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Nearly two-thirds of small business owners ranked economic uncertainty as the worst of 13 threats to their survival in a new survey from the National Small Business Association. After that, according to the survey, small business owners felt most threatened by a decline in customer spending, cost of health insurance benefits, regulatory burdens and taxes.

What’s wrong with this picture? Not one of the threats was internal. All had to do with outside forces.

So do business owners give enough credit to internal factors such as poor planning when it comes to the threats to their prosperity? Probably not, according to a study published in the International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal. In that 2009 report, a pair of European researchers said, “Even though some owner-managers showed a certain awareness regarding their internal weaknesses, many problems such as lacking strategy and vision, low educational levels, and inadequate social capital are not sufficiently recognized.”

A pair of Belgian researchers at an entrepreneurship research conference in 2010 offer a little closer examination of management weaknesses leading to failure. This report found five major causes for flat-lining among small firms: abrupt external events, failure to serve corporate interests, apathy, specific management errors, and recurrent management mistakes.

This isn’t to say that all bankruptcies can be blamed on the business owners. Sometimes success just isn’t in the cards. And risk-taking can’t be avoided. It’s hard to fault someone for expanding rapidly before an unpredictable downturn, for example.

But you can fault them for not recognizing how they’ve contributed the problem. Organizations like NSBA may see taxes, regulations, access to capital, small business contracting setasides, and other outside entities as the issues to focus on. Small business owners themselves need to keep an eye on the mirror as well.

About the Author: Mark Henricks has reported on business, technology and other topics for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, and other leading publications. You can learn more about him at The Article Authority. Follow him on Twitter @bizmyths

Original Article at http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-myths/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us/917

 

Facebook for businessUsing Facebook for Business? Or think your customers aren’t on Facebook?

Think again… There are tens of thousands of regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks. More than two thirds of Facebook users are outside of college and the fastest growing demographic is those 35 years and older.

While Facebook started off as a community for college students, it has expanded far beyond that and you will be hard-pressed to find a demographic not yet represented among Facebook’s 500 million users.

How Facebook Can Help a Business?

Firstly, your customers are Internet and Facebook savvy. Today when “everyone” is on Facebook, services and companies are sought out on Facebook by simply typing “facebook.com/businessname”. When you and your buisness has a presence on Facebook you’ll get found by people who are searching for your products or services!

Secondly, Facebook is a fantastic media to connect and engage with current and potential customers, and create a community around your business

Lastly, because of the relationship you have with your community, promoting other content you create, including webinars, blog articles, or other resources is an extremely powerful way to attract more of your followers to consume your fee-based products or services.

After all, YOU are the one who has become the authority in your niche of industry, and they trust you as a results of the value you have added to the community at Facebook.

How to Use Facebook for Business?

Facebook has grown into an essential online marketing channel, with over 500 million active users worldwide. But how should businesses create, manage, and grow their Facebook pages?

To start with, Facebook is a great tool to communicate with your target market.

If you didn’t grow up with social media, and feel like saying the “I don’t understand this Social Media stuff it’s a lot like what you would do in a business cocktail receptions and networking events.

  • You meet people and start conversations
  • Answer questions and help others
  • Ask questions and trust others’ advice

    Facebook is not a sales pitching environment, like would not be asking for a credit card number right away you have introduced yourself told what’s your business in a live networking event, you would not want to do that in Facebook either. Facebook is a great media to add value to the community by asking and answering questions.

    What is the huge difference between live networking sessions and Facebook is that there aren’t boundaries of time or space and other people can listen in easily because your communication and all you input is archived, which is a great benefit for you and a great time savior.

    Only the media is different, because you are online, and you can do all this from the comfort of your home or during the slow hours in your business, and you can do all in a very short time, connecting with big groups of people doesn’t take hours of your time anymore!

     

    HOw is your business' future looking like?Is there a future for entertainment or information related business? Of course there is when you never stop observing your business, testing new ways to make more sales, and keep your customers satisfied.

    What is for sure is headed toward extinction are products vulnerable to theft-facilitating technologies.

    Stay ahead of this spell of doom and rather than being suddenly surprised by challenges in business, make frequent in new and different directions. Especially, reduce dependency on products and product sales. Thriving in entertainment or information business requires  you to change the  entire approach, and fast.

    At least in the near future, product will still exist, there’ll be a lot of it sold (although more illegally than legally) and it will still play a role in most information businesses, albeit a different role. It’s my belief, product will survive for a while in only four viable ways:

    First, still as an entry level purchase by a new customer, who is then quickly moved to a different role than ‘product buyer,’ which I’ll discuss later. In a sense, many have already altered this slightly by tying continuity packaging as part of their business.

    Second, the more viable strategy, with the promise of longevity: the info-product only as a component part(s) of a more complex deliverable, with most of its parts not product—as a quick example, think about a franchise; it comes with operations manuals, advertising materials, i.e., info-products, but separated from the franchise, they have no value. In these scenarios, the product is incidental to a deliverable that is impossible to copy and illegally share or sell.

    Third, solely as advertising media; intentionally designed to be copied and distributed as free content, thus eliminating piracy because there’s no profit in what is given free. In fact, if you cleverly combine this strategy and the second strategy, you can actually totally eliminate piracy of your intellectual property. If the only things of yours that can be copied are free, and the other things you sell cannot be copied with much value preserved, thieves will ignore you and prey on others.

    Fourth, the only other approach is Disney’s. They dust off a product, say “Cinderella,” put it on a DVD with extra footage, advertise for weeks that it will be re-released and available for only 2 weeks … put it out for 2 weeks … then yank it back off the market for a year or years. By the time the thieves are selling it, Disney’s made its money and is done. By the time Disney’s ready to trot it out again, the illegal stuff has been cleansed from the market. They now sell each DVD much like a new Harry Potter book is sold; it’s all over in a week or two. This can work for some info-marketers for some products; however, it is at best, a bandaid, not a cure.

    Therefore, the beat way to protect your entertainment or information business is to use products on the entry level only and make sure that each of your information products has a back-end sales system with non-product deliverable.

    Original article by Dan Kennedy,  a $200 Million Marketing Advisor

     

    The “old way” of doing things no longer works. Not if you want to grow your business. Success is going to be found in adopting “new ways” of marketing and selling.

    For most small business owners, however, increasing sales and revenue means increased time at the office, increased customer complaints, increased bills, increased staff, time away from family and friends, and a myriad of other difficulties.

    Here’s the Good News… Technology, especially the Internet and Web 2.0, has revolutionized the way businesses both corporate and small function can get incredible ROI from their marketing efforts.

    Today Internet is a remarkable, profit making marketing media for every solo-entrepreneur and small business owner. (Yes, even for you offering a local service!)

    Discover what REALLY works in today’s competitive marketing environment and win BIG with your business!

     

    Integrated marketing (IM) is a management strategy and meta-discipline focused on the organization-wide optimization of unique value for stakeholders. The logic of integrated marketing has been described as the management of three interconnected business drivers, which are:

    1) Identification and maintenance of the organization’s or brand’s coherent identity, which is a reflection of the way it is organized and operated to provide differentiated value. This has also been described as the DNA of the organization. Influential characteristics of the organization include the business model, core competencies, positioning, product designs, and brand, as well as the heritage of culture and organizational purpose. In successful organizations, these come together to create differentiated value for customers. Internal characteristics of the organization lead to external actions that become the basis of the brand, brand equity and market positioning.

    2) Mobilization of all employees behind this identity and value, with lean, value-focused processes and appropriate resources. This is essentially a challenge of implementation and performance management, achieving integration, coherence and high levels of performance throughout the organization. In marketing circles, this has sometimes been described as “living the brand” (ref), but success draws on that subtly modifies such well-established disciplines as lean, balanced scorecard/performance management, service management and internal marketing. It therefore draws on the contributions of HR, operations, organization development, finance and other groups.

    3) Integrated contact management (integrated communications, creating valuable experiences for customers). This is where IMC fits, as well as related concepts such as media neutral planning (MNP) and experience management. Although this is a key area for the marketing team, it typically also depends on the contribution of sales, operational and service management functions and processes.

     
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