Small Business Basics
Tips For Managing Your Marketing Strategy
With the Labor Day weekend behind us, the carefree days of summer are gone once again. Oh. Who am I kidding? When you own a small business, there are no actual carefree days. (How is it that our kids “busy” makes us so busy? That doesn’t seem fair.) The business world has a cycle to…
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Are you Q4 Ready?
I know. I know what you’re thinking: “Erika, I haven’t even recovered from back-to-school shopping. How can you possibly expect me to think about holiday shopping now?” But, guess what? Labor Day is almost here, and you know what that means. You have a ton of work to do to make sure you get ahead…
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Finding A Niche: The Difference Between Adaptation and Extinction
*Updated 9/1/21. Meet Sarah. She’s an English major fresh out of college. She’s also a wide-eyed, new entrepreneur who has decided to start a freelance editing business. She starts out thinking like this: I’m going to edit resumes, website copy, journal articles, blog posts, and books for people. The US population is about 320 million.…
Read MoreClients are like cabs—you just have to find one whose light is on
There is this great line from an episode of Sex in the City that is as true about finding clients as it is about finding men (or whatever gender you prefer. It’s really none of my business). Charlotte, always the romantic, is lamenting the fact that finding the right husband is totally up to fate.…
Read MorePutting your business on cruise control for summer
All signs point to summer: In the DC area, almost overnight, it went from cold and rainy to HOT and humid (So, naturally, the A/C in the family minivan goes out). Spring Insight’s picnic basket swag has been spotted all around town at various festivals. And I’m playing hooky on a Thursday to go white…
Read MoreDashboards are the New Black
You often see me blogging about website trends. There was my State of the Internet series, including The State of Website Design and there were Web Trends in 2015 that I’m LOVING and NOT LOVING, to name just a few. Hey, some people are into fashion. I’m into websites. There is a fashion I am…
Read MoreWhen it comes to website development, good things come in three’s
I bet you don’t know who in Internet-land owns thirdwebsite.com. Go ahead and check. I will wait here patiently… Yep, it’s mine. I bought it a few years ago after deciding that I really liked the marketing message of Spring Insight building your third website. The logic of the pitch goes like this: When you start…
Read MoreThe customer is “sometimes” right
Let’s just say it: in business, mistakes happen. Of course, in a perfect world, you would deliver everything to every client exactly the way she wants it, exactly when she wants it (and, while we’re dreaming, chocolate would have zero calories). Sadly, we don’t live in the perfect world. And as we’ve discussed before, customers…
Read MoreIf you give a team a project…
Ever start to bake a cake and then realize that you don’t have flour, so you run to the store; then on the way you realize your gas tank is nearly empty and you after you stop to fill it, you realize you have spent the last of your cash getting gas, so you have…
Read MoreBeing Thankful in Business
Unless you live off the grid (in which case, I don’t know how you could be reading this), you are probably aware of the concept of the 30-Day Thankfulness Challenge that has been a trend each November on Facebook and other social media for the past few years. Don’t get me wrong; I am a…
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