Four sources of traffic for your blogsite

October 5th, 2006 by Glenn | 2 Comments - click to view »

For those businesses that use a blogsite or website to derive revenue, looking at different sources of web traffic – and how to build build it profitably – is worth analysing.

Small business websites don’t need lots of traffic for it to be profitable. If you are selling a real product or service and not just worried about flashing as many ads at people as possible, you are probably interested in attracting quality rather than quantity. Buyers rather than tyre kickers. New clients rather than just ‘eyeballs’.

So, lets have a look at four sources of traffic for your product/service oriented website, and see if this triggers ideas for you in how to make your own blogsite/website more profitable. By the way, a blogsite is an integrated blog/website. The blog component is useful for acquiring new prospects, and for building trust to maximise conversion to clients. The website is for describing your products/services, providing testimonials and letting your clients buy from you.

Publicity (in the real world). This is easy to understand – get your web address out to people in the real world. If you established a new store or service delivery centre, you would make sure you publicised it. So think of your web presence the same way. Get the web address out to people on your business cards, in letters, on postcards, and in directories (ever think of the Yellow Pages as just a big list of links, sorted by category?).

Better still, get publicity for your website wherever you can. Have you officially launched your website? Does your website do something unique? Let your local newspapers know, at the very least. If your website doesn’t currently act as an additional sales outlet, why not figure out how to adapt your product/service so you can open a new storefront for all of Australia?

Advertising. There are no doubt very many different ways to advertise on the Internet. But only one that matters for small business. Google AdWords. Just go to www.adwords.google.com.au, sign up, and start advertising. There is a useful guide to help you understand the concepts at Perry Marshall’s website (sign up for the 5 day guide). While I’m not a big fan of advertising overall, there is no doubt AdWords give you a quick and inexpensive way to find out whether Internet advertising will drive effective traffic for you. In terms of serious magazine/broadcast advertising – if you’ve got the budget for it, no problems, go knock yourself out. But typically small business finds it hard to benefit from branding style advertising, as it requires such a major investment.

Search Engines. Someone is searching for widgets .. you sell widgets … they find you on Google … and click through to your site! Fantastic dream, not always feasible for small business. But nevertheless, there are a range of things you can do to help get your share of search engine traffic. There are a lot of people who can advise you on SEO (or Search Engine Optimization … and I use the American spelling because … they usually are!). You will of course make up your own mind. A good site to get a feel for what the SEO crew do is the Wikipedia/seo page.

Personally, I am a believer in 80:20. That is, 80% of search engine results will come from focussing on 20% of the right things … namely, produce good content (blogs are ideal for this) and make sure you are talking about the right topics (aka keywords). Think about this for a moment, as the ‘right topics’ for you aren’t necessarily just the most popular ones. If you select keywords that everyone else uses … that is good, but you have tough competition before the search engines find you. If you find more precise topics, you have less competition, but possibly find that the people who do find you (less of them) are more valuable to you (because they are more relevant to you). I like placing a bet each way here, and developing a strategy based on the popular keywords for your product/service, as well as some very specific/unique keywords that may appeal to a very select audience. Maybe you can pay an SEO consultant to find a better approach than this .. if you do, please let me know. Until then, I think there is a reasonable body of evidence to support this 80:20 approach to SEO.

Links. This is quite possibly the hardest category to crack, but the most rewarding. If you create good, relevant content, you will start to interest other bloggers and website authors, and they will link to you. This is a powerful way for people to find out about you. Easy to say, hard to do for small business. Particularly as its quality, not quantity that matters. Building a strong base of quality inbound links is a substantial task.

Because the rules of the game here aren’t to build traffic or build page rank. If all you do is try to make money via ads, that might make sense. But if you are in the business of selling products/services, you need quality links that have a high chance of converting into new clients. So think carefully about what sites you would like to link to you. If you are regularly focussing on developing a small number of high quality links that are designed to bring you revenue, then you will be way ahead.

So there it is. Four sources of traffic to think about – are they relevant for your business? I’m sure there are more you have thought of, so drop me an email, I’m interested in your opinion!

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How the Internet lets you jump ship

September 25th, 2006 by Glenn | Comments Off

Starting up a new business often means compromising for a while in order the fund the start-up phase.

You, as business owner, may need to keep up your day job until it’s safe to jump ship.

So now your small business is going well, maybe even turning over a small profit – and perhaps reaching the stage where you need to grow. And yet you’re still living with one foot in the corporate world and the other in your dream enterprise.

What’s stopping you from jumping?

At the risk of sounding sexist, if you’re male, you’re most likely suffering from a fear of failure. If you’re female, you’re probably more afraid of success. (There’s another blog post in this – watch this space!)

At a more pragmatic level, ask yourself if you’re optimising use of the Internet to leverage your distribution, sales, marketing and overall efficiency.

9 new ideas that may sway on-the-fence entrepreneurs is an inspirational article that discusses the ease with which an Internet-based business can run and succeed without huge risk to the owner.

There’s lots of food for thought here – especially for hesitant entrepreneurs who are too busy to read it.

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What does the Long Tail mean for small business?

September 22nd, 2006 by Glenn | Comments Off

The Long Tail

Have you heard of the Long Tail? For a lot of small businesses, this topic matters a LOT. For some, it doesn’t matter much, but you’ll still find it an interesting read. The book on the topic is shortlisted for the Business Book of the Year. But its far more than that.

The Long Tail was an article written by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine, in October 2004. He has subsequently done a lot more research and published a book. Great author, great article. So good that reading it convinced me to resign from a big-company consulting role and head out and start my own business. This post owes an incredible amount to Chris Anderson.

I’m going to try and put my own small business perspective on the Long Tail. Most (not all) of the discussion around the Long Tail has been from the perspective of big companies – this isn’t a deficiency in the idea, just a natural byproduct of the audience. But I’m going to try and persuade you that the Long Tail is very significant for small business.

Ok, so what is this all about?

Addressable market.

When the Internet was established, it was the beginning of a tectonic shift in addressable market. Basically whatever your product or service, you only get to sell it to your addressable market. Mostly this means your customers have to be able to walk/drive to your outlet, or you go to them. So for a successful small business there needs to be enough people within geographical range of your business who … want/need what you are selling, come into your outlet (or you go to them), notice your product, don’t buy from a competitor … and … buy! (see p.162 of The Long Tail and the Tyranny of Geography).

If you want to sell specialist products/services, you better make sure there are enough people interested in your speciality within geographic range, or else it’ll be pretty lonely.

The basics of supply and demand are not difficult to understand.

No Demanders = No Suppliers!

But – and this is important – it also means

Some Demand with No Supply –> Buy a Subsitute or Don’t Buy

The Internet has created a situation where the addressable market for some products and services has expanded in an astonishing way. This is the tectonic shift you need to understand. The shift hasn’t occurred because of technology – it has occurred because of supply and demand. It is the same old laws at work, but with a new addressable market plugged in to the equation.
So lets look at an example:

Example 1: Old Situation

Book about mountain climbing sold in bookstore -> addressable market is essentially 10-15kms. Law of supply and demand says to bookstore owner … people interested in mountain climbing are spread thinly, and not enough live in my feeder area so I WON’T STOCK IT!

Example 2: New Situation

Book about mountain climbing sold on website -> addressable market is based on # of Internet users and languages supported on website = huge market. Even though mountain climbers are still spread thinly, there are a lot of people interested in mountain climbing overall. So I will STOCK IT!

So if you have read even the first few paragraphs of The Long Tail, by now you will recognise the example of Touching the Void. This is the classic Long Tail case study, thanks to Chris Anderson’s article. And its not hard to understand that Amazon (not just a big company, a huge company) is selling lots of niche books now. Around 32% of all their books.

So the theory of the long tail helps us understand that niche products / services are actually of interest to lots of people. And we can see easily that when the addressable market is large enough (e.g. the Internet), what was an unprofitable niche may now be profitable.
So what does this mean for small business? Well, its time for you to take a long, hard look at your products, services and expertise. I want you to ask two critical questions.

Do you have something that you can now sell to a larger addressable market, available to you over the web?
Can you draw on your niche expertise to create a new product or service that would unprofitable in your geographic market but profitable in your web-sized addressable market? Big caveat here … depending on how you intend to benefit from the product/service, you may need to be able to transact online.

If you are still with me here AND you get what I am saying AND you think its an extraordinary time to be changing how you do business, please comment on how the Long Tail might apply to your business, or even better, email me (glenn at publicityship dot com dot au). I love exploring this idea for new types of businesses, because in just about every case you go looking you can find an angle, a niche that is highly profitable for a small business person! Not necessarily for a large business. There is a very good interview with Chris Anderson, recorded by Ken Evoy of SiteSell, that discusses the long tail and small business. Its quite long (as if this post isn’t), and I recommend it to you.

And this is what makes it such an exciting change for small business. Small businesses have a chance to carve out a very specific niche. Its not even a matter of competing on an even footing with larger businesses. The tyranny of geography means a lot of people can’t find what they want/need, so they buy products or services that are a substitute for what they would really like to buy. Or they don’t buy at all. What happens you offer someone a choice that is a lot closer to what they want? The answer is (and Chris Anderson gives a lot of evidence to support this) they choose what they want. This means they buy less of what they used to, and more of what they really want to. The demand in the long tail includes a lot of pent up demand from people who haven’t been able to get what they want. And small business is exceptionally well placed to respond to this unmet demand.

Well, what are the barriers to achieving this? Why isn’t everyone doing it? I have a lot of thoughts in this area – its what I do a lot of in one of my startup businesses PublicityShip (www.publicityship.com.au). I’ll post more on these topics, or if you email me directly, be quite happy to converse via email. One of the first topics I will talk about is the long tail of Ocularists!

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With hindsight it all looks so easy

September 19th, 2006 by Glenn | Comments Off

I like the points made in The Really Bad News About Bad Customers.

Very wise. Only trouble is I could go and find an equally interesting story about a small business following its nose that turned into a great success. With hindsight, its relatively easy to see whether a customer is worth it or not, and to see which rule from the Business 101 rulebook could be used to prove you right or wrong. And many of the ‘rules’ are essentially just opinions. The levels of fact and experience that underpin them are highly variable.
In small business, its important to be focussed on the 20% of things that deliver 80% of the benefits. But at the same time, you need to be open to the left-field opportunity. Right or wrong, someone will no doubt point out (with hindsight) how it should have been obvious.

But it rarely is obvious at the time. In small business, it helps to have a good plan, listen to good advice, and then make a good decision. And to be lucky.

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Dream .. plan .. act .. celebrate

September 15th, 2006 by Glenn | 1 Comment - click to view »

Balloons

Don’t you love it when you encounter a new idea that is *so* good that it stays with you for years! Some years ago Adrian Glamorgan ran a workshop for me on project planning, and outlined a model that is just brilliant for looking at your business:

Dream – Plan – Act – Celebrate

Have a think about your own business, and consider how effective you are being in each of these four areas.

Dream. What are your dreams and goals? How are you going to go about achieving them (your strategies)? Have you written them down? Have you revisited them recently? Getting this dimension activated helps make sure when you are succeeding, you are succeeding at the right things.

Plan. Now that you have clear strategies, have you planned how are you going to implement them? And do you have this plan written down? Breaking down your goals into a plan with simple, achievable steps is a great way to make them happen. Setting deadlines and milestones means you can track your progress. And planning doesn’t have to be long winded – a good plan is simple and clear.

Act. When you act on your goals through a well defined plan, you are helping your business be effective. You must act to achieve success … plans and goals on their own aren’t enough.

Celebrate. Taking time out to recognise achievements and celebrate success is hard to do when you are the thick of it all. But without it, we miss out on a lot of the fun. Celebrating success means taking time to notice it first.

The model is all about balance across the four dimensions. Its not enough to dream up a grand strategy if you never plan and do it. Its not enough to dream an idea and then ‘just do it’, without taking time out to plan. And why work and succeed if you aren’t going to celebrate your successes?

Your strengths are the easy area, but its not enough to be the world’s best planner … if you don’t have a good strategy. Its no good working hard and doing a lot … if you haven’t got a plan. And if all you plan on doing is celebrating without taking time to put in the effort, you may not have a lot to celebrate.

Use this model to look at the balance of your overall business. Are you active in each of these four areas? If not, why not pay attention to the area you are neglecting most.

Dream .. plan … act .. celebrate.

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Building trust in your business

September 4th, 2006 by Glenn | Comments Off

Connected Hands In our company blog, we recently posted about the growth of our business and how we had made a few mistakes when first starting out. Our fabulous marketing consultant naturally questioned the wisdom of this approach, but we stuck to our guns.

Foolish? Perhaps, but if new media blogs and articles are anything to go by, we can only win trust through our honesty.
While traditional marketing techniques taught us to focus on the positive and play down the negative, the new media are confronting us with the need for honesty in building trust.

Today’s consumers – especially the Y generation – aren’t so easily fooled by trite sound-bites. They’re healthily suspicious of businesses that claim perfection – to be all things to all people, totally impervious to human error.

It seems trust is more likely to be generated by a business with a human face – one that admits it’s shortcomings and explains how it plans to, or has, overcome them.

Transparent Marketing goes into great detail about the benefits of employing honesty in your promotional materials in order to build trust. It’s worth reading the whole article, but in brief, the advice comes down to the following:

1. Tell (only) the (verifiable) truth – today’s consumer will reject anything that can’t be verified.
2. Purge all vague modifers (such as ‘finest’, ‘consistently’, ‘superior’) – if you’re left with little of substance, you need to start again.
3. Let someone else do your bragging – customers, peers, reviewers, or I would add, credible journalists.
4. Substitute general descriptions with specific facts.
5. Admit your weaknesses – not only does this help to engender trust but it sets you apart from your competitors in an engaging way.

Blogs are an ideal vehicle for building trust, as they give your business a human face – something consumers are longing for in the virtual world of today’s business platforms. Readers are savvy enough to suss you pretty quickly if you’re not being honest, or you’re just spinning a line. They read your blog because they like you and detect the seeds of trust.

Expert blogger, Robert Scoble, has eulogised the blog as the ideal trust-building tool in How the Blog Trust Network Works.

Building on this model, our PublicityShip website explains how small businesses can nurture growth by using blogging strategically, as well as harnessing the effects good old-fashioned publicity (someone else doing your bragging).

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Work as play

August 31st, 2006 by Glenn | Comments Off

In one of my other lives, I study psychotherapy, and a recent class examined the concept of ‘play’ – its importance in child development leading to a healthy adult psyche.

After establishing what was involved in play – exploration, experimentation, risk-taking, imagination, role-playing, trial-and-error, all those things that help to build fully rounded human beings – our tutor posed a question: ‘When, in your life, do you play?’

I surprised myself by immediately answering: ‘When I’m at work.’

This led to a discussion about work as play, and how this can be a helpful way to approach the elements involved in a working day, such as planning, discussion, concept development and so on.

So often we get caught up in deadlines, processes, systems. All these are necessary, but they only facilitate, they don’t create. Without play, your business is in danger of becoming its processes.

With play, you won’t just have fun – you’ll probably end up with a creative energy suffusing your business.

So encourage your staff to play with ideas, have a go, draw pictures to express new structural concepts, throw words around to develop a new business angle, and if a meeting takes an unexpected turn that takes you off the agenda, go with it and see where it leads – you never know where you’ll end up.

The play environment succeeds because the child is free to explore within safe limits – allow this for your staff and you’re onto a winner.

There isn’t a great deal of interesting web content on this subject, but plenty treating work and play as oil and water – mutually exclusive.

I did find this interesting article about South American Indians – Leisure in Action: Work as Play – for those wanting to stretch their psyches around the ‘work as play’ concept.

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Are you wasting skills?

August 24th, 2006 by Glenn | Comments Off

Another lesson gleaned from the seminar day mentioned in my last post has refocused my attitude to managing skills.

You will probably have found that managing a small business has demanded a whole new set of skills. And if you’re anything like me, some came naturally – and some didn’t.

Not only that, but the skills you think will come naturally sometimes don’t, and vice versa.

For example, my expertise lies in writing and editing, with a background in media and publicity. So you’d think I’d have a handle on marketing. Not so. Issues such as branding, market research, producing company brochures, designing an effective website have all left me stumped.

For a while I struggled to master these skills – spending hours researching, drafting, refining, brainstorming – until a seminar presenter switched a light bulb on in my gloomy head. And this was later reinforced by a blog post from Greg Chapman – Your Business’ Most Important Asset. Time!

Why was I spending all this time trying to master a new skill set that certainly wasn’t coming to me naturally, when there are exceptionally competent specialists out there who can do it for me?

Sounds obvious – but how many small business owners or managers do you know who don’t just manage their business – they do the book-keeping, produce marketing collateral, cold-call prospects, do the post office run, replenish the coffee supplies and clean the toilet?

By doing everything, we imagine we’re saving a heap of money on costs and forget how much we’re losing.

I learned that one of your first tasks should be to establish a realistic hourly rate for your expertise. Whether it’s $50 or $500, it becomes difficult to justify time-wasting.

This also serves as a benchmark to help you establish your goals in terms of ROI in your business.

Value your skill set – and those of your employees – by nurturing what you each do well and delegating what you don’t.

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Growing your business – and ours

August 18th, 2006 by Glenn | Comments Off

Yesterday I attended an excellent day of seminars focusing on growing your business with a view to a more holistic growth of the self.

I brought home several messages, but primarily the fact that growth is organic. Start-up businesses are usually driven by one or two people with a vision – people who are passionate about what they do and feel supremely confident that their product or service offers something special.

It’s easy to become disillusioned when clients aren’t bashing down the door within the first weeks of trading.

But look at it from their point of view – they don’t know you, you don’t have a track record, no one has recommended you.

Research shows that people are most highly motivated by personal recommendation. We also know that trust plays a big part in the purchase process, and this comes from knowing who you are, realising that others trust you and seeing evidence of your success.

If you’re advertising and getting no response, it could be because ads don’t offer trust.

How do you gather evidence of success without the clients, and how do you pull in the clients without evidence of success? – a classic catch 22.

The answer is networking. Everyone has an address book – physical or online – or a box of business cards. Talk to your friends, join business networks, get out there and convey your passion to others. BNI is a good one to start with.

Be prepared to practise patience, as it’s hard to gauge the knock-on effect of your interactions. Networking – What it is and What it isn’t is a useful article explaining the dynamics of business networking.

But be assured that it will pay off in the end. Because as soon as someone who knows you decides to take a chance and try your product or test your service, you’ve got the opportunity to prove your passion is justified. You begin to build a portfolio of success. AND you build a list of clients who are willing to recommend you to others.

But don’t leave it there. Leverage on your success – use it as evidence to persuade others to give you a try. Ask your clients to refer others to you.

And beware of trying to appear bigger and more successful than you are – tempting as it is. Trust also grows out of honesty and integrity.

Our small business, PublicityShip, began with jobs gathered from friends, network colleagues and pro bonos. We still have a relatively small portfolio, but the success we’ve had with those first few clients is – we think – impressive.

While we’re continually reviewing and refining our strategies and processes, we still believe passionately in what we do, and the portfolio justifies our passion.

Heads are now turning, potential clients are taking notice, people are talking about us … this is what we want. And this is just the start of our steady organic growth.

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Recruiting and keeping staff

August 15th, 2006 by Glenn | Comments Off

Having worked in three countries for several companies from massive corporate conglomerates to the smallest of small businesses, I have clear views about the advantages of working for a small business.

Experience doesn’t make me an expert, so I’m keeping my editor’s hat firmly on – this means I’ll be bringing you my personal overview with links to the real experts through research. That way you can keep up with the latest inspiration for small business by simply subscribing to this feed.

On the subject of staffing, take heart. Small companies struggling to recruit – and importantly to keep – top quality employees have a number of strategies available to them.

First the facts. Staffing Turnover and Retention presents a dry round-up of the reasons for staff turnover (the retention section is still to come – I’ll let you know when it arrives).

There are no surprises here, but two of the main criteria for staff retention – job satisfaction and organisational commitment – are worth highlighting, as they are often easier for a small business to provide.

Take a look at Small-Business Secrets to Hiring, which sets out ways small businesses can sell themselves to potential candidates. This is a US article, but most of the comments are generic enough to be useful.

Briefly, a small working environment can encourage engagement in the business at a high level, interaction regarding benefits and conditions, and attention to tailored career development. It is easier for a small business to show employees how highly valued they are, to offer flexible working conditions and to involve them in decision-making. All this leads to greater job satisfaction and company loyalty.

As for the question of perceived lack of security – the largest company I worked for offered the least security. Downsizing meant middle managers were occasionally seen clearing out their desks at a few minutes’ warning, and stress levels were high.

I have felt most secure – and enjoyed myself most – when working for small companies that reward loyalty and hard work with protection and career development opportunities. Sure, $$$ are important – but research shows that they’re not the most crucial factor in staff turnover.
So how do you find those skilled and loyal employees?

The UK’s Sunday Times advises Look Locally to Recruit the Best Workers. The article goes on to offer simple and wise advice on how to extract the best candidate from the mix.

Personally, when I have been involved in selecting candidates for interview, I have looked for something extra – maybe they gave up their degree in chemistry to join an expedition to the Antarctic, or maybe they left a secure sales position to set up an unsuccessful dog-washing company. Even if there is an element of failure in these choices, they were willing to take a risk on something they believed in. That’s a valuable quality.

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