Starting a Small Business

• How to Write a Great Business Plan
  Sure, you might be able to start a simple business without a business plan if you are not looking for funding, but writing out a business plan is an important step to help you clarify your offerings and goals with your business. I have seen many businesses fail from a lack of focus and direction.
• How to Choose the Right Colors for Your Brand
  From your website to your business cards, the colors you choose shape the opinions people will form about your business. Even if you are hiring someone else to create your branding, you should read this article to know what to watch out for.
• 10 Things to Do Before You Start Your Start-Up
  Planning is an essential part of starting a new business, so do your research before you start your business to save you from a lot of costly mistakes down the road.
• How to Write a Marketing Plan
  Even the most innovative products on the market can die a slow and painful death from a lack of sales. The difference? People who meet their sales goals have a clear marketing plan, which enables them to make the right move at the right time.

Your Home Office

• The Basics of Home Office Design
  Some people can just grab a laptop and go, but I find that I am more productive when I use a space that is designed for working. Mine happens to be in half my bedroom, which would kill some people but it is a good location for me. The goal is to design a space that works for you and meets the needs of your business.
• How to Set Up a Home Office
  This one goes into detail about tax deductions for home offices, which is an important consideration for those who work at home.
• Deducting Your Home Office Expenses
  Knowing what you can and can’t deduct off your taxes before you set up your home office will empower you to make more financially sound decisions for your business setup.

Running a Small Business

• How to Run a One-Person Business
  If you’re looking to run a one-man (or one-woman) show, you’re going to need a variety of skills to get the job done.
• 25 Ways to Jump-Start Your Business
  Has your business become stagnant? Get it going again — fast! — with these hints and techniques.

Sales and Marketing

• How to Improve Your Cold-Calling Skills
  I know that I generally do well on a sales call, but I only make warm calls (and I dread those anyway). The ability to turn a call into a sale without seeming like a pushy salesperson is a valuable business skill that everyone should have.
• How to Manage a One-Person Sales Force
  An efficient system is vitally important to a successful solopreneur business. This article will show you how to get there.
• How to Make Money on Etsy
  Are you a crafty person? You can make a great living on Etsy, selling your handmade goods, if you start with some sound business principles and some marketing know-how.
• How to Use Social Networking Sites to Drive Business
  The key to successfully using social media is to drive sales for your business is creating an efficient system so that you are not wasting all of your valuable time online.
• 7 Common Sales Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them
  By learning from others’ mistakes in sales, you can set your business up to be more successful from the start.

Your Web Site

• 7 Deadly Website Sins
  Before you spend money (or hours of your own time) on a web site for your business, read this article to educate yourself on the issues you should avoid.
• How to Design a Great “About Us” Page on Your Website
  This article is a great read for two reasons: 1) The About page is an important piece of your web site; and 2) The process of writing the About page will get you thinking about your marketing messaging, business goals, and how you will sell yourself both on- and offline.
• 10 Vital Items You Should Give Your Web Designer
  I’m not a big fan of the term "web designer" being used here, but gathering this type of information and handing it over to your designer/developer/marketing lead will save you from having to redo the site a day after you finished the first version.

Small Business Inspiration

• And the Money Comes Rolling InMarkus Frind started Plenty of Fish out of his home, in his spare time, and now his site serves up over 1 billion of pages a month and he pays himself $5mil USD a year.
• How Would You Like to Make $6 Million Sitting on Your Couch?
  Paul Mann runs Fetch! Pet Care, a service with thousands of employees all across the nation that brings in over $6mil in revenue yearly — and he does it all from his home.
• How to Make a Million in Your Pajamas
  If you think you can’t make "real money" working from home, think again — not only are entrepreneurs making sustainable income from their homes, they are increasing their profits by saving on overhead for their business.

To hear the complete series, follow these links:

• Marketing your Website #1 of 5: Focus on Content and Code
• Marketing Your Website #2 of 5: Participate and Network
• Marketing Your Website #3 of 5: Build Your Word of Mouth and Viral Marketing
• Marketing Your Website #4 of 5: Create Press and Write Articles
• Marketing Your Website #5 of 5: Sync Up with Search Engines and Online Tools

If you would like to download the podcast series directly, you can control-click (or right-click on a PC) these links and save them to your hard drive:

• Marketing your Website #1 of 5: Focus on Content and Code (mp3)
• Marketing Your Website #2 of 5: Participate and Network (mp3)
• Marketing Your Website #3 of 5: Build Your Word of Mouth and Viral Marketing (mp3)
• Marketing Your Website #4 of 5: Create Press and Write Articles (mp3)
• Marketing Your Website #5 of 5: Sync Up with Search Engines and Online Tools (mp3)

I switched to Mail, the e-mail program that comes with Mac OS X. The program itself works fine, but that’s not the point of this post. While I was cleaning up my mailboxes and transferring them, I realized how much e-mail I had just sitting around, not being deleted, that were completely unnecessary. The problem, I decided, was my use of filters—I had nearly 50 filters to sort e-mail into various boxes. What this meant is that I could just push aside e-mails instead of actually dealing with them.

Nikole’s Inbox, Unfiltered

Before you start laughing about my inbox problem, you have to realize that I have domain ownership or webmaster control over many domains, including my own and those of my clients. This means I get a few hundred legitimate e-mails a day. So what I did to deal with these e-mails in a more efficient way was to create a set of rules for myself to deal with my e-mail:

• Turn off all filters
  In my case, I just didn’t import them. What this did was to make all e-mails go directly into my inbox, every time.
• Implement spam filtering.
  Before switching all of my e-mail accounts to Google Apps for Small Businesses, I used to have to sort through thousands of spam messages every day. Google now catches about 95% of the spam. The flip side of this is that it also catches maybe 2% of legitimate emails, so I go through my spam folder on the Google Apps website once a week to read headlines so that I can send through any non-spam e-mails.
• Answer e-mails as they come in.
  I invoked a bit of Charles Green’s rules for e-mail on this one: As each e-mail comes in, deal with it. This doesn’t mean I have to do the work immediately. It means that I respond with an answer, whether it’s an immediate answer or just a "I’ll do this at such and such time".
• Create actions.
  If I can answer an e-mail immediately and there is no reason to keep the e-mail, I delete it! I know this is a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many e-mails I found cluttering my box that I should have just deleted. If the e-mail contains important information for the project, I put it in a box for that project. (Alternatively, you can just put the information in your project management software or contact management software.) If the e-mail requires work to be done on my part, I add it to my task list.
• Archive e-mail.
  When a project finishes, I put the entire project inbox into an archive folder. This way, if I need it 6 months from now, I can find it—but it’s not cluttering my e-mail program on a daily basis.

So how is this going? I started out with an inbox of about 2,500 e-mails. I’ve now been able to maintain it under 100 for over a month, so I think I’m doing pretty well!

Reader Question

What do you do to keep your inbox under control? Do you delegate like Tim Ferriss? Respond to everything like Charles Green? (For a review on the difference, see here.) Or do you have your own set of rules for your e-mail?

If you would like to download the podcast directly, you can control-click (or right-click on a PC) this link and save it to your hard drive.

Stay tuned to Small Business Essentials (perhaps by using the convenient subscribe buttons to your right, if you are viewing this at the website!) and I will update you weekly as each one is released.

If you would like to download the podcast directly, you can control-click (or right-click on a PC) this link and save it to your hard drive.

Stay tuned to Small Business Essentials (perhaps by using the convenient subscribe buttons to your right, if you are viewing this at the website!) and I will update you weekly as each one is released.

If you would like to download the podcast directly, you can control-click (or right-click on a PC) this link and save it to your hard drive.

Stay tuned to Small Business Essentials (perhaps by using the convenient subscribe buttons to your right, if you are viewing this at the website!) and I will update you weekly as each one is released.

UPDATE: If you would like to download the podcast directly, you can control-click (or right-click on a PC) this link and save it to your hard drive.

Stay tuned to Small Business Essentials (perhaps by using the convenient subscribe buttons to your right, if you are viewing this at the website!) and I will update you weekly as each one is released.

The Definition of Spam

When most people think of spam, they think of bulk emails with odd subjects, like “Enjoy your wanted meds” and “The most insane action”, but spam can come in many forms: bulk e-mail, unwanted/soliciting e-mail, junk blog comments, forum spam, text messaging from unknown senders, and so on. Simply put, it’s the abuse of electronic media to send other people something that they don’t want.

Spam comes with many costs that most people don’t consider. These costs can include:

• Wasted Time.
  I get several hundred spam messages a day. This means that I spend a significant portion of my workweek dealing with spam instead of actually doing productive work. If you multiply that by everyone else getting the same amount of spam, it adds up to a serious hit to our economy. Additionally, practices like spamming search engines, forums and blogs waste the time of the staff that have to deal with them as well as the people searching for information that have to sort through multiple pages of spam to find what they are looking for.
• Hardware costs.
  On an average day, I get 1-10 spam messages for every legitimate message. This means that my e-mail provider must give me at least 10 times the amount of mail storage capacity that I would require if I wasn’t getting any spam. This concept works across the board—blog and forum spam requires extra server space to handle the increased database load, text messaging spam requires additional infrastructure to handle the load, search engine spam requires additional server farms, and so on.
• Software costs.
  Developing software that can prevent and handle spam is expensive, and it must be updated frequently to stay ahead of the spammers’ capabilities.
• Payroll costs.
  Who handles all this spam? Your employees, from your IT staff right down to every user on your network who deletes spam messages from their inbox on company time.
• Theft losses.
  Malicious spam, usually in the form of phishing scams, is responsible for personal losses such as credit card fraud and identity theft. These personal losses also work on a corporate level for the fraud teams that handle these kinds of cases at banks, credit card companies, and other financial institutions.
• Legal fees.
  The cost of fighting spam through legal means, both criminal and civil, is paid both by private companies and taxpayers. Our government spends both time and money fighting spam that could be allocated to other resources.

The bottom line is this: Spam costs us all! So what can we do to prevent it and fight it?

Anti-Spam Technology

After updating and relaunching this site, I began to receive numerous spam comments on my posts. To combat this, I installed a piece of software based on CAPTCHA technology. The idea behind CAPTCHA is to use a simple task to tell a computer and a human apart. For the most part with blogs, humans are legitimate posters, and computers are automated spamming devices. I am using a piece of code called reCAPTCHA, which fights spam while also digitizing printed material! (I don’t have space to explain this here, so check out the link—it’s pretty cool.)

For your e-mail, many programs contain spam filtering. I use gmail for my e-mail servers, which does a pretty good job of spam filtering. The real problem with spam filters, however, is not the ones the filter misses that get through—it’s the accidental legitimate e-mails that the filter catches. I found that out a while back when I got PM from Rich Sloan in the StartupNation Community, asking me why I wasn’t responding to his e-mails. Apparently Google decided he was a spammer for a few weeks and was filtering out his e-mails! (I told gmail to mark them as not spam and it seemed to resolve itself, so the technology can learn.)

How to NOT SPAM Anyone, Ever

This blog uses FeedBurner to distribute posts in a newsletter-like fashion. To get on this list, you must sign yourself up and confirm your subscription. I use this same technology for a lot of my clients, and I can’t tell you how many have asked how to import their mailing lists into FeedBurner. The answer is this: You can’t. This is opt-in technology. Your users have to sign themselves up—you can’t just toss them on your list. This is the way it should be! Here are a few of my tips on how to not become a spammer yourself:

• Don’t purchase lists, and don’t sell your list.
  Building a list from the ground up is time-consuming but it is just a fact of life for businesses these days. Purchasing a list guarantees that you will end up sending unwanted advertisements to people who did not ask to be on your list. EVEN IF this practice is somewhat effective for you because 10% of this list buys from you, you have just spammed the other 90% of the people. (Refer to the costs above and quit being so selfish!) The only exception to this rule is if you are submitting material to an already-established list whose readers have chosen to receive information from you. An example of this is an opt-in list which asks its users if they would like to receive information from related 3rd party companies.
• Only send e-mail to people who expect it.
  The worst offense is people who send large attachments to unsuspecting victims. If you don’t know who the e-mail should go to at a company, or if they will be interested in your business/product/pitch/information, do your research or pick up the phone and ask!
• Don’t spam your friends.
  When clients of mine launch a new company, they often have a list of family, friends, former colleague and business associates that they want to tell. Go ahead and group your contacts and send each group a tailored message about your launch, but you only get to do it ONCE. After that, they can sign up for your newsletter or updates if they want to. (Encourage signing up by making it easy and giving them a valuable reason to do so.) If they don’t sign up, let it go.

For more tips, see the resources section below.

When SPAM Pushes You Over the Edge

To end this article on a slightly funny note, I think it’s worth mentioning a few recent extreme spam-fighting measures.

Our first comes from Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, who got so fed up with spam that he decided to post a long list of people who have recently spammed him. The even longer discussion in the comments that follow is just priceless.

Our second link comes from a guy who was unfortunately given a very common name. So common, in fact, that he’s been privy to way too much information about other people. Read about it in Return to Sender.

Additional Resources

• Nine ways to combat spam
  Note: Writing your email as "name [AT] domain [DOT] com" really doesn’t work anymore. The automated e-mail harvesters have wised up to that practice.
• Best Practices to Help Prevent Spam
  with Microsoft Outlook
• Security and privacy 101: how to prevent spam
  from HP
• WordPress SPAM Tools
• Preventing Comment Spam
  from Google
• Proper Usage of Forums, Blogs and Mailing Lists,
  part of my 5 Steps to Marketing Your Website series at StartupNation
• Preventing spam on your website without using captcha