If you wait to be great before you get out there, you’ll never move. Get out there when the edges are rough and keep on improving it while your out in your market. Let your market shape what you give them. Use technology to get the feedback and reiterate what your market demands from your products.

Tech breaks borders: location, location, location doesn’t mean the same thing anymore.

Email, blogs, video conferencing, wikis, and skype are some of the tools that are breaking down walls. What tech helps make happen is build interactions that foster trust and value. The key is to building relationships with your market and within your company. You don’t have to be in the middle of the hottest town to grow your business or start up. You have to provide value to your market, and they don’t care where you are while you do it.

Starting with little cash means focused better business discipline and good spending habits.

You have to choose options with better value. Limitations are your best friend to finding creative solutions to problems your business will face. Technology has made many improvements on how to get better value for your business dollars.

You do not have to be the next Google-sized business. Seriously.

Do you really need to be the next 450 billion dollar business? Heck no. Consider being the next level up from where you are today. That’s got a much higher chance of success and it’s completely within your reality. Let technology help your business move forward, not have you follow a business idea that has a gigantic chance of failure.

You don’t need a huge budget to get your business in front of your market.

Technology makes it cheap to do so and lets your message be the focus of the interaction. How much does it cost to be on YouTube versus to be on a 30 second TV spot? How much does it cost running an ad in print versus writing a blog post on your company website? How much does it cost hosting a live event versus a doing a video or teleconference?

In the early days of your new business, don’t focus on finding money. Focus on solving customers problems and getting feedback.

You might think you need lots of capital to start your new business. But what you really need is to get immersed in your customer’s world and identify their problems. Present solutions to those problems and ask them what they think of your results. At the start of your business, no amount of money will help more than being in sync with your market’s needs. It’s the ultimate litmus test: do you provide answers your market is looking for? Is it a business idea only on paper: in a business plan or through market research? Have you had real experiences with providing value to make a genuine decision on the likelihood of success?

Don’t write a business plan. Write a blog, post when you want.

Ah!! The MBA woman is saying screw the bplan. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Why is that? First off, who’s reading this plan? Investors? Banks? Your Future Partners and Employees? Do you really think someone wants to wade through 50 pages of a future potential with 5 year projections of million dollar revenue. Not really.
On the other hand, what do you think people interested in your business vision want? Bite sized chunks of value that they can get. Think ‘Thousand Songs In Your Pocket’ as the way to describe the iPod. That phrase was enough to get people to buy it.

Do small sampling size value with a blog post or a short video that you can continually trickle out to your market and get immediate and visible feedback from the people you want to serve. Not the imagined people your research tells you about. No business starting out ever has all things figured out. Be real with your market and tell them that you’re working with everything you’ve got to make their lives better. That’s what a business should be writing for. A business plan should be a living and breathing plan that changes. Make your company blog into the channel that shows your market and your peers what your business stands for. That kind of writing is what creates paying customers who will finance your business, not borrowed money from someone who is looking to turn a profit on your work.

Enjoy!

Start a weekly or daily TV show where your market can interact with you by emailing in questions, have people twitter questions to you and answer them in real time, talk about relevant news that your market would benefit from. Would you believe  that you can set up your own live broadcast through ustream for free? If you think that doing a regular video show is out of reach for a small business owner, you’ve got to check out Wine Library TV.

Get Connected to talk to people directly. As mentioned in an earlier post, your market is online and using social media. Your users are open to talking to you person to person. Take advantage of that with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Podcast. If being in front of the camera is something you’d rather not do but still like the idea of getting your current and future customer and market to hear what you have to say, consider doing a podcast show. The distribution works just like a blog although by itself, podcasting is not a solo revenue channel. Instead, podcasting is an effective way of talking to your market, building a brand and awareness for your other products and services. It can serve as a great learning platform for interviews and client case studies too.

Print on Demand. Getting a book written that will benefit your market is no longer a feat to be accomplished. Digital Print on Demand companies like Lulu,  Blurb and CreateSpace make the publishing part of having a book a non-issue. Anyone can publish their book. What is critical though is providing the value to your market and positioning yourself as the expert and give good content that others would want to read about in print. If a book sounds like too big an undertaking, HP has put together a Magazine on Demand print option called MagCloud. You can sign up for the beta as a publisher

Indie Music Distribution. This one is more for creative businesses than most other options on this post. The way music distribution has changed in the last few years enables musicians to reach their market and distribute their music with greater ease than before. iTunes, Amazon for distribution, Facebook and MySpace for connecting with fans and touring info. There’s a great startup helping musicians take care of the back end of music distribution, check out The E.A.R. Card.

Have a youtube vidoe channel for your niche. The benefit from the mass of users uploading content to Youtube by collecting the best of videos related to your niche. Be the leader in organizing the best of your niche on YouTube. You dont have to spend the time creating the videos for your industry, just editing down the list of the best.

Foster interaction within your niche community. Using a hosted service like Ning or an open source platform like Elgg.

Start small with new product manufacturing. A new company, Ponoko lets you turn your idea and design plans into a physical product.

If your own product is out of reach, how about branding existing products that would serve your industry. AliBaba provides the resources to do so.

Clothing on Demand with Cafepress and Printfection. For small businesses and entrepreneurs with events or looking for easy to get started add on product lines.

Bonus: Start Blogging. A blog lets you develop your expertise within your industry while keeping a two way communication going. Check out Wordpress.

Choose Your Branding, Business or Personal

You’ll want a business brand if you want to use Twitter for your marketing, event announcements, new blog/website content. A personal brand would centered around your life and want a place to discuss your business, your passions, the interesting happenings in your life, pictures things you like. Some small businesses have no separation between the owner’s personal brand and reputation from the businesses. If that’s your case, you’d be better off building your personal brand with Twitter until you grow into a need for a separate Twitter account. Now that you know the direction of your twitter account you can go sign up.

Customize Your Profile

Make it unique to you. Add a picture of yourself, your name and a layout that represents you. Twitter is only a means of connecting with an other person, not a company face. Make your twitter profile have the same kind of personality that you have and a good representation of interacting with you.

Build Your Network: Find People to Follow

See who you already know by doing an address book import.

Hit the search. Find thought leaders in your industry, peers, and competitors. Try familiar names to your business. Follow them and some of their followers

Still searching. This time your going to be looking for keywords related to your business. This will give you selection of people who are talking about your products or competitors right now and you can jump in and reply to their tweets. Go to some of the profiles and get involved in the conversations.

Building a network on Twitter is a lot like like a network event. Get over the awkwardness. Jump in and make a useful contribution to the conversation. Give people a reason to follow you by having something interesting to say.

Use the favorites to save the golden nugget tweets that showcase your brand. These could be great feedback used to improve service or your product, or testimonials from your clients that you want to organize and archive. Favorites as testimonials helps build your credibility since a trusted and reachable third party publicly said something good about you.

Find and communicate with your customers. Build a relationship with as many clients as you can on Twitter to build you brand and be that much closer to your market. It’s a great competitive advantage to be immediately available on Twitter.

Tweet helpful content. Finding value in 140 characters is less time consuming than writing a newsletter or blog post so you can do it without taking much time in your day. Add value to your followers by giving something good.

Twitter has carved itself the functionality similar other internet applications you are already familiar with but offers enough differences to be a unique platform.

Twitter is like…

1. Blogging, but limited to 140 character chunks of text
2. Text messages/SMS but available on web/desktop/mobile
3. Chat rooms but you get to choose who you’re having a public conversation with
4. IM‘ing but all tweets are archived and viewable on the web
5. Status updates on Facebook and Myspace but no other functionality

Anatomy of Twitter

Tweet: the 140 character blurb to answer “what are you doing now?”

@reply: the way to respond back to a tweet. enter the at sign then the username in your tweet for them to know you speaking directly to them

Your Network is built from Followers and Following

Followers are people who choose to follow or subscribe to your stream of tweets. Your followers are your distribution reach.

Following are people whose tweets you want to follow or subscribe to.  These will show up on your home page and update immediately on a dashboard like homepage.

Direct Messages A way to privately send a tweet to someone else on Twitter. You do this by typing in d + username + message or using the reply icon on your direct message.

Hashtags/pound sign A way to aggregate an event or group that gives people a place to go to talk about the same thing. For example, #debate was a way to make any tweet about the debates as they were happening show up as a focused chat room discussion with other people on Twitter.

How Twitter can Help Grow A Small Business

• Build your personal or company brand
• Open doors to attention and engaging people on a 30 second attention span
• Have an immediate conversation with someone relevant within your market, your peers and your clients
• Increase Sales funnel and leads for your product and service line
• Consistently deliver chunk sized value to your market through your twitter followers
• Easy to get, store and respond to testimonials and feedback from your clients
• Network with your market

Next post we’ll look at how to build momentum and get Twitter off the ground for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Step 0: Get an account with Google Analytics

If your business has a web presence that you expect to turn into business results like new sales, new client introductions, customer service and building relationships you’ll never know how well you’re doing until you track and analyze the data.

There are plenty of web tracking tools to choose from but what I recommend and use with clients in Google Analytics, the free analytics software by Google.

Have a Website to Generate Revenue? Enable the eCommerce Analysis

If you want to drive visitors to a page for a purchase or newsletter signup you can track successful conversions using Goals and Funnels. Enable eCommerce reporting and the eCommerce Analysis report set. From your dashboard, go to edit settings. Then in the main website profile information, go to edit in the right upper corner this will take you to the  Edit Profile Information. Here you’ll find the e-commerce section, select Yes and save changes.

Machiavelli Meets Business Intel, GAnalytics Style

The End, The Means, GAnalytics Goals and Funnels

In GAnalytics  the end is called a goal. It’s the action your visitor takes that you defined as important. It’s the end result you want to track to show progress towards your business goals. In GAnalytics the means is called a funnel. It’s the path you want your prospects to take in order to reach your defined goal.
For example,  a small business looking to build a relationship with prospects through its email would define a goal as newsletter signup and the funnel as landing on a recent blog post then entering their information on the sign up box on the sidebar.

Falling Off the Bandwagon Never Felt So Good

Usually, if you’re not tracking you have no idea where your clients and prospects go other than the place you’d like them to go like an add to cart button. So without tracking all you know are your successful transactions. You know nothing about how many other people were there and just didn’t pull the trigger on going forward or worse started to then didn’t complete the transaction.

Tracking lets you know where your visitors fall off your bandwagon

When you have your ends and means defined you’ll now have the data needed to see where your visitors fall off the desired path you want them to take. This lets you know more than just an abandon rate but exactly where your customer was just before they left your site.

Tracking Lets Your Business Read Between the Lines

Get context of your visitors intent and expectations when coming to your website.
GAnalytics lets you learn how visitors came to your site by the referring url and if they searched for a phrase and went to your site, you’ll know what they were looking for in Google. You can also tell who is sending you visitors by looking at the referring URLs

Your homepage isn’t the one place visitors go to when they visit your domain.
Visitors come to your website from search engines that dig through all your web pages. GAnalytics will show you what pages they came to first, known as the landing page, the last page they were on before leaving your site, known as the bounce page, and which pages they viewed.

Who Yelled Fire? Bounce Rate and the Bum Rush Off Your Site

An interesting factor you’ll get to know is what pages on your website is most often the last page your visitor sees. This will tell you where you’re loosing their interest or attention or need to deliver more value.

From tracking you’ll be able to see which categories of products are most popular. There’s an 80/20 somewhere on your site, and you’ll want to maximize the 20% that’s bringing in you more business.

Get to Know Google Optimizer. Another Free Google tool

Does She Want the Black Dress or the Little Black Dress?

Sure you’re prospects are looking for what you’re offering on your website but did you know that you can test out different parts of your page to see which gets a better response out of your visitors. Maybe they were looking for a black dress and you show them the little black dress and a whole new association pops int their head bringing them closer to a sale.
You wouldn’t know any of that is possible unless you are doing split testing.
Without split testing your are your own worst enemy to reaching your prospects
I’m not talking about Christan Slater, or even Sybil. Split testing lets you try out different headlines, colors, offers, guarnutees to different groups of your visitors and tracks the results of those tests.

Conversion Testing Rules of Thumb

For every 100 conversions test 1 page element over 2 weeks. That’ll give you enough time to see results and make adjustments. Once you find a winner, replace the old variable and keep trying to beat your results. Split testing lets your business sharpen its personal best in conversion which means more sales, happier customers and more growth.

Never Spazz Out on the High of a Good Revenue Day

When your website is giving your a great revenue day. Don’t think you’re looking a gift horse in the mouth by not understanding why you’re performing so well. Analyze your website data and see where they are coming from what they were looking for and make sure its something you can repeat again!

The Holiday Season: a Retailer’s Shot in the Arm

Many retail businesses are cyclical. Sometimes earning as much in the last quarter of the year as the previous two combined. I’m going to say it again, tracking will tell show you the trends in visitors coming in, from where, and what they are looking for. Make the most of your peak season by opening all lanes for green on your website.

Aside from your internal tracking, Google can offer you an industry wide tracking from Google Insights.
An example of what Google Insights can show for an industry is a comparison between basketball, football and golf in the US over the last 12 months. What can you tell about people’s interest in these sports? What sport specific business wouldn’t benefit from knowing this?

Look at this chart directly below. This shows the results of the top geographic areas for the keyword football.

What regionally targeted business wouldn’t want to know where their most interested prospective visitors might be coming from during football season?? Take a look at the second graph for footballs most interested US areas and key searches.

This is a hopefully brief, but long blog post,  overview of using Analytics on your website to help grow your business. If you feel I should cover more or have questions, please comment below!

When I first read Seth’s post on the productivity divide,  I didn’t get it. It seems like these were no-brainers to me. These were the things that make me a rockstar in dealing with everyday business tasks and help get lots done effectively.

But his post wasn’t meant for me specifically. I was too close to the solution to see that I’m on the other side of this divide. The questions Seth asked were meant to help all knowledge workers, small business owners and marketing heads get a healthy checkup on using all the tools available to help with responsibilities and increasing productivity.

Now that I see the value of putting the divide into a tangible list. I’d like to add on to Seth’s list of questions with some places to get answers.

1. Can you capture something you see on your screen and paste it into Word or PowerPoint? Screen Capture On Windows and Screen Capture on Mac
2. Do you have a blog? You can start one now with wordpress
3. Can you open a link you get in an email message? If it’s hyperlinked, just click. If not copy link into your browser and hit enter.
4. Do you read more than five blogs a day? If you can’t find 5 blogs relevant to your business, here’s how to look for them then discover how RSS works to make sure you keep up with new posts as they happen in one place.
5. Do you have a signature in your outbound email? An email signature is an underused marketing strategy that goes out with reenforces your message with every email you send.
6. Do you have an RSS reader? Watch an intro to Google Reader to see how it works.
7. Can you generate a PDF document from a Word file you’re working on? Install a free pdf writer for windows and Mac has a built in print to PDF feature
8. Do you know how to build and share a simple spreadsheet using Google Docs? Watch this how to video that explains building and sharing in Google Docs
9. Do have a shortcut for sending mail to the six co-workers you usually write to? Shortcuts in Outlook and in Gmail
10. Are you able to find what you’re looking for on Google most of the time? Surprisingly useful basic info on search and some in depth Google Search
11. Do you know how to download a file from the internet? Read how to download files.
12. Do you back up your work? Here is a list of back up options for your work
13. Do you keep track of contacts using a digital tool? Try something like Highrise
14. Do you use anti-virus software? If you don’t have one get an anti-virus program and an anti-spyware program.
15. Do you fall for internet hoaxes and forward stuff to friends and then regret it? See the link in the question for help.
16. Have you ever bought something from a piece of spam?

I’ve got no help for the last one but now you’ll be able to bridge this productivity divide that every knowledge worker faces. Like Seth says, if you need any help, there’s plenty to go around here.