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Business owners and entrepreneurs are invited to attend workshops in April offered by the Oakland County Business Center. This month, they are offering a series of three Facebook workshops in addition to the regular monthly seminars. held at the Oakland County Executive Office Building Conference Center 2100 Pontiac Lake Road, Waterford Township. For registration and location specifics, visit www.oakgov.com/peds/calendar or call 248-858-0783. Center for Empowerment & Economic Development (CEED) Microloan Orientation — Many small business owners face obstacles when trying to obtain a business loan. Topics discussed at this workshop include the requirements and process necessary to apply and obtain a microloan. This workshop is 9 to 11 a.m. Wednesday, April 4. It is free, but registration is required. Business Research: Feasibility to Expansion is for those thinking of starting a business and business owners who want to benchmark profit margin and other measures agains...

It may seem silly, but the pursuit of success often gets put on the back burner. Too often, businesses and workers go into complacent survival mode. Simply taking a step back and rethinking the approach to a task can usually make a dramatic difference in the outcome. At the very least, it can improve the worker's attitude. Sometimes it's impossible to take time for that. This should not be a constant scenario. There should be time periodically, to shift gears, evaluate what's happening, listen to new ideas and be open to change. While planning is good, there shouldn't be too much time spent in planning or research or else the goal gets too far away. When describing a solution to a team, use examples either visual or spoken, to "show" what you mean. Use a trial run, to test an idea. Priorities should center on what brings success. If an activity doesn’t seem to be productive, then ask why does it need to be done. If a process seems cumbersome, maybe there is a ...

American Institute of CPAs offers 10 tips for filing your 2011 tax return   Tax season is here again. While individual tax returns are not due until April 17 this year, America’s CPAs remind taxpayers that not waiting till the last minute will make filing easier and the process smoother. Here are 10 questions and answers from the American Institute of CPAs to help make sure you pay no more taxes than you should and to give you peace of mind that you’ve done everything required. Q.        How do I get ready to file my tax return? A.         Gather your W-2s and 1099s . The simplest thing to do is also the most important: Keep the W-2 and 1099 forms you receive where you won’t lose them and where you can easily find them. You can’t complete or file your returns without them. Q.        What else do I need to do? A.        Collect your other...

Local SEO is becoming more and more important if you want your website to rank well in search engines. Google recently posted this article talking about the changes they have made to their search engine algorithm throughout February 2012. Google recently shared details on their Inside Search blog stating they made 40 unique changes to their search results in an effort to increase quality. A number of these changes are directly impacting local SEO. Let’s take a look at a few of the local changes: “Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal. “Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.” More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ...

Submitted by Dottie DeHart of DeHart & Company Public Relations Click here for a review of Your Best Just Got Better Hoboken, NJ (March 2012)—There simply aren’t enough hours in the work day (or even the work week!) to accomplish everything on our to-do lists. Worse yet, when we finally do get on a productivity roll, there always seems to be a distraction (or two, or three) waiting in the wings to throw us off course. But the reality, says Jason Womack, is that we could actually accomplish a lot more each day if we would just learn to recognize and acknowledge when we’re done with what we’re doing. “One of the biggest time wasters we all face is spending too much time on those things that don’t require it,” says Womack, a workplace performance expert, executive coach, and author of the new book Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More (Wiley, February 2012, ISBN: 978-1-118-12198-6, $24.95). “It often seems that we put off the most important things on our to...

Working at a newspaper, I receive many emails with photos. It’s nice that people typically email them as .jpg files. Those are the best. (We can also use tiffs). The quality of submitted photos is usually pretty good but sometimes not good enough for the process that photos go through to end up on a newspaper page. The printing process can stress the quality of a good photo. For starters, the size of the photo needs to be 300 KB or larger, unless it’s a portrait picture of an individual. Even those need to be larger than 50 KB. We can't use photos that are copied from a website. The next big thing is focus. If it is blurry to look at it, it will not print well. Digital cameras are great and inexpensive. But there is one thing people often don’t realize. You need to depress the shoot button slightly, to engage the automatic focus before taking the snapshot. That makes a sharper photo. Photos with people in them are always preferred. We need the names of anyone in the photo, from lef...

March 6: Detroit Economic Club meets The Detroit Economic Club presents The Honorable Fred Hochberg, chairman and president, Export-Import Bank of the U.S., 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 6. The cost is $45 club members and $55 for guests of members; $75 for non-members. Visit w ww.econclub.org or call 313-963-8547 for additional information. March 7: Real Estate Investors host Mr. Landlord “Mr. Landlord” (Jeffrey Taylor), a nationally known landlording expert and author, will speak on finding qualified prospects , having tenants leave the property in move-in condition and how to increase monthly cash flow when filling vacancies at the regular meeting of the Real Estate Investors Assoc. of Oakland 5:30-9:30 p.m. Thursday, March 8 at Club Venetian, 29310 John R. Road, Madison Heights. The seminar is free to members and $20 for nonmembers. Visit www.REIAofOAKLAND.com or call 800-747-6742 for information. March 8: HR summit Walsh College presents an HR Summit 8 a.m. t...