Small Office, Home Office Information

by Toni Livesey

Oh man … getting back into work mode is the pits. We’ve just put our eldest son on the plane back to Orange in New South Wales and now we have to think seriously about getting back into work mode

While we’re thinking of that here is an interesting way to judge the success of your small business - apply the tshirt rule.

by Stuart Livesey

Sometimes I just want to sit here and bang my head on the desk

Well we’re back - in a temporary, casual, off-handed sort of way till after New Year’s Day when we’ll be back into work full time. This break has been absolutely wonderful although it hasn’t been without it’s frustrations.

On Christmas Eve Toni’s main computer died thanks to a part of the operating system suddenly becoming corrupted. Then it started to rain and went on raining for three days so all our plans to have fun outdoors with the family got washed away.

But today Toni’s PC is fixed and it has stopped raining - just in time for us to put the family on the plane and send them home.

Search Engines and Small Business

Over the last three months of this year Toni has begun to move her small business into web design and search engine optimisation. It’s really nothing new for us because we’ve been doing it for years for ourselves but now we’re offering our services in those areas to small business here in Hervey Bay.

And that is where the head-banging comes in. There are so many small business people out there who simply do not understand what large amounts of time and effort are required to get their sites ranking well on Google and the other search engines.

Instead they either think that they have to do no search engine optimisation and somehow their sites will rank well in Google almost by magic or they think that search engine optimisation just isn’t for their small business.

If you’re one of those small business people who can’t see that your website needs any search engine optimisation then read 5 Myths about SEO

Hopefully that article will help to change your mind.

by Stuart Livesey

Well this has been an interesting week to say the least. Several clients hit us with desperate pleas for work to be completed before Christmas and somehow we managed to get it all done. But it’s also left us so weary that we’ve made a firm decision not to work like that again.

In both cases the clients have known about the approaching deadlines for at least a month but never bothered to warn us and when a third client hit us up yesterday with a request to get some work done before Christmas they were politely turned down.

And just to underscore that decision - I was told by my Optometrist on Thursday that I either cut back on my hours in front of the computer or my eyesight will deteriorate to the point where I won’t be able to continue doing what I do.

It’s a warning that no small business person can ignore for too long.

And now to Friday Links.

What’s a Click Worth - it’s a simple tool to help you work out what the value is of each person who comes to your website.

Little Known Ways to Brand on the Cheap - 99 tips for poor web startups who want to get their name out there.

Leo’s Icon Archive - thousands of free icons for your website (just watch out for the popups).

And that wraps things up for this week. We won’t be posting now till after Christmas so Toni and I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy and harmonious Christmas - it’s a good time for most small business people to take a break and recharge the batteries so make sure you do

by Stuart and Toni Livesey

Well now it’s Friday. We started the week with good intentions of posting daily but for the last couple of days have been trying to find time to work, pick up family from the airport, get ready for Christmas and try to live what passes for a normal life in this small business.

We’ve survived so far but had to cut back on some things and unfortunately the blog was one of those things.

Stuart will be back tomorrow with his Friday Links - this time on a Saturday - and until them we leave you with a link to an excellent post on Small Business Public Relations

And the direct link to the interview referred to in Lee’s post can be found here

by Toni Livesey

Signs can send all the wrong messages

I bet you never looked at Under New Management in this way before.

by Stuart Livesey

If your small business runs an e-commerce site online then this is for you

If you are running your business online then every click - every hit - on your site has a value. If you want to know what’s a click worth to you then follow the link to find a handy tool that might be useful for your small business.

Thanks to Seth’s Blog for the link

by Stuart and Toni Livesey

Friday links on a Monday? Hey it works for me

Like most small business people this week consisted of trying to fit Christmas shopping into a very busy work schedule and managing to forget to do several important things.

One of those things we forgot was Friday Links … so here they are on a Monday.

11 Tips for Time Management in a Web Worker World - not all of these work for us but they are still worth considering.

How to Network for Introverts - Stuart talked about this earlier in the week but it is definitely worth mentioning again.

Self Publising for Free - books, calendars, music and a whole lot more.

by Stuart Livesey

Could your pricing structure actually be turning customers away?

Price partitioning occurs when a business charges a basic price for an item and then offers additional services for additional fees.

I guess the simplest example of price partitioning would occur if your small business charged $xx.xx for an item and then showed that an additional sum would be added for postage and packing.

But could it be that by using that type of pricing policy you are actually losing sales and driving customers away?

Some recent research has shown that partitioning prices really could be costing you sales and the research is discussed here at Fixing Price Tag Confusion

And thanks to the Business Pundit for the link to the study

Stuart and Toni Livesey

If your small business involves trading online have you stopped to think about what time of day your customers visit your website?

Is it even important to know such a statistic?

Well let’s answer the first question and think about the second.

A survey back towards the beginning of the year found that, in the United Kingdom, most purchases at online websites were made during office hours. That wasn’t because of some psychological impulse only to shop online at the same time one might shop in a bricks and mortar shop, it was because most people were shopping online while they were at work.

Even before the results of the survey came out there were a few savvy online retailers that we knew who had already spotted that trend.

Now the results of a similar survey in the United States has been released and the findings show much the same thing. Most online shopping - even window shopping - is done during business hours and people are doing it from work.

Is this an important statistic?
It’s a very important statistic to know and understand. At the very least the busiest time of the day for your website is not the time of day to do any upgrades. Save all that to the time of day when people aren’t trying to see your site.

It’s also important to know what time of day people are looking for your product because that can affect your advertising. If you are using Adwords then you want to pay to have it appear in an ideal spot at the time of day when your prospective customers are looking for your product.

One online retailer in the United Kingdom that we know is prepared to pay for his Adwords advertising to appear during office hours in the UK. For the rest of the day he’s prepared to turn his Adwords advertising off completely.

There are other ways you can use that statistic to help improve your sales too - but we’ll let you think about those for yourself.

By the way - even if you only have a bricks and mortar small business it’s still important to know the day of the week and even the time of day that most of your potential customers walk past your business.

Create your own niche small business
Stuart Livesey

There are a lot of people out there who would love to get into small business … if only there was a something they could handle.

Here is the story of one former teacher who started her own very unique small business.

Location, location, location