Archive for the ‘Business Principles’ Category

A while back, I was asked to participate in an over-the-phone interview that would be later broadcast online. This is one of those interviews where they ask you to provide a list of questions up front so they know what to ask. Sadly, I don’t even remember who it was or where the interview ran. But, what I do remember is my faltering missteps during the interview. Yeah, don’t pretend it’s never happened to you!

I submitted 17 questions and a few weeks later they called to do the interview. Fortunately, for me, I didn’t have to worry about any trick questions, because I wrote them. Unfortunately, for me, what seemed like an obvious answer when I wrote the questions, somehow escaped me during the interview.

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There is an odd phenomenon that I have noticed in the world of websites. There is a small, yet vocal, group of people that love crap! Time and time again, when I advise a client to improve their website or logo, I hear, “we get complimented on it all the time.”

That?

It brings up images of Charles De Mar from the movie Better off Dead saying, “I’ve been going to this high school for seven and a half years. I’m no dummy.”

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The thought that you should SEO your site before you even develop it seems counter-intuitive, and in many ways, it is. But, not entirely. I’ve been an SEO for over 12 years, and I still can’t get past the fact that optimization continues to be the “after thought,” only coming into play long after the site has been up and running for months or even years.

This mindset needs to change.

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One of the questions that I keep hearing from small business owners every year is this: How can a small business like me afford SEO/SEM? It’s a fair question coming from budget-conscious business owners. Not everybody can afford SEO. But, nobody can afford NOT to SEO.

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In the last post, we explored five of the Top 10 Guidelines to Establishing Web Credibility, provided by Standford back in 2002. Still relevant today, here we’ll explore the remaining 5.

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Operating an online business has a lot of advantages over brick and mortar shops. But, contrary to what many believe, being online is not the holy grail of business success. Brick and mortar stores have been successful, to varying degrees, for millennia. Comparatively, the web is barely a twinkly in Al Gore’s eye.

Unfortunately, many would-be business owners plunge ahead in this new marketplace as if it were some magic beans that will suddenly grow into a giant money tree. To be fair… for some, it has. But for the most part, these online business successes are rooted in the old-school business brick and mortar business philosophies. What has changed are the methods of marketing and advertising used to generate new and repeat business.

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The 12-Step Program, developed by AA, has been used by countless individuals and copied by many organizations to help people get their lives on track. Here, we present the 12-Step Program for business owners when dealing with their online marketing campaigns.

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Over the last dozen plus years, unscrupulous SEO’s have given the entire search engine optimization industry a bad rep. It seems like every few months some high profile person in the Internet world says something about how SEO is snake oil, sending ripples throughout the SEO community.

To be fair, some of the complaints about SEOs are deserved. Not for the entire SEO community, but for a small segment of “SEO providers.” Unfortunately, like sleezy lawyers, it only takes one to ruin the whole batch, perceptively.

I’m sure many readers have either heard about, or know someone who has had (or have themselves had) an extremely negative SEO experience. I talk to many business owners who are skeptical about SEO because their last SEO didn’t perform as expected, either over-promised and under-delivered, dropped out of contact, or just wasn’t doing the job as promised.

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The only way to avoid hearing criticism is to be deaf or dead.

The only way to avoid being criticized is to never have been alive.

As history books have shown, even the dead can’t escape criticism. So, those of us who are alive must simply learn to deal with it; even as we often try to avoid it.

As much as we hate it, criticism isn’t all bad. Criticism, regardless of how it was intended, can help us adjust and adapt to situations. It can provide useful insight, justified or not, into our lives and give us the opportunity to become a better person.

Rarely do we enjoy hearing it, but criticism is a needed component for growth as a person.

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I believe that one of the key things that keep small businesses small is that the owners maintain a small business mindset. For many, being small is just fine. They don’t ever want to be anything more than a mom and pop operation. But others dream big and want to see big goal accomplished but continue to struggle to “make it big.” They can’t ever seem to get over that hump that propels them out of small-time territory.

If you don’t want to be a mom and pop operation, or you want to be more than the small business you are, then it’s time to start thinking not like the small business you are but like the bigger business you want to be.

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