One problem that a lot of small venture owners operate into is simply thinking too small. I often have readers writing to me asking for helping getting their venture ideas off the ground. I also often hear from people who have function their small enterprises in to the ground. You will find five key areas where you could think too modest — and doom your venture to failure.
Niche Too Modest
Is your niche too little? Finding a modest market to target with your business is key to success, but sometimes individuals narrow their niche too much. While doggy dental products may be a wonderful niche (as almost any dog owner might attest) you could even narrow your focus down to a certain type of dog (such as lap dogs) but going for one exact breed would be taking it too far.
Target Market Too Little
Is your target market too little? In the event you are looking only at one community or little geographic region then you may well doom your product to failure. It is far too easy to saturate a modest market and it is far too easy for any marketing mistakes to end your campaign before it gets off the ground. In today’s economy with the availability of global marketing you need to think big when you are planning your target market.
Budget Too Little
Is your budget too small? You never need a million dollar advertising budget but you should have some seed money to get your venture and its marketing campaign off the ground. It’s possible to develop a business from nothing but it’s also a lot more difficult and you might find yourself making some mistakes that price you a lot much more down the road than putting a little money up front.
Schedule Too Modest
Is your schedule too small? Do you have enough time to devote to your enterprise? Starting, running, and growing a business takes time. Some folks get swept up in the planning and dreaming stages and never really start their venture. Other folks start before they have completely planned every thing out and quickly get mired down by unexpected difficulties. While others do everything right in the planning and startup but once the business is running they get overwhelmed by day-to-day venture and never think aobut ways to improve and grow their business.
Mind Too Little
Is your mind too small? You have to open up your mind’s eye to continually seek new opportunities to find new customers, to find new potential partners, to find new ideas for products, and to find new opportunities for marketing. Flexibility and adaptability are key to surival in today’s enterprise climate and you always need to have new ideas cooking to grow and expand your market and your enterprise. This means raising your head up out of the trenches once in a while. Yes, you might must dodge the occasional missile lobbed your way but this is actually the only way to see those opportunities heading your way.
Should you do your best to avoid these five not-so-small mistakes then you are going to be on your way to small enterprise success.
Olawhole Lawrence is the founder of a NJ SEO Company and a Internet Marketing NJ firm. For more informtion on small businesses, visit the author’s site.
Of all the social media platforms out there, LinkedIn stands as one of the best ones to promote businesses online. Although compared to Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn’s popularity is low, that does not make it an inferior platform. In fact, the sole purpose of LinkedIn is to provide businesses a better social media platform to market or run their businesses on. Most of the features on LinkedIn are therefore made and integrated for small businesses. So, there is no doubt about the fact that LinkedIn can be of great help in boosting your online business.
Here are some tips if you really want to use LinkedIn in order to promote your small business or online business:
Stay Fresh and Stay Current:
The first and the foremost tip for using any social media platform is to keep your profile updated. Posting one post a day can really help you be noticed by your connections. In other words, you need to keep your visitors engaged and updated with the current news of your business. The good part about LinkedIn is that you can also share the updates on Twitter and Facebook. So this means that once you update your LinkedIn page you can then update your Twitter and Facebook page as well directing your connections towards LinkedIn. That for sure is a cool feature!
You can search for new talents:
Trust me, if you want to expand your team then LinkedIn is the best platform for doing so. If you don’t know it yet, LinkedIn has become one of the fastest and most reliable platforms for finding new talent. If you really want to expand your team then you can post opportunities on LinkedIn because not only it will help you out in finding the right candidate but will also make people visit your profile more often. Think of it –thousands of candidates will visit your LinkedIn profile and of course some of them can become your potential customers as well.
Ask others – get noticed!
A very important feature on LinkedIn is that you can start groups and Q&A sessions. For instance, you are struck with a problem regarding your business or you want to conduct a survey, you can do that by starting a Q&A session. This is particularly important if you want to really be noticed by others. People will try and help you out and of course they will visit your profile page and know about your business. In other words, you will gain exposure and feedback as well on how to make your business more alluring for customers online.
Start promoting your events:
Whether you are going for a business meeting or a special seminar related to your industry, you can share updates with your connections to entice them about how enthusiastic you are about your business. On other hand, you can also promote your events on LinkedIn and invite people to attend. This works similar to how it works on Facebook. And, believe it or not, this is one great way of getting the attention you have always wanted from your connections!
Karriann Graf is a Social Media Manager providing done for you Social Media Solutions for small businesses.
Want to put your business in front of the biggest population of potential buyers in the
world? Check out Karriann’s FREE Social Media eCourse at http://KarriannGraf.com