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10 Steps to Boost Your Webinar Registration and Attendance

January 26, 2012 by Katie Reynolds with 77 views

Have you used webinars lately to nurture your audience? They’re a great tool to engage an audience with your content and your brand – if you can get people to register and attend. It can be difficult to get very busy people to open an email and commit themselves to an hour-long webinar. [read more]

Weekly Wrap: Women Entrepreneurs and the Death of the Like Button

September 24, 2011 by Carissa Wodehouse with 77 views

Perhaps the biggest business news of the week was actually Facebook news. With the introduction of verbs such as 'reading,' 'watching,' and 'listening' will the business 'like' be devalued? Please leave your opinion in the comments. I've already seen small businesses struggling to react to followers 'like's not appearing in timelines. [read more]

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5 Immutable Rules for Tax Happiness [Exclusive]

August 31, 2011 by Barbara Weltman with 89 views

When it comes to income taxes, no one wants to pay one penny more than necessary and, certainly, no one wants to invite the IRS to examine the return. After more than 35 years in dealing with taxes, here are my five rules to follow to make sure that taxes are minimized legally and safely so you can sleep at night. [read more]

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5 Keys to Positioning Yourself for a SBA Loan

August 12, 2011 by CDC Small Busines... with 71 views

With access to capital so tight now, many small business owners wonder what they can do to best position themselves for a “yes” when they approach a lender for an SBA loan. Here’s what the lender will look for in the initial consideration. [read more]

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Government and Economics Aren't Mixing

July 30, 2011 by Jim Daddario with 29 views

Regardless of your party affiliation, the debate in Washington is alarming, dysfunctional and should give every American pause about what it bodes for the economy. Partisan debates aside, the laws of economics always trump passion. Let's look at the facts. US GDP is driven by four factors: Consumer spending (which accounts for about 70%... [read more]

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What Will Fix the Job Situation? Small Business Creates 64% of New Jobs

July 11, 2011 by Barbara Weltman with 167 views

With unemployment now at 9.2%, it’s time to admit that whatever the federal government has been doing to create jobs isn’t working. It’s time to re-think who the job creators are and what can be done to help them. [read more]

The successful approach

June 28, 2011 by Alen Mejer with 43 views

The successful approach is simply an advance agent of the appeal, the talking points of what you have to sell.Instead of jumping right in and talking about the features or benefits of your product before you’ve won your buyer’s interest, cloak the points and present them as something the buyer would want. Then you’ve got an interested... [read more]

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Is it Time to Raise Your Prices?

May 10, 2011 by Barbara Weltman with 345 views

It seems that everyone else is doing this now. According to the April 2011 NFIB Small Business Optimism Index, a monthly survey of small business owners, 12% of responders raised their prices in April and another 24% indicated that they planned to do so.Why raise prices nowThere are compelling reasons to consider price increases at this... [read more]

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What USPS Can Teach Small Businesses about Going Green

April 24, 2011 by Geri Stengel with 80 views

The USPS has saved $27 million by going green. Small businesses can learn money-saving tips from how it was done. [read more]

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What Keeps You Up At Night?

April 8, 2011 by Andrew Hunt with 463 views

If you are like most business owners or executives, sleep can sometime seem like a luxury - more than a necessity. While the pressure to perform has been known to cause many sleepless nights, I think for true top performers its more adrenaline that keep them up. For that small group of people – perhaps just 1% to 3% of the population – sleep is a waste of time. [read more]

Innovation with the Cloud & Flying Scallops in the North Atlantic

April 6, 2011 by Peter Auditore with 114 views

Information technology is one of the most competitive weapons in the arsenal of business today and has been a game changer in many industries. Perhaps one of the most famous stories of the early Internet days was how Charles Schwab took billions in market share because Merrill Lynch’s CEO at the time David Komansky said the high net worth people would never trade over the Internet. [read more]

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One Less Regulatory Burden for Business

April 6, 2011 by Barbara Weltman with 88 views

The Senate voted on April 5 to repeal the 1099 reporting rule that had been created last year by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). That rule would have required all businesses, regardless of their size, to report on 1099 forms the value of goods and services of $600 or more to each provider starting next year... [read more]

A New Economy of Data

April 1, 2011 by Geoff Domoracki with 134 views

There is a revolution in data. Yet the revolution is not as much a new technology as it is a new economy of data. Technology has made it easy for every web and mobile app, from social networks and twitter mashups to daily deal sites and iPhone memo apps to quickly and easily store, edit, and update their own data. In fact, the growth of... [read more]

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Will Twitter replace community forums in next 5 years?

March 21, 2011 by Kamal Karmakar with 114 views

Many companies today use Twitter to send information to their customers, partners and other stakeholders. Companies still invest a lot in building community forums and portals around their products/ services to provide information to customers in real-time. It appears that Twitter is increasingly encroaching the well-defined territory of these forums. The war is not yet evident but it has already started. [read more]

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Digital Payments Going Viral

February 23, 2011 by Phil Wainewright with 1,309 views

Offering the potential to transform how businesses bill and collect payments, three new digital payment mechanisms look set to open up a world of opportunity for entrepreneurs, not only in digital content and services but also in new smartphone based selling models. [read more]

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Prospective Business to Government: “May I?”

February 8, 2011 by Barbara Weltman with 413 views

You can’t turn around these days without seeing the government’s hand in your business. One case in point highlighted by a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, which shows the number of state licenses growing at a disturbing rate. The percentage of workers needing licenses to do what they do has grown from 5% in the 50’s to 10% in... [read more]

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How Your Business Can Soar with the Cloud

January 17, 2011 by Phil Wainewright with 2,442 views

A new generation of ambitious young businesses are harnessing cloud computing and software-as-a-service to punch above their weight. While larger, more established enterprises struggle to master the always-on, 24x7 information streams of today's global business economy, their smaller rivals are taking advantage of new, online models to... [read more]

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Tax Hikes Are Economic Suicide

January 12, 2011 by Barbara Weltman with 400 views

In an effort to close a huge budget gap, the Illinois legislature voted on January 11, 2011, to raise the personal income tax rates from to 5% (up from 3%), and the corporate rates to 7% (up from 4.8%). The rate hike on individuals is 66% (the initial proposal had called for a 75% rate hike). I view these massive tax increases as economic suicide. [read more]

Building Silos in the Cloud: Insights from the SAP Influencer Summit 2010

December 13, 2010 by Peter Auditore with 755 views

One the most important differences between the SAP Influencer Summit and Dreamforce’s “dreamy spiritual event” as it has been called, is that SAP’s On Demand suite will provide seamless integration with all SAP systems and its open architecture will enable easily integration with other heterogeneous systems. In the case of sales... [read more]

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Taxes Go Down to the Wire

December 8, 2010 by Barbara Weltman with 478 views

With only a few weeks before the new year, Congress has yet to settle tax uncertainty that has been brewing for more than a year. What will the tax rates for owners of pass-through business entities, such as S corporations and LLCs, be in 2011? What will the estate tax rules be? Will provisions such as the research credit be effective for 2010; more than two dozen provisions expired at the end of 2009. Will there be a “patch” for the alternative minimum tax? [read more]

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