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Wednesday, April 26, 2017

5 Ways to Help Your Small Business When You’re Cash-Strapped

A banner of motivational quote of Norman Vincent Peale.

Image Credit: gstatic.com
 Well, no news here! Everyone gets broke sometimes, so are businesses. What counts is being able to find a quick way out of it when it happens. Experience has shown that the times when you need money the most are usually the times when it’s hardest to get. What to do? When your business is hemorrhaging money, you are running a very big risk. Finding a quick solution is what brings out the real business person in you. When your business is cash-strapped, you can do any of or a combination of the following.

  

01. Take a loan. Well, all you want is cash to keep your business running. Getting cash even at a cost is same thing as getting a loan to fund your business. Even though a loan may not necessarily fix all your problems, but it sure can help you out of a short-term cash crunch. How and where you can get it is largely determined by the cost of funds from the lender.

02. Cut your expenses. A very natural thing to do when cash-strapped! This step is absolutely the most critical. You must find and block any cash leakages to stop your business from bleeding cash. Even when the bleeding is not very obvious, you can still cut back on certain expenses which will not do damage to the business. However in doing so, you must try to be creative because if you can’t manage to get your expenses under control, then you’re going to be perpetually short of money.

03. Go liquid. That is, you must find a way to generate more cash. If you can do this creatively, it is much better than taking a loan. It helps if you can create a special offering, whether it’s a discount or a new premium package and get your clients to buy in. Going hard on your debtors to get them to pay up their debts can also help to raise needed cash.

04. Dispose of some assets. Yeah, disposing idle assets is one very viable way to raise cash. Sometimes, you may have in your stores, assets you acquired in the past you have not really used or some fairly used ones you have rested. You can dispose of these assets just like as in garage sales to raise cash.

05. Run your business profitably. It is difficult to get cash-strapped if you habitually run your business profitably. A profit mindset draws out the strictest money-management practices in any business. Putting profit first and setting aside a predetermined percentage of profit from every single bit of revenue will help you trim expenses and ensure your business remains financially solvent. That is one very sound management theory and practice which your business badly needs for survival.

Friday, April 21, 2017

5 Smart Ways to Boost Employee Morale


Work station with a black pen, notepad, calculator, flowers and a glass of water.
There is growing evidence that happy workers are productive workers. So, what do you need to do to make your own workers happy and productive? Somehow, you need some morale boosters to make your employees more productive. These here 5 tips will help. 

01. Flexible working options. Human beings need real freedom and privacy. Many tend to be more productive when they have both. With increasing improvement in technology, it becomes easier for professionals to work from home, or telecommute for portions of the day. More and more workers are buying into such loose arrangement and they are happier for it. It helps in morale boosting for such workers and companies and employers are not complaining for so long as productivity is not on the decline.

02. Continuous training. Many of today’s workers aren’t satisfied with just base qualifications. They want ongoing training and development to learn new skills and new concepts. Anywhere they get that, it helps morale because it makes them more valuable and helps to diversify their work experience so they don’t get bored or burned out very quickly. When you have a credible and beneficial training and retraining process in place, it helps to keep your employees engaged and gives them a reason to stick with your company for the long haul.

03. Decent remunerations. Of course this is a given. In this age and time, I very much doubt if anyone still expects people to work for free without adequate and decent remunerations. The better workers are remunerated, the better it serves their morale. Very directly too, productivity is also affected!

04. Growth potentials. Not very many workers like to associate with companies which have no credible growth potentials. The incentive is, if the company is growing, the workers grow with it. That no doubt is a morale booster for the workers.

05. Great working environment. Working in a cozy environment is a better morale booster than literally working in the dump. Even though changing times and changing technologies are fast affecting work environments and arrangements, the better a working environment is, the better it serves the morale of workers. Come to think of it, who wouldn’t want to work in a great environment?

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

4 Small Business Trends Steadily on the Rise


White on Green Small Business Owner road sign.
If you are very current with trends, you must have noticed that small businesses are going through a whole lot of changes in recent times. Apart from ethical and regulatory requirements, the advancements in communication fields, IT, marketing and other fields are playing major roles in engendering changes in the way and manner people run small businesses these days. The small business trends discussed here currently appear to be rising steadily because more people have started to pay more attention to them. Just take a look around you. You will discover that many small business owners are now:

 

Focusing more on customer service: Many small business owners have realized that if you support your customers well, your chance of customer retention increases tremendously. Of course, they know that repeat customers are extremely valuable to their businesses. With advancement in technology, many now use chat apps to literally lead customers by the hand to do business with them. Many are now able to provide 24/7 support services by way of availability, prompt response and prompt solutions. Right now, if you do not have chatbots for customer interactions, the time to deploy some in your own business is now.

Getting their businesses online: That simply means, less storefronts and more websites! The good news is that small businesses lately have become quite divergent and very daring too. With current popularity and real advancements in mobile technology, most small businesses are now flourishing significantly on the internet. The internet somehow allows these businesses to make some reductions in physical storefronts thereby saving on maintenance costs and some other space related problems. So, get smart now by getting yourself a business website if you don’t have one already. It goes with the trends.

Paying more attention to environmental issues: Small business owners are steadily endeavoring to go clean as well as green in the way they run their businesses! That is largely because environmental issues have become a very big concern of the modern world. Going with the flow, it is an excellent thing to see that small businesses have started paying special heed to environmental issues. With global concerns rising over issues like global warming, pollution, plastic, flora and fauna extinction, small businesses now do things to enable them conform to going clean and green to protect the environment in which they do business. So, you now see small businesses deliberately encourage cutting down on plastic and paper use and urging their customers to do same. Online shopping is one great eco-friendly way many of them do business these days.

Having more social media presence: These days, smart marketers consider social media presence a necessity and not a luxury. For that reason, having a presence on social media has become an absolute must for almost all business ventures who want to remain competitive. Hitherto, the online presence people were used to was mainly limited to having a complete website. Not anymore! With the advent of very popular social media platforms like, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, the game has changed completely. Social media craze has compelled many businesses to expand their online presence to the social media where the customers can be found and interacted with very easily. Right now, even the smallest businesses of the lot are trying their utmost to up their games on social media by socializing and promoting their goods/services to a very large mass of people. That no doubt is good for business. Get social, by putting your own business on social media platforms. That is the place to be right now if you sincerely want to take your business to the next level.

Monday, April 10, 2017

3 Trending Social Media Tactics for Effective Ads

Formatted social media symbols on display.
Online, marketers are literally at war trying to get customers’ attention. Everyone gets to use one tactic or the other particularly on social media to outdo others. We now generally know that social media has become one of the most fascinating developments of our time. Apart from ease of use and accessibility, social media is also cost effective and very efficient at getting ads across to millions of users within a very short space of time. Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram need specialized and different ways of use to get good results. That is where tactics come into the picture. Here now are the 3 currently very popular and trending.

01. Consistent posting. No doubt the most important ingredient in establishing a strong brand persona on social media is consistency. Once you have built up a good base of content, you can create an automated posting schedule most likely to garner high-engagement rates. That is because consistent posting leads to stronger brand recall, increased engagement and more opportunities to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

02. Tracking and analyzing results. If you want to keep conversations on your social pages going, you must be able to track your results and analyze them correctly. That is where tools like Google analytics come in very handy. You can use analytics to look at brand mentions and engagement to learn what is working for you, what isn’t and what needs to be improved upon. You can get details on certain factors like what demographics your posts appeal to most or what countries are most engaged with your brand messaging. With this information, you can target your ads correctly for better results.

03. Latching on to trends. Taking the message to customers where they can be found is one great advantage of social media ads. You can use tools like Buzzsumo and Feedly to enable you to learn about the content that is buzzing within your industry, around your brand or about your competitors. That information allows you to target your ads to trends correctly for better results.

 


Wednesday, April 05, 2017

5 Wasteful Small Business Marketing Strategies to Avoid

Opened book Marketing Strategy sign on work station with a smart phone, eye gladdes, tapes and a pen.
 For any small business, time and money are way too valuable for any wastage to be tolerated. Granted everyone in business always wants to do what most others are doing to promote their products/services in the market place. It gets real difficult most times. That is because marketing is no easy task. It is where some business owners at times get to overdo certain things thereby occasioning some avoidable wastage. When developing your own marketing strategy, you must take care to avoid wasting your time and money unnecessarily. Here is what to look out for and try to avoid.



01. Casting your marketing net too wide. Almost always, you get better returns on your investments and your marketing efforts work better if you target your audience effectively. Experience has shown that if you cast your marketing nets too wide, you end up wasting valuable time and money marketing to the wrong people in the wrong places. That clearly is a waste which is avoidable.

02. Untargeted video marketing. If you rightly assume that your customers are watching videos online, you must find out where. First you must try to know on what platforms your videos would be viewed on before you even create one. That is because creating videos for social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram for instance requires different approaches and strategies for the simple reason that videos are consumed differently on both platforms. Doing otherwise leads to avoidable wastage creating videos which are not well targeted.

03. Using too many social media channels. The more the merrier is hardly relevant when it comes to marketing on social media. If you are one of those marketers who still believe you need to be everywhere on social media, you are simply wasting your very valuable time, effort and money. When you decide to market on social media platforms, what is most important is to target your customers exactly where they are already spending their time. Just take your business to them in the social media where they already are. That saves you time and money.

04. Creating irrelevant content. We hear marketing experts say “content is king” when it comes to blogging for business. And that you need regular and fresh content all the time. Great! But that’s not all. What is important is that your content must be relevant to be useful. That is what helps your customers who want to build a relationship with your business. They appreciate your business more when you regularly give them valuable, relevant and fresh content which helps them. Irrelevant content is clearly a waste of time and money in that wise.



05. Wrong use of influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is good for your business if the influencer is in the right industry. To get good value from the advice of influencers, they must be right for your business and they must also have some visible and identifiable reputation. If however you’re in an obscure industry or you create products for a small niche market, influencers are probably not going to be of much help to you. Using influencers for such business will clearly be a waste of time, effort and money. Therefore, you can do well to avoid wasting your time and money on some low impact influencer or one in the wrong industry.

Monday, April 03, 2017

How to Join TripleClicks Booster Club


TripleClicks Decal on windshield of a car.
 The TripleClicks Booster Club is for SFI Affiliates who understand how important it is to support their store and practice Transfer Buying whenever possible. It means you have placed one or more orders with a minimum of 1500 VP for the current month AND also in the previous month. Your orders can be those set to reoccur automatically each month (Auto-Delivery) or they can just be placed manually at any time throughout the month. Any combination, your choice.

Being a Booster Club member means...

* You will receive 10 income-boosting CSAs (via CSA Rewards) monthly!

* You will receive 100 Bonus VersaPoints each month! That's 100 extra shares of the TripleClicks Executive Pool paid to you monthly, too!

* You will receive two additional entries each day in the big Daily Grand drawing! That's a whopping 730 extra chances each year to win hundreds of dollars in valuable and income-boosting prizes!

* Your badge mantel will be sporting a prestigious "Booster Club Member" badge to help you lead by example with your own team and enhance your recruiting.

And that's not all! Get the full details about the TC Booster Club at: