Mobile Marketing & Online Customer Getting Solutions

Learning Something New Is a Debate we often grapple with.

Two big questions

1. How hard is it going to be?

2. How long is it going to take to be worth the time investment?

Learning something new is often challenging. Challenges are good because they stretch the mind.

But we don’t like to do difficult things.

The 2nd question stymies. Beforehand, its almost impossible to know whether the skill you learn is going to be positive ROI for the time and mental energy invested to acquire it.

I am working for a client web design company. They don’t use WordPress.

I mastered WordPress.

I felt a steep learning curve using their system.

But I’ve got a handle on it now. The reason I went forward is because they’ve got over 3,000 clients nationwide and get 2 to 3 of their customers asking them about SEO.

I’m proving my SEO skills.

Once done I’ll be able to serve their clients. So in this case I was 100% sure it was worth leaping over the high learning hurdle with this quality company.

I like the owner and I like their company’s philosophy.

I wish I had a magic bullet formula to tell you beforehand with absolute certainty whether a skill was going to be worth your time invested to learn.

Use intuition. Use your common sense.

And sometimes just be okay learning something new. Because at the very least it expands your mind which is always good.

If you’ve got a cool way to evaluate the value of learning something new, post it in the comments.

Or just tell a story about something you’re glad you learned but didn’t pay off the way you thought it would.

I pledge to read and engage in the lively conversation.

As a small business owner money is usually a huge concern. There never seems to be enough of a budget to do all of the things you need to do.

But money is not your most important asset. This requires a shift in mindset because…

Time is your most valuable asset as a business owner.

In fact, according to the Small Business Administration the average value of business owners in the US is $350 per hour.

This means any activity you’ve taken a do-it-yourself approach on which pays you less than $350 per hour needs to be outsourced, subcontracted, or handed off to one of your W-2 employees.

If you ever want your business to grow you must get out of the do-it-yourself mentality.

Do you think Bill Gates does things himself? Does Michael Dell do minor things himself?

Some big things you don’t want to be cheap about and instead hire out are:

1. mobile friendly website build

2. content creation

3. mobile apps development

You definitely need the first two. #3 the mobile app may or may not make sense for your business.

Here’s more on this story from small biz trends:

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3. Mobile Apps

There’s a reason there are over 500,000 iTunes apps, many of which have few to no users. Companies that have no business creating apps are doing so. There are DIY app design programs like AppMakr, but they don’t help you with mobile app strategy, and without that – your app is useless. After all, do we really need a store locator app for your brand? Doesn’t Google Maps do that? What are you really trying to accomplish with your app?

Alternative: Find a mobile app developer with experience in your space. If you’re in the travel industry, find a designer who’s created other travel apps. Let the developer guide you to building an effective mobile app strategy rather than being stubborn about how your future app will be more popular than Angry Birds. It’s simply not happening.

4. Content

I could write books about the companies who undervalue good content. Suffice it to say, a lot of brands want content that will help them connect to customers, but they don’t want to pay its worth. Job boards like Elance are filled with writing gigs promising to pay a whopping $4 for 600 words (I’m not joking). If you devalue writing this much, you probably don’t get the overall content marketing thing. You pay to have a professional writer to create content that reflects positively on your company. For $4, you simply can’t guarantee that it won’t be riddled with typos and run-on sentences. Is it worth the savings to have to rewrite it?

”

Anything you’ve cheaped out on that you later regretted? Leave your comment below because I do read and responded to them.

Seeing a headline like that as a small business owner would make me curious and skeptical all at the same time. Since you clicked through I’ll show you exactly how it can be true for you.

It’s a somewhat new concept which has been enabled and greatly expanded because of the Internet. The friction involved with these transactions has been massively reduced to where it’s now a profitable and easy enough to do concept.

It’s called crowd sourced funding.

The true beauty is you get the money your local business desperately needs to grow without selling any shares nor a percentage of your company.

To recap: you get the capital you need basically for free. These are donations, you’re not selling shares in your company.

There’s one company in particular called Kickstarter Funding Marketplace which is a marketplace bringing together:

1. entrepreneurs and startups with business ideas

with

2. people who’d like to make donations to fund them.

It’s kind of like Kiva Donation Marketplace in that many people can make small donations from a dollar up to a few hundred dollars in order to raise the capital the business owner is looking for.

So instead of going to an angel investor to receive a $50,000 first stage round of funding you could go into the Kickstarter marketplace and raise the same $50,000 from say 1000 “investors” who are donating to your business costs.

This crowd sourced funding is a great way to see if people are actually interested in your idea. It’s the best form of interest because you find out if they’re actually willing to break out their wallets and donate.

It’s an even better and truer measure because they’re giving you money for free not even expecting a product as they would if they purchased something from your company.

There are a few guidelines though. Obviously, your idea has to have traction and be of interest to people. More than that it’s gotta be interesting enough where they’ll donate money.

The other potential gotcha is it’s an all are nothing deal. Meaning if you set a goal of raising $50,000 and you only get donations totaling $37,388 then you get zero funding.

The one upside to missing your donation fundraising goal is you get a ton of publicity just going through the process and setting up a business account page on Kickstarter.

I’m sure there are other sites out there in this much-needed marketplace and service.

Here’s more from Desert news:

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David Alden doesn’t like the idea of selling portions of his company for funding.

The Park City entrepreneur started Recoil, a company that makes universal cord winders just over a year ago.

“It is likely that I will have to part with percentages of the company over the course of the life of the company just to raise enough money to grow it,” said Alden, who quit his job in real estate to pursue his business venture. “I’m very wary of giving up pieces of that company too early in the process.”

Many startups in Utah are turning to Kickstarter, a New York-based fundraising website that allows individuals and groups to receive donations for their projects. This allows low-budget entrepreneurs to find funding without selling ownership of their company for investments.

”

I see crowd sourced funding only growing in importance because of the disastrous and worsening economies around the globe.

For the first time in history you can get access to millions of people who can make small donations which added up make a massive difference. The barriers have been almost eliminated.

The friction, marketing muscle and time required to find so many small investors has virtually vanished.

This essential capital infusion can be the difference between a startup having the money required to grow or becoming a small business administration statistic as a online business startup that failed because it was undercapitalized.

How do you feel about this funding source? I pledge to read and respond to your comments below.

I wrote a controversial post about the value of small businesses to economic job creation. This follow-up post cites the most recent job numbers which came out a little over a week ago.

Analysts said it showed encouraging data both on the top line numbers and when you dig deeper into the numbers. So this wasn’t just some surface level blips in new jobs created.

But as good as they were, with the massive overhang of unemployment and under employment, it’d take double or triple these gains every month for well over a year to make any meaningful dent in the unemployment rate.

While the government reports their main number at 8.3% unemployment the real number when you include those “too discouraged” to look for work is closer to 16%.

And the real over all unemployment when you consider:

* recent college graduates
* those looking for work
* those on unemployment benefits
* those so discouraged there out of the work force
* those who are underemployed

This real rate is up around 22% to 23% as reported by shadow stats. http://www.shadowstats.com/article/no-411-december-employment-and-unemployment

Here’s more from the CNBC story:

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The report cited 95,000 jobs created by businesses with under $50 million in revenue; an additional 72,000 jobs came from medium-sized businesses with revenues from $51 million to $499 million. Just 3,000 jobs were created by large companies in January.

While the numbers continue to trend up, Prakken says the U.S. is not out of the woods yet on unemployment. “We need monthly gains twice as big as this, for months on end, to climb out of the employment hole we are in,” he said. “I’m encouraged, but would like to see more.”

”

If the government reported statistics the honest way like they were doing back in the 20s and 30s then their numbers would match up with the reality of what you and I are seeing on the ground every day.

Courtesy GrantWickes

There’s a big debate around small business and government policy programs to assist small businesses everywhere. The local business world is definitely broken because of the battered economy.

Tons of small businesses have gone under. More so than the normal rate of attrition in a healthy economy.

Recent research is throwing water on this long-held belief that small businesses are the engine fueling America.

These studies show that bigger businesses (like the Fortune 1000) are bigger job creators.

This is a highly charged emotional issue going back to the very very bedrock of America’s foundation. Our founders were mavericks and entrepreneurs.

But after working with small businesses I’ve seen layoffs and rehiring’s due to under capitalization. Sometimes cash flow just doesn’t flow. This displacement causes much disruption in employees’ lives.

The article seems to suggest diverting more resources to large businesses. But they already do get a ton of resources so this isn’t the solution.

Here’s more interesting facts from the article in Harvard Business Review:

”

Kenny, a fellow at the Center for Global Development and the New America Foundation, cites a growing body of evidence that suggests that a reassessment may be in order. Consider the conclusions from some recent research: Small businesses may not be a strong source of prosperity. Not only are they less productive than their larger counterparts, they have, according to a World Bank study, a lower rate of productivity growth because they invest only a small proportion of total R&D money. They therefore charge higher prices and pay lower average wages.

An analysis of census data by economists Erik Hurst and Benjamin Pugsley found that companies employing fewer than 20 people made up 90 percent of the six million businesses with one or more employees in the US in 2007. Most were small entrepreneurs creating what might be considered “lifestyle” jobs for themselves, intending to stay small and avoid employing many others. Eighty percent that were studied in detail didn’t create a single job between the years of 2000 and 2003. Another study, The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By, by Scott Shane, found that while small businesses create more jobs than their larger counterparts, they also destroy more jobs. While they created jobs in the year of their founding, they netted out destroying jobs in years two through five as most of them failed, suggesting less job security than in larger organizations.

At the international level, economists Rafael La Porta and Andrei Schleifer conclude that a nation’s wealth is inversely proportional to the share of jobs provided by small businesses. Again, this is due in part to the lower productivity of such jobs.

”

Drawing from my over 12 years experience working on the Internet with local businesses and now getting this new information from these studies in the Harvard business review my conclusions have shifted a little bit.

It’s clear there’s a learning curve for 1st time or even 2nd time small-business owners. But they are creating more jobs on the whole than their Fortune 500 counterparts.

The biggest thing holding small businesses back, and therefore the overall economy, is excessive government regulation.

Excessive regulation causes uncertainty in small-business owners. Their decision-making is clouded and they don’t know where to make investments in expansion.

So repealing most of the regulations and dialing back the rest is the best way based on all the data to get our economic engine running again.

The goal is a few key basic regs to prevent over the top bad behavior (like dumping toxic wastes in drinking water sources) then for government to get out of local business owners’ way.

What are your thoughts? Make your comments below and I’ll respond.

Local search using Google places, Yahoo and Bing local is going to be the key driver for your small business going forward. People are out there searching for your local business. Are they finding you at the top of the results for your buying keywords?

Most business owners I talk to are nowhere to be found in these listings.

Google just updated their software to start showing what are called “blended results” for MOST local searches. This basically means the old unpaid rankings and the former Google maps listings are now blended together seamlessly.

You’ve got elements of both showing in the ranking results.

What this means for you is that the SEO value of your site is now more important than ever for getting priority positioning in the local business listings.

This means you must have high relevance of each page of your site to what your customers are typing into the search box. This means the amount and quality, most importantly the quality of your back links, coming into your website matters.

It also has to do with the speed your website loads, the user experience a search visitor has including how many pages they visit and how long they stay, and of course whether they pick up the phone to call you.

You’re not doing this as an academic exercise.

You’re looking to make the phone ring which then makes your cash register ring.

So now that you know the basics of what it takes you gotta keep in mind the mentality of your visitors.

Someone typing in the word “shoes” is in a much different mindset than someone typing in “size 7 women’s high heel shoes”.

Ask yourself what things people type in to find you? Then from each of those terms ask yourself “what mindset are they in right now by typing this in?

Are they frantic and looking for an emergency solution right now? Is this one of those “nice to haves” where you’ve got to do a little more selling to push them off the fence and over onto your side of the office complex buying from you?

Ask me your questions about this topic in the comments below.

Howard Schultz had a vision for a coffee company and enacted that big vision with spectacular success. Starbucks was on a major growth trajectory by the year 2000.

So like most entrepreneurs he decided to cash out and step away. But then the 2000′s hit, the economy went haywire, and then in 2008 the economy absolutely plummeted off a cliff.

Starbucks tanked with it but not solely because of the shattered economy.

So Schultz came back. The first step to initiating the turnaround he said was making difficult decisions. The leadership had to own up to their mistakes and apologize to all the employees.

When consumer behavior shifted to more savings Starbucks at $4 or $5 per cup was one of the first things cut. Unfortunately, neither Howard nor any of the executives in his network had the answers because none of them had ever seen this type of business environment before.

There were competitors on the low end like McDonald’s and there were competitors on the premium high-end marching to the drumbeat of “support local companies”. Starbucks was being seriously squeezed.

The world changed with the advent of blogs, social media, and the ever growing adoption of YouTube.

Starbucks was ill-equipped to handle these changes. You must be quick and nimble especially if you have a small business because speed is your main advantage over bigger competitors.

Know what the world is doing and what trends are. Position yourself in front of it. Check out more from the Starbucks interview to learn from this cautionary tale so you don’t repeat these mistakes

”

What was the low point after your return?

The challenge was how to preserve and enhance the integrity of the only assets we have as a company: our values, our culture and guiding principles, and the reservoir of trust with our people. There was unbelievable pressure from multiple constituents. I’ve saved every analyst’s report and major story, and what was said about us and about me. My favorite was “Never give an 800-pound gorilla caffeine.” There was a death march of comments like “Starbucks’s days are numbered,” “It’s no longer relevant,” “McDonald’s will definitely kill Starbucks,” and “How could the board bring back Schultz, who is responsible for all this?”

How had things gone so wrong?

There was a different team here—very good people, who deserve respect and not the burden of responsibility, because I was chairman of the company, and I am culpable. Success is not sustainable if it is defined by how big you become or by growth for growth’s sake. Success is very shallow if it doesn’t have emotional meaning. I think there was a herd mentality—a reason for being that somehow became linked to PE, the stock price, and a group of people who felt they were invincible. Starbucks isn’t the first company that has happened to, and thankfully we caught it in time.

”

One of the big takeaways from this interview is the danger of hubris. Just because you’ve had success in the past doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed for the future.

Bring a healthy skepticism and questioning attitude about your business processes into the office each day.

Always maintain a healthy view of your place in the world and ask yourself “How can we do better going forward?”

What are your thoughts on this cautionary tale?

Credit reporting is a sensitive area for small business owners and individuals alike. It’s been known for the past few years that these banks were using social media sites like Facebook and twitter to gather data on the “credit worthiness” of individuals and business owners.

Now there’s a new bank coming up in the world that plans to be almost totally mobile and use social media data as a major factor in determining whether to extend credit or not. It’s at the absolute bleeding edge of technology in the banking world.

They’re going to gather data from lots of “alternative sources” to make loan decisions. This has privacy advocates howling but the data’s already out there so I see it as much ado about nothing.

They say this will help some of the 65 million people who don’t have credit to get loans.

I don’t know whether this is truly their motive or there’s some more dark hidden motive lurking.

I do know this affects your small business and its ability to get financing. The more friends you have the more the bank’s going to give bonus points because you can potentially refer more account holders to them.

And the higher esteem you’re held in by your friends is going to be a huge factor. They’re calling this your “Street credibility”.

Here’s more from the story on American Banker:

”

Perhaps more intriguing still, it will use social media information to inform its credit decisions and to determine aspects of its relationship with customers, including pricing.

“We look at a bunch of elements, and one is your ability to act as a referrer, or influencer, who can drive acquisition as a basis for connections,” says Brett King, founder and chairman of MovenBank, and the author of Bank 2.0.

So far, banks have limited their social media exploits to marketing and customer service experiments on Twitter and Facebook. But financial institutions and their product vendors are aware their own customers’ data has potential implications for credit decisions, relationship pricing, even collections.

”

Bottom line is, build up your network and treat people the right way so they say good things about you publicly on these private social networks and it’ll improve both your ability to get credit as well as cut down on the rates you actually pay. Saving money is always a good thing.

You’ve heard the blaring headlines about your small business. You must be involved in social media or be left behind.

While this is true in many industries they don’t tell you the whole story. You can absolutely get lost in a time rabbit hole of social media if you don’t watch yourself and remain focused.

This can be incredibly hard to do as social media has so many things going on at all times it can suck you in with things you didn’t even know you were interested in. And that doesn’t count the things you actually are interested in.

So what’s the solution to avoid this time suck?

You’ve probably heard of scheduled postings. And you’ve probably heard it’s a negative.

But has anybody ever provided you any real numbers about scheduled postings?

The 2 big findings from these numbers are:

1. timeliness matters in a big way for conversions (adding 74% more conversions)

2. automated posting using an RSS feed is just as effective as manual posting.

So there’s a timeliness bonus because people want their information now. But they don’t care whether it comes from an automated source like an RSS feed or you actually logging into twitter or Facebook and posting an update manually.

This last part is very good news for us as small business owners.

Here’s more from the Argyle study:
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Is Post Automation Effective at Generating Conversions?

Now that we’ve shown that post automation is just as effective at generating clicks, let’s dig into automation’s impact on conversions.

An aside: measuring conversions is still nascent in social media marketing, and many community managers still have trouble linking social media activity to business outcomes. The secret to making this connection is multi-touch conversion tracking. Social media typically isn’t the final click that causes a sale or generates a lead, but it influences those behaviors, and this influence is measurable.

Based on our analysis, there is no significant difference between posts published via RSS automation and posts published manually. RSS posts influence an average of $268 in revenue and manual posts influence an average of $267 in revenue. It doesn’t get much closer than that.

Results diverge significantly when it comes to scheduled posting. Posts scheduled to publish in the future have an average influenced revenue of $177, while posts published immediately have an average influenced revenue of $308, a “timeliness bonus” of 74%.

”
So be timely in your posting and you’ll generate more conversions. The easiest way to do this is to plug in your RSS feed from your blog into your twitter account and your Facebook account so the moment you post it goes out to your network of followers and friends which has proven to get 74% more conversions.

Do you agree with these numbers from your own tests?

Post any thoughts or potential blind spots in these numbers in the comments below.

Small businesses can use SEO, a.k.a. search engine optimization, as one of the best sources in today’s economy to bring in more business leads. But SEO lead generation must be done a certain way to be effective.

And recent data shows small businesses and big businesses alike are woefully inadequate when it comes to proper SEO tactics.

Millions of dollars in profits are being left on the table. Customers are wasting time searching and quickly becoming frustrated because they’re not finding the results.

So everybody loses.

Here are some common mistakes:

– going after the wrong keywords
– assuming certain things about search visitors
– not looking at the true competitors

Who cares if a certain search term has 583,222,677 competing pages?

The only pages that matter are the top 10. And when you get right down to it the only pages that really matter are the top 3.

So those are your true competition.

Here’s more from the full story:

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According to a recent BrightEdge study, about $112 million was left on the table from financial services, retail and technology companies that failed to deploy optimal SEO techniques, ADOTAS reports.

Looking at “terabytes of page rank, social signals, keywords, backlinks, ranking and CPC data” from company databases, researchers were able to determine how much money sites could’ve earned had they reached their SEO potential.

”

There’s gold in them thar hills. You just gotta know how to find it or hire me to find it for you.

What are your questions regarding SEO? Post them in the comments and I promise to respond.