Being In Business Online

Whether you run a small business out of your home or work for a large corporation, you can use YouTube to promote your company. And unless you’ve been living under a very dark rock for the last few years, you know that YouTube is a video sharing website where anyone, including yourself, can upload videos for others to view.

I’m well aware of this and at this moment am seriously considering using it for my business, but as I sifted through some of the business videos on YouTube I was more than disappointed.

For starters I’m a creative and like to see creative things. So when I view a video with a poorly lit individual with echoing audio I’m immediately turned off. But I’m also not looking to create the next gimmick where a set of plastic eyeballs and a small stack of money stares me in the face during the video.

Secondly, every video I watched was “Me, me, me, us, we, we”. Seasoned marketing and sales professionals will tell you that’s not the direction you want to take. You need the viewer to feel safe, save them money, create a sense of urgency if they don’t act immediately. Just stop talking about how wonderful YOU are and how you can solve a problem of theirs. Plain and simple.

I was on YouTube looking specifically at “design firm” videos to get a feel for what others were doing and how I could be different. They were boring, mundane attempts at trying to communicate some message. Some were nothing more than slide shows with screen shots of the sites they’ve done and not even a lick of music. Where is the creativity in that!?

So now I have a goal, to create an informative, entertaining and “call to action-type” video created by a creative that people want to watch.

Anyone have any examples of videos that truly were entertaining? Worth a dime at all?

Owning part of a small online news media site called BuscoVoice.com, means we have to offer the content for free. Gone are the days (if they were ever here) of people paying subscriptions for online news. So how do we manage to keep it afloat? Well advertising of course and it’s a tough sell.

But why is it such a tough sell? My gut tells me that an online add is not ‘tangible’. You can’t touch it. You can’t run your hands over your internet ad or cut it out and display it on a wall. There’s no high gloss, full color image in a prominent magazine to show your colleagues. Not too mention the fact that the web is such a new medium and print has been around for centuries, people still have their doubts if it will continue.

The advantages to online advertising far outweigh that of any other media format currently in existence. For starters color doesn’t matter. One color? No problem. Full color photos? Not a problem. Every color under the sun? If you wish, it can be done. I’ll be, just created a little rhyme there. But I digress. Can a print ad show moving images like a video ad can? Is there any possible way for the owner or any other employee literally speak to their customers?

All print media can tell you is that they have x-amount of subscribers or “households” that they deliver to. Radio and television can only say how many listeners/viewers they have each week. But with online advertising a site can tell you how many visitors, time of day and even the amount of ‘clicks’ that occurred on your ad. And those clicks or links to your website matter. It matters to the search engines that you have what they call “backlinks” to your site. It gives you a better ranking in the searches and if that’s not enough an online ad literally brings people to your virtual door.

With all of that said, look at these rough examples and then consider just how valuable an online ad really can be.

Two Phone book ads: Avg $56.00/month =$1,344 per year
Business card newspaper ad: $40/week x 4 weeks x 12 months = $1,920
1/4 One-color ad in newspaper: $350 for one day
1/2 Page ad on “fund raiser calendar”: $500 and you get on 2,000 pieces
Sponsorship of local school or charity event: $25.00 x 3 = $75.00
*Estimates based on my geographic area. Yours may be higher or lower

This is a rough estimate of some of the things I’ve done in the past 12 months. The total spent?
$4,189.00

And not one of those can tell me exactly how many people saw my ad. What day was the most popular? Did anyone actually take my ad home? Cut it out? Keep it for later? (i.e. “clicked on it)

I can spend $100/month with a different local news media site nearby and see exactly what kind of response my ad is receiving and only spend $1,200 per year. That’s a savings of nearly $3,000 annually!

Will any of this garner you greater business or make you filthy rich? No, I’m not saying that all. But if you want tangible results and the knowledge of exactly who, what, when and where of your ad, then being online is the place to be.

And no matter your success, I’d like to hear your story. Both good and bad.

Nationwide Insurance uses the slogan, “Life comes at you fast,” and they’re right, it does.

At the beginning of 2008, I was still trying to recoup from the horrible Fall and Winter months of 2007. After going through the exercise of planning out the year once again, I told myself 2008 was going to be my most successful one yet.

The idea(s) were there. The marketing plan sketched out. The creative juices flowing. I was ready to cold-call and kiss clients, lick stamps for postcards mailings, even send out white papers. Yadda yadda yadda. You know the drill.

Then came the unexpected. Ah yes, those delightful little ventures into Mylanta® Land that we all know we should plan for, yet rarely do.

As a “hobby,” I help people survive the unexpected. Well, I do my best anyway. You see, I’ve been a volunteer firefighter for almost 20 years. So, by owning my design business in my small community, I felt I could provide a valuable design and printing service and help my neighbors. Just some of the fine services offered here at Gonink World Headquarters.

The beginning of the year was busy for both my business and the fire department. Then on February 12th, we had two house fires in less than six hours.

I rushed away from work around 4:30 to assist a nearby department on a large house fire. Tired, I returned home around 10:00 p.m. The second call came while I was finishing up with a reheated dinner.

This house fire went from arrival to extinguishing “hot spots” in about ten minutes. No sweat. Well, okay … a little swear. It was a wee bit hot in there. Then, while standing in the kitchen conversing with one of the captains, I heard a “crack.” The next thing I knew (or didn’t, as the case may be), I was out cold. I hate when that happens.

During a trip to the emergency room, the diagnosis was a broken neck with a rouge disc pressing against my spinal cord. Lovely.

My sister works in this very ER. She’s even talked about people in my very same situation … people who don’t walk out of the hospital on their own.

First up for me? Emergency surgery to replace the disc and get the vertebrae fused together to try and prevent any further damage to my spinal cord. That sounded good. “Further damage,” sounded kind of bad.

What followed, you ask? Partially closing my business to begin a grueling set of physical therapy appointments preformed by who appeared to be a student of the Marquis DeSade. For 30 days I could only work part-time.

Obviously, the business struggled. But, by early April, I was given the green light to go back to work full-time. None the less I was still required to attend physical therapy three times each week.

At this point in my life I had tasted the sweet ambrosia of local and international success. I had endured the feast and famine phases of business. And, I learned more about how to survive than I ever imagined possible.

I like to compare a sales person to a website only because I feel they both should be trying to accomplish the same thing - selling your product or service. And in my opinion they both should adhere to one particular guideline of being in sales: appearance.

Think about it, if your sales guy/gal is out there selling in a t-shirt, jeans and tennis shoes, they’re not going to make much of an impression. The same can be said for your website. If it’s boring, the graphics appear outdated or it looks as if it hasn’t been updated in some time, it doesn’t bode well for your company.

But it’s not just the graphics or images that make up your appearance, it’s also the copy you have written. The copy on your site should run as smooth as your top sales executive does when s/he speaks. Is it balanced? Easy to read? Simple to follow along with? (Yes, right about now I’m paranoid about my own and if any of you are critiquing) I think you get the idea of what I’m saying here.

Your website is there to communicate a message and if your visitors can’t understand it or comprehend it, you might as well send out the sales exec in his scrubby shirt and dirty jeans.

If you don’t have a sales executive and are strictly online, I would like to hear your story and how the copy/images are working for you!

In one of my most recent posts about getting your business website ‘out there’, I mentioned joining FaceBook and creating a “page” for your business. Quite honestly I think FaceBook could become one of the dominant social networking sites on the market, if not already. But I digress…

No sooner did I hit publish and went out to update my page, I was notified about a “free” application that allows you to track your visitors. Who visited? What photos did they look at? How many saw your profile?

Being the analytical nut case that I am, I forged on to try out this application and see who was visiting. You always have to “allow” an application to access your page for it to work and I’ve always obliged. But what came next was more than disappointing and a little irritating.

You have to collect “points” to use the app and the only way to do so is by buying them, which in turn means becoming a registered user of all sorts of sites that I have no interest in joining. So to get something for “free”, I have to pay for it?

Seems like a bait and switch to me. Anyone else every experienced something like this with a social networking site?