Wordpress is one of the top platforms that small business owners use to start blogging, but many don't realize they can also run a sophisticated website and online store from the Wordpress platform.
In our Sales Rescue Team free website review service, we talk to dozens of small companies every week and we've seen many of them tapping into Wordpress. One of the struggles we've heard is how to customize it, how to make it look like what you want, how to add ecommerce, online storefront, capabilities.
In reality, we struggled with that, too. You can get part way complete on a new website only to find that it doesn't allow you as much flexibility as you had hoped. When we made the switch back to Wordpress in mid 2008, we knew there would be some hiccups. What made those hiccups easier to deal with was the Thesis Theme for Wordpress. It is a robust theme that I consider a mini-application for helping a small biz owner to customize Wordpress to exactly what they want, often with just basic commands from the Thesis dashboard.
Here are three examples of what I like about Thesis:
1. You can design for one, two, or three columns with the click of a radio button. Better yet, you can add a photo box with rotating images by simply uploading them to a rotator file within the Post Images section of the dashboard.
2. You can add pages to the site and decide, again with a quick click, to add them to your site navigation menu. No redesign of your site to add or subtract a navigation item. Just check the box, or uncheck it.
3. There's a second tab in Thesis called Design Options where I can pick the font, the colors, the more aesthetic options. I changed the background color of my main navigation links so that as you mouseover them, they have a orange-red background highlight. On this, as I click that option, it gives me a color palette and I can simply choose and play around with different color options. Cool.
We have so many conversations about Thesis that I've started trying to answer the basics in some web tutorials via YouTube, Vimeo, Slideshare. I've posted some of them here on the Sales Rescue Team pages: Why I Use the Thesis Theme for Wordpress.
Take a look and let me know what you think and what you're using to manage your small business.
TJ McCue is an online content specialist and founder of the Sales Rescue Team.
Content is king. Most internet players already know this, but there's always new companies and people entering the fray who somehow think its about a pretty photo or webpage.
In my Dun & Bradstreet blog covering Demand Generation this week, I review and share some of my favorite recent finds. Jeff Ogden's whitepaper on How to Find New Customers is excellent. Lisa Rabone of Outspoken Media is helping small businesses in the catering niche, as just one example off the excellent blog they do.
In the current market, most companies are looking for ways to cut marketing costs, yet increase their leads via lead generation efforts. Telemarketing is one way that companies reach out to prospective companies.
Pre-marketing is a savvy way to learn what ideas, concepts and language work for your prospective customer. Rather than simply do web research, which can be very helpful, try using an expert phone interviewer. I consulted with Risa Sacks, a well known information professional who specializes in phone-based research, about how she uses the phone to learn more about prospects. These ideas and information may help you to better reach the hot buttons for your prospects in whatever marketing campaign you try next.
Risa explained to me that she has many client projects where you simply cannot find the information online. The knowledge, the important details, reside in the expertise that your customers and other experts have inside their heads. Tapping into that knowledge via phone, by way of a personal, professional interviewer can make the difference in how you write your telemarketing scripts, your email offers, and your website landing pages.
“The kind of project that could be done in just a few hours would include talking with customers, the ones who have already been contacted and have agreed to participate. Other services that help you dig deeper on a market segment in preparation for outbound appointment setting or calling efforts “include market overviews, win/loss evaluations, product analysis - really anything where getting direct input from the 'experts' - can give you critical information - whether those experts are customers, suppliers, government agencies, professional association experts, etc.,” said Risa Sacks.
Some business owners might want to do this sort of research directly before talking to customers or prospects, so Risa suggests the following:
Before you pick up the phone, do your homework. Start with online searching to see what information is readily available and to find possible experts to call.
Libraries and librarians are also great resources. You can safely ask a librarian questions about almost anything.
There are many specialty libraries that may have the exact area you’re researching.
Check professional associations and organizations – many times they have experts on staff who will talk to you about your request.
Whenever you talk with someone, whether they can help you or not, always ask them who else they might suggest you speak with, or who else might know the answers. Then when you call that person, be sure to mention “so and so suggested that I speak with you….”
If you need to hire a professional researcher to help you with any of this, you can find researchers at the Association of Independent information Professionals. It’s like having your own on-call research department.
Every so often, you find an idea or a post or an article that strikes you as valuable, as incredibly relevant. So it is with this post and collection of ideas that speak for our current situation -- Money Saving Ideas for Business Growth. Who doesn't need more of those kinds of ideas.
Many of you have probably wanted to monitor and watch how you, your company, or your brand comes up in online conversation.
Perhaps, you've used a search engine to do this. But one of the best ways is to use a free service from Nielsen BuzzMetrics called BlogPulse.
I just performed a search for a client of mine, Shiftboard, and if you use the typical search/boolean operators like quotes around the term, you'll get much better results (as in fewer, more relevant results).
For example, they are in the nascent online scheduling world with their web-based scheduling solution, so putting those terms in quotes makes a ton of difference in the results.
Blogpulse is worth a look, if you like to keep track of your terms within blogs and comments at blogs. You can turn the result into an RSS feed, too, which is an awesome feature.
Online Scheduling and when to work. Like everything in our wired and wireless world today, we expect to be able to manage our searching, our travel, our writing -- in one online place. That's why Google has so rocked the world with Gmail and Gcal and GDocs and all the rest of the web-based tools we are now coming to depend on.
Why not scheduling? Why not staffing? I see very few company's taking flexible schedules seriously except where they hire only temps or freelancers. Here's the reason i see -- its simply too hard to try and manage all of it. Top down approaches seem to be the most logical. Contingent workforces are still stuck with the top down model only because there has not been an alternative.
Until you enter the web-based, bottom up, world we are now participating in.
Fast Company's David Robert's did a piece on All in a Day's Work which talked about how a shorter workweek is more environmentally friendly. Kudos. But i think it is more than this -- i think there's a need to help companies, particularly in this 2008 economic crisis -- to manage their own schedules for the sake of staff time, for the sake of the employee who might have to work 3 jobs to make ends meet.
First, it's far more cost-effective (read cheaper) to do it this way and engage the team. It is like the collaborative, crowd-sourcing, concepts that are taking hold in design. If you give people the ability to interact with something, they make it better. Usually. Human beings are quite creative and self-regulating when you give them a chance. Hence, customers are designing sneakers and t-shirts and gadgets. Also, You create a more loyal employee because you've invited them into the control room. You make their life easier by letting them schedule their own shifts, schedule their own work time.
I started working on this project for a client, Shiftboard, and found myself drawn into the world of web-apps in a new way. I started to ask questions as a business owner and asking fellow business owners -- why don't we make some employee processes, like scheduling, much easier?? On ourselves.
Contract workers, flexible workers, freelancers, nurses, doctors, firefighters, police officers, nonprofit volunteers -- all of these and more have a scheduling problem and they need help to solve it. The employee wants them to make it easier on them.
If we treated our employees like we do our customers, we'd have far stronger companies. What do you think? Let me know what you think. Is something new coming in the way we manage employees?
Online Scheduling and when to work. Like everything in our wired and wireless world today, we expect to be able to manage our searching, our travel, our writing -- in one online place. That's why Google has so rocked the world with Gmail and Gcal and GDocs and all the rest of the web-based tools we are now coming to depend on.
Why not scheduling? Why not staffing? I see very few company's taking flexible schedules seriously except where they hire only temps or freelancers. Here's the reason i see -- its simply too hard to try and manage all of it. Top down approaches seem to be the most logical. Contingent workforces are still stuck with the top down model only because there has not been an alternative.
Until you enter the web-based, bottom up, world we are now participating in.
Fast Company's David Robert's did a piece on All in a Day's Work which talked about how a shorter workweek is more environmentally friendly. Kudos. But i think it is more than this -- i think there's a need to help companies, particularly in this 2008 economic crisis -- to manage their own schedules for the sake of staff time, for the sake of the employee who might have to work 3 jobs to make ends meet.
First, it's far more cost-effective (read cheaper) to do it this way and engage the team. It is like the collaborative, crowd-sourcing, concepts that are taking hold in design. If you give people the ability to interact with something, they make it better. Usually. Human beings are quite creative and self-regulating when you give them a chance. Hence, customers are designing sneakers and t-shirts and gadgets. Also, You create a more loyal employee because you've invited them into the control room. You make their life easier by letting them schedule their own shifts, schedule their own work time.
I started working on this project for a client, Shiftboard, and found myself drawn into the world of web-apps in a new way. I started to ask questions as a business owner and asking fellow business owners -- why don't we make some employee processes, like scheduling, much easier?? On ourselves.
Contract workers, flexible workers, freelancers, nurses, doctors, firefighters, police officers, nonprofit volunteers -- all of these and more have a scheduling problem and they need help to solve it. The employee wants them to make it easier on them.
If we treated our employees like we do our customers, we'd have far stronger companies. What do you think? Let me know what you think. Is something new coming in the way we manage employees?
So often, i hear from entrepreneurs and business owners about their online lead generation efforts, pay-per-click, and other methods to generate new sales.
It is pretty common to hear about thousands of dollars being spent to build a list, but then never thinking about how to manage that list of prospects for the long term. I believe the answer resides in thinking about others buy cycles, processes and professional needs.
Simply put, think about what helps your prospective client or customer to do his or her job better and you'll make huge inroads into building that all-important "relationship" that so many sales gurus talk about. Search engines make it relatively easy to do this. The best way i know of is to use the *Advanced Search* button found on most engines. Click that and then put in key terms and search by document type. Take a typical term for your industry and add *research study* to the end of the search term and you'll uncover all sorts of interesting studies and value-add type documents that you can share with a prospect.
This is lead nurturing at its best. This is not just a drip marketing campaign.
When you do this, you'll inevitably get email notes or phone calls of appreciation. I do it all the time for my clients, and my own business, and find it more than just sales. It is just plain rewarding on all levels.
