This year’s edition of The Business Growth Summit, an online event bringing together leading experts to share their strategies on how to grow a business, leverage opportunities, and increase profits starts today and will continue until September 23rd. What the summit actually offers is free, on demand access to videos by well known experts in the social media, marketing, PR and business development fields to help small businesses promote themselves more effectively and sell more.

Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Dan Schawbel, Amy Cosper, Carrie Wilkerson are only a few of the people you must learn from through the Business Growth Summit. If you’re a small business owner, entrepreneur, work-from-home professional or thinking of making a career switch to become either one, you should register for this online event and start watching the 5 to 20 minute videos the best and brightest of today’s business minds have to offer.

Yours truly, on behalf of the Mirror Communications agency, is also part of The Business Growth Summit. The video I have contributed is titles “How to Get More Business from the Social Media Clutter” and will help you decide what’s worthwhile and efficient from the huge social media world, what will help your business achieve better results.

After attending this business online event, please share your experience, your questions or your feedback either here, in the comment section, on Twitter, Facebook or via email.

Wish you all a great week and enjoy the summit!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Yesterday evening, WomenonBusiness.com published my first guest post. Thank you, Susan, for having me as a guest writer! Here’s a small excerpt to give you a taste!

For most women running a small business, constantly growing it also means cutting all unnecessary costs and trying to save whenever possible. If a fee seems a bit much for a certain service they might want to contract, they turn to the Do it Yourself/DIY approach. In most cases, doing anything yourself is not that difficult. There must be someone in your office with the skill set needed to learn how to and then do a good job at it!

While true, in most cases, this approach is counterproductive, unless you’re choosing the DIY option for services you are already offering. If you run a design agency, it would be crazy to hire someone else to design your corporate website.

I warmly invite you to head over to WomenonBusiness.com and read the entire article - DIY, the Small Business Mirage.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Guest post by Alexis Bonari

The Fed says we’re in recovery, but there’s no doubt in my mind that there continues to be a great amount of uncertainty about the economy. Looking at various economic indicators like gold futures, gun sales, and home security systems definitely supports this theory. People feel threatened and insecure, and that fear shows up in their spending habits. These are serious considerations marketers need to take into account in order to prosper under these dire circumstances.

We’ve all seen advertising campaigns based in fear, and as much as we may dislike these techniques, they do tend to work. Given the length of time that our current economic troubles have been going on, an increase in consumer awareness, target demographics, and media fatigue this base strategy will not be profitable for every market. A good marketer knows how to make the best of every situation, and what follows is some advice for how to successfully approach these stagnant markets. Continue reading

Popularity: 1% [?]

Janelle Vadnais of Create Business Growth and I had a wonderful conversation about Words of a Broken Mirror and blogging, PR and Marketing over the weekend. It resulted in an interview she published today. We talked about my long and winding road through the world of blogging, the PR and Marketing career I chose for myself and the life of a small business owner. Just to get you started, here’s the first question of the interview and my answer. To read the rest, please visit Janelle’s entry.

Have you always been involved in PR and marketing? What did you do before WoBM?

Popularity: 6% [?]

If your business isn’t totally irrelevant or focused on such a tight niche no one would think of considering your business model, you do have to worry about the top players in your field. Those strong companies owning huge chunks of your market’s share and having dizzying budgets to play with in each department. While you choose field related events carefully, trying to maximize exposure and awareness and leads, they can go to all of them and be one of the big sponsors.

But is this reason enough for you to fear them? I’d say no and explain why based on an example. Company X is relatively a new comer in a certain segment of the software development market. An important partner of theirs tells them about this huge event they should take part in. Attendance isn’t cheap at all, but there are major benefits. They’ll have a nice presentation that can target one third of the even visitors, they have a nice booth and some promotion from the event organizers and a number of complimentary invitations that they can send out to their potential customers. Sounds like a plan! Continue reading

Popularity: 4% [?]