The Small Business Doer

Overview

September was back-in-action month after a bit of a summer lull. This is my third September with this business, so I was assuming business would pick-up, but it was re-assuring to see that it actually did. What worried me was that something happening twice is not statistically significant, so the fact that I did good business for two September’s in a row was no guarantee that I would do well this September.

September, while my second highest revenue month of the year (and only a few hundred short of being the highest), was also a month where I got working on my business growth projects.

Profit & Loss Budget vs. Actual – September 2011

Looking at my numbers, I’m a few thousand short of matching last year’s sales numbers ($65K from Jan.1 to Oct. 1, 2011 vs. $68K for entire 2010). I still have October, November, and December left to bring in more sales this year. I can now confidently say that I’ll beat last year’s sales! Net Income, arguably the most important figure, will beat last year’s as well.

Looking at the fine details of the numbers, there isn’t much in the numbers that differ too greatly from the plan. Something that is more interesting to me is the fact that I had $1,400 in sales in August vs. $10,600 in sales in September. That’s a huge difference… huge! And that’s the thing about business. Numbers can vary widely from month-to-month, through no action or inaction of your own. When you are an employee, you get that stable paycheck no matter what. As an entrepreneur, you only see the money when your business does.

Profit & Loss - Business vs. Actual August 2011

Business Growth – Easy to Lose Sight of in the Day-to-Day

Something I’ve struggled with my business in trying to grow the business to what I envision it to be as opposed to growing my business because of the sales that happen to come my way. It’s easy to lose focus of your vision when you’re busy making the $$ doing the day-to-day things, which for me is now mainly video shoots.

Something that I’m happy to have been able to do in September is to actively work and think about, on a daily basis, my envisioned business growth. The start of that was actually working out some back log of things I’ve had on the back burner. To that end, I posted some new DIY or Go Pro Videos.

• Starting a Website?
• What to Look for in a Photographer
• Sales Tips – How to be a Good Salesperson

I was also able to work on some video sitemaps. I truly didn’t know the power of video sitemaps until I saw my post appear with a thumbnail of my video in Google’s search results.

Starting a Website - Google Search Enginge Results Page

That was my cool moment of the month. Knowing that items with images get more clicks with those that don’t I can confidently say that my video posts will have a competitive advantage over the majority of posts out there, since most people don’t post videos, and further, don’t have video sitemaps. Another tactic that I’m using is to host my videos using a paid video server. The advantage of this is that when someone clicks on the video thumbnail in the search engine, they will be directed straight to my website, and not to Youtube’s (or any other free video site).

I’m still putting my videos on Youtube, it is the number two search engine afterall, but I’m making sure that I’m getting a lot of traffic from regular google searches as well.

Information Product Goals

In my half year update, I spouted off that I wanted to hit 10,000 monthly visitors to my site, and that if I made a post a day, I may be able to hit that goal (that’s a big may). To that end, I personally made a goal of 100 new posts between September and December with the following spread.

• September – 10 posts
• Ocotober – 30 posts
• November – 30 posts
• December – 30 posts

The majority of my posts – about 80% – will most likely be Quickbooks related. Yep, I started a new section on my website called Quickbooks Tutorial and Training.

Why Quickbooks?

I wanted to focus in specifically on one topic that I knew a lot about that I could write a lot about. My theory goes like this:

• Every business needs to do bookkeeping
• Quickbooks is the number one bookkeeping software in North America
• Many business owners don’t understand / like to do bookkeeping
• Knowing your financials and cash flow is a crucial part of a business
• A lot of the time bookkeeping is delegated to someone with little training
• Current training materials are usually either Quickbooks focused (how to use the software) or Bookkeeping focused (understanding bookkeeping) but not both; Bookkeeping using Quickbooks
• Current training materials give you an overview of how to do things under ideal conditions, but as anyone who has done books knows, there are always issues that pop up
• There are forums for bookkeeping and Quickbooks but I find that I 1. Need to understand either bookkeeping or Quickbooks to understand the answers in forums 2. Don’t know if I can trust the answers, and 3. That’s dependent on being able to find the answer
• I intend my bookkeeping with Quickbooks materials to cover off how to fix things when they go wrong, or in other words, when a person has problem the site has a solution
• Moreover, I will use videos to show how to fix those problems. Forums are text based, some sites have screen shots, and I don’t know if there are many places at all that have problem/solution videos like I envision

That’s the start. I have strong ideas around usability, in that whatever I do it has to be usable – meaning that when people search the net for their Quickbooks questions and find my site, they will easily find an answer that will help them solve their problem. Sounds like a basic premise, but it is something that I take very seriously. The site has to be all about the user. They have to quickly find the answer they are looking for. How I will achieve this? Well, I have some solid ideas I’m fleshing out that you’ll have to wait and see to find out.

Getting the Word Out – aka Getting Traffic

Let’s face it, I could have the best small business materials on this site, but if no one knows about it, I won’t go anywhere.

So, number one goal is traffic. Nay, I should say quality traffic. 10,000 visitors is cool and all, but if they come and immediately bounce somewhere else after a few seconds, that’s not quality traffic.

I think a big misconception on the Internet, something that is true for business in general, is build it and they will come. Sure, if you build something great, people will tell others about it. On the Internet and our new communications age, it is easier than ever to have word-of-mouth explode. However, you can’t expect it to naturally happen, for people to magically find your business and for it to catch like wild fire.

Here’s a quick run down of where I expect to get traffic:

• SEO – Meaning people search for answers to problems they have using a search engine and my site pops up
• Website, forums, user groups – places where people go to find answers around Bookkeeping and Quickbooks. Interact and help this community. When you become a trusted source at these places, people will look to you and your site for help.

That’s it. Well, the devil is actually in the details. I guess it is kind of like saying, I will get the word out about this site online. That’s quite generic. I would love to go into details, but I think each detail would entail an entire article of its own. As I see individual tactics working, I may write about how it has succeeded.

Monetization

That’s quite a common question I get asked when talking about my information product / content marketing plan. How do you make money? It is a good question, especially since I aim to give away a lot of content.

The easiest one to say is advertising. I put up ads on my site. I’m not doing it now because with the traffic I currently get it would amount to pennies.

There is also affiliate marketing. This is quite similar to advertising. This is where I have a link (whether text based or image based), where someone clicks on it and purchases an item, and I get a commission on the sale. There are obvious affiliate partners, such as the sellers of Quickbooks software themselves, Intuit. The affiliates I can help sell products for can be any company that sells online products or services that aid businesses.

The third, and most likely most profitable, is selling content. Selling my writing and videos. How can I do that when I’m giving it away? I’m going to try and make a differentiation between solving immediate problems and preventing future problems. I think the vast majority of people searching will be searching for immediate problems. When people are in that mode, they are looking for the fastest, easiest answer. A free answer that you can find using a search engine is the best way to do this.

Once the problem is solved though, that’s a great time to be thinking about how to prevent the problem next time. That’s where the opportunity to sell would come in. I can sell prevention, so that those problems won’t occur, causing stress and costing time and money.

This is a similar strategy to anti-virus software. They offer free online scans of your computer, but if you want to prevent the problem before it starts, buy their software and have it working for you 24-7.

Conclusion

I’m really glad that I started in the direction of business growth in the month of September. I’m feeling quite a bit of self-inflicted pressure to give this information product thing a go. I am glad that I set up a time frame for which to accomplish the goals and some specific metrics (10,000 visitors – 100 posts). I’ve been waiting for two years to get going on this, and now am feeling confident that I have the skills, knowledge, and energy to give this a go for the rest of the year.

I think I’ve removed a lot of the road blocks that have stopped me in the past, such as not knowing what to specifically focus on, how to get traffic, how to make my offerings better than what’s currently out there (competitive advantage), time… well time is always an issue, but I’m going to make time.

Updates

1. Check out the next update Business Plan Update October 2011
2. Check out the previous update Business Plan Update August 2011
3. Check out all the updates