Ryan Chapin's Website

There are many businesses that are seeing their sales diminish and are realizing that they are going to have to cut costs to survive.  There are some businesses that wont make it and they and their websites will simply go away.

If your business is contracting and you need to batten down the hatches what should you do to survive the lean times that also helps you gain a better position for when things start to turn around. The number one mistake that we see people making is simply turning off their website to save money in the hopes that when things get better they will switch it on and pick up right where they left off.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.  Once you discontinue a website any of the search engine ranking that you have built up will go away.  You also break any of the bookmarks that people made of your pages.  When they try to access your site and it is gone they will assume that your business is gone too and might purge you from their rolodex.  At the very least, they are not likely to think of your business for future needs and/or referrals.  In general, turning off your site is the last thing you do when it is already too late.

Another mistake that we see people make is to panic and put together a direct mail campaign, buy a list and start cold-calling, or make other one-time marketing purchases like TV or radio ads.  In general, we suggest developing a marketing program with activities that have leverage and a force multiplier, as they tend to be less costly up-front and have residual effectiveness.  Not to say that the aforementioned marketing activities don’t work, its just that they typically require heavy continued investment to pay off.

Here three things that you can do with your website to help you through the recession:

1. Keep your website up and current:  As mentioned, this is rule number one.  If you have to switch providers or cut back on some features to reduce costs because youve cut everywhere else and something has to give just make sure to keep something online.  Even a simple website with a full list of your products and services, your contact information and information for your visitors about how you can best help them is better than nothing at all.  Adding a Blog, or setting up a Whats New to help keep your site current.  Making updates on a regular basis and including the date when the updates are made will help give people the confidence that things are happening with your business and that you will be there for the long-haul.
2. Set-up an e-mail newsletter:  This is a great outbound marketing activity that can be done very affordably.  Whether you use a third party service, or whether your provider includes an integrated feature, this is a great way to keep in touch with your clients and prospects and to help drive traffic to your website.
3. Content, content content!:  Fill your website with as much content related to your products or services as you can.  If you already have your site set-up with a content management system which enables you to make your own edits then you won’t incur any additional costs; just your time.  Just make sure that you keep your audience in mind when crafting your content.

As far as playing the attrition game goes, if you can keep things going and keep your website up and running you will have a much better online position once things turn around.

The websites that previously had a higher search engine ranking than yours and that were either deactivated, or went away forever are going to be “giving-up” those slots.  If you keep your site up and current you will come out of the recession with a larger share of your industry’s Internet pie.

So, when having to make tough budgetary choices keep in mind that even in tough times lay opportunity for future prosperity.  Keep your site up and running and you will come out of this in a much better position to grow the online portion of your business.

If you have any questions or need some ideas for your specific business situation, feel free to give me a call at 301-956-5400 or send me an e-mail.

— Ryan Chapin
President, Nuts & Bolts Interactive, Inc.

When developing any content related to your business keeping your story straight is an important principle to keep in mind that helps to develop and maintain good relationships with your clients and prospects.

The recent news story about FaceBook’s change to their terms of service is good example of how not following this business communication principle can lead to a lot of ill-will with your customers and create a lot of bad PR
In early February of 2009 FaceBook updated it’s terms of service to include the following:

"You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service . . . "

I am not an IP attorney, however, it is an arguable interpretation of that excerpt that FaceBook owns any and all content that you post to your account and can do whatever they want to with it.  This caused a veritable uproar among the FaceBook user base as well as many privacy and intellectual property rights groups.  On Monday, February 16, 2009 FaceBook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted the following to his blog:

"Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information."

This only fueled the controversy as it was clear to pretty much anyone who read the two documents that they just didn’t match up.  You cannot update your TOS to say one thing and then post to your blog that your corporate philosophy is another without begging to raise the ire of your customers/user base.  In this case they are clearly saying one thing and doing another and in the process degrading their credibility.  It is one thing to contradict your competitors, other organizations, or the media, but very bad to contradict yourself.  Your customers and prospects will now look at everything you say with skepticism and it will take a long time to regain their trust.

Now, that’s not to say that FaceBook shouldn’t have changed it’s TOS, or that at some point, you shouldn’t change company policies and practices that are determined important to its ongoing business strategy.  The important part is to stay on message and not to contradict yourself.  Be honest with your customers and prospects and then, even if you do things that they don’t like, you don’t make the problem worse by then ruining your credibility and losing their trust.

FaceBook has since back-peddled and re-instated the old version of its TOS.  Unfortunately, because they did not keep their story straight, not only did they upset people with the initial change to the TOS, but they have also strained their user base’s trust.

An efficient way to generate qualified leads without continual, heavy investment in capital is to focus on business development activities that provide leverage and a force multiplier.

Leverage means that the effort that you spend on a given activity continues to pay dividends long after you are finished working on it, and a Force Multiplier is something that allows you to get your message out to many people simultaneously without any additional incremental costs.
Three good examples are:

• Developing and maintaining a website that provides a continually updated source of valuable information about your products and services.
• Actively sending out an e-mail newsletter (sent ONLY to those who have opted in, of course).
• Deploying a modest, yet appropriately targeted, phone book ad.   

Engaging in these sorts of activities allows you to create a system that will enable you to establish yourself as an expert in your field, attract new leads, and, done properly, pre-qualify them before they get in touch with you for more information.  All done while enabling you to focus time and effort to service your existing clients.

This isn’t something that happens overnight, and it takes time and effort to craft the content, continually update your site, and write regular, relevant newsletters.  However, the time is well spent because of its leveragable nature.  This is contrasted against activities like cold-calling, going to trade shows, and sending out expensive direct mail campaigns where the effort that you spend has no leverage.  Once you are done with the activity, it does not continue to provide you direct benefit.
 
On your site, there are many different ways of providing the content to your visitors.  Blogs, forums, articles, and newsletters to name just a few.  Each business is different and the mix of features depends on your business, your products and services, and your audience.

A good example of a site like this is Pineapple Alley Catering, a website that we designed, built, host, and provide a comprehensive content management system whereby it is easy for the owner to continually update the site.  The owner gets approximately 4 – 5 qualified leads a week sending him e-mail through the contact form on his site because of the depth and breadth of content on it, and the fact that it is regularly updated.

As far as the phone book ads go, it might sound like an outdated approach, but it is another of those leveragable marketing efforts in that once it is out there it continues to work for you without any additional effort.  In most cases, when someone cracks open the phone book looking for something, they are ready to buy.  Make it very obvious in your ad that more information can be found on your website and you can help use it to drive traffic to your site.

All of these activities have the force multiplier effect because it doesn’t take you any more time to have 1 or 1,000 people visit your website; send out an e-mail newsletter to 1, or 1,000 people; and literally millions of phone books include your business’s marketing material, phone number and website in them.

So, when thinking about ways to market your business think about activities that have both leverage and a force multiplier to them and you can begin to build a system that continually works for you and helps you get the most out of your marketing investment.

— Ryan Chapin
President, Nuts & Bolts Interactive, Inc