If a college pitched you on a program to earn your MBA over the summer, would you likely respond with, “I can’t afford to take the time off from running my business” or “I don’t have the money”? Your 15 Minutes Radio, an Internet broadcasted radio show, offers you an alternative MBA that resolves both problems while giving you additional benefits.


Authors, politicians, magazine publishers, PR reps, actors, business owners, and other industry VIPs and personalities interested in getting their MBA (Marketing, Branding, and Advertising) are taking advantage of Your 15 Minutes Radio excellent, Internet exposure. Your 15 Minutes Radio just launched a new summer program for you to get the same exposure for your small business … for half the investment.


Before you jump right to the price, you need to consider the value of the investment.


Your 15 Minutes Radio’s host, Angle Bush, creates engaging talk radio with notable guests including:

• Congresswoman, Shelia Jackson-Lee
• Actor / Singer, TC Carson
• ABC and GMA contributor, Tory Johnson
• BlackEntreprise.com Editor-in-Chief, Alfred Edmond, Jr.
• Texas’ First Lady, Anita Perry
• Small Biz Lady author, Melinda Emerson
• … and more

Your 15 Minutes Radio distributes its show via its web site, Blog Talk Radio, iTunes and advertising on other Internet radio shows.


The combination of interesting, notable guests discussing relevant topics with Your 15 Minutes Radio’s own marketing efforts creates a loyal and growing following of listeners, giving you greater opportunities for marketing, branding and advertising your small business. In addition, since they promote their show on their site, through Blog Talk Radio and iTunes, interested listeners can pick up previous live shows creating residual exposure for your business.


Having worked with Angle and Your 15 Minutes Radio, I know the quality of care and dedication to service they provide. And if you don’t have the tools or the talent to produce your own spot, Angle and her team will produce one for you.


So the value that comes with Your 15 Minutes Radio’s alternative MBA program includes:

• Interjecting exposure for your business in engaging talk radio of notable guests
• A growing loyal listenership
• Residual exposure
• Quality care and dedication for helping your create MBA for your small business
• Double the exposure for the investment of one spot

Sounds like a good investment? It is.


What is the investment?


For the months of July, August and September, Your 15 Minutes Radio is offering a 2-for-1 advertising special. When you invest in one radio spot, they will double your investment by giving you another spot at no charge.


Take advantage of Your 15 Minutes Radio’s alternative MBA summer program before other intelligent small business owners grab the spots by sending an email to advertising@Your15MinutesRadio.com.


All the Best,


Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide
Small Biz Break

This is a big question that both the unemployed and those feeling locked in the cubicle prison are asking themselves.


There can be a difference between having your own business and being an entrepreneur. You can have your own business without being entrepreneur, and that’s OK depending on what you want and what works best for your skill set.


For example, you could buy into one of the many work-from-home programs, MLM and franchise opportunities, or even purchase an existing business. These types of businesses will give you structure and a formula to follow allowing you to have your own business. However, an entrepreneur, on the other hand, would find these scenarios restrictive.


In case you haven’t seen my previous mentions of my partnership with Maria Smith-Alvira at Small Biz Break, we coach people to help them decide which scenario works best for them and then consult them through the steps to success.


If you are ready to be your own boss and prefer a structured work-from-home, MLM or franchise program, we can help you determine a program that will fit well with who you are and where you want to go.


If you are ready to flex your entrepreneur muscles, we will coach you through defining and launching a business that is an extension of YOU (your strengths, your experience, your passion, your financial needs and wants, and your personal goals), ultimately giving you your optimal balance between your personal and professional fulfillment and financial success.


By following this process, we lead you to your “Simple, Spontaneous, Success”. By starting your ideal business (instead of just any business that makes money), the process becomes simpler because you will replace fear and frustration with enthusiasm and determination. As you think of ways to improve and grow your business, your ideas will be more spontaneous because the business is an extension of you, ultimately leading to greater success.


How can we help?


1. Register for access to the Solutions Center.
Click here to go to the Small Biz Break Solutions Center. Inside you will find a number of business templates and forms to help you focus your activity for creating and launching your small business. Registration and downloads are free.


2. Download your free copy of “My Idea, My Business”.
Currently, we are giving away our new ebook, “My Idea, My Business” in the Solutions Center. “My Idea, My Business” helps you define the business of you. This ebook walks you through creating a business that is an extension of who you are so you can achieve your “Simple, Spontaneous, Success”.


3. Get started with one of our package solutions.
If you want answers to starting your own small business, get started quickly with by choosing the package that best meets your needs. From a professional review of your business idea, to creating an idea and launching it, to increasing your brand recognition and revenues with your own book or ebook, simply go to our Services page and select the package that is right for you.


4. Contact us for personalized, professional coaching.
Not all help fits within a package. Sometimes the right package for your needs is the one that we create from scratch. Contact us for a free consultation to design your personalized coaching and consulting program.


5. Brand the business of you with your own book / ebook.
As we mentioned above, creating your own book or ebook is one of the most effective ways for building a warm prospect list of future customers, establishing a rapport with them, keeping them loyal, generating more sales and gaining recognition and credibility as a leader in your industry. Contact us to discuss our writing services of coaching, editing and ghostwriting.


Don’t let a struggling economy stop you from pursuing your passion of starting and growing your own small business.


Contact us to get your start today.


All the Best,


Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide
Small Biz Break

If you’ve been a regular reader on my blog, first, thank you, and second, you will know that I am a diehard believer in the necessity of banding together with other joint venture partners to create new opportunities and thus grow your business exponentially faster. I was recently introduced to some solo pros with a slightly different spin on the JV concept – a tribe.


As a solopreneur, you realize how difficult it can be to attract new business on your own. Some of the more common methods for attracting prospects include the following:

• Opening a brick and mortar location
• Setting up a web site
• Sending mass email blasts and direct mail pieces
• Blogging on a weekly basis (or more)
• Buying offline and online advertising
• Networking

 


But, what is the #1 form of marketing? Word of mouth. People always trust more what others say about you than what you bloviate about your own business.


Before we go further, let me define a joint venture partnership and a tribe.


Joint Ventures

JVs entail finding other individuals who have a similar target market with complementary products, services, and strengths to join you in the formation of a new business with shared marketing, expenses and risks, and ultimately shared profits, without giving up your own individual business.


Tribes

Tribes can often (and in my opinion should) include a JV partnership, but can remain as basic as a small group of people, syndicating and recommending each other’s content on their individual blogs.


For example, let’s say you’re still going solo trying to build an audience and a business by creating your own content –a health and beauty blog. After a couple of months, let’s say you create a list of 100 followers who trust what you have to say and enjoy the quality of your content. You can keep churning out content every other day or once a week speaking to those same 100 people. Maybe you add a couple more people a week. You could spend more time and money on some of the common marketing methods mentioned above or you could build a tribe.


Let’s also say you find four other solopreneurs doing the same thing with a similar sized list of loyal customers and readers. Seems somewhat silly to be redundant, doesn’t it. Why not group together, share content and have each member recommend the other tribe members blogs to their readers? Through this, you decrease your writing up to 1/5 and increasing your readership 5x.


Since each member holds sway over their audience, you have a much greater chance of capturing those new set of eyes than if you went out and promoted yourself. How do you get this done?


Six solo pros answer that question and more in an 8-week training course called the Tribe Mastery Intensive 2.0. Imagine if instead of taking one year to build your business, you could create the same following in three months or six months.


Here’s an excellent opportunity for you to decide if learning from these pros is worth your time and money, a free 90-minute webinar.


Date:  Thursday February 4th

Time:  6:00 PM PST


Do yourself a favor, don’t let your ego tell you that you don’t need anyone. Take the time to learn how to grow your business quicker through building a tribe. Sign in now to secure a seat at this free webinar, by clicking on this Tribe Mastery link. I’ll be there.


All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide

Location, Location, Location

When setting up a brick and mortar shop, one element critical for success is finding the right location. Whether you operate a retail shop, restaurant, law firm, or automotive service center, location selection can boost or break your business.

Often when selecting a specific location, business owners consider a site based upon its proximity to prime demographics, parking parameters, traffic, neighbors, cost per square foot and overall visibility. However, with the expanding capabilities of the Internet, there is the need to buy into the right virtual real estate, too.

Duke Getzinger, co-founder of MileHighSwap.com and a creative marketing mentor, launches his latest business, LocalMapExperts.com. LME.com is an online opportunity to position your brick and mortar business on prime Internet real estate.

The Evolution of Local Advertising

It use to be that shops focused their marketing efforts on local advertising options – the yellow pages, newspapers, radio spots, billboards, etc. – and then came along the big bang of online options. Suddenly the Internet not only allowed businesses to reach out to their local market, but around the world. With this explosion, many people were unaware of either their ability, the necessity or both of building a local presence online.

According to a recent report by comScore, yellow page usage has seen year over year decreases starting in 2006. As a matter of fact, they report that 2008 marks the first year Internet searches eclipsed all forms of the yellow page usage, claiming an impressive 31% of all local business search queries – and trending upward.

Other reporting agencies report similar statistics. Did you know that 90% of online business searches result in offline brick and mortar purchases and that 61% of all local searches result in a transaction? These statistics coupled with those reported by comScore make choosing the right “local” Internet real estate equally as important as selecting real estate for a true brick and mortar building.

Your Online Local Options

Let’s agree that Google is the undisputed leading search engine. According to comScore, Google owned 65.6% of the search engine market share in November ’09. Yahoo! Sites had the second largest market share at 17.5% during the same period.

You could go the unpaid, organic growth method. If you do, you better live in a tiny town, service a small niche or plan on waiting a while for your SEO tactics to grow your ranking. Plus, this route takes consistent work to keep you in a top spot. Do you have the time to run your brick and mortar business and manage your online activities?

There is the free option of registering with Google’s Local Business Center – a good option, but still no guarantee that Google is going to rank your business high when customers search their area for a local shop.

Another option is to hire an SEO expert. Not a bad choice, but the costs can be high, plus you still have no guarantee to hold a top spot on a search by your keyword / phrase in your area.

How much time and money do you want to spend with no guarantee that you will hold prime Internet real estate? Think the last time you did a search online for a local business. Did you continue to click on pages 2, 3, 4 … trying to find a business that caught your eye?

Stake Your Claim

LocalMapExperts.com gives you a guarantee of securing one of the top 7 spots on Google Maps when customers search their area for businesses by your selected keywords / phrases. And the Google Map always comes up on page 1 of a Google search (as in the screen capture above), significantly increasing your chances for grabbing customers’ attention and taking advantage of the excellent statistics for converting a search into a purchase.

There’s another bonus to the LME system – you only pay for guaranteed results. Separate from paying a nominal $250 set up fee, you don’t pay anything else until you secure one of the top 7 spots. Then all you have to pay is a low monthly flat fee to hold onto your spot. There are no long-term contracts to sign; you can give up your spot at any time. However, do you really want to?

There are only 7 spots on the Google Map that comes up on the first page of a search. Once LocalMapExperts.com locks up those spots, they’re off the market until one of the companies choose to give them up. So if you want to take advantage of guaranteeing a great virtual location for your brick and mortar business, you better contact LME now while the spots are still available.

Here’s how to get a hold of Local Map Experts to get started:

Web: www.LocalMapExperts.com 

Phone: (877) 582-3862

Fax: (435) 921-7533

Email: sales@localmapexperts.com

All The Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide

If you recall a post that I wrote about two months ago, I discussed the three entrepreneurial personality types in the piece, “The Split Personality of Entrepreneurship”. The three types of entrepreneurs are the Inventor, the Manager and the Split Personality (a blend of the previous two).

A significant percentage of solopreneurs are either the Inventor or the Manager type. Today’s interview is with Jeff Frutkin, the solo entrepreneur behind SmarterLeap.com and its sister site Idea Architects. Jeff recognized the delineation between these two entrepreneurial types and created sites specifically geared to allow people falling into these categories to take advantage of their strengths.

TSG:     What was your inspiration to launch SmarterLeap.com?

JF:     I’d been looking for a unique idea for a business for the last several years. I came across dozens of websites that claimed to have “new business ideas”, however, these sites simply published existing small businesses or reported on ideas that were started by other entrepreneurs. Further, many of the ideas were recycled from site to site and offered limited revenue potential and competitive advantage, especially to an entrepreneur looking for an invaluable idea to call his own.

I founded SmarterLeap.com to bridge the gap in the marketplace. Our purpose is to provide:

• Breakthrough business ideas for individuals serious about starting a new business, from original web 2.0 sites and unique service businesses to new product innovations, and
• Expert guidance assisting entrepreneurs with the successfully launch of a new SmarterLeap business idea.

TSG:     Can you give us a quick bio about your professional background?

JF:     Sure. I have 12 years of experience leading top performing organizations with national and global marketing presence. I held senior marketing and general management positions in a number of leading financial services companies, including HSBC and most recently, Advanta Bank Corp.

I earned degrees in Marketing and Finance from the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University) and The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania).

TSG:     Who do you think will benefit the most from the ideas on SmarterLeap.com?

JF:     While SmarterLeap focuses on cultivating aspiring entrepreneurs worldwide, many individuals from diverse industries turn to us for access to one-of-a-kind business ideas they can’t get anywhere else.

Here are just a few that count on our services:

• Budding entrepreneurs
• Consultants
• Experienced professionals seeking an alternative to working in large corporations
• Independent small business owners
• Franchisees looking for a fresh approach to new start-ups
• Trend watchers
• Marketers
• Venture capitalists

TSG:     What benefits do entrepreneurs have by becoming a subscriber with SmarterLeap instead of going to other free sites for business ideas or buying into a franchise?

JF:     We are offering aspiring entrepreneurs innovative business ideas that have the potential to become multi-million dollar companies. The ideas range from original web 2.0 sites and unique service businesses to new product innovations and compelling retail concepts.

The cost to join SmarterLeap.com is only $9 per month. For this small fee, you get:

• Unlimited access to search SmarterLeap’s idea bank, with in-depth descriptions of each innovative concept
• 30+ new business ideas are added to the site monthly
• Free reign to begin building your business using an original SmarterLeap concept
• Eligible to utilize additional member services

If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, and you don’t have a viable business idea, SmarterLeap is the perfect resource for you. 

TSG:     Why do you offer such an aggressive, low monthly fee of only $9 for the site’s innovative business ideas? Why not charge interested entrepreneurs $100 a month or more?

JF:     We are committed to maintaining a low subscription fee, so you can focus on finding the breakthrough idea that is right for you. Right now, you can get a 1-month subscription for a total of only $9, a tiny investment that will change your life.

TSG:     Where do the ideas published on SmarterLeap come from?

JF:    SmarterLeap taps into a network of really smart and creative people (we call them Idea Architects) to generate ideas that have yet to be imagined in the world of business. We compensate Idea Architects for developing powerful new business concepts. They participate in weekly brainstorms with the SmarterLeap team and submit ideas based on their expertise, research and knowledge of a particular market.

If you are interested in becoming an idea architect, please send us a brief description of yourself including areas of interest, current responsibilities and any significant achievements to: ideaarchitect@smarterleap.com.

You can also submit ideas on our sister website: http://www.ideaarchitectsonline.com/.

TSG:     Who can join Idea Architects Online?

JF:     Anyone can join IdeaArchitectsOnline.com. Many Idea Architects are also entrepreneurs. We are looking for people who are creative, smart and enjoy brainstorming new business ideas. Idea Architects also tend to have a strong interest in emerging trends and next generation opportunities.

Jeff, thanks for your time and insight into your two unique sites.

So, whether your preference is brainstorming new business ideas or you are looking for inspiration to launch your new livelihood, you now have two original sites to assist you – Idea Architects and Smarter Leap.

For more information, you can click on the hyperlinks above or contact Jeff at the following:

Jeff Frutkin
P: (312) 890-5502

jfrutkin@smarterleap.com

All The Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide