Our special guest on this episode of the Business Marketing Show is Haydn Stevenson from Staged.com

I first met Haydn in Tokyo when I was presenting at the Netpreneur Summit 2015. We hit it off and discovered we had a lot in common. He was kind enough to show me and a few others from the Summit around his home town of Kamakura well known for being the home of the Great Buddha.

Haydn is a hype-free Twitter organic lead generation specialist and Co-founder of Staged.com. He is father to 2 gorgeous girls, has escaped death 14 times, avid non-ficition reader and came to Japan when he was 19 to train in Martial Arts with the goal to train in Ninjitsu.

With a burning passion for apply technology, Social Media and leverage to business, and a clinical loathing of wasting time, Haydn has been developing lead generation software and system for small businesses for over 15 years.

The Staged.com suite of highly-automated, Twitter-based Lead Generation SmartTools is a culmination of a 5 year process of constant and never-ending, incremental improvement that the Japanese refer to as Kaizen.

We hope you enjoy this episode.

This is Episode 50 of the Business Marketing Show – we both regularly see clients in trouble, websites hacked, domain names expired and a whole host of other problems that could have been easily avoided.

In this episode we share some simple, most DIY steps that will go a long way towards eliminating the downside and protecting your web and online assets.

This episode is one every business owner should listen to as it’s extremely rare to come across a business that has all of these steps implemented.

Notes from this episode:

* Domain Names

* Whois privacy protection

* Registrar as far in advance as possible

* Check and make sure your domain name information is correct and is using a current email address

* Make sure your credit card/payment information is up to date with your provider

* Use two factor authentication if provided

* DNS

* Host on Cloudflare.com which provides firewall protection for your website

* The 4 components of your hosting ideally should be all with separate providers

* Get alerted to website outages with Pingdom.com

* Make sure your CMS has regular patches & updates applied (by your hosting company or website provider).

* Use Akismet Spam Filtering instead of captcha codes on forms

* Setup alerting for your name and your brand name using mention.net

* Get your IT or web company to setup an SPF record for your email hosting to help eliminate problems with spam and to ensure the best chance of your emails being delivered.

Listening options:

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.

 

This is our first episode to kick off 2016. In this episode we provide an update to the Small Business Marketing Plan & Blueprint episode we did at the start of 2015. In this episode we detail the exact strategy we’re using right now in 2016 to get real results for our small business clients.

1. Mindset

Fixing your mindset, particularly around time and cost investment, is a key part of making your online marketing strategy work effectively.

Unfortunately most small businesses owners choose services based on price instead of features, benefits and expected performance. Looking at the expected return on a service first, and then working backwards to determine what you can afford or an appropriate budget is a much better approach.

Other common mistakes in thinking and mindset:

* The blind quest wanting to be “number 1 in google” – for which term, which device, which location and which number 1 are you talking about? The Adwords results? The Google Maps results? Google Shopping or just the regular unpaid, organic search results (which are now often halfway down the page)?

* Thinking “Adwords is expensive”, it’s not if it works!

* Having a set and forget attitude – those days are over. You website and marketing strategy needs regular attention in order to deliver consistent and regular results.

* Looking at competitor websites and Google rankings continually/regularly/obsessively without working on your own site.

* Expecting overnight success and falling for sales gimmicks and tricks, e.g. “don’t pay until you rank”. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Those too good to be true offers do work in some cases but in other cases they can damage the underlying SEO fundamentals of your website so badly that you need to rebuild the site on a new domain.

* Only taking action when your business is in trouble…this is the worst time to be trying to get online marketing momentum!

2. Content

* To start with, specifically a page of content on the website for every single product and service you sell.

* Pages should be 500 words or around 5 paragraphs long, minimum – think 1.5-2 scrolls of the page

* The content should explain what you’re selling, why the customer should buy it from you (features and benefits to the customer) and how they get started (e.g. do they call? book online? email?)

* Dan Norris’ Book Content Machine is a great resource for expanding your content further beyond your products and services pages. We chatted with Dan in an episode back in mid 2015

3. High quality email and web hosting

There’s no excuse for email problems with today’s technology. Our email hosting providers of choice are Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 is the better one if you’re used to using Microsoft Outlook. Google Apps is the business version of Gmail.

Many businesses try to get the cheapest web hosting possible which is a terrible idea. You know yourself, if a website is slow to load or unreliable you quickly lose patience and click away. Visitors to your website behave in exactly the same way. Slow and unreliable websites also hurt your Google ranking!

Brendan’s company has built a high performance, search engine friendly hosting product specifically for this reason: https://www.thesearchengineshop.com/website-hosting/

For more detailed information on hosting check out our hosting episode:

https://www.businessmarketingshow.com/episode-14-web-email-business-hosting/

4.

In this episode we recap our 2015 year and share the tactics and strategies that really delivered results this year for us and our clients and look forward to 2016 and share our predictions on the strategies that you should be focussing on in the coming year.

 

What worked well in 2015:

* Remarketing and retargeting, for more information on remarketing visit Ed’s website remarketing.com.au

* Email marketing (done well), if you’re interested in digging deeper on email marketing we talked about it on episode 8 of the podcast

* Having a page for every product and service you sell on your website. It sounds simple but in a huge number of cases we deal with this overlooked

* Google Adwords for search, a no brainer but you shouldn’t be DIYing it. On Episode 7 of the podcast we discussed Adwords basics

* High quality high performance hosting – you know yourself if a website is slow you quickly lose patience and click away. Visit tools.pingdom.com to do a quick test of your hosting speed. If your site doesn’t load consistently in under 5 seconds you may have problems.

Where to focus in 2016:

* Content and content marketing strategy – Dan Norris’ book, Content Machine is a great place to start

* The smartphone/mobile experience on your website. The percentage of visitors hitting your site using a smartphone or mobile device is only going to increase!

* Becoming more aware of customer needs and being more personal as a business.

* Become a 24/7 business – your customers are now looking for you 24/7. Using things like marketing automation you can help them much more easily 24 hours a day. Taking the first step of your sales process online is another great way to do this.

* For retail businesses a solid ecommerce strategy is probably the only way to survive long term.

 

 

Listening options:

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.

 

Our guest on this episode of the Business Marketing Show is John Cadogan from AutoExpert.com.au

Here is a link to John’s full Bio on his website 

I first started watching John’s Auto Expert TV You Tube Channel  about 12 months ago and was very impressed by how he put the show together.

His presentation style was professional with a well scripted and thought out story for each of his episodes. Also the quality of the audio & video production was very well done.

So I invited John onto the show to share some of his insights into how to produce a quality video podcast.

We hope you enjoy this episode.

In today’s cloud enabled world working remotely, removing yourself from the office, being location independent or whatever you call it has never been cheaper or easier.

In this episode we talk about working remotely. Many small business owners struggle with technology and unchaining themselves from the office but that shouldn’t be the case. In the episode we share some of the cloud tools we use to eliminate the need for a centralised office and run a business grade IT infrastructure without large IT expenses.

 

Highlights, Notes and Action Items from this episode:

* Four Hour Work Week Book

* Backups episode

* iPhone personal hotspot feature

* Email Hosting

* Google Apps

* Office365

* File Sharing – Dropbox.com

* Phone solutions

* Vodafone $5/day global roaming

* Skype

* Viber

* Officehq.com.au

 

Listening options:

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.

 

Over the last few years small business has dramatically increased its reliance on technology. Unfortunately, as the reliance on technology has grown exponentially, there has been little or no improvement in the security precautions business owners take to protect their IT infrastructure and the commercially sensitive and valuable information stored on that infrastructure.

In this episode we detail some simple steps you can take to dramatically increase the security of your IT infrastructure, cloud services and online assets. By taking these simple steps you’ll significantly reduce security risks in your IT equipment.

Listen to this week’s show and learn:

* Simple DIY action steps you can take to boost your security including some powerful free tools

* Common mistakes many business owners mistake around computer security that is akin to leaving their front door open and a pile of cash on the kitchen table

Highlights, Notes and Action Items from this episode:

Making $5 million a year unboxing kids toys on Youtube

Excellent Ted talk on computer security and some of the risks you’re exposed to on a daily basis and probably don’t even know it!

Your action list from this episode:

* Don’t use same password on everything especially core services such as your primary email address, internet banking and Dropbox. Change your passwords so they are all unique and use a strong password!

* Using a password manager such as 1Password or Lastpass will make managing passwords and the task of using different passwords much easier.

* Use 2 factor authentication (aka multifactor authentication and 2 step authentication) on critical services such as internet banking, Gmail, Dropbox, password managers and other important services.

* Lock your computer when you’re away from it and have the screensaver kick in after short period of time with automatic locking. This is especially important if you’re working in public or shared spaces

* Change the default password settings on devices such as wifi routers, network printers, network cameras and any other device plugged into your computer network at home or at the office

* Give staff their own accounts to use for online services instead using yours

* If you’re using unencrypted public WIFI, for example at a cafe or hotel, make sure you’re using a VPN service such as Tunnelbear which will ensure your traffic is secured and encrypted. (Public wifi networks are extremely insecure)

* Make sure your home and office wifi is encrypted – encryption means you need a passphrase to access the network. The passphrase is actually the encryption key.

* Use OpenDNS servers which will protect you from many sites on the internet that have been compromised or have malicious code on them. OpenDNS will also reduce some of the risk around using public networks or public WIFI

* When you’re logging into a website or submitting sensitive info on a website make sure the site is using HTTPS so the info is encrypted. You’ll usually see this in the browser bar of the page.

 

Listening options:

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.

 

On this episode we have Fleur Allen from Out of the Box Biz.

Out of the Box Biz is a business community that provides business networking, development and education events for entrepreneurs, professionals and business owners.

Fleur also won the Ontraport Success Award for Most Creativity with Technology. (Ontraport is a marketing automation platform).

Networking, when done in the right way (i.e. you don’t become a business card ninja throwing business cards at people like they’re ninja stars), is a fantastic way to build and grow your business.

In this episode we talk about Out of the Box Biz, business networking and Ontraport.

Links from this episode:

* Ontraport.com

* Out of the Box Biz

On this episode we have John Bellamy from Heart Centered Money Makers

Through Heart Centered Money Makers John helps conscious entrepreneurs build, grow and systemise their businesses so they can focus on what they do best.

John is also a LinkedIn magician and regularly hosts workshops and events based around leveraging LinkedIn in a sales and marketing perspective. He gives us the low down on how to leverage LinkedIn to connect with prospects on customers on the platform and the difference between the free version of LinkedIn, the premium version and the sales navigator version.

Once you’ve listened to this episode make sure you check out John’s LinkedIn cheat sheet at linkthority.com

Links from this episode:

* LinkedIn cheat sheet

* Heart Centered Money Makers

* Connect with John on LinkedIn

On this episode of The Business Marketing Show we talk Turkeys, Jobs and Apprenticeships with Taylor Pearson who is the author of the new book The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom without the 9-5

This book is a must read for any business owner and really frames up how the world has changed and how business has changed over the last 5-10 years, what is means and what to do about it.

There’s a whole bunch of applicable stuff in the book e for any business owner (don’t discount the book because of the title like I did!) and the book comes with a whole bunch of additional online resources for both business owners and employees looking to break free of the 9-5.

We cover a range of topics including:

* The turkey problem

* Extremistan and mediocristan

* Limits and limits in a system

* Apprenticeships and education in today’s world and why going to university my be a risk move

* Competing with the entire world as a business

* The process of writing your first book

Links from this episode:

* The End of Jobs on Amazon

* Taylor’s website, TaylorPearson.me

* Access to chapter 1 of The End of Jobs plus all the online resources that come with the book

* The Goal by Eli Goldratt

* The Fourth Economy by Ron Davison

* Antifragile by Nassim Taleb