Be Ready for Another Short Holiday Shopping Season
While spring may be the time when “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” fall is when the concerns of many small business owners turn to the holiday shopping season. Here’s a roundup to help you put Holiday Shopping 2014 into perspective and get positioned for success. Shopping season I recently retweeted a graphic that had a picture of Will Farrell in the movie “Elf” jumping up and down and it said there were only15 Fridays left until Christmas, which, by the way falls on a Thursday this year. There are fewer than 15 Fridays left now. Flashback time: Remember Holiday Shopping 2013 when the number of days between Thanksgiving and Christmas could be counted on one hand? Okay, I exaggerate, but it was a shortened shopping season last year. Well, I’m here to tell you that retailers have one whole day more this year. In other words: it’s another short shopping season. Perhaps this explains why Costco started selling Christmas paper and other holiday supplies back in July. Remember that a lot of small businesses pick up supplies from Costco, so the warehouse retailer probably had its B2B business in mind when it started shelving red and green items in July. Shoppers’ mood The other variable to consider when trying to forecast and prepare for the holiday shopping season is the mood of the consuming public. Consumer sentiment seems to have been quite variable throughout the year. However, there wasn’t any time when buyers were ecstatic about their finances. If the two extremes are boom and bust, we seem to be stuck somewhere in the middle with little indication of where we’re headed next. However, no matter what our mood is, there will be a holiday shopping season, so small businesses need to be ready. Britt Beemer, chairman of America’s Research Group, recently shared an important piece of information with CNBC’s Krystina Gustafson. Beemer stressed the importance of getting customers through the door on Black Friday. It’s not just about lowering prices to make sales on the day after Thanksgiving, he explained. The stores shoppers visit on Black Friday are also the stores they tend to return to throughout the shopping season. Improve your odds According to America’s Research Group, when customers shop a store’s Black Friday sale, there’s a 70 percent chance they will buy there two to three more times during the season. However, when they skip a store on Black Friday, there’s a 30 percent chance they’ll never hit it during the Christmas season. Black Friday sales are a relationship builder as much as a way to get throngs through the door on that special day. With a short shopping season, it’s easy to see that those two-to-three additional visits are extremely valuable and could be the difference between a good and bad year for...
read moreDigital Nomads: Have Computer and PayPal Account – Will Travel
Jon Morrow, a successful blogger and Internet entrepreneur, once wrote a blog entitled, “How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World.” You see, Jon was a full-time blogger and one day he realized that he could ply his trade from anywhere he could connect to the Internet. He move to Mazatlan, Mexico and penned that blog from his balcony overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He had joined the global army of digital nomads. I’ve taken you through this scenario because when you hear “the rest of the story” you’ll get a sense for how desperately people want to become digital nomads themselves and you’ll learn how Jon did it. The post I mentioned in the opening went very viral, so viral in fact that it has earned him well over $33,000. It has enabled Jon to teach many others how to do what he does. There are a lot of folks who want that knowledge and are willing to pay for it to the tune of $33K-plus. As freelancing, fully web-based businesses and telecommuting become more popular, the number of digital nomads traveling the globe and working from interesting and sometimes exotic locations is increasing. Freelancing Sites such as Elance, oDesk, Freelancer and Guru have made transitioning to full nomad status fairly simple. Through them, finding and bidding on jobs is much easier and they facilitate the payment process. Professionals from a wide range of industries can find work on these sites. Some of the more in-demand skills are Writing, Web development, IT and programming, Design and Graphics, Administration, Sales and marketing, Legal, and Finance and management. Teaching Teachers can sometimes establish themselves in the digital nomad world. As colleges and universities add more online courses, the professors who teach these courses can sometimes be located anywhere. They pick up assignments and communicate with students over the internet. Further, there is a growing number of musicians offering private lessons over the Internet. They communicate with their students using Skype and usually advertise on Craig’s list or through their own websites for new students. eCommerce Some ecommerce businesses don’t require any physical presence, those that sell digital downloads, for example. In these cases, the owner can generally be located anywhere. Additionally, with fulfillment houses and drop shipping, even if you’re selling a traditional product, it may be possible to travel and still have the means to successfully manage your business. Blogging There are a number of professional travel bloggers who are always exploring new places. However, making enough money through blogs alone is very difficult. Anyone who has started a blog and loaded it up with Adsense ads, knows that the path to profits is long and difficult. As Jon Morrow found, selling something that is promoted by your blog is the real way to “monetize” it. If you are good at something, write about that and build your following. When you have some authority, then start teaching others what you know. Find the right employer Some digital nomads evolve from their day jobs. If you essentially have a job that adapts itself to telecommuting, you’re just one step away from living the nomad life—all you need is clout and an employer who can see the big picture. The key is to make yourself...
read moreMobile Website Design: Target Your Least Loyal Customer
Have you noticed all the one-page websites that seem to be taking over the Internet? They have the advantage that they don’t require any clicking on the part of the user, which leads to wait times while pages load. In other words, web users are a finicky and impatient bunch; everything you can do to streamline your website and make navigation seamless (or not required at all) is a smart move. Mobile site are perhaps the most egregious offenders today. This is especially true when the mobile site of a small business isn’t really a mobile site at all – just the regular site being displayed on a painfully small smartphone screen. When sites won’t load I ran into this problem recently when my husband and I were out on the town and I decided to check the Monday night specials at one of our favorite restaurants. The site flat out wouldn’t load. Fortunately for the restaurant owner, we like the place enough that we went anyway. Many others, however, don’t have that kind of loyalty, especially the prospects who owners desperately need to get through the doors. Here’s a simple tip: Design your web presence with your least loyal, most flighty customers/prospects in mind. If it works for them, it will work for everyone else too. There are some social currents that just won’t be turned back and the trend toward mobile is one of those. In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine some businesses designing their mobile sites first and then adapting them to a larger screen format. Get those walk-ins If your small business relies on customers walking through the front door – as in the retail, hospitality, or food industries – don’t leave your mobile site up to chance. If you designed your site more than a few years ago, there’s a great chance that you don’t have a separate mobile site that renders differently than your regular site. Here’s a homework assignment for you: Navigate to every corner of your mobile site and also have friends and family members do the same thing. Keep a critical eye focused on how easily you are able to navigate and how quickly pages load. Be sure that your landing pages work in the mobile world. Remember that you’re familiar with your site. Can prospects who come to your website for the first time while using their mobile devices understand it, get their questions answered and do the actions you would like them to do? Be sure to have some people who have never visited your website among your testers. Go into analysis Finally, if you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your site – or you seldom review the statistics – get on board. You’ll find out how many visitors are accessing your website through mobile devices, along with a lot more critical information you can use as you optimize your site. Image: “Virato Multiscreen” by dw capital GmbH – Own work (Original text: Eigene Grafik (Design: Massimo Mosna, dw capital GmbH)). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia...
read moreShould Your Promote Your Star Employee to Management?
Have you noticed how few Hall of Fame baseball players end up as managers after their careers end? In the same way, if you look at the managers who have made it to the Hall of Fame, you aren’t going to find any of the game’s biggest names. A recent managerial inductee is Tony La Russa, who I enjoyed following for years as he guided the St. Louis Cardinals through many championship seasons. However, as an infielder in the major leagues, La Russa’s lifetime .199 batting average doesn’t even put him over the Mendoza Line. The problem with great players is that they can’t relate to the average players. They expect everyone to live up to their standards. The same problem can pop up when you’re selecting managers for your small business. Also, different business situations require different managerial strengths. Let’s look at some attributes that will help you determine who on your staff should do well when promoted to manager. Leadership All managers should have some leadership skills, however, there are some environment swhen it needs to be one of the manager’s strongest skills. If you’re in a turn-around situation, opening a new area of business or are experiencing difficulties in one department, strong leadership is required. Organizational skills Good organizational skills will be needed at times in any managerial position, however sometimes they are critical. If you sense that efficiency is suffering, you need to bring in a manager who can see past the clutter and get the machine running smoothly. Ability to control Are personnel issues holding back your company? Leadership and organization are required, but the ability to maintain control is highlighted. To keep control, you need someone who can have frank conversations with employees without losing his or her cool, which brings us to the next quality. Proper temperament Anger has no place in management, although almost everyone suffers the occasional bout of anger. Sometimes “star” employees are also the most passionate employees. They can have a difficult time controlling their emotions. If you’re planning to promote such an individual, before you make the move, have a long talk about temperament and make sure the person knows your expectations. Communication skills Excellent communication skills are a hallmark of most great managers. If you’re in a technical industry, your most skilled techie might be your best employee. However, this person may have very poor communication skills – and no desire to develop them. Don’t promote your tech wizard just because he or she has been so valuable as an employee. Teaching nature Along the small business growth curve, there are times when you want to replicate certain people. If you have a star employee who has a natural ability to teach others, this person could make a good manager. On the flip side, there are people who like to keep their special knowledge to themselves to maintain their superiority. Watch out for them, even if they excel at their jobs. Choosing the right individuals for promotion is as much an art as a science. Keep these qualities in mind and try to avoid a real-life demonstration of the Peter Principle: Promoting people to the level of their incompetence. One final word of advice. When you have “Hall of Fame” employees, you can find other ways...
read moreFree Tools to Troubleshoot Your Website Performance
Remember when the Internet was young and innocent and everyone had counters at the bottom of their pages that revealed the total number of visitors? That seems so long ago now. Judging the performance of your site today is much more complicated than checking an odometer-style counter in the footer. And if you aren’t getting the results you had hoped for, straightening things out can be a major project. But here are some free tools that you should wield yourself before you cave in and take your site to an expensive website mechanic. Uptime Does your web host provide excellent uptime? This can be difficult to judge. They all advertise 99.9 percent uptime and greater. The only sure way to monitor your site’s uptime is to have it monitored. However, Hyperspin has a ranking that includes many hosts. It’s basically a compilation of data the company has gathered for its clients. Web host servers come in a variety of flavors, the most important of which are “shared” and “dedicated.” In other words, are there other sites on your server or does your site have the whole server to itself? Note these categories when you check Hyperspin. Mashable has a list of 10 free services that will monitor your site. They alert you when they find the site down. You can have most of them hunt for certain words on pages which helps you isolate possible trouble spots such as plugins failing to load. If you love DIY projects and only need the most basic alert, check out this simple uptime checker that uses a Google docs spreadsheet. Visibility The second basic attribute to monitor is your visibility on Google. Much of this is a reflection of your search engine optimization (SEO). Start by simply doing a search on Google for your domain name: www.yourdomainname.com. The vast majority of results should be pages from your site. A freelance writer friend of mine does a blog for a real estate company. He recently discovered that the company’s entire site was not being indexed by Google. No one at the company had any idea. He alerted them and it was quickly fixed. Copy and paste some complete sentences from various pages on your site and Google them. If they are unique, they should appear first in the search results. You’ll also discover if anyone is pirating your content. SEO Much is written everyday about SEO. Here I just want to cover a few basics. Sites such as SEO SiteCheckUp and WebSeo Analytics will scan your site and give you a free report. You should address any issues they discover with the understanding that SEO today depends on your increased “authority” in your field, not just fixing a few things on a one-shot basis. The SEO SiteCheckup report gives you a keywords cloud. Look at it carefully and see if it reflects what you believe are your most important keywords. Also, perform Google and Bing searches for your keywords and see how well you rank versus your competitors. Use the two free SEO tools – and there are others on the Internet – to analyze your competitors’ websites. See where they may outperform you. This is basic stuff, but it can’t be left to chance. Let me leave you with one more “self check”...
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