5 Ways to Improve Your Daily Life

As we spend more time at work and continue to feel the pressures of how to cope with daily stresses consider these tips that can improve your life.

1. Do something for someone else.  It can be rewarding and nurturing others can reduce stress.
2. Meditate: it only takes 10 minutes, sit comfortably, relax and focus on your breath with your eyes closed and your hands facing up on your lap
3. Spend quality time with others
4. Move more…exercise has been shown to elevate moods
5. Change your way of thinking…”how we think affects how we feel” Interrupt negative thoughts and replace them with constructive positive thoughts.

Please share things you have done to enhance your daily life.

Julie Brander, New Haven SCORE
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Stay Current & Win!

The first 100 subscribers in November for eNews and ExpertANSWERS will win a complimentary SCORE Great Ideas notebook. Subscribe here.

SCORE eNews
Monthly tips, trends, articles and small business news.
111,000 subscribers and growing.
Read sample issue.

SCORE Expert Answers
Monthly Q&A interviews with key insights from a leading expert.
100,000 subscribers and growing.
Read sample issue with one of Oprah’s favorite financial gurus, Jean Chatzky.

Note: Winners must live in the continental United States. When subscribing, you must include your full name and mailing address in order to receive the notebook.

Christine Banning, SCORE
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Marketing Self-Assessment

Tips on A Napkin

Who would have thought that the basics are still viable today, as it was years ago? Do a self-assessment and see where you stand in these back to basics tips.

A. Create An Informal Business & Marketing Plan, 1-3 Pages Each, As A Blue Print For Your Company

B. Marketing Business Basics:
1. Exercise A Professional Phone & Email Presence
- Let Your Smile Radiate Through The Phone
- Return Calls & Emails Within 24 Hours
- Develop A Brief Company Identity On Your Voicemail
- Use Proper Grammar, Especially On Emails

2. Exercise Professional Work Ethics
- Be The Employer, Not The Employee

3. Customer Service
- Service Your Customer: Internally & Externally
- Not Only Listen, But Hear Your Customers’ Needs

4. Networking
- Build Relationships
- Create Partnerships

5. Word of Mouth Travels Fast And Far

6. Create Your Unique Brand
- Collateral Materials
- Online Presence
-  External Presence: You

7. Grassroots Mix Media
- Article Write Ups
- Interviews
- Get Adequate Attention For Your Company
- Courtesy Efforts:  Thank you, Birthday and Sympathy Cards; Emails and Friendly Phone Calls

C. Suggested Reading To Help Further You, Your Business, Your Relationships And Your Marketing Efforts:
- Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson, M.D.
- The Starbucks Experience (Principles For Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary) Joseph A. Michelli
- Reposition Yourself (Living Life Without Limits) T.D. Jakes

How did you rate? These Back 2 Basic Business & Marketing Tips are helpful despite your overall goals and objectives.

YOUR IMAGE SPEAKS VOLUMES FOR YOU!

Vernita Naylor, Ft. Worth SCORE
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Tap the Power of Twitter to Search for Business Intelligence and Prospects

Learn to tap the power of Twitter search around your brand or business to gain insights on your market and to identify prospects.

This is the first of a three-part Twitter research tutorial, in pictures. I’ve created screen shots that relate to my nonprofit, SCORE Chicago, to use as examples.  SCORE, “Counselors to America’s Small Business,” offers free business counseling and inexpensive business workshops to entrepreneurs and small business owners. One of our most important keyword phases is “business plan Chicago.”

Twitter Search

To learn who it talking about business plans near Chicago, I can run a search. I might use the Advanced Search Form or search query terms Twitter specifies. Here’s my search for tweets with our main keyword in the Chicago area:

Using advanced Twitter search features like the one above, you can find relevant tweets by date range, keyword, location, even mile radius of a zip code.

Business Intelligence on Twitter

What can you learn from these searches?  You have the Twitter names of specific people in your area or niche — potential prospects — should you choose to engage them in conversation.

And they are talking using your keyword phrases.  The questions they have, the frustrations they express, the needs they describe are useful business intelligence that should inform your product offerings, your marketing messages and your business strategy.

SCORE Chicago could monitor these tweets and politely offer advice and help in response.  If our organization were to download the free Tweetdeck tool, we could also save and rerun this search daily.

Keyword Caveat

You might have noticed that I did not use “SCORE Chicago” as an example.  Well, our business name is problematic for simple Twitter searches.  It picks up sports scores (Chicago 8: Altanta:2), the Chicago radio station “670″ the SCORE, and even a certain gentleman’s club out by O’Hare.  Fancier social media monitoring tools, like SM2, are capable of more sophisticated filtering.

But for basic, ear-to-the-ground monitoring, Twitter is happening now, and growing fast.  Are you and your business listening?

Related Posts

Twitter Research Part 2: Twitter Hashtags for Business Intelligence and Prospects

Twitter Research Part 3: Twitter Emotions and Questions for Business Intelligence and Prospects

How To: Use Twitter’s Advanced Search Features Mashable blog

Viral Tweets: Rand Fishkin on How To Get Re-Tweeted

52 Links on Twitter for Business, with Brief Descriptions

Who’s On Twitter?  What Happens When You Shake Hands With Your Followers?

Peg Corwin, SCORE Chicago
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Outstanding Minority-owned Business Award Haas Media LLC

The first-ever SCORE Awards honors the success of America’s small businesses in a time of economic recovery.

SCORE honored Kim Haas, owner of Haas Media LLC, with the Outstanding Minority-owned Business Award. Haas Media is a communications company providing media consulting, community outreach, educational initiatives, training and editing services. Her firm provides English, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian translation for corporations, government agencies, small businesses, nonprofits and community organizations.

Haas combined her love of languages and cultures with communications and started her Milwaukee-based business in 2003. After relocating to New York City in 2006, one of the first things she did was contact SCORE’s Manhattan office. “I’d learned about SCORE while living in Milwaukee,” Haas says. “Anyone even thinking about starting a business should check out SCORE. They give you great insights on things to think about. And, it’s always nice to have someone in your corner who’s always there for you.”

Check out all the SCORE award winners.

SCORE Association
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The Female Advantage

Today’s tough economy calls for using every tool in our toolbox to keep our businesses growing. Personally, I think women entrepreneurs have a couple of advantages here.

First, we tend to be more intuitive—more willing to go with our gut to come up with creative solutions for doing things differently. Second, we’re more willing to share advice and ideas with others—and to learn from others, whether that means our colleagues, employees or customers. So take advantage of this fact and start gathering ideas from every source you can think of. That could mean using an online survey tool, holding a focus group, brainstorming with your staff, picking your best customers’ brains over lunch or talking to other business owners in an online or offline community. Find out what your customers want, what your employees think and how other entrepreneurs are handling tough times. Then, use your creativity to make this knowledge work for you.

Rieva Lesonsky, Guest Blogger
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2 Women Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter — Who Else Would You Nominate?

The Mashable Blog just had a post about 10 Essential Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter.  Two women made the list. I’d like to introduce them to you and get your nominations for more women entrepreneurs with useful tweets on Twitter.

Leila Janah

Leila C. Janah on Twitter

Leila is founder of Samasource, which provides digital work for Kenyan refugees.

Caterina Fake on Twitter

Caterina is a female entrepreneur with a major success under her belt — co-founder of the photo-sharing website Flickr – and a new and exciting project — Hunch – underway.

Who else would you nominate?

Please leave me a comment, a one sentence bio, and their Twitter name.  The voting booth is open.

And come connect with me on Twitter:  @pcorwin

Peg Corwin, SCORE Chicago
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Get Inspired

Business today is more challenging than ever before. Inspiration is what we need to be better at what we do. I just attended a business expo in NYC and was able to listen to some inspiring business authors.

Frances Cole Jones was a dynamic speaker who wrote “The Wow Factor.” Her focus is on developing effective communication skills. The things that she spoke about may also be helpful to you.

An audience will assess you when you speak: verbally, vocally and visually. We all know this when we hear any speaker, we judge them and have our first impressions. Here are a few interesting facts that Frances mentions:

• 7% is verbal, what you say and how you say it.
• 38% is vocal, tone, quality and enthusiasm.
• 55% is visual, what your body is doing.
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Three Tips

1. Never use a podium as your body is much more interesting and memorable for an audience. Keep your hands open and visible, never fold your arms or fold your hands. Studies have shown that people trust you more when they can see your hands.
2. Include stories when speaking as stories are more compelling and memorable when a point is being made.
3. Remember the rule of three. People can only remember three things, so when making a point use only three examples.

I would recommend this book as it has so many more things that will help you in today’s business world, www.thewowfactor-thebook.com.

Julie Brander, New Haven SCORE
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Grow Your Biz Using Social Media

Avaya’s Small Business Communications Makeover Contest
Small Biz Contest. What’s Your Disconnect? Want to win a communications makeover and new IP office system? Enter Avaya’s Small Business Communications Makeover Contest. Submit a short video or online written entry about communications “disconnects” costing your businesses pain, time and money. Enter by October 15th. Enter here.

DELUXE Corporation Foundation Provides Major Grant
DELUXE Corporation Foundation selects SCORE as a major grant recipient to develop a new counseling methodology for small business mentoring. This methodology will help increase business survival rates and create new business and jobs. SCORE thanks DELUXE for its tremendous support of small business. Learn more.

Avaya’s Small Business Communications Makeover Contest
Small Biz Contest. What’s Your Disconnect? Want to win a communications makeover and new IP office system? Enter Avaya’s Small Business Communications Makeover Contest. Submit a short video or online written entry about communications “disconnects” costing your businesses pain, time and money. Enter by October 15th. Enter here.

DELUXE Corporation Foundation Provides Major Grant
DELUXE Corporation Foundation selects SCORE as a major grant recipient to develop a new counseling methodology for small business mentoring. This methodology will help increase business survival rates and create new business and jobs. SCORE thanks DELUXE for its tremendous support of small business. Learn more.

Avaya’s Small Business Communications Makeover Contest
Small Biz Contest. What’s Your Disconnect? Want to win a communications makeover and new IP office system? Enter Avaya’s Small Business Communications Makeover Contest. Submit a short video or online written entry about communications “disconnects” costing your businesses pain, time and money. Enter by October 15th. Enter here.

DELUXE Corporation Foundation Provides Major Grant
DELUXE Corporation Foundation selects SCORE as a major grant recipient to develop a new counseling methodology for small business mentoring. This methodology will help increase business survival rates and create new business and jobs. SCORE thanks DELUXE for its tremendous support of small business. Learn more.

Christine Banning, SCORE
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Boost Your Search Engine Rankings With a Blog

With over 72 percent of people finding what they need online, you must get found. A blog offers the following benefits.

Share your expertise. A business blog gives you a platform to promote what you know and establish yourself as an expert in the marketplace.

Describe and build your brand. Your brand represents what people know about you or think of when they hear of you. Focusing your blog on your expertise will help promote your brand.

Boost search engine rankings. As you continue to offer tips, insight, and advice to people who need what you have, you’ll give the search engines what they crave – fresh, quality content.

Reach the masses with less effort and money. Search engines, links from other sites, integration with social media tools, and Google Alerts are just a few of the ways a blog can help you reach people you never would have otherwise. You could start to attract potential customers, clients, journalists, and industry giants seeking fresh ideas.

“I have a newsletter that I email regularly.
Why do I need a blog?”
It’s a good idea to collect email addresses and send your subscribers valuable information regularly. But if that’s all you’re doing, how will Google and other search engines know? The only people seeing your newsletter are your subscribers. When you add your expertise to a blog, it’ll get picked up by the search engines and exposed to the world! So do both.

“But I’ve heard blogs are free and
easy to set up. Why do I need training?”
Yes, it’s true. You can easily create a simple blog at sites such as Blogger from Google. But if you want to become a serious blogger and take advantage of customized designs and plug-ins that will boost your search engine rankings and virability, you’ll want our advice and training. You’ll want a self-hosted WordPress blog with powerful functionality that makes it easy to share and get others to promote.

With a self-hosted blog, you will:

• Have complete control over design, functionality, and virability.
• Be able to add any number of the thousands of free plugins that make your blog easy to share and promote, thus boosting your search engine rankings.
• Host your own content and easily move it from one host to another if you ever need to.
• Easily create full backups of all files.
• Be able to monetize it by selling your own products.
• Upload as much content as your hosting package will allow.
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If you need more convincing why blogging is so important, you have got to read this article from Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends blog, “42 Million U.S. Women Use Social Media: Blogs Most Influential.”

Peggy Duncan, SCORE Atlanta
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