Small Business Blog

Are you a little embarrassed when it comes to writing about yourself?  Do you respond to compliments with phrases like “oh, it was nothing”?  Does your competition have a better marketing material than you do, even if your service is better?

Help is on the way.  If you live in Seattle you cannot afford to miss the Bragging 101 seminar by Dr. Cathy Goodwin on Friday, September 21.  I’ve taken this class twice (the short version and the long version), and both times I learned ways to immediately improve my message on my website, my business cards, and even in my daily interactions.  You see, bragging is not a bad thing.  It is actually a way to reassure your customer that you are the right person for the job. 

Cathy will teach you:

• How to find your client’s true pain points. 
• How to effectively address those pain points.
• How to use testimonials to let others brag for you.

Bragging 101 is a catchy title, but the real basis of the class is learning to read your customer’s pain, develop solutions to address that pain, and then showing your customer how you can help them.  In a sense it is bragging, but it is the best kind.  The kind you can back up with action.

More information on Cathy’s seminar

Sign up for Cathy’s ezine

Let’s face it.  As small business owners we perform tasks far outside our lofty titles.  You may be president of your company, but in all likelihood you have answered the phone, gotten the mail, and even taken out the trash.  As time goes by and your business becomes more successful, you will hire others to take on these tasks while you focus completely on growing your business, but you may not be there quite yet.

One of the greatest tools I have encountered in the last several months has been Jott.  Jott is a personal messaging service that can help you stay on top of things whether you are a Getting Things Done student or not.   It has helped me get away from the job of working as my own personal assistant so I can focus on my business (though I still take out my own trash).

Jott works like this:

• You sign up for a free account and enter your phone number
• You put the Jott phone number on your speed dial
• Anytime you want to remind yourself of something, you hit the Jott speed dial and speak into the phone
• Jott yourself or any other recipient you have set up in your Jott account
• A few minutes later, you get a transcribed copy of your message in your inbox.

Need to remind your employees or clients of something?  Set them up as Jott recipients and you can “call in” your message to them, which will be transcribed and delivered to their email boxes.   You can also set it up to text message them, which is great if you have workers performing landscape duties or other jobs that keep them from getting email or answering the phone on a regular basis.

Do you perform a lot of service calls and need to update your bookkeeper?  Jott her after every call and never forget to bill a client again.

Do you control your to-do list, or does it control you?  Vitalist is a free to-do list website that works well with Jott.  Just make Vitalist one of your recipients and your transcribed to-do item will go directly to your action list. 

There are a couple of drawbacks with Jott, the main one being that it is not always transcribed properly, but even then Jott includes the voice file for your convenience.  The other drawback is background noise - you will not get great quality if you call in from airports or other loud places.

That being said, Jott is a great tool to use for the small business owner.  Keep your cell phone by your bed so when those great midnight ideas strike you can Jott yourself and then easily fall back to sleep without the worry you’ll forget by morning!

Do you have an effective elevator pitch? What do you say when asked “what do you do?” Whether you are standing in line at the post office, chatting at a cocktail party, or cheering on your kids at a sporting event, the opportunity to effectively market yourself exists. Following are some of the most popular “ingredients” in cooking up your own elevator pitch.

• Grab the listener’s attention with a strong opening. This is very similar to creating effective titles for your blog articles. Get their attention from the beginning so they are interested to hear the rest of what you have to say. The above example equates the real estate agent job with reaching dreams - a pretty good hook.
• Demonstrate how you can solve a problem. “My agency coordinates travel for small businesses so they can get the best rates and their employees can focus on growing the business, not finding a hotel or renting a car.”
• Talk about your success. You can also use talk about how you differentiate yourself from your competition.
• Wrap up your pitch with a memorable “tag line” and, if appropriate, schedule some type of followup. Your followup can also be saved until your listener asks questions.

When you first begin using your pitch it will feel a bit canned, but over time you will make adjustments that make it more conversational and your confidence in giving it will put you above your competition in the eyes of your potential customers. We all want to work with passionate, successful people.

For extra help in developing your first elevator pitch, go to 15 Second Pitch. The wizard will walk you through creating your first elevator pitch by asking you the most important information you want to convey.

So, how are you going to respond the next time you step into an elevator and the person beside you says “Going up?”

Are you a little embarrassed to brag about yourself?  Do you wait for someone to ask you about your accomplishments before telling them?  Worse, do you say “oh, it was nothing” when given a compliment?  We all want to avoid being the blowhard who knows it all and has done everything (well, *most* of us do), but we still need to let consumers know why they should choose us over our competition.  How can you do that effectively?Recently I was introduced to Cathy Goodwin, PhD, of Copy Cat Copywriting.  Cathy has several resources available on her website for the service professional who sells expertise as her product.  As an introduction to her services, I signed up for her free weekly Copy-Cat ezine and took her teleseminar on Bragging 101.  The ezine has been great in identifying some of the ways I was neglecting to brag about my accomplishments or even downplaying a compliment given to me by a client.  If you are the product you are selling, why would you ever do that?  Great question!

Bragging 101 is a short seminar that will give you the 5 steps to effective bragging, which starts with knowing your clients’ pain and how you can solve it.  Bragging really isn’t a dirty word, and you can reassure your client that you are the right one for the job with some effective self-promotion.  As with blogging, it is a focus on the “you” of your reader instead of the “I” of the writer.  Bragging effectively also means using stories and testimonials to show how you solved the pain of a client in a similar situation.  Don’t we all want to have the “expert” who solved a similar problem work on ours?

You can learn a lot about bragging to connect with your audience in Cathy’s class, and her weekly ezine will open your eyes as well.  Her teleseminar is purposefully small so she can answer specific questions from the group, and she encourages active participation.  She spent a good deal of time answering my questions, and I was able to implement some right away.  She really knows what she is talking about, and I encourage you to make the small investment to attend her seminar.  I noted in her last ezine that she is also offering an ebook with paid attendance at her next session.  I can’t wait to discover more in her ebooks, and I hope to catch her at one of her speaking engagements soon.

I don’t want to give too much away because you may gain something different based on your current level of ”bragging competency.”  My class had students from all over the US and even one night owl in Australia, and Cathy was able to give us each specific advice for our particular situations, which is what I liked so much about her style.  I learned from both my questions as well as the others in the class.

The takeaway from the class?  Your client needs to “see” how you can help them, so your stories and testimonials should reflect that.  What kind of pain was your client in when they came to you?  What did you do?  What was different about the situation when you finished your work?  Make sure you have some of these success stories in your marketing material and you can brag without being the know-it-all.  After all, your client just needs to know you can help them solve their problem, not that you climbed Mt Everest in a snowstorm wearing a blindfold.  You can save that story for your next cocktail party.

Want to know how to stand out from any crowd in a Wi-Fi spot?  Better yet, know that you can do it for less than the price of 10 cups of coffee (give or take, depending on your choice of caffeinated nectar)?  I discovered a great passive marketing tool that I want to share with you:  Laptop Skins.Yes, it sounds a little weird, maybe even a little futuristic.  But if you have kids you have probably already heard of cell phone skins and iPod skins.  It is basically a vinyl covering for your electronic device that is more stylish than the usual white/metallic gray/black option your electronic device comes in.

Laptop skins stick to the cover of your laptop lid to provide visual interest and a little personality.  You can showcase your favorite sports team, band, or color scheme.  Or, if you are a savvy Realtor, you can get a custom laptop skin with your name, logo and a witty tag line to help start conversations (”Want to talk real estate?  Pull up a chair!”).  Do you own a pest control company?  (”I love it when you BUG me!”)  Imagine working in a coffee shop between appointments and passively marketing yourself to every other person in the room.  Even those who are just coming in to pick up coffee will notice your laptop in a sea of metallic gray as they wait in line for their cup o’ Joe.

The idea for today’s post comes from the Laptop Skins Lens on Squidoo, and by googling I found several sites with premade skins available for about $15.  If you are looking for a custom order, you can get one for $25 from Schtickers.  As with anything, bulk ordering gets you a discount, so you can get one for all your employees who work outside the office.  Googling “custom laptop skins” will give you more options to review before buying.

A couple of things to remember when ordering a custom laptop skin:

• Use a high-resolution picture for your laptop skin, at least 200 dpi or higher.
• Most companies want the picture in JPEG format, though some will also accept GIF or TIFF.
• Before ordering check with your vendor on specifications for submission to make sure you will be happy with the end result.  The thing I love most about Shutterfly and other photo sites is that they will tell you when you order if your picture is not of sufficient quality to print/enlarge - not all laptop skin sites do, so do your homework first.  Most will accept the file via email or submit from their site.

If you do not spend a lot of time in coffee shops or other public Wi-Fi areas with your laptop, think about where you do spend your time online when you are out of your office.  Is there a way you can effectively market yourself in that environment?

What are some of your stories about passive marketing?  What is the most offbeat passive marketing strategy you have used?

Your reputation is key to your success, so make sure you know what is being said about you and your brand.Most of you have googled someone before, be it a blind date, a contractor, or a competitor. Google does not necessarily show you the facts; it shows you what is out there on that person, which may not necessarily be true. And therein lies the problem.

The Washington Post recently ran an article about online identity management companies. These are the people to call when you find someone out there slinging virtual mud at your good name, or if you want to downplay an event in your past with more current information. The first profile was about a woman who had an unhappy client who went so far as to write false blogs about her and slander her name, and she wasn’t aware of this until her friends and potential clients brought it to her attention. Think of all the business she might have lost from this.

“The clients the firms accept are varied: a real estate mogul wanting to move past a decade-old transgression, a prominent academic falsely accused of murder, a hedge fund manager who doesn’t like seeing his old New York Times wedding announcement on Google years after he divorced and remarried, a college student who regretted once dressing up as a prostitute at a Halloween party.”

These companies work by setting up sites and profiles on social networking sites like MySpace with current, positive information about the client. There really is no way to “erase” the negative entries, but if they are on page 6 instead of page 1, most prospective clients won’t see them. The goal of companies like ReputationDefender is to increase your exposure on the internet overall to downplay negative material already out there.

“Google does not object in principle to people adding positive content to outrank the negative. But a spokeswoman said in an e-mail, “if you use spammy and manipulative techniques to get this positive content to rank highly, we may take action on it.”

Soon after I started blogging I read a post by Kristal Kraft on monitoring your name online. As a matter of fact, Kristal will probably find this article on her daily report from Google regarding the usage of her name on the Internet. You can do this as well, and it is a good way to find out what is being said about you, whether true or false, so you can act accordingly. Kristal has great, easy-to-follow instructions on setting up your own searches, and by staying on top of this you can avoid problems faced by the people in the Washington Post article. No one wants an unhappy customer, but in all likelihood, you will have a few in your career, sometimes due to situations beyond your control.

Go ahead, google yourself and see what’s out there. Then set up your name searches to keep track of what is being said about you in cyberspace. After all, your reputation is key to your business success, so why shouldn’t you monitor it?

Hey, I know you aren’t a spammer. I’m not either. But sometimes my email newsletter gets blocked from an ISP, even though it was requested by the receiver. Your email newsletter service should allow for tracking of bounces (I use Constant Contact) so you can rectify this situation, but if it is happening more than occasionally you may want to take a more proactive approach.Seth Godin has written a Squidoo Lens on Whitelist Email Marketing that has great references on fixing this problem. As many of you know, Seth is a permission-based marketing guru and the founder of Squidoo. He has some great thoughts on marketing in general on Seth’s Blog.

So, don’t feel bad if you get classified as a spammer by an ISP. Be proactive and clear your name with these whitelisting tips so all of your clients receive the emails they requested.

Sometimes I can’t shut up long enough to let my message sink in. Does this ever happen to you?

“The point of brevity is not to say less, it’s to say what needs to be said effectively and concisely.”

Copyblogger has a great article on this subject by Muhammad Saleem titled Two Techniques That Help You Embrace Brevity. As a lover of words, sometimes I add so much to the core message that it gets suffocated. Or the reader stops before reaching the core message because the article is too long. As relatively new bloggers, we often that we don’t have enough content, and most of us have not moved on to the more difficult skill of cutting extraneous words. We want to make sure people understand us, so we just keep writing. Like I am doing right now.

The two techniques recommended are:

• Cut extraneous words (such as “the fact that,” “who is,” and “which was”)
• Restructure your sentences to combine thoughts into one main sentence.

Had I restructured my the above paragraph, it would read: Concise writing will make your blog more attractive to readers, and Copyblogger’s Two Techniques That Help You Embrace Brevity will show you how.

You can say more with less and hold your reader’s attention long enough to get your message through.

(I really want to keep typing, but I’m going to stop now.)

I see a lot of posts about bad customers. Buyers who use agents to view homes and then purchase from a family friend. Sellers who won’t price their home correctly and blame the agent when it doesn’t sell. Customers who use your store to view products and then buy online.
If your motivation is to get something off your chest, then I guess that is okay. But if the purpose of your blog is to attract buyers and sellers and become the knowledge expert in your area, “bad customer” stories will not help your cause.

Regular readers will know that Copyblogger is one of my favorites. Several days ago Brian Clark wrote a post called How to Become a Heroic Business Blogger. He discusses the problems with blatant self-promotion and the goal of using customer testimonials as “social proof” that we are what we say we are. But does that make potential customers pick up the phone and call you?

A better use of the testimonial is through a hero story. It is a story about your customer’s problem and how he or she solved it (with your help, of course). The center of the story is your customer, not you. While people will tune out when you start promoting yourself, they will listen intently when a peer tells a story in words they can relate to about a problem that is familiar to them.

Below are the components of the hero story, courtesy of Brian Clark:

• The story is not about you or your company
• The story is about your customer and how they solved their problem
• First, introduce the hero
• Next, introduce the problem
• How did the hero solve the problem?
• What did the hero learn along the way?
• What specific results did the hero achieve?

This is a great article, and even though I have covered the highlights it is well worth reading on its own. I’m working on my first hero story now, and I challenge you to write one as well. (Remember to honor your customer’s privacy by not disclosing identifying information without permission.)

Please link to your hero story in the comments below.

As a small business owner, you no doubt have struggled with vacations. You of all people need one, but how do you “get away from it all” when it is all yours? I struggle with the same issue, and as I write I am looking out at the mountains of Colorado while I’m - you guessed it - on vacation.

You may not be ready to head out on vacation with no thought of your business until you return, but there are tips to make your next well-deserved vacation a more relaxed one.

• Schedule your vacation at the beginning of the year just as you would any conferences or other business travel. Then make sure you remember this as you book new work or deliver estimates. In our company, I stagger start/deliver times when I will be on vacation and take on work accordingly. It doesn’t mean that I won’t have calls from existing clients while I’m gone, but it will rule out the more involved work of getting a new customer going.
• Let your regular customers know you will be on vacation but give them a number to call or an email address and let them know the expected timeframe for an answer. I find that most will rethink the idea of contacting you during your vacation, or when they do it will be to remind you of something they need when you get back. Even if you have to answer the voicemails and emails yourself, it is much better to know you can do it in 30 minutes or an hour each day and not fret about it during the rest of your leisure time.
• If it makes you feel better to work, then do it. I find the mountains to be a very relaxing place, which gets my creative juices flowing. I’ve scheduled some time each day to work on some new articles, and knowing that I’m taking advantage of this renewed creativity for our business helps me enjoy my vacation all the more.

We’ll be touching on this subject again over time, as it is a common problem no matter what your industry. What tips have you found to make vacations work for you?