Put Your Face on Your Blog

May 8, 2013 By 2 Comments

If you’re a consultant or solo entrepreneur you should put your face on your website. Preferably on the front page.

It’s important that you’re visible.

It’s important because it’s all about building trust and a sense of personality. After all, we do business with people.

Show Who You Are

I’ve written a lot about podcasting as a way of making it transparent to your potential customers just who you are and what you do. Video, of course, is also an incredibly useful tool for giving a clearer indication of who you are and what you do.

It’s important, though, not to forget that a simple picture can go a long way to help build a sense of who you are, especially if you’re not ready to get behind the mic or video camera just yet.

Here are some of my favourite pages that use an image to foreground the business owner. Maybe these will inspire you!
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Filed Under: marketing Tagged With: , , ,

Are You Missing Out on Business?

October 13, 2011 By 8 Comments

Blind with cain clipart

I was listening to a podcast this week by an internet marketer and content producer. He was talking at length about how his income had diminished since he stopped charging for premium content. He then went on to talk about trying to figure out which way to go next to generate business.

Sometimes I think we as small business owners can’t see the wood for the trees. The best business opportunities are right under our nose. For example, the consultant in question makes a variety of excellent digital training products for one of his niches in conjunction with a podcast. Yet he does nothing for an equally great podcast that he produces in a slightly different niche.

Where Else Are You Missing Out?

Some business bloggers put affiliate links on their sites to generate extra income. If you aren’t, do you know why? Is this part of your strategy?

As far as I’m concerned consultants that try their hand at also including affiliate marketing on their site is fine as long as it doesn’t water down the key value proposition. After all, if you make more money as a consultant you don’t want to be sending all your traffic away for a few pennies from Amazon affiliates.

But missing out on business could also be more complex. [Read more...]

Filed Under: communication strategy, marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

All the Smart Consultants Get it, Why Don’t You?

April 15, 2011 By 23 Comments

Tips for small business success

The “it” I’m referring to here is blogging. Yes, old school, good old-fashioned business blogging.

I decided to write about this after listening to this week’s edition of InsidePR where the gang were lamenting the decline of blogging amongst the C-suite.

I don’t think it’s just the C-suite or business managers that aren’t blogging as much as, say, they were three years ago; the number of consultants I’ve worked with in the last few months that aren’t blogging genuinely concerns me.

I don’t use the word concern lightly here because obviously I want my customers to succeed. However, of the last three consultants I’ve worked with only one had a blog, which he didn’t update more than once a week.

The other two consultants relied on pay-per click adverts driving traffic to their website.

Surprisingly all three consultants were active on Twitter, whilst only one had a Facebook Page.

Auditing Online Marketing

I looked at the Google Analytics of two of the customers – the third had no analytics set-up – and could see fairly quickly that the consultant who was blogging was getting much more organic traffic.

“The consultant who was blogging was getting much more organic traffic”

Blogging isn’t just about getting traffic; it’s a perfect communications channel for showing a more rounded, nuanced side of who you are and what your company is doing. In many ways a blog is the textual personification of a consultant’s know-how and special skills.

Social media channels like Twitter are great for networking, connecting and crisis management in the B2B sector, but they don’t really do enough to demonstrate a consultant’s skills. [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B, blogging, content marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

You Too Can Get Consultancy Work if You Stop Ignoring One Thing

April 7, 2011 By 1 Comment

If you’re setting out to establish yourself as a consultant or small business B2B service provider, there’s one thing you can do to increase your chances of getting work: being at the top of Google.

A lot of consultants who I work with, or approach me to audit their website, often underestimate the role their domain name plays.

Just this week a client was complaining that after several years of getting plenty of leads via his website, things had suddenly dried up since a new competitor had entered the Stockholm market.

It didn’t take very long comparing the two websites to see why the new entrant to the market was hoovering up potential leads and prospects. It was because he was at the top of Google.

“How come he’s top?” the client wondered. “My site’s five year’s old!”

The answer lay in the domain name. My client’s URL was very ambiguous and hardly related to his key services. The competitor’s URL included exactly what likely customers would type if looking for these kind of services in Google.

Now Put That into English

Let’s say you want to set yourself up as a Business English Trainer here in Stockholm. Your target clients are well-educated senior staff who have money to spend and need premier English skills for working with international clients.

The market is already pretty saturated as illustrated below.

Business english stockholm Google Search

Unable to get to the top of Goggle for these key words, Executive English, who are based in Stockholm, are relying on Google’s pay-per click ads to get to the top. The other sponsored ad is for UK-based Accent International, obviously hoping to persuade Swedish corporate clients to come and study in the UK.

BISEC Business English Consultant is top of the organic (i.e. not paid for) results because it’s listed in Google Local – a very smart move – with the key phrase “Business English Consultant” and they’re based in Stockholm.

After BISEC there’s a collection of job sites, foreign companies, oh and Berlitz, who do have offices and classes here.

Now if you wanted to get to the top of this page or there abouts you’d either have to compete with Executive English and outbid them for the pay-per-click Google ads or optimize your consulting business website for Google.

How to Compete with the Competition:

1) Purchase a domain name that, in this example, includes some of the keywords “business English Consultant”
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Filed Under: blogging, communication strategy, content marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

One Simple WordPress SEO Tip You Can Easily Fix Yourself

March 30, 2011 By 6 Comments

If you’ve just heard of this thing called Search Engine Optimization and want to improve the way WordPress handles SEO, here is a tip that should save you from having to rush off to your web guy.

Quick, Do This!

Install the All in One SEO Pack
If your site is built on the Thesis or Genesis framework you won’t need to get this plugin. If it’s not, open up your WordPress Dashboard, select new plugin and search for the All in One SEO Pack and install it (the above link also has install guidelines).

This plugin lets you write Custom Title Tags.

Title tags are important for SEO, as Google places considerable importance on them. Title tags should include primary keywords and ideally be limited to about 70 characters.

Title tags allow you to make a difference between what readers see on screen and what Google puts in the search engine results page.

It’s not just about Google though. If someone uses TweetMeme to retweet a blog post, the blog post’s title tag becomes the default text in your tweet. Because not everyone will take the time to edit that default text you need to ensure it’s interesting so other people click through to your post.

In other words, if your title tag doesn’t interest readers you’ll get fewer retweets on Twitter itself and less traffic coming to the post.

The Difference Between Page Titles and Title Tags

In WordPress, your post title defaults to the title tag. Sometimes – if you’re trying to create more SEO friendly blog posts you’ll want to tweak your title tag so your keywords come at the front of your title.
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Filed Under: blogging, web writing Tagged With: , , ,