Traps Common To Small Business: Pt2

6. No Employee Management
Motivating, training, and managing your staff is one of your toughest challenges in a retail setting. Employees are not ‘disposable.’ A well-trained and motivated staff is the best sales force available to retailers. A managers ‘people skills’ and management practices can cause problems where no problem existed. Employee moral directly affects profits. Train employees in customer service, good communication, and clearly outline their responsibilities. More important, outline what types of behavior cannot be tolerated, and the consequences.

7. Superman
You may own the business and you may be able to do everything, but you can’t do everything well. Learn how to Hire the right staff and delegate responsibility. If necessary, outsource tasks like bookkeeping and office work.

8. No Mastermind
Create a network of advisors or a mentor. Sounds expensive for a small operation? The cost of professional help is less than the cost of going out of business. Advisors can be associates, the local Chamber of Commerce, friends, or a business coach/consultant. Ask them to monitor you and your business. Having someone to bounce ideas off and get an objective opinion is critical.

9. Stop Learning
Business owners should never stop improving their management, people, communication, and sales skills. No one knows everything they need to know about every topic. The adage, “Ignorance kills,” is relevant in today’s business world. Another relevant saying is “what you don’t know can destroy you.”

10. You never fail until you quit
Some of the most successful entrepreneurs failed several times before doing succeeding. If you are failing then learn and try again. Never quit. The most common mistake is throwing good money after bad. A business is floundering, so more and more money is invested. A better idea might be to salvage the good from the existing business and start a new one.



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Traps Common to Small Businesses: Pt 1

1. What works will always work.
Ideas are the currency of entrepreneurs. Play with many ideas and see which ones bring money and success. Trends change, the local consumer base will change, so your store must change. Many retailers make the mistake of investing most of their money into fixtures and décor, making it impossible to change when the local economy changes.

Stores should never stagnate. Displays, colors, image and attitude needs to change.

2. Procrastination
Many retailers wait until they are in financial trouble before implementing a plan of action. Advertising runs on a six-month cycle. Waiting until sales drops can devastate an otherwise solid company.

3. “Advertising doesn’t work.”
This myth contributes to the high failure rate of small businesses. Successful businesses invest 25% of their profits into advertising. The belief that advertising doesn’t work comes from retailer’s lack of understanding. Newspapers may deliver 100 000 copies of your ad, but 30 000 copies are returned, 10 000 copies are never read, leaving 40 000 copies. Of them, only 10% of readers will see your ad. This means that a $900.00 ad in a large newspaper will produce less results than a $900.00 ad supporting a local event.

Retailers also expect ads to produce instant results. Not all products appeal to impulse buyers. Knowing your product, customers, and advertising mediums is the foundation of a good advertising campaign.

4. No Marketing Plan
Marketing plans keep you ahead of the pack, not trailing behind, following what works for other retailers. A marketing plan puts your store in front of the right types of people. A good marketing plan eliminates the need for trying things to see if they work. They outline different plans of actions, then when compared to the customer satisfaction data, identify most cost effective and potentially successful plan.

5. Know Your Customers
A solid customer care program can include newsletters, e-newsletters, fliers, surveys, and suggestion/complaint boxes. The information collected at the point of sale, and through customer feedback, can give your business the edge, leaving the competition in the dust. However, customer feedback data is useless without a good marketing plan.




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Great New Place to Advertise Your Business

Everyone knows that building links is one of the hardest parts of ecommerce business management. Anyone who wants their domains to receive traffic need to earn a profit and watch your business grow, knows that web advertising can be impossible. This problem doubled for tens-of-thousands of business owners when Google doubled their price.

Google hates paid linking, but for many websites, the only way to build the thousands of posts necessary for success is to pay bloggers to write a post for your business. It doesn’t really matter if they review your product or service. All that matters is whether they include a keyword anchored link.

Until now, the ad agencies controlled all the campaigns. IZEA recently released a new platform that lets Advertisers control the campaigns. An advertiser may put a campaign out for bloggers to vote on. Or, they may hand pick bloggers. Do you only want bloggers who will write reviews? Do you only have enough money for 50 posts? Do you only want your link on blogs that are in your niche? It doesn’t matter anymore.

You can pick and choose. It doesn’t cost anything to sign up for IZEA’s SocialSpark. The system (the evolution of PayPerPost) is one of the best on the net. www.socialspark.com



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Fight Back Against Telemarketing

I found a reverse phone look-up that lists numbers, even unlisted ones. I did a test using my number and it works. It didn't give out my name or home address, just the city, country, and real number. My husband's cell phone was linked to the city where he buys his service from.

The Reverse Phone Look-ups are a great way to check a number. If it is a telemarketer then just ignore the call or block it. For a small fee you can get the caller's full information. This is a great way to fight back against collection agencies that are harassing you and breaking the law, or telemarketers who won't take you off their lists.

What shocked me was that for $15 (retail) anyone can look up my information. This site has a service that blocks my information. The service costs less than $5.

And, don't forget to list your number with the National No Call Registry so that telemarketers must 'legally' stop calling you.

AVG 8.0 More Than a New Dashboard

CNET/ZDNET Review
AVG Anti-Virus 8 scored well in CNET Labs' performance tests and in third-party, independent antivirus testing using live viruses, although not always the top position. On the CNET iTunes test, AVG Anti-Virus 8 came in just 4 seconds above the test system at 272 seconds. On the CNET Microsoft Office test, AVG Anti-Virus 8 finished in 1,413 seconds. In a test scanning a single folder with compressed and media files, AVG Anti-Virus 8 completed it in 550 seconds. And in boot speed, AVG Anti-Virus 8 came in toward the slower end, with a fast 37.95 seconds. Click here to find out more about how we test Antivirus software.

In terms of protecting your PC, we refer readers to two leading independent antivirus testing organizations. In the latest test results from AV-Comparatives.org, gave AVG Anti-Virus 7.5 an Advanced rating (highest) for On Demand protection and Advanced Plus (highest) for heuristic protection, blocking 97 percent of the malicious code used in the test. Our second source of independent antivirus testing, CheckVir.com, ranked AVG Anti-Virus 7.5--the previous version--as one of five products to earn their Standard rating (highest) for identifying malicious software (the products were not tested for removal).


I upgraded to AVG 8.0 tonight. It was rather easy. I had to save the file to desktop and download both VISTA patches. Once that was done I had the new features that watch for viruses before I download them.

One is the AVG tool bar. I had to turn of Active Surf-Shield and Search-Shield ot download the image in this blog, but they didn't disrupt anything else. My firewall configured itself for all my networks inclusing firewall :) nice!

The only configuration I made was to activate the configure the 'computer scanner' and activate the check for Root. This is what has been missing from virus scan for a long time. I set it to even find locked and hidden files.

I remember once I had Norton and I my tech found more than 30g of hidden files that were running in the background.

I spend most of my time on familiar sites, so I don't need Active Surf on. But, there are times when I am doing research.

If you've followed me over the last year then you'll know that I've crashed twice because of viruses. Both times required a complete reboot.

There is a feature to let users disable the firewall when playing a game. I like this, but I also wish there was a feature to disable the firewall when accessing server based online content management systems. This type of feature will make it easier to administer blogs.

Reports have stated that there are holes in the firewall that protects ports. Keep in mind that we are talking high tech here and most people are protected. However, configuring the system to check these systems and then verifying the data will protect most people (never keep banking or personal information on your computer at any time.)

This does not bother me because I have 2 firewalls as well as Visa's security. But, if you don't have a newer system, you might want to download ZoneAlarm as well.

If there is one tool that cis worth the effort then it is linkscan. Like I said, I didn't like losing about 1 - 2 seconds of browser speed so I turned it off, but if you are afraid of malware then this tool could save you a lot of sleepless nights.

FREE Version

Don't worry if you can only afford the free version. AVG’s anti-virus tool has a 100%detection rate certified by the independent bodies ICSA Labs and VB100.