Business Articles

1. Customers: The Key To Successful Marketing

By Debbie LaChusa How well do you know your customers? What is the primary reason your customers or clients come to you? Or purchase your product or service? What is the Number One problem you solve for them? Do you know? Are you certain? If you don't, your marketing could be missing the mark, and you could be missing out on sales. Uncovering Your "Key Selling Point" This is the Single Marketing Message t... read more

2. Groupware: What Works the Way Businesses Do?

By Joe Miller Groupware The internet is full of 1.5 million to 7 million indexed pages of groupware packages available on the market today. Every business needs groupware to control, manage, or track documents. Groupware is similar to other systems that enable document management, often using a centralized system to work through business collaboration processes to create budgets, market reports, presenta... read more

3. Groupware and Online Collaboration: Collaboration Series #4

By Joe Miller This article is the fourth of a series of articles exploring specific aspects of groupware. The brief informational articles in this series discuss some of the technologies associated with groupware, as well as some of the characteristics of groupware. Some of these characteristics may go hand in hand with business collaborative needs. Other characteristics go beyond what some groupware provide... read more

4. Collaboration: 3 Keys to Keeping Your Documents from Getting Lost in the Shuffle

By Joe Miller > Often, collaborating documents in a team or in a business can feel like a complex sports play gone wrong. The ball gets passed off to the wrong person, dropped, or even lost. In addition, most document collaboration happens electronically. We are always told to save and resave these electronic documents, but it gets to the point that we can’t even keep track of which draft we’re on. Not to men... read more

5. Groupware: The Triple Threat of Document Collaboration Technology

By Joe Miller Document Collaboration has made leaps and bounds since the explosion of the technology revolution. In any business era, the need to collaborate remains a constant. What varies is the ability of technology to keep up with demands of the collaborators. Groupware has risen to the challenge, delivering solutions that streamline the editorial process - tracking documents, sorting, and even merging ... read more

6. Character: Is It Necessary In Leadership? (Part Two)

By Brent Filson PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: mail to: brent@actionleadership.com Word count: 838 Summary: One element of leadership that many leaders ign... read more

7. Groupware: 3 Tips for Sifting Through Collaboration Software Suites

By Joe Miller Collaboration and business are difficult, if not impossible, to separate. What makes effective collaboration possible without overloading hard drives and confusing your document versions? The answer is groupware. Groupware is software that is available to assist businesses in tracking document versions that are created, edited, reedited, and finalized by various participants in various commit... read more

8. Love: The Killer App

By Kathy Paauw "Love is the act of intelligently and sensibly sharing your knowledge, networks, and compassion with your business partners." --Tim Sanders, Chief Solutions Officer, Yahoo Yahoo senior executive, Tim Sanders, published a book on Valentine's Day titled Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends. In his book he explains that the road to prosperity is paved with a comm... read more

9. Real Estate Post Card Marketing; Million Dollar Mailings

By Lanard Perry Real Estate Post Card Marketing is an underutilized real estate marketing strategy known by many, but used by few. The test? How many agents do you know market real estate with postcards. Not many - that's what I thought! Yet, those that do maintain high visibility with their prospects. From useful tips to delicious recipes, customized real estate marketing post cards can leave ... read more

10. Review: Words That Sell

By Karon Thackston by Karon Thackston © 2005 http://www.copywritingcourse.com/wordswork.html It's the Golden Rule of copywriting. "Know your target audience." It is impossible to persuade someone you know nothing about to take any type of action. But the question remains: How - exactly - do you get to know your prospective customers? For copywriters, this task is the most time-consuming. When you're fa... read more

11. SEO: When Being Optimized Can Hurt

By Lisa Packer It’s a marketing dream come true: A potential customer, looking for what you have to offer, types a few words into her favorite search engine and voila! She is led directly to your website where she can go from “prospect” to “customer.” The best part is, it didn’t cost you anything (except time and elbow grease) to get to the top of her results. Unless, of course you paid for someone else’s tim... read more

12. Stress: Guilty As Charged

By Steve Gillman How To Defend Yourself Do you ever find yourself feeling overwhelmed? Do you sometimes feel like you just have too much to think about? Does it make you tired, irritable, or even depressed? What can you do about it? People rarely go to the doctor to say "I think I have stress," and yet the National Institutes of Health say that 80% of illnesses are caused by stress, directly or indire... read more

13. Marketing: Are You Focused?

By Lisa Packer In early 1992, President George H.W. Bush was riding high. He was sitting on an almost unprecedented 80% approval rating following the first Gulf War. Conventional wisdom pegged him as a shoe-in for a second term. Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton faced an uphill battle. He was largely unknown at the start of 1992, facing a very popular incumbent. Worse for him, his opponent “owned” foreign policy... read more

14. Marketing: Can I Trust You?

By Lisa Packer We live in an unprecedented era of communication. Because of this, your prospects are literally bombarded from all directions with marketing messages. They’ve heard so many hyped claims, that they automatically distrust them all. How can you avoid this in your marketing messages? How can you convince them that what you promise is what you will actually deliver? First of all, tell the truth.... read more

15. Mechanical Poetry; Part Two

By Steve Gillman What do you do when you want to write poetry? I hope your answer is "I start writing." Even writing a bad poem is better than waiting for the "right words." You can always throw it away, and the process has begun. You'll start to find the words sooner than if you just waited. Here are some more ways to get started. Sing A Poem Try a little experiment - alone in the basement if you mus... read more

16. Real Estate Marketing; The Profitability Of Past Clients

By Lanard Perry Many real estate agents spend a lot of time and money marketing new prospects, while completely overlooking the best ones they have; old ones. We all realize the importance of acquiring new clients, but how many of us truly grasp the importance of not only retaining old ones, but actually expanding on those relationships? The cost of acquiring new customers is escalating, no matter the indu... read more

17. Teamware: Answers the 5 Questions of Document Collaboration

By Joe Miller Every organization which creates collaborative documents, whether they are budgets, presentations, reports, spreadsheets, or other documents recognizes that collaborative efforts are requirement. That collaboration always forces the 5 eternal document collaboration questions: Who? What? Where? When? How? The reason I refer to them as eternal is that every day businesses are faced with these que... read more

18. CHANGE: Do you Do It? or Does It Undo You?

By Connie Butler Change: Do You Do it or Does it Undo You? It has been said that CHANGE is THE only constant. Change is all around us every day and every day our lives our changing. It CAN’T be avoided. We can’t bury our heads in the sand or a favored pillow and pretend it isn’t there. • Sometimes it creeps up slowly: over time we’ve gotten older, gradually the kids grow and leave, incrementally our heal... read more

19. Teamware: Avoid the Ad Hoc Shuffle

By Joe Miller Teamware Efforts are continually made to manage the unavoidable ad hoc business process, but ad hoc processes do not necessarily mean a pile of messy, shuffled documents, at least not anymore. Teamware is software which tracks and manages the ad hoc business collaboration. Look at the search engines to see just how many solutions similar to teamware are available to help businesses organize ... read more

20. Productivity: So Many Small Things

By Robert F. Abbott We rarely see stories or articles about productivity in the newspaper or on TV. When we do, it’s usually just another story on the economy that defies understanding. Which is too bad. Our prosperous standard of living arrived, in large part, because of the ability of companies and organizations everywhere, and for the past several hundred years, to increase productivity. Productivity simply... read more

21. Productivity: The greatest TV story ever told...

By Robert F. Abbott The gains we get from increased productivity come to us in two main ways: higher wages, or less expensive products. Let's take a look at one product that costs less and delivers more value because of higher productivity: When I grew up in the 1950s, everyone in the neighborhood took notice when a new television set arrived. The cost of a set represented a big portion of a family's income. ... read more

22. Anti-Phishing Bill Introduced To Congress

By Richard A. Chapo Sen. Partick J. Leahy has introduced the Anti-Phishing Act of 2005 to Congress for consideration. The Act would allow federal prosecutors to seek fines of up to $250,000 and prison sentences of up to five years against individuals convicted for promoting phishing scams. Online parody and political speech sites would be excluded from prosecution. “Phishing” is an online scam used to ... read more

23. Real Estate And Marketing; Part 1

By Lanard Perry There are two aspects of real estate and marketing that are paramount to your success as a real estate professional; the acquisition of new customers and the retention of old ones. As is the case in other industries the cost of acquiring new customers is escalating. So, it becomes more prudent to continue marketing to past customers. It’s less expensive and can be equally profitable. How... read more

24. Relation: building opt in list and affiliate marketing

By Eugenijus Sakalauskas Building opt in list and affiliate marketing have become synonymous to online success as an effective internet marketing strategy. For many online sites, building opt in list and affiliate marketing have proven quite profitable. Primarily because most online users are not exposed to any unscrupulous internet marketing strategies prevalent on the World Wide Web. As an effective Inter... read more