Are You Having Enough Fun?

The difference between enjoying the long hours an entrepreneur needs to put into their business and not is the amount of fun and enjoyment they find in the process.

For me, part of that fun comes in the form of taking risks (public speaking, going for bigger clients, and now I'm looking at going after VC capital or a large loan to grow my business). I've been on the fence for an entire year about getting financing. So, it was perfect timing on the part of my business coach, Molly Gordon of Shaboom, Inc. to send me a video called the eight principals of fun. One of the principals was, of course, taking risks.

If you find yourself sitting on the fence of indecision or the long hours of work have just lost their luster, this video may just help you get back on track: http://www.eightprinciples.com the animation was produced by Box of Crayons.

SEO - What's Old is New Again

I couldn't seem to resist another Bainbridge Island Chamber breakfast meeting this morning a the Wing Point Golf & Country Club. Why resist? The presenters, Seattle Web Training were discussing search engine optimization (SEO) and I feel it's my obligation to stay current. Listening to their speaker, Nick, I was glad to see that we do for our clients what they do at great expense for their clients. (Note to self - charge more!) In any event, I thought it was time to mention three of the basic rules to improving your site's search engine results position:

1. Content - it's what drives the value of your site for visitors and search engines. If your site has over 100 pages of content, it will probably be more valuable, relevant, even, to search engines and web visitors, if it's a 5-page site....well less valuable. Also, each page should have it's own unique content. BIG concept here. Don't just put the same keywords and page titles on each page - if one page is about Bamboo Panels and the other about Bamboo Flooring - differentiate your text from web content to keywords. 'Nuff said.
2. Link Generation - what's old is new again. Remember when all sites had a link page? Well it's back, sort of. Google was putting most of it's emphasis on page title tags to rank sites now it's focusing on in-bound links. What's an in-bound link you ask? It's a link from someone else's site to yours. We encourage our clients to email parallel industry sites and ask for a link exchange (I'll link to your site if you link to mine). Just an email back and forth will do. Then you or your web master can add the link your website. Here's the twist. The links can't just reside on a page of links they have to be embodied in relevant content (there's that content word again). One small client of ours, Savage Guitars, followed our advice and sent out emails to parallel industry websites and through that effort moved up in the search engine rankings enough to be discovered by Sundance and have their products featured in Robert Redford's Sundance Catalog. (They sent a photographer and everything - very cool. The photos they took are on the Savage Guitars website now.)
   
3. Email Newsletters - drive traffic to your site by referencing different areas within your site via an email newsletter. And, a newsletter in itself just helps to keep your name in front of people (it's like the catalog industry - when you're ready to buy something isn't there always an Eddie Bauer catalog in your mailbox reminding you to buy from them?).
   

I was glad to see we make the same recommendations to our clients as a company that specializes in SEO. It's not complex. Anyone can do the work. It's just time-consuming. Our clients who consistently show up in the number one spot are: Kitsap Peninsula Visitor and Convention Bureau (they have a monthly newsletter and change their content almost daily), Port of Bremerton, and Teragren Bamboo Flooring.