7 Reasons to Add Podcasting to Your Business Marketing Mix

Leveraging podcasting technology can give you a marketing edge that will allow you to increase your online visibility, increase your client acquisition rates and improve customer loyalty. The smart businesses and marketing companies will add podcasting to the marketing mix for their business. Adding podcasting to your marketing mix can have tremendous positive impact on your business.

Many small and large businesses are still trying to understand the basics of podcasting technology. There are many articles and white papers that can educate people on the basics of podcasting 101.

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Small Biz Marketing Strategy: When To Launch A New Product

The first question an entrepreneur should ask himself when contemplating whether to extend his product range is "Why would I do that?"

A good share of the entrepreneurs I know have a tendency to extend their product range in a very curious, opportunistic way. Whenever the market has more opportunities than suppliers, I see entrepreneurs deciding "Let's do this, too. We can do this, why not doing it?"

For this reason, they end up developing unrelated products that eventually lead to parallel businesses, very time and effort-consuming for the small business. An entrepreneur should first be able to address the following two questions:

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Super Sleuths: Using Trade Shows to Investigate Your Competition

Your company is in a precarious position. The marketplace is changing daily. New companies enter the industry. Your competitors are constantly unveiling new products, new services, and/or new marketing strategies. How do you keep up with or even better, how do you anticipate -- these changes?

That s where the trade show comes in. Gathered in one convenient location, you should find many, if not most, of your competitors. While industrial espionage is never a good idea, there s nothing illegal or immoral about asking the booth staff a few pointed questions.

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Yellow Page Advertising: Factors to Consider When Renewing

Before long, your Yellow Page directory rep will be paying you a visit. It's an annual event that happens several months before next year's directory goes to press. He or she will urge you to think about your ad just long enough to renew what you used in the previous directory - or to upgrade according to their suggestions. If you comment that business is up OR down, they'll recommend a larger, spruced-up ad as the answer.

The statistics they quote are out of date, and don't reflect today's realities. The typical business owner is afraid - unsure what to trust to bring enough new customers. Even if he wants to reduce his reliance on the Yellow Pages (or the every-escalating expense), he doesn't know what to do instead. The truth is, no single promotional method can do the job. However, the majority of the public is already changing the way it decides where to buy - which doesn't bode well for Yellow Pages.

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Internal Control: A Preventive Maintenance Program

You read about this in every newspaper in every town in the entire country: Some bookkeeper, trusted by the owner of a small business, embezzles thousands of dollars. If the theft doesn't put owner out of business, it certainly causes a major headache.

The reason we hear of these cases so often is that, in a small business, there may only be the owner and a bookkeeper. The owner doesn't like doing the books, doesn't understand them, and relies on this one person to take care of things. The bookkeeper, who is usually having personal financial difficulties, takes a small amount of money intending to pay it back. No one seems to notice, so more is taken. Over a period of time, it starts to mount up to a lot of money.

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Small Business Accounting: Understanding Depreciation

Depreciation is defined as a portion of the cost that reflects the use of a fixed asset during an accounting period. A fixed asset is an item that has a useful life of over one year. An accounting period is usually a month, quarter, six months or one year. Let's say you bought a desk for your office on January 1, for $1000 and it was determined that the desk had a useful life of seven years. Using a one year accounting period and the straight-line method of depreciation, the portion of the cost to be depreciated would be one-seventh of $1000, or $142.86.

Most non-accountants roll their eyes and shudder when the topic of depreciation comes up. This is where the line in the sand is drawn. Depreciation is far too complicated to try and figure out, or so it seems to many. But is it really? Surely the definition of depreciation mentioned above is not that difficult to comprehend. If you look closely you will see that there are five pieces of information you must have in order to determine the amount of depreciation you can deduct in one year. They are:

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Women and Entrepreneurship: Why Women Start Their Own Businesses

In our new website Women Home Business , we talk to various small and home-based women entrepreneurs on their experiences in starting their businesses, and how they continue to overcome the various challenges of entrepreneurship. More and more women are said to be starting their own businesses, but what really motivates women to go into entrepreneurship?

One of the interesting studies that explains why women start their own businesses is "Why Women Enter into Entrepreneurship: An Explanatory Model" written by Drs. Muriel Orhan and Don Scott both of Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia. Published in 2001 by Women in Management Review journal (Volume: 16 Issue: 5 Page: 232 - 247), the study explored the motivations that compels women to embark on an entrepreneurial career. The authors looked at the assumption that women go into entrepreneurship because they are compelled to do so, given the glass ceiling that supposedly exists preventing women to get recognition and climb up the corporate and big business ladder. Push and pull factors are also said to exist, such as using entrepreneurship as the means of accommodating their work and child-rearing roles simultaneously.

Using qualitative in-depth interview techniques with 25 successful women entrepreneurs in France, the authors found the following factors that motivate women to start their own businesses:

1. "Dynastic compliance" = influenced by family environment and circumstances such as family business, whereby the woman assumed the role of the head of the business following the death of the entrepreneur husband or due to decision reached by the entire family including children
2. "No other choice" = difficulties in the salaried employment area such as the inability to get a job after taking time off for motherhood, underemployment, failure to get good job after relocating, etc. In these cases, entrepreneurship presents itself as less worse alternative.
3. "Entrepreneurship by chance" = acccepted the role of an entrepreneur instead of seeking it due to financial difficulties and individual necessities
4. "Natural succession" = they are already involved in the business, and the reins have now been handed to them
5. "Forced entrepreneurship" = necessity factors such as losing a job
6. "Informed entrepreneur" = considered a secure entrance to entrepreneurship, the women may be in a business succession circumstance, the availability of funding as well as mentors
7. "Pure entrepreneur" = entrepreneurship is a professional and lifestyle choice

The study can be accessed by registering for free at the EmeraldInsight.com

New Metric to Measure Search Engine Marketing Effectiveness

Cost-per-click (CPC) has always been considered the key metric for determining the performance of search term. While CPC remains important, it has a number of deficiencies: (a) when you are running large search engine advertising campaigns with thousands of keywords, and not just single terms; (b) when you opt for something other than the first position on the term.

As such, Doubleclick's Performics group recently introduced a new metric that active search engine advertisers can use - the Cost per Keyword (CPK).

Cost-per-keyword (CPK) measurement is the metric that combines the elements of the individual measurements of keyword price, end-user demand and campaign size.

While CPC is about the bidding aggressiveness of advertisers for the keyword, CPK looks at both the cost of a keyword and the cost of the clicks that it generates.

To calculate the average Cost Per Keyword, divide Total Monthly Search Expenditure (defined as average cost per click multiplied by total number of clicks) by Total Active Keywords per Campaign.

Read more about CPK here (PDF file and requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)

Guaranteed Funding for the Right Business Idea

The September 2005 issue of the Business 2.0 magazine heralds a very interesting piece for those thinking of starting a company. Entitled "The $50M Giveaway," their writers asked 11 venture capitalist investors what business ideas they are ready to fund. In a previous piece, the magazine discovered that investors have some business ideas in mind that they think would really work, and they are simply looking for the right business plan and the right team to come along. If the right business plan comes, they are willing to put down millions of dollars in startup capital. Just like that.

Below are some of the busines ideas that venture capitalists are itching to write a check for (note that most are IT related given the focus of Business 2.0 magazine):

• Subscription PCs tailored for seniors that they can rent on a monthly basis
• Mobile ID authorization system for credit card purchases
• Software to provide better upsale recommendations online
• Application that converts proprietary banking software into a co-op IT service for member banks
• Smarter smartphone (e.g. phones that can open doors)
• Open source application for maintenance of a company's IT backbone
• "Souped up" Craigslist for every neighborhood everywhere
• VOIP-enabled software to automate and customize phone orders
• Plug and play mobile services
• Wireless home monitoring network for recuperating hospital patients
• Software for convergence of gadgets in your home

So how can you charm the venture capitalists into giving their money to you? Business 2.0 offers 5 suggestions:

• First rate executive summary (think of 2-second elevator pitch)
• How you think you are going to dominate the market
• Strong management team to prove that you and your group are up to the job
• Realistic market analysis
• Realistic financial goals and assumptions, including how much capital is needed and how much revenues can be expected

Read more of the article.

Tips on How to Keep Your Employees Motivated

If you have employees, whether part-time or full-time, you know that they are a key part in the success (or failure) of your business. Your employee may be the face of your business, or the critical person running the day-to-day operations of the business. Whatever functions or tasks they are doing, you need your employees in tip-top shape. The ideal employee would be one who is happy and motivated to work in order to accomplish the goals of your business.

But what makes an employee motivated? Potentials Magazine's August issue lists the basic factors that keep an employee productive and motivated:

1. Provide a healthy work environment
2. Reward consistently and quickly
3. Be a strong leader, not a tyrant
4. Make all employees feel that their participation is critical to the company's success
5. Think of everyone
6. Looking to reward an employee? Choose brand name merchandise
7. Be creative (e.g. create a "Bright Ideas" award to employees with the best ideas)
8. Communicate
9. Recognize employees with fun and fanfare
10. Invest in a costly health plan (resounding chorus of "ouch" from many small business owners)
11. Implement an open book management program (e.g. sharing with employees financial results)

For more ideas on how to keep your employees motivated, visit our Managing Your People channel

Back to the Real World

After a week-long absence, I'm back in circulation (and civilization!). I went on vacation with the family at the beach, and the sun and surf proved to be the right ingredients to recharge my batteries. Entrepreneurs like us who have worked hard for the past months deserve a break to rest our minds and bodies!

To get away from it all, we went to a place with no high-speed Internet connection. I thought I would survive life without Internet, but found that I could not, though my husband was cool with it. He liked the idea of being totally unplugged, even for just a week. But not me. Worse, we didn't even have dial-up connection (which I was hoping we would at least have) because the house we rented disallowed long distance calls and to dial-in to our ISP requires long distance connection! On the second day, I was already combing the phone directory to find an Internet cafe. Luckily, there is one 3 towns away from where we were staying and we drove to the place so I can satisfy my Internet fix. My Treo, though, proved to be a God-send item, as it allowed me to at least receive and respond to critical emails.

The vacation showed me how surgically-attached I am to the Internet. I would love to take time off from work again next summer, but this time, I will make sure that the rental house or hotel provides Internet access.

Read the article "Vacation Time for the Home Business Entrepreneur"

Using eBay for Your Business

As eBay continues to grow, more businesses are discovering this online marketplace. eBay is the go-to place of bargain hunters (ehem, "value oriented customers"), and big retailers are finding that eBay's traditional customer base has a place in their revenue model. Companies, both big and small, are discovering the effectiveness of eBay as a new sales channel. Ebay has slowly evolved from simply the marketplace of pez and beanie babies to business liquidation, among others.

So how are businesses like Sears, Samsonite, or National Geographic using eBay?

• To sell new overstock items
• To sell open-box returned goods
• To introduce and test market reaction on new products
• To expland sales channel

So why not check out how eBay can work for you? Visit our online auctions channel for more tips on how to sell on Ebay.

Using a Self-directed IRA for Business Investing

A PowerHomeBiz.com reader sent us this question:

Hello. I have a small business that I would like to invest additional monies in. One of the sources is a simple IRA being managed by my financial institution. I was advised that I could set up a self-directed IRA to invest that money in the business. As an S-Corp, would that be possible? And how would I go about doing such a thing through my CPA, attorney, financial institution or all of the above? Also, how long would something like that take? Thank you! - Bryan Stone, TX

Read the response of our incorporation expert Chrissie Mould of MyNewVenture.com

Tricks of the Banner Advertising Industry?

An interesting article from AdBumb.com posits that banner advertising networks are selling their inventory using the CPA model -- unknown to the publishers as well as investors. Said to be a hush-hush but common industry practice, banner ad networks resort to negotiating CPA deals with advertisers in order to sell their low-quality inventory. Afterall, it looks better to the shareholders that all inventory was sold out, never mind if the publishers were tricked to believe that they showed CPM banners only:

Talk to anyone who knows much about online advertising and you’ll hear quickly that some of the bigger networks like Fastclick, Casale Media and RightMedia are running CPA offers without actually advertising the service. Dig around a little more and you’ll find that this is true across the board on many networks. But try to get these networks to admit they’re doing it and you often run into a brick wall

Read the full article here

The Real Secret of Unstoppable Achievers

What marks the difference between the person who achieves their goals and the person who doesn't? How many times have you been told the difference is just having a definite, well-defined goal.

Actually that is putting the cart before the horse, and it's not really true. You can have a serious goal and still never even come close to achieving it. In fact, that goal might even end up further eroding your self confidence.

Why is this so? Because just having a goal does NOT magically bring your desire into reach. Neither does creating a detailed goal plan.

The difference between those who actually achieve their goals and those who do not is this: Non-achievers put the cart before the horse. Achievers hook the horse up to the cart.

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Finding Merchandise to Sell: Creativity is King in Business

In my last article, The Reality of Buying Wholesale, we looked at some of the controls that the largest companies in the consumer goods market place on their distribution channels. As we learned, some of these companies make it impossible for the small, start-up online retailer to obtain their merchandise.

However, this is no reason to give up on your dream of being a retailer. Less capital to invest just requires a little more creativity. Many established retailers have built their businesses by starting out small and then adding more products as they grew. In this article, we'll look at some creative options available for those who don't meet the requirements to be an authorized retailer with some of the most popular brand names.

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Celebrating Life: Women's Expo Seminar

I will be one of the guest speakers at the upcoming expo/seminar geared towards women. Billed as "Celebrating Life: Women's Expo," this one-day gathering will include seminars and exhibits covering various aspects of womanhood, including health, career, grooming, home business, and other issues (even daytime soaps!). I will be speaking about "Turning Something We LOVE into a Profitable At-Home Business," a topic well-covered here at PowerHomeBiz.

This event will be held on September 17, 2005 (Saturday) from 10 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the New Jersey Convention Center in Edison, New Jersey. My talk will be at 1:00 p.m.

If you are around the area, do drop by and I would love to see you there. You can get more information about the event at Lifetime Expos website.

9 Easy Steps to Writing a Business Plan

Writing a business plan is a fundamental step to ensuring your business has every chance of succeeding. Common statistics state that 9 out of 10 businesses fail on the first 5 years of operation, and of the remaining 10%, 90% fail in the following 5 years.

Why? There may be a number of reasons - from poor customer service, inadequate product, poor logistics management and cost control. However, the number of businesses that do not define their goals and map out their path to success is phenomenal. Taking the step to define your business goals, plan where you want to go and what you want to achieve will place you in an increased position of future success and realization of your dreams.

Below is a list of the areas you need to consider when writing your business plan. These steps will help define the business goals, the reason for existence (of the business), and define the direction you will take.

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10 Cardinal Rules for Business Growth

After over 30 years of participating in hundreds of businesses, competing in at least as many different industries, with companies marketing both products and services, you begin to develop and accumulate some fundamental businesses axioms or rules of thumb that seem to make more sense everyday and gain more value in business practice as your career continues to advance and evolve.

You like to think what you have learned and the business knowledge you have retained along your long and varied career path is unique, proprietary, or even original , but somewhere deep inside you know that most of the things you hold near and dear to your own business self identity probably were already developed, practiced, and taught way before you ever entered your first business conference room.

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7 Ways to Lure Offline Buyers to Online Customers

A July 2005 whitepaper prepared by VerticalResponse Inc. offers a list of 7 effective ways you can bring an offline buyer to your website.

If you have a retail store or sells through catalogs and now wants to bring your buyers to your website, here are the suggestions made in the whitepaper:

1. Send promotional codes in your direct mail piece or postcards if they shop in your online store
2. Encourage store customers to register for promotional offers on your website
3. Web-only inventory clearance
4. The lure of the free gift (everybody wants freebies!)
5. Visible web address in your postcard mailings such as pre-catalog announcements
6. Web address in your catalogs; better yet, announce web-only specials in your catalog
7. Reactivate inactive customers by sending them postcards announcing web-only sales

This 4-page whitepaper is available through KnowledgeStorm (requires free registration).

What Annoys the Net Users?

Pop-ups, what else!

In a survey conducted by Tayloy Nelson Sofres for Hostway.com in July, almost 35% of the 2,500 respondents said that pop-ups are their pet peeves on the Net. They also find annoying the requirement to register and login before viewing the website (17%) and the installation of extra software to view the site (16%).

The rest of the website characteristings that US adult Internet users find the most annoying include:

• Slow-loading pages (9%
• Dead Links (5%)
• Confusing navigation: hard to find pages, too many clicks (4%)
• Content that is out of date (3%)
• No contact information available - web form only (3%)
• Music or audio that plays automatically (2%)
• Inability to use the browser's back button (2%)
• Ineffective site search tool (2%)
• Overdone sites - unnecessary splash/flash screens or animations (2%)
• Text that moves (1%)
• Opening a new window for a link (0.3%)
• Poor appearance - colors, fonts, format (0.3%)

So what's the implication if your website exhibits one or two of these annoying characteristics? The same survey respondents said that they are "extremely" or "somewhat" likely not to visit the site again (75%). Another 3/4 of the respondents also said they may unsubscribe from the website's promotional messages (or possibly newsletters). Many also said that they might not purchase from the website or view the company in a negative manner.

And here's the kicker: only 25% said that they plan to complain to the company! For every single negative feedback you receive, think that there are 10x or 20x more folks who had the same exact negative sentiment but did not bother to notify you.

Best Business Ideas in the World

The August issue of Business 2.0 magazine focuses on what it calls the "29 best business ideas in the world." While I expected a single article focusing on the topic, the magazine interspersed the lessons in all their articles. For example, idea #1 can be found in their Editor's Letter while the others are in various articles in the issue. Plus, I was thinking "business ideas" in the vein of the hottest businesses to start only to find nuggets of business wisdom that worked in the recent past.

Some of these ideas may be over-the-top for home business entrepreneurs (e.g. offshoring to Latin America, invest in regions not countries, etc.), so I included only those that may be relevant to a small business operation. Nonetheless, this is a great collection of business nuggets that are worth pondering upon:

1. Scour the planet for the best ideas and adapt them to your local market
2. Apply the idea behind eBay to other businesses
3. Target local markets with culture-specific goods
4. Use edgy technology to cut through clutter.
5. Launch a startup with government funding (you must be part of a special interest group or your business idea is so cutting edge)
6. Tweak a commodity product to target a unique niche
7. Bone up on biology to master the science of selling
8. Differentiate - at all costs
9. Look out the window for inspiration.
10. Create growth by launching spinoffs, not just products.
11. Find the customers who need you most - and give them what they want.
12. Get people to spend more by making them think they're spending less.
13. Sell services to remote offices of global corporations
14. Get a job with a multinational to spot startup opportunities
15. Cash in on American cachet by making yourself a celebrity
16. Be one thing to all people: cheap
17. Use your model where it makes sense; partner where it doesn't
18. Refine new ideas via small trials before launching full rollouts
19. Find profitable alternative uses for low-rent real estate
20. Find ways to sidestep industry middlemen.
21. Lower prices enough to tap into latent mass-market demand
22. Demand more for less.
23. Make a free product so good that customers will pay