For cost and coverage control, take this online health care tool for a test drive
By Susan Solovic, THE Small Business Expert Editor’s note: This is a sponsored post by UnitedHealthcare; however, all thoughts and opinions are my own. One of the things that has come to light in recent years is how little consumers really understand about health insurance. If you go buy a new car, before you leave the showroom, you’ll know every feature, have a feel for the leather interior, and know how much oomph it has…down to the last horsepower. But health insurance has been a mystery. Consumers often don’t understand what kind of health insurance they’ve purchased until it’s time to make a claim, and then many are surprised (in a bad way). Perhaps the single biggest benefits consumers have enjoyed today through the Internet is the ability to educate themselves better than ever before and there’s no reason that this benefit shouldn’t apply to health insurance. And that, I believe, is one of the biggest benefits of UnitedHealthcare’s online tool for small business owners. I’ve already discussed how this online system eliminates a list of “pain points” – such as improved cost controls and flexibility of coverage. In this article, I want to go a little deeper into the actual process and “unpack” a few more points that are critical to small business owners and their employees, including greatly improved understanding of the coverage you and your employees are buying. Answer three easy questions – your location, your number of employees, and when you want to start coverage – and the online tool gets busy (as shown in the short video below) setting up the three simple steps required to complete the process. (Many small business owners find that it takes only 20 minutes to get hooked up with the plans that best suit their team. However, even though you’re going to save time using this tool, in the end you’re going to better understand your coverage.) http://www.susansolovic.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/UHC-steps.2.mp4 To give you a quick overview of what to expect, let me walk you through the steps. 1. Select plans After I entered a zip code near where I live, UnitedHealthcare came back with six plans offered in my area. The most critical financial details of each plan are presented – costs to the employer, costs to the employee, deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums, drug costs, etc. At this point you can keep as many plans as you would like to offer. If, for some reason, you want to limit choices you can do it at this point. However, if you offer at least six levels of coverage, your employees can use UnitedHealthcare’s “fit finder” tool, which brings convenience and peace of mind to folks on your team when they’re working to choose the best coverage for themselves and their families. 2. Enter employee details Once you’ve settled on the array of coverage you would like to offer your employees, it’s time to get down to some more specific details: The employee ID (initials), Zip code of employee’s home, Employee age, and Employee gender. The employee’s spouse and children can be added at this point. UnitedHealthcare has set up this process to import details of your employees from Xero, Quickbooks, or Excel files, so most small business owners won’t have to be keying in this information. I’m telling you this here so...
read moreHow to make and use GIFs to increase Twitter engagement
Each social media platform has evolved to excel at sharing certain kinds of content and – despite its shortcomings – Twitter is one of the best platforms for sharing news about your business, your blog posts, and certain graphics, especially GIFs. GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format) are those animated mini-movie graphics that last just a second or three that loop back. They are powerful on Twitter because when someone is scanning a long list of Tweets, the motion in a GIF commands the Twitter user’s attention. Creating a GIF is easy. There are free online services that you can use. The process starts with a video. I’ve used Giphy in the past and found it to be pretty user friendly. Ideally, you’ll have a short video from which you want to capture a few seconds for your GIF. It can be an online file for which you have the URL or it can be a video file stored on your local computer. In the example below, I’m dragging a file from my desktop over to the Giphy window. (By the way, I used Giphy to make this GIF.) Once you have your video uploaded, use the online sliders to set the start point of your GIF and its duration. Beneath the sliders, you’ll find areas where you can type in a caption, if you want a message to be displayed on top of your GIF. You can also add options tags and a source URL. The tags are useful if you want people to help people find your GIF on the Giphy website and use it for their own content. Finally, you can share your GIF directly from Giphy, copy the link where your GIF lives on their website, grab embed code for your website, or download your GIF in various sizes. Don’t overuse GIFs. If all your posts flash GIFs in your followers’ eyes, at best they will start ignoring them, at worst, your followers will begin to become annoyed. However, the occasional use of a GIF is a good way to highlight special content and remind your followers that you’re still around and...
read moreThis week in small business: It’s like an MBA in a box!
This week’s collection of curated content from around the web touches on virtually every aspect of starting and leading a successful business. It’s like have an MBA program at your fingertips! Leadership, management, and productivity Dave Lavinsky says that although writing a business plan isn’t fun, it makes you build four important habits. I suspect many of us can use this advice from Ben Angel: 2 Awesome Ways to Motivate Yourself When You Feel Like Quitting. Tired of trying to think “outside of the box”? If so, take Glenn Llopis’ advice and think more strategically “in the box.” Newcomers – like Millennials and Gen Zers – often see opportunities veterans miss, says Tim Elmore, so not having industry experience could be your biggest advantage. Not only is it about the bottom line, it’s about a lot of the lines in between the bottom and top lines. Discover the important financial ratios in this sponsored post on the MasterCard Biz website. And if you aren’t using a small biz credit card, you should consider the advantage I outline in this MasterCard post. Marketing and sales What?! Smart companies aren’t marketing, says Steve Lucas. Check out what they feel is important. Discover how Zola grew its bottom line by giving away free products in this article by Kate Rockwood. In this Search Engine Land article, Chris Liversidge shares highlights and insights from two industry events where integrated search marketing was a hot topic this year. Can a company get over $700,000 in new leads in 25 days via cold emails? Jose Escobedo describes how one Filipino company did it. Marc Wayshak gives you 5 Simple Steps to The Best Sales Presentation of Your Life. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Genevieve Fish shares the best advice from nine women founders on starting a company. Angela Schonberg relays the entrepreneurial tips from 10 women in business. Need a business you can start for less than $10,000? It’s here for you in this slideshow by Aja McClanahan. In this Forbes article, Ashley Harris outlines seven ways to balance entrepreneurship and...
read moreAre you letting your analytics mislead you? Don’t make this common mistake
If you want to get to the important truth, you need to dig more deeply. That wisdom applies to life in general, but it’s especially important in business analytics. With the power of the Internet and all the software that we depend on each day, we are able to access all kinds of “analytics” and dashboards. However, if we just scan the top levels of information, we can miss some important facts. I’m going to use visitor acquisition to my website as an example. I have Jetpack statistics installed on my WordPress-powered website and I check them frequently. I was looking at “Referrers” recently to see the rates at which my social media sites were sending visitors to my website. I noted that, according to Jetpack, 31 visitors had come to my site from Facebook and 14 had come from Twitter. A little later I decided to touch bases with my Google Analytics to get a better picture of social media acquisitions. To do this, log into your Google Analytics account then on the navigational sidebar click ACQUISITION, then Social, then Overview. When I got to Google, the default reporting period was a little different than what I was using on Jetpack, so the numbers aren’t identical. However, the overall trend was about the same. It showed that I tallied 42 sessions from Facebook and 26 from Twitter. Now let me go down a little – but important – side path. These metrics, by themselves, are meaningless; they are just numbers on a glowing screen. You put meaning into them when you take action based on what they are telling you. I’m a believer in putting most of your effort into the areas where you will enjoy the biggest gains. And, if I want to apply that principle to social media visitor acquisition, this first look at my data would tell me that my greater opportunity would be to invest more in Facebook than in Twitter. However, when I viewed the full report on Google Analytics (click on view full report), the story took a sudden, and unexpected, twist: Even though sessions from Twitter were fewer in number, they accounted for more page views and more time spent on my website than their Facebook counterparts. In other words, they were far more deeply engaged with my content. Visitors from Twitter looked at an average of four pages per session and stayed on my site for nearly five minutes. Facebook visitors looked at a little more than two pages and were on my site for just over a minute on average. Which visitors do you think are more valuable to me? I would have to say that the visitors who come from Twitter are far more serious about what I’m doing than those who come from Facebook. Had I merely looked at the top level of Jetpack referrer and Google Analytics acquisition statistics, I would never have seen this important truth about visitors to my site. I would not have realized how much more value visitors from Twitter are than the average Facebook visitor. Whenever you can drill down in your analytics, take the time to do so. Otherwise you may be misleading...
read moreEntrepreneur: Your opening act was a success. What do you have for Act II?
Success in business is a moving target, and today the target is moving more quickly than ever before: Competitors push the target further away. Changes in technology move the target to one side or the other. Consumer preferences and demographics evolve, changing the size and shape of the target. We talk about having a laser-like focus on implementing your business plan, but if that laser focus doesn’t have any peripheral vision or limits your ability to look further down the road, you can find yourself in big trouble after having successfully piloted a startup or small business to a profitable beginning. Let me give you a common scenario. You’re first with a new product or service, or a fresh approach to an existing product or service. If you’re successful, prospective competitors will soon be hatching their plans. And, since you’re doing well in your lane, they’ll be looking for the “next thing” that will be more appealing to your customers. In other words, rather than compete with you directly, the smart competitor will try to find ways to do what you’re doing but do it better somehow. Therefore, you need to go into any new business with plans to protect your position and your financial structure. Of course, a major component of this is to be constantly improving your core offering. In addition to that, you need to start any entrepreneurial project with a list of items that will be your “next big thing.” Some of the software as a service and app developers are excellent at this. Let me give you an example. I use ThriveLeads on my WordPress website. It was a major product of Thrive Themes when I first adopted their software. I thought it was one of the better choices for creating opt-in forms. The core mission of ThriveThemes is converting website visitors. Since their initial offerings – A WordPress opt-in plugin and template themes – the company has expanded by adding a Content Builder, its Landing Pages app and templates, a quiz builder, and recently Thrive Architect, a WordPress visual editor. You don’t have to be in the technology sector to have these kinds of plans and strategies. Retailers can always experiment to find ancillary products that will complement their legacy core and even one day replace it. Traditional service providers can do it as well. A one-person house cleaning operation can expand to clean rentals, homes going up for sale, and commercial properties. However, don’t think that this merely means adding more services to your brochure or business card. Expanding into these related service areas would take a different approach to marketing. More is required than just saying you service landlords with their rental properties. Let me add one more note to this that is specifically directed to one group of entrepreneurs. If you’re thinking about pursuing investors, they will be keenly interested in what your follow-on plans are after you get your initial operation up and running. If you can’t show that you have the ability to see beyond the immediate horizon, they will be reluctant to believe your project holds the promise of sustainable...
read moreHow reuse, repurpose Facebook Live videos for your content marketing
Are you squeezing all the value out of your content? Manufacturers work hard to eliminate waste, but I don’t think we’re as vigilant with our content marketing materials. I’ve written before about ways to reuse and repurpose written materials, but today I want to point out a simple and extremely productive way to repurpose videos. It starts with a Facebook Live session, which I hope you are conducting. If you aren’t using Facebook Live or don’t really understand what it’s about or how it can benefit you, check out this article. However, there are some downsides with Facebook Live: The videos are only available on Facebook, They get pushed off your fans’ and friends’ news feeds very quickly, and They get lost on your own Facebook page as you publish more Facebook content. Considering the power and popularity of video, these limitations are severe drawbacks to Facebook Live. You need to get more value out of your Facebook Live sessions and to do this, you need to get your Facebook Live videos into YouTube and feature them on your website. Fortunately, there’s a way to download these videos from Facebook and then upload them to YouTube. Once they are on YouTube, you can put them wherever you think they will serve you well. Here are the steps: 1. Find your video on your Facebook page. Then press Play followed by Pause. 2. With the video paused, right-click (PC) or control-click (Mac) inside the screen. This gives you a little menu where you can reveal the video URL. Copy the URL. 3. Paste the URL into the address bar of your browser then change “www” to “m” and press ENTER. This takes you to the mobile page version of your video. 4. Press Play followed by Pause again. Then with the video paused, right-click (PC) or control-click (Mac) inside the screen. Another menu will appear giving you the option to Download the video. 5. Download the video to a convenient folder. The file will be in MP4 format, which you can then upload to your YouTube channel, or use it in other places on the Internet....
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