How to avoid this big company’s customer service fiasco
“I bought an HP all-in-one printer through Amazon the other day and encountered a problem when I set it up. During setup, the small touchscreen on the front of the printer – which is called the control center – stopped working. “It froze at one point. I uplugged and replugged in the printer and the […]
read moreThis week in small business: The stock market correction, beaucoup productivity hacks, and many marketing tips
It’s easy to talk about a drop in the equities market today, but Tim Duy was discussing it back in mid January. Check out the link at the bottom of today’s collection of curated content. On the way there, you’ll find some excellent advice on mistakes to avoid and productivity habits to adopt. Leadership, management, […]
read moreYouTube imposes strict new rules that prevent 1,000s from earning $$$
What do you think of this headline from the YouTube Creator Blog: Additional Changes to the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) to Better Protect Creators YouTube wants to do a better job protecting creators! Good news, right? Wrong. YouTube is cutting off the small guys from its monetization program. It supposedly wants to protect creators from “bad actors” who harm “inspiring and original creators who make their living on YouTube.” Cutting off monetization won’t stop bad actors. Frankly, the bad guys on the Internet seem to continue their evil deeds just because they can, even if there isn’t money in the proposition. In any case, YouTube is implementing stringent new requirements if you want to monetize your videos with AdSense ads: You need to have at least 4,000 hours of watchtime over the previous 12 months, and You need to have at least 1,000 subscribers to your channel. This is going to cut off thousands of small vloggers and hobbyists who have been picking up some extra money via their YouTube channels. YouTube promises that as soon as users meet both of those thresholds, they will be eligible for monetization if they are complying with YouTube policies. It looks to me like YouTube is turning its back on the small creators that made the platform such a success in favor of a handful of “professional” YouTube creators. It is certainly their right to manage their business as they deem best, but there’s a lot of wisdom in the adage, Dance with the girl that brung ya. The unintended consequence of YouTube’s move will be to create an opening for a competitor willing to allow monetization for smaller video creators. YouTube’s policy will certainly send new creators who aspire to make money online to different video platforms. Further, YouTube’s policy seems to fly in the face of the huge movement toward microinfluencers. Content providers can use sites like Twitch and Instagram that have monetization programs without the draconian rules YouTube seems intent on imposing on its creators. If you search my site, you’ll find a few older posts on ways you can use YouTube to earn money. I guess I’ll have to go back to those pretty soon and add the label “Never mind…” to them. YouTube says the new policy goes into effect on Feb. 20, 2018. Let’s hope it comes to its senses soon and eases restrictions. Otherwise, it may be taking the “you” out of YouTube....
read moreThree business lessons from the NFL ratings debacle
It was just a few years ago that the NFL reigned supreme among televised professional sports. Cable and broadcast networks got into bidding wars for the right to televise games. Now it seems that the NFL has gone from champ to chump very quickly, at least if you measure it by audience trends and its treatment in the popular press. And the problems of the NFL have had a ripple effect. ESPN was one of the winners in the last bidding war and now ESPN is one of the biggest financial boat anchors in entertainment. ESPN went on a spending spree for broadcast rights and on-air personalities, and now it’s going through a period of severe contraction with its subscriber base tumbling mightily in recent years. I’m not pinning all of ESPN’s troubles on the sagging popularity of the NFL, but certainly that has played a role. While NFL executives try to right the ship, the rest of us should look at the situation as a precautionary tale and learn from what has gone wrong on the gridiron. Suffering from hubris I think NFL leadership felt it was “too big to fail” and its popularity so embedded in the American psyche that nothing could threaten its place as the premier broadcast television sport. The idiom “How the mighty have fallen” is as old as the Bible and it’s a testament that no one is so highly placed or so strongly positioned that they can’t be toppled. It’s a good lesson for all of us. Whether you’re Google or the most popular diner on Main Street, your position today isn’t assurance of tomorrow. Remember the warning you see on any investment prospectus: Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. Not tending to core A 17 percent loss in TV ratings began in 2015 and seemed to pick up steam last season. Over exposure may have started the downward trend, but polls indicate that much of the current fan loss is due to the on-field protests that have been so much in the news. I sympathize with NFL management because they were trying to walk a line that kept protesting players happy while not offending a large segment of the fans. Once the protests were underway, I have no idea if they could have devised a strategy that would have been less damaging to viewership. The problem was not being able to anticipate the problem. The communication between team management, league officials, and players was not good enough to head off the problem before it got out of hand. Further, no one seemed to understand that everyone – owners, players, league officials – should be customer focused. Again, I think they all felt that they were in an enterprise that was too big to fail. Well, the fans have the last word on that one. Let’s be honest, the core football fan is the guy we used to call Joe Six Pack. He works hard through the week and wants to put all his daily headaches aside on Sundays to root for his team. When political strife starts to encroach on his entertainment time, he’ll find some other activity to enjoy. The lesson is to understand who your core customers are and make their experience everything they want it to...
read moreHow to ‘leverage’ your way to success this year
Archimedes said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.” The famous Greek mathematician was illustrating the power of leverage and you can use this power in your business. But instead of just one lever, you have several within your reach, and if you don’t use all of them, you aren’t moving your business as far or as fast as you can. The two “levers” I want to discuss here are: Other people, and Other people’s money. The great thing about doing business today, is that you can leverage other people and their money much more easily than ever before. That’s because you can use the online world as the tool to “grab” and move your levers. Leveraging other people I want to break this down into two big categories: Leveraging other people’s muscle, and Leveraging other people’s brains. By leveraging other people’s muscle, I mean finding people to do tasks you can’t do or don’t want to do. Some of these are sporadic jobs, and I’ll use logo design as an example. I’m sure that by now you know that you can connect with good designers through one of the freelance websites or specialty graphic design sites. Finding outside “muscle” to do this work for you is great and highly recommended, but today I want to focus more on offloading regular, daily, nitty-gritty tasks to one or more virtual assistants. Think of the repetitive tasks you do or the repetitive tasks you would like to do but always put off. Systemize these and then start your search for a virtual assistant. You can find a U.S.-based virtual assistant, or you can hook up with an off-shore VA. Although many of us have experienced nightmares when trying to work with an offshore customer service rep, there are many skills offshore VAs excel at. If you find a good Indian or Filipino VA, for example, the lower wage rate will allow you to pay for some tasks that aren’t cost effective at U.S. pay rates. The second area of leveraging other people is leveraging their knowledge and experience (brains). Coaches, mentors, and mastermind groups are great ways to benefit from the knowledge of others. YEC (Young Entrepreneur Council), Founder Society, and SCORE are good online places to begin your search for a mentor. Mastermind groups spring up all the time. They are often offshoots of courses or other special interests. Sometimes they can be organized as a private Facebook group. They are great because they also serve as accountability and encouragement groups. Connecting with a mentor, coach, or mastermind group can pay benefits beyond what you might imagine. It takes a lot of energy to push a business forward and if we are always depending on the “charge” stored in our own “batteries,” we can soon run out of energy. We need one or more outside sources of energy to give us the spark to keep going. Other people’s money Everything we’ve talking about here is a kind “muscle.” We’ve talked about heavy lifting muscle (getting tasks done) and mental muscle. Now we’re talking about financial muscle. It’s a simple fact that it takes a significant investment for a business to muscle its way into a leadership position. Without the financial resources to...
read moreOnline holiday sales beat estimates: What it means for you
Normally, it’s not a good thing when your financial prediction is off by about $1 billion; that’s how much Adobe Analytics’ holiday online shopping spend prediction missed the mark for the 2017 holiday shopping season. But in this case, Adobe’s miscue is online sellers’ windfall because actual online receipts outpaced Adobe’s estimate by almost $1 billion. In early November, Adobe predicted online sales of $107.4 billion; the actual figure hit $108.2 billion. Perhaps the most important figure in Adobe’s final analysis is that 52 percent of the holiday online traffic to retail websites came via mobile devices! Although we don’t know the exact nature of the mobile devices, I suspect tablet use is becoming an increasingly big share of what we classify as “mobile traffic.” If your observations are anything like mine, you are seeing more and more users rely on their tablets as a primary gateway to the online world. And, of course, we know that smartphones continue to be our constant companions. The lesson here is one we started to stress a couple of years ago: design your website for mobile first! Be sure that your site performs on smartphones; if it looks good on a smartphone, it will be fine on a tablet. Further, if you’re depending on a plugin or even a responsive template to automatically make your legacy site “mobile friendly,” double check your type faces, colors, and site structure to make sure they work on a small screen. Have friends and family members put your mobile site through its paces. If you are in a retail industry, can your customers do everything they might want to do via your mobile device? Can they easily accomplish these things or do they have to navigate multiple pages? I believe that one of the reasons mobile holiday online traffic outpaced legacy computer traffic is that many retailers are finally taking the move to mobile seriously. However, I also believe that we still have a lot of store and restaurant owners who are dragging their feet. Tip: If you own a restaurant, connect your website to some of the third-party services that provide home delivery and reservation services. If you don’t embrace the move to multi-channel sales, you will soon be left in the virtual dust as your competitors optimize their online presence....
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