Five pros you need to recruit to your small business team
The right professional advisors help small businesses grow. I don’t think anything has changed in business over the last several years more than the relationships between business owners, employees, contractors, advisors, consultants, and freelancers. Owners are still owners, but the lines between owners and all the other professionals with whom owners work are blurring. Small business owners have for a long time “outsourced” some vital functions – for example, there’s nothing new about having an established relationship with an independent accountant. But, there are other professionals who are new to the game. Let’s look at critical professional relationships that have almost always been outsourced as well as some new independent professionals you might want to recruit to your team. Mentor or coach The wise know what they don’t know. I’m not contradicting myself here. What I want you to understand is that wisdom is recognizing the limits of your knowledge and that’s why the most successful business owners and entrepreneurs work with mentors and coaches. Taking this just a step further, you need to connect with a coach or mentor who has experience that matches your situation. If you’ve been in business for a while and are now hitting a rocky patch, you need to find someone who has “fixer” or turnaround experience. If you’re in a crazy startup mode, that requires a different individual. Even if you are a start-up and feel you’re not in a position to get an “official coach” there are dedicated websites where you can obtain advice online. For example, SCORE is an excellent resource where you can get expertise and advice for free. Manta is another community where small business owners can share ideas and expertise. I encourage you to take steps today to find the right mentor for the position you and your business are in. Until we start working with people more experienced than ourselves we don’t know what we don’t know! Accountant Unless you come from an accounting, investment, or banking background, you probably have a lot to learn about the relationship between your business and its growth to cash flow, assets, taxation, payroll, and other sundry financial issues.In a great recently published MetLife paper on this topic, they note that only about a quarter of all businesses with between 11 and 25 employees have a controller or CFO. Further, whenever the topic revolves around money, it’s critical that you work with someone that you not only trust, but with whom you are also comfortable. You need to be open, honest and frank with your finance pro, and this person needs to be the same with you. The MetLife report offered some good tips for finding a financial advisor, including: Get a few recommendations when you’re searching for an accountant, bookkeeper, or independent CFO. When you have identified candidates, give each some smaller tasks as a kind of audition to find who is the best fit for you on both professional and personal levels. Benefits advisor Benefits and their costs are critical for small businesses today because of two market forces that are at odds with each other: The tight market for top talent requires small business to offer appealing benefits packages. The competitive business climate requires small businesses to hold down costs. Those requirements aren’t mutually exclusive, but any...
read moreHow good branding runs deeper than graphics and typography
Have you seen what Amazon is doing for Goodwill? You take an old Amazon box, fill it with items you want to donate to Goodwill, print out a label via the Amazon website, slap it on the box, and take your donation to the post office for mailing to the charity. This is a convenience for folks who don’t live near a Goodwill outlet and it also saves you from breaking down the cardboard box and having it take up space in your recycling. There’s one more thing it does: It builds Amazon’s brand image. We tend to consider branding in terms of logos, fonts, colors, social media posts, taglines, marketing, and advertising, but it really goes much further: You need to think about your public image. To broaden your vision of branding and improve it overall, consider these areas. Community and professional outreach. This includes programs like the one Amazon is doing with Goodwill, but it also includes traditional networking. The simple question to ask yourself is: “How involved am I in my community and professional organizations?” Your participation with these associations will help build and define your brand. You will gather a reputation and be known by it. When you’re the president of a chapter for a professional organization, that gets noticed. It gets reported in the press. You can hang the plaque on your wall. When you sponsor a pee-wee football team, or a float in the local parade, it gets noticed. I encourage you to put these activities on your website as well. When people click to your “About Us” page, they want to get a personal feeling for who you are and what your company stands for. These kinds of involvements are ideal for that purpose. The “face” and tone of your company. Do you train everyone on your team in the manner you want them to deal with the public and vendors? How many times does the phone have to ring before someone picks it up? Is the greeting always consistent and pleasant? How about your email correspondence? Is it professional, well laid out, grammatically correct with no spelling errors? People pick up on these things and they all are pieces of the puzzle that make up the image of your brand. Your facilities. If you’re a local business, what is the feeling people get when they walk through your door? Is it pleasant? Excuse me for asking, but how does it smell? You need to keep your premises tidy and organized. Failing to do so sends a bad message to everyone who visits your location and that message will inform their image of your brand. This also includes the deportment of your employees. They need to be regarded as professional, trustworthy, authoritative, pleasant, approachable, and more depending on your specific enterprise. If a prospect walks into your business and finds disinterested employees, that will mar your brand. Everything I’ve talked about here starts with you. If you don’t set the tone and the example in these important real-life branding areas, you have no right to expect more from your employees. In fact, you should expect them to detract from your branding. Further, as you demonstrate exemplary habits in these areas, train your team, and put systems in place to make sure that...
read moreThis week in small business: Tips from a BMOC, 2017 predictions, boost your reading speed and more
I predict that the 2017 business trend forecasts won’t stop being published until we all break the habit of writing 2016 on our checks. But that’s okay, we found a few good ones this week, along with a lot of advice for entrepreneurs and those managing startups. Leadership, management, and productivity Kelsey Clark gets the secrets to career success from her five favorite female bosses – a quick and good read to start 2017. Is your home office holding your back? S. Tia Brown delivers the entrepreneur how-to information you need to upgrade from home office to business space. How are you doing on your New Year’s resolutions? In this PCWorld article from Intel, you’ll learn how to train your brain for success in 2017. Ian Altman gets brave and predicts the top 10 business trends for 2017 in his Forbes piece. The most successful people tend to be voracious readers. If you really want to get up to speed (boost your words per minute), Tom Bilyeu offers some great tips and strategies. Marketing and sales Have a new product ready to launch? How will you promote it? According to Matt Lawton’s article, a survey of 730 senior marketers points to social media as your best bet. Here’s some more crystal ball gazing: 4 top SEO trends for 2017. If you’ve been focusing on GenXers and Millennials, you need to check out Connor Blakley’s ideas for marketing to Generation Z. Vicci Ricci must be a BMOC. After all, the college student’s social media reach is something like 250 million. Steve Young captures Ricci’s influencer marketing tips. Does getting 25,000 subscribers in 30 days and then monetizing them sound good? Cheryl Conner gives us the story of one young entrepreneur who went that route. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Isaac Asimov wrote the classic I, Robot. If he were writing today, he might write I, Digital Assistant Bot. Check out what Nicholas Badminton has to say about artificial intelligence and the economy in TechCrunch. I’m a major proponent of instilling business savvy in our children, so I appreciated Deep Patel’s Entrepreneur article, “5 Life Lessons You Kid Will Learn as a Young Entrepreneur.” Pricing is always a popular topic and we’ve heard a lot about the “freemium” model in recent years. Here’s why Courtney Williams rejected it for his...
read moreDigital Marketing Glossary: Must-know Technical Terms
You can’t tell the players without a scorecard and you can’t understand what’s going on in digital marketing unless you know the lingo. Here are the most important and frequently used terms you will encounter in the digital marketing world. 301 Redirect. A permanent redirect from one URL to another URL. 301 redirects are often used SEO purposes and in affiliate marketing. 302 Redirect. A temporary redirect from one URL to another URL. 404. An error message when a page cannot be found on a website. A/B Testing. A way to test two versions of a web page or item on a web page against each other for effectiveness. Ad Unit. A size-and-format specification for an ad. Aggregator. A tool or website that collects content from various websites. Many popular news websites are aggregators. Alexa Rank. A measure of a website’s popularity or traffic. A lower number reflects more traffic. Algorithm. A coded formula used to rank websites in search results. The most well known is the Google Search Algorithm. ALT Attribute. A line of text assigned to an image that is displayed when the user hovers over the image or the image does not load. ALT Text. See ALT Attribute. Anchor Text. The clickable text of a link. Authority. The more popular a website is (the more traffic it receives), the more authority it has. Avatar. An image or illustration used to represent a real person. Backlink. When one website links to your website. Black hat SEO. Tactics designed to improve a website’s SERP by leveraging loopholes in Google’s algorithm. Bot. See Crawler. Bounce Rate. The percentage of visitors who exit your site without viewing any additional pages. Breadcrumbs. A navigation trail on a website that shows visitors the pages they have clicked through to get to the current page they are looking at. Broken Link. A link that goes to a page or other website resource that no longer exists or has moved. Cache. Stored static versions of dynamic web pages. Using a cache improves load speed of a web page. Canonical. A “rel” tag that tells a search engine which is the original or preferred web page when the same page or content is repeated on a website. This prevents the page authority of that page from being diluted. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). A web language or system used to apply styles to web elements such as font size, color, background, and alignment in order to create visual design consistency. Click-through Rate (CTR). The percentage of clicks from users who have seen your offer: Clicks divided by impressions. Conversion. When a user takes the desired action, such as signing up for an email list or buying a product. Conversion Pixel. A 1×1 transparent image pixel placed on a web page whenever a conversion occurs. It is used for tracking and analytical purposes. Cookie. A text file stored on a website visitor’s browser that holds information about the user. Cost per Acquisition (CPA). The cost of acquiring one customer: Cost of advertising divided by the number of customers acquired. Cost per Click (CPC). How much you pay for each click on your ad. Cost per Lead (CPL). How much you pay for each click on your ad that results in a lead. Cost per Thousand (CPM). How...
read more3 automated ways to reuse and recycle for marketing success
When you reuse and recycle website content and social media marketing posts, you may not be saving any trees, but you are certainly saving yourself a lot of effort. Better yet, if you have the right “recycling” plugins and apps working for you, you can take time away from your digital marketing and not worry that you’re letting hot prospects escape your attention. Here are three good ones – and most of you should be using at least two of them. (You’ll see why in a moment.) Revive Old Post. This is a WordPress plugin that automatically “reshares” your older blogs on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You’ve put too much effort into creating those articles only to have them burst onto your social media stage merely one time. You set up the frequency at which you want to re-promote older content on your site. And, if you have posts or categories that shouldn’t be re-shared, you can exclude them. There is a free and paid version of this plugin. One of the main differences with the paid version is that it will include images in Tweets when you re-publicize a piece of your content. Edgar. You may be more familiar with Hootsuite and Buffer than Edgar. All of these are good and have their individuals strengths, but there is one advantage of Edgar’s that will motivate you to give it a hard look. Edgar will follow schedules to post on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, unlike most other automated social media tools, it will re-loop through its schedule, going back and re-posting items when it gets to the end of the content you’ve originally given it. In other words, it just doesn’t come to a dead stop – your queue never runs out of content. Further, you put your social media posts into categories and each category can have its own schedule. Edgar, however, is much more expensive than Hootsuite or Buffer, both of which have decent free plans. Edgar seems to start at around $50 a month. SocialJukebox. This is a newer player in the game and it’s another idea from the brain of Internet entrepreneur Tim Fargo. You create jukebox play lists of social media posts (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn). Each jukebox has its own schedule; you assign both hours and days of the week when you want to publish. A jukebox will either loop (randomly grabbing posts) or go through its posts once and stop. You can also assign a date range for a jukebox to post. You can tell a jukebox how many days to wait between repeating a post. SocialJukebox offers a free plan that limits you to a maximum of five tweets per day and one daily post on both Facebook and Linkedin. Paid plans range from around $20 to $100 a month. Earlier, I said you need two of these. Since Edgar and SocialJukebox share a lot of functionality, I would choose one or the other. If you have a WordPress website, I think Revive Old Post is a plugin you should definitely try out. Do you have any favorite tools that have automated your marketing? Don’t keep them a secret – Please share in the comments below!...
read more3 automated ways to reuse and recycle for marketing success
When you reuse and recycle website content and social media marketing posts, you may not be saving any trees, but you are certainly saving yourself a lot of effort. Better yet, if you have the right “recycling” plugins and apps working for you, you can take time away from your digital marketing and not worry that you’re letting hot prospects escape your attention. Here are three good ones – and most of you should be using at least two of them. (You’ll see why in a moment.) Revive Old Post. This is a WordPress plugin that automatically “reshares” your older blogs on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You’ve put too much effort into creating those articles only to have them burst onto your social media stage merely one time. You set up the frequency at which you want to re-promote older content on your site. And, if you have posts or categories that shouldn’t be re-shared, you can exclude them. There is a free and paid version of this plugin. One of the main differences with the paid version is that it will include images in Tweets when you re-publicize a piece of your content. Edgar. You may be more familiar with Hootsuite and Buffer than Edgar. All of these are good and have their individuals strengths, but there is one advantage of Edgar’s that will motivate you to give it a hard look. Edgar will follow schedules to post on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, unlike most other automated social media tools, it will re-loop through its schedule, going back and re-posting items when it gets to the end of the content you’ve originally given it. In other words, it just doesn’t come to a dead stop – your queue never runs out of content. Further, you put your social media posts into categories and each category can have its own schedule. Edgar, however, is much more expensive than Hootsuite or Buffer, both of which have decent free plans. Edgar seems to start at around $50 a month. SocialJukebox. This is a newer player in the game and it’s another idea from the brain of Internet entrepreneur Tim Fargo. You create jukebox play lists of social media posts (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn). Each jukebox has its own schedule; you assign both hours and days of the week when you want to publish. A jukebox will either loop (randomly grabbing posts) or go through its posts once and stop. You can also assign a date range for a jukebox to post. You can tell a jukebox how many days to wait between repeating a post. SocialJukebox offers a free plan that limits you to a maximum of five tweets per day and one daily post on both Facebook and Linkedin. Paid plans range from around $20 to $100 a month. Earlier, I said you need two of these. Since Edgar and SocialJukebox share a lot of functionality, I would choose one or the other. If you have a WordPress website, I think Revive Old Post is a plugin you should definitely try out. Do you have any favorite tools that have automated your marketing? Don’t keep them a secret – Please share in the comments below!...
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