eBusiness Resolutions for a Healthier Business in 2010

If you’re a retailer, after the busy-ness of the season, you now have a little time to reflect on your business and how you’d like to do things differently or better in 2010. If you have another type of small business, you are looking at your successes and wondering what you might do to make things even better in the coming year. If successes have been thin on the ground, then you’re looking at ways to improve. This brings me to my eResolutions.

eResolution 1: Crawl before Sprinting

Most of us have had an experience of diving in and trying to fix everything at once. How did that work for you? Right!

So start small. If you’re a retailer, consider setting up a Twitter account. You can start following other people and seeing what’s going on while you plan the next part of your strategy. You can read more about Twitter on this blog in this series of posts on Twitter strategy.

eResolution 2: Put your Website on a Diet

Unless the name of your business is, All Things to All People, then you know that you have to specialize. Does your website reflect this. The average web home page has about 80% too much stuff on it (my wild statistical generalization). Remember, people who search for you have searched for something specific. Give it to them. Statistics show that you have 2 to 3 seconds to give them what they want or they’ll leave. This is even shorter than the average window shopping experience. You can read more about this on my Landing Page posts from last fall.

• It’s what you do with Traffic to your website that counts.
• Landing Page Optimization for Small Businesses on a Budget
• Landing Page Optimization – the best video from youtube.com/

eResolution 3: Make Good with Google

Google has numerous free tools to help you manage your online presence. You can access them once you have a Google Account (free). Here is a list of useful Google tools as well as posts on Google.

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Adwords
• Google Analytics
• Google Local Listing – how to get listed
• Add a coupon to your local listing in Google

eResolution 4: Face up to Facebook

I suggest that you set up an account and think about how you might use your “Page”. Take a look at my articles on using Facebook to see how to get started.

• Setting Up Your Page on Facebook, Part I
• Setting Up Your Page on Facebook, Part II

eResolution 5: Make social media an integral part of your business plan

Take a look at this post; 5 Ways to Integrate Social Media in Your Marketing – a Presentation by Jason Baer. It’s worth your time.

Bonus eResolution: Consider what you might be able to do with YouTube.

Youtube.com is one of the most visited sites on the web. Good, fun and interesting video attracts audience. It can be a good way to raise your profile. In future posts I’ll address this issue in more detail.

Here’s wishing us all a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.

I welcome your questions. Please question or comment via the “Comments/No comments” link below. If you found this article useful, please share via your networks. Thank you so much.

1. Where you will host the blog?
2. What software you will use to manage the blog?
3. What name you will give to your blog?

Where will you host your blog?

You have three choices on hosting your blog. If you’re unsure of the meaning of hosting, think of it as the place where all your blog files will be that are accessible to the Internet. People cannot (we hope) read the files on your computer so you want the blog files out where people can find them.

Choice One: The Free Hosting from the Blogging Software Site
This is the easiest and cheapest of the three options and can be done by someone with minimal computer skills. If you can email, you can do this. You can have your blog up and operating in less than half an hour. In this option, your web address will read something like: mycompanyname.wordpress.com.

• Advantages
• Quick and easy
• Free
• No major web or computer skills required.
• Disadvantages
• Some limitations on your name.
• Is separate from your company website and may lose some of the advantages of having all that fresh material on the website.
• Some limitations on the look of the site and the features.

Choice Two: Incorporating the blog into your website.
In this case, you set up a separate section of your website that contains the blog. You will need some help from your web designer for this. The URL (address) will be something like this: www.yourwebsite.com/blog. You can replace “blog” with “news”, “updates”, whatever suits your purposes.

• Advantages
• Adds new material to your website and so attracts search engines.
• No additional cost for hosting.
• More closely tied to your brand or company.
• You have more control over the look of your blog.
• Disadvantages
• Extra work to set up and requires some technical skill.

Choice Three: Set up your blog on a separate website.
In this option, you will have to register a new name for your blog and buy some new hosting for your blog. You address would be something like: www.companyblog.com

• Advantages
• If you want to write about a variety of topics or brands, this might be better.
• Disadvantages
• Cost of registering the new name – about $15 per year.
• Hosting Costs – about $20 per month.
• Technical skill required.

What blogging software should you use?

I have used two different versions of blogging software, Blogger and WordPress. There are a number of other free and paid options out there. I greatly prefer WordPress. It has so many options to make your blog more attractive and likely to be found by search engines. WordPress makes it incredibly easy to add pages to your blog. In fact, I’ve started building whole websites from WordPress.

If you just want to add a one page blog to your website, then you might find Blogger a bit easier to use. Here is an example of a news blog integrated into a Canadian writer’s website using Blogger software. You can see an example of a freestanding real estate blog done using WordPress here. Here is a demo blog I set up using WordPress and hosted on their site: http://radiancedream.wordpress.com/

What name you will give to your blog?

If you add your blog to your website, then there are few or no limitations on what you can call it. If you register a new domain or select a WordPress name, then you are limited to names that are not already registered by someone else. That is, if someone is already calling himself sandiegoplumber.wordpress.com, then you cannot. That’s san diego plumber, not sandie go plumber. Be careful that your name cannot be misinterpreted.

Options for choosing a name include:

• Choose a name with important search engine keywords related to your business. For example, abbotsfordorganic.wordpress.com.
• Choose a name that is close to your business name. For example, samsorganicgrocery.wordpress.com.

It may be worth paying an SEO (search) expert to do a little research on what words are most searched for in your field. You want words that are frequently searched but also not too competitive. After all, you want to show up near the top of the search results.

If you decide to use spaces in your URL, then uses – (dashes), not _ (underscores). Search engines read dashes as spaces. For example, sams-organic-grocery.wordpress.com, which is read as sams organic grocery, not sams_organic_grocery.wordpress.com, which is read as samsorganicgrocery.

Some people recommend using a catchy name. This could be useful if your blog is more personal or general in nature and you are trying to build a reputation,but for your business, you are wiser to use your business name or keywords (important search words).

A last point on naming your blog. Give it lots of thought. Once you’ve built up a following, you do not want to have to change your name. Have some options ready in case your first choice is not available.

So, for tomorrow, have an email address and your blog name choices ready and we’ll set up your blog.

You need a blog for three very important reasons. First, Google loves new material and a blog (if you keep it up of course) provides lots of new material. Two, a whole raft of Internet Search professionals list blogging as the number two way to get traffic to your website via search results. Three, the blog is the center of your social media universe. In his book, The Social Media Marketing Book, Dan Zarrella puts the blog at the center of his social media strategy diagram.

What’s a blog?

A blog is simply a website that is regularly updated with new and interesting information about your subject. The most recent news is found first on the blog and older news is lower on the page or archived. The first handful of blogs were created in the mid ’90s.

According to Wikipedia,

As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112,000,000 blogs.

For some fun statistics on the state of the blogosphere, check out thefuturebuzz.com.

What Should You Blog About?

As a small business owner, you most likely have a wide range of knowledge about topics related to your business. Here are some ideas.

• News about your business. You’ve added new staff. You’ve won an award. You’ve sponsored a charity event.
• New products. This should be a chatty piece about the new product, not a sales pitch.
• Special events. You’re having a demonstration on how to build your own terrarium. You’re having a book signing.
• Special offers. Have readers print a coupon or give them a special code for a discount.
• Your thoughts on news affecting your industry.
• Your expertise – for example – you run a building supply. How about articles on how to refinish a deck, or how to replace your bathroom taps.
• Answers to common questions. People who come into your store or use your services have some questions. In person, you give answers. Gather some of these answers into a series of blog posts. You can build your reputation for giving added value.

How do you get a blog?

This week I propose to write a series of articles on setting up your own business blog. I’ll include lots of detailed instructions so that even if you have only average computer skills, you’ll be able to do this yourself. Tomorrow we’ll start with naming and setting up your blog.

Creating Your Coupon in Six Easy Steps

1. To get your Google local listing you had to set up a Google account. To create your coupon, you need to login to that account.
2. Here is the screen that will appear


First step to adding a coupon.

3. Click on the “local business center” and the following screen will appear.


The coupons tab in the Local Business Center

4. Now, you see the coupon information


An explanation of the coupon feature

5. As you fill in the form on the left you’ll see your coupon appear on the right. You can also allow for a mobile phone coupon, give your coupon a number for ease of tracking and add an image.


Your coupon takes shape





Adding an image.

6. When people click “More information” on your map bubble they will see more details of your business and your coupons. When they click on one of your coupons, this is what they’ll see.


Here's my coupon. Click on it to see the actual coupon live.

Publicize Your Coupon

You can link to your coupon from your website, your blog or your Facebook account. In fact, I’ll go over there and do it right now.

Please feel free to ask questions or make comments via the “No comments/comments” link below.

Thanks again for following my blog.