Thought I would share a few facts on Small Business.

• Small business produces roughly half of the private Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and creates, on average, about two-thirds of net new jobs annually.
• Small businesses are the greatest source of new employment in inner cities, comprising more than 99 percent of establishments and 80 percent of total employment.
• American small business is the world’s second largest economy, trailing only the United States as a whole.
• Small businesses employ more than half of private sector employees.
• Ninety percent of small businesses employ fewer than 20 people.
• Small firms represent 99.7 percent of all employers.
• Nearly 16 million people operate a small business as their primary occupation in a year.
• Women-owned firms have grown at around two times the rate of all firms.
• Minority-owned firms have grown at around four times the rate of all firms

Source: National Federation of Independent Business

Get Smart on Small Business: The Backbone of the U.S. Economy. To learn more about Small Business Facts, visit the NFIB website at http://prod.ion.nfib.com/object/smallBusinessFacts.

Marketing brings customers to the door. Sales puts their signature on the order and can make the order even bigger.

Selling is the act of persuading or influencing a customer to buy.

Marketing activities support sales efforts. Actually, they are usually the most significant force in stimulating sales. Oftentimes, marketing activities, like the production of marketing materials or ads, must occur before a sale can be made. Marketing activities should follow the sale as well, to pave the way for future sales and referrals.

I’m a big email newsletter fan.  I follow a lot of newsletters and I assist many clients with publishing their newsletters. Many business that publish newsletters have an Archive page where old issues can be reviewed. Sometimes these addresses or URLs can be rather long.  Not good if you “Tweet.”

On Twitter, a long web address can eat up a lot of characters (you only get 140). There’s a great, free online service called tinyurl.com.

Simply paste your Archive URL or Sign Up page URL into the form on their home page, and poof… out comes a short (tiny) URL!

Because Twitter limits “tweets” to only 140 characters, it will challenge you to be concise when you write an article teaser. You can tell your followers, “just wrote a newsletter on [insert your topic]. Find it here [insert your tiny URL newsletter archive link].”