Grand Prize Winner Selected!

Congratulations to kathyluman on Twitter, who has been randomly selected as the grand prize winner of a 16 GB Wi-Fi Apple iPad. Thank you to everyone for entering and participating in my first social media contest. Continue following me on Twitter for details on my next giveaway!

Keeping Your Business Profitable in Tough Times

While the economy is slowly starting to improve, many small businesses are getting creative to turn a profit. CNN Money discusses one such creative florist who stopped selling flowers to retail customers. Instead she opted to serve wedding and event planners exclusively. How could reducing her customer pool keep her profitable? By focusing her business, this florist reduced her wasted inventory, only ordering what was needed for each event.

No matter what kind of product you are selling, your first order of business is to get customers to the store. Don’t be afraid to step up your advertising or promotions during rocky economic times. Customers today want value. They want to know they are getting their money’s worth, so smart sales and freebies can go a long way in increasing your profit. (Remember, smart is the key word, you can’t make money giving away the store!)

It will also pay to become technically savvy--whether using point-of-sale software to collect customer information or using social media to get the word out about the promotion you chose. Some businesses even choose to go entirely virtual, eliminating brick and mortar stores and the overhead that comes with it. No matter what your business, you can benefit from harnessing technology to increase your profitability.

Read more on CNN Money.

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RSS (most commonly translated as "Really Simple Syndication" but sometimes "Rich Site Summary") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed's URI – often referred to informally as a "URL" (uniform resource locator), although technically the two terms are not exactly synonymous – or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.