Hello again. It’s Monday, so it must be time to share some great articles (and, yes, some thing sI wrote as well) from the last week or so. Here are some items I think you should read as a small business leader:

• Ten successful #entrepreneurs reveal the (mostly non-business) books that changed their lives: bit.ly/2fgZr1U
• Some ideas to help get the most from your email marketing: bit.ly/2fIDM5O
• Here are a few free marketing tools you might not want to overlook: bit.ly/2fdxEQ4
• Good reminders about why a small business’s leader should be blogging: bit.ly/2e2K53R
• Some ideas for how startups can protect their intellectual property: tcrn.ch/2f8bcu8
• Become a better negotiator. It will help you in lots of areas of your life: on.inc.com/2ebQdSr
• Quite slouching! (and become more productive): bit.ly/2ebPelw
• Today, it’s not enough to just have a great product/service. Customers want a deeper connection: bit.ly/2ebaRlJ
• Apple & Whole Foods lead the way forward with retail.  Developing experiences over just transactions: bit.ly/2fa68Da
• Some good ways to protect yourself from work burnout. Connection might just be the key: bit.ly/2eXZgID
• Here are some great tips for “wowing” your customers and earning their loyalty: bit.ly/2e5HlO8

Last week I was thinking quite a bit about developing market research and, more specifically, the best way to develop a questionnaire. I shared some tips that I thought would be helpful to business leaders like you. Here are a few:

• IDiscover Daily Tip: In your surveys, avoid simple “yes/no” questions in favor of deeper, more informative questions.
• IDiscover Daily Tip: Have someone else review your market research survey for typos, grammatical errors, jargon, sentence structure, etc.
• IDiscover Daily Tip: Mixing research methods is helpful to allow collection of broad data (economically) and also to dig deeper.
• IDiscover Daily Tip: Clearly define your market survey’s purpose BEFORE you choose a methodology or start drafting a survey instrument.
• IDiscover Daily Tip: It’s important to define your brand around customer problems/issues and YOUR company’s unique solutions to them.

Since a well-designed survey instrument is SO central to great, actionable market research, I also wrote a more in-depth post here on the blog: Constructing a Survey That Works. I’d love for you to read it and let me know your thoughts.