Home Wealth Project
Extensive Research On How To Build Wealth From The Comfort Of Your Own Home.
What’s the State of Green Business?
Jan 24th
What are corporate sustainability leaders worrying about these days? Are businesses still investing time and money in green initiatives like they did a few years ago?
GreenBiz recently unveiled its State of Green Business 2012 report. The 84-page report goes into great detail about the current climate for business sustainability and outlines some emerging green business trends.
Though there’s a general perception that it’s been a grim few years for sustainability given the down economy, the report says that’s not exactly true. Companies continue to “make, meet and even exceed” their sustainability goals, it says, and invest in clean energy.
That said, it points to some disconcerting signs: Carbon and other toxic emissions continue to climb worldwide, despite efforts to curtail them. E-waste, the recycling of electronics, continues to pile up in landfills.
The report looks at what’s happened to a wide range of key sustainability indicators over the past year or two.
Here are some of the interesting findings:
- Clean-tech venture capital investments dropped by one-third in 2011 over 2010. (This was partly due to the economy, but also the high-profile failure of solar panel maker Solyndra that caused political backlash, the report says.)
- Prices of solar panels are falling, installations going up.
- Clean energy patents grew by 24% in 2011, up to 2,331.
- Nearly half of all S&P 500 companies now report their non-financial environmental indicators.
- The percentage of people carpooling and taking public transit to work fell slightly in 2011, according to U.S. Census data.
- People working from home at least three days per week grew slightly, to 8.6 million, accord to IDC Research.
- Energy use per dollar of U.S. gross domestic product rose by 4.5% in 2010 – the first increase in more than half a century of declines – according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data. (The reason? The bad economy in 2010 led to fewer companies making energy-efficiency improvements to offset the growth in energy consumption.)
- 2.44 million tons of electronics were discarded in 2010, and only about 25% of that was recycled.
- The number of building owners pursuing LEED in 2011 dropped slightly from 2010.
Though the tough economy has certainly made it more challenging to devote resources to sustainability efforts, the report says companies would be hurting themselves by not trying:
“For companies, the risks and potential costs of doing nothing are rising … Addressing sustainability issues is no longer an optional, nice-to-do activity. It is an expectation, no more PR-worthy than safety, quality, employee retention, or customer satisfaction.”
Green Photo via Shutterstock
What’s the State of Green Business?
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
What’s Your Annual Marketing Plan for the New Year?
Dec 7th
The new year is almost upon us. What are your plans? A new plan for the new year with its new opportunities ahead may be in order. Here are some things you may wish to take into consideration.
Marketing
Your annual marketing plan for the New Year. Ring in the New Year by creating a new marketing plan. What’s on your agenda? What are you planning to do with your business in the coming year? Small Business Marketing Tools
Protecting your small business site from phisher attacks. Large or small, your business Website can be susceptible to online attacks. Fortunately there are protections for even the smallest Webpreneurs. Noobpreneur.com
Sales
How is the sales process like finding your way? David Brock imagines a scenario in which you land in an unknown city and must find your way without a GPS. This is like the sales process. How can you help your customers find their way? Partners in Excellence
Deconstructing direct mail. Josh Grillo does a post mortem of a direct sales letter to give you a look at what your own direct mail marketing should look like. How effective are your sales letters and how could you make them work better? Dirty Marketing Secrets
Branding
How truthful is your brand? Some people may not consider truthfulness in branding important, but chances are your customers will. Here’s a debate on the topic arguing for a better way. Bloggertone
Policy
Online sales tax plan could hurt small business. Amazon supports a plan that would have online retailers scrambling to collect tax for appropriate states and other municipalities, but small business online retailers say the plan is not fair to them. WSJ
The case for crowd-funding. Raising money for small business has always been challenging. Now there’s a new method that’s getting a lot of attention and seems to be a hot news trend. What is it and how can your business get involved? You’re the Boss
Leadership
Seven things your startup must know to survive. Startups have always involved risk, it’s true, but perhaps never quite the kind they face today. The small business startup faces an environment much different than what entrepreneurs have been used to in the past. How will you cope? Startup Professionals Musings
The path every small business leader must avoid. This is not the way to run a small business with employees. In fact, if you follow the scenario laid out here, you will most probably loose your best people in the process. Be warned. Your company can only be as good as your leadership. Expert Business Advice
What’s Your Annual Marketing Plan for the New Year?
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Real or Fake Christmas Trees: What’s the Greener Choice?
Nov 16th
Few things kindle the holiday spirit in a store or business like a decorated tree. But if you’re an eco-minded business owner, you might wonder: What’s the greener option – real or fake? The answer is not very clear-cut.
On one hand, fake trees are typically produced in factories in Asia and usually contain oil-derived, pollution-causing polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic. Plus, fake trees may contain unsafe levels of lead, and will ultimately end up in landfills, since they’re not biodegradable. Retailers and distributors use lots of fuel transporting them thousands of miles over the ocean and then on trucks to the stores where they’re bought.
On the other hand, once you factor in all the water, pesticides and energy used to grow, chop down and transport real trees from tree farms, they aren’t exactly so eco-friendly either. Plus, you have to get a real tree every year, so all of that energy and water use multiplies over the years. (Real trees, do, however, absorb carbon dioxide and can be recycled into wood chips.)
There’s plenty of debate over which is the greener choice: The National Christmas Tree Association, a trade group for tree growers, argues – naturally — that real trees are better because they are all natural. The American Christmas Tree Association – a trade group of artificial tree makers – argues just the opposite. They contend that fake trees, when used for many years, have an overall lower carbon footprint.
What it generally comes down to is this: Where does your tree come from, and how is it grown or made? How many years will you be using the fake tree? If you will use a fake tree for more than a decade, it may be the greener solution since you won’t have to replace it year after year. If you already own a fake tree, you might as well keep using it – the environmental toll has already been taken.
Of course, there are other considerations to the tree decision beyond the environmental. Real trees become a fire hazard if they dry out, so you may not be able to keep a real tree up as long as a fake tree. Real trees will generally be more expensive and time-consuming to set up, take care of and discard than fake ones that you can easily store in the closet or basement.
If you do decide a fake tree is the better option, buy one secondhand. (There are lots for sale on Craigslist.) As this DailyGreen article notes, there are also U.S.-made holiday trees that use recycled PVC and therefore aren’t so environmentally detrimental.
If you opt for a real tree, look for local tree farms that use sustainable or organic growing practices, such as “no spray” (meaning no pesticides). LocalHarvest.org lets you search for ones in your area by city or ZIP code.
Real or Fake Christmas Trees: What’s the Greener Choice?
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Lisa Barone Asks: What’s Your Blog Persona? [BlogWorld Coverage]
Nov 5th
When you blog, you’re delivering a version of yourself. Maybe you use a voice a little different from your everyday voice to stand out. Maybe you use your blog as a character, much the way Lady Gaga uses her costumes and different personas.
According to Lisa Barone, co-founder of Outspoken Media (and contributor here on Small Business Trends), you need to create your blogging superhero, or: the marketable version of you.
She spoke at Blog World on “Creating Your Blogging Superhero.”
Here’s just a sample of what I learned.
What Do You Want to Be Known As?
Creating a character for your blog, says Barone, can help you sell products, build community and find new customers. But if you don’t already have a persona for your blog, where should you start?
Barone talks about figuring out what you want to be known as. Is that the Sassy Sales Lady? The Behind-the-Scenes Tech Guy? This can help you build the character you blog with. Once you’ve identified this, determine what traits are important to help you build that blogging superhero.
What Makes You Weird?
A recurring theme at Blog World was storytelling. Barone says to find the story that makes you the best “you” possible. That may be telling about what makes you weird; people identify with weird better than the absence of a personality, so don’t be afraid to share it!
If It Doesn’t Relate, Toss It!
Even if you’re striving for a blog persona that’s genuine, it’s important to filter out what isn’t relevant to your readers. You might talk about your business and industry in a very honest way, but clearly, it’s not necessary or beneficial to share the argument you had with a supplier. Or photos from the company holiday party. Filter out the distractions and zone in on what your audience cares about. Barone explains:
“Too much irrelevant information distracts people from their core goal and threatens the brand you’re trying to build.”
Takeaway: wear a superhero outfit under your work clothes. Ask yourself: what sort of persona do you portray on your blog today? If you’re not sure or not satisfied with your persona today, what persona do you WANT to portray? Is it genuine? Authoritative? Social?
Start creating it the way you want to appear!
Lisa Barone Asks: What’s Your Blog Persona? [BlogWorld Coverage]
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
What’s the Green Benefit of Telecommuting?
Oct 29th
Many small businesses already participate in an easy and low-cost way to be environmentally friendlier: letting employees work from home – either every day or just on occasion. But how much of an impact does that really have?
You must account for several factors, but the heftiest savings comes from taking cars off the road. Let’s look at the numbers:
- The average U.S. commute is about 32 miles round-trip, according to a 2005 poll by ABC News, analyzed by Gary Langer. That’s about 7,840 miles per year, assuming an employee works five days a week, 49 weeks per year (with 3 weeks of vacation).
- If the employee drives a standard midsize vehicle — which typically emits around 0.9 pounds of carbon dioxide per mile — he or she would emit 29 pounds of carbon per day commuting, adding up to a commuting footprint of about 7,100 pounds of CO2 per year.
- Have five full-time employees? That’s nearly 35,500 pounds of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere each year – the equivalent of what an average American four-person household generates annually. (See CO2 emissions of various things here.)
However, the calculation isn’t quite so straightforward. When employees work from home, they generally use extra electricity and heating fuel to keep their home office lit and climate-controlled and to power their computers and other peripherals. (The extra emissions created by using a furnace to heat the home during the day, for instance, can nearly offset the CO2 savings from not commuting, a 2003 study found.) If you’re able to turn off the equipment and close the office because nobody’s there, however, the savings will be more significant.
Though the total green benefit may not be quite as powerful as it first seems, it can be quite impressive depending on the circumstances. And keep in mind there are other non-green benefits that come with telecommuting. For one, surveys repeatedly find that telecommuting make employees happier by providing them more work-life balance and less time on the road. Moreover, businesses can save money by reducing their operational costs. Studies have also shown telecommuting leads to higher employee productivity.
Do you or your employees often work from home? Do you think there’s a big environmental benefit?
What’s the Green Benefit of Telecommuting?
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Is this what’s feeding the Occupy Wall Street protests?
Oct 13th
We’ve seen it mentioned several times over the last week so we thought we’d pose this question to our readers:
Should the real targets of the Occupy Wall Street protests be the fat cats in our institutions of Higher Education?
The fact is that it’s nearly impossible to untangle the causes of the economic mess we’re in. Whether the cause is government (according to the libertarians) or the financial industry (according to the progressives) or an economically ungrounded system of higher education and student loans (according to all of us with a degree, no job and big student debt), there’s a pretty clear message… everyday people are getting tired of getting jerked around.
From: Best Colleges
View full post on Business Pundit
What’s a Facebook Like Worth?
Sep 16th
Facebook and comScore recently published a white paper on “How Brands Reach and Influence Fans Through Social Media Marketing.” The document is full of some pretty interesting case studies on Starbucks, Southwest and Bing, with regards to how they use their Facebook Pages to generate interest, buzz and business.
How to Measure a Like
What’s interesting to me is that we’re finally getting away from measuring ROI for social media in the terms of “this interaction = this in sales.” It’s about time. According to the white paper, Facebook fans can be valued in several ways:
- By increasing the depth of engagement and loyalty of fans
- By generating incremental purchase behavior
- By influencing friends of fans
So you can see, it’s hard to put a dollar amount on any one of these values, yet they are all tremendously valuable.
Why Friends of Fans Are Important
Another tidbit I learned from this report is the importance of friends of fans of a brand’s Facebook Page. If you’re a fan of, say, Starbucks, there’s a pretty good chance your Facebook friends might be interested in the brand as well. And brands realize this. According to Facebook, in looking at the top 100 brand Pages, they determined that for every brand’s fan, there are another 34 friends of fans that the brands can reach. So exponentially, you can reach a lot more people than just those who click “Like” on your Page.
From the report: “Starbucks’ Fans and Friends of Fans showed the highest average propensity to visit the brand website, with Fans 418 percent more likely to visit Starbucks.com and Friends of Fans 230 percent more
likely.”
Getting More Eyeballs to Your Page
According to the report, for brands that post updates five days a week, an average of 16 percent of Fans are reached. It’s all about what appears in that person’s feed when they’re on Facebook. Post too rarely, and your content won’t be seen. Post too often, and you irritate people. The report suggests that to increase the likelihood of reaching your fan base, you should focus on highly relevant content that your fans will want to read and share, and to post more regularly:
A Facebook analysis suggests that each incremental day of publishing branded content from the Facebook Page increases the reach among Fans by approximately 2.5 percent.
That’s good advice any brand, small or large, can use in marketing on Facebook. The report had some other great statistics, so I suggest you check it out for yourself.
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
What’s Your Ideal Sales Process?
Sep 6th
I write quite frequently about sales and how important it is for everyone to be able to articulate what they do and sell. Isn’t it unfortunate that the image of a hyped-up, intrusive, snarky, used car salesman still permeates our perceptions? Why is this image still so prevalent? Because of that “predatory” salesperson, the one who just sells something to someone for the sport of it, many people lack adequate respect for the sales profession.
And profession it is. In fact, professional sales is becoming part of the degree curriculum of more and more colleges and universities. I have great respect for high-level professional salespeople. I was one for 24 years in broadcast radio. In many ways, sales today is very different than it was even five years ago!
Developing the Process That Works for You
When was the last time you had someone ring your doorbell to sell you something, or just stroll into your office or place of business to sell anything other than flowers?
I found a great article from Business News Daily, “How to Conquer the Fear of Selling,” by Dave Mattson, CEO of Sandler Training. In it, he talks about selling as a science in developing an “ideal sales process” and says anyone can be trained to have one.
I believe that. Over the years I have hired, trained and worked with salespeople from many walks of life. The ones that believe in what they sell, love sales and work on their own unique process are the ones that do the best long term.
Today’s entrepreneur and small business owner must embrace a “sales mentality” to succeed. The sales process has changed very little over the years. It’s still fundamentally about building that “like, know and trust” with people so that you can move your goods and services, to help them, for a fair price.
Don’t get intimidated by this. Rather, get empowered by the opportunities there are to:
- find a prospect
- qualify the prospect
- analyze their needs
- match their needs with your solutions
- negotiate
- consummate (close) the sale
- provide customer service and retention
When you think about it, today offers us all so many more ways to accelerate this.
Passion has power
If you love what you do, love what you sell, and love how it can benefit and has benefited others, then simply focus on that “selling approach” and make it your ideal sales process. There is power in that passion!
To help you, here are the Top 50 Sales Blogs from BlogRank. Some awesome resources for today’s new face and language of sales!
What’s Your Ideal Sales Process?
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Chart: What’s Happening with Angel Investing
Aug 9th
Last year, the dollar value of angel investments increased 11.7 percent from a recent low of $18 billion (measured in 2010 dollars) the year before, according to analysis by University of New Hampshire’s Center for Venture Research (CVR). While this increase marks the first rise in angel dollars invested in real dollar terms since 2006, the amount put into companies in 2010 remains below that in every year from 2003 through 2007. In 2010, the amount invested by angels was only 5.6 percent higher in real dollar terms than that supplied in 2002.
Click for larger chart (in new window)
The trends are very different for the number of companies financed by business angels. Despite a slight dip between 2007 and 2008, the CVR reports a consistent increase in the number of angel-backed companies. Between 2002 and 2010, the number of companies financed by business angels rose 71.9 percent, according to the University of New Hampshire research group.
The result of these divergent trends is a steep drop in the size of the average angel investment from $528,000 in 2002 to $325,000 in 2010 (in real dollars).
Why angels dropped the average size of their investments 38 percent in real dollar terms between 2002 and 2010 remains an important unanswered question. Any thoughts?
Source: Created from data from the Center for Venture Research.
Chart: What’s Happening with Angel Investing
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
