Small Business Success Index

Index Score^*		Grade
SBSI INDEX	75	C
Capital Access	67	D+
Marketing & Innovation	70	C-
Workforce	79	C+
Customer Service	91	A-
Computer Technology	74	C
Compliance	90	A-
*Index score is calculated on a 1-100 scale.

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Social Media and Competitive Intelligence: What You Need to Know

August 19th, 2010 :: Thursday Bram

When you’re posting information to your Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook accounts, anyone can see it. That includes your customers, of course, but it also includes your competition. Social media can provide incredible levels of competitive intelligence — information on what clients you’re working to land, where you’re traveling and even new products you’re going to roll out.

In most cases, it isn’t obvious information. Rather, it’s a case of someone looking at what you’re doing and making a few assumptions. But if you’re traveling to a city where a big client resides, you may be broadcasting what you plan to do in that city without ever saying a word.

Don’t Give Up On Social Media

Using the tools available to gather competitive intelligence isn’t something new — most business owners still scour the news looking for information about the competition. It’s just a case of the tools changing. The big problem is that analysis has improved. We know more about social interaction: we can make an educated guess about why someone changed jobs (whether they were fired or they quit) just by looking at how their LinkedIn profile changes.

You can’t let that sort of improved analysis throw you, though. The benefits of using social media to reach out to potential customers are incredible and worth the chance that you’re broadcasting information your competition can use. But you can minimize the information that your competition can act on by carefully considering what you’re sharing. There’s no particular item that you should avoid posting, unfortunately. It’s a matter of thinking about the whole picture you’re portraying with what you’re posting.

Turning the Tables on the Competition

Especially if your competition is just getting into the social media game, you may have some opportunities to learn about what they’re up yourself. Make a point of following their activities across social networking sites as well as their blogs: that sort of information can help you plan how to respond to their new products or even get a head’s up if they’re in town to try to poach one of your clients. Since this information is out in the open — they’ve posted it themselves — it’s worthwhile to make use of it and learn from it where you can. Don’t let it turn into more of a focus than accomplishing what you need to on those same social networking sites, however: your marketing should come first

It can be tempting to post information that would lead a competitor astray on your social networking profiles. That may be taking things too far, however. Remember that you must balance the needs of those followers who actually want to buy something from you and your concerns about competitors. You want to post the best information you can for your followers and even something that is a little off can turn into a big problem as far as your social media efforts go.

Image by Flickr user Tony the Misfit

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Tags: competitive intelligence, social media
Posted in social media | View Comments

5 Ways Affiliate Marketing Can Help You Make Sales

August 18th, 2010 :: Thursday Bram

Affiliate marketing is a simple concept: you offer a percentage of the sales price to anyone who can help you close a sale. There are more than a few nuances to the situation, of course: especially with the advent of online tools, you can control which affiliates you’re willing to work with, what constitutes a sale and a variety of other factors. The important point is that for small businesses, affiliate marketing can be a relatively inexpensive way to increase your sales.

Affiliate marketing lets you market inexpensively. The cost of marketing a product or service can cut into your margin of profit. But, as long as you know how much margin you can afford to offer up to affiliates, you can often get them to market your products less expensively than you can arrange for yourself. Depending on the payoff, some affiliates will even buy ads and take other steps to promote your product or service.
Affiliate marketing helps build brand recognition. Even if your affiliates make relatively few sales, your product will be on their websites. They may write reviews, put up ads and take a variety of different steps to make sure that their readers are aware of your product (with the intention of selling, of course). But that sort of exposure can help create sales down the line, especially if a prospective customer sees your product all over a variety of websites.
Affiliate marketing offers access to tastemakers. While it’s nice when someone refers a friend to your product, the fact of the matter is that people are more likely to do so when they have a financial interest. Tastemakers, such as bloggers, can be especially interested in affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing can get you access to existing audiences. Many affiliates work hard to build up their own audiences, on blogs and through other media. The size of that audience can vary, but it’s not out of the question that you can get access to an audience in the tens or even hundreds of thousands with some careful planning. That sort of exposure, combined with the endorsement of the person who has brought a particular community together can be very worthwhile.
Affiliate marketing can give you the initial connection to a new customer. If you offer products or services that allow you to build on one small sale to earn significantly more over the lifetime of that customer, affiliate marketing can be a cheap way to get access to new customers. Even if you have to offer up most of your profit margin on that initial sale to the affiliate that referred your new customer, it can still wind up being less expensive than advertising.

Affiliate marketing can take some work — you need to give your affiliates tools that will help them to be successful, whether that means logos or review copies. But the pay off can be phenomenal, especially if you can get the support of affiliates with wide audiences already in place.

Image by Flickr user Steve Snodgrass

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Tags: affiliate marketing, sales
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The Drawbacks of Early Adoption

August 17th, 2010 :: Thursday Bram

Every business owner wants to be out in front of the pack, whether that means adopting a new process or picking up new gadgets. But early adoption can cause problems, especially in a smaller business that may not have the time or ability to test out new processes before making them standard.

Early adoption can let you get the drop on your competition, but there are potential problems that go along with it. Some of the most obvious examples come from tech gadgets — the people who picked up the iPhone 4 can attest to the downside of being among the first buyers just based on their antenna issues. But similar problems occur in business, as well. Even something as simple as a new machine that doesn’t work exactly as it should can slow down your business as you look for ways to fix new problems.

Conservative, But Not Too Conservative

Entrepreneurs are used to risk — after all, starting a new business from scratch can be more than a little risky. But when it comes to changing the way you do business, a little conservatism can come in handy. A certain level of reluctance when it comes to adopting new techniques or technology can be useful. Being first in line may allow you to get the drop on your competition, but it also means that your competition has a chance to see where things go wrong before adopting those new steps themselves. If you let someone else go first, you’ve got a chance to see where someone else goes wrong.

Once you’ve got a good idea of how to avoid those problems, though, it can be well worth the effort to be second. There are plenty of situations where the second company to get into the game is the winner — just think about how Sony released Betamax, only to be trumped by JVC’s VHS tapes. Sony was first to market, but JVC was able to take advantage of almost two years of observing Sony’s sales efforts. An observation period allows you to see the problems and even more opportunities to move forward, without have to break that ground yourself.

It’s Okay to Be a Pioneer Sometimes

Despite the drawbacks of being an early adopter, the benefits can sometimes be enough to make it worthwhile. If, for instance, you really are pioneering a new technique, you may have an opportunity to get years ahead of your competition if you do things right. There will always be risks in making a change, but if you’re a business owner, you can’t be afraid of risks. All you can do is look for ways to improve your business and reduce the risks as much as possible. That can mean waiting for someone else to jump in the pool first, or it can mean changing the situation so being the pioneer won’t cause you problems. There’s no metric for being sure that a situation is ideal, of course, but if you are sure you can turn early adoption into a benefit, it may be worthwhile.

Image by Flickr user MattHurst

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Tags: early adoption, Technology
Posted in Innovation | View Comments

Public Relations for Small Businesses: Interview with Robb Deigh

August 16th, 2010 :: Monika Jansen

Robb Deigh

Robb Deigh is President of RDC Communication, a strategic communication, marketing, and public relations firm located outside of Washington, DC. He worked in journalism and PR at PBS, AOL, Blackboard, Inc., and a large PR agency before venturing out on his own 12 years ago. He’s the author of How Come No One Knows About Us?, as well as numerous articles for trade journals and other publications. In the following interview with Robb, he offers suggestions on how to get a PR program in place, what mistakes to avoid, and how to track the ROI of your PR efforts.

What are the biggest challenges small businesses face when it comes to planning and executing public relations?

Besides the obvious—budget—there are two. First, their language and messages might be all over the place. I take clients through a messaging exercise that helps create a strong, solid set of messages that can then be used on their website and in presentations, print materials, and other communications. If everyone on the team uses the messages, it is a very powerful tool.

The second challenge is knowing how to get attention using traditional and social media. Make a list of stories you can pitch to the media and match those stories to the right publications and appropriate reporters. Knowing how to pitch a story is THE most important PR skill to have. In terms of social media, small businesses need to get their messages and website in order before deciding to start a blog, use Facebook, or even publish an e-newsletter. Make sure that before you say something to the world, you have something to say. If you use Twitter, you know that there is a lot of jibberish out there right alongside useful information.

What are some easy ways for small businesses to get going with PR?

Start out by creating your organizational messages. Get your team together and brainstorm a list of all of your company’s attributes. Use those attributes to build 5-6 great messages that tell prospects, “Here is what we can do for you.” Update your website with those messages, since all of your communication is designed to steer prospects there first. Then, try some press. If budget is tight, build your own small press list. What do you and your audiences read? The reporters at those publications are your targets. Get their email addresses and send them announcements when you have real news. Put yourself in their place and call them with great story ideas about your industry.

What should small businesses avoid doing?

Three things immediately spring to mind:

Don’t assign a non-communications person in your organization the task of doing PR. It will end up taking a back seat to his/her real job. Hire someone with applicable experience and, if needed, get some outside help.
When pitching stories, do not call reporters with non-news.
Don’t blog, use Facebook or Twitter, or publish an e-newsletter unless you have something useful and non-self-promotional to say. Educate your audience and give them the advantage of your expertise.

How can you track the ROI of your public relations efforts? Seeing a mention in the press is great, but figuring out if it’s generating leads is probably not so easy.

Absolutely! A stack of clips with your company’s name in it is definitely not a measure of success. But clips that include at least one of your 5-6 main messages are of immense value. That’s part of your long-term public relations ROI. Make sure that when you do an interview, publish an article, or make a presentation, you use your messages. In time, you will hear them echo back to you in the news media and elsewhere. That’s how you know it is working. Of course, you’ll also know it’s working when your sales increase, because good PR leads to high visibility which leads to higher sales.

Care to share a couple of success stories?

I’ve helped dozens of companies go from being virtually invisible to being strong brands, but I think my biggest PR/media successes over the years have occurred when I have found good story ideas within client organizations and packaged those stories with 2-3 good sources for the right reporters at the right time.

When you have a great story pitch, make an initial phone call and then send details by email. If you are doing it correctly, you really are doing part of the reporter’s job—finding good stories and sources. Make it easy for them to say “yes.” It works the same whether you are pitching your community paper or CNN (although CNN will be harder to reach on the phone!).

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Tags: blogs, e-newsletters, Marketing, marketing ROI, public relations, ROI, social media
Posted in Marketing | View Comments

Leveraging Your Blog for your Inbound Marketing Efforts

August 12th, 2010 :: Steven Fisher

In these days of social media marketing there are all sorts of tools that help you market but the most fundamental is your blog. It is funny that only six years ago all that everyone talked about was blogging. Now it has seemed to fade into the background and that is actually a good thing. A blog has become a fundamental component in an organizations communication strategy that if you do not have it included or have one running you will be perceived as behind the times.

But let’s face it, writing for writing sake can be fun in some cases but in this case you are looking for customers. The term inbound marketing is the opposite of outbound marketing (i.e. cold calls, email marketing) and it is focused on getting the customer to come to you on their own. One of the best way to do this is through blogs.

A few great ways to use you blog for inbound marketing are:

Forms for downloading content – You want to drive leads to your site and the best way to do that is give something away. These can be white papers and ebooks or other types of content that people want. One thing to keep in mind is that your content doesn’t have to be completely new. It can be repackaged blog posts in a new context along with some updated content.

Surveys and polls – This is a great and quick way to engage the reader. People that read your blog have an opinion and if you are looking to learn from them, do a survey or a poll. It can also be a great way to test new features or content types that people might want in the future. Don’t forget to make a blog post about the survey, it will bring people to the site to engage.

Most of all….provide fresh content – This continues to establish you as an authority and search engines love it. They see that as a site that is new and with linking and trackbacks it builds your search engine juice.

So don’t just look at a blog as a necessary evil you have to “deal with” and “write for” but a real communications channel that can engage and make new sales in ways you never thought possible.

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Tags: blogs, Inbound Marketing, social media
Posted in Marketing, sales process, social media | View Comments

GrowSmartBiz 2010 Conference is on Nov 5 so Save the Date!

August 11th, 2010 :: Steven Fisher

Coming this fall is the second annual GrowSmartBiz Conference being held on November 5, 2010 at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, DC. Last year Network Solutions launched this conference and it was MC’d by Alex Orfinger of the Washington Business Journal. This year the Washington Business Journal is partnering with Network Solutions to make this a bigger and even better event than last year.

We listened to your feedback and this year we also plan to have multiple content tracks to really take this event up a notch. If you are interested in reserving your booth space before August 27, call 703-258-0800.

Register Now!

Our GrowSmartBiz registration site is up and running! Tickets are $79 per person and if you want to bring a group of 10 the cost $69 per person or $690 for the group. You can register at http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/event/27781

If you are curious as to the quality of content, here are some videos from the 2009 GrowSmartBiz Conference.

This is an event not to be missed. We will be announcing more in the weeks ahead so fill out the form below and we will let you know the details as they are announced.

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If you are curious as to the quality of content, here are some videos from the 2009 GrowSmartBiz Conference:

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Tags: Alex Orfinger, GrowSmartBiz, Network Solutions, small business
Posted in Grow Smart Business Conference, Videos, small business | View Comments

Using Content Curation To Become a Thought Leader

August 11th, 2010 :: Monika Jansen

Ever hear of content curation? Neither did I, til I signed up for another fabulous American Marketing Association webinar on that topic last month. Pawan Deshpande, Founder and CEO of HiveFire, and Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs, collaborated to present the informative, funny, and very interesting webinar. Here’s what I learned:

Thought leaders share four qualities:

They distill information into key insights
They foresee new directions their industry is taking and set trends based on that information
They are trusted, go-to authorities for information
They look for patterns in trends and news and report on those patterns

Chris Brogan

So, what a thought leader will do is identify a topic they think is worth pursuing. They’ll do research on that topic and produce a report, article, blog, white paper, or whatever. Then they repurpose the content for different uses, distribute it, and start all over again.

The reason it’s so important to become a thought leader in an industry is due to the power of influence. You want to not only influence your prospective clients but, most importantly, have them seek you out, rather than vice versa. Remember, though, that thought leadership is NOT about tooting your own horn. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: no one cares about you, they only care about themselves.

So let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about content. Content marketing evolved as the cost of publishing information nose-dived. Thanks to the internet, free blog software, and numerous social networking platforms, anyone can publish and distribute content for the price of a high-speed internet connection. This, as we well know, has lead to its own complications. There’s just so much out there! And because marketers struggle to get found, they publish tons of stuff and distribute it on as many mediums as possible. So now there’s this vicious cycle going that is expensive, time-consuming, and creating content marketers rather than thought leaders.

Pawan Deshpande

This is where content curation comes into the picture. Rohit Bhargava defined it very nicely: “A content curator finds, groups, organizes, and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific topic online.” Think the Drudge Report, TMZ, the Huffington Post. Because these companies are so good at content curation, they have become thought leaders. We go to them for our information.

To become a thought leader using content curation, you have to first decide if content curation is a good marketing strategy for you. Ask yourself two questions:

Is your brand focused on an issue and do you have an innovative perspective on that issue?
Do your prospects conduct a lot of research on this issue?

If you answered yes, then here’s what you do:

Distill information into key insights
Provide fresh perspective on a topic (or topics) within your industry

As always, easier said than done!

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Tags: Branding, content curation, lead generation, Marketing, Thought Leadership
Posted in Branding, Marketing, Thought Leadership, small business | View Comments

Planning a Business with a Sale in Mind

August 10th, 2010 :: Thursday Bram

When you start a new business, you can have a variety of exit strategies in mind. They can vary from leaving it to the next generation to going public. But one of the most common scenarios you can be planning for is to sell your business once you’ve built it up. Maybe you’re planning to sell when you’re ready to retire, maybe you know that you enjoy what you’re doing now but after a few years you expect you’ll be ready for a change. No matter the reasons, putting your business in a position that you can sell it easily simply makes sense.

Planning a Sale from Day One

Not all entrepreneurs think about their exit strategy when they’re starting a new business. After all, it makes more sense to think about a sale when you’ve actually got the company up and running. But the way you start your business can have a major impact on how you will be able to leave it. Something as simple as the business structure can slow down a sale, especially if there’s another party involved in the ownership (a partner or an investor). While thinking about a sale may not make you avoid partners, thinking ahead will allow you to set up a contract or an agreement that can minimize problems down the road.

Similarly, the processes and systems you put in place to operate your business can make a buyer more or less interested in taking over the management. The tools you use, in particular, are worth considering. For instance, you can put together a custom website for your business that requires a personal knowledge of HTML and more than a few hacks to work. Or you can make the whole thing easier to hand over to a successor whenever you choose to sell by using a well known content management system to create your site and make sure that everything about the site is by the book and easy to update.

Delegation is the Key

Ultimately, your ability to step back from the business and have it run itself will be one of the most important factors in the sale of your company. While you can sell a business that requires close supervision from the owner, buyers are likely to offer lower prices. That’s because it always takes a new owner some time to get up to speed — time that can translate to lost money if the business can’t hum along on its own. The more processes and systems you can put in place to make your business automatic, the easier it will be to sell.

As you plan your business, spend some time thinking about how vital you are to the process. If, for instance, you’re a consultant and the business is based on your abilities as a principal, you’re going to have to problems to overcome if you want to be able to sell your business eventually. That may mean hiring some staff who can handle the same projects you do or automating the process.

Image by Flickr user Ian Muttoo

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Tags: business planning, sale
Posted in Entrepreneurs | View Comments

Founders At Work: Max Levchin, PayPal

August 9th, 2010 :: Monika Jansen

The book Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston provides an educational, behind-the-scenes look at companies that began life as start-ups and exploded into huge companies. She interviews the founders of Hotmail, Apple, Yahoo, Trip Advisor, Firefox, and Adobe Systems, among many others, and lets them tell their stories: how they got started, the mistakes and smart decisions they made, what they wished they’d known, etc.

In her introduction to the book, Jessica says all of the founders she interviewed shared one quality: perseverance. That’s a trait most small business owners share, too. And because I like to learn from others (even while making plenty of mistakes on my own), I thought sharing insights from select founders each month on this blog might be fun. So here goes:

What you can learn from Max Levchin, Cofounder and former CTO, PayPal, launch date December 1998:

Throw out business ideas that aren’t working. Before PayPal became a web-based payment system, it offered a service for transmitting money via PDAs. When Max and his co-founder, Peter Thiel, realized everyone was trying to use the website, which was just a demo, for transactions, a light went off. Max and Peter made the decision to shut down the PDA service and focus on the web-based service.

If someone warns you about potential risks, listen to them. Max was warned about fraud from people in the banking and credit card processing systems. They did what they could to prevent fraud, but after 6 months, chargebacks started popping up. (I had no idea what a chargeback was, so I looked it up on PayPal’s website: Chargebacks occur when buyers ask their credit card company to reverse a transaction that has already been approved. Fraudsters game the system by requesting a refund on goods they purchased and received.) In no time at all, PayPal got swamped with chargebacks—to the tune of $10m in losses per month. Because the problem was so severe, Max ended up refocusing his time and energy on the fraud issue. PayPal had to hire investigators to help track down the sources of fraud, and he and an intern built an internal system called IGOR to finally bring chargebacks down to almost nothing.

What Max wishes they’d known. They had no idea that fraud would become such a huge issue and require so many resources—both time, money, and people—to combat it. As Max says in the book, they are basically a security company pretending to be a financial services company.

Free is a powerful tool to fuel growth. Because PayPal allowed non-members to receive money without being charged a transaction fee, growth went viral. The catch: once the money was sent to you, you got an email saying you had to become a member to actually retrieve it. Max said, “That’s the most powerful viral driver there is. Free money available to you.”

Endnote: Max has left PayPal and, like many serial entrepreneurs, he has moved on to found a new venture, Slide, which sells apps for Facebook. He is also the Chairman of Yelp.

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Tags: Interview, PayPal, small business, Start-ups, viral marketing
Posted in Entrepreneurs, small business | View Comments

Building a Location-Independent Business

August 5th, 2010 :: Thursday Bram

The term ‘location independent’ is showing up all over these days, as are terms like ‘digital nomad.’ The general idea is that a small business owner can create a company that can support him, without requiring him to stay in one place. That means that travel is much more of an option for small business owners, along with a general flexibility that makes for more options for entrepreneurs.

But building a location-independent business is a little more complex than deciding that you want to head off to Bali for a few months. You have to have a foundation that allows for you to work from little more than a laptop and a cell phone. You also have to either be working in a field that requires minimal face-to-face interaction or that you can adapt so that Skype, email and phone calls are sufficient.

The Right Business

It’s easy to think that most businesses could never become location-independent. Every business has to be where clients can find it. But more and more, thanks to improving online tools, clients are going online. That, in turn, means that many businesses can, as well. It’s just a question of thinking about how you truly need to interact with customers or clients — and how they’re willing to communicate with you. An architect, for instance, may need to meet with clients in order to understand their needs for a projects, but that meeting doesn’t necessarily need to be in person. A video conference can serve the same purpose, without even requiring the client to come into the office. The actual act of creating architectural plans is all done on a computer as it is, making it a profession surprisingly easy to turn into a location-independent business.

It’s not always that simple. An IT professional, for instance, typically has to actually be around the computers he needs to fix. But that doesn’t mean that a location-independent business is off the table. Creating resources for the same clientele — such as automated tools for backing up a computer — can allow someone who is looking for an opportunity to get out of the office to do so. It’s a question of thinking broadly about your skill set and what options you have for providing services and products if you aren’t physically present.

The Right Systems

At first glance, it may seem that most location-independent businesses are limited to being one-person businesses. Managing employees across distances, however, has become a relatively easy matter. Provided that you’re willing to be flexible about time zones, it can even be surprisingly easy: scheduling meetings for individuals located all around the world is the hardest part. But with email and online project management tools, everyone can stay on the same page, even if one of you is asleep while everyone else is working.

Even better, a willingness to work with employees located elsewhere can resolve issues like having a physical presence for your company. If you need a warehouse to ship products from, you can hire employees anywhere there’s cheap warehouse space. You can have an employee check a P.O. box on a regular basis and generally handle the physical details of running a business if you aren’t comfortable with more automated services.

Image by Flickr user ableman

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Tags: digital nomad, location independent
Posted in Entrepreneurs | View Comments

Small Business Success Index

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Small Business News

5 Ways Affiliate Marketing Can Help You Make Sales

The Drawbacks of Early Adoption

Conservative, But Not Too Conservative

It’s Okay to Be a Pioneer Sometimes

GrowSmartBiz 2010 Conference is on Nov 5 so Save the Date!

Register Now!

Using Content Curation To Become a Thought Leader

Planning a Business with a Sale in Mind

Planning a Sale from Day One

Delegation is the Key

Founders At Work: Max Levchin, PayPal

Building a Location-Independent Business

The Right Business

The Right Systems

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