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Tips on Building the Confidence to Grow Your Business

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By Phil Buckley

My first experience with small business owners was in the late 80s. I was an operations manager for Zack’ Famous Frozen Yogurt, a franchise chain experiencing massive growth. My role was to set up new stores and help franchisees manage them successfully.

I was inspired by each owner’s courage, determination and passion to win. They tackled challenges head-on and typically took a glass half-full approach to managing problems.

However, when presented with opportunities to change or expand their businesses, I noticed that many owners lacked the confidence to get to the next level. They were comfortable with what they knew, and uncomfortable with what they didn’t know. Often, they’d forgo opportunities without fully exploring the benefits because their personal uncertainty was stronger than their desire for greater success.

As my career progressed into business training and then change management, I observed that most leaders struggled with change. Their confidence was tested most when their operational experience didn’t help them assess and pursue new opportunities or manage challenges. In those circumstances, what had made them successful had little impact on their ability to manage well.

Over time, it became apparent to me that the key to managing change (offering new products, entering new markets, opening a new location, etc.) is confidence.

Here are three ways that small business owners (and any business leader for that matter) can build their confidence when they uncover big opportunities to grow their businesses:

Make a list of the skills you used when making past successful changes

Small business owners will benefit from taking stock of past accomplishments and the skills they used to achieve them. Listing them in writing will help you build a playbook on how to manage new opportunities – steps to take, advice to get, behaviors to demonstrate, etc. Studying your past successes will help you create a path towards your goal and identify the capabilities you need to get there.

Identify who you can call upon for help

Peer support is a key enabler of evolving a business. Wise small business leaders ask for help, especially when opportunities require a departure from their current business model. Learning about how similar situations were managed, both successfully and unsuccessfully, will provide practical guidance on what you need to do, what to watch out for and how to act.

Write a solid plan

Business plans help small business owners stay focused and manage time and resources productively. They provide a means against which to track progress and a working tool to adjust as new information becomes available. A wise person once said, “Create the plan, work the plan, change the plan.” A growth opportunity business plan provides a map to confidently navigate.

It can be difficult to manage and grow a small business. With the right skills, knowledge, advice and plan, the small business owner can take the next step on their businesses journey and reach the next level of personal success. Have confidence!

Author’s Bio: Phil Buckley is a senior change management professional with nearly twenty-five years of experience helping individuals, teams and organizations deliver change in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Phil writes about managing change at www.changewithconfidence.com. He is also author of Change with Confidence: Answers to the 50 Biggest Questions that keep Change Leaders Up at Night (Jossey-Bass), where he provides complete, actionable answers to the fifty burning questions that leaders routinely ask about how to manage change successfully. Follow him on Twitter @philbuckley01.

Online Marketing Mentors to Follow on Quora

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By Jessy Troy

Marketing has always been a core necessity of the successful business. But as the Internet has become the primary form of shopping for most people, the need to market in a web-specific fashion has increased. While the old and new way are similar, there are differences that have to be accounted for. Not to mention principles that are completely separate that have to be learned and utilized.

Quora is one of the best professional networks on the web. It is full of experts who really know their way around the online marketing field. Since Quora is, by nature, a Q&A site, it is a great idea to follow some of these experts. But who are the best?

That point could be argued, and everyone has their own opinion on who the true experts are. This is my personal list of must-follow Quora profiles in the world of online marketing.

Michael Lazerow

Michael Lazerow on Quora

You might not have heard his name, but you have probably come across his companies (of which he has had several) more than once. His first venture, University Wire, was a network of more than 700 university newspapers that were bought out by CBS. GOLF was bought out by Time Inc., and he has worked for big names like Saving Star. He doesn’t always update, but his answers are always worth reading.

Peter Hershberg

Peter Hershberg on Quora

Specializing in online advertising/marketing, Peter Hershberg is a powerhouse who funded many startups in his day. He is currently a successful angel investor, business owner, company adviser and a handful of other impressive titles that all trnaslate to him knowing his stuff. His answers are always incredibly informative and in depth.

Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble on Quora

Perhaps best known for his time at Microsoft, he is now the startup liason officer at Rackspace. He is also a video blogger, text blogger and technology genius. His Quora profile is well used, and he answers questions all the time. This includes online marketing, of which he is well versed on both a professional and personal brand level. This is one of the must-follow people for anyone interested in either marketing, or technology as a whole. There is a reason this guy is a celebrity in the tech geek world.

Gayle Laakmann McDowell

Gayle Laakmann McDowell

Less an expert in online marketing on a business level, Gayle is more of a personal branding and self-marketing guru. She teaching people how to deal with branding themselves on a busy and crowded market, including selling yourself in an interview. She also answers questions unrelated to the field, and is just a personable and interesting person. Well worth following for both her advice and her personal stories about her life, she balances information and experience well.

Joshua Stylman

Joshua Stylman on Quora

A business owner and angel investor, Joshua Stylman doesn’t answer very often. But his communications are always worth following, and he is just a good guy to have on your network. Experienced, successful and an overall down-to-earth guy, he has a simple way of thinking that still holds enough personal experience and opinion to take you outside the box in your own thinking. He is also a habitual upvoter on other people’s answers, and a proud New Yorker. What’s not to like?

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel on Quora

President of Twist Image, a company dedicated to digital marketing, Mitch Joel is one of Canada’s most influential social media users. He knows all about leveraging the web for marketing, and he is more than happy to share that expertise. He is one who is worth following of various social media sites, as he is more active on places like Twitter than he is on Quora. But keeping an eye on his answers is also a good idea. If you want a good read, check out his Six Pixels of Separation. It is part of what has made him such a beloved marketing guru, and launched him into industry stardom.

Do you know of anyone who belongs on this list? Who do you follow on Quora for online marketing advice? There are plenty to choose from. Let us know in the comments.

Author’s Bio: Jessy Troy is the self-made marketer blogging for VIP Realty, privately-owned business based business in Dallas. You can follow Jessy on Twitter as @jessytroy.

How to Enhance the Usability of Your E-Commerce Site

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By Charles Mburugu

Usability is a very important factor for the success of any website. When designing your ecommerce site, your aim should not just be to have an online store which looks good on the eye. Instead, work at building a site that makes it easy for customers to find information and complete the checkout process. If visitors have a hard time finding what they are looking for, they will simply leave and go elsewhere.

Here are some tips that will help you make your ecommerce site more user-friendly.

1. Offer contact information

Besides enhancing sales, an ecommerce site can be a very powerful tool for attracting new leads and building new bonds with customers. It is therefore very important to have a dedicated page in your site that contains your contact information. In addition, these details should appear clearly on all your site’s pages. Besides the usual email address, include links to your social media profiles. This will enable visitors to reach you through the medium that suits them best. If possible, you could also offer telephone contacts.

2. Make your navigation clear

Most ecommerce sites have many pages with lots of information about a wide range of products. As a result, visitors are likely to lose their way. This is why a good navigation system is absolutely essential. At any one time, visitors should know exactly where they are, where they have come from and where they can go. A breadcrumb navigation system is very helpful. In addition, make sure your pages have clear headings and subheadings which show the subject of the page.

3. Add a search feature

A native search feature makes it possible for visitors to find what they are looking for without having to go through numerous pages. Make sure the search bar appears prominently on your pages in a place where visitors can easily find it. You could place it on the top of the page or on the right sidebar. Whatever the case, make sure it is ‘above the fold’ (can be viewed without scrolling). To make the search function more effective, you could break it down into filters such as color, size, price, availability and type. This search filter will offer your visitors a more pleasant user experience.

4. Show related products

When designing your product pages, place related products in a common group. When a customer purchases a particular product, you could suggest a different product in the same group. This enhances the likelihood of the customer buying another product, even if they had not planned to.

5. Add a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section

When visitors land on your pages and read the content, they might still be left with a wide range of questions. It is therefore vital to have a dedicated FAQ page on your site which seeks to answer some of the concerns customers are likely to raise. However, allow your customers to contact you in case they need further clarification on anything.

6. Make registration optional

If you require visitors to sign up before accessing your site, they are likely to get put off and simply go away. Therefore, I recommend that you make registration optional. Allow customers to shop even if they are not registered. This will attract more people to your ecommerce site and ultimately enhance customer loyalty.

Author’s Bio: Charles Mburugu is a HubSpot-certified content writer/marketer for B2B, B2C and SaaS companies. He has worked with brands such as GetResponse, Neil Patel, Shopify, 99 Designs, Oberlo, Salesforce and Condor. Check out his portfolio and connect on LinkedIn.

Entrepreneurial Tips – How to Maintain a Positive Attitude

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By Ronald Alexander

As entrepreneurs, we put work just above everything else. Unfortunately, sometimes when we are working toward something, we forget to maintain a positive attitude, which can lead to additional stress and an unhappy all-around life.

The 10 tips listed below will help you to stay positive while at the same time driving your business in the right direction.
How to maintain a positive attitude

1. Work with people that you like

It’s easy to be unhappy in a business where you are surrounded by negative people all day. This is why it is vital that you hire and work with people who have a positive attitude and don’t drain you emotionally.

2. Don’t hesitate to fire people

It is 100% okay to let people go who are not doing all they can do to help your business. Usually a primary cause of stress for entrepreneurs in the workplace is having people who make them unhappy because they either don’t work hard enough or constantly stress out about little things. It’s a great release when you know that you have just made your work environment better for everyone by letting someone go.

3. Create long-term goals

Short-term goals are good, but having goals that extend decades will allow you to be more focused on where you want your business to go. These goals are usually far less stressful and will show your team that you do know what you want out of your company.

4. Feed your creative mind

Every entrepreneur is creative, so it’s natural that we need to fill our off-time with things that will feed that creativity. Some people like to read, while others get their creative juices flowing by taking a long walk. Whatever you need to stay charged up, you need to make sure that it is included in your weekly schedule.

5. Continue to be yourself

People often forget what got them to the point of being an entrepreneur and having a business. The fact is that you need to continue to be yourself even as you are taking off as an entrepreneur. The people who work for you and the business contacts that you make need to know who the real “you” is. You don’t have to develop a phoney business persona, which, I promise you, will lead to additional stress.

6. Don’t be a yes man

Many people have the instinct that saying yes to their employees will keep all parties happy, but in reality a business has to be run by someone who knows when to say no. If someone needs help with something and you have an important task that you are dealing with right now, you have to tell them no and they’ll need to find another solution to their problem. Always take a second to assess everything before you answer questions at work so you can be honest with yourself and others.

7. Remember to take a break once in a while

Entrepreneurs are usually workaholics, but everyone needs a break to stay fresh. The truth is that those breaks that you take every day will allow you to get better work done, which should be reason enough to take them.

8. Expect stressful situations and deal with them the right way

Work is stressful no matter what you do for a living, so it is each person’s responsibility to deal with every bit of stress that is thrown in their direction. It’s tougher earlier on because you are new to all of the business scenarios that you will face, but with time you will learn how to deal with the stress. Just go into every situation knowing that there will be stress and then conquer it.

9. Don’t expect flawless work

It would be nice if everything we do in our work life ends up being absolutely perfect, but that’s just not reality. You want to draw things up to be perfectly played out, but the most important thing is that you reach the end goal in everything you do. Don’t focus too much on the imperfections; this can help you put off some burden.

10. Don’t try to do everything on your own.

You have a team for a reason, so you have to learn how to delegate responsibilities. It’s not easy at first, but you shouldn’t try to do too much of the work on your own. You run the business, so figuring out who should be doing what all day will help you to take a lot off your plate.

To sum up: You need to figure out what’s keeping you from being as happy as you can be in your business life. Going over these tips should help you to figure out how to lessen the stress so you can focus on getting your business to where you want it to be.

Author’s Bio: Ronald Alexander is a passionate writer and avid blogger currently associated with Forsyth.co.uk, which provides business services including flexible office space and virtual office services in Manchester.

Image source: Pixabay by Nemo

Simple Sentiment Analysis for Small Business

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Stop reading this post right now if you’re rolling in cash, have a team of more than 10 people involved in your marketing efforts, or if your social media headquarters looks anything like this:

Social listening command center

OK, now that those lucky folks are gone, let’s talk reality for most of us.

Are you relying solely on Google Alerts to find out what your customers are talking about? Maybe you took it one step further and set up a Hootsuite column to track Twitter mentions. What are you doing with that information as it accumulates?

Welcome to the club.

But we can all take it up several notches this week, by implementing a few simple routines.

Step One – Start Proactively Listening

Use the free tools at your disposal and start seeking out mentions of your brand, your company, and your industry. Both Topsy and Social Mention are great options, and will cover Google+ and Twitter, as well as blogs. I do this task weekly, gathering the resulting information into a spreadsheet.

What’s that you say? No-one’s talking about you? Not to worry.

Turn the tables, and evaluate sentiment about your big brand competitors. Find larger companies that are in your industry and see what people are saying about them. Is it positive or negative? You might uncover a great business opportunity, or a competitor weakness by doing this. Bonus: you might discover topic ideas for your blog!

Step Two – Self-Exams Are Useful Too

Particularly if you don’t have a lot of external social discussion going on yet (maybe you just launched, or you haven’t gotten traction yet), evaluate the contents of your email feedback or support questions. Analyze whether the questions and reactions you’re getting from your own customers are positive or negative. Talk to your colleagues and collect some anecdotal evidence if you don’t have a formal online feedback tool.

Step Three – Act on the Data

Now that you have some indicators of sentiment, get further value out of the exercise by engaging with those who mentioned you. For example, if Topsy revealed a Tweet that gave you a shout-out, you might reply to that person with a thanks. If you found that a certain person has been promoting your content consistently, you might want to reach out and look for some of their content that you can promote.

On the flip side, if you find someone who is unhappy with your services or who has mentioned your company in a negative light, evaluate whether you can address the issue and turn them around. This is one of the strong suits of social media—the ability to capture those negative reviews and the opportunity to respond to them.

Are you doing any sentiment analysis right now? How might you add this data to your marketing tool kit?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

How Do I Hire the Right People?

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Judging a book by its cover probably is not the best way to find the right candidate for your company. These days you have to at least open the book and read the first chapter.

Luckily, there are ways to ensure your company hires the right people without sitting them down in an interrogation room first.

The following tips will help you get the most out of your first encounter with potential employees and ensure you pick the perfect candidate.

Screen Resumes

In an attempt to streamline the interview process, resume screening is a great way to cut out candidates that don’t meet the requirements. Sure, resumes are naturally screened as you read them, but they should be accompanied by a detailed checklist.

The job specific checklist can work as a 1 to 10 scale broken down into categories ranging from candidate qualifications, experiences, and whether or not they should move on to the interview process.

By doing this, you, the employer has a tailored checklist that’s easily compared to other checklists based off the competition’s resumes. Additionally, it’s wise to have dedicated screeners during recruiting periods to act as candidate experts.

Interview for Attitude

Before you hire any employee, it’s important to know whether their knowledge and skill level is up to par. But, another essential facet to any potential candidate is their inner office attitude. That’s where the interview comes into play.

Don’t spend too much time grilling the candidate on information already stated in the resume. Instead, try to gauge their personality. Ask questions concerning work habits, how they function under stress, and their opinion on working long hours.

This is also where your ability to read body language plays a huge role. If the candidate becomes uneasy or makes a seemingly harmless joke at the mention of possibly working nights and weekends, it’s probably because they’ll ultimately have a problem with it.

Quiz References

If and when a candidate reaches the reference checking stage, it’s the perfect time to dig deep into the potential employee’s work past. And, if the reference is strictly professional, it’s also a great chance to gather unbiased opinions about the employee in question.

Once questions concerning the candidate’s abilities are out of the way, transition directly into their people skills. Questions like whether or not the candidate works well with others, their day-to-day attitudes, and their willingness to go above and beyond what’s asked of them are all fair game.

Test for Success

After the candidate checks out on paper and face-to-face, it’s wise to request they take an abilities test.

Whether it’s to get a sense of the candidate’s general knowledge or gauge skills particular to the job, if the potential employee is all they say they are, they should have not problem taking the test and more importantly, receiving an adequate score.

So, when it comes time to fill your next open position, take some of the above tips into consideration and find the best employee for the job.

As an employer, what have your hiring experiences been like to date?

Photo credit: ABC15.com

About the Author: Adam Groff is a freelance writer and creator of content. He writes on a variety of topics including business, invoice software, and personal health.