Weight loss? Well, this year it was a gain of 2 pounds for the month. So much for that resolution — maybe I’ll just try it again next year. If this all sounds way too familiar, don’t worry. You’re not alone… millions out there are doing the same exact thing!

For this year, why not set a few goals that are realistic, attainable, yet still big and bold? We’ll leave the personal and fitness goal setting advice up to the gurus on those topics — for now, let’s consider goals like building new entrepreneurial and marketing skills and growing your small business.

Here is a remarkably effective method of setting business goals and following through to a most successful outcome:

Step One: Define Your Goals

Brainstorm, write them down, and most importantly, break them down into small steps. For example, rather than saying, "I want to make my first million" as a goal, instead, get really specific. Ask yourself what skills and steps are going to be necessary to get to this overall objective. They might be things like learning to write better sales copy or getting your new website live and online. They could also simply be along the lines of "get up an hour earlier each day to really get that big project the jumpstart it needs." Whatever they are, make a list and write them down.

Step Two: Pick One Goal At A Time.

For all that’s been said about the merits of multi-tasking, one thing certainly holds true — we’re just not wired for it. We function much more clearly and effectively when laser focusing on one ambition at a time. Studies have proven that changing more than one habit at a time is nearly impossible for us to do. We’ve got to keep this in mind if we want to make progress with our goals. One great way to do it is to select and focus on one new goal (small steps) at a time each month. That’s 30 days of focus and persistence towards accomplishment.

Step Three: Hold Yourself Accountable.

First of all, if we don’t track and measure our progress towards reaching goals, we’ll never know where we stand, whether or not we’re making decent progress, or if we’ve ultimately reach the expected ambitions. Review and track your progress each and every day. Also, find an accountability partner — someone to share your goal and your progress with. Keeping the drive required to get there is easier when we know that someone else is watching too.

One goal per month, and twelve goals per year might not sound like much, but when you actually achieve them all and can look back at the end of the year and see the big picture, it’s really quite a remarkable accomplishment!

Until Next Time.
George Chaney
President/CEO
SEO King, Inc.

A Few Words About Complex ROI Formulas

Understanding ROI and how it affects your business and profitability is vitally important for small biz entrepreneurs and micro-preneurs. Knowing about all of the formulas that economists and accounting gurus use might not be quite so important. In other words, do you really need to understand:

• Arithmetic return;
• Logarithmic return;
• Continuously compounded return;
• Arithmetic average rate of return;
• Geometric average rate of return;
• Dollar-weighted rate of return;
• And so forth and so on?

The answer is most likely to be a big NO. Now if you’re really into this kind of stuff and want to learn more about it all, you might consider going back to college to take a few refresher courses on the subject. And if your business has gotten to the point where these terms are beginning to surface on a daily basis, then yes — it’s definitely time to become intimately familiar with them (and it’s probably time to hire an expert in-house CFO too)!

But Let’s Get Back Down To Earth For A Minute…

As an entrepreneur, your keen business instinct will tell you when it is time to know more about all this stuff. For now, we’ve just got to solidly grasp the basics, right?

For entrepreneurs, and online business entrepreneurs especially, grasping ROI is fortunately quite simple. For each dollar you spend in your business (the "Investment" or "I" in ROI), you should realize monetary returns (the "R" in ROI) if things are profitable. Clearly the higher the percentage of ROI, the better!

Now it’s also important to understand that in everyday business, ROI can be determined for any individual given marketing campaign or product line or it could be used to describe an overall percentage for your entire group of operations. Many businesspeople throw ROI numbers around left and right — so it is important to understand exactly what they’re discussing before making assumptions.

ROI In Online Marketing

You’re most likely to see ROI used in the business of online marketing when it comes to describing a few different areas, including:

• ROI for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns;
• ROI for SEO campaigns;
• ROI for a new landing page;
• And even ROI for social media campaigns being carried out.

As an entrepreneur, learning more about ROI and how it affects your day-to-day business and profitability is a wise idea indeed. Just try to avoid becoming so immersed in the details that it becomes a distraction to running and growing your business. After all, maintaining balance is what defines a successful entrepreneur as a leader!

Until Next Time.
George Chaney
President/CEO
SEO King, Inc.

Well, you probably have a few different answers in mind, but here’s something I’m sure you’ll agree with: We all tend to make things just way more complicated than they need to be.

Here’s A Typical Example:

You have an idea for a great new website slash online business venture. Wouldn’t take much to get it started… maybe just a simple 5 page website with decent copy and an hour a day worth of promotion through social media networks. Simple enough, right?

Well instead of taking an initial action or two to get it started right away, you put it off for a week. Then another week goes by. You still think it’s a great idea and would really work perfectly, but in the meantime, you now have ideas for about 10 additional pages on the website and several more great ways in mine to market it.

One year later, you have practically a notebook full of ideas written down, but no website started, no marketing done, and no sales made. It got too complicated!

What’s The Solution?

Sometimes you’ve just got to jump right in and start something while the idea’s fresh. Get that website live and start promoting it. Sure, you can always add to it and make upgrades and improvements as you go along — and you’ll think of plenty of them. But the key to success is taking action instead of thinking and talking about it but not ever doing anything about it.

About Wants Vs. Needs

When it comes to your wants vs. needs, it always helps to start with some basic goal setting. Ask yourself questions and answer honestly. For example:

• How much money will my new website need to make per day to break even?
• How much money will my website need to make per day to allow me to quit my day job?
• Where would I like my website to be in 1, 5, 10 years from now as far as market share and profits are concerned?

You know the routine. It’s important to clearly define your needs (what absolutely must happen in order for it to work out) and your wants (big picture goals and objectives… like making millions with your idea).

For most people, meeting needs will be simpler than initially imagined… perhaps making $100 per day would do the trick. And it does help sometimes to look at the numbers by the day in the beginning; they’re much less intimidating this way.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. Keep it simple by starting simple and addressing your most essential needs first. You can achieve all of your "wants" as you become more and more successful, but only after you’ve actually gotten the ball rolling in the first place.

Until Next Time.
George Chaney
President/CEO
SEO King, Inc.

And the very best part about building a strong base of clientele and customers is the fact that word of mouth referrals and repeat customers tend to snowball incredibly. Compounding customers is just like compounding interest!

Now this is really no big secret at all, but many neglect to realize the impact and power of an ever-growing customer base until it begins to happen. Here’s how to get there:

1. Provide a desirable service or product.
2. Work hard, especially in the beginning to get the word out.
3. Develop a good rapport with new potential customers and clients.
4. Offer your customers value (this could be financial value or anything else that’s valuable to them).
5. Earn the sale.
6. Deliver everything you’ve promised to your customer, exactly as expected.
7. If any kinks arise in the process, be transparent and make it right.
8. Express your sincere thankfulness to your customer.
9. Potentially ask them for referrals (or at least make sure they know you’re open to new customers).
10. Keep doing steps 1 through 9 above again and again.

Seems like common sense, right? That’s exactly what it really is, but it’s just a matter of following through with it all time and time again.

Before long, your highly-satisfied customers and clients will not only come back for more of a good thing themselves — they’ll also tell their own network of friends, associates, family, clients, and so on. This is powerful stuff here (and where things can begin to get very interesting)!

A Figurative Look At The Numbers

For this example, let’s assume that you are a freelancer offering web marketing services to your clients. You’ve started your new venture as a New Year’s resolution and you’re just getting started. End of month one, you now have a great little website promoting your services and have begun working hard to attract and earn the trust of new clients (probably through email, social media, or even the trusty but dreaded cold call).

After several unsuccessful contacts, the 12th person you contact decides they’ll give your service a try. It’s a small project and a week later, you’ve delivered on your promise. Client books a bigger project. In the meantime, you’ve successfully secured 3 additional new clients. All is well.

About two months after you’ve completed the project for your first new client, you get a phone call from a business associate of theirs — this person is looking for someone to help them out as well. Deal is made. Now guess what?

Because of just this one initial client, there’s now two good clients. That’s 100% "compounding client interest" right there alone. Now those other 3 clients you’ve started working with before… 2 are highly satisfied and maybe the third decides to go a different direction.

At any rate, let’s assume each of your 4 existing active clients refer you to 3 more new clients over the course of the year. End of year one: your client list of 4 hard-earned customers has now grown to 16 (for the work of attaining just 4).

Now let’s count on another successful year for year two. Each of your "referrals" now in-turn refers you to 3 new active clients on their own part. That’s 52 clients for the work of the initial 4 in the beginning. As you can see, it only compounds from here!

In The End…

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in or what your product or service is. Work hard at earning a few good clients in the beginning and before you know it, you’ll have more referrals than you’re able to handle. Compounding customers is just like compou

Until Next Time.
George Chaney
President/CEO
SEO King, Inc.

One: You can project the image you choose online.
Want to look like a mom and pop style small enterprise to help convince online customers that you’re small enough to really care about their needs? No problem. Want to project the professional corporate image of a Fortune 500 company on your website? Again, no problem… it’s your website, and with good pre-design planning, you get to pick your business image. Plan wisely!

Two: Even the smallest micro-budget online businesses can compete.
This is the beauty of the online business environment. Sure, there’s still plenty of competition — but the thing is, the barriers to entry are low enough that practically any small business can use a combination of search optimization (SEO), search marketing (SEM), and pay-per-click (PPC) to create a high-conversion rate, profitable business. The capabilities to test, adjust, and repeat the process over and over again really helps streamline online operations.

Three: Small businesses can go global overnight, but they can also dominate a local niche online.
We’ve all been trained through experience to understand how a good website or e-commerce online presence can turn a micro-business operated from computer in someone’s bedroom into an international competitor. But even more practical (and often overlooked), is the fact that with a little bit of optimization, a local business can use their online presence to dominate their own local market.

Four: Professional search optimization can tune your website to deliver leads like crazy.
Many small businesses have been rather pleasantly surprised when they discover that when spending a reasonable share of their monthly advertising budget to optimize and fine tune their online business process, the percentage spent on optimization out delivers the other advertising dollars spent several times over. Pro SEO has a way of delivering downright astonishing results when it comes to creating leads and sales conversions with a small biz website.

Five: Your online business doesn’t have to be perfect.
So many small business owners put off development of a profit-producing online presence because they know they won’t be able to develop the same kind of website that they imagine they’ll need to play in the same game as their big league competitors. The bottom line is that even a $1000 website can be tuned to produce respectable results in a niche market. The biggest key here is to develop a plan — with both short-term and long-term components — and begin setting it in action. With a smart plan, you can definitely start small on the web and grow your online business to perfection.

Small businesses have the distinct advantage of being able to level the playing field online — are you choosing to participate?

Until Next Time.
George Chaney
President/CEO
SEO King, Inc.