03 January 2010View Comments
Credit: MychaelThompson
You must have seen several ads about how to get “free” money for your small business. Is there really free money available for your businesses?
While the government does offer grant money, it is not easy to qualify or receive as some may lead you to believe. There are hundreds of scams out there that entice small business owners with the promise of free money, for a small fee.
These scams work by guaranteeing that you will get a small business grant or you will get all your money back. They charge you a fee of about $50 for a packet with information on how to write your grant proposal and a list of organizations that can provide the grant you are looking for. Unassuming business owners pay this fee and receive information with a list of organizations that don’t give any business grants. When you try and get your money back, you find that the guarantee was just a hog wash.
Does that mean there are no small business grants?
There are, but are rare, and the information you need to find and apply for the legitimate grants is available “free” of charge. For businesses that qualify, there is a possibility of getting free grants from the county, state and city governments. There are also some private corporations and foundations offering these grants.
Grants for Technology Startups
Businesses that stand the best chance of getting grants are technology startups. As long as they match the extremely stringent requirements, the federal government’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology (STTR) programs are there to help. They award more than $2 billion in grant funding each year.
Small Technology Focused Businesses
Many state and city governments offer grants for small businesses that focus on technology. In Ohio, TechColumbus offers grants to help entrepreneurs test their ideas and see if they can actually run a business. In Philadelphia, The Ben Franklin Partnership and in Gardiner, Maine, the Maine Technology Institute are just a few of the many organizations that help local tech companies out. Continue Reading →
26 August 2009View Comments
If you’re in business, you want to make money. When you invest time or money into something, you expect to see a return on investment (ROI). In fact, the goal is to maximize that ROI. But your potential customers aren’t always eager to spend money with you. How can you set yourself apart from the competition, make potential customers or clients love you even before spending anything, and manage to turn them into buyers?
Easy. Give them something for free.
I tell freelancers this all the time. Give your knowledge away — not all of it mind you. Some people are just too protective. They figure they should charge for everything they have to offer. That’s silly though. Here’s why:
Why Freebies Lead to More Sales
When you give something away for free, you’re attracting leads. Will everyone convert into a paying customer? No. But the conversions can be just as high (if not higher than) other lead generation tactics like advertising. It can cost far less up front too (improving your ROI even more).
Think of freebies as a base for an up-sell. This happens quite often in publishing. For example, a free excerpt of a book might be given to magazine publishers (and therefore their readers). The idea is to suck them in and entice them to the buy the book. It’s true of information products online too. Let’s look at a hypothetical example.
Credit: Christian Ferrari (via Sxc.hu)
Let’s say you run an online consulting program or course on SEO. There are a lot of people giving SEO advice, and you need to set yourself apart if you want people to actually pay. You already have a decent selling point in that you run a highly successful SEO firm that regularly wipes the floor with the competition. But you need more. Continue Reading →
10 March 2009View Comments
Earlier, we posted an article about how to conduct a training needs analysis (TNA). Many readers of that article expressed interest in sample questionnaires for an analysis of the sort described.
There is no single “one size fits all” questionnaire that can serve this purpose. Company requirements vary too widely, and any analysis of an employee base must be tailored to that specific group and the unique attributes of their work. That said, it is possible to share with our readers examples of the kinds of things that assessment instruments ask, with the understanding that these must of course be customized for the particular workplace being analyzed.
Sample Surveys
The previous article mentioned several components that may be chosen as elements of a TNA. These approaches included observation, interviews, surveys, job description analysis, difficulty-of-task analysis, problem-solving conferences, identification of motivating personality factors, and analysis of organizational policies.
For the sake of providing a useful example in this limited space, we will focus on surveys. The reasons for this are threefold. First, no matter how a TNA is constructed, at some point it must entail direct input from the individuals who are candidates for training. Surveys accomplish this handily, and are perhaps the most frequently used tool in such analyses. Continue Reading →
