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    Blog Posts by Barbara Quick

    • Averill’s Sharper Uniforms: A revamped website and SEO efforts helped this business change direction

      By Barbara Quick | Yahoo! Small Business Advisor – Thu, Jun 6, 2013 4:45 PM EDT

      One of the most appealing aspects of the Internet is the opportunity it gives us to reinvent ourselves. The virtual world—unlike the brick-and-mortar world, or even the face-to-face world of daily life—is nonjudgmental and neutral. No preconceived notions about your age, training or past experience will bar you from getting a fresh new start as an Internet entrepreneur. If you notice a consumer need that isn’t being filled—and you have the tenacity to figure out how best to fill it—the tools are there to help you stake your claim and start panning for gold.

      Massachusetts resident Averill Bromfield had spent 25 years in the corporate world, managing voice and data networks, when the air went out of the Dot-com bubble, leaving him without a job. With a wife and three children, Bromfield couldn’t afford to sit around and sulk about the downturn in his fortunes. Thinking fast, and exhibiting the adaptability that seems to be characteristic of Web entrepreneurs, he started looking around for

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    • Ivy’s Garden: Growing a gluten-free Asian food business online.

      By Barbara Quick | Yahoo! Small Business Advisor – Thu, May 9, 2013 2:18 PM EDT

      The niche market chosen by online marketing entrepreneurs Ivy Lau and Mark Ivey—gluten-free, home-style, fresh-frozen Asian food—seems to be, just like their shared first and last name, a matter of destiny.

      Niche markets are created, after all, by identifying consumer needs and desires that are being addressed inadequately—and developing and delivering the goods or services to fill that gap.

      Ivy and Ivey’s newly launched gluten-free food company, Ivy’s Garden Foods, was born of the couple’s joint expertise in marketing communications, Ivy’s life-long devotion to Asian cuisine—and her medical diagnosis, seven years ago, of gluten intolerance.

      Gluten-free food isn’t easy to find—and gluten can lurk in unexpected cooking ingredients, such as soy sauce, or even in nominally gluten-free foods that were processed with the same equipment as food items containing gluten. Ivy personally experienced the frustrations and dangers that face the home cook trying to protect a susceptible family member.

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    • SOS: Strategic Office Support’s Kathrine Farris helps out with advice for startup service businesses.

      By Barbara Quick | Yahoo! Small Business Advisor – Tue, Mar 26, 2013 4:23 PM EDT

      Do you remember the day when the training wheels were removed from your two-wheeler and you made your first attempt to ride solo?

      Scary, exhilarating and momentous, wasn’t it?

      The same words are apt descriptors for what it’s like to quit a good salaried job with benefits and embark full time as an independent online entrepreneur.

      Just ask Kathrine Farris, owner of Strategic Office Support LLC, which the young mother and wife created as a part-time online enterprise (at first called Office Solutions ME) while working full-time as an assistant bank manager in Southern Maine.
       
      “My family, my faith, and my desperation gave me the courage I needed,” says Farris, whose husband wasn’t working at the time, making her leap into uncertainty even scarier. “I took three full months of maternity leave from my banking job, which gave me a little taste of what it would be like to become a full-time entrepreneur.”

      The idea of working from home and being her own boss was a bright beacon for Farris in her

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