Posts Tagged ‘Small Biz’

 
photo credit: Stabilo Boss

With online businesses growing before our eyes, I feel it is important to provide these online business owners with as many tools to help them in their venture as possible. We all know that you can never have too many resources and helpful suggestions to fall back on. Below are some great tools that I recently saw posted on CrowdSpring that will come in handy for your online business.

• Google Website Optimizer is a great free tool that is easy to use for anyone and allows you to test several different conversions on your site such as text and image conversions.
• Gmail Apps. This is a wonderful tool that supplies you with several different applications such as state of the art email, calendars, and intranet solutions for small businesses. The best part about this program is that it comes at a low cost to you.
• Campaign Monitor. This is probably one of the more important applications that you can find on the Internet at such a great price. This tool is great for online and email marketing campaigns, tracking your results and managing your subscribers. With marketing branching out in all sorts of different forms, this tool would be perfect for online small businesses.

Basecamp is a web-based project collaboration tool It allows a team to share files, assign tasks, centralize feedback and manage projects.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

The New York Times:

Kickstarter, a Web site that helps connect aspiring artists with patrons who finance their projects and often receive some tangible memento in return.

But it’s not just artists who are using the platform. Some small businesses and entrepreneurs see it as a way to raise money to supplement and support their business in new ways.

One of Kickstarter’s earliest success stories was Polyvinyl Record, an indie record label that has released albums by of Montreal and Asobi Seksu.

Polyvinyl recently used the service to offload extra albums that were piling up, said Matt Lunsford, co-president of the company. “We had a lot of overstock from our worldwide distributors who weren’t selling as much as they once were,” he said.

Faced with either paying exorbitant storage costs to house the 10,000 albums crammed into the company’s warehouse or destroying them, Mr. Lunsford decided to try to clear the surplus inventory through Kickstarter, which he had heard about from one of its co-founders, Yancey Strickler, who was also a friend.

“We thought, why don’t we find a way to get these records out to people at a low cost instead of destroy them?” said Mr. Lunsford.

The company structured its reward packages for donors to resemble a clearance sale — for a $5 payment, patrons received a concert DVD; a payment of $15 or more would get five albums and a concert DVD. Mr. Lunsford said the company originally set a goal of raising $1,000, figuring that would sell enough of the backlogged albums to clear out the company’s stockroom.

Since then, Polyvinyl has been using Kickstarter as a way to test whether there is sizable audience interest in an album before making copies of it.

Photo by Kickstarter.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

CNNMoney.com:

In Detroit, a city with rampant unemployment, big crowds in the middle of the day may mean someone is giving out freebies.

But on a recent workday, over 450 people packed an auditorium downtown. They weren’t looking for a hand out, sympathy or even a job application. They were looking to start their own business.

These would-be entrepreneurs flocked to an auditorium on Wayne State University’s campus with ideas big and small.

Attendees also took part in a variety of workshops including ones on how to raise money, how to save on shipping costs and how to run a service or lifestyle businesses. Each attendee got a chance to meet one-on-one with a business counselor and the opportunity to sign up for more free classes.

Some proposals focused on technical businesses — a former Ford manufacturing expert wants to start a consulting firm advising companies on how to make their manufacturing processes more efficient, while a former software engineer had started a company that makes Web-based system that hosts emergency contact and other medical information for children.

Photo by LeoSynapse.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.