Small Office, Home Office Information

by Stuart Livesey

The big end of town can overwhelm the marketplace with advertising. They have more money to spend and they can call on the resources of huge advertising firms but who says that they spend their money wisely and who says that the big firms have a clue about what can resonate with consumers in the local area?

Here is a quote from John Carlton, a well-known American copywriter, that should give you some encouragement not to let the big guys win simply because they are big.

For business owners, the lack of good writing in your market is an opening you should leap into with guns blazing. Whether it’s honing your sales message, or building up your content and nurturing your list… this is the most important writing you will ever do.

And doing it really, really well allows you to stand out no matter how much better funded, or better situated your competition is. A single good copywriter can go up against Attila The Hun, Inc, and win.

You can read more of what he said here and you can find the rest of his blog here

by Toni Livesey

A survey released this month by eMarketer suggests that the percentage of male Internet users is declining slightly while the number of female Internet users is increasing slightly.

By 2011 the survey suggests that 51.9% of Internet users will be female. In 2006 the percentage of female Internet users stood at 51.6%

Managing your what????

by Stuart Livesey

Whether you’ve realised it or not you and your business now reside in what’s fast becoming a global village. More and more people in the village are talking to one another on the Net. They’re talking in chat rooms, message boards, blogs like this one and anywhere else they can leave a comment … and they could be talking about your small business.

While people aren’t so quick to talk about a good experience they’re always very quick to talk about any bad experience they may have had. You may not even realise that they had a bad experience with your small business because they didn’t mention it to you at the time but that won’t stop them telling others about it.

So what do you do when someone says something bad about the experience they have had with your business? How do you even know that they’re telling people about it?

Google Alerts
Let’s answer the last question first. Head over to Google and find Google Alerts. If you don’t already have an account with Google you will have to sign up for one. Once you have an account then sign up for a Google Alert for your business name.

If your business is known under several different names sign up for an alert for each name and while you’re at it sign up for a Google Alert for your name too.

Google Alerts will then send you an email every time Google finds a mention of whatever the terms were that you chose for your Alerts. When you get those you will begin to see what people are saying about you.

Managing your reputation
If you find that people are talking about any bad experiences they have had with your business it’s time to slip into damage control mode. One of our clients did that today when someone posted on a local blog we happen to run, about a bad experience they had with his business.

Sadly his idea of damage control was to pour scorn on the poster and resort to calling him names. Now, in this case, there could have been some suggestion that the poster was a competitor but calling them names and was the worst thing our client could have done.

Imagine how a response like that would look to people who had never dealt with this guy’s business. All they see is a belligerent small business person who wants to kill, maim and destroy instead of accepting a complaint at face value and working to resolve it.

Instead of hoisting the battle flags and preparing to board the enemy a far better response would have been to approach the situation in a conciliatory and understanding manner. You don’t have to be submissive and roll over to let them scratch your tummy but you do have to protect your reputation and tearing your opponents to pieces won’t win you friends and it will turn further business away.

So put your brain in gear before you put your fingers in motion and manage your reputation instead of destroying it.

by Stuart Livesey

Ok, so we’ve been away from this blog but now we’re back. The week before last we spent preparing for a visit from one of our daughters. That’s not as terrible as it may sound … we actually spent that week getting a lot of work done so that we could spend time with her and we certainly achieved that goal.

For a variety of reasons we haven’t seen Adrienne in about three years and so we knew that there was going to be a lot of catching up to do and we were so right. Adrienne was with us for a week and about the only time we weren’t talking during that whole week was when we were asleep.

Sometimes you just have to step away from your small business to focus on your family and last week was one of those times for us. We all had a blast and now that Adrienne has gone and we’re back into the work thing we’ve found that we’re refreshed and already achieving much more than we were before she came.

I even rebuilt our small business copywriting and web design site yesterday. We hadn’t touched it in years and it was a constant source of embarrassment … but now it’s been spruced up and reflects our web design philosophy.

We also finished a site for the best cafe in Hervey Bay in the week before Adrienne arrived.

And the really scary part about Adrienne’s visit was that when we talked business we understood each other perfectly. She’s a Unix Systems Engineer and we understood what she was talking about. She also has a knack for marketing so she understood us too

by Toni Livesey

You expect producing work for friends in small business to be different.

You expect the project to run more smoothly

You expect to put in 110% - just as you would for any client - and the friend/client to treat you and the work in a professional manner

You expect to be paid on completion

You could be expecting way too much.

It’s now been a week since the newspaper ad that I referred to here was published.

The results, that I talked about in the case study that you will find here, continue.

More new customers are coming in every day to have their computers repaired and something else has happened that I really didn’t expect after reflecting on the ad. Rick’s picked up an order from a new customer for a new high-end machine who saw the ad and liked the plain, simple language.

by Stuart and Toni Livesey

Perhaps this could have been titled this “How we turned a $5.00 mouse into more work than the client could handle” … because we did.

We could also say that the moral of this story is ‘don’t ask because you may just get what you ask for’ but we’ll try and be serious and say that A Case Study in Newspaper Advertising for Small Business is an interesting look at how we made some local newspaper advertising work for one small business.

We think there are some lessons there for you too.

by Stuart Livesey

Last week I was invited to join in a new venture that is aimed at small business - and medium sized business too - and is really exciting. What was even more exciting for me personally was the fact that in the world of search engine marketing and and search engine optimisation I’m a nobody but I was being asked to join with some very well-known names.

Today we had a conference call and, at first, I was in awe as I listened to a few of these people - people I had looked up to. They were talking with the guy who had the vision about where the idea should go and what they would bring to the table to turn the vision and idea into a success.

Then I began to lose that awe and instead I began to wonder just how much contact that these people really had with the average small business. I even got to the point where I wondered if some of them lived in the real world.

How much did they really understand what the average small business needed and what they had to do to deliver their message to those small business people that were supposed to be our target market?

I listened to them talk and their talk was the talk of the slick search engine marketer used to talking in jargon that the average small business person just wouldn’t understand and wouldn’t have the time to try and learn.

Small business people speak the language of survival and paying the bills on time and I don’t think these guys understand that language or even realise that they need to learn it.

Of course, it’s not just these guys that I listened to this morning that don’t understand the language of small business. There are many marketers out there who target small business who don’t understand that language and while they don’t understand the language and talk in that language they’re not going to be able to deliver the best results for the small business people they claim they can help.

Yes Dean I still want in - because your vision is good - you just need to get your ‘experts’ to come down to the level of your target audience.