Want Some Cool Free Stickers to Promote Your Business?

By John Joyce on June 29, 2011 - Comments 0

I have been a bit lax in writing here at The Small BizNest since joining the MOOCrew but figured I could make up for it by offering some freebies to you all.  MOO has developed some great new sticker products that allow businesses of all types to add some creativity to their offline marketing efforts.  MOO round stickers and labels are printed on thick, durable vinyl with a glossy finish. There are four stickers/labels printed on a perforated sheet, so you can tear and share one or more at a time, or use an entire sheet to show off 4 of your different designs at once.  The sticker sheets come in a protective box that you can easily re-brand and sell or give as a gift to clients.

If you’re one of the first 75 people to follow this link, you’ll be able to order a set of round or rectangular stickers completely free!

What KPIs Should You Track?

By John Joyce on March 2, 2011 - Comments 0

The only way for you to accurately understand which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you should track is to understand which answers you are seeking. Reports are useless if they don’t tell a story, give insights, and offer measurable/actionable tactics that help you achieve your goals. You must take a step back and develop a thought process that maps KPIs to your overall business strategy.

Here’s an example. Maybe you’ve recently deployed Google Analytics on your website and you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to leverage the great data that’s being gathered such as:

• Total Unique Visitors
• Pageviews
• Bounce Rate
• New Visits
• Traffic Source
• Average Time On Page

Read more…

5 Free Tools That Automate Your Business

By John Joyce on February 15, 2011 - Comments 0

The challenging economic climate has taught business owners that it’s absolutely imperative they embrace solutions that will help them work smarter and focus on generating revenue. Of course, limited budgets make business automation solutions that much more difficult to evaluate and implement. If your number one goal for 2011 is to bolster lead generation, customer acquisition, or customer retention, you must ask yourself this question: How am I going to create operational efficiencies that will free up my time, give me leverage, and allow me to grow my business?  Read the entire post over on OPEN Forum.

Your Small Business And Technology: How Do You Maintain A Competitive Edge?

By John Joyce on January 5, 2011 - Comments 0

This is really the prelude to a book review that is forthcoming but I wanted to start the conversation about challenges facing small business owners when determining which technologies will have a positive impact on their overall business growth. The prevalence of open source development platforms has become a double-edged sword. The good news: Anyone can develop applications fairly easily. The bad news: Anyone can develop applications fairly easily.

There are so many choices that it’s impossible to keep abreast of new technology, new versions of existing products and new companies popping up in already crowded markets. The alternative, however, is to stick your head in the sand and be left in the dust by your competitors.

Phil Simon has written a book that offers real world examples of small businesses that are enjoying success by harnessing the power of emerging technologies. Please look out for a full review in the coming weeks and be sure to check out the book yourself.

Does Your Website Suck? 5 Free Tools to Help You Find Out

By John Joyce on October 29, 2010 - Comments 2

Your site might look fine on the surface but it could have many issues you’re not even aware of and this could be hurting your lead generation and customer conversion efforts.  Here are five tools that will allow you to take a look under the hood and get an in-depth diagnostic view of your website:

1)  Website Grader

Website Grader actually gives your website a grade, X/100, based on it’s adherence to “searchability” best practices relative to the other sites that have been tested. (currently 2,973,941 sites have been graded) A report is generated and offers areas for improvement including the following:

• Checks for a blog and gives a grade
• Number of indexed pages
• Readability level
• Inbound links
• Do you have a permanent 301 redirect of yourcompany.com to www.yourcompany.com?
• Is your domain going to expire soon?  (it’s important to show the search engines you’re in for the long haul)
• Do you have an RSS feed?  Do you have a conversion form?

2)  W3C Validator

The W3C Markup Validation Service checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. The whole concept behind the W3C organization is to encourage the use of standards compliant, user-friendly and accessible code. The feedback from this tool is extremely technical and would be best suited for your website developer.

3)  Pearanaltyics

Pear Analytics has a more friendly user interface and offers great detail on how to fix website issues and the degree of difficulty for each recommended change.  Some of the relevant checks they perform are as follows:

• 404 error handling
• Do you have analytics installed?
• Domain age (the older the better)
• Duplicate content
• Do you have a sitemap?

4)  Reactionengine.com

The Reaction Engine is another bare bones technical tool that is geared toward the developer crowd.  The key difference with this tool is that it analyzes the SEO performance of a URL based on a given key phrase.

5)  Woorank.com

Woorank is a very comprehensive reporting tool with a great looking interface and the ability to save a copy of the report as a pdf.  You can drill down and gain a great deal of insight from stats such as:

• Traffic to your site
• Valid robots.txt file
• Usability
• Related websites
• Directory listings
• Social media presence

The one caveat I did find when trying each of these tools?  Some of the results are inconsistent, for example, Pear Analytics reported that I did not have an H1 heading and the others saw that I did.  So, if you’re going to take the plunge and optimize your site using free tools, make sure you get a second opinion before making any big changes.

Of course, if you’re not comfortable doing this yourself, please reach out and we’ll give you a hand.

What if You Could Combine Outbound/Offline Marketing with Inbound/Online Marketing?

By John Joyce on October 28, 2010 - Comments 2

If you have a local business and still rely on direct mail to reach prospects as well as existing customers, then you have experienced the fear of not knowing whether you have achieved any ROI.  What if you could actually track the audience response to your direct mail campaigns and even follow their progress through your own online portal?  What if you could track their referral activity once they transitioned into the online world and allow them to utilize social networking links to evangelize your offer to their network of contacts?  And, finally, what if you could reward these customers based on their influence and ability to drive new customers to your business?  That would be just Dukky!

I read an article about a company called Dukky in the July 2010 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine where the founder of Dukky, Shawn Burst, had an idea to revive the dying direct marketing and print industries.  Let’s face it, more than 99% of “junk mail” goes directly into the trash. But, with this solution, you have a lead generation system that marries the offline marketing world with the online marketing world. Take a look at the video below to get a better understanding of exactly how Dukky works:

50% Discount for Small Business Technology Tour In Boston

By John Joyce on October 19, 2010 - Comments 0

Friends of The Small BizNest are eligible for a 50% discount on admission to the Small Business Technology Tour in Boston next week.  Ramon Ray, founder of Smallbiztechnology.com, has put together a great series of events to educate growing companies – whether you are an entrepreneur or a small business owner – in how to use technology as a tool to grow your business.  The next event will be taking place on October 25th at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center. (NERD)

Check out our latest newsletter for more information on enrollment and other cities where you can attend this great event.

LinkedIn Adds “Share” Functionality To Help Boost Your Presence

By John Joyce on June 2, 2010 - Comments 0

I just received an email from LinkedIn announcing a new feature that essentially allows you to share your favorite news and media from within your profile.  This is really a natural progression and I’m sure there were plenty of customers clamoring for more publishing and sharing capabilities to be built into the application.

Personally, I use CoTweet as my main dashboard for posting updates and then send them to LinkedIn via Ping.fm but, for someone who spends the majority of their time on LinkedIn, this is a very easy way to position yourself as an expert from within the most powerful business networking platform.

The process is very simple and can be seen in the video below:

Why Aren’t You Measuring The ROI Of Your Online Marketing Efforts?

By John Joyce on May 28, 2010 - Comments 0

I recently participated in Omniture’s ”2010 Online Analytics Benchmark Survey” and received a customized report from them yesterday and wanted to share some of the information with you.  It doesn’t take a genius to understand that businesses shouldn’t spend money on new marketing channels without having the ability to track their success, but that’s exactly what the majority of us are doing.

The main takeaways from this survey are as follows:

Key Web Analytics Challenges Include Talent, Measuring ROI and Multi-Channel Support

Top challenges for online marketers include:

1. Difficulty finding and training top talent
2. Determining what actions to take based on their data
3. Maximizing marketing ROI through full funnel measurement and automatic multi-channel integration.

Do you find yourself or your staff spending large chunks of time developing programs and campaigns, delivering them across an assortment of online marketing platforms and then wondering if they had any impact?  It looks like you’re not alone.  The most telling statistic from this study is glaring proof that, since many of the emerging online marketing platforms are very much in their infancy, businesses are unable to track their success as illustrated below:

Marketers know which metrics are important to measure, however they are not capturing all the metrics they need to achieve their goals.  Eighty-two percent of survey responders believe ROI is somewhat to very important to measure, but only 30 percent of marketers can effectively measure marketing ROI!  Additionally, 86 percent of respondents think conversion rate is somewhat or very important to measure yet 27 percent of marketers cannot effectively measure conversion rates.

We all know measuring the success of offline marketing is difficult to nearly impossible but that’s because there’s no system available to allow for granular collection of metrics.  Conversely, online marketing offers so much data that we become overwhelmed by a never ending stream of seemingly valuable information .  They key, however, is knowing how to interpret that information and turn it into an actionable plan that exploits the repeatable successes you have unearthed.

If you’re going to “try” a mobile marketing campaign, social media campaign or viral video campaign, make sure you develop a system to track and measure success against your business goals.  Work smarter and not harder.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

A Must Read For Small Business Owners: The Referral Engine

By John Joyce on May 14, 2010 - Comments 1

I was fortunate enough to receive an advance copy of The Referral Engine from John Jantch and I have to say that this is one of the best small business marketing books I have ever read. For those of you who don’t know John, he’s a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author Duct Tape Marketing.

This book is equal parts human behavior, marketing insight and phenomenally relevant stories from real people who have successfully built their own referral engine around their business. It actually kicks off with a quick physiology lesson illustrating how our hypothalamus registers “pleasure in doing good and being recognized for it”. Let that soak in a bit. Human beings are conditioned to refer their favorite businesses to others because it makes them feel good.

With that in mind, John takes us on a journey of discovery that empowers small business owners to understand how they can build a systematic process to harness peoples’ innate need to make referrals. Some key quotes are as follows:

• “Repetition consistency and authenticity build trust and are the foundational tools of the referral trade.”
• “Commitment to a remarkable difference demonstrates that yours is not a gimmick.”
• Establish a “give-to-get mentality”.
• “Expect Referrals”

The referral mindset isn’t just a necessity of your sales and marketing efforts – it should span the entire organization from management to customer service.  It’s also something that can spread exponentially by empowering prospects, partners and customers alike, so make it easy for people to to make referrals.

This book gives every small business owner a blueprint for 1) developing your referral engine strategy, 2) mapping your referral mindset across your organization and 3) implementing the tactical components that make up a successful referral system.  The rich marketing content coupled with stories from hundreds of interviews John conducted with some of the coolest and most successful companies make this an absolute must-read for every small business owner.

* The Amazon link to the book in this post is an affiliate link.