Perhaps this is counter-intuitive? In this era of frantic, ever accelerating pace-of-life, it’s crucial to make every minute count, even when running a simple errand.

Looking for a specialized organic tincture today, I had my daughter with me and knew I couldn’t spend the day meandering from place to place on the off chance somebody had it. First I used google’s local search to compile a shortlist of herbalists and natural health-food stores in my area, then I started calling them.

I had about a 90% failure rate. Most of them went into voicemail after about 20 rings, and the voicemail greeting didn’t answer any basic questions: hours of operation, location, common directions, type of business carried out.
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Remember what we’ve talked about in this blog previously: when going the self-employment route, your best shot at success is through sticking to what you know. If you are an out-of-work janitor, you have a better shot starting a cleaning company (or some periphery service) than being a daytrader or an internet marketer.

With the economy cratering and unemployment soaring, we’ve remarked here before that the climate is ripe for a spike in “self-employment”. With this come the inevitable scams that prey on the desperate. We’ll start a channel here to point them out.

Our first “Beware” outfit is a Bait-and-Switch operation called EarnCashFastWithGoogle.com. If you have a facebook account you’ve probably seen these ads, or maybe you’ve clicked through a link to some blog.

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SelfEmployment.ca is back. Given that we’re in the midst of the single biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression, there are bound to be more people looking to self-employment as a vehicle toward their own economic security.

Since December we have 17 million sites more. If you think you were afloat, check your ranking now… Surprised? You should be. Internet is evolving so fast that any fairly new technologies in online marketing are becoming irrelevant sooner than ever.
There is a lot of manipulation trying to take over organic search results. New distribution of market shares involves names that did not exist few months ago. Did you hear about Wikia (Wikipedia’s for-profit search)?. With wikis being created or edited by ‘users’, blogsphere growing daily by leaps and bounds, new Google applications like Knol and customized filters for search you don’t know what you are looking at any more.
Fragmentation of search resources brings new opportunities to smaller players. Sophisticated Internet Strategy knowledge becomes crucial to serious players in online marketing. For medium and large companies this position is not called “webmaster” any more. It is a true Internet Strategist who emerges. Roles of IT and Marketing are blurring together to keep up with the new tasks at hand.
So what’s a small business owner to do? Well, multi threaded plan of attack is advised.

Foremost – determine your niche! You can’t expect to be found on the first page of search results if you do what other 10 million people do. If you create cell phone cases – maybe you should advertise as “pink cell phone case with sequins” or something equally unique and specific.
First – make sure that your site is visible to major search agents at all. If you’ve chosen spectacular Flash movie for your presentation – it may not be so obvious.
Secondly – start geo target your audience. Maybe you rather be seen in Toronto than Australia.
Thirdly – include paid advertisement, register with LinkedIn, Facebook and what have you, and have someone to become active in blogs of your industry to spread a word in a wide variety of mediums.

How to approach an optimization of your site? Be sure that everyone in your company will have their own opinion what looks or works best – it is politics, and it happens everywhere. No matter what your designer/developer will come up with – your CEO or owner will probably dismiss or try to edit in their own way. The only way to really optimize your site is through objective testing, not guessing. Changes to the website can be made/tested so easily and so often now, that testing is the only objective way to come up with a solution that WORKS – by bringing you new customers.
Experiment with new copies of the pages and check how these changes influenced your traffic.

There is not enough time in a day for you, business owner, to track visits to your site, monitor yours and competition’s rankings or plan for online marketing. Someone’s gotta do it, however, unless you give up on marketing all together.

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Many good companies started as a self-employment venture, where one or more individuals ardently poured all that is necessary into becoming successful entrepreneurs. However, self-employment is not for everyone. No one should know this better than you if you are planning to become an entrepreneur. Knowing yourself will make the difference between realizing a successful entrepreneurship dream or rolling up shop and moving back with your parents while you pay off your accrued debt.
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