Small Business Blog

A recent survey conducted by TD Bank indicates that most small business owners (87%) expect to meet or beat last year’s performance. Hoping to see real and lasting recovery, more than 90% of respondents said they were considering “proactive strategies to prepare for an economic upswing.”

2009 was a tough year for small business. Two-thirds of respondents characterized the recession’s effect on their business as “negative.” Almost one-quarter of respondents characterized the impact as “very negative.”

Not surprisingly, 34% of respondents said that managing cash was their biggest challenge last year. (Maybe they are not using an integrated cash flow spreadsheet, such as the one we have available for free at BusinessMorgue.com??) What is surprising is that 24% said that, in retrospect, they should have done more sales and marketing. (Hmm…that doesn’t sound like the small business owners I know…)

Read TD Bank’s press release here.

1. There is no SEO magic wand. SEO is a long-term, ongoing process that requires planning and the ability to adapt. Remember that you are chasing after a moving target: you are building content and links and link bait, while your competitors are doing the same. At the same time, the search engines are tinkering with their algorithms, which always remain top secret. Don’t expect to spend a few hours or a few hundred bucks and be done with SEO. If your business depends on web traffic, then you must have an ongoing SEO strategy and budget.
2. Anyone can call himself an SEM or SEO expert. Not everyone is. The SEO services space today reminds me of the Sears Auto scandal of the 1990s. If you remember, Sears Auto service advisors were recommending repairs that the customers did not need. They got away with it because they were trusted as experts. This is not to say you shouldn’t trust anyone, but don’t accept advice blindly. Check credentials, ask for references, and be skeptical of recommendations that are offered before you even explain what your objective is.
3. Being “on the first page of Google” is not the answer to your business problems. Don’t fall victim to the assumption that first-page ranking will radically change your business. It all depends on the phrases associated with those first-page rankings and the mindset of the users who are searching.
4. SEO is not free. At a minimum, you have to compensate someone for doing the work of writing content, building partnerships, creating buzz, obtaining links, etc. Decide what your search rankings are worth to you and budget accordingly. Understand that you will always have competitors who have deep pockets, and don’t expect miracles on a tiny budget. (continue reading…)

A free website is easy to come by. If you’ve ever searched for one, you probably found a whole slew of competing service providers. Some are full-featured, robust website builder interfaces, and others are not.

Before we get into where Wix falls on this spectrum, let’s talk about how you would use a free website. This is a service that’s targeted to individuals launching hobby sites and solo entrepreneurs launching micro businesses. For those who need to keep their launch costs to a minimum, the free site can be a decent option. But there are drawbacks, and you shouldn’t go down this road unless you are comfortable with those drawbacks. (continue reading…)

The other day, a Twitter glitch caused everyone’s follower and following counts to drop to zero. This sparked a flood of panicked tweets (here’s an opportunity to coin a new term, how about twysteria?); at least one of those anxious comments compared the incident to a national disaster.

I note the fame of Twitter only to make the point that the microblogging platform has solidified its place in modern communication practices. And that means that people are probably using it to talk about your business, your industry or your products/services. If you’re not convinced of that last point, go to Twitter’s home page, type in a general term for your industry or product category into the search box and hit enter.

See?

Now the results you get from running that search may not be particularly helpful to you. Chances are, they are mostly comprised of your competitors in the act of promoting themselves. If you scrolled through the results pages, you might eventually find someone asking for a solution to the problem that your product or service solves. That would be the ideal marketing opportunity, wouldn’t it–to present yourself to a target customer at the very moment she needs your help? It doesn’t get any better than that.

The problem is, it’s going to take you way too long to find that tweet. So here’s a better alternative, known as the “anyone know” search. I first read about the “anyone know” search here, at searchengineland.com. The implementation of an “anyone know” search is pretty simple; just type in “anyone know” along with your product name into Twitter’s search box. Note that when you search, “anyone know” should be in quotation marks, but the name of your product or service should not be. For example, I typed in “anyone know” copywriter and immediately saw several tweets from people who were looking for copywriters. These are legitimate prospects for me, and all I have to do is sign in and hit reply to make contact.

Try it out for yourself and let me know what you find.

Want to know how to get more visitors to your Web site?

If your answer’s yes, you’ve probably already seen a zillion articles outlining the latest and greatest sources of Web traffic. Heck, I’ve probably written a zillion articles on the topic. Well, guess what? It’s time for a reality check.

As Internet marketers, we get so involved in the process of staying “in the know” that we can sometimes overlook the big picture. And often, it’s the big picture that shapes our future success. So let’s take a step back now and assess the landscape: where does Web traffic really come from?

Web traffic is comprised of three broad categories:

• Search engine traffic
• Referral traffic
• Direct traffic

Search engine traffic can be bought via pay-per-click, sponsored listings campaigns. Free search engine traffic, on the other hand, must be earned. Since the search engines guard their algorithms carefully, there is no accepted list of what factors determine whether your site is worthy enough to rank well in organic search. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Factors that are believed to be of importance include site content, incoming links, site age, page load speed, internal links, and quality/type of coding.
(continue reading…)

Back in Feb., SmallBusinessNewz published a short article entitled “Consider These 8 Sources of Web Traffic.” To quote the article, the 8 sources mentioned are:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• StumbleUpon
• MapQuest
• QR Codes
• Blogs
• Pictures

You could also add YouTube, Squidoo, HubPages, Yahoo! Questions (don’t tell Yahoo! I said it though) and others to the list. While it’s great to have a list of resources, it doesn’t get an entrepreneur/small business owner any closer to strengthening sales or profits. Small business owners have the problem of having too many options available; there isn’t enough time or money to participate in every strategy that presents itself.

So how can an entrepreneur efficiently make decisions about where to spend scarce marketing dollars? The process begins with developing a detailed understanding of where the business is currently. By this, I mean knowing things like:

• Your average ticket 
• Traffic to your store (if applicable) and your website (if applicable)
• If you have an office or store, what percentage of your customers have seen your website 
• Your close rate (once you get them in the store, in the office, on the phone, etc., how many buy from you?) 
• Amount and frequency of repeat sales from existing customers 
• Demographics of your average customer

Getting a handle on your average ticket along with the close rate can infuse your marketing decisions with a small bit of certainty. For example, say 5 percent of the people who visit your Web site end up buying from you. If you also know those eventual customers will spend an average of $350 (for example) with you over the next year, you can then estimate what each Web visitor is worth to you. (continue reading…)

Small business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly attracted to Web marketing and, in particular, social media marketing. The appeal of online media is their low respective costs. When you own and operate a small, brick-and-mortar business, you face the marketing dilemma constantly: affordable options often lack scale. But the options with sizeable reach aren’t affordable and may be touching consumers who aren’t even viable targets. On top of that, successful ad campaigns these days often take repetition to make an impact. And repetition is expensive.

As an entrepreneur, you may weigh the costs of running print ads in your local newspaper and decide you’d rather take your chances with Twitter and Facebook–options which are free as long you have the available manpower. This decision may make sense from a financial perspective, but don’t make it lightly. Shifting all of your ad dollars to one medium is a mistake, unless you know for certain that that medium can reach all of your existing and target customers. Here’s some food for thought: in 2009, a poll on CNN.com indicated that 94 percent of CNN’s audience wasn’t using Twitter.

Now I know what you’re thinking…if you’ve read some of my previous posts, you know I’m a proponent of Twitter. But I’m not a proponent of putting all your eggs in the Twitter basket, the Facebook basket, or any other ad basket. Even if it may seem like all the world’s gone a-Twitter, there’s still a place for print, for cable, for radio. And actually, one of the most effective ways to use repetition in your advertising is by reaching the same customers through different media.

Of course, these days, you have to be creative with the dollars you direct towards traditional media. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Direct Mail: Find a vendor that does postcard printing and mailing. Print up some loyalty postcards to encourage repeat purchases and send them out. Consider putting a time limit on the card, such as, “make X number of purchases within X number of weeks” or something like that. Use what you know about your customers to set the number and time limit. For example, if you know that your typical customer makes three purchases from you every eight weeks, offer a discount or reward to those who make four purchases within eight weeks. (continue reading…)

1. Open your home page. How does your site tell your visitors that they can find the information/service/product they need?

a. An immediately visible, powerful but short statement in big, bold text
b. An image of your logo
c. A picture of your product
d. A paragraph describing your business
e. A link to an “About Us” page

2. How many courses of action can your user take to engage with your site?

a. Unlimited, e.g., she can search, research, buy, leave her email, live chat, meet up with friends, leave a comment, check her pulse, do her laundry (wouldn’t that be nice?)b. Two or three, e.g., she can buy, subscribe or leave her email

3. How does your site lead your users to the desired action?

a. Compelling offer or short call to action
b. Paragraph explaining the supreme quality of your products/services
c. Main navigational bar giving the user quick access to all the options
d. Fancy flash intro that your user must watch or “skip”
e. Contact us button in the footer

4. What color are the links on your page?

a. Black
b. Yellow
c. Red
d. Old-fashioned royal blue

5. How long does your site take to load?

a. I don’t know, seems pretty fast
b. I don’t know, kinda slow
c. I don’t know, does it matter?

Answer Key

Before we get to the specific questions, I have a short disclaimer. The “ideals” for any Web site are dependent on the purpose of the site. This quiz is slanted towards sites that sell product. Although these concepts can be used to improve the user experience on any site, some may be hard to implement on a brochure-type site or a content site.

Question 1: Why am I here? (continue reading…)

It’s not an uncommon situation for B2B service providers: you spend hours consulting with your prospective customer, get that prospect to put his inked pen to the contract, and then it all goes south. Seemingly, at the very moment your prospect will retain your services, his phone rings. On the other end of the line is a slick salesperson who promises the world and plants the seed of doubt. Next thing you know, your prospect is on the fence between the rosy world of dreams and the real world, where your business operates.

The world of Web marketing seems, at times, like auto repair or psychotherapy: the customer is at the mercy of the service provider. When the service provider says you need a new timing belt or six months of biweekly sessions, you may not have the know-how to doubt the diagnosis or the recommendation. In Web marketing, sales people routinely diagnosis your problem as poor search visibility and recommend expensive and unnecessary solutions to get you “to the top of Google.” (continue reading…)

We set up a Twitter account ages ago and then neglected it for months. Although we have been managing a few other accounts for different purposes, we never put the time behind building our own follower base. About two weeks ago, with a paltry 60 followers, we launched an experiment with one objective: get to 1000 followers without spending more than a few minutes a day. We passed that milestone earlier this week.

We reached the goal by using various free and paid Twitter tools. Here’s the run down of the tactics we used:

• Socialoomph.com. We created a free Socialoomph account and starting using the Auto-follow and automated welcome message feature. Auto-follow checks your follower base periodically and automatically follows anyone who’s already following you. The welcome feature, as the name implies, sends out a welcome message to new followers.
• Twellow.com. We listed our account for free at Twellow.com. A quick Google search will point you to many other Twitter directories.
• Tweepsearch.com. We used Tweepsearch.com to search profiles for various keywords pertaining to our business. Tweepsearch allows you to run broad searches, and then narrow your results down by searching within a certain user’s follower base. Once you hone down your list of results to a manageable number, a “Follow All” option appears. This task is implemented by TweepML.org, and it empowers you to follow dozens of users at once.
• Hootsuite.com. Hootsuite.com has an efficiently laid out interface that lets you view all of the activity on your account pretty quickly. You can also manage more than one account, without having to log in and out of Twitter. We used Hootsuite to tweet (of course), but also to track mentions and retweets, and to respond to others’ tweets.
• Mentions. Promoting your existing followers attracts new followers. Mention your followers and retweet your followers’ most interesting posts. Join the conversation and you’ll make new friends.
• Hummingbird 2. Hummingbird was the only paid Twitter tool we used. The software is $97, which isn’t cheap, but we found it to be a huge time-saver. Hummingbird monitors conversations for your specified keywords and automatically follows users who meet stated criteria. If you reach the 2000-marker, where you are capped on following more people, Hummingbird automatically unfollows those who aren’t following you back, one at a time. Once you set it up and turn it on, Hummingbird can run in the background.

If you’re not ready to spend the money on Hummingbird, you could duplicate the functionality on your own. Set aside 30 minutes a day to search keywords and reach out to new users.

Keep in mind that the above list references only a tiny slice of the tools and strategies available for promoting your profile on Twitter. Also remember that mass following and unfollowing can get you banned, so don’t get reckless in your actions.

The above actions helped us get to 1000 followers in a relatively short period of time. The next challenge is to get to 2000…and that may take a little longer. We’ve hit the 2000 limit on the number of people we can follow. So we’ll keep you posted.

What are your favorite Twitter tools?

*Post disclosure: this post contains an affiliate link to Hummingbird. All opinions are mine.*