Know your Website's Goals: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Your website has goals. Some website owners aren’t aware what they are, but they’re there somewhere. If you’re a small business you probably started your website to get more customers. Or just because everyone else had one and you felt you should too.

The main goal of a website is to get more customers. Whether you make sales through the website, have visitors call you about your products, or simply have it printed on your stationary, the goal your website is to obtain more customers.

So what are you doing to make this goal a reality? Did you create your website a few years back and leave it sitting there? Do you occasionally put some new content or news post on there? Or are you improving and developing your website as a marketing tool every day.

The power of the internet and your website should not be underestimated. It should be your most important marketing tool. It is definitely your most powerful one…unless your market is over 80 perhaps.

So start taking control of your website, start setting goals and taking action. What kind of action, well look around my blog for ideas, read my real free ebook to start. Together we’ll take your tired and undernourished website and turn it into a sales generator. Doesn’t that sound like something worth putting some effort into?

 

 Pareto Principle: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’d be surprised if you hadn’t heard about the Pareto Principle before. It’s the theory that 20% of the effort achieves 80% of the results. It can be applied from many different angles but I want to talk about work efficiency today. So, 20% of the work you do, achieves 80% of the results.

I constantly see small business people rushing around doing the menial tasks that won’t improve their business. Sure, the floor may need to be swept, but is it really contributing to your sales? Then they ignore the tasks that are more long term, business growing necessities. For some reason it’s in their head that the unimportant daily things need doing now, while the really important tasks like planning and marketing can be put off till tomorrow.

Just because it doesn’t have a deadline, doesn’t mean it isn’t important. And by focusing on these more important tasks, even a little bit each day, you can grow your business at an incredible rate. Plus, you’re the boss, you should be putting deadlines on yourself to get these things sorted.

Now I can hear you saying, “but the floor needs to be swept too!” Yes, fair enough. But does it need to be done right now. If you have a choice of sweeping the floor or sending five emails to potential customers, what is more important? So send the emails (that was the correct answer by the way), then sweep the floor. If it doesn’t get done today, will it kill your business? If you don’t have any more customers, that will kill your business.

So go through your daily task list (please tell me you have one) and work out what are the most important things to do. Prioritise them and carry them out in the correct order.

That’s how you take care of the 20% that will grow your business. Use the Pareto Principle to your advantage, not to your detriment.

 

 Micro Management: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Micro management is a tendency that most small business owners have. After working so hard on your baby, it’s hard to let go and have someone else complete different tasks and projects. This hands-on approach can also be what is crippling that business and halting it’s growth.

Now when you give a task to someone else to do, they will usually do it in their own way. If the result is the same, does it really matter to you how they do it? Probably not, but I know that answer will probably not make you happy. So, how do you get your staff doing things the way you want them to be done?

You train them. Or shall I say, you train them properly. Training someone is not throwing a task in their lap, telling them quickly how to do it, and then coming back later and being disappointed with the results. Training is making sure they follow a clear procedure to get consistent results each time, every time.

How do you do this? First, you train yourself! Sorry, but having a task done wrong is not the fault of your employees, it’s your fault. If millions of teenagers around the world can run one of the world’s most successful companies, McDonald’s, then how do you expect to blame your employees for not doing your tasks correctly?

So how do McDonald’s get the same result, every time, all around the world, using high school students? Simple, the have great processes.

Before you hand off a task to an employee, you have to make sure it has a process. That means you have written it down in the simplest steps possible. It means you have tested it and followed the process yourself. It means you have stepped through the process with them, explained it, watched them follow it, and given them guidance when they’re unsure.

Only then will your small business create the results you want and allow you to stop micro managing everything. And remember, when your employee finds a better way to do things (which they should), they amend the process and update your operations manual. That’s how a successful small business operates and becomes a big business.

The best idea for good website design that I can give you comes back to the age old idea of KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

The style of your website design should be simple. The usability of your website should be simple. And the functionality of your website should be simple. Is my message simple enough?

Style
The average attention span of a web surfer is about a few seconds, unless you can grab their attention with something special. If they arrive at your website and find it looks complicated and confusing, another website is just a click away. So keep your design simple if you want them to read what you have to say.

A good website design is clear, uncluttered, and easy to read. Make your article headline stand out, make your navigation easy to find, don’t overwhelm the user with a million choices. We’ll talk about website objectives and flow in a second but the design should work to guide the visitor to where you want them to be.

Also, one of the biggest mistakes design-wise is to add too much technology to a page. Moving or flashing pictures, excessive use of technologies like Flash and Javascript, and other technology before design mistakes are all too common. Does it add to your users experience and make them more likely to buy what you’re selling?

Usability
While we’re on the topic of technology, don’t get carried away with your navigation menus. Remember, keep it simple! Your website should be easy to use and the information easily accessible. If people can’t find the information they want, they leave. Check out the MIT usability guide to see how your website measures up.

Test your websites usability on potential customers, on your friends, your family, your dog, the blind neighbour down the street. Seriously, blind people use the internet as well, can they buy your products and services? And they can’t be far off pre-approving dogs for credit cards either.

Functionality
Does your website achieve its objectives?
Are you selling products, services, or advertising?
And what is the outcome you want from a visitor to your website?

Whatever the objective, you want to make it as simple as possible for a visitor to reach that objective. If you can close the sale through your website in just 10 seconds, do it. No need for fancy tricks and the currently popular 69 page long sales letter. Design a flow through your website, see if visitors follow it. If they don’t, redesign it. If they do, see how you can improve it anyway! No one has a 100% conversion rate.

Unless you’re blogging for fun about how your dog just got pre-approved for a credit card, your website has a purpose. Make sure it fulfils that purpose.

So those are my ideas for good website design. Ignore them at your own peril. Embrace them and watch your website go far.

When you’re starting a business, you obviously want to try and get everything right. Between building the right structures, creating plans, and doing the actual work, it can be easy to get that sinking feeling.

It helps to realise that building a business is a process. And part of that process is the continuous improvement that I’ve been going on and on about. Hence, when you start your business, you don’t always have to get everything right. The important thing is you get it out into the market place to see if it floats.

I’m not saying it’s ok to do crap work, but just to be aware that perfection takes time. Michael Jordan didn’t walk out onto the court the first time he played and instantly become the greatest basketball player in history. He practiced, improved, practiced, improved, over and over until he reached his level of greatness. And then he practiced some more!

So don’t let the feeling of overwhelm hold you back. Get started, get improving, and just start the process.

When your business starts to take off you need to have a strategy to deal with the growth. Many entrepreneurs start to get tied down with the technical work of the business rather than planning and controlling the growth of the company. When you create a business, you are creating a system that should be able to run without your input. You need to put systems in place so other people can take over the technical work while you grow your business.

So as you start to get more customers, remember to focus time on writing down the systems you use to deal with them. When you’ve designed that job, you give it to someone else and go to work on other aspects of your business. Imagine how much you could grow your business if you focused on marketing and finding customers all the time. This should be your first goal. Then as you grow more, you find other people to take care of this role as well.

Your final goal is to be able to sit on a beach in Hawaii sipping piña coladas while your business functions without you. The obvious dream of every business owner, but you have to work smarter than most to obtain this goal.

I’ve been re-reading “The E-Myth Revisited” over the weekend so I thought this would be a good time to talk about business development. Basically, business development is your business. Every business is in either two phases: it is either growing or dying.

Not hard to work out which group you want to be in. To keep growing you have to always be improving, always be looking for ways to make your business better.

The best way to do this is dedicate some time each day to business development. It’s time to start working ‘on’ your business, rather than ‘in’ your business. I’ll go into this in a bit more detail but your first step is realising you need to improve, and not get too buried in the day to day work of your business.

I mentioned receiving feedback yesterday and thought maybe I should go a little more depth on the subject. Because honestly, most of us aren’t very good at receiving feedback. Most of us enjoy being right instead and will argue until we’re blue in the face about it.

Being right will not help your business! In fact, being unable to receive feedback could be a symptom of much greater problems in your entrepreneurial ability. Customers aren’t interested in you being right, they’re interested in you solving their problems. If they don’t understand the message you’re trying to convey or some fancy jargon you use, will they buy your product?

So if you take feedback poorly, make it your personal goal for the month to be more open to others’ thoughts and opinions. Stop trying to convince the other person of your point of view and just listen for a change. You’ll definitely learn a thing or two about your business.

When you work in a small business, or you are the small business, it becomes hard to see the forest through the trees. You can get so lost in what you’re doing that you forget that everybody else has a perspective too. And this can be very dangerous for your business.

Whether you’re working on marketing material or designing products, other people should be involved in the process. You should be soliciting feedback from as many sources as possible to ensure people actually see it the same way you do. This goes quadruple when you are an expert in the field and your customers may not be.

So who do you ask for feedback? Ideally, your customers. But running it past other people you work with, your friends, your family, or your neighbour isn’t going to hurt either. The next step is learning how to deal with feedback, constructive or otherwise.

As another Monday rolls around I think this is the best time to update your action plan and see how you’re progressing. I usually do mine on Sunday night, crossing off what I’ve completed, remembering what I wanted to complete, and then writing it all up for the next week in a nice new list.

This allows you to focus on the tasks that are most important to your business and can make the most impact. It also allows you to see if you’re trying to do too much and where your time can be spent more productively. The final benefit is you can see the progress you’re making on a week to week basis. I find it motivating to look at what you’ve achieved and what you will achieve at the end of the next week. It keeps you moving forward.