Free EBook Samples: Free ebook sample of "Patrick Soller's Guide to Digitizing Your Business" by Patrick Soller

Patrick Soller's
Guide to Digitizing Your Business

How to Build your Business Online...
A Simple System to Increase Sales,
Improve Profits, and Grow Your Business

Patrick Soller

Patrick Soller’s Guide to Digitizing Your Business

Copyright © 2011 by Patrick Soller

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

Foreword

Patrick Soller’s Guide to Digitizing Your Business is an important book for any small business owner to read. Those of us who are veterans of Internet marketing know successful online business promotion never happens just by building a site and hoping customers will find it. Developing a successful website for your business is not rocket science – but expertise does involve a pretty steep learning curve. That’s why I like this book so much. It gives business owners an intelligent overview of what it takes to thrive online. The result is the potential for widespread economic recovery starting at the small business level.

This book presents local online marketing in a way that even the most tech-adverse business owner can get an understanding of what they need to do next. It highlights some of the challenges in today’s marketing world, and gives practical advice on overcoming them. It shows companies how to connect better, faster, and easier with their prospective customers using the Internet.

If you own a business, this book was written for you. In these pages you’ll find hope – hope that your business can thrive even today, hope that you might be able to get back to whatever it was that attracted you to your field in the first place rather than working all the time to try to get new customers. Most importantly it provides a process for helping you connect with the people who really need the products and services your business offers.

Patrick explains local Internet marketing in a simple,
conversational style that makes for an easy read. That’s not to say any of this complicated strategy was over-simplified. In fact, I’m proud to see how well the discussion matches with my extensive, industry-leading course on the subject.

Anyone wanting to double or triple their business should read and re-read this book. It can literally turn a dying business into one that’s booming again. Around my
company’s headquarters, we often say we’re in the business of creating heroes. Thanks, Patrick. Through your book, you’re making a difference.

Mike Koenigs

Table of Contents

Yippee

Yippee. You’ve got your own business, or practice, or what-ever you want to call it. It’s all yours (well, and the bank’s or whoever you’ve got calling or mailing you on a regular basis asking for payments). And how wonderful that you’ve achieved your childhood dream of getting paid to do always and only what you LOVE to do.

OK. So maybe not.

In fact, if you could travel back in time to meet with your young self, all bright-eyed and enthusiastic about this endeavor, you might smack yourself silly for thinking that THING you wanted to do would be just about all you’d have to do in order to have a successful business.

That younger version of you - hair intact and fully
pigmented - never dreamed of all the OTHER stuff you’d find yourself doing day in and day out. The planning, the marketing, the sales, the scheduling, the re-scheduling, the supply ordering (how is it you go through so many pens, and where do they GO?), the accounts payable, the
accounts receivable, the never-ending cycle of hiring, training, firing, and replacing, payroll, bookkeeping,
researching, buying, learning, and maintaining all your equipment... exhausted yet?

Oh yes, and there’s that THING you wanted to do. The thing that started all of this. You probably went to school a while for this. Probably took on some debt. Probably invested some money and time and sweat to learn how to do it well. At one point you loved this thing - maybe you still do. But it sure seems like a lot of trouble having to do all that other stuff so you get to do that thing.

It gets worse.

Just a few years ago, there was this big, thick book
published every year that magically put some money into your coffers. Customers, patients, clients - whatever you call them in your world - opened this book, found your
business, called, and then spent money with you. The phone book... sure it cost you an arm and a leg, but the ads worked (for the most part, sort of). Sure you grew to hate the sight of your rep, your wallet sweating every year when they came to renew your ad, always with the pressure to try
something bigger, bolder, more colorful. But at least it sort of worked.

Now, not so much. Unless your customers fit certain die-hard phone book user demographics. Otherwise, your customers probably can’t remember where they shoved their phone book. Or it went right into recycling as soon as it was delivered. Or if you’re in a metropolitan area, it was one of several different books they received - and they chose to keep the one you decided not to advertise in this year.

The marketing spaghetti toss - you know, throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks - it’s expensive, head-bangingly frustrating, and more than a little scary. You know you’ve got to have a steady stream of feet through your door, butts in your seats, or however else you measure profitability. Not only do you have to get these people to come in once, in most businesses, you’ve got to keep them coming back. You know it’s not cutting it just being a business networking group member, joining a leads
swapping group, or advertising every-where you can think of.

You know the Internet’s inevitable for you. You probably even have a website. Possibly even a really great-looking one. And if it’s not so great-looking (thanks to your
brother’s idiot nephew who swore he could build you one that would be ‘awesome’, you’ve probably got plans and dreams for the site you’d really like to have. Maybe you’ve got website envy - your competitor’s got the site you’d love to have someday. You keep hearing how important it is to get your business online, to build an Internet presence, to use social media to get new customers, to tap into the power of the web...

Sure. You need one more (huge) challenge for your business. In your spare time. Oh yes, and one with a pretty steep learning curve.

“Got a sharp stick I could poke my eyes out with?”
Yeah, I know.

That’s why I’m giving you this book.

That THING you do in your business? Well, my thing is
marketing businesses like yours. I like it. I’m good at it. I’ve invested time, money, and sweat learning what works, what doesn’t work so well, and what’s going to work best for your kind of business. Whatever it is that you do as your THING, it’s not something I can do for myself, probably - and for sure it wouldn’t be the best use of my time and energy learning how to do it, or trying to do it. But I bet if you had a book on it that broke all the steps and processes into manageable bites and translated all the jargon into plain
English, I could learn enough about it to understand what I needed to learn more about in order to do it, or to learn that no way, no how did I want to have to do that thing for myself, ever.

This is that book.

One way you’ll benefit by giving it a quick read is that there are a lot of people out there who would love nothing better than to take your money and not do squat for you, and hopefully this will help you avoid them. Or, maybe you actually DO want to do all your own marketing for your business, and this will help you understand what you’d need to do to make it work. Maybe you’re starting from square one as far as online marketing goes; this should help you avoid some costly pitfalls and develop a battle plan before you start throwing money around.

Or, maybe you’ve got a site that’s sucking your money into a black abyss, your website developer has disappeared, the site’s outdated, unattractive, and just sitting there - and you’d rather stick your finger in a socket than deal with trying to fix it.

This should help.

Cheer up; it won’t be so bad. In fact, this could be a major turning point in your business. Learning just a little bit about this - enough to take some action - could mean the difference between closing your doors (or wishing you could) and expansion. The info you’re about to read has helped many, many businesses double, triple, or grow even more than that, even in a challenged economy.

If your competitors have been stealing your lunch money lately when it comes to getting new customers, that’s about to stop. Your phone book ad rep would break a sweat seeing you read this, because the next call you’d make might be to be sure your ad doesn’t renew because you’ll be “going another direction” next time.

You might even put this book down in a couple of hours feeling more optimistic than you’ve felt in a long, long time. You’ll understand some stuff you’ve never really had anyone explain clearly before, your brain will begin hatching all kinds of new ideas, and you’ll see the start of a game plan you can actually follow to restore some sanity to your life.

This Means War

Nobody should ever start anything without some sort of plan in place. Doesn’t have to be completely fleshed out to the nth degree with every contingency accounted for - but it’s awfully hard to hit an undefined target. You need a battle plan. At stake, the future profitability and (dare we even say this?) enjoyment of running your business.

What’s the end goal? More, better customers (clients, patients - we’ll just go with customers to keep it simple). Meaning, you’ve got all the customers you want, anytime you want them - and they’re paying you well and walking away happy. Not asking much, huh?

Think about this from the customer’s side. Think about a favorite business you frequent (or one you remember from being a kid - since everything looks rosier with a couple of decades in the rear-view mirror). This business was THE best at something. You looked forward to going there, you told your friends about it, you told people you didn’t even know about it, you knew without a doubt that THIS was the place to go for (fill in the blank). You didn’t even really mind if they raised prices - and you weren’t alone, because the place pretty much had a line wrapped around the building anytime the doors were open.

Now, maybe this business WAS the best... but maybe, just maybe, it benefited just a tiny bit from peoples’ perception being contagious. It was seen as the best because it was seen as the best. Nothing wrong with that - and certainly a dog of a business would have a hard time convincing anyone it’s the best - but it makes the ‘best’ status a little more
attainable. Also good news because it means your business doesn’t truly have to be the hands-down winner of
measurable ‘best-ness’ in order to enjoy outrageous success.

One of your primary goals in marketing is to become known as the go-to business for whatever it is you offer. There’s a sense of expertise involved. Probably this isn’t an issue for you, but if you do happen to feel a little overwhelmed by the ‘expert’ label, consider that an expert really only needs to know more than, say, 90% of people out there in the general population. If you’ve been in business for any length of time, it’s pretty safe to assume you’re an expert in your field.

Why is this important?

People want to do business with people they know, like, and trust. They want to business with an expert because time’s short, resources can be tight, and frankly, they just don’t want to mess around doing business with a hack.

Generally, people will give some benefit of the doubt that you’re an expert - just by virtue of the fact that you’re in business. But there’s a lot you can do to help that
perception along. It’s not bragging or boasting - it’s actually a matter of helping your prospective customers get what they want and need.

How does this play out in your online marketing?

This is huge - and it’s the foundation of everything you need to do online for your business. You want it to be that anytime someone goes looking online for the products or services you offer, there you are. You want it so that everywhere they turn online, they find information, positive reviews, maps, directory listings, news, articles, videos, and more - all pointing to YOU as the go-to resource they’ve been looking for. If you do enough to promote your business (and give value even to people who aren’t yet your customers), you will achieve online domination. You will become practically untouchable by your competitors.

OK, so let’s get to work. Let me give you an overall
understanding of how this all plays out online.

Let’s say you sit down at your computer and go looking for... information on how to train your dog.

• Chances are, you’ll use Google (it’s by far the most-used search engine, dwarfing all the others by a mile) - but maybe you’ll use Bing or Yahoo.

• You type in: how to train a dog (or something similar). This is called a keyword (or keyword phrase).

• You get a list of results (websites, articles, blog posts,
  videos, products, maybe even a trainer or two).

At the top of that list you’ll probably have a few
‘sponsored’ results - these are ads. They’re at the top of the list because someone paid for them to be there. The moment that advertiser stops paying for the ad, it
disappears. Same thing with many searches where you get sponsored results to the right of the screen.

As an aside, these ads are created through a program called AdWords. It’s a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising model - you bid on ad space according to the words you choose, and you only pay up to your bid amount anytime someone clicks your ad. Unless you’ve got experience running a PPC campaign, or you have unlimited marketing funds, you may not want to go that route on your own - you can run up a huge tab pretty quickly and not get much in the way of results.

Anyway, once you scroll down past the ads, you get to what’s called organic results. There are ten of these per page in most cases. These are websites, articles, blog posts, videos, etc. that Google has determined to be relevant to what you went looking for.

This is important. Relevancy is very important to Google. Here’s why... if you went looking for tips on training your dog and ended up with a list of results that ranged from oatmeal cookie recipes to hot vacation destinations to how to sharpen a pencil - well, you’d probably never use Google again. And that would mean Google lost (usership, revenue, and respect) - and the one rule to get straight right off the bat is that Google never loses. So, Google strives to make absolutely sure that no matter what, the results it comes up with are relevant to what the user hoped to find.

With that in mind, when someone goes looking online for the products or services you sell, Google WANTS to include your business in those search results.

Trouble is, Google’s pretty clever - but it doesn’t know everything. And unless you’ve made an effort for Google to know your business, it’s not going to bet the farm in speculating what you do.

Back to our example. You’ve got a dog that needs training. You’re looking at about 3.7 million results that Google suggested for you. Alright - now it’s time to read all of them.

No?

Of course not. In fact, you probably will stop clicking after the first page. Certainly after the first few - and you’d have to have one bad dog to keep reading up to that point. Most online searchers end with the first page. In fact, most end with the first few organic results - the ones that appear “above the fold”. Above the fold is a reference to print news-papers - the front top of the first page has all the stories most likely to cause someone to plunk down a few coins to buy the paper. Online, above the fold is what you can see without scrolling down.

Those top several results on the first page of Google are
statistically far more likely to get clicked than others toward the bottom.

Not to jump ahead too far, but YOU WANT THOSE TOP SPOTS! In fact, you want as many spots as you can get, as high as you can get them. (So does your competitor.)

Nobody knows exactly how Google determines what’s going to appear in those top spots. If you ever hear an Internet marketer complaining about Google changing its algorithm, that’s what that is - some mysterious calculation they use to see how to order the results.

While we don’t know all the details, we have figured out how to make Google like a website enough to list it toward the top. We know what Google likes, and what Google hates.

Quick aside here - one thing Google hates is being tricked. There’s a whole industry out there called “Black Hat SEO” - it’s sneaky, bad guy kind of stuff with the whole goal of making Google like a website under false pretenses. The tactics are constantly evolving, but the end result is always the same - eventually Google figures out what the black hatter did and bans websites that are using this sneaky stuff.

So, how do you make Google like your site?

You play fair. You offer real, valuable content. You don’t try to play games.

It’s a bit like a popularity contest, really. Someone searches on Google, and Google scours the Internet looking for the most relevant results possible. It looks at your website (if you’re catching Google’s attention) to evaluate whether your site is a relevant results. It looks at other websites to see whether they’ve got an opinion of your site’s relevance for that search. It pays special attention to websites it already respects. The goal is to have all of these (your site and other respected sites) essentially voting for your
website.

And the best news is, you can stuff the ballot box. That means your website will get listed toward the top, you’ll make it easier for more prospective customers to find you online (even if they don’t know your name), they’ll visit your site and be far more likely to call or come in, and they’ll want to do business with you.

The rest of this book is going to lay out a plan for you to achieve online domination. It’s a bit like playing chess - but with the end goal of helping your customers to get what they really want and need (you!).

The Secret Sauce

Know how in most projects, there’s a preparation phase that’s boring, tricky, tedious, and yet completely crucial to the success of the rest of the project?

That’s this part.

Skip this, and you’ll be in good (bad?) company. You’ll get to dive into dozens of online marketing tasks that are way more fun - but you won’t be able to do them correctly. You’ll jump ahead to the part where you get to climb the ladder - but you’ll figure out pretty quickly your ladder wasn’t leaning on the right tree.

What is it? Keyword research.

Yes, just as boring and techy as it sounds. But without it, you’ll completely waste your time and money and get way less than optimal results.

We’ll try to make this as painless as possible.

What Is Keyword Research?

When people go searching for information, products, and services, what they type into Google (and we’ll just use Google to represent all of the search engines) is a keyword. A keyword could actually be a whole phrase - even a really long one - or just a single word.

Keyword research involves studying how people search online. Seems like it would be pretty intuitive and straight-forward, until you dig a little deeper. For our example of searching for dog training tips, keyword research might reveal that people go looking for that same information using these key-words:

• how to train a dog

• dog training

• tips for training dogs

• how can I get my dog to stop barking?

• dog barks

• puppy training

• Labrador Retriever training

• my dog won’t stop barking at the delivery man

• dog bark help

• why does my dog bark

• puppies help

• help dogs

• …and about a million other variations

People search in odd ways online. Sometimes in ways you’d never imagine. Sometimes with misspellings, ‘wrong’ terms, slang, bad grammar, and generalities or specifics that are mind-boggling.

It’s just about impossible to predict how your customers will go looking for you online. It’s really better not to even try, because you’ll always be wrong - you just may not know it.

There are four major traps you can fall into with keyword research:

Mistake #1: Skip it altogether.

We’ve already gone over why that’s a really, really bad idea.

Mistake #2: Look at your neighbor’s paper.

You can tell from the wording that this will be a mistake - and for some of the same reasons this isn’t a good idea in school, either. It happens, though. A business owner decides it’s time to get busy online and hears something about keywords being important. They go to their
competitor’s website and do some poking around to discover what keywords that guy’s going after. That guy seems smart enough, so the keywords are probably good.

Trouble is, you don’t know how he got his keywords or whether they’re performing well. You’re going to be spending a lot of time trying to get Google to associate these keywords with your website; it would be a shame to chase after keywords that stink. Worse yet, you’ll be
competing with that guy for these keywords - and if they stink, it’s an even bigger loss.

Mistake #3: Forget to actually use them.

Sounds crazy, but even after compiling a list of great
key-words, some people just file the list away and forget to actually use what they’ve learned. It’s like custom-crafting fine marble tiles and then using a cheap laminate for your kitchen instead. You’ll want to refer to your list of great keywords constantly as you work on marketing your site.

Mistake #4: Only do your keyword research once.

Doing keyword research the right way is an ongoing process. It’s not something you can do just once and then cross it off of your to-do list forever. There are a couple of reasons for this.

Chances are, your business is multi-faceted and there are
multiple ways people might go looking for your products and services online. There are multiple angles you could pursue as far as your keywords go, and it’s unlikely you will be able to go after all of them exhaustively in one attempt.

For example, consider a dental practice that’s looking to use the Internet to get more patients. Depending on what sort of specialties the dentist has, it might work to go after pain-free dental treatment, pediatric dental, restorative or
cosmetic dental services, or even sedation dentistry. There are hundreds of keywords that could work for each of these niches. Doing exhaustive research on each of them could take weeks.

Rather than trying to get all of your keyword research done at one time, it’s a better idea to do thorough research on one particular part of your business and then come back and add another part later. Otherwise, you may never get past the research stage, which is useless on its own.

Another reason you’ll need to revisit your keyword
research is changes in your industry or individual business. Again, for dentists, if you get advanced training on a new procedure and want to market your new service online, you’ll need to know how people are searching for that procedure. The same holds true if you get new equipment, a new product line, or some sort of new technology that people are looking for. As conditions and offerings change in your business, you’ll want to be sure your online presence connects with the changing way prospective customers look for you.

So, how do you do keyword research?

There are a number of ways to perform this task - none of which are particularly quick and easy, but there are a few that aren’t too complicated. Be prepared to spend several hours doing your keyword research. It’s not a process that can be hurried, and it’s important enough that it’s worth taking the time to do it correctly.

Keyword research tool options include some that you pay for (either a one-time fee or a pay-as-you-go option), and some that are free. Some are fairly easy to use, and some have such a steep learning curve that they’re really not appropriate for non-Internet marketing professionals’ use. For the best possible keyword research results, you may want to outsource this task to an expert. They typically have access to sophisticated keyword research tools and know how to use them efficiently. Purchasing the better tools and learning how to use them is probably not the best use of your time - and because you’ll want to do your keyword research a bit at a time, you’ll end up spending a
considerable amount of time trying to remember how to use the tools.

Purchase this book or download sample versions for your ebook reader.
(Pages 1-16 show above.)