The Self Employment Blog

I’m going to be harsh here, so hold on to your hat. Have you CHECKED to see if people want your product or service?

The first – and ultimately the biggest – mistake that small business owners make is that they fail to do adequate market research. We get overly-excited about a new idea and assume that our customers will love it, too. We ask a few colleagues or a few customers, and base our strategic business decision on the opinion of six people. Then we are bitterly disappointment when no one buys.

Save yourself the wasted time and money (not to mention the anxiety and frustration), and learn to conduct a simple marketing research project to test the waters. For more help on Marketing Research:

• Read our article, Ground Truth and the Importance of Market Research
• Listen to our free, how-to audio, Yes, You Can Do Your Own Market Research

A strange phenomena has been spreading like a virus over the past few months. In the past four weeks alone, three of my clients have told me that their website designer or virtual assisant has “disappeared.” No return phone calls, unanswered emails. Gone, gone, gone.

Kidnapping? Hardly. When the economy gets tough, many website designers and virtual assistants (small business owners themselves) simply go out of business. Some get full-time jobs in corporations, some just shut their doors. If they use a lot of sub-contractors to fulfill project demands, they find that the sub-contractor pool is drying up, so they become less responsive to your voicemails and emails.

This is a huge problem for small business owners, who rely upon their website designer or virtual assistant to maintain and upgrade their websites for them. There’s not much you can do if your website designer or VA goes out of business. But you can protect yourself and prepare yourself to move to a new website designer. You just need to have access to all your files before your website designer disappears.

When we design websites for our clients, we always give them the following information immediately after the site is complete. Use this checklist to get control of your website for the future:

1. Login information for the hosting company control panel (CP).
2. FTP login information.
3. Blog login information (this may be different than 1 and 2 above).
4. Email address login information for each email account (you may have more than one email address for your domain, such as office@domain.com or mary@domain.com or info@domain.com).
5. Other login information to auxiliary software, like membership software, forum software, content management systems, etc.
6. Logins for Google Analytics and Google Adwords, if you use either of these services.
7. A copy of all your website coding, graphic, audio, video and animation files, including the original source files for all your graphics and Flash files (typically Photoshop for graphics and Flash for animation), on CD or DVD.
8. Written confirmation that YOU own the content of the website and have the right to transfer it, edit it, submit it to Federal Copyright Office, sell it, etc.

For security purposes, if your website designer disappears, change ALL login IDs and passwords on your accounts. In addition, if you have given your website designer your credit card information, you may wish to cancel the card and have a new number re-issued.

I think we may see more of this happening in 2009. I recommend you get the above items from the person who maintains your website today so that you have full control of your website — and your internet marekting — for the future.

We always want to know which marketing techiques are the best, the easiest, and yield the greatest results for our time and money. Any shortcuts to marketing are viewed with awe and respect.

And yet what can you do when you try the “best” marketing techniques and they just aren’t working for you? Do you ditch them? Or is there a simple tweak you can do that will transform them?

I began to research why marketing fails about a year ago. So far I’ve come up with 35 different reasons why marketing fails, separated into nine categories. In this blog post series, I will review each of those 35 reasons and offer you a quick tip on how to tweak your marketing as related to the “failure point.” Hopefully these insights and tips will help you get your marketing back on track.

Just a quick note to let the locals know that I’m speaking in Philadelphia on Saturday, January 10, 2009 at the National Speaker’s Association (NSA) Midatlantic Chapter internet marketing event, Plug Into Profits. The full-day event is being held at the Renaissance Philadelphia Airport Hotel.

I’ll be doing two sessions: one on SEO and the other on paid online advertising (using Google Adwords, etc.).

Here’s the information:

===

Are you a professional speaker, coach, trainer, consultant or business owner who wants to:

• Generate more and better leads from your online efforts, using websites, blogs, podcasts, and social media?

• Use e-mail newsletters (ezines) and promotions to extend your brand and grow your business?
• Motivate more of your prospects to take action - whether it’s buying your products, inquiring about your services or signing up for your ezine?
• Improve your position in search engine rankings so your website attracts highly qualified prospects at the very moment they’re searching for your exact type of product or service?
• Develop paid search strategies that deliver high returns without breaking the bank?

If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, then this intensive 1-day event is for you! The agenda is packed with tools and strategies to help YOU turn your web presence into sales and enhance your bottom line.

Here’s what we have planned for you:

MORNING SESSION: Use the Internet and Web 2.0 to Establish Authority, Boost Your Brand, and Build Your Business

As the list of web technologies and social media tools continues to explode, it can be overwhelming trying to figure out what to do - or even where to begin - to drive prospects and customers to your website. But your next level of success in growing your business might very well depend on it, so you definitely can’t afford to leave things to chance.

This value-packed session, led by nationally recognized internet marketing expert Tom Gray from Denver, Colorado, will take the mystery and a big chunk of the fear out of pursuing the many opportunities that Web 2.0 and social media present to drive prospects to your website and convert those prospects to profit-rich customers. You’ll understand what Web 2.0 and the social media explosion is all about and take away actionable ideas that you can put to work immediately.

LUNCH and AUCTION: Eat, network, and join the fun bidding on valuable products and services specially chosen to help you grow your business! You’ll choose a “table interest group” focused on a specfic internet marketing strategy you want to explore.

AFTERNOON SESSION: Internet Marketing Labs

Roll up your sleeves and plunge in-depth into the topics of your choice! Our roster of afternoon presenters will lead 60-minute breakout sessions where you’ll learn their best tools, tips, and secrets that you can incorporate into your own internet marketing gameplan. You’ll choose two topic areas of most interest to you and walk away with dozens of low-cost and no-cost strategies that will make your cash register go ka-ching!

CLOSING SESSION: Internet Marketing Excellence panel discussion
Put all the pieces together in this closing session, featuring our panel of internet marketing, search engine, blogging, and web audio/video experts. Bring your most pressing questions and leave with a clear plan and the answers you need to “plug into profits” and boost your business fast.

Members: $127 / Early Bird $97
Non-members: $187 / Early Bird $157
(Early Bird rates end Friday, December 12, 2008)

Register right now, mark your calendar, and maximize your savings!

I saw a great video this weekend about a Massachusetts business called The Hungry Ghost Bakery. While they prefer to use organic flour for their bread-making, the cost of growing wheat in Montana and shipping it to South Carolina to be milled, then on to Massachusetts to the bakery sometimes tripled in the past year.

So the owners had a brain-storm! Why not ask their customers, many of whom are farmers and gardeners, to grow wheat for them. Many farmers thought of this as an “experiment,” although wheat had been grown in the region prior to World War II. One farmer was able to produce 2,000 pounds of wheat from one acre of land.

While it’s doubtful that you own a bakery, this story gives us all inspiration about how — with a little creativity — we can reduce our costs and include our customers in the process. When so many people are complaining about feeling isolated, why not ask your neighbors, your customers, to participate in your business? Now that’s teamwork!

You can read more about this story here.

I’ve been reading Po Bronson’s book, What Should I Do With My Life? Has anyone read it?

It’s a series of stories about how people found meaningful work and a meaningful life. Not every story has a happy ending (which I appreciate) and some people didn’t get to follow their dreams until they were in their 60s.

In one story, the woman was always asking “What should I do next with my life?”  When she rephrased the question to “To what can I devote my life?” it changed the way she perceived her world and her choices.

I love that question. When I’ve been looking for “the next big thing” in my business, I’ve been stumped. Nothing came up that excited me, challenged me, or made me any happier than I already am. (I’m a pretty happy person by default. I’m not looking for more happiness in my life.) But when I asked myself, “To what can I devote my life?”, I could immediately drop off those things that were interesting but I wasn’t willing to devote my life to, especially when it comes to work.

The result? It was surprising to me (but maybe not surprising to anyone who knows me) that the work that I really could devote my life, my heart, my soul to was “helping people to be successfully self-employed.” It was a simple statement of what fires me up, what mirrors my values and beliefs, and where I can best serve the world.

I’m such a huge fan of self-employment. It gives people freedom and flexibility that they wouldn’t have in a job, and forces them to bring forth character traits that will hold them in good stead throughout their lives and their relationships, like honesty, self-discipline, and creativity.

To me, self-employment is a fire that forges the personality. It’s an incredible personal growth vehicle. It also helps people to put their personal values into every aspect of their lives. The integrity it offers is extraordinarily important, especially as more and more people find that they can’t express their integrity in their job for an employer.

I still don’t know what’s next for my business, but I feel more strongly than ever that I’m doing the “right work” in working with other self-employed people to grow their businesses. So I’ll stay in the not-knowing about the future and see what comes up, certain, at least, that I’m on the right track.

THANK YOU to everyone who responded to our survey, How Do You Prefer to Learn? I appreciate the feedback about how you prefer to learn new information, skills and ideas.

I think these results will be helpful to you if you are creating any boot camps, classes or teleclasses in the next 12 months. This information is also helpful if you’re creating information products: books, ebooks, audio and video.

Here’s what you had to say about the ways you like to learn.

The first question was about whether people liked to learn on their own, or whether they liked to learn with an instructor:

With a teacher in a classroom/teleclass setting - 42.3%
With a teacher, one-on-one - 26%
At my own pace - 32%

The second question was, specifically, which learning techniques do you most use. (Note: people could vote for more than one way they liked to learn, so the numbers don’t tally to 100%):

I like to learn by reading a book or ebook - 70.4%
I like to learn by listening to audio (CD or MP3) - 60.3%
I like to learn by watching a video/DVD - 31%
I like to learn in a teleclass with an instructor - 54.7%
I like to learn at a live event (1-2 hours) - 30.2%
I like to learn at a live event (full weekend) - 12.3%
I like to learn by one-on-one mentoring - 46.4%

I hope this information is helpful to you!

If you didn’t get a chance to take the survey, or if you’d like to see how I worded the survey so that you can ask your own students similar questions, you can see the survey here.