Along with the serious work we do, we still know how to have fun here at the Women’s Enterprise Centre.  We surround ourselves with great folks who not only know how to educate entrepreneurs (and teach us a thing or two as well) but can also be highly entertaining.

Last week we invited Liz Hover, local blog-guru, to spend part of an evening chatting with us about all things bloggish (and since part of the conversation was about her Shih Tzu Sadie’s blog, it was about things doggish too!).

Liz takes a somewhat revolutionary perspective on business blogs and believes that the blog should be the hub around which your website revolves, acting as a channel to some of the information that you want to send to the world. 

She notes that one of the chief reasons to blog is that it gives you a chance to change your website frequently (thus incenting a greater degree of search-engine optimization (SEO) that gets more people to your site.  Naturally, this is the desired outcome,

particularly if your site is set up to optimally show off your product/service and if you have a way of easily converting views into sales.

Liz asserts that a blog gives a company a human voice, as well as a chance to establish your expertise.  It also allows you to build trusting relationships with your customers and promote some of your new products.  Blogs are also attractive to other bloggers who may be looking for industry information or education about your offerings.  That kind of blog networking can lead to collaboration and can give you a wider audience for your voice via other similar-thinking blog writers.

On the ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’ side of things, while blogs are inexpensive to develop and post, they do require a high degree of commitment and consistency.  It can take as long as a year’s solid application before you see any real results in your sales.  The trick is to keep at it while you find your voice and build your community.

Check out Liz Hover’s great resources at her informative website.

Posted by Sandra Altner at 4:26 PM 1 Comments

Tags search engine optimization  SEO  blogging  blogs  Women’s Enterprise Centre  Liz Hover  networking 

I recently spoke at an entrepreneurship conference in Windsor, Ontario.  The Canadian Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (CCSBE), built primarily on academic membership, is now encouraging attendance and input by non-academics, specifically business owners, policy makers, and practitioners who work to support entrepreneurs. The resulting mix at this year’s conference provided a rich offering of workshops and presentations that had some good application possibilities.

As an entrepreneurship development organization, it’s clear what benefits this kind of gathering might have for the Women’s Enterprise Centre of Manitoba, but for our entrepreneurial clients, what’s the payback for attending something like the CCSBE event?

When I had my own business, I would often pick up a copy of one of the North American academic journals that can be found in any business school library.  Whether its area of concentration was on management, marketing, entrepreneurship or organizational behavior, I always found something of interest that sparked an idea that I could use in my own business development.  Granted, some of this stuff is really abstract and statistical, but it’s ok to skip over the more esoteric methodologies to get to the conclusion, the meat of the study, to see what the findings tell you.  Similarly, reading the abstracts of articles, just getting the gist of what the research has been about, can inspire a wealth of creative thinking. 

Some brilliant people have spent countless hours studying entrepreneurs and their behavior.  Having that kind of aggregate information can’t help but serve the forward thinking entrepreneur in his/her imperatives to reach target markets, act strategically, utilize financial tools, measure activity against benchmarks, and get a good sense of what the rest of the enterprise world is doing to reach success.

In similar fashion, attending a conference can benefit the entrepreneur in many ways.  Listening, learning, informing and networking are all ways to refresh the brain and get a new handle on how things might be done better to enhance the bottom line. 

Meanwhile, check out International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal if this idea resonates with you.

 

 

 

 

Posted by Sandra Altner at 4:54 PM 0 Comments

Tags women entrepreneurs  women-owned businesses  Women’s Enterprise Centre  Canadian Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship  International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal