Are you operating your business month-to-month, even year-to-year, without a plan?

We’re all so busy – too busy, if you ask me. When business is good, we’re so busy filling orders that there’s little time left for anything else. When business is not so good, there’s an urgency to do something, almost anything to bring in new customers. Sound familiar?

It doesn’t have to be feast or famine.

But you won’t fix the problem in 30-minute sound bites. You’re going to need to set aside some time to go deeper, to ask and answer some fundamental questions once again or for the first time, before creating a plan that will direct you through 2012 and beyond.

Questions like:

Why are you in business? For most of us, there’s a much bigger reason than just ‘making a living.’ In fact, if  ‘making a living’ is the only reason you’re in business, that’s mindset leads directly to poverty. So what’s your why?

What goals have you set for your business 10 years down the road? Five years? Three years? and for 2012?

Who is your ideal customer? Are you serving that market now? Why or why not?

• What does your ideal customer want?
• How are you serving your current customer base?
• Are you even reaching your ideal customer base?
• How can you do a better job of meeting their needs?
• How can you improve what you offer them?

Do you have a marketing budget?
If you don’t, you’re not serious about growing your business. Effective marketing requires an investment of time, expertise, and money. Leave any one of those items out of the equation and it’s just not going to work. Far too many business owners try throwing money or time at their marketing, but you can spend an awful lot on marketing that takes you nowhere, or spend all your time going in the wrong direction.

Expertise without time or money is just as damaging. You have to be able to implement what you’ve learned, and that often requires additional expense. It can get real frustrating real fast trying to master intelligent marketing practices for your particular business.

Be honest – we’ve all been there.

You need to start somewhere. Setting up a budget will help you get started and show you where the holes are.

Buyer Beware
You’re no doubt getting several calls each week from companies offering to improve your website’s rank on Google. You’re hearing about getting your business on Facebook and Twitter, on television, in local directories, and from companies like Groupon and Living Social. You’re getting calls from big companies and from freelancers – offering everything from full-page phone book ads, websites, and videos to website optimization so your site shows up in local search. It may all sound pretty good. How do you know who to trust? How do you know which you need?

First, return to the basics – to those questions about your why, your goals, and your ideal customer.

Then you listen – to your market AND to those people offering to sell you services. Are they asking ANY of the right questions? If they’ve skipped right on over to how to get your site listed as #1 on Google, they’ve tipped their hand. After all, anybody can get a site listed #1 on Google for something!

Frankly, I’m tired of Internet marketers preying on small businesses. There is no one-size fits all solution – and (SURPRISE!) it’s not all about your website rank. It’s time to look at your business, your goals, and your marketing holistically. Now open a new Google doc or grab a pencil and paper, turn off the distractions, and let the 2012 planning begin in earnest.

A little over a month ago, we made the smartest business decision of 2011. We outsourced our bookkeeping to a qualified small business accounting firm. I’ve long prided myself on handling the books internally, so this was a monumental change of operations.

I thought I was simplifying my month-to-month tasks and eliminating the dreaded end-of-year tax preparation burden, but have been humbled to learn that what I didn’t know could fill volumes. In fact, it’s felt a bit like drinking from a fire hose. The insight from a professional looking in from outside our business, even in these early stages, has made a dramatic impact on how we conduct business. Without a doubt, this will help us to be far more profitable in 2012. How exciting!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no slouch in the bookkeeping department. But it’s not my area of expertise, not something I’ve gone to school for, and studying tax law would bore me to tears. Outsourcing it makes total sense. It’s an investment that will save me money, and make it easier for me to focus on profit-producing tasks.

Are there tasks you should be outsourcing?

As small business owners, we’re probably all guilty of trying to do way too much on our own. We figure we’ll handle everything until we can afford to hire help or outsource. Many business owners also figure they’ll forego marketing until they can afford to spend the money on advertising. While I don’t advocate going into debt to build your business, if we wait until we can afford to do these things, it’s likely we’ll never do them – and we’ll miss out on the full potential our businesses offer.

Take website development, for example. Sure, you can buy $4.95/month hosting and set yourself up a simple website – using WordPress or one of the many site builders on the market. But do you know how to set your site up securely so that it won’t be hacked? (Hint: There’s more to doing it right than using the one-button installation within your hosting account.) And how long will it take you to get your site to look the way you want it to? Do you know how to set it up so that it’ll rank highly on the search engine results page? In short, is website development one of your core strengths?  If not, outsourcing your website development to a qualified professional will allow your business to put its best foot forward and allow you to focus on profit-producing tasks.

I encourage you to assess your skills and interests honestly, then find a way to outsource those items that fall outside of your core strengths.

Did you make an outsourcing decision that helped you grow in 2011? Tell us about it in the comments below.

As we draw nearer the end of the year, it’s a good time to review our core business principles. Are you on track to accomplish this year’s operational and marketing goals? Are you doing what you intended to do? Are you growing, or barely hanging on?

It’s also a good time to ask yourself, “why am I in this business, anyway?”

If you’re just getting started and find that you’re working longer hours for less pay than you ever have in your life, know that you’re not alone.

The first few years of a startup business are notoriously rough for most entrepreneurs. Few start out with enough cash to live comfortably, and unless you build your business on a credit card (not a good idea), you’re going to be faced with tough choices while you grow your business.

Knowing and remembering your ‘why’ will help you get through the tough spots.

Zero to Sixty Marketing LLC has gone through a transformation in the past six weeks or so.

Just as I’m advising you, we reviewed where we are, where we want to be, and honed in on our ‘why.’

Our passion has been – and continues to be – helping small businesses attract new customers.

But our ‘why’ encompasses so much more than that.

We want to be a part of the economic recovery in America. We want to be a part of and witness to your business success – the kind of success that puts people to work and food on the table.

The politicians and news media make it sound like it’s up to the government to create jobs, but think about it – it’s the small business owner who takes the risk, sets up shop, hires employees, and grows the local economy. We understand that to do that, a small business owner has to understand how to profitably run the operations of the business and effectively market that business.

As we honed in on our ‘why’ we got excited all over again. It’s re-energized our business. It’ll do the same for you.

So, why are you in business? Please tell us in the comments, below.

Content is so important to your online efforts. It’s a mountain to tackle, though. There are so many places to continually update, it can seem like a daunting task. Even when you love to write, it’s not always easy to conjure up the passion necessary to crank out quality work.

I suggest free writing to everyone I know. It’s a simple, 10-minute strategy to start the ball rolling. Simply, set the timer and go for 10-minute intervals with no regard for anything but the subject matter. The revising and editing done after it’s set for a day will turn your lump of clay into very useful material.

That’s not the end of the story, though.
There’s still quite a bit that can be – and needs to be – done to get the most out of your content if you intend to increase back links to your website, improve your Google ranking, or generate sales.

Take that useful material and consider where you can use it most effectively. Content can be used to promote your business on article submission sites, blog posts, email campaigns, and even landing pages, so think about your strategy.

Keep these points in mind to make your content irresistible when revising and editing again:

• Write in bite-sized paragraphs.
• Keep the focus of your content on benefit to your audience.
• Ask the questions your reader is asking.
• Delete thoughts that don’t contribute to your main purpose.
• Delete words that don’t contribute to the sentence.
• Break your sentences down, keeping commas to a minimum.
• You’re either communicating with one person (preferable) or several. Keep your pronouns consistent.
• If your material will be distributed sequentially, revise and edit in one Google Document. Separate your content with a dashed line, and make sure your content flows easily from the beginning of the series to the end. Keep your message smooth and your offer clear.
• Pay attention to the length of your content. The length should be consistent with its distribution method. Articles, for instance, are better at around 400 words, where email campaigns require far less content per email.

These tips used with your compelling content will greatly improve the response rate of whatever distribution method you’re using. Don’t forget to use a well-thought-out link strategy to get the most out of your work.

Do you know how to recognize comments you should keep versus comment spam? I’ve noticed recently that some of our clients are confused about what should be deleted. Some discard everything without a second thought, some simply ignore them until they have a zillion piled up.

Comment spam

• Piles up quickly.
• Is vicious, redundant, pornographic, or unrelated to the subject.
• Makes you wonder if the comment came from an English-speaking source that would understand your response if you choose to leave one.
• Leaves unscrupulous links.
• Looks spammy.

I don’t understand why anyone thinks comment spam benefits an online effort. Black hat SEOers are another comment irritation. They don’t understand link strategy, and they make reputable companies look foolish to each other. When my name and website are going to be visible to another company website I’m leaving comments on, I don’t want my comment to sound ignorant, use poor grammar, or be downright illiterate. I want to leave a comment that might generate a reply.

I seriously doubt many businesses have any idea that the SEO company they hired for back link generation made them look ridiculous to other companies, instead of reaching out to them!

Here’s a cheat sheet to refer to. Some are obvious, some … not so much. If you find out your SEO company is doing anything like this using your website URL, I suggest you fire them immediately.

Go ahead and delete comments that have any of these 10 attributes:

• “There is some validity but I’ll take maintain opinion till I look into it further.” Seriously? I’m certain that’s not right in any language. Delete any comment that makes no sense.
• Anything that requests that you follow a link to consider a purchase.
• Long paragraphs unrelated to your post.
• Movie stars or public figures in the email or website links, or any other links in the comment.
• Nasty language.
• Keyword names instead of an actual name, like website design or Rolex watches.
• Requests for links and comments. These can be made through a contact page or phone call. Really.
• SEO advice. If a good SEOer gets in touch with you, it won’t be through a dumb comment.
• Comments about your pages not loading in their browser or other technical advice.
• Comments from a forum link. These forums tend to have one member with no interaction.

Many times the spam is done so well, you won’t even notice it until you approve it, only to find seven more just like it the next day. Some spammers will use slightly different web-based email accounts but post the same comment under different names to different posts.

Following these links can open you up to security issues like viruses or worms. Even when they don’t, checking a link wastes your time when you find a spammy website or shopping page for a product you don’t want your name associated with.

High spam counts don’t mean you’re doing a bad job with your blog. It actually means that you’re being found online, though not by the company you’d like to keep. Be patient, learn how to recognize comments that should get deleted, and share your posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Posterous to get in front of the audience you do want. I hope this helps!

What spammy comments do you find most annoying? Do you use tools to limit the spam that shows up on your website? Share them with us!

Photo Credit: somaya on Flickr made available through a Creative Commons License.

We’ve just begun using a terrific social media release service in lieu of the traditional press release submitted via wire service. If you haven’t yet tried PitchEngine, you really should. News submitted through PitchEngine can be accompanied by multiple images, video, audio, resource links, and a ‘tweet pitch’ (your message in 115 characters or less). At the $29 pay-per-pitch level, it’s submitted to the major search engines and hosted forever on the site. For what you get, it’s a steal!

The strength and power of a social media release is its ‘sharability.’ So what do you do after the pitch to facilitate sharing and really get the word out about your company’s news?

11 Tips to Get the Most From Your Next Social Media Release

1. Make sure to use the ‘tweet pitch’ feature. Don’t just rush by this item. Give it some thought. Make your tweet conversational and engaging – and be sure to tweet it out yourself right away.
2. Create three to five additional tweets with links back to the release, and schedule them to go out over the course of the next week or so.
3. If your employees are part of your Twitter team, they should also share the release in the same manner. That doesn’t mean for everyone to say the exact same thing though. Personalize the message per Twitter account.
4. Share it on Facebook – on your business page, and if appropriate, also on your personal profile. Again, keep it personal in tone, especially on your profile page. Ask your staff to comment or at least ‘like’ your shared link on your business page, but to do so themselves, not as page admins.
5. Share it on LinkedIn. If all of your staff share the same basic contacts, one person sharing it may be sufficient. If there’s a great deal of diversity, ask everyone to share it.
6. Monitor the response. Set up Google alerts and Social Mention alerts on your company name, product or service, and the names you use in your social profiles.
7. Engage: As you receive comments or alerts that your company, product, or release is being mentioned, respond. This lets your followers know you’re real and you’re listening.
8. Share the link to your release with other bloggers as appropriate. For instance, if your release is about a new restaurant in town, find local bloggers and let them know about it. Better yet, local or regional foodie bloggers!
9. Share it on forums. If you regularly participate in industry forums, share your release with your online peers. It never fails to amaze me – how many of our clicks come from forums.
10. Share it on Reddit and other social sharing sites as appropriate.
11. Bookmark your release on Delicious and other social bookmarking sites.

Your turn: What are your best tips for after the pitch?

We’re kicking off a series today, in response to our clients’ questions about how to effectively use social media for business. If you’re an RSS subscriber, you’ll see this in your feed reader on the day we publish. Email subscribers will receive these tips as part of our weekly newsletter that now comes out on Saturdays.

What is Social Media?

Social media is not just Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or your blog. Rather, it encompasses all of these social channels and many more. I’ve lost count of how many social sites are online, but that doesn’t really matter anyway. We’re going to help you appear to be everywhere, but we’re only going to focus on one thing at a time.

It all begins with your blog.

Think of your blog as the foundation for all of your online interactions. With interesting, useful content – relevant to your target market, your blog becomes magnetic. Useful information gets shared, which drives new viewers to your blog and new buyers to your site.

The main social media channels we’ll focus on in this series are

• Your Business Blog
• Youtube
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter

If you have particular questions you’d like to see addressed, please let us know in the comments.

When was the last time you updated your company website? Today? Last week? Last month? Last year? I’m hoping it was no later than last week, but a recent report suggests otherwise. SiteKreator’s Small Business Usage Study found that 54% of small businesses update their websites less than once per month.

Why it Matters: Content Is Still King.

From an SEO perspective, if you want Google and the other search engines to rank your site high for your chosen keywords, your site needs to supply a steady flow of fresh, quality content related to those keywords.

From a search perspective, when the ‘searcher’ types what he’s looking for into the Google search bar, he now looks for the most relevant information AND the most recently produced. For instance, when I’m searching for a technical solution to a website problem, I’m not interested in results from 2008. Google gives me the option to filter by time range and I find that very useful.

From a viewer’s perspective, when a new visitor arrives at your site, will he find what he’s looking for? If not, your ranking on the search results page won’t matter.

Introducing the New Green Light Sign Solutions Website

Our client, Green Light Sign Solutions, specializes in energy-efficient electronic message centers and LED outdoor signs. As we developed their new website, we returned again and again to the three perspectives mentioned above. Honing in on the viewer’s perspective, we looked for ways to build-in opportunities for engagement and interactivity. And let me add a quick disclaimer here: we’re still building out portions of the site behind the scenes.

This site is built using WordPress because it’s versatile, full-featured, and user-friendly. Our client will be able to easily and frequently add content – in the form of posts, image galleries, and video. A support forum will make it easy to provide troubleshooting assistance and answer customer questions. The key idea here is ease of use for every staff member who will have access to the site, so that quality information can consistently be delivered in a variety of formats for site visitors.

Have you been thinking about how to make your website more interactive and easy to update? Then you’re on the right track. Share your plans with us by leaving a comment, we love to hear from you. Here’s to a successful 2011!

Related Off-Site Articles:
Online Engagement and the Small Biz Success Correlation

If you’ve been diligently building links to your website, good for you! Generating inbound links to your site is one of the most important things you can do to improve your website’s visibility on the search engines. But are all those links going to your home page?

SEO Link Building 101

Each page of your website has a job to do. Each page represents a unique opportunity to share information about one specific topic – and to rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for that one topic. If you’re only building links to your home page, you’re limiting the ability of other pages to be found – meaning this grossly limits your website’s potential. Linking to pages other than your home page is referred to as ‘deep linking.’

How to Build Deep Inbound Links

When you leave your name, website address and comment on this site, the ‘Comment Luv’ plugin pulls the title and link to your latest blog post and adds it to your comment. If you’re a blogger, that’s an automatic deep link. If your website doesn’t include a blog, you can accomplish the same thing by leaving a specific page link in the website address field.

Think of other places you can link back to pages on your site. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn quickly come to mind, but those are just the top of the iceberg for social sharing sites.  ‘Add This’ lists 300+ social sharing opportunities! Some business directories allow you to leave deep links. How about industry forums where you participate, publishing your expertise through article directories, guest posting on another business blog?

Since inbound links are so important to the success of your website, make a commitment today to begin or renew your link building efforts. Feel free to begin here. We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Exact Target reports that Twitter users are more likely to post regularly to blogs, more likely to post product and service reviews, and more likely to share coupons on coupon sites. We’re also more likely to write articles, post videos, contribute to wiki’s, and comment on other people’s blogs. This rings true for me, because as a Twitter user, I like to find interesting or educational tidbits that I can share with my readers.

I found the statistics above on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, a site I follow in Google Reader. They could have just as easily come from a short post and link on Twitter. Either way, I’m sharing with you here, and I’ll share this information on Twitter and our Zero To Sixty Marketing Facebook page, and a variety of other sites. Other people do the same thing, and that’s how online content gains wings.

What does this have to do with your local business? Give us something to talk about! Post your in-store specials to Twitter, offer recipes, how-to articles, tip sheets, etc. If it relates to your product or service or offers something of value, share it on Twitter, Facebook, and directly on your blog. Doing so multiplies your message and provides more opportunity for your readers to expand your reach. Get it right, and it’s free viral promotion for your business.

Are you on Twitter? Let’s connect! Just click the link or look for @ShariV. Please include your Twitter address in your comments, below.