http://www.smallbusinesswebsitesadvice.com.au/18_Advertising_On_Google.html Do you have an adwords account that is not selling your products or services? Don’t switch it off, watch this video instead
One of the things that I always find interesting with my small business clients, is the attitude some small business owners have with their business. This attitude quite often becomes apparent right at the start of my dealings with them, when I am going through the pre-sales and sales stage of my offering. Very often, it becomes clear very quickly, that the business owner I’m dealing with does not approach their business with the mindset of the business owner, rather they approach their business with the mindset of someone who has a job. It is as if in starting their own business they have simply purchased a guarantee to have a job out into the future.
There is a big problem with this approach to small business. The problem here is that whether you like them or not, as a small business owner, you own all the risks and responsibilities of a business owner. You are not actually guaranteeing yourself a job into the future as your job into the future also depends upon your ability to sell. You still need to sell yourself and your services to ensure there is work there for you to do.
If you want to do a job or have a job it is far easier to be employed by someone than to prop a job up in a small business. If you want to be a small business owner is important to approach your business as if it is a business. This means you need to take risks, business risks. This means you must have a plan for the growth and development. This means you must consider advertising and other means to reach your target audience, knowing full well that the advertising may fail. If an advertising campaign fails, as a small business owner it is your job to measure the results of the advertising campaign and make the decision regarding the continuation or discontinuation of the campaign.
It is in this simple process that so many small business owners that I meet, fail. All they really want is to have a job. As such any spending on their business they see as money out of their own pocket money, that should not have to be spent, money that would much rather be spent on their lifestyles. They actually resent the fact that they have to spend money on marketing and advertising. They do not realise that every dollar they spendon marketing and advertising, could very well put three or four or five dollars back into their pockets. And this includes every dollar they may spend on their website or internet marketing efforts. As such, they have no budgeted cash flow to advertising or marketing. So when it comes to the crunch of doing something about their business and increasing their reach to more customers, they always say “I can’t afford that now I have no cash for it”.
You are in business now, you need a business budget and part of this budget must be growing your business and finding new clients using marketing and advertising techniques.
I find much of my time with new clients is spent in educating them on the simplicities of business. A website is nothing more than a medium for advertising and marketing your business and your brand. You need to be prepared to commit to the advertising campaign which means developing a website and marketing it properly in the search engines. You need to commit some of your business’s budget to ensuring that campaign is executed in a robust manner. You must measure the results of their campaign to decide whether it needs to be refined restructured or continued as it is.
If you are a business owner of a small business and you cannot commit a few thousand dollars to get a website created and marketed properly, you really should ask yourself whether you want to be in business or or whether you have just bought yourself a job. If you don’t want to be in business and just want a job, why do you want the hassle of bookkeeping, tax accounting, finding clients, GST reporting, etc, when all you’re getting for it at the end is a job. You can always find someone who wants to be in business to take care of all those administration tasks while still doing your job, so you won’t have to spend all the extra time you’re standing at the moment doing all the administration tasks in your business. Just go to seek.com.au and start applying.
If you want to be a business owner though and run a small business, run it like a business. Allocate a budget to marketing and advertising. Find the experts in the industry of advertising and marketing. Have a plan for business growth, have a plan for increasing your workforce if your business growth exceeds your capacity to match the demand on your own. Have a plan for removing yourself from the business, so you stop working in the business and rather work on the business. That is what every good business owner should do and what all successful business owners do do.
With the popularization of the internet, more and more people are refocusing their time and energy as business professionals on creating websites that sell a product, offer users a service, or simply act as a landing spot for discussion and advice. The more people who flock to the internet and use it as a resource, the more websites will continue to spring up. In other words, as the demand continues to climb, the supply will surely follow right behind.
Anybody who runs a website knows that there is a lot that goes into the creation and maintenance of it. There is no silver bullet answer to how to make a great site on the internet, but there are a number of common factors that are present in successful sites and are lacking in those that fail.
The first thing that one must consider when they are putting together a new or recently upgraded website is how it is going to look. There are dozens of questions that must be answered from a design point of view before a site can be launched and unveiled to the public. What will the overall, general layout look like? What color scheme will you use? What type and size will be used as the main font throughout all the different parts of the site? These questions may seem like simple ones to tackle, but the truth of the matter is the general attractiveness of your site can be a huge deal breaker toward the overall success or failure of it.
Once you have ironed out the aesthetic features of your site, you must next look at the overall setup of what you are trying to do, and see how best you can turn this project into a money making venture.
If you are a retail store based on the web, you will probably make your profit off of the items you sell, be it shoes, sports equipment, auto parts or travel packages. But if your site is one based on something other than selling goods – maybe you help run an up to date blog about a sports team, or maybe you post opinion columns and host discussion boards about cooking or photography – you need another stream of income if your website is going to turn a profit at all.
Finding ad agencies that have a hand in the internet is incredible simple these days. Advertisers are able to reach core audiences on a content-specific website (say, about a sports team or sports equipment) easier than ever. As a result, no matter what your site revolves around, there is undoubtedly an advertiser who is looking to match up with your target audience.
There are a number of different ways for an advertiser and a host site to work out the specifics of how their deal will unfold. However, one of the most common ways of doing online advertising business is through a pay per click setup.
Pay per click is a system that binds an advertiser to pay its host site every time their ad is clicked on. Pay per click benefits both the advertiser – they are not bound by pricey contracts and only need to pay if their ad is a popular and successful one – and the host – an owner of a site is able to change up the ads on their sites so as to ensure that they make money off the ads over time – making it the perfect fit for both parties involved.
Web site creators, designers and operators have to juggle a number of different things if they are to put out a successful and popular site. Once a site is rooted in the internet browsing community, however, the focus very often turns to making money, which is where something like pay per click advertising comes into play. With a pay per click system set up, you can be sure that you will get the most out of your ad space over the long run.
You know, I continue to get email after email requesting a reciprocal link. I honestly do not know why people still do this. It is a strategy that is not very effective and to be honest, I believe it makes websites look sloppy. So I’ve basically sat down in front of my video recorder today and explained my thoughts on this issue. I hope you enjoy the video – I just hate these time wasting, useless and counter productive linking strategies.
This video also explains how to create backlinks to your website without wasting time, and mitigating the quality of your website, by using reciprocal linking strategies. You are welcome to embed this video on your own website/blog.
