Small Business Buying, Building and Selling

A friend of mine just emailed me today to let me know he’s just been promoted, is now taking on a much larger leadership role where he works, and sales are doing well BUT he’s having ‘people’ issues.

Well who isn’t, right? All businesses have issues with unproductive, combative, and poor-communicating employees. But before you can address how to fix those problems, you need to know why people are that way. It’s my firm belief that the vast majority of people don’t want to suck at their job. If that’s the case, why do so many businesses have so many personnel issues?

Here’s a quick litmus test to see if your business is creating personnel issues or you just happen to have a few bad eggs.

Personally I’m not a big fan of the term “managers” as “managers manage resources and leaders lead people”. A hundred little things, like your titles, added together form a culture for your team and team members (not employees) that can affect everything about your culture, including financial results. I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, so I’ll get more into what’s required of a leader in number 4.

1. The first step is defining the culture you want… Mine is literally called our “14 Points of Culture” that set the ground work for our team expectations. While you’re laying the ground work for your team and culture, you may already have a Vision and Mission statement, but if not, that’s foundational so create that as well.
2. From there you need to develop a Team Organizational Structure chart with the hierarchy of the leaders in your business. Keep in mind that the 3 points on a successful business triangle are made up of Sales/Marketing, Finance/Administration, and Service/Operations so your Team Structure should make sure someone is excellent at each of those things and has the supporting team to get better. At it’s most basic level, your Organizational Chart would include a Team Leader (CEO) above the Sales/Marketing Leader, Finance/Administration Leader, and Service/Operations Leader who all report to the Team Leader. Underneath each of those leaders will be their supporting teams. Keep in mind that the Team Leader should always dedicate half of his time to sales/marketing and the other half of his time to everything else!
3. Create job descriptions for every position in your Team Organizational Structure. The descriptions should include expectations, benefits, Key Performance Indicators and benchmarks tied to incentives. No one on your team should ever be able to say “I don’t know what’s expected of me or how to do my job well.” More importantly, you must fit each team member’s skill-sets and passions into the position that will best allow her to express those passions.
4. Now you start changing the culture by actively leading your team. You provide opportunities for open communication like regular team meetings (even going to the point of picking fights between people and departments). You provide regular and consistent feedback with quarterly performance reviews based on the 12 Questions Marcus Buckingham outlined in First, Break All the Rules. You rearrange your offices according to the rules of proximity. Make sure each of your leaders knows how to use NLP and then train your people. When you come up with new products, ideas, promotions, etc. you work hard to provide systems, procedures, scripts and all the pieces your people need to be successful at implementing new programs. You develop a culture of innovation by requiring people to come up with new ideas without fear of reprisal for “bad” ideas that don’t materialize… And rewards for the ideas that do yield results. You ensure that your leaders all develop relationships with their team members because the most important factor in employee satisfaction is an employee’s relationship with his direct superior.
5. The fifth piece is probably the hardest, yet most important. You fire, let go, or force out the people who don’t fit into your culture, vision, structure, or job descriptions. You get rid of the people who aren’t contributing to the team and culture immediately. The lost time and energy in trying to “fix” them can almost never be recouped. However, if you haven’t provided for them an environment to succeed (with all of the 5 pieces), you’ll really have no idea if they’re good or not because you haven’t defined the rules of the game, yet. If you’re the leader or manager, this is your responsibility. If your leader or manager isn’t providing this type of atmosphere, maybe you should read my last blog on moving on.

Obviously I just presented a whole lot of ideas and pieces that make up a complex problem in a rather succinct manner. The myriad links throughout this blog will provide additional details on certain topics, however don’t try to make this TOO complex. Problems that are TOO complex get pushed to the back-burner, avoided, and ultimately never solved. Take these 5 pieces at relative face value, work on each of them, and enjoy the results.

For further resources, I recommend the following 3 books to help you change your culture:

1. First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham
2. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
3. Instant Team Building by Brad Sugars

To your culture-creating success, Bryan

P.S. Though it should go without saying, before you do anything else you should foster a highly ethical business environment. Without an ethical foundation, everything else will be overshadowed.

It is much harder to leave security than it is to take a risk.

In Thomas Stanley’s book, The Millionaire Next Door, he points out that the profile of your average millionaire generally includes getting FIRED from his previous job and starting his own business. That’s right, the ultra-risk-taking macho entrepreneur millionaire you know generally became successful because, quite literally, he had no other option. Of course their are the guys, like me, who seemed to have everything going well but that just wasn’t enough and we had to venture out on our own and forge our own paths in business and in life. But don’t kid yourself, that give-up-something-great-to-get-something-better mentality is the VAST exception.

Keep that in mind the next time you’re reading a book or blog by a successful person who just happens to be in the minority who was just naturally programmed to never except “good enough”. If that’s not you, you need to learn how to get over your current “security” in order to venture out on a “risk”. (I put both of those in quotes because they’re often not reality, but just figments of our imagination.)

So for the majority of people who have a job, house, family, car payments and a steady income, how do you decide to make the jump and take the risk of leaving your steady paycheck behind and trying something else?

1. Risk-taking is just a lack of knowledge. – If buying a business, writing a book, starting a band, quitting your job to take a new one or just being the first one at your work to try a ground-breaking new idea seems like a risk to you, then you simply need to study more. You need to make sure you understand how to take that business to a level of profitability before you buy it. You need to know how to effectively market your book or band and develop a following. You need to know that you have options for your livelihood before you tell your boss off and walk away (something I never recommend). And if you’re simply trying to get everyone at work to get out of their rut and change, you better be able to backup your reason for the change with some hard evidence as you’ll undoubtedly be met with nay-sayers. Whatever it is, you can always trace an increase in risk to a lack of knowledge on the subject matter and vice-versa. Let me make this even more clear. If you consider a “standard” medical operation like removing an appendix as safe, would you consider the same operation under the same conditions safe if it was performed by your plumber? What’s the difference? The risk is mitigated when the procedure is undertaken by a knowledgeable doctor.
2. Hedge your bet. – One of the cardinal rules of marketing is ONLY the consumer knows if the marketing is effective or not. They vote on their choice for great marketing by spending money. The same is true in almost any venture where you’re going out on your own. You really don’t KNOW that your customers, readers, listeners or coworkers are going to love the idea until it’s out there, right? Well then, in addition to becoming knowledgeable, make sure you have a backup plan… Or 2 or 3. Of course we all know of the stories of people overcoming impossible odds to make their ideas work. Heck, the entire 3m success can be built on the concept of passionate people overcoming all odds to bring their ideas to fruition. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team as a sophomore. Albert Einstein’s first 2 graduate thesis’ were rejected. A successful business owner friend of mine told me he was turned down by 27 banks before finding one who would loan him money for his first business. My point is not to throw the towel in because of adversity. My point is that consumers are impossible to predict, so if you’re going to bet the farm on an untried idea, you better have a few tried and true ideas in your back pocket to fall back on. Most entrepreneurs you speak with will tell you about their myriad failures that were necessary before becoming successful. They always had another plan and another way to succeed. Even at 3m where a culture of risk-taking and never accepting no is programmed into the culture, everyone knows there’s little risk of losing your job for pursuing that passionate idea. In other words, 3m developed that culture with a built-in hedged bet to encourage innovation.
   
3. What is your time worth? – Though this is third item, this one is the most important. Most people grossly over-estimate what they’re capable of in a year but also grossly under-estimate what they’re capable of in 10 years. So what does that mean? We are likely to set goals for the next year that are unreachable but then either not set goals for longer-term or set drastically underestimated goals. If you always spend less than you make, you will never run out of money. But no matter what you do, you will run out of time. So how do you determine if you’re going to stay at your current job, position, or business? If you’re learning on a regular basis from those around you AND your given an opportunity to express your own talents and ideas then stay. The former is more important than the latter, but you should be able to do both. Keep in mind that you should be learning things that you couldn’t otherwise learn on your own. Notice, I did not say that you have fun at work or you have a reasonable wage with lots of perks. Those temporary benefits are important for someone who will live forever and so has plenty of time to find something better later on. However, if you’re not immortal, and you’re not learning at work on a regular basis, it’s time to move on. The reason for this is because with the knowledge you can be learning at an underpaying job, you can leverage that at your next job, business, or passion. That’s why people underestimate what they’re capable of in 10 years. It’s sometimes challenging for us to step outside of our situation today, whether good or bad, and view it as a step forward or backward in our 10 year goals because we’re just trying to make it day-to-day.

If after evaluating your situation, you’ve now determined that it’s most likely time to move-on, check out a few of my other blogs that might help you get started:

The most important life lesson, and the key to success…

Why not?

The first 3 steps to becoming wealthy

To your success, Bryan

P.S. If the concept of setting 10-year, or even 1-year, goals is a bit foreign to you, check out my blog on The 3 steps to become successful at anything…

Oh… You don’t have any customer complaints? Right. I don’t either. This is just for other business owners…  Now that we have that out of the way… Let’s go through our 4 step process for converting complaining customers to raving fans.

This may be the quickest and simple business “fix” I’ve ever discussed and yet may have the greatest impact, so be sure to implement this immediately!

1. Convince your team to get “on-board” – This step is easy. At your weekly Team Meeting present your team with the number of new customers in the last year who had some sort of previous service experience with your business before purchasing. These would be referrals, current customers making another purchase, leads generated by your service department, or if you have a franchise like me, possibly people who have dealt with your franchise somewhere else. In my business, about 60% of our new sales in 2009 came from people who had heard something about our service. What!? You don’t track your lead sources??? For now you’ll have to guesstimate at this number. Then simply ask your team, “Why are customer complaints bad for us and how many people do you think are affected by each customer complaint?” My team’s answers ranged from 3-30 people. Since I like numbers, they expected me to have an exact number for them. I did not. I just pointed out that even if only 3 people hear about each instance of poor customer service, how many potential new customers are we losing each year? They got the point.
2. Track Customer Complaints – I don’t care if people are upset you gave them a bad haircut, cheated them out of money with outrageous lawyer fees, think your plumber smelled repulsive, or just doesn’t understand your bills. If the customer is complaining, it’s a complaint. Now that we’ve defined what constitutes a complaint, we need to actually track them. In my office, the same software we use for lead-tracking, scheduling, conversations, and billing has an option to track Customer Complaints along with the contact, time, details, and follow-up person. We can then run reports on all of the complaints by department and/or a time frame.
3. Address and Fix the problem – All customer complaints should immediately be assigned to someone who can fix the problem. Of course, that person should then fix the problem and update the details of the complaint in your software program. The customer should be notified by telephone about your resolution. Moreover, we address every customer complaint at the weekly Team Meeting in order to keep everyone abreast of poor customer service issues and to come up with ways to prevent issues in the future.
4. Send a “Thank You” letter – Have you ever been upset at a business? After voicing your dissatisfaction, did you have a few of those companies address and fix your problem? Now, of all of the instances where you actually had your complaint corrected to your satisfaction, have you EVER received a letter afterward thanking you for continuing to be a valued customer??? Me neither. My customers, however, have. It’s a weekly responsibility for one of my office administrators to run a report of the customer complaints, print it out for me to review, and then create “Thank You” letter addressed to each customer. Obviously each letter includes coupons to encourage them to patronize us in the future and almost universally those coupons get used. Can you afford to NOT send those letters and risk losing a long-term paying customer at the cost of $.50 per letter??? As Team Leader, I sign each letter.

Now what about those instances where the complaint isn’t justified, wasn’t our fault, or the customer is quite frankly someone we’d rather not have as a customer any longer? Well whoever takes care of Step 3 should have the foresight to determine that and “resolve” the issue accordingly. I’m a firm believer that not all customers are profitable and certainly don’t want to encourage the customers who suck the life out of my team and I to come back. Moreover, when I review the Customer Complaint report in Step 4, if any are “unjustified” I cross them off the list and so don’t send a letter.

I’ll point this out once again, people who are upset enough about something to complain will tell their friends and family about their dissatisfaction. If you don’t address, resolve, and then follow-up with a “Thank You” letter, your business is undoubtedly losing potential new customers and long-term existing customers.

To your “customer-loyalty” success, Bryan

In that order.

For the first time in 2 years, I spent a few days in the last week onsite at other businesses doing some consulting and training. Since I’ve been working on my own business, I just hadn’t the time to put a lot of effort into helping others. After a few days of interfacing with some very successful small business owners, it intrigued me how interested they were in my own personal daily schedule…

A few months back I noticed sales were slipping and my stress level was rising rapidly. In those moments, when you finally realize that in the last 5 working days you got absolutely nothing of value accomplished, you really need to step back. Sit in your office with the door closed or take an extra long shower since you’ll have no interruptions and evaluate a few things:

1. What is your role as the business owner/leader? Literally, what is your job description and are you following it? No job description? Make one!
2. What can you do that would most benefit the company in 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, and 5 years? Forget about what’s needed to get through today for a few minutes and focus on longer term. Unlike public companies, you don’t have next quarters earnings report to cloud your long-term judgement.
3. Are you spending half of your time on marketing/sales (getting new customers) and half of your time on customer service/operations (taking care of existing customers)? Granted, your sales and marketing efforts should certainly include marketing to your existing customer base, do not make the mistake of convincing yourself that that ONLY means dealing with current customer issues. Your sales/marketing efforts to existing customers means up-selling, cross-selling, educating them on all the products and services you offer along with gathering referrals and testimonials.
4. Does your schedule allow you to acheive 1-3? Obviously, this is where most business-owners, myself included, often get side-tracked.

So what can you do about it? The answer is simple, create a daily or weekly schedule.

Initially my daily schedule looked like the following:

However, after realizing that the “creative” processes of Sales and Marketing weren’t really as effective in only an hour time-slot I converted to a weekly schedule with 2-hour blocks for Sales and Marketing in the afternoon and my standard morning schedule. Personally, I define Marketing as everything my business does to get a prospect to contact us to solve a problem. Once the prospect has contacted us, they are now in my sales process/system and everything from that point of contact, till we sit down with the new customer after our work is finished to make sure they’re happy and to gather referrals, is Sales.

Monday through Thursday I alternate between Sales and Marketing and Friday is a “flip” day where I choose which one will benefit the business more (or whether I need to just go for a motorcycle ride).

So now that you know what needs to be done, do you have any doubts that in 3, 6, or 12 months, let alone 5 years, your business and therefore you will ultimately benefit from such dedication to your job description as the business leader???

Businesses generally mimic their owners according to the 3 Leaders every business needs. If you’re sales oriented you’ll love that time spent working on sales and marketing. If you’re a more technical hands-on guy, you’ll feel much more in your element taking care of the customer issues and making them happy. If you’re just a numbers person, that time from 11-12 and 4-5 where you work on payables, reports, and other accounting needs will be right up your alley. That being the case, you have 2 options:

1. Commit to taking care of all of these items yourself.
2. Hire someone else to help you in the areas you aren’t good or passionate about.

If you choose the first, my Recommended Reading section is a great place to learn about books that will help educate you on all of these areas.

If you choose the second, I’d read some of the books anyway so you know if the team member or consultant you’re working with really knows there stuff. There are plenty who do not. The first item I would outsource would be the accounting stuff.

My blog title obviously infers that just by setting your schedule you’ll now have a sense of control over your business and more importantly your life… The only proof I can offer for that is to try it. Force yourself to make it a priority to follow your schedule and you will be utterly amazed at how productive you can be.

To your scheduling success, Bryan

P.S. At our weekly Team Meeting, I apologized to my team for not doing my job and let them know about my new schedule. I recommend you do the same so everyone knows things-are-a-changin.

In my Internet Marketing for Small Business series of blogs we reviewed the 3 pieces of your small business’ online presence:

1. Traffic
2. Website
3. Commitment

We then discussed the 3 primary ways to get Traffic (Search Engines, Online Ads/Google Adwords, Viral Marketing) and of course reviewed videos explaining some basics of Viral Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and optimizing your Google Adwords campaigns. We most recently looked at some great tips for your website in my last blog.

The final piece to the puzzle and the item we’ll be reviewing today is the Commitment. The commitment is simply the visitors commitment to buy from you or to contact you for more information if you’re not selling any products online. Obviously we’ve been talking about the sales aspect of your website, not how it caters to current customers, so with that in mind, everything you do to your website should be geared towards that goal. Here are a few pointers for achieving that.

1. Setup your website layout and design according to my last blog.
2. Use the 4.5 points of marketing to address their questions and concerns.
3. Offer them something for free in exchange for their email address.

Since the first 2 points were addressed in the last post, we’re solely going to focus on the third.

When buying a product, the primary reason people use the internet is to educate themselves by reading information about the product or service they are interested in. They may also be looking for the best value, but without knowing what makes a product or service valuable they’ll first have to educate themselves on that product or service. This is where you have the opportunity to set yourself apart. If you’re an online retailer, the best reason for someone giving you their email address would be to receive email notifications of special sales and promotions. However, if you’re a service or knowledge-based business, they can have many reasons for dealing with you. A few thoughts your prospect may have to consider would be:

1. Your level of expertise – Can you fix their problem the right way the first time?
2. Your history – If your business is less than 5 years old chances are you’re not going to be here in another 5 years.
3. Your prices – Are they fair and reasonable for the services you deliver?
4. Your credibility – What do your customers say/think about you?
5. Your guarantee – If you turn out to not do what you told me, what do I stand to lose?

Now your website can do a great job of addressing most of that, however you need to hold something back. You need to not let the cat out of the bag on your expertise right away. Why? After all, that may be the most important thing to your client and what they NEED to know about you before making a decision. Exactly. Because of that, if setup correctly, your potential client will gladly give you their name and email address in exchange for you sharing some of your expertise with them. Read that sentence again and let it sink in for a minute. That’s your hook. If the rest of your website is setup in such a way to address the other 4 items (and any others you may determine your prospects want to know) then they’ll trust that you are an expert.

This is where you utilize an “opt-in”. An Opt-in is where your visitor opts-into your mailing list or newsletter. Obviously the key to getting someone to decide to sign up for your newsletter is to offer them your expertise for free in return. So once they opt-in, you email them a PDF or direct them to a web page where they can download a PDF providing your expertise. (Mailchimp.com can get you started with this for free.) This would be in the form of an article, whitepaper, special report, expose’, or research paper addressing your expertise. For instance:

1. For a law firm – “The top 10 cost-saving questions you need to ask before putting down a retainer for a lawyer.”
2. For an accountant – “The top 10 things your accountant missed on your last tax return.”
3. For a plumber – “How to know if your plumber is more interested in your pipes or your wallet.”
4. For a an auto-body shop – “The quickest way to tell if your body-shop repair estimate is accurate or if the body-man has been spending too much time in the paint booth.”
5. For a photographer – “The 5 things a photographer must do to get the best picture of you – that have nothing to do with the camera!”

You get the idea. The goal is to provide a topic that is relevant and important to your visitors. Here are a few guidelines:

1. Make it generic – Don’t say “top 10 reasons to do business with us”. No one is going to give you their email in exchange for a sales pitch. They’re looking for a “free lunch” by learning from your expertise.
2. Set it up to paint a picture that only your business fits – This is, of course, the power of this sort of marketing. It allows you to define exactly what the perfect lawyer, cpa, plumber, beauty salon, etc. should look like. Make sure only your business can fit that definition. This is part of the way you can build value to demonstrate that your prices are higher but your overall value is unmatched.
3. Provide some real expertise – We’re all smart enough to see right through a thinly veiled sales pitch. This is the kind of thing that will help them decide to NOT do business with you.
4. Make it simple – Lay it out with a list or graphs and make it conversational. Write this copy, as you should with all marketing copy, as if you’re sitting across the table from this person explaining to them exactly what you’re talking about.
5. Promise not to sell their email – Unless of course you do plan to sell their email. But I don’t really recommend that.

Now some of the great internet marketers have learned that providing a PDF in exchange for an email only gets you so far. Instead they setup automatic email responder campaigns with the help of sites like aweber.com. This basically tells your visitor they’re going to receive some level of your expertise once per week for the next 4 weeks or something along those lines. This keeps you in touch with them constantly and helps you get closer to Jay Conrad Levinson’s claim that it takes 9 communications to make a prospect a customer. This is the reason gathering an email address is so important to begin with. If Levinson’s research is accurate, your chances of gaining a customer because of one visit to your website are pretty slim. However, if they visit your website and then you keep in constant contact with them via email, now the tide has turned in your favor.

To your success in gaining a commitment with your website, Bryan

In my last 3 blogs we reviewed the 3 pieces of your small business’ online presence:

Chichen Itza - the 7th Wonder of the World. Is your website this complex?

1. Traffic
2. Website
3. Commitment

We then discussed the 3 primary ways to get Traffic (Search Engines, Online Ads/Google Adwords, Viral Marketing) and of course reviewed videos explaining some basics of Viral Marketing and Search Engine Optimization for Small Business. We then looked at some of the best tips for optimizing your Google Adwords campaigns in my last blog.

This time around we’re going to take a closer look at your website. From my last 3 blogs you have a lot of great ways to get people to your website, but how do you know your website is any good? Let’s break this into 3 sections:

1. Goal of your website
2. Content
3. Layout
4. Tracking or Analytics

1. Goal of your website – This is so important to understand as I think most people never even consider this point. For most people they have a website because they’re supposed to have a website and then they leave it at that. That’s not at all true, the goal of your website is to sell something! Since my small business is service-based, my goal is to sell an appointment or, in other words, get the potential customer to contact us. For other businesses the goal is to sell a product directly online. If you fail to sell your product or appointment via your website your secondary goal should be to collect your visitor’s contact information for future marketing. We’ll discuss basic ways to do that in the future.

2. Content – Since your goal is to sell your visitor something, the content of your website should be geared to do just that. How do you accomplish that? You answer all the questions that might prevent them from buying from you. That’s what your content MUST do if your customer is ever going to make a commitment to purchase from you. Here are the basic points you must cover in any marketing to earn a customer. I call these the 4.5 points of successful marketing:

1. What problem can you fix for me? – Address and detail their problems to demonstrate that you understand their needs.
2. Is your solution the best? – Explain how your solution to their problem is the best solution available.
3. Why should I work with your company? – Compare your business to your competition to show how ONLY your business can meet their needs and requirements.
4. Why do I need your solution now? – Dollarize their potential losses by not having your solution so they understand that every month, week, day or hour that they wait they’re losing money by not working with you.

4.5. What am I risking? – Make the process of either buying from you or contacting you for an appointment as risk-free as possible.

The biggest negative business owners point out to me when addressing these points is that now their competitors can see their whole “sales pitch”. My response to that is firstly, so what? They’re going to find it one way or another anyway. Secondly, if your business and product can’t highlight enough advantages, benefits, and differences to make it IMPOSSIBLE for your competitors to steal your sales pitch then you need to go back to the writing board and come up with better copy and/or a better business plan.

3. Layout – In the online world you basically have 4 types of websites:

1. Complex – You have graphics and videos and Flash programming and javascript drop-down menus and somewhere amongst the entertainment you may even address some of your customer’s questions or needs.
2. Simple – You list your business name, phone, address, a short About Us, a Contact Us page and maybe even a bit about your products. These websites do nothing more than provide contact information for people who already want to do business with you. Most visitors, however, don’t care about you until you educate them on how you can make their life better.
3. Corporate – Every major corporation has one of these. It has all the standard pages for Contact Us, About Us, Investor Relations, Products, Store-Finder, etc. etc. It answers a few questions of the 4.5 points of successful marketing but often is bordering on the too Complex described above.
4. Long-winded – These are those scrolling 1-page sales pitch websites that you just hate to visit. However the truth is, these are some of the best tracked, best-designed, best-selling websites in existence. Millions upon millions of dollars in internet fortunes have been made through this style of website. These designers have often done their homework and tweaked their website sales-machines to perfection so don’t write these off as unprofessional or ineffective. An unprofessional website is the one that doesn’t generate sales – nothing more.

So how do you optimize your site to generate the best results without getting too far off-track like the site descriptions above?

1. Make it EASY to contact your business. Their should be a phone number, email, and/or contact us button on every page so that it’s visible at all times.
2. Never make anything more than 2 menu’s deep (unless you sell millions of products). This is a lesson learned from the “Long-winded” guys. You can’t direct people through the 4.5 points of successful marketing if you have too many clicks. People want their questions answered right away and in a logical progression and if they have to click through more than 2 menus deep to get those answers they’re much more likely to leave.
3. Relate your pages to each other. I was just searching for car parts for my 2008 Mitsubishi Evolution X on a performance parts website. The website had some awesome Youtube videos of their 10 second Evo with a listing of the parts they sell and used on that car. Only problem was the list of parts didn’t link back to the spot where I can buy the parts. After 30 minutes of navigating around I’m still not sure if the parts I found were the same ones they used on their own car! The point is, don’t make every visitor have to go back to your home page to find what they need. If you reference another product, idea, or reason to do business with you on an individual page, you better have a link to your reference.
4. Provide testimonials. You can say all you want about your solutions and business however that never has the same effect as third-party testimonials from your customers. If your website doesn’t have those, start gathering them right away. Gathering testimonials is literally as simple as asking for them so be sure to ask!

4. Tracking or Analytics – Since we’re all looking for the simple answer let me give you just that. The most important performance number for your website is your conversion rate. This is the number of customers created divided by the number of visitors. In other words, if you have 100 visitors and 4 bought from you (or scheduled an appointment for a service-based business), your conversion rate would be 4% (4/100). Some benchmarks for conversion rates by industry are available courtesy of Fireclick.com where the current internet average conversion rate is 4.3%. It’s also helpful to talk to other people in your specific industry if possible. As a point of comparison, my conversion rate in the 4th quarter of 2009 was 6.5% for my local service-based business. In a future blog we’ll discuss ways to really analyze your Google Analytics stats to determine how to improve your conversion rate.

To your website’s selling success, Bryan

P.S. Here’s another short article about website design by Barry A. Densa at Melissadata.com that I think is very appropriate.

Sorry for the delay in continuing our series on Internet Marketing for Small business however I’m back and ready to roll!

In my last 2 blogs we reviewed the 3 pieces of your small business’ online presence:

1. Traffic
2. Website
3. Commitment

We then reviewed the 3 primary ways to get Traffic and of course reviewed videos explaining some basics of Viral Marketing and Search Engine Optimization for Small Business:

1. Search Engines
2. Online Ads
3. Viral Marketing

This time around we’re going to take a closer look at online advertising and, in particular, Google Adwords so that if your website isn’t perfectly optimized it still pops up as the answer to searches by effective Google marketing.

Firstly, there are thousands of website to advertise on so why focus on Google? That answer is quite simple. Google is the internet search juggernaut. Over 80% of internet searches are performed on Google so why focus on the 20% when you can cover 80% in one fell swoop?

Secondly, this is not a tutorial on setting up a Google Adwords account and campaign. It’s very simple to do, however so if you’re looking for some hand-holding check out Google’s resources.

Finally, this post is about getting the best results out of your Google Adwords campaign. If you’re currently paying someone else to handle all of your Adwords marketing, I highly recommend you either take it over yourself or at the very least verify that they’re applying the principles I’m about to cover.

If at all possible, as a small business owner, leader, or manager you really should be handling your adwords campaigns yourself and here’s why:

1. It’s not that hard to get started. As a matter of fact, in a lot of respects it’s probably a lot easier than most other forms of marketing. Have you ever tried to produce a TV commercial? Now that takes work!
2. It’s the future. Let’s face it. Google is still growing and online marketing is here to stay. From my talks with marketers in TV, Radio, and Newspaper all of those mediums are in very difficult circumstances right now. Why? Because the marketing isn’t targeted. Broadcast or print advertising blankets thousands to millions of people of which a very small percentage “might” be interested in your product. Google Adwords allows you to only show your ads to people searching for your product (if you know what you’re doing). It’s much better bang for your buck!
3. You’ll learn lessons that can be applied to all of your marketing. Things like: which promotions draw the most attention and which headline phrases elicit the best response. Heck, even which words people are using to find you. This information can then be carried over to your email marketing, direct marketing, broadcast marketing and everything else because then you’ll know which headline will give you the best response.

Though I do claim that Google Adwords marketing isn’t that hard to get started, it can be quite complex to become a top Google Adwords marketing expert. Lucky for you, your small business competitors aren’t even remotely savvy on Adwords, let alone master marketers, so all you need to know are the top most important pieces that I’m about to cover to set yourself apart.

So here are the most important parts to your Adwords campaign that you must implement:

1. Split test
2. Mimic the keywords in your ad
3. Direct them to a page that answers their question
4. Use broad-match, match phrase, match term, and negative keywords
5. Track your results

That’s it. Five relatively simple pieces to becoming an Adwords guru. Let’s look at each in more detail.

Split-testing – This is the same thing in the online world as it is in the physical world. In the physical world of marketing this would be like creating 1 direct mail marketing letter with 2 different headlines and determining which one had a better response. With Adwords this means you setup 2 different ads at all times for each Ad Group. The 2 ads will alternate and after a few dozen people clicking on your ad, you’ll know which one generates a higher Click-Thru Rate (the number of people who click on your ad/the number of people who see your ad). A high click-thru rate is very important because the higher percentage of people who click on your ad the cheaper your marketing will be. Part of Google’s formula for determining your cost-per-click is to include your Click-Thru Rate. For instance if your ad has a click-thru rate of 1% and you pay $2/click, your competitor with a click-thru rate of .5% will have to pay $4/click. Google does this because they want to offer the most relevant content so the more people who like your ad the more relevant they consider your content. Your goal is not more impressions. It’s more clicks with less impressions.

Mimic the keywords in your ad - This simply means that your ad must answer the question to the search someone typed in. For instance, if you’re selling clothing for dogs, and you purchased a keyword for “Dog Sweaters”, your ad better have the words “Dog Sweaters” in it somewhere. If you also bought the keyword for “dog collars” you better show a completely different ad touting “dog collars”. In Google Adwords there is an organizational hierarchy that includes a few pieces:

1. Your account
2. Campaigns – for budget, language, and territory restrictions
3. Ad Groups – primarily for grouping similar keywords
4. Ads – to split-test 2 ads against each other

Your account can have multiple campaigns, campaigns can have multiple ad groups, and each ad group can have multiple ads. For each set of similar keywords, you’ll have a single Ad Group. For instance the following keywords may all be in one Ad Group: “dog collar”, “dog collars’, “decorative dog collars”, “fashionable dog collars”, “unique dog collars”. Keep in mind that Ad Groups will have 2 ads to split-test headlines, promotions, benefits, domain names, or features. You will then create another Ad Group for your keywords related to: “dog sweaters”, “dog sweater”, “pink dog sweaters”. Again, each group of similar keywords requires its own Ad Group with 2 ads competing for the highest click-thru rate.

Direct them to a page that answers their search - People search for answers so whatever you do, don’t direct your traffic to your home page. If they search for “dog sweaters” then send them to the page that talks about your high-quality dog sweaters. Don’t send them to your home page which they now have to take time to navigate to find more information on dog sweaters. In your hiearchy, this will be done at the Ad Groups level. Both ads that you’re split testing within an Ad Group should point to the same page on your website. If you need a different Ad Group to answer the customers’ search, you need a different landing page on your website.

Use broad-match, exact-match, exact-term and negative keywords – Your main reason for doing this is to only show your ads to people who are actually interested in what you have to offer. This will in turn drive down your cost-per-click and improve your click-thru rates. Let’s look at each one:

1. Broad-Match – (simply type the keyword to make it broad-match) if anywhere in a search your words are found, your ad will be displayed. So, for instance, if someone searches for: why do people put stupid sweaters on their dogs? Your broad-match keyword for dog sweaters will display your ad. Now do you think the person who typed in that search is going to click on your ad or have any interest in your product??? Of course not. But he will drive your cost-per click up because he just saw your ad and didn’t click on it.
2. Term-Match – (put brackets around your [keyword] to make it term-match) this means that your ad will ONLY be displayed when that exact search is typed in. If your term-match keyword is [dog sweaters], the only time someone will see your ad is if they type in dog sweaters exactly as you have it in the brackets. Generally you can get lower costs-per click and higher click-thru rates with these type of keywords because you can target your ad to answer a very specific question.
3. Phrase-Match – (put quotes around your “keyword” to make it phrase-match) this means that your ad will be displayed in any search where your exact phrase is found. If your phrase-match keyword is “dog sweaters” then your ad would be displayed if someone searches for: sign a petition to ban dog sweaters. Again, not a likely customer for your business.
4. Negative-Match – (put a negative sign before your -keyword to make it negative) This is where you can really optimize your campaign to target just the people interested in your products. In the examples above for broad-match and phrase-match if -ban and -stupid were negative keywords, your ad would not have been displayed. Now there are potentially millions of keywords that could be negative so how do you determine which ones to add to your group? You use the free keyword tool we talked about in my last blog to determine the most common phrases people are searching related to each of your keywords. Simply type your keyword dog sweaters into wordtracker’s search tool and add negative keywords to your Adwords campaign for every search that doesn’t sound like a likely customer. For instance the second most popular search including the term dog sweaters is dog sweaters pattern. If you don’t sell dog sweater patterns you’d add -pattern as a negative keyword.

Track your results – This is the easiest one because Google provides you with all of the reports and graphs that you need. For the most part you only need to look at your click-thru rates for each keyword, each ad group and each ad. You look at click-thru rate for:

1. Each keyword to determine if your ad is catching the attention of people searching for that word.
2. Each ad group to determine if that overall group of keywords is adequately being addressed by your ads or if you need to break up your keywords into smaller more specific Ad Groups.
3. Each ad to determine which one had the higher click-thru rate in your split-test so you know which one to keep and which one to ditch for a better one.

Though learning and implementing all of these tactics in your Google Adwords campaign isn’t overly complex, it certainly takes some time and effort. After you’ve setup a few, you can easily go from nothing to a new account, campaign, half-dozen ad groups and dozen ads in half an hour. Make the effort to learn these rules and your business will improve.

To your Google Adwords success, Bryan

In my last blog we first reviewed the 3 pieces of your small business’ online presence:

1. Traffic
2. Website
3. Commitment

We then reviewed the 3 primary ways to get Traffic and of course reviewed a video explaining some basics of Viral Marketing for Small Business:

1. Search Engines
2. Online Ads
3. Viral Marketing

This time around we’re going to take a closer look at search engines and, in particular, optimizing your website for search engines (search engine optimization) so that your website pops up as the answer to searches.

As with everything in life, there are dozens and dozens of things you can do to improve your business, cut expenses, increase profits, grow sales, and even optimize your website for a search engine. However, the 80/20 rule applies in this situation, just as in all the others, so we’ll just look at the top 4 things that will generate the most results.

1. Title Tags – The title of your webpage that shows in the top left-hand title bar of your web browser.
2. Keyword Density – The percent of times the keywords you’re optimizing for show in relation to all of the words on your page.
3. Easily crawled and indexed – Using Google Webmaster Tools to make sure your site is indexed and crawled.
4. Incoming Links – Google’s goal is to provide relevant content. So they theorize that the more people who link to your website, the better the content must be and so they give you better results on searches.

In the video I referenced:

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool on Wordtracker
Google Webmaster Tools
Merchant Circle
Google Local

To you search engine optimizing success, Bryan

You have a small business, you don’t sell anything online, but you realize that whether you sell something directly online or not, most people are still searching the internet to learn about your business and what you have to offer.

Beyond that, you’ve heard a bit about Viral Marketing, Google Adwords, Facebook, Myspace, Digg, Twitter, Youtube, and have even heard that businesses are somehow doing free marketing with these online tools. But how can your small business benefit from this latest method for getting in contact with your customers?

As you know, I own a small business with the average ticket price for a sale in excess of a few thousand dollars. My business requires an onsite inspection and analysis of a prospect’s home prior to completing a transaction. So my business doesn’t allow for a direct internet sales approach at this point and quite frankly, that’s part of our Niche. We take the time to learn what you need because we’re the experts and you shouldn’t have to be.

So let’s break down how the internet can help small businesses by looking at the 3 pieces to an online presence.

1. Traffic – You need to get people to your website.
2. Website – This tells your story and prompts people to take the next step… Whatever that might be.
3. Commitment – This is the next step. Whether it’s committing to buy a product, contacting your for more information, or to schedule an appointment, as is the goal with my business, this is the most important piece. Another smaller commitment would be to simply capture a name and email address to keep them up-to-date on products, services, news, and even specials.

Traffic

For this blog, we’re just going to focus on getting traffic to your website and there are basically 3 ways to do that:

1. Organic Search – In other words people type in a search for a product and your business appears. This is often called SEO or Search Engine Optimization or Organic traffic. That simply means that your website is designed to answer the questions that people are asking. That brings up the question, so what are people asking? Well a great tool to use for optimizing your website to find out what are the most popular searches is located at freekeywords.wordtracker.com.
2. Online Ads – This is where you have to pay someone else to drive traffic to your website. The most popular way to do this is SEM or Search Engine Marketing. Whether you’re doing Google Adwords, Facebook advertising or the Microsoft Network, you’re paying someone to bring more visitors to your site.
3. Viral Marketing – This is your free marketing that has the power to expand itself. Well this can be a tricky one because there are so many ways and pieces to viral marketing these days… The video below will explain this key aspect to online marketing in a bit more detail

In my video I referenced the following tools:

Google Adwords – To buy keywords to market your website. This is paid traffic.

Twitter – Mircoblog (every post has to be 140 characters or less) to keep your followers up-to-date on the latest things going on at your business.

My Facebook Fan Page – Promote your business to all of your friends on Facebook… And all of their friends…

Youtube – Create your own videos to integrate with your content and to provide another way for people to find you online.

Digg – Submit a blog or article for people to “digg” if they like it to push up your blog or site’s popularity.

Reddit – Same concept as Digg above.

Shareit – Share your shareware software programs with the world.

Del.ico.us – Social bookmarking site that allows you to keep track of all of your bookmarks no matter what website your on. It also provides you lists of the most bookmarked sites to help users determine the best content.

Stumlbeupon – Helps you better navigate the web by you telling Stumbleupon what topics interest you and then others will “stumble” articles and blogs in those topics to provide the best content based on the number of “stumbles”.

To your internet marketing success, Bryan

Adam Penenberg’s book, Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves, is addictive. That’s quite ironic considering the content so maybe he even designed it that way.

In my last blog, I wrote about the amazing valuations that companies with little to no revenue and often huge losses can achieve. The mantra was more about getting big (meaning getting a lot of customers not necessarily profits) and getting bought up. It’s happened dozens of times with businesses ranging from Facebook (valued at $15 billion thanks to Microsoft) to Twitter (who still has no source of income) to Bebo.com (which sold for $850 million) to Myspace (which sold for $508 million) to…. Well you get the point. Companies got real big, real quick with no marketing. But how did they do it???

Well Penenberg focuses this growth on businesses achieving a Viral Coefficient above 1.0. That simply means that for every person who signs up for your website or service, they influence at least one other person to also become a customer of yours.

Let’s say for every person who signs up for your new social networking site, they invite (on average) 20 of their friends to also join. Out of those 20 people who are invited, if  one person signs up (i.e. 1 out of 20) the viral coefficient is 1 (20*.05) and so the product is considered to be viral and therefore will experience exponential growth. If instead, 2 out of those 20 signed up, the viral coefficient would 2 and the growth would be ridiculous.

Table illustrating the power of viral marketing for viral coefficients of .8, 1.0, and 1.2 when starting with 10 initial users.

If we consider that it takes 1 day for a current customer to bring you another customer, after 20 days, you’d have 50 customers with a coefficient of .8, 210 customers with a viral coefficient of 1.0, and an astounding 2250 customers with a viral coefficient of 1.2! Some people might suggest that 1 day is a very short time frame and for some businesses it is indeed short, however when Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.Com at Harvard University with no marketing just by telling friends, he had 1200 people sign up within 24 hours! Within 24 hours of HotorNot.com launching their website (again with no formal marketing) they had 100,000 visitors. Adam Penenberg’s book goes through the numbers of many more of the businesses that I’ve mentioned above so I’m hoping you can start to see the amazing growth potential of businesses that can become viral.

So what does it take to become a viral business?

Well Penenberg’s book addresses this a bit, however he never really provided a precise formula simply because the way Facebook or HotorNot grew was not the same as Hotmail, or even Tupperware. That being said, he pointed out, and I’ll expand on some items that were similar in his viral businesses.

1. It has to be something people REALLY want. – How do you know people really want it? Because they’ll pass it along to their friends without being asked to do so. Another way things can automatically get passed along would be how Hotmail put a tag at the bottom of all of their emails that said “Sign up for your free Hotmail account.” Obviously they’ve changed it to rotate marketing about Windows 7 now.
2. It has to be simple. – Becoming a customer or user has to be quick and easy. The more steps or pages or data to fill out and the fewer people will join. That was obviously the beauty of HotorNot and Twitter. Even Ebay and Paypal make pretty quick work of buying and selling online.
3. There has to be an incentive for people to spread the word. – At first it sounds like this may counter my first point, however that’s not the case…  An incentive can simply be “if all of my friends are on it, this <product>” will be so much better for me. Think of MCI’s Friends and Family plan for instance. I just bought some pants from Bonobos.com and for everyone I refer they give me a $50 credit. Obviously I racked my brain to think of people who might enjoy some high-quality pants.
4. It has to be easy to spread the word. – Businesses like RockYou and Slide popped up literally overnight because of the viral design of Myspace and Facebook. Myspace and Facebook themselves even make finding and inviting new friends easy by accessing your email addresses from Yahoo, Gmail, Aol, and Hotmail. The easier it is for people to tell their friends, the more people will tell their friends.
5. You have to be the first one to achieve critical mass for your market. – There are dozens of examples of this from Hotmail to Ebay to Facebook however let’s just look at Paypal for now. Paypal was the first to market and adhered to all the steps above including allowing you to send money to people without a Paypal account (which was simply a way to get new people to sign up). With their viral hooks built-in, they became extremely popular on Ebay in short order. However, Ebay (along with several other companies) wanted their own payment processing company and they even partnered up with Citi Bank to make it happen. They made rule changes to their online listings so that their payment system would show prominently for every item and Paypal’s logo would be pushed to the bottom of the listing. But they did it all too late. They spent millions to make their payment processing company work. Ebay even considered (threatened) banning Paypal altogether. Eventually they decided to just buy Paypal which at the time was privately owned. Unfortunately they didn’t think it was worth the $1 billion dollar asking price and so they let Paypal go public and a few months later were forced to buy the public company for $1.5 billion. You think you had a bad year, at least you didn’t make a half billion dollar mistake (at least I hope you didn’t).

As you know, I own a small “brick-and-mortar” business. Less than 1% of our business currently originates on the internet and my business has a designated service territory so my market is limited. That certainly is a much different playing field than all of the businesses in Penenberg’s book and quite realistically only a tiny fraction of businesses in the world will ever fall into that realm. So for the rest of us in the real world, how can Viral Marketing make a difference to us? Well, understanding the power of a viral business where you develop systems and programs to encourage every single new customer to bring at least one other new customer with them is the key. In the small business world we call this developing referrals. It’s a powerful (and cheap) way to grow any business so I look forward to addressing some ways to do that in the future.

To your viral success, Bryan