The First Immutable Law: find ability part II

Back in the day… espe­cially the ‘50s,‘60s and ‘70s being found was not as much an issue as it is in today’s over com­mu­ni­cated, noisy world. The job of mak­ing sure your busi­ness was found was the job of the Ad men of Madi­son Ave. Since the ‘70s, espe­cially since the inven­tion of those tube things, it is not only eas­ier to con­nect but also harder and harder for busi­nesses to be fo0und by the folks who are look­ing. And this find abil­ity prob­lem is rooted in the increas­ing demands on our attention.

Find abil­ity is a real chal­lenge for small busi­nesses for a whole slew of rea­sons, which are not the sub­ject of this arti­cle. Instead, I’m going to focus on some of the more use­ful tools and tech­niques to help the right folks find you.

Every­body who does busi­ness should have a head­quar­ters, a place where folks look­ing for solu­tions to their prob­lem can eas­ily find out if you have what they want. Your HQ can be a brick & mor­tar store front, a vir­tual store,  a blog, or web site, what­ever it is, it needs to be a place where folks can quickly find out:

• If you have any­thing close to a solu­tion to their press­ing problem;
• If you are some­one they can trust and in turn trust that the stuff you make will work for them;
• If you make it easy to search for and maybe buy what you have.

So… you must have clear paths that help poten­tial buy­ers check you and your stuff out. That means, if you sell in mul­ti­ple places don’t send some folks to one place and some to another, have a pre­view place with clear ways to check out each of those other places.
Ok, now that we have that all cleared up lets talk about ways to get those folks to your HQ.

Remem­ber:

• You want to give folks a clear way to find us, if they can’t find us we can’t give them the chance to buy our solu­tion to their problem.
• Your choice of find abil­ity strat­egy really depends on your own per­sonal and busi­ness goals.

Rais­ing your find abil­ity score

Today being find able is a whole lot eas­ier than ever and because of the ever evolv­ing tools avail­able you get to deter­mine the nature of your tool bag. There are lots of ways to bring peo­ple to your home base but I’m only going to men­tion the most popular.

Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO)

Being found on line has always depended on whether a par­tic­u­lar search engine pops your name up some­where near the top of the first page to show up when some­one types in any­thing rel­e­vant to you or your stuff. Mak­ing that hap­pen is the job of SEO.

The short expla­na­tion of SEO is that if you write about the right stuff, change the con­tent of your web site fre­quently, use the right words (key words) Google’s search algo­rithm will pop you up at or near the top of the first page that shows up when some­one is look­ing for left handed wood fired mugs. Not being on the first page is like being in East Waz­eris­tan, as far as being found is concerned…you may as well not bother.

Why you may ask do I need to worry about this search engine stuff when all peo­ple have to do is stick my name in the box and hit enter? Well, here’s the deal…those folks stick­ing your name in the box  got your name some­where, so they are already on the trail to your HQ. This search engine stuff is impor­tant when some­one you don’t even know exists types a string of words that some­how describes that stuff you make. So if you make glass gar­den art that reflects the sun in pink AND you have talked about it a lot… Google will find you. If you think to add you are from W.Sagebrush, Google will make sure any­body look­ing for stuff you make in W. Sage­brush will know you exist. And this is impor­tant Why? Because, if that dude search­ing for for stuff like yours lives in W. Sage­brush guess who he’ll see at or near the top of the results page?

With­out those spe­cial words and descrip­tions you’ll miss out on con­nect­ing with that per­son who loves glass gar­den art espe­cially when it is pink. Now, that may be OK if there aren’t that many folks like that out there. But, there still may be other folks look­ing for exactly what you make but can’t find it because Google can’t find you.

Adwords/Adsense etc…

This tool is not much dif­fer­ent than it’s old school counterpart…the use of adds placed on web sites by ser­vices like Google. These tools can be very effec­tive if you have lots and lots of money to throw at them. See, how much your add gets clicked on depends on how much you want to spend, adwords works is like an auc­tion, not to dif­fer­ent than eBay and unless you really no what you’re doing you can very quickly run up a large bill.

I wouldn’t rec­om­mend this for artists there are bet­ter ways…

Social Media

Next to or com­bined with SEO, social media like Facebook,Twitter, Friend­feed, Linkedin  are very effec­tive tools to help bring folks to your HQ. Each ser­vice is like a bet­ter ver­sion of the Cham­ber Net­work­ing “get-together” and you don’t have to wear those dum­b­ass  name tags that you always seem to for­get to take off!

Social media has been proven to be extremely help­ful as a tool for help­ing folks find the right buy­ers. In fact, the big guys like Dell and Jet Blue, have used Twit­ter to gen­er­ate mil­lions in sales in 2009. What’s cool is the tool is great for artists even more so because it lets you build your own per­sonal entourage with­out a lot of work and…it won’t cost you a cent!

A Con­tent Man­age­ment System(CMS) aka blogs

As a plat­form for an HQ, a CMS  can­not be beat, it is made for ease so you can:

• eas­ily keep your web con­tent current;
• opti­mize for search engines (gen­er­ally not avail­able for ser­vices like Blog­ger, or TypePad);
• have a place where poten­tial buy­ers can learn more about you;
• make social con­nec­tions eas­ily from one cen­tral platform;
• eas­ily cus­tomize appear­ance to the point of being indis­tin­guish­able from the old sta­tic sites.

Mix it up

No one of these tools will fully work as a road map for your poten­tial buy­ers. Mashed up with  your busi­ness goals they’ll help the right buy­ers find you and help the wrong buy­ers move on with­out wast­ing anyone’s time. The beauty here is in the ease and cus­tomiza­tion poten­tial and once every­thing is set up it pretty much runs itself with a few tweaks now and then.