To portray yourself as a professional, you must use professional tools.

What tools do you use to perform work tasks? When you want to dig a ditch, you won’t use a spoon because you are so miserly you don’t want to spend money to buy a shovel, right? When a seamstress cuts fabric and sews a dress, ...

Showcase SME for Job Search or Business Consulting

Becoming a Subject Matter Expert for business or job search via HARO (Help a Reporter Out)   Many job seekers – especially business consultants – have a hard time explaining why their background and experience is important and useful to others.  The best way to showcase ...

Don’t Stop at the LinkedIn Personal Profile!

Don’t stop at the LinkedIn personal profile! You probably have seen the posts, the emails, and the training announcements where ‘specialists’ are horn blowing about building up your LinkedIn profile. They are directing you to get it filled out completely, get certain sections added, and the ...

Social Media Management – Why Small Businesses Need It

STUDY SHOWS INCREASE OF 70% BUSINESS TRAFFIC WHEN A BUSINESS USES SOCIAL MEDIA Did you see the research noting consumers are be more likely to shop and spend money with independent businesses if those businesses did a better job of marketing themselves on social media sites? Consumers ...

Advice and Bartering Could Be Costly Endeavor

Asking for advice and trading for services.   If you are an entrepreneur or struggling to start a business, you want access to as many resources as possible – especially if free or at minor cost.  It is accepted business practice to meet with other professionals ...

Virtual Introductions Make You Memorable

Providing Virtual Introductions Make You Memorable.   One of the capabilities LinkedIn (LI) provides is ‘virtual introductions’ between parties for business, a career promotion, or developing relationships for future business. Unfortunately, LI will only allow a limited number before charging the user for ‘additional’ introductions. To ...

Blogging For Business

Blogging for business   One of most successful (and primarily free) methods of getting your company branded, and name recognized by your target market, is blogging on a business website and posting on social media platforms. A growing trend is educational marketing. Business website and blog ...

Vulture Customers – Recognize and Avoid

Are your business customers ‘vultures?’ Do you have a vulture customer that is making your profits lower?   Business owners need to incorporate into their profit structure and marketing plan contingencies for ‘vulture’ customers.  What are those?  They are the clients who will blast the slightest ...

Social Media Policy Best Practices

Best practices for a company social media policy.   Whether you are a sole proprietorship with a single employee or a huge corporation with thousands of employees, the nature of digital communications and the prevalence of social media (SM) demands mention in the employee handbook. The ...

Time to review required doctor note policy for illness?

Be careful in doctor’s notes requirements – HIPPA law requires medical privacy, so it may be best to totally eliminate the requirement. The bottom line is – requirements for doctor’s notes for a simple illness such as a severe flu, cold, or 1-2 day absence, as long as not consistently occurring, should not require doctor’s notes (unless the employee shows a pattern of abuse; which may require other remediation action).

Lessons Learned From Website Memberships

The sales spiel sounded great – this website was going to provide me with sales leads for potentially hundreds of folks looking for my services or products – for free (three monthly after the first 30 days). Or, I could join the site at the next level and get a higher number of warm referrals from the membership site. Sounds great – where do I sign up? ... Then the warning flags start ...

Why Businesses Want to be Involved in Non-Profit Organizations.

Cause marketing increases brand awareness for the contributing business, but also the NPO. Who doesn't know Target provides local schools money for education? Who isn’t aware of the US Marine Corps collecting Toys-For-Tots for Christmas?

Recommendations Up May Get You Positively Noticed

Recommendations from others on your social media profiles gain you attention, but the third type of recommendation can also bring you lots of attention. This is the lateral or upward recommendation. And you are able to manipulate the recommendation to bring attention back to yourself and potentially obtain more eyes looking at your own job qualifications.

Using quotes to create website content

Quotes: These pre-written mini-blogs might be used to your advantage for some of the best content marketing for your business or branding message.

LinkedIn Training for Beginners

OBJECTIVE: You walk out excited and have a more than basic understanding about what LinkedIn can do for your business, branding, business development, building relationships with other business owners, and to start your quest for more B2B sales in the future.

LinkedIn Profile – Vital for a Job Search

Is your LinkedIn Profile at 100%? LinkedIn has just celebrated reaching 200 million users on their business professional platform within the last few weeks (remember when Facebook got excited about reaching their half a billion users?). In researching this social media platform after LinkedIn recently dumped ...

A critical ROI for business owners: Well-written resumes versus bios

Critical ROI for Business Owner Resumes (Listen to the MP3 – click on this link!) Entrepreneurs should realize one of the most critical pieces of advertising is showcasing the knowledge, skills, and experience of the most important person (or people) at the helm of the company.  ...

What’s your daily email routine?

What’s your daily email routine?   When I sit at the computer in my home office each morning, I have a routine to help me focus and stay on track for accomplishing work-related communications without getting distracted in unproductive sidebars. Time management specialists recommend a ‘touch ...

Social Media Management Blueprint for Business or Job Search

Have you ever needed to work up a Social Media Plan for your business, but wasn’t sure what Social Media Management entailed or was the tasks were on a regular basis?  Here’s a cheat-sheet that helps you (as a business owner) or a job seeker to ...

LinkedIn: Why you don’t want to miss out on the activity

LinkedIn: Why you don’t want to miss out on the activity. Do you ever ask yourself – what good is LinkedIn?  How can it help me pursue business development or a new career search?  What effort do you put into learning about LinkedIn and its advantages? ...

Tom Antion’s Secrets for Sales Letters – All the Elements You Need

If you are in business development and sales, you need to know exactly what and how to create a sales letter with all the elements that encourage people to buy!  Use Tom Antion’s list of “Sales Letter Elements” to write your own script.  (From a Tom ...

Needed – Government Contracting SMEs in HR/PM

I’m looking for research participants from the government contracting industry to participate in a ground-breaking Ph.D. Dissertation study. Listen to this video below to see if you know anyone who might qualify as as Subject Matter Expert Panelist: PhDProjectAppeal Thanks in advance!  

Small Business Branding – What to Consider When Researching the Best Aspects of the ‘Brand’ itself…

COMPANY BRANDING has three distinct facets: There are three distinct facets of a company brand. Each is an aspect of the employment brand and not the whole thing:   Stories and positioning for people unfamiliar with the brand:  This is what most employment branding conversations are ...

Convert Boyd’s OODA loop to HR practice to streamline procedures

Convert Boyd’s OODA loop to human resource practice to streamline procedures   Boyd’s Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) loop theorized by Air Force Colonel John Boyd in the 1970s seems to have done well for the military, although the Occam’s Razor theory (the simplest explanation ...

The First Step in Writing a Business Plan – Simple Math

Before you can write a business plan, you need to determine if you can ‘afford’ to go into business for yourself and still support yourself and/or your family.  Determine what finances are needed to support and grow your business.  Use this simplified table to envision the ...

Ask human resources to assist in writing business plan

Writing a business plan can be a hard task for entrepreneurs, but those lucky enough to have access to a human resources practitioner (HRP) or a veteran human resources (HR) manager on staff may complete the job faster with assistance from that HR subject matter expert.  ...

Creating a roadmap for hiring new employees = success!

When you own a small business, seeking, identifying, and hiring new employees can be a daunting task.  What questions need to be asked in an interview? What questions might create a lawsuit liability for the company?  What types of records should be kept for the job ...

What’s in YOUR Company’s Personnel Files?

Small business owners who are finally successful enough to start hiring employees are wading into unfamiliar territory when they start the process of hiring, on-boarding, and keeping records of the employee’s tenure with the company, as well as records of disciplinary actions and terminations.  Not keeping ...