Business Owners are too often either over or under sold on the basics of what they need to run their business. From registering an LLC to financials, insurance, employees, a place to actually run the business, there's a lot that goes into getting things off the ground and rarely is the business owner an expert at all of those areas. 

The Chamber hosted a Pro-Tips: What’s the Risk? event that was able to provide legal liability and important insurance options that all businesses should be aware of. The main goal was to inform business owners how to protect what they’ve worked so hard to build and to make sure they are appropriately covered for their type of business. 
 
Susie Cirilli, an attorney with Litchfield Cavo, brought her legal expertise on labor employment law to the table to inform the audience about worker’s compensation, sexual harassment, and different kinds of discrimination laws. Bill Sprague, the owner of Risk Averse Insurance, brought his knowledge of insurance to better explain the different types of insurance policies to protect your business. He went over various policies that aren’t covered by a general liability policy such as: auto policies, business interruption, EPLI, and professional liability. Bill explained how the worker’s compensation time line works and how to handle worker’s compensation. 

Here's 10 things to take away from this event:

​Although many political pundits predicted a Trump-inspired “blue wave” of Democrats overwhelming Congress and state legislators across the country, the actual results nationwide were not as dramatic as expected on November 6. The Democrats did indeed regain control of the US House of Representatives, but not by the margins that have been customarily seen in “mid-term” elections after a new president is elected. The parties of Clinton, Bush and Obama all lost more seats than the Republicans did this year, and they actually ADDED to their majority in the US Senate, giving President Trump even more of an advantage should another Supreme Court seat come open.

During a Business Owners Group meeting, we heard from Pete Ricci at Solstice Media and Brent Doane from Click Canyon about a few basic marketing tips to make sure your website is working for you! 

1. Claim your FREE Google listing and work it. Add images, videos and post on the blog every other week.
2. Don’t forget your Bing listing too! The more free listings you can claim online the better.
3. Title Tags and Meta Description on your website is important for SEO. Again this is FREE ways to get people to your site.
4. YOAST is a good plugin for SEO on your website, works well with word press.
5. Make sure your site is mobile friendly – your site won’t even come up in a google search on a mobile device if it’s not.
6. Check the loading speed of your site, you lose people if it takes too long - testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com There are simple solutions to make it quicker.
7. Ad retargeting (ya know when you look up a pair of shoes, then hop on facebook and that pair of shoes is an ad in your facebook feed now?) there are ways to do this pretty cost effectively at Adroll.com
8. Blogging – posts should be more than 300 words on your website, under 300 on google and always remember to put a call to action on your blog posts.
9. Don’t discredit email blasts. (MailChimp & Constant Contact are good email blast distributers.)
10. Consistency (social media, blog posts, emails, etc.) is KEY!
11. Caption images on your website – more to be scooped up by SEO.