Blog: Small Business

The primary purpose of your small business website is to attract the right customers and motivate them to take action. The call to action might be to contact you, find out more about you and your offerings, or referring others to the business. A mere entertaining site is simply noise and is no real value, ahem social media sites. Your website needs to work just as hard for you as you do; consider the following suggestions:

I have a couple of confessions to make; I used to hate reading! I would often read the Cliff Notes versions if one was available. In college, I would do my best to skim what I had to read and fake my way through the discussion. In hindsight, not the best decision, but I passed, right? However, as I have gotten older, I have forced myself to read more. My thoughts are I already have a master’s degree, reading sales and marketing books is cheaper than an MBA, less time-consuming, and I don’t have to do accounting classes! I am happy to report as of writing this, I have read 14 books just this year. Some have been short, some have been longer. Some I struggled to get through, a few I could take or leave, while others really spoke to me. Of all that I have read in the past few years, there are three maybe four that I think every entrepreneur and small business owner needs to read. I call it the sales and marketing trifecta. Without further ado, here is the order I think you should read them.

As children, we were often told the story of the tortoise and the hare. It is probably one of Aesop’s more famous fables, being made into a cartoon by Walt Disney. You recall how the story goes. The hare is beaten by the much slower tortoise simply because it keeps going while the hare stops to rest. The same can be said when doing a sales call or series of sales calls. This was one of the biggest takeaways I had from the Sales Skills Bootcamp by David Weinhaus.

You may be asking yourself how can the famous fable be related to my previous sales process. The short answer is, before taking the class I would always rush to “make the sale.” I have since learned its better to go slower and really learn the prospect’s real and true goals, not just the commoditized goal.

On the surface, Google My Business (GMB) is a FREE tool from Google that helps businesses manage their online presence on the search engine results page and maps. It is the vessel that allows the local search to be more accurate. The only stipulation is that you must meet people in person. In other words, you can’t operate 100% online.

For example, if you chartered Nautilus trips, you could have a Google My Business listing, however, if you just sell seashells online, it's a no go.

Before we dive too much into GMB, let's look at how people search.