Like many of my peers in Generation X, my parents and my grandparents have never really understood what I do for a living. My parents use the web, so it’s not entirely outside their comprehension, but when it comes to my grandparents: I may as well be communicating with aliens via mental telepathy. Being an [ Read More ]
Virtualization, globalization and economic changes convert long-time employees into (sometimes reluctant) entrepreneurs.
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, [ Read More ]
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 [ Read More ]
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 [ Read More ]
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 [ Read More ]
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?). [ Read More ]
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 [ Read More ]
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 [ Read More ]
Well, I can’t say that I’m sorry to have seen 2009 go. Personally and professionally, it was one hell of a rough year. On the other hand, it did bring with it some changes that — despite fighting pretty voraciously at first — have ultimately proven to be profoundly valuable. The biggest and most obvious [ Read More ]
As someone who consumes most of her daily doses of new information through the blogosphere (as opposed to traditional media), there are different bloggers I read for different reasons. As I’ve been trying to streamline my process for writing more (and better), myself, I’ve been thinking more and more about what I specifically get out [ Read More ]
I was reading an article this weekend, on Entrepreneur.com, and it actually made me a little snarky. In Health Insurance, a 401(k) and…Facebook?, author Justin Petruccelli discusses a new Junior Achievement/Deloitte Teen Ethics Survey in which 58% of teenage respondents stated that the ability to use social networks would be a factor in their decision-making [ Read More ]