How they work
After you understand the difference between SEO and SEM, you can put them to work. The article “10 Practical Small Business SEO and SEM Marketing Tips“ gives suggestions for making your SEO and SEM efforts count. Two of my favorite tips are #5. Pay attention to landing pages10 (you don’t have to send visitors to your home page) and #10. Stay True To Your Business. Write for your audience, not for search engines. You don’t need to implement all ten tips but you’ll find some good info you can use right away. Isn’t that the best kind?

Verizon + Office Depot = savings
There’s a new team in town: The Verizon Small Business Center and Office Depot. Reuters reports that this new team’s goal is to offer small businesses discounts up to 12% when they buy office supplies. That’s a definite improvement from the 0% discount I’m getting at my local Office Depot.

To participate, businesses need to log on to the Verizon Small Business Center’s Web site and click on the “Office Depot Discount Program” link (under “Alliance Discount Program”).

The incubator they described is a place where business professionals share office space with other professionals in different fields. The Jackson County Small Business Incubator, now with eight tenants, has been so successful that they’re opening a second location.

Incubators are similar to various co-working sites that I described in another post. The main difference is that the purpose of incubators is to help an individual grow his or her business, instead of just providing a place to work away from the family. There are a few more benefits to incubators:

• You’re encouraged to network with your “incubator neighbor” and maybe even work together on projects or hire one another. One business professional is considering hiring his neighbor to design a new Web site for him.

• Incubators offer high-speed copiers, printers and other equipment that a typical home office professional can’t afford at the beginning.

• You can’t get lonely in an incubator. There are too many people around.

• You can still keep your home office but as your business grows, an incubator is the perfect place to work with other business owners who are much quieter than your kids and barking dog.

Working Naked: Who came up with the name garoffice?

J. Kelly: My brother and I were working out of our garage and it became our office. Just like our company name (JACKSTIN) we squashed them together.

Working Naked: What does JACKSTIN do?

Tables, computers, a sofa, bed and more make up the garoffice.

J. Kelly: We have a truly fruitful, informal collaboration between the two of us and also our clients. We help them get the message they want to send online via websites, social networks, and consulting with us in our prior experiences of what’s worked and what hasn’t.

Working Naked: Who else works in the garoffice?

J. Kelly: Day to day it’s just Justin and I, but we do have interns and friends that come over to learn our traits and ask us how we did it. Our clients will even come over and pull out their laptops and start working on their projects with us face-to-face.

Working Naked: What’s the best thing about the garoffice?

J. Kelly: Being in the moment and making clients happy without the stress of a cubicle or a boss looking over your shoulder. We love to take the laptop out on the backyard deck and look over the ocean and meet with clients…get creative on their project! A new concept that we have been pushing is the “Client Trust Swing”. New and old clients come over and there is no better way to get them thinking outside the box than to push them on our 35 foot, ocean-view swing!

Working Naked: I have to ask about the bed. Does someone live in the garoffice, is it for client meetings or is that topic off limits?

J. Kelly: It’s a guest bed. Sometimes clients come through town and need a place to stay, and sometimes we get downgraded from our own rooms for our parents when they come in town. It’s a very cozy, creative spot that lets us get out of the same chair and desk routine. Shouldn’t everyone be able to relax and work? That’s going to be our next slogan on our business cards.

Not now…I have a headache
The last time I had a headache, I figured it was because I was thirsty, had skipped lunch or was tired of negotiating with my younger son. Turns out it could have been from the way I was sitting. According to an article in SHAPE magazine, slouching in your chair can cause a headache. Todd Sinett, author of The Truth About Back Pain, says, “In this position, holding up your head, which weighs up to 10 pounds, can strain your neck and lead to a tension headache.”

He recommends that you sit back in your chair and every few minutes shift your weight from side to side. He suggests using a lumbar pillow or even a Visomate that beeps or flashes when your head gets too close to the monitor. I wonder if they make that product for chocolate lovers who need to cut back!

SCORE offers advice to entrepreneurs and small business owners.

My sweet, adorable, perfect niece—I’m not at all biased—is at the “I do it myself” stage. She doesn’t want her parents to help her do anything. My niece has the same characteristic of most entrepreneurs who think they can do everything themselves (myself included) and do it better.The truth is there’s no way we entrepreneurs can know everything and do everything well. The good news is that there are experts out there who’ve graduated from the school of hard knocks and have made every business mistake possible. Best of all, they’re available from one source: SCORE.

“Counselors to America’s Small Business,” SCORE is a nonprofit association—it’s been around since 1964—that provides information and support to entrepreneurs and small businesses around the country. They have 370 chapters throughout the United States and 11,200 volunteers nationwide.

They’ve helped 8.4 Million Small Businesses including Vermont Teddy Bear, Vera Bradley Designs, Jelly Belly Candy (I think my family accounts for most of their sales!) and more. SCORE offers advice from starting, managing and growing a business, to financing and technology. They also publish articles from successful business professionals.

The site itself is packed with information but their help goes beyond the online community. The SCORE mentoring program matches entrepreneurs with both working and retired executives, as well as business professionals.

It’s easy to get lost in the business world, especially when you’re out there on your own. Doesn’t it make more sense to follow a straight path to success in business than to hit more roadblocks than you can handle? SCORE is worth checking out, and best of all it’s free.

When do you tell a client they're fired?

The economy has changed the way most of us work. Several of my clients have started working with smaller clients instead of counting on larger corporations to keep them busy. Jobs they wouldn’t have considered doing have become their bread and butter but at what emotional and stress-inducing cost?

At what point do you finally tell a client, “You’re fired!” which allows you to focus on the clients who appreciate what you can do for them? In case you’re wavering about firing a client or looking for a sign that the relationship needs to end, consider a few clues.

• Your client calls you at least five times a day, sometimes with the same question. You’re their supplier, subcontractor or consultant, not their babysitter.

• Your client continually asks you to lower your fees or threatens to fire your company if you don’t. Intimidation shouldn’t be part of a working relationship (or any relationship for that matter).

• You have a signed contract, your company performs the work and then your client asks to renegotiate the contract at a lower price. Don’t undervalue your services or product. A contract is a contract and if you delivered what you promised, there’s no need to negotiate.

• Your client continually changes his or her mind which causes you to backtrack and rework projects. You can bill for that time but is the frustration worth it?

Firing a client will affect your bottom line but your sanity is priceless.

SEO is about increasing traffic to your site, but figuring out how to use SEO effectively can be confusing and costly. “50 SEO Secrets for Mom Entrepreneurs” by Holly Klaassen, offers practical, quick, and effective tips for all entrepreneurs. She breaks down the mystery of SEO into 50 easy-to-use tips.  A few of them stood out.

• Get traffic from Yahoo. Go to Yahoo Answers and run a search for topics related to your business or niche. Provide helpful and well thought out answers to questions and include a link back to helpful information or articles on your site.

• Keep urls short. While your urls should be descriptive, they should also be fairly short. The shorter they are, the easier it is for people to remember them, cut and paste them into their blog or an email, or write on a business card.

• Go after “long tail” keywords. Rather than trying to be found with popular (and competitive) phrases such as “chocolates” (23,600,000 results in Google), try longer, more descriptive phrases such as “milk chocolate truffles” (510,000 results).

• Get traffic from Ezine articles. Try using Ezine articles for difficult keywords. Write an article using your keywords, and submit it for publication. Even if you can’t rank for your keyword on your own site, including a link back to your site at the bottom of your article will send referral traffic to your site.

The bottom line about Holly’s book? Her tips work.

“My virtual assistant handles all my website design and maintenance. I’ve gone from four published books to eight. She has also saved my neck during a couple of major e-mail crises, performed troubleshooting of all sorts of stuff, and researched the best option for me on various technologies and platforms. She lives about 5000 miles away from me in Alaska and we’ve never met.

—Shel Horowitz, ethical marketing expert

”My virtual assistant has always been based in Copenhagen. I have used my virtual personal assistant for over a year and find that it is the only way to maintain efficiency and excellent service levels than any other method. She schedules all of my global meetings, does all of our invoicing and travel arrangements- getting me to and from clients in the US to Europe.

—Jennifer Hicks, founder of ink Communications and co-founder of bGrand

My virtual assistant does many of the things I am not qualified to do: She created a web site for me and maintains it by adding new materials, links, resources etc. She does this also for an existing site I have. My virtual assistant pushes me and encourages me. We’re a team that just happens to sit in two different states.

—Jane Cranston, ExecutiveCoachNY

Over the years, my virtual assistant has done a variety of tasks for me including formatting/updating documents, creation of Powerpoint presentations, flyer development, database management, email marketing, and website design/update. Over the years she has also helped me to automate as much as possible so I’ve actually used her less as time has gone on.

—Jackie Nagel, President of Synnovatia

Shredders are invaluable for protecting information.

The other morning while I was working in my home office, I heard a strange grinding noise. (Sounds like the opening line of a gory, horror movie!) I knew it wasn’t a lawn mower or a leaf blower or the neighbor’s go cart so finally I went outside to check it out.

Parked in front of my neighbor’s house was a huge truck with a shredder inside. My neighbor had trashcan loads of paper to shred and instead of wasting time shredding each piece, he had hired an on-site shredding company to do it for him. He could have just loaded up his car with boxes of paper and recycled them, right? Not so fast. There was the security issue—he had old tax information to shred—and then there was the possibility of identity theft.

I hadn’t heard of anyone working naked hiring someone else to shred their papers (my corporate clients have done that for years), but it made perfect sense. I’ve been through three shredders in two years because of my impatience at shredding. If a shredder can shred 8 sheets at a time, I shove in 12.

If I ever need to shred a massive amount of files, I’ll call in for shredding reinforcements or see if I can test my luck and avoid burning through a few more shredders.