This week at SaveYour.Town, we’re sharing how to take big empty buildings and divide them up for multiple small businesses. One model is co-working spaces, which offer shared office and workspace. Then our friend Jon Swanson sent us an article on rural churches doing innovative things, including one doing a co-working space. This seems like…
Every small town has some empty windows downtown. Some are empty buildings, some are buildings being used for storage, and some are service businesses that just don’t have a lot to put in their windows. Here are three ideas I saw on my trip through Cowlitz County, Washington. Make a mini-museum. Work with the local…
A few weeks ago, we talked about knowing your customers in order to help them answer questions they get asked. This week, get to know your customers better by thinking through what they want to be good at. What do your customers want to be good at? You help customers all the time. The…
You do some events that are open to the public, right? Here’s the tip to get more locals to attend. When you hold an event that is open to the public, put up a sign that says, “Open to everyone! Come on in!” Of course you know it’s open to the public, and of…
You know I’m a big fan of answering customer questions. That’s been part of my marketing advice for 10 years now. Should I blog for my small business? Yes, answer customer questions Talk less about you, more about them Top small business blogging questions answered But there’s a deeper layer to serving your customers….
I loved this restaurant marketing idea from the Texas Downtown Association: Collaborative Marketing for Local Restaurants In order to compete with new chain restaurants, a group of Longview restaurateurs decided to band together to form a local marketing collective to help encourage people to “Chews Longview”. The marketing campaign urges people to support local…
For years, we’ve all worked on SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, to get our names out there and associated with specific words and phrases we knew our customers would type into a search engine to find us. Now that customers are saying their searches out loud, how does that change things? Today’s voice searches…
A small town official wrote in to ask me what business would work on empty land. This town had acquired an old industrial site with 30 acres of empty land in the middle of town. They’d like to build a city within a city, maybe a mix of residential and commercial. To get there,…
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