​What: Make your professional profile easier to find online.
Why: People search online and you want search engines (“Google”) to list your preferred professional online identity first so people can easily find you.

Evidence/Example: Search “Dave Sue” to see where I rank, even compared to a published Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Western Washington University who has a number of academic journal entries and a book on Amazon.

Key Questions:

1. Who do you want to find you? Who is your desired primary audience(s) or DPAs?
2. Where online besides Google and Linked-in do they look? What sources do they trust?
3. When you search for your name online and in the places defined in #2 above, what do you find?
4. What (i.e., info, photo, etc.) about yourself do you want to share professionally online?

Use the inputs from #4 and put them into all the places defined in #2; share the same information (and photo if possible) consistently across different platforms. Also, diffuse any negative listings found in #3.

​Level One (i.e., basic places to start):

1. Update your Linked-in profile (or create one if you don’t have one; it’s free).
2. Use a custom Linked-in address or URL (http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname).
3. Follow basic Linked-in tips (e.g., make sure you have solid recommendations from people who you are not giving a Linked-in recommendation to, etc.).

Update it and make sure you’re OK with anyone reading it. Assume nothing on Facebook is private.

1. Get a Twitter account and name it @firstname+lastname or @initials.
   [If you have one already, switch your Twitter account to @firstname+lastname or @initials]
2. Add a short bio to your profile: a brief, high level overview.
3. Start following people and subjects relevant to your industry.
4. Be active! Tweet daily news articles you find interesting. Reply to people who share interesting things. Be part of the conversation and the community!

READY TO EXPLORE A MARKETING LIFT?

What: Learn this framework that covers most major Western business strategies.
Why: Leading with a portfolio of strategy options will give you and your business a competitive edge.

Our Recommendation:
Although there are many classic business strategy authors (e.g., Porter, Pareto, Ansoff, etc.) worth reading, if we were to recommend only one business strategy book to read, this would be it. Published in 2015 by a few thought leaders at Boston Consulting Group, Your Strategy Needs a Strategy articulates a five category strategy framework within which many of the more prominent strategy approaches are organized and described.

We especially appreciate its strategy palette approach, “a robust way to select the right [strategy approach] for the right circumstances,” which avoids the all too frequent mistake of “a hammer assuming that everything looks like a nail.” Given its clear explanations, interesting case studies, and solid quantitative and qualitative foundation, both veteran strategy hands and those newer to the field will find this a worthwhile read.

From Amazon:
Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy.

In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment… They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories–Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable… In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch.

Purchase from Amazon here.

If your business is wrestling with a strategy challenge that you either have not been able to solve or need to have solved quickly and effectively, contact us at LIFT SME to schedule an initial scoping call at your earliest convenience.

CONNECT WITH US TODAY

What: Understand the basics of building a website.
Why: To save you time and money – i.e., so you won’t purchase more than you need OR try to save money and end up creating something you will not be able to use anyway.

Example: Before I built this current WordPress website, I operated for 2 years with this initial website www.lift-sme.com I built myself for $0 upfront (2016) and <$200 per year to keep and maintain it. I had www.miyim.com built for $2.5K+ upfront (2016) and used to paid just a few hundred dollars monthly to maintain it (until we decided to manage it ourselves). 

There are two basic steps :

1. PLAN out your website – i.e., purpose, functional requirements, ROI expected.
2. PAY for a domain name, a place to host it, and the DIY website builder program to build your Website OR pay someone else to take care of part or all of this for you.

Is it really that simple?
​Like everything else in business, there are hundreds of ways to describe, assess, and (unfortunately also) complicate website building. The fact that every advice giver has their own agenda + the overload of easily accessible info to everything = hours (and money) easily wasted and headaches.
​
It is for this reason that we at LIFT SME start by asking website inquirers two questions :

1. PLAN. What is the END GOAL or the purpose of your website? Or, what FUNCTION does your website need to fulfill within your marketing plan? Is 90% of your business through referrals and so you just need a digital business card so people can get more information on you? Is most of your business local so a strong Google Maps presence is actually more important for you than a highly optimized website? Or do most of your customers find you through a Google search and are your competitors stealing your customers via Google Ads and other digital tactics?

Here’s a chart to help match your website END GOAL with our recommended question #2:

2. PAY. What do you want to pay to accomplish your PLAN (from Q1)? Do you want to pay more money to save yourself time? Do you want to spend more of your or your team’s time in order to not pay an outside vendor or digital marketing agency?

Although a lot of small business people tend to think saving money is better than saving time, the danger with that approach is that website building can get quite involved, tedious, and complex quickly (e.g., website security, staying abreast of the changes Google makes to its algorithm, automatic updates made to WordPress themes that end up “breaking” plugins, etc.).

In other words, while it is always smart to not pay for something you don’t need, it is also smart to avoid spending a lot of time on YouTube, Google, etc., learning a little about things not essential to your business only to end up with a subpar product that you need to pay someone later to start-over or fix.

Simple rule of thumb: if you’ve more discretionary time than money, DIY; if your working on some other part of the business will earn you more money than it costs to hire someone, hire out.

So what do you need your website to do? And what do you want to pay for it?

We at LIFT SME always recommend THINKING BEFORE DOING and so hope this saves at least a few small business people from either unnecessary purchases or a lot of time wasted. If your small business marketing plan requires a more involved website or you need help putting an actionable marketing plan together, we at LIFT SME would love to connect.

DIGITAL MARKETING PACKAGE

READY TO EXPLORE A MARKETING LIFT?

Updated: 2020 March