5 Ways You Can Stand Out from Your Competitors

  Do you have a lot of competitors, and are having trouble setting your business apart from the rest? Your potential customers are waiting to see some selling point that defines you as the better choice of all the options for your product or service. There are a few key strategies that you can use to start gaining the advantage over your competitors. 1. Superior Customer Service Excellent customer support cannot be over-emphasized, and it is exactly the thing that turns out to be the Achilles’ heel of many businesses. The unfortunate tendency is to provide customer service that is barely sufficient, only to show that you have some level of support to appease your customers, and this is 180 degrees wrong. It cannot be a peripheral aspect of your business to which you don’t devote much attention; people will give you their business over a competitor, solely for your …

Use a Secret Shopper to Learn About Your Business

Remember secret shoppers? It used to be a lot more commonplace than it seems to be now, but this was, and still is, a great way to gain insight into how your business is performing overall. It can still be useful to your business today, for finding out what you are doing well, and where you are falling short. How to be a secret shopper. A secret shopper, or mystery shopper, basically impersonates a customer who is shopping at your business and doing some reconnaissance, unbeknownst to the employees. It’s not likely that you’ll be able to play this role yourself, as the owner, because obviously you would be recognized. That’s why you’ll probably have to commission someone whom the staff cannot identify, possibly hiring a person who is unaffiliated with your company, who can then report back to you. What can be gained from secret shopping? Overall Experience The …

7 Encouraging Facts About Being an Entrepreneur

    There’s no doubt about it, running a small business is no walk in the park. While it has its challenges, there are also personal, as well as practical benefits to being a business owner. Here are a few of them.   1. You can take it as far as you want. You have the power and the freedom to run your business as effectively as you want; the sky really is the limit. The point here is that you can build a business that is as professional, as grand, as specific as you want it to be. The only limitations you have are the ones you set for yourself. You set the tone, you establish the parameters, and you stop exactly where you decide you want to stop.   2. Power to change things as needed. If you see something about your business that isn’t being done the …

5 Things You Never Knew PayPal Could Do

    Everybody knows that PayPal is a tool that many businesses can’t do without. What’s more is that the company has grown to such a degree that it has a hand in all sorts of different areas of commerce and industry. PayPal is involved with charitable giving, open source projects, international payment management, and they even provide business loans. Below are a few of the things that the company has to offer, which most PayPal users probably aren’t aware of.   1. Mass Payments Sometimes you have to pay a lot of people at the same time, and PayPal actually has a pretty good solution for this. For things like survey incentives, scheduled disbursements, or employee benefits, it makes it a lot easier to have some kind of program that will send out the payments efficiently, and all in one shot. All you need to do with PayPal is …

Specialized Crowdfunding to Meet Any Need

    Most of us are familiar with the concept of crowdfunding to promote a creative project or other pursuits, as it has become woven into the fabric of commerce. As you start to look into different crowdfunding platforms, you will quickly find numerous types of these platforms, for just about anything under the sun that needs to be funded. Kickstarter is the most well-known, but there are many others that may be a better fit for you to raise funds for your small business or startup.             Kickstarter Though ArtistShare is generally credited with being the first crowdfunding platform to emerge in the U.S., Kickstarter followed a few years later and gained the most traction of the preceding platforms. It pioneered the concept of sourcing funds from the public for just about any project, including startups that were not able to secure traditional funding …

How to Keep Your Head with a Struggling Startup

When you hear about startups, they are usually success stories of thriving businesses, but this isn’t a perfectly accurate reflection of reality. Many startups are wildly profitable at first but can’t be sustained for the long haul, and many never quite get off the ground. You may be one of the lot who had a rough go of it, doing everything you can to keep your new business afloat. It is a scary and incredibly stressful position to be in. It only takes some altered thinking to turn difficult circumstances into potential for an upside. Peace of Mind Comes from Preparedness If you’re running a business, then you probably have your ducks in a row, for the most part. But there are a vast number of business owners who really don’t plan for the worst, and this is key. Let’s be honest, though; sometimes you just don’t have the resources …

5 Ideas for Side Businesses that You Can Use Today

    Everybody would like to find a way to make more money, something that they can realistically execute without making an extreme career shift. Entrepreneurs, especially, are always looking for another venture on the side that is worthwhile for them to pursue. Maybe you want to try your hand at another field of business, simply to challenge yourself and broaden your vocational horizons. Whatever the reason, it’s always a good idea to put your eggs in different baskets because one of those baskets might end up yielding a lot more eggs. The following are a few extracurricular ventures that might be the perfect supplemental revenue-generator that you’re looking for.   1. Rent out your space. In the same way that land always has intrinsic value, the same can be said of space in a building. If you are fortunate enough to have some unused space in your home, garage, …

4 Basic Steps to Stop Unwanted Calls

You would think that we would all respect each other’s space, not to mention time, and refrain from calling other people when the call is not welcome. Sadly, though, we all get those unwanted calls from telemarketers, identity thieves, scam artists, and even unruly customers, leaving us desperate for a way to stop them. Fortunately, there are systems in place, and measures you can take to stop these disturbances to yourself and your business. Take advantage of these 4 solutions to prevent those irritating calls from disrupting your day from now, on. 1. Block the phone number. The first and most obvious solution, simply blocking a phone number may take care of the problem; however, due to the multiple phone numbers that they tend to use, you may end up constantly blocking numbers. Most cell phones have an internal blocking function on the device, and if yours doesn’t have this …

3 Techniques for Defining Your Brand Identity

Brand identity is a little easier to pin down than your brand, in general, for which there are varying definitions due to its tendency towards the abstract. Jeremiah Gardner puts it simply in his article, “The difference between brand and identity,” defining a brand as “the relationship between an organization and an audience”. The assertion that it is a relationship is the key distinction, as a company or individual’s brand revolves around how its customers or patrons relate to it. “Brand” and “brand identity” can almost be used interchangeably, but not quite. If your brand is a collection of all kinds of expressions that are associated with your company, then your brand identity is basically the sum of all the parts. Brand identity is the clear manifestation that defines to customers, or to any outsiders, who you are and what your specialty is. The following three exercises will help you …

giving customers too many options

Are You Giving Your Customers Too Many Options?

    Although it wasn’t always the case, the general idea for businesses today is to give customers as many options as possible because that’s what they demand. Is that what they actually want, though? It’s exciting to have a variety of options to choose from (like forty different kinds of pasta sauce), but there is something to be said for simplicity. Here we will consider both sides: Should you offer fewer options for your customers, or as many as possible?   Letting Them Decide There is actually more to this than it seems at first glance. It’s one thing to have a store, online or otherwise, that sells a wide variety of products which are not of the same type; but it’s something else to specialize in one type of product and offering many different versions of it. For instance, you might have a website that sells iPhone cases …