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Take Out the Trash Day

Posted by Linnea Blair on

09/21/2012

I am (still) a die hard fan of The West Wing TV series. One of the episodes was called “Take Out the Trash Day” and had to do with putting out a bunch of stories on a day when fewer people were paying attention.

For some reason that I am not really sure of, I grabbed on to that phrase and related it to my Friday workdays. For me, Take Out the Trash Day is about winding up projects, contacting people I need to get back to via phone or email, and closing out my week. In no way does it feel like unimportant work. It’s more like I need to get this done because it’s important to my clients and my business. It feels like a good way to complete the week, tying up loose ends and (hopefully) being able to hit the ground running on Monday. Here’s to your success in wrapping up your week!

Have fun watching this video trailer of the WW episode 🙂
Take Out the Trash Day

Categories : Productivity

Tags : Productivity

Back to School – Back to Business

Posted by Linnea Blair on

09/10/2012

I’m sure you’ve noticed how getting back in academic mode in the fall affects the pace of business. We’ve been conditioned by so many years of gearing up for a fresh start at school, and now maybe we’re getting our kids off for a new year, or at least we remember those days!

Summer seems to have a more leisurely pace for many people, though for some businesses, it is your very busiest time. Either way, I find that there comes a different focus, a different energy as we move into fall and a new academic year.

For businesses that have been slower over the summer, there’s a renewed energy to start a new initiative or accomplish something important before the holidays and the year end. For businesses that have been busier over the summer, it may be time to take a breath, look around and make a plan for what you want to achieve in the final quarter of the year, or better yet, get out ahead of what may tend to be a slower season in the winter.

Whichever scenario fits your business, it’s time to look at your strategy and goals for 2012-2013 and start implementing a plan for a successful outcome. At Advisors On Target we are here to help in ways that suit your business and suit your budget!

I want to particularly highlight our 10 Week Intensive program, Chart Your Course to Business Success. This is a program that teaches best business practice fundamentals that every business can benefit from, even if you have been in business for many years. The program is just what it says – a 10 Week Intensive and is delivered via live group coaching in an online webinar format. We meet Tuesdays at 10:00 AM Pacific beginning on September 25, 2012 and going through to December. Get more details here. Attendees have access to a special website with all the class materials, and recordings, so if you miss a session you can make it up. This program is limited to 10 business owners, so there is plenty of time for personal attention.

While this program is great for any business, it is especially valuable for home improvement contractors, so if you are a painting, remodeling, landscaping or any other type of contractor, this is perfect for you.
Come “back to school” for your business and join us this fall in our 10 Week Intensive or one of our other coaching and consulting programs for small businesses.

Categories : What's Next?

Build Customer Relationships with Email Marketing

Posted by Linnea Blair on

09/06/2012

Woman reading email For small businesses just getting started with marketing or even more established businesses who want to build better relationships with their customers, email marketing is one of the excellent tools business owners should consider.

Are email newsletters overused? Yes. Do your customers always have time to read your newsletters? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean that they never read them. I don’t have time to read all the email newsletters I receive, but I keep my subscriptions to many that I know that I want to read from time to time.

What’s good about email newsletters?
They keep your brand out there in front of your audience. Maybe your readers don’t need your service this week or this month, but they may need or want it sometime in the next few months, and they’ll remember getting your newsletter and go back and search for it to contact you. When they do have time to read, we hope your great content will keep impressing them that you are the go-to expert in your field who serves up valuable information that will help them. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and your newsletter will reach them just when they are ready to buy. An example in my own business is when one of my readers signed up online for a $1,000 program I was offering without even calling me to talk about it. Though when that $1,000 hit my PayPal account, you can bet I called him!

Email newsletters are easy to use and very affordable. There are many good ones out there. I have tried several and found most to be user friendly. Most offer free trial periods. I personally use Constant Contact which has many great features and they keep adding more. I also see many people using Mail Chimp, which is free, with certain limitations. I found a very comprehensive review of email marketing software which you may want to check out. In future posts, I’ll talk more about how you can make your email newsletters more likely to be read and more effective in achieving your objectives. Many of the email newsletter software companies offer tips on their websites and some, like Constant Contact offer in person classes as well.

Categories : Relationship Marketing

Spice Up Your Blog Posts with Photos

Posted by Linnea Blair on

08/10/2012

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big advocate of having a blog for your business. It’s a great way to create content for your newsletters and social media to engage your readers, while simultaneously giving your website a boost from a search engine optimization standpoint.

People love visuals and by using images (and videos too!) you can create more interest in your blog posts. If people see a post from your blog on Facebook, for example, they are more likely to click on it if it has a photo.

Here are a couple of tips for adding photos to your blog posts.

Where to get photos to put on your blog posts

If you have a visual business, like a painting contractor, for example, you probably have many photos of projects you have done that show off your expertise, give before and afters or demonstrate a technique. So your own photos are the best ones to use whenever possible (assuming they are decent quality).

If you have a non-visual business, like mine as a business coach, you will likely need to use some stock photos to add interest to your blog posts. Here’s where you need to be careful. Do NOT just search for images on Google and use them! You can be subject to copyright infringement if someone discovers you are using their photo without authorization. The exception may be when you are also linking to a vendor website from the post and including a photo from their site. You can find many low cost images from sites like iStockphoto and Fotolia. I usually buy a block of credits, so it’s then quick and easy to find an image and purchase it on the site. Be sure to observe the terms and conditions of usage.

How to edit images for your blog posts

I don’t know about you, but I am not a professional or even an experienced photo editor, so I like it to be really easy to edit photos. For years I was a big fan of Picnik, but they’ve now been acquired by Google. Their tools are supposded to be available in the Google+ Creative Kit, but it seemed more complicated than I wanted to deal with when I tried it out. What I’ve found now that I like is Pixlr.com. They have three versions (all free from what I can tell). I like the Pixlr Express which is quick and easy if you mostly need to just crop and re-size, which is 90% of what I need to do to get my photos ready for my blog. I definitely like resizing in a photo editing software as opposed to resizing with the wzard in WordPress. You have much more control to get it just the way you want it.

Happy Blogging!

Categories : Marketing

Clear Your Desk to Start Fresh

Posted by Linnea Blair on

03/23/2012

I coach many small business owners and a recurring theme seems to be around getting organized enough to make time to actually be able to do the things we put on their action plans.

Part of the problem lies with coming into your office and seeing piles of papers and projects spread over your desk. It often makes you feel like you don’t know where to start because you have so many things that need your attention.

I know that many business owners (myself included) can get sucked into working away on projects or meetings right up until the moment we need to run out the door to get to a meeting or social event, or get home for dinner with our families. When we do this, it leaves us feeling rushed and scattered, and when we return to our offices, we waste valuable time trying to pull ourselves together to be productive.

What I suggest for my clients (and need to remind myself periodically!) is that you actually block a time on your calendar – with a reminder that pops up on your screen, to stop what you are doing at least 15 minutes, or even 30 minutes before you need to leave the office to get closure on your day and be more ready for the next one.

This is the time to save and file electronic documents, file away any physical papers or files (even if they go into your inbox for tomorrow), and take stock of what you need to focus on when you get back to the office next, and make sure you capture anything that needs to get on your “to do” list.

If you follow this advice, I know you will be more productive and less stressed, a good combo, don’t you think?

Categories : Productivity

The Art of Hiring Smart – 8 Steps to a First Class Hiring Process

Posted by Linnea Blair on

03/23/2012

Free Webinar – March 30, 2012

“Did you know that 63% of all hiring decisions are made in the first 4.3 minutes of the interview. The rest of the interview is mostly used to justify the decision already made.

Most interviews are “wandering conversations” that don’t focus on the most critical aspects of a job. Most interview questions relate to the tasks necessary to perform a job. Most people don’t succeed on the job because their behaviors don’t match the culture of the company and the attitudes required to perform.”
Excerpt from Doug Duncan, Your HR Solutions. Download flyer

The Art of Hiring Smart 8 Steps to a First Class Selection Process

In this information packed webinar, Doug Duncan from Your HR Solutions will talk about how to select the right people and the appropriate approach to integrate your human system with your other business systems.

You will learn:

How to get employees engaged in your work – what does engagement mean and why is it important to your business?
Once you get the idea behind engaging your employees in their work, you need to decide how to select the right people
As you understand how to select people correctly, then how do you train them, and how do you retain them

Doug will also share his 8 Steps to a First Class Selection Process

Properly written job descriptions (JD)
Expand your ability to find and source the right people
Applicant management tracking system (AMT)
Conduct behaviorally structured interviews
Do both technical and behavioral assessments
Use background checks to verify who they are
Build a linked compensation, bonus, benefits and reward systems
Legal hiring practices

Date: Friday, March 30, 2012
Time: 1:00 PM Eastern (12:00 PM Central, 11:00 AM Mountain, 10:00 AM Pacific
Duration: 60 minutes
Presenter: Doug Duncan, Your HR Solutions
Cost: Free

Categories : Events

How Do You Look On The Small Screen?

Posted by Bill McKinney on

02/08/2012

How important is it for your business to look good on the mobile web?

Let’s check out a few facts:

• Over 85% of mobile phones can access the mobile web
• Mobile web usage doubled last year and will double again this year
• In the US, 25% of mobile web users are mobile-only
• The most popular mobile web destinations include social networking, search and maps
• Mobile searches have quadrupled in the last year
• 71% of smartphone users who see TV, press or online ads do a mobile search

Is there any doubt?

A few years ago, a small business mobile site was a novelty; today it’s a necessity. How many people get their first impression of your business from a screen that fits in the palm of their hand? And what happens when these visitors have to wait for your site to load, or struggle to navigate your site or read your content?

They leave…

You need your customers and prospects to have a positive experience on your site, whether they visit you from home, office, car or sidewalk. Fortunately, there are some simple guidelines you can follow to create a mobile-friendly experience for your visitors, starting today.
Read More→

Categories : Internet Marketing

Going Paperless (or nearly paperless)

Posted by Linnea Blair on

02/07/2012

Huge filing cabinets and files stuck in one location no longer serve many of us as business owners. Space is at a premium and we would like to keep our offices as streamlined as possible. Maybe even more importantly in our mobile society we want (or need) to be able to access our files from remote locations.
There are a number of options for accessing our files online. Services like Log Me In, GoToMyPC or direct log in to our own company servers assist us in accessing our office computers from home or on the road.

Being able to access our files electronically means that we must have an easy way to convert our paper items to an electronic format. Granted, many of us, many of the files we create or receive via email, we can already save to our hard drive or server in an electronic format. But what about all the statements and correspondence we receive via snail mail or documents that we receive only in paper format?

I have discovered some solutions that work really well for me, so I want to pass them on to you. First of all is a really stellar scanner. I have been seeing advertisements for a long time about the Neat Receipts series of scanners and I was on the point of purchasing one when I decided to do a little more research. By the way, Amazon, Google and YouTube are your friends when you are deciding on a major purchase. My research led me to the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500. I absolutely love this scanner! Really easy to use and to scan documents both to your server, backup device and/or Evernote, a service I totally love. Evernote is in the cloud, but you can also create notebooks on your local server/external hard drive/or computer. You can tag files by categories for easy access. Even better, it’s completely searchable by text recognition (OCR) technology as well making it really easy to find your files.

Here’s to your success in simplifying your life!

Categories : Uncategorized

Do you know where your target market is?

Posted by Linnea Blair on

02/06/2012

I suggest that every business owner spend some time getting clear about exactly what target market you serve or wish to serve witht the products or services your business offers. You may serve multiple target markets. It is important to gain clarity about what specific groups of people you want to sell to and how they differ from each other in terms of how they benefit from your product or service as well as how they differ in how you reach them with your marketing message.

For example, a home improvement contractor could have one target market that consists of homeowners in certain geographic area and with a specifc set of demographics. He could also have another target market that consists of real estate property managers.

For another example, a massage therapist could have one target market that consists of professional business people who enjoy regular massages for stress relief, and she could have another target market that consists of athletes who are recovering from an injury.

In both cases, you as the business owner want to be able to clearly define your different market segments: What are their characteristics (demographics, habits, etc) and where are they located geographically if that is a factor in your business model.

Next, you want to define how your product or service benefits each market segment. Then you will be ready to craft a marketing message for each group that they can relate to.

Finally you will need to decide on the best method to reach that market segment. Some groups of customers will be best reached through advertising, whether it is direct mail, internet advertising, etc. Other will be best connected with via referral or personal introductions. Still others might be reached by cold calling or canvassing, or at a trade show or other event. Often you will end up crafting a multi-pronged strategic approach to reaching each of your target markets.

The first step to to define who they are. Taking the time to document the characteristics and location for each of your customer segments is an activity that is extremely valuable and will greatly increase your opportunities for success in reaching your target customers.

If you want to find out more, attend one of our free business planning classes.

Categories : Business Planning

January is Work ON Your Business month

Posted by Linnea Blair on

01/04/2012

Isn't it time to invest in making your business better?

January is an especially good time to work ON your business. For many companies, business tends to slow down in January. Whether or not your business is seasonally slow in the winter time, there is usually a lull right after the holidays. Many consumers of your goods and services may have spent a lot of money during the holidays and now are a bit more dormant than usual.

This is your opportunity! Remember in your busy season when you have all kinds of great ideas about making your business better, but you don’t have time to put them into effect? This is the time to do some strategic planning and put into place some of those missing procedures and systems that will make your business run better next busy season.

It’s also a good time to put together your profit plan and budget for the year and lay out your marketing plan. Remember the all important action plan that will help you detail specific tasks, assign responsibility and set due dates for accomplishment.

Take the time now, and you will reap the rewards all year!
For more ideas, read my 10 Tips for a Successful 2012.

Categories : Business Strategy

Call 619.291.3700

Take Out the Trash Day

Back to School – Back to Business

Build Customer Relationships with Email Marketing

Spice Up Your Blog Posts with Photos

Clear Your Desk to Start Fresh

The Art of Hiring Smart – 8 Steps to a First Class Hiring Process

Free Webinar – March 30, 2012

The Art of Hiring Smart 8 Steps to a First Class Selection Process

How Do You Look On The Small Screen?

How important is it for your business to look good on the mobile web?

Going Paperless (or nearly paperless)

Do you know where your target market is?

January is Work ON Your Business month

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