Linda Tomb says to start your business day being still.

Having once birthed a baby and a business in the same month, Linda Tomb knows a thing or two about the unique challenges that women entrepreneurs and working moms face. After a decades-long business career, during which she helped to expand a chimney sweep service across three states, launched three high-tech companies, and secured several million dollars in venture funding for a dot-com startup, Tomb turned her attention to helping other women figure out how to balance life and motherhood with business ownership.

Today, as owner of Unleash Your Business, Tomb offers one-on-one and group coaching targeted at female entrepreneurs. Though she has come to the conclusion that "there's no magic pill—every working woman needs to arrive at her own tailored solution for achieving balance and flow," Tomb says there are some issues that trip up just about everyone. So she's devised a three-step free teleseminar to help. It's called "Time, Focus, Money: The Three Step Solution to Unleash Your

trust

By TJ McCue

It should come as no surprise that your customers research before they buy. But many small business owners don't believe in managing their brand and reputation online. Every business, from doctors (yes, even doctors) to lawyers to retail stores is judged online.
Lisa Barone, at Small Business Trends, explains in her post: Why Online Reputation Matters to Small Business that "consumers are using social word of mouth, online reviews, and other online content to form a judgment about your company. The judgment they form is then strongly tied to whether or not they decide to purchase your product (or service)."
How do you keep up?

1. Set an email alert. This is one of the easiest ways to monitor if and when your brand name, product names, specific keywords, or your personal name are being used on Twitter, Facebook, or other review sites. Most alerts can also be sent as a text message (SMS) to your mobile phone.
2. Sign up for a reputation tracking service like the Yahoo! Marketing

By Brent Leary

customerdialogIt's tough keeping up with today's socially-empowered customer. Armed with social networks and mobile devices, their adoption and adaptation to the latest technology is accelerating at breathtaking rates. Just look at what took place this past Christmas:

• US online holiday shopping season reaches a record $37.2 billion, up 15 Percent vs. 2010 — a rate of increase almost 4X higher than the overall rate for retail.
• 7% of Christmas Day 2011 total online sales made via iPad
• As late as one week before Christmas 2011, one-quarter of consumers hadn't even started holiday shopping. (Consumer Reports)
• Almost one in four retail searches online on Christmas Day were made using mobile phones or tablet devices, according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC).
• The number of adults in the United States who own tablets and e-readers nearly doubled from mid-December to early January, according to a new Pew Research study. (New York Times)

These numbers paint a dramatic picture

Conquer your inner saboteur

"Fear is the biggest reason people don't start their own businesses," says Paska Nayden, a business coach in Fairfield County, Conn., who serves a national clientele. "Fear comes into play when you're making any kind of life change, such as getting married, starting a family, or switching careers. And it becomes louder when you're considering starting or buying your own business," she says.

After a 30-year career at IBM, Nayden faced her own fears when she decided to leave the corporate world for home-based work with more flexible hours. Even her mother urged her to stay with an employer, but she has succeeded in carving out a niche as a coach who helps people explore options in franchise ownership. As much counselor as coach, Nayden has, through surviving three debilitating battles with cancer, honed a talent for showing others the way to face frightening, life changing events. I spoke with her about how she helps would-be entrepreneurs overcome fear.

YSBA: When it comes to starting

reputation

By Paul M. Rand

Think about the last time you got a new client or customer.

There's an overwhelming likelihood that your new business came from someone recommending you. In fact, 92 percent of all consumers report that a "recommendation from people I know" is the biggest influence on their purchase behavior, according to a recently released study from Nielsen research. This percentage is well ahead of TV ads (47%), newspaper ads (46%) and even radio ads (42%).
While recommendations have always been important, social media has fundamentally shifted the marketing dynamic. Today, consumers can share their positive — and negative -- word of mouth recommendations with hundreds, thousands and even millions of other people.

Overwhelming Choices

Every day, there is a new social media tool, process or platform being announced. And Google, Facebook, Groupon and a host of social media marketing platforms and providers are promising a never-ending stream of new business by marketing through their

By Barry Moltz

For most of the last century, consumers believed what a company said in its advertisements. A business might hire an advertising agency on Madison Avenue (ala "Mad Men") to come up with a slick slogan delivered by a celebrity in order to influence what the customer would buy.

The Internet has allowed society to move from this one way medium to a more conversational one. It is not surprising that 97% of customers review products online before buying. But, what may be a surprise is the exact information they are researching. Consumers are not only looking at the latest features, prices and availability. They want to know what other consumers are saying about the product and the company. Today, these reviews have a higher level of credibility than any company directed advertising and most directly influence what the consumer eventually buys. Ninety-two percent of consumers say they trust "earned media" (word-of-mouth and recommendations from friends and family) above all

Stacey Shiring, Owner, Creative Invites and EventsIn 2009, less than a year into her first job out of college, Stacey Shiring was laid off. Then her sister, three months pregnant, was downsized out of her job as a designer at the Los Angeles Times. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. Shiring and her sister paired their graphic design skills to start a customized wedding stationery business that they called Bridal Divas Ink.

Since then, Shiring's sister dove full-time into motherhood, and Shiring bought her out of the business. In the second half of 2011 she began making sales—75 bridal customers between July and December, the off-season for weddings.

Today, the company, which makes a name change next week to Creative Invites & Events, has two full-time and two part-time employees, a retail location in Cincinnati's Reading Bridal District, a headquarters office reserved in the Hyde Park neighborhood's American Small Business Center, and a first-of-its-kind interactive stationery design website set to launch in

Mike Silagadze sells his technology to college students instead of schoolsMike Silagadze was a graduate student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario when he started a company, Top Hat Monocle, in his living room three years ago. His business idea, based on his experience as an undergraduate in engineering, was to help professors better engage with students by leveraging the technology every one of them brought to class. Silagadze built an application to enable students to ask questions, respond to surveys, take pop quizzes, play with computer simulations, and interact with each other and a teaching assistant using their mobile devices.

His product development completed, Silagadze began selling the Top Hat Monocle service in September 2010. After overcoming some early obstacles, today the company has 24 employees in offices in Toronto and San Francisco. More than 60,000 student customers at 80 universities worldwide pay $20 per semester to subscribe to the service. Top Hat Monocle has generated $1.2 million in revenues during the current schoolyear and is