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With over 50% of all new businesses failing, there's got to be a better way. Building a successful business is certainly difficult. It's fraught with problems over sales, capitalization, and poor management, says Charles F. Goetz, adjunct professor of organization and management and a distinguished lecturer in entrepreneurship at Emory University' Read More

It's often been said that B2B selling largely consists of developing a relationship with the customer. Most sales pros think that a customer relationship should like a friendship. Wrong. You can be friends with plenty of people and never get any business from them. So here's a secret that Jerry Acuff, author of The Relationship Edge in Business re Read More

Considering how focused PR people are with having a 'social media strategy,' I'm still a little surprised when I see press releases online that aren't optimized for the web. Come on people — it's not that hard! The first and easiest thing to do is to embed links in the body of your press release. Pick out the key phrases in your press release — yo Read More

There's a new neat little site you might want to bookmark. One of the biggest small-business organizations has launched a new research portal that advocates and offers up support for today's SMB shops. The National Federation of Independent Business, whose mission is to promote and protect the right of businesses to operate and grow, just launc Read More

Once a month, eight New York area entrepreneurs cancel all appointments, power down BlackBerrys and cellphones and gather in a cone of silence. For three hours, they unload the triumphs, and more often, stresses, not shared with spouses, friends or boards: a marriage on the rocks, the pain of firing a long-term employee, depression that's usurped Read More

In his DMA 07 Conference and Exhibition presentation, “Running Red Lights: The Keys To Creating Dazzling Direct Mail,” Steve Penn, CEO and executive creative director of Penn Garritano Direct Response Marketing, said he likes to think of the direct mail package as a touchpoint for the entire brand experience. Copywriters always should “tell a stor Read More

Personalized e-mails boost open rates, according to a MailerMailer study. The e-mail service provider found that personalized "subject" lines in particular increased the number of times recipients opened their mailings. The "subject" line is so important that, even when marketers have recipients' permission, the wrong line can still mean trou Read More

Social media and conversational marketing will outpace that of traditional marketing by 2012. Nearly 57% of respondents report that in 5 years time, what they spend on conversational marketing will be greater than that of traditional marketing, while another 24% believed it would be the same as traditional marketing. Significantly, 81% of marketer Read More

According to the Discover Small Business Watch, reports the DMA, economic confidence among small business owners continued to fall in October as many expressed increased pessimism about both the future of their own businesses and the US economy in general. The monthly survey of 1,000 small businesses with five or fewer employees shows that at 96.8 Read More

Advertising placed on relevant content pages on neutral and general-interest websites outperformed the same advertising on out-of-context pages, according to a pilot study. Moreover, the ad's performance on in-context pages of neutral and general-interest websites equaled the performance of the same ad on a highly relevant website. The study conc Read More