Faol-Inc.Com - Education Guide

The online marketing landscape has become so complex that cutting through the “noise” is now one of the biggest problems small businesses face. Sorting out WHERE and HOW to spend our limited time and resources is increasingly the challenge.

So Many New Choices

Part of the problem is that we are bombarded right and left with new choices.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has taken on a much higher profile as the number of indexed Web pages balloons and it gets harder to be found in search engines like Google. The search marketing industry is now in the multi-billion dollar range. Not only is search growing, but it is increasingly being broken down into distinct specialties, such as local search, paid search and mobile search marketing.

Affiliate marketing has become big business, too … a more-than $6 Billion a year industry.

Blogs, YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and every manner of social media site are discussed ad nauseum. Yet, many businesspeople do not have the time it takes to investigate these social media sites. Most people have only the vaguest idea what these sites do or how to use them — perhaps just a nagging sense that the sites are somehow “hot.” ‘Better not be left behind,’ you think.

OK, It’s Complex. So What Do We Do?

Recently I’ve been experimenting with a chart to visually demonstrate where we small businesses can best spend our limited time and dollars on online marketing. The chart can be a useful tool to quickly cut through all the noise — and focus.

The chart uses concentric circles to outline an online marketing strategy. Here is the chart I’ve come up with (click image for larger version):

The most important elements of an online marketing strategy appear in the center two circles. Those are the activities you will get the greatest return from, for the time and money you spend on them.

As you move farther toward the outside circle, most business will spend more time and/or money for smaller overall return. In other words, the return on investment will be smaller, the farther out from the center circle you get.

Center circle – At the center of the chart is your website, which should be the core of your online marketing plan. Hopefully if you are reading this article, you already have a website and it’s not a question of IF you should have a website, but how you can improve it. First impressions count and today’s prospects and customers will form impressions of the quality of your products and services from your website. Plus, by investing in smarter technology you can make your website work harder to generate leads and sales. Consequently, spending time to improve your website can bring the biggest payoff. (If you don’t have a business website, get thee to a Web designer now!)

Second circle – The second circle outlines activities that most businesses will see a meaningful return from. Investing in search engine optimization, setting up a blog, growing and leveraging your house email list, issuing press releases through an online distribution service such as PRNewswire or PRWeb, and doing PPC ad campaigns are key strategies most small businesses in America can get value from commensurate with the time and money invested.

Outer circle – The light yellow circle on the outside contains activities that generate a lot of the “noise” that confuses most small businesspeople. Not that I’m against those activities — not at all. In fact, some of them bring excellent results for the right kinds of businesses. It’s just that the return from such activities tends to be lower compared with the time or money you put into them.

Marketing always involves prioritizing. There’s never enough time, staff or budget to do everything.

What you don’t do is as important as what you do. You could end up wasting a lot of time by focusing too much on the outer circle, and neglecting the inner two circles. For instance, you could be driving visitors to your website but failing to convert them once they get there, because your website looks unprofessional or needs a message overhaul or needs logical navigation.

Some businesses simply decide that activities in the outer circle are not worth doing, no matter how ga-ga others seem to be about them.

Thoughts?

What would you change, eliminate or add to this chart?

And how would you fit e-commerce and freelance businesses into this type of chart? For instance, where do eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Etsy, Elance and other online marketplaces fit in to a small business’s online marketing strategy?

The other thought about this chart is that it can be a living/breathing part of your marketing plan. You could customize the chart specifically for your business, in order to get everyone on your team on the same page.

I’d like to hear what you think.

Share This

Source: Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends

Any small business reaches a point at which the inability to delegate will cripple a manager. Yes, delegation is a critical skill. You must always ask yourself if you are doing something that someone else could do. Ultimately, as a manager, you should strive to spend your time on the things that ONLY you can do, like generating new business, developing new products, or strengthening client relationships. Delegation is the methodology for scaling a business.

Here are a few tips that a small business manager should keep in mind:

(1) Identify what you can delegate! If your team members can do something 80% as well as you or better, consider delegating the responsibility.

(2) Delegate according to your employees’ interests. Whenever possible, consider the skills or interests that your team wants to develop, and try to pair tasks with these desires. Self-interest is the best path to alignment.

(3) Be willing to let go, even when you disagree. Truly successful delegation involves going along with the judgment of your employees. Challenge yourself to empower your team to make decisions on delegated tasks. A greater sense of ownership will yield better performance.

(4) Recognize the issues that you need to deal with yourself. Of course, at the end of the day, there are some tasks that simply cannot be delegated.

Behance articles and tips are adapted from the writing and research of Scott Belsky and the Behance team. Behance runs the Behance Creative Network , the Creative Jobs List, and develops knowledge, products, and services that help creative professionals make ideas happen.

All Information (c) Scott Belsky, Behance LLC

Share This

Source: Scott Belsky of Behance

If ever a technology had a public relations problem, RFID is it. Saddled with the moniker “spychips” and attracting conspiracy theorists in droves, it is dogged by an image problem.

And that’s a shame, because RFID is a marvelous technology.

As consumers, millions of us use RFID every day whether we realize it or not.

RFID saves lives when used in hospitals to keep track of infants, life-saving equipment and medical instruments. It can help us recover our pets if they are lost. Farmers use it to keep track of livestock.  And it makes our lives more convenient in many daily uses — everything from allowing us to use the fast lane on toll roads, to electronic security badges to enter and protect buildings.

What is RFID?

The easiest way to explain RFID — which stands for radio frequency identification — is to liken it to barcodes on consumer goods.  Imagine yourself in a supermarket. When a can of soup with a barcode on the label passes in front of the scanner, the cash register picks up information about that can. It can tell the price, the discount from the two-for-one special this week, and so on.

RFID is somewhat similar. When an object with an RFID tag attached to it passes within a certain distance of an RFID reader device, the device picks up information, too. It can tell what the object is and details about it, just like with the barcode.

The difference with RFID is that the item does not need to pass directly in front of a scanner. It only needs to be within a certain distance — anywhere from a few inches away to a few yards away. The reader picks up the information wirelessly via a radio frequency signal, instead of via an optical scanner. That means the tagged item just needs to be close by, not positioned carefully in front of a scanner or reader item by item — allowing more items to be “read” much more quickly than with barcodes.

RFID is different in other ways from barcodes and there are even differences among the various types of RFID tags. You can go here for a technical definition. But for most of us, the above description usually suffices.

Urban Myths by Conspiracy Theorists

Unfortunately, RFID just can’t seem to get away from its bad reputation. It is like the dirt cloud that accompanies PigPen, the character in the Peanuts comic strip, everywhere he goes.

RFID in recent years has been the subject of urban myths that stubbornly persist, despite being debunked over and over.

RFID has been claimed to be the ‘mark of the beast,’ a myth linked to extreme conspiracy theories. Even though that myth has been soundly debunked at Snopes.com, people continue to spread it.

Another urban myth is the false assertion that Big Brother government is watching us via RFID chips embedded in $20 bills. That led to the comedy of people running around microwaving twenty-dollar bills in an effort to prove they contained RFID chips — and leading some to wonder, ‘don’t these people have anything better to do?’. Not to mention being a waste of good money. That myth too has been debunked. Still, some believe it.

RFID’s Powers are Over-estimated

OK, so most of us will quickly dismiss the conspiracy theorists and the tinfoil hat types. But a deeper issue is the way RFID’s powers are seriously over-estimated and misunderstood by the public, media and elected officials.

The big concern of the public is privacy. And privacy is a valid concern.

But privacy is a concern that applies to a much broader range of consumer practices and not uniquely to RFID. Today with proliferating marketing databases and a Google index containing billions of pages, not to mention highly-publicized identity thefts, sometimes it feels like nothing is private anymore.

Who shouldn’t be concerned about privacy? That’s why consumers pay more attention to companies’ privacy policies and data security these days.

However, the issue with RFID is that people connect dots that don’t exist. RFID gets put under the microscope in ways it does not deserve.

For instance, a huge practical limitation to RFID privacy breaches is distance. Most RFID tags are activated only when they come into very close proximity to a special RFID reader. And most RFID tags can only broadcast within a very short distance, i.e., inches or feet. That means the item with an RFID tag has to be pretty close to an RFID reader. Yet, people often assume that if somehow you have consumer goods in your home with RFID tags, someone spying from miles away could make a list of everything you have. Or that your movements could be tracked hundreds or thousands of miles away.

As an aside, a technology such as GPS can in fact track a thing or, say a person in a vehicle, remotely from far away, by triangulating off of satellites. Yet GPS, for whatever reason, is not dogged by the same bad rap as RFID. (Read: What is GPS?)

Another protection is encryption. When RFID is used in payment applications or highly sensitive situations, the data is either encrypted or it simply transmits a numeric code back to a computer system. The computer system, not the RFID tag, contains the customer’s private account information. Even if someone managed to get within a few feet and could eavesdrop on an RFID signal, they would not get any identifying information. All they would get is encrypted data or a numeric code that is meaningless without also cracking into the computer system.

And if hackers are going to break into a computer system, why would they bother with RFID tags in the first place.? It would be easier to skip that step and go straight to the computer database.

Let’s face it. If someone wanted to track your consumer purchases or steal your identity, there are easier, cheaper and better ways to do that. For instance, what about store loyalty cards that record everything you buy? What about Amazon wish lists that can be publicly searched? What about plain old dumpster diving?

Overreaction Due to Misunderstanding

The result has been media reports that whip up fear; public relations debacles for organizations that underestimated the public’s misimpressions and failed to proactively address privacy concerns; and misguided legislative initiatives to “protect” the public from this so-called “spy” technology.

What Should You Do?

(1) If you are a consumer don’t fear RFID. There’s nothing inherently dangerous in the technology itself. It’s less of a threat to privacy than many other practices and technologies today. Look for responsible companies and do business with them, and don’t worry about which technology they happen to be using. And remember, you’re probably using RFID technology whether you know it or not, because RFID is used in so many ways today.

(2) If you are in a business or governmental agency that employs RFID in consumer-facing applications, or is considering it, don’t underestimate the public’s concern over privacy. Privacy is a big issue. Take precautions, such as encryption, or disable RFID tags before they leave the store, to protect privacy. Also, don’t assume the public knows what you know about RFID. Go out of your way to explain how you are safeguarding the public’s privacy. Be responsible AND proactive.

(3) If you are in a law-making position, seek to learn about the technology before enacting laws. Get some expert advice. Don’t hear from privacy advocates only. Seek out technologists to explain the technology’s practical limitations and safeguards, not just its theoretical powers. As one commentator pointed out recently, if laws under consideration today had been passed years ago, the public would never have enjoyed such conveniences as the EZPass toll payment system, which uses RFID. It would have been banned. And that would be a shame.

Share This

Source: Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends

Self-starters are often successful doing everything themselves. However, when forced to grow beyond the one gal/guy-show, many creative professionals are unable to take the leap from a solo success to a successful collaboration.

The transition from running with your own ideas to working with a creative team can be painful. The skills needed to lead yourself (primarily self-reliance) are quite different than the skills required to lead others. Once the best candidate for every task, you can become a victim of your own talents as you are forced to delegate, share ownership, and “let things go.”

Here are a few classic problems that Behance Reseach has observed:

Problem #1: You are doing things that can be done by others (although, admittedly not quite as well). Yes, it is always ideal when the head designer or band leader can deal directly with any inquiry. However, with such a task, the leader is not doing the critical things that only he/she can do. The leader of any creative endeavor should focus on the things that ONLY he/she can do - the stuff that others cannot do. You must let go of the rest.

Problem #2: As the founder, you’re still acting and thinking as the sole owner. When you fail to share ownership, you’ll fail to get those around you to care. This is not about money, it is about mentality. Having only one person take the extra mile to spread the word and think of solutions to problems is not enough. You need to engage your team as owners by sharing credit, sharing responsibility, and sharing financial rewards.

Problem #3: You just want your team to get the job done rather than learn how to do the job better. Remember that the people who work for you are likely interested in more than money; they want to become experts. Besides being the leader, you need to be a teacher. Find opportunities to engage your team in whatever interests them, even if it is beyond the scope of their job.

No great creative project can thrive (or even survive) off the energy of one person. You must be able to evolve with the scope of your creative ideas in order to make them happen.

Behance articles and tips are adapted from the writing and research of Scott Belsky and the Behance team. Behance runs the Behance Creative Network , the Creative Jobs List, and develops knowledge, products, and services that help creative professionals make ideas happen.

All Information (c) Scott Belsky, Behance LLC

Share This

Source: Scott Belsky of Behance

Hackers have a new shtick: gaming the search engines. And they are using small business websites and personal blogs to do it.

There is an alarming trend in which hackers take over small business websites and blogs and use them as link drones to link to third-party sites. Their goal: to get those third-party websites to the top of the search engines.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the bad guys are so sneaky your site may have been compromised, but you might not even know it. And if that happens your search engine rankings could tank.

This activity is happening with greater frequency and it’s happening to small businesses and entrepreneurs. It even happened to Al Gore. In November 2007 his climate blog was compromised and became the poster child of this type of hacking.

Not Just Ecommerce Sites Affected

Some people still envision hackers as high school kids playing pranks and vandalizing sites. But they long ago graduated into crime rings involving credit card theft and identify-theft. Now they’re on to their latest crime spree: spamming the search engines.

If you’re like me, when you heard about hacking attacks in the past you probably were mildly interested for all of 15 minutes. Then you promptly put it out of your mind, thinking one of 3 things:

“With the millions of websites out there, odds are it won’t happen to our company website”

Or

“We don’t run an ecommerce site so there’s nothing of value for a hacker – no credit card numbers, no confidential customer data”

Or

“I write a personal blog and no hacker could possibly be interested in that!”

Well — don’t get complacent.

Since last year (2007) the number of hackings of blogs and smaller content-based websites is on the rise.

The hackers are attacking smaller sites and blogs to take advantage of laxer security (after all, who worries much about security for a blog?). This is not just random activity, but part of an organized scheme. They search through the Web for certain types of software or back-end configurations that they’ve learned how to crack and go after hundreds or thousands of sites at a time.

According to StopBadware.org, that organization “has seen hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of sites that have been compromised at the same time with links pointing back to a single central point of infection.”

It’s All About Search Engine Spam

The hackers’ goal is to gain control of your site so that they can insert links from your site to “bad neighborhoods” – adult sites, ringtone sites, and pharmaceutical sites. And by pharmaceutical sites I don’t mean Merck or AstraZeneca, but rather that shady offshore site claiming to sell drugs without a prescription.

When the hackers insert the links into your site they are crafty. They hide the unauthorized links from casual observation. You could go on for days, weeks or months without realizing the links are there. However, the search engine spiders can see the links and may penalize your site for promoting spam. Worse, even if you manually remove the links, they may reappear because the hackers install hidden scripts that generate the links again.

So what happens if your website gets hacked? It’s not pleasant. It means extra work and probably some extra expense. I know. It happened to one of my sites this past Christmas Eve.

In my case it took a few intensive days of work and lots of help from both my Web hosting company and my contract webmaster to resolve. Among other things we had to revert to earlier backups of the site code and databases.

Afterwards I decided to make it a point to write regularly and often about this alarming trend, to raise awareness.

How to Protect Your Website or Blog

I’m no security expert and don’t claim to have all the answers myself. But from a practical standpoint, here are 3 steps to take:

(1) Talk this issue over with your internal tech team or outsourced webmaster, if you have one. Ask them to do a security audit to nip vulnerabilities in the bud.

(2) If you suspect a hacking, and do not have the luxury of an in-house tech team or dedicated external provider, get technical help immediately. Start with your hosting company. Even as a reasonably tech-savvy business owner, I could never have fixed things by myself. These hackings are too devious.

(3) Read up. Either you or someone in your organization should add this topic to your business reading. Become educated about the risks, how to spot trouble, and how to avoid it. Here are some articles and sites to read or to forward to others in your organization:

StopBadware.org

How to Protect Your WordPress Site (my own experience)

SpyBye

Google Online Security Blog

BlogSecurity.net

Oh, and good luck!

Share This

Source: Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends

We live in a world of choices. When we buy, we have to make a choice between varieties, brands, and sizes. Similarly, when we work we have to decide what to focus on and how to use our time. While prioritization helps us focus, our minds still have the tendency to wander. We are most likely to focus on whatever catches our eye. Along the lines of “out of sight, out of mind” we learn that “right before our eyes, actions thrive.”

It is no secret that design is a critical element of productivity. Design helps us organize thoughts and maintain a sense of order amidst creative chaos. However, design is also a valuable tool for managing our own attention span. Design can help us advertise actions to ourselves.

Think of it as your own personal Madison Avenue marketing agency. You have some critical, time-intensive projects that will require your energy and relentless focus. Your time is precious currency. How are you going to advertise the project – and its many action steps – to yourself?

When you have a project that is tracked with a beautiful chart or elegant sketchbook, you are more likely to focus on it. The attention you give to various parts of your life is an emotional choice. Recognize the power of a personal productivity marketing strategy, then launch a few advertising campaigns!

Some Tips for Advertising Action To Yourself!
• Keep Variety: Colorful post-it notes have a huge following. However, when you use too many of one color, you will start tuning them out! Use different colors and materials to keep your advertising fresh.
• Seek Quality: You are most likely to stay loyal to an organization system when you are attracted to it! The little details (the pens you use, the paper, the design) make a big difference.
• Be Bold: The Behance team has found that bold methods are the best methods when it comes to featuring action steps. Think big signs and screen savers with project names or energy maps!

Behance articles and tips are adapted from the writing and research of Scott Belsky and the Behance team. Behance runs the Behance Creative Network , the Creative Jobs List, and develops knowledge, products, and services that help creative professionals make ideas happen.

All Information (c) Scott Belsky, Behance LLC

Share This

Source: Scott Belsky of Behance

RSS is one of those tools that’s phenomenally wonderful for (1) website/blog publishers and (2) readers who are information junkies or looking to stay up to date efficiently.

Unfortunately, RSS is saddled with this incredibly geeky nomenclature that makes it tough to describe. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about when I say RSS, start here.)

But you know RSS has arrived and is valued when (1) business owners start displaying their RSS feed counters on their sites, and (2) start dressing up their RSS icons.

Dressing up? Heck, they’re downright getting artistic about them.

A Brief History of the RSS Icon

In the beginning, the RSS icon was a rather drab orange button that initially said XML on it, then RSS. As in this:

Then in late 2005, the powers that be, including Microsoft, standardized to a slightly more artistic and abstract RSS button. They adopted the Firefox browser’s feed icon. It was still orange, but the rounded corners and white swooshes at least made it more interesting, as in this:

Still, RSS remained the stuff of geekdom, until FeedBurner started allowing you to track your RSS subscriber numbers. That made the marketers take notice, but at first the numbers were small so it took awhile for attention to grow. Then one day Google Reader started reporting numbers of subscribers. That made the pro bloggers and Internet entrepreneurs sit up and pay attention. Suddenly those few hundred or (for the lucky ones) few thousand subscribers jumped to many thousands, even tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

RSS numbers now looked meaningful. Site owners started wearing little counters on their sites showing their RSS subscribers, like this:

In early 2007 lists started popping up where some industrious souls had manually rounded up the Top 40 FeedBurner feeds, or the Top 100 FeedBurner feeds.

Suddenly, “What’s your FeedBurner count?” was on everybody’s minds.

Amazing, isn’t it, what some increasing numbers and a little vanity will do.

Dressing Up your RSS Icons

But the real signal that RSS had arrived and was being taken seriously is when entrepreneurs and business owners stopped burying RSS icons below the fold of their sites, and starting putting them front and center — and showing them off.

Not only were they showing them off, but they started dressing them up to call attention to them. Last year I started noticing some fanciful things being done with RSS icons. Now it seems everywhere I turn on the Web I bump into some new and interesting variation on the standard RSS button.

Just for fun, let’s take a look at some of the interesting ways RSS icons are being dressed up.

First, there’s Frantic Industries’ “Cube with a flair” RSS button:

There’s Copyblogger’s “Hanging off the Edge” way of showing the RSS icon:

The bold watermark RSS (see it “behind” the subscription block) comes from Joel Comm:

The RSS icon as sticker is from Awake at the Wheel (with accompanying email subscription sticker):

The cool blue icon turned on its head at Zen Habits makes you calm:

There’s the BIG BOLD 3-D button from Internet Business Mart:

RSS goes round, with Randa Clay Designs’ selection of round RSS icons in colors of the rainbow:

There’s the ultra-contemporary black RSS icon with a flair … and a better looking feed counter next to it, at Freelance Switch:

There’s Business Opportunities blog’s understated rather-have-you-subscribe-via-email-to-feed-updates approach (to encourage people to subscribe for email updates, which is a more active reminder than simply subscribing in a feedreader):

Or try this creative RSS button paper-clipped to the site at SpoonGraphics:

But my favorite of all, is the RSS icon in the dog bowl. Search Engine Guide, knowing that people are drawn to pictures of pets and kids, manages to work a friendly pet theme onto a search marketing site, using a cute puppy dog logo. And in their recent site re-design they continued the pet theme by putting their RSS icon in the dog bowl.

How Do You Get One of Those Cool Icons?

There’s a site where you can download and customize the standard RSS Feed icon to suit your website or blog design. Or you can take an online tutorial in how to use Photoshop to create a round RSS button.

Or, if you are graphically challenged like me, you could just hire a designer to do wonderful things with your RSS icon to integrate it into a WOW design. Someday I will do that.

Why Should You Care?

Vanity and entertainment aside, what exactly does all this attention on RSS feed icons get you?

All of the creative examples above come from small businesses and entrepreneurs. I find this activity important because it suggests that small businesses are discovering the value of RSS.

And the real value of RSS to the small business owner with a business website / blog lies in creating a loyal community of followers. Instead of small businesses having static brochure-ware websites, anyone can begin to develop a loyal community online that engages people.

Start a blog with an RSS feed and you, too, can have a loyal community. You don’t need more than that. Even if your blog gets 50 or 100 regular readers a week, it’s still a community who are interested in YOUR business.

Be careful not to dismiss RSS subscribers as geeks, either. If you are NOT in tech industries you might assume RSS does not apply to your industry. That could be a mistake.

True, some RSS aficianados are geeks.

But I’ve found with my own audience that most RSS subscribers are not geeks, but are actually entrepreneurs, wannabe entrepreneurs, marketers, analysts, journalists, business owners and “information hounds.” They are people who want copious amounts of information to stay up to date. It’s the desire for information that characterizes them, not necessarily whether they work in a tech field or even are early adopters of tech generally.

For instance, I spoke to a group of librarians and school educators recently. Most didn’t know what a podcast was. Some of the librarians had never seen an iPod in person before. But the majority subscribed to RSS feeds.

Put a little attention to your RSS-enabled blog, by blogging regularly, and gradually that community will grow. It took me 14 months to get to the first 100 RSS subscribers. Eventually the law of increasing returns kicks in. As you touch more and more people each day, the word spreads. Before you know it, the pace of subscriber growth will accelerate and your network (community) will grow exponentially.

From the tiny acorn the mighty oak grows.

Share This

Source: Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends

(Part Two of a series, Part One can be found here)
Think about your favorite part of running your business. (OK, besides counting the money.) Is it the independence you feel from being your own boss? The pride of ownership in something you’ve built? The satisfaction of having made it this far?

Or might it also be the pleasure you get from providing a service that others value?

We humans are a very social lot. Without getting too academic, a pretty common tenet of psychology states that our greatest satisfaction comes from adding value to the lives of others. I know that in my business, my greatest satisfaction comes from the result of the work we do – providing a key source of revenue for scores of talented publishers. So think about that question again – what gives you the greatest satisfaction in your business?

I know the answer for my friend Mark, who runs a successful family restaurant near where I live. For him, it’s the countless exchanges he has each and every day with his customers. His place is always full of people, always buzzing, and Mark’s at the center of it all. He knows nearly everyone who comes in, and makes a point of getting to know the newcomers. He remembers your children’s names, your favorite wine, or the fact that you’ve been traveling too much lately. And when he comes by your table, nothing seems to please him more than to tell a story about his business – where he got the special cheese in the pizza, for example, or the day last week when a local winemaker came for dinner. In short, Mark’s greatest pleasure seems to be the conversations he has with his clientele.

And his restaurant is, in effect, a platform for those conversations. It’s a truism for nearly every successful local business I’ve seen: The owners are engaged with their clients, they know them well, and moreover, they are seen as leaders and storytellers – masters of their domain, and more than happy to talk about it.

Now, that is a lot of throat clearing to get to the first topic I promised to talk about in this post: Search as the driver of customer intent. But stick with me here, I think there’s a real connection.

First, as I intonated in my last post, search has become your customers’ interface to the web. It’s how they ask questions, research buying decisions, and increasingly, how they understand who you are and what service or product you provide. Given that, the question becomes: When folks find you on the web, is your site like Mark’s restaurant? If they are returning customers, does your site greet them warmly, invite them in for a glass of wine, remember their kids’ names? If it’s the first time someone’s come by, does your site welcome them in and tell a story that engages and connects?

It’s a great way to think about designing what is, in essence, a proxy for your physical business online. Online, as in your storefront, you need to be in conversation with your customers. And the better that conversation, the stronger your business will be.

In my next post, I’ll cover some simple ways your presence on the web, as well as your marketing, can become more conversational.

(Image Credit)

Share This

Source: John Battelle of SearchBlog

Every action taken (or not taken) either pushes your idea forward or holds it back. Sometimes we ignore the intangible elements of productivity, namely self-awareness, discipline, and confidence. You must manage yourself as you manage ideas. If you stop and think about it, your ability to make ideas happen is dependent on you and…the ball.

Are you moving the ball forward?
With everything you say and do, you either move the ball forward or backwards. Excess chatter in meetings, repetitive questions, and inconsequential concerns only distract you and others from action - thus moving the ball backwards. Aspire to content-make rather than commentate. Moving the ball forward is adding value that enriches and expedites the outcome.

Is the ball even moving?
Insecurity and apathy can inhibit progress. In the process of pursuing ideas, you need to keep the ball in motion. Remember, idle balls sitting still on the floor are dangerous: you can trip on them. Catch yourself when the components of an active project are still. Dwelling over inactive projects can destroy motivation.

Is your eye on the ball?
Typical meetings are full of digressions and points made beyond the scope of the meeting. Sometimes interesting stuff takes the place of relevant stuff. If you can stay focused on the purpose and the points that gain traction, then you can help foster productive discussion.

Who has the ball?
The ball is either in your court or someone else’s. The problem is that, after many meetings, the ball is left in neutral territory. No-man’s land. Are you supposed to call the person to further discuss the problem or are they supposed to come back to you with possible solutions? Always know where the ball is, and never ever leave it in your court. If we all committed to never let the ball rest in our respective court, then the ball would ALWAYS be moving.

Illustration by Silja Goetz.

Behance articles and tips are adapted from the writing and research of Scott Belsky and the Behance team. Behance runs the Behance Creative Network , the Creative Jobs List, and develops knowledge, products, and services that help creative professionals make ideas happen.

All Information (c) Scott Belsky, Behance LLC

Share This

Source: Scott Belsky of Behance

One day not long ago we got a call in the office. My husband looked at the caller ID and said, “Hey, this says Google is calling. Can that be? Or is it some telemarketer spoofing Google?”

In fact, it turned out to be Google. Calling me.

Yes, I really got a call from Google. Out of 300 million people in the United States, Google had chosen to call li’l ole me.

When I heard the young woman in the other end of the phone say, “Hi, this is Emily from Google” I zipped through a range of emotions in about 3 seconds flat.

First I got a little thrill. Hmmmm, I thought. Have they heard about me and want to recruit me? Or maybe they want me to speak at one of their events. Could be a big opportunity here ….

No, wait! My next thought came with a sinking feeling. Uh, oh … I wonder if I inadvertently violated one of their quality guidelines for my website. Maybe they’re calling to tell me my site is being removed from the Google index. Geez! How bad could it be, that they have to call me personally to lower the boom?

Well, as it turns out, it was neither of the above.

Yes, it was Google. Yes, they called me personally. But it was to tell me that there was a bug in the software code for the Google Website Optimizer tool I had used on my website. And that I needed to remove the code, because it presented a security vulnerability.

And even though they were conveying news that was embarrassing for them, I was impressed.

Google Publisher Tools Help You Get More Online Business

To back up a moment, Google has been doing something wonderful for small businesses. They have been assembling a toolkit to help you run your website better and manage your business’s online presence.

Unless you’ve been lost on a mysterious tropical island for the past 2 years, you’re probably aware of Gmail, Google Calendar, and possibly even Google Docs, which give you spreadsheets, word processing and other office capabilities.

But I find that far fewer entrepreneurs and business people are aware of the full collection of Google Publisher Tools. The Publisher tools help you drive more online traffic — and if all goes according to plan — more sales.

Among them is my #1 favorite, called “Website Optimizer.” Website Optimizer is a free tool that lets you perform tests of different versions of a Web page, to see which one works better to get sales. You can compare different images in a page. You can compare two different blocks of text. You can compare different layouts. Google’s Website Optimizer will tell you which version works best. In fact, Website Optimizer is one of Google’s best kept secrets, in my opinion.

Admitting a Mistake Can be the Best Customer Service

Fast forward to the call I got. What impressed me is how ordinary Google seemed, despite its size. As of this writing, Google stock is selling for $470 a share and the company has a market capitalization of $148 Billion. That’s WAY bigger than, say, General Motors which has a market cap of a measly $15 Billion.  :)

So you’d be tempted to think of Google as some monolithic giant, for which my site wouldn’t appear on the radar screen.

Yet, here they had a software bug — just like the smallest tech startup could have — proving that even the biggest make mistakes. And not only did they have a software bug, but they were going to great lengths to alert people to the security issue. Not ignoring it. Not hiding it. But admitting it and being proactive.

In that one instance of calling me, Google impressed me more than anything else they’ve done. Amazing, isn’t it, how admitting your mistakes can make the best impression on customers.

Share This

Source: Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends