Self Employed Success

Getting a Top 10 listing on Google take a bit of doing…getting a Top 3 listing is a real accomplishment! So we offer huge congratulations to Kate Nasser, who implemented our SEO suggestions on her website after we did an SEO Review of her site, and now lists as #3 on Google for the keyword phrase Professional Soft Skills, and #9 on Google for Professional Soft Skills Training!

Aly reviewed Kate’s sight and found lots of SEO ideas that could boost Kate’s search engine rankings. After producing a written report for her, we got on the phone with Kate and her web designer and brainstormed an implementation plan, which they undertook immediately. (I just love Kate’s “can do” attitude…she jumped in and made the changes even though the holidays were upon us!) That phone call was on December 21, and by January 10 Kate had emailed us with the good news – she was on Page 1 of the search results for her chosen keywords!

If you ever doubt that you can achieve high search engine rankings, or think it’s going to take six months for your site to crawl to the top of the listings, Kate’s success shows you that you can do it, too. (I’ve had situations where I’ve done a major SEO edit on a site on Friday, and by Monday I was on Page 1 of the Google results for my chosen keyword….zoom, zoom, zoom!)

Check out Kate’s website at  www.katenasser.com (and don’t forget to go to Google and type in her keywords, so you can see her rankings!).

Need more information about our Website and SEO Reviews, and how we can help you get the marketing results you want from your website? 

Visit our site:
http://www.passionforbusiness.com/website-review.htm

SEO For Everyone class begins Tuesday

Since 84% of internet traffic goes through search engines, being ranked highly by search engines sends you a huge number of prospective customers.

For instance, for the phrase “mastermind group” (which I rank #1), Google sends me 23,000 visitors per year. For the phrase “small business coach” (which I also rank #1), Google sends me over 10,000 visitors per year. Just those two search phrases alone send 30,000 NEW visitors to my site each year.

In order to achieve high rankings on search engines, you need to know and use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

In this 5-week teleclass, you will learn:

• What to do to get a higher ranking
• How to choose the absolute BEST keywords for optimum results
• How to figure out what your competition is doing — and how you can beat them at the SEO game
• The secret places on your website where you can optimize for keywords
• How to stay out of trouble with the search engines
• How to optimize your website AND all the places you can optimize online
• Powerful (and free) tools you can use to setup and track the results of your SEO campaigns

For more class details and to register:

http://www.passionforbusinesslearning.com/seo/

This class is designed for small business owners, to learn the basics of SEO, whether you do the work yourself or hire someone to implement your SEO plan for you.

Join us for this five week teleclass series where we cover some of the most important things you can do to improve your search rankings.

This five-week teleclass begins
October 27, 2009

For more class details and to register:

http://www.passionforbusinesslearning.com/seo/

We’re so pleased to announce that we’ve released a re-designed website that we did for Helga Matzko, owner of The Gestalt Institute of Rhode Island.

Helga asked us for a major site makeover: combine THREE sites into one and give it a branding facelift. Much website planning work went into this site redesign, including copywriting and editing, new colors, new logo, new graphics and a major navigation structure change.

The Gestalt Institue of Rhode Island offers training classes to therapy and coaching professionals, as well as one-on-one coaching and therapy to individuals. Helga Matzko is well-known in the Gestalt Therapy field.

Congratulations, Helga, on your new site!

http://www.gestaltri.com

I’m offering two great business-building classes for September!

Now that summer is over, it’s time to kick-start your business. After all, there are still four more months in 2009…better make good use of them!

What do you want to create for your business?

• Increase Your Income With a Powerful Marketing Plan – if your marketing isn’t bringing the results you want, it’s time to revisit your marketing strategy — begins September 15
• Creating Small Business Websites That Grab Attention - do you need a new website or a face-lift on your existing one, and need a strategic plan for a successful website project? — begins September 17

“Education is not filling a pail, but lighting a fire.” 

–William Butler Yeats

Recently I heard a story that bears repeating:

Several years ago, a well-established company had hired a website designer to create their website for them. After working with this graphic artist for several years, they decided to move to a new graphic artist (my colleague). At the same time, they decided to move to a new hosting company, so they simply copied their website files from the old hosting company and moved them to the new hosting company. After all, they owned the website, didn’t they?

The surprising answer is No. Since the previous graphic artist  and the client didn’t have a “work for hire” written agreement, many courts would say that the previous vendor still owned the work. And “work for hire” agreements might not cover the copyright complications of both the graphics work done on behalf of the client, and the software coding work done.

It would seem to me that a fair resolution to this type of case would be to use the assumption that the website designer was doing work for you, and therefore you own the work. In the legal world, this may not be the case, as websites include both graphic work and software coding work. These two types of work are protected differently under copyright law.

You can read more about this type of situation here:

“Who Owns Your Web Site?”

and

“Who Owns Your Web Site Anyway? The Surprising Truth…”

If you’ve hired a website designer to design your site, check your written contract. Make sure it clearly states that YOU own the website upon full payment to the designer. If you never had a written agreement with your designer (or if your current agreement does not have this clause in it), it’s time to re-negotiate with your designer. Get it in writing. This is no time for verbal agreements.

Our Passion For Business website design contracts clearly state that you own the copyrights to the work we do for you. There’s just one item where this may not apply: if you purchase stock photography or graphics for your site, then the original artist owns the copyright. Most stock photo websites will grant you a license to use the photo/artwork, but will not give you the full copyright to the artwork. (This is also the case if you use a pre-designed theme for a blog, or plugins for your site/blog. The original designer of those retains the copyright.)

If you feel awkward or embarrassed to speak with your website designer and ask for this in writing, then you are putting your business success in jeopardy. Don’t delay. Take care of this immediately.

What happened to my colleague in the above situation? She had to completely re-design her client’s website to comply with copyright law. It was good news for her: a nice revenue stream and a new, ongoing graphic design relationship with the client. It was bad news for the client: they had to pay for a brand new website design or risk being sued by the previous graphic designer. In the end, the client got a BETTER website than they had before, but at the cost of a lot of time, money and frustration.

Read the companion blog post: Has Your Website Designer Disappeared? for tips on what information you need to get from your website designer to protect your website.

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 assistant 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 marketing — for the future.

Creating Small Business Websites That Grab Attention

begins July 17

Is your website giving you the results you want?

Your website can be a wonderful marketing and educational tool. But what makes a small business owner’s website great?

Whether you design your own site — or hire someone to do it for you — this information-packed class is for all small business owners!

In this six-week teleclass, you will learn:

• What makes a good web site design that’s both appealing and usable, while accomplishing your marketing goals at the same time.
• What visitors really want to find when they visit your website
• How to choose effective page layouts and colors for your site.
• The keys to powerful website text that sells your products and services.
• How to critique websites (including your own!) in order to apply this knowledge to your own website.
• How to effectively market your website to get more traffic to it.
• Which website statistics are important to track for the success of your business.
• What to look for in a website designer.

This six-week class begins July 17.

http://www.passionforbusinesslearning.com/websiteplan

What Students Say…

“This is the best class I have ever taken for helping you get started with your website! It really taught me the basics and essentials and was easy to understand and implement…A MUST if you have a website or are thinking about one. Karyn is a wonderful teacher….very personable, energetic, helpful and extremely knowledgeable…I can’t recommend this class enough!”

–Roxanne Hunt
Intuitive Life Coach

“I found Karyn’s website design course extremely helpful. I was in the process of re-designing my course and had actually settled on a homepage design. After the first session, I told my designer to hold everything until I finished the course, as we had already made some poor design choices! Since the course, I have re-thought my objectives and design choices and am much more confident that my website will truly work for me in the future.”

–Susan Smith
Raising Canine, LLP

Schedule

This six-week teleclass begins July 17, 2008

• July 17
• July 24
• July 31
• Aug 7
• Aug 14
• Aug 21

All teleclasses are 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM eastern

Classes will be recorded, so if you miss a session, you will be able to download the audio recording of the live class and listen to it at your leisure.

Registration

Registration Fee: $179

Instructor: Karyn Greenstreet

Registration Information and Details:

http://www.passionforbusinesslearning.com/websiteplan

Imagine that you enter an unfamiliar supermarket or hardware store. Typically you’re not going in these types of stores to browse around for fun: you know what you want before you walk in the door. How do you tackle the task of finding the specific item you want?

For most people, they’ll do one of two things: they’ll grab the first employee they see and ask, “Where do I find the hot dog rolls?” or they’ll walk past the end of each aisle, glancing at the aisle signs that tell them the aisle contents looking for a fairly good match, then walk down that aisle to see if their item is in that aisle.

Visitors to your website have the same “hunting” mentality. They come to your website looking for a specific answer to a question they have in their head. They scan your home page, looking for a clue about what’s in each section of your website, and grab the first “closest” link that seems to match their question. Or, they’ll go right to your Site Map or Search Box to get some help. Only when they reach the page that really answer their question will they begin to read in any great depth.

If you keep in mind that people are in hunting mode (not reading mode) when they arrive at your website, you’ll save yourself and your visitors a lot of hassle. Here are some tips:

1. List all the questions that a typical visitor might have when they arrive at your site. What are they looking for when they come to your site? Create your home page to lead them to these answers.

2. Create navigation and in-paragraph hyper links that include the text that visitors are looking for. Use text labels that are intuitive and the type of phrasing a typical visitor might use.

3. Keep paragraph text to a minimum until they reach a page that will convert them from “hunter” mode to “information gatherer” mode.

4. Make it easy for them to get back to the home page. If their initial “hunt” doesn’t unearth the answers they seek, they may be willing to try again, but only if you make it easy for them.

Planning your website is one of the most important things you can do. If your site is difficult to use or doesn’t reflect the real way that visitors use websites, your revenues will suffer. If you’re not getting the results you need from your website, maybe now is the time to consider a website re-design.

All small business owners need to learn good copywriting skills.

If you haven’t visited CopyBlogger yet, I strongly encourage you to do so…today!

CopyBlogger offers tips and tutorials on good copywriting. Their recent blog posting, Just Say No to These Three Enemies of Clear and Direct Writing, is a perfect example of what you’ll learn on this great blog. Sure, you may already know these writing tips, but the examples clarify good and bad writing habits.

(After reading CopyBlogger’s post, I feel like it’s time to re-write my entire site!)

Website usability is all the rage these days. Why? Because if people can’t use your website, if it’s too cumbersome and confusing, they will leave (and go visit your competitor’s website!).

The United States government has gotten into the act — in a good way. Their usability website offers free advice on how to make a website usable.

The section entitled, “Research Based Guidelines” is arguably the best part of the site.

Check is out!