small-business-blog

No One Can Guarantee Page One of Google

Sat, 25 May 2013 17:29:25 +0100

How many times during a week do you receive emails from web and SEO companies with canned scripts swearing if you sign up with them, they will get you on the first page of Google? The truth is, no one can really promise this, as there is no guarantee based on doing SEO properly. Much of this depends on your business, your target market, your keywords, your willingness to update your website, and much more. We must get 3-4 emails a day from those companies that just pull email accounts from your website and directories and then will spam every email account telling us they can get us on page one. The funny part for us is that for the majority of my keywords, we are on page one of Google Canada. This is where our customer base is located, but someone in India or Europe looking on Google in their country or Google.com does not know or care and has no idea what our business is or what it does. In order to truly help someone with SEO, you need to understand their business, their target market, and where then need to be found. It is only really important that you rank on Google in the countries that you serve or sell. Since we only provide service for Canadian customers, Google Canada is the only search engine of Google that is important to us.

SEO has changed dramatically in the last couple of years and especially in the last year on Google. Many of the SEO companies of days gone by that are continuing to use older methods will most likely go out of business as many of their customer's websites are being penalized by Google versus ranking. These are the companies that have link farms, have stuffed keywords, written hidden text, as well as are using a number of other methods that will not help you rank today. Google today owns a large share of the search market worldwide, but has 90% of the Canadian market. If your a Canadian business and are not conforming to Google's new SEO algorithms, this could actually hurt your site. You need to make sure you are using an SEO company that are using SEO methods that are related to what Google is looking for with their new algorithms.

At the end of the day SEO is really about online marketing, whether organic or paid. You need to understand your target market and how they will search and what keywords they use to find your type of business. You need to understand your competition and how they are performing online. Your "local" competition may be quite different than your "online" competition. When we started looking at companies who do what we do, based on searching most of the ranking companies were in Vancouver versus Toronto.. I spent time on their sites and looked at their keywords, their content, and the frequency of change. Most of these companies have been in business for years and their site is over 5 years old. My goal was to surpass them or at least be under them on the page, so that is what I spent the next 3 months doing. SEO is not a one time thing, nor is it magic, it is ongoing and continuous work. For many of my keywords within a particular month, I will bounce up and down a couple spots on the page on Google based on someone writing a new blog article, or even a newer site moving up. It is something you have to keep on top of regularly.

Google's new rules of penalizing the old SEO methods, though self-serving really make sense when you think about it. They are looking for sites that have relevant and fresh content. They are indexing pages and ranking them based on the quality and relevancy of the content and the keywords used. As a web owner, you need to make sure you are using SEO basics, such as clear descriptions and titles for your web pages as well as headers and alt tags. If you are using YouTube videos on your site and are using Google+ with authorship, I am sure that is helping your ranking as well. Let's face it, Google is in the business to make money as well and using their products doesn't hurt you either. Backlinks are still very important, but the key is relevant backlinks. Link back and forth with your customers, vendors, partners, and other relevant industry sites. If you are paying for links that are not relevant, you most likely want to look at your bounce rate and see how many people actually stay on your site for over a minute. What good is traffic to your website that comes and automatically leaves?

It is also important that you really understand how your keywords are performing on your website and overall on the internet. If you choose keywords and phrases that are only searched 100 times a month, though you might rank for the keyword on page one of Google eventually, you will not see any traffic from it. What you will find is that being on page one of Google for that keyword really didn't buy you much. You also want to make sure that the keywords you are using are the ones your potential customer will use when searching for your business, products, and services. We all think we know what terms our prospects will use, but it is interesting to find out over time, prospects are using terms that mean something to them and not necessarily the words or phrases we think. We think they are typing in the product or service name, when many times they are typing in what the issue or problem the product or service will solve. One of the things I have started doing for those clients who found my on our website when they call, I have started asking what they typed in to find our business. I also keep an eye on my competitors to see what keywords they are using as well. To find out what your competitors are using, you just need to viewsource in your browser and look for the meta tag for keywords near the top of their source code.

SEO takes time and is an ongoing process, especially as Google and the other search vendors change their algorithms on a regular basis. Social Media is starting to playing a big role in rankings as well by sharing of content. You want to make sure that visitors to your site can share content at minimum on the major social media sites. You also want to make sure you are using Social Media and are Blogging as well as this helps you with traffic to your site and that links to your Social Media sites are prominent on your website.

Mobile is playing a large role in search today as well. If your business is one that searched predominately on mobile and your website does not work well on mobile, then you could be losing a lot of your traffic. You might be surprised to see how many people are actually searching on mobile devices for your products and services. Check your Google Analytics to find how how many mobile users are on your website. Our mobile traffic has increased dramatically in the last 6 months.

Even if you are doing all of these things, there is still no guarantee that you can have the top position on Google. SEO is something that is changing and is something that has to be kept up with on a regular basis. The days of static websites with content there for years is gone. If you your website is not inviting, interactive and you are not utilizing the methods above for organic search, you may never have a chance of ranking on Google. Even if you use all of the methods above, you need to make sure that you continue to monitor your site and make changes as required. You also need to monitor what changes Google and the other search engines are making to their algorithms on a regular basis.

So if a web or SEO company contacts you and says they can guarantee that your website is on page one of Google in a month, you need to be very suspicious. They might initially be able to get you there by methods of the past that Google has not started penalizing for, but find out how much their guarantee will stand if your site is banned by Google due to their black hat tricks. Your site can with work be on page one of Google if you work with the right company. You want a company that is not just focused on SEO, but one that can help you with all of your digital marketing needs. All of this plays a role in your ranking. Google Adwords is a way that you can get to the top (as an advertisement) and help with traffic until you can spend the time "organically" on your site.

To give you perspective, it took me 3 months to get to page one of Google for any of my keywords. I have optimized our website, blog a couple times a month, use 3-4 social media sites on a regular basis, keep an eye on my rankings and my competition, and watch for the changes that Google continues to implement. I implement changes a couple times a month to my top performing major pages. We even recently started ranking on page one near the bottom for a keyword that had high competition, but this has taken 6 months and a lot of work. Many of our keywords due to the type of services we provide are either searched infrequently or have high competition. It was important for me for our website to rank on page one for a few keywords first before looking at Google Adwords. I do continue to get increased traffic, but know in order to get a major jump I either can start using Google Adwords to build some traffic or I can wait a few months to get there organically with an additional set of words. It is always good to have choices.

How Feasible is Your Business Idea ?

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:31:41 +0100

Whether you are starting a business from scratch or are looking to add a new business concept on to your business, it is important to understand the feasibility and long term viability of your business idea before you spend your life or your company savings along with your valuable time. This is also a very important step before approaching a financial institution for financing. In most cases a financial institution does not need a detailed 60 page business plan, they just need to know that your overall business strategy supports your financials. This is what a feasibility study accomplishes. It looks at your business strategy and provides you with recommendations on what you need to do in order to meet your financial targets. There are certain areas that a financial institution or investor will look at when making a decision on lending your money or investing. Here are the key areas to focus:

Target Market Analysis
Understanding your target market and size is important. It is very hard to determine if you have a viable business without knowing your potential market. This does not ensure you can penetrate it, but it shows that you understand the market and that is who you are going to target for selling your products and services.

Skin in the Game
If you are asking a financial institution or investor to provide funding for your business, they want to understand how much you plan to invest yourself in your business. Depending on the type of loan, you may not have a chance to receive any funding unless the lender can see that you are willing to take a risk in your business by investing your own personal or company's money and time. Why would you expect others to invest if you cannot show them that you believe and are willing to take a risk in your own business. If you are showing you are taking a high salary in the company in first few years before you are profitable, this shows a banker/investor that you are not really willing to take the risk in the business and have skin in the game and could be an area of concern.

Management and Staffing
You want to make sure that you can show that you have background and experience in the area of your business idea or that you have advisors or other management staff that can help you. Just because you like good food and like to cook does not give you the credibility needed to a financial institution or investor to show you can be successful running a restaurant. This is key to lenders and investors, as they are lending the money to you and are betting the success of the business on your ability to execute on your business strategy. If you do not have the background and experience, it is important that you hire others that do, or find those that have experience to be on your board of advisors. This can include lawyers, accountants, management consultants, or other entrepreneurs that have run a business in the past.

Understanding your staffing requirements and costs are important as well, since this is usually a high expense for a business. Make sure you do not hire employees until you need them and can support the expense in the business. In the early days, it will be expected that you run lean until you have the revenue to support adding staff. You do not want to forego service, but you do not want to pay employees who are standing around either.

Go To Market Strategy and Marketing Plan
You need to be able to define and articulate how you plan to go to market. How are you going to sell? Are you going to sell online, directly to a consumer or business, inside sales over the phone, through channels, or a combination of methods? How many sales people or channels do you plan to have? How many sales are possible in what period of time? How are you going to market to your customers and sales channels? How are you going to roll your product out? What is your pricing model? What are your margins? Do you have a clear message and branding? What is your marketing plan and are you spending enough on marketing to meet your forecasts you defined?

Competition
What level of competition exists already for your business idea? Are you competing against large companies or local businesses? It is important that the size of your potential market supports having the competition that exists for your business idea. If you are opening a store that sells similar products in an area that is saturated, it will be difficult for you to get the revenue you need to sustain your business?

Forecasts
You need to define and support your forecasts based on your target market, your pricing model, and your sales and marketing plans. Forecasting is guessing in a way as you can only estimate what you will make, but it needs to make sense. All of your parameters for building a forecast need to make sense. You need to have a way to make sales, have an adequate target market size, your sales cycle time needs to make sense, your number of sales/pricing needs to add up, and your sales/marketing plan needs to support obtaining the prospects to make the sales. If a banker or investor adds all of these up and finds there is no way to earn that amount of revenue in the time period defined, you will lose credibility.

Operations
You need to show that you have everything in place to support your business after you make a sale. Do you have the right systems, skills, and staffing? Do you have defined business processes? Are you a business that requires warranties, maintenance contracts and customer support? How do you plan to track your inventory and do you plan to have enough on hand? Operations differs by industry and business, but every business needs to show they can support and sustain customers after the sale.

Financials
Finally, you are going to have to show 3-5 year financial projections and just as with your forecasts, your business strategy needs to support your financials. You need not only understand your sales, but what your expenses are as well as your assets and liabilities. Can you show that you can make money in this business? When in your financials does it show that you will break even?

Summary
Not every business idea makes a viable and sustainable business. It is sad to see someone be passionate about an idea without thinking it through and determining the viability. Many times entrepreneurs will put up their house as collateral, use their children's post secondary education fund, or cash in their retirement to start a business based on an idea. It is important that someone is passionate about their idea, but it is more important that they have done their homework and determined the following before they take the plunge and invest their money and time in their business idea:class="selected ">

There is a market and it is not saturated.
You have a go to market strategy that makes sense
You have skin in the game.
Your marketing efforts support your revenue and forecast
You have experience to help make the business successful or have staff or advisors
You have everything in place to support after you make the sale
Your forecast and financials can be supported by the plan

Understanding Your Prospects for Online

Thu, 09 May 2013 16:31:59 +0100

Though it is always important that you always understand your target market, digital marketing and an online presence have reinforced the requirement that you really need to understand the problem you solve for potential customers as well know exactly who your prospects are, otherwise you will not receive your return on your investment in the digital world. You really have to understand how your potential customers will find you as well as understand how to attract the prospects you want to your business. So it is important that you plan your digital marketing strategy with that thought in mind.

It is going to be even more important online for smaller businesses, to get access to their market. With print advertising, most small businesses had to rely on someone else to develop an advertisement for them and possibly write the content. Today with Content Management Systems and everyone having access to Social Media, and Paid Online Advertising, it is very easy for businesses to do a lot of work online themselves, but is important before you start that you learn how to make it work for your business. Though access is easier, it can end up costing you business and more money then you need to spend if digital marketing is not implemented correctly for your business.

Keywords
The first place to start is by defining your keywords and keyword phrases to use throughout your digital marketing strategy. As a business owner, you and your key staff should sit down and make a list of 20-30 keywords and phrases that you believe your potential customers might use when they search online. It is key to put yourself in your prospect's shoes of what their problem is that they need solved by your product or service. Because we know our products and services and business so well, we sometimes don't stop to think how someone else might search versus ourselves and what we think prospects will search on sometimes is completely wrong. I experienced this myself in the first year of my business an my first online presence. I started asking clients when they called what they searched to find me and were not what I thought at all they would be. Once I changed them to what clients were searching for, my traffic significantly increased, and my phone started ringing a lot more.

After you have your list of keywords and phrases, you might want to type them into Google and find out what shows up. If you are just starting online, most likely your company will not, but you would expect your competition to show up. To help, you can also look at what your competition is using. For most websites, you can right click "view source" and look for the meta tag keywords near the top of the code to find out what your competition is using. This will help you start.

Using the Google Adword keyword tool can help you come up with related search terms as well as help you to understand if your keyword list of words and phrases are actually searched with any frequency. You might believe that prospects will type in a keyword phrase to find your business, but if only 300 people in your local country search the keyword phrase you chose a month and if you high competition, the chances of getting traffic on that keyword phrase are very low. You need to focus on keyword phrases that have a high number of searches and low to medium competition.

Having the wrong keywords will affect the traffic and bounce rate on your website and social media sites. It will also affect the effectiveness and return on investment of your online marketing campaigns. By not understanding how prospects will search can end up costing you customers as well as costing you time and money .

Content
After keywords, content is the most important focus. You need to be sure that you are developing content that is targeted at what your prospects are interested in. Content should not just be about your business. It should be educational and provide value to the reader. There is nothing worse than going to a website or social media site and all that it contains are constant infomercials about their products, services or their business. Content online is to remain relevant and up to date. You want to provide content that shows your business understands the market and the industry as well as customer needs. It is up to you to educate your prospects and customers and by doing so you are showing what you know over your competition which could just have static website that lists their features.

To find relevant content for your social media, you need to follow people in your industry, related fields, and even those that might be selling similar services and products, but who you do not compete with directly. You also need to develop your own content as well to show your expertise as well as a business. Frequency and quality of content is very important in helping to not only get visitors or followers, but is important in keeping them coming back. In most cases, most prospects do not either fill in a form or call the first time they visit, they come and browse to see if what you provide is relevant to what they are looking for and will do their research and then come back.

Advertising
Whether you are utilizing Google Adword campaigns, Social Media advertising, or banner advertisements, the goal is to bring traffic back to either your website , social media site, or a landing page and create a conversion. For this reason, it is very important that you have a Call to Action that is targeted at at your potential customers to do something, whether that be download a document and fill in their contact information, like your Facebook page, or provide a discount that makes them make a buying decision now.

If your advertisement is not targeted appropriately, you can end up spending a lot of money on Online Advertising with no return on your investment. Not only did you not make a conversion, but you brought the wrong prospect to one of your online mediums which will give you a high bounce rate, because they will leave as soon as they get there what is being offered does not correspond appropriately to the ad.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Because search engine optimization is used to help you be found online, it is important that your sites are optimized appropriately. There would be nothing worse than spending months to optimize your website to show up on page one of search engines, just to find out that the search terms are so infrequently typed in that you didn't increase your traffic.

Understanding your prospects and customers is important whether you are using digital marketing or not, but once you are online, it plays even a bigger role. You are no longer a local store that someone in the neighborhood is walking by, you are on the internet with access to a larger potential prospect pool and it is up to you to develop your digital marketing so that prospects that you did not have access to before can find you. This is even more important if you are selling products online on your site. As you put together the mediums you plan to use online, spend the time as a business thinking about who your all your targeted prospects are based on what you offer and what problem you solve. Then spend time thinking what they will type in to find you, what is important for them to know and what kind of information they need to make a decision, and are you providing the right calls to action to help them make their decision.

Yes Virginia, There is an ROI using Social Media and SEO

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:57:22 +0100

Two years ago, my husband and I attended a presentation put on by a "so called" Social Media and SEO expert. At the end, my husband asked his typical "accountant" question ; Can You Tell Me What The ROI is on Social Media and SEO and how much revenue have you made from implementing them? One would think the speaker would have a snappy come back and a slide of examples, but the answer was I don't know. I could tell it almost made the "accountant" in my husband smile and say to himself, "I knew it".

I was already starting putting together our Social Media sites and was starting to work on the SEO for our website, but had not volunteered too much of that to my husband and business partner. He then caught on to what I was doing and basically shook his head, but having both as strong technical and marketing background, I was going to prove him wrong.

For anyone who is in a professional type service business versus product one, you know that some of the traditional sales and marketing mediums do not work as well. Customers usually have an issue before they call and they are not going to take your word for it through a cold call or from an advertisement, that you can solve their problem. They need to have a requirement for your services and to have some level of trust before they will call. This is why Digital Marketing and specifically our website and Social Media were important. This was the perfect medium to show clients that we had the background, experience, and skills to help them.

Though really important for professionals or service providers, the same is true of any business. You need to build confidence and show who the customer should buy your product or service over your competition. Around 90% of customers will research your business or your products and services online before they buy. Your hope is that your competition does not have a website, Social Media sites, and cannot be found online. If you believe your customers after meeting you did not go back and "Google" you and your business online, you are probably mistaken. If you do not have some type of online presence, you may have been discounted for the business without knowing.

About a year and a half ago, I redid our website and decided I was going to embrace SEO, Social Media and Online Marketing as a whole. I made sure our website was targeted at the prospects we were interested in helping which were start-ups and small business. I added a blog and resources that clients could download, integrated social media, and spent time implementing SEO from an organic perspective. At the same time I focused on Social Media sites that had more of a B2B focus such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and Quora. I personally like Facebook, so even developed a company page there as well, knowing this is probably not a key focus, but still wanted to be there.

I knew what my metrics were when I started and where I wanted them to be and I started measuring. Within 3 months we were on page one of Google for 4 of our keyword phrases. Within 6 months I had doubled my traffic. I spent probably 3-4 hours a week on Social Media and tweeking our SEO based off Google Analytic and an SEO tool results. One of my business partners, who is in this space told me that having forms on our website was a waste of time, as people didn't fill them in. I listened and then ignored him. Within the 3 months, we had prospects downloading resources and also filling in forms to contact us about engagement and signing up for our newsletter. The phone starting ringing and we were getting more and more contacts each week both from our website and through Social Media. We were also found by writers from the newspapers who wrote on small business, who now consider us experts on certain subjects based on our website and LinkedIn profiles. This is exactly what we wanted to happen.

My husband and business partner all of the sudden was having to eat his words and is now a believer. Now roll foward a year and a half later, over 1/3 of our overall revneue last year came from leads from our website, Social Media, and other Online Marketing such as landing pages. The amount of time spent to achieve this was not trivial. You have to truly embrace it and spend the time making sure content is current and up to date and something that is of value to your prospects and customers. Going to a blog and seeing the last entry 6 months ago tells the reader this person is not committed. Visiting Social Media sites where businesses are only providing self-serving "selling" information will not benefit you either. Social Media is about communication and about sharing useful content. You also have to find out what platforms your prospects and clients are using. There is also a lot of trial and error with Social Media and SEO, so you have to be able to understand the metrics that are produced and what they mean in order to make changes to benefit your business.

I am not saying that Online Marketing is the be all and end all, as there are some industries where print advertising is still being used due to the demographics of the end customer. In this case, it is important that you utilze both and have them support each other. If you have a print ad, send them to your website or landing page for a call to action, for example. If you truly believe that none of your prospects are looking online for you, then you are truly missing out on those that are.

Before you embrace SEO and Social Media, you need to do some work and research and understand how prospects will find you and what platforms are appropriate. Both SEO and Social Media are not something you can do half heartedly , nor is it something that will give you instant gratification - it does take time. If it is done correctly though, it is something that can give you a lot higher rate of return than the .5%-1% return you got from that direct mail that you sent out to 5000 prospects.

Digital Marketing - Is it Really that Different?

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:22:18 +0100

Though in some industries, print advertising and marketing is still alive and living, the majority of businesses are starting to rely on digital marketing for their business. With the age of digital marketing out of the woodwork come new businesses putting up a shingle or old companies rebranding themselves saying they are a digital marketing company, when last week they may have been just mediocre graphic design or internet development company. When people say or think digital, the internet is what comes to mind and usually the first thing is a website. A website is a very important piece, but is not the only piece and is why you have to be even more careful when implementing digital marketing.

With print advertising, direct mail, and all of the ways we all did marketing in the past, there were some key things we had to keep in mind. We needed our messaging to be succinct, we needed to have the piece directed at our target market, and we needed to have a call to action or offer to inspire the prospect to pick up the phone and call. It was not just about the design of the ad or the direct mail piece, though having a poorly designed and not properly branded piece could be a hindrance.

The fact is that with digital marketing, none of those things have changed and in fact have become even more important. Digital marketing is about marketing on the internet using different mediums, but all of the important marketing concepts apply and just because a company can design a website or can do SEO (search engine optimization), it does not mean they are a digital marketing company. There are new mediums and tools for digital marketing, but all the same it is still marketing and if you look at each piece independently and do not look at a digital marketing strategy as a whole, you could really miss out. You also need to make sure your providers understand Marketing and not just are technical and understand the internet.

Integrated Marketing
Even with print, to get traction, you have to have more than just one ad in newspaper or send out one direct mail piece to get results. You have to use multiple mediums, have them support each other, and hit people multiple times to get the leads you need.

The same is true on the internet. Digital marketing is more than a website; you need to embrace social media, digital advertising, landing pages, search engine optimization and much more. All of these work together. You cannot just market in one place and expect results any more than you did if you put one ad in a newspaper and that was it. All of your digital marketing has to support each other.

Branding, Messaging, and Content
You need to have the proper branding and messaging and make sure it is consistent throughout all of your digital marketing. People go to Google and search these days before they ever call you or visit your business. This is the first impression that most people have of your business. Whether they land on your website, a directory, or a social media page, they should know this is your business, what you do and recognize it from your print branding or branding on another site. It is also important that you have content that is fresh and is of interest and relevant to the reader.

Target Market
Narrowing down your target market is even more important with digital marketing in getting your prospects to find you. On the web it is a lot easier to do this because you can utilize tools to help you. You can optimize your website, landing pages, social media, directories, blogs, and advertisements with keywords, so when you are searched, your pages will come up base on what those targeted prospects and customers are searching for in search engines.

Campaigns
Marketing campaigns on the internet are not any different in concept than they are in print. Whether you are using social media ads, Google Adwords, or have a landing page, you still need to have a call to action and need to be able to measure your return on investment. How you implement this different, but the concept is the same. If you are going to spend the money to do campaigns, you need to understand and know how this is accomplished, whether it is filling in a form, getting a phone call, or having code inserted in your webpage from Google Adwords.

This article just touches the service on the topic of digital marketing, but is to educate you and leave you with the following as you begin to think about implementing digital marketing in your business.

Marketing concepts are the same and apply whether you are using print or digital marketing, just how they are utilized and implemented may be different. Only having a website is not enough today, you need to have a digital marketing strategy. If you are an industry where print is still important, do not let someone talk you into abandoning print completely. Look at how the two can support each other.
Make sure that who you hire to help you with your digital marketing knows marketing as well as the internet. Because this is the “new” service business, there are a lot of companies who are pushing this without the background and experience. In some cases they are selling the service and outsourcing this overseas to even less qualified individuals.
Make sure if you do not know how to get the results, know how to read Google Analytics or understand other tools that provide this. If you are not able to read or understand the tools, your provider should be explaining this to you in detail. If you are paying hundreds a month and are not sure what benefit you are receiving, do not just keep paying without asking the important questions.

Are You A Business Owner or Are You Another Employee?

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 14:39:17 +0100

Karen Fischer

When we start our business it is a fact of life that we almost always have to do everything. We have to do the bookkeeping, the marketing, the sales, the customer support, as well as probably cleaning the office. This is with the hope that over time our business will grow and we can relinquish those duties to employees, where we can focus on the strategy, vision, and overall profitability of the overall business. In some cases, as the business grows and flourishes and it is time to hire employees, some business owners have time relinquishing control, as they feel that no one can do the job as well as they can.

We have worked with a few small businesses where this has been the case. This is especially found in businesses where the owner has been the main individual selling. The owner enjoys building a relationship with the customer and convinces themselves that they will lose customers if they hire someone else. In many cases they feel they have actually proven this to themselves. They hired sales people and it just did not work out. They will have a list of issues about the sales person, such as; they were lazy, they didn’t know how to do their job, they didn’t understand our business, and my all-time famous line - our business is different and you can’t find sales people for this type of business. In a good many of those instances, the owner did not know how to hire a sales rep, did not provide any training to the individual on the business or the products, expected them to come in and hit the ground running without any direction, did not provide objectives or manage expectations and then wondered why they failed. We had one client that hired a sales rep, gave him a desk and phone and that was about it. They did not take him out and introduce him to customers, did not train him on the business, and did not manage him or provide direction and expectations. This was the proof that sales people did not work in this industry, even though larger competitors has sales teams. What it came down to was the business owner liked selling and did not want to relinquish control of selling to someone else and did not want to manage an employee.

What is a business owner? A business owner is someone who owns a business and who is responsible for the profit and loss of that business. They are responsible for the overall direction, strategy, and vision of the business and have the authority and decision making capabilities. They are also responsible for the overall management of the business and those employees that work for them which includes providing training, supervision, direction and guidance. This also includes monitoring and providing feedback. No one can expect an employee to come in and know what to do. They need to understand the overall vision and direction of the business and what are the values and expectations. They require a job description and to understand what their role and responsibilities are in your business and they need to be given proper training and guidance, if they have any chance for success.

In some circumstances, there are business owners that start a business and find out that as they start to grow, they may not be the right person to take the business to the next level. They enjoy doing certain roles in the business, but when it comes to hiring and managing people, that is not something they really want to do. We had just the case with a young business owner. He was a great sales person, but he did not want to deal with customers when it came to issues of non-payment, legal or accounting issues, or anything that took him away from customer interaction that was positive. He did not even want to be bothered with collecting HST which was going to prove to be a large financial issue for him. He even admitted all he wanted to do was sell. This is someone who will make an excellent employee for another business, but should not be a business owner.

There is nothing wrong with finding this out, it is about recognizing the issue and deciding what to do about it. If you really want to be the business owner but need some help in areas, you can find a coach or mentor to help you learn how or can get outside help. As the business owner, there is no shame in hiring employees in your business to be responsible and perform the duties that you are not best at doing. This is all part of delegation. If you find you are not cut out to be the one to make the hard decisions, then you can still be the “owner” of the business, but you need to hire someone to run the business and you can continue in the areas which you enjoy and are comfortable. The key to this is acknowledging this and knowing what you want.

In the case of the owner who does not believe anyone can do certain jobs but themselves, this is just not true. It is about letting go and relinquishing power. This has to happen in every business at some point. When many large businesses started out that were owner operated, the owner did everything just as every small business owner that is starting a business today. Can you imagine Bill Gates sitting behind a computer screen coding Microsoft® products to sell to his customers? At some point he had to let go and hire and trust others to take the reins of the day to day business and he then had to focus on where to take the business. Good and loyal customers buy from you because you have quality products and/or great customer support and service. Customers understand that every business has to grow and at some point they may not be dealing with the owner. It is how you transition those customers to your new employee that is important as well as assuring the customer that you are still responsible so if there are any concerns, they will be addressed.

It is tough to give up control and put trust in others, but if you are going to grow your business, this is the only way that you will be able to accomplish this. If you are content with being a small business where you do everything, there is no shame in it, but you have to understand this is all you will ever be. To grow, the business owner has to relinquish control and focus on working on the business versus working in the business. They need to either hire the right staff or outsource certain parts of their business to professionals.

Marketing Will Not Provide Instant Gratification

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 14:39:41 +0100

Karen Fischer
Marketing is a phenomenon that is sometimes very misunderstood by some business owners. In a lot of cases, it is an overhead that many will avoid spending money until they are in trouble financially or their business has been stagnated and is not growing at the pace it was in the past. This is when they might decide they need to start marketing to get new leads and then when they do not have new prospects flocking to their business after they have tried implementing one marketing or lead generation campaign, they become frustrated. This is how many justify saying to themselves marketing is a waste of money.

Marketing is something that has to be continuous and needs to be started day one and cannot just be started and stopped and receive expected results. Except for the impulse buying client, it takes sometimes 5-12 contacts of some type with your product and your company for a prospect to contact you. The more your business or products are not known, the longer this takes. A business needs to do some level of marketing from the beginning to build awareness of their brand and their value proposition. It is up to you as a business owner to educate your prospects and future customers and show your knowledge and value as a business to make yourself stand out. This has to exist in every marketing piece or medium you develop, whether that is a brochure, website, social media, or press release.

Before implementing a marketing campaign, you need to understand what the average return is for that particular medium. In a lot of cases, 1%-2% return is good and that will happen if there is clear messaging and a call to action. Understanding the return and your costs will help you determine whether that medium is even right for your business. Example: If you pay $5000.00 for an advertisement in a magazine and you have a product that is $25.00 and there is a magazine distribution of 4000. The chances of seeing a return on your investment is very low. On the other hand if you have a landing page that is search engine optimized and shows up on page one of Google where you receive thousands of impressions a day, this is probably a good return.

After choosing the right type of campaign, you need to make sure that your messaging is clear and that there is a call to action that can be tracked. The call to action needs to be something of value whether that is a discount, a giveaway, a draw, or some type of download. If you are not able to track your results, then you should question spending the money unless this is just to build awareness. Examples: If you are offering a discount or an in store offer, make sure that they have to bring in the coupon. If you are providing a free download, have them provide information before they download the e-book, white paper, or case study.

If your business has not done marketing in the past, you cannot just decide to run one advertisement or send out one direct mail and if you do not get instant customers from it - throw up your hands and run - it takes time. You also cannot put all of your eggs in one basket. You need to try different marketing mediums if you are not aware of what works for your customers or industry. What works for the business next door may or may not work for you. Our business is a very good example. Our past life background was focused on high technology product companies where a lot of traditional marketing mediums worked, such as direct mail or cold calling. When we started our business, this is what we tried first and found out very quickly these were not good mediums for the type of consulting we do. Because we are working very closely in someone's business, there has to be a level of trust. The client has to be in need of our services and know they want help in their business. That is not something you are going to talk them into over the phone or make them understand through a direct mail piece. We get business through referrals from other clients, through networking, from our website, social media, and through doing workshops and seminars. It has taken time and did not happen overnight. I would have to say the money we spent on marketing 2 years ago is paying off today and we make sure we keep spending time and money on marketing now so we keep generating awareness and leads for the future.

The key is not to wait to decide to implement marketing in your business when you are stagnate or are in trouble financially. If you spend a little money along as you have it versus waiting until you need leads and then spend $10K on a campaign hoping to save the business - it is most likely too late. You are at a point you need new customers and are counting on that one big win and that is not going to happen. It is like buying a lottery ticket and hoping it pays off. Marketing has to be planned out and cannot be used only at a time you need new growth immediately or are in trouble financially.

Copyright Infringement - Are You Sure You Are Covered?

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:11:52 +0100

As a small business owner myself, I never considered the thought of ever having material that I developed infringed upon from a copyright perspective. On one hand one might consider that we should have been flattered. Instead, I have never felt more violated in my life. We spent the last 3 years developing consulting and marketing material and working on our search engine optimization. A lot of time, money and effort was invested and in the end - it is ultimately our brand.

When most of us think of copyright infringement, we think of large corporations. With small business, this is a greater problem than with big business. Big businesses have a legal department to look out for this and go after violators, but what do you do when this happens to you as a small business owner? What do you do when someone basically "steals" your intellectual property without your permission and uses this to promote themselves and their business? Having just experienced this, I wanted to let small business owners know how protect themselves and also how to prove copyright infringement has occurred.

I was attending a networking event, when someone approached me and mentioned in passing that they thought they had seen a website that had copied a lot of my material from my website. I initially didn't think anything of it until a friend of mine mentioned that I should use a a web tool called Copyscape and just check. When I did, I found someone that was trying to pass themselves off as a consultant in close proximity to our business was using a lot of our written material on our website. In fact almost every page on their website had copyrighted material from our site. It was not even altered, it was verbatim. I contacted the owner, and asked them to take down the material and to contact me before I contacted a lawyer. I did not receive a response, so I proceeded. I contacted a copyright and patent lawyer who I knew and the process started. Here are some steps to follow before this happens:

Make sure documents, web content, and any other content that you develop has a copyright associated with it and a date. I actually had a copyright on the material, but the individual had copied earlier material that had been updated. Luckily, I had an older version of my website captured on disk.
If you have content that you change make sure to keep the older versions instead of saving over the same document name. This way if you have made changes, you are able to track it back to the original content.
To have infringement, you do not have to have exact content. The Copyscape tool can provide you with the percentage of how much of the content is the same for web content. In most cases, most hosting agreements have information of what can happen if they find copyrighted material has been put on their servers. If someone has infringed upon you, they are most likely in violation of their hosting agreement.
This is basically "theft" and is a criminal offense if proven.
Before going through a lawyer and incurring fees, you might want to contact the individual who has infringed upon you or your company and ask them to immediately take down the material before you pursue further means. I have heard in most cases, they know they have been caught and will do so. Unfortunately this did not happen in our particular case.
If they do not comply, then contact a legal professional. Be prepared before you call a lawyer to print your material as well as theirs that is associated with the infringement. If this is a document, book, or other printed material, it is important that there is a copyright as well as a way to show when the material was created. If this is on your computer, find the date created. If this is on the web, there is a tool that can help with this as well as show when the content was created/updated if the pages have been indexed - www.waybackmachine.org.
The legal professional will contact the individual or company and let them know that the infringement has occurred with the proof provided and give them a time frame to have it destroyed and taken down. They will have sign an affidavit that they acknowledge what they did and will not do this in the future. If the individual or company does not comply, this can be taken to court. In most cases, as a small business, it will be an individual or another small business that has done this and they will comply as they cannot afford to be taken to court.

You need to know and understand your rights and not let others take your valuable content, brand, and work and pass it off as their own. For small business owners, there is so little time already, so when you either develop or pay to have content developed for your business, you want to make sure it is protected and that your competitor is not taking your work and your intellectual property and trying to compete against you with your own material. In our particular case, this individual used our material on multiple websites to advertise themselves. They were selling themselves as a consultant using our copyrighted material in close proximity to our business. If not for someone that knew us and happened to see this content, we would have never known and this individual would be selling themselves and our services using our material. You have invested in building your brand, your reputation, and your content. Protect yourself, your business, and your brand from potential competitors that are using your work to build their business.

How to Make Social Media Work for Small Business

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:48:51 +0100

Karen Fischer
Though social media is free for the most part, small businesses tend to struggle most with the time it takes to be successful implementing social media and keeping it up to date with content. This does not have to be an onerous and time consuming task, if you plan your social media, you can make this a lot easier for your business to implement. Some items to keep in mind before you start:

Who is your target market and what type of content will be of interest to them?
What type of content will show you understand your market?
What type of companies/individuals should you follow?
What blogs and online content is relevant to your audience for content you do not produce personally?
What type of content are you going to produce: blog articles, presentations, papers, updated web content...etc?
What social media platforms are of most use for your business?
What platforms are you going to dedicate time (no more than 2-3)?

Once you have this decided, you do need to set aside time each week to make this work for your business. There is a constant debate on whether you should outsource this because you know your business, but if you must there are many out there that will do this for you. The best is to get someone to come in and teach someone in your organization. I set aside 30 minutes each morning or around 2-3 hours a week to do this. There are tools that can help you and save time as well. Not that this regiment will work for every business, but I myself though a consultant for small businesses, am a typical small business owner and hopefully this will help provide you with some ideas to help social media in your business:

Our target market is small business owners in Canada.
Our focused social media platforms are : LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Quora.
My occasional social media platform is Google+.
We follow others who provide content for small businesses and those that provide similar services in other countries.
Before I start work each morning or at least every other morning, I get up and read articles of those I follow on the different networks and Tweet, Like, Share content that is relevant as well as content from other websites/blogs that have useful content.
Twice a week I answer a few questions on Quora and periodically my business partner will as well.
At least twice a month we write a blog article, develop a paper or presentation of our own content to share.
We have share, like, and + buttons on every page of our website.

There are tools that can help you with this endeavor to help you decrease the amount of time you spend. The application that I have started using is called Buffer which is a SaaS tool which can be found at buffer.com. There is a free and a paid model. This tool will allow you to add content to a "buffer" and then allow you to schedule what social media pages you want to use and create a schedule throughout the day to provide content. The free version will allow you to have 10 buffered for each network you set up. You then can set up a schedule throughout the day to provide content so you do not have to keep logging back on. This product will free up some time for you. You could look and buffer content for a couple days versus you logging on to every network each day.

When I started using social media, my business partner who is also my husband told me I was wasting time as he didn't see a return on investment from using social media. I ignored it as a typical accountant comment and continued. In the last year, he has changed his mind. We have gotten several clients and met several business partners through social media. It is something that you need to think through before you start, but once that part is done and your sites are set up, you follow the right people, and use the right tools, it is a marketing medium that is cost effective to use, but you have to set time aside to make it work for you.

To Link or Not Link - That is the Question

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:20:45 +0100

Karen Fischer
There is a ongoing debate on LinkedIn on whether you should link to individuals who you have never met or had interaction. Even among my business colleagues and partners there is a difference of opinion. For myself, I fall into the camp that does not link to individuals that I do not know, have met, interacted, or have a common interest for connecting. I view my LinkedIn as my true network of people that I could interact or count on and do not view just adding connections for the sake of increasing the number of connections to be important.

My thoughts center around what social is and should be just as networks that you have off the internet. I would never connect someone or give out information about or to someone that I did not know just as I would not refer business to someone if I truly could not vouch for them. I view my network is sacred and is one that is "worth" something versus a link to everyone on the internet. Ask yourself, why is it in your interest or someone else's to connect to you if there is not some common interest or reason. Would you then introduce people that you value to them without knowing anything about them?

Now you ask yourself, what am I going to do when I am contacted by someone to connect? Are you just going to hit the add button because it is easy and now have an extraneous person in your network that now has access to your close network and can use your name because you connected to them? Have you considered sending those individuals back a note letting them know that you appreciate the contact, but since you normally do not connect to people you have not had some level of interaction, could they let you know why they would like to connect? What you will find is that a lot of those individuals have sent out a mass connection to everyone in a group and do not even have a reason. They may have just decided to increase their number of connections. For most, you will never hear back. For the "right connections" you will hear back with a valid reason and find out something more about the person and why they are a good connection.

Live Example of a Good Connection

I had a financial equity lender contact me blindly and sent him a similar note. A couple days later I received a nice note back from him saying he knew we were small business consultants and thought there might be a way that we could help each other out. Since then, we have met him in person and had the chance to work on a potential deal and we share links between each other's websites. The truth is if I just added him and didn't say anything, I may or may not understood what the value of the connection actually was. Instead, we are now connections that interact and can use each other's services to help our clients and have become friends.

There are definitely two camps for this debate and you have to decide how important LinkedIn is in your marketing and sales strategy and how pure you want your connections to be. Think about it, the people you link to that you just click the add button could be anyone. They now are connected to you and can tell people they are connected to you and there is the implied understanding that this is true. Do you then want perfect strangers contacting your true connections that you know and have mutual trust using your name because they are a "connection" on LinkedIn when you know nothing about them?

Something to think about?