Sunday, April 7, 2013

Participate in One of These Small Business Events, Awards or Contests

Participate in One of These Small Business Events, Awards or Contests

Link to Small Business Trends

Participate in One of These Small Business Events, Awards or Contests

Posted: 06 Apr 2013 02:00 PM PDT

This is curated weekly listings of small business events, awards and contests.   To see a full list or to submit your own event, contest or award listing, visit the Small Business Events Calendar.

Featured Events, Contests and Awards

Affiliate Management DaysAffiliate Management Days
April 16, 2013, San Francisco, CA

Whether your company already offers an affiliate program, or you are considering offering an affiliate program, Affiliate Management Days offers insights into how other online retailers are successfully implementing and managing their affiliate programs. Learn about: affiliate recruitment techniques, communication with affiliates, affiliate analytics, landing page and conversion optimization, legislative issues, and mobile affiliate marketing. Twitter hashtag: #AMDays
Discount Code
SBTAM250 (Get $250 off)

2013 Content Marketing Strategies Conference2013 Content Marketing Strategies Conference
May 09, 2013, Berkeley, CA

Marketing and PR professionals from companies of all sizes will gather at the 3rd annual Content Marketing Strategies Conference, hosted by dlvr.it and Business Wire, to gain practical “how to” advice on content marketing SEO, content distribution optimization, content ROI, and learn from case studies by brands including Red Hat, New Belgium Brewing, FOX’s hit show Glee and much more.

Local University - New OrleansLocal University – New Orleans
May 07, 2013, New Orleans, LA

A half-day search marketing conference educating small businesses about local search. Local University is a training program that travels to cities around the country. The New Orleans event is provided by the local-search practitioner experts, under the support of Google, Search Influence, The New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, Greater New Orleans, Inc. and Nokia.
Discount Code
NOLAEARLY ($40 Off)

Access to Capital ChicagoAccess to Capital Chicago
May 22, 2013, Chicago, Illinois

Join us at the Navy Pier to learn how you can raise capital for your small business. Meet 1:1 with loan officers. Attend panels on traditional and alternative lending options, start-ups, crowd-funding, and more.
Discount Code
sbtrends (Get 30% off)

More Events

More Contests and Awards

This weekly listing of small business events, contests and awards is provided as a community service by Small Business Trends and SmallBizTechnology.

The post Participate in One of These Small Business Events, Awards or Contests appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Bezos Invests In Business Insider – How Soon Will He Expect Profits?

Posted: 06 Apr 2013 10:00 AM PDT

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is one of the newest investors in digital publication Business Insider. Henry Blodget, the former former Wall Street analyst who co-founded Business Insider, announced it saying:

Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment company of Jeff Bezos, has led a new round of financing for Business Insider. Many of our existing investors, including Institutional Venture Partners and RRE Ventures, also participated. The new capital–$5 million–will allow us to continue to invest in our editorial, technology, and client teams and make Business Insider even better.

On a personal note, I will add that we are totally stoked about this.

Jeff Bezos’s leadership, vision, and philosophy at Amazon over the last two decades have inspired a whole generation of startups and entrepreneurs, including me.

Bezos invests in digital publication Business Insider

A New Breed of Digital Publication

Business Insider started out in 2007 as Silicon Alley Insider, a reference to Silicon Alley, an area in New York with a concentration of  Internet startups.  A few years later it rebranded as Business Insider. It expanded its focus to cover general business, not just the Manhattan startup scene.

Business Insider is one of the new breed of online-only publications.  It’s known for its provocative headlines and freewheeling mix of breaking news, analysis and entertainment. It’s sophisticated in the topics it covers, yet casual and scrappy in how it covers them. As one example, notice the headline in the image above.

In an age when so many traditional publications are declining (my local newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, just announced it will cut home delivery to 3 days a week), digital publications are growing.  Today’s digital publications are  spontaneous and fast on the draw.  They are more conversational, participatory and edgier than traditional newspapers and magazines.

It’s a formula people seem to like.  And no wonder.  News can be delivered in minutes or hours, versus days and weeks for print publications. You can access it whenever you want  – versus TV news that’s delivered on a schedule. It’s fun and  informative.

Digital publications can easily rival or exceed the reach of traditional news outlets.  At 24 million monthly unique visitors, Business Insider has a bigger reach than CNBC, according to the New Yorker.  Even a niche publication like ours here at Small Business Trends, where we get under a million monthly unique visitors, has a larger reach than most midsize city newspapers and trade publications, where circulation is in the tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands.

What It Takes to Grow a Digital Publication

Henry Blodget has been open about the financials for Business Insider.  One year he wrote about the company’s financials on Business Insider. A few months ago he gave a terrific behind-the-scenes look at Business Insider including traffic numbers and PowerPoint deck.

Quartz did a quick summary of Business Insider’s financial situation.  I include it here because of the fascinating numbers behind a high-growth digital publication:

  • The Bezos investment brings the total raised by Business Insider to about $18 million.
  • When it last raised money in 2011, the company was valued at $50 million. We're still trying to pin down the new valuation. Blodget told AllThingsD it's "above" $50 million and told me it's "double super-secret." Many of BI's competitors are valued at much more than $50 million.
  • Business Insider had $4.8 million in revenue in 2010, turning an Amazon-like profit of $2,127 — yes, two thousand dollars. Revenue grew to about $7.5 million in 2011 and $10 million in 2012, but as the company expanded, it ended up losing $3 million last year.  ***
  • The company has spent about $7 million of the venture capital it has raised.

It doesn’t surprise me that Business Insider lost money last year.  It takes money to grow in today’s competitive online news space.  Even in a self-funded news site like ours, we plow every penny back into the business.

Most outsiders don’t realize how much cost and labor is involved with running an online publication. True, digital publications are not saddled with the high costs of printing and distributing a print publication or broadcasting on television. But you still have to hire people, invest in technology, market the business, pay salespeople and cover all the  functions it takes to run a business such as bookkeeping and legal.

So, will this investment be enough for Business Insider to turn a profit, and how soon?  Amazon’s Bezos certainly has the kind of long-term patience I’d want if I were looking for an investor.  Amazon was unprofitable for the first 8 years of its history.  By that metric, Business Insider has at least until 2015.

See related coverage at Techmeme.

The post Bezos Invests In Business Insider – How Soon Will He Expect Profits? appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Your Survival Instinct May Be Killing You

Posted: 06 Apr 2013 06:00 AM PDT

Survival Instinct is Killing YouAfter a particularly down day, my husband turned to me and said, "You know what? You are your own worst enemy."

How many times have you heard or thought that yourself?  Usually, this phrase comes up when you're being a little too critical or hard on yourself.  But did you ever consider that this is actually true?  I don't mean figuratively, I mean literally true.

We all know that our brains and our evolutionary wiring hasn't quite kept pace with our culture or environment. Our brains still act as if we're in the stone age; hunting and gathering and running from saber-tooth tigers, while the biggest threat we face in the Western world is a long line at the Starbuck's that might make us late for our next meeting.

You're Stressed Because Life is Just Too Easy and Pleasant

It didn’t take long for this book, “Your Survival Instinct May Be Killing You, to grab my interest.  As soon as I opened the envelope from the publisher, the title grabbed me. But it was the idea that our stress is really triggered by the fact that we’ve lost touch with discomfort that pulled me into reading this book.

This seemed counter-intuitive to me, so I had to read more.  I mean, how can all the advancements in our culture that were designed to keep us “safe” actually contribute to more stress and anxiety? For the answer, you have to understand how our brains are wired and what triggers this survival instinct.  And for that, it helps to learn a little about the author.

Marc Schoen (@marcschoen) is an assistant clinical professor at UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine, where he teaches and conducts research on decision making under pressure, mind-body medicine and hypnosis.

Toward the beginning of the book, he tells the story of what prompted his curiosity about how our inability to process discomfort impacts our reactions to stress.

He relates how Mikeal, a Finnish man, had been hiccuping for more than two years, every fifteen to twenty seconds.  As it turned out, the hiccups were a result of Mikael's poor management of his discomfort. Mikeal had experienced several significant losses in his life.  For some people, hiccups are a reaction to being upset or fearful.  And in most cases, they resolve themselves fairly quickly, but for some, as in Mikael's case, they didn't.  Instead, they created a new pattern and eventually turned into a vicious, unresolved cycle.

The book is filled with many different stories and examples where our inability to deal with discomfort literally transforms into a physical malady.  As you read through each one, I'm sure that you'll see a little bit of yourself in several of them.

How to Override Your Brain’s "New" Wiring

Your Survival Instinct is Killing You is almost a handbook for identifying those areas where you are managing your discomfort poorly and then helping you put new patterns in place so that you can recondition your brain to deal with your life more effectively.

Schoen discusses the five main steps to boosting your performance under pressure:

  1. Lower your "agitance" levels: Agitance is a measure of your inner speed or activation levels.  When your agitance level is high, then you are likely to freak out more when you experience discomfort, and this triggers your fight or flight mechanism.
  2. Manage your discomfort: The next step is to realize that it's your feelings about discomfort that play as the trigger for the stress reaction.  Recognize that you can't eliminate discomfort, you can only manage your reaction to it.
  3. Build your discomfort muscle: Once you are aware of all the areas where you may feel discomfort, you can train your brain to deal with it.  In other words, instead of letting your brain run amok by simply reacting, you can manage how you will react to stress.
  4. Discomfort becomes a source of power: Now you are ready to transform the discomfort from being a source of stress to being a source of power and control.  This puts you, not your brain, in control of the outcome.
  5. Strengthen your discomfort threshold: Use the discomfort-dealing tools that are offered in the book to increase your tolerance to discomfort and ultimately, become more successful.

Your Survival Instinct is Killing You actually contains practical exercises you can do to begin rewiring and training your brain to deal with discomfort.

Can “Your Survival Instinct is Killing You” Cut Healthcare Costs?

I'm being a little facetious with the headline, but maybe not as much as you might think. I've personally experienced where a company's healthcare costs literally doubled when they were sold to an equity company that radically changed the culture of the company.

When employees who were used to working 40-hour weeks were suddenly thrust into 80+ hour work weeks, more of them started having stress-related health issues. Prescription costs increased as more managers started taking anti-depressants and sought treatment for cardiovascular issues.

If you find yourself and your employees under performing when under pressure or overreacting to seemingly harmless situations, you may just be suffering from an overreacting survival instinct. Your Survival Instinct is Killing You is a must read for today's multitasking, crazy-busy business owner.

The post Your Survival Instinct May Be Killing You appeared first on Small Business Trends.
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