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Expert Tips for Picking the Best Floral Arrangement for Mother’s Day

This Mother’s Day, florists around the nation would like you to think outside the vase when you choose a floral arrangement for mom.

“Your mother is special and unique, and her floral arrangement should reflect that,” says Kate Owsley, a florist on BloomNation and lead floral designer at Back Bay Florist in Boston. “Many people ask florists for a typical ‘Mother’s Day’ arrangement, but there isn’t such a thing. Every mom has her own tastes, and it’s her style that the arrangement should reflect.”

Rather than ordering a generic arrangement, think about your mom’s favorite colors, the style of her home, the way she dresses and her personality. Here are a few different styles to give you some ideas.

Traditional: If mom tends to like a classic look, a traditional arrangement is the perfect gift. Such designs are usually created in tall vases and include flowers such as rose, lily, daisy, stock, iris, tulip, gladiola and baby’s breath.

Cottage: Moms who have cottage-style décor in their homes and like to garden are often delighted with arrangements that sport blue hydrangea, sunflower, lilac, snapdragon, anemone, poppy pod, hyacinth and daffodil. If your cottage-style mom is also a gardener, get ideas about her favorite flowers by what she grows.

Modern: Sleek, monochromatic designs are what moms with a contemporary style like. Good choices in flowers for such dynamic floral arrangements include cala lily, flowering branches, white hydrangea, green trick dianthus, orchid, ginger, succulents and ti leaves.

Eclectic: The mom who marches to her own drum and sports a unique, quirky style tends to gravitate toward unusual, flowing arrangements on the wild side containing flower and filler selections such as peony, jasmine, silver brunia, veronica, hellebore, scabiosa pods, ranunculus and berries.

Feminine: If your mom is still a girl at heart, then an ultra-feminine design is sure to make her smile. Choose flowers in blush and soft pink tones, such as rose, peony, hydrangea, dusty miller and lilac.

Everlasting: Those moms who prefer something more enduring than a bouquet of cut flowers enjoy containers of planted items, such as houseplants. Other good long-lasting options include dried flower bouquets that can be displayed indefinitely and succulent gardens.

Choose containers carefully. Whatever type of floral arrangement you get for mom, pay equal attention to the vase, which pulls the whole arrangement together, says Owsley. “Vases run the gamut, from wooden or vintage pedestal glass to concrete or metal. Also keep in mind that the dimensions of the opening in the vase will dictate the style of arrangement that can be made.”

Mother’s Day vies with Valentine’s Day as the busiest for florists, so order as early as possible, says Owsley. “And don’t forget the note. Take the opportunity to let mom know how much you care.” If you order through the online floral marketplace, BloomNation, you can get a handcrafted design from one of the country’s top florists. They send you a photo of the arrangement before it’s delivered to mom.

Julie Bawden-Davis is a garden writer and master gardener, who since 1985 has written for publications such as Organic Gardening, Wildflower, Better Homes and Gardens and The Los Angeles Times. She is the author of seven books, including Reader’s Digest Flower Gardening, Fairy Gardening, The Strawberry Story, and Indoor Gardening the Organic Way, and is the founder of HealthyHouseplants.com

How to Create a Carefree Living Wall

If you think you don’t have sufficient garden space or you wish to hide unattractive vertical surfaces in your garden, Shawna Coronado wants to talk to you. The author of Grow a Living Wall has a solution to limited garden space—installing a vertical garden. By growing on elements like walls, fences and gates, you increase your growing space exponentially.

The desire to grow more plants led Coronado to vertical growing. After buying a window box and determining that it gave her added growing space, she did the math regarding stacking five such window boxes on top of one another and ended up with the ability to grow 35-40 plants in those boxes, which is more than many full-sized gardens.

Since that revelation, Coronado has devised a system for planting a wide variety of living walls, including succulents, vegetables, herbs and aromatherapy gardens, all of which and more she shares in her book. “It is very easy to grow herbs, flowers, vegetables and perennials in a vertical system,” she says. “Plants can be grown in shade to full sun.”

(Shawna Coronado)

When Coronado talks about a living wall, she isn’t referring to plants rooted in the ground and growing up a wall. A living wall consists of a self-contained vertical garden with a soil- or water-based medium that is fastened to a vertical surface. Some living wall systems also have the ability to automate watering.

In addition to increasing your growing space, living walls have a wide variety of benefits. They are the antidote to small space gardens, provide those with limited mobility an easier way to garden, and they make otherwise boring vertical spaces green and gorgeous.

“Growing a living wall can also sometimes extend the growing season if a gardener plans well. For instance, putting a wall up in a warm, protected niche might enable seasonal plants a few extra days— or even weeks—of growth,” says Coronado, who hosts the Good Green Home Show, a radio show focused on social good and organic living. “Living walls can also function as an added layer of insulation on a home by reducing the heat effect for a homeowner and simultaneously saving money.”

Better yet, living walls don’t require weeding. “No weeds means incredible time-saving advantages for an urban family,” says Coronado. “Additionally, if you set up a container garden watering system on your living wall unit, you will not have to water the plants either. No weeds and no watering means a super easy gardening experience.”

To have the best luck with a living garden it’s important to use the best soil mix. “For example, if you have drought conditions, it might be a good idea to plant your living wall garden in moisture retentive soil,” says Coronado. “One of my favorite recipes for a moisture retentive mix is one-third rotted manure, one-third traditional potting soil, and one-third compost. Also make sure to feed your vertical garden with a well-balanced fertilizer every 4-8 weeks.

HOW RECENT TWITTER CHANGES CAN BENEFIT YOUR BUSINESS

APRIL 23, 2015Twitter recently revamped some features and policies that may help you improve your social media strategy. Those changes include the ability to direct message anyone, even without following one another, and the prohibition of any posts that promote violence.

Here are some of the most sweeping recent Twitter changes that could affect how you use this social media platform to build business and beef up customer service, with tips for making the most of these changes.

Direct Message Anyone on Twitter

It used to be that you needed to follow Twitter users if you wanted to direct message them. That method may have proved cumbersome and confusing and discouraged communication in the past, notes Tyler Sminkey, social media specialist and account executive for Insider Media Management.

It’s important to monitor your Twitter account and hop on engagement opportunities ASAP. Answer questions and react to comments and complaints within 20 minutes of the initial posting. If someone was in your store, you wouldn’t wait to answer a question. Virtual customer service is no different.

“Now you can direct message anyone on Twitter, and that’s good news for small-business owners,” Sminkey says. “This change will encourage a more open form of direct communication for small-business owners. Direct messaging also enables small-business owners to connect and communicate with customers without sharing that information with the public. For example, we often request to obtain contact information from customers if they felt they could have had a better experience.”

Though private direct messaging could provide benefits, for the sake of managing your company’s reputation in the face of complaints, it may be a good idea to do that managing on Twitter where everyone can see, suggests J.P. Hervis, president of Insider Media Management.

“In most cases, management of an upset client on Twitter is still best done in front of everyone so other followers can see you are reacting to a potential issue and care about making it right,” Hervis says. “Those conversations can get into heavy detail and fill up a feed, though, so many times there is a point where moving to direct messaging is ideal—especially when obtaining the client’s personal information for a ‘make-good.’”

Retweet With a Comment

Click the retweet icon when you spot a tweet you want to broadcast, and you’ll notice a new “add a comment” link. Also known as quote tweet, this feature can make retweeting easier and offers the potential to share your insights about a tweet in a more meaningful manner.

Prior to this change, you could either simply hit retweet, which essentially reposted the tweet for your followers, or if you wanted to make a comment, you had to do a manual retweet that required you to cram your information in with the original tweet, with a 140-character limit. Now the original tweet is embedded and your comment can be up to 116 characters.

The new feature encourages you to add your own insight and voice to the tweet, which can be ideal for increasing customer engagement. By personalizing the tweet, you can also help build your reputation as a thought leader on certain topics.

Ban on Tweets that Promote Violence

This new policy, suspending any users that promote violence against others, may create a less contentious Twitter landscape for conducting business.

And while you probably haven’t threatened anyone on Twitter, it can still be a good idea to protect your company’s reputation by reviewing your Twitter behavior protocol on a regular basis and making sure all employees abide by certain standards, Sminkey claims.

He suggests asking the following questions before tweeting:

Does this tweet fit your brand?
Is it appropriate for your audience and the date/time it will be sent?
Have you left any questions unanswered?
Does the tweet negatively affect a customer or another business? “The first thought when sharing something on social media should be that you aren’t harming anyone or saying something that could be thought of as mean or negative,” Sminkey says. “This is a public forum, and your posts can live forever online.”
Are you abiding by Twitter’s best practices? Have you used shortened links and/or hashtags and tagged other profiles appropriately?

“For many small-business customers, Twitter is the fastest and best form to ask simple questions,” Hervis says. “That being said, it’s important to monitor your Twitter account and hop on engagement opportunities ASAP. Answer questions and react to comments and complaints within 20 minutes of the initial posting. If someone was in your store, you wouldn’t wait to answer a question. Virtual customer service is no different.”

Read more articles about social media.

Photo: Getty Images

Create a Welcoming Butterfly Garden in Your Yard

The warm, sunny days of spring bring butterflies back to the garden. Luring these lofty beauties to stay in your landscape is well worth the effort. Butterflies add an unmatched ethereal sense of movement to the garden.

Plant a butterfly garden and you can enjoy a confetti display of multi-colored, winged visitors floating about your yard throughout the spring and summer. Even better, you’ll be doing good things for the planet. These graceful beauties might seem like pretty “airheads,” but they’re actually environmentalists.

Butterflies are one of the world’s top pollinators. They pollinate many species of flowering plants, and without them many crops wouldn’t get fertilized. These winged beauties aren’t as productive as bees, but they are often the main insect flying around flowers, and that means they do a lot of pollinating.

In their adult and larval stages, butterflies also make a good food source for other animals—especially birds. As a matter of fact, mother birds must feed their nestlings a steady supply of hundreds of caterpillars in their first weeks of life.

(Julie Bawden-Davis)

Lure butterflies to your garden with these tips:

Create a place for butterflies to lay eggs that shields the resulting chrysalis from predators and provides food for the adults and larvae. Good choices for this include what are known as host plants. For instance, shrubs like spiraea and trees like ash. Other good host plants include aster, birch, broccoli, cassia, dill, elm, lupine, mallow, milkweed, mustard, parsley, passion vine and Southern Magnolia.

Provide a basking area. Sunning is the key to butterfly flight. The insects must keep their body temperatures above 70 degrees or they can’t fly. Sunny spots with flat stones or stone walls make good places for butterflies to get warmed up for flying.

Offer shallow water. Butterflies require puddles of mud or sand in which to draw out water, salt and nutrients. This behavior is known as puddling. Place the puddles in sunny areas.

Serve up nectar plants. The more items you have on the menu for butterflies to sample, the better your chances for attracting them to your yard. Some good nectar plants include sunflower, columbine, butterfly bush, Mexican plum, coreopsis, black-eyed Susan, lantana, yarrow, milkweed, purple coneflower, daylily, honeysuckle, petunia, salvia, marigold and zinnia.

How to Repot a Houseplant

Your houseplants may live their lives indoors, but they know that spring has sprung. The season’s warm weather initiates new growth, which makes it the ideal time to repot your indoor garden.

Signs your houseplants require repotting include roots coming out of the bottom of the pot, water rushing through when you water and sluggish, weak growth. If the pot is filled with more roots than soil, it’s definitely time for repotting.

To have the best luck repotting your houseplants, keep the following guidelines in mind.

Select the right size pot. It might seem like a great idea to plant your houseplant in a much larger pot so you don’t have to repot for a long time, but by doing that you’ll be signing the plant’s death warrant. Excess soil around a plant remains wet and results in perpetually wet roots that succumb to fungal disease and rot.

Use a pot that is the same size as the existing container or just one size larger. You do want the plant to have new soil in which to grow, just not too much. The roots should fill about one-half of the pot.

Choose a new pot that has drainage holes. Keep in mind that plastic pots are the most water retentive. Terra-cotta pots tend to dry out quickly. If you prefer the look of clay but don’t want the pot to dry out fast, opt for glazed ceramic pots, which do a better job of retaining water than untreated clay.

Prevent transplant shock by watering the plant with warm water two to four hours prior to repotting.

Remove the plant from its old pot carefully. Attempt to hold the pot upside down with one hand and ease it out of the pot with the other. If the plant gets stuck, try running a knife around the perimeter and try again. If the plant refuses to come out, you may have to cut the pot if it’s plastic or break it if its terra-cotta or ceramic. Prior to doing this, try soaking the entire pot in water for an hour. This may dislodge the plant from the pot.

Loosen plant roots and shake off excess soil. Trim especially thick root masses by 10 to 20 percent, which will encourage them to reach into new soil. If you want to plant in the same container, trim the root mass by one inch.

Fill the container two-thirds full with moist organic potting soil that drains well. Place the plant in the pot, fanning out the roots. Fill the pot with soil. While doing so, tap the container a couple of times during the process so that the soil settles. Fill the pot with soil to an inch below the pot rim. Tamp down the soil. You should have covered the plant roots but not the stem.

Water the plant well and let it drain. Don’t water again until the top inch of soil has dried out. This may take two to three weeks or even longer to occur, as most plants use less water when establishing. You’ll know the plant has established itself when it puts on new growth.

Wait to feed the plant until it resumes new growth. At that time give it a half-strength solution of an organic fertilizer.

Prepare to watch your houseplant flourish in its new soil.

Talk of The Towne SAS Handcrafted in Son Antonio

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When Jim Furry, owner of Roy Step SAS Handcrafted Shoes in Orange, started in shoe sales in the late 1950s, the business was a bit cutthroat.

“At the time there were more department stores like the May Company and the Broadway vying for customers, so the atmosphere often became competitive,” says Furry, who has operated shoe stores in Orange for 30 years.

Furry started in the shoe sales business in Ohio, coming out to Los Angeles to work at the Broadway and eventually opening his own shoe store in Orange at the now defunct City Shopping Center. At one point he had seven stores in the mall, which was razed in 1996 and replaced with the Outlets at Orange (formerly the Block.)

“The last two to three years before they closed the City mall, we had seven stores. Mall management let me operate some of the shoe stores that had been vacated free of rent,” says Furry. “At the time we carried several brands, but the last six months or so at the mall we found that SAS sold the best, so that, coupled with the fact that all of their shoes are made in the U.S., led me to switch to just selling SAS.”

Longtime employee Karen King, who started out as a stock and salesperson and is now general manager of their two stores, which are in Orange and Santa Ana, recalls those busy days at the City Shopping Center and the logistical challenges.

“At times it was comical, like an episode of I Love Lucy,” says King. “A customer would find a shoe and want the mate, which would be in another store, so I’d run down a back hallway to retrieve the shoe. It could take 15-20 minutes to get back. When I returned, customers would say, ‘I thought you went to lunch.’ Sometimes I’d come clean and explain.”

Save $15 OFF your next SAS Handcrafted Shoe purchase, through the end of April 2015.

King sprinting from one store to the other highlights the company’s attention to customer service, which they offer by being as accommodating as possible and carrying a wide selection of shoes.

“Customer service is what sets a good business apart,” says King, who notes that SAS employees have even gone to homebound people’s residences to fit and provide shoes. “I don’t think many other shoe stores would offer that kind of support,” she says.

Another thing not offered by many competitor shoe stores is the depth of inventory carried at SAS. “A lot of stores try to have just the minimal sizes and widths on hand, but that doesn’t work when competing with shoes coming from China,” says Furry. “By having a large inventory of sizes, we have the opportunity to show people what a well-fitting shoe really feels like. Sustaining that kind of inventory is expensive, but it enables us to always have on hand just the right shoes for every customer.”

Karen De Soto began buying SAS shoes in 2006 when she started working in retail. “I soon realized that the comfort of my feet was key to a successful day on the job,” she says. “My mother loves her SAS shoes, so I headed there.”

In 2012, De Soto began working at SAS as a sales associate. “I enjoy working for the company, because customers leave satisfied with the product and the personal service,” she says.

Attention to customer service has paid off for SAS, which continues to grow. In June 2014, they moved from their former 3,700-square-foot location next to Walmart to a nearby 7,000-square-foot store at 820 North Tustin St., 714-283-4950. They also have a store at 3313 S. Bristol St., Santa Ana, 714-444-0777.

Published in the Mar/Apr 2015 edition of the Old Towne Orange Plaza Review

Written by Julie Bawden-Davis, Photograph by Will Hare

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Grow Tasty Lemon Verbena

Of all lemon-scented and flavored herbs, lemon verbena (Aloysia triphylla) is by far the winner when it comes to fresh lemon taste and smell. Brush the narrow, pointy leaves of this shrub, and you’ll release the tempting odor of lemon.

A South American native, lemon verbena grows outdoors in most climates during the summer months. In mild climates it will go dormant during the winter. In climates that freeze, it’s best to grow the plant in a container and bring it indoors for the winter months.

Lemon verbena makes a tasty herbal tea. It’s a popular ingredient in a number of commercially prepared teas, including Vervein tea. To use the leaves for herbal tea, simple rinse them well and place the leaves in hot water, allowing them to steep for five minutes. Remove the leaves and add sweetener to taste.

Also use lemon verbena to flavor fruit desserts and ice cream, and you can add it to poultry dishes, marinades, and vinegar. It also makes a fragrant potpourri and is often used medicinally for stomach problems.

To successfully grow your own lemon verbena, keep the following tips in mind.

Provide high light. Lemon verbena requires bright, filtered light in order to thrive. Outdoors, place in a full sun or brightly lit filtered light location. Indoors, grow the plant one to two feet from a sunny window or under full-spectrum lighting.

Give lemon verbena room to grow. If you grow lemon verbena in the ground, keep in mind that it will reach 3- to 6-feet tall and 3-feet wide. To plant in a container, go to the next pot size up from the nursery container. Use high-quality potting soil that drains well.

Provide excellent drainage. Lemon verbena doesn’t do well in compacted, heavy soil that prevents good drainage. If drainage is a problem, amend the soil with 30-50 percent compost.

Water lemon verbena when the top 2 to 3 inches of soil has dried. Lemon verbena likes the soil a little on the dry side.

Fertilize. Lemon verbena is a heavy feeder. Give the plant a dosage of an all-purpose organic food monthly, from spring into early fall.

Prune. Lemon verbena becomes leggy and rangy when allowed to roam free. Pinching back some new leaves causes the plant to become bushier. Also prune off any small white flowers if they appear, which will keep the plant producing leaves. Once the plant goes dormant in the fall, do a light pruning to shape.

Dry leaves by placing them on a screen or hanging a bunch upside down in a cool, dark area. When the leaves are completely dried, they can be put in a sealed container that doesn’t let in light. When you want to use the leaves, crushing them releases the heavenly lemon scent and flavor.

Dye Your Easter Eggs Naturally

If you dye your Easter eggs using natural botanical dyes, be prepared to become a bit breathless when you pull the resulting eggs from the dye mix. Using natural materials to make dyes creates spellbinding colors much richer and more complex than any food coloring-based hue.

In her book A Garden to Dye For, Chris McLaughlin shows how to use common foods and plants from your garden to create natural dyes for eggs and fabrics. The author got her start with natural plant dyes two decades ago when she began pounding flowers to extract their colors.

McLaughlin’s book is chock full of photos of naturally dyed items and features more than 40 garden plants that can be used to make a rainbow of colors for your eggs and more. She dyes with hot and cold dye methods. The latter is her favorite, because the process results in intense colors.

Here McLaughlin shares her cold dye method for your Easter eggs.

Pick plants from the garden. Good choices include rudbeckia, calendula, coreopsis, St. John’s wort, marigold, and chamomile. Make certain that the plant materials you gather from the garden are not toxic. Dyes for eggs to be eaten should always be made only from edible plants.

Use kitchen scraps. Try beets, blackberries, blueberries, onion skins, red cabbage, and turmeric.

Simmer the dye materials separately in pots of water for 20-25 minutes. Remove the materials from the water.

Pour each dye color into a glass jar or bowl and add 1/8 cup of vinegar. Let the liquid cool.

Add hardboiled eggs to each dye color. Leave the eggs in the solutions for at least an hour and up to 10 hours. (If you plan to eat the eggs and soak them for more than one hour, keep them soaking in the dye mix in the refrigerator).

Note how you made your favorite dye colors. To ensure that you can recreate your masterpiece hues, record what materials you used, how much, and how long you kept the eggs in the dye.

Create Nonstop Color in Your Garden

To create a garden that resonates, take a cue from interior designers. Planning an eye-catching landscape that attracts attention throughout the year hinges on color choice.

In her new book, The Nonstop Color Garden, “GardenMama” Nellie Neal shares her secrets for choosing just the right hues for your garden and designing in such a way that your landscape features color throughout the year.

“I am always inspired by gardens that reveal their beauty high and low across the seasons—gardens you can enjoy whether it’s 104 degrees in July in Georgia or a frigid January day in Minnesota,” she says. “When I think about how to achieve that particular bliss, it’s the use of color that sets such gardens apart.”

Color sets a mood and works to unify gardens, says Neal, whose book walks you through the steps to designing with color in order to create an awe-inspiring landscape. “Use plants and hardscape and you can create boldly contrasting forms, emphasize particular design elements, highlight a destination in the garden or shield a view,” she says.

Though flowering plants certainly bring a kaleidoscope of color to the garden, they’re only a part of the color design process.

“I think of annual flowers as jewelry,” says Neal. “They’re the brooches and earrings that complete every look. Essential, but only effective if the larger color palette works. Every gardener has a favorite color that never fails to please. For me green is that color with its nearly endless shades, hues and intensities. The high contrast of forest green and rich red iron tones makes my personal statement and creates the perfect setting for a riot of annual flowers.”

To create a nonstop color garden of your own, start by picking a color palette and sticking with it, suggests Neal.

“Begin with the color you most want to see,” she says. “Pick two shades of that color and then add two or three other major colors you want to combine with them. For me, the color is green, the shades are lime and teal, and the two other colors are lilac and coral. Design with your chosen color palette when selecting trees, shrubs, seasonal color, accessories, and paint for hardscape.”

To ensure that you have color throughout the year, Neal suggests taking photos every season and looking for areas that require color; then fill in those spots.

She also advises ignoring color trends, which come and go. “The color(s) you use in your garden directly reflect your personal taste and style, so embrace them.”

Chock full of photos and illustrations of gardens designed with color in mind, NonStop Color Garden guides you in developing your own color style. The book also features an encyclopedia of colorful plants, including trees, shrubs, groundcovers, and flowering perennials.

Click the gallery to see some beautiful photos from the book.

Grow Your Own Pineapple!

After a long winter, are you dreaming of a tropical vacation with all of the perks—including snacking on tasty fruits like sweet, juicy pineapple? If so, grow a little slice of the tropics at home by rooting your own pineapple. After a couple of years of growth, the plant will even produce edible fruit.

A member of the bromeliad family, pineapples are surprisingly easy to grow indoors during the winter months. Once the weather warms and stays above 60 degrees Fahrenheit, you can move the plant outdoors. In addition to fruiting, pineapple makes an attractive potted plant.

To successfully root and grow a pineapple at home, keep the following guidelines in mind.

Purchase a ripe pineapple. Choose a fruit with golden-brown skin and green leaves that are firm and not brown or yellow. You want the fruit to be just ripening, not overly ripe. If the leaves are loose and easy to pull off, the fruit is too ripe.

Twist off the leaves as a unit, taking with them a small portion of stalk. If you are unable to do this, cut the leaves off the top of the fruit. In either case, you want to trim off excess fruit flesh hanging onto the stock, as it could cause the plant to rot when you root it. Air dry it for two to three days, which will allow the stalk to heal over and prevent rotting when you plant.

Place the stalk end in a solution of water and a pinch of rooting hormone. Leave the fruit in the solution for three to six weeks until roots form. Add more water when the level gets low.

Plant the rooted pineapple in a well-draining potting soil, such as cactus mix. Use an 8- to 10-inch clay pot with a drainage hole. Cover the roots with soil, leaving the foliage exposed. Place the container in a bright window or in a protected location outdoors that receives morning sun and afternoon shade.

Expect slow growth initially. The plant will take a couple of months to get established. You’ll know that it is growing when you see new leaf growth. Pineapple will grow 6 to 8 inches the first year, eventually reaching about 2 feet tall. After two years, expect fruit, which will pop up in the center of the crown and take six to eight months to mature.

Before the fruit ripens, baby pineapple plants will spring up near the mother plant and will be ready to take over when the plant is done fruiting. When the fruit ripens, cut it from the plant. Remove the plant to make room for the new plantlets.

Water when the top inch of soil has dried. The plant should remain moist but not soggy.

Feed twice a year with an organic vegetable or fruit fertilizer. Always fertilize when you see fruit forming.

Dragonfly Shops & Gardens: Making Customer Service Personal

A former recruiter trained in the art of networking, this small-business owner harnesses the power of personal. Find out how she built her business on relationships.

FEBRUARY 02, 2015

When Beth Davidson becomes friends with her customers, she knows she’s succeeded at her No. 1 goal: making customer service top priority. “If I’m on a first name basis with my customers, I’ve humanized my business,” says the owner of The Dragonfly Shops & Gardens in Orange, California. “In order to be successful, you have to be personal.”

Davidson’s brick-and-mortar lifestyle shop carries a wide variety of home and garden goods, including housewares, jewelry, clothing, and plants and garden art; offers classes; and provides a venue for birthday parties, weekend retreats and weddings. Whatever the small-business owner cooks up at the bustling shop focuses on people connecting with people.

From Recruiter to Shop Owner

Davidson is no stranger to networking. A former executive recruiter for 20 years, she decided to leave the recruiting business in March 2007 to open up Dragonfly Shops & Gardens in order to “feed a need to bead.” After beading for 30 years, Davidson wanted a place to showcase and sell her jewelry, so she opened the Dragonfly.

The shop is located in a 1924 former house that consists of 1,500 square feet, including a yard where she carries garden products. In July 2013, after weathering the recession and continuing to grow, she doubled her space by setting up the Dragonfly Studio in another historic house next door. While the first building holds the merchandise, the second serves as an indoor and outdoor art studio and classroom space.

“The studio has the same welcoming vibe as the shop—with lots of character,” says Davidson. “The space features incredible artists and instructors who are known throughout the community.”

The studio harkens back to Davidson’s original intent with the shop. “When I first opened the business, my primary emphasis was holding beading classes, so I reserved one room as a classroom,” she says. “In the retail world, they might have called that move ‘Beth’s Folly,’ because it would be considered sacrilegious to use retail space for a classroom.”

The tactic increased customer engagement and business, though. “Those who came to bead were introduced to the shop and vice versa,” Davidson says. “Best of all, many customers have taken my beading class for several years and have become great friends.”

Hang Out at the Cash Register

Davidson also bucks tradition when it comes to advice regarding working more efficiently. “I’ve gone to business building seminars where they advise small-business owners to work smarter and not tend the cash register, but that’s where all of your customers wind up,” Davidson says.

“I’m the face and voice of the Dragonfly, and I need to be present and accounted for,” she adds. “Recently, I went into the shop on a Saturday planning to get a lot done, but I spent 95 percent of the day chatting with customers. Though I had a long to-do list, I realized that engaging with customers and encouraging the personalized culture we’ve created at the Dragonfly was what I needed to do that day.”

Make it Personal Online

When it comes to her virtual presence, Davidson keeps it just as personal. “I’m so tied into the Dragonfly that I don’t ever post on my personal Facebook page,” she says. “If anyone wants to see what’s going on with me, they’ll find it on my fan page. Just recently someone came in to remind me that I hadn’t sent out an email for a few weeks. Her comment showed me that customers are looking for a sense of belonging and community, even online, and those business owners who provide it will reap the rewards of increased business.”

It Takes a Village to Build a Small Business

Davidson will be the first tell you that she couldn’t have grown her business alone. Those she enlists to help, such as her two employees and 15 instructors, have done a great deal to spread the Dragonfly vision.

“The studio is instructor inspired,” she says. “I knew I wanted to expand and that I couldn’t possibly fill up the studio space on my own, so I reached out to a group of fabulous instructors who also bring in students. All of this connecting has resulted in the Dragonfly becoming a hub with an exponential reach.”

Once a month, the Dragonfly also hosts the Marketplace, where 20 to 25 local artisans sell their products. Davidson started the event six years ago as a way to give the many artisans coming into the shop a venue.

“People would come in with great products, but I didn’t have any space available, so we started holding the Marketplace, and it’s a big hit. We don’t make money on the event itself, but it brings people in and keeps us current and relevant,” she says. “Don’t be afraid to share your resources—doing so will pay you back ten-fold.”

Be Real

Davidson’s most important advice regarding effective customer service is probably the simplest. “Customers aren’t looking for perfect,” she says. “It’s okay to let them see you make a mistake—that shows you’re human. Do your absolute best, but don’t let paralysis from analysis stop you. I had a customer tell me the other day that my shop is the antithesis of the mall. That made me feel great and showed me that the Dragonfly is as personalized as you can get.”

Read more articles on customer engagement.

Photos: iStockphoto; Courtesy of Dragonfly Shop & Garden (2)

CHANGING YOUR BODY LANGUAGE TO HELP YOU SCORE SALES

DECEMBER 01, 2014When he opened his own business, Jordan Sayler discovered that his mother wasn’t trying to annoy him when she told him to stand up straight as a kid. She knew the secret: People tend to read body language rather than listen to what’s being said.

“I learned quickly I was not only merchandising my store; I was selling myself,” says the owner of the men’s apparel and footwear store Winn Perry & Co. “I used to put my hands in my pockets or hold them down in front of me so I wouldn’t be viewed as pushy or overbearing, but I found that people often didn’t take me seriously. So I started striking a confident pose by putting my hands directly at my sides or on my hips.”

Several years ago, Cecilia Lynch also discovered just how important body language can be when she met with a senior sales executive at a large international financial services company.

“I didn’t think much about my body language when engaging with her. As a result, the meeting didn’t go as well as I would have liked,” says Lynch, principal and founder of the consulting company Focused Momentum. “She still hired me, but gave clear instructions that I was not to be put in front of their clients, which was a wakeup call for me.”Today Lynch makes good use of her body language. “I conduct strategy sessions of up to 60 people at a time. I often literally need to hold the energy of the room and move it along in a productive manner, which I do through body language,” she says.

When it comes to inspiring and influencing others, you can say all the right words, but if your nonverbal postures send a different message, that is what others will take away from your interaction, explains Sharon Sayler, an executive coach specializing in verbal and nonverbal communication (and Jordan’s mother). She owns Competitive Edge Communications and is author of What Your Body Says (and how to master the message): Inspire, Influence, Build Trust, and Create Lasting Business Relationships.

“Nonverbal communication happens whether we want it to or not, and it’s all too easy to send the wrong message,” Sayler says.

The good news is that with a little direction, any small-business owner can appear comfortable, in control and successful.

Breathe Naturally

One of the first nonverbal actions you’re judged on by others is your breathing, Sayler notes. “How you breathe unconsciously alerts the other person’s as well as your own fight or flight response,” she says. “If you are breathing naturally and comfortably, the other person assumes he or she is safe. Low, steady breathing always calms the mind and body and is the most powerful nonverbal [action] to give the impression that you’re confident and in control.”

Display Effective Eye Contact

Direct eye contact can be a signal of confidence, yet it is one of the most overrated and misunderstood of the nonverbal behaviors.

“Much advice suggests that if you don’t make constant direct eye contact, you’re untrustworthy. I’ve even heard a recommendation to have ‘sticky eyes,’ which is nonsense,” Sayler says. “Eye contact works best when both parties feel it’s ‘just right,’ so take your cue from the other person regarding how much eye contact to use. Too much or too little eye contact is not only disrespectful, it can be downright creepy. Breaking eye contact happens naturally during conversations, and it makes it easier to process what you’re hearing.”

Be Strategic With Your Chin

Although eyes get a lot of attention when it comes to nonverbal cues, it’s the chin you should be paying more attention to. “What you do with your chin tells others a lot about what’s going on inside you,” Sayler says. “For example, if your chin is off to the side, your head is tipped or tilted. That is a submissive move that can make it seem like you’re hoping to be liked or you’re confused.”

Your chin up in the air makes you appear snooty, and a tucked in chin communicates that you are shy and don’t wish to talk. To exude confidence, stand up straight and keep your chin parallel to the floor.

Lean in to Show Interest

Displaying interest in what a client has to say increases the level of commitment in the business relationship. The best way to show you care is to slightly lean toward the person or the object of interest. “The more you lean, the more interest you show, but be careful not to overdo it,” Sayler says. “The lean is slight; it should not be a lunge. You always want to respect comfort zones and personal space.”

Exude Expertise With Your Arms and Stance

Showing that you’re an expert on your subject is important to selling your products and services. To show you know what you’re talking about, Sayler suggests standing with your forearms waist-high in front of your body and your wrists at the same height as the elbows so the forearms are parallel to the ground. Your hands can be gently clasped, but don’t move your fingers. To exude even more confidence, touch your thumb-tips and fingertips together, so when you look down at your hands it looks like they’ve formed a triangle with your fingers pointed away from you.

Variations on this include standing with your arms hanging at your sides or leaving one hand hanging at your side and the other parallel to the ground grasping a notebook or similar item.

Smile

A smile communicates that you are confident and content with yourself and your business, and approachable, notes Tsutomu Carton, owner of Sielian’s Vintage Apparel. “Smiling is just as important in person as on the phone,” Carton says. “I always make sure that the person I’m talking to can ‘feel’ my smile.”Use these tips to strike a confident pose, and you’ll soon find yourself giving a high-five to increased business.

Read more articles on productivity.

Photo: Getty Images

WOW YOUR CUSTOMERS WITH KILLER CUSTOMER SERVICE

NOVEMBER 18, 2014Successful small-business owners know that their “secret weapon” for winning the race against larger competitors is stellar customer service. The up-close-and-personal approach just can’t be replicated by most big businesses.

“In an increasingly disconnected world, the small-business owner has the competitive advantage of delivering one-on-one connections,” says small-business consultant Olga Mizrahi, author of Sell Local, Think Global: 50 Innovative Ways to Make a Chunk of Change and Grow Your Business.

“By having meaningful interactions with customers, small businesses engender the kind of loyalty that’s not price-dependent. There’s a magic to the Main Street retailer who knows your daughter’s name, the local pizza joint that remembers your gluten-free preference and the independent bookseller who recommends the perfect beach read.”

As a small-business owner, you generally can’t compete with big advertising budgets or numerous employees and locations, but you can “out service” larger companies, says Scott Stratten, author of UnSelling: The New Customer Experience and president of UnMarketing. “As a small business, you can easily make customers ecstatic by turning on a dime and making requested changes much more quickly than large businesses can ever do.”

If you’re trying to harness the power of customer service, put these 10 tips to work for you:

1. Look to online reviews.

“It’s no longer ‘The customer is always right,’ ” Mizrahi says. “While it may be hard to digest, the new adage is ‘The critic is always right.’ Online reviews are the number-one way small businesses get noticed. There’s a real power in responding to your online reviews, both positive and negative. Treat each review as an external communication tool and internal suggestion box, rife with ideas about how to improve.”

2. Hire with attitude in mind.

You want talented employees with an aptitude for the tasks you give them, but it’s equally important they have a positive, welcoming, can-I-help-you attitude. Anything less is insufficient and even dangerous to your business.

3. Offer customers multiple ways to get in touch.

“Don’t miss opportunities to connect with customers where, when and how they want,” Mizrahi says. “Let people choose to hear from you through ‘new offerings’ emails, special sales text alerts, Instagrams of new items, curated content on Facebook and helpful article links on Twitter.”

4. Lose your inferiority complex.

“Just because you [run] a small business doesn’t give you an excuse to give subpar customer service,” Stratten says. “Even if it’s a business out of your home, you have to act like a business.” For instance, telling a client you can’t meet a deadline because of a personal problem is terrible customer service.

5. Stay pleasant.

“Always have the attitude that everyone matters and that it’s a pleasure to work with any customer who walks into your business, calls or checks in online,” says Sherry Agee, owner of Fort Knox Flowers and Crafted Gifts. “It’s easy to dismiss people because you may not like their attitude, but recognizing everyone and offering patience and a relaxed communication could be the key to a customer’s acceptance of your suggestions. Make sure to leave a lasting impression that sways people to want to do business with you.”

6. Make it easy and simple to do business with you.

If you own a retail business, as soon as you see a customer pick up an item or look for a price, give a little bit of information about the product and then step back, Agee suggests. “Be ready to engage with the customer and follow up when the person is ready, but don’t be pushy. If the customer is holding several items, offer to take some to the counter. That causes the customer to relax and engage in conversation and that builds trust.”

7. Recreate in-store attention online.

On your website, recreate the face-to-face “Can I help you?” moment that happens when a customer walks through the door, Mizrahi advises. “Engage website visitors as soon as they log on via proactive live chat.”

Agee agrees. “It’s important to reach out directly to online customers to show them that even if you’re not meeting face to face,” she says, “you still care and recognize them just as much as people who walk into your store.”

8. Limit your offerings.

As a small business, you’re not equipped to be all things to all people, and because of that, you’re likely to do a poor job if you try, Mizrahi notes. “Limit what you offer to choice offerings curated by your unique lens of expertise,” she says. “It’s overwhelming out there, especially online. By narrowing down the options, you can create a convenience model where customers ‘get’ your taste and trust your picks.”

9. Be truly active on social media.

“Don’t join a social media site and only check it once a month,” Stratten advises. “Many customers use social media as a customer service communication line. And avoid automating social media as a customer service tool. That’s like sending a mannequin to a networking event. You’re ‘there,’ but you’re just not there.”

10. Learn from every customer service opportunity.

Realize that every customer service issue is a learning experience. “Interactions with customers are only truly a problem if a customer doesn’t alert you to a problem but just leaves without telling you,” Stratten says. When people see that you truly care about their satisfaction and are willing to make changes to fulfill their expectations, you’re likely to inspire loyal customers who wouldn’t think of going anywhere else.

Read more articles on customer service.

Photo: Getty Images

WHAT REALLY DEFINES AN ENTREPRENEUR?

NOVEMBER 12, 2014Ask many small-business owners why they risk job security and what may be their life savings to start a business, and the answer isn’t always money. After all, there are easier, more predictable roads to building a nest egg that include a steady paycheck and a matching 401(k) plan.

By their very nature, entrepreneurs have a different mindset than lifetime employees—a mindset that causes them to jump in head first. And while each entrepreneur’s story is different, one common denominator is the desire to drive their own ship and effect changes themselves.

Social entrepreneur Melanie St. James explains why she takes the necessary risks to be an entrepreneur: “I’m driven to change the things I can’t accept. Entrepreneurs take risks, because the alternative is unacceptable.”

St. James is founder of Empowerment WORKS, a global sustainability think-tank that hosts biennial Global Summits, including this year’s summit in San Francisco from November 16 through 18. Her goal is to connect the world’s culturally rich, yet economically challenged communities with resources.

Early Interest in Entrepreneurship

Like many business owners, St. James started on the entrepreneurial path early. “My father was an inventor who created an electrically heated ice-cream scooper that I sold door-to-door while in high school,” St. James says. In 1994, she decided to pursue global social change after a semester abroad in mainland China, followed by an international education in sustainable development studies.

Marcy Hogan also embraced the lure of entrepreneurship early on. “I’ve always had the entrepreneurial spirit, which I attribute to my mother. She spent many years as an entrepreneur and got me involved when I was young in helping her build her different businesses.” Hogan currently wears several entrepreneurial hats, including as a freelance musician, private music teacher, and fitness and exercise industry professional. She’s also co-owner with her husband of the greeting card and gift business Send Out Cards.

Desire to Control Their Destiny

For Hogan, being an entrepreneur is well worth the risk that comes with controlling her own destiny. “Having your own business gives you the ability to create the life you want,” Hogan says. “It establishes accountability because if something doesn’t get accomplished, you have only yourself to blame. As your own boss, you have control over how you structure your business, and when your business flourishes, you have a real sense of accomplishment.”

Entrepreneur Matt Richter-Sand previously worked for a Fortune 500 company but knew he wouldn’t last there. “I could practically see the next 20 years of my life playing out,” he explains. “How boring! Being an entrepreneur introduces you to the excitement of uncertainty and the unknown.”

Richter-Sand started his first business—building websites for small businesses—in high school when interest in the Internet was exploding. Today he regularly starts new companies and is also a clinical assistant professor atLoyola Marymount University in Los Angeles where he teaches entrepreneurship. “I’m fascinated with the process of new product development,” he says. “Creating innovative products that solve real world problems is fun, rewarding and incredibly challenging.”

His interest in entrepreneurship even inspired him to research what drives some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, and he subsequently wrote the book The Agile Startup: Quick and Dirty Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know after he was done with his research. “There’s no such thing as a standard entrepreneurial personality type,” Richter-Sand says, “but there are some common traits that the best entrepreneurs share.”

Willingness to Venture Into the Unknown

Risk and uncertainty are inherent in the entrepreneurial process, and anyone venturing in needs to understand and accept that. “The job of the entrepreneur is to take uncertainty and convert it into certainty,” Richter-Sand says. “When you’re certain you can acquire customers for a specific cost and that they’ll convert into a certain amount of revenue, you can be sure you have a feasible business idea. If there was little uncertainty, then there probably isn’t an entrepreneurial opportunity. Entrepreneurs must be willing to venture into the unknown, to make leaps of faith and move forward without full information.”

That said, the best entrepreneurs don’t seek risk—they seek to contain risk. “Risk is the enemy of the entrepreneur, because the more uncertainty and risk you take on, the more likely you are to fail,” Richter-Sand explains. “Instead, the best entrepreneurs de-risk their startups by testing assumptions and proving hypotheses.”

Ability to Face Reality

Successful entrepreneurs are able to face reality and accept its truth. “Your initial business idea is often a bad one,” Richter-Sand says. “You have your own perspective and bias, and the way you initially try to solve the problem is probably quite different from what customers want.

“The best entrepreneurs objectively listen to the market and react to what the customer says,” he adds. “Your business is your baby, and it’s hard to hear that your baby is ugly, but the best founders are able to objectively evaluate their business and react to the reality they’re experiencing. If it’s not working, they face that head on and focus instead on building something that will work.”

Richter-Sand points to the initial idea of PayPal as an example of business founders who had to acknowledge and accept reality. “Their first idea was to transfer money over Palm Pilots, which they realized was a terrible idea [after getting] negative feedback. So they used their technology on the Web instead. The rest is history.”

Sticking to Their Vision

As they strive to reach their goals, most entrepreneurs run up against setbacks and naysayers. But successful entrepreneurs understand that it’s important to keep moving forward. During preparation for the 2012 Summit, for instance, St. James experienced a great deal of resistance when the venue they were scheduled to use went bankrupt.

“We didn’t have a location just days before the event,” she says, “and I was strongly advised to cancel it, but I didn’t want to do that after working on preparations for a year. I vowed we’d find a place, and I kept putting one foot in front of the other. At the last minute, I ended up finding the perfect venue, and it all worked out.”

Despite the hurdles that entrepreneurs face on the road to business success, their desire to steer their own course, often into the unknown, and remain true to their vision helps them stay strong even in the toughest of times.

Read more articles on leadership.

Photo: Getty Images

5 SIGNS YOUR COMPANY IS THRIVING

OCTOBER 03, 2014Sales and a positive cash flow are obviously good signs for your business, but don’t take out the champagne just yet.

Indications that your small business is built to last are a bit more complicated than a healthy balance sheet, says Donna Novitsky, CEO of employee rewards company Yiftee and a professor of marketing and entrepreneurship at Stanford University. “There are a lot of factors that go into building a successful company besides growing the top line,” she says.

True, every small-business owner has his or her own barometers of success, but thriving enterprises have a few common denominators.

1. Positive Workforce Climate

Thriving companies have employees who enjoy going to work each day. And those employees feel as if they are making an impact with their contributions to the company, says Novitsky. “If you want to know if your employees are satisfied, ask questions such as ‘Is the development team innovating in creative ways to differentiate our products?’, ‘Does the marketing team love finding the sweet spot in messaging to connect with prospective customers?’ and ‘Is the customer service team building great relationships with customers so that they become true advocates?’”

The bottom line is that your team must believe in the mission and goals of your company, says Novitsky. “An employee who gets discouraged and loses faith has to go.”

A healthy company has optimal team play, agrees Frances Moreno, managing partner of Vaco Los Angeles. (Her company was recently named the “#1 Best Place to Work in Los Angeles” small employer category, for the fourth time.) “Five signs of great team play include commitment, trust, resolving conflicts quickly, results and accountability. This goes for everyone in the business.”

2. Clearly Defined Market

Early on, it’s not about sales and profitability at all, says Novitsky. “The first stage of success is about proving a product-market fit. From the very beginning, you must define a market need and a solution that has clear benefits to customers and is a big enough opportunity to be worth your dedication for several years,” she says. “Then you have to build the solution and cultivate relationships with your initial customers.” This is a process successful companies repeat as needed in order to grow.

3. Adherence to Values and Objectives

Thriving companies have a transparent set of objectives and values to which they adhere at all times. A clear set of company goals allows everyone to understand the purpose of the company and their roles within the company, which results in a healthy business.

“Successful companies have a purpose and a future plan and make sure the company is unified in moving towards a common goal,” Moreno says. “This results in an overall healthy corporate culture.”

4. Ability to Scale

The ability to scale allows your company the bandwidth to comfortably and effectively handle an increasing amount of work. This includes hiring capable employees to ensure that you keep up with demand. If you create a product for sale, this means building it at a cost that the market will bear and getting customers interested and invested enough to buy the product and offer repeat business—all of which helps ensure that you make a profit.

5. Expert Status

Those small-business owners who cement their status as leaders in their fields help ensure that their companies thrive, says social media expert and LinkedIn specialist Karen Yankovich. “The owner of a thriving company finds the time to give back,” she says. “When you’re generous with your products, services and expertise and are able to leverage that to establish your company as an expert in the industry, your expert status leads to greater profits and higher margins and that allows the entire cycle to continue to thrive upwards.”

If you have achieved success and your company is thriving, then by all means bring out the champagne. “There are plenty of challenges in running a small business and success requires many leaps of faith,” Novitsky says. “Acknowledge the wins, large and small. Remind yourself that you’re going places where no one has been and doing things that have not been done. When it works, celebrate!”

Read more articles on leadership.

Photo: Getty Images

MEET THE BLOGGERS

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”MEET THE BLOGGERS”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Amy Laskin is the Director of Content at Bed Bath & Beyond. She has lived in her home for 13 years, but she’s not finished decorating it, and probably never will be. The one room that’s “almost done” is the kitchen, because she loves to cook and bake (but not clean).

Jen Dennis is the Content Development Lead for Bed Bath & Beyond. She loves thinking, and writing, about all things home and travel. She considers herself the ultimate test case for whether a recipe is really idiot-proof, because if she can make it, anyone can.

Megan Mostyn-Brown is a writer for Bed Bath & Beyond. She’s obsessed with mid-century modern furniture, wallpaper, and any item that will get her organized. Someday she’d like to own a claw foot tub and more than one pan.

Sam “The Cooking Guy” Zien is host of the TV show Sam the Cooking Guy, author of 3 cookbooks and a frequent guest in the Today Show kitchen. He’s also and proud of his “big in taste but small in effort” cooking style — “food that anyone can make,” he likes to say.

Bonnie Vengrow is a writer for Bed Bath & Beyond. She’s a sucker for pretty stationery, postmodern art, and any furniture with a claw foot. A lifelong neatnick, she’s learning to embrace the cheerful chaos that comes with living in a New York City apartment with her husband, son and two pets.

Julie Hartigan is a recovering engineer turned chef. She develops recipes and writes about cooking, entertaining, and health for Bed Bath & Beyond, WeightWatchers, FitPregnancy, and others, looking for the spot “where Healthy meets Happy.” Julie shares a small urban condo with her 2 little girls, 2 chubby guinea pigs, and 1 very patient husband. You can find her on Twitter @cookingwjulie.

Nicola Ruiz is a writer for Bed Bath & Beyond, and writes about fashion and style for various publications. She grew up in England and California but loves to call New York City home for one simple reason: shopping for all four seasons! That means she has learned to be a whiz when it comes to organizing her closet. When she’s not writing about style and decor (and organizing her stylish finds) you’ll find her hard at work on her novel or chasing after her busy four-year-old son and her four-pound Chihuahua Lola.

Kate Kelly is a writer for Bed Bath & Beyond. She is weirdly obsessed with bedspreads (stripes, florals, graphic—you name it, she wants it) and dinner ware which she loves to mix and match. She is currently searching for the perfect rug to replace the very expensive beige one that her three boys have ruined.

Lisa Milbrand is a writer for Bed Bath & Beyond. She constantly battles the chaos that comes with cramming one husband, two daughters and four pets into a standard-sized house—and when she’s winning the war, she loves to throw a good party to celebrate.

Bonnie McCarthy is a writer for Bed Bath & Beyond. In addition to combing flea markets for vintage treasures and collecting colorful California pottery, she enjoys photographing the world around her and loves to bake when it rains.

Julie Bawden-Davis is a writer for Bed Bath & Beyond. She loves to write about all of the fun ways to make a house a home. Her only problem is her tendency to buy and try everything she writes about, which means she has just about every kitchen gadget ever created.

Terry Grieco-Kenny is a recipe developer, food writer and food stylist. As a magazine food editor in NYC, she developed and styled hundreds (if not thousands!) of recipes, and has contributed to over 15 cookbooks and 10 magazines. It may sound like a super-busy life, but with her only son Jack now away at college, cooking up a storm in the kitchen certainly helps take her mind off the empty nest blues![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

7 EXCELLENT WAYS TO ATTRACT NEW CUSTOMERS

SEPTEMBER 12, 2014As a business owner, you’re no doubt keenly aware that your client base is the lifeblood of your company. A steady stream of new customers allows you to grow your business and fulfill your company vision.

OPEN Forum community member Farzana Irani realizes the importance of a strong client base for all small businesses, including virtual ones, which is why the Web consultant with iAdControl.com/Fuzzworks UK recently asked the community: “What’s your best approach in creating a client base for your online business?”

It turns out that a seven-step approach works best for attracting new clients.

1. Identify Your Ideal Client

It’s easier to look for customers if you know the type of consumers you seek. Without a composite of your ideal customer, you probably wouldn’t know where to start looking.

“Have a crystal clear picture in your head of exactly who you’re targeting,” says OPEN Forum community member Nicole Beckett, president of Premier Content Source. “Think about what makes those types of people happy, sad, scared, relieved, and then think about how you can make their lives a little easier.”

Narrow down the focus of your ideal client and avoid making broad target market statements, such as every woman, every man or all baby boomers. Few products appeal to that vast of a group of people, and overstating your market will prevent you from developing viable targeted strategies for attracting clients.

2. Discover Where Your Customer Lives

With your targeted customers in mind, “identify those places where they are likely to be found (media, online, offline, mail, etc.), and then create messages for them,” says Jeff Motter, CEO and chief marketing officer of East Bay Marketing Group.

Where you look for customers will depend on the nature of your business. Some good online locations include forums and social media pages, including your own and those of similar or complementary businesses. Offline, you can meet plenty of potential customers at conferences and conventions in your industry.

3. Know Your Business Inside and Out

Thoroughly understanding your industry and having a firm knowledge of your product or service is critical to being able to attract interested clients. When you know your product backward and forward, that fact comes through. The people who would be interested in your offerings can see how knowledgeable you are and will seek your assistance.

4. Position Yourself as the Answer

Give potential clients you come into contact with a good reason to try your services, which is your first step to making them loyal customers, suggests Jason Reis owner and lead programmer for Flehx Corp.

“Provide value and establish yourself as having an in-depth understanding of the problems they are looking to solve,” he says. “This takes the form of creating content via webinars, blog posts, guest blogging, and getting out there and physically networking with people. From all this you will start to attract a following, and as long as you have a structured sales funnel setup, you will be able to convert the followers/fans into paying customers.”

5. Try Direct Response Marketing

Your best bet for reaching out and touching customers is to use tactics to encourage them to complete a specific action, such as opt into your email list or request more information.

Create messages directed at your target market, suggests Motter. “Learn to create ads that attract your ideal clients by giving them something of value for free to get them started in your funnel. Learn all you can about direct response marketing practices, because they will teach you to focus on results that matter. Create compelling messages that tell your ideal audience why they’d have to be a fool not to work with you. Show them you understand their pain, and can make it go away faster and cheaper than they could without you.”

6. Build Partnerships

Teaming up with businesses that offer complementary services offers you the opportunity to take advantage of synergy, which can be very effective in building a business. For instance, if you have a company that specializes in SEO, consider teaming up with a business that builds websites.

When all is said and done, nurturing relationships, either with other business owners or customers, helps you create a client base, Beckett suggests. “Focus on building human relationships. The stronger your relationships are, the more likely your customers will be to tell their friends about you. And, the more likely they’ll be to come back.”

7. Follow Up

After your efforts to bring in business, always remember to close the loop, suggests Josh Sprague, CEO of Orange Mud. “Remember to set follow up tasks (follow up to sample sent, etc.), and execute your plan. So many leads and great conversations are wasted because you forget to follow up.” Doing this simple step is sure to get your client base to grow.

What do you do to attract new customers? Share your advice with the community.

Read more articles on marketing.

Photo: iStockphoto

HERE’S HOW SMALL BUSINESSES CAN PROVIDE STELLAR CUSTOMER SUPPORT

As a small-business owner, you likely went into business to provide customers with a stellar product or service. Somewhere along the line you realized you also had to provide customer support, too—but didn’t know where to start. This topic was broached recently when OPEN Forum community member T.S. Praveen Kumar, CEO and founder of Animonks Animation Pvt. Ltd., asked:

“How do you guys handle customer support for your startups/companies? You may get a lot of email support tickets, calls from clients and on-site live chat support—how are you handling it? Even if you want to hire a support person, how much can you pay per month to handle your support emails, calls and on-site live chat? I`m facing the same problem with my product, so help me please.”

Community member responses to this common challenge varied depending on the size and type of the business.

Opt for Email

Some community members report that they’ve found the most expedient way to deal with customer support is to solely use email and not provide phone support.

“Speaking from an e-commerce perspective, we offer no phone support,” says Sean Dawes, co-founder of Rocket Dove. “We decided to ditch phone calls to increase efficiency and accuracy in our responses to customers. We have a blog post explaining that decision to customers and reference it when asked why we can’t get on the phone. We have yet to have a complaint. Emails are answered very quickly, and we use olark live chat, which helps us document every single customer issue, which we can reference when customers follow up.”

Josh Sprague CEO of Orange Mud, agrees. “Ditch phone for email early on until it’s truly necessary,” he says. “You might be surprised how few calls you get, as most prefer to chat or email.”

When Phone Calls Matter

Other small-business owners, such as Ben Baldwin, co-founder and CEO of ClearFit, believe that customer service via phone support is key to the success of hia company. “At ClearFit, we believe that support (we call it customer success) is integral to everything that we do,” he says. Rather than delegate the task of customer service to one employee, Baldwin reports that all employees take turns answering customer questions and responding to requests.

If your office is too small, or you simply don’t have the resources to allocate to customer service, you might need to hire someone to answer calls. A benefit to this solution is that you can train the employee to deal with concerns just as you would.

Prior to hiring anyone to do customer service for you, Jason Reis, owner and lead programmer for Flehx Corp, suggests that you look at your pricing. “You want to ensure that it’s at a level that enables you to hire a virtual assistant or other person who can help with support chats,” he says.

If your business isn’t bringing in sufficient income to sustain a full- or part-time employee to answer the phone, you might need to try a less expensive solution, such as a call center, Sprague suggests. “Do your best to make sure that you find a call center that knows your industry, and get some referrals,” he says. “I’ve had some colleagues with bad experiences in the industry with call centers.”

Talk to business owners who have successfully used call centers, and test out a center personally prior to signing on, to make sure that its service is up to par and a good fit for your company.

Try Instructional Videos

Reis offers a time-saving suggestion regarding providing customer service: “Customer support can consume a lot of time, and when you are a startup, you may not have all the people in place to be able to handle the volume. I would suggest if you are generating a lot of support requests that you look at some of the types of requests and make a few support videos to answer some of the more generic questions people have.”

Aim for Excellence

If your company is heavy on customer support, you will get requests for assistance, whether they come via phone, live chat or email. As a small-business owner focused on customer service, it’s your job to come up with a system for dealing with the requests that works best for your type of business and customer service style. And as your business grows, be open to changing tactics when necessary.

Read more articles on customer service.

Photo: iStockphoto

6 Ways To Boost Your Business Relationship IQ

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SEPTEMBER 05, 2013Like many small-business owners, Ashish Rangnekar, CEO and cofounder of BenchPrep

, started his company on a shoestring.“I didn’t have a sales force or a million-dollar budget in the beginning,” says Rangnekar, whose company provides personalized, interactive educational courses on portable devices. “What I possessed was the ability to tell my story to potential customers and build those relationships.”

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]A small-business owner’s relational IQ—the ability to get along well with others, manage conflict and problem-solve—can be more important than his or her actual IQ, according to Van Moody

, author of the The People Factor

and professional speaker. Q

“Lasting success in the workplace depends on your ability to relate effectively with people,” Moody says. “Research shows that 60 to 80 percent of all difficulties in organizations stem from strained relationships between employees, not from deficits in skill or motivation. Small-business success often has little to do with acumen or product quality, but everything to do with the ability to successfully navigate relationships.”

Raise your relational IQ and increase business by keeping the following six tips in mind.

Make Working With You Easy

“Your customers and partners should never feel like maintaining a relationship with you is painful for them,” says Michael Weissman, founder and CEO of SYNQY

, a company that specializes in growing new small-businesses and turning around brands with Internet marketing techniques.

“People immediately turn away from friction,” Weissman says. “Do everything you can to lower the emotional, logistical and financial costs of working with you. If you don’t, your relationship might not be strong enough to withstand challenges from competitors. The truth is if a customer has two companies that both provide excellent service but one company is easier to work with, that company will get the job every single time.”

Increase Your Capacity for Empathy

The ability to understand where others are coming from goes a long way toward creating good business relationships.

“When I put out verbal or written communication, I consider what I have to say from a recipient’s point of view and ask myself if I’m speaking to his or her needs,” says Phrantceena Halres, chairman and CEO of Total Protection Services

, a certified security services company that protects infrastructure assets for businesses.

“I’ll inquire about the person’s situation, including what he or she has already tried that hasn’t been effective and why I’m being contacted,” Halres says. “Taking an interest in the person sends a positive message and gives me important information as to what to do and what to avoid.”

Have A Trustworthy Online Presence

Now that an increasing number of relationships are established digitally before you meet in person, it’s critical that you establish trust online instantaneously, Weissman says. “Ask yourself if your online presence is building relationships or is it just transactional?” he says. “It’s important for businesses to also be relational digitally.”

Make It Reciprocal

Don’t be a “taker,” says Moody. “It’s important to recognize when a relationship could use more of a giving spirit. When we think about what we can do for others instead of what we can do for ourselves, we get to the very heart of healthy, successful interactions. In a strong relationship, both people willingly give far more than they take.”

The strongest relationships are mutual and synergistic, Rangnekar agrees. “People are much more interested in what you have to say when they realize that you truly understand what they need and want, and that you care.”

Have Patience

It took Rangnekar six months of relationship building before he secured his first educational publisher.

“Don’t expect to be best friends overnight,” he says. “Relationships take time. We worked for several months before securing that first publisher. Because we so patiently cultivated that relationship, not only did we land that company’s business, they referred us to more publishers.”

Maintain The Relationship

When it comes to business relationships, a lot of emphasis is put on starting relationships, but not a lot focuses on building those relationships for the long term, Rangnekar says. “I can’t emphasize enough the importance of maintaining your business relationships so they stay healthy and profitable for everyone.”

Keep these relationship-building tips in mind, and you’ll soon find yourself with increased business and happy customers.

Read more articles on customer service.

A freelancer since 1985, Julie Bawden-Davis has written for many publications, including Entrepreneur, Better Homes & Gardens and Family Circle.

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Guide to Open-Ended Toys

When it comes to purchasing toys for kids, consider the quality and kind of play children will experience. Creative toys that offer open-ended and endless possibilities are often the best choice.

What Are Open-Ended Toys?

Open-ended toys allow children to direct the play as they choose. Such toys don’t feature a set way in which they should be used. For instance, they generally don’t feature a cause and effect, such as toys that talk when you press a button. Open-ended toys allow for interpretation and experimentation.

Benefits of Open-Ended Toys

Creative toys that allow children to experiment and try their own ideas out for activities foster positive behaviors such as exploration and ingenuity. Open-ended toys encourage imaginative play, which teaches children to think for themselves and to become resourceful. The more thinking a toy requires, the better the toy is for the child. Open-ended toys tend to also cause a child to develop various skills, including fine-motor and thinking skills and language development.

Open-Ended Toy Suggestions

Generally, simpler toys offer open-ended play opportunities. Toys that have stood the test of time are often open-ended toys. These include:

Building blocks. The classic building block offers hours of open-ended play opportunities. Blocks that come in different shapes and sizes will keep kids occupied and developing many skills, including visual-spatial skills and problem solving. Get children wooden, plastic or even foam blocks.
Sandbox. The sandbox offers children the space to create and let their imaginations soar. A wide variety of sandbox options exist, including ones that provide shelter from the sun. Sandbox ideas for little tykes include encouraging them to make a castle or a giant super highway with cars and trucks.
Arts and crafts. Give a little one an art set, and the sky is the limit as to what can be created. With paper, paints and glitter, a child can make masterpieces that are totally unique each and every time. Ideal art supplies include finger paints, nontoxic sculpting clay and washable markers.

3 WAYS TO BECOME THE GO-TO EXPERT IN YOUR FIELD

AUGUST 20, 2014One of the fastest ways to increase business and attract attention is to become a go-to authority in your field. When potential clients seek the help or products you provide and your name pops up, you’re bound to reap the benefits of the exposure.

“Expert positioning aligns you with the best-of-the-best in your industry,” says business and brand specialist Debbie Allen, author of The Highly Paid Expert: Turn Your Passion, Skills, and Talents Into a Lucrative Career by Becoming the Go-To Authority in Your Industry. “An expert is recognized as an authority who knows in-depth knowledge about a specific subject. Such individuals solve problems, and when they offer invaluable solutions to make pain go away, people pay top dollar for their advice, wisdom and expertise.”

When you establish yourself or your business as a leading authority in your industry, clients reflexively seek your assistance, which drives repeat business and recommendations, says Kristi Marsh, founder of Choose Wiserand author of Little Changes. Thanks to cementing her status as a leader in environmental health and its effects on personal health and the home, Marsh is now the featured educational video blogger for Seventh Generation, which manufactures eco-friendly health and home products.

It’s surprisingly easy to become a go-to expert today. “There’s never been a better time to launch yourself as an authority,” Allen says. “The Internet, social media, video marketing and the print-on-demand industry have made it entirely doable.”

Welcome to the New Marketing Model

If you want to become an authority in your field, it’s important to embrace a new marketing model. “Expert marketing that positions a business owner or entrepreneur as the go-to authority focuses on offering valuable, free information in the form of videos, articles and media, rather than the push of advertising and selling one-on-one,” Allen says.

The bottom line? You must give before you can receive.

“Becoming an expert means taking on a level of responsibility to support others with your knowledge,” says Allen, who notes that this doesn’t mean offering people a cookie cutter get-rich-quick scheme.

“True experts are those who offer personalized, proven solutions and give people lasting results,” she explains. “Authorities offer valuable assistance, not only from their heads but from their hearts. They share their wisdom freely, and in the process they get paid well in return.”

To excel at becoming a highly paid expert, it’s important to lay the groundwork, which all stems from education-based marketing. Try these three tactics for becoming a household name in your industry.

1. Establish Yourself As an Author

Publishing is an excellent way to claim authority in your field, says Linda Scott, owner of eFrog Press, a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs who want to self-publish.

“Blog what you know,” Scott suggests. “Writing original, regular posts on subjects in your area of expertise showcases what you know and gives you an opportunity to find your writer’s voice. Comments to your posts help you understand where you need to clarify your message and, even more importantly, what works.”

Create categories for your blogs and keep adding detailed posts, and you’ll soon have enough chapters to put together a book. “When you can say you have literally ‘written the book’ on a subject in your field, you immediately gain expert status,” Scott says. “Forevermore, ‘author’ will be added to your introductions at conferences and speaking engagements. Reviews on Amazon and Barnes & Noble will further increase your credibility and exposure, and posting your book cover on your website is a subtle reminder to all who visit that you know what you’re talking about.”

2. Become a Communicator

Speaking is another opportunity to establish yourself as an expert—so accept every chance you’re given to present. Also, host your own live events, both online and off-line. It’s ideal if clients and customers actually hear you speak, but it’s just as nearly beneficial if people know you regularly speak on your chosen topic.

In addition to public speaking, Marsh advises, “share educational tidbits, tips or lessons through video blogs or vlogs. The combination of your storytelling or speaking style, along with value-added tips, can solidify your image as an expert. It used to be that this opportunity only came through being interviewed on television, but sharing through video messaging is now affordable, easy and under your control. The result is educational, informative tips that are shareable by consumers.”

When you present, always take your book with you, Scott adds. “Bookmark a short, interesting passage to read aloud. If your book is a work-in-progress, or even if it’s still in the conceptual stage, remind audiences of your expert status by saying ‘In my upcoming book on … ’ “

3. Rebrand and Refocus When Necessary

It’s possible that the current setup of your business may not lend itself to you becoming an expert, which means you’ll need to shake things up a bit by rebranding or refocusing your business. For example, if you’ve spent 20 years in the carpet cleaning business and want to launch yourself as an authority, you could reposition yourself as a carpet cleaning expert who teaches other carpet cleaners how to run a successful business, Allen explains. “Essentially,” she says, “you take off one hat—running a carpet cleaning business day to day—and put on another hat as a thought leader and expert.”

Read more articles on branding.

Photo: iStockphoto

When’s the Best Time to Water Your Lawn and For How Long?

A well-hydrated lawn looks healthy and lush. Knowing when is the best time to water your lawn and for how long takes keeping a few pointers in mind.

Testing for water readiness

Performing daily irrigation on turf grass is often not necessary, especially during cooler weather. The secret to how to grow grass that is healthy is to test for water readiness prior to watering. Only watering when the turf is dry and actually requires it creates a stronger root system and longer-lived, healthier grass. Several methods work well for checking to see if your lawn requires watering. They are:

Test the grass by walking on it. If the turf springs back quickly, it doesn’t require irrigation. If your footprint remains for several minutes, it’s time to water.
Examine the color of the turf. Grass that has a blue-gray tinge requires water.
Insert a finger, trowel or moisture meter into the soil, and check the top 6 inches. If it is dry, it’s time to water.

Know the best time to water lawn

Water during periods of the day when evaporation is less likely. This means irrigating in the early morning hours or at night. Respond to the changing seasons by resetting your sprinklers accordingly when the length of day changes.

Set up multiple watering cycles

Avoid waste by preventing water runoff. If you experience excess water flooding the street, shorten the watering cycle and create more of them. For instance, set up to water three times at one-hour intervals, which allows time for the water to sink in before watering again. Your goal is achieving deep soil penetration, which will lead to stronger, healthier grass.

Check your irrigation system

Watering systems require regular inspection to ensure that they are working properly. Few things will kill your grass faster than broken sprinkler heads during the hot days of summer. Check to see that the sprinklers offer head-to-head coverage and completely saturate the lawn. Also consider using low-flow sprinkler heads, which help prevent runoff. And if you don’t have a programmable sprinkler system, consider installing one to make your irrigation chores easier.

When Is the Best Time to Prune?

One of the keys to a healthy, attractive garden is regular pruning. Trimming your plants keeps them shapely and initiates new growth and blooming. Consider the following factors when determining when to prune.

Time of year

Certain plants require pruning at specific times of the year. For instance, hydrangeas bloom on wood that grew the previous year. That means if you want flowers, it’s important to only prune the plant immediately after flowering. If you prune at any other time of year, you risk removing buds. If you live in a cold climate, heat-loving summer bloomers like hibiscus should be pruned no later than mid- to late summer. Pruning initiates growth, so if you prune hibiscus too late, it will put on new foliage that could be damaged by frost. This damaged growth can result in no blooms come spring.

Periods of blooming

Generally, good times to prune are following periods of flowering and rapid growth. If the plant blooms more than once a year, pruning will often initiate it to re-bloom. Pruning right after flowering is also safest for those plants that only bud up once a year, because doing so helps guarantee that you don’t accidentally prune off latent buds.

Harvest

Giving many vegetable plants a minor pruning following harvest cleans things up and often initiates regrowth and blooming. Slightly prune back vining veggie plants like tomatoes, beans and cucumbers, and within a couple of weeks, you will often enjoy another flush of blooms. Only prune veggie plants back by 10 percent to 15 percent at a time. And avoid doing so toward the end of the season, as the plant may not have enough time to re-grow before frost sets in.

Dormancy

Most fruit trees and berry plants require pruning while dormant. Without this pruning, they will often experience a poor or even nonexistent fruit crop. Pruning fruit trees also helps direct growth. Dormant pruning applies to grapes; stone fruits such as peaches and plums; and berries, like raspberries, blackberries and boysenberries.

Following rapid growth

It’s often an ideal time to trim back after a period of rampant growth. Doing so keeps quick growers, like certain invasive vines, under control.

Bountiful Container Vegetable Gardens

If you want a vegetable garden but lack ground space, try container gardening. Growing in containers lets you enjoy plenty of homegrown veggies. For a prolific potted produce harvest, keep the following growing tips in mind.

Ideal veggies for container growing

You can grow just about any type of produce in containers. Good choices include garden beans, peas, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, strawberries, lettuces, Swiss chard, spinach and herbs, such as rosemary, thyme, marjoram, oregano, lavender, basil, parsley and chives. Root vegetables also do well, including carrots, beets, potatoes, radishes and parsnips. When choosing your vegetables for container growing, pick varieties with smaller fruits. For instance, opt for cherry and small tomatoes, pickling cucumbers and dwarf carrots and beets.

Choose the ideal container

Just about any container will work well, as long as it has adequate room for soil and drainage holes. Choose from wooden planters, plastic pots, glazed ceramic and terra-cotta. If you live in a dry, hot climate that receives little rainfall, opt for plastic, glazed ceramic or wooden containers, rather than terra-cotta, as that material dries out quickly. For large plants like tomatoes and potatoes, use at least a 10-gallon container. Anything smaller will result in the plant declining before its time from lack of adequate root room. Plant smaller veggie plants, such as leafy greens, strawberries and root veggies, in a 3- to 5-gallon container. Use a high-quality potting soil to plant—never use soil from the garden, as it is too heavy for containers and won’t result in healthy crops.

Indoor container garden

Growing vegetables indoors is possible, provided you have sufficient light. Place plants in an eastern or southern window, or use full-spectrum lighting. Keep your plants as close to the light source as possible so that they receive adequate light for growth and veggie production.

Container-grown veggie maintenance

Water well. Container-grown veggies require much more water than their in-ground counterparts. When the temperatures are high, some pots require daily watering. Soak the pot well, letting water rush from the bottom of the container.

Fertilize regularly. Potted veggies are heavy feeders. Add a slow-release fertilizer when planting, and feed plants every two weeks with an organic fertilizer designed for vegetables.

Harvest often. Keep your veggie plants producing by harvesting them frequently. Pick produce when it is still young and tender and before it becomes unwieldy, at which point it could cause the pot to become top-heavy and fall over.

Drought-Tolerant Landscaping

Growing drought-tolerant annuals and other low-water plants offers a wide variety of benefits. Such plants allow you to save water, which can be especially helpful in areas hit by drought. Many plants that possess drought resistance, like certain shrubs, also tend to be low maintenance.

What is drought tolerance?

Drought tolerance indicates that a plant is able to withstand periods of drought and can survive on low amounts of water overall. It does not mean that the plant can survive on no water. It’s important to remember that because of their access to limited amounts of soil, drought-tolerant plants in containers require more water than their in-ground counterparts.

Common drought-tolerant annuals

A wide variety of drought-resistant annuals exist. Some easy-to-grow favorites include ageratum, blanket flower (Gaillardia), cockscomb (Celosia cristata), cosmos, dusty miller (Senecio cineraria), flowering tobacco (Nicotiana alata), marigold, moss rose (portulaca grandiflora), salvia, verbena and zinnia.

Drought-resistance shrubs and vines

Growing foundation plants that are tolerant of dry conditions gives you the opportunity to enjoy a low-maintenance landscape. Drought-resistant shrubs to grow include panicle hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata), flowering quince (Chaenomeles speciosa), glossy abelia, maple-leaf viburnum (Viburnum acerifolium) and American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana). Vines that stand up to little to no watering include bougainvillea, bower vine, morning glory and passion vine.

Growing tips for drought-tolerant plants

Locate drought-tolerant plants in a sunny location in well-draining soil. If necessary, improve drainage by adding compost, which will also help the soil retain moisture. Mulch drought-resistant plants by covering the area surrounding the plant with a 2-inch layer of shredded bark. Water your drought-tolerant annuals and shrubs regularly for the first few weeks after planting. They don’t actually become drought-tolerant and able to go without water for extended periods of time until they’ve established themselves, so this early watering is important to their survival. Once they’ve put on 25 percent new growth, slowly ease off on watering until you are only irrigating weekly for annuals and monthly for vines and shrubs, when there is no rainfall. Water deeply when you irrigate, which creates a deep root system that is better able to withstand dry periods.

HOW YOU CAN BECOME A THOUGHT LEADER

Making yourself known as a thought leader who offers unique, forward-thinking ideas can be great for business, provided you have sufficient outlets for expressing those ideas. Obvious choices are quality websites and blogs that welcome your insight, but OPEN Forum community member Dan Stelter knows that first you have to find these sites.

With that in mind, the freelance copywriter and SEO/inbound marketing consultant recently asked the community:

“So how do you find quality websites to contribute your content to in order to build and grow your business? Tricky, but getting easier with the sites Google is putting at the top of the SERPs these days.”

Several OPEN Forum community members offered their ideas for finding the appropriate sites for content contribution.

Determine Your Target Audience

Identify who your target audience is, and you’re bound to discover where they hang out online, says OPEN Forum community member Elizabeth Tan, a digital marketing consultant with the company Affluential. “By identifying your target market, you would be able to find forums, blogs and social media where you can contribute to and build your thought leadership.”

Knowing, for instance, that your target audience is antique car enthusiasts or individuals into holistic health gives you clear indicators as to what sorts of blogs, forums, websites and social media to search for content contribution opportunities.

Examine Your Own Thought Leadership Interests

Emerald Bixby, founder of Clarity Health Centers, recommends comparing your target audience to your own content source interests. “I suggest starting by examining where you hang out online and writing down a few notes about what you value in blogs and other content sources that feed your interests,” Bixby says.

“Try to focus less on topics and more on accessibility—think about how you search for things, and what sort of media you like to experience. (For example, how did you find this site?) Then compare and contrast this to the Web-searching habits of your target market,” she says. “I think you might find this helps you creatively and realistically target good places to establish your name as a contributor.”

Try Keyword Searches

An especially effective way to find sites where people are talking about what you wish to comment on is to Google your own keywords or the more generic versions of them. The top results are apt to offer excellent outlets for guest blogging.

Another surefire way to easily locate conversations regarding your thought topic is to take those same keywords and sign up for Google Alerts, says OPEN Forum community member Jason Kanigan, owner and founder of Sales On Fire, Inc.

“Go to Google Alerts and sign up for emails about articles on your keywords,” he says. “It’s as simple as that. I have four key phrases that Google Alerts sends me emails on every day, and that is more than enough to find content to write about. Another source is to go to Twitter search. The term ‘inbound marketing blog,’ for instance, got me many useful results.”

Remember Your Inbound Marketing

While offering your expertise on other websites and blogs is an effective marketing technique to establish yourself as a thought leader, Ken Marmer, vice president of CLERITI, suggests that you don’t forget about showcasing your thought leadership ideas on your own website.

“The best way to build your own thought leadership is through inbound marketing,” he says. “By creating and providing valuable content for your target persona, promoting your remarkable content, building customer relationships and overall pulling the customer towards you, you will create thought leadership,” he says. “At the same time, you will have brand awareness, improve SEO and establish credibility.”

Being seen as a thought leader doesn’t happen overnight. Follow these tips to get started building your foundation and broadcasting your expertise.

Read more articles on marketing.

Photo: Getty Images

Enjoy Tasty Edible Flowers

The next time you see a rose in the garden, rather than stopping to smell it, try taking a bite. Roses are one of many tasty edible flowers worth trying.

If eating flowers seems odd to you, consider this: We consume the seeds, foliage, fruits, and even roots of plants, so why not the flowers? And if you really want to get technical, when you eat fruit, you are essentially eating flowers, because all fruit starts with a flower.

Not all blooms are edible, but many are. They make delightful additions to salads and stir-fries, and they can even be candied and used to top baked goods.

The following tips will help you enjoy edible blooms:

Experiment. Like all foods, edible flowers vary greatly in taste, so be adventurous and try a wide variety of them. Some, like roses, are mild, while nasturtiums have a spicy, radish-like taste. Certain flowers are sweet, like honeysuckle and pansy, and others are markedly floral, like lavender.

Additional tasty edible flowers to try include fennel blooms, zucchini blossoms (which are excellent stuffed with meat or cheese), hibiscus, calendula, borage, viola, Johnny Jump-up, anise hyssop, dianthus, dandelion, lilac, and pineapple sage.

Use caution. Ensure beyond a shadow of a doubt that a flower is edible before eating it. Some flowers, such as foxglove and sweet peas, are highly toxic, so correctly identifying the blooms is crucial. Also avoid any flowers that have been sprayed with pesticides or chemical fertilizers, as you will end up ingesting them with the flowers.

Let your imagination soar when using edible flowers. Besides adding them to salads and stir-fries, edible flowers can be put in casseroles, omelets, and quiches. It’s also fun to use them to make flavored vinegars and butters.

Flavor sugar with lilac and lavender. Add the flowers to your sugar bowl, and your tea and coffee will have fragrant floral undertones. Some flowers are also particularly tasty when candied, such as pansy and viola.

Harvest edible flowers just prior to using them, as most soon wilt. While clipping the blooms, avoid exposing them to the sun, as this will cause them to quickly deteriorate.

Right before eating or using edible flowers, wash them under a gentle stream of cool water at the kitchen sink. Shake the excess water off and place them on paper towels to drain. If harvested ahead of time, store the flowers with their stems in water in the refrigerator.

Julie Bawden-Davis is a garden writer and master gardener, who since 1985 has written for publications such as Organic Gardening, Wildflower, Better Homes and Gardens and The Los Angeles Times. She is the author of seven books, including Reader’s Digest Flower Gardening, Fairy Gardening, The Strawberry Story Series, and Indoor Gardening the Organic Way, and is the founder of HealthyHouseplants.com.

Grill and Pickle Summer Veggies

One of the highlights of the summer season is grilling and pickling summer veggies. A wide variety of methods exist for preparing and preserving your summer harvest. Try these preservation and grill methods to add some great flavor to your summer meals!

Grilled vegetables made easy

Barbecue recipes for veggies call for oiling your produce prior to grilling. Either spray with a light coating of cooking oil or toss in a bowl with a little bit of oil. Avoid adding too much, as dripping oil causes excess flames which can burn your veggies. After coating the veggies in oil, sprinkle with your favorite seasonings. Make the grilling process easier by either skewering your produce or placing them in a grill basket. You can cut your veggies large enough so that they won’t slip through the basket or barbecue grate, or place your produce in aluminum foil packets and grill in this manner. Spray the interior of your packets with cooking oil and fill with dense veggies, like sweet potatoes, regular potatoes and parsnips. For crispy veggies, cut thin slices; for meatier produce, make big, chunky cuts.

Produce that grills well

Veggies and fruits that do well when grilled and taste terrific include squash, pineapple, cherry tomatoes, onion, green beans, sweet peppers, asparagus, eggplant, corn, okra and potatoes.

Pickling summer veggies

Another way to preserve your summer produce is to pickle it. Pickling allows you to extend the enjoyment of your produce for a few extra weeks. Good produce for pickling includes cucumbers, beets, carrots, artichokes, green beans, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, ginger, okra, peppers, tomatoes and peaches. To pickle your produce, prepare by washing and drying well. Then chop or dice, depending on the veggies and the desired shape you want. Beets and carrots often work well in rounds, whereas cucumbers are best cut into spears. Place your veggies into mason jars, filling each one three-quarters of the way full. Next, add herbs and spices, such as dill for cucumbers. Then make your brine, which is a mixture of vinegar, water and sugar:

To make 6 cups of salty brine, boil for two minutes in a large saucepan: 3 cups distilled white or cider vinegar, 3 cups of water, 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons sea salt and 2 tablespoons sugar.
To make 6 cups of sweet brine, boil for two minutes in a large saucepan: 3 cups distilled white or cider vinegar, 3 cups of water, 1 1/2 cups of sugar and 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon sea salt.

Add your brine to the veggies, filling your jar up to a half inch from the brim and covering all of the veggies. Lid the jar and refrigerate for a minimum of 24 hours before serving. Veggies pickled in this manner can be kept for up to a month in the refrigerator.

Creating a Hummingbird Garden

Attract hummingbirds to your garden and enjoy watching the energetic birds flit from one flower to another. Get close, and you can even hear the unmistakable whir of their wings. Creating a hummingbird garden requires incorporating a variety of elements, including flowers that hummingbirds feed on, a source of water and nesting sites.

What plants do hummingbirds like?

Hummingbirds have a high metabolism and eat twice their body weight in nectar and insects daily. This means that if you know what plants hummingbirds like, you’ll be able to provide a menu that attracts them. The hummingbird’s favorite flowers are red and tubular, although they also sip from other brightly colored flowers. Good choices include trumpet vine, cardinal flower, various salvias, bee balm, honeysuckle, fuchsia, penstemon, columbine, impatiens, cleome, hibiscus, hollyhock, buddleia, lupine, petunia, flowering tobacco, coral bells, larkspur and foxglove.

Space out hummingbird plants

When planting, leave room between flowers that hummingbirds feed on. The tiny birds hover while feeding and require sufficient room to do so.

Hang hummingbird feeders

Considering the fact that hummingbirds must feed almost continuously, it also helps to hang hummingbird feeders in your garden. Keep the feeders filled with a clean solution of one part sugar to four parts water.

Add water

Hummingbirds gravitate to running, shallow water sources. A flowing fountain or recirculating birdbath gives the hummingbird a chance to hover and sip from the water, as well as bathe. Keep the water clean and locate the fountain or birdbath out in the open. This allows you to get a good view of the hummingbirds. Birds in general won’t visit water sources near dense vegetation, as it could harbor predators.

Provide shelter and nesting sites

Keep hummingbirds in your garden by giving them a place to obtain shelter and nest. The birds gravitate toward a variety of trees, including bottlebrush, willow, eucalyptus and ash. Trees offer locations for bird’s nests, as well as nesting materials.

Leave dead wood

Hummingbirds prefer to perch on dead limbs rather than living ones. When such wood decomposes, it also attracts a variety of insects, which hummingbirds dine on, particularly when they are nesting.

HOW TO GET CUSTOMERS TO WRITE AWESOME REVIEWS FOR YOU

JULY 14, 2014Thanks to the Internet, word-of-mouth advertising for the small-business owner is powerful and long-lasting. When an infinite number of reviewers can share their opinions online, the potential for exposure and increased business becomes exponential.

According to the Harvard Business Review, online peer-to-peer reviews are powerful because they give customers a good sense of what it’s like to use your goods or services. Small-business owners can tout their services, but customers are more likely to believe other customers.

OPEN Forum community member Robert Chamul understands the game-changing results of reviews, which is why the owner of Mr. Sewer Rooter recently asked the community:

The best way to get reviews is to ask for them. And the best time to ask is when you finish the job and are with them.

“What’s a great way to get customers to write reviews for you? I just started my plumbing and sewer contracting company and wanted to get feedback from our customers of our service.”

Based on their experiences, several OPEN Forum community members chimed in to answer Chamul’s question.

Just Ask

“The best way to get reviews is to ask for them,” says Jeff Motter, CEO and chief marketing officer of East Bay Marketing Group. “And the best time to ask is when you finish the job and are with them.”

“While excitement and satisfaction is still in the air about your service, ask for some feedback,” agrees Bret Bonnet, chief marketing officer of Quality Logo Products. “Don’t be afraid to say to clients, ‘Hey, if we helped you, we’d be grateful if you let people know.’ They might take to Yelp themselves.”

Make It Easy

A certain percentage of satisfied customers will take the time and make the effort to review your company on sites like MerchantCircle and Yelp, but an even larger percentage are more likely to do so if you pave the way and make the process as easy and convenient as possible.

“Create some sample testimonials that they can use as a model, and give them a form to fill out,” Motter says.

If you meet with customers in person, give out business cards that list your URL on various review sites so that it’s easy for them to locate places to leave a review, and include your email so they can send the review directly to you if they prefer, says Bonnet. “A line that reads, ‘Send us your feedback or questions’ works well,” he says. Or send such information out via email right after the job is complete. Include a brief questionnaire or survey.

Bonnet also suggests placing a feedback form on your website and posting a status update on your company Facebook page that asks how you’ve been doing. Existing and new fans will see the post and hear about how pleased your customers are.

Offer Incentives

“Don’t be afraid to offer some sort of minor incentive for submission,” suggests Michael Korolishin, an intern with Media Wizardz. Give out incentives that make sense and relate to your business, such as percentage off coupons for future services or products, free gifts and promotional pieces.

If you want to build up reviews quickly, try holding a contest. For a specified period of time, enter anyone who gives a review into a drawing for a more expensive and impressive item, such as an iPad or a gift card.

Spotlight the Customer

Most people like to be the center of attention. When you do receive referrals, highlight those customers who took the time to provide them. Ask if you can share their testimonials on your website and social media, and make the mention even more of an event by including a picture of the person with the testimonial.

Or go a step further and create a short video of you interviewing the satisfied customer, suggests Jason Reis, owner and lead programmer of Flehx Corp. “After a service call is complete, you (as the owner) can make a video personally thanking the customer for giving you the opportunity to work for him or her,” Reis says. “The video would be 30 seconds or less. Make sure to mention the customer’s name at least twice in the video. Then post the video to YouTube and send the customer a personal email with the link to the video. This is sure to get your customers talking about you in a very positive way.”

Follow a Routine

Not everyone will get around to giving you reviews, even when you ask. But if you incorporate the task of making the request into your regular business routine, you will begin to accumulate an impressive amount of reviews.

“Create a process that you and all of your people will follow on each and every job,” Motter says. “This will guarantee that you will have testimonials and referrals. The best part is that if you do this, you will have designed a real business system that will always produce results.”

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