Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends

I don’t know about you, but my initial thoughts about this “bailout plan” to deal with the current credit-market crisis were overshadowed with skepticism. You see, I’ve rarely met a new tax or regulation I like. I value free markets and tend to distrust intervention by government. So my immediate reaction was, “Here we go, another government program filled with pork that eventually has to be paid for out of OUR pockets.”

Initial Skepticism Turns to Frustration

That skepticism soon turned to frustration. We kept hearing and reading about the “bailout plan” with increasing frequency — and urgency. Big screen TVs are great for all sorts of things, and one thing they show with alarming granularity is fear in the eyes of financial executives and regulators. Yes, the fear was coming through. Unfortunately, the public was getting few details about the solution.

The mere fact that it initially was called a “bailout plan” made it suspect. It sounded like we — small business owners like me and the people on my small team — would be the ones paying for take-your-breath-away bonus packages for overpaid Wall Street executives laughing all the way to the Caymans.

This has to be one of the worst jobs explaining to the American people why we need a $700 Billion package that I’ve ever lived through. Being in the final throws of a presidential election has not helped — it degenerated into partisan football.

But I am not interested in hearing about partisan politics right now — it’s a pointless exercise. We need decisive action, not blame. Leaders, are you listening?

read more

It’s becoming a standard piece of advice for small tech companies to set up what I call the Web triumvirate:

• website
• blog
• support discussion board or forums

The reason for the website is obvious:  it serves as your online presence for your product offering.

The reasons for a blog are many — among them:  more content means better search engine results;  discussing your product with customers and the public in a conversational voice leads to deeper engagement;  and a blog gives you a means to announce useful information that does not rise to the level of a press release.

The reason for the support discussion forums is read more

If you were in an accident or got sick, what would happen to your business?  Could your business continue operating for several weeks or months without your day to day attention?  Could your spouse or a family member or a trusted employee step up and keep it going, until you returned?

For many business owners, I’m afraid the answer would be “no.”  The business would quickly wither and die down or collapse altogether if without our attention for extended periods.  With a small business, so much depends on the individual business owner who runs things day to day.

That’s where systematized activities and an operations manual come into play.

Recently franchise expert Joel Libava wrote about the need to write down processes and procedures if you intend to franchise your business. That’s the only way your franchisees can replicate your processes and success.

That got me to thinking about the need for an operations manual even if you have no intentions of franchising. I suddenly realized that most of what it takes to run my business is in my head.  Even when I’ve had to train staff and explain processes, it’s been 90% verbal.

And that’s not good. read more

I am of the Baby Boomer generation and I’ve been using technology for 25+ years.

So I have to laugh when I read articles suggesting Baby Boomers are a bunch of old, tech illiterate dinosaurs.

OK, maybe the calendar doesn’t lie and we are getting up there in years.

But what’s with this tech illiterate stereotype, already???

What prompted me to write this is a recent blog post I read about entrepreneurs and technology. The post basically made the point that you should dumb-down technology for Boomer entrepreneurs. It was written by a 20-something tech blogger. (Said blogger shall remain nameless to protect the guilty.)

Here’s a news flash for Gen Xers, Gen Yers and Millennials: read more

Welcome to Part Two of my interview with Aaron Wall, founder of SEOBook.com.

The topic is online business models, with practical, street-smart insights into how entrepreneurs and small business owners can grow a business online, starting with no capital and just some ideas.

If you have not yet read Part One of my interview — start there. Otherwise, continue on below ….

Question: What role does your blog play in your new private-community business model?

Aaron Wall: As communities grow and age they grow via word of mouth. But when they are new you also need to keep marketing them to ensure they keep growing. For years I have been a firm believer that one of the cheapest forms of marketing is giving away free content.

Giving away content leads to citations on other trusted well read industry related sites.

The links from other sites and the archive of online content help the site rank well in search engines and get thousands of free visitors a day. Most of those people will not convert, but a few will, especially if you keep blogging and they learn to trust you more over time.

The blog also leads to a lot of media coverage and opportunities that would not exist if I were not a well-known blogger. Exposure and the credibility it brings allows you to charge for your services, and it also lets you stumble into many other good deals. I am not a fan of most JV (Editor’s note: joint venture) partnership formats in the Internet marketing field, but I recently did a lot of work with another company in our space which should help create another nice revenue stream for both of us.

Question: How important is brand on the Web today?

Aaron Wall: Local substitution is the process where local merchants try to create something similar to a more expensive and higher quality good created elsewhere. That process has been happening for at least 1,000 years now.

With information every publisher is global, and cloning your knowledge is often as easy as copy and paste. Online many business models are based around advertising and automated networks. Whatever you are selling will work its way onto the Web for cheaper prices or free. Thus, it is hard to use price as a sustained competitive advantage.

A brand is defined in part by what people think of or how they feel when they hear it. While people can (and will) clone, rip off and steal your content, one of the few lasting competitive advantages that you have is brand. Brand is subjective and something that works at a higher level than most thieves do.

Brand and social relationships are what protect your business from the tragedy of the commons. read more

When Aaron Wall started in the search industry in 2003, he was an unknown entrepreneur. He taught himself search engine optimization and went on to write a book called SEO Book.

He sold his book over the Internet in the form of an instantly-downloadable ebook (in PDF form).

SEO Book became famous in SEO circles and online marketing circles. Although many entrepreneurs write ebooks, the difference with Aaron is that he created a business around his ebook. And he bootstrapped his business from a clean sheet of paper — literally — to what it is today.

Fast forward 5 years. Aaron Wall is now one of the premier voices in the field of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing. SEOBook has become a brand unto itself. read more

Former President Ronald Reagan once said that government’s view of the economy is … “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it.”

Sometimes his humorous observation feels painfully serious.

One example is the Cost of Government Day. The Cost of Government Day is that day of the year (woo-hoo!) “on which the average American worker has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of spending and regulatory burdens imposed by government.”

As of about a week ago (July 16, 2008) those of you in the United States have earned enough to pay for your government.

That means you had to work 197 days just to pay for government (state, Federal and local).  The Cost of Government Day took 4 days longer than last year to get here. What this chart shows is that the regulatory burden and government spending have been ratcheting up since 2001, pushing the Cost of Government Day later and later:

read more

I don’t know about you, but all these social networking sites are making me dizzy.

The reason? I don’t know where the conversation is anymore.

It used to be that you didn’t have to worry about conversing online anywhere, except maybe at the occasional message board or perhaps email.

Then came blogs, and suddenly you had conversation on your blog, with readers leaving comments. Or readers might extend the conversation to their own blogs, by discussing your company, you, or even a blog post you wrote. So you had to track the conversation on other blogs as it related to you.

But that’s not what’s making me dizzy. No, what’s making me dizzy are all the social media sites that now encourage sharing, comments and/or voting.

The conversation now is taking place at multiple places … potentially thousands of sites if you are a large company and thankfully fewer if you work in a small business or are a solo entrepreneur.

The past two years have seen an astonishing range of “social” sites or sites with a social component enter the picture. In my case I only pay attention to perhaps a dozen sites (aside from individual blogs), but those keep me busy: Facebook, MyBlogLog, Twitter, Stumbleupon … to name a few.

Others that encourage sharing and commenting include YouTube, Amazon.com, iTunes, Yelp, Google Local, DocStoc. And the list goes on. read more