I had a great opportunity to speak on a distinguished panel last week for a Business and Economic Summit put on by the New Landings Job Club here in Kansas City (and before you ask, I don’t know why I was on the distinguished panel either…). 

This wasn’t just any panel discussion, not only were there 10 9+1 sharp panelists – there were 400+ in attendance and focused for 2+ hours!

The purpose of the discussion was to talk about what’s going on in Kansas city with jobs, the economy and what job seekers should be doing and looking for as they work to get into their next opportunity.

There was a lot of great discussion (it was primarily a Q&A format) and I believe the job seekers got a lot of great ideas and good advice…what was interesting to me was how much of that great information and advice also applied to business owners.

We talked about the importance of stalking (done the right way), relationships, professionalism…lots of great points – here are the highlights that I took away:

(photo by Jesse757)

Relationships…I sound like a broken record

I talk a lot about the importance of building relationships because people do business with people that they Know, Like and Trust.  One of the central themes for the evening was a strong confirmation of that fact.  Brad Justice – Owner of Team Office made this point very strongly: whether you’re looking for a job, looking to collaborate with a partner or sign a prospect up for business it all starts with building a genuine relationship.

It takes time…you can’t rush relationships.  It takes effort and a sincere desire to help and connect with someone.  It’s work, but the fact of the matter is most jobs aren’t found through job postings and business isn’t done without some kind of connection.

Add Value

Another common theme was the importance of adding value.  Chuck Vanasse, CEO of Prio, Inc. made a great point about the best way to make a positive impression on somehow when you’re meeting with them…is to simply ask:

“What can I do to help you?”

Approaching anyone with a genuine interest in adding value, solving real problems and helping them will quickly put you at the top of their list – from a job perspective or from a potential client perspective.

Things are looking up…really

We’re not out of the woods just yet when it comes to economy, but the Kansas City metro is doing better than a lot of areas and in some pockets, things are actually going quite well.  This was more than just a gut feeling – Andrew Nave – an economic developer with Overland Park has real data that shows we’re on the upswing and overall it painted a fairly bright picture.

Michael Rapken – the COO of Genesis 10 Consulting reinforced that positive message with the discussion on his company’s growth (and focus on finding quality local resources to work with).  There are opportunities out there.

You’ve got to have Passion and a positive focus

Jon Schramm – owner of The Purple Guys did a great job describing his company and one of the things that sets them apart (besides wearing purple).  They’ve had great success which he attributes (in part) to having a lot of passion about what they do and why they do it – I love their concise Mission, Vision and Values page.

Elizabeth Allen – owner of Marketsmartz was the moderator for this whole event and she covered a lot of great points, but the one that stuck most with me was her message about the importance of getting excited about what you do and keeping a positive approach…even when times are tough.

Stay Educated, Stay Fresh

The world is changing – arguably there’s been more changes in technology and how people live in the last 10 years (internet and mobile) than we’ve had in the previous 100 years!  But if you want to be successful and stay successful you’ve got to keep learning.  Sam Atieh – CEO of the American College of Technology is seeing his clients / students really benefit in tangible ways from going back to school…or even just getting the training needed to stay up on things.

David Longstreet – the President and Owner of Longstreet Consulting took the idea even a bit farther with a great point about how you’re only as old or out of date as you think you are.  To back that up, he shared the story of getting a cool new tattoo as a way to celebrate his 50th birthday.  Take some chances, do things that you have always wanted to do!

The easy way out would be to check out on all of the changes…social media is for kids!…what’s with all of these new-fangled mobile devices, I just want to make a call?  But if you go down that path, not only are you missing out on some amazing things that are going on, but you’re also putting yourself at the back of the line when it comes to business and opportunities (there is a real impact for not participating in what’s going on in the world).  Get excited about learning what’s possible!

Get Found Online…but be professional!

You might have noticed that everyone who was on the panel is not only really successful, but every one of them has a Linkedin Profile and most of them are using Linkedin in a big way.  (Coincidence?  I don’t think so).

What ever you do for your business or your job, people are looking for you.  Can they find you?

If you’re interviewing for a job or meeting with a prospective client, it’s almost certain they are going to look you up on Google, LinkedIn and Facebook…do you know what they’ll find?

As Marquita Miller – owner of Five Start Tax and Business Solutions pointed out…it’s important to be out there, but it’s equally important to be professional about it.  She used a great example about the mistake of posing with a bottle of Grey Goose on your profile picture.  That is almost a guarantee that you’re not going to get that interview…or the follow-up sales
meeting!  (nothing wrong with Grey Goose, but you know what she means!).

The Art of Stalking

Finally – Don Jalbert, VP Sales and Marketing with CTI Solutions had some great advice about sales and prospecting.  The best way to build a relationship and add value is to get know a lot about your prospects (whether it’s the hiring manager or a prospective client).  Online tools like LinkedIn give you an amazing amount of information including telling you people that you know in common…who could introduce you.

Friendly stalking (he doesn’t advocate hanging out around their house), gives you the chance to learn what your target’s interests are, where they went to school, what they’ve worked on in the past, what they write about and who they know.  In short – it’s immensely valuable information…if you take the time.

Great session!

All in all, it was a very good night – lots of great discussion from very smart people and a lot of positive interaction – it was a lot of fun.  I’d love to hear other thoughts – if you were in attendance, please leave a comment below and let me know what you got out of the evening.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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Search Engine Optimization has become a mystical term, invoking the idea of wizards laboring in their lofty towers to get websites onto the first page of Google.

The reality is that SEO for really competitive online sites is an arcane art and if your business is going up against the big boys then you need to seek out professional help. 

However if you are a typical small business and you are in a well defined, narrow niche or you’re in a contained geographic area then there are a couple of basic SEO principles that will make a world of difference to you and won’t cost an arm and a leg to implement.

The challenge I’ve had is how to explain these basics to business owners that don’t know HTML, don’t want to know HTML and really don’t want to get bogged down in the details.  Here’s my attempt – let me know what you think.

Think of Google as a Giant Library…in fact it’s the largest library in the world!

Instead of physical books, this library is made up of virtual ‘pages’, each of them like a book on the shelf of the library.

Google wants to make it’s users happy!

Google makes money (lots of money) because 64% of all searches happen on Google – giving them the leverage to charge a lot of money for ads and other stuff.

However those users only continue to use Google if they get what they want when they’re searching.  So Google wants to make the users happy and the best way to do that is delivering search results that best answer what the user is searching for.

Therefore Google has to understand what all of the books (web pages) are about so they can find the best responses depending on what was searched for.  (With me so far?)

Back to Google being a library

Just like at a library – if you wanted to know what a book was about, the first thing you would do is look at the title of the book (the title of the web page).  If the title is “Great Burgers in Kansas City” then Google would assume the book is about Great Burgers…in Kansas City.

The next step to identify what the book is about is to crack it open and look at the Table of Contents section.  What are the chapters in the book about?  For a web page, the equivalent to a Chapter or Section title is a Header Tag – specifically a Header 1 (H1) or Header 2 (H2) tag. 

Using our example, it would be likely to assume there would be a chapter titled “Best cheeseburgers in the Kansas City Metro area” or maybe “Unusual burgers found in KC”.

Finally – the last thing that Google will do is thumb through the book and glance through the content.  Does it look like it’s a book about burgers in Kansas City?  For Google to really be comfortable, there should be a lot of content that would support the chapter titles and the book title.

Where Google isn’t as much of a library

The other thing that makes Google comfortable that a web page is important (and helps determine what it’s about) is based on the number of other web pages that point to a web site with a link…and how they  point to it.  Ideally other sites would setup a link that says Learn about Great Burgers in Kansas City.

The more sites that point to a page, especially if they’re related to the content overall, the more important that page or site becomes to Google and the higher up it will rank for searches on topics related to the title.

What most sites look like to Google – the reality!

Most small business books (web sites) that are out there either don’t have a title or the title is the name of the business…or sometimes even just the word ‘Title’.  So if your business is BFD and Associates and that’s all you’ve got in your title tag, all Google can do is assume that your book is about BFD and Associates (whatever that is).

Then Google opens your book and there’s nothing in the Table of Contents – there are no Header tags anywhere!  Now Google really isn’t sure what your site is about.

Finally – Google flips through your book – maybe there are a lot of words, but nothing really stands out…as far as Google is concerned, your book is about…NOTHING!

I don’t have actual numbers, but I would bet that 90% or more of small business websites don’t have Titles that reflect what the site is about (Keywords), Header Tags that support the Title and reinforce the keywords and content that additionally reinforces those same keywords.

The really great news about basic SEO!

Because almost no one does it right and most of your competitors don’t understand that Google is a library – if you can make a few small changes to your site, you will quickly start moving up the search results, without expensive black magic!  Here are some Quick Tips to get started:

1. Come up with at least 3 keywords for your home page that you think your best customers would use to search for your services.  That could be something like Peer Group Advisory Board or Kansas City Small Business Accounting.
2. Add those keywords to your Title Tag for your home page (it may be difficult to get 3 of them in there, especially if they’re longer, but do what you can).
3. Create headers on your home page content using H1 and H2 tags as natural descriptions for sections of your page.  Use the identified keywords in those sections.
4. Add those same keywords into the overall content on that page.  They should show up at least 3 or 4 times on the page – but make sure the page doesn’t sound stupid when you read it.  This is not more important than readability!
5. Don’t use flash or scripts as your home page (or only use it in 1 section) – it may look interesting but to Google, that’s like have a book without any pages.  You will get NO credit for search if there’s no readable content.

Start looking at your websites or your competitors websites and see how your book reads to Google.  (Try right clicking on your browser page and ‘View Source’ to see the code for your page – you don’t have to understand all of it, just look for Title and H1 or H2).

Does this description make sense?  Send me an email (skinkade at aspirekc.com) to request an article that gets into more detail on this idea – I’d love to hear from you (or post to the comments below)!

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach (letting Google know who I am)!

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Photo by Adam Pniak

These days more than ever it’s critical that your business stands out from the crowd (for the right reasons).

Recent studies show that an ever growing majority of people are turning to the internet first to solve their problems and buy solutions, services and products.  Specifically they’re using search engines like Google.

They’re looking for you, but if they can’t find you…if you’re not standing out, then they’ll go with who ever they can find and you’ll be out a customer opportunity (and an easy one at that since they were ready to buy when they started looking).

The good news is that most small businesses aren’t doing a very good job at building an online presence.  For most businesses owners the bar is pretty low – if you do just a couple of things on purpose you could find yourself on the first page of Search Engine results when those customers come a searching.  A little creativity and some focus could be all it takes to really ramp up your lead generation.

Below are 8 examples of different ways to stand out online – real businesses, real examples that you can steal borrow from.  What could you start doing with your business to stand out?

1.  Develop a viral video!

Blendtec makes high end blenders.  A few years ago, the CEO of Blendtec noticed some of his R&D engineers cleaning up a huge mess.  It turns out they had decided to try blending some wood (2×4’s) just to see what would happen.  The end result was a mess of sawdust and very blended wood!  Sensing some cool possibilities, the CEO asked them to do it again – this time with a camera running and the WillItBlend campaign was born. 

Over the years they’ve blended everything from an iPhone to a bunch of glow sticks with 90 videos posted to date (each at about 3 minutes or less and many of them will millions of views).  This is the only marketing that Blendtec has done for several years and despite a tough economy and an expensive product, their sales have gone up steadily every single year!

2. Move up in the search rankings with a blog!

Search engines love blogs – a blog will supply your website with fresh content that’s (ideally) built around keywords and ideas that your customers are looking for.  In fact one study discovered websites with blogs are getting 55% more traffic than their blogless counterparts.

One great example is the Signal Integrity blog written by Colin Warwick, a product manager with Agilent.  Signal Integrity is the premium keyword for the product that Colin is responsible for, but unfortunately his company website was showing up on page 5 of the Google search results – prompting him to jump into his own blog to start improving the search results.  And improve they did, moving from spot 44 up to the top 5 spots.  You can read more details on all the benefits on an interview he did at WebInkNow.

3.  Educate the old fashioned way

Social Media marketing doesn’t have to be about high tech – Lehman’s is a catalog company that’s been around for 54 years and started out targeting the Amish community in Ohio.  Here’s how Multichannel Merchant describes Lehman’s product lines:

The Kidron, OH-based marketer sells old-fashioned, non-electric merchandise from oil lamps and Amish-made wood toys to soap-making supplies and butter churns.

The starting point is the Lehman’s Country Life blog, the single largest driver of traffic to the website, augmented by educational videos on Youtube and a Facebook group that’s used as a focus group for the business.

4.  Promote your product via Twitter

Kogi BBQ in Los Angeles is one of my favorite Social Media success stories.  It’s self described as Korean BBQ but with a twist of Mexican and just an overall unusual menu.  To make things even more fun – the primary way to get Kogi BBQ is from one of their two trucks that cover metropolitan LA.  And the best way to know where the trucks are going to be?  You have to follow them on Twitter. 

They have over 45,000 followers, and more importantly their trucks typically have a 1 to 2 hour long line waiting for them when ever they show up!

Here’s a great write-up from the LA Times with more details.

5.  Get more traffic than you can handle…literally!

Threadless.com is a cool story – it’s an online t-shirt store where the designs are submitted by artists / wanna be artists around the world and voted on by customers and members of the community for contests and to decide which shirts actually get made.  However this isn’t some small time thing – Threadless has over 1.2 Million followers on their twitter feed and they recently ran into the nice to have problem (but still a problem) of crashing their servers when they ended up with too much traffic! 

It takes a lot of traffic to bring down a server like the one that they’ve been using.  All of that traffic was driven by an online campaign!

6.  Break the rules!

Ask anyone in Financial Services and they’ll tell you that marketing is a huge challenge because of all of the regulatory issues they have to deal with.  In fact they’ll generally tell you it can’t be done.  Anything they share with the public has to be reviewed by seemingly dozens of people before it can see the light of day – making Social Media an impractical marketing opportunity…or so everyone thought!

Putnam Investments is rocking the boat when it comes to participating on social media.  Their CEO is on Twitter.  They’ve built a blog focused on the Retirement Savings Challenge.  It’s not about their products (which would get them in trouble with the SEC and likely wouldn’t be very effective anyway).  Instead they focus on educating and discussing the challenge that all of us face as we try to figure out how retirement planning works in the first place.  By educating and not selling, they set themse
lves up as progressive, helpful and experts to turn to.  As David Meerman Scott points out Putnam is a great example – it’s fear that’s holding other companies back.

7.  Give away great educational content!

Infusionsoft is a software company that sells an automated marketing solution aimed at small to medium sized businesses.  They do several things well when it comes to marketing themselves, but the thing that stands out is their focused effort to create really strong free educational materials (reports and ebooks).  What’s great about the eb00ks is that they specifically don’t focus on the Infusionsoft products, instead they focus on the problems that their target market have and offer solutions.  Then they encourage sharing those materials out to a wide audience through contests and email campaigns.

I’m not a client of theirs, but I continue to be impressed with their educational approach and how they position themselves in a challenging marketplace.

8.  Increase your leads by 850%!

Few things suggest cutting edge online marketing and social media practices less than a 116 year old company that manufactures Fencing materials in Massachusetts.  However looks  can be deceiving – Louis Page is in a niche, blue collar market that most would think of as old school – in fact, they only put up a website about 5 years ago.   However when they launched their blog (The Fence Post), last December they started seeing a dramatic increase in traffic and leads for their products.

In fact as the owner Duncan Page describes to a local news station – his leads have increased by over 850% in just a few months.  People have been drawn to his educational approach and a focus on writing about topics that their customers are struggling with or interested in.

It doesn’t have to be that hard to stand out!

Although these are all impressive stories, looking at them collectively, none of these companies is doing anything that most small business owners couldn’t do. 

They’re doing the basic technical things around search engine optimization that anyone can do (I’m a perfect example – I’m not an SEO specialist, but if you do a search on Kansas City Business Coach on Google, I’m at the top of the list – because I’m doing a few basic things consistently).

They’re in touch with what they’re customers want and they’re willing to take the extra steps to make themselves available and to share valuable content to make it worthwhile to search them out.

What could you do today to start standing out online?  I’d love to hear your thoughts or questions – or let me know if you have some other great examples.  Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade – Kansas City Business Coach

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