The Great American Small Business Challenge

The Hispanic Chamber of E-Commerce invites you to participate in the Great American Small Business Challenge. The event is designed to help small business owners develop a faster, easier and better business development process.

The Great American Small Business Challenge is a collaborative effort to support small business owners so they can receive the tools, training and support they need to feel more optimistic, confident and energized about their business. The GASBC is coordinated by an all-volunteer staff who is passionate about helping small business owners take the actions that will help them turn their business into the successful and profitable enterprise they have always dreamed of owning.

Challenge participants will have access to the resources, products and people that can help make their business development process faster, easier and better. Challenge participants will utilize free web-based business development and management software while receiving free online training that will help them set-up their organizational infrastructure, plan strategies, set-goals and measure results.

Participants will be introduced to the resources and services of their local Small Business Development Center (SBDC) and will have the opportunity to work one on one with an SBDC counselor. Small business owners will have the opportunity to earn awards based upon the progress that they make during the GASBC. The Challenge will run from January 1, 2009 through December 31, 2009.

Business owners who participate in the GASBC are competing against themselves and not each other. Every business owner has the opportunity to win an award. Awards are earned every time a specific milestone is achieved. The process for earning Awards is a four-step process. Every time a small business owner completes a step in the process, a milestone is reached and an award (Bronze, Silver, Gold. Platnium) is earned.

This makes it easy for small business owners to achieve multiple successes during the duration of the Challenge. The process and the supplied management and business development software, also makes it easy for Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) to measure the success of Challenge participants.

Business owners that start the Challenge late, or run into difficulties because of time constraints or outside commitments, should still have plenty of time to earn an award.

Bronze Award

Step one. Setup your organization’s business model.

Silver Award

Step two. Create your company’s management system.

Gold Award

Step three. Use your company’s management system.

Platinum Award

Step four. Achieve organizational and performance excellence!

To learn more about the GASBC, please visit the official site.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Sincerely,

HISCEC Staff

Online Catalogs

Promoting your products and services in a catalog is very valuable for your business, printed and online catalogs to offer you the opportunity to reach potential customers and to keep your current customers informed too. If your business can’t afford to have a printed catalog and an online catalog, we recommend you to at least have an online catalog in order to have presence in the Internet. Your online catalog will play the role of a sales agent that works for 24 hours day/ 7 days a week for your business.

An online catalog is defined as an Internet-based presentation of a set of items available for purchase, including description, price, and ordering information; it’s also called cyber catalog, electronic catalog and web catalog. (Answers.com)

One of the main advantages of having an online catalog is that potential customers find you rather than you finding them. That helps to increase your opportunity to make a sell because the potential customer is searching for a product that needs.

Online catalogs are accessible 24/7, they offer detailed product information, easy to update and promote. Some companies use online catalogs to increase brand awareness, to provide more information about their products, to have a forum where customers leave feedback, etc. To date, one of the biggest on-line catalog successes is Amazon.com, which is serving as a model for on-line catalog marketers.

If you already have a printed catalog, we recommend you to submit it to Google Catalogs.

Google Catalogs helps you browse and search merchant-provided catalogs right on your computer.

If you are searching for an affordable way to create an online catalog, we invite you to join the Hispanic Chamber of E-Commerce. As soon as you create and activate your account, you can add up to 5 products to your online catalog but if your needs are greater than that, you can get a Premium Membership and create an online catalog with 100 products.

The e-commerce tool offered by HISCEC allows you to create an online catalog with up to 12 pictures per product, description of the product (SKU, bar code, dimensions and price) and customer feedback.



Examples of online catalogs created in HISCEC:

- Online clothing catalogs:

Viaggio (Online clothing catalog in Spanish)

- Online furniture catalogs:

El Porton Cobre (Online furniture catalog in English)

Within the following weeks, our Members are going to be able to sell their products through our site. Their online catalog is going to become a complete online store. We’ll let you know when HISCEC’s e-commerce service becomes available. In the meantime, join the Hispanic Chamber of E-Commerce and create your online catalog. You can use your online catalog as part as your marketing materials. Promote your link to your online catalog in your web site, printed materials and with your current customers.

In order to create a high quality online catalog, we recommend you to use high quality photos.
If we can assist you with anything, please let us know.

Sincerely,

HISCEC Staff

Free Websites

These days having a website isn't a luxury, it's a necessity. Do you know that there are sites in the Internet that offer you the opportunity to create a free website? A free website where you can be able to update the content as you please without having to hire a professional web designer to do so. If you are interested in having a website, but you don't have enough resources to get the job done by a professional web designer, we have found sites that may help you to solve your problem.

The sites that we want to recommend you are:

Weebly.com

If your requirements aren't that many, and if you need to create a website in minutes Weebly offers you a very easy way create and publish a website online. You can choose a design, add content, customize the content and managing your pages by just dragging and dropping the pages into a place.

site2you.com

We recommend site2you.com for those who are interested in having a website with a more professional look. Creating free websites with site2you.com takes a little more time than Weebly, but you can get a better looking website too. Site2you also offers you the opportunity to create a complete website with unlimited pages for $59.95. Site2you.com website development program includes two full weeks of access to your website as you develop it, and permits download anytime after opening your account. You can also directly transfer the website to your hosting company servers using our transfer interface.

If you don't know where to get a hosting service, we recommend you to visit www.free-webhosts.com to select a free web hosting or service or go to www.webhostinggeeks.com where you can check their web hosting rating (e.g. Top 10 Web Hosting), select a great hosting service out of their web hosting awards list (e.g. Best Budget Hosting, Best Blog Hosting, etc.), learn from the webmasters reviews or customers reviews and check what services are using the webmasters (e.g. Hosts by Speed, Cheap Website Hosting, etc.)

Freewebs.com

HISCEC's top three free websites also includes freewebs.com. At Freewebs you can create your free website very easy, you can choose from more than 300 templates to give your website the look you want, you can add images, documents and multimedia files to your website using a very user friendly tool. If you are interested in conducting business online, Freewebs offers you the opportunity to do so by adding e-commerce capabilities to your website.

If you are planning to start selling your products or services online, you are going to need an online merchant account. We recommend you PayPal merchant account or Google checkout. Both companies offer very reliable services, they are very well known and customers trust them. If you need some basic information about what you need to know before choosing an internet merchant account, we recommend you to read a very interesting article published by findmyhosting.com; If you aren’t familiarized with e-commerce activities, we recommend you to visit a very well explained section about e-commerce provided by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

In the event, that none of our suggestions satisfied your needs or if for some reason you find Weebly, site2you and Freewebs too complicated you can create a free blog at blogger or wordpress.org. Both companies offer you very simple ways to have presence in the web in minutes.

Once you have your website, make sure to promote your business in the business directory of the Hispanic Chamber of E-commerce, it's free. To learn about the benefits of becoming a member of the Hispanic Chamber of E-Commerce click here.

If you need help with your internet business strategy, or if you need to ask us something related with this article, please feel free to send us an e-mail, and we will reply back as soon as possible.

We look forward to having you as a Member of the Hispanic Chamber of E-Commerce.

Sincerely,

Jose Aburto