What do your customers need from your website?: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Working out what customers need from your website should be the first step in the design process. How can your website improve the experience of your customer or potential customer?

When you look at a website from this point of view, you’ll come up with a completely different implementation and the results will show in your sales. Too many business owners decide they need a website, decide what they want on the website, hire a web designer, write a little bit about their business, and then publish the website for all the world to see.

The problem is, no one looks at the website. And definitely, no one purchases or calls because of the website. So this moment is a decision point on how your business does in the future. You can either take a long hard look at your website, or you can ignore this post and continue to be a small business. It’s really up to you.

Convinced? Good. So put yourself in your customers shoes for a while and work out what they’d like from your website. What would compel them to read further? What questions would they like answered? What would get them to actually pick up the phone and call you or make a purchase?

Once you think you’ve improved, test it. If you can’t watch customers use your website (and you can with the right software), then watch your friends. See where they get confused, see where they get bored, and see if they can actually find their way to the objective. And remember, your potential customers have about 0.01% of your friends patience.

So work out what your customers need from your website…and give it to them!

 

 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.

 

 Your internet marketing strategy: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Do you have an Internet marketing strategy? Or did you just put up a website and expect traffic and sales to start flowing in. If you’re like most people, you’re in the later category.

The truth of the matter is you need to have a consistent internet marketing strategy to be successful on the internet. Consistent doesn’t mean it doesn’t change. It means you head towards the same objective and don’t get sucked in to every little fad that comes your way.

To get results in anything, you need to be prepared to stick with it for the long haul and actually do some work on the way. The same applies for your internet marketing strategy.

You set your objectives, turn them into quantifiable goals, and then make your action plan. For example:

• Your objective is to increase sales over the website
• Your goal is sales of $30,000 per month
• Your action plan contains all the tasks you will complete to obtain it, e.g. viral marketing campaign, search engine optimisation, etc

To help you in developing your own strategy, download my free internet marketing strategy ebook. No gimmicks, no signups, completely free because I like your style.

In it I talk about:

• How to see things from your customer’s point of view
• Discovering what benefits you’re selling them
• How to set objectives and goals for your website
• What you should be measuring to obtain those goals
• How customers find you
• How to make them buy from you when they do
• A quick and painless One Page Online Marketing Plan template to use
• Why you need to take action and continuously improve

As you read and complete the short exercises, you will step through the process of creating a meaningful, measurable, and effective internet marketing strategy.

 

 Vision, Strengths, and Passion in Small Business: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today we’re going to talk about whether you should be in business and if you’re actually in the right business. Scary, I know, but it’s better to face these things head-on rather than try to ignore them and wake up in a few years broke and miserable!

First, I want to summarise a very quick point about internet opportunism versus a real business. If you’re a person who’s running round looking for the next get rich quick scheme, forget about it. It doesn’t exist and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is just plain lying. There’s only one way to build a successful internet business, the exact same way as you build a successful bricks and mortar business out on the street. If you’re running from affiliate program to affiliate program, trying to find the right product, launching multiple different websites that you lose interest in you’re not creating anything sustainable. Read on for the fix.

There are three important considerations when starting a new business. Before you start a venture you should ask yourself how it fits with your vision, strengths, and passion. Rich Shrefren’s ‘The Missing Chapter‘ goes into more detail about these but I wanted to lay them out quickly for you.

Vision
Vision is the view you have for your business in the future and when it’s finished. If you don’t have a clear picture of what you want your business to be like in 1, 5, 10 years time, how will you ever improve your business? Your business will simply drift from one goal to another and you really have no hope of making it as great as we both know is possible.

You should have an image in your mind of what your finished business will look like. How will it be decorated? How many stores will you have? How many employees and what will they be doing? Once you have this picture in your mind, write it down. This is your business’ story as talked about in the E-Myth. Does you business have a compelling story?

Strengths
It’s time to look long and hard at yourself. What strengths do you have? What weaknesses do you have? Is your business aligned with your strengths and are you working on improving or finding other people to cover your weaknesses? Your strengths are built into you from a young age and you’ve been developing them all your life. So it makes sense to align your business with your strengths for it to be as successful as possible.

Rich uses the example of his friend being a professional tennis player while he is very good at poker. If either of them is playing for money against each other, they’ll want to play the game that they’re best at. Business is another game, so choose the game that you know you can win at.

Passion
We all have things that we are passionate about and no, you can’t say making money. Your business should be something that you feel passionate about, with a vision that compels you to get up each morning and do your best. Without this passion, with money as your only drive, you will find yourself unmotivated and hating your business. You spend most of your day working, so make sure you’re working at something you enjoy.

For example, I love helping and growing businesses. I love talking about business, I love finding out about how other peoples businesses work. And are you in trouble if you ask me for business advice, you’ll never shut me up! This makes me happy, this gets out of bed in the morning, and this is why my business works.

Too many people nowadays are goal obsessed. They set all these goals and when they reach them wonder why they’re still not happy. Happiness and fulfilment is something that should happen every day in your life, not just when you achieve a goal. If the only time I was going to be happy was when I made a million dollars, what a miserable life I would lead!

Connecting your business vision with your strengths and passion is the way to create a sustainable, expandable business that will be fulfilling everyday.

There is a lot more than development and maintenance for your online web site to be successful. If you’re currently looking for a web site designer, you need to consider some very important aspects right from the outset. A web site needs careful planning and strategy to succeed so you need to start off on the right foot. That’s the big questions, what aspects does your web site need?

Great design
There are many talented web designers ready to make your web site successful. As long as you’ve spent some time on the internet and know what looks good and what doesn’t, you’d think it’d be hard to go wrong on this aspect. Though it’s surprisingly easy to get wrong. I know some very smart people that have stumbled on this first step and wasted a lot of money. However, the biggest mistake is trying to do it yourself and creating an amateurish looking web site that no one looks at.

Usability
Making your web site usable is not always as easy as it seems. It involves the correct positioning of items on a web page so the user can follow a logical flow to the result you want. If you want a sale, you need to lead the customer there. If you want them to contact you, you need to lead them there. But most importantly, you don’t want customers to get frustrated and leave your web site.

Findability
So now you have a professional looking web site that’s usable and all you have to do is attract some visitors. What’s the best way to get traffic? Search engines of course. We call this Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and it involves making your pages just right for the search engines. Your customers type in keywords to find your web site. The trick is to rank well on the keywords they are typing in. And yes it can be a trick, a weaving of art and magic to do well in the search engines. But those in the know can do it consistently to ensure your web site gets exposure.

Combined with this are the many other marketing techniques that go along with your web site development. A web site is nothing if no one sees it, so you need an online marketing plan to make sure your web site is getting the attention it deserves. This should be the most important aspect of your web site maintenance contract. Your web site development company needs to keep marketing your company once the web site is up and running.

Functionality
You are developing your web site for a purpose and it is important to keep that purpose in mind throughout the entire development process. You’d be surprised how many people set out to design an online shop or ecommerce web site and end up forgetting to check if their web site actually sells products. With a web site, you have very little time to attract a visitors attention, wow them with your proposition, and collect their money. You need compelling sales writing to do this and like all of the above, you need to leave it in the hands of a professional.

The internet is the most competitive marketplace in the world. It’s not like a physical store where a customer has to travel to find your competition, a competitor is literally seconds away. You need to make sure all aspects of your web site work together to achieve your goal or you will find yourself another unsuccessful internet entrepreneur.

A final word of advice, it’s difficult to find a company that can handle the full spectrum of these skills and offer you the web site development abilities and online marketing you require. When I work with my clients, I take care of the search engine and functionality aspects and team up with a web site graphic designer to combine all our knowledge in to making the web site a success. And we’re always getting other input to make sure the web site we deliver is of excellent quality.

So be careful out there, the web site development industry is littered with false promises and propaganda. People that say the can do it all and fail miserably. Be smart with your money and your business’ future.

Before you launch a website you need to make sure you have your web strategy right. I’m not talking about having your website perfect. I’m talking about having your strategy in place for how you plan to make your website a success. The strategy may change over time but you need to know how you’ll make money and why customers will buy from you.

I’m currently working on a project that involves a paid subscription model. The website has been around a while and we know the website is popular already, but it’s not as popular as we thought. So to make sure we get all our ducks in a row first, we’ve delayed moving to the paid model for another two months.

It was a hard decision to make considering we were about to get a nice cash influx, but it’s the right decision. In the long run, the new strategy will make us a lot more money and create a sustainable business in the future.

The moral of the story, don’t underestimate your strategy. Get it right first time and life will be a lot easier.

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.

Or did you just put up a website and expect traffic and sales to start flowing in. If you’re like most people, you’re in the later category.

To successfully make money for your business using a website you need to have an Internet marketing strategy. You need to decide on objectives for your website and work towards them.

Without a strategy, you’re just another website that nobody visits. But don’t feel too bad, at least you have a lot of company.

[This has been expanded into a full article on Internet Marketing Strategy.]