StartupNation Blogs

As the “royalty” status of Hollywood stars has risen, so has their effectiveness as key influencers in consumer purchasing behaviors. Celebrity product placement is considered an “influencer-marketing” approach for helping brands increase their competiveness in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Marketers and small business owners can harness that power through strategic product placement opportunities that have [...]

Ever heard of “The Conference Board”? It’s a global, independent business membership and research association. Their mission is to provide organizations with the practical knowledge they need to improve their performance, among other things.
They do a study on a quarterly basis that measures CEO confidence, which had increased in the second quarter of 2009, and of [...]

Since many of you commented on my last blog entry, here are three more free tools to help you with your small business PR activities:
1. Help a Reporter Out
PR Pro Peter Shankman set up this great site at http://www.helpareporter.com/. Simply enter your name and e-mail information. And each day, you’ll receive a list of reporters [...]

Recently, I caught up with Cynthia Good, CEO, founding editor and co-owner of the award-winning PINK Magazine, www.PINKmagazine.com. PINK reaches more than two million professional women every year and has raised more than $60,000 for nonprofits benefiting women and girls.
Before becoming an entrepreneur, Cynthia was a news anchor on television stations nationwide, created her own [...]

Tory Johnson, frequent reporter on ABC’s Good Morning America show and anchor of the ABC NewsNow series focusing on careers asked for a little StartupNation love recently. One of her faithful fans, Natalie, of ChicSweets, asked for ideas about how to move her business forward on a variety of levels, especially in the transition from part-time [...]

To follow up on a previous post requesting feedback on topics and offering to highlight members of the community, I learned of Guideposts.com—a site devoted to helping people find and reach their potential. This site interested me not so much from an entrepreneurial standpoint, but because of its history.
The nonprofit organization was founded in 1945 [...]

The recent CIT Group news hit the franchise community late last week. One of the larger small business lenders announced, CIT Group announced it needed additional money from the government to stay affloat. The government denied their request but CIT was able to cut a deal with its creditors giving them a little more time [...]

With over 70% of the economic experts expecting a last quarter uptick in the economy, now is the perfect time to start preparing for the extra business.  I am a big fan of using virtual assistants to help build out my team during peak seasons.  This is an especially useful business strategy in today’s [...]

On Tuesday, we heard from David Durick of gotoBilling, www.gotobilling.com. This business experienced a 307% volume increase during the recession so I sat down with David to get his insights for other small business owners.
Here is the rest of that interview and more of David’s tips:
What kind of marketing and publicity activities have helped GTB grow [...]

Some companies are doing well during these tough economic times. That’s why I sat down with David Durick of gotoBilling, www.gotobilling.com, to find out the secret to their success (and how marketing has played a role in their significant growth over the past year).
Here’s what David had to say…
What do you do at gotoBilling.com and [...]