Turn Your Small Business Into a Money Making Giant

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Tim McDonnell

Small businesses face a chicken-and-egg type of predicament: They feel pressure to appear larger than they really are, as it seems like the only way to grow is if they’re already big.

Based on our own experience helping clients meet this challenge, the following suggestions can help you look bigger while you grow your business.

Maximize Your First Impression

You get what you pay for. It’s as true for your company’s image materials as it is in any other part of the business world. The good news is that even if you don’t have a big design budget (or any design budget) you can still create a professional image for your company.

You’d be surprised how many small businesses overlook details like company name, description and contact information. Even without an expensive web platform you can instantly boost your visibility (and credibility) by paying attention to how your company is listed in all the free online directories and social networks you can reach.

Make your message more about the reader than about you. Focus on key terms they search for online and use language that describes the result they’ll experience, not the product or service itself.

Do What You Can With What You Have

In The $100 Startup, author and entrepreneur Chris Guillebeau talks a lot about the concept of strategic giving. You’ll be out some wholesale costs initially if you sell a product, but it can be virtually free outside of your own time if you offer some kind of service. Create a virtual army of volunteer marketers by liberally giving away samples that they’ll naturally share and talk about.

Extending that same concept, any marketing material — audio, video or print materials you have laying around — can be sliced, diced and re-purposed for all sorts of things. You can make blog posts or podcasts out of them that have topical appeal for your target customers. You can also bundle them into information products you can sell to generate a steady residual income stream, or to give away as a bonus for new prospects.You’d be surprised how many people want to know what you know about any given expert subject.

Finally, remember that good marketing ultimately has more to do with high quality relationships than it does with tools, techniques or tricks. Think about where your customers go before they come to you. What else are they buying, thinking and talking about? By building co-marketing relationships with other businesses that complement yours you can inexpensively tap into large groups of people who are already qualified prospects for what you have to offer.

Optimize Your LinkedIn Presence

Optimize not just your company’s LinkedIn page but also encourage you employees to polish their personal profiles on the social network to boost your brand. While the latter requires you to educate your staff, you can do the former by taking matters into your own hands.

Optimizing your page begins with a series of test searches to determine how to focus your improvement efforts. Search the companies section of the site using different keyword combinations, and note which word combinations produce results that your company ranks the highest in. Then click through to the pages of every other company that ranks higher than yours in the keywords you’ve chosen.

Advance Thought Leadership Online

Cultivate thought leadership and communicate it online via the blogosphere and social media. Don’t limit this to your own company blog and social networks pages. Seek out guest blogging arrangements, and post meaningful comments on other blogs, along with their respective social media pages and related groups; for all of these efforts, choose online destinations popular with your current and prospective customers.

Related to this: answer questions posted on Quora and LinkedIn, which can also provide inspiration for blog post topics. Spend time reading these sites and following insightful posters for ideas on what kinds of answers get voted up the most. Then use that to guide what you post in response to others’ questions. Obviously, stick to topics that you have expertise in and that advance your business objectives.

Would You Cross The Line?

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Tim McDonnell

What is it about a juicy business ethics scandal that grabs so many headlines?
bizethicpic

Partly, it’s a guilty pleasure – it’s hard to look away when corrupt corporations or high-profile chief executives get busted in public. We boil over with righteous anger (if not a little jealousy) when power players score eight or nine-figure paydays at the expense of countless “little people” who wind up broke, dead or terminally ill.

Ethical horror stories like these can be instructive, but they’re also dangerous.

The bigger the scandal, the more imaginary distance it puts between the perpetrator and the small choices the average person makes on a daily basis. Who’s going to be hurt by that extra ten bucks on the expense report? It’s not like we’re jetting off to the Caribbean with a widow’s life savings. Most of us would never consider crossing an ethical line like that.

Or so we think.

One problem with that assumption is that few of us ever get close to a line that big, so we don’t really know for sure what might push us over it. The other is that decisions that big are rarely made in one step. They usually result from a series of tiny compromises made over a long period of time.

In his classic business book The Success Principles, Jack Canfield makes a down to earth case for being what he calls “a class act.” You and I have no control over what the fat cats get away with on Wall Street or Capitol Hill, but we do control the choices we make and the commitments we keep. Trust is eroded between coworkers and business partners every day in hundreds of little ways that never make the headlines, but they add up to big long term impacts on success and relationships.

Authors like Zig Ziglar, Stephen R. Covey, Andy Andrews and Miguel Ruiz offer similar ideas on what it means to be a class act. Here’s a sample of some of their best advice on ethics:

1. The simple truth works best.
2. If you make an appointment, show up.
3. If you can’t show up, show respect and call.
4. Keep your commitments and don’t promise things you can’t deliver.
5. If you can’t keep your commitment, do what you can to make it right.
6. Do the right thing, even when it’s the hard thing.
7. Acknowledge and thank people who invest time and effort to be of service to you – even the acknowledgement of an email can brighten the day.
The business world can be a tough place and commitments get broken. While there are some narcissists and sociopaths out there who try to game the system, usually the other party is someone like us who’s just doing the best they know how. What can you do when people break their commitments to you?

If it’s an isolated incident, try these repair tactics:

1. Confront the issue factually and directly, but with balance and respect.
2. Propose solutions based on shared interests, not opposing positions.
3. Put metrics in place to keep track of promises and results.
4. If real amends have been made, accept them and move on.
5. Forgiveness doesn’t mean accepting similar behavior in the future. A pattern of broken trust probably means it’s time to ditch the relationship, even if it’s a customer or a boss.

Author and speaker Andy Andrews suggests that instead of asking if a choice is “wrong” we should ask ourselves if it’s WISE. Each incremental step we take away from the place we recognize as our ethical center is one step closer to crossing a line that may become irreversible and carry unintended consequences. Keeping small promises to ourselves and others is the key to success and self respect.

Questions: How have you or your colleagues been affected when someone compromised their business ethics? What solution did you find and how did the parties benefit from it?

Prioritize Interactions With Customers and Influencers in 2013

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Ulrike Ruppelt

Some get hooked on marketing automation while others obsess about metrics or branding. While all of them can improve performance, none should take priority over the need to interact with customers and influencers.

Interaction is necessary to help your target market retain the information that you provide. In the era of mobile digital communication, we are flooded with data, to the point that it’s hard to remember any of it for very long. When one first encounters information, it enters short-term memory, where it risks being usurped by the next set of data to come in. In fact, short-term memory can hold about seven items for no more than 20 or 30 seconds at a time. However, each time information is repeated or used, the more likely it is committed to long-term memory. Interaction reinforces information and will help your target group to remember the information that you want them to retain.

Prioritize Interaction Online and Offline

To initiate interaction online, you need good content. Here are a few ways to improve what you post on the Internet.

Use your unique background to provide an original approach to known challenges in your field.
Determine the most relevant keywords for your area of expertise and make a point of (re-) using them.
Keep sharing your highly original and useful content over multiple communication channels that are utilized by your most important influencers and decision makers.
A useful acronym to guide how to structure your communications is AIDA, which stands for: Attention; Interest; Desire; Action.
Watch out for comments and respond in a timely fashion.
Make sure that you include contact data with your content to facilitate action.
Ensure that inquiries receive immediate response.
Offer incentives to encourage an ongoing dialogue.

Network Offline

To initiate interaction offline, you could attend networking events. Make sure beforehand that you:

Identify the people you would like to meet there;
Determine what you’d like to be the outcome of meeting them;
Do your research so you know which topics they are interested in;
If you haven’t met them before, identify the people who could introduce you;
Make sure that you look and act professional – refrain from fragrances (Allergens);
Have business cards with you that include services or products you offer;
Follow up within 48 hours with an acknowledgement;
If you are going to attend another networking event related to their interest; contact them.

Make these things your priority in 2013 and all of the other aspects of marketing will be a breeze.

The Year’s Most Popular Google Searches

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Jackie Cohen

The most popular Google searches in 2012 were:

That’s an overall international ranking, as released by Google this week.

Country-specific data broken down into image searches, trending topics and keywords, appears in the full report we’ve embedded below. Underneath it you’ll find another embed, of a video Google created to highlight the year. Let us know what you think of these materials in the comments section.

Google Search 2012 from ticular – strategies for success

Which Facebook Pages Are the Best Role Models?

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Jackie Cohen

Walmart outperforms all other U.S. brands on Facebook, according to the latest report on the topic by Socialbakers..

This jibes with what we’ve previously said about Walmart, which for over a year has outranked other brands in Facebook engagement. Runner-up Samsung also also has more fan interaction than all but one brand.

Note, however, that Socialbakers‘ definition of brands excludes entertainers and celebrities, many of whom enjoy more engagement than any brand included in the report.

Actually, the most engaging pages on Facebook have a religious focus: Jesus Daily in particular has held the top spot in engagement rankings for over a year and a half, and during this period of time another five theologically focused pages have remained in the top 20.

So, does that mean Jesus Daily is a better role model than Walmart? Both merit at least some attention, if not full emulation. Liking their pages on Facebook will enable you to receive updates that will give you ideas on how to improve your own page engagement.

That said, a copy of Socialbakers’ report on Facebook page performance appears below. Let us know what you think in the comments section beneath this post.

Is Stupidity Genetic?

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Jackie Cohen

Could an IQ test could skip the questions altogether and go right to your genes?

Science has gotten closer than ever to being able to make this a reality: Neuroscientists have linked intelligence to a combination of Dlg genes.

Imagine a job application asking for access to your genetic profile to assess whether you’re as smart as your college degree implies. This isn’t just the stuff of science fiction anymore — it comes with individualized medicine.

Except for the fact that it’s already illegal for prospective employers to request DNA samples from applicants. And while we’re at it, it’s very likely privacy advocates will lobby for legislation preventing the substitution of genes for actual IQ tests too. So maybe sci-fi will continue to make more use of gene-based intelligence screening than anything in real life will.

U.S. Budget Problem Could Cut Your Pay 6.2%

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Jackie Cohen

Today we’ve seen some of the most compelling data showing what will happen in the U.S. if Congress doesn’t reach an agreement on its budget by the end of the year: the average citizen will effectively have 6.2 percent less take-home pay in 2013.

That’s the effect of tax increases and spending cuts that together add up to $600 billion, which would put the economy into a recession for six months. You can find out how this would affect your own finances using this online calculator created by the Tax Foundation.

Many people either don’t understand the problem or feel confident that lawmakers will solve the problem before the ball drops on Times Square.

Those who worry the most about this issue tend to be involved in capital markets, and claim that businesses hesitate to hire or invest until the federal budget is sorted out.

Regardless, until lawmakers fix the budget, the graphic below has relevance in showcasing the possible cut in Americans’ take-home pay. So let us know what you think of the image the comments section below

freecolar.comltation@ticunsu

Are You Prepared for Social Media Emergencies?

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Jackie Cohen

Google a phrase like “social media outcry” and you’ll see hundreds of headlines dated within the last 24 hours about the latest nightmare for public relations executives.

The controversies usually follow this pattern: Something is posted on a social network that probably didn’t need to there in the first place, and spreads like wildfire before the subject of the post — or those representing it — responds.

Too often the response comes too late because the poster needs to obtain approval from someone higher up on the food chain.

In an ideal world, the original offending post would be prevented from going up in the first place. While that’s wishful thinking, the next best thing is do-able: a nearly instant response made possible by preapproved templates designed for emergencies.

We’re talking about the social media equivalent of fire drills. And we’ve got just the thing for you to do your own advance preparation for emergencies on social media: a form you can download and share with management — and an attorney — so you can create pre-approved messages for different worst-case scenarios.

Of course, one hopes that emergencies never happen in the first place, but set that aside when filling in the worksheet. To come up with the hypothetical scenario for the first field on the form, think of the worst possible thing that could happen to your brand or profiles on social media. Then think about how you might try to placate customers and the public to minimize damages. And consider using a coupon or giveaway — even creating one just for this type of occasion — that you could give to those affected by the problem.

We recommend that you go through this exercise at least once, but completing several of them will optimally prepare you for any unwanted surprises. For an example of a completed emergency form, check out our Social Media Strategy Summit presentation scheduled for 2 pm PST December 7. Get a 10% discount on registration by using the promotional code SPEAKVIP.

Please let us know in the comments section what you think about the social media emergency form. Also, feel free to share any experiences you may have had with online crises — how did you deal with them?

Click here to download a worksheet that will help you plan for social media emergencies.