The 6 Traits of Successful Small Businesses

Do you have what it takes to make it as a small business owner? This has always been a nervous-making question. But now, a recent study has boiled down the key attributes of successful business owners. Take a look, and see if this sounds like you. The study, from the Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute, is The Guardian Life Index: What Matters Most to America’s Small Business Owners . The survey of more than 1,000 entrepreneurs with between two and 99 workers first identified 60 critical factors for business success. These were then boiled down to six important skills that were common to successful business owners. These owners are: Collaborative. Delegating effectively and building good relationships with employees, vendors, and other partners is key. The study found successful owners had a win-win attitude and were dedicated to “creating opportunities for others.” Self-fulfilled. Great entrepreneurs love being in control of their destiny, deciding how hard to work and when, and deriving personal fulfillment and gratification from operating their businesses. Future-focused. Good business owners aren’t just slogging through the day, focused on keeping the doors open another 24 hours. They’re the woman or man with a plan. Curious. Constant learning is a hallmark of winning business leaders. They’re always looking for opportunities to improve how they manage their business. Tech-savvy. The study found winners “intensively value their company’s Web site and are significantly more likely to rely a great deal on technology to help make our business more effective and more efficient.” Action oriented. Successful entrepreneurs are taking proactive steps to build their businesses. They indicated high levels of agreement with phrases such as “commitment to taking the business to the next level,” “differentiating ourselves from competitors,” and “having something to sell when I’m ready to retire.” These glass-half-full types saw hard times as “a kick in the rear to help move you forward.” So how’d you do? Personally, I could stand to improve on the tech-savvy front especially!

It’s Time For Microsoft’s Second Inception

If you’ve watched television at all over the past two months, you’ve likely seen the trailer for Inception , the new film by Christopher Nolan. The trailer is great, and the film looks like it could be even better. In it, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a special agent whose job it is to construct dreams in order to lure people inside and take their ideas — a tactic they call “inception”. “ An idea can transform the world and re-write all the rules. Which is why I have to steal it ,” Cobb teases at one point in the trailer. For whatever reason, the film and that premise got me thinking about Microsoft. More specifically, about some of the recent stories about yet more internal struggles at the company and the complete and utter failure of the Kin . It seems to me that Microsoft created one of these inceptions once in the 1980s. And it led to the company’s greatest success: Microsoft Windows. Now I think it’s time for a second inception. Before I get into that, a bit of history. For nearly 25 years now, the story has lingered that Microsoft stole the idea of Windows from Apple while working to develop software for the Lisa and Macintosh operating systems. The stories you hear generally seem to be a mixture of truth, urban legend, and fanboy fabrications at this point — but the fact is that Apple did sue Microsoft in 1988 for copyright infringement on the matter. After four years worth of arguments, Apple lost. They also lost the subsequent appeal (and they even tried to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court, but that was denied). But they didn’t lose because Windows wasn’t thought to be similar to Apple’s operating systems. They lost because the judge ruled that you couldn’t protect the concept of a graphical user interface or the desktop metaphor idea. And more specifically, Apple ran into problems because of a decision that then-CEO John Sculley made in 1985 to sign an agreement licensing certain parts of Apple’s GUI to Bill Gates for use in what would become Windows 1.0 (presumably without realizing exactly what he was doing). Yes, you could make a similar charge against Apple — that they stole several GUI components from Xerox’s PARC labs. (There was a subsequent lawsuit of Apple by Xerox on these grounds, but that was largely seen as a tactical

Orkut About To Fall To Facebook In India

For all the grief Google gets for not understanding social networks, people often forget that it owns a pretty big one, Orkut . While Orkut is much smaller than Facebook worldwide, it does dominate in at least two large countries: Brazil and India. But that soon may change. India looks like it is about to fall to Facebook. In May, 2010, Facebook attracted 18 million unique visitors in India, compared to Orkut’s 19.7 million (comScore). In the past year, Facebook grew 177 percent from 6.5 million Indian visitors, compared to 35 percent growth for Orkut. When the June numbers come out, Facebook may very well surpass Orkut in that country. Indeed, Google’s own Trends for websites shows Facebook edging out Orkut in India last month. Facebook has been pouring a lot of resources into India, and is currently hiring 500 people there. It is a major global priority for the company. Brazil, however, is still safe for Orkut, with 29 million visitors a months versus only 8 million for Facebook. But Google is no longer pinning its social networking hopes on Orkut. It has moved onto other things like cloning Facebook with its not-so-secret Google Me project . Well, it might not be a complete clone, if the ideas of one Google researcher are any indication. CrunchBase Information Facebook Orkut Information provided by CrunchBase

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Orkut About To Fall To Facebook In India

Don’t Fall Into the Trap of A/B Testing Minutiae

Posted by randfish Jason Cohen recently authored a post on A/B testing that deserves both broader awareness and a deeper dive. Most of us in the online marketing world are aware of the power A/B tests can bring through improved click-through, sign-up and conversion rates. Getting a higher percentage of visitors to a page to take a desired action is powerful stuff. The process by which we hypothesize, design, create and run testing, however, is fraught with peril. And, one of the least obvious, but most insiduous potential pitfalls is actually what we choose to test . Visualizing

Does Your Business Suck? 15 Warning Signs

When I stroll around the two-block main street in my town, I find myself feeling sad. That’s because after nearly 20 years of covering small business, I have a pretty good sense of who’s going to make it and who isn’t.

Excessive Worry About Competition

Excessive Worrying = Missed Opportunities Do you worry too much about who you are competing against? Do you feel competitive research leads to many more “move on please” rather than “let’s go!” types of outcomes? Believe it or not, it may be a good sign. Competition is usually a good thing , it means something is worth fighting for. A lot of hucksters try to push ways to “Uncover hidden markets that nobody else knows about, that you can make millions from with little effort, and that is yours for just $47.” Here is the problem with lots of opportunity and 0 competition: businesses follow the money and shorten the supply chain. If an ad market is ripe it means that some of those advertisers are also going to be publishers in the same darn market, targeting the same darn keywords. So if there is big money there will be competition. It is unavoidable. It isn’t so much that specific niches are glossed over, but more to do with the fact that the bigger a site gets and the more keywords it targets the less time it has to focus on optimization at a granular level. These kinds of sites leave the door open for you to come in and attack some of their profitable keywords by creating niche sites around those topics. Consider that our competitive research tool shows a site like ehow.com coming in with 2,948,950 organic keywords they are ranking for in the top 20 (our tool is powered by SEM Rush). Lots of opportunity there! However, if you are interested in your public-facing status then chasing the long tail of a large site may not be the sexiest thing in the world to you. If you are more interested in profiting from your efforts versus tooting your own horn then what should matter is how you can maximize profits while keeping expenses low. Certainly I’m not advocating that you only focus on niche keywords. If you have the resources then you can go after just about anything you want. In either scenario, long-tail plays or broad keyword plays, there should be less worry about who your competition is and more focus on what their weaknesses are, and how you can beat them. There is an intimidation factor that is at play in just about every situation where competition exists: Business Sports Personal Relationships Much of that intimidation is perceived by the underdog or the new competitor. The following points are worth keeping in mind: The best team is not unbeatable The biggest site is not strongly optimized for all their keywords The girl or guy you are quite fond of is actually approachable Many of the competitors at the top of the heap are there for a reason, they’re good. However, it doesn’t mean they are invincible or beyond reproach. In fact it’s quite the opposite. Some of the upper echelon sites in your market likely have become lazy or so big that can no longer reasonably go all out on all their profitable keywords. There are no shortage of tools out there that can help you find potential keywords for your sites by looking at profitable keywords of a competitor’s site. You can’t win every battle you fight but if you win more than you lose then you are on the right track. Competing, in and of itself, is not going to mortally wound you if you lose . Look at is as a learning lesson. What could you have done better? Where could you have pushed harder? Do you need to rethink how you view potential opportunities? The great thing about SEO is that (providing you don’t torch the site) there is no 4th quarter, final set, TKO, or bottom of the ninth. Your timing for failing is based on when you think it’s a good time to pullout and move on to another site or use a new approach. The effective holding cost for a paused project is ~ $0. And who knows, maybe a future algorithmic update or another search engine will take a liking to your site. As long as you have analytics installed you are passively collecting market data – not a bad deal. Google can be the referee that makes a horrible call which ends the game but more often than not you get to be the decider of when to push and when to pull. So rather than worrying about your competition you are better off tracking your competition and figuring out where they are outperforming you. I like to keep a running log of ideas and processes that my competitors are implementing along with notes on where I think they are weak and how they could do what they are doing more efficiently. Armed with that information, along with your findings with free tools like SEO For Firefox , you can start in on a thorough review of your competition and the feasibility of competing against them. Some core items you’ll want to consider are: Number of backlinks from unique domains (don’t be *wowed* by the total link count) Anchor text distribution of external links Domain age, relative to when the site went live (with a few links) Presence of the site in some of the better directories like Yahoo! and Business.Com .Edu Links .Gov Links Is the exact match ranking? Is it all big brands? Are there lots of interior pages ranking? The on-page optimization of the site/page PageRank and so on… There are a number of tools available which can help you find weak spots in areas where your competition is possibly profitable and where potential opportunities exist for you. We did a review of the following spy tools : SEM Rush Compete Keyword Spy SpyFu iSpionage Alexa We outlined a competitive intelligence strategy recently in addition to having quite a bit of killer tips and posts in the competitive research threads inside the forums. So while you shouldn’t ignore the competition completely you shouldn’t be consumed by it, particularly if it’s just a few metrics that you find daunting. There are enough tools out there where you can try and clone most of their best strategies but at some point you will have to go beyond what they are doing. Studying a competitor’s on and off page strategies, then finding ways to exploit weaknesses and build on strengths, will produce a better ROI for your business rather than searching for “The Fountain of No Competition” promised by that really nice internet marketing fellow you got that email from . And SEO is just one phase of your analysis. Does everyone have the same business model? Are there other options? Do they all have similar site structures? Are they so inspired by one another that they are missing huge market segments?

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Excessive Worry About Competition

Attention Ecommerce Sellers: Streamlined Sales Tax Is A’comin’

For more than a decade, online retailers have been able to make the case that they can’t be required to collect sales tax. With every state, city, and county making its own sales-tax rules, it’s just too complicated! Or was. After many years of effort, a streamlined sales tax bill has been introduced in Congress that aims to take the air out of that argument. The Main Street Fairness Act of 2010 would take a simplified sales tax scheme 23 states are currently participating in and make it a national norm. Presto, end of complexity in collecting sales tax. Pay up. Rep. Bill Delahunt (Dem-Mass.) introduced the bill. (Is it a coincidence that he’s already announced he’s not running for re-election?) Even if the federal bill doesn’t go anywhere, ten more states are already considering signing onto the simplified tax program, which sets down agreed-upon tax rates for scores of different merchandise categories. So the movement to collect online sales tax was picking up steam already with states hungry for revenue in the downturn. Some of the ecommerce giants have been aggressive in defending their right to not collect sales tax, even resisting efforts to get them to help states collect the sales tax from consumers (technically what’s supposed to be happening now, except it mostly isn’t).

Skype Recruits Yahoo Engineering Exec For Key Technology Role

The exodus of talent from Yahoo continues. Skype has just announced that Madhu Yarlagadda , Yahoo’s VP of Engineering, has joined the company has as the new Chief Development Officer. Yarlagadda will report to Skype CEO Josh Silverman and will oversee Skype’s engineering and development initiatives. The company’s current CTO Dan Berg will be leaving the company following Yarlgadda’s transition to the role Yarlgadda joins Skype from Yahoo where he was VP of Engineering for ICE (Integrated Consumer Experiences), leading engineering efforts for Yahoo’s Home Page, MyYahoo, Buzz, Profiles, ToolBar, Mobile, Maps and Local. Most recentlyhelped unite 35 plys different code bases of Yahoo home page for each of the different countries around the world into a single manageable code base. Yarlagadda, who spent more than 11 years at Yahoo, was also previously VP of Engineering for Yahoo Communities, which includes Messenger, Voice (VoIP), Video, Flickr and Yahoo Groups. He joined Yahoo in 1999 after his realtime messaging company MyQuest was acquired by Yahoo. Other Yahoo execs who have recently departed the company include EVP Arsh Patel, CTO Ari Balogh, and Search VP L arry Cornett. As for Skype, the company may be looking to add new ideas and leadership to its engineering platform. And Yarlagadda seems to be a seasoned exec, especially on mobile initiatives. And this could be a big year for Skype if the company goes public. CrunchBase Information Skype Information provided by CrunchBase

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Skype Recruits Yahoo Engineering Exec For Key Technology Role

Prioritize and Summarize – Final Step of the 8-Step SEO Strategy

Posted by laura This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. My friends, you’ve made it. You’ve sat through over 10,000 words I’ve shoveled into these

Dear Mr. President: Immigration Reform Won’t Be Enough To Stop The Brain Drain

In a speech at the American University last Thursday, President Obama highlighted the incredible economic rewards that America has gained from its immigrants. He spoke of new waves of immigrants—from places like Ireland, Italy, Poland, and China—challenging the generations before them, and consequently being subjected to “rank discrimination and ugly stereotypes”.  Yet the immigrants kept coming to America. That’s because it was the only land of opportunity. The President wants lawmakers to fix the immigration system so that America can remain globally competitive. But I don’t think it’s that simple. America is no longer the only magnet for the world’s best and brightest. Fixing immigration policy is an important start, but it won’t be enough to stop the brain drain of highly educated and skilled workers that the U.S. is presently experiencing. Just last week, there were two notable visitors to Silicon Valley—Russian President, Dimitry Medvedev, and Chile’s minister of Economy, Juan Andres Fontaine. President Medvedev wanted the brilliant Russian-born and -educated programmers who write some of the Valley’s most sophisticated software to know that they are welcome back home and that he is setting up a science park for them. Minister Fontaine wants to turn Chile into a tech hub and is following my advice on how to make this happen : by attracting immigrants; building a diverse culture that encourages risk-taking and openness; and creating networks of mentors. Over drinks (some excellent Chilean wine), the minister told me of a new program that Chile is piloting to lure bootstrappers. Chile will grant $40,000 and provide some really cheap office space and accommodation to budding entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world. All they have to do is to build their products in one of the most beautiful locations on the planet. Chile is betting that once these entrepreneurs get there, they will never want to leave. China is also doing all it can to get its scientists and engineers to come back home. It is spending billions of dollars to establish research institutes and build technical capacity. Returnees to China are now powering its most significant scientific breakthroughs. For example, according to the Washington Post , at the National Institute for Biological Sciences, which is responsible for half of the peer-reviewed publications in China, all of the key scientists are returnees from the United States. I witnessed on my recent trip to India how much things had changed there, as well. At Startup Saturday , which has become a regular hangout for tech entrepreneurs in Delhi, I gave a talk to a group of about 100 company founders. I was surprised at how similar they were to the techies I know in Silicon Valley: they are building the same types of products; have the same interests; ask the same questions; and, like their Valley brethren, complain that venture capitalists won’t give them the time of day.  I learned that more than one-third of these entrepreneurs were returnees from the U.S. They went back for the same reasons that my research had highlighted : they missed their family and friends and saw greater opportunities in India than in the U.S. Now they are invigorating the entrepreneurial ecosystem back home. The returning techies aren’t only building tech companies. After completing his MBA at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Ritesh Bawri built a very promising product that could capture a customer’s real-time purchase intent. He had VCs lined up to provide funding but decided not to pursue this because he saw an even greater opportunity back home, in India. Among his father’s business interests was a cement business that produced $10 million a year in revenue. Ritesh knew that, with India’s need for infrastructure, there was almost unlimited potential for growth. But this would require rethinking production and distribution methods, importing new technologies from the west, and building the logistics infrastructure to consolidate the materials supply chain. Ritesh returned home in 2003 and raised about $110 million in financing from financial institutions and private equity funds to purchase assets and build plants, and revamped the cement business’s operations and strategy. His bet paid off.  His company, Calcom Cement , has become a hugely profitable $250 million business and expects to hit $2 billion in revenue in 2016. Some of India’s best and brightest won’t even consider moving to the U.S. Ashish Sinha started his career in 1999 at one of the first successful tech companies in India, called Aztec software. Later, he worked for Ketera, IBM, and Yahoo, in India. He was offered several opportunities in the U.S., but believed his career would progress better in India. In 2007, Ashish started India’s TechCrunch—a site called PluGGd.in , which now draws 1.1 million visitors a month. Ashish takes a lot of pride in his decision not come to the U.S. as an H-1B worker. He says “I have seen a whole lot of my friends go to the U.S. for IT services/outsourcing jobs, and repent later as it hardly brings satisfaction to one’s soul”. Arvind Nigam and Praveen Kumar Sinha are in the process of moving their ideas-crowdsourcing software company, called BubbleIdeas , to Singapore because the Indian government places restrictions on Paypal types of transactions, and they want to be closer to western markets. When I told Arvind about Chile, he thought it would be an even better place to move to, because of its physical and cultural proximity to the U.S. and Europe.  I asked Arvind whether he had considered the U.S.  His response: “too expensive… and who needs to put up with the visa nightmares?”. The U.S. immigration debate will no doubt going be contentious and get bogged down in the issue of providing amnesty to people who entered the country illegally. The reality is that, no matter how long the debate takes or how it concludes, the poor and unskilled will still be here. But the educated and skilled professionals—who could be creating new jobs and making the U.S. more competitive—won’t be here. They will, instead, be boosting the economies of other countries. The U.S. will need not only to change its immigration policies to welcome skilled immigrants, but also to keep those who are already in the U.S. And  it will have to do what countries like China, Singapore, and Chile are doing:  send its scouts out to find and recruit the best talent in other countries. Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com .

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Dear Mr. President: Immigration Reform Won’t Be Enough To Stop The Brain Drain