A smaller group of companies will tell consumers that stores will remain closed on the holiday, reinforcing their commitment to the importance of family.

The proliferation of smartphones and tablets has facilitated this trend. Shoppers who are on the road,  away from their work visiting family and may welcome a distraction. Some companies will use the days before Thanksgiving to remind consumers, via e-mails about mobile shopping opportunities.

Think about whether you want to create a holiday promotion for your business and whether it makes sense to include emails in your marketing sequence.

As Entrepreneurs, we frequently have well meaning friends and family question our business choice. We’re told to get something more stable, something that comes with regular hours and health benefits. It’s tempting to get discouraged especially if you haven’t yet achieved monetary success. But resist you must, because you are limited only by what YOU believe to be true and the amount of effort you’re willing to expend to achieve your dream.

Both Williams and Federer have endured challenging injuries and personal situations. While Federer has remained one of the top ranked players, he had dropped to number 3 in the world. Williams came into the season ranked close to 200 in the world. As of this week, Federer will be ranked #1 and Williams #4.
They both imagined a bigger outcome for themselves and were willing to work to make it happen even when people around them were saying it wouldn’t.

You have the ability to achieve the success of your dreams.There are many examples of people who didn’t accept other’s limitations for them. I want you to be one of them.

Email Marketing

touch with your customers. The problem is that everyone is in email overload. Our

in-baskets are filled to the brim so your message really needs to stand out in order for us to

open it. The first thing I tell my clients is to start with a business goal. Determine how

your email campaign will support and enable you to reach that goal.

Next, create a compelling subject line that will capture the readers curiosity. If the subject

line isn’t interesting, the email won’t be read.

Then create a plan. Carefully lay out in advance how many emails you will send, which

ones will make an offer and which ones will provide information or entertainment.

Finally, measure your results. The bottom line for every marketing promotion, lead generation

vehicle or marketing channel should be how well it accomplishes the goals you set

for its success. That goes for low cost efforts like email as well as higher cost efforts.

Popular metrics for email marketing are Open Rate(the number of people who opened your email)

Click Through Rate (the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email) and Unsubscribe Rate (the percentage of people who clicked the unsubscribe button).  Popular email tools such as

Constant Contact and iContact will provide these stats as part of your subscription package.

Whether your email marketing goal is to generate new sales or stay in touch with current clients, make sure

your email is the one that gets opened immediately.

Now I can make it a point to find a little flower shop and set up my vase along with a photo of my family and suddenly, a hotel room seems a little more life home. Of course when I first saw it, I said – ” I should have thought of that!” It’s such a simple but elegant solution.

The folks at trend watching reminded me that innovation doesn’t have to be serious. It can be fun and quirky as well. I highlight three of the mini-trends here that you can use to spark some creativity in your business:

1. Happiness Trend – My flower vase fits this category. It’s a little thing that brings a bit of peace and calm to the potentially stressful situation of being away from home
2. Embedded Stories – Adding a personal history  or back-story about you or your product creates an emotional link with your prospects and customers.
3. Professional – Giving regular people access to professional quality products and services. A digital single-lens reflex camera is a step above the average point and shoot camera and is geared to enthusiasts who want the same features and functions that a professional photographer would have.

These techniques can be used by any business type to stand out from their competition. You just need a little creativity to make it happen.

Planning tomorrow's agenda

In a recent article on American Express’ Open Forum, Elaine Pofeldt discussed five daily habits of  successful entrepreneurs. The one that really resonated with me was Plan tomorrow’s agenda today . I’ve found that small successes build upon each other – a satisfied customer recommends you to a friend who then hires you. The friend recommends you for a speaking engagement. All of a sudden, your business has momentum and you start attracting new prospects and potential partners. But just like turning a crank, getting that momentum started in the first place isn’t always easy to do. What I’ve found is that creating business systems keep me on track and give me the capacity to respond to opportunities. One of my critical business systems is calendar management.

I’m a pretty organized person so I resisted the idea of planning tomorrow’s agenda today for a long time. My attitude was that I already had a calendar to schedule important events and meetings. Why bother scheduling things down to the minute when I never knew what might pop up in my in basket or phone the next day. Then a few weeks ago, I attended Susan Kousek’s Get Organized Workshop. What I learned in that workshop is the difference between planning an agenda and scheduling appointments. Rather than trying to micro-schedule my day, I identify the 2, 3 or 4 things that must get accomplished the following day. I know that I have to fit them in at some point. Now if I need to handle a hot email or phone call, I can just re-prioritize as needed. At the end of the day, I can see what’s still on my list and move them to a different day.

The real breakthrough I learned from Susan is not to arbitrarily move everything to the next day but to take the time to determine how important a task really is and move it to the following week, month or ‘someday’ category. Taking this approach has given me the freedom to :

• Start each day knowing what the most important tasks are to move my business forward
• Sleep better at night because I’m not trying to remember everything
• Find blocks of time. Instead of spending the start of each day going through my laundry list of tasks, I can immediately start work on my high priority projects. When an appointment gets canceled, I already know what the next thing on my list is and can focus on it.

Even if you feel you’re not the ‘organizing type’, try this technique for a couple of weeks and I guarantee you’ll build momentum in your business. Let me know the results you get by posting a comment below or on my facebook page.

Mindy Johnson

Mindy was an Architecture and Business student at The University of Virgina this past year and will be studying at UNC Chapel Hill in the Fall where she plans to study Entrepreneurship. She is an outstanding student, earning All A Honor Roll, Academic letters and many other academic achievements. Her passions include baking and softball. In fact, Mindy just started her own baking business called Mindy’s Cupcakes.

Ari Morris

Arianna Morris will be a senior at Pennsylvania State University in the Fall pursuing a degree in Public Relations and a minor in Business. Ari is also an outstanding student and was named to the Dean’s Academic List in her Freshman, Sophomore and Junior years. In high school, Ari participated in numerous community service projects and was on the Varsity Volleyball and Varsity Tennis teams.

We are very excited to have both of these sharp and intelligent students bringing fresh ideas to Grass Roots over the next few months. They will be doing market research on several new products and services that we will roll out in the fall and they will also be testing some  techniques to increase visibility which we’ll be able to share with our clients.

Creating Content

Relevant content has always been an important factor in your website’s search engine ranking. With Google’s recent update (called Panda or Farmer), it’s  become essential. When you enter a search term into Google, it returns both paid results and organic results.  Organic results are driven by content and keywords that are most relevant to the search engine request whereas paid results are based on those companies who bid or pay the most for certain keywords. The goal of both types of search results is to get people to click on the links to your website, generating leads and potentially bringing more profit into your business.

One of the techniques that I’ve recommended to clients to position themselves as industry leaders and to achieve more organic traffic is to write articles and publish them in article directories. Unfortunately, due to mis-use of these content farms by authors who produced shoddy content, the new Google algorithms severely penalize them. Sites such as ezinearticles.com, articlesbase.com and hubpages.com saw significant traffic reductions of over 80% after the change. The purpose of the Google update was to prevent those site that provide poor content from ranking high in the search results.  I’m sure that these sites will tighten up the requirements for article submissions but in the meantime, here’s what you can do as a business owner to improve your organic search results.

• Ensure that any content you have currently posted is clean, with no errors, typos, broken links, etc.
• Create original content. Put your own unique spin and expertise on the topics that relate to your industry.
• Use more video. Video has become increasingly important for small businesses with over 2 Billion streams viewed on You Tube every single day
• Use your company blog , website and social media channels to publish content
• Use natural language in your articles and posts. Don’t try to ‘game’ the system by overusing keywords to get higher rankings

The key to producing relevant content is to write articles and blog posts that are thoughtful, informative and are good enough that your readers will want to share them with others. When that happens, you’ll know that you’ve created high quality content.