5 Steps for Calculating Your Startup Costs

You can’t create a realistic business plan without knowing how much it will cost to get your business up and running. If you don’t have an idea of your startup costs, you won’t know how long you’ll have to bootstrap, how much funding you’ll need, how quickly to scale. In other words, without calculating your startup costs, you don’t really know where you’re going—or how you’re going to get there. And your company could fail before you even hit the break-even point.
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Why Your Business Blog Should Be a Group Effort

A certain amount of care must be invested into making the blog a success, or it will stagnate and eventually die off. Oftentimes the blogging effort becomes halfhearted, especially if the position responsible for blogging has a high turnover rate—for example, social media interns typically only stay on board for a semester at a time—or if the person in charge of blogging burns out.
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Moving Your Prospects to the Next Step

For most organizations, a sale is a multi-step, complicated process. So keep that in mind as you create your calls to action. You’ll have a lot more success getting people to take one baby step at a time. Just give them the steps.
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5 Ways to Brand Like the Fortune 500s

Branding can be daunting at the best of times. For small- to medium-size enterprises, budgets to address brand initiatives are just a fraction of what a Fortune 500 company may apply. If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly educating yourself on ways to fine-tune your brand.
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Looking for the Light Bulb

Coming up with blog topics can be stressful even for experienced writers, and is especially hard for small business owners who are focused on other tasks. Many are afraid to start blogs because they worry they won’t be able to come up with enough topics. Even experts in their industry who have enough knowledge to write a book sometimes share these fears. Three simple methods can help any blog writer find that light bulb idea that helps them create value-added content for their readers.
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A 5-Step Beginner’s Guide to Video Marketing

Video marketing: You’ve heard the experts talk about it, the gurus blog about it, and your business peers rave about it, but how do you get started?  What is the first step to creating your own engaging video content, and how can you share your videos with the world?
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How to Beat the Competition with Boldness!

If you are bold enough to really position yourselves as leaders in your fields you can develop powerful relationships. Most companies simply follow the leader and their brands and brand images reflect this. These are short lived differentiators developed with little thought but appreciated by competitors who appreciate how bold branding can really benefit them.
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What’s Stopping You From Starting a Business (But Shouldn’t)?

Many people dream of owning their own businesses, but never actually make it happen. There’s always an excuse as to why: You don’t have the money. You don’t know anything about business. The list goes on and on. But if running your own business is truly something you’re passionate about, any of these obstacles can be overcome with a little effort.
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