inside the office

I was looking through the directory tonight for a professional organization, and was struck by how many people have multiple service angles that don’t seem to have anything to do with each other. The case that sticks out most in my head is the builder, remodeler, Certified Green building specialist and Quickbooks consultant – really?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for finding your professional passion and running with it. However, when offering different service bases that are so far removed from one another, is it really advisable to offer them through one business, or might it not be better to set up a secondary business for the second set of services. Personally, when I see someone offering such different services, I wonder about their commitment level to maintaining skill level and current knowledge of that service area.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

• Services/Products- Don’t just list them; describe them! Tell your customers how each product or service is going to help them, what they’re going to gain from purchasing it, and why they should buy it from you, specifically. What about your product or service is different, better or more effective?
• Solutions - Now that you’ve described all of your fabulous products and services, give your visitors some concrete examples of how these services have helped other customers. Sometimes this page could be called Case Studies , or Portfolio for designers. Whatever you call it, this is your opportunity to showcase the ways that you can help your potential customers with your products or services.
• Testimonials: You’ve described your products and services. You’ve given your visitors practical examples of how these same products and services have helped others. What’s next? Testimonials! Direct quotes from your happy customers that hopefully include some detail about how you helped them and how or why you are the right choice for the visitor.  People want to do business with people that they know, like and trust. Seeing happy results from other customers helps potential clients trust your abilities better. There are many easy ways to collect testimonials and comments from your customers, if you don’t already have them. Stay tuned for a Bonus post with some tips to help you.
• Call to Action – Okay, so this isn’t really a page. It’s more an element that should be on most, if not all, pages on your site. It should be simple, easy to understand and eye-catching. It tells the visitor what you want them to do. Some common examples are:
  • Request More Information
  • Schedule Consultation
  • Submit Order
  • Sign-up for Newsletter or White Paper
  • Connect on one (or more) social network(s)

  No matter what your Call to Action, the overall objective is to get visitors to contact you, and the get them to give you, at the very least, their name and email address, that you can add to your “house list” for marketing purposes. Stay tuned for more information on how to market to your house list.

• Confirmation page: You’ve described your fabulous products or services. You’ve gien your visitors concrete examples of how your products or services can help them. You’ve enticed them to sign up or request information with a compelling Call to Action. Now they need a confirmation page.  Your visitors want to know that their request/submission/sign-up/etc. was successful. Redirecting a visitor to a confirmation page after successful form submission, or adding a “Success” type of message to their existing page, gives the visitor a higher sense of trust with your website and the process and, therefore, in you.
  A cofirmation page is also a great place to offer free information or additional resources, such as a white paper, e-book, or information article.

One of the most comment questions that I get from new web development clients is about what kind of information to include on their brand-new website. Specifically, they want to know what pages and information their visitors will expect to be able to find. Here’s the top 5 pages or information areas that I recommend to new clients:

• Contact info:  Your web site should include an easily accessible, comprehensive contact page with a real address and phone number, not just an email address. If you operate your business out of your home and don’t want to give out a home address, obtain a PO box from your local post office, or other places that offer these types of services, such as the UPS Store. Similarly, there are many services where you can obtain a secondary or alternate phone number for your business without the traditional expense of installing a second line in your home of office. (Stay tuned for a post about these services next week.)
• An ‘about us’ page:  You hope that your index page does a good job of explaining your site, but sometimes consumers want to know what ELSE you do.  An about us page gives you a chance to let your visitors know about you and your company, as well as an opportunity to show off additional services and products that may not be relevant to the website if the site is directed to a very targeted audience.
• Security/privacy policy page:  Are you collecting visitor data on your website? Do you have a newsletter sign-up form, or some way for interested visitors to request more information? What about site statistics – do you have a script that tracks information about your visitors, such as location, type of browser, operating system used, and monitor resolution? I’m guessing that the answer to at least one of these is yes.  So, if you’re collecting any sort of consumer data, people want to know how you use it.  Even if they only skim, just the presence of a privacy policy can go a long way towards building trust with your clients.
• FAQ:  Do you find that your visitors and potential clients ask you the same questions over and over? To save your time, and offer better customer service, you should have a “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ) page on your site.  Does it have to be called “FAQ”? Well, that’s debatable. If you can address the primary questions, for instance, on your home page, and then link to a page called “Customer Support” or “More Information,” you can win the same customer service points without the sometimes ill-fitting title of FAQ. Don’t forget to update your FAQ (or whatever you call it) if you find you are getting repeated questions from potential customers that aren’t already addressed in this area.
• Site map:  In a perfect world, visitors would have no trouble navigating your site, and will always know exactly which page contains the information they want, and how to click their way there. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. A Site map is a page which lists all of the pages of your site with direct links to access them. Additionally, a well-done, XML-based site map can be submitted to Google for optimal indexing, which can help increase your search engine results. (Look for more information about this in an upcoming post.

“Social” has become a bit of a buzz word over recent times. Social networking. Social media. Social bookmarking. Social marketing. Social responsibility. And the latest that I’ve heard – Social shipping.

Social shipping is a term I first came across on the Smashing Magazine website on the post about their upcoming book. Here’s how they put it:

We want to make the book affordable to everyone and therefore are subsidizing shipment of the book worldwide. However, shipping costs are extremely high to some parts of the world. Please help us minimize these shipping costs for folks who are worse off by voluntarily paying more for the shipping of your copy. This is what we call “social shipping.”

Cool idea, huh? What do you think?

How many times have you downloaded a report, white paper, or other “freebie” from a website and when the PDF is saved on your computer, the file name that comes with it is something like “SEO White Paper,” that doesn’t tell you, at first glance, where the file came from? Sure, one could rename the file as it’s being saved on their computer but, fact of the matter is, most people don’t. Why are you not giving yourself the credit that you deserve?

If you are offering a download from your website, especially as a way to increase traffic or newsletter sign-ups, make sure the filename includes your business or website name in it. So, instead of “SEO White Paper, ” you have “SEO White Paper from beyond the office”. That way, the subject of the download is still the first part of the file name, but it also serves as a reminder to the reader of where they downloaded it from or, if they’ve downloaded oodles of SEO white papers from many different sites, that this particular file came from you and you care enough to want them to be able to get in touch with you quickly if they want more information.

One of my clients is a smaller college, and I always make sure that the PDF application or viewbook that I am uploading onto the server has the college’s name at the beginning, so that high school students that have downloaded dozens of PDF applications can tell quickly which one is for my client.

Not to mention that if the user does happen to download a similar report from another website that is inconveniently titled the same as yours, your file will not get inadvertently overwritten because it has the same file name.

And if someone is managing your website and isn’t doing this for you, well, shame on them.

One of the more interesting discussions at PodCamp Boston was not scheduled – which is the great thing about PodCamp. It was a mostly impromptu and ad-hoc discussion about women in social media. I joined the discussion about halfway through, as I had started out elsewhere, but was encouraged to join the discussion on the lawn by a VA associate on Twitter who wasn’t even at PodCamp. Word of the fabulous discussion had spread quickly and far.

My favorite quote from that discussion was by Christopher Penn, who said, “I don’t care what you have between your legs, be AWESOME between your ears!” Fellow PodCamper Georgy Cohen had this to say about that:

I guess I just don’t understand reactions like Sarah Wurrey’s, who was angered by Christopher Penn saying that all women had to do was “be awesome.”

I’m sorry, I was unaware that we weren’t already awesome. I can name at least 100 awesome women right now. Why is it the responsibility for changing the state of affairs all on us?

Um. I really don’t think he was saying you weren’t awesome now. But there’s a difference between being awesome in a closet and feeling comfortable and confident enough to wield that awesomeness. And really, in the realm of social media, I don’t think there’s a patriarchy waiting to beat you down. The “responsibility for changing the state of affairs” is on ALL of us, irregardless of gender. It’s called the democratization of media.

As an ironic follow up to this discussion, I atteneded the Southeastern Connecticut Women’s NETWORK luncheon yesterday, where our speaker was Teresa Younger, Executive Director for the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) in Connecticut. She gave an interesting speach about the inequalitiess of women in the work force. Some of the statistics Ms. Younger gave were astounding:

• Women earn $0.78 for every $1 a man earns
• Women stay in [job] positions longer, on average, than men
• Women CEOs are more likely to focus on long term sustainability than men
• 80% of women value customer relationship more highly than business growth and expansion
• There are 14 million people out of work & 10 million woman-owned businesses in this country – if every woman owned business hired just one person we would have the lowest unemployment rate ever!

So, the way I look at it, women are awesome. We take care of our families, our businesses, and ourselves (all too often, in that order) and we do it all for less pay. Changing the landscape of women in social media is a great idea, and maybe empowering women in just one area will push that same passion and enthusiasm into empowering women in other areas as well. Who’s with me?

(Another irony: as I write this, my Twitter stream is exploding to references with the same types of messages.)

One of the great sessions that I attended at PodCamp Boston 4 was about Podcasting, led by Guido Stein. Guido covered many great tech tips about podcasting, from Recording to Editing to Posting and Interacting with your listeners. All of Guido’s great tips are available online. One of the things that was discussed is the importance of editing your recording before posting so that you are presenting a quality podcast to your listeners. All of these tips immediately sprang to mind when I was listening to a back issue of an SEO podcast. Seriously, those people needed to be at Guido’s discussion.

The podcast in question started out okay enough – catchy into music, brief description about what the podcast was about, and what they would be discussing in the episode. Then it went downhill. In that episode, they were interviewing the creator/spokesperson for Knowem.com, a web service for checking the availability of your branded or favorite username at hundreds of different social media sites. Great concept, and I was really interested in learning more about it. However, the podcast was filled with lots of dead air as the hosts were busy checking out websites and having a private tour of some of the enterprise level and soon-to-come features of the service. Hearing the hosts say “Wow” over and over made me want to know what they were looking at but since it was a sneak-peek that couldn’t be shared with the audience yet, it left me frustrated not knowing what they were so excited about. I think a better way for this to have been handled would have been to share the sneak-peek with the hosts off the air and have them talk about it during the podcast, and not spend/waste so much time with checking email and viewing websites that you can’t even describe and discuss with the listeners.

So, this brings me to my podcast point of the day: if you’re going to be intereviewing someone during your podcast, be sure to have your questions/topics outlined before you start, and be sure to edit out dead air before posting.

This question recently came up, so I thought I’d put a quick how-to up here for future reference.

Basically, there are two ways you can do this – by individual document, or change the default file format to Word 97-2003 compatible.

Save individual document as Word 2003 format

1. Click on the Office icon button in the top left corner of the screen.
   

   Office button in Word 2007

2. Select “Save As” & “Word 97-2003 Document” from the flyout menu
   

   Save as Word 97-2003 Document

Change default file format to Word 97-2003 compatible

1. Click on the Office icon button in the top left corner of the screen.
   

   Office button in Word 2007

2. Click on “Word Options” button at the bottom of the menu
   

   Word Options button

3. Select the “Save” tab from the left-side navigation and change the selected file format in the drop-down box to “Word 97-2003 Document”
   

Hope this helps. If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment below, and I’ll do my best to help you out.

I came across this quote the other day:

“Appreciative words are the most powerful force for good on earth.”
Dr. George W. Crane

It resonates with me especially lately because of a gift that I received the other day. A few weeks ago, an associate contacted me, asking about how she could start a blog. She had a great topic that she thought other women would be interested in, and wanted to share her thoughts with others in a similar situation. While a talented writer, she is not at tall familiar with code, and didn’t know where to start. I offered to install the blog software on her server for her and throw in a template or two to help her out. It took maybe an hour of my time, and I was happy to do it.

Last week, UPS arrives at my door with a package. I was curious to see the return address from a popular gift website. Inside I found a trio of Egglings (plants that grow in eggs – how cute!) and a card that read, “That which comes easily to you is valuable to others.” These few appreciative words put a smile on my face for the rest of the weekend. In fact, every time I look at the Egglings, which I still have yet to hatch, I smile again. I just wanted to help out a friend – I didn’t expect anything in return. And yet, what I got is immeasurable.

When was the last time you did a favor, without expecting anything in return? And what did you get? The most powerful force on Earth? I completely agree.

John Jantsch, marketing guru and founder of DuctTape Marketing, has come up with an ingenious way to stimulate the economy – an initiative he calls Make-a-Referral-Week.

Make-a-Referral-Week takes place March 9 through 13, 2009. The goal to generate 1,000 referrals to 1,000 small businesses as a testament to both the power of referrals and the power of small business in the nation’s economy. This week-long virtual event also will feature daily educational programs that show small-business owners how to put referral marketing to work for them.

According the www.makeareferralweek.com, “The week long virtual event will also feature daily education programs focused on teaching small business owners and other marketers how to tap the power of referral marketing. Featured guest experts include Ivan Misner, founder of BNI and author Masters of Networking, Bob Burg, author of Endless Referrals and the Go-Giver, Bill Cates, author of Get More Referrals Now, Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing, Guy Kawasaki, author of Reality Check, Rich Sloan, author of StartUpNation, Anita Campbell, publisher of Small Business Trends, Scott Allen, author of the Virtual Handshake, John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, Scott Ginsberg of Nametag TV, Michael Port, author of the Contrarian Effect and Book Yourself Solid, Susan Solovic Wilson, founder of SBTV.com and Pam Slim, author Escape from Cubicle Nation.”

I have personally seen the wonder of referrals first-hand. Most of my business comes from word-of-mouth and referrals, and I am truly grateful. I’m looking forward to next week to help John in his efforts to stimulate the economy.

With that in mind, I’d love to know what kind of client or customer you are looking for. I just might know somebody that I can refer to you! I invite you to leave a comment with your target customer and to reach out to your network and see who else you can help out during Make-a-Referral-Week!