Posts Categorized: Small business advice

4 Tips To Deal With The Fact That The Internet Is Always Changing

Posted on in Small business advice

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When Facebook changed its algorithm (so it sucks even more than usual) I was so, so angry. Incensed! I’d spent four years building up a Facebook page with almost 4,000 followers and now Mr. Zuckerberg was telling me I’d have to pay to access the people who actively opted to follow my blog.  I maaaay have tweeted some cuss words about it.

I can swear about it all I want, but that won’t change Facebook’s new policies and it won’t change the fact that blogging, social media, and the internet in general, change at the speed of light. It can be totally overwhelming to try to stay on top of the internet as is currently exists.  New developments?  Forget it.

But there’s a reason we have all those sayings about ‘evolving or getting left behind’.  And it really is possible to evolve along with the internet, without losing your mind to overwhelm.

Here are four ways to deal with the fact that internet is always changing - and some tips about how you can change along with it.

1. Before you dive into a new social media platform, really think about if it works for your business
There are new social media platforms popping up left and right and it can be really beneficial to be an early adoptor.  But if you want to use a platform really effectively, you should be creating content that’s specific to that platform - don’t just push your Instagram photos onto Facebook or your Facebook status updates onto Twitter. It’s lazy and it looks unprofessional.  And creating that custom content is time consuming, so make sure the platform is a good fit for your business before you hire someone to manage your account.

You’re a local bike shop that specializes in mountain bikes and 90% of your customers are men? Maybe don’t devote 10 hours a week to Pinterest.
You’re a travel concierge who creates custom trips for high-end clients?  You’re obviously taking gorgeous photos of all your adventures and posting them on Instagram, right?

2. Stay on top of changes by listening to podcasts
I’d be remiss in my duties as your internet BFF if I didn’t tell you to read Copyblogger, Problogger, and Mashable. But even I don’t have time to read everything they write - and I’m on the internet for a living!

So here’s what I’d suggest instead: listening to small business/entrepreneur/social media podcasts. You can listen in your car or while you putter around the house and even if you don’t absorb 100% of that information you’ll be better off than you were before. Podcasts to check out: Fizzle // Suitcase Entrepreneur // Smart Passive Income // The Unmistakable Creative

3. Change your offerings to reflect changes in the market
Did you start your career helping people making Myspace pages? If you did, you’ve probably altered your offerings a bit, yeah?  My Solution Session offering includes a plan for Facebook + Twitter domination - but I’m thinking of scrapping the Facebook portion of that and including something else.  I fancified and updated my free ebook to reflect Twitter’s new in-stream photo option and using Twitter lists. Changes in the market create opportunities for you to help people in totally new ways!

4. Know that you can also be successful by doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing
We’ve all heard that blogging is dead because people only have the attention span to look through Instagram photos.  Or that the only blog posts that matter at gif-riddled listicles.  And there’s probably a grain of truth in there.  But you know which blogs I love these days?  The ones that publish long, well-written personal essays.

There are well-known bloggers who don’t have Facebook pages (I’m looking at you, Alex).  Print media is allegedly dying and Danielle Laporte is launching her own printed magazine.  You can opt out of new things that don’t resonate with you try something completely off the wall - an actual, print mailing list!  Where you send your readers postcards! Taking photos with a film camera! Writing long form pieces! Creating and printing a newspaper!

There are certain non-negotiables in business. Customer service, taking pride in your products and services, talking about what you do in some form - print advertising, Instagram, billboards, giving your customers a good product for their money.

The rest is up to you.

How do you stay on top of changes online?  What changes have you made recently?

P.S. If you’d like help mastering the internet in the least overwhelming way possible, I can help! I’ve been blogging 5+ days a week (even while traveling internationally!) without losing my mind, so I know a thing or two about creating an online presence in a doable way.

photo by jurvetson // cc

Internet Stalking Your Way To Success

Posted on in Blogging, Small business advice


We’ve all got professional heros, right?  That roster of people whose books you devour, whose videos you watch, and who you’d pay to see in person.  I mean, I certainly do.  (I love you, Anne Lamott, Cheryl Strayed, Bill Bryson, David Sedaris).

Let’s say - for the sake of argument - that your professional idols made their names through the internet.  Maybe you love Marie Forleo or Jenna Marbles or Ramit Sethi or Matthew Inman.  They’re so awesome!  Everything they do is amazing and gilded in gold and met with praise and adulation!  It’s really easy to imagine that
a) they are a completely different species and meant for success in a way that the rest of us aren’t
b) they never filmed a bad video, launched a product that failed, were ever anything other than hugely successful

You guys?  That’s simply not true.  No matter how awesome our heros currently are, they were newbies once, too.
And do you want to know something really amazing? If you want to see exactly how they got where they are today, all you have to do is click the ‘older posts’ button.

Some people call it ‘creating a case study’ but I’m calling it what it really is: internet stalking.
When the internet is your medium (and your professional heros’ medium) it’s incredibly easy to see how/when/why they’ve made a name for themselves.

Here are some things to look for when you’re stalking your heros

Blogging
How often do they blog now?  How often did they blog when they started out?  How long are their blog posts? How are their blog posts formatted? Are they essays? Filled with tips and actionable items? Do they include photos? Do they include outgoing links? How often do they link to their own products?  Do they host guest posts? Do they interview other people? Do they use images in their posts?  Do they have on-going post series?

Social media
Which platforms do they use?  How do they use them?  How do they promote their own work on those platforms? Do they promote others’ work on those platforms? Did they join, then abandon, any social media platforms - and if they did - why? How often do they link to their social media accounts in their blog posts?  How much personal information do they share on social media?

Email list
How do they get people to sign up for their email list? How frequently do they promote it? Do they have different opt ins for different people? How often do they send it out? Is it unique content or is it the same as what’s on their blog? How is their newsletter laid out?

Community
Do they interact with their readers and respond to comments on their blog and on social media?  Do they end blog posts with a question? Do they link to other people? Do they provide their readers with freebies? What sorts of freebies? Do they answer readers’ and clients’ questions in blog posts or videos?

Professional trajectory
Who do they write guest posts for? Who has interviewed them? What sorts of products did they launch? How was the launch structured? Which products were successful? Which ones weren’t? Do they mention having a team that helps them? Who have they collaborated with? Did they mention any trainings or workshops that they went to? Did they mention the books that they’ve been reading?  How do they stand out from their competition?  What are they doing differently?

There are two reasons why this internet stalking is insanely useful
1. It will provide you with heaps of insight into success and tons of ideas you can implement yourself
2. It will remind you that everyone - even rich internet celebrities - started with five Twitter followers and poorly filmed Youtube videos.

There’s absolutely no reason you can’t be just as amazing and successful as they are.

Who’s your favorite internet celebrity?  Whose career are you going to stalk?

How To Use Google Webmaster Tools In A Non-Overwhelming Way

Posted on in Self-promotion, Small business advice

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This guest post is from Olivia of Early Bird Strategy. She helps small businesses, entrepreneurs, and bloggers create and grow their online presence. She digs process, content strategy, SEO, A/B testing, Oregon IPA and email marketing. You can sign up for her free resources newsletter here - don’t worry, you can sleep in.

Google judges you based on your technical issues. Even though you have awesome content - sometimes the Googlebots can’t find you (which means awesome customers and potential Internet-besties can’t either).

Thankfully, you can play by Google’s rules, using one of their free tools. After plugging in your site, you can find any errors or areas for improvement and get back to focusing on the fun stuff like cat videos and writing.

In this post, I’m going to show you three smart ways you can use Google’s free tool Google Webmaster Tools to learn about - and fix up - your blog, to ultimately improve your SEO. When you’re a blogger, it can feel like you spend all your time writing and connecting. So more “technical” things might sound like a terrible way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but putting in a little effort can get big results.

1. Find out how people are finding your blog and what searches you’re showing up for but people aren’t clicking on

Sure you might know what some people searched for to arrive at your site from using Google Analytics, but do you know what people are searching for when your blog comes up in a search on Google, but they DON’T click on you? Would you believe me if I told you this was something you can find out?

1-GWT-queries 1-GWT-queries

If your mind just exploded from the above image, here’s what’s happening… This part of Google Webmaster Tools takes a look at some of your top posts, tells you about how many people saw it on Google (Impressions), how many of them clicked on it (Clicks), what that click through rate was (CTR is clicks divided by impressions), and what the average position on Google was (for example #1, would be the very first result).

As you can see in the above image, even though I only wrote the post on editorial calendars a couple weeks ago, I’m already getting Google traffic from it. It’s still pretty far back (#28, which would be the 3rd page) on Google results, but it included a free download of an editorial calendar template and was something I spent a lot of time on, so I expect it to continue bringing me traffic, potential customers, and connections.

Actionable homework #1: In Google Webmaster Tools, navigate to the Search Traffic>Search Queries area, and click on the Top Pages tab. Then, sort your list from largest to smallest, by Impressions. Make a note of the three pages with the highest CTR, and the three pages with the lowest CTR. What can we learn from this? The higher your CTR the higher relevance (or perceived relevance) someone searching on Google thought you had on those search terms. What a great way to know what your first impression is on what people are finding useful!

What else you could write about similar to those topics. For the low CTR pages, take a look at the post. Is there something in the post title or meta description that people aren’t finding your little preview snippet compelling enough to click on? (how rude!) What can you learn or change about this?

2. Use Google Authorship to have your profile show up in search results

Have you noticed sometimes when you’re searching on Google that you see a little picture of the author in the results, like this:

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Did you think it was only for massive sites like Mashable and Gawker etc.? It’s not! You can show up here too. One of the most overlooked areas of Google Webmaster tools is bloggers passing up this great opportunity to have your Google+ profile linked to your content, and more often than not have your profile picture in the results! Hello higher click through rate!

One of the Google Webmaster Tools Labs features is showing you statistics for your verified author posts.

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Actionable Homework #2: Get the ball rolling for Google Authorship, whether that’s first signing up for a Google+ account or verifying your email address. Here’s Google’s Guide for linking your content to your Google+ profile (2 options).

3. Fix those crawl errors

This section of Google Webmaster Tools can feel like homework. {Hey, where did everybody go?!} While it can be tedious to clean up some of the broken stuff on your site (especially if you’ve been around a while), it can also make a big difference in traffic. Think of it as spring cleaning and from a reader’s perspective how frustrating is it to click a broken link!?

4-GWT-crawl-error
With one of my clients, I found thousands of crawl errors that instead of fixing one by one, we were able to fix in one go, during my Website Audit and Action Plan, by adding an automatic redirect! This tiny change resulted in a significant increase in organic traffic that previously had just been landing on a broken page - while a few people had managed to find their way to the homepage, most had just abandoned ship.

Actionable Homework #3: Navigate to the Crawl>Crawl Errors area in Google Webmaster Tools. Click on the “Not found” tab. Clean up a few of these by click on the line item, which opens a little popup window with more info. The “not found” url at the top is the link that is broken. By clicking on the “linked from” tab you’ll find where this traffic is coming from. For example, if you’d mistyped when linking up this on another post, you could go in and correct it.

If you log in and find that you have a lot of crawl errors, try not to feel too overwhelmed. Instead, fix a few to get an idea of how it works, and then set a reminder to come back and do recurring maintenance in this area.

To wrap things up, even if people are finding you via social channels, overlooking organic search is like pulling a humble brag trick on your content. “No thanks, you don’t need to look over here, I just spent tons of time creating all this. Look away, I don’t want to be found!”. With a few small tweaks you can set yourself up to be found.

To learn how to add and validate your site in Google Webmaster Tools, here’s an in-depth post with additional advanced things you can learn.

Have you tried Google Webmaster Tools?

Stop Reading This Blog Post. Go Do Stuff.

Posted on in Small business advice

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I spend huge amounts of time either:
a) telling people how to do things (use Twitter lists! find ideal clients! roadtrip solo!)
b) learning how to do things (why are fishtail braids so haaaaaard!?)
c) reading lady magazines and throwing themed dinner parties 

I also spend a lot of time Googling how to do things.  When people ask me if I know how to do something I usually say “No. But I just figured we could Google it.”

But here’s the thing about all those how-tos and tutorials and Google searches:
That information is worth exactly nothing unless you do something with it.

It’s incredibly easy to load up your RSS feed with blogs that teach you how to do things
to assemble link round ups of helpful posts
to retweet “5 Ways To Revolutionize Your Blahblahblah” links
But at some point?  You actually need to do that stuff. 

You need to read the whole article - not just the bolded headings.
You need to spend the hour installing that complicated-but-super-useful plugin.
You need to carve out a few hours to nail down your About page.
You need make your first video - even if it’s bad.

And this blog post is just as much a note-to-self as a call-to-action.
I’m just as guilty as the next person of reading headlines, scanning chapters, and having to encounter something 45 times before it sinks in that, yes, Sarah, you do need a newsletter.

So let’s make a pact, shall we?
Let’s read less and do more.
Let’s close all those tabs and start writing.
Let’s stop skimming and start implementing.

Great things are coming for us.  We just have to make an actual effort. 

P.S. Did this get you all fired up?  Want some help actually making things happen for your business online?  I can help!

3 Clever Things To Do With Old Blog Posts

Posted on in Blogging, Small business advice

3 clever things to do with old blog posts
In internet years, I’m practically a dinosaur.  Yes and Yes has been around since 2008 and I’ve got 2,300+ posts in the archives. Crazy, right?  Now, it seems a pity and a waste to let all that writing sit there and gather dust so I’ve been brainstorming other things to do with them.  Want to try some yourself?

1. SEO-ify it, pretty-ify it, and re-promote it

When I started blogging, I’m not sure that SEO was even A Thing and if it was, I surely didn’t know about it.  While my content was good, my titles were too quirky and mysterious to inspire much click through and all my photos were saved as “008138ejplorb.jpg.”  This was also the age when people used any old photo they found - regardless of copyright and I wasn’t any different.

Here’s what you should do to make your old posts more awesome
* Find the best ones. Hint: they’re probably tutorials or how-tos
* Find a good, legal image for them. I like Flickr Creative Commons (sorted by ‘most interesting’) or Unsplash for beautiful, legal images
* Rename the photo as something SEO-friendly -  “woman-using-computer” not “9109282joli.jpg.”
* Put the title of the post on top of the image. This will make it more Pinterest and Twitter feed friendly.  I use Picmonkey for all my photo editing needs.
* Add spaces, bolding, or headings to make your post more readable.
* If you named your post something ‘clever’ the first time around (like song lyrics), rename it something obvious and Googleable
* Schedule out a few tweets to re-promote your newly awesome old blog post

2. Offer it as a guest post

Do you have internet friends? Of course you do.  Do they ever go on vacation or need a break? Dur. When that happens, offer up the best of your archives to fill that time while they’re off drinking margaritas on the beach.
Or you can rework the best of your archives and offer them as guest posts to any of the websites that syndicate content. Thought Catalog! Mind Body Green! Daily Love! Etc.

3. Put it in a different format

Some people like to read blog posts.  Other people want to listen to podcasts as they drive or watch Youtube videos during lunch. There’s absolutely no reason you can’t repurpose your old content in new forms.

I can take all of my most popular travel blog posts and turn each of them into a video.  I can turn old posts from this small business blog into infographics.  I turned my Real Life Style Icon interviews into a newsletter opt-in ebook that netted 1,000+ new subscribers.  Please feel free to copy all of these ideas and use them yourself!

What are you doing with the posts in your archive?  Share your best tips in the comments!

P.S. Does all this advice ring true?  But maybe you need a little bit of extra help with your blog or a loving push in the right direction?  I can help!  For less than you’d think!

photo by ray from la // cc

Why having a disjointed social media presence is hurting your blog or business

Posted on in Small business advice, Social media

This guest post comes to us via the lovely and talented Bobbi of Ready To Blog.  She helps small businesses, creatives, and bloggers with branding, blogs, and web design. Forpetessake, her custom-designed Blogspot blogs start at $200!  You can follow her adventures on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

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Having confusing or slightly obscure internet handle was pretty much a right of passage for anyone who can remember the times when dial-up was king and AOL used to send you CDs packed with ‘1,000 FREE HOURS, FREE!’

But, with the rise of social media and the proliferation of personal and social brands, it has become necessary for people to be able to find you quickly and in a way that makes sense. Before, using an acronym of all of the sports you used to play followed by a string of numbers as your Twitter handle–I actually did this at one point–might have been fine, but now doing so will rightfully earn you a few side-eyes.

A common, and damaging, mistake that many companies and brands are making on social media has to do with both consistency and clarity. How many times have you seen this: On Twitter, your favorite store has a handle of @marysteacups. Awesome! You scoot over to Facebook so give them a ‘like’, but you find it almost impossible to locate their page. It’s not facebook.com/marysteacups. No sign of Mary’s Teacups when you do a search. When you finally (finally) locate the page, you find a messy URL with an indecipherable string of numbers tacked on to the end. It’s annoying, and it’s totally unnecessary to force your customers to chase you around the internet just to give you some love!

If you’re running social media for a company or for yourself, it’s crucial that you make the best case for yourself online, and that starts with getting your social media property in check. Why?

You’ll look more professional
Once you decide on a name, stick with it, and hoover up all the real-estate you can get your hands on. If you are your brand and you’re going with @firstname_lastname on Twitter, go with the same on Instagram. If you can snag Facebook.com/firstnamelastname (or something close), do it! There’s no reason to leave your potential customers or fans playing a guessing game to find you. Make it easy and make it obvious. (To set a vanity Facebook URL for a fan page, log in to your account and navigate here: https://www.facebook.com/username.)

You’ll encourage people to engage with and share your content
It’s much easier to write, “Find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest at @brandname!” than it is to list three different handles. While it might not always be possible to get your desired usernames, you should get as close as possible and keep an eye on the handles you want in case they become available. When your handles reflect your brand in a concise and clear way, your viewers will have an incentive to not only check you out on your different platforms, but to engage with you on them as well.

You’ll protect your brand
You might not be Twitter-famous yet, but why risk having handles that can be closely associated with your brand snagged by someone who has nothing to do with your business? Having control of your name on different platforms means that you get to determine what’s done with the real estate. Even if that’s nothing, it’s important for you to control the content and messaging through as many of the channels at your disposal as possible.

So, how can you get your social media in order?

Start with your domain
If you’re currently blogging on a free platform like Blogger or WordPress.com, make the $10 investment and get yourself a custom dot com. If you’re feeling particularly thorough, look into securing the .net, .org, or other similar secondary domains as well! This is the first step to putting your best foot forward online and to avoid co-branding yourself with a third-party.

Bring your handles in line
If you currently Tweet from @firstname_lastname and Instagram from @highschoolnickname, start changing your handles to match your brand and each other! Whether that means that both are @firstname_lastname or @companyname is up to you, but make a choice and stick with it. It’s scary, I know! But the sooner you do it the better, and since you can switch your handles without losing your fans and followers, you’ll be glad you made the switch in the long run. Note: If you already have a following and don’t want anyone else to use your old username, swoop in behind yourself and secure your old handles with a new account. While it seems a bit strange to hold on to a handle that you’ll rarely use, you’ll want to have control over your old account to 1) prevent anyone else from pretending to be you and 2) direct any fans that may not check in with you regularly to your new handles.

That’s it!

An investment of 20 minutes is all it takes to get your house in order and begin to project a streamlined and professional front online.