Month: June 2012

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Independent Contractors Are Not Employees – Make Sure You Differentiate Them

My firm has one employee and eight independent contractors. It is important for your business just like mine, that you clearly differentiate how you work with, manage, and treat each separate group of team members.

The IRS has very specific guidelines on when an Independent Contractor is really an employee. If you are hoping that a contract stating that they are an Independent Contractor is all you need, guess again. I work with all types of Independent Contractors, those that are super organized and are working with several clients and I just happen to be one of their customers, and others that seem so needy and inexperienced that I have to be really careful to not cross the line and provide support services that may be misconstrued as potentially treating them really as an employee.

The bottom-line is that an Independent Contractor is a business entity that you have hired for a project. They need to be totally self sufficient and running their own processes and services where you are just one customer in their queue.

I have to say from my experience that there are plenty of Independent Contractors out there in my industry who don’t get that, they really want to be treated like employees. As a business owner you have to “man up” and make Independent Contractors be what they are supposed to be – independent – by not slipping into providing support or training which may get YOU into trouble just by being nice.

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Dealing with Negative Reviews in a Good Way

Anyone who has been in business for a while has certainly had a bad review at some point or another. The review may have been warranted or may have been unfair. What really doesn’t matter is if the review is true, but how you handle it.

Here are two excellent articles to check out for two different ways to handle negative reviews:

The Startling Secret to Getting Positive Reviews for Your Business

Three Tips to Handle Online Negative Publicity

Both articles are easy and fast reading. Here are my tips to add to the topic:

  1. Don’t respond immediately to a review when you are upset or angry. This will do more harm than good.
  2. Think about if the review has some truth. Do you need to change what you are doing to be better?
  3. Decide if you have to respond at all. This is a hard one, sometimes to rise graciously above a bad review is the best path and in other cases to address it head-on is better. Chat with some other business owners you trust to help you decide based on your situation and the review.

Actively start working on a regular basis to get good reviews and post them on your website. You want to make sure that there is a balance of reviews about your business online. Posting good reviews on your website is a great way to start.

I never recommend creating fake reviews. This can get you in more trouble than you need. If you are having trouble getting reviews, try a third party service who will contact your customers for you and even help them write the review about your firm.

If you do get a negative review, address, deal with it, and put it behind you. It is important to realize that you will not be able to please or service every person to their own satisfaction over the years you are in business. Do the best you can, and keep a mind-set of excellence in all you do.

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Google AdWords Advertising Services – Local Start

Sometimes it is not practical for a business to hire a Google AdWords™ account manager. Let’s be real about it, sometimes the fees for account management are too high for a business who wants to just test Google AdWords™ or has a small initial budget.

For this very special type of customer my firm has developed a very special program called Local Start™.

These are the types of clients that would want to consider our Local Start™ Program:

  • Have a 30 day click budget from $100 to $300
  • Want to show their ads in a 15 mile radius from their business location
  • Do not have the skills to self manage and AdWords account
  • Are not interested in having regular account management
  • Are really looking for a turn-key automated option for Google AdWords
  • Wants to have their ads show in Google Maps searches

Our Local Start™ program is perfect for these scenarios. Building an AdWords Express™ account treed off of your Google Places™ account, we help you get the local exposure you need plus harness the massive power of Google to help get the word out about your local business.

Although Local Start™ is not a good match for all businesses, it may be the perfect solution for some that are just now considering Google AdWords™ as an option.

For businesses that really want to test Google AdWords™ at a higher monthly ad spend, need professional help and guidance, we recommend our Quick Start™, Fast Start™ or Power Start™ programs. To find out more about all these programs, please visit our Google AdWords™ advertising services page.

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Google AdWords and the New Auction Insights

Just this last week Google AdWords added an “auction insights” icon to AdWords control panels. On certain keywords (on the keyword tab or keyword rollup found on your campaign tab) you may see a small block graph icon. Tick the box next to the keyword and then click the button called “keyword details” and then select “auction insights”.

AdWords will return a list of your actual competitors and your position in the AdWords auction. The table will show the following data:

  • Impression Share
  • Average Position
  • Overlap Rate
  • Position Above Rate
  • Top of Page Rate

This information is very important and allows you to be much more strategic about your bidding and to understand more fully what is happening in your account. This additional transparency is welcome indeed and I would like to thank Google for providing it.

Here are a few things you can do with the data:

  • If your impression share is high and you are in the top position, you can lower your click cost to have a greater ROI (return on investment).
  • You can actually see the names of the businesses and sites you are competing against. You can harvest these names and do an additional ad group to try to take additional market share away from them. This is a short term approach, but as Google will most likely drive the quality score of these keywords down quickly, but you can bleed off a bit of traffic and boost CTR. It just depends on how competitive you want to be.
  • If your impression share is low and you are not in the top position as frequently as you would like, this may be a good time to optimize and possibly increase your bid.
  • If your impressions share is high, your ROI great, you may want to consider breaking out that keyword and variations of it into its own ad group to get an even higher quality score and even better return.

I have to say that I personally feel that the auction insights tool is a wonderful refinement to AdWords. Knowing who you are competing against and how you really stack up against them by keywords is excellent and a feature I will be using to strategically position my clients in their marketplaces.

For more on how my firm can help you with Google AdWords, please visit our Google AdWords services page for account management options.