Archive for October, 2011

Happy Halloween!

By | October 31, 2011 | Marketing, Micro Business Tips | 1 Comment

Happy Halloween all! As you may have read last week, we shared a list of a few Halloween marketing tips your micro business could utilize to help promote your business around this festive holiday. To get a better idea of what different entrepreneurs were doing, we went to our Vistaprint Facebook community and asked the following question: What creative ideas are you implementing to celebrate with your customers today? 

Per usual, the entrepreneurs within our community shared some great ideas they have utilized. Here are a couple of our favorites: 

“We are doing a trunk or treat in front of our store to give out treats and brochures. We also participated in our towns treat or treat this morning with the schools and daycares that come downtown. Great fun and great customer relations too.” – Jan B. Waller

“I run a small music studio. Over the past few weeks, my students have colored pictures which are now the decorations on my windows! Hopefully they all come by to trick or treat tonight and see their creations lit up!” –  Amy Flamminio

“Pizzerias (or any business) can invite the public to visit your business on Halloween to receive a special “treat” and get a picture taken with your mascot (a costumed employee). You can then e-mail them a copy of their photo. Of course, you will need to get their email address to send them the photo and in doing so, you will be building your database so that you can email them throughout the year.” – Scott Anthony

Click here to see the rest of the feedback.

Be sure to keep your ideas coming as well as the feedback you receive from customers. In the meantime, please have a safe and fun Halloween!

MBR: Happy Halloween Edition

By | October 28, 2011 | Micro Business Roundup | No comments

Our Jack-o'-lanterns!We’d like to start this week’s edition of the Micro Business Roundup to wish you and your family a happy Halloween. While there is some chilly weather in store for the New England this weekend, we’re sure that it will still be a spooky weekend. How is your business celebrating the holiday? No matter what you are doing, enjoy the weekend and we look forward to connecting with you next week.

White House Alleviates Student Loans for Entrepreneurs – earlier this week President Barack Obama announced a change in student loan payback for entrepreneurs. If you are fresh out of school and have either started or are interested in starting a new business, be sure to read this article.

Say “Boo!” To 7 Deadly Small Business Mantras – Donna Maria from Indie Business timed this post perfectly. Instead of simply dispelling common business myths, she gives them a quick boo. Topics for booing include: fans/followers, not needing a business plan and passion equaling success.

Getting Your Small Business Ready for the Holidays – believe it or not, the holidays are just around the corner. Is your business ready for the season? If not or if you are still looking for ways to plan ways to engage your customers, be sure to check out this post from Small Business Trends.

What if your business is not making it? – The Micro Business Roundup is often filled with tips on running your business better. This article from Small Biz Survival takes a look at the tough questions and offers answers for when a business is not going so well.

Image - blackberrylaw

Halloween Marketing Tips

By | October 25, 2011 | Marketing | 3 Comments

Whether it’s Valentine’s Day or Independence Day or some other holiday, we like to discuss different marketing tactics that can help build your brand around different . With Halloween right around the corner you may be more concerned with what your child is going to wear or how you’re going to avoid eating the entire bowl of Candy Corn than how you can tie your micro business to the holiday. But like the great entrepreneur that you are, you’re always enthusiastic about trying something new to help get your name out there.

As with all holidays though, we must remind you that the different holiday seasons can be a difficult time to reach consumers as they are focused with other activities. Obviously this holiday will not drive your business to record sales, but even obtaining a few potential sales leads can help make your efforts a success. Set reasonable expectations before you start planning your marketing plan of attack.  

With that said, here are a couple ways you can help promote your micro business over this fun celebration:

Have Candy ready for Adults – Let’s not forget that parents and guardians can enjoy candy as well! When trick-or-treaters visit your house, have a side pot of candy for the adults that have a special sticker with your business name, website address and short description. You can even include a short call to action such as “Thank you for visiting our home! Please feel free to like us on Facebook” followed by your company name. Think of it as transforming your business card for the holiday season.

Host an Event – Whether you work out of your home or in a separate building, promote that your micro business will be giving out candy for little ones who come in dressed up on Halloween (you could also host a few days before Halloween to avoid conflicts). You may even want to think about partnering with other local businesses to help increase the exposure for your event.

Update Your Marketing Collateral – Add some Halloween-inspired images and content to your website, company Facebook page and other marketing materials for the month of October. With traditional Halloween themes such as  pumpkins, witches, ghosts and haunted houses, you have a variety of ideas to help get you started. This tip can obviously be carried over to other holiday seasons.

Take a Charitable Approach – Think about taking a charitable approach with marketing your micro business around Halloween. Perhaps you can set-up a costume drive that helps donate used outfits to kids who cannot afford a Halloween costume. Or you can donate a percentage of your profits from the week leading up to Halloween to a local charity. Not only will it paint your company in a positive light, but more importantly you’ll be providing a great service to someone in need.

So what’s your approach to Halloween marketing? Do you hold off on reaching out to your customers, or do you use the holiday as a reason to reconnect?

MBR: What Makes Entrepreneurship Work?

By | October 21, 2011 | Micro Business Roundup | 1 Comment

Hello everyone and happy Friday! We hope you had a great week. In this edition of the Micro Business Roundup, we’ve pulled together some great articles for you around what makes entrepreneurship work and why content is king of marketing; among other items . Also if you haven’t had a chance to check out our most recent Small Business Happiness Index results, be sure you do and let us know what you think. Have a great weekend!

A Short, Thoughtful Video on What Makes Entrepreneurship Work — Earlier this week Tim Berry, president and founder of Palo Alto Software shared this great short video (rounghly three and a half minutes) from  the Kauffman Foundation. The video, titled “We are looking for the Magic Sauce” is a great video about how small businesses can help grow their businesses. Take a look and let us know your thoughts! 

Why Content Marketing is King — Do you produce a lot of content, whether it be videos, blog posts, or posts/tweets, around your micro business and the industry you serve? Many feel that content marketing has surpassed other mediums as the preferred marketing tool for entrepreneurs. This recent Entrepreneur.com article takes a look at why content has been named “King” and how it can help grow your business effectively.

Sheldon Yellen: Why I Went on Undercover Boss – Many of you may know the popular show “Undercover Boss” that takes a high ranking official of a large company and places him in disguise among his peers to get a better sense of how his or her company is run “within the trenches.” Sheldon Yellen, CEO of $1 billion Belfor Holdings recently went on this television show and received a lot of valuable information about his company. Here’s a Q&A he did with Inc.com discussing his time on the show and why he was happy to have had the experience.

As Jobless Claims Rise, Businesses Try to Manage the Burden of Benefits — As a micro business owner, have you ever had to unemployment claims from an employee who left your company? Chances are you haven’t but it’s important to know the ins and outs of this complicated system so you know your rights and help protect your asset’s. This helpful New York Times article can help get you up to speed and provide a better understanding of how unemployment insurance work.

How Many Jobs Do Small Businesses Create? — There’s no secret that there are a ton of stats floating around about how influential small business is around creating jobs. But how many jobs do they really generate? According to John Tozzi in his recent Businessweek.com article, it depends on who you ask. Interestingly the U.S. government counts companies with fewer than 500 employees as “small businesses” its 65 percent statistic. As a reminder, Vistaprint measures a micro business as a company that has ten or fewer employees, including the owner.

How Does a Micro Business Owner Stay Happy?

By | October 20, 2011 | Micro Business Tips Thursday | 1 Comment

In this week’s edition of Micro Business Tips Thursday, on the heels of our Small Business Happiness Index results being released earlier today, we wanted to get a better sense of how micro business owners stay happy. To help give us an idea, we asked our Facebook community the following question:  What is your one tip for staying happy as a small business?

Our index found that 77 percent of micro businesses remain happy, and the feedback we received from our great community of entrepreneurs certainly supported those findings. We recieved a ton of great tips, but Keiron Hubbard comments stuck out to us:

“Stay enthusiastic no matter what happens, you’ll have your good and ‘not so good’ times in business, just stay positive and NEVER get lax on customer service and satisfaction. Good customer service doesn’t cost anything but reaps great rewards morally, ethically and socially. REMEMBER word of mouth travels faster than anything. Make EVERY customer/client feel special.”

To see the rest of the feedback, please click here.

So what helps keep you happy with running your own small business? We’d love to hear what different entrepreneurs are doing to keep such a high rate of small business happiness! Please feel free to share your tips and feedback below in the comment section.

Be sure to tune into our Facebook page next week for your chance to be featured on this blog.

Micro Businesses Still Happy, But Wary of Economy

By | October 20, 2011 | Micro Business Issues | 2 Comments

As we’ve shown in the past, micro businesses are an optimistic group of people.  But while they might be happy in what they are doing – running their own business and being their own boss – that doesn’t mean that they are blind to the turmoil that is surrounding them, including the state of the US economy.  In our most recent micro business Happiness Index, we found that micro business optimism remains unchanged, with 77% of survey respondents happy or extremely happy in running their own business.

But where they aren’t so optimistic is the state of the local and national economy.  When asked if they thought the local and national economy was making a recovery, 67% said no with the local economy and 76% said no with the overall national economy.  Despite projections to make more or the same money that they did last year, micro businesses are also working harder, including weekends. Just under 50% indicated they were not going to take a vacation this summer from their business, while another 85% work at least one weekend a month (or more) on their business.

This survey also debunked another myth about the small business community: that lack of loans or funding is strangling growth.  According to the results, over 85% haven’t even tried to get financing for their business in the last 12 months.  Although the 15% that did found the process difficult or weren’t able to get the financing they required.  But it’s clear that demand for financing isn’t what others are reporting.

And despite small businesses traditionally lagging behind in terms of marketing methods and technology, that gap appears to be closing fast.  As they become more agile and able to do business on the move, micro businesses are adopting smartphones, exploring social media and specifically Facebook.  For example:

  • 71% use their mobile phone for their business.
  • 57% use a smartphone to help run their business.
  • Of smartphone users, Android was the preferred platform with almost 43%.
  • The iPhone ranked second at 31%.
  • This quarter’s index found that 38 % are not using social media for their business, up 3% from last quarter’s survey.
  • Facebook remains the most popular forms of social networking marketing, with 48% integrated within marketing efforts. LinkedIn was a distant second with just under 7%
  • Despite exploring social media, over 67 % of micro business owners place no social networking contact information on their business card and other marketing materials

To see an infographic that lays out the differences between last quarter’s survey and this quarter’s, please click the image. What do you think, are you happy being your own boss but not necessarily optimistic about the nation’s economic recovery?

 

Never too Small to Make an Impression

By | October 17, 2011 | Business Stories | No comments

Since 2005, Vistaprint employee Dan Barrett (front row, third from left) and his family have been hosting a Halloween haunted house in Newton, Massachusetts.  Using spooky props and a dozen volunteer “monsters” (graduate students and postdocs from his wife’s lab, the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University), they turn their old stone basement into a haunted cavern for kids. Last year they raised $2500 in two and a half hours and donated the entire sum to the Greater Boston Food Bank.

To publicize the event, the Barretts ordered 1000 postcard-sized invitations; several hundred went to the nearest elementary school where, with the principal’s permission, they were distributed to all students. The rest were placed in local shops (again, with permission from the shop owners).

In addition, the Barretts solicited businesses in their neighborhood to sponsor the event in various ways.  A local pizzeria provided free food for the volunteers after the event. A local bakery whipped up some Halloween-themed cookies to be sold (for charity) at the event. And several other businesses simply donated cash for the Food Bank. To encourage donations, Barrett created a three-fold brochure at Vistaprint that described the haunted house and its mission and history.

Finally, the Barretts ordered several large banners and lawn signs, to place outside their house to advertise the event for a week.

Now in their seventh year of spooking kids, the Barretts are hoping for their biggest turnout yet in 2011!

Has your micro business or family organized a fun activity to raise money for a charitable organization? We’d love to hear about it! 

MBR: Small Business Lending, Government Contracts and Cold Calls

By | October 14, 2011 | Micro Business Roundup | 1 Comment

Hey everyone! Hope you had a great week. In this edition of the Micro Business Roundup, we’ve pulled together some great articles for you on PR, cold-calling and small business lending. Have a great weekend!

A ‘Systemic Shift’ in Small Business Lending – this article from BusinessWeek’s John Tozzi takes a look at the expansion of Community Development Financial Institutions and how small businesses are able to attain loans through them.

5 Steps to Small Business Public Relations Success – Are you looking to build buzz around oyour company or attain media coverage? If so, check out these five solid tips to get you started on grassroots public relations.

How to Get Cold Call Results – Let’s face it, making cold calls is scary and hard. No one really likes doing it, but at some point we all have to do it. This article from Inc.’s Marla Tabaka offers tips on getting the most out of these calls.

Avoiding the Growth Trap – If you are considering growing your business, check out this article from the owner of Jayson Home where he discusses his reasoning for growing his business at his pace.

Free Conference on Government Contracting in Dallas – If you are in the Dallas area and interested in learning if Government contracting is right for your business, check out this free event on October 18.

The Power of Customer Testimonials

By | October 13, 2011 | Micro Business Tips Thursday | 4 Comments

In this week’s edition of Micro Business Tips Thursday, we wanted to find out if micro businesses were utilizing testimonials from their customers within their existing marketing mix. To help give us an idea, we asked our Facebook community the following question:  How have you used customer testimonials effectively in your marketing materials? 

We grabbed some great thoughts from our micro business owner community, but we had one comment that we thought stuck out from the crowd. So thank you Denise D. Blust for your following tip:

“We have a page on our website with customer appreciation and pictures. There are two tied for my favorite: the thanks from a service member who is stationed in Afghanistan, and the shower enclosure shot with the cat in it!”

To see the rest of the feedback, click here.

Has your small business used customer testimonials code to help legitimize your business and increase buyer convergence?  We’d love to hear how you utilize testimonials below in our comment section.

Be sure to tune into our Facebook page next week for your chance to be featured on this blog.

Behind the Scenes of a Micro Business: YouBar

By | October 12, 2011 | Micro Business Insight | 1 Comment

From time to time, Micro Business Perspectives likes to highlight a micro business to get a better understanding of how they came to fruition. This entry comes from Anthony Flynn, owner of YouBar (www.YouBar.com), an online custom protein bar company. You may recognize Anthony from the newest Vistaprint television commercials running live now. 

The idea behind YouBar’s custom protein bars was hatched in 2006 on a chair lift at California’s Mountain High Ski Resort.  My mom, Ava Bise, and I were both snowboard instructors back then (my mom still is!), and we ate a lot of protein bars up on the slopes so we wouldn’t have to stop for lunch. One day, while we were riding the lift together to the top of the mountain, we started talking about how neither of us had found the perfect  protein bar — and we started discussing what that would be.

We discovered that our ideal protein bars were totally different. My mom wanted nutrition bars that weren’t too sweet with lots of protein to fuel her days teaching snowboarding and belly dancing. Meanwhile, when I got off the slopes, I did other athletics, like marathon-running, so I needed high-carb, lactose-free bars (I’m allergic). We both wanted fresher bars with far fewer preservatives than any of the bars we could find on the market. 

Just like today, back in 2006, there were seemingly a million different protein bars available at stores. But strangely, as the number of different types of mass-produced protein bars on store shelves increased, the number of commercial bars that my mom and I wanted to eat actually decreased.  We were both fed up with having to adjust what we ate to fit the bars on the market, and felt that food should be designed for people’s appetites — not the other way around.

So my mom and I took the bar by the horns (apologies for the cheesy pun!), and we began making our own protein bars at home. “It was as though we’d died and gone to heaven,” my mom used to say, “Except for the dishes we have to clean!” We finally had protein bars with the exact ingredients that we wanted — free from preservatives and high fructose corn syrup. And they tasted delicious too.

Once we started making our own protein bars we found out we were not alone in our frustration with the mass produced bars. Almost everyone we knew lit up at the possibility of creating custom protein bars tailored to their own tastes and dietary needs. Before we knew it, we were making bars for all of our friends and family.  And so YouBar was born.

In early 2007, YouBar set up shop in an 800-square-foot kitchen in Hollywood and sold bars through a simple website that was created by one of my best friends from college, Garett Wenig.  Then, In February 2008, we had our breakthrough as a company. YouBar was featured in The New York Times, National Public Radio’s Marketplace and Daily Candy — all in the same week! Overnight, YouBar went from a couple orders a day to hundreds.

YouBar expanded its product line to include custom protein shakes in 2008 and custom trail mix and cereal in 2009 — giving our customers full control over three more on-the-go foods.  This last summer, we moved to a new 8,000 square foot facility in Downtown Los Angeles.

Today, YouBar is still exploring new ways of empowering our customers to customize their lives. We now feature dozens of organic, gluten-free, high-protein and low-calorie ingredients, and we always listen to our customers suggestions. At YouBar, our customers aren’t just customers, they’re the creative spirit behind the whole company: the recipe designers. As my mom always told me: “You are what you eat, so choose!”

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