Small Office, Home Office Information

Ok so it’s been a while since either Toni or I posted anything here. I guess that some of our regular readers may have wondered whether our small business had died during the recession but it didn’t.

Times were a little tough there for a while but we’ve come out of it in pretty good shape and now we’re busier than ever … which is more than we can say for some other local businesses in our line of work.

The reason we stopped posting was because a local competitor was taking some of the things we wrote here and including them word for word in their newsletter and claiming them as their own thoughts, ideas etc. Now however that competitor is no longer in business … at least not in the form they were in when they were stealing our content.

So now that you know why we’ve been away let’s talk about a local small business that has found that a website has brought them a lot more business than they thought.

The business is Hearty Foods a small business that provides nutritious ready made meals. They operate from a small store where people can call in and pick up frozen meals that are prepared by a real chef on the premises.

Not long after they started business they contacted us to build a website for them. Basically they wanted to put their menu online so that people who were house-bound … and there are quite a few in this town … could choose some meals from the menu and then call and place an order and have the meals home-delivered.

We built the site and promoted it on a number of local websites and at the same time the guys at Hearty Foods added the site’s URL to all their off-line marketing and the site became quite popular. They didn’t get millions of visitors to the site but they did get plenty of locals who downloaded the menu and called to order meals.

We even had a couple of friends who found the site, downloaded the menu and wanted to give it to us because they knew that sometimes we’re too busy to cook.

Then late last year they decided to take their website to another level and have us turn it into an online shop so people could actually order and pay for their meals.

While we were happy to do that for Alex and Chantal we really did wonder just how many people would actually use the online store. The first problem we saw was that Hearty Foods only delivers to a fairly small area and the second problem was that the people who had been using the home-delivery service were mostly older people who may have been reluctant to use their credit cards to make online purchases.

But we built the site and turned it over to our clients and to our surprise people have actually been using the online shop to order and pay for meals to be delivered and the guys at Hearty Foods are now thinking of ways to expand their online presence.

So if a small business in a small town can make a website work for them can a website work for your small business? And if you have a website for your small business and it isn’t working for you then why isn’t it working?

It’s been a while since I’ve had a spare moment to pop in here and do one of my typical brain dumps but business kicked into overdrive back in June and that’s still continuing, Toni spent some time off earlier this month after a knee operation and about the same time her mother passed away.

It wasn’t a sudden passing … unfortunately she spent about three weeks slowly fading away and we spent a lot of that time at the hospital and that put a heck of a strain on our business. Fortunately all our clients were very understanding and in a couple of instances we were able to pass some of our work … the work that Toni and I usually handle ourselves … over to those who work for us (most of them are already working at 100% capacity just like us) and that somehow got us through.

But how would you and your small business cope if you had to spend a very large chunk out of every day at the hospital as a loved one slowly passed away? If your parents are elderly then it’s something that you should be considering because when it happens you’re going to need some contingency plans in place or your business may pass away as well.

Perhaps that all sounds a little insensitive and the time we spent with Toni’s mum wasn’t time that we felt was wasted in any way … it’s important to support a loved one right up to the time they pass. But the strain it puts on your business can be incredible and it really is something you need to be preparing for because it’s inevitable.

Here’s a question that a number of small business people are going to be asking themselves in this town in the coming months.

What do you do when you run a small business in a tourist town that has just had it’s major tourist attraction hijacked by a number of other towns that are all much closer to your target market?

Whale watching is a big deal in this town and for three to four months each year it’s boom time. Sadly for those small businesses that depend on whale watching for their existence the last few years have seen a major increase in whale watching tours being offered by new operators in places that are much closer to where the tourists live.

With the increased cost of travel people are staying closer to home and for this town the coming whale watching season is not looking good. Fortunately our exposure to businesses that rely on that annual tourist boom is limited.

What would you do if your major market began to shrink?

The number of people who expect something for nothing that you, as a small business person, will bump into in the life of your small business is unbelievable. Or as one person put it on Twitter today:

The sense of entitlement for a person getting financial value who has no intent of ever becoming a customer is astonishing.

These days more and more small businesses are taking their business online. Some are even going so far as to shut down their bricks and mortar stores and concentrate solely on selling online.

Actually succeeding online can be quite a challenging task because suddenly you’re not just competing with other businesses in your own city or town. When you take your business online you’re competing with other like businesses spread around the world and if you want to succeed then you had better know what you’re doing and understand the realities of conducting a business online rather than pinning your hopes on the fantasies that so many people peddle.

Something you see less frequently is a small business that is doing well online and now wants to expand into a shopfront out in the real world. However that’s exactly what one of our clients has done in the last couple of weeks.

Fraser Coast Lawn Bowls came to us late last year and asked us to build an online shop for them and we did and right from the start business was good. The owners used our expertise to market their business online and they used their own expertise to market the store offline and business has been very good.

Now they’re taking their business out into the real world with their own shopfront and even in these hard times business is looking good there too.

So don’t limit yourself to running a business online … there are plenty of businesses that should do just as well offline as they do online and maybe your small business is one of them.

“Every thought you have is a road that you can travel down … so where are your thoughts taking you.” (Martin Fritz)

Our business continues to boom and we’ve had some excellent results with outstanding search engine placement for a couple of clients in the last week. While none of them have been mission impossible it’s still good to be able to say that “I love it when a plan comes together”

On the other hand it gives me little pleasure to tell you that over the last few weeks we’ve had a number of enquiries from local businesses who have been dissatisfied with the work done on their websites by other local designers.

These people have spent anywhere from $1500 to $5000 dollars on sites that have turned out to be absolute failures. They neither rank well in the search engines or make sales or generate leads and the sites owners come to us in the hope that we can work some miracle without costing them any more money.

Sadly we can’t because our time is just as valuable as any other small business and all too often the site designs are so bad that they need to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. Even if the design can be recycled the cost of re-writing the text on the site is often more than the site owner can afford.

So if you’re about to pay a web designer to build a website for your business you’ll find 85 Reasons Why Website Designers/Developers Keep SEOs in Business in invaluable read for it will give you some guidelines that will help you to avoid wasting money on a clueless web designer.

Some of the reasons given in the article:

3. They develop navigational menus that are invisible to search engines

5. They ask the client to provide them with website copy (it’s the designer who should develop the text based on the concepts that you give them).

6. They have the client provide them with what pages they want on their website.

10. They think that SEO is submitting (the site) to search engines.

12. They put the same title on every page of the website.

18. They find it easier to use paid search.

I could go on with more but then I’d be breaching the fair-use rules of copyright so just let me encourage you to follow the link and read those 85 points. Unfortunately we’ve come across every one of them in the last few weeks.

More and more small businesses are going online with their own websites. Once their site is online it’s not long before they begin to wonder what their site is actually doing for their business. At that point the site owners start looking for an analytics programme that will give them the information they need.

Many small business website owners turn to Google Analytics and that’s certainly the one that we recommend to our clients. Google Analytics is a very powerful program and it’s also free so it’s hard to beat when it comes to value for money.

However, it’s one major flaw does rest in all that power and the information it can provide. For many small business owners all that information becomes overwhelming but help is at hand. Google’s own expert on their analytics programme was interviewed recently on just what was the important information that Google Analytics could tell small business owners.

You’ll find that interview here and it certainly does shed some light on the data that is important for small businesses.

In tough financial times like these there will always be plenty of people looking for a way of earning an income by working from home.

In tough financial times like these there will always be plenty of sharks out there looking to fleece gullible people and pyramid selling schemes are a great way to do just that so be very careful of any get rich quick scheme that you may see advertised.

Just because someone says that what they’re offering isn’t a pyramid selling scheme doesn’t mean it isn’t … and just because you see it advertised in your local paper doesn’t mean that it isn’t a pyramid selling scheme either.

Even if they happen to be a feature article in your local paper doesn’t mean that they aren’t pyramid selling schemes.

Several years ago we had a client who was spending a heap of money on advertising his small business - a tourism related business in a town that relies heavily on tourism.

He spent a small amount on having us build his website … but then spent nothing more on promoting it. He spent up big on advertising in glossy magazines produced locally for the the tourists. He did some local television advertising because what he offered to tourists was also appealing to the local population. He also spent a reasonable amount on brochures and leaflets as well as a very small amount each month on a newsletter that went out to all the motels and resorts in town.

The one problem for this client was that he had no idea which form of advertising was the most effective and claimed to be too busy to find out. We even designed a short, simple questionaire that would have identified what form of marketing had attracted them to his business. He could have given to each client who came into his business but that was too much trouble for him or his staff to hand out.

At the time we parted ways he still had no idea which form of advertising was giving him the best return on investment.

In today’s tough economic times, when money is in short supply and advertising is so important you need to know which form of advertising works for your small business. Don’t think that doing a little simple research … something as simple as just asking new customers where they saw your business advertised … is a waste of time.

Sometimes it can mean the difference between surviving times like these and watching your business go down the drain because you’ve wasted your advertising dollars.