Millions of people across America are putting away their winter coats and unpacking their shorts and T-shirts. For small business owners, the coming of summer isn’t just a moral pick-me-up; it presents an opportunity to cash in on the change of season with contextual marketing. Below are four small business-friendly summer promotion ideas that could give your business a seasonal boost.

Outdoor Signage

One cheap and easy way to increase your visibility in the summer is to take advantage of increased pedestrian activity with outdoor signs advertising your business. Make sure your signage is well-placed (near a high-traffic area) and attention-grabbing (with a pleasing design or a short joke). Even a chalkboard on the sidewalk can prove lucrative to your business while also adding a homey, inviting aesthetic.

Giveaways

For a small business owner, “giveaway” is a misnomer. The money you spend hosting one is more of a marketing investment. Find vacation-friendly luxury products, such as a pair of designer sunglasses or a tablet, and sell tickets – or just exchange them for “likes” on social media. The buzz and customers you’ll attract will easily pay for the cost of the prizes.

Branded Summer Promotional Items

If you can put your logo on something cheap and useful during the summer months to sell or distribute, you can strengthen your brand and promote customer loyalty. Good examples of promotional knick-knacks for summer include hats, towels, and bumper stickers.

“Staycation” Campaign

This one can work with any of the above three strategies, or any other marketing medium. Amid the economic turbulence of the past decade, taking an inexpensive summer pseudo-vacation in one’s own town has become extremely popular. Small businesses can take advantage by running seasonal specials or advertising to target “vacationers” who live nearby.

Summer is sometimes associated with a slump for small business sales, but it doesn’t have to be. With some seasonally smart marketing, you can capitalize on people’s summer consumer habits, and thus turn the rising temperatures into rising profits for your business.

We’ve all done it before: you click on a page, stare at a loading screen for a few seconds, get impatient, and then leave. In business website design, speed is king, and reducing your loading time is the key to boosting your conversion rate. Here’s a crash course in the basics of website speed optimization, listed for your convenience in order of complexity.

Easy Solutions

To optimize your website’s loading speed, you need a clear picture of the things that take up loading time. Fortunately, you don’t need a computer science degree to evaluate what needs fixing; this thing does nicely.

Another simple improvement suggested by business website experts is to turn off any plugins you aren’t using. That doesn’t mean all of your plugins; as we’ll see later, some can boost your loading speed. If you don’t handle the technical side of your website, ask your webmaster about trimming the fat.

Images take up a substantial chunk of loading time. Bigger = takes longer to load, so use the smallest images that fit the aesthetic of your site. Also, take advantage of the different kinds of image files. Low-detail images load faster as a .gif, while a slower-loading .jpeg or .png is better for more visually complex displays.

Intermediate Solutions

One plugin you do want to use is one that caches your webpages. Unless you make significant updates to your site several times a day, you can save a lot of loading time by showing visitors cached (quickly saved) versions of your pages rather than making their devices load them from scratch every time.

Redirects eat up loading time. While they’re useful for making changes while conserving search engine ranking, you must gauge whether doing so is worth the extra milliseconds that could bounce some traffic away.

Advanced Solutions

In many cases, HTTP requests take up the lion’s share of loading seconds. Compressing your data (i.e. storing more data in fewer files that must be requested) is a good move; if you use a web host you may need to talk to them about implementing this fix.

One mistake that slows down loading is putting JavaScript and CSS code right in your HTML document. To reduce file size, take full advantage of caching, and generally speed up your loading, save them externally.

It’s amazing how much of a difference a couple of seconds can make for your business site. Amazon found that every tenth of a second eliminated from loading time boosted their revenue by 1%.  From common-sense fixes to more sophisticated web developer hacks, hopefully a few of these ideas will subtract from your business site’s loading time— and add to your bottom line.

By Manpreet Singh

Integrity is crucial to a successful business, and nowadays too many companies show little integrity in their marketing approach. From lost revenue to legal action, there are a multitude of reasons why dishonest marketing isn’t worth its hidden costs and risks. Below are four easy ways to ensure that your sales approach stays truthful.

Say/Don’t Say Sheets

The simplest way to promote sales ethics is to print something out about it. At TalkLocal, we ensure our sales team’s honesty by issuing them lists of possibly misleading statements they shouldn’t use, and more clearly-worded alternatives that won’t misinform customers. For example, our sheets warn against saying “We have so many requests in this area for your business to serve!” and instead suggest saying “We are expanding in your area and getting more requests.”

Oversight

Employee monitoring is a surefire way to catch marketing dishonesty early, but too much of it can create bitterness and distrust. On a surveillance scale from 1 to the NSA, your goal is no more than a 5. If recording calls is too heavy-handed (or expensive) for your sales team, keeping a supervisor within earshot generally suffices; we’ve implemented this easy solution without any problems.

Meetings

Your salespeople are more likely to stick to the truth if you talk to them about it. Spending a few minutes of a meeting discussing sales ethics can make a real difference in preventing deceptive practices. What’s more, promoting a culture of morality in your business can boost employee pride and, therefore, performance.There’s a one-letter difference between “morale” and “moral.”

Accepting the Negatives

No matter your industry, your customers value honesty; they can also usually tell when they’re being given a run-around. Encouraging your salespeople not to verbally dodge the downsides of your business or market builds trust with those customers. If done right, it can also keep the conversation going. As I drafted this article, I overheard one of our team members commiserating with a customer about the weak demand for landscapers during DC’s snowy winter. Within a few seconds, he’d shifted the conversation to the customer’s side job as a home contractor. He ended up making the sale.

Fighting dishonesty in your marketing and sales process doesn’t have to be difficult. A few simple safeguards can keep your approach truthful while providing your business with side benefits like happier employees and better quality control. Do for your business what you do in life – just keep it real.

By Manpreet Singh

“Positive work environment” is a common phrase with a lot of wordy business definitions. In short, it describes a workplace where employees feel motivated and appreciated. Having this kind of culture is an essential part of any healthy business, so here are a few points on why workplace positivity matters and how you can  create it.

Why to be positive

Workplace positivity boosts your bottom line. It’s correlated with higher productivity, easier recruitment, and much lower employee turnover.  Workplace negativity, on the other hand, has bad consequences of its own, being linked to depression, insomnia, and anxiety in employees, all of which hurt performance as well as the lives of your employees.

Employees in a positive environment also rebound from setbacks faster. In 2005, researchers Isen and Reeve wrote that positivity  gives employees the motivation needed to complete a task. In other words, happy workers get stuff done, even when things are tough.

How to be positive

Another benefit of workplace positivity is that it’s easy. One of its biggest components is your relationship with your employees. Demonstrate trust in them by taking  what they say seriously, and by strategically delegating important tasks to them. To do this, all you need to do is have meaningful conversations with your workers. This will make them feel more engaged and important.

The way you communicate also matters. In a positive workplace, a boss isn’t just an overseer; they ask for (and use) ideas and feedback from the whole team. You’re their leader, but everyone wins when you give your employees a say every now and then.

Positivity also means fun, a staple of any healthy business. Enjoyable rituals in the workplace get employees excited to come in. At TalkLocal, we reward hard work with great break-time options, including a video game corner and a snack bar that overflows with junk food on staff birthdays.

To run the best company you can, you need positivity; research repeatedly shows that having the right environment is almost as important as having the right equipment. Fortunately, creating the good vibes that will propel your company forward is pretty simple. Just respect your employees and make sure they’re happy to work for you, and you will find them going above and beyond your expectations.