Heather Villa

In the last Tips In Ten we talked about selling more. We talked about how small businesses had a few options to sell more: 1. They could go out and generate more leads and, simply because sales is “a numbers game”, they would convert more prospects into customers. This is a good strategy but time [...]

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Ongoing communication with prospects and customers can help you develop a following and increase your business. By creating an autoresponder (like a newsletter or an ezine) you can automate that ongoing communication and add value to your customers’ lives. In a previous Tips in Ten, I talked about different types of autoresponders and gave you [...]

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Last year, we watched the economy melt down. Some saw it coming for a while but most people started to get worried around August or September and then we fell off the cliff in November. It has been bad for many, many people. While there is still a lot of effort to be put into [...]

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Many small businesses begin as one-person operations. A new small business owner may have neither the budget nor the workload to justify hiring employees. In the early days, this generally works just fine. A small business with a slow stream of work usually allows its owner plenty of time to focus on all aspects of [...]

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I love reading about small businesses and freelancers who find tricks that allow them to do what they do better. I cover a lot of this kind of content in my Tips In Ten newsletter where I try to provide the business “hacks” that have worked for me. In a recent blog post at LocationIndependent.com, [...]

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In my reading I’ve enjoyed the writing of Duct Tape Marketing creator John Jantsch. You can read his blog over at Duct Tape Marketing. In a recent blog, The Three Natural Phases of Successful Small Business Growth, Jantsch talks about the 3 phases that he sees small businesses progress through. The first phase is foundation, [...]

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A friend of mine just returned from a trip with his family. It was the first time he went on a multi-state trip in his brand new Prius and he came back bragging about the mileage. The last multistate trip I went on was in an SUV (with apologies to the environment) so the difference [...]

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