Customers and vendors are a small businesses most valuable resource. Do you use a paper address book? Do your business contacts live  in a paper rolodex? Do you search by hand for client details, flipping through sheets of paper on a call trying to find the answer to someone’s question while frantically flipping through pages of notes? When was the last time you had a paper cut? Well those days should be behind you.

With the rise of the age of technology, your clients and customers expect you have instant access to their detailed information. Lost pages and delays are not good customer service and they reflect poorly on you and your business. The good news is that customer relationship management (CRM) is now cheap, easy to use and accessible.

Most small businesses just don’t need something big, expensive and complicated. Your biggest priority for your CRM should be to quickly and easily access up-to-date information about the people you do business with. Smal Read all…

As micro business owners, we do not typically operate under the same constraints faced by major corporations.   We don’t require Board approval to make changes to our marketing strategies, we have greater flexibility with the content and direction of our marketing programs and have the ability to efficiently and effectively market ourselves with minimal expenditure.

The economic downturn has caused many companies to downsize their non-revenue and ‘non-essential’ departments.  Mine was one of them.

By taking time and seriously considering long term goals for my business, I have utilized this new-found free time to maximize efforts in expanding my offering and taking a long, hard look at how I have been marketing myself.

When employed full-time, my micro business was more of a dream than an active reality.  I ordered the supplies needed to have the ability to launch my business when the timing was right.   My office is filled with fantastic marketing materials for, ironically, my online marketing business.  I have a few clients that I work with on a regular basis, but did not have the time to take on new commitments.

Post-layoff, I took the time to beef up my website, order third-generation business cards that now present the image I want to sell to my clients.  The businesses I worked with in my past professional life have now become clients and prospects – they know my ethics, they recognize my abilities, and we have a pre-established positive relationship.

For established micro business owners, I encourage you to seek out new ways of building your business.  If you have a website, but are not active on social media – now is the time!  Most of the tools are free; establishing accounts, finding a preferred social network stream aggregator to monitor your business presence online, and getting involved in the newest trends.

Early adopters of internet ‘trends’ have the luxury of being among the first to get your brand name populating search engines, generating traffic through online gaming programs, and being involved in your area’s online community.  It takes time, yes, but if you are experiencing a slowdown in traffic, the time is available – it’s how you choose to use it.

Seek out online communities in your area and become active.  Share your personality first and product second with thousands of people in your area, for absolutely free.

If you are not internet savvy, or just simply don’t get it, that’s fine – there are plenty of former professional marketers with years of experience just starting their own companies to show you the way and assist you in your efforts.  Think of how you began your business, how you wanted to share your product or your skills with the world and re-energize that dream.

Downturn is only that for those that ride the wave.  Grab your board and rise above it.  The view is endless!

CC 3.0 / Andrew Sullivan Kabl00ey

If you saw the post we ran on Monday that surveyed Vistaprint micro business customers, you might have noticed that there was data that suggested Yellow Page listings and ads were no longer an area of focus.  In fact, just 3% surveyed considered it the most important marketing channel for their business, and only 28% indicated they currently had a listing or ad or planned on pursuing one in the next 12 months.  This was the lowest of the five channels offered in terms of current and future interest.

This past weekend Bruce Barker, an Athens, Georgia business owner and contributor to the Athens Banner Herald told a story in his column about how much of an impact Yellow Page ads once had, but no longer have in today’s internet savvy world.

I remember back in the 1980s and 1990s when our business was spending as much as $1,200 a month for two display ads in the Yellow Pages. It Read all…

You have heard the term “micro business” a lot on this blog and some of you might be wondering what exactly that means. For us, it means any business that has between one and 10 employees.  So if you’re self-employed, you’re a micro business.  So if you just have a small dog walking operation that you do part time during the week, that’s a micro business. But if you own a deli in the center of town and you only have a staff of 10, you also would be considered one.  While the industries and stories vary, this group is a very small but vital subsection of the “small business” community.

Other surveys have focused on “small businesses” that range from one employee to 50, 100 or even 500, but our target audience is the very small micro business (often referred to as small office/home office businesses, or SOHO businesses), typically local and with an average of less than 60 customers.  Collectively they have a big impact on communities across the nation.  You have more than likely done business with one in the past year.

But how do micro businesses behave, how do they market to others and do they even consider marketing a vital component to their success?  If so, what channels are they using right now and what would they explore if they had more money and more time?   These are questions t

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Whether you like it or not social media has become a piece of the marketing puzzle and can be a great way to reach your target audience on a more personable level.  But before you start making Facebook fan pages and YouTube channels, you should do some research on who and what people are looking for when they go to these sites.

A Look at The Numbers

A study done by Chitika, a full service online advertising network, has broken down the users of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Digg.  They found that an overwhelming 47% of Twitter users go there to find news, while 51% of MySpace users are there for either video games or celebrity/entertainment purposes.  Twenty-eight percent of Facebook users go there for the news, while Digg seemed to be distributed evenly between news, tech, and video games.

= These types of numbers are important to know where to target your social media efforts. Ha

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In the brave new world of Social Media for Small Business there are the big, well known and highly lauded vehicles for promotion (Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, Yelp, LinkedIn) that almost every business has heard of, if not tried.

And then there are the new entrees into the scene, which get a lot of buzz in certain industries but which have not yet reached mainstream awareness. The obvious barrier to embracing these tactics as an “early adopter” is that your target audience may not have jumped on board either which will delay the potential benefits of directing your energy into these strategies.

However there are a multitude of advantages to being among the first in your area/industry to embrace these new platforms and a potentially greater payoff in the long run then directing your efforts to competing in the over saturated Social Media spheres.

These newer tactics are not as widely used, and therefore not as competitive, as the older social media platforms. The

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