With small businesses moving in droves to pay-per-click (PPC) online ads, the ability to gauge click quality just got a welcome shot in the arm. After years of planning and wrangling over standards, the Media Rating Council (MRC) — an online ad industry group — has awarded the first-ever click quality certifications to four leading sites, including Microsoft, Business.com (which publishes What Works for Business) and two others not yet publicly named.

In short, this provides — for the first time ever — an objective, audited means of assuring that the clicks you pay for are generated by real people with a real interest in the product or service you are advertising. MRC puts sites that apply for accreditation through a rigorous “stress test” to ensure that click quality meets strict industry standards. Sites with sub-standard traffic and shoot-from-the-hip measuring methods won’t pass the test — and there aren’t any government bailouts available. Read the full entry

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Financial Armageddon has been postponed.  Despite the gloom, know this: There’s still money to be made in high-growth businesses with low barriers to entry and terrific prospects for entrepreneurs willing to put in some hard work.  IBISWorld, one of the nation’s top market research firms, has identified the high-growth businesses with the best money-making opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors right now. Here’s how they stack up, ranked by annual growth expectations over the next 3-5 years:

1. eCommerce and Online Auctions:  With anticipated annual growth of 12.1 percent to 2013, this sector has huge opportunities to buck the economic trends. Newly-thrifty Americans are going online in ever-increasing numbers to search for the best deals on everything. This industry has low entry barriers and the cost of purchasing, establishing, and maintaining a website is low, making it an encouraging prospect for new entrants, says Toon van Beeck, senior analyst with IBISWorld. Just keep in mind that the costs of establishing, and maintaining a more advanced e-commerce site with enhanced functionality and features is much more significant. Setting up and maintaining databases can also be costly and maintenance requirements are ongoing.

2. Video Game Retailing: As an industry experiencing 11.4 percent annual growth, video game retailing is a lucrative business right now. With low barriers to entry and modest initial capital requirements, this industry is well suited for new business owners. Plus, securing contracts from game wholesalers is relatively easy these days, and the only significant barrier for new entrants is the cost of buying stock for initial sale. Read the full entry

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Dear Dan – Our sales have tanked and profits seem a distant memory. Nevertheless, I’m an optimist who believes things will turn around. Meanwhile, how can we prepare and position our business right now for better days ahead? — Preparing

Dear Preparing:  One upside of an economic downturn is that it offers opportunities to take a fresh look at how you operate and make some of the relatively simple changes that can put your business at the front of the line when things start to pick up.  Small businesses can often see an immediate bump in sales just by making a few easy tweaks, such as fixing website functionality or revising a sales pitch.

Here are ten things you can do to prepare your business for profits ahead. Read the full entry

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Succeeding in small business today requires a solid grip on your finances and an arsenal of tech tools to help you collaborate with colleagues, schedule your time, manage customer relationships and leverage the Internet.  And guess what? You can get all of that – and more – absolutely free from some of the nation’s top tech companies that support small business.  

The free products, services and solutions from these three organizations alone have already helped millions of business owners succeed. They represent some of the “core competencies” any business needs to survive and prosper, including finance, technology, information and customer relationships.  Here they are – free for the taking:   Read the full entry

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If you sell business to business (B2B) — and especially if you are launching a new B2B product or service — here’s good news:  Your job is far easier than business-to-consumer sellers who must convince hordes of fickle, faceless, un-invested citizens to buy their latest gizmo.

But you — as a B2B maven — can easily get potential customers to do much of the heavy lifting for you.  B2B sales expert Dan Adams says they’ll even do it willingly. “Compared to end consumers, your B2B buyers are more insightful, interested, rational and fewer in number,” says Adams, president of Ohio-based Advanced Industrial Marketing, Inc.  “They are perfect marketing partners and if you don’t take advantage of their clear-headed wisdom, your new product launch will suffer.”

The purchasing process has changed. The Internet and other digital technologies now drive the B2B marketplace. It’s all about the free exchange of information. And unlike yesteryear when the onus was on you to seek out customers, it now makes sense to let prospects find you on their terms and timetable. Research by MarketingSherpa.com shows that customers now find suppliers – not the other way around – in 80 percent of B2B transactions. Adams recommends these steps to B2B success: Read the full entry

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Many businesses both large and small make the mistake of trying to increase profits only by boosting volume or cutting costs. There’s another vital component that — oddly — tends to get overlooked:  Pricing. But this is pricing on a regular, strategic basis — not the rampant, ad hoc discounting taking place now in the face of recession.

Millions of business owners are boarding the search engine optimization (SEO) bandwagon to boost their share of web traffic, or jumping into social media marketing with hope and a prayer.  But those tactics won’t translate to bottom line success if you don’t also optimize your prices.  Think of it as VPO, or Value Price Optimization. It boils down to a simple question: Do you know what your customers are really willing to pay, and why?  Read the full entry

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Dear Dan: The slow economy is taking a toll on our business. Things really feel stagnant here. What are some good ways to regain a little competitive energy that’s gone flat along with business overall?  - Slumping

Dear Slumping: If sales are stalled and things seem stagnant at your business, this might be a good time to consider a fresh look at how you are operating in some key areas. This can be especially valuable if you’ve been in business a long time, in which case some of your methods may need a little freshening up.

But even if you’ve only been around a short time, small businesses moving beyond the initial stages of startup find themselves facing an entire new set of challenges. The “to-do” list gets even longer, and is filled with tasks that didn’t exist before. Likewise, a bad economy adds to the to-do list as well.

A website that seemed great a couple of years ago might now be woefully inadequate. Your business might need to review benefits such as health insurance or retirement plans to look for cost savings. Vendor contracts may be ripe for cost savings. Outdated technology might be causing you to lose business. Bookkeeping systems could use streamlining and marketing methods that once sparkled might simply not be working any more.

And what about that pool of customers you’ve carefully coddled?  Are you taking care of them like you should? Customer service is an area that’s prone to breakdown.

Wherever you turn, there are needs that will either become problems for your business, or opportunities, depending on whether you put them off until later or face them now. Here are seven ways that you can use current conditions to change the way you run your business: Read the full entry

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The $25 billion-per-year U.S. venture capital industry has grown fat and ineffective, and will have to shrink by as much as half to regain status as an economic force in America. That’s the conclusion of a gut-punch study released today by the highly respected Kauffman Foundation, a premier non-profit that supports entrepreneurship. The stunning conclusions will likely send shock waves through venture capital-dom.

Kauffman came out with guns blazing, ripping the VC industry for having become far too comfy with itself, its structure and compensation. And it debunks the myth that American entrepreneurship lives on VC support. In fact, only about 16 percent of the 900 unique companies that appeared on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies over the last 10 years had venture capital backing.

And the report also reveals that only a tiny percentage — less than 1 percent — of the estimated 600,000 new “employer” businesses (more than 1 person) created yearly in the U.S. get VC money…  Read the full entry

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Got a local business?  The Google Local Business Center (LBC) has just launched a new free tool that lets you easily get helpful information that includes:

• Impressions: The number of times your business listing appeared as a result on a Google.com or Google Maps search in a given period.
• Actions: The number of times someone took action. For example, the number of times they clicked through to your website or requested driving directions to your business.
• Top Search Queries or Keywords: Which specific queries (keywords or phrases) led customers to your listing. For example, did they find your cafe by searching for “tea” or “coffee?”
• Zip codes where driving directions come from: Which Zip Codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location.

I’ve often urged small business owners to take this simple (and free) step: Read the full entry

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Psssssst! Got a small manufacturing company, or are you starting one? Here’s something you might not want your competition to know about.  Ready? Here goes: There is a low-profile but high-octane national network of 393 manufacturing assistance centers —stocked to the gills with cutting edge expertise — whose sole purpose in life is to help small widget makers like yours become more tech-savvy, more efficient, more competitive and more profitable. 

Better yet, you can tap this small army of experts for help in nearly every aspect of your manufacturing business, from improving plant layout, to getting your shop floor in shape, to restructuring your finances, upgrading your Web site, securing specialized software or you name it. There’s a cost, albeit a small one – generally a fraction of what you’d pay privately for similar services (if you could even find them).  shutter Read the full entry

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