Once you've built and launched a website for your business, you might think that you're done with site design. But you don't want your site to become stale and outdated to potential customers. Do you? Small incremental investments in your site's design can pay big dividends. The best sites are iterative, improving over time and offering dynamic features to keep things fresh. Recently...

If you're like many entrepreneurs, your target market is affluent customers — and you've been hurting as even they have pulled back on spending. Well, here's some good news: The latest Ipsos Mendelsohn quarterly online Barometer survey of affluent adults — those with household incomes of $100,000 or more — showed they were more optimistic about the economy in the spring of 2009 than they...

Wouldn't it be nice if your business was growing so fast that your staff could barely handle it? What if you got as much business in the first month of 2009 as you got in all of 2008? That's not a fantasy; it's reality for Richard Palarea's company, PA & Associates, as I read with fascination in The New York Times . Palarea's company helps arrange freight transportation for...

I rarely get discouraged, but recently a series of unfortunate events with potential clients left me feeling blue. Emails were going unreturned, appointments were canceled at the last minute, budgets were being frozen — in short, no one was saying "Yes." Of course, we all know it takes a lot of "Nos" to get to "Yes," but when so many "Nos" happen all at once...

In Southern California, where I live, housing prices have plummeted, and now commercial rents are following suit, according to the Los Angeles Times . This article focuses on retail space, which now has a 50 percent higher vacancy rate compared to last year. That's bad news for landlords, but good news for tenants. Some Los Angeles-area landlords have dropped rents by as much as 40 percent, the...

When you ship an order to a customer, what do you include in the box? If your answer is: "The product and a packing slip," you're missing out on a big opportunity to keep customers coming back, says consultant John Park on BizCrusader.com. Instead, Park says, consider tucking one or more of these extras in the box: Coupon: Include a coupon code good for a customer's next purchase...

Today, social networking is all the rage. And yes, I use (and blog a lot about) Twitter, Facebook, and many of the rest of them. But there's one mode of online marketing that small-business owners shouldn't ignore, even though it may not be as trendy as social networking. I'm talking about the good old-fashioned email newsletter. I can't count how many of these I subscribe to. Maybe...

While driving to the office last week, I heard a radio news report about the difficulty teens are having finding summer jobs. Apparently, with all the unemployed adults in the work force, competition for jobs that traditionally go to teens has gotten much stiffer. The radio reporter offered teens some tips for landing the summer job. But he didn't offer the one that seemed most obvious to me: Forget...