The best way to make the most out of this year-end is to get a great start on next year.  Since you can’t start something until you know where you want to go, it’s time to set some goals.

When setting our goals, we’re not going to produce a big report that ends up in a three-ring binder, we’re making a one-page plan for your business that you can refer to and think about every day.  There are only a few ground rules:

1. You can only have three objectives.
2. It must address your entire business.
3. It must be in writing.

To start, write down ten things about your business that you’d like to improve. Sales?  Profits?  Number of Customers?  Add new products or fulfillment capacity?  Growth?  Change of – or new – location?  Change of – or new – employees?  Having more fun?  Taking home more income? Cutting costs?

Got ten written down?  OK; now prioritize them, because you can only work on three at a time. I know, it’s tough, so try the “forced choice” process.  Pick the most important goal.  Then, from those remaining on your list, pick the most important goal.  Repeat this once more, and you have your list of your top three objectives for the year.

Write these three goals down on a clean piece of paper, and you’re halfway done with your plan! No, it’s not crazy.  If you concentrate on just three things – and do them well – your business will improve and you can work on the NEXT three.

In my next post, I’ll show you how to finish your plan!

One of the reasons that I have always loved being in the web business is because things constantly change.  When I first got online in 1993, we used bulletin board systems and monochrome monitors.  When I got my first tech job in 1996, everything was about corporate Windows networks and preparing for Y2K (remember that?).  When I started in ecommerce in 2000, it was all about building tech tools from scratch because very few existed at a price point for small to mid-sized businesses.

Today, the web is about marketing.  And one of the biggest influences in that shift has come from the world of search.  Findability is key, above all else.  And that means the topic of search engine optimization is one that every web professional has to be at least a little familiar with, even if it’s not your core business.

Every single week I have people coming to me to ask for help with their SEO, and the cold hard truth is that most of them have no idea what they really need, and are not prepared for what it’s going to cost (in either time or money) to get what they think they want.  As a result, these entrepreneurs are often tempted by unscrupuoulous parasites who troll the internet looking for hapless victims who can quickly and easily be separated from their money.

In his recent blog article, In SEO, There’s No Such Thing As A Guarantee, Brand5 CEO Mark Faggiano takes these spammers to task and issues a warning to those who might be tempted to bite.  Mark’s point is that, if you get an email from someone “guaranteeing” you top ranked SEO results, it’s junk and don’t buy into their promises.

For anyone (legitimate) who works in this field, this is often the very first conversation we have with prospective clients.  Why?  Because such “guarantees” are not possible.  There is too much outside of any one person’s control to be able to make promises like this.  Things change too rapidly and there is no way to ensure that what worked yesterday will work tomorrow.

Of course, this is also the reason that many people get sticker shock when they talk to a legitimate SEO about doing this type of work:  it’s time consuming, and so it is often very expensive.  Moreso than many entrepreneurs are ready, willing or able to pay.

So when I start working with a client, my first meeting with them is about understanding what truly makes sense, and figuring out a plan forward.  I start with a few basic questions when it comes to developing a plan.

What are your products or services?
Not all businesses need great SEO to get the effect that they need.  In fact, some will be better off putting those resources in other places entirely, because their customers are just not internet-centric.  Another thing to consider is that, the only way people can find you is if your product or service is something that your customers can describe/articulate themselves and would think to look online for a solution.

For some businesses that is obvious, but for innovative products or services, sometimes keyword-based solutions are the wrong way to go because your customers may not have any idea that you’ve even got a solution or what you’ve named it.

Do you have an automated sales process or a hands-on one?
If you have a product that people can find, signup and use without ever having to interact with a live person (such as WorkingPoint), then SEO has great value.  If you are someone who provides a customized service (such as a consultant), where you have to scope the job, do some research, have some meetings and evaluate your potential contribution before setting a price, then there are other areas where your efforts are going to garner better return — starting with some targeted social media.

Your prospective customers need to be able to research you online by name, but that’s probably not the way they are going to find you in the first place.  So, again, heavy investments in getting top tier SEO results are probably better allocated elsewhere.

Who are your customers and where do they spend their time?
This is the final lynchpin in developing a strategy, because you have to be where your customers are.  If your customers are corporate clients who have an internal purchasing department, then you need to spend time using their channels to get on their approved buyer list — their process usually preclude online research until it’s a last resort.

Not all customers are available via the same channels.  You need to know who your customers are to figure out how to find them.  And then figure out what internet marketing channels make the most sense.

What’s the state of your content?
As a content strategist, this is actually my last step once all of the above have been examined.  What kind of content you need on your site will depend on your product/service, your sales process and your customer base.  You can have the greatest product in the world, but if you can’t articulate it in a compelling way on your site, you will never see any conversion.

Conversely, you could have tons of great content, but if it is not organized in an intuitive and meaningful way for your customers, and if it’s not focused enough to have findable keyword value, then you could be wasting your time and effort generating content that is not serving your goal.

I start off most of my content workshops by telling attendees, “Don’t drink the SEO Kool-Aid!”  Too many people think it’s a silver bullet that is going to make or break their business.  And sure, it can be a big help, and when someone comes looking for you, you absolutely need to be findable.  Twenty years ago businesses did that buy being in the phone book.  Today we do it by being online.

But how much time and effort you should really be sinking into your SEO is a different question, and it does not have a straight forward answer.  So beyond Mark’s original warning against those who offer you guarentees, I’ll toss out a second warning: not everyone needs to be #1 on the search engines.  And the truth is, not everyone can be.  Developing an appropriate web presence is unique to every business.  Don’t let anyone sell you on the one-size-fits all fantasy.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

A small business owner asked me which phone he should buy. The short answer is: small business people should buy an iphone for it’s superior web surfing ability, enormous number of applications and excellent ease of use.

Having said that, let me be clear I’m not telling you which phone to buy or what will work best for you. I’ll add a personal disclaimer as well – I carry an iPhone and would buy another in a second because I am online constantly: checking our website status, seeing how our users are doing and sending emails and texts to keep my posse together. I use it as a phone only a distant third. You are certain to have different needs and priorities.

Here are some things you should consider:

• What will you use the phone for most?
• Will getting emails and text messages on your phone help or hurt your business?
• Can you afford the additional cost of having a data/web plan?
• How rugged does the phone need to be and will it fit in your pocket, purse etc.?
• What’s your total budget? (hint: the purchase price is a loss leader to get you hooked into an expensive data plan)

Here’s a fun little quiz to take that tells you whether you should buy an iPhone or not. It’s not specific for small business but it’s a fun use of an expert system.

Infoworld did an extensive test of the most popular phones (ultimately agreeing with my conclusion: buy an iPhone for small business) and summarized their findings in the table below. You can read the article by clicking on the image:

Entrepreneur-turned-VC, Mark Suster, recently posted an article on his blog, Both Sides of the Table, highlighting what he considers to be the essential qualities of entrepreneurship.  At the heart of his post is a very, very simple philosophy: entrepreneurs just do it.

For some people, this is easy.  Moving ahead, pulling the trigger, motivating people into action, moving at light speed — categorize it however you like, but how comfortable you are with this type of thing often starts out as being a very basic part of your personality.

For other people, however, this is much, much harder.  Whether it’s a fear of being wrong, a need to collect input from numerous different sources, or just a methodical decision-making process, some people are very uncomfortable churning through a couple of dozen decisions per day, and tap-dancing their way around obstacles in real time.

So what do you do if you want to own your own business, but rapid-fire decision-making did not come baked into your DNA?  Here are a few tips and tricks I use when working with new entrepreneurs, to start getting them comfortable with what the role demands of them:

Define and document your process
Everyone has a different process for making decisions.  But for most of us, it’s intuitive and has evolved over time.  We often don’t think about it, or even recognize all the steps.  The benefit of sitting down and writing it out (I often either recommend a flow chart or a bullet list) is that it helps us be aware of places we are likely to get stuck or where we become repetitious.

Focus on what your process actually is, not what you’d like it to be.  (You can work on changing it later.  Start off by understanding it.)

Even more valuable, however, is having this on hand when it comes to working with others.  Because if you can show your partner or your staff what your decision-making process looks like, it helps manage their expectations.  It also identifies at what point you need input, and at what point they need to be prepared for action.  It sounds amazingly simple, but it’s invariably far more powerful an exercise to go through than most people expect.

Once you’ve documented your process, the next step is to identify the part of the process with which you are least comfortable (generally speaking), and at which point in the process you most frequently find yourself getting stuck.  Sometimes it’s the same step, sometimes it’s not.  But again, breaking it down and really thinking about something that you do instinctively is critical if you are going to start changing your habits at all.

Partner up
For as nice an idea as it is that we are all always going to keep our promises to ourselves, the truth is, our promises to ourselves are often the first ones that we break.  So for most of us, accountability is most successful if it is to someone else entirely.  So find a parter, coach or collaborator.  It’s like having a workout partner for the gym: sometimes knowing that someone else is expecting you is the only way you’re going to make it.

Whether you go to an organization like SCORE for a mentor, or you hire a business coach, or even a part-time project manager to help you with planning and organization, sometimes the best thing you can do for your progress is to put yourself — and your money — on the line.  Putting some skin in the game is almost always good for the end results.

Break it into bite-sized pieces
Some projects and efforts are just huge, and until you dice and slice them, they are simply too overwhelming to make any real progress.  So break it down.  Again, this may require some outside help, but once you have your efforts broken down into logical chunks, it’s much easier to define tactical next steps for each piece, and then to show — and see — progress.

The best rule of thumb is to keep every piece to 8 hours (or a day’s) worth of work or less.  Don’t let anything get too big, and it’ll be much easier to stay focused.  If you’ve parsed out your steps into day-by-day sized pieces, then you will also often find that the difficult decisions that seem huge in their original state are also broken down into more readily managable sizes, making them easier and faster to resolve.

Not everyone is a natural born entrepreneur.  But there are tons of people who are willing to do the work to make the transition, including being ready to push themselves out of their comfort zone to get there.  There is nothing wrong with wanting to analyze details in more depth; just be aware of the fact that being wrong is ok, and that there are very few decisions that can’t be reversed if they really need to be later.

Often times it’s not possible to know for sure that an answer is right until you’ve explored the wrong one a bit.  But if it doesn’t come naturally to you, find some help.  There are lots of people who have been there and figured it out already.  Take advantage of their expertise and get their assistance building a system to help you make the transition you need.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

While some of you may have been planning for your holiday retail promotions since late summer, it’s not too late to start marketing for this holiday season if you haven’t.

Our partner, VerticalResponse is one of the largest and most trusted email marketing providers online and their service is used by thousands of small businesses and freelancers to create self-service email marketing, online surveys and direct mail campaigns. They can help you get the word out to your customers about products and services quickly and easily this holidays season.

With tips and how-tos form webinars like how to Make the Most of Your Holiday Promotions and download-able guides plus their thousands of ready-to-go email and postcard templates, you can create a marketing campaign in minutes and jump start your holiday sales.

If you aren’t yet familiar with VerticalResponse, sign up for a free account. As a WorkingPoint Premium Subscriber, you will receive 500 free email credits when you sign up for a VerticalResponse account and if you’re on the Free plan, you get 200 free email credits.

To redeem your credits:

1. Signup for a WorkingPoint account (if you don’t have one already)
2. Log in to your account
3. Look for the Free Email Credits widget on your Homepage Dashboard
4. Click the “Set up your VerticalResponse account now to redeem your credits »”  link
   

In the world of tech startups there is a common phenomenon: developer entrepreneurs who can write great apps, build slick sites and develop cool technology… but who forget that the work of finding and acquiring a paying customer is a whole separate discipline.  It’s what we often refer to as The Field of Dreams problem.  For as great a saying as it is, “If you build it, they will come” is not a sound go-to-market strategy.

Debra Murphy from Masterful Marketing recently started a year-end marketing series to help small businesses re-examine their marketing plans in preparation for 2010.  While her focus is on walking small business through updating their marketing plans to reflect changes to their business, the process can apply to those just getting started as well.  Her very tactical list includes the following steps:

• Current client profile – has it changed?
• Goals – which ones did you accomplish?
• Service or product offerings – do they need to be redefined?
• Why people hire you or pay for your services – what makes you different?
• Messages – do they still work?
• Website content and other marketing materials – are they consistent?
• Marketing activities for the past year – what worked and what didn’t?
• Online reputation or presence – do you exist?
• Action plan – what activities will you be using to market your business?

Obviously some of the details of how you would proceed through these steps are different the first time than they would be during an annual re-evaluation, but it’s a great list that all small business owners could afford to spend at least a little bit of time considering.

The couple of specific things that I would add are often particularly applicable to new businesses just getting started:

• Competitors – who are they and what lessons can you learn from their marketing?
• Resources – what do you have, what can you get and what do you know you need?
• Skills – do you need training, outside expertise or just some study time?

One of the reasons I most love working with entrepreneurs is that tend to be very optimistic — sometimes to their own detriment.  Doing something yourself is great, if you are good at it.  But bringing in some help, even on a brief consultative basis, is invaluable if it means you can better target a solution with more precision and less waste.  Unless you have a day job and are just getting your business started on the side, most entrepreneurs do not have the time or financial flexibility to just let customers find them all by themselves. So be surgical, be deliberate and be willing to get help if that’s what you need.

Entrepreneurs will often recognize the value to expert advice when it comes to legal or tax matters, but they are frequently willing to cut corners when it comes to marketing.  It is easy to forget that, unless you have a successful marketing strategy bringing you customers in the first place, you aren’t going to have much need for your legal or tax help.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

It’s Cyber Monday and if you’re an online retailer, then this could be one of your biggest sales days of the year.  You’ll likely have a lot of repeat orders for that special deal you’re offering and of course, you’ll want to know your sales total for the day by the end of the day. Think it’s impossible? Not with WorkingPoint.

We’ve built in a time-saving feature into WorkingPoint so you can create like orders quickly and easily. To enter the slew of orders you’ll get today, use the Copy link. With copying, you can create a new invoice with the same details as a prior invoice without having to re-enter all the information. Then, you can make whatever changes are necessary and send off the new invoice without missing a beat.

To copy an invoice:

1. Create an invoice with your special deal and click save.
2. For new orders, click the Copy link from your special deal invoice.
3. Then change the customer information and click save.

To check the sales for today:

• Run a Profit and Loss Statement for “Today” to see the total sales for the day.
• Check your Daily Operating Report widget on the home page dashboard to see how many invoices you created today and the total sales volume for the day.

The more time you spend with WorkingPoint, the more ways you’ll find that it can help your business.

Earlier this year, my husband and I took a small business workshop offered by a local certified public accountant.  He covered the ins-and-outs of both starting and growing a small business, starting with assessing the pros and cons of each type of corporate structure: sole proprietorship, limited liability company, corporation and various partnerships.  His (relatively tongue-in-cheek) advice was: “Whatever you do, avoid a partnership!”

Obviously that’s not realistic.  In point of fact, most successful serial entrepreneurs I know spend most of their early-stage ideation efforts in looking for the right partners to go in on a new venture together.  So the CPA’s follow-on advice (after ‘avoid partnerships’) applies: if you do go with a partnership, make sure you have an explicit partnership agreement — down to who is responsible for cleaning the toilets and who is responsible for dealing with collections and over-due clients.

This is also the subject of a recent Inc.com post by the Executive Director of the Inc. Business Owners Council, Lewis Schiff: be sure you are prepared in the event that something happens to your partner.

The 3 D’s

While most people who do preparation on this front focus on the death of a partner, the far more likely scenarios are divorce or disability.  The implications of disability are pretty obvious, particularly if it is severe or prolonged.  Divorce, though, is a much stickier wicket, and begs the question: are you prepared to be in business with your partner’s spouse?

That’s a sobering thought, isn’t it?  But it’s one to seriously consider if you have a legal partnership.  And, depending on divorce laws in your state, some states require different approaches to a solution.  Our anti-partnership CPA was quick to point out that the State of Texas is a community property state, which means that if a parnter who owns 50% of a business gets divorced, unless there are legal provisions put in place to protect your business interests, suddenly half of that 50% is now owned by the ex.

How comfortable are you with the idea of suddenly being in business with your partner’s spouse? (And, in a worst case scenario: what if their divorce turns into a nasty legal battle?  Do you want your business in the middle of that?)

In Schiff’s article, he discusses a recent Inc. Business Owners Council event in New York City, where speakers discussed how to protect your business, and how to make sure you don’t wake up one morning to an unpleasant and entirely avoidable surprise.  Schiff was quick to point out that the audience was extremely uncomfortable at the idea of having these conversations with their partners, and yet they were also emphatic that they did not want to be in business with their partner’s spouse.

So the advice?  Deal with it before it’s an issue.  In an Inc.com white paper written by Russ Alan Prince, Hannah Shaw Grove, and Ted Tafaro entitled “Unprepared for the Unthinkable,” the authors research reflects that only about 40% of business owners are financially prepared in the event their partner(s) dies, while only about 15% are prepared if their business partners are disabled.

The most important thing to remember is that any of the types of situations that need to be dealt with — death, disability or divorce — are highly emotional life events.  Waiting to try to deal with them at the time is asking for trouble.  In a small business, success is often heavily dependent on the involvement of the partners.  Any one of these types of events has the potential to radically disrupt the business; the last thing the remaining partner(s) also need is to try to “figure things out” about the partnership agreement at the same time they are trying to manage the impact on the business itself.

For as difficult a conversation as it is to have, it is far less painful for the partners to have the conversation during a rational, stable time, rather than waiting until there is a trigger event.  Everyone is much more likely to be reasonable and come to mutually agreeable terms before emotions are running high than if you wait.

And if you get knots in your stomach at the thought of having this conversation with your business partners, consider this: how much less comfortable would you feel broaching the subject for the first time at your partner’s funeral? Or outside their hospital room? Or when you show up at the office on day to find that your partner’s soon-to-be-ex has just moved into the spare office and is now planning to run their share of the business?

This is one of those times when an ounce of prevention is worth far, far more than a pound of cure.

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Mark Cooper of 73rd Barrelmaker:

Providing web site design and consulting done inexpensively to meet your needs.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Elizabeth Barkley of CEC Training Institute:

CEC helps people obtain career creditability and workforce experience through credentialing in  healthcare administration training, medical coding, medical billing, and other careers.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!