Network Solutions - Small business conversations and working together for small business success

10 Simple Rules to Effective Personal Branding

Last month, Jay Berkowitz came by the Network Solutions office for a visit to speak about the Web in 2010. It was a great presentation and we did a great write up on it too. However, there was one point in the presentation which deserves its own post and that is Area #9 - Personal [...]

Just Because You Give It Away…

The campaign was clear, very honorable in its intentions, and was giving something away a gift thanks. And this wasn’t just a cheap give away item. It had value both financially and use. The campaign had all the makings of a successful campaign if the appropriate effort was put into it, but what happened?

If You Aren’t Excited About It…

If you’re on the fence whether you’re excited about what you do or if the shine has worn off… pick a side and go there. It’s going to suck at times. It’s going to be exhausting at others. There’s going to be days where you look at your loved one, friend, employees, or business partner and think, “What the hell did I get myself into” and the answer to that question is the very same thing “I love what I do for a living!”

Marketing Your Business On A Shoestring Budget…

In my previous post ‘Get Your Hand Off Your Wallet And Your Head Out Of Your…*’, Terry Upton asked in her comment “What if you don’t have any money at all? What would you say to those people trying to get there business off the ground?”

Well fear not Terry, and all you trying to have your business take flight, this post is for you.

Grow Smart Business Webinar Interview with Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends

Anita Campbell, Editor of Small Business Trends will be one of five panelists on the GrowSmartBusiness Webinar (next Thursday, April 30 at 2pm ET). Her well-rounded expertise will shed light on two of the biggest challenges for small businesses –marketing and finance – as revealed in the Small Business Success Index. We asked Anita to [...]

Get Your Hand Off Your Wallet And Your Head Out Of Your…

Let me be very honest, starting a business costs money.  Starting a successful business…still costs money.  Getting the marketing pieces and materials you’ll need to do the bare minimum to promote your business effectively…will cost money.
Does spending a lot of money guarantee you are going to be successful?  No, but spending it smartly does help.  [...]

Twitter as RSS: Reciprocally Stupid Syndication

I keep thinking about the idea that “Twitter is killing RSS,” and it makes me uncomfortable.
I’ll leave it to the technologists to debate the merits of using Twitter vs. RSS from a network standpoint — my own misgivings are cultural. It goes back to my nightmare scenario of a wasteland of marketers blasting tweets at [...]

Reacting to Social Media-Inflamed Crises: Amazon vs. Domino’s

I think enough time — gosh, like a whole week — has gone by so we can be sufficiently clear-headed to draw wildly self-serving and far-reaching conclusions from the latest Twitter-enabled, blog-powered, marketing and PR dustup/corporate nightmare scenario. In fact, we’ve got two of them, so we can do an episode of compare and contrast: [...]

Millennial Erica Douglass Shares Her Thoughts about the Small Business Success Index

Below is a snippet of her thoughts about the Small Business Success Index. For the full interview, visit the Grow Smart Business Blog.
Erica Douglass started her own Internet-based business (a web hosting company) during the tech downturn and at the age of 20. She noticed that many large web hosting companies were going out [...]

When She Says Your Marketing’s a Good Size…

There’s a quote that I use to keep taped somewhere on the wall behind my monitor. It was:
“Go BIG or go home”
For the longest time I took that to mean that the actions I took in marketing, design, and in life, had to be larger than life.  Ultimately, I learned the hard way that ‘big [...]