Home | TrendTracker | PowerBlog Reviews | The Experts | Newsletter
ABOUT
SMALL BUSINESS TRENDS brings you daily updates on trends that influence the global small business market.
Anita Campbell, Editor
Past life: CEO, corporate executive, tech entrepreneur, retailer, general counsel, marketer, HR ... (more)
email me
free business magazines
FREE BUSINESS MAGAZINES
Trade publications FREE to qualified professionals. No hidden offers and no purchase necessary.
On Wall Street
The Deal
Computing Canada
 CIO
Employee Benefit
Oracle Magazine
100+ additional titles. Click to browse.
ARCHIVES & SEARCH
Previous Small Business Trends articles can be found at the links below:
October 2003
November 2003
December 2003
January 2004
February 2004
March 2004
April 2004
May 2004
June 2004
July 2004
August 2004
September 2004
October 2004
November 2004
December 2004
January 2005
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
Or, use the search box below to find a
specific post:


NEWSLETTER
Sign up for our FREE Small Business Trends newsletter. (View Current)

We publish regularly and promise we won't share your email address with anyone. (Privacy Policy)
SMALL BIZ INFO & RESOURCES
BLOGS TO READ DAILY*
* Don’t have time to read several dozen blogs a day? Pick two or three. Your brain will thank you for it.
ONLINE COMMUNITIES
BLOG DIRECTORIES
THE BUZZ

SPECIAL RESOURCES
Small Business Trends Radio
Tuesdays, 1:00 PM Eastern U.S. time
on Voice America network
Click to listen

November 1st: Torsten Jacobi, CEO of Creative Weblogging, joins host Anita Campbell. Sponsored by Six Disciplines. Show details.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Using Email For Selling to Small Businesses
Do you use email to make cold calls on small businesses? Or, more precisely, do you use email as the first point of contact to try to get an appointment by phone or in person with a small business owner?

Over at BNET I have two articles posted about using email as part of your sales outreach -- and I'm not talking about blasting out thousands of direct marketing messages (or spam as some might call it). Read:

Cold Calling Today

Making Email Contact with Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs

By Anita Campbell | Permalink | |
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Free Book Giveaway - "Selling is Dead"
Would you like to be entered in a drawing to win a copy of the new book, "Selling is Dead"?

The authors, Marc Miller and Jason Sinkovitz, were kind enough to donate three (3) copies of this hardback book published by Wiley & Sons.

To be entered in the drawing, all you need to do is take our quick 3-minute survey.

Your answers to the survey will help develop market intelligence about what it takes to sell to small businesses successfully today. All responses are 100% anonymous. Survey results will be shared on this site and to newsletter subscribers.

About the Book

You can read reviews of "Selling is Dead" over at Amazon.com. The book is getting good reviews, such as this one:
"Selling is Dead" is one of 10 best books on sales effectiveness published in the United States in the past 20 years. * * *

Of course selling isn't dead, literally. But it's changing in major ways, the authors say. Sales teams are underperforming because they are ineffective. The cost of sales people has risen much higher than their productivity. If selling isn't exactly dead, it's broken. The authors say the main reason is that sellers are generally unable to cope with the quickening pace of innovation."
Also, if you want to communicate directly with the authors -- and get further bites of insight -- go over to the book's blog, Selling is Dead. These days, even books have blogs.

Details, Details

No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. Winners will be chosen by random drawing. The books will be mailed anywhere in the world. Survey and drawing ends November 12, 2005.

Go here to take the 3-minute survey.

By Anita Campbell | Permalink | |
Thursday, October 27, 2005
American Express OPEN Adventures Wrap Up
We have come to a close of the American Express OPEN "Adventures in Entrepreneurship" event.

This has been an extremely positive experience. I want to take a moment to thank the outstanding people involved: Rob May, Dane Carlson, Clay Shirky, Di-Ann Eisnor and Stacy Hoffman of Community Centric, and Thomas Harris and Lexi Reese of American Express OPEN. You can't help but learn from talented people like these, and walk away richer in experience.

American Express OPEN throughout this offline/online event has treated the bloggers with respect. They recognized that our time has value.

Not only have they compensated us for our time and effort, but they did several things to promote the bloggers and our blogs. American Express OPEN ranks number one bar none, in my book, and operates as a good corporate blogging citizen.

I hope we can look forward to future events and that they can involve a wider circle of bloggers.

By Anita Campbell | Permalink | |
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Top 10 Most Practical Blogs for Entrepreneurs
The Entrepreneurs section at About.com has named Small Business Trends to the Top 10 Most Practical Blogs for Entrepreneurs. That's quite an honor -- many thanks to Scott Allen, the About.com Guide who developed the list.

I see a number of friends on the list, from whom I learn a great deal. If you frequent the small business blogs much at all, you probably recognize many of them, too. Here is the full list:
  • Small Business Trends - Anita Campbell looks at the latest trends affecting small businesses and entrepreneurs. A must-read for entrepreneurs.


  • Just for Small Business - Full of thought-provoking tips for small business owners from Denise O'Berry, I like this blog because the topics are often unexpected - not your usual small business fare.


  • WorkHappy.net - Carson McComas lives up to this blog's subtitle of "killer resources for entrepreneurs" by providing links and reviews of "killer" applications and other resources to help entrepreneurs work smarter, not harder.


  • Duct Tape Marketing - John Jantsch delivers 2-3 small business marketing tips weekly in easily digestible, actionable bite-size chunks.


  • Home Office Voice - Internet entrepreneur Martin Neumann shares his experience and tips for building a web-based business. His writing style is very informal and entertaining, but at the same time he provides some really solid advice.


  • Sacred Cow Dung - There are a number of really good blogs out there by venture capitalists about the VC market, entrepreneurship, and so on, but Christian Mayaud's blog is for me the one that most consistently provides content that is actionable, not just informative.


  • The Entrepreneurial Mind - Jeff Cornwall, Director of the Belmont University Center for Entrepreneurship, looks at trends in small business and entrepreneurship and their impact on individual business owners.


  • Escape Velocity - Flemming Funch chronicles the ups and downs of life as an Internet entrepreneur.


  • BizzBangBuzz - Pittsburgh attorney Anthony Cerminaro delivers excellent commentary and some original posts on the challenges facing emerging growth companies, with particular emphasis on legal issues.


  • Business Opportunities Weblog - Dane Carlson mixes links and commentary on legitimate business opportunities with his thoughts and personal experiences regarding entrepreneurship.
Congratulations, one and all.

I also want to mention that Scott is the co-author of a new book on online networking, called The Virtual Handshake.

By Anita Campbell | Permalink | |
Monday, October 24, 2005
Adventures in Entrepreneurship: Tomorrow's Business
Editor's Note: The following article is part of a series written in connection with the American Express OPEN "Adventures in Entrepreneurship" event, featuring Richard Branson. The event includes an online "panel discussion" around certain questions posed by Clay Shirky, our Facilitator.

I and two other blogger panelists have been asked to write about business topics posed by the Facilitator. The following is the fourth and final question.


Question: If you weren't doing what you are doing, what business would you launch tomorrow?

Response: If I were not doing what I am doing today, I would be doing something similar. Sound like I am hedging? Bear with me as I explain.

By doing something similar I mean that I would be:
  • running several businesses that are symbiotic and related in ways that I can see, but which must seem far-flung and unrelated to the casual observer;


  • bootstrapping small businesses, because today I think there is so much opportunity for small businesses versus larger ones that there is no need to get out and get venture capital or other seed money;


  • leveraging the Internet with information businesses, because those areas have growth potential and, besides, they are what I know -- and everyone should be in business with something they know.
Once again I will refer back to the words of Richard Branson for inspiration.

In his book, Losing My Virginity, (it's a business book, trust me), he writes about how his Virgin Companies seem to lack a cohesive connection to outsiders, but that there is a symbiotic relationship between many of them: "When Virgin Atlantic opens a flight to South Africa, I find that we can launch Virgin Radio and Virgin Cola there."

He describes his hodgepodge of 200 or 300 companies as a jigsaw, and says that he refuses to be held by conventional thinking about sticking to your knitting. Rather, he remains fluid in his thinking and does not rule out anything:
"The more diffuse the company becomes, the more frequently I am asked about my vision for Virgin. I tend either to avoid this question or to answer it at great length, safe in the knowledge that I will give a different version the next time I'm asked. My vision for Virgin has never been rigid and changes constantly, like the company itself."
I myself take this view. For instance, in addition to running this site and putting out information products (special reports, etc.) dealing with trends in the small business market, we also put out information products for motorcycle dealerships, and we publish an ad-supported, award-winning site for RFID technology. We also do consulting. We also write for other blog sites for compensation. And we consult with other small businesses to show them how to promote themselves online.

What's the connection? Everything relates to providing business information in some fashion and leverages the Internet. As long as these two criteria are present, I will consider any opportunity that presents itself.

I believe in bootstrapping small businesses whenever possible, because today the cost of starting many kinds of businesses is very low -- dirt cheap actually. That's especially true for information-based businesses. When I look at a business opportunity, I ask first whether it will throw off sufficient free cash flow fairly quickly, to pay a group of outside contractors whom I hire to provide specialized skills. Despite being a small business and a "virtual" company, I hire the best in order to leverage my reach. Plowing whatever money is earned back into the business is a key growth strategy for my businesses at this point, and I think should be for any small business in its early years.

Finally, there is always a business information component to what I do. I tend to be a bit of a wonk. That's my nature, and so I leverage it. I dig deep to find information niches that are not saturated, and fill the voids. For instance, with the RFID Weblog, we were one of the very first on the topic out there. By consistently working at it over a period of nearly two years, we have built up a loyal readership and have begun to be taken seriously by companies that would not have paid us any respect a year ago. This site you are on, Small Business Trends, was one of the early business blogs, and we have deliberately taken an approach of doing things that either the mainstream media publications or other business blogs are not doing. We try new things (PowerBlog Reviews, bringing in outside experts to comment on trends, this American Express OPEN event, and soon, a companion radio program.)

Having spent much of my career in the corporate world, I've come later than some to the entrepreneurial party. But that experience in the corporate world has been my secret sauce. It continues to supply the business grounding needed to have a clear sense of where I want to go in my businesses -- even if that means maintaining a unstructured "Richard Branson" view.

What do you think? What would you be doing? Please leave a comment below with your thoughts. (To comment, click on the small "comment" link at the bottom of this post -- it will bring up a small pop-up window where you can type in your comments.)

Read what the other two participating bloggers, Dane Carlson at Business Opportunities Weblog, and Rob May at BusinessPundit, have to say about this question.


* * * * *

Follow the conversation at Technorati:


* * * * *

The opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of American Express. If you post on the blogs, be aware that any personal information you post will be viewable by anybody reading the blogs.

The facilitator and bloggers for this event have been compensated for their time by OPEN from American Express.

By Anita Campbell | Permalink | |
Friday, October 21, 2005
Adventures in Entrepreneurship: Managing Change
Editor's Note: The following article is part of a series written in connection with the American Express OPEN "Adventures in Entrepreneurship" event, featuring Richard Branson. The event includes an online "panel discussion" around certain questions posed by Clay Shirky, our Facilitator.

I and two other blogger panelists have been asked to write about business topics posed by the Facilitator. The following is the third question.


Question: How do you manage change?

Response: One of the most important ways to manage change is simply to stay in tune with the world around you.

Why is it that as people age, we still listen to music that was popular in our younger days? I still prefer to listen to "The Who," the greatest rock band that ever existed in my opinion. They haven't put out any new material in years. But that doesn't stop me from buying the latest digitally remastered copy of "Who's Next", one of their best albums.

We become comfortable with what we know and what we liked when we were younger, that's true.

Along with being comfortable, I think we just stop investing the time and effort into keeping current in many avenues of our lives, and that includes our businesses. It takes extra time -- hard work even -- to stay on top on what's new and changing in the world around us. And failing to invest time in staying current is the crux of the matter.

We all get busy and focused on the day-to-day. There are fires to put out, payroll to meet, customers to satisfy. Many times we are so focused, we get tunnel vision.

Tunnel vision is not always bad, of course. Sometimes a good case of tunnel vision in a time of crisis is the only way our businesses have managed to survive. Our single-minded focus gets us through it.

But tunnel vision all the time is dangerous. Tunnel vision is when you are so focused on the here and now, that a new competitor comes out of left field and eats your lunch. Tunnel vision is when your products stop meeting customers' expectations, because your customers have grown but your company has stayed the same. Tunnel vision is when you wake up one day and suddenly realize something big has changed in the world (like the Internet), and your business is not ready for it.

The good news, however, is that managing change may actually be easier than most people think. Nearly 50% of managing change is just to make ourselves aware of it -- to stay on top of current events and culture. Most of us readily have the tools at hand. We simply need to set aside time to do it.

How should we stay current? One simple way to start is by reading, listening and watching what is happening around us in the form of books, magazines, newspapers, films, TV, radio and the Internet.

Earlier this year, I had the chance to meet and speak with small business expert Steven Little.

He advocates that every small business owner read 50 magazines a month (or Web sites, newspapers, radio shows, or other sources of information). Break it down and the number sounds do-able: it amounts to fewer than 2 a day. And, remember, they've repealed the law that says you have to read a magazine cover-to-cover. Skim parts of it and read one or two articles that catch your eye, that's all. This is a simple strategy we can all do, if we set a goal to do it.

Then, if you want to take it one step further, Little advocates learning how to listen to "weak signals," those faintest initial indications of change around us. He described the concept of listening to weak signals in a guest column here at Small Business Trends on this very point, Using "Weak Signals" To Identify Opportunities.

The bottom line is, that if you start with something you can control, i.e., devoting some small amount of time each day or week to staying current on what is happening around you, change will not seem so dramatic and difficult. You already will be in sync with change. You will have taken the first big step to dealing with change.


Read what the other two participating bloggers, Dane Carlson at Business Opportunities Weblog, and Rob May at BusinessPundit, have to say about this question.

What do you think? How do you manage change? Please leave a comment below with your thoughts. (To comment, click on the small "comment" link at the bottom of this post -- it will bring up a small pop-up window where you can type in your comments.)


* * * * *

Follow the conversation at Technorati:


* * * * *

The opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of American Express. If you post on the blogs, be aware that any personal information you post will be viewable by anybody reading the blogs.

The facilitator and bloggers for this event have been compensated for their time by OPEN from American Express.

By Anita Campbell | Permalink | |
Thursday, October 20, 2005