If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "Twelfth Night", Act 1 scene 1 Humans are creative beings with a strong creative impulse, and this comes into play in almost all realms of our lives. Even in business, a seemingly dry and uncreative pursuit, art and creativity play important roles. From logos to taglines, businesses use art to peak the interest of clients. In addition, managers of companies often get a "spark" of creative insight or inspiration that drives them to introduce a new product, feature or service for the ...

There are two exciting events coming up in the world of small businesses and bloggers in Israel. Small Business Day in the Knesset On January 9, 2007, the Knesset will be holding a Small and Medium Sized Business Day. A "marathon" of sessions and discussions will take place with representatives from the small and medium-sized business sector on issues such as financing, education, immigrant absorption, social issues, and more. There will also be a main panel discussion to analyze the situation of small businesses on the front lines that have been affected by the war. Avi Balishnakov, General Manager of the Knesset, claims that "it is no secret that ...

Ben Yoskovitz at Instigator Blog initiated a Group Writing Project where people can share any lessons they learned over the course of 2006. So here's my lesson from this year: diversifying your marketing strategy can benefit your business, and it is possible to do this on a shoestring budget. Diversity is good People generally agree that diversity is a good thing. Not only is there a lot we can learn from cultural diversity among people, but diversity is praised in other realms as well, such as investing (diversify your portfolio), eating (diversify your diet), exercise (different types of exercise encourage you to continue), etc. And now I can ...

Like every year, the question arises as to what holiday greetings should be used so that people who do not observe Christmas will not be offended. While many people see the generic "Happy Holidays" as a solution, one blogger pointed out that this really just means "Merry Christmas to those of you who do not celebrate it." Even in Israel, we have our own generic version of Happy Chanuka – "Happy Festival of Lights." I guess Israeli businesses and municipalities want to avoid identifying the holiday by its name so that the many non-Jews in this country will also not be offended. But could it ...

Globes held its annual Israel Business Conference at the beginning of this week. The self-proclaimed "conference of the business elite in Israel" did indeed draw business leaders from all over the world. The grand opening was attended (via videoconference) by Donald Trump and his children, Donald Jr. and Invanka, both Vice Presidents in the family business. The Trumps are about to start construction on a new luxury 70 story building in the Ramat Gan area. Globes has a number of videos on their site from the conference, and the Trump video is ...

In yesterday's post, I argued that a business should have a website right from the start so that they look professional for the first potential client that they meet. There are more reasons that a business should have a site from the beginning, and all of them have to do with vision – a big vision of where you want your business to go is an essential part of achieving your goals. Therefore, your first steps should take into account where you want to be in a year, or two or three from now. Unless you have venture capital funding or a PhD (Papa ...

A friend is currently enrolled in the MATI Small Business Course, a comprehensive course designed to provide budding entrepreneurs with the basics needed to start their own business. According to many of the lecturers at the current MATI course, it is not recommended for new businesses to invest in a website. These lecturers explained to the participants that first you need to have customers who will go to your website, so first get the customers and then get the site. They said the same applies to printing brochures. I strongly disagree with this approach as far as websites go. I do agree with them on the brochure issue, since designing and printing a brochure is very expensive and inflexible – once ...

One of the challenges of running your small business is the number of tasks for which you are responsible. Your tasks range from the exciting to the mundane, the very short-term to the very long-term, and are related to clients, service providers, and even your family. While we all want our businesses to grow, this growth brings with it many more tasks and increases the difficulty of managing them. I recently found myself spending too much time trying to figure out what to do next, rather than actually doing. I felt like things were slipping out of control, and I needed to find a simple, effective and free way of managing my responsibilities. I tested ...

5 steps to an effective e-newsletter campaign An exciting subject line – your readers are bombarded with emails every day, including other newsletters. Your first goal is to get them to open your newsletter, and your subject line plays an important role. First, make sure that it is obvious that the email came from your business, and is not spam. It is recommended to start the subject line with your company name in brackets, like this: [illuminea]. After that, write the most exciting subject line you can come up with, in as few words as possible. Try not to use more than ten words in your subject, and make sure it tells your reader about ...

What should you write about? So you're ready to send out your first e-newsletter where you're going to tell your clients how amazing you are at what you do and why they should order more business from you. Don't do it! Your newsletter's level of effectiveness is directly related to how interesting it is. A monthly newsletter raving about you and your business is not interesting. It is perceived as annoying advertising, and your subscribers will either ignore it, delete it, or will unsubscribe. Your goal as the manager of an e-newsletter is to retain your subscribers and encourage them to open and read your mailing. But if I'm not talking about myself, you may ask, how ...