Small business owners and entrepreneurs like to jump right in and get started, which is crucial to success, but it’s also important to prepare and plan and set objectives, especially when it comes to email marketing. When you’re getting started with email marketing make sure you step back and think through what you’re trying to accomplish. The best way to do this is to try and see things through your customer’s eyes.

Last month, I gave a talk on “Surviving and Thriving in Real Estate” to about 200 people. I went around the room and met about 50 people before I spoke. I asked, “If you were giving today’s talk, what would you say?” I got eight great ideas and shared them with the audience. I showed them: If you’re working, you already know what works.

GIS Planning used this criteria to identify the best small cities (with populations between 20,000 and 200,000) for startups in each state. With that data in hand, BusinessWeek asked entrepreneurs in each city what people should know about starting a business there. Many said factors such as affordability, availability of talent, existence of a thriving business community, and quality of life helped them choose where to open shop. What emerged is a picture of 50 dynamic cities, each with its own draw for new businesses.

Tempted to cut prices? You’re not alone. With slumping sales, many businesses have been quick to offer discounts. “Cutting prices is by far the easiest marketing technique you can use,” says Frank Luby, a partner in Simon-Kucher & Partners, a pricing and marketing consultancy. But price cuts raise some tough questions: Will deep discounts cheapen your brand? Once you cut prices, can you raise them again? How do you deal with narrower margins? Says Luby: “I try to get my clients to think about where they want to be as …

In 2008, entrepreneurs Chris DiMambo and Keith Dupuis sought to upscale the Main Street Grille, a sports bar and family style restaurant in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Their $48,000 risk–in seemingly positive changes that included an expanded menu, flowers on the table, linen napkins, and even new salt and pepper shakers–so angered local customers that, after 9 months, the pair had to acknowlege a flop. Disheartened by the empty seats, angry customer letters, and a 15 percent drop in revenue, the two look back in this MSNBC video to what went wrong.

Over the years, I have noticed that most bad clients seem to fall into certain common patterns. In this post, I share those patterns with you. Keep in mind that none of these bad client types are specific to any one client that I’ve ever worked with. Rather, these examples are a generalization of the many different characteristics a bad client can take. Personally, I rarely ever have to deal with a bad client in my business, and I’ll explain how you too can avoid them later on in the article.

Women often negotiate over issues that men take as givens—opportunities for promotion and training, mentoring, client assignments, partnership arrangements, resources, and office space, among others. When and if these negotiations occur, they take place in the context of a particular negotiated order—cultural patterns and work practices that are the result of past interaction and negotiation. What is of interest here is how these patterns and practices might shape our understanding of gender and negotiation in the workplace and the implications of this framing for research and practice. We explore second …

Outsourcing has received a bad rap in some circles because of its association with job losses that occur when corporations “export” jobs to countries with much lower labor costs than the U.S. But those of us who run small and home businesses have a different perspective on outsourcing. For us, outsourcing is the “secret sauce” that lets us pull together the resources to handle temporary work overloads, reduce fixed costs, speed products to market, simplify distribution, provide more or better service to our customers, and compete with our deeper-pocketed competitors.

When he started his company, Donald Coleman had nothing but his personal savings and a few faithful friends to fund it. Twenty years later, GlobalHue, Coleman’s marketing communications agency that focuses on minority consumers, closed 2008 with $825 million in billings. Numbers like that earn Coleman membership in an all-too-exclusive club: He is a successful black entrepreneur. And he has an idea why there aren’t more people like him. “I think it’s quite evident that the lack of access to capital is the reason why there aren’t more minority entrepreneurs,” he says.

Gary Vaynerchuk may sound like an all-American boy, but at 33 he is a successful, grown-up businessman who has put his enthusiasms — and his penchant for publicity — to work in achieving 15-fold sales growth in his family’s wine business in the last decade, to $60 million… Last December, seeking to enhance sales, he offered free shipping and promoted it three ways. As a result, he said, a direct marketing mailing cost $15,000 and brought in 200 new customers; a billboard ad cost $7,500 and won 300 new customers; and tweeting the promotion on Twitter attracted 1,800 new customers.