One of the hottest forms of marketing in today’s digital world is the webinar. You have seen large companies offer them and you may have even attended one – but are webinars appropriate for small businesses too? According to our latest interview guest, Steve Jarriel, the answer is a resounding YES! Steve started out as...
Getting blindsided by a cease and desist letter chalk full of technical legal jargon is an extremely intimidating experience for small business owners. Oftentimes, a C&D letter involves a claim that your business has infringed on the sender’s trademark or copyright. For most business owners, being threatened to halt a business action or face...
While first introduced to the market over a decade ago, geofencing, a form of location-based marketing (LBM) is relatively new territory for small businesses. It works by creating “virtual barriers” that trigger promotional text messages, email alerts, or app notifications when a mobile device enters (or exits) a specified area. Joshua Markham, ReachLocal I've asked Joshua...
There's something magical about booking an appointment to work on a project. The date is confirmed, you protect the time - work gets done. Nice. But what happens when it’s just you - the deadline is looming, and procrastination could rear its head? Simple: block time. I stumbled across this simple time management hack years ago, and...
Smart Hustle Editor Ramon Ray is used to being on a certain side of the interview table, picking the brains of today’s entrepreneurs and small business owners in order to learn about their journeys and to share their advice in feature stories. Today you are in for a treat because the tables have turned....
With messages coming at consumers from every direction, social media, emails, television, radio, newspapers, and more, it’s getting harder and harder to be heard above the fray. While push messaging, your attempt at pushing your products at people has completely lost its relevance, you still can do the opposite and pull people into your brand...
Keeping data secure is a must for every small business. While many small businesses feel that they are safe, or immune, from today’s cyber criminals, they are not. New threats arise every day, and savvy hackers are finding new ways of taking advantage of those who are not protected. Imagine this scenario: you are super...
Too often, small business owners consider customer service to be a necessary but expensive part of their organization. Using the strategies in this post, convert your customer service team into a revenue-generating profit center. The typical structure in a small business’s sales process might look something like this: Pre-Sale: Sales team runs the show. Sales representatives...
At some point in their business career, everyone in sales will experience the “sales slump.” It’s a sad truth but a truth nonetheless. In these dark times, one must understand why and how the slump happened in the first place. Is it the result of a dried up pipeline? Did a major client defect...
With so many people betting on a crash in the venture capital and tech sectors, the billion-dollar question is how to make sure your startup avoids the oncoming tsunami collapsing on the shores of Silicon Valley. The simplest answer is to make sure that you have traction. The longer answer is that if you...
