If it’s the latter, there are steps you can take to help you go from business duress to business success.

Last week I introduced 4 simple questions to help you start and grow your business. They are the same 4 questions I use with my clients every day. They’re purposefully simple. Yet behind their simplicity lies all the depth and detail you need to create a successful business. Answer these questions fully and you’ll be on your way.

So let’s review what the four questions are:

1. Who you are?
2. What you do?
3. Who you do it for?
4. Why do you do it?

Pretty simple, huh? Now answer them. Get our a piece of paper and write down your answer for each question. Go ahead. I’ve got time to wait for you while you do so.

Now, take a look at your answers and see what you’ve written. Is there a question you couldn’t easily answer? Is there a question that you couldn’t answer clearly at all? Be honest with yourself – your prospective clients will.

Now, let’s go a little deeper. Each of the four questions has layers – layers of detail, layers of information, and layers of complexity. Let’s break it down a bit:

Who You Are…?

First, as a human being. What are you talents, your gifts and your passions? What are your shortcomings? What areas of your life could you use some help with? What areas of your life do you want to hide from? How do each of these questions translate to your business?

For instance, if you believe you’re not a good writer, it’s good to know that so that you can do something about it. Perhaps you hire a copy editor or take a copy writing course. Either way, you need to know where your strengths and weaknesses are so you can either utilize them or get help.

Once you identify who you are as a person, as I mentioned above, you want to know how you – as a person – translate to a business owners. Are you organized? Do you use systems? Do you outsource any of your tasks? Do people tend to feel comfortable with you? Do you have any issues with selling (read: Hate Selling, Well You’re Doing It All The Time)? What knowledge do you have of using your website or social media to promote your business? How effective is your marketing strategy? The list goes on, really.

Ideally, you want to be asking yourself how you are with every aspect of owning, running, promoting and evaluating your business. And don’t worry if you don’t know something or have large gaps in your abilities. All you have to do is ask for help.

What You Do…?

The primary answer here, of course, has to do with what you do for a living. In other words, what are you in business to do?

But it goes deeper than that. You want to also consider what your service actually is and does. Meaning, you want to consider your business offerings from the stand point of what problems they solve for the people in your target audience. In essence, you’re not just providing a service but providing a way to solve problems in people’s lives.

For instance, let’s say you’re a life coach who helps women through career change. Your offer is likely so much more than just a career coach. You may have a background you can call on that gives you a market advantage. You may have gone through a career transition yourself. You may be able to provide emotional or psychological support in a different way than your peers. Whatever the offer you make, just be certain that you’re bringing your full self, with your complete background into play here. Just remember, what you do includes what you have done.

Who Do You Do It For…?

As with the previous question, this one helps you focus more precisely on what you actually have to offer. In this case, it’s not about the offer itself, but who you’re offering it to.

Who do you do it for asks you to go deeper than demographics. You don’t just serve, for instance, women between 45 & 60 who are looking for a second career. You want to narrow your focus down to a specific type of client who fits perfectly into your specific set of abilities.

And you want to think of what problems the people in your target audience are facing. What sort of stopping points are they hitting as they are, for instance, going through a career change? Speak directly to those in your marketing.

Ideally, who you do it for is one person. Just remember that there are 100′s if not 1000′s of that one person out there waiting to find you and your service. Make it easy on them by identifying exactly who you help.

Why Do You Do It…?

Ultimately, this may be the most important question of all to ask yourself. After years of working with hundreds of clients on their websites and coaching them on increasing their business, I’ve found that the most successful business people make meaning.

While making meaning may not be, in the short term, the more important than knowing what you do and who you do it for, eventually it will be. That’s because as business owners, we need to make meaning. It may sound airy-fairy, but it’s true. I’ve seen it with dozens of clients who are successful in one area but burn out because the business they made successful isn’t making the meaning they want in the world.

So your business, to be successful, needs to make meaning. And it needs to make meaning to one person – you. It doesn’t really matter what I think or anyone else. What matter is that your business makes meaning to you. In other words, you are contributing something important to you to the world.

Do you know what that is? Do you know what impact you have on the people you touch? Do you know how your offer is making meaning in the world? Take it deeper…

The key to a successful business is clarity

To create, grow and maintain a successful business you need one thing more than any other – and it’s not even talent. You need clarity! Clarity with your business will set you free from the confusion most small business owners face.

So why don’t more life coaches, holistic practitioners and other service-based business owners take the time to find clarity?

Lots of reasons, really. The biggest one is likely fear of something. Fear of hard work. Fear of not being able to do it. Fear of being boxed in by a vision and plan. Fear of putting in the effort to get clarity only to find that you have none. All these, and more, get in the way of you finding clarity and, hence, stop you from growing a successful business.

But you know the neat thing? You don’t have to get that complex. Fear is a complex thing. Fear is what makes the process bigger than it needs to be. All you have to do is begin by answer the three questions – who you are, what you do and who you do it for. That’s it. These are the seeds you need to plant, then nurture, so they can germinate and grow into a living, thriving business.

And let me know how it goes…

How well can you answer the 4 questions in your business?

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from mikecogh on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

What is your business about?

Is it about branding and marketing? I’m sure it is. Is your business about sales and profits? I sure hope so. And is it about making some difference in the world? Ideally, that would be nice.

But branding, marketing, sales and making a difference require one thing – relationships. Ultimately, business is about relationships. Doesn’t matter whether you’re selling products or pitching services, ultimately people buy because they trust you. And trust comes from developing a relationship – even if that relationship is built from content on your website.

Whenever I work in my business, make plans etc, I always think about people. I remember that it’s people that I’m doing business with not some segment of niche market (though I may use the terms). And I remember that my own clients hire not my business, but me; they hire me. While they may like, want or need what I know or can teach them, ultimately they’re working with me because of the relationship we’ve built – and are building.

Solid businesses, especially independent and small businesses are built on relationships.

That’s always been the case and it will continue to be the case going forward. Which is why I’m such a big fan of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Sure, Cluetrain’s been around a while. Yeah, many others have said the same things – perhaps even better – since. But I still like the original. I like the way it’s put together. I like that it can be definitive and yet explorative at the same time.

For me, Cluetrain remains the quintessential work on how businesses are relationships and markets are conversations. Probably my favorite section is a piece written by Doc Searls where he describes a conversation he had with a Nigerian Pastor named Sayo:

…After hearing (about ‘markets are conversations’), he acknowledged that our observations were astute, but also incomplete. Something more was going on in markets than just transactions and conversations, he said. What was it?

I said I didn’t know. Here is the dialogue that followed, as close to verbatim as I can recall it…

“Pretend this is a garment”, Sayo said, picking up one of those blue airplane pillows. “Let’s say you see it for sale in a public market in my country, and you are interested in buying it. What is your first question to the seller?”

“What does it cost?” I said.

“Yes”, he answered. “You would ask that. Let’s say he says, ‘Fifty dollars’. What happens next?”

“If I want the garment, I bargain with him until we reach an agreeable price.”

“Good. Now let’s say you know something about textiles. And the two of you get into a long conversation where both of you learn much from each other. You learn about the origin of the garment, the yarn used, the dyes, the name of the artist, and so on. He learns about how fabric is made in your country, how distribution works, and so on. In the course of this you get to know each other. What happens to the price?”

“Maybe I want to pay him more and he wants to charge me less”.

“Yes. And why is that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You now have a relationship”.

Their conversation goes on to talk about the importance of relationship in public markets. ”Transaction still matters, of course. So does conversation. But the biggest slice in the social pie of the public marketplace is relationship. Price is less set than found, and the context for finding prices is both conversation and relationship. In many cases, relationship is the primary concern, not price.”

In essence, price matters – but not as much as relationships. Just think about the recent purchases you’ve made. How often was it just about price and how often did you pay a little bit more because you had established a relationship with the seller? Branding, marketing, selling and good will all have their foundations in relationships.

So in creating your business, in running your business and in marketing your business, why not make it about relationships first? Sure, you absolutely need to know who you are, what you do, why do it and who you do it for. But once you know that, the rest is about building relationships. And relationships begin with conversation. And now, we’re back to using your website, your email list, social media and search engines to get into the conversation. This is where successful businesses are built.

What specifically are you doing to build relationships in your business? How do you nurture your current and post clients? And how to you build those relationships with prospective clients?

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from dbarronoss on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

Poke around the web and you’ll find numerous opinions on why, as a small business owner, you should be blogging.

Some say you should blog to increase your reach. Blogs can certainly help you reach a larger audience faster, and often cheaper, than your usual website. Toss in social media and you can gain a large following quickly. So it’s gotta be reach, right?

It could be. But increasing the reach of your website doesn’t mean you’ll land more clients or get more customers. The blogosphere is full of bloggers who have tons of traffic and are making pennies.

Another oft-quoted reason for blogging is search engine optimization. And it’s true, there are some pretty major SEO benefits to blogging. Blog posts tend to be more keyword centric since often they’re on a specific topic. Then there’s the backlinking opportunities that can come with a well-written blog post. So it’s gotta be the SEO factor, doesn’t it?

Well, maybe. But that’s not what I’m thinking. SEO drives traffic and while traffic is important, getting more traffic doesn’t always mean more sales. It could, but not always.

Then there’s those that say you small business owners should be blogging to grow a community around your business and create brand loyalty. I’ve been someone who’s built my businesses through conversation and relationships, so community is definitely important in building a successful business. And brand loyalty is a plus as well.

But I think that each of these are putting the cart before the horse. I think focusing on reach, traffic and community is useless unless you position yourself effectively in your market.

I’ve worked with hundreds of small and service-oriented business clients over the past thirteen years. Many have had great offers and understood copy writing. They’ve known the importance of keywords and building a following. But what they often lacked was one of the most fundamental aspects of running a business: how they positioned themselves and their offer.

Some think of positioning as just branding. Others see it as image or identity. Neither are wrong. Yet, I define positioning a little differently. I see positioning as what your target audience believes your business provides. In other words, can you clearly illustrate that you have the solution to your target audience’s problem. It’s how you communicate what you do.

But to clearly and successfully communicate what you do, you must have that clarity yourself. And that’s what blogging affords.

When you blog, you write often about your business, your knowledge, and your capabilities. You share stories about how your product or service has been uses by your customers and clients. And you provide valuable proof of the effectiveness of your offer.

Yet you also have the opportunity to let people respond to what your write. They can certainly respond in the comment box. But they also respond through how often they share your posts on Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon. They also respond by how long they stay on the page. And they respond by whether they clicked links in the post or a call-to-action at the end of the post. All of this is feedback on whether people are getting your content or not.

With a blog, you can take this a step further. You can also display your expertise in solving problems your audience face – whether personal or professional. You can offer advice on dealing with circumstances and write specifically to their needs. Then you can watch the response. If it’s positive, you know that you’re communicating well about what you do. And if not, you know that you need a bit of work.

In essence, your blog allows you to find the most effective way to communicate with your audience. It can help you refine how you talk about your products and services so that your readers can clearly understand what your business offers. But more importantly, you can use your blog to display exactly how your offering can help them solve the problems they’re facing.

The bottom line is that before you drive traffic or focus on keywords or even build a community, make sure people know what you do. They won’t buy from you if they’re not clear what you’re about. But once they are, in other words, once you’ve positioned yourself well, then you’ll find that more people will buy from you because you’re talking to the right audience in the way they want to be communicated with.

And needing work is fine. It’s what having a business is all about. You need to allow your business to never be finished – to always be changing.

So small businesses, especially, can use blogging to experiment with how they talk to their audience. With a blog, they can explore different avenues for communicating. But moreover, they can find clarity in their business.

So how are you using your blog to find clarity in yours?

(note: image from horizontal.integration on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

I’m constantly amazed at the amount of content that gets published to the web every single day

If I just count myself, I probably published a total of 100 website pages from 1997 to the end of 2006. Since then, however, I’ve published more than 2000 articles/posts on the web between my 3 websites, articles I’ve submitted, guest blog posts and content I’ve written for the membership sites I’m a resident expert in.

That’s remarkable. And if you consider that I wrote daily from the beginning of 2007 until some time late 2008, it’s even more remarkable that I’ve produced that much content. Interesting thing is I’m not close to being as prolific as many of the bloggers out there.

But what’s happening with all this content? How are people using it once it’s published? Or two weeks later? Or a year later? Is there something more we can all do with our content then just publish it online and move on to the next post? Perhaps there’s something more we can do with all this content – something that generates income.

What I suggest is package up some of this content and create informational products. Doesn’t matter whether it’s ebooks, e-courses, video tutorials or audio programs, informational products can generate massive revenues. For instance, I know a number of small business owners who are making mid-to-high five-figure incomes each month off of a handful of electronic products they’ve developed. That’s every month. That’s a lot of text-link ad click-throughs.

Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we should sell just any old content. Nor do I suggest that we should stop producing free content to put on our blogs. Not at all.

But think about it. You’re taking the time to write useful content. What’s more, people are enjoying and gaining benefit from yoru content. Why not package it for them as themed pieces and offer it at a reasonable price? Seems logical, doesn’t it? Not only does it give you a chance to make a little cash off your writing, your ideas, your knowledge; but it also gives people who love your work a chance to support you. Everyone gains.

Yet there are many reasons you may want to consider creating an info product. Here’s five:

1. You probably already have the content for an info product. If your blog content is niche focused, it’s likely you already have content to create an info product from. All you’d need to do is compile your posts, organize them and do some edits and you’ve got an ebook that you can sell.
2. You’re going to be writing content for your blog anyhow. Maybe you have some content for an info product, may not. But your future blog posts (podcasts and vcasts too) can be crafted to be the content that makes up the core of an info product.
3. People want what you know...and they want it the way you explain it. If you have people finding and reading your blog, and if you’re number of feed subscribers continues to increase, this one should be obvious. They’re all reading because they like and want what you’re writing.
4. Your readers want to support you. Contrary to popular belief, people want to support you. Give them a way too. If you put up a ‘donate’ button, they may click it and make an offering – but how much. Instead, offer them more value by producing a product and they’ll support you even more by not only buying but possibly spreading the word as well.
5. Info products can increase your readership. Create a product – whether free or for sale – and bloggers will likely write about it. If they have it, they may review it. If they enjoy your blog, they may promote your products. Either way, an info products gives people something of great substance to share with their readers.

There are other reasons, for certain. For instance, your info product will always pay you on time – something I know some ad services don’t do. Or that your info product offers very long-term passive income potential regardless of pageviews. Not to mention, the info product is yours and once it’s created you get all the revenue generated.

And if you’re wondering how to get an info product developed, published and distributed, I happened to have written about that for you already.

So what’s stopping you from using your blog to create an informational product?

(note: image from users_lib on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

Want To Increase Sales? There’s almost limitless methods for doing so.

Be in front of your audience when they need you.

That’s it. That’s the key to increasing your sales. Think about it, when you’re at a restaurant, do you care with the bathroom is? Not til you need it, right? Or an ATM. You likely pass dozens of them every day and don’t notice them, right? But what happens when you’re out of cash? Every ATM comes into focus. What’s more, you might scurry to find one.

So many small business owners don’t consider this when they market their business. They work hard on their vision and business plan. Then they focus on their offer and how best to communicate that offer to a target market. Ideally, they’re wanting to position themselves as an expert in a select niche market.

But no one cares that you’re an expert until they need an expert. In other words, no one cares that you can solve a set a problems until they are faced with those set of problems. Then, they go out and look for a solution.

As a business owner, you want to find the most effective ways to get your business, your expertise, your solutions in front of people when they need it.

I know what you thinking…how do I know when people need what I have to offer?

The simple answer is, well, you don’t. But you can spend time identifying a clear niche in which to spend your marketing efforts (and budget). And you can use search engines, forums, social media (blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc) and your website to make yourself more visible to people as a whole. The more people know what you do, the more potential for your work to passed on to someone who needs it.

For instance, you can use SEO and SEM to target specific key phrases that people may be searching for when they’re looking to solve their problem. But be specific and highly targeted. If you train poodles, you likely aren’t going to get much return for optimizing your site for dog trainers. But if you optimize your site for poodle trainers in New England, now you have a specfic niche you’re targeting. And when people need their poodle trained, and live in New England, you’ll likely get found.

Same is true with social media. Use your blog and profiles on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, among others, to establish your expertise. Then openly share with people who you are, what you do and who you do it for. If they don’t need your services, they may know someone who does.

And there’s other approaches as well – forums, blog commenting, article submission, etc. The list goes on. Just remember that you want to present your expertise at the time when people most need it. If you allow that to be your guiding light, you won’t be marketing in the dark. And more people will buy – today, even.

Are you targeting your audience at the times they need you most? If so, how’s that working for you? And if not, why not? Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from Troy Holden on Flickr)

If Mr. Shaw is correct (and I think he is) then all progress – hence all success – happens when you adapt your surrounding conditions to meet your specific situation.

Think about what that means in your business.

So often, small business professionals get caught up in playing follow the leader. They find some system or program – some marketing philosophy or method for copy writing – and they follow blindly. They think that because this method has worked for others, that it’ll be great for them.

What they don’t see is that when we’re always a follower we’re always at the whims of the what’s around us. And when the marketing plan doesn’t work for them they either figure they’ve not learned enough or that they can’t learn it at all. So they either spend more time as a follower or they quit.

But successful business – whether you’re a coach, consultant, therapist, widget maker, etc – isn’t found in following the leader or conforming to the masses. Successful businesses are built out of stepping out of line and finding your own path.

I liken building a successful small business to hiking, which I’ve done plenty of in my short life. Sure, you can follow the trail that’s been cut and see some great scenery. It’s easy, just walk and let the trail be your guide. Or you can decide to bushwhack; getting off trail and taking a risk. It’s when I’ve gone off trail that I’ve discovered the most serene mountain lakes, amazing meadows full of blooming flowers, glaciers hanging off unimaginable cliffs and easy access to ridge lines that lead to breathless views – none of which I would have seen if I’d remained on the trail.

The same is true with your business. Be willing to cut your own path. At the very least, explore off trail. Don’t just be a follower who adapts his or her self to the conditions that already exist. Rather find your independence, become your own leader and make the conditions that surround you work for you and your business.

How can this be pragmatic? Don’t just settle for following someone else’s marketing plan. Learn it, adapt it to your business – rather than your business to it – and leverage what you learn to generate more business. If you’re learning copy writing, don’t just learn the formula. Instead, learn the formula and then figure out how you can adapt it to your specific way of communicating and to your specific business model.

In other words, own it. Own what you learn by making it part of you and adapting it to how you work best. Learn it, adapt it, own it! And be as unreasonable as your business success allows.

So what can  you do today to be a little unreasonable; to go off trail or to adapt your surroundings to your business?

And if you’re unsure, consider how you’re allowing your surroundings to dictate how you do your business – and share it in the comment box.

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from mutbka on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

Are you one of those business owners who’s not tracking your business activity, tracking your marketing or recording how you spend your time each day working on your business?

If you are – you’re certainly not alone. Very few small business owners are measuring their business activity these days – especially on the internet. And even fewer – way fewer – have an established system for tracking and evaluating the effectiveness of each of the most important parts of their business.

This is a HUGE MISTAKE!

I don’t mean the sort of mistake where keeping your business opened is threatened – though it could come to that. I mean that you’re missing an absolutely fundamental part of running a successful business. Just ask anyone who is successful. They’re going to tell you that they key to their success is:

…doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

It doesn’t really matter your field or your niche. If you’re an engineering firm who makes $10 million per year, you need to track what’s happening in your business. If you’re a life coach making $40,000, you need to track what’s happening in your business. And if you’re just getting started, you want to track what’s going on in your business.

Why? Because what you don’t measure – doesn’t exist.

Strong statement, I know. But just consider it for a moment: Can something that’s not being measured really, truly exist?

Now before we start playing a game of semantics about what measuring means – let’s consider a couple of definitions:

To measure means to ascertain the size, amount or degree of something by using a marked standard or by comparison with a known object.

AND

To measure means to take an exact quantity or fixed amount of something.

So you don’t have to use a ruler to measure something. Your eyes measure everything you look at all the time. You don’t need a ruler to know the difference between a long board and a short one. The same is true when you look at a number of something. It’s usually pretty easy to gauge the difference in number between a line of ants on the ground and the number in and around an ant hill. So you’re taking measure of things all the time – that’s how our minds catalog our experiences. Hence, everything you see and experience in your life is because you’ve measured it in some way.

This is why I can feel comfortable in saying, “what you don’t measure – doesn’t exist.”

So let’s move from looking at the world around us to looking specifically at your business. Do you know how many people view your website? Do you know where they come from, what pages of your site they’re reading most and what pages of your site they’re leaving most from? If you have a website – you should. Just those four things alone can tell you a great deal about the effectiveness of your website in marketing your business.

Now, if you’re not measuring and looking at those statistics, are they happening any way. Sure, there are. But do you know anything about it? No, you don’t. This is why I say they don’t exist. The events are happening – xx number of people are reading your website each week – but because you’re not tracking that information and then using it to evaluate your marketing, the visitors really don’t exist to your business. Without knowing whether you have 10, 100 or 10,000 visitors this week, you can’t really know what they did on your website. And if you can’t really know what they did on your website, then you can’t use any of the information their visits left you about how well your website is doing. And if you can’t use that information, then the visitors really don’t exist. They don’t exist because you don’t know anything about them that you can use in your business.

The same is true whether you have a website or not. Following website statistics isn’t the point here. Rather, the point is to have a system setup to evaluate your business at different times, in different manners to find out how well you’re doing – and – to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.

That’s why every business should begin with clear business objectives or goals in mind. And those goals or objectives should be prioritized in importance so that you’re always leading with the most important objectives. Once you know your objectives you want to create a method for measuring and evaluating the efforts you’re putting out to meet each of them. This way, you can know the most important thing to know in marketing:

…what’s working and what’s not.

So are you measure your business efforts? If so, what are you doing, how often to you review your marketing? And have you found it necessary to stop doing an activity because it wasn’t helping you reach  your business goals?

Let’s talk about it.

Oh yeah…I’ll be speaking live on this topic further during The Self Employment Telesummit beginning on September 10th. I’m joined by some amazing presenters such as Molly Gordon, Pam Slim, Mark Silver, Sean D’Souza, Sonia Simone, Nancy Marmolejo and a host of others. Seats are filling up so register today.

note: image from ppdigital on Flickr, some rights reserved)

If you have a small business website it should serve one purpose – generating sales

Sure, it should inform your visitors of your offers and give them social proof of your abilities through testimonials. Without a doubt, your website should generate and capture leads. And most importantly your business website should move your visitors toward buying your offers.

While there’s nearly infinite ways to do generate sales, a few necessary pieces need to be in place on your business website in order to generate more sales effectively. Most of this is really common sense. Yet after the more than 20 Business Website Assessments I’ve done in the past month, these basic elements are consistently being missed on small business websites.

Yet, these basic elements are so fundamental that you want to be sure you’re not missing them on your website.

1. Ineffective use of Page Titles

Page titles are part of the HTML code on your website. Usually you’ll see the page title in the top bar of your web browser window.

While it serves a number of purposes, it has two very primary, and important, functions. First, it is an important piece in keyword optimization for SEO. No effective SEO strategy is complete without including keywords in the page titles. For effective SEO, each of your business website pages should have unique page titles. These page titles should include the keywords that you’ve optimized for each, specific page.

Secondly, and perhaps even more important, your page titles are used as the main, linked text in search engine results. It’s the large blue text you see in the graphic below:

Effective page titles tell people what they’ll find when they click through the search results into your website page. Ideally, your page title will show a benefit the searcher can gain from visiting that page. The best page titles will increase click-through rates from search results, increasing your visitors, your leads and potentially your revenue. Spending any time SEO without optimizing your page titles for conversion is a poor idea.

Of the 26 websites I’ve evaluated in the past month through my Website Business Assessment, every single one of them were not using page titles effectively. If you have a small business website, you may want to look into this.

2. No Clear Business Objectives

Your small business website is nothing more than a marketing tool. On its own, there’s nothing magical it can do. It’s merely a servant to how you want to use it to market and promote your business.

As a marketing tool, your business website needs to be considered as part of your marketing plan. when you create a marketing plan you identify objectives – the things you want to accomplish through your marketing efforts. Then you set out to do the tasks that will accomplish the objectives.

Your business website, as a marketing tool, needs to also have clearly identified business objectives. In other words, you want to be absolutely clear what your goals are with your website. Sure, it could be getting more clients. But there’s a process involved in getting more clients. And your website is a place to implement that process.

But to go a step further, it’s not just enough to state your business objectives and then go about using your business website to accomplish them. You need to prioritize your business objectives. You need to decide that this one objective is the primary mission of my website. Then do everything you can think of to get your primary objective in front of your website visitors, blog post readers and anyone else who will see your website.

After you identify your primary business objective then decide on the second and third most important things you want people to accomplish on your website. Make each of those visible at the most opportune time in your business website. Just make sure they don’t trump the primary objective.

An example that came out of the 30-minute follow-up call I do with every Business Website Assessment came from an alternative healer. She had her signup box for joining her email list on every page of her site. Yet, when we spoke, her primary objective was a free consultation time. The email signup was important – actually her secondary objective – but was not as important as the free consulting time. So we discussed ways that she could adjust her website to make the free consulting time more visible and more appealing. What’s great to here is that after two weeks she’s gotten 6 more inquiries than she usually had.

Be clear, ultra clear, with your business objective, prioritize them and then design your website around them. Doing so, you’ll find much greater success using your business website to promote your business.

3. Few or No Enticing Action Steps for Visitors to Take

In every case in the past month, the websites I’ve evaluated have had few, if any, direct action steps. Action steps, I define, as what you want your visitors to do when they arrive a to a certain point on your website page. Every page of your website needs to have clear, easy-to-do action steps – even your bio page. Actually, especially your bio page.

To have easy-to-do action steps it helps to have clear business objectives. If you know the objectievs of your website, the action steps you want your visitors to take simply become an extension of your primary, secondary and tertiary objectives.

The key here is that the steps are easy for your visitors to complete. Remember, this is the point of conversion. The action you’re asking your visitor to take will directly engage them in your business. So this isn’t the time to get cute with language or too wordy. It’s not the time to explain a bunch of things about what you can do for them. Simple, easy-to-understand, to-the-point content is what you want here.

The best action steps are the ones that combine your business objectives with the wants of your visitor at the moment. When their wants meet your objectives, you’ve got a conversion – a list signup, a consult inquiry, a seminar registration, a product sale, etc. Ultimately, your website’s copy should almost always be about moving people toward an easy-to-do action step.

Now, I keep saying easy-to-do for a reason. On three occasions this past month, I’ve done Business Website Assessments on business sites where the action steps visitors were asked to take were way too complex. In one case, the primary objective was an email list signup in exchange for a free product. The business owner, wanting to get as much from the conversion as they could, insisted that first the visitor signup for a list, then verifiy their email address, then fill-in a “short”, 16 question survey, then verified their email address again, and then they finally got the giveaway product.

All this was explained up front so there was no misdirection. But the business owner wasn’t getting many signups. So I suggested moving the survey in the process to the end and don’t require it. Deliver the product and then offer the survey. I spoke with the business owner yesterday and in the past week he’s tripled his list signups and doubled his survey respondents. Make the process easy.

And…make it easy to find. Don’t hide your action steps like I’ve seen on a number of websites.

Of Course, There’s More…

And there always will be. But when it comes to having an effective business website for your small, service-based business, these are the three most common mistakes I’m seeing during a Business Website Assessment. They also happen to be three of the most critical pieces to having a successful business website.

Perhaps it’s time you find out what’s working and what’s not working on your website. Or what you can do to make your website more effective in reaching your business goals. I’ve got a few slots available still for Business Website Assessments. Signup today.

Are you making these mistakes with your business website? How about your blog? What will you do to change it?

Or do you feel your website is dialed in and performing exactly how you want it to? Tell us how you did it.

Let’s talk about it.

note: image from TopTechWriter.US on Flickr, some rights reserved)

Your business website should effectively represent your brand while providing ways for your leads to easily engage you. All roads in your business should lead back to your website, making it the pivot point for all your marketing. And you want to treat your website that way.

Furthermore, having a website opens the possibility to not just market to your leads, but to create a powerful touch point for engaging your audience in conversation and building relationships with your prospects and clients.

So if you want a successful business, and I believe you do, it only make sense to create a website that fuels the growth of your business.

Yet, as a small business owner, it can be easy – or tempting – to get in the way of your own marketing. You may take shortcuts with your business website. These shortcuts can become mistakes that undermine your business goals and turn your website from golden egg to fried omelet.

The sad thing is that you may not know your making these mistakes and undermining your business website.

So let’s look at 8 common, and often critical, mistakes I see everyday with small business websites:

Mistake #1: No Clear Objectives for Your Business Website

The very first thing you should do when you plan your business website is define its purpose. What objectives do you want your website to achieve? In other words, what do you want our visitors to see, to read and to do. To do is the most important set of objectives so you want your website objectives to be action oriented. Do you want them to sign up on your list, get your RSS feed, buy a product or take a survey? Any of these can be objectives. Just make sure your objectives are clearly defined.

One more thing on objectives: if you have more than one objective for your website, you want to put them in order of importance. Then, make sure you primary objective is the most visible and easy to find on your site. Your secondary objective should take its appropriate place behind the primary…and so on.

Mistake #2: No Strategies For Reaching Your Business Objectives

Once you know the objectives of your website you want to create strategies around how you’re going to accomplish these objectives. Strategy gets into how you’re going to do what you’re setting out to do with our business website. The more thought out and researched your strategies, the more likely your marketing and your website, overall, will be successful. From a strategy comes our plan of action, which gets us into tactics.

Mistake #3: No Tactics to Achieve Your Business Objectives

If you’re like most people, you’re pretty good at thinking about what you want to do with your business website. Often, where the trouble begins is when you have go from thought to action. That’s where tactics come in.

Tactics are the actionable steps you’ll be taking to achieve your business objectives. Your tactics are, flat out, a task list of what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it. Think of your tactics as being the implementation of your strategy. It’s how you’re going to do what you think.

Mistake #4: No Targeted Metrics to Measure Your Progress

One great thing about the internet is that if it happens on your business website, you can measure it. Which means, you can find out amazing detail about how your visitors as seeing, reading and using your website. So the only question is are you recording that information?

What’s sad is that I see so many small business owners who aren’t even looking at their most basic website statistics. Yet, it’s so much easier to know how effectively your building your list, for instance, if you know how much traffic you’re getting. And from knowing that, you can make a plan for increasing you list signups.

There’s no way else to put it, it’s a mistake if you’re not recording your website statistics and looking at them with some regularity (not daily). And it’s a further mistake if you don’t take the time to learn how to interpret your website statistics because they will tell you what’s working and what’s not working on your website.

Yet, it’s important to go one step beyond just your basic traffic stats. You want to also consider how you’re going to measure the effectiveness of your strategy and tactics so you can see how well you’re achieving your objectives. In other words, you want a solid system of metrics – even a simple one – so you can evaluate your marketing and make it work better.

Mistake #5: No Integrated Marketing Plan

So often I see small business owners thinking of their website as one part of their marketing and their offline marketing as being another part. Don’t make this mistake. Integrate the two. Communicate your offline promotions online. And even more effective, use your offline marketing to drive people to your business website. This works great when you can make an offer on your website that your offline audience wants. As I said above, your business website should be the hub of you marketing – not just online, but all your marketing.

Mistake #6: No Focus on the Value of Your Offer

I’m asked to evaluate a lot of websites for whether they’re business ready. One of the most common mistakes I see is small business owners not focusing on or effectively communicating the value of their service. Too often, the focus is on either the cost of service or the ‘unique approach we use that makes us different than everyone else.’ Yet, this just confuses the prospect because either they don’t care about the approach or they have to consider what they’re getting for the cost. In other words, they have to figure out the value themselves.

Don’t make your prospects figure out for themselves the value of the services you provide. Tell them about it. Show them what they get, what they can expect and how you will help them solve their problems. And offer testimonials of people who you’ve helped so that they can see the social proof in your offer.

Mistake #7: No Action Plan for Your Visitors

We said earlier that your website should have clearly defined objectives. Once you’ve identified what your objectives are, it’s likely they require an action by your visitors for you to achieve. So tell them to take the action. Make it exceptionally clear that if they’ve gotten this far in your website, that ‘this is the action step you want to take next.’ Could be a list signup, a free report, a set of articles – doesn’t matter (as long as it’s toward your business objectives). Just be sure you’re hyper-clear about what action steps you want your visitors to take.

Mistake #8: No Balance Between Design & Marketing Message

Having been a website designer for well over a decade, I’ve dealt with this one a lot. Often, business owners become too concerned over the visual look of their website and it gets out of balance with the purpose of their site – which is a marketing tool to promote and sell their products and services.

That’s not to say that a website shouldn’t be visually appealing – it should. For instance, I’ve had dozens of people contact me just to let me know how much they like the design of my site. Yet your website design shouldn’t get in the way of your marketing message and business objectives. It should provide a professional, attractive frame for your all-important content.

Ideally, your design will be something people see initially and get a good impression of you from. Then, as they begin to read your copy, it should fade into the background. So think of your website design not as a paramount piece of the marketing puzzle but as a frame for your marketing message. And remember, that you want to consider your business objectives in any website design.

So these are the 8 most critical mistake I see everyday in working with clients on growing their business and on developing their web presence. There are more, of course. But I’ve found these to be the biggest and most important 8 to correct.

Does your website make any of these mistakes? If so, which ones? And what will you do about it?

Let’s talk about it.

If you’re uncertain where to turn for help or if you’d like to discuss any of these in more detail as to how they relate to your business website, signup for a free 20-minute advisory session with me. Let me solve your problems for you.

(note: image from iampeas on Flickr, some rights reserved)

Marketing your business is a really good idea, don’t get me wrong. However you choose to do it, marketing is a vital part of your business. As a matter of fact, marketing your services is something I teach my clients to do more effectively every day.

Yet I find that there’s a hole in the thinking that “all you need to do is effectively market your business.”

You also need to sell!

Now I know that for some marketing covers selling just as it covers distribution and delivery. Yet I so often see marketing gurus focusing all their time on the preliminary aspects of marketing – clarity of message, target audience, demographics, psychographics, methodology, etc. Seldom do I see marketing coaches get into the specifics of selling.

But more importantly, so seldom does the average business owner see selling as a part of marketing. More often than not, they believe that if they communicate their offer effectively that people will just buy their service. For instance, the majority of the service providers I’ve run into – either as prospects and clients or through a large network of friends, associates and partners I offer help or advice too – see the importance in communicating their offer. And they understand what systems they want in place once the prospects enters their funnel.

But what they seldom focus on is the conversion process – when the prospective client becomes an actual, paying client. That’s where selling comes in.

What many don’t consider is that while there’s a process for marketing, there’s also a process for converting; for selling. And while there’s numerous, effective processes and methods for both marketing and for sales, neither make a successful business on their own. It’s hard to sell your services if you don’t draw prospective clients in through your marketing. Just as you’re not guaranteed a large number of prospects converting to clients without clearly knowing how you sell to them.

To drive the point home consider if I told you, “An effective marketing campaign should lead to increased sales and more clients.” Without a hitch, you’d agree, right? I mean, that’s the whole point, isn’t it – the better your marketing the more you sell and the more clients you have.

Well, effective marketing is like having a bus drop off thirsty people in your driveway. They’ve searched, they’ve found you and they’ve journeyed to your home because they trust you can satisfy their thirst. But just because they’re standing in your driveway doesn’t mean they’ll get to drink. Some will, sure. But many will just stand there waiting for some guidance. Selling is guiding those thirsty people to the well in your backyard, hoisting the bucket from the well, pouring them a cup of fresh water and handing to them to drink.

In other words, selling is a process as well. It’s the process of guiding the people your marketing brings to your business into becoming clients. So how you sell your business, how you convert your prospects, is something you need to consider in order to get more client, increase your business and generate more money.

So, how does your marketing process differ from your sales process? Does it? And if you’re getting people to engage your business, how could you more effectively sell to them?

Let’s hear your thoughts!

(note: image from Ward_ on Flickr, some rights reserved)

Now, three years later, she’s struggling to get enough clients. She seems to get just enough clients to keep afloat. However she’s not fully replaced what she made at her day job.

Yet, she’s self-employed. She runs her own business. Or does she?

That’s the question I asked Susan when she called me last week. She told me she wasn’t getting any new clients and that her leads have pretty much dried up. She’s committed to her business, but not sure how much longer she can run in the red since she’s financing her business with her credit cards.

I asked Susan, “So, if you had to think about it this way – are you employed or unemployed? In other words, are you working or not?”

At first she insisted that she was employed – self-employed at that. She has some clients. She just doesn’t have enough and she doesn’t know what to do.

So when I asked her why she wasn’t getting more leads she gave me the same tired answer that the media is banging away on – it must be the economy. She felt that “the economy was keeping people from contacting her and taking her programs.”

Of course the economy is adjusting itself from the overblown, over indulgent corporate abuses. That’s why we keep hearing about layoffs and buyouts. But in truth the economy isn’t affecting us small business owners too much, really. But that’s another story.

So I asked Susan to consider, just for a moment, what she might be doing differently if she was unemployed rather than self employed. Without even a breath she said, “Well, I’d be out there looking for a job.”

EXACTLY!

Getting out there to look for a job is exactly what she – or any of us – would do. We’d be reading ads, searching the web, making calls, scheduling meetings and following up appointments. But wait a minute…isn’t that what we would be doing with our business as well?

Another way to put it – isn’t that the same process we would go through in marketing out business? We’d promote our offer, generate new leads, schedule appointments, and followup with prospects. In other words – we’d be actively engaged in marketing and selling our products and services.

In short order, Susan got it. She remembers the days of looking for work. And she could see, almost immediately, that in having a business she always had to be looking for work. She always had to be generating new leads and working those leads into hiring her.

And that’s the truth with running a small business – you’re always looking for work. Remember, you’re only self-employed if you’re actually employed by your business.

Did you ever think the secret to succeeding in your business would be act as though your unemployed?

If so, what tactics are you finding the most successful in finding more clients? And if not, how do you think your business could improve – even grow – if you treated yourself as being unemployed?

(note: image from nogger on Flickr, some rights reserved)

Yet if you run a small, independent business, the economy has far less impact on your business than you think. So you’re likely not facing the doomsday that’s being talked about with every newscast and editorial.

Unless you believe you are. But remember, as a service provider, you have much more opportunity in these times than corporations do.

You see, all this talk about financial meltdowns, depressions, and layoffs are mostly affecting corporations – at least at this point. Sure, job losses and home foreclosures are bad things. I, for one, don’t want to see my friends and their families suffer. But there are millions of us out out here who aren’t working for corporations. And most of us aren’t serving corporations either. Our clients are other small business owners, other service providers and the like.

What this means is that you’re much less affected by what you’re hearing about on the news than the guy working for Ford or GM. As an independent business owner, your job is secure if you make it that way. Even if you’re, say, a corporate coach who’s working with large companies, you can still have a great deal of control over how successful your business is – and especially in troubled economic times like these.

The key is to first not get scared. Turn off the TV, stop listening to analysis on the radio and just pass by those articles in the newspaper. In other words – stop buying into all the titillating stories about how we’re heading for a depression worse than the 30′s. We may be – and I’m not saying don’t pay attention to what’s happening. Just stop listening to all the scare tactics that keep you from focusing on the growth of your business.

Everyone with half a business sense knows that it’s during an economic downturn that you have great potential to increase revenue and grow your business. But you have to have a strategy for doing so. And the strategy often means looking at your business, your customers and clients and your revenue model with fresh eyes. See the changing market for its benefits. For instance, there’s less money being loaned right now by banks – so don’t rely on borrowed money. And remember that a good portion of your competition does. Tighten your own belt a bit to stay out of debt – but don’t tighten your spending to the point of loosing business.

I ranting now, I know. But the thing to realize is that during a repressed economy like the one we’re facing now there are tons of opportunities – if you choose to see them. Be bold in looking for them. Be bold in taking them on. And be bold in knowing that you have a chance to grow your business while many others are shrinking.

Just be smart. This is not a time to overextend your business. And it’s not a time to take risks that bet the farm like you may have in the past when a loan could bail you out. Be smart – meaning evaluate everything you’re doing in your business. Look for places your can be more productive and more efficient. Look at your costs and make sure you’re getting a return on what you’re spending.

And more than anything, evaluate your market. Not only yours, but others as well. Begin thinking of your business from the point of view of your audience. What are they likely dealing with in these times? How can your business help them get through? Look for opportunities inside the problems people are facing. And attach your business solutions to those problems. Then get out there and let people know that you can help them solve the problems they face.

In other words…define and refine your niche market and how you’re positioned to the people in your niche market. Be bold, yet be smart. Find the new opportunities and be bold in claiming them. Yet be smart in how you go about it. Think it, plan it, do it and measure your results. Then do it again. And you’ll find your business growing – while others fade.

How are you dealing with this economic crisis? What will you do if it gets worse? Are you positioning your business to take advantage of the downturn? How?

Let’s talk about it…

And if you need help clarifying your niche, positioning yourself effectively, or figuring out how to grow your business right now, then you’re welcome to a free consultation with me where we can talk about how to solve the problems you’re facing in your business.

(note: image from fabiogis50 AWAY TILL 2/11 on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

Let’s talk about it

I work with business owners all the time who aren’t sure about what they want, what they’re doing or where they’re going. Nothing wrong with that at all. After all, unless your expertise is in small business development or marketing, there’s little reason to think you’d have a solid understanding of how to structure and grow a business.

Yet one thing that thatseems to set successful small business owners apart from those who aren’t is their mindset.

Business is all about creating your space in the market place – in your niche market, that is – and working hard to inform people how what you sell can help them. The thing is, if you’re wishy-washy you’ll get wishy-washy responses. Just as if you’re pointed, certain and clear in what you offer your clients, your clients will often be clear and pointed in what they want from you.

That’s why being uncertain about how you’re positioned within your niche market leads to uncertain, and often lackluster, results. Little focus means little results. And what other positioning in your niche market is there than being considered the best in your market space? Do you hear any of your clients say, “I’m working with Dawud because he’s the 12th best business advisor in his field?” Of course not. People always want to feel they’re working with the best. And usually they are – the best for them.

So I’ve never understood having a business unless your intent was to be the best in a market space. And that means that you set out from the beginning to dominate the market. It doesn’t always mean you reach your goal, of course, of being the top-dog in a niche market. But that’s not the point.

The point is your mindset. Do you go after the people who can serve in your niche market or do you sit back and let them come to you? Do you work hard to develop relationships that help establish your expertise and grow your business or do you sort of stay within your comfortable group of peers who will never be clients? And do you set out to be the best in your highly specific, targeted niche market or do you reserve yourself to having a business that doesn’t create the lifestyle you want?

It’s all in the mindset. Set out to be seen as the best in your niche market and you will be – at least by those who you bring into your business. And that means you have to dominate your niche. How else can you grow and maintain a successful business?

As Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.” So what we believe is what we end up creating.

Love to hear your thoughts on how you’re dominating your niche market? Or are you at all trying to dominate your niche? And if not, why not?

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from Danius! on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

Just the idea of it makes your stomach turn a bit. It seems dishonest and dirty. And you’ve convinced yourself that it’s pretty much unnecessary to sell. Somehow you can get more clients and customers without having to deal with all that selling stuff.

But how? How do you encourage more clients and customers to buy your products and services without selling to them? How can you grow your practice, increase your revenue and grow your small business and be apprehensive to selling what you produce and offer in your small business?

Perhaps you don’t have to be apprehensive to selling. After all, you’re selling all the time.

That’s right. You’re selling all the time. As a matter of fact selling is second nature to you. How do I know this? Because you’re a person. You’re a person with ideas, thoughts and opinions. And this is what you sell all the time without even realizing it.

Think about it. Why do you share your knowledge? Why do you offer your opinions? Isn’t it because you have something to share or add to a situation or conversation? And when you do so you’re selling. You’re selling your ideas, your opinions, your perspectives. And you’re doing it all the time. I’m doing it right now.

So if that’s the case, why do you think it’s so easy to sell your ideas in a conversation while it’s difficult to sell your offerings to your prospects?

I think it has to do with money. Often, when you’re engaged in a conversation and you’re sharing your perspective on a topic there’s no money involved. Now there may be other currencies such as what people think of you, but something changes when money is involved. Why do you think that is?

So do you think selling would be easier if money wasn’t a part of it?

If so, I say, then, don’t make it a part of how you engage with your prospects. Make the conversations about them – their problems and how you can help them solve them. Make money the just part of the agreement if they’re a good fit for you.

In other words, take the pressure off to feel as though you need to justify what you charge for your offer. The price only really matters if you’ve illustrated to them that your products and services can help them. Otherwise, price is moot.

Don’t you think?

How do you feel about selling in your business? What have you done to overcome it?

And what else do you think stops the natural flow of selling other than money?

I’d love to hear about it.

(note: image from Lorna87 on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

I’ve always been a do-it-yourselfer. I’ve taught myself a great many things by taking this attitude.

When I bought my first house, I completely gutted it – down to the timbers in most rooms. In other places, we removed and moved walls. For instance, I created a large, walk-in closet in our huge bedroom where there was once a little coat room.

When it came to moving plumbing, rerouting and adding electrical, drywall, replacing subfloor, moving my toilets and bathtub drains – I basically did it all. And in most cases, I took to each project never having done it before.

But at some point, you have to live in  your house. And that means it has to get done – as my wife might say, “be livable.”

For us that time came as we neared the birth of our first child. As the first trimester of my wife’s pregnancy led to the second, we had to make some choices. We’d remodel the kitchen later, for instance.

Well, two kids and four years later, the kitchen hadn’t been finished. Yet we wanted to redo the kitchen. It had been one of the main reasons we moved in the house – a huge dinning room adjacent to a tiny kitchen. The remodel was a no-brainer. So, as my wife was pregnant with our third, we made a strict timeline and went ahead with the remodel.

This time, the do-it-yourself Dawud gave way to the asking for help. I called in favors when it came to moving the plumbing and installing the cabinets and countertops. And I hired a contractor to do the electrical and new lighting. The demo (remove a wall, tear out old kitchen), drywall, flooring and painting I’d do myself. And in less than 8 weeks, we completed our kitchen – for the most part (there’s some odds and ends left to do).

What I learned in the process was something that I’ve seen many small business owners struggle with in their business – they don’t ask for help. They don’t seek people to help them with tasks in their business. Rather, they try to do everything themselves. This usually means one of a number of things happens: They either don’t grow very fast because they can only do so much work or their business goes backward because – well – they can’t do so much work.

But when you outsource tasks in your business, it supports your business in a number of ways. One, it frees up some of your time so that you can focus on the tasks in your business that need your specific attention – such as referral marketing or creating new products and services to sell. Two, it creates space for you to take on new projects because you have more time on your hands. Three, it allows you time to clean up the things that have gotten neglected in your business. Four, it starts the process of handing off even more tasks because once you can trust one person with managing a part of your business, you can trust others. And five, outsourcing lets you share your success with another person – helping them become more successful.

If you’re stuggling with the idea, or if it seems that it’ll cost too much, don’t let that stop you. You can manage how someone else completes tasks in your business. And managing takes far less time than doing. And consider the costs not on what you’re paying out versus your revenues. Rather, consider the costs in relation to how much more productive you can be in creating more revenues streams in your business. Paying someone $20 an hour to manage your email, for instance, is nothing when you can generate $50 or $80, $350 or more with that same hour.

Outsourcing is one of the keys to growing your business. So allow yourself a chance to ask for help. There are plenty of virtual assistants out there, for instance, that do all sorts of things – from general office work to executive resources to web and graphic design to marketing. Just find the one that best fits your needs.

And be sure you know when to ask for help.

As a small business owner, are you outsourcing in your business? If so, how’s it working out. And if not, why not…what stops you from asking for help?

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from jen_maiser on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

I’ve heard so many web-based small business owners do their best to avoid using the word advertise that I’ve begun to wonder why. I’ve worked with enough clients offline to know that it’s not small business owners in general. Offline businesses use advertising constantly to get the word out about their business.

But it seems different for online small businesses. Somehow it seems that the word advertise is unclean or dishonest or something. While I haven’t quite put my finger on it, it is obvious that online small business tend to look at advertising differently. They often don’t consider placing ads – even Google Adwords.

This strikes me as odd because a few, well-placed advertisements can often drive far more than business than their cost.

But the more interesting thing is watching how web-based small business owners avoid using the term altogether. Sure, they talk about marketing, but rarely about advertising. Why do you think that is?

Yet advertising is simply a part of marketing. The best, simple, explanation of the difference between marketing and advertising was written by Rick Cockrum some time back.

“Marketing is the sum of the activities you perform to get the word out about your business and attract the customers you want. Advertising is one marketing activity. It usually entails publishing paid announcements about your business. At our theatre we advertise in the local paper weekly. Our marketing consists of a website, word of mouth from our customers (our best marketing), involvement in local activities, public service functions, involvement with local business groups, (etc)… . You can see that advertising, while important, is only a small part of marketing.”

Rick goes on to suggest that you should “use both.”

I fully agree. I’m a huge – I mean huge – proponent of word-of-mouth marketing and client referrals. Yet it can be difficult to grow a successful business just by word-of-mouth. I’m not saying it can’t be done. Heck, I did it myself. But I know that the right ads in the right places can speed up the growth process immensely.

And advertisements work. No doubt about it. Otherwise Pepsi, McDonalds, Ford and every other company in the world wouldn’t spend the money on it. Even spam email works. And that’s basically what spam is – a paid advertisement sent to your inbox. What makes it spam is that you’ve not given the sender permission to email you about their product. Yet spam must work otherwise no one would be paying spammers to send their messages.

Advertising, for good or bad, simply works. That’s not the question.

The question? Is adverstising working for your business? If so, how; what sort of results have you gotten? If not, why not; what have you tried and how did it turn out?

And if you’ve not tried paid advertising on the web, why not? What keeps you from jumping in?

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from Pink Ponk on Flickr, some rights reserved)

Yet, as business owners, we spend so much of our time focusing on how to do what we do better. We read, we blog, we train, we attend workshops and conferences, go to events, network and so on. All under the guise that we can gain some edge in how we do what we do.

But what if the edge isn’t in what we do for our clients and customers?

My grandmother buys a new car every four years. And for the past three decades, she’s been buying her cars from the same guy at the same dealership. Is it because the Buicks they sell are somehow better than the Buicks at other dealerships? Or maybe it’s that this specific salesman does his job better than the other salesmen do.

Certainly he does, to some degree. But I’ve spoken with him, he’s not the most knowledgeable salesman on the lot. He’s not the best dressed or most polished either.

Yet my grandmother keeps coming back. She won’t even consider buying from another salesman, let alone look at a different make of car.

I’ve asked my grandmother about why she keeps buying from him. Her answer is a simple, “I like him.” Now she doesn’t mean that in any flirty way. I’ve been with her when she’s bought a new car and there’s no weird flirting going back and forth. It’s just that she likes him.

And in their interactions is a little known secret to business success and customer loyalty – feeling. It’s not what you do that’s important with your clients and customers, it’s how they feel about what you do that’s important.

Let’s say that again:

What you do isn’t nearly as important as how it makes your clients and customers feel.

Would you say that’s true in your business?

If it is, why do you think most small business owners spend much of their time on the other?

(note: image from Storeyland on Flickr)

Yet I’m always surprised how many small business owners miss this. Somewhere in all their efforts to develop their business plan and marketing strategy they seem to forget that it’s about the people.

Maybe it’s using terms like target audience or niche market that somehow dehumanizes their thoughts, I’m unsure. Or perhaps it’s the way we think about business in general as being a cold, cut-throat world where business owners are always trying to gain an upper hand on the competition. I know it’s hard to see people when we’re thinking like that.

Yet successful businesses have something in common – people; people buying their products and services. It’s people who make the decision to buy. It’s people who use what we sell. It’s people who give us valuable feedback on how to do it better. And we shouldn’t forget that it’s people who are our best marketers.

All of this being true, why are more business owners not putting the people they sell too first? Why are they not spending time getting to know what the people they can serve want? And perhaps more importantly, why don’t small business owners spend more time learning how to communicate with the people who make up their target market?

Is it fear? Or is it that we never learned solid people skills in the first place?

Or could it be that we enter into a mindset around business that tells us that we can’t be ourselves; that being human makes us unprofessional?

One thing’s for certainly, it’s healthy relationships that lead to healthy business. So why don’t more small businesses get it?

You can guess by all the questions that I’d love to hear what you have to say on this one. I have my own theories that I’ll bring out in the conversation in the comment box.

(note: image from RyanDianna on Flickr)

But one thing is similar between almost every client…they somehow see their blog as their business. I’m not sure where this developed exactly, but I see this all over the web as well. Perhaps there’s a misunderstanding between those who have made money blogging and those who want too.

But a blog is not a business. Blogging, in it’s own right, is no more a business than your gasoline is a car. Sure, the car and gasoline are forever linked, even dependent on each other, but you’re not going to step inside a can of gas and make it to the grocery store.

You can think of your blog in similar terms. Your blog is like gasoline in that it can make your business go. And done well, blogging can make your business grow. But you first need a clearly defined business model before you can attach a successful blog to it.

Even for the problogger, your blog is the method that allows you to make an income – in other words, it’s marketing. But your business is about publishing, sell advertising or affiliate programs or being paid for reviews. The blog is simply the way you accomplish your business model.

I bring this up because I see so many people getting it backward. They think the blog is their business. They see the blog as their car. They expect to just get in and have the blog deliver them to their destination. But it doesn’t work that way. You can blog successfully for years and never make any money. You can have tens of thousands of commenters and no clients.

The answer to making money with your blog isn’t about text-link ads, having more ad space or finding the right affiliate programs. It’s not even about converting clients or selling products. All this can certainly make you money, but your chance of success decreases greatly if you don’t have a plan – a business model to follow.

Here’s some simple points to set you in the right direction toward finding your business model:

• Know thy self – What is it you have to offer. With a service or product this is obvious. For the problogger, it’s still necessary as content will drive your success.
• Know thy market – What is it the people who make up your market need? Solve a problem for them and they’ll become a customer. One help…think of your market as a person.
• Know thy vision – Think about where you want your business to go and what you’d like to accomplish with it. Write down your ideas. And be sure to set goals.
• Know thy plan – Your business is like building construction – you have to have a plan. Your plan is the path� you’ll follow toward accomplishing your goals.
• Track thy success – Tracking is way underutilized by small business owners today. As a blogger, tracking traffic is great. But consider tracking conversions and revenue and tweak things to gain more success.

The bullet points above ideally answer four questions – who are you, what do you do, who do you do it for, and how do you do it? When the answers to these questions are clear, you have the foundation for your business. Now, go get your blog to do the marketing for your business.

And that’s what a blog is – a marketing tool; a method for drawing attention to your business. But first you have to know what your business is about. You have to know who you serve and with what. And to be successful, you need to know how to meet the goals you set for business. Blogging can help with all this. But without a clear vision and solid plan, you’ll likely end up like the tens of thousands of bloggers who are writing their fingers off and making pennies.

So if you’re problogging, what’s your business model? And if you’re blogging to convert clients or customers, how are you using your blog to gain revenue?

More importantly, how well is it working? I’d love to chat about it…

(note: image from B Tal on Flickr)

But what’s the truth? Have we reached a point where we should dump our email lists and find other channels to market through? Or is email marketing still as viable as it always has been?

My own thoughts are that email marketing is still alive and somewhat well. There are lots of business owners today that are making quite a nice living from the revenue they generate from their ezine lists. They continue to get new subscribers weekly, which just reinforces that email marketing is working.

I do think, however, that email marketing is dying – however slowly. And I’m willing to concede that email marketing may just be evolving rather than dying. But of course evolution means a slow death of one so that something new can take its place. And that’s where I feel email marketing is right now.

I mean, let’s face it, we just don’t have the time to read all the stuff that comes to our inbox. So what does come in front of our eyes better either be expected, interesting or useful to my specific needs – whether personal or in business. If I subscribe to an ezine, I’ll likely give it a few issues and if the content isn’t either highly valuable or doesn’t help me solve a specific problem I’m facing, I’ll unsubscribe.

What are your thoughts? Is email marketing dying? Is it evolving? Is it static?

And how effective is your ezine list, if you have one?

(note: image from sean dreilinger on Flickr)