Business in General blog

In my last post we talked about keywords for a PPC campaign. This time we’re going to talk about Advertising copy.

Your first step was to review keywords. Your second step is to review and create advertising copy.

Does your ad copy correlate to the keywords the user typed in? It should. Does your advertising copy repeat the keyword? It should. Your potential customer will have a better user experience on your site if your advertising copy mimics the search term they typed in. If you were searching for a product or service online, which types of advertising copy do you click on? The ones that might have something to do with what you are looking for or the ones that obviously say they have what you are looking for?

Advertising copy is hard to create. With only 70 characters, how do you get your potential customers to click on your ad instead of your competitors’ ad? Testing ad copy (see bonus tip below) and trying different messages to see which one works best for your goals is the way to go. To get started, look at your landing page and pull text from there. The landing page’s headline could be used, or perhaps one of your product’s listed features will fit in the 70 characters allowed. Not only will the landing page give you some ideas, but by using the same content in both the advertising text and the landing page, the customer experience is better (and so is your quality score!).

Bonus Tip: Include at least two different advertising texts in each ad group. You can see click-through rate (the ratio of impressions to clicks – one of the factors in your quality score) and potential conversion rate for each different ad, allowing you to find the wording that best suits your objectives.

Nicole Poole
Online Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Tags: advertising, fundamentals, keywords, ppc
Posted under Marketing, Success on November 20th, 2008 | No Comments »

With the plethora of instant text communciations it is easy for us to become sloppy in our spelling, and when using texting, reducing words to rebuses and abbreviations is near-mandatory.

Still, when you are involved in any form of business writing, especially where you have an outside audience, an audience that has some control over your future, correct spelling, and edit reviews are critical.

One of today’s contributions to Global Entrepereneurship Week is our “Back to the Fundamentals” article Spelling and editing are fundamental business planning activities.

Tags: , backtofundamentals, editing, fundamentals, grammar, language, spelling
Posted under General Business Planning, Small Business, Startup Business on November 20th, 2008 | No Comments »

I’m sure almost everyone is familiar with the story that Thomas Edison discovered 99 ways to NOT make a light bulb. That’s 99 no to reach 1 yes. The point here is that a negative result, proving something didn’t work or was not so, is just as valuable as a positive result. Sadly, scientific research has become so expensive, and so heavily subsidized/sponsored by corporations, that it has become the expected norm that every result must be a commercially marketable yes result.

That “always yes” attitude has come to shade the development and use of business plans as well. It’s gotten to where people think that every business plan has to show exorbitant profits and wild success. And to reach that end, all that they need to do is overestimate the financial tables a bit, or a lot, until the Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet show the desired results. This is a bad and dangerous tack, in my opinion.

For instance, we saw one plan for a tennis club with indoor court rentals. The financial tables looked good until we divided the rate per hour into the sales forecast. Seems those courts were rented continually, 28 hours a day, every day, 365 days a year. Not possible I’m afraid.

Or the mobile auto oil change business in a large mid-western city. Again, closer inspection of the sales forecast showed that the one worker was changing the oil in a car every 45 minutes, with no travel time between jobs, in all weather, every month of the year. Now, I’ve tried to change my oil in Illinois in January, outdoors, lying on my back in the snow and below-freezing temperatures. Let me tell you from experience that 45 minutes is painfully unrealistic.

Final example: there was the apartment rental company with five vice-presidents but no employees in the personnel forecast, and they never showed how or when they paid for the buildings they said they purchased.

These business plans all said YES in the financials — if you didn’t look too closely.

Now, I say that NO is an acceptable result from a business plan. A business plan for a start-up company that shows huge losses, or negative cash flow is an OK result. It tells you that the business as planned will fail. It tells you that some of your basic assumptions are wrong. It tells you that you are missing something immensely important.

And this is better than OK! Rather than starting up with unrealistic expectations and then hitting bottom in an excruciating crash, you can stop right now and reassess, before you make a financial commitment. Don’t ‘embellish’ the financials by boosting the sales forecast. Look at your market, your competition, your expenses, and everything about your plan and be realistic.

Honest reflection may tell you that this isn’t the business to start right now. Or, you might revise the plan and discover if you put some of those vice-presidents out on the production line, it reduces your costs of goods to a point where you really can make a modest profit on steady sales, without hockey-stick growth. After your revisions, you still might not make a profit until year three. But in going through this process, you may become convinced that the business is viable with adequate start-up funding and second-round investment.

NO is an acceptable result for a business plan if the plan exposed the flaws and showed the way to a realistic YES.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

Tags: backtofundamentals, business plan, business planning, failure, fundamental, Success
Posted under General Business Planning, Sales Forecasting, Small Business, Startup Business on November 20th, 2008 | No Comments »

Planning, monitoring, tracking, and managing your cash flow and cash balance is always important. In an economic downturn this becomes, perhaps, your most important business management activity.

In this next addition to our Global Entrepreneurship Week series of “Back to the Fundamentals” business planning articles we look at The importance of cash flow during an economic downturn.

Take a look at all our Bplans Back to the Fundamentals contributions.

Tags: , "Back to the Fundamentals", backtofundamentals, business financials, cash balance, Cash Flow
Posted under Cash Flow, General Business Planning, Small Business, Startup Business on November 19th, 2008 | No Comments »

Survey says…

Every now and then you have to stop guessing about what your customers are doing and actually ask them. This fall, we conducted a survey of over 650 entrepreneurs and business planners who are using our software. Their responses yielded some helpful information for others tackling the most challenging aspects of business planning.

As part of our series on “Back to Fundamentals” in business planning for Global Entrepreneurship Week we’ve posted an article about our survey, what it tells us, and you, how to use survey results in developing and planning our marketing strategies, tactics and programs.

Click here to read our Planning tips from Palo Alto Software customers article.

Tags: , "back to fundamentals", backtofundamentals, global entrepreneurship week, marketing tools, survey
Posted under Market Research, Marketing on November 19th, 2008 | No Comments »

There are so many details to managing a good Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign that many people outsource the task to those who know the systems very well. Others try to manage their website’s keyword lists, advertising copy and landing page on their own – Some do it well, others do not.

It’s important to go back to the basics of a PPC campaign (keywords, advertising text and landing pages). Google is constantly changing the aspects of how advertisements are ranked for certain keywords (it’s not just about the bid), that having the core fundamentals in place is important and needs constant review.

I’m going to be presenting this subject in three parts, starting with keywords:

Your keywords are how people find your website, your products and your services. The terms that potential customers type in when searching can be everything from your website name to a very obscure misspelling of your top product.

Doing research on which terms people are using to find you is critical. You want to be in front of those potential customers. Google AdWords has a good keyword tool that lets you enter a term, such as one of your product names, and it will give you the average search volume for the past month as well as other related search terms. This tool is one of many that give you the power to find out what your potential customers are typing into the search engines to find your business.

For those who already have a keyword list, it is still beneficial to get back to the basics and see what others are searching for. Trends change, language changes and seasons change. Many different external factors could have an impact on user behavior.

Once you have finished researching your terms or refining your keyword list, review your list of terms. Ensure that these are the terms you still want to bid on. Perhaps your business goals have changed and you no longer want to promote Red Widgets because you have found that Blue and Green Widgets are what potential customers really want.

Change is good – as long as it follows a plan.

Bonus Tip: Use the Search Query Report. Among the reports in Google AdWords is a search query report that aggregates the actual searches that people used to find your ad and site. This is a great place to get additional keywords (straight from the user!) and also to find negative keywords. Negative keywords are important to help qualify your customer before they see your ad (and before you get the impressions and clicks that you know will not convert).

Nicole Poole
Online Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Tags: , fundamentals, ppc
Posted under Business Information, Marketing, Success on November 19th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

For those of you who attended Monday’s Back to the Fundamentals webinar, you heard a lot of references to some websites, books and blogs.

For the reference of those people looking for more information and for those of you who weren’t able to make it to the webinar, I’m going to put a reference list here.

If there are any that I fail to include here, please leave a comment and I’ll track it down and get it for you.

Tim Berry

Blogs : Planning, Startups, Stories, Up and Running,  Tim’s posts at HuffingtonPost, Tim at Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends, Planning Demystified at AllBusiness.com

Books:  The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan book and website, Three Weeks to Start-up

Slides: Download the slides from Monday’s webinar as well as other presentations Tim has given over the years.

The webinar itself will be available for download starting today at our video site   eta: This link is fixed now, sorry about that!

Resources: Palo Alto Software products,  Business and Marketing calculators, more planning video’s.

I hope that was helpful, again, if I’ve missed anything or you’re wondering about a particular resource or website, just comment!

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Tags: backtofundamentals, business planning, global entrepreneurship week, resources, smart planning, Tim Berry, webinar
Posted under Business Information, Small Business, Success on November 18th, 2008 | No Comments »

As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week we are focusing on bringing business planning Back to the Fundamentals. One key issue is the uniqueness of your business planning. There is no other business exactly like yours. (If there is, you’d better reconsider your plans PRONTO!)

Sample business plans are simply examples. They are NOT a one-size-fits-all solution. Sample plans exist to give you ideas and guidance in your thinking and planning for your business.

In a new article planning guru Tim Berry discusses why It has to be YOUR plan for YOUR business.

Tags: , business plan, example business plan, sample business plan
Posted under General Business Planning, Small Business, Startup Business on November 18th, 2008 | No Comments »

We work really hard, here at Palo Alto Software, to make sure our software works right - not just on one operating system or setup, but on all the possible configurations we support. We’ve got two full-time testers sitting right next to the developers who write the code, gleefully pointing out any bugs they find. You know, just to keep the programmers on their toes.

But even the best products can have problems, whether it’s a package that gets broken in delivery, or a design flaw that makes your knees hit the steering wheel on that new-fangled bike.

The good news is, these frustrated customers can become your best word of mouth.

How? Great customer service should be an opportunity to market your company.

Read our latest Global Entrepreneurship Week article on Bplans.com discussing customer service as a flaw or opportunity.

Tags: customer service, Marketing, service
Posted under Marketing, Small Business, Startup Business on November 18th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Our part of Global Entrepreneur Week got off to a rousing start this Monday morning with Palo Alto Software’s founder and president Tim Berry conducting a Webinar on “Back to Fundamentals” of business planning.

One of the points Tim stressed to the 600+ webinar registrants is the importance of managing the cash flow of your business. You can be profitable, and still be broke.

One of the FREE online business tools we provide here at Bplans is a Cash Flow Calculator.

Here’s a short article explaining how to use this tool, right now, real time, to better plan and manage your business.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

Tags: cash, Cash Flow, cash flow calculator
Posted under Cash Flow, General Business Planning, Small Business, Startup Business on November 17th, 2008 | No Comments »