Archives for February 2017
The 7 Phases of Small Business Success
Small business success is measured in a wide variety of ways. Regardless of how you measure your success, or what stage you believe you are at in your business journey, you can rest assured that you are not alone. Furthermore, it is critical that your growing business understand that its problems along the success journey are predictable. Therefore, you should take the time to learn from those who have advanced themselves and did so by solving common problems that presented themselves at predictable moments.
To grow your business in a sustainable fashion you must solve key problems on your success journey. The point of the 7 Phases of Small Business Success is twofold. First, you are not alone in your success phase and second, that your problems are not unique.Â
The following information regarding the 7 Phases of Small Business Success was derived from a Census Bureau survey and shared with the team at Viral Solutions by Clate Mask, CEO of Infusionsoft while participating in the The Elite Forum.
In general, one can point to seven different phases of small business success. Those seven phases are listed here. Each phase is categorized based upon revenue, the number of employees, the number of business at each phase and the common problem they must solve in order to advance to the next phase in a sustainable fashion:
- Solopreneur: People who are just getting started with their businesses do not have the same resources as slightly more established companies, which means they tend to wear all the hats and spend a significant amount of time working on every aspect of their business. This stage accounts for about 22 million businesses in America. Businesses in this stage usually do less than $100,000 in business per year. They must solve their problem of being spread too thin. Time is their enemy.Â
- Partnership: Partnerships have two or three people working for the company, doing anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000 in business per year. This category accounts for about 1.7 million businesses in America. The success factor for this group is salesmanship; at this point, partners must be able to sell their product and service to new audiences.
- Steady operation: A steady operation usually has four to 10 employees, including the entrepreneur who started the company, and does from $300,000 to $1 million in business annually. This phase accounts for about 1.9 million businesses. Here, the main success factor is the quality of the business’s marketing and customer service. It’s all about building up a brand and keeping customers coming back over and over again.
- Local success story: At this stage, a business typically has 11 to 20 people working for it, and is doing $1 million to $3 million in annual business. There are about 700,000 businesses in America that fit the description of this phase. At this phase, the businesses that will continue to succeed and grow have set a clear vision for their company and have an action plan in place to keep finding new avenues for success.
- Managed organization: A business hits this stage once it is doing $3 million to $10 million in annual sales and hits 21 to 50 employees. There are about 300,000 businesses in this phase in the United States. Now that the vision is really taking off, businesses are able to begin hiring more rapidly to bring in employees who help deliver on that vision.
- Mature company: At this sixth phase, businesses are doing $10 million to $20 million in annual sales and have around 51 to 100 employees. This category accounts for about 100,000 businesses in America. The main success factor for mature companies is strategic planning. Now that the business has grown and matured, businesses must implement detailed strategies to stay efficient and continue growing.
- Corporate player: At this seventh and final phase, the business has $20 million to $100 million in annual sales and 101 to 500 employees. About 90,000 businesses in the United States fit into this category. Now that the company is a major player among the other big fish in the industry, leadership development is a key success factor. If the company is able to continually develop great leaders, it will maintain its success in the long run.
Viral Solutions is able to work with businesses at every single one of these small business success phases to maximize their potential. We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves so business can be fun again.
Copyright 2017 Viral Solutions LLC
Prior to joining Viral Solutions, Christine held executive leadership roles at some of the largest small business consulting firms in the USA. Her experience includes leading direct reports of over 130 remote sales agents who generated $38mm in annual revenue. She obtained her Marketing degree from British Columbia Institute of Technology. Bring her C-Suite experience to your small business. Although our company is virtual, and we can work with you wherever you are located, she is located in Denver, Colorado and owns a second home in Vancouver, BC Canada.
Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner and an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant.
We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves, so business can be fun again.
Common eCommerce Mistakes | No Competitor Research – Part #7
The more successful your ecommerce website becomes, the more competition you create. That is a basic fact of business. Your recourse is to out think them, out market them and outwork them. You must know your competitors marketing strategy as well as your own. Your organic search rankings can be improved by having such knowledge which in turn will enhance the performance of your ecommerce website.
Most business owners have an SEO strategy. The common mistake ecommerce businesses make is not understanding their competitors SEO strategy.Â
Search Engine Optimization most effective component is to produce great content that your viewers want to share, and other sites that are relevant to your viewer want to link to, this is SEO 101 and yields in better rankings. The problem with that practice is that better quality content is harder and harder to create as millions of websites follow the same belief.
Where many ecommerce websites fail is with competitive research, they only consider themselves.
Here are some insider tips for you to use to give your ecommerce website an organic boost over your competition.
Researching a competitor is at the hub of Search Engine Optimization.Â
All of us have keywords and keyphrases that we include in our landing pages and editorial content. What is less common is for an ecommerce business to research the keywords and keyphrases used by competition. We believe that what elevates a website in ranking is how this is structured not only within linked sites but also the structure of a page within your site.
Competitor research is important for several reasons. It helps you establish benchmark metrics by which you can measure your performance and then determine which performance metrics can be improved economically. Your competitive advantage and disadvantage will become self evident and help you define realistic SEO targets.
One of our favorite tools for this is SEMrush. This tool will enable you to see competitor's best keywords, discover new competitors, uncover competitors' ad strategies and budgets and observe domain changes….to name just a few.
Staying on top of your ranking and your competitors ranking can give you a competitive advantage.
Understanding Crawl Limitations
An SEO technical skill that is often neglected is is putting noindex/nofollow tags on pages that do not need to or should not appear in a search engine. Examples of those are thank you pages, checkout pages and those for internal use. If you have lots of pages on your site, Google will not crawl all of them everyday. This is a very simple tactic but requires your marketing team to coordinate with your webmaster. Staying on top of the crawl budget will give you a competitive advantage.
Be smart with content.
Every landing page, every sales page and every blog article should have a defined purpose. Your content must appeal to your audience and you should stay on top of such items as content social sharing and time on page as a way of measuring the engagement level of your content. Your bounce rate needs to be less than your competitors comparable content. Your time on page average needs to be better than your competitors.
Your smart content will help your rankings more than anything. Your goal should be to 10x the hits and shares your content receives. To do this you need to speak to your audience's pain points, focus on just one of those pain points per article and narrow your discussion, research your competition with regard to similar points as noted above, deliberately differentiate your content, include opposing points of view, expand your understanding of the topic by researching how influencers handled the subject, plan your content layout and bullet points carefully and then seek the advice of others to help you polish your smart content.
In addition, when you cover a topic, cover it in-depth. Surface fluff articles, just so that you have articles are not valuable. Go deep!
Engaging content will give you a competitive advantage and fuel your rankings.
HTTPS your entire site, not just your ecommerce pages
Google has changed how non-https sites are viewed in Chrome. Switching your entire site to https will avoid security warnings when you audience views your pages.
Do not over optimize for keywords
The tactic of producing content for your blog or saturating your ecommerce website with keywords you want to rank for is now an ancient tactic and is highly frowned upon. However, you do want to focus on those long-tail or mid-tail keyphrases that research has shown there to be little competition for. This is because search relevancy has become a bigger factor to search ranking than ever. The ultimate goal is for your target to find your specific landing page that appeals to their need without using your website hamburger menu. That requires understanding the keyphrases that your target uses to find someone like you.
Our point here is that it can easily be overdone and you can easily spend too much time and money optimizing for it.
We need to keep reminding ourselves how incredibly important search marketing is. We all must invest in the right resources, techniques and processes to compete. If we don’t, then there will always be more SEO-savvy competitors who are investing to take us out. Unfortunately in this game of competitive SEO research the best tactician can often win over the best product or service for the prospective search customer.  To ensure you deliver the best results from the search engines, be smart with you content, research your competition and go deep!
In our next article on the most common ecommerce mistakes we will discuss retargeting to bring visitors back to your site.
Copyright 2017 Viral Solutions LLC
We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again.
Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner, an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant and a Google Partner – Certified in AdWords.
Common eCommerce Mistakes | No Competitor Research – Part #7
The more successful your ecommerce website becomes, the more competition you create. That is a basic fact of business. Your recourse is to out think them, out market them and outwork them. You must know your competitors marketing strategy as well as your own. Your organic search rankings can be improved by having such knowledge which in turn will enhance the performance of your ecommerce website.
Most business owners have an SEO strategy. The common mistake ecommerce businesses make is not understanding their competitors SEO strategy.Â
Search Engine Optimization most effective component is to produce great content that your viewers want to share, and other sites that are relevant to your viewer want to link to, this is SEO 101 and yields in better rankings. The problem with that practice is that better quality content is harder and harder to create as millions of websites follow the same belief.
Where many ecommerce websites fail is with competitive research, they only consider themselves.
Here are some insider tips for you to use to give your ecommerce website an organic boost over your competition.
Researching a competitor is at the hub of Search Engine Optimization.Â
All of us have keywords and keyphrases that we include in our landing pages and editorial content. What is less common is for an ecommerce business to research the keywords and keyphrases used by competition. We believe that what elevates a website in ranking is how this is structured not only within linked sites but also the structure of a page within your site.
Competitor research is important for several reasons. It helps you establish benchmark metrics by which you can measure your performance and then determine which performance metrics can be improved economically. Your competitive advantage and disadvantage will become self evident and help you define realistic SEO targets.
One of our favorite tools for this is SEMrush. This tool will enable you to see competitor's best keywords, discover new competitors, uncover competitors' ad strategies and budgets and observe domain changes….to name just a few.
Staying on top of your ranking and your competitors ranking can give you a competitive advantage.
Understanding Crawl Limitations
An SEO technical skill that is often neglected is is putting noindex/nofollow tags on pages that do not need to or should not appear in a search engine. Examples of those are thank you pages, checkout pages and those for internal use. If you have lots of pages on your site, Google will not crawl all of them everyday. This is a very simple tactic but requires your marketing team to coordinate with your webmaster. Staying on top of the crawl budget will give you a competitive advantage.
Be smart with content.
Every landing page, every sales page and every blog article should have a defined purpose. Your content must appeal to your audience and you should stay on top of such items as content social sharing and time on page as a way of measuring the engagement level of your content. Your bounce rate needs to be less than your competitors comparable content. Your time on page average needs to be better than your competitors.
Your smart content will help your rankings more than anything. Your goal should be to 10x the hits and shares your content receives. To do this you need to speak to your audience's pain points, focus on just one of those pain points per article and narrow your discussion, research your competition with regard to similar points as noted above, deliberately differentiate your content, include opposing points of view, expand your understanding of the topic by researching how influencers handled the subject, plan your content layout and bullet points carefully and then seek the advice of others to help you polish your smart content.
In addition, when you cover a topic, cover it in-depth. Surface fluff articles, just so that you have articles are not valuable. Go deep!
Engaging content will give you a competitive advantage and fuel your rankings.
HTTPS your entire site, not just your ecommerce pages
Google has changed how non-https sites are viewed in Chrome. Switching your entire site to https will avoid security warnings when you audience views your pages.
Do not over optimize for keywords
The tactic of producing content for your blog or saturating your ecommerce website with keywords you want to rank for is now an ancient tactic and is highly frowned upon. However, you do want to focus on those long-tail or mid-tail keyphrases that research has shown there to be little competition for. This is because search relevancy has become a bigger factor to search ranking than ever. The ultimate goal is for your target to find your specific landing page that appeals to their need without using your website hamburger menu. That requires understanding the keyphrases that your target uses to find someone like you.
Our point here is that it can easily be overdone and you can easily spend too much time and money optimizing for it.
We need to keep reminding ourselves how incredibly important search marketing is. We all must invest in the right resources, techniques and processes to compete. If we don’t, then there will always be more SEO-savvy competitors who are investing to take us out. Unfortunately in this game of competitive SEO research the best tactician can often win over the best product or service for the prospective search customer.  To ensure you deliver the best results from the search engines, be smart with you content, research your competition and go deep!
In our next article on the most common ecommerce mistakes we will discuss retargeting to bring visitors back to your site.
Copyright 2017 Viral Solutions LLC
We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again.
Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner, an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant and a Google Partner – Certified in AdWords.
Certified Search Marketing Specialist | Become the master
Want to figure out how to drive more free organic traffic to your website? Then the Search Marketing Mastery course, offered through Digital Marketer, is right up your alley!
SEO has changed a lot since the concept first started gaining traction over a decade ago. Google’s algorithms are constantly changing, meaning the rules for SEO are as well. Today, we can clearly see that the future of search marketing is Intent Based Search Optimization, or IBSO.
Today, more than ever before, businesses need search marketers who understand that there are significant differences between what used to work and what currently works in the world of search marketing.
There is a shocking amount of search marketers who still operate as though it’s 2009, unable or unwilling to see the game has completely changed since then.
In this master class, you will learn:
- The principles of IBSO and how to use the IBSO research planner to ensure all your products and services are discoverable
Complete this course and you will be issued a certificate along with this badge to display proudly on your website, with your email signature or wherever you want to show it off! Let your colleagues, competitors, prospects and clients know you are certified to help them with all things search marketing.
- A seven-point Search Health Audit Checklist to help you remove issues that cripple your SEO potential
- How to build a white hat, sustainable search strategy with UXO and RXO best practices
- An 11-point domain level SEO audit that helps you find and remove any crippling search issues you must fix
- An easy Google “hack” that helps you find SEO problems within five minutes
- A four-step process to updating your blogposts that takes Google’s QDF algorithm into account, helping refresh content you already have created
- Seven ways to engage in backlinking to help get your websites ranked for the keywords you care about
- How to drive organic traffic across all platforms, including Google, YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, Pinterest, Yelp, TripAdvisor and more
Becoming a master of search marketing is absolutely critical in today’s digital-first world of marketing. For more information about this certification course and its benefits, reach out to our team at Viral Solutions today and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you have.
Ready to take the course? Click here to purchase and get started now!
Certified Search Marketing Specialist | Become the master
Want to figure out how to drive more free organic traffic to your website? Then the Search Marketing Mastery course, offered through Digital Marketer, is right up your alley!
SEO has changed a lot since the concept first started gaining traction over a decade ago. Google’s algorithms are constantly changing, meaning the rules for SEO are as well. Today, we can clearly see that the future of search marketing is Intent Based Search Optimization, or IBSO.
Today, more than ever before, businesses need search marketers who understand that there are significant differences between what used to work and what currently works in the world of search marketing.
There is a shocking amount of search marketers who still operate as though it’s 2009, unable or unwilling to see the game has completely changed since then.
In this master class, you will learn:
- The principles of IBSO and how to use the IBSO research planner to ensure all your products and services are discoverable
Complete this course and you will be issued a certificate along with this badge to display proudly on your website, with your email signature or wherever you want to show it off! Let your colleagues, competitors, prospects and clients know you are certified to help them with all things search marketing.
- A seven-point Search Health Audit Checklist to help you remove issues that cripple your SEO potential
- How to build a white hat, sustainable search strategy with UXO and RXO best practices
- An 11-point domain level SEO audit that helps you find and remove any crippling search issues you must fix
- An easy Google “hack” that helps you find SEO problems within five minutes
- A four-step process to updating your blogposts that takes Google’s QDF algorithm into account, helping refresh content you already have created
- Seven ways to engage in backlinking to help get your websites ranked for the keywords you care about
- How to drive organic traffic across all platforms, including Google, YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, Pinterest, Yelp, TripAdvisor and more
Becoming a master of search marketing is absolutely critical in today’s digital-first world of marketing. For more information about this certification course and its benefits, reach out to our team at Viral Solutions today and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you have.
Ready to take the course? Click here to purchase and get started now!