You want to do good. You really do!
But sometimes you don’t. It happens to all of us. We take on a project that doesn’t turn out well for whatever reason.
One of the most common and stressful causes of poor customer service is being too busy. Slammed. “In the weeds” as we used to call it when I waited tables in college.
You simply can’t give the client the attention they need. It’s not possible because you have too many irons in the fire.
But here is what’s strange…
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There is a second way a business will fail. And it is, perhaps, a more tragic way.
Even if you are swimming in cash — in fact — especially if you are swimming in cash, read on. You’re not out of the woods yet.
Don’t kid yourself. There IS more to life than money.
When your business begins to “take off” financially, is when this second type of business failure begins to rear its ugly head.
Here is the danger: at about the same time you start lighting your cigar with $100 bills you realize that you have created a monster.
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No question… Google is a powerhouse. It virtually holds a monopoly on search engine traffic in the U.S.
But search engines aren’t the only game in town.
This is a sad story. And it happens every time time Google updates the way it ranks websites.
On April 24th, Google introduced what it calls the “Penguin Update.” This update targeted people building spammy websites with less than reputable SEO practices.
A few days after the update a business owner submitted a scathing entry to Google’s Webmaster Forum:
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Have you ever seen someone walking around with 80′s hair? It’s tough to break the news to them that times have passed them by.
If you take a quick spin around the web, you won’t have to go far to find businesses that are living in the past.
And, contrary to an 80′s hairdo, an outdated website is a serious matter. It’s a financial matter.
Why are 99% of the best Internet marketers on the earth using WordPress?
This video will show you why.
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We live in an era of soundbites, 140-character status updates and headlines.
Rapid fire. Like a game of Asteroids we blast through the crap to find the nuggets of information we want or need.
If you don’t want your communications to be separated into the crap pile, understand the difference between these two statements:
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Browsing through my mail takes all of about 5 seconds.
Most of it goes straight to the trash.
But this letter stopped me cold. It appeared to be personally written to me. I’ve seen tricky handwritten fonts before on snail mail letters. But this looked like it was truly handwritten.
So, I opened it.
And here is what I saw:
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In MBA school, they call them “barriers to entry.”
Anything that makes it harder for new businesses to enter your market and existing businesses to keep pace makes your moat wider. More lethal to attempt to cross. More daunting.
Here are some examples:
- A patent on an invention
- A $5 million investment in equipment
- A print, radio and television ad campaign
Doing any of these things makes it harder for competitors to enter your market. And puts pressure on the existing competition to keep up.
But you know me. And I know you.
We aren’t patenting inventions and running million dollar ad campaigns. And we sure as heckfire aren’t investing $5 million in equipment (although I did buy a schnazzy new Epson printer the other day from Office Depot, does that count?)
Nope. Tiny business owners have to be smarter about digging our moats.
Here are three ways to dig a moat that will be difficult, if not impossible to cross:
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You are one of the lucky ones.
The big corporations are trying to act small in social media.
You don’t have to act. You are small. In fact, you are tiny.
You don’t have to write a 60-page Social Media Policy manual. You don’t need to hold meetings about your social media strategy.
For you, social media is easy.
Here’s why:
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Ok. It’s logical and all and I (among others) have been preaching it for several years.
But I had never seen a stat on this before.
70% of purchases are at the RFP stage before a sales person is called in.
That, according to UBM TechWeb.
In other words, before a buyer lets you know they are going to buy, they have already done all the research they need to do.
I don’t care if you are a B2C company that doesn’t even know what an RFP is, (Request for Proposal, by the way) this should change the way you view your marketing and sales process.
Why? Because two things are happening:
- Researching a sale is done online, not with a sales person
- Your online content needs to be answering a lot of questions or you won’t even be in the conversation when the purchase takes place.
Even if that statistic is only 1/2 right, this is a staggering statistic.
If you haven’t bought in to the idea of creating a content strategy that considers the content that a buyer needs at all stages of the buying cycle, this statistic should seal the deal.
If you are not doing this, you likely don’t really understand how Google works.
Google knows a lot about you. And they are learning more and more each time you search.
They have a pretty good idea about things like:
- What kind of car you are thinking about buying
- What illnesses you have
- Whether you are a dog or a cat person
Now, with their introduction of Google +, a Facebook competitor, they are adding a social layer. This includeds information like:
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