Business Blogs: Trends, tips, and real-life anecdotes from industry experts.

My trip to India is underway. I am speaking day after Thanksgiving on entrepreneurship. (see previous post, “This Year, Turkey Tandooori Style”).
I land, work my way through a sea of drivers standing with name cards for their clients, find mine and walk out into the parking area with him. Next to our car is a [...]

Since many of us will be busy getting ready for the Thanksgiving holiday this week, I just wanted to take a brief moment to thank you for reading my blog entries and providing your insights and comments.
I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving full of fun, family and friends!
Melanie

As the old saying goes, “Time is Money.”  Big retailers such as Gap, Limited Brands, Office Depot, Toys R Us, and the Meijer grocery chain are all jumping on this bandwagon as they try to squeeze as much profit as possible out of the upcoming weak holiday shopping season. (Read more here from the WSJ, [...]

Have you ever been frustrated by employee’s who love to spread rumors and create “noise”?  In a fast growth business where you learn things everyday you need to make changes quickly.�
The noise can really get in your way if you don’t get in front of it.  We have been trying to execute on this every [...]

Over the past few weeks I have discussed several topics involving email marketing. In this post I plan to highlight a few tips to keep in mind the next time you create your email marketing campaigns.

Use quality control for your emails. You can reduce the amount of errors found in [...]

It’s very early in the morning, and I’ve spent the last five minutes deleting spam e-mails touting the latest software programs, seminars and too-good-to-be true credit offers.
With the economy the way it is, more people are increasing their marketing budgets to boost sales. And while there are a lot of good deals out there, [...]

Well folks, next week is my favorite holiday. I love the family time, I love the non-material/inclusive nature of the holiday, and of course, I love the food.
But there’s one thing I love more: Inspiring people to start and grow successful businesses.
That’s why I passionately accepted an invitation from Franchise India, Asia’s largest small business [...]

Targeted marketing is a very effective method of marketing your business via email. Instead of sending blanket emails to all of your contacts, you can segment your lists and send them only to the most relevant information. Here are few tips that might make the segmentation process easier.

Segment your campaigns with more than just one [...]

The big buzz in marketing these days is all about social networking and viral campaigns. In the past two days alone, I received about nine e-mails inviting me to various, educational seminars online.
And I’m sure you have been inundated with this same kind of information. It can be overwhelming…Do I start a Facebook page, [...]

This has become my new mantra and quite honestly, I wish I would have seen the light a little earlier.  However, as a small business owner swamped with trying to make sales, market the business, oversee the day-to-day operations, and oh yeah- create the product, I just never saw where “having lunch” had a worthy [...]