Over the last ten years, the internet has changed a lot. The problems that challenged and obstructed people from their objectives in the past have been solved in intelligent ways over time and as the internet evolved.  One of the biggest challenges that people used to face was "How do I get online?".  For companies, this meant, how do I build a professional website. For individuals it meant, how do I share my hobbies, passions, photos and other personal items with my family and friends.

I call this the "content" problem and it can be summarized by asking "How do I get my content onto the internet in an acceptable manor."  This problem was so big for so many people that a huge multititude of solutions were developed.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of content management systems (CMS) commercially available on the internet today.  These systems range from simple and easy to use to complex and require professional training.  Some systems publish content in page format, some systems publish content in blog format. Some systems are free, some of them are expensive to use. Despite their various characteristics, they all serve one general purpose, to help you get your content online.  The most popular content management systems have become synonymous with "the right way to build a website.".  You've probably heard of content management systems such as Drupal or Wordpress.  These systems have become extremely popular as they are free to use and are extremely powerful when it comes to putting content on the internet.

But putting content online is only part of the problem that needs to be solved.  What if you are running a business and need to do more than just share your content online. What if you need to use your content and your website to represent your business. What if you want website visitors to be able to interact with your business online like they would in real life.  What if you want to sell them products, and track their behavior?

I call this the "marketing" problem and it can be summarized by asking "How do I build a website that displays content and also allows visitors to interact with it like they would interact with a real business?"  Like the content problem above, there were many people who had the "marketing" problem and so lots and lots of solutions were developed.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of eCommerce platforms and marketing automation systems.

As a result, we have many CMS solutions and many eCommerce and Marketing Automation solutions available.  The question I ask is, why should you have to choose one when clearly you need both.  You need to have a way to easily publish content to your website, but you also need an easy way to sell products and services as well as interact and track your customers dynamically.

Until now, there has been no easy way to solve both the content problem and the marketing problem with one tool. What people usually do is use the cheapest and best CMS available, usually Wordpress, and then extend it and hack it with lots of modules and add-ons so that it approximates a complete system.  While I appreciate the ingenuity of the typical solution, I often wonder why so many people use it when there are better alternatives available at a similar cost.

I think the answer is that people put their content needs in front of their marketing needs.  I'm not sure people understand the difference between "making a website" and "starting an online business".  When people want to get online, or make a website, they look for tools that will solve their content problems first.  Then, once they have the content problem solved, they want to know, "how do I market this content and make money from it."

The message that I am here to share is that generally speaking, when you want to represent a business on the internet, you do not have a content problem.  Representing a business online does not simply involve publishing text content about your business.  I want to educate people that representing a business online is not a content problem but a marketing problem.  You are not trying to design a website, you are trying to market your business on the internet.  Once you realize this fact, it changes your focus away from design and content towards marketing and automation tools.  Design and content are a subset of your desire to market your business.

Just like you wouldn't use a hammer to screw in a screw, you shouldn't use content management tools to solve your marketing problems.  And luckily, you don't have to. Today, we are offering an amazing solution that bridges the gap between traditional content management systems and expensive marketing automation software.

I've put together a simple comparison chart to illustrate the features and prices of the most popular solutions, including Wordpress, Infusionsoft and Marketo.

New Year.
Ok, so it's not quite 2010, but the new year is coming up fast.  2009 has been an amazing year to say the least.  I have personally learned so much and changed more than I could have imagined.  Those that have been keeping tabs on the blog and Onyva as a company over the years have witnessed firsthand as we've changed and grown.  We started by offering freelance web design services then we tried to sell website templates and now we offer online marketing consulting services, with a focus on marketing automation software solutions.  In the process, I've developed entire new skill sets around online marketing, marketing automation, small business marketing and have also discovered a serious passion for helping wellness providers succeed in getting new customers.

Throughout all of this change, and despite the ever evolving look of our various websites, one thing has never changed.  The constant motivation for everything has been my unwavering desire to solve real life problems for the people in my life that I care about.  For me, that means finding ways to get you online faster, easier, and cheaper.  It means giving you the tools and knowledge that I think will help you most in your business and in your life.

I've spent the last 10 years devouring every bit of information I could find about how to succeed and get the most out of life.  It's been a profound journey and I am so pleased to have an opportunity to share what I've learned with you.

As it pertains to business and marketing, my quest for the best has resulted in a professional partnership with Adobe Business Catalyst who provides the most amazing software I've ever used.  To put it simply, the software we offer is by far the most robust, feature rich offering available to help you succeed in your online business ventures. Not only that, it's affordable and within everyone's reach.

It is my most sincere belief that these tools, coupled with concise marketing insights and sound business logic, can provide a solid foundation for sustainable and profitable business.  I wish for nothing more than for you to take advantage of these opportunities and for you to use them to achieve your own personal success.

New Design.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday break, I was busy redesigning this site.  The purpose of the redesign was to refocus on our primary software solution, our Online Business System. I'll talk more about this in a minute, but let's talk about the design more first.  In my opinion, this new design is sleek and stylish and reflects our new focus on selling the Online Business System. 

To those of you who think of me as a designer, it may come as a shock when I tell you that I didn't design this new website. Nope. It's a template, and a really nice one at that.  You can even buy this template for yourself right here. Why am I making a point of telling you it's a template?  Because, I want you to know how easy and affordable it can be to make a really nice, professional looking website using our Online Business System.

There are literally thousands of professional html templates that you can buy for less than $30.  Even better, you can import these templates directly into our Online Business System automatically using the import website feature.

Truth be told, I built this entire website in about 2 hours. Of course, it took me another 5 days to write the copy and put on the finishing touches, but the nuts and bolts of this website took less than 2 hours to assemble. I want you to know that you can do the same for your business any time you want.

For those of you who really liked our previous design, that was a template as well. You can find it here on ThemeForest.net. ThemeForest has hundreds of high quality professional templates for lots of different businesses, so definitely take a look before dropping thousands of dollars on a custom design.

New Approach.
We're going to be doing things very differently in 2010. In 2010, we're going to focus on providing tools and education instead of focusing on individual client projects. As a small business with big goals, we want to reach as many people as we can with our Online Business System and with our new found knowledge about online marketing, marketing automation and the impact it can have on your business.  To this end, I plan on offering marketing lectures and classes to educate people about the power of marketing.  If there is enough interest, I may offer some coaching programs for small groups, or individuals.

While we have traditionally worked with small business owners, over the last year we've developed relationships with many online marketing professionals and web & marketing agencies.  We have found that our Online Business System is perfect for them as well. We have had the great fortune of helping several agencies join the Adobe Business Catalyst partner program and will continue to offer it to marketing professionals who are looking to reduce development and IT costs while improving their offerings.

Same Company.
As I change and the company grows, I want you to know that at the core, we are still the same. We are still focused on helping you succeed through online marketing and marketing automation. We are still friendly and approachable. We still want to help you in any way that we can. And now more than ever, we have the resources to do just that.

Here's to a successful 2010

If you are familiar with Yelp and have made any effort to encourage your clients to review your business on Yelp, then you are also familiar with the extreme frustration caused when those hard earned reviews are seemingly deleted indiscriminately by Yelp.  And what's even more annoying is that the bad reviews don't ever seem to go away, just the good ones.

The fact that client reviews evaporate from Yelp so easily is such an issue for many business owners, they hardly see the point in trying to get new ones.  And since I spend so much time encouraging business owners to try and get more reviews, I better have a good answer when people ask "Why are my reviews being deleted from Yelp?"

The good news for you and for me is that I do have a good answer and there is something you can do about "deleted reviews". Before I tell you how to avoid these problems, I want to make it clear that the point of this information is not to trick Yelp and is not to write bogus reviews. The purpose of me sharing this information is so that you can make the most of your genuine client feedback that comes in the form of online reviews through Yelp.  I do not support phony reviews or any attempt to game the system. But, I also do feel your pain when the reviews you've worked hard to get are erased. Most importantly, I know that it makes your customer upset to find out that their review was deleted. So, let's address these issues.

I suppose the natural tendency for many business owners is to blame Yelp and cast the website as a big, bad monster. I'm not exaggerating, many business owner think that Yelp is evil and not helpful to small business owners.

I've done a lot of research and thinking on this subject and have formed my own conclusions that I would like to share with you.  I don't think that Yelp is a big bad monster.  Ultimately, I think Yelp is doing a big service to small businesses around the world. 

So why is Yelp deleting reviews? The technical answer is, they're not!  Yelp does not actually delete reviews. Shocking, right? This news should come as a sigh of relief to you. Your hard earned reviews are not deleted.  So why then are they not visible?

One clue to the way Yelp thinks comes from a statement made by one of i's founders. He said "Yelp caters to community first, consumers second, and businesses third."  Spend some time with that sentence because it holds almost all of the secrets to Yelps review algorithm and clearly states Yelp's real intentions.

Yelp is a social media website before it is a review site. They want to build a community of "Yelpers". This means they are first and foremost trying to encourage participation from their community.  This also means that their algorithm is designed to reward people who participate more and penalize people who don't.

Second, Yelp caters to consumers. This means that they want to promote an environment where consumers can talk openly about their experiences with certain businesses.  If you step out of your business owner hat for a minute, you can appreciate this from a consumer perspective. It's a very democratic system for consumers. And it works great. People have written millions of reviews, both positive and negative and in between.  It's a marvelous thing.

Third, Yelp is for businesses.  But being third doesn't feel very good. And the result is that Yelp barely caters to business owners because in truth, it would conflict with their desire to provide a safe place for community and consumers first.

Translating these thoughts into a computer algorithm, we find that much of Yelps automated behavior can be explained by its commitment to supporting its community.  Online reviews are hidden not because Yelp is evil, but because the person who wrote the review has not participated on Yelp enough for their reviews to carry any weight.

If that same person was to go back and write a second review, or update their profile picture, or otherwise engage with Yelp as a community member, they would find their reviews coming back to life.

Yelp also has the challenge of evaluating the truth behind online reviews.  There seems to be an assumption within their algorithm that negative reviews are "real" because no business owner would pay someone to write bad reviews about them.  Whereas, if a business suddenly has a lot of one-off positive reviews, it could be suspicious.  This doesn't stop your competition from writing bad things about you, but they would have to have an active profile for those bad reviews to stick for long.

Overall, I think Yelp does a great job of maintaining the quality of the reviews and being fair to all parties to the best of its ability. It's a tricky thing to accomplish.

So what's the point of getting client reviews if they are going to be hidden? What can you do to remedy this situation? The first thing I want you to know is that even if you get a new review, and it is subsequently hidden from view after a few weeks, that is still worthwhile.  Every review you get brings you up in the ranks and gives you attention.  So, don't get discouraged if that review gets hidden after a while. You got a temporary boost from it, and if the person who wrote it ever gets back on Yelp, you'll get another boost from it. There's not much you can do to control this.

But, one thing you can do is to claim your Yelp profile and save each review you get.  When someone reviews your business on Yelp, as the verified business owner, you will get an email copy of each review.  Save these reviews. Post them on your own website and at the bottom of the page, make a big link back to your Yelp profile so that everyone visiting your site will know how to write their own review of your business.

You can also try and get more reviews than Yelp can hide. And you can encourage your clients to participate on Yelp more.  And you can trust that the entire process, with hidden reviews and all, is good for your business.

But there is more you can do. You can give your clients options. You can encourage them to review you not only on Yelp but on Google or other review sites.  Have them review you wherever they want.  The more reviews you get, the better off you are. 

If your client comes to you and complains that their review got deleted, ask them to update their review with an additional anecdote. This will liven their review again.

In order for online reviews to be authentic, they must be maintained by a 3rd party. So, as a business owner you are never going to have total control over the process. And that's a good thing. All you can do is encourage people to share their experience and maintain a positive attitude because you know that ultimately, the good will outweigh the bad as you continue to deliver an excellent offering.

Here's to your success!

I just got back from a local BNI event over in Arlington, MA.  For those of you whom I just met and spoke with at the event, it was my pleasure to meet you and welcome to my website.

Whenever I meet with a group of business owners and talk one on one with them, I feel renewed inspiration for the topics that come up during conversation.  Today, it seemed like I was sharing the same bit of advice with many of the business owners I met.

Today's advice was all about the power of online reviews.  First, I spoke with a lovely woman who owns a local restaurant. I asked her "Do you get a lot of online reviews on Yelp?".  She replied, "oh, we cater to an older crowd". Upon further questioning she revealed that she had received some negative reviews on Yelp years ago and hadn't been back since.  I asked her "Have you claimed your Yelp profile? Do you know that once you claim your listing, you can actually respond to online reviews directly"? No, she responded, she didn't know that.

This type of interaction is almost exactly like the one I hear from countless business owners when I ask them about their experience with Yelp.  They get angry, uncomfortable, and try and change the subject.  Why do they react like this? Because they feel hurt and offended by Yelp. They've received one or two bad reviews and have taken it personally.  They also get upset because they have been badgered by Yelp's sales staff and think that they have to pay to participate in Yelp. News flash, claiming your business listing on Yelp is free.

While I understand that it must feel terrible to be written about negatively online, I try and encourage business owners to see past their own pain and recognize the immense opportunity that Yelp provides.  I explain that positive or negative, all online reviews provide value to other customers and will ultimately increase exposure for your business.  I also like to explain that it's possible to use the power of online reviews to your own advantage.

What I suggest doing is to create some feedback mechanism by which you are softly encouraging your satisfied customers to share their experience of your business on Yelp.  Restaurant owners can add a paragraph of text onto the bottom of the customer receipt saying "If you enjoyed your meal tonight, please share your experience online." Sometimes having a physical reminder to take an action later on is helpful in encouraging your customers to write a review.

After the event, I spoke to another women who runs a local wellness center. I shared the same message with her. If you can encourage your satisfied members to share their positive experiences online, it will grow and multiply and bring you back great results.

The secret to this technique, and the reason why most people brush it off, is that it works exponentially. This means, that on a small scale, you may not notice much results. If you get one or two reviews, it won't bring you much business.  But if you apply a systematic approach to consistently acquiring new reviews, you will find in time that it can become a significant channel for new business.

Just like doing 10 sit-ups wont iron out your abs, neither will one online review make your business flourish. But if you can find a simple but effective way to encourage and increase the process of online review generation, you will be well on your way to more customers guaranteed.

So go put a system in place today that encourages your customers to be your best advocates and help grow your business. Free advertising is good advertising. What are you waiting for?

Lately, I've been noticing a disturbing trend across many of the websites that I monitor on an ongoing basis.  When I look at the entry path visitors are using to access a website, I notice two things right away.  The two most popular pages of most sites are the homepage and the blog page. In fact, to generalize, I would say that many sites get 50% of their traffic going to their homepage and 50% of their traffic going to their blog. 

At first glance, this doesn't really seem like a problem. It makes sense that lots of people would access the website directly, and that many people would be drawn in to the website through its blog. So what's the big deal?

The big deal is that the bounce rate for homepage visitors in many cases is very high.  People are coming to the website, seeing the homepage, and leaving.  In contrast, the bounce rate for the blog is much lower. This means that people are reading and engaging on the site for a longer time when they visit the blog first.

Having observed this trend not only on my own website but across many of my client websites as well, it has gotten me wondering, does your website really need a traditional homepage?

What happens if a website started with the content that visitors wanted most, the dynamic content that is updated regularly through the blog?  What if we lead with what the visitors want and only tell them about our businesses products and services after they have identified with our content and experienced our value first hand in our blog?

As you can tell from the recent redesign of Onyva.com, this concept has been brewing in the back of my mind for quite some time.  So, I am experimenting with my own website to see what impact it has on visitor behavior when you eliminate the static, traditional text that you find on many homepages and lead with your thoughts and ideas through your blog.

I will keep you posted on the results of this change. In the meantime, if you have any feedback or insights of your own to share, please leave a comment below.

In an ideal world we would all have a full marketing budget that we could spend across all the most relevant and effective channels in proportion to their return.  Having a strong presence across the most effective marketing channels would bring us a steady stream of leads and business. Wouldn't that be nice.

But many small businesses are operating far from this ideal. They are either struggling to determine what the most effective channels are, or are focusing their energies on one channel at the expense of others.  As you can imagine, neither of these scenarios lead to effective marketing and can actually make your situation worse by depleting precious resources without getting any return on your investment.

Holistic marketing is a concept that I came up with to describe a possible solution to this common problem.

But first, let's look at the ideal scenario.

The Ideal
This graph illustrates the ideal marketing scenario. You have determined which channels are most effective for your business and you are fully engaged in each channel. For example, you've got a well optimized website up, you are advertising your business on Google and are actively getting online reviews from your clients. You have claimed your Yelp profile and your Google Maps profile. You're blogging and even have a Facebook fan page.





The Typical
In this graph, we see the more common scenario where instead of spreading your efforts across multiple channels, you are only engaged in one at the expense of everything else.  You can see from the graph that the gray area doesn't feel very healthy or active. You can also imagine that there is a lot of activity and possible customers in those channels that you are completely ignoring.  To make this situation worse, if you are only engaging in one channel, you may not be actively monitoring that channel for it's effectiveness. You may have taken a "set it and forget it" mentality and are still paying for marketing that may not be bringing you any return. If that's the case, your green sliver would become gray, and your entire marketing efforts have expired.


But with a limited budget, and with limited time to learn and explore your options, what is a small business owner to do?  One possible solution is a more holistic approach.


The Holistic
In this graph, you'll notice that you are participating actively across all channels. You have your bases covered and a full circle of protection surrounding your business.  To save money, you participate to a lesser degree in each channel, but you do not ignore critical channels.  As your business increases or decreases, you can adjust your engagement across all channels accordingly.






If you're not getting the results you want from your current marketing effort, give the holistic approach a try. Determine a sustainable budget for your business. Do some research on the most effective channels for your business (many of the most effective channels are outlined in detail on our blog).  Once you have determined the most effective channels, divide your budget by those channels and see if there is enough to sustain your presence in that channel.  Keep playing with the numbers until you can make a strong but sustainable effort in several of the most effective channels.

Don't be afraid to spend some of your budget on exploration. Marketing is all about testing to see what works for your business. Trial and error is a big part of this process. It can be scary to "waste" money when you don't know for sure what is going to work best. But the alternative of never finding out what works at all is much worse.

What's your strategy? Please share your experience in the comments below.

Over the last 2 years, wellness has become a big part of my life, and my business. On a personal level I've started seeing Chiropractors, Acupuncturists, Massage Therapists, Psychotherapists, Yoga instructors and Life Coaches.  On a business level, I've started helping clients who come from those same professions.  This development in my life has been very exciting but was also very unexpected.

Looking back over my entire life, it makes perfect sense in retrospect. But, in the context of the last eight years alone, it took me by complete surprise. Let me explain.

I was born in 1979 in Amherst, Mass. I was raised by not one but two Chiropractor parents. They were not just any Chiropractors, they were the first Chiropractors to settle in Amherst and were there at the beginning of what is now a very wellness-centric community in Western Mass.

Being raised by Chiropractors in what is typically considered a very liberal, open community, I was naturally exposed to all sorts of alternative approaches to health and wellness. Heck, I had been born at home and had never visited a hospital before I was 20.

But as a rebellious teenager, trying to find normal in a crazy world, I turned my back on my roots and went into a life of computers.  I got my first real job at 21 years old, working for Tapestry Health Systems, a non profit health organization in Northampton, MA as an assistant systems administrator.  I soaked up every bit of technical information I could about servers, networking, software, hardware, the internet and by the end of my 2 year career there I was primarily in charge of the web server and website.  Little did I know then, that I was closer to my true calling than I could know.

I left Western Mass in 2002 to start a new life with my soon to be wife who was working at the French Consulate in Boston's Back Bay.  I started out as a Freelance web designer and was lucky enough to pick up some great local clients such as Alpha Omega Jewelers and the Alliance Francaise.  Then I got another big break and landed a job at Verndale, a growing web development agency in downtown Boston.  Verndale was an amazing experience for me where I worked on large websites for The Boston Marathon and other large clients.  I learned more in 4 years at Verndale than I had imagined learning in a lifetime.

But something else happened after learning and working so much.  I started feeling sick and unhealthy.  All of those years behind a desk were starting to add up and I was no longer the young gun I once was.  I was not taking enough care of my body and felt like I was working myself to death.  In 4 years, I had not taken more than 3 days off at a time (except once when I was renovating my house for a week).

I knew that I had to quit my job if I wanted to get healthy.  I had no clue what healthy meant at that time, but I knew that leaving the 9-5 world would be a step in the right direction.  Once I had picked up a few freelance gigs, I worked up the nerve to quit my job and worked my last day in April of 2007. 

Running my own business over the last 2+ years has allowed me to focus more on my own health. I now have the time to schedule appointments during the day. This has turned out to be one of the biggest benefits of starting my own business. 

While I was meeting with all of these various health providers, I was dreaming of new directions to take my web design and marketing business.  Overtime, there was more and more overlap between my personal and professional interests in wellness. I had the unique opportunity to study how many clinics worked from the perspective of a patient, but with the outside knowledge and expertise of an online marketer.

This brings me up to where I am today. I am some one who is extremely passionate about helping wellness providers market and grow their business using the internet.  I have very detailed and unique knowledge about specific techniques and tools that wellness clinics can use to grow their business.  Further, it brings me much pleasure to share this information with wellness providers because I know that the more business you do, the healthier people get.

And this brings me to my final and ultimate point about wellness marketing. Wellness marketing is not just about getting clients and growing your practice.  I have come to realize that there is something much larger and much deeper going on.

Our country and our world are facing some extreme challenges.  We are out of balance with ourselves in many, many ways.  I see wellness and alternative health as a large part of the solution to the worlds problems.

Holistic medicine is a low cost, highly effective way to make our entire population healthier and happier. Many of the techniques being practiced have been passed down from ancient cultures over thousands of years.  When you open your business, and when I market a business that offers these services, we are not only helping ourselves, we are supporting and maintaining healing traditions that are critical to the success of our people.

As I know from watching my parents struggle against the insurance companies for 30 years and from being ridiculed as a child for being raised by "quacks", there is a lot of prejudice and misinformation surrounding the world of alternative health. 

I tried myself to forget about alternative health and live a mainstream life. But, when I started to get sick, I needed effective care and I found it best at my local acupuncture office.

It is inspiring and grounding to promote the amazing work of healing practitioners and I encourage you to remember this in your own marketing efforts. We are not just promoting our own businesses, we are promoting the health and happiness of our species through the application of ancient wisdom and healing techniques.

My mission is to help you in your mission to promote health and wellness in your business and in your local community.

Jade Sylvan is a successful writer and wellness aficionado who lives in Somerville Massachusetts and works for Massage Therapy Works of Davis Square.  Over the last 6 months, Jade has helped Massage Therapy Works launch The Boston Healing Blog. In this interview, we will talk to Jade and learn the secrets to starting a successful blog and how it can help you grow your business.

Jade, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. We're excited to learn from your success.

What was the motivation behind starting The Boston Healing Blog and what were the goals of the project?

It was really a collaborative effort.  Richard and I had been tossing around ideas about how to grow Massage Therapy Works.  MTW already had a solid client base, but it didn't yet have that sense of community that's so vital in a modern business.  I don't remember who came up with the idea of the Blog, but from the first entry, it was clear we were onto something.  People online are always looking for well-written articles, and there's a lot of... how should I say this... not-so-well-written stuff out there on the web.  We could see the hits on the website go up practically overnight, and they've continued to rise steadily.

We wanted to expand the scope of the Blog to include all aspects of complementary health care in addition to writing about massage therapy and bodywork.  I've written articles about diet, yoga, expressive therapy, and gardening with the idea that holistic wellness extends to all these aspects of a person's life.  The far-reaching nature of Boston Healing Blog has really helped expand its readership.

Have there been any major challenges or obstacles that you have had to overcome in order to get the blog to where it is today?

I do a lot of interviews for the Blog, and any time you're working on something that's partially dependent on other people, it can get frustrating.  When I'm working on a project, I tend to throw myself into it gung ho until it's done.  Not everyone is like that.  It can take someone weeks to get back to you.  I've had to learn to cultivate a productive balance of patience and persistence.  Also, finding ways to be friendly and charming while bugging people is a major asset.

How have customers responded to The Boston Healing Blog?

The response has been very encouraging.  Especially when clients start commenting on posts and participating.  It's all about building those ties and that sense of being a part of something.  That's what makes the client care.  It makes your business more than just a business.  It turns it into a part of the client's life.

Do you have a regular writing schedule? How do you come up with ideas and what is your process like?

I've always been very disciplined when it comes to work I care about.  It helps to section off time for work, time for play, time for cooking dinner, time for friends and boyfriend, etc.  Coming into the MTW office to work on the Blog has been helpful in this regard.  While I'm in the office, I'm working on this and this alone.  When I leave, I don't have to think about it.  Even if you don't have that ability, it's a good idea to section off time and say, "From 2-4, I'm going to work on this, and then I'm done, and I'll finish tomorrow if I have to."  You actually wind up being more productive that way than if you're always jumping from one thing to another and trying to fit stuff in.

Can you describe how the blog has impacted business at Massage Therapy Works? Has it created a greater sense of community or had any other effects?

Absolutely.  Like I said, it's so important for people to feel connected to your business, especially in something as personal and transformative as a wellness/bodywork center.  We've also been able to tie the Blog into a Facebook Fanpage, where people can stay even more connected to Massage Therapy Works and The Boston Healing Blog.   

The Blog also increases visibility.  We now have regular visitors who were drawn in by the Blog who had never heard of us before.  We even have some regular readers from all over the country.

Do you have any advice for other wellness clinics and small businesses who are considering adding a blog to their marketing mix?

Make sure your blog is well-written, engaging, and is updated consistently and reliably.  The internet audience is fickle.  If there are long, unpredictable lulls in your updates, people will soon lose interest and go elsewhere.  And if your posts are obviously tossed off by someone who doesn't have a knack for writing engaging material, there's no reason for a client to read them.  There's so much out there on the internet, and all of a sudden it seems like all small businesses have a blog.  However, most of them are written by employees who aren't writers, and it shows.  The way to really set your business apart is by hiring a professional writer who can generate consistent quality content.

Is there anything else you would like to share with us about your experience creating The Boston Healing Blog?

It's been a very fulfilling journey for me.  I've been interested in holistic wellness and complementary health care my whole life, but this has given me an opportunity to delve into these topics.  I've learned so much, and it feels wonderful to know that I'm sharing this information with a wide audience.  I feel like it's a journey we're all taking together.

Jade, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate these insights and wish you and the Massage Therapy Works team continued success with The Boston Healing Blog.

If you have questions for Jade, or about how to start a blog, please add your comments below.

If you are looking forward to 2010 and thinking about whether to do more marketing, it may be useful to perform a marketing audit for your own business.  When you meet with your marketing team for the first time, this is likely what they will be doing either formally or informally for you, to determine where you are at currently with your marketing.

So in preparation for that, here are 5 helpful questions to get you started with your own marketing audit.

1. What are your business goals for the year and into the future?
All business owners are at different phases in their lives and in their businesses. You may be in an aggressive growth mode, or you may be playing it on the safe side. It's your business so you get to do what you want. Either way, it's good to be aware of what your goals are and make sure you have a marketing plan that matches your goals.  To put it another way, if you are actively trying to grow your business than you may want to ramp up your marketing efforts.  Marketing works with momentum and the laws of attraction, so it's important that your internal goals match your external marketing activities.  Once you know what your goals are, it's much easier to plan your marketing efforts.

2. What is the life time value of a new customer to your business?
This is a good number to know and is useful in many common marketing calculations.  Determining the life time value of a new customer to you, is a way of asking how much money will you make from an average customer over their lifetime with you.  If you are a roofing company, perhaps you know that the average customer only repairs their roof once for an average price of $7,000.  Factoring your expenses and your margins, you would determine the life time value of a new customer.  You can use this as a baseline for evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

If you earn $2,000 profit from a new roofing client, then it's theoretically worth it to spend up to $2,000 to get one new client. If you can spend $2,000 and get two new clients, you've doubled your investment.  If you are breaking even, or doubling your investment, then you can start optimizing your conversion rates and increasing your spend to get a higher return. This is a simplification, but the idea is to use these numbers as a guideline for your marketing spend.

3. Do you have an annual marketing budget?
This question can sound like a loaded one.  Many times I have asked clients this question and will receive a prompt "no". Upon further questioning I come to learn that they have a website for which they are paying a monthly fee for hosting. They have a domain name for which they are paying an annual fee. Often times they will have a yellow page ad and likely some business cards.  No matter how low these costs may be, these items come out of your marketing budget.  In some cases, you may be spending up to $1,000 a month (if you are advertising in the Yellow Pages for example) and still not consider it a formal marketing budget.  In reality, your marketing budget in this case is at least $12,000 a year.

Stated this way, it's easier to evaluate your current spending and compare the cost and return on investment to other forms of marketing.  For example, you may get a better return switching from offline advertising to online advertising. But before you can test this out, you need to know how much you are spending, what you are spending it on, and have some way of tracking it's effectiveness.

Once you learn how critical marketing is to the long term success of your business, you will feel more comfortable establishing a formal marketing budget.  It may also help you feel better when you start seeing positive results from your marketing.  If your marketing is bringing you new business, and the life time value of a new customer is large enough, then you should be happily enjoying the steady growth of your business.

If you have an extremely limited marketing budget, you may feel frustrated and think, "marketing doesn't work". The analogy of riding a bike comes to mind. When you first get on a bike, it is very wobbly and unsteady. The first few cranks of the peddles take a lot of effort and don't take you far. But once you are up and going, the bike seemingly rides itself. Momentum is hard to build but easier to maintain once you've got it.  So if your having trouble getting started, try not to blame the bike.  It may just take a larger push-off to get the bike going.

4. What are the most critical marketing channels for your industry?
In marketing, a channel represents each different place that you advertise. Place in this sense can refer to different media such as a newspaper, the internet, or even different websites. It includes both online and offline marketing.  Each industry can have completely different established channels. It's important to know what those channels are and to determine if it will be cost effective for your business to market in those channels.  While every industry is different, there are some online channels that are almost universal, including:

Google Maps
Google Adwords
Google Organic Search
Yelp
FaceBook
LinkedIn
Your Own Public Website & Blog

Depending on your industry you may want to add offline channels to your marketing mix including:

Newspaper & Magazine Advertising
Trade Shows & Industry Events
Local Television Advertising

Here are some industry specific channels you can include in your marketing mix:

Lawyers can visit Avvo.com.
Wellness providers can visit Wellness.com
General contractors can visit ServiceMagic.com

5. Do you have a content creation plan?
You may have heard the expression "content is king"? Many experts have claimed that the most effective form of marketing is "content marketing". What this means is that people who produce content for their audience on a regular basis get more traffic and more visitors. In fact, there is a strong correlation between the amount, quality and frequency of your content creation and the amount of people who visit your website. This in turn increases the number of potential customers you interact with.  You probably already know this intuitively. If you think about the websites you yourself visit most frequently, I guarantee they are the ones who write content on a daily basis. Your favorite news portal is a good example of this.  While you don't have to write every day to be successful, the opposite is also true. The more often you create relevant content for your target audience, the more successful and the more traffic you will get.  It's pretty much guaranteed.

It's important to create a plan for the production of content so that you know what you want to say, who you hope will listen and engage with your content, who is going to produce the content and how often the content will be produced. 

A website without fresh, relevant content will not likely get much traffic.  So plan ahead.

Hopefully these questions will get your gears going and put you in the marketing mindset.  While there are endless opportunities for marketing, try not to get overwhelmed.  Try one technique at a time and make sure to put all of your effort into it for as long as it takes to make a clear determination about its effectiveness. But if you do determine after a while it's not effective, stop doing it.

If you have any questions about how to audit your own marketing efforts, or about marketing in general, please feel free to leave a comment below. Here's to your marketing success!

When I speak with clients, I inevitably end up talking about social media.  I can't seem to avoid it in response to a myriad of client questions.  Many times my response is as simple as "you really need a FaceBook fan page". 

In the back of my mind, and sometimes out loud, I can hear my clients say, "Am I really going to get new business through FaceBook?"  And even if I answer and say "probably", most of my clients will not believe that it is worth the investment to proceed with using social media for business purposes.

No matter how many reports they read with case studies and graphs and charts about Coca Cola using social media, they just don't think it applies to their small business.

So I thought perhaps I should put my money where my mouth is by sharing my own anecdotal experience. Now you can see how one small business owner has used FaceBook to grow his business.

Over the last year, I've been watching with excitement as more and more leads come in to Onyva from FaceBook.  And now I can officially tell you that FaceBook is far and away my biggest source of leads.

So, how did this happen?

First off, no, I didn't have the all important "social media strategy". In fact, just like most small business owners, I was pretty scared to mix business with social media.  I tried Twitter a few times, but honestly, it totally freaked me out. It still does.  This is probably not what you would expect to hear from someone who gets paid to talk about social media.

Meanwhile, I started using FaceBook for the same reasons you do. I liked to share photos of my life with friends and family. I liked to catch up with old high school buddies and to chat with friends.

I can remember one period of time when my wife was in France and I was at home and I got sick. I started to get really lonely and was spending a lot of time on FaceBook talking with close friends.  This may sound silly, but the point is that over time, I became extremely comfortable on FaceBook.  It became natural. It was the place where I could just be myself, for better and for worse, in front of the world.

This familiarity developed before I ever considered using FaceBook to discuss my work life or to connect with potential clients.

Another thing that developed is what I call the "free advice channel". I started to get private messages from friends and family asking for all sorts of advice. Computer advice, business advice, design advice and more.  In this same vein, I started naturally offering my thoughts and opinions to people I know through comments and discussions on their walls.

In the beginning, this participation was truly natural and I saw no connection to it and generating business. I was just simply trying to help out people I know.  But, many months later, I can tell you that it was my early participation that grew and spread. Other people would read what I wrote and a flag would go off in their head saying "Ben knows about this subject". Sure enough, when they needed help with something similar, they would contact me.  I am still very free and giving of my opinions and advice on FaceBook and there is not much I love more than offering my advice to people. 

But did you really get actual business?

Much or most of the advice I give on FaceBook does not turn into actual business. But then, seemingly out of the blue, it started.  I started getting leads and referrals from people that knew people who needed actual paying work done.  I would get a private message saying "I forwarded your information to so and so, you should expect a call soon." Awesome!

At this point I started getting excited about the real potential for using FaceBook as a way to get new business. I started paying more attention to my friend list and started thinking of it as a lead list. I started categorizing my friend list into market segments so that I could know who I was speaking to at all times.

Now, if you're a friend of mine and you are reading this, you may think "gross". He's trying to make money from his friends? Not the case.  As I mentioned above, I love helping my friends and family, and hopefully those who know me know that I am very giving in this respect.

But nestled within my network of friends and family and what now includes a lot of professional contacts, are a lot of potential client leads.  This is not just true for my business. It's true for your business as well.

Taking the next step. Using FaceBook for lead generation.

Anyone who runs a business knows that your business depends on an influx of new contacts and customers.  Without this, you can say sayonara to your business.  It just so happens that the connection tools provided by FaceBook are the absolute easiest ways to get detailed information about, and connect with people you just met.  All you need is their name and you can likely find them on FaceBook.

So here is a simple strategy for doing lead generation using FaceBook: Open your office door, and walk out into the real world. Go to meetup groups, or industry events.  Talk to people you know and people that you interact with on a daily basis about what is going on in their lives.

If you feel it's appropriate, try and become friends with them on FaceBook.  Learn more about them as people and as businesses.  See if there is a way you can help them achieve success in their goals. The worst case scenario is you've just made a new friend.  The best case scenario is that you are inspired by the connection and find ways of working together in a mutually beneficial way.

It may not happen instantly, but overtime, that connection will deepen. You will learn more about one another and trust will develop.  If you listen carefully, there is a chance that you need their services just as badly as they need yours.  These connections can spread, multiply and overlap in fun and unexpected ways.

Conclusion

I'm all for having a plan. And the details of your plan will depend greatly on the size of your business and your target audience. But at the same time, I am all for jumping into the waters and getting wet. 

In many ways I think social media mirrors the real world better than any internet service has done before. You have to explore and learn to succeed. 

Hopefully you can summons the courage to try and reach out to the world around you, online and off. Certainly there has never been a time where it was easier to do so than now. So enjoy this opportunity and take full advantage of it.