Advice for Solo Entrepreneurs and Small Business

Over at AWeber.com you can find a brief, but useful series of three articles on setting up an email marketing calendar. Marketing calendars are so important that I’ll be devoting a post or two to them myself, though not specific to email campaigns. Check out the AWeber article here.

Pinny Cohen has a useful review of four very good productivity tools for freelancers on his blog Life of an Internet Entrepreneur. Along with these four, I would recommend Yugma for desktop sharing and online meetings. Check it out.

If the infrastructure is sound, you’ll manage to catch many problems before they become real disasters. For example, across the street from my house in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California:

In this case, it was phone lines holding a 40 foot tree off the ground, keeping it from blocking road access. In your case, it might be having a process in place for dealing with dissatisfied customers or suppliers who go out of business overnight.

Wondering how somebody came up with the idea for reusable shopping bags that are easy to carry? A few years ago, Andy Keller was in the mood to make some home improvements. He did some work around the house, then made a dump run to dispose of some household waste. At the sight of the plastic shopping bags filling the landfill, Keller recalls, “I was instantly shocked and inspired by the tremendous waste, visually dominated by all the plastic bags. On the way home, I thought about why people don’t use reusable bags. My conclusion was that they are hard to use and are often left at home.”

ChicoBag Founder and CEO Andy Keller

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We’ve talked about many ways to get your business in shape. Here are ten of the most important and immediately effective ones:

Ask Customers for Testimonials—Testimonials are critical in building credibility for your business.

Perform a Breakeven Analysis—Unless you do it, you won’t know if you’re really making money.

Get Help When You Need It—You can’t do it all. And hiring other professionals to help you will free you up to do the things you love.

Perform a SWOT Analysis Now—The best way to figure out just where you need to improve or hire somebody.

Create Effective Project Proposals—Create a template that you can use for every bid. Just fill in the blanks.

Build the Project Statement of Work—Create a template that you can use to lay out your projects for your clients and yourself.

Put Business Systems in Place—Every function in business can be simplified with a system, whether it’s getting customers, pitching customers, doing the work, billing, customer service, or follow-up marketing.

Match Your Image to Your Market—Using the wrong image for your market can be deadly. Like playing elevator music for your market of punk rock aficianados.

Check Out the Best Online Invoicing Applications—These applications will simplify and speed up how you bill and get your money.

5 Selling Truths You Must Learn—Embrace these truths and you’ll improve your new business effectiveness.

Free Business Tools You Need—These free tools will help you get a handle on your business finances.