Advertising Your Business on a Budget

August 16, 2010 by Leave a Comment

While I think it’s absolutely critical that you have plenty of money to market your business, I understand that many entrepreneurs are on a tight budget, and have to be very careful with how they spend it. If you’re looking for ideas on how to market your business for free, these ideas won’t be of much help. But if you have a few shillings and are looking to get some good word out there, here are some ideas to help you:

  1. E-mail – Borderline ethical and some ISPs won’t like this but do good research and don’t send out form mail. You can e-mail potential prospects directly with a good offer and they could respond with interest about your product or service. Here is an lead generator that you can use.
  2. Search Engine Optimization – I think the payoff from attracting visitors naturally to your website is great for your business long term. My problem is that it’s just too slow to get results. But if you’re willing to bide your time, start buying some links for a payoff further down the road. Need help on this?
  3. Get a website – Nowadays, having your own website is as important as having a business card or a telephone. There is simply no reason why a small business, should not have a website. Can you do e-commerce if you are not online? No. Can potential customers who hear about you check you out later on the internet if you do not have a website? No again. Can current customers find out what your new offerings are if you lack a website? Not easily. Get one here.
  4. Partnerships – Everyone talks about partnerships but no one talks about how to do it. Here is the method we used to bring in some of our best partners. To reach out to potential partners, you’ll have to e-mail them or send them a letter, so you’ll need to implement something similar to what you would do if you were trying to reach clients directly. But what I like about this is that I think your money go much further sooner since you don’t have to worry about establishing a relationship with your new potential prospects – it’s already done for you.

Marketing Ideas that I Don’t Like
Here are some ideas that you may hear for new businesses on a budget but I don’t like them because they are way too slow to develop and you need some sort of factor that is beyond most people’s control.

  • Networking – Uggghhh. To me this is just about brown-nosing with the hopes of something giving you a break. The problem with this is that it may never develop. You’re not developing a plan with any type of numbers to back you up. You’re just going out on a whim and a prayer. Yes, it has helped some people but it does not work consistently enough for most new businesses to rely on.
  • Give Away Free Stuff – The idea of giving away stuff for free is not a bad idea in general but the problem we are trying to solve here is that we’re just trying to get people to pay attention to a new product or service. We’re just trying to get the eyeballs and this does nothing to help that. Keep it handy down the road but don’t focus on this too much when you’re getting started.

The most important thing to remember when you’re marketing on a budget is to determine what your goal is. If it’s to generate new leads, find the method that will bring you leads at the lowest cost per lead – don’t worry about branding, or creating a foundation to build on in the future. Get leads inexpensively, now.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

Choose a Boring Industry and Excel!

August 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment

One of my big irritations (that I do not know how to handle) is when a friend comes up to me and says they have an awesome (often get rich quick) idea. Usually it’s something really stupid that no one is going to be interested in.

Everything thinks they have to invent the Next Big Thing to be really successful (and rich) and it’s just not true, and highly unlikely. Here’s a much better and easier option for you. Pick the most boring industry and do it better than anyone else!

Shoes are Boring
I was reminded of this from Seth Godin’s post on Zappos. In case you don’t know Zappos, they are a web retailer who only sells shoes. Think about that – selling shoes for a living (boring). Not only that, they sell them online, which seems like the worst product to sell online. Everyone wants to try on their shoes to see how it looks and determine whether it fits right. But they went against what most people would think of doing and are doing incredibly well.

Do It Better Than Anyone Else
The reason both of the above examples were so successful is they did it different than everyone else. They went against convention to give clients what they really want. That’s the real key. But I tell you what, I would rather come up with that new idea for a boring product than invent something brand new that will take a ton of money to build and might not even have a market yet.

One way I suggest doing it is create the most efficient, awesome process in your industry. Make it a great experience for your clients because you have refined your processes to the Nth degree. It’s not sexy or exciting, but it will differentiate you from the competitors in the industry.

Remember – no one wants a company that just lays concrete. But if you could be a business owner with a lot of money from that concrete business or a poor owner working around the clock for a new idea, what would you choose?

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

Less is More

July 17, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I find myself watching some strange reality shows at times and last week I was watching Kitchen Nightmares. It’s hosted by that British chef who’s always swearing at people in his “game show”. The premise of this show is that he goes into a restaurant that is failing for some reason and some drastic changes, brings it back to life.

Don’t Give Customers What They Want
In the show that I was watching last week, he visited an Indian restaurant that was bleeding money. The biggest problem he found in the restaurant is that they gave their patrons too many options. The customers were able to customize the sauce that they wanted. The owner came from a sales background so he had a noble strategy – he just wanted to give the customers what they wanted. Great intentions but bad results.

The problem with this strategy is that everything suffered in the business because their was no consistency:

  • The customers thought they knew what they wanted but the fact was that the experts (the chefs) could put together a better combination of flavors that the customers would enjoy
  • The orders would not come out in a timely matter because there were so many different combinations and the chefs could not operationalize the preparation
  • The waiters could not stand behind and recommend different dishes because they were all just slight variations of each other and could not be differentiated from each other in blind taste tests
  • The customers were left paralyzed with too many choices and felt unsatisfied that they weren’t getting what they want (having too many options is a classic in limiting sales because of “paralysis by over-analysis“)

Less is More
The lesson in this when running your business is that you should limit the options for your clients. Too often, we try to satisfy the wants and desires of our clients and what we end up giving to them is something that they don’t really want. They may think they want it when they “order” it but they leave our “restaurant” unhappy with the whole experience.

Even worse than a restaurant, we get clients who just get up and leave. If we don’t present a clear offer with a limited number of options, they’re less likely to become our clients.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: ,

Easily Replaceable Employees

June 30, 2010 by 1 Comment

If you’ve been running a business for any length of time in Kenya, you probably already know that it is extremely hard for a small business to get good employees. Yet, a business needs skillful and dependable employees to succeed. However, one of the keys to running a highly profitable and low-headache business is not depending on key individuals to make or break a business. While it would be nice to hire a bunch of overachievers to build and run your business, it’s a shaky strategy to rely on.

Searching for a Sales, for example, All-Star is not easy or cheap. The process to find good candidates and put them through the interview process can be very expensive and time-consuming. Even if you take months to go through a rigorous hiring process and think you found the person you were looking for, there is no guarantee that that person is even going to live up to expectations.

But let’s say that you do find that “diamond in the rough” – someone who is highly energetic and can bring in new business for you. You will have invested a decent amount of time training them and getting them ramped up. Everything has started running smoothly. Your new employee is bringing in a ton of new business and you don’t have to pay any attention to what they are doing or how they are doing it.

All of a sudden they drop a bomb on you. They got a better offer at another company and will be leaving in 2 weeks. You’re frozen in panic. You knew that it took 2 months to find this person and you were extremely lucky to find them. You went through 2 other people and wasted 8 months to get your “All Star”. Now you have to start all over again and be ready in 2 weeks. On top of that, you just kicked off a huge new marketing campaign that’s going to run but not have anyone to follow up and do the sales work. There is no way you’re going to be able to get new clients any time soon.

Enter The Real “All Star”
Here’s a slightly different situation for you. You’re tired of going through the crapshoot hiring process and praying that you get lucky and find a salesperson that can keep your business afloat. Instead, you decide to take matters into your own hands. You’re not going to rely on having the best talent, which is extremely hard to retain and keep happy. You’re going to depend on more readily available resources – lower wage employees.

How can your business do as well with someone who isn’t as talented compared to a rainmaker? Simple – you create processes that anyone can follow. You don’t leave your business up to chance. You create systems that you can constantly modify and tweak to make better and then you find people who can execute them.

Humans aren’t robots so you need to provide motivation to ensure that they do their job well. You can start providing incentive-based bonuses that are tied in with your revenues and profits so that everyone wins.

Now you have employees who are sufficiently motivated and happy because they are making more than they would with other similarly-paying jobs and you have turned a risk and a headache into a reliable and consistent system within your business.

What Kind of Systems Should You Put In Place?
Throughout this post, I’ve referred to salespeople when I talked about employees. That’s because they can have the biggest positive or negative impact on your business because sales and marketing for a small business has the biggest impact on the success of the business. And what we’re trying to avoid is the unpredictability that good and bad employees infuse into your business.

Your Sales and Marketing is the first part of your business from which you should remove the unpredictability of star employees. Here are some suggestions how to do that:

  • Create a Follow-Up Sequence that details every single contact you will have with leads from the day they become a lead, until a year later.
  • Write scripts and create every single marketing/sales piece that goes out to prospects. You should drive the sales message so that it’s not who gives it but what’s being communicated.
  • Add “Call-To-Action” in every sales and marketing piece that goes out. You shouldn’t have messages that say “are you ready to buy yet?”. They should spur on the prospect so they are calling to purchase from you.
  • Automate your sales presentations. Create web bases sales presentations that prospects can view at their leisure. This removes “bad days”, “being off your game”, etc. that affect even the best of employees. Nickel Pro can help with this, incidentally.
  • Create targeted marketing campaigns that deliver interested prospects. This way, you aren’t dependent on your employees ability (or inability to generate leads).

These are just a few examples of how you can replace highly skilled, valuable, but hard-to-find salespeople with replaceable, easy-to-find, and less expensive employees who provide the benefits without the headaches. Many of these ideas can be applied to your operations, customer service, and accounting. It’s all dependent on YOU setting up the repeatable systems that anyone can execute and not relying someone to just “get it done”.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: ,

How To Turn Your Skills Into A Real Online Business

June 24, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Open for businessA lot of the people reading Like Chapaa have a skill set. They are strong in web design, writing, marketing, Web development, or some other different skills.

People with such skills who want to be entrepreneurs often end up selling their skills as services. That usually entails trading money for their time, expertise and experience. It’s the path of least resistance (and risk) and a way to form a source of income. The problem is that while the business might be moderately successful, there is a limit to how successful the business can be. There are only so many hours in a day and only so much that you can charge for these services (no matter how good you are). Since freelancing is not a real business model and does not scale, you should focus these skills on building a system-based business.

Here are some ideas to create a new business based on the skills that you already have.

Scale Your Skills
Instead of doing the work yourself, have 1, 2, 5, 10, or even 50 people do the work for you. Once you have other people doing the work, there is no limit to how big you can grow the business. Start by creating a manual detailing everything that you do and make it a repeatable process that someone else can follow. You will still have to find some people with some ability as you don’t want someone with zero creativity to design high-end websites for your clients. But if you create an efficient process in getting new clients and delivering their service at a reasonable, known cost, you can start scaling the business.

In order to reduce your risk, I would start out with contractors. Pay them on a “per project” basis so you are only obligated to pay when you get paid. Your profits won’t be as high and it can be tough to find reliable contractors with good prices and quality products but once you do, it becomes very easy to scale up your business. Start out with determining your profit margin and you can estimate projects based off of the quote you receive.

Create a “Product”
If your skills are in web design, pick a market and create your best web design that you can sell over and over again. If you create a really great web site with a lot of cool features for restaurants (newsletters, birthday club, email-a-friend), sell it to restaurants operating in different markets. You might charge a lower price for each site but it will require less effort to set up. It’s even something that you could hire a contractor to set up on a per-site basis.

If you are a writer, you can also create a ‘product’ around your writing skills. You just have, for example, to look for something that would benefit by having a well written guide/manual. For instance, many writers make money by writing How-To ebooks for platforms such as Joomla and Drupal. I know others who have created a complete and re-usable business plan which they sell to anyone looking to write a business plan quickly.

If you are an Adsense expert, you could sell a program to similar businesses of keywords and ads that are pre-built and tested to be very effective. Just make sure you don’t sell it to competing clients.

Become a ‘Digital Landlord’
This is very similar to creating a product, the difference being that you do not sell it outright but rent it out and collect a subscription fee. Please have a look at this: Landlord 2.0

The basic idea is to utilise your expertise to create a service. If you are an accountant, you could create an accounting system which you charge a monthly fee for people to use it either online or offline. When most people think of this, they think that it has to be a large undertaking. That is not the case, you do not have to recreate Quickbooks, the secret is to niche – create a simple accounting system specifically for freelance web designers (incidentally, such a system is badly needed).

If you are a marketing guru, you could create a marketing system for very small businesses and freelancers (guys earning 10,000 to 500,000 a month) – a system whereby the businesses completely outsource marketing to you. Again, such a system is badly needed in today’s Kenya (most of these business owners are too busy to market properly and would appreciate some help, as long as it actually generates more business).

Web Site Flipping
basically, this is the selling of websites. It might require a little more investment but you could also bootstrap and start with a small portfolio that you constantly turn over and make more money off of them. But the idea is that you should buy websites, improve them, and then sell them. Maybe it’s a website that just needs a few tweaks to convert better, or a site that needs some basic search engine optimization, one that hasn’t utilized Pay-Per-Click yet, or one that could use all of these changes.

Create systems to effectively find, value, purchase, and improve sites. Most people who flip websites might do it on a “one off” basis. They don’t create systems to repeat the process over and over again. I liken it to real estate flipping companies who have scaled their business so they buy multiple properties, have a select group of vendors they use to improve the properties, and then sell it. They have great systems in place. From the very beginning, they have a set budget and they know what changes they can make and how much value it should add to the price.

Create Software
Ok, nothing too original here but I think this is a case which people think too big. They think the only software worth creating and selling is something that nobody else has created. There are a lot of niche markets for which you can build useful software. You don’t have to create Microsoft Windows, just something that is useful to your targeted niche market.

For example – you could create an online scheduling service for businesses that take appointments like doctors, salons or beauty parlors. There is a lot of scheduling software out there but if you create a product specific for an industry, you have created a successful product.

And the best part about software is that once it’s created, there is very little effort to maintain it. Unlike trading hours for dollars, you can create a mostly passive form of income.

What Do All the Ideas Have in Common?
It probably wasn’t apparently obvious with each of these ideas but they all involve targeting a niche market. You’re not going to be able to create something that works for everyone but if you create something that has utility for a niche market, your system based business can grow quite successfully.

Image courtesy of Pheezy.

Filed Under: Internet Culture, Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With: , , , , ,

Doing it like Fareed

June 9, 2010 by 5 Comments

I’m not a big fan of X-Fm Djs – I find them annoying. But I love my rock, so I’m glued to the station all day.

Fareed Khimani I have massive issues with. He has a nice voice, and he’s kind of cute, but he has this thing: nag-nag-nag-whine. Also, he can be a little rude – which I guess is the whole point of the show.

I like him for one thing though: he got me to like Alice in Chains. Let me explain.

Some weeks ago, I was in a matatu on my way to work. Almost all matatus like to play The Maina and King’ang’i show, or as I prefer to call it, Matatu FM. Matatu FM has great music, but the presenters annoy me. Their call-ins are even worse. So my morning routine is get into a mat, plug in my earphones, tune in to X-Fm, and crank it loud enough to drown the matatu.

Yes, I expect to be deaf soon.

Anyway, I was listening to Fareed, and he started talking about how he was going to play the coolest song ever, and how it would get us all jumping, and how if we didn’t like the song, we were boring.

He hyped the song five more times before he finally played it – twice. It was just a regular rock song, and I didn’t get what the hype was about. But because he’s said it so many times, the name stuck in my head.

The name of the song in Man in the box, by the rock band Alice in Chains.

Later, he picked out his favourite part of the song, which is the riff-and-chant in the beginning. He played that bit over and over again, explaining how cool it was and why.

Then, he declared it the ‘May Traffic Song’, and for the next one month, he  played it two or three times a show, usually after the traffic update. I learnt to expect the song, and within a few days, I’d learnt some of the words.

I still have no clue what the song is about, but when I eventually found myself singing along and enjoying – even loving  it, I was amused. The song in itself didn’t impact me, but hearing Fareed get so excited about it, and having it played so often, I guess it grew on me.

So here are some business lessons we can learn from this cute, annoying man.

1. It’s all about hype

Create awareness of your product, service, or business. Make it a big deal. It can be word of mouth, hot air balloons, luminous rollerblades, a regular twitter account, glow-in-the-dark vuvuzela, anything really.

Your product doesn’t have to match the hype, but it will get noticed. And once prospective clients notice, you’ll have a foot in the door. That’s always a good place to start.

2. Be persistent

Fareed’s song didn’t impact me the first time I heard it – or even the second or third. But on day 2, I noticed it’s great walking music, and by day 3, I liked the words to the song. They are so fun to yell to.

Keep yourself in the client’s mind. Make follow-up calls, get sponsored in prominent places, remain visible.

3. Be consistent

The thing with this song is it doesn’t change. You’ll hear it a million times and it sounds exactly the same. You might pick a word or note that you hadn’t heard before, but the content is the same.

Once your client notices you and starts to like you, be sure that the thing they like is always there. Going herbal can sometimes be a bad thing.

4. Tap into mnemonics

People make links in their heads, often without knowing it. Baby girls get pink, little boys get blue, metro kids wear orange, valentines means chocolates, roses mean passion and love. There isn’t any specific reason for this. They’re all just trends that caught on.

Fareed go me to associate man in the box with traffic. So every time I’m in a jam, I wait to hear the song play, even when I’m tuned to a different station.

Associate your product with something popular, or trendy, or common, something with staying power, something that clients see every day. They’ll become conditioned to your work. That’s why in Kenya, all detergents are ‘Omo’ and all margarine is ‘Blue band’.

5. Stand out

This song has a great riff, rebellious lyrics, and an interesting beat. But more than that, the band has an amazing name. It’s hard to forget anyone called Alice in Chains. Why is Alice in Chains? What did she do? What kind of chains are they? And more to the point, who the- is Alice?

Have your product stand out. It can be as simple as giving it a catchy name or colour, or as complex as making it actually good. You could also pull a saf-com and make it really, really ugly.  After all, cute fades – just look how quickly we get bored of babies.

Either way, pull a Krest with it and stand out from the crowd. Make it memorable.

Speaking of sodas and pop music, there’s a Sprite advert on TV that has teenagers ramming each other and making bubbles. At some point, a really prettylady makes a stage dive.

I have no clue what the advert means, but I love the music behind it. Does anyone know what it is?

Crystal Ading’ is a professional author, editor, rock lover and mother. Her work is available through www.threeceebee.com.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

How To Increase Revenue By Decreasing Effort

June 3, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Work?When Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google, they created the original search engine based on a research project that they did at Stanford. Once they thought they had a real idea to work with, they rented out the garage of a house to begin their business and to continue working on their search engine. This was all occurring around 1997 and 1998. Google didn’t start making any money until almost 5 years later. However, the Google co-founders spent most of that time working on their business and not programming their search engine.

The lesson with their story is that they realized that they couldn’t continue building their product – they needed to build their business, even if there was no revenue coming in (there were investors to provide them with cash to survive on). If they continued to work IN the business instead of ON the business, the company would not have been the success it is today.

I’m not sure what specific actions they took to build the business but they had to implement systems and processes so that other people could work in the business (building and improving the search engine) while they could grow the business (getting financing, hiring people, creating systems to generate revenue).

As a small business owner, the only way you can have a truly successful business is by stepping outside of your everyday activities and create a self-sufficient business. It might seem like it will cost you more money but in the end, it is the only way to drastically increase your revenues while decreasing the effort you put into the business:

1. Create a Manual
No matter what task you are doing for your business, write down the steps you take in a manual. It might seem like more work without any direct benefit but this step is probably the most important thing you can do for your new business. The next time you do the activity, it makes it that much easier because you just have to follow the steps that you wrote down. It also makes it easy to hand it off to someone else to do in the future.

2. Outsource as much work as Possible
This doesn’t mean that you have to ship your entire business to India. It just means that you have to find someone to do a lot of the tasks that you do yourself. It could be something as simple as distributing marketing materials, doing weekly bookkeeping activities, or providing support to existing customers. It’s very easy to hire a virtual assistant to get stuff done for you.

If you completed Step #1, you just have to hand it over to someone else to complete. It might seem like a waste to pay someone Kshs 5,000/- to do something that is so easy for you to do but imagine if you can spend that saved time on 1 thing that will increase your revenue by Kshs 20,000? You increase your revenues and there is less work that you have to do.

3. Define a Sales Process
If you don’t have a defined sales process and just wing it with every new lead or visitor to your web site or place of business, you are missing out on a significant amount of business. You are reinventing the wheel each time you get a new prospect so you are spending too much effort on that initial sales effort.

It also means that you are not perfecting your sales process so that you can increase the effectiveness of your sales process. By finding a system that works, you can constantly apply that and make changes to increase the effectiveness of it. It also minimizes the human element so that you are not as reliant on a superstar sales person (whether it’s you or someone else). By having a sales process in place, you will increase your conversions and increase your revenues without any additional work on your end. You are just replicating what has already worked.

4. Automate Your Sales and Operational Processes
This draws on much of the first 3 steps. Once you have created a manual and have systems that are beginning to work, you need to work on automating processes as much as possible. If you’re automating your sales process, maybe you send the same basic e-mail to potential leads through an e-mail auto-responder. If you call to set sales appointments with leads, maybe you can hire someone to do that part of the process for you.

As far as automating your operational processes, software is often the best way to do this. See if you can purchase a product that will automate part of your process. It might even be worth it to hire a developer to build a program to help you automate part of your set-up or service delivery process.

5. Act on Regular Tasks Less Frequently
Start setting aside time each day, or week, or month for specific processes. I used to get in the bad habit of working on accounting tasks every day. Not that it’s so bad to stay on top of that stuff, but by focusing my attention on it once per week instead of each day, saved me a tremendous amount of time. I love checking on the status of some of my marketing efforts but I must force myself to wait until my regular time each week so that I’m not repeating the same thing every day.

Increase Your Revenues and Decrease Your Efforts
Creating a new business requires a tremendous amount of upfront time and effort. Successfully growing your business means creating systems and processes so that other people can work in the business while you grow it by working on the business. This is the only way that you can significantly increase the revenue in your business while decreasing your effort. In fact, it’s the only way to really build a business. Otherwise, you’re basically just a one employee company and you will never get much bigger than that.

Photo courtesy of eneas.

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business Tagged With: