Ever heard that phrase? What it’s alluding to is the discipline to tackle the most important item on your to-do list first thing in the morning. I say discipline because it won’t have much effect on your business if you just do it once. But, if you ‘eat that frog’ day after day you’ll see your productivity zoom and you’ll feel really good about yourself.

When you’re in business it’s typical to feel overwhelmed since there’s always so much to do. One way to feel better about your big task list is to divvy it up in to meaningful categories. The ones I recommend are commonly used:
1. Urgent & Important
2. Urgent & Not Important
3. Not Urgent & Not Important
4. Not Urgent and Important

I created a simple Task Prioritization Grid where you can split up your task list and drop each item in to an appropriate category. (I readily admit the doc’s not pretty. Hey, I’m a business coach.) It’s fairly easy to place items in the Urgent & Important category and that’s good because this is the quadrant you want to pay attention to. It’s where your frogs are hanging out.

Now you know what’s next. Eat that frog and start your day off productively and feel lighter from there on. The next morning, eat it again. If you find that you’re making appointments first thing in the morning and that’s causing you to skip eating the frog for days at a time since your day often starts having a life of its own after 10:00 am, then revisit your scheduling process.

Need a little more inspiration? Here’s the short film that helps explain the concept. Do you use another method to ensure you get the most important work done every day? Please share it with me.

When you look at this article you can’t help but look at the picture, right? And as you look at it, you are probably thinking something positive is going on because of the lady’s smile and two thumbs up. That’s the power of pictures.

This post is intended to encourage you to make the leap to regularly using images that evoke feelings wherever you have words about your business.

We’re talking blog posts, newsletter articles, web pages, brochures, PowerPoint slides, and so forth. Don’t just rely on words alone to captivate and move your reader. You’ll lose against your counterpart that’s using rich imagery in combination with the words.

Two recent events reinforced this idea in my mind. The first event was related to advertising on Facebook. I have a client who’s dipping his toe in the water on Facebook ads. We were disappointed to find that his first ad, which ran for nearly a month had received no clicks. None. So, he didn’t pay anything since we set his campaign as a pay per click. But, that didn’t make us feel good about the campaign.

The original ad featured his company logo as the image. In a webinar I attended on Facebook ads the experts at Facebook advised to avoid using your company logo unless it’s very recognizable. My client’s logo is not well known. (Interested in the webinar? Go to Facebook’s Marketing Page on Facebook and click on the Facebook Live tab to find the May 11 webinar replay).

So, we picked the image above and used that along with some slightly adjusted copy. The good news is that the ad started getting clicks. I really doubt it was just the revised copy that caused the change.

The next event was listening to a webinar on blogging from Jay Baer, a new favorite online marketing guru of mine. If you’re looking for a guru to follow, go with Jay. Anyway, Jay said that he ALWAYS uses meaningful images as part of his blogs and articles. Nuff said.

I often get asked where I get my images. I use 123RF. They have more than 9.5 million in their inventory, charge as little as $1 a pic, and you can use the one you buy over and over. Simple and inexpensive.

Now it does take time to find just the right image. I sometimes spend 10 – 15 minutes finding one picture for one PowerPoint slide or a newsletter article. But i think it’s worth it because the right picture really supports your writing. It’s worth the effort. Start using the power of images going forward and you’ll see the results of your marketing improve.

In the 80′s we had telephones, the mail, fax machines, and face to face. All that has changed now. The ways to communicate with another person have exploded . The old ways still work, but now we have email, instant messages, texting, Twitter, Skype and so on. Wow, it can be overwhelming to consider what ways one should use.

Here’s what I recommend, have about 10 different ways you feel comfortable with so you’re not hitting people the same old way. Email may be your favorite way to contact someone, but what if the other party gets too much email already? In that case your email’s likely to be ignored.

What you can do alternatively is to send them a Facebook or LinkedIn message, or maybe a text. Indeed, they might prefer one of these methods. The fact is they’re more likely to respond if you communicate with them the way they prefer.

So, then, what if the other party likes social networking as a way of staying in touch and you don’t do that? Well, you could pick it up just to communicate with them. For the right person it might be worth it. You don’t have to become a full-blown social networker, but just a casual user for the right times.

Now we’ve only talked about 1to1 communication. What about mass communication? Email marketing and Facebook are great for that. Prefer direct mail? I like SendOutCards, which allows me to send a lot of personalized real cards all at once – very useful and a blend of modern and old fashioned methods.

I’ll just mention one more method here and that’s BLD marketing. What’s that you say? It’s breakfast, lunch and dinner, of course. Many deals are closed during meals. I make it a point to take out all my clients to lunch as often as possible. They really appreciate it and we have a chance to get to know each other better without the clock running. I like to meet prospects over meals or coffee, too. People are generally looser when they’re in a social atmosphere. The conversation seems to flow more naturally than in a quiet office. If you’re not using BLD marketing, then maybe you should read Keith Ferrazzi’s now classic book on the subject, Never Eat Alone.

The last point I’ll make is that there is what I call ‘disruptive communication’. What I mean by that is you get a message to someone in an unexpected way and that disrupts them and makes them take notice. For example, you stop by their office and leave a note and, if allowed, small gift. That will get their attention more than an email. Facebook messages can be disruptive, too, since few people get many of these. Texts are disruptive and are being used more and more for marketing purposes. Use a form of disruptive communication when you’re having trouble breaking through to someone. Don’t just keep sending emails.

If you’d like the handout I used for this talk as a checklist to see just how many communication methods you’ve got in your quiver and what you might want to add, just email me and I’ll send it over to you. And if you have a favorite disruptive form of communication I’d like to hear about it. Please comment below.

Okay, I’m going to get a little technical with you here. Google Analytics is a free software that you install behind the scenes on your website to get a ton of data on the visitor traffic.

A typical report will tell you:
- How many visitors have hit your site in a given period
- What percentage of visitors are new versus repeat
- Where your traffic is coming from, e.g., Google, Facebook
- What percentage is coming from referral sources like Google versus direct input, which would be your URL
- How long visitors are staying on your site
- What pages they’re looking at
- What words they used to find your site
- What part of the country or world they’re coming from

This is just a sampling of the data you can get from Google Analytics. It can also be combined with Google Adwords campaign to give you great data about how well your advertising efforts are working.

With Google Analytics I’m able to understand how my site is doing from month to month in terms of traffic. I can tell how my traffic spikes after I’ve done a lot of public speaking or released blogs through social media such as Facebook and Twitter.What I’ve found is that most of my traffic comes from Google and from people entering my URL right in to a search engine. Since I’m not getting much traffic from Bing or Yahoo, then I know that I either need to focus most of my energy on Google, or figure out why I’m not getting a lot of traffic from the other search engines and work on improving optimization for them.

Another key stat is how long people are staying on my site. On average people will remain on my site for two and a half minutes. I feel pretty good about that. However, I’m also seeing that a good percentage of my visitors are bouncing from my site, which means they stay for just a few seconds and leave. This tells me they didn’t find what they were looking for. I can look to see what keyword searches are bringing people to my site to learn whether my site is relevant for those searches.

Here’s an example of this. I did a blog comparing Costco and Target stores in terms of customer focus. It’s an educational blog for small business owners. Unfortunately this blog comes up a lot for people searching for Costco or Target. They click on the link to my blog, then immediately leave since they aren’t a small business owner. Google Analytics helps me understand this sort of phenomena on my site. As you dig in to the reports you’ll learn some fascinating truths about your site.

Bottom line, it’s an amazing package that every business should have on their website. If you don’t have it, then learn more and determine how to install it on your site. I can refer you to a resource who can install it for you if you’re not sure how to get it done.

If you would like to go through your first report together after you’ve had it installed for 30 days, feel free to let me know and we’ll set up a time to do that.

The bottom line is this: You need to be aware of what’s happening with your website and you will not know unless you get this software installed and activated.

Picking up from a recent post about creating a great impression, one of the simplest ways for any retail business to make one is to have an impressive sign. The flipside of this is that if your sign is really old or just wrong in some way you’ll make a bad impression, which is probably not any business owner’s goal.

In this post I’m going to highlight a few examples of good and bad signs. The first situation is when a business changes its name. That necessitates new signs. Well, signs usually aren’t cheap, which drives some owners to look for the least expensive way to brand the new name.

In this photo you can see that this real estate agency has changed its name. It’s pretty obvious since they chose to get an inexpensive banner and place it right on top of the old sign. Now if the decision was made rapidly and they needed something quick to put up for opening day I could understand this move. However, this banner still hangs over the old sign months later. It’s even worse at night when the old sign lights up and shows through the banner!

Why does the owner want to keep this as the permanent sign for their real estate office? Probably to save money. I wonder how much this money-saving move is costing in the quality of prospective customer impressions? I also wonder how many of the realtors in this office are proud of where they work driving up here every day? This sort of thinking was the genesis of the saying, Penny wise and pound foolish.

Now this sign is for a new restaurant that’s opened up in the local area. The owner wanted to make a strong impression on those driving by, which number in the thousands daily. The location is on a major boulevard and faces traffic that’s coming off of a major freeway. I apologize for the quality of this picture as I took it with my BlackBerry from my car.

I think you can see that the sign is lighted up though, which is what makes this a nice sign day or night. I’m sure the owner paid a lot for this sign and could have saved plenty by getting a sign that didn’t sparkle. But, in my opinion it was worth every dime as this sign alone makes me want to see the inside. It must be classy is what goes through my mind when I see this sign.

This sign is an example of how to make a strong impression. It’s big and bold and very easy to see from afar. Again, not an inexpensive sign by any means, but as the store is on a major thoroughfare and next to a large drugstore, gym and supermarket it’s probably worth going the extra mile to get something impressive.

Now that you’ve finished this blog, why don’t you take a look at your sign? Is it making a good impression on your business? Does it beckon people to come inside and have a look? Or does it make people think you don’t care about your business enough to invest in it? Your sign is often what creates the first impression someone will have of your business. If it creates a bad impression and turns people away you won’t even know because it’s very unlikely anyone will take the time to tell you. That’s why I’m telling you now to have a look.

I recently visited a restaurant in the south bay and had a conversation with the manager. I noticed that the place was fairly weathered inside with the flooring needing some serious refurbishment. The person I was talking to noted that updates to the interior needed to happen, but they were being postponed due to business being down.

That made me think about what effect the look of the establishment might have on a person’s willingness to patronize the business. As a guerrilla marketer I know that every contact with a client or prospect is marketing and first impressions count for a lot. So, I think you know where I stand on the matter.

I decided to open it up for discussion on my Facebook Page to see what members of my community think since most of them are business owners. You don’t need to have a Facebook account to read the comments. That’s what’s nice about having a Business Page.

Anyway, what I heard was that impressions are important to a business and the owner should do what they can to ensure a good one is made each and every time.

Now if you don’t own a physical location, don’t think this doesn’t apply to you. Think about how your car looks, your shoes, your suit, your hair, your briefcase, and so on. How you present yourself is the impression your business is making.

Be careful when it comes to making excuses for why you’re willing to make a weak impression on customers and prospects for it may be costing you more than you think.

You can save incredible amounts of time by going out and getting trained by an expert in the area where you need to improve.

Most of the workers in forward-thinking corporations already fully get this tip. While employed at Oracle I attended numerous training events that were paid for on my behalf including Dale Cargegie and Patricia Fripp’s Speaking School. The key statement there is ‘paid for on my behalf’. I got better by using OPM, or other peoples’ money, and that was a nice benefit of being an employee.

As small business owners we don’t always have access to OPM though. Thus, when we discover that we’re deficient in an area crucial to the growth of our business we might hesitate and think and think and think about whether we want to go pay someone to teach us. But what’s just as dear to us as our money? Yes! Our time.

If we know we need new skills and choose not to pay someone else, then we’re trading time for money. What makes it worse is when we end up not getting around to learning what we need to and lose the benefit of the new found knowledge. That really hurts and can affect the growth of our business.

This topic is on my mind because I recently took three days out of my schedule to learn a lot about SEO (search engine optimization) at a Search Engine Academy. In the first two years of my business I didn’t learn more than I did in the workshop. Was it worth my investment? Absolutely. I’ve already started making positive changes to my website such as moving my blog off my home page and on to a tab of its own.

Are you ready to save time this year and grow your business? Make a commitment to learn from an expert what you need to know to make a big jump forward. I’d like to get comments on what types of training you’d like to take this year. What do you want to learn from an expert?

Yelp is a very popular resource for searches for all types of businesses. It can really boost a small business when searches lead to your page. As small business owners we want lots and lots of positive reviews. Sometimes our thoughts turn to ways to game the seemingly simple system.

We think about asking clients and friends to give us positive reviews so we can up our star score. But, Yelp knows about this tactic and regularly filters reviews that look illegitimate. Their filter’s not perfect, but it does catch many fake reviews.

As difficult as it is I must agree with Yelp that you don’t want to try to rig it to make your business look good. This goes completely against the spirit of Yelp. And, according to Yelp, it’s precisely because there are much fewer fake reviews on Yelp that its popularity and usefulness are maintained while other review sites wither. Makes sense. We wouldn’t use Yelp much longer if we saw way too many 5-star reviews for all the businesses listed.

So, switching the angle from manipulative to altruistic, what can YOU do then to help out a friend who owns a business? Simple, give them a Recommendation. Yelp provides this feature exclusively so owners can help out other owners. If you’ll look at my Yelp page you can see that I recommend 3 businesses that I know and trust (look all the way at the bottom left to find them). Yes, I know I need to add more!

In case you’re not sure how to use this feature on Yelp – you do need to be the owner of a business listing – then watch this short video I’ve made to help you.

Now that you know how to use this above board Yelp feature for business owners why not use it? You can start with The Growth Coach if you like.