One of my clients owns a botique bookkeeping, accounting, and payroll processing business in Los Angeles. She is very successful, but needed help with her online effort. As part of that effort I authored a series of blog posts relating to the importance of using income statements (aka, profit and loss) and balance sheets to increase profits in any small business. Here are the headlines. Click through to read the details. Increase Your Profits Tip #1 - Margins Matter
No matter what kind of company you have or where you are in the US, you may want to give ATPP a call to discuss whether they would be a good fit to do your payroll processing, bookkeeping, and are accounting for you. You can reach them at
As Millions of your potential customers purchase iPhones, iPads, and Android-based devices in 2011, you will be hind the curve if you have not created a mobile version of your small business website in 2012.
Go ahead. Check yourself out. Use your Iphone or Android phone and see what your website looks like on the phone. Probably not that great or usable, and the navigation is probably impossible to use. Google is now providing device information in the analytics. We checked on one of our restaurant clients and 25% of all traffic to their website was coming from mobile devices. We checked a bike shop and 15% was mobile. Mostly iPad and iPhone, but plenty of Android, too.
So, you and I need to make our websites look pretty and useful on this fast growing way to communicate and advertise. And there are things about the reasons for using a phone that need to be updated as well. For instance, having an autodial feature on page one.
The cost will vary depending on who does the work and how complex the work turns out to be, but we should be able to deliver a conversion for under $1000 in most cases.
It is a normal human condition to wait until the last minute to do things. I certainly fall into the normal range in that regard. But, at least for 2011 I am turning over a new leaf in that department. Here is a list of goals for 2012 that I will apply to my business, and that very likely apply to every one of your businesses. Over the next 30 days, these will be detailed out at on this blog. Be sure to subscribe or set up a feed so you don't forget to see the rest of the story.
While our marketing company, Randy Kirk and Associates does not generally take on project based work we are going to make an exception for two types of products over the next 90 days. It is so critical for most of you that you have Mobile Websites and Mobile Apps, that we are going to take those projects. The balance of the items on the list are all things that we do, but are only offered as part of an ongoing retainer.
As always we are offering free DIY advice for all these elements on this blog. Please help yourself.
For almost all of us, excellent execution on even a portion of this list would result in a 20% increase in sales or more.
1. Mobile website appx $700 2. Mobile Ap appx $750 plus $70 a month 3. Add Google Plus Page and Google+ to all online resources 4. 50 online videos 5. Double email list - Send out 12 - 48 emails 6. 10 blog post per month. Videos will create most of those 7. Mobile blog 8. Reputation management 9. Maintain or improve rank of primary website and Google Places 10. Use push notification on text list and Apps 11. Improve Customer Service 12. Add a profit center 13. Improve margins 14. Improve closing ratio 15. Continue to increase activity on all Social Media 16. Continuous effort on back links to websites and videos
Yelp.com and CitySearch both maintain that having a YouTube video on their listing for your company doubles the likelihood that the visitor to your listing will take some kind of action. What their claim leaves out is that a poorly created video will not produce those kinds of results and might have a negative effect. On the other hand, there are dozens of other good reasons to create one of more YouTube videos for your local small business other than its effect on Yelp.com.
2. Not every business, but most, will generate more customer calls and decisions to shop if the client has a reason to trust you. The written word is good at this, because folks tend to trust what has been made permanent on paper or screen. But you can really increase trust by allowing your customers to hear and see your personal passion about your products and services through a video.
3. The internet is hungry for information. If your YouTube video has information that your client base is seeking, they will find the video to get that information.
4. YouTube has a search function. If you do a good job of Titling your video, creating a good description, and providing relevant keywords in the title, description, and tags, your potential customers will find you through the search mechanism on YouTube. They may also find you because you are related to other searches they do and videos they watch.
5. YouTube videos show up on Google Searches and other similar search engines. It is not uncommon for a thoughtfully keyworded YouTube Video to show up higher than your $5000 website.
7. You can add your YouTube video to your website as a URL link, like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-0VIHJCRk, or as an embed (see below). By putting the video on your website, you generate far more chances of it being seen. This is where you can really build trust and increase reasons for your customer to shop with you.
8. You can add your YouTube video to your blog, your facebook, you can Tweet about it, and you can socially bookmark the original video, the article on your blog, and the facebook entry. All of these increase the chances of the video being seen, and also benefit your activities on these other web tools.
9. Daily Motion and other video depositories similar to YouTube may pick up your video and add it to their listings. But if you don't want to wait and see if they do so, you can upload the same video to each one, or you can use an aggregator to put the video up on numerous of these sites all at once.
10. A single YouTube video that we did for a client for less than $300 resulted in the sale of a $6000 bicycle. This is just one of many such examples. The best part is that the YouTube video is listed on page one of a Google search for Specialized Transition and is going to still be selling bicycles for this client a year from now.
You can create your own YouTube video. But I caution you that it needs to be thoughtfully created, edited, superscripted, titled, keyworded, described, and uploaded. Please take a look of one we did recently for an apartment management company on this page. We can do a video like this for you for $300. If you are not located within driving distance of our headquarters, you may need to send us some raw footage or we can work from pictures and create a slide show with voice over.
Give us a call. We can dramatically impact your business with a single YouTube Video
Getting in front of the press has never been easier or harder. The traditional press release is almost dead, but the new wave methods are not sufficient in themselves to get major regional or national coverage. If you are interested in getting press coverage for your event, new product release, special, change in personnel, or any of the many, many reasons for sending out a press release, take a minute to review the following. It could save you thousands of dollars.
If you are releasing a new movie or automobile, have the latest invention that will solve the energy crises or cure cancer, or you are attempting to establish a national brand most of the old rules apply, but there are some new ones. You will not turn to Page1Listings.com for this type of release. You need an experienced professional PR firm that has connections...lots and lots of connections. You see, because of the new rules for lesser PR events that follow below, the press has more than enough news coming their way to fill their ever smaller newspapers and magazines. So, these editors have put up more walls between themselves and small PR producers than ever in the past. This means that unless you have one heck of a story, or you are connected, you are not going to get the time of day from most mainstream media: print, TV, radio, or even internet.
On the other hand, let's say you have a great new idea, or you're going to have an event that has a potential to be of interest to 1000, 100,000, or a few million folks. Getting your information out to narrow interest groups is simple and no longer requires massive PR expenditures. You can do some of it yourself, although a professional can increase the chances of wide exposure very substantially. If you are a writer, and you know something about the structure of a Press Release, you can easily put it up on PRlog.org absolutely free of anything other than your time. I have tried as hard as I can to find other truly free web based press release sites, but all the others are either too painful or have too many tricky ways to get you to pay something. (Do you want a picture? Is it more than 800 words? Do you want it to be targeted to more than one interest group?) PRlog.org is 100% free and no tricks. Not only that, due to their size and presence, their releases commonly place very well on Google Search.
Now the tricky part. Like any other web based effort, your press release needs to have key words in title, description, and content. But you also want the release to be compelling and interesting to the press and to your target group. And, what are the key words that you should use? Now that the Press Release has been put on PRLog.org, what else should you be doing to get the word out? How can you maximize the results of this PR campaign.
Your PR release placed on PRLog.org or other "free" or paid internet services will be seen by 1000's of people, many of whom will be bloggers, internet news sources, and traditional media. That is, if the release is properly created and promoted. There are still industry and local news organizations that you can contact to reinforce your interest in having the news published in their online or traditional media products. Most of this you can do yourself. And I'm pleased to provide you with this short primer for DIY. If you'd like some help, you can check out examples of some of the press releases we have done recently by going to http://pressroom.prlog.org/Local_Biz_Marketing/
Here is a short video that offers some additional ideas
If you would like us to write your press release, please know that it will be written from the standpoint of a marketing professional, not a reporter. We will design the press release to maximize the potential for being read, but also being acted on. This means that we will be very conscious of your organizations goals and expectations, and make every effort to see that the presser fits in with other elements of your campaign. We will do independent research regarding your article to flesh it out and make it readable and likely to be seen on Google and Google news. We will research key words and report back to you for your input on which keywords to emphasize. This entire effort commonly costs less than $500.
Give us a call and let us help you get the word out!
If you are interested in creating a major promotion and you are long on time, but short on money, here is an example of an almost free cross promotion we did for a local retailer as part of a grand opening. This case study example could be used any time in conjunction with an event, no matter how small.
The central element in the promotion was a raffle. We wanted to involve the local high school in that the retailer wanted to attract that age group to his new location. After a few phone calls we were able to find one of the performance groups at the school that was trying to raise money for an out-of-state competition. It could have been the band, the choir, the art department, but in this case it turned out to be the audio-visual department.
We set a goal to raise $10,000 and decided to sell the raffle tickets for $5 each in sets of 20. The students would do all the selling. We recommended that the students pay $100 for the pack in advance and then sell the pack to recover their investment, then return the signed stubs for the drawing.
The students then asked their own parents and friends parents if there were products that could be donated from local businesses they knew. Of course, the prizes would be listed on the raffle tickets as publicity for those donating major prizes.
We also canvassed other retailers in the area to gather even more prizes. We ended up with a very nice list including products, tickets to sporting events, free lessons at local music shops and karate studios, and dinners at restaurants in the area.
The students had no difficulty selling the tickets and raising the cash. In fact, they could have raise substantially more. Each day for several weeks the students announced the entire event over the PA system during homeroom, including the name of the client.
Our client paid for the tickets. The cost was under $300 for the 2000 tickets. On each ticket, the largest words were the name and address of the client.
For less than $300, the client became a great friend to the school, made dozens of contacts, had multiple announcements to the 2000 students, teachers, and administrators at the school, and received multiple impressions from the 10,000 tickets that were handed to consumers in their neighborhood.
And since this was a major event, many individuals attended the event to see if they won, which created more crowd and excitement for the grand opening.
If you wanted to do this promotion at -0- cost, merely get a co-sponsor to pay for the tickets.
