Successful Blog

Thanks to Week 363 SOBs

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Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

Purple SOB Button Original SOB Button Red SOB Button Purple and Blue SOB Button
and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

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They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

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Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

How Working Abroad Helped Me Start My Dream Business

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by Kelly Dunning

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I Wanted to Do Something Amazing with My Life

Three years ago I left my home country of Canada to go work abroad. I had just graduated university with a pretty useless art degree and I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

The only thing I knew was that I was creative, loved to write and daydreamed about traveling the world. I wanted to do something amazing with my life, but I just wasn’t sure what it would be. So, instead of settling down into a “career” I applied for a work visa and bought a flight to New Zealand just to roll the dice and see what would happen.

Now I make a living as a full time freelance travel writer, which allows me to wander the world and work from anywhere I choose. In the past couple of years I have traveled and lived in New Zealand, England, Portugal, Italy, Scotland, the USA and Thailand and I am writing this from a hostel in Malaysia with many more Southeast Asian destinations in my near future.

How did the decision to work abroad allow me to create my dream business?

Being Penniless in New Zealand gave me the Idea

I had a job when I first arrived in New Zealand, as a tour guide in a creepy old prison on the North Island. It was there that I met Lee, a gregarious English guy who completely won me over with his down-to-earth charm. After a couple months of working on the North Island I wanted to see the South Island so I headed down to Christchurch where Lee happened to be working, having left the prison a few weeks before me.

My plan was to find a job in Christchurch as well, but things didn’t go as planned. I struggled to find full time work even though I was sending in applications every day. I found a part time job as a pub crawl host but that was only one night per week and my travel savings were quickly disappearing. I started to get more and more desperate and I began to think of any possible way that I could make some cash, including offering my gardening and babysitting skills on the local classifieds.

I remembered that my parents had mentioned a freelance writing website and I started to look around on the internet for places that I could find paid writing jobs. I was getting nowhere with my job search and writing random articles for a few extra dollars would be better than having to look under the couch cushions for enough change to buy lunch.

Sometimes it is only when you are in a situation where things start to get desperate that you are forced to think outside the box and try something unconventional.

I did a few little articles here and there and earned a few bucks. I started to like the idea of online writing, but I didn’t really take it seriously until the next stage of my working abroad adventure.

Working My Butt Off in England Gave Me the Drive

After we had lived in Christchurch together for a few months, Lee and I realized that our travel romance had the potential to be something more and he asked me to come back to England with him. I said, “why the hell not?” and I jumped on the plane to Manchester.

When I arrived, the first thing I did was take the first job I could find (I was penniless, remember?). I soon went from being unemployed to working 45 hours per week at a daycare facility plus Saturdays at the local football club. Although I enjoyed it and I was glad to have money again, it was hard work.

Meanwhile the little bit of writing work that I had done in New Zealand was beginning to grow into the odd article here and there. I kept at it, working on my writing during evenings and weekends. Between my two jobs and my writing projects on the side, I sometimes worked around 50-60 hours per week.

I started to realize that the conventional full time 9-5 job wasn’t for me but if I was going to be able to make a living on my own terms I would have to put in the work first to earn that freedom. I invested hours and hours into building up my freelance writing portfolio.

I worked more on my writing when I had to squeeze it in around a full time job than when I was unemployed and had all of the time in the world. That seems backwards, but it is true. Do you know the saying “if you want something to get done, give it to a busy person?” When I had all that time, I was lazy and stretched everything out so it took longer. When I was super busy, I needed to make every second count and I was more motivated to get stuff done.

When you fill up your plate with a lot of new challenges, sometimes you can surprise yourself with how energized you are to succeed.

Teaming up With a Fellow Adventurer Gave Me the Techniques

One of the most important parts of building up my dream business was not what I did while working abroad but who I met. I wouldn’t have been nearly as successful as I am now without my amazing partner Lee.

Our skills complement each other out because although I love writing I am not so good at the organizational and planning side of things. Lee’s logical business minded brain has helped me take my raw talent for writing and turn it into a business model that actually works. He helped me with solutions for time management, ways of organizing my work and my invoices, strategies for increasing my productivity, tools for recording my progress and so much more. My writing business grew in leaps and bounds and it started to actually look like a feasible source of income!

When you go take your business on the road and work abroad you end up meeting people who share the same goals as you and are able to offer you fresh insight that is vital to your success.

It took me just over a year from those first writing assignments in New Zealand to the day when I was able to quit my “day job” and start writing full time. That was over 18 months ago and we are still going strong as we travel around the world.

The experiences during my time working abroad were the essential catalyst to my success as a world traveling freelance writer, a dream job that I would never have created if I had stayed in one place.

Author’s Bio:
Kelly Dunning writes for Global Visas, the world’s leading authority on immigration and working holiday visas.

 

The Ultimate Pre-Conference Checklist

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by
Rosemary O’Neill

SOBCon NW Here I Come!

As you read this, I should be happily rubbing elbows with Liz, Terry, and tons of other smart enthusiastic entrepreneurs and small business owners at SOBCon NW in Portland.

The trip inspired me to share my personal pre-conference to do list.

I hope it helps make your next conference experience more productive!

  • Try to connect with other attendees in advance (Twitter is my weapon of choice).
  • Start following the conference hashtag (if you’re really hardcore, make a Hootsuite column for the conference stream).
  • Charge all devices and pack chargers, cords, Mophie juicepack, and a power strip.
  • Download a movie or two to the iPad.
  • Re-look at and update all social profiles, since they’ll hopefully be getting looked at a lot. You want to make a good first impression.
  • Back up your laptop and phone, in case either gets misplaced or stolen. You should already have your important stuff stored in the “cloud” on DropBox or elsewhere.
  • Try to arrange specific meetups in advance (sometimes in the heat of the action you can lose out on meeting specific people).
  • Consider whether you want to capture some content for your blog (be ready to shoot impromptu interview videos or live-blog a session).
  • Include flat shoes that can be tossed in a briefcase (I saw you do that, Gini Dietrich!).
  • Always bring a couple of powerbars (good if you get stuck in an airplane, or if the conference food is bad, or if you skip lunch to meet with someone).
  • If there’s an attendee list (check the event site, or Lanyrd.com) scan for new people you can meet.
  • Decide what your ‘ask’ is, in case anyone says, ‘so what can I help you with?’ (I learned this one painfully ).
  • Brush up your two-sentence pitch for when someone says, ‘what do you do?’
  • Scan the session information and think in advance of what smart questions you might ask if the speaker does Q&A at the end.

Note that this is the ‘attendee’ version of the list. Mitch Joel posted the definitive ‘speaker’ version of this list a few months ago.

What do you do to make the most of your conference attendance?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Internet Marketing for Small Businesses – What You Must Keep Track of?

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Keeping track of your performance is imperative in all types of marketing, because that is what allows you to see the ROI (return on investment), and to figure out exactly what is working for your business and what’s not. Same goes for marketing your business in the cyber world, if you are not keeping track of your progress, you will keep wasting your time, money and resources on strategies which are practically of no use to your business. Tracking, monitoring, and evaluating your marketing regime is the only thing that can keep you on track.

Keeping an Eye

There are different levels and criterion for tracking, but following are the most basic metrics that must be tracked in all types of Internet Marketing campaigns.

Back Links:

In the olden days of Search Engine Optimization, we use to deal with back links in bulk i.e. the more links you had, the better. Keeping track of these links was limited to having a look at the number of links your website has. A list of free directories was considered to be an asset; people paid hundreds of dollars to get a link from some of those high page rank web directories.

Fast forward to the present days, and you can see that things have drastically changed. Good news is, you don’t need to build links in bulk, bad news is, you still need to build links more than before, however you need to be extra vigilant and make sure you are not over optimizing. The links need to be relevant, coming from trustworthy websites, and they should be growing in numbers that looks natural, or else you will get a penalty instead of going up the ranks. Tracking your back links or link prospects will let you steer clear of the practices that might result in a Google Penalty, and do more harm than good.

Rankings:

It’s quite difficult to know your exact rankings, in fact there’s no universal ranking anymore, owing to highly personalized search results. Your ranking for a given keyword can vary from one location to another (in fact from one PC to another). However, you still need to keep track of your rankings to have an idea if your SEO efforts are paying off or not. It will also allow you to experiment with different SEO and link building methods to gauge the ROI.

Unique Visitors & Bounce Rate:

Everything you do, in the name of Search Engine Optimization, is meant for attracting unique visitors and eventually some sales for your website, so it’s a given that you must to keep track of your bounce rate and the number of unique visitors to see if you are on the right track. Having a high bounce rate means that you were so close (yet so far) of making a sale, while knowing everything about your visitors will let you determine the possible reasons for a high bounce rate. Not keeping a track of these statistics is like shooting in the dark.

Social Media:

Keeping track of your presence at social media is important; because social media is the next big thing after search engine (some might say it’s bigger than that). Social media works differently for different types of websites and businesses, so you cannot rely on stats or tips posted by other webmasters or bloggers. For success at social media, you need to be more creative than systematic, you need to experiment a lot while trying new ways to go viral on some of those social media websites. Without having any kind of tracking (e.g. the referrals from social networks), you will never know if your efforts are paying off.

Author’s Bio:
Arba Hana is an Internet Marketing expert and contributing writer for Digital Third Coast Internet Marketing, Inc.

Are Your Employees Driving You Crazy?

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Today’s small business owner should be looking for every opportunity to save money. If they’re not, then there is a good chance they may be closing up shop sooner rather than later.

One area that can oftentimes be overlooked, but should be reviewed several times a year to search for additional savings, is a company’s auto insurance coverage.

For the small business owner that must make deliveries or customer contact calls using company vehicles, having the right insurance at the right price should be a given.

In order to get the right coverage at the right price:
* Obtain several quotes – You should go online and put together several quotes in order to compare and contrast.  Also research each insurer to see how they rate when it comes to customer service and financial stability;

* Consider a larger deductible – In order to save some money on premiums, you can opt for a higher deductible, but make sure you have the money in place to meet the expense of the deductible should one of your drivers be in an accident. Even the smallest of fender benders can turn into something major if the other party or parties decide to consult a lawyer, claiming they were injured by your employee;

* Bundle coverage – Another option for trimming your insurance rates is by bundling coverage with the same insurer. In the event you have a homeowners, renters, life or health insurance policy with Company #1, consider switching your business auto insurance from Company #2 over to the former. Many insurance companies will offer policyholders a deal when they manage all of their insurance needs;

* Maintain a clean driving record – This should be a no-brainier, but having a clean business driving record goes a long way in keeping your rates manageable. Make sure that any employee using a company vehicle has a good driving record, practices safe driving, and is reminded of this on a regular basis (see below). As for your company vehicle/s, the latest safety features available such as airbags and anti-lock brakes will also help lower your rates.

Employees Need to Take Responsibility Too

Having said all that, the business owner must also make sure they have a policy in place with their employees who use company vehicles to properly and efficiently use them.

It should not come as a surprise in today’s technological world that more employers are either using or considering putting in place GPS systems to track employees while on the clock.

As an example, your employee is scheduled for a client call at the customer’s business for 9:30 a.m. The employee leaves your office a few minutes before for the short drive over to the business, with the intent being the call should take no more than half an hour. Some two hours later, the employee returns and you have questions. First, why were they gone so long? Secondly, why did a short trip result in an additional 50 miles on the company vehicle? Yes, you can see where there could be an uncomfortable situation here for both employer and employee.

For the small business owner, did they clearly state to the employee when they hired them that a policy was in place for such calls, along with the fact that all trips are recorded for both time and mileage purposes?

Not only did monitoring the employee present the employer with the potential for disciplining the worker in abusing their driving privileges while at work, but it also called into question potential insurance issues, as the employee could have been involved in an accident while doing unnecessary driving on the clock.

And you thought being a small business owner did not come with a lot of responsibilities?

Photo credit: electronics.howstuffworks.com

With 23 years of experience as a writer, Dave Thomas covers a wide array of topics to help small business owners succeed.

Analyze Social with Google Analytics Today

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Franklyn Stephen

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Social media reporting in Google analytics

Google analytics provides a reporting which would make you understand little bit easier that efforts you put in social media marketing are worth the investment. Also it gives you in-depth analysis about which social channel gives value to your business and which plans are most effectual.

Business metrics with Social Media

These new reports are framed in a way to span the gap between business metrics and social media. Using these reports, you can assess the traffic/clicks comes to your site from different social channels and how they leads to conversions, future conversions, and where the users navigate within your website and many social activities that are going on and off the website which enables to do in-depth analysis and take further actions in social media for the growth of your business.

If you are unaware of these updates, check through as you log in next time. Here are few things that you can keep an eye.

By the above overview report, we can have a quick look at how much conversions has been produced by social channels. Also it gives you comparison between the money invested and profit obtained from all your goal completions obtained through social referrals.

Social Channel Conversions

We can evaluate the conversion rates of each social channel whereby it allows marketers to measure the value of each social network that drives profit and supports your business. This conversion report gives influence of the social content whether it may be from facebook conversion post, or Google plus post or stumble upon post or new video.

Social Plugins Report

Social plugins report gives good insight of how the article pages of website is influenced by the social media through the social buttons (like facebook, Google plus, twitter) being clicked on the article page to share them. By this, clear picture can be availed of which articles are most engaged, interesting among the users and how the users are following socially with your content on and off your site.

Activity stream: What is going on outside of your website?

All other reports would depict the social content as how it is being engaged inside the website, While this activity stream report will present the activities that are carried out in the social content off the website across the social web.

Social content shared publicly as how it is shared, where it is shared (through facebook, twitter, Google plus, stumble upon etc), what people have commented and URLs of all these sources can be seen. Presently activities are covered for Google+ and the list of social data hub partners is growing which includes Meetup, Badoo, Hatena, Echo, etc…These new reports can be availed through standard reporting tab.

Sources of Social visits

This report gives visits received to the site through different social referrals and how users behave in the site, as shown in the parallel comparative picture . The in-depth details of conversion metrics of each social network and how the content is engaged and interacted among the people is depicted. This report turned out to be handy, because whether visitors are getting the desired outcome in the website can be examined here, which is essentially and really you want to know.

Focus on Content

Recently, Google analytics has brought few updates which enable the users to get adept understanding about their social impact. For the long time this was lagging being unable to find how much the content was socialized. But now Google analytics is able to measure the social reach of content/website/product/services. Notwithstanding the availability of tools on hands, social reach is all about how the content is being used and shared. Keeping all these in track, Google has released few updates designed in its analytics tool. Two significant new updates are centered on assisting the users to get clear understanding on how the content is socializing online and how it’s being viewed across different devices.

Content Experiments

Users can experiment content to test and improvise the website. Site owners can create different versions of a page say A, B, and C experiments to measure how effectively each versions get the visitors to convert. Google analytics already have this facility called website optimizer. It is now called as ‘content experiments’ and incorporated into analytics. Website optimizer isn’t a standalone product any more from August 01_2012. Content experiments assists to hone toward the goals that have already set in the Google analytics which will help to find out which page design and content is most effectual.

To start up with these content experiments, open Standard Reporting of Google analytics, and in the Content section, click Experiments.

Here you have to go through four steps to complete the set up wizard.

Browser-Size Analysis

The visible portion of a web page is very smaller than the actual screen resolution for the users who are accessing through mobile platforms due to many toolbars and welters. Essential factors for conversion rates are items that are above the fold on a web page. To find the percentage of visitors for whom the page items displays below or above the fold is really baffling. Therefore Google analytics facilitates users by creating a visualization to ascertain which parts of page are viewable to which percent of visitors.

Go to the Content section of Google Analytics, and click In-Page Analytics. Then click on the browser-size to see the shaded portions of the web page that are underneath the fold. Now click in at any place of the screen to find how much percent of visitors can view it or just hold the threshold percentage by using the slider.

Clicking on show-percentiles will display the summary visualization of several percentiles. This depiction will help to get the clear picture of how the browser sizes are dispersed among different devices. For instance, if you select to compare all the visitors of mobile device traffic, solid difference can be noted.

Concentrating on the good content and where the content flows is so essential to the sound health of any website as well as the experiences it gives to users. Thus far, web analytics focused on page clicks/visits and traffic sources to get the picture of what is working and what not is working in the website. Although it is significant, it is also as important as to perceive how content in the each page of the website impress the user’s/visitors. With this new website optimization tool, more mystification comes into picture!

Conclusion

These new reporting styles will significantly and ultimately help the marketers to generate the desired results who want to produce solid numbers and assist them in furthering their marketing efforts. Nevertheless, it is important for the company to set the fair and sensible goals which would really convert them into indispensable and worthwhile.

Author’s Bio:
Franklyn Stephen Issac.J is a webmaster having substantial four years of experience in analytics, Search engine optimization, social media marketing, SEM and PPC. His achieved results will highlight his profile as one having great passion for analytics and ecommerce solutions. More than 50 keywords ranked prove his strong insight knowledge on keyword research and analysis.