have provoked rueful laughs from small business owners. Today, however, the outlook is improving and if you're considering selling or hoping to expand by buying a business. Now could be the time to make your move.

The BizBuySell Insight Report for the third quarter of 2013 shows small business owners' finances are improving and, as a result, more of them are willing to buy. This is the third straight quarter in a row that business sales have improved significantly, jumping by 41.7 percent compared to the third quarter of 2012. A total of 1,685 transactions closed, up from 1,189 during the same period in 2012.

What's Behind the Rise in Small Business Sales?

An Improving Overall Economy

Small businesses' performance is improving, meaning interested buyers are more able to afford a purchase and the businesses that are for sale are more desirable.

Personal wealth is recovering, too, so interested business buyers have more money to work with. In addition, financing has become easier to come by than during the worst days of the recession, creating more options for buyers.

An Aging Demographic

There’s an increase of business owners who are ready to sell and more confident that they can do so. During the recession, many Baby Boomers who wanted to sell their companies and retire were forced to delay taking action. Some put their plans on hold because they hoped to get a higher price after the economy recovered. Others did so because the recession frightened many potential buyers away from small business ownership.

Now, however, small business owners are feeling confident of their abilities both to sell their companies and to get a good price for them. In BizBuySell’s recent Buyer and Seller Confidence Survey, 70 percent of current small business sellers say they expect they'll be able to sell their business within one year of listing it.

Leading the Way

If you own a restaurant or retail business, or if you hope to buy one, now is an especially good time to make your move. These industries led the way in growth of business sales, with restaurant transactions up a whopping 109.4 percent in the third quarter of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012, and retail transactions up 60.9 percent.

Restaurant and retail transactions combined accounted for 54 percent of all small business sales in the third quarter of 2013, compared to 43 percent a year ago.

Lower cash flow multiples for restaurants, and higher year-over-year revenues for restaurant businesses, could be behind the growth in sales of businesses in these categories. The average sales price of restaurants as a multiple of cash flow in the third quarter of 2013 was 1.83, below that of small businesses in general. This means restaurant buyers are getting more cash flow per dollar spent. In retail, the average median revenue for retail businesses reached $520,000 in the third quarter of 2013, up from $423,015 a year prior.

But restaurants aren't the only businesses whose sales are improving. Median revenues for all businesses grew 8.9 percent in the third quarter of 2013 compared to the prior year, from $385,327 to $420,000. As their sales and cash flow improve, small business owners are able to ask higher prices and buyers are ready and able to pay.

The median asking price for businesses sold in the third quarter of 2013 was $199,000 and the median sale price was $180,000, both up slightly from the second quarter of 2013. This is the fifth straight quarter of growth for both asking and sale prices. And while the economy is still somewhat of a wild card going into 2014, overall it appears the outlook is positive.

If you're considering selling your business, now is the time to meet with your attorney, accountant and any other key advisors to make sure you're doing all you can to build value in your business, that documentation is in place of your ownership of any processes or proprietary information and that all your financials are in order.

If you're interested in buying a business, you also need to get your financials in order and take steps to explore your financing options. So you're ready to act when you find the perfect deal.

As BizBuySell puts it:

"Conditions are finally coming together."

This means the time could be right for you to achieve your dream – whether that’s to sell your business and retire, or grow your company.

For Sale Photo via Shutterstock

The post Is Now a Good Time to Sell Your Business or Buy a New One? appeared first on Small Business Trends.

A feature up until now only available to a select group of YouTube users is now available to all.

That feature is streaming video. And it is being touted as an important means of creating engagement on your YouTube channel and collecting subscribers.

In a recent post on the official YouTube Creators blog, Google product manager Satyajeet Salgar and Google software engineer Tim James explain:

“Over the last year, we've seen creators across music, gaming, sports, news and more categories use the power of live video to create amazing experiences for their audiences, and build new fans.”

“Now, all YouTube channels that verify their account and are in good standing will be able to live stream live video to the world.”

You verify an account by providing a phone number where YouTube, or its parent company Google, can contact you and verify your identity. You are in good standing when your account doesn’t have any community violations. Being in good standing also means you haven’t been flagged for copyrite violation or been blocked worldwide for any other content issues.

To determine whether your YouTube channel has been enabled for live streaming yet, check your “account feature” page. Or you can check your “Video Manager” section on YouTube to see whether “Live Events” has been added as an option.

Follow the video below for quick and easy directions to set up a streaming video event from RPM Network.

Live events have been appearing on YouTube since 2011. But before this most recent update, only YouTube users with at least 100 subscribers could use streaming video.

The feature might be used to create or broadcast a live Webinar, presentation or any other live event. YouTube says live streaming video is a way to build subscriptions on your channel.

The site provides an overview of how to organize and get the most out of your live streaming events. You can also stream a Google Hangout on YouTube by simply scheduling a Hangout on Air in the Google Plus community. The event will automatically be streamed on YouTube, the company says.

There seem to be many possible uses for live streaming video on YouTube. The question will be whether small businesses find it helpful in their efforts.

Image: YouTube

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If you want to grow your small business, you need technology. If you want to give your customers what they want by customizing their experience, you need customer relationship management (CRM) software to help you. CRM software helps you run marketing campaigns, manage leads, offer support services, and in some cases, manage inventory to keep on top of the market. Zoho CRM offers a low-cost and effective option for the small business owner.

I just spent a couple of weeks importing contacts into Zoho CRM for a client of mine, so it is fresh in my mind. It isn’t that he really needed someone to do the tech part, he was simply too busy, so I volunteered to help and then produced this Zoho CRM review. So let’s jump in and get started.

Zoho CRM Review

The screenshot below shows the activity types you can add on a contact and also on specific accounts (in orange).

Zoho CRM doesn't look fancy when you use it, but it offers the same services you could pay up to 4x as much for with other software. You can track your sales, connect with your customers, and integrate your CRM account with other apps to expand it into a customized business solution. It even allows you to sync your account with Google Apps.

What I Like:

• Once you set up a workflow a few times, Zoho CRM's time-saving design limits the number of clicks necessary to use it. The inventory management features make it easy to turn a quote into an invoice or sales order with one click. There are also built-in social network monitoring features.

• They have a two-factor authentication process, which gives you and your customers added protection.

• One especially interesting feature is the ability to access all your up-to-date customer data from remote locations through your phone. You can do this even if you are on an airplane and offline, but iOS, Android and Blackberry are supported. You can even log your calls, send emails and manage records. I view these as great features.

• Zoho CRM comes with the ability to create dynamic reports. Not only can you choose from a variety of pre-constructed reports, but you can use CSV, Excel or PDF to create your own. Adobe Flash technology allows you to create dynamic charts from the data. One click on a chart takes you to the data set producing that information to help you better understand the results.

What I'd Like to See:

• Zoho CRM can be a little tricky if you are a first-time CRM user. To be fair, that's pretty standard for CRM. It can take time to wrap your head around.  So, maybe a few more popups to guide you through the basics would help. Overall, Zoho does a great job of providing plenty of self-help information – from blogs to videos. Expect to spend a few days getting it up and running, but paid customers get 24-hour support responses and free customers can expect an email response in two business days. You can tell I don’t have many “complaints” with this service because it handles the basics plus way more.

Zoho offers a free 15-day trial so you can test its paid plans. There are three levels of service available:

• Free
• Professional
• Enterprise.

The Free level is a basic package that allows three users to access it (pretty good deal, I think).

The Professional level is $12 per user per month and includes a workflow management and inventory management.

The Enterprise level adds security controls, data storage and duplication and more customization options for $25 per user per month.

Overall, Zoho is a great value for the price.

The post Zoho CRM: Low-Cost Customer Relationship Management Software appeared first on Small Business Trends.

By now you’ve probably heard that the Oxford Dictionary word of the year for 2013 is “selfie.”

What Exactly is a Selfie?

A selfie is nothing more than a self-portrait photograph that you share via social media.

Of course, the selfie isn’t new.  The black and white photograph above is a selfie of Grand Duchess Anastasia of the Russian Romanovs (yeah, that Anastasia) from 1914.

Apparently 100 years ago girls were just as into themselves as they are today.  They simply didn’t have Facebook or Instagram to share their selfies on.

But it wasn’t as easy to shoot selfies back then.  You had to aim a camera in the mirror to shoot a selfie in those days.

Today, with ubiquitous camera phones and front-facing cameras on laptops and tablets, it’s incredibly easy to take a selfie.  It’s become a cultural phenomenon and a form of entertainment.

There have even been a number of quick-to-arrive  and quick-to-go fads when it comes to posing for selfies.  ”Duck face” is the term used to describe people who pucker their lips for their selfies (usually young women trying to look like Angelina Jolie).  But for those keeping track, there’s also the sparrow face (wide eyes, lifted brows); the frog face (tongue out); and the trout face (open trout-like mouth) – among others.

And then you have the weird penchant for taking selfies at funerals — something that Jason Feifer, a Fast Company editor, chronicled at Selfies at Funerals, a Tumblr site he set up.  The fad prompted this hilarious headline at the Huffington Post,  ”Funeral Selfies Are The Latest Evidence Apocalypse Can’t Come Soon Enough.”

And finally, you have three heads of government taking a selfie at a memorial service for the deceased Nelson Mandela:

Some speculated that First Lady Michelle Obama was angry due to her husband laughing with the blonde Danish Prime Minister.  I think the answer is simpler.  Mrs. Obama, with her dignified demeanor,  just had a better sense of decorum.  She didn’t look angry to me — just like she hoped nobody would notice she was with those other three!  She was mindful of the time and place.

As a business owner, when it comes to selfies, it’s also about being mindful of the time and place, and how others will react to your selfie.

Should You Use The Selfie in Business?

I’m going to go with “No” on this 90% of the time for small businesses.

Let’s face it:  most selfies are horrendous — the kind of picture only a teenager’s friends can appreciate.  If you have a traditional small business and are thinking a duck-face selfie of you as the owner will somehow bring profitable attention to your business, well … it probably won’t.

However, there are exceptions.  Sometimes selfies can be good.  So let’s take a look at some times when selfies makes sense and can help your business:

• Entertainers – If you are a musician or other entertainer-entrepreneur, your fans want to hear from you and they want to see you.  The right kind of selfie can create a closer bond with your fan base.  Go for it.
• Professional personalities – If you are a professional personality like Chris Pirillo, and your life is your business — consisting of a constant stream of videos taken in your home of you because you are a figure your audience wants to hear from — then selfies would fit right in.  Just keep in mind that long before the current selfie trend, Pirillo was videoing himself.  His YouTube channel has nearly 6,000 videos — most with him in them. Opening up his personal life is part of Pirillo’s mystique.
• Professional speakers – If you are a professional speaker, then a tasteful, and I emphasize tasteful, selfie occasionally can be slipped in.  As a professional speaker, you are your product.  So images of your product — you — make sense. In all likelihood you have fans who want to know more about you as the person. Think creatively on this.  Take a selfie showing you getting set up for your next speech.  Or showing the audience over your shoulder.    Just keep the selfie consistent with your image. If you are known as a speaker with gravitas, then a silly selfie would be out of character and diminish your image.
• Authors – You’ve probably seen authors who encourage readers to submit a headshot of themselves holding the author’s latest book up.  In this case, it’s the reader’s selfie you are looking for.  Each selfie-with-book shows that the reader liked the book. Each selfie-with-book also serves as an effective way of “advertising” the book without it being an advertisement.

What if you’re not an entertainer or personality, but run some other kind of traditional small business?  There’s still room for selfies.  Here are some ways other types of small businesses can leverage selfies:

• Contests – Hold a “selfie” contest and encourage customers to submit selfies of themselves using your product.  Give a prize for the best one.  This past year saw Jamba Juice leverage the selfie trend with its #SmoothieSelfie contest (see image above).  The contest made sense because the selfie naturally lends itself to a smoothie product AND the customer’s face while drinking it.
• Engagement – You don’t even necessarily need to hold a contest.  Encourage people to use and engage with your product, and share a picture of themselves doing so.   For example, those in the beauty business  could encourage customers to submit before and after selfies of themselves showing the difference the product makes.  Consider setting up a hashtag and thread on your Facebook page for sharing their selfies.  Be careful if you establish a hashtag — try not to make it self-laudatory, or it may be hijacked by detractors.
• Human interest –  Include some fun selfies of your team on the company blog.  Or feature a customer-of-the-month selfie in your newsletter.  People love human interest. It’s why newspapers and magazines run profiles of individuals or companies, or stories of rescued puppies and New Year’s births.  Used in the right place (such as an informal setting like the company blog or Facebook page), and at the right time (for light diversion and human interest), selfies can humanize your business.

For more ideas, see 25 tips on using Instagram – Instagram is ground zero for selfies.

The point is, keep your customers top of mind  as to what you think they would want to see or find interesting.  If use of a selfie would be welcome by them, or benefit them, or cause them to think better of your business interests, then by all means go for it.

As marketing firm Hero Farm says, make sure your use of selfies “goes beyond feeding egos.” And always remember to be mindful of the time and place when sharing selfies.

Images: Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook

The post The Selfie: Should You Use It In Your Business? appeared first on Small Business Trends.

If you own a retail business and think you can relax after the holiday rush, think again. With cash a perennial gift and gift cards gaining in popularity, you're likely to have just as many people hitting your store after Christmas seeking to spend their gift money as you did before the holidays looking for the perfect presents. Then there are the customers looking to return that not-so-perfect gift and treat themselves to something they really like.

How can you make the most of the busy post-holiday season and keep your sanity (and profits)?

How to Profit From the Post-Holiday Retail Rush

Be prepared

Employees may be pining for time off after the holiday rush, but make sure you've scheduled adequate staff to handle shoppers and returns. Consider offering employees comp time later in January, or some other type of reward, in return for taking the least desirable shifts.

Make it fun

Post-holiday shopping can get crazy but without the festive feeling of holiday gift-buying, sometimes tempers can flare. Keep the mood in your store light with music. Offer refreshments to soothe thirsty and hungry shoppers. If you can, redecorate with fresh décor that will put people in a happy mood, so they aren't looking at holly and tinsel and feeling sad that the holidays are over.

Speed up wait times

To make the return process easier on everyone, consider setting up separate point-of-sale stations for returns or exchanges and for purchases. Nothing gets shoppers grumpier than getting in line behind someone who dumps out a whole bag of products without a receipt when they're only waiting to buy one thing.

Engage and upsell

When customers return a purchase, always do your best to turn a return into an exchange. Your salespeople should never just accept a return, but always ask in a friendly way if the customer would like to exchange the product instead. Offer different options such as pointing out similar items in different colors or noting the special sales you have going on that could help the person get more value for their money compared to just returning the item.

Get mobile

If you use mobile point-of-sale technology such as card readers with smartphones or tablets, you have more options. For instance, salespeople could take returns at any point in the store, or could walk customers over to show them other items they might want to exchange their return for and then ring it up on the mobile device.

Discount, but don't go crazy

Customers spending gift money or gift cards are often freer with their purchases than usual because it feels like "free money." Yes, you may need to discount some items (and it's a great way to get rid of seasonal merchandise for the New Year), but dial it back from the deals you may have offered during the holiday shopping season.

It's OK to be selfish

With customers feeling the need to reward themselves after getting through the holidays, now is the time for your marketing messages to encourage them to be selfish. "Reward yourself,""Treat yourself,""Give yourself the gift you really wanted"—all of these tactics are effective for customers who have a little bit of money to burn.

Reach out

Get customers into your store by reaching out via email marketing and social media. Reward customers who purchased from you over the holidays by sending them emails with special limited-time offers. Hold a contest on social media asking customers to post pictures of the best gift they got. Basically, do everything you can to remind customers you're here and engage them with your store.

Shopping Bags image via Shutterstock

The post 8 Ways to Profit From the Post-Holiday Retail Rush appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Keeping up with the latest is important for your small business’s success. Here are the top stories of the week from the Small Business Trends editorial team:

Marketing & Branding

Local grocery bakeries battle over “killer brownies.” Or not. Actually this is the story of how cooler heads prevailed in a dispute involving the branding and geographical marketing of a very special bakery product. And we even throw in a recipe for good measure. Enjoy!

The Scary Snowman teaches business lessons — with some fun. There are probably harder gigs than dressing up like a life-sized snowman and scaring people silly. But even this business has some things to teach the average business owner about interacting and making an impression.

Online Services

YouTube offers streaming video to all users. Though you must have a verified account in good standing as far as YouTube is concerned, this is importance news for businesses and marketers. YouTube introduced streaming video for selected users in 2011, but is now rolling out the feature for everyone.

Google Talk in Windows to be silenced. If you’ve gotten use to the Windows version of Google Talk for communicating with your team, here’s some bad news. The Google Talk for Windows app is going away in the next few months. Happily there are some rather simple alternatives.

Tech

Apple’s Mac Pro may face delivery delays. It’s a very niche product with a premium price tag. And those pros who need it will have to wait longer than they might have expected to get their devices. But most probably feel it’s just as worth the wait as it is the investment.

Mobile

AT&T wants to dump phone subsidies. And they aren’t the only ones, it turns out. Businesses in need of regular smartphone and mobile device upgrades to keep up with the technology may have a problem. But there are some options.

Nokia is developing an Android phone. Yes, you heard right. The company most closely associated with mobile products running on Windows is making an Android phone. And this is at the same time the company is being acquired by Microsoft. Learn more.

Content & Communications

Reverse guest blogging may be the next content marketing trend. As search engines change the way they evaluate content, you must re-evaluate the way you create it. In this new environment, it’s no longer sufficient to publish just anything guest posters submit. Here’s an alternative.

What is a “selfie?” And should you use them to promote your business? “Selfie” is the new trendy term for a self portrait. It should be distinguished from self-portraits in traditional photography by the fact that it is generally taken with a smartphone camera or front facing camera on your laptop or tablet. Small Business Trends CEO Anita Campbell asks whether these often-used photos really present the most professional impression of your business.

Franchise

This franchise could rock your world. See this post on the School of the Rock franchise, a unique business that combines music and creativity with a franchise model. The business offers camps and music lessons for rock musicians in training.

Reading via Shutterstock

The post Killer Brownies, YouTube Live Streaming and More appeared first on Small Business Trends.

When you think of Nokia, you think of Windows phones. That’s even more the case with the recently announced plans for Microsoft to acquire the Finnish company for $7.2 billion.

Nokia has certainly been responsible for its share of Windows devices. They include the Lumia 625, the company’s largest screened smartphone to date and possibly the world’s largest Windows phablet, the Lumia 1520.

And let’s not stop with Windows Phone devices. Nokia also recently made headlines by unveiling it’s first Windows tablet, the long-awaited 10.1-inch Lumia 2520, which runs on Windows RT.

So many might be surprised at news that Nokia continues to develop a new Android phone — and that Microsoft may actually be open to the idea.

Nokia Android Phone is Code Named Normandy

Photos of the new Nokia Android phone code named Normandy have appeared on well-known tech leak site @evleak, reports The Verge. (See the photo above.)

The device is described by sources as being similar in design to the company’s Lumia phone line, but created for a budget market like the company’s recent line of Asha phones.

It would have a modified version of Android similar to the modified versions Amazon has created for its mobile devices. And it would feature many popular apps available on other Android phones.

Most surprising, however, is that Microsoft might be willing to go ahead with the phone even if it takes over and starts operating Nokia before the new phone is released.

There are a couple of reasons Microsoft might not be adverse to the idea of a Nokia Android device, reports AllThingsD:

• First, the new design reportedly has a look and feel closer to Windows Phone, despite its operating system, and
• Second, the phone would deliver Microsoft services like Bing and Skype, and Microsoft may like the idea of a phone for Android users that doesn’t market the services of its rival Google.

Benefits for Small Businesses

If Microsoft lets the Nokia Android phone move forward, it may signal the beginning of the end of the fiefdoms large technology companies have created around their products.

Microsoft is already contemplating free licensing for its Windows Phone operating system. This could encourage more smartphone developers to incorporate Windows Phone making it available on more types of devices. It also frees small business 0wners from the difficulties of having to choose between their favorite operating system and their favorite hardware.

Image: @evleak

The post Nokia Develops Android Phone Despite Microsoft Deal appeared first on Small Business Trends.

UserVoice, creators of a platform that makes it easier for 150,000 companies of all sizes to respond quicker to customer needs and gather more feedback from them, was recently named winner of the 2013 CRM Idol contest.  CRM Idol is an annual competition among emerging customer-facing tech companies. The winner is selected by a panel of judges, experts and influencers in the CRM space, as well as by the online community of voters.

Richard White, CEO and Founder of UserVoice, shares his thoughts on how a small company can scale and build great relationships with thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers. He also talks about the role speed plays in keeping customers happy. And most of all, he explains how when you run an online software service or mobile app, how customer retention is paramount.

* * * * *

Small Business Trends: Tell us a little bit about what UserVoice does, and a little personal background.

Richard White: My personal background is really what I call design engineering. UserVoice came out of my struggles as someone who is a designer, working on software-as-a-service [SaaS] applications. I started working on SaaS applications at Y-Combinator companies back in 2005, 2006.

Even back then we really struggled with the same problem we're trying to solve with UserVoice today.  That is, how do we have conversations with our customers at what I call web scale?

It's not uncommon for a 20-person company to have 200,000 or two million users.

How do you support those users? But how do you also go beyond support, and actually have a good grip on what do our users want to do, how can we improve the product?

In SaaS, retention is everything — not necessarily acquisition. I mean acquisition is important, but retention's what can we do to build a really big business.

Part of retention is customer care and support.  But a bigger part of that is building the right product. A big part of that is understanding how to get feedback from users, and not just a vocal minority but a representative sample of your user base, and build the best product you can for them.

Small Business Trends: We’re hearing more and more the term, "in-app." What exactly does "in-app" mean?

Richard White: Traditionally, when you have a customer portal, a customer community, a survey, these things are only done off-app. What I mean is it's a separate site. There's a link in your footer that takes you off to another site, and that's where you get help.

Or there's an email that goes out and it takes you to a link, it takes you to the survey, and that's where you get the feedback. Our main problem with those kinds of approaches is that we know that were someone to click a link in a footer, if you take them to another site, you lose so much of your audience.

When we're servicing SaaS applications, people are already living inside your application. Why can't we get them the help at the point they're having the problem? That is in your application. Why can't we ask for their feedback directly where they're actually using the product or the piece of the product you want feedback on?

That can be a web app or a mobile app. If you're getting feedback, we want you to get it in-app. If someone has a problem, we want them just to be directly on that page, click a button, fire off that message, read a knowledge base article, you name it.

Small Business Trends:  Please explain the impact that in-app has.

Richard White: One of the first things we built with UserVoice were these little feedback tabs to put on the side of websites. We did that back in 2008. We built that because we found that people were just putting links in the footer that said, "Give us feedback."

The biggest problem we had was people clicking through those links and going off to the third party site. We wanted to give them a brain dead, simple way to tell people you really care about feedback.

That helped. With our latest batch of feedback, we're doing various different approaches to really get feedback. You can think of these as almost single question surveys in your app. Do you like this idea or this idea, how would you rate us, etc. etc.

We've seen in some cases a 700% improvement in the percentage of users engaging. Because what we find is when people have to have all this motivation to click off to a third-party site, you're only going to get what I call a vocal minority. Only the most passionate people will go off.

That may not always be the people you want to be listening to. The people that are really angry, or might be just your super-early adopters. Maybe you want to say hey, this quarter we want to focus on the feedback we're getting from our customers paying us over $100 a month that have been with us for six months.

We get I think about 7X the number of people engaging when the mechanisms are in-app, and we get just as much depth of engagement.

Small Business Trends: As subscription services grow, that means that people are going to have to really be into what customers want, and that means being able to effectively get the feedback on a continual basis, correct?

Richard White: The primary concern we're trying to deal with is 3% of our active users at any given time are contacting us for support. How do we stay on top of that?

We provide them some ways to do that. In some cases we've seen about 50% of inbound requests get an auto-suggested knowledgebase article, or an auto-suggested piece of feedback from another issue. It will deflect that issue, and you won't have to have a live person respond to it.

We can provide context to the agent and make it so they can answer the question very quickly. One of the things we've found is that when it does get to the agent and they are responding to it, in a web world, in the real time world we live in, people value expediency. They want an answer quickly.

We focus on agility. We have a huge ratio of end users to support agents.  We take this approach that we try to make it as email like as possible, and we have very simplistic opener, close statements. If you respond to a customer, we assume that if the customer still needs help, they'll contact you back.

This is different than the traditional resolution tracking and all these things. If you've got customers that are paying you thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a month, maybe you should take the time to follow up with them and make sure everything gets closed and everything gets resolved.   But in a consumer environment, that's just not possible. That's not scalable.  We've never really gone to a company that's consumer-focused – that doesn't have customers that are paying thousands of dollars a month – and seen them track resolution times effectively. We just don't think it's possible in the consumer environment.

What we have seen in the stats we do show is you get a disproportionate number of kudos if you respond within 15 minutes.  In this agile world of support that we really try to support, we focus on response times.

Resolution times are something that we think are more of a legacy concept, or more of a concept for when you have a much smaller user base, paying you much more money per person. Then maybe it's worth tracking. To the average web app company, and especially for the average mobile app company, it's not a good use of your time and energy.

Small Business Trends: What impact do you think Amazon's "Mayday" button may have on customer service going forward?

Richard White: Mobile apps are three to four years behind the Web in terms of customer care and in-app customer feedback. No one really put a lot of effort into it.

Up until about 12 or 18 months ago, most of the revenue in app stores — and you're talking about retail — but most revenue in app stores was from paid apps. Once you bought the app, there was very little incentive for the company to try to support you (as the customer). They've got your money, they've got maximum value from you.

Now in-app everyone's shifted to free-to-play in gaming and freemium for SaaS apps. You have the same problem you have on the Web, where only one in 10 people are going to convert with all of your app installs to a paying version, but you don't know which one in 10 they're going to be. You have to support all 10 of them.

That's creating this demand for more in-app customer service. The other thing that's going to create demand for more in-app customer service is things like this "Mayday" button actually raising the bar of people's expectations.

We see how quickly we as humans habituate new technologies. The iPhone is great for about two years, and then we're all bitching about how slow 3G is. I think what you'll see is gosh, look how great it is to shop on Amazon, it has a "Mayday" button. Why don't we have a "Mayday" button on every website?

I think there are economic reasons why people are already starting to invest in better in-app customer care and customer feedback in mobile apps, because of market dynamics. I think things like this sometimes have an even greater effect, because they change the customer's perception of what's possible, and raise the bar on what you should expect.

Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more?

Richard White: Uservoice.com. We've got all of our stuff on there. If you're also interested in these topics, we run a conference twice a year. Next one's going to be May in Chicago.

This interview on the customer survey experience is part of the One on One interview series with thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This transcript has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click on the player above.

The post Richard White of UserVoice: Customer Retention is EVERYTHING When You Run An Online Service appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Yep, the end of any year is hectic, crazy and disruptive but it's also a key time to review, refine and refocus on our accomplishments, changes and how we dealt with our challenges.

Ultimately, we should look mostly at the pluses, but be honest about the minuses and how they have held you back. There are always endless positive insights and lessons to be learned from them.

I don't do resolutions as they are too rigid for me.  I prefer setting my intentions, which are more fluid and allow me to decide what I would like to see happen, then set myself up and be ready for them to happen. I call it “active dreaming” which adds the “doing” to the dreaming.

I have to constantly be monitoring myself on several levels. Self appraisal with a healthy dose of honesty is a valuable tool. Developing our EQ (Emotional Quotient) is a huge asset in business success in addition to our IQ.

Our professional success is only possible if our house is in order. We need to know ourselves, change ourselves when it's called for and trust ourselves more than we sometimes do.

According to Talent Smart, 90% of high performers at the work place possess high EQ, while 80% of low performers have low EQ. Emotional Intelligence is absolutely essential in the formation, development, maintenance and enhancement of close personal relationships.

Below are eight items to review, refine and refocus that can jump start any year.

Your New Year Business Review

Work Life Balance

All work and no play, or too much play and not enough work, definitely impacts our happiness and success.

Trying to put into place your best balance is an effort whose value we should never underestimate.

Health and Wellness

It is ultimately your responsibility to take care of yourself. Employee wellness is a top priority now, as it can cost companies $23 billion each year, according to the Wall Street Journal, and impacts hiring and retention.

Healthier employees make more productive workers. Take a look at these 46 healthiest companies to work for and what they are doing.

Coping Skills

How are your coping skills?

All of us go through uncertainty, health issues, sudden change and other life events that we must be able to work through. What are the best coping activities and mechanisms you have in place and what do you need to do to refine them?

We can never have too many coping skills.

Skill Gaps

Career retention and job search change are ongoing. Make sure you are qualified for the jobs you want and the one you currently have. Don’t fall behind, stay ahead.

Upgrade both your hard and soft skills, especially if you are in technology, healthcare, medical and professional services. Develop more likeability, be more of a team player and take more initiatives to develop leadership.

People who show thoughtful initiative will be rewarded.

Relationships

Networking and making quality connections both online and in person are the most non-negotiable part of standing out as an employee or small business owner. Focus on the pillar social media marketing tactics including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, blogging and eMarketing and go out and meet people in person and at local and national events.

Show up, connect, engage and grow relationships daily. Find the time, make the time, invest more time and be selective.

Resentments

Get rid of them, work through them, resolve them and let them go. They are not productive or good energy to hold onto.

Intentions

What do you want to see happen in your life this year? What do you need to do to make them happen?

Move yourself in the direction you want to go. Your career path is your responsibility. Set the tasks, timelines and tone, which will impact the outcome.

Optimism and Kindness

These two assets are capable of changing anything and everything and building so much good faith and good will.

Be willing to uncover everything  you need to know about yourself to get your house in order, inside and out and continue to refine your who, what and why.

Big commitment – but even bigger payoff.

Review Photo via Shutterstock

The post 8 Things to Review, Refine and Refocus for Any New Year appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Recently, I was reading a blog that was talking about innovating. This company did this, this company did that – that sort of thing. It was a fun read, and certainly inspiring.

But then the author ended by basically suggesting if you did these things you’d be innovative too.

Wait – what?!

I don’t mean to sound like a third grader, but that’s not really innovating – that’s copying.

The good news is, this article did inspire me to create a cartoon on this topic. . .in an innovative way.

The post Innovate Err…Like Everyone Else Is Doing It appeared first on Small Business Trends.

With just a few days left in 2013, we’re now looking ahead to 2014 and the events to come.  We expect to update in the coming week or two, but for now, please check out the list of small business events, conferences, seminars, context and awards for 2014.

Welcome to our latest curated list of events, contests and awards for small businesses, solo entrepreneurs and growing companies. To see a full list or to submit your own event, contest or award listing, visit the Small Business Events Calendar.

Featured Events, Contests and Awards

Affiliate Management Days San Francisco 2014
March 19, 2014, San Francisco, CA

AM Days is the must attend event for affiliate managers who are responsible for their company’s affiliate marketing strategy, management and operations. Whether you have an existing affiliate program or you are creating a new initiative, AMDays offers you valuable insight into how other online retailers are successfully implementing and managing their affiliate programs. Topics include: Affiliate program set up; Affiliate recruitment techniques; Affiliate marketing fraud; M-commerce; and much more.
Hashtag: #AMDays

ICON14 by Infusionsoft
April 23, 2014, Phoenix, AZ

#ICON14 is the eighth annual conference for small business, hosted by Infusionsoft (previously called Infusioncon). Over 3,000 attendees expected. Confirmed speakers include Seth Godin, JJ Ramberg and Peter Shankman.

Hashtag: #ICON14
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More Events

• Aspen Global Investment Forum
  January 06, 2014, Aspen, CO
• Google Analytics Grand Tour: Roadmap to Collecting, Reporting and Analyzing Data
  January 07, 2014, Uniontown, OH
• Consumer Electronics Show 2014
  January 07, 2014, Las Vegas, NV
• SYMPOSIA::2014 Conference for Women Entrepreneurs
  January 10, 2014, San Francisco, CA
• Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry: Creating What Will Be
  January 13, 2014, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
• Kick Off The New Year: Business & Entrepreneur Networking Mixer
  January 14, 2014, New York City, New York/USA
• Small Business Expo 2013 – Miami
  January 16, 2014, Miami, FL
• Road Map to HIPAA Compliance – Webinar
  January 16, 2014, Online
• Take Action. Get A SLAP: Create A One-Year Growth Plan For Your Business
  January 23, 2014, Online
• Outlook Tips for Finance Professionals
  January 28, 2014, Online
• HIPAA Compliance: Managing the Business Associates Relationship ‘Safely’ Webinar
  January 29, 2014, Online
• Mastering the HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules
  January 30, 2014, Online
• Appreciative Inquiry Facilitator Training (AIFT)
  February 10, 2014, Las Vegas, NV
• Small Bytes & Apps
  February 22, 2014, Cambridge, MA
• 18th Annual North American Shared Services & Outsourcing Week
  March 12, 2014, Orlando, FL
• Conversion Conference West 2014 San Francisco
  March 17, 2014, San Francisco, CA
• International Conference on E-Technologies and Business on the Web
  March 18, 2014, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
• Second International Conference on Green Computing, Technology and Innovation
  March 18, 2014, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
• International Conference on Technological Advances in Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering
  March 18, 2014, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
• SPREE 2014 – Specialty Retail Entrepreneur Expo & Conference
  April 08, 2014, Las Vegas, NV

More Contests

• SBA’s National Small Business Week Awards
  January 17, 2014, Online
• DREAM BIG Small Business of the Year Award
  February 03, 2014, Online

This weekly listing of small business events, contests and awards is provided as a community service by Small Business Trends and SmallBizTechnology.

The post Our Last Events List of 2013 appeared first on Small Business Trends.

We’ve looked around the online business community again this week and scooped up some helpful tidbits. We’ll be sharing them with you this week as always. And check out the information below for more on how to get involved with making our community news reports more helpful.

15 Tools to Improve your Conversion (J Plus Media Solutions)

Different online businesses will likely define conversion in different ways. To some, it means visitors buy something while on your site or email you about your services. To other, it just means getting people to sign up for your newsletter. In either case, this list of tools from Adam Connell may help you get more.

How to Identify a Difficult Customer (Mosiac Networx)

When you first met with them, they seemed like the perfect fit for your company. But all of that has changed. Today they treat your firm with condescension and lack of respect. Here’s how to spot this kind of customer ahead of time.

Wearable Technology will Change your Business (Get Saga Blog)

They include smartwatches, Google Glass and other devices that may not have gotten as much coverage in the news. This may have been the year of wearable technology, writes Kevin Rexroat. It is a movement likely to change our business and personal lives in the years to come.

8 Digital Marketing Firms Have Holiday Fun (Marketing Land)

An important part of effective marketing is letting customers know a bit more about your business’s personality. Matt McGee shares eight examples of video hijinx for the holidays from some prominent marketing firms.

Now You Can Buy a Starbucks Franchise — in Europe (The Franchise King)

Franchise King Joel Libava has some exciting news. For the longest time he’s been telling those interested in buying a Starbucks franchise that know such opportunities exist. But all of that had changed now. If, of course, you live in UK and France.

Using LinkedIn for Content Marketing (Link Humans)

Content marketing is a huge part of the use of social media. Few think about LinkedIn as a marketing channel. It seems more like a networking channel for professionals. But before you assume this is the case, have a look at this post.

A Guide to Weekly Roundups (The Practicing IT Project Manager)

OK. We thought this one was interesting. Of course, Small Business Trends isn’t the only website to publish weekly news roundups. Here’s blogger Dave Gordon’s guide to the preparation of his weekly roundup. Perhaps we can pick up some tips as well!

Google Plus Post Ads Unveiled (Search Influence)

Thanks to Will Scott for this post on a new advertising option over at Google Plus. Have you heard of the Post Ads yet? Supposedly, they are a completely different animal than the sponsored posts on Facebook and Twitter. Check it out.

Communities are a Great Place to Get Information (BizSugar)

Communities are not just great places to network and share your marketing message. They can also be great places to share valuable information. Here BizSugar member Becky Holsen posts some cool information on where to get photos for your blog or other business website. Very helpful. Thanks, Becky!

If you’d like to help us create a better community news and information roundup, we’re always open to suggestions. Just email us at sbtips@gmail.com with suggestions. Or submit your content to the BizSugar.com community. We often listen in to the site for more on what the small business community is talking about. So feel free to join in.

Business tablet via Shutterstock

The post Improve Conversion, Spot Difficult Customers and More appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Comedian Jack Vale (pictured above) recently took to the streets of California to freak out unsuspecting pedestrians. Vale simply searched for social media posts around his current location and then did some research on the users to make them think he knew the personal details of their lives. You can view the entire prank in the video below.

While the prank was made for entertainment, it has raised some concerns about social media privacy. If it's so easy for someone to learn these details on social media, maybe some people aren't doing enough to protect their information.

Here are a few tips to help you protect your personal information on social media.

1. Monitor Yourself

Set up a Google alert for your name and/or business name so that you know if anyone is using your information inappropriately. It can also help you monitor your online reputation.

2. Review Your Settings

In a post on Social Media Today, Mike Johansson suggests:

"Understanding your FB settings may take 30 minutes one day, but it will be the best half hour you spend on yourself on the social network."

Facebook, for example, automatically sets your posts and profile information to public. So if you want only friends or certain people to see your information, you'll need to go into your settings and change them. Other sites also allow you to make private profiles or protect posts from certain users. Take at least a few minutes when signing up to review the settings and decide how to best use them.

3. Control Tagged Posts

Some sites, like Facebook, allow others to tag you in photos or posts that then appear on your own profile. To avoid these tagged posts accidentally giving away your location while you’re on vacation or traveling for business, The Nationwide Blog recommends:

"Prevent tagged posts from automatically appearing on your timeline by enabling the timeline review control. Then you can approve pictures snapped by friends or family during vacation after you get home."

[Image: Facebook]

For other platforms that may not have the same settings, consider just talking to your friends and family to go over any guidelines for tagging you in posts or photos.

4. Use Caution With Location Based Apps

Checking in at local businesses and other locations can help you interact with brands and like-minded individuals. But letting people know where you are at all times can also be an obvious privacy concern. If you're worried about people knowing your current location, but you still want to check in, doing so right before you leave can help you interact while still enjoying some privacy in person. You should also regularly monitor which apps have access to your location data on your mobile device. As Jonny Evans of Computerworld reports.

"It's important to understand that when you allow a third-party app or website to use your information on an Apple product you become subject to the terms of service and privacy policies of those applications."

5. Protect Your Mobile Devices

Mobile devices can hold so much personal data. It's important to have a plan in place for if your device is lost or stolen so your information doesn't end up in the wrong hands. Apps and programs like Norton Mobile Security or Google Sync can help you track your device or wipe your information if lost. You should also consider using a password to get into your device.

6. Use Two-Step Verification

Some programs like Gmail give you the option to use a two-factor login system. This often means that sites will require you use both your computer and phone to sign into your account. Taking advantage of this makes it twice as hard for people to hack into your accounts and get access to your information.

[Image: Google]

Dave Lewis of CSO Online explains:

"Two factor authentication is not the be all end all of authentication measures, but it sure beats using just a simple password."

7. Consider Your Browser

Cookies and browser history are directly tied to online privacy. So clearing them regularly is a must. But you should also be aware of your preferred browser's policies on cookies. An infographic at WhoIsHostingThis.com outlines some of the other factors that impact online privacy, such the kind of browsers we choose to search the Web. For example, the WhoIsHostingThis.com team suggests concerned individuals stay away from Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari, suggesting:

"'Private browsing' and 'incognito mode' on these browsers still use cookies to track what you're searching online."

Instead, the site’s team recommends opting for Mozilla Firefox, Opera, or Tor.

[Image: WhoIsHostingThis.com]

8. Be Careful What You Share

Aside from not wanting your personal information out there for all to see, sharing certain tidbits with a large audience (like your Facebook connections or Twitter followers) can invite hackers and compromise your accounts. An official post at the Microsoft Safety & Security Center recommends:

“A common way that hackers break into financial or other accounts is by clicking the "Forgot your password?" link on the account login page. To break into your account, they search for the answers to your security questions, such as your birthday, home town, high school class, or mother's middle name."

So consider the information from such questions, and other personal tidbits, very carefully before broadcasting them on social media.

9. Don't Blindly Click Links

Links in messages and posts on social networking sites aren't always what they seem. Hackers and others trying to gain personal information can lure unsuspecting users into giving away their passwords and other data. Online security experts at Kaspersky Lab recently told Telegraph Media Group:

"Scammers use numerous techniques to get people to give away their Facebook logins. Clicking on an email link entitled ‘Facebook Christmas Specials’, for example, could open a fake Facebook portal in which users are required to enter their login details."

10. Log Out

Staying logged into your social accounts and having them remember your passwords is certainly convenient. But it also leaves you vulnerable for anyone who uses or gains access to your device to use your accounts and find your personal data. To combat this, log in and out of your accounts each time you use them, and use particular caution on public or shared devices.

Image: Jack Vale Films

The post 10 Tips for Greater Online Privacy appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Selecting a unique business book is difficult sometimes. Some topics require a lengthy treatment that may not fit into a busy schedule. Others are given too few pages to offer much insight on a topic.

But some authors hit that perfect balance, short enough for the busy small business person and yet the perfect length to deal with the subject matter effectively. That's the case with “Revenue and The CMO: How Marketing Will Impact Revenue Through Big Data and Social Selling…and How To Get Started“.

The author Glenn Gow (@CrimsonCEO) addresses big data needs from the perspective of a company’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Gow is more than a business expert. He is also CEO of Crimson Marketing, a fast-growing Inc. 500 technology marketing firm. My review e-copy arrived courtesy of the Crimson team.

A Case Study and Lessons Learned

This book is a short read – 90 pages – with half of that dedicated to a case study and half made up of lessons learned. The case study is a story about a CMO, Mary, who is frustrated with being under-appreciated. A conversation with the VP of Sales, Sal, leads to an examination of how to fix a three quarter sales decline at the company. They rely on developing a pilot for a social selling program meant to improve the sales team's engagement with customers in the sales cycle.

At first blush, I'll admit I felt some uncertainty about the content's value relative to today's technological landscape. Most discussions about big data these days are a bit more technical and difficult to handle adequately in such a short treatment. For a while, part of me wished Gow had chosen a more pressing big data issue. Examples might include the problems posed by the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement or the challenge of integrating a new database into a legacy database structure.

But ultimately I got what Gow was attempting to do with this book. The text speaks to sales teams that are impacted by customer response to multichannel marketing. Thus Gow’s approach differs from the detailed strategy provided in books like “Islands of Profit In a Sea of Red Ink.” It simplifies just enough to recommend steps regardless of technological specifics. For example, read how Gow views the role of the marketer in almost any organization:

"Marketers are in a unique position to bridge the gap for your company's sales force. You have the power to enable your sales reps to be trusted advisors to your buyers."

Customers are receiving information through numerous sources. This impacts the sales funnels, and forces sales reps to adjust their tactics around three customer actions – trigger, research, and purchase. That impact may be driven by social media and big data. But working out the organizational details to handle it can best be done by leveraging your people. Make sure they’re on board with the changes that need to be made. That will make your tech decisions a bit easier to address.

This approach works particularly well for workplaces resistant to change. As an example, Gow notes steps for a social selling pilot that addresses said resistance. Look at this tip regarding setting up responsibility for the pilot.

"Since marketing already owns the information flow and infrastructure required for the social selling pilot, and since marketing will be doing the bulk of process development and training, it makes sense for marketing to run the PMO. However, we recommend that the V.P. of Sales be the executive sponsor of the pilot. This lets the sales team know this isn't just some side effort – their V.P. is sponsoring, so it's important."

If your sales team is really stuck – or seeing declining sales as described in the case study – you'll find the latter half of the book particularly worthwhile. The tips focus more on organizational hazards that occur way before the any discussion of changing the way your company’s data is shared or any other technical consideration. And Gow does note the value of optimizing a sales force. Indeed the opening pages note a statistic about how sales intelligence increases revenue.

Bottom line: you’ll likely find this book a helpful aid for on-the-go marketers, sales teams, and managers. The book's short and concise approach makes it  a good supplement for slightly more detailed sales books such as “How To Sell When No One is Buying” or a book on teamwork such as “Shortcut.” Use “Revenue and The CMO” as a way to open a dialogue about the changes that need to be made in your data management strategy.

The post “Revenue and The CMO” Provides Case Study Worth Reading appeared first on Small Business Trends.

There have been many companies jumping on the smartwatch bandwagon since the introduction of the Pebble.

But so far, one company has clearly led the way in the development of smartglasses. In fact, Google has been so closely associated with the smartglass revolution that one tech writer coined the term glogging to describe blogging with Google Glass.

Of course, all of that may be about to change.

Atheer Labs Introduces Immersive Experience

The word you hear repeated most often by developers at Athere Labs to describe their new smartglass prototypes is “immersive.” And a glimpse of what the company says these devices can do certainly seems to bear that out.

Check out this video shared with the Indiegogo community, where Athere Labs is trying to raise $100,000 for release of two devices (nearly $83,000 has already been raised) :

Google Glass offers a computer display projected against one lens of the wearable glasses. The device allows you to check online information and control the taking of point-of-view video and photos.

The new devices from Athere create a 3D experience with a 36 degree field of vision. The glasses create the impression of a tablet display screen floating just in front of your eyes.

The 3D effect is visible through both lenses on the devices. And gesture recognition technology even makes it possible for you to scroll through online documents, turn pages and do searches with a swipe of your finger.

New Adhere Devices Set for 2014 Release

A consumer device called the Athere One starts at $350 and can be pre-ordered now on the company website for estimated shipment in late 2014. The device allows you to connect to an Android smartphone and use it to access online information, games and even videos.

Developers say connecting with an Android device means you have access to around 800,000 apps in the Android app store.

A developer version of the glasses called simply the “Developer Kit” starts at $850. And it should be available in early 2014. It comes with USB and other connections designed so that developers can hook up a tablet and use it to develop new applications.

A Truly Mobile Business Tool

Just based on initial impressions, it looks as if the new devices may have real potential as business tools.

While news on Google Glass has focused mainly around its ability to capture images and to be a source of multitasking distraction, the Athere devices may be different.

There have been stories of Google Glass users being banned from businesses due to privacy concerns. And there has even been one run-in with the law by a Google Glass wearer.

However, Athere developers have focused on accessing data rather than taking photos or video. There is no way to use the new devices while driving or performing any other activity. However, there may be a benefit for business owners away from the office to be able to immerse themselves in important work online. And that’s without the need to carry a laptop or even a tablet along.

Image: Athere Labs

The post New Smartglasses Raise Nearly $83,000, Rival Google Glass appeared first on Small Business Trends.

When Anant Vats was working for Infosys in Houston, he once took the bus with some friends to go to dinner in town.

Suddenly, an old lady sitting next to them asked them if they could fix her computer. Pleasantly surprised at this request, Anant asked her what led her to believe they could.

"Because you are Indian!" she said.

The incident stuck in Anant's mind. So two years later, when he quit his job at Infosys, it was to co-found Techieworks, a venture that fixes computers remotely for seniors in the U.S. and Canada.

More Seniors Online

The need to keep in touch with family and friends is leading an increasing number of seniors to use the Internet. A Pew Research Center report says that more than half of American adults over 65 years of age are active online.

Nearly 86% use e-mail for communication, with 48% accessing it every day. More than 39 million from this group use social networking sites such as Facebook, Skype, and Twitter. Their presence on social networking sites such as Facebook has tripled to 43% during the last four years making them one of the fastest growing demographics in this space.

However, they are often at a loss when they encounter technical problems.

It was to solve these problems specifically that led Vats and his brother, Abhinav, an advertising and copywriting professional, to found Techieworks in 2011.

Based in Gurgaon, India, the company offers remote technical assistance services including PC optimization, anti-virus support, operating system support and troubleshooting. The company also helps with data backup, transfer of contacts and multimedia from phone to PC, application installation, home or office network setup and and other tech updates.

Need for Online Technical Help Grows

Techieworks is not alone in providing online tech help.

There are several remote technical support firms operating out of India. But what sets Techieworks apart is its specific targeting of the senior niche.

The company is sensitive to the needs of its ideal customers and so has evolved an intuitive, simple service model.

It offers multiple touch-points to reach out to customers eliminating the need to remember and write down numbers. It also offers chat support for customers who find it difficult to talk. And it eliminates waiting queues by allowing customers to leave a request to be called back.

Bootstrapping Model Leads to Profitability

The two brothers bootstrapped the company with their own funds.

They hired their first two employees in a coffee shop even before they had any office space. And they pushed themselves to be austere in their expenditures by using second hand furniture and by renting IT infrastructure instead of buying new.

The money they saved was used to build their knowledge and expertise in areas where they could gain a competitive edge. The company is currently generating revenue and profitable. And it owes this profitability to the cost-saving methods established in its early days.

What Comes Next?

So, what's next for Techieworks? Vats says the company will continue to offer new products and services that address the needs of the senior market.

The company is not yet ready to look for external funding. And Vats says he believes that external investors take the fun and freedom out of building a company.

The founder adds that he does not harbor dreams of becoming a multimillionaire overnight. Though making more money is certainly a consideration, he says he wants to be in a situation where he can decide the kind of culture he will build for the members of the Techieworks family.

As a fan of bootstrapping entrepreneurs, I am delighted to see a company generating revenue and reaching profitability without external financing. And the secret is catering to the needs of an under-served segment.

Senior on laptop image via Shutterstock

The post Techieworks: Providing Seniors with Online Tech Help appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Marketing has gotten complex. But who says you have to be implementing every single marketing technique or social media platform? Granted, there are many experts extolling the virtues of this strategy or that platform, but no one is telling you to use them all.   In 2014 consider SIMPLIFYING your marketing.

In fact, if you were to just choose ONE major marketing strategy, you would have more than enough tactics to keep you busy for years. Let's take content marketing as an example.  And what better place to learn about content marketing than a good reading list.

Here are the Small Business Trends Editorial Team picks for best content marketing books published originally or in a new edition during 2013:

List of 2013′s Best Content Marketing Books

1. Epic Content Marketing

by Joe Pulizzi (@JoePulizzi) (Sep 3, 2013)

It's not enough to simply throw content out onto the Internet and expect that customers will see it and connect to it. You need more than that.

This book is a great resource for marketing managers and small business owners who would like to use content marketing as a way to gain visibility for your business. You will find everything you need to get started here. (Read our review.)

You will learn to define your niche, revise your mission statement, and differentiate content types and content assets. You will also learn how to use social media to market your content and be introduced to some other content promotion techniques as well. And you will learn how to measure the impact of your content marketing initiatives to determine whether they have been successful.

2. The New Rules of Marketing & PR

by David Meerman Scott (@dmscott) (Jul 1, 2013)

This is a classic! It is now in its 4th edition.

It contains updates on all of the basic social media channels as well as new case studies and examples.

You'll learn the best and most successful practices in social media, blogging, video and audio as well as the latest content marketing strategies.

This is a comprehensive content marketing guide for small business owners.  Every marketing department/person in a small business should have this on the shelf.

3. Content Marketing: Insider’s Secret to Online Sales & Lead Generation

by Rick Ramos (@ricktramos) (Jul 10, 2013)

If you've chosen content marketing as a strategy for getting the word out about your business, but are unsure of exactly what is involved, this is a great place to start.

Ramos, an online marketer himself, shares everything you need to know to develop a comprehensive content marketing strategy for your business.

Some of the topics include finding your online voice, choosing your channels, developing content calendars and providing insider tips and tricks for creating killer content.

4. 500 Social Media Marketing Tips 

by Andrew Macarthy (@andrewmacarthy) (Feb 7, 2013)

If you'd rather be in the trenches DOING social media rather than just thinking or reading about it, this might be the book for you.

It contains 500 practical tips that you can put to use in minutes. You'll get strategies for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Vine and a few more.

Included are also templates and a general strategy for social media success. You’ll find this truly readable book full of ideas that will get you ready to reap the benefits of social media for your business.

5. The Big Book of Content Marketing

by Andreas Ramos (@andreas_ramos99) (May 26, 2013)

Done right, content marketing can help you both build your brand and attract your ideal customers.

This book will help you get that process started. Or if you've already started and want to improve your strategy, the Big Book of Content Marketing will help you do that too. In its pages you’ll learn to determine how content marketing fits into your overall strategy, use influencer marketing to distribute your content, and track the success of your strategy.

6. Content to Commerce

by Avi Savar (@avisavar) (May 20, 2013)

If you have already implemented a content marketing strategy and are looking for some ideas to help you take your efforts to the next level, this is a good choice.

This book gives you more of a 30,000 foot view of content marketing and contains essays from successful strategists and marketers who have used these strategies to propel big brands to success.

7. Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype

by Jay Baer (@jaybaer) (Jun 27, 2013)

You already know that selling to existing customers is the best and highest use of your marketing dollars and efforts.

This book shows you how to transform your marketing content from being "hype" focused to being "help" focused. Baer asks the pivotal question for today's content-focused marketing strategists.

"What if instead of trying to be amazing, you tried to be useful?"This book will show you how to transform your marketing content from being salesy to being helpful and in-turn generating more profitable customers.

8. How to Write Articles That Convert Like Crazy 

by Ian Hollander (Jan 24, 2013)

The subtitle to this book is:  ”The Secret To Turning Your Ideas into Income …. & Your Content into CASH!”

From that subtitle, you might think this was going to be a totally cheesy Kindle book — but you’d be wrong.

Yes, it’s self-published and not as polished as some of the other books on this list.  But it’s also only $2.99, so you won’t be risking much.

Read this short and easy-to-scan book to harvest the straight-forward ideas.  For a small business owner or entrepreneur on a budget, who writes a blog or submits guest articles, this book has practical advice you can put to work immediately.

9. The Invisible Sale

by Tom Martin (Oct 4, 2013)

Content marketing isn't just for writers. It's a good strategy for people who hate cold calling.

So many small business owners run away from selling. But you can't afford to do that.

This 200+ page book contains four sections that overlay a common selling cycle on top of powerful content marketing strategies that will help you reach out to customers and generate leads for your business without cold calling.

10. Subliminally Exposed

by Steven Dayan MD (Jun 4, 2013)

Subliminally Exposed isn't a marketing book per se, but no marketer should ignore it. Author Steven Dayan, MD reveals the how and why behind your actions and empowers you to decode and translate others' subconscious behaviors.

No, this isn’t likely to be a book on the radar of your typical marketing professional. But it's loaded with interesting facts that will help you better understand social dynamics of all kinds. It could also help you attract your ideal customer, too.

Think of content not just as words, but as images, too.  If you want to know how to push the right buttons to engage the interest of customers, this is the book.

* * * * *

While some of these content marketing books may not be best sellers, they each offer something of value for those intent on becoming expert content marketers.

We limited this list to books new (or newly updated) in 2013.  If you’re looking for older content marketing books, take a look at a previous list of content marketing books.

Content image via Shutterstock

The post 10 Best Content Marketing Books for Small Businesses of 2013 appeared first on Small Business Trends.

There are several reasons to consider creating a greener business.

They can include things like saving money and, of course, just a basic concern for the environment.

But Kurt Kessner and Alline Anderson (pictured above), co-owners of the Milkweed Merchantile Eco Inn and Organic Cafe, have  discovered there is something more. It can be a profitable way to distinguish your business too.

The inn is built with reclaimed wood and insulated with straw bales (a waste product from local farmers). The roof is made of metal from recycled cars and is designed to  collect rainwater for drinking, cooking and bathing.

Food served at the bed and breakfast and at the environmentally friendly cafe is organic and most comes from local farmers. One specialty is the cafe’s signature pizza served every Wednesday. The pizza features dough and even feta and mozzarella cheese made locally.

And all vehicles in the inn’s compound are either 100 percent biodiesle or electric.

See more about the Milkweed Merchantile in the YouTube video created to showcase the business below.

The environmentally friendly bed and breakfast recently was named one of the nation’s top three green businesses for travel and transportation by Green America.

The national non-profit supports environmentally friendly businesses with an annual People & Planet Award recognizing the nation’s top 12 environmentally and socially responsible businesses.

Owners Kessner and Anderson received a $5000 prize in addition to the recognition.

Anderson says the money will be invested to continue the business’s growth which, she says, includes education of consumers and others.

Anderson told Green America on the organization’s official Website:

“The funds will go a long way in our efforts to demonstrate that a sustainable life is about joy, community, a real sense of connection, hope, and of course, great food!”

She said one goal was to further promote the business’s branded line of jams and pickles created with ingredients from local farmers and gardeners.

Bottom line: you may never have thought of creating a greener business as a form of marketing. But Kessner and Anderson’s experience proves this approach can be a simple solution when targeting the right customers.

Image: Milkweed Merchantile

The post Green Bed and Breakfast Wins $5000 Award appeared first on Small Business Trends.

As proven by this year's holiday shopping season, technology is reshaping the way customers find and purchase products. And research indicates those trends are likely to continue. So they should be reflected in your marketing plan for the coming year. Here are some related predictions about where marketing is headed in 2014.

Native Advertising Grows

Traditional forms of advertising rarely draw in customers in the Information Age. With new information inundating us daily, forms of advertising such as display ads only average a 0.1% click-through rate, with 85% of clicks delivered by 8% of the online population. However, native advertising, in which content is integrated into the user's online experience, is much more successful. IPG Media Lab and Sharethrough found that when compared to display ads, consumers looked at native ads 53% more frequently. Additionally, consumers were 18% more likely to purchase the advertised product with native ads.

So what are the different types of native ads you can invest in? One popular subset is content marketing, in which businesses produce relevant branded content that consumers actually want to read. These include blogs, articles, and white papers.  90% of customers consider this type of content useful, and among B2B businesses, 93% plan to use content marketing in 2014. Forbes predicts that content marketing in 2014 will be more strategic and professional, so be sure to invest the necessary time and money for a well-planned content marking initiative.

Another type of native advertising is promoted tweets, trends, and stories on social media. As advertising on these sites becomes more prevalent in 2014 and beyond, it will be harder and harder for businesses to promote themselves for free. This expense might be difficult for small businesses on a limited budget. However, this strategy does work. A recent study found that promoted Tweets increased brand conversation and drove offline sales.

Image Marketing Matures

While the big social media sites (Facebook, Twitter) have a mixture of text and image content, the new sites on the rise (Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Buzzfeed) are almost entirely image-based. And businesses are increasingly marketing on these new sites. A study by Simply Measured found that "71 percent of the world's largest brands have adopted Instagram"– and that number is only predicted to grow in 2014.

Why the rise in images? Well, for one thing many people learn visually, so images are the best way for them to process new information. But the reason for the recent surge probably has more to do with the ease with which photos and videos can be optimized on mobile devices. In fact, video now accounts for 90% of all Internet traffic and 50% of mobile traffic. And search engines now reflect this shift, with Google highlighting image search results to the top of the page. So to attract consumer attention, you need to integrate visuals into next year's marketing strategy.

Still not convinced of the power of images? A mom and her teenage daughter started a local teen trend website, and they received 10,000 visitors in a month just by posting a single image to Pinterest.  Now that number is up to 120,000 average visitors per month. Huffington Post has the details on this story and how you can better leverage Pinterest for your organization.

Mobile Traffic Becomes Critical

Mobile traffic is increasingly important in business marketing. According to the Walker Sands Quarterly Mobile Traffic Report, 28% of website traffic now originates from mobile devices, and that number is only predicted to grow in 2014. So it is more important than ever that your company's website be optimized for mobile viewing – whether that means creating a separate mobile version or investing in responsive web design. The Search Engine Journal has these great tips on how to make your website mobile-friendly if you want a good kick-start.

But its not enough to have a functioning site, you should be investing in mobile-centered marketing initiatives. For example, mobile geo-targeting, which allows companies to send relevant messages based on their location, is predicted to account for one half of mobile advertising dollars by 2017. And it's well worth the investment. Geo-targeting can help you target your advertising within a specific area, and perhaps more importantly, help you determine the interests, shopping habits, and demographics of your potential customers.

As these trends demonstrate, customers have numerous platforms and devices by which to interact with your brand, so you have to be cross-pollinating and compatible with all of them. Business Insider reports that perhaps the biggest challenge for businesses in 2014 will be to find a way to track customers across all of these channels. But once you figure out the best strategy for your company, you’ll get a fuller picture of customer shopping habits and see more effective marketing results in the long run.

Customers go mobile photo via Shutterbug

The post Technology Drives Marketing Predictions for 2014 appeared first on Small Business Trends.

It's the part of our jobs every small business owner hates – dealing with a problem employee.

Whatever the reason, whether you dislike confrontation or worry about getting sued, you can't ignore employee problems, or they will just get bigger and potentially threaten your entire business. Fortunately, there are some simple steps you can take to protect your business legally, while also correcting a problem employee's poor behavior.

The moment you hire your first employee, you need to create a written employee policy that documents your rules and expectations for the workplace. It should also state what actions (such as theft) would be grounds for dismissal. Have all employees read and sign a copy.

Successfully Correcting a Problem Employee

When a problem does arise, start by getting the facts. Talk to other employees to see what's going on and document the issues as objectively as possible.

Then it's time to talk to the person. To stay on the right side of the law when it comes to discipline, you should have a progressive discipline policy that gives employees opportunities to correct their behaviors. Start with a discussion of the issue and a verbal warning, and set a date by which the behavior needs to be corrected.

The goal is to work out problems and hopefully keep the employee on board. Work with him or her to create a plan for how to improve. Getting the employee's input makes him or her more invested in the outcome.

If the behavior still doesn't improve, escalate your discipline to a written warning, which documents the problem and its duration, specifies how long the employee has to correct the problem and details what will happen if it's still not fixed. You and the employee should both sign this.

Depending on your employee policies, how severe the issue is and whether the employee is really trying to improve or not, you may do multiple written warnings before (in the worst case) terminating an employee. However, by implementing progressive discipline early and correctly, hopefully you never come to that point.

If you have any doubts or questions about discipline and termination, be sure to consult with an attorney who is familiar with your state's employment laws.

This article, provided by Nextiva, is republished through a content distribution agreement. The original can be found here.

Disciplining Photo via Shutterstock

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The number of employed Americans rose from 144,144,000 in October 2013 to 144,775,000 in November 2013, an increase of 631,000, according to Federal government data.

That's good news. More people going back to work is something that everyone – left, right and center – agrees is good for the country.

But a closer look at the data shows that the employment situation isn't as good for those Americans in business for themselves as for those who work for others. Hidden in the rise in the number of employed Americans is another trend. It’s a divergence between what has happened to people working for themselves (what economists call the self-employed) as compared to those working for others (what economists call the wage-employed).

Last month, the number of wage-employed Americans increased by 673,000, while the number of self-employed Americans declined by 42,000. (Wage employment is total employment minus the sum of incorporated and unincorporated self-employment.)

This divergence isn't just a one-month aberration. Consider what has happened over the last year. From November 2012 to November 2013, the number of Americans working for others rose by 1,451,000. But, over the same period, the number of self-employed Americans fell by 225,000.

Both wage and self-employment took a similar-sized hit during the Great Recession, with self-employment dropping 5.5 percent between November 2007 and November 2009. During the same period, wage employment declined by a comparable 5.4 percent. But since then the recovery has been uneven. Wage employment has nearly returned to levels seen before the economic downturn. In November 2013, it was only 0.8 percent lower than it was in November 2007. By contrast, self-employment has declined further, and is now 8.1 percent below its November 2007 level.

The divergence in wage and self-employment means that fewer Americans are in business for themselves now than before the Great Recession. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data reveal that 6 percent of the American population is now self-employed, versus 6.9 percent six years ago. While a difference of 0.9 percentage points might not sound like a lot, it is. If the same fraction of the population was self-employed today as six years ago, 2,223,000 more Americans would currently be self-employed.

The history of self-employment over the past six years stands in sharp contrast to what happened over the previous seven. From November 2000 to November 2007, the number of self-employed Americans increased by 10.9 percent, while the number of U.S. wage-employed rose by only 6.6 percent.

If policy makers are as interested in self-employment as they seem to be at election time, they might take a look at what's been different over the past six years versus the previous seven. The earlier period was far more favorable to self-employment than the latter one. Perhaps a change in policies is responsible.

Self-Employed Photo Via Shutterstock

The post The Era of Declining Self-Employment appeared first on Small Business Trends.

There’s plenty of lip service in Washington about creating a better climate for startups and small businesses. So it’s disappointing to hear that a law designed to do just that is stalled indefinitely thanks to political posturing.

But that’s exactly what seems to be happening with the Small Business Capital Access and Job Preservation Act H.R. 1105.

The bill was introduced by Congressman Robert Hurt (R-Virginia) earlier this year. It was an attempt to loosen up some of the regulation on private equity companies like venture capital and growth capital firms.

Why Startup Investors Need Less Regulation

Simply put, these firms invest in startups like Facebook and Twitter when they are small and grow them into huge companies. These companies in turn create jobs and opportunities for smaller contractors and other small businesses.

Up until recently, private equity firms were assumed to manage the money of more sophisticated investors less in need of protection by the federal government.

So federal regulators who monitor publicly traded stock on Wall Street didn’t bother with these groups much if at all.

But all that changed with the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Now many private equity firms need to register with federal regulators meaning greater costs and greater regulatory hurtles.

In an official release supporting Hurt’s bill, House Committee on Small Business chairman Sam Graves (R-MO) explains:

The Dodd-Frank Act creates excessive red tape that inhibits growth, and the costly new requirements on smaller private equity funds is a clear example. H.R. 1105 helps reduce that regulatory burden on private equity funds in a common sense way, so that private sector capital isn't unnecessarily restricted and these funds can remain focused on investments that help grow the economy."

In short, critics of Dodd-Frank think the new regulations on private equity may be slowing the flow of capital to startups.

Small Business Capital Bill May Not Move Forward

Earlier this month, supporters of Hurt’s bill from both parties helped pass it in the House 254-159.

But opponents of the new bill like Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) say relaxing regulation, even on private equity firms, is a bad idea. And the White House has threatened to veto the bill meaning the Senate is unlikely to even consider it anytime soon, reports The Washington Post.

Certainly, there is need for some regulation where risk to investors or the public is concerned. But creating regulations that potentially hurt business and investment is a step in the wrong direction.

Image: U.S. House of Representatives

The post Small Business Capital Bill Seeks Less Regulation for VC Investment appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Despite all the emphasis recently on major-medical health coverage, let’s not forget three other types of insurance policies that can provide valuable protection for you, your employees and respective families in the event of injury or illness.

1. Disability Insurance

Only 31 percent of Americans are protected by disability insurance and half of those believe they need more coverage, a 2012 LIMRA and LIFE Foundation Insurance Barometer Study found. Disability insurance helps protect employees' most valuable asset: their income and ability to earn a living.

Without steady paychecks, many would find it difficult — or even impossible — to pay the monthly mortgage or rent, car and credit card payments, utility and food bills, education costs, etc. In fact, half of all U.S. households examined would struggle to come up with $2,000 within a month, a study 2013 from the National Bureau of Economic Research determined (PDF).

Disability insurance could help alleviate some of the financial stress when disabling accidents lead to tightened purse strings.

2. Cancer or Specified Disease Insurance

An estimated 1.6 million Americans were expected to be diagnosed with cancer by the end of 2013. Cancer or specified-disease insurance can go a long way toward helping families focus on recovery, rather than on financial concerns.

A supplemental policy can help protect a patient's savings from expenses that aren't covered by major medical insurance. These include deductibles, out-of-network specialists, experimental cancer treatment, travel and lodging when treatment is far from home, child care and household help, and normal living expenses.

3. Life Insurance

Finally, life insurance isn't fun to think about, but is crucial to a family's well being should a household suddenly lose an income to death. Without it, a family's entire standard of living could change drastically.

Life insurance policies that pay cash benefits can be used to pay remaining medical costs, cover funeral expenses, or pay monthly household bills. They can even be used to ensure a child can do something as simple as continue dance lessons or as momentous as attend college.

Women, Too, Need to Pay Attention

When providing benefit plans and making benefit choices, it should be self-evident that female employees and female business owners today have concerns just as do males when it comes to continuing the family lifestyle or caring for dependent children in the case of an emergency.

Consider these points when it comes to women business owners and women employees:

• The number of women ages 25 to 64 currently in the labor force with a college degree roughly tripled from 1970 to 2011, according (PDF) to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• The earnings of these women have also increased in proportion to men’s over the years, the Pew Research Center finds, and
• Mothers are the sole or primary providers for children in four out of 10 homes, the U.S. Department of Labor has determined.

So don’t forget to assess the needs of the female segment of the workforce.

Insurance policies photo via Shutterstock

The post The 3 Insurance Policies You and Your Employees Should Not Ignore appeared first on Small Business Trends.

A lot happened during 2013 that affects small businesses.  Let’s take a look at the top small business news stories for 2013, as tracked by the Small Business Trends Editorial team:

Wearable Technology Gets Attention

Wearable technology ranges from Google Glass (the eyeglasses-like computer you wear on your head – image above) to the smartwatch.  Pebble raised a cool $10 million on Kickstarter and started shipping its smartwatch.  Not to be outdone, Samsung unveiled the Gear smartwatch as a companion to the Note 3 phone.   And 2013 saw the concept of the Smarty Ring , which raised almost $300,000 on IndiegoGo.

Maybe one day Google Glass will be perched on every head, but that day will be a while coming, if it ever arrives.   Part of the reason is due to privacy concerns people have about being filmed without their realizing it.  Already there are businesses where Google Glass is not welcome.

Accounting Software Market Changes

Competitors from offshore and with cloud products, challenge the big players in this market. And we are seeing the market stratify, with accounting and financial products designed for various sizes of small businesses:

• Xero, out of New Zealand and Australia, still has a small footprint in the United States, but raised $150 million in funding in October, to go after the U.S. market.
• Entrepreneurs and micro businesses are catching on that they don’t necessarily need double-entry accounting software. Freshbooks, out of Canada, is mainly an invoicing and expense tracking software, but calls itself “cloud accounting” now, and has 5 million people using it.  And there are dozens of other invoicing apps that when paired up with downloaded bank and credit card records, provide sufficient recordkeeping to meet the needs of very small businesses.
• Sage went the other direction. It continued developing and adding features to its Sage One product— combining accounting, invoicing, time tracking, productivity and collaboration features into an all-in-one suite for businesses with under 10 employees.
• Intuit, the largest player in the U.S. with millions of small businesses using it, went off on yet a different direction, by announcing plans to acquire document aggregator DocStoc.
• GoDaddy acquired the Ronin invoicing app, pairing it with previously acquired Outright, to create the GoDaddy Bookkeeping software.

Online Business Reviews Provoke Frustration, Legal Action

Online reviews and local listings that display them continue to be a sore point.  Some of the sites where reviews appear have come across as cavalier and uncaring toward small businesses through poorly implemented review systems and uneven efforts to deal with rampant fake reviews:

• A sting operation by the New York state attorney general resulted in fines against a number of marketing firms and small businesses for faking online reviews.
• Yelp sued a business that it alleges was faking its own reviews – after that same business won a small claims case against Yelp.  There’s a lot of “underground” grumbling by small business owners who feel the system is too easily gamed — a common complaint remains that Yelp’s algorithms hide too many legitimate positive reviews, and highlight fake ones by competitors that know how to manipulate the system.
• Facebook rolled out starred reviews.  The system was promptly given a poor review by some small businesses due to its clumsy implementation.
• Google managed to confuse small businesses with its  Google Local (Places) Plus and Google+ for Business.  By the end of the year, things started to look better.  In late November, an upgrade was rolled out that allows business owners to manage and respond to reviews left on their business listings. 
• The Better Business Bureau expanded its pilot program for verified local business reviews. The BBB review system, which is separate from its rating system of A+ through F, seemed to provoke less frustration than some of the other review sites.

Twitter Goes Public; Focuses on Revenue and Spam

• The company went public in November, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol TWTR.  The stock has gone up and down in the past two months, but currently is up over 40% and the company has a market cap of $35 billion.  That’s more than 16 times the size of the New York Times’ market cap of $2.3 billion.
• In anticipation of its IPO, Twitter continued rolling out advertising products and improved its business resources.  It announced plans to acquire MoPub, a mobile ad platform.  We expect the focus on advertising and sponsored offerings to only increase, given the need to meet quarterly earnings expectations.
• Perhaps anticipating closer scrutiny, Twitter changed its spam algorithms, cracking down on DM spammers and other abusers.  We saw a spate of legitimate small business users having their Twitter accounts banned in error – apparently it is now trickier to follow a lot of accounts without tripping a spam filter.

Scrutiny Increases on Content Marketing

Content marketing continued to grow in 2013.  We published not one, but two lists of content marketing books during 2013, so that ought to tell you how much interest there is.  Native advertising also grew — native advertising comes in many forms, but newspapers have long published a form called advertorials.

Guest blogging and advertorials became so popular that they were over-used and abused by some.  It seemed like an epidemic of plagiarism and “spun” articles.  Fake writers and rings of “made-for-links” sites proliferated.  What was the goal?  Build links.

In May of 2013 Google’s head of Web spam, Matt Cutts (pictured above), spoke out and explained how advertorials need to be handled under Google’s guidelines.   Then later Cutts cautioned against “low quality” guest blogging.  The U. S. Federal Trade Commission also updated its advertising guidelines to address disclosures needed in social media.

There will always be value in high quality content in marketing.  But 2013 was the year that saw abuses of content explode, and a resulting crackdown start.

Counterfeits and Mass-Produced Goods Irk Entrepreneur Artisans

Etsy was originally set up as a marketplace for handmade items — and supposedly a refuge from mass-produced stuff.  But shop owners, who number nearly one million on Etsy and are mostly entrepreneur-artisans and small businesses, have been vocal about mass produced goods being allowed.  Even Etsy’s “be honest” rule is not enough, some say.

Some hand-crafted items from Etsy also are copied. Fakes end up on wholesale sites such as Alibaba. Alibaba, through founder Jack Ma (above), announced an anti-counterfeiting campaign in advance of its rumored 2014 IPO.  While counterfeiting is often thought of as a “big brand” type of plague, it also affects small businesses like artisans.

Obamacare Confusion Reigns

The year 2013 has been one of confusion.  With many media reports being politically motivated either left or right, millions of small businesses had a tough time getting good information about healthcare options. Here are some key facts:

• An estimated 5 million people had their health insurance policies cancelled or costs increased for individual policies, due to the Affordable Care Act requirements.  The cancellations and higher premiums hit self-employed freelancers and small business owners as a group hard, because they tend to have individual policies.
• The Federal healthcare.gov website rollout was almost universally regarded as a disaster.  On a positive note, some website improvements have been made since October and it seems to be getting better.
• Many government workers and other select groups have been exempted from the new healthcare law.  Larger employers (including small businesses with 50+ employees) got a one-year delay in their employer requirements, until 2015.  But that delay does not benefit the estimated 5 to 7 million self-employed and small business owners who rely on individual policies.
• The online SHOP exchanges, which are supposed to enable small businesses with fewer than 50 employees to shop for affordable coverage (and in some cases get tax credits), were delayed until November 2014.  Small businesses can still use the SHOP exchanges — they just have to apply through brokers or by mail.

The words of Professor Scott Shane take on added meaning: “Despite (or because of) our policy makers' efforts, employee health insurance remains a burden for small business owners. ***  Only time will tell whether our policy makers' efforts to help have alleviated or exacerbated the problems.”

Social Media & Mobile Valuations Hit Records

Are we living through another tech bubble, like the Dot Com bubble of 2000?  Judging from some of the valuations, possibly.

Remember Instagram, the company with no revenue that was valued at $1 billion back in 2012 when Facebook acquired it?  The year 2013 saw a redux of sorts, when Snapchat’s 23-year-old founder turned down an offer of $3 billion from Facebook.  Meanwhile, at least 16 million small businesses had Facebook pages, and Facebook was placed on the S&P 500.  Despite all that success, a report by Oklahoma Senator Coburn suggests Facebook will for the second year in a row pay zero taxes.

Yahoo, trying to reinvent itself, acquired Tumblr, a blog platform known for its porn, for $1 billion.  Shortly thereafter, Tumblr jumped on the sponsored posts bandwagon. And Yahoo is currently a Wall Street darling, with its stock price at a five-year high.

If you want to create a high-valuation startup, mobile and social are hot spaces to be.  At least for now.

Traditional Tech Companies Retrench, Reinvent

Remember those traditional technology companies so many of us run our businesses on?  Here’s what happened with a few of them:

• Dell went private again after a battle by Michael Dell to retain ownership of the company he founded in his dorm room in 1984.  Dell expanded its traditional laptop and desktop computers to include tablets and tablet hybrids. It is aggressively investing in innovative startups, acquiring other companies, and entering into partnerships to reinvent itself into a combined hardware, cloud software and services company.
• Microsoft announced the retirement of CEO Steve Ballmer as it began its own reinvention with strong moves toward mobile.  Along with aggressive marketing campaigns for its Windows Surface and RT tablets, Microsoft made a bid to acquire Nokia to gain a bigger footprint in the mobile space.
• BlackBerry – well, pundits have been predicting its demise for the past two years.  After the disappointing launch of BlackBerry 10, the company changed CEOs in November.  For awhile it planned to go private, then scrapped that.  Right now the focus seems to be on serving businesses in regulated industries and government.

Netting it out: the changes at Microsoft and Dell are good news for small businesses. BlackBerry is becoming less of a player in the small business market with each passing month.

Phones Get Bigger, Tablets Smaller, Voice Minutes Go Away

• Mobile devices become big then get cheaper. We saw plenty of data about the increased popularity of mobile devices with consumers this year. And manufacturers responded with more phones and tablets. There were also hybrids like the phablet. And then the devices started getting cheaper too.
• The responsive Web design approach gained steam.  Instead of creating a separate .mobi site, today a responsive design can make sure all visitors experience your site in the best possible way – whether they are using a smartphone, tablet or computer.
• Voice minutes are becoming almost a thing of the past in the United States. The reason is that mobile carriers have realized charging for data transfer is the more lucrative approach. Carriers are beginning to do away with hardware subsidies, too.
• Apple, meanwhile, announced that its app store had generated $10 billion in revenue for the third-party developers. The demand for mobile apps on other sites like Google Play also is strong.

Grumpy Cat and Gangnam Style Memes Cool Off

Two of the hottest viral memes  in recent memory became big news this year and later faded. Though the Gangnam Style video was posted in 2012, by 2013 it had became the most watched online video in history. Grumpy Cat still has her fans, but the adorable cat (pictured above) is not quite as hot.

Independent Worker Marketplaces Grow, Merge

oDesk and Elance announce a merger. The two online freelance marketplaces decided to pool resources. That fact, along with 30+ other freelancer sites, shows how the labor market is changing, with more hiring of independent workers being done online.

Crowdfunding Sites Grow

Sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo became instrumental in funding startup projects. And sites like CrowdBrewed are springing up to represent niche markets like brewing. Meanwhile, the SEC issued “no action letters” that made it a bit easier to do online venture and angel crowdfunding.

Internet Sales Tax Heats Up, Stalls

The issue continues to divide small business owners, depending on their business interests.  An effort to pass national legislation — the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act — appears stalled in Congress.  Meanwhile, various states tried attacking related issues from another angle, by taxing affiliate marketing.

Printing Evolves From Laserjet to 3D

Traditional printing remained in demand, despite our move to electronic data. The HP laserjet turned 30 years old and HP shipped its 200 millionth printer. But 2013 also was the year that saw 3D printing start to hit the mainstream (image above). Some UPS Stores now offer 3D printing to customers.

Bitcoin: Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?

Bitcoin, the alternative virtual currency, was much discussed throughout 2013.  Some Web entrepreneurs use it because it makes it harder to track their money.  However, Bitcoin has a long way to go to catch on with mainstream small businesses.

Privacy and Security Woes Increase

By now you’ve read about the NSA reading emails and listening to phone calls.  But it’s not only the government digging into your privacy.  News came out that Facebook knows more about you than you might think.  And hackers found small businesses to be easy targets.

The post 17 Top Small Business News Stories of 2013 appeared first on Small Business Trends.

The popularity of CMS-based websites has been growing constantly, and WordPress is the most used platform by far.

At least 19 percent of the entire Internet is powered by the WordPress platform. This number includes nearly half (48 percent) of the top 100 Technorati blogs, as well as some of the largest websites in the world – Ford Motor Company and NASA, to name a few. In 2014, that number is expected to increase.

In the 10 years since its launch, WordPress website trends have come and gone. Below are some of the latest emerging 2014 WordPress website trends that you can expect to see more of in the new year – and some of the features that have fallen by the wayside.

2014 WordPress Website Trends: What’s Hot

Speed, Simplicity, Standout Backgrounds

Fast loading times are crucial for a successful website today. With more people than ever accessing the Internet on mobile devices, the trend is toward websites that are simple and easy to navigate, yet elegant and interesting.

Look for these WordPress features to rise in popularity during 2014:

Typography Over Images

Through simple add-ons like Typekit, more WordPress websites are creating great looks with the use of distinctive fonts.

Previously, most websites were limited to using standard fonts like Arial, Times New Roman or the dreaded Comic Sans, with the process of displaying custom fonts limited to hand-coded or designer sites.

Now just about any font style can be displayed through easy-to-use technology and more WordPress sites are incorporating stunning typography to help them stand out.

Flat Websites

The latest digital interfaces, including Windows 8 and iOS 7, shy away from fancy design elements like gradients or shadow, and instead rely on the use of color to make things pop. This trend is also surfacing in WordPress websites.

Clean and simple layouts with strategic color placement are the basis of the sleek, modern designs you can see reflected in many WordPress templates and custom websites. Expect this WordPress website trend to continue through 2014.

Single Page Websites

Potentially inspired by navigation challenges on mobile devices, there have been plenty of these simplified WordPress designs popping up lately. Simple, yet elegant, single page websites contain all of the main content in one page. When you click on a "menu" item your view shifts to another area of the same page, rather than changing the URL and loading a new page.

Some examples of single page WordPress templates include the free One Page from WordPress, and paid themes like Renova, Stylos, and Interion.

Full Width Background Images

While simplicity is trending high, style and professionalism are still important facets of a successful site.

One way many WordPress websites are bringing their designs to life is through the use of page-width imagery, usually with a hi-definition photo as the background.

2014 WordPress Website Trends: What's Not

Lag-Prone, Slow Loading Page Elements

In a world built on speed, most WordPress websites are shedding anything that slows them down and makes navigation cumbersome.

These outgoing elements include:

Frames

A popular page-within-a-page layout style for many years, frames can make for a dramatic website.

Unfortunately, they also slow down loading times and make for SEO (search engine optimization) unfriendly pages that can bring searchers to random content outside the main website.

PDFs as Pages

While it's fairly easy to insert a PDF document as a page into a WordPress website, it's also cumbersome and most visitors don't appreciate the shift from viewing a standard Web page to downloading a PDF, especially on mobile devices. PDFs also have a tendency to crash browsers.

Flash and Animations

In the battle of Flash versus HTML5, the more dynamic HTML5 is far ahead. This is particularly true in the mobile market, with iOS devices not supporting Flash display. Other types of animations, such as Gifs, are also being left behind due to the drag on loading times.

It's shaping up to be a great year for simplifying and transforming your website using the latest 2014 WordPress website trends. Begin to envision your Web presence for 2014 now.

Hot Trends Photo via Shutterstock

The post 2014 WordPress Website Trends: What's Hot and What's Not appeared first on Small Business Trends.

The New Year provides an opportunity to start with a fresh, clean slate. However, more than nine out of 10 Americans (92%) will not to keep their resolutions to lose weight, quit smoking, or find romance. It can be the same with the goals small business owners set for themselves to grow revenues or become more profitable.

The number one reason why New Year's resolutions fail isn't feasibility or a lack of motivation.

The number one reason resolutions fail is all about time.

It is easy to become overwhelmed by the goals you set for yourself in the course of the next year.

Procrastination is a significant part of the problem. At the beginning of the year, people rationalize “I have over half a year left to do what I said I'd do.” And when the summer months roll around, there is still enough time left in the year that you might not feel a real sense of urgency.

Before you know it, the holidays roll around again, and yet the resolution has not been accomplished.

Set Achievable Goals

“For many people, this depressing chain of events recycles on a yearly basis because far-away deadlines allow us to be slack on execution. Give yourself too much time and you will procrastinate. It's human nature," write Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington, co-authors of The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months,

Instead, Moran and Lennington advocate setting realistic deadlines that will be better motivators to take action. “Success is all of the little things you do throughout the year to make your goals happen,” they explain.

I always advise taking a look at smaller chunks of time when setting goals for a small business. One can compare January to the previous month of December or to January a year ago to gauge what direction the company is heading.

Setting a goal of 50 percent growth in a year is noble, but it can be daunting. A smarter way is to plan smaller, more manageable and less overwhelming growth rates for each month of the year. By the time next December rolls around, the overall increase for the year may indeed be closer to the target.

Every day should be filled with important, attainable goals. For example, one goal could be as simple as committing to reaching out to one new prospect each work day. Over the course of the year, this could add up to over 200 contacts. Even with a modest success rate of 2%, you could find yourself with four new accounts over the course of the year. If one or two of them are substantial new clients, you may indeed hit projected growth targets.

Achieve Little Victories For Big Results

By setting  attainable goals and achieving little victories on a weekly basis, the outlook will seem brighter. And, as a result, your commitment to growth will grow throughout the year.

In business, as in life, unexpected occurrences can put things out of whack. Natural disasters, such as Hurricane Sandy, set back thousands of small businesses. In 2013, the government shutdown had an unanticipated devastating effect on companies that directly and indirectly rely on federal spending. Machines break down. Key employees leave. New competition arrives in the marketplace. The key is to establish good habits and to have systems in place to spur business growth despite outside influences.

Little things that mean a lot over the course of the year include:

• Committing to contacting a set number of potential clients each week, setting appointments when possible, and keeping them on a regular basis.
• Improving your record keeping so that you can monitor what’s happening in your business and subsequently implement changes where needed.
• Paying bills in full and on time in order to increase credit scores in case you need an infusion of working capital or seek to expand.
• Keeping abreast of changes in technology and making upgrades in order to stay ahead of the competition.

Smaller, monthly improvements will add up during the year. Committing to certain tasks and maintaining that commitment will manifest in greater overall performance.

Do not set yourself up for failure like the people who aspire to drop 20 pounds or drop two dress sizes and then become depressed and discouraged when it doesn’t happen within two months. The successful individuals will make it a point to drop one or two pounds a week over the course of 10-12 weeks.

Set achievable goals, over small periods of time.  They will be easier to reach, and as you reach each goal you will feel motivated because of your small successes.

Continually reaching small achievable goals is the key to long-term success — this year and every year.

Achievable photo via Shutterstock

The post The Secret to Achieving Resolutions: Setting Small Goals appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Users of the rapidly growing photo sharing social app called Snapchat got some potentially bad news — and now the company has responded.

It’s estimated the names and phone numbers of about 4.6 million Snapchat members were published online by anonymous hackers at a site that’s since been taken down (although some information is still available via leaked databases).

If you are a Snapchat user and aren’t sure whether you’ve been affected, visit this site first. It was set up by a security group very close to the Snapchat problem.  Only users within certain area codes in the United States were affected by the breach, according to the site.

You may remember Snapchat as the social startup that recently turned down a cool $3 billion from Facebook, which wanted to acquire the company.   You may also remember that Snapchat specializes in a type of photo sharing in which temporary photos and brief messages are shared on the network for up to 10 seconds and then deleted. (The site actually notifies the sender if another user has made a copy of the message.) Also important is that messages are shared only with the connections you specifically designate – not to the entire world.

So with such an emphasis on allowing users to control with whom they are sharing messages, you would think that user privacy should have been a top priority.

However, it turns out that Snapchat was apparently warned twice about a vulnerability in its system and did not do enough to address the vulnerabilities.

In fact, Snapchat was reportedly contacted as early as August by an Australia-based company called Gibson Security, The Daily Caller reports. Gibson set up the site mentioned above for members to determine whether or not their accounts have been breached.

Then, last week Snapchat acknowledged the security group had posted a private communication detailing a specific method hackers could use to obtain private user information, but downplayed the problem.  On its official blog, Snapchat explained:

Theoretically, if someone were able to upload a huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or every possible number in the U.S., they could create a database of the results and match usernames to phone numbers that way. Over the past year we've implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do. We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse.

Yet, hackers apparently used a variation of the exact tactic spelled out by Gibson to successfully obtain user information from the site.   Hackers who claimed responsibility for yesterday’s breach insisted they were trying to expose Snapchat’s security issues for everyone’s good.  They told the Verge:

“Our motivation behind the release was to raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed. Security matters as much as user experience does.”

Snapchat today responded by emphasizing that the information released was limited to redacted phone numbers and usernames, not “snaps” (i.e., pictures shared).  It also said that the vulnerability is related to the optional “Find Friends” feature and noted:

“We will be releasing an updated version of the Snapchat application that will allow Snapchatters to opt out of appearing in Find Friends after they have verified their phone number. We're also improving rate limiting and other restrictions to address future attempts to abuse our service.”

Image via SnapChat

The post Snapchat Hacked: Names and Phone Numbers of 4.6 Million Users Posted appeared first on Small Business Trends.

AllThingsD has been on our list of “must read” sites for a long time.  With a new year, AllthingsD is no longer.  Tech guru Walt Mossberg and journalist Kara Swisher have a new gig now, in 2014, called ReCode.net.

The new site logo is a bit confusing in that it is “Re/code.”  If you go to recode.com (as most might assume) you will end up somewhere else.  If you attempt to put the slash mark in the URL, you’ll really get confused.  It’s easier to think of it merely as Recode.net so that you end up at the right site.

AllThingsD was once part of the Wall Street Journal network online.  You could be sure to find the latest technology news there, especially news affecting large publicly-traded companies.

Today, however, if you go to AllThingsD.com, you’ll be redirected to the Technology section of the Wall Street Journal.

The change is not unexpected.  Mossberg and Swisher announced back in September that they would be leaving the Wall Street Journal at the end of 2013.

Their new site is owned by Swisher and Mossberg’s holding company Revere Digital LLC.  According to a report on CNBC, “The new enterprise is being launched with minority investments from the NBC Universal News Group and Windsor Media, an investment firm run by Terry Semel, the former chief of Yahoo and Warner Brothers.”   ReCode.net also has a separate content partnership with NBCUniversal News Group for tech coverage — apparently the goal there is to get more video coverage.

So what happens to the big AllThingsD tech conference every year that featured such big names as Bill Gates?  It will still go on, but will be called the ’Code’ conference.

As Mossberg explains in the video interview below, previously AllThingsD was a product of Dow Jones (owner of the Wall Street Journal). Now, their site will be independently owned by them.  They are still going to cover breaking news and give fair analysis of technology news, adds Swisher, who is Co-CEO of the new company along with Mossberg.

The post Goodbye AllThingsD; Welcome ReCode.Net appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Each year, the number of new businesses spikes in January as the start of a new year seems like the most natural time to begin a new venture. Whether you're just starting out or are a seasoned entrepreneur, run through this startup checklist to better understand the steps needed to make your business legit.

1. Make Sure Your Business Name is Legal

You dreamed up the perfect name for your new company, but is it legally available for you to use? Before you get too far with your branding and order your signage, you've got to make sure that your business name isn't conflicting with an existing business. Name conflicts are actually one of the primary reasons why many LLC/corporation/DBA applications are rejected by the state or county processing office.

Fortunately, running a name search isn't complex process and you don't need a lawyer to help you. Perform a trademark search to check the availability of any name in the U.S. By checking to make sure your name is available early on, you'll have peace of mind knowing that you won't find yourself at the wrong end of a trademark dispute sometime down the road.

2. Pick Your Business Structure

Unless you specifically create a formal business structure with the state, then you're operating as a sole proprietor by default (if you're a single owner). While the sole proprietorship may be the right choice for certain situations due to its simplicity, you should consider this move carefully. With a sole prop or general partnership, there's no separation between the business and business owner. This can keep things simple, but if a business is sued or can't pay its bills/debts, the business owner(s) are personally on the line.

When you create a formal business structure with the state, you are separating yourself from the business. Popular structures include the Limited Liability Company (LLC) and Corporation (either S or C Corporation). A little research will help you determine which structure is right for your situation. For example, the LLC is great for people who want liability protection (i.e. to protect their personal assets if their business is ever sued) but don't want a lot of paperwork or administrative formality. The C Corporation is better for companies who plan to go public or get VC financing.

You can also take the self quiz to determine the best business structure for your business. It’s fast.

3. Register Your Business Name

If you decide to form an LLC or corporation, that will automatically register your business name and you can skip over this step. But if you're not quite ready for a formal business structure and stay a sole prop, then you'll need to register your business name by filing a Doing Business As (DBA), also known as the Fictitious Business Name. This step lets the public know who's behind a company, ensures that you're legally able to operate your business under that name, as well as stops anyone else from using your business name in your state.

Keep in mind that while a "Doing Business As" application protects your name in your state, it doesn't stop anyone from using the same name in the other 49 states. You can, however, file for trademark protection to protect your name and brand in all 50 states.

4. Apply For a Federal Tax ID Number or Employer Identification Number (EIN)

The IRS tracks your company's transactions via a Tax ID number. Think of it as a social security number for businesses.

If you're operating as an LLC or corporation, your business is required to have a Tax ID number and you'll also need one to open your business bank account.

If you are a sole proprietor, you're not obligated legally to get a Tax ID number, but it's smart practice. With a Tax ID number, you won't have to give out your personal security number to every client or vendor you work with.

Read how to apply for an EIN at the IRS website.

5. Apply For Any Necessary Permits

Depending on what kind of business you have and where you live, you may need to get business licenses from the state, county, or town. Examples include: zoning permit, sales tax license, permit from the health department, professional licenses, or a general business operation license. Keep in mind that a tattoo artist, daycare center, or restaurant will be more tightly regulated than a copywriter or business consultant.

You can read more about business licenses and permits here. If you are not sure about business licenses that may be required, check out our free tool called the "Business License Compliance Package."  You can find out all the licensing requirements and applications for your particular business in the state and county where you are conducting your business.

6. Brush up on Employer Laws

If you are planning on hiring an employee for your business, you need to clearly understand your legal obligations as an employer, including payroll and withholding taxes, unemployment insurance, anti-discrimination laws, OSHA regulations, workers' compensation, and wage/hour requirements. If this is your first time hiring an employee, it might be wise to speak with an employment law professional or consultant to fully understand all the legal intricacies.

The new calendar year is an ideal time to turn your dreams into reality by becoming your own boss and starting a new business. But in the excitement of your new venture, don't forget to get your legal foundation squared away. And if you've been running a business for years without thinking about these things, now's the time to catch up! These activities are fundamental to your business' long-term health and to the security of your finances.

We hope this startup checklist gets you on the right path. Here’s to a prosperous and productive 2014!

Legal checklist photo via Shutterstock

The post Starting a Business in 2014? Here Is Your Startup Checklist appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Small business lending is increasingly going mobile – and we predict you can expect to see more about the mobile lending trend in 2014.

Three companies are addressing it in different ways. Let’s take a quick look at each:

Kabbage, an Atlanta-based company specializing in loans for online sellers and home-based businesses, has iPhone and Android apps.  Small businesses can apply for funds on mobile devices, and access their accounts via their iPhone or Android devices, as well.

Sarah Eyres is co-owner of Cephalopod Yarns, a Baltimore-based yarn store. When a shipment was delayed, she needed to buy 200 pounds of yarn to get her through the Holiday shopping season. And she used $3,500 from Kabbage to do it.

The loan was approved in just seven minutes, Eyres said.

She told The Washington Post:

“I would have just been sitting and waiting for that shipment. I would not have felt comfortable [making the purchase] without the loan."

CUNA Mutual Group, a Madison, Wis. insurance company that supplies financial products and services to many credit unions, also offers a mobile version of its Loanliner.com system that credit unions can extend to their members.

Peer to peer lending is also converging with mobile.  There’s already been speculation that peer to peer lending will gain ground compared to traditional bank loans as a viable option for small business funding.

So it probably makes sense that peer-to-peer lenders like Prosper.com have already have mobile lending, too. Prosper.com’s app lets investors select business listings they would like to lend to and even lets them transfer the funds from a mobile device.

One thing to remember:  the apps don’t necessarily allow you to do everything using a mobile device.  Each app and its functionality will be different.

Of course, the apps don’t necessarily make it any easier to qualify for a loan. It only makes it faster for those who are approved.

Finally, remember the security issues that have abounded with mobile technology. So be aware of the information these apps request from you when applying. It may have an impact on which lending apps you’re willing to try.

Image via Kabbage

The post 3 Examples of The Mobile Lending Trend: CUNA, Kabbage and Prosper appeared first on Small Business Trends.

What's the future hold for franchising in 2014? What sectors should you keep your eye on? If you're looking into becoming the owner of a franchise, it's important to be a trend-watcher. It's important to find out what today's franchisors are up to.

In this, my sixth annual top franchise trends article, I'm going to let you in on the top franchise trends for 2014 that are taking shape in the franchise industry. All of them are worth watching and some of them might be right up your alley. So let's see what franchising has in store for 2014.

Franchise Trends for 2014 Headed Your Way

More and more franchise opportunities are starting to appear that are highly specialized. These opportunities feature products and services that are hyper-focused on specific niches. Some examples include:

The Interface Financial Group (IFG)

IFG franchisees are in the business of helping companies improve their cash-flow by using a form of short-term borrowing called invoice discounting.

Invoice discounting allows a business to draw down a percentage of their outstanding sales invoices, so they can have immediate cash flow. Revenue for franchisees comes from the fees they charge businesses that wish to implement this highly specialized solution to improving cash flow.

Mosquito Squad

Pest extermination as a business has been around a long time. Our view on bugs hasn't changed during this time; they must be eliminated. Mosquito Squad is different because they only focus on outdoor pests like mosquitos and ticks.

Franchisees have two market opportunities: homes and businesses.  Let's focus on the business opportunities:

• Playgrounds
• Beaches
• Golf courses
• Stadiums
• Outdoor restaurants
• Theme parks

Venues like the ones I just listed take pest-control seriously and they'll pay for specialized services like the ones Mosquito Squad franchisees provide.

Brain Balance Achievement Centers

Brain Balance Achievement Centers offer programs that focus on the underlying issues resulting in most of the behavioral, developmental, and learning disorders that plague so many children today.

The co-founder and creator of the special programs offered by these centers is Dr. Robert Melillo. He's a researcher and the author of several bestselling books including “Disconnected Kids and Reconnected Kids.” His latest book is titled “Autism.”

Franchisees try to help children with:

• ADHD
• Learning disorders
• Behavioral issues
• Processing disorders
• Asperger's
• PDD-NOS

No healthcare experience is necessary to become an owner. This franchisor is looking for people that have the desire to make a difference in the lives of children and their families.

Other niche franchise opportunities that may be worth a look in 2014 include:

• Rapid Recovery, a refrigerant recovery franchise business.
• WG Storage and Delivery, a franchise that provides high-end moving and storage solutions.
• UFC Gym,  a fitness franchise offering boxing, kick-boxing and basic mixed martial arts training and workouts.
• OsteoStrong a franchise offering a natural wellness based system designed to improve the symptoms of Osteoporosis, Osteopenia, and Fibromyalgia.
• Kona Ice a franchise that sends tropical-themed frozen dessert trucks to children's events, corporate events and fundraisers.

Franchise Trends In Food

A comprehensive article on the top franchise trends wouldn't be complete without mentioning some of things taking place in franchising's most visible sector, food franchises. One of the things I've been watching is the trend towards self-serve. Franchisors in the frozen dessert segment are the ones that have really been focusing on self-serve, especially frozen yogurt franchises.

The Fuzzy Peach is a young franchisor out of the Wilmington, North Carolina area, offers a rotating array of toppings that customers add to their favorite frozen yogurt selections. The end product is then weighed and charged accordingly.

Menchie's is another self-serve frozen yogurt franchise that lets customers create their own frozen desserts using fresh toppings and fresh yogurt that comes from "Happy California cows that live in nice weather year-round."

Several other franchises in the frozen yogurt sector offer self-serve including, FroyoWorld, CherryBerry Self Service Yogurt Bar, YoGo Factory, Yogurtland, and Zinga!

The newest segment in self-serve food franchising combines vending machines with healthy snacks. Vending machines have always been self-serve. It's just that they've never really offered a lot of healthy choices for consumers to purchase…until now.

Headquartered in sunny San Diego, Fresh Healthy Vending has 200+ franchisees servicing over 2,300 vending machines. One of the niches they're concentrating on is military bases, where there are always hungry men and women that need to stay in tip-top shape.

Human Healthy Vending claims to be "a socially responsible franchisor of healthy vending machine and micromarket franchise businesses." Their offerings include vending machines specializing in coffee, and a large selection of machines offering fresh fruit and even locally sourced products. There's also an option to add a 23-inch LCD video monitor to the vending machines to stream ads for additional revenue opportunities.

There are also a few business opportunities - which differ from franchise opportunities– being offered in the vending machine space including Grow Vending, Healthier4You Vending, and Naturals2Go.

Tech Trends In Franchising

It's all about mobile for 2014. The importance of mobile technology in franchising can't be overstated. Today's franchisees need to have access to their businesses when they're not on-site. They need to have the power to make decisions while they're on the go…decisions that can affect the profitability of their franchises.

Franchisors need to make sure that their corporate websites are optimized for mobile viewing, so their future clients, customers and prospective franchisees will stay engaged long enough to get information and take action.

Ramon Ray, a community member of Small Business Trends, and a small business technology expert, told me this about the importance of mobile technology:

"If you are not as productive out of the office as you are in the office – you are NOT productive. Successful business owners must leave…..their offices. Do NOT reduce productivity just because you’re not on the office. Mobile technology and good processes will make you a digital ninja."

Today's busy consumers are using their mobile devices for everything from online shopping to surfing locally for places to eat. They're also using the Click to Call feature that more and more mobile business websites are featuring. Franchisors need to make sure that their franchisees can capitalize on every opportunity that's increasingly coming from people using mobile devices.

Franchisors that are investing in mobile technology today…the kind that their franchisees can use to become more productive and more profitable, are making a wise long-term business choice. Here are some other examples of how some franchisors are using mobile technology:

McDonald's is testing out a smartphone app that scans a unique QR code when customers visit a location and activates a virtual "scratch card" that reveals prizes like free food or discounts. Franchisees of Zoom Room, a dog-training franchise, can use an iPad to do things like check dogs in for their training classes, bill and take pictures of their "clients."

Some fast food chains are investing in Point of Sale (POS) systems that can accept payments from their customers’ mobile devices. This trend will gain momentum in 2014. Little Caesar's Pizza encourages website visitors to download branded ringtones to their smartphones in the hopes that Little Caesar's will remain top of mind when it's pizza time.

Great Clips, a hair care franchise with over 3,400 locations, offers online check in for clients that would prefer not to wait for a stylist once they arrive at their local salon.

Mobile technology use will continue to grow in 2014, and franchisors need to continue finding ways to utilize it for maximum benefit.

Loud Franchisees

They're starting to get louder. They're starting to have more impact… more clout.

"They" are the franchisees. They're the ones who have put their own money on the line in order to be in business for themselves. And some of them are starting to have real impact. Some of them are starting to change things in franchising. For example, several franchisees of McDonald's decided that they're not going to take it anymore.

This past summer a group of them banded together and formally complained to corporate about the increasing fees that McDonald's charges them and their shrinking profits. There was also what I'll call, "franchisee feedback" concerning the Dollar Menu, and the lack of profit because of it. Well, someone at corporate listened, because the Dollar Menu is no more.

McDonald's franchise owners are a powerful bunch. They're some of most elite in franchising. They have an amazing and very powerful brand (and system) behind them. And, even though their profit margins aren't what they used to be, they really do have a pretty good thing going. They want (for the most part) to stay in business.

As opposed to the next group – because they're out of business.

Loud Ex-Franchisees

Disgruntled ex-franchisees (or soon to be ex-franchisees) are some of most vocal around. For the most part, these franchisees aren't looking for change. They're looking to recoup their losses. A few of them even focus on preventing others from losing their money.

You can thank the invention of the Internet and the still-growing popularity of social media for the ease with which dissatisfied franchisees can voice their feelings. A couple of websites immediately come to mind when it comes to learning which franchisors are getting heat from their franchisees.

Rip-Off Report

I've personally used information from this consumer protection website to assist my clients with their franchise research. A gentleman by the name of Ed Magedson started the Ripoff Report website more than 10 years ago. His stated goal:

"To empower consumers by helping them to speak out, share information and fight back against bad business practices."

Ripoff Report is a no-holds-barred website that prides itself on honoring free speech.

Type "franchise" in the search box and you'll find information on all sorts of things related to franchising.  Everything from supposed faulty heat pumps that were sold and installed by heating and air conditioning franchisees and/or their employees to fitness franchises that possibly went out of business and aren't refunding membership dues are listed.

You'll also find complaints from franchisees that have supposedly lost their money on specific franchise opportunities. And, once in a while, there will be a complaint about a franchise broker or franchise consultant who supposedly sold an unsuspecting franchise business buyer a franchise that turned out to be not as described.

If you're going to use a website like Ripoff Report as part of your research on a franchise, you have to be willing to do a deeper dig into what you've found. See if you can find out more about the people or companies mentioned in the complaint by typing the name into a search engine and seeing what comes up. Also make sure you mention what you found to your franchise sales rep and to the franchisees that you're contacting as part of your due diligence. That way you can hear both sides of the story.

UnhappyFranchisee.com

I've known Sean Kelly, the proprietor of UnhappyFranchisee.com, for several years. He's hilarious and can write with the best of them. He's been in franchising longer than me and has heard his share of stories about franchise concepts that didn't quite make the grade.

That's probably one of the reasons he launched his website a few years ago. His other reason? Like me, he wants to make sure that today's would-be franchise owners have all the information – the bad and the good – about the opportunities they're thinking of investing in.

Fact: Most people who are looking at franchise ownership are doing so for the first time, so there are bound to be mistakes made. But, sometimes the mistakes seem to be made by the franchisor. The Unhappy Franchisee website has several examples. And, as an added bonus, the comment area of the site features ex-franchisees of some of the franchise concepts that have been reported on sharing their true-life stories.

Franchising, like any industry, includes great companies, average companies and lousy companies. The trick is to find the ones that excel in their niches.

Make sure that your research includes conversations with current franchisees. They're the ones who have already taken the risk. They're the ones who are working in their businesses every day. They're the ones with the answers.

There are plenty of good franchise opportunities for you to check out in 2014. I only scratched the surface with these franchise trends for 2014. It's up to you to find one that you feel offers the best chance of success.

Franchise Photo via Shutterstock

The post Top Franchise Trends For 2014 appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Google has replaced a faulty charger on the HP Chromebook 11 which was holding up continued sale of the new laptop.

Google and HP issued warnings about the chargers back in November and December halting sales and eventually leading to a recall of the chargers.

The initial decision came after complaints from what both companies called a small number of customers who said the chargers had become damaged due to overheating.

Google and HP decided to recall the chargers after receiving additional information from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

In a post on the official Google Chrome Blog Dec. 17, 2013, Google explained:

With guidance and approval from the CPSC and other regulatory agencies, Google and HP are recalling the original charger for the HP Chromebook 11. Customers should visit http://chromebook.com/hp11chargerform to request a free replacement charger. We apologize again for the inconvenience this has caused. Your safety is our top priority.

A release from the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued the same day said Google had received nine reports of the charger overheating and melting. The federal agency added that in one case a consumer had reported receiving a small burn from the charger. In another,  a pillow had apparently been damaged as a result of heat generated from the malfunctioning charger.

Last month, 9to5 Google reported that Google had sent the website’s editorial reviewer not only a redesigned charger but an updated version of the Chromebook 11.

Both companies had initially said they would immediately resume selling the Chromebook 11 with a replacement charger. But until recently an order page for the Chromebook had displayed a “coming soon” announcement about the device’s availability.

As of this week, however, the online store indicates the device is available. The HP Chromebook 11 costs $279. The 11.6 inch laptop is .75 inches thick and weighs 2.5 pounds.

Google claims that businesses can save an average of $5,000 per device over a 3-year period by using Chromebooks.  They offer an on-site calculator to calculate the savings.  Reviewers say this particular Chromebook has minimal features and would be good as a second computer for business or perhaps as something light for business travel.

Whatever you are looking for, this Chromebook’s problems seem to be behind it for now.

HP Chromebook Image: Google

The post HP Chromebook Now Good to Go – Google Replaces Faulty Charger appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Are you struggling or confused with what you want to, need to or should be saying on your social media sites?

Me too sometimes!

Social Media is such a consuming yet integral and inspiring part of our daily world. We use it for getting real time news and alerts, finding information on a particular topic, finding communities of niche interests, or staying in touch with family and friends.In fact, we turn to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, blogs and several other platforms for just about anything we need.

How we maintain relationships and communicate with each other both personally and professionally will never be the same because social media has made it all so much more accessible, effective and fun.

Consider this sampling of impressive social media data:

• 49% of small businesses found social media marketing effective for their business
• 80% of small businesses prefer to connect themselves to brands through Facebook
• 58% spent 10 minutes on social media daily
• 46% of online users count on social media before making a purchase

With regard to social media, there is a right way and a not so right way to use these tools. And making the right choice can get you impressive results like this too.

Get more serious and focused, have a better plan and strategy and follow these rules of engagement to get better results from social media.

Be Committed

If you are doing "it" because you think you have to, you will fizz out and people will too. Post less but make what you post about more meaningful and purposeful not only to others but to you too.

Be Consistent

The more you suit up and show up on social media and bring some value to people's day, the more loyalty you will build. Think about people you actively follow and understand what they are doing that makes you look forward to engaging with them.

Focus Your Content

Stick to what you know, what you want to be known for and what you want to be associated with. Pick two or three areas of expertise and stick to them no matter what they are. There is an audience and niche for everything. Simplifying your social content makes it easier for people to remember you.

Customize Your Content

Customize your social content for each of the social media channels that you use. They all have a best practice and application with regard to content and strategy. Observe people that get a lot of engagement and action. Watch what they do and say and emulate their approach.

Use the Best Social Media for You

One of the smartest things you can do is figure out what social media channels are best for you and your customers and community. Using the pillars — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google + — is usually the best. But there are other niche platforms including Vine, Instagram  and Pinterest that can be very effective.

Don’t spread yourself too thin on too many platforms. Less but consistent and focused content on a few of these channels is the better way to go.

Be Strategic

This is where who you are, what you do and how you can help comes in. Post social content that is thoughtful and shows you can be trusted, are knowledgeable, authentic and results oriented.

Educate, Inspire … and Only Then, Sell

It's the 60-20-20 formula.  Use your social content 60% of the time to educate and serve and 20% of the time to inspire. That earns you the opportunity to sell the other 20%.  Notice the order this is in.

Show Your Heart

Be real, be kind, be who you say you are as much as you possibly can, but know your personal boundaries when sharing online and always respect others’ boundaries.

#trusthewhy

If we could only stop thinking we have to know the ‘why’ about things before we take action and jump in, instead of trusting more often that we already know the why most of the time, our curiosity and wonder would do the rest. I am so intrigued with this idea that I am writing a book around this topic in early 2014.

Finally, check out these social media highlights of 2013 from the world of social media.

Going forward remember:  YOLO, so take a cool SELFIE of you doing things you enjoy and don’t worry. There’s no need to have any FOMO cause whatever you think you are missing is pretty much going to be there 24/7 online somewhere.

Social media photo via Shutterstock

The post 9 Tips For Getting Better Business Results From Social Media appeared first on Small Business Trends.

One of the major shifts taking place is the growing adoption by consumers of subscriptions for goods and services instead of buying them outright. According to an October 2013 Economist study of 293 business executives commissioned by billing/subscription management platform provider Zuora, 80% of respondents believe that their customers are changing how they obtain access to goods and services.

During Social Biz Atlanta 2013, Zuora's CMO Brian Bell (pictured left) presented on why a subscription business model is good for companies looking to build long-lasting relationships with today's tech-savvy consumers. Below are some of the key points Brian delivered to help understand what's driving the shift to a subscription business model, how companies are making the transition from the traditional product-driven economy, and how financial performance is measured.

Embedded below is a video of the full session, including a great introduction to subscription economy thinking by Denis Pombriant, a leading analyst in the CRM industry and thought leader on Subscription Economy development.

* * * * *

Small Business Trends: What is the subscription economy?

Brian Bell: It really is this massive shift that we see in the market as you move from a one time transaction product based economy to this service oriented, recurring, relationship driven economic model. You see this across the board, you see it across all verticals and all parts of the economy. When the company started five years ago we didn't anticipate that you would be able to subscribe to virtually anything as a consumer. We didn't imagine that you could subscribe to Netflix and get DVDs; that you would never really as a consumer own music anymore. It is seldom that you would own movies, or even that you would own cars.

Small Business Trends: What kinds of businesses are getting involved in the subscription economy?

Brian Bell: Many of our customers — companies like Box and Splunk, Zendesk, Marketo — are designed around the subscription business model.  So they knew that before they launched, they actually needed a platform to run their business. But what is more interesting is how it’s impacting a lot of the legacy technology companies — Dell, HP, and Informatica. Other customers that are really enterprise customers are adopting this, almost out of necessity.  They are having to pivot and to essentially to embrace Cloud Computing in SaaS, because their legacy businesses are in decline, and they are finding they don't have the systems in place to manage it.

Media is another really interesting industry that is under a lot of pressure, and it is rapidly transforming. What is interesting about this industry is that you outsource your relationships to the customer. In media you would outsource circulation, and the circulation department, or the third party would go and get people to subscribe to print media, that was their function. Then the media company would take that demographic information and sell it to advertisers and that is how they made their money.

Now they are finding that they can't survive that way, that as everything has moved online, and as people expect more from the media industry, they have to own that relationship with the customer.

The bottom line is if you run a business like Zuora we subscribe to virtually everything to run the business. You can subscribe to helpdesk software, CRM solutions, you can subscribe to accounting solutions; you can subscribe to real estate, virtual office space, telephone systems, this is a massive shift in the way you build and grow any business.

Then on the customer side I can subscribe to clothing, to wine, to prophylactics. The Dollar Shave Club is an amazing company that provides a disruptive model to the established shaving industry.

Small Business Trends: Why is it happening?

Brian Bell: It is happening because customers demand it. They like the flexibility, they like the ability to be current in technology and current in media, and it's a great business model.

If you run a subscription business you have very different financials that makes it very attractive, and this is why the evaluations of these companies on Wall Street, and by the VCs is so high, because they look at the finances of a recurring model very different.

Small Business Trends: Why is this so different from a product economy?

Brian Bell: In a product economy, you are selling units, you look back and you say how many number of widgets did I sell? How many bottles of Coke did I sell? How many iPhones did I sell? That's how you measure your success, where in a subscription economy your focus is on the relationship. How many customers did I acquire? If you look at and imagine, how many customers came in? How many converted? How many did I acquire? How many have I retained?

Instead of pricing per unit it's all about service plans, so do we have bundle plans? Do we have a gold, silver, platinum? Do we have plans that are monthly, weekly, or daily, are they based on usage or based on user? How are we going to price the plans? They are not one time orders that are recurring, multiple orders of a life time of a customer.

Box.com was an early customer that started with us in the consumer space, and then they said we need to go to the enterprise because the money is in the enterprise, how do we start to sell to enterprises? They realized that it's B2Any, and in the new world you can sell just as easily to enterprises as you can to any consumers.  This is the fundamental shift in the subscription economy.

Small Business Trends: What are the financial metrics involved in the subscription economy?

Brian Bell: In a traditional product business you look at an income statement and an income statement is a backward looking financial statement that looks at how much revenue you did, and what it cost for you to deliver that business? In the subscription economy it is a forward looking annual recurring revenue based financial statement.  I will talk more about this but this is a big, big shift and frankly, the industry has not kept up with how different the financial model is.

These are the the metrics that matter:

• Retention Rate:  How much of your ARR are you keeping every year?
• Recurring Profit Margin:  It is your annual recurring revenue less churn minus the cost to run a deliver that service, and
• Growth Efficiency: How much does it cost you to acquire a new dollar business? These are the three key metrics of this Subscription Economy.

Small Business Trends: How do you grow a business in the subscription economy?

Brian Bell: If you think about a product business how do you grow? In a product business Apple will design the next cool iPhone, they will innovate, build the distribution channel, get it out to market and then they will have their reps and partners selling that device, and then they start all over again they create the next version of that device.

The way that you grow in a subscription business is, as I mentioned before, you acquire the relationship, you reduce the churn you want to stop people from leaving and you need to understand why are they leaving if they leave, and how to you prevent them from leaving, and you need to increase the value.

These are the three ways that you grow a recurring business:

• acquire customers,
• grow the dollar per customer, or
• reduce the churn of the customer base.

There is a variety of strategies to do this.  We have identified 12 different strategies that are supported in our platform that would allow you to do this. If you are trying to acquire customers you are launching new products, you might be delivering products or offerings in multiple currencies, or you might want to enter a new market.

You have reduced churn by looking at maybe having a different pricing plan. You might find that your churn is the result of only having a monthly plan when actually people want a weekly plan. Or you might find that you can increase the value by charging overages on consumption, or up-sales or bundles. There is a variety of pricing of packages strategies to really drive growth in this recurring model.

Small Business Trends: Tell us about the importance of automating process flows.

Brian Bell:  The second area is process flows, automating these process flows; this is very, very different than the economy that was product based. Let me add a bit more color. In a product based business you book an order, you ship it, you invoice and collect for it, and then they receive it. This is pretty straight forward, we pretty much know how this works, but in a recurring model it is much more dynamic.

When you look at a process like "cash" it gets much more complicated when you start to look at renewals. If someone goes in and renews the system how do you actually manage that process? How does it change your processes? In view of your payment failures if someone is a subscriber and then their credit card doesn't go through what do you do? Do you suspend them, can you stop them? Is it more expensive for you to turn off the service to them than it is to actually kept them on the service even if there are not paying?

As consumers we see this happening all the time, we will stop subscribing to something, we will continue to get the service, often the reason is because either they don' t know, or two, they don't know how to call sufficiently or effectively a turn off or modify the subscribers or the subscription that you have.

It is much more complicated and essentially in this new world you can have multiple orders coming in that you want to have in one invoice. You might have one order coming in that you might want to spread out across multiple invoices. You might have an order coming in that then it is going to be recognized in your accounting system in a very different way. Do you recognize revenue on a usage basis? Do you recognize it on a payment basis? What is the accounting policy you are going to use to recognize revenue? And what complexity does that have when your users are constantly changing the things that they subscribe to? How does that impact your financial systems? It gets very, very complicated.

Small Business Trends: What do you need to know for a subscription business model?

Brian Bell: Remember this from basic accounting 101, it is pretty straight forward. You say I did $100 of revenue last year, the cost of goods of the things that I sold was $30 so my gross profit is $70.  Then I have a bunch of other expenses just in my company. I have sales and marketing, I have G&A, I have R&D and the bottom line is that is my total operating expense.  I subtract that from my gross profit and that is your net income. This is how we run accounting in the business world today.

This is very different in a recurring revenue model, and the fundamental difference is that in a recurring revenue model you are beginning your fiscal year with a book on business. You are beginning with, let's say $100 of annual recurring revenue (ARR) where as in a product business you have to go out and sell all of the new business you are going to generate.

We are proposing in the industry what we call a “Subscription Economy” income statement, or a recurring income statement.

This is different so it starts with your annual recurring revenue, you have $100 of annual recurring revenue. You say what was the churn? Well I lost 10 customers that were paying me a $1, so I lost $10. So I am down to $90 after my churn. Then I look at the expense that I incurred to run that business, and that would be your cost of goods, but also your R&D, your data center cost, and anything involved in delivering this service you are providing. And that delivers a number that we call the recurring profit, that is your recurring profit margin.

Finally you can take that $40 — you had $100, you lost $10 by churn, and you have a bunch of expenses that need to run the business so you are left with $40 of profit. The big question in a recurring business is what do you do with the $40? Do you invest it and try to acquire new customers, or do you just bring it to the bottom line?

This interview on the customer survey experience is part of the One on One interview series with thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This transcript has been edited for publication. For the full interview, please view the video above.

The post Brian Bell of Zuora: Why Subscriptions are Good for Business appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Well, it’s a brand new year. A year full of unknowns, 12 full months of blank slate, 365 days of surprises.

Like, for instance, a rogue line coming from the wrong side of a graph. What does it mean? Is it good? Bad?

Hard to tell, but it’s certainly different.

And unlike the people in this cartoon – I’m excited to see what happens!

The post Who Knows What It Means, It’s a Brand New Year! appeared first on Small Business Trends.