Category: Women in Business
Happy New You!
Get Excited and With Good Reason!
It’s a Happy New You Going into a Happy New Year!
With another new year upon us, wouldn’t it be great to take your business to the next chapter in your book. You’ve written all the pages of your book and now you are prepared to write a whole new chapter with new beginnings that start with a whole new you.
What are your goals for 2015; business and personal? Do you know how your business goals, aspirations, endeavors and dream will fit into your personal life and vice versa? How can your personal life help you to reach your business goals and how can your business goals impact your personal life? This is a never-ending conversation and a great one at that. Have you devised a new and unique plan to do things completely differently than you did in 2014?
If things worked out great for you and your business last year, then that is fantastic! If things didn’t go as you had hoped or planned, well, let’s just say that there were lessons that had to be learned. Look at it as a blessing and move on equipped with these life-changing lessons that have the awesome ability to help you see things that you could not have seen if these lessons had not been learned.
The Time is Now!
It is time to design new strategies to ensure great success for your business. It doesn’t have to be hard. You have the skill set, and you have been blessed with the ability to create an unmatched marketing plan. It’s time to move.
Go into 2015 cleaving unto the Lord. Trust in Him with all your heart. Do His will. Work intelligently. Take verses of Scriptures from the Bible and apply them to your life and business and watch you and your business go places you have never gone before. This will be the very thing that is going to motivate and to keep you determined to build your business until it takes on a whole new business of it’s own. You are going to experience new and inviting things you have never encountered before in ways you never could imagine.
God Bless You and Your Business!
Designs created by Cynthia G. Boyer of Cyndi’s Light Work Designs and are Copyright Protected.
My Path to Success
Faith To Do Any and All Things
Dreams of Hope
When I was a child I remember looking through the Philadelphia Magazine that came out every month. In the back of the magazine were fabulous mansion-like homes that were advertised for sale. I used to tell my heart, “One day I am going to purchase one of these homes for my parents.” I used to dream of living in a beautiful home with lots of space with my mother and father.
My Life, My Path
As I grew older, I lost those dreams to life and all the things I experienced. In the back of my mind, those dreams lay dormant until I became an entrepreneur.
The path that has led me to the enormity of my success has been through the deepening of my faith. I could write a book about not having an ounce of faith to believing all the things that have helped to shape my life, my happiness and my success.
The path to my ultimate success has been learning and applying God’s commandments as well as His principles, deepening my faith and belief in the Lord has led to great success, not only in my businesses, but in my life as well. My faith has helped me to build the businesses of my dreams.
Now, I’m back to dreaming and believing that I am going to receive the home that I always knew that I would buy some day.
4 Festive Tips for Holiday Social-Media Marketing
Happy Holidays!
The holidays are a special time of year, highlighted by the three F’s – family, food, and … fighting? I don’t mean fighting over who gets the last drumstick or whether Home Alone is better than A Christmas Story. I’m talking about retailers and brands fighting for consumer attention during the busiest shopping time of the year.
The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the biggest opportunity brands and retailers have each year, but it’s also incredibly competitive, so it’s crucial to reach and communicate with your customer audience in the correct way.
One way to do so is through social media. The holiday season is filled with social posts about gifts bought, deals found, and complaints of poor customer service. Now like never before, brands and retailers have the ability to connect directly with their customers and create a more personal shopping experience.
Here are four tips for how brands can get savvy with their social media marketing during this year’s holiday madness.
1. Drive that local cheer.
The holidays experience in New York is different than in San Francisco. Your messaging should reflect that. Leverage geo-targeting tools to know from where your customer is. Then you can create content they can relate to and messaging that resonates with a personalized brand experience.
2. All I want for Christmas is user-generated content.
How do you connect with audiences when they are already inundated with advertisements? You make them the hero. Businesses that can actively leverage user-generated content are the ones that will drive deeper connections with fans. Most people today are programmed to ignore ads. Showcasing authentic photos of your audience drives your intended message while encouraging a deeper, emotional interest from new and loyal fans alike. Relate to them with real people, in real moments, using your product and services.
Your featured fans get credit and interaction, audiences find trust in real people using your product or service, and your brand will better understand what motivates your audience. Everyone is jolly.
3. Deck the social walls.
The best way to harness a viral lift is to showcase your interactive experience. Remember, the more observable you make a campaign, the easier it is for your fans to imitate.
Create a social hub with aggregated content from multiple social channels on your website or microsite to capture audiences online. Your consumers can then share with their social community when you feature them, extending your reach. But don’t forget about in the store. Providing social displays, with easy calls to action at physical locations, are a simple, yet effective way to generate engagement.
4. Multiple chimneys equal multiple presents.
Facebook is still expected to be the channel of choice for holiday social spend, as 92 percent of marketers are planning extensive campaign efforts for this one platform. But 73 percent of marketing professionals think Instagram is going to be the breakout platform for this year’s holidays.
Don’t silo yourself to one social-media platform. Instead, create content on the appropriate channels for your audience, each with native content focused exclusively to that channel. Your Facebook posts, Instagrams and Tweets should drive the same idea, but the content should be customized to resonate best with each channel’s unique community.
Think of your various social media channels as your own little elves, and put them to work for you this holiday season. Utilize these tips and you’ll win the holiday retail battle while leaving your customers filled with joy.
Amir Zonozi
Business Success
Great Tips for a Highly Successful Business
Duff Goldman says running a business is like being Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner.
Goldman, owner of Charm City Cakes in Baltimore and the focus of Food Network’s Ace of Cakes, says you have to be willing to give it your all and not worry that you might get hurt once in a while. Here are the 39 year old’s four other ingredients to running a successful business:
1. Don’t over-think your business or idea.
When Goldman was thinking about starting his business, he asked his dad, who has a graduate degree in business from UCLA, how to run his new cake shop. His dad said, “Sell a cake son, start from there.” In other words, keep it simple. Don’t get into the analysis-paralysis rut. Get busy. Do good work. Prove the model. Rinse and repeat.
2. Live within your means.
Goldman spent $2,600 and bought his first large mixer after he sold his first big cake order.
“If you can’t afford it, you don’t need it,” he says.
Too many startups waste money on swag and T-shirts with their logo on it when they should be banking that cash or spending it on people or things they really need.
3. Make great stuff.
No matter how great the product or experience was last month, Goldman says he is always judged by the last cake he makes. In his case, a sub-par product will literally leave a bad taste in mouth of customers. That’s the quickest way to go out of business.
4. Be kind.
This one seems like a no-brainer, but so many companies seem to get this wrong. Why is the customer-service person at the department store so angry when you bring in a return? Why is it so difficult to get through to your cell phone or cable TV provider?
Being kind also applies to treating your employees with the respect they deserve, Goldman says.
We can probably all afford to be a little more kind to each other.
BRYAN ELLIOTT
CONTRIBUTOR
CEO of The GoodBrain Digital Studios
Happy New You!
Get Excited and With Good Reason!
It’s a Happy New You Going into a Happy New Year!
With another new year upon us, wouldn’t it be great to take your business to the next chapter in your book. You’ve written all the pages of your book and now you are prepared to write a whole new chapter with new beginnings that start with a whole new you.
What are your goals for 2015; business and personal? Do you know how your business goals, aspirations, endeavors and dream will fit into your personal life and vice versa? How can your personal life help you to reach your business goals and how can your business goals impact your personal life? This is a never-ending conversation and a great one at that. Have you devised a new and unique plan to do things completely differently than you did in 2014?
If things worked out great for you and your business last year, then that is fantastic! If things didn’t go as you had hoped or planned, well, let’s just say that there were lessons that had to be learned. Look at it as a blessing and move on equipped with these life-changing lessons that have the awesome ability to help you see things that you could not have seen if these lessons had not been learned.
The Time is Now!
It is time to design new strategies to ensure great success for your business. It doesn’t have to be hard. You have the skill set, and you have been blessed with the ability to create an unmatched marketing plan. It’s time to move.
Go into 2015 cleaving unto the Lord. Trust in Him with all your heart. Do His will. Work intelligently. Take verses of Scriptures from the Bible and apply them to your life and business and watch you and your business go places you have never gone before. This will be the very thing that is going to motivate and to keep you determined to build your business until it takes on a whole new business of it’s own. You are going to experience new and inviting things you have never encountered before in ways you never could imagine.
God Bless You and Your Business!
Designs created by Cynthia G. Boyer of Cyndi’s Light Work Designs and are Copyright Protected.
My Path to Success
Faith To Do Any and All Things
Dreams of Hope
When I was a child I remember looking through the Philadelphia Magazine that came out every month. In the back of the magazine were fabulous mansion-like homes that were advertised for sale. I used to tell my heart, “One day I am going to purchase one of these homes for my parents.” I used to dream of living in a beautiful home with lots of space with my mother and father.
My Life, My Path
As I grew older, I lost those dreams to life and all the things I experienced. In the back of my mind, those dreams lay dormant until I became an entrepreneur.
The path that has led me to the enormity of my success has been through the deepening of my faith. I could write a book about not having an ounce of faith to believing all the things that have helped to shape my life, my happiness and my success.
The path to my ultimate success has been learning and applying God’s commandments as well as His principles, deepening my faith and belief in the Lord has led to great success, not only in my businesses, but in my life as well. My faith has helped me to build the businesses of my dreams.
Now, I’m back to dreaming and believing that I am going to receive the home that I always knew that I would buy some day.
4 Festive Tips for Holiday Social-Media Marketing
Happy Holidays!
The holidays are a special time of year, highlighted by the three F’s – family, food, and … fighting? I don’t mean fighting over who gets the last drumstick or whether Home Alone is better than A Christmas Story. I’m talking about retailers and brands fighting for consumer attention during the busiest shopping time of the year.
The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the biggest opportunity brands and retailers have each year, but it’s also incredibly competitive, so it’s crucial to reach and communicate with your customer audience in the correct way.
One way to do so is through social media. The holiday season is filled with social posts about gifts bought, deals found, and complaints of poor customer service. Now like never before, brands and retailers have the ability to connect directly with their customers and create a more personal shopping experience.
Here are four tips for how brands can get savvy with their social media marketing during this year’s holiday madness.
1. Drive that local cheer.
The holidays experience in New York is different than in San Francisco. Your messaging should reflect that. Leverage geo-targeting tools to know from where your customer is. Then you can create content they can relate to and messaging that resonates with a personalized brand experience.
2. All I want for Christmas is user-generated content.
How do you connect with audiences when they are already inundated with advertisements? You make them the hero. Businesses that can actively leverage user-generated content are the ones that will drive deeper connections with fans. Most people today are programmed to ignore ads. Showcasing authentic photos of your audience drives your intended message while encouraging a deeper, emotional interest from new and loyal fans alike. Relate to them with real people, in real moments, using your product and services.
Your featured fans get credit and interaction, audiences find trust in real people using your product or service, and your brand will better understand what motivates your audience. Everyone is jolly.
3. Deck the social walls.
The best way to harness a viral lift is to showcase your interactive experience. Remember, the more observable you make a campaign, the easier it is for your fans to imitate.
Create a social hub with aggregated content from multiple social channels on your website or microsite to capture audiences online. Your consumers can then share with their social community when you feature them, extending your reach. But don’t forget about in the store. Providing social displays, with easy calls to action at physical locations, are a simple, yet effective way to generate engagement.
4. Multiple chimneys equal multiple presents.
Facebook is still expected to be the channel of choice for holiday social spend, as 92 percent of marketers are planning extensive campaign efforts for this one platform. But 73 percent of marketing professionals think Instagram is going to be the breakout platform for this year’s holidays.
Don’t silo yourself to one social-media platform. Instead, create content on the appropriate channels for your audience, each with native content focused exclusively to that channel. Your Facebook posts, Instagrams and Tweets should drive the same idea, but the content should be customized to resonate best with each channel’s unique community.
Think of your various social media channels as your own little elves, and put them to work for you this holiday season. Utilize these tips and you’ll win the holiday retail battle while leaving your customers filled with joy.
Amir Zonozi
Business Success
Great Tips for a Highly Successful Business
Duff Goldman says running a business is like being Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner.
Goldman, owner of Charm City Cakes in Baltimore and the focus of Food Network’s Ace of Cakes, says you have to be willing to give it your all and not worry that you might get hurt once in a while. Here are the 39 year old’s four other ingredients to running a successful business:
1. Don’t over-think your business or idea.
When Goldman was thinking about starting his business, he asked his dad, who has a graduate degree in business from UCLA, how to run his new cake shop. His dad said, “Sell a cake son, start from there.” In other words, keep it simple. Don’t get into the analysis-paralysis rut. Get busy. Do good work. Prove the model. Rinse and repeat.
2. Live within your means.
Goldman spent $2,600 and bought his first large mixer after he sold his first big cake order.
“If you can’t afford it, you don’t need it,” he says.
Too many startups waste money on swag and T-shirts with their logo on it when they should be banking that cash or spending it on people or things they really need.
3. Make great stuff.
No matter how great the product or experience was last month, Goldman says he is always judged by the last cake he makes. In his case, a sub-par product will literally leave a bad taste in mouth of customers. That’s the quickest way to go out of business.
4. Be kind.
This one seems like a no-brainer, but so many companies seem to get this wrong. Why is the customer-service person at the department store so angry when you bring in a return? Why is it so difficult to get through to your cell phone or cable TV provider?
Being kind also applies to treating your employees with the respect they deserve, Goldman says.
We can probably all afford to be a little more kind to each other.
BRYAN ELLIOTT
CONTRIBUTOR
CEO of The GoodBrain Digital Studios