Business Coaching

Everybody’s online these days, right?

It sure seems that way, but there are still a shocking number of businesses that aren’t taking advantage of the online world to grow.

In fact, almost 40 percent of small businesses in the United States have no online presence at all.

It’s easy to blame uncontrollable factors on failures, but a business that has no online presence and fails has no excuse. There is help for any business if they know where to look.

The economy may be bad, taxes may be high and the economy may be uncertain, but none of those factors mean anything if you aren’t taking full advantage of the opportunities around you and the internet is as powerful a marketing tool as we have ever seen.

People don’t look for the products and services they need in the Yellow Pages anymore.

In fact, many communities have done away with distributing phone books because most people search for what they want online these days and having a massive tome with everyone’s contact information was simply too expensive to produce every year.

For business owners that haven’t gone online with their message yet and then wonder why they aren’t finding enough customers, it’s time to move to the 21st century.  If a business isn’t marketing, it’s dying.

Developing your presence isn’t hard and it shouldn’t take up too much time, but it’s vital to your success.

If a small business doesn’t have an online presence, whether it’s a Facebook fan page or a dedicated, multi-page website, they are missing out on hundreds if not thousands of potential customers.

Online you can build a following of your best customers, interact with them and find easy, cost-effective ways to market your business.

An on-line presence is, arguably, the most important marketing tool available these days, so get online today and don’t lose any more business to your competition.

TV news anchors can breathe a sigh of relief everywhere: a recent survey found that local and national TV news programs are more popular than online news.

According to the Pew Research Center and American Life Project’s survey, almost everybody (92%) gets their news from multiple platforms. For 78%, that includes local news; national news — including both cable news like CNN and network broadcast news — comes in at 73%; online news manages 61%; radio sneaks away with 54%; local newspapers snag 50%; and national newspapers like USA Today get only 17%.

So, what have we learned? While print journalism might still be suffering a long-impending death, at least people get their news from multiple platforms, which include the ever-increasing online news and good, old-fashioned TV news.

Read all the findings in the full article.

Why are local TV news stations more popular than local online news? Any ideas, readers?

Tracking progress with online marketing is easier with these tools.

After finding online marketing opportunities, like we said yesterday, you’ll need to track your “wins.” This can be a confusing and daunting thing to do, too…unless you know the tools that can track your leads for you.

Google Analytics helps yet again! It tracks referrals from the company’s social media profiles. And twinfluence and Twitalyzer are Twitter-specific tools that measure how influential and
far-reaching the company’s Twitter presence is.

Klout tracks the impact of your posted content and links, including which audiences are exposed to the content and how they interact with it.

Translate the information about results and figure out the positive financial impact on your
business. Key performance indicators can come in various forms, like new revenue generated, a good amount of time and money saved, or a good financial return on investment.

Armed with this information, hopefully it will become clear how much social media marketing is helping your business…or how much more you need to work at it in order to make a positive financial impact on your business! If you want to find out what needs work in your business quickly, take our Business Health Check.

As with traditional marketing, it’s all about opportunities. When you find opportunities to sell your products and services, you don’t shy away, do you? You take advantage! The same with online marketing – find opportunities to get the word out about what you’re promoting. However, with online marketing, it can be trickier. Where do you find these opportunities? And with social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, sure, you might have 500+ followers/friends, but do they really care about what you’re promoting?

If you’re lost in terms of online marketing, you need to be able to first find opportunities which you can expand upon in terms of marketing. Don’t know how to start? The following tools will at least give you a good idea of what’s being said about your company or industry online, and where users spend their time:

• Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) emails you whenever a chosen
keyword (e.g., company or product name, CEO name, campaign tagline,
industry term, etc.) is mentioned in any form of online content.
• Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/) scans the blogosphere
for any keyword or phrase you type in.
• Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/) scans all Twitter posts for your
selected keyword or phrase.
• SiteVolume (http://www.sitevolume.com/) reports how often keywords or
phrases appear on Twitter, Digg, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.
• SocialMention (http://www.socialmention.com/) enables you to search
keywords and phrases by specific channel category (blogs, images, news,
video, etc.), or as a whole, and to receive email alerts when a new mention
is posted.
• Socialcast (http://www.socialcast.com/) offers real-time analytics on microblogging
and other social activities and identifies individual users’ level of
activity. Unlike most tools, it also can quantify the value of “lurkers” who
aren’t visibly posting comments, but by how often they frequent a site.

Take note of what’s being said about your company or whatever keywords you search, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral; what people
are passing along to friends; and if there are any particular needs or customer
segments that aren’t served. These are all opportunities for marketing…

Blogging is a new way to market a business.

If you’ve been following this business coach blog, you know blogs are gaining more and more traction as a legitimate marketing tool in the business world, as well as a legitimate news source for journalists. They are far-reaching and cheap to produce and to maintain. They’re not a substitute for traditional marketing materials like press releases and direct mail, but they do provide a way to reach a mass amount of people in a short amount of time that can be well worth your investment.

Blogging or being a guest blogger on a reputable website will increase business visibility, increase leads and add revenue. All you have to do is write a blog every few days.

If you want to set up your own blog, here are a few quick tips to get you started:

Choose a Blogging Platform: Choose an easy to use blogging platform to start writing for. WordPress and Clearspace are some good ones that are clear and easy to figure out.

Figure out Blog Ideas: Some content ideas for your blog might include industry trends, hot topic news, interviews with other industry leaders, your position on industry issues or innovations, book and article reviews, and lessons learned related to subjects that might be important to your readers. Think about what lessons you’ve learned along the way, and shed light on the complexities of running a small business.

Be a Credible Source: Remember that as soon as you put something in writing on the Internet, it’s out there for all to see. So be careful about what you write and make sure you’ve done adequate research and covered all your bases.

Learn How to Engage your Readers: Your blog’s success will depend on the number of readers you have. Increasing readers is all about motivating them to come back time and again. Make sure your blog is structured in a way that’s easy to navigate on your site. Besides useful information, a little humor never hurts. Think about linking to other blogs you enjoy reading that relate to what you’re blogging about, and establish links to monthly archives.

Happy blogging!

Will a newspaper be an ancient artifact soon?

Just like the times…they just can’t stop changing.

As we’ve said before, the businesses that make it through the recession aren’t necessarily the most successful ones to begin with or the biggest, but those that adapt. This is something a lot of businesses and business owners seem to be having a hard time grasping. At the same time, several different industries are changing rapidly during this rough economic period, making some businesses even harder to stay afloat. For example, newspapers, magazines and print journalism are at risk of becoming extinct.

According to the latest Integrated Newspaper Audience finding from Scarborough Research, in its recently released Scarborough USA study, 74% of U.S. adults, nearly 171 million people, read a newspaper, in print or online, during the past week. The study examined newspaper readership, which captures media patterns and other consumer behaviors of adults across the country, and found that newspapers are still read in print or online by a critical mass of adults in the U.S. on a daily and weekly basis.

Gary Meo, Scarborough Research’s Senior Vice President of Print and Digital Media Services, notes that “While our data does show that print newspaper readership is slowly declining… given the fragmentation of media choices, printed newspapers are holding onto their audiences relatively well… ”

The analysis of data indicated that newspapers are being read by a majority of adults in print and online, but also that these Integrated Newspaper Audiences continue to attract educated, affluent readers. In an average week:
• 79% of adults employed in white collar positions read a newspaper in print or online
• 82% of adults with household incomes of $100,000 or more read a printed newspaper in print or online
• 84% of adults who are college graduates or who have advanced degrees read a printed newspaper in print or online

So…are newspapers really dying? They still might be…the findings say people read print OR online newspapers. Maybe newspapers are growing in the online sector, as the media industry seems like it’s moving that way.

What do you think? Can print news make a comeback? Or is everything going online? And, a more interesting question, could business coaching help some print companies stay afloat?

It’s no secret that just about every newspaper in the country has had to make cutbacks.

But still, newspaper circulation is actively decreasing, meaning the fate of the newspaper is in question.

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, circulation for 379 U.S. dailies dropped 10.6%, based on a cumulative average for the six months ended Sept. 30.

This is the sharpest drop in sales in more than 10 years.

Nearly two-thirds of the country’s 25 largest papers posted declines of 10% or more.

While everyone has their predictions about what will happen to newspapers in a few years if things keep going like this, one thing’s for sure – as a business owner, your business must change with the times.

Several businesses, whether they’ve expanded their reach and their key products or changed their investment strategy, have had to change in order to weather the economic recession.

Even some newspapers have weathered it as much as they can by investing more time and energy in moving online.

For example, The Wall Street Journal sold an average of 2.02 million copies and online subscriptions during the six months ending Sept. 30, a 0.6% increase from the same period in 2008.

Recognize where the times are taking people. For newspapers, there is now a greater demand for news online rather than an actual newspaper.

Some people don’t like change, but not changing could mean the end of your business.