Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL

Your marketing work isn't getting done, neither is mine, we need anoter plan.

The Problem

Small business owners usually agree that marketing is the toughest and most critical part of their business. After all, the number one reason businesses fail is lack of sales. Even as a seasoned marketer with over twenty years of marketing  and online experience I have to say that this small business owner agrees.

Early in my career I called on thousands of small business owners as a Yellow Pages advertising rep. Today I work with the same kinds of small and medium sized businesses on web design and internet marketing but the major challenges remain. Here’s what I used to hear in 1988 and what I still hear today when I talk with business owners.

• Advertising cost too much
• Advertising doesn’t work
• Marketing is a mysterious, confounding practice with little real feedback
• I don’t have time for this
• I want to work on my business, not marketing and advertising

As a small business owner myself I have to say that today I feel your pain. While I’ve been busy raising my two youngest kids and building my practice LOCAL Na8ion, I’ve had a hell of a time taking my own advice. While I appreciate the irony in this I don’t like that I’m not walking-the-talk. I’ve been like the landscapers who I used to call on who had a dirt front lawn – always too busy making their customer’s gardens lush and paying the bills to work on their own.

The Solution

So let’s talk about solutions. Here they are (and yes, I’m taking my own advice):

• Use tools & technology that save time and reduce complexity
• Build your marketing tasks into your daily routine
• ‘Microsize’ your marketing workflow until it actually gets done and then slowly raise the bar
• Leverage, leverage, leverage – anyone, anything, anytime. Remember to say thanks
• Find any way to take action today
• The more you do it – the easier it gets

I’m going to talk more about two items on my list: Microsize your marketing workflow until it actually gets done and The more you do it – the easier it gets. If I bit off any more this post won’t get written and I won’t move forward.

Microsize your marketing workflow until it actually gets done

Here’s the first clue if you’ve made your task small enough (microsize) to get the job done. Did you produce something that you can call DONE? Can you check off the task? Until you actually produce a result or a task you can check off you’re biting off more than you can chew. Break the task down into chunks, making it smaller so you can complete it.

I encourage you to make it small in a silly way – get really micro and creative! This kind of technique is about overcoming the mental hurdle in non-starters. Once you get something done, you feel accomplishment, you build mental kudos and success and with enough repetition – momentum! As you move forward keep doing the small stuff – it all adds up. Be wary of piling on. Recognize now that you will do this. Rather than letting that pattern seep back in to your practice go after it the very next day with a smaller task – microsize.

The more you do it – the easier it gets

I was trying to record a video blog post yesterday and it’s been ages since I’ve done one. It was rough, felt useless and originally felt like a waste of time. But here’s the thing – it wasn’t. I got some practice and that’s important because I’m way out of practice. The last video lesson or vlog post I put up was September 24th! Right now I’m slow, inefficient and rough around the edges. How’s that going to improve? Practice.

It’s no different than getting my two youngest kids to practice their violin. If they don’t practice for a few days, the next time they do it’s hell on them. So it might take me three more tries to get that vlog post done but the practice will make it sharper and easier to do the next time.

I know what you’re thinking. If I had microsized my work I wouldn’t have felt like I failed. You’re right. I DID fail in my original task which was to shoot, edit and post a new vlog post. That would have been OK if I was in a flow state, but I was far from it. What I needed to put on my task list yesterday was to practice a vlog post. That would have changed everything.

So, today I did something that is easier for me. I wrote a blog post. And this task is almost checked off. Which is good because in looking at my task list I see I’ve got three client projects to juggle, five loads of laundry to fold, a shopping trip, kids to take to violin, school, feed and look after and much much more. And if that goes well I might (just might) practice vlogging a bit more later tonight. If I do, that’s great but if it doesn’t happen I’ll have already produced a result.

Are there any practices that you use to get the job done? If so, please share them.

You may know WordPress as the very popular blogging tool that is now in use in over 50 languages and powers millions of blogs worldwide. What’s less known is the ability to use WordPress to power a regular small business website, even when there’s no blog involved.

Web marketers and website developers are increasingly using WordPress to power very large websites as well. Here are a few examples.

Customers around the world trust Network Solutions to manage more than 7 million domains, over 1.5 million e-mailboxes, and more than 350,000 Web sites.

Network Solutions Uses WordPress

Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1978, Timberline Lodge is one of Oregon’s most popular tourist attractions, drawing more than two million visitors every year. Considered an architectural wonder, it’s still being used for its original intent—a magnificent ski lodge and mountain retreat for all to enjoy.

Timberline Lodge in Oregon uses WordPress for their website

Camacho Cigars have been described as “The Best Habano outside of Cuba” by many cigar experts. Our brands are made with the original Cuban Criollo and Authentic Corojo seed tobaccos grown by the Eiroa family in Honduras.

Camacho Cigars uses WordPress

Just from looking at these three examples of business websites built on WordPress you can see why we love to use it here at LOCALNa8ion.

Central in our strategy in using WordPress for small business websites is the flexibility inherent in WordPress itself. Think for a minute about the diversity of small businesses. There are almost as many types of companies, products and services as there are people – each one with their own unique needs.

The diverse requirements of small business requires your website publishing platform to meet three main criteria:

1. fully featured
2. easy to customize design and add content
3. easy to extend or add functionality (extensibility)

WordPress is part of the newer class of website platforms called Content Management Systems (CMS for short) and it scores near perfect marks in these categories, making it ideal to adapt for any use.

Did we mention that WordPress is free?

That’s because WordPress is Open Source software, which simply means anyone is free to use and alter the software for any purpose. Due to its open source nature WordPress has amassed a legion of users worldwide and that in turn has created a massive development community (over 10,000 worldwide) that write software (called plug-ins) that add functionality to WordPress.

An example of this flexibility would be a plug-in to make your WordPress website an e-commerce store. With the addition of just one WordPress plug-in (also free) your small business website can be completely transformed to sell your products over the web.

This saves tons of money on web development costs. A site that could have cost $5,000 to $10,000 U.S. only a few years ago can be made for as little as $1,000 $3,000 today.

The amount of WordPress users and developers insures an almost limitless supply of online tutorials, how-to guides, video lessons, books (like WordPress for Dummies) and other resources you can tap into to help build your website (like us here LOCALNa8ion). You never have to worry about buying some obsolete dinosaur that no one will be able to fix or change a few years down to road.

So what are some other examples of WordPress flexibility?

DESIGNM.AG, is an online community for web developers that recently posted 11 non-traditional uses of WordPress. If you read the post you’ll see people using WordPress to do everything from running an online membership directory to an email newsletter or online job board.

That’s part of the backstory on why you should sign up wth us to get your own WordPress installation today.

Julian Seery Gude, ed
Small Business Internet Marketing, Website Design, SEO | LOCALNa8ion
Where you are is where it’s at

Your web site should be your star sales person

Most small to medium sized businesses have already declared by action, NOT INTENT, that their web site is a brochure and not a sales person.

Yes, even as an online marketing professional I have done no better at times. Want a real life example? Just look at my parent company web site at exceler8 and compare that to the focus and variety on my local online marketing site Local Na8ion. It’s like the difference between managing a sales force as a group of clock-punching employees and managing sales, guess which improves the bottom line more?

I recommend that you take a look at your web site as if it were your sales person and not a brochure because it will not so subtly change your attitudes and actions about your site and your online sales strategy.

Think about it, successful businesses have well trained, well paid and properly incented sales people. Without our sales people we wouldn’t have a business. You’re constantly managing, coaching, incenting, and helping your sales people to help you. We measure their success with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual reports along with performance evaluations and customer feedback metrics. We recognize the importance of their physical dress and appearance, their ability to communicate verbally and in writing, and how cleanly they submit their orders and follow company practices. We do all this because our sales people are the face of our company and that means that our sales people are an asset we can’t afford to mismanage or we’ll face serious consequences.

Here are some questions for you and your online sales person:

First, be honest with yourself. Is your web site a star sales person or getting ready to pack their bags for greener pastures?

• does your web site know everything about your business that it should?
• do you measure your web site’s success (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually)?
• do you offer your web site ‘training’ on your business fundamentals, new trends, or economic changes in your local market or in the national business climate for your industry?
• does your web site have all your current products, services and pricing?
• do customers know how to contact your web site, your address, phone, and email address for your business?
• is your web site ready to take orders and provide a smooth experience doing so?
• does your web site make points succinctly and answer questions clearly?
• does your web site talk circles and marketing nonsense that customers neither care about or have time to read (ouch, talk about my weakness!)?
• is your web site, knowledgeable, professional and suited to your business image?
• how are your web site’s communication skills, do you offer email newsletters or RSS feed?
• how well does your web site sell against your competition?
• does your web site handle typical customer objections smoothly and confidently or fumble nervously with the keys in its pocket?
• does your web site know of current job openings at your company and always have en eye out for new talent?
• when someone goes looking for a product or service like yours is your sales person in front of them or out on the golf course?
• speaking of golf, can your web site play golf? Ha, just kidding.

If you answered yes to all those questions congratulations – you’re a star and so is your web site. For the rest of us (and I do mean US) it’s great to get a wake up call once in a while to remember what’s important.

Realistically, a typical small to medium sized business makes their web site when they open their business and then just leaves it. Maybe your site is one of those cut and paste beauties from 1999 that your kid cousin made for you. Or you have one of those cookie cutter web sites a media sales rep put together for free so you’d buy an ad from them in the Yellow Pages or Newspaper. Let’s face it, this isn’t how you’d treat your star sales person.

I know that comparing a live sales person to a web site is a little extreme. But it’s a much better way to think of your site than a static brochure. Wasn’t the old point from ten years ago that your web site was a sales person that never slept, got sick, or took a day off? Wasn’t that a relief. Yes, your web site DOES offer these advantages but you’ll never make a star sales person of your web site without investing in the same kind of process, management focus and attention to detail that you use with your sales team.

Should you really bother with all this work? Is it a worth while investment in your time? To sum it up, there are more people online today shopping and buying (both locally and nationally) than the people who DON’T refer to the web in buying situations. The days of ignoring your online sales person and not suffering any consequences are over.

What to do?

Business people aren’t ignoring their online sales person out of malice or indifference. We’re strapped for time and online marketing and publishing can be just as confounding as local business ordinances or an old fashioned media slickster in sansibelt pants and a clip-on tie. Use your search engine to locate sites that educate and inform you – there are multitudes of FREE resources that businesses have available to them on the web. In fact, there are more free and low cost methods to setup, design, and market your business online than ever before and it’s getting easier all the time.

Don’t let a fear of technical know-how or lack of marketing experience get in the way of your great company idea and vision. Remember, search engines, blogs, and business web sites are all available to your business. Do your research and then support, build, and train your online sales channel and web site like you would your own sales team: day by day, follow a process, measure your results, and keep tweaking your message and offers until your web site is the star it should be. Good luck!