As a small business owner or entrepreneur, you started your enterprise with an overall goal and a strategic plan to reach that goal. How long is it since you even looked at that plan?

Planning is an essential skill for any small business owner or entrepreneur. Without good planning, your business is likely to fail. You need to review your business plan at least every year and to plan productively for the coming year. Your business plan is a key document for the everyday running of your business and you should not lock it in a filing cabinet and forget about it.

Many small businesses and entrepreneurs fail in the first few years of business for no other reason than a lack of planning. A solid business plan will include contingency plans as well as your goals. It will include information on your planned actions to sustain and, more importantly, grow your business. An annual review of your business plan allows you to reconsider your goals and plan new actions for the coming year.

Without reviewing your business plan regularly, you may find your business suddenly goes downhill and you have no idea why. Maybe your competitors have released a new product or you have focused your energies on achieving your financial goals but have forgotten to work on your goals for maintaining and rewarding your good employees. If a key employee leaves your small business suddenly, you can lose more than just the knowledge and skills of that individual. You could lose customers and your business reputation too.

A good business plan is a working document and you can revise it as often as you need to in reaction to circumstances and changes in your business. Successful entrepreneurs will always tell you that the confidence to take the actions that others assume are risky stems from having a solid business plan that enabled good contingency planning to mitigate the risks.

Here are some of the features of your business plan you should review regularly (at least annually, if not more frequently).

Compatibility with Your Overall Business Strategy

Entrepreneurs who are awake to new opportunities may discover that the new opportunities are leading the business away from core goals or the overall business strategy. You may need to look at the direction your business is taking and revise your plan and your business strategy accordingly.

SWOT

A small business that is two or three years old will have different strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, than one that is just starting out. An annual review of your SWOT statement will ensure you keep on top of the threats to your business, explore the new opportunities, and continue to grow your strengths column while learning from your weaknesses.

Financial Goals

Review your business financial goals and decide if the goals are in line with the current economic climate and the forecast growth of the business.

Customer Goals

Review your customer goals to ensure that you are looking after the customers you have and to look at new markets or customers you want to have by the end of the year.

Product Goals

You need to take a good look at your products and decide if your current products will continue to meet customer needs in the future. If not, you need to plan to create new products with detailed research and development actions.

Operational Goals

Your business operations need to align with customer expectations, the expected growth in sales, and any new products you wish to launch in the coming year.

People Goals

Employees can be key for running the business successfully. Even if you have no employees, you still need to consider whether your personal skills still align with the needs of the business. Do you need to undertake some additional training to keep up with your business goals?

Environment Goals

Are your business goals and action plans still environmentally friendly? Consider whether you need to revise and change your plans for the good of the environment.

Action Plan

Finally, the last section you should revise in your business plan is your action plan. This should include specific actions, who is to complete the actions, and when. The action plan should be the part of the document you refer to most regularly, as you check off the actions you have completed.

Updating and reviewing your business plan regularly will ensure you keep your business on track to achieving your goals and that you do not have unpleasant surprises in your business.

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Are you a small business owner who cares for your professional relationships?

How trusted are you in all your business dealings with your associates or potential customers?

Would you like to find out more about your trustworthiness as a small business owner?

To answer all the above questions, here is a link to a quick quiz that you can take to ascertain your TQ-Trust Quotient, in order to develop your business by promoting trust among your business contacts. http://trustsuite.trustedadvisor.com/

Take the quiz to help you realize how trustworthy you are in your business relationships. In the present day economic environment, it has become imperative for you to maintain your customers’ trust and loyalty. Any relationship, including a business relationship depends entirely on trust to grow and flourish.

Trust is essentially a very crucial element to the sustainability of a business. If you treat your customers with respect and fulfill their expectations, your customers will recommend you to other contacts. This will be highly beneficial in the expansion of your business over time.

As a small business owner, you ought to build a relationship based on trust, with your customers, employees, business partners, and business stakeholders. Such relationships help in the development of a flourishing and profitable work environment.

The value of trust in any relationship is immeasurable. This is precisely the reason for the tremendous growth of some businesses in a very short span of time. The level of trust that your employees or customers place in you depends on how they view your capabilities and assess your sincere nature.

Recent studies on the importance of trust in a business show that trust has a telling effect on the sales and profits of an organization. It also gives the business an edge over its rivals. In an organization where trust prevails, you will find easier and more effective communication, motivation and a willing contribution to your business growth.

What do your associates look for in a business relationship with you?

The following is a list of what others would expect of you in order to develop an excellent business relationship with you based on trust:
You should be competent enough in your business to make your associates believe that you can take the business to higher planes. If they are convinced about this aspect, then you have their complete support. This is their trust in your knowledge and efficiency.

• Inspire your employees by the trust in your honesty and commitment to work hand in hand with you to promote your business. Your business partners and customers will be impressed by these qualities to build a healthy, ongoing relationship with your organization.

• Customers and business associates should have trust in your words. This is the most important of all levels of trust. Keep up your word even if it affects your business financially. Learn from your bad experiences but ensure that you do not go back on your word. This will certainly find you amidst genuine supporters for life.

• Make your customers feel important by promptly returning their calls. Your reputation is very important to maintain a successful business.

• If you happen to make mistakes, do not try to cover them up; instead admit your errors, apologize and fix the errors immediately.

Your trustworthiness can help you take your business to the next level. The trust that you gain from all your business contacts is most critical for your organization to thrive and move ahead at all times. Therefore, focus on being trustworthy to build stronger relationships on both personal and professional fronts.

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The popularity of sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Digg has resulted in the rapidly exploding phenomenon of online social networking. Entrepreneurs can tap into this latest societal trend to see surging business profits.

Here are some reasons why social networking can benefit you if you have a small business:

• Networking online is a great way to get attention for your website and business. Do not think of online networking as a replacement for your conventional networking or your website. You can use social networking online to notify customers and contacts of developments in your business and to promote any new product or service.

• It can help your search engine optimization campaign. If you have presence on a large number of sites, search engines notice all the links and connect the links with the original website, thus giving your business a higher rank in searches for the specific keywords and making it easier for potential customers to find you.

• These natural inbound links can drive traffic to your original website. You can also get quality traffic driven to your website if you select networking websites, related to your niche.

• Networking websites offer unique branding opportunities. When you sign up for a networking site, you get your own unique URL. By including your brand name in the URL, you will not only be able to get favor from the search engines but can also build brand recognition among your present and potential clientele.

• Social networking sites allow you to interact with the customers, bring their attention to your services and products on offer, and make them aware of the latest company news – by giving them an insider’s glance.

• These websites can be effective channels of communication with your customers and show the human side of your company. By listening to their concerns and feedback, you will be able to show your genuine care.

• Such interaction with the customers will also allow you to do some product or service development, in tune with the market needs.

• By using social networking sites, you can participate in specific groups of interest, get connected with others in your industry and interact with them to see where you stand and what you can do to improve.

Twitter is an extremely popular site where you can send messages with a maximum of 140 characters. You can use Twitter to remind customers to revisit your website if something new and exciting is there.

If your site has good content, others might want to promote it. As soon as you tweet something, readers and followers find out about it. It is the fastest way of getting your message across to readers. Moreover, the limitation of 140 characters keeps the flab off, and allows the communication to be bang on target.

Twitter also helps in researching for your product or service. You can find out what consumers are looking for, what is selling and what is not. You can also put up a poll questionnaire for product development.

Twitter and other social networking sites, like DiggIt, LinkedIn, and Facebook allow you to post links along with messages, which in turn can help you drive traffic to your website. Your followers would be either existing customers or prospective consumers.

The more you interact with your followers on the social networking sites, the more you know what is good for business and can develop your business accordingly. Your posts can reflect your area of expertise, impress your clients and build up brand identity.

Millions of people across the world use social networking websites. You simply cannot afford to miss the opportunity to reach out to this potential global audience. Since these sites are free to use, all you have to do is to register, create a profile and start interacting with the people out there. So, what are you waiting for? Use the power of social networking to your advantage today!

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Twitter is an extremely popular social networking medium that connects people from across the globe. As a small business owner, you can benefit from the use of twitter in developing and expanding your business. In earlier times, you had to advertise your business either by word of mouth or through media like newspapers and television, which took a great deal of your time, money and effort.

In just a few clicks, your messages can reach hundreds and thousands of people all over the world within a fraction of a second. Such is the advancement in technology today and more and more people are dependent on the Internet services for enhancing their personal as well as professional life.

When you talk of Twitter, the feature that comes to your mind instantly is ‘tweets’ or user ‘updates’ that you can see on Twitter’s home page. But, that is not all there is to Twitter. There are a lot more features on Twitter than you can probably imagine. If you are a small business owner, you are likely to benefit a great deal by using it to your advantage.

For an entrepreneur, Twitter is a very interesting tool that helps in building relationships with existing and potential customers. There is a ‘follow’ feature on Twitter that lets you link to people you would like to know more about. In other words, you can follow people who belong to your category of business owners and have similar interests.

You can use this excellent platform to interact with your clients. You can post messages on the introduction of new products by your business so that it reaches them in no time. This helps in better sales and thereby, an enhanced profitability in your business.

Twitter has proved to be a very powerful medium for businesses to develop healthy relationships with prospective clients as well as existing ones. This is why it is an invaluable tool for the overall development of a small business.

Finding and following interesting and useful contacts on Twitter is another beneficial feature. However, there is no hard and fast rule in the ‘following’ procedure. You choose people who you think have your kind of interests and ‘follow’ them. It is not mandatory for you to follow people who follow you. You have to choose wisely those that would appreciate an association with you.

An easy way to find people who belong to your category on Twitter is to do a twitter search. This enables you to choose good contacts for your business growth and interact with them.

If you are new on Twitter, here is a brief but exhaustive list of things to do to help you become a regular user of this powerful medium:

• Create an account on Twitter with your business name.
• Post messages on Twitter with regard to your current status (the answer to the question ‘what’s happening?’).
• Share online resources on Twitter.
• Give a link to your blog/website so that people get to read your blog posts/articles.
• Express your opinion on any subject like current affairs or the latest news.
• Announce important events of your business like seminars and conferences.
• Inform people about developments or changes in your business, such as a new location when you upgrade to larger premises.
• Prepare a list of people you want to follow based on the kind of information shared by them or some important business issues addressed by them. It is very important to choose the people you follow on Twitter, else ‘tweeting’ will become a time-wasting affair.
• You may find financial benefits in following a few organizations that offer their services to the small businesses like HP, Dell, Microsoft and American Express, etc.

To sum up, Twitter is an effective tool that helps you advertise your brand at no cost and lets people know about your online presence. In Twitter, you have the greatest advantage of quick and real time interactions with the people you follow and your followers. It has now become an all-time favorite of small business owners due to its multifaceted benefits.

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In today’s business environment, networking has become one of the key determinants of success of a business organization. Most entrepreneurs in the business world realize the need to be proactive. In order to emerge successful in business, the wisest step is to form alliances and make the most of the networking opportunities available today.

LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world today and offers exciting networking opportunities for everyone. It is a business related social networking site where professionals from all walks of life ‘connect’ with each other and form a network of like-minded people. LinkedIn has a user population of more than eight million people from all over the world. Users send out invitations to people on LinkedIn and build ‘connections’ or contacts.

Benefits of LinkedIn

• You can use direct connections to link with other reliable sources and these contacts can in turn connect you with many more contacts.
• You get to find business opportunities, jobs, and projects to tender on through a known connection.
• You can find prospective employees by posting jobs on this site.
• You can also get to know the profile of the hiring employers that helps you in ascertaining your suitability for the job advertised.
• If you are a small business owner, you will be able to form alliances or partnerships with like-minded business owners, which enables great development of your business.
• When someone sees your profile on LinkedIn, there is a high probability of a potential business connection for you.
• You can let others know that you are an expert in your field by your contributions to the Answers and Discussion section of the website. This gives you more publicity.
• The recommendations by others on your profile make you a popular entity. This gives you a lot more credibility.
• The sole objective of this network is to promote trust among its users. It is always better to carry on business transactions with a known connection than with strangers.
• LinkedIn facilitates good relationships among people who may not be directly known to each other but through their friends and other group contacts.

Specific Benefits for small business owners

• Small business owners are discovering great benefits in using LinkedIn for promoting their businesses in a cost-effective manner. You can find a group for any and every business segment on LinkedIn.
• There can be no better way than to advertise your company’s products and services on these groups. The forums on these groups act as an important platform for exchange of ideas and opinions on various business issues and their possible solutions.
• A new aspect of LinkedIn is LinkedIn Events by which your organization can announce business meetings, seminars and conferences that expand the scope of your business.
• The present day hiring market is a tough one and it becomes difficult to find the right candidates for your business. LinkedIn enables hiring of the right people for your business needs.

Useful Business Applications on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has many additional applications that are extremely beneficial to the business users. In 2008, LinkedIn launched an ‘application platform’.

You can use LinkedIn applications like Wordpress, Blog Link by Six Apart and Amazon Reading List within a LinkedIn member’s profile.

You can let the other members read your business blogs and let them know what books you are reading. You can also get to know what books you should read from your connections’ updates or others that interest you on LinkedIn. This would possibly lead to new ‘connections’ which are very vital for your business growth.

As a LinkedIn member, you can tell your contacts about the present day business trends and even suggest particular groups for them to join. This enables your connections to know more about your business objectives and may lead to a possible partnership with you. You can join groups that appeal to you so that you can find people with similar interests.

LinkedIn has another great feature called Slideshare. Slideshare lets you share your presentations and documents worldwide with your LinkedIn network. You can also display your portfolios and presentations on your profile.

For marketing opportunities, Twitter is another popular networking site that gives you ample scope for your business development.  You can use the ‘Tweets by LinkedIn’ application on LinkedIn and ensure your popularity on Twitter.

LinkedIn applications help you to enhance your profile, share and team up with your networking groups and gain a better understanding of the business world that facilitate more efficiency in your business.

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