1. Purchase a great content-rich professionally designed website

I have to say if you do not have a great website, and I am not talking about one your kid sister made, or one created using a GoDaddy template, then you will not be able to convey the professionalism that you need to convey to create confidence in yourself or your products to potential customers. Many startups come to me asking why they do not generate sales and when I look at their website it appears that they are operating on a shoe string. The Web is a great equalizer. Your business startup website can make your business appear to be large, established, and successful if it reflects true professionalism in content and in design. This is one of the most critical expenses that any new business startup should invest in. You may choose to work with our firm for a custom website or a Quick Launch website or select another web design firm, but you must have a good-looking professional appearing web presence.

2. Get involved immediately with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter

You’ve got to get the word out about yourself once you have a website. By updating your status and posting information, sharing and interacting online at a minimum of three times a day on these various sites you start to build an online presence, get authority links to point to your new website and inside content, and start to establish yourself as a contender in your industry. I have reviewed many social networking sites and these are the ones where I invest my own time (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn). I recommend in some cases setting up accounts under your own name as the business owner. I do not have one profile for business and one for pleasure. Small businesses need to just get involved with social networking and typically some of your very first customers will be friends, family, and social contacts.

If you take the attitude that social networking is a time pit and worthless, you will be woefully wrong and out of the loop. In fact the more you involve yourself in these endeavors with the attitude that you are sharing and providing information and not looking particularly to sell, the more fun you will have and the more fruitful the connections will become.

I have closed sales from social networking contacts. It does happen, really. But if you watch any of the networking I do myself you will see that I am open, sharing, providing information on a wide variety of topics and soft selling my own services only occasionally. I do not use social networking as a brochure or lead generation opportunity, but yet it has worked to bring me business over time.

3. Get started on Google AdWords

If you have the budget you really want your very next step to be advertising your products and services on Google AdWords. Don’t waste money at this point on Yahoo, MSN adCenter, Yoddle or other pay per click enterprises. Concentrate on AdWords. If you cannot afford a professional account manager such as myself, then get started using the simple to use Google AdWords Starter version. If you are advertising your services to a national audience be prepared to spend anywhere from about $1.25 to $3.50 or so per click (some businesses will pay much more). Don’t go into this expecting to pay $.05 per click and set $150 per 30 days as your monthly budget. Allocate $500 to $800 for the first 30 days of clicks and set your maximum click cost to a “market reasonable” setting. Make sure you set up special landing pages for your ad group themes and have conversion tracking installed. Review your program often to make sure that your money is working for you and is an investment in the future not an expense.

4. Build great content on your website under your domain name using a blog

Now we’re moving into maintenance mode on your website. You must be adding to and growing your web presence over time to attract search engine robots, improve your placement organically, and to provide opportunities for readers to connect with you. There is no better way to do this than using a blog. Blogs build website traffic, allow for keyword dense topics to be discussed and housed under your domain name, and build “web authority” for your site over time. It is not necessary for you to have a professional blogger write for you. Although we offer this service, there is no replacement for your insights as the business owner, but you must be a consistent writer however and provide interesting on-topic information and resources in your blog posts.

5. Focus on customer service in all you do

I have found when I first started out that it was easy to do the work, but hard to find someone to pay for it. Here is where top notch customer focused customer service is key for a new business startup. You must provide free information and help initially to prospects, then move them to a paying customer status, and then finally  make sure that you do everything possible to satisfy them. My own business started out solely as a word of mouth referral service and now earns a six figure income. When you build your base on happy customers, rewarding referrals, and provide real advise and value to customers, your business will grow.

If you have other recommendations for a business startup, just leave your comments to this post below. I’d love to see what you think is important.

If you feel that you need a more personalized plan and review of your own business’ current statistical information we do provide consulting services for $90 per hour.  Much of the information on what you can do and how to do it however is provided as free content on our website and blog, so we invite you to dig deeper and browse our content. You’re sure to find a wealth of information in both locations.

I have to say it is flattering when this happens but is troubling to me as well. We pay our writers typical blog writing rates for blog posts. I have to say it can be good money for a prolific blogger but is certainly not a way to get rich by being a writer. Web content and book writing is typically paid at a significantly higher rate normally $75 to $125 per hour including research time or even $1 per word. It rubs me the wrong way when we have a client take blog posts and pass them off as their own writing in a book and then make a large profit on the book without looking back.

It seems incredibly unfair to the writer and in fact simply does not square with me when this happens. I work hard to help our writers be productive, learn great technique, and make money blogging. If I get more money, I share with them. Their hard work is our success story and we create a partnership with each writer to help them be all they can be and to receive fair compensation for what they do for us in a great work environment.

Based on this new query of book  use, I will be putting a clause in our letter of agreement that blog posts may not be used for books. Our writers simply must receive more compensation when a written piece is used in a professional arena such as a book or professional magazine.

One other big issue to consider for clients to just take blog posts and compile a book from them (one actually told us) is that we reserve the right to use the content we create for marketing and promotional purposes, as we see fit on our website. If a client takes blog post content and passes it off as their writing in a book, it is highly possible that on a Google search the same content will turn up on our website stating that we are the writer in our sample content section. For a high profile book this could be potentially embarrassing for an author.

It is by far better to be upfront with us,  negotiate fair payment for what you will using content for. This way you will not be hurting yourself or your reputation in the future if you are suddenly outed with not having written your own content for your own book. Just my thought for the day. you may agree or may not.

Rich Snippets

When Google speaks I listen. Recently it was announced that Google was embracing Rich Snippets. There is a special syntax to use that is XML based for creating your snippets and embedding them in your source code and I want to review, try them on my own website, and see how the search engines really use the information. Will it help in anyway with what is shown in the results, does it give a website a bump over the others? Whatever I find out, I’ll make sure to share with you here. Learn more about Rich Snippets at Search Engine Land.

Spry Features

I moved to Dreamweaver and am now introducing several new XML technologies into my own website. Right now I am working on creating and XML feed to show my online web design Portfolio. Dreamweaver makes it pretty easy to do this stuff, but the applications for other content and sites may be really cool, so I am chinking away at learning more about the use of accordion panels and data sets. I am already heavily using the Spry drop down and fly out menus. They are nice and very search engine friendly, but I would like to skin them better with background graphics for a more custom look. I’ll point to my projects when I am ready to show them off.

Web Slices

This is another brand new technology introduced with Internet Explorer 8.  Web slices are little snippets that you can change and people can subscribe to to review in their browser favorites bar without visiting your site. Could be a very cool way to show discounts, feature products, or snippets of content that change regularly. I think that this will have really cool application for websites and want to understand them more. Here is some information from CoDe magazine on how to build a web slice.  I’m not sure what search engines are doing with the information yet, but just like RSS feeds this could be a huge new technology that will bloom in the months to years to come.

Topics for this month are:

Graphic Electric Inc. Moves to the Web

Facebook Advertising Reviewed: Is It Worth the Money?

Microsoft Releases a New Search Engine Called Bing

As always you’ll get my candid comments and review as well as notes on special features or things to keep an eye on.

For us, we are niche suppliers. My firm specializes in organic placement and the creation of Web Authority websites. That means, great website design full of SEO built from the ground up and content rich. You will pay for this kind of website truthfully, but with nearly nine years of experience we know our stuff! Our typical client will spend about $4,000 to $5,500 for the initial website and then continue to add content and enhancements to it over time. At around the end of one year, we typically will have excellent organic placement on Google and a marketing machine built for the client that is propelling their business forward.

Many clients will tie the original design work in with our blogging services, article marketing, and Google AdWords services after the website is launched. However initially rarely do we sell all items as a package together. I really feel that I want to see what is needed after the site is launched before we recommend the next step.

I have long felt that the best approach for businesses is to allow them to “cherry pick” our service offering based on what their needs are and their budget is. I have rarely created big packages as I feel that each client is different and each persons need is different. We want to help the client make great decisions not based on a package we sell, but based on where they can get the most “bang for their buck”.

We’ve lived in several different states over the years - Ohio, Florida, Texas, and now Maryland. When we moved to Maryland just outside the DC area we were amazed at how unfriendly the people in the area were in comparison to the other places that we have lived. We’ve lived here now over 10 years and our perception has not changed. In fact, as we have chatted with other transplants, we’ve found that they share our viewpoint.

I am not sure whether it is a “clannish” kind of Southern Maryland thing, where natives have never lived anywhere else and feel that the unfriendliness and outright rudeness sometimes is the norm, but it can be shocking to say the least. For the two of us, we call it the “Waldorf Mentality”. That means, “we are so busy and so000 very important that we do not have time for you or for your little need”. Man, I have to say for businesses who embrace this arrogance, this is a real growth crusher.

It is easy to slip into the “Waldorf Mentality” - hey I live here and I see that sometimes I even get that attitude too. When business is great and clients are really rolling in, you can forget your best business model which by the way my husband and I used to call the “Southern Suck Up”. (This one is the opposite extreme where the customer is always right and you do anything to keep a customer.)

Now, I strive to stay humble and focused on what the customer needs. I may not be the best match sometimes for a customer and am not afraid to say so, but when I am a match, I roll out the red carpet and work my best to be the best “partner” for success ever. So what mentality have you embraced? Is success and the arrogance that comes with it becoming your downfall?

Next time you log into your Facebook account you will probably see a list of URLs that Facebook suggests for you. You can even check some of your own selections. If you are like some of our clients, you clicked this closed and now that you want a vanity URL you cannot find where to get one in the Facebook control panel settings.

Here’s how to get your vanity URL:

1. Log into your Facebook account.

2. Enter this URL in your browser: http://www.facebook.com/username/ 

3. This will bring up the Vanity URL screen and allow you to select your vanity URL.

So what’s the big deal? Well my vanity URL is www.Facebook.com/nancy.mccord that is a whole lot easier to remember than what it was before with a huge string of numbers and characters.

With our Twitter Executive program you will get:

• Twitter set up and account configuration
• Consultation with Nancy McCord to understand your business objectives
• Integration into your blog, website, and other social networking platforms
• Personal training on using TweetDeck
• Training on how to use Twitter effectively
• One business week of multiple posts per day on Twitter
• List of our resources to watch for great content to tweet about

If you really don’t want to do your own tweets after set up, for very select group of clients we will ghost Twitter. You can find out more about these two programs and our pricing by visiting our Twitter services page on our website.

With HootSuite, I can post to both Twitter accounts or just one account with one click. I can even schedule tweets to one or both whenever I want from one online control panel. In fact that is the beauty of HootSuite, it is an online application that really saves you time. You can have as many Twitter profiles set up as you desire. Then when you want to tweet, just click on the profile icon to assign where your tweet will be published. It’s easy!

HootSuite even allows you to review @ replies and direct messages for each profile on one very handy screen. For me, the power Twitter user, this is excellent news!

Now the reality of the situation is that HootSuite does not replace TweetDeck for me at this point, hopefully TweetDeck will add a multi-profile management option in the future, but for now does not. Typically during the day I will have TweetDeck open to monitor Twitter traffic and topics and also a browser screen open with HootSuite. This way I can rapidly tweet with one click yet monitor my groups and traffic.

HootSuite is not an application to replace TweetDeck, which is still hands down the best Twitter aggregator that I have tried, but it does make posting to multiple Twitter profiles easy which you simply cannot do with TweetDeck.

Just be careful if you have multiple Twitter accounts in posting the same content to all. Twitter can consider this spamming and will close your account so be judicious about when you tweet about the same topic on multiple Twitter accounts.

You can sign up for access to HootSuite for free and check it out for yourself.

I have one large client whose site I occasionally webmaster who has had this happen to him. It crept up on him slowly, but now the tech bloat is really coming back to bite him. big time. The issue is that now his site is so dynamic in nature, pulls in fields from his database from many elements that  he is spending more time fixing things than he is spending growing his business. Right now his administrative control panel is down, broken when his developer added an interface to feed registrations to populate a store shopping cart. Then the developer broke the look and feel of the site when he set up a new password login. It is one problem after another.

Now if his database tied to his computer server in his business office has a hiccup, his website is impacted. It has become so sensitive and the problems now so fierce that he almost has had to set up a cot for his developer. All this for about 30 visitors a day to his website!

This is a situation where you don’t have to have everything fed into your website from a database. For a business this size they just don’t need this type of technological interface, in fact it is overkill.

At this point due to the nature of the problems, now the client is considering scrapping his entire site and all the technology that he has paid to be created and going back to a static site with an off-site place for certain transactions to keep the main site separate from the more dynamic problems. It is a shame that the client did not receive good guidance from the programmer to help scale his needs to his traffic and has ended up throwing money out the window. Technology is a good thing, but don’t let it drive your website before you really need it.

Here’s a great example from another of our blog writers who has done just that - taken a dry or difficult topic and had some fun with it and made the blog interesting reading. You can view the blog at Dual Flush by SelectAFlush.

This writer has taken a perspective that the client’s product is something that every water conscious customer should install at home in their toilet. She has blogged on a variety of topics such as:

1. Celebs’ Climb to Focus Attention on Water Crisis
2. Where Does Your Trash Go?
3. Water Woes Batter South Florida
4. How Easy Is It to Install SelectAFlush Toilet Retrofit Kits?

Although this blog may not be one that is up on your watch daily list, it is an excellent example of how business of all types and sorts are using blogging to drive traffic to their website with unique, interesting, and well written content. If your business is like SelectAFlush, now may be the time for you to contact me to check this writer availability to write for your topic too.  With eight blog writers writing for McCord Web Services clients, we are sure to have a writer who is a good match for your needs too!

We have an e-commerce client who happens to sell new issue stamps and we blog three days a week for him about interesting stamps, stamp trivia, stories about stamps, and cool information that you might not know about particular stamps. Blogger has decided that the blog is a “spam blog” as all links point to his website (to products) as do many e-commerce blogs.

As a result, Blogger has threatened to delete the blog if we do not request a review. It has now been two weeks since we requested a review. In fact actually the second time we requested a review as Blogger forgot after one week that we had already requested a review once. There is no time frame on the review, just the threat to delete the blog.

Additionally now to publish a post on the blog, we have to enter a series of letter or numbers into a field, proving that we are real humans not robots posting to this blog. I have to say that this is annoying but to the nth degree. All of our content is unique and not scraped. If there was ever a good reason to move to WordPress, this is it.

I understand that no one wants to read spam, but I feel that Blogger is being heavy handed here. They should have instituted a timely review process before they slapped down interesting content rich blogs!

In fact you can check the blog out to review it for yourself here at The Stamp Collectors Corner.

Graphic Electric

We’ve just finished this brand new website for Graphic Electric and wanted to share it with you. This site was built for an electrical contractor located in Maryland which serves Maryland, Virginia, Washington DC, and Delaware.

This is their first time on the Web. The business has been providing industrial electrician services since 1986 but just now putting up their first website.

Make sure to check out the Flash slide show on the Industrial Laundry services page as you will see some fabulous before and after shots of the warehouse before and after Graphic Electric has wired and installed all of the laundry equipment. It is very interesting.

This site was built with Dreamweaver’s AJAX navigation which is search engine friendly yet gives the look and feel of a typical drop down menu - in this case horizontal slide out menu.

The site has been well optimized and is full of client testimonials and project descriptions. Even if you are not looking for an electrical contractor, we invite you to click in and check out this new website.

I have been testing this new application and consider it a must have for any Twitter “power user”. It is free to use, but you can upgrade to the Professional version and get more features, but the free version is certainly handy and does a few very cool things.

• Allows you to set up an auto responder sent automatically to anyone who follows you.
• Allows you to follow (or not) them automatically when they follow you.
• Allows you to unfollow them automatically when they unfollow you.
• Allows you to schedule tweets for future publishing.
• Allows you to enter tweets and will meter out their publishing automatically - like a drip campaign.

I have been using TweetLater mainly for the auto responder feature and find it a great tool for building and connecting with others. If you want to consider the Professional version, it will cost $29.97 a month. In the Professional version you will be able to:

• Manage multiple Twitter accounts.
• Allow account access to an assistant
• Schedule @ replies and direct messages to when the recipient is online.
• Schedule reoccurring tweets and supply alternative text for rotation.
• Choose to mute specific uses without unfollowing them.
• Use TweetCockpit as your Twitter power user interface.

For my personal needs the free version is a good fit. People who may be interested in the Professional version may be product managers and advertising agency account managers.

If you are not using Twitter, you may wonder what is all the buzz about, why invest my precious time? With the research that I have done this past month, what I have found is that some people are actually selling their Twitter traffic services. Let’s say you have 20,000 followers, you tweet about a product and include a link. Even if 10% of your followers went to visit the link, that’s a whooping 2,000 new visitors exposed to your product or service. There have been some interesting stories lately on the Web of entrepreneurs making thousands of dollars a month driving traffic to paying web clients in this manner.

What does this all mean for the everyday business owner? Well first, I’m not going into business selling traffic, but what that does tell me is that if you have a new service, a new product, something you want to promote. You can do it easily, for free, to others in your wider social network thereby exposing your products, services, and content to a massive audience all by yourself. All it takes is some time to build your Twitter following base while interacting with others. It’s actually a win-win situation have fun, build followers, build website or blogsite traffic. TweetLater is just one of the tools to use in your arsenal to get and build your following in your first step towards marketing yourself and services online for free.

First remember that blogs communicate in the world of HTML and each blog post is really an entry in a database. When you use special characters in your blog post title sometimes you mess of the database preventing WordPress from being able to find the post to return it on its own page.

Here are some of the characters that we know cause this to happen: …   -   &

If this happens to you, you cannot just go in and fix the title, the damage has been done. You will need to delete the blog post and totally re-enter it in WordPress.

So if you have been mystified over when and why this happens, now you know!

Have you seen other characters do this on your blog? Leave me a list below to share your knowledge so we can all stay away from those characters too.