Self Employed Success

I’m excited to announce two brand new classes for our Winter 2008 calendar:

1. SEO for Everyone - In order to achieve high rankings on search engines, you need to know and use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Join us for this teleclass where we cover some of the most important things you can do to improve your search rankings.

2. Marketing To Women – In order to grow your business, you must understand women’s lifestyles and what are their specific wants, needs and desires. In this teleclass you will learn to re-define your marketing strategy and re-design your marketing copy to speak directly to women.

Check out our Calendar of Events for dates and times!

Website Review for
Ignite Your Life With Kenyon Coaching

http://www.kenyoncoaching.com/

#1. Authority. In the business of coaching, WHO you are as a coach, your philosophy, and credentials are of the utmost importance to prospective clients. While you do have a “The Coaches” page, it doesn’t have the power and focus it could have because there are too many options on the page. People have to choose between learning about Allan, about Barbara, seeing testimonials, and scheduling a complimentary session. A confused mind always says No and navigates away. Consider simplifying the choices; perhaps create a new page called “Success Stories” where you can house all your testimonials.

#2. Authority – Part II. Once you click through to About Allan or About Barbara, the information does not give the prospect a sense of who you are and what you’re about. It is a basic listing of credentials, education, people you’ve worked with, and hobbies. What about who you are and what makes you the right person for the prospective client? How can you make them feel more connected to you?

Consider a personal story or experience from your own life that drives home who you are and why you do what you do. Or expand the Life Changing Events section to really tell them what shaped you and why you are a coach.

#3. Benefits. Whenever a prospect visits a website, they want to know “What’s in it for me?” That is, what are the benefits to me of what you offer and why should I hire you over another coach.

On your home page you only ask two questions: “Would I Like to Have Someone Totally Committed to My Success?” and “Is Kenyon Coaching for Me? While both are great questions, the information is far too general and brief to offer a prospect any really feel for what you do and the benefits your coaching offers. Expand upon the content so it is personally compelling to the visitor and uniquely answers the question “What makes Kenyon Coaching different and what will it do for me?” Answer the question: “What IS attraction based coaching?”

#4. Your Library Page. Your library page renders fine in Internet Explorer. However, in Firefox and Netscape, it looks like this:

It’s critical that your website designer test your entire site using the most popular browser software: Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

A consistent look and feel throughout your website is crucial not only for branding but also for user experience. It appears that the library is attempting to use a blog format for information. Either make the library consistent with the other pages, or call it a “blog” and use the built-in features with proven blog platforms (Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad) to derive full benefit from these activities.

#5. Search Engine Optimization. You indicated that one of your keywords is “attraction based coaching.” However, on your home page, this text is inside a graphic. Search engines cannot read text inside graphics, so you lose the opportunity for SEO if you place your keywords inside of graphics.

Because much of your site is in Flash, search engines may have a hard time reading and indexing the text into their database. To see how search engines “see” your site, use this Search Engine Simulator.

Also, read our article, Getting Your Site Seen by Search Engines:

#6. Copywriting. There is not enough description on the site about what coaching is and how coaching can benefit the client.

Tucked away on the Contact page, you offer a motivational workshop. You need more text around this offer. Describe the workshop, who should attend, and what they will get from participating in the workshop.

Finally, you have a page devoted to your book, but it says “coming soon.” How soon? If you’re not ready to sell it, remove this page from your site until you really have something to offer.

#7. Overall Visual Impression. The visual impression is one of darkness, the dominant color being black, combined with vivid contrasting colors (red & yellow for text and graphics). Such high contrast gives a jarring visual impression.

The website color theme doesn’t psychologically match how you convey yourself in “The Coaches” section. Barbara describes herself as “happy, sensitive, intuitive, supportive, friendly, funny, down-to-earth, warm….” Allen describes himself as “motivational, sense of humor, positive and realistic, high standards, patient….”

Think about what colors and design convey these positive, warm, friendly and motivational qualities.

#8. Text Color. White text on a dark background is harder to read than dark text on a lighter background.

#9. Header Logo Size. The header logo takes up a large portion of the screen, especially at lower screen resolutions, so losing valuable space on the webpage to the graphic. Consider shrinking the size of the graphic to allow more marketing text to be seen “above the fold.”

#10. Navigation Bar. The navigation bar changes vertical and horizontal position between pages, which is visually distracting, as the bar appears to jump from page to page. Clicking on The Library link changes the theme, color and size of the graphics. Look for steady position and consistent navigation across all web pages.

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How about our readers? Do you have any comments about this site? Please post them below and help our business owners create the best site they can. Just click on the “comments” link.

Want your site reviewed for free? Visit our blog entry on our Rate My Site – Website Reviews for Charity to learn more.
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ABOUT OUR REVIEWERS

Karyn and Aly Greenstreet are the owners of Passion For Business. They offer full website reviews as well as business and technology consulting to the self-employed small business owners.

Using her signature down to earth and “plain English” approach to website design, Paula Gregorowicz works with small and solo business owners to make the web work for them so their online presence is a true reflection of who they are.

A colleague recently asked me what she should expect to pay a Virtual Assistant. Another colleague asked me the going rate for a Website Designer. Someone asked me if they could get a Copywriter for less than $10 an hour.

As your business grows it become apparent that you can’t do it alone. Finding skilled consultants and assistants greatly increases your efficiency and your revenue. This is one area where the maxim “You get what you pay for” applies.

Before worrying about the cost of getting help, first decide what you want your help to do for you. I’ve written two articles that may help you with this process:

• How to Choose a Virtual Assistant
• How to Choose a Website Designer

While these are just two of the possible types of consultants you’ll want to hire, the process is the same for thinking through what work you want them to do, what skills you want them to have, and what personality type you work best with.

Then you can begin thinking about what to pay them. It’s natural for a small business owner to want to save money, but you’ll be disappointed if you hire someone at a low hourly rate only to find that they either can’t do the work or their quality and timeliness suffers.

Think about it this way: these sub-contractors are small business owners, too. If they charge $30 per hour, they have to work many more hours in order to make a living. Will they give you and your projects the attention they deserve? If they can’t make a living, will they go out of business?

Here are some of the common fees you can expect to pay for help. As skill level rises, so does the hourly fee. Often sub-contractors will give you a discount if you commit to a certain number of hours per month (a “retainer”). Others will charge you by the project, or in the case of copywriters and transcriptionists, by the page or by the word.

• Virtual Assistant: $35 – $70 per hour
• Website Designer: $50 – $125 per hour
• CPA: $125 – $150 per hour
• Attorney: $125 – $250 per hour
• Technology Consultant: $65 – $100 per hour
• Business/Marketing Consultant: $100 – $200 per hour

Here are some other people you already hire, though you may never have thought about their “hourly rate” in this way:

• Car Mechanic: $80 – $125 per hour
• Massage Therapist: $60 – $120 per hour
• House Cleaner: $30 – $50 per hour
• Doctor: $200 – $300 per hour

Decide up-front whether the person you hire is an “expense” or an “investment.” An investment implies that the work they do for you either directly increases your income or indirectly saves you time.

Having a support team around you can grow your business. Choose wisely and watch your business blossom!

When a cook is writing a cookbook, he tests each recipe in his own kitchen to make sure the instructions are 100% accurate. He may also have friends and colleagues test the recipe, as ovens, ingredients and altitude have a sneaky way of affecting a recipe’s success.

Let’s relate this back to selling services and products. Regardless of your industry or area of expertise, have you “kitchen-tested” your services and products? Do you write and speak about what you know based on your real-life experience, or do you merely base it on something you read in a book? Have you tested your ideas yourself and have you asked others to test them too, before bringing these ideas to the public?

Too often I’ve seen small business owners rush a new service or product to market before really testing to make sure it’s accurate. They use their first customers as guinea pigs without warning those same customers that they’re actually testing the product or service for the first time.

Recently I signed up for a class. I was so excited to learn more about this particular topic! The class was through 100% self-paced multimedia online content. Yet, after I paid and entered the website, more than 50 percent of the content wasn’t available yet. Of the content that did exist, much of it was weak and watered down, too simple for most students. Cries of “Where’s the Content?” were heard from all the students.

Had the teacher told us that we were to be guinea pigs, had the teacher told us that the content was not tested and that new content would be rolled out over time, we could have chosen whether we wanted to be testers. In addition, much of the content was not based on the teacher’s real-life experience but on what was read from books. When asked questions, the teacher didn’t have adequate answers. The teacher came off as “not an expert,” bad news for their reputation. I definitely won’t buy another class from them again. Worse, I won’t recommend them to others.

I know when you have a brand new product or service that you’re very, very excited about it and you want to launch it immediately. Just take that little extra time to kitchen-test your ideas before you birth them into the world. It will save your reputation and your revenue for years to come.

When was the last time you visited your local library? Remember that feeling of being surrounded by thousands of books and knowing you could take any one of them home with you?

I rediscovered my local library when we moved to the countryside two years ago. Sure, I can order business books through Amazon, but the nearest bookstore to us is 25 minutes away. So instead of trudging over to the bookstore when I wanted to see the latest business book, I went to my library. Not only did I discover a wealth of business books there, but I discovered something even more precious: I didn’t really want to own all the latest business books.

So now, I go to the library, check out the business books that interest me, read them for three weeks, then decide if I want them in my personal library. Most business books can be read in a couple of evenings and don’t have enough real “meat” in them to warrant needing to read them again. In the past two years, only 10% of the business books I read do I go ahead and purchase for inclusion in my personal library. I love the idea of being able to preview books at my leisure.

They also have a full stock of books-on-tape and DVD movies, everything you could want for both your business and personal needs.

This is great for the environment, too! Why waste the paper and processing of a book for each person when it’s so much better for the environment to share a book among many?