Karen Skidmore's Kick-Ass Blog | CanDoCanBe

5 Common Myths About Websites

Have you heard about the one about the life coach who spent almost £1,000 on a website and no one could find it on Google?

This may sound like a joke, but if you were that life coach you wouldn't be laughing, would you?

And yet I hear stories like this over and over again.

When it comes to websites and building an online presence, there seems to be such a steep learning curve that most people starting out in business just don't know where to begin.

And this often leads to cowboy website rip-offs or genuine mistakes made by helpful friends and family.

Running a home business means that it is essential to have some form of online presence.  Many potential customers like to check someone out before buying from them and the easiest way to do this is by googling their name or checking out their website.

No website or no online presence means that there is nothing to judge and if your potential customer is comparing and contrasting, they are going to just move swiftly on to their next choice - your competitor.

But there is no reason to panic. There is no need to pounce on the first website designer you meet to hand over your life savings in exchange for an all singing, all dancing website.

There are plenty of ways of being able to get online, without spending much money at all AND without much previous technical knowledge either.

But before I tell you how you can discover what these ways are, let me share with you the 5 myths surrounding websites.

Myth No 1:  Websites cost at least £1,000 to build.  Yes, some websites will be £1,000 or even more to get built, especially if you are launching an e-commerce site where you need integrated shopping carts and membership logins.  But how many of you really need a flashy, bells-and-whistles website when you are starting out?   

A simply designed website consisting of 2 or 3 pages of carefully written content containing your core key word phrases should only cost you a few hundred pounds by a website designer.  And there are plenty of DIY options available to you for as little as £35 that any one who can click, cut & paste using a mouse can create

Myth No 2:  Website built, job done.  A website is not something that once created, just hangs about in hyperspace waiting for potential customers to find it.  A website is a marketing tool that needs to grow with your business.  It needs feeding and watering by adding new content and pages over time.  It needs to be measured to see how and why it is growing.  And it needs constant appraising to see whether the content is representing your business as it is today.

Myth No 3:  One website for one business.  When businesses started to realise they needed a website, many jumped for joy because they thought they would save lots of money by not printing any more brochures.  There are still plenty of brochure style websites to be found, and although there is nothing drastically wrong with this approach, there are actually drastically better ways of offering yourself on the web. 

One website for each part of your business is a far more effective way of marketing yourself - just have a look at how CanDoCanBe is offered over 5 core websites now.   

Myth No 4:  You have learn dreamweaver to build your own website.  Dreamweaver is one of the main web software that you can use to build websites but I wouldn't for one minute recommend a non-technical person to go out and learn how to use it (unless of course you want to set yourself up as a website designer!). 

You are running a business and you don't need to have technical knowledge of each and every part of your business.  So don't teach yourself to be a website designer.  Use a simple content managed system that you allows you to create, edit and publish your own website.  Use templates to start with and build your website up simply until you are ready to invest something that has been professionally produced.

Myth No 5:  Your website has to be perfect!  I wanted to leave my favourite one to the end.  Any project you take on in your business must never, ever be perfect.  Strive for completion and never perfection.  If you wait until you find the perfect website designer, to offer you the perfect design, the perfect logo and have the perfect content written, there is every chance that you will run out of money before you are even past your first 12 months. 

Your website has to start somewhere and you will learn what to do, explore your options and develop your website over time.

If you fancy having a look at where I started from, then click on this link.  You can see an archive of my website from October 2004.  Some of the images are no longer viewable, but I think it proves it doesn't matter where you start - you just have to start!

Now, I promised you that there were plenty of ways of being able to get online without spending much money AND without having much previous technical knowledge.  And I want to share with you lots of ideas, suggestions and practical advice on how to create a low cost website.

There is far too much information for me share in one blog article so I invite you to check out my recording of "What every home business owner ought to know about creating low cost websites".

Have fun :o)

Who the Google are you?

When was the last time you Googled yourself? 

I was asking around a few weeks ago for some personal recommendations of a business coach/mentor.  One guy came highly recommended from someone who was working with him at present and I was given his name and contact details.

Now, I always like to check someone out online before phoning them to see for myself how they represent themselves.  So I eagerly put his name in to Google.

He didn’t have a website, which was a little disappointing as I felt that I needed to work with someone who marketed themselves online.  But I decided to have a further look, as he was recommended.

There was a linked-in profile, but not up to date.  There was the odd reference on Ecademy but that was all.  Then on page 2 on his Google search I found a link to his Christmas letter which he obviously sent out via email.  Not only could I read his Christmas letter, I could read the past 6 year letters in all their glory – photos, personal references, the full works. 

A quick scan and I realised that he wasn’t to be the right personality fit with me.

What is the moral of this story?  Check yourself out on Google today and see what comes back.  You may not be able to control everything that you find and yes, there may be other people out there with the same name.  But if someone out there was to Google you, what would they find out about you and your business?

It’s worth a look!

5 simple marketing ideas that you can do without leaving your desk

How many of you have a day each week or month that you dedicate to marketing?

Monday maybe bookkeeping and sorting out your accounts.  Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday you spend with clients and dealing with the day-to-day part of your business.  And perhaps Friday is your marketing day.

It feels easier sometimes to break your week down and allocate fixed times to ensure you spend the time on marketing your business.

But marketing is not an activity that is put in to your diary on a fixed day or written on your to-do-list as "Do Marketing".

Marketing at its most effective should happen each and every day.

"But", I hear you cry, "I haven't got time to do marketing every day!"  You are just too busy dealing with your customers, answering emails and making sure your admin is sorted, aren't you?

"Do Marketing" doesn't have to take hours each day.  If you are clear on your overall marketing objective and what it is you are promoting, marketing can happen any time, any place and any where.

Here are my 5 top marketing ideas that should take less time that it takes to drink a cup of tea and you can do without even leaving your desk:

Buy a dedicated domain for your individual products

For those of you who have just the one website promoting your business online and yet have several programmes, products or specific workshops on offer, having a dedicated domain for each programme, product or workshop can make your marketing messages work more effectively (as well as helping your search engine optimisation).

It is a great short cut to having lots of mini-sites created, as well as keeping your online visitor within your one site.

Let me give you an example.  You may be promoting a particular workshop called Creative Minds.  You have the page on your website listing the dates, times, agenda, testimonials, etc but that page url may be something like this:  www.YourBizName.co.uk/workshops/creativeminds.html

Quite a link if you are using this page to send people to in your marketing.  Too long a link in an email as it could easily be broken in the received version.  Too long a link to look good on a printed leaflet.  And far too long for people to remember if you are telling them.

Register www.CreativeMinds.co.uk – something short and snappy which people can type easily – and set up your web host to re-direct the traffic to the dedicated page on your website (it’s called domain mapping).

Hey presto, you have an effective marketing message.

Great up sell at the post office today

“Have you got your mother’s day card yet?” was the question asked of me today.

I was in the post office sending off my monthly pack of receipts to my accountant and the guy behind the counter asked me this question just before he asked for my money for the letter.

“No, I hadn’t,” I replied (with a smile - as I always love a good up sell!) “Which one would you recommend?”

3 minutes later and I had also chosen another 6 cards to stockpile for birthday cards over the next month.  This guy had converted my £4.89 registered letter to a £16.45 sale.

What could you suggest to your customers at the point of sale?  Gift wrapping?  Perhaps a place on your next workshop?  When your customer have their credit cards out to give you, whether in person or online, this creates the perfect opportunity to ask for a little more business.

What’s the worst your customer could say?  No?

Only 1 more week to go!

One of the simplest and easiest ways of keeping the communication going with your past, present and future customers is harnessing the power of Email Newsletters.

Any yet, because of the technology involved and the thought that you have to be a HTML programmer to send one out, many of you are still very unsure on where to start and how to use the simple web-based technology available to you.

My 4 week Email Newsletter Bootcamp starts in less than a week!

A 4 week step-by-step programme that will show you how to set up, write and send out your email newsletter - by Easter.

Who is this programme for?

• Coaches and trainers who run seminars and workshops
• Consultants and therapists who would like to steady flow of 1-2-1 clients
• Women who feel overwhelmed by the technical aspect of setting up an email newsletter and yet can't afford a consultant to set one up for them
• Women who want to re-energise their marketing and discover how writing quality articles really can grow your business
• Women who would like to spend more time delivering the service and products they started up in business to do, rather than spend exorbitant amounts of money on advertising and sweat it out each month hoping that someone responds!

What will you get?

• 4 90 minute structure telephone workshops
• A bonus one hour follow-up clinic
• Workbooks for each of the 4 modules
• Dedicated website where you can access all recordings and workbooks
• Clear and simple actions to take between each module

When and where?

Dial in from the comfort of your own sofa or office
Starts Thursday 21st and then every following Thursday for 5 weeks
12.00pm until 1.30pm

The price of this programme is only £147 which includes personalised email support throughout the programme

The group is limited to an absolute maximum of 15 so that each of you receive personal attention and everyone's questions can be answered.

To quantify the value of this offer, the 1-2-1 coaching and mentoring programmes invested in separately would be £230 a month for just 2 one hour sessions.  If you were to invest in 6 hours with me on an individual basis, this would amount to £690.

£147 is a bargain!  Especially when you realise you will have the recordings and the workbooks to go over and over again whenever you need to.

Take action now and reserve your place immediately

There are only 6 places left at the time of this posting being made, so hurry before they all go.

Click here to reserve your place NOW!

Reasons to Make Contact Part 3

It's too easy to give up early. 

You make a follow up phone call to a customer about their enquiry and they fob you off with the infamous answer "No, not at the moment. Now is just not the right time".

It is easy to feel that you don't want to keep calling them.  After all the last thing you want is your customer to feel pestered and get annoyed with your incessant phone calls.

If you have ever been in a supermarket with a 3 year old who wants sweets, you know how frustrating it can be to have the pester power directed at you.  You may give in and buy the sweets but the buying process is not a pleasant one, is it?

"They will phone me when they are ready to buy", you quietly assure yourself.  "I won't call them again."

Wrong!  There is every chance that this customer will not call you when they are ready to buy.

Why?  Because they will forget about you and your offer.  The offer they were interested in was just not desirable enough at the time and a busy work and life schedule will just get in the way.  Your prospect client will forget you.

So, how do you keep the communication with your prospect without becoming a pest?

Inspired by the sun shining this week and hearing Ian Drury & the Blockheads on the radio singing "Reasons to be Cheerful", I begun to list the number of different reasons that you can use to make contact with your past, present and future customers.

Enjoy my cheesy interpretation (and humble apologies to the late Ian Drury for my dreadful song writing skills!)

Reasons to Make Contact Part 3

Have a cup of coffee, catch up about the weather
What about the results this weekend
How are the children, do you prefer it giftwrapped
What articles would you like me to send?

Have you read my letter, about my latest offer?
Just following up about that quote
Going to that meeting, hope to see you there
Let's do lunch, let's push out the boat

How did you find our service, was it up to scratch
I'm doing a survey, could you help me out?
Got a new product, give me your opinion
Have you seen the latest news about?

Happy birthday to you, Merry Christmas to all
It's start of a new financial year
Would you like to re-order, got a special deal
Thanks for the referral, I owe you a beer

Reasons to make contact part 3
Reasons to make contact part 3
Reasons to make contact part 3

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What reasons do you have to keep the communication going with your past, present and future customers?  Leave your thoughts in the comment box below.

Happy Valentine's Day, my dear business

How much do you really love your business?

Being passionate about what you actually do is one thing, but loving the business that supports what you do can be an entirely different thing.

You may have started up a business around a skill or a product that you may love to do or deliver, whether it be therapy, coaching, organising holidays or taking photographs.

But if the business processes are not set up to support what you love to do, cracks soon start appearing and the business becomes a weight on your shoulders.  Sometimes it is the worry of having no clients, sometimes it is the horror of having customers complaining and asking for their money back.

Make sure you take time out to set up the business processes that will support you in what you want to do.  Look at your marketing activities, work out your delivery processes and see how you make them more efficient, see how you can improve your customer service follow up, perhaps spend some time on customer database maintenance and never ignore the bookkeeping and accounting side.

So, Happy Valentine’s Day, my dear business – let’s spend some time together!

2008 is the year of what?

When I started this year, I joked to a few people that 2008 was the year for collaboration.  In only 7 weeks in to the year, I have to stop joking because I now find myself at the beginning of 5 seriously great collaboration projects.

When I first started out in business in 2004, I would have a cup of coffee with anyone who would meet me exploring the possibilities of doing some work with a more experienced business person.  Didn’t know how to make money by myself, so why not try to piggy back on someone else’s success!

However, no meetings went any further than a “nice to meet you, let’s keep in touch” as me and the other person always seemed to be at the same “haven’t got a clue what we doing” stage.  No projects seemed profitable enough to start the planning stage and neither us had any database or enough connections to get whatever it was, started.

Throughout 2007 I worked my little socks off, writing, promoting and delivering workshops and programmes.  Nice profit margin splitting it with just me, but there comes a time when you realise that you could do more – make more – help more people, if you collaborate and join forces with others.

How have these collaborations come about?  Well, they are just happening.  The right conversations happening at the right time with the right people who I have built strong relationships with other the last few years.

Perhaps it is because I announced that 2008 was to be the year of collaboration – my mind opened to the possibilities.

Why post about this?  Certainly not to brag about my new projects – no way.  I don’t even know for sure if they will all come to fruition. 

It just struck me today how easy things can come to you when you open your mind and subconsciously ask for them to happen.

What have you decided 2008 is the year of? 

Ten Top Tips for Marketing Your Own Business

Whether you consider yourself as self-employed, a business owner or as someone who works for themselves, if you don’t have any customers or clients you don’t have any potential of making any money.

Marketing your own business and getting people to find out about what it is you do is essential to your long term success and here are ten top tips to help you kick your marketing in to action.

1. Know who your customer is – the clearer you are on who it is you are marketing to, the easier it will be to understand where you can reach out to these people and how to communicate with them

2. Know that marketing is not selling – marketing is about building relationships with people and gaining their trust so that, one day, they may decide to spend some money with you. 

3. Less is More – the more focused you are on your marketing activities, the more impact you will make.  If your marketing approach is to throw as much mud at a wall to see what sticks, you just make one almighty mess!

4. Do one small marketing activity every day – Rather than choose a day a week to “do your marketing” it is far more effective to integrate your marketing in to your every day business activities.

5. Make your marketing fun – Cold-calling and leaflet dropping may work for one person but to many of you this approach is just a hard slog.  Focus your energies on something you enjoy with a passion and you will notice your customers being attracted by this energy.

6. Set targets – there is no point writing down “do more marketing” on your to-do-list.  This just will not work.  Be specific about you need to do, give your self a time scale and have something to work towards.

7. Measure your results – Whether you are spending money or spending time on your marketing, you need to measure how effective your marketing activities are.  Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t and you will soon see more customers knocking on your door.

8. Do what is right for you and not for your competitors – By all means find out how your competitors are marketing themselves, but don’t just blindly follow their methods.  Just because they advertise week in and week out in the local paper, if it doesn’t get you results, then try something else.

9. Be consistent – It takes on average 7 times for someone to notice your messages and take action.  Don’t give up after one phone call or after sending a letter or two.  Vary your messages, keep the communication going and build a trusting relationship with your potential customer

10. Learn and move on – the biggest mistake anyone can make in business is to make the same mistake over and over again.  If something doesn’t work, learn from it and try something different.

For more information about CanDoCanBe’s Marketing Basics for Home Businesses, a 60 page workbook and marketing guide, click here