When promoting your small town tourism, one essential element is getting your local businesses online where your visitors can find them. But most of your small town businesses either have no website, or a website they don’t maintain, or a website that isn’t mobile-friendly. Rather than fight with all the local businesses about getting and…
“What you say before the event is an explanation, after it’s an excuse.” Guest post by Jurek Leon, Perth, Australia Brisbane dentist Paddi Lund makes this point in his fascinating book Training customers to treasure your business. He has a ‘Welcome Book’ which is given to all new patients before their first appointment. This explains…
Paint company Benjamin Moore is identifying with Main Streets through a campaign to repaint 20 downtowns. They’re backing it up with TV commercials praising downtowns, the “three-story highrise,” and the small businesses that typify Small Town Rules.
Even national retail chains can borrow some local connections. The Shops at Target are a new type of collaboration, taking products from small shops, “the shops we stumbled upon and couldn’t help but fall in love with” and putting them in Target stores around the country for six-week runs. And not just stacking them in,…
The Brag Basket is traveling the world to celebrate all the places you, the people who read Small Biz Survival, come from. This time, we’re celebrating our readers in the U.K. The Brag Basket is our tradition of sharing. The basket is always free and open all weekend, this one August 9-11, 2013. What good news…
Guest post by Cathy Lloyd, The Village In the summer of 2007, I had an idea to help the state of retail on the square in downtown Washington, Iowa. Since Wal-Mart came to town in the ‘70s, there had been a steady decline in the number of retail businesses in the downtown area. I hoped…
Visitors don’t want to LOOK, they want to DO. People are looking for things to do, not just things to look at, tourism expert Roger Brooks said. That’s why it’s so hard to market your history in tourism. You have to find ways to make people involved in the experience of that history. Visit Indiana…
The Best Way to Deal with Email What’s the best way to deal with email? Have it sorted automatically, before you ever see it, into groups based on the frame of mind needed to act on it. Frame of mind might be “reading” for newsletters that are informative, or “read and reply immediately” for work…
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