Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends

First of all, let me say that I have a lot of respect for Tim Ferriss’s book, The 4 Hour Workweek. After hearing the 6th or 7th person recommend the book, I recently sat down and read it. I found it to be motivating and also thought-provoking. I even picked up a few good tips from it that I am putting to use in my own business.

But I have to say that you should never take the title of this book literally.

The book explains, more or less, how to create a virtual business — one that you can run from anywhere. And one that takes as little as 4 hours a week by the owner. Or at least, 4 hours a week is the goal.

The author makes some great points in it about managing your time, especially email. In fact, a large chunk of the book is about time management. He also provides actionable how-tos on how to find the help to outsource so you have more free time (Lou Dobbs, close your ears — he suggests … gasp! … offshore labor).

Tim’s ideas aren’t new. Other books and management philosophies have touched on some of the same concepts for a couple of decades now. Book shelves are bursting with time management books. And enterprising entrepreneurs have been structuring virtual businesses they can run from anywhere for some time now. In 1998 I sat next to someone on a flight from London to Chicago (on a first class upgrade) who ran several global businesses from the Cayman Islands, and who regaled me nonstop for 6 hours with his philosophies about creating virtual businesses run almost exclusively on outsourced labor.

Still, no knock against The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss brings an up-to-date take on things and scales it to the individual entrepreneur who is starting out with very little money. It’s McKinsey for the solo entrepreneur. read more

Last week I wrote about the almost-empty South China Mall. The developers had built a gorgeous, state of the art mall — the largest in the world. Only problem: it is built in a factory city, Dongguan, where there are few people able to afford what it has to offer.

To me it signified a stunning lack of advance market research and planning.

However, I inadvertently may have given the wrong impression about all of China — that the entire country can’t afford the upscale, Western, middle class lifestyle that such a mall presupposes. From what I understand, that’s not the case. It all depends on what part of China you are in. Some parts of China have a rapidly growing and thriving middle class.

Take, for instance, Shanghai. Shanghai is a rich city and the center of China’s financial industry. A friend of mine who grew up in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, says that even during that time citizens owned considerable property and ran businesses in Shanghai.

As one reader emailed me, “To compare Dongguan with Shanghai, is like comparing Altoona with Manhattan. It’s two different worlds economically.” (Apologies to anyone from Altoona — those were a reader’s words, not mine.)

But the point is a good one. As a fast expanding country, China does seem filled with economic opportunities, and not just opportunities to outsource factory jobs from the U.S. to China. There is also the opportunity for enterprising U.S. companies to find an outlet for their products in newly affluent parts of China. read more

South China Mall is the world’s largest shopping mall, according to this article in The National.

At over 7 million square feet, it is double the size of the gargantuan Mall of America in the United States. It has an amusement park including a roller coaster; an indoor rain forest; and Las Vegas-style replicas of famous places, including a Venice canal and the Arc de Triomphe.

But it has one big problem: it’s nearly empty.

South China Mall is designed to have 1,500 stores. Unfortunately, only a handful are currently occupied.

The developers expected 100,000 visitors a day. Instead they get 10,000, if that.

Opened in 2005, it was once hailed in the New York Times for exemplifying China’s new consumer middle-class.

Then something went terribly wrong. read more

In the eyes of many, “gazelles” are coveted.

Gazelles is the name adopted in the 1980s by researcher David Birch of Cognetics, to describe fast growing companies. According to Inc magazine:

‘Some years back, David Birch of the research company Cognetics conferred that name on fast-growing companies, thereby distinguishing them from the “mice” on Main Street and the “elephants” on the Fortune 500. The name stuck.‘

Economic development organizations, non-profit entrepreneurship programs, venture capitalists and other groups jumped on the bandwagon. Gazelles were in. If you wanted to see jobs, economic growth and high investment returns, gazelles were what you had to focus on.

On one level, that’s pretty obvious, right? Fast growing businesses are the ones that are going to bring the biggest returns, presumably add the most jobs, become a larger part of the economy, faster — when compared with slower growing companies.

It’s hard to argue with that.

But one thing that’s always bothered me with the focus on gazelles to the exclusion of slower-growing small businesses, is that it ignores the life cycle of so many smaller companies and startups.

You see, it simply takes time for most businesses to grow.

In my experience a lot of startups are not fast growers immediately out of the gate. Many businesses remain small for years until they reach some critical mass, the business matures and becomes efficient, and growth explodes. read more

So the Associated Press (AP) kicked up a little kerfuffle last week when it started threatening bloggers who quote AP stories.

It seems that the AP sent a takedown notice to an independent blog site called the Drudge Retort, demanding that they stop quoting AP stories and linking back to them.

The news media and bloggers are having a field day with it. Things did NOT die down over the weekend. In fact, if anything many people are just winding up to have their say.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch responded to the AP’s actions by noting that the AP is wrong — and banning AP stories. Mathew Ingram, technology writer with Toronto’s Globe and Mail is just one of the chorus of veteran journalists and editors opining that the AP needs to get a clue. Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine goes further and says, “For shame, AP.”

What’s at issue is the interpretation of copyright law and what constitutes “fair use.” If the quoting of the AP articles is fair use, then it’s protected under copyright law. If it isn’t fair use, then it’s not protected.

There’s even a handy 4-part test of what constitutes fair use.

Sounds like an easy issue, right? Just look it up and see what’s fair use, right? read more

In an interesting discussion thread here at OPEN Forum the moderator asked “do you update your business plan?”

The comments were revealing — one comment in particular. The commenter responded by describing how early on in his business he was advised to create a business plan for investors, but he didn’t want to spend hours on that exercise, stating: “I couldn’t see 40 hours of writing a business plan on assumption (typical entrepreneurs view) when the whole plan could change in a month and then how do you tell the investors the plan you made the deal on has changed?”

However, he says that later on he came to realize he needed planning of sorts in his business as it grew larger, stating:

“I learned when you get bigger you need some sort of plan for your own execution or else you just can get mixed up, simply. Maybe not a full BP by the book but something. I do have my BP in my head but it should be written down like all told me to do. If I did everything right I would modify my written plan once a month. Once a year is not nearly enough and writing it will bring about new ideas yet.” read more

How do you take advantage of social media sites without them eating up your entire day, like the attack of the killer tomatoes?

You know what I’m talking about … those social media sites where you can network with other people, make valuable business contacts, and spread the word about your business. Everything from blogs to Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn to ….

Social media sites can put punch into your marketing and PR at little or no cost. The price is definitely right — the price in dollar terms, that is. For some small businesses social media has become a cost effective and crucial part of the marketing mix.

Only problem is … 4 hours into it you’re flitting from site to site reading everything in your path, leaving comments and voting on your favorite articles, and making new connections along the way. With no end in sight! It’s social media marketing gone amuck.

Meanwhile your phone goes unanswered. Your email inbox is reaching crisis proportions. And work keeps piling up. read more

Learning how to market your business and close sales can be the toughest part of running a business. Most of us start a business because we happen to be good at “something.” We started a business because we were good at accounting, or landscaping, or building houses, or freelance writing, or software programming, or Web design.

But chances are, we are not that great at sales and marketing. Heck, you can’t be good at everything, right?

Unfortunately, no sale = no eat.

But if you want to boost your marketing by 100% and make it easier to get sales, try this one little technique that anyone can learn to do … read more