September 2012
DIGITAL MARKETING INSIDER
HOW TO ATTRACT AND KEEP TOP TALENT 2 WAYS TO START A BUSINESS WHY YOUR BUSINESS IDEA IS WORTHLESS HOW 1 LETTER CAN LOSE YOU £100K
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Contents.
02 / A Note From The Editor. 03 / How To Attract And Keep Top Talent ( An Employee’s Quirks ). 05 / 2 Ways To Start A Business. 07 / Why Your Business Idea Is Worthless. 09 / How 1 Letter Can Lose You £100K. 11 / Get In Touch.
About Us We create great looking online advertising campaigns that enhance your brand, we use scientifically proven online advertising methods to drive visitors to your website and adverts and then we optimise your site to make sure those visitors become paying customers that tell all their friends and come back for more.
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A Note From The Editor.
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This is what the U.K. needs if we’re to become greater, role models who’ve aspired to greatness. Neil Asher, Roarlocal.com
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Neil with his wife Natasha and daughter Isabella. First a warm welcome to September’s edition of the Digital Marketing Insider, produced by ROARlocal.com. If this is the first time you’ve received this a hearty welcome to you! You’re receiving this because we want to show you what we’re all about and also give you some usable strategies to help your businesses grow. Of course, many business owners are being completely distracted from working on their businesses by the Olympics but not, I’m sure, the businesses you are involved with. And here at ROARlocal Towers, we are practicing our best time management techniques to be able to enjoy the best of both worlds! Because Olympic has gripped the nation and didn’t we do well! 65 medals all together - amazing! And the para-olympic team are currently doing brilliantly too. Two great things stood out for me; 1. For 1 month our celebrities were people who worked their butts off to active greatness. This is a definite improvement over our normal celebs who’s only claim to fame is being inept or morally repugnant. This is what the U.K. needs if we’re to become greater, role models who’ve aspired to greatness.
2. The esprit de corps that this created within communities and the UK as a whole was palpable, it was great to see so many people proud to be British and our spirits were lifted up by the achievements of our olympians. More of that please England. I had to laugh as well that the Olympic squad from Cameroon jumped ship as soon as they got here so they could stay and live and work in the UK… I for one say anyone who’s prepared to go to such incredible lengths, qualifying for the Olympic squad just to stay in our country should be allowed to stay… we need more people like this and less dole bludging losers. Maybe we can send all our dole bludgers to Cameroon and we can have all their willing and enthusiastic entrepreneurs and workers instead.... I live in hope. I hope you’ll enjoy reading this months magazine it’s jam packed with our usual level of brilliant content and as always if we can help you in any way please get in touch.
Neil Asher
/ CEO / ROARlocal.com
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How To Attract & Keep Top Talent (An Employee’s Quirks). By Nicola Cairncross
1 / Regularly Communicate Your “Commander’s Intent” – Weekly At Least I first heard Secret Millionaire Gill Fielding talk about the Commander’s Intent at her annual presentation for the Worthing & Adur Chamber of Commerce and thought it was a great way to enable employees to make great decisions in the absence of the boss. From Wikipedia: The Commander’s Intent is an intent describing military focused operations and it is a publicly stated description of the end-state as it relates to forces (entities, people) and terrain, the purpose of the operation, and key tasks to accomplish. It is developed by a small group, e.g. staff, and a commander. Commander’s Intent (CSI) plays a central role in military decision making and planning. CSI acts as a basis for staffs and subordinates to develop their own plans and orders to transform thought into action, while maintaining the overall intention of their commander. - (U.S Army 2003, para.4-27) Read More on Wikipedia 2 / Figure Out How You Are Going To Let Me Know How I’m Doing (And Vice Versa)
As someone who has been on both sides of the fence many times, as both entrepreneur / employer and employee / talent, and now as someone who works with our fast growing client companies and advise them, I thought it might be useful to look at the quirks a boss – especially an entrepreneur new boss in a fast growing company – may need to know about when hiring.
Are we going to have weekly assessments, monthly assessments, quarterly assessments? Will they be by email, skype, phone or in person? Will I be able to feedback to you too? Work out how you want things to go in these meetings. An effective simple format is: What Went Right This Week? What Went Wrong This Week? How Did That Make Us Feel? What Are We Going To Change Now? 3 / Pay Me Well & On Time (& Don’t Let Your Finance Director Dick Me About I wanted to put this as Number Uno but felt that it might be a bit of a negative start! However, in the eyes of your employee it’s pretty much up there at number one on their list! As your talent/employee I may have bought into your Vision and your Mission, but I’m principally here to get paid. If I wanted to work for free, I’d be starting my own business or lying on a beach somewhere. If I have to spend one single MINUTE thinking about whether I’m going to get paid, when I’m going to get paid, whether I’m going to pay my bills on time, those are thoughts that are doing a lot of damage to the trust between us, my relationship with you and your company, and those are precious minutes that I’m not working in your business to make you more money. 4 / I’m Always Doing My Best… In the absence of a good system! Read The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber immediately if you haven’t already. If I screw up it’s probably because I’m winging it because you haven’t specifically told me how you want things done. Entrepreneurs aren’t known for being great at creating systems, how you do things is all in your heads, but mindmaps is a good start and then turning the mindmap into a list and starting to use something like Basecamp to map out the steps in each process. Or make a video of how you do things, send it to the Philippines to get transcribed and then turned into a ticklist. Then when we make changes to any process, I can document that from there.
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5 / Know My Personal Motivation Triggers & Keep Up To Date With Those
Conclusion
Not everyone is primarily motivated by money, some are more motivated by the social aspect of business, some by recognition, some by the sense of accomplishment, the pleasure of a job well done. Take a couple of minutes to get to know what REALLY motivates me and keep up to date with that as life changes can change your motivation.
Entrepreneurs and employees are very different animals, both making lifestyle choices and sacrifices for what is important to them. This can be a symbiotic relationship, working for both, but only if both species understand each other and communicate their needs and desired outcomes to each other clearly.
A great book for you to read here is “The E-Myth Manager” as it covers all this very well and also gives some great ideas on how best to recruit in the first place. One idea is to encourage your employees to keep an Amazon Wishlist, with items of
varying value on it, then if you want to say thank you for a job well done, you can just order something and surprise them. 6 / Encourage Me To Think Of Your Business As My Business Having said above that not everyone is motivated by money, a great way to get everyone, from the cleaner upwards, focused on your profit margins, is to put aside a percentage of your profits to pay a bonus to everyone in the company, perhaps proportionate to our salaries, perhaps not.
At ROARlocal.com we have committed to be open and honest in all our intercompany communications and we are always looking to do better. Why not share your experiences of being a boss OR an employee using the comments area there? We would love to read them!
A second percentage of your profits should be set aside to reward the “rain-makers” the people who either enhance sales or bring in new business. These bonuses should be paid quarterly and profits progress communicated monthly. Transparency around overheads, salaries, bonuses, turnover and profits encourages trust. If you are a limited company your accounts are going to be made public eventually, why not share them with us now so we can all see how we are doing? 7 / Never Make It Personal Just like when you are talking to your wife and kids, you should never make it personal. If I do something wrong or you want me to change my behaviour, tell me about the effect my behaviour had on you or your business, and how you feel about that, then tell me how you want me to change my behaviour. Never use words like “you are….” Or “you always…..” becauese that makes it personal, I feel attacked and I’ll either defend, attack or withdraw. If I then choose to carry on doing that thing, it’s time to get rid of me as I’m making a choice, having been informed clearly. 8 / Tell Me The Truth Always Even If It’s Bad News Even tiny white lies or lies of omission have a detrimental effect on the trust between us. If you lie about the little things, I’ll think you will lie about the big things. 9 / Respect The Fact That I Have A Life Perhaps one of the reasons I’m not busily building my own business is that I’ve made a lifestyle choice, which you are now benefiting from! I’ve chosen to get a life and that’s why I’m working for you rather than being entrepreneurial. While I’m happy to talk to my boss out of office hours if necessary, don’t expect me to talk to the clients, unless you are away, there’s a HUGE emergency, or we have preagreed it. 10 / Confirm Everything In Writing This shows respect and that you are good for your word. It’s all about trust again. You can always re-negotiate and re-confirm if things change.
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2 Ways To Start A Business. By Neil Asher
Instead of building a business that will grab headlines and shake industries, why not build a business that can support you?
The 4 Pillars of a Lifestyle Business > When most people start a business, the overall plan goes something like this: Get funding (angels, VCs, absurd amounts of credit card debt, whatever it takes). Find product/market fit (make sure customers actually love what you have to offer). Sacrifice everything you have for growth to establish yourself as the market leade.r Sell your business to a major corporation or go for the IPO in order to cash in. But there’s another option: The Lifestyle Business. To build a lifestyle business, the entire plan gets much simpler: Prioritize, automate, outsource, and batch everything to give you the largest income with the least amount of time required. You only need a little funding, a small market, and a little luck to get going. Then you work to build a business that doesn’t require your constant attention.
Got an idea for a lifestyle business but don’t have the expertise to put it together? Then check out our business building programme. ROARlocal.com
Prioritisation
In business, some tasks have high value. There’s the tasks that only you can do and your entire business depends on the quality of that work. If you’re a freelance designer, the time spent designing is by far the most valuable. But there’s a host of other tasks and responsbilities that a business requires. You need to keep expense records, manage invoices, find new clients, keep in touch with old clients, etc. Even worse, a small portion of your overall efforts produce the results you achieve. This is called the 80/20 rule (also Pareto’s Principle). A minority of your inputs (effort) produce the majority of your output (results). When you learn to identify and focus on the tasks that produce disproportionate results, you can greatly increase your productivity. So we have to ruthlessly prioritise and only focus on high-value tasks. But what about low-value tasks that are required? That’s where the other three pillars come in.
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Automation
Whenever you find yourself doing the same tasks repetitively, think of ways to automate it. You want to remove yourself from the process as much as possible. Let’s say that you send out several invoices each week. Currently, you use a Microsoft Word template, fill in the details, save it as a unique document, write an email to your client, thank them for their business, and link to your Paypal account every time you have to send one of them. That’s a lot of repetitive steps that suck up a ton of time. Why not just use an invoice program that saves all your client information and does all the other work for you? - click send. Done.
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Outsourcing
When a system can’t be built in order to completely automate something, consider outsourcing it. For example, it’s pretty hard to automate customer service. But you can hire someone to help your customers for you. You also want to outsource any activity that can be done at a cheaper rate than what you’re worth. If you make £75/hour, should you really spend an hour doing data entry? Why not pay someone £3/hour to fill out that spreadsheet for you, work for that hour on more important tasks, and pocket the difference? The entire goal of outsourcing is to pay other people to do tasks that take up your time. Then you can spend more of your time working on the projects that produce an immense amount of value for your business.
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Batching
What happens when none of these options are available and you still have to deal with repetitive tasks? When you can’t get rid of something, batch it. So instead of doing something here and there throughout the day, do all of it at one time.
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Let’s go through an example. You’re interviewing for an open position at your company. Hiring is a pivotal decision so you definitely don’t want to automate or outsource it. Right away, resumes start coming in sporadically throughout the day. Now if you look at each one as it comes in, all your other work will be interrupted. Simply by having to start and stop each task, you’ll waste a ton of time. Instead, look through all the resumes from the day (or the week) at one time. You’ll do a better job at finding the great applicants and the quality of your other work will also go up. By being heroically productive, reducing the time that your business requires of you, and building systems to run your business, you create a lifestyle business. Before long, you have a legitimate 4-hour work week and a full-time income. Is it easy? Absolutely not. But is it easier than starting a business from scratch and having a successful IPO? Of course. Most people can build a lifestlye business, very few can build a company that shapes industries.
So what’s it going to be? Lifestyle or growth? But Neil! You’re wrong! My cousin Joey only works 6 hours a week and his business keeps growing. That’s nice. Your cousin Joey is an anomaly. If you’re in the right industry, with the right customers, and the right product, at the right time, your company may be lucky enough that it grows on its own without any effort on your part. But this sort of thing doesn’t happen with any regularity.
But there’s just one small problem with all this…
Some people have been lucky enough to have growth kiss them right on the cheek. The rest of us have to work like dogs to make it happen. Contrary to what 99% of the BS Guru’s will tell you building a business is hard.
As Soon As You Play the Lifestyle Card, You Give Up Growth.
Is a Lifestyle Business Worth it?
As anyone that’s started a business can tell you, growth at any level takes a monumental effort. This is true when you’re starting and it’s also true when you’re trying to take everything to the next level. Building a business from scratch that pulls £100,000 in revenue is only stage one. You won’t magically find yourself at the £1,000,000 in revenue mark within a few years. The next stage of growth requires just as much effort and hustle as the stage before it… perhaps more.
It definitely can be. For many people, a lifestyle business is exactly what they need. You’ll get plenty of spare time to enjoy life as you wish, enough income to support a modest lifestyle, and you’ll be the captain of your fate.
Without your determined will and unrelenting passion, you’ll never get there. Your business will stall and next year will look exactly the same as this year.
But remember: growth is not one of the benefits of a lifestyle business. So if you want to take your business to the next level, you’re going to have to make some serious sacrifices. Get back to eating ramen noodles and hustling until 3 in the morning. Growth only comes to those that are truly committed.
Bonus Round: These are also great strategies for people trying to dominate markets and go for a massive exit. But instead of spending their spare time living the lifestyle, they’ll pour it back into their business.
So when you step back and enjoy life, you’re giving up on growth. You Also Become Vulnerable to Competitors The only way to ensure that you don’t get sideswiped by some upstart is to relentlessly pursue growth. If you grow faster than every other play in your industry, no one can catch up to you. But if you’re not growing, not innovating, and not improving, it’s a matter of time before someone finds the same business model and figures out how to do a better job than you.
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Why Your Business Idea is Worthless. By Neil Asher
Did Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all start with brilliant ideas? Absolutely. But the reason they’re all billion dollar companies today is because of the brilliant execution of their founders.
Many new entrepreneurs (and plenty of battle-hardened ones) believe that all they need is one brilliant idea. If they come up with the idea for the next Google, Facebook, or Apple, they’ll have it made and be on easy street. Nothing could be further from the truth. Why? Your ideas are worthless. So are mine. In fact, every idea is worthless. That’s right, the valuation of your idea comes out to be a whopping ZERO. Nothing, nada, zilch. So if the value from a business doesn’t come from the idea, where does it come from? Execution. Ideas have no value in and of themselves. Instead, ideas are a multiplier. The better the idea, the higher the multiple. If you want to figure out how much your business is worth, multiply the quality of your idea with the value of your execution. A good idea (multiple of 10) combined with the value of good execution (£100,000) will give you a business in the £1,000,000 range. Here’s the breakdown: Awful Idea = -1
No Execution = £1
Weak Idea = 1
Weak Execution = £1000
So-so Idea = 5
So-so Execution = £10,000
Good Idea = 10
Good Execution = £100,000
Great Idea = 15
Great Execution = £1,000,000
Brilliant Idea = 20
Brilliant Execution = £10,000,000
Obviously, these numbers are not empirically based at all. And remember that we always overestimate the quality of our ideas. Brilliant ideas only come around a couple times during a decade.
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Everything from an idea for an industry shattering business to an idea for a better email subject line. Obviously, as your ideas get smaller, they also get easier to execute. But they still depend on execution. What does this mean for you? The next time you come up with a great (or brilliant) idea, you’ve only just started. Now you need to build it, test it, and grow it. For big ideas, this takes years of effort. Honesty time: your idea probably isn’t as good as you think it is (this applies to all of us). Just because you think it’s a great idea doesn’t mean the market place will. This is why the value is in the execution and not the idea. So test your idea, validate it, then try to build it into your ultimate vision. The better you get at executing, the faster you’ll be able to test and grow ideas. From there, it’s only a matter of time until you do come across that great idea that truly makes an impact.
Bottom Line: A brilliant idea only becomes a “billion pound idea” when combined with brilliant execution. The idea is the easy part. Most people get hung up on the execution.
Some people have a wealth of ideas but can never seem to follow through. If this describes you and you’re committed to getting to the next level, you either need to get better at execution or find someone who is. Either way, the key to success is combining your ideas with great execution. What about patents and licensing fees? If you know what you’re doing, you could register a bunch of patents on your ideas and then license them out to companies. Once you’ve secured the deal, you’ll collect royalty cheques for as long as your idea is still useful or legally required. But here’s the thing: not only do you need to secure the patent, then you need to actually sell it to somebody. In other words, this business model still depends on execution. You’ll still need to take the quality of your idea and multiply by the value of that execution. If you have a great idea and combine with a great patent attorney and salesmanship, you’ll be making a lot of money from your ideas. But the value with be coming from the execution of this strategy, not the actual ideas.
Got a great idea but no time to execute it? Then why not check out our “we work for you” service. ROARlocal.com
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How 1 Letter Can Lose You £100K. By Neil Asher
Lets talk about keywords, I think for this article and in fact for all your online marketing it would be best to think of keywords as search intentions. So what is the intention or the intended outcome of the person who is typing something into Google in the hope of finding something. Still with me? Ok, so now lets look at 2 keywords that look the same BUT have very different intentions behind them, to illustrate this lets take a search: “mobile website” vs “mobile websites” So I’ve added an ‘s’ to this and made it a plural (something Google VERY naughtily does for you unless you stop it). Notice they are phrase matches meaning my ads will show up if someone types in to Google: “how do I get a mobile website” and it will also show up for the search term “what’s the big deal with mobile websites?” Now one of those is going to result in a sale for me and the other is not. And it’s because (in general) the plural of any word is used when the searcher is gathering information and the singular of a word is (usually) used when you’ve done your research and you’re ready to buy.
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One of the services we offer is mobile website design, we’re very good at building mobile optimised websites and then driving a ton of local traffic to them, in fact our mobile campaigns are our best performing landing pages…
So as you can imagine it’s a bit dumb to send these 2 very different people to the same place. Now you could reasonably argue that negative keywords and/or exact match keywords are the way to go, but that’s a rookie error that will result in you missing out on a HUGE chunk of money. That’s because searchers are not good at searching, they don’t know what to type in to Google to get exactly what they want so they type in a crappy search term “mobile websites” and click on 2 or 3 ads and if those ads don’t yield what they’re looking for then they try a different search term… BUT the damage to your ad budget is already done. So no, you must be much smarter than that. You’ve got to isolate the intention of the searcher based on the keyword and deliver (as closely as possible) what they’re looking for. In fact one of our recent clients was doing his own PPC and asked us to look after it for him instead along with his web design, conversion optimisation etc. Bottom line for him was we added £100K to his business bottom line in just 3 months… it pays to get good people to work on your marketing for you. So if you’re running PPC you’ve gotta take into consideration the intention of the searcher and create their experience accordingly.
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Get In Touch.
Contact www.roarlocal.com/contact Fill in the form to contact us at any time. We need your name, the domain name of your existing site (if you have one), your preferred method of contact (phone number or email address) and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
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