The darkest days of the Great Recession are over, so we are told, but I’m finding that sales have increased only slightly for some small-business owners, while revenue remains deeply depressed for many. While some customers are loosening up their wallets a little, it is clear purchasing habits have changed.

Deep economic changes have occurred, and business will never be the same.

Entrepreneurs — whether they’re an unemployed person striking out on their own or a seasoned veteran trying to get the mojo back again — must do things differently in order to survive. Everyone must change, especially small-business owners.

Luckily, what have not changed are the business fundamentals, those management traits that successful entrepreneurs almost all possess: tenacity, commitment and vision, and basic business skills.

New strategies are required, however, strategies designed to work in a changing business climate.  Here are 7 ways to help ensure your business succeeds:

Upselling is a great way to increase your profits as a freelancer–if it’s done right. Upselling means selling additional products and services to your existing clients or convincing them to upgrade their current purchase to a more expensive purchase.

If a fast food clerk has ever asked you if you “want fries with that,” then you’ve experienced an upsell. Upselling is common for both service-based and retail businesses and it can help freelancers too.

Smart freelancers use upselling to increase their income without annoying their clients. In fact, if it’s done right, upselling can actually strengthen your relationship with your client.

In this post, we’ll list eight bad upselling practices to avoid and then we’ll explain how to do it right.

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When you receive the spark of a great idea, you start to get the itch. You can’t contain it. You can’t keep it to yourself. You want to do something with it. You’ve got to turn it into a viable business.

In Poke the Box, Seth Godin says, “All around you are platforms, opportunities, and entire organizations that will come to life once you are driven enough and brave enough to contribute the initiative they are missing.”

Great ideas don’t make great businesses; great execution does. When you have developed something marketable, you are on the right track by thinking about shipping before you’ve even produced anything. That means you are a doer. That means you have the capacity (rather than simply the desire) of starting a new business. You have the initiative. The only thing left to do now is to ship.

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For those of you who have already successfully started a business and are ready to take the next step, you may be wondering what you can do to help growing your business. There are many ways to do this, 10 of which are outlined below. Choosing the proper one (or ones) for your business will depend on the type of business you own, your available resources, and how much money, time and resources you’re willing to invest all over again. If you’re ready to grow, take a look at these tips.

1. Open another location. This is often the first way business owners approach growth. If you feel confident that your current business location is under control, consider expanding by opening a new location.

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“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” said Peter Drucker.

Social media measurement tools are one of the fastest growing areas of analytics and venture funding. But, among businesses that purchase them, only 34% are “happy;” 60% say they are merely “okay” and 6% are so frustrated they are ready to switch (source: KISSmetrics).

Do we need to know lots of measurements, or just manage the ones that matter.

Here are 10 social media measurements every marketer should know.

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Ready to ramp up your efforts on Pinterest? Here are the no-fail guidelines to become a real “pinner.”

You can generate lots of traffic from Pinterest in a short amount of time. You can make your path even quicker if you let these 9 rules guide you to success:

Rule 1: Keep your boards in order. A common mistake is to dump all your content onto one board. Instead, use different boards to break down content in a way that makes sense. This is a way to broaden your reach by reaching out to multiple segments of your audience. Doing this also shows your followers that you respect their time enough to have your content organized.

Rule 2: Image quality matters. For Pinterest, which is all about images, this seems like something that shouldn’t have to be said. Yet many images uploaded are actually blurry or too small. Or, just as bad, have an obvious watermark.

Of course, this guideline should be about much more than just avoiding the bad. Not every image has to be something that qualifies to hang in a museum, but the more effort you put into making your images as professional as possible pays real dividends.

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Whether you have a blog for your small business or blogging is your business, WordPress has a number of plugins that can help you maintain and grow your blog with minimal effort.

Plugins are snippets of code that, once activated, automatically embed themselves into your blog. They can be installed directly from your WordPress dashboard by clicking on “plugins” in the sidebar, then choosing “add new.” From there you can search by category or type in the name of the plugin you’re looking for. Once you’ve installed a plugin, you’ll need to click “activate” and, in some cases, follow the instructions to configure the application.

From moderating comments to social sharing to raising your search engine visibility, here are four plugins that every owner should have installed on his or her small-business blog:

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When you’re starting a new company, you’re hoping it’ll experience breakthrough growth, which means that every step is crucial because so many changes are taking place in the first few years.

To help move your company forward, you need to find and retain the right employees.

In the book ‘The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change’, author Jason Jennings identifies five qualities that are crucial for new and growing businesses.

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One thing that has always drawn me to online business is the access to data it gives you, that you can then use to help make business decisions.

I am not suggesting data alone is the answer to all the decisions we make in business, but it does go a long way in proving or disproving the viability of certain actions.

In my experience many companies are very bad at using data, they often collect it but do not spend enough time analysing it and trying to draw actionable conclusions from it.

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If your web traffic is high but people aren’t buying, reviewing, or signing up, it means you have a low conversion rate.  Here are a few ideas that can help improve you website conversion rate:

1). Offer an incentive

2). Create a compelling call to action

3). Use quality images

4). Make your checkout of sign up process easy

5). Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

6). Use trust symbols

7). Build your brand

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In case you missed Top Blog Posts from last week, click here last week’s Top 10 Posts

1.     How Your Small Business Can Attract a Big Client

2.     The ultimate business owner’s guide to Facebook advertising

3.     Join The 1% And Become A Content Creator

4.     Red Bull just gave everyone a Master Class in social branding – here’s how and why:

5.     Why Focus Groups Kill Innovation, From The Designer Behind Swiffer

6.     10 Errors Entrepreneurs Must Avoid upon Social Media – Part 2

7.     4 Ways Small Retailers Can Compete with Amazon

8.     5 Things Michael J. Fox Can Teach Us About Business, Happiness and Life

9.     The 10 Most Prominent Writers’ Workshops in America

10.  4 Ways to Keep a Small Company Culture as Your Business Grows

For your convenience, Best of the Web is now available on other social media platforms: on Facebook , Google+ and Pinterest.

What is Best of the Web?  Best of the Web, written as excerpts or blog snippet for the busy executive, is a collection of web marketing and business blogs that are relevant to the web marketing community and other business professionals. We update the information frequently to make sure only interesting, useful and informative articles are included. Below each excerpt is a link to the original article source, so the readers can read the blog in it’s entirely.

Best of the Web posts are written by the most prestigious sources, great writers as well as from people with ‘boots on the ground’ the movers and shakers of the web marketing and business industry who are writing about what they are doing.   Sources include: Jeff Bullas, Seth Godin, Kim Garst, IBM, Deloitte, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Business 2 Community, Entrepreneur, Forbes, Mashable Social Media, imediaconnection, Huffington Post, Social Media Today, KISSmetrics and more.

How does a company move from becoming a promoter of their stuff to a provider of business insights? How do brands become publishers without hiring entire newsrooms full of journalists?

Turns out, the answer is simple: take the knowledge, the expertise and the passion of your employees and focus that on answering your potential customers’ key questions.

As Marcus  Sheridan (aka @TheSalesLion) suggests: “They ask. You answer!”

This means your company is no longer in the business of just making and selling products. Your company is in the content businesses and needs to become a supplier of education and insights to your industry!

The Content Challenge in B2B

Content and “becoming a publisher” is a huge challenge for businesses today. Especially in Business-to-business (B2B) companies, where many of our employees are stuck on the notion that our products are so complex and our sales cycles are so long that we have to spend a majority of our time and resources explaining why we are better.

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Global viewership, life and death stakes, an historic moment – Red Bull masterfully combined all these ingredients to create a social and shared brand experience on a scale never seen before. While the live and post leap coverage focused on Felix the man and , no doubt, daredevil, let’s deconstruct the top ten features of this masterstroke in social branding.

1. ANTICIPATION: Like veteran launch expert, Apple, Red Bull built anticipation for the leap for the last year while Felix spent the last 5 years preparing for jump (above is a video prepared by Red Bull in January this rear.

2. HUMANITY: What Red Bull did so well was to communicate directly and coordinate through PR sources the human story of Felix which allowed people to emotionally connect with the brand.

3. IMAGINATION: Full credit goes to Red Bull to go one better than their already startling array of live, daredevil events, literally reaching the stratosphere on this one. It’s this flight of imagination of a brand that matched the raw ingenuity and ambition of Felix.

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Twitter has been my blogs content distribution powerhouse since the day I hit the “publish” button on my first blog post.

It allows me to tweet information to the world in real time with simplicity and no fuss.

All you need is good headline, a shortened link and some hashtags (if you don’t know what a hashtag is I will fill you in soon)

When I started on Twitter I was like a mad monk, tweeting here and chirping there. Chasing followers who didn’t care about social media but just because they had large follower counts.

Finally, I learned how to build an online tribe.

Connect to Global Tribes

One of social media’s  real strengths is to connect global tribes who are passionate about their interests. It could be photography, gaming or gummy bears.

In the past “Tribes” met in town halls and coffee shops. Now we create virtual communities online that can use social media platforms and technology to hangout (hence the term applied by Google+ to its groups feature “Hangouts”) and talk about their “stuff” in words that are often incomprehensible to an outsider.

The opportunities are now about abundance rather than scarcity.

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THE AERON CHAIR, THE SWIFFER, AND THE REEBOK PUMP–NONE OF THESE BREAKTHROUGH PRODUCTS WOULD HAVE GOTTEN HIGH MARKS FROM A FOCUS GROUP. HERE, CONTINUUM’S GIANFRANCO ZACCAI LISTS FOUR STEPS TO TAKE BEFORE INTRODUCING A DESIGN TO THE MASSES.

Think about it: How many great ideas have you had sitting around a table? If you are like most people I know, not many. Yet, time after time, companies looking for a winning idea gather a group of people around a table to ask them what they would like. Other times, companies may actually develop innovative ideas–but then their impulse is to convene a focus group to critique them and, more often than not, undermine them.

In my 40 years working in design and innovation, alongside some of the most brilliant minds in the business, I have never seen innovation come out of a focus group. Let me put it more strongly: Focus groups kill innovation. That’s both because of what they do and what they don’t do.

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Part 2 continued from Part 1

Typical Social Media Errors Your Start-up Ought to Avoid

Stopping too soon

Developing an Internet presence takes a good amount of time. But, the largest error entrepreneurs usually make is to quit their consistent updates as they have an adequate following. Keep in mind, sustaining your Internet presence will be as demanding as developing it.

Giving Jobs Away to Others

At least within the first stage, you, the entrepreneur must be engaged in developing a social media presence. Employing somebody else to perform it might benefit you as far as strategy, yet the passion which you may exude in your effort will be bound to be lacking amongst the ones who work for you.

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Going after big clients may seem like a daunting task. However, whatever their size, all businesses have similar needs and challenges for which they seek quality solutions. If you can demonstrate that you offer those solutions, you could prove to be an ideal partner or provider.

To that end, here are five tips for attracting big clients:

1. Do your research. Never approach a prospective client without thoroughly researching its people and products ahead of time. Plenty of basic information is available on a company’s website and through its social media presence. Check out the owner’s LinkedIn profile and the company’s Facebook page. Of course, you should already be knowledgeable about the industry the client serves. Positioning yourself as a well-informed resource helps to establish your credibility and demonstrates your value to the potential client.

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Most smart business owners understand the value of Facebook advertising and are excited by the prospect of being able to reach such a huge number of prospective customers using the world’s largest social media platform. Facebook Ads can return big bang for your advertising buck. However, many business owners don’t know how to get started and are confused by the myriad of options provided.

This 3-part series walks you through your options to help you pick the best advertising features for your brand. I’ll be covering the following:

1. The power of Facebook Ads
2. What are your options with Facebook Ads?
3. Facebook Ad tips to get the edge over your competition.

Part 1 – The Power of Facebook Ads

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Most startups are looking to grow. But once success hits, how can you scale your company without shedding the shared values and culture that helped make you successful in the first place?

FreshBooks, a cloud accounting company based in Toronto, started in 2003 as a handful of people in a small office. Today, more than 5 million people have used FreshBooks to manage their books and we now have more than 90 employees.

As we’ve moved beyond our initial startup stages, here are four ways that we strive to keep our small business values as we continue to grow:

1. Keep a small-business owner’s perspective. When we were a really small business, it was easy to empathize with the pains felt by our small business customers — be it paperwork keeping them from the work they love, to struggling to grow their own businesses. As we grow, it’s critical that we continue to see things from the small business owner’s perspective.

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The success of giant e-commerce businesses are forcing other retail websites to pick up the pace.

Retailers, such as Macy’s, Saks, Ralph Lauren and Tiffany & Co., have huge resources to build up their online presence, but no other online retailer can compare with Amazon in terms of innovation in recent years, according to Aram Rubinson, an analyst at Nomura Equity Research.

“Amazon is just revolutionizing retail. I don’t think any other adjective or any other verb would suffice. They are changing the way every retailer on the planet is thinking about retailing, and if they aren’t, they should be thinking about it differently because of Amazon,” Rubinson says.

It’s important to keep in mind that the online consumer is wealthier than average. According to a report by Forrester Research, online buyers with household incomes of $75,000 or more represent the largest group of the online consumer population. In fact, they make up more than 40 percent of all online buyers—almost twice the number of those with household incomes of $50,000 to $75,000. These consumers have considerable spending power, making it important for businesses to invest in the e-commerce space.