On Wednesday, October 21st, the magazine Fast Company celebrated their annual October Masters of Design issue by hosting an event at the Chelsea Art Museum.  This industry jam-packed event included interviews with David Butler, the VP of global design for Coca-Cola, David Rockwell, the set designer of this year’s Academy Awards, and Lisa Strausfeld, a digital designer, as well as hosted starchitect David Adjaye and Smart Design’s Femme Den.   The new Porsche Panamera, which debuted only four days earlier was also out on display, along with all-night demonstrations of HP’s new Envy laptop.

Visit http://www.magicbulletmedia.com/MNR/fastcompany/MOD/ to see the inviews with David Butler David Rockwell and other thought leaders!

I actually do not call myself a business blog consultant.  It seems like an odd term.  People that have not work with blogging for business might thing that business blogs are not serious tools for business.

In the past years, I have focused a lot of energy on using business blogs to generate Internet leads.  This has proven to be very effective.  Instead of thinking you need a business blog consultant, you probably need a content marketing consultant instead.  But the business blog will be a big part of that lead generation content marketing strategy.

How it works is simple.  You combine keyword research, calls to action that appeal to your target market and content creation that focuses on solving the needs of the people you want to reach.  Then those people start finding you and requesting what you want in larger and larger numbers.

So should you hire a business blog consultant?

Certainly a consultant can help you succeed faster.  Business blogging and content marketing is a vast topic, but some things work much better than others and some things can actually hurt your effort.  If you have a budget, hire a business blog consultant or buy a packaged business blogging system.

If you do not have a budget, start a business blog anyway.  A consultant or social media coach can help you improve your effort in the future when you are ready.

CRM stands for customer relationship management. On Thursday I was talking to several business owners and we got off of the topic of marketing and it turned into a 5 hour business building session. They really seemed to appreciate my knowledge of best free CRM systems. One of the people had a corporate sales background but she was not excited about the cost of paid CRM systems while in start up mode.

Want More Leads in your CRM?  -> Free Lead Generation Software Access

First, I want to say that if you have a sales team and a high volume of sales, paying for a CRM is worth the money. The paid versions will have support and they will probably have more automation features. This post is actually for small businesses that in the past have not been tracking sales in an official system and need a low cost or free CRM to get started.

Before You Begin

Before you start looking at all the cool features of the CRM’s I am going to discuss, map out your sales process. The first time I used a CRM I found it overwhelming because of all the options. You want to turn off everything you do not need and focus on a clear system that handles exceptions.

Open Source CRM

There is not one best CRM. The best CRM is the system that best matches your needs, and different industries, products and businesses have very different sales tracking needs.

There are a lot of Open Source CRM solutions. I have personal experience with two. While open source is free, there is a very real prospect that you will need to hire someone to set it up for you, although I just noticed Bluehost added Sugar CRM to the simple scripts as a quick install. That means you could have it up and running very quickly and pay only for your hosting and domain – that is what I am currently using and it works really well.

So, option #1 is Sugar CRM – I used this years ago and now use it again. It has nearly everything I need in the open source product. I would love the email automation for drip marketing after entry, but other than that this does the job. It also has some free plugins and a big community.

Open source CRM vTiger is #2 – If I had to pick my favorite on feel and ease of use, it would be vTiger. I used it about a year ago and really liked the interface. The problem I found with it was some features I wanted were missing and I could not figure out how to capture leads from the web. There was a 3rd party plugin that I never did get to work. It looks like it has been updated, so it may be better now. If you are using a current version of any of these CRM tools feel free to leave a comment.

Hosted Free CRM

The third product I used in the last 2 years as a CRM is Zoho CRM. If you only have one or two sales people and do not think you will grow beyond that, the free Zoho CRM is an excellent choice. They host the software and you only pay if you have more than three users. I really like this software and I do not mind paying a monthly fee. However, I started adding up all the things I wanted and it became rather expensive if I upgraded and my team grew. I did not want locked into the system.

Which brings me to a good point. I think there are some thing you need to carefully select because changing them is difficult later. If I could go back in time, I would have selected my bank more carefully – although I am fine with my various banks, I would hate to move now. I would also choose my credit card payment gateway more carefully. No way I can change now because we have a code base built on it. It works well, but a slightly more expensive but universal one would have given me more options. Payroll companies are another one of those things where not sticking to one can really cause headaches.

Likewise, you can play with these various CRM systems to see which one you like best, but once you commit and start getting serious with it, changing later will not be fun. Your CRM will take time to set up and customize and train people to use. Make sure you select wisely and try not to keep changing or you will be spending more time on your CRM and less time on selling. Good luck.

If you are on the lookout for working from home jobs you might need to rethink your job search.

The fact is, there are more people than ever working from home and there are a huge number of work from home opportunities.  What I think confuses many people is the idea that there are a lot of “jobs” that allow you to work from home and get the same pay and benefits.

The truth is that there are a lot of small businesses and even big businesses that need someone working from home  to do jobs on a piecemeal basis.  A 1099 is music to a business owner’s ears because of the cost savings and the ability to terminate the consultant at any time – easily.

Working from home jobs are not usually going to be like normal jobs.  They are going to be more likely to make the person into an entrepreneur and you are going to have to market your services, have multiple clients and prove your worth.  So working from home is not for the faint at heart.

If you want working from home jobs then the good news is that with the rise of social media, content marketing and blogging there are more opportunities than ever.  Most business owners are completely overwhelmed by the Internet Marketing landscape.  Working from home can be easy if you just learn how to be a virtual marketing assistant.  We build a whole virtual assistant membership site around that concept, because there is such a huge demand.

Working from home can be very rewarding – but remember if you are going the freelance route, it is going to take time to build your client list and build your business.

If you are a regular reader you probably have seen me talk about wishlist member and rave about how wishlist member wordpress plugin really helped me expand my business online by making membership sites so easy to build and manage.  I went through six different membership technologies for membership sites before I bought the multi-site license of wishlist member and then everything became easy.

Until the end of October, 2009 Wishlist Member is having a great bonus with Gary Vaynerchuk.  Buy Wishlist Member Plugin and get a free copy of Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk as well as a great interview.

To be honest, Wishlist is such an important tool and such a great value that you really do not need free wishlist member bonuses.  The value you get is immense.

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