The Pragmatic Strategist

Free Tools for Entrepreneurs – WordPress

The single biggest struggles I encounter with entrepreneurs trying to build a business is marketing.  Some small business owners don’t think about it; some don’t understand it; some don’t like it; some cling to the belief that it simply shouldn’t be necessary, as long as their product is good enough.  One way or another, though, [...]

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The Entrepreneurial Economy

As my year-end consumption of ‘top ten lists‘ continues, I came across one on Chicago Now called “The Top 10 Small Business Trends of the Decade” by Barry Moltz.  In the list he mentions several things that have all dovetailed together to define the changing nature of work — most centered around the pros and [...]

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Why Winning the “SEO Game” is About Your Content

As a content strategist one of the things I spend a great deal of time discussing with entrepreneurs is SEO.  As I’ve written here before, my first goal in any SEO discussion with someone is to help educate them on what SEO is and isn’t, and what it really can do versus what it really [...]

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Through the Entrepreneurial Looking Glass

In a recent blog post, author Scott Ginsberg recently asked Have You Executed These Ten Essentials of Entrepreneurial Excellence? He then listed off the ten things he highlights as essential for entrepreneurs to be truly successful: Prestige requires pandemonium Confidence requires congruency Fame requires flexibility Success requires surrender. Creativity requires curiosity Originality requires murder Serendipity [...]

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Lies, Damn Lies and SEO

One of the reasons that I have always loved being in the web business is because things constantly change.  When I first got online in 1993, we used bulletin board systems and monochrome monitors.  When I got my first tech job in 1996, everything was about corporate Windows networks and preparing for Y2K (remember that?).  [...]

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Hooray the Freelance Economy

Scott Shane‘s recent article on Business Week is called, “Beware the Freelance Economy.”  In it, he posits that cheering for the increased number of new businesses is premature, since so many of them are really solo practitioners (a.k.a. “freelancers”).  His point is that, because of this, these firms are not realistic sources of new jobs [...]

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Using Tech to Make More Businesses Non-Tech

I grew up in a family-owned business.  I remember, back in the early 1980′s, when my mother (the bookkeeper) got her first computer for the business: it was a Data General and it was bigger than our dishwasher.  It had five-and-a-quarter floppy disks; it had virtually no RAM to speak of; and it came with [...]

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