This Week in Small Business: Hundreds of Ideas to Boost Your Bottom Line
In small business, success is a numbers game, so we’re starting out this week’s collection of curated content with some big numbers: advice from 110 top bloggers and 100-plus ways to promote your content. But if you don’t have time for such long lists of ideas, we have links to several lists that are much shorter. Marketing and sales In this collection, 110 top bloggers and entrepreneurs share their most successful social media action. And since we’re into big numbers, here are 100-plus ways to promote your content. But if you don’t have time to deal with 100-plus ideas, you may appreciate these three simple ways to grow your small business in 2016. If you’re blogging to boost your business, you need to learn how to write posts that convert. Do digital marketing analytics really matter? Yes, and here’s why. Leadership, management and productivity Does your small business have an “upper limit problem”? Naomi Dunford gives us 11 warning signs and once you recognize the problems, you’re well on the road to fixing them! As spring settles in, many will be planning fishing trips. However, don’t get tripped up by these phishing schemes! Keeping customers is a lot more cost effective than finding new ones. That’s why you’ll want to be on top of these five ways to keep your customers from leaving you. Old wive’s tales. Myths. Whatever you call them, don’t fall for them in the business world. Customer-centric companies sweat the details. Does yours? Check yourself against these practices. Politics, government and the economy It was just in December that the Fed raised its interest rate target, but it didn’t this time around. Has the economy changed, or just our perception of...
read moreInexpensive apps to put your sales on autopilot
The goal of this series is to help the small business owner or solopreneur who is strapped for time keep prospects coming into the sales funnel. We discussed how to add to your sales team in a way that sets you up for success. If you have a “well oiled” sales team, the process will run on autopilot in the sense that it won’t require much of your attention or energy to keep prospects coming into the fold. But let’s look at other ways to add autopilot features to your sales system. We’re trying to solve a problem for small business owners who find themselves cycling back and forth between time spent selling and time spend providing services to clients. If that describes you, there are two ways you can use technology: You can use it to force you to deal with sales when you might otherwise let your sales efforts slide, or You can use it to feed into the team you have assembled and keep them busy. While this might apply to some small businesses that sell products, I think most of this will be applicable to service providers. And in that scenario, when a sale is finally “closed” it virtually always requires human interaction. Contrast that to selling a product; sometimes that can be acnieved entirely online and without a human having to make contact with the prospect. There are a variety of software products on the market today that are designed to get leads into your funnel and, in many cases, nurture them to some extent. It may be best to envision the process like this. You devise means to generate some interest in what you do or who you are. These are either prospects finding you via organic search results, seeing a paid advertisement of yours or responding to social media posts. The prospects that find you are whisked off to a landing page where they are encouraged to give you their email addresses or call you on the phone. You nurture and followup with these prospects through targeted emails or other forms of contact. Steps two and three can be automated to a large extent; step one somewhat less so. You need to invest in building a website that is powerfully search engine optimized, so you rank well, or you need to invest in advertising of some kind (keyword or display), or you need to get a social media marketing program going that attracts attention…or you need to do all three! If part of putting your sales program on autopilot is to start building a team, some of these tasks can go to that team on an ongoing basis, such as creating the social media marketing pieces. Further, if you just need some reminders and motivation to keep your personal sales efforts active, the automated operations in steps two and three might do the trick. (However, I think you’ll still want to start building a team to take over the follow-up so you can focus on what you do best.) Landing pages There are a variety of services that help you build, test, and optimize landing pages. Some of them have additional marketing bells and whistles that will prove useful to your small business. Here are some of the most reasonably priced options...
read moreHow to tackle the biggest problem facing solopreneurs, consultants and other small business owners
A friend of mine and his wife once started a weekly newspaper in a very rural area. She was a graphics professional and he was a former newspaper reporter, so it was a natural fit. Before their launch date, the wife hit the back roads and visited all the local businesses selling ads and setting up places to sell the newspaper. Once they started publishing, she spent her time putting the paper together and he spent his time filling it with articles. I should also mention that they had another business and a growing family, so they were quite busy in general. The point I want to make is that beyond that first foray into ad sales and newspaper distribution, they never revisited those essential duties again; they became tied up with the work of putting out the newspaper week after week. This is exactly the same problem solopreneurs, consultants and other small business owners face. Usually the cycle goes like this: Drum up clients. Service clients. Finish client projects. Start looking for more clients. It becomes much like the instructions on the side of a shampoo bottle: Lather – Rinse – Repeat. This puts these small businesses into a feast or famine mode in terms of cash flow and more than anything else, small business is all about cash flow management. The importance of planning for sales We often talk about the importance of working on your business, not in your business and the topic I’m covering here illustrates this perfectly. My friends with the newspaper ended up working in their business and never took a step back to work on their business so they would be able keep the ad sales activity continuing. If you’re in that situation right now, or you will soon be starting a small business, you need to do this kind of planning. Also, I should mention that what I’m talking about is especially crucial for solopreneurs, consultants and other small businesses where the service being provided depends greatly on the founder…at least in the beginning. You need to devise systems that automatically keep prospects coming into your sales funnel. My friends, for example, should have hired a sales person to go around and sell additional ads and find ways to increase subscriptions. Don’t kid yourself and think that you’ll be able to easily do client work and client acquisition simultaneously; deadlines associated with servicing your clients will “elbow out” the activities you need to perform to find new clients or additional projects from existing clients. Automating the sales funnel There are essentially three ways to automate the sales funnel: teams, technology and a combination of teams and technology. I’ve used the words “automatically” and “automate” here on purpose because it’s vitally important that you set up systems that keep this flow of prospects coming into your business. You will tweak it and improve it with experience, but its single most important attribute is that it provides a steady – and hopefully increasing – number of prospects being introduced to what you offer. To feel good about your automated system of feeding the funnel, you have to be able to count on it delivering a given amount of prospects for a given amount of investment. If you can’t do that math and end up...
read moreRevealed: The Science of Small Business Success
If you roll a ball along a flat surface, it will simply continue in the direction you’ve pushed it, unless it hits something – or something hits it – to change its course. People are basically the same. We continue along the path we’ve chosen unless something outside of ourselves changes our direction. We are governed as much by the laws of human nature as a moving object is governed by Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of physics. This is why self-help books make up one of the biggest categories in the publishing industry, and the self-help industry overall racks up more than $10 billion in annual sales. In their homes, many earnest people looking for change have shelf after shelf filled with self-help books. If people were truly able to change themselves, there would be a handful of good self-help books on the market and they would do the trick. For most of us to be able to change the course of our lives, both personally and professionally, we need an additional shot of energy. It’s just a law of nature or physics that as individuals we only have a certain amount of energy. The extra energy required to achieve change needs to come from outside of ourselves. There is another dimension to this: We can’t truly and honestly evaluate ourselves. We need views taken from a perspective that is not our own to really “see” what we are doing. It is for these reasons that there will always be coaches and these reasons also explain why savvy people from all walks of life align themselves with good coaches. Even a golfer as experienced and successful as Phil Mickelson relies on a swing coach and his caddy for advice, direction and correction. We have several equivalents in the business world. There are many good coaches and other relationships or institutions that serve this purpose. Some business professionals maintain semi-casual “mentor” relationships with experienced leaders. Others join mastermind groups that provide guidance and accountability. I think what separates those who use business coaches from those who don’t is their honesty with themselves and ultimately the degree to which they want to succeed. If you really want to make your small business one of the elite leaders in your industry and/or your community, you’ll do whatever it takes to achieve that – even if it means that you need to look outside of yourself to do it. So how about you? How high are you aiming? There may be a much greater level of success awaiting you, but you may not see it or have the ability to make the required course corrections to get there without an injection of energy and expertise from outside of yourself. With all of this said, there is only one more question to ask: What are you waiting...
read moreEverything I Know About the Best Sales Emails I Learned From the Republican Debates
I’ve lost count of how many debates there have been featuring the Republican and Democratic candidates vying for their party’s presidential nomination. But I do know one thing: Most voters made up their minds after the first few debates. It’s the same thing with email marketing. The best email marketing campaigns are short. Prospects only receive three or four emails. If you haven’t achieved your goal by then – and we’ll talk about your goal in just a moment – it’s not going to happen. Before I go on, let me put this discussion in perspective. We’re talking about the best email marketing tactics for the email version of “cold calls.” The advice here isn’t for nurturing qualified leads or defining what makes the best follow-up email after a prospect has displayed significant interest in your offer. With the “cold call” email your goal is to simply get a response. Understanding that fundamental idea will guide you as you explore how to write an email offering your services or product. Here are the basic principles. Keep it short. The first four paragraphs of this article are less than 90 words. If you’re striving to craft the best email marketing series, that’s about the length you should strive for. Also notice how the sentence, “It’s the same thing with email marketing” hangs out in white space all by itself. Your eye picks it up even if you decide not to read anything above or below. I could have made those first four paragraphs one long paragraph, but they would not communicate as well. Keep your emails short and keep your paragraphs within your emails short – some might be no more than: Three words long! Make it intriguing. Your marketing can survive a lot of mistakes, but it can’t survive being uninteresting. If you can’t quickly capture your prospect’s attention, you don’t have a chance. The best sales emails will grab readers’ attention immediately. You need a strong subject line and strong first sentence. Remember: Many will see a “preview” of your email, which typically displays the first 40-90 characters of your message. Some email services allow you to separately enter your “preview.” Make it relevant. You can say a lot of things that are intriguing but not relevant to the person receiving the email. The best sales emails will touch a nerve with their audience. And if you can’t make it relevant – if you don’t know what that nerve is – why are you sending it? Establish your expertise or value. You need to let the recipient know that there is “weight” in what you say. If your service boosts widget sales by 45 percent, say that, but say it briefly. Ask for a reply. All you want from these emails is for a prospect to indicate some level of interest. What you do after interest is expressed is a different question. A different series of sales emails could follow or it could be time to make a phone call. Knock three times. Make the above points in the first email you send. In a follow-up email – or two follow-up emails at the most – you briefly restate those points using slightly different words. Your last email is a “I won’t bother you again – if you...
read more