Usually after, or sometimes during, nearly every speech I give, people ask me if they should use social media for their business. My answer is always the same:

If your business sucks, social media will help you suck faster.

What do I mean by your business sucking? And how will social media make it suck faster?  Continue Reading;

Every once in a while it’s good to dust important things off from the archives. The idea of creating customers that come to you first- not when there are no other options- was resonating with me, so here we go.

In the scheme of personal relationships, the top of the totem pole is unconditional love and pretty near the bottom is the booty call.  If you aren’t hip to the lingo, a booty call is where you go when you are in need of, ahem, something, and you accept something familiar that you wouldn’t go near if you had other options at that moment. Continue Reading;

In this technology-laden world that we now inhabit, common courtesy and the benefit of the doubt have seemingly given way to the online rant and snarky tweet. Automated messages and grammatical errors frequently replace saying “please” and “thank you”. But the good news is that you can really make your business stand out (in a good way!) by returning to some of the basic etiquette practices of the good ol’ days (wow, do I sound old). Here are a few simple tips: Continue Reading;

If you are an entrepreneur, you are in many ways your business-there is barely a separation between our personal and professional lives.  Given that you live and breathe your business, are you truly capitalizing on all of your opportunities for marketing?

When I travel, I always keep at least one copy of my book, The Entrepreneur Equation, with me.  I carry it through the airport in the outer pocket of my oversized red bag standing vertically so the top half of it is showing.  This is my walking billboard, and it’s effective.

Today, the gentleman standing behind me in line on the plane tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Is that your book?” Continue Reading;

Entrepreneurs as a whole are largely an optimistic bunch. We have to be!

There are plenty of reasons, day in and day out, to see the glass as half-empty. Yet, we still muster up the intestinal fortitude to carry on.

We choose to remain positive, even in times when mere mortals would curl up and die. Ultimately, that optimism is one of the factors that lead to the success we crave. Continue Reading;

In order for our businesses and ourselves to grow, it’s critical that we are able to give others responsibility.  But empowering others with too much latitude can often lead to nothing getting done.

I  was once a part of a fantastic group of bloggers in a combined– and ultimately failed– new blog project.  Each blogger was extremely smart and creative and as such, was given the latitude to set parameters relating to their contribution.  They could pick the topic, the posting day and the posting frequency.  The only commitment was that you were asked to contribute at least twice a month.

That should seem easy enough for anyone to follow and certainly smart adults should be able to stick to that schedule, but for many people, without structure, it’s impossible to continue to deliver on time (or at all). Continue Reading;

You’ve heard the story about the guy who meets a girl in a bar, takes her back to his room and wakes up in a bathtub minus a kidney.

It really happened, right?  To your third cousin’s friend.  Or was it your friend’s third cousin?

Nope.  It never happened.  That is a (very popular) urban legend.

Business has urban legends too.  Unfortunately, they’re not as harmless as retelling your third cousin’s friend’s cousin’s story.

Debunking the top 3 Small Business Pricing Urban Legends Continue Reading;

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower”

Planning is an awareness-generating process and one of the things that a good plan will illuminate is your assumptions. Every plan has some assumptions embedded in it; some of those assumptions are unproblematic, while others are crucially important. Continue Reading;

Technology allows us to do amazing things to streamline our businesses.  However, we are reaching a point where by saving time, we are cheapening the interactions that differentiate our businesses. Here are a few examples.

Twitter validations and auto DMs (Direct Messages)

There are services like TrueTwit that purport to validate Twitter users so that the person holding the account eliminates spam followers.  But that means that when I- the real follower who may be a potential client, customer or collaborator- follows you, you are asking me to do more work to save you from a spam follower.  It seems quite selfish and is a very big turn off.  Continue Reading;

With the economic climate as tough as it is right now, financial backing and investments are harder than ever to secure for small businesses. But a great new way for businesses to raise capital is through crowdfunding and websites like KickStarter. A few of the CarolRoth.com contributor network of entrepreneurs, advisors and experts have shared some of their best tips for ensuring a successful crowdfunding project. Their tips are presented below in no particular order.

You may notice some of the same ideas listed, but I kept them separate, as something in the way one is framed may resonate differently with you. Continue Reading;