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Here are two small businesses in Arizona that utilized their local small business development programs. Both are doing well.

COCONINO COUNTY:

One of the businesses that Scott Neuman, the program coordinator for the Coconino County Community Services Department (CCCSD), worked with was Cheesecake & Chocolate owned by Jalalieh Marian.

Marian started her own business in 2008. She’s her only employee and she runs the business out of her home.

This single mom sells her goods at a farmer’s market in Flagstaff and caters in the off season.

Marian started baking various cheesecakes and other goodies for potlucks.

“People kept saying this is something you’d find in a café. Ok, thank you. I think I’ll start a business!” Marian said.

But she didn’t know anything about starting a business.

Most small businesses don’t start off with a plan. They just open their doors and hope for the best. Along the way they find that the key to their success is to eventually develop a strong business plan to keep their shop doors open. In Arizona, small businesses have increased more than 30 percent in…

As a child, Nolan Bade would go camping with his family and during these trips Bade learned to appreciate nature.  This is also when he realized that there would be a need for sustainability activists in the future.

When Bade would get back to the city, he would think about how trees and animals used to cover the area, and how soon it would be before the places in nature he enjoyed would become a plot for a new building.

Now Bade is a senior at Northern Arizona University and an environment major. He meets with the Student Environmental Caucus every week. The caucus is a group of students interested in sustainability and increasing the green initiatives effort on campus.

Bade and his group are not alone in their commitment to nature. All three Arizona universities have least one student-run group where students look for ways to increase the green initiatives efforts on their campuses.

In a slumping economy, Arizona small businesses have a modern trick up their sleeves: social media.

Online web sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Yelp help small businesses in Arizona to market themselves.

Mary Lewis, social media director for Netwirks, an internet marketing company based in Phoenix, said that building an online social media presence consists of two things: building a community and increasing sales.

According to Lewis, many small business owners simply focus on increasing sales, not realizing that building a community on sites like Facebook or Twitter will increase sales much more.

“It’s frustrating,” Lewis said. “People focus on fast results and it can be hard to build community quickly.”

Beyond creating an online community, using social media sites creates loyalty and it “humanizes the brand, which is the real power behind social media,” Lewis said.