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If you are currently living the life of a small company manager, there is no time to regularly check this site or any other site for updates and news that might be relevant to you. So instead of placing the burdon of proactivity on you, THEsmallCOMPANY Blog will gladly push relevant information out to you as it becomes available. This information could take the form of small company-related news, featured blog postings, book reviews, surveys, and even solicitiations to be a guest blogger on occasion.
Strategy, Growth, and Mistakes
4 Pricing Strategies That Work for Small Companies
As many of you know, this article is Part 2 in a two-part series on product and service pricing. And I am happy to say that so far, Part 1 (4 Pricing Mistakes You Need to Stop Making) has generated a surprising number of comments and spurred some interesting debates among Marketing people. One of the more heated Twitter conversations ...
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4 Pricing Mistakes You Need to Stop Making
Of all the things I was asked to do early in my career as a marketer, one of the most intimidating was determining the price of my company’s products and services. To this day I still remember the first time I was asked to come up with a go-to-market pricing strategy, and will never forget the stress I felt and ...
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6 Critical Mistakes All Small Company Managers Must Avoid
Before I get too far into this article, I need to point something out. Like hundreds of people before me, I could have used the 1,000 words that follow to declare that running a successful small company is about things like taking risks, accepting failure, multi-tasking, finding creative solutions to problems, and never accepting ‘no’ for an answer. But anyone ...
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The Most Alarming Trend in Small Business
As regular visitors to my blog know, I typically don’t give lectures or tell small company owners what to do. Most of my articles are written under the assumption that a) good or bad, adults can make their own decisions, and b) small business people will almost always do what is best for their organizations. But as of late, I ...
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5 Ways to Immediately Improve Your Small Company Operation
Regardless of why it was initially founded, the goal of any small company is to generate more money. But once our businesses are off and running, most of us become too preoccupied with running them to make the constant improvements necessary for increased efficiency, increased sales, and ultimately more money in our pockets. But there are some operational ways we ...
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15 Signs You Might Lose Your Small Company Job
Over the course of my 18-year career, I have spent a great deal of time on both sides of some messy employment situations. In addition to terminations, corporate reorganizations, company mergers and hostile acquisitions, I have been part of several multi-round company-wide layoffs . . . one of which resulted in me exiting the building with my personal belongings in ...
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Marketing and IM
9 Reasons Your Marketing Communication Lacks Credibility
Before I get too far into this article, I’m going to come right out and say something: I believe Marketing Communication is quickly becoming a lost art. In fact, I would go as far as to say that at many companies, the quality of marketing-related communication is not only devalued, but coming dangerously close to being completely ignored. I will save ...
Read More4 Pricing Strategies That Work for Small Companies
As many of you know, this article is Part 2 in a two-part series on product and service pricing. And I am happy to say that so far, Part 1 (4 Pricing Mistakes You Need to Stop Making) has generated a surprising number of comments and spurred some interesting debates among Marketing people. One of the more heated Twitter conversations ...
Read More4 Pricing Mistakes You Need to Stop Making
Of all the things I was asked to do early in my career as a marketer, one of the most intimidating was determining the price of my company’s products and services. To this day I still remember the first time I was asked to come up with a go-to-market pricing strategy, and will never forget the stress I felt and ...
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What Does a Social Marketing Manager REALLY Do?
When it comes to Marketing, every decade has had its ‘hot’ careers. During the 1980s, catalog marketing and direct mail houses were the place to be. In the 1990s, web design firms and ad agencies were overloaded with job applicants. And from 2000 to 2009, any career related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seemingly turned to gold the minute it ...
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Twitter for Small Business: An Interview with Shannon Evans
When you spend as much time networking as I do, you meet some pretty interesting people—people with things like motivation, ideas, experience, and a strong desire to help others become better at what they do. Shannon Evans (@shannonevans on Twitter) is one of those people: a development editor, literary coach, book reviewer, and author of the brand new small business ...
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5 Free Twitter Tools for the Busy Small Company Marketer
As I have mentioned several times in previous posts, there are few things in business more challenging, more stressful, and more frustrating than being asked to market your company’s products and services on a shoestring budget. Those of us who have carved a career out of small company (and small budget) marketing know the secret to success lies not in ...
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Management & Entrepreneurship
5 Secret Resume Killers Every Hiring Manager Looks For
At one point or another, it has happened to all of us. An exciting job opportunity that matched our background, experience and education finally came along. And not only was the job well within our salary range, but it was a PERFECT fit for our resume—to the point we convinced ourselves “They actually wrote this job posting for ME!” So ...
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Top 10 Small Business Articles of the Year
These days, you can’t expose yourself to any sort of digital media without bumping into an indiscriminately-assembled Top 10 list. But if you’re sick and tired of having the year’s most wealthy celebrities and hottest baby names repeatedly shoved in your face, there is good news: this particular Top 10 List might actually add some value to your life AND ...
Read More6 Critical Mistakes All Small Company Managers Must Avoid
Before I get too far into this article, I need to point something out. Like hundreds of people before me, I could have used the 1,000 words that follow to declare that running a successful small company is about things like taking risks, accepting failure, multi-tasking, finding creative solutions to problems, and never accepting ‘no’ for an answer. But anyone ...
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5 Survival Tips from Successful Small Company Managers
Truth be told, few things in business are more complex than running or managing a small company. While our counterparts in Fortune 500 organizations have the benefit of things like goals and job descriptions and long-term plans, the only constants small company managers have on their side are change and uncertainty. . . and a minimal amount of job security. ...
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7 Reasons Your Employees Might Hate You
When you take a moment to list all of the functions involved in running a small company, it is easy to see how overwhelming entrepreneurship can be. Having to perform sales, marketing, accounting, purchasing and shipping (along with two dozen other daily tasks) requires set of skills many people simply don’t have . . . which is why most successful ...
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The Key to Catching (and Passing) Your Market Leader
If there is one thing nearly universal among small company owners and managers, it is the need—and sometimes the outright obsession—to do what the market leader is doing. Whether copying a piece of their business model, matching their prices, advertising in the same places or hiring their ex-employees, the fact is most small companies spend a great deal of time ...
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Social Bookmarking: Dos and Don’ts
One of the steepest learning curves I have encountered as the owner, writer and chief Search Engine Optimization guy of a blog site is with the art—and science—of social bookmarking. As I discuss in one of my recent posts Inexpensive SEO Strategies for Small Company Websites: Part III, getting websites to link back to yours (a.k.a. reverse-linking) is the Holy Grail of ...
Read MoreTwitter for Small Business: An Interview with Shannon Evans
When you spend as much time networking as I do, you meet some pretty interesting people—people with things like motivation, ideas, experience, and a strong desire to help others become better at what they do. Shannon Evans (@shannonevans on Twitter) is one of those people: a development editor, literary coach, book reviewer, and author of the brand new small business ...
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An Interview with Buzzom CEO Bhupendra Khanal (Part 2)
Below is Part 2 of a recent interview with Bhupendra Khanal, the architect behind Buzzom—a leading social marketing and Twitter account management tool. Mr. Khanal offered to share his time with Eric Rudolf, a career Internet Marketing professional and owner of THEsmallCOMPANYBLOG. Please follow this link to access Part 1 of this Interview. THE INTERVIEW: QUESTIONS 6 THRU 10 Eric: For marketing analytics ...
Read MoreSocial Marketing Automation: Interview with the CEO of Buzzom
Below is Part I of a two-part interview with Bhupendra Khanal, Founder and CEO of InRev—developers of Buzzom. Buzzom is one of the fastest-growing Twitter Account Management tools in the industry, and was recently featured in PC World’s list of Top 5 Twitter Ranking applications, as well as in a recent article in Forbes Magazine. Although he runs a company in ...
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6 Blogging Lessons I Learned the Hard Way
When I wrote my very first post in October of 2008, I knew there would be a few things to learn about blogging. Back then, I figured my 16 years of small company marketing experience could take me most of the way, and I would simply fill in the gaps with a handful of articles and one good book from ...
Read MoreMarketing Tool Review: SocialOomph Social Media Productivity
As a blogger who also has a day job, the lure of automated marketing tools is, at times, nearly impossible to resist. But as I discussed in a recent post titled Four Marketing Technologies That Are Ruining the Internet, most of the tools marketers have to choose from do little more than encourage us to clutter the Internet with artificially-generated traffic, ...
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SEO
Inexpensive SEO for Small Company Websites: Part 4
Given the current state of the economy, the days of being able to afford professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) help are gone. As website traffic struggles with the economic downturn, small companies need the services of market-leading firms like Bruce Clay, SEO Inc. and HighRankings.com now more than ever. Unfortunately, we have no hope of affording their five-figure start up ...
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Universal Search: Still Relevant for Small Companies?
In mid-2007, Google gave SEO experts and Internet marketers an entire year’s worth of job security when it announced the first steps toward a Universal Search model. Shortly thereafter, similar announcements were made by MSN and YaHoo; and for the remainder of 2007 and much of 2008, the topic of Universal Search was featured at every marketing conference and written about by every blogger on the planet. But then—like O.J. ...
Read MoreInexpensive SEO Strategies for Small Company Websites: Part III
Given the current state of the economy, the days of being able to afford professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) help are gone. As website traffic struggles with the economic downturn, small companies need the services of market-leading firms like Bruce Clay, SEO Inc. and HighRankings.com now more than ever. Unfortunately, we have no hope of affording their five-figure start up ...
Read MoreInexpensive SEO Strategies for Small Company Websites: Part II
Given the current state of the economy, the days of being able to afford professional, full-scale Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are little more than a distant memory. As your website traffic struggles with the economic downturn, small companies like yours need the services of market-leading firms like Bruce Clay, SEO Inc. and HighRankings.com now more than ever. Unfortunately, you have no hope of affording ...
Read MoreThe Importance of Blogs for Small Company Web Traffic
This past summer I attended a 3-day marketing conference. I spent most of my time in the e-Commerce and Web Marketing Track, hoping to learn more about increasing the effectiveness of my internet-based campaigns, generating additional web traffic, and maximizing new web technologies for marketing and online sales. One of my favorite sessions was a panel presentation and Q&A on ...
Read MoreInexpensive SEO Strategies for Small Company Websites: Part I
Given the current state of the economy, the days of being able to afford professional, full-scale Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are little more than a distant memory. As corporate website traffic struggles with the economic downturn, companies need the services of market-leading firms like Bruce Clay, SEO Inc. and HighRankings.com now more than ever. Unfortunately, we have no hope of affording their five-figure start up fees, much ...
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Social Networking