She Owns It

Celebrating, Connecting, and Supporting Women Entrepreneurs

Do you have the right tools to be an entrepreneur? by Renee Pedro of @crashpaddesigns

by 9 Comments

by Renee Pedro | Featured Contributor 

Have you been thinking about starting your own business? How many times have you heard, “Just do it!”,” Go for it!” If you’re like me, those words aren’t inspirational they’re scary.

I’ve put lots of thought into why those are the wrong words to inspire women. A phrase like “just do it”, presupposes that you already know what to do and are sitting on your hands. For me, nothing was farther from the truth. When I started my home textile design company Crash Pad Designs 7 years ago, I wasn’t even a textile designer. Now I design, manufacture and sell my home textiles all over the world.

People say perspective is everything, In my life, it’s been 80% of everything. Action has been the other 20%. I have always known I could do whatever I wanted despite my less than prosperous background. My perspective is guided by the simple phrase, ” I’ll figure it out”. It’s my mantra. It’s confident and proactive. “I’ll figure it out” is also relatable and familiar. That’s why it can be especially inspirational for women. Because women figure it out every day.

Think about how many things you figure out in your daily life. If you’re a  mom who also works outside of your home, you’re getting everyone dressed and ready to leave the house on time every morning. You’re responsible for how everyone gets to where they need to be. You work at whatever your job is all day. Then you orchestrate getting everyone home, fed and in bed, so you can do it all again the tomorrow. Suppose tomorrow is a snow day or someone wakes up with a fever, or you get a flat? That’s life, and you figure it out.

The experience of your everyday life as a woman makes you a great candidate for an entrepreneur. Being able to think on your feet and to think outside the box makes entrepreneurship a perfect fit. Figuring things out is an inherent female quality, it’s a tool,  it’s in our DNA. Far too often we fail to celebrate and capitalize on this quality.

My business started with a list of things that I needed to figure out. Designing, licensing, manufacturing, distribution, web design, branding, marketing, sales and 900 other things. I had no idea what I was doing or how to do it.

One step at a time I conquered my list. If you ask questions someone will answer them. You’re reading this, so you know how many resources there are available to you. One email, or one phone call at a time I found people who could answer my questions and point me in the right direction. Remember there are no stupid questions and people are usually happy to help. Of course, it was still overwhelming and scary, but trusting I could figure it out, made it easier. I don’t want to sugar coat how difficult it is because sometimes it is very difficult. What’s important though, is how you think about it. That change of perspective can change your life.

Yes, that first step requires more than a step, it requires a leap, a leap of faith, and trust in yourself. So take a deep breath, get ready, set. Jump!  And you’ll figure it out. #Illfigureitout

How To Overcome The Fear Of Entrepreneurship With A Side Hustle by @XLConsultingGro

by 1 Comment

by Elaine Slatter | Featured Contributor

Perhaps you have been thinking of becoming an entrepreneur for a while, but aren’t quite ready to take the plunge?You might be afraid it isn’t going to work and don’t want to ditch your steady income day job for the uncertainty of entrepreneurship.  Starting a side hustle could be your answer.

A side hustle may become a full-time venture in the long term, but it could also remain a side hustle as an income supplement.  There is no hard and fast rule.  Whichever way you choose needs to be right for your unique situation, however, you will need to find some time to develop your side hustle.  How many hours a week can you devote to a side hustle?

Sometimes you have to try different side hustles before you find the right fit.  But that’s ok, too. In today’s work world, we will have many different roles before we retire.   We are called “slashers”.  That’s right, we have titles like   Author/Speaker/Trainer/Teacher, we are not just one dimensional with titles such as Accountant!

What Kind of Side Hustle Could You Start?

One of the first things is to decide what product/service you could start while still working your existing job.  The easiest way to list your transferable skills that could translate into an entrepreneurial adventure.

For example

Current Day Job = Teacher

Transferable skills = speaking, designing programs, writing, presenting, creating

Entrepreneurial opportunities = certified coach, creating courses on your topic specialty, teaching others how to create courses/webinars, writing a novel, writing a ‘how to book’ such as ‘how to be a dynamic teacher’, teach via Udemy platform.

Current Day Job = Fitness instructor

Transferable skills = great at exercise activities, believes in a healthy lifestyle, trainer skills, communication skills, program organization.

Entrepreneurial opportunities = Create healthy food line of frozen products to go such as paleo foods with home delivery, launching a natural skincare product line, mobile personal trainer to executives, network marketer for products in related fields of health/nutrition/exercise.

Turning a hobby or interest into a side hustle is another alternative.  For example you might be a math teacher but piano or art might be a hobby that could also translate into a side hustle.

If you cannot think of anything that really comes to the top of your mind, then hundreds of people have turned into Amazon sellers, making plenty of money with this side hustle.  The easiest way is to become a reseller, called Retail Arbitrage.   Basically, in retail arbitrage, you find a product in a retail store and re-sell it at a higher price on Amazon.  It is surprising what items you might be able to find at a deep discount on a seasonal clearance that you can re-sell at a high profit.

The capital outlay, while you experiment, is very small and it is fairly simple to set up. The fees from Amazon are quite reasonable and there is an app you can get for your mobile phone that helps you find out if you have permission to sell a particular product.  It also figures out at your retail purchase price whether you can make a profit selling on Amazon. So all the hard work has been done for you.

Success Tips for a Side Hustle

  • Learn as much about your new product/service as you can before you launch
  • It doesn’t have to be a perfect product/service
  • You have to be able to make money
  • Start small without a huge outlay of cash
  • Dedicate a minimum of 16 hours a week to your side hustle
  • Take action steps (baby ones) every week
  • View failure as feedback, nothing more
  • Try again and again

If you have tried a side hustle tell us all about it.  Let us know if you are going to jump from a side hustle to being a full-time entrepreneur or just letting your new business stay as a side hustle.  We would love to get your honest feedback to share on this platform.

Save

Save

Do You Dream Of A Business With Over A Million Dollars In Revenue? by @XLConsultingGro

by Leave a Comment

7 Strategies To Reach a Million Dollars in Revenue

Business Success

by Elaine Slatter | Featured Contributor

Did you know that less than 2% of women-led businesses reach over a million dollars in revenue?  In researching for my follow-up book to “Fabulous Fempreneurship” a business startup guide, I have been interviewing women founders to see what it takes to move up from a startup business to a superstar organization of over a million dollars in revenue.

Here are some of the highlights of these interviews.

 

Don’t over analyze and paralyze yourself into taking action

Victoria Sopik founder of Kids and Co. is a visionary and her partner is an accountant and a detailed person.  As a visionary Victoria says it’s her role to think big and expand the business (originally starting in Canada and now spreading across North America).  Her partner’s role is to find holes in the vision but not stop the vision.  Victoria will listen to her partner but unless there is a great reason why the company should not go forward with its plans, she takes the risk, because she knows from her past experiences, with the risk comes the reward.   She has seen and heard a lot in her 15 years of business, but nothing she says is insurmountable. After all, she has survived the trials of being the mother of 8 children all of whom she says are still alive to-day!

Surround yourself with mentors

No-one can be an entrepreneur on their own.  The successful women founders I interviewed all said they had mentorship.  For some it was mentorship by other women in CEO networks, for another CEO it was earning a spot in the Quantum Shift leadership series, partly sponsored by KPMG

Have a strategic plan

If you don’t know where you want to go, how can you get there?  All the women leaders stressed that as your business gets traction you have to plan the next phase.    Using SMART planning to define your strategy was a unanimous choice.   Breaking the strategic plan into 5 year, 3 year and 1 year visions is paramount to success.  Sharing the plan with all your employees is another essential element because everyone on board has to be part of your plan says, Shantel Feltman, CEO Sitiris Research.

When putting the strategic plan together it should include the total structure of the company.  As you grown, your company structure will change.  What will that look like?  Identify employees that can grow with your company says Shantel and push them to take on the responsibilities.   Shantel knows this only too well.  Having to take a couple of years away from her business for breast cancer surgeries and recovery, she learned that people will step up to the plate if they are empowered and encouraged to do so.

Joni Lien, franchisor owner of Supperworks also found out the same thing as she was forced to take a break from her business to look after her terminally ill husband who was the chief operations officer.  Her team stepped up to the plate and now Joni has been getting back to her business but in a different role.  She is focusing business growth, while her team handles the operations side of the business.

Listen to your customers

For Debbie Gracie-Smith, founder of Cretos an International IT business that she has since sold said “it was listening to the customers of American Express when I worked there was the whole premise of starting my own successful company”.   Cretos filled the gap for her customers that American Express was not interested in filling.  Debbie says “Do the right thing and do work you are proud of”.

This also means making things right even if you make a loss and it’s not your fault. Having respect for the client.  In the case of Michelle Bailey, CEO of Blazing The Agency, this also meant covering up the mistake of a manager in her client’s business who signed off on a $60K print run with an error.  The error was fixed, the print run reworked and Blazing The Agency footed the bill so the client’s employee could save face.  Not every company would go that far, but Michelle believes the client is always right (even when they are wrong).   Michelle suggests making sure your clients are partners, not users.

And how does Michelle get it right for her clients?  Without a doubt, it’s “by active listening”.  “ How can you make sure your solution fits the client’s needs if you don’t understand what the problem is?” says Michelle.  Mirroring back to the client in their own words clarifies the problem.  If you don’t have the solution, recommend another company who can solve the client’s problem.

Hire for cultural fit and teach the skills

All the female founders stressed that building a team that gets what you are trying to do and buying into the strategic plan is paramount to success.  Don’t hesitate to remove toxic employees from your company.  It’s not the right fit for you or the employee.   They will be happier at a different kind of company.

Use technology to expand your business

This can mean so many different things.  It could be app based software to manage employee projects, it could be software to make the quoting process more efficient.  Or it might be database management to keep track of your strategic metrics.  Whatever it is, information at your fingertips is paramount to efficiency in all areas of your business.   Technology can also change your business focus from offline to online giving you more areas of growth towards a million dollars in revenue.

Read, read and read some more

Whether you are reading for ideas, productivity, business structure, success stories or client engagement, keep reading. Or to-day should we say watch videos, listen to podcasts and attend webinars.  But like anything else, keep the end goal in mind and educate yourself only on items that fit your strategic plan.

Keep focused and head on up to the million dollar club.  Let’s get the million dollar club up from 2% to 3% of women-led businesses in the next few years.   If your business already has a million dollars in revenue, and you would like to be interviewed for this new book “Startup to Superstar”, drop a comment below.

—————————————————————————

Elaine Slatter is a Small Business Expert, founder of  XL Consulting Group and author of the popular book, “Fabulous Fempreneurship”, a complete business guide for women.  XL Consulting Group helps entrepreneurs with market planning, strategy, branding, web design and social media. She has over 30 years of executive business and marketing experience and is ready to help you rocket your business to success.  Elaine is passionate about mentoring women to become successful women entrepreneurs.   To find out more, visit XL Consulting Group or join the Fabulous Fempreneurship mastermind.

You can connect with Elaine on social media at:  Facebook Group | Twitter | Facebook

Save

Save

How To Use Your Book As A Lead Generation Tool by @JaneTabachnick

by Leave a Comment

How To Use Your Book As A Lead Generation Tool_She

by Jane Tabachnick | Featured Contributor 

Have you written a book, or perhaps you are thinking of writing a book?

You may have heard it said, a book is the new business card, but you wonder how will it help get you business? I wrote about this in an earlier post – 4 Ways Writing A Book Can Help Grow Your Business

When writing a book, you have the opportunity to turn it into the maximum lead generation tool, by building elements right into your book itself. Here are 4 ways to make your book a super lead magnet.

4 Ways to Turn Your Book into a Lead Generation Tool

When readers connect with you and your message, they will naturally want to continue to engage with you outside of your book. Highly motivated readers will go online to seek you out and start to follow you online. They may even inquire about working with you, and some will hire you.

Why leave it to chance, when you can encourage readers to engage and go deeper with you. Here are some of the ways you can incorporate calls to action within your book, that will help generate leads for your business.

Invite readers to join your email list

Your email list is natural way to bring your readers into your network and have them continue to engage with you.  By inviting them to sign up for your email list right within your book, you are suggesting an action that will benefit both of you.

Why?

  • The reader is loving you. Now you are telling them how they can get to get more of you for free. Your email list is how your readers will be able to continue to engage with you. They can keep up to date with your news – content, events, products and new books that may interest them.
  • People respond to invitations and calls to action. By letting them know you care about them and their success, and that they can get more information via your newsletter, you are deepening their engagement with you and your brand.

It can take from seven to 11 touches [email, social media, webinars…] before someone is ready to buy from you. Your newsletter will insure they get multiple touches and keep you top of mind.

Invite them to an online class or a webinar

Your reader is loving you via your book. Now you invite them to an online class or webinar where they can experience you live, as well as get to ask questions. This can be irresistible to someone who has connected with your message in print or e-book format.

You will want to set up your invitation to be evergreen. Readers may be seeing the invitation in your book today or in one year, so you don’t want to send them to a webinar page that has expired.

 Invite them to a strategy session

If you are a coach or a service provider, an invitation to a strategy session, while the most direct of the lead generation methods, can help readers become clients more quickly. A strategy sessions is a discovery call that can end with an offer if there is a mutually agreed upon fit. It’s a great way for a reader to get to know you and find out more about what it might be like to work with you.

To make it easy for you to set up these strategy sessions, I recommend you use an online calendar scheduling tool and build in a few screening questions; that way you can manage your time better and screen out requests that are not the right fit.

Invite them to your live event

If you host a regular event, annually or biannually, why not invite your readers to attend. This is both a great way to fill your events as well as provide a way for your readers to get to meet you. As an author and expert, they look up to you and will want to meet you in person and get to work with you.

My client Mai Vu put an attractive graphic featuring a special event offer towards the back of her book. She began filling her Hot Life, Hot Love™ event earlier than ever before, as readers used the coupon to sign up.

When Should You Start planning the Lead Generation aspects to your book?

If you haven’t started writing your book, this is the perfect time to think about how you’d like to continue to engage your audience/readers once they begin reading your book and beyond. Design your book to include one or two of these calls to action, so that once published, your book works even harder for you as a lead generation tool. If your book is already written, you can always revise it to build in your call[s] to action.

————————————————————–

Jane TabachnickJane Tabachnick is a digital marketing and publicity consultant, and book publisher. She works with savvy entrepreneurs and enlightened professionals to help them tell their story, become published authors, and create greater visibility, buzz and profits.

Jane is eternally inquisitive and working on perfecting her gluten free baking. She has been named one of the top 100 people online by Fast Company. As an ambivert who has often been featured or quoted in the media, she sill prefers to help her clients get visibility.

Jane is the creator of a program on Sustainable Design Entrepreneurship at NYC’s Fashion Institute where she is also an adjunct professor. Her next book, Irresistible Influence will be published in Spring 2017.

Connect with Jane: Facebook | Twitter | Linkedin

Save

Save

Do You Want To Be A Successful Business Owner? by @XLConsultingGro

by Leave a Comment

by Elaine Slatter | Featured Contributor

Of course you do, but sometimes you just don’t know the right path to success.  From my experience of many years of privately coaching and mentoring women in business, here are the top 5 tips for becoming a successful business owner.

  1. Understand your Numbersphoto-saying

Not the favourite topic for many of us, but essential to understanding your whole business.  At the beginning, when you are looking for investors/loans, the first questions will be about your business numbers.

Did you know the whole business health is in your profit and loss statement?   If you don’t understand what goes into a P&L statement, your accountant can help you interpret accounting terms such as: gross profit, fixed and variable expenses and net profit.

  1. Market Your Business and Fill the Sales Funnel

Along with understanding your numbers this is the next important part of business success.  Yes, there is a cost to customer acquisition, but without customers, where would you be?

See what millionaire and celebrity Shark, Robert Herjavec, has to say in his video about these two key steps to success.

  1. Find a Business Mentor

Many organizations, including our own Fabulous Fempreneurship community, recognize the importance of having someone help you and run free mentorship programmes.   Mentors don’t operate your business, they listen to your questions & concerns and help guide you to the right solutions.  Mentors have a wealth of experience, why not tap into their knowledge.  Asking for help isn’t a weakness, it shows how determined you are to be the best.

Business Success

  1. Have The Right Structure for Growth

This includes putting in place systems and processes as your business grows.   When you are ready to hire additional employees, this will help with the on-boarding of new members of your team.   Even if you are using contractors to help you, systems and processes will shorten their learning curve.

  1. Be Ready to Pivot for Success

Your first business idea doesn’t always work out.   Entrepreneurs usually have many ideas before one takes off.  Just read the story of Haute Chocolate and how they changed their focus away from chocolate to inventing a stock photography site for women entrepreneurs!   Talk about pivoting your business, this is a classic example of completely changing your business and finding the magic.

10 Tips for Silencing Your Inner Critic by @LUCYrk78

by Leave a Comment

10 Tips for Silencing Your Inner Critic

by Lucy Rendler-Kaplan | Featured Contributor

We all have it. That little inner voice that creeps up in the most inopportune times. The one that tells us not to ask for the promotion, that we aren’t good enough, that we shouldn’t accept that date….the list can go on and on. Sometimes it speaks to us loudly and sometimes it is simply a quiet nag throughout our day. It can last for a minute, an hour or a week. Maybe even longer. At times, we didn’t even want to get out of bed, what’s the point?

Then, one day we learned we can talk back. We learned weccan tell that voice that we ARE good enough to go after what we want.

Here are a few tips that I hope will help:

  1. Start a journal: write down what you were doing each time you began to hear that voice and look for patterns. Learn to recognize that critic for what it is. Next to that list, write down something you did that day that you felt proud once you accomplished it. Look through those proud moments when your inner critic begins to creep in.
  2. Look in the mirror: look at your reflection and tell yourself ONE good thing about what you see. If you can, keep going! Don’t stop at one. If you can only muster one positive attribute, be happy you recognized the good.
  3. Place a post-it on your mirror: It can be anything positive, the one on mine says “I am Grateful.” Make sure it’s a mirror you will look into each day, perhaps while you’re brushing your teeth.
  4. Add a positive to a photo: find a photo of yourself looking happy, a photo you have always liked an use an app that can place a positive self-affirmation or quote over the photo.
  5. Make a list of your closest friends: for each person, write a couple of sentences about each person on why you are friends, why you like them so much. It is said that we are a product of our five closest friends, so the positive attributes you see in them are most likely also seen in YOU.
  6. Think about 10 years from now: when something seems hard or I’m feeling down about something small I may have done wrong, I like to remind myself, “Will this REALLY matter 10 years from now?” Remember a test you failed miserably in high school, and thought it would ruin your life, having done so poorly on it? No? Of course you don’t.
  7. Reframe negative thoughts: put a positive ending on each one. You made a mistake yes, but what did you learn from it?
  8. Phone a friend: the best way to stop obsessing over your own shortcomings is to get outside yourself. Call a friend and inquire about their day, get THEM talking and truly listen.
  9. Cut yourself some slack: are you trying to do much? Are you rushing through things because the to-do list seems overwhelming? Move some of the day’s tasks to three days from now. The earth won’t stop turning.
  10. Put it in perspective: ok, you made a mistake. While your screw up may feel like the end of the world to you, think of how many people truly don’t care? How many don’t even know about it and never will? We are just a small part of a much larger world – teach that inner critic some perspective.

You CAN break this cycle. And you CAN start right now. Let me know in the comments some of the tips that have helped YOU when the inner critic gets too loud.

————————————————————

Lucy Rendler-KaplanLucy Rendler-Kaplan is a marketing veteran, with close to 17 years experience in field marketing management public relations and social media marketing. Both in-house and as a consultant, Lucy has created, developed and managed marketing projects for organizations including: Red Bull North America, ONE Coconut Water, Camel and Ethos Water, to name a few.

Most recently, Lucy has left corporate America to work as a consultant, focusing on small businesses and start-ups to design effective social media and marketing strategies to jumpstart brand growth. In addition to strategic business development efforts, she directs media relations, branding, advertising and website development.

As a social media consultant, Lucy works with companies in auditing their current social media efforts and creating a comprehensive social media strategy that aligns company-wide objectives through social business practices.

With an early background in journalism, Lucy regularly contributes to a number of NFL and music blogs, as well as her own, with a diverse focus encompassing Lucy’s passion not only for networking and marketing but also for fitness. She spends her free time honing her photography skills, running and watching an excessive amount of true crime shows.

Let’s connect! Twitter & Linkedin

An End To The 140 Life As We Know It by @LUCYrk78

by Leave a Comment

An End To The 140 Life As We Know It

by Lucy Rendler-Kaplan | Featured Contributor

It’s hard to imagine life without Twitter for those of us that spend hours upon hours on it each day. If you are like me, you have definitely made the joke “I even have conversations in person in 140 characters!” more times than you’d like to admit. But there IS something to be said about how Twitter’s 140-character limit has trained us to speak, write and communicate more succinctly.

Suddenly, and without leaking information early, we have now learned that Twitter plans to allow users to write and share tweets much longer than the current 140 character limit. While it seemed to go against everything Twitter was built on, at first many of us were skeptical that this was actually something in the works, until Twitter CEO and Co-Founder Jack Dorsey chimed in.

We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it. Instead, what if the text… was actually text? – Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO & Co-Founder

I’ll admit: when I first started on Twitter and didn’t have any clue how to express myself in only 140 characters, I DID take a picture of longer text I’d written out in word and tweeted it. It’s ok, you can admit that you did too. Even early on, however, I felt almost guilty about having done that, and can honestly tell you that it only happened that one time. I spend at least 2 hours on Twitter each day, and follow many people, reading even more people’s timelines than I follow, and I never see people “taking screenshots of text and tweeting it.”

Without more than half a second of thought, I can come up with suggestions of changes I’d like to see Twitter make, and upping the character limit would never come up. First and foremost, I’d love the ability to edit tweets. I can see your head nodding in agreement. I would also love to be able to “mute” a hashtag, just like I can “mute” certain people that I don’t want to see daily, but don’t necessarily want to unfollow.

Keep in mind, Jack has not used the words “10,000 characters” yet, but it seems like a good guess for the upcoming change, given that direct messages were changed last August to allow up to 10,000 characters. We also do not have an exact timeframe as to when this change will occur, but rumors are it will happen before the end of March of this year.

What does this mean for all of us?

1. We will no longer need to use services to shorten our URLs.

2. Our messages won’t have to be written with 1a, 2a or 1/3, 2/3 – we can simply keep writing all our thoughts and comments into one, much longer tweet. This could help eliminate or cut down on annoying Tweet Storms, where people go on diatribes in 20 tweets, clogging up timelines.

3. Twitter COULD become more like Instagram, with people adding in 11 hashtags for each tweet.

4. Haters, trolls and angry users have much more room to spew out thoughts we didn’t want to see in 140 characters.

5. People will most likely begin to use Twitter as a sort of microblog.

And let’s remember – when Twitter first opened up, that is precisely what it was intended for – it was not intended to become a social network!

6. More characters open up the possibility for more searchable content marketing, giving you more of an opportunity for brands to interact with their consumers right in the platform they are already on.

7. Customer Service will become more transparent as lines of communication won’t have to be directed off Twitter into a call center, email or direct message in order to fully discuss issues a customer might be facing.

8. Context will be easier to see, without having to scramble to find all the tweets that landed a discussion where it ended.

9. Marketers will receive more data on who is reading what, and for how long in order to more intelligently tailor ads.

10. Twitter wants to be Facebook?

The scariest part of this news at first glance seemed to be the thought of what our timelines would look like with everyone taking advantage of having 10,000 characters available to them. Fear not – we soon were told that tweets and timelines would still look like they had the imposed 140 character limit, but would also include a CTA to expand the tweet and see the fully written, longer tweet, without any change to the timeline design. Personally, this made me breathe a bit easier. I can choose to open tweets and see longer form content from people I want, and can easily just not engage with opening the longer tweet when I don’t feel like it.

I think this change FEELS a lot bigger and like more of an intrusion than it will actually be. Looking at this post, I am currently only at 731 words – how often will people actually use ALL 10,000? And let’s be real – how many times did we “hear” rumors on “huge changes” coming to our favorite social media platforms that never came to fruition? Do we have certainly this will happen? And honestly, do we have a choice? We didn’t when it came to exploding hearts, or losing favorites to likes. One choice we do have? You know that other rumor: “adapt or die.”

—————————————————-

Lucy Rendler-KaplanLucy Rendler-Kaplan is a marketing veteran, with close to 17 years experience in field marketing management public relations and social media marketing. Both in-house and as a consultant, Lucy has created, developed and managed marketing projects for organizations including: Red Bull North America, ONE Coconut Water, Camel and Ethos Water, to name a few.

Most recently, Lucy has left corporate America to work as a consultant, focusing on small businesses and start-ups to design effective social media and marketing strategies to jumpstart brand growth. In addition to strategic business development efforts, she directs media relations, branding, advertising and website development.

As a social media consultant, Lucy works with companies in auditing their current social media efforts and creating a comprehensive social media strategy that aligns company-wide objectives through social business practices.

With an early background in journalism, Lucy regularly contributes to a number of NFL and music blogs, as well as her own, with a diverse focus encompassing Lucy’s passion not only for networking and marketing but also for fitness. She spends her free time honing her photography skills, running and watching an excessive amount of true crime shows.

3 Resolutions For New Year To Make Your Brand Grow by @upasnakakroo

by 2 Comments

by Upasna Kakroo | Featured Contributor

It’s the end of the year, and a time for family and giving. It’s also a time to take stock of your business initiatives and plan for the next year. Many of us tend to fail at our resolutions consistently. My small trick for making sure I am able to keep up with my new year goals is to prioritize a few. It’s also important know why that goal is important and note a measurable result that will fulfill it. From a branding and small business perspective, here’s a list of my top 3 resolutions. These are an absolute must to make your brand grow in the new year.

3 Resolutions For New Year To Make Your Brand Grow

3 Resolutions For New Year To Make Your Brand Grow

1. Invest in learning or improving new skills: Let me show you the a-b-c approach for this resolution.

  1. Reason– Why do you need it: Small businesses spend over 20 hours per week on marketing. A lot of times these hours are inflated because we’re so busy learning things on our own, and reinventing the wheel. You’re not the first person ever to build a brand. Leverage the experience of experts and those that have done similar stuff.
  2. How to do it: There are a ton of websites that allow you to learn new skills. Future proof your brands. From marketing to design to coding, you can learn something easily at the comfort of your home and be able to use it in your business. There are a ton of free and paid courses available. Just like the gym membership, I tend to take it more seriously, if it’s paid. But you need to find your own initiative and drive. Also, if you’ve never invested in a training before, it’s good to check the background of your instructor and see their body of work. I also prefer “live” online or in-person workshops as these allow you to be more interactive. If I’m unsure, I ask tons of questions, or choose something that’s not exceptionally expensive so that I feel I’m not going over budget. You could also learn via books/ebooks on your topic.
  3. How to measure it: Define areas you’d like to be trained on. And make a list of topics you’d like to cover in a year. Define your budget, preferable timing and method of training. And at the end of the year, see how far you’ve come.

2. Get out and meet others: Many entrepreneurs  and small businesses tend to work in set ups that allow for interactions with select clients and a few employees. Many work from home. Step out of that zone and get inspired.

  1. Reason– Why you need it: Diversity in any format makes us smarter. When you interact with people from outside your usual circles, you get new ideas. These can find a way into your business or foster a sense of community and support.
  2. How to do it– Find Meetups, Facebook events or any other mechanism to discover physical events in your neighborhood. I’m very new to the country, and I can tell you these work for everyone. It’s important to build connections in person. And get feedback on your ideas from people who’re unrelated to your work. It doesn’t have to be a business group. You can join a bunch of hikers, writers, film enthusiasts or anyone that you feel you can spend quality time doing something tangible.
  3. How to measure it: Decide on a number of Meetups in a quarter that you’d like to attend. And just keep ticking them off.

3. Define your big objectives for each quarter: I shared last month that sometimes, we’re the ones holding ourselves back. But it’s hard to fix anything unless we know what’s wrong. Therefore, setting objectives is crucial.

  1. Reason– Why do it: Write down your goals. This works better than just mumbling something to yourself. You need to know what you expect your business to do in the coming quarter. This is true even if you’re not a publicly listed company or someone with an investor asking for this information. You can’t reach goals that you don’t set.
  2. How to do it– Set up SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound) goals. Use a spreadsheet or your little black book. Write down your goals, how you’d measure them, the measure of success or failure, and set deadlines. Do this each quarter. See what’s working and where you’re failing. Learn skills or use expert help where you need.
  3. How to measure it: Set a calendar entry in your work calendar. Imagine you’re a listed company and spend a few hours sharing your thoughts about what you’ve done in the past quarter and where you are with respect to your SMART goals. If you’re a one-person company, share this with yourself. Write a blog post talking about it or make a journal entry. Each quarter force yourself to review your progress. It’s 3 hours in a quarter but really valuable.

What are your new year resolutions for next year? Do share your thoughts with me in the comments below or on Twitter.

Original image: Flickr

—————————————————————-

Upasna KakrooUpasna Kakroo is the Co-founder of an online branding and content marketing Startup, Brandanew. Her previous experiences include, McKinsey & Co., Rocket Internet among others. Upasna has devoured urban culture, art by traveling in 30 countries, living in three and blogging about these for over 12 years. Upasna sounds overeducated having gone to school for her BS (engineering) in India, MS (telecom) in the UK and MBA (marketing) in Germany. She currently lives in Ann Arbor Michigan.

Connections: Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | Google+

Tis The Season For Giving Back by @LUCYrk78

by Leave a Comment

Tis The Season To Give Back

by Lucy Rendler-Kaplan | Featured Contributor

Many businesses realize that affiliating themselves with charities are not only a great opportunity to get involved in giving back, but it is also a powerful marketing tactic. The business gets to develop a larger network and it helps others at the same time. Consumers like to associate themselves with businesses that support causes – while they may not have the means to donate regularly to a charity (even if they wanted to) it makes people feel good that they are giving back while purchasing something they need.

This idea is nothing new – the idea of companies “giving back” goes by many different names and uses a variety of marketing slogans: Social Corporate Responsibility (CSR) and “Voting With Your Dollars” are the two I tend to hear most often. Simply put, CSR refers to the idea of participating in initiatives that benefit others.

As a marketing or brand manager, it can be confusing and overwhelming to decide what charity to align with. Once you have done your research and found charities that are worthwhile, transparent with where the donations they receive go and have similar views and visions, how do you pick one? When I do this with clients, I tend to choose charities that I am personally drawn to, and also ones that seem to be close to my consumers’ hearts. It is more important that the chosen charity would be one that my current and target consumers would support, than if I would support it with my own money.

The next criteria to choosing a charity from a brand standpoint, is one that gives the brand a broader reach than they would get on their own, and brings a meaningful and engaged community to your brand. This is a win-win for both you and your charity. Charities, like brands, are interested in building their membership base. Partnering with a charity not only brings their community to you, but it also allows the charity to get their message out to all the people your brand interacts with, with the goal being to bring new members to support them, as well as your brand. Cause marketing is actually no different than any other partnership you might form between your brand a for-profit business. You are looking for another like-minded company, where by coming together, you both will have the opportunity to amplify your messaging with a shared voice.

As you build up the relationship between your brand and the charity you have aligned with, you will want to get in front of the employees that work with the charity and explain your product or services to them. Most charities also have people that follow the charity or support the charity in some way. These people are all target consumers by indirect association. As the relationship deepens, you can look to these people to become brand ambassadors, as their charity will also benefit from your brands success. Perhaps you are donating a specific portion of your brand’s sales to the charity- you can invite the charity to help get the message out that they will be the beneficiaries of sales during a specified time period.

While you are working on a charity marketing initiative, it is important to keep your motives clear. I would suggest that the end goal is always helping people, making a difference.

————————————————————

Lucy Rendler-KaplanLucy Rendler-Kaplan is a marketing veteran, with close to 17 years experience in field marketing management public relations and social media marketing. Both in-house and as a consultant, Lucy has created, developed and managed marketing projects for organizations including: Red Bull North America, ONE Coconut Water, Camel and Ethos Water, to name a few.

Most recently, Lucy has left corporate America to work as a consultant, focusing on small businesses and start-ups to design effective social media and marketing strategies to jumpstart brand growth. In addition to strategic business development efforts, she directs media relations, branding, advertising and website development.

As a social media consultant, Lucy works with companies in auditing their current social media efforts and creating a comprehensive social media strategy that aligns company-wide objectives through social business practices.

With an early background in journalism, Lucy regularly contributes to a number of NFL and music blogs, as well as her own, with a diverse focus encompassing Lucy’s passion not only for networking and marketing but also for fitness. She spends her free time honing her photography skills, running and watching an excessive amount of true crime shows.

Let’s connect! Twitter & Linkedin

Make Your Social Media Great by @mwqpr

by Leave a Comment

by Michelle W. Quinn | Featured Contributor

Make Your Social Media Great

Social media can be exhausting.

It involves pinpointing a target audience, followed by posting at relevant times with strategic creativity. The job is underestimated. It’s almost like a layered cake, where the separate hidden layers are what make it great…

Who knew posting pictures could have this much to it? What you thought may be an easy task ends up being mentally draining. Additionally, when you’re running a social media account for a particular business, the job is even more grueling.

How do you keep your business’ social media successful, as well as staying successful in your day-job? A social media audit can help by giving you direction. It helps eliminate what you’re doing wrong, and where your strengths are. It finds the information necessary for maintaining an effective social media platform, helping you to keep your sanity.

A clear, cohesive message across each social media platform is critical in attracting your target
audience. Your followers initially followed you because they have interest in your business’
message and style. Keep this apparent in each post. And through which platform are you
sending this message? Facebook? Instagram? Twitter? For whatever content you’re posting, it should be catered around which platform you plan on using. A majority of Facebook users consist of the Baby Boomer generation. Instagram, however, is mostly occupied by Millennials and younger.

So, which platform you use should depend on your audience. What about the platforms that are newly trending? Snapchat and Tumblr being examples. These platforms allow you creatively demonstrate your content while reaching a wide array of audiences.

TRistoranteo understand how to maintain a successful social media profile, we’re giving ONE lucky She Own’s It reader a COMPLIMENTARY social media audit.

A social media audit will report and update suggestions for your own social media. It allows you to enjoy your social media strategy, knowing the outcome will be successful. Have your layered cake and eat it too!

Kickstart your social media audit today!

 

 

—————————————————-

Michelle QuinnMichelle W. Quinn is the founder of MWQPR a Lifestyle Public Relations & Marketing Agency. A seasoned marketing, public relations and social media professional, she leads highly effective global marketing, communications, strategy and customer advocacy campaigns. She has experience across diverse industries, particularly Luxury, Retail, Technology, Travel, Hospitality, Financial Services and Consumer Goods in both corporate and consulting roles. Michelle has acquired a deep understanding of client profiles and needs from small business owners to the affluent global consumer.

Currently preparing to launch an online program for small business owners to embrace their social media and marketing strategy.  Michelle is fluent in Italian and currently studying French. A quick wit, New York sense of directness and superstar Auntie, Michelle also volunteers with Ovarian Cancer National Alliance, supporting their Race Across America Campaign.

Connect with Michelle: Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | Instagram