The very words Trade Show make some small business owners shudder. A Trade Show can take a lot of time and most of the time that’s something a small business owner just doesn’t have. With some careful planning however, a trade show can not only be fun they can be profitable as well.

Here are 10 tips we’ve picked up from attending a lot of shows, not only as vendors but participants as well. They may be basic but the best tips usually are pretty basic.

1. … Continue Reading

Social Media Self Test Sure there are more tests than you can shake a stick at, but give this one a shot.

• Is your facebook status updated?
• Have you tweeted today?
• Can you “Google” yourself?
• Can Ya “Digg” it?
• Viral means disease or success?

Chances are you if can answer one or more of those questions, you know a little something about social media. Which leads to the question, is their really such a thing as an un-googleable person? Furthermore, if and when there is…would you trust them?

Most business people … Continue Reading

I lost a customer recently and that really bothers me. A small vendor of woman’s accessories, the customer bought a website from Net Solutions last year. She wanted an eCommerce site and she wanted to keep costs as low as possible. She used PayPal as her payment gateway and I designed her site, set up the pages, wrote and added text, added the items into her shopping cart and got her site launched.

After the site went live, she indicated … Continue Reading

Many years ago I worked for the Ritz Carlton Hotel chain in Atlanta, Georgia (The one off Peachtree Street if you know the area). Anyway, there were several wonderful things about working for a large hotel chain, and a few not so wonderful. One of the great aspects was being able to travel the globe and stay at some of the greatest hotels in the world for next to nothing, more on that in another article.

One of the “opportunities” of … Continue Reading

Ask the average person to name 2 of the 7 dwarfs and 99% will be able to do it. Ask that same person to name 2 of the 9 supreme court justices in the US and 80% won’t be able to do it. Maybe its because we don’t give our Justices cute nick names. Judge Roberts was nominated by Bush and went to Harvard, if you combine the 2 we could call Judge Roberts, Hushy. More people might be able to remember it that way. They still wouldn’t remember his politics, but that is another blog.

What does that have to … Continue Reading

Some ad guy somewhere decided that no matter what industry you work in, no matter what service you provide and no matter what product you sell, the tag-line of the year needed to be “Now is a great time to buy!” You need a car? You are in luck! It’s a great time to buy. In the market to buy a house? Fantastic! It’s a great time to buy. How about a fireplace? You need one of those heading into summer time, well shoot! It’s a great time to buy! To all those people who can’t afford to … Continue Reading