xgibbousx | Answers

I think traditional business plans can be dangerous and I personally don’t use them. Many people tend to use business plans as a method of procrastination (i.e. it’s easy to just write down the plan than to actually execute it). Traditional business plans tend to be massive with a lot of predictions and can become intimidating to execute.

With that said, I think you should just plan out the next week or month of your business. Set a goal and write a small strategy of how you are going to achieve it. Then, start executing the next day.

Absolutely!

1. Google’s search engine algorithm looks at how many like and shares you are getting. If you get a lot of likes and shares, Google ranks your associated website higher in organic search results thereby getting you a ton of free, highly targeted business leads.

2. Potential clients will go to your social media to “check you out”. If you have a lot of activity and great content, they will see you as a higher quality/active offering and be more inclined to by from you.

Here’s a pretty good strategy:

1. Write a catchy song on your instrument of choice.
2. Record a video of yourself playing it.
3. Make a YouTube channel and post your catchy song video there.
4. Share your video with your “close” family and friends by phone and email.
5. Share your video on Facebook with your “other” family and friends.
6. Start contributing to some online music forums (e.g. answer questions, post interesting tips, etc.)
7. After a dozen or so non self-promoting forum posts: create a new forum thread, post a link to your catchy song video, and ask for feedback.
8. Repeat steps 1 through 8 until you get a good YouTube following/subscriber base.
9. Become an official YouTube partner and start getting paid for the views on all your channel’s catchy song videos.
10. Start playing some live shows in your area with your collection of songs you created.
12. Create a website and promote it to your YouTube followers in your videos.
12. Have a contact link on your website.
13. Record labels will start to contact you.
14. Sign a record deal.

Somewhere on the path above you will earn a million dollars.

Good luck.

I think you should give as many paid holidays as possible. If you did 10 last year (and everything worked out fine), then I would offer 15 this year with 5 of them floating. You may find that the extra paid holidays actually increase employee productivity due to higher morale and satisfaction. I would then keep increasing the paid holidays every year until you see a drop in productivity or team coordination issues.

Regarding the team not being all together sometimes: this is a problem all teams face and they need to learn how to redistribute work load in these circumstances. I have always found that work can very easily be redistributed and our fear of not having the team fully intact is usually over blown. Once you get this down, it’s nice to know that people can leave and the team productivity doesn’t screech to a halt.

There are a few first steps that should be taken as follows:

1. Check for proper meta title, description, and keyword information on ALL your website pages. Look at other competing websites at the top of Google results to see how their meta titles and descriptions are structured.

2. Run your website through the MozBar and Meta SEO Inspector Google Chrome plugins and fix all issues/errors shown. This includes all meta information, H1 and H2 tags, and image alt tags.

3. Create a sitemap.xml, upload it to the root folder of your website, and submit it to your Google Webmaster Tools account.

4. Use Google Webmaster Tools to crawl your index page as Google and then submit it to their index with the crawl all sub links option. This will ensure Google quickly reindexes your website and all of its internal links.

5. Use the Goolge Chrome inspector to make sure their are no console errors using the “Console” tab and that the website is loading quickly (with no extra large assets/images) in the “Network” tab.

The above is what should be done at a minimum.

The best way to get traffic is through SEO! Why? Because it’s free and highly targeted. Here’s a pretty decent checklist:

1. Have proper meta title, description, and keyword information on ALL your website pages. Look at other competing websites at the top of Google results to see how it’s done correctly.

2. Have a lot of content pages that match the keywords in your meta information. Content pages are things that go into depth about your business, website, or offering. This is why those new and cool single page websites aren’t that great for SEO.

3. Have a blog that you update regularly (e.g. at least once per week). Google loves educational content and it supports your website’s ranking under targeted keywords. Also, people coming to your website to get educated will regularly convert into customers.

4. Try and get some back links from other blog articles, blog comments, news publications, forums, other websites, resource directories, Yelp, etc. A back link is just a link from another website to your own. It’s best to have what’s called an anchor title associated with it (e.g. “best web developer” as a link). Google’s entire ranking algorithm is based on back links. The bigger the website that give you a back link, the more it counts toward your Google ranking (i.e. go get one on CNN!).

5. Get and stay active on all your social media accounts.

6. Get great reviews on Yelp, Clutch, Google Business reviews, and any other review websites.

There’s a ton of other stuff too. The above will get your well on your way though!