Author Archives: Kristen Hicks

Great Customer Service as Marketing

Marketing is about reputation. Creating one amongst those not yet aware of your business, and maintaining a positive one for those already familiar with you. Hands down, the number one thing a company can do to ensure a consistently good reputation is to provide exceptional customer service.

People remember their best and worst customer service experiences and are quick to talk about them to friends, colleagues, and sometimes a much larger internet audience. Companies can now be made and ruined according to their reputation in online forums.

Social media and online review sites have made what was always true much more so: customer service is crucial to good branding and marketing. While providing acceptable customer service will help you to avoid the PR disasters of bad online reviews and social media rants, if you want to really stand out from the competition and turn customer service into a form of marketing, you’ll have to resolve to go above and beyond.

One particular example of a company that’s gained a lot of positive attention based purely on their reputation for customer service is Zappo’s.

When it comes to buying shoes or clothes online, some may still be skeptical, concerned about finding the proper fit or paying for shipping. Zappo’s alleviates those concerns with free shipping on many orders and a free 365-day return policy for all items. In addition, many customers have publicly shared stories of Zappo’s going above and beyond to help them out, fueling one of the best word of mouth branding successes in recent business memory.

How did they achieve this success? For one thing, company CEO Tony Hsieh has acknowledged that the company made a decision early on to treat customer service as a top priority. They’re picky in hiring service positions, making sure not only that the candidate is qualified, but also a good fit for company culture. Perhaps most importantly, in contrast to many large companies, Zappo’s is willing to spend more on customer service to get better results, rather than seeing it as an area to cut costs. As a result, customers can get ahold of a competent, friendly representative anytime they need help, and the company inspires articles like this and this, without having to put money into marketing.

If your customer service is good enough, your customers will do the marketing for you.

6 Awesome Free Tools for Freelancers and Small Businesses

The old aphorism that “you get what you pay for” may serve well in some situations, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by just how many incredibly useful free tools I’ve encountered that have become invaluable to me in working as a freelancer.

Many of these will be very familiar to most freelancers and small businesses, but others are a little less known and might help you accomplish some of your business needs more easily and affordably.

1. Skype

Skype is probably one of the most commonly used and valuable resources available to web-based contractors and small businesses. The free account offers:
1) A real time chat function that allows for easy drag and drop file transfers between users
2) Both one on one and multi-person online phone calls
3) One on one video calls
4) Easy screen sharing between users

You may have to buy a microphone or webcamera to use the phone and video call features, if your computer doesn’t come already equipped with them (Macs usually do). For a relatively minimal costs, you can also choose to establish a skype phone number, enable calls to phone numbers (domestic and international) and upgrade to group video calls.

For small businesses with remote employees, skype is an extremely effective tool for helping bridge some of the difficulties that come with not being in a shared office environment. It makes communication between workers, customers, consultants and anyone else a company needs to be in touch with simple, without increasing costs.

For a freelancer, it allows you to work from anywhere with internet without losing the ability to be in touch with clients and partners.

2. WordPress

I’ve already written a bit about how valuable blogging can be to a small business, and the same applies to any freelancer. WordPress is one of the most user friendly platforms for beginning a blog. Starting an account is simple and getting a blog into place requires no prior knowledge of html or web design. There are a wide variety of templates and different applications available to help make your blog look how you’d like it to and include the features you’re interested in. WordPress also has a powerful statistics module that helps track the number of visits made to your blog and where they come from in an intuitive fashion

3. Freshbooks

Accounting is one of the more intimidating and painful aspects of running a business. Freshbooks is a free software that allows for the creation of customized invoices and easier tracking of business payments and expenses. It also offers a useful feature for tracking your hours by project and task.

4. LazyMeter

Lazymeter is a simple tool for creating and tracking your to do list. You can add items to be completed right away or on future dates and check them off as they’re done. It’s a good way of tracking your progress and productivity and keeping items from falling off your radar during busier times.

5. Google Analytics

Every business with a website should have a Google Analytics account. As with everything else on this list, it’s free and fairly simple to use. You can keep up with the number of visits to your website, what search terms and engines people are using to get to it, and what other sites and social media sources are referring hits to you. The data collected can then be used to improve your website copy and SEO strategy to help ensure you’re attracting the right audience for your products and services.

6. Wave Accounting

There’s a bit of overlap in the features offered by Wave Accounting and Freshbooks, Wave also allows you to create invoices and track business expenses and payments made. In my experience, they’re a bit more feature rich and useful for the latter tasks. You can easily track payments received from sources other than the invoices issued through Wave Accounting (not an option I’ve seen in Freshbooks) and the dashboard provides a handy visual representation of your account’s financial snapshot. Sure, you could use Excel to keep track of your income and expenses, but keeping up with spreadsheets can be a pain and Wave Accounting is much more visually intuitive. It also allows for integration with Freshbooks, so you can set it up to keep track of the invoices you create and send through Freshbooks without extra effort.

SEO Best Practices: Networking

One of the primary tenets of good online marketing is ensuring that your small business carves out a visible space in the larger community. This applies both to the online community as it relates to your industry and the geographic community that you’re a part of, the latter in particular if the goods and services you offer are primarily targeted at local consumers. In terms of search engine optimization, building positive relationships is important as it’s likely to lead to more links to your website.

By establishing positive relationships with bloggers, publications and other businesses and organizations active within your industry and community, you can help expand the reach and awareness of your own business. The value of networking to business is nothing new and certainly not exclusive to the benefits it provides to search engine optimization, but there are new techniques and venues to explore for developing beneficial relationships for your business.

In person networking is still one of the best means of creating new contacts. Local networking events and conferences provide valuable opportunities for meeting people in your community and industry who can help with an exchange of ideas, projects and links. You can learn about services and products being provided that can help your businesses, while also raising the profile of your ability to help other businesses and individuals with your own goods and services.

Moving more into the online sphere, there are multiple useful strategies that can be deployed for online networking. Social media is in some ways an ideal tool for this. LinkedIn was developed for precisely this purpose. It offers an easy means to stay connected to those contacts you meet at the live networking events, as well as an easy to use solution for seeking out new relationships with individuals doing work of relevance to your industry. There are many industry specific groups you can join on LinkedIn to stay informed of and contribute to conversations occurring of importance to your profession.

Though in many ways less direct, Twitter is another tool many are coming to find useful for networking. You can follow prominent industry leaders, journalists or bloggers with an emphasis in your area, as well as other local businesses and organizations to stay afloat of any events, updates and notable comments or articles they’re likely to highlight. By contributing thoughtful and useful information via your Twitter messages, you can gain more attention for yourself and your business and cull a following of your own. Much of the value of Twitter lies in interaction: showing that you’re listening and interested in what others are saying and also willing to provide valuable information as well.

While it involves a little more time and work, developing a presence on industry blogs, listservs, forums and message boards provides another venue for increasing your online profile and getting the attention of those in your field that could serve as productive networking contacts. Following the most pertinent online resources and adding insightful comments where appropriate will demonstrate your value to the community and ensure that people are more likely to think of you and your business when a need arises for the services you offer.

One of the themes that appears commonly in discussions of what makes for good SEO is finding opportunities to add value. Use the knowledge you’ve developed in your industry to provide helpful information to others and it will go far towards raising your profile in your industry and helping you develop and maintain the kinds of relationships that are crucial for long-term success. All of this will help lead to a growing awareness of your business and a greater likelihood of others to link to your website and increase your page ranking.

SEO Best Practices: Blogging

Making sure your small business ranks well in the main search engines isn’t easy, but there are several SEO best practices that you can implement to increase the likelihood of achieving and/or maintaining a good ranking for relevant search terms.

If you spend any amount of time at all reading up on SEO, you’ll see the same mantra repeated over and over: content is king. Search engines are designed with the goal in mind of prioritizing websites that users are most likely to want to visit. Thus, if you make sure your website includes content that people are likely to be interested in and, consequently, link to, it earns your webpage virtual currency in the view of search engines.

For most businesses, descriptions of your products and business in and of themselves won’t necessarily bring the level of attention to your website that will encourage repeat visitors and links from related websites. One option for developing regular, enticing content is to begin a company blog.

The blog can be a mix of announcements directly related to your products and company, posts that speak more generally to your industry and any topics that are likely to be of interest to your customers. Its worth investing the time and resources into producing quality content whether you decide to maintain the blog yourself, or bring on writers to develop blog posts for you.

Starting a blog isn’t too difficult, many webhosting services have features that make it easy to install a WordPress blog. Designing it to look how you’d like it to and implementing SEO features can be a bit more of a challenge, but there’s a thriving support community for WordPress users and plenty of free templates, plugins and other resources to help you get started. You can always bring on a consultant to help create content and get your blog started.

If you’re still at a loss for the best topics to write about or how to get a blog going, spend some time seeking out blogs related to your industry to see what others are talking about. Seeing what works well for others is a good way to find ideas. Don’t be hesitant to leave comments and begin making yourself known as a contributor to the larger conversation happening about your industry online. A big part of developing a successful web presence is becoming part of an online community.

Content Overload: Making the Excess of Available Knowledge Work for You

We live in an age of content overload. There’s so much to do. Keeping up with ever changing industries and technological tools is a continual challenge; not to mention all the resources for entertainment and learning outside of your professional field.

Currently, I have:

  • Close to 50 blogs bookmarked
  • Hundreds of movies in my Netflix queue
  • A long list of books in my Amazon wish list (as well as those on my bookshelf I haven’t gotten to yet)
  • A sizeable list of tv shows I hope to view in their entirety in the near future
  • Hundreds of podcasts downloaded I haven’t yet listened to
    …and, of course,
  • A to do list of a variety professional intentions that’s always growing even as I work my way through it
  • I bet you could create a similar list to this.I’m fully cognizant of the privileged position I’m in historically to be able to complain of having just too much quality content at my fingertips. Even so, it does feel like a problem at times. There are so many distractions and technology is developing creative new ways to distract us further all the time.

 

On the other hand, technology is also creating tools to help us organize and prioritize our various lists and tasks. I wrote recently about my feelings on movie queues and wish lists, but there are also tools readily available for managing a to do list; RSS feeds to help us scan blog headlines and thus prioritize which to read fully; and, personalized ratings systems to help us weed out entertainment that’s likely not worth our time.

There’s also the wisdom of just accepting that we’re simply not going to get to all of it. That nagging to do list is going to continue to keep me from many of those movies, books and tv shows and that’s ok. I don’t seek out great stories so I can check them off a list when I complete them, I do it so I can enjoy them in the moment. My life really won’t be the poorer if I forgo that blog post about a stranger’s trip to Argentina in order to read one that teaches me something new about link building.

We’re all lucky because we get to be choosy. The content overload that occasionally feels like a curse, always reminding us of what we haven’t done yet, is really one of the great privileges of our age. Enjoy it.