I am currently reading the book “Steal These Ideas: Marketing Secrets that Will Make You a Star” by Steve Cone (Bloomberg Press, 1 September 2005, ISBN #1576601919, 204 pages), and I am finding it to be a really great read. Witty, blunt, direct to the point and even funny in some parts, the book is very straighforward, easy to understand and my favorite of all, it has lots of bullets! Even if you have your hands full running your business, you can simply go to the chapters and skim the bulleted items or the sub-headings to see the author’s main

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

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 The statistics they quote are out of date, and don’t reflect today’s realities.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,