Startup & Small Business - Page 17

Check out our latest entrepreneurial-driven content geared toward helping startups and small businesses grow their brands.

How to Pump Up Your Startup’s Online Brand Image

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onlinebranding

Crafting a brand image is no easy feat. A lot of work must go into establishing a brand, let alone creating an image that stands out and is successful. Many new startups often falter because their image isn’t one that actually serves them well, and a brand image that fails a company often belongs to a company that fails.

All in all, a company’s brand image speaks to the audience as a first impression. Consumers make a lot of decisions based on a company’s branding, so it’s essentially that your own startup have a pumped up brand image that snags you success the first time around.

Narrow Down Your Target Market

A common mistake startups make is trying too hard to have “mass appeal.” Unless you have a tried and true company that has services and products that can truly appeal to all consumers, there’s no need to market to a broad audience.

Target markets aren’t just necessary to consider when it comes to marketing. Your brand image and representation speak to a demographic, but what demographic are they actually speaking to? A pumped up brand image is one that knows who it’s trying to access and succeeds at doing so.

Focus On Your Competition

How often do you check in on what your competition is doing? Don’t worry – you aren’t snooping around in an attempt to copy your rivals, but instead you need to focus on what your competition isn’t doing.

Simultaneously, it is good to see what your rivals are succeeding at. Do they have a bigger audience than you do? Why? It’s okay to mimic their branding successes as long as you put your own spin on them – copy the concepts, not the content. Also look at where they’re faltering and take advantage of these flaws by fixing the problems within your own branding schemas.

Determine Your Selling Point

What makes your brand unique? How do you differ from other startups and businesses out there? Establishing your uniqueness should be the cornerstone of any brand messaging. There are thousands of businesses out there that do the same things, but each one has something special that applies only to them – and if they don’t, they fail.

Your brand image should center on what differentiates you from everyone else. This is your selling point – so why not use it to do what it’s there for?

Get Help with Problem Areas

Most startups are incredibly understaffed. If your company is run out of your living room with help from you and three others, it’s very likely that you won’t have all of your marketing and branding bases covered. For instance, is someone in your startup a graphic designer? Is someone an expert on demographic studies?

When you have a weak point within your company, find a way to fix it. Good branding is visual and focuses on marketing psychology, and if you don’t have team members that perform these functions flawlessly then you’re already lagging behind.

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4 Great Online Resources for Brand Management

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brandmanagementblog

Brand management isn’t as easy as everyone says it is. It requires tons of effort, a watchful eye, an impressive understanding of marketing and hours’ worth of work every day. This can get tedious, and it’s very easy to get burnt out – at least, if you don’t have any help, that is.

Luckily thanks to the Internet age there are tons of blogs and sites dedicated to helping you stay on top of your brand management game. These are only four incredible resources you can use, so start with these and always be on the hunt for more.

The HubSpot Blog

Want brand management, marketing and sales best practices right at your fingertips? What about helpful hints and pieces of advice to help your business run better? The HubSpot blog contains tons of curated content from industry writers who know what they’re talking about when it comes to business betterment topics.

Every day HubSpot posts numerous pieces of quality content that pertain to any number of subjects – from how to create a better social media brand image, to the top five reasons you need to be on LinkedIn, they’ve covered it. This makes it an incredible resource for brand management best practices.

Google Alerts

Brand management means knowing who’s talking about you, where and why. When you go to Google your name or business, sites like your social media accounts and main site hub should be first, but do you know what else ranks along with your name?

Google Alerts are an excellent way to keep on top of this essential information. Anytime content ranks that mentions you, Google sends you a notification so you can keep tabs on your brand image. This is how brand management professions stay ahead of bad press and also celebrate good reviews and testimonials.

Canva

Brand management isn’t just about staying on top of a brand, but also elevating the brand through content and other forms of marketing. If you want to delve into content marketing for your own brand in order to help boost its image, Canva is a great place to start.

Canva is a free-to-use online platform that allows for innovative image editing, including creating banners, visual resumes and infographics that can be used for marketing purposes. The quality of these images is impeccable, and Canva comes with tons of preloaded templates to help make your life easier.

Wishpond

This easy-to-use marketing platform includes tools that can be added to a website to offer features like intelligent forms, popups, and automation. These also include native integrations that helps sales, marketing, management, and promotion through both email and social channels.

Essentially Wishpond is your one stop shop for brand management through innovation and lead generation. Anyone who wants to market a product, a brand, a business or a service can do incredible things with only a few of Wishpond’s add-ons, let alone their complete arsenal of branding tools. Wishpond has also worked with famed brands, like Vervegirl and Diamond Candles.

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The 3 Motivational Resources for Small Businesses

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3 Motivational Resources for Small Businesses

Staying motivated is one of the keys to staying in business. When you don’t give yourself enough of a push to get things done, things start to fall off track. Think about an unmotivated version of yourself to the highest degree – not answering phone calls, deciding to stay in bed all day. How productive is that?

Normally motivation is something that starts to slump off slowly, though. It starts with small shrugs and ignoring your to-do list for one day, but it soon snowballs into something else: full blown apathy.

This is only compounded in a setting where others are also at risk for losing motivation. You can try your best to keep yourself and your employees motivated, but a big problem is that what drives all of us is totally different. Someone in their 40s might find their children and spouse to be what drives them to perform every day, but someone younger may find motivation in the form of trying to pay off those student loans.

What doesn’t change for everyone, though, is general motivation – the kind of motivation that tells them to keep doing what they’re doing for success. This three resource areas can be what kick you and your employees into motivation overdrive.

Trade Shows and Conventions

Sometimes what keeps someone from being motivated is they feel like their job or business is stuck in a rut. It isn’t trying new things, so why should they? As a small business owner, you have the power to show them the possibilities are endless, but it can be hard to do this through talks and conversations alone.

What’s the solution? Invest in taking your team to a convention or a trade show. In this environment, you can both take notes as a SMB owner about future possibilities while simultaneously showing off to your team that change is possible, you’ll just have to figure out how to implement it.

Motivational Speakers

This may sound cheesy, but motivational speakers CAN work for your team. You need to get rid of the stereotypical motivational speaker image from your mind – the energetic man on stage, screaming faux-zen self-help adages at an audience.

In reality, motivational speakers are often very business savvy. Their main audience is one that is in the business industry, thus they put a business spin on their advice. Topics like success, communication, motivation and confidence are common topics that these speakers cover, and their sermons often include tips and tricks for a more fulfilling business life.

Literature

There are a ton of motivational books out there that are geared towards business, but sometimes a problem arises: much like you may not have wanted to read the required reading in high school English class, your employees may feel no incentive to read any books you recommend.

The solution is to invest in a class set, of sorts. Buy enough books for your employees and schedule in meetings or time during existing team meetings to talk about a chapter or concept from the book. This puts more emphasis on the necessity to read the book while also making it a discussion about the motivational, helpful aspects of the book.

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Ways to Grow Your Small Business with Your Friends

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Ways to Grow Your Small Business

Growing a business is hard work on your own, and that’s why you hire employees to help. It’s often, though, that businesses in their early stages are generated from a lot of pro bono help and nourishment. Entrepreneurs often get their friends and family to help volunteer for advertising, product making and other tasks that need to be handled when there’s not enough money to pay yourself, let alone an actual workforce.

Your family might be an easier sell, but your friends could use some warming up to. Some friends will jump at the chance to help, but you can’t blame someone for wanting something a little more. There’s an art to convincing your friends to go in with you on a business venture, even if it’s just in the capacity of handing out fliers.

Work the Tit for Tat Angle

Not many people are willing to give something away for free. In this exchange model, your friends are giving away their time for you. What are you going to offer them in return?

Whenever your friends help you out, give them something in exchange. It can be free product, a future cut, or even something more creative, like naming a future product or service after them. When you give someone an incentive to help, they’re more likely to do so.

Make it Fun

Sometimes all you need to do to entice someone to help you with your business is give the activity a competitive edge. Get your friends to all try and refer people to your business. Whoever gets the largest number of referrals wins free product, and everyone gets to have a night of drinks to celebrate the success.

Word of Mouth

One area of marketing that people don’t focus enough on in this digital age is the power of the word of mouth advertisement. Your friends have friends, and that’s something you can use.

Tell your closest friends about your business venture, and all you ask of them is to tell their friends. This kind of pyramid, trickle down advertising is how early grassroots movements got started, and the same can be said for your new small business.

Capitalize On Togetherness

Being with your friends is a fun experience in and of itself. When you want to do something for your business, involve your friends not only to help you work, but also to have something to do together. People are often happy to organize fundraisers, make product and commit to other business activities if that’s what they think of it as – an activity.

Ask for Advice and Opinions

When you have friends, you have the perfect opportunity for case studies and beta testing free of charge. For instance, say you have an ad campaign you want to start running. Shoot it by real people you know first before taking it out of the family to market to others. Ask for their real opinions. They may be more likely to be frank with you than a stranger.

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Incorporating Fitness into Your Everyday Schedule

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Incorporating Fitness

One common excuse you’ll hear people make for not exercising is that it simply doesn’t fit into their schedule. The fact of the matter is that this is exactly what it sounds like – and excuse. The reality is that you can always find time to exercise, but you have to be able to incorporate it into your schedule.

It’s possible to be fit at all times while still having a busy day, and just because you’re always busy doesn’t mean you’re being fit. Not eating and sitting at a desk all day won’t make you lose weight, and it certainly won’t make you healthier. The trick to being healthy and working is moving and eating right.

The following are quick ways to incorporate fitness into your everyday life while you’re at work, at home or anywhere in between.

  1. In general, move more. If you don’t want to concern yourself with actual legitimate exercises, you’ll have to find ways to be more active without them. Walk the long way around the office, job home instead of driving, or do leg exercises while you’re sitting. If you can find a way to be more mobile, go for it.
  1. Start planning a regular mobile activity. This can be 30 minutes of walking or 15 minutes of cardio. No matter what kind of activity it is, you can easily squeeze it into your schedule.
  1. If you don’t want to give up Netflix night so you can commit to your exercise evening, combine the two projects. You can easily do yoga and watch the latest episode of Narcos. Find exercise methods that still allow you to watch TV or enjoy your other hobbies you’d miss out on otherwise.
  1. Don’t commit to exercises you don’t like. If you hate burpees, don’t do them. There are tons of exercises out there that work every part of your body – enough to substitute one for the other. If you don’t enjoy an exercise, you’re likely to fall off the wagon with committing to it.
  1. If you’re looking to exercise more to lose weight, that’s a noble cause – but your main focus should be on being healthy. When it comes to your schedule, you shouldn’t focus your routine around a certain number of days or sessions in order to lose 10 pounds. You have to make working out and being mobile a commitment that’s long term in your appointment book.
  1. You have to focus on more than one area of exercise. For one day, schedule cardio. For another, strength training. Space these days out and schedule them so that you can have rest days for easier movement in between your harder days.
  1. Always try to get involved with fitness groups. Usually fitness classes have a set time that they occur, and this can make scheduling in a workout easier and more of a commitment than just picking a random time to do some sit-ups in the kitchen.
  1. Choose a time of day to work out and stick to it. Whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, keep your schedule routine so you’re more likely to work out when you say you will.

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3 Time Management Lifesavers for New Entrepreneurs

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Time Management for New Entrepreneurs

If you’re new to the world of being an entrepreneur, then you likely don’t know how to manage your time like one. There’s a certain science to time management in general, but when you’re an entrepreneur you’ll need an airtight budget for your time. You’re a business owner, an employee, and a customer service rep all in one – you don’t just have one job, you really have all the jobs.

This means your time is no longer yours unless you work hard to make it yours. Unless you have tight control over your time limits and management, you’ll find yourself drowning. The charm of being your own boss is supposed to be you write the schedule and you can take as many days or evenings off as you want, but the reality is that without having a mature discipline, you can easily find yourself swamped.

Time management is about give and take and sacrifice. While you may want to sleep in, it’s better to handle your invoices in the morning and spend time for yourself at night. This kind of compromise is what your new schedule will run on, and these three time management tips may be what separate you from a full schedule and a week-long vacation.

Start Analyzing Your Current Time Management

Before you commit to any new, improved schedule, first thing’s first – you have to understand where your time is going now and what you’re capable of. Spend one day next week working at full capacity. In a sense, run yourself ragged. This will show you what your maximum capacity is. Now spend the rest of your week as usual. This can be a slow pace or one that’s realistic; whatever you would naturally do.

At the end of this week, step back and compare your starter day to the other days in between. Your time management schedule should be somewhere in the middle. You need to do enough in a day to be productive and you need to be trying hard at it in order to make the most of your day.


Plan Your Downtime

Real people have office hours, and you should too. It’s okay to check your work phone while you’re away from your desk, but don’t schedule yourself for anything when you know you’ll probably have to be ripped away from something else. You have a life, you have to eat and you have to sleep. If you know you won’t be awake before 7 AM, don’t schedule a conference call for 6:30.

This also keeps you grounded. You shouldn’t sacrifice your life for work. You’re working so you can live your life – remember that.


Learn to Put Things Off

Sounds weird, doesn’t it? But one important concept of time management is the focus. Don’t answer every email that comes in just because your phone tells you it’s there. Don’t pick up the phone when you’re working on something else. There is a time to give everyone your undivided attention, and it’s not while you’re in the middle of giving it to another task.

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you would like to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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How to Promote a Fit Work Environment to Boost Business

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How Promoting a Fit Work Environment can Boost Your Business

Being conscious of your health is important for anyone in any walk of life. No matter if you’re a stay-at-home mom turned entrepreneur or a big-wig CEO at a Fortune 500 company, fitness isn’t something to laugh off. This is especially true in a work environment. Factors like staying sedentary and stress can lead to major health problems, like heart disease, weight gain, and overall immune system deterioration – and that’s just a small sampling of the potential risks of staying inactive in the business world.

It’s a common problem that professional women make unhealthy choices because they feel they’re too busy to do what’s right for their health. This can be skipping workout routines, choosing quick and greasy foods because there’s no time to make dinner, or even snacking too much while at work in order to keep their energy up.

This is something that needs to change, but it’s not a change that includes just you. Instead of only focusing on getting your own health in check, start considering a work environment that puts fitness first.

Group Activities Promote Teamwork

It’s always been advised that working out and dieting is best done with a buddy. When you exercise and diet with a partner, you hold each other accountable for your successes. Working out alone means that you can quit whenever you want with no motivation while doing it with someone else is motivation in and of itself.

This only increases when there are more people added to the mix. Think about a yoga class – you don’t want to be the only one who can’t do a Downward Facing Dog, do you? This same mentality can be applied in a workplace that promotes fitness. There’s a drive put in place that pushes employees to succeed and go beyond their capabilities, which also promotes workplace teamwork. Employees that get fit together work better together.

A Shift from Workplace Boredom

Think about your daily work schedule. There are certainly times when you think to yourself “I wish I could be doing something, anything that isn’t this right now.” Your colleagues and employees think the same thing too. The reality is that bored workers and unchallenged workers stagnate in the workplace. This ennui leads to lower productivity.

This can be fixed with regular breaks that focus on getting that blood circulating. When you encourage others to get up from their desk occasionally and walk around, be it around the block or a quick stroll through the office floors, you break up their boring schedule with something different. This recharges their minds and gives them an incentive to work more.

Science Supports It

Multiple studies have been done over the years that laud exercise and fitness increase productivity and focus. When you exercise, you get your heart racing and your blood flowing. Sitting or being inactive for extended periods of time causes lethargy, which isn’t conducive to workplace productivity while getting up and getting active gets the brain working again.

Would you rather have a work environment filled with sluggish employees and colleagues, or one that promotes fitness and gets things done?

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4 Unique Brainstorming Methods for your Next Project Meeting

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Brainstorming methods

Being the owner or employee of a small business means being a constant idea machine. You’ll have to learn how to come up with solutions and ideas on the spot at any time of the day. At first, this can be pretty easy – you’re a fresh mind with fresh ideas and you’re spitting them out left and right. After a while, though, the well starts to run dry. You’re grasping at straws, trying your damnedest to come up with whatever you can and what you do deliver isn’t very good.

This means you’re going to have to learn how to brainstorm. No matter whether you’re totally new at this or you’ve exhausted your entire idea bank, it’s never a bad idea to develop a talent for brainstorming – especially with others.

Group brainstorming activities can be the best way for you and your team to come up with brand new ideas, or even fine-tune old ones. One half-formed idea you have combined with one half-formed idea from another coworker can add up to be the best idea you’ve seen all year.

But sometimes the common forms of brainstorming don’t work as well as they should. Everyone will get pretty burnt out on just shouting out ideas, so implement these four new and innovative brainstorming strategies during your next project meeting. You’ll be amazed by how much synergy you guys will share, and the ideas will come pouring out.

Change the scenery a little bit

Sometimes what’s really blocking all of your creativity is staying in the same old meeting room and office space over and over again. Even if you work in the most inventive and creative office in the world, staying in the same place every day stagnates your creativity. Instead of staring at the same wall again, suggest everyone move somewhere else.

The best place for sparking creativity is somewhere engaging, like the outdoors, but even moving to a different room can get the juices flowing again. Being in a different setting can give you a refreshed sense of newness. Oh – but if you’re a cool boss or have some pull in your workplace, definitely go for the work picnic option.

Stop applying all that pressure

One of the reasons you’re drained of ideas is probably that you’re trying too hard to force them out. The best ideas are organic – they simply spring out of you without effort. When you sit there and think, think, think yourself into a stupor, you aren’t going to get anywhere.

This idea is two-fold: first, always keep a pen and paper handy – even in every room in your house. Don’t let that idea slip past you in the shower. Hop out and write it down! Just let your engines rest and write things down as they come to you.

Utilize some group therapy techniques

No not in a somber way. When you all pile into the meeting room, sit in a circle and just talk – you can pick a question or topic to answer, but just get talking about something other than brainstorming.

When you engage with others on a more personal level, you get your mind working in ways that get it ready for more extensive brainstorming work ahead. Talking about critical thinking or personal questions makes you actually think about your answers, so you aren’t just regurgitating ideas using the same old brain techniques you usually use.

Also, try the opposite strategy

Sometimes what really gets people motivated is keeping them apart from the rest of the pack. Skip the meeting once and tell employees that they have an hour to come up with an idea – just one. After the hour, bring everyone to the meeting room and go around in a circle, reading off the ideas.

Also work in making small groups with different dynamics, instead of just one large group. Some people work better with other personality types – if you can make an ideal match made in heaven, you’ll get brainstorming ideas in no time.

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you would like to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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Best Entrepreneurial-based Books Hitting the Shelves this Spring

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entrepreneurial books

The notion of building wealth and becoming prosperous is not a strange desire; many have dreamed of this for ages, since money is one of the factor’s that ultimately gives us freedom. Many of the best books of the last five years have talked about social media marketing, how to allocate wealth once you have it, and the art of public speaking.

This year is going to be a big year in the entrepreneurial space: the popularity and usefulness of drones is rising, web commerce is still driving a lot of traffic, and people are really starting to travel again. Here are some great picks for the year ahead, as the entrepreneur in you will be encouraged by curling up with a great read.


The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from Their Founding Entrepreneurs, by David Kidder

Just 5 years ago, more than 550,000 businesses were concocted just within the borders of the United States, all hoping to become financially stable for life. This New York Times bestselling author and expert on the current economic climate shares experiences from some of the globe’s most successful entrepreneurs and startup players; picking the brains of those you want the most advice from.

He goes very deep into his duty, and here you can glean information about how companies such as Paypal, LinkedIn, Ted, Flickr, and many others became a common name instead of just a pipe dream.
Selecting a successful business model, finding funding for your venture, and dealing with hurdles you may encounter along the way are all some of the topics covered in this book that we conclude are one of the most valuable of the decade! We know it wasn’t written this year, but it is a drop-dead contender.

Mad Genius: A Manifesto for Entrepreneurs, by Randy Gage

One of the reasons we deem this one so important is that it shows us how conventional business thinking is not always cutting it in the market these days and talks about the candid reasons why. This book really goes deep into what it takes to change the culture to get results in the business world, and even change what is taught in the educational institutions about an entrepreneur’s mindset.

Whether you want to have an excellent product for sale, gain inspiration for your own call to action, or need pointers on never settling for the second best, there are tons of valuable tips and ideas here for you. This is one author that recognizes the difference between the entitlement mindset and sitting down and actually getting something done, and he has inspired many to think big worldwide.

Wouldn’t you be thrilled to be sitting in the driver’s seat of an incredibly awesome business idea at the start of 2017?

The Conquer Kit: A Creative Business Planner for Women Entrepreneurs, by Natalie MacNeil

The best thing about this work and the reason it really caught our eye, is that it’s very interactive! The open invitation to doodle, sketch and record what you are seeing in your mind’s eye in many ways is one of the best things about this book.

It seems like a simple notion that you may sometimes overlook, but when you are reading other great books about how to get a killer startup up and running if you don’t choose to write things down, you may completely lose them in the most crucial moment!

Finding the perfect name, the right kind of legal status, constructing your team, and fully bringing the business to life are the 4 crucial components of business strategy covered here. AND: it’s exciting that it’s geared towards women, the innovators that will continue to shake up and define the world in 2016!!

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Odile Koudou’s “The Blessing Legacy” An Inspirational Story of A Destiny Fulfilled

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Theblessinglegacy
A wonderful story of perseverance, faith and a Father’s belief in his young daughter’s fruitful future Odile Kondou’s, The Blessing Legacy: A Memoir of Africa, A Father’s Faith, And A Destiny Fulfilled  is a touching memoir of a destiny fulfilled. With her family battling against the odds, Odile invites you into the impoverished village of her youth. Raised in the West African country of the Ivory Coast, she puts the reader on the front lines of her desperate attempt to change the culture of her family’s past, and that of the village she was raised in. Highlighting the struggles of her remarkable Father – often rejected by family members and others in the community, The Blessing Legacy recounts his constant sacrifice, determination and unfailing belief that God would provide.

Despite the setbacks of her youth, Odile continued to believe in her Father’s inspirational words and the values he instilled in his children. The Blessing Legacy is her testament; A wonderful testament that triumphs over her past experiences with hardship, rejection, and defeat. She found herself in all the despair, and with her Father’s continued encouragement and positive outlook Odile was able to find hope and success. If you’re interested in reading The Blessing Legacy: A Memoir of Africa, A Father’s Faith, And A Destiny Fulfilled, the book is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 

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