AngelBiz commented on the following stories on BizSugar
Your Small Business Needs To Stop Using Social Media
"Many small business owners fail to understand that it takes time and effort to be successful in Social Media. Just having a profile on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media is not going to bring in customers. You have to interact with them and engage with them to be successful. As you rightly said it takes a long time to get results. I like your idea of focusing on only one or two social networks. This way you can devote time in building long-term relationship with customers."Why Even Great Marketing Ideas Fail
"Marketing is both art as well as science. World's best advertising will fail to bring in customers if it is not targeted to the right audience. Similarly, a crappy advertisement will not be liked by your right target audience. In my experience most small business owners do not spend enough time trying to understand who is buying their products and services. In turn they fail to create products and marketing that aligns with the target audience. This can only be achieved by tracking and analyzing customer data."Navigating The Social Media Marketing Maze
"Excellent guidance on social media. I particularly like your advice on securing your brand and responding to customer inquiries on social media. Business owners need to know that just having a presence on social media is not enough. It needs lot more work to take advantage of social media. "2 Things to Know Before You Start a Business
"My advice for all start-ups is this - it will always cost more than you thought and will take longer than you hoped. You have to be prepared to meet those challenges and have a backup plan. Your advice about starting low-cost is very important and useful."Are you staying on your strategic track?
"Monitoring activities against strategic objectives is a very good idea. Lot of time we get sucked in urgent things, which may not be important. For every task that comes your way you have to weigh its importance relative to strategy. There are times when you have to address urgent issues that may not align to the strategy, but if it happens every day you have to take a step back and look for some fundamental changes in the way you operate."Learn to Use Delegation as a Tool to Develop & Engage Employees
"Your take on developing others through delegation is interesting. Many people think about delegation to improve their own productivity and focus on important things, but this other aspect of delegation is important too. Leaders who are not willing to delegate and grow their employees will end up losing the valuable key employees."The Anatomy of a Small Business
"Very interesting analogy. I particularly like the analogy of employees to heart. They are truly the heart of your business. You have to make sure it is functioning properly (employees are doing their job well) to keep the whole machine going. The day they malfunction the body (business) will start deteriorating. "Serving First Selling Second
"Ian - Interesting concept. I look at this as Relationship selling. Your job is not to sell the gadgets, but to build the relationship with the customer, understand their needs and then offer how you can make your customer's life easier by offering solutions that meet those needs. Writing a purchase order should come last and should be the least painful part of selling if you have done your job of building the relationship."Subscribe
Do You Really Need to Be Productive ALL the Time?
"Some of the best ideas are developed when your mind is idle and “not producing” anything. Archimedes’ famous Eureka moment occurred when he was in the bathtub without being productive. In our society productivity is taken to the extreme that strips people of having precious idle time when they can let their mind wander and come up with those Eureka moments."