Four (4) Most Important Things to Know for Small-Medium Sized Business Owners
1. Give good/free advice & generate a focused network
2. Unify and build a focused & supportive community that has a need for your services.
3. Utilize effective traffic interfacing tools for your blog
4. Communicate with Experts to Understand Changes/Trends
Give good/free advice ...
More often than not, first we take rather first we give. The greater the hardship, the more we are inclined to be like animals. Constantly we are reminded to pay those bills and we've soon forgotten that our business is even less inviting. If we have a restaurant, the portions or the quality may even suffer.
Employees understand when the supervisor cracks the sell, sell, sell whip. And you just want to respond, "hey boss, the product that sold the best -we're out of" As the boss, you scream, "well make the ones the people don't want ... sell too!!" Effective approaches require you to do the opposite of this. You reap what you sow. Therefore, spend time sowing seeds of relationships, give, provide service, useful information and this will yield a plentiful harvest because customers and your employees prefer this attribute.
Unify and build a focused & supportive community ...
Not everyone will listen to you (friends and family included). Internet blogging is a wonderful way to unify those who like to hear what you have to say. It is necessary to bring these people together and develop a channel. Your topics and discussions are critical. You may serve many roles as a living breathing human being but when go to work you have specific tasks and roles. The very same thing applies to blogging. If you're billing as a certain service provider -blog in your category and make strong connections. Put time into your blogging and ensure that the content is genuine. Customers can really see this in your presentations.
Utilize effective traffic interfacing tools ...
When I do my radio broadcast channel, we allow listeners to call in and ask questions. Answers are provided and when they're helped they tell their friends. The listener base grew to over 1 million. But it did very little to improve or capture the same listener base onto the magazine and print media. This is because the broadcasting channel and the print channels did not have an interface. To really top things off, the S.E.E.K. (Safe, Effective, Earth Friendly, Kind) Health Generations franchise stores on FaceBook would have very few sign-ups. If this was reflective of actual business, the establishment would be out of business. Clearly, the conversions dwindle and my point is coming to FaceBook doesn't have anything to do with conversions and visitors can easily get distracted. As a health and wellness service provider, FaceBook is a platform but it is not effective.
Ultimately, when you spend time on the building your business, you need to choose the right platform. It is like choosing a good piece of real estate. If the services and people are too generalized, it is like having a store at a large mall or flea market and you have lots of the wrong customers. The interface must be friendly, engaging and allow for relevant monetization. You could have the most popular blogging station (i.e. Google's Blogspot or Yahoo's MyBlogLog) but if the only monetization is advertisement clicks you can imagine how frustrating it would be for building a focused network for your business. In fact, you and the customer ends up feeling used by the service provider which will only pay pennies on the dollar. So while an occasional non-relevant advertisement can be overlooked, in the end high relevancy is crucial.
There has been so much media hype on the consumer that this has taken on a negative consumer behavior. Trying to sell someone something on FaceBook is ineffective and driving web traffic to another site after they are on FaceBook doesn't work. Just imagine if your lawyer only looked at you from the perspective that win-or-lose s/he is still a paying client. Then imagine, you know this. Then they say "We'll kill 'em in court". You already know they are saying this only to upsell your emotions and once they've leeched out enough funds, they're entire approach changes to "We don't think it looks so good anymore". For attorneys, this consensus amongst consumers has developed overtime.
To summarize, as a business owner you can't have your own site because you can't get the traffic. Yet if you're on the wrong platform, you'll be maintaining lots of blogging with poor results.
My thoughts on this matter has led me to working on Social Media Monetization problems for business owners and disgruntled consumers. The engine Servana was created to solve this critical issue and provide a free learning platform of information to help small business owners develop their niche and solve tactical problems in basic client generation irrelevant of your location.
Communicate with Experts ...
Sounds easier said than done. But sharing solid advice amongst people who have succeeded and been successful is the fastest way to learn how to do things right. If you wanted to learn how to play golf and beat Tiger Woods, your chances would be improved by being taught from Tiger as well as all his competitors.
Clearly networking is important. We all know that. But effective networking is often not utilized. If you're looking for a job and you go to one of those conferences that is hiring people and most of the attendees are applicants, what are your chances in a "poor labor market" of finding something? Same thing applies to business owners who attend tradeshows and expos -rarely will you develop a network of gurus and experts to help your business.
Going fishing and being able to catch the right fish requires:
A. Knowing what you really want (this means getting to know yourself)
B. Knowing your market and managing reasonable expectations
C. Always be able to identify and have a pulse on macro/micro economic situations/trends from experts who base their analysis on academia and on the field informatics.
Practice: Take the example Minyanville. An interesting financial site with animated experts. Look for their methods of monetization. Ask yourself is this effective for every crowd? Would type-A personalities like/dislike it? What is the target age groups? On a bull vs. bear market, how would their business do. If you owned this site, how would you build-up your crowd and scale the traffic for this business?