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.

The rest didn’t even go into voicemail.

The one person who answered the phone, told me they had what I wanted in stock. Guess what? They got the sale, along with a few other items I wanted after I made the trip directly to their location.

All of these places struck me as mom-and-pop’s or owner-operated shops. They all serve as a good example of what we talk about here: growing your business through common sense approaches and using web tools to extend any business.

So our takeaways from today’s odyssey could be:

• A ringing phone is a surgically optimized lead screaming CLOSE ME, so maybe pick up the phone and close that sale.
• If you can’t answer the phone within a short number of rings, have it go into voicemail with an informative message: store hours, locations and if you have a website, your URL.
• Then on your website, have an easy-to-use search function, hopefully with some degree of search-engine-optimization that lists everything you carry, or if you’re a service, every type of service you provide. So when people like me type “organic echoberry tincture, etobicoke” your page would likely be on the first page

It isn’t rocket science, yet we find time and again, the few businesses that succeed above their peers take these basic common sense mechanisms and automate them, optimize them and have them operating 24/7.

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.

hg

Funny to say so since barter is by definition an exchange without money.

Some companies will approach you with a proposition to barter their services or goods for yours. Others require membership to take part in barter.

It is hard to say if barter makes sense for you. Wouldn’t it be simpler to pay for what you need and get money for what you delivered? Financial benefit of barter is rare to be obvious. Why? Because companies offering barter for their goods and services usually set the price high.

I came across this company renting computers and laptops on a barter basis.
If you needed computer for a month, the price was almost equal to buying one from the discount store. So why bother? Well, maybe this company wants something that you produced, and your actual cost to produce it was low – like an artist’s painting… Sure, you spent time painting it and it contains your very creative idea, but you had plenty of time anyway, and you find it hard to sell your products, just for this simple reason that you are not a salesman and you can’t afford one at the moment. But you have this presentation coming up to a large corporate client, and you can’t go there without a laptop… In this situation you can set a ‘price’ for your painting at the market value, and get a laptop in barter exchange. You both benefited, because otherwise you could not get a laptop and that company couldn’t have afforded a great painting you made.

Try for instance B-Commerce. It’s a private, membership-based barter exchange facility. Who needs barter? Well, everyone needs plumber, electrician, dentist, florist or computer repair. There are many more categories of businesses that barter there. It does sound interesting and it’s worth checking.

Barter is also a good way to network. One more way to spread a word about your business – among others seeking services and goods, is to advertise on barter exchanges.

In Toronto you can barter on Craigslist, on U-Exchange, on BCommerce, and others.

Some great entrepreneurs like for instance Razor Suleman estimates that … “5% to 10% of sales by his Toronto-based promotional-products distributor, Snap Promotions, are in exchange for goods and services. Barter has generated sales Snap might have missed doing a straight cash business, and it has cut costs, too. “We’ve been taking the dollars we save,” says Suleman, “and investing them back into the business.” He said in an interview for Canadian Business online. “

Beware that some barter networks aren’t always as advertised: despite promising low fees and lots of liquidity, few of them have delivered the goods. “We started dropping them,” says Suleman, “because the time and energy to manage relationships with these non-profitable exchanges affected our bottom line.”

See this article about barter: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/entrepreneur/financing/article.jsp?content=20041027_115252_3420

Barter thrives on international markets, too. You wouldn’t believe how many barter offers is out there:
http://www.google.com/Top/Business/International_Business_and_Trade/Barter/
Maybe one of them will give your business that extra kick it needs to soar.

If you want to barter with me, my ears are wide open.

hg@minibizweb.com

Partner offerings have definitely more value for the consumer. Let’s take a website for instance as a product: If you are a star designer, chances are you never developed technical skills to upload that design to the server, and you don’t have time to go out there and market the newly developed website to the target audience. But if you partnered with a techie, marketer and sales strategist, your quad can offer a pretty powerful product to your consumer.

The most commonly known partnerships of self-employed are medical doctor’s offices. Three or more doctors can share an office to provide full time care coverage and benefit from space and equipment sharing.

The same goes about bidding for government, municipal or national bodies jobs. Did you see this questionnaire? Inquisition about number of past projects, interdisciplinary experiences, bios of your staff, number of people available and so on and so on. You will never get through, even if you’re brilliant in your little area. But what if you had organizational and project management drill and were able to glue together a temporary ‘team’ of professionals, that can solidly account for all the experiences and powers required? – This next contract can be yours.

Because the truth is: it does not matter how many people work for you. In global contacts made possible by professional and social networks and information to be found at a snap of a finger: you are the boss of your dream project if you make an effort to create strategic partnerships with other self employed individuals.

Such a partnership can obviously span one project or years and years of successful business relations. Maybe even without a spare overhead burden. Would it eventually put out of business some well stuffed (I know… no, I did not mean ‘staffed’) corporations?

Partnering pays. But don’t ask me how to do it – this is something that I still have to learn.

Because a customer only cares about what you are going to do, before when and for how much.

Do you have a successful partnership story to share? Comment here.

hg@minibizweb.com

What kind of disaster can impact self-employed person or small business? Fire, flood, tornado, death or illness of key employee, including car and plane accidents, break-in and theft, breakdown of key equipment like computers with storage hardware, servers security breach like hacking, takeover of the website or theft of a domain. Events in the city, like long power outage, epidemic, quarantine, long strike of a transit system can also impact your business to the point of bankruptcy. Imagine you can’t get out of your house or employees can’t get to your office or no one is buying your products…

What a self-employed person needs to do not to lose the business when disaster strikes?

The answer is simple: have a plan, stick to it!

OK, what such a plan contains? First – it identifies critical sources: key people, data locations, vulnerable points of business. Secondly – it addresses these points one by one, in terms of a) protection, b) contingency.
A bigger business would address recovery objectives and crisis management. We just know – we want to stay in business!

What result do we want to achieve? – ESTABLISH A PROCESS that would protect our business the best within our means.

Here are some examples how you can address the key issues:
People – after identifying your key people, without whom business cannot run, make sure you have sufficient documentation of what they are doing, how they are doing it and have a copy of their important contacts. Think who can replace this person or have a process established so well that someone else, with existing documentation can take over. Take a good care of your key people.

Data and Technology – after identifying where is your data stored, establish a process for backup. It needs to be redundant. If you have two computers – cross-backup crucial data from both of them. Additionally copy frequently your data to CDs, and you may also use an online backup.

OK, I can hear you sigh – who’s got time for that…
It’s easier than you think. With a little help from a techie you can setup a program which, with one click of a button will backup your data from one location to another. Set aside time of a week when you regularly do a backup.
Establish an off-site location where you can keep one spare, current (weekly) backup. It can be your in-laws house or a safe deposit box in your bank or one of the online backup facilities.

Think about your contractual obligations and how are you going to fulfill those in time of crisis. Will you be liable? Maybe you need to make sufficient provisions in your contracts.

There are provincial and federal government regulations and resources on crisis management, emergency planning and your obligations. Learn what they are. Do you have a personal emergency kit?
If you want to know more about disaster recovery and business continuity, visit Business Continuity Institute site.
In Canada there are regular courses on Business Continuity, run by Surefire Continuity Inc, based in Calgary. You may even want to become a Business Continuity Professional and start your own business organizing businesses to prepare for disaster.

hg

After awhile, I simply stopped handing out resumes, printed up some business cards and started handing those out instead. Things picked up pretty quickly. Instead of being a recent grad, out of work, looking for work, I became (to paraphrase Robert J Ringer) the “expert from afar”. People were far more willing to hire me as “a consultant” to do a particular job for my then outlandish rate of $20/hour, than as a recent student willing to do the same project “on spec”.

Today you can do a lot better than printing up business cards and for less than $100 you can bootstrap yourself into a respectable “consulting practice” that on the surface would be barely distinguishable from a top shelf firm.

• Register a domain name with email and web forwarding, $35/year (disclosure: I own this company)
• Grab a virtual fax service $10/month
• Get a toll-free 1-800 number for calls in, google it, I see offers starting at $9.95/month
• Open a Skype account to cut your long distance bills to near zero, use skype-out (free to all numbers inside North America) to return calls you received on your handy dandy 1-800 number above
• You can shortcut your website by simply starting a blog, which you can get for free at some place like Blogger and then redirect or point your domain name to it. Later on, you can develop a more in depth site.
• Open a Google Adwords account and start drilling down into some niches where you can advertise your services, starting at whatever you can afford. $1/day may bring you a trickle of pre-qualified leads which will be the foundation of your consulting practice.
• Opening a Paypal account, which is free, allows you to accept credit card payments, even from non-paypal users.

There you have it. By following the steps above, you’ve gone far beyond what I did with my measly business cards over a decade ago, but if you decide to print up business cards they will look very professional because you’ll have a toll-free phone number, a fax number, and a web address (be sure to use an email address at your own domain name, even if it forwards to your ISP mailbox).