Want to see exactly how to get Started in Facebook Places? Our very own Community Resources and Marketing Manager will walk you through the process step by step! Read more about Facebook Places here with our handy Step by Step Guide.
You find yourself at the end of your proverbial rope. There is a problem you can’t solve. An idea sitting on the tip of your tongue but you can’t get it out. You feel discouraged, question yourself and the crazy decision to go out on your own. You feel lost, confused, overwhelmed, even scared. And you are a small business owner, on your own, out in the world, without a safety net. There is a problem you just can’t figure out how to solve. You need to pivot, take a turn, change gears, find a new direction, and you just can’t figure out what to do. You need a good idea, or a process to take that good idea to the next step. And you are stuck…
What then?
Everybody gets stuck. It happens to great thinkers and miserable failures alike. What makes the difference between the great successes and the failures? Knowing how to pull up your bootstraps and keep going until you find a solution. What you need is inspiration… something to keep you moving forward until you get unstuck.
This is a collection of some ways to unstick yourself (or at least keep going for a little bit longer until you can think of a way to get unstuck).
If you’ve been banging your head up against a wall trying to cram some ideas into it, or just feel like you don’t have the juice to be a “great thinker”, stop beating yourself up and get out in the world. Steven Berlin Johnson is the best-selling author of six books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. His forthcoming book examines “Where Good Ideas Come From.” In this video Steven breaks apart the often intimidating idea that ideas come from some kind of “Eureka!” moment by offering up a history of how really great ideas are born from engaging discussions (and coffeehouses!).
Naomi Dunford, genius behind the Small Business Marketing Blog Ittybiz, made this inspirational recording at the urging of her adorable son Jack because “it’s really good to listen to when you’re scared”. I think it’s really good anytime you are feeling stuck, or down on yourself, or when a challenge is facing you that seems overwhelming.
Watch live video from HackerTV on Justin.tv
This video was sent to me when I asked my engineers for video inspiration recommendations. In typical engineer fashion they took this very pragmatically and ignored inspirational/inspiring in favor of practical step by step help (engineers believe processes and A/B testing solve every problem). This video by 37Signals offers a step by step breakdown (with lots of sarcasm and humor to make it bearable) for how to build a profitable business (aka how to make money online). It is great when you’ve had enough of the touchy feely you can do it! believe in yourself kind of inspiration and you are looking more for a swift kick in the pants/get to work/make a plan kind of inspiration.
When you start a business blog or begin blogging for your business (by offering guest posts to other sites) there’s so much to think about. Business blogging can be a really great way to build a following, to demonstrate your expertise, keep readers up to date on business related developments and help you to be part of your online business community by contributing thoughtfully to relevant conversations. Coming up with creative, small business blog friendly topics is only the first step. Then you need to create informative, beautiful posts which sell your brand, build your profile, and keep readers coming back for more.
Blogging can be really fun, but it also can be stressful, time consuming and challenging. The following are tools are resources that I could not blog without. They give me inspiration, help me focus and provide me with important details on the effectiveness of my tactics.
If you’re a self taught blogger (and really who isn’t?) these experts in the field will teach you the essential concepts to make your blogging experience meaningful and effective.
Tim Ferris’s Blogging Tips:Tim is considered one of the world’s most successful bloggers, and he happily shares his tips and strategies through his blog.His recent post “Blogging by Numbers: How to Create Headlines That Get Retweeted” is a must read and I watch his video “How to build a high Traffic Blog without Killing Yourself” about every 4 months just to keep his ideas fresh in my mind.
Seth was called “the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age” by Business Week. His book “Unleashing the Ideavirus” is the most popular ebook ever written downloaded by more than 1,000,000 people His work has been featured in USA Today, The New York Times, The Industry Standard and Wired Online, Ideavirus hit #4 on the Amazon Japan bestseller list, and #5 in the USA. The Big Red Fez, Godin’s take on web design, was the #1 ebook (worldwide) on Amazon for almost a year before it was published in paperback in 2002. The Miami Herald called it one of the best business books of the year. Seth is the Godfather of “permission marketing” the fundamental foundation for blogging as a marketing tool.
Blogging for business is about generating measurable results. These tools will help you maximize the effectiveness of your blog writing to help improve SEO and make sure you are staying on topic!
Easy to use tools like OpenSite Explorer and Linkscape help you to monitor how you are ranking for your keywords so you can make sure you are targeting your efforts effectively. Their
Google Analytics is the gold standard for analyzing website traffic and marketing effectiveness. “How to Use Google Analytics for Beginners” is a great intro to all the ways you should be using Google for your business blogging.
I’m a visual person, and so I try whenever possible to include rich, interesting and dynamic image in my posts to make them engaging and beautiful!I personally respond better to blogs which include interesting visuals that draw me into the content in the posts and so I try to create useful or interesting images whenever possible.
About 95% of images I create myself come from Mac screen shots. By pressing command shift 4 I get an adjustable sized window which I can use to select a perfectly sized image on my screen.
If I want to create an image from multiple screen shots, add comments, highlight or insert arrows I place all of the different pieces into the free google docs. Once I have what I need I can either save it as a file or take another screen shot!
I love this collage interface, it’s so easy to use and has really beautiful fonts to overlay onto my posts. I used it to create this image for my post “Essential Ingredients for Small Business Success“, which I think makes a fun and exciting change from a photograph.
“Lipstick theory” dictates that in times of economic crisis lipstick sales soar. The theory? Since women don’t have money to spend on designer clothes they indulge in more affordable luxury items which fit with their downsized budgets and more conservative spending habits.
“Frugal chic” embraces the shift to de rigueur thrift. Necessity and successful marketing have made thriftiness cool again and these businesses have found interesting and effective ways to capitalize on this trend. These brands are flourishing because of (rather than in spite of) the changing economy. Now that it’s cool to pinch pennies and people’s spending habits are more conservative, how can your business embrace these strategies to ride out the economic down turn?
Advertising to the financially challenged (a strategy which effectively targets and then engages people without a lot of extra income) is counter intuitive to traditional marketing strategies which logically suggest that you target your marketing to people with a lot of expendable income. But by targeting people who self identify as being “strapped for cash”, and then offering consumer solutions which work for this demographic, small businesses like Brokeass Gourmet (“The premier food and lifestyle blog for folks who want to live the high life on the cheap”) and Brokeass Stuart (“You are young broke and beautiful”) have built successful brands on marketing specifically to the financially challenged.
Stuart has parlayed his “Brokeass” brand into a deal channel in San Francisco (the aptly titled “Broke Bucks“), 2 successful books: Brokeass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply in New York and San Francisco, as well as a line of “Young, Broke and Beautiful” branded merchandise.
Flash Sales are every where… Whether it’s high fashion luxury brand names ( Gilt Group or Ideeli), national chains (Groupon and Twitter’s Early Bird), or discounts on every kind of local service from dog grooming to restaurants to spa services (LivingSocial, BloomSpot, and about a million other spinoffs, including deal aggregator Yipit which sources all discounts offered in your area). The proliferation of offerings to get premium, name brand, or luxury goods and services at a deal is overwhelming.
Most of these deals feature well known restaurants and brand names, offering discounts on premium items, which were not traditionally subject to mark downs. The various sites provide access to new customers in exchange for steeply discounted access to goods and services. The businesses can then capitalize on the “deal seeking” culture of the downsized economy by gaining access to engaged, targeted lists who have “opted in” to receive these emails. Although many local deals are currently only offering deals in large urban areas like New York, LA, Boston and San Francisco, group buying discounts and flash sales are rapidly expanding to new areas as fast as they can open up new markets!
DIY Guru Erica Domesek has created a thriving business from making super chic DIY apparel and home items inspired by high fashion and runway trends. (Her Motto ” I see it. I like it. I make it”). In addition to her incredibly popular blog PS. I made this and her newly released book of the same title, Erica’s work has been featured in publications such as Teen Vogue, Glamour, Vogue Nippon, Domino, GQ, InStyle, and Marie Claire, among others. She has styled and designed campaigns for International brands such as Kate Spade, Tumi, J.Crew, Anthropologie, Roxy, Sigerson Morrison, and True Religion, Helmut Lang, Coca-Cola.
New York Design Shop, which is a DIY heaven supplying ideas and products for the aspiring DIYer, sums up the trend best: 
“In the present economy, many are forced to get creative where they would normally splurge. ”
By creating a foothold for the frugal fashionista who can’t afford pricey designer goods (and so instead decides to create her own) these two businesses used their understanding of the changing marketing dynamic to build a niche for themselves because of rather than inspite of the economic downturn.
According to Mashable, discounts account for 40% of why people “like” a business on Facebook. Social Media and “frugal chic” seem to go hand in hand in building an effective customer acquisition strategy for small businesses operating with limited resources. Moxsie has been praised for developing a highly effective social media strategy based on the “frugal chic” model, combining highly interactive content and discount incentives to build a tremendous, and highly engaged Twitter following. In addition to creating a very interactive experience, tweeting items as they arrive and giving people a first look at new products (sometimes straight from the box!), they also use twitter to frequently offer discount codes and other special offers. Moxsie has also built their brand reputation around offering independent designer fashion at an affordable price point. Their twitter page broadcasts sales as soon as they launch, as well as offering discount codes and prizes… everything from 15% off an order to an ipad.
Moxsie’s Twitter strategy was featured in Twitter Tales check out the video below.The result? With very few employees and a limited budget they now have over 92,000 followers.
Twitter Tales – @moxsie from TwitterHQ on Vimeo.
How are you adapting your business marketing and strategy to reflect the changing economy? In what ways has your business model adapted to reflect the ways in which spending habits have changed?
The old adage, you never know how much you miss something until it’s gone, was never truer than on the day that my internet when out and I couldn’t access it. Suddenly I realized all the myriad ways that the internet improves the way that I do business. Everything took three times as long to do, my records and documentation were a mess on scraps of paper and post it notes (I’m still recovering). Suddenly I was very very appreciative of my business software, and of those features that I use without even thinking about them (that’s why I love them, so easy to use I don’t have to think about them!). Rather than subject yourself to the lasting psychological (and organizational) effects of internet deprivation I thought today I would remind you of all the ways that the internet makes your life and running your business easier.
1) Access to your financial information from anywhere. As someone who was quick to adopt technology and all of it’s multiple uses (I haven’t gotten a bank statement or paper bill in abut 5 years) I was in for a shock when my lack of internet access prevented me from being able when to access my bank or financial records. How would I decide what I needed to reorder or if I could even afford to reorder the things I needed? How would I know if I received payment for that invoice and then record that payment for my invoice in my records for later. As a hopeless multitasked being able to import my transactions with one click is an absolute lifesaver, now what was I supposed to do without internet access?
2) Managing relationships with your clients aka Customer Relationship Management If you run a small business you spend a large part of your day interacting with people, and tracking those interactions is an important way to make sure important information conveyed doesn’t slip through the cracks. I use WorkingPoint for this because I absolutely love being able to track the invoices I sent, import transaction with one click once payment is received, plus input notes and contact information. And I have it all in one place… which means no searching in multiple applications or (shudder) paper files when I’m in the middle of an important call. There is nothing worse than stalling on the phone while trying to figure out where I recorded the data I need! Having it online is also really great for the way I do business, because it means I can access the information from anywhere (well anywhere there’s internet… all I can say is thank goodness for Smartphones!).
3) Sending invoices/Paying Bills. All that paper, all those poor trees. I can say with no shame that the last time I used an actual stamp the value was 32 cents. Paying bills online and sending invoices online saves me so much time and money, plus makes me feel good about not using unnecessary office supplies.
4) Social Media in all it’s glorious forms. I shudder to think how many amazing articles I missed, plus I feel guilt at the birthdays I forgot to acknowledge on Facebook, the questions I was delayed in answering, the myriad ways I use social media to interact with my community every day. I was also filled with fear that this would be the day my twitter followers moved on to someone else to supply them with great articles and answer their questions. Social Media works best when you work it everyday and a working weekday without internet made me realize how important social media is to me!
So, what internet related business tool would you not be able to live without? Let us know in the comment section below or on our Facebook page!
WorkingPoint is so excited to host a business card giveaway from UPrinting! Even in this digital age, there is no substitute for some well produced business cards to give out during networking, to customers and to vendors. For over 25 years, UPrinting has been mastering the world of online printing with their easy-to-use website and Free File Check, a complimentary proofing service. U-Printing wants to help small businesses succeed, just like WorkingPoint! Which is why we’ve come together to offer this awesome contest…U-Printing is offering the WorkingPoint Community 4 sets of 250 die cut business cards!
This offer is only open to WorkingPoint Subscribers so sign up for a free account now! Sign up is quick and easy and gets you all kinds of awesome features like profit/loss reports, free online invoicing, expense tracking, customer relationship management and more…
Technical disclosures:
Giveaway Prize:
250 Die-Cut Business Cards for Four (4) Winners
2 x 3.5”, 2 x 2” (square card) or 1.75 x 3.5” (slim card)
Die cutting options available: Rounded Corners, Leaf, Rounded One-Corner, Half-Circle Side, Circle
Paper Type: 14pt Cardstock Gloss, Matte, or High Gloss; 13pt Cardstock Uncoated
Color: 4Color Front, Blank Back; 4Color Front, Black Back; 4Color Both Sides
Limited to US residents only 18 years old and above
In adherence to the FTC ruling on Blogger Reviews and Sponsored Postings, we need to disclose that WorkingPoint will also be receiving 250 Die Cut Business Cards from UPrinting.com for hosting this giveaway (and we’re really excited to be getting them!).
3rd Quarter Estimated Tax Payments for 2010 are due in just two days on September 15! WorkingPoint’s Tax Reports are built to make it as easy as possible for you to calculate and pay your 3rd quarter estimated taxes, but an important part of the process is making sure you report an accurate picture of your business finances. I am lucky enough to have an amazing accountant who helps me review my deductions to make sure I am recording all of my business deductions and avoiding unnecessary overpayment, but if you are not so lucky the below list includes some great deductions that she mentioned that were not mentioned in other lists I came across!
Your Tax Reports are only as good as the data you put into them, so make sure to track your finances accurately all year round and check the list below to see if your business is eligible to deduct the following as business expenses.
Your Cellphone/Smart Phone: If you use your cellphone as your primary contact number for business then you should be able to deduct it as a business expense. Don’t forget to include the cost of the actual phone and any hardware, any applications for business you use on your phone and your monthly bill.
Public Transit Costs: If you use public transportation for travel, either individual transfers or bus passes 100% of the expense can be written off as a business expense (using a vehicle? the calculation is more complex and can be found here).
The Complete Cost of your Home Office: Which includes rent and also utilities like water and gas, data/wireless, insurance, housekeeping. Read more about how to calculate here.
Your Computer: Either the total sum in the year you purchased it or depreciation in the subsequent years…
Your Camera: Do you use your camera to take product pictures? What about a printer, fax, scanner? Big electronic purchases for work should also be considered for inclusion.
Travel expenses: Flight, hotel, taxis, some food while you’re traveling, wifi, make sure you keep an accurate count because almost all travel expenses are deductible.
Software for Business including Social Media, blogs, accounting, and your URL: Keep track of any software (including online) that you purchase for business, including services that track social media metrics, video recording if you use it for business, Microsoft office, etc. If you pay for anything hosted (including your accounting software, your email provider for business, your website host, premium wordpress membership, your domain name) all of these things may be deductible as business expenses!
Non Cash Deductions to Charity: If you gave an in kind donations to charity don’t forget to include them as well!
Other Recommended Reading:
“31 Small Business Tax Deductions” Gregory Go, American Express Open Forum
“Small Business Tax Deduction Checklist” Gilberto Fuentes, Ehow
Today’s headlines revealed the onset romance between ex-Gilmore Girls actress Lauren Graham and her Parenthood costar Peter Krause which Graham discusses in her interview in this month’s Redbook magazine . In the article, Graham describes how the couple met and had a failed “board game” pseudo date together almost 15 years before but that timing and shyness kept the romance from blossoming until the two reconnected on the Parenthood set. Graham is best known for her role on popular TV show Gilmore Girls and her film roles in Bad Santa with Billy Bob Thornton, Evan Almighty opposite Jim Carrey and The Pacifier where she played Vin Deisel’s love interest. Krause is most famous for his roles on several short lived “cult favorite” TV series including Sports Night, Six Feet Under, and Dirty Sexy Money.
This kind of crossover between personal life and professional life is notoriously widespread in the world of celebrity (check out this gallery of successful onset romances). But those of us who work outside the entertainment industy still encounter a crossover between our personal lives and professional lives. In fact, a 2008 study found that 18 percent of the married or committed couples they surveyed met at work, while just 14 percent met in school or college. This represents a dramatic shift from data from 15 years earlier which showed that only 15 percent of the couples said they met in the office and 23 percent met in school.
More and more couples are meeting in the workforce.
And it’s not only romantic relationships that are blurring the line between work and personal life. Technology has made it increasingly easier, and therefore more common to work from home. People are developing social media strategies for their small businesses which often involving using their personal networks for business purposes. The economic downswing has people turning to family and friends for business fund-raising. Burgeoning professionals spend their after hours at networking events.
All of these cultural movements help to blur the definitive line between the personal and professional. So how do we navigate these blurring boundaries? With tact, awareness and as much conscious planning as possible! The following is a list of articles to help you navigate the blending of work and personal life with as much savvy as possible:
FAMILY BUSINESS
Video “5 Tips for Managing a Family Business” Based on an article in Entrepreneur.com, from OpenForum.com via MSNBC Business Watch
“When Friends and Family Finance, Pitfalls to Avoid” OpenForum.Com
ROMANCE AT WORK
“Tips about Dating, Sex & Romance at Work” Humanresources.About.Com
“Top 5 Keys to Mixing Work and Romance” Monster Career Centre
SOCIAL CAPITAL
“Raising your Social Capital” Technorati.com
“7 Lessons for Better Networking with Social Media” Mashable.com
VACATIONS
“How I managed to take a Vacation” New York Times Small Business Online Blog
“6 Things to think about on your Summer Vacation” OpenForum.com
WORKING FROM HOME
“When is it time to Ditch your Home Office?” OpenForum.com
“80 Ways to Steal Valuable Minutes from your day” OpenForum.com
3rd Quarter Estimated Tax Payments for 2010 are due next week on September 15, WorkingPoint wants to make sure you’re prepared and avoid any penalties!
According to About.com, “You need to pay in at least enough tax through a combination of withholding and estimated payments to avoid the estimated tax penalty. To avoid the penalty, you will need to pay in at least 90% of the tax for the current year, or 100% of the tax shown on the return for the prior year, whichever is smaller, according to the IRS.“
WorkingPoint’s Tax Reports can be found here to help you calculate the amount you should pay to avoid these interest charges from overpayment!
Tax Reports help you prepare your taxes, whether you pay them monthly, quarterly or yearly. Tax reports are typically tax form specific – meaning a specific tax report helps you fill out a specific tax form, for example, a 1099 report helps you complete the IRS Form 1099.
Small business tax information and reporting can be intimidating, especially if you are not a tax professional. Using tax reports can help make filing your taxes easier by transforming your business activity from the way it makes sense to you, to the way it make sense to the IRS and other tax agencies. Tax reports can help you save time and avoid stressing out over what you owe to agencies and how much by helping you track the information you need to file a specific report.
Once you have your business activity updated in WorkingPoint for the period you want to report on, you’ll be able to see what is happening in your business from a tax perspective with the click of a button.
With WorkingPoint Tax reporting, you can generate time-saving tax reports, including:
Customize your reports by selecting a predefined or custom date range, print as a PDF, export your data to Open Office or Microsoft Excel® with formulas and formatting intact and expand and collapse categories to get more or less detailed.
The IRS has a worksheet available for Form 1040-ES which can also help you calculate the minimum amount of estimated tax you should pay to avoid the penalty. The worksheet also includes all of the current year figures for standard deductions and tax rates, to help you obtain an accurate figure for this year’s estimated payments. You can also view a sample estimated tax calculation.
An invoice is so much more than just a template for collection, it is the delivery tool for the most essential function of running a sustainable business, getting money into your bank account! Once you’ve sold your product or service, you need to actually, physically collect that revenue for all your hard work to count. As an accounting software, we at WorkingPoint see a special elegance and art in streamlining the process of collection with online invoicing.
The art of the invoice is not about customizing your invoice templates to make them look fancy or over designed. In fact, we don’t think you should waste any of your valuable time fiddling with customizing the look of your template. The simplicity of the invoice’s humble cousin, the receipt, is testimony to how little frills the invoice really needs for it’s true purpose: collection of revenue, tracking inventory, and record keeping. The lost “art” of the Invoice is about streamlining the process of invoicing down to only it’s most essential steps, and eliminating any unnecessary steps, clutter, time wastage and inefficiencies that have recently given invoicing such a bad name.
We’re hoping that you’ve already simplified your life by ditching that excel spreadsheet you were using to keep your books in favor of a time saving business software and that this cleansing process has left you filled with the excitement that comes from streamlining your essential business functions. Now you are ready for the next step…
What should be a desirable task (getting money!) has somehow become the black sheep of business management and we are ready to change that. These commandments are dedicated to purging unnecessary steps from the noble task of invoicing. No more will we tolerate additional tasks that drain valuable time from other business functions. No more will we fuss unnecessarily with our collections but instead focus on getting them out and getting our essential revenue reinjected into our businesses!
1) Thou shalt not spend more than 4 minutes on each invoice.
2) Your invoice shall automatically reflect the goods sold as an inventory adjustment in your inventory management software.
3) Thou shalt automatically save the new contact in your customer management software, when you create an invoice with new contact info.
4) Invoices shall automatically populate thine invoice reports, profit loss reports and other business/accounting reports.
5) CRM shall automatically fill in saved contact info throughout thine invoice once it’s been saved.
6) Invoices shall automatically populate your accounting software with all relevant data related to your business.
7) Thou shalt, whenever possible, employ paperless billing to save money on printing costs and postage.
8) Thou shalt convert thy invoice into a sendable email with one click
9) Thou shalt automatically save a copy of every invoice sent
10) Invoicing shall be accessible from anywhere with internet access/computer or smartphone
