By: Lisa J. Lehr Everyone knows by now (or should) that if you have a business, you must have a website. Even if you have a brick-and-mortar building and a strictly local clientele, you need a website to stay competitive. Many people toss their phone books into the recycle bin as soon as they get [...]
by Lisa J. Lehr Business owners can easily get stuck in a vicious cycle: Business isn’t so good. They can’t afford to outsource their marketing. They do it themselves, results remain poor, and business remains not-so-good. How do business owners get out of this vicious cycle? It’s not easy, but it’s simple: they make a [...]
by Lisa J. Lehr In an earlier post, I talked about the importance of autoresponders: those little automated messages that your website visitors get when they opt in to (i.e., put their name and e-mail address in the boxes) your website. In doing some outreach to local businesses recently, however, I discovered that not only [...]
Lisa J. Lehr is one of the local contributors to this website. I’ll have more about our travels in Italy tomorrow. By the way, I really appreciate Lisa’s contributions and welcome anyone else who would like to contribute to this site. Have you heard about the tool that can bring in 90% of your sales? [...]
by Lisa J. Lehr Yes, we know. The economy is bad. Recovery may be on the horizon, but no one really knows how close. Or if we can “hold out” till it happens. Yet we can each take some actions to position ourselves in the best possible way to survive a weak economy—and be at [...]
As tax day approaches, Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. today urged Californians to avoid “phony tax-relief companies” that charge taxpayers up to $3,000 in up-front fees to reduce or eliminate back taxes owed to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), but provide no actual relief. “Every tax season, phony tax-relief companies emerge to exploit cash-strapped [...]
by Lisa J. Lehr What’s wrong with this picture? The fictitious Modern Widget Company in Grass Valley has a small staff of reasonably capable people who do pretty much everything. One day, Bob notices a leak in the restroom. “I can fix that,” he says, “and I’ll save the company a ton of money.” He [...]
BEIJING —China announced Wednesday that its exports climbed 46 percent in February from a year earlier. Economists said the data signaled a rebound in consumer demand from the United States and other Western markets after the financial crisis last year. It was the third consecutive month of increases in Chinese exports and the fastest growth [...]
By Lisa J. Lehr Would you like to have more communicative employees—or be one? Have a more effective sales force, or be a trainer with phenomenal presentation skills? Be a more confident, competent leader? Be persuasive, inspirational, and/or entertaining? That’s what 235,000 people around the world are doing right now, and it’s called Toastmasters International. [...]
by Lisa J. Lehr (Lisa is a regular contributor to this site) If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you know that getting new customers is a lot more work—and a lot less profitable—than selling more to your existing customers. Needless to say, people who’ve bought from you in the past already [...]
