small business – Nicole Munoz Consulting

How To Use One Idea On Multiple Sites Without Duplicate Content: Social Media Mash-Ups

Effective marketing requires more and more content as different platforms become available. It can exhaust your creativity and monopolize your time. As a small business owner, you can’t afford the overhead required to hire a full time team of marketers to cover all the bases. What can you do?

“Stop trying to reinvent the wheel.”

You’ve heard the old saying, but what does that look like for you and your content creation? You know that duplicate content hurts your website in the eyes of the search engines, so you’ve been struggling to create unique content for all of your social media platforms. As a result, you find yourself stretched thin and having to choose between taking care of your current customers and finding new leads via social media.

Sound familiar?

You need to develop some social media marketing mash-ups!

What’s a Mash-up?

Mash-ups are when a musician blends two or more different songs together to create something new. Perhaps you’ve heard a DJ do a mash-up at a wedding or seen it on a movie like Pitch Perfect. The musicians are using what’s already been created to make something else.

Let me explain. We’ll begin with something fairly simple: a blog post.

Starting With a Blog Post

You’ve written a great blog post and put it on the company website. Is that all you can do with it? The answer is no. You can share that post on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Google+ to reach a wider audience. Did you include an image with the post? (Pro tip: that’s definitely a best practice for blogging.) Pin it to a relevant board on your Pinterest account.

Let’s take it a step further. Can you think of a way to use that same content in a video? If you had to give a presentation with that content, what would it look like? Could you do the same presentation in front of a camera and post it to your YouTube channel? The MOZ Blog has perfected this idea with their Whiteboard Friday posts.

Recapping. You wrote one high quality blog post, shared it on five social media sites and used it as the basis for a new video. You’re starting to get the hang of mash-ups.

Starting With a Podcast

Let’s try another one. This time we’ll start with a podcast. Maybe you prefer talking to writing, so podcasts are less time-consuming for you. Great. Let’s work with that. After you record the podcast and upload it, what else can you do with it to get it to a broader audience?

You can link to it on Facebook and Twitter with a catchy introduction that fits with your audience there. You could have the content of the podcast transcribed and edited so you can post it on your LinkedIn profile. If the content lends itself to illustration, it could be transformed into an Infographic and posted on Instagram or Pinterest. What if, while you recorded the podcast, somebody on your team shot a video of you talking? Now you’ve got a YouTube video, too.

Recapping. You started with the content for a podcast, linked to it on two social media sites, created an Infographic for a third site, posted the transcript on LinkedIn and uploaded a video to YouTube.

Are you beginning to see how this kind of thinking can help you to maximize one great idea by using it on multiple platforms?

One more example before we move on to some pro tips.

Starting With a Webinar

This time we’re going to start with the content you’ve created for a webinar. You’ve created the content for the webinar as a free resource for those who filled out an opt-in form on your website. (Good thinking!)

In preparation for the webinar, you put the content into a PowerPoint presentation. You’ve also decided to use your Google+ account and hold the webinar as a Google hangout to keep the cost down and make it as easy as possible for your attendees. By recording the hangout, you are automatically producing a video you can post on YouTube later.

As a bonus, you can use any good questions your attendees ask as the basis for future content creation. After the webinar, you decide to upload the PowerPoint presentation to SlideShare in hopes of directing more traffic to your site.

Recapping. You prepared for one webinar, added to your email list with opt-ins, added connections on Google+, made a video for YouTube, uploaded to SlideShare and came away with ideas for more content. All in all a successful endeavor, wouldn’t you say?

I think you’ve got the hang of mash-ups now. Here are some things to keep in mind as you go.

Pro Tips for Social Media Mash-ups

Don’t just post links on Facebook and Twitter. If you really want to peak interest, use a great quote from the content before you link to it.
Duplicate content hurts your website in the search engine rankings. Refrain from posting the same content on your blog that you post on LinkedIn.
Keep your audience in mind. You may need to tweak some of your content in order to meet your audience of different platforms. The goal is to reach different audiences, but people who read posts on LinkedIn may be different than people who follow you on Pinterest. Mash-up accordingly.
If you don’t have a target audience presence on a certain social media site, focus on other sites instead. Let your buyer persona work for you.
Don’t try to do it all yourself. Graphic designers, photographers, video editors and writers on your team can adapt your content for various platforms.

I saved the best pro tip for last…

You can always hire a virtual team of professionals to create and manage the content for you. We’d be glad to help. Schedule a free consultation today.

How to Feel Comfortable and Confident with Your Rates

by Nicole Munoz

Deciding what to charge for your services is just as difficult as finally narrowing down your service choices. You want to be sure to charge enough to cover your expenses, plus provide a decent income for your family. There are a few good methods that you can use to determine your fees.

One popular method is to find out what other people are charging and charge that. It’s easy enough to search for your competition, find three to five others, average what they are charging and there you have your fees. Another method is to instead, figure out how much money you need coming in, how many hours you have per day, week and month to work, (billable hours) and then charge that much. Both are legitimate ways to decide upon your fee.

Another way is to not charge an hourly rate but instead charge “package rates”. This method can actually work in your favor if you are the type of person who gets faster as you learn how to do something. This way you don’t get penalized for being fast. However, it can also end up being a problem if you’re not clear in your contract with expectations of the service with no limits placed on the client as to how many times they can edit something.

Many service providers offer a combination of fee for service and hourly rates. This seems to work best for most service providers. But, again it depends on what services you will provide. Most people want to pay a set rate for graphic design, writing is usually billed on a per-word or per-page basis, with data entry tasks either by the word, line, or hour. Ultimately, you need to charge what makes you happy and find the clients who are willing to pay you for your hard work. This is your business.

How to set your pricing and charge what you are worth!

by Nicole Munoz

Are you a service provider, consultant, or solo-preneur and struggle with how to set your pricing? Then this is for you.

The challenge most service providers have when they first get started is they fall into the cycle of:

Well I could not afford to pay that much…. Therefore no one else can….. Therefore I can only charge so much…. Or no one will buy from me… or people will think I am greedy…. Or worse… that I don’t deserve to charge that much!”

The problem with this way of thinking is that you are setting yourself up for failure right from the beginning.

If you want to create a viable, successful, business you need to start thinking like a business owner… and not an employee.

All of your business expenses can be divided up into one of 6 categories. When you are trying to decide how much to charge, you should consider all of these “hidden” costs and set your prices accordingly.

Although I can’t tell you exactly what to charge as each business is unique, if you assign a percentage of your fees to each of the six categories, you will be on your way to creating a business that can be scalable.

The six categories are: Executive, Client Success, Marketing, Business Development, Operations, and Project Management.

Depending on your type of business, your categories may vary as well! A massage therapist for example may not have Project Management but would need a category for her employees or independent contractors.

So what types of expenses go where?

Executive

Percentage of profit off the top for owner draw and salary
Continuing Education for Executive Staff

Operations

Software
Phones
Rent
Computers
Accounting / Bookkeeper
Lawyer
Taxes
Merchant Account Fees
Bank Fees

Client Success

Customer Service
Customer Gifts for Birthdays and Christmas

Marketing

Cost to acquire a new customer
Website Design
Email Marketing
PPC Campaigns
SEO
Video Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Marketing Training and Education for Staff

Business Development (Sales)

Cost to close the sale
Sales Reps Commissions
Affiliate Commissions
Referral Partner Program
JV Manager
Sales Training and Education for Staff

Project Management (Contractors, Employees)

Cost to fulfill your service
Independent Contractors
Writers
Social Media Managers
Community Managers
SEO Specialists
Project Manager
Team Leader

If in the beginning you are doing all of the work, then you would be paying yourself the full amount you allocate in “project management”. Just take into consideration that if at any point in the future you want to grow your business, you will have to duplicate yourself. The only way to do that is if you can hire someone else to take on the work for you. You should set your pricing so that at any time when your sales justify it, you can hire someone and train them to do the work.

A business owner has two jobs: Increase Revenue and Implement Systems.

You should be working ON your business and not IN your business to make it scalable!

Outsourcing for your Small Business

by Nicole Munoz

Small businesses, even home-based businesses, can follow the trend of outsourcing. For quite some time, large businesses have been on track with outsourcing activities such as payroll and accounts payable / accounts receivable; and now more and more business owners are realizing that there really is something to the outsourcing game.

One thing to keep in mind when beginning your journey into outsourcing work to a professional not employed by your company is that it does involve a fair amount of time and commitment. While finding a person or a company who will take on the activities you wish to outsource can be relatively simple, you’ll want to make sure to check work samples and references of candidates you are considering.

Once you have found the person or company with whom you will work, there is sometimes a period of adjustment for both you, the company, and also for the employees you do have working directly for you. Transitions can go much easier when you have a clear plan spelled out and meet with members of your staff to ensure understanding. It is important that everyone has a crystal clear understanding of their role, and their responsibilities when work begins to be outsourced to others.

Outsourcing companies, most of the time, will be good at what they do. For instance, many online businesses engage in outsourcing their SEO, or their Google Adwords campaigns because these are tasks that require a lot of time and almost constant attention to changes. Care should be taken, however, in considering an outsourcing company. There have been a few that make promises they just can’t keep in order to earn more business.

When choosing which tasks you will outsource, you want to consider what your point of difference is when compared to your competitors. If prices are the selling point of your business, then outsourcing customer service to an overseas company could be well worth the savings you will receive on the payroll side of things. However, if your company’s highlight is that nobody can beat your customer service, then you definitely want a full time staff member who will be invested in providing that customer service beyond what your competitors can offer.

While outsourcing is becoming more widely used with every inch of web growth, the best thing you as the business owner can do is analyze where you can take full advantage and see the most benefit from outsourcing. There are some tasks that you will definitely want to keep in house. Those tasks will differ from one business to another depending on how it is run. Tip-toeing into outsourcing is not a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with trying out a few providers to get a feel for how they can best meet your needs. In fact, beginning in such a manner would be more advisable than entering into a long term contract with a company up front.

Some examples of tasks that can be outsourced are: multi-media, social networking such as blogging and Twitter posts, sales and marketing, presentations, website design, SEO, and writing. These are only a few of the many tasks that can help your company grow at a lower cost than you might otherwise pay. Take your time, but give outsourcing some serious consideration.