Hello, I’m Ellen!  It’s a hot Friday in most places across the country!  I know I can sure use some ice cream... While we all know how to introduce ourselves, it’s always good to get feedback, click here for some insights from BNET.  

Now I know we are all winners here, but every once in a while something may not work out in our favor and we lose a little of our self-confidence, so click here for a short read to give yourself a boost.

This article caught my eye… five ways to improve your website. 

The Verizon Author Series was designed to bring experts to small businesses.  This month’s featured author is Phil Simon a technology consultant, author, speaker, and small business owner.  He just published his third business book “The New Small.” 

This Wednesday, June 22^nd, at 2 p.m. ET Phil will host a live (free) webinar presented by the Verizon Small Business Center and then be available for a whole hour on Twitter on Thursday, June 23^rd at 12 p.m. ET to answer questions and offer advice.

I urge all businesses to seize these two opportunities to get insights from Phil Simon directly. Consider these as free consultations with a business expert; so, why not participate? 

I had a wonderful experience today at the events taking place in Washington D.C. during National Small Business Week.  The Social Media Forum: Get Your Business Connected offered great tips to the many small – and medium-sized businesses in the audience.  Check out this video featuring one of the speakers from this forum: Rieva Lesonsky.

It’s National Small Business Week.  As I had mentioned on Friday’s Weekly Roundup, we feel everyday here at Verizon, we work to help small- and medium-sized businesses be productive, have the right tools and put experts at your fingertips.  So in our eyes, every week we’re celebrating small businesses! 

Here at Verizon we support SMBs by bringing a broad range of products and services to help you run your business better, faster and more productively.  From our bundled solution which includes the essential services your business needs  (phone, Internet, Internet security, online backup, Google Apps for Business, and an easy do-it-yourself website building platform) to additional cloud bases services, we are SMBs champions.     

In some ways, we bloggers here like to think of ourselves as small business owners when it comes to the Verizon Small Biz Blog.  Granted, our focus here is not generating sales from our posts, but to provide relevant, useful and insightful information for small/medium businesses… so you’ll keep coming back for more. 

Running this blog has been a learning process… it’s always a challenge to develop worthwhile content.  It took some time for us to determine which types of content were more widely useful and read than another.  Over time, we changed some things up, brought in new bloggers, added some videos – all to improve and enhance the Verizon Small Biz Blog.

Depending on the report you read, roughly 40 percent of small businesses today do not have a website.  And those businesses that are slightly savvy with a website typically have one that is static which does nothing to help bring in sales or even engage with customers or potential customers online – another valuable channel to bring in customers.

(This is a good read from the New York Times small business blog featuring a limousine company that for years treated its website as if it were an online brochure… one day this business owner made some changes and today, 85 percent of his business comes from the Internet… his website!)

Today Verizon launches a new TV spot featuring small business customer Elizabeth Heins from Long Island and a mother of two teens and an eleven year old.  She recently opened a retail store selling unique clothing, accessories and jewelry.  The last thing on her mind was setting up a website for her business.