It sounds simple, so why do people have such a hard time delegating?

Entrepreneurs have a hard time giving up control because they think they can do almost everything better themselves. They also think they are the only ones with enough knowledge to do the job properly.

Let’s say, for example, that you have always been in charge of payroll. What are the pros and cons of continuing to do payroll as your company grows? You might have a tried and tested system in place that allows things to run smoothly, so you think to yourself, “It’s much easier for me to continue to do payroll than to try to find someone else, who can do it as well as me.”

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it prevents you from handing over tasks that eat up a lot of your time—time that you could be spending on more critical aspects of your business.

Why do you need to let go?

Delegation is often difficult in the short term, but the long term benefits will make your organization much stronger and make YOU a better leader.

For starters, you will give your workforce access to new skills and experience. By developing others through delegation, you will open the door to new perspectives and solutions that you wouldn’t have had if you continued to do the task by yourself.  

Most importantly, you will have more time and energy available to focus on growing your business. Too often entrepreneurs become enslaved to the day-to-day operations of their business. This prevents them from seeing the bigger picture, and can actually harm their business in the long run. Just think of how much more time you would have for creative and strategic thinking if you weren’t caught up doing payroll, accounting or whatever?

Try this:

Take out a blank piece of paper and draw a chart with two columns. In column A, list the jobs that you do that no one else can; in column B, list the jobs that you do that someone else could also do. Then, make a delegation timeline for yourself out of column B. Think through how you might delegate 25% of the activities in Column B in the next 3-6 months, and 50% of them within the next year.

Don’t delegate everything at once! Start slow, LET GO, and watch your business grow.

10 Mindsets Women Entrepreneurs Must Have To Succeed - You must be willing to pay for high-quality dynamic people and be able to delegate tasks and projects. Web entrepreneurs are innovative people that like things a certain way and often fall into the trap of doing everything themselves. …

Do You Delegate it or Do it? - One of the biggest weaknesses of poor managers is their inability or unwillingness to delegate tasks, responsibilities or outcomes. In order to be an effective manager you need to know what you can delegate, when you can delegate it and …

Necessary Tasks You May Want to Delegate - The type of tasks you should delegate will become obvious quickly. Below is a list of commonly delegated tasks. I bet you can add a few to this list! Necessary Tasks You May Want to Delegate. Secretarial services. Research …

Delegate in a small business (part 1) - Learning how to delegate tasks it’s not really something specific in a small business. If you are a boss somewhere and have some colleagues to help you over, it means that you have to know how to delegate. However, in a way, …

Source: delegation

I always encourage my clients to schedule time in their calendars for brainstorming or idea generation. These are not problem-solving sessions, or a time to address issues that have already presented themselves. This is specific time for fresh and innovative thinking about directions for the business.

I’ve said before that four is an ideal number for brainstorming. The power of four is one of those natural dynamics of synergies in teams that has a powerful affect on their effectiveness. In brainstorming and strategizing, it’s harder when one person tries to do it alone. With two people, you develop velocity in the communication. The addition of a third person adds mass. With a fourth person, you add volume.

If you already set aside strategic time every week, good for you. If you are like most, however, spending time contemplating the “big picture” each week might take some extra motivation, but they are well worth your time. Too often, business owners forget why they started their business in the first place, and where they see it going in the future.

Here are a few “big picture” questions to ask yourself:

Business Purpose – what was your original purpose for building your business and how have things changed since you began. How do you plan on accomplishing what you set out to do?

Organization Goals – how do you see your business evolving? Have these goals been clearly communicated to your employees? Which industries does your organization currently serve and where might your reach be expanded in the future?

Strategies for Attaining Goals – which methods will you use to reach your targets? This part of your planning may change frequently.

Action Plans – state specific objectives for your company. These don’t need to be set in stone, but should be thought through with care.

Remember: Strategic planning is not only for large corporations that can afford the time and personnel to develop a sound plan; it is a matter of long-term survival for small businesses.

A couple other thoughts on this from around the interweb…

 Companies Without Strategies Are Heading For Tragedies - Executives always have the excuse for not doing strategic planning. They reckon that things are changing so rapidly. It does not make sense to do ten or even five year planning as events will change and it is not possible to preempt …

Brainstorming Tips and Techniques – 6 Colored De Bono Hats - The hats can be used even by an individual brainstorming alone. If in a group members identify which hat they are wearing so as to feel free to speak their mind without worrying about offending anyone. …

Effective Brainstorming: 7 Tips To Brainstorm Better With Your Team

Source: brainstorming

Trust me on this point, if you trust me on nothing else: You will kick yourself later for not setting up a business blog now.

Why is this?

Simply put, a blog is THE way to get your site visited by search engine spiders quickly, which in turn gets not only your blog, but your entire business site indexed very quickly.  And the more effort you put into your blog, especially in the beginning, the more results you will ultimately see in regards to traffic.  Traffic converts to customers.  Customers convert to sales. 

Blogs are by design considered “spider food”.  When used correctly, the inherent design of a blog attracts all of the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.   You absolutely cannot go wrong when starting a business blog and using it to promote your business.

The strategy here is two-fold:  Get your links to your main money pages up on your blog through anchor text linking in the “links” section of your blog. These are static links and never go away. 

The other side of this is to post actual blog entries that highlight your services, and establish more anchor text links to those services (pages on your money site).   These posts are crawled by the SE spiders, and show up as posts in the search engine index.  As you get more comfortable with posting to your blog on a regular basis, you can set up additional posts for things such as discounts, special offers, etc.  There is no limit to what you can do to increase your business traffic conversion ratios with a blog.

When people search the internet, if they are using the keywords you establish, they will come up on these posts,  and hopefully, click on them to come back to your site.

Done right,  exploring and implementing this type of strategy is sure to pay off nicely in the longterm for your business site.   The links you establish will enable you to build higher rankings in the search engines,  and over time, will increase your traffic conversion rates.

Want to find out more about this strategy?  Contact Go Article Marketing LLC today for free information on how a business blog strategy can help your business compete effectively.

I always encourage my clients to schedule time in their calendars for brainstorming or idea generation. These are not problem-solving sessions, or a time to address issues that have already presented themselves. This is specific time for fresh and innovative thinking about directions for the business.

I’ve said before that four is an ideal number for brainstorming. The power of four is one of those natural dynamics of synergies in teams that has a powerful affect on their effectiveness. In brainstorming and strategizing, it’s harder when one person tries to do it alone. With two people, you develop velocity in the communication. The addition of a third person adds mass. With a fourth person, you add volume.

If you already set aside strategic time every week, good for you. If you are like most, however, spending time contemplating the “big picture” each week might take some extra motivation, but they are well worth your time. Too often, business owners forget why they started their business in the first place, and where they see it going in the future.

Here are a few “big picture” questions to ask yourself:

Business Purpose – what was your original purpose for building your business and how have things changed since you began. How do you plan on accomplishing what you set out to do?

Organization Goals – how do you see your business evolving? Have these goals been clearly communicated to your employees? Which industries does your organization currently serve and where might your reach be expanded in the future?

Strategies for Attaining Goals – which methods will you use to reach your targets? This part of your planning may change frequently.

Action Plans – state specific objectives for your company. These don’t need to be set in stone, but should be thought through with care.

Remember: Strategic planning is not only for large corporations that can afford the time and personnel to develop a sound plan; it is a matter of long-term survival for small businesses.

A couple other thoughts on this from around the interweb…

 Companies Without Strategies Are Heading For Tragedies - Executives always have the excuse for not doing strategic planning. They reckon that things are changing so rapidly. It does not make sense to do ten or even five year planning as events will change and it is not possible to preempt …

Brainstorming Tips and Techniques – 6 Colored De Bono Hats - The hats can be used even by an individual brainstorming alone. If in a group members identify which hat they are wearing so as to feel free to speak their mind without worrying about offending anyone. …

Effective Brainstorming: 7 Tips To Brainstorm Better With Your Team

Source: strategic planning

Does your business have an online website? If you do, how much time is spent making sure that the website is actually performing at optimum levels, and driving visitors and potential customers for your business? How much time is spent performing search engine optimization, or, SEO maintenance to those websites?

You might be surprised to know how many business owners don’t pay too much attention to this very important issue. In fact, you may even be more surprised to learn how you can actually take that little fact and turn into a HUGE advantage for YOUR business.

A lot of business owners are hip to the fact that if they have a website, they open themselves and their business up to a whole new level of people who might be interested in the products or services that their business has to offer. And, as savvy as a lot of people are overall about using the internet, and buying product online, a lot of business owners are not yet as savvy at getting those customers in the “virtual” door of their business.

I am not saying this in a negative sense, purely because I am quite sure that most business owners don’t purposely set themselves up to fail. In fact, business owners set up websites for the express purpose of improving their bottom line revenue numbers. So, why do so many of them ultimately not achieve this goal?

Like so many things in life, it boils down to this: FEAR. Fear of the unknown, and in this case, for a lot of business owners, that fear is directed at this one concept - search engine optimization. Why do they fear it?

Simply put - they don’t know search engine optimization. Or they know of it, but don’t understand how it works, or how to perform it. Again, I am not saying this in a negative sense towards the business owner, I am simply stating the facts.

But, if you, as the business owner, are willing to look at this situation from a business standpoint, and address it in the same light that you would address any part of your business that could be performing better, then you are already in the correct mindset to not only take corrective action,  but you can also position yourself to take advantage of this situation by taking the steps that your online competition is not taking.

In other words - your online competition more than likely is also not taking full advantage of search engine optimization concepts, and if that is the case, adjustments on your website now could pay huge dividends for your business down the road, and in the long term.

Why is this? Simply put, the major search engines will almost always favor a well optimized site over a site that has little or no optimization each and every time.  Every time that the search engines review and refresh their page rankings (organic search listings),  your site will have the opportunity to move higher in those rankings. 

Do you know where your business ranks for search terms you may be trying to rank for? Are you in the top 10 results in Google for your search terms?

Are you aware that, if you are not in those top 10 rankings (1st page of search results) that your chances of being seen by potential customers drops dramatically?  And more importantly - if you are not on that first page of top 10 rankings, who is?  Your competition?  How did they get there?

These are all questions you, as a business owner, need to be asking yourself, and assessing accordingly, if you own a business website.  I would like to provide you with a FREE white paper that addresses in great detail about why businesses fear SEO,  and how you can take advantage of this situation today.  Click HERE to download our FREE whitepaper entitled, “Why Busnesses FEAR SEO” today and start to position your company to overcome and overtake your online competitors  - and start getting some of that business your missing out on today!

Enjoy your weekend!

Michael

Far too often, Search engine optimization experts spin their wheels obsessing
about link building. (I myself included) It’s easy to forget that classic on
page and site-wide SEO still works.

Recently, this hit home. While working on a page on one of my sites, I
accidentally left a link pointing to a page that was irrelevant to the actual
anchor text in the link. In other words, the keywords in the anchor text had
nothing to do with the actual text of the page. Despite this, Google quickly
picked up the page for the target search phrase, replacing the page I intended
to optimize for. Despite having at least a dozen good quality, keyword specific
external links pointing to the page I intended to optimize, the other page now
replaced it in the SERPs because the weight from the 1 internal link trumped all
the external links.

This situation reminded me that good SEO starts on-site. In my opinion, you
shouldn’t even start link building until you:

1. Build Several Internal Links: Search engines care immensely how
   webmasters categorize and label their own content. The best way to do this is with one time occurring links within a body of content. In my opinion, 1
   relevant contextual link from your own site can be worth more than 10 good
   external links. In Sugarrae’s great link building interview, Andy Hagans
   recommends having at least 5 internal links to every landing page.
2. Sculpt Your PageRank Flow: SEO Fast Start has a great explanation
   of using the no-follow tag to sculpt your PageRank. Basically, the idea is to
   cap off the flow of PageRank using the no-follow tag to pages that are
   unimportant from a search point of view. For example, while your Privacy
   policy page may be important to customers already on the site, it’s probably
   getting little to no action from the SERPs. By capping off PageRank to pages
   like this, you will increase the relative importance of your product pages and
   product category pages.
3. Do On-Page SEO on Your Landing Pages: Title tags, H1 tags, keyword
   rich content, alt tags, and even Meta tags should be optimized before worrying
   about external links.

Since many experts think effective link building tactics are going
underground, I believe on page and site wide SEO tactics such as these will
become increasingly important.

Justin Palmer is a Internet Marketing Consultant that offers
Christian Search Engine Marketing services. Justin’s current projects
include C28.com, which sells religious t-shirts, and Bright Circle, a Video Production Company offering
Corporate Video Production services in Florida.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Justin_Palmer
http://EzineArticles.com/?Dont-Build-a-Single-Link-Until-You-Do-These-3-Things&id=973718

Source: search engine optimization

Having come from “the ground up” in regards to my background and education in this area, I find it rather unnerving that a business will spend good money to have a web site built for them, in the hopes that it will help them level the playing field in their market, when in fact the web site that they probably paid top dollar for will never even get off the ground.

Sure, the website most likely will get indexed in Google, and the othe major search engines. But, based on some of the things I see - these websites will never rank for any keywords and therefore will probably never rank against their online competitors websites. You really have to ask yourself: What’s the point of having the website out there if it’s never being found?

I look at some of the fundamental aspects of what I consider to be competent search engine optimization in this issue. On page optimization is one of the keys to a web sites ability to rank well for search terms (keywords) and those search terms are the life blood of any web site. Without that - your web site is pretty much dead in the water.

So, here are the first three things I look at in regards to the “fundamentals”:
1. META TITLE TAG - This is the tag that puts the title of your site up in the little blue bar at the top of your browser. This is also the primary link (in blue) on a Google result.

2. META KEYWORDS TAG - This is where your site keywords are stored, and these should associate with the keywords being used on your sites pages. There is always some debate going on somewhere in the SEO world about the viability of a Keywords META tag - Some say use it - some say it’s not necessary. I believe that there is some use for the tag, and I do believe it assists in search results, which of course, translates into visitors on your site.

3. META DESCRIPTION TAG - This is the descriptive field that describes your sites pages. I find that the time spent to customize this for each distinctive page on your site will pay huge dividends in the long term in regards to ranking. Proper use of keywords in this field will help you to dominate the search engine rankings, as this field is in most cases the description part of the same Google search result we mentioned in # 1 above.

Like I said, there is some debate in certain circles about the KEYWORDS tag - and there has been some debate about the DESCRIPTION tag as well. I don’t subscribe to that debate too much, because to me the results of using the description tag are obvious in the search engine results.

Getting back on point: When I do competitive analysis for a lot of my clients, and potential customers, I am finding a LOT of websites with neither the KEYWORDS or DESCRIPTION tags in them. We’ll save the lack of other META tags for another discussion. These two alone are worth a minute here.

When I complete the competitive analysis for sites that are missing these tags, in almost every case what I find is no linking, no demographic data available for the site, and almost always, I find low traffic counts.

The site itself may be a really well made, well designed site. But - it’s pretty much dead in the water. And without the traffic to inflate those stats and demographics I just mentioned, that’s pretty much where that web site is going to stay. DOA.

So, my advice: If you own a business web site, and someone else built it for you, or you built your own site, but are not too sure what I am discussing today, perhaps you should take a moment, and check the HTML code for your site (go to your website, then go to VIEW on the menu, and then look at “SOURCE”). META tags are usually installed at the top of the code page, between the HEAD and /HEAD tags of the code. If you don’t see these META tags installed, you need to see about getting them installed ASAP.

If you would like to get assistance in finding these and other potential issues with your web site, contact me at Go Article Marketing LLC’s Contact Page, and we help you review your site’s performance and potential.

In this day and age, the timing has never been MORE critical For Your Business To LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD.

ARE YOU READY TO PLAY?

Online marketing research shows that:

Over the next three years 66% of offline businesses, from small businesses and sole proprietorships to large public corporations, will move the majority of their marketing online.

This includes your competitors - and understand, we are referring to your ONLINE competition, who may or may not be the business down the street.

It may be someone across the city, across the country - or around the world. This significantly increases who your competition is, and when you realize that, you realize that each visitor you lose online is a customer lost - to your competitor.

Add to this the fact that 60% of companies find online marketing more efficient and profitable than traditional marketing AND that 74% of businesses plan to increase their online spending over the next three years…

If you’re not establishing your presence online and effectively grabbing your online market share, then your competitors will steamroll you in the very near future.

And if you are ready to take control of this - Go Article Marketing is ready to help you with this all-important task!

We know that you’re already swamped with your day-to-day business responsibilities. Through this seminar, we’re going to give you the exact step-by-step tasks you need to do to get your company online and get the most ROI out of the least effort, time, and money.

Better yet: We’ll even show you how to get someone else to do it for pennies on the dollar.

Our Seminars are full day, intensive training events; For your investment, you will receive:
 
Step-by-Step Training on:

Creating or Re-Designing a Website for Converting Sales
Reinforcing Company Brand and Identity Online
Conducting Competitive Analyses on Your Company and Competition
Reverse Engineering the Efforts of Successful Companies in Your Industry so you can Emulate and Exceed Them
Conducting a Search Engine Optimization Campaign
Conducting a Pay Per Click Campaign
Creating and Promoting Videos
Blogging
Creating a Suite of Social Profiles
Marketing Your Company via Social Media
Tracking Statistics & Conversion Testing
How to Outsource Anything You Don’t Want to Do Yourself
A 47-Page Attendee Workbook for Home-Study that includes:
Exercises for Implementing Everything You’ve Learned
Task Checklists for Each Section
A Copy of Our Training’s Slides Presented During The Training Session, For Review
Post-Training Resources, including hundreds of free resources, tools, and training materials and several step-by-step tutorials.

Our seminar is designed with one thing in mind: Helping business owners increase their ROI and the bottom line with online sales and marketing!

If you would like more information on our seminars, and how they can help your business strengthen your online marketing presence,  and help you out-perform your online competition, go to our Seminar Details Page today!

• “Marketing is just a different way of saying ’selling’ and I hate to sell!”
• “I don’t have time to market, I’m already too busy!”
• “I’ve tried marketing before and it didn’t work.”
• “It’s too expensive!”
• “I’m a doctor, lawyer, accountant, consultant, business owner…, not a marketer.”

That’s why one of the 7 principles of our marketing program is to overcome these negative mindsets.  To that end, we present marketing as a game.  It has a set of rules, which should be followed in a particular order, and which, if done correctly, will ensure a victory.  The particular game that we use to help clients visualize this, is baseball, except we call it “Marketing Ball”.  Here’s the diagram:

Part 2 will focus on “Spring Training”, the pre-work you’ll need to do before you ever make it to the dugout.

Source: marketing consulting

I am a believer in self sufficiency. That is not to say one should not reach out when in need of assistance. I believe there are business owners out there who understand SEO and search engine marketing very proficiently.

I also believe there is a larger group of business owners who really don’t know a lot about SEO. This vision “thing” that I have is one where this group of owners empowers themselves, armed with the right information and knowledge, and this empowerment allows them to finally take control of their online marketing efforts.

But what about those who don’t want to learn it, or don’t have the time to learn it, and then apply it? Well, that’s ok…cause what I do is teach it - in a day long, intensive training session to those who want to learn it.   And what I find more and more is, business people are HUNGRY for this knowledge.  And the main reason for this is: They want to gain control over the cost of maintaining an online presence, and they want to gain more conversions, more sales, and most importantly to the bottom line:  Positive return on their ROI.

At the very least, a business owner can gain this knowledge,  and, if the business owner does need to ask for help in maintaining their website, at least the business owner has the knowledge to understand the work being done for them.

I think that is pretty important when knowing where every dollar is going in the budget. And of even more importance, feeling confident that you got what you paid for is a big step in the right direction.

I have always felt that at some level or another - people want to learn.  I think this applies in particular to those who run their own small/medium sized businesses. Why? 

Because people who own these businesses usually have everything in it.  Their heart, their soul, and their financial future.  Most people who own a business are passionate about that business, passionate about what they do, and most importantly, passionate about succeeding at all possible levels.

Are you one of those people?

Next time:  The seminar - what it is, what we teach…and how you can get your company involved…

Till then -

Michael