11 Great Ways To Work Smarter and Better in 2016
In terms of the economy and its outlook there may only be thing that small business owners can agree on: It’s been quite unsettled for a long time. There have certainly been some positive signs, but as often as not, they seem to get offset by bad – or at least mediocre – news. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that as coming year becomes the focus of small business owners, many will be committing themselves to redoubling their efforts at achieving success. This is great, but I want to take a quick look at the various approaches small business owners take when they decide to “really go for it.” Their options are: Work longer. Work smarter. Work better. Of course, some will adopt a blend of two or more of these three approaches. However, of these three, only one as the unfortunate quality of delivering severely diminishing returns the more you do it. If your approach to pushing your small business forward in 2016 is to work longer hours, I fear that you will be disappointed in both the results and the impact it has on your overall quality of life. I remember hearing someone once say that no one on their death bed says, “I wish I would have spent more time in the office!” I understand that small business owners have to meet their commitments and sometimes that requires long hours. But please, don’t consider working longer hours a “strategy” to achieve success next year. If you work better and smarter, you can achieve more, spend less, and maintain your mental and physical health at the same time. Let’s take a quick look at 11 strategies to help you work better and smarter in the coming year. Work better Complete small tasks. Divide bigger projects into smaller tasks that you can attack and complete successfully. Respect the length of the workday for yourself and your team. Eliminate distractions. Keep the main thing, the main thing. Tame social media for yourself and your employees. There may even be some clients that are more of a distraction to your business than they are a profitable pursuit. Don’t be afraid to trim. Get organized, stay organized, and establish good habits. For example, if you find yourself picking up and reviewing the same invoice a half dozen times before you deal with it, you have a problem. Live by a “once-and-done” philosophy. Get some exercise. Don’t let yourself or your team get physically run down. You’ll lose productivity and people’s attitudes aren’t the best when they aren’t physically active. Make it a priority. Be sure you have the right people doing the right things. Don’t force people to work outside of their strengths. This is a common small business problem. Sled dogs love to pull sleds. Hunting dogs love to be out on the hunt. When you try to force them into roles outside of their strengths, they don’t flourish. Find the right roles for your team. Work smarter Commit to self improvement. You are the most valuable asset in your small business. Invest in that asset and grow it! Take a mile-high look at your business and organization. One of the highest compliments among NASA astronauts and engineers is to be called a...
read moreYou May See a Plain Cake Pan – But an Entrepreneur Sees an Opportunity.
It was January 1957, when an accidental entrepreneur, Walter Fredrick Morrison (“Fred”), sold the rights for the Pluto Platter (later known as the Frisbee) to the Wham-O toy company. (The name may have come from the Frisbie Baking Company.) As legend has it, Fred and his girlfriend were tossing a popcorn lid back and forth when the idea came to him. Soon the two discovered that cake pans actually flew better and were easier to obtain. So they started a little business selling “Flyin’ Cake Pans” on the beach in Santa Monica, California. After completing a tour of duty in World War II where Fred learned about aeronautics, he designed a flying disc he called the Whirlo-Way and found an investor who paid for molding his design in plastic. Today, the Frisbee can be found in the more than 45,000 sporting goods stores nationwide, ringing up sales of over $26 billion annually — not to mention hours and hours of fun. Small businesses are responsible for most of the innovation in the U.S. and creative entrepreneurs such as Fred provide our economy with a competitive advantage. That’s why small businesses will take the forefront in driving our economic recovery. Look around you. Is there a flying cake pan in your future? Do you have other great “accidental entrepreneur” stories you can share with us?...
read moreUse photos to improve your local small business SEO
A colleague of mine was browsing through her Facebook news feed the other day when she saw a picture a FB friend (who lives across the country) had posted. The picture was of a colorful Mexican restaurant front with a sign in the window that said, “Soup of the day: Tequila.” She recognized it immediately as a restaurant (Rose Pepper) in the city where she lives (Nashville). This photo had gone viral to some extent, but the point I want to make is that all photos can be used to boost your small business search engine optimization (SEO) – and in a couple of different ways. Great photos key Using photos for local small business SEO is a fantastic strategy. That’s in part what my Rose Pepper example illustrates. It starts with taking excellent photos. You’re going to be using these photos yourself, but you also want them to be shared in the social media. We know that sites like Facebook are becoming increasingly important to the search engines, so if a photo of your small business goes viral, it may have a significant impact on SEO. This gives you your first strategy: Take good photos that are “share worthy” at your place of business. Save these photos to your computer and give them names that include your keywords and, ideally, the name of your business. Upload them to your social media accounts, adding a keyword-rich description when you can. Also, be sure your geo-tag feature is turned on when you take the photo. However, don’t limit your photo uploads to Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. Flickr Flickr is a great site to leverage in your quest to boost your local small business SEO using photos. Name your files as I described above, but Flickr also gives you space to add a description and tags. Again, be smart about this. Use the appropriate keywords, tags, and the name of your business if possible. You’ll also have the chance to define who has the rights to your photo. For most purposes, it’s a good idea to let others reuse your photos, perhaps asking for credit…or not. However, if you have people featured in your photo and the photo wasn’t taken openly in a public place, you could have model rights to deal with. If all your photos feature employees, have them sign off on their model rights via a release while they are working for you. Google will find your photos and index them. Hopefully then, others will find your Flickr photos useful and want to use them on their websites or social media. I might also suggest that using Flickr as your central repository for your small business photos will help you keep track of them and give you a good cloud service to store them that is free. And if you properly tag and describe your photos, I think you’ll be surprised how many people view them over time. If you’re more of a visual person than a wordsmith, leveraging photos to improve your small business SEO should be easy, enjoyable and...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Let’s Keep Score on the 2016 Predictions!
Articles over the last month or so have been looking back to 2015. This week many writers are making their predictions for 2016. Would someone please keep score and report back? Leadership, management and productivity Small business owners have been having trouble finding good employees for quite some time. Learn how to use employer brand management to attract top talent. In today’s environment retailers must constantly improve their customer experience. Here are ways to smartly approach this challenge. Moving forward, an important element will be providing great customer service to Millennials. We’re facing something of a retirement predicament. Here’s how small business can help close the retirement gap. Check your small business 2016 resolutions against this list of 16 items. Do you have your IRS forms yet? The IRS says it’s time to order them. Marketing and sales You certainly won’t use all of the 153 SEO tools on this list, but you should at least give it a quick once-over and find the best for your small business. And speaking of search, get yourself up-to-date on the current trends. In this MarketingDive article, 16 insiders tell us what they see happening in digital marketing in 2016. Get the most mileage out of your small business content marketing materials by using LinkedIn publisher. Is yours a B2B small business? If so, you need to review these 2016 trends and predictions. If you’re new to online marketing, this overview will get you the basics in a hurry. Reeta Gupta, founder of The Network, weighs in with her top five 2016 content marketing trends. Commandments always come in groups of 10. Here are 10 for customer engagement via your content marketing. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation If you’re launching a startup (or new) website, you’ll want Google to index it immediately. Here’s how. Startup equity investing is not just for the super-rich and that should create a lot of opportunities for both entrepreneurs and average investors. Politics, government and the economy Even before the stock market tanked in recent days, growth in the U.S. economy looked pretty...
read moreTwo simple ways to boost sales in your small business
It is often said that nothing happens until a sale is made. A corollary to that is if you make a lot of sales, a lot of things – and good things to boot – will happen. I’m not here today to sell you some secret sauce to improve sales, but give you two simple, and very concrete, easy-to-understand, tactics or strategies that will improve your ability to sell and I’ll start with the simplest, most direct piece of advice: Unless your prospect tells you directly to stop calling, keep calling. We know after years of experience that it typically takes five contacts with a prospect before a sale is made, but it can take longer. Keeping the communication going is at the top of your list as a sales professional. If you aren’t communicating, you can’t be selling. This doesn’t mean that you’re always applying pressure. Some great sales people live by the ABC rule –Always Be Closing – but “closing” in many settings doesn’t have to be a process that makes the prospect feel uncomfortable and this brings me to the second piece of guidance I have today: See yourself as a doctor, not as a sales person. In a good sales relationship, your job is to fully understand the problem that your prospect is experiencing and prescribe the best cure for it. Sadly, few doctors today have time to really sit down and talk to their patients, so you may have never experienced that kind of relationship with a physician. In any case, the wise and experienced diagnostician asks questions and listens carefully to the answers. The patient does most of the talking. This should be the approach you take with your prospects. If you work this way you’ll experience some immediate benefits. First, you’ll begin to see yourself as the true professional that you are. You’ll lose any of the baggage that sometimes comes with being in sales. Second, your prospects will realize that you care about them and that you are a thoughtful person. They will tell you more and might even reveal what’s really on their minds. That can give you a huge competitive advantage! Remember, if you come off as “salesy,” the first objective for your prospects will be to get you out of the room! Further, when people find doctors they like, they try to keep them for as long as they can. If your clients see you in this kind of light, they will value your relationship in the same way. Get the picture? Nothing I’ve outlined here is difficult. Be persistent, but care about the people you’re serving. That’s always a winning one-two...
read moreIs your small business ready to adopt ‘Facebook at Work’?
The question of whether instant messaging and social media in the workplace are productivity killers or loyalty enhancers has been an intense topic of debate for the last several years. As 2016 rolls in, Facebook, the social media heavyweight champion of the world, is going to put its mark on the topic. After having been in a closed beta mode throughout 2015, Facebook will debut its “Facebook at Work” enterprise service sometime in 2016. Companies will sign up with the service and employees can then join their company’s private Facebook at Work group. All the posting, messaging and scheduling features and tools will be essentially the same as what we’re all used to in the regular edition of Facebook. However, there won’t be any “cross talk or cross posting” between a person’s private Facebook presence and his or her Facebook at Work presence. What happens at work, stays at work. Facebook at Work has the potential to solve some problems that have been annoying small business owners for a while now, not the least of which is that employees enjoy communicating via social media while they’re on the job. Posting, communicating and responding to coworkers in a social media environment has become a way of life. With Facebook at Work, this can be done in a more controlled environment, for the protection of the company and the employees themselves. This could help employers build employee loyalty and serve as a special welcome to the millions of Millennials that will be so important to our workforce in the upcoming years. In other words, Facebook at Work, may represent a natural and positive evolution in the workplace environment. After all, everyone will already know how to use its tools and features. It will feel like slipping into a comfortable pair of old sneakers. I should mention that Facebook management isn’t the only force working feverishly to bring a social element to the workplace. The startup Slack has established leadership in this area. It is officially a tech “unicorn” – a privately held company with a valuation of more than $1 billion. With that much interest – read “money” – in socializing the workplace, Facebook had to make a serious play, and with all of its experience and advantages, it’s safe to bet that it has a good chance at eventually elbowing out or buying out Slack. It’s interesting to note that Slack is built around a multi-platform instant messaging service and Facebook has already adapted its instant message app (in its Android version) for Facebook at Work. The iOS version is due out soon. Being able to instant message and send information between coworkers through Facebook at Work may prove to be its most valuable service. First, these are becoming the natural means of communication today and also, using a private social network for these communications will help diminish the role of email in small businesses. Considering all the security risks that accompany email – even internal email – anything that reduces its presence in the workplace will be extremely valuable. One of the most dangerous security risks is when an email arrives that looks like it came from within your company, but is in fact a fraud. When communications are tied directly to a member of your Facebook at...
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