Want to grow your business? Don’t get caught out like business owners in the stories below. Use this checklist to reduce the chance of issues arising while trying to expand a business in the future, increase the likelihood of having greater success right now and improve your online reputation as well. Here’s what to do if your business is ready to take off.
1. Check How Your Business Or Brand Appears On The Internet.
During the initial research phase on my newest client, I found that all her top level domains (.com, .com.au etc.) were owned by other people: an ex-manager, someone in Kuwait, the CEO of a large online portal she is a member of and more. So when I started to improve her branding and build her business, a standstill could have occurred while negotiating how much money the cyber-squatters will demand in order to relinquish these domains, which are an important aspect of any online presence. But I had a brainwave while out walking yesterday and found a way to bypass this problem and outsmart them all. More about how I did that a bit later.
WHY IS OWNING YOUR TOP LEVEL DOMAIN SO IMPORTANT: When anyone sees your name and wants to find out more about you or your business, they usually do a search for yourname.com, yourbusinessname.com or yourname.com.au (if you live in Australia). If you know what you’re doing or you have a savvy marketing manager, on-page SEO expert or business developer, you can buy a lesser known domain extension like yourname.info, and get your website on the first page of Google Search Results (without needing to advertise) within the first 4 weeks. If potential customers don’t find you easily, most will get sidetracked or go elsewhere instead. Having the right domain name not only helps customers find you easier, it prevents others from fraudulently taking advantage of your popularity, especially in the earlier stages of a business. Imagine one year down the track and you are infinitely more successful, using a low level domain is NOT in your best interest. The owners of your top level domains could do anything with them, reinvent stuff, sell unrelated stuff and make it appear to be yours etc. It could cost an absolute fortune and years of time to make them stop, that’s even if you can! At that point you would have to come up with another strategy to outsmart them anyway — outsmart them NOW instead. See the bonus section below for one great idea.
By the way, choosing the BEST Business Name and Domain Name for selling goods or services online is an entire topic on its own and one I’m planning on writing about in the future.
2. Update Any Outdated Information.
KEEP YOUR BUSINESS INFORMATION UPDATED: One business lost revenue by not updating information quickly; their online shop rendered OFFLINE for 3 days because after moving premises, they neglected to change their address and phone information on major portals like Yellow Pages (business phone and address details), ASIC (government registration of business name details), ATO (Australian Taxation Office information), Dunn & Bradstreet (worldwide industry insights, credit reports and business financials) etc. Due to this oversight, it took extra time for their change of address to be verified when renewing the SSL (Security) Certificate necessary to keep taking payments through their online store. Get stuck in a situation where you lose major income like this once, you’ll never make the same mistake again! When we got their website back online, it took 3 solid weeks of work for me to re-build the sales momentum that was flowing before the shutdown, and I know what I’m doing. Imagine if they had to do it themselves!
MAKE SURE YOUR LINKS ARE VALID: When examining Google Search Results on a friends business recently, I found posts on various websites that were attributing her old business name and website (which no longer exists), so the link-juice she would have gotten was wasted and potential business was lost. Link-juice is content which provides genuine fuel for search engines to place your name higher in the rankings. Things like leaving a useful comment on a forum with your website address in your signature, you published an article that was picked up by someone else with a link back to your website, you wrote a substantial review for a product or service that was ‘relevant’ to your business and added a link etc. If you go into a different line of business, get a new website or change your business name, consider keeping any old domain names and diverting them to your new one OR do a thorough internet search and update as many old links as possible with your new contact details.
MAKE SURE YOUR SECURITY CERTIFICATES ARE NOT ABOUT TO EXPIRE: Problems with expired SSL Certificates create havoc for online businesses. Have you ever visited a website and a message popsup that says something like, ‘This Website Is Not Secure And Your Information Could Be AT Risk – Go Back!’ These security notifications can stay in the cache of a customers web browser for weeks even after the issue has been fixed on your website, preventing genuine comments, questions, referrals and sales. One of the most common reasons a clients website has disappeared – they forgot to pay their website hosting. I now take special note to remind my clients to renew their SSL Certificates, contact details and web hosting plans ahead of time.
3. Clean Up Your Website and Social Media Accounts.
Only keep images and Social Media posts that are an asset to your brand name or your business. Do a Google search of your personal name (might need to add your country or city location as well) and then press the ‘images’ tab to see what pictures show up. Any old profile pictures showing up from years ago from websites you haven’t thought about in ages? Do a search of your registered business name and select the ‘images’ tab to see the results for this search too. Found some old pictures you’ve already removed from your own website that still show up on Google? Use Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) to request additional removal if they bother you. I’ve found that most are automatically removed from Google Search Results after 8 months or so, (and it seems to take even longer for Bing and Yahoo to update their listings) but for business clients, I manually request removal of outdated product images and anything that no longer fittingly represents the brand. Analytics reports show that almost 20% of customers found us through image searches, so for online stores especially, make sure the pictures on your website are as relevant, appropriately named and as appealing as possible. If you want to see the exact content that Google has indexed for your website, search this term — site:elizabethrichardson.info — (but change my website name for yours first).
4. Claim Any Posts Automatically Created By The Search Engines.
Next, when people look for you online they are likely to see automatically generated wiki posts (named after the information pages on wikipedia.org). If you’ve ever had any media attention, these wiki posts (also called a ‘knowledge panel’), are automatically created by the search engines which includes a compilation of media releases, news headlines, images from Facebook, Instagram, thumbnails from YouTube videos and a host of stuff from other social media sites etc. Google, Bing and Yahoo allow you to claim any of these as your own and give you an opportunity to manage them (to some extent). I know a renowned International Author and Workshop Leader who tried multiple times to remove incorrect information from their personal celebrity wikipedia page and was eventually kicked off for trying, so the opportunity you have to manage your own publicly generated information may be limited, especially if you’re trying to get rid of something controversial. Don’t expect to obliterate any negative press or bad publicity. The internet has a knack of accumulating records that don’t disappear – but there are ways to improve bad business or personal reputations that may inadvertently develop along the way. Next is some information that might help you understand how anyone, including you, could accidentally create a bad online reputation, and further down the page, how I have successfully repaired them.
5. Learn About How You Can Unintentionally Get A Bad Internet Reputation.
Back in 2010, a client of mine wrote a letter of complaint to a competitor, saying their product descriptions were ‘misleading the public’. Maybe that was true but what happened next, created a long term bad online reputation for their own business that dogged them for years. The competitor published the letter of complaint online, wrote a long detailed article about it explaining their position and made points about how my client was wrong. A business owners personal name is synonymous with their business name – remember that when you make public remarks or complaints to anyone, anywhere! Anyway, this particular article got lots of views and comments on it (and probably sales because of it) and 10 years later, was still appearing in the first few pages when searching for my clients business – This is not a good look. This same client also wrote a letter of complaint to Choice Magazine about a bad review they thought was unfair on one of their products. This information also showed up in internet searches some 7 years later, adding fuel to an already fiery negative review. MY STRONG RECOMMENDATION – STOP DOING THINGS LIKE THAT!
a) Researching what your competitors are doing can be useful to help define your path, but don’t get so focused on what they are doing that it steers you off-course.
b) Reading negative reviews might be constructive so you can make improvements in the future, but don’t take it so personally that you forget the positive things you still have to contribute to this world.
c) Seeing someone doing something that you wouldn’t do yourself, could make you feel angry if you think about it long enough, but don’t waste time and energy trying to fight against it and make yourself feel even worse.
Consider doing these things instead.
6. Fix Bad Press Or Negative Publicity.
Here is my no-fail, 100% success rate method to fix bad publicity that makes your business, your personal name or your brand appear to be less that what you’d like it to be.
a) Change whatever can be changed that is immediately in your power. That usually means to change your attitude, change your tack, change your marketing, change your method, change your delivery, change your direction and/or change your thinking. Anything that anyone else is doing or saying about you is up to them, and whether you like it or not, it is neither your business nor is it in your power to change.
b) Let go whatever would take considerable time, effort, worry, discourse or money to fix.
c) Focus forward, stay in your lane, re-define what makes your unique service / ability / product stand out from the rest, move one step ahead and keep on moving. Every time you stop to take a look at what someone else is doing or has done, your own projects lose valuable momentum, your business takes a step back, sales tend to slow, you lose energy for your own endeavours and any previous positive efforts are side-tracked. If this happens to you, catch yourself as quickly as possible and then focus forward, stay in your lane, re-define what it is that makes your unique service / ability / product stand out from the rest, move one step ahead and keep on moving all over again. You can’t get it wrong but you can make it easier on yourself!
d) Do what you came to this earth to do. Follow your passion. Fulfill your dreams. Live fully and mind your own business. And consider what Robert Kiyosaki says, “All publicity is good publicity!”
7. [BONUS SECTION] How To Stop Cyber-Squatters.
My new client has a high public profile with around a million followers on social media (2 to 4 times more than most well-known and established Australian Celebrities). She’s only 25 and already making more monthly income that what the average Australian makes in a year. Because her success came so quickly she hadn’t really prepared to treat her brand as you would a long-term business, and like many celebrities and influencer’s, uses social media (particularly Facebook, YouTube and Instagram) to drive sales and produce revenue. Well this girl is savvy. She’s brought me in early to help with Business Development and Branding. She’s already got the marketing thing nailed and I am in awe of how switched on she is at such a young age; just needed people with other skills and experience on her team to make business expansion easier. Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, all the top level domains using her name are owned by other people who only after a short 6 months, could see potential and bought these domain names out from underneath her. One cyber-squatter has asked for $2000 for a domain that costs less than $20. That’s not too bad, but then we would have to negotiate prices for all the other domains as well. It’s not extortion, it’s a business and many people are into it — however, buying a domain name you think might become valuable in the future and holding onto it until someone wants it, isn’t as profitable as it once was now that hundreds of new domain extensions have been made available, such as yourname.shop, yourname.tv, yourname.business, yourname.coaching, yourname.melbourne, yourname.tech, yourname.shopping etc. and I even registered one for a Facebook friend, yourname.fun.
Did you know that it’s illegal to register an Australian domain if you cannot prove that the name has a legitimate connection to you? My new client felt cheated and just yesterday, filled out a form to claim her .com.au domain from the person who registered it before her. This process takes time and money, she does have legal ground to stand on but waiting for an outcome will slow down the massive momentum she already has flowing.
HERE’S THE LESSON: You cannot stop Cyber-Squatters. It’s a nuisance to negotiate with them. So my advice is, don’t try – Get Creative Instead.
What’s the solution for my new client? We’ve outsmarted them with a simple trick! We are using the same brand but with one letter-change in her name, rendering all the domains the cyber-squatters bought, completely useless. We’re lucky, it’s early days, I can see the future and this is the perfect time in the evolution of a personal brand to build a more cohesive foundation. The logo and design samples I’ve already produced look so much better and make so much more sense by implementing this one little improvement. Here is yet another example where problems are opportunities in disguise and if you can relax and keep your spirits uplifted, the solutions come, and usually better that what they would have been, if you kept doing things the old way.
If you have the capacity to grow, I have developed a unique set of techniques that will guarantee a 70% revenue boost in the first quarter. I think that almost every Australian Business can achieve such results with a bit of insight, intelligent planning and strategic action. Want me to help you with something too? Let’s chat.
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