Whether your business sells business-to-business or business-to-consumer products or services, it is important to create and nurture diverse communication channels. Why? For multiple reasons, all of which help expedite the timely and targeted distribution of information.

For example, if your business launches a new product, how are you going to get it in front of consumers? Without fresh, existing channels, you would have to rely on expensive advertising via pay-per-click or be forced to wait months for a search engine optimization effort to take shape. A lack of existing channels creates time and cost barriers that can prolong the dissemination of information and push out the time to realize revenue. Yet, if you created and continually nurtured various communication channels (each with a specific purpose) you can drastically reduce time to revenue by gaining speed and lowering cost.

What are some communication channels worth creating and nurturing? Some of the best involve:

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There’s a very interesting sales tax issue brewing here in Boulder, as reported in the local paper. Seems that someone in city hall has gotten the inspiration to tax a local coffee house, Vics, for the hundreds of free cups of coffee they hand out to frequent customers.

Lots of companies in Boulder have the customer loyalty device in question: a frequent buyer punch card or similar. I have about a dozen of them in my wallet or car glove compartment and they’re all generally the same: get ten punches and the eleventh is on the house. Whether it’s an expensive coffee drink, a burrito, a smoothie or even a sandwich, companies from Safeway to Wahoo’s Fish Tacos have these ubiquitous cards.

According to the paper, Vic’s owes the city approximately $3,000 in unpaid sales tax, which is being labeled “use tax”. Rather than just pay it or register a complaint through the chamber of commerce, Vic’s has brought its fight public by putting up a Web site and hosting a fund raiser for its legal fund. You can check out the site at Vic’s Espresso.com.

I’m torn on this issue because on the one hand, I really like the loyalty card idea and it does help me decide to return to my favorite haunts on a regular basis, but tax revenue from commercial transactions are also an important source of funds for the city and the myriad of services I enjoy as a resident too.

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Search Engine Roundtable notes that the Google Local Business Center is allowing businesses to enter their own, custom categories. While this new functionality has been around for a few weeks now, it is an important one and addresses a major need that both Mike Blumenthal and I have highlighted previously — I recently spoke about this issue again at the SMX West session on Local Search & Blended Results. Previously, businesses could only select business categories from an unusually short list of categories. Exacerbating the issue, some businesses achieved other category associations outside of Google’s sharply limited taxonomy when their listings found in other yellow pages providers such as Superpages were absorbed into Google Maps, including the more comprehensive categories found in those other content sources.

Under the new functionality, businesses may type in custom business categories, and the interface also provides helpful potential term using the Google Suggestion Tool:

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When I began freelancing I thought it was important to make my fledgling business appear bigger and more established than it really was. My website used phrases like “our designers” and “our programmers” in an effort to make a one-man show look like a full team of professionals. No matter what a potential client wanted I felt the need to make them believe I had all of the resources to do it.

You’re probably a lot smarter than I was at that point, but I eventually learned two important lessons that changed my approach.

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Recently Google’s Kevin Marks was interviewed by cNet, where he said:

OK, stop and think about your application. Do you really need to be a standalone site? Do you really want to write user registration code, or would you be better off taking your application and bringing these other sites where there are lots of users already and where they have already expressed both their personal information and their connections to other people?

The answer to that is of course you want to be your own destination. Writing registration code once means you can re-use it over and over again on various projects. If you can program a successful widget or application then you are not the type who thinks registration code is a roadblock.

Some of the most successful viral applications (like Paypal and YouTube) leveraged other platforms for growth, but a large part of their success was that they also chose to be destinations.

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I met with a potential client last week who’s been trying (without a lot of success yet) to put together a real estate site using one of the ubiquitous do-it-yourself sitebuilder packages on a prominent host.

He asked me point blank: “What can you do for me that’s better than what I can get on (name of ubiquitous host)?”

A very good question. We talked for about an hour, and I answered his questions and just submitted a bid for his project last night. But I thought I would summarize here (Not in any particular order).

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We often hear that people should think globally and act locally to protect the environment. Often forgotten among the segments of society who are doing their share to conserve resources for future generations are home based offices and businesses. In an era of Peak Oil and climate change, the telecommuter and solopreneur are more important to the economy than ever.

Home based business ventures and home satellite offices are now a fixture of the modern economy. Service based industries and outsourced subcontractors are one of the fastest growing segments of the business landscape. Many large corporations are using telecommuting and modern technology to manage off site employees as well. With the rise of the internet, as a base for entirely new business models, countless virtual companies exist purely as online entities.

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1. Make your site more search engine-friendly.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a must, not a ‘maybe,’ if you want your business site to be found in Google. If you have a great-looking site that no one can find, it’s not doing its job.

2. Add a blog or podcast to your site.

If you like to talk (or write) about your business and you’re good at what you do, a blog or podcast may be just the thing. Both of them do one thing very well – they encourage visitors to come back to your site again and again. And they’re so easy to use! (I’m a huge fan of Wordpress). Blogs give you the advantage of adding a new page of fresh content to your site every time you post, while a podcast is like having your very own radio show.

3. Remove a blog from your site.

That might sound odd – but if you have a business blog and haven’t committed the time and effort to post fairly regularly, it’s probably better *not* to have one at all. If your last post was in 2005, consider removing the link to the blog for the time being. It reflects poorly on your company and makes it look like you don’t keep up with things.

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Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, provides a simple framework of five forces that lead to collapse: environmental damage and population growth, climate change, hostile neighbors, weakened trade partners and failure to solve societal problems. I thought I would mash it up with the Techcrunch Deadpool:

The NY Times has a great piece on Dr. Diamond’s theory and the academic debate amongst anthropologists. The above mashup is based on their infographic about the model and collapsed civilizations like the Maya, and it serves as an excuse to discuss the risks facing startups.

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Every business goes through tough times. Expecting to have season after season of continuous growth without any dips or downturns is pretty much unreasonable. And despite all your strong marketing pushes, there will always be times when business isn’t as swift as you’d like it to be. But that doesn’t have to be cause for concern. Well, OK, concern is good, but there are things that you can do to make slow times a whole lot less stressful on you and your finances.

1) Prepare

When business is going good it is important–now more than ever–to prepare for the future when things may take a downturn. Remember the children’s story (and excellent Pixar movie) about the ants that store up food for the winter and the grasshoppers that don’t? This is more than just a fable about bugs. It’s about learning to plan ahead during the times of plenty and to be prepared for times of famine.

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