A common question asked by business owners is “how can other people find my website?”  After all, even if you have the best website in the world, if no one knows about it, your business doesn’t benefit.

One common way is to hope people find you through Google or other search engines.  But say, if your company sells cheese, how many results will turn up if they search for a “cheese company”?  Hundreds of thousands.  Chances are your company won’t even show up on the first few pages, unless you do some search engine optimization (SEO) on your website.

SEO is a big field that requires a lot of knowledge in both the web technologies and how search engines work.  If you want to learn more about SEO, there are plenty of tutorials out there.  But as a starter, if you just want someone to take a quick look at your website and tell you what you should change, you can take a look at WebSite Grader.

Website Grader is a free online tool for SEO beginners that tells you how effective your website is, and how you could change it to get a higher Google ranking.

It’s free, so give it a try.  What’s your grade?

What’s the best way to encourage people taking a mock test to do their best?  Should you pay them:
a)  2.5 cents per correct answer.
b)  Nothing.

2.5 cents is a lousy amount of money, but it’s better than nothing, right?  Wrong.  This was tested out in Israel, and it turns out that people do 10% better when doing it for free than when offered the small cash reward.

What’s going on here?  Test-takers in the two scenarios above had the following mindsets:
a)  What’s in it for me?  2.5 cents isn’t worth the trouble.
b)  I’ll help out.  If I do my best they can figure out if the questions are too easy or not.

It would seem reasonable that these mindsets could combine into something like “I’ll help out and earn a few bucks at the same time”.  But actually, it’s pretty much one or the other.  Scientists have even tracked the two mindsets down to different parts of the brain, and generally, only one is active at a time.

So when you need help with something, you should either pay enough to answer “what’s in it for me“, or ask for a favour instead (and return it later).  If you offer too little money, you just draw attention to the fact that it’s not enough.  Pay enough or don’t pay at all.

Most small businesses these days have a website up to share information and attract new customers.  If you don’t, you might want to consider getting one designed.

If you already have one, have you ever wondered what kind of people are visiting it?  Where are they from?  What do they click?  How did they get there?  How many come back?  Answering these questions helps you understand how people interact with your website, so you can improve on weak points and promote your selling points better.  Luckily, there are free tools online that can help you track how people use your website.

Google Analytics gives you detailed information on how your users browse your site.  It can tell you what time of the day you get the most traffic, which countries the users from, which page is the most viewed, etc.  The nice thing about it is that the graphs are all interactive, allowing you to drill down to find the exact information you want.

Quantcast shows you the demographics of your users.  Information like the age group, average household income, the gender percentage, etc.  How could you target your marketing message better if you found out that most of your visitors were women over 50?

Using these tools is very easy if you already have a website.  Simply sign-up for a free account, and follow their instructions to attach a small piece of HTML code on your website.  You might be surprised by how your website is being used.  We know we were when we saw Malaysia in the top 10 countries visiting us.  Time to go international, anyone?

Using barcodes to enter products can be quicker and more accurate than manually typing in item codes. If your products already have barcodes on them, then all you really need is a barcode scanner and some software. If not, you can first make your own barcodes.

If your products are going to be sold in other retail stores, you’ll need to use standardized formats and pay to make sure your barcodes are unique. We won’t cover that in this article, but you can find more information here.

Otherwise, if the barcodes are just for your business’ own use, it’s pretty easy to print them yourself. Barcodes are just a special way of writing letters and numbers so that a scanner can read them. You can make up your own letter/number codes (e.g. ABC1234) for each of your products. Then, use some software like IDAutomation’s free version of their barcode label printing software to print them as barcodes onto some sticky address labels, like those Avery sells in office supply stores. You can then peel them off and stick them onto your products, and you’re all set.

If you want to print barcodes directly onto your packaging or other materials, you can instead get a barcode font and use that to type barcodes into your designs in Microsoft Word, Publisher, Adobe PageMaker, etc. IDAutomation also offers a free Code 39 barcode font. There are different types of barcode fonts and symbols - Code 39 is the simplest type, but perfect for your company’s own use. Other common types you might come across are UPC-A in North America and EAN-13 in Europe.

Don’t let all the barcoding jargon scare you away - it’s quite easy to get started and you can really speed things up for your business.

Listening to your customers is critical in identifying how your business can improve.  But usually, you only hear from either your greatest fans or the customers having the most trouble.  What do the rest of your more moderate customers think?

An online survey tool can help to gather more feedback and help you organize it to decide how to improve.  You can make your own survey, invite your customers to complete it, and then generate reports with graphs and charts on their responses.  For example, you might find that only 30% of your customers know about your latest product, and decide to improve that by showing it more prominently on your website or sending out a newsletter.  Most of these tools are free to start, but will charge reasonable rates if you have a large number of responses.

Here are 2 of these online survey tools:
- Survey Gizmo
- Survey Monkey

Give it a try today.  What your customers think might just surprise you.

Having a professional e-mail address and telephone number will help you make a good first impression when you hear from customers, but having a nice logo and website will make them more likely to contact you in the first place.  As a businessperson, you don’t need to be a great designer if you can find someone who is.

Traditionally, hiring a designer involves first finding someone you can trust on quality, style, and budget.  This is not easy.  A new alternative is to host a design contest for your logo or website, let designers around the world submit entries, and award the prize to your favorite.  This way, there’s no risk of getting tricked into hiring a lousy designer.

Two websites that make it easy to host these contests are:
- 99 designs
- Crowdspring

Ballpark costs are about $250 for a logo and $500 for a basic website design, including the contest prize money and administrative fees.  The average turnaround time is about a week, with somewhere around 25 entries.  Of course, you’ll get more entries with a larger prize or if your contest guidelines spark the designers’ creativity.

If you want to touch up your company’s look, holding a design contest may be a good way to do it.

The first impression you make on customers may include the e-mail address that you use. An address like janedoe42@hotmail.com looks amateurish, whereas jane@mycompany.com is much more professional. Here’s one way you can make the switch, typically for under $20 a year.

1. Pick and register your business domain name (the part of your e-mail address after the @ sign). If you have a common business name, it might be already taken, so you might have to get a little creative. Some sites that provide this service are godaddy.com and 123-reg.co.uk, or search for domain name registration in your country and check that your choice offers free e-mail forwarding (most do).

2. Sign up for a GMail account. Many other e-mail services will also work. It doesn’t matter too much what this address is, as your contacts usually won’t see it.

3. Set up e-mail to forward to your GMail account. You can usually do this from a control panel that you’ll be given access to after step 1. Instructions for GoDaddy

4. Set up GMail to make it look like you’re sending messages from your new business e-mail address. Set this as your default account.

That’s it! Now you can log into GMail and treat that as your business e-mail address, your contacts won’t be able to tell the difference.

If you keep products in stock, you’ll need to know how many you have. How can you keep track of this? The first thought that comes to mind often involves pencil and paper or Microsoft Excel. However, if you invest a little more time into setting up an inventory software system, your business can continually benefit from the following 4 things:

1. Automatically update inventory as you buy and sell - There’s no need to make an invoice and then come back and update your inventory later on; do both in one step.

2. Use history to find errors - Do you have less in stock than you expected? Get a detailed history of inventory movements to help find out if it was an honest mistake or if something was lost or stolen.

3. Automatically re-order - When you run low in stock, get suggestions on what to re-order, and automatically make purchase orders for your vendors.

4. Share with others more easily - Do you work with other people who also need to check and update inventory? Set up two or more computers and let everyone always have up-to-date information.

We designed inFlow Inventory to give you these four benefits, and much more. You can download the Free Edition and start entering your inventory or import it from Excel right now.

Do you know someone in a small business that might want to improve their inventory handling?